Category Archives: Blog

Battle of Verdun

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As 1914 drew to a close, the Western Front had become a permanent fixture of trenches stretching 400 miles from the English Channel to Switzerland. Stalemate ensued. A year later, the situation was no better. Each side looked for a ‘Big Push’ that would break the opposing line of defence and bring about victory. Rupert Colley summarises one such push – the Battle of Verdun.

‘France will bleed to death’

At the end of 1915, the German commander-in-chief, Erich von Falkenhayn, decided that Germany’s ‘arch enemy’ was not France, but Britain. But to destroy Britain’s will, Germany had first to defeat France. In a ‘Christmas memorandum’ to the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, Falkenhayn proposed an offensive that would compel the French to ‘throw in every man they have. If they do so,’ he continued, ‘the forces of France will bleed to death’. The place to do this, Falkenhayn declared, would be Verdun.

An ancient town, Verdun in northeastern France, was, in 1915, surrounded by a string of sixty interlocked and reinforced forts. On 21 February 1916, the Battle of Verdun began. 1,200 German guns lined over only eight miles pounded the city which, despite intelligence warning of the impending attack, remained poorly defended. Verdun, which held a symbolic tradition among the French, was deemed not so important by the upper echelon of France’s military. Joseph Joffre, the French commander, was slow to respond until the exasperated French prime minister, Aristide Briand, paid a night-time visit. Waking Joffre from his slumber, Briand insisted that he take the situation more seriously: ‘You may not think losing Verdun a defeat – but everyone else will’.

‘They shall not pass’

Galvanised into action, Joffre despatched his top general, Henri-Philippe Pétain (pictured), to organise a stern defence of the city. Pétain managed to protect the only road leading into the city that remained open to the French. Every day, while under continuous fire, 2,000 lorries made a return trip along the 45-mile Voie Sacrée (‘Sacred Way’) bringing in vital supplies and reinforcements to be fed into the furnace that had become Verdun. Serving under Pétain was General Robert Nivelle who famously promised that the Germans on ne passe pas, ‘they shall not pass’, a quote often attributed to Pétain.

But the French were suffering grievous losses. Joffre demanded that his British counterpart, Sir Douglas Haig, open up the new offensive on the Somme, to the south of Verdun, to take the pressure of his beleaguered men. Haig, concerned that the new recruits to the British Army were not yet battle-ready, offered 15 August 1916 as a start date. Joffre responded angrily that the French army would ‘cease to exist’ by then. Haig brought forward the offer to 1 July.

During June 1916, the attack and counterattack at Verdun continued. On the Eastern Front, the Russians attacked the Austrians, who, in turn, appealed to the Germans for help. Falkenhayn responded by calling a temporary halt at Verdun and transferring men east to aid the Austrians.

The Battle of Verdun wound down, then fizzled out entirely. The French, under the stewardship of Generals Pétain and Nivelle regained much of what they had lost. After ten months of fighting, the city had been flattened, and the Germans and French, between them, had lost 260,000 men – one death for every 90 seconds of the battle. Men on all sides were bled to death but ultimately, Falkenhayn’s big push achieved nothing.

Rupert Colley
Taken from the forthcoming World War One In An Hour due 15 March 2012, published by Harper Press.

Frederick Douglass

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The title of Renaissance man would not be inaccurate in describing Frederick Douglass.  Born a slave in about February 1818, Douglass, originally called Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, was raised by his grandmother. Denied even the most basic education, Douglass rose beyond life in bondage to a man of intelligence, principles, and influence.

Douglass’ mother was a slave named Harriet Bailey.  The identity of his father is uncertain, but is believed to be his mother’s owner, Anthony Bailey. Like most slave children, Douglass was taken from his mother at birth and fostered by an older slave woman.  He later said that he saw his mother no more than five times in his life.

At the age of 12, he went to live with a relative of his owner whose wife began teaching Douglass to read.  When her husband learned of it, he demanded his wife desist.  Not only was it illegal to educate a slave, but it was believed that if a slave learned to read, he might become dissatisfied with his lot in life and attempt to rise above it.

But Douglass had already obtained the rudimentary skills of reading and continued to teach himself using the Bible and newspapers.

Slave breaker

In 1833, Douglass was hired out to a poor farmer named Edward Covey.  Covey was known as a slave breaker and 16-year-old Douglass was whipped on a regular basis.  On the verge of breaking, Douglass opted to rebel and fought back.  Covey lost the fight and could have sent Douglass to jail, where he would have been executed without trial.  But Covey wanted no one to know that he had been bested in a fight with a slave.

After three attempts, Douglass escaped in 1838 and married a free African American woman named Anna Murray.  Before long, he became acquainted with abolitionists and earned a reputation as an orator, telling his story of slavery and escape to audiences all over New England, and later in the United Kingdom.  It was while in Britain in 1845 that funds were collected to purchase Douglass’ freedom.

Douglass and the President

With encouragement from fellow abolitionists, such as newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass wrote several narratives about his life as a slave. He also owned and edited five newspapers, including The North Star.  He was known as an orator, a social reformer and a statesman. Living in Washington, DC during the American Civil War, he came to know President Abraham Lincoln and advocated emancipation for slaves and equal pay for black soldiers who had joined the Union army.

After the Civil War, Douglass held several government positions, including US representative to Haiti.  In 1872, he became the first African American to be nominated for the post of US Vice President.

Douglass lost his wife, Anna, in 1882.  He remarried in 1884 to Helen Pitts, a white feminist.  The marriage was met with controversy not only because of their difference in race, but also because Helen was twenty years younger than Douglass.

Douglass died on 20 February 1895 at Cedar Hill, a home that he had purchased in 1877.  He and wife Anna expanded the house from 14 rooms to 21, and purchased surrounding lots to expand the property to 15 acres.  Overlooking the Anacostia River as well as the city of Washington, DC, the house is maintained by the National Park Service.

Kat Smutz
For more, read American Slavery In An Hour
See also Nat Turner – the Slave Who Killed for God

Martin Luther

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Martin Luther was born 10 November 1483 of peasant stock, and lived among the untutored folk of the remote woods and mines around the East German town of Eisleben. His mother and father, Hans and Margaretta Luther, were both devout and prayerful, and yet superstitious and believing in spirits that inhabited the forests, winds and water.

Devils, witches and ill-tempered spirits roamed this world among the church spires and bell towers in towns where Luther learned his psalms and marched in religious processions.  Both parents were very strict with him, and Luther later told about how their whipping of him had drawn his blood as well as making him very fearful of his father.

Caught in a thunderstorm

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Abraham Lincoln – the Legend and Legacy

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In the United States, Abraham Lincoln has become an iconic and idealized figure, held up to every American school child as an example of honesty, intelligence, and morality.  His life is often used as an example of American liberty and freedom, where anyone can climb to the highest achievements, no matter how humble their beginnings.

But how much of Lincoln’s life is fact and how much is legend?  The realities of the life of a hero are often exaggerated in an effort to emphasis the moral of the story.  Often, they are simply misinterpreted with each telling until the subject becomes a bigger-than-life hero.

A defective education

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The Marshall Plan and the Cold War

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The European Recovery Program, commonly known as Marshall Plan, is usually remembered for the economic support provided by the United States for the rehabilitation of European countries ravaged by the Second World War. But the US was motivated by more than just economics and today a far more important role is accredited to the Marshall Plan. By way of example, Andreas Enderlin points to two influential works dealing with the Marshall Plan and its implications for the Cold War. The publications were published in 1995 and 2005, the ten-year gap alone promising two differential points of view on the motives that lay behind the Marshall Plan.

United Europe

Published in 1995, Klaus Schwabe examines traditional view of the Marshall Plan in his work Der Marshall-Plan und Europa. In a speech given in 1947, the then US Secretary of State, George Marshall (pictured), declared that the ‘official goal’ of the Marshall Plan was the unification of Europe. The program met with great approval in the United States. One noteworthy supporter of the idea of a unified Europe was a future Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, but who soon realized, along with others, that the Soviet Union would render a united Europe impossible. So instead the US concentrated on forming a united Western Europe, motivated, to use Schwabe’s words, by a ‘rational utilization of Europe’s economic potential’ and an ‘alternative for Europeans against communist propaganda’.

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Dickens, Debt and the Marshalsea Prison

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Today, 7 February 2012, is Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday and History in an Hour celebrates with the publication of Dickens: History in an Hour. Here, its author, Kaye Jones, writes about the imprisonment for debt of Dickens’ father and the lifelong effect it had on the young Charles.

‘Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea Jail. He will see its narrow yard to the right, and to the left, very little altered, if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among crowding ghosts of so many miserable years.’

You don’t have to delve too far into the works of Charles Dickens to find a reference to the infamous Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison. Dickens possessed an intimate knowledge of the jail that came not though rumour or research but through a deeply personal experience that would profoundly affect his character and his writing.

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The Death of George VI

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Sixty years ago today, on 6 February 1952, Britain’s King George VI died. Sinead Fitzgibbon summarises the life of the reluctant king.

Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George the second son of George V and Queen Mary of Teck, was born on 14 December 1895, exactly 34 years after the death of his grandfather, Prince Albert, consort and husband of Queen Victoria. The elderly queen was delighted that her newest grandson should be named after her late husband.

As a child, the Prince, the Duke of York, known to his family as Bertie, suffered from crippling shyness and developed a debilitating stammer which affected him for a large part of his life.  He also was forced to wear painful leg braces to correct a condition that is commonly known as ‘knock knees’.

Prince in love

After a two-year courtship, during which she twice refused his proposals of marriage, Bertie finally became engaged to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in January 1923. The Duke and Duchess of York would go on to have two daughters, Princess Elizabeth (the future queen) and Princess Margaret. At the news of the birth of Princess Elizabeth on 21 April 1926, the newspapers of the time stated, somewhat mysteriously, stated that the Duchess was obliged to undergo ‘a certain line of treatment’, thought to be a euphemism for a Caesarean section.

The new king

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Eva Braun

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Eva Braun was born this day, 6 February, 100 years ago.

Eva Braun first met Hitler whilst working as an assistant and model to Hitler’s official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman. It was 1929 and she was 17, Hitler 40. At the time Hitler had taken upon himself the responsibility of looking after his 21-year-old niece, Geli Raubal. The exact relationship between uncle and niece has never been properly ascertained except that Hitler was overly-possessive and jealous of the company she kept. On 18 September 1931, Raubal committed suicide by shooting herself with Hitler’s pistol.

Hitler’s relationship with Braun began soon after Raubal’s death and possibly before. Raubal’s jealousy of Braun has been mooted as a possible cause of her suicide.

The Invisible Woman

Germany, as a nation, never knew of Braun’s existence as Hitler went to great lengths to keep her hidden from view. He was, as he often remarked, primarily wedded to the German people and wanted to maintain his popularity amongst German women, whose adoration for Hitler sometimes contained a sexual dimension.

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Kliment Voroshilov – Defender of Leningrad

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During the 900-day siege of Leningrad, the man initially charged with the city’s defence was one of Stalin’s old favourites, Kliment Voroshilov, born this day, 4 February, in 1881. Rupert Colley summarises his efforts.

During the Second World War, the city Leningrad (modern-day St Petersburg) was in the midst of a devastating 900-day blockade that lasted from September 1941 until January 1944. The German army had laid siege to the city, bombarded it and cut off all supplies in its attempt to ‘wipe it off the map’, as Hitler had ordered.

The men in charge of the defence of Leningrad were Andrey Zhdanov and 60-year-old Kliment Voroshilov, one of Stalin’s old favourites. During the Russian Civil War, Voroshilov, working closely with Stalin, had gained a reputation for his fierce defence of Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925).

Utterly reliable 

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Woodrow Wilson

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Born in Virginia to a slave owning Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson became the first Southern US president since Andrew Johnson in 1869.

A world safer for democracy

Elected the twenty-eighth US president in 1911, Wilson, a Democrat, was determined to maintain American neutrality during the First World War. He was re-elected in 1916 on the slogan ‘He kept us out of the war’. But Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, which cost American lives, together with the exposure of the Zimmermann Telegram, forced the president’s hand. Wilson received Congress’ mandate and on 6 April 1917, the US declared war on Germany, a course necessary to make the ‘world safer for democracy’.

On 8 January 1918, in a speech to Congress, Wilson delivered his Fourteen Points, a programme for peace based on the principles of democracy and justice and not on punishment and reparations. Wilson hoped it would encourage the Germany to seek peace. Georges Clemenceau, the new French prime minister, was scathing of Wilson’s Points – ‘Fourteen? The good Lord only had ten’. The establishment of a body to act as an international arbitrator, the League of Nations, was also core to Wilson’s philosophy.

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