Last casualties November 11th 1918?

[greatspywar]

Yes, Persico's book is interesting - but very American of course. Ciphers and numbers are always difficult. Persico also believes that the true number of casualties, whether fatal or not, for this last day of fighting was voluntarily underestimated, or better, downsized by some US divisions.

[Martin Bennitt]

On 11/4/2017 at 21:45, greatspywar said:

I should move.... No way I can watch 'Yesterday' when not being in the UK. 

 

It was on the RMC Découverte channel on French television last week (Tuesday, IIRC), though unfortunately dubbed, so you might be able to catch it somewhere. As every year, the French channels are showing a whole series of programmes on the Great War in the run-up to November 11, some of them taken off the BBC. Tonight on RMC Découverte there's a programme on the Butte de Vauquois while Verdun features on Arte.

 

Cheers Martin B

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Dai Bach y Sowldiwr said:

 

Yes. But most of these were not Western Front casualties of that day. 267 died in the UK of which 22 were German.

There were deaths in Iraq, Iran, Russia, India, and other countries.

You need to filter for France  (285 incl. 10 German) & Belgium (42, incl. 13 German)

 Apologies. I thought it was obvious that the filters are an option. My error for making that assumption.

 

The OP didn't specify dying on the Western Front (?). Men obviously died on Armistice day (and for many days and weeks after) in UK hospitals and hospitals in France and Belgium...so I think it will be difficult to separate the last two from men who simply died on the front line on Armistice day. 

 

What might be more interesting is to find men who served from the very start but died in the last days... having transcribed a few 1914 Star rolls it is quite tragic to see how some of the first cohorts nearly made it all the way. There is a thread that attempts to quantify the proportion of an infantry battalion who managed to get through the war unscathed whcih might be of interest to the OP. 

 

16817 Pte W fisher 2nd Bn Grenadier Guards disembarked on 13th Aug 1914 and was KIA on 6th Nov 1918 must be one of the unluckiest men of the war.... he lasted 1,546 days. 

 

It is extremely rare to see men like this less than one in a thousand. in most 1914 Star medal rolls I have worked on the fatalities stop in early 1917; the inference being that wastage through death, wounds, sickness transfers etc was close to 100% and so few men were still serving in the same battalions who had originally disembarked in Aug 1914. 

 

 

Edited 7 November , 2017 by Guest

[Dai Bach y Sowldiwr]

1 hour ago, QGE said:

The OP didn't specify dying on the Western Front (?).

 

No, I appreciate he didn't.

 

I just wanted to make sure that we all are comparing apples with apples and pears with pears.

The Armistice Day deaths of British (excluding Empire) troops on the Western Front, commemorated by the CWGC is 266 (France 238, Belgium 38), including 11 officers.

Bearing in mind that this number must have included those men dying of wounds that day from injuries sustained on previous days, the number must therefore be less than 266.

 

[greatspywar]

1 hour ago, QGE said:

What might be more interesting is to find men who served from the very start but died in the last days...

 

Yes, indeed, very unlucky men.Emiel De Naeyer, born in 1886, volunteered in 1914. He became 1st Sergeant-Major and was killed on 11 November 1918. Of course, the Belgian army was relatively spared from major offensives in 1915, 1916 and 1917.  

[phil andrade]

It's an excruciating thing to countenance, isn't it, those poor blighters dying in the last moments, especially if they'd served in the front line for a long time ?

 

You have to wonder as to how many  men simply refused to take the risks of " copping it " as they knew hostilities were about to end.

 

And who was going to blame them ?

 

Bernard Freyberg was most definitely not one such, if what I've read about his - literally - last minute exploits are true.

 

Is there any anecdotal stuff about how French commanders conducted their duties in these closing moments ?

 

I was wondering about Mangin, the Great War's equivalent of Patton .

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

Even worse there are hundreds of men who survived the War but were victims of the Spanish Influenze that ripped through Europe in the immediate aftermath. 

 

Separately I am aware of one Officer who spent three years as a POW under the Turks and died on his voyage home. Simply excruciating for his family. Untold misery and emotional agony. 

 

While identifying those who randomly managed to die on Armistice Day is a small curiosity, some may have only served a short time. I am not sure it will capture the essence of the tragedy of the Great War; the long relentless slog of attritional,warfare punctuated by days of extreme violence.

 

i recently did some analysis on the Grenadier Guards, a regiment that saw some pretty horrific days. One of its battalions was more or less annihilated in March 1918... When trying to understand the distribution of death, I was utterly shocked to discover that half of all casualties occurred on just a few dates. The concentration of the 'rendezvous with death' was extreme. I can't recall the exact figures but an extremely  large proportion of the men died in just a few very violent episodes. It is something that rarely comes out in unit histories; the skewness in the experience of war. Cross checking with other units revealed similar trends; some even more extreme. One begins to then understand why certain dates and battles are etched into the minds of the survivors and what some of those battle honours actually mean and the sacrifices they represent. 

[phil andrade]

Persico is adamant that the loss of life on the Western Front on the last day was greater than the daily average throughout the war.

 

Much as I like his book, I think we must refute that assertion.

 

A day in which fewer than one thousand Franco British soldiers perished cannot be considered as a worse than average day in a conflict that took two million French and British lives in fifteen hundred or so days of fighting in France and Belgium.....we could qualify that by mentioning that we're talking about combat that ceased in the morning ; but that would be a futile quibble !

 

Martin,

 

Your observation about the focusing of fatalites on those notorious bad days intrigues me.

 

What I notice about the Great War in France and Flanders is the relentlessness and ubiquity of the killing.  In this regard, the preeminence of those bad days is reduced in general terms, although it clearly applies to individual cohorts.

 

To illustrate my point, if we look at the experience of the British army in the Crimean War, one day of battle at Inkerman accounted for more than one fifth of all British combat fatalites throughout that conflict .

 

Things changed a decade later, when, in the American Civil War, the ten worst days in aggregate accounted for about one quarter of all those killed in action.

 

And I would expand on this theme, and suggest that the ten worst days of the BEF in France and Flanders, in aggregate, did not take much more than one tenth of all British Empire lives lost on the Western Front throughout the war. I might try and check that on the CWGC site.

 

The change from spasmodic slaughter to relentless killing is apparent in that development.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

[greatspywar]

Hello Phil and Martin

 

Interesting discussion! For the Belgian Army it is true that most fatalities are in the offensive periods or during mobile warfare. As a general rule we use the 3/3: 1/3 of the casualties is during the 1914 campaign (a.o. Liège, Battle of the Yser) and is only a period of three months, 1/3 is during the trench warfare warfare from November 1914 util nearly the end of September 1918. The remaining 1/3rd of the casualties is during the Liberation Offensive (Army Group Flanders and the Spanish Flu of course), between September 28th 1918 and "11/11/1918". As for the final date, I'll have to check. I can cite some ciphers, but I haven't got the book with me. I'll check tonight.

 

Other battles such as Steenstraete (April 1915 - first gass attack), the Battle of Merckem (April 1918) which lasted only for a day, you can clearly see a higher number of fatalities. Being killed during trench warfare is just bad luck, at least in the Belgian army. More research to this will be conducted in the next couple of years, as my Phd focusses on the Belgian army, its fatalities and the Trench of Death.

 

Jan

[phil andrade]

Jan,

 

Your contribution would be deeply appreciated, by me at least, since I've often wondered how much fighting was done by Belgian soldiers in the period between the two great convulsions  of the autumn of 1914 and that of the autumn of 1918.

 

Those two days you mention in April 1915 and April 1918 would be especially interesting in respect of Belgian losses.

 

Phil

 

 

[greatspywar]

Phil,

 

The research carried out my major Tom Simoens might be of interest as well. He has studied the Belgian 1st Army Division throughout the war. His research was focused on the changes that this division went through. Hi conclusion is a.o. that the division completely changed during the war, and that the soldiers completely changed during the war. While in 1914 an infantry soldier was just there to follow orders and to shoot, by the end of the war all soldiers had special competences or specialities. 

 

His book is only in Dutch (as far as I know), but he has written two small pieces for the International Encyclopedia of the First World War:

 

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/belgian_soldiers

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/warfare_1914-1918_belgium

[wrightdw]

One of the largest battles fought by British, Canadian and US troops in Russia 1918-20 was the defence of the village of Tulgas on 11 November 1918, a number of British, Canadian and US troops died during the battle.

 

The men did not learn of the Armistice until the following day.

 

[Matlock1418]

On 07/11/2017 at 09:51, phil andrade said:

Joseph E. Persico estimates 10,944 casualties on the Western Front on 11 November 1918, of whom 2,738 lost their lives, and states that this is a conservative estimate.

On 07/11/2017 at 13:19, phil andrade said:

Persico's figure smacks of extrapolation and conjecture : it seems that he's applied an arbitrary ratio of 25% of all casualties being fatal..hence the 10,944 producing 2,738 deaths.

Not challenging your posts but interested in your Persico source(s).

Would be interested to know please - Which source(s) are you quoting from?

M