On This day in World War 1

On August 24, 1914, Lt. Harry Colebourn, a Canadian veterinarian and soldier with the Royal Canadian Army Veterinary Corps, was travelling in a troop train, which stopped in White River, Ontario.  There, he met a hunter who had shot a female black bear.  The bear had a cub, which was almost certain to die without its mother.  Colebourn offered the hunter $20 for the cub, whom he named Winnipeg Bear to commemorate the city where he had lived before the war. The name was soon shortened to Winnie.  Winnie accompanied Colebourn to England, where the cub played with Canadian soldiers during their off-hours in their encampment on the Salisbury Plains. Colebourn later donated Winnie to the London Zoo, where the bear inspired the creation of A.A. Milne’s famous children’s book character, Winnie the Pooh.

Source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnie-the-pooh-saga-turns-100-years-old-1.2745104

Thanks for the nice anecdotes, Mark!

During the evening of August 25, 1914, there was some sort of incident at Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, then in German hands. Shots were fired, and while it’s unclear what exactly happened, the Germans reacted with an eruption of violence and destruction that would last for days, would take hundreds of lives and cause widespread destruction. On the night of the 25th, they set fire to the Lakenhal, which was the library of Leuven’s university. More than 300,000 books were lost, among them some 800 from the Middle Ages.

Austria-Hungary enjoyed an initial success, defeating the Russians in the Battle of Krasnik.

Japan called upon Austria-Hungary to retreat its cruiser SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth (named after the famous empress “Sisi”, aka “Sissi” when the films were made in the 1950’s) from Tsingtao. The Japanese request was refused, and Japan now also declared war on Austria-Hungary.

August 27, 1914, saw a particularly heroic stand of the 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers in the Battle of Etreux. About 800 British soldiers were attacked and surrounded by a German force outnumbering them six to one. The British kept fighting until they had lost three quarters of their strength, and the 200 survivors only surrendered by nightfall as they ran out of ammunition. Their bravery bought the British Expeditionary Force precious time that they needed to escape from the Germans, who had been in full pursuit.
A detailed and illustrated account of this dramatic battle can be found here: http://www.britishbattles.com/firstww/battle-of-etreux.htm

The Imperial Japanese Navy started their blockade of German-held Tsingtao on the Chinese mainland.

In Africa, the German colony of Togoland had capitulated on the 26th, but Kamerun, EastAfrica and Southwest Africa were holding on for now, and would do so for years to come.

On August 29, with the French Army and the BEF still in full retreat before the advancing Germans, the French commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre ordered general Lanrezac of the fifth army to counterattack towards the city of St Quentin, which had already been captured by the Germans and was to the west of the French position at the time. The fifth army had just suffered defeat at Charleroi, and it took Joffre a personal visit to convince Lanzreac. Unfortunately for the French, their plans fell into German hands, and they were pushed back across the Oise river, which runs between St Quentin and the town of Guise. The French were not wholly unsuccessful though, because hey did capture Guise and cause another much-needed delay to the general German advance.
Who actually won this battle, remains a matter of dispute even today. The German wikipedia lists it as “Schlacht bei St. Quentin”, and the result is “deutscher Sieg” (German victory); the French version mentions the “Bataille de Guise” and a “Victoire tactique et strategique francaise” (French tactical and strategic victory).

No such uncertainty on the eastern front, where the multi-day engagement raged that has been somewhat dubiously named the “Battle of Tannenberg” (the fighting never actually reached Tannenberg and was named after that town at the request of the victorious German commander Paul von Hindenburg, possibly to eradicate the memory of a German defeat against the Polish there in 1410). August 29 was a day of major disaster for the Russian second army, the main body of which was surrounded by German forces near Neidenburg. Relentless artillery fire killed many Russians, and the Russian first army, further to the north, never came to the rescue. While lack of clarity and lack of information definitely played a role in the Russian failure here, the personal animosity between the generals Rennenkampf of the first army and Samsonov of the second army certainly didn’t help either.

An expeditionary force from New Zealand occupied German Samoa without a fight.

The Women’s Defense Relief Corps was founded in Britain, for both civil and military aims.

The German Far East Cruiser force , under Admiral Graf Spee, unite in the German Caroline Islands around this date. This force consists of two armored and three light cruisers.

Von Spee considered recapturing German Samoa, but decides its importance in the War limited.

I have always thought the German Fleet in WWI should have attempted to get warships out in the Atlantic for commerce raiding. How would a German Battlecruisers team have done? The Allies would get forced to place many units able to match a Battlecruisers in speed and firepower in the Atlantic. This could have upset the British numerical advantage allowing for a more favorable Jutland style battle for Germany.

@ABWorsham:

I have always thought the German Fleet in WWI should have attempted to get warships out in the Atlantic for commerce raiding. How would a German Battlecruisers team have done? The Allies would get forced to place many units able to match a Battlecruisers in speed and firepower in the Atlantic. This could have upset the British numerical advantage allowing for a more favorable Jutland style battle for Germany.

Germany’s battlecruisers were unsuited for commerce raiding in the Atlantic for several reasons.  First, like all German capital ships, they had very poor crew accommodations.  Intended only for short excursions into the North Sea, their living space had been pared down to a minimum (as a design trade-off for features that were considered more useful) and their crews normally lived in barracks ashore.  This contrasted with the British design philosophy of providing decent (or at least adequate) crew accommodations, since Royal Navy ships had world-wide responsibilities and thus could be away from their home ports for extended periods.

Second, all of Germany’s battlecruisers had coal-fired engines.  For long-range commerce raiders which need regular support by a network of supply ships, coal is very problematic.  It’s extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive (and messy) to load aboard a ship even when it’s just sitting in a port, so re-coaling a ship at sea – especially in the often-turbulent Atlantic – would have been even more difficult and perhaps even impossible.  To make matters worse, coal delivers less thermal energy than oil, so coal-fired ships need more frequent refuelleing than oil-fired ships.

There’s also the problem of how the required German supply ships themselves could have kept operating for long in an Atlantic Ocean controlled by the RN and to a lesser extent by the French and American fleets.  Britain maintained a blockade of the North Sea throughout the war (taking advantage of the fact that the North Sea can only be entered or existed via a small number of passages) – so it would have been difficult for the supply ships to return to Germany for restocking, and probably impossible for them to obtain coal and other supplies in foreign ports (most coal sources being, I think, on the Allied side).

Great information, thank you for the information.

Based on this information Germany best option for raiding would have been the light cruisers or converted merchant ships such as Wolf.

I’ve been lagging quite a bit…. 2014 took precedence over 1914 this week.

August 30 saw the conclusion of the Battle of Tannenberg, the destruction of Russia’s second army at the hands of the German eight army, commanded by the famous generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Russian losses were staggering and exceeded German losses by a factor of more thatn 10. The Russian commander Samsonow wouldn’t face the disaster and committed suicide on this day. The Germans found his body, which was returned to his widow a few years later.
Around the same time, Austria-Hungary won the Battle of Komarow, though in a far less decisive way - and it was offset by a defeat on the Gnila Lipa, a river now in the Ukraine. Russia took the city of Lemberg, the capital of Galicia, on September 3.

In the west, the French and British armies finally stopped the German advance on the outskirts of Paris, with the massive First Battle of the Marne starting on September 6. The Germans, encouraged by the success of their campaign so far, planned to encircle Paris with their first army and pressed towards the southeast, but that maneuver exposed their right flank to an Allied counterattack.
The French fifth and sixth armies and the British Expeditionary Force attempted to exploit a gap that had formed between the German first army and the second army that had remained further to the north. The French government wasn’t optimistic about the outcome however, and fled to Bordeaux. To illustrate the precariousness of the Allied position, the French sixth army had to be reinforced by driving 6,000 reservists to the front in Paris taxis.

On September 2, Japanese forces landed in China to begin the siege of Germany’s Tsingtao colony.

In late August - early September, German colonial troops repulsed a British attack in northern Cameroon, winning a battle at Garoua.

On September 5, HMS Pathfinder was the first ever ship to be sunk by a self-propelled torpedo fired from a submarine. Submarines sank ships before, and so did self-propelled torpedoes, but the
combination of the two saw its debut that day - to be repeated many times after. The event also carried the message across that there was no safety in the British home waters, because it happened in the Firth of Forth.

A curious and rather successful German enterprise began during this period: the passenger lines Kronprinz Wilhelm had been converted to an auxiliary cruiser, and captured 15 allied ships off the coast of South America during the months that followed. Her typical course of action was to use her superior weapons and speed to compel the enemy ship to stop and board it. If it was of any prospective military value, the crew would be captured and the ship sunk - otherwise, the Germans politely wished them a pleasant journey.

@Herr:

In the west, the French and British armies finally stopped the German advance on the outskirts of Paris, with the massive First Battle of the Marne starting on September 6. The Germans, encouraged by the success of their campaign so far, planned to encircle Paris with their first army and pressed towards the southeast, but that maneuver exposed their right flank to an Allied counterattack.  The French fifth and sixth armies and the British Expeditionary Force attempted to exploit a gap that had formed between the German first army and the second army that had remained further to the north.

Perhaps I’m not recalling the circumstances of the Battle of the Marne correctly, but I was under the impression that it came about because the Germans strayed from their plan to encircle Paris. The right wing of the German Army was originally supposed to pass to the west of Paris as it headed southward, thus enveloping the city.  The German commanders, however, went “off script” and instead swung their entire force around so that it passed east of Paris in an attempt to trap and destroy the French Army; in other words, rather than trying to envelop Paris, they tried to envelop the enemy’s main force.  Unfortunately for the Germans, this exposed their own flank to a potential counter-attack from the west, which (as you described in detail above) is precisely what subsequently happened.

Enveloping Paris from the west as well was indeed a part of the original Schlieffen plan, but that plan hadn’t been quite as successful as the Germans had hoped it would be. Which was not too surprising, because they had committed fewer troops than originally intended by Von Schlieffen, and the reason for that was, that they also needed to fight Russia.
As a result, when the Battle of the Marne started, the front line ran north-south from Ypres in Belgium to a point some 50 to 60 miles north of Paris, and from there, mostly east-to-southeast towards the Franco-German border. Sending an army westward and then south to arrive west of Paris, would have been a high risk operation, exposing that army to counterattacks on both flanks. In the original Schlieffen plan, a much larger area to the north would have been overrun, and the encirclement of Paris would have involved forces arriving from that direction.

So while I agree that the German High Command probably planned and hoped to win the war that way when it started, I’m not sure that encircling Paris from the west was still their intent in early September. Accounts of the situation and events and especially of the various plans are not always consistent, and I may have misinterpreted some of them, but it seems that the German idea was to break the French lines east of Paris, and thus separate the French armies in the east of the country from the capital, which would then be captured. The actual encirclement would only have been partial.

Why exactly that plan went wrong, can probably be attributed to various courses. The Germans may have underestimated the strength of the Paris garrison, or may have been misinformed of the whereabouts or even the existence of the French Sixth Army, that had just been formed. This account by Von Kluck, the commander of the first German Army, casts blame on Von Bulow’s Second Army for not protecting the right flank of the advance, and it’s illustrative of the overall difficulty in coordination and communications. Of course, it was written by a man who had to defend himself for the failure of the entire operation. Another factor may have been that troops had recently been transferred to the eastern front, because the Russian threat seemed bigger than it turned out to be - the Germans didn’t know beforehand that they would be as successful as they were at Tannenberg.

Just seen in Twitter: today, the 22nd September 1914 the U9 Sank three Cruisers: HMS Hogue, Aboukir and Cressy. All in about an hour. Remarkable feat.
The commander was Otto Weddigen. He first torpedoed HMS Aboukir, causing heavy flooding. It was evident she would sink. (Took 30 mins.) the British commander, Captain Drummond, ordered his two other Cruisers to pull alongside the foundering ship to aid in rescuing the crew, thinking it had hit a mine!
The rest had been made easy for the German commmander. Next Weddingen fired two torpedoes from 300 metres at HMS Hogue. The Sub had to surface, but was able to avoid destruction by the fast sinking second Cruiser (10 mins).
After firing two torpedoes at the last Cruiser, hitting with one, Weddingen turned his Sub around and fired his last torpedo at HMS Cressy, which took 15 mins to sink.
1459 sailors died, the rest were rescued by (Neutral)Dutch vessels and returned (illegally) to service.
Everyone British who could be, was blamed. From the Admiralty, the Admirals who were not present and who did not “lend” Desrtoyers,  to the commander of all 3 ships, Captain Drummond. Zigzagging at 12-13 knots as prescribed, was not done as the Cruisers could not maintain that speed!
The result was that Armoured Cruisers were never again asked to do the patrol and stopping major ships in dangerous seas was banned.

@wittmann:

Just seen in Twitter: today, the 22nd September 1914 the U9 Sank three Cruisers: HMS Hogue, Aboukir and Cressy. All in about an hour. Remarkable feat.
The commander was Otto Weddigen. He first torpedoed HMS Aboukir, causing heavy flooding. It was evident she would sink. (Took 30 mins.) the British commander, Captain Drummond, ordered his two other Cruisers to pull alongside the foundering ship to aid in rescuing the crew, thinking it had hit a mine!
The rest had been made easy for the German commmander. Next Weddingen fired two torpedoes from 300 metres at HMS Hogue. The Sub had to surface, but was able to avoid destruction by the fast sinking second Cruiser (10 mins).
After firing two torpedoes at the last Cruiser, hitting with one, Weddingen turned his Sub around and fired his last torpedo at HMS Cressy, which took 15 mins to sink.
1459 sailors died, the rest were rescued by (Neutral)Dutch vessels and returned (illegally) to service.
Everyone British who could be, was blamed. From the Admiralty, the Admirals who were not present and who did not “lend” Desrtoyers,   to the commander of all 3 ships, Captain Drummond. Zigzagging at 12-13 knots as prescribed, was not done as the Cruisers could not maintain that speed!
The result was that Armoured Cruisers were never again asked to do the patrol and stopping major ships in dangerous seas was banned.

This U-Boat was a warship killer. She would later sink another RN Cruiser and a Russian Auxiliary Minesweeper. Her merchant GRT was low at 8,600 tons. This U-Boat would survive the war and the actions of September 22, 1914 will never get forgotten.

I thought it remarkable the ship survived.
The commander, Weddigen, didn’t though. He was transferred to another U Boat and that was sunk.

Thanks for an interesting story, Wittmann. I’ve been a bit to busy myself to tell more of the Great War, but I intend to return to this thread soon.

I believe on the Western Front at this time a series of flanking movements from both sides begun which continued until Flanders. This series of local actions has become popularly known as The Race To The Sea.

Have any of you read the account of the SMS Seeadler? Its the most unusual merchant raider of the World Wars.

@ABWorsham:

Have any of you read the account of the SMS Seeadler? Its the most unusual merchant raider of the World Wars.

I’d never heard of her.  I’ve just looked her up.  I thought at first you were talking about the German cruiser of the same name, but then I saw the article on the sailing ship that served as a commerce raider in WWI.  16 merchant ship captures is an impressive record; from what I can recall, it’s an even higher figure than the Graf Spee scored in WWII. Thanks for this interesting bit of naval history.