Iron Europe: 1914-1916 Mod Page Launched At Moddb.com

Here's the page we just launched on the moddb.com website; it shows some of the modding work we have completed:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/iron-europe-1914-1916

Progress on the mod has been going slowly but steadily.

I guess I'm learning that modding a video game is a little bit harder than I thought.

Essentially, you have to make a lot of models of everything you want in the game, in order to give it that certain authenticity of how things looked during the time period which is being focused on.

We have an excellent modeller who goes by the nickname of N!ghtmare.



Now, if we could just find even one more modeller, and of course even better would be two, I think our modding team would be in excellent shape.



I could also use an additional Researcher and Writer, so if you ever wanted to write a few pages about a WWI battle, based on the maps we are including, and have it electronically beamed into people's homes 24/7, which an audience of mostly males, ages 13-45 will read before they enter into the game, please contact me.

In addition, we could also use someone who would like to research uniforms, weapons, army structures, and research the maps by finding historical and modern photos on the internet of the geographioal locations featured in the maps.



We will also eventually (although I would say we are probably a year to a year and a half away) research the French Army and have a series of maps based on the battles they fought in WWI.

I think we are going to avoid Verdun because another modding group is making a mod based on the Verdun battles.

Instead, we can focus on Ypres, the Somme, Champagne, and Alsace-Lorraine.

So, we could use someone who has a good reading knowledge of the French language.

We will also need French Voice Actors to say some commands, phrases, and insults, and we will include those recordings inside the game.


We are not a business, so learning about the First World War and helping make the game is a rich experience in itself and is its own reward.

Which Tank Map For Iron Europe?

Thinking about this a little more, the Mark I tank saw limited action on the Western Front.

They were used at Flers (4 tanks), Thiepval (2 tanks but historically one tank broke down), Mouquet Farm (2 tanks but there the two tanks broke down), I think also at Morval (I'm not really an expert on all the Somme battles).


Then, I think they were replaced by the Mark IV tank in 1917, and the Mark IV was used in the Cambrai offensive. I think there were some also used at Passchendaele but with less success due to the mud.

So we could end up making just one tank, both, or I guess none.



Here was an old PM I sent to CrazyThumbs about Cambrai; over a year ago, someone said they were going to model a tank for us, but unfortunately the person never made the tank:

[QUOTE]I flipped through my WWI book by H.P. Willmott for a good tank battle, and found a real interesting one in the Battle of Cambrai, which occurred between November 20- December 4, 1917; Cambrai was a French town, a major rail center, about 50 miles south of Lille, "where the Germans defenses on the Western Front were at their strongest."

The tank used however was a Mark IV, and Willmott says "[t]he tank that fought at Cambrai in 1917 was not very different from the Mark I of 1916, but it did have a better radiator, a silencer, and tracks with better grip. It dispensed with the rear wheels."

Here the British decided to assault the German defenses, which they believed to be undermanned and not expecting an attack, with 381 tanks and a number of infantry units along a 6 mile sector of the German frontlines.

The tanks smashed through the barbed wire (that will have to be fixed, because in vanilla RO tanks can't drive through barbed wire), and the Germans were overwhelmed.

In a single day, the British advanced 5 miles, taking 7,500 prisoners.

"There was jubilation back in Britain, where church bells rang for the first time since 1914 and the newspapers proclaimed the greatest British victory of the war."

There is a special feature with these tanks however.

In order to advance through the trenches and not get stuck, these tanks were equipped with fascines. These large wooden bundles were dropped into an enemy trench, enabling the tank to get across.

It appears from the photo I'm looking at that the tank has a lever mechanism on top of which the bundle of wood at least 5 feet tall sits, which pushes down and drops the bundle.

However, the very next day, a German division, relieved of duty from the Eastern Front due to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, arrived. Fighting occurred in a village called Fontaine for the next few days, but the British tanks didn't work too well in the narrow village streets, and many were destroyed.

With the British having less than 90 tanks left, the Germans launched a counterattack. The British had to retreat.

The upshot was that the battle was essentially a draw. The British still retained around 7 or so miles of their initial advance from the first and second days, but had lost fresh ground to the south.

Each side had about 45,000 casualties a piece.

I admit the wood dumper lever mechanism sounds a little complicated, but instead of doing the initial assault (which undoubtedly would make a great map), you could have a map centering on the fighting around Fontaine. Hopefully, they dumped the wood bundles by that time (which I imagined they did; afterall, I doubt you can fight in the streets of a village with a 5 foot stack of wood on your tank).

There's a book (which I don't have) which would describe the battle more: Cambrai: The First Tank Battle (publisher Cerberus Ltd.) by Terry C. Treadwell.

If the tank modeler doesn't want to design a Mark IV and insists on a Mark I, tanks were introduced into combat at the Battle of the Somme in July?, 1916, and an engagement from that battle would be the Mark I map.

But I thought I would float the Battle of Cambrai first to you and the modeler since it sounds like it was the big tank battle of WWI. If it isn't feasible to map it now, perhaps then in a future release.

[/QUOTE]


Both Thiepval and Fontaine sound somewhat similar (tanks in a village).


Although both battles were important, Thiepval was probably, strategically speaking, the more important battle, since Thiepval and the Schwaben Redoubt (which would not appear in the proposed Thiepval map) were the lynchpin of the German defensive line on the Somme.


We could just do Thiepval, or wait until the Second Release, Iron Europe: 1917-1918, and make a Mark IV instead, or we could do both scenarios.

The difficult part though is not so much making the tank, since N!ghtmare wants to and can do that, but it is animating the tank.

And we need an Animator to do that.

United States Societal Disgrace On Veterans Day, 90 Years After The Armistice

Well, I was home on Veterans Day here in the United States, and I can tell you that all the Cable and the Big Three TV Networks care about is the amount of revenue they receive from running commercials and attracting as many eyeballs as they can to their particular channel.

90th Anniversary of Armistice Day; 50,000 American soldiers who gave their lives during the First World War.



Does the Establishment in our society pause and take some time to remember them? The men who served our country and sacrificed their lives for their freedom to own commerical TV networks and stations, run mindless television programs, and receive millions of dollars for one minute television commercials.

The Answer: no.

There was nothing of any substance on television here in the United States about Veterans Day.


None of the major TV network affiliates (ABC, NBC, CBS) ran any special programming to remember the men and women who served and who are now serving this country.


There was nothing about World War One; nothing about the Armistice.

MSNBC ran about 6-7 minutes of Vice President Dick Cheney's speech at Arligton National Cemetery Veterans Day Ceremony, and then cut him off to run commericials and never returned to the Ceremony.

None of the other Cable News Networks (CNN, Fox News) showed any of the Arlington Ceremony.

I forget exactly what the other Cable News networks were talking about while the Arlington Ceremony was taking place; one station, either Fox or CNN (I think it was CNN) was talking about Michelle Obama and her impact on womens' fashion here in the United States.

CNN, about noon, did talk briefly about some WWII veterans' stories during the day (I saw about a 4 minutes segment).


None of the local major TV network affliates (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) showed the Arlington Ceremony.


We do not have a two minutes silence that's observed in the United States.


The History Channel did run some military history programming; one show was about the Iraq war; almost all of it was about WWII.

They did run one of their "Dogfight" programs, which for about half an hour (including commerical breaks) did talk about American WWI Flying Ace Eddie Rickenbacker.

Then the second half of the show was about a WWII dogfight.


Only the Cable System Public Affairs channel, C-SPAN, showed the Arlington National Veterans Day Ceremony live.


For about 10 minutes, however, their microphone lost the sound, so they changed to some filler "talking heads" programming, but they were able to get the sound back on before the Vice President made his speech.


I watched NBC Nightly News at 6:30PM, and besides briefly mentioning that it was Veterans Day and showing Cheney lay the wreath at Arlington and Bush giving a speech at the USS Intrepid in New York City, NBC had no news segment about the First World War or the 90th Anniversary of Armistice Day.


If anyone knows if NPR Radio in the U.S. ran any special Veterans Day programming or about the Armistice and the First World War, I would appreciate your comments.



All in all, these Cable and TV networks disgust me.

It is all about making money.


That all said, there were quite a number of Hollywood movies about World War II on the Cable movie channels.

Public Broadcasting System (our public, non-commercial) also re-aired Ken Burns' 13 hour documentary about World War II called "The War".

But PBS ran nothing about the Armistice or any programs about the First World War.


Shame.

Tank Question For The Mod Leader

Just some more computer mod business stuff on the subject of Tanks:


I guess the other thing we have to remember is that, at least in 1916 (I think later on, 1917-1918, the French (who had the Renault tank) in just a few battles in 1917-1918 had several hundred tanks, but at the Somme, they were just being introduced.

So the amount of tanks was very limited.


When the tanks were introduced on September 15th, 1916 the British had 50 tanks.

About 1/3 broke down, so that left about 32 tanks.

These tanks were used to capture the town of Flers on September 16.


Of course, the Germans had no tanks at this time.

There apparently was only one tank used at Thiepval.

I think that historian I quoted who said there were 13 tanks used to capture Thiepval may have been mistaken (some historians and authors make mistakes, mispell place names, get some facts sometimes wrong, etc.).

I have a few books on the Somme, so I'll have to consult those.


I'm just trying to think which scenario would be better?


The first appearance of the tanks would allow the player to relive a historical moment.

Plus, it may help balance our Somme maps out.


I wouldn't give the British a lot of tanks on the map, I don't know, maybe like 3 tanks (with 3 men Game version crews).

I'm not sure how Gommecourt and Mouquet Farm will turn out as far as gameplay is concerned.

The Germans will be defending in those maps, with strong defenses in Gommecourt.

Mouquet Farm should be a little more level playing field, but the Germans will still be dug in the trenches, dug-outs, and shell holes.


If we gave the British 3 tanks, and say they could respawn twice, that would be 6 tanks altogether.

In real life, the Germans basically just abandoned the area and ran for their lives.

But they'll have no anti-tank weapons, maybe unless we have rifle grenades.

Thiepval might be then a more balanced if there is only one tank.


So, which scenario do you think is better? September 15 or September 26th at Thiepval??

Info zu Flandern, Pelikaan Ferm (Madonna) - Locations / Orte

Info zu Flandern, Pelikaan Ferm (Madonna) - Locations / Orte

Langemarck, 1914

The Imperial German Army made numerous attempts to break the British salient line surrounding Ypres in the fall of 1914.

Thousands of British and German soldiers were killed or wounded, although the Germans suffered substiantially higher casualties, with little gain to show for the enormous lost of men, about 20% of the killed being upper middle and middle class university and high school students.

This was Von Falkenhayn's newly reconstituted German 4th Army, replenished with the volunteers, the Freiwillige, who had rushed to join after the Great War started and were given eight weeks of military training and then sent to both the Western and Eastern Fronts.

Most were German university and high school students, who had obtained military passes to defer their studies until the war's end; but some were unemployed, older men; riff-raff like the Bavarian Army volunteer Adolf Hitler.

One of the most well-known German assaults was near Langemarck, on October 21st and 23rd, 1914.

The British SMLE rifles cut down the onrushing mass of German soldiers like scythes cutting wheat.



This battle is one of the more controversial in First World War history, because it was to later become politicized and enshrined as part of the mythology of German National Socialist ideology.

The legend created, based partially on the facts, but amplified by doctored up lies from the very beginning by the German Military and, later, Third Reich politicos, was an attempt to turn a costly defeat into a spiritual victory of sorts.


An article about the battle appears below.

I try not to get too political on this Blog, however, I have noticed that some of the university historians who write about Langemarck tend, in short, to draw a lot of conclusions about this battle that there is just, no matter how you slice it, no way they really can make final determinations and absolute conclusions about.



At best, they can speculate and offer their opinions as to what happened during the battles.

There are a number of sources, some mentioned below, that make references to Imperial German soldiers singing as they advanced into battle, including war diary and letter entries by both German and also British soldiers.



They may have sung the Deutschland song; perhaps it was a different song?



We really don't know; we were not there.




The Imperial German soldiers were fighting for a Prussian expansionist state.

But the Imperial German soldiers were not Nazis.


However, one can say that their deaths were exploited by the Imperial German military establishment and the German Empire's media of the day, who attempted to turn a military thrashing and the wasted lives of these thousands of young men, the intellectual and social elite of their youth, into a spiritual victory by labelling their deaths with the emotive phrase "Die Kindermord bei Ypern."



Again, not to get too political, but my own government in the USA, did something a little similar when the NFL Football Player, Pat Tilman, was killed in Afghanistan a few years back.

First, the military said Tilman was killed in action; I think Tilman was killed in 2004, and the 2004 Election was pending.

Well, we didn't have to wait 31 years to find the truth out; but it was not until a year or two after the 2004 Election that the real facts were disclosed.



Pat Tilman wasn't killed in action; he was killed by friendly fire and may have even been a victim of negligent homicide. This was known by U.S. military officials within hours after he had been killed.

It is said that Tilman shouted his name several times to the American military personnel that were shooting at him.



Something sort of similar to this happened in the USA in 1980s with Vietnam, with all the Rambo type movies and TV shows, but I don't have time to get into that.



Copyright 2008 by Gamburd, USA

Langemarck, Part I, 1914

WWI: Massacre of the Innocents
One of the enduring legends of the Great War, the singing attacks of German students at the First Ypres, is a curious mixture of fact and self-serving fiction--a cover-up that became a cornerstone of Nazi mythology.

By Robert Cowley

At Ypres in 1914, Germany botched its last chance to win the upper hand on the Western Front--and its last chance, perhaps, to win the Great War. From the middle of October to the middle of November, practically without letup, parts of two German armies, the Fourth and the Sixth, battered the British and French divisions clinging to a narrowing salient. Their immediate objective was Ypres, once the center of the medieval cloth trade in northern Europe; but beyond lay the last real strategic prizes of the fall, the Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne, where the British buildup was centered.

Villages, even crossroad features, with hitherto forgettable names like Bixschoote, Zonnebeke, Kortekeer Caberet, and Langemarck, gained sudden notoriety. Time and again the Germans threatened to break through, only to lose momentum or to run up against a determined improvised defense at the last moment. The "last": The repetition applies in every sense but one. Though nobody imagined it at the time, this would not be the "last" Ypres but the "First."


The losses, hideous for all concerned, were worst for the Germans. They had nothing to show for them. There would be no more turning of flanks, no more opportunity to maneuver, no occupation of the Channel ports. The war in the West had hardened into a trench stalemate. How could Germany's military and political leaders rationalize the disaster at home? How could they put the best heroic gloss--a favorable spin, as we might say--on the shambles of their hopes? Out of this public relations dilemma, apparently, grew one of the enduring legends of the Great War: the massacre of the singing innocents at Ypres.

Few caught the essence of the story better, if with less regard for the truth, than Adolf Hitler, then a private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment. In Mein Kampf, he describes his baptism by fire--or, as he put it, the "iron salute" he received near Gheluvelt on October 29:

With feverish eyes each one of us was drawn forward faster and faster over turnip fields and hedges till suddenly the fight began, the fight of man against man. But from the distance the sounds of a song met our ears, coming nearer and nearer, passing from company to company, and then, while Death busily plunged his hand into our rows, the song reached also us, and now we passed it on: "Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles, über alles in der Welt!"

By the time Hitler wrote those lines in 1924, while incarcerated for his part in the failed Munich putsch, the invention of myth and not the establishment of fact was uppermost in his mind. In this instance, Hitler was busy pushing what would become one of the most persistent semi-fictions of the interwar period and a cornerstone of the Nazi experience, a vision of manly young patriots sacrificing their lives for the greater good of the Fatherland. This was the story of Der Kindermord bei Ypern--the so-called massacre of the innocents at Ypres. The "innocents" were the student volunteers in the German reserve corps, who were slaughtered in droves but who went to their deaths singing. In German Bibles, the word kindermord was also applied to the children Herod killed after the visit of the Magi, and it had, in both cases, the connotation of "holy innocents."

The story even has its own special locus, the village of Langemarck on the north face of the Salient, and date, November 10, 1914--in both location and day some distance from Hitler. According to the next day's official army bulletin, which appeared on the front pages of many German newspapers, "West of Langemarck youthful regiments stormed the first lines of the enemy trenches and took them, singing 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.'" They took approximately 2,000 prisoners, the dispatch concluded, French regulars all. The carefully crafted story, notably repeated in accounts published during the Third Reich, is basically this: The student volunteers, called the children's corps "by mocking veterans," advance silently in the fog, "a wide sea of white air," as one memoirist puts it. There is no preliminary artillery barrage that might tip off the enemy. The volunteers are discovered anyway, and fire from a source they cannot see chops down their close-packed rows. They continue to throw themselves "into this hell with childlike trust." But nothing avails. They lie in the open, unable to advance or retreat. "In this hour, they have become men."

Then the miracle happens. A voice rises in song, then another and another takes up "the holy words." The young soldiers rise up as one and storm forward; they sing as they run. Some are helmetless, their heads wrapped in bloody bandages. With their "burning eyes" they are like "unreal figures from an old saga." In some versions, the volunteers sweep over the enemy trenches; in others, the song dies as they die, and silent grey heaps litter the damp fields in front of Langemarck.

There are all manner of things wrong with the story, beginning with that official dispatch. The singing volunteers took no Allied trenches at Langemarck on November 10. The one incident that comes close to matching the words of the dispatch took place a day earlier. It is recorded in the daily diary of the 206th Reserve Infantry Regiment, published as part of the history of the regiment in 1931. Regimental histories can be the meat and potatoes of military history, but seventeen years had passed since the event, time enough for the author, one Werner Maywald, to stupid into, and insert, some of the more improbable details of the story--including the singing of the most patriotic German song, a tune that is not easy to carry under normal circumstances. (Imagine American troops under fire trying to mouth the words of "The Star Spangled Banner.")

At six in the morning on the 9th, the diary reports, soldiers with unloaded rifles and fixed bayonets leave their lines "almost noiselessly." But French troops detect their advance and begin to fire. At that moment the singing starts. It "reaches heaven like a cry for help: first one man, then a small group, then more and more, until the entire advance sings, "'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!' Even the wounded sing. The words are on the last breaths of the dying." The attack sweeps over the French lines, taking fourteen officers and 1,154 men prisoner, mostly older soldiers from territorial regiments--the equivalent of our National Guard--but not regulars, whose capture by green German troops would have added luster to the exploit.

Unfortunately for the myth, the November 9th incident did not occur at Langemarck but three miles away at a village called Bixschoote. Beck-skota: that rough, turnip-eating name does not lend itself to myth in the same way that the vaguely Teutonic vibrations of Langemarck do. As one former student volunteer put it in 1933, the first year of Hitler's reign, "the name sounds like a heroic legend." That the actual village had, both in 1914 and in its postwar resurrection, a drably brickbound and distinctly unheroic look seemed beside the point.

But the single dispatch is only the beginning of the confusion that the myth-makers wrought. When we look at contemporary accounts and regimental histories, we come up against an inconvenient fact. There seem to have been not just one Langemarck but several, both in this sector and in others miles away. They occurred on various dates, as early as October 21 and as late as November 16. During that three-week period, singing attacks were reported everywhere from the Yser to the Langemarck sector to Neuve Chapelle, twenty-five miles to the south.

In his diary entry of October 27, for example, a junior staff officer named Rudolf Binding (who was several miles away from Langemarck, at the German-occupied village of Passchendaele) laments that against experienced defenders "these young fellows we have, only just trained, are too helpless, particularly when the officers have been killed." Binding, later to become a prominent man of letters, goes on to note that a battalion of light infantry, or Jäger, "almost all Marburg students . . . have suffered terribly from enemy shell-fire." And then: "In the next division, just such young souls, the intellectual flower of Germany, went singing into an attack on Langemarck, just as vain and just as costly." Binding gives no date, but since the Germans temporarily suspended their attacks in the Langemarck sector on October 24, the episode he refers to must have taken place earlier. But then, for all their curious similarity, accounts don't always agree on chronology. This includes Hitler's--if, indeed, he actually did hear singing. He was even farther from Langemarck than Binding.

Allied eyewitness reports only add to the confusion. The closest to Langemarck that a singing attack comes is in the village of Koekuit--no more than a narrowing of the road, actually, about a mile to the north. A battalion of the Gloucester Regiment reported it on the 21st, and the attack did force the British to retreat toward Langemarck. There are military historians who point to that episode. On the same day, at Zonnebeke, five miles away, one of the "old contemptibles" (as the British regulars called themselves) remembered how German volunteers spilled down the ridge from Passchendaele "singing and waving their rifles in the air." It was, you might say, 1917 in reverse. "As fast as we shot them down, others took their place. Even when their own artillery barrage caught them by mistake, they kept on advancing. They were incredibly, ridiculously brave."

The next day, October 22, at a place called Kortekeer Caberet (named after a crossroads estaminet), about a mile west of Langemarck, Einjährige--volunteers--of the 46th Reserve Division attacked other units of the perilously overstretched Gloucestershires. According to the regimental war narratives, it was "a particularly fine feat of arms. . . . These lads . . . advanced with the utmost determination, singing patriotic songs, and though suffering appalling casualties, actually succeeded in driving back their seasoned opponents." (The British would in turn drive the Einjährige back to their starting point.)

At least one British description--of an action in the same area on October 23--seems to stupid into the script for the legend, though it also raises questions. This time the attacking volunteers wear not the regulation spiked Pickelhauben but what appear to be student caps. (Did the British confuse them with Feldmützen, or field caps? It is not unlikely.) The defenders hear the distant sound of voices raised in song; the volunteers surge forward, arm-in-arm. (If that is true, how did they hold their rifles?) In the event, batteries firing over open sights, as well as the famously disciplined rifles of the British regulars, blow them away.

Word of the singing attacks got back to London. Sir Henry Wilson, the British deputy chief of staff, crowed in the October 24 entry of his diary about yet another killing extravaganza some miles from Langemarck: "The I Corps really took tea with the Germans. . . . These Germans attacked five times in close formations singing 'Die Wacht am Rhein' and the place became a shambles. They must have had 6,000 or 7,000 casualties"--surely a vast overestimation.

Perhaps the final recorded instances of the singing attacks in Ypres occurred on two days very late in the battle, November 14 and 16. Both were against the French (the badly mauled British were by then being pulled out of the Salient), and both happened near Bixschoote; they are noted in the journal of the commander of the French 26th Infantry Regiment, Lt. Col. Henri Colin. November 14 began with hailstorms and German assaults; the fighting continued, practically without letup, until dark. Reports began to filter back to Colin in his command post of close, desperate struggles over farm buildings, bits of tattered woodland, and shallow impromptu trenches that were already filling with water. A noncom ran up, out of breath, and blurted out that his company had been almost annihilated. He told Colin that his company commander had been killed, but not before dispatching a German officer with his revolver. Later, Colin's surviving company commanders would describe an even wilder sight in this "day of terrible distress." With fanatic élan, masses of fresh young German troops had thrown themselves at the thin French line, "singing and shouting insults at us. They were finally driven off, leaving a great number of corpses on the ground."

But how are we to take the odd, ghastly episode that Colin records two days later? There may be more to it than met the eye. The first snow had just fallen, and the weather, as much as the rapidly diminishing ardor of the combatants, was about to shut down serious fighting for the next few months.