The Great War: 100 Years Ago

In middle August, 2014, despite comments from many people associated with government that the war would be over in months, Lord Kitchener - a war hero and soldier who was appointed to the civilian post of secretary of war, declared that the emergency could last years and require an army of millions of men - a military force undreamed of before that time.  To pull this off the government turned to advertising agencies to replace the normally tone deaf political communications used by the opposing political parties to batter each other in the lead up to elections.  In the process London Opinion, a weekly magazine, choose artist Alfred Ambrose Chew Leete (1882–1933) to create a cover graphic for their 5 September edition.  

Working rapidly Leete decided that the cover should be a "call to action" directed at each reader, leveraging patriotism and the cult of personal responsibility ascendent in British thinking since the Edwardian age to "make the sale" in terms of recruitment for the Army.  Recognizing the popularity of Lord Kitchner and his recognizeable mustache, Leete created the poster to have the secretary of war pointing directly at the reader and making a simple call to action, "your country needs you."

The cover, with minor modifications, soon became a postcard, a poster in several sizes, and was featured in many other magazines, expanding its reach far past the original 300,000 circulation of London Opinion. One amazing result was that while the original cover was a paid advertisement, tens or even hundreds of thousands of further placements were paid for at the expense of the person viewing the artwork.  This poster, along with others, was credited by many new enlistees as the primary reason they enrolled for service in 1914.

A French pilot, after being frustrated that he was often flying within a kilometer of German planes on reconnaissance missions, decided to take a machine gun up with him to take shots at them.  This was the first true air to air engangement.

The third König class battleship, the SMS Markgraf is commissioned into the High Seas Fleet

I first encountered the Killing Time in 1974 when my father, who had received his copy as part of a book club, left it on the floor of our 9th Street soutside house in St. Petersburg, Florida.  I was around six at the time, and was already an avid reader, and I had seen my first submarine with my grandfather earlier that summer when I visted the USS Requin, then moored on a river that ran behind Curtis Hixon Center.  I did not think much of the ship - she was all edges and corners and seemed confusing, but she was also, or so it seemed to me, the essense of a boat with all the pretense eliminated.  I even used those words in a childish diary I kept with a big red pencil.  Of course I also noted that it was a good idea for a designer to create a ship that could not be sunk because it was already under water.  

So it was late August of that year that I picked up the Killing Time and slid my own bookmark into the book in front of the bent page my father used for the same purpose.  The first sense of the book that you get is its apt title.  The book is a brutal account of endless sinkings.  Three or four pages cannot go by before you get to the next account, and most sinkings are similar even if they have different details penciled in - sort of like the plots of a 1980s sitcom.  The submarine as hunter, stalking prey, then it pounces and kills, and the story explains why this is significant.  Or the submarine is the stalked, running from the enemy on the surface or below the waves, and either the submarine escapes, or it dies and a new chapter ends.

So the story of the Killing Time is very much a story of the submarine.  The merchants, the navy, and the rest of the war exist in the book only as settings to tell the story of how submarines fought their war.  

With that limitation I disovered that the book was an excellent and detailed story of the how the Atlantic campaign was fought.  Although it strays to other theatres for short views, it mostly remains with the people of the European U-Boat fleet.  Within that venue though it is often encyclopedic without being pendantic.  The lead up to unrestricted warfare is evenly displayed.  The captians of the submarines are not seem as demons, just sailors.  It condemns some captians for particularly viscious acts, but only as part of laying out an impersonal case on the conduct of the strategic war at sea.  

One testement to the book's quality is that in nearly 40 years I have not replaced it as my must read for understanding the Great War.

Three obsolete British of the 7th Cruiser Squadron, the HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy were sunk by the German submarine U9 piloted by  Otto Weddigen.   

The victory of a submarine against a surface ship was not the first in history, submarines had been used since the American Revolutionary war, but it was a shock to the moral of the British Navy.