I’ve never understood WWI. Glad to hear even the experts think the same way. But for WWI, no WWII...
Everything was set in place. Plans, modern (for its time) equipment, transportation, troops, large navies ready to go. All it took was a spark for the excuse to commit.
Enter the Black Hand of the Serbians, the clumsy assassination of a third rate Austrian prince and an arrangement of mutual defense treaty agreements.
The war of kings. It wasn’t really a surprise to them or a mystery.
Mmmmm....well...perhaps not. But there would have been war. Were the Japanese emboldened by the antics of Hitler? Perhaps. But they had been well prepared to unleash hell after years and years of, what they perceived to be, abuse at the hands of the US. Probably starting with Teddy Roosevelt.
The Armistice of 1918 was a recipe for disaster. There was no way Germany could pay back the reparations imposed on them.
“I have never understood....”
I can hear what you are saying. As with the Kennedy assassination, I just don’t want to think that what I suspect happened was actually the truth. It really was all those interlocking mutual defense treaties. Once Austria decided to go to war, it pulled everybody else in.
We think it was foolish and unnecessary, and what if everybody then knew that, but they could not overcome the inertia of events!? Why after all, those treaties were legal, dontcha know. We can’t break a treaty!
As another Freeper on the thread has asked, how did we, the USA, get pulled in? If it was all Wilson and only Wilson as another suggested, then consider that as one bullet in the archduke started the war, then one bullet in Wilson could have kept us out of it.