The war of 1914 to 1918 is usually remembered in broad strokes, which is a shame, because the detail is where the people are. A chemist who learned to drive so her X-ray cars could reach the front. A footballer commissioned against the rules. A famous pigeon whose story turns out to be mostly legend. These are thirty-six of them, checked against museums and archives.
Every tile in a World War I game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Curie already had two Nobel Prizes when she spent the war fitting X-ray equipment into cars. By October 1914 the first of about twenty vehicles was ready, and French soldiers called them petites Curies. She learned to drive, and to clean a carburetor. Her daughter Irene, seventeen, came along as an assistant. Around 150 women trained to run the machines, and more than a million wounded men were examined by X-ray.
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Johnson served with the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, and on the night of May 15, 1918, on sentry duty in France, he held off a German raiding party. France gave him the Croix de Guerre with palm, making him one of the first Americans to receive it. His own country took longer. The Purple Heart came in 1996, the Distinguished Service Cross in 2002, and the Medal of Honor in 2015, eighty-six years after his death.
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Tull was a professional footballer, at Tottenham Hotspur and then Northampton Town, when he enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment in December 1914. His commission papers survive at The National Archives. Question four asks whether the applicant is of pure European descent, and the answer written there is no. Army rules of the day barred such men from becoming officers. He was commissioned anyway in 1917, was recommended for the Military Cross, and was killed in France in March 1918.
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Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia, and went to war for a country that was not his own. He joined the French Foreign Legion, was decorated for bravery at Verdun, and then qualified as a pilot, flying about twenty missions in a Spad. The National Aviation Hall of Fame calls him the first African American combat aviator. When the United States entered the war and he applied to fly for it, he was turned down. American squadrons took white pilots only.
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McCrae was a doctor, posted as surgeon to an artillery brigade because doctors were in short supply. He wrote In Flanders Fields on May 3, 1915, during a brief rest at the Second Battle of Ypres, after seventeen days of treating the wounded. Punch published it that December and it was famous almost at once. McCrae never saw the armistice. He died of pneumonia in France in January 1918 and is buried at Wimereux.
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Close to four thousand members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force were of Aboriginal descent, at a time when First Peoples in Canada faced restricted civil rights. At least fifty were decorated for bravery on the battlefield, and the most decorated of them was Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibwa corporal from the Parry Island Band, who received the Military Medal and two bars. The war brought no broader breakthrough in civil liberties at home, and Pegahmagabow spent his later years working for First Nations rights.
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The Canadian War Museum counts 171 Canadian air aces, and William Avery Bishop led them with 72 victories, second among all Allied aces. The job was as dangerous as that sounds. The museum notes that the life expectancy of new aircrew could be measured in weeks, and that in a period before reliable parachutes came into widespread use, few aircrew bailed out safely. Of 6,166 British Empire air service fatalities, 1,388 were Canadian.
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More than 2,800 Canadian nursing sisters served, and they did it as commissioned officers in a rank created for them, holding relative rank and pay equal to the men beside them. The Canadian War Museum records them as the first women in the Allied forces to do so. Margaret Macdonald had permission in August 1914 to enlist a hundred nurses. They worked far beyond the Western Front, in Egypt, Salonika and at Gallipoli, and at least 58 died.
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Canada introduced compulsory service in 1917, and the Military Service Act seemed to exempt several religious denominations from combatant service without naming one of them. In July 1918 the central appeal judge ruled that Mennonites, Seventh-Day Adventists, Quakers and several other groups qualified. Tribunals were often unsympathetic and treated objectors as men dodging their turn. Sydney B. Curry, a Christadelphian, refused to sign his recruitment papers at all. In January 1919, two months after the fighting stopped, more than a hundred objectors were still in custody.
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The Gallipoli landings are remembered as a costly failure, and the withdrawal as the one part that worked. In December 1915 about 80,000 men were taken off the peninsula with roughly half a dozen casualties, partly because the trenches kept firing after they were empty. Lance Corporal William Scurry rigged rifles so that water dripping from one tin into another slowly pulled a trigger. The Ottoman line went on answering an army that had already left.
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At 5:30 in the morning on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, the Canadian Corps attacked Vimy Ridge with all four of its divisions side by side for the first time, behind nearly a thousand guns. Most of the ridge fell that day and the rest by the 12th. It cost more than 10,600 killed and wounded. Earlier French and British attempts on the same ground had cost over 150,000. Canadians have treated it as a national moment ever since.
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Seven tanks went forward with the Canadian Corps at Courcelette on September 15, 1916, among the first tank actions anywhere. They were mechanically unreliable and no faster than a walking man, and they broke down freely. They also frightened the defenders badly. The Canadian War Museum records German soldiers surrendering when the machines first appeared. The village was taken. The Somme cost the Canadian Corps about 24,000 casualties before it ended.
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Late on October 31, 1917, with the light going and the wells of Beersheba still held by Ottoman troops, the 4th and 12th Australian Light Horse regiments charged. They were mounted infantry and carried no swords or lances, so they held their bayonets in their hands and used them as swords instead. It took less than an hour to cross the trenches and get into the town. They took about 700 prisoners. Thirty-one of them were killed.
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On April 25, 1915, while the troops were landing at Gallipoli, the Australian submarine AE2 went up the Dardanelles, a channel heavily mined and heavily defended, and got through. No other submarine had managed it. AE2 reached the Sea of Marmara and worked there for five more days before damage forced her commander, Henry Stoker, to sink her and surrender the crew. The wreck was found again in 1998.
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Fromelles was meant to be a distraction, drawing German attention away from the Somme. On July 19, 1916, the newly arrived 5th Australian Division and the British 61st attacked over open ground, in daylight, in full view of the German line. More than 5,500 Australians became casualties in a single night, believed to be the heaviest loss by one division in twenty-four hours in the whole war. The Australian War Memorial calls it a disastrous failure.
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Newfoundland was not part of Canada in 1914. It was a separate dominion of 242,000 people, and it sent 12,000 of them to the war. On the morning of July 1, 1916, its regiment attacked near Beaumont Hamel. Of the 801 who went forward, 710 were killed, wounded or missing, and the attack lasted about thirty minutes. Newfoundland's losses for the whole war came to 1,305 killed, out of that same small population.
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On August 8, 1918, the Allies attacked at Amiens with no long bombardment to announce it, 420 tanks, aircraft overhead and a deception plan that hid where the Canadian and Australian divisions had gone. The Canadians advanced thirteen kilometers that day, the most successful single day the Allies had on the Western Front. The German general Erich Ludendorff called it the black day of the German army. The armistice came three months later.
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The story goes that a wounded pigeon named Cher Ami carried the message that saved the Lost Battalion in the Argonne in October 1918. The bird was real, and the mounted specimen still stands in the National Museum of American History in Washington. The link to the Lost Battalion is the unsettled part. The museum says military records cannot establish which pigeon carried the key message of October 4, and curator Frank Blazich, who retraced the bird's life, found nothing conclusive. A 2021 DNA test did settle one thing. Cher Ami was male.
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Little Willie was built in 1915 by William Tritton and Walter Wilson at an agricultural machinery firm in Lincoln, and it is the first working tank in the world: armor, an engine and tracks in one machine meant to cross a battlefield. It was also out of date almost at once, because the same designers were already drawing the rhomboid shape, tracks running right around the hull, that became the tank everyone pictures. It survives at The Tank Museum.
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At Gallipoli the opposing trenches were close enough that raising your head to aim was a serious risk. In May 1915 Lance Corporal William Beech, a builder's foreman before the war, clamped two mirrors to a rifle: the upper one looked along the sights, the lower one looked back at the soldier's eye. He could aim and fire with his head below the parapet. They were built in a workshop at Anzac Cove and used along the line.
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The answer to gas was not a weapon but a piece of equipment. Hoods covering the whole head came first. In 1916 the British Army introduced the Small Box Respirator: a rubberized mask joined by a hose to a filter canister carried in a haversack on the chest. Chlorine gave way to phosgene late in 1915 and to mustard gas in the summer of 1917, and by then shells, not canisters, delivered it. About a million gas casualties were recorded across all armies. The museum credits better masks with helping counter the German advantage.
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One of the war's most important medical advances was a procedure, not a drug: moving blood from a healthy donor into a wounded man through tubing or a syringe, to hold off shock. Surgeons also learned to clean wounds against infection, to set broken bones in new ways, and to draw metal fragments out of sensitive places with magnets. The result is a figure that surprises people. Almost 90 percent of wounded soldiers who received medical treatment survived.
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Artillery did most of the damage in this war, and the British 18-pounder was the workhorse of it. More than 10,000 of these field guns were built, and they fired approximately 100 million shells between 1914 and 1918. Averaged across the whole war, that is 43 rounds a minute, every minute, for four years. By 1918 Allied gunners could find and destroy German batteries and lay a creeping barrage just ahead of their own infantry, which is what finally made an attack work.
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A Vickers machine gun was dependable and water-cooled and fired 450 to 500 rounds a minute, and it was heavy enough that getting it forward during an attack was a real problem. The German Maxim needed a crew of five. The Lewis changed the arithmetic: one soldier could carry it and feed it a 47-round drum, usually with a partner for ammunition. Heavy guns moved into specialist units, and the infantry carried its own firepower forward.
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Field telephones worked well until the wires were cut, which shellfire did constantly, and early wireless sets were bulky, fragile and short-ranged. So armies kept birds. The Canadian War Museum calls carrier pigeons surprisingly effective, though they needed trained handlers and could be thrown off by the noise of artillery. Troops on the ground signaled up to aircraft with lamps, panels and flares, because the sets carried aloft could only transmit. The museum's verdict on the whole problem is blunt: it was never fully solved during the war.
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Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, 1917, attacking any ship supplying the Allies. By the end of that year about 3,170 Allied and neutral vessels, nearly six million tons of shipping, had been sunk, and in June the Admiralty warned that Britain could lose the war if it went on. The answer was old and simple. Merchant ships stopped sailing alone and crossed in escorted groups, which a submarine found much harder to locate.
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No single invention broke the trench deadlock. What worked by 1917 was coordination: artillery and infantry timed to each other, with tanks, machine guns, engineers, aircraft and the supply system all working to one plan. Infantry carried grenades and light machine guns of their own, and junior officers were given room to make decisions on the spot. Before an attack, troops studied large models of the ground they were about to cross, a practice introduced in early 1917.
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On December 6, 1917, a ship loaded with explosives caught fire after a collision in Halifax harbor and blew up. It was the largest human-made explosion before the atomic bomb, and it killed 1,963 people and injured about 9,000 more. Help came quickly from the United States, including a relief train carrying doctors, nurses and supplies. Nova Scotia still sends the city of Boston a Christmas tree every year in thanks for what Bostonians did that December.
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Britain's royal house was called Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a name inherited from Prince Albert, and by 1917 a German name at the head of a country at war with Germany had become impossible. On July 17, 1917, George V issued a proclamation adopting Windsor as the name of the house and as the family's surname. He took it from the castle. The name was a wartime decision, and it has outlasted the war by more than a century.
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Women at the Dick, Kerr munitions works in Preston formed a football team in 1917 and played charity matches for wounded soldiers. The crowds were far bigger than anyone had predicted: about 53,000 packed Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920. In December 1921 the Football Association shut the women's game out of its members' grounds, resolving that football was "quite unsuitable for females" and complaining that too little of the gate money reached charity. The ban held for half a century, and the team played on until 1965.
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Canada interned 8,579 people it classified as enemy aliens, most of them civilians rather than captured soldiers, and the majority of Ukrainian origin, who had come from territory ruled by Austria-Hungary. Tens of thousands more had to register with the authorities and live under restrictions for the rest of the war. Public feeling hardened after events such as the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. Sir William Otter ran the camps.
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Canada had no federal income tax when the war began. Ottawa had to pay for the fighting anyway, and it turned to its own citizens: the first domestic war loan, in November 1915, asked for $50 million and brought in $100 million, twice what had been hoped. Canadians eventually bought more than $2 billion in domestic war bonds, drawn by long-term rates of up to 5.5 percent. A tax on personal incomes followed in 1917, described at the time as a temporary wartime measure.
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The Imperial Munitions Board turned a farming country into an arsenal. By 1917 almost a third of all British shells were being made in Canada, and the companies working for the board were turning out about $2 million worth of goods a day. Its 600 factories also built naval vessels and training aircraft. The board hired 30,000 women. Of the almost 300,000 people doing war work in Canadian factories in 1917, about one in eight was a woman.
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The fighting stopped and then several hundred thousand men had to wait for a ship. Canada brought home 267,813 soldiers and about 54,000 dependents. Atlantic shipping was allotted up to 50,000 departures a month, and Canadian railways could at first promise spaces for only half that. To fill the months the army ran the Khaki University, where about 50,000 men studied everything from mechanics and agriculture to law and medicine. Waiting still told on them. There were thirteen disturbances at demobilization camps.
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Armistice Day was inaugurated across much of the British Empire in 1919, on the second Monday in November. Canada's Parliament then set its own ceremonies, in 1921, for the Monday of the week containing November 11, which tied the day to Thanksgiving. In 1931 the federal government separated the two, renamed the day Remembrance Day and fixed it to November 11. The ceremony settled into a shape people still follow: two minutes of silence, the Last Post, and a poppy on the coat.
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Canada created the War Poster Service in 1916 to turn out posters in both official languages, and the poster became the way a government spoke directly to its own people: buy war bonds, ration meat and fuel, enlist. As the war went on the messages grew more direct. In one, a Canadian soldier asks the public outright to buy bonds, a design borrowed loosely from the 1914 British poster of Lord Kitchener. Parades and rallies pressed the same case, along with the shaming of anyone not doing their bit.
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