Paul Rempe - From German Cavalry Officer to Reconnaissance Pilot: The World War I History, Memories, and Photographs of Leonhard Rempe, 1914-1921

2016 by Paul L. Rempe

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First edition, first printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rempe, Leonhard, 1893-1956, author. | Rempe, Paul Leonhard, editor.
Title: From German Cavalry Officer to Reconnaissance Pilot: the World War I History, Memories, and Photographs of Leonhard Rempe, 1914-1921 / edited by Paul L. Rempe.
Description: First edition. | El Dorado Hills, California: Savas Beatie LLC, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041616| ISBN 9781611213218 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781940669540 (ebk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Rempe, Leonhard, 1893-1956. | World War, 1914-1918Personal narratives, German. | World War, 1914-1918Cavalry operations, German. | World War, 1914-1918Aerial operations, German. | SoldiersGermanyBiography.
Classification: LCC D640 .R446 2015 | DDC 940.4/4943092dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041616

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Digital version by Savas Publishing

PRINT ISBN: 978-1-61121-321-8
eISBN: 978-1-94066-954-0

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All photographs courtesy of the Rempe Family Collection

To my parents,
who taught their children to live in the present, but learn from the past.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Of course, my first debt is to my father, who left Germany for the United States in 1923 but who had the foresight to pack not only clothes but also war-related papers and photographs for the 191421 period.

Dr. Dieter H. M. Grschel, MD played a critical role in recognizing the importance of those archival materials. A medical doctor, Dr. Grschels deep interest and understanding of this critical period in German history represents more than an avocation. In this case, Dr. Grschel carried out a significant amount of research using German sources and thereby confirmed much of my fathers experiences in the Great War. Dr. Grschel also identified many of the individuals in the photographs my father had preserved in his war album.

The major work of translating my fathers papers was undertaken by Dr. Kimberly Redding. Dr. Redding chairs the Department of History at Carroll University and also teaches courses in German history. A valuable colleague while I worked there, I remain grateful for her help. Dr. Michael Koch, of the Language Department at Carroll, also provided some translating help.

Richard Bennett, past President of The League of World War One Aviation Historians, provided valuable information about the German Air Force in general and about my fathers units in particular, both during the war and with the Freikorps. He also read an early draft of this work and provided very helpful comments.

Im also in debt to my student assistant Nate Corvette, and to Kathy Olsen for their help in moving my fathers photos into the digital world. Kathy is one of those people associated with Carroll University who provided constant encouragement during the course of this work. Others in the same category include Professor Wis Guthrie and Lance Herdegen, a respected author in his own right on the Civil War in general, and the Union Iron Brigade in particular. Mr. Herdegen has worked with Mr. Theodore P. Savas, Managing Director of Savas Beatie LLC, and I can only agree with Lance Herdegen that Ted Savas is an exceptional publisher. Mr. Savas has provided help and support throughout this project. Along with Mr. Savas, Im grateful for the editorial suggestions of Mr. Bogdanovic, a keen-eyed editor who makes his home in the United Kingdom.

Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Kathleen, who not only spared me some household chores but provided IT support throughout. Our three sons, Tim, Jon, and Ben motivated me to continue whenever they asked me to tell them stories about the grandfather they never met.

Of course, any and all errors in either text or in mislabeling photographs are mine alone, and I take responsibility for the same.

Introduction

Early efforts to capture in language its catastrophic effects failed as the unleashed and unparalleled violence mocked those who bravely shouted, Ill be home for Christmas! The bitter irony of the short war illusion spawned widespread disillusionment, but later terminology proved no more adequate to the task. As the enormity of the savage bloodbath took conscious hold, some took to describing calling it The Great Warsomething it surely was not. Finally, as the industrialization killed millions amidst scenes of untold carnage, came the hopeful yet hopeless appellation, The War to End All Wars.

As people commemorate the war that few wanted or imagined, we still struggle with inadequate descriptors. The First World War, pointing as much to the second as to itself, fails to reach the depth of four years of slaughter and insanity. The preeminent British historian of the war B. H. Liddell Hart called it The Real War when he first published his account in 1930. The Harvard academic J. K. Galbraith used the term The Great Ungluing to describe the wars brutality as well as its profound transformative effects. Perhaps, The Suicide of European Civilization is the best way to try to access the wars pathology, and its voracious appetite for death and nihilistic destruction which turned Europe into a charnel house.

By August 1914, the belligerents of the Triple Entente and Central Powers quickly mobilized what eventually would become millions of combatants. By the time it ended in 1918, nations and empires had suffered staggering losses. Germany lost 2 million dead, and AustriaHungary some 1.5 million. The British Empire recorded 1 million dead, while 1.7 million paid the ultimate price in defense of France. The Italians contributed 460,000 to this grim total, and the Russians 1.7 million before they signed a separate peace with Germany at BrestLitovsk in March 1918. Other countries suffered as well.

In August 1914, my father Leonhard Rempe, then 21 years old, heard Kaiser Wilhelm II declare from the balcony of his Schloss in Berlin that he recognized parties no more; I recognize only Germans and that confronted by the enemy a united Germany would defeat the invaders. On hearing this, he could only have felt the patriotic need to defend the Fatherland. My father could no more know of the complex of long- and short-range causes that led to the Kaisers declaration than could the average GI, many years later, know that he was not actually fighting in Vietnam to contain the spread of international, monolithic communism. For all my father knew, it was imperative for him to join the colors in defending German Kultur against a Russian invasion.

However, if he could not know all of its causes, my father would know some of its effects if only by living through them. The collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, the emergence of the United States as a great power, the Great Depression, occurring ten years after the signing of the Versailles Treaty, and the Second World War, clearly a toxic product of the first, are but a few of its more important consequences.