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The Old Front Line

Despatches: Fort de Loncin 1914

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

Education, History, Tv & Film, Film History

4.8637 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In August 1914 a force of more than 55,000 German soldiers descended on the Belgian city of Liege. Protected by a belt of steel and concrete forts, at Fort de Loncin the garrison of 550 men came under murderous German artillery fire resulting in a huge explosion that turned this site into a national cemetery and memorial, and came to stand for Belgian defiance in that first year of the war. The website of the fort is here: Fort de Loncin. Send us a text Support the show

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Dispatches, a shorter podcast from the Old Front Line and me, military historian Paul Reed.

0:11.6

In August 1914, 12 mighty forts encircled liege to defend Belgium a neutral country against any aggressor,

0:25.0

and at one of those Fort de L'Anse a tragic story of heroism and destruction played out

0:35.2

under those summer skies.

0:42.3

I've just returned from a battlefield recky looking at an early period of the Great War

0:49.3

and examining the battles and battlefields of August 1914 in eastern Belgium, areas like Chalawa, Namor, Dino, and Lijij.

1:03.5

And these are all places where significant battles were fought before the first British shots of the Great War were fired.

1:15.6

These are places that I visited quite a lot in the 1990s and early 2000s

1:21.6

when I was living on the battlefields of the Great War,

1:25.6

but I've not been back to look at them in any kind of detail for a while.

1:30.2

And this recchi was for a tour that I originally planned for the centenary of the Great War in 2014.

1:37.0

But that year we were especially busy, and it was kind of put to one side,

1:42.7

and it's taken now 10 years to get this new tour across the line

1:45.9

and that's not uncommon in the way that we plan and kind of put battlefield tours out there we can keep

1:51.4

these kind of little gems ticking away and this year being the 110th anniversary of 1914 it seemed a good

1:58.6

opportunity to bring that tour back. So Battlefield recies both for the kind of

2:05.7

tour work that we do and anyone interested in the subject of the Great War really important, I think,

2:12.5

because they get us out onto the battlefields, they get us connected to the battlefields. And when we're doing this from a battlefield tour point of view, we're not so much looking at just the history.

2:24.3

We're looking at the kind of logistics of it and the practicalities, access, and where we'll deliver talks to people and kind of what we might talk about,

2:34.9

because every area that you go to, so many themes come up.

2:39.5

And certainly this last week, being out on those battlefields,

2:44.0

we came across so many different aspects of the Great War,

...

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