The neglected treasure: Women’s contribution and courage during the Great War

The True Story of “Hidden Figures,” the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

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It talks with eloquence and passion of the many, many gifts India has bequeathed to Britain. Several poets, lost in the veils of time and virtually unknown today, made important interventions on the War. The key theatres of World War 1 and the important battles. The poem ended with a fervent plea that the people of Hind should not be taken in by the sorcery of the reforms. The ever-doubting, ever-satirical voice of Akbar Allahabadi, a long time critic of colonial rule and a new-found admirer of Gandhi, shows us the great inescapable link between commerce and empire that Tagore too alluded to:.

The great visionary poet Iqbal who is at his most active, most powerful during the war years, does not make direct references to actual events in the war arena; nevertheless, he is asking the Indians to be careful, to heed the signs.

Slender though the output is, writings on the Great War reflect a wide spectrum of voices and attitudes. While for the informed Indians, the war brought vestiges of loyalty to the empire into direct conflict with a rising nationalistic consciousness, for the great mass of peasantry, enlistment in the Army was due to a combination of reasons: The Indian response to the First World War was complex and variegated; the writings on the Great War reflect that ambiguity.

Indian response to World War 1 variegated, literature reflects that A years after the end of the Great War, it is useful to see how Indians themselves responded to the events surrounding a war to which they contributed immensely without fully comprehending its reasons and implications; even though their response is not uniform and un-variegated. Nov 11, During a march past of Indian troops, a woman pins flowers on to the tunic of one of the soldiers. Several small makeshift tents can be seen in the background.

World War I: | Striking Women

This was during the Battle of the Somme. They tried to interrogate some poilus about the purpose of this meeting, but no one was willing to respond, or they answered evasively. Our commandant tried to block the road by the police station, but the poilus got through by using other routes. In the afternoon the order was given for immediate departure. It included the formal promise that home leaves would begin again, starting the next day, at a rate of sixteen per one hundred men. They needed nothing more to reestablish order.

Rifle shots were fired on a group of officers who were trying to approach the barracks. The bullets went wild and hit some innocent victims in the town, killing two, it is said. Saturday, December 15, 15 December: With both sides utterly exhausted, the Battle of Verdun, the longest struggle of the Great War, ended after days on 18 December The last attack of the battle's most memorable aspect was the hard-fought recapture of the tiny, but symbolic, village of Bezonvaux.

Bezonvaux, with a population of in February , was located a mile northeast of Fort Douaumont. A redoubt bearing the same name as the village was located a quarter mile to its south. They were finally abandoned by retreating French forces on 25 February Afterward, shelling gradually wiped out the village completely. The success of General Mangin's re-capture of Forts Douaumont and Vaux in October and early November left German forces still holding territory they had captured early in the battle.

This led Mangin and his superior, General Nivelle, to contemplate repeating the attack on a front approximately ten kilometers long from Vacherauville near the Meuse River, east to Eix with the limited objective of capturing this area. The date chosen was 15 December On 10 December the French began a preliminary artillery barrage to soften up the German positions. Four of the French Army's best divisions took part in the assault.

Three regiments of the 37 Division d'infanterie DI left Fort Douaumont pushing east, advancing all day long through snow, mud, and barbed wire networks toward the Bezonvaux. Many of the soldiers ended up with frostbite. The attack on the village commenced at 2 a. Despite a French artillery error and heavy German shelling, the French completely rid Bezonvaux of its previous occupiers. However, they could not advance any farther. The Battle of Verdun was over. The front in this sector remained stable for the next two years, when American units would liberate the Meuse Heights just to the north at the very end of the war.

These are ghost villages, communities that laid down their lives for France, moving memorials thanks to the chapels and commemorative monuments erected after the end of the war. Bezonvaux and her sisters are managed by a municipal council of three members appointed by the prefect of the Meuse department. Annual commemorative services are held at each of the villages. The site today still shows signs of the wartime damage.

Commemorating the events of are the marker and the chapel shown above. The Bezonvaux memorial chapel's stained-glass window immortalizes 16 December , showing troops wearing both the horizon blue uniforms of metropolitan France and the khaki worn by colonial forces. Readers are probably familiar with the exploits of Lt.

Frank Luke of the 27th U. Aero Squadron, who made a specialty of attacking highly defended enemy observation balloons, earning him the nickname of "Balloon Buster. However, his spectacular career was brief. Luke was shot down and killed on 29 September.

The leading balloon buster of the war was actually a Belgian pilot, Willy Coppens, who, in little over a year, destroyed 37 observation balloons and possibly six more that were unconfirmed officially. His intense and dangerous war service ended in October , when he was hit by flak while trying to down his second balloon of the day.

His left leg was smashed and had to be amputated, but he lived until Some of our readers have told me about meeting Willy; he became one of the grand old men of World War I aviation. A man of prodigious energy, able to out-work all his subordinates, and enthralled with an archaic view of the divine right of kings, he spent the first two years of his reign elbowing off the political stage his powerful chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. A grandson of both Queen Victoria and the first Kaiser, upon ascending to power, he had apparently intuited a notion attributed to Count Waldersee, "If Frederick the Great had had such a chancellor [as Bismarck] he would not have been Frederick the Great.

In post-Bismarckian administration, Germany's chancellor was reduced to the status of chief of staff for his sovereign. Under Wilhelm's erratic direction, Russia and France were allowed to form an alliance, so the army had to plan a war against both of them. A navy was built to back Wilhelm's dream of a colonial empire, which was perceived as a challenge to Britain's Royal Navy, thereby both creating an economically burdensome ship-building race and forcing his admiralty to prepare for a war with a third nation. His foreign office, meanwhile, maneuvered for influence in Africa and the decaying Ottoman Empire, further alarming all the established colonial powers.

Wilhelm's prewar neglect of domestic affairs also led to a victory by the Socialists in the Reichstag election of , an event he would long rue. What, then, was the Kaiser's role in all this? It was he, ultimately, who had to sanction a decision to go to war, he who finally signed the relevant mobilization orders, as he did in early August His tactless blunders on the international diplomatic stage did much to prepare the ground for hostilities among the major European powers of the day, as did his expressed desire to achieve a position of world power for Germany. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the most powerful position in Germany was to be filled by a megalomaniac monarch who was ultimately so ill-suited to occupying such an influential office.

In the events leading to the outbreak of war, the role of the Kaiser must therefore be seen as a crucial factor. Supreme War Lord was a role Wilhelm certainly looked forward to playing, and he was never so popular during his reign as he was in the early days of the World War. But soon survival—not only of his own throne but also of the German Empire—was perceived to be at stake. Specialists were needed to manage "Total War", and as they displayed competence, they would siphon off Wilhelm's power. Number 12, page This is the Great War.

The AEF in Print: Monday, December 10, France at Gallipoli. It is often forgotten that the French made a major contribution at Gallipoli. On the first day of the landings their forces sent to capture Kumkale on the Asian side were the only troops to accomplish their objective. When moved across the straits they held down a good part of the Allied right flank at Helles through the fall of Things were basically stagnant all along the Cape Helles sector.

I see no end to it. The French troops, however, were considered something of a weak link until placed under the command of General Henri Gouraud, a future "Western Front star," who arrived in May. It was Gouraud who organized the limited, but impressive, advance by French units on 21 June His men, though, soon lost their gifted commander. On 30 June , Gouraud became one of the highest-ranking officers of the war to be wounded.

He lost an arm and broke both legs as a result of being hit with numerous fragments from the explosion of an artillery shell. The effectiveness of the French forces around Cape Helles diminished noticeably after his evacuation when he was replaced by a general of lesser caliber. The sacrifices of the 42, metropolitan and colonial French soldiers that served at Gallipoli is honored at a cemetery and memorial above S Beach where there are over 2, graves and four ossuaries with 3, skeletons each.

Fully one third of the troops France deployed to Gallipoli found their final resting place there. Russian Reserve Soldier, This 6. Petersburg, by the artists P. It's made of gold, silver, jasper, ophicalcite, and pegmatite. The statue is currently held at the Fersman Mineralogical Museum in Moscow. Naturally the video also features a lot of information on the famous Easter eggs. Saturday, December 8, Remembering a Veteran: For Curie, the war started in early , as German troops headed toward her hometown of Paris.

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She knew her scientific research needed to be put on hold. So she gathered her entire stock of radium, put it in a lead-lined container, transported it by train to Bordeaux— miles away from Paris—and left it in a safe deposit box at a local bank. She then returned to Paris, confident that she would reclaim her radium after France had won the war.

Rather than flee the turmoil, she decided to join in the fight. But just how could a middle-aged woman do that? She decided to redirect her scientific skills toward the war effort—not to make weapons but to save lives. At the start of the war, X-ray machines were still found only in city hospitals, far from the battlefields where wounded troops were being treated.

One major obstacle was the need for electrical power to produce the X-rays. The petroleum-powered car engine could thus provide the required electricity. Frustrated by delays in getting funding from the French military, Curie approached the Union of Women of France. This philanthropic organization gave her the money needed to produce the first car, which ended up playing an important role in treating the wounded at the Battle of Marne in —a major Allied victory that kept the Germans from entering Paris.

More radiological cars were needed. So Curie exploited her scientific clout to ask wealthy Parisian women to donate vehicles.

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Soon she had 20, which she outfitted with X-ray equipment. But the cars were useless without trained X-ray operators, so Curie started to train women volunteers. She recruited 20 women for the first training course, which she taught along with her daughter Irene, a future Nobel Prize winner herself. Read more on Marie Curie's war service at Smithsonian Magazine. Multiple Commemorations in Los Angeles.

There were four other events supported by the Task Force over the three days. Our state paid a high price with more than giving their lives, of that nearly being from Los Angeles.

Forgotten Voices of the Great War

In the County of Los Angeles over thirty memorials were dedicated to the war, including this very building that we sit in today. Sadly the USA's sacrifice has forgotten in the century since. It is our hope, that our program will have illuminated this blind spot in our history and honored the generation that gave so much. Part 4, Forces for Change Roll On. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin rises to prominence, advocates violence to overthrow existing governments.

Inspires murder of state officials in an effort to incite state retribution and mobilize the population against the government. Charles Darwin re-conceptualizes biology with his theories of evolution; his views are interpreted as a challenge to traditional religious thought. In a career lasting over a quarter century, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck guided Prussia to three quick military victories, stage-managed the unification of Germany, and created a delicate balance of power that shielded Europe from general war. The last step in bringing the fragmented German principalities into a single nation was a war with France instigated by Bismarck.

Victory was quickly gained, Paris placed under siege and a German Empire declared in just a few months. The taking of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine by the victors, however, left France Germany's committed enemy. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? Part 3, Forces for Order Respond. This in the long run meant more aggressive foreign policies. This New Europe of the Old Order, however, was to prove itself progressively less governable. Begun under the pretext of a dispute over the Holy Lands of Palestine, the conflict was rooted in the Eastern Question, the disposition of lands controlled by the decaying Ottoman Empire.

It would initiate a series of small wars over the next generation. The war's settlement halted Russian expansion temporarily, left the Black Sea neutral, and guaranteed Turkey its territorial integrity in return for a promise to improve the status of Christian subjects. It was the last major battle in world history where all the armies were under the personal command of their monarchs. Civil War, Europeans observe impact of telegraph, railroads, observation balloons, rifled artillery, and armored ships on warfare.

In a progressive country change is constant, and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines. The story of the Great War is not just the story of generals and Doughboys, kings and politicians, heroism and cowardice, life and death.

It is also the story of the social change that flowed from and followed in the war's wake. The Great War caused great changes in Britain.

Wartime demands and the numbers of men drawn to the front created both the demand and need for women to enter the work place. The recognition of the contributions of women provided support for women's votes. In Britain was a cauldron of strife between business and labor, among classes and ideologies. The rise of a common enemy summoned men, and women, to rally for king and country. The demand for female workers in industry flowed from two forces As men entered the armed forces their places were taken by women.

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