Loyalty and Rebellion During WWI

Below is link to an audio interview with Adam Hochschild. You will need to go to the link via your computer to listen to it.

The Leonard Lopate Show: Loyalty and Rebellion During WWI

Adam Hochschild discusses World War I, which stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage. In To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, he focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper on toilet paper for his fellow inmates. He looks at whether we can ever avoid repeating history.

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 is available at Amazon.com

WWI remains the quintessential war-unequaled in concentrated slaughter, patriotic fervor during the fighting, and bitter disillusion afterward, writes Hochschild. Many opposed it and historians mention this in passing, but Hochschild, winner of an L.A. Times Book Award for Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, has written an original, engrossing account that gives the war's opponents (largely English) prominent place. These mostly admirable activists include some veteran social reformers like the formidable Pankhursts, who led violent prosuffrage demonstrations from 1898 until 1914, and two members of which enthusiastically supported the war while one, Sylvia, opposed it, causing a permanent, bitter split. Sylvia worked with, and was probably the lover of, Keir Hardie, a Scotsman who rose from poverty to found the British Labor party. Except for Bertrand Russell, famous opponents are scarce because most supported the war. Hochschild vividly evokes the jingoism of even such leading men of letters as Kipling, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. By contrast, Hochschild paints equally vivid, painful portraits of now obscure civilians and soldiers who waged a bitter, often heroic, and, Hochschild admits, unsuccessful antiwar struggle

From WIkipedia
Adam Hochschild (born 1942) is an American author and journalist.

BiographyHochschild was born in New York City. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his book Finding the Trapdoor. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was one of the co-founders of Mother Jones.

Hochschild's first book was a memoir, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son (1986), in which he described the difficult relationship he had with his father. His later books include The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey (1990; new edition, 2007), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (1994; new edition, 2003), Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), which collects his personal essays and reportage, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998; new edition, 2006), a history of the conquest and colonization of the Congo by Belgium's King Léopold II. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, published in 2005, is about the antislavery movement in the British Empire. His latest book, concentrating on the opposition to World War One, is To End All Wars (2011).

Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. He was also a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Hochschild's books have been translated into twelve languages.

A frequent lecturer at Harvard's annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference and similar venues, Hochschild lives in San Francisco and teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is married to sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild.

Into the Breach, by Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider

Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I, by Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider
toExcel Press, 2000
285 pages plus appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. 8 pages of photos
Library: 940.315 SC

Description
The story of the 25,000 American women who went overseas during the First World War in a variety of functions to aid the war effort and to save lives--often at the risk of their own. Vividly and entertainingly told, the account offers quotes from letters, diaries, written memoirs, novels, and interviews, all of which evoke the exuberance and the despair that these women experienced in war-torn Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The result is an immensely readable book, a living, breathing slice of Americana.

Although most of these women have vanished completely from memory, the accounts they left of themselves remain to reveal them in all their remarkable diversity. Memoirs, letters, newspaper reports, novels and diaries, from doctors, pilots, photographers,, journalists, interpreters, telephone operators and entertainers tell the story of these neglected veterans of World WAr I.

Table of Contents
Preface
1. The Entrepreneurial War
2. Common Experiences
The Participants
3. To the rescue
-The American community abroad
-Ad hoc organizations
-The American REd Cross
-The American Friends
-College Groups
4. Binding up Wounds
-The Medical Needs
-American Women in Foreign Medical Systems
-American Organizations
-American Medical Women: Who Did What
5. Aid and Comfort
-Canteening
-In Service to Womem - the YWCA
-Books for Sammies
-Trouping for the Troops
6. The Black Record
7. The Hello Girls
The REcorders
8. The Reporters
-Amateurs and Chance Observers
-Journalists on the Western Front
-Reporting the Russian Revolution
9. The Novelists
The Protesters
10. The Women's War Against the War
Conclusion
11. The Front as Frontir
Appendices
1. Numbers of American Women in Europe in war-connected activities (1914-1918)
2. World War I Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
-Fiction and poetry
-Memoirs and biographies
-Organizations
-Reference works
-Women and war
-World War I
Acknowledgments
Index

Op-Ed: Last post for World War One

Digital Journal: Op-Ed: Last post for World War One

Perth - An obituary and an article contrasting the lives of the last three veterans of the First World War, and the lessons we should have learned from their sacrifice.
On July 18, 2009, Britain’s oldest man died, but Henry Allingham was more than that; he was also the oldest man in the world, and the oldest surviving veteran of what was known at the time as The Great War.

Seven days later, Harry Patch died. A Briton like Henry, Harry was also “the last Fighting Tommy”, the last man to go “over the top”, to personally experience the horror of the trenches. Jack Babcock, the last Canadian veteran died last year aged 109; Frank Buckles, the last American veteran, died February 27 this year aged 110. Now, they have all gone; on May 5, Claude Choules died at Perth, Australia, aged 110. He was the last man, the last person alive, to see active service in World War One.

Now, there is only one person left from that era, Florence Green, who was born in 1901, was a member of the Women’s Royal Air Force; she joined in 1918, and worked as a steward in the officers’ mess in an era when it was not considered “sexist” for female military personnel to be employed only in non-combatant roles.

The veterans of the first great conflict of the Twentieth Century, the war to end all wars, were a modest bunch. Only in the last few years before their deaths did they really speak in public. Henry Allingham was arguably the most dignified; Harry Patch, who published his memoirs only in 2007, the most introspective and thoughtful. And, from what we have seen of Claude Choules in video footage released or re-released since his death, he was the most “chirpy”.

Henry Allingham was an engineer by profession; Harry Patch was a plumber; and Claude Choules, who emigrated to Australia, spent forty years in the armed forces. These three radically different men had little in common besides experiencing the horrors of war, and increasingly, especially towards the end, speaking out against it. And it was Claude, the professional sailor, who took the lead.

Like Henry and Harry, Claude was an Englishman by birth; he was born March 3, 1901, and after lying about his age, joined the British Navy in April 1915 aged only 14. He witnessed the surrender of the German Imperial Navy, and in 1926 travelled to Australia on loan, but was never to return, transferring to the Royal Australian Navy with which he served in the Second World War.

After leaving the Navy in 1956, he became a pacifist, refusing to march in the Anzac Day parades. In an interview with Bonnie Malkin published in the London Daily Telegraph, on Armistice Day last year, Adrian Choules said of his father: "He used to say that while he was serving in the war he was trained to hate the enemy, but later he really grew to understand that they were just young blokes who were the same as him", adding "He said wars were planned by old men and fought by young men and they were a stupid waste of time and energy. “

Like Harry Patch, Claude Choules left it until the eleventh hour before writing his memoirs; produced with the help of his daughters, they were published in 2010 as The last of the last : the final survivor of the First World War.

The legacy of these grand old men is a loathing for war and all it stands for, yet since they first took up arms for their country we have seen not only a second and even greater world war, one in which the atomic bomb was used, but hundreds of regional conflicts which persist to this day. And, in recent years, from the 1970s especially, we have witnessed a new phenomenon: the war by proxy of international terrorism. Terror is of course nothing new; the Fenian Brotherhood, the forerunner of the (now defunct) Provisional IRA was founded in America in 1858, and terrorism was not new even then, but it is only really since the late 1960s early 1970s that we have seen innocent civilians including women and children targeted by those who would overthrow the existing order, or even destroy us.

The culmination of this terror was the atrocities of 9/11, which those with sick minds and of a certain perverted ideology saw as a latter day replay of David and Goliath, the valiant warrior striking at the Great Satan on behalf of the oppressed peoples of the world.
Claude Choules died three days after Osama Bin Laden, and lived to twice his age. While we must never forget Bin Laden and the evil that he brought to the world, let us remember above all this grand old man, and those other grand old men Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, and all those who unlike Henry, Harry and Claude, saw the horrors of war, but did not live to tell.

Looking for a home for First World War medals

TheSpec.com: Looking for a home for First World War medals
His name was Private Alfred Pearson. And he was one of more than 60,000 Canadian soldiers killed in the First World War.

Now, 96 years after the Hamilton native’s death — and one year after the passing of the last known surviving Canadian veteran from the war — his name has surfaced on eBay as part of a collection of war memorabilia including a memorial cross and memorial plaque, sometimes called a death penny.

But Dave Thomson, of St. George, is hoping to angle the material back into the hands of Pearson’s family or into a public institution collection because he feels it is the right thing to do.

For the past five years Thomson has been watching online for medals on the auction block, and then trying to alert families that the mementoes are available if they want them. So far he has managed to redirect military memorabilia of more than 500 veterans to families or museums.

He often goes to the media, hoping a story will catch the eye of a relative. In the case of Private Pearson, he knows the following:

• He was apparently unmarried.

• He was the son of Alfred and Mary Ann Pearson, of 568 Catharine St. N., Hamilton.

• He was born on Aug. 28, 1896 and died on Feb. 21, 1915 (“by sniper,” according to one online military source).

• He was with the Canadian Infantry, 2nd Battalion (Eastern Ontario Regiment) and buried at La Chapelle D’Armentières Communal Cemetery in France.

The item on eBay had a bid of $107.50 as of Wednesday afternoon, with May 9 being the final day for bids.

The memorial cross on eBay is a medal given to next of kin of Canadian military personnel killed in active service. The memorial plaque was issued by the British government to families of empire soldiers killed in the First World War. It is sometimes called a Dead Man’s Penny because it looks like a large coin, about the size of a compact disc. The soldier’s name is marked on the plaque.

The seller on eBay is also offering for sale a photo of Pearson and a picture of the gravesite, a cemetery map and other documents.

“I sure would like to see this brought back to Hamilton for local honours,” says Thomson, who searches for the medals as a hobby.

“I would really like to see his valour off the auction block.”

Thomson can be reached at 519-448-1967.

UK: Last combat veteran of first world war dies aged 110

Guardian.co.uk: Last combat veteran of first world war dies aged 110
The old man of the sea had outlived all other known combat veterans of the first world war, served again in the second, and became possibly the oldest published author in the world at the age of 108.

Claude Stanley Choules, former military volunteer who served 41 years in two countries' armed services, later sceptic of war anniversaries, and a swimmer until he reached three figures, had three children, 13 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. He finally died, blind and almost totally deaf, in a nursing home in Perth, Australia. He was 110.

Choules put the secret of his long life down to "breathing" and cod liver oil. On 3 March – his birthday – one of his daughters, Anne Pow, told a journalist: "He doesn't have medication because there is nothing wrong with him."

Born just six weeks after the death of Queen Victoria, in 1901, he saw the first motor car to drive through the village of Wyre Piddle, Worcestershire, witnessed the surrender of the German fleet in 1918 and its scuttling at Scapa Flow the following year, and – having emigrated to Australia in 1926 – laid charges on boats in Fremantle harbour, near Perth, in 1942 amid fears of a Japanese invasion.

Choules, who had dual British and Australian nationality, was nicknamed Chuckles for his personality. He had been determined to create a happy home for his growing family. "My family is the most important thing, " he told The West Australian in a 2009 interview.

Family life had not always been straightforward. At five he was told his mother had died. The truth was more painful. She had left to pursue an acting career.

Choules's son Adrian told the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday he had been overwhelmed with phone calls offering condolences over a man who had become Australia's man and something of a national hero. It was not a time to mourn but to celebrate his father's life and the memories, he said. "He treated his family very, very well, and so they all responded by looking after him very well," Adrian said. "He knew you only get out what you put in, and he was a fine example of that. He was a good family man. He's certainly going to leave a gap in our family."

Choules was renowned for avoiding parades on Anzac Day, the April day when Australians commemorate their military dead. "He always said that the old men make the decisions that send the young men into war," Adrian said.

His daughter, Daphne Edinger, 84, said: "We all loved him. It's going to be sad to think of him not being here any longer but that's the way things go."

The Royal Australian Navy, only two days older than its oldest former member, paid tribute. Captain Brett Wolski, Commanding Officer HMAS Stirling, said: "His career has spanned some of the most significant events in maritime history."

Choules's other daughter, Anne, said: "Dad was always proud of his navy service and considered it his other family. We are grateful for the navy's continued association with the family and their recognition of our father's life."

The last three first world war male veterans living in Britain – Bill Stone, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch – all died in 2009. Florence Green, who was serving as a waitress at RAF Marham, Norfolk, on Armistice Day 1918, is 110. She, however, did not see the front line.

Choules had dropped out of school at 14, was rejected when he applied to join the army as a bugler, and lied about his age to join the navy in 1915. His brothers had fought at Gallipoli before going on to the western front in France, where one, Douglas, was gassed and died a year later; the other, Leslie, won the Military Medal.

By the time Choules saw the German surrender, he was on the battleship HMS Revenge. "There was no sign of fight left in the Germans as they came out of the mist at about 10am," Choules wrote in his autobiography. The German flag was hauled down at sunset. "So ended the most momentous day in the annals of naval warfare," he wrote. "A fleet of ships surrendered without firing a shot." In 1926 he was dispatched to Australia as a naval instructor in the state of Victoria. On the six-week boat trip he met Ethel Wildgoose, whom he married 10 months later. She died 76 years later at the age of 98. "I think it was love at first sight," he wrote in his autobiography. "Certainly on my part anyway." He then settled in Australia and served in the Australian navy.

During the second world war, Choules was the acting torpedo officer at Fremantle and also the chief demolition officer on the western side of Australia.

Early in the war he was flown to Esperance, on Western Australia's southern coast, to identify a mine washed ashore nearby. Eventually it was identified as German and Choules duly disposed of the first mine to wash up on Australian soil during the war.He also had the task of destroying facilities and oil storage tanks in Fremantle harbour, rendering them useless in the advent of a Japanese invasion. He had depth charges placed in ships that had been unable to sail from Fremantle for a safe harbour, with the intent of sinking them should the Japanese invade.

Later he transferred to the naval dockyard police, which allowed him to remain in the service until 1956. In those days, naval ratings had to retire at 50, while police could serve until 55.

Then it was time to go cray fishing. Choules bought a boat and spent 10 years fishing off the Western Australia coast.

In his 80s, encouraged by his children, he took a creative writing course and recorded his memoirs for his family. The memoirs formed the basis of his autobiography, The Last of The Last, which was finally published three decades later in 2009. "I was nobody," he told Australian radio in November 2009. "But I was somebody here." Summing up his life, he said: "I had a pretty poor start, but I had a good finish."

The White War, by Mark Thompson

The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919, by Mark Thompson
Basic Books, 2009
394 pages plus Appendix, Notes, Bibliography and Index. 16 pages of B&W photos
Library: 940.4145 THO

Description
In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire, hoping to seize its "lost" territories of Trieste and Tyrol. The result was one of the most hopeless and senseless wars of modern times. Nearly 700,00 Italians and perhaps half as many Austro-Hungarian troops were killed, with most of those deaths occuring on the bare, stony hills north of Trieste, and in the snows of the Dolomites.

Outsiders who witnessed these battles were awestruck by the incredible difficulty of attacking on such terrain. To maintain discipline in the face of desperation and low morale, the IOtalian chief of general staff restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. Italy was plunged into chaos, and, eventually, fascism. Some would say it has never recovered from the havoc of World War I.

With great skill and pathos, Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front. Not merely a history of the cruelty and destruction of battle, The White War tells the story of the nationalist frenzy that preceded the conflict, the poetry it inspired, the haunting landscapes and political intrigues, and the outsize personalities of the statesmen, generals ad writers who were drawn into the heart of the chaos.

A work of epic scale, The White War does justice to one of the most remarkable untold stories of the First World War.

Table of Contents

Quotes: David Lloyd George

"We all muddled into war." (Lloyd George on 1914)

David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor OM, PC (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was a British Liberal politician and statesman. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the head of a wartime coalition government between the years 1916–22 and was the Leader of the Liberal Party from 1926–31.

During a long tenure of office, mainly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was a key figure in the introduction of many reforms which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. He was the last Liberal to be Prime Minister, as his coalition premiership was supported more by Conservatives than by his own Liberals, and the subsequent split was a key factor in the decline of the Liberal Party as a serious political force. When he eventually became leader of the Liberal Party a decade later he was unable to lead it back to power.

He is best known as the highly energetic Prime Minister (1916–22) who guided the Empire through the First World War to victory over Germany. He was a major player at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that reordered the world after the Great War. Lloyd George was a devout evangelical and an icon of 20th century liberalism as the founder of the welfare state. He is regarded as having made a greater impact on British public life than any other 20th century leader, thanks to his leadership of the war effort, his postwar role in reshaping Europe, and his introduction of the welfare state before the war.

He is so far the only British Prime Minister to have been Welsh and to have spoken English as a second language, with Welsh being his first.

____________
"Causes of War,"
The Military Quotation Book: More than 1,200 of the Best Quotations About War, Leadership, Courage, Victory and Defeat, edited by James Charlton, 2002.