100 Years Ago Today

[Olympic Fan]

Although the First World War was precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, the start of the war is usually dated from July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, German declared war on Russia and attacked France.

In my opinion, the First World War was the most tragic event in the 20th Century. Yeah, the next one was worse (especially when you add the Holocaust), but to me the First World War is so terrible because it was so unnecessary, so avoidable. Reading the accounts of the diplomatic maneuvers in the days after the assassination has you banging your head over the stupidity and short-sightedness of the leaders at the time.

Of course, so much of the disaster that followed the First World War stemmed from it -- Hitler, Communism and even -- when you dig into it -- the Great Depression were all products of that terrible, unnecessary war.

[PSurprise]

And then throw in the Spanish flu near the end if the war, it's amazing Europe had enough people in 1918/19 to do it all over again thirty-some-odd years later.

[PSurprise]

And then throw in the Spanish flu near the end if the war, it's amazing Europe had enough people in 1918/19 to do it all over again thirty-some-odd years later.

And of course I meant twenty or so years later. Stupid math. Good thing it only took me two hours to remember I got it wrong

[rthomas]

And there was the tragedy of Fritz Haber, the German chemist, who figured out ~1911 how to reduce N2 gas to ammonia, until then only bacteria could do this. He won the Nobel Prize for this in 1918 since NH3 was the beginning of fertilizer and could help feed the world. NH3 also was a big component of explosives. Before he figured out this process, almost all fertilizers were from Chile - bird poop. So it was a huge thing that we still, of course, use today.

Haber's tragedy began when he was commissioned by the Kaiser to develop and employ chlorine gas and Haber is known as the "father of chemical warfare". He oversaw the first successful battle using chlorine gas and after seeing masses (1000s) of dead French bodies, he proclaimed it a great victory. He strongly defended the use of chemicals, saying that it was cleaner and would save lives. His wife also a PHD chemist was against chemical use. His wife committed suicide because of this soon after the first battle using chlorine.

Nice, huh? But it doesn't end there. His team also developed cyanide gas, Zyklon A, an insecticide that was transformed to Zyklon B before WWII by Hitler's scientists, and used to kill 1.2 million people, including over 900,000 Jews.

Haber died in 1934 from a heat attack. His son left Germany and committed suicide in the US during WWII because of his shame of his father's role in chemical weapons.

Somewhat ironic was that Haber was a Jew and his lab developed the chemical ultimately used by Hitler to killed thousands of Jews.

[gus]

His wife also a PHD chemist was against chemical use. His wife committed suicide because of this soon after the first battle using chlorine.

Reading the Wikipedia article on Haber, it's clear that the story of Clara Immerwahr (Haber's first wife) is itself interesting and tragic. She was a feminist and a pacifist, and chafed and society's expectation that she subjugate herself after marriage.

[aimo]

Some years back, my grandmother was telling me stories. Her day-to-day memory was failing, but she could remember lots of stories from her childhood. She told me about the day her cousin Ralph came to the house and said the war had started. They thought he meant right then right there. They were scared, so they locked the doors and windows and ran to Grandpa's house. They told him what Ralph had said. He told them that the war was way across the ocean in Europe and they were OK there in Beaufort County, NC. I asked my grandmother, How old were you when this happened? She said, I don't know . . . maybe eight? I realized she had just described the day WWI started.

[CameronBornAndBred]

to me the First World War is so terrible because it was so unnecessary, so avoidable.

And fought so moronically. For a lighthearted (yet poignant) take on the futility of trench warfare, watch Black Adder Goes Forth.

[Tom B.]

And fought so moronically. For a lighthearted (yet poignant) take on the futility of trench warfare, watch Black Adder Goes Forth.

For all the centennial remembrances of the Great War that are popping up now, equally important to remember is the ongoing sesquecentennial of the birth of modern trench warfare at the Siege of Petersburg.

In fact, tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Crater. History repeated itself almost 52 years later when the British tried a similar tactic at The Somme, with equally disastrous results.

[Dukeface88]

He strongly defended the use of chemicals, saying that it was cleaner and would save lives.

This was much more common than you might suspect. J.F.C. Fuller, B.H.L. Hart and Giulio Douhet, all important interwar military theorists, were strong advocates of chemical weapons. The gist of the argument was that men who were gassed were more likely to survive than men who were shot or shelled (which was true, but rather missing the point).

And fought so moronically. For a lighthearted (yet poignant) take on the futility of trench warfare, watch Black Adder Goes Forth.

I'm of the opinion that the accusations leveled at the Allied generals are rather unfair. Yes, there was some stupidity (the British refusal to acknowledge that the basic units of maneuver should be platoons and squads rather than regiments comes to mind), but there is in every war, or any other endeavor of comparable size for that matter. And development was somewhat faster than often appreciated. The techniques that would ultimately break the stalemate had all been invented by late 1916 ("packet movement" by the French, the "hurricane barrage" by the Russians, trench raids along with light machine guns, mortars and tanks by the Brits), demonstrated on a small-scale in 1917 and finally implemented on a large scale (by the Germans) in 1918. It just took time to prove them, and then more time to retrain and reequip everyone.

Even more fundamentally though, you don't defeat peer opponents without taking casualties of the same order of magnitude as you inflict. The cost of the war always going to measured in tens of millions, even if the tactics and gear for breaking the trenches were available from the start. I can say that with a fair degree of certainty because other fronts didn't settle into the stalemate seen on the Western Front. The bloodletting was just as horrific (ask the Russians and the Serbs), the lines simply moved around a bit more in the process. Without getting too far into PPB territory, the world would probably be a better place if countries just assumed that cheap or easy wars were impossible, no matter how skilled the commanders, before asking whether they ought to be started.

[Olympic Fan]

I'm of the opinion that the accusations leveled at the Allied generals are rather unfair. Yes, there was some stupidity (the British refusal to acknowledge that the basic units of maneuver should be platoons and squads rather than regiments comes to mind), but there is in every war, or any other endeavor of comparable size for that matter. And development was somewhat faster than often appreciated. The techniques that would ultimately break the stalemate had all been invented by late 1916 ("packet movement" by the French, the "hurricane barrage" by the Russians, trench raids along with light machine guns, mortars and tanks by the Brits), demonstrated on a small-scale in 1917 and finally implemented on a large scale (by the Germans) in 1918. It just took time to prove them, and then more time to retrain and reequip everyone.

Even more fundamentally though, you don't defeat peer opponents without taking casualties of the same order of magnitude as you inflict. The cost of the war always going to measured in tens of millions, even if the tactics and gear for breaking the trenches were available from the start. I can say that with a fair degree of certainty because other fronts didn't settle into the stalemate seen on the Western Front. The bloodletting was just as horrific (ask the Russians and the Serbs), the lines simply moved around a bit more in the process. Without getting too far into PPB territory, the world would probably be a better place if countries just assumed that cheap or easy wars were impossible, no matter how skilled the commanders, before asking whether they ought to be started.

I was just reading The Long Shadow (by David Reynolds), which explores the impact of the war on the 20th Century and the way its been perceived in history and art. He makes a very similar point to yours -- that modern historians are less critical of the WWI generals. Reynolds points out the theory that both world wars of the 20th century turned on massive, bloody campaigns of attrition that ultimately wore down German resistance. It's just that that campaign was in the East in World War II, while the East remained relative free flowing in the first war. The bloodletting in WWI was on the Western front.

Interesting to read the new research on the Somme battle -- long portrayed as the most boneheaded campaign of the war. Certainly the first day on the Somme was a military disaster for the British, occasioned by bad tactics (the British high command didn't trust the new volunteer army to behave competently, so they sent them out in rows to get mowed down). But while Haig was long castigated for persisting in the offense long after it was clear to everybody but him that there would be no breakthrough, modern research suggests that over the course of the Somme campaign, the Germans suffered at least as many casualties as the British -- so it was an important and maybe even successful battle of attrition (I know that wasn't Haig's aim).

I'm still more horrified by the diplomatic blunders that led to the unnecessary war than the tactics used to fight it. Worse, the pre-war blunders of 1912-14 led politicians of the pre-WWII era to make almost exactly the opposite mistakes ... leading to that terrible war. And the chain of mistakes would continue -- one of the reasons LBJ refused to deal with North Vietnam was that he did not want to be perceived as "Appeasing" Ho Chi Minh (his word!).

And that reminds me that our problems in Vietnam date back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, when an idealistic young Ho Chi Minh -- who idolized Jefferson and the American ideal -- petitioned Woodrow Wilson and attempted to get the president to apply his principle of self-determination to Indochina. But Wilson was a racist hippocrite who only meant his concept of self-determination to apply to white, western Europeans. A disillusioned Minh left Paris looking for another path to freedom and soon found it in the Communist Party.