The Great and Unremembered War

“There are no good wars, with the following exceptions: The American Revolution, World War II, and the Star Wars Trilogy” — Bart Simpson

More Americans have compared Iraq to Vietnam than to WWII.

The U. S. of A. got nothing out of WW1. Except an opportunity to grab the whole wide world a few decades later – WW1 neccesitated WW2. But, that’s hindsight. So, yes. It is a forgettable war. Not enough spoils to be had. Why remember a wasted effort?

4: yes, both are fairly potent themes in the national legend – the former much more so.

WWI is hardly unique in not being as popular a topic for writers as WWII or the Civil War. There is also lot less popular literature on the Korean War than on WWII or Vietnam. But, I do not see how any of this has any bearing on current US policies. It is not as if the British who are obsessed with WWI then abjured from war in places like Iraq. The memory of WWI seemed not to have dampened the British and French “war parties” one bit as late as 1956 when they attacked Egypt.

4. World War I is remembered in the UK because *so many died*. Also, thanks to “Pals Battalions” whole school years, whole villages of boys, were wiped out. We have just as many memorials to the Boer war but because it was a small professional army, it had far less impact.

There is a lovely book came out last year called Singled Out about the women left behind that points out that almost every woman, from the age of 15 in 1918 upwards spent the rest of their life mourning a brother, a fiance, a husband or a son. If you read any “popular” book written before about 1980 when these women were dying off, someone always has an old photograph on the mantlepiece, someone’s aunt or granny has always worn black. There’s strong evidence that the entire UK education system and welfare state was built by women left behind by the war–surplus labour.

But that isn’t what I came here to say: some of the strongest evidence of the way the US “misunderstood” WWI is in US quest fantasies. All of these “Tolkeinesque” fantasies convert Tolkien’s rejection of great power, and acceptance of the awfulness of war, into some kind of glorification. The ommission of “The Scouring of the Shire:” from the films was not unexpected.

Magistra — it would be very sad if Australians were to use Breaker Morant as a way to remember WWI.

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case …

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” …

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

[…]

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

–Ezra Pound, from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”

It has been argued that the waste & slaughter of WWI is in part responsible for turning many intellectuals and artists toward fascism. In that sense, much of Anglo-American High Modernism can be read as a cultural reaction to the consequences of WWI.

“The ommission of “The Scouring of the Shire:” from the films was not unexpected.”

Yeah, but Jackson is a kiwi, but didn’t like the Scouring of the Shire. (To me, leaving out the scouring radically alters the message of the story.)

This is — how do you say? — cod oral historiography. Even if the doughboys wanted to tell their stories, most of the living American public couldn’t hear them; my great-grandfather was in the AEF, but he died forty years before I was born, and a lot of people aren’t as close as that. I did know quite a number of American WWII vets when I was younger, and the definite impression I got was that “the done thing” was not to tell stories — when they did, they would make them as absurdist or nihilistic as possible. Hard to get a prowar message out of that.

Stepping outside living memory, it seems strange to think that a country with a permanent fixation on the first modern war, which had an incredible cost in lives and which many cannot but remember as an affront, would lack for examples that “war is all hell”. And as far as I can tell, it is historically inaccurate to think that World War I did not make Americans loath to fight; casting its influence on sentiment as “isolationist” is prejudicial, since a somewhat hazy hatred of arms merchants was as big a result as Lindberghianism.

Returning to the present, I think for the purposes of assessing Iraq it is more important that the US consider its history of sinister “projects” in non-European countries than that it further remember fighting with and against the (partially) consanguine. I fear people are getting worse, rather than better, at considering Guatemala and Haiti (and does the list go on) and that clarity about these “police actions” is the order of the day. We need to face the world, and I think we should try to do it eye-to-eye.

Americans are bad at remembering history; lots of people my age have only a vague idea who President Johnson was, and don’t think it’s because they lack schooling. But others doing a bad job remembering our history for us helps deliver our public discourse into the arms of idolatrous Establishment scholars, and their “re-revisionism” is no small component in the justification for the American nightmare.

The fact that merely redressing injustices would do nothing to contain Hitler only become clear gradually.

To many people, yes. Which is why many others have looked to those who had a solid understanding of who he was from an earlier point. Like the former pacifist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who quickly came to argue for US entry into WWII (and also wrote the serenity prayer). Hitler was quite explicit about what he wanted – he was only ever ‘rational’ in how he tried to go about achieving an insane, revolutionary, utopian vision when dealing with other powers.

#8 – Try walking through the University of South Carolina sometime proclaiming the greatness of Sherman. The South remembers the depredations of the Civil War. And yet the South is heavily Republican, more likely to join the armed forces, and more likely to support foreign military interventions than other parts of the country.

ajay,

But Stalin did plunge into war, just not with Germany. He was quite happy to fight the Finns, the Baltics, the Poles, the Japanese, etc. It’s not correct to paint Stalin as reluctant to wage war – he just wanted to fight smaller, less powerful enemies that he could overwhelm and annex.

mikhail:

I believe the reference to “inherent pacifism” was in the context of 1920, not 2008; the complaint of the WWI vet was that people at the time were unwilling to discuss the horrors of the recent war. And I think that may have been a factor: at that time, the spectre of the Civil War was still active in the US, and people were still alive who remembered what it was like to live in a war-torn country. When that generation died, however, the US lost that memory, and has never regained it. And I agree with you that that memory is the most significant distinction between the US and most of the rest of the world.

fjm:

World War I is remembered in the UK because so many died.

I think that’s right, and I think it also explains a lot about attitudes toward war in the US versus Canada. Canada lost about half as many men in WWI as the US, but their population was less than 10% of the US. The figures work out to roughly 2% of the UK population dying, 1% of the Canadian population, and .15% of the US population.

Accordingly, Veterans Day is observed in Canada with a great deal of reverence and public display, while I’ve never seen anyone do anything special for it in the US. I get the sense that that war was the last time Canada was willing to sacrifice a generation of men for such stupid reasons.

Re: 12. I’m reading John’s post differently. He’s asserting that WWI has made Europe more pacifist than the US today, not before WWII. My response was meant to suggest that it seems implausible that the lesson Europe learned from WWI was pacifism, when in fact the continent found itself in an even vaster war a generation later.

It just seems to me that current differences in attitudes toward military action will have been so heavily influenced by the effects of WWII and post-WWII defense policy that WWI just doesn’t carry a lot of explanatory power.

bq. But that isn’t what I came here to say: some of the strongest evidence of the way the US “misunderstood” WWI is in US quest fantasies. All of these “Tolkeinesque” fantasies convert Tolkien’s rejection of great power, and acceptance of the awfulness of war, into some kind of glorification. The ommission of “The Scouring of the Shire:” from the films was not unexpected.

Farah – I’ve just finished reading your fascinating account of LOTR in _Rhetorics of Fantasy_ (will write up my reactions to the book in general when I get back to blogging). But there’s an interesting relationship between what you describe as Tolkien’s rejection of great power (which you develop in your argument about the Ring), and his account of politics. On the one hand, the nominally apolitical ‘anarcho-communalism’ of the Shire, on the other, the

bq. high politics of Middle Earth. Essentially high politics, it is the politics of kings and princes, wardens, and stewards, of decisions made and mysteriously carried out. The carrying out is never depicted, the link between decision and action is hidden. This is politics as magic, the will and the word transmuted.

Both of these, as you present them, are flights from politics – either into a bucolic rural community where politics more or less takes care of itself, or a high politics where we can and should leave grand decisions over war and the like to the Big Folks, who understand them better. And when a little person like Frodo becomes one of the Big Folks, he can never really go back.

While Tolkien is rejecting the awfulness of war (and its aftermath) in the LOTR, my first half-arsed reaction is that there is something interesting and weird in his abnegation of politics, which maybe has to do with WWI. He’s interested, perhaps obsessed with the consequences of war, but never wants to talk about war’s origins in any serious way, because that would get him embroiled in a discussion of politics that would be hard to fit into his ontological scheme of the world. Individual decency on the one hand, and lordly destiny on the other, substitute for any discussion of how wars happen, how people have clashing interests and understandings of the world and all that stuff (the only real exception I can think of is the Denethor-Faramir-Boromir triangle, and that is as much a family squabble as anything else).

WWI was a very painful and ugly experience for a lot of Americans at home and it’s not surprising that people wanted to forget it as quickly as possible. In 1913 the single largest non-anglo ethnic group in the US were German-Americans. In Milwaukee, in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis, New York City and elsewhere there were still thriving German language schools, German language newspapers, German language churches, German language theatres, etc. Within the space of a few years all this was repressed, sometimes violently, millions of German Americans had to turn their backs on their culture to show their patriotism and bona fides. I think a lot of Americans just wanted to put that war behind them as quickly as possible.

Don’t underestimate the importance of film in nations’ recollections which are, of course, subject to market rules – the people do not wished to be bummed out, man. Put simply, Saving Private Ryan was filled with opportunities for ruminating on the call of patriotic duty, while Gallipoli wasn’t. Similarly, The Dambusters gets a remake, but I think I’ll be waiting a long time to watch Mel Gibson play the war-crazed schoolteacher in a new All Quiet on the Western Front.

That’s before we get to the kind of emotions I feel whenever I’m confronted with the reality of WWI – not empathy for the soldiers, but wild anger and regret that so few of the generals and politicians involved in the genesis and conduct of the war finished it swinging from lamp posts*.

That kind of thing isn’t the type of message the ruling classes in, say, America or Russia want the populace thinking on too much, is it? Especially the latter, where they too are far keener on the Great Patriotic War, and a nation ruled by millionaire kleptocrats probably doesn’t want to prod memories of Tsar Nicolas.

Incidentally, Tony Judt wrote an excellent article on just this issue a couple of months back.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21311

It’s particularly good on how we treat history in the modern age, especially the tendency to regard it as another country with little to teach us beyond “Tyrants must be stopped at Munich – Bombs away!”

*Prussians first, Haig second, everyone else after that.

A big part of the US forgetfulness of WWI was the ambiguity of our participation. On the one hand we see ourselves as joining into a pointless futile slaughter. On the other, we see that the destructive stalemate had to be broken, and our entry into it pretty much guaranteed that it would end quickly. Then there is the huge disappointment with having been sold on it as the “war to end all wars”, then discovering that that was not its result.

As a Yankee transplant to the American South, I really have to agree with EnlightenedDuck: this notion that American’s are warlike because they have no historical sense of the horror and consequences that attended a conflict such and WWI simply does not hold water. The South is arguably that most militarily-oriented part of the country. It is here that martial values are mostly deeply held and revered.

And it is here that the memory of exactly the sort of costs we are all talking about is most acute. The Civil War was searing a defeat, and in a country (America) that does not handle most *victories* gracefully or with gentility, let alone defeat. It devastated the South’s economy and culture (which is not to defend the foundation of either, but simply to say that that was what it was). The casualties were simply staggering, and the destruction did reach into the living rooms of Southerners (Sherman is the most well-known example of the Union men who brought the war home to the South). The memory of this lives every day in this area of the South, in a thousand little ways. And yet these people will not shrink from a fight.

I just don’t think this core idea holds water.

Vietnam was a shining example of social awareness amidst America’s general head-in-the-sand approach to the horrors of war. Americans just avoid listening to stories about injustice and atrocity unless they know they have a happy ending, as the unpopularity of any movies about the current war has shown.

Who is supposed to be remembering WWI in order to avoid calamity? The nitwits propagandists and zealots who make up the executive branch?

There is plenty of history we can learn from but it’s probably more important to learn not to vote for imbeciles and to understand what evidence is. No analogies or remembered catastrophes were required to understand that Iraq was a stupid adventure on the part of fools.

Vanya, #31: In 1913 the single largest non-anglo ethnic group in the US were German-Americans.

I suspect that in 1913 (as well as today) people of German descent constituted the largest ethnic group, period.

Let me just second and extend peter’s comment. The South remembers the War Between the States, quite well; it was a civilization-destroying defeat; and the casualties were about as great (deaths as a % of population) as France’s casualties in the Great War.

Southerners are still pro-military.

This is admittedly based on a very partial knowledge of it, but the American South’s militaristic attitude has always struck as being based on a kind of never-to-be satisfied revanchism, a bit like the French Third Republic. Perhaps the key thing about the British and French memories of WW1 is that they won, and yet it was for nothing. Germany on the other hand was susceptible to the same revanchist feeling up to WW2, but the scale of the Nazi atrocities was horrifying enough to shock the population out of any kind of defeated side’s resentment.

Duncan,
It is possible that there is some element of truth to what you say about the South’s martial values, but I am sort of skeptical. From my reading, this place has basically always been a factor in the South. My only point is that it was not, in fact, derailed by exactly the kind of collective memory experience the post and many of the comments in it implicitly suggest WWI might have imparted. I don’t think this counter-example to the core argument can so easily be written off.

The shadow of Silent Sam* is long, but has not fundamentally changed this place in the sense of its martial values.

*Silent Sam is the local nickname for a memorial statue of a CSA soldier who has from his post on the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus borne silent witness to an ever, but not all, changing South.

With the American South, it’d also be the apartheid system – continual violence was needed to keep it going, which produced a strange culture.

One has to wonder whether cultural distancing over the Great War in the US has made it easier for Niall Ferguson to market his increasingly obsessive counterfactual from over there — i.e. that if Britain had stayed out, there’d still be a British Empire, instead of the American half-arsed version of Empire.

It plays into the very different domestic treatment of Wilson that Americans generally learn (if they learn it at all), by comparison to the British classroom line on post-Wilson isolationism.

(Listening to Thomas Laqueur’s history lectures to Berkeley undergrads, there appears to be a historiographical trend towards seeing 1914-1945 as a modern 30 Years’ War, which has a certain amount going for it.)

“Next to Bombadil, the Scouring was the thing that most obviously had to be cut.”

I’d put the “Aragorn takes a bath” bit in the film version of the Two Towers before the Scouring, myself.

Roac wrote:
‘I can’t read that now without thinking: Denethor is Cheney.’

Then when’s Dick gonna immolate himself on a pyre in Arlington Cemetery? [I want to set the VCR to record in case I’m out of the house.]

On the U.S. South and militarism: folks have to remember that the U.S. military plays a powerful social role (it’s almost like a state-within-a-state) and that its veteran’s program’s are the closest to social democracy in the U.S. (and is a source of social mobility). The South was poor, and so in the days of a volunteer army its contributed more than its share of personnel to the U.S. military.

Yes, the martial spirit has always been strong in the South, a fact attributed to the strong influence of the Scots-Irish who heavily settled the region A little known fact is that LSU’s first president was William Tecumseh Sherman (pre-Civil war, and at LSU’S precursor, LMI–Louisiana Military Institute). Even today two Confederate cannon that fired on Fort Sumpter sit in front of the Military Science ROTC Bldg. on campus.

WWI is not as forgotten as one might think–it is perhaps a generational thing, with the younger
generation not knowing where to look. Almost every small town in America both in the North and South east of the Mississippi have a monument to the WWI “doughboy” in the town square (or in front of the Post Office as it is in my home town of Charleston, Ill.). In the South, they are usually side by side with earlier Civil War statuary–not
so much emphasis in the North, except for really big ones like the one in Market Square in Indianapolis, Ind. The bell tower, or Campanile, at LSU is a monument to LSU’s WWI vets, and a fixture of the main quadrangle. LSU’s class rings feature the tower with crossed sabres on one side of the ring, and the school itself bears the nickname of “the Old War Skule.” At Eastern Ill. Univ. in Charleston the football field was named for the first EIU graduate killed in WWI and his name inscribed on a plaque affixed to a large boulder that used to sit in the end-zone. When the stadium was enlarged in the 70’s they renamed the field and stadium and unceremoniously dumped both the name and the rock. As I say, its in part a generational thing.

Goddamn HTML tags. Apparently you have to tag each paragraph separately. The quote runs to the end of the post.

More on the martial South.

The story goes that an Army drill instructor told his charges: “There are only three kinds of people in this man’s Army: White Southerners, Black Southerners–and everybody else.”

The ommission of “The Scouring of the Shire:” from the films was not unexpected.

FJM is right that in the US, the quest fantasies tend to glorify war, but not this is because courage in combat in thought of as glorious, not that war itself is.

However, the omission of the “Scouring of the Shire” I think reflects not the filmmakers refusal to confront the horrors of war, but their desire to be apolitical. In the “Scouring,” the Hobbits’ efforts to secure themselves enslaves them, and the shire is defaced in order to save it. The potential parallel to US security myopia is clear. Likewise, the the result of the Entmoot is changed. Rather than deliberating and choosing war, the Ents reject war, but are enraged at the destruction of Fangorn. They choose war out of vengeance. Given the drumbeats toward war in the US in 2002, I wonder if the Entmoot outcome was changed to avoid implying that war was a reasonable choice.

I agree with those who suggest that degree of forgetfulness of World War I in the US can be exaggerated — but then my word of mouth memories go back to the Civil War (via my mother who as a teenager cared for her maiden aunts who probably never got over the death of the elder brother from wounds received at Stones River).

There are a couple of family stories about WW I that may be of interest. My grandfather joined the army shortly after finishing medical school but never got to France; instead he fought the flu epidemic in army camps on Long Island (?). While I actually talked to him quite a bit in his last years I regret I didn’t know enough to ask about that part of his life. I suspect he lost more patients than if he’d actually gone to France.

His younger brother, my godfather, (like Barack obama, I’ve always called him uncle) had the dubious distinction of being drafted in both world wars. Late in life he decided to leave Lodi and move back to live by himself in Traverse City in upper Michigan — where the family came from and I have never been. Places like that in the rural midwest are just where the memories of the Great War persisted longest, and many of his friends there were members of the last remaining WW I veterans drill team or drum and bugle corps or whatever. When the 60th anniversary of the war came, the French somehow heard about these guys and offered a free trip to Paris to be honored in the celebration (if that’s the right word). They offered to take Uncle John along with them, but he predictably declined. However, he did tell us that when they came they were ecstatic over how the French had treated them (this is probably not an overly Francophile part of the world). Apparently Pompidou (I think that was the French president at the time) came to the reception and shook hands with each of them and personally thanked them for their service to France.

So maybe it is a bigger deal there?

My hypothesis is that cultural memory of the First World War is so weak because Americans weren’t permitted to experience the war in the first place. The First World War saw the most strenuous and relentless state control and suppression of speech and communication in the nation’s history. The slightest expressions of dissent, and even doubt, about the war could be penalized with long prison terms. Criticism of war profiteering by US companies was also punished legally. Propaganda was omnipresent.

It was also a period in which the nation’s two largest and most well-established ethnic groups after the English – the Germans and the Irish – were subjected to relentless suspicion and harrassment due to the anti-English postures in their home countries. Newspapers and other important cultural institutions were silenced and lost. The works of German composers could not be played. In many ways the war in Europe appears to have been the occasion of a great cultural war at home between the WASP establishment, which was still clearly ascendant throughout the country, and virtually every other ethnic group. The experience of the war for the non-WASP American was in many cases one of shame, fear and humiliation, something most would be quick to forget as soon as possible. Reds and labor were also persecuted during that era.

Wilson and company perhaps succeeded in their repressive aims. They turned Americans into a nation of docile and intellectually terrorized subjects, wrapped in silence and emotionally muffled by the thick veil of taboos that prevented any frank intellectual encounter with the war, or frank reporting of the events of the war.

As Walter Karp has written, “The official repression drove millions of independent-minded Americans deep into private life and political solitude. Isolated, they nursed in private their bitterness and contempt.”

Uh, weren’t Germans, technically speaking WASPS? And was the WASP establishment really “at war” with the Poles, Jews, Italians, Greeks and other ethnic groups? I mean, more than usual for the time period.

Uh, weren’t Germans, technically speaking WASPS?

Well, no – not technically speaking, anyway. WASP means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon means “descended from the Germanic invaders of England during the Dark Ages.”

As a practical matter, I think the term comprises any light-skinned Protestant who is assimilated to the dominant culture, regardless of actual ancestry. (I myself am certainly a WASP although all the ancestors I know of were Celts of one kind or another, or Swedes.) There are many, many WASPs of German ancestry today, and surely during WWI as well — but there were also, as earlier commentators have pointed out, a whole lot of Germans who were barely assimilated at all.

I have utterly lost track of who else is talking Tolkien

That would be me, mostly I am a Tolkien fan (of more than 50 years’ standing), as can be seen from my username. I don’t get jumped on all that much, not here.

Remember, too, that Morant’s problems was not so much that he shot civilians but that he didn’t understand that white civilians were different from black civilians. Australians didn’t, that much; one of the things that the Americans all commented on was the way the Australians shot their German prisoners. We were famous for it.

Pre-WWI history isn’t my field, but I’ve heard that it was widely believed that a war like WWI would be too terrible. The network of alliances was supposed to prevent wars because small wars would turn into WWI which was not acceptable, and so everybody in europe had an interest in getting disputes settled without battle.

And then the war started that nobody wanted, and it was as bad as anybody had thought. Nobody could “win”, the best they could do was make the other side suffer horribly. Duty required people to die for no more purpose than keep the other side from “winning” a victory that also was not worth having.

It wouldn’t be surprising if they felt about it kind of like we would have felt if MAD had failed and we had a nuclear war that nobody ever wanted, that we had planned in meticulous detail with the entire intention that we had to be ready to kill everybody in the world so that no one would want to start a nuclear war. And then it happened anyway. Except with WWI they had a lot longer than a half hour to think about it.

That’s a completely different experence from the US south. Southerners fought to defend their homes from a brutal and implacable foe, and they failedl, and they suffered pretty severely for it.

The lesson from that experience is not “Try to stay out of disastrous wars that have no possibility of a good result”. The lesson is “Do your level best to protect your home, because losing hurts”.

I apologize for leaving out Vanya@31 who also outlines the plight of the Germans in the US during WWI. Another example of a name change was the venerable Roosevelt Hotel of “blue room” fame in New Orleans. Originally it was named “The Grunewald” after the German immigrant who built it. It fell on hard times during the war and, in 1923 was purchased by local businessmen who revived its fortunes in part by naming it after T.R.

My father fought in WWI. He was a sergeant in the Gordon Highlanders and went to France with the expeditionary force at the beginning of the War. He was wounded but had recovered in time for Passchendaele where he got a bullet in the head. He was operated on and survived. He died in 1967. He would never – and my mother confirmed this to me – talk about the war. I believe this was common amongst suvivors, a combination of survivor’s guilt and of having been involved in something that was literally unspeakable. He had four sisters, one of whom married. One of the sisters was a career nannie with a London family and accompanied their children to Canada in WWII. Another was ‘companion’ to a rich old lady.

Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ trilogy gives, I think, some idea of the period.

Last month I was walking in the SW of France and stopped in a small rural village. It was a national holiday so the place was even quieter than usual. There’s a school (maternelle), a church with a preist who visits evry few weeks and a bar but no shops. There is of course a war memorial. It commemorates twenty-four young men from that one small rural community who died in 14-18.

“What – no Rosa Luxemburg, no Vladimir Lenin, no “highest stage of capitalism”, no “concentration of banking” – nobody believes any of this stuff anymore?”

No. Can’t think why.

Virgil Xenophon: “…the interventionist strain of Wilsonian idealism(“We are going down in Mexico to teach the Mexicans how to elect good men!”)…”

I don’t think that it’s Wilsonian idealism, but simple imperialism and exploitation, wrapped in whatever ideological ‘flag’ was most suitable at any given time.

It’s like the current administration’s ‘humanitarian’ interventions:

1) Payback for 9/11 – minimal involvement, with involvement cut as soon as politically pragmatic.

2) Oil – wrapped in the flag of payback for 9/11/democracy/national security/excuse of the day.

3) Nothing else.

Re propaganda: I recall someone remarking on the odd fact that the Germans in WWII committed, in reality, many of the very atrocities that they were falsely accused of committing in allied propaganda of WWI.

Does anyone know if this is accurate (not the atrocities in WWII, but the propaganda in WWI)?

J, are you denying that the geopolitical balance of power has changed dramatically? If you don’t, then clearly someone, some group, some subset got to exercise more power while some other subset had lost some power. That’s where you look for a rational explanation. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve been told.

J, are you denying that the geopolitical balance of power has changed dramatically? If you don’t, then clearly someone, some group, some subset got to exercise more power while some other subset had lost some power. That’s where you look for a rational explanation. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve been told.

You should be more skeptical of what you’re told. An increase in relative power does not necessarily make one a winner.

abb1, thank you. Yes, definitely geopolitical balance of power has shifted a great deal. Given changing technology, changing resources, changing population sizes, large-scale immigration, etc it would be implausible for that not to change.

It sounds like you’re arguing that somebody figured out that they would be better off after a stalemated WWI and so they arranged for it to happen. This would be an extreme conspiracy theory.

More plausible is that somebody thought they could easily win WWI and they would be better off afterward. Then things didn’t go according to plan and whoever was best at picking up the pieces wound up comparatively ahead. It was maybe kind of accidental who actually wound up with the upper hand, and there’s no evidence that they did better than they would have without a war, but in any horce race some horses will run faster.

It isn’t my field, and I had the idea it was widely understood that WWI would be a MAD situation. That the british at least thought of their war preparation as a deterrent — not that they could come out winning more than they lost, but that they could prevent a war from starting by making it too costly for their enemy. Kind of like NATO — we were going to fall back and make the enemy take casualties, we were going to nuke german towns and cities as the russians entered them, and if the Warsaw Pact forces did make it past paris and to the coast they would not have won any valuable territory to justify their losses. Is my view of the british thinking wrong?

My layman’s reading hasn’t given me much idea what the french thought apart from them trying to apply Napoleon’s idea that elan was the most important thing. He was right, but …. The guys with low morale will tend to sit behind their machine guns and wait for something to happen while the high-morale team sneaks through and kills them. But you don’t keep high morale by taking lots of casualties for nothing. Did the french generally expect it to be a bloodbath or were they surprised?

The germans were in a bind — they could expect to lose a defensive war against britain, france, and russia simultaneously. So if a war started they needed to win quickly against france and then hope the others would back off. They had to hope they could win a short war because otherwise they would lose everything. When they failed to win quickly then sure enough they did lose everything.

I see three ways to go with this. One is that a war which nobody wanted, happened by accident. Once they mobilised they couldn’t send the troops home until the enemy did, and they couldn’t leave them in place at railheads etc. They didn’t know they were completely committed to war when they mobilised, but they were.

A second approach is to suppose that somebody (the german government?) thought they could win a quick war and profit greatly, so they tried. Things did not go according to plan. Some of the survivors wound up in better shape than others; hard to say whether they benefitted compared to how they might have done without a war.

A third approach is to figure that somebody correctly saw they’d be better off with WWI and so they started it and reaped the benefits. Who would that be? Americans? Hardly, how would we have started WWI? Jews? Bankers? Did a bunch of elite bankers start the Great Depression because they pretty much owned the world and they were shutting down the parts they didn’t want to bother with?

It’s hard for me to credit the third approach but I gather that before WWII a lot of people did believe it.

Of course it does. In the land of the blind one-eyed is King.

But he still only has one eye.

Just curious – do any American schools have war memorials in them? I can’t see why not but I’ve never been in one.

“Are you saying some european country won more than they lost in WWI? Some european population?”

Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Balts just to name a few. Not saying it was a “good war” or anything though.

#47 about unsatisfied southern revanchism sounds quite plausible. My understanding is that the current war party gets much of its fuel from resentment of the Vietnam war.

Bruce Wilder,
Most of what you said in 100 I can agree with. I think the martial tradition of the South can be traced to several factors:

1. The cultural backbone of the predominant migrants to many areas of the South, who were essentially low-land Scots and Northern English from the Ulster Plantation (ie the so-called Scots-Irish). These people were the most martial and anti-government sub-populations in their own traditional ancestral setting (let’s face it, their journey to Ireland took care of two pacification needs at once from the British standpoint). They were hardened further by the savage low-level conflict with the native Irish. And the story of the Southern frontier to which they migrated is one of nearly constant warfare at a low level against fellow colonists (witness the incredible release of giant reservoirs of resentment during British Southern campaign) and Native Americans.

2. The experience of the Revolutionary war, which was a big deal everywhere but involved an exceptionally personal, immediate, in-your-living room kind of violence in the Carolinas, southern Virginia and all along the Appalachian frontier. (Would Banny Tarleton ever have found such a natural setting for a man of his talents in the North?)

3. Slavery, slavery, slavery. It required constant violence, or at least the undertone of it, to compel obedience. Moreover, the very fact of it militarizes all free males in the society (b/c a servile insurrection is likely to have implications far beyond the plantation).

4. An ingrained sense of insecurity regarding the North that was already evident in, for instance, many of Jefferson’s positions at the end of the Revolutionary war.

5. Reconstruction, which served primarily to deepen both hostility toward government and longstanding traditions of private justice.

6. An anachronistic attachment to a Walter Scott-esque sense of honor and chivalry, particularly among the Southern elites (who do have influence over common values). In their world view and aspirations, the Southern aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries were entranced by an English model of aristocratic values that had been gathering dust since the 17th century (one could argue that these people were sort of in a cultural time-warp).

7. A long-standing love affair with firearms for both silly (even I admit that M-14s, M-16s, AKs, etc, and their 18th century counterparts look cool) and more deep (eg some gut conviction that the state should not have a monopoly on violence) reasons.

Etc. etc.

All of these things held to a degree everywhere in the United States, I just think that they did so most strongly in the South. And yes, I do agree that the South as such has had some effect on America’s Roman outlook. But I also think a reasonably straight-line can be drawn from, say, the crusading elements of the abolitionist movement to the modern Neocons. All I am saying is that the outlook of segments of American society like the Neocons is the confluence of many complex streams of American thinking, and not simply the martial values of the South.

And, viz the original argument, the South is the place where the memory of a WWI-type experience (in the sense JQ invokes) is strongest, and that has not in any sense dulled the martial tradition. So I am really skeptical that this idea of collective amnesia (at least of the sort being discussed) in America can explain the present gulf in mindsets between, say, Americans and Europeans. The South provides too strong a counter-example.

Regardless of whether the survivors thought World War I fell short of expectations, World War I did bring about the final end of the political heritage of European feudalism and domination by an hereditary landed aristocracy. Whatever the diplomatic manuverings and aspirations, the demise of the political power of the landed aristocracy and absolute monarchy was a huge, irrevocable event. I would rank this change in Europe far above any diffuse philosophical reaction to the scale of bloodshed. After World War I, this powerful political class invested in martial tradition and ambitious for Empire was radically diminished.

The United States has several distinct historical political cultures, of which “the South”, perhaps because of the Southern nationalist project, which led to the Civil War, is the most widely recognized. An almost separate nationalism leads Southerners to identify with and celebrate a Southern heritage that includes distinctive political committments and convictions. A moral culture of personal honor is also associated with this southern identity, as well as a distinctive role in American political history, as peter notes. Southern identity becomes a kind of jungian shadow of American idealism, with much of the non-southern population holding Southerners, to a degree, in contempt. The otherness of the South, for most of the country, has to figure in the dynamic of how Southern views filter into the mainstream and into the foreign policy of the country.

World War I did bring about the final end of the political heritage of European feudalism and domination by an hereditary landed aristocracy.

I disagree. It was long past European feudalism; the Capital was written 50 earlier, the communist manifesto almost 70 years earlier; European feudalism was long gone. Hereditary aristocracy doesn’t matter: when they need to be gotten rid of – it happens internally.

Bruce,
I just took my dogs out to go and ran into a neighbor, an old Southern boy who has done multiple tours in Iraq (his joke about that: “if it’s being done wrong somewhere on earth, it’s probably being done by the Pentagon”), 75th Ranger regiment and 82nd Airborne vet, Bronze star, etc. He’s from an old Scots Irish line down here. I asked for his thoughts on this basic exchange and he perhaps cut right to the heart of it (I’m regenerating his quote as best I can from memory):

“Southerners really do make better fighters. And maybe that has to do with an outer layer of brashness and some inner insecurity. I mean to say, on some level there really is this sense that, bottom line, I am a son of the South, and hence will stand taller than you in any brawl and lick you, given even terms. At the same time, growing up working class in the South, you always sense people looking down on you. Elites here, Yankees, liberals, Europeans, whoever. On some level, I know they view me as just some kind of shit-eating redneck. A lesser-evolved ape. And that affects your sense of self-esteem, and one way can be to reinforce a kind of stubbornness: because you feel like these people view you as just lesser, you won’t give any ground. Not an inch. It’d be like admitting they’re right. Maybe if we hadn’t lost that war we wouldn’t be this way, but we did lose, and bad. Faulkner was right about what that did to us. We’d rather die than concede the point. That can admittedly make for a lousy political culture, but a great army. “

thanks for relating that conversation, peter

“I was more bothered by the fact that when folks start talking about WWI (or WWII for that matter) and “Europe” they almost invariably are referring to UK, France and Germany, forgetting that things worked differently elsewhere.”

Notsneaky, that’s a good point and certainly it’s what I was doing. The immediate context was the idea that WWI started *by accident*, that none of the major players particularly wanted it but it happened anyway.

I just don’t see that. “I think I’ll start a world war. Afterward *somebody* will gain control of the Ottoman Empire and it might be me!”

But then, there was a network of treaties and such, and some minor power could have wanted a war and maybe gotten it on purpose. That would be hard to document. If I ahd been involved in a conspiracy like that I would have done my best to make it hard to document.

It isn’t enough to look at who benefits from something to decide who made it happen. By that reasoning we could claim that the israelis were behind 9/11 and that Cheney is an iranian agent.

Sometimes people benefit from things they didn’t plan.

Even harder when it’s only a relative advantage. If we had managed a nuclear exchange in which we destroyed every russian city but they only nuked half of ours, it could be argued that we “won”. But it wouldn’t have seemed like a victory to me, assuming I survived. If I found a government official who admitted to planning that exchange on purpose so we’d be better off, and if there was a lamp post and a rope available….

Barry@87: I think most “government” decisions and/or actions are the resultant blend of multiple inputs by multiple actors (not to say that somebody like Wilson can’t, by dint of force of personality, strongly impute overall coloration to everything) and that the old single-track Marxist theory of “Imperialism-as-the-cause-of-everything-bad-and explanation-for-everything-bad” (i.e.,Imperialism as the equivalent of Physics for explanatory power)is rarely the whole(or even main) explanation. Reality is more complex than this and, while I realize that it is the tendency of scientists(Social or otherwise) to attribute multi-casuality when they really can’t figure out exactly what the REAL reason is, very few Presidents make their decisions on a tabula rasa,
but are often moved to action as the near inevitable resultant of a whole series of little decisions made by previous governments and bureaucracies over the proceeding 10-20 yrs.

make that: feudalism is still strong

abb1: “any European war used to cause someone to lose a throne. That’s insignificant.”

We are not talking merely about the fate of individual princes, but of four imperial dynasties, each at the center of an hereditary aristocracy and an extensive Empire — all four terminated suddenly without hope of revival. That was huge, a change not just in the person of the ruler, but in the whole theory and practice of government over a vast area of Europe and the Middle East.

abb1: “It was long past European feudalism; the Capital was written 50 earlier, the communist manifesto almost 70 years earlier; European feudalism was long gone.”

The Communist Manifesto was issued in the midst of a failed 1848 revolution and Marx was a refugee exile in London when he wrote Das Kapital. His writing inspired many, who worked against the oppression of the old regime, but did not magically overthrow 900 years of landed aristocracy.

The political power of hereditary elites, and the role of the landed aristocracy in supplying the officer corps in various European countries had significant effects in the runup to, and the conduct of World War I.

Britain had been among the most responsive to the forces of change, expanding the franchise in 1832 and 1867. Although the Chartists failed in 1848, the British had repealed the Corn Laws that provided high tariffs to protect the landlord classes, especially in Ireland. In stark contrast, the Junkers in Germany retained their political power, and German nutrition suffered from high tariffs right through WWI. That’s just by way of sketching a single substantive effect. But, hereditary landed aristocracy was a pervasive fact of European political life before WWI.

There are some great essays by Barbara Tuchman on this subject. The introduction to the Guns of August, where she describes the funeral parade for Edward VII, is one. There’s another essay I love, where she describes the last Conservative cabinet assembled by Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (and 9th Earl of Salisbury in the fifth [1605] creation of that title), a direct descendant of the chief advisers to Elizabeth I and James I, and the last Prime Minister to sit in the House of Lords. As I dimly recall, she describes the one Manchester magnate in that cabinet of 1900 as a cuckoo in the nest, a nest of the landed gentry and heriditary nobility, who had ruled England for over 800 years. It should give pause to any claims that feudalism was dead in the 19th century.

Hot damn! A crack big enough to stick another Tolkien post in!

This one is my parallel between LotR and – wait for it! – Lady Chatterly’s Lover! Specifically, the childless Frodo set against the hyper-fertile Sam, and the impotent Sir Clifford against the priapic Mellors. In each case, I would argue, representing an overturning of the prior social order as the result of a war.

No influence in either direction is suggested. I doubt very much if Tolkien ever read Lawrence (was LCL on the Index, does anyone know? Tolkien would have taken the Index seriously.) I submit that both authors were responding, Lawrence consciously and Tolkien less so, to the post-war situation. Which is of course the thesis of T. Shippey’s second book, apparently followed on by fjm, from whom I would like to hear more.

Yes, I know — the social order in the Shire didn’t change, it’s just that Sam and his family were recruited into the squirearchy. Nevertheless.)

Feudalism is a mode of production, with serfs and so on; following an industrial revolution it’s replaced by capitalism.

Obviously not in large rural areas, such as East Prussia and elsewhere – he who owns the land calls the shots there and that land was inherited. The industrial and technological revolution was not a uniform development, there were large parts of the world who simply weren’t affected that much.

It’s true, titles and monarchs are the remnants of feudalism, but I think by 1914 it was mostly superficial.

The Duke of Westminster used to top the UK rich list until only recently, when he got replaced by naturalized foreigners like Mittal and Abramovic. Large parts of his net worth (~$14 billion)are derived from owning a lot of the world’s most expensive property in Mayfair and Belgravia, along with his estates in England and Scotland, all of which is inherited. Alright, maybe we shouldn’t call it feudalism anymore, but he does derive immense wealth and power from his aristocratic ancestry. And 90 years ago this was much more common than today.

You don’t see a difference between a speculator who made his fortune 15 years ago and a family who’s wealth dates back to 1677 ?

“Feudalism is a mode of production”

abb1, I think you are being more than a little dense. Feudalism is a institutionalized political system for governance and land ownership. The mode of production associated with medieval feudalism would be manorialism.

I am using the term, feudalism, somewhat playfully, but the point is that World War I coincided with a revolution in political institutions, which terminated four Empires along with their hereditary monarchies and the whole associated theory of what constitutes legitimate political governance and organization.

When one looks backward, as Quiggin is attempting to do, it is easy to adopt the kind of perspective that lets the past recede into the background, the differences shrinking to insignificance.

The shock of World War I was how massive an undertaking the industrial revolution could make it. The concept of a battle, which could go on for weeks and claim a million lives, simply had never occurred to anyone. War had been a hobby of aristocrats, policy continued by other means or a grand adverture among the savages, narrated on the inner pages of the Times.

Europe’s take on World War I was not limited to, or even primarily, pacifist revulsion. The number one, immediate reaction was to reject aristocracy and Empire. The United States, with no feudal aristocracy to overthrow, saw World War I more clearly than the Europeans, as a phenomenon of the industrial revolution. And, the lesson the U.S. took from its clear sight was war by mass production. The Russian Communists took up much the same view.

“Stab-in-the-back” is a false gloss from overheated rhetoric. The deeper, broader problem in the inter-war period in Central and Southern Europe was the felt loss of aristocratic hierarchy and Empire, and the loss of a sense of place, shared identity, community and history with it. This was the emptiness into which fascism and national socialism stepped.

I don’t think anyone appreciated the risks of the Great Power machinations that led to World War I. But, it takes a lot of effort to fully appreciate the mindset of those playing the Great Game. They just assumed that conspiratorial diplomacy made sense, and it did within their shared worldview; wars were brief, limited affairs, in which gentlemen never lost their heads. And, beneath the surface, the industrial revolutions had created a monster. But, the aristocratic manuvering on the surface was, also, an antiquated monster. Europe discovered that its generals were privileged fools and bloody madmen.

The American way of war, as it emerged from the experience of WWI was to use mass production technology is a mass effort to change the world. The purpose of war would be to obtain unconditional surrender and then to restructure what had been conquered. This flowed from the American experience of WWI and the Civil War.

To a large extent, Europeans, especially after WWII, shared the American view, that the task was to remake the world in a complete and deliberate revision of institutions.

The Shadow view in the U.S. has always been a deep skepticism, not about the futility of war, but about the futility of remaking the world through diplomacy. Yalta is the American stab-in-the-back myth.

Bush and the neocons brought the Shadow view into power.

“You don’t see a difference between a speculator who made his fortune 15 years ago and a family who’s wealth dates back to 1677 ?”

No, he believes in the axioms of capitalism and he doesn’t believe in the axioms of feudalism. Feudalists say those are very different. Capitalists say that those guys can sell all their land and buy Google stock. Feudal wealth is fungible so it isn’t special.

Feudalists believe there *is* something special about feudal rights and obligations, while capitalists think they’re wrong. Feudal rights and obligations are irrelevant to the real business of the world.

It’s like being able to pronounce shibboleth.

@89
In my high school history class we spent some time analysing German vs British propaganda in America and its effect on American participation in the war. The British basically accused the Germans of being bloodthirsty Huns, ready to rape lady liberty and kill widows and orphans. British propaganda was highly racialized, often depicting Germans as gorillas or with darker features, in comparison to blonde women (representing Anglo-saxons or lady liberty). The term Hun, which implies non-Indo European ancestry (the Huns are from Mongolia originally) also was part of a move to make Germans seem not civilized or European. While the Germans have no one to blame but themselves for their self-aggrandizing racial views, British proganda did play a role to fuel German racial hysteria immediately after the war.

Ironically, during WWI the Germans played by the rules while the British disregarded them, by doing among other things: mining neutral waters, explicitly targeting civilian populations, sanctioning neutral countries who traded with the Central powers, and illegally detaining and searching neutral ships in British waters. Much of these actions contributed to America’s delay in entering the war, as Americans were annoyed by the behavior of the British. Also, the British were excellent at manipulating public outrage, usually by using civilians as a front to carry out military operations. For example, they used civilian ships (with passengers) to transport weapons and military personnel, and trained red cross nurses as spies. THis left the Germans in a double bind: they could either refrain from attacking and let the British smuggle in weapons etc., or the could attack and then be accused of killing women and children. Edith Cavell, the Belgian red cross nurse shot by the Germans was one of those spies, and the Lusitania was one such civilian cruise ship also carrying weapons.

Right, what J said. In a feudalist society the guy called ‘Duke’ is special in a very significant way, it’s a caste system; in a capitalist society he is no different from Abramovich. If someone has 10 billion pounds in the bank (and no warrant for his arrest has been issued) – that fundamentally defines his status in capitalism; his name, the story of who he is and how he managed to acquire 10 billion pounds is irrelevant.

Who said anything about meritocracy? Many of the rich in England used to be aristocrats and many of the rich in, say, Azerbaijan used to be communists. Nevertheless, neither England is feudal nor Azerbaijan is communist. Personal identities of the rich (or, for that matter, the poor) are irrelevant in a capitalist system. Capitalism doesn’t care about hereditary castes.

That’s true. I’m just saying that by 1914 it’d been well over a century since the new paradigm emerged first in GB and then spread all over Europe. By mid-19th century it was already the dominant paradigm, I think.

Random thoughts:

1. Only book I ran into during my childhood which even mentioned what people thought about during WWI was one of the Anne of Green Gable books.

2. Americans suck at history. Really really suck. We love forgetting stuff, because we always want to recreate ourselves. We’d much prefer to read Horatio Alger stories. Plus, as has been mentioned above, the fighting wasn’t on US soil.

3. Other historical events which helped wipe it out from US memory: flu epidemics, Great Depression. Prohibition.

4. If anyone wants to read what the average Frenchman thought about the Germans and what they did during WWI, go read L’eclat de l’obus by LeBlanc (author of the Arsene Lupin novels). It’s one of his grimmer novels, and even though there’s a lot of LeBlanc’s standard heroics and melodrama and it all ends happily, there’s a lot of war stuff in there and exactly what the Germans were accused of.

5. Own family history: suspicion that the reason my grandfather left Poland when he did was to keep from being forcibly inducted into the Polish army during WWI….

abb1: “I’m just saying that by 1914 it’d been well over a century since the new paradigm emerged first in GB and then spread all over Europe. By mid-19th century it was already the dominant paradigm, I think.”

“paradigm” of what?

If we’re talking about Constitutional Monarchy and Parliamentary democracy, there’s certainly a sense in which the British model of political progress had become dominant by 1900, aspirationally, particularly in the minds of liberals. But, operationally dominant? Not so much, obviously, or there would not have been four Empires to fall with World War I.

Even in Britain and France, there were issues. The power of the hereditary House of Lords was curbed for the first time in the course of quite dramatic events in 1910-11. The Dreyfus Affair in France exposed deep fissures in French society.

Relating this to Quiggin’s speculation about the sources of comparative strength of “the war party” in the U.S. and Europe, I would submit that institutional factors probably dominate a diffuse collective memory. To the extent that a common interpretation of shared experience shaped institution-building strategies and goals, of course, there may be some shared causality. But, what has been forgotten and what is imagined may be more important than what is actually recalled.

Maybe one reason we drew so few lessons about war from WW1 is because it was such an incompetently fought war. The Generals on either side had no idea of tactics beyond meat-grinding and no idea of strategy beyond grinding up the other side’s supply of soldiers first. And this was all pretty obvious not long after the War’s end.

So the assumption, I think, was that with better management the next war would produce better results; the problem was not with ‘war’ but with the leadership that particular war had suffered from. The fact that the entire world had, essentially, embarassed itself by such a monumentally stupid effort probably didn’t make people all that eager to dwell on the subject, either.

Personfromporlock, you are wrong: the WW1 generals were coping as well as they could with several diferent immense revolutions in technology. They were not fools.

You can cope ‘as well as you can’ and still be both incompetent and a fool. No sane person can look at Verdun or Ypres and say “Oh, good try!”

The interesting point for me was, and is, why in the UK WW1 is not remembered as a military victory, when it clearly was one.

First, because it wasn’t worth the cost and second, because Britain only acheived a tie; it took American numbers to force Germany to the armistice table.

I should point out that Gallipoli was the brain-child of Churchill to attempt an “end-around” to shorten the war and avoid the meat-grinder stalemate of the trenches in Europe. Although Churchill received the lion’s share of blame for that disaster, some military historians say it was really the fault of the Royal Navy whose commanders were hesitant to press their initial advantage and expose their ships to shore battery fire. Had they provided aggressive naval gun-fire shore bombardment, so the critique goes, the plan would have succeeded. (But perhaps not, WWII naval gunfire was found after the fact to have been ineffective at Normandy, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and most of the other Pacific island landings. And the US Navy was just as skittish at Iwo Jima as were their WWI British counterparts at Gallipoli.)

The point is, if Gallipoli had succeeded Churchill would have appeared as neither incompetent nor a fool by the public of that time (especially in Aus/NZ) but rather as a far-sighted innovative strategic thinker/leader who shortened the war and saved many lives. He, for one, was not callous about the high casualty rates, which was what the landings at Gallipoli attempted to ameliorate. As it was, failure at Gallipoli proved not to be the proverbial orphan, but was seen to have been fathered by one man only–the future British hero and savior in WWII. Such are the fortunes of war and of man.

Britta, the Schlieffen Plan was not known to the French and British general staffs. There are a number of other errors in yr post but I’ve not got time to correct them.

With the usual proportion of exceptions, WW1 generals were not incompetent. They were attacking because they’d been ordered to: in the case of the allies on the Western Front, they were attacking because a large chunk of their country (or their allies’ country) was under foreign military occupation. What else could they do? It’s a war – people get killed. You had more chance to come back alive from WW1 than from the typhoid-ridden gentleman’s wars of the C18th.

NB, I’ll give the Liddell Hart fans the Third Battle of Ypres – that’s about the only battle of the war that the BEF chose to fight when it didn’t have to, and lost horribly. There are good reasons for all the rest (If you accept that WW1 was worth fighting, of course. Me, I don’t, but that would have put me in a tiny minority in 1914-18.)

By 1918, some generals had actually worked out how to make attacks on trenches work. They attacked and drove the enemy back for good. They won on the battlefield. That’s interesting and important, but has gone down the memory hole.

As for the Somme: John, from Australia I’m not sure that you can appreciate how much of the UK’s popular memory of WW1 is concentrated on the experience of the British army on July 1st 1916. Lots of people know about the 20,000 dead on that day: very few realise that by the end of the battle, allied and German casualties were of a similar order. Nobody remembers the second (or the 60th) day of the Somme.

Perhaps everyone who agrees with the Blackadder view could spend about half an hour reading anything written by a military historian on the topic in the last 20 or so years? A good place to start is Dan Todman’s blog _Trench Fever_ [http://trenchfever.wordpress.com/]

The interesting meta-issue here is that way that professional historians often have very little purchase on the views that the mass of the population – even those elements within it who consider themselves academics – have about history. If I want to find out about economics, I don’t turn to a Jeffrey Archer novel, but the first port of call for many people’s knowledge about WW1 is fiction.

PS The acutal US contribution in 1918 was largely financial rather than military. The huge US armies had not really learned to fight effectively by the Armistice. What they provided, though, was the prospect of a virtually unlimited well of manpower for the offensives of 1919.

PPS In WW1, the US war effort was fought very closely in tandem with the French: they didn’t have very much to do with the British. This contrasts strongly with WW2, where the majority of US combat troops in the ETO spent time in Britain. In 1917-18, the AEF was based in France, with French equipment, fighting alongside them. Perhaps this attached the memory of WW1 far more closely to the subsequent history of Franco-American relations?

Chris
If you’re going to nitpick, in 1904 the French military gained access to the preliminary Schlieffen plan. Despite the 10 years in between that and WWI, the Germans pretty much left the plan unaltered. Not that it mattered all that much, because a)it wasn’t all that different from Franco-Prussian invasion plans, which the French already had experienced and b)the Germans didn’t get it right anyways (crucially, their bungling allowed enough time for the French army to escape entrapment, thus resulting the the French war of attrition).

You may not agree with my historical interpretation, but it’s based on far more than Black Adder. One of my favorite books about the lead up to WWI is “The Long Fuse.”

britta: “in 1904 the French military gained access to the preliminary Schlieffen plan”

Oh, good lord. There wasn’t a Schlieffen plan, until December 1905. Almost everything else you wrote earlier about the Plan was also wrong.

chris williams: “By 1918, some generals had actually worked out how to make attacks on trenches work. They attacked and drove the enemy back for good. They won on the battlefield. That’s interesting and important, but has gone down the memory hole.”

It may be diminished by our long perspective, but it did not go down the memory hole, at all, at the time. Quite the contrary. Storm troopers loomed large in the popular imagination. Tanks became the obsession of some key young career officers, from Patton to DeGaulle.

chris williams: “With the usual proportion of exceptions, WW1 generals were not incompetent.”

I have to disagree with this. Competence was a central issue during the war and in making sense of the war afterwards, for good reason. It would take a book, not a blog comment to tease out the how and the why competence was so clearly lacking, and so much in question, and the answer would contain many subtleties.

Technological capabilities had clearly outrun military training and traditions — much more in some countries than others. The mixed state of technological advance played a role: the industrial capacity to mass forces had outrun the communications and control capability to manage and direct them adaptively. Moreover, military strategy and tactics were inadequate to the industrial scale and firepower involved.

The questioning of political and military elite competence was a central aspect of the World War as a revolutionary event, overthrowing the old order and the unearned privileges of its social classes. Just as WWI was the culmination of Europe’s long ambivalence over absolute monarchy after 1789, WWI was also the culmination of a parallel ambivalence over the organization of the military after Valmy (1792).

The fog that surrounds questions about who was competent and who was not was a critical dynamic of the war. That fog is exemplified in continuing debates about the wisdom of Gallipoli, but there were many such controversies over events and persons, and one of the peculiar features of memory of the Great War was that people never seemed to get a useful or accurate moral narrative out of its failures: the wrong lessons were often drawn.

The French loved Joffre, who epitomized incompetence on many levels. Verdun convinced the French of the usefulness of fortification, inspiring the Maginot Line. Neither the Belgians nor the Dutch nor the French grasped the lesson of the Schlieffen plan, even after that full-scale demonstration. Kitchener, who actually seems to have known his business, was treated by the British as an annoying gadfly, while Haig and French . . . well, what can be said? The Italians decided that they had been on the wrong side, after all. And, the Germans, in the greatest blunder of all, convinced themselves that they had been winning all along.

For the Americans, WWI was more about the mass mobilization at home than about actual fighting in Europe, and more about victory and defeat in the diplomacy of Versailles than about battlefield manuever. And, the Americans generally seemed to learn from the experience. WWII mobilization was much better, and the American plan for afterwards was also far more sensible.

“in 1904 the French military gained access to the preliminary Schlieffen plan”

Oh, good lord. There wasn’t a Schlieffen plan, until December 1905. Almost everything else you wrote earlier about the Plan was also wrong.

I found this easily. “link”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1473-8104(193305)12%3A3%3C409%3AUPALDL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Bbritta:

“It contains interesting information about the way in which, in the spring of 1904, the French first became acquainted with the Schlieffen plan….”

I don’t have access to the actual article. I notice that the link itself includes the string “britta”. There is a possibility that the person you’re arguing with has been publishing on the topic, and is not simply misinformed at a basic level.

“link2”:http://cnparm.home.texas.net/Wars/Marne/Marne01.htm
“==Apr.— > A spy slips an early version of the Schlieffen Plan to the French (though the episode may have been a ruse) -~ rising concern in the French Army over the possibility of a war with Germany ” Another claim about this 1904 event.

“link3”:http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4013coll3&CISOPTR=2001&filename=2002.pdf
“The French were well aware of the German plan to attack using a strong right wing as they were given the plan by a German staff officer in 1904. (34)”

It seems to me that Britta is not insane to believe this. It could be wrong, but it isn’t just Britta making it up. There could have been a plan similar to the Schlieffen plan in 1904 that got revealed to the french, whether it was a proto-Schlieffen plan or not. In general terms the germans didn’t have a lot of good alternatives, though lots of details of the plan were open to innovation.

Chris W, why would you agree with the military revisionism when it’s clear the generals’ strategy didn’t, and couldn’t, work? They used attrition against an enemy far more skillful than they, and who killed Allied soldiers far quicker and at much less expense.

And on what scale did they squander their blood and treasure!

That is why this form of revisionism is so unconvincing.

But it doesn’t end there, because their tactics were miserable as well, almost until the end. Even a laymen would see that. No person of average intelligence or above would repeat costly operations that are known not to work, would they.

Which is why the people of Britain rightly perceived and still perceive the “blimps” to have been incompetent. It’s also why the British Army to this day teaches — even to the lowest ranks — that that kind of engagement is STUPID

However, I agree with you on the political aspects

Chris, my bookshelves are packed with it, in four languages, including the revisionist stuff, and it’s obvious to me, as it is to most people, that British strategy was a disaster in terms of human life and financial expenditure.

They had to wait almost four years before generals got anything right, and that is what the British public were and still are correctly very indignant about

More importantly, nobody won WW1. Some benefited from it, such Finland and Lithuania, and arguably the USA, but there was no victor

Most of them lost outright

Chris, look at the British victory in WW1 this way: two eBay bidders who don’t know what the thing’s worth get caught up in a bidding war for a very ordinary Radio Shack Cassette player: the final price is $250. One of the bidders can be said to have ‘won’ the auction, but….