In 1917 the cessation of warfare between Germany and Russia presented General Erich Ludendorff and the German General Staff with a fleeting opportunity. They had several million soldiers and several thousand artillery pieces in the east that could be deployed in climactic offensives on the Western Front before the American army was present in significant numbers. Intelligence believed that the British were spent from their Passchendaele offensive, noting that the best British units, the ANZACs and the Canadians, had both taken heavy casualties. And although it seems that the Germans had never learned the extent of the French Army’s mutinies, it was clear that they weren’t in the mood to mount attacks.
Kansas WW1
Commemorating the First World War Centennial in Kansas
We’ve tried to post links to the Educator’s Newsletters issued by the National World War I Museum and Memorial. Unfortunately, we’ve been inconsistent in what we’ve called these posts. To make it bit easier, we are simply going to post the link to the archive of these newsletters: https://www.theworldwar.org/education/archive
Coming up this weekend on C-SPAN3, the following WWI programs are scheduled. Times given here are Central; we’re not responsible for schedule changes. Errors in this post is another story; we resent all errors.
–Lasting Impressions of World War I. This program airs four times over the weekend; it’s a joint press conference co-hosted by the National World War I Museum and Memorial and the National Press Club. First airing is at 6:00 p.m. Saturday, April 21, with a repeat at 10:00 p.m. that evening. Third airing is at 4:01 p.m. Sunday, April 22. The last airing is in the wee hours of Monday morning, April 23, at 2:01 p.m.
Country and Western singer Merle Haggard’s (1937-2016) signature hit was “I’m Proud to be an Okie from Muskogee” (1969) , which contains the line “We still wave Old Glory down at the Courthouse”. Three miles away there’s a Visquesney Doughboy dedicated to the service of Native Americans in WW1. Read more in this story of interest .
One hundred years ago in Kansas, April 22 – May 4, 1918:
April 22, 1918.
-The War Department authorized a new Kansas National Guard. Two regiments, the Fourth and Fifth, were organized immediately.
April 30, 1918.
–The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me, by William Allen White, was published by the Macmillan Co., New York. See the previous post: https://www.kansasww1.org/kansans-of-the-great-war-era-william-allen-white/
Nelson E. Edwards (1887-1954) was born at Point Pleasant, WV, the second of the nine children of Jake and Margaret Edwards. Before Nelson’s first birthday the parents decided to homestead near Plevna, KS, which today is a community of 97 persons located in Reno County, about thirty miles west of Hutchinson. Although they started out in a sod-roofed dugout, their wheat crops were successful and eventually they had a large home with outbuildings. Jake Edwards served as a County Commissioner and was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives in 1914 and 1916, but this was all after Nelson had left in 1908 to study photography.
By 1910 he was learning from a photographer in New Jersey who was associated with Thomas Edison, in 1911 Nelson was experimenting with aerial photography and in 1912 he went to work for William R. Hearst’s International News Service in New York. A biographer has described Nelson as “a tall, muscular man with prominent cheekbones, a hawk nose, lighthouse eyes peering out at the world from under heavy eyebrows, and thick, dark hair which photographed jet black”, and also “stocky [and] … quite large”.
It’s been two years since my original article about the memorials to the missing, beginning with the Lone Pine Commonwealth War (CWGC) Memorial at Gallipoli. In that piece I defined what is meant by ‘Missing’ in WW1. Since then I’ve posted over thirty articles about a variety of the WW1 ‘Memorials to the Missing’, so I thought it might be time to re-rerun the explanation of the concept of ‘Missing’ for the newcomers. As you read you’ll learn that the CWGC has 127 Memorials to the Missing and the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) has just 13. Spoiler alert: I don’t plan to report on every one of the CWGC sites, just the largest and most interesting, with at least one from every theater of conflict.
Eugene Bullard (1895 – 1961) was an American pilot who served with the French in WW1. Born in Georgia, his father was an immigrant of Haitian descent from Martinique and his mother a Native American of the Muscogee nation. Bullard received only five years of school and left home at an early age. As a teenager he was boxing and playing in music halls in the UK and France. He joined the French Foreign Legion in October, 1914 and fought as a part of a machine gun team with the First Moroccan Division in Artois, Picardy and Champagne, where he was wounded. When he returned to duty he was reassigned to the regular French Army’s 170th Infantry Regiment, known as Les hirondelles noires de la mort (the black swallows of death). He was sent to Verdun where he was wounded again in March, 1916.
Multi-million dollar houses in a posh section may be at risk. Read about it here.
It is perhaps a bit early to post C-SPAN programming for next weekend–too much of a chance for schedule changes–but at this point, there is only one WWI program scheduled and it will air twice.
American Artifacts: World War I Combat Artists will air Sunday, April 8th, at 5:00 p.m. and again at 9:00 p.m. Central. This was filmed at the National Air & Space Museum and the talk is led by the museum’s chief curator, Peter Jakob. Their exhibit is entitled, “Artist Soldiers: Expression in the First World War.”
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