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.
