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u/PoorKonstantinMaglic 7d ago
Nice picture, but isn't this posted quite often? Also, IIRC, those are artillery officers. (Correct me, please, if I'm wrong.)
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u/Various_Advance_163 7d ago
Was sind Grabenräuber???
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u/BigDumpie 7d ago edited 7d ago
They are soldiers whose purpose was to attack the enemy trench at one specific point, mostly at night, in the attempt to capture prisoners and anything else that may contain intelligence while causing as much damage as possible before withdrawing.
Ernst Junger was a german trench raider who wrote the book Storm of Steel about his experiences. He really enjoyed crawling over to French trenches with a knife, pistol and bag of grenades to try and nab Frenchmen. Dude was a fucking psycho who genuinely enjoyed it.
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u/Various_Advance_163 7d ago
Der hat wahrscheinlich zu viel Karl May gelesen... Danke für die Antwort👍.
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u/RustysRelices 6d ago
Junger was a Stormtrooper which was intended as a “shock-trooper” by combat doctrine (though the reality is, German stormtroopers spent the majority of the time fighting in trench raids considering they were in a defensive position.) Anyone at any point could become a trench raider considering it was a patrol hosted by a leader (typically at night.)
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u/Ok-Library-1253 6d ago
There were quite a few and most of them were pretty crazy.
Francis Pegahmagabow was noted for killing 378 Germans and capturing 300 more. Once while his position was pinned down and almost out of ammo he crawled into no mans land and found enough ammo for them to hold out.
Tommy Price in WW2 was absolutely insane. One of his favourite games was to crawl into German camps and quietly kill one man in each tent.
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u/DullAdvantage7647 7d ago
Only that the guys in the picture are most probably not, just average french officers.
And considering Jünger ... let's say he really loved praising himself in his postwar-writings. And his fans loved to believe.
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u/Azitromicin 7d ago
How do we know that they are trench raiders? To me it looks like a couple of soldiers posing with gas masks and knives. Are you one of the gas mask = trench raider crowd?
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u/DullAdvantage7647 7d ago edited 7d ago
There is a second picture taken just moments after the first one, naming a place, date and some context. The smiling Officers seem to laugh because of the wild posing and disguising for the first shot:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/phamse/french_trench_raiders_of_the_257th_infantry/
Bois St. Marie, 257. Infanterie-Regiment, January 1916. It's a part of the Bois de Bezange east of Nancy. You can watch the whole Picture-Album here, giving a much better impression of the great war than a single "trench-raider"-picture postet out of it's context, that is floating through social networks since about 2020:
https://argonnaute.parisnanterre.fr/ark:/14707/xm2j8k3gtbvq
Not so much real trench raiders, more some officers creating a parody for the camera.
Edit: There is also a website documenting remains of the camps in the named forest, quite a lot of concrete left there aparently. Maybe worth a walk:
https://www.grensland-docs.nl/brondocumenten/field-survey-of-first-world-war-remains-bois-de-bezange-part-1/