Why was World War I called The Great War?

"It was a good war, not a great war."

Dunphy, suitable for any occasion.

the name was coined shortly after (or perhaps even during) the war, to distinguish it from the various pissy wars that had been fought in the fifty to a hundred years before it.

xpost - even funnier, it actually lasted 116 years!

I thought the same thing, Chris.

-- Elvis Telecom (quartzcit...), November 13th, 2006 4:26 PM. (Chris Barrus) (later)

hahahaha yeah and the most famous battle in it happened after the war was over.

Others that pop up in my head from time to time:

- the guy who claims to have just driven over from the next city, but there's a baby on the hood of his car, which should be really hot

- this weird one where Encyclopedia can tell this woman at a restaurant is actually a man in disguise, based on some batshit rule about how women always get the seat facing the room, and men sit across from them???

- "if the window were broken from the outside, the glass would be in the room"

- "it's impossible for a person to use his left hand to stick his mumblety-peg knife in his right jeans pocket while running"

The term First World War was first used in the 1920s. So-called not because people knew there was going to be a second one, but because it was the first time a war had taken place on a global scale.

"Great" meaning "large" or "immense"/
We use it in the pejorative sense"

- suspect claims he kept some document between page 97 and 98 of his favorite book - but books don't have odd-even facing pages, apparently ever...busted!

- something about "an arrow flight away"/"a narrow flight away"...ends with EB bootin it up the stairs, i think.

i recall this one weekly. because i am always late and sort of running while finishing dressing etc. it is so not impossible, unless you are running very fast and/or have extremely short arms. i do it all the time.

-"All block lettering looks the same" or something like that ... in the context of shredding some graphological defense, maybe?

Also, "civil war" - what's so civil about it?

and

Encyclopedia Brown: The Complete Casebook

...Please turn to the next thread to see the answer.

What does it say about me that, when I first read this, I thought it meant he'd hit a baby on the way over and it was wedged the front of his car and would be really hot if he's actually driven all that way?

I know this because I read it in one of Campbell's old Pears Cyclopedias. I didn't know it beforehand. In fact, it had never occured to me. I would be rubbish at being an ace attorney with the wildest cross-examining skills in town if I couldn't even wonder about THAT contradiction...

I see.

a friend claims to have once been in a history tutorial where someone in all seriousness asked from where Kings and Queens got the numbers after their names.

-- Bhumibol Adulyadej (starrysdarkmaterial...), November 14th, 2006.

i'm being thick, i don't get you here. i don't know when that name came in, though it's possible it came in before the war started, given that everyone knew it was going to. but they could have got by calling it just 'the war'; as they did with the first one quite often.

Hint: it wasn't WWII, and it was more than just 'the war'!

I am surprised not more people know this - I felt really thick when I realised I didn't know.

yeahbut isn't it only later convention that says 01/09/39 is when 'it' started anyway? japan had been getting into it with china (and therefore teh brits) way before then; and even as of that date the ussr was involved.

and who can forget the battle of the river plate?

it only needed US involvement to make it as worldly as ww1.

given that the initial combatants included the British and French empires, it would seem not inappropriate to call it a world conflict.

'operation polish storm'

This is cheating as it's the same source where Starry's got her info from!

I don't. Someone please tell me.

that's not batshit, it's an iron law.

It was called: THE WAR OF ATTRITION!

So there you go! Neener neener neeener. And they would have called it SOMETHING before the Brit/Fr empires got involved in 39 as PROVEN by the Pears Cyclopaedic evidence, your Honour!

The defense rests! SUSTAINED!

I guess I was too distracted by the giant sack of DAIM bars whilst I was reading that Pears Cyclopaedia - damn my eyes!

need more than 1x source to believe it.

however my answer is correct but the pears were too PC to admit it

like: let's get it on already.

they did czechoslovakia in march '39 i think.

it's an interesting question. i bet 'the falklands war' was always called that. and iirc 'the gulf war'. but what of our present wars. it's probably called 'the iraq war', but what about the war in afghanistan? doesn't have a real name.

I had a history teacher, echoing Churchill, who claimed that the Seven Years War (French & Indian War) was the first world war inasmuch as the hostilities occurred in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, North America, the Carribean and India.

that has to be more 'worldy' than ww1 innit.

didn't know any of this

xpost

woof, xpost-a-rama

For a while, when she heard W refer to the 'War on Terror', my gf had a tendency to affect the accent of Scarlet O'Hara and inquire what he had against Tara.

eh, the Iroquois Confederacy or those guys from TEH LAST OF TEH MOHICANS are hardly European powers. In India I understand that local forces were major players.

xpost

(Sorry, Archel.)

They'll give it some trendy name like "Wr3.0 (beta)"

Repurposing thread for actual World War One talk as we're in the 100th anniversary year.

Obligatory: https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWI

Highly highly recommend the current "Blueprint for Armageddon" series in the Hardcore History podcast. Part 2 just went up last week.

Obviously, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman, needs prominent big-upping on this thread. When you finish reading it, you know why starting this bloody, pointless, enormously futile war seemed like such a compelling idea to so many people at the time.

An avalanche of recent publications. I need to read Max Hastings' book. I finished this three months ago.

o man thx for that twitter rec. npr had a similar thing for 1963 last year that was great.

planning to whip through a bunch of WWI books this year and decided to start with 'guns of august.' it's pretty much as good as everyone says, and actually really surprisingly laugh-out-loud funny in places, but the endless parade of unfamiliar names in the first 50 pages or so made me dizzy. i'm kind of thinking i need to read up on my late 19th century/early 20th century european history before i tackle another WWI tome.

like, everyone always says WWI is where everything starts, and they're probably right, but it's also the end of a thousand small rivalries and lingering conflicts that no one ever talks about anymore. tuchman doesn't even get into the balkans et al.

one thing that really struck me was how resigned so many highers-up in the german gov't at least were to the inevitability of war, to the point where they were arguing over whether it would be better to have a war THIS year or NEXT year.

THE SCHLIEFEN PLAN

sounds like a '60s caper movie with a huge international cast

might reread 'against the day'. or maybe just think abt it a lot

THE SCHLIEFEN PLAN

by Robert Ludlum.

The thread I wanted! I'm in the thick of reading about the war too. I read The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark on the origins, which despite the elegance of Clark's book are just dizzyingly hard to wrap your head around. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a great compendium of literary tid-bits about soldiers' experiences in the trenches.

Just started Meyer's A World Undone - seems like the best follow-up to Tuchman so far.

Link to Hardcore History: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive

Lots of quotable stuff in Clark's book. Here's his final statement concerning the lead-up to the July crisis before moving on to the Sarajevo assassination, arguing that war was still not inevitable despite the macro-level dynamics bringing the major powers into collision:

The future was still open - just. For all the hardening of the fronts in both of Europe's armed camps, there were signs that the moment for a major confrontation might be passing. The Anglo-Russian alliance was under serious strain - it looked unlikely to survive the scheduled date for renewal in 1915. And there were even signs of a change of heart among the British policy-makers, who has recently been sampling the fruits of détente with Germany in the Balkans. It is far from obvious or certain that Poincaré could have sustained his security policy over the longer term. There were even tentative signs of an improvement in relations between Vienna and Belgrade, as agreements were sought and found on the exchange of political prisoners and the settlement of the Eastern Railway question. Above all, none of the European powers was at this point contemplating launching a war of aggression against its neighbours. They feared such an initiative on each other's part, and as the military preparedness of the Entente soared, there was talk among the military in Vienna and Berlin of a pre-emptive strike to break the deadlock, but pre-emptive war had not become policy. Nor had Vienna resolved to invade Servia unprovoked - an act that would have amounted to geopolitical suicide. The system still needed to be ignited from outside itself, by means of the trigger that the Russians and French had established on the Austro-Serbian frontier. Had Pasic's Serbian government pursued a policy aimed at domestic consolidation and nipped in the bud the irredentist movement that posed as great a threat to its own authority as it did to the peace of Europe, the boys might never have crossed the river Drina, a more clear-cut warning might have been given in good time to Vienna, the shots might never have been fired. The interlocking commitments that produced the catastrophic outcome of 1914 were not long-term features of the European system, but the consequence of short-term adjustments that were themselves evidence of how swiftly relations among the powers were evolving.

And had the trigger not been pulled, the future that became history in 1914 would have made way for a different future, one in which, conceivably, the Triple Entente might not have survived the resolution of the Balkan crisis and the Anglo-German détente might have hardened into something more substantial. Paradoxically, the plausibility of the second future helped to heighten the probability of the first - it was precisely in order to avoid abandonment by Russia and to secure the fullest possible measure of support that France stepped up the pressure on St. Petersburg. Had the fabric of the alliances seemed more dependable and enduring, the key decision-makers might have felt less under pressure to act as they did. Conversely the moments of détente that were so characteristic of the last years before the war had a paradoxical impact: by making a continental war appear to recede to the horizons of probability, they encouraged key decision-makers to underrate the risks attending their interventions. This is one reason why the danger of a conflict between the great alliance blocs appeared to be receding, just as the chain of events that would ultimately drag Europe into war got underway.

http://ejf.cside.ne.jp/review/diplomacy.jpg

Relatedly, just read The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. It's a 30s book, in the Lytton Strachey line of beautifully styled ironies & character portraits; covers 1910-14 - rapid collapse of a Liberal consensus through the Tory revolt over the Lords, Irish home rule & unionist agitation, rising union militancy, suffragism. Ends with the war changing everything, of course, but not really about the war. Tons of magnificent passages.

It is customary to think of that society as a doomed thing, calling in the traditional doomed manner " for madder music and for stronger wine," and plunged at last, with no time to say its prayers, into the horrors of war. The scene may even be given some of the qualities of a pre-Raphaelite canvas. The sky is massed with tall black clouds ; but one last shaft of sunlight, intolerably bright, picks out every detail of leaf and grass ; and in the midst of it those little figures go through their paces with the momentary precision of a dream. There is, too, a satisfying irony in this : the spectator knows what is going to happen, the actors do not; they are almost in the happy condition of OEdipus and Jocasta, before the news arrived which made the unhappy gentleman remove his eyes. And the conception is, above all, a convenient one. It is easier to think of Imperial England, beribboned and bestarred and splendid, living in majestic profusion up till the very moment of war. Such indeed was its appearance, the appearance of a somewhat decadent Empire and a careless democracy. But I do not think that its social history will be written on these terms.

I like how Henry James and Sigmund Freud had such oppositely characteristic reactions to the outbreak of war, James experiencing it as a shattering of naiveté, Freud as a swelling of libido.

The plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we had supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for meaning is too tragic for any words.

For the first time in thirty years, I feel myself to be an Austrian, and feel like giving this not very hopeful empire another chance. All my libido is dedicated to Austria-Hungary.

*"making for and meaning"

are there any WWI vets left? at all?

no

there are <10 people born in the 19th century alive now

2 Sarah Knauss F 24 September 1880 30 December 1999 119 years, 97 days United States

lol gutted

can't help but think that living for another 367 days wasn't that big a deal for her

think u just played urself there bro

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Green

died in 2012

xp ?? 21st century began 1 Jan 2001

Relatedly, just read The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield. It's a 30s book, in the Lytton Strachey line of beautifully styled ironies & character portraits; covers 1910-14 - rapid collapse of a Liberal consensus

Yes! I read it last summer. Beautiful. That era of English political life was a mystery.

Michael Gove's favourite book, apparently.

I second recommendation of The Sleepwalkers, though Clark is a Hapsburg scholar and is perhaps over-sympathetic towards the bumblers in Vienna. It did succeed in bringing home to me the centrality of events in the Balkans, and particularly Serbia, in the run-up to the apocalypse.

ha, the gove thing is why i read it - had a short piece on it commissioned after he mentioned it on monday.

Tuchman putting herself in The Guns of August, awesome

While she did not explicitly mention this in The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman was a witness to one of the pivotal events of the book: the pursuit of the German battle cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau. In her account of this pursuit she writes: "That morning [August 10, 1914] there arrived in Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester's action against Goeben and Breslau. Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau."[11] As she was a grandchild of Henry Morgenthau, one suspects that she is referring to herself. This is confirmed in her later book Practicing History,[12] in which she tells the story of her father, Maurice Wertheim, traveling from Constantinople to Jerusalem on August 29th, 1914, to deliver funds to the Jewish community there. Thus, at age two, Barbara Tuchman was a first-hand witness to the pursuit of Goeben and Breslau, which she documented 48 years later.

There seems to be a lack of WW1 films compared to WW2 films. Are there any films that realistically depict the horror of the WW1 battlefields?

I've heard great things about this book. Has anyone read it?

http://www.amazon.com/Paris-1919-Months-Changed-World-ebook/dp/B000XUBC7C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392658826&sr=8-1&keywords=1919

xp

you shd check out the 1930 film of All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory if you don't already know them. Gallipoli isn't on that level iirc but also worth watching.

I actually started reading Paris 1919 just yesterday. It's great so far, a refreshing change after Tuchman's intense descriptions of apocalyptic warfare. It's interesting reading about the headiness of the immediate post-war period, the armistice having come very abruptly while countries were still predicting at least another year of war, few people having thought ahead about what the future should look like but finding themselves suddenly in a position to radically reshape the world. So all sorts of optimistic projects were being debated simultaneously, from African unification to suffragism, with Bolshevism as an imminent threat spurring efforts on the part of capitalist countries to mollify their working classes. I'll be able to say more when I'm further in, but it's good so far.

Great read, that. The portrait of Wilson is hilarious (and chilling).

The credible threat of Bolshevism has, on the whole, been very good for raising the working conditions of the working class in capitalist countries.

Bolshevism and the Working Class
By Aimless 0 comments
2/17/2014
1:23 p.m.

The credible threat of Bolshevism has, on the whole, been very good for raising the working conditions of the working class in capitalist countries.

at the risk of channeling every ilxor's favorite finlander, idgi

Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

happy birthday!

sort of

As it happens I'm reading Max Hastings' book.

how is that? read 'the guns of august' recently and wondering how it stacks up against the newer histories.

The up-to-the-minute accounts of the final hour August chats has never been better presented. Hastings' thesis: once Russia committed to Serbia's defense, there was no way to stop it. A-H wanted revenge (and territory), Germany willing to help.

i still can't quite handle the news that there are no WWI vets left, let alone the fact that WWII vets are dying out.

kinda serendipitous for me that i've been playing my first game of diplomacy these last couple weeks (supposedly JFK + kissinger's favorite game) and i got assigned Austria. germany is really the only country you can count on on the board. italy + turkey too tempted sitting on your border and you're ultimately going to have to deal with russia if you want to take a shot at winning the game. they actually have a name for an austrian german alliance in diplomacy: anschluss

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss

yeah, it's anachronistic, but understandable

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/27/world/legacy-of-world-war-i.html

I'm also reading Richard Striner's Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear, which makes the same case that Walter Karp did in the seventies but obscured in the wake of John Milton Cooper and A. Scott Bergg's solid recent bios: this messiah wanted to be the savior of the world from the beginning.

had it for years, but perhaps now i will get all the way through the war the infantry knew, which is a welcome antidote to general melchett-type histories

the answer to OP is that the war was really cool

so great

otm

no ww1 thread is complete without some wilson-bashing!

man screw wilson

Edith did, quite a lot.

My 11 year old cousin just referred to America as back to back world war champions. He gets it.

What's so great about war anyway.

https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWI btw

recent article by usually v good Paul Mason, formerly of Newsnight, now of C4 news, whose Gaza reporting has been superb (and obviously <3 his Northern Soul documentary):

How Did the First World War Actually End.

finally

The first big Red Scare in the USA was prompted by the apparent successes of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the growing organization of the labor/socialist movement in the USA. Attributing the final victory over Germany to organized worker resistance was a narrative that had to be censored out of existence.

it's almost as if when the German Right was obsessed with the country having been stabbed in the back there was some historical reason behind it

neither my wife nor i remember learning about how ww1 ended in [american] high school. i didn't have history classes in high school but i did take the reagants and had to study independently for both the american history and world history tests and i don't remember it being a part of the curriculum for either.

tho we did learn about a. american participation in and contributions during the war, and b. the archduke and lead-in to the war

the general way it's taught in the UK if at all is kinda "the German economy wasn't doing so well and they couldn't afford to keep fighting even tho the Eastern front had ended and mumble mumble something oh look a poppy"

that "usually" read the wrong way. I meant usually very good (but not always) + here is an article by him, rather than usually v good but her is an article by him that isn't.

Daphnis's summation of school WW1 history teaching spot on.

i don't remember how it's taught in school in america -- probably just that we swooped in and won it at the end + the french are wusses. certainly much less of a Thing than ww2 or the american civil war

we did the archduke in a kind of vague vacuum (someone shot him... and a war started!) because to go into any more detail would have required betraying that something happened in the 19c besides our civil war. then we watched all quiet on the western front. better than the longest day: fewer class periods.

our history curriculum was quite good on buildup and execution of ww1 iirc

merely a ploy to put off home rule

ya p much

neither my wife nor i remember learning about how ww1 ended in american high school. i didn't have history classes in high school but i did take the reagants and had to study independently for both the american history and world history tests and i don't remember it being a part of the curriculum for either.

Pretty sure we just learned about WWI as prelude to WWII--("Germany had all these reparations to pay. Why? Because there was this other war that wasn't as interesting.")

A good recent book about U.S. involvement confirms the thesis advanced by Walter Karp thirty years ago which refutes what we learned in high school about a noble, reluctant Woodrow Wilson. The consequences of the peace put in stark relief too.

i don't remember how it's taught in school in america -- probably just that we swooped in and won it at the end + the french are wusses.

uh this is definitely not how it was taught at my school

At my high school (early 80s, private American), WWI was framed in roughly equal parts of "Europe shaking off monarchy and transitioning to nation-states" and "hey, hey world, we're the Americans." I knew what the Zimmerman Telegram and the Palmer Raids were going into the final and aced it.

In college (at good ole UC Irvine of all places!) I lucked into a Topics in 20th Century History class that ended up being entirely about WWI. Three weeks alone on August 1914. What I remember most was reading an editorial printed in one of the London papers around 1916. No explanation for the cause of the Great War made sense other than "people just got tired of being peaceful."

40 maps that explain World War I
http://www.vox.com/a/world-war-i-maps

this may not be the right thread for this question, but I am trying to track down an anecdote involving I think Bismarck and William I in hopes that I did not imagine it. I think they were on a train or carriage riding past a square and William said something like he feared that some action they had recently taken would result in them both being executed in that square and Bismarck replying along the lines of "yes but what a thrilling way to die that would be." The details are really fuzzy at this point so I suppose it could have been some other monarch/advisor combo but I think it was William I/Bismarck. Anyway, hoping this rings a bell for someone...

ended up finding it myself after all, for the record, it was a conversation after the blood and iron speech:

Bismarck thought that the words he had spoken
on the 30th of September, 1862, might have been
used against him with Wilhelm, and he was right.
Having gone to meet him when travelling, and
getting with him into an ordinary first-class car-
riage, he found him " visibly depressed." The
King was still under the impression of his talks
with Queen Augusta. Bismarck wanted to explain
his words, but Wilhelm interrupted him :

" I foresee exactly how it will all end. Down there,
in the Opern Platz, beneath my windows, they'll
cut off your head, and then, a little later, mine."

Bismarck simply answered, " And after that,
sire ? " " Well, after that we shall be dead."

"Yes," vehemently retorted Bismarck, "after
that we shall be dead ; but one must needs die
sooner or later, and could we perish in a worthier
way ?

I like how you can tell Julius Caesar is mortally wounded because he starts speaking Latin.

they are currently repeating the 10 part The First World War series from 2003 on BBC4. It is very good, in fact brilliant.

sounds great, must look for a rip

World War I was a great war... for me to poop on

xp
I got one, that took ages to dl and is 7.3gb. But it was worth the loss of memory space.

this series isn't as myopic as others and goes into the World aspect of it tbf

^^^this series is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. It's good!

I'm almost done w/The Guns of August, likely plunging into The Sleepwalkers and Catastrophe 1914 soon.

any recommendations on books covering the whole of the war or other periods of the war?

The Deluge by Tooze is a brilliant book on the "20 year armistice"* between the wars. Sleepwalkers is a really great as well.

* 1919 quote from some French general at Versailles, 20 years to the day of Hitler invading Poland.

The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order is the full title.

thanks that looks right up my alley!

I was thinking recently about the cultural invisibility of WWI in the states, which makes sense in a lot of ways. The U.S. was far less involved, and consequently it has been overshadowed by WWII. It is a very complicated war with no outsized heroes or villains (not saying there were no heroes or villains, clearly Albert of Belgium is a significant example in the former camp) so it's harder to pin down, you've got to dig into pre-war geopolitics a bit and I still have to get into it more. (Probably should get that AJP Taylor book folks have raved about.)

Which leads to the limited understanding I had growing up, via textbooks, which is that "Archduke Ferdinand got shot and everyone got very angry and fought."

But it's maybe an even better example of the insanity of war in terms of how wars come about than WWII.

there are loads of good bbc programmes on the buildup and complex causes but damned if i remember any of em

Capitalism, amirite?

men

caucasians (balkans but fuckit)

^ white men

Austrians. The whitest of white men.

'the sleepwalkers' is grebt

it's been twenty years since i read them, but i recall john keegan's and martin gilbert's full treatments being good. the section on the somme in keegan's 'the face of battle' is also very revealing on the actual mechanics of what was supposed to happen and why it didn't

haven't read niall ferguson's, but fuck that guy in general

'the war the infantry knew' is a kind of amazing account of day-to-day life drawn from (british) memoirs. still struck by how they marched all the fuck over france and belgium in august 1914 and had no idea where they were going or where the enemy might be

Christopher Clark is such a good writer I might read Sleepwalkers again at some point. His Iron Kingdom book about the rise and fall of Prussia is totally ace as well.

this is some prime Clark from Sleepwalkers:

When the American historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt of the University of Chicago travelled to Europe with letters of introduction to interview former politicians who had played a role in events, he was struck by the apparently total immunity of his interlocutors to self-doubt. (The one exception was Grey, who 'spontaneously remarked' that he had made a tactical error in seeking to negotiate with Vienna through Berlin during the July Crisis, but the misjudgement alluded to was of subordinate importance and the comment reflected a specifically English style of mandarin self-deprecation rather than a genuine concession of responsibility.)

omar, I'm a fan of Margaret McMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World , which paints indelible portraits of Wilson, Orlando, their subalterns, and the wounded Clemenceau.

The involvement of the United States in WWI destroyed Progressive dreams for a generation. It turned Wilson into a blue-eyed tyrant, instigated horrendous race riots when it was over, and gave us the Espionage Act.

nice rec there Alf, sounds good.

Tony Judt's review.

the keegan review linked above was also by judt

Tony "Postwar" Judt.

i kind of like the crackpot revisionist theory that there was only _one_ world war and it just had a break of a decade or so between its two active phases

not really crackpot

yeah!

I think if the heads of state were largely similar that would be a pretty popular notion, I think when you bring Hitler and Stalin into the mix that's where folks begin to draw a serious line.

I think there is a (possibly inaccurate) common opinion that WWI-era Germany was much much more honorable than Nazi-era Germany. The Kaiser seems like a figure of old school nobility in a lot of historical narratives but I think a lot of that is colored by 1933-45.

a proto-Poppy Bush situation

would suggest that reparations had quite a lot to do with hitler's rise. not that i exactly blame the WWI allies for it -- i'd be pissed too -- but note the difference between that and the marshall plan/rebuilding of japan

and tbf the kaiser did not instigate the holocaust

honestly? i'm not a historical expert, but i think wilson getting the blame for the failed peace of versailles is only part of the story. i think the monarchist powers of europe bear as much, if not more, responsibility for the failed peace. wilson wanted to "make the world safe for democracy", and no matter how racist, eugenicist, and fundamentally flawed his vision of "democracy" was, i think one could argue that it was a bigger problem that he did not, in fact, accomplish this, either in america, who reverted to their isolationist past, or in europe, where colonial expansionism reached its apex in the wake of versailles. the marshall plan was great and all, but the abolition of monarchy gave them a certain advantage that the negotiators at versailles lacked. i can't imagine a "long peace" that didn't involve the dismantlement of the British Empire.

"and tbf the kaiser did not instigate the holocaust

― mookieproof"

world war ii started five years after the death of leopold ii

god dammit, do i need to have roman numerals banned too

world war one started five years after the death of leopold ii

not sure i follow, though -- all the european/usa powers were racist as hell and were barbaric in africa and other colonies, but i don't think it has much bearing on why either war began (apart from germany perhaps feeling left out of the colonial spoils leading up to WWI)

Aaaand Austria annexing Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire.

yeah i'm starting to lose coherence - i meant to type world war i, or "the great war", but i mixed up my roman numerals. :) my point is there's this certain school of thought that holds that the holocaust is a unique, or at least an unprecedented, event in human history, and that hitler was a uniquely evil person, and i'm not sure i'm entirely convinced of that.

there was definitely nothing unique about Hitler's Antisemitism, but his level of industrial murder was truly unique and still hasn't been "bettered" over such a relatively short period of time.

Otm. The more I read about other atrocities, the more the gas chambers seem unique. There's been other camps, plenty of other genocides, but the gas chambers are something else.

DV, formerly of this parish, has been blogging “100 years ago today in the Great War”, starting with the assassination (and going on until the treaty, though it’ll probably be a little quiet for the last bit).

https://ww1live.wordpress.com/

Traditionally, if you want to kill millions, you engineer a famine. Your victims will even voluntarily bury the dead for you. This is still the primary tool for killing people on that scale.

Hitler wanted to hand-pick his victims out of a much larger population, so a continent-wide famine was not the appropriate tool. Industrialized and particularized murder on the scale of multiple millions was indeed a new thing under the sun.

he had a starvation plan for Putin's dad, makes u think!

The Dan Carlin Hardcore History “Blueprint for Armageddon” episodes are still available if you want 27 hours of WWI podcasting

> (possibly inaccurate) common opinion that WWI-era Germany was much much more honorable

Rape of Belgium

6,000 Belgians were killed, and 17,700 died during expulsion, deportation, imprisonment, or a death sentence by court. 25,000 homes and other buildings in 837 communities were destroyed in 1914 alone, and 1.5 million Belgians (20% of the entire population) fled

Worth noting that Max Hasting's (Catastrophe 1914) earliest work on WWII came 56 years ago, in the 26 episode BBC series The Great War. It's all on YouTube, and benefits from having many interviews with participants.

WWII WWI. Funny how the fingers just automatically put the second 'I' on as swiftly as they'd type a 'the'...

anyone itt seen Westfront 1918?

mookieproof I picked up Keegan's The Face of Battle today, looking forward to checking it out. (This version, maybe a first edition?)

http://mcsmith.blogs.com/.a/6a00d83451ccc469e20133ee6ae367970b-pi

The Guns of August remains completely fascinating, I'm especially intrigued by the BEF's seeming attempt at avoiding battle entirely due to needing rest for "ten days"(!) after initial battles, all at the insistence of their ironically named commander John French (who wanted to get the British back home ASAP), while the armies of France on no rest tried to figure out a way to slow down the German armies and save Paris. The fortunes of so many generals rise and fall within days.

That book is one of my very favorite among several thousand. The descriptions of soldier level circumstances at Agincourt and Waterloo are just as immersive as those for the Somme.

You'll find, having read this, that other descriptions underplay the hopeless situation faced by the factory workers and miners who climbed over the ramparts on 1 July 1916.

Keegan's other historical works are competent, but IMO none are classics.

"Around the fortress of Verdun, site of the worst French battle, not a living thing grew, not a bird sang. The coal mines on which the French economy depended for its power were flooded; the factories they would have supplied had been razed or carted away into Germany. Six thousand square miles of France, which before the war had produced 20 percent of its crops, 90 percent of its iron ore and 65 percent of its steel, were utterly ruined.

I find it interesting that parts of the Rouge Zone are still completely dangerous and uninhabitable a 100 years later. Still littered with toxic chemicals, arsenic, unexploded ordnance etc. Apparently the German's early chemical warfare game involving 65 million shells has left the place so toxic that the arsenic levels in the soil have actually risen by 17% recently. That is some apocalyptic shit! In comparison the Chernobyl site has recovered so much better + faster than this hellhole.

that is nuts

it is one fucked up place that is still killing nature a century after the event.

omar, I'm a fan of Margaret McMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World , which paints indelible portraits of Wilson, Orlando, their subalterns, and the wounded Clemenceau.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 14 March 2018 23:45 (one month ago) Bookmark

just started this today, and am already massively enjoying the character studies of Clemenceau, Wilson and the Welsh windbag you didn't mention! Clemenceau with his one boiled egg for lunch military asceticism, comes across like a total arsehole, but an extremely interesting one.

http://www.uticaod.com/news/20180924/100-years-ago-us-fought-its-deadliest-battle-in-france

100th anniversary of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which resulted in over 26k Americans killed (along w/28k Germans.)

Everyone should read The Guns of August.

all time.

in terms of descriptive place-setting, Carlin's blueprint for armageddon podcast is very good. insanity made into an international imperative, and almost a death sentence for that generation.

derp I just scrolled up and saw prev recommendation. yup.

Margaret MacMillan picked The Guns of August as "the book that changed me" and was waxing lyrical about its novelistic qualities and colourful character sketches, sounds pretty good.

Guns of August is an all-time classic of narrative history and can withstand comparison with any history ever written.

*impeccably-observed silence*

also lest we forget: fake tuomas

haha wait yeah how is THIS the ww1 thread

anyway i'm paying respects the proper way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDmhP6YiN6s

xps

Guns of August is indeed an excellent narrative history. not got to the RIP Scandinavian sock-puppet fusiliers chapter yet.

I was listening to someone quite bad on R4 making the observation that back in the 60's a common response was to tell WW1 veterans to stfu when the ones that weren't too shook to talk about it went into reminiscence mode.

Kevin Coyne wrote a song about that once...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1E_H9dBwws

I’m pretty lucky that I don’t live/work somewhere where I’m likely to be challenged for not adequately celebrating the awesomeness of war and pinning a shitty piece of prison slave labour-produced tat to my clothes

As a happy consequence of this I have completely forgotten World War I

I don't know where that actually happens though, if it happens at all. I saw my first ever white poppy yesterday.

ban either tuomas

BREAKING: World leaders have missed the exact moment to commemorate the armistice that ended World War I.

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 11, 2018

i mean come on

at least putin can say "pre-gregorian calender mate, no one understands that bollox"

You've got one thing to do and you can't even do that.

you had 11 11/11 job

lol

Putin can piss off those weirdo Romanov cultists as much as he likes. though I'm not sure they gaf either tbh!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DruEouKXgAIIfpj.jpg

Otto Dix otm

otm indeed.

Wonder if that etching was an influence on the editors who created the opening credits of the BBCs 1964 The Great War series.
I watched it all during a week of deep depression in 2014, it didn't help.

So why is Theresa May in London today?

brexit

World War I, hence not all leaders in attendance are European. But I'm probably putting too much thought into this.

i thought this was one correct lesson to the very high % of usa that don't understand it this way

1. It can't be underlined enough how important the First World War is to France's national self-conception. Trump's failure to attend the memorial is a huge diplomatic insult.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 10, 2018

well, i didn't mean the "insult" part, i meant the scale of ww1 relative to ww2 in popular perceptions

I was somewhat astonished to read casualty numbers in WWI vs those in WWII: overall the total number killed in the latter dwarfs the former but France was fully engaged in battle for all of WWI vs their swift surrender in WWII. Once people also understand what France went through the first time it becomes easier to understand why there was not as much drive to fight Germany to the death again (a nation that remained in the throes of a violent nationalistic sickness that one defeat wasn’t enough to cast away.)

I doubt trump knows a single thing about that war

i remember my dad at a memorial day parade in the 70s trying to explain to 5 or 6 y/o me why the (very few) wwi veterans were so important and notable because of the immensity of the great war in world history.

His wife is Slovenian yet he still blamed the Baltic states for the crimes they committed in Yugoslavia. 'Cause it sounds just like the Balkans, duh!

xp

I've heard it said before that the failure of The Maginot Line and surrender of France was much more down to a widespread fatalistic malaise amongst the French military than any stroke of genius from Manstein. It might not tell the full story, but I think there is some substance to that.

And in France they still have 1200 square kilometres of land that is still a century later, an uninhabitable toxic wasteland. Tho I'd have let it slide if they had invaded England and done the same to Middlesbrough.

And in France they still have 1200 square kilometres of land that is still a century later, an uninhabitable toxic wasteland.

Remember learning about this some years back. Like a pre-nuclear Chernobyl.

the only difference is that Chernobyl has become quite a nature reserve in some parts and you read stories of people moving back there recently. Zone Rouge is still lifeless and deadly, it's quite mindblowing really!

"According to the Sécurité Civile agency in charge, at the current rate no fewer than 700 more years will be needed to clean the area completely."

So why is Theresa May in London today?

Putin RSVP'd first is my punt tbh

"Remembrance Day: In pictures"

meh, no decent Up The Arse Corner contenders this year.

I'd have let it slide if they had invaded England and done the same to Middlesbrough

how would we tell?

no such thing as "uninhabitable toxic wasteland" in Real England!

so this Peter Jackson doc is on bbc2 tonight and its just mindblowing seeing all this footage in high-ish def colour.

how is that P-Jax doc? I saw a trailer and it is really something else seeing the film transformed in this manner, hoping it's worth a view and isn't just a gimmick on which to hinge a thinly sketched statement.

I thought it was very bland + heavily sentimentalised Our Boys type claptrap, and aside from the old movie stock tarted up by CGI - with absolutely nothing interesting to say and with no coherent narrative. Although I'm sure it made Tommy Robinson cry into his beer. Just basically the type of shite you'd see playing on one of the screens at the imperial war museum.

Saw most of The Long Shadow repeated on BBC4 the last few weeks. That was interesting and challenging even when I was sceptical of some of the interpretations he made.

I want a full book about this story.

I want a movie too. I want the whole damn thing.

a gay love story of the 1st world war’s year.

[thread by @guillemclua im just a translator]. pic.twitter.com/I3CkgKd1EO

— maaayyy. (@brendonsexual) December 7, 2018

Well, the chances are probably quite high..

https://guillemclua.com/comunicado-sobre-el-hilo-de-twitter-emilyxaver/

Rather!