worldwarone posts
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (6 months ago)
Nov 11th, 2011 at 11:00AM:
Today is Veterans Day, also known as Remembrance Day and Armistice Day because in 1918, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, World War One ended.
For four years the nations of the world had torn each other apart. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the Ottoman Empire was mortally wounded, Germany's Kaiser's fell and so did Russia's Czar. The world changed forever ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (11 months ago)
Jun 15th, 2011 at 1:00PM: In the years before the outbreak of World War One, European artists developed a variety of different styles to reflect the pace of change and industrialization in what used to be a traditional continent.
Cubism and Futurism were two of the biggest movements. One of the briefest and most vibrant was Vorticism. The Vorticists started around 1913 and focused on the hard lines and quick pace of the ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (11 months ago)
Jun 10th, 2011 at 11:00AM: The common image of the Western Front in World War One is of muddy trenches and artillery barrages. That was certainly the experience of most soldiers. But while huge armies slugged it out in the mud and ruin of France and Belgium, another war was going on underground. Sappers from both sides dug tunnels under enemy trenches, packed them with explosives, and blew them up.
The explosions were ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (11 months ago)
Jun 7th, 2011 at 3:00PM: A team of British archaeologists working in Jordan is tracing the military campaign of Lawrence of Arabia, and they need your help.
T.E. Lawrence was an English archaeologist turned soldier who capture the public imagination during World War One when he helped the Arabs rebel against the Ottoman Empire. After its disastrous defeat at Gallipoli at the hands of the Ottomans, the British Empire ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
May 5th, 2011 at 8:30AM: Claude Choules, the last known combat veteran of WWI, has died aged 110. Born in England in 1901, he was too young to enlist in the army when the war broke out in 1914, so he waited until he was 15 and enlisted in the Royal Navy, where he saw service throughout the war.
Unlike most veterans, he liked the service and stayed on. While working as a visiting instructor for the Australian Navy, he ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Apr 24th, 2011 at 10:00AM:
Archaeologists in Turkey are making a detailed survey of the famous World War One battle of Gallipoli. Using period military maps and GPS technology, they're mapping the old trenches and redoubts used by both sides.
Gallipoli was the scene of fierce fighting starting in 1915. A peninsula with highlands dominating the Dardanelles strait linking the Black and the Aegean seas, it guarded the ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Apr 21st, 2011 at 10:00AM:
There's nobody quite as determined or stupid as a junkie.
Maybe it's hard to buy a hit on the streets of Cashmere, Washington, or maybe this particular junkie was short of cash. In any case, someone with a craving for drugs broke into the Cashmere Historic Museum and Pioneer Village and made off with a bottle of morphine pills dating back to World War One.
A doctor interviewed by the ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Jan 12th, 2011 at 1:00PM: Archaeologists in Armenia have discovered what they believe to be the world's oldest wine press. The press is inside a cave, where they found the remains of grape seeds, pressed grapes, and vines of Vitis vinifera vinifera , the same type of grape still used in winemaking today. The site is dated at 4,000 BC, about 900 years older than the previous record holder--wine from the tomb of King ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Nov 11th, 2010 at 1:30PM:
On the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the First World War ended. It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history and it redrew the map of Europe. As the 100th anniversary of the start of the war approaches in 2014, there's been an increased interest in visiting the places where it was fought.
War historian Mike Hanlon is leading three ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Oct 18th, 2010 at 1:30PM: More than sixty years after the end of World War Two, Germans are still struggling with their Nazi past. While most of the population is too young to be culpable for World War Two, their parents or grandparents were involved. Many Germans opposed Hitler's rise to power, but many more supported him, at least in the beginning.
A new exhibition at Berlin's Deutsches Historisches Museum explores ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Sep 16th, 2010 at 12:00PM:
The Italian army gets a bad rap.
Sure, it made a poor showing in World War Two, but it was Italian Communist partisans who finally bagged Mussolini. Plus the Italians fought in one of the toughest fronts of the First World War, high in the Alps against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. They endured freezing conditions on top of glaciers for months on end. One of the favorite tactics was to ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (1 year ago)
Jun 23rd, 2010 at 4:00PM:
Underwater archaeologists exploring off the coast of Gallipoli, Turkey, have found a somber relic from the famous WWI battle. A barge that removed dead and wounded soldiers from the beachhead back to a hospital ship was found at the bottom of the sea. The team also found the wreck of the HMS Lewis, a British destroyer.
Gallipoli is a Turkish peninsula that controls access between the Black ...
by Sean McLachlan (RSS feed) (2 years ago)
Aug 26th, 2009 at 12:30PM: With the recent death of the last veteran to fight in the trenches of World War One, one of the twentieth century's most convulsive events has passed into history. From 1914-18, great armies battered at each other across a hellish landscape in which millions died. Old empires fell and new countries were born.
This photo gives an idea what it was like. A member of the Cheshire Regiment of the UK ...