As I sort out copyright and usage rules, I will post if possible, a collection of official signal corps photos and printed photo postcards. I also hope to update and add new material to the site every month.

World War 1 and it's immediate aftermath 1914-1921

has come to be known as the “belle epoque”, a time of peace and prosperity. Few saw the war coming. Fifty years of peace on the continent had dulled the societal memory of war, fewer still in the continental militaries had any ideas of the effects of technology on soldiers in the twentieth century. Lessons that could have been learned from the slaughter of the American Civil war, the Crimean war or even the Sino-Russian War of 1905, were largely ignored or forgotten as irrelevant to professional continental armies.        

  When the war broke out that August, millions of young men all over Europe joined up, to do their duty and share the glory and adventure with their “mates, chums and pals”. With the briefest and at least by today’s standards most rudimentary training, millions marched to war. They were by most accounts secure in the knowledge of their own personal vigor, and national superiority. The war would be brief, glorious and over in a couple of months. The young men wanted to be “in it” before it was over. They would be back to their civilian lives and boring factory jobs and farms by Christmas 1914.

  By the time of the Armistice in 1918, the war had cost an estimated ten million lives lost directly. The actual number of Russian, Serbian, Turkish and Romanian military dead is unknown and only estimated. There is no accurate numbers or figures of civilian dead. And there is at least some correlation between the havoc and depravation wrought by the war;on the individual participants health, that left all weakened and susceptible to the “Spanish Influenza epidemic that broke out in the last year of the war(1918). By the time the virus ran it’s course, it had killed an estimated 22 million more people worldwide. The physical and mental health of many of the war’s survivors was irreparably damaged.

he war broke out in Europe in the beginning of August1914, in what many participants recall as a bucolic summer. The period before the war
 Treaties were in place that promised mutual support and defense if attacked by others. Yet no side could wait to mobilize troops until they were attacked. The diplomats of Europe might still have avoided war had they ignored the advice of the militaryabout the need to meet mobilization timetables.
   In 1914 the French, Germans and Russians had large standing armies, made up of mostly conscripts with many levels of reserves. Also complicating diplomacy were the multitude of treaties guarantying cooperation toward war if certain conditions were met. No one of the time knew that once the minimum conditions for war were met, once mobilization was begun, it couldn’t easily be stopped ( not without showing political weakness) and schedules had to be met. physically the rail system was capable of moving only so many men and only so much material, by a given time. To get a jump on the enemy you had to stay a head of him, only then could you maintain the offense. The spirit of the offense was the dominant theory of late 19th and early 20th century war plans. The idea was that with the proper leadership and spirit, massed infantry could over come any fortification or defensive fire. Regardless of whether the enemy had machine guns or quick firing field guns, casualties were expected, but if the troops displayed the proper spirit, verve, bravery or “elan” it was believed that no defense could hold. Sadly the weapons decimated real flesh and blood and real troops bore the brunt of, and paid the cost of these false assumptions and outdated theories. It took all of 1914,1915 and 1916 to learn that barb-wire, rapid fire machine guns, and artillery would always overmatch even the most spirited infantry.

 

 

                                                                                

   No one knows how many wounded soldiers died in the years soon after the war ended, of complications to the wounds they received during the war, their health wrecked by bullet, high explosive and gas. Many soldiers and veterans succumbed to influenza and yet many more died, the victims of wide spread, post war governmental neglect. None of the governments that sent their young men to war, had the will or money for rehabilitation and quality medical follow up care, there was no comparable post World War2 G.I bill or educational retraining. Financial support of the returning veterans was inadequate and mostly provided by civilian charities.
   World War One was a war that should have, and could have been avoided, except that all the mechanisms of government were unable and unwilling to adapt quickly enough to the changing strategic scene. In 1914 all governments and their military advisors felt that to show weakness or doubt was worse in the long run then the risk or the waging of actual war.
   Since the Prussian defeat of France in 1870, logistics was the heart of successful war planning. All of Europe’s militaries had war plans dependent on train time tables, as trains were necessary tools to move men and material in the quantities and time necessary to wage a successful war. The war plans specified that they needed to mobilize X number of men by day X of mobilization. This many men had to be at the border by day X to repel X number of enemy or surrender X miles of frontier to fall back position X.

  

   It was not understood by diplomats or their governments that war plans drove the time table for ultimatums that set Europe on the road to war. It was an age where the typical foreign service relied on coded letters, letters which needed to be decoded and then moved up the chain of command to the cabinet of ministers in charge. It was a process that had worked in the past because of the time required, time that allowed manoeuver. Unfortunately in 1914 the necessary time required no longer existed. And no government or minister understood what was driving the rush to war.

   It was not understood by diplomats or their governments that war plans drove the time table for ultimatums that set Europe on the road to war. It was an age where the typical foreign service relied on coded letters, letters which needed to be decoded and then moved up the chain of command to the cabinet of ministers in charge. It was a process that had worked in the past because of the time required, time that allowed manoeuver. Unfortunately in 1914 the necessary time required no longer existed. And no government or minister understood what was driving the rush to war.