I’ve never understood WWI. Glad to hear even the experts think the same way. But for WWI, no WWII...
One word: Stupidity.
I can tell you why WWII happened...because not enough Germans died on their homeland during WWI. It’s amazing the kind of wars the masses support when they think they won’t be harmed.
Most of the principal participants in the war wanted a war of some type for their own reasons but nobody could have wanted the one they actually got. Great Britain was the exception, having quite enough other irons in the fire in 1914, notably Home Rule for Ireland, a conflagration that did pop up the Easter Rising in 1916 in the middle of the war. The situation in the Balkans generally was incredibly fluid due to the retreat of the Ottoman empire and the attempt by the creaky Austro-Hungarian empire and the Romanov dynasty to move in on the territory, where nations newly created out of the Balkan Wars vied with the Austrians for possession of the turf. The Austrians simply occupied Sarajevo and dared anyone to do anything about it. The Serbs had experienced a bloody palace revolution that placed one party in and the other in a mood for revenge. It was the latter party who had the Serbian Black Hand, and they were fine with starting a war with Austria so that the ones they regarded as usurpers would get thrown out of government.
There was a peace faction and a war faction in Austrian government, and it was the head of peace faction, Francis Ferdinand, who got assassinated. The war faction deliberately made impossible demands and the Serbs acceded to all but one to keep peace. That wasn't what the Austrians had in mind.
What is amazing is how this one incident ballooned into Germany invading Belgium at the other end of Europe, not just that it happened but how fast it happened. There was a European diplomatic community that had been very successful in defusing such crises just prior to 1914, but it was overwhelmed by the speed at which events took place. The general view was that once mobilization started it couldn't be stopped, which was true of such nations as Russia and France, but as Barbara Tuchman revealed in her remarkable Guns Of August the Germans actually did have a plan for a partial mobilization and Moltke misled the Kaiser when he said it couldn't be stopped. "Your uncle would have given me another answer," said the Kaiser, some of the saddest words in history.
Empires were dying and younger nations springing up from the ashes were eager to grab as much land and resources from the former empires.
Technology made warfare much more deadly and the warring entities didn’t learn from the American civil war and marches their young men off into the abattoir of battle.
Whole generations of English, French and German were lost (Americans were loses were bad but compared to Europeans, not so much)
Partially because Britain and France didn’t like the new kid on the block, Germany.
I read somewhere that when the soldiers returned to their trenches after celebrating Christmas together in 1914, that was the exact time of the point of no return on the suicide of Christian Western Civilization - and the subsequent horrors of Marxism, Naziism, materialism, post-modernism, etc... that WWI would unleash on the 20th century.
I recommend the YouTube channel: The Great War. For the last four years they’ve done a weekly installment of what happened in WWI exactly 100 years ago. Obviously next week’s edition will finish the series. I started view about 2 months ago and am now in the middle of 1915. I thought I knew a lot about WWI (I taught history) but I learn something new in each 10 minute episode. They also have specials on the run up to the war. They cover just about every aspect of the war—the Eastern Front, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific—not just the Western Front.
One interesting thing I learned is the one man in the Austro-Hungarian leadership who was dead-set against any war was Archduke Ferdinand.
Mystery?
Among many other reasons, war through the 20th century eradicated the demographic threat to centuries of societal control mechanisms-the Deep State
Vietnam and the domestic chaos flowing out of it was the first beginnings of serious opposition to the DS
“The First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why,
Same could be said of Wisconsin electing a radical socialist Democrat who has pledged more or less to turn the state from prosperity, $500,000 budget surplus years in a row. 2.9% unemployment, hosts of new manufacturing jobs, and low property taxes back into the Governor Doyal days with near bankruptcy, 9% unemployment, high taxes, drive manufactures and farmers out of the state, and allow the Teachers Union bosses to set property taxes. Why? Time for a Change many say. Perhaps the same was somehow true back in Europe’s 1913-14.
Keegan, despite his vast expertise, confesses that even when one knows what happened, it is difficult to explain why.
So, it’s not just me. I was born in 1958 but the subject of WWI I’ve always found haunting aND sad.
Well, we tend to see WWI as the first of the modern wars, but really it may be better to look at it as the last of the pre-modern wars, because the reasons for it were sown in the previous centuries of European history.
Consider the state of the world at the end of the colonial era. The entire world had been divvied up among the European powers (and the United States), but then you had Imperial Germany which arose as a superstate at the end of the Napoleonic wars, too late to claim any of the really choice overseas colonies. It was left with a few scraps that none of the other powers wanted. The only option for it to expand its holdings in order to compete economically with the other powers was to go to war and hope to claim more colonies in a peace settlement.
The conflict was going to happen sooner or later, and the alliances were all set and ready to go, they were just waiting for some plausible excuse to get it started.
My father was wounded Sept 26, 1918, at the Battle of the Argonne Forest.
Compound Comminuted Fracture of fibia, severance of artery, three surgeries in France and US. Lost 90% of his hearing.
Purple Heart awarded in the 1930’s. I can give privately his entry in the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor.
Confluence of growing globalist powers taking control: banksters, manufacturers, etc. (The Arms of Krupp.)
1913: Drastic globalist changes in America to our Constitution and policies, fiscal and political. 1914: world war.
Just disconnected circumstances? I think not.
My perspective has definitely changed since I learned about WWI in high school.
Firstly I understand President Wilson lied to the American people saying they would not be involved. Sadly, at the time, for us Canadians, when the British said jump, we replied “how high”. We really had no sense of ourselves as an independent nation quite yet.
Secondly, as aggressive as the Germans were, the British bear more fault than we are told in our history books. The British just would not allow some wily “krauts” the right to build up their own navy. British vanity and war mongering certainly, IMHO, was a factor. The French were sore over previous skirmishes with the Germans, and the Russians just trigger happy where the Germans were concerned.
As far as conduct however, I understand the Germans (not sure about the Austrians) were particularly brutal. They shot citizens from entire small towns, tortured people, and treated their prisoners of war abdominally. The Allies treated populations and prisoners far more humanely.
The British also had some other marks on their reputation. They treated ANZAC troops like cannon fodder against the Turks. Not sure how I feel about the Arabism that was injected into the British psyche via Lawrence of Arabia and uniting Arab states against the Ottomans.
Why?
Because the UK declared war on Germany.
Both sides should have killed all of their officers and just went home. I have watched hundreds of hours of documentaries about WW1. Total waste total madness.