Monthly Archives: August 2023

by | August 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

The next few months of the Battle of the Somme with more revelations about British stupidity (Part 5)

Surprisingly, throughout the whole First World War, the British were unbelievably lax on what could be termed “personal security”. In the German Archives, therefore, battlefield expert, Peter Barton, seen below,………

………found that literally hundreds of lower ranked British officers had been captured by the Germans with top secret plans in their possession, including many labelled “not to be taken into the front line”.

Not surprisingly, the Germans found these maps extremely useful and once they had seen them, they would quickly change their defensive plans and tactics to fit in with them. For example, on one occasion, they resited all of their heavy machine guns out of range of the Allied creeping barrage. Here they are, the schweinhunds……

During the very harsh winter of 1916-1917, the morale of the British troops plunged, in large part because of the lack of success on the Somme and the huge casualties suffered there.

According to the German Archives, hundreds of British POWs shared that very same opinion. The POWs were only too ready to tell the Germans that anxiety, depression and pessimism were rife among the men in the British trenches. A war which was going to be a “walkover” had now become a very long steeplechase with an almost infinite number of obstacles.

Indeed, war weariness was such that both officers and soldiers were frequently delighted to become POWs in German captivity. There was also widespread disgust at how the British press told blatant lies about the progress of the war, especially the Daily Mail. Here are headlines about how a desperate German population was now eating the corpses of their dead soldiers…..

By 1916-197, divisions were also beginning to appear between the British and the Dominions of the Empire, with the Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders only too willing to slate the British leadership on the Somme.

The numbers of men who wanted to go on fighting were increasingly small and the Australians in particular, who were no fools and were 100% aware that they were “always used in tough battles” were beginning to see their role as the “White Slaves of the Somme”. The same would happen to them in World War Two, and the Canadians would also suffer in a similar way in both wars. In World War 2, the Poles and the French speaking Canadians could also added to the list.

Mental illness, shell shock and desertion were increasing by leaps and bounds. Haig showed them no mercy and nine times out of ten opted to have them shot. It was carried out in the most ill considered of ways, with the members of the firing squad always selected from the condemned man’s unit. On many occasions, therefore, they were being asked to shoot somebody who they may have known personally, quite possibly as a friend. Here’s a British Army firing squad, hard at work…….

Both sides tried wrongdoers at courts martial. The British did not give the accused access to a lawyer, but instead they had an officer to give them advice and to fight their corner.

The Germans made it much more like a civil trial. There was a jury whose job was to decide the guilt of the prisoner, and he had access to a fully qualified lawyer.

The Germans used physical punishments and these were carried out in the local area.

When dealing with captured German soldiers, the British constantly harassed them and tended to be very fierce and very nasty to them. The result was that they hardly ever discovered any useful intelligence information.

The Germans, though, were always very pleasant with the British POWs, who soon became much more relaxed. The two sides would begin to chat to each other, and share a cup of tea, sometimes with biscuits.  Those simple aids would usually persuade the British to give up their secrets, often in very great detail. Here are prisoners in a German Prisoner-of-War camp. Some of these men might have been here for four years, since being captured, for example, at the Battle of Mons….

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by | August 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

Widdle (8)

Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:

There was nothing to stop the urban foxes.  On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….

“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”

Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:

Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:

At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.

In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.

It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.

Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :

Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:

Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:

Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.

 

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by | August 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

The next few months of the Battle of the Somme; a change in German tactics (Part 4)

My three previous blog posts about the Battle of the Somme were all based on the extensive researches of the English historian, Peter Barton, who has spent many years as a “battlefield guide” in the Somme area. He was the first person ever to consult the German language military archives and I was amazed to find that he was the only English historian who had looked at them in a whole century.

He discovered, for example, that the Germans from August 1916 onwards, were beginning to change their tactics, with many of the changes heavily reliant on skilful camouflage. Here’s a genuine 100 year old camouflage scheme from an aeroplane called the  Rumpler Taube……

From late 1916 onwards, the Germans began to renounce their previous doctrines of heavily fortified defensive lines with numerous bunkers forty foot underground and countless tons of concrete protecting their troops. Instead, they began to start making extensive use of shell holes, with a man in each, hidden by a tarpaulin over him. In this way, whole machine gun crews might become almost completely invisible. And the Germans, of course, always had huge numbers of machine guns……

This more simple arrangement would go on to take the place of trenches and to replace what had gone before with what was called “defence in depth” with “every position defended to the last man”.

You’ve seen this picture before, but I make no excuses for re-using an image with such unbelievable numbers of machine guns in it. What’s the collective name? A rattle of machine guns? A maximum of Maxim guns?

Frequently, the German soldiers operated in teams with each team responsible for the defence of a specific area. Within the team, each man usually had his own job, such as flame thrower, mortar crew and so on. This made immediate counter attack much easier, and arrangements were constantly being revised. Eventually, the members of the defensive teams would begin to be called “stormtroopers”. Here is a platoon of them, with a selection of different weapons……….

The Germans always studied the tactics of their opponents, particularly when the latter were using their tanks in combat. The Germans did not particularly favour tanks, but the Australians, British and Canadians did, and every German soldier, even those in the lowest ranks, was encouraged to analyse what had occurred in an engagement, and, if necessary, to make criticism of it themselves. Anything particularly significant could be circulated around the army in hours. Here’s a German tank. I wonder what a “Schnuck” is?

Let’s finish withj two more Funfacts…..

Funfact One

In battle, the British always attacked in enormous numbers, but the Germans seemed to have better communication and always to be completely aware of what was going on, and to be completely capable of dealing with anything the British or French got up to.

Funfact Two

An innovation based, I believe, on the Canadian tactics at Courcelette in 1916, the Allies’ so-called “creeping barrage”, was an effort to cut casualties among their own troops attacking over no-man’s-land. It was, though, frequently difficult for the advancing troops to keep up with the barrage and they were often left vulnerable to enemy fire. Equally frequently, friendly fire would take a heavy toll.

Here’s a diagram. As the troops go forward, the artillery is fired at whichever enemy troops are directly in their way. The attackers are relatively safe behind the carpet of shells as it creeps gradually forward…..

Funfact Three

In the attack on Boom Ravine on February 17th 1917, around 2,000 Allied troops were killed. From the way the German artillery operated over the course of the day, and the timing of their use, it was widely believed at the time that they had been informed by treachery on the previous day, by British POWs already in German hands and by British deserters who preferred to surrender rather than risk their own lives going “over the top”. Other similar events were not unheard of, but what made it an important first was that they had never previously been described in any written accounts published later about the battle.

And that’s it. And I would strongly recommend that you record and watch Peter Barton’s “From Both Sides of the Wire” if you ever get a chance to do so in the future. It is a refreshing look at the First World War by a man who has literally, tramped every inch of the fields where the war took place, explaining carefully to his battlefield visitors the real truth of how events unfolded. Channels such as Discovery, PBS, and Smithsonian frequently dedicate a whole day to programmes on the same subject, often for public holidays or weekends. That’s your best chance if you want to see all three programmes.

Funfact Four

I actually have a piece of World War 1 aircraft fabric taken from a crashed German aircraft. It comes to me via my Grandfather, Will Knifton, who served with the 19th Canadian Field Artillery. The aircraft in question was shot down, and the Canadian soldiers all rushed straight out of their trenches to cut a souvenir from the wreckage with their bayonets. Here is the piece of fabric that Will managed to grab. Note the relatively complex use of different colours for camouflage purposes, unlike the planes of the RFC…..

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by | August 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls (4) A cry from history

What traces remain of Brincliffe Grammar School for Girls? Well, in Balmoral Road, the front wall still remains, running from No 23 Balmoral Road, all the way to the corner with Forest Road East and then past that for a few yards. It’s easy to see and it is virtually untouched. It’s a sandstone wall which continues round the corner and runs as far as what would have been the old boundary of the High School in, say, 1895. The wall continues for all this distance and the fact that it matches both of the two remaining Victorian photographs of the school is proof enough for me.

Here are the two pictures of Brincliffe still in existence. This is the older of the two:

And here is the one where the bike has been invented:

And here is a sample of the wall. The brighter, red one is modern, the tan coloured lower wall dates from 1870 at least. At the same time, you can see how, in modern times, it was thought wiser to make the original wall much higher.

The sandstone Brincliffe wall stretches all the way round onto Forest Road East and meets the old boundary line of the old High School (right). Here we are:

But what is this Victorian remnant? Some kind of fire hydrant?

At the side of No 23 Balmoral Road there is a pillar which clearly dates from the turn of the 20th century or earlier, and is visible in the second of the old photographs above. Here it is:

Further down, what has clearly been a gate to the school is still visible. In the controversial “pushbike-and-dog” photograph, it is down near the fir tree, but difficult to see. In the “Welcome, Munsters” postcard, it is the first gate you see in the wall and the ornate tops are clearly visible.  Here it is:

As  you know, I sometimes buy articles connected with the High School from ebay. A while back I produced seven blog posts called “Nottingham High School on ebay”. This link should take you to No 1 if you are interested. Sometime after #7 was published world wide, I bought this:

It shows a group of unknown children from what was called “Brincliffe School” although the presence of little boys must mean that events took place before 1907 when the Girls’ Grammar  School started up. I have no idea whatsoever what is going on with all their sticks and costumes. But the picture and the words that go with it really amount to a cry which comes from well over a century ago. And that wordless cry says

“Here I am. I used to be alive like you.”

And those sentiments are present in the picture but they are also written on the back of the postcard:

It reads, as far as I can see:

“Yours Truly

Bernard Raven

as

A Farmers Boy

First boy on top row to the left”

Just have a look at him. The back row, the boy on the left. He can’t even be trusted to carry a stick, and appears to have lost his. But he is the one we can look at and we know his name. Bernard Raven. He grew up, perhaps he fell in love, perhaps he married, perhaps he had children of his own. I suspect we will never know. But with a little bit of luck, he will be read about, if only for a few seconds, in Australia, India, the USA, all over the world. I hope he was happy with his life.

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by | August 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

The next few months of the Battle of the Somme, July, August, September, October 1916 (Part 3)

My previous blog posts about the Battle of the Somme were based on the “Both sides of the wire”” series of TV programmes, which were themselves based on the extensive researches of the English historian, Peter Barton, who has spent many years as a “battlefield guide” in the Somme area. He was the first person ever to consult the German language archives and was amazed to discover that he was the only English historian who had looked at them in a whole century. Here he is…..

My previous blog posts concentrated on the famous “First Day of the Somme”, July 1st 1916, the British Army’s most disastrous ever day, which  was portrayed in the first programme of the three. The remaining two programmes followed the campaign until the Battle of Boom Ravine between February 17th–18th 1917. This was when the Allies attacked the Germans troops on the Ancre Heights near Courcelette and to the north of the Ancre valley. That was the end, more or less, of the Somme Campaign. Overall, the British had casualties of 420,000 men, the French 200,000 and the Germans 512,000. If my Maths serves me well, that is 1,132,000 poor souls killed or wounded, many of them horrifically disfigured for life.

Rather than take you through these two remaining TV programmes in immense detail, I would prefer to tell you about the most striking details Peter Barton found. Although they are often unrelated to each other, these details are all really interesting and might well persuade you to set the recorder for all three hours of programming on the next occasion these ground-breaking documentaries are shown. So don’t expect a bedtime story, rather a list of unusual, quirky truths that Peter Barton found in his researches in the German Archives. I decided to label them “Fun facts” in case anybody wanted to have a test afterwards.

Funfact One

In the fighting from July 14th onwards, the excellent fighting qualities of the Germans were often completely underestimated, particularly their defensive organisation. Advances which were anticipated to take a few hours, instead took the British several weeks. The Germans had by now developed new tactics, there was extremely fierce resistance and the British attack just petered out. It took an unexpected two weeks to capture Longueval, and the Germans in nearby Delville Wood were to remain there until August 27th. What a pretty little wood it was! …….

Funfact Two

Overall, the Germans had always preferred to be defensive and the British were forced to be offensive. According to the German Archives, though, the British POWs had told their German captors that the British feared open warfare and very much preferred a war based on a defensive system with trenches, barbed wire and minefields.

Not all the British generals shared these views, however, and differences of opinion were frequently marked. Rawlinson was the second in command and he was an infantry man. He believed in what was popularly called “Bite and hold”, or the acquisition of enemy territory in cautious, tiny steps. Haig, however, the British No 1, was a cavalry man, who believed in great thrusts of advance. Haig had the derring-do of a cavalry man and was considered to be a “thruster”, a man who would always unleash the cavalry when the opportunity arose. Here’s Haig, wearing his “Anti-Gas trousers”….

Funfact Three

During the July 14th attack during the Somme campaign, there was a cavalry charge which involved some Indian troops of the 20th Deccan Horse. Peter Barton discovered that German POWs in British hands had reported, when they spoke to their own officers much later, that many of the British cavalrymen were feeding and watering their horses at the very same time when senior British officers had told the press that their derring-do charge was taking place.

In other words, the charge could not possibly have taken place as the newspapers described it. This was further emphasised by the fact that it could not have happened as early in the day as the newspapers reported, because the ground at that time would have been too hard and slippery for the horses’ hooves. Only later would conditions have been suitable. The inference is, of course, that direct lies were being told about events to make the British attack and their meagre achievements look more impressive.

Funfact Four

The Germans were aware of every single detail about the British because of their enormous number of telephone intercepts. They must been aware too, therefore, that the German army was only one fifth the size of the Allied forces.

Funfact Five

Again, the fact was emphasised that the British may actually have been very pleased to turn to defensive, trench warfare. Open warfare requires great flexibility, lots of different techniques and lots of different skills, but the German Archives revealed that the British troops seemed to have received no battlefield training whatsoever. Their basic tactic remained a massive heavy bombardment by thousands of mortars and field guns, and then a charge across no-man’s-land in large numbers. They had presumably learnt nothing from July 1st 1916, except that it was okay to run rather than having always to walk.

Even so, the Germans had enormous respect for the British, who attacked and then attacked again, even when it was obviously pointless. This, of course, produced enormous casualties for very little gain but that did not seem to matter a huge amount. With the Allied forces five times as numerous as their opponents, the war became very much a “war of attrition”. The effectiveness of attrition as a tactic was made to look all the better by using optimistic, or possibly, even false, German casualty figures.

Funfact Six

In the skies, the Royal Flying Corps, the RFC, were always dominant but the Germans were very adept at protecting themselves with camouflage, and very good at hiding themselves, and their weaponry. Most striking, perhaps, was their use of “dazzle camouflage”, as on this possibly early Bauhaus chamber pot from 1918…..

 

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