Modern Euro, Week 3, Tech Developments in Warfare

We jumped into week three with a focus on technological advancements and mechanized warfare in the first period. As we've covered fairly extensively in the first two weeks, technology changed the methods by which war was conducted. You cannot teach or study the First World War and not focus on the drastic shift in how war was waged. European countries were wrapped up in their glory, and warfare was a noble endeavor. The generals of this era had virtually zero practical experience; the last skirmishes or wars, such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, were fought quickly and with the fanfare of the previous generation. The onset of World War I was a New War with Old Generals, as this video points out. The old methods could not compete with the new technologies and science advancements in killing. Tech Developments of World War I, a snippet of a video, begins by saying "Soldiers rode in on horses, and they left in airplanes." The greatest example of this is the cavalry. Between Tradition and Machine Guns details the shift from leading with cavalry first to their usage falling to the side. The cavalry was for charging against an enemy equally equipped and armed on horseback with sabres, and not machine guns.

In the movie War Horse, Steven Spielberg created a scene that illustrated the expectation versus the reality of this new war. (On a side note, there are some girls in my class that adore Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston. I've waited months to use this clip. The fallout was epic when they realized they died in the scene. I've been labeled evil... and I've been excessively amused all day thinking about it.)

The greatest advancements were those made for air warfare. In the early days, most planes were used for scouting and reconnaissance. These planes first dropped steel darts, bricks, and grenades by hand upon their enemies as they flew over. On October 5, 1914, Louis Quenault, a French pilot, opened fire on German aircraft and claimed the first air-to-air kill in history. Zeppelins were also widely used to cross the English Channel and hand drop bombs. In World War One: A Very Peculiar History, page  92 goes into more detail on these instances. As London was bombed by Zeppelins, the book states " Despite the danger, there were no air-raid sirens in London as it was thought they would cause panic!" This becomes a very different story during WWII.

For more information on aircraft and air warfare of World War I,  the videos we viewed in class are:

The Sky was the Limit: Aviation in WWI and The Red Baron: Manfred von Richthofen. 

Bonus material not used in class: Fight for Air Supremacy: Bloody April 1917 and World War I Uncut 8: Combat in the Skies.

The first period ended with a bit of pop culture: Snoopy vs. The Red Baron "Christmas Bells"

Second Period covered Chapter Two of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and The Great War by Joseph Loconte. The emphasis of this chapter was "duty, patriotism, and muscular religion." Page 30 says "Christianity and love of England went hand in hand, but the emphasis was on duty-- duty to king and country-- not on belief." A few pages later, the British applied the value of this war being a "Christian duty," "the belief that their nations were specially chosen by Providence to accomplish his progressive purposes on the world stage. Fidelity to God demanded fidelity to one's country as God's instrument, especially in wartime." (page 36) All facets of society encouraged this train of thought, and British men were shipped off, believing the God was on their side, they would squash those that were enemies, and do so quickly. Every nation involved in the war believed that what they were fighting was a holy war, like from the days of the Crusades, and fully expected to go do their job and be home by Christmas, as we discussed last week.

Arming British men with these beliefs, the men were woefully unprepared for the reality of what they experience on the front lines. Page 31 talks about Tolkien's experiences "...the 'universal weariness' of war and the 'bitter disillusionment' of discovering that his military training had not prepared him for the conditions of actual combat." Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, says in J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography " For signalers such as Tolkien there was a bitter disillusionment, as instead of the neat orderly conditions in which they had been trained they found a tangled confusion of wires, field telephones out of order and covered with mud, and worst of all a prohibition on the use of wires for all but the least important messages... Worst of all were the dead men, for corpses lay in every corner, horribly torn by shells. Those that still stared with dreadful eyes. Beyond the trenches no-man's-land was littered with bloated and decaying bodies. All around was desolation. Grass and corn vanished into a sea of mud. Trees, stripped of leaf and branch, stood as mere mutilated and blackened trunks. Tolkien never forgot what he called the 'animal horror' of trench warfare." (page 91)

Tolkien was one of four main founders of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, an unofficial gathering of young men, who met on a regular basis to talk about life and their writing projects. Of this group, all but one, Christopher Wiseman, perished in the war, deeply affecting Tolkien for the rest of his life. 

For the biggest chunk of time in the class, we viewed The Appendices Part 5: The War of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Legacy of Middle Earth, this is from the third disc in the Return of the King, extended edition. It has some extraneous information, like Tolkien's love of languages and the creation of Quenya and Sindarin, but it goes into detail on how "the nobility of warfare no longer exists," the decisions a person makes to choose despair or to choose hope, and Tolkien's coined term "eucatastrophe," the opposite of catastrophe.

Bonus material for this period is a radio interview with Joseph Loconte and his book, also covering large chunks of the theme of the book, the first couple of chapters, and Tolkien's 'eucatastrophe.' I had initially intended this for use in class, but the clip is 38 minutes long, and not conducive to an enjoyable class experience.

Week four we will be going over the battles of Verdun and the Somme, trench warfare, and chemical warfare.