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Great War Wire Cutter


N.O.S.

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Where these issued to first wave troops in attacks?

 

 

No, the use of cars and armoured cars was a bit topsy turvy. This sort of wire cutter also shows up on cigarette cards from the time - they certainly wouldn't have been used in any "first wave" scenario as far as I know - but there would have been periods from 1914 in particular when odd cars were rumbling around getting into mischief.

 

MB

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:rofl::rofl::rofl:Pretty good for a first post - looking forward to the next 1,000.......

 

I thought that was meant tongue-in-cheek (as in one of these cars going 'over the top' into the wire and mud above the trenches).

 

If not, I do apologise :-) (Looking at it that way it was very funny though) :-D (edit: Well actually not funny at all if you think of the horrors that awaited them as they went over the top. No - my mistake :embarrassed:)

 

This was an advert from one of a large batch of the 'Great War Magazine' which I recently picked up. Some very graphic photographs and sketches of the front line, and some interesting reports of actions as they took place, rather than written many years in retrospect.

Edited by N.O.S.
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Snap - that humble pie tasted quite good with loads of custard poured over it........it did taste mainly of custard though :blush:

 

It does beg one question though - why were wire cutters needed?

 

I've always thought of the Great War as a face-off between entrenched armies, with the barbed wire in No Man's Land where only men and tanks could operate. You wouldn't expect a car like this to get anywhere near this terrain.

 

So it must imply the threat of sabotage teams operating well behind enemy lines, laying single strand wire traps for unwary motorised 'brass'. Which surprises me a bit.

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It was tounge in cheek. Three buddies and I did The Somme and Flanders last spring. After seeing that, it's the old expression, if you don't laugh you will cry. Staggers the imagination that it lasted four years!

My great uncle was railway troops, one freinds grand father was engineers and the other two brothers uncle was infantry and died of wounds from the Second Battle of Cambri, us Canadians called it Crossing the Canal-du- Nord. We reckoned all our relatives must have been there in that area at the same time.

Edited by 15cwt
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Not strictly on thread, but I was recently reading one account of a Tank commander at the Battle of Cambrai, witnessing a bizarre look of horror on the faces of wounded Germans in front of the Tank - not looking at the Tank in fear that it would crush them, but behind it - when the commander looked behind, instead of simply crushing barbed wire and leaving it behind, it had gathered up behind it and was being towed by it, like a huge cocoon!

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  • 3 months later...
  • 4 months later...

A couple of photos attached showing the Austro-Hungarian army's version, these cars were with a medical unit on the eastern front - somewhere in Galicia. The vehicle in the lower pic is a Graf und Stift

File0002.jpg

File0001.jpg

Edited by Mike_H
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