Questions and Answers Episode 33

Our latest questions from podcast listeners discuss what role German steel helmets, Stahlhelm, had on the First Day of the Somme, how did Great War veterans feel about WW2, how were women who fell pregnant from British soldiers treated during the conflict, and when we visit British and Commonwealth cemeteries are we walking over the graves of those buried there?

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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. Coming up soon on the podcast is something a bit different. bringing in quite a few different things in recent times and I think that's good to move the podcast forward and what I'm going to do is effectively take kind of a month's worth of podcasts and focus them around a specific theme and in this case the theme will be the war in the air the war above the western front during the great war and there's going to be an introductory episode there'll be some interviews with some experts and then a bit about what you can find of the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF I'll pick the best four and that'll keep that theme of looking at one particular subject going for that month. But let's get straight down to our questions this week. And our first question comes from Zachary Lang in Massachusetts, USA. He asks, in that crucial campaign in 1916. Well Zachary, you're quite right that there are quite a lot of documentaries out there where you'll see film, archive film, being used to symbolise the German side of the Battle of the Somme, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, where you'll see film and the men in it, the soldiers in it, are wearing Stahlhelms. Now that's because the amount of film that TV companies draw on is actually relatively limited and it comes from archives like the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives in America and in particular with America a lot of that film was stuff that was actually captured in the Second World War by American units entering Nazi Germany who cleared out huge collections of newsreels which included recent stuff from that conflict but also material from the First World War and a lot of the material that exists The good material seems to always show German soldiers with Stahlhelms on. Now, that's a kind of national military characteristic that emerges from the First World War, but we more commonly see with soldiers in World War II. And I think when it comes to making documentaries, documentary makers probably focus on that kind of imagery because if you show some film of some soldiers in Stahlhelm, Stilhelm, it's like that, then... Everyone knows that they're Germans. Now, the truth of the battle on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July, 1916, was that probably very few German soldiers had Stahlhelms. I almost said probably none of them did. And my own opinion would be that that was probably much nearer the truth, because by that opening stage of the Battle of the Somme, only tens of thousands of Stahlhelms had actually been produced. Officially, this was the M1916 Stahlhelm, designed to protect German soldiers and to replace what we would call the Pickelhaube, which was often also called the Leather Helm, from leather with brass fittings and that famous spike although there were variations of that in the artillery they wore a ball mounted on that feature for example so that kind of helmet was a pre-war bit of kit that in the early battles particularly once trench warfare began that kind of helmet a leather helmet on the perched on the top of someone's head was redundant and a Stahlhelm just like the adaptation of steel helmets in the French and then the British forces was was something that was really essential to allow soldiers to survive the experience of trench warfare with shells going off above positions and causing casualties to the men below. But the Germans were planning a major offensive in that early part of 1916, which was the Battle of Verdun. And in that battle, a decision was made that the assault troops in the leading waves would all have the new Stahlhelm. So the focus was on issuing the Stahlhelms to those units that would fight in that opening stage of the offensive there in the Meuse at Verdun and I think only about 30 or 40,000 of these helmets were available for that early phase of the fighting at Verdun and that kind of prioritization of the Stahlhelms to troops there seems to have continued so when we look at the German units that were occupying the Somme front from Gommacourt down to Montauban in the French sector I don't think that they were on the kind of top of the list for the reception of the Stahlhelms and when you you look at the unit history so I've got the unit history of the 119th Reserve Infantry Regiment which was the unit that defended Beaumont Hamel and Hawthorne Ridge and the positions in front of the Sunken Lane in that northern part of the Somme battlefield and when we look at some of the contemporary images of their troops in the front line area leading up to the Battle of the Somme they've all got pickle halbers many of them have removed the spike and put a cloth cover over the helmet to stop the sun reflecting on the brass fittings but they don't have Stahlhelms and over the years of collecting images of German soldiers on the Somme front I have only rarely seen images of Germans with Stahlhelms taken during the 1916 Battle of the Somme so in terms of the 1st of July battle I think very few if any actually had Stahlhelms when we look at the pictures of captured German soldiers wearing these in the early phase of the Somme battle it seems to be actions where they're units that were brought in after the fighting of the 1st of July, or in sectors where helmets had been issued, not to every soldier, but as trench stores. This seems to be the more common practice. So the Germans don't really have enough Stahlhelms to give to every single soldier. Of the millions of German soldiers that are holding all 450 miles of the Western Front, so they issue them in penny packets, as the British would call it, where the Stahlhelms are sent into a front line here and they become trench stores which units going to and from those trench systems hand over and retain for the use in the trenches to units coming and going and Ernst Junger talks about this in Storm of Steel so as he's coming up in September 1916 to take over the positions near to the village of Guillemont they're marching up with the men wearing Feldmutzers these are the kind of German soft caps or the Pickelhalber and when they get into the line the unit they're relieving they've got Stahlhelms and they hand their Stahlhelms over to Jünger's Hanoverians and they wear them when they're in the forward zone of the battlefield and by the end of 1916 although over a million Stahlhelms had been made and issued to German soldiers on the front line again it still wasn't enough for every single soldier so probably throughout the battle of the Somme unit after allied unit that encountered the Germans over And you see again in some of the early images of the Battle of the Somme. where units have gone into battle in some of the areas where there's been some success and have captured the German position. There are quite a few famous photographs of British Tommies holding up pickle halberds with the spike and the badges of Bavarian or Württemberg soldiers or Prussians or whatever it is, proudly displaying these souvenirs, which were much sought after. And really, it would be well into 1917, at the time of the British assault at Arras or the French fighting on the Chemin des Dames, that the vast majority of German soldiers by that stage of the war were now issued with Stahlhelms and they were not just part of trench doors, they were part of a soldier's kit. And when we look at photographs from that period, private photographs and then official photographs, we see the Stahlhelm in much greater evidence than the Pickelhalber. That seems to have been put into the kind of corner and not quite forgotten because it was probably worn on parades behind the lines again I've got kind of images that show this but the Stahlhelm was the bit of battle kit you took with you into the front line area and probably by the end of the war particularly as that was a period in which a large number of new conscripts came into the German army and the army was swelled in terms of numbers to cope with the fighting on the western front and then all those men were brought from Russia in 1918 to come and fight in the west when Stahlhelms would certainly have been issued to them for for the fighting on the Western Front. They may not have had them on the Eastern Front. I'm not honestly sure how prevalent they were there. Any Stahlhelm experts listening to this perhaps can contact us. But I think the greatest symbolism of the Stahlhelm as part of the German soldiers' identity is what makes it kind of an everlasting symbol of frontline service for German soldiers in the Great War. And you see this reflected in the books that were published in the 1920s and 30s, and that symbol of the Stahlhelm used used on quite a lot of those and you see it most definitely on war memorials right across Germany where the Stahlhelm is a central feature on many German local war memorials listing the local dead. So while the first day of the Battle of the Somme was part of that transition period from just assault troops and machine gunners and sentries, those kind of people being issued with the Stahlhelms initially, By the end of the Battle of the Somme, you're seeing a kind of shift towards them being not just trench doors, but rapidly becoming part of a soldier's everyday kit used on the front line. A footnote to the Great War, perhaps, but certainly an interesting one. And thank you, Zachary, for that question. So let's move on to question number two, which comes from Ryan Alder. Ryan asks, Obviously I can't speak for all Great War veterans nor all Second World War veterans but when we read the accounts of men who served in the Great War that went on to experience another conflict just a generation later many of whom had sons or daughters involved in it then we see how I guess how sad they were to see that the sacrifice of the Great War wasn't entirely in vain but within two decades Europe was at war once more with the same enemies. In fact enemies on an even greater scale and in some ways much more of a world war in World War II than in the Great War. Now If I look back on the veterans that I interviewed in the 1980s and 90s, the vast majority of them did go on to serve in the Second World War. Most of them probably, from what I recall, in the Home Guard or as ARP wardens because they were slightly too old or slightly unfit or not fit enough to really properly serve again. But some did go on to serve. So Malcolm Vivian, who I often talk about in this podcast, who'd been a gunner officer on the West Coast, in the First World War. He rejoined the Royal Artillery in 1939. He was managing all of the Joe Lyons tea bars in London at that point and he got permission from Joe Lyons to re-enlist and he joined the gunners again and he was put in charge of the anti-aircraft defences along the Suez Canal until he got sick about two or three years into the war and then was sent home and discharged. Jimmy Lovegrove, who'd been an infantry officer on the Western Front with 2nd 4th South Lanc and a very young officer at that had been wounded in one of the attacks on the Hindenburg Line in 1918 he ended up in the Pioneer Corps George Butler who's at regular soldier, underage Tommy, joined the army before the Great War, aged 12, went across in 1915 with the Lancashire Fusiliers and then joined the Machine Gun Corps and by the time of the Battle of the Somme, aged 18, he was in charge of a machine gun section, the oldest serving soldier in the unit, the longest serving soldier in the unit, the most senior soldier in that unit in terms of other ranks, but the youngest soldier in that unit. and his service when the Machine Gun Corps was disbanded after the Great War he returned to the Lancashire Fusiliers and he continued to serve with them up to and after World War II he went over with the Lanc Fusiliers in the BEF in 1939-40 during the Phoney War and then took part in the retreat to Dunkirk and then for the rest of the war once he got back to Britain he was working at the depot training new recruits and I've had World War II veterans of the Lancashire Fusiliers come to places like Monte Cassino with me who had been trained by him during that period and could remember him and there was another chap M.L. Walkington who had served with the Queen's Westminster Rifles on the Western Front in the early phase of the Great War taking part in the Christmas Truce then he was commissioned into the Machine Gun Corps and in the late 30s joined the Royal Sussex Regiment and served with them again in the BEF in 1939-40 so those are just a few The Great War The War to End All Wars and there they were just a few precious years later in uniform once more going off to Europe to fight against Germany and many of them said that they thought of the mates the pals that they'd lost in the Great War wondered whether that sacrifice had really amounted to anything in the end and I remember Malcolm used to say that he wondered what the families of those who had died in the Great War which included his own parents who'd lost one of their his younger brother in the fighting at Ypres in 1917 he kind of wondered how they felt about the meaning of sacrifice to see that great war sacrifice somehow squandered in the peace that followed and I think that's also a kind of sense that you get from some of these men that they'd fought so hard to bring victory to bring a conclusion to that war they'd done their bit the next bit was over to politicians to make something of it that victory and turned the peace into a meaningful part of world history and many of them felt that perhaps the politicians had fallen short on that I think for others as well it was just fairly simple that they'd served in the Great War they were proud of their service proud of what they'd done they were proud to have been in uniform during the Great War they didn't see it as a terrible experience on one level it was And it was an experience, whether they acknowledged that or not, that affected them for the rest of their lives. But they said pretty much unanimously something they would never have missed. And when it came to serving again... There wasn't really much conscious thought involved in that. That was what they did. That's what duty meant. They'd served king and country in the Great War, and now, 20 years later, as Britain's about to go to war again, I think, as Jimmy Lovegrove said, it went without question that we would serve. There was no question about it. Of course we were going to be in uniform. Of course we were going to be doing our bit. Just as we've done our bit in the Great War. And a lad like George Butler, a working class lad who'd lived on the streets of Manchester, seen the sharp end of the First World War, spent all those years in the peacetime army in the 20s and 30s, and now went back to war in 1939, probably for him... perhaps a degree of relief. He loved soldiering. He was a warrior, really, not just a soldier. A man who lived and thrived in the army, perhaps even lived and thrived on the battlefield. And so for him, it was kind of a natural environment to return to. And probably, if he felt anything about his service in the Second World War, he regretted that he wasn't able to continue to serve on the front line beyond that experience in the BEF in 1939-39. So I think there's a lot of complex emotions going on there, but I think at the heart of it was this sense of duty that that generation had that, as Jimmy Lovegrove said, there was no kind of question that they wouldn't have stepped forward and done their bit again. Now, having said that, I do know that there were quite a few examples, and this is something that was very common in that 1930s period when there was a great polarisation of political ideas and identity. that some men who had served in the Great War and some women who had served in the Great War turned to organisations like the Peace Pledge Union. They were against war. Vera Brittain is a very, very good example of that, who had seen her brother killed in the Great War, her fiancé, and just about every man that she'd ever cared for had fallen in that conflict. She'd married a very badly wounded veteran, and so the kind of shadow of the great war went right across her life and many people like her did not want to see that repeated a generation later so they turned to peace organizations of which there were several examples to try and push that message of peace it's not the same as appeasement these were people who felt that war was wrong and then when the war did break out and it was clear that hitler and and the Nazis were perhaps even more of an identifiable enemy, not just of Britain, to the whole of mankind in 1939-40. Despite their feelings about peace, despite their feelings about war, many did go on to serve as conscientious objectors. There's a whole plethora of emotions and ideas here, and like I say, I can't speak for an entire generation or multiple generations, but I guess one of the hardest things perhaps to have been would have been a Great War veteran who'd survived, seen his mates killed, perhaps even named some of his children after those mates, and then seen those children march off to war again. There are so many people whose memoirs of the Great War that I've read that I've subsequently discovered lost sons in the Second World War. How would that have made you feel? It's perhaps almost unimaginable. And I'll give you a bit of an example. There's a chap called Lancelot Spicer, who was an officer in the 9th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Line Infantry, and who was awarded the DSO and MC for gallantry in the Great War. He was in that battalion that on the eve of the Battle of the Somme made that famous toast, When the Barrage Lifts. And he wrote a collection of his letters that was subsequently published. Now Spicer's quite an unusual name, and on one of my early trips to Anzio, following my dad's war, around that part of the Second World War battlefields, I went into the Beachhead Cemetery at Anzio. And there's quite a lot of men from the King's Own Yorkshire Line Infantry in there. They had a battalion at Anzio. And when I was looking along one of the rows, I saw a Lieutenant Spicer. And that kind of connection between the regiment and the name made me stop and pause. And when I looked him up in the register... He was the son of Lancelot Spicer. So that man who'd served in the Great War, published his letters, told that story about when the barrage lifts had lost his son at Anzio. in a kind of trench warfare on that part of the Italian campaign battlefields in World War II, and then went on to publish his son's letters of his experience in Tunisia, North Africa, and then in the Italian campaign. So just like you kind of hint at at the beginning of your question there, Ryan, This is all part of those crisscross pathways that link the Great War with the Second Great War, World War II. And I'm sure over time all of us will discover more and it's all part of the fascination of that subject and things that I guess make us stop and think about the meaning of sacrifice as it stretches across those two great conflicts. It's a fantastic question, Ryan. Thank you. Question number three comes from John from California, and this was sent in on fan mail, which is a little thing where you can fill in a little form, I think, on the Buzzsprout website, and it sends me a kind of text message, but I don't see your number, and unless you put your name on there like John did, So John asks, I often think of that young woman and can only imagine that this was quite common. Do you know how such women and children were treated after the war? Were records kept? Were British soldiers ever required to financially support their illegitimate kids? And P.S. How do I find out about the tours you lead? Well, John, thanks for this question. I mean, this is a really interesting subject. We've got to remember that when soldiers are in a war on active service, away from the trenches with money in their pocket and perhaps a sense of the limitations of their life expectancy, they are going to find young women and have relations with them, whether they're meaningful relations or perhaps less meaningful. And this could easily and definitely It was something that I think the army found very difficult to control. There was no way really to stop it or control it. You could lecture soldiers about all kinds of aspects of sexual health. Whether they followed that advice was a very different subject indeed. And that would have led... to exactly the kind of situation that you describe. And it was a time in which women's rights were really fairly minimal. So a young woman, having fallen pregnant by a British Tommy, being presented to the commanding officer of a unit by her father, and the father expecting some kind of justice, probably would have been given short shrift, shown the door, and the soldier moved on somewhere else. And probably no contact between that soldier And that family... ever again and I wonder how many soldiers left behind that kind of situation during their period of service on the Western Front some going back home perhaps to wives and girlfriends or fiancées and then perhaps marrying after the war but knowing in the back of their mind there was another family perhaps that they'd had to completely ignore again how would soldiers deal with that element of their experience an interesting question to which I really don't have an answer. But I do remember an old friend of mine, Keith Quabel, who was one of our team of battlefield guides. He's retired from guiding now. And he went in the 1970s with a lot of veterans to the Great War battlefields. And he once told me a story that as he was taking them in a minibus up towards the Somme, somewhere like that around Arras, and he went through a whole series of villages before the motorways were constructed. And he thought, well, we'd better stop so the old boys can have a drink and go to the loo. And he was coming up to this village. and he said, we're going to stop at this next village. And one of the veterans kind of peered over his shoulder, tapped him and said, not here lad, I left issue here. back in the Great War and what he meant was of course that he perhaps fathered a child there and he was going to turn up and all of the family members would come out recognise him somehow I mean it's an incredulous situation and probably would not have happened but in the back of his mind was this worry that somehow as an old man he'd be recognised and to be called to account for what he'd done all those decades before and left behind that son or daughter who he'd never known and who had never known him and again there must have been almost a kind of generation. I mean, that's a too big a phrase for it, but a generation of young people in the 20s who knew that their fathers had been British soldiers, British and Commonwealth soldiers, and would never know them, would never know who they were. And if we went across to the other side of No Man's Land in the area occupied by the German army in Belgium, right across France in that occupied zone, exactly the same thing would have been happening there as well, with German soldiers having relations with local French and Belgian girls. And I spent a lot of time in my early career as a battlefield guy with Ledger, staying in the town, the city of Tournai, got to know a lot of people there, and that was a big billeting area for German troops, and quite a few of them used to boast how they were related to German soldiers who had served there during the Great War and had never returned, and their grandmother had been a single parent for all that time and had brought up their father or their mother. So I think there's a whole element of the Great War with this that we really do not know enough about and so little of it would have been written down that we probably will never know about. as much as we should do, would like to know about it. Because it's all part of the social history of soldiering and the social history of what happened behind the lines on the Western Front in the Great War. Now, the part two of your question was about how do you find out about the tours that I lead? Well, I did a live stream recently with Al Murray and James Holland looking at the Second World War and the tours that we do with Ledger, with Ben Main and many of our team of World War II guides discussing the World War II tours. And I spoke about on there how these days, because of my position as the kind of product manager of battlefields, I spend more time guiding a desk than I do a coach. I still do 10 or 12 tours a year, but different to the 40-plus tours that I was doing 10 years ago. So you can find all of the tours that I'm involved in on the Ledger Holidays website, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes for those who are interested. There's a big team of guys that were with me, and all of them, like me, like me, you listening to this podcast they are fascinated they are passionate about their aspects of military history and some of them do both the first and the second world war some do waterloo as well but the key element to it is their passion for the subject and their ability to talk about that subject quite complex subjects in a meaningful and understandable way and put that across to a group so what i'm saying is if you ever travel on a ledger battlefield tour you may not get me but you're going to get one of the other guides who will give you just as good an experience so if you were looking at battlefield tours there's many companies out there by no means are we the only ones doing it but in terms of what i do i only do tours through ledger and one that i do every year which i always enjoy is walking walking the battlefields in flanders with my old friend dr victoria humphries and we do a double act where i do the kind of historical side and she does more of the right Thanks for your fantastic questions. And I would love to do an entire episode on the main substance of your question, looking at those children that came about as a consequence of relations between young women behind the front and soldiers who were returning from the front line. But if only there was an expert out there. If anyone knows one, then get in touch. So on to our fourth and final question which comes from John Benneker and he asks I'm busy watching your old Frontline podcast event live from the Arras Memorial and saw you walking towards the grave of Major Sinclair. This made me think on which side of the headstone is the actual graves of the soldiers. I've not yet been so privileged to visit a First World War cemetery but from what I've seen on videos and photographs there seems to be no outline of the actual grave only the rows and rows of headstones as seen in the videos. Aren't we walking over their graves? Isn't it disrespectful? Or what was the thinking behind the design of the war cemeteries? Well, you've come to an essential point there, John, about how these cemeteries were constructed. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them across just the British and Commonwealth sector of the Western Front. Some of them tiny collections of graves, others much bigger cemeteries. The vast majority of the smaller burial sites were closed and moved into what were called concentration cemeteries creating these nice neat rows that we see in the modern photographs and videos of cemeteries on the western front and even during the war itself cemeteries were constructed in an orderly way if they were away from the battlefront slightly which the faubourg damien cemetery which features in the video that you mentioned which is on our youtube channel that is a good example of this as well and you are quite right that the the headstone sits just as it suggests at at the head of the grave. And if the soldier is lying there, his head is resting close to where that headstone is and the rest of him lays beneath where we stand. So we are walking over their graves. It's different to a civilian cemetery where that grave is outlined by a kerbstone or by a structure or a feature or whatever it is. The decision with military graves was that they would be marked with a headstone and then there would be earth and grass laid on top. and it would then be constructed made permanent to look like an English garden with all the plants and flowers that would be placed amongst the headstones and in the rows and in the cemetery more widely and no direct consideration was given to this idea of walking on graves and in some respects when we walk over a grave I spoke about how you know imagine a soldier laying there with his head towards the headstone of the grave and his body lying beneath you the sad reality of of trench warfare was that to bury the complete remains of a soldier was perhaps often very rare. I remember a veteran that I interviewed who was in a trench at Ypres when they got heavily bombarded. He was in the zig and the zag of a trench, the crenellation of the trench, the bays as they were called. He was in one bay, his mate was in the other, and shells came down, direct hit on his mate. All that was left of him was his two army boots with his feet in them and smoke coming out of the boots. That was all that was left of that soldier. so what he did is he took his mate's boots with his feet in popped them in a sandbag and when they were relieved and went out the line he stopped at a soldier's cemetery just behind the front dug a little grave put the boots and the feet in that grave covered it over put up a cross with his name on and wrote to his mother and said sorry to tell you that your son was killed in action shot through the heart died at once suffered no pain he couldn't tell her the reality of what had happened to him and he was read popular newspapers throughout the his life and he picked up a supplement in the 1920s, 30s which showed the construction of the war cemetery which he said made him kind of giggle really, kind of smile because he saw these beautiful cemeteries constructed and no doubt the families of those who were buried there thought they were lying in repose underneath with their arms on their chest and he thought back to the lad who he'd buried which all that remained of him was his two feet in his army boots. So if we could and not that we should somehow archaeologically scan these cemeteries I think as I've seen with archaeology and the recovery of human remains would see a very different picture and see how fragmentary many of these burials will be but I think the essential idea behind the cemeteries to create this memorial garden of which the headstones were the central point of remembrance for individual soldiers the whole consideration to walking over graves and curb stones for graves just wasn't even considered and I think it was a right decision because it turned them into what they are now very much part of the landscape these incredible beautiful gardens of remembrance which I hope that you will get a chance John to go and visit sometime soon and you will be moved you will be affected your life will be changed by visiting a cemetery like this there's no doubt about that and I think you'll take a lot away from it once you have actually seen them and I hope that's going to happen for you sometime soon. So that's a great question, John, and that's where we draw this episode of the questions and answers to a conclusion. Don't forget, think about those questions for the war in the air on the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force. Send those in for a special edition of the Q&As. You can send any question in, whether it's for that or something else down the line via the two traditional methods of email and the Discord server and also fan mail via Buzzsprout. And as always, I hope you found these questions and answers of interest see you again soon for some more q and a's here on the old front line you've been listening to an episode of the old front line with me military historian paul reed you can follow me on twitter at somcor you can follow the podcast at old front line pod 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, patreon.com slash oldfrontline or support us on Buy Me A Coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.