This thought occurred to me last night, so I wanted to ask.
Imagine a world where journalists in 1911 had the technology of reporting as 2011. They have access to e-mail, blogs, Youtube, there are 24 hour cable shows on television, etc etc. For some reason that you can rationalize however you like (so long as you’re not fighting the hypothetical), this does NOT affect military technology or the like. So no Apache helicopters, no drone missles, no Humvees. Just good ol’ fashioned trench warfare.
In general, I’m asking is how journalism affects a war. In specific, I’m asking how the journalism of today would influence the outcome of WWI, its aftermath, and the leadup to WWII.
On the one hand, you’ve got WR Hearst who may or may not have said of the Spanish American War “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Still, with people like him still at the helm, you can only imagine the bonanza he’d have today’s technology out in the field. We’d go from Yellow Journalism to a dull crusty brown, no doubt.
But on the other hand, look at statistics. 10 million military dead. 20 million military wounded. Probably around a million civilian casulties. Those are unheard of numbers in today’s warfare and I’d have to believe that having a nightly news broadcast of those types of results as they were occurring would have soured people to the war altogether.
But I’m no history buff so I’d be interested to know other people’s thoughts.
The relatively slow pace of trench warfare would have modern reporters desperately scrambling for stories, leading to endless human-interest profiles of Private Johnny Thudpucker and his pat rat, and the like.
I’m no historian but with the true horrors of WWI on display at home I there would be a significant change in attitude. Instead of sending Johnny off to be a hero and kick the Kaiser in the keister, you would be sending him into a meat grinder.
The US would very likely remain neutral as it wasn’t really their war. Britain would also probably cut its losses early for the same reason, leaving France on its own on the Western Front. Of course German would be wondering whether invading France was worth all the bother. So there is a chance that it would have arranged an equitable peace settlement leaving both countries largely intact.
There is also the chance that it could have changed tactics. When the public at home sees wave after wave of their boys mowed down by machine gun fire due to a generals bone headed tactics they will want that general replaced right quick.
Finally although this may violate the spirit of the OP the advent of information technology would radically change the way things worked on the battlefield. To my understanding one of the reasons that tactics were so bad in WWI was that communications were difficult, so if it became clear on one part of the line that your master attack plan wasn’t going to work it couldn’t be communicated to the rest of the line, which would have to just blunder forward. So even without drone missiles etc. you have added a radical super weapon to the war.
What I do think modern communications would had done was to make even harder for the warmongers to keep the charade going, especially during and intermediately after the miraculous Christmas truce of 1914.
I do remember reading historians making the point that if more had known about the truce and if the knowledge of it would had arrived in real time to the public, it would had galvanized the opposition to the war and not only among civilians, but for the soldiers having to pointlessly die on it, leading to scenarios with revolutions like the Russian one erupting in all the European nations and not just Russia.
One of the biggest problems in 1914 to 1918 was the difficulty in communication, it was difficult for a company commander to control and direct men, never mind the Corps Commander. Breakthrougs were routinely made, the problem was that by the time the mrssage got back to HQ the things had changed. If you have modern jounaliam then, you have modern communications and hence less chance Of a deadlock.
Europeans knew quite quickly about meat grinders because if you kill tens of thousands of soldiers in one day, the relatives and friends at home will quickly get the death notices.
They would ignore the sinking of the Lusitania?
Germany invaded France to protect from an attack by France on them. That was the major problem - not the treaties binding countries to help, but that everybody knew war was coming, was looking forward to it, and was afraid that the enemy would attack first, so of course you had to pre-emptivly attack first…
You ever hear of censorship by the military? How many Americans know about the losses in Iraq and Afghanistan? Even the coffins were not displayed in the news to keep from upsetting the public. Soldiers’s cellphones would be confiscated when joining, and journalists would be embedded and thus reporting propaganda.
TVtropes has an interesting overview about the causes and development of WWI. (So as not to always link to Wikipedia ;)).
Given the experiences of modern technology on reporting in the past decades, I don’t see many positive changes. Censorship, apathy and patriotism, coupled with “we must defend ourselves” for the non-patriots would quickly cancel the advantages of new media.
Exactly what I was going to say. Yes, machine guns and barbed wire and artillery and no tanks created trench warfare. But what really created trench warfare was the inability for commanders to communicate and coordinate, field communication technology was not much more advanced than during the American Civil War.
So if you give journalists digital cameras and satelite internet hookups and mobile phones, how do you keep this technology out of the hands of the military?
OK, I’m done fighting the hypothetical. On to the real question.
The Frist World War was really unprecedented. Nobody expected grinding trench warfare, in fact they expected attackers to win easily over defenders. A country that mobilized first and attacked was supposed to be able to steamroll over an unmobilized defending country. And the last 100 years of colonial warfare had instilled upon all European militaries the power of attack. An attacking force had esprit, it knew what it was doing, it could concentrate. But the incredible density of troops and material made colonial-style mobile warfare impossible.
And so you have the meat-grinder of trench warfare. And while people back home knew that casualties were immense, they didn’t really understand what that meant. Neither did the generals, really.
Not yet up in TVtropes–the Parade’s End tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford. He was already an established author when the war began & could have stayed in London writing propaganda. Partly to escape from a difficult domestic situation, he got a commission & went overseas as an out of shape 41 year old. He was kept in Transport, his commanders knowing he wouldn’t last on the front. But a near miss by a shell in the Somme made him lose a good bit of memory & he suffered mentally & physically for years. His artist’s eye is clear & his look at English society–before, during & after the war–is fascinating & often witty.
We learn a lot about home front policies, rough times for pacifists & dealing with red tape. (“Thank God we’ve got a Navy!”)
Oh, and BBC/HBO is making a 5-part series–with a screen play by Sir Tom Stoppard! Some scenes of the book are so full of excellent dialog they could be cut out & pasted into a screenplay. But many events (in war & peace) are only discussed or remembered–so there are plenty of scenes for Sir Tom to “invent.” He did a pretty good job showing us what went on at Elsinore while that prince went all emo…
Back on topic (sort of): On The Front, our hero becomes obsessed with the need to communicate with other units on the line.
With the Centennial looming, we’ll see much more about The Great War…
I’ll have to chime in against the hypothetical as well as the change (modern or even simply advanced communications) cuts to the very heart of why the horrible meat grinder of trench warfare happened. Radios were not portable, and while attempts were made to unspool communications wire across no-mans land they were sure to be cut by the artillery fire into no-man’s land in short order. Generals take a lot of the blame for the carnage of WW1, and while some of it is deserved, a lot of it had to do with this communication problem. Once the attackers went over the top of their trenches, there was very little generals could do to affect the outcome of the battle; the soldiers may as well have disappeared to the dark side of the moon as far as the ability to communicate with them went. All there was to do was carry out the plan and hope for the best, and as the old military adage goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy.
That said same day footage from Vietnam was on network TV every night from 1965-73. While it certainly had some effect on public dissatisfaction with the war, blaming the loss of the war on the media is just scapegoating and ignores the fundamental reasons the war was unwinnable. The public was aware of the losses occurring, in WW1 and WW2, it was common practice to hang a Service Flag in the window, one blue star per family member in the service and a gold star for each family member lost in the war. All of the literature produced by the Lost Generation on the horrors and futility of war didn’t sour the next generation from enthusiastically going about killing each other in WW2.
The newspapers of the day had stories every day about what was going on at the front. The serious battle casualties were filtering back home, to. So the public had the info, and could see that the armless veteran backs up the story.
I don’t think the technology would have changed the mindset of the people.
I believed President Bush, and thought Saddam was a “loose cannon” that needed to be dealt with once and for all. After a while, I began to sour on the war, but at that point I felt that we can’t pull out now, otherwise we can’t fix what we broke, and all those people (on both sides) will have died for nuthin’. Is there any reason why the populace of the Nineteen-teens would have been different?
Theose people, I assume, were jingoistic, nationalistic, and afraid to look unpatriotc, too, more so than nowadays. The newspapers had all kinds of pro-war spin in the beginning. Sure, 60k Commonwealth troops died at the start of the Somme… but then the papers would also report that the Hun suffered worse.
Any reports leaked over from Germany would be ridiculed as if it came from “Baghdad Bob”, so all a regular schmo can do is hope our elected leaders know WTF they are doing, and hope that in the future, our kids won’t have to go through this again.
It also seems possible that there would not have been any such truces, if the soldiers knew that their country (including all those people who had lost loved ones) would see them breaking bread with the enemy.
Well, the thing is, what army then would force them to not do it?
If the soldiers of both armies had “shoot their officers and go home” as George Bernard Shaw recommended on a letter?
I **do **know that on 1914 most of the population was indeed in favor of killing the enemy, but we are talking about them having access to modern reporting tech. That IMHO means that most had access to humanizing information coming from families of the enemies, access to up and coming philosophies that told soldiers to not kill in the name of kings or Tzars, access to pacifist ideas, etc. Ideas and information that were mostly suppressed by the rulers of the day, (like the letter from Shaw). Hard to do all that demonizing and propaganda effort if the communications that we have today had been available then.
Just because modern tech is possible, doesn’t mean it’s accessible. It’s easy for the army to suppress cell phones, just as letters to and from the front were actually censored.
And for every pacifist poem talking about mother’s grief at loosing their children, there were two praising the heroism of their sons (Come back with your shield or on it).
The propaganda which demonized the enemy was one tool to make the killing easier despite the barrier people still had back then (as the study about how often people missed in close distances showed). But a major reason to fight was that the other side was evil and you couldn’t let them win, because then you would be slaughtered. Look at American propaganda in the recent wars, it’s like fighting Orcs in Tolkien.
True, propaganda accused the other side of the most barbaric of actions on the flimsiest of evidence, During the First World War
Funny you should mention Tolkien, a lot of his writing in the LOTR trilogy and related novels was based on his personal experience in WW1 and his son’s in WW2. From here