Sunday, December 18, 2016

Verdun

Today in 1916 marked the end of the Battle of Verdun. It's chalked up as a French victory because the Germans didn't achieve their strategic objectives, but with over 1 million casualties on both sides and nearly 300,000 killed over 10 months, it's a Pyrrhic victory at best.

The Germans attacked the French in the area of Verdun on 21 February 1916. The German objective was not to acquire territory (although that would have suited them just fine), but to defeat the French in a battle of attrition and cause so many casualties that the French would just give up. It would have worked except that the Germans vastly underestimated the French attachment to the area around Verdun. This area, in the northeast of France, was a natural corridor through which invasions had come since the Dark Ages. The French, starting in the 1880s had continually improved the fortifications in and around Verdun and were determined that no one would ever break through there again. The French were willing to throw in many of their reserve divisions in order to keep Verdun. They also took some lessons from the Germans and became much more proficient at defense in depth.

Verdun was in many ways a battle of artillery. Both sides used large numbers of artillery from small 75mm field guns up to 440mm siege weapons. During many assaults, both sides would regularly throw more than 1 million shells against their enemy in just a few days. Most of the casualties during the 10-month battle were the result of artillery.

For the first few months of the battle, from February through June 1916, the French were just hanging on. If the Germans had had more infantry and artillery their plan may have worked. But on 1 July 1916, the British and French attacked further north and west on the Somme River - a battle that would last 5 months and cause another 1 million casualties - and this caused the Germans to draw off both guns and troops from Verdun to bolster their defenses along the Somme. At this point the French began a series of offensives that gradually pushed the Germans back until the last offensive from 15 - 18 December settled the front roughly back where it was in February.

While Verdun was largely a stalemate in the end, it marked a turning point in strategies on both sides. For the first time the Germans used their newly trained stormtroopers to break through trenches and open holes in the French lines. The French, for their part, began perfecting the use of the creeping artillery barrage that would eventually be one of the ways to open up the Western Front and turn it from a static affair and back into a war of movement.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

The Kingsland (NJ) Fire and Explosion - Prelude, December 1916

The Kingsland (NJ) Explosion and Fire - Prelude

The Canadian Car and Foundry Company was based in Montreal, Canada and in early 1915 the company signed a contract with Russia for $83,000,000 to supply artillery shells for the Russian army. Because they didn’t have enough capacity at their Canadian plants for this contract and all their other war work, the company built an assembly plant in Kingsland, (now Lyndhurst) New Jersey.

The plant opened in the spring of 1916 and by early 1917 had 38 buildings on the site, all surrounded by a six-foot high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. All the employees entered and exited the plant through a single gate and searches were common. Explosives, shell casings, shell warheads, and fuses were shipped to the plant and assembled there and ultimately loaded on transports in New York harbor and shipped to Russia. By 1917 the plant could produce upwards of 3,000,000 shells per month.

Because of the security at the plant, Hinsch and Herrmann (two German spies based in Baltimore; they were also believed to be involved in the Black Tom Island explosion the previous summer) decided they needed operatives inside the plant itself. Hinsch had met a man named Carl Thummel, a German national who had emigrated to the United States in 1902. Using the name Charles Thorne, he had joined the U.S. Coast Guard in 1913; shortly after that he met Hinsch in Baltimore and they became friends. Thorne resigned from the Coast Guard in May 1916 and Hinsch began using him as a courier, sending him back and forth to England several times during the summer of 1916. In September 1916, Paul Hilken (head of the German spy network in Baltimore) arranged for Thorne to get a job as an assistant employment manager at the Canadian Car & Foundry plant in Kingsland. Thorne was responsible for hiring men who would be assembling shells and hired a number of men sent to him by Hinsch.

One of these men was Theodore Wozniak, an Austrian national. Wozniak was hired in December 1916. He met regularly with Fred Herrmann who was paying him for information on the Kingsland plant. Herrmann also gave Wozniak several pencil bombs. (chemical explosives hidden inside cast iron pipes with a copper plug between them. The thickness of the plug acted as a timer for the acid on one side. When the acid finally ate through the plug, the bomb would ignite.)

Wozniak’s job in Building 30 of the plant was to clean out newly arrived shell casings. The cleaning was a multi-step process, involving wiping out the shell casing, cleaning a coating of grease applied to the casing before shipping using rags soaked in gasoline and denatured alcohol, and then drying off the shell casings. There were forty-eight benches lined up side-by-side in Building 30 and the gasoline soaked rags piled up during a workers shift. Hermann and Wozniak continued to meet regularly through December 1916 and into January 1917 (to be continued).

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Voynich and Yale

Recently the Beinecke Library at Yale University has published a limited edition volume of facsimile's of the Voynich Manuscript (see http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/voynich-manuscript).

Blogger and excellent Voynich researcher Nick Pelling has written a blog post that links to a number of the reviews of the new volume. Nick, as always, has interesting things to say and also lists the links of the reviews. Enjoy!
http://ciphermysteries.com/2016/12/10/voynich-reviews-summarized