The next stop on my trip to Moscow was the Central Armed Forces Museum, which is also known as the museum of the Soviet Army. The former is probably now more accurate, since there are exhibits from the post-soviet period as well as sections being developed that cover the whole history of Russian arms back to the middle ages.

The first hall we visited was a display of artifacts and paintings of scenes from the Russian Civil War.  The large dioramas were impressive. The central piece in the room was a tachanka machine gun cart, which I had read about. It was interesting to see one up close.

By far the largest subject covered in the museum was  the Great Patriotic War (World War II) Certain battles had their own rooms (Leningrad, Stalingrad) while there were many general exhibits. There was a substantial display on partisan warfare. Also, there was a room with displays honoring the western allies. There was a large diorama of the Normandy Invasion complete with a jeep. Interestingly, a TV screen on the wall in this area was showing “Saving Private Ryan” dubbed in Russian.

From the room, we passed through a series of exhibits on the Holocaust, and then into the great hall which houses displays from the Victory Parade in 1945. This was most impressive and featured many Soviet and captured German artifacts, including the huge bronze eagle which had topped the Reichs Chancellery. Also on the display were the cast-down German Banners, which Soviet soldiers threw on the ground in front of Lenin’s mausoleum at the end of the parade.

Past this hall, we viewed post-war displays and finally post-Soviet Russian military exhibits. There is a large outside display area, which was apparently closed for the winter. Outside we also passed a bronze statue in memory of the crew of the Russian submarine, Kursk, which sank in August of 2000.

This another great museum in Moscow, and one not to be missed by the history buff, if you are in town.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Armed_Forces_Museum

GWA events are always a hoot and this November was definitely worth the price of admission. When I arrived at Newville on Friday afternoon, the parking lot was full of more cars than I could remember seeing there. With a forecast of good weather for the weekend, a good turnout was probably a sure thing. As usual, there was an extensive vendor area in the parking lot, but I wasn’t in shopping mode, and after greeting a few folks that I knew, I signed in and made my way to the Russian Legion section of the trenches.

As number two man on the Maxim, it is my job to assist the gunner in setting up, firing, and maintaining the gun. Vanya got there just after I did and we began making our little bunker homey. This was time well spent, because almost as soon as the event began, we were subjected by determined attacks by the Huns. I believe that we must have shot up nearly 2000 rounds!

Indeed, I heard the comment made on the Allied side that the Germans were more aggressive than usual this year. One thing is certain, they had a lot more gas! The gas alarm sounded frequently, requiring us to resort to our gas masks. Since I am nearly blind while wearing mine, it is a bit of a nuisance. It does give one a very, very small taste of that aspect of life in the trenches. At one point, Saturday afternoon, the entire German line was blotted out by an enormous orange cloud which seemed to sweep in and stay for an unusual amount of time. A very surreal moment, to say the least.

The Russian Legion section of the line lies between the French sector (we operate under French Command) and the U.S. Marines. Being flanked by two strong units and operating two Maxims and a couple of more portable mgs gave us a very secure position. The Germans rarely got into our lines, despite their aggressiveness. Our mortar crew outdid themselves as usual, in tormenting the Boche with the accuracy of their fire.

Also, we once again had the Allied and German air corps operating over the battlefield. We had a Madsen gun set up for such a possibility and we opened up with the gusto on the German plane. After a few passes, he began trailing smoke and disappeared, so we must have gotten him!

This was my third GWA event, and definitely the best, in my opinion.  I am definitely looking forward to the next one.

Thanks to Matt Gillespie for additional pictures.

Bill and Linda Donegan attended the annual Troops and Trains event in Strassburg, Pa over the weekend of November 5th. Here is their report:

Strasburg, Pa November 4, 2011 had dinner with Dave and Lois Nowack.

Saturday November 5,2011 we had breakfast with the Nowacks.  Linda and I dressed in Civil War attire and we proceeded to the Strasburg Train Museum for our orientation/safety meeting.  Linda and I were greeters/meeters at the museum and acted as a walking Civil War display.  We met Mike, a fellow Union solder and we decided to form an ad hoc unit.  We found an empty table and chairs, Mike took off his accouterments and voila, we had a display table. Soon we were joined by another artillery sergeant and Linda and I decided to walk around in the museum and pose for photographs with visitors.

Linda and I decided to walk across the road to the train station and mingle with the crowd, walk the platform and wave to passengers on the train (a train ride of one hour was assigned to each presenter). Soon we were joined by two more couples in Civil War attire.  We posed for many photographs and represented the Federal Generals Corps. We were General William Rosecrans (myself), Thomas Crittenden, and George H. Thomas. Funny how we three actually served together in Chattanooga.  In fact we actually asked the conductor if this was the Chattanooga cho cho.  To which he replied, “quarter to nine, track 29″. I told him that nothing could be finer than to have ham and eggs in Carolina.

“At the outbreak of war in 1939 Choules was the Acting Torpedo Officer, Fremantle and also the Chief Demolition Officer on the western side of the Australian continent.

He was tasked with destroying vital military installations should the threatened Japanese invasion of Australia come to pass.”

As part of his duties in WWII, his demolition team were ordered to destroy the port facilities in Fremantle to keep them from falling into Japanese hands. Mr. Choules retired from the navy in 1956 after 40 years serving in uniform.

With the recent death of Frank Buckles in the US, this leaves only Florence Green of Great Britain as the last living veteran of WWI. Ms. Green was a waitress in the Women’s Royal Air Force.

News source – BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10205174

It’s spring, 1918 and on the killing fields of France, the armies are stirring in the mud and filth of the trenches. The Kaiser’s forces prepare for an offensive that will strike a decisive blow and divide the allied lines. The western allies including the new American troops and the hardened veterans of the Russian legion serving with the French army make their own preparations. Both sides hope for a victory that will end the grinding trench warfare that has characterized “The Great War.”

On the weekend of May 15-17, the Great War Association held it’s annual spring battle reenactment. This was only my second time participating in a WWI event with the Russian Legion, but one that I had been eagerly anticipating. Once again, I was number two man on a maxim gun, assisting Vanya Pertsev, (aka: John Pepper). It is always a treat to fire ‘Uncle Maxim’, but he can be cranky. On this occasion, we were dismayed immediately on Friday,  by the tendency of the gun to jam after only a couple of rounds. This necessitated a teardown  of the weapon. With nightfall approaching, it was crucial to ascertain exactly what was the nature of the problem. Vanya’s expertise enabled us to find the defective part and determine means of  working around it in order to keep firing for the remainder of the weekend.  By Saturday afternoon, we had perfected mini-teardowns that took only a couple of minutes and occurred only on occasion.

The weather Friday evening was quite pleasant for mid-April and we had no need of our overcoats until well after dark. In late evening, many of our men were pulled out of their positions to support an attack by the British. The Huns chose this as a time to attack our line. Hearing shouts and firing ahead of us, we began firing but the gun again jammed. Vanya sent me out of the bunker with grenades, but the trench  filled with smoke as a hail of german rifle grenades rained down on our positions. Just as I staggered past the opening to the bombproof tunnel in the rear of our position, dark figures wearing Stalhelms emerged out of the smoke, firing on the run. We were had.

If the weather Friday was pleasant, Saturday, however, was a different matter entirely. The morning skies were a steel gray and the air felt ominiously cool and damp. We were anticipating rain, and by ten o’clock or thereabouts, it arrived. The precipitation started out slowly, but increased as the day wore on. The trenches got very muddy and the overcoats got soaked and very heavy.  Thankfully, being on the machine gun crew meant that we got to spend most of our time in an MG bunker, which kept Vanya and I out of the worst of the rain. This changed when a major allied offensive captured the section of German trenches directly ahead of us and we were selected by our Poruchik to deliver a case of grenades to the troops occupying the Boche positions. With Vanya carrying the grenade and me acting as armed guard, we raced across no-man’s land and started distributing grenades, but we soon learned that our brothers-in-arms were beginning to pull back. As we neared our own lines, the Germans hit our trenches with a gas shell. This necessitated the use of gas masks. I learned that it is virtually impossible for me to see with one of those things on. The French gas masks that we use allow all water vapor from your breath to stay in the mask and instantly fogged up my glasses. I followed directly behind Vanya, since his back was all I could see, but he then got gas in his mask and began gasping for air and collapsed onto a bench in the French line. A corpsman with the US Marines began working on him and was quite effective. Vanya was soon smiling and breathing fine, having added a good-natured bit of living history to our battle reenactment.

The rain continued to gain in intensity and finally, around 3:15pm, the downpour was punctuated by lightning and loud rolls of thunder. This was too much realism and the event was called. This was an unceremonious end to a very good event. Despite the rain, the Legion Bunker was warm and dry and our new commissary was a wonder to behold. The evenings offered great food, strong drink and good company. Special thanks to Slava, our cook for keeping everyone in the legion fortified in the cold and dampness, and a большие спасибо to our commander and everyone else in the Legion for a great weekend. Great War is a fascinating and interesting departure from the average reenacting shoot-em-up.

This year, I attended my third ‘Military Through the Ages’ at Jamestown Settlement. For those of you who have not attended this event, it is a high-quality, prestigious time-line event. Since it takes place in the environs of the reconstructed Jamestown Settlement and museum, it is doubly interesting. As usual, there were a wide variety of living history impressions on display here.  It is always a challenge to capture them all on film, but I have done my best. There is only a limited amount of time to do so, since we have to man our own displays as well. Again this year, the 193rd was well represented by our membership. This year, we concentrated on representing a Red Army field hospital, which was well-received by the public.

The timeline represented this year extended from the time of the Emperor Charlemagne (around 800 A.D.) though the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, represented by groups from the Hundred Year’s War though German mercenaries from the 1500′s and English privateers preying on Spanish shipping in the late 1600′s. The various conflicts of the eighteenth century were well represented, both in Europe and North America by such groups as Roger’s Rangers and His Majesty’s Detached Hospital in North America.

After a brief stopover in the War of 1812 (Fort Norfolk Garrison) the timeline marched into the American Civil War with a large representation of Yanks and Rebels of various units, including the ‘Nancy Hart Militia’ (imagine women in hoop skirts carrying muskets!)

One of the highlights of this year’s encampment was the British 24th Regiment of Foot from the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. This guys always look sharp, but this year, they upped the ante and brought some Zulus with them. The Zulu reenactors looked great and knew their stuff and this aided the group in netting some of the top awards.

There were several good WWI units as usual and this year included for the first time since I have been going, Imperial Russian (11th Siberian Rifles). Then we had another good display from the Irish War for Independence with the West Cork Flying Column and their nemesis, the Black and Tans. Then on to an extensive WWII array including our group, British Commonwealth forces, Americans and Germans.

The last two displays moved into the Cold War period with a fine Vietnam display (which gets better every year) and the First Company of 154th Independent Spetsnaz Detachment in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, 1987, who put up an excellent and creative display for their first year. I know that I haven’t mentioned every group here, by a longshot, but there are just too many. Come out next year and see for yourself.

This is a great show, which would be worth the drive, even if your group wasn’t participating.  For me, it is a hoot just to see impressions that I don’t get to see in the usual single time-period events. Apparently the public thinks so as well, given the turnout, which I understand was larger than anticipated. I know we had a lot of people come through our camp and show a great deal of interest. That is, of course, one of the most gratifying aspects.

On the weekend of November 6, I was able for the first time, to take part in a WWI event at the GWA site at Newville, PA., thanks to the support and loan of equipment from John Pepper and Keith Allen. The group I was with, is La Legion Russe, which portrays “a machine gun company of the 1st Battalion of La Legion Russe in France in 1918.”

The background of the real ‘Russian Legion’ is probably little known to most people. According to Wikipedia, the first Russian soldiers landed in Marseille in April 1916. Before the end of the year, “General Aleksei Brusilov was responsible for the 4 Special Brigades which contributed a total of 44,319 men to the war in France.”

This force served the French well until the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the withdrawal of Russia from the war. Not surprisingly, many of the soldiers questioned why they should be in France fighting with the situation that existed in their homeland. Men in one of the Expeditionary Forces’ camps then mutined, but were put down by the soldiers in the other camp who were still loyal to their officers. “The survivors were at first sent to jail camps in North Africa and France, and after some months many were sent back to Russia, while a good number of the men integrated into French society.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Expeditionary_Force_in_France

The loyal men asked to be allowed to continue to fight and the Russian legion was formed under Colonel Gotua. They were attached to the 1st Moroccan Infantry Division. These men served with great distinction until the end of the war and were the recipients of the Legion of Honor and other awards.

The reenactment group which portrays these men seeks to duplicate as much as possible the life of Russian soldiers on the western front in the Great War. The reenactors use a combination of French and Russian kit and eat Russian food. There is always a hot pot of chai (tea) available for the cold troops.

The event itself was quite amazing. I have been to Newville for numerous WWII events, but this was different. For one thing, there were many more participants. There didn’t seem to be any large gaps in the line. The French were to our right, the American Marines to our immediate left, with the American army just past them and the British Commonwealth forces beyond them. Needless to say, there appeared to be quite a few Germans and Austrians across from us. Despite all the allied troops, somehow, German trench raiders still managed to sneak into the trenches from time to time. Give these guys credit, though, they nearly always took their hits.

Another interesting factor was the use of aircraft. A German Fokker D7 periodically straffed our trench, while two Allied Nieuport 17s frequently made the Boche duck their heads. I have heard that the Fokker crashed upon landing when it returned to its field, severely damaging the plane, but with no serious injuries to the pilot. That is certainly unfortunate, for the planes certainly put on a good show and added a lot to the atmosphere.

As I frequently do a WWII Red Army impression, this impression came fairly easy, although I had to keep reminding my self to refer to the others as ‘Brothers’ rather than ‘Comrade.” I greatly enjoyed this weekend and I think that it is safe to say that if all goes well, I will be adding yet another impression to my repertoire.

November 11, 1918.

a machine gun company of the 1st Battalion of La Legion