Rico's rants: Ten weirdest facts from World War One

War History Online has an article about the First World War:

1. A fake Paris was built to fool German pilots.
At the end of the First World War, a second Paris, complete with a replica Champs-Elysees was built to fool German bombers.
According to archives unearthed by Le Figaro, military planners believed German pilots could be fooled into destroying the dummy city rather than the real one.
Situated on the northern outskirts of Paris, it featured fake streets lined with electric lights, replica buildings, and even a copy of the Gare du Nord railway station. By recreating a dummy city, including a myriad of bright lights, the French thought they could attract the German night bombers away from the real Paris.
White, yellow and red lamps were also used to create the effect of machines in operation at night, while false trains and rail tracks were also partly illuminated at night. However the replica Paris was not quite finished before the last German air raid on Paris in September of 1918, meaning it was never tested.
2. Spring tyres were used in bicycles by Germany.
Soldiers inspecting a battered German bicycle with tyres made of springs due to the rubber shortage in World War One. Location probably France. Photograph taken 14 September by Henry Armytage Sanders.
3. Urinated handkerchiefs used during gas attacks.
At the second Battle of Ypres in 1915, the Germans use gas against the Canadians for the first time in World War One. On the morning of 24 April, the Germans released another gas cloud towards the Canadian line, just west of St. Julien. Word was passed to the troops to urinate on their handkerchiefs and place them over their nose and mouth. The countermeasures were insufficient, and German troops took the village.
After the first German chlorine-gas attacks, Allied troops were supplied with masks of cotton pads soaked in urine, as it had been discovered that the ammonia in the pad neutralized the chlorine. The pads were held over the face until the gas dispersed. Other soldiers preferred to use a handkerchief, sock, or flannel body-belt, dampened with a sodium-bicarbonate solution and tied across the mouth and nose, until the gas passed. Soldiers found it difficult to fight like this, and attempts were made to develop a better means of protection against gas attacks.
4. A wounded pigeon saved more than two hundred soldiers.
Cher Ami (French for “dear friend”) was a female homing pigeon, used by the US Army Signal Corps in France during World War One, and she helped save the Lost Battalion of the 77th Division during the Battle of the Argonne in October of 1918.
On October 3, 1918, Major Whittlesey and more than five hundred men were trapped in a small depression on the side of the hill behind enemy line,s without food or ammunition. They were also beginning to receive friendly fire from allied troops who did not know their location. Surrounded by the Germans, many were killed and wounded in the first day and, by the second day, just under two hundred men were still alive. Whittlesey dispatched messages by pigeon. Two pigeons were shot down and only one homing pigeon was left: Cher Ami. She was dispatched with a note in a canister on her left leg:
We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake, stop it.
As Cher Ami tried to fly back home, the Germans saw her rising out of the brush and opened fire. For several moments, Cher Ami flew with bullets zipping through the air all around her. Cher Ami was eventually shot down, but managed to take flight again. She arrived back at her loft at division headquarters miles to the rear in just under half an hour, helping to save the lives of the survivors. In this last mission, Cher Ami delivered the message despite having been shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, covered in blood, and with one leg hanging only by a tendon.
Cher Ami became the hero of the 77th Infantry Division. Army medics worked long and hard to save her life. They were unable to save her leg, so they carved a small wooden one for her. When she recovered enough to travel, the now one-legged bird was put on a boat to the United States, with General John J. Pershing personally seeing Cher Ami off as she departed France.
5. Hitler had a full-sized mustache
Adolf Hitler’s toothbrush mustache was the feature that made him instantly recognizable, however, during World War One, he sported a full handlebar mustache complete with twisted ends. However during a gas attack on his trenches Hitler discovered that it prevented his gas mask from sealing tightly. Logic overcame vanity, and he decided to trim his mustache and he must have liked it, he kept it that way until the very end.
6. Chinese laborers were used en masse by Britain & France
The Chinese Labour Corps was a force of workers recruited by the British government in World War One to free troops for front line duty by performing support work and manual labor. The French government also recruited a significant number of Chinese laborers. In all, some hundred and forty thousand men served for both British and French forces before the war ended, and most of the men were repatriated to China between 1918 and 1920.
The workers, mainly between twenty and thirty-five, served as labor in the rear echelons, or helped build munitions depots. They were tasked with carrying out essential work to support the frontline troops, such as unloading ships, building dugouts, repairing roads and railways, digging trenches, and filling sandbags
In all, an estimated ten thousand died in the war effort, victims of shelling, landmines, poor treatment, or the worldwide flu epidemic in 1918. Some Chinese scholars, who contest these figures, say the number of deaths was as high as twenty thousand.
7. Shortage of steel forced concrete ships
During the late nineteenth century, there were concrete river barges in Europe and, during both World War One and World War Two, steel shortages led the American military to order the construction of small fleets of ocean-going concrete ships, the largest of which was the SS Selma.
On 2 August 1917, Nicolay Fougner of Norway launched the first self-propelled ferrocement ship intended for ocean travel. This was an eighty-foot vessel of four hundred tons, named the Namsenfjord. With the success of this ship, additional ferrocement vessels were ordered, and in October of 1917, the US government invited Fougner to head a study into the feasibility of building ferrocement ships in the United States.
Few concrete ships were completed in time to see wartime service during World War One but, during 1944 and 1945, concrete ships and barges were used to support American and British invasions in Europe and the Pacific.
8. War work turned some women’s skin yellow
Early in the war, the United Kingdom’s munitions industry found itself having difficulty producing the amount of weapons and ammunition needed by the country’s armed forces. In response to the crisis, the British government passed the Munitions of War Act in 1915 to increase government oversight and regulation of the industry. It also forced the factories to admit more women as employees, because so many of the nation’s men were engaged in fighting in the war, and male labor was in short supply. By June of 1917, roughly eighty percent of the weaponry and ammunition used by the British army during World War One was being made by female munition workers, called munitionettes.
Munitionettes worked with hazardous chemicals on a daily basis without adequate protection. Many women worked with trinitrotoluene (TNT), and prolonged exposure to the sulfuric acid that turned the women’s skin a yellow color. The women whose skin was turned yellow were popularly called canary girls. Prolonged exposure to the chemicals also created serious health risks for the munitionettes.
9. The crucified soldier
The Crucified Soldier refers to the widespread atrocity propaganda story of an Allied soldier serving in the Canadian Corps who may have been crucified with bayonets on a barn door or a tree, while fighting on the Western Front during World War One.
Three witnesses said they saw an unidentified crucified Canadian soldier near the battlefield of Ypres, Belgium on or around 24 April 1915, but there was no conclusive proof such a crucifixion actually occurred. The eyewitness accounts were somewhat contradictory, no crucified body was found, and no knowledge was uncovered at the time about the identity of the supposedly crucified soldier. During World War Two the story was used by the Nazis as an example of British propaganda.
10. The Great Influenza Pandemic killed more people
The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted from January of 1918 until December of 1920, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. It infected five hundred million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed fifty to a hundred million of them, or three to five percent of the world’s population, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States; but papers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain, creating a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit and creating the pandemic’s nickname: Spanish flu.