Via email;
Please could you include something for ANZAC day for us, down under this is a big deal and rightly so, even more this is the Centennial remembrance. There are plenty of good links on the NZ blogs including this one on Whale Oil, whose owner is presently out in Gallipoli with his grandfathers medals,there is also a nice renditioning of the last post on there by Marc Knofler to boot.
Would really appreciate and know your NZ readers would as well.
Remember there were Newfoundlanders there too. Yet another shining example that the British High Command were a bunch of aristocrats whose mental faculties were too adled from too much inbreeding. The same problems that plagued the Gallipoli campaign were repeated again at Dieppe in WW2.
Also commented at The Real Revo including Liam Clancy performing ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’
http://therealrevo.com/blog/?p=130738
The problems were definitely repeated at Anzio. Dieppe was a raid not an invasion.
Interesting to note that there were more air assets devoted to the Dieppe Raid than there were for D-Day.
Dieppe is a beach of flint cobbles, very narrow front and likely would not have got far up the narrow streets anyway. Just up the road they were trying to capture an enigma machine . There is speculation that this was the purpose as the dieppe front would have been to narrow to land any substantial forces
And the ANZAC Corps and the Canadian Corps in their respective Armies would spearhead the final 100 days offensive. The ANZACs took more prisoners (a couple of dozen as I recall) and the Canadians took the most ground. The number of prisoners taken by the two single army corps would make up about half of the total British-Imperial numbers and were more taken than by all of the American corps combined.
I’ve read in a secondary source that P.M. Lloyd George planned on making Currie C-in-C with the Australian commander, Monash, as his Chief-of-Staff had the war continued into 1919.
And inspired by work done by Australian historians and archaeologists, Canadians have also begun the task of identifying and reinterring previously Unknown Soldiers of the Great War into marked graves.
http://tvo.org/program/209097/the-great-war-tour
Blazing Cat Fur also linked some Anzac Day items today:
http://www.blazingcatfur.ca/2015/04/25/gallipoli-centenary-australia-and-new-zealand-mark-anzac-day/
Have a thoughtful Anzac Day, guys, and take care.
The point I was trying to make was that with improper support the troops were doomed. While Dieppe was only a raid with a brigade-sized force…it was an operation where troops were being landed en masse on a defended beach much like Gallipoli. Dieppe wasn’t a surreptitious landing/insertion–it was an invasion by a sizeable number of troops with the intent to capture and hold ground until the operation (snatching an Enigma machine) was accomplished.
What makes me wonder is why they foolishly and futilely land the, then, new Churchill tanks at Dieppe….which were captured. The Wehrmacht took them home and tested and evaluated them thoroughly…and very critically. The reports were in Whitehall before Berlin.
Critical changes were made to the Churchill design that increased their reliability and effectiveness.
The Churchill tank was the basis for most of the specialised tanks which defeated the German fortifications on D-day.
D-day planners deliberately avoided the fortified Channel Ports and shingle beaches. The D-day beaches were surveyed and even sampled and British equivalents found and used to test the intended invasion vehicles. One such beach, Slapton Sands in Devon, was the scene of a disaster…..a rehearsal was attacked by E-boat causing catastrophic losses…making for planning changes to prevent E-boats from Le Havre or Cherbourg getting involved in D-day.
Waffen SS General Kurt Meyer observed that all Allied tanks had to do was retreat about 20-30 miles so the Leopards and Tigers would all break down chasing them.
Erwin Rommel observed that many many Valentine tanks chased him all the way from Al Alemein to Tunis on their own tracks. The automotive reliability of Shermans was legendary….protection and fire-power not so much…
good version by Liam Clancy.
Then there’s this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG48Ftsr3OI&list=RDWG48Ftsr3OI#t=0
by Eric Bogle.
// I’ve read in a secondary source that P.M. Lloyd George planned on making Currie C-in-C with the Australian commander, Monash, as his Chief-of-Staff had the war continued into 1919 //
+
Do you have the reference handy?
dizzy “Do you have the reference handy?”
If you are a student of history, you have read the quote concerning Currie 100 times. If this is new to you, I suspect there may not be a ready reference but feel free to waste your own time looking for it.
“There is even evidence to suggest that Lloyd George at one point had considered appointing Currie commander of all British forces.”
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-arthur-currie/
WW Iwas suppost the be the War to end all Wars and whe France surrendred to the nazis they forced them to use the very same Train Passenger car they signs the WW I armacence in just to rub it into the french
Thanks for that! Very moving.
It has since been revealed that Dieppe was an attempt to draw the Germans to the beach. The real reason was to get a group into town in order to steal German high level data. It failed ad one group was held up due to high waves by enough time that the group trying to get in were detected and forced back.
> Waffen SS General Kurt Meyer observed that all Allied tanks had to do was retreat about 20-30 miles so the Leopards and Tigers would all break down chasing them.
Highly unlikely. I pretty sure Panzer Meyer knew that there was no Leopard tank in service during World War II. The VK1602 Leopard never entered production, and the Leopard I was introduced in 1965. And he probably would have used kilometers, not miles.
I had the opportunity to visit Gallipoli last year. Standing on the beaches and looking up at the natural ramparts of eroded cliff, I tried to imagine the raw, untested young men doing the same thing. Difference was that 99 years later there was no one above me and no lead raining down.
I found it interesting that at the top of the cliffs are impressive memorials to both the Australian/New Zealand dead and those of the Ottoman Turks. It’s both sad and interesting that after nearly 100 years, Turkey is rapidly reverting into pre-Attaturk ways. Our young Turkish guide said he expected every trace of Attaturk to be wiped away and history rewritten so that a new generation of Turks have no recollection of a Turkey without an Islamist government.
The really sad part about Gallipoli was that it wasn’t the best strategic target…people with experience in the area were recommending a landing at Alexandretta (modern day İskenderun, Turkey) which was less defended, easier to assault, and would have cut the Turks off from Syria and everything south. It was stopped by Churchill’s ego (he wanted a bold move to win the war against the Turks) and the French who insisted that this was an invasion into their colonial territory and wanted command and control (despite the fact none of their troops would be involved).
Thank you Kate,
Of course there where also Newfies at Gallipoli though at the time it wasn’t a part of Canada. The tragedy that was Gallipoli was so easily avoided with hind sight and its important to remember that this was a clusterF of enormous proportions something that Churchill et.al will have to answer to their maker for.
For any that want more than the bland rhetoric there are some thought provoking and interesting articles on the history of the conflict at, http://pc.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/countdown-to-anzac-day-so-who-pulled.html
and of course Mark Steyn always remembers and adds something for this historic day, part of the bond that ties together people of a common heritage with a shared history in a pointless blood letting.
History sadly will continue to repeat itself because the intelligentsia are always far to advanced to read and learn from the past.
Again thank you Kate
I hope the military steps in as they have in the past when the Islamist went too far.
They’ll never completely reverse Attaturks influence – they’d have to to give up the Latin based alphabet and revert to Arabic script. Canada switching to Cyrillic script would be trifling by comparison.
“The tragedy that was Gallipoli was so easily avoided with hind sight…”
Ah yes, hindsight. That magical gift that makes us all so much more wise than anyone who was there when it happened.
“Yet another shining example that the British High Command were a bunch of aristocrats whose mental faculties were too adled [sic] from too much inbreeding.”
Right. That’s why the Germans won WWI and WWII of course.
They didn’t? Oh.
I think the source was one of the Osprey Publishing Men-at-Arms series on Canada’s WW1 troops, Dizzy. And I didn’t take your query to have been snarky in any way.
Hard to say
They call it a shingle beach but it’s more like 3 inch flint ball bearings. And then about a 4 ft sea wall
The headlands, think white cliffs of Dover are to this day bunkered. A tough spot which couldn’t possibly handled a Normandy sized invasion
Canadians were still heading the call
Ready Aye Ready
Leopard – Panther… Meh, I would surmise that in the German Language, there is little distinction between the big cats…??
Yes the Leopard was not around in the late 1940’s….but the 75mm gunned Panther certainly was.
Happy ANZAC day to all..!!
stk
The Islamists have already stepped in and purged the military. It will take at least a generation, probably several, before the Islamists are complacent enough and a new batch of more secular-minded leaders grows up in the military for any chance of another movement like Kemal Attaturk’s “young Turks.”
Those who paint the senior British officer corps during the Great War as incompetent fools do them a great disservice. General Haig and his colleagues and subordinates were, after all under the direction of a civilian government which often issued instructions for offensive operations that were based on political and diplomatic considerations rather than what was militarily achievable Gallipoli being a case in point.
It’s also important to remember that in 1914 Britain had a small professional army that had more experience of modern combat (Boer War) than either the Germans or the French. Despite its small size this army was able to fight a vastly superior (in terms of size) German force to a standstill in the summer and Autumn of 1914 but at vast cost in lives and more importantly institutional knowledge. Experienced highly trained officers, NCOs and private soldiers were replaced with newly trained men. Combat effectiveness plummeted and the ability of the army to undertake complicated operations was degraded. Men were rushed into battle inadequately trained without adequate supplies because politicians wanted a quick victory or because their French allies needed support.
As an indication of the general quality of the British officer corps its worth noting that just one man, Julian Byng, successfully evacuated the allied forces from Gallipoli without losing a man in the operation, commanded the combined Canadian/British force that captured Vimy Ridge, and masterminded the first modern combined arms attack utilising both tanks and infantry at Cambrai. Not all senior British officers were as talented as Byng but many of them were.
‘Spirit of the Anzacs’
https://www.youtube.com/embed/NfFFzFiiVYM?rel=0
Hats off to my Australian friends in Queensland!!
https://youtu.be/7cKPchRDaVM
OK, I know I say this a lot on Anzac Day, but as Canadians — while justly celebrating the work of our sister Dominions — we might spare a thought for the hundredth anniversary of the Second Battle of Ypres, the first major Canadian action of the war.
It was the first use of poison gas (chlorine) in the war. French and Algerian troops to the left of the Canadian line broke, and it fell to the Canadians to close the gap.
Not to take anything away from the ANZACS and the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, but Second Ypres (or St-Julien) deserves the same prominence.
My son and I were at a dusk service Friday evening, memorializing the 15th and 3rd Battalions, CEF, the two Toronto battalions that formed part of the 1st Division. The 15th was drawn from, and is perpetuated by, the 48th Highlanders; the 3rd was a composite unit raised from the Queen’s Own Rifles, the Royal Grenadiers (now the Royal Regiment of Canada), and the Governor-General’s Body Guard (now the Governor-General’s Horse Guards). At the point of the line, and as the central target of the German artillery and gas, the 15th lost 647 men, the worst day for any Canadian unit during the whole war (other sources say 691).
St-Julien mattered to Canada because it was there that the CEF first earned its fighting repute, the one that culminated in the great “hundred days” in the fall of 1918, and the nationhood that the CEF “brought home in their backpacks”. Twenty years later, the men that fought the Second World War were drilled and disciplined by First War veterans, some of whom were still young enough to go overseas again.
And it mattered to the Western Allies as a great what-if: had the line collapsed and the Canadians not closed the breach, what might have happened on the Western front with British war strategy already reeling after the Dardanelles, and would the Western Allies have recovered?
I think the History Channel commemorated this historic event with a Pawn Stars Marathon.
> I would surmise that in the German Language, there is little distinction between the big cats
Both “Leopard” and “Panther” are the same in English and German.
> Yes the Leopard was not around in the late 1940’s
And WWII was long over.
“I would surmise that in the German Language, there is little distinction between the big cats”
Whatever faults German may have as a language – massive separation between subject and verb, sentences with more Claus’s than Santa’s family reunion, etc. (see Twain for the full recap), occasional stimulation of its speakers to dreams of world conquest – imprecision is not one of them.
such a slaughter at Ypres where 800000 were lost over about 2 miles of ground .
the Brits slaughtered their mid class by raiding the school for soldiers. by the end of the first world war they had a million underaged soldiers. so many were underaged that they changed the uniform , which at the beginning included a mustache and by the end had nearly a million that couldnt grow one.
my grandfather went to both WWI and WWII , first as a Brit and second time as a Canadian. was gassed at Ypres, shot at Passendaele and participated in both Dday and the liberation of Holland.