The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375509097 ISBN 13: 9780375509094

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

The great war—or the First World War, as most Americans call it—was the true turning point of the century just past. It brought down dynasties and empires, including the Ottoman—one of the roots of our present difficulties. It changed the United States from a bumptious provincial nation into a world power. It made World War II inevitable, and the Cold War as well. Above all, the Great War was history’s first total war, an armed conflict on a world stage between industrialized powers.

Robert Cowley has brought together the thirty articles in this book to examine that unnecessary but perhaps inevitable war in its diverse aspects. A number of the subjects covered here are not just unfamiliar but totally fresh. Who originated the term “no-man’s-land” and the word “tank”? What forgotten battles nearly destroyed the French Army in 1915? How did the discovery of a German naval codebook bring the United States into the war? What was the weapon that, for the first time, put a man-made object into the stratosphere?

The Great War takes a hard look at the legend of the “Massacre of the Innocents” at Ypres in 1914—an event that became a cornerstone of Nazi mythology. It describes the Gallipoli campaign as it has never been described before—from the Turkish side. Brought to life as well are the horrors of naval warfare, as both British and German sailors experienced them at the Battle of Jutland; the near breakdown of the American commander, John H. Pershing; and the rarely told story of the British disaster on the Tigris River in what is now Iraq.

Michael Howard chronicles the summer of 1914 and the descent into a war that leaders were actually more afraid to avoid than to join. John Keegan writes about the muddy tragedy of Passchendaele in 1917. Jan Morris details the rise and fall of Sir John Fisher, whom she characterizes as the greatest British admiral since Nelson. Robert Cowley tells the haunting story of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, determined to create a memorial to her dead son.
In every way this is a book that does justice to the drama and complexity of the twentieth century’s seminal event.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Cowley is the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, from which these articles were taken. He has edited two previous MHQ anthologies, No End Save Victory, about World War II, and With My Face to the Enemy, about the Civil War. He has also edited two volumes of the What If? series, and a third that will appear later this year. Cowley, a well-known authority on the Great War, has traveled the entire length of the Western Front, from the North Sea to the Swiss border. He lives in Connecticut.

From the Back Cover

From The Great War

“The Germans...were sniping from loop holes near the base of the parapet. They sniped at anything that moved, wounded and all. Thus we few that were left dug ourselves as low as possible. I was wedged in between two dead men....Never shall I forget that awful experience. For four hours (4 p.m. to 8 p.m.) I lay there cramped up and never moved once.” —Lt. Lionel Sotheby, Black Watch, “A Bad Afternoon on Aubers Ridge”

“Those most imperiled by internal explosion—indeed without hope of escape at all—were the ammunition and engine-room crews. Ammunition handlers, if at the flash point, suffered instantaneous extinction. Stokers and mechanics might undergo a protracted and awful agony. That must certainly have been the fate of the engine-room crews on the Pommern, as well as on the Indefati-gable and Queen Mary, trapped in air pockets belowdecks, plunged into darkness, engulfed by rising water, perhaps also menaced by escaping superheated steam and machinery running out of control. The details of the last minutes of those engine-room spaces are mercifully hidden from us.” —John Keegan, “Jutland”


Praise for With My Face to the Enemy

“Fascinating, well written, logically formatted, and amply supplemented with useful battle maps. Recommended for all Civil War collections.” —Library Journal

Praise for No End Save Victory, a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection and a History Book Club Alternate

“Cowley has chosen judiciously, taking us to Africa, Asia, Guadalcanal, and other WWII hot spots....[A] combination of solid writing and star power.” —Publishers Weekly

“Captivating...Cowley’s collection is likely to stand among the best histories of the year....These essays will revive the drama and sense of desperation that marked WWII for a new generation of readers.” —Kirkus Reviews

Reviews

The founding editor of Military History Quarterly has assembled yet another eminently readable collection (after No End Save Victory and With My Face to the Enemy) of essays by MHQ's regular contributors. The depth and breadth of the "Perspectives" vary somewhat, as some of the items (such as Jan Morris's character sketch on the audacious British Admiral Fisher) can more accurately be called opinionated, colorful snippets. On the other hand, some treatments of individuals (Cowley's piece on German artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose grief for a son killed in battle she expressed in sculpture; historian Thomas Fleming's account of the "collision between love and war" that separated Teddy Roosevelt's son Quentin from his beloved fiancee; and aviation expert Michael Spick's look at German ace Oswald Boelcke) achieve an extraordinary amount of both new information and emotional impact in few words. As for the battles, readers may miss accounts of the U-boat war and the Italians' valiant efforts, but two pieces by Timothy Travers and Cowley, which add up to a summary of the Battle of the Somme, provide a balanced exposition on one of the bloodiest battles in history. There are also stories of generals who got it right (the brilliant Russian Brusilov, responsible for the "summer-long dissection of the Austrian army" in 1916) and treats for hardware aficionados, in studies of the flamethrower and the Paris Gun. The war, as Sir Michael Howard points out in his prologue, "was for all governments a leap into a terrible dark"-and yet they were all more afraid of what they might lose in peace than in the battles they knew they would have to fight.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amid the recent flurry of books on World War II and the "greatest generation," this collection of essays reminds us that the original "War to End All Wars" actually defined the climate of industrialized warfare and cataclysmic loss. These military history narratives, collected from MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of American History, describe the traditional images of the war--gas attacks, the Red Baron, No-Man's Land, the Christmas truce--but also unearth less archetypical, more revealing, strategic moments. Four essays on the naval war, for example, remind us that those in the trenches weren't the only ones to suffer horrific conditions; the section on the often-eclipsed battle at Bertrix lends insightful perspective on the larger Ardennes offensive. Another strong point is this selection's broadly international focus: the British quagmire in Gallipoli analyzed from a Turkish perspective, for example. MHQ editor Cowley authors several sections himself and is supported by military historians Thomas Fleming, Tim Travers, John Keegan, and illustrious others; their combined historical expertise make this an illuminating work indeed. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Europe 1914

Sir Michael Howard

I hold war to be inevitable, and the sooner the better." The frequently quoted words of General Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, were part of a memorandum to the Reich chancellor written at the end of 1911. "Everyone," Moltke added, "is preparing for the great war, which they all expect." He was merely putting on paper a fatalistic anticipation that had become increasingly widespread. A series of intensifying international crises seemed to justify an ever-heightening military preparedness-which, in its turn, only ratcheted up Continental tensions. It was clear that soon enough scores would be settled not at the conference table but on the battlefield.

More than just expecting war, most Europeans wanted it. They snapped up novels about war in the near future, which had developed into something of a literary subgenre. (Only the 1898 Is War Now Impossible? by the Russian industrialist Ivan S. Bloch envisaged a long war leading to major upheavals, in which "the spade will be as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle.") The heroic paintings of Detaille and Lady Butler, full of bright uniforms, grim-nostrilled chargers, eager marksmen, and clean deaths, were the most familiar images of combat; few, probably, had glimpsed the American Civil War photographs of Alexander Gardiner, with their bursting corpses. "In the popular mind, as in the military mind," Michael Howard notes in the essay that opens this book, "wars were seen not as terrible evils to be deterred but as necessary struggles to be fought and won."

Howard, one of the preeminent military historians of our time, reexamines the fateful decisions taken in the midsummer days of 1914, as well as the near-universal mood that sustained them, decisions that would finally bring on the great Continental civil war. What, he asks, did Europeans-governments, armies, and ordinary citizens-think would happen to them if they did not go to war? "Why did war, with all its terrible uncertainties, appear to be preferable to remaining at peace?" Every potential belligerent, except perhaps Russia, could summon convincing rationales for an immediate score-setting. The risks of continued peace seemed greater than those of a quick and decisive war. Politicians like to deal in sure things. Going to war seemed to be one. Meanwhile, military leaders on both sides maintained publicly that the best chance for victory lay in taking an immediate offensive: To yield the initiative, as the French had done in the Franco-Prussian War, was to court defeat. (New documents discovered in the former East German military archives indicate that even before 1914, many German senior war planners had private qualms about whether they could indeed achieve a quick win.) "The lessons of history," Howard concludes, "seemed to reinforce the strategic imperatives of 1914." But how dangerous such "lessons" can be, he points out-and how often they can lead us to opt for short-term gains that may have unforeseen long-term consequences.

Sir Michael Howard is the former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University and the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. This article was included in Howard's collection, The Lessons of History, published by Yale University Press.

In a place of honor in the Oxford Examination Schools, there hangs a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, wearing the robes of the honorary doctorate of civil law bestowed on him by the University of Oxford in November 1907. Seven years after the kaiser received his degree, out of a total of seven Oxford honorands in June 1914, five were German. The duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Professor Ludwig Mitteis of the University of Leipzig, and the composer Richard Strauss all received their degrees at the encaenia on June 25. Special sessions of convocation were held to bestow honorary doctorates on the king of Württemberg and the German ambassador, Prince Karl Lichnowsky. At a banquet in the latter's honor, the professor of German reminded his audience that the kaiser's great-grandfather, King Frederick William III of Prussia, had also received an honorary doctorate of civil law exactly one hundred years before. He welcomed the presence of so many German students in Oxford (fifty-eight German Rhodes Scholars had matriculated over the previous ten years) and expressed the hope that thereby the two nations would be "drawn nearer to one another," quoting the belief of Cecil Rhodes "that the whole of humanity would be best served if the Teutonic peoples were brought nearer together and would join hands for the purpose of spreading their civilization to distant regions."

Three days after this encaenia, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated at Sarajevo. When the university reconvened three months later in October 1914, many of the young Germans and Englishmen who had rubbed shoulders at those celebrations had enlisted in their respective armies and were now doing their best to kill one another. The Examination Schools had been turned into a hospital. The number of undergraduates in residence had dwindled by over half, from 3,097 to 1,387. (By 1918 it would be down to 369.) During the vacation over a thousand of them had been recommended for commissions by a committee established under the vice-chancellor, and they were already serving with the army. As yet, only twelve had been killed; the slaughter of the First Battle of Ypres was still a few weeks away.

Several colleges had been taken over to house troops. Organized games had virtually ceased, while the Officers' Training Corps, to which all able-bodied undergraduates now belonged, trained for five mornings and two afternoons a week. As if this were not enough, the Chichele Professor of Military History, Spenser Wilkinson, advertised a course of lectures "for those who are preparing themselves to fight England's battles." The course was to begin with a description of "the nature and properties of the weapons in use-the bullet, the shell, the bayonet, the sword and the lance."

In one way it can therefore be said that the war came out of a clear sky. But these events do not indicate a profoundly pacific community taken totally by surprise and adjusting only with difficulty to astonishing and terrible new conditions. Everyone seems to have known exactly what to do, and to have done it with great efficiency. Arrangements to take over the Examination Schools and colleges had been made by the War Office two years earlier. The OTC was already flourishing: One undergraduate in three belonged to it, and five hundred were in summer camp at Aldershot when the news of the assassination came through. And insofar as such iconographic evidence can be legitimately adduced, group photographs of Oxford colleges and clubs show how the lolling dandies of the turn of the century, with their canes, blazers, and dogs, had given way soon after the Boer War to a new generation of muscular young men-fit, serious, short-haired, level-eyed-whose civilian clothes already seemed to sit uneasily upon them. This generation may not have expected war to break out in the summer of 1914 but was psychologically and physically ready for it when it came. The challenge was expected, and the response full of zest.

In this respect Oxford was a microcosm, not only of Britain but of Europe as a whole. Europe was taken by surprise by the occasion for the war-so many comparable crises had been successfully surmounted during the past five years-but not by the fact of it. All over the Continent long-matured plans were put into action. With a really remarkable absence of confusion, millions of men reported for duty, were converted or, rather, reconverted to soldiers, and were loaded into the trains that took them to the greatest battlefields in the history of mankind. It cannot be said that during the summer weeks of 1914, while the crisis was ripening toward its bloody solution, the peoples of Europe in general were exercising any pressure on their governments to go to war, but neither did they try to restrain them. When war did come, it was accepted almost without question-in some quarters indeed with wild demonstrations of relief.

The historian is faced with two distinct questions: Why did war come? And when it did, why was it so prolonged and destructive? In the background there is a further, unanswerable question: If the political and military leaders of Europe had been able to foresee that prolongation and that destruction, would the war have occurred at all? Everyone, naturally, went to war in the expectation of victory, but might they have felt that at such a cost even victory was not worthwhile? This is the kind of hypothetical question that laymen put and historians cannot answer. But we can ask another and less impossible question: What did the governments of Europe think would happen to them if they did not go to war? Why did war, with all its terrible uncertainties, appear to be preferable to remaining at peace?

Clausewitz described war as being compounded of a paradoxical trinity: the government for which it was an instrument of policy; the military for whom it was the exercise of a skill; and the people as a whole, the extent of whose involvement determined the intensity with which the war would be waged. This distinction is of course an oversimplification. In all major states of Europe, military and political leaders shared a common attitude and cultural background, which shaped their perceptions and guided their judgments. The same emotions that inspired peoples were likely also to affect their political and military leaders, and those emotions could be shaped by propaganda, by education, and by the socialization process to which so much of the male population of Continental Europe had been subject through four decades of at least two years' compulsory military service at an impressionable age. (It must be ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375509097
• ISBN 13: 9780375509094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528
• Editor: Cowley Robert