If they bother to teach it at all these days, World War I is still presented as a big mystery. You get some stuff about the Triple Entente, some other stuff about the assassination of the Archduke, maybe something about the Zimmerman Telegram. Why any of that should’ve led to the most horrific war in human history up to that point is left unexplained. Also left unexplored is how nobody seemed to see it coming. World War I just kinda … happened, kids are taught.
You can blame the usual suspects for a lot of this — the Kaiser et al are far too White and male to be worth spending time on, especially when you’ve got to devote so many weeks to Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. But the other reason — the far more important one for our purposes — is this: It’s a mystery to the teachers, too.
As academics who have never set foot in the real world, they take other academics’ words at face value. And the academics of 1913 couldn’t figure it out either. They pointed out that a general European war would cause the world’s financial system to collapse; ergo there would be no war. Besides, they argued, even if Germany did go to war, she lacked the natural resources to sustain the fight. And finally, they claimed, the firepower of modern infantry is just too overwhelming — given their rates of fire, two regiments equipped with machine guns would wipe each other out in less than two minutes.
Credit where it’s due: The eggheads were right about all of that. The global financial system did collapse; Germany as constituted at the outbreak of war didn’t have the resources to keep fighting; and the initial skirmishes showed the overwhelming impact of massed firepower. But the eggheads never learned that people are people, and since people love fighting more than anything else in the world, solutions were quickly found.
The United States, with its shiny new Federal Reserve system (created late 1913), was more than happy to step into the financial breach, just as American companies were more than happy to help Germany (and everyone else) with their armaments shortage. And Walther Rathenau happened, as my students would write, keeping the raw materials flowing to German industry. And faced with the overwhelming firepower of machine guns, soldiers ducked. Then they dug, and there’s your four years of bloody trench warfare.
Even the outbreak of the war, far from being a mystery, is painfully obvious if you know the first thing about the major players. In what historians call the Long 19th Century (1789-1914), it was taken for granted that a nation needed colonies to be a serious power. The reasoning behind this was never too sound, and by the turn of the 20th century various smart guys had figured out that on balance colonies were more trouble than they were worth, but pretty much by definition smart guys don’t hold on to the reins of power. Bismarck didn’t — the Berlin Conference was supposed to keep jingo knuckleheads like Wilhelm II from starting a war over a few acres of scrub jungle, but since Wilhelm II shared his class’s raging hardon for colonial expansion, all it ended up doing was sweeping Bismarck out of office. And as for Tsar Nicholas and his colonial adventures in the Balkans (and the Far East), one could write an entire book about that stupidity and still not cover all of it. Throw in England’s stuffed shirt of a king, and France’s legendary inability to maintain a stable government, and tragedy was inevitable.
In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege*, or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.
* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.Severian, “1913”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-20.
August 22, 2022
QotD: The inevitability of World War 1
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For a lot more on the origins of World War One, I’d point you to my longest-ever post on that very topic here.
Comment by Nicholas — August 22, 2022 @ 10:11
From a conversation on Gab:
@WarEagle82 – The fact that war happened cannot prove that that war was inevitable. But it was highly likely. The German military believed it was reaching its peak strength around this time and they believed the relative balance of power would shift inexorably toward the Russians within a short time.
The Germans also believed the Austrians would make short work of the Serbians and thought the Russians would not intervene.
Rarely have such a collection of inept rulers, politicians and military been in power in so many nations at the same time. It might not have been inevitable but it is difficult to understand how these incompetents could have avoided a war that destroyed four empires and killed tens of millions.
Even worse, the war set the stage for the “next round” only 20 years later.
@nrusson – My only disagreement with your summary is about the German thinking on Russian involvement — I think they were convinced that Russia _would_ be involved, which is why the modified Schlieffen Plan was still their preferred strategy. Knock the French out early, shift east and catch the Russians still slowly advancing and Wilhelm’s your Emperor.
@WarEagle82 – That’s another great irony that puzzled me as a youngster. Germany attacked France because Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary?
The Germans created the Schlieffen Plan and then spent a decade tinkering with it to make sure it couldn’t actually work. I believe one of the Corps that had been withdrawn from the German right flank spent over a month in transit to the east where it made no impact in France or in East Prussia. But it was only one of many troop reductions to that vital right flank of the attack.
The German military learned all the wrong lessons from their last several wars (1866 and 1870) which were small, contained and short affairs. And it appears no one really understood what the massive firepower available would do on the modern battlefield.
Lee realized too late what the rifled musket could do to massed formations. The better rifles, machineguns and artillery of 1914 were significantly more lethal. And so German, French and Russian boys were slaughtered.
It’s not clear to me whether Wilhelm thought he could talk Nicholas out of declaring war or not. Nicholas seems to have hesitated a few times before “pulling the trigger.” It’s also clear that almost every government had one and only one mobilization plan and it was an all-or-nothing affair. There seems to have been no option to limit a war between two major powers.
It was an unimaginable tragedy that still ripples through our lives today.
@nrusson – In popular (well, popular a couple of generations ago) history, I think it was Barbara Tuchman who emphasized the critical nature of train timetables for all of the major European powers to fully mobilize their armies. By their nature, timetables are very sensitive to interruptions, so the Tsar trying to improvise a “partial” mobilization to only mass against Austria was foredoomed to failure, and even the attempt might cripple Russian mobilization plans. The Kaiser having issued the “blank cheque” to Austria-Hungary meant there was no chance that the Austrians would not attack Serbia, and the Russians were very clear that they would go to war if that happened.
The key problem with the Schlieffen Plan was its logistical impracticality: Moltke reduced the forces on the right wing because they could not be supplied after they’d moved more than a few days’ march beyond German railheads … there were too many units on too few roads. Moltke “betrayed” Schlieffen’s masterplan because the masterplan always had “and then a miracle happens” around three weeks into the war.
We all clearly understand that after the “race to the sea” phase of open warfare, the trench systems were sheer attrition battles with no real hope of return to open warfare … but the casualties of the open warfare phase were much higher than they were once the troops dug in. Exactly as you say, the lethality of modern infantry weapons made any kind of traditional mass attacks suicidally expensive.
@WarEagle82 – The logistical problems are interesting considering how developed Belgium was in 1914.
Logistical concerns would ultimately cripple the German invasion of Russia in 1941. And the German logisticians warned the military that they would run out of steam around Smolensk in August/September. And of course, Russian and Belorussian roads and rail were probably worse than the Belgian networks 20 years earlier.
And Rommel suffered similar problems in Africa and frequently ran short of supplies and had to rely on captured material.
Tuchman certainly covered the rail problem quite well. A few other more recent books have also covered the rails and mobilization plans. But it does seem like there was no alternative available to either the Germans or the Russians. The French didn’t need much of an alternative because there was really only one major front for them which compounded the German problem.
It’s fascinating how these issues are still such a debate 100 years later.
@nrusson – Consider the path the German army has to take going through Belgium … take a funnel and point it down at about a 45 degree angle and try to feed hundreds of thousands of marching men and horse-drawn wagons from the mouth of the funnel to the spout. It would be a monumentally difficult task even if the Belgians didn’t resist — and the German staff had convinced themselves that the Belgians wouldn’t resist — which made the logistical nightmare even worse.
Any popular images of Barbarossa in 1941 are shaped by German propaganda films, which have been endlessly recycled by war documentaries and, latterly, Youtube channels. A more realistic view of Heer logistics would have each major combat unit supplied beyond the railheads by a kaleidoscope of motor vehicles of every model and make, which in turn were merely a small percentage of the carrying capacity beside the horse-drawn wagons that Prussian troops knew from 1870.
Rommel was his own problem with logistics … the one consistent element of Rommel’s military rise was his total disregard of the real constraints of logistics. Partly because of that (and his phenomenal luck) he conducted advances that his opponents never expected … and absent his luck, should have ended his career in 1940. Being a close, personal friend of Hitler saved his ass.
Logistics are boring, even (as Rommel exemplifies) to too many professional soldiers, but while battles can be won by dash and daring, campaigns are won by successful logistical support. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Comment by Nicholas — August 22, 2022 @ 13:31