Western Front Research Articles

The forgotten Eastern Front: dealing with the social and archaeological legacies of the Battle of the Rawka and Bzura Rivers (1914–1915), central Poland

While the Western Front of the Great (or First World) War is deeply engrained in the European historical consciousness, memories of the Eastern Front are less prominent. Here, events have been repressed, obscured by the subsequent experience of the Second World War and by heritage policy in the region. The authors present the results of archaeological investigations of a battlefield in central Poland, where static trench warfare was fought between December 1914 and July 1915. A unique landscape palimpsest was formed, the present neglected state of which is a material expression of contemporary attitudes to the legacy of the forgotten Eastern Front. The study illustrates the wider intersection of warfare, identity and memory.

The Psychotherapist and Neurologist Ernst Jolowicz (1882-1958): An International Career in the Shadow of Anti-semitism and Emigration

The study focuses on the life and work of the German-Jewish neurologist Dr. Ernst Jolowicz who was born in 1882. Originally from Poznan in present-day Poland, Jolowicz had gained his initial professional experience in the German Empire before serving as a neurologist at the Western Front during the First World War. After the war, he opened a private psychotherapeutic practice in Leipzig, published numerous scientific papers and was involved in the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy. In his writings, Jolowicz appeared as an undogmatic adherent of suggestive techniques and came up with his own methods for a patient-centered, psychagogic psychotherapy. In addition, he wrote numerous cultural and social scientific essays showing a wide range of interest. Shortly after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, he emigrated to Paris and supported the anti-fascist resistance in a Strasbourg radio station. After the occupation of France, Jolowicz fled to the United States in 1941 and gained a foothold there once more before he died of a heart disease in New York City in 1958.

William March’s Company K: history, memory, and metafiction

ABSTRACT Despite enjoying a sustained readership, William March’s Company K remains a surprisingly understudied examination of American soldiers in World War I. To date, just a mere handful of critical articles or book chapters have examined the novel in detail. March’s relentlessly anti-heroic themes, which now seem overly familiar (even clichéd) thanks to the popularity of works like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the bestselling war novel of all time) and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Paths of Glory, are perhaps part of the problem. But Company K is more than a war novel: on many levels, the book is about war writing. Indeed, March’s metafictional narrative plays with notions of representation and truth-telling in war literature in ways that anticipate Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This essay offers a new appraisal of Company K by focusing on its metafictonal features, which include the deployment of a novel-within-a-novel structure, and its iconoclastic form. To underscore the originality of March’s approach, as well as his implied scorn for the critical standards of his day, the essay first summarizes attempts by leading war-literature critics in the 1920s and 1930s to nail-down the relationship between war fiction and truth. This section of the essay spotlights the controversial French expert on literary testimony, Jean Norton Cru, as well as the English military historian Cyril Falls and two distinguished American men of letters, Archibald MacLeish and Malcolm Cowley, both of whom had strong opinions about what constituted a truthful depiction of the Great War. The essay then demonstrates how March’s novel rejects most of the assumptions put forward by these critics, both through its reflexive recognition of its own fictionality and through its subversive form, a transmedia blend of devices drawn from early cinema, modernist painting, and historical writing.

Unraveling the Enigma of Neonatal Herpes: A Novel Tool for Assessing Risk of Infection.

* Abbreviations: CNS — : central nervous system HSV — : herpes simplex virus SEM — : skin, eye, and mouth In October 1939, the world was on fire. Nazi Germany had invaded Poland on September 1, and 2 days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The war on the western front was hot, but, initially at least, all was quiet on the eastern front. During those tumultuous first months of the Second World War, it was unclear what Russia’s involvement would be. On October 1, 1939, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered one of his most famous quotations during a radio broadcast on the BBC: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Although obviously very different from global war, herpes simplex virus (HSV) also is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The virus can be devastatingly brutal to the body of a neonate who acquires the virus at the time of delivery, but it also is exceedingly rare, occurring in only 1 in roughly 2000 deliveries.1 We have powerful molecular testing tools that can identify minute amounts of HSV DNA, technologies that have revolutionized our diagnostic capabilities for neonatal HSV2 but that also can be prone to false-positive results given how … Address correspondence to David W. Kimberlin, MD, 1600 Seventh Ave South, CHB 303, Birmingham AL 35233. E-mail: dkimberlin{at}peds.uab.edu

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

Fellow Travellers: Communist Trade Unionism and Industrial Relations on the French Railways, 1914–1939

An Exceptional Mortality: Dumped Munitions, Inconclusive Science, and the Mass Death of Oysters in the Thames Estuary after the First World War

Abstract When the First World War ended in November 1918, the British military was overwhelmed by logistical problems involving the disposal of leftover munitions piling up across the Western Front. To expedite disarmament, the British started dumping all manner of bombs, bullets, and chemical weapons into the seas surrounding Europe. On the surface, dumping appeared to be a miracle solution, but serious questions and concerns were raised almost immediately by bureaucrats, fishermen, scientists, and military officers, who debated its merits and limitations without a full grasp of the environmental, economic, and health implications. This debate was particularly well documented in Britain, where operations coincided with a sudden and unprecedented die-off of oysters in the Thames Estuary in 1920 and 1921. Oyster merchants blamed dumped munitions for the die off, but political and military officials remained skeptical. To resolve the issue, stakeholders turned to science, but the subsequent investigations into the mortality’s cause failed to provide definitive answers. This article examines the immense ecological and logistical implications of demobilization and the ways in which inconclusive science shaped events. It argues that demobilization and disarmament have troubling environmental histories, tied to the contamination generated by ordnance destruction and the ways in which government and military officials defined acceptable risks and controlled disposal. In the end, they used dilution to elide the uncertainty and normalize dumping operations, thereby setting precedents that shaped institutional memories about the consequences throughout the twentieth century.

Anglican army chaplains’ responses to prostitution on the Western Front, 1914–1919

ABSTRACT Anglican Army chaplains’ responses to prostitution in the First World War remain a neglected subject. Typically, historians have used references to prostitution in chaplains’ diaries and memoirs as anecdotes to illustrate moral tensions with military authorities. However, this approach implies a consistent moral condemnation throughout the conflict, contradicting recent research which emphasizes that chaplains adapted to their military environment and changed their perspectives. This article moves beyond the prevailing use of isolated anecdotes by situating chaplains’ responses to prostitution within military and social contexts. Rather than a static moralist position, it argues that chaplains’ responses to prostitution shifted throughout the conflict. While early responses were characterized largely by interventionist moral objections, from 1915 onwards these moral objections were accompanied by pragmatic assessments and criticisms of regulated prostitution. By adopting a chronological approach, and contrasting civilian and military chaplains approaches to the subject, this study argues that chaplains’ responses to regulated prostitution provide another means of showing how the military environment affected chaplains’ moral stances.

“A Very Entertaining Book”: The Ventriloquism of Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia

This article is a critical comparison between the text of letters written by Indian soldiers on the Western Front of World War I, and the text of Rudyard Kipling’s The Eyes of Asia. The deployment of Indian soldiers by the British Empire to the Western Front produced controversy, anxiety, and excitement among European observers. Indian soldiers were depicted in a range of representations that reflected a discursive tension between loyal, heroic warriors, and racialized primitives. A number of British authors wrote stories from the perspectives of Indian soldiers built to assuage Western anxieties over the presence of non-white colonial soldiers in Europe. The concept of ventriloquism is used to read these works as reproductions of the imperialist “discourse of the master” through the purported voice of the Indian soldier. The Eyes of Asia, a quartet of short stories by Rudyard Kipling, is the chosen case study for this critical analysis. The Eyes of Asia was a commissioned work of British military propaganda using an archive of letters written by Indian soldiers, gathered by British censors, and provided to Kipling. By comparing Kipling’s stories written from the perspectives of fictional Indian soldiers against the letters by real Indians, the article reveals how Kipling manipulated the voices of Indian soldiers to produce a caricature of their testimony that conformed to British expectations of the men of the Indian army.

Covid 19 and the China Challenge: Interrogating the Domestic International Nexus in Beijing’s Coronavirus Response

This article considers China’s political manoeuvers between February and October 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate many parts of the world. It argues that the pandemic has exacerbated geopolitical tensions between China, the United States and the West. Consequently, Chinese policy-makers perceive the existence of a broad Western front which seeks to contain its global ambitions, as well as to de-legitimise the rule of the Chinese government domestically. In response, the Chinese government has attempted to shore up its territorial claims while embarking on a global diplomatic offensive to cast itself as a responsible power and at the same time call into question the West’s ability to practice global leadership. Taken together, these narratives have emboldened China to attempt and seize the moral high ground while at the same time undermine Western criticism that it was an uncooperative and opportunistic power that had taken advantage of the pandemic to pursue its own selfish agenda.

Historical Empathy and Museum Culture

ABSTRACT The Centenary of World War I (WWI) between 2014 and 2018 attracted international attention. Many Australians travel to key battle sites in mainland Europe, especially Turkey, France, and Belgium to connect with the experiences of Australian soldiers and nurses who served in this war. As no conflict occurred within Australian borders, sites make for popular tourist destinations. Museums and other cultural sites along The Remembrance Trail provide educational tours and experiences to a range of visitors, including private tour groups, individual tourists, school and university groups. Through the exhibition and accompanying guided tours, participants of a university elective study tour developed their historical understanding of WWI, with a specific focus on the Western Front in France and Belgium. Focus group interviews took place after visits to key museums to gauge students’ reflections to their learning, including any affective connections to particular historical narratives and experiences as presented in these cultural sites. This article will discuss the participating tertiary students’ development of historical empathy through visits to museums.

ОСВОБОЖДЕНИЕ СМОЛЕНЩИНЫ КАК СОСТАВНАЯ ЧАСТЬ КОРЕННОГО ПЕРЕЛОМА В ХОДЕ ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The article analyzes the offensive operations of the Red Army in 1942-1943, deployed on the territory of Smolensk region. The battles in the western strategic direction during this period are considered in the general context of a radical turning point in the course of the Great Patriotic War. Attention is focused on the economic and political factors that determine the strategy of the Soviet high command in planning large-scale military operations against the Nazi Army Group Center. There were revealed the causes and consequences of an incorrect assessment of the state and potential capabilities of the enemy troops on the eve of the general offensive on the Soviet-German front in January 1942. The distinctive features of the operations of the Red Army in the central, Moscow direction, during which Smolensk region was liberated (within the borders until 1944, taking into account the territories later transferred to Kaluga and Kalinin regions). Using the example of changes in the number of personnel and equipment of the Western and Kalinin Fronts, a gradual build-up of superiority over the enemy troops holding the Rzhev-Vyazma ledge - a bridgehead for an attack on Moscow along the shortest route is shown. The article reveals the gradual process of the transition of the strategic initiative to the Soviet army in this sector of the Soviet-German front.

Using converted WW1 Army Grid Referencing Systems to identify locations where Australian soldiers fell Europe

ABSTRACT Topographic maps (1:40,000) used by the British Army on the Western Front in World War 1 had a five-part Grid Reference System consisting of: (1) Map Number; (2) Letter-Square – 24 letter squaresA to X on each map; (3) Number-Square – 36 (and sometimes 30) 1000-yard squares in each letter square; (4) Minor-Square – four 500-yard squares denoted a, b, c, d in each number square; (5) Small-Square – 10 × 10 = 100 small-squares in a minor-square. Letter and number grid Woesten references (e.g. X: 28.A.6.b.73) cannot be used by modern GPS navigation devices that require geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude) or current map grid coordinates. This paper provides the background behind this project and demonstrates a method of transforming WW1 grid references to Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid coordinates using Google Maps to obtain geographical coordinates, Geographic to UTM grid conversion and a 2D Conformal transformation. As well, it provides a ‘snapshot’ of practical methods that were used to develop a software package that would allow amateur military historians to convert the WW1 Grid Reference System to contemporary coordinates.

Bulgaria and Hungary in the First World War: A View from the 21st Century

Bulgaria and Hungary in the First World War: A View from the 21st Century

‘Dominant’ First World War memory: race, nation and the occlusion of Empire

ABSTRACT Surveys carried out in the UK have revealed a marked lack of awareness of the contribution of non-white, non-European soldiers during the First World War. For many, the First World War is understood as an exclusively white, European conflict that was confined to the battlefields of the Western Front. This article considers how British cultural memory of the First World War was formed over the course of the 20th century, and asks why dominant memory came to exclude the experiences of the non-white soldiers of Empire. Drawing on the scholarship of Jay Winter, this article re-considers the two major ‘memory booms’ during which popular cultural memory of the First World War developed, and argues that each of these memory-making periods was shaped by interrelated forms of exclusionary racism. In the immediate postwar period, the experience of non-white soldiers was differentially commemorated according to imperial, taxonomic racial hierarchies. In the late twentieth century, meanwhile, First World War remembrance coalesced around a fundamentally white British national memory at the expense of the non-white ‘other’. Finally, this article considers how far the recent First World War centenary may have reshaped public understanding of the conflict and integrated non-white, non-European experience into British cultural memory of the war.

The Emergence of New States in Eastern Europe in 1918—Lessons for All of Europe

Abstract The year of 1918 was a crucial point in the history of Europe. Its importance does not only stem from the end of World War I, but also from the establishment of new states. Eastern Europe was particularly an arena where many new states emerged after the dissolution of tsarist Russia. The abovementioned process was correlated with the outcome of World War I (the defeat of the Central Powers on the Western Front and their victory on the Eastern Front against the tsarist Russia resulting in imposing their protectorate over Eastern Europe) but simultaneously it was influenced by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution originating from a structural crisis of Russia. The legacy of nation-building processes, taking place in the period of 1917–1921 in the European part of the tsarist Russia— even when some of the states did not manage to survive— occupies a key role in the historical memories of those countries. The importance of this legacy originates from the fact that these states often constituted the most progressive nation-building efforts in the world. The wider context of these developments and the important interlinkages existing between them are very often unfamiliar to many Europeans today. Despite that, the state-building attempts, undertaken in Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1921, had a huge impact on the trajectory of European history. Contextualising this particular academic enquiry with the events of 1918 and benefiting from methodological advantages of process tracing, our project represents an attempt to restore (or, if necessary, build from scratch) a communicational system for sending a historical message to a wider Europe. A century after, while celebrating the Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish truly big anniversaries in 2017–2018, Europeans have already forgotten how interconnected and interlinked the 1918-bound events had been and by how much those events had affected the entire European continent as well as the international system.

Predator and prey: The origin of antisubmarine warfare

The month America entered The War [That Did Not] End All Wars, in April 1917, Germany’s relentless U-boat predators hunted their prey throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic, sending 400 ships to the bottom. During those 30 days, hundreds more were damaged and put out of commission. Soon after his arrival in England, Admiral Sims, Commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Europe, sent a warning to the Secretary of the Navy that with the “appalling destruction” by U-boats, the “unconditional surrender of the British Empire would inevitably take places….” After a three year stalemate along the Western Front, Germany was becoming dependent on the Unterseeboot, declaring: “[T]here is no possibility of bringing the war to a satisfactory end without ruthless U-boat warfare.” Briefly reaching back to 1776 when David Bushnell’s submersible vessel Turtle attempted to sink a British man-of-war, this presentation will focus on the emergence of submarine and antisubmarine technologies at the beginning of the 20th century. The U-boat solution would come from a cadre of scientists and engineers at the Naval Experimental Station in New London, CT, adapting the hydrophone to exploit a submarine’s vulnerability: they were extremely noisy. The predator now became the prey.

A NEW SET OF FIRST WORLD WAR DIARIES FOR THE MESOPOTAMIA CAMPAIGN, FEBRUARY 1916 TO JUNE 1917

Two diaries written by a Territorial Force officer serving in Mesopotamia from 1916 to 1917 have been recently discovered. They contain valuable insight into the difficulties and dangers of life on campaign, an account of the action of As Sahilan (11 September 1916), and what appears to be a unique description of the escort of an Ottoman princeling to a prisoner-of-war camp. These diaries help shed light on a theatre of the First World War that is often overlooked in favour of the Western Front. This paper presents some of the most interesting entries and discusses their significance.

Net right-lateral slip of the Eastern Frontal Fault System, North Andes Sliver, northwestern South America

The NNE-directed tectonic escape of the North Andean block (NAB) or sliver (NAS) with respect to South America (SA) is generally accepted now. NAS is detached from continental South America (SA) by a 2000-km-long, NE-SW-trending dominant dextral fault system, known as the Eastern Frontal Front System (EFFS; Pennington's name and acronym kept for simplicity) that extends from the gulf of Guayaquil-Tumbes basin (GGTB) in offshore Ecuador to the Caribbean coasts of Venezuela in the Golfo Triste region. From SW to NE, EFFS comprises the following fault systems: In Ecuador, Puná-Pallatanga-Cosangá-Chingual (CCPP); In Colombia, Afiladores, Sibundoy, Algeciras and Guaicáramo; and in Venezuela, Boconó (BF).Several estimates of total dextral slip have been calculated along the EFFS. In Ecuador, the Pallatanga fault (part of the CCPP) displaces several large geologic and morphologic units in about 10 km. The net slip of EFFS at this western front of the Western cordillera can be as much as the double (≈20 km) if strain happens to be distributed between sub-parallel faults. Further south, at the very southern tip of the EFFS, from seismic data acquired from the GGTB, an estimate of 13.5–20 km of lengthening of this basin from the Plio-Quaternary boundary has been proposed.In Colombia, the Algeciras lazy Z-shaped pull-apart basin (Huila Dpt.) provides another estimate. The extent of the Quaternary basin fill measured along the regional fault trend on SGC geologic plate 345, is about 10 km. This is a minimum estimate because the fault shortcuts the basin in more recent times, increasing such slip in at least about 1–2 km. In Venezuela, although more reliable and frequent dextral offsets are of the order of 30 km, a larger 70–80 km offset in Mesozoic rocks was once proposed across BF. A supportive argument to the 30 km net slip along the Mérida Andes axis may be derived from a present mismatch of Bouguer anomaly minima between both adjacent flexural basins of no more than 40 km.From all the estimates of total slip here compiled along EFFS, we can conclude that the NE tectonic escape of NAS is most likely not larger than 30–35 km. This net slip may vary along EFFS strike, being smaller (close to 20 km) in the south. Therefore, despite the large size of NAS, its escape remains modest at plate scale. Remarkably, EFFS net slip is in the same order of magnitude as the ≈20 km for the Sumatra fault, which is as long as the EFFS (≈1900 km long).

Franco-British responses to chemical warfare 1915–8, with special reference to the medical services, casualty statistics and the threat to civilians

AbstractThis dual-focussed examination will critically compare and contrast the British Royal Army Medical Corps and the French Medical Service’s involvement in the Western Front chemical campaign between 1915 and 1918. Because the Anglophone historiography has tended to marginalise the French contribution to the allied chemical war, this article will attempt to re-balance the historical narrative by emphasising the collective nature and importance of this joint Franco-British enterprise. By interrogating a raft of under-utilised primary evidence in the French and British archives, this investigation will contribute to the ‘alliance literature’ by arguing that when it comes to aspects of the Franco-British chemical war such as the co-operation of the medical services, the appellation ‘together but alone’ does not fully hold. The article will explore avenues of the two national armies evolving process of mutual medical assistance, material exchange and scientific collaboration. The striking similarity of French and British gas casualty statistics is highlighted with reference to the overall congruence of their anti-gas strategies – notwithstanding the problematic nature of these statistics. In addition to enhancing soldiers’ resistance to the poison gas threat on the battlefield, the Medical Services were also responsible for the protection of local civilians in the war zones. With reference mainly to France, this investigation will discuss the significance and implications of the poison gas threat to the home front. Finally, the impact of chemical weapon production upon civilian war workers in France and Britain will be commented upon.

When war came home: air-raid shock in World War I.

During World War I, civilians became a target of the war machine. Air raids transformed the lives of those not involved in active combat and blurred the lines between the home front and the war front. This paper argues that the experience of air raids in World War I was comparable to the combat stress at the Western Front. The author bases her argument on contemporary publications in medical journals, measures taken by British authorities to prevent air-raid shock, and contemporary case records. The narratives of air-raid shock – similarly to those of shell-shocked soldiers – reflect the feelings of terror and loss of control, and demonstrate the profound effect these experiences could have on individuals’ mental health.