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The Great War: 100 Years Ago


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Battle of Zanzibar

September 20th, 2014

The Battle of Zanzibar was a minor skirmish between the British Navy and the German Navy in Zanzibar harbor.  The German patrol unit for its colonial possessions in that part of Africa in 1914 was the SMS Königsberg, a fast, well armed light cruiser captained by Commander Max Loof.  He was normally aware that  the British African squadron was stronger than he was, but in middle September intelligence reached him that only a single light cruiser was currently on station, and that cruiser was in port.  Loof decided to attack the same day the intelligence was recieved, but it was the 20th before he arrived at Zanzibar.  

The British, in preparing for the war with the German High Seas Fleet, had not stationed modern light cruisers to the colonies as was the normal practice.  Instead the protected cruiser HMS Pegasus, a 17-year old member of the Pelourus class, was on station.   Caught without steam on its boilers and in peace-time mode, the Königsberg was able to set the distance of action, allowing its longer range guns to easily outrange the weapons on the Pegasus.  The battle ended in the sinking of the British ship.

The victory was hollow for the Germans, who lacked the logistic ability to maintain Königsberg in fighting condition.  She would be blockaded in harbor and eventually destroyed by simple river monitors.


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Siegfried Sassoon: A War Poet

September 15th, 2014

Siegfried Sassoon was the scion of a wealthy British family who had a formal education at  Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge where he read history.  He was somewhat of a dilletente but was also a brilliant writer, publishing the well-recieved The Daffodil Murderer in 1913.

Just prior to the onset of the Great War Sassoon enlisted in the  Sussex Yeomanry and although not required to serve outside of the country volunteered to enter one of the battalions being prepared for overseas deployment.  Although delayed by injury from deployment, he was fit in time to be commissioned into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in mid-1915, allowing him to deploy to the front with that unit's 1st Battalion.  

At war Sassoon proved to be a competent and brave officer, and was well known for his almost suicidal actions at the front.  During this time he became friends with another poet soldier, Robert Graves, and turned his poetry to trying to describe the conditions which he found at the front.

Sassoon would exemplify a generation of British gentlemen scholars, which included J.R.R Tolkien, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Ralph Hale Mottram, and others who had grown up in rural Great Britian and had the money and liesure to pursue liberal studies.  His poems were modernistic, in that they focused on the effects of war and not the grand sweep of history that would have been the lot of a romantic era.  Like many of the mentioned authors he poems could be quite biting in their attempt to find meaning in the bloodshed they experienced.


 

Dreamers

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

 



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The Conundrum and French Pistol and Rifle Cartridges

September 12th, 2014

Link: http://www.virdea.net/french/fprc.html

In the past several years more than one new comer to the history of French rifles has pointed out to me an interesting fact: from the 1870s to the 1940s the official French  sidearm always fired the same calibre bullet as the main service rifle.  Many historians, inexperiences with the technology of small arms, often assume interchangeability, which is of course impossible, but the similarities of bullet diameter was no accident on the part of the French.

The French adopted the 1873 Chamelot-Delvigne Revolver firing the 11 mm Mle 1873 (11x17mmR) at a time when the French Chassepot rifle was likewise in service, chambered for an 11mm paper wrapped bullet.  Shortly after the French adopted the 8x50Rmm rifle round, it adopted the MAS Mle 1892 revolver chambered for the French Ordnance 8x27mm round.  This appears to work with the 7.65×20mm Longue, adopted in 1935 after the 7.5x54mm round was put into service as the main service round.  So three different combinations of weapons shared the same calibre of bullet for nearly 70 years, only broken by the adoption of the 9x19mm pistol bullet after World War Two.

For the 11x17mm and 8x27mm pistol rounds, the rounds were indeed chosen to be the same calibre as the main rifles being issued at the time.  This of course was not so that the weapons could share ammunition, this would be impossible, but because one very expensive piece of manufacturing equipment can be shared.

To drill a barrel, a blank, solid tube of metal is fitted onto a drill.  Unlike what is normally imagined, this drill does not spin a drill but.  Instead the barrel itself is spun allowing a straight whole to be drilled.  The drill bit itself is hollow, and oil is shot through the middle to lubricate the process.  After the barrel is drilled through it is put on a second machine called a reamer, which smoothes the barrel cut and makes it ready for rifling.  Finally the barrel is taken to a third drill, called a rifling drill, which cuts the rifling into the barrel. Barrel drilling is one of the most complex and expensive tasks on a rifle. 

In the case of the drill and the reamer the same bits can be used as long as the intended barrel is the same diameter, meaning that the 11mm rifle and pistol barrel cutters could use the same hardware, and the same for the 8mm pistil and rifle barrel cutters.  For the rifling cutter the same bits can sometimes be used but with a different "twist" setting. 

The cost savings that were realized by the French by a simple trick such as this was huge, spread out over millions of rifles and pistols.  By 1935, when the French adopted the 7.65 Longue pistol round (originally invented by the Americans to convert the 1903 Springfield to something like a sub machine gun) which may have had the same advantages, it allowed the same barrel making machines to be used for both pistols and the new MAS 1936 rifle series, but there is no evidence this happened.


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Australian forces occupy German New Guinea.

September 11th, 2014

With the High Seas Fleet bottled up in harbor, the German pacific possessions proved impossible to realistically hold.  September 11th saw forces of the Australian Army taking German New Guninea in a nearly bloddless change of administration that would be repeated several times in the comong months as other possessions fell to the allies.


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The Battle of Heligoland Bight

August 28th, 2014

The Battle of Heligoland Bight was a minor skirmish in the north Atlantic near the German coast.  The UK Navy was able to ambush a German cruiser patrol of 6 light cruisers, 19 torpedo boats, and 12 minesweepers under the command of Franz Hipper with a force of Battlecruisers under David Beatty.  The result was a German defeat with  three light cruisers, SMS MainzCöln and Ariadne and the destroyer V-187, sunk.  

The Kaiser, furious at the loss, ordered the High Seas Fleet to avoid action hence forth, limited their usefulness to a fleet in being.