>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:19 >> Paulette Hasier: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for coming to the Phillip Lee Phillips lecture that we're having today on World War I. My name is Paulette Hasier. I am the Chief of the Geography and Map Division going on four months at the end of this week. So, I'm very pleased to introduce our moderator for the event, and that will be Mr. Dick Pflederer and he will come up. Thank you again. ^M00:00:43 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:47 >> Richard Pflederer: We appreciate that invitation, and also the reference to the Phillips Society. I'm curious to know if we have any members of the Phillips Society present here. Raise your hand please? Wow, good. Well, before we get into actually discussing the program, I wanted to take just a minute to talk about the society. If you signed it outside and you're not a member already, you may get an email because we are always looking for members. A brief history: The society has been in action for more than 20 years. Our goal is to support the G and M Division of the library, both financially and with programs such as this. And we hope that you will take a minute to look at the materials we have outside. I'm just going to hold up one card which is of particular interest to me because that's the one you get to put an envelope with your check if you want to do that. I'll also tell you that that is optional. That is not a requirement of membership to make a donation. But we want to see as many people at these lectures. We want to see as many people utilizing the facilities. Okay, with that behind us, I want to talk about today's program. And we're really lucky for a couple of reasons, mostly that we have two great speakers. Before I introduce the speakers, I wanted to just give a word about the subject, World War I. You may know that the US officially entered that war 100 years ago last month, so we're looking at an event that is, for us who are maybe a little bit older, it's not so long ago, but for the young people it's something like -- It's like the Civil War was when I was a kid, as far as that far distance in the past. You probably know that we had the so-called American Expeditionary Force under the leadership of General John Pershing. And it took us a while to get, let's say, fully mobilized. In fact, it's about a year before we actually achieved a headcount on the ground in Europe of 1 million people. But by November 1918, when the war ended of course, we were pouring, literally pouring resources into that Western front, 10,000 new American faces every day are on the ground. So, you know, we're going to hear a speaker later who was British and we can't even measure the impact that that war and the sacrifices that they made had on Britain. And of course, France was probably even worse. So, I promise to keep the so-called overhead of today's session as short as I could. And I wanted to start by introducing our first speaker, Mr. Ryan Moore, who is a member of the staff of the G and M Division, and I want to give a little bit of background about him. He's quite active as an author. In fact, there's also a copy of an occasional paper that he's authored, which is out there which is available, I guess, for anyone who doesn't have it who wants to take it. But Ryan's education is quite interesting. He has an undergraduate degree from Cleveland State University and he has two advanced degrees, one from Kent State in Library Science and the other from Cleveland State University in History. Before coming to the Library of Congress, he had worked for four years in the Special Collections of the Cleveland Public Library, which is quite a substantial library, and he's been in the Library of Congress here for just about 10 years now. His subject is the maps of World War I, and he's going to look at the way that maps illustrated the military, yes, but also the political facets of the war. He's also going to discuss aerial photography, the scouting, and also an interesting sideline I hadn't thought of, and that is how did the interviews of prisoners -- German prisoners in this case -- affect the content, the detail, that was on the US maps of that period. So, without any further ado, we will ask Ryan to come up here and give his talk. ^M00:05:14 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:26 >> Ryan Moore: Thank you very much for the introduction. And before I begin, I've always reminded to say please and thank you. I think it's the appropriate thing to always begin with please and end with a thank you. And so, I'm pleased to thank all of you. I want to start by thanking Dr. Abear who is here. When I first came to G and M, encourage me to go beyond my interest in World War II, and look at World War I. And his advice was just to the point. He said, "That World War II field is too crowded. Look at something else." And he was right. It's a great field of study and it's something that I am very interested in, but broadening one's horizons with these great collections that we have here at the library has been a wonderful experience for me. Ralph Ehrenberg, who is also here -- When I worked under him when he was Chief of Division when he returned, we worked together on the Phillips Society in reenergizing the occasional papers and getting people to start to actively write about our collections and promote them through that research. It was a great time to work with him and a pleasure to be part of that process. And now we have Chief Hasier who was with us. She comes from a background NGA, National Geo Special Intelligence Agency, and she's bringing new ideas about technology, and it's an exciting time to be in the division. I'm glad that all three of these Chiefs can be here at one time. It's a great day. So at that being said, I would like to begin my talk. The Library of Congress intersected with World War I with the publication of A List of Atlases and Maps Applicable to World War I (1918) authored by Phillip Lee Phillips, the namesake of our organization. Phillips was the first superintendent of maps at the Library of Congress. He compiled a list of maps -- political maps, road maps, railroad maps were printed contemporaneous to this event. So, these were ways that people could find information about what countries looked like, what the situation on the ground may be, because what media was available at that time? Photographs, maps, the written word. There was not video, instant video, Twitter feeds today that would inform us. So, this resource was very valuable for not only the common researcher but for policymakers. What I plan to talk about today, as Mr. Pflederer mentioned, is I'm going to mention maps that illustrate the history of the war. So, the storytelling piece. When the general public wanted to know what was going on, how is this information conveyed to them? A second part of my discussion will entail an overview of the relationship between maps, intelligence gathering, primarily photographs but also prisoners' statements, and how that affected the use of weapons, primarily artillery. And lastly, I'm going to close was showing some maps that describe the process of peace and how that was related to Germany and how that sort of was an omen for the next war. So, you're all probably familiar with this story, this estimation of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia by Gavrilo Princip, down there in the lower corner. They were visiting Sarajevo and he was essentially there to review the maneuvers of some troops, and he had taken a tour through the city. Princip and his associates were funded and supplied with weapons by a group called the Black Hand. They had a relationship with Serbian intelligence and possibly higher elements in the Serbian government. It's still in dispute today how high up that may have gone. But nonetheless, they were given weapons and transported into Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Princip and his associates lined this road here along the [Inaudible] River, waiting for Ferdinand's possession to come by. They fanned out along the road with the idea being that, "Well, if you don't have a good shot at him, let him go by. The next person will take a shot at him." So what happens is the entourage passes and one of the assassins throws a bomb out onto the road. It doesn't land under the Archduke's car, but one of his secretary's cars, and those folks are injured by the blast. The Archduke goes to the town hall and protests about the situation. He is advised to leave because they say, "Well obviously, there was an attempt on your life. You should get out of here as soon as possible. We can't ensure your security." Well, before leaving they want to check on the injured parties and then depart from the city. Princip, while this is happening, he's 19 and 20, it depends. There was a dispute about his age as well at the time. And he is dejected because he is a very ardent Bosnian Serb nationalist. He wants to see the Archduke killed. The reason being is that this guy has some liberalizing ideas about the Empire. They want to give their constituent groups more autonomy. His group feels, "Well, if you give Bosnian Serbs more autonomy that may steal the thunder of the Pan-Serbian movement, and we want people radicalized, not pacified." So he's sitting in a café feeling dejected. And then what happens is they come back down from the City Hall to this area here where this arrow is. The driver makes a wrong turn. Princip can't believe his eyes. There's the Archduke sitting in a car several feet in front of him. He immediately gets up, pulls a pistol out of his jacket, walks up to the side rail and fires, and hits the Archduke and his wife Sophia. The Archduke implores his wife, "Sophia, please live for the children." They have several children together. Princip, he is supposed to commit suicide. All the assassins actually are supposed to commit suicide after they make an attempt. He has been given a cyanide pill which he takes and it doesn't work. He attempts to put the gun to his head, and security wrestles it from his hand. He will wind up in Austrian prison and died in 1916. He has tuberculosis at the time that he commits this assassination. He will languish in a prison cell and die. So the question always is, how do we go from this event to a world war? And the stars like Margaret McMillan, for example, The Road to War, discusses at length. And I encourage anyone who is very curious about all the particular political details that go into the making of the First World War to dig into books such as that. So at the outset of the conflict, we have a couple of countries lining up together because they have diplomatic agreements. The countries in pink -- France, Russia, and England, although England is a slight technicality here which I'll mention -- is that they agreed to a mutual defense pact. England has agreed in principle, and their militaries have discussed plans of mutual defense should it be necessary, but they are not a signatory towards any defense pact. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy also have a mutual defense pact. What the Austro-Hungarians wanted to do is they want to invade Serbia. Well, Russia says, "If you invade Serbia --" And they consider Serbia, it's been said, is the little brother of Russia. It's not a pejorative term. It's sort of a very familial term in that part of the world. They said, "If you attack here, we'll attack here." The Austro-Hungarians then turned to the Germans for help. They said, "We can't defend the Russians and attack Serbia at once. We don't have enough troops." So, this is where our complication begins, with the Germans, and this is how we get a world war. And I'm going to skip forward and explain that and come back to all the belligerents in a second. There's something called the von Schlieffen plan. The Germans said, "Our big enemies are France and Russia." Now, if Russia mobilizes against Austria-Hungary over this Serbia issue, that means France will mobilize too. If they mobilize their troops first, they have a distinct advantage of us if we wait. So we must mobilize. But the problem with mobilization in Germany is this von Schlieffen plan. It's been kept a secret since 1905, when it was first conceived and later revised through the years. And what it said was Germany has to strike first to win. We're fighting two major powers, France and Russia. What we want to do is hold the Russians at bay with a small amount of forces as possible, put the bulk of our forces against France and to march through Belgium and to take Paris and knock the French out of the war. In six weeks this has to be done. And this is a time when soldiers primarily move my walking, okay. So they're going to have to march 20 miles a day to make this happen, if not more. So they tell the Kaiser, they said, "Russia is angling for war. We have to mobilize. And by the way, if we mobilize, we must fight because that reveals a secret plan. Because we move troops to the front, they know what our intentions are. We have to fight." So to go back here for a second, so that will expand the war eventually. By 1917, the United States will enter the war, and we see our former President Wilson here. And this map was one of the many educational maps that were printed at the time to inform the public what was going on. It compares the area of Europe here inside the continental United States to sort of explain to the everyday American how big and powerful our country is, it's suggesting, and all these countries fit within our borders. It's telling who are the Allies, America, and a lot of people are surprised to learn that the Japanese Empire was an ally, a very important ally in World War I. They, in fact, were responsible for patrolling the Pacific and protecting commercial and troop transports moving from Australia, New Zealand, and India to the Western front. The British had stripped most of their ships as well as the French to affect the blockade against the Germans. So the Japanese were a very key ally in the First World War, as was Italy, Great Britain, France who bore the bulk of the fighting and suffered the highest level of casualties, and of course, Great Britain and Canada. And there were other minor countries supporting the war effort as well. The Central Powers were not as international. These countries were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire -- these countries in black. These individuals over here, the Kaiser of Germany, the Kaiser of Austria-Hungary, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and the Czar of Bulgaria. They believed that their location in proximity to one another would allow them to have a strong common core defense, and could move troops wherever they needed them by rail -- which I'm going to discuss next -- to fight the Allies. They were able to mobilize 22.8 million military personnel, and if I can jump back and show you that the Allies were much stronger, 42.2 million military personnel. In addition to people who are fighting, the Allies though also were materially richer, bigger factories, more natural resources, greater shipping industry to move the stuff around. ^M00:20:14 So, it was important for the Central Powers then got to get involved in a long protracted war because they did not have the resources to contend with such might. So the Germans -- going back to the von Schlieffen plan -- had a strategic rail network in the country, and this allowed them to rapidly move forces from here, the Eastern front of the Western front and vice versa. German staff officers were charged with plotting how long it would take for a given troop unit to move from one front to another, and they would practice these and memorize these schedules, because timing was very important, the delivery of the troops to the front had to be done at a precise time. Once the von Schlieffen plan was given the go-ahead, they couldn't have some troops there ready to go, waiting around for others. They had to all be in place. And the Germans built these mile-long rail platforms so they could take troops on and off the trains as rapidly as possible. And when these things were going up, the Belgians in particular on the border noticed this. Like their intelligence service said, "Hey, we're spotting these mile-long rail platforms and these sort of country towns on the border. What's going on? Either big real estate investment in the future or it smells like a possible war is brewing." And they were very concerned about that. So, my me to use a pictorial map to sort of explain to you the opening phases of the war. This comes from a French publication, and we see Falkenhayn giving the uppercut to Joffre. And the Germans were initially very successful in marching through Belgium and portions of France. The Belgians, although they were a neutral country, they were very powerful, and they punched above their weight because they had vast resources coming in from the Congo. And if you ever heard of the novel, "The Heart of Darkness," it was about the Belgian Congo. And King Leopold II had a secret private empire in the Congo where he became very personally wealthy, and the entire country Belgium became very wealthy. And so therefore, with this money they were able to erect a series of fortifications along the border with Germany that they thought would stop any kind of invasion attempt. The problem was, the Germans invented these massive railroad guns that they would train in on the fort and just blast it. So once you build a fort, the problem with the fort is it can't move. Patton said it's a monument to the stupidity of mankind. Because once the enemy locates the fort, surrounds the fort, unless you can come to the aid of a fort, it will be lost eventually. So the Germans were able to smash through Belgium. And as they moved within reach of Paris, the Allies rallied their forces. At the First Battle of the Marne, they found that the Germans had exposed their flank, and they took advantage of this gap in the German armies, and they temporarily checked the German advance. There German said, "Okay, we're going to go around this, and started something called "the race to the sea." They weren't literally running to the sea, but they were trying to outflank another, the Germans and the Allies. And they went all the way up to the Belgian coast. And it culminated with the Battle of Ypres, where the Allies were again able to check the Germans. And at this time, the war is very fluid, it's very mobile. We think trenches, World War I. At this time, it's not trench warfare. They're fighting in open country. They're trying to get around one another and secure the best ground. And the Germans don't want to erect any kind of temporary fortification because they want Paris, they want to knock it out. And they get their troops over to the Eastern front to fight the Russians who are mobilizing. ^M00:24:53 ^M00:24:59 So the question in Germany became, in 1915 after all those opening moves, what's going on? Where does our Army stand in France? This is a commercial map published by Dietrich Reimer, a very famous German publishing house. Probably, you could say, it's akin to a Rand McNally, that kind of level of popularity. And they regularly published maps to show the situation on the ground. And these theater maps were very popular in Germany, and other countries had similar kind of mapping that was also very popular. What I've done here is I pulled this out over here for everyone, and I have annotated it here. This is the blue showing the German main movements through Belgium towards Paris, and also making a side thrust here into France. These areas in red were fortifications or major cities that they had to go through or bypass. So what happens is that the front starts to settle in 1915, in 1916. And the geography of this land in France here is that it's sort of gently rolling up this way. And the Germans are in a naturally elevated place over the Allies, and they decide that they're going to dig in here because the Russians have entered the war and they need to send some troops back to do with that. So they start to do trench lines all the way down to Switzerland, and the Allies will respond with their own countering set of trench lines along the way. The British were concerned what the Americans were thinking, because they viewed us as a potential ally to help deal with this crisis on the Western front. One means to educate Americans, and you could put that in quotes -- you know, you could use the word "propaganda" -- was to use a map. This map is by a publishing house called Stanford's of London, and it's showing the battlefronts of Europe and comparing it with traveling time that Americans could think, "Oh yeah, that makes sense to me. If the Western front is some 450 miles long, that's half the distance from New York to Chicago." So these kinds of maps helped an American audience digest not only what was going on, but sort of a geographic scale on which the fighting was occurring. ^M00:28:02 ^M00:28:07 And it's interesting what the map says here. Some of this language I know you can't see, but I want to share it with you. This is on the eve of America sending its troops into Europe. The US has decided to go to war, and the British mapmaker says this. It says. "Despite the victories which have crowned the Allied arms, their task still remains a heavy one, and it will need every effort which they and their American comrades can put into the struggle to defeat the sinister aims of Prussian militarism." And we will revisit this term "Prussian militarism" at the end of the talk. But what it alludes to is before Germany was a country, there was a very large state called Prussia. Frederick the Great, you may have heard the name -- They were kind of like a European ancient Sparta. They were a military state. It's been said that, you know, some countries have an army. Well, this army has a country. And that sort of belief was carried on into German culture at the time here. So now, let's have an overview of military maps. What they did -- how they were using the result of them. I call this a military mapping revolution. What do I mean by that? Well, never before was information about the field of battle, its scope, the particular details of the train, the obstacles and the enemy formations given to a junior officer in a map form before. ^M00:30:06 In World War I, millions of maps were produced. The U.S. Army alone produced 3.5 million maps for its own forces, and it was just there from 1917 until November 11, 1918. Maps were made every day of the war, often updated every day of the war, a very detailed level of intelligence. So, we're going to talk about, what were they looking for? They were looking for the enemy's artillery, their trench lines, obstacles, routes in and out, and something called "the order of battle." That means, who are the enemy troops, how strong are they, how long have they been in the battle, and what's the overall situation? How is that information gathered? Through reconnaissance, direct observation by people on the ground, and aerial photographs. Prisoners, of course, were an important source of information. Sometimes they willingly gave it over for a sandwich and a cigar. Defectors and spies. And the result of all this was that tremendous tactical mapping at a very scale, high level of detail, and it allowed for massive deployments of troops and bombardments that were beyond what the eye could see. As you know in historic battles, such as the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Napoleonic War, the general himself would get on a horse and serve at the battlefield, and be able to see everything. Well, these battles are stretching for miles and miles and miles. One general cannot see what's going on. He needs a map. And then, for the subordinates in the field to understand and to translate his orders into action, they need a map that relates to their particular situation. And this resulted in some of the deadliest battles in the history of warfare. ^M00:32:03 ^M00:32:07 When the war began, however, in 1914, they were making all these great big strategic plans like the von Schlieffen plan. The other countries had their plans and they were wrapping up their militaries with the latest weaponry. But the mapping effort was not on par with that energy. When both sides went to war, they were relying on maps that were printed in the 1880s that were these large-scale maps. And when I talk about map scale, think of it like this -- one to one is unity. It's the same. And the more you move away from that, you're able to show more of the earth, but in less detail. So this is showing 1 to 8000 in France. And this is a great regional picture, but if you are asked to go take the enemy dug out, well, where's even the trench line on this map? It would be so small. It's useless for a tactical purpose. So it took them two years to get things right on both sides on the Western front. They developed things called tactical maps, which I've talked about. So for the infantry, the guy fighting on the ground, he wants a map at 1 to 10,000. This is going to show you buildings, trees in some cases with the Germans map, particular trees, wells, very detailed information. The artillery want a little bit of a bigger picture because they're shooting miles down the road. And for planning, 1 to 40,000, I'd give me a regional picture and then I'll translate that information into the infantry and the artillery planning. It has to show topography. It has to show waterways, roads, communication lines, of course buildings and military information. And things, although we think, "Oh, it's a static war -- they're in trenches," what was going on in and around those trenches was changing all the time. And so, that information needed to be updated daily often. Even if nothing changed, that might be a sign of something is going on. Why is nothing going on on the German side? We don't see anything. Well, maybe they've taken some guys across the way and moved them down the line because they want to attack down the line. So that information is also important. So here's a blowup of that same tactical map, and it's a German map, by the way. And it's showing an Allied trench line. They don't put their own information on this map because this is given to a junior officer. And if he's out in the field and he's captured or he drops this and they show their own trench line, that's given away intelligence to the enemy. So often, what the folks in the field had was a one-sided depiction. So, we see here an Allied trench line with these X's are here in red that I'm tracing along. That's barbed wire, and there are many, many rows of barbed wire to inhibit attack. You can't pass through barbed wire unless you blast it with artillery -- it's that thick and dense. Over here, we have a legend that explains the information on the map. So the Germans even went down to the level of showing deciduous verses evergreen trees. I mean, they plotted this stuff. It's amazing. I suppose -- we were joking about that earlier, Peter and I. But I guess that matters if you're operating in a time when there's leaves on the tree verses not. Are your troops concealed or are they not concealed? Town maps -- how to interpret that. How to interpret topography and various structures on a map, because junior officers are not necessarily map experts. You've got to lay this out in a very literal and clear way so that somebody with a low level of training can use it effectively. So maps, as we know, operate with a grid. You see that on all these maps, every sort of maybe not think about the intended purpose. So it's about subdividing geographic space and allowing one to point to a specific place on earth and share that information in common with someone else. You don't want to say, "Dr. Abear, take the platoon down the road and take the church." "What church are you asking me to take?" Right? If I give you a set of coordinates then we can agree upon where is it going to be. And so, the way these grids worked is that there was one for the 40,000, which was used for planning, and one of 10,000. And each one of these squares would get divided into four sectors, and that it would get sub-divided again into 10, so these are 50 yard squares here. So it allows immense precision when talking about a geographic location that should be bombarded or should be attacked. ^M00:37:55 ^M00:37:59 And the same holds true for aerial photography. It operated on a grid system and they were given the job of mapping a particular lettered square. This map here is by the British. It's in Belgium, of Ypres. And I'm going to show you, they were challenged with mapping letter I -- right here. ^M00:38:26 ^M00:38:32 As you can see on the map here showing the town in the river, and here is the aerial photograph of this location. Amazingly accurate, right? And we're talking, this is 1916-1917 flyover. And to make this happen, they would go into enemy territory on a daily basis, flying at altitudes 10,000 feet maybe, lower sometimes, to get this kind of clarity. And that would put them in range of any anti-aircraft. It was a very dangerous business doing this. And they were asked to go over every day because planners and analysts wanted to see if there's any change in what you captured today, and how can we compare that to what's happened in the past. So we can either have an indication that they plan to attack or if they want to recede from a certain area. They want to know that. So, this stuff is happening on a daily basis. And flying in World War I, by the way, was a very dangerous business. Most people are killed on takeoff. These are wooden planes, and if the engine failed, you're in a plane with a heavy camera and another person who's going to take the pictures. And if you don't get enough lift and you come down heavy, that's the end, generally speaking. ^M00:40:06 ^M00:40:11 So, what were they taking photographs of? What are you supposed to be looking for if you're an analyst? So I'm going to ask all of you. Like, say you're an analyst and this gets returned from a flight, and they said, "Where is the machine gun nest?" Now, we can't ask Paulette because she has a background in this stuff, so she doesn't count. But some of you, if you were given this photograph, where's the machine gun nest? ^M00:40:38 ^M00:40:42 It's right here. See this round secular running in pairs? There is two actually in this mound. What they were taught to look for were features that don't generally occur in nature. And human beings have a tendency to build things logically, geometrically. And when you look at the earth, the earth doesn't form that way. In the human mind, it wants to construct it in this fashion. So they're taught to look for what the human would build. And so, right there is a machine gun that's on a hill that commands over these trenches down here. And there's a lot more enemy activity actually on this photograph. ^M00:41:31 ^M00:41:36 Up here is a headquarters. These buildings, they determined prisoners were being kept in. They set up roadblocks here. So, this flyover intelligence was very important to develop tactical knowledge of what the enemy was doing and where he was situated. So the question becomes, okay, you got a photograph. You know where it is. How do you get that to a map? There are no computers. There's no GPS. There is no cut and pasting. So the process is called rectification, meaning transferring the information onto a map to have it lined up with the coordinates of the map. It was a very primitive process, yet very effective. What mappers were taught to do was find the point that you're interested in that shows up on a photograph here. Alignment it with known points. And they would trace the photograph using tracing paper. And then, they would take that known grid which I told you about earlier where the plane would fly over, and they would layer that upon a topographic map and they would draw that onto the map. And that's how intelligence would get laid over onto existing maps. It seems very basic and rudimentary, but it was miles and miles ahead with the world had ever done before in terms of military mapping. ^M00:43:22 ^M00:43:26 Now, eyes on the ground also was still important for intelligence mapping in World War I. This is a patrol map from the Germans in the Saint-Mihiel sector where the Americans launched our first American-led offensive campaign. All sides sent patrols out, usually at dawn or dusk to use the cover of darkness, and to approach -- go through no man's land -- as quietly as possible, and to take note of the enemy lines. What do you see? Are they cooking food? Do you see anything behind the lines, like trucks or supplies that had been recently deposited? Do you see artillery? When did you see? How much did you say? Patrol leaders in both armies were required to fill out reports about what they had seen, when, and where. This information would be then kicked back to their headquarters and also used to update maps. ^M00:44:41 ^M00:44:46 And if they could such a patrol, they loved to grab a prisoner. Sometimes they grabbed a sentry, who was unwilling. Sometimes the guy on the other side, you know, I mean, was giving himself up too quickly without a fight. And this here is an American map that shows intelligence garnered from a prisoner about the German lines. We have here showing machine guns. Prisoner told them -- Here's the American line, by the way. Here's the German line, okay. The Germans often would move machine guns up close to the line to harass the Americans in their trench. Should anyone stick their head up, they would unload a blast of machine-gun fire on them. It told about a German observation balloon here. Although we had planes, balloons were still very important and very effective, but it was a terrible job to have because they were very visual to the enemy and they would go after them whenever possible. And if you're in a balloon that catches fire and is coming down, there's really no way out. Here the Germans have an airfield. And behind, deep in their line, is their artillery, their heavy artillery, field artillery, and their mortars. So this information from prisoners is very valuable to get a better picture of the enemy lines. Aerial photography couldn't always get the stuff because you learn to camouflage, you learn to adapt and overcome. The enemy is spying from above, so they would throw netting or do various things to try to deceive the aerial reconnaissance. And we see this sort of going on today in the various wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East, in northern Africa. United States and NATO has drones and airplanes, heat detection. So, opposition elements are turning towards tunnels, concealment. It's a cat and mouse game from the beginning of warfare has occurred, and this is part of that. All of this information would be used to culminate in something called "the enemy order of battle." What does that mean? Ideally, you can identify enemy units by their name. Who are they? What's their specialty? What is the quality of those troops? Do they have experience? Are they very green? Also equally important is how long have they been fighting? You know, if they're good troops, good troops get tired. And the Germans -- because I mentioned earlier, the Central Powers had less manpower than the allies -- they could not rotate their men off the line. When you're on the line, you stayed on the line. And individuals would maybe go on leave, but groups of soldiers would not be taken off the line together. The Allies had that luxury. They could take a whole unit off and put a whole new unit on the line to rest. Also, when were they last in battle and what's their morale and level of supply? If they have low morale and they're not being fed, maybe that's where you want to attack, because they're going to maybe give up easier. And if you can create a hole in the enemy line with one of these units that has low morale or low supply, you could compromise their entire defense in a given area. And so, that opportunity was a kind of opportunity the planners would look to exploit. And they would present this information to commanding officers to make decisions about operations. The last map I'm going to mention of the military kind here is a planning map. This is a map from the Meuse-Argonne, and these kind of maps have a particular look. They show something called jumping off points here, where units would begin in a battle. And they would follow a line of progress, [inaudible] line. They were given a sector. "You stay in your lane and I stay in my lane, and we move forward together, so that we don't get salience in our line. We don't want to have one group go forward, and a group next to it stays behind, because that protruding salient then becomes vulnerable to attack on two sides. We want to move together along the same axis of advance. And so, this is the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, all the way up to November 11 on the armistice, where we pushed the Germans back. ^M00:49:58 ^M00:50:03 Now, I mentioned in the beginning, weapons were important to [inaudible], and the greatest weapon in the most effective weapon of the war was artillery, responsible for some 60 plus percent of all casualties. These are some of the various guns that the American army employed, from this field artillery here to this railgun which could shoot some 20 miles. And it would lay waste to the landscape. Forested areas would just turn into effectively something looking like a lunar landscape. The amount of devastation that they could deliver was incredible -- incredible in a very dark way, of course. What makes this possible are maps to direct this fire. They're not just guessing. They're firing at known points. Towards the end of the war, the mapping was so accurate that they felt that they could hit something that had an air factor of maybe 50 to 20 yards of being off if they just used a map with no pre-firing, where they could see the round go down. And the spotter would call back and say "Adjust." They felt that they had mapped it effectively, they could shoot and surprise the enemy and not give them a chance to move and hit the target, and that's very incredible. This is all analog. There's no digital, GPS guiding this stuff. Yeah, it was amazing -- again, in a very dark way. This map here comes from one of our special collections, the John Heinz Collection, and it shows America's first artillery shock of the war. It's kind of a neat specimen to have in our archive here. On October 23, 1917 at approximately 6:30 AM, Battery C of the six field regiment, first field brigade, first division -- have to get it all in -- under Colonel Scott, Major Starkey, and Captain McLendon, said to Sergeant Alexander Arch, "Go ahead and shoot." And Aches' battery is here, and they take the first shot against the Germans in anger. General Pershing said, "That's a special gun." Pershing is the commander-in-chief of the American forces. He said, "Send that gun home," and that gun is in West Point now. And the gun, incidentally, is French make, 75 millimeter field gun. The United States Army, at the time of World War I, did not have a lot of heavy ordinance. We were able to bring bodies to Europe, but not necessarily the gear to go with it. We had to use British and French equipment to fight. This is very different in World War I, where we're supplying all the Allies with various armaments, like the British with Sherman tanks and the Russians with trucks, for example. So this is a very interesting piece of history right here from the Library of Congress' collections. One tactic that made artillery so devastating was something called creeping barrage, something developed by the British in the Boer Wars of South Africa. Creeping barrage meant we want to put the artillery fire in front of our troops, and have that fire move forward while our troops move behind it to limit the enemy's ability to shoot our troops advancing. In order to pull off this complex maneuver, two things are important. You got to both know where you're going to be, because you don't want the guys here when the bombs are falling here. They want to be behind these various rings of fire, "curtain of fire" they called it, and what time that that would happen. So the artillery unit and the unit in the field would share the same map, and according to a schedule, they would move together. And this was very effective at blasting away barbed wire and other enemy emplacements along the way, to reach the final objective where then the infantry could charge into the enemy trench and take it over. This particular map also has a unique history. It's from the G and M Collection by General Charles Summerall. Summerall ordered an attack on November 10, 1918. Does that sound significant to you? Because November 11 is the day that the armistice is going to take place. He ordered an attack, because he was of the mind that the Germans were faking, that this armistice was baloney. They just wanted time to rest and recover, and that we needed to keep the heat on them. So he orders troops to cross the Meuse River and to take German positions on the other side. In this attack, some 360 plus Marines -- not part of the Army but under their command and some of the best troops that we had at the time -- die. It becomes a scandal back in Washington. Why did you send Marines across a river where the Germans had machine guns on the other side, to die on the next-to-last day of the war? Pershing and other military leaders came to Summerall's defense. They said, "We didn't know if the Germans were going to give up or not, and we had to keep the heat on them." And Summerall was exonerated for any wrongdoing, although the families of the servicemen who died hated him tremendously for this order. And this, again, is part of the Summerall papers in the G and M Collection that any one of you want to come in and review, it's available. ^M00:56:36 ^M00:56:41 Since artillery was so dangerous, it's important to locate the enemy's artillery, and I talked about aerial photography was one means, patrol was the other. But often, those methodologies were insufficient to map where the enemy's artillery might in fact be. Both sides develop something called "sound ranging," and the technologies among the different armies varied and I'm going to generalize what they did here. This map by the U.S. Army, using sound ranging to detect German batteries across the front lines. Microphones would be set up along predefined points. And when a gun would fire, the sound would travel and reach those microphones at different times. They would calculate how long the sound took to reach the vibration, to reach the microphone, and triangulate where the gun might be. This was so effective that they could triangulate an enemy gun within about 20 yards by the end of the war. So what that meant was that if you shoot, you got to move your gun. If you got to move your gun, that means you're exposing your gun to reconnaissance, so you better make it count. So this but the Germans, in particular, in a predicament because when they would shoot, we would fire a counter battery barrage right away to blast their guns. They would try to move the guns to a new hiding place. We would immediately send up airplanes and look for them, and we were hot on their tail and they knew it. ^M00:58:23 ^M00:58:28 So trenches, of course, then, it should be stated, is more important because artillery was so devastating. Where could you safely put troops then on the front line if these maps were so accurate, and 60% of all casualties are caused by big guns. How do we keep the troops safe? And it was the trench. The trench was -- we think of it as a terrible place. It's muddy, it's dirty, it's got rats, all kind of disease in these trenches. Who wants to be in a trench? But on a World War I battlefield, the trench, generally speaking, is the safest place to be. The problem with the trench is getting out of it. And when they blow the whistle and they say you've got to go over the top to attack the enemy, men were mowed down within feet of their own trench line, because the enemy had it pre-sited, meaning they knew where you would come out. There were snipers, machine guns, their artillery, and they were ready to blast away. ^M00:59:30 ^M00:59:34 This map here is what we call a trench map. It's a German trench map. We have British, American, and many other versions of trench maps in the collections of the Library of Congress. Trenches of World War I often were organized what they call "in depth," meaning there was a main line of defense, a secondary line, and finally a third line. The idea here was that that the enemy attack. We have light forces in the front to screen them. Should we need to, we would fall back to the second line. The advantage of this is they sent men over the top. They had taken this position. We fall back here. Our artillery is back here. We have this all mapped out very nicely, and we're happy to blast our own front line trench to bits, now that the enemy has occupied it. And this was a trick that the Germans would use. And the Americans, because we entered the war in 1917, we were a little bit slow to pick up on this, although our Allies warned us about it. ^M01:00:44 And we would occupy their trenches and stay. And the French were like, "You need to keep going forward." And after a few blasts -- and this happened a few times -- our commanders adjusted and said, "You can't stay. You need to move to the second line and to safety." Incidentally, this map is from the area of Verdun, an important battlefield of World War I. Verdun was a very political battle. The Germans said in 1916 when they were unable to take France by mobile warfare, that they would wear the Allies out through attrition. And they said, "The French will defend a very historical and sacred city of Verdun with as many troops as it takes. So we will force them into this cauldron and kill as many as possible." And the German field commanders were appalled by this high command decision because they said, "You're asking me to order my men to fight, not to gain an objective or ground -- something tangible. You're asking my men just to go out and fight and kill until they get killed. How can we sustain this?" Whereas on the French side, they said, "This is our territory. This is our land." It became a sacred battle for the honor of France, and they staved off the German offensive here. And it was a high cost of life to both sides. The ground was virtually just stagnant -- the trench lines. ^M01:02:28 ^M01:02:33 One of the last maps I want to show you of the war here is of the armistice, 11/11/1918. ^M01:02:40 ^M01:02:44 This map was initially a secret map showing the final disposition of forces as they would stand when the armistice was to begin. The Allies had in the field at this time some 280 plus divisions that were well fed, rested, high morale, good supplies. The Germans had 180 under-strength divisions. They were called division on paper, but maybe they were half strength, even less. They weren't getting food. Their guns were being worn out. The barrels were so worn that they couldn't shoot straight. They realized that the Americans have now come into the war in 1970 and advancing against us. And Americans, incidentally, put some 2 million troops into battle against the Germans. It was just too much. They were tired, fighting since 1914. The Americans come along, very fresh, energized. They bring this new momentum. The Allies start the hundred days campaign against the Germans, and it culminates with this armistice on the 11th. ^M01:03:55 ^M01:03:59 So Germany before this happened, wanted to look for a way out. They said, "What can we do to preserve what we have taken in this war?" And I know I've been focusing on the Western front, but I want to bring in a map from the Eastern front because it is important to understand the German psychology at the time, and then leading to World War II. So the map here, this says, "Our march in the East. The facts versus the lies." The Germans took all this territory on the Eastern front from the Russians in this area that eventually would become Poland, okay. They were hugely successful against the Russians. And in fact, the allowed Lenin who was in Switzerland, passage to Germany into Russia. And they gave him money with the thought being that this guy is crazy enough to bring followers to his side and to get the Russians out of the war. And he was successful. The Russians had sent millions to their deaths on the front lines, lives of casualties. They didn't want to fight anymore. There were tired. The Communists took control. They negotiated a peace with the Germans, and the Germans took all this land, the Baltics, Ukraine, all this, Poland. This was all the German Empire in the East. And we see that here also on this map printed by the United States Committee of Public Information. See all this territory? The pink is the land which the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians extended their empires, Belgium, portions of France. This was in 1917. And the Germans say at this point in time, they start talking, "Let's settle this, Woodrow Wilson. You're the great negotiator for peace. You want us to sit down and talk about this? We're happy to end the war now. Because the Germans realized, "We can't push them away. We've tried our best. What can we do? So let's negotiate." But the Germans had infuriated the United States. As you know, they sunk the Lusitania. They were sinking other ships of ours, acts of sabotage within the United States such as blowing up the ammunition depot at Black Tom Island in New Jersey. Up here in Baltimore, there is a place called Hansa Haus. It still exists, and the Germans had a legation there. They brought in spies by submarine to recruit German-Americans to engage in acts of spying and sabotage. And then, they tried this plan called the Zimmerman Telegram which you may have heard about, where they wanted to enlist the help of Mexico to occupy the United States so it wouldn't come to Europe. All this had come to the attention of the American leadership, and when these overtures for peace started to continue, Woodrow Wilson was pushed beyond his limits and said no, to the relief of the British and the French. No, we're not going to entertain any peace overtures. If you want peace, you're going to move back within your borders and you're going to be responsible for paying for this war. And this Committee on Public Information was the American propaganda apparatus, and would put out all these different kind of publications about teaching Americans about Prussian militarism and the rape of Belgium and all these kind of things. And maps were one of the means which they communicated why America ought to be in this war. As you know, America was very culturally diverse. Millions of Germans living in the United States, people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Irish. These folks necessarily didn't have a vested interest in seeing England succeed, for example. How do we communicate to our population why this war is important? And these kind of propaganda maps were used by both sides. ^M01:08:30 ^M01:08:37 Germany, as we know, eventually gives up its military, has over the reins to a civilian government, and since them the Versailles to negotiate for peace. It's a convenient way to blame them for anything that goes wrong, because the German military had held the power of the country in their hands since 1914 once they went to war, and it was effectively a military dictatorship in Germany. Now they send these civilian diplomats to France, and the German diplomats are shocked by the terms of the peace. They said first off, you must accept total blame for the war. You must pay reparations. Your proud Prussian militarism, your German army, is going to be reduced to 100,000 men with no heavy equipment, essentially a territorial defense. So that's the heart and soul of the Germans is their army, their military. It hits at the gut. And on top of that, you're going to lose territory. They're forced to concede Alsace-Lorraine to the French. The Rhineland and the Ruhr Valley here in the East is Germany's industrial heartland. This is where the big weapons factories are. This is going to be occupied -- this surprises a lot of folks -- by American troops. In the South -- French, British, and Belgian. We're going to occupy that for several years, and the French will be the ones there the longest until the early 20s before they withdraw. ^M01:10:33 In the East, land is going to be taken from Germany and given to Poland. As you may know, during World War I Poland does not exist as a country. Its historical territory was divided between the Germans, Austro-Hungarian, and the Russians. Woodrow Wilson makes it a point of war in his famous 14 Points that there must be a free Poland with access to the sea. How are they going to make that happen? They're going to take land from the Germans, because the Russians are not going to be giving up any land, so the land comes from the Germans. A new country forms, Czechoslovakia, and within it is an area called the Sudeten land where Germans are living and forced to live under Czech authority. So this creates a situation where millions of Germans are now forced to live under the authority of other governments. Germans are blamed entirely for the war, rightly or wrongly, and their proud military has been taken away from them. German soldiers, unlike their Allied counterparts, when they go home, they don't take off their uniforms. They stay together and they form barracks and cities and they call themselves Freikorps, and they act like they're still in the Army, and they don't want to be dismissed from their jobs. And among these Freikorps is a corporal named Adolf Hitler. Hitler had the very dangerous job in World War I of being a runner. He would leave the safety of the trench and go back to the headquarters and communicate what was going on, often in the middle of artillery barrage. The folks who did this didn't live very long often. It was very dangerous to expose one's self out of a trench under fire. He received medals for his bravery, and he, like many other German military, were thinking, "Why did we give up?" Right? "We have all this land in the East." Right now at the time of Versailles, their army was still in situ in these areas, okay. They didn't want to move out. They said, "Grant us this land. We won it. We paid for with our blood." And when they were finally forced to come back home, the notion was, "We're stabbed in the back. We did this for country, for the Fatherland, and now we have been forced to give it up against our will." And so, thinking about the next war, in the minds of Germans, people like Hitler, and veterans of the First World War. We think, "Oh, it's crazy to invade Russia." But they felt, "We did it once and we won. We can do it again." Something to think about. And I think maps tell that story better than anything else. And lastly, I'm going to with this illustration of saying, "To end all wars." Right? We see that they are going to bury German militarism and the fires of hell, and Uncle Sam is within your gleefully with a shovel, and his top hat says, "Lusitania." This image can be seen online at the Library of Congress' webpage. And Allied powers are happily depositing German militarism to the grave, which we know comes back again in the Second World War. Thank you very much. ^M01:14:35 [ Applause ] ^M01:14:39 >> Richard Pflederer: Okay, let's please take our seats, and I'd like to introduce our speaker. I think you'll agree that the first talk by Ryan had a heavy focus on the US, very appropriate. We're going to now have a speaker from Great Britain. Professor Peter Doyle has come over. He's a PhD, of course, and he's a visiting professor at the University College in London. ^M01:15:02 ^M01:15:07 His topic is Gallipoli and the physical aspects, the geographical aspects of that battle. It went on for almost a year. It was a disaster personally for the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. And it has a strategic, let's say, outlook. Ryan had described those Central Powers as being basically four -- Germany, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. If this Gallipoli campaign had been successful, it would have at least separated out the Ottomans. So, Peter Doyle has spoken at West Point at least twice that I know of. He's got a very interesting talk. Without any further ado, I will invite him up now. And also say that the Q&A will be combined with the two speakers immediately after Professor Doyle's talk. Peter? ^M01:16:14 [ Applause ] ^M01:16:21 >> Peter Doyle: Can we pick up these lights? >> Richard Pflederer: Yeah, he's going to get it right now. >> Peter Doyle: Okay, well, difficult act to follow, Ryan's exposition on the First World War. So, I'm going to try to follow that up. I was going to draw upon a number of things that Ryan said today. I wanted to concentrate on the battle which has a great deal of mythology associated with it. I'm also going to be looking at a map that that became a scapegoat for failure. So, here we have a map which was used not only to plan a campaign, but one that was also blamed for the failure of a campaign. It's very important. So obviously from my perspective, I know where Gallipoli is and I know what it's about, but I'd like to know how many of you have even heard of Gallipoli? So, can we get a show of hands? Excellent, so I have an informed audience. And how many of you think that it was only the Australians that fought at Gallipoli? Okay, so still an informed audience. That's good. So what I want to do then today is to take you through and examine the concept of Gallipoli, of terrain, of maps, on our failure in the Dardanelles in 1915. Now, I'm talking about mythology. The mythology of Gallipoli is one of the most important aspects of the historiography of the campaign. What we're looking at is a pathology that makes its way into popular culture. We have an American comic book from the 1960s that summarizes, in effect, what the Gallipoli campaign is about. Tens of thousands, it says, who died and fell on hard beaches there at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles. It was a campaign that was doomed to fail. And if you look at this, the mythology goes that the campaign, of course, were doomed to fail because of its geography. It was also doomed to fail because of its planner, and the planning that went into that campaign. And specifically, it was also a let down by its maps. And so, if we follow the mythology through, was this actually true as the American comic book here portrays. "I say, old chap, this map of Gallipoli is only a hundred years old." "Probably nothing has changed since then." Is this really the way to run a war? So I want to examine what the truth is. I can say categorically at this point, that without Gallipoli, we probably wouldn't have the success in the invasion of Normandy. But really, was that something that we want to portray Gallipoli as? So let's look at the road to Gallipoli, the road to the war. Now, as Ryan has eloquently put forward to us, this is a war that has erupted in Europe. A war that has seen all of the alliances putting themselves together, and we've heard about the Schieffen plan. We're also bringing in the personality of one man, one very important man, and that man is Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill, as you know, is a man who is credited in the Second World War as being a great orator and a great leader and somebody who saved the British from destruction in many ways. But what we're seeing is, during this great war, he was what was known as the First Lord of the Admiralty, typically British, I guess. The leader, the civilian leader of the Navy. And he wasn't happy that one of these enemies -- that is, the Ottoman Empire -- had the audacity to have two ships from the Germans, the Goeben and the Breslau, selling to the straights of the Dardanelles, pitching up at Constantinople, which is present day Istanbul. And this was thumbing the nose at the British. ^M01:20:22 That precipitated perhaps the alliance with the war and also following that. It probably would be better without the light, that's all right. I don't mind being behind that. >> Excuse me just one second. This light has been turned on because the people who are filming this say they just have to have that light on for the -- So if it's possible to move so that glare isn't hitting you -- >> Peter Doyle: Yeah, it's more the slides that I'm concerned about. >> Try aiming that light possibly to the left a little bit then, please. >> Peter Doyle: Shall I continue? >> Just wait, just one second, please. >> Peter Doyle: Certainly. ^M01:21:00 [ Background Conversations ] ^M01:21:21 >> Richard Pflederer: Carry on, Peter. >> Peter Doyle: Thank you. Yes, I will, amongst the arguments in the corridor too. That's interesting. Anyway, thank you very much. So, Winston Churchill, the two chips have gone through, the Germans, their influence over the Ottoman Turks meant that the Ottoman Turks were now an enemy. And Winston Churchill, a man who had a Navy at his disposal, and let's not put too fine a point on it -- it was the finest and strongest Navy in the world at that point. So Winston Churchill has this Navy. He wants to do something with this. Not only does he have a Navy, he creates an army out of this [inaudible] sailors. He was constantly thinking about how he could take the war. And one of the ideas was he could knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war using a Navy. So he hopped back a hundred years or so to the concept of forcing the Dardanelles, the idea of creating a Navy -- see if I can get this to work -- creating a Navy that would be able to force its way through the Dardanelles. There is the Dardanelles passage. There is the Gallipoli Peninsula. These are a line of ships that would literally force their way through, bombarding the fortresses as they went. Now, that sounds great on paper. The trouble is, is that admirals, once they start to lose ships, those ships full of men, thousands of men, then the admirals taste for forcing their way through started to wane a little bit. And so, by the 18th of March 1915, a day which is in present-day Turkey a public holiday, we see the failure of the campaign. No longer could they force the way through the Dardanelles, pitch up at Constantinople, and do what the British do best, which is threaten the city there and hope that they would be defeated. Ships were sunk. Men were lost. The Navy turned back, and it was relied upon for boots on the ground. You can imagine when I give this at West Point, that's where I get the biggest cheer -- for that. ^M01:23:31 [ Laughter ] ^M01:23:34 So, the Navy withdrew. The Army has to come -- the Army and the Marines. And landings therefore on a hostile shore would then be necessary. And if you look at any of the doctrines of amphibious landing, landing on a hostile shore is of the most difficult order. So it was a gamble. This look at this gamble. Here, we can see the peculiar shape of the Gallipoli Peninsula. We can see the narrowness of the Dardanelle Straits and we can see its location there in Turkey, in Europe. Turkey had been shrinking in size because of various Balkan wars. The landings weren't there to actually just take the Peninsula. The landings were there to silence the guns and remove the minefields to allow the Navy to do its job. So they were actually supporting the Navy. There were some possible landing places. These lending places had been surveyed already. They had been in place since the early 19th century. At this location here to the neck of the peninsula Bulair, ironically this was a fortified zone, fortified by the Anglo-French Army during the Crimean War, when the Ottoman Turks were allies to the French and the British. There was also the possibility of landing on the Asiatic shore, as it was called. Remember, this is the junction of two continents, Asia and Europe. So, there's a possibility of landing there. But if you land there, you're going to get lots and lots of angry Turks on your back, in effect. And so, remaining are these beaches here across the peninsula, both at the point here at Cape Helles to this location here at Gaba Tepe, or here, an unknown place in Suvla Bay. All of those things, landing places had been surveyed and were in position. And by April 25, 1915, just under a month after the Naval attempt had failed, the British, French, and Australians landed here. Did you know the French were at Gallipoli? No? One thing, just the one thing. So we can see Anzac -- Australian and New Zealand Army Corps -- the British 29th division -- a strange echo, if you like, of the 29th division at Omaha Beach. There are comparable issues there. And the French Corps de Orient landing there to take on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Now, one thing that we have that they didn't have was any kind of satellite imagery, obviously. What we can see from this satellite image is a very peculiarity of this landscape, the challenge of the geography of Gallipoli. Well, first and foremost, you have the distance you have to travel in a straight line. It's 230 miles from the entrance to the Dardanelles to Istanbul (Constantinople). But getting there means jinking your way through here and a long way, and you can see the offset and all the strange coastline of Gallipoli. That's because we have the junction of two tectonic plates, and therefore lots and lots of breaks which have created this parallel coastline and fractures. So we can see how we get these lines of fractures which are picking out for us the landscape of Gallipoli. That was going to cause real problems for the British and Anzac troops and French who landed there. It also means that we have a rugged terrain because as the faults and fractures operate, so they uplift the landscape. So just like the bad land topography that we have in your Southwest, similar kind of situations and uplifting landscape and down cutting, we have exactly the same in miniature here in Gallipoli. And so, understanding this terrain was essential to military success. If you look at the doctrine of amphibious landing from your own United States military, you will see that that is written large in understanding that. Because those men, with their boots on the ground, have to fight not only against the enemy but also against the topography. And how are they going to know what the topography is about? Well, they do that through maps. So, this is where the map myth comes in. Here we have General Sir Ian Hamilton, ramrod straight as you can see in typical British fashion. He was the most senior general that was not directly employed at that time. In Kitchener, who was Secretary of State for War, was his superior. Hamilton looked up to Kitchener and a great way. Kitchener was a man who took no fools and listened to no kind of excuses. Yet, Hamilton made those excuses. Hamilton was put in charge of the Gallipoli campaign. He was really experienced. He fought in the Anglo Boer War, and yet he wrote -- he was a very literary general -- he wrote after the war these words. "Ten long years of General Staff created after the Boer war. Where are your plans for an amphibious landing?" None, he is saying. "And it may have well been the moon that I'm invading because I just don't have any information." Now, one has to ask oneself, is this true? Written in 1920. Remember that after the failure of the Dardanelles of Gallipoli, Hamilton's career, esteemed and distinguished, was in tatters. What we do know is what he has written down about how he was instructed to invade. The problem is, who is it that's writing about this? So we can see here, Brigadier-General Aspinall-Oglander was a colonel, senior staff officer, with Hamilton in 1915. And so, when he's writing here, he's defending his old chief. And what he's saying is that Hamilton, when he was briefed by Kitchener, very, very brief because Kitchener didn't mince words, he got some instructions. In essence, go and take the Dardanelles. A handbook of the Army -- Well, that's okay. That's only a couple of years out of date. Everything like this will ultimately be out of date. But two other elements -- a prewar report of the Dardanelles defenses kind of implying that it was substandard, and a map which is specifically considered to be inaccurate. In other words, their setting up the mythology that the map is at fault, trying to hide perhaps that Hamilton might have been at fault. ^M01:30:30 So, what did they actually get? Well, we have the War Office Handbooks that were provided. But we also have a whole range of other reports, 1905, 1909, 1908. All of these things had been prepared because Britain was cautious about the Ottoman Empire. Remember that Great Britain was involved in many of the Middle Eastern states and Egypt in particular with the Suez Canal. Oh, and there was that map, the map which creates the mythology. This map of two sheets of 1 inch to 1 mile map, 1 to 63,360 scale map. So, the corrective to this is one man, another general, General Callwell. Callwell, cautious in his British speech, director of military operations in the British War Office, and a man who had been involved in military planning and had actually been involved in the preparation of those military reports in the early part of the 20th century. So, if we try and unpack this, Hamilton had been informed with information as to the various possible landing points. He's saying Hamilton knew about this information which was fairly correct information, and that fairly correct information about the interior. So again, he's saying, "Yes, I'm being cautious." But he's also talking about the map. He's saying that in the absence of regular surveys, the maps supplied were necessarily untrustworthy. What he means is the only maps that were available were yes, inaccurate, but that's all we had. That's the necessary inaccuracy here with respect to the ground. So Callwell is saying, "Hamilton, you're overstating this." Let's see whether what's being said is true. Okay, so let's examine to the components of the briefing. The War Office secret report on certain many places in Turkey. Remember Hamilton saying, you know, "I didn't have any information. I didn't know where to go. I didn't have anything that would allow me to land in Constantinople." Well, what about the map? The War Office map, the Geographical Section of the General Staff 2285, 1908 map, the map of the Peninsula of Gallipoli. Okay, so let's look at "Certain Many Places in Turkey." This is a fat, big report with two sections. He was drawn up in response to one of the many, many disputes. This one the Aqaba Crisis of 1906, which is a dispute between drawing the boundary between Egypt and Syria -- sounds familiar. The diplomatic argument between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, which meant that they needed maps to provide information for any future boots on the ground. A report which has lots of information about the Gallipoli Peninsula, about locations there in the Dardanelles, the Dardanelles itself, and the Buliar lines as mentioned. It's a book that Hamilton is saying has barely any information, and yet we have maps and plans really valuable, lots of detail here. And topographical panoramas. You remember this is an amphibious landing, and for sure what you want to see is what you see from the sea, moving on to the land. And so, there's topographical panoramas. We also have the very, very detailed specifics of fortifications. This is Seddel Bahr, at the entrance to the Dardanelles. And panoramic photographs with annotations, once again providing information. Let's remember, this is 1914, 1915 that this is being operated. This had been developed in 1909, we're not a long way from the detail that we can provide in 1916 [inaudible], again, as Ryan has explained to us. Okay, so was this information any good? Well, the report gave all the details of the batteries, of the defenses. So sure, it's good. It also identified the nature of the terrain from the sea. Well, it's an amphibious landing. That's what you want. And for sure, it influenced the choice of the landing beaches, and Hamilton deployed that information. And yet, Hamilton postwar is saying he didn't have enough information. Well, he certainly used that information. What about maps? Maps that the Phillips Society and the Library of Congress who I'm very grateful to for bringing me here to do this, a great honor for me to talk about it. Let's look at that map. Yet another product of the Aqaba Crisis, derived though from an earlier survey, a survey made by the French in 1854. I will pronounce this particularly well, but it's the "Carte de la Presqu'lle de Gallipoli," okay, produced in 1854. We've heard again from Ryan about what was available to the allies in 1914 and '15 in France, a map of similar quality to this. This had been surveyed in 1854 during the Crimean War, and this is a 1 to 50,000 scale. So actually, this is a larger scale map that had been produced for the mainland of France, constructed most likely with theodolite and plane table to give the angles, to get the locations, similar to domestic survey that was carried out. And at a scale of 1 to 50,000, it had contour intervals of 10 meters, giving you a map which has a fair amount of detail. So let's look at this map. It's fairly handsome. It's black and white. Those of you in the audience who are acquainted with that, which I would count as everybody, would understand that this map is telling you this is a tough terrain to work on. Straightaway, you are identifying the ruggedness of the terrain by the contour interval. You're picking out the readings. You're picking out the way in which the water is flowing. Across here, you can see the gray location of high points. There are terrain annotations here. There is a feature called Gully Ravine which became a major part of the battle. And we can see here Achi Baba, a location which became a British obsession but never, ever taken. I spoke to Turks on the ground. They said this would be Verdun. The British would never take this. It was always going to be in Ottoman hands. So, at 1 to 50,000 scale, equivalent in quality. Was this really the map that has no information that Hamilton is talking about? Well, to be fair, we're looking at something that the British thought they could improve on, which is probably a bad thing. That map was regularized. The British wanted it to be 1 inch to 1 mile 1 mile. You measure an inch, on your map you've gone a mile. So they make this really strange adjustment to 1 to 63,360 scale map. And they also increase the contour interval to 31 meters, a hundred feet. That immediately creates something which looks much more open, perhaps difficult to see in this light, but you can see how there are fewer contours here. Now you, as experienced individuals, will know full well that even this map has information upon it because these contour lines at a hundred meters separation still quite close together, still picking out a ravine, still picking out the major points. So this is Gully Ravine. This is Achi Baba. There are terrain annotations on the full sheet also, so it is giving information. But the change in scale does cause problems, and those subdue the terrain features. So I've talked a lot about the mythology of the map, but maybe now I am erring towards -- Well, hold on a minute, maybe this map is not as good as I had first made out. Was it valuable? And there's a corrective that I have to point out to you here. Well, the map depicted the same features as the French one before. The French one was still available to the British. The French map was the only medium -- I would call it necessarily a large scale map -- that was available. There was no choice but to use it. You can't conjure up. You can't do a satellite survey. You can't conjure up an aerial photographic sweep. This was enemy territory. And by the way, we're talking about 1914-1915 where your aircraft, as Ryan has pointed out, are very, very flimsy. But the problem was that the redrawing of this map created the mythology of the scapegoat, that this had an effect of subduing the features of the landscape. Okay, great. I'm thinking, okay, well, why didn't they just use some other maps? You know, if that one's no good, use something else. ^M01:40:02 Maybe the story about them combing the bookshops in Alexandria was correct. To be honest, what map are available? Hardly any, if any. There are some prewar surveys carried out by British military and naval officers, often surreptitiously, clandestine, because of these crises that I've mentioned. There was a single small-scale location map, very similar to the image I showed you of the satellite scale. And tellingly, there were no large-scale Ottoman maps. So, not even the Ottomans had a map, be it to a scale that could be used in a military sense. The 1 to 25,000 survey, very similar to the scales used for military maps that Ryan has referred to, was completed only on the eve of war. So that meant that the British 1 inch map and its derivatives was the only map available to the Allies, so bemoaning it is yes, it is a difficult map to use but it's the only one you've got. So if it's the only one you've got, get on and use it. Okay, so here you go. This is what's known as the quarter inch map. This is the map that shows 1 to 250,000 scale. It's pretty useful and that it shows you how Gallipoli and the Peninsula works in the Dardanelle Straights. It was printed in 1908, so again, it's a derivative of those maps and its strategic, not tactical. We've heard this again from Ryan, in that different maps are doing different jobs. This was issued to the British forces because it gave them an idea of where they were in the world, and therefore they needed to be able to get larger scale maps to work it out. It still was used though, as you can see here, with the little red annotations showing the landing beaches in the southern part of [Inaudible]. Okay, what about the older surveys? These are the ones surreptitiously carried out or done under diplomatic cover. There was one by Captain Grover of the British Royal Engineers in 1876. Grover was operating under diplomatic support because, again, the British and French were allied to the Ottomans at this point. There were also surveys of the Bulair lines, these very, very important fortifications across the narrowest part of that location. So there was lots of that information available. I want to take you to looking at Grover's survey. This is entirely prescient, because what Grover is talking about are some of the landing beaches, because those landing beaches which had appeared in the reports early on and the reports in 1909 were the self-same landing beaches that would be used again. The reason for that is, they're the only landing beaches on this rugged terrain. So Grover carried out a rapid reconnaissance of the coastline between two locations that will become familiar to you. This place Gaba Tepe here, and this location here, Fisherman's Hut, which still exists today on this coast. If you look at this, we can see something which looks fairly impressive. It's a scale of 4 inches to a mile, 1 to 15,000 plus or minus. But what we get is a sense of the rapidity of the mapping here. It's a stylized form. We don't see very much the rugged terrain that I will demonstrate to you in a moment. We're getting really a sense of this relatively smooth point. This is the heights to Sari Bair, which is a mountain area in this location. So, getting a sense of stylized, smoothed contours, really done in haste, but we do have topographical annotations. Scrub, impossible cliffs, difficult beaches, precipitous cliffs, that kind of thing -- all of which was available to Hamilton. So, I've mentioned about the maps that were produced on the eve of war. And here we have an Ottoman map with a beautiful Ottoman script -- Ottoman calligraphy, of course, is amongst the finest in the world. And what we see here is the map of the Cape Helles area that was once reputedly owned by General Liman von Sanders, the German commander of the Ottoman troops in this location. This resides in the National Archives in the United Kingdom and the originals in the equivalent in Australia. This emphasizes the fact that these maps might have been available to somebody as senior as Liman von Sanders, but they were just not available to the British, French, or other allies. The reason for that is, they were literally surveyed between 1912 and 1914, and the issue of them was probably only in 1914 and 1915. So, pretty much they're having some intelligence services that have to do a lot of hard work to get a hold of these maps if they had not actually yet been issued to their own troops. So once again, we have the only map that's available to the Allies is the ill-fated and godforsaken 1 inch map. Okay, so what I want to do now is to take you in more detail down to two of the main locations of the Gallipoli Peninsula. We're talking about what is now known as Anzac Day, April 25, 1915, when the landings were made of the wild colonial boys of the Australians and New Zealanders. They were the ill-prepared, unpracticed, untested troops with a little bit of colonial verve sent to fight up these really difficult terrain. In the South, the British 29th division, professional troops, fought long and hard in Britain's small wars, sent to take the biggest nut to crack at Cape Helles. An idea behind them was to rise up the high ground, join forces, [inaudible], dispose of the guns and dispose of the minefields. That's the idea behind it. The terrain here is different in both locations. So, this wonderful spot -- I had to Photoshop my son out of this to make it look more military, but he was only a little boy then. This wonderful spot, a magnificent beach, is very similar in many ways to the killing beaches of Omaha. We have cliffs, we have narrow slot-like drawers, as the Americans would call them after Omaha Beach. And we would imagine here the men coming ashore, wading ashore here into the face of hell. So, what was the plan at Helles, sending the most experienced troops? Well, it was to split the force because what we have is Hamilton has a large force of 80,000, but not large enough really to take the Peninsula. I'll come into that in a moment. He split them according to these very, very small beaches. They were narrow, they were constraining. They were that way inclined because of the drainage each went in a rectilinear pattern, down the line of the Peninsula because it's lining up with the faults, the fractures, the tectonic features. We can see an open -- what we could call a glacis, very typical of any fortification. And we can see the rising ground, and the idea here is that there are no artillery pieces being landed at this point. It's an amphibious landing. There are no tanks. There is no chance of bringing field guns. You need the Navy to do their job. A naval gunnery is low trajectory. So you've got a low-rising slope. You can hopefully sweep that with those guns. The idea behind it -- to get to the prize of dominating the narrows, of allowing those Navy boys to get through. But that's assuming that nothing is happening on land. And so, Hamilton is writing almost begrudgingly, how dare they organize for defense? "The Peninsula is being fortified and many Turks work every night on trenches, redoubts, and entanglements." How dare they? Because the Turks and the Germans who are operating here knew what they were doing. The Turks have fought many wars before this -- the Balkan wars. They had fought against the Italians. They fought against the Bulgarians. They fought against everybody, and they had lost a lot of territory. So they were fairly battle hardened. They knew what they were doing. The trench lines here were following the contours. There were strong points, machine-gun posts, barbed wire put in position to stop the troops coming ashore. There were hillsides. Again, very, very similar to the kinds of fortifications that were put in place before Normandy, with Rommel placing his defensive positions on those D-Day beaches. So, the Turks were ready. They were also capable and they were able, of course, to use the terrain effectively. So that meant that the 1 inch map, of course, needed extra embellishment. ^M01:50:04 So there were reconnaissance sketches. Here's a reconnaissance sketch in the National Archives in the UK showing some interpretation on the map -- very much sketchy. And there were also aerial interpretations literally with an aviator in a very, very rudimentary aircraft with a map on his lap, drawing on the position of trenches and other things, because we're not getting aerial photography at this particular stage of the campaign. Yes, we have panoramic sketches because every military officer today, as then, was trained in the art of panoramic sketching. And we can see just how difficult these individual landing beaches would be in the face of such a terrain. Now, I want to look at the map. I've said about this a mythology. I sort of overemphasized that. Let's actually now take a more objective view. Did the map do its job? Well, here's the French one. This is at the tip of the Dardanelles. And here's the British one. And I think as you'll see, there's a change in the view of that map. What we have is a much more open terrain. Doesn't seem to have the same level of detail as the French one. That's because of the contouring and the change in scale. We can see one or two hill features, Hill 114, Hill 138, and Hill 141. These were all named by the British. On the French, we can pick out contouring. It gives us a sense of the hills and [inaudible]. On the British, just spot heights. I should also point out that each one of the beaches is a concave situation, and if you look in any manual of amphibious warfare, you avoid these like the plague because they create [inaudible] fire from two sides. There's also just about picked out on the French one a kind of feature known as Guezi Baba, which is totally absent on the British map. Why does this matter? Well, let's look at one of the maps that was captured in April and May 1915 as the Allies started to land. This is an Ottoman map, mapped to the scale of 1 to 25,000. British cartographers looked at this and said, "Yeah, it looks a little bit too good to be true, but pretty accurate." We can see all of the features on here. Hill 114 with nice contouring. Hill 138, similar kind of contouring. We see that Hill 138 and Guezi Baba nearby, part of a similar terrain feature. That was completely missed on the maps and the annotations. But let's not forget these maps were not available to the Allies. So what is this matter? Well, this is a map that was carried out by Commander Douglas. He was a naval commander and cartographer. He did a survey post war -- well, post to the initial landings during the campaign to give a sense of what the British had to face. There was a lot of sort of recrimination and discussion. He puts on all of the trench lines. He shows the point that has the British land at W and V beaches. The intention was that they would join up and join forces, also with men coming ashore here which I haven't put on -- X beach. They would then take the Turks in the rear there, remove the threat, and push on up the Peninsula. But what's been forgotten here is the effect of that missing fortification. So yes, the map failed in this instance. So, let's look at that. We can see here the concavity of that, the bowl shape, the sense that the trenches built by the Turks. Follow the line of that bowl, with the obvious effect that when the British landed, they thought, "Right, there's no fire here. Everything's fine." As soon as they got on the beach, the Turks used their [inaudible], their knowledge, their experience. Held their fire until the British were ashore, and poured fire into those men. From Guezi Baba over here, Hill 141, and from the line of the Turkish trenches. The same is true here at W Beach. Limestone outcrops. This is a line of dunes here. We can see here the narrow beach. All of this had barbed wiring. All of these trench lines that followed this concave area. All picked out, of course, on the reconnaissance surveys. And we can see the most effective kill zone. As the men were struggling through the barbed wire here, they were facing an onslaught of fire to try and get ashore and move and move on its way. And you can see now, can't you, why it was and why it still is that Gallipoli is studied by the US Marine Corps in considering amphibious landing, and why this had an element on the doctrine of D-Day. Okay, so let's shift away from Helles. Yes, the map failed a bit there. Let's look at the Anzac territory. Badlands, okay, a bit like South Dakota or Arizona, places I've had the honor to visit in your beautiful country. And what we can see here is the incredible element of the landscape here. This tortuous land -- doesn't look anything like Grover's survey of 1876. What was the plan here? Difficult to see, I'm afraid, but what we can see here is this is Sari Bair, the range of the hill, which is badland topography. Another from Gaba Tepe to the narrows is a transport corridor, a valley. The Turks knew that. They fortified that. They created a kill zone of field artillery. They defended that as far as they could. So, there was no way that the Allies could lend there. Instead, the Anzacs would land -- Remember, they were the untrained guys who felt could be able to combat the terrain. Very few Turks here, relatively unopposed landing. Very much more combined with the terrain, a difficult challenge for the men to get up into that challenging environment. So the idea was that they would rise up, go on one of these ridges, hit the top of that hill, rise over the top, get down and help the other guys who had landed at Helles and take the narrows. Okay, so let's look at one of the mythologies. You speak to any Australian. They'll tell you how the British generals failed them. They'll tell you how they landed in the wrong place. How the British generals had no idea. Part of the enduring mythology of the Australian male at the current moment. So, is there any truth in that [inaudible]? The first, second, and third ridges -- one here, one there, one there. These are going to be important. General Hamilton, literary man, a man who swept his arm and said, "Right, we will take this area." He is saying, "Let's go from Gaba Tepe to Suvla Bay. So he's saying, "Look, chaps, if you land here can you take the ridge, everything will be fine." General Braithwaite, his chief of staff, a bit more constraining. "Hold on a minute, Hamilton. Our men need some very small specific landing locations." Again, the doctrine of amphibious landings is you have to plan and plan again. Now Braithwaite is saying, "Let's say north of Gaba Tepe, which is heavily defended, to the Fisherman's Hut." Remember Grover's survey? That area of the Gaba Tepe to Fisherman's Hut. The Admiral, Admiral Thursby, on the 10th of April is saying, "Hold on a minute. Let's reduce that a bit." Now, I know it's the same in the US as it is in Britain. The Navy doesn't speak to the Army, the Army doesn't speak to the Navy, and the Marine Corps in the middle. It's exactly the same situation happening here. So what we're seeing here is that Thursby is altering the plan. He's saying, "Well, let's reduce the scale of it a little bit," whereas Braithwaite is saying somewhere between that. And Thursby, on the night of the landings, is saying, "I'll tell you what. We'll reduce it even further." So all of these messages are mixed, and nobody is really getting that message. So it means that when the Anzacs finally land, we struggle ashore here in yet another concave location, largely unopposed. They then have to fight their way up the ridges. And it's that which is the butt of contention, because some historians or popular writers are saying that the map failed. The British land them in the wrong place. Not only did the British land them in the place which had been long held, the map accuracy had very little to do with the landing place. So we can't blame the map. This look in more detail at the map. Let's look at those ridges. Okay, there's our French map. You can see beautifully detailed. Is it accurate? Well, that's another question. There's our first ridge, second ridge, and third ridge going up [inaudible] to the ridge top at the Sari Bair. The British map in this case, not massively different to be honest. Just a little bit less detail, but again, first ridge, second ridge, third ridge. And those ridges feature in all the British landing plans because Australians and New Zealanders would fight their way up these ridges to get to the top. Okay, they land here, get up that ridge. If they land here, get up this one, and this one. ^M02:00:23 But the problem is that the maps that the British and the French had didn't pick out what the Ottoman maps did at a scale of 1 to 25,000. This is what subsequently has become known as Anzac Cove, as it is still today. We see the first ridge there has a plateau, now known as Plugges Plateau. The second ridge also has a plateau. These plateaus become very important because as the Anzacs, who have not fought a battle before, are rushing up the slope in darkness, they get to a bridge top. What do they do? They dig in. Once you've done again, the battle is, in effect, over, because you have to, as Ryan has pointed out again, get out of those trenches and fight the enemy eventually. You can't sit there forever, not if you've got a very precarious beachhead. And then, this is the bone of contention, because not only do you have a plateau on the first ridge, you have no means of getting across because that is impassable. There is the razor's edge. Believe me, that is the literally centimeters -- inches wide. And so, men trying to get across here stumbling in the darkness. No chance. The actual opportunity was lost. So stuck on those plateau tops, the Anzacs would stay on those plateau tops throughout the whole campaign. But let's remember, those maps were not available during the war, and are in the planning stage of the war here. And also, there were no aerial photographs that could depict that. So, what I'm saying then, is that the battle was really dependent on the mapping and maps. But it was also dependent on the planning that was going into that campaign. What became known as the Battle of the Beaches in April 1915 was the battle or battles that lost the Gallipoli campaign. Because at Helles and at Anzac, the tenacity of the troops that were facing them, the failure of the troops to get on shore, the loss of speed and the development of inertia as they were starting to be held by the terrain and the Ottomans meant that the stability of those situations meant that the war was effectively lost. So, at Helles and at Anzac, we have beach has established, and those beachheads would have to be supplied. They would have to be improved. They would have to be therefore mapped in more greater detail. So we're now looking at the latter part of 1915, when on the Western front, new techniques were starting to be derived, starting to be considered in terms of mapping. They had some sense of being able to capture the maps. So, what we have here is the new 1 to 20,000 scale maps based on Ottoman originals. There was a maps officer that was associated with the Egyptian service, British Army, name of TE Lawrence. You might've heard of him -- Lawrence of Arabia. He was involved in the production of maps there. The British took this very, very seriously and created their own series of 1 to 20,000 scale maps with artillery squaring, again as explained by Ryan. There are also aerial photographic plans. We can see the trenches here. We can see how this has been built into a mosaic. Photo rectification is very, very difficult at this stage in the war, but these are being used now to try and match up with each other, and we can start to see the production of sketch maps. We also get the production of mosaic photographic maps, which this was done by the Royal Naval Air Service. The British, at that time, had a Naval Air Service and an Army Air Service, and they were obviously still not cooperating. But anyway, what we're seeing here is a production of an aerial photographic map from this service of the Royal Navy. And then we get the production of trench diagrams. We are now going from the broader scale down to the minutiae. We need the largest possible scale of maps. And what we have is the production of so-called trench diagrams, which are precursors to trench maps. These trench diagrams are picked out by aerial photographic survey and by trench raids and by prisoner taking, all those things that again Ryan has helped us understand, at a scale of 6 inches to a mile here, which is 1 inch to 29.3 yards, which is interesting. We can see all of the various trenches here, all named after a range of locations and places in Paris or wherever it might be, and we can see the locations of those. And that gives rise to the kind of trench mapping that we start to see at this point in the Western front as the Allies got serious about creating trench maps. In the trench mapping is actually a nod towards the realization that you are stuck where you are, and that every small point in detail matters. It doesn't mean they're going to win you the war. So, the increased survey effort were pretty much to no avail. Trench warfare, from the failure of the Battle of the Beaches, became an attritional battle, just the same as we had on the Western front. The inertia had said in. What Clausewitz called "friction" had meant that we are no longer in a position to be able to take the front. The frontal assaults, both at Anzac and at Cape Helles, where thousands of men were losing their lives, not necessarily on the beaches of Gallipoli as the US comic book pointed out, but actually in the killing fields of the peninsula. And then, there were new landings. In August at Suvla Bay, a complete and utter disaster, a waste of time with the most inexperienced general you could possibly think of, simply because that general was most senior. The campaign had been lost in April, not afterwards. And once in April, we are looking at the loss of that. There was nothing else that could be done. No amount of surveying could win the war for the Allies. So to finish up, did Hamilton have everything he could? Well, yes he did. He had the maps and the plans. They were the best available. The maps, the plans were all that he had. There were no new surveys. The Ottoman Turks had them -- nobody else. And there was no means of carrying out a survey. So yeah, those maps were done with the best of intentions and the capability of these working in a foreign country with allies perhaps. What we can say is, that the maps themselves were not themselves responsible for failure. They contributed to it by things like the missing [inaudible] or the location of razor's edge. But he can't blame a map for the failure. You have to think and be honest, is that the campaign is not only doomed by the geography of this location, but it was also failed by its planners. You can't send 80,000 men to face 50,000 to 60,000 men on the ground. Normandy, there were three times as many Allied troops as they were German. So this was lost for the want of resources, not lost because of a map, and it was one by its tenacious defenders. So it's incumbent upon me to just say that we must remember all of these troops, tenacious defenders, all of those allies who fought in this beautiful landscape. I'd just like again to thank you very much for inviting me here. Great honor for me. Great pleasure to talk to you. And I'd like to thank Ryan and everybody else, the directors here, and the Phillips society for this great honor bestowed on me. And thank you very much for listening. ^M02:08:33 [ Applause ] ^M02:08:41 >> Richard Pflederer: I'd like to thank you, Peter. This is a very high-energy talk. Thank you very much. We have some lights please, and we're going to have a few minutes for Q&A. So let's get Ryan up here please. And I'll tell you what. I'm going to stand down here so I can be out of the killing field. ^M02:09:01 [ Laughter ] ^M02:09:06 >> Professor Doyle, a few quick questions. Mapping elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, for the other options, for example, Kitchener was looking at the [inaudible] option. Was there mapping to support planning there? And secondly, at your conclusion, do you think really, even if given very good maps and all the other things, there was really anything they could have done in 1915 to defeat the Ottoman? >> Peter Doyle: Two very interesting questions. The first one -- >> Richard Pflederer: Excuse me, [inaudible] behind the microphone. >> Peter Doyle: Oh, bigger pardon, yes. The first one, I think very interesting. Bear in mind, of course, that the British were mapping in these locations. I'm an expert in this. I must draw my colleague into Dr. Peter [Inaudible] who has worked on this. But I can say that, for example, Lawrence had been carrying out a whole range of different mapping aspects, part of his archaeological investigations, a lot of it clandestine to try and do mapping. There was a lot of work, of course, in that area because of the Egyptian survey. That was very well furnished with maps. How well, I couldn't comment on, but certainly there was a huge British effort, bearing in mind the British involvement in that part of the world. The second question -- this is one of those what if's. If you're looking for a "what if" in the First World War, then the big one is, what if the Allies had got through in Gallipoli? The critical thing here is could the Navy have got through? Well, potentially. The Navy could only have got through if the minefields have been cleared. Could the minefields have been cleared? Well, you need to take Gallipoli. Could you have taken Gallipoli? Well, you could have done if you of had more men, okay, and if you of had more resources, better planning, more opportunity to do that. Because once those men are punched through, you're driving the Turks back. ^M02:10:52 Suvla Bay, when they landed at Suvla Bay there were no Ottomans to speak of in their way. They could have driven those men back. With the maps have helped? Well, maps are always going to help. But bear in mind as soon as a map is made, it's obsolete, it's out of date immediately. So you can't blame a map. This is a man who is scapegoating this map, is Hamilton. And I would say there's a chance. No modern historian would argue there was a chance. Everybody would say it was doomed to failure. But I don't know -- I'm a bit of an optimist. Maybe, just maybe, if we had had what we know now, if it had learned from the Gallipoli campaign through Normandy and Inchon, all the rest of it, and come back to Gallipoli, maybe we would've taken it. ^M02:11:32 [ Laughter ] ^M02:11:34 >> Richard Pflederer: A lot of good questions. Thank you very much for the questions and the answers. Other questions? Yes ma'am? >> This is out of curiosity, not just for myself but for other people who might not be into war history and know a lot about that. Could you talk about exactly what you mean by failure? Because in my mind, there's failure of the whole campaign, but there's also different levels, of loss of life or equipment. And exactly how do you define failure? >> Richard Pflederer: Who is that addressed to? >> Peter Doyle. >> Richard Pflederer: The question is -- everybody else didn't hear it -- how would you define failure of this operation? >> Peter Doyle: Well, it depends who's speaking, because from the Ottomans, this is not a failure. This is a success. This is celebrated as a great victory over the Western powers. Coming to your actual point, if we step aside from Gallipoli a moment, an argument last year in the United Kingdom is, was the Battle of the Somme a success or a failure? And in the Battle of the Somme, as you may or may not know, there were 40,000 men killed on the first day of that battle -- 40,000 men. So, what we're considering here is how do you measure success and how do you measure failure. And in today's military atmosphere, the loss of 10 men would be seen as a massive failure in many ways. We're looking at what become acceptable losses to these officers. Now, in the Gallipoli campaign, we break it down a little bit. The maps failed -- that's the argument -- because it didn't provide the information for the planners to go on and win that campaign. I'm arguing, well, that's a scapegoating of the maps. The campaign failed from the British and French and Anzac perspective because it didn't deliver the objectives, which is to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. But lying on those beaches and in those hills were thousands upon thousands of men, not only from the British, Australians, and New Zealanders, etc. Also from the Ottoman Empire, who lost incredible numbers of men at that point. So on that basis, could you ever say that a battle that lost that many men was a success? Possibly not, and maybe I can bring Ryan into that in relation to the last battle of the war, where we see the Americans engaged here. Is that a success? Did that fail? Why was there a commission to discuss that where the general involved was actually exonerated? And Hamilton also was exonerated, but shunned into the environment. So I think we have to be careful putting a 21st century perspective on it. It failed because they didn't achieve their objectives. It failed because the maps didn't possibly do what they wanted to do. And in terms of a human tragedy, it was a complete failure, I would say. >> Further to that, had those losses been as great as they were in the objective achieved, it would've been an expensive victory. But it is an expensive failure because the objective was not reached and the troops were ultimately [inaudible]. >> Peter Doyle: And adding a sort of a rider to that, the very fact that the British and French thought that they could send ships through -- obsolete is the word they used, obsolete ships -- It dawned on the admirals that these obsolete ships were full of non-obsolete sailors, and it was at that point that the campaign was really doomed. >> Richard Pflederer: We've got time for a couple more questions. Are there any specifically aimed at Ryan? >> Ryan, it wasn't part of your talk, but when we were in Belgium in the [Inaudible], one of the things that came through in terms of tourism was the absolute massive loss and suffering of the Belgian people. And one of the undercurrents to that was now that this was simply the fortunes of war, but that Germany was particularly brutal in what they did in Belgium. How do you feel about that? Do you think [inaudible] accurate, or do you feel that was a consequence of the circumstance? >> Ryan Moore: Okay, so before I answer how I feel, I'm required to say that this is my opinion and not the Library of Congress. So, I will venture into these dangerous waters. Thank you for the question. One of the reasons that we see the Germans being, in fact, very brutal towards the Belgians is the von Schlieffen plan required them to move so quickly through Belgium to their final objective, which was Paris. The Belgians put up a tough defense. I mentioned some of the forts that they had and the money they had. They could punch above their weight. They were very angry by being delayed, and that they felt that the Belgians should have just capitulated and allowed their troops to go through. And so, this is one of the reasons that they started to exact revenge upon the Belgians. And they were also looking back to the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Belgians had irregular troops, meaning no uniform, taking pot shots, sniper shots at German troops. German troops before the invasion were told, "The Belgians are probably going to do this again," which we understand they did not. But anytime they would hear a rifle shot, they'd say, "Hey, Belgian sniper." They would round up communities and have summary executions. So it was a mix of the plan and then the mindset that the German troops had before going in. I think that's the best way to answer it, and it was very brutal, because war is a brutal thing. Also when they were starving from the blockade, which I mentioned, that "We're not going to get the Belgians food. It's going to come to Germany." >> Richard Pflederer: Good question, good answer. This is going to be the last question right here. >> Yeah, how crucial was that knifelike ridge? Which >> Richard Pflederer: On razor's edge? >> Peter Doyle: The razors edge was -- How crucial was it? Well, one of the problems we have is, as the Anzacs are coming ashore and the argument goes that they landed too far to the north. That means they were facing that first ridge. And as the first ridge breaks down into the knifelike edge, that means of course that they can't progress but it's more complex than that because as the Anzacs came ashore, not only did they get up into that Pluggie Plateau and face the ridge, they were also swarming up in the [inaudible] and the [inaudible] and all the other elements of the terrain. So the argument is that that did have the material effect on it, but the general argument is that the terrain creates this inertia, this friction, that as you are losing momentum, you're starting to consider the opportunity to dig in. And because these men were inexperienced, they started to do that. And there were also stragglers -- this is not talked about. I'm not from the Library of Congress, so I can say it. These men straggled back to the beaches and there was a lot of concern from the Commander Birdwood that they were going to completely lose that command. And that's where Hamilton said dig in, dig, dig, dig, and dig into you get your security. And that's why the Australians are called diggers in that way. >> Richard Pflederer: As a means of avoiding a retreat. >> Peter Doyle: Exactly. As a means of holding on to what that is. So the razor's edge did have a role to play in the terrain had a role to play, but you can't blame the razors' edges the only real significant feature that caused the failure. >> Richard Pflederer: I wanted to remind everyone that all of us are invited to an open house in the reading room of G and M. It's on the basement level, right? I don't know which one to get off of. And it is starting in 10-15 minutes and it will be going on for an hour, a chance to see some displays and a chance to meet some more of the staff. I'd like to make a couple of thank you's. Was that Ryan's idea? I like to thank the speakers. Think of the research that went into both these talks. Thank you both very much. ^M02:20:03 [ Applause ] ^M02:20:06 And I'd also like to thank the audience for sticking it out. I know it's a long afternoon, and maybe somebody's lunch hour was impacted by this. But thanks again, and we'll look forward to another lecture series from the Phillips Society sometime in the late fall. Thank you again, and class dismissed. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.