Air University Review, July-August 1982

Past as Prologue?
The Relevance of the Great War

Perhaps no war in history encompasses so many ironies as the Great War of 1914-18.¹ Begun as an Austrian attempt to "chastise" Serbia, it grew to involve all the great powers of the globe and many peripheral nations as well. World War I began in a beautiful summer of European hopes and nationalistic fervor and ended in a winter of disillusion and despair. Fought by the greatest war machines ever assembled, the conflict stagnated into a gridiron-like struggle in which progress was measured in yards gained and in casualties inflicted (at least on the Western Front). When the war began, Europe’s autocratic royal houses, related by blood and intermarriage, secure in their centuries-old positions, held sway over the continent. Yet the war for which they connived, or the war in which they acquiesced, or the war into which they blundered (depending on one’s interpretation) swallowed up Hapsburg, Romanoff, and Hohenzollern alike.

There is a further irony about the Great War, however, that lingers to this day: While the War of 1914-18 continues to elicit volume after volume of analysis and debate from historians and aficionados, the war itself is generally neglected by the military professional.² Although intensively studied in the immediate postwar years, the conflict was soon forgotten by scholar-soldiers, who found themselves confronted with new technologies that produced startling tactical and strategic innovations. Following World War II, in the rush to understand blitzkrieg, carrier warfare, and strategic bombing, the lessons of World War I were shunted aside. This neglect is unfortunate, for at least three examples come quickly to mind which illustrate the Great War’s continuing relevance for soldiers and statesmen as well as scholars.

One example of this relevance is highlighted in the controversy over the war’s outbreak. Endlessly debated though this issue has been, the central fact that seems to emerge from the ink-stained scholarly battlefield of the last sixty years is that no power wanted a general European war or even imagined what that war might be like.³ Certainly, the manner in which that war broke out is especially significant for today, when a similar miscalculation, blunder, or foolishly taken risk could launch a third world war.⁴

From a purely military point of view, the war offers the spectacle of great armies marching into battle equipped with modern weaponry whose utilization and impact were only imperfectly understood. Similar problems may afflict today’s planner: after all, no one has yet fought on the "automated battlefield," launched or survived the strikes of tactical nuclear weapons, tried to penetrate the Soviet’s most sophisticated mobile surface- to-air missile/antiaircraft artillery envelope, or used laser weapons in combat. Most military professionals have ideas as to what this environment will be like, but for now, no one really knows.

Finally, and perhaps most ominously, certain examples of modern combat, most notably the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, seem to indicate that the lethality of the modern conventional battlefield for men and machines may equal or even exceed the abattoir of l914-l8.⁵ It is extremely unlikely that the addition of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons will lessen this lethality. For these three reasons at least, the Great War remains a fertile if unplowed field of study for the military professional. Three recently published books address different aspects of this war, all of which hold interest for the soldier and scholar.

Perhaps the first priority in attempting to analyze and understand a conflict like the Great War is to consider the causes for its outbreak. As exhaustively assessed as these causes have been, the stream of dispassionate analysis and impassioned polemic has continued in monograph after monograph. In addition to the traditional question of "war guilt," these works have often addressed the "lessons" of the 1914 crisis as well. After all, a major concern ought to be to try to prevent the recurrence of such a catastrophe. Unhappily, Professor Arno Mayer’s The Persistence of the Old Regime,* gives little aid or comfort to those seeking such guidance. Rather, Mayer claims that it is the socioeconomic structure of pre-Great War Europe and its dominance by the anciens régimes that led to war. Mayer argues that for too long historians have concentrated on the "advance of. . . the bourgeoisie and professional middle class, of liberal civil society, [and] of democratic political society" and have ignored the "forces of inertia and resistance that slowed the waning of the old order," (p. 4) This old order, composed of hereditary and privileged nobilities, the Church, the military, and such members of the bourgeoisie that could be co-opted, bears the responsibility for the catastrophe. "The Great War was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy." (p. 4)

*Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981, $16.95), 368 pages.

As a critique from the Left, this book possesses the immense utility of forcing the reader to reexamine many traditional ideas and beliefs. It is difficult, for example, to quarrel with Mayer’s assertion of the persistence and dominance of the old regime in pre-Great War Europe. (See pp. 102-09) France, perhaps, is the one country in which the idea of the old regime’s dominance is not entirely convincing.

Much more questionable, however, is Mayer’s delineation of the responsibility of this old order for the deluge. He sees war increasingly used as a lever in domestic politics rather than a rational tool of diplomacy, and he reminds us that domestic problems form a critical backdrop to the debacle of 1914. (p. 305) There is certainly evidence to support this assertion: Britain alone, for example, faced in 1914 political crises over the future of Ireland, the women’s suffrage movement, and mounting demands by the labor unions.⁶ By volume’s end, however, the reader is confronted in essence with yet another conspiracy theory: "the governors of the major powers . . . marched over the precipice of war with their eyes wide open, with calculating heads, and exempt from mass pressures . . . determined to maintain or recapture an idealized world of yesterday." (p. 322) Thus the elites combined with their henchmen, the bourgeoisie, to subdue the proletariat, the only group that showed a "marked disposition" to "resist impressment." (p. 323)

It is certainly possible to apply Mayer’s thesis to the world situation today—on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Those who walk in terror of our military-industrial complex, for example, usually point to the Soviet boogieman as a threat at budget time and in the continuing debate over domestic and foreign policy issues. On the other hand, whether one agrees with speculations on the decline of the Soviet regime or not,⁷ these speculations certainly raise the question: to what lengths might the Kremlin go, confronted with a declining hegemony and convinced of the possibly irretrievable nature of its plight, to maintain its power?⁸ Given Mayer’s sympathy for the Bolshevik revolution, this scenario is ironic indeed! (p. 3)

Mayer’s work is nonetheless a fascinating synthesis, a tour de force. Its provocative thesis will engage—perhaps even enrage—some readers. But for the student or professional seeking to broaden his understanding of this period, the book is a must.

When the war came—and again there is that eerie parallel to the ideas of today—most believed it would be violent, destructive, and over by Christmas. Just as today there seems to be a general consensus that a war in Europe would-be violent but short—because of NATO’s lack of reserves, because of the expected disintegration of the Soviet bloc, and a variety of other reasons—so the generation of 1914 expected that improved transport, greatly magnified firepower, and the crush of mass armies would result in a speedy decision. Unlike today, however, both sides were convinced of their superiority and the certainty of their victory. "Both sides were confident that their causes were just, that their armies were invincible, and that their consequent victories would be glorious, overwhelming, and practically immediate." ⁹

Such was the resilience of modern societies, however, that these bright hopes turned to hideous nightmares of a war without end. As the impact of the conflict intensified on European society, one expedient after another was utilized in an attempt to break the deadlock: from tactical innovations, like poison gas and the creeping barrage, to bold and ruthless strategic initiatives, like the Dardanelles landings, the Allied blockade of the Central Powers and their response, unrestricted submarine warfare. By 1918, the war thus resembled a poker game among rivals where something has gone horribly wrong: instead of the customary modest pot, the lifesavings of each player had been wagered in a series of steady and ultimately ferocious raises. On both sides of the table sat "players" who felt they held the winning cards. For the Germans, this trump card was the collapse of Russia and her imminent withdrawal from the war. The Allied winning hand was the vast potential assured their cause by America’s entry into the war.

It is at this point of balance that John To-land’s book No Man’s Land begins.* The work is typically Toland: a detailed, absorbing, yet fast-paced look at the last tumultuous year of the war, from the Kaiser and his entourage to the exploits of America’s "Lost Battalion." This work is popular history in the best sense of the word.

*John Toland, No Man's Land: 1918--The Last Year of the Great War (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1980, $17.95), 651 pages.

Certain themes are highlighted by Toland’s account. Emerging clearly from the narrative are the tremendous difficulties of forging and maintaining multinational coalitions. It was only the specter of absolute defeat by Ludendorff, for example, that finally prompted the Western Powers to appoint a general-in-chief in 1918. And French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, part mystic, part cheerleader, part conglomerate head, spent much of his time cajoling his alleged subordinates to undertake a desired course of action. Nor were relations any rosier between the Allied governments, especially after the entrance of the United States into the war. The high-minded, and at times highhanded, idealism of Woodrow Wilson clashed with the aims of David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. The "Grand Alliance" of World War II seems a model of unity and cooperation by comparison, perhaps as a result of lessons learned from the Great War.

A second and related theme was the distrust manifest between political and military leaders. In some cases this distrust was simply the clash of personalities, republican Dreyfusard Clemenceau versus conservative Catholic Foch, for example; in others, most notably the profound antipathy between Britain’s field commander Sir Douglas Haig and Lloyd George, the issues were both personal dislike and professional disagreement. The results of these clashes were almost fatal for the war effort. (pp. 1-10)

No Man’s Land also forcefully points out the Great War’s role as the crucible of modern history. Although the book’s focus is the Western Front, Toland does steal a glance at Russia. The birth pains of the Bolshevik revolution are recounted; Lenin and Trotsky make their first appearance on the world scene. Nor are they alone. A number of the twentieth century’s most important figures served their apprenticeship in this conflict: Americans like Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Patton, George Marshall, and Douglas MacArthur; Europeans, like Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and Tito. Toland also reminds us of the costs and consequences of this struggle. With numerous personal accounts and some truly horrifying pictures, No Man’s Land illustrates another aspect of this crucible, the price modern war exacts from its participants.

No Man’s Land is not a work of analysis. Scholars will mutter that no really new ground has been broken and criticize its neglect of the war’s other theaters. Nevertheless, the book’s pace and extensive coverage of Western Europe make it an immensely readable introduction to a critical year of the world’s history.

In To Win a War: 1918, The Year of Victory, John Terraine takes an analytical look at the reasons for the Allied victory.* In many respects this book promises to spark just as much debate as Mayer’s work, for Terraine’s controversial thesis will probably elicit swift rejoinders and, one would hope, some judicious reevaluation of the whole Western Front business.

* John Terraine, To Win a War: 1918, The Year of Victory (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1981, $14.95), 268 pages.

For over twenty years, Terraine has waged a lonely, almost-solitary battle in defense of Douglas Haig and his overall command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Many have regarded this defense as an exercise of intellectual eccentricity—a paragon of bulldog British stubbornness in the face of almost universal opprobrium.

The case against Haig is certainly well known to students of the war: the offhand remark about the uselessness of machine guns and the increasing utility of cavalry; the "hash" he made of maneuvers while commanding in 1912; his allegedly political marriage; his correspondence with the king during the early stages of the war, voicing dissatisfaction with the BEF’s first commander, Sir John French; his responsibility for the terrible battle of the Somme, where Britain suffered more than 59,000 casualties in a single day, almost 20,000 dead outright; the terrible battles of attrition around Ypres in 1917, summed up in the one haunting word, Passchendaele.¹⁰ If all this is not convincing enough, Haig’s reputation was pilloried after the war by both J. F. C. Fuller and Sir Basil Liddell Hart as well as by a younger generation of British military historians who followed in the footsteps of Fuller and Liddell Hart in the l950s and 1960s.¹¹

With the quantity and quality of the opposition, Terraine’s efforts might seem to be a forlorn hope. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Terraine focuses on the final campaign of 1918, the last victorious Hundred Days, which, he argues, is "virtually an unknown story." (p. xv) Terraine asserts that this great campaign has been ignored in Britain because of the antipathy between her political and military leadership. Because the war was won on the Western Front—an arena whose staggering consumption of men and material earned the fear and suspicion of Prime Minister Lloyd George—and was won by a man whom Lloyd George detested, the victory made nonsense of many of the prime minister’s "cherished strategies and . . . [threw] an unpleasant light on many of his policies. So he tried to pretend that it had not happened—and was supported in this by all those who, for reasons of their own, emotional or doctrinaire, saw the Western Front and its generals as villains of history." (p. xvi) Terraine adds that this deliberate belittling of the achievements of 1918 also added fuel to the myth that the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield but stabbed in the back by Communists and Jews at home.

Terraine thus has carved out for himself a formidable arena for combat. Yet in point after penetrating point, he treats and dismisses many of the traditional arguments about the 1918 campaign. Why not a negotiated peace? Terraine points to Germany’s brutal treatment of Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk and the belt-tightening it produced among the Allies. (pp. 21-22) Why not avoid the Western Front altogether and knock Germany’s "props," her allies, out of the war? Terraine notes that Germany was in fact the prop of Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria. The Western Front was thus the decisive theater of the war; once Germany was defeated there, her "props" collapsed one after another. (pp. 104 and 130) Terraine suggests that those like Pétain, who advocated waiting on the "Americans and the tanks," might have had a long wait. America gave the Allies a tremendous psychological boost, but no tanks, no artillery, and a raw, ill-trained army unprepared for the Western Front. (pp. 5-6) As for "the tanks," Terraine stresses that although a magnificent invention, they were hardly war-winners. Slow and vulnerable to enemy fire, tanks were marvelous against entrenched infantry, but they took terrible losses to men and machines. On 8 August 1918, the BEF took 414 tanks into battle against the German lines around Amiens; by 12 August, only six tanks were still operational. (pp. 96-97)

Others have argued various aspects of Terraine’s contentions before. The volume remains compelling, however, because of his impressive synthesis and integration of the 1918 campaign as a logical follow-on to the bloody fighting of previous years. Terraine yields not an inch to his opponents in this thoughtful reassessment.

For the professional student of war, To Win a War has a heightened relevance. Let us suppose that, as in 1914, contrary to prevailing opinion, a conventional war breaks out in Europe today. Let us extend this 1914 analogy a little further, and suppose that this war does not end in a matter of days, either with Soviet tanks on the Channel or the collapse of the Russian empire. Much has been written about our logistical capabilities and problems in a conventional war in Europe. Much less has been written about our psychological or moral capabilities to sustain such a war. If, like the original BEF in 1914, our professional armed forces in Europe should be crippled by losses, are our reserve forces prepared to endure and defeat the enemy? Is our society capable of sustaining such a conflict? Somehow the generations of 1914 just managed to sustain their war. Book after book has attempted to analyze these men and women. They have been labeled naive idealists; fools; tools of the elites; poltroons. For whatever reason, they maintained their cohesion to the end. Could we do the same?

These three books provide an excellent introduction to a fascinating and critical era of world history. The Persistence of the Old Regime, No Man’s Land, and To Win a War all deserve to be read, studied, and debated. They offer much food for thought for today’s scholars— and today’s soldiers.

1. It is in the works of Professor Paul Fussell that I first considered the ironies of the Great War. See Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

2. In addition to a continuing flow of books, new civilian publications about the Great War include a new journal, Der Angriff, and a British journal of a new society devoted to the study of World War I, the "Western Front Association." Unhappily, military publications list only a trickle of articles, as a quick perusal of the Air University Library Index to Military Periodicals will confirm. One bright spot is Army Command and General Staff College’s new publication, the Leavenworth Papers, which has listed both "German Tactical Doctrine Changes in World War I" and ‘Chemical Warfare: The Integrated Battlefield 1917-1918" as subjects for upcoming issues.

3. Standard accounts of the war’s outbreak are legion. One that still displays admirable balance and readability is Sidney B. Fay’s The Origins of the World War, 2d ed. rev. (New York: The Free Press, 1966). For a later and more contentious look at the war and its origins, see D. J. Goodspeed, The German Wars, 1914-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977).

4. See Miles Kahler, "Rumors of War: The 1914 Analogy," in Foreign Affairs, Winter 1979/80, pp. 374-96; also General Sir John Hackett et al., The Third World War: August 1985 (New York: Macmillan, 1978).

5.Israeli losses for the Yom Kippur War have been put at 2412 dead and 508 missing in Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz, The Israeli Army (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 397. In three weeks of fighting the Israelis lost approximately one percent of their total mobilization base (put at about 270,000).

6. For a discussion of England’s domestic crises, see George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 (New York: Perigee Books, 1980).

7. See, for example, the interview with Secretary of State Alexander Haig, "The Soviet Union Shows Clear Signs of Historic Decline," in U.S. News and World Report, May 18, 1981, pp. 28-30.

8. Such, in essence, was the underlying thesis of Hackett’s The Third World War.

9. Barrie Pitt, 1918—The Last Act (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963), p. 17.

10. For a summary of the case against Haig, see Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields (New York: Ballantine Books, 1964), pp. 40-44.

11. See, for example, both Wolff and Pitt.

Captain Gary P. Cox (A.B., University of Georgia; M.A., University of Virginia) is an instructor in the Department of History at the USAF Academy. He has held wing intelligence positions for Strategic Air, Command and Tactical Air Command and in squadron intelligence for USAFE. Captain Cox is a Distinguished Graduate of Squadron Officer School and a graduate of Air Command and Staff College.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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