5
WTF Facts About
World War I -
The Great War
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When you think about World War I, you probably picture machine gunners, gas masks, pointy little helmets,
Snoopy mercilessly gunning down that
Red Baron pizza guy
... but as is so often the case, it turns out that history class presented us with an extremely narrow, kinda boring viewpoint for one of the world's greatest conflicts. See, the
Great War was also quite possibly the weirdest. That's because ...
#5. Lances Were
Used On
The Same Battlefields As
Machine Guns
Though it's often considered the first modern war, World War I went down while, most of humanity still took the word; "horsepower"; literally. A
WWI battlefield was an odd and terrifying blend of the old and the new. Take
Germany, for example, which had a reputation of being fairly high-tech at the time: Their army launched into the earliest battles of the war led by Uhlans -- horse-mounted shock troops armed with 10-foot steel lances, then followed by the main units armed with machine guns and artillery.
This presumably inspired the Uhlans to ride faster.
Even then, the Brits relied heavily on horses to move artillery and supplies, drafting more than a million of them to slog through the muddy trenches of
Belgium and
France. By the end of the war -- taking all sides into account -- more than 8 million horses had died on the
Western Front alone. But where's their memorial?
#4.
London Was
Bombed By Gargantuan
German Airships
Germany's airships were the only aircraft capable of making it across the
English Channel and far enough up the
Thames to rain hellfire on London, and from
1915 to
1917, that's precisely what they did.
Problem was, though they undoubtedly looked metal as hell, the airships were basically just giant, floating bags of ludicrously flammable gas. While they initially operated at a higher altitude than the Brits could reach, improvements in anti-aircraft artillery soon transformed them into history's biggest fireworks displays. And that's when they were replaced by heavy bombers.
Said heavy bombers looked like this, by the way:
Remember, the airplane was still a fairly new technology, so the first bombers were basically scaled-up biplanes with a big
hole in the floor through which bombardiers dropped bombs. By hand
#3.
French Troops Took Taxis To
The Battlefield
The Germans marched straight into
Belgium and Northern France in August of
1914, opposed by only a small
British force. German troops quickly reached the
Marne River, just 35 miles east of
Paris. German victory seemed imminent. Until
General Joseph Gallieni (the military governor of Paris at the time) managed to strengthen the wavering
Allied front lines by sending in waves of reinforcements.
Via taxi.
That's right:
Gallieni hired 600 of the
City of Light's considerable battalion of cabs, and for the next 24 hours, a steady convoy of taxis carried carloads of French reserve troops to the battlefield the same way your drunk ass gets carried to the
Taco Bell late Friday night.
#2.
The White War Of
The Alps Saw Ice Fortresses And Possibly Weaponized Avalanches
The fighting during this so-called
White War was like nothing you've ever seen in a war movie.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers battled at breathless altitudes in inhuman conditions.
More than 10,
000 soldiers died on a single day, when someone apparently pissed in a
Yeti's cornflakes on Dec. 13,
1916. There's even speculation that the combatants weaponized
Mother Nature, intentionally triggering avalanches above their enemies by launching artillery into the snow.
Letters, journals, and, holy shit, freeze-mummified soldiers are gradually finding their way out of the ice to this day.
#1.
History Class Is Euro-Centric, But World War I
Really Was A
Global Conflict
Doesn't the first W in "WWI" seem like sort of a misnomer?
It's an international conflict in the same sense that the
World Series is an international contest: It should be called the
Great European War instead.
Actually, despite
Western education's tendency to focus on the more
European parts of the conflict, the first declarations of war were by Austria-Hungary against
Serbia, and by Germany against
Russia.
Japan was early to step in as an ally of Russia, sending 23,000 troops and six battleships to capture
the German colony in Tsingtao, China, and later captured German-held islands throughout the
South Pacific.
South Africa invaded
German Southwest Africa.
Meanwhile, German General
Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck fought a guerrilla war in
British East Africa for four years, and couldn't even be assed to surrender until two weeks after the
Armistice, still undefeated at the head of a standing army of locally recruited African troops.
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- published: 25 Mar 2016
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