Warning- this is a zombie thread. However, most of the contributors are still with us so I thought I might add on.
Casdave, I believe the casualties from gas in WW1 was closer to 80,000 rather than 40,000. That doesn’t include those who suffered for years after with scarred lungs and vision disorders.
Slithy Tove, a few years ago I would have agreed with you regarding Haig being a butcher. Now I am not so sure- I have read a lot more tracts recently and am not sure what else he could have done with the limited communication at his disposal. Certainly he was better than French, and he was often let down by the promises of the French military (they fielded a far larger army and were to a large extent granted a larger say in matters). Haig was certainly under scrutiny and there exist rumours that lloyd-George was going to replace him with A Colonial General. Whether this was Currie or Monash (or even if it was going to happen) is unclear. However, the end result was that Haig did win the war for the British. I do think he suffers from being a dour person with few interpersonal skills- much the same as Montgomery. Whereas someone like Currie (Canadian) was known for a volcanic temper, extraordinarily foul language and also stealing canteen funds.
However, the reason I found this thread was a reference to Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck- I think it was by Rick jay. Not only a brilliant officer he was the only German general I know of to tell Hitler to go fuck himself. Link
They already are considered one war in some circles. I know that Churchill felt that way. For instance, his 6-volume set about WW2 actually begins many years before the fighting broke out.
I don’t think that’s really true. Wilhelm was at least 100 years too late in his attitudes. If other European leaders were that similar those who won would have kept the spoils to a far greater extent. I’d guess it just wasn’t considered “appropriate” to build empires in Europe anymore.
Unless you’re just going to use the “no WWII without WWI” logic, that seems… completely untrue.
First of all the USA became a superpower after (and with the help of) WWII, which of course affects a lot of the world. The Cold War happened because of WWII which has led to the creation of NATO and a lot of countries’ policies today, including the US’s huge military and the current regime in China - another very important part of our modern world. It led to the decline of the British Empire (the largest empire ever). It led to the creation of Israel and a less-stable Middle East, which arguably was a significant factor in the amount of Islamic terrorism around the world now, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which has led to the current situation there. I don’t know much about the history of Iran but I’d guess the current regime there - another major contributor to world news and international discussions - would not exist without WWII. And of course it led to the creation of nuclear weapons.
Of course you could argue that some of these things (such as the decline of the British Empire) would have happened without WWII, but if that’s the case WWII certainly accelerated the process.
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Unless you’re just going to use the “no WWII without WWI” logic, that seems… completely untrue.
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Well, it was several years ago, so not sure what I meant by that. However, my guess is I was thinking of the redrawing of national lines in Europe and, importantly, the Middle East (and the chopping up and distribution of the old Ottoman Empire) and the fact that WWI pretty much spelled the doom of European colonialism, even though some of it took until after WWII to actually finally topple over. Most of the major European colonial powers were simply too beat to shit to continue colonial expansion after WWI, and were doing all they could to just hold onto their overseas empires, or using other methods revolving around influence or puppet kingdoms (as in the Middle East).
That’s just a guess at what I was thinking 5+ years ago, of course.
Certainly, and that certainly changed the world we live in, but the US was already an economic superpower coming out of WWI, even when you take into account the Great Depression. I suppose you could make the case that the US becoming one of the dominant military superpowers was a key aspect to the modern world, and that this would only have happened with another world war.
I think they all had their roots in WWI, and that WWII was merely WWI version 2…the culmination of a lot of forces and factors started during WWI and the conditions in Europe and Asia that came out of that war.
At any rate, I originally jumped into this thread due to misreading what the OP was saying, and then sort of faded out as I didn’t have much to say on the subject, so I’ll leave it there with a lame attempt to expand on whatever I was on about when this thread was newer-ish.
No, I think Haig’s reputation as a bungler is deserved. Haig didn’t win the war - he was on the side that won the war. The western powers won the war because it became a battle of attrition and the west had more resources.
And Haig didn’t even see this much. He wasn’t conducting offensives to wear down the Germans. He was trying to achieve a breakthrough so he could send in the cavalry. And somehow he was able to ignore years of repeated failure and not reach the conclusion that his plan wasn’t going to work. Haig should have been replaced.
Just as with the Western Front we’ve fought over this ground before and it doesn’t look like there will be a break-through any time soon
Having said that, this is such a simplistic mis-characterisation of Haig - and the whole course of war - that it has to be challenged. Of course Haig was trying to breakthrough and send in the cavalry - exploitation of a breakthrough is how battles - and wars - are won. But you have to grind down the enemy before you can breakthrough. The trouble was that with armies in millions the wearing down phase can last for years. Even so he had to be ready to exploit a breakthrough if it occurred and the only possible arm of exploitation - able to run down a broken enemy - was the cavalry. Ironically one of the criticisms of Haig was that he did not have the cavalry in position to exploit the breakthrough achieved at Cambrai in 1917.
Haig did not ignore repeated failure and keep repeating the same tactics - any scholarly examination of the war will show new methods and tactics being introduced for each battle. I’m not saying Haig was the best general the world has seen but he was more than competent in managing an army bigger than any British General has had to manage before - or since. His strengths outweighed his weaknesses and his successes his failures. If you say Haig should have been replaced you have to say by who? And what would they have done different?
I’d disagree. A major breakthrough is a way a war can be won but it’s not the only way. Sometimes a war is like a siege - you just hammer away at the outside while your opponent slowly uses up his resources. And then when he runs out and his defense collapses, you move in and occupy whatever’s left. There may be a “breakthrough” in the technical sense but the breakthrough wasn’t what won the campaign - the campaign in this case was already won by the siege and the breakthrough was just the epilogue.
And that’s what I think the First World War was. The entire war was essentially a huge siege of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Allies didn’t win the war by breaking through the Western front. They were able to break through the Western front because they had already won the war.
Sure. Haig wasn’t out there by himself. How many of the new methods and tactics that were tried were initiated by Haig? And how many of them were initiated by someone else and carried out despite Haig?
That’s part of it. 25 years ago, when we still had some WW1-era people around, and lots of people with secondhand memories of it, it was discussed a lot more.
Nowadays, with no living memory of it and even secondhand memories fading away, it has finally receded into the history books. In 20 years WW2 will be further along to doing the same than it is now, to what extent remains to be seen.
A recent excellent documentary of the BBC (The first world war) did touch on a bit that should never be forgotten, how the imperialistic designs of the rulers of the day and their conspiracies affected even WWII.
For example, I already knew that the Kaiser had made a deal with Lenin to put him on a train with safe passage to Russia that had just deposed the Tzar, but the new government still kept fighting, the Kaiser counted on Lenin to end the eastern front war by inciting an even more radical revolution to stop Russia from fighting, but what I did not know was that the help the Kaiser gave to Lenin did not stop with his safe trip, intelligence resources as well as weapons were furnished by the Kaiser to ensure that it was Lenin and the Bolsheviks that took control of Russia.
His plan worked in WWI… only to later cause the destruction of Germany in WWII.
Upon reflection, I think another issue is that of narrative.
The First World War is, to be frank, a hard war to understand. It’s hard to explain why it was fought, how it was fought, or what the hell it was about. It was hard to explain these things **while it was being fought **- the Allies, in particular, just completely changed their official justification for the war about halfway through. Even the ending is confusing, with countries changing sides and one major Ally losing and changing its name and then the Germans losing anyway by sort of just giving up. If you read a detailed history of it, just explaining why major operations were undertaken is an astounding spaghetti of interrelated political and military personalities and considerations.
I’ve read a dozen or more histories of World War I and learn something really significant, and get a totally different perspective, every time I read another. It was just an absolutely bizarre conflict where a bunch of major powers went from being happy and smiley to fighting for their very survival in a span of a year or two.
By comparison, World War II, though vast in scope, has a straightforward narrative; you had The Bad Guys and The Good Guys (some of the Good Guys were not so nice but they were on our side) and the main Bad Guy started the war pretty much because he was evil. At first the Bad Guys were winning, but then the Good Guys came back to win. The lines of battle move back and forth in a reasonably logical manner, and with the exception of the Finns it’s easy to tell who’s on what side and why. The war ends through utter conquest. It’s an easy story to tell, and humans like something that flows in a narrative.
BTW it was commonly called the Spanish flu because none of the combatant nations would admit to the pandemic for fear of appearing weak. Spain, which was a noncombatant, did admit to it.
Yes WW1 is now quite remote in time from us.
But it is important to remember that “Kaiser Bill” wanted and provoked the war. He thought that it would be at most, a 4-6 month affair. And, after the enormous slaughter of the Western Front, nobody had the sense to call a halt.
Wilhelmine Germany was a pretty weird country-it was a collection of kingdoms, which was held together by an army-which had its members swear an oath to the Kaiser. It had a well-educated intellectual class, which blindly followed the (childish and petulant) Kaiser to disaster-and allowed the foolish war to continue…long after any chance of success was gone.
And what did the Kaiser want? A “place in the sun”? more worthless African colonies? It was a war provoked by an adolescent fool who knew how to start a fire, but nothing about putting one out.
After all, the Washington’s Secession from the UK wouldn’t have succeeded if the French weren’t such excellent soldiers and navymen, and the King of Hanover’s Hessians weren’t so ineffective.
There appeared to be the feeling that a war was going to happen anyway, indeed, the people in the UK seemed to be actually wanting a war in the beginning.
However, as I understand, how it started wasn’t simple.
Nobody has mentioned Archduke Ferdinand yet? Well, his assassins failed to kill him in Sarajevo earlier in the day he visited there, and it was only later when the Archdukes car took a wrong turn up a side street, where one of the assassins spotted them and shot them.
From then, the Austro Hungarian empire cracked down hard on the Serbian nationalists. The Russians were on the Serbian nationalists sides. A month later Austro Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia.
At the same time, the Germans, as allies of the Austro Hungarian empire, felt threatened by their two main allied enemies, France and Russia. I remember seeing a documentary on this stage, as one of the examples of the worst military mistakes in history. Germany decided that its well trained army, which had been preparing for a number of years, could march unopposed through neutral belgium, invade france and take Paris in a total of 3 weeks.
The Belgians didn’t agree and put up a fight. The british entered the war as they’d promised Belgian neutrality.
This is where it kind of all goes haywire, and my understanding is a bit lost. Declarations of war shows who declared when with Germany declaring war with Russia then starting to invade France…
An interesting alternate view from the comedian Rob Newman, was the brits actually entered the war for different reasons, detailed here: Rob Newmans World War I: Invasion of Iraq, spoilered here for those who don’t want to watch it.
[spoiler]His theory was that Germany was in the process of building a train line from Berlin to Bagdhad to establish a major oil supply. One of the first actions the brits did was to send a force to defend Bazra. The first war was about oil for the brits at least.
The above clip it is part of the full show: A history of oil.
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As far as I understand the end of World War I happened because of a communist revolution in Germany, brought on by starvation caused by the Allied forces Naval blockade. With the army never actually defeated along with the treaty of versailles, it was a timebomb of well trained embittered soldiers and economic deprivation which led to WWII.
