Actually another vote for Tuchman’s book. The Western Front started out as a fast moving war of maneuver and counter-maneuver. It was a very close run thing for the Germans nearly won the war early according to thier strategy.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
It’s a side issue, but I’m honestly curious as to what those lessons that were ignored are supposed to be. Given the terrain, technology, and size of the armies available in 1914, I challenge you to come up with a solution to the operational difficulties faced by the two armies.
QUOTE]
Infiltration tactics come to mind. If the Germans had employed them in 1916 instead of at the very end when they were exhausted, they might have won the war.
Although your argument is sound, it’s the one being used annoyingly for the last few years by apologist historians who now let Haig off the hook. Me, I’m old school - the dumbshit was a butcher.
I totally agree that WWI is “under-appreciated”, not in the sense of something glorious that should be celebrated, but as something incredibly important that is under-remembered.
I firmly believe that the reason Europeans and Americans so often talk past each other—sometimes on this very Board—is that Europeans experienced WWI as four years of stalemated slaughter in their own front yard, whereas Americans experienced it as 18 months of victory “over there”.
To this day, patriotism, nationalism, and all things military are viewed with a visceral dislike in Europe that Americans will never comprehend.
World War I re-drew the map of Europe, sounded the death knell for four centuries-old empires, shook the class system to its foundations, ushered in women’s suffrage and (in the US and Canada) prohibition, destroyed Western self-confidence, and of course led to the twin traumas of Nazism and Stalinism a generation later. In Barbara Tuchman’s words, it lies like a band of scorched earth separating everything before from everything since. It would be hard to over-state its importance.
Following up on what Freddy said, the impact of the two wars on the US was quite different. Neglecting the suffering brought on by the war (which was much worse in Europe in both cases) after WW II the US got dragged into becoming a great power, while after WW I the US turned its back on the world. Pre and post war Europe was a lot different - the pre and post War US was not very different. I’d say prohibition and votes for women were coming anyway.
Perhaps a contributing factor was that after WW II the goal was to prevent the rise of another state like Nazi Germany. After WW I, the reaction was that the war was a waste, and I’m not sure how many people found the post-War world an improvement. The mindset of the Lost Generation was not that they had just done something noble.
It’s interesting that both the classic movies mentioned were anti-war movies. There are relatively few anti-war movies and books set in WW II - Catch 22, maybe.
Finally - there are tons of books on what the world would be like if the Axis won. Does anyone know of any about the world if the Germans had won WW I? Does anyone think it would be that much different?
I have to say that while World War I may be underappreciated in the world at large, it doesn’t seem to be here on the Dope. The rate of response to this thread has surprised me not a little.
Someone else would have made essentially the same speeches as Hilter, except in French.
I do think it’s under appreciated, maybe because the politics that started it are so byzantine and hard to understand. (I’m interested because of a family connection, too. My grandfather came back, but his mind never left. He wound up in the VA psych ward for over 30 years.)
There was a repulsive artificiality of life in the trenchs that hasn’t been much explored in movies. Conflicting personalities, excursions into No Man’s Land, wire parties, stretcher bearers, family bereavement, insanity, horrible death – so many personal accounts and novels about the war would make incredibly compelling movies. I’m waiting for someone (Guillermo Del Toro are you listening?) to pick up Flanders by Patricia Anthony.
Slithy Tove have you been to Trenches on the Web?
That’s an interesting point. By 1918 it’s hard to imagine how things could have been much different, because so many of the social and attitudinal changes arising from the war didn’t depend on who won.
It might make a good thread, though.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine how things could have possibly been worse if the Germans had won. This to me is one of the most interesting aspects of American involvement, since if the Americans hadn’t intervened, the Germans would have won, in all likelihood.
Damn that Zimmerman telegram anyway!
An interesting novel about Haig’s approach to war is The General by C.S. Forester (1936).
The main character is Sir Herbert Curzon who was trained as a cavalryman (as was Haig) and fought in the Boer War (as did Haig). At the beginning of WWI Curzon was given command of an infantry Division and wound up in the Battle of The Somme. Curzon’s idea of war was a glorious charge across open ground (so the horses could have free rein) against enemy machine guns by people on foot carrying rifles. Despite such shortcomings he maintained his position and ended the war as a Lt. General with honors.
The book is a searing indictment of British military leadership in WWI.
They may simply view WWI through WWII and the various Cold War wars (Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, etc) as One Big War.
So Pat Buchanan speeches would sound better in the original French? 
<Insert French jokes about how long the new WW II would have lasted here.>
I for one am actually facinated by WW I. I thoroughly enjoy the insne anachronistic mix of horses, modern weaponry (machineguns, planes, tanks), and good ole’ fashioned aristocratic pompous buffoonery.
[QUOTE=Slithy Tove]
Infiltration tactics WERE used on the Western Front. Google “trench raids.”
Such things simply aren’t going to make a lot of difference when fighting against the most fortified armies to ever take the field in the history of the world. It’s akin to letting mosquitoes loose against a Bengal tiger.
Of course he was; Haig demonstrated just about every conceivable characteristic of a bad general. Just because the general approach to war was logical given the limitations of the time doesn’t mean every indidvidual general was a genius. (That said, Haig was at least better than John French, which, I admit, is like saying that David Berkowitz was a nicer guy than Ted Bundy.) Truth is, though, that a better general wouldn’t have sped the war up or made things go that much better. The Allies won the war only when
- Germany was forced onto the offensive, and
- American troops prevented the Germans from pressing the advantage of having beaten Russia, although the inevitability of German victory in the absence of U.S. involvement is perhaps being a little overstated by our American doper friends here.
A better general than Haig would have simply done what could have been done - within the limits of political possibility - to attack less and defend more, which would in the end have made the victory in 1918 a bit easier. Germany was defeated, in the end, not by outright defeat, but because the German state collapsed. The casualties taken in the Allied offensives of 1916-1917 was one of the proximate causes of that collapse; if the Allies go onto the defensive, they retain more strength to stop the German push of 1918, but the Germans would have been correspondingly stronger and the 1918 battle would have been a tougher go. I’d agree Haig was a butcher, but I don’t see that there was much chance for a more competent individual to really improve matters.
It’s interesting that in the common meme of WWI generals being idiots, all the idiots, by the most remarkable of statistical unlikelihoods, came to occupy positions of power on the fronts of interest to Western audiences. But WWI was truly a global war and the actions of many generals in African, the Middle East, on the high seas and the Eastern Front were, like any other war, a mix of a lot of the ordinary with sprinkles of brilliance and idiocy. I’ll put Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck up against any general you can name; he was at least as brilliant as Rommel, Wellington or Napoleon, and is barely heard about.
I think an in depth study of the conduct of the Western Front will reveal that in fact the same was true for that war; most generals were in fact reasonably competent, a few were geniuses, and a few were hopeless nitwits or obsessive loons (Haig was an obsessive loon.) It was, however, a war in which the political, the historical, the geographical, and the technical conspired to create a situation where a breakout/pursuit grand victory operation just was not going to happen no matter who was calling the shots, until one side pretty much collapsed in exhaustion.
I saw on a PBS show (forget which one) that covered the Influenza Pandemic and WWI. They made a case for the flu severely overtaxing the German infrastructure and was a proximate cause for their surrender. They also discussed the flu having started in the American Midwest and being brought to Europe by our doughboys. So it seems to me that America entering the war was critical to the German defeat, just not the way we expected.
Does this make any sense, or am I stringing to many inferences together?
I think it’s likely that troop movements contributed to the spread, but the worst of the epidemic was after the end of the war.
I looked at the wiki entry for casualties, and it seems France lost more than 400,000 to the flu, on top of 1,900,000 war dead (and more than 4,000,000 war wounded) from a pre-war population of 41 million. Given the demographic of the fighting men, that’s a lot of spinsters.
Movies tend to be more about whats dramatic rather than whats important. And good vs evil is more attractive than ‘what a mess that was’.
I mean the same can be said about the huge concentration of WW2 movies on Allied battles vs USSR ones for instance.
And of course, in WW2 we finished it off with ushering in the nuclear era. That had a pretty big impact on the world psyche.
Otara
I am going to get that book this weekend. It should compliment nicely The Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour about the final day of the war, which I have already read.
And here in KC is the only (as far as I know) memorial to WWI. Dunno how others have viewed it, but when last I went (it’s been tarted up a bit since) my reaction was best described as quiet awe. Very impressive, and if you get the opportunity, highly recommended.
Too, the hellish clusterfuck that was Gallipoli.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
You have clearly studied WWI more than I have but …
Smarter generals would have realized a lot quicker that the tactics of the past were simply not going to work agains machine guns and rapid fire artillery. All of them would have gone to more defense and a lot less offense while they studied about how to solve the problem. With the technology, particularly in communications, of the day the problem might have been essentially unsolvable but casualties would have been greatly reduced. Who knows, after the war slowed down to a desultory, long range shooting match with no one hitting anything in particular the politicians, blind as they were, might have lurched into a solution.