World War One – Page 24 – Old Magazine Articles

Anticipating New Equipment
(The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

Three notices appeared in the fall of 1918 announcing changes in design for three items issued to American troops: the 1918 combat knife, a.k.a. ‘the Knuckle-Duster, the mess kit and the canteen. Interestingly, the notice pertaining to the canteen states that Doughboys had been carrying both French canteens and American canteens by the end of the war.

Click here to read magazine articles from the Second World War.

W.W. I Trench Fighting
(The New Republic, 1915)

The seasoned war correspondent from THE NEW REPUBLIC filed this essay some five months into the war in order to clarify for his American readers the exact nature of trench warfare. His observations are based upon the trench fighting that he witnessed both in France and during the Russo-Japanese War, some nine years earlier:

There is an illusion that the range and effectiveness of modern arms tend to keep armies far apart. On the contrary, there is more hand-to-hand fighting today than at any time since gunpowder was invented… at this rate the French will not drive out the Germans in months, but on the other hand a frontal attack, and every attack must now be frontal, even if successful would cost several hundred thousand men.

The article was written by Gerald Morgan; by war’s end he would serve as General Pershing’s press chief (ie.censor).

Baseball as a metaphor for war…

Summing Up the Aisne-Marne Offensive
(Dept. of the Army, 1956)

This printable page from an R.O.T.C. manual concerns the American military efforts in World War I.
Attached is a useful summation in three paragraphs of the Aisne-Marne offensive. The reader will learn which American and French units participated, the dates on which the battle raged and the German defense strategy.

The battle had numerous and far reaching results. It eliminated the German threat to Paris, upset Ludendorff’s cherished plan to attack the British again in Flanders, gave the Allies important rail communications, demonstrated beyond further doubt the effectiveness of American troops on the offensive, firmly established Allied unity of command…

Trench Medicine
(Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

An informative article from World War I concerning the doctors of all the combatant nations and how they dealt with the filthy conditions of stagnant warfare and all the different sorts of wounds that were created as a result of this very different war:

This is a dirty war. Gaseous, gangrene, lockjaw, blood poisoning, all dirt diseases… Colonel G.H. Makins of the Royal Army Medical Corps longs for the clean dust of the Veldt, which the British soldier cursed in the Boer War.

The Mistranslated Clause
(New Outlook Magazine, 1935)

This surprising article appeared sixteen years after the Versailles Treaty was signed; it argued that the War Guilt clause (article 231) had been deliberately mistranslated by the German Foreign Minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau (1869 – 1928):

Brockdorff-Rantzau, coldly, haughtily, in the best German manner but with trembling legs, carried the thick [treaty] back to his hotel and he and his aides made their own translation into German… Count Brockdorff not only exercised his prerogative there; but he inserted words not synonymous with any that the Allies had written.

The U.S. Occupation of Turkey
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1920)

There aren’t many Yanks in Turkey but an American naval force of eight destroyers is being kept in Turkish waters to protect American interests and to assist the British, French and Italian navies before Constantinople to induce compliance by Turkey with the terms of the peace treaty and to serve as a warning to cease her practices against the Armenians in Asia Minor.

The German Rebellion Against the Treaty
(Literary Digest, 1923)

This 1923 German editorial by Professor Rudolf Euken (coincidentally published in THE EUKEN REVIEW) was accompanied by an anti-Versailles Treaty cartoon which attempted to rally the German working classes to join together in rebellion against the treaty.

The so-called Peace of Versailles subjects the German people to unheard-of treatment; has injured and crippled Germany; has, with refined cruelty, deprived her of fertile territories; robbed her of sources indispensable to her existence; has heaped upon her huge burdens, and this for an indenite time – the intention being, if possible, to reduce her people to serfdom.

Click here to read another one of Rudolf Euken’s post-war efforts.

Click here if you would like to read about the 1936 Versailles Treaty violations.

Remembering Cantigny and Chateau-Thierry
(The Stars and Stripes, 1919)

Monday, June 2 (1919), was a holiday in the 2nd Division in the bridgehead on the Rhine. The anniversary of the battle of Chateau-Thierry was observed. It is just a year ago that infantry and Marines of the 2nd Division were thrown against the Boche on the Paris-Metz road near Chateau-Thierry, and from that moment on the Americans were in continual fighting until November 11.

The U.S. Sixth Engineers and the 1918 March Offensive
(The Stars and Stripes,1919)

When the Doughboys began arriving in France the infantry and artillery were kept in the rear areas and taught the necessities of World War One trench warfare. This was not the case with engineering units of the A.E.F. who were dubbed noncombatants and dispatched hither and yon to attend to those duties deemed appropriate for men with such training. The U.S. Sixth Regiment of Engineers were rebuilding roads on the Somme when the German army came across no-man’s land on March 21, 1918 (a.k.a. Kaiserschlacht: the Kaiser’s battle) and they were quickly ordered to go in support of a nearby British regiment. These engineers were the first Americans to come under German fire and their story is told here by Private E.P. Broadstreet, who was there.

The experiences of the 108th Engineers (Thirty-Third Division) during the Argonne campaign is also told in this article.

Another first-hand account of that day can be read in an interview that appears in this book: Make the Kaiser Dance.

Private Abian A. Wallgren: Cartoonist
(The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

If there was any mascot who best represented the staff of the old Stars and Stripes, it would have been their primary cartoonist (even though he was a Marine), Abian Wallgren; who went by the name, Wally.

This cartoon was from his on-going series, Helpful Hints

C’est la Guerre
(The Stars and Stripes, 1919)

One of war’s many, many sad stories. This one concerned a German mother living in Coblenz during the American post-war occupation and how she came to realize that her son would not be coming home.

The Elephant on the British Home Front
(Popular Mechanics, 1917)

We are told that the attached picture could only have been snapped in the more eccentric parts of Britain during the Great War and that it serves as graphic proof that the farm labor shortage was as dire as the farmers declared that it was.

To Outlaw War
(Literary Digest, 1922)

Not pacifists, but soldiers, have signed what several editors term one of the most striking and remarkable appeals for peace that have come to their tables.

Veterans of the 1914-1918 slaughter called for their respective governments to oppose territorial aggrandizement and demanded that an international court be established to outlaw war; following the establishment of said court, the immediate effort to disarm and disband sea and air forces and destroy the implements of warfare should begin. The American Legion Commander-in-Chief, Alvin Owsley (1888 – 1967), was among the signators.

Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.

A Briton Writes From Ypres
(Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

In a letter to his family, a soldier from one of the Scottish territorial regiments gives an account of his experiences fighting in Belgium.

He was in the thick of the fighting that came as a result of the Kaiser’s desperate attempt to take Ypres, yet he indulges in no heroics. He writes as though reporting a cricket game or a boat race.

Wrong Turn at Gallipoli
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This is an opinion piece written at a time when the world stood at the doorstep of World War II. The writer went to some length to outline the fatal error made just one generation earlier and how the sins were to be paid for by their sons and daughters:

The world of today, an upheaval of antagonisms heading toward destructive war, was not inevitable. Russia need not have fallen to the Bolshevists, Germany to the Nazis, Italy to the Fascists. The United States need not have entered the Great War. Two million men slain in battle need not have died. These consequences resulted from a decision of a few men during the World War.

He argued that the Dardanelles Campaign is where the whole war went sideways.

Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.

A Tribute to General Pershing
(American Legion Weekly, 1924)

Six years after the last shot was fired, war correspondent Frederick Palmer (1873 – 1958) typed up some sweet words of praise for the American W.W. I Commanding General John Pershing:

When the people at home were thinking in terms of thousands, Pershing planned for an army of a million men overseas…He was organizer and molder of the A.E.F.. The stamp of his character was upon it in so far as any one man can put his stamp upon a vast, modern army.

During that brief period of the war in which Pershing’s Doughboys were at bat against the Germans, Palmer worked under the general as the press liaison officer and censor for the entire A.E.F. (a job he hated). His bitter recollections of W.W. I were recorded in his 1921 memoir; click here to read the review.

Click here to read an article from 1927 by General Pershing regarding the American cemeteries in Europe.

Sioux Code-Talkers of the Great War
(The Stars and Stripes, 1919)

The Navajo code-talkers in the Second World War are well-known, but not so terribly well known were their brothers the Sioux, and the similar contributions that they had made just twenty years earlier in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

Dogfight Over Hunland
(Vanity Fair, 1918)

British fighter pilot in the Great War, Lieutenant E.M. Roberts, gave this account of the deadly game of Boche-hunting above the clouds:

I noticed he was going down a little, evidently for the purpose of shooting me from underneath. I was not quite sure as yet that such was really his intention; but the man was quick…he put five shots into my machine. But all of them missed me.

I maneuvered into an offensive position as Quickly as I could, and I had my machine gun pelting him…The Hun began to spin earthward.