Some of the ‘battlefield poets’ of the First World War are well-known: Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Francis Ledwidge, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Julian Grenfell, Guillaume Apollinaire, August Stramm, John McRae and A. Joyce Kilmer among others. You can read more about some of these by clicking here.
Kansas WW1
Commemorating the First World War Centennial in Kansas
Author: James Patton (page 1 of 29)
With the new big-screen production “1917” now playing in theaters (click here to read the previous post about the movie), it seems appropriate to put up this list, compiled by the movie critic website Rotten Tomatoes (click here).
Click here to view a dramatization of the start of the well-known 1914 Christmas Truce. This scene is from the 2005 French movie entitled Joyeux Noël, which, although historically inaccurate, is nevertheless poignant. The film was rated 3 ½ stars by Rotten Tomatoes, 4 stars by IMDB and also 4 stars by Roger Ebert. It was also nominated for an Oscar as the Best Foreign Film of 2005.
In October the National Capitol Planning Commission gave its approval to the design for the memorial at Pershing Park in Washington, DC. Subsequently the National Park Service issued a Building Permit and just over a week ago the site work began. You can read more about this in the DC press by clicking here or from The American Legion by clicking here.
The National Guard traces its existence to December 13th, 1636. These citizen soldiers have served in all of our nation’s conflicts, and in the First World War the 26th through 42nd Divisions of the American Expeditionary Force were composed of Guardsmen. You can read more about this here. Happy Birthday to the Guard!
In this recorded lecture Stephen Badsey Ph. D (Cambridge) FRHistR, for 19 years a professor at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and now on the faculty at the University of Wolverhampton, discusses the myths and misconceptions that have passed down to us about World War 1. Click here to see the whole presentation on YouTube. Settle in, though, because it lasts over 47 minutes.
A superb documentary film about the Lafayette Escadrille premiered on November 9th at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Ohio. Read the whole story by clicking here.
Also well worth a read is the 2007 monograph entitled Like a Thunderbolt, produced by the Air Force Historical Studies Office. You can download it here, courtesy of The Doughboy Center.
In the spring of last year John Singer Sargent’s iconic work was displayed at the National World War 1 Museum in Kansas City.
The famous photograph shown above, also from the Imperial War Museum Collection, may have inspired Sargent. The image was taken at an Advance Dressing Station near Béthune, France on April 10th, 1918.The gassed soldiers are from the 55th (West Lancashire) Division, a territorial force formation, which single-handedly stopped a German advance towards the vital rail center at Hazebrouck. The 55th had been paired with the Portuguese 2nd Division, which quickly broke into a full rout, leaving the ‘terriers’ alone in the line for over three days. Although the combat was intense, they didn’t yield.
Regular readers may recall that I posted about Metcalfe’s project to find and properly mark all burials in the U.S. of persons who served in the British Imperial Forces in World War 1, and in August of 2017 I reported that his project had located two such burials in Kansas, You can read about this by clicking here.
Only the British and the Americans attempted to keep track of the number of their missing, and the official counts are still changing as the remains of fallen soldiers are regularly found in the areas of France and Belgium that were the battle grounds of the Western Front. Every now and then an American soldier is found, particularly in the Meuse Argonne.
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