Find old World War 1 articles here. Find information on uniforms, women, gas warfare, prisoners of war and more.
Although the year 1919 (and spanning throughout much of the Twenties) was a period marked by a strong sense of anti-communism in the United States, the words war profiteer proved to be a term capable of getting a good many people in both camps riled up. This is a fine cartoon by Rollin Kirby that nicely satirizes that low breed of opportunist.
Click here to see how weird the first car radios looked.
War Profiteers (Life Magazine, 1919?) Read More »
Although the origins of chewing gum have been traced to many different parts of the ancient world, no culture has whole-hardheartedly embraced the stuff quite as thoroughly as the Americans. The Yankee bromance with chewing gum has largely been credited to the American industrialist William Wrigley, Jr. (1861 – 1932) for creating, in 1906, a gum that appealed broadly to the American palette – and when Americans went to war in 1917, Wrigley’s chewing gum was in their arsenal.
We added to this page a small column about Dr. Morris Nafash, who was one of the brilliant chemists at the Bazooka Bubble Gum Company.
Click here to read about the A.E.F. love for candy…
Click here to read about all the effort that was made to get cigarettes to the Doughboys.
Supplying Chewing Gum to the A.E.F. (America’s Munitions, 1919) Read More »
Illustrated with six photographs, this 1918 article is one of the first pieces of journalism to document the planning, construction, testing and deployment of the Railway Batteries that were manned by the U.S. Navy in W.W. I France.
They dreamed a dream wherein a squadron of colossal trains, sheltered in armor plate, cruised constantly on dry land behind the battle lines. On each train a hundred bluejackets and their officers lived, ate, slept and worked the giant guns that rested upon mechanically perfect mounts and hurled explosive shells to the limit of their extreme ranges. In short, they dreamed the United States Naval Railway Batteries just as complete to the firing lines a few months later.
Firing from the Rails (Sea Power Magazine, 1918) Read More »
Railway-mounted artillery can be dated to the 19th century, however their shining moment came during World War One, and the most notorious of these was the German manufactured Paris Gun
The well-illustrated article attached herein first appeared a few months prior to the war’s outbreak and concerns the railway gun that the French had on hand at the time: 7.87 inch, 6 inch and 4.7 inch howitzers which were intended for coastal defense. By 1916 both sides in the war would be deploying enormous rail-mounted naval guns, capable of delivering a far larger blow.
Click here to read about the U.S. Navy railroad guns of W.W. I.
Railway Guns (Popular Mechanics, 1914) Read More »
Railway-mounted artillery can be dated to the 19th century, however their shining moment came during World War One, and the most notorious of these was the German manufactured Paris Gun
The well-illustrated article attached herein first appeared a few months prior to the war’s outbreak and concerns the railway gun that the French had on hand at the time: 7.87 inch, 6 inch and 4.7 inch howitzers which were intended for coastal defense. By 1916 both sides in the war would be deploying enormous rail-mounted naval guns, capable of delivering a far larger blow.
Click here to read about the U.S. Navy railroad guns of W.W. I.
Railway Guns (Popular Mechanics, 1914) Read More »
Railway-mounted artillery can be dated to the 19th century, however their shining moment came during World War One, and the most notorious of these was the German manufactured Paris Gun
The well-illustrated article attached herein first appeared a few months prior to the war’s outbreak and concerns the railway gun that the French had on hand at the time: 7.87 inch, 6 inch and 4.7 inch howitzers which were intended for coastal defense. By 1916 both sides in the war would be deploying enormous rail-mounted naval guns, capable of delivering a far larger blow.
Click here to read about the U.S. Navy railroad guns of W.W. I.
Railway Guns (Popular Mechanics, 1914) Read More »
A seven page recollection of the history of the US Navy Railway Artillery Reserve, penned by W.W I naval veteran Bill Cunningham, who served as an officer on one of her five rail-mounted batteries. The unit was lead in collaboration by a hard-charging U.S. Army artillery officer but commanded by Rear Admiral Charles Plunkett (1864 – 1931), a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Cunningham described his first encounter with the admiral, who he first mistook as a member of the YMCA:
I looked up to see a tall stranger approaching. He wore a pair of black, I said black, shoes beneath some badly rolled puttees. He didn’t have on a blouse, but wore an enlisted man’s rubber slicker open down the front, and badly rust-stained around the buckles. His battered campaign hat had no cord of any sort He was strictly the least military object we’d seen in a couple of years, if ever.
Click here to read about the woman who entertained the U.S. troops during the First World War.
With the Sailor Guns in France (The American Legion Magazine, 1940) Read More »
An article written for an American veterans organization one year after the war, the attached piece tells the story of the five American naval batteries that were mounted on specially made rail cars and deployed along the Western Front. The article is two pages long and is filled with interesting facts as to the whereabouts of their assorted deployments and what was expected of the naval crews who worked them.
The U.S. Navy Railway Guns (American Legion Weekly, 1919) Read More »
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT reviewed the third edition to Charles Hamilton Sorely’s (1895 – 1915) collection, Marlborough and Other Poems, with particular attention paid to an addition to that volume called Illustrations in Prose.
Sorely reminisced about his days before the war when he was briefly enrolled as a student at the University of Jena. During the war Sorely served in the Suffolk Regiment and was killed in the battle of Loos during the autumn of 1915.
War Poet Charles Hamilton Sorely Reviewed (Times Literary Supplement, 1916) Read More »
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT reviewed the third edition to Charles Hamilton Sorely’s (1895 – 1915) collection, Marlborough and Other Poems, with particular attention paid to an addition to that volume called Illustrations in Prose.
Sorely reminisced about his days before the war when he was briefly enrolled as a student at the University of Jena. During the war Sorely served in the Suffolk Regiment and was killed in the battle of Loos during the autumn of 1915.
War Poet Charles Hamilton Sorely Reviewed (Times Literary Supplement, 1916) Read More »
