The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.
Click here to see the complete report.
The big push on the big screen of picture theatres across Great Britain in 1916
http://greatwarlondon.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/the-big-push-on-the-big-screen/
I’d like to see the numbers in such exhibits complemented so that using augmented reality on a Smartphone or Tablet you get to see the exhibit in situ, with commentary, even drama reconstruction.
Fig 1 Sketch of the movements of Corporal John Arthur Wilson, MCG, October 1917.
My grandfather drew a version of this in biro when in his 97th year; his eye-sight was very poor. I redrew it as you see, with him adding comment and annotations. Houthoulst Forrest is a bit out, there is a rail track and I haven’t drawn it strictly North-South.
From Haig’s despatches:
After the middle of October the weather improved, and on the 22nd October two successful operations, in which we captured over 200 prisoners and gained positions of considerable local importance east of Poelcappelle and within the southern edge of Houthulst Forest, were undertaken by us, in the one case by east-county and Northumberland troops (18th and 34th Divisions), and in the other by west-county and Scots battalions (35th Division, Major- General G. Mc. Franks) in co-operation with the French.
My goal, my pleasure, reliving stories he first started telling me on his knee after Sunday Lunch age 6 or so is tp be there with him, to time travel and by following closely in his footsteps survive as he did (just).
A scratch is all he suffered during the 1 1/2 years he was out there (April 1916 to December 1917).
Fig. 2. The silver ID bracelet Jack had made in Grantham. 13203. 104 MGC.
Courtesy of published maps and Google Earth I am gradually picking out the spots. In 1992 he attended the 75th anniversary of Passchendaele and marked the spots where he buried Dick Piper and Harry Gartenfeld. Even after those years, however ‘dull and featureless’ the landscape, and however broken it had been in his time, he was able to pick out the exact spot where these men died.
Is it feasible that the Jerry Prisoner who took can be identified? Handed over to Captain Blair in early October? Somewhere out by International Corner?
His papers came through at the end of December 1917, around the 27th I believe. A couple of officers gave him pictures of themselves, but who could this be?
Fig 3. A senior officer of the Machine Gun Corps who gave this picture to Corporal J A Wilson on 27th December 1917 as he headed home to train with the Royal Flying Corps.
Who is it?
‘After the middle of October the weather improved, and on the 22nd October two successful operations, in which we captured over 200 prisoners and gained positions of considerable local importance east of Poelcappelle and within the southern edge of Houthulst Forest, were undertaken by us, in the one case by east-county and Northumberland troops (18th and 34th Divisions), and in the other by west-county and Scots battalions (35th Division, Major- General G. Mc. Franks) in co-operation with the French’. Haig’s Despatch
NOTES
Scanning ‘The Road to Passchendaele’ John Terraine 1977 I am struck by the statement that has Haig wanting to take Passchendaele Ridge in order to have command of the open land to the east in order to use cavalry. Also Lord French’s criticism to the War Cabinet that Haig keeps making the same mistakes. From Birdwood ‘Khaki and Gown’ p 316.
British Army Maps:
The Military Medal awarded to Corporal John A Wilson ‘Jack’ in late 1917 while serving in the Machine Gun Corps during the Third Battle of Ypres. His journey through the trenches and up and down the Western Front is plotted in this blog, alongside his detailed memoir recorded when Jack (my grandfather) was in his 97th year.
Recorded on a Sony Digital recorder and will in due course be available as a podcast.
Transcript with the Imperial War Museum and author Lyn Macdonald who Jack joined at the 75th Anniversary of Passchendaele with a visit to the spots where he served and so many of his friends and colleagues died.
Jack Wilson, a Machine Gunner, served in Third Ypres going in against the French line north east of Ypres up to Houthulst Forrest. These panoramas and maps allow me, with his memoir, to track his movements. Stories he told me as a boy and visualised as a six or seven year old look very different on seeing the reality.
In 1992 Jack Wilson MM, a former Machine Gunner, visited the Western Front for only the second time in 75 years. (In 1919 he had gone to the grave of his younger brother Flight Lieutenant William Nixon Wilson ‘Billy’ who had died a few months AFTER Armistice delivering mail across Belgium in his RAF DeHavilland Bomber. He as only 19 or 20 a the time.
Here Jack is with the author Lynn Macdonald in front of the name of Gartenfeld, a fellow machine gunner who Jack had seen die in late October 1917 out on the edge of the Passchendaele Front; later this day he finds the spot where he ‘buried’ both Gartenfeld and Dick Piper.
A studio photo taken soon after joining the Durham Light Infantry, March 1915 before transfer to the Machine Gun Corps or ‘Suicide Squad’
This picture used in the Consett local paper when Jack Wilson was awarded the Military Medal
(This photograph from a faded original cutting from the paper originally kept by Jack’s mother Sarah Wilson nee Nixon)
