MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · April 22 · 1915
ON THIS DAY · 22 APRIL 1915
Gas at Ypres
22 Apr 1915 — A green-yellow chlorine cloud rolls over French colonial troops at Langemarck: the first mass poison-gas attack. By 1918 gas has killed some 90,000 and maimed a million more. Remember what industrial chemistry did here.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
With the west locked, 1915 is the year everyone looks for a way around — and the war metastasizes. At Ypres in April, Germany opens a cylinder valve and the age of chemical warfare begins (the memorial marker stands at Langemarck). In May, Italy — bought by the Treaty of London’s promises of Austrian land — joins the Entente and attacks up the one corridor available: the Isonzo river, a limestone trap it will assault eleven times. And at the Dardanelles, Churchill’s great idea — force the straits, take Constantinople, open the warm-water road to Russia and knock the Ottomans out with one blow — dies on the beaches of Gallipoli, where Anzac and British infantry cling under the ridgelines for eight months against an Ottoman defense organized by Mustafa Kemal, and never take them.
From Chapter 4 — The Widening War of The Great War, 1914–1918 (NOV 1915).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — The “easterner” temptation. If the Western Front is a wall, said London’s easterners, go around: the Dardanelles, Salonika, Mesopotamia. The logic was real — knock out weak…
- The turn — Gorlice–Tarnów, 2 May 1915. The war’s most consequential forgotten battle: a four-hour hurricane bombardment on a narrow front — the method later perfected everywhere — and the…
- What it changed — Russia wounded where it cannot heal. The army recovers — 1916 will prove it — but the home front does not: refugees choke the cities, inflation eats wages, and the Tsar at headquarters…
Then ask the room: Gallipoli: a brilliant strategy ruined by execution, or a bad idea rescued by nothing? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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