Have I Told You About WWI? Heroes and Villains.
World War I prompted some of the most widespread and successful propaganda campaigns in the history of Western nations. This media coverage became increasingly important as the war dragged on and those on the home front grew critical of the reasons for the sacrifice. Newspaper reports propagated semi-mythical stories of individuals to distract from the horror of the mass slaughter of the front. As many of these stories have survived and even been immortalized on the silver screen, let’s take a moment to set the record straight on some of these heroes and villains.
Lawrence of Arabia. Perhaps the single best remembered hero of the Great War began his career as an English academic with no military training or experience whatsoever. Educated at Oxford and long fascinated by Arab culture, Thomas Edward Lawrence was a junior lieutenant working as a mapmaker in Cairo when he talked his way on to an exploratory expedition into the Arabian desert. The British in the Middle East were trying to forge an alliance with the native Arabs against the Turks, promising them autonomy after the end of the war. When the greater part of the expedition returned to Cairo, Lawrence continued on and formed a friendship with an Arab prince, Feisal. Securing equipment and financial backing from the British, Lawrence was soon leading the Arabs in a savage guerrilla war against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Though a tiny conflict compared to the catastrophe in Europe, they were remarkably successful in protecting the Suez Canal and providing support for the British conquest of Jerusalem. However, Lawrence knew that the British had no intention of granting the Arabs autonomy after the war, and he grew increasingly uncomfortable in his role. He told his friend Prince Feisal of the secret agreement between the British and French to divide the Arabian peninsula between them after victory over the Turks. Shortly after this knowledge became public in 1917, he returned to England, unwilling to see the war to its conclusion. He attended the peace talks at Versailles in 1919, lobbying in vain on behalf of his Arab friends, and became internationally famous thanks to the photographs and films an American journalist recorded while following him through the desert. Resisting this acclaim, he managed to live the rest of his life in anonymity, dying in 1935.
HEADLINE (Daily News [London], Dec. 30, 1919): LAWRENCE OF ARABIA; Man Who Raised an Army to Fight the Turks
IMMORTALIZED IN: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), starring Peter O’Toole
The Red Baron. You remember him from the Peanuts cartoon, of course. But who was this mysterious pilot that Snoopy was always trying to shoot down? Manfred von Richthofen was a Prussian baron who began the war as a lancer in the light cavalry. However, the Germans, quicker than the British to acknowledge the new realities of modern warfare, soon disbanded their cavalry units, and Richthofen ended up running messages between the lines in the mud of Verdun. His deep rooted individualism rebelled against this anonymity, and he jumped at the chance in 1916 to train as an airplane pilot. This was despite the grim statistics associated with this new profession — the life expectancy for a pilot on the Western Front was just 3–6 weeks. He quickly developed a reputation as a brilliant strategist. He eschewed the popular, showy aerobatics of some of his colleagues in favor of brutal, efficient dogfights which he always won by making unprecedented use of the third dimension. When put in charge of his own fighter squadron, he took advantage of this reputation by painting his airplane bright red, so that any pilot who met him in the skies would know they were facing the fearsome Baron. Oddly enough, this had the effect on one British squadron of convincing them that he must be a woman; only a woman, they reasoned, would agree to fly in such a garishly painted contraption. After 80 confirmed kills, more than any other ace in the war, Richthofen was finally shot down in April 1918 over Allied lines manned by Aussies. He was not yet 26 years old. In Germany he was immortalized as a hero; in the United States, he made his way into comic books as a sinister and mysterious villain.
HEADLINE (NY Times, April 23, 1918): FOE’S GREATEST ACE KILLED; Baron von Richthofen Shot Down After 80th Victory Had Been Claimed for Him
IMMORTALIZED IN: Peanuts, created by Charles Schulz; and on pizza boxes in a grocery store near you
Mata Hari. The modern era’s most famous femme fatale, this world-renowned Indian dancer and notorious lover was, in fact, Dutch. Born Margaretha Zelle, she left her daughter and abusive husband after her son was (possibly) murdered by the nanny. Unable to make ends meet and despairing of ever seeing her daughter again, she reinvented herself as an exotic dancer using moves she had picked up while stationed with her former husband in the East Indies. To supplement this income, she also began sleeping with powerful men for money. She was soon packing theaters across Europe, having made the striptease into an art form. Though beginning to age out of exotic dance by the time the war began, she continued to make herself available to those who would pay, no matter which side they were on. In 1916, she was hired by the French to pass information German officers might let slip in her bed. Unfortunately, her espionage never proved terribly useful, and by 1917 the French were facing mutiny due to the massive, unending casualties. Finding the aging prostitute a convenient scapegoat, and with scant evidence, the French accused Hari of being a double agent responsible for the death of thousands of Frenchmen. She was executed by firing squad October 15, 1917; when she faced the riflemen, she refused to wear a blindfold. Her almost entirely fabricated reputation as a dangerous seductress and spy made her even more famous in death than she had been in life.
HEADLINE (NY Times, Oct. 16, 1917): WOMAN DANCER SHOT BY FRENCH AS SPY; Mlle. Mata-Hari Suffers Penalty for Betraying Secret of ‘Tanks’ to Germans
IMMORTALIZED IN: Mata Hari (1931), starring Greta Garbo
Gavrilo Princip. Though his shot arguably started the war, you may never have heard of this villain. Recruited by a shadowy Bosnian-Serb nationalist group, this 19-year-old assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne on 28 June, 1914, almost by accident. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade had already passed by 5 of the 6 assassins in the group that day, and had faced only one attempt which resulted in no harm to the royals. Princip had given up on the venture, stepping into a deli and buying a sandwich while the heir gave his planned speech. But when the royal driver took a wrong turn and had to flip a U-ey, he did so directly in front of Princip, who took his shot and killed both the Archduke and his wife Sophie. So why was he not more vilified in the international press? Perhaps because, at that moment, no one in the international press thought anything would come of it. The Manchester Guardian reported the next day, “It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand [sic] will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe.” By the time the dominoes had fallen and the global catastrophe exploded into action, it was much bigger than an idealistic student from a small town in the Balkans. However, in the Balkans even today, Princip is anything but forgotten. A plan to erect a centennial memorial to him in Sarajevo, where his famous act was committed, met with mixed reactions. The same cultural and ethnic tensions motivating extremists like Princip in 1914 most recently led to the brutal Yugoslav Wars, still very fresh in living memory. It’s an important reminder that the villain of one person’s story might be a hero in someone else’s telling.
HEADLINE (Manchester Guardian, June 29, 1914): ASSASSINATION OF THE AUSTRIAN ROYAL HEIR AND HIS WIFE; Shot By Student in Bosnian Capital
IMMORTALIZED IN: That one paragraph in that one chapter on World War I in your 5th grade history textbook
