World War I

World War One was like no other war before in history. The main theatre of war, the Western Front, was deadlocked from a few months after the war's start in 1914 until a few months before its end in 1918, stretching in a continuous line of trenches from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. By 1916 the forces of Germany, France and the British Empire, armies millions of men strong, measured advances in terms of a few miles (or kilometres) gained over several months. Casualties for each big attack or 'push' ran into hundreds of thousands on both sides, with calculations for victory based on national birth-rates to replace the losses. This was not the kind of war that anyone, including the politicians and generals who directed it, wanted to fight.

Under Kaiser Wilhelm II Germany moved from a policy of maintaining the status quo to a more aggressive stance. He decided against renewing a treaty with Russia, effectively opting for the Austrian alliance. Germany's western and eastern neighbours, France and Russia, signed an alliance in 1894 united by fear and resentment of Berlin. In 1898, Germany began to build up its navy, although this could only alarm the world's most powerful maritime nation, Britain. Recognising a major threat to her security, Britain abandoned the policy of holding aloof from entanglements with continental powers. Within ten years, Britain had concluded agreements, albeit limited, with her two major colonial rivals, France and Russia. Europe was divided into two armed camps: the Entente Powers and the Central Powers, and their populations began to see war not merely as inevitable but even welcome.

In the summer of 1914 the Germans were prepared, at the very least, to run the risk of causing a large-scale war. The crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire decided, after the assassination on 28 June, to take action against Serbia, which was suspected of being behind the murder. The German government issued the so-called 'blank cheque' on 5-6 July, offering unconditional support to the Austrians, despite the risk of war with Russia. Germany, painted into a diplomatic corner by Wilhelm's bellicosity, saw this as a way of breaking up the Entente, for France and Britain might refuse to support Russia. Moreover, a wish to unite the nation behind the government may have been a motive. So might desire to strike against Russia before it had finished rebuilding its military strength after its defeat by Japan in 1905.

The most sinister interpretation is that Germany had been actively planning an aggressive war. In December 1912 the Kaiser held a meeting at which some historians believe it was decided to go to war some 18 months hence. This interpretation is controversial, but the bellicosity of Wilhelm and some senior advisors is clear, and the coincidence with the actual outbreak of war in August 1914 is remarkable. A month after the war began, Germany drew up some far-reaching war aims. French power would be broken, Belgium reduced to vassal status, and a colonial empire carved out in Africa and elsewhere. Mitteleuropa, a German-dominated customs union would give Berlin economic hegemony. As the war went on, Germany's appetite grew. In 1917-18 Germany set up a huge informal empire on the ruins of defeated Russia. There were distinct continuities with Hitler's aims in World War Two.

It is unclear whether Germany went to war to achieve these aims, or whether, having found themselves at war, they began to think about what they would do with the victory they hoped to win. Some important figures in Germany, including industrialists, politicians, and the Kaiser himself, favoured a radical approach. In 1914 fate seemed to have offered Germany the opportunity to turn dreams into imperial reality. Germany now controlled most of Belgium and some economically important parts of northern France. Campaigns in 1915-17 conquered Poland and portions of Russia. By the end of the war, the Germans were even casting covetous eyes on their ally, Austria-Hungary.

The size and wealth of the conquered Eastern territories easily outweighed what would have been lost had the Germans withdrawn from Belgium and France. Had they done so, France might have made peace and the anti-German coalition collapsed. Instead, in March 1918, the German army struck on the Western Front in an attempt to knock Britain and France out of the war. The gamble failed and the Germans were themselves defeated by the Western Allies. Having played for everything, the German leadership lost everything. On the surface, it is strange that despite the military deadlock, the belligerents did not reach a compromise peace. However, since Germany's aims were fundamentally incompatible with those of the Allies, and almost to the end, both sides believed that the war was winnable, it is not surprising that the struggle went on. Despite some sporadic attempts to find common ground, it was not until autumn 1918 that Germany, clearly defeated, staged a deathbed conversion to the idea of a compromise peace.

France's immediate aim was to expel German troops from its territory. In the longer term, many desired the return of the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany after the war of 1870-1, and the crushing of German power in some form, thus enhancing French security for the future. Britain went to war because it saw a German victory as a threat to its security. For centuries, Britain had fought to maintain the balance of power in Europe, to ensure that no state became overmighty. The Kaiser's Germany followed Napoleon's France, and preceded Hitler, as a threat to stability. In particular, Britain was highly sensitive about Belgium. In the hands of an enemy, Belgian ports offered a major threat to the British naval supremacy and hence the security of the British Isles. Britain had no real option but to go to war in 1914. If France had been defeated, Britain would have been faced with the nightmare that since the days of Elizabeth I it had fought to avoid: the continent dominated by a single, aggressive state.

What made World War One so different was the long-term impact of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying political and social changes. This was the first mass global war of the industrialised age, a demonstration of the prodigious strength, resilience and killing power of modern states. The war was also fought at a high point of patriotism and belief in the existing social hierarchy; beliefs that the war itself helped destroy, and that the modern world finds very hard to understand. More than a century before, the French Revolution of 1789 had seen the first attempts to harness citizenship and patriotism to a national war-effort. In the ideology of revolutionary France, young men were conscripted into the armed forces as part of their duty as citizens, but the remaining population was also expected to make personal sacrifices for the war, blurring the distinction between civilian and soldier.
Known at first as 'People's War,' this idea developed in the 19th Century as part of a growing sense of national identity. By the middle of World War One it was known as 'Total War,' the organisation of entire societies for war in a social, economic, and even spiritual sense. There were, of course, protests and debates, but the vast majority of people fought in World War One, or supported it with the 'Home Front' because they believed that victory for their own country was worth the cost.

The 19th century saw the industrial transformation of much of Europe, with vastly increased populations, developing urbanisation, and new scientific inventions. In particular, this was the age of iron and steam. Railways and steamships led to a revolution in transport, allowing large armies with their supplies and ammunition to be moved long distances in days rather than weeks. Developments in metallurgy, chemicals and electricity led to new forms of explosives and propellants for improved firearms and artillery, and to a revolution in communications with the electric telegraph.
The wars of the mid-19th century gave the first indications of what these new technologies and the potential for mass armies might mean. Particularly important were those wars leading to the unification of Germany - the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).

The Prussian Army was a peacetime training organisation for a system of mass conscription controlled by a highly professional general staff. Soldiers returned to civilian life after two or three years, but could be recalled in the event of a war. A well-developed bureaucracy and efficient railway system then mobilised and deployed the mass army, trained and ready to fight.
After 1871, the German system of mass peacetime conscription and a general staff to plan future wars based on railway deployment was copied throughout Europe. The exception was Britain which, with the Royal Navy protecting it from invasion and a global empire, relied on a long-service army of volunteers, supplemented by auxiliary forces from around the empire, including the Indian Army, the largest all-volunteer army in history.

The major powers of Europe avoided war with each other successfully for a generation until 1914. Instead, Europe largely exported its wars, in the last great age of imperial expansion.
Within Europe, a series of interlocking alliances grew up, meant to preserve stability. In 1879 the two empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary allied together, joined by Italy in 1881. This was matched in 1894 by the unnatural alliance of republican France with Imperial Russia. Finally in 1904 Britain agreed to an 'Entente Cordiale' (literally a 'friendly understanding') with France, and in 1907 with Russia.
The basis was that each alliance would support its members, the 'Triple Alliance' of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy against the 'Triple Entente' of France, Russia and Great Britain, so that an attack on any one major power by another would produce a general European war. In Britain's case this was not a formal alliance, but an informal military commitment with the French. The Italians also were less secure in their alliance; in 1914 they were to stand neutral, and a year later they joined the Entente powers.

Between 1871 and 1914 further institutional, technological and scientific developments, at least as great as those that had gone before, made differences to the conduct of warfare that could not be tested without a major European war. Colonial wars before 1914, and even quite sizeable wars fought outside Europe like the South African War (1899-1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) gave only partial clues to the future.
At full mobilisation, armies of many millions became possible, and in 1914 France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia each mobilised between three and six million men. As the 20th century loomed, electricity and chemicals joined iron and steam in industrial importance. In communications, the telegraph was followed by the telephone in 1876, and then by wireless and radio. In 1901 the first radio transmission was made across the Atlantic. By the same date, trains had exceeded 100 mph (160 kph), the first cars and lorries were making their appearance, and the diesel engine made the ocean-going submarine a practical weapon of war.
Two years' later came the Wright brothers' first flight, potentially adding airpower to the means of war. The changes also included a new generation of weapons, rifles, artillery and machine-guns, that would remain in service throughout the first half of the 20th Century, and would not be entirely obsolete even at its end.

The peace settlement was drawn up at the end of a long and gruelling war which cost over eight million lives and, according to one estimate, around 260 billion dollars, or to put it another way over six times the sum of all the national debt accumulated in the entire world from the end of the 18th century to 1914.
The expectation of both the allies and the Central Powers was that the costs of the war would largely be recouped from the losers. Furthermore, both sides planned to exploit their victory by inflicting territorial losses and military limitations on the enemy, and confiscating a sizeable chunk of their economic and industrial resources.

However, such ambitions did not accord well with the peace programme being drawn up in the United States in the course of 1918. The Fourteen Points, delivered by the President of the United States to the American congress in January 1918, and his subsequent addresses represented an ambitious and idealistic bid by Woodrow Wilson to seize the initiative on behalf of the United States and to offer moral leadership to the world in the ensuing peace negotiations.
When press reports about Wilson's Fourteen Points first reached Germany, the American peace programme was indignantly dismissed by conservatives as being a 'front for imperialistic conquest' and striking a note of victory which was 'hardly appropriate to Germany's unprecedentedly promising military situation' in early 1918. In stark contrast to Wilson's peace proposals, the Germans concluded an extremely harsh treaty with Russia at Brest Litovsk in March 1918, and turned their attention to a final, all-out push to break the allied lines on the Western Front.
But victory did not materialise. Instead, by August of 1918 the German High Command were facing defeat. Now Wilson's peace proposals looked very attractive, compared to the terms likely to be put forward by French or British leaders. The High Command hastily summoned political leaders from the German Reichstag to put their weight behind a new civilian government under Prince Max von Baden, and to agree to pursue peace negotiations with Wilson based on the Fourteen Points. The cynical calculation was that a new civilian government would secure a more lenient peace than would be offered to German military leaders.

The Guns of August

"More dramtatic than fiction. THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative - beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained ... The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."

Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.

The best "popular" history of the war yet written

The First World War

"Masterfully telling the complicated and heart-rending story of the war from his unique perspective as the world's leading military historian, Keegan weaves the eventful tapestry as no one else could. Particularly useful are his frequent summaries of where the combatants and their armies stood at various crucial times which provide the reader a much better sense of how and why subsequent events unfolded as they did. It is true that Keegan does not dwell on the causes of the war; for that story, try Niall Ferguson's recent and somewhat controversial "The Pity of War." Nor can he spend much time on the thoughts and feelings of the combatants (though he includes several carefully chosen soldiers' reminiscences); none better for that than Lynn Macdonald's series of "year" books, "1914", et al. What Keegan does do is provide even the knowledgeable reader with an amazingly fresh and insightful assessment of those four terrible years when the world turned upside down. Perhaps Keegan would agree that it is a book he could write only at this point in his long and incomparably distinguished career. It is Keegan at his mature and very best."

The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916

There is no doubt that Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory, first written in 1962, is a classic of military history. Horne's account of the sanguinary ten-month Battle of Verdun in 1916 is still the best English-language account of the campaign. The Price of Glory also represents the middle volume of Horne's trilogy on the Franco-German wars fought between 1870 and 1940. Certainly anyone with an interest in the First World War should read and reread Horne's book.

Horne's descriptions of the German capture of Fort Douamont and the underground battles in the corridors of Fort Vaux are told dramatically and with great style. The battles for the hills on the left bank of the Meuse and the constant see-saw of German attacks and French counterattacks round out the narrative. It should be noted though, that Horne's primary focus is on the high-level strategy behind the battle. German General Falkenhayn's intent to fight a limited attritional battle at Verdun in order to bleed the French white is explained, although the failure of the German's to follow through on the commander's intent should provide examples in the danger of "mission creep". There is much emphasis on French generals, too, including Joffre, de Castelnau, Petain, Mangin and Nivelle. Although diary and post-war accounts from junior soldiers are included, their accounts seem intended more to embellish the main story.