Showing posts with label Russo Japanese War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russo Japanese War. Show all posts

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Prisoners of Myth I. The Russians in the war with Ukraine

How the Soviets,  and by extension the Russians, came to see themselves.  In reality the wool in the uniform may have come from the US, the steel nad munitions that supported his artillery did as well, when those jack boots wore out he may have worn service shoes, and he definately dug into SPAM for rations from time to time.

The danger of believing myths is that some become ahistorical.  

Not all, but some.

Which points out while studying history is so important.

Myth itself is something that's not existentially bad.  Cultures create myths for a reason, with that reason stretching back into antiquity.  The earliest human beings created myths, as their entire historical memory was oral.  Current events were reduced to stories, and the stories remembered through telling, with them evolving into myths over time.  For that reason, myths are often surprisingly accurate. There really was a Troy that the Greeks waged war upon. . . the Apaches and the Navajo had really once lived in a region where there were great white bears, you get the point.

The problem becomes that myth making can become a coping mechanism for a culture as well.  And that can become enormously dangerous to that culture in some instances.  The Germans adopting the theory that they hadn't been defeated on the battlefield in World War One, which they had been, lead them to adopt a "stabbed in the back" theory that lead directly to World War Two.  The myth of the "Lost Cause" resulted in rank and file Southerners forgetting that they'd gone to war over slavery and had been outright defeated on the battlefield with a huge percentage of Southern soldiers deserting before the war's end, resulting partially in the preservation of formal institutional racism well into the second half of the 20th Century.  The myth of the Stolen Election is corrupting American Conservatism and the Republican Party right now.

Russia, likewise, went into Ukraine believing in a set of myths, with one overarching myth, and its paying the price for it.

Modern Russia and the Myth of World War Two.

  • The basic myth.

At some point during World War Two itself the Soviet Union started telling the myth that the USSR, alone in its fight against Nazi Germany, and supported only weakly by two untrustworthy and cowardly allies, the US and the UK defeated the Germans.

Not hardly.

But this myth, or versions of it, became all pervasive in the USSR and are still believed in Russia today.  Indeed, amazingly enough, versions of this myth became relatively common, in a different form, in the West.

It's simply not true.

Now eighty years after the fact, the history of the Second World War is starting to be more accurately told, stripped away of many of its myths, including this one.  Let's flatly state the truth of the matter here.

The Soviet Union, following its own self interests, was an occasional defacto Axis ally from 1939 until the spring of 1941.  In that capacity, it helped the Germans subjugate continental Western Europe, but the Germans were unable to defeat the British.  Unable to do just that, Germany turned its eye on Soviet resources, which the USSR was well aware it was going, and the two nations bargained on greater German access to them.  Stalin overplayed his hand and sought a post-war position from Germany, at the expense of the British Empire, which was too much for the German's to agree to, and the Germans, contemptuous of the Slavs in any event, were ready to break off the effort and go to war with the USSR, the heir to Imperial Russia, which the Germans had defeated in 1917.

The German invasion came in June 1941.  The Red Army made some heroic stands in the summer and fall of 1941, but by and large it was thrown back in defeat.  The real Soviet achievement in 41 was not being outright defeated, but it was thrown back again, on a massive scale, in 1942.  Only in the winter of 1942 did the Soviet fortunes turn, but it would take titanic efforts and massive loss of life in order for the Germans to be pushed back and ultimately defeated.

Added to that, much of the Red Army was simply never very good.  Materially, the Soviets were unable to supply their own army adequately, and that fell to the UK and the US in large part.  Only 55 to 60 percent of the Red Army was Russian, with the balance being made up of other ethnicities, including large numbers of Ukrainians, 7,000,000 of whom served in the Red Army. At no point whatsoever did the Soviets ever fight, moreover, alone.  There was always a "second" or even third and fourth front which was manned by other Western Allies alone.

  • The actual truth
It's odd to think of the myth of the invincibility of the Red Army when it's also so commonly known that the Soviet state spent so much time destroying it after the Civil War.

Contrary to the way we came to imagine it, the USSR did not spend a lot of time trying to become a military titan before World War Two.  The Reds, not without good reason, somewhat feared what an effective standing army would mean to its political leadership.  People have often been mystified by the purges of the Red Army, but in context they made sense.  After the fighting of the civil war had ended, the only powers powerful enough to challenge the Communists core running the country were in the Red Army, or in other established Communists.  Both took a pounding during the purges.  Indeed, while it hardly justifies murder, it's far to ask if Stalin would have been able to remain in control of the country if political opponents like Trotsky had run around unaddressed, or if powerful military leaders had not been done away with.

Added to that, the Russian armies, and it's fair to use the plural, that we have as examples in the 1900 to 1941 time period were bad.  The Japanese had defeated the Imperial Russian Army in 1905, the same army in World War One did not turn in a stellar performance.  The Whites and the Reds did fight each other tooth and nail during the Civil War, but all civil wars tend to work that way.  The Soviets did well in some of the Russo Polish War but were ultimately defeated, and thereafter they lived in mortal fear of hte Poles, and the Romanians, even though logic would dictate that neither country was capable of being a serious military threat to the Soviet Union.

And, of note, it's clear that the Russians still fear the Poles today.

The USSR was fought to a standstill in the Winter War with Finland just before World War Two. And only in the final months leading up to June, 1941, did the Soviets undertake a real effort to build a capable modern army.  It had some raw elements of that, including some good armor and aircraft designs, but it also had a weakened military institution with no NCO corps and a murdered officer corps.  It realy wasn't able to fix this, and nobody would be, prior to the German invasion.

What the Soviets did have was a  massive amount of territory and a leader in singular control.  

What it also had on 1941 was a British Empire that was already fighting the Germans, with ground combat having been going on in North Africa since June 1940.  The German invasion of the USSR was the second front, or the third if the Battle of the Atlantic is considered.

The UK was already receiving substantial US material, and frankly military, support well before Barbarossa, but the British were a major military materials producer itself.  Both the US and the UK immediately started to offer the Soviets material support.  It would take months before it really began to arrive, but of note, it took months as well for the Red Army to become really effective.

During the war, that aid would become enormous.  The US supplied 400,000 vehicles to the Soviets, changing what had been a horse-drawn army into a mostly vehicle transport one.  Studebaker's 6x6 trucks were for all practical purposes a dedicated Soviet truck, not even entering the US military in substantial numbers.  14,000 aircraft were supplied to the Soviets, including some, like Studebaker trucks, that were essentially models dedicated to Soviet use.  13,000 US tanks were supplied, with additional numbers of British tanks also being supplied.

15,000,000 pairs of Army service shoes, the legendary U.S. Munson Last boot, were supplied to the Red Army. If you see a photo of a Soviet soldier wearing lace up boots, those are almost certainly US made ones.

107,000 tons of cotton went to the USSR for their use.  2,700,000 tons of petroleum products.  4,500,000 tons of food were supplied.

An entire Ford tire factor was supplied.

80% of the copper used by the USSR during the war came from the US and UK.  55% of the aluminum.  

Immediately after the war, before the myth really set in, Soviet sources outright admitted that the USSR could not have fought without lend lease supplies. As late as 1963 a Soviet marshal was known to have stated the same.

The Western Allies, of course, provided this for their own purposes.  It was not charity.  The Soviets were always reticent to some degree to really acknowledge it at that.  But its important to note that the option not to provide it existed.

That would have been risky, which is in part why the leaders of the Western Allies were so ready to engage in it.  The Soviets were a known potential enemy, but the Germans were a present actual enemy.  Prior to June 1941, the British had gone it alone, but they had been fighting a defensive war the entire time.  It was possible to imagine a Germany, particularly one that made some sort of accommodation to the Soviet Union, consolidating gains in Europe to the point where it would have been impossible for the British to ever dislodge them.  Even after December 7, 1941, that remained a possibility.  The Western Allies needed the Soviets in the fight, just as the Soviets needed the Western Allies in order to fight.  The Patrick Buchanan view that the Western Allies should have allowed the USSR and Nazi Germany to destroy each other is wrongheaded, as chances are good that the Germans would have forced the Soviets into a peace of some sort that secured southern Russian materials and left Germany in a position basically impossible to deal with.  Having said that, at the same time, it's not impossible either to imagine the Soviets getting to that point.

It was, after all, the Russians who had given up in the Russo Japanese War and who had collapsed in World War One. And the Soviets, who had been defeated by the Poles after the Great War. And the Soviets, who had accommodated in the Winter War, after invading Finland.  Throughout World War Two, Stalin worried about the Western Allies reaching a separate peace, but that may have really  revealed more about Soviet thinking than anything else.  The Western Allies had fought the Germans to the bitter end in 1914-1918, which the Russians had not.

Moreover, for all its self-congratulatory propaganda.

Additionally, or all its self-congratulatory propaganda, the Soviet casualty list does not suggest what it might.  Massive Red Army losses in World War Two were in no small part self-inflicted, reflecting a poorly formed army that was badly trained and lacking a NCO corps.  It also reflected a leadership that was completely immune to concern over human losses, truly viewing Soviet soldiers as cannon fodder.  The German view as quite similar.  The fighting on the Eastern Front was in part savage, as the two armies engaged had leadership which didn't really care about high losses as long as goals seemed obtainable.  The Western Allies did not fight this way as, being from democratic societies, they could not contemplate using their citizenry in such a callous fashion.

Additionally, and seemingly completely missed by Soviet propaganda, the Western Allies went int alone on the seas, with the Soviet Navy being largely irrelevant the entire war.  While the Soviet Union had a navy, it didn't really matter, which effectively means that in a war fought on the land, air, and sea, the Soviets only fought on two out of the three.

And, as earlier noted, the Soviets were latecomers to the war and, in fact, had been on the other side early on.  If the US and UK did not take such massive losses, it was because, as noted, that they didn't fight that way.  They were, however, fighting, and fighting in more areas than the USSR was.  They were not, of course, fighting on their own ground, however, which does make a real difference.

And it goes beyond that.

Over 7,000,000 Red Army troops were Ukrainians, as noted, with indigenous Poles, Turkic peoples, and others filling the Red Army ranks.  But around 1,000,000 Soviet citizens provided aid to the Germans during the war as well.

This is a complicated story, as that aid varied in nature substantially.  The most pronounced anti-Soviet variants of it might be found in Cossack elements that went over wholesale to the Germans and who served on the Eastern Front, the Western Front, and in the Balkans.  But they were not alone.  Other Soviet citizens willingly took up arms with the Germans and fought against the Moscow.  Others, particularly in Ukraine, fought against the Soviets and the Germans, reprising the odd role of the Ukrainian Greens of the Russian Civil War who fought against the Reds and the Whites. Large numbers of Red Army POWs joined Vlasov's White Russian Army, but probably did so out of a desire simply to survive the ordeal of being a German POW.  

Soviet civilians aided the Germans in varying ways as well.  The examples are too numerous not to take note of, with Soviet civilians providing all sorts of minor aid and comfort to the Germans in spite of the fact that the Germans were barbaric towards Soviet citizens, visiting death and rape upon them at a scale that was too large not to be regarded as institutionally sanctioned.  Indeed, early on Russians and Belorussians greeted the Germans as liberators, with their view largely changing due to German barbarism.  Ukrainians greeted the Germans with bread and salt, a traditional Ukrainian greeting.  They, too, came to change their views under German repression.

  • Bringing the myth forward.

After the war, and even by its late stages, the Soviets were developing a myth that they had won World War Two basically on their own.  Their leadership knew better, which showed itself even as late as the 1980s, when the Soviets lived in real fear of a NATO attack upon the Soviet Union.  But the myth has solidified, and it's showing itself now.

The logical question would be why such a myth would have been developed and fostered.  There are, however, a series of reasons for that.

All nations have foundational myths that are central to their identify in a way.  The American one dates back essentially to the Revolution, and was redefined by the Civil War, giving the country the foundational story of rising up against tyranny, which isn't really true, to form a self-governing democratic republic with a unique mission in the world. The Australian one involves a history of mistreatment by the British culminating in the disaster of Gallipoli, which in truth the Australians were only one nation involved in a much larger Allied effort. Other examples could be given.

The Soviet Union going into World War Two already had the Russian Revolution, but the imposition of Communism on the Russian Empire had not been universally accepted by any means, and various peoples struggled against it into the 1930s.  The USSR had only been saved from defeat by the support of Western, capitalist, nations during World War Two, after it had first conspired with the fascist Nazi Germany, for its own reasons.  During the war, large percentages of its population, in spite of massive Nazi barbarism, had sided with the Germans, and resistance movements went on in the country until the late 1940s.  A myth of a Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets came to call it, served to counter all of that.

The modern Russian Army is not the Red Army.  For one thing, it lacks the huge number of Ukrainians that the Red Army had.  But the Red Army, without the West, was never all that good.  It was bad going into World War Two, and it survived World War Two thanks to the West.  After the war, it continued to rely on Western technology for a time, in the form of purchased Western material, and in the form of acquired German knowledge, but over the decades it had to go over to simply acquiring it however they could, and often they simply did not.

The current Russian Army retains all the vices of the old, plus one more.  Its equipment is antiquated and poor.  Its leadership is bad.  

And it believes that it was invincible during World War Two, forgetting that it wasn't defeated due to Western support, the very thing Ukraine is getting now.

Saturday, May 4, 2019

May 4, 1919 Drama in China, and at the movies.

On this day in 1919 protests lead by Chinese students erupted over the anemic response of the Chinese government to provisions in the Versailles Treaty which gave German colonies in China to Japan.


The build up to this had been going on for years, as the Japanese government, following the Meiji Restoration, had become increasingly aggressive on the Asian mainland.  Prior to that, after experimenting with an attempted invasion of Korea in 1592-93, and again in 1597, Japan had retreated into isolationism before the encounter with American Admiral Perry.

The Meiji regime had defeated the Chinese to the world's surprise in the First Sino Japanese War, which resulted in Korea being freed from  Chinese control but not to the immediate benefit of Japan, which none the less obtained world power status as a result of the war. The disappointing territorial result, which had benefited Imperial Russia directly, soon resulted in the Russo Japanese War, which resulted in Japan having a foothold on the mainland itself and Korea had been converted into a Japanese colony.  World War One had given the Japanese an excuse to expand its colonial presence in Asia and the Pacific and during the war it had made demands upon China which caused huge Chinese resentment.  The Chinese government had resisted those demands but took a position of accord with Japan that expressed itself in a willingness to acquiesce to post war Japanese demands at the Paris Peace Conference. The Chinese people, however, were not so willing to endure such demands.

The protests are widely regarded by the Chinese Communist party as the birth of their party, and not without reason.   Many of the adherents of the May 4 Movement did become communists and many of the opponents of Chinese communism also opposed the May 4th Movement on the basis that they felt it turned its back on Chinese values and culture.

Of course, it being a Sunday, dramatic movie releases were in the offering.



Saturday, December 10, 2016

Field Marshall Prince Ōyama Iwao, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and founder of the Imperial Japanese Army died at 74.


Field Marshall Prince Ōyama Iwao, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and founder of the Imperial Japanese Army died at 74.

He was a major figure in the Meji Restoration and went on to study the military art outside of Japan.  He commanded Japanese land forces during most of the Russo Japanese War.  He was occupying the noted cabinet position at the time of his death.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Remembering the Great War

The Centennial of the commencement of the disaster that was World War One, The Great War, is upon us.  In August of this year World War One's start will hit the century mark.


Lots of commemorations will occur in Europe, where 100 years has not dulled the sense of disaster.  The war was a big one for us here in the United States as well, but I think we'll largely fail to note the event.  That's sort of the American thing.  We passed through the bicentennial of the War of 1812 pretty much without noticing it, and some of the wars we fought we remember so little that many average Americans don't even know that they occurred.  Try dropping a reference to the Philippine Insurrection into your conversations, for example.

There's something about World War One that causes the war to stick out in the minds of Europeans in a way that just doesn't occur to us.  For Americans, World War Two is the Big War of the 20th Century, and to some extent its the Big War of all wars.  In terms of modern wars it still dominates our consciousness like no other.  It crowds out its near neighbors, including World War One, which to us is sort of unfairly characterized as a prequel to the Second World War.  It's unfair to our memory of the Great War.

Having said that, the European obsession with the disaster of the Great War may be almost unfair to its memory as well.  The war is seen as sort of a huge, homicidal disaster to Europeans, and most particularly to the British, which actually doesn't really reflect how Europeans viewed it at the time, and therefore inaccurately recalls what they thought of while they were fighting it.  We'd hardly realized, based upon the way it is recalled today in Europe, that the British, including British servicemen, felt that World War One had been necessary and a genuine victory immediately after the war. And we'd do well to recall that in spite of the horror of World War One the Germans were so upset about the losing result that they were willing to launch a second world war just a little over 20 years later, when the surviving combatants of the first war were often still of military age.

Given the centennial of the war, and the fact that we don't recall it really well, I thought it'd be worth looking at going into the centennial.  I don't intend this to be a revisionist post (and there are piles of revisionist theories about World War One) but rather a post to point out some of the things about the war that are inaccurately remembered.  World War One, it seems to me, has suffered a great deal in our recollection by being recast in the light of World War Two and the Cold War, making the war something that's shown at the wrong speed and out of focus like an early silent movie, to some degree.  And it's a war that, like all wars, indeed all historical events, that saw those who participated in it note the huge and unusual, but pass by the mundane, making us who read about it sometimes think the huge and mandate were the norm.  As a result, entire areas of the history of the war have been inaccurately mythologized.    Let's take a look at the war going in.

 American cemetery in France, following WWI.

But, before we do, let me state why I think the war looms so large in the European imagination.  It's in part, of course, because of the slaughter.  But more than that, the war destroyed The Old Order in Europe, giving us modern Europe after a long violent process that really only concluded, for the most part, in 1990 when the Soviet Union fell.  Europeans know that, and to a degree, perhaps instinctively, they mourn a bit of the passing of that order.

Okay, let's take a look at what we hear about the Great War that might need a little correction.

The War ended a long period of Peace in Europe

This is a good place to start, as it starts before the war. The Peace.

We often hear that the war seemingly came out of a long peace, and that took everyone by surprise.  Indeed, it's even noted that a popular book prior to the war stated that a big general European war was impossible for economic reasons.  Socialist of the period were fond of stating that socialism had no borders, and they meant it.  So, from both the right and the left, a general European war seemed impossible.

What we often don't hear is that Europe certainly had not seen the end of war, and the claim that sometimes is made that there'd been no European wars following the Franco-Prussian War is just flat out wrong.  The claim about wars being thought to be impossible really apply only to wars between the major European powers, or to a general war (i.e., the equivalent of a continental war).

In reality, the entire Balkans had been engaged in one war after another in the years running up to World War One.  Turkey and Greece also fought prior to World War One, in the 20th Century.

 Turkish soldiers prior to World War One.

Russia, a major European power, fought a major war with Japan, a major rising power. Granted, that's not a European war, but it was a bit war.  It could have caused a European war as the Imperial Russian Atlantic fleet actually sank a British fishing fleet in the North Sea under the panicky belief that the fishing boats were Japanese torpedo boats (a bizarre error), but the British wisely let cooler heads prevail.

 Japanese cartoon depiction of Russian cavalryman, Russo Japanese War.

And of course the British were fighting a transplanted European enemy in southern Africa at the start of the 20th Century.

Of course, none of these were general European wars, i.e., wars between the great European powers, in Europe.  Some involved great European powers, but not against each other.  The point is, however, that the often stated claim that Europeans had somehow grown bored with Peace is just wrong.  Some of the European countries had been in major wars well within a generational experience.

The war pitted unqualified democracy against unqualified totalitarianism, and the rights of small nations.



I don't mean to be revisionist here, and launch of Noam Chomsky like on some deluded Marxist vision of the war, and it's already often noted that one of the major Allies, Imperial Russia, was not a democracy.  Still, this claim should come with an asterisks. 

The reason for that is that every major combatant in the war was part of an imperial system, and imperial systems, to varying degrees, are anti democratic themselves.

It is certainly the case that the Central Powers in the war, together with the Allied Power of Imperial Russia, were not democracies.  Apologist for Germany sometimes note that it had a Reichstag with a broad theoretical franchise, but theoretical must be emphasized there.  The real power in Germany was in the traditional, mostly Prussian, landed class of which the crown was part.  The parliament was not governing the country in a complete sense.  Likewise, the Russians had an assembly, but it certainly wasn't in control, nor was the Austro Hungarian political system democratic in any meaningful sense.  As I'll probably note elsewhere, it was, in  my view, the strenuous efforts to keep the lid on democratic expression in these Old Order countries that caused the fermentation of dissent, yielding in the poisonous brew of Communism and Fascism.

 Poster for relief in the Near East.  Of the nations listed, Armenia would not secure nationhood by way of the war, although this poster depicts an Armenian girl.  Syria would emerge a French mandate.  Persia would be a British client state for many years.

But something we should note is that even democratic countries were comfortable with having overseas empires at the time, and in some cases even local empires.  And these aren't really democratic.  So, while a country like France could fight for its self defense and democracy, it could still feel okay about running the show non democratically in Indochina or Algeria.  Even the United States, which was an anti imperial power, was still fighting a guerrilla war in the Philippines running up to World War One, even though we'd stated our intent to ultimately free it.

Now, some of this must be balanced a bit.  The British Empire was the largest in the world, and therefore is frequently one of the most criticized, but it did have an amazingly good record for developing democratic institutions and setting their former colonies out into the world as British Dominions.  Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all domestically self governing leading up to World War One, although the British Parliament retained control of foreign affairs to some degree for each (including the right to declare war on their behalf.)  This was also the case for South Africa.  Indian was well on its way towards an anticipated dominion status, with the only real question being when, as opposed to if.  As noted, the US declared itself set to follow suit after the Philippines were sufficiently schooled, in our opinion, on democracy, something that would take another 30 years and a second world war.

To make this story a bit odder, however, we should also realize that it wasn't the case that the Central Powers were universally for suppressing the national dreams of small European nations, and the Allies universally in favor of the right of self determination, no matter what people thought of Wilson's Fourteen Points.  Indeed, while we hardly recall it today, Germany back independence for several nations during the war.  Granted, it did so for its own reasons, but it did it.

A really confusing example of this is provided by Poland.  In regard to Poland and Germany, we tend to think that Poland was carved out of the fallen German and Russian imperial regimes and restored to nationhood by the Allied victory in World War One, until Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union gobbled it back up in 1939. And that is partially true.

But forgotten is the fact that the Poles were proactive in seeking independence during the Great War and during the early stages of the Russian Revolution, and that the Germans backed them in part.  Germany, which occupied part of the Polish national soil itself, did this as Imperial Russia occupied more of it.  Perhaps it was being dangerously cynical, but Germany sponsored Polish nationalist in a German supplied, trained and controlled Polish revolutionary army.  They weren't the only Polish rebels in the field, however, as a much more left wing socialist native revolutionary movement had its own rebels in the field, largely behind Russian lines.  When Russia bowed out of the war, Polish soldiers in the Imperial Russian Army discharged themselves, sometimes asking their Russian officers to go along (who largely declined) and went home.  Poland was effectively born, but there was a tense period, even lasting after the Versailles Treaty, in which conservative German trained Poles and left wing Polish rebels stared each other down.  Eventually the divisions were worked out and Poland was born, even though the boundaries of Poland were not.

 As if things weren't complicated enough, while there were anti Russian German sponsored Polish troops fighting in the East, and independent leftist Polish rebels fighting there also, the Allies were recruiting Poles to fight the Germans. All with the same theoretical Polish cause of creating a Polish state.

They were not in part because another new state that the Germans backed was getting up and running, and that was the Ukraine.  Everyone agrees that Ukraine is a real nation, but often missed in that is that the Ukrainians and the Poles are so close ethnically that its very difficult to for anyone, including them, to tell where Poland starts and Ukraine stops.  Generally, about the most convenient dividing line is religious, as Ukrainians are pretty universally members of one of the Eastern churches, with some being Ukrainian Catholics (a Church which actually goes by another name), some being Ukrainian Orthodox, and some being Russian Orthodox.  Poles are almost all Roman Catholics.  This divide, however, was not regarded as sufficiently so vast as to prevent Poland from making a very serious effort at taking the Ukraine from the Soviet Union during the Russo Polish War in the 1920s.

During the Great War, Germany backed Ukrainian independence, again for its own reasons.   The Ukraine came out of the war weak, and hit teetered for some time on the verge of independence and falling to the USSR, before it ultimately did that.  A German backed Ukrainian state re-emerged during World War Two, with the Germans reprising their World War One role in those regards, but it was reabsorbed by the advancing Red Army in the same war, with some underground independence movements holding on into the late 1940s.  And it reemerged again with the fall of the USSR, and is int the news, nervously, again today.

Probably the most successful example of German backing the national aspirations of a small nations comes in the form of Finland.  Finland's history is odd in any event, but it had become a Russian vassal many decades before.  As such, it tended to have a fair degree of independence, up until the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, when the Russians, already sensing the problems that would ultimately drag the empire down, began to try to solidify the central authority of Moscow, which did not sit well with the Finns, who were really a foreign people.  During World War One the Germans armed and equipped Finnish Jaegers who fought on the German side, seeking independence for their nation.  When Imperial Russia fell, they got it, but went almost immediately into a civil war, not being able to avoid the situation that Poland ultimately did.  In that war, the better armed and trained Jaeger elements became the backbone of the Finnish Whites, while urban Finnish socialist became the Reds.  The war was a nasty miniature, uniquely Finnish, version of the Russian Civil War, and the bloodbath it created lingered on over the nation until the Soviet invasion of 1940 united the Finns against the Russians.  Here too, however, Finland basically owed a debt of sorts to Germany as Germany had backed its independence against an imperial power.

 Photos depicting Finnish Whites and German troops, in Finland towards the end of World War One.

While all of this was going on, the leading European democracy, the United Kingdom, ended up putting down a rebellion on its own soil, in the form of an Irish uprising in 1916, followed by the beginning of the terrorist campaign that would lead to the Anglo Irish War.  This is a bit more complicated than might be imagined, as Ireland, by that time, did have the franchise on an equal basis with other citizens of the United Kingdom, and Irish support for the rebels was, at that time, much much weaker than generally imagined.  Indeed, the best evidence is that the majority of the Irish opposed rebellion.  It makes for an interesting complication of the story, however, and points out that some major European nations, while democratic, still contained areas within their own nations that had divided national loyalties.

This is not to suggest the entire Fourteen Points were baloney.  The Allies, following the US entry into World War One, really did come to back the national aspirations of small or occupied European peoples.  But the story is just somewhat more confused than that.  Indeed, it's quite a bit more confused as not only did the Germans back some of the same peoples, for their own reasons, but the early USSR did as well, doing so under the belief that all nationhood was passing away rapidly anyhow, and soon the same nations would follow their Communist path. The USSR, however, got over that quickly.

And, as it can't help be noted, independence for small nations, really only meant small European nations, but that's a well known story.

It was the war that showed horse to be obsolete

American Remounts, World War One

Oh no, it was no such thing.

There's a widely held belief that World War One was the end of  the military horse.  It wasn't even close to that, but the belief is extremely widely held.

 Dramatic British recruiting post, this was more accurate than supposed. The British and Dominion forces in fact retained, and used, sabers during the war, and did plan on using cavalry to exploit breakthroughs, which in fact they did in 1918.

In fact, every nation that fought in World War One used vast numbers  of horses.  Some, acknowledging that, will simply pass it off to the artillery and transport branches of the militaries, which most realize were nearly entirely horse powered at the time.  That much is true.  Movement of most things heavy in World War One, the introduction of vehicles and tractors (yes, tractors) aside, was principally done by horse.  Most artillery at the time was horse drawn (and in the case of the Germans, this would continue to be the case through World War Two, contrary to the popular belief and German propaganda).  Most transport, ie., the process of bringing supplies of all types, and equipment of all types, up to the front, was horse drawn as well (and in the case of the Germans again, would also continue to be the case for large percentages of its forces throughout World War Two).  But the story doesn't stop there.

 British artillery poster, reflecting actual artillery transport of the period, if also depicting a scene that no artilleryman would hope to get into.

People commonly imagine that cavalry had no role in the war.  Even Lord Angelsey, who wrote the definitive multi volume history of the British cavalry throughout its history, admits to thinking that until he end up committing more volumes of his work to the First World War than any other British conflict. As that demonstrates, however, there was actually a lot of cavalry action during World War One.

The opening year of the war, when it was still a fluid war, saw all the armies use a fair amount of cavalry in the field.  When the lines grew static, however, this did begin to change.  The French, which used the "square" division, like the US would come to do, devolved their cavalry down to the division level, essentially eliminating large scale cavalry formations in favor of smaller ones. The thought was, on their part, that if they needed to they could consolidate these units.  The Germans, who grew desperately short of horses during the war, did the same, repeating a process that they would do during World War Two, and then coming to regret the decision, just as they also did during World War Two.

 U.S. Cavalry just prior to entering World War One.

The British, on the other hand, kept large scale cavalry formations throughout the war, using some of them as infantry from time to time.  Their thought was that they would need them if they were able to break through.  On several occasions during 1917 and 1918, they were proven essentially correct, but primitive communication abilities prevented their cavalry from really exploiting any breakthroughs until the very concluding months of the war.   During that time, the British and Canadians engaged in some very large cavalry assaults.

Even the U.S. Army committed cavalry to Europe, contrary to what is generally supposed.  Following the French pattern, the US mostly limited its cavalry to divisional reconnaissance troops, although the 2nd Cavalry was deployed to France as an intact cavalry regiment, and the 3d was partially so committed.  The big American problem was finding horses for cavalry, which in the end caused it to adopt the French pattern by default, as we simply were unable to transport an adequate number of cavalry mounts to Europe. At the same time, however, we kept cavalry formations on the Mexican border, out of fear that revolutionary Mexico would join the Germans against the Allies.  Cavalry had already proven its worth there in the Punitive Expedition.

As with our example along the Mexican border, the British, French, Germans and Turks all found cavalry vital in desert regions were they were fighting.  Cavalry was extensively used in North Africa, along with its close cousin mounted infantry, the most famous examples of which are the Australian assault on Beersheba and the irregular cavalry of T. E. Lawrence.  Such was also the case on the Eastern Front, where the Russians conducted several huge cavalry raids behind German lines.

Coming out of the war, most countries knew that the introduction of mechanization was going to impact he horse in war, but nobody was exactly sure how.  Most armies were not as naive about that as they've been portrayed, but most correctly understood that the day hadn't quite arrived.  Huge cavalry formations would go on to fight after World War One in the Russian Civil War and the Russo Polish War, but by the mid 30s most were exploring their options.  Even at that, cavalry hung on into World War Two, particularly in the Soviet and German armies.  The Red Army retained cavalry formations until 1953.

Finally, it was actually the lack of German cavalry that may have saved the Allies in 1918.  By that period of time, German horse supplies were so depleted they simply couldn't deploy cavalry to exploit a breakthrough, and when they achieved it, their advance, being basically infantry only, ground to an exhausted halt.  Appreciating what cavalry meant, panicky British sentries continually reported German cavalry as being just over the horizon, when in fact, it just wasn't.

All the weapons were new.



Another common misunderstanding about World War One, and often used to explain the battlefield conditions, is the belief that all the weaponry was new..  It wasn't.

Most armies that went into the war used weapons that had either been in their inventories for some time, or which were versions of weapons that had been around for some time.  In truth, the utility of many of these weapons had been already proven in the Boer War and the Spanish American War, which had answered the nagging questions about many of them

German troops, with a large number of curious German spectators, work on a German tank that's fairly obviously a copy of the British model, if in fact it is not a captured British tank.  The Germans never really did get the knack of tank warfare during WWI, which remained an Allied deal.

Rifle wise, this is certainly the case.  The Germans went to war principally armed with versions of the 98 Mauser rifle, which they had adopted in 1898.  That was a relatively new weapon really, but the Mauser itself had been proven in battle in prior version in the last decade of the 19th Century, where it had proven itself better than many competing designs. They'd retain the 98, in a short rifle variant, all the way through World War Two.  The British went to war armed mostly with the Short Magazine Lee Enfield, a rifle that they'd developed form the Long Lee they'd used in the Boer War and whose service went back to the 1890s. The Russians used the Mosin Nagant, as weapon they'd adopted in 1891 and which they're retain in slightly altered form up until it was replaced by the AK47 in most units.  Compared to these, the US's M1903 was quite new, but it was a Mauser variant itself, adopted after our Krag rifle was proven inferior to the Spanish M94 Mausers during the Spanish American War.

Pistol wise, semi automatic pistols were really coming into military service for the first time, but nobody will maintain that a pistol is a war winning weapon.  In contrast, machineguns would come to dominate the battlefield, but they were almost all designs that date back to around 1900.  New, perhaps, but not so new as to not have already seen battlefield use in various wars, such as the Boer War, or the Russo Japanese War.

Artillery came to dominate the Western Front, but most of the designs, once again, had been around for some time.  They'd evolved, but not enormously.  Most designs were around 20 years old at the time, some older, some newer.

 Massive Austrian mortar.

What that really leaves us with, of course, is aircraft, submarines, tanks and gas. Gas, however, did not prove to really be a dominating weapon.  It was nasty, and left a lasting impression, but nobody was going to win the war through gas.  Those other weapons, however really were seeing use, or at least significant use, for the very first time. And they were all hugely significant by the end of the war.

 Helmet-less Italian infantry goes into action against the Austrians.

The War disillusioned the masses everywhere.


This is partially, but not completely, true.

What the war really did was to destroy the old order, everywhere.  Where there were existing democratic institutions, this translated itself into a wider franchise.  The British, for example, feared a socialist rebellion following the war, but it was truly an idle fear.  The UK expanded the franchise, and granted Ireland dominion status.  The end had come for "Downton Abbey", but the nation didn't collapse.

 Patriotic World War One Marine Corps poster.  By 1919 the bloom was off the rose in the United States, but not elsewhere.

Where strong autocratic institutions remained the real power, however, they fell.  The Kaiser left.  The Czar and his family were murdered.  The Austrian Empire was no more.  The Ottoman Turks became just the Turks.  Even some Allied nations followed through with this process, as ultimately Imperial Japan, which was strongly autocratic, would see its Imperial crown dominated by the army in the 1920s.  Some weak democracies ultimately collapsed, as in Italy and Spain.  And bizarrely, one last gasp to autocrats was made in some of the newly independent European states.

 The British sacrifice of men in World War One surpassed that of later World War Two, but following the war the British remained proud of their role in the war.

But generally it was not the case that people came out of the war bitterly disillusioned about everything.  That was more the case, frankly for World War Two.

Post war studies showed that, contrary to the myth created in the 1950s, British solders overwhelmingly were proud of their service  and thought the war had been won, and necessary.  France created an entire myth around the glories of its soldiery, even though those soldiers had stopped advancing in 1917 and could no longer be made to do so.  Even in defeated Germany veterans were vociferous about their service and nearly worshipped, part of the process that brought about World War Two, as they refused to accept the reality of their defeat (and their rebellion at home, which they should have been very well aware of)..

 Grim 1918 vintage German Freikorps poster, recruiting German combat veterans for the German civil war, immediately after World War One.

German Freikorps poster, recruiting veterans, based on an appeal to past German martial glory.

Perhaps only in the US was there really bitter disillusionment about the war.  Americans, notoriously fickle about war, came to regard the war as a mistake by 1919 and were even hostile to returning veterans by that time.

Postscript I, The Guns Fell Silent on November 11, 1918

A really common myth about World War One is that the guns fell silent on the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month of 1918.  In actuality, November 11, 1911, at 11:00, saw the cessation of combat on the Western Front. That is, an armistice was entered into between the Central Powers and  the Allies, but that didn't mean the end of all the fighting that was going on.

Indeed, an often missed aspect of the Armistice is that it required the Germans to retain German troops in the East in order to have them combat the Reds in the Russian Civil War.  The Russian Civil War, of course, had already broken out by the end of World War One and the Allies had committed troops to Russia in an effort to support the Russian republicans against the Reds, a mission that was frustrated by a lack of Allied forces and by White disorganization.  By the wars end, however, the Germans, who had backed Lenin against the Imperial government, found that they too were sliding into war against the Reds on the territory they occupied in the East.  A requirement of the Armistice was that they remain committed in Russia against the Whites, which they did for a time until the revolution in Germany required German troops to be redeployed at home.

Which brings us to the next point, while German war fatigue had contributed to the collapse of the Imperial German war effort, the end of the war with the Allies didn't end the fighting for the Germans.  German troops went right on fighting in the German Revolution, a bloody affair that is  a bit bizarrely omitted from the story of World War one, perhaps because it's a mess.  Basically, as the home front collapsed the German army realized that the country was going to follow Russia into revolution and it sought to save itself, tossing out the Kaiser and gathering up the Frontsoldaten for redeployment against radicalized rear area troops and sailors, and Socialist revolutionaries. As the new Social Democratic Party lead government negotiated the peace, the Germans fought out a war at home which went on until August 1919.  In the meantime, the Germans saw the formation of a lot of unofficial right wing militias that were aligned with the German Army, known as Freikorps, which also saw service in the East against the Russian Reds.  At least the British, however, took some actual military role in the German revolution themselves, committing some troops in aid of the Weimar government.

The war between the Allies and Turkey also went on.  The Ottoman Turks were German allies, of course, but the war had the same impact on the Ottomans that it had on the Hapsburg's, Romanov's and Hohenzollern's.  That is, it caused an imperial collapse.  In Turkey's case, this lead the takeover of the country by the "Young Turks", that military faction made up of younger officers.  They did not enter into peace with the Allies along with Germany (and technically were not at war with all of the Allied powers) and this lead to ongoing fighting. To add to it, seeing an opportunity, the  Turks invaded the Turkic regions of the former Russian Empire in an effort to build a greater Turkey, but were beat back by the British.  This ongoing fighting went on until 1922.

The point is that the common concept that everyone who was fighting in November 11, 1918 stopped fighting at 11:00 is simply wrong. The Germans kept on fighting in the East. The Russians were fighting each other, so were the Finns, so were the Germans.  The Turks kept on fighting the British and French, and soon thereafter the Russians.  The British, French, Japanese, and the United States had troops in Russia.  The United States still saw sporadic fighting on the border with Mexico.  The Great War might have ended, but wars certainly kept on uninterrupted.