Not the Western Front Conference

Richard Van Emden – Boy Soldiers

When war broke out in 1914, no one was more caught up in the popular tide of patriotism than the young boys who wanted to fight for King and country. This is their untold story – the stories of boys aged as young as thirteen who enlisted for full combat training.

Andy Stuart – Northern Russia and the Allied Intervention, 1918 – 1920.

North Russia was the entry point for supplies from the Allies throughout WW1. The Revolution in 1917 changed everything.  Peace in the east would release enemy troops for the west. Bolshevism might change the world. Churchill wanted to stop both. Tired, desk bound officers, second rate conscripts, released prisoners and several mutinies. This talk covers the politics, the motivation, the local plan and conditions, and why it was allowed to fade from memory.

Dr Graham Kemp – ‘The Battle for Lake Tanganyika, 1915‘

Story of the war on Lake Tanganyika is like a real-life Ealing comedy.  A story far stranger than the fiction, like the film The African Queen. In 1914 Lake Tanganyika was undisputedly a German lake. Then a Belgian white hunter had an idea, came across the most eccentric and dim-witted of  English naval officers, and together, against the odds, and in almost farcical manner, took the Lake from the Germans. 

Peter Hart – The Third Battle of Krithia, 4 June 1915

Who will ever forget the immortal Third Battle of Krithia, 4 June 1915? Peter will examine Hunter Weston’s innovative plans for this set piece battle, an early attempt at ‘bite and hold’. Using witness accounts, he will chart the varying success up and down the Allied line, followed in turn by the mass Turkish counter-attacks that threatened to break through to fling the British and French right back into the sea. It was a close run thing sure enough, but for which side?