The First World War: The Death of Eagles and a World Friday, Aug 29 2014

 

This year, 2014, marks the 100th anniversary of the First World War, a meat grinder affair that shaped the rest of the twentieth century and still echoes in the present world today.

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.

Lou Holtz

The great advantage historians have is they know how the story ends.

Mark Byrnes

Because it transcends particular parties, the institution of monarchy was suited for large areas with diverse and conflicting regional interest.

John H. Mundy

That men do not learn much from the lesson of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and a few are able to rise themselves above the ideas of the time.

Voltaire

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of things.

Epictetus

No war is at first unpopular

Ramsey McDonald

A single event can shape our lives of change the course of history.

Deepak Chopra

             In his book, The First World War, which was revised in 2002, John Keegan, one of the most respected voices on military history and war, begins his seminal book which the following passage:

The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.   Unnecessary because the train of events that led to the outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence of common good will found a voice; tragic because the consequence of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns fell silent, four years later, a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the Second World War can stand without  reference to those roots.  The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was a direct outcome of the First. On 18 September 1922,  Adolf Hitler,  the demobilized front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realize seventeen years later:  “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain… No, we do not pardon, we demand – vengeance.”

            One hundred years ago this month the First World War broke out in Europe, it was  fought by almost every nation   and on almost every continent in the world and, at the time, it was one of the greatest slaughters that humanity ever experienced, until the world went to war again twenty-one years later.   How did this struggle begin and what was the effects of it, that has been debated ever since November 11,1918, when the armistice was signed.  Today some historians are beginning to see the conflict not as an isolated event, but as part of a long struggle that may have started with the Spanish-American War in 1898 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.   It may be in some distant time, when all the prejudices and conclusions of today have passed history may mark this time not as a series of crisis and great wars, but one long war began in nationalistic fever and ending in ideological conflict.   A world died in this war and a new one was born in the later conflicts, one we of this time may not see mature, but one our descendants might find much different from we imagine.

           Before examining the war itself, one must wonder how did Germany become such a central figure in this and other twentieth century conflicts?   Was it an ancient kingdom, like France, who could trace its history back almost into Roman times?  Did it boast a king like Charlemagne, who reigned like a colossus over the early medieval times?   Was the Hohenzollern dynasty like the Valois or Plantagenet that ruled France and England during the Middle Ages?  No, although the Hohenzollern family traced its lineage back to 1192, they became kings in Prussia in 1701 and Kings of Germany only in 1871.  In fact if one turned the clock from 1914 to 1814, one would find no Germany as a nation.  It was an area of separate states, left over from the Holy Roman Empire that Voltaire famously described as being, “neither holy, or Roman, or an empire.”  It had been disbanded by Napoleon in 1806(6 August) and after the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 became what was called the Prussian Zollverein (custom union) in 1818.  The question of unification soon developed along two lines, one called  the kleindeutsch losung,  which was called small Germany, one without Austria, opposed by both Austria and Russia.  The other was  grossdeutsche losung, which was a union that contained Austria, opposed by France and Russia.  The idea of one great power dominating central Europe was also opposed by Britain who were committed to a balance of power, this idea is why the British considered allying with the South in the America Civil War despite their opposition to slavery.   The Crimean War was fought for this reason as well, continental powers like the United States and Russia concerned the British as they feared such states might one day dominate to world.

          Prussia, because of its army’s performance at Waterloo,  became the dominate force in this area and during the Revolutions of 1848 many revolutionaries saw German unification, as they saw the Italian, as a sign of progress.  Thus they sought unification under the Prussian King (Frederick Wilhelm IV), but  more conservative forces wished for a loose confederation of states in the area. The conflict over a strong central government or a loose confederation of states also dominated American politics and was only resolved in 1865 with Union victory in the American Civil War.   In 1849 Wilhelm turned down a parliamentary offer of the crown, saying it was a clay crown and mainly fearing interference from Austria and Russia.  The 1850 Treaty of Olmutz (called by the Prussians the Humiliation of Olmutz) led to a confirmation of the Treaty of Vienna and had a loose confederation nominally under Austrian influence.  This would last until 1858 when forces began moving towards a German unification under Prussian rule.  In that year Wilhelm had a stroke and his brother William took over as Prince Regent, he appointed Helmuth von Moltke (called the elder) in charge of the army and Albrecht von Roon in charge of the Ministry of War.  conflict between the two over who controlled the military budget led William, now Wilhelm I, to appoint Otto von Bismark as Minister President of Prussia in 1860.  Bismark quickly replaced liberal policies with his realpolitik, a term that means policies or actions based on power and material factors and consideration s and not on ideological or moral considerations.  While supporters call it pragmatic and realistic, opponents say it is coercive and amoral and usually call it Machiavellian.

         Bismark used this idea to undercut many liberal politicians by putting in place many of their reforms and calling it his, such as a pension for the aged, setting the age at 65, since the life expectancy of Prussians at the time was 68.  He famously stated, “The great questions of the time will not be resolved by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by blood and iron.”  Bismark may have meant that he could impose his will because German ability to  produced and use both, but historically it has been seen as the beginning of German militarism.  With Italian cooperation he manged to maneuver Austria into a war with his German confederation and despite much opposition from several southern German states he and Moltke won a quick victory over the Austrians by 1867.  One result of this was that Austria turned its attention from Germany and its northern border towards the south and the Balkans, a turn of events that proved to be a disaster in thirty-three years.   To reinforce his unification Bismark needed an enemy he could rally the people around, he found one in France and Napoleon III.  Napoleon III had recently lost his brother in Mexico in a foolish and futile attempt to establish an empire there, now his forces would lose to the new German state and by 1871, the Germans forced them to sign the Treaty of Versailles (which was ratified in Germany by the Treaty of Frankfort in May of 1871) and crowned William (or Wilhelm) Emperor, or Kaiser, of all the Germans  in the great Hall of Mirrors in Versailles (18 January 1871).

        Thus, Germany as a united nation is younger than the United States by almost one hundred years, and a nation that felt it had to make up a lot of ground to catch the older nations of Europe. This meant, they felt,  colonies in Africa and Asia along with a modern navy.   Bismark convened the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885 were Germany, Britain, Belgium, France, and Portugal affect the partitioning of Africa between the Europeans.  Before the conference Europe controlled only about 10% of the continent, it expanded to 90% after the conference closed.  The Germans gained Kameran (now Cameroon and part of Nigeria), East Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania), and East Africa (Namibia).   In the Pacific they acquired the northern part of Papa New guinea (Kaiser Wilhelmsland, Bismark Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands, Bougainville), Nauru, Marshall Islands, Mariana Islands, and the Caroline Islands.  This along with leasing land in the Jiaozhou Bay in China, were their troops participated with British, American, French, Japanese, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Italian troops to suppress the anti-foreign movement called the Boxer Rebellion in 1898 -1900.  This along with the naval arms race (1898 – put forth by Admiral von Tirpitz) with Britain had made Germany a leader in the world before the First World War.  Since the British, French, and Russians had formed an alliance to check this power, Germany signed treaties with Austria-Hungary and Italy to counter act what they saw as an encirclement of German nation.   To the Germans and Austrians, the main enemy was Russia, whom they saw as a great colossus of manpower and machines that would by 1916, be ready to swallow up the whole of Central Europe.

       Otto von Bismark was a great influence therefore on German thinking, but he was influenced by another, as was the majority of the German armed forces, that person was Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz (1730-1831).  Clausewitz, who may or not have been a disciple of Hegel,  wrote a book on his views on war, which was called, On War,  in which this noble put forth his arguments on war and how it should be approached and conducted.  He states that war is the continuation of politick by other means, he could have been speaking about policy or politics, but it has been another underpinning of the legend of German militarism and love of war.  He stressed the uncertainties, diverse factors and unexpected developments would cause what he called the “fog of war”  and by studying the tactics of Napoleon and Frederick the Great tried to present a systematic philosophy of war.  He was planning to include a chapter on guerrilla war and wars  between entities that were not states when he died in 1831, leaving his book unfinished.  Clausewitz defines war as:

Clausewitz did and provided a number of definitions. The first is his dialectical thesis: “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”  The second, often treated as Clausewitz’s ‘bottom line,’  is in fact merely his dialectical antithesis: “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.”  The synthesis of his dialectical examination of the nature of war is his famous “trinity,” saying that war is “a fascinating trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; the play of chance and probability, within which the creative spirit is free to roam; and its element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to pure reason.”  Thus the best shorthand for Clausewitz’s trinity should be something like “violent emotion/chance/rational calculation.” However, it is frequently presented as “people/army/government” which may be a corruption resulting from text later paragraph in the same chapter. (quoted from Wikipedia)

       Thus, Clausewitz’s idea of the  trinity of war, (people, state , and government) and that war is a tool of politics made him a grand influence on many.  Helmuth von Moltke (the elder) said “No campaign survives first contact with the enemy,” was in complete standing with the idea of the “fog of war,”   while he greatly influenced the Germans he had others who studied him as well.  Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao Zedong all used Clausewitz as a model.  Britain began studying him after the Boer War and B. H. Liddell Hart attributes Clausewitz as inventing the idea of total war, but many dispute that.  His influence in American military thought is all post 1945, but in 1914, he was a big influence on German thinking.  And this was Clausewitz’s final thoughts on the area:

Two natural centers of power exist in the German Reich – Austria and Prussia.  Theirs is the genuine striking-power, theirs is the strong blade.  Each is a monarchy, experienced in war.  Their interests are clearly defined; they are independent  powers and are preeminent over all the rest.  These  natural lines, not the mistaken idea of  “unity,”  define the lines that German military organization should follow.  Unity is anyhow impossible under these conditions, and the man that sacrifices the possible in search of the impossible is a fool.

        In the previous paragraph he calls for the defeat of France and its occupation by German and British forces in order to bring peace to Europe.  He also says that defenders have a great advantage over aggressors and an aggressive power will ultimately fail, something his students in 1914 should have taken to heart.   Clausewitz dictated two things, first victory by a decisive battle to avoid a long war of attrition, which he feared.  He also said that, “The heart of France lies between Brussels and Paris.”  These lessons were taken to heart by the German Chief of Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, who constructed Germany’s grand plan for war in Europe.

        Alfred von Schlieffen (1833-1913) was the son of a Prussian who studied law at the University of Berlin before joining the army and working his way through the ranks to the top position in 1891.   He once said, “A man is born, not made a strategist.”   During his time as chief of the German military he constructed a plan to fight a war in Europe that many saw as inevitable and welcome.   Central to his plan was a tactic made famous by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), the double envelopment, using the two flanks to attack an enemy and surround and destroy him.  The tactic was used many times, in the American West it was used by the Sioux to defeat Col. Fetterman in Red Cloud’s War in 1866 and later by the Zulu to defeat the British at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.  Of this tactic Dwight Eisenhower commented, “Every ground commander seeks the battle of annihilation; so far as conditions permit, he tries to duplicate in modern war the classic example of Cannae.”   To this refrain, Schlieffen would have added a hearty “amen.”

       In event of a war with Russia and France, Schlieffen  sought to knock out the strongest foe first, which was France.  He saw that an attack on the vast Russian Empire could be bogged down simply by a Russian retreat into the vast steeps of the land, much as they had done with Napoleon and later would do with Hitler.   Thus, he reasoned, the best move was to keep Russia out of the war and knock out the French with a quick counter stroke to their attack with a maneuver around their forces attaining the envelopment to the east of Paris.   Since he knew that smashing into the French forts along the border would be futile and without enough room to move around them he chose to move through the Low Countries with his armies.   He theorized that he could not achieve a double envelopment, because of French border forts (though he probably hoped and dreamed that a breakthrough along the border could achieve this), he substituted a great flanking maneuver  from the Dutch province of Maastricht  through northern Belgium and Luxembourg into the heart of France.  To keep from battles along the Marne and a siege of Paris, he proposed the right-wing of these armies was to touch the English channel (he famously said that the last soldier on the right was to dip his sleeve in the English Channel) and cross the Seine west of Paris, drawing out French forces and achieving a Cannae  east of Paris and south of the Marne River.  This Schlieffen said should take six to eight weeks to subdue France and by then, if Russia attacked, Germany could concentrate he entire force in the east against the Slavic horde.  If Germany was in a two front war, seven eighths of the army was to attack France and the remaining one eight engage in a holding action, even if this endangered the provinces of East Prussia, the homeland of Junkerdom and the Hohenzollerns.  This was in the tradition of Frederick the Great who said, “It is better to lose a province than split the forces with one seeks victory.”   German military intelligence  had determined that Russian mobilization would take six to eight weeks, thus giving them time to complete victory in France and then turn towards their traditional enemy in the east.

        Belgium, once called Flanders, was the creation of the British (who from the time of  the Tudors have had vested interest in the ports and markets of this area being open), as the people of the area did not wish to be ruled by the Protestant Dutch and Britain did not wish this area to become part of France.  England negotiated a treaty with European powers, Prussia France, Russia, and Austria , in 1839.   It was known in 1914 that the British would go to war to protect Belgian neutrality, despite much anti-British sediment in that little country during the Boer War, but Schlieffen and the German general staff determined that violating such neutrality was a military necessity,  and in the early twentieth century the military was able to overrule any doubt or opposition from the German Parliament or diplomatic corp.  Schlieffen said of his plan, “To win, we must endeavor to be the stronger of the two points of impact.  Our only hope of this lies on making our own choice of operations, not on waiting passively for whatever the enemy chooses for us.”  Even though this plan failed, for several reasons, and author Max Hastings (Catastrophe: 1914 Europe Goes to War, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2013) lays some blame on Schlieffen and his successors for this failure, Schlieffen’s reputation as a strategists of the tactic of maneuver warfare was strong, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, Walter Bedell Smith said of the German general’s ideas of warfare ( laid out in Schlieffen’s thesis, Cannae ), “we’re imbued with the idea of wide bold maneuvers for decisive results.”

        By 1914 the German general staff under Moltke had modified Schlieffen’s plan to exclude the foray into Dutch territory, thus keeping the nation as a window to commerce and intelligence.   This plan did work as much material and equipment from many nations, including America and Britain, flowed through Dutch ports during the war until 1917 when the British navy decided to totally cut off the Central powers.  So Germany, like France and its famous Plan XVII that called for a thrust to the Rhine and the liberation of Alsace-Lorraine (annexed by Germany in 1870) and similar plans by the other nations, had a plan for war.  Kaiser Wilhelm II in late 1913 said, “I fell… not the slightest doubt that Russia is systematically preparing for war against us and I shape my policy accordingly,”  and Chief of the German General Staff said in late 1912, “war was inevitable, and that the sooner it came the better for Germany.”   The Germans felt that the modernization program in Russia would be complete in 1916 and thus the sooner they fought the Russians the better.  In 1913 an Imperial Russian Army newspaper stated, “the whole nation must accustom itself to the idea that we arm ourselves for a war of annihilation against the Germans.”  On the British side, Eyre Crowe, a senior British Foreign Official in a 1907 memo proclaimed, “Germany is deliberately following a policy which is essentially opposed to vital British interest, and that an armed conflict cannot in the long run be averted.”  ( all of the above quotes are from Paul Ham’s book, 1913 The Eve of War, Endeavour Press, 2013)   One can get similar quotes from all of the combatants in the pre-1914 era.

        The myth of the time is that the powers basically slept walked into a war, that just snuck up on them and engulfed them in August of 1914.  This Is not the case, war was being planned in every capital and it was not something they dreaded, but embraced.  It was a society that had embraced the notions of Social Darwinism and its protegé, eugenics.  Social Darwinism applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection to society and politics, arising from the works of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer in the 1860s and 1870s, and caught on quickly in the Untied States and great Britain and then spread to the other nations of Europe and Japan.  It applied the biological idea of natural selection to all forms of human society, from business and politics, with its assertion that the strongest of a society will get more and weaker will get less it became most popular in the United States.  From this idea, through the works of Darwin’s half cousin Francis Galton, the eugenics movement was born, which made this social theory of Social Darwinism into a science.  The United States led this field with the works of William Goodell and its supports were many of the top people in society. (such as Winston Churchill, Margaret Sandler, H G Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keys and later Adolph Hitler)  By the early part of the century they main thought was, yes this war would be terrible and destructive, but since the strong nations would prevail (they all felt that would be them) it would be the best thing for civilization.  eugenics and Social Darwinism were discredited by the Holocaust in World War II, the natural conclusion of a theory that proposes that there are undesirables in a human society.  One must feel relieved that these theories were not in the minds of John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

        Thus, the nations of Europe had convinced themselves that a war was not only inevitable, but necessary as well.  The participants not only knew that a war may be imminent, but it was relished, willed and acquiesced to as well.  While the Germans and Austrian saw it as a war to give them their place in the world and beat back the treat of a Russian menace, whose Slavic hoards might overrun Europe and destroy civilization.  Russia, Britain and France saw it as a fight against German, or Prussian, militarism, that was threatening to overrun Europe and destroy civilization.  Many threads led up to the final break in 1914, such as the Moroccan Crisis of 1905 and 1911, the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 (were Serbia and Bulgaria basically pushed the Ottoman Empire out of Europe), and the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.  Except for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and the Spanish-American War in 1898 Europe had a cycle of peace that lasted from 1871 till 1914.  The economy of Europe during the period 1870-1913 was only exceeded by the period from 1950 to 1973,  Also, this was the Progressive era of politics and many socialist type parties were making great gains all over Europe.  In 1911, the House of Commons gained power from the House of Lords in Britain, and Russia after 1905 seemed to be drifting into a constitutional monarchy, in a model  based on Great Britain.  Despite close to a century of Bolshevik and Soviet propaganda, the Russian economy of pre-war Russia was expanding and the nation was slowly modernizing.  without the war, the Russian Czar, Nichols II, probably would have acquiesce to a drift into a constitutional monarchy, as well as Germany that would have resembled those in the west.  The same may have occurred in the Ottoman Empire through the efforts of the Young Turks who took power early in the century.  The only nation that may not have survived was Austria-Hungary, even if Franz Ferdinand’s dream of a triune crown had come true.  The leadership of this nation was living in a dream world of Vienna waltzes and nostalgic fairy tales that covered up a deteriorating nation who, unlike Turkey, refused to admit it was in danger of falling apart.

        While governments thought of war, one can see this in the opening lines of Eric Remarque’s book,  All Quiet on the Western Front, (1928) were the characters are filled with heroic talk before class, but for many of the people of the time war was last thing on their minds.   This was a society that, for the first time, dreamed of having a car or a motorcycle.  France was the first credible motor car manufacturer, but the other nations of Europe  were not far behind.  The telephone was making its debut and it and much of the new technology were the center of fascination to society at large.   Sheet music was the rage and many ballrooms used an early form of radio to broadcast music to its customers.  Vaudeville was in bloom and people devoured  newspapers , mostly for the gossip about royals and their affairs with actresses, or actors,  and the sordid stories of the rich and famous.  Rich American families sent sons and daughters on long European vacations in hopes of landing a marriage with some young, or old, member of an aristocratic family in an effort to improve their preside in society at home.  It was the time of the grand European vacation, which many on the doomed ship Titanic  were returning from when it sank in 1912.  It was the high point of Flagler’s  Palm Beach and many of the same type of destinations in Europe and Asia.  It was a time of optimism that some even proclaimed the millennium was at hand.  One big scandal of the time was the new dance from South America, the tango, which was seen as a dangerously erotic dance and many hostess gave secret tango parties in their homes.

        Britain was engrossed in the debate over women’s suffrage and the ongoing problems in Ireland over home rule.  Many feared a civil war between the southern part of the province with the ten northern, and Protestant, counties. Germans were captivated by the new hobble skirt that showed part of a woman’s leg and shorts that revealed a man’s knees.  Society was enamored with the marriage of the Kaiser’s only daughter, Victoria Louise, to the Duke of Brunswick,  and were enjoying the peak of pre-war German economy.  The Kaiser had worked for peace and cautioned the Austrians to not invade Serbia in either of the Balkan Wars of thin 1912-13. (1913, Paul Ham)  Paul Ham summarizes what was going on in his book 1913 this way:

Yet the eruption of violent chauvinism over economic and imperial supremacy in Germany, Austria-Hungry, Russia, and France threatened the peace, and prompted the Kaiser’s friend, the Jewish intellectual Walter Rathenau, to speculate about the formation of a European common market to preserve the status quo and accommodate German ambitions.  ‘There is one possibility left,’ he wrote on Christmas Day 1913, ‘an industrial customs union, of which sooner or later, for better or worse, the states of Western Europe would become members… Fuse the industries of Europe into one… and political interest will fuse too.’

       In 1913 the rising progressive forces threatened the old conservative orders, many of them felt a war would help them to beat back this new movement.  It was the Kaiser’s silver jubilee, and the three hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty and Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 1896 and the world flocked to her funeral in 1901, while her son Edward VII’s funeral in 1910 was the last great gathering of the crowned heads of Europe. The British Empire was at its zenith and Vienna and Paris were the site of many great balls and gatherings,  America was on the rise, although many like Mark Twain protested the United States’ recent procurement of colonies in the Pacific.  The free market, which would reign supreme until 1930, was at a high point and tourist crisscrossed all the boundaries in Europe.  The great naval arms race between Germany and Britain was waning and all outward signs seem pointed to a long period of peace, as it had been a century since Napoleon had engaged the Europe in a continental war.  The French socialist Jean Jaures yearned for a time, which he felt may be soon when war without the consent of the proletariat would be impossible and he felt that workers would in that time refuse to fight each other.  Like many in the present he noted that when the rich waged war the poor died.  He said about his dream:

What will the future be like, when the billions now thrown away in the preparation for war are spent on useful things to increase the well-being of the people, on the construction of decent houses for workers, on improving transportation, on reclaiming the land?  The fever of imperialism has become a sickness.  It is a disease of a badly run society which does not know how to use its energies at home.

        Jaures was right, he lived in a badly run society, ruled by states whose leadership was weak and incompetent, who feared to think of different paths clung to old ways until  they were washed away in blood, Jaures was assassinated on 31 July 1914, the second casualty of World War I.  Historian John Keegan asked this question in his book on the war:

Why did a prosperous continent at the height of its success as a source of global wealth and power and at the peak of its intellectual and cultural achievement choose to risk it all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?

        By this time all the treaties were in place, the one the Japanese signed with the allies forbade it to assist in a war against the United States,  but France, Great Britain ,and Russia all agreed that if one of the Central powers , Italy , Germany or Austria, attacked one other allies they all would go to war.   This was not a sleepwalk, each nation knew exactly what was at stake and many felt that a war would destroy the society they knew, but they went ahead anyway, all of them.  Patriotism would top class and many willing went to war, the rising tide of socialism was seen as a reason for war, the old guard felt that in a war the people would rally to the state and the socialist would be destroyed, they were wrong, the old empires were destroyed.   Paul Ham in his book 1913 the author states this:  “Afterwords, when the First World War had killed or wounded 37 million people, ripped apart the fabric of society, uprooted oppressive regimes and set the planet on a course for the bloodiest century in human history, they all claimed, with different degrees of insistence and self-delusion, that a Great War was inevitable, or ‘necessary’, and beyond their powers to contain or avoid.”   It was, as all claimed, a defensive war and helped save Europe from a dark fate, when it actually condemned it to one.

        In all of the plans of the combatants they had planned for all events except one, what the enemy would do.  One could not interrupt the timetable of mobilization, yet all expected the enemy to just sit back and do as the planners said they would do.  German generals were shocked when Belgium refused to allow them to progress through that country to France. It was as Paul ham characterized it in his book (1913)  :

An anecdote from the Crimean War comes to mind.  The British Surgeon General, when faced with complaints about the breakdown of medical services, replied: ‘The medical services would have been perfectly adequate if  it had not been for the casualties.’  Similarly the general staffs could say before 1914: ‘Our plans are perfect unless the enemy interferes with them.’

         To see how and why, one can start with Max Hastings’ book  Catastrophe 1914; Europe Goes to War, (New York, Alfred  Knopf, 2013) were the author begins the book with this paragraph:

As commandant of the British Army’s staff college in 1910, Brigadier General Henry Wilson asserted the likelihood of a European war, and argued that Britain’s only option was to ally itself with France against the Germans.  A student ventured to argue, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could precipitate a general conflagration.’   This provoked Wilson’s derision:  ‘Haw! Haw! Haw!  Inconceivable stupidity is just what you’re going to get.’

       The parties involved in the conflict neither understood, nor cared to understand each other, the idea of a war was embraced and willed, it was what many of them wanted.  To the Germans there was a timetable hanging over them, the general staff felt the Russia would be modernized and its rail system improved to the point in 1916 that it could prevail against Germany in any war.  Much like the missile gap that John Kennedy used to defeat Richard Nixon in 1960, what was perceived by a people trumped any reality that came along.  The causes and who is responsible is a matter of debate, Max Hastings places the blame on the Germans using Fritz Fischer’s book,  Germany’s  Aims in the First World War, (1967) which argues that “documentary evidence showed the country’s leadership bent upon launching a European war before Russia’s acceleration development and armament precipitated a seismic shift in strategic advantage.”  Others disagree, Sean McMeekin blames the Russians, Niall Ferguson points to British foreign sectary Edward Grey, Christopher Clark lays the blame on Serbia, whom he characterizes as a rogue state.  Historian Cyril Falls, a contemporary of the war, in his book, The Great War (1919)  said this, “The roots of the blame are too tangled to follow.  Eventually it can be traced to Homo sapiens, so named.  Yet we cannot forget that the victors had to a large extent a free hand to make a new world.  It could never have come up to their hopes.  They could have made something better of it than they did.”   Another contemporary historian, B H Liddell Hart, in his book, The Real War 1914-1918,  (1930) asserts, “The truth is that no one cause was, or could be fundamental.”

       During this war Russia changed the name of St. Petersburg to Petrograd, later the Soviets changed it to Leningrad and later the Russians returned to the name St Petersburg.  It is also when George V of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha House took the present royal House name of Windsor.  Historian Kenneth Morgan lamented the history of the war was hijacked by its critics in the 1920s while Maynard Keys called the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 so vindictive it proved to nothing but folly.  The war brought many changes, not all of them good, it set the stage for the Second World War and later Cold War, but little of it is remembered today.   For example, in the United States, the armistice day, November 11, was changed after World War II to Veterans Day, and in many areas is now nothing more than a Monday holiday for many in November, the one before the big holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas.  So how did this get even come to be?

       In June of 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) was taking an official progress (visit) to the southern area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  He became the heir to the throne as the result of a series of events that began in 1889 when his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling.  The position first went to his father, Karl Ludwig and to him in 1896 with his father’s death.  He had married Sophie Chotek in 1900, whom he had met and fell in love with in 1894, but she was not of the royal line so Franz Joseph, the Austrian Emperor since 1848, opposed the marriage.  Pope Leo XIII, Tsar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II all supported the marriage and Franz Joseph only agreed in 1899 under the condition that Franz Ferdinand’s children could not ascend to the throne.  Franz Ferdinand had a passion for hunting and was credited with shooting around 250,000 wild creatures before he became the trophy of the Serbian teenage terrorist.  Max Hastings describes how others felt about this man in this passage: “The Emperor Franz Joseph resented his nephew; others considered him an arrogant and opinionated martinet.”  In Max Hastings book Catastrophe 1914  Europe Goes to War ,  He gives an example of this “After Edward VII’s 1910 funeral in London, he wrote home deploring the boorishness of most of his fellow sovereigns, and the alleged impertinence of some politicians present, notable among them ex-President Theodore Roosevelt.”   He favored a federated Empire with each ethnic group having some home rule, but he despised many in his kingdom, especially the Hungarians.   He was making an official visit to the area of Bosnia in an attempt to make better relations between the local population and the Empire that ruled them.

       This visit was to include a stop in Sarajevo, a city founded by the Ottoman Turks in 1461 and was the cultural center of the Balkans.  Its religious diversity, including Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims has led to the city to be referred to as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, or of Europe.  It was seen as the heart of the Balkans and the Serbs desperately wanted to place it under their control, and create a Slavic state in Balkans called Yugoslavia.  It had been annex into the Austrian empire in 1878 and had undergone much industrialization under the Habsburgs, and was seen a critical component of the empires southern flank.  The Serbs desire for this city would cause them in the Bosnian War of Independence (1992 – 1996) to place the city under the longest siege of a capital city in modern times (5 April 1992 – 29 February 1996)  While the city would host the 1984 Olympic Games, in 1914 it was a hotbed of Serbian terrorism and intrigue,  Franz Ferdinand may have told Sophie, much as John Kennedy told his wife Jackie as they prepared to tour Dallas in 1963, “We are really entering nut country today.”

       Serbia was a small nation in the Balkans with big dreams, it had fought against the Turks and Bulgarians in the Balkan Wars to keep their sovereignty and become the premier state in the Slavic Balkans. During the Middle Ages, Serbia was first a kingdom in 1217 and later called an empire 1346, but in 1389 at Kosovo the Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbs and began centuries of rule by either the Turks or the Habsburgs.  In 1878 the Serbs won independence from the Turks and began a brutal and bloody history of their own.  By 1914 there were three faction in the Serbian government, one led by Col. Dragutin Dimitrijevic (also know as Apis-the Egyptian Bull god who headed the terrorist organization Black Hand and lead the party that butchered King Alexander and Queen Draga in their bedroom in 1903), government forces led by Nikola Pasic, and the royal faction led by Prince Regent Alexander.  All were united only by the dream of a greater Yugoslavia and all saw the Austrians as being the main obstacle to the fulfillment of this dream.  Apis, whose organization was much like the Irish IRA in the latter part of the century was a man whose business was murder.  It is most likely he approved the assassination attempt on the Grand Duke and supplied weapons to the men he picked to carry it out, it was suspicions and actions like this that had much of Europe seeing Serbia as a rogue state and felt the major powers would not come to assist them in any troubles. Yet, the Russian, who saw themselves as the protector of the Slavic people, had guaranteed the Serbs that if the Austrians attack the nation, the Russians would go to war with Austria.

       Russian protection of this area dated well back into history as they had supported all of the Slavic independence movements in Southwest Europe in the hope of driving out he Turks and gaining the Dardanelles and Constantinople  for themselves.  This once was opposed by Britain, which was why the Crimean War was fought in an effort by the British to deny the Russians access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East were the British feared the Russians would push them out and upset the balance of power in Europe.   Interestingly, the area still holds much love for the Russians as Russian troops were cheered when the entered Belgrade during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

       On the 28 June 1914 Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade moved slowly through the city of Sarajevo and at one point Nedeljko Cabrinovic tossed a grenade at the Grand Duke’s car, but it went off behind the auto, injuring some of the spectators and when the Grand Duke reached the city hall he snorted at officials about how they treated visiting dignitaries.   As they left it was decided they would visit some of the wounded in the hospital, but forgot to tell the driver, thus they had to turn around and venture down a narrow street.  There, at 10:45,  Gavrilo Princip, age 19, was at a cafe cursing the failure of his compatriot to blow up the 1911 Graf & Stift Bois de Boulogne that the Grand Duke was riding in.  Suddenly,  right in front of him, there was his target driving down the street, he pulled out his FN Model 1911 and fired at both of the aristocrats hitting Sophie in the throat and Franz Ferdinand in the chest.   Ferdinand begged that his wife should survive for the children and claimed his wounds were nothing, both died on the way to the hospital. Princip explained himself by boldly proclaiming at his first interrogation , “Wherever I went, people took me for a weakling,”  it echoed some remarks later made by Lee Harvey Oswald. Princip (who as a minor only got a twenty year sentence and escaped capital punishment, he died in prison of tuberculosis in 28 April 1918) actions may have been explained in 1908 when at the trail of  a young man from Wisconsin who shot a Hapsburg authority why he felt killing was justified, the man said, “In this case it is.  It is the general opinion in America, and behind me are 500,000 American Croats.  I am not the last among them… These actions against the lives of dignitaries are our only  weapon.”  (Hastings)  The blame for the assassination was official negligence, the Austrians were incompetent, but so was everyone else.  The one man who may have sought peace was now dead, and since he wanted peace, to Serbia, he was more dangerous than any other Austrian.  In earlier Balkan wars Germany would not support an Austrian invasion of Serbia, but in 1914, they gave the Austrians a blank check, then the Kaiser went on vacation.  Many who attended Franz Ferdinand’s funeral remarked that the man was neither mourned  nor missed, but it gave Austria the reason to go to war, the only thing celebrated in his death.

       On the 19 July 1914, the Austrians decided to invade Serbia and,  like President Grant in 1875 to the Sioux in Dakota, drafted an ultimatum that Serbia could not accept.   In Britain, the nation was more concerned with Ireland, especially the six counties of Ulster, fearing he was on the brink of a civil war in Ireland Prime Minister Herbert Asquith made it known he felt Serbia deserved a thrashing.  100,000 Social Democrats demonstrated in Berlin against war, but Moltke and the general staff were longing  for the showdown.   Many still felt things could be mediated and Serbia, under Russian orders, accepted all of the Austrian ultimatum except the clause that allowed Austrian military authorities to enter Serbia and find evidence against the assassins.  It was a clause that basically demanded Serbia turn over the sovereignty of their nation to the Austrians, which they would never do.   Europe’s future was sealed by Russia’s security guaranteed s to Serbia and Germany’s to Austria, the two great powers placed their fates, as many nations do, in the hands of inferior states.  On July 28 Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia responded by mobilizing, on the 31st, Germany demanded Russia stop mobilization, Russia responded it was only against Austria.  1 August, 1914, Germany declares war on Russia, the First Worlds War had begun.

       As July turned into August the generals of all the armies pushed their nations forward, fearing that any delay would put them in a bad position to any attacking enemy.  Britain delayed any moves and the French political leadership was out of the country, thus the whole continent stumbled forward to a war all of them planned.  These plans and arms did not cause the war, they were symptoms of the lack of diplomacy and dreams of conquest that had infected the nations in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  They all looked at such affairs as the Spanish-American War or the Russo Japanese War to gauge how modern war would look like.  They  looked at the wrong American war, it was not the Spanish-American War, where the superior forces of the United States dispatched the crumbling forces of Spain to announce itself as a world power.   The war where to fairly equal modern armies collide was about fifty years earlier, it was the American Civil War, where near the end around Petersburg the ground look much like that of the Western Front.  While European generals threw thousand against machine guns and entrenched armies, US Grant condemned the full frontal attack after the Battle of Cold Harbor (May 31 to June 12, 1864), he wrote in his memories of the battle,  “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. … No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.”   He discovered what the Zulu would at Rorke’s Drift and Sitting Bull surmised at the Little Bighorn facing the entrenched troop of major Reno, to move a modern entrenched army was going to be long and bloody affair with the attackers sustaining high casualties.

       As Russia and Austria mobilized, meanwhile, the Germans on were shocked when the Belgians rejected their ultimatum to allow troops move through  the nation without any delay.  The British made it clear that they would go to war to protect Belgian neutrality, despite the little nations dismal record of human rights abuse in the Congo and it anti-British position in the Boer War, the German delay while waiting for Belgium to answer the ultimatum gave King Albert the time to organize a defense and appeal to Britain.  While Britain would not have gone to war without the invasion of Belgium, it was of little concern to the Germans who felt that the British would be a small factor what they saw a basically a grand land war on the continent.  Many books and papers give detailed accounts of the first month of the war, the time before the combatants settled into the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front.  Britain was the only combatant to have a Parliamentary debate on the war and in the end sent only a small force that had many delays until it stood firm in the Battle of the Marne.   The great wings of the German army moved like clockwork with few delays in the first weeks of the war, meanwhile the French sent thousand into futile charges into the German border defenses and almost lost its army in the slaughter until its commander Joffre perceived the German advance and moved troops to meet it.

       As battles and casualties mounted both sides made mistakes that caused much blood to be spilled in the Western Front.  Moltke, at the end of August mistook the allies retreat as a collapse and moved away from the Schlieffen Plan and set General von Kluck’s army to move east to the Marne to, as he thought, deliver the death-blow to the allied forces.  This was not to be, the allies attacked the German flank and the Battle of the Marne turned the allies from  wallowing in defeatism to a major victory that forced the Germans aback and made them dig in to the north.  By early September both sides had dug in and the trench warfare that the First World War is famous for had begun.

     Why did the Germans fail in 1914, at the time many placed the blame on Moltke, saying the general lost his nerve and his lack of boldness doom the Germans.  This idea of the failure of leadership was one of the factors that led to the “stab in the back” myth that permeated German in the early thirties and was used by Hitler to advance his cause.  While Moltke made many mistakes and his indecision cost the Germans dearly, it was not the thing that doom the Schlieffen Plan.  Max Hastings lays out the reason in this sentence, “The armies of 1914 were equipped to inflict appalling human and material destruction upon their enemies, but the technology of movement lagged.”  In May of 1940, Hitler’s armies defeated the French and British in about six weeks, why, well one might point out that while the allies main defense looked for a repeat of  the 1914 movements, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe surprised them by thrusting through what was thought to be an impenetrable Ardennes Forest and through southeast Belgium to cut off the forces and thoroughly defeat them.  Only Hitler’s decision to give the Luftwaffe the job of  cutting the British off at Dunkirk, instead of allowing his tanks, who had one Erin Rommel as a commander, to move in and finish the British at the famous beach.  Here, like the taxis of Paris delivering troops to the Marne, private boats commandeered by the Royal Navy helped pull many British and French troops, including Charles De Gaulle out of  France to fight again, mostly at Normandy.

       Thus the failure of Britain and France to recognize the weakness of their defense is often cited the critical element that led to the Fall of France in 1940, but it ignores a very large element that proved decisive, an element that Moltke did not have.   In 1914, those great modern armies, on both sides, many times looked like those of the nineteenth century, as horse pulled supplies, men marched and runners, like one Adolf Hitler, either by horse or foot, delivered messages from commanding officers and those in the front.   In the movie, Patton, George C Scott in the main role notes after a battle that the large amount of horses shows the Germans are falling, he was noticing that the motor vehicles of modern war were now no longer the main transportation means of the German army.  The Blitzkrieg  was a motorized attack, troops did not march days at a time to gt to a battlefield when they ran out of train tracks, as they did in 1914.  Trucks and armored vehicles carried men and supplies, while the  air forces delivered troops and supplies as well, also providing cover and intelligence to the command center.  In 1914, great cannons were used to try to blast not only front lines, but rear supply centers as well, which in the case of rear areas, they were often useless.  But, planes could not only see these places but bomb them as well, along with transportation systems and retreating troops. In World War II, runners not nearly as important as in the first, wireless communication linked the battlefield to the command center, as well as to adjoining armies, this was the critical difference in the two conflict, the technology of transportation had caught up to the technology of killing.  Rommel’s memoirs of the war spoke of tanks running out of gas and having to wait on fuel to continue, they were not, as many of the soldiers of 1914 finishing long marches and then being thrown into battle with little or no rest. On several occasions in 1914, follow-up attacks or offensive thrust by reserves had to be delayed, because the troops were physically unable to perform them.

       Max Hastings argues that, “The reversal of German fortunes that took place in early September was principally influenced by the vast fallacy of Schlieffen, in lesser degree by Moltke’s infirmity of leadership, but also by the technical difficulties of directing the motions of six German armies, fighting on foreign soil.”  Despite his losses, Joffre was able to exploit his communication and transportation systems of his own country, sadly the failure of the British under John French failed to see that the Germans were not only exposed, but in trouble.  Lack of sleep and mistakes by commanding generals doomed many of the early battles in northern France.  Moltke’s agreeing to Crown Prince Ruprecht’s thrust into French border defenses ,which established the Saint-Mihiel Salient, which they held until American troops pushed them out in 1918, failed to move French troops south and contribute instead, to their strategic defeat. The allies came close to a breakthrough on the Marne, but so did the Germans,  but mistakes still handed both sides, the biggest was the German failure to destroy the bridges over the Marne, that allowed the allies to press forward.  The last battle of  the 1914 summer was the First Battle of Ypres, where the old British army and its reliance on an all volunteer force died, soon it was replaced by conscripts.  In this battle several future stars of Hollywood were present, Ronald Coleman, Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshal, and Claude Raines were all fighting here.  One wonders how Hollywood might have been changed by one bullet or shell  had hit one place instead of another.  Allied failures allowed the Germans to retreat to the Aisne and set up on higher ground, thus even in victory, as so often would be the case in this war, the decisive punch failed to deliver.  Moltke was dismissed later and blamed for the defeat, he died in 1916, the armies now dug in, stalemate was the rule until summer of 1918.

       The war on the sea was mostly confined to the British blockade of German, which is not total until 1918, as  Holland was a great source of German supplies for most of the war.  Many innovations did come from this time, one is the first attack by an aircraft carrier, the Japanese Wakamiya on 27 October 1914, it was not successful but foreshadowed the main navel weapon of the future.  The navies of the time were dominated by the dreadnought battle ships and their smaller sister the battle cruiser.  Britain spent the war looking for another Trafalgar, but the only large battle between Jellicoe’s ships and those of Speer’s fleet occurred at Jutland (May 31 v-June 1, 1916) which was basically a draw. While the battleship mindset would dominate the minds of naval planners the use of mines and submarines were quietly changing naval war.  The sinking of the HMS Audacious on 27 October 1914 showed the vulnerability of these grand ships to mines and later submarines, like the famous German U-boats.  German U-boats conducted submarine warfare to basically blockading Britain and both early and in 1917 came close to achieving that goal, unfortunately the sinking of the British ship Lusitania on 7 May enraged America and was a factor in the United States entering the war on the allied side in 1917.  The other was the Zimmerman Telegraph, a German diplomatic proposal to Mexico to join Germany against the United States with the proposal of Mexico winning back the lands they lost in the Mexican War.   While the German navy failed to break the blockage, and its unrestricted submarine warfare proved work against them, the war did do one thing, it ended the British navy’s position as the top navy in the world, a spot held since the middle of the 1700s.  it also began the death of the big battleship, whose end would be delayed until the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

      The German army in the twentieth century twice (1914 – early 1918, then 1939 -1944) fought the world to a standstill.  Coming close on a few occasions to actually winning these wars they had entered into, sadly their allies could not say the same.  Turkey was in decline but 1914, the revolt of the Young Turks may have had a stabilizing long-term effect with out the war, but it collapsed late in the war. The area was a sideshow of the war mostly known for the exploits of T E Lawrence and the Battle of Gallipoli, a disastrous attempt to seize the Dardanelles proposed by Winston Churchill, it cost him his position in the government and began what he would call his, “wilderness years.”   The other event that came from this was what is known as the Armenian Genocide (called either the Armenian Holocaust or Massacres and by Armenians as the Medz Yeghern, the Turks have no name and mostly deny it happened)  which occurred in 1915 and thousands were slaughtered by Turkish forces and lead Raphael Lemkin to call such actions as genocide in 1943, the first time that word was used.   After the war France and Britain divided the Mideast into zones of influence and planted the seeds of many of the present day conflicts in that area.

     Germany’s other ally( Italy dropped out of its treaty to join the Germans in September of 1914,and chose to join the allies instead)  Austria Hungry proved to be a total disaster.  The Austrians were pushed out of Serbia and came close to defeat by the Russians, they proved mostly a drag on the German war effort as men and material had to be several times rushed to the nation to prevent a collapse.  German victories at Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes (after their victories in these battles the Germans viewed Russian troops with disdain and held a low opinion of their fighting ability, a view that would bring much regret in the next war) were offset by an Austrian collapse in Serbian and Russian victories in Galleria.   Germany in the First World war found that Russian forces could overcome great defeats and just pull back into the vast Russian interior, which is what happened.  For most of the war Hindenburg and Ludendorff constantly keep demanding more troops to gain victory, much like William Westmoreland in Vietnam in the 1960s.  Only by slipping Lenin into Russia in 1917 and precipitation the Russian Revolution  (Lenin actually overthrew a constitutional democracy under Alexander Kerensky) and resulted in the treaty of Brest Litovsk in 18 March 1918. In this treaty Russia, now the Soviet Union, renounced claims to the Baltic State (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia), Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Finland.   Finland and Ukraine were recognized as independent nations by Germany (only Finland and the Baltic states would retain this after the war) and freed German troops for an offensive, led by Hindenburg and Ludendorff , in the west, that would fail.  Interestingly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus , the Baltic States and Ukraine once again were independent, and like the Czars of old Putin is trying to bring them back under Russian control.

      In the Pacific, Japan entered the war on the allies side in exchange for German Pacific colonies on 7 August 1914.  Japan quickly overran the German Pacific empire taking places like Marshall Islands, Caroline Islands, Mariana. Bougainville and Samoa, leaving the German New Guinea lands (Papa New Guinea) for the Australians (Britain).  Names that would become sites of many of the Second World War’s bloodiest battles, the Japanese also began expanding their influence in China which would foreshadow their invasion of that land in the 1930s.  Japan was the only nation that would achieve all of its aims by joining the war, Italy did not receive the Austrians lands it expected, leaving many Italians, like Benito Mussolini, angry and blaming the government for not getting them what they deserved.  For most of the nations involved in the war, it was as Lloyd George lamented, a vision that went unfulfilled and led to bitter disappointment.

      Many new weapons were introduced during this war, the tank by the British, a weapon the Germans did not use much until the Second World War, the flamethrower, which was destined to be mounted on tanks as ones carried by men were prone to explosions.   It was the first time gas was employed as a weapon on a grand scale, the most famous was the German mustard gas which took many victims, many suffering from its effects for many years after the men were exposed.  One of the most famous victims of gas was Adolph Hitler who was exposed as he performed his duties as a runner,(for which he was awarded an Iron Cross).  Gas was not used in the Second World War, it was not very reliable and too dependent on the weather.  The use of gas and flamethrowers basically paved the way for more terrible weapons such as biological weapons and napalm.

     The most glamorous weapon of the war was the airplane, with a plethora of characters who became the knights of the early twentieth century.  The top aces of the main nations were  Manfred von Richthofen, of Germany with 80 victories (he was one of the most famous pilots of the war known as the Red Baron for his red Fokker tri-plane and was later resurrected by Charles Schultz to be Snoopy’s opponent in the comic strip Peanuts), from France was Rene Fonck with 75 ,  Billy Bishop of Canada with 72, Edward Mannock of Great Britain with 61, Francesco Baracca of Italy with 34, Julius Arigi of Austria-Hungary with 32, Eddie Rickenbacker of the US (who later owned the Indianapolis Speedway and Easter n Airlines) with 26, and Alexander Kazakov of Russia with 20.  These men,and many more pioneered the art of dogfighting and aerial warfare, which went from humble beginnings as observations and spotting for artillery to a main arm of each armies force.

      The Wright Brothers had first achieved flight in 1903, only eleven years before the war, but the Germans were more impressed by the airships (Zeppelin) that the aeroplanes and rejected a contract from the Wrights to build commercial planes for Germany in 1907.   By 1909, with the advent of a French air force, the Germans began their own efforts under Dr Walther Huth of the Albatros company, both nations were committed to air power by 1912 and in March of 1914 the Kaiser placed the German air corps on par with the other branches of the armed forces.  The British lagged behind, but the Royal Flying Corps were formed as all nations began using planes, mostly for observation, but many saw a wider role for them.  By 1914 the Germans (Taubes, Albatross, Aviatiks) had 254 pilots for 246 planes, the French (Cauldrons, Morane, Salamis) had  500 pilots for 200 planes, the British (Farmans , BE 2a) 197 pilots for 113 planes, the Austrians had 48 pilots for 12 planes, and the Russians had 200 planes with 16 different types. The French were first nation to divide their planes into types (fighter, bomber and reconnaissance) and squads (escadrilles).  The British were the first to use radios in planes in September of 1914, and the pilots became the gentleman of the sky, who seemed to fly above the dirty nasty war on the ground.  It was as if the airmen fought in the old way of war, a battle of gentleman as many soldiers felt war had lost in the grim battles before and later in this new modern war.  Yet as Max Hastings asserts, “In 1914-1918, what airman could see beneath them of the enemy’s movements proved much more important than the destruction they could inflict.”

      While the airplane was an interesting development many saw a bigger role in the future for the flying machines.  Billy Mitchell, who in 1921 proved that aircraft could sink a battleship and in his 1925 book ,Winged Victory,  he proposed that one could attack Pearl Harbor with aircraft,  and in 1921 Italian Giulio Douhet wrote his treatise on strategic air war, Command of the Air.   Douhet asserted that in total war, which he believed was the only way great nations could fight a war, nations would fight with large air forces that would attack the vital centers of industry, transportation, infrastructure, communications, and government and thus, shatter the civilian will to fight on.  He foresaw great squadrons of bombers filling the air, he did not believe they could be stopped, that would make war short as the population would demand that the state surrender to such overwhelming power, shock and awe as later generals would assert.  This work greatly influenced the strategic thinking of airmen in the mid twentieth century and led to the idea, as American Curtis Le May would state, that one could “bomb them back into the stone age.”   In practice, however, in both the Second World War and many of the hot wars of the Cold War, the opposite proved true, in both England and Germany, the people’s will to fight only stiffened under air attack and German factories were not stopped until they were occupied by allied forces.

      By Christmas of 1914 the battle lines were drawn, with the allies seeing this as a war to destroy Prussian militarism and the Germans as a fight to gain their proper place in the world. Both sides rejected an offer from US President Woodrow Wilson to mediate the conflict, and German general Falkenhayn suggest that Germany seek a separate peace with Russia, whom the Germans saw as their main enemy.  The armies dug in and the war would continue for four more years, until the allies, backed by fresh American troops, achieved a breakthrough and forced the Germans to sing an armistice by November of 1918.  The war produced some of the world’s costliest battles, at Verdun, the Somme, two more battles at Ypres, another along the Marne, Passchendaele, Belleau Woods, Saint Mihiel, and many others.   They were fought in every continent of the world except Australia and Antarctica.  In his book, The Price of Glory,  (1962) author Alistair Horne sums up the battle of Verdun, and most likely the entire war in this way.

The folly, the waste and stupendous courage of the men who fought at Verdun indeed  seem to belong to an age a thousand years removed from our own;  the world of Falkenhayn and Neville, of the murderous rivalry between the Gaul and Teuton superman, to have disappeared in the mists of Ancient History.  How much longer will the ghost of Verdun continue to haunt France?  When will they be exorcised?  Will it be when the last of the old warriors guarding the Douaumont and its memories have moved to Valhalla?  Or will  France have to wait until the eery forest on the Mort homme mature and are hewn down, and farms and happy villages once again populate its dead slopes?

       Why did this war last so long?  “Machiavelli observed that ‘wars begin when you will, but do not end when you please’.” (Hastings, Catastrophe)   Hastings declares in his book (ibid)  “Every national leadership wanted the killing – and the vast expenditures – to stop, but only when sufficient gains had been made to justify the sacrifices of 1914.”   Thus the nations at war were caught in a vicious circle, more casualties brought more pressure to quit, but one did not wish their troops to have died in vain, so the killing went on.  The nations of Europe fought the war for many reasons, one was to use the patriotism of war to undercut the leftist power that was raising in Europe at the time, the fact reform might be blocked by may have kept Wilson out for much of it.

      The majority of Americans were not interested in war, although some like Theodore Roosevelt constantly urged the US to join the fight, but for many, they obeyed the warning of George Washington and wanted to stay our of foreign entanglements.   In his 1796 Farewell Address,  according the popular view the first President urged the new nation to not get involved in such things, though he actually did not say that.  What he said was, “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relation, to have with them as little political connections as possible.”  he went on to say:

“Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe? Entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rival ship, interest, humor or caprice?  It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.  Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”

    Wilson, described by Barbara Tuchman in her book, The Guns of August,  as ” He had (referring to Edward Grey who looked to maximize the blockage without angering the United States) a formidable opponent who was nothing if not a man of principle.  Rigidly, puritanically  attached to neutrality, Woodrow Wilson was driven to take and maintain a stand on neutral rights less for their own sake than because they were part of the neutral’s role that he grasped with fierce intensity from the beginning.”   He saw himself as the great mediator who could bring a peaceful end to this conflict, and only after the Zimmerman telegram forced his hand, he stood aside from the conflict.   He supported Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief that fed millions behind German lines in Belgium during the was and with America’s entry in 1917 he took over the job as Food Administer for the duration, a job he did until 1921.   Wilson’s idea of the great mediator extended to the post war and his going to Versailles to deliver his Fourteen Points, a plan for peace in Europe and the world.  It was not received well by the allies, George Clemenceau said of them, “Wilson Has fourteen points, God only had ten.”

      The war was officially ended on 11 November  1918. once called Armistice Day, in America it has become Veterans Day honoring not only the soldiers of World War I but all Americans that have severed the nation in war, from the Revolution to Afghanistan.  fighting had lasted all the way up to the morning of the eleventh, but the Germans, whose offensive in the spring had failed, were now exhausted and close to collapse.  The Germans did not surrender, it was a negotiated armistice that French commander Ferdinand Foch said, “This is not a peace.  It is an armistice for twenty years.”   Because there was no surrender and because of unrest in Germany, Hitler and many others were able to construct the “stab in the back” scenario  as the reason for defeat.   It was also the main reason that the allies in World War II were so adamant on the Germans and Japanese sign unconditional surrenders at the end of that war.  Also, after seeing how unrest could be exacerbated by large amounts of out of work former soldiers in the twenties, America came up with the G I Bill that sent many to college and helped create the great post war boom of the 1950s.

      In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was signed to officially end the war, a treaty that many blame for the Second World War.  While it rejected much of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and was severely harsh, was it worse that what the Germans may have demanded if they had won?   Would the Germans had been more magnanimous than the allies, judging by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, no.  What would have the world been like with a German victory, in the west a defeated France would have burned with anger at officials it who would have been blamed for the defeat, which could have led to the Fascist parties becoming victorious in that nation during the twenties and thirties.  With much of the conditions that led to the rise of Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy may have left the Gallic nations in a great fascist alliance seeking to regain their power in the world.   Great Britain could have moved towards some kind of alliance with Germany to preserve the balance of power in Europe and save their empire in Africa and Asia.  Austria-Hungary would have been in a state of revolutionary collapse as the Habsburgs  would try to hold that dying empire together, whole Turkey may have experienced a renaissance.   Meanwhile, Lenin may have been able to move through a crumbling Austria to Russia, but after the defeat Kerensky’s nation (the Czar abdicated before Russia was defeated, and might have become a resident of Palm Beach while in exile) would have been in turmoil, which could have had Joseph Stalin making a rise to power much as Hitler did on Germany.  By the late thirties, with the United States and Japan coming into more and more conflict in the Pacific, another war may have been in the cards.

      Also what might have happened if the war had been avoided, the world may have been a vastly different place.   The Kaiser died in 1941, Germany of that time may have more resembled the British government than a Prussian military establishment.  Both Austria and Turkey may have disintegrated,  but in a much different way than history now records.  Russia could have drifted into a constitutional monarchy itself, the economy was strong in 1914, despite what Soviet propagandist wrote, and the Czar may have acquiesce to a drift into democracy, about the same age as the kaiser, his son may have been a constitutional king by the early forties.   It might have not been to different in the Pacific, several experts had predicted a war between the US and Japan as early as the early twenties and several predicted it beginning with an attack on Pearl Harbor.  Instead of another great war, history may have spoken of the Japanese American War in the mid-century.  Or maybe a Pacific War as Russian and British interest may have collided with both nations in the Pacific Rim.

      So why was this war fought, because the main characters of the time, in every nation, wanted to fight a war.  They all believed that their nation was the fittest and strongest and would survive the coming whirlwind.   Instead the Europe of the early twentieth century, a time of great optimism and progressive ideas died.  The Habsburgs who traced their time to around 1108, the Hohenzollerns who are first mentioned in 1061, and the Romanov who came on the scene in 1347 were all washed away by revolution and defeat.  It marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire that had stood since 1763 and their victory in the Seven Years War (1754-1763).  An obscure American military incursion in the new Soviet Union, one in far eastern Russia and the other in northern Russia.  The American Expeditionary Force Siberia was in Russia from 15 August 1918 in Vladivostok to assist the Czechs forces that tried to hold the trans-Siberian rail road, and the Polar Bear Expedition (officially the American North Russia Expeditionary Force) who occupied Archangel from 1918 until early 1919.  President Harding called these expeditions mistakes and blamed the Wilson administration, then Americans basically forgot about them, the Russians did not.  Europe was thrown into upheaval and the next twenty years saw the rise of totalitarian states in Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Japan used the old German colonies as a stepping stone to their dream of an East Asian Zone under their control.

      The leadership of Europe before the war planned, anticipated and even looked forward to this war, it was seen as inevitable and all thought it would provide them with a chance to remake the world in their image.  It meant the recovery of the Alsace-Lorraine for France, Germany saw the chance to gain their place in the sun, the British saw a chance to not only ensure their empire but keep the balance of power in the world in their favor, the Russians saw the chance to capture the Dardanelles,  for the Serbians, the chance to unite the Balkans and all of the Slaves in a greater Yugoslavia,Slaves in the Balkans, for the Austrians, it was a chance to gain the Balkans for themselves and increase their empire. Only France and Serbia gained anything close to their aims, but the price was higher than any wished to suffer.  This led to many trying to blame others or push the myth that Europe was sleepwalking and this war just happened because of alliances and rash decisions by others, revision on a grand scale.

     The forces were put into motion for the Second World War and much historical what if was being done by all.   While all of this may be interesting and fun, history is not a science, it is a literary discipline that uses many scientific methods. In science, one merely can change one of the components of an experiment to determine what elements are essential to the outcome of a hypothesis.   It is not possible to change historical events, though many writers do try for various reasons.  We have only the events that occurred, we might interpret them differently over time, but they cannot be changed.  For one hundred years we have been dealing with the consequences of the First World War, and will deal with them and those of the Second for decades to come.  In some distant time, historians may no longer see these wars as separate entities and might just label them different phases of what might be called the Second Hundred Years War. (using the dates 1898 to 1989 one can argue that the conflicts of the time are so interrelated that they could be seen as one long event that had several small and large phases)  Determining these things may be long in coming for as author Harper Lee once said in her book ,To Kill a Mockingbird,  “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”

     What we have to deal with is that on 31 July 1914 a man, who may be best described by the Beatles song Nowhere Man, as,

         He’s a real nowhere man.

Sitting in his nowhere land.

Making all his nowhere plans.

For nobody.

     Gavrilo Princip was a small man who nobody ever noticed, like Eleanor Rigby of another Beatles song, he was destined to be, “buried along with her name.”  He like another man, Lee Harvey Oswald, was going nowhere when suddenly he took a gun and made an event, a sad lonely man, with no prospects of ever rising above his lowly post, change history with a few shots.   Princip in Sarajevo and Oswald in Dallas, took some shots and changed history.   One might wonder, as Lennon and McCartney did, “All the lonely people , where did they all come from.”

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