Questions and Answers Episode 36

In our first QnA Episode for Season 9 we look at what happened to the German forces when the guns went silent on 11th November 1918, discuss the use of poison gas and it's legacy on the battlefields today, examine if British and German dead were buried in the same trenches on the battlefield, and ask what happened to the horses used by the British Army when the war came to an end?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Welcome back for our first question and answer episode of season nine of the Old Frontline podcast. This is where we feature questions posed by you, the podcast listeners, and we cover, as usual, a lot of diverse subjects. We've had a bit of a gap in these Q&A episodes due to the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force series that we did towards the end of season eight, and we've built up quite a big backlog of questions, but But as always, keep them coming in because these episodes are proving pretty popular and I very much enjoy doing them, being challenged each week to look at some different elements, different layers, different parts of First World War history. And as we move into Season 9 of the podcast, our sixth year of doing the Old Front Line, this is the third series where we've featured these Q&As and I think you'll agree that they've become really an integral part of what we do on the old front line now so long may they continue and one other thing that I wanted to mention as we move forward into this new season is that we now have an old front line podcast bulletin and that's an email newsletter that goes out every two weeks where there's news about the podcast about the YouTube channel that we've got and it gives me you an opportunity to add a little bit of extra to what we do on some of the podcast episodes and share things with you as well whether that's links on YouTube whether it's links to the online old front line shop where you can buy podcast merch or whether it's something else that's come up during the course and often in response to some of the episodes of that particular season the bulletin is completely free you can just to sign up for it via the link that's in the show notes for this episode and indeed every episode and I hope you find it of interest but let's get back to the Q&A's and what questions have we got this week our first question comes from Kevin Pennock Kevin asks when the armistice was signed and the guns fell silent did the German army just abandon the trenches and retreat to Germany on their own accord or were they taken as prisoners of war Or did troops on both sides in reduced numbers stay in place until the Treaty of Versailles was signed? How did the opposing armies return to their respective home countries? Well this is a really good question Kevin. Essentially what happened with the armistice on the 11th November 1918 that brought not the whole of the First World War to an end but the war on the Western Front. And you might have thought that in preparation for it with these two huge armies, the Allied on one side and the Germans on the other side deadlocked along all those hundreds of miles of what had been the western front and that although the final phase of the war had been a war of movement and had seen breakthrough on many parts of that static front it had still brought them to a demarcation line if you like on the 11th of November where the fighting had stopped with allied troops on one part of the battlefield and the Germans on the other and as As we've noted in previous podcasts the fighting at different parts of that front went on right to the very last second of the war with the Canadians at Mons and the Americans along the Meuse River and the French near to Sedan and many other places besides and you'd have thought at the conclusion of that as the armistice came into effect at 11 o'clock on the 11th of November 1918 as you suggest did they just dig in and hold their ground until the war was finally over because the armistice was not really a total end to the war it was a ceasefire so did they just sit there and hold their ground well there was no provision for that and no one really wanted that when the war ended essentially the Germans just walked away I mean there are stories of for example a German machine gunner firing his machine gun his belt-fed heavy machine gun right up until the last second of the war and then basically firing off all his ammunition all his belt of ammo and then standing up saluting the enemy the British troops who were in front of him and then just calmly walking away and no one stopped them there was no rounding up of the troops it's not like the images that we have of the end of the second world war with those long lines of men being marched down the autobahn it's clear in that conflict in 1945 as the war in the west came to an end it's clear that those men were defeated in November 1918 The Germans just simply went home. And there are many, many images. I've got a lot of postcards of German soldiers just marching through the streets of German towns, going over the Cologne Rhine Bridge. That was a famous sequence of photographs of troops returning to Germany via the Cologne Rhine Bridge, coming into Cologne, columns of men, wagons with troops on board, guns being towed by their limbers and the horse. and then columns and columns of troops marching down the road marching over that bridge all with their weapons their rifles and their ammunition and their trench mortars and everything else so there was no attempt at all to disarm the German army round the German army up or put them into prisoner of war cages and make them prisoners they just simply went home and there was a warning at the time from quite a lot of senior officers officers General Pershing who commanded the American Expeditionary Force was kind of one of the loudest in that and that he felt that this was a mistake just to allow the Germans to walk away was wrong because they needed to have a sense that they'd been defeated and these were wise and indeed prophetic words because he could see a situation in which if you hadn't clearly identified to the enemy that they'd lost and you hadn't demonstrated to them that they were now going back home in defeat then they might not accept that and they might build up the resentment of a war that would end and a peace that might punish them and they might come back they might want to fight another conflict a generation later and as I say those are in many respects prophetic words because Because if we jump on a bit to that period in the 1920s and 30s, which was this period of conflict between two extreme political views, the extreme left on one side and the extreme right on the other, it enables people within those diverse political views to use the outcome of the First World War in 1918 and the final chapter of its ending for their own political views. devices so it enables Hitler to stand on the stage of a beer keller in Munich and tell the crowd do you not remember at the end of the first world war we were not defeated our men came home with their rifles on their chest their ammunition in their pouches their grenades on their belt we were not defeated we were stabbed in the back by Bolsheviks traitors and Jews which of course is to someone like Hitler, those three groups were essentially the same people. And while we're not going to kind of go into the outcome and the rise of fascism in Germany in that interwar period, you can see a clear correlation and the mistake of not ending the war in a way in which you took the enemy prisoner. They'd agreed to an unconditional surrender, they were defeated militarily, economically, politically, the whole country country was in ruins was in revolution either active or really on the edge of revolution in so many places across Germany but not to really enforce in the minds of your enemy of the German soldiers who were on that battlefield on the morning of the 11th of November 1918 that this was an end to the war and that they had lost was a colossal mistake and when we look at the images of some of these troops crossing the Rhine Bridge at Cologne and so many other images besides, they do not look like defeated soldiers. So it was a curious outcome really, a curious ending to the war. Having formalised that armistice, having brought that war on the Western Front to an end, perhaps the outcome that you wanted, that you needed, didn't really happen. And the enemy, the Germans, those who had lost, just went home. A mistake that was not made at the end of the second world war as we mentioned those images of men marching in defeat their weapons removed their dignity in pieces the regime terrible regime that they'd fought for fragmented and destroyed and the country of their birth literally in ruins perhaps that in 1918 would have changed the outcome of the next two decades who knows i'm not a fan of war but certainly it makes an interesting speculation. So thanks for that, Kevin. I'm sure the armistice is a subject that we will return to many, many times on this podcast. It's a fascinating element of the First World War, again, with so many layers to it. So let's move on to question number two. This one comes from Samuel Ayers. Samuel asks, I was wondering a couple of things regarding poison gas shells. Firstly, how long did it take for the gas to dissipate also did the gas in the shells have a shelf life so if one was found today would the gas in it still pose a threat well the the legacy of the first world war one of the many legacies of the first world war on that landscape today is that so-called iron harvest where every year when there's plowing or any kind of work or archaeology the ordinance of the first world war comes to light and this can be from clips of ammunition through to hand grenades through to to shells from artillery shrapnel high explosive and of course gas and the presence of gas projectiles whether that's shells whether it's gas canisters whether it's livens projectors full of gas that poses a massive problem and threat to people even today more than a century later so to initially answer your final element of that question gas is still a problem and up at EAP for example in the bomb disposal unit there in Huttos Forest they had to develop a special bit of equipment that the gas shells were placed into and the gas was then released from the shell and it was burnt because if they just blew the gas shells up the gas would be released and they would have no control over where it went and it might destroy elements of the forest, it might escape in the wind to local communities, of course none of that was acceptable. So this bit of kit, a kind of chamber that the shells are put into and then the shell is essentially opened up and the gas is released and then it's burnt now that takes quite some time and it means that the stock of gas shells that they have just in that one disposal unit never really goes down I don't think because every year they're brought in every year it takes a while to dispose of the ones that have already got there and then they are essentially continuously replaced so it's almost never ending that lesson legacy of the First World War. But in terms of the use of poison gas shells in the First World War that came about because the early use of gas being released from cylinders to create a gas cloud was unreliable because the wind had to be blowing in the right direction to carry that gas and as the British found out at the Battle of Loos in 1915 the wind can change direction and blow the gas back onto your attacking troops and cause just as many if not more casualties to your own men so gas shells were developed which were essentially the same as ordinary high explosive shells with some of the high explosive removed and a gas canister placed inside either a metal canister or in the case of many German gas shells it was a green bottle and some years ago a whole stockpile of these green bottles came up and I remember buying one in a in a Rommelmarkt a car boot sale an antiques fair in Kemmel the village of Kemmel not far from Ypres for example so when the shell was fired from the artillery piece it would act as a normal high explosive shell continuing its trajectory to its target and then explode and then the gas would be released because the explosion would shatter the canister shatter the bottle and the gas would come out liquid gas forming a gas cloud and it meant with a bombardment you could deliver a huge number of gas shells into a given area and saturate a target. Now in terms of how long it took for the gas to then dissipate, disperse, that depends on a number of factors. It's often dependent on the weather. So if there was a lot of rain, that could dissipate the gas, and if there was strong wind, and the wind could obviously carry the gas that had been fired into those areas away from the target that you were trying to neutralise with your gas attack, so there isn't really a set period as such I'm sure someone at the time could work out the properties of gas and how long they would remain effective in one specific area but the conditions on a battlefield on any bit of ground are never 100% favourable and so the weather and the landscape and the ground where the gas was fired onto then I'm sure all of that played a part in how long it would remain effective. What the troops of course then had to endure were periods wearing gas masks to protect them from that gas so the gas would come down explode they would see that rather than high explosive shells these were gas shells instead they made a slightly different noise and veteran soldiers could distinguish between the explosion of a high explosive shell and a gas shell so what both sides would do was to mix up a greater proportion of HE with gas shells to disguise the fact that gas was being dropped amongst that high explosive but once it was realised that there was a gas attack gas alarms would be sounded and that familiar phrase gas gas gas would be shouted by the men as they donned their masks that wasn't always massively reliable in the din of battle they had gas rattles as well but later on in the war the British for example brought in what was called a strombus horn which was a massive horn that made a very loud noise that was powered if you like by compressed air and when you heard that noise you knew gas was present on your battlefield and then at some point during that period where you've donned your mask the gas is visible perhaps begins to dissipate then it's someone's job to work out whether it's safe or not to remove your mask so this kind of shelf life really on the battlefield depended on a number of things if this is late on in the war and the men are at advancing over open ground probably the gas would have less of an effect than if it was back in 1916 and they were in deep trenches and the gas could then collect if you like within trenches and within dugouts and make it much more problematic to the men in those conditions but gas that weapon really that we forever associate with the war on the western front and the great war generally just going back to where we started with this answer again remains one of the most potent and potentially deadly elements of the legacy of the First World War and there have been people injured by gas when it's been released including mustard gas which is not just a poisonous gas it is a chemical weapon as well that can burn when it comes into contact with skin and soft tissue and there have been those who have been injured by that even when that's been sitting in the ground for more than a century so there's no sign that any of these weapons that were built to kill built to destroy built to maim built to saturate areas as with gas with poison gas there's no evidence that they're really getting any easier to deal with by those on the ground by the bomb disposal units in Belgium and those in France who operate on that much bigger area of the old landscape of the the Western Front from the Great War but another element to this question is the reliability of gas on the battlefield as a weapon there's no doubt that it had a massive fear factor for the men who were on those battlefields they greatly greatly feared poison gas it being dropped on them unable to get their masks on suffocating because of it Malcolm Vivian whose story I told at the end of season 8 in one of those bonus episodes he was gas in 1916 with a gas that smelt like pineapples and whenever he smelt that again for the rest of his life he went into complete panic mode so there was no doubt a psychological element to the use of gas but because it did disperse and because it had no guaranteed shelf life on the battlefield itself then it wasn't the best and most reliable of weapons when it was most effective was when you could release a huge amount of in one go to cover an area or you could drop a huge number of gas shells onto a part of the battlefield and with the British development of the Livens projector which is a big sausage shaped bomb fired from a tube buried in the ground with a kind of mass battery of these tubes that would fire the Livens bombs with phosgene gas inside which is much more deadly gas compared to the earlier chlorine gas for example these would then be fired onto German German positions and would literally make them impossible to hold or would cause heavy casualties amongst those who were holding that ground and they were used to good effects for example in the prelude to the third battle of EPUB in the northern sector near Bosinga where it was impossible to attack across the Issa canal and a massive bombardment and gas bombardment of the German lines there effectively pushed the Germans back from the edge of the canal and back to a position known as artillery wood where an outpost line was established and then the guards division was able to cross that canal and set up positions ready to make the assault over that ground for the attack on the 31st of July 1917 now that's a story in its own right and perhaps something will come to another day but it shows how gas could be used but there was always potentially and especially when the war became mobile there were always problems in the use So thanks for that question, Samuel. I mean, certainly from my perspective as a young man all those years ago, going, for example, to the Imperial War Museum and being fascinated with the Great War, one of the things that always kind of slightly obsessed me were the look of First World War gas masks. The masks themselves are pretty horrific looking devices. And I think that that connects us to the story of gas and that potent weapon and that potent symbol really. of what the whole First World War on the Western Front was really like. Moving on to question number three. This one comes from Richard Tatterton on fan mail. Now fan mail is a way you can send me a text message via Buzzsprout who are the hosts of our podcast. There's a link to that in the show notes. If you do send in a question that way remember to put your name at the end because it doesn't tell me who you are and I don't see your mobile number either so I can't respond to you. So thank you you Richard for this question and thank you for your generous comments you say that you're a massive fan of the podcast and your question is the standard pod and Q&A pods have been really insightful I'm currently reading Some Mud by EPF Lynch I'm very much enjoying it my question is he talks about a burial party filling in a trench full of dead soldiers near Delville Wood from the book it's both Tommies and Germans I've not come across So was this a practice you know of, and have any been discovered? I assume, if so, now given proper burial plots. Well, the burial and recovery of the dead, so the burial during the war, the recovery of the dead after the war, and the continued recovery of the dead today, is something that, again, a bit like gas, is kind of very much a legacy of the First World War. The landscape, when it's peeled back, doesn't just reveal us, artifacts, it can reveal human remains as well. And I've been privileged to work with archaeologists to see the kind of work that they do, the incredible work, whether it's the amateurs like the diggers 20-odd years ago, or professionals like Simon Verdigum working at Messines and many other places besides. The incredible work they do to recover the archaeology, understand the archaeology, record it, but also to recover the dead and as well and the book that you mentioned Some Mud by EPF Lynch is a fantastic memoir of the First World War published many many years after his death easily available now there's hardback and paperback editions of it and he served as a young soldier in the 45th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force so he was a digger and he goes into a lot of detail about a lot of really interesting elements of the First World War and it really is a classic memoir which I think got quite a good public coverage and brought many people into the subject of the First World War not just from an Australian perspective. Now during the war itself the problem of burying the dead on the battlefield while the fighting was going on was just that, it was a problem. Soldiers don't linger too long to bury the dead in case they expose themselves while they're doing that work and they end up essentially joining the dead. So So often there was a bit of a rush to bury the dead. Now, in terms of their own men, when a position was captured, and when I think of the interviews that I did with veterans all those years ago, they often used to speak about this, to capture a German position in an assault. They'd lose some of their guys. They'd be buried back behind them in no man's land, or they'd been killed capturing the trench and their bodies were in the trench. They would round those up. You don't want to be sitting there, particularly in the summer, surrounded by dead soldiers. You want to get them buried as quickly as possible you'd wait till nightfall and then you'd select an area close to the trench and bury them there the British and by British I mean the British Expeditionary Force so that includes Australians Canadians New Zealanders and all the others they were pretty strict about the non-burial of dead in a trench because if you bury your comrades in the trench you're now occupying at some point you are going to have to work on that trench put in a new parapet dig the floor deeper lay some duck boards and then and you will then exhume those bodies and you're going to have a lot of problems with that so they would bury the dead close to their trench perhaps in a shell hole in no man's land perhaps men would be if they had shovels detailed to go out and bury the dead on the battlefield in a battlefield burial site and these are often the kind of things that archaeologists all these years later uncover in terms of the enemy dead so you've captured a trench you've killed german soldiers in the capture of that position they would often be taken to a shell hole they would be properly buried but it would be done very very hastily and sometimes if you had resources close by they would bring up quick lime and quick lime would be placed over those bodies to prevent the spread of disease with rotting corpses close to a position that you were now holding but that was more likely in a static position than in a fluid battle but what it means is that there's really not a kind of set way of burying the dead and I'm sure there must have been circumstances in which perhaps a disused piece of trench slightly away from the ground you've just captured which you're not going to use that ground again yourself then you would take your dead and perhaps the enemy dead and bury them side by side there was a respect for the German soldier in the First World War that you really don't see amongst British soldiers in the Second World War and I think that they wouldn't necessarily in the Great War have had much of a problem burying their lads next to German soldiers who they'd seen fight and respected them for that fight and respected them as the warriors the soldiers that they were and of course we know there were trench burials because there are many cemeteries on the western front where we will find examples of that the Devonshire cemetery at Nemetz which was itself essentially a trench burial disused bit of trench that the men of the 8th and 9th Devons were brought into for burial after the first day of the Somme is a good example of that but there are plenty of others as well. If you look for trench and inverted commas cemeteries on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database you will find quite a lot and they're normally connected to the story of a position being captured, a trench being taken and sometimes as a kind of mark of respect for the sacrifice of those men they were buried in the ground that they captured. I remember going to a cemetery that was situated on a section of the Drocor-Quillon switch line, the DQ line, captured by by Canadian soldiers in September 1918. And when I used Linesman, that digital bit of software that allows you to use First World War trench maps with GPS, I realised that plot one of the cemetery, where the Canadians who fell in that action are buried, is literally on the trench and they're most likely buried in the trench to mark the fact that they took it in that key battle of 1918. So there were examples of men being buried in trenches. Whether it was that common to bury... British or French and then German soldiers side by side I suspect that was less common and I don't recall any examples of that in recent archaeological projects where they've excavated a trench and found British Tommies lying there side by side with German Soldaten. The diggers for example when they were operating at Bosinger did find German soldiers but they were buried in their own trenches separately or buried in shell holes in no man's land they weren't buried in the same places that they found all those dozens and dozens of British soldiers which had been largely killed in 1915 so I don't recall any recent examples of that and if you kind of look at the records of the recovery of British dead you don't often see a reference to British soldiers being removed from German burial sites in terms of the same location where both sides are buried and literally side by side. British soldiers are recovered from German cemeteries, and if you go to a cemetery like Cabaret Rouge at Suchet, just north of Arras, there's a very high percentage of burials in certain parts of that cemetery, where there are graves that have been removed from German cemeteries that were in that part of northern France, where the German cemeteries have sometimes been retained or perhaps closed, moved into another German cemetery, and the British burials have then been taken from there to Cabaret Rouge to be buried properly in a Commonwealth then an Imperial War Graves Commission cemetery but that's a kind of different thing really but it's a fascinating subject the burial and the recovery the continued recovery of the dead and I think that we learn more and more about it all the time especially through memoirs like Some Mud and again I can't recommend that as a memoir enough really well worth seeking out so thank you for that Richard and thank you for your fan mail onto our fourth and final question from frank baxendale on social media now a few people do post questions on social media it's sometimes difficult for me to keep on top of those so please if possible send them in through email or through the discord server or fan mail but frank is a long-time listener to the podcast a long-time supporter of the podcast and someone who very generously is continuously kind about what we do week after week and i always appreciate frank's comments on the episodes that we put out now frank's question is a really good one and this is it what happened to all of the horses at the end of the great war i read somewhere that they were put down surely that's not correct well the whole subject of horses in the first world war has always been there i mean if you go back to the 20s and 30s there's quite a few books written by men who were in the army veterinary corps or in cavalry units or in artillery units units that speak about the horses the suffering and the conditions that these horses endured on the battlefield so that very emotive subject when we kind of look at the war through the eyes of animals but what brought it into sharp focus was Michael Morpurgo's War Horse the book the film and the play incredibly moving I read the book when my daughter was little we saw the film and we went to see a production of the stage version of itself and I I mean to be honest I kind of broke down towards the end of it because it brought back a lot of memories of listening to veterans talk about their horses and what happened to them on the western front and there was recently a BBC Radio 4 reunion program about War Horse which is available now on BBC Sounds which is quite interesting to listen to to how the book came about and then the production came about as well but anyway we digress slightly let's get back to the history. Now where do we find information about the use of horses by the British Army in the Great War? Well there's a publication called Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Army During the Great War published by HMSO in 1922. That's His Majesty's Stationery Office. It's a huge volume, hundreds of pages. It's available as a free digital file online which you can download and it's got all kinds of information about just about any of that British military effort during the First World War and there's a section on the use of horses and it says in August 1914 the quota of horses in the British Army was raised from a standing figure of 25,000 horses to 165,000 in a very short period of time as the size of the army grew as the expeditionary force went across to France and then the Crusaders and arrival of the new army Kitchener's army the requirement for horses just got bigger and bigger and bigger and by the end of the Great War over 428,000 horses had been purchased from North America for use within the British Army and over 450,000 had been brought in from places within the UK itself so the total number of horses used in the British forces during the first world war was something like 1.2 million and over 36 million pounds was spent on the acquisition of those horses and that's 36 million pounds in old money which is probably billions of pounds today so it wasn't a small amount and it shows how important these horses were to the war effort they were absolutely essential in the movement of equipment of men of supplies of ammunition for weapons to be moved from A to B whether that was field guns or trench mortars or whatever it was they were absolutely vital to the war effort and that's why so much money was thrown into the acquisition of horses so they could be used on the battlefield casualties to horses in the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front were nearly 226,000 horses killed destroyed missing or died and when When the war was over and you had that vast army of horses that had been used in that conflict and you spent so much money on acquiring them, what did you do with them? And I'm afraid, Frank, that your worst fears were realised because when the war was over, a certain number were taken home, but the vast majority of what were called surplus horses were sold in all theatres of war with, for example, many in Mesopotamia and Palestine and Egypt being sent to India or sold locally and then Marseille the port of Marseille was used as a hub for horses then they would then be sold on from Marseille to buyers all over the world and in France and Flanders alone 197,000 horses used by the BEF were sold at the end of the war and sadly terribly over 40,000 on top was sold for meat they were sold to the French meat industry because horse meat was eaten on a big scale by French people during that period and indeed much later I remember in the early years visiting places like Albert and Arras still seeing horse meat butchers I mean when we look back over the passage of over a century I guess it's hard for us to understand and perhaps accept this that horses that are given so much which are sold off many of them sold for meat having said that I've seen figures which suggest perhaps less than 60,000 horses came home after the war so that wasn't the fate for all of them but that 60,000 of the hundreds of thousands that served is only a very small proportion with the vast majority becoming casualties in the conflict itself or being sold it's a sad thought a sad conclusion considering all the things that we know horses went through on those battlefields of the Great War. But the past is a different world to the world of today, and I guess things were looked at very differently when that war was over. So a highly emotive subject, and thank you, Frank, for that excellent question, and I'm sorry it's taken a bit longer than normal to answer it. So thanks to you all for the questions this week. Keep them flowing in through email, through the Discord server, through fan mail and I'll join you again soon for some more questions and answers 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 old front line 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.