World War I Podcast

In November 2014, the MacArthur Memorial hosted a World War I Centennial Symposium. Dr. Lee Craig was one of the presenters. Dr. Craig is the author of Josephus Daniels, the story of the Secretary of the Navy, who helped to prepare the U.S. Navy for eventual involvement in World War I. Have a comment about this episode? Send us a text message! (Note: we can read texts, but we cannot respond.) Foll...

In November 2014, the MacArthur Memorial hosted a World War I Centennial Symposium. Andrew Robertshaw, author of the book Digging the Trenches, was one of the Symposium presenters. Over the last 25 years, Mr. Robertshaw has directed numerous archaeological projects on the Western Front. His lecture focused on using historical research and archaeology to identify the remains of soldiers killed on t...

In November 2014, the MacArthur Memorial hosted a World War I Centennial Symposium. Dr. Frederick Dickinson was one of the Symposium presenters. Dr. Dickinson is a Professor of Japanese History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of War and National Reinvention: Japan and the Great War, 1914-1919. Dr. Dickinson's lecture focused on the impact of World War I on Japan. Have a comme...

In November 2014, the MacArthur Memorial hosted a World War I Centennial Symposium. Dr. Holger Herwig was one of the Symposium presenters. Dr. Herwig is the author of numerous books, including The Marne, 1914. His presentation focused on the importance of the First Battle of the Marne, the differences in French and German command structures, and the legacy of the battle in the 20th Century. Have a...

In November 2014, the MacArthur Memorial hosted a World War I Centennial Symposium. Catrine Clay was one of the Symposium presenters. Ms. Clay is the author of King Kaiser Tsar - a work that explores the relationships between the royal cousins King George V, Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II on the eve of World War I. Have a comment about this episode? Send us a text message! (Note: we can r...

The Allies and Central Powers employed hundreds of thousands of sea mines during the Great War. These mines were commonly used to defend coastlines and strategic locations from invasion – but they were also used as part of a broader anti-submarine campaign. In 1917, with German submarines sinking many tons of shipping in the Atlantic, the United States Navy working in cooperation with its British...

Some of the great heroes of World War I were the “aces” – pilots who were credited with bringing down large numbers of enemy planes. These dashing young pilots captured the imagination of the public and imbued the war with a sense of romanticism. Their celebrity came from the fact that they fought a war of individual heroism in the blue skies – far from the anonymity of the muddy trenches. In term...

As dusk arrived on December 24, 1914, it was a cold night on the Western Front. It had been five months since the start of the war, and already, German, French and British Armies, slugging it out in the mud of Flanders, had experienced unimaginable casualties. The war was supposed to be over by Christmas – or so many of the soldiers had been told. Instead, there was an unbreakable stalemate, and m...

1917 was a winter of gloom for the Allies. The British had lost more than 400,000 men in their failed offensive at Passchendaele in the previous summer and fall. That was followed by mutinies of nearly half of all French Army units after the failed Nivelle offensives. To add to the gloom, Europe was about to experience its worst winter in many years. The only glimmer of hope was the slow, steady a...

Dr. Lisa Budreau, author of Bodies of War: World War I and the politics of commemoration in America 1919-1933, visited the MacArthur Memorial in October 2012 and lectured on the topic of repatriation, memorialization, and the creation of American cemeteries overseas to commemorate the fallen. World War I marked the first war in which the United States government and military took full responsibili...

World War I was a war of production and supply: whoever could feed their populations and soldiers, make the most weapons, and marshal the most resources would win the war. Surrounded by enemies on land, and desperate to break the trans-Atlantic trade and supply lines of the Allied Powers, Germany used submarines during the war to hunt down and destroy Allied vessels. With this German U-Boat campai...

The North Atlantic is cold and stormy in October and November, and it loomed as a dreaded specter to thousands of members of the 42nd Rainbow Division at Camp Mills who had never seen the ocean much less taken a twelve day journey across it. Furthermore, in 1917 all shipping routes to Europe from America were patrolled by German submarines. The danger was clear, but so was the need for American tr...

Situated on Hempstead Plain in Long Island, New York, Camp Mills was the primary training ground of the 42nd Rainbow Division. The camp was swiftly constructed in the summer of 1917 and soon 27,000 men and 991 officers of the Rainbow Division began arriving at the camp to begin preparing for the war in Europe. General John J. Pershing was already leading the American Expeditionary Force in France,...

When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, it had an absolutely miniscule standing army. As the US Army General Staff began frantically preparing to mobilize an American Expeditionary Force, an internal debate arouse about the type of army the United States should send to France. Should they wait for enlistment to swell the ranks of the regular army? Or should the National Guard be us...

Robert Dalessandro, Executive Director of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, visited the Memorial in October 2012 and lectured on the topic of the organization and insignia of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). World War I marked a watershed moment in the organization of the United States military. The incredible scale of the war, as well as the changing nature of warfare made many of...

Author Stephen L. Harris visited the Memorial in October 2012 and gave a presentation on “The Fighting 69th” in World War I. As part of the New York National Guard, elements of the 69th Infantry Regiment have participated in five wars to date: the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Iraq War, and Afghanistan. The regiment earned its nickname “The Fighting 69th” during the Civil War,...

On September 4, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II exulted: “It is the 35th day!” The 35th day of the war had a very significant meaning to the German General Staff. The Schlieffen Plan anticipated a victory over France within 35-40 days of combat. This would allow Germany to avoid a damaging two front war and would leave the Germany army with plenty of time to turn and crush the Tsar’s newly mobilized force...

This podcast features an interview with Megan Good, the director of the J. Welles Henderson Archives and Library at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. The Independence Seaport Museum is currently the home of the U.S.S. Olympia – a vessel that served as Commodore George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish American War. By World War I the Olympia was no long...

In the decades before World War I, all the European powers had secret plans to defend against invasion or to make preemptive strikes against their enemies. In Germany, the main war plan was the Schlieffen Plan. This plan grew out of a German fear of encirclement. Increasingly cut off from the rest of Europe by French, Russian, and British alliances, by the early 1900s Germany was geographically an...

Otto von Bismarck once predicted that some “foolish” thing in the Balkans would start a major war in Europe – and he would prove correct in this belief. In an age of entangling alliances between nations, unrest in the Balkans would be enough to disrupt and twist the relationships between the major European powers and lead to a world war. The spark that would ignite this awful cataclysm would be a...