This Day in World War 1 History: APRIL 17, 1917 : SECOND BATTLE OF GAZA

As the major Allied offensive masterminded by Robert Nivelle was failing miserably on the Western Front, British forces in Palestine make their second attempt to capture the city of Gaza from the Ottoman army on this day in 1917.

In the wake of the failed British assault on Gaza of March 26, 1917, Sir Archibald Murray, commander of British forces in the region, misrepresented the battle as a clear Allied victory, claiming Turkish losses to be triple what they actually were; in truth, at 2,400 they were significantly lower than the British total of 4,000. This led London’s War Office to believe their troops were on the verge of a significant breakthrough in Palestine and to order Murray to renew the attack immediately.

Though the previous assault had caught the Turks by surprise, the second one did not: the German general in charge of the troops at Gaza, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, was by now well aware of British intentions. By the time the British launched their second round of attacks on April 17, the Turks had accordingly strengthened their defenses and extended their forces along the road from Gaza to the nearby town of Beersheba.

Still, as in the First Battle of Gaza, British soldiers outnumbered Turkish troops by a ratio of two to one. Moreover, the British employed eight heavy Mark-1 tanks and 4,000 gas shells (used for the first time on the Palestine front) to ensure victory. The tanks proved unsuitable for the hot, dry desert conditions, however, and three of them were captured by Turkish forces, which again put up a blisteringly effective defense despite their inferior numbers. After three days and heavy losses—the British casualty figure, of 6,444 men, was three times that of the Turks—Murray’s subordinate commander, Sir Charles Dobell, was forced to call off the British attacks, ending the Second Battle of Gaza with the city still firmly in Turkish control.

As a result of this second failure to capture Gaza, the Allies called in reinforcements, including Italian and French troops, which arrived from Europe in time to join the third and final Battle of Gaza that fall. Under the new regional command of Sir Edward Allenby, the Allies finally broke through and gained control of Gaza in November 1917, leaving them free to move ahead toward Palestine’s capital city, Jerusalem, which fell into Allied hands on December 9.

Article Details:

April 17, 1917 : Second Battle of Gaza

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  April 17, 1917 : Second Battle of Gaza

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/second-battle-of-gaza

• Access Date

  April 17, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: APRIL 16, 1917 : LENIN RETURNS TO RUSSIA FROM EXILE

On April 16, 1917, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returns to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution.

Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870, Lenin was drawn to the revolutionary cause after his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander II. He studied law and took up practice in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where he moved in revolutionary Marxist circles. In 1895, he helped organize Marxist groups in the capital into the “Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” which attempted to enlist workers to the Marxist cause. In December 1895, Lenin and the other leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for a year and then exiled to Siberia for a term of three years.

After his exile ended in 1900, Lenin went to Western Europe, where he continued his revolutionary activity. It was during this time that he adopted the pseudonym Lenin. In 1902, he published a pamphlet entitled What Is to Be Done?, which argued that only a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia. In 1903, he met with other Russian Marxists in London and established the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). However, from the start, there was a split between Lenin’s Bolsheviks (Majoritarians), who advocated militarism, and the Mensheviks (Minoritarians), who advocated a democratic movement toward socialism. These two groups increasingly opposed each other within the framework of the RSDWP, and Lenin made the split official at a 1912 conference of the Bolshevik Party.

After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin returned to Russia. The revolution, which consisted mainly of strikes throughout the Russian empire, came to an end when Nicholas II promised reforms, including the adoption of a Russian constitution and the establishment of an elected legislature. However, once order was restored, the czar nullified most of these reforms, and in 1907 Lenin was again forced into exile.

Lenin opposed World War I, which began in 1914, as an imperialistic conflict and called on proletariat soldiers to turn their guns on the capitalist leaders who sent them down into the murderous trenches. For Russia, World War I was an unprecedented disaster: Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war. Meanwhile, the economy was hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort, and in March 1917, riots and strikes broke out in Petrograd over the scarcity of food. Demoralized army troops joined the strikers, and on March 15, 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, ending centuries of czarist rule. In the aftermath of the February Revolution (known as such because of Russia’s use of the Julian calendar), power was shared between the ineffectual provisional government, led by Minister of War Alexander Kerensky, and the soviets, or “councils,” of soldiers’ and workers’ committees.

After the outbreak of the February Revolution, German authorities allowed Lenin and his lieutenants to cross Germany en route from Switzerland to Sweden in a sealed railway car. Berlin hoped, correctly, that the return of the anti-war socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort, which was continuing under the provisional government. Lenin called for the overthrow of the provisional government by the soviets; he was subsequently condemned as a “German agent” by the government’s leaders. In July, he was forced to flee to Finland, but his call for “peace, land, and bread” met with increasing popular support, and the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd soviet. In October, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd, and on November 7, the Bolshevik-led Red Guards deposed the Provisional Government and proclaimed soviet rule.

Lenin became the virtual dictator of the world’s first Marxist state. His government made peace with Germany, nationalized industry and distributed land but, beginning in 1918, had to fight a devastating civil war against czarist forces. In 1920, the czarists were defeated, and in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. Upon Lenin’s death in early 1924, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. After a struggle of succession, fellow revolutionary Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union.

Article Details: 

April 16, 1917 : Lenin returns to Russia from exile

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  April 16, 1917 : Lenin returns to Russia from exile

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lenin-returns-to-russia-from-exile

• Access Date

  April 16, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks

This Day in World War 1 History: APRIL 15, 1918 : BRITISH EVACUATE PASSCHENDAELE RIDGE

With the Germans, in the throes of a major spring offensive on the Western Front, hammering their positions in Flanders, France, British forces evacuate Passchendaele Ridge, won by the Allies at such a terrible cost just five months earlier, on April 15, 1918.

Under the command of Erich von Ludendorff, the German army launched “Operation Georgette,” the second phase of their first major offensive on the Western Front for more than a year, on April 9, 1918, near the River Lys in Flanders. In the first days of the attack, the Germans regained the momentum they had lost at the end of March, when the Allies halted the first phase of the attacks at Moreuil Wood and around Amiens, France. Storming ahead against the British and Portuguese divisions at the Lys (one Portuguese division was so overwhelmed it refused to go forward into the trenches after the initial bombardment), German forces advanced quickly as panic swept down the Allied lines of command.

On April 15, less than a week after Georgette began, the British were forced to evacuate Passchendaele Ridge, an area that had seen heavy bloodshed the previous fall, during the Third Battle of Ypres. That battle had ended in the Allied capture of Passchendaele on November 6, 1917, but only at the cost of 310,000 British casualties, compared with 260,000 on the German side. In addition to Passchendaele, the Germans gained control of Messines Ridge, the scene of another important Allied victory in June 1917, before the Allied defenses hardened and Ludendorff shut down the Georgette operation on April 29, 1918.

Article Details:

April 15, 1918 : British evacuate Passchendaele Ridge

• Author

  History.com Staff

• Website Name

  History.com

• Year Published

  2009

• Title

  April 15, 1918 : British evacuate Passchendaele Ridge

• URL

  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-evacuate-passchendaele-ridge

• Access Date

  April 15, 2015

• Publisher

  A+E Networks