This edited article about World War One originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 230 published on 11 June 1966.

When the stricken Germans boarded the ship fierce hand-to-hand fighting on the forecastle of the Broke

The night of April 20, 1917, was dark and menacing. The sea in the Straits of Dover was calm under a cloudy sky. It would be easy for German sea raiders to sneak up to the English coast.

As the darkness thickened, and heavy clouds obscured the moon, two British destroyers, the Broke and the Swift, began their dangerous night patrol. Their job was a vital one, and they were both equipped with powerful guns and twenty-one-inch torpedo tubes.

The Broke was under Commander “Teddy” Evans. She had originally been built for the Chilean Navy, and had the moderate speed of twenty-nine knots. She was requisitioned by the British Government to help combat the German Navy, and had already tasted battle and been badly damaged at Jutland.

If there was any trouble, Commander Evans knew he could rely on his crew to fight until their ship sank under them. The Broke was eight knots slower than her companion ship, but her bows and flanks were stronger, and if necessary she could take an enormous amount of punishment.

The first indication that six German destroyers had by-passed the patrol, and sailed to within three miles of Dover, came when a series of vivid gun flashes lit up the sombre night sky. The two British destroyers immediately changed course towards the attackers.

The Swift attacked the enemy raiders, her guns blazing and torpedoes striking home. The German destroyers were so concerned with trying to escape from the Swift, that they did not notice the slower British ship steaming into their midst.

With her first torpedo, the Broke sank one of the enemy. And then Commander Evans gave the order which was to win him a permanent place in history. He decided not to open fire with his guns, nor to use any more torpedoes. He would simply ram the nearest destroyer, the G.42!

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This edited article about World War One originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 229 published on 4 June 1966.

Britain’s strangest naval action of the First World War was fought seven hundred miles from the sea and 2,500 ft. above sea-level – on the choppy crocodile-infested waters of Lake Tanganyika. To fight it, two motor boats had to be shipped from London to Cape Town and then transported through bush, jungle swamp and river, by rail, steam tractor and barge – a Herculean trek of over three thousand miles.

The overland journey took nearly four months, but at the end of it, in a few short sharp encounters, the British Tanganyika Expedition – the smallest and most far-ranging of its kind of the whole war – pulverized a superior German “fleet” and cleared Central Africa of an enemy menace without a single casualty.

Since the start of the war, the Germans had dominated the four hundred mile long lake that separated German East Africa from the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia. Their pocket squadron, the 1,500-ton Graf von Gotson (two 4-inch guns), the sixty-ton Hedwig von Wissmann, and the Kingani (both armed with quick-firing cannon) and a few smaller craft had patrolled these waters unchallenged, playing havoc with the Allies’ African war effort.

In Whitehall, the War Office had grown increasingly infuriated with this state of affairs, and early in 1915 asked the Navy to do something about it.

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This edited article about World War One originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 228 published on 28 May 1966.

Colonel Meinertzhagen dropped his haversack in full sight of the enemy by Graham Coton

A Haversack dropped in the desert sand by a decoy horseman, full of documents meticulously faked to mislead the enemy – it seemed pure story-book stuff, as far removed from real war as an episode in a boys’ adventure yarn.

Would the wily Turks be taken in by it? Or would they see it as a clumsy piece of bluff, sponsored by the stupid Britishers?

General Allenby’s Intelligence officers at G.H.Q., Palestine, asked themselves this in October, 1917, the third year of the first World War, as they put the finishing touches to the Baited Haversack.

They need not have worried. The Turks fell for the deception hook, line and sinker. And in doing so they opened the way for a great British victory that ended in Allenby’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem in the December of that year.

In July, 1917, Allenby’s problem, as he faced the Turks across thirty miles of Palestine front, was how to turn the Turkish flank and drive them out of well-nigh impregnable Gaza. Without taking or side-stepping Gaza, a powerful coastal fortress, he could never advance towards Jerusalem. So, direct assault being virtually impossible, he decided to concentrate on the other end of the front, thirty miles inland, and outflank Gaza.

Here, opposite his own waterless right flank, lay well-watered, Turkish-held Beersheba, whose wells, when captured, could supply him as he moved west to attack hostile Sheria and Hereira, in the direction of Gaza.

But to take Beersheba, surprise was essential. The Turks must still think Gaza was the main objective.

It was to create this surprise that Allenby’s Intelligence men hatched up the hoax of the Baited Haversack.

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This edited article about World War One originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 219 published on 26 March 1966.

British artillery firing a heavy howitzer in France, World War I, which had a much shorter range than ‘Big Bertha’

At 7.20 on the morning of Saturday, March 23, 1918, the paving stones outside No. 6 Quai de Seine, Paris, erupted with a loud bang. It was the last winter of the first World War, and people dived for cover, thinking the explosion was the beginning of a German air raid. But there had been no alert, and not a single aircraft could be seen in the clear blue sky.

During the next eight hours there were twenty-three more explosions in different parts of Paris, but no signs of German bombers. The military authorities, making a careful examination of the craters, found a number of steel splinters and pieces of grooved copper ring, which they identified as the remains of artillery shells. Yet Paris was sixty-seven miles from the German front-line – three times the range of any gun known to the Allies.

Within a few days the mystery was solved by the French secret service. The Germans had developed a super-gun which was shelling Paris from a place behind the German lines called Laon.

The super-gun had an enormously long barrel and fired a 9.1 in. shell weighing 228 pounds. The shell left the barrel at a speed of one mile a second and travelled upwards in a great curve to a height of twenty-one miles. After that gravity brought it sweeping down on a curving path until it hit its target at a speed of 3,000 feet per second, 176 seconds after it had been fired.

Germany’s long-range gun was called Big Bertha after Bertha Krupp, head of the armament firm of that name, which had manufactured the gun. Altogether, the Germans built half-a-dozen Big Berthas.

This edited article about World War One originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 209 published on 15 January 1966.

‘Big Willie’ brought a crucial victory at the Battle of Cambrai in WW1 by Stanley L Wood

The big “landship” bumped and rumbled its way over the closely guarded golf course, and its driver muttered irritably to himself as he worked the large, heavy levers.

Seated next to him on the cramped driving seat was yet another important visitor who had come to see how the new invention was progressing. It was difficult enough just to be steering the landship, thought the driver, without having some unknown bigwig breathing down your neck!

The two men were jammed close together, and as the trial proceeded the visitor became more and more engrossed in the operation. He moved even nearer to the driver to see how the gears were used.

At this, the mechanic really lost his temper.

“Hey you, do you want all the room?” he cried. “Shove up there.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said King George V, moving back to his proper place. “I didn’t mean to crowd you.”

Later the King recalled with amusement that day in 1916 when one of his loyal subjects told him to “shove up.” But at the time the driver – who had no idea of the identity of his latest guest – was justified in his rebuke.

For weeks “Big Willie,” as the landship was called, had been undergoing a series of secret trials on a golf course at Hatfield, in Hertfordshire. It was hoped that it would be the answer to the German weapon of poison gas, which was used against the Allied troops with horrifying effect during the first World War.

After the first devastatingly rapid advance by the German troops in Belgium and Northern France, the fighting developed into a stalemate. The military leaders on both sides cried out for a new weapon that would bring them total victory, and at home the scientists racked their brains to meet this need.

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This edited article about the Red Baron originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 197 published on 23 October 1965.

Dogfight with the Red Baron in his Fokker Dr.1 by Wilf Hardy

The morning of Sunday, September 16, 1916 – in the middle of the first World War – British aircraft droned deep into the German lines to bomb Marcoing railway station. The great German ace, Oswald Boelcke, leading his newly-formed Albatros squadron into a climb before attacking, counted fourteen bombers and escorting fighters.

Boelcke continued climbing until the sun was behind him. Then, as the first British bombs fell among the rail wagons, he gave the attack signal and dived.

As he had taught them to do, each of his young pilots singled out a definite target and closed in. One Albatros fastened on to a two-seat fighter, but found its fire too hot for comfort. The attacker dropped away into a cloud, then soared up underneath his foe – in the plane’s “blind” spot. A stream of bullets punctured the British plane’s engine and it nosed down and landed shakily. The exultant young German pilot almost crashed his own aircraft in his haste to collect a souvenir. . . .

An aristocratic ex-cavalry officer, Baron Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, had scored his first victory.

Richthofen’s second victim was a Martinsyde Elephant, and soon he was averaging one kill a week. The souvenirs he collected – pieces of fabric, machine-guns and propellers – began to mount up.

Major Lanoe G. Hawker, V.C., D.S.O., the British victor of nine combats, gave Richthofen a long and fierce fight for his eleventh claim. It was a fight in which two aces challenged each other’s skill, banking steeply into a circling dogfight which spiralled down from 8,000 to 3,000 feet.

The German’s advantages of full fuel tanks, prevailing wind, and of fighting over his own territory at last made Hawker whip out of his bank and dive for home territory. But Richthofen was an adept at a running fight, and a few short bursts sent Major Hawker’s aircraft crumpling into the ground.

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This edited article about Lloyd George originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 197 published on 23 October 1965.

Crowds outside Buckingham Palace cheer King George V on Armistice Day

The Boer War was at its height. The fortunes of the British troops fighting 6,000 miles away from home in South Africa were low.

But in England the tide of patriotism was running strongly. Any man who spoke against the war – any man who questioned the wisdom of sending troops all that way to fight in what might be a hopeless cause – was a traitor.

Yet in Lloyd George – a fiery schoolmaster’s son with high political ambitions – the Boer War found an implacable opponent. Constantly he spoke against it.

Such opposition could have cost him his career. Certainly it almost cost him his life.

It happened on the night of the Birmingham Peace Meeting.

The mob that lay in wait for Lloyd George that night outside the Town Hall hated him for his speeches about the war. The Chief Constable of the area had advised him not to speak. Lloyd George’s friends had begged him to call the meeting off, but there was no dissuading him.

So Lloyd George arrived alone among that milling, muttering crowd outside Birmingham Town Hall. Would they stop him? If they did, and he went down, they would certainly kill him.

Slowly, deliberately, he walked towards the Town Hall doors. There were shouts of “Dirty Traitor!” Whatever he did, Lloyd George knew he must show no fear.

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This edited article about British prime ministers originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 196 published on 16 October 1965.

The Right Honourable Herbert Henry Asquith, ‘A Great Orator’

To be a great statesman in peace is one thing; to lead a country in war is quite another. A man may be firm and resolute when times are tranquil, but he may crumble before the demands made upon him by grim battle.

So it was that the first ominous signs that heralded the first World War spelled disaster for the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, one of Britain’s greatest Liberal leaders and a fine Prime Minister.

He was surrounded by brilliant men. There was Churchill. There was Haldane. There was Lloyd George. And yet, faced with the gravest crisis in the country’s history, faced with an aggressive Germany, Asquith stumbled and fumbled.

He made fine, stirring speeches as war broke out in 1914 and the nation turned to arms. “We shall never sheathe the sword which we have not lightly drawn. . . .” he began one speech. And he meant it.

Yet, from the start of the war, little went right. There was an ammunition shortage; there was rebellion in Ireland; there was mounting pressure against Britain’s leadership.

Churchill, irascible, impatient, clamoured for greater action. Asquith, cool, calm, unmovable, seemed unable to grasp that what was good enough and quick enough in peace was inadequate in time of war.

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This edited article about World War One originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 194 published on 2 October 1965.

As the dog began scratching at the door, Trooper Fowler’s protectors wondered whether the Germans would grow suspicious

Among the grim relics in London’s Imperial War Museum stands an object which seems completely out of place. It is a plain wooden cupboard.

Not very grim – or exciting? Yet this cupboard figured in one of the most amazing stories of the first World War.

It was in 1914, at the terrible battle of Le Cateau in France, that Trooper Patrick Fowler, of the 11th Hussars, had his horse shot from under him. Cut off from his regiment, he lived for several weeks in the woods. Often he had to lie low when German patrols came near, and he had no idea of how the war was progressing. He was nearly dying of starvation when a woodcutter found him and took him at night to the home of his widowed mother-in-law in the village of Bertry, well behind the German lines.

Recalling the adventure for me many years later, Patrick Fowler said: “After the good people had fed me, the problem was to find a hiding-place. Suddenly the widow’s daughter had a brainwave – the cupboard.”

It was less than six feet high, and was divided into two sections, each with a door. One section was fitted with shelves, and the other had pegs for clothes.

“Little did I think as I squeezed into it that it would be my home for nearly four years,” Fowler said. He went on to describe how he sat in the section which was used as a wardrobe, with his chin resting on his knees. “I thought that in a few days I should be well enough to escape, but I did not get a chance. Not knowing French was only one of the things against me – and soon eight German soldiers were billeted in the house.”

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This edited article about France originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 181 published on 3 July 1965.

Leon Gambetta left Montmartre in a balloon to raise a resistance army in the provinces to relieve the beleaguered city of Paris, by Pat Nicolle

Since early morning a huge crowd had been gathering in the square in the Montmartre district of Paris and now, as the hands of the clock neared eleven, a hush of expectancy settled over the patient assembly.

All eyes were directed to the centre of the square, where three balloons of huge dimensions swayed in the breeze above their anchored baskets. The hush over the crowd became absolute silence as five none-too-happy passengers, holding bags and suitcases, emerged from among them and climbed into the baskets.

Suddenly a cry of “Vive la Republique” rose from thousands of throats. The onlookers had recognized the balloon passenger they had come to see – Leon Gambetta, one of their ministers. Nervously, Gambetta climbed into one of the balloon baskets. Then, as the holding ropes were cut and the balloon lurched upwards, the white-faced minister waved an unsteady hand at the people receding below him.

That October day in 1870 the people of Paris had little to cheer about. For three weeks their city had been under siege by the combined German armies of Prussia’s “Iron Chancellor,” Count Bismarck. After inflicting a disastrous defeat upon France, the Germans had marched to the capital, only to find the Parisians in a determined, we-shall-never-surrender mood. The subsequent siege had completely isolated the city from the rest of the world, and already the pangs of hunger were being felt by the citizens; already the cold wind of winter was slipping down their chimneys and fingering their empty hearths.

It was at this point that the resourceful Parisians decided that the only way to get messages and messengers out of the city was by balloon. Some of the balloons they used, like the one in which Minister Gambetta left the city, were nothing short of suicidal. One hazard was that they might burst upon inflation; another that the encircling German soldiers might put a bullet through them; yet another that they were quite unsteerable and might take goodness knows how long to arrive no one knew where.

One balloon that left Paris drifted through bitterly cold weather that nearly froze its occupants to death. Next day it hovered over a snow-covered landscape and everyone aboard decided to jump out from a height of more than forty feet. Some hours later, after marching shivering with cold through the snow, they found some peasants, who gazed back wide-eyed and mute when the Frenchmen spoke to them. It was some time before the balloonists established that they had landed in Norway.

Leon Gambetta’s balloon trip from Paris was short but not lacking in hazard. The Germans opened fire at it as soon as it sailed over the edge of Paris, and a bullet struck the minister’s hand. But two hours later the balloon landed out of harm’s way and Gambetta set off on his mission – to organize the French provinces’ resistance against the Germans in support of besieged Paris.

The war of 1870 had resulted from a series of manoeuvres engineered by Prussia’s Count Bismarck. By international intrigue of the most cunning order he made the French Emperor Napoleon the Third look like an aggressor, thereby effectively dissuading Britain from joining in on the French side, and at the same time gaining the allegiance of other German states who had been previously hostile to him.

So successful was Bismarck that in a short time he had an unthinking minority of people in France howling for war with Prussia – a minority that drove Napoleon to fight in hopeless circumstances. And war against France was exactly what Bismarck had planned.

Just how hopeless things were for the French Napoleon quickly realized when he rode to Metz to take charge of his army. Organization barely existed and scarcely a soldier of France was equipped to fight against the well-armed, well-ordered Prussians. Still, the French crossed the border and to Napoleon’s delight the first shot was fired by his own son, the Prince Imperial. That, however, was one of his few successes in the war, for in battle after battle the Prussians defeated the French.

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