Welcome to today's deep dive. I am I'm genuinely
so thrilled you're joining us today. Absolutely.
Because we are going on a journey that has been
meticulously entirely custom tailored for you.
Yeah, we've really dug into this one. We have.
And knowing you and knowing your grasp of history,
I am well aware that you already know the basics
of World War One. Right. Like when we mentioned
the Great War, we don't need to lecture you about
the tragedy of the Psalm. Or Verdun? Exactly,
the meat grinder of Verdun. Or those static muddy
trenches stretching across France lined with
barbed wire. The standard textbook stuff. You
already know the textbook picture of the Western
Front. But we were setting that standard narrative
aside today. Completely aside. What if I told
you that the grand strategy of this conflict,
the war that violently dragged the world into
the 20th century, was dictated by events far
beyond those infamous trenches? It's a crazy
thought. It is. We're talking about seaplane
carriers operating off the coast of China. We're
talking about freezing, chaotic, blind breakouts
in the snow -choked plains of Poland. Yeah. We're
going to look at multilingual fortresses slowly
starving to death and flooded Italian rivers
literally swallowing entire empires whole. It
is a necessary and frankly profound shift in
perspective. The standard Western Front narrative,
while undeniably tragic and historically crucial,
it really does a disservice to the sheer terrifying
global scale of this conflict. It really does.
When we limit our view to just France and Belgium,
we miss the truly bizarre, highly mobile and
technologically experimental fringes of the war
that actually dictated how the empires fought,
adapted and ultimately collapsed. And that is
precisely our mission today. We're going to completely
reframe your understanding of the First World
War. Reframe it entirely. To do this, we've pulled
together a massive stack of sources for you.
Specifically, five incredibly detailed Wikipedia
articles covering massive, yet wildly different
engagement. Right, covering a lot of ground.
We're going to examine the Siege of Tsingtao,
the Battle of Udu, the Siege of Presemual, the
Battle of Eris, and the Second Battle of the
Piave River. It's a huge scope. It is. Our goal
isn't just to recount dates and casualty figures.
We want to explore the true, sprawling global
scale of the war, the terrifying extremes of
the environments these soldiers were forced to
fight in, and the rapid, almost desperate evolution
of military tactics on the ground. Yeah. Okay,
let's unpack this. The goal today is to connect
the dots between these five seemingly disparate,
geographically isolated battles. We want to show
you how these massive empires frantically adapted
to modern warfare in real time. We are going
to look at the granular details of what that
human cost actually felt like on the ground.
Because when you move away from just staring
at the static lines of the Western Front, you
see what is essentially a horrifying, globally
distributed laboratory of military science and
human endurance. I love that framing. Yeah. A
horrifying laboratory. So to start this deep
dive, we're going to travel to the very last
place most people associate with the outbreak
of World War I. We are heading to Asia. Specifically,
we're looking at August 1914 in a German colonial
port city called Qingdao, China. And right off
the bat. Just, I have to ask, how on earth did
a massive European war immediately trigger a
siege in China? To understand that, we have to
look at the aggressive imperialism of the late
19th century. Back in 1898, the German Empire
under Kaiser Wilhelm II essentially strong -armed
the Qing dynasty into granting them a 99 -year
lease on the area around Qizube. Wow, 99 years.
Yeah. They poured massive amounts of money into
Qingdao, or Xingtao as it was spelled then, turning
it from a relatively small fishing village into
a heavily fortified, modernized naval base. So
it wasn't just a tiny outpost. Not at all. It
had had wide streets, modern plumbing, breweries,
and most importantly, it was the deep -water
home port for the German East Asia Squadron.
It was Germany's crown jewel in the Pacific,
their main hub for projecting naval power across
the globe. But the moment the Archduke is assassinated
in Sarajevo and the dominoes fall in Europe,
that prized colony suddenly becomes a massive
liability, doesn't it? because Japan enters the
chat. Precisely. And what's fascinating here
is the geopolitical shift happening right beneath
the surface. You have Great Britain, who had
been viewing the German naval buildup in the
Pacific with immense paranoid suspicion for over
a decade. Naturally. To counter this, Britain
had actively forged closer ties with Japan, culminating
in the Anglo -Japanese alliance of 1902. So when
war breaks out in August 1914, Britain officially
requests Japanese assistance to hunt down armed
German raiders in the Pacific. But Japan takes
it a step further. They absolutely do. Japan,
seeing a golden opportunity to expand its own
empire and eliminate its primary European rival
in Asia, doesn't just hunt ships. They issue
a blatant ultimatum to Germany. Hand over the
entire port of Tsingtao immediately, without
conditions. And of course, Kaiser Wilhelm II
isn't going to just hand over his prized colony.
I was reading through the source material and
he actually sent a telegraph stating that it
would shame him more to surrender Tsingtao to
the Japanese than it would to surrender Berlin
to the Russians. It's a wild statement. He orders
them to defend it to the last man. Which was
essentially a death sentence for the garrison.
The German commander in Singtau, Captain Alfred
Meyer Waldeck, was a deeply pragmatic man. He
knew he was completely isolated. He had to know.
The main German East Asia Squadron, commanded
by Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee, had already
recognized the trap. Spee took his heavy cruisers
and fled across the Pacific towards South America,
knowing that staying in port meant annihilation.
Smart move by speed. So Meyerwaldeck is left
behind. Yes. He's left with roughly 3 ,600 men.
This wasn't even a cohesive army. It was a hodgepodge
of Marines, naval personnel whose ships were
undergoing repairs, Chinese colonial troops,
and even a contingent of Austro -Hungarian sailors
from a cruiser called the Kaiser in Elizabeth
that happened to be trapped in the harbor. So
you have 3 ,600 isolated cutoff defenders. And
marching toward them is an incredibly well -equipped
Japanese force. of over 23 ,000 men. Vastly outnumbered.
Eventually joined by a token British force of
about 1 ,500. But here's where it gets really
interesting. This isn't just a standard 19th
century colonial skirmish. The Siege of Tsingtao
is actually a battle of massive technological
firsts. Huge firsts. I mean, we're talking about
aviation, which is in its absolute infancy in
1914. Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk was barely
a decade prior. And yet, We see the Japanese
utilizing a ship called the Wakamiya. Yes, the
Wakamiya. Can you explain what this ship was
actually doing? Because the idea of a 1914 aircraft
carrier is just blowing my mind. It really challenges
our timeline of military aviation, doesn't it?
The Guacamea wasn't an aircraft carrier in the
modern sense. It didn't have a flat flight deck.
Right. It was a seaplane tender. It carried four
Maurice Farman seaplanes. These were incredibly
fragile wire and canvas biplanes with pontoons
attached to the bottom. Wire and canvas. Exactly.
The crew of the Guacamea would literally use
a heavy derrick crane to hoist these planes over
the side of the ship and lower them down into
the ocean swells. Oh, wow. The pilots would then
start the engines, taxi across the water and
take off right from the sea. That sounds incredibly
dangerous just on a mechanical level, let alone
in a combat zone. It was incredibly risky, but
the strategic advantage was unprecedented. Beginning
in early September 1914, these Japanese seaplanes
conducted the world's very first naval -launched
air raids. The first ever? Yes. They flew over
the fortified German harbor, scouting artillery
positions and dropping explosives on the trapped
German ships, including the Austro -Hungarian
cruiser Kaiser and Elizabeth and the German gunboat
Jaguar. That's insane. They even conducted the
first recorded nighttime bombing raid in history.
At night. in 1914. The psychological impact on
the German defenders, having explosives dropped
on them from the sky in the middle of the night,
was profound. It fundamentally changed the rules
of naval engagement. We are seeing a stark foreshadowing
of the Pacific theater that would play out decades
later in the Second World War. Japan was actively
testing, improving the concept of modern carrier
style warfare. And what's wild is that the Germans
weren't completely blind in the sky either. But
their situation was so much more desperate. They
had exactly one operational airplane left in
the entire colony. Just one. It was an Ettrich
Taub, which, if you look at pictures of it, literally
looks like a giant mechanical bird with these
swept back dove -like wings. A very striking
design. And it was flown by a single guy, Lieutenant
Gunther Plucho. Plucho's story is one of the
most romanticized yet objectively terrifying
narratives of the early war. He was entirely
alone up there. Entirely. He was flying this
fragile unarmed monoplane over a besieging army
of tens of thousands of men constantly taking
ground fire. He was acting as the sole set of
eyes for the German artillery commanders. desperately
trying to map out the Japanese trench networks.
And he wasn't just scouting. The sources say
he was dropping improvised bombs out of the cockpit
by hand, just leaning over the side of the fuselage
and tossing explosives. Yeah. And then he supposedly
claims the first aerial victory in aviation history.
Not with a mounted machine gun, because they
didn't have those yet, but by pulling out his
personal service pistol and shooting at a Japanese
farm and sea plane midair. Incredible. I'm struggling
to picture the sheer adrenaline of two pilots
taking pot shots at each other with handguns
thousands of feet in the air. It highlights the
improvised, almost experimental nature of this
siege. Plusho became a massive annoyance to the
Japanese command. But ultimately, one man in
a town couldn't stop an empire. As the Japanese
closed in, Meyer Waldeck, the German commander,
realized the fortress was going to fall. On November
6th, literally the day before the final Japanese
assault, he gave Plusho his final orders. Escape.
Get out of there. Plucho strapped the governor's
final dispatches to his body, took off in the
Taub, and flew deep into Chinese territory until
he ran out of fuel, eventually making his way
back to Germany after an insane multi -year journey.
But back on the ground, the siege was grinding
toward its inevitable conclusion. And before
we move on from Tsingtao, we have to talk about
the British involvement. because it perfectly
illustrates the messy reality of these newly
formed global alliances. Britain sent a relatively
small force, the South Wales borderers and the
36 Sikhs, but they weren't really there to help
Japan win. They were there to keep an eye on
them, right? Exactly. Britain was deeply uncomfortable
with the idea of Japan taking over a massive
fortified deepwater port in China, essentially
replacing German imperialism with Japanese imperialism
right next to British spheres of influence. Right
in their backyard. The British troops were sent
as a political statement. We are here, we are
watching, and we expect a say in what happens
to this territory after the battle. Which led
to a massive problem on the battlefield. The
source mentions a severe friendly fire issue.
The Japanese sentries kept shooting at the British
troops. You have to consider the conditions.
You are operating in heavy rain, in muddy trenches
often at night or in thick fog. The standard
British khaki uniforms, when caked in dark mud
and seen from a distance, didn't look drastically
different from the German uniforms to a Japanese
sentry who had never fought alongside British
troops before. That makes sense. The friction
of this newly formed coalition was resulting
in lethal mistakes. And the solution they came
up with is so absurdly pragmatic. The British
command literally had to issue Japanese military
raincoats to the British soldiers. Yes. They
told the South Wales borders to wear these specific
Japanese raincoats over their own uniforms so
that their allies would recognize the silhouette
and stop shooting at them. It's such a tiny,
bizarre detail, but it speaks volumes about how
messy this war was from day one. It truly does.
And the ultimate outcome at Tsingtao, which fell
on November 7th after a methodical, overwhelming
Japanese artillery bombardment, proved a crucial
military doctrine. Japan's use of parallel siege
trenches and massive 11 -inch howitzers. Tactics
they knew well. Tactics they had perfected just
nine years earlier during the Russo -Japanese
War at Port Arthur. It proved that modern, heavy
artillery could systematically reduce and destroy
any static fortress no matter how well -built.
The era of the impenetrable walled city was officially
over. So Tsingkau proves that if you sit still
in a fortress, modern artillery will eventually
crush you. But what happens when armies refuse
to sit still? What happens when millions of men
are moving rapidly trying to outflank each other?
A very different kind of war. Because just a
few weeks later, and thousands of miles away
in Europe, the Germans and the Russians were
testing a completely different, infinitely more
chaotic type of war. This is where the concept
of the laboratory really becomes terrifying.
We are moving from the calculated methodical
siege warfare of the coast of China to the sheer
freezing chaos of maneuver warfare on the eastern
front. Which brings us to the Battle of Udu,
taking place in November and December of 1914.
To set the scene for you, we are in the freezing
plains of Poland. The Russian Empire is feeling
confident. They are amassing a massive army,
preparing for a devastating invasion of Silesia.
A huge threat. Now, Silesia is the industrial
heartland of the German Empire. If the Russians
get into Silesia, the German war machine loses
its coal, its steel, its factories. The war could
literally be over in months. Germany couldn't
let that happen. To prevent this, the German
high command, specifically Paul von Hindenburg
and Erich Ludendorff, have to pull off a logistical
miracle. They decide to preemptively strike.
They pull their entire 9th Army out of southern
Poland and shift it hundreds of miles north.
And they do this by running 80 trains a day.
80 trains. I have to pause here. How do you coordinate
80 massive steam trains a day on 1914 rail infrastructure
without modern computers or radios? The logistics
of the German railway system in 1914 cannot be
overstated. It was the secret weapon of the German
general staff. The secret weapon. They had a
dedicated railway department within the military
that spent decades prior to the war meticulously
planning train schedules down to the minute.
Every station, every sighting, every water tower
was mapped out. Just mathematical precision.
When Hindenburg and Ludendorff ordered the 9th
Army north, they were executing pre -calculated
timetables. They moved an entire army, hundreds
of thousands of men, thousands of horses, field
artillery, and ammunition laterally across their
own front lines in a matter of days. The goal
was to achieve absolute operational surprise.
And the plan was to smash into the right flank
of the Russian Second Army, right near the city
of Udu. The sources describe this as an attempt
at a double envelopment. I know that's a classic
military term, but I'm struggling to picture
exactly how that looks on the ground. Can you
break down what a double envelopment actually
means for the soldiers involved? Think of it
like a giant pair of pincers or a crab's claws.
A single envelopment is flanking your enemy,
moving around one side of their line to attack
them from the side and the front simultaneously.
OK, got it. A double envelopment is the holy
grail of maneuver warfare. You smash through
the enemy lines on both the extreme left and
the extreme right simultaneously. Your two attacking
wings then hook inward behind the enemy army,
linking up in their rear. So you surround them.
If you successfully close the pincers, you have
completely surrounded the enemy army. They have
no supply lines, no way to retreat, and they
are taking fire from 360 degrees. This is exactly
what the Germans had done to a different Russian
army at the Battle of Tannenberg just a few months
prior. prior, destroying it completely. They
were trying to recreate that masterpiece at Udu.
specifically Grand Duke Nicholas, isn't totally
incompetent. He realizes the severity of the
danger. He saw it coming. He immediately cancels
the invasion of Silesia and orders the Russian
Fifth Army, commanded by General Pavel Plav,
to abandon their positions and march north to
save the Second Army. And they move with insane
speed, covering 72 miles in just two days on
foot. Which is an agonizing forced march, especially
when you factor in the environment. We have to
discuss the weather because the weather at Odu
wasn't just a backdrop. It was an active, lethal
participant in the battle. The temperatures were
plummeting to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, which is
minus 12 Celsius. And it wasn't just cold. It
was freezing, dense fog. Imagine the sensory
deprivation. You have hundreds of thousands of
men marching through unfamiliar Polish countryside.
The roads are turning into frozen ruts of mud.
The fog is so thick you can't see 50 feet in
front of you. You can't see anything. And remember,
in 1914, armies relied on visual signals. Flags,
flares, and dispatch riders on horseback. The
fog effectively blinds the commanders of both
armies. It severs the nervous system of the military
structure. And because of this fog, and because
the Russian Fifth Army arrives so incredibly
fast after that forced march, the entire battle
geometry violently flips in a matter of hours.
It's a total reversal. The German pincers that
were trying to surround the Russian Second Army
suddenly find themselves slamming into the Russian
Fifth Army. The Germans who had broken through
into the Russian rear are now cut off from their
own lines. The Hunters have become the hunted.
It turns from a double envelopment into a massive
chaotic cauldron battle. The focal point of this
chaos falls on the German 25th Reserve Corps.
This unit was commanded by General Reinhard von
Schäfer -Boyedal. Sheffer Boyadal. Now Sheffer
Boyadal was a 63 year old general who had been
recalled from retirement. He was an old school
Prussian officer. And suddenly he finds his entire
corps, tens of thousands of men, completely surrounded
southeast of Odu by an overwhelming Russian force.
The Russians are ecstatic. They are so absolutely
certain that they have trapped and destroyed
this German corps that the Russian command literally
orders trains to be brought up to the front lines
to accommodate up to 20 2 ,000 anticipated German
prisoners of war they're celebrating before the
battles even over but they fundamentally miscalculated
two things the sheer disciplined desperation
of the trapped German troops and the catastrophic
fragility of their own Russian command structure
under pressure. Right. Sheffer Boydell evaluates
the situation. He has no supplies. The temperature
is lethal and he is surrounded. He decides that
surrender is not an option. He orders his corps
to turn around, face the Russian lines that trapped
them and break out by force. This leads to what
has to be one of the most terrifying cinematic
moments of the entire war. The Vanguard, the
tip of the spear leading this breakout attempt,
is a cavalry unit commanded by a man named Manfred
von Richthofen. Yes, the uncle. Who, for the
aviation buffs out there, is the great uncle
of the famous Red Baron? They are tasked with
punching a hole through the Russian lines at
night. And because the fog is so thick and the
Russian lines are so close, Richtofen issues
an incredible order. He tells his men to fix
bayonets and then he orders them to completely
unload the ammunition from their rifles. It's
a brilliant, if terrifying, tactical decision.
In the pitch black and freezing fog, a single
accidental gunshot from a nervous freezing soldier
would instantly give away their position and
bring down the entire weight of Russian artillery
on their heads. By unloading the rifles, Richtofen
ensured absolute silence. It forced his men to
rely entirely on cold steel. So you have thousands
of freezing German soldiers armed only with bayonets
sneaking through the icy night, and they literally
stumble right into the town of Brissini, which
is currently occupied by the sleeping Russian
6th Siberian Division. The historical accounts
of this breakout are surreal. Because of the
absolute silence and the sheer audacity of the
move, the German troops actually managed to occupy
large sections of the town of Brzeni before a
single shot was fired. It's unbelievable. The
Russian sentries were either frozen, asleep,
or completely caught off guard. But wait, how
does a sleeping division of Siberians not wake
up and immediately annihilate the Germans once
the alarm is finally raised? Where was the Russian
command? The Russian command was experiencing
a total cascading structural collapse. General
Nikolai Ruski, who was overseeing the sector,
completely lost his nerve. Shift broke down.
The short winter days, the blinding fog and the
conflicting reports coming in from his terrified
frontline commanders broke him. He was literally
issuing orders via telegraph and then immediately
sending a second telegraph contradicting the
first one. The local Russian commanders in Brasini
were completely paralyzed, unsure of whether
to attack, retreat or hold their ground. And
because of this absolute paralysis at the top,
Sheffer Boydell pulls off the impossible. His
63 year old retired general manages to march
his entire trapped corps right through the Russian
lines. And he doesn't just escape. No. The sources
say he brought his wounded with him. He dragged
out 12 ,000 Russian prisoners that he had captured
while he was surrounded, and he even hauled away
64 captured Russian artillery pieces. It is the
great escape of World War One. It is a stunning
tactical achievement, but it leaves us with a
fascinating, almost contradictory strategic outcome.
Historians often debate who actually won the
Battle of Yodu. How is it a debate? The Germans
escaped a trap and took prisoners. Doesn't that
make it a German victory? Tactically, you could
argue it was a Russian victory. The Russian army
successfully recognized the double -envelopment
trap, rushed reinforcements to the sector, broke
the German encirclement, saved their second army
from being destroyed, and avoided suffering another
Tannenberg -level disaster. The German 9th Army
failed to destroy the Russians. Oh, I see. But
the original Russian plan? Exactly. Strategically,
it was a massive, decisive victory for the German
Empire. Why? Because the original Russian objective,
that massive invasion of the German industrial
heartland of Silesia, was permanently derailed.
They stopped the invasion. The sheer chaos and
heavy casualties of the battle forced the Russians
to abandon the offensive and fall back to more
defensible lines closer to Warsaw. The Russian
army never threatened deep German soil so closely
for the rest of the entire war. The German preemptive
strike achieved its ultimate strategic goal even
if the tactical execution devolved into freezing
chaos. It's deeply unsettling when you try to
visualize the reality of maneuver warfare on
the Eastern Front. No static trenches to hide
in. Just millions of men stumbling into each
other in freezing fog where the lines between
attacker and defender dissolve instantly. It's
a nightmare. But as 1914 bleeds into 1915, this
rapid maneuver warfare begins to grind to a halt
in certain sectors. And the consequences of that
halt were arguably even more horrific than the
chaos of Iudu. We are moving from the agility
of armies moving 80 trains a day to the agonizing
slow deaths of absolute stagnation. We are going
to look at the siege of Pridjiel. Pridjimiel.
represents a completely different nightmare.
It was a massive Austro -Hungarian fortress complex
located along the San River in what is now southeastern
Poland. Unlike the fast moving armies at Udu,
this was a stationary target. They weren't going
anywhere. And when the Russian armies advanced
through the region in the fall of 1914, they
didn't want to get bogged down in a costly urban
assault. So, they simply bypassed the fortress
and circled it with a ring of troops, cut off
all supply lines, and settled in to starve the
defenders out. This siege lasted for a staggering
133 days. It was the longest siege in Europe
during the entire First World War. To truly understand
the horror of Prismule, you have to understand
who was locked inside. Because it wasn't just
a military base. Inside this ring of Russian
steel, You had a sprawling garrison of 127 ,000
Austro -Hungarian soldiers. That's a massive
force. But you also had 18 ,000 civilians trapped
with them. And this garrison was a perfect tragic
microcosm of the Austro -Hungarian Empire itself.
The sources explicitly note that because the
empire was such a massive disjointed patchwork
of different nationalities and ethnicities, the
daily military orders within the fortress had
to be issued in 15 different languages. 15 languages.
Just pause and think about the sheer friction
that introduces to a chain of command. How does
an Austrian general efficiently convey a complex
defensive order down to a Hungarian colonel who
passes it to a Polish captain who has to give
it to a squad of Ukrainian or Romanian peasant
conscripts? It's a recipe for disaster. The potential
for mistranslation, confusion, and deep -seated
suspicion was woven into the very fabric of their
army. And as the siege dragged on from the autumn
of 1914 to the bitter winter and into the spring
of 1915, that friction ignited. Whatever initial
patriotic fervor existed at the start of the
war completely evaporated. As the food supplies
dwindled, the multi -ethnic society inside the
fortress began to aggressively devour itself.
They turned on each other. We aren't just guessing
about this, either. We have primary sources.
The sources point out that surviving diaries
from people trapped inside paint a devastating
picture of civil and moral collapse. The diary
of Dr. Joseph Toman is particularly harrowing.
He was an Austrian junior doctor, a medical officer
serving in the fortress hospitals. His entries
are not the stoic, heroic accounts you expect
from wartime propaganda. They are dripping with
absolute disgust, primarily aimed at his own
superior officers. The sources say he writes
about the hospital system, which was completely
overwhelmed. They were dealing with typhus, cholera,
and rampant malnutrition. To cope, the military
administration began recruiting local teenage
girls from the civilian population to work as
nurses. The military offered them 120 crowns
a month and, crucially, free meals. Free food
during a starvation siege. In a starting city,
that is an offer you cannot refuse. But the sources
note, Thoman explicitly, furiously writes in
his diary that these young girls were essentially
being drafted into institutionalized exploitation.
He writes that they were primarily there to be
used by the officers. The medical realities he
recorded reflect the moral decay. Toman documents
the explosive spread of venereal diseases, syphilis
and gonorrhea running rampant through the officer
corps and the newly recruited nursing staff.
He refers to his own superiors as pestilent pigs
in their spotless uniforms. Pestilent pigs. He
was furiously noting that while the enlisted
men and the civilians were literally starving
in the streets, the officers were hoarding what
little high -quality food remained and exploiting
desperate young women. It is a complete breakdown
of military discipline and basic human decency.
And that class and moral divide is echoed in
another incredible source provided here, the
diary of Helena Jablonska. She was a wealthy,
middle -aged Polish woman living inside the city.
Her diary gives us a window into the civilian
nightmare. And the sources point out it exposes
the visceral, ugly anti -Semitism that rapidly
boiled to the surface as the society collapsed.
Yes, the source material explicitly documents
how she blamed others. Jablonska's diary is difficult
to read, but historically vital. As the caloric
intake of the city plummeted, the black market
thrived. Jablonska, writing from a position of
relative privilege, complains bitterly and constantly
about Jewish merchants in the city. She outright
accuses them of hoarding supplies and malicious
price gouging. She essentially scapegoats the
Jewish population for the structural failure
of the Austro -Hungarian military logistics.
And that simmering hatred has a brutal, horrific
climax in the texts. In March 1915, the garrison
is finally broken. They have eaten all the cavalry
horses. They have eaten the stray dogs and cats.
Everything was gone. The commander, General Herman
Kuzmanek, orders the destruction of the fortress's
own artillery, so the Russians can't use it.
And on March 22nd, he officially surrenders the
city. Over 117 ,000 starving Austro -Hungarian
soldiers march out into captivity. But the tragedy
doesn't end with the surrender. When the Russian
Imperial Army, specifically the Tsarist Cossack
cavalry units, enter the fallen city, they bring
their own virulent anti -Semitism with them.
They find a city already fractured by ethnic
hatred, and they ignite it. The texts note Jablonska's
diary captures this exactly. The Cossacks unleash
a violent systemic pogrom against the Jewish
population of Przysztof. She coldly notes how
the confects deliberately waited until the Jewish
residents gathered at the synagogue for prayers
and then set upon them with whips and sabers,
beating them in the streets. It's awful. The
fact that she writes about this with an almost
detached, grim satisfaction just underlines how
deeply the societal rot had set in. The fortress
didn't just fall to Russian artillery. It collapsed
internally under the weight of starvation and
ethnic hatred. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, the physical isolation of those 133
days was absolutely absolute. The only way the
garrison communicated with the outside world
was by sending up unmanned paper balloons, hoping
the wind would carry them over the Russian siege
lines or by releasing carrier pigeons. But the
true horror of Przemysl isn't just what happened
inside the walls. It is what happened in the
mountains outside. You're talking about the relief
efforts. Yes. The chief of the Austro -Hungarian
General Staff was a man named Franz Conrad von
Hutzendorf. Conrad became strategically and psychologically
obsessed with breaking the siege. He viewed the
potential fall of Przemysl as a fatal blow to
the prestige of the Habsburg monarchy. He couldn't
let it go. So, throughout the brutal winter of
1914 and early 1915, he ordered offensive after
offensive. He hurled hundreds of thousands of
Austro -Hungarian soldiers against the Russian
lines in the frozen, treacherous terrain of the
Carpathian Mountains, desperately trying to punch
a hole through to the fortress. listeners to
brace themselves for this next number, because
when I read it in the source material I had to
stop and reread it to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.
The cost of Conrad's obsessive rescue attempts.
The Austro -Hungarian army suffered 800 ,000
casualties in the Carpathian winter offensive.
800 ,000 men. It is a casualty figure that defies
human comprehension. Nearly a million men wiped
off the board in a matter of months. And the
most tragic aspect of this is that the vast majority
of those 800 ,000 casualties were not killed
by Russian bullets or artillery. They weren't.
No, they were killed by the environment. Conrad
ordered men to assault fortified mountain passes
in the dead of winter without adequate winter
clothing, without proper supply lines, and without
sufficient shelter. They died of severe frostbite,
exposure, typhus, and exhaustion. Entire battalions
simply froze to death in the snowdrifts. It is
a staggering monument to military incompetence.
To lose 800 ,000 men trying to save a fortress
of 120 ,000 men, it just breaks the brain. Historians
frequently refer to the Siege of Presimus as
Austria -Hungary's Stalingrad. The loss of the
garrison itself was a severe blow, but the loss
of those 800 ,000 men in the relief efforts fundamentally
broke the back of the Austro -Hungarian Imperial
Army. It broke them completely. From the spring
of 1915 onward, the Habsburg Empire ceased to
function as a truly independent military power.
Their army was so gutted by the Carpathians that
they had to rely entirely on the German Empire
to supply them, reinforce them, and essentially
command them for the remainder of the war. Presimal
was the wound that slowly bled the Empire to
death. That is just, it's an overwhelming amount
of human suffering caused by sheer logistical
and command failure. And as the years dragged
on as 1915 turned into 1916 with the bloody stalemates
of Verdun and the Somme, the armies of Europe
realized that neither freezing maneuver warfare
nor starving sieges were winning the war. They
needed a strategic breakthrough. They needed
something completely new. And on the Western
Front, they decided that the only way to break
the deadlock of the trenches was to fundamentally
engineer a new way of fighting. Which brings
us to the spring of 1917 and the Battle of Arras.
By early 1917, the strategic situation for the
Allies on the Western Front was bleak. The French
Army was exhausted and on the verge of mutiny.
The plan for 1917 was for the French commander,
Robert Nivelle, to launch a massive war -winning
offensive to the South. But to ensure the French
had a chance, the British Expeditionary Force
needed to launch a massive diversionary attack
further north, at the city of Arras. So it was
a distraction, essentially. The goal was to draw
the German reserves away from the French sector
and, if possible, punch a hole straight through
the German trench network. But to do that, the
British couldn't just rely on walking slowly
across no man's land. they needed to innovate.
And the scale of that innovation is breathtaking.
When we think of trenches, we think of ditches
dug six feet into the mud. But at Eras, the British
didn't just dig trenches, they built an entire
underground subterranean city. A literal city
underground. The city of Eras is built on a foundation
of chalk. For centuries, going back to the Roman
era, people had quarried this chalk, leaving
a vast network of ancient, disconnected caves
beneath the city. The British military realized
the potential of this they brought in specialized
mining units Primarily the New Zealand tunneling
company men who knew what they were doing men
who had spent their civilian lives digging gold
and coal mines in New Zealand and Tasked them
with secretly connecting these ancient caves
into a massive continuous underground staging
ground The engineering logistics are phenomenal.
The New Zealanders working alongside British
and working class bantams. Bantams. Yes, soldiers
who are traditionally too short to meet the height
requirements of the regular army but were perfect
for tunnel work. They dug over 12 miles of subways.
They carved out an underground labyrinth capable
of hiding 24 ,500 allied troops. And it wasn't
just a dark damn cave. They fully modernized
it. They ran electrical cables to provide lighting.
They piped in fresh running water. They built
fully functioning underground hospitals with
operating theaters. They even laid down miniature
railway tracks so they could use hand -drawn
tramways to quietly move thousands of tons of
ammunition and high explosives right up to the
front lines without ever being exposed to the
surface. Brilliant. It was a secret city. designed
to protect the assault force from the devastating
German artillery bombardments that usually decimated
troops massing in surface trenches before an
attack. It provided a massive tactical advantage.
The German military also had mining units, but
they were completely outmatched in the air sector
by the allied tunnelers. The element of surprise
on the ground was secured. However, to make the
ground assault work, the British needed absolute
superiority in the air, which was a problem.
They needed airplanes to fly over the German
lines, map out the artillery positions using
aerial photography, and spot targets for the
British guns. But the airspace over Eris in April
1917 was arguably the most lethal environment
in the world. Yes, the infamous Bloody April.
This is where the grim reality of rapid technological
advancement rears its head. The Royal Flying
Corps was tasked with this vital reconnaissance,
but they were flying aircraft that were technologically
obsolete compared to what the Germans were putting
in the sky. The British were flying planes like
the BE -2, which was a staple, slow, two -seater
reconnaissance plane. It was great for taking
photographs, but it was basically a sitting duck
in a dog fight. And waiting for them was the
German Lissstreitkraftus, specifically the elite
hunting squadrons like Jasta 11, commanded by
a man who needs almost no introduction, Manfred
von Richthofen, the Red Baron. The Red Baron
himself. We mentioned his cavalry uncle earlier,
but Manfred had transferred to the air service
and he, along with his pilots, were flying the
new Albatross D III fighters. These planes had
twin synchronized machine guns that fired directly
through the propeller arc. They were faster,
heavier armed and more maneuverable. It was an
absolute slaughter. The Juran fighters decimated
the Royal Flying Corps. The British commanders
knew their planes were inferior, but the strategic
need for aerial photography to support the infantry
attack was so critical that they simply ordered
the pilots to keep flying, accepting the horrific
losses. The statistics from Bloody April are
dishelling. They really are. The average life
expectancy of a new British pilot arriving in
the Aerith sector in April 1917 was just 18 hours
of flight time. 18 hours. It's hard to fathom.
They were taking teenagers fresh out of flight
school in England with barely a dozen hours of
solo flying and throwing them straight into a
meat grinder against seasoned German aces. It's
heartbreaking. But despite the total loss of
air superiority, the British commanders pushed
forward with the ground assault. And the artillery
plan they devised was revolutionary. Because
they had realized that simply bombing the enemy
trenches for a week straight didn't work. It
just churned the ground into impassable mud and
gave the enemy plenty of warning to bring up
reserves. So they changed tactics. Instead, at
Arris, they perfected the creeping barrage. Can
you explain how this creeping barrage actually
works? Because the timing required seems impossibly
dangerous to me. The Creeping Barrage is a masterpiece
of lethal choreography. Instead of just firing
at the enemy trenches, the artillery fires continuous
curtain of high explosives and shrapnel into
no man's land, landing roughly 100 meters in
front of their own advancing infantry. Every
minute or so, the artillery gunners meticulously
adjust their elevation, lifting the barrage and
moving it forward another 50 meters. The infantry
is trained to walk literally right behind this
wall of exploding shells. So you have thousands
of men walking slowly across a muddy field while
their own artillery is dropping high explosives
of football field away from their faces. If an
artillery crew mathematically miscalculates the
wind or the powder charge by a fraction of an
inch, they are dropping shells directly onto
the heads of their own men. Exactly. It required
immense discipline from the infantry to stay
close to the barrage and immense mathematical
precision from the gunners. The goal of the creeping
barrage wasn't necessarily to kill the Germans
in their deep dugouts. it was to force them to
keep their heads down. The barrage rolls over
the trench and before the German defenders can
climb up the stairs from their deep bunkers to
man their machine guns, the British infantry
is already standing on the lip of the trench
looking down at them. But a barrage is only effective
if it can clear the obstacles in front of the
trench, specifically the dense belts of barbed
wire. And this is where another massive technological
leap comes in. In previous battles, like the
Somme, the British artillery had fired millions
of shells, but the shells had delayed action
fuses, so they would plunge deep into the soft,
churned -up mud before exploding. Which just
threw geysers of dirt into the air. It didn't
destroy the barbed wire sitting on the surface,
it just tangled it worse. The infantry would
advance expecting a clear path and find impenetrable
walls of wire waiting for them, and they would
be massacred by machine gun fire. To solve this
at Arras, the British mass produced a terrifyingly
simple innovation. the known 10A6 fuse. Instead
of a delayed timer, the number 106 had a highly
sensitive striker plate projecting from the nose
of the shell. It was designed to detonate instantaneously
upon the absolute slightest impact. If it hit
the ground, it exploded. If it brushed against
a strand of barbed wire, it exploded above ground.
This created a horizontal blast of shrapnel that
literally vaporized the German wire entanglements,
leaving clear paths for the infantry. The combination
of the subterranean surprise, the creeping barrage,
and the No. 106 fuse created a perfect storm
for the opening day of the battle. Zero Hour
was set for 5 .30 a .m. on April 9, 1917. And
once again, as we saw at Odoo, weather plays
a critical, chaotic role. The weather again.
It was freezing cold and a heavy squall of sleet
and snow was blowing from the west. This meant
the wind was blowing the snow directly into the
faces of the German defenders, blinding them
while pushing at the backs of the advancing British
and Canadian troops. The initial assault is a
spectacular shock that tens of thousands of troops
hiding in the subterranean caves burst out onto
the surface. The creeping barrage rolls forward,
vaporizing the wire. The blinded German troops
are completely caught off guard. The historical
accounts of that morning are incredible. They
really are. Because the bombardment was so sudden
and effective, British troops captured hundreds
of German soldiers who were still half dressed,
scrambling up the stairs of their deep dugouts.
Some Germans were captured without their boots,
stuck knee deep in the freezing mud trying to
run away in their socks. It was a massive initial
triumph. The Canadian Corps famously executed
a brilliantly coordinated assault on the northern
flank, capturing the heavily fortified heights
of Vivini Ridge in a single day. An achievement
that is still celebrated as a defining moment
of Canadian national identity. The success on
the first day wasn't just due to shock and awe.
The British infantry themselves had evolved.
They weren't fighting the same way they fought
at the Somme a year earlier. The British High
Command had analyzed their failures and issued
a new revolutionary training manual known as
SS -143. Which fundamentally changed the structure
of the infantry platoon. Can you break down why
SS -143 was such a big deal? Before 1917, the
standard British infantry tactic was to advance
in rigid, long lines of riflemen. The idea was
to overwhelm the enemy with a continuous wave
of bayonets and rifle fire. But a single machine
gun can mow down a rigid line in seconds. SS
-143 abolished the rigid line. It decentralized
command down to the platoon level, giving junior
officers and sergeants the autonomy to make tactical
decisions on the fly. That's a huge shift in
doctrine. More importantly, it changed the composition
of the platoon. A platoon was no longer just
30 guys with rifles. It was divided into four
specialized interdependent sections. You had
a section equipped with a Lewis gun, a portable
drum fed light machine gun that one or two men
could carry. You had a section of rifle grenadiers
who could launch explosives in a high arc. You
had a section of hand bombers trained to clear
trenches with hand grenades. And finally, a section
of traditional riflemen. So how does that specialization
change a firefight? Let's say this new platoon
encounters a surviving German machine gun nest
in a ruined farmhouse. What do they do? In 1915
they would have been ordered to charge it and
probably died. In 1917, under SS 143, they execute
fire and maneuver. The Lewis gun section drops
down and lays down a heavy base of suppressing
fire, forcing the German gunners to keep their
heads down. While the enemy is pinned, the rifle
grenadiers launch explosives over the walls.
Meanwhile, the hand bombers and riflemen use
the terrain to infiltrate around the flanks,
creeping up on the blind sides of the bunker.
It's a coordinated team. Once they are close
enough, they throw hand grenades through the
firing slits and clear the position. It is small
unit combined arms tactics. The manual taught
them to leapfrog past resistance, flowing around
strong points like water to keep the momentum
of the attack going. So the British have completely
overhauled their approach. They have underground
logistics, instantaneous feases, creeping barrages,
and specialized economist platoons. It sounds
like they have finally solved the riddle of trench
warfare. But the Germans aren't just sitting
there passively taking the punches, they are
actively studying the war too. And during Eris,
The German High Command is undergoing a massive,
violent, doctrinal crisis of their own on how
to defend against these new tactics, right? Exactly.
The German military was deeply divided in early
1917. The commander of the German Sixth Army
defending Eris was General Ludwig von Falkenhausen.
He was a traditionalist. He firmly believed in
a rigid, unyielding frontline defense. His philosophy
was that every single inch of German -held territory
was sacred and must be defended to the death.
hold at all costs. He packed his infantry densely
into the forward trench lines telling them to
hold at all costs. Crucially, he kept his reinforcement
divisions, his reserves, up to 15 miles behind
the front lines so they wouldn't get hit by artillery.
Which, against the new British tactics, proved
to be catastrophically obsolete. Precisely. Because
Falkenhausen packed his men into the front lines,
the British creeping barrage and the No. 106
fuses simply vaporized them. And because his
reserves were 15 miles away, by the time they
received orders to march forward, The British
had already broken through, captured the trenches,
and set up their own machine guns. The reserves
arrived exhausted, marching through mud and artillery
fire only to be cut down. But there was an alternative
theory of defense circulating in the German high
command, championed by a very influential staff
officer named Colonel Fritz von Loosberg. Loosberg
saw what happened on the first days of Eris,
and he forcefully argued that Falkenhausen's
rigid front line was suicide. He had a completely
different vision. I want to dig into Losberg's
theory because it seems completely counterintuitive
to military tradition. He championed a concept
called defense in depth. Can you explain this
to me? Because the core idea of defense in depth
is that you voluntarily give up ground to the
enemy, right? Wouldn't telling your army, hey,
we're just going to let them capture our front
line completely destroy the morale of soldiers
who had bled for years to hold that mud? It was
highly controversial, and it required immense
psychological discipline from the troops. Losberg
argued that trying to hold a thin, rigid line
against modern massed artillery was impossible.
It was like trying to stop a tidal wave with
a brick wall. The wall will shatter. Instead,
Losberg proposed building a defense that acted
like a sponge. A sponge. He abolished the idea
of a single, heavily manned front line. Instead,
he organized the defense into deep zones. The
very front, facing no man's land, was designated
the outpost zone. It was very lightly held, just
a few scattered machine gun nests and snipers
hiding in shell craters. Their job wasn't to
stop the British attack. Their job was simply
to break up the cohesion of the British platoons,
inflict some casualties, and slow them down.
So they're basically speed bumps. Exactly. Behind
the outpost zone, sometimes a mile or two back,
was the main battle zone. This is where the real
defense was. And crucially, Lowesburg placed
the main battle zone on the reverse slopes of
hills. Reverse slopes. This meant that British
artillery observers looking from their own lines
couldn't see the German bunkers. They couldn't
accurately target them. The genius of defense
in depth relies on exhaustion and friction. You
let the British attack. They easily overrun the
lightly held outpost zone. They cheer, thinking
they have broken the line. But as they advance,
they move out of range of their own supporting
artillery. They are dragging heavy Lewis guns
through miles of churned up mud. They are exhausted,
their command structure is confused, and they
are disorganized. And right when the British
are at their absolute most vulnerable, exhausted,
disorganized, and without artillery cover, they
crest the hill and slam into the untouched German
main battle zone. Yes. And that is exactly when
Losburg unleashed the final lethal component
of his system, the Eingreif divisions. These
were fresh, highly trained, fully equipped counterattack
divisions. Unlike Falkenhausen, who kept his
reserves 15 miles away, Losburg kept his Eingreif
divisions hidden just behind the main battle
zone, ready to spring. Waiting in the wings.
The moment the exhausted British attack bogged
down, the Eingreif divisions would surge forward
in a massive coordinated counterattack, hitting
the disorganized British and violent pushing
them all the way back to their starting lines.
It's an incredibly brutal mathematical approach
to warfare. You are trading space for time and
absorbing the enemy's energy until they collapse.
And we see this play out in real time at Eris.
Because Falkenhausen kept his reserves too far
away on April 9th, The British made those spectacular
historic gains on the first two days. They took
Vimy Ridge. They advanced miles deep into the
German lines. But then Lohsberg arrives. Right.
When the German Supreme Command Ludendorff realized
the disaster that was unfolding, he fired Volkenhausen's
chief of staff. He immediately dispatched Colonel
von Lohsberg to the air sector with emergency
dictatorial powers over the defense. Lowesburg
arrived, immediately implemented defense in depth,
brought the Eingriff divisions forward, and the
British advance simply slammed into a brick wall.
The battle raged on for over a month, grinding
into mid -May, but the initial spectacular momentum
of those first two days was completely lost.
So what does this all mean? The British implemented
a subterranean city, perfect artillery fuses,
and decentralized platoon tactics. They achieved
the longest continuous advance on the Western
Front since the trench lines were dug in 1914.
They captured Vimy Ridge. But did they win? That's
the tragic question. The agonizing reality is
that they couldn't achieve a strategic breakthrough.
Losberg's defense and depth proved that no matter
how perfectly you engineered the initial assault,
no matter how brilliantly your tunnelers worked
or your gunners aimed, a disciplined enemy could
absorb the punch, stretch your supply lines,
and hit back with fresh reserves. It was a tactical
stalemate. The final human cost of this technological
duel is sickening. The British suffered nearly
158 ,000 casualties in just over a month. The
Germans lost roughly 120 ,000 to 130 ,000 men.
Nearly 300 ,000 human beings killed, maimed,
or missing, all to move the line on a map a few
miles east across a landscape of poisoned, churned
-up mud. The Battle of Arras proved that even
with maximum technological innovation, the tactical
stalemate of the Western Front was almost unbreakable.
It is a profoundly tragic testament to the overwhelming
supremacy of the defensive in 1917. The technology
to kill had far outpaced the technology to move.
However, the tactical lessons learned at Arras,
the decentralized small unit platoon tactics
of SS -143, and the elastic absorbing sponge
of Losberg's defense in depth would define how
armies fought for the rest of the war. Yes, it
set the standard. In fact, we see those exact
concepts perfectly mirrored and ironically flipped
in our final battle. We're going to see what
happens when the very tactics the Germans perfected
at Arras are used against their own allies to
destroy an empire. Which brings us to section
five, or rather our final theater of the war.
We are moving away from the mud of France and
heading south. We are traveling to June 1918
to the Italian front, specifically the second
battle of the Piave River. In Italy, this is
famously known as the Battaglia del Solstizio,
the Battle of the Solstice, and it represents
the final desperate gasping offensive of the
Austro -Hungarian Empire. The very end for them.
To give you the crucial context of why this battle
is so important, we have to look back a few months
to late 1917. The Italian army had suffered an
absolutely catastrophic, apocalyptic defeat at
the Battle of Caporetto. A combined German and
Austro -Hungarian offensive had shattered the
Italian lines. Caporetto wasn't just a defeat.
It was a total collapse of morale and structure.
The Italian army literally routed, fleeing in
a disorganized panic. They lost hundreds of thousands
of men, mostly as prisoners, and abandoned vast
stockpiles of artillery and supplies. They retreated
for miles and miles, finally stopping only when
they reached the natural geographic barrier of
the Piave River. The river was their last hope.
The Piave became the absolute last line of defense
protecting the heart of Italy. If the Austro
-Hungarians crossed the Piave, they marched directly
into Venice, Padua and Verona. Italy would be
knocked out of the war entirely. And the Central
Powers, Germany and Austria -Hungary desperately
need Italy out of the war. By June 1918, Germany
is launching its massive spring offensives on
the Western Front, trying to win the war before
the millions of fresh American troops can arrive
in force. The German High Command demands that
their Austro -Hungarian allies launch a massive
attack across the Piave to pin down the Italians
and ideally force a surrender, freeing up troops
to move to France. Emperor Karl of Austria -Hungary
agrees. But behind the scenes, the Austro -Hungarian
military leadership is tearing itself apart,
aren't they? The dysfunction in the Austro -Hungarian
High Command was paralyzing. You have an empire
fighting for its very survival, and its top generals
are engaged in bitter, petty rivalries. The chief
of the general staff, Arthur Arz von Strausenberg,
wanted a coordinated plan, but he was dealing
with Field Marshal Svetozar Borovich, who commanded
the southern sector near the coast, and our old
acquaintance from the frozen disaster at Przemyja,
Field Marshal Konrad von Huttsendorf. Konrad
again? Yes, Konrad, who commanded the northern
mountain sector. Borovich wanted to concentrate
all their forces for a single massive punch across
the lower river. Conrad, still driven by ego,
vehemently demanded that the main attack be launched
from his sector in the mountains aiming for the
Asiago Plateau. Because the high command lacked
the authority to impose a single vision, they
compromised in the absolute worst, most mathematically
foolish way possible. They split the difference.
They split the army. Instead of massing their
forces for a decisive breakthrough, they diluted
their strength, spreading their infantry and
artillery thinly along the entire length of the
riverfront, ordering a massive, rigid, simultaneous
frontal assault everywhere at once. It violated
every fundamental rule of concentration of force.
waiting for them on the opposite bank of the
river, is a completely revitalized Italian army.
After the disaster of Caporetto, the Italian
government fired their old, brutal commander,
Luigi Cadorna, and replaced him with a much more
pragmatic, intelligent general named Armando
Diaz. Diaz spent the winter completely overhauling
the Italian military. He improved rations, he
instituted better leave policies to repair morale,
but most importantly, he revolutionized Italian
tactics. And guess whose textbook he read? He
studied the Germans. Diaz implemented a brilliant
variation of the exact defense -in -depth tactics
that Colonel von Losberg had perfected against
the British at Arras. It is an incredible historical
irony. Diaz looks at the Piave River and abolishes
the old Italian doctrine of packing all his men
into a rigid trench line on the riverbank. He
knows that if the Austrians bombard a rigid line,
his men will die. Instead, he implements the
sponge. He leaves the riverbank lightly defended
by outpost troops. He constructs his main battle
zones further back, out of range of the initial
Austrian artillery. He gives his smaller units,
his platoons, and companies the autonomy to fight
flexibly, to fall back if necessary, and to counterattack
locally without waiting for orders from headquarters.
And crucially, Diaz understood the vital necessity
of the Eingrave divisions. He didn't just spread
his men out, he organized a massive, highly mobile,
central strategic reserve. He held back 13 fully
equipped divisions and he centralized a fleet
of 6 ,000 motor trucks. Six thousand trucks.
This meant that the moment the Austro -Hungarians
managed to cross the river and bog down in the
Italian defense in depth, Diaz could physically
rush tens of thousands of fresh troops in trucks
directly to the exact point of the breakthrough
to smash the exhausted attackers. So you have
the Austro -Hungarians repeating the arrogant,
rigid, wide front mistakes of 1915, marching
blindly into a modern, flexible elastic trap
designed in 1918. It was a disaster waiting to
happen. The battle begins on June 15. The Austro
-Hungarian artillery opens up, firing gas and
high explosives. And despite the sheer logistical
incompetence of their commanders, the individual
Austro -Hungarian soldiers fight with desperate
bravery. They actually manage to force crossings
across the Piave River in several locations.
They throw down pontoon bridges, paddle across
in boats, and carve out a bridgehead on the Italian
side. For a brief, terrifying moment, it looks
like the Italian line might crack. But Diaz's
defense in depth works exactly as designed. The
Austro -Hungarians push past the riverbank, but
they immediately lose momentum as they hit the
Italian main battle zones. The fighting is incredibly
fierce, devolving into brutal hand -to -hand
combat in the vineyards and ruined farmhouses
along the river. But because the Austro -Hungarians
spread their artillery too thin, they can't effectively
support their infantry. They become bogged down,
exhausted, and disorganized. And right at the
critical moment, when the Austro -Hungarians
are trapped on the Western bank, desperately
trying to push forward, nature steps in to deliver
the final lethal blow. The environment acts again.
We talked about the freezing fog at Udu and the
snow squalls at Eris. The weather at the Piave
River was arguably the most decisive environmental
intervention of the war. Massive rainstorms hit
the Alps to the north. This heavy rainfall, combined
with late spring snowmelt, surges down the mountains
and violently swells the Piave River. The river
essentially turns into a raging torrent overnight.
The water levels rise drastically, the current
accelerates, and it simply tears the Austro -Hungarian
logistical network apart. The flood waters violently
rip away the wooden pontoon bridges that the
Austro -Hungarians had painstakingly built to
cross the river. It creates a logistical nightmare
that is almost hard to fathom. Suddenly, you
have tens of thousands of Austro -Hungarian soldiers
who have crossed the river, fighting fiercely
against the Italians. But they look behind them
and their bridges are gone. The river is impassable.
They are completely hopelessly trapped. They
cannot receive artillery ammunition. They cannot
receive food or fresh water. They cannot evacuate
their mounting thousands of wounded soldiers.
And most terrifyingly, they cannot retreat. They
are pinned between a heavily armed, highly motivated
Italian army utilizing defense in depth on one
side and a raging flooded river on the other.
They are sitting ducks. The Italian artillery
commanders realize exactly what has happened.
They stop firing at the Austrian infantry and
focus every gun they have on the river crossings,
blasting any attempt by the Austrian engineers
to rebuild the bridges. The slaughter on the
riverbanks is absolute carnage. The historical
sources grimly note that as the Italian counterattacks
those mobile reserve divisions, DS had kept ready
and the trucks finally swept forward. Thousands
of panicked Austro -Hungarian soldiers drowned
in the flooded waters of the Piave, trying to
swim back to the eastern bank to escape the slaughter.
The battle is a decisive, annihilating victory
for Italy. The Austro -Hungarians are completely
pushed back across the river by June 23rd. And
the cultural footprint of this battle is massive.
It's famous for a few incredible pop culture
cameos that really anchor it in the 20th century
consciousness. For instance, there was an 18
-year -old American volunteer working for the
Red Cross driving an ambulance on the Italian
front during this period. He gets caught in the
fighting and gets severely wounded by an exploding
Austrian trench mortar shell, taking dozens of
pieces of shrapnel to his legs. He survives,
falls in love with his nurse in the Milan hospital,
and uses the profound trauma of the Italian front
to write one of the greatest novels of the 20th
century. That 18 -year -old was Ernest Hemingway,
and the experience directly inspired a farewell
to arms. It's a prime example of how the visceral
reality of this war birthed the modern literary
movement. We also see the intersection of war
and early mass propaganda. The famous Italian
nationalist poet Gabriele D 'Annunzio took to
the skies shortly after the battle. He actually
flew a daring long -range airplane mission all
the way over the Austrian capital of Vienna.
But he didn't drop bombs. He dropped hundreds
of thousands of propaganda leaflets written in
Italian and German, mocking the Austrian defeat
at the Piave and praising the invincible spirit
of the Italian army. It was a massive psychological
blow to an already crumbling empire. You can
feel that soaring, desperate Italian morale in
the artifacts left behind on the battlefield.
I was reading about the graffiti scrawled by
the Italian soldiers. On the ruined walls of
bullet -packed, destroyed rural farmhouses along
the river, these peasant conscripts wrote mottos
in charcoal and paint that are still preserved
in museums today. My absolute favorite, which
encapsulates the entire spirit of the Italian
defense, reads, It is better to live one single
day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.
You can literally hear the fierce defiance, the
absolute refusal to break in those words. That
defiance held the line, but it came at a terrible
cost to the attackers. This raises an important
question, one that historians grapple with constantly.
How much of global history is decided not by
grand strategy or diplomatic maneuvering, but
by sheer total physiological and psychological
exhaustion? That's a profound thought. The Second
Battle of the Piave River wasn't just a military
defeat. It was the structural and spiritual death
of the Austro -Hungarian Empire. They suffered
nearly 120 ,000 casualties in just over a week.
They expended the absolute last reserves of their
artillery, ammunition, and food. The morale of
their soldiers was completely obliterated. The
diverse nationalities within their army that
checks the Poles, the Hungarians, the Croats,
finally realized the empire was doomed and began
actively fracturing, with entire units refusing
orders or deserting. The realization of that
collapse echoed all the way up the chain of command,
right to the very top of the Central Powers.
It did. When Erich Ludendorff, the supreme commander
of the German military, who was currently bogged
down in his own failing offensives in France,
received the telegraph detailing the absolute
disaster at the Piave River, his reaction was
chilling. He later wrote in his memoirs that
upon hearing the news, he had the sensation of
defeat for the first time. The sheer scale of
the Austro -Hungarian collapse made it mathematically
clear to the German high command that the war
was lost. They no longer had an ally. They had
a collapsing corpse tethered to their southern
flank. The Austro -Hungarian Army essentially
disintegrated a few months later at the Battle
of Vitoria Veneto, and the First World War ended
shortly after. It is an incredible, sprawling,
terrifying narrative. Let's take a deep breath
and synthesize the immense ground we've covered
today because it has been a massive journey.
We started our deep dive by looking at the very
first naval airstrikes in human history launched
from primitive seaplane carriers against a besieged,
isolated German colony on the coast of China.
We covered so much. We then travel to Europe
to witness the freezing, chaotic, blind cat and
mouse breakouts in the blinding winter fogs of
Poland, where armies moved by train and fought
with unloaded rifles. We examine the horrifying
societal collapse, starvation, and ethnic violence
inside a polylot fortress in the east, and mourn
the 800 ,000 men who froze to death trying to
save it. We explore the desperate, highly engineered
subterranean cities carved out of chalk by New
Zealanders beneath the mud of France, where new
infantry tactics clash with the brutal logic
of defense in depth. And finally, we ended with
the flooded, raging rivers of Italy, washing
away the pontoon bridges, the logistics, and
ultimately the final remnants of a centuries
-old European empire. It's a lot to process.
When you take a step back and look at the First
World War through these five distinct, incredibly
detailed lenses, it completely shatters the illusion
of a single uniform war of static trenches. It
was not one type of conflict. It was a fluid,
terrifying global laboratory of human endurance,
rapid technological adaptation, and military
science. It absolutely was. And looking at the
sheer friction that defined every single one
of these engagements, I want to leave you with
a lingering concept to mull over long after you
finish listening. We've seen today how meticulous
military manuals, beautifully drafted railway
timetables, perfectly synchronized, creeping
artillery barrages and grand imperial strategies
constantly inevitably fell apart the exact moment
they met reality. Whether that friction was an
unexpected squall of snow at Arras, a freezing
fog bank in Poland, a suddenly flooded river
in Italy, or simply the absolute limit of human
exhaustion and starvation in Przemysl, the plan
never survives contact with the environment.
Never. So it makes you wonder, in our modern
era right now, where we rely so heavily on hyper
-advanced predictive algorithms, satellite intelligence,
AI targeting, and remote drone warfare, have
we actually eliminated that friction? Or are
we arrogantly fooling ourselves? Our modern military
is still just one unexpected extreme weather
event, one flooded river, or one massive communications
blackout away from experiencing the exact same
chaotic, uncontrollable collapse of the plan
that those soldiers experienced a century ago.
Wow. That is an incredibly sobering, chilling
thought to leave on. The technology of killing
changes rapidly, but the fundamental chaos and
friction of human conflict remains stubbornly
the same. Thank you so much for joining us on
this deep dive. We truly hope this journey into
the fringes and extremes of the conflict has
completely reframed how you view the First World
War. We want you to keep asking these hard questions,
stay insanely curious about the past, and always
remember that history is never as simple or as
neatly confined as the textbooks make it seem.
Until next time.