This Day in World War 1 History: OCTOBER 14, 1918 : ADOLF HITLER WOUNDED IN BRITISH GAS ATTACK

Among the German wounded in the Ypres Salient in Belgium on October 14, 1918, is Corporal Adolf Hitler, temporarily blinded by a British gas shell and evacuated to a German military hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania.

The young Hitler was drafted for Austrian military service but turned down due to lack of fitness; while living in Munich at the start of the First World War in the summer of 1914, he asked for and received special permission to enlist as a German soldier. As a member of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Hitler traveled to France in October 1914. He saw heavy action during the First Battle of Ypres, earning the Iron Cross that December for dragging a wounded comrade to safety.

Over the course of the next two years, Hitler took part in some of the fiercest struggles of the war, including the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the Second Battle of Ypres and the Battle of the Somme. On October 7, 1916, near Bapaume, France, Hitler was wounded in the leg by a shell blast. Sent to convalesce near Berlin, he returned to his old unit by February 1917. According to a comrade, Hans Mend, Hitler was given to discourse on the dismal state of morale and dedication to the cause on the home front in Germany: “He sat in the corner of our mess holding his head between his hands in deep contemplation. Suddenly he would leap up, and running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.”

Hitler earned more citations for bravery in the next year, including an Iron Cross 1st Class for “personal bravery and general merit” in August 1918 for single-handedly capturing a group of French soldiers hiding in a shell hole during the final German offensive on the Western Front. The injury in October, however, put an end to Hitler’s service in World War I. He learned of the German surrender while recovering at Pasewalk. Infuriated and frustrated by the news—”I staggered and stumbled back to my ward and buried my aching head between the blankets and pillow”—Hitler felt he and his fellow soldiers had been betrayed by the German people. In 1941, Hitler as fuhrer would reveal the degree to which his career and its terrible legacy had been shaped by the First World War, writing that “I brought back home with me my experiences at the front; out of them I built my National Socialist community.”

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October 14, 1918 : Adolf Hitler wounded in British gas attack

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  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

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  October 14, 1918 : Adolf Hitler wounded in British gas attack

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/adolf-hitler-wounded-in-british-gas-attack

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  October 14, 2015

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  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: OCTOBER 13, 1915 : POET CHARLES SORLEY KILLED AT LOOS

On this day in 1915, the 21-year-old Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley is killed by a German sniper’s bullet during the Battle of Loos.

The son of a university professor in Aberdeen and a promising scholar himself, Sorley decided to spend a year studying in Germany in 1913 before continuing his studies at University College, Oxford, to which he had won a scholarship. When World War I broke out the following August, Sorley was interned for one night at Trier before being released and told to leave the country immediately. Upon his return to England, impatient to join the war effort, he enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment. Sent to the Western Front in May 1915 as a full lieutenant, Sorley saw action at Ploegsteert in Flanders and was promoted to captain that August.

The Battle of Loos, an ambitious attack masterminded by Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the 1st Army of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), went ahead on September 25, 1915, as half of a simultaneous Allied offensive by British and French forces designed to divert German resources and relieve the distress of Russian forces on the Eastern Front. As the British attacked at Loos, the French attacked the German lines at Champagne and at Vimy Ridge in the Arras region of France. Though the Allies enjoyed considerable numerical superiority, the Germans were able to successfully repel the attacks in both regions, and British death tolls at Loos exceeded those of any previous battle: Of the nearly 10,000 British soldiers who attacked, 385 officers and 7,861 enlisted men were killed.

Among them was Sorley, who was shot in the head by a German sniper on October 13. His body was never found. The 37 poems found in his soldier’s kit after his death and published posthumously included one entitled “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead,” which contained the following powerful lines evoking the war’s ever-mounting death toll: “…scanning all the overcrowded mass, should you/Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,/It is a spook. None wears the face you knew/Great death has made all this for evermore.”

Article Details:

October 13, 1915 : Poet Charles Sorley killed at Loos

• Author

  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  October 13, 1915 : Poet Charles Sorley killed at Loos

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/poet-charles-sorley-killed-at-loos

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  October 13, 2015

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This Day in World War 1 History: OCTOBER 09, 1915 : BELGRADE FALLS TO AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

On October 9, 1915, Austro-Hungarian forces capture the Serbian capital of Belgrade, assisted in their defeat of Serbian forces by German troops under the command of General August von Mackensen.

It was not the first time during World War I that Austrian troops had occupied Belgrade. They had captured the city on December 1, 1914, effectively accomplishing what might have been their foremost war-making objective the previous summer: bringing the upstart Serbia to its knees after a Bosnian Serb nationalist shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria during an official visit to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. As the American war correspondent John Reed observed during his visit to Serbia that winter, Austro-Hungarian forces reduced many areas of Belgrade to ruins, including its university: “The Austrians had made it their special target, for there had been the hotbed of pan-Serbian propaganda, and among the students that formed the secret society whose members murdered the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.” Two weeks after the Austrians entered Belgrade, however, Serbian forces recaptured the city, taking 40,000 Austrian prisoners.

By the autumn of 1915, though, Serbia’s prospects were dwindling, and at the end of September, the Austrian army—composed of both Austrian and German troops—stood to the northwest and north of Belgrade, reinforced by the German 11th Army nearby. On October 6, German and Austro-Hungarian troops under the command of General von Mackensen crossed the wide Danube River in heavy rains, closing in on Belgrade. Three days later, they entered and took control of the city, forcing the Serbs to evacuate.

Though the Serbs planned to counterattack, their defeat was sealed only days later by the entrance into the war of Bulgaria, whose forces immediately invaded Serbia and Macedonia, the former Ottoman province in the Balkans it had long coveted. Bulgaria’s expressed reason for joining the Central Powers—aside from its economic relationships with Germany and Austria—was to annex Serbian territory. Its army neatly closed Serbian forces off from its allies, including a British and French force newly arrived in Greece for the purpose of aiding the Serbs. By the end of November, both Serbia and Macedonia were in the hands of the Central Powers.

Of all the belligerent nations during World War I, Serbia suffered the greatest number of casualties in relation to the size of its population. Its losses were staggering: Of some 420,000 soldiers in September 1915, 94,000 were killed in action and another 174,000 were captured or missing, while undoubtedly great numbers of civilian casualties remained uncalculated.

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October 09, 1915 : Belgrade falls to Austria-Hungary

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  History.com Staff

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  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  October 09, 1915 : Belgrade falls to Austria-Hungary

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  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/belgrade-falls-to-austria-hungary

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  October 09, 2015

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  A+E Networks