Even though all of the MEF’s supplies arrived from overseas and from all over the British empire, once in theater those supplies had far less distance to travel. There were those who opposed the use of underage soldiers. Sumida, Jon Tetsuro: Forging the Trident: British Naval and Industrial Logistics, 1914-1918, in: Lynn, Feeding Mars 1993, p. 217. The Ottomans dealt with both distance and, even more significantly, fighting on multiple fronts. With World War I raging in Europe, African soldiers were forced to fight for their colonial masters between 1914 and 1918. British forces landed at Fao in early November 1914 and secured Basra, the primary port, three weeks later. On the roads the requisitioning of draft horses for the army reduced the amount of freight that could be carried. Many wounded were transported by water in hospital barges. 312-314 for the jamming issues. Edward Erickson, for example, offers Ottoman Empire figures of 466,759 disease fatalities during the war compared to 305,085 combat dead and missing. [51] Indeed, Basra’s mid-1918 capacity of 130,000 tons per month was not far short of what the BEF planned to import to France in March 1917 through the wharves it had been assigned at Boulogne. At the outbreak of the war, roughly 45 percent of the world’s merchant ships in excess of one hundred tons carried British Empire flags; they totaled just over ten thousand ships and roughly 20.5 million tons of shipping. 184-185. It is this intermediate level at which much of the true heavy lifting occurs when it comes to logistic issues. The fast-changing battle lines in that conflict left little time for soldiers to dig temporary graves, so the dead for the first time were carried from the front and shipped home even while hostilities continued. These included the storage yard at Montoir with its 14 million square feet of storage on 1,200 acres and other facilities of only slightly less massive scale. They planned for ninety days’ supplies in theater at all times with another thirty continually in transit. Even more importantly, they had the civilian expertise and organizations that used and managed that infrastructure and trade on a daily basis and could be tapped to help the military effort. Helicopters were extensively used by the Americans to transport their troops to and from patrol areas. Finally, even though the rivers were at their summer lows, few ships were grounding because a great deal of work had gone into buoying the channels adequately. Please click on the gallery images to enlarge. Spee’s squadron arrived on the morning of 8 December, midway through the roughly forty-eight hours it normally took to reload the coal for Vice Admiral F.C.D. The area in which the British and Ottoman empires faced off was not blessed with abundant transportation infrastructure. War also removes large segments of a country’s population from productive activity such as manufacturing or farming and puts them in a place where they are inherently unproductive and, furthermore, where they have to be actively and continually supported. [52] Marshall’s inland water transport ran a daily average of nearly 3,700 tons of supplies from this base port to the river head at Mosul, 792 river miles upstream. [28] In fact, Britain controlled closer to 55 percent of the globe’s merchant marine and global trade. They made increasing use of the automobile as the war progressed but the true logistic implications of the automobile and airplane would not be illustrated until the next world war. No one in a decision making position foresaw the rate at which munitions would be used and all the major powers involved suffered supply crises such as shell shortages in 1915.[3]. Erickson, Edward J.: Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War, Westport 2001, Appendix F, Table F-3, p. 240. Once they were transported to Germany, Other ranks prisoners were employed to support Germany’s domestic needs. Find out about listed buildings and other protected sites, and search the National Heritage List for England (NHLE). [13] This was evident in British Empire forces, particularly those from the Indian subcontinent. For examples from Basra’s expansion see Roy, From defeat to victory 2010, p. 46. Canadian troops were feared by the Germans Canadian soldiers resting in a trench This meant a continuous supply of clean clothing and building materials had to be available. Troop trains were a major means of transporting troops to near to the front. The wounded were divided into three categories that could be summed up as 'trivial, treatable and terrible'. Desperate for soldiers, some countries were willing to look the other way, while others, like France, encouraged boys as young as 15 to join. All armies invested enormously in infrastructure development, but French, British and American building included significant port expansion to handle more ships simultaneously. Soldiers married their sweethearts while on leave or before departing for the front. Harwich, Essex, this innovative roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) bridge was erected at the Port of Richborough in 1916 to speed up the supply of war material to the western front. At higher levels of policy and grand strategy, logistic decisions generally revolve around force composition and destination. Though, as late as mid-August, German railway construction was still 125 kilometers short of the new front lines.[20]. © Historic England Archive. Some men formed close relationships with the horses, but they could do little to prevent the appallingly high death rate due to exhaustion, shelling and front-line charges. A horse had to be over three years old, healthy and the right size for the work they were purchased to do - either for riding, for pulling guns or for transport.. The barges were converted from a range of general use barges such as coal or cargo barges. Overall, the Germans, French, British and eventually United States made the most effective use of transportation as all began the war as highly industrialized nation-states with dense transportation infrastructure and global trade routes. The official ration was 2.5 fluid ounces (about 70ml) per man: twice weekly for soldiers who were serving behind the frontlines or resting, daily for those in the trenches. The practice of logistics affects us on a daily basis - when we buy groceries in a supermarket, collect the mail or fill our cars with gasoline for example. Soldiers spent less than 40% of there time in the front line. At Richborough, Kent a new port was built and included the world’s first roll-on roll-off rail ferry; the connecting rail bridge survives at Harwich, and is listed Grade II. It was later moved to Harwich, Listed Grade II. [27] At the end of the voyage, the whole process had to be reversed to unload the cargo. On the eastern front, massive numbers of Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian troops also faced off but the sheer length of the front meant that troop densities never matched those in the west. Once there, stevedores and longshoremen physically moved the goods around in the hold and secured the cargo therein. The Military Hospital was a great centre of interest to local people with its two large red crosses on the front gates. This requires a variety of means of transportation: light railways for artillery ammunition, horse and wagon, sometimes motorized transport and often the backs of fellow soldiers to reach the trenches. US Department of the Army, Historical Division: United States Army in the World War, 1917-1919, Volume 14, Washington, DC 1948, CD-ROM reprint, Center for Military History, 2001, pp. Nonetheless the Ottomans faced four widely separated fronts at most times during their participation in the war, of which three faced serious logistic obstacles. Battle Hospital in Reading treated casualties who had recently been transported back to Britain, while two country houses in Yorkshire, Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall, admitted convalescent soldiers. [32] One GRT is really a measure of volume equal to one hundred cubic feet,[33] so the average British merchant ship in 1918 had a carrying volume of roughly 460,000 cubic feet. This meant that supplies to Mesopotamia or the Caucasus faced long overland routes by pack train which greatly limited the forces that Ottoman commanders could bring to bear.[22]. [4] Food, water and other consumables need to be physically moved from army, corps and divisional areas to the soldiers in the fighting line. Finally, a soldier required at least a couple of liters of potable water over and above that contained in their food, plus water for sanitary purposes such as shaving and a means of efficiently disposing of human waste, ideally in a manner that would not result in its being spread liberally about the countryside by shelling. Ultimately, the difficulties with trying to get supply ships in contact with raiders left German captains obsessed with finding coal sources, whether from neutral countries, raiding allied ports or capturing prizes at sea. First and foremost he needs weapons, ammunition and their regular resupply. ): Maude, Stanley, Syk, Andrew / Army Records Society (Great Britain) (eds. Paice, Edward: World War I, The African Front, New York 2010, pp. First, the affront to their religion would deal a blow to unit morale and cohesion and second, the refusal of the soldiers to eat the meat would leave them short on rations. [14] Furthermore, when the temperature or combined effect of temperature and humidity reaches roughly thirty degrees Celsius, one must break up the working period with considerable periods of rest — say twenty minutes work and forty of rest per hour — which draws out the amount of time it takes to get things done. The biggest change over the past century, however, has occurred in the means by which we move people. Soldiers were protected from shrapnel by their trenches. Find out about services offered by Historic England for funding, planning, education and research, as well as training and skill development. The Mesopotamian Theater is a useful case study because it illustrates many of the difficulties facing the Great Powers when they faced off in areas that, for all intents and purposes, lacked infrastructure. The Great War witnessed mass armies battling with modern, quick-firing weapons systems and using consumables of all kinds - ammunition, food, water, soldiers - at rates that had not been seen before. With the exception of commercial aviation, businessmen and militaries moved goods and people around the globe in 1914 much the same as in 2014. The Middle East (Palestine) battle front lacked continuous rail lines from Istanbul — supplies headed from Istanbul to Haifa had to be trans-shipped (off-loaded from one rail system and re-loaded on a second) at Pozanti and then a second time at Osmaniye before arriving at Haifa. He wrote that for four infantry divisions and one cavalry division he needed “500 tons daily for rations, forage and fuel” with another hundred tons per day for “mails, canteen, ordnance and RE stores” and a variable quantity of ammunition which ranged from ten to 120 tons per day during heavy fighting. Poignant archive pictures show the ambulance trains that transported soldiers wounded in First World War to hospitals across Britain e-mail I love the way the nurses were dressed. [42] Maude noted in early 1917 that September to December were “the best months for operations” with some additional reasonable weather normally expected in February. It’s hard to imagine that Slovenia’s Soča Valley, a land of aquamarine river rapids and dense emerald forests, was once the site of WWI’s Isonzo Front, where 1.7 million soldiers died. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10454/1.1. In Europe, Germany’s political-military decision makers had to prepare for the possibility of a two-front war in both the east and west. Soldiers were also supported by formations using a wide array of field and heavy artillery pieces ranging from the famous French “Soixante-quinze” (75 mm) field piece to the massive Krupp “Big Bertha” 420 mm siege guns used by the Germans. A total of 3,240,948 tons of food was sent from Britain to the soldiers fighting in France and Belgium during the first world war. In order to fight effectively a soldier (indeed an army) requires many things. India had both a tremendous and diverse population and her soldiers shared that diversity. Brave story of the youngest soldier of WW1 - killed at Ypres aged just 14 ... “My dad is in the Army and my grandad was too but I never realised how young the soldiers were in the First World War. The static nature of the Western Front made it less useful than its advocates expected. 1 US quart equals roughly 0.95 liters so 1 quart to 1 liter is used here. Capital ships deployed batteries of main guns ranging from 280 to 380 mm and the 330 guns that comprised the main batteries of the RN’s Grand Fleet dwarfed those available to the BEF. Boulogne’s planned imports were 33,875 tons (roughly 135,500 tons per month using four weeks). International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Graham, Mesopotamian Campaign 1931-1932, p. 17 and 19. The destruction of Spee’s squadron on 8 December left the naval war between the British and Germans largely to the North Sea, the Mediterranean and, ultimately, to submarines, which proved far more dangerous than cruisers without overseas bases from which to replenish coal supply. A horse had to be over three years old, healthy and the right size for the work they were purchased to do - either for riding, for pulling guns or for transport.. The First World War marked the shift from a 19 th century, relatively ''ad hoc'' management of prisoners of war, to the 20 th century’s sophisticated prisoner of war camp systems, with their bureaucratic management, rationalization of the labour use of prisoners, and complex modern logistical and security apparatuses. This took more effort than one might assume at first glance. Stephenson, Backs to the Wall 2011, p. 91 and 162. Five million Britons are under arms, and our Allies must also be supplied with food, munitions and clothing. [39] The British, however, had instituted an active hunt for Spee and realized the importance of their coaling station at Port Stanley. Conserving the Fog Battery Station on Lundy Island. Posts about WW1 Transport written by sommecourt. [34] Ironically, one TEU is roughly the same size as one of the famous “forty and eight” boxcars that saw use on the French railways during the Great War. By the end of the conflict there were five million soldiers dotted around the world, with more than 2.3 million on the western front alone. Sturdee’s (1859-1925) battle cruisers Inflexible and Invincible which had arrived the day before and which significantly outclassed the German warships in terms of speed, armor and fire-power. In theory, men were supposed to spend no more than a week in trench combat before being rested: In practice however, they would often get stuck at the front for weeks on end. Many died, as a result. A century removed from the opening salvoes of the Great War, there is little truly new in terms of means of transportation. [48] Erickson notes that the British pause in the late spring of 1917 was a godsend for the Ottomans and that its impetus was logistic. While they understand that armies cannot fight without supplies, transportation and logistics lack the glamour of operations or tactics. 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