The End of World War One

A hundred years ago today at 11:11 am, one of the most destructive wars in the history of the world finally ended. World War One led to the fall of several governments, destroyed large swathes of Europe, and killed millions of people. Not just confined to Europe, battles were fought in the Middle East, the Far East, and Africa.

The signing of the Armistice led to wild celebrations in the victorious countries, and a huge sigh of relief in the defeated ones. German civilians were close to starvation thanks to the Allied blockade, and had long since become sick of the war. Little did they know that less than 30 years later they would be in for worse.

This photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, shows The Black Watch celebrating in their camp. As you can see, they are mired in mud, and the photo itself is battered and faded. I think it makes a fitting image for this post.

As regular readers of my blog know, I've been writing a series of action novels set in the Great War called Trench Raiders. I'll be coming out with book four, Under the Front, in the coming year. It will deal with the tunnelers' war, those brave men on both sides who endured unthinkable conditions to tunnel underneath enemy lines. The heroes of Company E are sent in to help, and poor Crawford, the bravest of the brave, discovers a phobia he didn't know he had.

So take a moment today to think about what our forefathers had to endure in those tough times.

May they never come again.

Military History Photo Friday: Tunnels Under the Western Front

While I'm busy writing the fourth installment of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, I'm also in the research phase for Under The Front, the fourth in my Trench Raiders WWI action series. In this book, the men of Company E won't be going over the top under  hail of machine gun fire or sneaking into No Man's Land in the middle of the night, instead they'll be burrowing under the German trenches.

As the Western Front stagnated and neither side could make any significant headway, new tactics evolved in an attempt to break the deadlock. One of these was digging tunnels under the enemy trench, filling them with explosives, and detonating them.

Digging these tunnels was a grueling job. The Germans and British, who were the main tunnelers, hired miners and made sure only to take the smallest men, often those who were too short to make it into regular service. Age restrictions were relaxed in order to get experienced miners. The men had to work in cramped, dark conditions, digging by hand through thick clayey soil. They had to work silently too, because the enemy would be listening. If a tunnel was detected, the opposing side would try to dig a counter-tunnel and break through. Then there would be a hellish underground fight in the near darkness.

A mine going off during the Battle of the Somme

Some of the most extensive tunnels were dug in preparation for the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. This will be the setting for Under the Front, as I continue my habit of having the book written on the centenary of the events they cover.

This tactic met with varying degrees of success. Like with everything else the generals tried, it didn't prove to be a game changer, and the war dragged on for years before Germany was finally too exhausted to continue.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Even after a century of erosion, some of the craters made by mines at the Somme are still huge. For scale, note the people on the right edge.

Military History Photo Friday: WWI German Trench in Cameroon

While the iconic image of World War One is the trench, the trenches we usually see were on the Western Front, that jagged line from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The bulk of the fighting and dying for Britain, France, and Germany was done there, and those years have been seared into the national memory. My own Trench Raiders series takes place on the Western Front. There were other fronts, however, including those in the Alps, Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Near East, and Africa.

This shot shows a German trench in Cameroon sometime between 1914 and 1916. The Germans had a number of colonies in Africa and their colonial forces fought the colonial forces of Belgium, France, and Britain. The majority of soldiers were local recruits fighting in colonial regiments. Civilians, too paid the price.

In a fascinating article on the BBC about the East Africa Campaign, the author tells how more than one million died just in that one region of the continent. No one is clear just how many died in Africa as a whole since the colonial rulers didn't bother counting.


Photo courtesy Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) - Koloniales Bildarchiv, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main.

Old West Photo Friday: Cowboy Riding Jackalope

Here's an old postcard showing a cowboy riding the fabled Jackalope. While most Jackalopes are rabbit sized, sometimes they get big enough for cowboys to saddle them up and hop around the plains. A Jackalope, of course, is a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.

You can read about Jackalopes and a lot of other weird stuff in my new booklet out by Charles River Editors, The Weird Wild West: Tall Tales and Legends about the Frontier. There was a free giveaway on Amazon for the past couple of days, but since I was traveling up to Oxford I didn't get a chance to tell all of you. Sorry about that! I think a lot of people will be reaidng about Jackalopes this week because it made it to #271 on Amazon!

Charles River has come out with a second booklet of mine on The Trench Warfare of World War I. It got up to #338 on Amazon during the free giveaway. Sadly, that's also over. I should really get a Smartphone and start obsessively checking the Internet like everyone else. On second thought, I think I'll stay in the real world. That's where the Jackalopes live!


Photo courtesy Jackalope postcards, which has an amazing collection online. Seeing is believing!

Happy Holidays! Have A Free Ebook

I'm headed to Tangier on Friday for a couple of weeks so this blog will probably go quiet until the new year. In the meantime, enjoy a Christmas story on me. I just published Christmas Truce, a novella in my Trench Raiders series of WWI books. It looks at how the men of Company E react during the real-life Christmas Truce of 1914, when British and German soldiers skipped the war for a day and met as friends in No Man's Land. The blurb is below.

Christmas 1914: In the cold, muddy trenches of the Western Front, there is a strange silence.
As a crack English trench raiding team enjoy their first day of peace in months, they call out holiday greetings to the men on the German line. Soon both sides are fraternizing in No Man’s Land.
But when the English recognize some enemy raiders who only a few days before launched a deadly attack on their position, can they keep the peace through the Christmas Truce?

You can get it as a free ebook on Smashwords or, if you have a spare $2.99 you not doing anything with, you can buy it on Amazon.

Military History Photo Friday: The Cleanest Soldier in the World

During World War One, lots of companies jumped on the patriotic bandwagon to market their products. Here's a typical ad.

So was the British soldier the "cleanest fighter in the world"? I doubt he felt that way, what with all the rats, lice, mud, and rotting bodies. But hey, they were no dirtier than any other soldier in the war!

Today the second in my Trench Raiders series of WWI action novels, Digging In, went live. It's available for $2.99 from Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and all other major ebook outlets. Coming soon will be a related novella about the famous Christmas Truce.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Military History Photo Friday: Digging Trenches in World War One

This photo shows British troops digging a trench while protected by rudimentary gas masks. I have no information about this picture but some of the details give us clues as to where and when this was taken.

First off, the soldiers are wearing service caps and not steel helmets. At the beginning of the war in 1914, no army issued steel helmets to their troops. The British wouldn't get their trademark Brodie helmets until 1916.

The Germans didn't use gas to any significant degree until 1915, catching the Allies entirely off guard. The men scrambled to make some sort of protection. The first things used were bandannas soaked in various substances and tied around the nose and mouth. Other troops fashioned their own masks or used whatever was available. The fellow in the center seems to be wearing a surgical mask! Because of the primitive gas protection, I'm thinking this was taken in early 1915, probably still in winter considering that the men are wearing sweaters even while digging.

I also think this was taken in a support area or maybe during a drill well behind the lines. No weapons are visible and the photographer is standing atop the parapet, something you wouldn't do in battle!

Digging trenches was hard work, as I make clear in a couple of scenes in my latest WWI action novel, Digging In.