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Thread: The Eleventh Hour

  1. #1

    The Eleventh Hour

    The Eleventh Hour is kind of an archaic term, these days. It has pretty much been replaced by The Last Minute. It referred to getting things done before a midnight (or noon) deadline--if you're working at 11:something, you're a procrastinator.

    So, ninety years ago today, when The Armistice was signed late in the morning, the grim, gallows humor was that they waited until the Eleventh Hour--The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month... And there was a reason for that--Europe was in tatters, and the majority of the young men of an entire generation (or two, or three--at the end, they were taking them mighty young and mighty old) were gone. It was past time to end that nightmare.

    Kaiser Wilhelm II, the crazy, spoiled young brat of the Prussian House of Hohenzollern, had decided shortly after his coronation that the new confederation called Germany would become a major power, not only on land but on the sea. So, he started building battleships, and eventually dreadnought type battleships, much to Great Britain's consternation. This added to other European tensions, many of which were centered on the uneasy alliance that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and helped make diplomacy big, big business in the region. Alliances were formed. And so it was that when the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in an open automobile in Sarajevo the dominoes began to fall.

    The Kaiser wanted France, as Germany had always wanted to own France. France didn't want to be Southern Germany, and concentrated its forces on its German border. So, Germany waltzed through Belgium and avoided the direct confrontation (or, at least, put it off). This bit of short term thinking cost them dearly--Great Britain was no great friend of France, but it and Belgium were the best of allies.

    At first, the war was much like any other, with infantry fighting and calvary on horseback scouting. However, trenches were soon dug and reinforced against the new breed of artillery, and before long the ground war in Europe (the "Western Front") turned into a stalemate--a standoff which still ranks as one of the greatest human meat grinders in history. Four years and hundreds of thousands of lives later, the gains were still more conveniently measured in yards than in miles.

    The dreadnought-type battleships that had been the focus of the arms race and the source of much of the pre-war tensions proved largely useless. Both England and Germany kept their fleets largely together as single units for fear that the other side would do the same and demolish smaller squadrons with impunity. As a result, one section of the North Sea was completely controlled and the whole rest of that body of water was completely unguarded. The two massive fleets met only once--near Jutland--and fought an indecisive battle. The rest of the time, the sea war was largely a matter of keeping the sailors from getting too bored, which doesn't sound like much of a problem but it really was.

    One interesting highlight was the rise of the battlecruiser. Highly armed and fast, they had very poor protection. They were designed to hunt down raiders that were preying on vital shipping, and they performed this chore with distinction. The first of the breed, the British H.M.S. Invincible, led some friends in a sortie to South American waters and sank the raiding cruisers Sharnhorst and Gneisenau to much acclaim. Then, as governments are wont to do, they were horribly misused by being reassigned to a duty for which they were not designed. They were assigned to replace light cruisers in scouting for the battleship fleets. At Jutland, they proved fast enough to run away from the enemy fleet they had found, but by the time these large ships turned about the squadron had been, if not decimated, certainly thinned considerably. The Invincible herself proved to be terribly misnamed. Eventually, Britain solved the scouting problem by inventing something completely new--the aircraft carrier. This primitive new thing made no real difference to the war for which they were invented, but their day would come...

    Locked in a stalemate on the surface, Germany turned to a new innovation--the submersible. This scourge was extremely effective in cutting Britain's lifeline of vital materials. Britain, of course, decried this as piracy and ungentlemanly warfare--but this didn't prevent them from building submarines of their own and using them with amazing valor and to good effect in the Adriatic. The one thing the German surface navy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire did manage to accomplish was to cut off communication through the Baltic and the Adriatic with Russia. This was the motivation behind Churchill's wildly unsuccessful attack on the Dardinelles. Eventually, the starving Russians rallied behind Vladimir Lenin and his 'Bolsheviks'--interestingly, with a bit of Wall St. support helping to bring this sad development about.

    Meanwhile, there was a technology only ten years old when the war began which had already been used by the Italians for warfare in Africa. The Wright Brothers' little toy was invaluable for reconaissance, and the cavalry was soon essentially obsolete in the bloody stalemate of the Western Front as the aircraft took the task over. From light, boxkite-like contraptions which required their pilots to muscle the wings into odd shapes just to change directions, the aircraft very, very quickly evolved into fast, nimble fighters, heavy bombers, camera-equipped recon craft, floatplanes for sea reconaissance, and eventually Germany produced an all metal cantilevered low-wing monoplane--an amazing transformation. Along the way, malfunctioning interruptor gears cause pilots to shoot off their own propellors, bad equipment and tactics caused the infamous "Bloody April" in 1917 in which the average duration between deployment and death for a British airman on the Western Front was less than a month, and both sides discovered that in this new century the nation that ignored the rapid march of progress was screwed. Eventually Britain deployed the infamous Sopwith Camel, which was such a good performer yet so difficult to fly that it not only shot down more enemy aircraft than any other model, it killed more of its own fledgling pilots than any other.

    The air war also provided the one source of grand propaganda in a war of bloody stalemates. With a stalemate on land and another at sea, these aerial knights provided one of the last opportunities to duel like gentlemen in a war. My theory is that this caused the death of Manfred, frieherr (baron) von Richthofen (aka the "Red Baron"). He got wind that the Kaiser wanted to give him a desk job, and theorized (probably correctly) that the king would do so when Richthofen's victory score stood at a round number. So, when his score hit a round number, he got in the habit of making sure he got another the same day. The day he got his eightieth kill, he went back up and violated all his own wise rules. The result was a bullet through the heart from an Australian marksman. But before that happened, he and his mentor Oswald Boelke had invented dogfighting techniques and squadron deployment techniques that would remain in use for over half a century.

    At the beginning of the war, the U.S. was essentially no power at all. When we came into the war late, the European powers were so decimated by their bloody stalemate that our relatively small but very fresh contingent proved decisive. The U.S. Navy, which had grown into the world's third-largest, sailed with the British Grand Fleet and this fact was essentially enough to keep the German High Seas Fleet at anchor. The U.S. Marines were stuck into one of the ugliest situations on the Western Front and performed with such valor that they proudly wear their German nickname--the "Devil Dogs of Belleau Woods"--to this day.

    My grandfather was a baker with the U.S. Army, and gave me some insights into the true nature of the main battle of the war. He said that when the barrages were at their height you could read at night by the light of the shelling and that trying to communicate by screaming in the ear of the person right beside you was useless--and this in the base camp five miles away from the trenches!! He said the men were going in, and their bodies were coming out, by the trainload.

    And on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month ninety years ago, it stopped. The war that should have but didn't end all wars ended. The actual treaty wouldn't be signed for a year or so, and was so flawed that young Winston Churchill accurately called it not a treaty, but a "twenty year truce". Not surprisingly, the holiday was not declared to be celebrated on the anniversary of the terrible Treaty of Versailles, but on the day of the blessed armistice.

    And in honor of my grandfathers, I remember The War to End All Wars today. It was innovative. It was formative. It was ugly. It was. And if you wish to remember with me, may I suggest either reading the book or watching the movie All Quiet on the Western Front. There are other great sources on this fascinating war, but I can't think of a better place to start than with Erich Maria Remarque's remarkable work.
    Last edited by acptulsa; 11-24-2008 at 01:43 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...



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  3. #2
    Another great film on the subject of WWI is Paths of Glory, which happens to be Stanley Kubrick's first film. Another entertaining read is Richthofen's memoirs, translations of which have been sold in this country under the title The Red Baron.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  4. #3
    Bump. 'Cause it is the eleventh hour on the east coast.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  5. #4
    my grandfather flew in World War I

    acptulsa... you have a poet's soul

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Aratus View Post
    my grandfather flew in World War I

    acptulsa... you have a poet's soul
    Thank you. That means that much more coming from you than anyone else. Don't know that my workmanlike prose deserves it, but I'll take it nonetheless!
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Aratus View Post
    my grandfather flew in World War I
    Oh, and my granddaddy (the other one) trained on Jennies just before the war ended.



    Last bump, then I guess I'll put the thread away for another one to three years. 'Night, folks.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  8. #7
    Or so I thought. Then itoccurred to me last night that this thread needs a little Will Rogers in it:

    Quote Originally Posted by acptulsa View Post
    'Nowadays we have diplomats work on wars for years before arranging them. That's so when it's over, nobody will know what they were fighting for. We lost thousands and spent billions, and you could hand a sheet of paper to one million different people and tell 'em to write down what the last war was for, and the only answer that will be alike will be, "Damned if I know."'--Will Rogers
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  9. #8
    Another well made WWI movie is "The Lost Battalion" 2001.
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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by pacelli View Post
    Another well made WWI movie is "The Lost Battalion" 2001.
    Thanks. I'll be checking that one out.

    I'll tell you one that's ain't worth a damn--Flyboys. Anyone who knows anything at all about WWI aerial combat will spend the whole two hours alternately scowling and laughing. Total waste.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by acptulsa View Post
    Thanks. I'll be checking that one out.

    I'll tell you one that's ain't worth a damn--Flyboys. Anyone who knows anything at all about WWI aerial combat will spend the whole two hours alternately scowling and laughing. Total waste.
    Just a warning, Lost Battalion is all-ground. But very well done. You almost feel like you're running around with those guys.
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  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by pacelli View Post
    Just a warning, Lost Battalion is all-ground. But very well done. You almost feel like you're running around with those guys.
    Well, the dreadnoughts grabbed all the glory before the war, but wound up doing little. The airmen really did a lot, and got a disproportionate share of the glory for it. But the grunts down in the meat grinder went through the most hell for the least acclaim.

    They deserve all the movies they can get. All Quiet on the Western Front follows them, too...
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  14. #12
    On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as he rode in one of those newfangled automobile contraptions through the streets of Sarajevo.

    A month later, that empire fired it's first shots in the invasion of Serbia.

    Happy anniversary?
    Last edited by acptulsa; 07-29-2014 at 10:33 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  15. #13
    "Tell me though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor's children starving?" Taylor -Planet Of The Apes

    Ecclesiastes 8:14
    14 There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless.


    A sad creature man.
    Last edited by bunklocoempire; 07-29-2014 at 10:07 PM.
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  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by acptulsa View Post
    "People talk peace, but men give their life's work to war. It won't stop 'til there is as much brains and scientific study put to aid peace as there is to promote war."--Will Rogers 1929
    ..
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  17. #15
    'Peace is like a beautiful woman. It's wonderful, but it bears watching.'--Will Rogers

    It is now 100 years since the end of The War to End All Wars.

    *sigh*
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...



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