Questions and Answers Episode 31

Our listeners have a few intriguing questions: Is there still live ordnance in the moat at the Ypres Ramparts? What exactly was the role of Inland Waterways Transport during the First World War? How would the French portrayal of the Last Hundred Days differ from the traditional British narrative? And finally, if you could take any piece of modern military technology back to the Great War, what would it be, and why? 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to some more questions and answers here on the old front line. These are questions submitted by you, the podcast listeners, and each month we select some of the best questions that have been submitted via email and the Discord server to answer here and hopefully give us all fresh perspectives and new knowledge of this vast subject of the Great War. So let's begin. Thank you very much. And long may they continue and keep sending those questions in. So let's get down to this week's questions and they've all come in via email or via the Discord server. And our first one comes from Anne. Anne asks, having just watched your YouTube video about the Ypres ramparts, a thought struck me. In view of the heavy shelling the city suffered throughout the Great War, have the waters at the ramparts ever been searched and cleared or could there still be ordnance under the water that could explode in the future. Secondly, were German shells subject to the same failure rate as those of the British, which I understand to have been about 30%? Was that a true reflection of the number of duds? Well, an interesting question there, Anne, about ordnance, the nature of ordnance, and also the legacy of that ordnance. It is one of the biggest legacies of the First World War that this iron harvest of shells comes out of the ground on a regular basis. And if it comes out of fields, logically, it is still within waterways, whether that's canals, rivers, or in this case, the moat around the city of Ypres. and I know that at different points over the years that I've been visiting those battlefields they've done work on it when they constructed for example the footbridge between the sally port that you saw in that video and if you haven't seen the videos they are available on the old Frontline YouTube channel and I'll put a link to that in the show notes so when that bridge was constructed from the old sally port across the moat on the site where there had been a Royal Engineer bridge during the Great War things were discovered within the moat during the building of the foundations for that and there have been one or two occasions when the level of the water in the moat have dropped in particularly dry summers and that has exposed things within the banks and in recent years I know for example that magnet fishers have been going into the moat have been fishing off the sides of the moat or even from the bridge now it's unclear to me as to whether that is is permitted. magnet fishing where you have a huge powerful magnet that you drop into a waterway again whether it's a canal or a river or in this case the moat can attract metal objects and you can pull up all kinds of things I mean there are plenty of YouTube videos out there with people magnet fishing all over Europe all over the world probably and it's incredible what can and is pulled out of places like this and I know this is happened did he because I've seen it I've seen someone on the bridge drop one of these things in there and come up with a huge amount of shrapnel shell shard of shell fragments from high explosive shells that have exploded on the walls of the ramparts in the moat itself on the edge of the moat I mean who knows where and the fragments from those shells have ended up at the bottom of that moat probably with loads of other layers of our from previous centuries as well, but with a big sprinkling of stuff from 1914-18. And what I saw this person bring up, basically, was what I would call battlefield junk. So it is a lot of shell shard. There were some rounds of 303 ammunition. I guess when there were the footbridges here, soldiers dropped stuff all the time, and who knows what dropped out of bandoliers and ammunition pouches and all kinds of equipment that were being carried by the soldiers. soldiers fell into that moat and this guy found lots of fragments few bits of ammunition but that was it thankfully I mean what I was worried about was this guy dropping it deep into the moat and coming up with grenades or mortar rounds or worse than that so there must be munitions at the bottom there logically there must be if shrapnel shell shard and small arms ammunition is pulled up by a magnet fisher if you did a serious kind of excavation of the bottom of that moat who knows what you'd find in there and consider that the Germans threw pretty much everything at the city of Ypres from the lowest caliber mortar when they had positions on Hellfire Corner in April 1918 very very close to the city of Ypres through to the massive 420 millimeter shells that were fired from guns established in the Houthos forest and General Snow who was divisional commander at Portesa I think I've mentioned this story a few times on the podcast when he was there in 1915 sitting on the veranda of the Poteza Chateau while his men were in the front line he was having his morning tea and he observed one of these 420 shells appear in the sky above the Huttal's forest and pass like an express train over his head he turned round to watch it hit one of the great buildings in the city of Ypres and tear it apart now who knows if any of those dropped short and landed in the ramparts in area and in the moat of the city of Ypres. So really who knows what is in there and I'm sure that this is a problem. I don't recall in recent years the local bomb disposal unit being called out to deal with anything in the moat itself but a few years ago they were doing some work on the moat bridge and the road junction directly in front of the Menin Gate where they found quite a lot of ordnance there including stuff that hadn't gone off and also the bones on of horses that have been killed coming over that moat bridge going up the Menin Road coming back from Hellfire Corner I mean who knows what the story is there so aside from the munitions there's going to be all kinds of archaeology within that moat itself and perhaps one day there will be some kind of project to explore that properly because it's just as important as doing excavations in a field on the battlefield area right up in the front line And considering that they're underwater drones now, I mean, you know, in the next few years, who knows what kind of technology can go into a moat like the one at Ypres, and who knows what it'll find. So that, again, is the pages of Great War history still turning. Now, the second part of your question was about the ordnance itself. You mentioned the dud rate. These are shells that never went off. And I think this figure of 30% for the British is only an approximation. I don't think it could ever be counted. calculated accurately and when you look at different periods of the war I suspect it would change when you had quite a big workforce that was not properly trained I suspect there were more duds being produced in the munitions factories in Britain and shells were not going off and certain fuses were known to be better than others and that was adapted over the course of the war so more shells did explode so it was an ongoing process when you read the accounts of men who were on the battlefield particularly in that period of the Battle of the Somme they talk about getting to the German wire and finding it like an ammunition dump where all of the unexploded shrapnel shells that haven't gone off because the fuses didn't work are lying amongst the German wire that they should have cut so there was quite a high percentage in some bombardments but I think by 1918 they were beginning to perfect a much better production process and much better fuses to ensure that those shells that ordnance actually worked In terms of how that compares to the Germans... I've never seen any kind of figures for that. I've never seen any comparative study of the production of German ammunition in the First World War and what percentage of it didn't work. And I suspect the records today following World War II bombing of Germany probably don't allow that to be done on a kind of full scale. There may well be publications during or after the First World War where the Germans look back on that. Perhaps in the post-war Germany there was little interest in looking back on the production of munitions in that most recent conflict which had resulted in German defeat to assess whether it was of any purpose use or ability so maybe those studies just don't exist logically I suspect the Germans had exactly the same kind of problems that the British had with shell production and indeed the French and every nation that fought in the Great War bringing in largely unskilled workers that would require rapid training to produce these munitions was fraught with issues so probably I mean it's definitely a study in its own right and but we'll probably never have a clear answer to that so I hope that's been of interest and I hope it hasn't inspired you to go magnet fishing because that is not something that I would advise I'm not sure of the legality of it and also I would advise in terms of the safety of it because you just would never know what you were going to pull up so thanks for and we're going to move on to question number two which comes from robin prattley recently i discovered that a distant cousin on my dad's side of the family was serving in the inland water service what was this and did it serve in france and belgium it was a kind of a link here with anne's question not quite in a moat but we now moved on to canals well the inland waterways transport or iwt was actually a unit of the royal engineers part of the british army and and it was formed in response to the kind of landscape that the British Army inherited when it moved its forces across to France in the early phase of the Great War, particularly once the front was established from Flanders down into northern France, which in those first 9-12 months of the war, that's where the bulk of the British forces were located. Behind it, going back towards the coast, was a whole network of canals linking up all the towns and even some of the small villages and creating a kind of super highway that could be used alongside the roads to ship up war material, supplies, ammunition, equipment, everything else, not on the road, not with trucks that had fuel in that cost money, but on a waterway, a canal. So a unit was formed to bring over men who had this kind of experience, who'd worked, for bring over barges to France and Flanders and utilise them on the battlefield area or behind the battlefield area in that canal infrastructure. And the IWT of the Royal Engineers, the Inland Waterways Transport, was formed as early as December 1914 under the command of a Colonel Holland. And it used those canals very effectively in its first few months of existence. And there's a quote relating to them which says, around could be much more easily moved in barges and they were. by this IWT Royal Engineers unit and in addition with the food for animals again that was a huge amount of food that was required just to keep animals on or near the battlefield with tens of thousands of horses and donkeys and mules they had to be fed they needed hay for where they were based behind the lines and it was again much easier to move that via barge than it was with horse transport or with lorries so it became an essential part of the infrastructure and as i've said quite a lot of times on this podcast the british really invested in that infrastructure from the very beginning of the war and utilized everything that was there so there was this huge network of road transport with everything from donkeys horses and mules pulling wagons with supplies and equipment in through to lorries petrol driven lorries doing the same kind of thing. Old build buses, old London buses that were turned into transport vehicles to move soldiers around from rail heads towards the front line area and then the canals were used in exactly the same way and it's something that we still see today when you take that journey from the French coast up to the front line area whether that's in Flanders or in northern France you will criss-cross canals all of the time and all of those canals were active during the Great War and would have had these Royal Engineer inland waterways transport units operating on them and by the end of 1915 there was over five and a half thousand men in this unit with over 550 barges operating just on the western front and they continued throughout the rest of the war to move supplies move equipment Eventually there were hospital barges as well because if you could move things up you could bring things back and in terms of the wounded it was another way to evacuate them. Men that didn't have high priority wounds that you could stabilise, put onto a hospital barge where there would be doctors and nurses from the different nursing units that formed part of the British Expeditionary Force, you could use these hospital barges to bring them in back to the area closer to the coast where there were the base units. hospitals and even at one point the barges were used to move fresh water because again fresh water was a massively important commodity and a precious commodity on a battlefield and you needed infrastructure to bring that up it could be brought up in petrol tins in the back of lorries but you could also bring up much greater volumes of it within these barges so they were incredibly incredibly important and the barges could go direct from the docks up in northern France onto the coastal area and then inland via this canal system most of which were joined up and they could get right up towards the battlefield area so for example at Bethune in northern France there was quite a big canal dock area there and it became a drop-off point for all the kit supplies and everything else that was being brought forward by these barges and it was also a point in which wounded were brought to one of the where there were hospital barges to the front line and therefore nurses on them so this became an area Bethune where women got close to the realities of the battlefields of the Western Front much beyond that you wouldn't see places where nurses would be it was too close to the front line and there was always that fear of them being killed or wounded but at Bethune there were casualty clearing stations just the other side of the town where nurses were working there and also on these hospital barges too and when you look at the kind of men that were in these units Robin and you mentioned the fact there was a distant cousin on your father's side who served in this unit during the Great War they were a much higher proportion of them were older men so these weren't 18 year old Tommies they were older guys in their 30s through to their 50s because by 1918 with conscription coming in they conscripted much older men who were not destined for the trenches to fight and go over the top with bayonets fixed but they could work in units like this or in logistics behind the lines and free up much younger men who were fit and able who could be transferred to the infantry and could go on to do that fighting so again can't really emphasize this enough the story of the inland waterways transport And that whole kind of logistic story of the First World War is absolutely essential. It's not as attractive, it's not as kind of book-inducing as some of the tales of the Somme and Flanders and the war in the air and the war underground, but none of that would be possible without logistics, without supply. And the work of the inland waterways transport was a central cog in that massive wheel of supply that kept the war on the Western Front going and kept the British and Commonwealth forces who fought that war on the Western Front going as well. And the use of inland waterways transport units wasn't just confined to France and Flanders. They were used in many other theatres of war where there were rivers or canals that the British Army could use. My great-uncle Albert Youngs was a bargeman from Colchester in Essex. He worked on the River Hythe and he ended up in the inland waterways transport in Mesopotamia working on the River tigress there so wherever there were waterways wherever these barges of the inland waterways transport could be implemented they were there doing their bit not as glamorous as the infantry there's no victoria crosses in that kind of work but it's so so important and thank you robin for giving us the opportunity to talk about it So let's move on to question number three. And this one comes from Ian Carr. Ian asks, how differently would the French portray the last 100 days to the way it's perceived and recorded in the UK? Well, that's a good question. First of all, what is the last 100 days? Well, it's generally that period from the 8th of August 1918 with the Battle of Amiens, that decisive day on the Somme when British and Australian and Canadian and French force ruptured the German line on the Somme, a day, the 8th of August 1918, which Ludendorff said was the black day of the German army, which led to the final hundred days of the war on the Western Front, ending with the armistice on the 11th of November 1918. So the British army and its Commonwealth forces, they've been on the back foot, stemming the tide of a German advance on the Somme, in Flanders, on the Chemender Dam, and in the Second Battle of the Now was on the offensive, pushing the Germans back, back across the Somme battlefields, back across the Hindenburg line, until in early October... They were breaking through the final line of trenches and it was open warfare up until that last moment in places like Mons. So that's the kind of traditional British and Commonwealth narrative of it, looking at that breakout from Amiens to Mons in that final period of the First World War on the Western Front. The French would, of course, see this differently because for them it was a much bigger part of the front that they were holding for a start, so their forces were spread out on half of miles of the Western Front, where in 1918 the British Army was holding just over about 100 miles of it. So even at its peak, the British did not hold the bulk of the line. That was always the French Army. And in that last 100 days, they don't really have a phrase for that. They break it up into a number of different battles. So from March to May of 1918, that is the Bataille de Picardie and the Bataille de la Troyes and de la Flandre, so the Battle of Picardy, Artois and Flanders where you see the Germans trying to break through and the British and Commonwealth forces attempting to stop them but always always with French assistance. If you look on the Somme there were French troops helping out British forces there on the southern part of the Somme sector beyond places like Villers-Bretonneux where the Australians and British were in March and April of 1918 and then up in Flanders in April 1918 a whole load of French forces were sent up there in the southern particularly in the southern sector of Ypres trying to help around Kemmel Hill and the Messines Ridge with the German breakthroughs on that part of the front and then the attack on the Chemin des Dames on the 27th of May 1918 broke hard against both British and predominantly French forces there and you see lots of official photographs of that period where you see columns of men and you have to look very hard to pick out who's the British Tommy with the British shaped helmet and who's the French poilu with the Adrienne helmet on it. So they were really important French troops coming to British and Commonwealth assistance during that period. The next phase of the war from July to August of 1918 is what the French would call the Bataille de la Marne, the Battle of the Marne, the second Battle of the Marne. Now there's a lot of recent and current research on this that would identify that period of the war as being just as crucial, perhaps more important than the Battle of I'm not entirely convinced by that, and I hope to speak to some of those who believe this and are researching this further down the line. But what's clear to me is that this whole period of the turnaround, of the failure, the stagnation of the German offensive, and then the Allied counterpoint to that, with predominantly French troops in the Second Battle of the Marne, but also assisted by some British troops and American troops as well, push to begin to push the Germans back and Amiens is the kind of pinnacle of that which sees the rupturing of the German line and gradually the collapse of the German positions on the Western Front no one does this in isolation it's not just France it's not just Britain or Australia or Canada we've got to mention America in this as well because they're a big player by this period of the war it's coalition warfare that's what brings victory both in the First World War and in the next Thanks for watching. and no doubt in the future as well. So that's July to August of 1918. The next part of the conflict was August through to September from the French perspective, and the Bataille de l'Elette plus the Offensive de la Somme, which was the continuing breakout on the Somme, where the British and Commonwealth forces kind of peeled off and went towards the main part of the Hindenburg Line, where they'd been fighting the previous year. The French continued along that old Roman road going from Amiens towards Saint-Quentin to take on the southern part of the Hindenburg Line in that area and the German defences in that part of the Western Front. So it was kind of a continuation of that, which took them across various rivers and canals through the Somme region on into the area of the Aisne. And that became a major French battlefield, which you see with French military cemeteries in that area with the two ends of the war in it, 1914, where they're fighting there at the very beginning of the conflict and then a lot of casualties from 1918 as well and that kind of feeds into the Bataille de Saint-Quentin in September and October of 1918 as the French army are fighting on the flanks of the BEF who are advancing through the Hindenburg Line up into that area of north-eastern France resulting in battles along rivers like the Selle and canals like the Sombray and the French are doing exactly the same kind of thing and this leads us Eventually, to their own battles along these rivers, the Battle of the Esco and the Bataille de l'Assombe in that final six weeks of the First World War. So we have a whole kind of series of offensives there, kind of mirroring parts of the British and Commonwealth experience, but the French, of course, fighting their own battles as well, often in cooperation with allies on their flanks. And it's clear the French army are far from standing still and far from a spent force. Many books will tell you that the French army was finished after the mutinies of 1917 and any study of the Great War will quickly indicate otherwise. But in addition to those offensives in that area of northern north-eastern France, the French were also, of course, fighting in what for them had been one of their major battle areas, which is in that area of eastern France. So there's a general offensive in the Lorraine during this period and also in the Argonne from September through to November of 1918 where French troops are fighting in the Argonne forest fighting alongside American units the American extraditionary force are fighting in that area of the Argonne pushing up towards the Meuse river with the French on their flanks and all those years ago when we made last day of World War I and we looked at the Americans the final American casualties being suffered along that Meuse river were not far from where Tribuchon the messenger who was the last French casualty of the Great War was killed a little bit further up towards Sedan. So all of these battles were taking place, and in that northern and central area, that's where the German line was ruptured by this big coalition force. On the southern flanks of the Western Front, as you head beyond Lorraine into the Vosges, there were eventually offensives there that brought the war there to a conclusion, but it wasn't on the kind of scale that you saw in other parts of the Western Front. And during this period, although the French don't give all of those different actions one kind of global name in the same way that the British and Commonwealth forces with this phrase last 100 days, it cost the French more than 500,000 casualties during this period. So this was a victory with cost. Cost for everybody. Tens of thousands of American soldiers killed in those last weeks and hundreds of thousands of British and Commonwealth casualties with certain units suffering proportionally higher than others because they became part of the tip of the spear. Australia and Canada in particular being there from Amiens through to the last fighting in Mons and especially in the case of the Canadians who were losing men on the 8th of August 1918 in the breakout battle there right through to the last casualty at 1058 in Mons on the 11th of November 1918. So it's a fascinating subject and it's easy just to see the the Great War, particularly the war on the Western Front, just from a British and Commonwealth perspective. That's where the bulk of our own language sources obviously talk about or relating to. But it's important to understand that wider war as well, the French War, which the war on the Western Front was for most of that conflict. And there's more and more material coming available to tell us about that war. And it's an important part of our understanding. And we can't neglect to the role of the Americans in this either. So it's really about a kind of a joined up knowledge, I suspect, really, of the First World War, not just seeing it in terms of a British victory in 100 days, but understanding that all of that, none of it was possible without one partner working alongside another. So a fascinating question Ian that really again I say that about so many questions in these Q&A's really deserves its own podcast and I'm sure it's something that we will return to particularly in terms of some of the most recent research being done on this. So let's move on to our fourth and final question that comes from Parry Hunter who posted this on our Discord channel and that's an area you can go on to to post your questions and also make some comments and ask general stuff about the podcast too. They ask, this is a question that got posed in a different airsoft group but thought it would be interesting to pose here. Which single piece of a present day infantryman's regular equipment if teleported back to an infantryman on the 1917-18 Western Front would be the most impressive. I said Gore-Tex. Well, that is a good answer to your own question, Gore-Tex, because soldiers in the muddy conditions of the trenches of the Western Front, when the weather was foul and there was lots of snow and the trenches got flooded very easily, they didn't have anything like Gore-Tex to protect them. Their boots were not even kind of sewn together, so they filled up with water very easily and they would be exposed to being submerged. Their feet and parts of their body submerged in that water for long long periods of time which caused all kinds of health issues and resulted in soldiers becoming casualties so in the winter you could have more casualties from the elements than from the enemy and in that same cold kind of conditions they only had really meagre protection from that cold which proper Gore-Tex would today give a soldier and stop them from getting chill blains through to full scale frostbite so that is a really Thank you. kind of important bit of kit that if you could take back to the Great War I'm sure soldiers would have been very very happy to see it but in terms of my own answer I think you could come up with all kinds of things certain types of weaponry you know certain types of anti-tank missiles and multiple launch rocket systems and all this kind of stuff but I think in terms of an ordinary infantryman's experience one of the big things that if you could take back to that period of the Great War is place light armour. because if you look at modern soldiers, they carry a lot of armor to protect them. The survivability of soldiers on the battlefield is really important. The level of training, the expense of that training, everything else that's put into putting that soldier onto that battlefield today has a cost to it, and you want to preserve that soldier's life and his ability to continue to fight as much as possible. In the First World War, it wasn't that men were more expendable. The army, of course, was much bigger, there was no technology to try and save their lives in the way that that can be done today with a mixture of protection in the form of this plate armor through to of course medical advances as well conflict in the last 100 plus years has moved medicine forward in ways hitherto unknown and has made the ability of surgeons and medical officers to keep soldiers alive save their lives much greater so that's again not in isolation but the issue of armour to soldiers does mean that even with really horrendous wounds or massive impact from explosions or ordnance whether that's IEDs or mortars or artillery fire means that their chances of living through that because of this protection is much greater whereas in the First World War no such armour no such protection existed certainly not initially now as the war went on they did introduce trench armour I used to have a set of of the German trench armour which was this massive armoured sheeting that went over your shoulders protected the front of your body you had kind of a little fish tail that protected the lower part of your abdomen and the upper parts of your legs you had another plate that affixed to the German Stahlhelm the steel helmet to give extra protection there it weighed an absolute ton and to try and move around with this stuff on would have been very very difficult it wasn't for going over the top in it was large for men who were on sentry go that could come under artillery mortar fire more likely sniper fire so it was a different kind of armour the British did experiment with this kind of stuff the French too there are lots of photographs of this out there where a kind of armour is introduced and there were private in the British army there were private purchase body shields that could be purchased through popular newspapers and magazines and they were guaranteed guaranteed the advert said to save your life if you were hit by a bullet now there are plenty of examples of in particular officers because they were the ones that would have had the kind of money to buy extra kit like this an ordinary soldier on a shilling a day is not going to go into a magazine like the bystander or the sphere or the graphic and order up a body shield that could cost more than he's ever paid for anything in his life so there are examples of officers having these wearing them going into action and then getting hit by rifle and machine gun ammunition and these body shields being pretty much useless because the armor was so thin there was a lot of padding with them but the actual armor plating of it was very thin that's why they were wearable you could move around in them but the actual protection they gave was fairly minimal and i think if soldiers in the great war would have had the kind of body armor that is issued to soldiers on the battlefield in recent conflicts and right now in ukraine then their chances of surviving those trenches and experience of trench warfare probably would have been a lot greater there still of course would have been issues with medicine because without antibiotics to stem infection that was one of the greatest killers so although you might be wearing armor plating that could save you and you weren't killed instantly by a blast or a bullet you could still have an injury that could get infected and you could die from that infection so again a bit like kind of coalition warfare what you're looking at here if you're going to take something like that back into the past it can't be seen in isolation but a great question thank you for that and if any of you listening to this want to kind of pop in your own ideas as to what bit of kit should go back to the trenches of the first world war then please add that to the podcast website or post something on social media so thanks to all of you for our questions this week as always keep sending them in you can do so via email and the discord server quite a few of you recently have also sent in fan mail which is kind of a a text message that comes in I don't see your number and unless you put your name on there I don't know who you are and I can't respond to those but I'm quite happy to receive questions via that method keep them coming in and details of how to send your questions in are contained in the show notes of this episode so until we meet again for some more questions and answers on the old front line You've been listening to an episode of The Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page at patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon