May 09, 2012

Today's sad refer

I sometimes see google searches in my refer that I think are noteworthy. Here's one that makes me a bit sad:

who+were+we+fighting+in+world+war+1

Whoever this is, why didn't they learn about that in school history class? Unfortunately, that's a rhetorical question. I already know the answer.

For the record: once things settled down and everyone was involved, on one side the major players were Imperial Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottomans (Turkey). On the other side the big teams were Britain, France, Italy, Imperial Russia, and eventually, the United States. There were a lot of other countries involved (e.g. Belgium, Canada) to a greater or lesser extent on one side or the other but few of them made much difference at all.

Imperial Russia was knocked out of the war by the Russian Revolution, about the same time that the US began sending significant forces to France.

And who won? Well, pretty much no one. Austria lost the worst, Germany probably second worst. The US lost 117,000 dead and didn't really gain anything out of the war, but among the big players that was the best outcome. So I guess it would be fair to say that the US was the best loser, if that makes any sense. Maybe, we could say the US lost the least.

The war formally ended with the Treaty of Versailles, which in my opinion is the most misbegotten, ill-conceived "peace treaty" in all of history. It pretty much guaranteed another war, and starting in 1939 we got it. "World War II" really should have been called "World War I, the next generation" or "WWI part 2" or maybe "Son of WWI", because that's what it was.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:18 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
Post contains 285 words, total size 2 kb.

1 It goes without saying that this is a simplistic explanation, though it could be too complex for your googler. 

If we were cruel, it could be fun to explain that Japan fought on one side in WWI and on the other in WWII, just to watch the resulting brain explosion.

Posted by: Wonderduck at May 09, 2012 05:08 PM (6CHh4)

2 Not to mention Italy...

Posted by: DrHeinous at May 09, 2012 06:14 PM (bU+xB)

3

I had a mention of Japan's involvement in WWI but took it out.

Besides, Italy was on three sides in the two wars, just to make things even more confusing. For that matter, France was on three sides in just WWII, depending on how you count. (A different way to put it, and perhaps more fair, is that Italy changed sides in WWII and France changed sides twice.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 09, 2012 06:14 PM (+rSRq)

4 In case anyone's curious, the IP belonged to a school district in Minnesota. So perhaps some student really was learning history. We can only hope.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 09, 2012 06:16 PM (+rSRq)

5 "World War 2:  War Harder!  Now with ten times more science fiction, and ten times less moral ambiguity!"

Posted by: metaphysician at May 09, 2012 07:03 PM (3GCAl)

6

WWI certainly is morally ambiguous, because it's really difficult to explain just why in hell it even happened. That assassination in Serbia was the spark that set off the first powder keg, but it didn't build the stack of powder kegs which eventually exploded. And if that assassination hadn't happened, eventually something else would have set it all off.

I suppose that it could be argued that it was the last manifestation of the Sport of Kings. There were a lot of leaders who, deep down, wanted a war (most notably Kaiser Wilhelm II). Of course, they expected to win easily; no one really understood just how terrible it was going to end up being.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 09, 2012 07:26 PM (+rSRq)

7 Another ambiguity: the history books are pretty dry on the subject, but American opinion was significantly divided on the war.  The number of people jailed in the U.S. for sedition because they stated their opposition to "President Wilson's war" was around 1,000. 

The Espionage and Sedition acts were passed in 1917 and 1918, theoretically to address mob violence against opponents of the war.
That's right, the government decided it needed the power to keep domestic order by shutting up the dissenters.

Support for the bills broke mostly along party lines, with the Republicans in opposition, but they were passed by wide margins.

Posted by: ubu at May 09, 2012 07:44 PM (GfCSm)

8 European empires of the age were badly screwed up. Kaiser was somewhat crazy or at least quite eccentric, if memoirs of Von Brullow and the like are to be believed. Emeror was a chickenhead - consequences of royal family inbreeding gone bad. Tzar wasn't that daft, but he was just as insulated from reality like the rest of them. French, I think, had a republic at the time, although I am not sure. They used to change their government styles like socks. Britain was probably the sanest of the bunch, but managed to build defensive treaties with France. So it all had to collapse sooner or later. I am quite annoyed that they didn't learn the lesson first time around though.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 09, 2012 07:47 PM (5OBKC)

9 The French were indeed a republic at the time, but their constitution gave their military leadership a rather astonishing level of independence. Among other things, they concealed from the civilian government evidence of how badly things were going in the first few weeks of the war, until the flood of refugees was utterly obvious, as well as the audibility of guns from the outskirts of Paris.

Wilhelm is a little complicated, historians are still arguing over his intentions and capabilities. He seemed to be playing diplomatic chicken, and appeared to be quite surprised when the war did break out. He also simply did not understand why he couldn't rearrange the alliances of Europe to be democracies versus monarchies.

And even at the time, the idiocy of the Treaty of Versailles was widely recognized, but ignored. (Sort of like how hundreds of economists were pointing out the bubble in housing prices?) The French commander who was perhaps most famous at the end of the war, Marshal Foch, called the treaty "a truce for twenty years" and he was almost exactly accurate as to the timing.

Posted by: Boviate at May 09, 2012 08:09 PM (63JPq)

10 Another notable event that most people haven't heard of is the mutiny of the French army.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 09, 2012 08:20 PM (+rSRq)

11 Sadly, almost everything I know about the Great War comes from Soviet sources. Obviously, nobody there cared much about the French mutiny, the serial defeats that Russians received in Poland received a muted coverage, but Brusilov's victory over Austians was written up as an astonishing military genius (so when Germans cut up Soviet defences in 1941, they were considered students of Brusilov's doctrine). I heard that Big Berta existed, however.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 09, 2012 08:31 PM (5OBKC)

12 I think it makes more sense as a continuation of the Great Game, with some elements dating back to the late 19th-century wars, some to the colonization/imperialism scramble, and some old grudges dating back to the 30-Years' War and beyond.  The various leaderships lost control of the strategic situation and almost seemed to mulishly sit there like a pair of Zax.

I have a hard time grokking the feelings and sensibilities of the time, both among the public and their rulers/representatives, but I can kinda maybe see it if I squint just right.  I find things like Civ and Total War to actually be rather helpful in getting into the mindset, especially when backed by lots of Wikipedia.  It's just so alien if you don't grow up steeped in that feudal history and mindset.

I do remember one rather good piece that Rev. Sensing wrote some years ago, about how French taxis were indirectly responsible for a hundred million murders, or somesuch; it was a counter-factual that posited that if Germany had won in 1914, it would have taken a province that they'd been squabbling over for decades, and that probably would have been that.  Without the destruction of an entire generation (between the war and the flu), and the malaise that accompanied it, would the radical collectivist utopians still have succeeded?  Could we possibly been worse off with kings and princes than with Fuhrers and commissars?

Posted by: BigD at May 09, 2012 09:23 PM (qLkdZ)

13 Even I didn't learn much about the first war in school. Had to go hunt down books on my own. (We did read "All Quiet" in English class at one point, though.) Picked up Keegan's book on it, quite a good survey. It's WAY easier to find material about WW2 (though, well, WW1 was not always interesting, hm?)

Basically it all came down to the Franco-Prussian War and the impact of mobilization of conscript infantry. If your potential enemy mobilized, then you had to mobilize too; to delay even a week risked losing a war by default.

Germany's position between two hostile powers meant they had to either go to war aggressively, or not go at all - they couldn't afford to fully commit against Russia with France at their back, or vice versa. They had a plan for a quick defeat of France, and it almost worked, but in the end it couldn't have - there just wasn't the road density to move enough troops where they needed them to go, and nobody had built out any significant quantities of non-train motor transport. But they came a lot closer than they had any right to...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at May 09, 2012 10:32 PM (GJQTS)

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