Voices from the Past
2 total works
At 11.00 hours on 11 November 1918, the guns fell silent across the battlefields of Europe. After the deadliest conflict the world had ever seen, peace had finally arrived. Since the withdrawal from the Somme and the repulse at Verdun, the Germans knew they could not win the war and had sought a negotiated end to the fighting. This was rejected by the Allies and the fighting continued until, almost two years later, with its economy on the verge of collapse, Germany had no choice but to accept defeat and seek terms for an armistice. The story of the efforts to bring the war to a conclusion, and those final days and hours of the First World War, are told in the words of the politicians, soldiers and newspaper columnists who were there at the time. From the nervous anxiety of the men on the front line counting down the last few, and in some cases still deadly, minutes, through to the wild celebrations around the world on Armistice Day, renowned historian Paul Kendall relives some of the most emotional scenes ever witnessed through the eyes of those men and women that were there, and had lived, to see the end of the First World War.
The purpose of this raid was to attempt to block the submarines at Bruges. These submarines were responsible for sinking a third of all Allied merchant shipping during the First World War and in early 1918 there was a danger that the German submarine campaign could have starved Britain into submission. The book explores the role of the German Flanders Flotilla based at Bruges and the submarines that passed through the canal entrance. Haig's plan to break out from the Ypres Salient and capture Bruges and the German Naval Base was thwarted in the hellish quagmire at Passchendaele during November 1917. The Allied forces were exhausted and were in no fit state to carry out a further campaign to capture these objectives. It therefore fell to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Light infantry to block the entrance at Zeebrugge. The raid was practically a suicide mission with a remote chance of surviving or returning home. With this knowledge the men who took part demonstrated great courage and fortitude under cover of darkness, challenged by the tide and the German gun batteries. This book features biographical tributes to accompany photos of 133 of those men from the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Light Infantry who took part in the raid. They were ordinary men who performed extraordinary, heroic deeds.