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The Cambridge History of the First
World War
This first volume of The Cambridge History of the First World War
provides a comprehensive account of the war’s military history. An
international team of leading historians chart how a war made possible by
globalisation and imperial expansion unfolded into catastrophe, growing
year by year in scale and destructive power far beyond what anyone had
anticipated in 1914.
Adopting a global perspective, the volume analyses the spatial impact of
the war and the subsequent ripple effects that occurred both regionally and
across the world. It explores how imperial powers devoted vast reserves of
manpower and material to their war efforts, and how, by doing so, they
changed the political landscape of the world order. It also charts the moral,
political and legal implications of the changing character of war and, in
particular, the collapse of the distinction between civilian and military
targets.
JAY WINTER is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University
and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University. He is one of the
founders of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the International Museum of
the Great War, in Péronne, Somme, France. In 1997 he received an Emmy
award for the best documentary series of the year as co-producer and co-
writer of The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, an eight-
hour series broadcast on PBS and the BBC, shown subsequently in twenty-
eight countries. His previous publications include Sites of Memory, Sites of
Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995);
Remembering War (2006) and Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2006).
The Historial Museum of the Great War
Péronne, Somme
The Historial is an internationally acclaimed museum that presents the First

World War in a unique way. Located on the battlefields of the Somme, the
museum presents and compares the presence of the three main belligerent
nations on the Western Front – Great Britain, France and Germany. It
unfolds the story both of the front and of civilians under the pressure of war.
The Battle of the Somme in 1916 caused over a million casualties in less
than five months of fighting. The ground would be fought over again in
1918. By the end of the war, combatants from well over twenty-five nations
had fought on the Somme, making it the place where the war truly became a
World War.
Historial de la Grande Guerre/Thiepval Château de Péronne

B. P. 20063
80201 Péronne Cedex
www.historial.org
Members of the Editorial Committee
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Nicolas Beaupré
Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand and Institut Universitaire de
France
Annette Becker
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and Institut Universitaire de
France
Jean-Jacques Becker
Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
Annie Deperchin
Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire, Université de Lille 2
Caroline Fontaine
Centre international de Recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre,
Péronne, Somme
John Horne
Trinity College Dublin
Heather Jones
London School of Economics and Political Science
Gerd Krumeich
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Philippe Nivet
Université de Picardie Jules Verne
Anne Rasmussen
Université de Strasbourg
Laurence Van Ypersele

Université Catholique de Louvain
Arndt Weinrich
Deutsche Historisches Institut, Paris
Jay Winter
Yale University
The Cambridge History of the First
World War
VOLUME I Global War
Edited by
Jay Winter
Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University

The Editorial Committee of the International Research Centre of
the Historial de la Grande Guerre
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press,
New York
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the
pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international
levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521763851
© Cambridge University Press 2014
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the
provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of
any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge
University Press.
First published 2014

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge History of the First World War / general editor, Jay Winter,
Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University.
pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-52176385-1 (v. 1) – ISBN 978-0-521-76653-1 (v. 2) – ISBN
978-0-521-76684-5 (v. 3) 1. World War, 1914–1918. 2. World War, 1914–
1918 – Political aspects.
3. World War, 1914–1918 – Social aspects. I. Winter, J. M., editor.
II. Title: History of the First World War.
D521.C36 2013
940.3–dc23
2013007649
ISBN 978-0-52176385-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites
is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of illustrations
List of maps
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
General Introduction
Jay Winter
Introduction to Volume I
Jay Winter
Part I A Narrative History

1 Origins
Volker R. Berghahn
2 1914: Outbreak
Jean-Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich
3 1915: Stalemate
4 1916: Impasse
Robin Prior
5 1917: Global war
Michael S. Neiberg
6 1918: Endgame
Christoph Mick
7 1919: Aftermath
Bruno Cabanes
Part II Theatres of War

8 The Western Front
Robin Prior
9 The Eastern Front
Holger Afflerbach
10 The Italian Front
Nicola Labanca
11 The Ottoman Front
Robin Prior
12 The war at sea
Paul Kennedy
13 The air war
John H. Morrow, Jr.
14 Strategic command
Gary Sheffield and Stephen Badsey
Part III World War

15 The imperial framework
John H. Morrow, Jr.
16 Africa
Bill Nasson
17 The Ottoman Empire
Mustafa Aksakal
18 Asia
Guoqi Xu
19 North America
Jennifer D. Keene
20 Latin America
Olivier Compagnon
Part IV Rules of Engagement, Laws of War and War Crimes

21 Atrocities and war crimes
John Horne
22 Genocide
Hans-Lukas Kieser and Donald Bloxham
23 The laws of war
Annie Deperchin
24 Visual essay: Global war
Jay Winter
Bibliographical essays
Index
Illustrations
8.1 Distribution of German forces 1914–18 by front
Plate section I
All illustrations are from the Collection of the Historial de la Grande
Guerre, Péronne (Somme), unless otherwise stated.
Photography: Yazid Medmoun (Conseil Général de la Somme), unless
otherwise stated.
1
German colonial clock: Our future lies on the seas.
2
Exhibition on German East-Africa, Leipzig, 1897.
3
Sir Edward Grey’s juggling act: dangerous diplomacy.
4
German toy model warship.
5
Jean Jaurès assassinated.
6
Great Britain Declares War, Daily Mirror, 5 August 1914.
7
Britain and France giving Germany a final rinse on the Marne, 1914.
8
Allied military leaders 1914, painted ceramic plate.
9
German military commanders 1914, painted ceramic plate.
10
Two British naval victories, 1914.
11
Hindenburg and Ludendorff celebrating the victory at Tannenberg.
12
Dardanelles defended, 1915, ceramic plate.
13
German sailors in Ottoman uniforms on horseback.
14
HMS Chester with damage from the Battle of Jutland.
15
Pitcher: Haig, the man of push and go.
16
Air war: Captain Guynemer in flight.
17
Air war: biplane over Compiègne.
18
German soldier near Fort Vaux at Verdun.
19
Péronne town hall destroyed, 1917.
20
Panel left on destroyed town hall of Péronne by German soldiers, 1917:
‘Don’t be angry just be amazed’.
21
The decorated ceiling of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice destroyed by
Austrian fire.
22
Statuette of Lenin.
23
‘Anti-Semitism is the enemy’: Russian revolutionary poster.
24
Black American troops in France.
25
Allied signatories of the Armistice at Compiègne, 11 November 1918.
26
Homecoming.
27
Commemorative plate: U-boat 9.
28
Model submarine made of bullets.
29
Figurine of an African soldier.
30
North African soldier’s family war album.
31
Model airplane.
Plate section II
24.1
Soldiers of the French Empire in a German prisoner-of-war camp, 1917.
© Musée d’histoire Contemporaine, Bibliothèque de documentation
internationale contemporaine, Paris
24.2
French African soldier transported to a German casualty clearing centre
for the evacuation of the wounded, 1914.
24.3
Indian soldier signing up for military service with his thumb print.
© Imperial War Museum, London
24.4
Egyptian physicians treat an Asian labourer for beri-beri.
24.5
Postcard of a black French soldier with a white nurse.
24.6
Dying Serbian soldier, Isle of Vido, near Corfu.
24.7
Charon’s barque, Isle of Vido, Corfu.
24.8
A Jewish family in a field, Volhynia.
© Leo Baeck Institute, New York
24.9
Jewish prostitutes, Volhynia.
24.10
Austro-Hungarian mountain troops in the vertical war on the Italian
Front.
24.11
The white war, the Kosturino Ridge on the Macedonian front.
24.12
All quiet on the Eastern Front, Volhynia.
24.13
Destroyed village on the Eastern Front, Volhynia.
24.14
Airplane hauled by horses, Volhynia.
24.15
HMS Inflexible, near the Falkland Islands, 1914.
24.16
A Japanese cruiser off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia, 1917.
George Metcalf Archival Collection © Canadian War Museum, Ottawa
24.17
Horses stuck in the mud, Western Front.
24.18
Passchendaele, 1917.
24.19
The uncanny: part of a horse in a tree.
© PH coll. 781, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
24.20
Horses bringing provisions and supplies to soldiers on the Western
Front.
24.21
Poster announcing a Grand Carnival in aid of sick and wounded war
horses, December 1917.
24.22
A broken-down tank near Passchendaele, 1917.
George Metcalf Archival Collection © Canadian War Museum, Ottawa
24.23
Flame-throwers on the Eastern Front.
24.24
Gas attack on the Western Front, I.
© CBWInfo
24.25
Gas attack on the Western Front, II.
© Science Photo Library Ltd, London
24.26
French soldiers with gas masks.
Artist: Maurice Le Poitevin (1886–1952)
Aquarelle and charcoal drawing
24.27
Mules and soldiers wearing gas masks.
24.28
A soldier wounded by mustard gas.
© Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa
24.29
Children who survived the Armenian genocide, Erevan, 1919.
© Melville Chater/National Geographic Stock
24.30
American aid for the survivors of the Armenian genocide, 1919.
© Melville Chater/National Geographic Stock
24.31
Food aid carried by a camel column for victims of the famine in Russia.
© Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
Every effort has been made to contact the relevant copyright-holders for the
images reproduced in this book. In the event of any error, the publisher will
be pleased to make corrections in any reprints or future editions.
Maps
4.1 The Battle of Verdun and its aftermath
5.1 The Nivelle offensive, April 1917
5.2 Passchendaele: waterlogged areas
6.1 Advances by the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, 1917–18
6.2 Territorial divisions under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March
1918
6.3 German spring offensive, 1918
6.4 The Armistice, 1918, and position of opposing forces in France
and Belgium
8.1 German operations in France and Belgium, 1914
8.2 The Battle of the Somme, 1916
8.3 German withdrawal, 1917, Operation Alberich
8.4 The German offensive, 1918
8.5 Breaking the Hindenburg Line, autumn 1918
9.1 The Eastern Front, 1914–18
9.2 The conquest of Poland and the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów
9.3 The Brusilov offensive
10.
1 The war in Italy, 1915–18
10.
2 Caporetto and after
10.
3 Retreat of the Italian army after Caporetto
10.
4 Lines reached by the Italian army in late 1918
11.
1 The Gallipoli campaign
11.
2 Anzac landing area
11.
3 Deployment of Allied forces landing at Gallipoli, 23–25 April
1915
12.
1 Major naval engagements in the North Sea, 1914–16
12.
2 Allied losses in the Mediterranean, 1917
12.
3 Allied convoy routes in the Atlantic
12.
4 British merchant shipping sunk, 1917
13.
1 Strategic bombing of Britain, 1914–18
16.
1 The war in East Africa, 1917–18
18.
1 The war in Asia
18.
2 Sources of manpower for British Labour Corps, 1914–18
22.
1 The Armenian genocide
Contributors
Holger Afflerbach is Professor of Central European History at the

University of Leeds.
Mustafa Aksakal is Associate Professor of History and Modern
Turkish Studies at Georgetown University.
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau is Directeur d’études at the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, and President of
the Centre International de Recherche de l’Historial de la Grande
Guerre at Péronne.
Stephen Badsey is Professor of Conflict Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton.
Annette Becker is Professor of Modern History at the University of
Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and a senior member of the Institut
Universitaire de France. She is Vice-President of the Centre
International de Recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre at
Péronne.
Jean-Jacques Becker is Professor Emeritus at the Université Paris
Ouest Nanterre La Défense and founding President of the International
Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne,
Somme.
Volker R. Berghahn is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia
University.
Donald Bloxham is Richard Pares Professor of European History at
the University of Edinburgh.
Bruno Cabanes is Associate Professor in the Department of History at
Yale University.
Olivier Compagnon is Professor of Contemporary Latin American
History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3.
Annie Deperchin is Professor of Law at the Centre d’Histoire
Judiciaire, Université de Lille 2.
John Horne is Professor of Modern European History at Trinity
College Dublin, where he was the first Director of the Centre for War
Studies, 2008–10.
Jennifer D. Keene is Professor of History and Chair of the History
Department at Chapman University, Orange, California.
Paul Kennedy is J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History and
Director of International Security Studies at Yale University.
Hans-Lukas Kieser is adjunct Professor of Modern History at the
Universität Zürich, specialising in the late Ottoman Empire and the
Republic of Turkey, and on interactions between the Near East and the
transatlantic world in general.
Gerd Krumeich is Professor Emeritus of Contemporary History at the
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf and Vice-President of the
International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre,
Péronne, Somme.
Nicola Labanca is Professor of Contemporary History in the
Department of Historical Sciences at the Università degli Studi di
Siena.
Christoph Mick is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Warwick.
John H. Morrow, Jr. is Franklin Professor and Chairman of the
History Department at the University of Georgia.
Bill Nasson is Professor of History at the University of Stellenbosch.
Michael S. Neiberg is Professor of History in the Department of
National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Robin Prior has been Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School of
History and Politics at the University of Adelaide since 2007.
Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton.
Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University
and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University.
Guoqi Xu is Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong.
Acknowledgements
The completion of this three-volume history of the First World War would
not have been possible without the support and assistance of the staff of the
Historial de la Grand Guerre, Péronne, Somme, France. This museum,
opened in 1992, was the first international museum of the 1914–18 conflict
to give equal treatment to both sides and to its global character. The fruit of
a generation of work in cultural history, the Historial was designed and its
museography developed through its Research Centre, which began its work
in 1989. We historians were at the heart of the project throughout its
inception and remain so today.
The Historial is funded by the Conseil Général de la Somme. It reflects
local pride and a commitment to the preservation of the traces of the Great
War embedded in the landscape and cultural life of the Department of the
Somme and of the wider world that shared the catastrophe of the Great War.
In the Conseil Général, we are indebted to Christian Manable, Président,
and Marc Pellan, Directeur de la Culture. At the Historial itself, thanks are
due to Pierre Linéatte, Président, Historial de la Grande Guerre; Marie-
Pascale Prévost-Bault, Conservateur en chef; Hervé François, Directeur;
and the following staff members: Christine Cazé (a very large vote of
thanks); Frederick Hadley; Catherine Mouquet; Séverine Lavallard. In
addition, Yazid Medmoun was of essential help in providing us with
photographs of the Historial’s unique collection, visible in the illustrations
selected for this three-volume history.
This transnational account of the history of the Great War was assembled
through an editorial board composed of the members of the Comité
directeur of the Research Centre of the Historial. As editor-in-chief of this
project, I simply could not have even begun the task of creating this history
without being part of a collective of historians with whom I have worked
for more than two decades. Their shared vision is at the heart of these three
volumes, and it is to these people and numerous other colleagues in the
field of Great War studies working alongside us that the deepest vote of
thanks is due. May I add a special note of gratitude for Rebecca Wheatley
for her help in preparing the maps we have used?
Our work took the following form. After the table of contents was set,
and authors’ assignments distributed, each section of the book was placed
in the hands of section editors, who were responsible for the development
and completion of individual chapters and bibliographical essays for each
chapter in their sections. The chapters they approved were sent to the
editorial board as a whole, and I, as editor-in-chief, ensured their
completeness, and the compatibility of their style and approach with our
global and transnational objective. Helen McPhail and Harvey Mendelsohn
did yeoman’s work and more in translating French and German draft
chapters into English, respectively. An essential part of the coordination of
this vast project rested on the shoulders of Caroline Fontaine, Director of
the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre at
Péronne. For any errors that still remain, I take full responsibility.
General Introduction
Jay Winter Writing history is always a dialogue. When historians put pen to
paper, they carry with them the accumulated interpretations their colleagues
have developed over time. Frequently, it is against the grain of these
interpretations, in opposition to them, in exasperation with them, that
historians decide to write. To be sure, there are many occasions when
historians concur with their colleagues or draw their attention to previously
untapped sources on matters of common interest. But most of the time
historians argue, make objections, and present through their writing a
portrait of the past different from those available in print.
This is true both within a generation of historians and between

generations. Today’s scholars engage with colleagues still at work, and they
do so dialogically. The critical point, though, it that the dialogue is also with
those historians in the past whose works still inspire reflection,
confirmation, elaboration and, on occasion, refutation. We historians are
part of a very long engagement with the Great War, an engagement that will
continue long after we cease to practise our profession.
The dialogic nature of historical practice therefore makes it necessary to
place one generation’s thinking about the Great War alongside those of
early generations. And we are now the fourth generation of historians who
have approached the history of the war of 1914–18.
There have been three earlier generations of writing to which current
scholars refer, sometimes explicitly, most times, implicitly.1 The first was
what I will term ‘the Great War generation’. These were scholars, former
soldiers and public officials who had direct knowledge of the war either
through their own military service or through alternative service to their
country’s war effort. They wrote history from the top down, by and large
through direct experience of the events they described. The central actor
portrayed in these books was the state, either in its dirigiste forms at home
or at the front. The most voluminous of these efforts was the 133-book
effort to write the economic and social history of the war, sponsored by the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Most of these tomes were
penned by men who helped run the war or who had to deal with its
aftershocks.
This first generation was also composed of men whose memoirs went
over the ground again for evident purposes of self-justification. This took
many forms, from books by generals and cabinet ministers about their
contributions to victory, to exculpatory reminiscences about those trying to
evade responsibility for defeat. There were also official histories, many of
which were written by former soldiers for the benefit of the various national
staff colleges, trying one at a time to frame ‘lessons’ for the future. These
works were frequently highly technical and so detailed that they took
decades to appear. The delay diminished their significance for planning the
next war in more efficient ways.
The second generation may be termed the generation ‘fifty years on’.
This group of historians wrote in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote not
only the history of politics and decision-making at the top, but also the
history of society, defined as the history of social structures and social
movements. Of course the two kinds of history, political and social, went
together, but they were braided together in different ways than in the
interwar years. Many of these scholars had the benefit of sources unknown
or unavailable before the Second World War. The ‘fifty year rule’ enabling
scholars to consult state papers meant that all kinds of documents could be
exploited by those writing in the 1960s, which threw new light on the
history of the war.
In the 1960s, there was much more use of film and visual evidence than
in the first generation, though in the interwar years battlefield guides and
collections of photographs of devastation and weaponry were produced in
abundance. After the Second World War, the age of television history
began, and attracted an audience to historical narratives greater than ever
before. This became evident in the size of the audience for new and
powerful television documentaries about the war. In 1964 the BBC
launched its second channel with the monumental twenty-six-part history of
the war, exhaustively researched in film archives and vetted by an
impressive group of military historians. Many of the millions of people who
saw this series had lived through the war. In 1964, the young men who had
fought and survived were mostly above the age of seventy, but what made
the series a major cultural event was that the families of the survivors, and
of those who did not come back, integrated these war stories into their own
family narratives. The Great War thus escaped from the academy into the
much more lucrative and populous field of public history, represented by
museums, special exhibitions, films and now television. By the 1960s, the
Imperial War Museum in London had surpassed many other sites as the
premier destination of visitors to London. It remains to this day a major
attraction in the capital, just as does the Australian War Memorial, an
equally impressive museum and site of remembrance in the Australian
capital, Canberra.
There was more than a little nostalgia in the celebration by survivors of
‘fifty years on’. By 1964, the European world that went to war in 1914 no
longer existed. All the major imperial powers that joined the struggle had
been radically transformed. The British Empire was a thing of the past; so
was Algérie française, and the French mission civilisatrice in Africa and
South Asia. The German Empire was gone, and so were most of its eastern
territories, ceded to Poland and Russia after 1945. Austria, Hungary and
Yugoslavia were small independent states. And while the Soviet Union
resembled Tsarist Russia in some respects, these continuities were dwarfed
by the massive transformation of Soviet society since 1917.
The nostalgia of 1964 was, therefore, for a world which had fallen apart
in the Great War. For many people, the blemishes and ugliness of much of
that world were hidden by a kind of sepia-toned reverence for the days
before the conflict. ‘Never such innocence, / Never before or since’, wrote
Philip Larkin in a poem whose title referred not to 1914, but to the more
archaic ‘MCMXIV’. This poem was published in 1964.
In much historical writing, as much as in historical documentaries, the
dramatic tension derived from juxtaposing this set of pre-lapsarian images
with the devastation and horror of the Western Front, and with the sense of
decline, a loss of greatness, which marked the post-1945 decades in Britain
and beyond. Whatever was wrong with the world seemed to be linked to
1914, to the time when a multitude of decent men went off to fight one war
and wound up fighting a much more terrible one.
Decencies were betrayed, some argued, by a blind elite prepared to
sacrifice the lives of the masses for vapid generalisations like ‘glory’ or
‘honour’. This populist strain may be detected in much writing about the
war in the 1960s, and in the study of social movements which arose out of
it. The fiftieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landing provoked a surge of
interest in the Great War in Australia and New Zealand, where the loss of
the battle was eclipsed by the birth of these two nations. Similarly heroic
were narratives of the Bolshevik Revolution, celebrating its fiftieth
anniversary in 1967. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many scholars
told us much more about the history of labour, of women, of ordinary
people during the conflict than had scholars working in the interwar years.
The third generation may be termed the ‘Vietnam generation’. Its
practitioners started writing in the 1970s and 1980s, when a general
reaction against military adventures like the war in Vietnam took place in
Britain and Europe as well as in the United States. This was also the period
in Europe when public opinion turned against the nuclear deterrent, and
when the 1973 Middle Eastern war had dangerous effects on the economies
of the developed world. The glow of the ‘just war’ of 1939–45 had faded,
and a new generation was more open to a view that war was a catastrophe
to both winners and losers alike.
This was the environment in which darker histories of the Great War
emerged. There were still scholars who insisted that the Great War was a
noble cause, won by those who had right on their side. But there were
others who came to portray the Great War as a futile exercise, a tragedy, a
stupid, horrendous waste of lives, producing nothing of great value aside
from the ordinary decencies and dignities thrown away by blind and
arrogant leaders.
The most influential works were written by three very different scholars.
Paul Fussell, a veteran of the Second World War who was wounded in
combat, produced a classic literary study, The Great War and Modern
Memory, in 1975.2 He was a professor of literature, who fashioned an
interpretation of how soldiers came to understand the war they found in
1914–18 as an ironic event, one in which anticipation and outcome were
wildly different. It was a time when the old romantic language of battle
seemed to lose its meaning. Writers twisted older forms to suit the new
world of trench warfare, one in which mass death was dominant and where,
under artillery and gas bombardment, soldiers lost any sense that war was a
glorious thing. Fussell termed this style the ‘ironic’ style and challenged us
to see war writing throughout the twentieth century as built upon the
foundations laid by the British soldier writers of the Great War.
Sir John Keegan produced a book a year later which paralleled Fussell’s.
An instructor in the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, but a man whose
childhood infirmities ensured he would never go to war, Keegan asked the
disarmingly simple question: ‘Is battle possible?’ The answer, published in
The Face of Battle in 1976,3 was perhaps yes, long ago, but now in the
twentieth century, battle presented men with terrifying challenges. The men
who fought at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 could run to the next hill to
save their lives. Foot soldiers converging on Waterloo four centuries later
could arrive a day late. But in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, there was
no way out. Given the industrialisation of warfare, the air above the
trenches on the Somme was filled with lethal projectiles from which there
was no escape. Mass death in that battle and in the other great conflict of
1916 at Verdun, pushed soldiers beyond the limits of human endurance.
Nothing like the set battles of the First World War followed in the 1939–45
war, though Stalingrad came close to replicating the horror of the Somme
and Verdun. Here was a military historian’s book, but one whose starting
point was humane and to a degree psychological. The soldiers’ breaking
point was Keegan’s subject, and with power, subtlety and technical
authority, he opened a new chapter in the study of military history as a
humane discipline.
In 1979, Eric Leed, a historian steeped in the literature of anthropology,
wrote a similarly path-breaking book. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity
in World War I4 borrowed subtly from the work of the anthropologist Victor
Turner. He had examined people in a liminal condition, no longer part of an
older world from which they had come, and unable to escape from the
midpoint, the no-man’s-land, in which they found themselves. Here is the
emotional landscape of the trench soldiers of the Great War. They were men
who could never come home again, for whom war was their home, and who
recreated it in the years following the Armistice. Here was the world of
shell-shocked men, but also that of the Freikorps, militarised freebooters of
the immediate post-war period, who prepared the ground for the Nazis.
In all three cases, and by reference to very different sources, the subject at
hand was the tragedy of the millions of men who went into the trenches and
who came out, if at all, permanently marked by the experience. They bore
what some observers of the survivors of Hiroshima termed the ‘death
imprint’; the knowledge that their survival was a purely arbitrary accident.
Here we may see some traces of the anti-nuclear movement, putting
alongside one another Japanese civilians and Great War soldiers. The moral
and political differences between the two cases are evident, but the
wreckage of war, so these writers seemed to say, is at the heart of the
civilisation in which we live. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that
these three books, alongside others of the time, helped create a tragic
interpretation of the Great War, one in which victimhood and violence were
braided together in such a way as to tell a fully European story of the war,
one to which the founders of the European Union clearly reacted. From the
1970s on, European integration was an attempt to move away from the
notion of the nation-state as that institution which had the right to go to war,
as Raymond Aron put it. The result has been a progressive diminution of
the role of the military in the political and social life of most European
countries. James Sheehan asked the question in a recent book, Where Have
All the Soldiers Gone?5 The answer is, they and most (though not all) of
their leaders have fled from the landscape of war so devastatingly presented
in the works of Fussell, Keegan, Leed and others.
Now we are in a fourth generation of writing on the Great War. I would
like to term it the ‘transnational generation’. This generation has a global
outlook. The term ‘global’ describes both the tendency to write about the
war in more than European terms and to see the conflict as trans-European,
transatlantic and beyond. Here was the first war among industrialised
countries, reaching the Middle East and Africa, the Falkland Islands and
China, drawing soldiers into the epicentre in Europe from Vancouver to
Capetown to Bombay and to Adelaide. Here was a war that gave birth to the
Turkey of Atatürk and to the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin. Demands
for decolonisation arose from a war that had promised self-determination
and had produced very little of the kind. Economic troubles arose directly
out of the war, and these were sufficiently serious to undermine the capacity
of the older imperial powers to pay for their imperial and quasi-imperial
footholds around the world.
A word or two may be useful to distinguish the international approach,
common to many of the older Cambridge histories, from what I have
termed the transnational approach to the history of the Great War. For
nearly a century, the Great War was framed in terms of a system of
international relations in which the national and imperial levels of conflict
and cooperation were taken as given. Transnational history does not start
with one state and move on to others, but takes multiple levels of historical
experience as given, levels which are both below and above the national
level.6 Thus the history of mutiny, developed in Volume II, is transnational,
in that it happened in different armies for different reasons, some of which
are strikingly similar to the sources of protest and refusal in other armies.
So is the history of finance, technology, war economies, logistics and
command. The history of commemoration, cited in the discussion on
remembrance in Volume III, also happened on many levels, and the national
is not necessarily the most significant, not the most enduring. The peace
treaties following the Great War, discussed in Volume II, show the meaning
of the transnational in other ways. Now we can see that the war was both
the apogee and the beginning of the end of imperial power, spanning and
eroding national and imperial boundaries. Erez Manela’s work on ‘the
Wilsonian moment’ is a case in point. He reconfigures the meaning of the
Versailles settlement by exploring its unintended consequences in
stimulating movements of national liberation in Egypt, India, Korea and
China. Instead of telling us about the interplay of Great Power politics, he
shows how non-Europeans invented their own version of Wilson in their
search for a kind of self-determination that he, alongside Lloyd George,
Clemenceau and Orlando, was unprepared to offer to them. Who could have
imagined that the decision these men took to award rights to Shandong
province, formerly held by Germany, not to China but to Japan would lead
to major rioting and the formation of the Chinese Communist Party?7
Historians of the revolutionary moment in Europe itself between 1917
and 1921 have approached their subject more and more as a transnational
phenomenon, as we can see in Volume II. After all, both revolutionaries and
the forces of order who worked to destroy them were well aware of what
may be termed the cultural transfer of revolutionary (and counter-
revolutionary) strategy, tactics and violence. In recent years, these
exchanges have been analysed at the urban and regional levels, helping us
to see the complexity of a story somewhat obscured by treating it solely in
national terms. Comparative urban history has established the striking
parallels between the challenges urban populations faced in different
warring states. Now we can answer in the affirmative the question as to
whether there is a metropolitan history of warfare. In important respects, the
residents of Paris, London and Berlin shared more with one another than
they did with their respective rural compatriots. These experienced
communities had a visceral reality somewhat lacking even in the imagined
communities of the nation.
Here we must be sensitive to the way contemporaries used the language
of nation and empire to describe loyalties and affiliations of a much smaller
level of aggregation. A journalist asking British troops on the Western Front
whether they were fighting for the Empire, got a ‘yes’ from one soldier. His
mates asked him what he meant. The answer was that he was fighting for
the Empire Music Hall in Hackney, a working-class district of London. This
attachment to the local and the familiar was utterly transnational.8
Another subject now understood more in transnational than in
international terms is the history of women in wartime, discussed in Volume
III. Patriarchy, family formation and the persistence of gender inequality
were transnational realities in the period of the Great War. Furthermore, the
war’s massive effects on civilian life precipitated a movement of
populations of staggering proportions, discussed in Volume III. Refugees in
France, the Netherlands and Britain from the area occupied by the Western
Front numbered in the millions. So did those fleeing the fighting in the
borderlands spanning the old German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian
Empires. One scholar has estimated that perhaps 20 per cent of the
population of Russia was on the move, heading for safety wherever it could
be found during the Great War. And that population current turned into a
torrent throughout Eastern Europe during the period of chaos surrounding
the Armistice. What made it worse was that the United States closed its
gates to such immigrants, ending one of the most extraordinary periods of
transcontinental migration in history. Thus population transfer, forced or
precipitated by war, transformed the ethnic character of many parts of
Greece, Turkey, the Balkans and the vast tract of land from the Baltic states
to the Caucasus. Such movements antedated the war, but they grew
exponentially after 1914. This is why it makes sense to see the Great War as
having occasioned the emergence of that icon of transnational history in the
twentieth century, the refugee, with his or her pitiful belongings slung over
shoulders or carts. The photographic evidence of this phenomenon is
immense, as we see in the photographic essays accompanying all three
volumes.
This three-volume project is transnational in yet another respect. We live
in a world where historians born in one country have been able to migrate
to follow their historical studies and either to stay in their adopted homes or
to migrate again, when necessary, to obtain a university post. Many of the
authors of chapters in these volumes are transnational scholars, practising
history far from their place of birth and enriching the world of scholarship
thereby. Seeing the world in which we live at a tangent, in the words of the
Greek poet Kafavy, opens up insights harder to identify from within a
settled order. The world of scholarship today may be described in many
ways, but the term ‘settled’ is not one of them. This unsettledness is a major
advantage, one which someday will enable more transnational histories to
emerge alongside national histories, and for each to enrich the other.
It is important to repeat that these new initiatives in transnational history
have built on the work of the three generations of scholars that preceded
them. The history of the Great War that has emerged in recent years is
additive, cumulative and multi-faceted. National histories have a symbiotic
relationship with transnational histories; the richer the one, the deeper the
other. No cultural historian of any standing ignores the history of the state,
or of the social movements which at times have overthrown them; to do so
would be absurd. No military historian ignores the language in which
commands turn into movements on the field of battle. War is such a protean
event that it touches every facet of human life. Earlier scholars pointed the
way; we who have collectively constructed this three-volume history
acknowledge their presence among us in our effort to take stock of the
current state of knowledge in this field.
The potential imbedded in this transnational approach is reflected as well
in one institution explicitly committed to going beyond the strictly national
confines of the history of the war: the Historial de la Grande Guerre at
Péronne, France. The Historial is a museum of the war, designed by
historians and presented in three languages – English, French and German –
located at the site of German Headquarters during the Battle of the Somme,
that vast bloodletting in 1916, which the German writer Ernst Jünger
termed the birthplace of the twentieth century. Together with four historians
of the Great War from France and Germany – Jean-Jacques Becker, Gerd
Krumeich, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker – I joined a
collective which reached out across national frontiers to create a new kind
of museum, one which treated the Great War as a transnational catastrophe.9
This blending of different national viewpoints and emphases suited the new
Europe of the 1990s, when it became apparent that to understand the
integration of Europe at the end of the twentieth century, you had to
understand the disintegration of Europe at its beginning. It is this optic
which guides these three volumes, as it has guided the Historial in the first
generation of its existence.
The board of directors of the International Research Centre of the
Historial de la Grande Guerre served as the editorial committee which
guided this book through its long gestation. We note that all authors and
editors have foregone payment in order to direct the royalties these volumes
earn into a fund for postgraduate work in First World War studies anywhere
in the world. It is to the young scholars whose work we have supported and
to those still to come, those whose perspectives are still unfolding, that this
transnational project is dedicated.
1 For a fuller elaboration of this interpretation see Jay Winter and Antoine
Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the
Present (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Jay Winter (ed.), The
Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On (Columbia, MO: University of
Missouri Press, 2009).
2 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975).
3 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Allen Lane, 1976).
4 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I

(Cambridge University Press, 1979).
5 James Keegan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
6 For some discussions of the emergence of transnational history, see Akira

Iriye, ‘Transnational history’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004),
pp. 211–22; John Heilbron et al., ‘Towards a transnational history of the
social sciences’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 44:2
(2008), pp. 146–60; and C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly,
Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol and Patricia Seed, ‘AHR conversation: on
transnational history’, American Historical Review, 111:5 (2006), pp. 1441–
64.
7 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the

International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford
8 Jay Winter, ‘British popular culture in the First World War’, in R. Stites
and A. Roshwald (eds.), Popular Culture in the First World War
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 138–59.
9 For the story of the creation of the Historial, see Collections de

l’Historial de la grande guerre (Péronne, Somme: Département de la
Somme, 2010); and Jay Winter, ‘Designing a war museum: some
reflections on representations of war and combat’, in Elizabeth Anderson,
Avril Maddrell, Kate McLoughlin and Alana Vincent (eds.), Memory,
Mourning, Landscape (Amsterdam and New York: Rodolfi, 2010), pp. 10–
30.
Introduction to Volume I
Jay Winter
A global war needs global history to bring out in high relief its conduct, its
character and its manifold repercussions. The first volume of this global
history of the 1914–18 conflict focuses on the war in time and space. First,
we present a narrative of the war as an unfolding catastrophe, growing year
by year in scale and in destructive power far beyond what anyone had
anticipated in 1914. Secondly, this volume considers the war in spatial
terms, and shows the ripple effect of the conflict throughout the world. We
explore how imperial powers devoted huge reserves of manpower and
materiel to their war efforts, and how, by doing so, they unintentionally
transformed the global world order of 1914 into something radically
different four years later. Emphasising the Eastern European and the extra-
European character of the conflict enables us to escape from a narrow
definition of the war as that which took place on the Western Front alone.
By a global war, we mean the engagement in a conflict of fifty months’
duration of the world’s great empires and industrialised or industrialising
economies. Historians of globalisation point to 1914 as the moment of
rupture of the first phase of globalisation, entailing the movement of goods,
capital and people on an order of magnitude the world had never seen
before. It was only after 1945 that this first phase of globalisation was
succeeded by another, which is still in motion today. Our approach to global
war is therefore one which is dialectical in character: it examines the way
the war ended one of the most remarkable periods of the expansion of
capitalism, and the way it channelled the remarkable energies of the world’s
economies into the greatest destructive campaign to date. Innovation and
structural change compensated to a degree for the destruction of capital,
land and lives in wartime, and created new forms of state capitalism and
communism which came to govern economic and political life for the rest
of the century. The history of the war in time and space in Volume I thus
prepares the ground for Volume II, where we focus primarily on the
wartime transformation of the institutions of the state.
The war we present has a history that cannot stop at the confines of the
European continent. Our intention is to introduce readers to a war made
possible by globalisation and imperial expansion, a war which left its
unmistakable imprint on the way global affairs have developed ever since.
We conclude this volume with a discussion of the moral, political and legal
implications of the changing character of war, and in particular of the
collapse of the distinction between civilian and military targets, reaching its
nadir in genocide.
Part I A Narrative History
Introduction to Part I
Jay Winter
There is little doubt as to when the Great War began, but much more doubt
as to when it ended. The reason for the shift in perspective is that the
revolutionary character of a war beginning with a set of formal declarations
of hostilities set in motion forces which broke through the conventional
moment of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November 1918 as the
time when the conflict came to an end. It did no such thing in Eastern
Europe or in Russia, in Turkey, nor in colonial or semi-colonial settings
ranging from Egypt to India to Korea to China.
The primary reason we still celebrate 11 November as Armistice day is
that on that day the great European powers accepted the formal capitulation
of Germany in a railway carriage in a forest near Compiègne. But even
then, it took six months to settle the terms of the peace treaty with
Germany, during which interval the Allied blockade of Germany and
Central Europe continued. And it took longer to settle terms with
Germany’s allies, the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
Bulgaria and Turkey. Terms were agreed with the Ottoman Empire in 1920
at Sèvres, and then renegotiated after considerable fighting, and to Turkey’s
advantage, in 1923 at Lausanne.
A global history of the Great War thus needs a chronological narrative
that sets the outbreak of war and the end of the conflict in a framework
starting before 1914 and ending after 1918. This we provide in seven
chapters. The first two focus on the long-term and immediate origins of the
conflict. The chapters on 1915 and 1916 unfold the story of stalemate and
slaughter which, as we see in chapters on 1917 and 1918, both continued
and took on new forms on account of the entry of the United States and the
withdrawal of Russia from the war. On balance, the Central Powers were in
a stronger position than the Allied Powers in the first two years of the war,
but after 1916, the balance of forces shifted the strategic balance in favour
of the Allies. In 1919 more chaos than order emerged from the effort to
construct a lasting peace. The rest of these three volumes tell us in a host of
ways how, where and why this general narrative unfolded.
1 Origins
Volker R. Berghahn
Introduction
While the immediate origins of the First World War are being analysed in
the next chapter of this book, this one will examine the more long-term and
deeper causes of what has rightly been called by George F. Kennan and
others ‘the primordial catastrophe’ of the twentieth century.
In trying to identify these causes, historians have traditionally taken a
chronological approach and written detailed narratives, some of which are
very readable to this day; others are somewhat less riveting. The drawback
of this approach is that, in light of the complexities of international politics
and economics in the decades before 1914, readers could easily lose their
way in the thickets of events and actors in the historical drama that ended in
the outbreak of a world war in 1914.
The alternative is to take a thematic approach to the subject with
individual sections devoted to one of the major issues of the time, such as
European colonialism and imperialism, domestic politics, cultural
developments and armaments. The advantage of this approach is its
relatively greater clarity and accessibility. At the same time it is inevitably
more difficult to provide a sense of the constant inter-relatedness of events.
The best example of this approach is James Joll’s The Origins of the First
World War.1 To be sure, Joll was too sophisticated a scholar to keep all his
themes in a finely calibrated balance. Instead he raised the question of
which of his various themes was, in his view, in the end the most important
one. Although his rankings are not very explicit, he does highlight one
theme that, he believes, is the key to an understanding of the war’s origins
and deeper causes. He called this factor, discussed significantly enough at
the very end of his book, ‘the mood of 1914’, and defines it as follows:
This mood can only be assessed approximately and impressionistically.
The more we study it in detail, the more we see how it differed from
country to country or from class to class. Yet at each level there was a
willingness to risk or to accept war as a solution to a whole range of
problems, political, social, international, to say nothing of war as
apparently the only way of resisting a direct physical threat. It is these
attitudes which made war possible; and it is still in an investigation of
the mentalities of the rulers of Europe and their subjects that the
explanation of the causes of the war will ultimately lie. 2
This chapter is also very much concerned with ‘moods’ and mentalities
and the bearing that these had on the outbreak of war in 1914. But it is
sociologically quite specific in that it focuses on the role of the military in
the decision-making processes that led to war and relates it to the dynamics
of one major factor, the pre-1914 arms race. This means that other factors
relevant to the origins of the First World War will be discussed first before
turning to the one that in my view must take first place in a ranking of
causes. Organised like a funnel, it ultimately homes in on the key to
understanding what happened in Europe in July and August 1914.
Industrialisation, demographic change and

urbanisation
To grasp the highly dynamic developments that the societies of Europe
underwent in the three or four decades before 1914, the impact of
industrialisation, demography and urbanisation must be considered as major
background factors. It is in this period that much of continental Europe
experienced two Industrial Revolutions following closely upon each other.
The first Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the eighteenth century,
driven by the manufacture of soft weaving materials and textiles as well as
by coal mining and iron-making. In the second half of the nineteenth
century it was followed by what is generally termed the Second Industrial
Revolution, characterised by the development of electrical and non-
electrical engineering and chemicals. For both these revolutions it should
also be remembered that production initially took place in quite small units,
many of which began as craftsmen’s workshops. However, before the end
of the nineteenth century there occurred a merger and concentration
movement, resulting in the emergence of large corporations with hundreds
and thousands of workers. And with their increased numbers also came the
rise of white-collar employees, white-coated scientists and the female
white-blouse professions.
Secondly, from the eighteenth century Europe had also seen a very rapid
population growth. Sooner or later, many men and women no longer found
employment in agriculture, the mainstay of the pre-industrial economies.
They began to move to regional or faraway towns, many of which grew into
cities. In fact, there were many urban communities by the late nineteenth
century that had trebled or quadrupled their populations within a decade.
Most of the migrants who did not emigrate to North America, South
America or Australia in those years, found employment in manufacturing
industry, and although pay and work conditions were better than in
agriculture that they had left behind, the levels of poverty were still
shocking to contemporaries. With, on average, three or four children, many
working-class families lived in very cramped apartment blocks, known as
rental barracks. Medical and dental care was minimal and often
unaffordable for blue-collar workers and their families. Charities were
overburdened and underfunded. Unemployment benefits and social security
programmes developed slowly in some European states, but were never
adequate.
At the same time, industry and commerce created new wealth, promoting
the rise of a well-to-do commercial and professional middle class, including
white-collar employees. The growth of local regional and national
bureaucracies and of systems of primary, secondary and tertiary education
also provided better-paid and more secure jobs. The gap between the
wealthy and the poor was particularly visible in residential segregation,
dress and shopping habits. Accordingly, the industrial societies of pre-1914
Europe became more rigidly stratified in terms of socio-economic position
and cultural habitus.
Political mobilisation and domestic politics

Since the political systems outside Eastern Europe had begun to open up
and tried to integrate as citizens those who had been born into a particular
nation-state, socio-economic conditions and divisions contributed to an
awakening of a political consciousness, but this time not merely among the
liberal bourgeoisie or the upper classes who tended to hold on to the
positions of power they had gained within the state, but increasingly also
among industrial workers. With the spread of suffrage systems and the rise
of the printing press, the lower classes, too, were able to articulate their
hopes and expectations vis-à-vis their local and national governments. Like
the middle and upper classes, they founded political parties and associations
to represent them in public.
Although many suffrage systems remained restricted and unfairly skewed
against the working class, by the later nineteenth century there were a
growing number of deputies in the local, regional and national assemblies
who had been elected by those at the bottom of the pile. It did not take long
for the other parties and classes to see them as a threat. It did not matter
whether they were running a republic, like in Italy or France, or a
constitutional monarchy; they all were faced with growing numbers of
citizens living in the cities under conditions that were crying out for
improvement. Perceiving a threat to the established order, politicians and
bureaucrats relied on and refined several means by which they tried to
stabilise political conditions. One of these was social appeasement, the
attempt to satisfy the hopes and expectations of the working class with
tangible concessions or promises of a better life in the future. But there was
also reliance on the repressive power of the police and, as a last resort, on
the army.
A third method was to mobilise nationalist feelings and to win over
citizens by appealing to the integrating force of patriotism. There are two
examples of how these processes worked in the 1880s under the French
Republic led by Jules Ferry, on the one hand, and in the Prusso-German
monarchy during the period of Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, on the
other. Both of them faced stiff opposition in the national parliament and
were anxious to stabilise their support among the parties. National elections
were coming up, Bismarck found himself in a situation similar to Ferry’s,
who had successfully pushed back the monarchist opposition, whereas
Bismarck had curbed the threat that the German Social Democrats posed to
retaining his conservative majorities in the national parliament by outlawing
their party, trade unions and related organisations.
Imperialism and colonialism
There was yet another device by which – so politicians calculated –
patriotic pride and support for the national state could be fostered: the lure
of expansion into overseas territories and the quest for a colonial empire.
The British elites had already practised this policy by mobilising ‘working-
class Tories’ who cheered the Empire that they had been told would bring
both material and immaterial benefits to all Britons. Bismarck, the
conservative Prussian landowner, was personally unenthusiastic about
Germany joining the scramble for colonies that was in full swing in the
final decades of the nineteenth century. At the 1884 Congo Conference in
Berlin, where the Great Powers discussed the distribution of territories in
Africa, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, had been given for his personal
exploitation the huge Congo Basin with its rich mineral resources.3
Soon sceptical Bismarck began to change his tune, significantly enough
just prior to the upcoming Reichstag elections. He was not concerned about
a few German working-class Tories, if they existed at all, but about
powerful interest groups among the commercial bourgeoisie who were
clamouring for the acquisition of colonies. As the Reich Chancellor once
put it rather cynically, he knew that the quest for colonies was a hoax but
that he needed it for creating majorities that supported his government. 4
The notion that imperialism was a useful tool not only to respond to
commercial pressures but also to divert and ease domestic tensions and to
promise material gains for more than a few businessmen involved in
international trade, had by the 1890s become popular among politicians and
intellectuals all over Europe. In Britain, Cecil Rhodes, the tycoon, stated
that
my cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to

save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody
civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the
surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by
them in the factories and mines. The empire . . . is a bread and butter
question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become
imperialists.5
Alfred von Tirpitz, a German naval officer soon to become the naval
secretary of Kaiser Wilhelm II, wrote in 1895: ‘In my view, Germany will
in the coming century rapidly drop from her position as a great power
unless we begin to develop our maritime interests energetically,
systematically and without delay.’6 This expansion, he added, was
necessary ‘to no small degree also because the great patriotic task and the
economic benefits to be derived from it will offer a strong palliative against
educated and uneducated Social Democrats’. The importance of this factor
to international politics and ultimately to the origins of the First World War
may also be gauged from the statement by Enrico Corradini, an Italian
intellectual who opined: ‘Social imperialism was designed to draw all
classes together in defence of the nation and empire and aimed to prove to
the least well-to-do class that its interests were inseparable from those of
the nation. It aimed at undermining the argument of the socialists and
demonstrating that, contrary to the Marxist allegation, the workers had
more to lose than their chains.’7
As the jockeying for colonies continued among the Great Powers up to
1914, research also turned to studying the impact of European colonialism
on the non-European world. While Ferry had claimed quite unabashedly
that France was on a civilising mission that the Europeans had gone out to
fulfil, scholars today are generally agreed that European colonialism
brought few benefits to the colonised peoples and was by and large
extremely destructive to local economies, social structures and cultural
traditions. In Leopold’s Congo it is estimated that some 11 million
indigenous men, women and children died either of diseases and
malnutrition or through killing sprees that colonial troops perpetrated. It
was no better in Asia where revolts, however insignificant, against the
colonial masters were, like in Africa, brutally repressed. This has led
students of imperialism to raise the question of what this massive violence
in turn did to the European psyche. Some have gone so far as to see in this
violence the precursors of the Nazi Holocaust of the Second World War.
Others have had no hesitation to call, for example, Germany’s war against
the Herero and Nama in colonial South West Africa a genocide. Isabel Hull,
in her book Absolute Destruction, has argued that the violence practised in
this war became part of German military culture.8 In other words, it became
so deeply ingrained in the ethos of the officer corps that it came to see a
future European war in the same terms of complete annihilation, a concept
that will be discussed in more detail below.
The economies of pre-1914 European colonialism

Colonialism was dangerous and, indeed, self-defeating in the sense that it
exacerbated economic tensions and rivalries that were inherent in the
economic systems of an increasingly industrialised Europe. Economic
constitutions were essentially capitalist and hence based on the principle of
competition in the national and international marketplace. However, and as
we have seen above, late-nineteenth-century colonialism was not an
exclusively private enterprise. National governments had made the conquest
and possession of colonies their own project. They stationed troops abroad
and sent bureaucrats to administer these territories. The trouble was that
there were several international crises in the decade before 1914 that
involved both European governments and certain business interests.
These crises in turn impacted on the trade among the Great Powers within
Europe in which the United States had meanwhile also made an appearance.
In the late nineteenth century America had witnessed a process of
industrialisation and urbanisation at least as dramatic as that of Britain or
Germany. By 1900, trade within the Anglo-American-German triangle had
become very lucrative, although there had been a few diplomatic crises
around 1900 when Britain and Germany appeared in Latin America and
upset the US government that, pointing to the Monroe Doctrine, considered
these European efforts an intrusion into its ‘backyard’. But by the mid
decade, peaceful trade among the three nations and also in the rest of
Europe had intensified. They were making direct investments by setting up
agencies and subsidiaries. Some firms even built factories abroad. Other
companies concluded patent agreements and other forms of cooperation.
However, for reasons to be examined below, from around 1910 the business
communities on both sides of the Atlantic became increasingly nervous
about the international diplomatic and military situation. Before going into
this topic, an analysis of cultural developments in Europe before 1914
provides yet another clue for understanding why the Great Powers ended up
in the First World War.
European culture between optimism and
pessimism
An evaluation of the press around New Year’s Day 1900 will reveal that the
mood in most of Europe was overwhelmingly celebratory – with splendid
fireworks and church bells ringing in the twentieth century.9 The nations
looked back on a century that had not only brought industrialisation and
urbanisation but also relative peace and prosperity. The wars that had taken
place in mid century had been quite short. After the Franco-Prussian War of
1870 that had led to the founding of the German Empire, much further
progress had been made, especially in the fields of science and technology.
The achievements in the arts, humanities and social sciences had been no
less impressive. Conservative agrarian newspapers in Germany, it is true,
were not quite so enthusiastic about the new century as was the bourgeois-
liberal press. The agrarians warned of the growing threat that the industrial
working class posed, thought to have fallen under the spell of Marxian
socialism. Meanwhile British conservative papers wondered about the
future viability of the Empire after the difficulties that the army had
encountered during the war against the South African Boers.
Overall, though, European culture, broadly defined so as to include the
sciences, education and popular culture, was divided into optimists and
pessimists when it came to looking into the future. The optimists could be
found among the professional middle classes and among the engineering
and laboratory professions in particular. They confidently expected further
breakthroughs and successes to emerge from the centres of research and
learning in the universities, academies and Research & Development
departments that the big corporations had added to their operations,
especially in the chemical and electrical engineering branches. The cities
that had come into wealth through rising tax revenues tackled the major
task of building a modem infrastructure such as gas, electricity and water
works, as well as sewage plants. They proudly also funded concert halls,
theatres and opera houses as well as recreational parks, playgrounds and
public swimming pools. The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and the
Werkbund in Germany became typical expressions of this optimism. There
were also the architects who designed modern housing, garden cities and
spacious and light factories. They were searching for an ‘international style’
that transcended national borders and experimented with new building
materials such as glass and concrete. The transatlantic connections of these
movements were embodied by American architects such as Frank Lloyd
Wright, whose visions of modern housing left a deep impression on his
European counterparts. Finally, there were the World Exhibitions that had
started in London in 1851 and reached a high point at the Paris Exhibition
in 1900, where the nations of the world presented themselves in their
architectural tastes and the display of industrial machinery and artistic
creations.
However, all the while there were also the cultural pessimists. They
worried not merely about a political radicalisation of the ‘masses’ in the age
of universal manhood suffrage. Nor was it just radical Marxists who
believed that industrial capitalism and the bourgeois age were bound to
collapse under the weight of their inner contradictions. There were also
non-Marxist intellectuals and social critics who foresaw a period of conflict
and instability. Among them was the German sociologist Max Weber who,
while acknowledging the wealth-creating and rational capacities of
capitalism, nevertheless warned of the growth of large and ever more
pervasive public and private organisations that promoted the
bureaucratisation of the world.10 To him this trend was so powerful that he
feared humanity would end up in what he called an ‘iron cage of serfdom’.
It was a world in which the Fachmensch (expert) ruled from the top,
regulating all aspects of individuals’ lives. Meanwhile in Vienna, Sigmund
Freud probed the darker and irrational corners of the human soul.
Perhaps the most intriguing development in the field of European culture
was a shift that took place in the arts. Classical music, theatre and painting
had highlighted the uplifting aspects of human experience. Good invariably
triumphed over evil. The stage was devoted to portraying such values as
beauty, heroism and generosity. A new generation of artists now insisted
that the mission of modern art was different; it confronted its audiences and
viewers with the sordid and disharmonious sides of the human predicament.
Soon realism was overtaken by expressionism, with its creations that
reflected not what the eye captured in the real world but what an inner eye
was making of it. Life to these artists appeared fragmented, de-centred,
subjective. It was full of contradictions and disharmonies. For some cultural
producers it was but a small step from these positions and their implicit or
explicit criticism of the world to believing that European civilisation as a
whole was rotten and heading towards the rocks.
Significantly, such predictions of the last days of mankind could most
frequently be heard in Central Europe. A few intellectuals and artists even
began to see its end in a huge cataclysm from which a thoroughly
rejuvenated society would emerge, freed of its outmoded traditions and
values and its stuffy bourgeois conformism. For orthodox Marxists, this
cataclysm would come in the shape of a violent social revolution. For some
artists who were not radical socialists, rejuvenation would come in a major
war. In Germany, these pessimists received lateral support from more
political popular writers such as Friedrich von Bernhardi, who in 1912
published his bestselling Germany and the Next War.11 But as 1914 drew
closer there were also other voices. With tensions rising both inside the
nations of Europe and in international politics, partly stimulated – as has
been seen – by colonial rivalries, there were those who warned against just
such a war. Among them was the Polish banker Ivan Bloch, who published
a six-volume study on The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and
Political Relations as early as 1898 (Russian edition).12 It contained
disturbingly accurate descriptions of what this war would be like, i.e., a
mass slaughter of the kind that occurred for real in the trenches of the First
World War. War between industrialised nations was for him tantamount to
the destruction of civil and civilised society. In 1909 Bloch’s dire
predictions were complemented by a bestseller written by another
businessman, Norman Angell, entitled The Great Illusion.13 He postulated
that with the rise of industry and peaceful commerce around the world the
future was potentially bright. But it was threatened, at least for the time
being, by militaristic and chauvinistic elements in modern society.
Consequently, Angell became another writer to warn against the self-
destructive danger that hovered over Europe. To him, major wars among
Great Powers had become a loss for all participants, even for those who
formally won, and the drain on resources would be so great that the region
might never recover.
Looking at cultural developments in pre-1914 Europe, the situation had
become curiously schizophrenic. On the one hand, large sections of the
population and their intellectual and political leaders saw a bright future
ahead. If to them the nineteenth century had been one of socio-economic,
technological, political and human progress, the twentieth century would be
no less one of further improvement and gradual reform. On the other side
were the cultural pessimists whose numbers were growing towards 1914.
They were sceptical of the viability of the liberal-capitalist societies of
Europe. Some of them predicted not only a great upheaval but actively
prepared it. The artists among them, though often unpolitical, also
interpreted recent trends as harbingers of a huge crisis to come. While
popular culture continued in its traditional tracks of folk festivals, folk
music, folk art and folklore, analysts of high culture and avant-garde artists
saw themselves as seismographs registering the early rumblings of an
impending violent eruption that would bury European society. To be sure,
none of the writers, painters or composers who celebrated disharmony,
gloom and decadence had the power and influence to unleash the
catastrophe that they predicted. It was army and naval officers who devoted
their careers to the preparation of a major war and who would then unleash
it in August 1914 with ferocious force.
The German naval challenge to British hegemony

During the late nineteenth century, the Great Powers on the European
continent eyed the armament policies of their rivals with much suspicion.
Perhaps one of them would achieve military superiority and then use this
advantage to start a preventive war. At the same time there was the question
of naval armaments after the scramble for colonies had shifted the balance:
now it was thought to be naval power that would determine the course of
power relations in the twentieth century. Up to 1900 Britain had occupied
the first rank by maintaining the Two-Power Standard, i.e., a navy large
enough to be capable of confronting the next two strongest sea powers
together and thus able to protect both the British homeland and her overseas
possessions.14 In the 1890s, technological developments generated a debate
among naval strategists. The orthodoxies of contemporary naval warfare
envisioned prolonged raids by fast-moving cruisers against enemy ports and
overseas settlements. Along came an alternative strategy that demanded the
building of very large, slow battleships that would face their opponent in
the European waters in a do-or-die battle.
By 1897, Tirpitz, by now the Kaiser’s naval secretary, had opted for the
latter strategy. He was convinced that the only way to gain sufficient power-
political leverage against Britain, the first sea power, was to expand the
hitherto modest Imperial Navy into a major tool that could be used to wring
territorial concessions from the British at the conference table when another
‘division of the world’ was being negotiated. However, should Britain not
only refuse to make such concessions, but also steam across the North Sea
to destroy the German battle fleet at Wilhelmshaven, the latter would be
strong and well-trained enough to defeat the Royal Navy in a battle of
annihilation. It is interesting how this idea of annihilation and total victory
that had gained currency in the Prusso-German army inspired Tirpitz’s
concept of a Vernichtungsschlacht in the North Sea. A victory would have
shifted the international balance of power virtually in one afternoon. The
German naval files contain the evidence for this preposterous idea that,
according to the German historian Klaus Hildebrand, would have
revolutionised the international system.15
As Tirpitz explained to Wilhelm II in September 1899, ‘thanks to our
geographic position, our system of military service, mobilization, torpedo
boats, tactical training, organizational structure [and] our uniform
leadership by the Monarch we shall no doubt have [a] good chance against
England’.16 In another secret document, he added that all of Germany’s
efforts should concentrate on the creation of a battle fleet ‘which alone will
give us a maritime influence vis-à-vis England’. Of course, ‘the battle must
first have taken place and have been won before one can think of exploiting
it’. Indeed, ‘without a victorious battle’ the sea lanes to the Atlantic could
not be kept open for Germany: ‘“Victorious” is the decisive word. Hence let
us concentrate our resources on this victory.’After all, ‘the bear’s skin’
could not be cut up ‘before the bear has been killed’.17
After Wilhelm II, himself an enthusiast of German overseas expansion
and naval power, had given his approval, Tirpitz and his fellow-officers in
the Reich Navy Office began to implement a long-term building plan. They
envisioned an expansion of the German battle fleet in several stages at the
end of which Germany would have sixty big battleships, capable of
defeating the Royal Navy. A file note of February 1900 assumed
that the enlargement of the British fleet cannot proceed at the same rate
as ours because the size of their fleet requires a considerably larger
number of replacements. The [attached] table . . . demonstrates that
England . . . will have to construct and replace a fleet almost three
times as large as the German one as envisaged by the Navy Law [of
1900], if she expects to have an efficient fleet . . . in 1920 [!]. The
inferior tonnage which our battle-fleet will continue to have vis-à-vis
Britain’s shall be compensated for by particularly good training of our
personnel and better tactical manoeuverability of large battle
formations. . . . The [enclosed] figures . . . on the tonnage which both
battle fleets keep in service amount to a superiority of Germany. In
view of the notorious difficulties in England to recruit enough
personnel, it is unlikely that this favorable position will change.
These quotations should be telling enough about what was being planned
in Berlin. By adopting a building tempo of three big ships per annum up to
1920, Tirpitz would not only have gained his sixty battleships, but would
also have provided the German steel and shipbuilding industry with regular
orders, protecting them against the vagaries of the market. A further
advantage was that the building tempo looked quite modest in its early
stages and was therefore unlikely to alarm the Royal Navy. In other words,
at the turn of the century Germany started a unilateral arms build-up against
Britain, and Germany’s long-term ambition of defeating the Royal Navy
had to be kept secret. Tirpitz was therefore very conscious of the need to
keep this secret and of the ‘danger zone’, as he called it, that the Imperial
Navy would be passing through. For, if London discovered the ultimate
aims, it was likely that it would try to destroy the embryonic Imperial Navy
in a coup reminiscent of the preventive strike Britain had launched against
the Danish fleet in 1805 outside Copenhagen. To avoid such a
‘Copenhagening’, German diplomacy had to be aligned with the Tirpitz
Plan, and indeed this is what Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow tried to
do after 1900.18
However, the future is always unpredictable and German diplomacy
failed to give the necessary cover by keeping Germany aloof from
international troubles. First, Britain began to wonder about the relentless
building tempo across the Channel, and concluded the Entente Cordiale
with France, Germany’s arch-enemy on the continent. It was not quite as
solid as the Franco-Russian alliance treaty of 1893 that would involve
Germany in a nightmarish war on two fronts. But the Entente of 1904
rattled the German Foreign Office and caused it to test its firmness by
challenging France in North Africa a year later. The Moroccan test proved
to be a very bad miscalculation, and the international conference that
followed left Germany without the gains she had expected. At exactly the
same moment there arose an even greater threat to Tirpitz’s grand design,
i.e., the decision of the British to begin building a much bigger battleship,
the Dreadnought. Having observed German shipbuilding activity very
closely, Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, had been suspecting for some
time that the Germans were up to something sinister and were hoping to
win a veiled quantitative naval arms build-up. Fisher now escalated the
competition by adding a qualitative dimension to it, i.e., by building ships
with bigger displacements and bigger guns against which German ships had
insufficient armour.19
When Tirpitz, unwilling to concede that his ambitious plan was failing,
also began to build dreadnoughts, Fisher stepped up the building tempo.
Against the three ships per annum envisaged by Tirpitz he decided to build
four dreadnoughts per annum. Still refusing to give up, Tirpitz again
followed suit. But by 1908/9 it was becoming clear that he could not sustain
this accelerated arms race in dreadnoughts. The additional costs were
throwing the careful budgetary calculations on which the original plan had
been based into disarray.
There are two telling statements that put the story of what happened in
1908/9 nicely into focus. The first one is by Lord Richard Haldane, a
member of the Liberal Cabinet in London. The Liberals had won the
elections of 1906 with promises of reducing the armament burdens through
international negotiations at The Hague. The savings were to be used for a
new social security and insurance programme to attract the votes of the
British working class. Faced with the failure of the disarmament talks
(largely because Germany refused to be part of any armament reduction)
and with the need to fulfil election promises, the Liberal Cabinet decided to
finance both stepped-up naval armaments and social programmes. As
Haldane declared on 8 August 1908:20 ‘We should boldly take our stand on
the facts and proclaim a policy of taking, mainly by direct taxation, such a
toll from the increase and growth of this wealth as will enable us to provide
for (1) the increasing costs of social reform, (2) national defence [and] (3) a
margin in aid of the sinking fund.’ Knowing that the wealthy in Britain
would not welcome higher direct taxes on their incomes, Haldane tapped
into middle-class fears of the labour movement by adding that this policy
‘will commend itself to many timid people as a bulwark against the
nationalisation of wealth’.
Meanwhile in Germany, Reich Chancellor Bülow was facing exactly the
same dilemma. There were the increased costs of the dreadnoughts. At the
same time, he continued to hope that increasing the social insurance
benefits that Bismarck had first introduced in the 1880s would woo the
industrial workers away from the Social Democrats and the Social
Democratic trade unions. The SPD had greatly increased their votes in the
1903 national elections, but had lost seats in 1907, partly because of
stepped-up nationalist agitation. Thanks to this agitation it had been
relatively easy in the past to get enough Reichstag votes for increased naval
armaments. However, when in a follow-up finance bill it came to
distributing the costs of naval expansion onto different shoulders, the well-
to-do, and the agrarians in particular, had rejected higher income and
inheritance taxes. Instead they voted for increased indirect taxes on food
and other daily needs that disproportionately hit the lower-income groups.
The medicine that Haldane prescribed for the British was therefore not
available to Bülow. He was under pressure from the Conservatives and no
higher direct taxes were in the end approved. The SPD having been kept out
of the government and not having enough votes to reverse the trend, only
had its press organs and speakers to protest against this unequal distribution
of tax burdens imposed for military expenditures that they had been
opposed to from the beginning. Their supporters, well aware of the rising
cost of living in their weekly budget felt that these protests were perfectly
justified.
It is against this background that Albert Ballin, the Hamburg shipping
magnate and friend of Wilhelm II, made the other telling statement. He
warned the Kaiser and his Reich Chancellor in July 1908 that ‘we cannot
enter into a race in Dreadnoughts with the much wealthier British’.21 He
might have added that the British did not have a system of taxation as unfair
and conflict-ridden as that of Imperial Germany. Of course, Ballin was also
opposed to a continuation of the Anglo-German naval arms race because he
feared a further escalation of tensions that the building of battleships had
already produced. A major war, he felt, would be a disaster for his shipping
empire and for world trade, as indeed it turned out to be in 1914.
There was yet another and in this case very powerful group that began to
get restive in the face of a costly naval arms race that Germany now
increasingly looked like losing: the Prusso-German army. Partly in order to
allow Tirpitz to have the first call on the Reich’s financial resources, but
also because the top brass feared that an expansion of the army beyond its
1890s size would undermine the social exclusivity and reliability of the
armed forces, the officer corps had decided at the turn of the century to
refrain from submitting fresh increases to the size of the land forces. The
existing shortage of officers of noble background was thought to undermine
the esprit de corps if more men of bourgeois background had to be taken in.
There was also the problem of a growing number of ordinary draftees who
came from an urban working-class background and were suspected of
having been influenced by socialist ideas. In the late 1890s, the army had
initiated a programme of patriotic indoctrination to counter this threat.
Soldiers were not allowed to frequent certain pubs in the vicinity of their
barracks, and time and again their lockers were searched for socialist
literature. In short, no more working-class recruits either.
The shift towards the pre-1914 European arms

race on land
In 1907 Britain and Russia had settled their longstanding differences in
Afghanistan, which had facilitated the formation of the Triple Entente of
France, Britain and Russia. Thereupon the spectre of ‘encirclement’ took
root in the thinking of the German general staff and of the Kaiser. The
scales were finally tipping against further naval expenditures in favour of
rearmament on land. This became very visible in the wake of the Second
Moroccan Crisis of the summer 1911. This confrontation over North
African territories further strengthened the determination of France and
Britain to stand together. Berlin was forced into a humiliating retreat. As
Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the general staff, wrote very angrily to
his wife on 19 August 1911:
I am beginning to get sick and tired of this unhappy Moroccan affair . .
. If we again slip away from this affair with our tail between our legs
and if we cannot bring ourselves to put forward a determined claim
which we are prepared to force through with the sword, I shall despair
of the future of the German Empire. I shall then resign. But before
handing in my resignation, I shall move to abolish the Army and to
place ourselves under Japanese protectorate, we shall then be in a
position to make money without interference and develop into
ninnies.22
While these lines reflected the mood of this key army officer bluntly
enough, the first signs of a revolt against the Imperial Navy could be
detected as early as 1909. In March of that year, the influential and semi-
official Militaerwochenblatt published an article with the title ‘Army in
Chains’. By the summer of 1910 dissatisfaction had become so strong that
Colonel Erich Ludendorff made the army’s case even more insistently:
‘Any state that is involved in a struggle for its survival must use, with
utmost energy, all its forces and resources if it wants to live up to its highest
duties.’23 The number of Germany’s enemies, he added, had now become
‘so great that it could become our inescapable duty’ to use ‘in certain cases’
and from the first moment every available soldier. Thenceforth everything
depended ‘on our winning the first battles’.
This evaluation is significant for two reasons. First of all, Ludendorff,
himself of non-noble background, advocated dropping all limits on
recruitment that had guided earlier policies of freezing the size of the army.
Secondly, it indicated that sooner or later the general staff would insist on
the introduction of a bill to enlarge the country’s land forces. Accordingly
War Minister Josias von Heeringen, announced in November 1911 that the
‘political-strategic situation’ had ‘shifted to Germany’s disadvantage’.24
Appropriations for the army had to be increased without delay. Tirpitz
immediately averred what was at stake: the army was to be used as the
‘battering ram’ against his naval plan. No less awkward for him was that
the Reich Treasury had meanwhile collated figures to show that Germany
could not afford both a powerful navy and an army large enough to face the
Franco-Russian alliance. With the Treasury also putting its political weight
behind a reorientation of the nation’s armaments policy, it was clear that
Tirpitz had already lost the interdepartmental struggle that raged in Berlin
in late 1911, and of course he had lost the naval competition against Britain
that had thwarted his plan to out-build the Royal Navy.25 Meanwhile,
subverted by Slav and particularly Serbian nationalist independence
movements within its boundaries, Vienna was also getting more and more
agitated.
Against the backdrop of these developments both within the structures of
the imperial courts and the governments in Berlin and Vienna, it is no
longer surprising that the army’s demand for 29,000 more soldiers and
‘manifold technical improvements’ became law very quickly in 1912. There
were also enough Reichstag votes to approve the subsequent finance bills,
but only with a good deal of manipulation and the appendix of the so-called
Lex Bassermann-Erzberger, which required that the Reich government
introduce before 30 April 1913 ‘a general property tax that takes account of
the various forms of property’.26 By the winter of 1912/13 the debate over
taxes that revolved around the same questions that Haldane had asked in
Britain in 1908 was in full swing. By autumn 1912 a regional war had
broken out in which the Balkan League of Bulgaria and Serbia (with Greece
joining a few months later) challenged the possessions of the Ottoman
Empire in Europe. The Ottoman Turks were soundly defeated, with Serbia
gaining many of the territorial spoils of the League’s victory. After this the
government in Vienna was even more alarmed about the future of its own
position in the Balkans. In 1908 the Habsburgs had tried to bolster their
territorial position by annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, this move
backfired because it angered the Russians who now saw themselves more
than ever as the protectors of the Slavs in the Balkans.
The alarm spilled over into Berlin where the army was now drawing up
plans for a second expansion of its land forces. As in the previous year, this
bill was also passed by a Reichstag majority in a mood of determined
patriotism. Again the funding question had been postponed. It was clear that
more money had to be found, and there was also the Lex Bassermann-
Erzberger of the previous year to be implemented. There is no space here to
discuss the very complicated tax bill that, apart from the usual higher
indirect taxes, this time did include, in the face of the fierce opposition of
the Conservatives, an income tax, the Wehrbeitrag, though it was limited to
one year.
In terms of the origins of the First World War, the more important
development was the reaction of France and Russia.27 They promptly
introduced army bills themselves so that the abandoned Anglo-German
naval arms race was now being replaced by an even more dangerous
military competition on land. Next to the push for the 1913 army bill, the
German generals also reacted to the First Balkan War with a growing sense
that a war was bound to break out soon. It seems that Wilhelm II, under the
influence of his maison militaire, had been reaching a similar conclusion.
Thus, when he received news from London that the British position was
also hardening towards his policies, the pressure was rising, also from
Vienna, to launch an early war against Serbia in an effort to strengthen the
position of Austria-Hungary against Slav nationalism. To the Kaiser the
life-or-death question had been raised for his realm:28 ‘The eventual
struggle for existence which the Germans (Austria, Germany) will have to
fight in Europe against the Slavs (Russia) supported by the Romans (Gauls)
will find the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs.’ ln pursuit of this
strategic assessment, Wilhelm II called a conference with his top naval and
army advisers on 8 December 1912.29 The monarch opened the discussions
by urging that Austria should, without delay, take a stand against Serbia,
lest ‘she lost control over the Serbs inside the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’.
Moltke also took the view that a war was inevitable. The sooner it took
place the better it would be. Tirpitz argued for a postponement by eighteen
months because the widening of the Kiel Canal to allow for the movement
of German dreadnoughts between the Baltic and the North Seas would not
be completed before the summer of 1914. Moltke voiced his impatience at
Tirpitz by interjecting that ‘the Navy would not be ready then either and the
Army’s position would become less and less favourable’. The country’s
enemies ‘were arming more rapidly than we do, as we were short of
money’. In the end no decision to unleash a war was taken, not only
because of Tirpitz’s opposition and the Kaiser’s vacillations, but also
because it was found that the German ‘nation’ had not yet been sufficiently
enlightened about the ‘great national interests’ that were at stake in the
event of a war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.
Preparing for a preventive war in 1914

This chapter began with an examination of the non-military factors that
have to be studied when trying to understand the deeper origins of the First
World War. Accordingly, we discussed industrialisation, demographic
change, electoral politics, cultural optimism and cultural pessimism.
However, the most dangerous development that pointed towards an
outbreak of a major war was, after the collapse of Tirpitz’s naval ambitions
to challenge Britain’s power, the incipient arms race on land between
Russia and France on the one hand, and Germany and Austria-Hungary on
the other. Moreover, the army professionals who, in the wake of these
developments, had moved to the centres of decision-making in Berlin and
Vienna, not only shared the gloomy sense that a great clash of arms would
come in any case, but were also increasingly attracted by the concept of a
preventive war. Not knowing the future, the generals became inclined to hit
before it was too late and while victory still seemed possible. When the
‘mood of 1914’ is therefore invoked, it is important to remember that a
preventive strike was very prevalent among the military in Berlin and
Vienna.
There are two key documents that date from the spring of 1914 after the
international and domestic situation in Germany and Austria-Hungary had
deteriorated further in 1913. There is first of all an exchange that the
Austrian Chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, had with
Colonel Josef Metzger, the head of the Operations Department. On this
occasion, the former had been wondering aloud ‘if one should wait until
France and Russia were prepared to invade us jointly or if it were more
desirable to settle the inevitable conflict at an earlier date’.30 He added that
‘the Slav question was becoming more and more difficult and dangerous for
us’.
Having summarised his worries, in particular about the size of the
Russian armament programme, in a memorandum to the German Foreign
Office on 24 February 1914, Moltke decided to meet Conrad at Karlsbad in
the middle of May. The meeting merely confirmed both of them in their
conviction that time was running out. Moltke was by now firmly convinced
that ‘to wait any longer meant a diminishing of our chances; as far as
manpower was concerned, one cannot enter into a competition with
Russia’. Upon his return to Berlin, Moltke went to see Foreign Secretary
Gottlieb von Jagow, who made the following record of the meeting:
The prospects of the future seriously worried him [Moltke]. Russia
will have completed her armaments in 2 to 3 years. The military
superiority of our enemies would be so great then that he did not know
how we might cope with them. Now we could still be more or less a
match for them. In his view, there was no alternative to waging a
preventive war in order to defeat the enemy as long as we could still
more or less pass the test. The Chief of the general staff left it at my
discretion to gear our policy to an early unleashing of a war.31
In all these discussions the industrial and commercial elites of Europe

played no active part and most of them were nervous onlookers. They knew
that a major war would not only have terrible consequences for their own
businesses, but also for the region and its populations as a whole. This is
why some of them with connections to the inner political circles tried to
dissuade the two emperors from using their exclusive constitutional right to
declare a war. In the end, they were sidelined and this also applied to the
business communities in France and Britain, once the German invasion of
Belgium and France had begun.32
The ‘masses’ of ordinary Europeans, many of whom were organised by
1914 into large socialist parties and trade unions, found themselves in a
similar situation. Their leaders, though not privy to government thinking,
had an inkling of what would happen if several industrial powers clashed,
that were now so frantically arming themselves to the teeth irrespective of
the financial costs. They sensed that there would be a blood bath, in which
their own members would be the first victims. As the threat of war loomed
larger following the armament bills, the leaders of the European left made
desperate efforts to stop the march towards the abyss. Jean Jaurès, the
French socialist leader, sent out a call to hold a congress of the Second
International in Brussels. On 31 July he was shot and killed by a right-wing
nationalist fanatic. Meanwhile, after the delivery of the Austro-Hungarian
ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July 1914, the German Social Democrats, fearing
the outbreak of war, held demonstrations in major cities to warn Vienna
against an invasion of Serbia.33
These demonstrations made Reich Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann
Hollweg realise that Germany could not possibly join an Austro-Hungarian
war, unless the population could be convinced that they were being called
up to defend the fatherland against the autocratic tsarist juggernaut. He
promptly initiated negotiations with moderate SPD leaders to obtain their
support if the country found itself in a defensive war against Russia. This
explains why the Kaiser waited for Russia to announce her mobilisation
order first. When the deadline of the German ultimatum to rescind the order
passed without a Russian response, Wilhelm II proclaimed Germany’s
mobilisation. But instead of moving against the Tsarist Empire, Moltke
invaded France and Belgium as envisaged by a revised Schlieffen Plan. It
was his only option. All Eastern operations’ plans had been dropped in
previous years. Still there was great relief once the trains had been ordered
to roll West. As Georg Alexander von Mueller, the Chief of the Naval
Cabinet, recorded in his diary on 1 August 1914: ‘Brilliant mood. The
government has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.’
34
As these developments put the two monarchs and the military entourage
so glaringly into the limelight, we must take a final look at their ‘mood’,
also in order to build a bridge to the next chapter that will discuss the last
weeks and days of peace in greater detail, including the question of whether
Berlin and Vienna thought at first in terms of a localisation of the conflict to
the Balkans or whether, as Fritz Fischer has argued, the Reich government
and the military aimed at an all-out war from early July onwards.35 The
issue on which to conclude this chapter is therefore what Lancelot Farrar
has called ‘The Short War Illusion’.36 To understand this phenomenon, the
warnings of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the uncle of the namesake who
in 1 August 1914 got the Kaiser to order the attack in the West, are highly
germane. Pondering in his years of retirement the lessons of the Franco-
Prussian War in which he had led Prussia to victory against Napoleon III, he
came to the conclusion that a future war could no longer be fought among
the Great Powers of Europe. Such a war, he was convinced, would be a
Volkskrieg, a people’s war, that no belligerent could hope to win.
Everything should therefore be done to avoid a major European war.37
The problem was that if this insight of an old war horse had been
followed by his successors it would have made large armies and the
planning of a major war superfluous. Although his nephew and his
comrades never openly refuted Moltke the Elder’s wisdom, it seems that for
their own profession’s sake they wanted to make great wars fightable and
winnable again. Hence they adopted Schlieffen’s idea of annihilation and
added to it the notion of a lightning war. Brutal attack, swift advances into
enemy territory and total defeat within weeks had become the way out of
the military-professional dilemma that they faced in the era of People’s
Wars. This explains the illusory claim that circulated among the soldiers on
the Western Front, that victory would be achieved within months and that
they would be home again by Christmas 1914. It is against the background
of the feeling that a preventive war could be won by the Central Powers that
a fatal decision was taken by a few men in Berlin and Vienna that pushed
Europe over the brink. This means that there is no need for scholars to go
on a roundtrip through the capitals of Europe with the aim of finding out
that other decision-makers were more responsible for the First World War
than the two emperors and their advisers. Berlin and Vienna continue to be
the best places for historians to look closely for clues as to why war broke
out in 1914.38
There is also likely to be more work on the so-called ‘unspoken
assumptions’ – a notion that T. G. Otte has revived with reference to the
attitudes and mentalities prevailing in the British Foreign Office before
1914 below the top ministerial and Cabinet level.39 This chapter, it is true,
has focused on the ‘outspoken assumptions’ that flowed from the
mentalities, dispositions and decision-making processes in Berlin and
Vienna. While often but opaquely articulated perceptions and assumptions
of international politics are no doubt worth exploring, the moves of Sir
Edward Grey in London, through which the decision to go to war was
delayed until 4 August, were largely imposed by the split in the British
Cabinet about whether to enter the war at all. Only when it became
absolutely clear that the main thrust of the German invasion was head on
through Belgium and not further south against France, was he able to sway
his Cabinet colleagues. Like London, Paris similarly took a more
‘attentiste’ position and not the proactive one of the decision-makers in
Berlin and Vienna.
There can be little doubt that the debate is likely to continue on what
share of the responsibility not only Russia, but also the other powers have
to bear in the origins of the First World War. However, as this chapter has
been arguing, these shares will be secondary in comparison to the
aggressive diplomacy and armament policies that the German monarchy,
with Vienna increasingly in its wake, pursued from the turn of the century,
and that for the reasons examined here, culminated in the idea of the
Central Powers launching a preventive war in 1914.
1 James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London: Longman,
1984).
2 Ibid., p. 196.
3 See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1999).
4 See, e.g., Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Domestic origins of

Germany’s colonial expansion under Bismarck’, Past and Present, 42:1
(1969), pp. 140–59; see also Sebastian Conrad, German Colonialism: A
Short History (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5 Quoted in Edward Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation before the Great

War (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1976), p. 349.
6 Quoted in Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig: Hase and Koehler,

1919), p. 52.
7 Quoted in Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation, p. 348.
8 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of

War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
9 See Volker R. Berghahn, Sarajewo, 28. Juni 1914: Der Untergang des
Alten Europa (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), pp. 16ff.
10 For a very good digest of Weber’s ideas see Wolfgang J. Mommsen,
The Age of Bureaucracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
11 Friedrich von Bernhardi, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Stuttgart:

J. G. Cotta, 1912), English trans., Allen H. Powell, Germany and the Next
War (New York: Longmans, 1914).
12 Ivan Bloch, The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political
Relations: Is War Now Impossible?, trans. R. C. Long, with a prefatory
conversation with the author by W. T. Stead (New York: Doubleday &
McClure, 1899).
13 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London: Putnam’s Sons, 1910).
14 See, e.g., Arthur Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power (London:
Putnam & Co., 1940).
15 Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Imperialismus, Wettrüsten und Kriegsausbruch

1914’, Neue Politische Literatur, 2 (1975), pp. 160–94.
16 Quoted in Volker R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in

1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 51.
17 Ibid., pp. 50ff.
18 Jonathan Steinberg, ‘The Copenhagen complex’, Journal of

Contemporary History, 1 (1966), pp. 23–40.
19 See Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971),

pp. 419ff.
20 Quoted in H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, 1892–

1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 201.
21 Quoted in Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914,
40 vols. (Berlin 1922–), vol. XXIV, no. 8216, letter from Bülow to Wilhelm
II, 15 July 1908.
22 Helmuth von Moltke, Erinnerungen, Briefe, Dokumente (Stuttgart: Der

Kommende Tag, 1922), p. 362.
23 Quoted in Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 4 vols.

(Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1954–68), vol. II, p. 274.
24 See Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, pp. 126ff.
25 Isabel Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II: 1888–1918

26 Quoted in Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf: Droste,

1969), p. 257.
27 See Peter-Christian Witt, Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschen Reiches von

1903 bis 1913 (Lubeck: Matthiesen, 1970), pp. 356ff.
28 See John C. G. Röhl, ‘An der Schwelle zum Weltkrieg: Eine

Dokumentation über den “Kriegsrat” vom 8. Dezember 1912’,
Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 21 (1977), pp. 77–134.
29 Ibid.
30 Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, 5

vols. (Vienna: Rikola, 1921–5), vol. III, p. 597. For an excellent analysis of
Austro-Hungarian policy in 1913/14 see Samuel R. Williamson, Jr.,
Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1991), esp. pp. 143ff., 164ff.
31 Quoted in Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, p. 584.

32 On the attitudes of business and finance see Niall Ferguson, The Pity of
War: 1914–1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 193f.
33 See Wolfgang Schieder (ed.), Erster Weltkrieg (Cologne: Kiepenheuer

& Witsch, 1969), pp. 174ff. For the moves of the Austro-Hungarian
government in July, see Williamson, Jr., Austria-Hungary and the Origins
of the First World War, pp. 190ff.
34 Quoted in John C. G. Röhl, ‘Admiral von Müller and the approach of

war’, Historische Zeitschrift, 4 (1969), pp. 610ff.
35 Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des

Kaiserlichen Deutschland (1914–1918) (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1964 [1961]).
36 Lancelot L. Farrar, The Short War Illusion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-
Clio, 1973).
37 See Stig Förster, ‘Facing people’s war’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 2

(1987), pp. 209–30.
38 Many years ago L. F. C. Turner, The Origins of the First World War
(London: Edward Arnold, 1970), held Russia primarily responsible for the
outbreak of war in July/August 1914. This argument has most recently been
taken up again by Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World
War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). The most recent
work (2013) that also raises the question of Russian responsibility is
Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
(New York: HarperCollins, 2012). Clark also examines the role of Serbia
and her ambitions in the Balkans. It is to be hoped that the research that is
likely to be published in connection with the centenary of 1914 will yield a
more definitive weighting among the three governments that have also been
at the centre of this analysis.
39 T. G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign

Policy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
2 1914: Outbreak
Jean-Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich On 28 July 1914, Austria-
Hungary declared war on Serbia. On 30 July, Russia ordered general
mobilisation. During the night of 30–31 July, Austria-Hungary decided to
mobilise, followed on 1 August by Germany and France at approximately
the same time. Also on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia, and on
France on 3 August. On 4 August the United Kingdom declared war on
Germany, and on 6 August Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia.
Within a few days virtually all the great European powers were at war (with
the exception of Italy at this stage, which did not declare war on Austria-
Hungary until 23 May 1915).
From the very beginning of a European war such as had not been seen for
nearly a century, it was impossible to compare it to any other conflict: by
reason of the general mobilisations at its outbreak, and the call for mass
volunteers in Britain, this time millions of men would be involved in the
war. How did all this come about?
It seems that no other historic event has ever aroused so many questions,
controversies or so much research – and so it has continued for nearly a
century. First, there was the bitter argument over ‘responsibility’, which
began in August 1914, and which led to the first official white, blue, yellow
and orange books prepared by the foreign offices of the various nations at
war. These documents are to some extent still useful today, but are partially
undermined by falsifications, counter-truths and omissions. It was later,
after 1918, that the debate became equally political and historiographic,
concentrating on the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles and in particular the
clause which unilaterally declared Germany and her allies responsible for
starting the war. The discussion was intensified by the need to justify to
public opinion the deaths of the 10 million soldiers who were killed in the
war. In addition there were the tens of millions more who suffered the
consequences of wounds or exposure to gas, including incalculable
numbers of permanently handicapped and mutilated men. This discussion,
led by Sydney Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt and Pierre Renouvin, continued
until the early 1930s, when historians of the different nationalities agreed
that none of the Great Powers could be considered entirely free from some
degree of responsibility. ‘Willy-nilly, along with the great majority of
historians (even though the number is irrelevant), the (unequal) division of
responsibility must be accepted.’1
The colossal total sum calculated by the Italian journalist Luigi Albertini
(published in 1940, but debated and accepted as an authoritative work of
reference since its publication in English in 1953)2 reflects this trend in the
interwar years to deepen knowledge of the actions of all the leaders in the
crisis of July 1914 through comparative study. The general impression of
this approach had already been stated by Lloyd George in his War
Memoirs,3 that all the Powers ‘slithered into the War’. Nonetheless, it may
have been the particular intransigence of the German government which
initiated the final explosion, or perhaps Russia above all should take the
blame: in the view of Jules Isaac , it was Russia’s general mobilisation on
30 July which made war inevitable.4
This relative equilibrium in the historiography of the Great War was
disturbed in 1961 by the German historian Fritz Fischer, in his publication
Griff nach der Weltmacht.5 Using all the documentation known at that time,
he accused the German government of having intended and prepared for
this war since 1912 as a conflict from which Germany was to emerge as a
world power – in other words, a power of world supremacy. The result was
an outcry, above all in Germany, with profound opposition between the
‘Fischerites’ and their opponents. In the longer term, however, the
controversy was valuable: it instigated an entirely fresh and wholehearted
approach to the historiography of the Great War – despite the general
opinion in the 1950s that it had broadly reached saturation point.
Concentration was focused far more closely than before on specific actions
or behaviour in July 1914. This was the moment when ‘mentalities’ began
to appear in historiographical works on the origins of the war and of fateful
decisions. From this perspective, the inaugural lecture at the London School
of Economics by James Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions, remains a
beacon for research on July 1914.6 For France, we have the book by Jean-
Jacques Becker7 on French public opinion and the mentalities of those
taking the decisions, and of the French in general – since then we have
learned that, for example, the ‘enthusiasm’ of August 1914 is either
ephemeral or a myth. In the case of Germany, we have Wolfgang
Mommsen’s fundamental article, ‘The topos of inevitable war in Germany
in the decade before 1914’,8 which established a solid link between
‘mentalities’ in general and the spirit of decision-makers in the approach to
war, particularly in July 1914.
This historiographical list could be extended further but, to remain
strictly with the ‘July crisis’, several quite recent studies by Samuel
Williamson, Annika Mombauer,9 Antoine Prost and Jay Winter10 have
amplified our knowledge. For Samuel Williamson,11 who has personally
revived research on military agreements before the war of 1914–18,12 the
role of Austria-Hungary was primordial in the genesis of the international
crisis in July 1914. Williamson’s study is of particular value since the role
of Austria-Hungary was long overlooked in historiography. For Fritz
Fischer and his followers, it merely followed in the wake of Germany’s
aggressive designs, yet for the past twenty years research into the role of
Austria-Hungary has been increasingly important .13 The least that can be
said is that the Emperor and his entourage, together with the enigmatic
Chief of the general staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, played an active and
aggressive role both before and after the attack in Sarajevo. This applies
particularly to the Foreign Minister, Berchtold, while General Conrad was
unrestrained in his demands for a ‘good’ war against Serbia: in the
aftermath of the Balkan wars this ‘minor power’ had expanded greatly and
taken an increasingly aggressive attitude towards Austria-Hungary in order
to instigate the outbreak of such a war. Had not Conrad demanded, at least
three times since December 1912, that this disturbing neighbour be
disposed of by means of a preventive war?
The Sarajevo attack would supply Austria-Hungary’s political and
military leaders with a convenient reason for dealing conclusively with the
Serbian (and pan-Slav) threat. Whatever the more or less remote origins of
the conflict (as discussed in Chapter 1), the assassination in Sarajevo on 28
June 1914, which killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke
Franz-Ferdinand, and his wife, in effect gave the signal. This assassination
was a ‘Serb’ affair. From the Congress of Berlin in 1878 until their final
annexation by Austria-Hungary in 1908, the provinces of Bosnia-
Herzegovina – which in law were always Ottoman – came under Austro-
Hungarian annexation. Russia, protector of the Slavs, was unable to respond
to this situation: it had been weakened by the combination of its defeat
against Japan in 1905 and the revolutionary movements of 1905 – and,
further, its French ally had indicated that it was not to be called on in an
affair which did not concern France’s vital interests.
The population of Bosnia-Herzegovina was not solely Serbian since it
also included Catholic Croats and Muslims. In reality the great majority of
these Muslims were Serbs who had converted to Islam. Overall, however,
Orthodox Serbs represented the most numerous ethnicity, and despite the
advances introduced by the Austro-Hungarian authorities the young Serbs
resented foreign domination. Many plots had been fomented to assassinate
one or another significant person without ever coming to the point of action,
and Franz-Ferdinand’s announced visit provoked a new conspiracy in which
the chief figure was a 19-year-old Bosniac, Gavrilo Princip. Surprisingly,
this conspiracy came to fruition through a series of accidents, even
exceeding the intentions of its plotters: the car bearing Franz-Ferdinand
stopped in front of Princip, who used his revolver to kill both the Archduke
and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, a second murder which had not
been part of the conspirators’ plan.
The attack immediately posed the question of who was behind the plot. In
Austria-Hungary, all eyes turned immediately towards Serbia: had the
attack genuinely been fomented in Serbia with the knowledge of the Serb
government? Princip was a student in Belgrade, in independent Serbia,
when he learned of the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo. The idea of the assault
came to him almost at once, but he had three problems to solve. The task of
assembling a certain number of fellow conspirators from Bosniac students
in Belgrade and Sarajevo did not seem very difficult; in addition, weapons
had to be found and transported to Sarajevo. Weapons were provided by a
Serb nationalist group, Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death), better known
under the name used by its enemies, Crna Ruka (The Black Hand), and it
was also branches of the Black Hand which enabled Princip and two of his
comrades to reach Sarajevo with the weapons. At the same time, the Black
Hand had connections in the Serb army: its leader, Colonel Dragutin
Dimitrievic, was also head of intelligence for the Serb army’s general staff.
It should not be inferred from this that the Serb government was implicated
in preparing the attack. For the directors of the Black Hand (who thought
that this attack would fail like all others before it), it was above all a means
of applying pressure to the Prime Minister, Nikola Pašić; having
personified the Serb nationalist current, Pašić was now accused of passivity
and complaisancy towards Austria-Hungary. Clearly he found the situation
far from easy and understood immediately that this attack would be
exploited against Serbia by its powerful neighbour. The following day he
established his political strategy: the Serb government declared that it was
not concerned by an event that was ‘internal’ to Austria-Hungary because
the authors of the attack were all Bosniacs and thus Austro-Hungarian
subjects. However, as Pašić also knew that members of the Serb army and
frontier officials had helped Princip and his companions, supplying them
with weapons and allowing them to cross the frontier, it was easy to see that
Austria-Hungary would hold Serbia responsible. Although Pašić and his
entourage expressed their condolences and displayed (more or less sincere)
alarm, the very different attitude taken by other members of the government
was echoed in the press, which represented the nationalist and pan-Serb
opposition. It exulted wholeheartedly and congratulated Princip and his
companions, who were raised to hero status, even martyrs, in the
‘Yugoslav’ cause.
Pašić had every reason to maintain his stance because it was evident that
Russia had not the slightest interest in adding oil to the fire at that moment.
When on 3 July Pašić sought advice from Sazonov, the Russian Minister
for Foreign Affairs, the reply was the same as that already given by the
French Président du Conseil, René Viviani, on 1 July: everything must be
done to keep calm. This was easier said than done, but Pašić, without any
great conviction, made the effort. However, to say to the Austro-Hungarians
that Serbia regretted this incident but was not unduly concerned by it was
one thing, but it was another matter entirely to claim that it could not
muzzle the free Serb press and that to do so would undermine the ‘difficult
balance of restraint and cooperation’ between officials and the press. No
one took this latter argument seriously. 14
Without going further into these subtleties, Austro-Hungarian opinion
immediately expressed great indignation towards Serbia. The Austro-
Hungarian government considered that the incident must be put to good use
to tame Serbia, whose aggressive behaviour, and indeed its very existence,
were a danger to the stability of the ‘multi-national’ Empire. The imperial
court in Vienna immediately decided to seize the occasion to settle the
question of Serbia once and for all. On 7 July, the Imperial Council of
Ministers took offence at this Serbian lack of genuine cooperation in which
certain circles of officials and the mainstream press persisted in applauding
the attack – a reproach which was expressed again in the ultimatum of 23
July. German ‘nationalist’ historiography also recorded this ultimatum as
severe – but not exaggerated, in view of the events. In reality, at this
Council of 7 July the participants had favoured sending an unacceptable
ultimatum to Serbia in order to trigger a punitive war, even though
Berchtold, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, had pointed out the inherent
risk of provoking war with Russia and that the Prime Minister of the
Hungarian Council, Tisza, was openly opposed to it:
In return, all participants with the exception of the President of the

Council of the Kingdom of Hungary consider that a success of a purely
diplomatic nature would be without value, even if it led to dazzling
humiliation for Serbia. It would thus be necessary to bring Serbia face
to face with claims so considerable that rejection could be expected
and a radical military intervention can be undertaken.15
Nonetheless, Austria-Hungary could not act without German acquiescence,

particularly because in the preceding year Austria-Hungary and Italy had
categorically objected to Serbia becoming a maritime power by extending
its territory as far as the Adriatic Sea, and had achieved this through the
creation of Albania. Austria-Hungary would have liked to take further
advantage of these circumstances to eliminate the Serb danger once and for
all, but Germany had restrained them from acting to do so.
The eventual outcome of events therefore depended on Germany, where
the attack had been felt more powerfully than in most other European
countries. It had stirred feelings everywhere and sometimes, but rarely,
anxiety. In France, for example, Clemenceau was almost alone in
expressing concern, in his journal L’Homme libre, over the potentially far-
reaching consequences of the attack. In Bavaria, long allied to Austria,
feelings had been particularly strong. The same was true of Kaiser Wilhelm
II, to whom Franz-Ferdinand had been close.
The Kaiser’s feelings were reflected in remarks which have become
famous, written in the margins of a report from the German ambassador to
Vienna, Count Heinrich von Tschirschky. The ambassador later recounted
his first conversation with the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister,
Berchtold, on 30 June, in a report addressed to Chancellor Bethmann
Hollweg but also read and annotated by the Kaiser. Among other points,
Tschirschky explained that in Vienna, even among ‘serious people’, many
voices explicitly wanted the Serb question to be dealt with conclusively,
and he took pains to assure the Chancellor that he would not stop preaching
caution to all concerned. The Kaiser commented in the margin:
Who authorised him to speak like that? It is very stupid! And this is no
concern of his because it is Austria alone which will decide what it
sees best to do. Otherwise, it will be said later, if the affair goes off the
rails, that it was Germany which did not wish it. Tschirschky must
imperatively stop saying such absurd things. Austria-Hungary must
finish with Serbia, and finish soon.
It is unlikely that debate about the real impact of the Kaiser’s remarks on
German foreign policy over the July crisis will ever end. His ministers were
used to his temperamental outbursts, and it does not seem that Tschirschky
suffered any sanction; nonetheless, it should be noted that in this case
German policy followed the Kaiser’s directions quite closely. It is even
possible that the genesis of the doctrine of ‘localisation’ of the conflict may
lie in these marginal notes. It was not a sophisticated calculation, but simply
Germany’s wish not to be reproached by Austria-Hungary with having
prevented it taking action against the Serbs (as had happened in 1909, 1912
and 1913). The thinking of the Kaiser was thus simple and doubtless quite
widely shared: the opportunity offered by the assassination attack must be
used to tame Serbia – the affair must also remain the work of the double
monarchy alone and, if the Austro-Hungarian action were to fail, Germany
must not be held responsible for this fresh setback suffered by its Austrian
allies.
This obsession was shared by the entire German government and had
heavy consequences for later events. It was the result of a major fact, which
has frequently been overlooked in the relevant historiography – namely, that
Germany had only one reliable ally in Europe, Austria-Hungary. Although
Italy was also linked to Germany within the Triple Alliance, its lack of
reliability as an ally was already felt strongly and would soon be confirmed.
If Austria-Hungry were to remain an important ally it must not be
weakened. When an Austrian diplomat, Count Hoyos, came to Berlin on 5
July to discuss reprisals against Serbia, he therefore received full German
support – what came to be called ‘the blank cheque’. The British military
historian Hew Strachan, whose analysis of ‘July 1914’ is perhaps the most
complete ever achieved, has expressed understandable surprise: ‘What is
striking about the “blank cheque” is not that it was issued but that it was
indeed blank.’16 Certainly what happened at this moment was an
unexpected ‘extraordinary abdication of responsibility’17 on the part of the
German government. Far from pressing the Austrians to take action against
Serbia even at the risk of a war with Russia (this, in summary, was the
thesis of Fritz Fischer and his school18), the German government simply let
them go ahead. Hoyos brought a letter to Berlin from the Emperor Franz-
Joseph (in reality, a very long memorandum), explaining the situation of
Austria-Hungary faced with the Balkan states and Russia, and above all
sketching out a general policy designed to weaken the Balkan League,
attract Bulgaria and totally undermine the entire pan-Slavist movement,
while frustrating Russia’s clear intention to ‘encircle’ Austria-Hungary by
means of its French alliance. But this long-term strategy would only be
possible if Serbia, at that time the linchpin of the pan-Slav policy, were
eliminated as a Balkan political power, and the Emperor Franz-Joseph
asked his ally the Kaiser to support him in a ‘common counter-attack of the
members of the Triple Alliance, above all Austria-Hungary and the German
Empire’. It would be in the interest of the two powers to strike down
agitations ‘systematically conceived and nourished by Russia’. The assault
in Sarajevo – and this was the conclusion of the memorandum – demanded
a response from the double monarchy, to achieve a decisive break in the
threads which the adversaries were in the course of ‘weaving into a web
around them’.19
This Austro-Hungarian memorandum referred only secondarily to action
by Germany, insisting all the while that Austria-Hungary must use the crisis
to decapitate the pan-Slav movement and defend itself against its originator,
Russia. This document was delivered by Hoyos through the Austro-
Hungarian ambassador, Szőgyény-Marich, and on 5 July the Kaiser
assembled his entourage of political and military figures of authority .
Much was said in the 1920s of a ‘Council of the Crown’ set up for this
purpose, but this was not the case. The meeting brought together the
Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, the Under-Secretary of State, Arthur
Zimmermann (instead of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Jagow, who,
remarkably, was on holiday), the Prussian War Minister, Falkenhayn, Moriz
von Lynker, the Prussian military chef de cabinet and General Hans von
Plessen, who was close to the Kaiser. Moltke and Tirpitz were both also on
holiday and therefore absent. The decision was taken, apparently quite
quickly, to support the Austro-Hungarian intentions, even in the case of a
Russian intervention. No record of the meeting exists. In 1919 General von
Falkenhayn affirmed to the commission of enquiry of the German
Parliament that nothing had been discussed, and that the Kaiser had simply
asked him whether, if it so required, the army would be ready. He had
confirmed this.
On 6 July, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg summarised for the Austrian
ambassador the opinion of this group at the Kaiser’s meeting. Germany
would accept fully whatever action Austria-Hungary considered useful to
take against Serbia, given that the German policy, which until then had
consisted of seeking a compromise with that country, had been rendered
null and void by the Sarajevo attack. The Chancellor again gave assurances
that Austria-Hungary would be supported by Germany in whatever action
they decided on; but he also repeated the advice to take action quickly
against Serbia.20
The German government has been heavily criticised for the risk of a far-
reaching war. Fritz Fischer and his school have dramatised this concession,
maintaining that the double monarchy would not have been capable on its
own of taking any serious decision: it was German consent alone which
opened the way for the actions which followed. The risks, in truth, had not
been great: the only one, Russian intervention, was unlikely, specifically
because of the origins of the situation and the existence of a certain
monarchical solidarity. Above all the risks were if any reprisals were swift
and brief.
Nonetheless, there are problems in analysing the German Chancellor’s
situation. Reference to Bethmann Hollweg as ‘the enigmatic chancellor’21
is well-founded, and since German diplomatic and political correspondence
show that he very rarely took a stance before the ultimatum of 23 July, it is
not easy to define his policy during the July crisis. It seems likely that at the
very beginning of the crisis, Bethmann Hollweg, whose policy since taking
office had not been warlike or even included any risk of war, was still trying
to calm the situation. In the interests of maintaining European peace, he
considered that it would be useful, and possible, to ‘localise’ the conflict –
to prevent it from spreading beyond the single point at issue between
Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Germany should therefore remain in the
background. But, and this is a major ‘but’, Bethmann Hollweg was
fundamentally convinced of the ‘Russian danger’ and this since at least the
armaments crisis of 1913 when he had spoken in the Reichstag about an
inevitable conflagration in the long run between ‘the Slavs and the
Germans’. The press campaign between Russia and Germany in the spring
of 1914, following the appointment of a German general, Liman von
Sanders, as head of the Ottoman army,22 had noticeably intensified his
fatalism. In addition, he was deeply concerned at information transmitted
by a German spy, Siebert, at the heart of the Russian embassy in London,
concerning Anglo-Russian negotiations over a possible maritime treaty
between them. This concern was aggravated by the British government’s
denial, on several occasions, that such conversations had taken place,
despite Siebert’s detailed reports. Before July 1914 Bethmann Hollweg was
increasingly convinced that the encirclement so much feared by the
Germans since the Franco-British treaty of 1904, the Moroccan crises of
1905 and 1911, the exchange of letters of support between Grey (the British
Minister for Foreign Affairs) and Paul Cambon (French ambassador in the
United Kingdom) at the end of 1912, had now become reality.23 From these
suspicions he became convinced that something extremely serious was in
the making, to the detriment of Germany. On 24 June, four days before the
assassination in Sarajevo, he was again showing signs of extreme anxiety
over Russia’s behaviour.24 Whether or not this was well-founded is of little
importance: the important point was what the German authorities thought.
Bethmann Hollweg’s personal pessimism was further intensified in May
1914 by the death of his wife. Kurt Riezler, his secretary and confidant,
expressed this clearly in his diary which, despite its deficiencies and the
cuts that it has suffered, has become one of the key sources for the July
crisis. On 7 July, for example, Bethmann Hollweg commented to Riezler
that for him the Russo-British negotiations on a maritime convention were
very worrying and formed ‘the final link in the chain’. Russia’s military
strength was growing rapidly; Austria was increasingly weakened by
pressures from north and south, and would be incapable of following
Germany into a war. On 8 July Riezler noted the Chancellor’s opinion that
if war came from the East, Germany would go to war to support Austria-
Hungary. It was always possible that Germany would win. ‘If war does not
come, if the Tsar does not wish it or if France, in confusion, counsels peace,
we will still have the prospect of making the Entente collapse through this
action [i.e., war by Austria against Serbia].’ A week later, on 14 July,
Riezler’s notes show that for the Chancellor the intervention of Austria-
Hungary and its support by Germany was ‘like a jump into the unknown,
and that is the supreme duty’. The Chancellor considered, however, that it
would be convenient for the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum not to be sent
before Poincaré’s visit to Russia, so that ‘France in anguish’ over a potential
war would ask Russia to maintain the peace.
On 20 July, informed that the ultimatum would not be sent before 23 July,
Bethmann Hollweg showed himself to be ‘resolute and silent’. However, he
spoke to Riezler of Russia’s growing ambitions and its impressive
expansion, which in a few years would be beyond restraint. On 23 July
Riezler noted that ‘the opinion of the Chancellor is that if war comes, it will
be the consequence of a Russian mobilisation undertaken in the heat of the
moment, that is, ahead of any preliminary negotiations. In that case
negotiations would hardly be possible, because we would have to attack
immediately. The entire nation would recognise the danger and would rise.’
Overall, the German rulers were convinced that rapid action would
prevent the other powers from intervening in the conflict between Serbia
and Austria-Hungary. Bethmann Hollweg told Riezler of his opinion that
‘to strike rapidly and then be friendly towards the Powers – this was how to
soften the blow’.25 Jagow, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, referred to
this attitude as the ‘localisation’ of the conflict. He explained his plan in a
long memorandum dated 15 July: ‘localisation’ also meant that Germany
would require the other powers to stand back from getting mixed up in this
conflict in any way. Because of the rigidity of the system of alliances, and
purely through their operation, the risk would exist in the continuing
situation of being led into a European war. In consequence, the British were
asked to abstain when, in line with the custom of the Concert of Europe,
they proposed to unite the ‘non-interested powers’ in order to find a
friendly solution. Jagow and his collaborators then made every effort to
avoid such a meeting of ambassadors, asserting that if the Serb question
was not ‘localised’ in this way, there was a risk of a general war. For, it was
added, if Russia did not fall in with this wish for ‘localisation’ and acted
militarily in support of Serbia, it would show proof of its war-mongering
and pan-Slavist aims. In this case – and this was an old argument, but
updated during the ‘July crisis’ – it would be convenient to go to war
immediately, before the Russian army could draw on its numerical
superiority and the completion of its ‘strategic’ railway lines. These
developments, which could be expected around 1916, would enable it to
undertake a rapid offensive and mark the death of the Schlieffen Plan.
In the end, the ‘localisation’ of the conflict thus formulated was an
adventurous political tactic. As described by Wolfgang Mommsen, it would
mean a deliberately high-risk ‘all or nothing’ scheme – but with the genuine
risk of plunging into major catastrophe.26 Yet, did this political calculation
reflect a spirit of moderation, as has often been asked? Of course when it is
asserted, as do Fischer and his school, that Germany’s all-out insistence on
war was in the interests of imperialism, this wish for the ‘localisation’ of
the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia alone could indicate that it
was truly a spirit of moderation which ruled in Berlin. Gerhard Ritter and
many others have confirmed this – it was even one of the salient points of
the ‘Fritz Fischer controversy’ in the 1960s.27 In reality, above all in the
minds of Bethmann Hollweg, Jagow and the Kaiser, localisation was a test
of what Russia and its allies wanted. The conviction of Russian aggressive
intent, and the prospect of its military superiority within a few years was
such that this fear had overwhelmed calmer and more balanced political
reasoning. No one in Berlin, apparently, had wondered whether or not this
strict concept of the localisation of the war – which was not taken up by any
of the other Great Powers – might push the situation further towards war. To
demand that this conflict remain limited between Austria-Hungary and
Serbia meant that no mediation was acceptable. To demand that Russia
should let Austria-Hungary act against Serbia was not a test, but genuine
blackmail on a grand scale and a self-fulfilling prophecy in respect of
Russian behaviour. This was the attitude that struck Chancellor Bethmann
Hollweg, according to Riezler’s notes, as ‘our heaviest duty’. German
policy in July 1914 cannot be stated more clearly. It was the reflection of
behaviour which was entirely speculative, even irresponsible.
In an interview with a politician friend, the liberal deputy Conrad
Haussman, in 1918, and despite his recognition of the terrible slaughter in
the war since August 1914, Bethmann Hollweg summarised his way of
thinking and attitude to his responsibilities at the time of the July crisis:
‘Yes, by God, in a way it was a preventive war. But if war was in any case
hovering over us; if it had come in two years’ time, but even more
dangerously and even more unavoidably, and if the military leaders
declared that now it was still possible without being defeated, in two years’
time no longer . . . ! Yes, the military!’28
The final straw that was to change everything was the slowness of the
Austrian reactions: in letting affairs drag on for nearly a month they
modified behaviour elsewhere, in particular in Russia. The Austrian
government was generally slow to act – but this time it was slow for a
particular reason. The most active protagonists in favour of an Austrian
intervention against Serbia were the Foreign Minister, Count Leopold
Berchtold, who lacked both experience and character and was a man of a
‘disturbing lightness’, according to Pierre Renouvin,29 and General Franz
Conrad von Hötzendorf, Chief of the general staff to the army. Hötzendorf
had been a protégé and friend of Franz-Ferdinand and had succeeded at
least partially in overcoming the distrust of the Emperor Franz-Joseph, who
was now 84 years old and recovering from an operation. But there was a
sizeable obstacle in the form of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count István
Tisza, a firm and energetic spirit who had no wish for a war which could
possibly lead to an increase in the number of Slavs in the Empire – a
number which he already considered excessive. It was not until 14 July that
he accepted the plan to intervene against the Serbs. The reasons for his
change of mind remained mysterious for a long time, but recent research
has shown how he was influenced by Istvan Burian, Minister responsible
for Bosnia-Herzegovina affairs between 1903 and 1912. Burian seems to
have convinced him that only military intervention against the Serbs could
prevent the power of Austria-Hungary being permanently undermined in
these regions. Whatever the circumstances may have been, after 14 July
Tisza became ‘a relentless supporter of the military solution’. 30
The decisions to attack Serbia were not settled until 19 July. On 23 July
an ultimatum was sent to Serbia which, as shown above, had been designed
to be unacceptable. Serbia had forty-eight hours to accept the conditions,
which would turn the country into a sort of Austro-Hungarian protectorate.
Anti-Austrian propaganda would be forbidden, nationalist associations
dissolved and, as a supplementary condition, Austro-Hungarian officials
would take part in repression of the ‘subversive’ movement. The Serb
government showed great prudence and accepted all the conditions – except
the final one. To the Austro-Hungarian government this proviso represented
a rejection of its ultimatum: it declared war on Serbia on 28 July and
Austro-Hungarian artillery opened fire on Belgrade from the opposite bank
of the Danube.
The German government had complained continually at the slowness of
the Austro-Hungarian reaction, but to Wilhelm II the conciliatory response
from Serbia was a great success, and there was no longer any reason for
war: at most, Austria-Hungary could demand a pledge that the
commitments would be fulfilled. But the hitherto docile ally, Austria-
Hungary, rejected the Kaiser’s counsels of moderation – encouraged by
Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s extremely tardy transmission of the
Kaiser’s thinking, for reasons which still remain unclear. Further, at the
same time Moltke let it be known to his Austrian analogue, Conrad, that
Germany would continue to support the action of Austria-Hungary without
alteration: a military intrusion into politics, no doubt, which gave rise to the
famous exclamation by the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Berchtold:
‘So who is governing in Berlin, Bethmann or Moltke?’ 31
The great question now became, what was Russia going to do? As in
1908 at the time of the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, would it accept
the fait accompli or would it claim to fulfil its role as protector of the
Balkan Slavs? The conditions were no longer the same. The effects of the
defeat against Japan and the events of 1905 were fading, and Raymond
Poincaré, France’s Président du Conseil at the time of the Balkan wars and
now President of the Republic, had held back from restraining Russia’s
action out of fear of losing the alliance. As a result, the Russian government
could imagine that no matter how France behaved, Russia had no reason to
fear Clemenceau’s crisp warning of 1908.
This hypothesis was supported by the presence in Russia of the French
Presidents – Président du Conseil, René Viviani, and President of the
Republic, Poincaré – in the days before the Austrian ultimatum. In the
prevailing circumstances this visit, in theory a routine encounter between
two great allies, held consequences of two kinds. Leaving from Dunkirk on
15 July, Viviani and Poincaré stayed in Saint Petersburg between 21 and 23
July. They did not yet know of the ultimatum, but French diplomats in
Vienna had an idea that something was in the wind. In this context,
Poincaré’s reference to the ‘indissoluble alliance’ did not appear to be
purely routine, and his warning to the Austrian ambassador affirming that
‘Serbia has very warm friends in the Russian people and Russia has an ally,
France. How many complications there are to be feared!’ was heard
particularly clearly in Russia.
It may be added that after the departure of the Presidents, the French
ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, was to add to this inclination and, further,
kept his government very poorly informed about what was happening in
Russia. It was only after an appreciable delay, therefore, that the French
government learned of the Russian move to general mobilisation – but none
of this had any apparent effect on the course of events. The second
consequence of the French Presidents’ visit to Russia was that, not without
reason, the ultimatum was sent on 23 July, while the French Presidents were
at sea and where they remained until 29 July, at the mercy of unreliable
communications. The role of France was naturally affected.
Both the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sergei Sazonov, and Tsar
Nicholas II were peaceable. Neither the Sarajevo attack nor the death of
Franz-Ferdinand, who was seen as broadly hostile to Russia, had provoked
any great emotion. A warning of some kind could have been tolerated, or
sanctions against Serbia, but an ultimatum sent so late was to change the
situation, to the extent that the attack had not immediately led to limited
reprisals in terms of area or time. Russia could not let Serbia be
overwhelmed without reacting: what would have been felt as a new national
humiliation would be unacceptable to the army leaders and public opinion
alike (urban opinion at least – the vast mass of peasants remained
indifferent to all of this). Nor would it be acceptable to a government
dominated by its Minister of the Interior, the somewhat outspoken
nationalist, Nicolai Maklakov. The only question was how to react without
provoking German intervention. The first thought was to launch a merely
partial mobilisation clearly directed against Austria alone – but this turned
out to be technically impossible. It should, however, be stressed that in the
end Russia was the first of all the Powers to call on the army, with the
decision on 24 July to mobilise four military districts (the district of
Warsaw was avoided for this mobilisation as it would have been a direct
threat to Germany). Hew Strachan considers that for Sazonov this
mobilisation did not exclude the possibility of opening political
negotiations. But he also suggests that it was naive to think of it as being
insignificant. Could not this be considered a sort of ‘blank cheque’ for
Serbia?32
It was of course known that in the case of war the German plans were
based on the Russian army mobilising slowly, and that Germany could not
accept being caught out by speed of action. Matters became more urgent
when on 30 July Russia decided on general mobilisation, ignoring
Bethmann Hollweg’s warning to Russia that general mobilisation there
would lead to general mobilisation in Germany, and would mean certain
war. It is not known precisely when the German government learned of the
Russian decision for general mobilisation, but with this decision the dice
were thrown. As Jules Isaac has written: ‘Would the war have been avoided
if the order for [Russian] general mobilisation had not been issued on 30
July? Very probably not. Did the Russian general mobilisation render war
inevitable? Certainly, yes.’33
The second idea was an exchange of messages between the two cousins –
the emperors of Germany and of Russia – which took place on 29 July but
which ended inconclusively. Following Austria-Hungary’s declaration of
war on Serbia, the Russian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sazonov, shifted
his position and abandoned his earlier pacific stance. Tsar Nicholas was
submitted to such pressure that, after several refusals, on 30 July he allowed
himself to give the order for Russian general mobilisation.
This Russian decision, taken without consulting France but with the
conviction of French support following the declarations of Poincaré and the
ambassador Paléologue, was extremely serious. It should be emphasised
that Austria-Hungary, which had so far hoped for a local conflict, decreed
its own general mobilisation on 31 July, some eighteen hours after the
Russian decision. Contrary to what has frequently been said, and was
believed at the time, Russian mobilisation preceded Austrian mobilisation.
The first great question had been what would Russia do? The question
now was what would Germany do? Russia’s action settled the matter.
Taking into account its extreme technical superiority, Germany had no need
to be excessively anxious over a mobilisation which was bound to be slow,
but this was not the opinion of the generals nor, to some extent, of public
opinion. Kaiser Wilhelm II and the civil powers, still hesitant, were
insistently driven by the generals who had hitherto remained reserved. The
generals considered – rightly – that in order to carry out the Schlieffen Plan,
this very bold plan which was designed to finish with France before turning
to deal with Russia, every day counted.
This applied above all to the head of the German army, Moltke. Like
Conrad von Hötzendorf, Moltke had insisted for some years that matters
must come to a head in a preventive war to save the position of Austria-
Hungary in the face of Slav nationalist movements. He had said this in
1909, 1911 and 1912. His biographer Annika Mombauer, with whom we
agree on this point, has rightly pointed out this semi-obsessional conviction
held by the nephew of Moltke the Elder. He felt, and expressed this
repeatedly to his political leaders, that the war was necessary and that
Germany and its ally had still every chance of winning – but not for long.
Did Moltke exceed the limits of his functions in trying to impose his
beliefs? Annika Mombauer thinks so, but she is contradicted by, among
others, Samuel Williamson, who considers that Moltke acted correctly in
sharing his observations and wishes with his political leaders. In 1917,
Bethmann Hollweg, as mentioned above, confirmed that the generals’
warnings had to be followed, but were they followed throughout the July
crisis? This raises the question of knowing who led decision-making in
Berlin. It was obvious on 28 July when, faced with the Serbian response to
Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum, Kaiser Wilhelm II showed signs of hesitation
and was in favour of halting the action undertaken: the slogan was ‘Stop at
Belgrade.’
Undoubtedly at this moment Moltke wished to impose the military point
of view. On 30 July he demanded urgently to proceed to mobilisation, while
Bethmann Hollweg wanted at any price to wait for the Russian general
mobilisation. As he had said repeatedly since 28 July, this was in order to
be forced to act in the interests of national defence, and thus obtain the
support of the Social Democrats. But Moltke was so impatient that at
around 2.00 p.m. on 30 July he took the initiative and asked the Austrian
military representative in Berlin for general mobilisation to take place
immediately in Austria-Hungary – a move which would force the German
government to follow suit. 34
A further question arises: would agreement on German mobilisation have
been reached on 31 July, even if Russia had not mobilised first? This is
what Fritz Fischer and his followers assert, but it remains very doubtful. It
has by no means been shown that Germany would indeed have mobilised if
Russia had not made the first move, if only because Bethmann Hollweg was
convinced of the importance of national consensus for ‘national defence’.
Russia was called on to halt its mobilisation. On receiving its negative
reply at around 7.00 p.m. on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia.
Another question arose in Germany. As Poincaré had recalled, Russia had
an ally in the form of France. Although France was not directly concerned
in events, the German generals considered that they could not take the risk
of a war on two fronts. The Schlieffen Plan must be put into action without
delay; as described above, the plan provided for the use of all possible force
against France to eliminate it in a few weeks before redirecting all German
forces against a Russia which was slow to mobilise. Understandably, in
these circumstances it was necessary to act as fast as possible. On 2 August,
German troops crossed the frontier into Luxembourg, while Belgium was
summoned to allow them free passage. On 3 August, Germany declared war
on France.
What had France been doing during this time? Not very much: as the
British historian John Keiger has written, it followed a ‘policy of going with
the flow of the stream’ and was one of the most ‘passive’ of the Great
Powers. At least two or three reasons explain this. The two French
Presidents had left Dunkirk only on 29 July, even if Poincaré, who was
punctilious about courtesies, had resigned himself with difficulty to hasten
through certain Scandinavian stages of their travels. French opinion,
including among politicians, was largely drawn away from international
affairs by the vagaries of the case of Madame Caillaux, whose husband
Joseph Caillaux was leader of the Radical party and one of the most
powerful men in France; a few weeks earlier she had assassinated the editor
of Le Figaro, Joseph Calmette. Further, the evolution of the crisis, and the
fact that Russia had been the first to mobilise, did not oblige France to go to
war automatically in support of Russia. In practice, general mobilisation in
France began at approximately the same time as in Germany; the German
‘aggression’ had left France no option.
And Britain? Under the leadership of the Liberal H. H. Asquith, who
along with the business circles of the City was strongly against war despite
the Entente with France and Russia, there was no question of joining in
automatically, particularly since it was initially a Balkan affair, concerning
the Serbs. As a supplementary reason, Serbia was held in very low esteem
in Britain. This was indeed the main error in the calculations of the German
leaders, who hoped that the United Kingdom would not intervene; to add to
this, in the phrase made famous by the Kaiser, the British army immediately
available was said to be ‘contemptible’. Traditionally, it is said that it was
the invasion of Belgium which sharply overturned the British attitude. In
reality it was not, properly speaking, for Belgium that Britain was to go to
war, but because a German victory in Western Europe implied a disturbance
in the European equilibrium which would be unacceptable to the British,
and because such a victory would put Germany in control of the Channel
ports. On 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany.
It is, however, useful to understand why Germany was mistaken over the
British attitude. For his part, Wilhelm II was convinced that the British
would hold back from any war because of the close relationship between
the two royal families. Not all German leaders shared this view – according
to the study by Volker Ullrich,35 Bethmann Hollweg’s opinion was the
complete opposite. He seems to have been fundamentally convinced that
Britain ‘would march’ in line with France, and this since well before the
‘July crisis’. Had not Grey, the British Foreign Minister, replied to a
message from Bethmann Hollweg dated 24 June (four days before the
assassination in Sarajevo), expressing German anxieties over a possible
maritime alliance with Russia, that Britain in fact had very strong links with
France and Russia? In return, the opinion of the German Foreign Secretary,
Jagow, wavered during the crisis. Zimmermann, the Under-Secretary for
Foreign Affairs, shared Bethmann Hollweg’s opinion, while Wilhelm von
Stumm, the political leader at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and
considered the expert on British questions, tended to agree with the Kaiser
that Britain would hold firm.
It is true that the behaviour of Grey, who had been leading foreign affairs
in Britain since 1905, changed a great deal during the course of the crisis –
for which he was bitterly reproached after the war. It has been suggested
that a firmer attitude from Britain could have led Germany towards
negotiation. In fact, Grey’s behaviour was extremely complex, as a number
of studies have underlined,36 and he avoided taking any firm position until
the moment of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum. Diplomatic documents
reveal only a remarkably few sparse and insignificant remarks from Great
Britain’s senior diplomat.37 At the beginning of the crisis, the British
government considered letting Austria punish Serbia – and that it would
remain a ‘local’ affair – which supported the German strategy. On 27 July,
Grey stated his opinion that it was appropriate for Austria to deal with
Serbia, and that Russia should keep out of the matter.38
The attitude of Grey and his advisers changed fundamentally with the
Austrian ultimatum against Serbia on 23 July. Grey was greatly angered by
this, although without adopting a firm position. This was demanded of him
by an important diplomat, Eyre Crowe, on 25 July: to the extent that France
and Russia were very close to each other and that France would not halt
Russia, it was necessary for the United Kingdom to prove its solidarity with
its usual partners. Grey judged that this could lead to war, and for this
reason on 27 July he proposed to call a meeting of the powers which had no
interest in the war, a proposal which surprised his partners. Germany
persisted in its wish for ‘localisation’. Bethmann Hollweg replied to this
proposal, which fell within the framework of customary European
diplomacy, that it seemed to him unsuitable to expose Austria to being
‘judged’ by the powers. After accepting for too long the German demand
for ‘localisation’, Grey thus persisted in hoping that the matter could be
settled along traditional diplomatic lines. But after 28 July the behaviour of
the British government was less equivocal: on 29 July it refused to accept
Bethmann Hollweg’s demand that Britain should remain neutral in the case
of war if Germany promised not to touch French possessions. On 30 July,
Bethmann Hollweg declared to the authorities of the Prussian Ministry of
State that the hope of keeping Britain neutral was ‘nil’ .
Was the British entry into the war already certain? Poincaré was very
doubtful of this when he wrote to the King of England. And if we follow
the study of Herbert Butterfield, on 31 July British opinion was still very
deeply divided between neutrality and participation in the war, as it was
among members of the Cabinet and of Parliament. This was so marked that
Butterfield concluded – in 1965 – that it is still not known in our time what
Britain would have done if Germany had not violated Belgian neutrality.
In less than seven days, Europe was launched into what would be the
greatest war ever known to date. Only Italy broke its alliance with Austria-
Hungary and Germany and chose neutrality. It was not a casual decision. In
broad terms ‘the right’, including Roman Catholics, was in favour of
respecting commitments, while ‘the left’, including socialists, preferred
neutrality. General opinion also broadly favoured neutrality, which Italy
kept until 1915.
How can we explain such a brutal descent into this war between
Europeans, particularly since in preceding years negotiation had resolved
some serious crises? Looking elsewhere, we can see that the Second World
War in particular, despite its unforeseen later developments, was
deliberately triggered by Hitler. The Great War had no Hitler figure;
virtually none of the European leaders, monarchs or civil governments
wished to go to war. But there were no statesmen energetic or capable
enough to find the means to block or delay the mechanism which led to the
war, not least because the origin of the crisis seemed marginal. Only
Austria-Hungary and Russia had a direct interest in this Balkan affair.
Despite everything, it was a disturbing sign that the great European nations
split into two camps, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, particularly
because adherence to these two groups did not in any way signify automatic
participation in a war. The best proof of this came from Italy, which found
itself in the opposing camp. On 1 August the British government still
refused to assure France of its support in the event of war. The French
situation was the most ambiguous, to the extent that a figure like Poincaré,
who as an individual was not in favour of war, was very clearly obsessed by
the need to avoid losing the Russian alliance.
Apart from the leaders, were the nations champing at the bit for war? In
this respect, not all the nations were in the same situation. There would
have been general stupefaction if the Belgians had been told that they
would soon be drawn into a European war, and the same applies to the
British. It is more difficult to describe in a single phrase the attitude of the
French faced with a potential war, although one at least can be put into
words. The idea of ‘la Revanche’ had largely faded, although this should
not be confused (as frequently happens) with enduring regret at having lost
the two provinces of Alsace and northern Lorraine. Fear of war existed,
however, for international relations had not been calm in the early years of
the twentieth century. It explains France’s return to three years of
compulsory military service in 1913, a question on which the nation was
sharply divided. The law of three years was still a major theme in the
election of 1914, won mainly by those hostile to the law and thus the least
warlike. Moreover, the Socialists and their main leader, Jean Jaurès,
campaigned tirelessly to maintain peace. It goes without saying, however,
that continual discussion in favour of peace and the organising of pacifist
meetings meant that at least part of society saw war as a possibility.
The situation of Germany and the German people was different, if only
for geographical reasons. For a Germany located between the two allies,
France to the west and Russia to the east, the concept and fear of
encirclement were sensitive matters. Further, as is often the case, opinions
did not always reflect realities. German opinion, for example, believed quite
strongly – and entirely wrongly – that France was preparing to attack
Germany at the first opportunity. Speeches over the three years’ law,
military propaganda in France, French pressure for Russia to develop its
strategic lines in relation to Germany which, for lack of economic interest,
held only military interests, had together convinced many Germans that
France still held thoughts of revenge and was even preparing to realise them
with the help of Russia and its huge numerical advantage over Germany.
The fear was strengthened by the knowledge that, following its defeats, the
Russian army was rebuilding and would not take long to reach its optimum
level.
A consequence highlighted by the German historian Wolfgang
Mommsen39 is that ‘the idea of the inevitable war developed in Germany’.
But also for Mommsen, who took his inspiration from the works of Max
Weber, semi-constitutional systems like the German political model were
more sensitive than parliamentary systems to the pressures of public
opinion. Large sections of opinion were convinced that Germany was
threatened, even ‘encircled by ill-disposed neighbours’. While Germany
was seen as the aggressor by most European nations, this did not apply to
German opinion: in taking the initiative, Germany felt, it was simply acting
in self-defence, and indeed young German soldiers set off for the war with
the conviction that they were defending their country. Moreover, Mommsen
thought that this syndrome of ‘the inevitable war’ existed not only in
Germany but could be seen in many countries, including France – at least
among the leaders who were incapable of seeing the performative element
in this precipitate march towards war.
The German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who had tried to block the
idea of war and then been forced to renounce this stance, declared on 27
July 1914 that: ‘A fate beyond the power of mankind hovers over Europe
and the German people.’40 This was expressed by the British historian
James Joll in the following way: ‘Again and again, in the crisis of July
1914, we are confronted by men who suddenly felt themselves caught in a
trap and from it called for a destiny that they were incapable of
controlling.’41
Not everything, however, was the result of fate or impotence. From a
certain moment on, and for simple reasons, military circles played a
decisive role in launching the war. All the European armies were convinced
that any potential war would be terrible, but it would be based on offensive
tactics: after one or several large-scale battles everything would be settled
in a few weeks. The essential point was not to be left behind by any
potential adversary. Apart from Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Chief of Staff
of the Austro-Hungarian army – who, as partisan of a preventive war
against Serbia and by laying siege to Franz-Joseph until the old man gave
way, had largely set fire to the powder-keg – there were three large military
forces in Europe: German, French and Russian. The leaders of these armies
were warriors by trade, for this was still the period when making war was in
the natural order of things, and from the moment when they felt it was their
turn to speak, they leaned on the civilian governments as heavily as
possible. In France, General Joffre, Chief of Staff since 1911, was not as
peaceable as he seemed from his genial appearance. To an interlocutor who,
in 1912, said to him, ‘you are not thinking of war’, he retorted briskly, ‘No,
I am thinking of it. Indeed I am always thinking of it . . . we will have it. I
will wage it. I will win it.’42 During the crisis he redoubled his warnings to
the government over the risk of a potential delay, and was entirely opposed
to the governmental decision on 20 July to keep the troops at a distance of
ten kilometres from the frontier, to show French goodwill and avoid chance
incidents. Finally, at 3.30 p.m. on 31 July he jumped at the order for general
mobilisation.
On the Russian side, it was also Headquarters (with the help of Sazonov
who, as we have seen, had switched camp), which seized the order for
general mobilisation from the very hesitant Tsar. It was first obtained on 29
July; the Tsar then cancelled the order – and reconfirmed it on 30 July. At
this point, Headquarters acted to cut communications, to avoid any possible
further change.
The decisive role, however, was played by the German Chief of Staff,
General Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew of the victor of 1871 and head of
the German army since 1906. Moltke was a convinced partisan of the war,
at least since 1912 after the Agadir Crisis. For him ‘war was inevitable’ and
‘the sooner the better’. Since the beginning of the crisis, German
Headquarters had been pressing its Austro-Hungarian equivalents to reject
any compromise and put pressure on the civilian authorities, that is on the
Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, to take measures against Russia. They
made no secret of the fact that it was essential not to have the French army
at their heels and they must therefore start by getting it out of the way.
The role played by Moltke nonetheless requires some further nuance. It is
known that in extremis he sought to impose the military point of view: on
28 July itself, he addressed a long memorandum to Chancellor Bethmann
Hollweg43 which opened with an explanation of the general political
situation. For five years Serbia had been ‘the cause of European troubles’:
Austria had tolerated this for too long; it was only since Sarajevo that
Austria had decided to ‘burst this abscess’, an action for which Europe
should, in normal times, be grateful. But Russia had chosen ‘to take the part
of this criminal nation’, which had disturbed the situation in Europe. After
this political section, Moltke proceeded to strictly military explanations.
Austria’s mobilisation against Serbia concerned only eight army corps and
was thus negligible, while Russia was preparing at short notice to mobilise
four military districts. For this reason, Austria would be obliged to mobilise
completely if it wished to tackle Russia. Once Austria had decided on
general mobilisation, the conflagration with Russia would be inevitable and
the terms of alliance relationships would draw Germany into the decision. If
Germany mobilised, however, Russia would mobilise completely, alleging
its own defence, which would bring in French support. Russia denies to this
day having mobilised, but its preparations were advanced to the extent that
once the mobilisation began it was able to proceed in a few days to the
deployment of its forces. The memorandum concluded:
To realise the military measures that we envisage, it is extremely

important to know as soon as possible if Russia and France are ready
to go to war with Germany. In the event that our neighbours’
preparations continue, their mobilisation will be quickly accomplished.
For this reason, our military situation can be seen day by day in a less
advantageous light, which could have harmful consequences if our
potential enemies are in a position to make their preparations in
tranquillity.
This text has given rise to numerous interpretations and in particular that
it reflected a seizure of power by the army when the ‘July crisis’ reached its
peak. In reality, is it not possible to argue, with Hew Strachan and Samuel
Williamson, that Moltke’s only concern in this case, what he had to do, was
to explain to the government the potential military consequences of the
situation? In fact the success of the Schlieffen Plan, as is known, depended
on Russian tardiness in mobilisation, which explains very well the anxiety
of the German generals. Finally, the essential problem lay elsewhere. It was
that Germany depended entirely on such an inflexible military plan and had
given priority to strictly military considerations. ‘Military needs’ had
hampered possible political discussions. As we have seen, Moltke’s anxiety
was such that at around 2.00 p.m. on 30 July he even dared to ask the
Austrian military representative in Berlin to start the general mobilisation of
Austria-Hungary immediately, in order to force the German government to
order mobilisation in response. But there is no proof that this appeal from
Moltke had any effect on the decision of the Austrian government, which
knew nothing of this intervention until the morning of 31 July.44 On 30 July,
Moltke urgently sought to proceed finally to an inevitable mobilisation; but,
as we know, Bethmann Hollweg wished at any cost to await the Russian
general mobilisation.
But can one say that the German mobilisation would have been
confirmed on 31 July, even if Russia had not mobilised first? This is what
Fritz Fischer and his school assert, but it may be doubted, as has already
been shown by Jules Isaac, established in detail by Luigi Albertini and
demonstrated again with precision by Marc Trachtenberg.45 There is no
certainty at all that Germany would indeed have mobilised if Russia had not
moved first: the contrary appears to be true. Moltke did not succeed in
making Bethmann Hollweg ‘capitulate’ before military exigencies: ‘Von
Moltke was not able to get Bethmann to agree even to the
Kriegsgefahrzustand (“threatening danger of war”) until the news of the
Russian general mobilization reached Berlin.’46 It is, however, true and
noteworthy that, once he had been informed of the Russian decision to
proceed to general mobilisation, Bethmann Hollweg had no further cards to
play, and that he was completely resigned to the situation. And we follow
Marc Trachtenberg again: ‘There had been no “loss of control”, only an
abdication of control.’47 Since the Russian mobilization, Bethmann
Hollweg remained set in his habitual pessimism and held suddenly to a
single idea: to do everything to convince the Social Democrats and the
nation that Germany was in a defensive situation. Bethmann Hollweg knew
that the prize of ‘national consensus’ lay here.
In reality, the German military men were not the masters of political
decisions at the severest moment of the crisis – but in practice it is not
realistic to reject the view that the political decision-makers were heavily
influenced by the military warnings. In the end, if a climate of risk of war
had developed, it was indeed the army leaders who provoked the outbreak
of the war, applying pressure on hesitant or paralysed civilian powers.
A careful study of the July crisis shows that the eventual outcome was
not inevitable. It is clear that most of the European leaders harboured no
wish for this war, and that actors as central as Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser
Wilhelm II hesitated greatly at certain moments. The July crisis could have
been concluded like many other earlier crises and the fate of the world
would have been different. Why did this not happen? Because certain
elements – which were not new – came together and took the lead. This also
applied to national feelings which, in Russia just as in Germany, could not
be ignored. Although important elements of public opinion and political
forces, in particular the socialists, who represented a growing force in the
various nations, included a struggle for peace in their plans, international
attitudes in general still did not regard war as an absolute evil. And even if
the reality of war was increasingly rejected, recourse to armed conflict was
a legal and undeniable historical fact, a habit. When all solutions were
exhausted, or judged to be exhausted, war remained the solution.
A final feature was substantial. It was said, and accepted, that a European
war would be terrible, but no one, either in the armed forces or civilians,
had any idea of how terrible it could be. It took more than four years of war
for this lesson to be grasped.
Helen McPhail translated this chapter from French into English.
1 Jules Isaac, Un débat historique: 1914, le problème des origines de la

guerre (Paris: Rieder, 1933), p. 227.
2 Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, 3 vols. (London: Oxford
3 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London: Nicholson & Watson,

1936).
4 Isaac, Un débat historique, p. 21.

kaiserlichen Deutschland (1914–1918) (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961),
translated into French as Les buts de guerre de l’Allemagne impériale,
preface by Jacques Droz (Paris: Éditions de Trévise, 1970) and into English
as Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus,
1967).
6 James Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions (London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson, 1968).
7 Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914, Comment les français sont entrés dans la
guerre: contribution à l’étude de l’opinion publique, printemps-été 1914
(Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977).
8 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘The topos of inevitable war in Germany in the

decade before 1914’, in Volker Berghahn and Martin Kitchen (eds.),
Germany in the Age of Total War: Essays in Honour of Francis Carsten
(London: Croom Helm, 1981).
9 Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the Great War: Controversies and

Consensus (London: Longman, 2002).
10 Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la grande Guerre, un essai

d’historiographie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004); English translation, The
Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present
11 Samuel R. Williamson, Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First

World War (London: Macmillan, 1993).
12 Samuel R. Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy: France and

Britain Prepare for War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
13 Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-

Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1993).
14 Apart from the works of Williamson and Rauchensteiner, see the

clarification by Mark Cornwall, ‘Serbia’, in Keith Wilson (ed.), Decisions
for War, 1914 (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 55–96.
15 See Immanuel Geiss (ed.), Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch Eine

Dokumentensammlung, 2 vols. (Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und
Zeitgeschehen, 1963), vol. I, no. 39: Protokoll des Gemeinsamen
Ministerrates . . . 7 July 1914; cit. ibid. p. 110.
16 Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. I: To Arms (Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 95.
17 Ibid.
18 See Geiss (ed.), Julikrise, vol. I, p. 119: Fischer, Griff nach der
Weltmacht, p. 71 and passim.
19 Die österreich-ungarischen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch (Berlin:

National-Verlag, 1923), p. 12.
20 Szogyeny, report on the meeting, 6 July, ibid., p. 19.
21 Konrad Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and

the Hubris of Imperial Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1973).
22 See particularly Klaus Wernecke, Der Wille zur Weltgeltung

(Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970).
23 See particularly Stephen Schröder, Die englisch-russische

Marinekonvention: Das Deutsche Reich und die Flottenverhandlungen der
Tripelentente am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2006).
24 See Geiss (ed.), Julikrise, no. 6 (Hoyos report), vol. I, n.1.
25 Kurt Riezler, Tagebücher – Aufsätze Dokumente, ed. Karl-Dietrich

Erdmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), p. 190.
26 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Die Urkatastrophe Deutschlands: der Erste

Weltkrieg 1914–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), p. 18.
27 See Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 4 vols. (Munich:
R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1965), vol. II, p. 314; Hans Herzfeld, Der Erste
Weltkrieg (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), p. 38; Karl-
Dietrich Erdmann, Der Erste Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1918), p. 80.
28 English translation by Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the

Origins of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 189.
29 Pierre Renouvin, Histoire des relations internationales, 6 vols. (Paris:

Hachette, 1955), vol. VI, p. 378.
30 Samual R. Williamson and Ernest R. May, ‘An identity of opinion:

historians and July 1914’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), p. 357;
with reference to the works of Leslie, and the biography of Tisza by Gabor
Vermes, Istvan Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statescraft of a
Magyar Nationalist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
31 Isaac, Un débat historique, p. 165; for the Berchtold–Conrad interview

in full, see Geiss (ed.), Julikrise, vol. II, no. 858.
32 Strachan, The First World War, vol. I, pp. 104–6.
33 Isaac, Un débat historique, p. 217.
34 See Geiss (ed.), Julikrise, vol. II, no. 858; David Stevenson, The First
World War and International Politics (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 28
for mention of an ‘act of military insubordination’. See in particular
Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke, pp. 203ff.
35 Volker Ullrich, ‘Das deutsche Kalkül in der Julikrise 1914 und die
Frage der englischen Neutralität’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und
Unterricht, 34 (1983), pp. 79–97.
36 For the details, see the historiographical study by Williamson and May,
‘An identity of opinion’.
37 See the classic study by Herbert Butterfield, ‘Sir Edward Grey and the
July crisis of 1914’, Historical Studies, 5 (1965), pp. 1–25.
38 George B. Gooch (ed.), British Documents on the Origins of the War,

vol. xi: The Outbreak of War: Foreign Office Documents June 28th–August
4th, 1914 (London: HMSO, 1926), p. 130.
39 Mommsen, ‘The topos of inevitable war in Germany’, pp. 23–45.
40 Quoted by Raymond Poidevin in Les origines de la Première guerre

mondiale (Paris: Documents d’histoire PUF, 1975), p. 97.
41 Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions, p. 6.
42 Quoted by Henry Contamine, La victoire de la Marne (Paris: Gallimard,

1970), p. 58.
43 Geiss, Julikrise, vol. I, no. 659.
44 Ibid., p. 270; but compare this with Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the
Scepter, 4 vols. (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1970), vol.
II, p. 258, quoted by Marc Trachtenberg, ‘The coming of the First World
War: a reassessment’, in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton
University Press, 1991), pp. 47–99 (this chapter is an extended version of
the frequently cited article by this author: ‘The meaning of mobilization in
1914’, International Security, 15 (1990), p. 89).
45 Trachtenberg, ‘The coming of the First World War’, pp. 120ff.
46 Ibid., p. 89.
47 Ibid. p. 91.
3 1915: Stalemate
The European war which broke out in 1914 acquired its enduring name in
the following year: in France it became the Grande Guerre, or ‘Great War’,
in Germany it was the Weltkrieg, or ‘World War’. Here was final
confirmation of a genuine awareness at the time that this was indeed a new
kind of war which required an appropriate new title. The very considerable
interest of this second year of the conflict lies here, in the shift from one
form of war to another. Yet collective historical memory now seems to
overlook 1915, which has been somewhat neglected: caught between the
vast events of the war of movement in the summer and autumn of 1914 and
the great wars of materiel in 1916, the second year of the war appears to
lack an identity of its own.
Rediscovering 1915 means returning to the sources of the strategic
impasse from which the war of position emerged. It also means a return to
the comprehensive mobilisation of the societies at war, the essential basis
for the prolongation of this new kind of war. This in turn involves
examination of the way in which war activity extended its roots into every
sector of cultural life. Although mobilisation of every resource –
demographic of course, but also economic, moral and cultural – was
developing by the end of 1914, its effects only came to be felt during the
course of 1915. Only then did European societies, at war since the summer
of 1914, tend to become ‘societies-for-war’. The year 1915 saw the gradual
invention of a new kind of war activity which, in return, permanently
transformed the actual image of the war.
Apprenticeship for a static war

The ‘map of the war’ which defined the general evolution of the conflict is
a useful starting place. In this respect, 1915 was a year of strong contrasts.
On the ‘decisive front’, the Western Front – decisive in the sense that, like
defeat, victory on this front would lead to the defeat or victory of one of the
two coalitions engaged – 1915 confirmed and even reinforced the strategic
deadlock which was apparent from the autumn of 1914. Yet the war of
movement did not cease in 1915. It was still the aim of the belligerents and
met with some success where the confrontation was less dense than on the
Western Front: in the theatres of the Eastern Front, the Balkans and even
more visibly in the Near East, the war of movement alternated with a war of
position which imposed its pattern only partially and temporarily.
The long-term digging in along the lines on the Western Front and the
slide into static warfare grew out of a strategic and tactical situation which
was characteristic of military operations in the First World War, and which
established the whole of its evolution: the superiority of the defence over
assault. Added to this was the extreme difficulty for the High Command to
fully understand this new factor, which had appeared for the first time
exactly ten years before 1915 but on a much smaller scale and over a much
shorter period: specifically, at the Battle of Mukden in February–March
1905 during the Russo-Japanese War.
At the beginning of 1915 the troops dug into trenches in somewhat
summary style. Initially the network of defences dug into the ground, in a
mirror image of stone walling, which transformed open warfare into a vast
siege war under open skies along a front of 700 kilometres, was not laid out
in depth. Behind the front line, along deliberately wavy lines in order to
avoid enfilading fire, the trenches were protected by banks of barbed wire,
parapets, sandbags and crenellations. Dugouts were set into the sides,
designed to protect soldiers from shelling, but as yet no one dreamed of
organising more solid reserve positions to the rear. In most cases the front
line was linked by a few hundred metres of communication trench to a
simple support trench. This turning point of the front line was characteristic
of a battle tactic leading to long-term survival: a rigid reading of the
principle of defence. This meant holding the front positions in such a way
that in case of enemy attack there was no danger of having to retake the
line. Further, there was no question of abandoning any particular stretch of
front line that was too exposed, or of shortening the lines in the interests of
easier defence: the position remained where battle had established it.
Nonetheless, however rigid and relatively provisional, from the beginning
of 1915, this defence system showed its superiority over offensive tactics.
Several elements contributed to this – barbed wire, which prevented any
simple crossing of no-man’s-land; infantry rifle fire, above all machine-gun
fire, setting up a virtually impassable wall of bullets; and barrages of
artillery shells, which shattered assault troops as soon as they left their
trench. In 1915 this link between barbed wire and fire from both artillery
and machine guns, set up an equation which was impossible for any
attacking force to resolve on the Western Front. Some factors intensified
this situation: with the prevailing somewhat simple techniques of attack, the
temptation was strong to launch troops into an assault without adequate
artillery preparation. Without any hope of achieving the essential
preliminary destruction of enemy defences, they were doomed to failure
from the start and had no hope of reaching the enemy positions. Infantry
tactics for crossing no-man’s-land were also generally unsophisticated in
the first months of 1915.
The major offensives of 1915 – Allied and particularly French, because
with the exception of the assault on Ypres in April 1915 the Germans
concentrated all their offensive efforts on the Eastern Front – added impetus
to defensive planning. Techniques of attack also made progress, notably
with the French infantry development of advancing in short rushes behind a
rolling artillery barrage, which was dependent on extremely tight
coordination between the two military branches. But the development of
artillery in the trenches and the widespread use of grenades reinforced the
combatants’ defensive capacity as much as their offensive strength. At the
same time, techniques of defensive organisation of the lines made greater
advances. On several occasions the Germans observed the collapse of their
front-line position under the blows of the great Allied attacks (as in Artois
and Champagne) and learned from this: support trenches were strengthened
and supplementary lines of defence were laid out well to the rear. In
October 1915, the French High Command in its turn codified the principles
of defence in depth, based on the spacing out of several successive lines of
trenches. By the end of 1915, therefore, even where the enemy front line
was pierced, no one could hope to exploit the initial success. The stopping
power of the rear lines, combined with the prompt availability of reserves,
enabled enemy advances to be blocked and breaches to be filled.
No one on either side was resigned to a purely defensive war: fearing a
collapse in the troops’ offensive spirit, Headquarters sought to maintain it
by maintaining a permanent state of attack, notably through repeated raids
on the enemy lines. Similarly, in an instruction of September 1915,
Falkenhayn decreed that rear trenches must not be designated ‘fall-back
trenches’, ‘counter-attack trenches’, ‘defensive trenches’ or ‘protective
trenches’.1 The very heavy losses on the Western Front during 1915 can be
explained largely by this gap between the cult of the offensive, sustained
towards and against everything, a hope of decisive breakthrough which was
not eliminated by the digging in of the lines, and a flagrant inability to
achieve such a programme of assault. 1915 was not the year of a paradigm
shift, and it was the soldiers who paid the price of this ideological rigidity
of command.
In this strategic and tactical context, all the great offensives of 1915 on
the Western Front ended in bloody setbacks. Although the German army
remained essentially in defensive positions in order to to concentrate its
attacking powers on the Eastern Front, the Allied offensives rested
principally on the shoulders of the French army: despite Kitchener’s army’s
gradual entry into the lines, in 1915 the British Expeditionary Force was
still far from being on equal terms with the French and German forces.
The French army first pursued a series of attacks on a moderate scale. In
Champagne, following a start in December 1914 which was broken off in
mid January, it took the offensive again from mid February to mid March
while the British army launched its brief parallel attack at Neuve Chapelle
(10–12 March 1915). Then, between 9 May and 18 June, the combined
French and British forces launched a massive attack in Artois: in some
places this achieved penetration of up to four kilometres in depth along a
front of around fifteen kilometres, but without achieving a decisive
breakthrough – in static warfare, this breach was too narrow for lasting
exploitation. From 25 September, while the British were playing an
important role around Loos, the offensive began again in Artois. This time
the front, at thirty-five kilometres, was much broader; at the same time, the
greatest offensive of the year was launched in Champagne, along a forty-
kilometre front. Despite the increased density of field artillery and the
mobilisation of heavy artillery for the first time in the French forces, the
hoped-for breakthrough was not achieved. Although the German front line
was taken and the second line reached in a few places, the arc of field
artillery fire had not inflicted sufficient damage on the enemy defensive
positions; the German machine guns remained intact and decimated the
waves of attack while their batteries, also undamaged, proved the force of
their firepower as a barrage or in support of counter-attacks. The two
offensives continued until mid October, however, in a pattern characteristic
of a war which was slow to learn from an initial setback. Both sides
suffered massive losses but, following the logic of static warfare, the
numbers of Allied dead and wounded were twice as heavy as those among
the defending Germans.
The gap between an offensive effort sustained on both sides and the
superiority of defence over attack; the great attempts at breakthrough on
one side, but the proliferation of small-scale attacks on the other (the
murderous ‘nibbling away’ of the winter of 1914–15 promoted by the head
of the French general staff, Joffre); a doctrine of pushing forward to recover
lost positions at any cost; finally, the particularly challenging living
conditions of the first year in the trenches, all these were elements which,
cumulatively, explain the scale of casualties in 1915. The figures were
lower than those for losses in the second half of 1914, proving, from one
point of view, the effectiveness of the trenches in providing protection from
modern firepower: for both the French and the Germans, 1915 showed a
spectacular reduction in the monthly mortality rate of the previous year.
Nonetheless, the French army, by far the worst affected, lost 392,000 men
during this single year of 1915 – a higher total of violent death and
wounding than was to be recorded in any of the three following years. 2
Casualty figures are not the whole story. In particular, they do not show
clearly how levels of brutality in battle increased steadily in the battles of
1915. The long-term installation of the war of position, a defining feature of
the second year of the war, also contributed to the institutionalisation of a
full range of practices which radicalised the inherent violence of the
battlefield. Gradual increases in explosive charges expanded the scale of the
mining war and other growing forms of violence also became
institutionalised: with a range of around seventy metres, grenades were used
increasingly and became one of the infantry’s essential fighting tools for
attack as well as defence. The enemy drew even closer as weapons for
hand-to-hand fighting became more widespread:3 daggers and bludgeons
were distributed to the soldiers, while they often took the initiative in
creating such weapons for their own needs. For the offensive in Champagne
in September 1915, knives were liberally distributed to the French assault
troops. In October, German directives specified in their turn the use of
daggers and shovels sharpened on both edges. There is no doubt that during
the great offensives of 1916, both sides turned to extreme methods of
putting prisoners to death.
The introduction of gas and flamethrowers in the same year marked an
inflection in violence of a different order, inflicting death or wounds
without breaking the anatomical barrier of the skin, and thus without
spilling blood. The flamethrower, originally a German invention which
made an occasional appearance from the autumn of 1914, was used by
waves of assault troops from mid 1915 before coming into general use in
the French army. The appearance of gas as a battlefield weapon was on a
much greater range. A first threshold was breached early in 1915, when
asphyxiating forms of gas – chlorine, at this stage – replaced tear gas and
suffocating gas products used in the autumn of 1914. Their first use at the
end of January 1915 on the Vistula was a failure due to the wind and cold,
but the second trial, at Ypres on 22 April, during the only German offensive
on the Western Front, was a shock. The attack, which took the form of a
drifting wave of chlorine released into the atmosphere from gas cylinders,
brought to the site and hidden in the front lines, caused massive panic
among Allied troops: a three-kilometre-wide breakthrough was achieved,
the right bank of the Yser had to be abandoned and liaison between the
French and British forces was broken in a front zone of high strategic
sensitivity. But the Germans, surprised by their own success and by changes
in wind patterns, failed to exploit the breakthrough, and from 26 April the
front was stabilised once more.
Then the escalation began. By early June the French artillery was already
capable of responding, using gas shells during the offensive in Artois. On
25 September it was the turn of the British to use gas for the first time, at
Loos. In October, in Champagne, the ‘race to toxicity’4 crossed a first
threshold with the German use of chlorine with added phosgene.
At Ypres, despite the panic among the French troops caused by the attack
of 22 April, the British and Canadian counter-attacks managed to close the
breach: in the end, the terrain lost at the end of May remained limited and
the Ypres salient, although broached, was intact. Elsewhere, defensive
measures such as gas masks advanced more rapidly than the means of
assault and reduced the anticipated effectiveness of gas as a weapon of
attack. Although it was seen at the time as a major rupture, for which the
Allies immediately cast the blame firmly on Germany, nonetheless in this
domain too defence overcame attack: in December 1915 a fresh gas attack
at Ypres was a complete failure.
This superiority of defence over attack was repeated all the more easily
elsewhere because the experience of static warfare was broadly valid on
other fronts. This applied to the Germans on the Eastern Front, in the Near
East and at Gallipoli.
The principle of the operation in the Dardanelles – driven politically by
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and imposed on the military
forces – was accepted by the British and French governments in January
and February respectively. Designed to take control of the Dardanelles
Straits and Constantinople while simultaneously creating solid and direct
liaison with Russia, the plan for the operation was an interesting attempt to
get round the strategic blockade in the West, supported by the British navy.
But it was precisely the offensive move which failed when the British and
French fleets were unable to force their passage through the Dardanelles on
18 March. The laborious landing of British, New Zealand, Australian and
French troops on the Gallipoli peninsula, which began on 25 April, was also
a failure: the troops were pinned down on the beaches and dominated by
Ottoman defensive positions. In August, fresh landings by night further to
the north also failed to break the stalemate. By the end of the summer all
the troops present on the peninsula were immobilised in a dense network of
trenches, similar to those on the Western Front but concentrated into a much
smaller area. In November, evacuation was agreed on, and was carried out
in masterly fashion from the end of December. The end of 1915 thus saw
the failure of a strategically imaginative undertaking, which had been
broken on insurmountable tactical obstacles and a series of errors in the
preparing and carrying out of the operation.
When Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies in May 1915, the
Austro-Italian front presented an even more sharply defined state of
stalemate. Because of the mountainous terrain, the Isonzo front provided
the only possible terrain where an offensive strategy could be envisaged.
But from June to November 1915 the four Italian offensives on the Isonzo,
with inadequate artillery support, failed one after the other, gaining only
minimal territorial advances at the cost of increasingly heavy losses. By the
end of the year, losses in the Italian army had reached over 200,000 men
killed and wounded, against an Austrian figure of 165,000. The unfolding
of operations on the Austro-Italian front brought fresh proof of the
impossibility of any breach in a defensive front line that was solidly
established, above all when the terrain added to the difficulties inherent in
any attack.
Maintaining momentum
Even so, the war of movement was not dead in 1915. The warring nations
continued to believe in it, particularly as the German High Command
turned its main efforts to the East in the hope of then being able to
concentrate fully on the Western Front. In the East, in fact, movement could
still be achieved between long periods of immobility: lacking the manpower
and the defensive network in terms of artillery and logistics, the Eastern
Front was less dense than its equivalent in the West. Despite extremely
severe weather conditions, the Austro-German High Commands launched a
double offensive in mid January, in a pincer movement against the Russian
wings, starting in the Carpathians and East Prussia. The first failed to
recapture Galicia from the Russians as they advanced in the Carpathians
and also forced the Germans to capitulate at Przemyśl on 22 March. The
second German offensive was successful, however, and the Russian front
gave way early in February. The winter battle of the Masurian Lakes left
more than 90,000 prisoners in German hands together with a vast quantity
of materiel. The Russian retreat covered nearly 130 kilometres.
In April the German High Command went on the offensive again in
Galicia. The Austro-German attack broke through for the first time early in
May at Gorlice-Tarnów, forcing the Russians into an initial retreat on a 160-
kilometre front: Przemyśl first, then Lemberg, fell in June. The next
German move was northwards, a thrust towards the Warsaw salient: the
Russian lines were broken on 13 July to the north of the city, which fell on
4 August, while the German armies continued their frontal assault. Brest-
Litovsk was taken on 26 August, Grodno and Vilna in September, while the
advance on a very broad front continued towards Minsk.
By the end of the month, the German and Austro-Hungarian forces,
exhausted by five months of uninterrupted and murderous fighting, could
go no further. And yet the ‘great advance’ of the Germans was the chief
military victory in 1915: Russia lost Galicia, Poland, Lithuania and
Courland in their ‘Great Retreat’, representing a withdrawal of 250
kilometres between January and September, provoking the decision of the
Tsar to take over the military High Command in person. Since May, the
Russian army had lost 2 million men, including a million prisoners.5 It did
not collapse, however, and resisted any separate peace with Germany.
The Austro-German success on the Eastern Front was matched by
parallel success on the Balkan front, at the same time establishing liaison
between the Central Powers, Ottoman Turkey and Bulgaria. While the latter
took its place alongside the Central Powers on 1 September, two German
and Austro-Hungarian armies attacked on the Sava and the Danube on 6
October, just as Anglo-French forces were landing at Salonica, too late to
come to the help of Serbia. Belgrade fell on 9 October, while Bulgaria in its
turn entered the stage on 14 October, outflanking the Serbian army from the
south. At the beginning of December, with Serbia entirely occupied, the
remains of its army had no alternative but to set off for the Adriatic at the
cost of a murderous winter march through the Albanian mountains, while
the Allied troops had no choice but to withdraw to the Greek frontier.
In the Near East, military operations were even more dominated by
movement. The beginning of the year was initially marked by fruitless
Ottoman Turkish attacks on the defences of the Suez Canal. From April to
November 1915, the British forces moved up the River Tigris to a distance
of around thirty kilometres from Baghdad before clashing with Ottoman
Turkish resistance at Ctesiphon, forcing them into a difficult retreat of 160
kilometres to Kut-al-Amara, which was encircled in December.
Thus by the end of 1915, not only had movement continued to be the
order of the day everywhere except on the Western Front, but even there,
the end of 1915 showed that there was still hope of a breakthrough followed
by a return to manoeuvre. Indeed, by the end of 1915 vast battles of
materiel were being planned for the following year: at the turn of the year
the Germans had not yet decided on the project to attack Verdun, but the
inter-Allied conference at Chantilly on 6–8 December 1915 made the
decision in principle to plan for a general simultaneous offensive on all
fronts. Substantial breakthroughs were expected in Galicia on one side, on
the Somme on the other. For the Allies, this was the first real attempt at
combined strategic coordination.
Violence against unarmed populations

The events of 1914 had established mass attacks on unarmed civilians as
the order of the day. The ‘1914 invasions’ had been accompanied by serial
atrocities, more numerous, however, in the West by Germans than in the
East by Russians: civilians massacred, but also soldiers wounded after
laying down their weapons, villages or whole towns burned, women raped,
and so on.6 All these practices stimulated movements of mass exodus: the
effects of the refugee phenomenon, a central feature of the outbreak of war,
continued to be felt throughout 1915, upsetting the fragile equilibrium of
the home fronts.
Although in the West the attacks on unarmed populations were limited to
1914, it was in 1915 that awareness of the attacks spread through the
warring nations: the commissions set up by all the nations at war to enquire
into failings affecting ‘human rights’ made their reports from the beginning
of the second year of the war. Their content was then widely taken up by
the press, in popular literature, caricature, posters, film and so on. This
moment of ‘revelation’ of the violence of the ‘Other’, accompanied by
written and pictorial records, themselves very violent, constitutes an
essential phase in the fixation of mutual hatreds. During 1915, for example,
the ‘war cultures’ became enduringly crystallised around a body of
mobilising themes, words and images which confirmed the meaning
initially attributed to the war itself – both in justifying its continuation and
the new sacrifices that this implied. This was particularly the case when
atrocities continued to feature in powerful replays of memory: for the
Allies, the sinking of the Lusitania, which caused the death of 1,198
civilians on 7 May 1915, or the execution of Edith Cavell in Belgium in
October,7 forcefully revived memories of the atrocities of invasion the year
before. The bombing of civilian targets – in south-east England, London
and also Paris – created very few victims and did very little material
damage, but nonetheless indicated a further major rupture: without true
strategic objective, they signalled that enemy populations in their entirety
were henceforward considered enemies and were therefore now a legitimate
target. The extension of institutionalised concentration – with the prolonged
internment, on both sides, of non-national individuals present on national
soil at the time of the outbreak of war – was fundamentally part of the same
logic.
All the same, 1915 brought a certain degree of stabilisation in the West:
although it led to a logic of repression in the case of the occupied
population, the establishment of a regime of occupation meant an end to the
straightforward brutality of the summer and autumn of 1914. In the
Balkans, on the other hand, the assaults of the invasion remained part of
daily life during the second year of the war. In this way the third invasion of
Serbia by German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian troops during the
second half of 1915 involved ferocious treatment of civilians. Violent
assaults were inflicted on the Serbian and Greek populations of Kosovo and
Macedonia when they were invaded in October by Bulgarian troops. On the
Eastern Front, the situation was different again: civilian populations there
suffered from a long war of movement throughout 1915. The war provoked
massive movements of exodus – 4 million people in all, fleeing the German
armies, but also from May onwards the Russian authorities’ ‘scorched
earth’ policy; above all the assaults took the form of deportations operated
by Russian civilian and military authorities related to ethnic nationality and
origin. They were aimed at Austro-Hungarian and German subjects and
Russian subjects of German origin, as well as a large fraction of the Jews of
the Russian Empire who were seen as ‘unreliable elements’ and thus likely
to aid the invader. The great Russian retreat between May and September
accentuated the process; in 1915 alone, 134,000 German and Austrian
civilians were deported and assigned to live in the Russian interior. From
the summer, the process began to expropriate and deport most of the
700,000 German settlers from Western Ukraine. Although direct physical
violence was not entirely absent from this exercise, it remained occasional,
as in the great anti-German pogrom in Moscow on 26–29 May 1915. In the
case of the Jewish population of Galicia, on the other hand, the procedure
was one of deportation and extreme brutality accompanied by systematic
pogroms and physical elimination (see below). 8
The regimes of occupation which were established in the West from the
end of 1914, and during the following year in the East and in the Balkans,
are evidence of the significance of the territory conquered by the Central
Powers during 1915 – territory which also grew larger month by month. At
the beginning of the year the German forces occupied almost all of Belgium
(7 million inhabitants) and nine departments of the regions of the north and
east of France (3 million); but in October it was the entire population of
Russia’s Polish territories (6 million) which was living under German and
Austro-Hungarian occupying forces. Belgrade also fell in October, and
before the end of 1915 it was the turn of Serbia to fall under a regime of
occupation. In all, at the end of the year 19 million people were living under
German, Austro-Hungarian or Bulgarian occupation.9
A very varied range of mechanisms was established for the supervision of
occupied territories, themselves in widely contrasting conditions by the end
of the invasion period with its associated forms of violence. For the
occupying powers, the primary concern was the material exploitation of
resources; the local occupied population was itself an important local
resource, to be put to active use as part of the invaders’ war effort. Violence
was part of this process, less in relation to the German occupation in
Belgium and the north and east of France than to the Austro-Hungarian
presence in Serbia and above all the Bulgarians in Macedonia; in these
latter regions, instead of the occupation bringing an end to the violence of
the invasion it created a new situation which allowed it to continue.
On the other hand, the German and Austro-Hungarian occupations of the
second year of the war, however severe, constituted a stage designed to re-
establish order. Military engagements, the Russian scorched earth policy
and depopulation as a result of the massive exodus had inflicted terrible
suffering on the occupied territories. Epidemics of typhus, malaria and
cholera were rife. Several occupation regimes developed in this space
characterised by a mosaic of complex ethnicities regarded as ‘uncivilised’
by the Germans: the Russian areas of Poland were divided between an
Austro-Hungarian administration around Lublin on the one hand and a
German zone with Warsaw at its centre on the other. Combining northern
Poland, Lithuania, part of Belorussia and Courland, the Ober Ost
represented a veritable German military colony.10
Although the reorganised regions of Central and Eastern Europe were not
yet settled by the end of 1915, the occupation was clearly visible in the
establishment of a certain degree of appeasement and legitimation of the
occupying power. It was in this sense that one can speak of a ‘long’ 1915,11
characterised by relatively moderate regimes of occupation, before their
radicalisation in 1916.
With the massacre of part of their own population by certain warring
states – Russian Jews, Assyrian Christians and above all Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire – 1915 was also characterised by an unprecedented
radicalisation of violence towards populations seen as too unreliable to be
left alive in their towns and villages. It was in this sense that the second
year of the war played a central role in the process of totalisation and
‘brutalisation’ of the war.
The first mass expulsions of Jewish communities by the Russian army
occurred in the autumn of 1914 in Poland, and from the start were
accompanied by acts of violence committed by the troops: to the traditional
anti-Jewish prejudice was added here a new form of anti-Semitism, focused
on a population seen as politically and militarily ‘dangerous’. It was
repeated early in 1915 in Austrian Galicia, this time in a region under
temporary occupation. From the end of April expulsion turned into
deportation on a massive scale. While assaults developed in parallel with
the reverses suffered by the Russian army from May, the deportations
expanded with the ‘Great Retreat’, henceforward touching communities
located well beyond the front line and forcing abolition of the residential
restrictions hitherto imposed on Jews in Russia. In this way a million Jews
in all were forcibly displaced during 1915.
Apart from the heavy death toll resulting from the hunger and exhaustion
which accompanied these measures, pogroms were part of the mass
deportations. Here the army played a major role, unlike the anti-Jewish
assaults of pre-1914, which were condemned by the authorities.
Nonetheless, programmes of deportation were broken off in the autumn and
the anti-Jewish measures of 1915 ceased to follow a rising curve. At the
same time, there was no move to a policy of generalised massacre. 12
A precisely opposite process occurred with the Armenians of the
Ottoman Empire, whose genocide was one of the major events of 1915.13
Without entering into deterministic detail, it appears that the Armenians of
the Empire had been targeted well before the outbreak of war, as seen in the
widespread plundering and large-scale massacres of 1894–6 and 1909. In
addition, although the war should not be seen as the principal rationale for
the genocide, the reading of the war by the Young Turks movement was
undoubtedly significant in the designation of Armenian communities as ‘the
internal enemy’. The jihad proclaimed in November 1914 thus placed the
Christians of the East (like the Syrian Christians, who were also massacred)
in the position of legitimate victims of the Muslims. The setting of a pan-
Turkish ethnicity designated the Armenians as potential enemies of the
‘Turkish race’ destined to regenerate the Empire. Finally, the vicissitudes of
the war also contributed to setting a cumulative genocidal spiral in motion.
The anti-Armenian policy thus grew more intense with each new military
threat: in January, at the time of the Russian victory of Sarkamish in the
Caucasus; in March, with the Russian victories in Persia and the Franco-
British attack on the strongpoints of the Dardanelles; in April, at the time of
the Allied landings on the Gallipoli peninsula and the fresh Ottoman
setbacks in Persia; in May–June, during the Van uprising (a defensive
movement which escaped the massacre) and the Russian advance in
Anatolia. Against the setback to their external military projects, the Young
Turks’ leadership to some extent turned to the destruction of the designated
internal enemy.
The first massacres began in January 1915. On 24 April came the arrest
followed by the killing of more than 2,300 Armenian intellectuals and
distinguished figures of Constantinople. Mass deportation orders aimed at
the eastern provinces of the Empire were not launched as such until the end
of May: it was these which signalled the intention to eradicate the
Armenian community. From June onwards the forced displacement was
accompanied by systematic massacres carried out by the Kurdish tribes,
unionist agents, the police and the Turkish people themselves. The use of
forms of cruelty was systematic; in the camps established in Mesopotamia
and Syria, the survivors who had not died on the journey (that is, a fifth of
those deported) were to die of hunger, thirst and sickness, or would later be
massacred within the camps themselves. This process of elimination,
‘improvised along the way’14 and according to a ‘cumulative logic’15 of
eradication, brought about the death of more than a million individuals out
of a total of between 1.8 and 2 million Armenians living in the Empire
before 1914.
These applications of extreme violence, which culminated in genocide in
the case of the Armenians and the many variations – on the battlefields in
respect of wounded men and prisoners, or focused on civilian populations,
or again in indirect and invisible forms of blockade (see below) – were all
central to the establishment on both sides of the warring societies of a
powerfully mobilising logic of justification. In this context, the year of 1915
can be seen as the moment of full flowering of the different national ‘war
cultures’, transmitting diverse ways in which contemporaries represented,
and represented to themselves, a conflict in which they were, directly or
indirectly, simultaneously victims and actors. All of them transmitted
extreme hostility to the enemy. In such conditions, challenges to the validity
of the war existed but were extremely minor. Self-censorship in the media
was largely complicit in the universally established management of
information; few intellectuals, writers, scientists or artists escaped self-
mobilisation in the service of their own country. Forms of political rallying
round the existing powers – the ‘union sacrée’ in France, Burgfrieden in
Germany, the Asquith coalition Cabinet in Great Britain in May 1915, the
Duma–government alliance on the Russian economic management of the
war in August – were universally absorbed and even deepened, leaving
minimal space for any forces of dispute over the war.
This was the case of the ‘national’ claims at the heart of the Austro-
Hungarian and Russian Empires: the mutiny of certain Czechoslovak
regiments sounded a disturbing forewarning in April 1915, but only in
retrospect would the creation in London of the Czech National Committee
in November, looking towards a future Czecho-Slovak state , gain its full
stature. The same applies to the first breaches at the heart of the working
world. Russia’s first strikes broke out in the winter of 1914. In Western
Europe, the first protest movements came in February 1915 in Glasgow and
the Clyde valley, followed by a strike of Welsh miners in July: nonetheless,
the Munitions of War Act, of the same month, which set up special tribunals
to settle work disputes and to set wage and skill levels in war industries,
showed that worker participation in the British industrial effort had to be
negotiated with the trade unions. In fact, social conflict in 1915 was averted
by rent control and other measures of accommodation of workers’
grievances. Inflation was very noticeable from 1915 because of the
distribution of paper money and the various bottlenecks that strangled
production (notably agricultural); but in the Entente powers food supplies
remained acceptable and standards of living were stabilised. In addition,
strikes, frequent at the outbreak of the war, disappeared with industrial
mobilisation. Although the situation was from the first more difficult in the
Central Powers, where the blockade meant that problems in the food supply
were felt very quickly (bread was rationed in Germany from January 1915),
real social difficulties and ruptures in the consensus were not seen until
after 1915.
At the time, direct opposition to the war had little popular support on
either side. The socialist minority in Germany, which showed its opposition
to the pursuit of the war from the beginning of 1915 and dared to vote
against the military credits in December, remained restrained. In September,
the denunciation of the war by minority socialists at their Zimmerwald
gathering in Switzerland found no further echo, any more than the ‘address
to warring peoples and to their governments’ from Pope Benedict XV at the
end of July. In this second year of the war, appeals of this nature still fell on
deaf ears.
Development of the war logic and the process of

totalisation
On 24 January 1915, a brief naval encounter on the Dogger Bank in the
North Sea proved that any major offensive by the German fleet against the
British navy was doomed to failure. Thereafter, naval surface warfare
remained of very limited significance. Still, the question of control of the
seas was of central importance during the course of 1915. The blockade
imposed on the Central Powers, and the submarine war designed in
response to unlock its grip, were thus determining elements in totalisation
of the conflict. The consequences of the blockade, in terms of food supply
and the economy on the one hand and of military and diplomatic matters on
the other – and, finally, of morale – were indeed considerable. They were to
be an enduring burden throughout the rest of the war.
The blockade began in the autumn of 1914, with the British declaration
that the North Sea was now a ‘war zone’. This statement was open to
challenge in international law, but it resulted in the blockade of the neutral
ports and shipping used for a large proportion of German imports. Early in
February 1915 this embargo elicited a protest in which it was described as a
barbarous way of undertaking a form of war designed to overcome the
enemy through hunger. Here lay the origins of the submarine war, launched
as a legitimate response through the affirmation of a violation of human
rights. In return, the classification of the waters surrounding Great Britain
as a ‘war zone’ and the proclamation of submarine warfare provoked the
British Reprisals Order of early March 1915, which radicalised the
economic war by allowing the seizure of any merchandise of German
origin, or destined for Germany, via inspection of all neutral shipping.
Early in 1915, the German submarine war was based on a very limited
body of submariners. From the beginning of February, with the German
declaration of British coasts as a ‘war zone’, these men, who had hitherto
been engaged in regular warfare against enemy shipping, changed their
practices: German submarines were now authorised to sink civilian
shipping of the French and British merchant fleets without warning – nearly
580 ships were sunk in this way between February and September. This was
the context, early in May, in which the British merchant ship Lusitania was
torpedoed. Around 1,198 passengers died, including 128 Americans, and
the shock produced by this direct attack on civilian life was exploited
intensively in Allied propaganda. Faced with the force of the American
reaction, the German government gave up a style of submarine warfare in
which international diplomatic risks were all too obvious, limiting itself
thereafter to targeting British shipping as it transported troops to the
continent. The political powers then resisted the demands of the High
Command which wished to use the undersea arm to an unlimited extent,
that is, against any ship without restriction and whatever its nationality.
The gradual totalisation of the war evidently did not always proceed
according to cumulative logic in 1915: despite the serious situation in
getting supplies into Germany, certain steps back remained possible during
this second year of the war. However, the effects of the blockade very soon
made themselves felt in the treatment of occupied populations and of
soldiers in prisoner-of-war camps. In this respect the blockade and
Germany’s early food-supply problems legitimised the requisitions operated
in the occupied territories and the rationing system imposed on their civilian
populations: total exploitation (ameliorated to some extent by the
Commission of Relief for Belgium) was established. But the blockade also
legitimised the harsh food regime imposed on French and British prisoners
of war: in clear breach of Article 7 of the Hague Conventions prescribing
food supplies for military prisoners equal to that of soldiers in the captor
country, supplies in their camps declined considerably in both quantity and
quality.16 In mid 1915 the situation in the camps deteriorated still further
with the interruption of food aid supplies sent via Switzerland from warring
and neutral countries.
In 1915 the nations of the Entente established a system of drawing on
international resources – principally American, thanks to Morgan’s Bank –
in the service of the war effort.17 Meanwhile, the measures for the
comprehensive naval blockade of Germany and their stiffening, together
with the German reaction on the other, both at sea and on land in the
occupied territories and the prisoners’ camps, showed the extent to which
from 1915 onwards the blockade helped to extend and intensify the
violence of the war.18 Through restrictions, above all nutritional – still
relatively limited in 1915, unlike the following years – suffered by the
German and Austro-Hungarian populations, the societies of the Central
Powers became more clearly integrated into the logic of a war in the course
of radicalisation. The consequences in terms of representations of the war
are significant: as a powerful reinforcement of a besieged fortress mentality,
already apparent in 1914, the blockade effectively contributed to the
growing totalisation of the war. 19
With two new belligerent nations joining the war (Italy in May in support
of the Entente, Bulgaria in October on the side of the Central Powers), 1915
would see only a limited extension of the war’s territorial hold in Europe.
On the other hand, the conflict steadily continued to plunge its roots ever
deeper into the very heart of the societies at war.
From 1915 the prolongation of such a murderous and costly war
constituted a demographic challenge. Although nations with universal
conscription such as Germany, France or Russia remained capable of filling
the gaps resulting from battles without any need to change their system of
recruitment,20 the United Kingdom was differently placed: despite the
massive volunteer movement of 1914 and the recruitment of a million
further men for the Kitchener army in 1915, such numbers did not provide a
demographic base capable of meeting the demands of the British war effort.
July 1915 saw the introduction of a compulsory census of all adult males
(the National Registration Act) followed at the end of 1915 with the shift to
compulsory conscription from 1 January 1916.
The demographic effort also drew directly on Empire territories, and
1915 saw the quasi-completion of the conquest of the German colonies with
the capitulation of South West Africa in July.21 Great Britain mobilised her
colonies, with India in the lead (particularly in sending troops to the Middle
East), and the Dominions sent large numbers of volunteers to Gallipoli
(Australians, New Zealanders) and the Western Front (Canadians). For the
French, it was North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa (French West Africa)
which constituted the main source of recruitment of troops destined to be
used against the Germans. From November 1914 and continuing for nine
months, this pressure from the colonial force provoked the largest African
revolt stirred up by forced recruitment throughout the modern states of west
Burkina and south-east Mali.
The challenge of 1915 was also economic. The background to the
organisation of war economies was a net drop in industrial and agricultural
production in all the warring nations, with the possible exception of the
United Kingdom.22 Originally, this industrial mobilisation was linked,
fundamentally, to the consumption of munitions on all the fronts that were
active during the first months of the war, and to the grave supply crisis
which followed in all the belligerent nations. In this respect, although the
first measures of industrial mobilisation were taken in 1914, it was during
1915 that their principal consequences became apparent.
Even so they sometimes appeared gradually. Great Britain’s turn towards
a true war economy, for example, had barely begun by the end of 1914 and
developed only slowly. Without direct territorial threat and without general
mobilisation capable of upsetting agricultural and industrial production, the
measures of setting a war economy in hand were initially limited in scale.
However, a turning point can be identified during 1915, in the context of a
scandal connected to the munitions crisis, as revealed in the battles which
involved the British Expeditionary Force. A new ministry extending state
control over a vital industrial sector was set up in May 1915: in the hands of
Lloyd George, the Ministry of Munitions was now empowered to act
decisively in supervising the production and management of armaments,
machinery, raw materials and prices. Further, with the law of July 1915
giving full powers of economic mobilisation to the executive, several vital
sectors passed into state supervision by means of requisitioning – without,
however, going so far as direct administration. In a government/industry
confrontation, the state thus established firmly its oversight of the
distribution of raw materials and food supplies, at the same time
maintaining an overall liberal framework, which included a degree of profit
motive to encourage entrepreneurs.
In the case of France,23 the decisive moment in industrial mobilisation
can be located in 1914 – more precisely on 20 September, at the time of the
Bordeaux Conference which brought the main French industrialists together
with the War Ministry as it sought to make good the shortages of shells and
guns. Contrary to the situation in Britain, the launch of a war industry in
France came up against a double stranglehold: shortage of workforce and
loss of the industrial regions of the north and the east. These lay behind a
massive fall (50 per cent or more) in the production of coal, iron and steel.
In 1915 the state deliberately and wisely gave priority to industry in
enabling half a million mobilised workers to return from the army to the
factory. At the same time, a large-scale appeal was made to foreign and
colonial workers and also to women. Faced with the heavy deficit in raw
materials, the planning of imports began in November 1915. A decisive role
was played by the Comité des Forges, which was rewarded with a
monopoly of import and distribution. In managing supplies to metallurgy in
this way, French industry developed its own organisation independent of the
state, through its organisation into manufacturing groups under a major
business ‘group leader’. The system – a form of cartel of large armaments
firms enabling coordination and centralisation – was launched in 1914 and
developed effectively in 1915. From the second year of the war, as Paris
and its region became a major industrial centre, armaments production
made a great leap forward: although demand exceeded supply, from the
summer of 1915 the production of rifles was multiplied five-fold, that of
shells ten-fold and that of explosives six-fold.
At the core of the French state’s armaments programme was the
Directorate of Artillery located in the War Ministry. In May 1915 this
Directorate became an autonomous Under-secretariat of State for Artillery
(led by the socialist, Albert Thomas). In July 1915, the title of the
responsible authority was changed to that of an Under-secretariat of State
for Artillery and Munitions, again with Thomas at its head. The latter
played a decisive role in coordination between the High Command, the
state and industry, as well as in the planning of armaments production,
while still maintaining a liberal framework which respected private
initiative and authorised the search for profit.
Similarly in Germany, the effects of the blockade and mobilisation of the
workforce in terms of a large conscripted army forced the establishment of
economic mobilisation, and in 1914 the industrialist, Walther Rathenau,
proposed the necessary plan at the War Ministry. On this basis, an ‘Office of
Raw Materials of War’ (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung or KRA) was created,
prepared to undertake the first measures of economic planning; large
companies were brought together to work for the national defence in
compulsory cartels (Kriegsgesellschaften) which were dominated by the
largest Konzern but directed jointly by entrepreneurs and civil servants.
Stocks of raw materials were requisitioned and distributed appropriately,
with priority of delivery to factories involved in war production. Research
into substitute products was encouraged. From the beginning of 1915 this
system offered a solution to the German war economy at least temporarily,
characterised by an army/industry face-to-face management based on the
Office of Raw Materials of War, under military direction. In fact the
preconditions were now in place for a segmented war economy in which the
army had every opportunity of gaining priority for supplies. This was
contrary to the war economies established on the French and British model,
in which the state remained capable of arbitrating as necessary between the
needs of the two fronts – military and domestic – and thus between war
industries and domestic supply industries. Nonetheless, after 1915 the
superiority of the second model emerged fully.
Among the Great Powers, it was in Russia that the crisis of shell supplies,
clearly evident from September 1914 onwards, reached its peak at the
beginning of 1915. It was also in Russia that it lasted the longest, in large
part due to transportation problems: in May 1915, which marked the
beginning of the great Russian retreat, at the time of the break in the front, it
could even be considered dramatic. From January to April the Russian army
received fewer than 2 million shells, at a point when the same quantity per
month would have been far from adequate.
No more than any other power had Russia foreseen the need for a
production and distribution system organised ‘in depth’ in the case of war:
as elsewhere, the accent had been on the accumulation of stocks. But it was
the Russian delay in building a war economy in 1915 that defines its
particular place among the leading nations at war. The combination of the
Russian War Ministry’s unjustified resistance over the nation’s capacity to
develop its own production, and its equally unjustified confidence in the
Allies’ capacity to provide aid, led to considerable delay in the
establishment of a home-based industrial production system. Thus the
massive orders passed to external production at the beginning of 1915
resulted in due course in very disappointing deliveries, aggravated by
material difficulties of supply in Russia, problems of transport and a chain
of distrust between the principal actors – Headquarters, War Ministry,
entrepreneurs and government. This over-tardy development of a war
economy resulted in inadequate armaments production being maintained to
a much later stage than in the other warring economies.
And yet, in May, Russia’s greatest industrialists came together in a
‘special council for the examination and harmonisation of measures
required for the defence of the nation’, in order to take control of the war
effort. In June, this structure included the local Committees of War
Industries allied to the union of zemstvos local authorities. From this
moment, the framework for a war economy was established. The special
council, dominated by large entrepreneurs and monopolies, had 2 million
workers under its wing. It divided the country into eleven regions, each one
with a plenipotentiary official at its head to set prices and wages and if
necessary to arrange requisitions to their best advantage.
The year 1915 was thus identified as a first point of take-off for
production,24 even though it continued to be hampered by multiple pinch-
points characteristic of an accelerated crisis of growth. No matter: at the
cost of this gigantic industrial effort launched in 1915 and sustained in the
following year, the superiority in materiel, and no longer simply in men,
was to tip in favour of the Russian army in 1916.
In return, the financing of the war – in 1915 this absorbed around a
quarter of the expenditure of the various warring states25 – did not produce
a tipping point of the same kind. In this respect, it was Great Britain which
initially made the greatest innovations. With an effective tax system already
in place before 1914, the United Kingdom chose to apply intensified fiscal
pressure: beginning with the first wartime budget, the number of those
subject to income tax was increased, and on 1 December 1914 the rate was
increased. The British government was also the first to tax war profits with
a special tax of 50 per cent.
The other powers retained more classic policies. France was already in a
state of full fiscal reorganisation on the eve of war; in addition, the
occupation of part of its most productive territory sharply reduced its
resources. Initially, it therefore refused to increase existing taxes and create
new ones. Income tax (introduced on 15 July 1914) would not be applied
until 1 January 1916. As a result, the resources of the French state
continued to diminish in 1915 (as also happened in Russia). Germany,
where the budget was also poorly adapted to modern warfare, announced in
March 1915 that in order to avoid increasing the burden of charges
weighing upon its population, no new taxes would be imposed. Military
costs would be taken into a special budget provisionally fed by borrowing
ahead of payment on the understanding that it would be repaid by the future
losing side. The income from indirect taxation would not enable the Reich
to do more than maintain the stability of its tax receipts during 1915, not to
increase them.
None of the nations at war had a fiscal system capable of meeting the
costs of the war; all had recourse to credit – in France, this applied from the
beginning of 1915, in the form of Treasury Bonds and long-term war loans.
In March and again in June, the British government launched two large
loans, as did Germany in the same year. France, after its success with
‘Bonds of National Defence’ in September 1914, launched its first large
loan in November 1915. At the same time, external credits were
underwritten by the Allies with American banks: in mid October, a banking
consortium under the aegis of Morgan’s Bank lent $500 million to the
British and French governments. Finally, apart from the tax on war profits
introduced very early in Britain, 1915 did not see the emergence of true
innovations designed to finance the costs of the war. Similarly, the change
of scale in fiscal pressure and public borrowing would be effective at a later
stage. In this respect, 1915 can be recorded as a relatively gentle transition
between the financial norms of peacetime and the new demands of modern
warfare.
Conclusion
As the historian John Horne has rightly written, it was in 1915 that ‘the war
[became] a world in itself’.26 Nonetheless, the second year of the war can
be seen in a complex and ambiguous light. Rather than a brisk turning point
in the history of conflict, it can perhaps be described as a curve. On certain
points, of course, the rupture is clear. It was in 1915 that the first great
attempts at breakthrough were launched against an organised defensive
front, and it was also in 1915 that they failed at the cost of bloody sacrifices
which foreshadowed the immense battles of materiel of the following year;
it was in 1915 that completely new forms of combat – such as gas – were
introduced, giving contemporaries a clear sense of historic rupture; it was in
1915 that the Allied blockade, destined to create a later and tragic excess
death rate at the heart of the Central Powers, was tightened, while initially
provoking a type of counter-measure – submarine warfare – of extreme
brutality; 1915 was the year when civilian populations were first shelled
without military objective, and suspect populations deported. After the
atrocities of the invasions of 1914 –which tended to continue into 1915 on
fronts which remained mobile – these acts of war, of a new kind, signalled a
depth of hostility to the ‘Other’ in which no part of the ‘enemy’ population
within would be spared: it was in 1915, finally, that the first genocide of the
twentieth century was committed.27 In a context of extreme ‘negative
mobilisation’,28 1915 confirms that the totality of the enemy population –
and sometimes a part of one’s own people – was now the enemy, and not
only the nation’s armed and fighting fraction.
But the year 1915 cannot be summed up solely in terms of these
undeniable developments, so clearly felt as such by contemporaries. These
twelve months saw the survival of the warfare of earlier times, at least in
certain respects. The great strategic movements, in which the cavalry
continued to play its part, played a key role in the unfolding of the war on
all fronts other than the Western Front. Complete demographic mobilisation
was not imposed everywhere, as can be seen in the important place of
volunteering in the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British
Empire; the occupations of 1915, however severe, became established as a
phase of normalisation following the anomaly of the invasion rather than as
a form of exploitation of a new kind. As for the industrial, social and
financial mobilisations, they unquestionably made their effects felt, without,
however, rendering the belligerent societies henceforward fully prepared for
war.
The year 1915 was the one in which totalisation of the war was
substantially set in motion. But it was still some way from reaching its full
destructive potential. That was soon to come.
1 Anne Duménil, ‘De la guerre de mouvement à la guerre de positions: les

combattants allemands’, in John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le
tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), p. 59.
2 This represents more than a quarter of French losses for the whole of the
war. Ibid., p. 79.
3 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Les armes et la chair: trois objets de mort en

1914–1918 (Paris: A. Colin, 2009).
4 Olivier Lepick, La Grande Guerre chimique, 1914–1918 (Paris: PUF,

1998).
5 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London: Penguin, 1998),

p. 191.
6 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of

Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
7 The nurse Edith Cavell belonged to a clandestine Brussels organisation
which helped Allied prisoners to escape to the Netherlands.
8 Peter Holquist, ‘Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs en

1915: causes et limites’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 191–219.
9 Sophie de Schaepdrijver, ‘L’Europe occupée en 1915: entre violence et

exploitation’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 121–51.
10 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture,

National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge
11 Ibid., p. 150.
12 Holquist, ‘Les violences de l’armée russe’, pp. 191–219.
13 Donald Bloxham, ‘Les causes immédiates de la destruction des

Arméniens ottomans’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 247–70.
14 Ibid., p. 266.
15 Ibid., p. 270.
16 Uta Hinz, Gefanen im Grossen Krieg: Kreigsgefangenschaft in

Deutschland, 1914–1921 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2006). Heather Jones,
Violence against Prisoners of War: Britain, France and Germany, 1919–
1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
17 Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918

(London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
18 Gerd Krumeich, ‘Le blocus maritime et la guerre sous-marine’, in
Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 175–90.
19 Ibid., p. 177.
20 Searching all the while, however, to pick up the largest possible number
of men available, as in the Dalbiez Law in France, voted in August 1915.
21 The struggle continued only in South West Africa, although it continued

there until the end of the war.
22 In relation to 1913, the drop in production was calculated at 25 per cent

in France in 1915, 15 per cent in Germany, 10 per cent in Austria-Hungary
and 5 per cent in Russia. This reduction was not made up for through
imports. (Theo Balderston, ‘Industrial mobilization and war economies’, in
John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 227–249.)
23 Patrick Fridenson (ed.), The French Home Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford:

Berg, 1993).
24 Stone, The Eastern Front, p. 209.
25 This included 25 per cent for Great Britain and France, 27 per cent for
Germany, 22 per cent for Austria-Hungary and 24 per cent for Russia
(Balderston, ‘Industrial mobilization and war economies’, p. 222).
26 John Horne, ‘Introduction’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, p. 17.
27 On condition of excluding from this heading the massacre of the

Herero, in modern Namibia, ten years before the Great War.
28 Horne, ‘Introduction’, p. 24.

4 1916: Impasse
Robin Prior
The year 1915 had proved barren for the cause of the Entente. The French,
with some British assistance, tried to blast their way through the Western
Front by enormous offensives in the spring and autumn. They failed with
heavy casualties and no useful ground gained. The British, with some French
assistance, tried to go around the Western Front by their adventure against
the Ottoman Turks at Gallipoli. They failed even to take the ridges
overlooking their landing places. Italy joined the Entente in May to no effect
whatsoever. The least of the Great Powers would not, it was soon realised,
alter the balance.
The Germans were no more successful on the Western Front. They tried a
new measure of frightfulness – poison gas – at Ypres but it had little impact
except as a boost to Allied propaganda. In the East they were more
successful. Their armies made great gains at the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów,
capturing all of Russian Poland. In the Balkans they assisted their struggling
ally, Austria-Hungary, by eliminating Serbia. But they also knew that these
gains meant little while the armies of France and Britain remained
undefeated in the West.
In 1916 the major powers sought to increase their production of
armaments before they made additional attempts to break this stalemate.
Germany was the most successful in this endeavour. It had entered the war
with a considerable munitions industry. But in 1915 it was still only able to
produce thirty-eight pieces of heavy artillery per month. By the autumn of
1916 this figure had increased almost ten-fold to 330. Shell production rose
in due proportion.
France was not as well placed. The army had called up an undue number
of munitions workers and was slow to release them. Moreover, some of the
French industrial heartland in the north-east was now under German
occupation. Despite these difficulties the French made some headway. By
mid year its production of heavy guns showed a five-fold increase over the
previous year.
Even Russia, contrary to popular belief, had made some progress. Its
munitions industries were no match for those of Western Europe but by 1916
it was starting to produce guns and shells in the quantities that the huge size
of its army had always required.
Britain entered the war with a munitions industry designed almost
exclusively for the use of the navy. In 1915 Lloyd George had been
appointed Minister of Munitions to create a similar industry for the army. He
was spectacularly successful. In 1914 Britain produced just ninety guns of
all types. By mid 1916 this number had increased to 3,200. And increasingly
the types being produced were the heavy weapons needed to batter down the
ever more complex trench systems on the Western Front.
The transformation of Britain into a major military – as against naval –
power, was looked on with consternation by the decision-makers in Berlin.
The longer the war, they reasoned, the less chance Germany would have of
winning it. This especially troubled the German Commander-in-Chief,
Falkenhayn. Falkenhayn had always been a Westerner. He had looked on
with impatience during 1915 while his rivals, Hindenberg and Ludendorff
had won great victories in the East. At the end of the year he wrote a paper
on Grand Strategy, always a dangerous matter when entrusted to the military.
Not surprisingly he identified the Western Front as the area for decisive
action in 1916. He also identified Britain as the ultimate enemy, the glue
which held the Entente together. At first sight the logic of Falkenhayn’s
paper seemed to point towards an attack in the West on the British armies,
not yet fully trained and not yet fully formed. But as with many papers with
a grand strategic sweep, logic was not its strongpoint. With some ingenuity,
Falkenhayn concluded that France was ‘Britain’s best sword’ in the West and
therefore it should be the French who should bear the brunt of the German
offensive. To defeat the British therefore it was essential to defeat the
French. It seems idle to point out that to defeat the British the most direct
and obvious method was to attack the British. But the fact is that the new
conception of war being hatched by Falkenhayn precluded such an
operation. His new idea was to attack at a point that was bound to be
defended and then use his superiority in artillery to batter the defenders into
submission. The British were not bound to defend any particular locality in
France or Flanders. The French would better fit the bill if a locality on
French soil could be found that they would defend to the last man.
Falkenhayn thought he had identified such a place – and events would prove
that he was correct – in Verdun.
It is true that the fortress of Verdun had played a role in the military
history of the French since at the least the time of Charlemagne. But it was
also true that whenever Verdun had been besieged by a hostile army, it had
fallen. This was true in the Napoleonic Wars and in the Franco-Prussian War.
Why then was Falkenhayn correct in assuming that the French would see its
fall in 1916 as something catastrophic – something indeed that might end the
Third Republic? The fact is that given the military doctrine prevalent among
the French in 1916, almost any point on French soil that was subjected to
attack would be defended to the utmost. They would defend Verdun but they
would almost certainly have defended Belfort or Reims or anywhere else
with equal tenacity. Falkenhayn would achieve his purpose, not so much
because he was attacking Verdun but because he was attacking France.
It should go without saying that the French were not obliged to defend
Verdun to the last. Its fall would have meant little. Behind it stood no large
strategic objectives such as munitions factories or important railway
junctions. If the Germans had captured Verdun nothing would have
followed. They had no means of exploiting such a victory and the hills to the
west of the city might easily have proved too strong for an increasingly
exhausted army to assail. As for the Third Republic, there is no reason to
suppose that it would not have survived the fall of Verdun. It survived worse
disasters in 1917 and 1918. In truth the sacred nature of Verdun is largely a
post-war construct – a symbol of the sacrifice that had to be paid for victory.
At the time to the poilu, Verdun was ‘the mill on the Meuse’, a grinding
machine of appalling proportions. A withdrawal from the salient around
Verdun might actually have raised French morale, not led to the fall of the
Republic.
Falkenhayn would therefore attack at Verdun. But his ultimate goal still
lies shrouded in mystery. Did he intend to capture the city? Or was his
purpose to bleed the French army white? In his paper he has a bet each way.
If the French stand and fight he will grind them down. If they collapse he
will have scored a great victory. In short, however the plan unfolds,
Falkenhayn emerges as a winner. All this is very convenient as is the fact
that the only copy of Falkenhayn’s paper that can be found is that published
in his memoirs. It seems possible that Falkenhayn always intended to capture
Verdun but wrote a post-war justification for the nature of the battle into his
paper.
By what means did Falkenhayn seek to achieve victory – however that is
defined? What he proposed was to assemble the largest amount of artillery
yet seen in war, about 1,200 guns of which 500 were heavy calibre, and in
relatively short but devastating bombardments destroy the French defenders
until the ground could be occupied with modest infantry resources. To this
end 2 million shells were stockpiled for the battle. Operations would be
entrusted to the German Fifth Army commanded by the Crown Prince but
actually directed by his Chief of Staff General Knobelsdorf.
The Allies were also making plans. Joffre called a conference at Chantilly,
north of Paris in December 1915. One conclusion reached there was that in
1915 the Entente had not coordinated its actions, which allowed the Central
Powers to transfer troops from one front to another. To rectify this in 1916 it
was decided that all powers – Russia, Italy, France and Britain should mount
simultaneous attacks. But given the munitions shortages such operations
could not be carried out until mid year. The centrepiece of the proposed
operations was an attack by the Russians against the Germans on the
northern part of the Eastern Front around Lake Naroch and a combined
Anglo-French operation astride the River Somme in Picardy. These
operations looked very different from those being devised by Falkenhayn.
They were not designed to be attritional battles. Great masses of cavalry
would sweep through gaps made in the enemy defences and roll up the
German positions. However, the gaps in the enemy line would be achieved
by the same means put forward by Falkenhayn – that is, huge amounts of
artillery and shells would be used to eliminate the dominance of defensive
trench positions.
These plans were destined to be disrupted by the speed of the German
preparations. Just a conception in December, Falkenhayn had by mid
February assembled his guns and shells and concentrated 500,000 troops
opposite Verdun. Only bad weather delayed the opening of the attack until
21 February.
The defences Falkenhayn would be assailing looked formidable. The city
was defended by twelve main forts. In the outer ring lay the formidable
Douaumont, Thiaumont and Vaux; the inner contained Vacherauville,
Belleville, Souville and others. There were also eight smaller forts, many
redoubts and trench lines to be overcome. Just before the war many of the
forts had been strengthened. Douaumont had received a three-and-a-half-
metre concrete reinforcement, supplemented by four metres of earth. In the
event this reinforcement kept out even the largest German shells. But the
forts were not as formidable in practice as they seemed on paper. The
destruction of the Antwerp forts by heavy German mortars and howitzers in
1914 had convinced many in the French High Command that the days of
such defences were over. Consequently many of the largest guns had been
removed from the Verdun forts and deployed on more active sectors of the
front. And as the manpower crisis deepened in France, many of the garrisons
of the forts were also removed. So in 1916 Douaumont had been reduced to
just one 155 mm and four 75 mm guns and a garrison of sixty. Vaux had no
heavy guns at all and a similarly meagre garrison. Pleas from local
commanders for reinforcement fell on deaf ears. But continued pressure
finally brought Joffre to Verdun on 24 January. He conceded that the
defences needed reinforcement and offered two additional infantry divisions.
There was to be no reinforcement in guns, either for the forts or the field
artillery.
Contrary to some accounts, the French were not unaware of the impending
German attack. Despite German air superiority, some French reconnaissance
aircraft managed to obtain some photographs of German concentrations of
guns and men. Deserters from the German army confirmed that a great
attack was imminent. They even told of fearful new weapons –
flamethrowers and a new and more deadly poison gas. This intelligence
produced another corps of troops from Joffre for Verdun but no more guns.
Amid some controversy, Falkenhayn had decided to confine his attack to a
ten-kilometre section on the right bank of the Meuse. The Crown Prince (or
Knobelsdorf) pointed out that this would lay the attackers open to French
artillery fire from the unattacked left bank. Falkenhayn was not swayed. He
reckoned, not without reason, that to sufficiently devastate the French
defenders his artillery fire must be as concentrated as possible. Spreading its
fire across both banks of the Meuse might weaken it everywhere. In the
event, however, the success or failure of his endeavour would turn on the
question of whether he had sufficient artillery even to achieve success on the
right. Whether he ever made any calculations on this matter is open to doubt.
In the Great War, generals on both sides proved astonishingly averse to
calculating whether the guns and shells they had at hand were sufficient for
their purpose. What most of them did instead was merely assemble an
amount of guns heretofore unprecedented and assume that this would be
enough. In Falkenhayn’s case this lack of precision is particularly egregious
considering that the whole basis of his plan turned on artillery concentration.
And at Verdun Falkenhayn was not just taking on lines of trench defences.
There were also numerous forts and fortified villages to be overcome. In fact
what was required at Verdun was the bombardment of the entire area of
ground between the front line and the city, a formidable undertaking indeed.
The weather improved in the latter half of February and on the 21st the
bombardment began (Map 4.1). Nothing approaching its ferocity had been
seen before. Every hour for nine hours 2,400 shells landed on the French
defences. They destroyed train lines, uprooted trees and obliterated troops in
trenches or caught in the open. Some French defenders were too shell-
shocked to respond, others fled to the rear, but as the Germans sent forward
their probing patrols, they found to their consternation that many French
defenders had survived the bombardment and were manning their weapons.
Soon the sparse numbers of assaulting troops were stopped in their tracks,
and even, in a few areas, driven back by spirited French counter-attacks. In
all, gains on the first day were minimal.
Map 4.1 The Battle of Verdun and its aftermath.
The next four days, however, were to tell a different story. Each German
attack was again preceded by an intense bombardment and the attackers now
committed more troops. They also committed a new weapon –
flamethrowers. These devices sprayed troops with fire from cylinders filled
with petrol. Being burnt to death as well as being gassed or blown to pieces
became an added horror to fighting on the Western Front. No doubt the
introduction of flamethrowers was one reason that the French defence
gradually wilted. One division broke entirely; others were worn down by the
bombardments. The XXX Corps, so recently committed by Joffre to Verdun,
had ceased to exist as a fighting unit by the evening of the 24th. Key
defended localities which had resisted on the first day fell one by one. By the
24th, Bois des Caures, defended to the death by Colonel Briant and his men,
was captured, as were the villages of Beaumont, Samogneux and Haumont.
Then on the 25th disaster struck – Fort Douaumont was captured by a
handful of German troops who infiltrated into the underground galleries and
overpowered the garrison. To those who knew of the true state of
Douaumont, defended by few guns and a score of weary men, its capture
would have come as no surprise. But for many the fort represented the last
word in French fortification and its fall produced a shock throughout the
country. More shocking in fact was the feeble and uncoordinated response of
the French artillery on the left bank. Individual batteries did their best to
hamper the Germans, but their fire was sporadic and random.
Even before the fall of Douaumont however, the French were responding.
At French High Command (Grand Quartier Général, or GQG) General de
Castelnau demanded that Joffre send a new commander to Verdun. Pétain,
the master of defensive warfare, was selected and told to proceed to the
Meuse with his Second Army at once. In the meantime Castelnau rushed to
Verdun himself, concluded that it was still possible to defend the right bank,
and on Pétain’s arrival handed him an order to that effect.
Pétain immediately came down with double pneumonia and was forced
for the first week to direct the battle from his sickbed. He did so to some
effect, helped by the arrival of Balfourier’s XX Corps, one of the best in the
French army. One of Pétain’s first acts was to insist that the left-bank
artillery coordinate their response. There would be no more sporadic fire.
Batteries were grouped and given specific targets. He requested many more
batteries and this time there was no hesitation – 155 mm and 75 mm guns
soon began to arrive in numbers.
Just as importantly, Pétain had to ensure that the increased numbers of
guns and men being requested were adequately supplied. This was a difficult
feat. Of the two railways that had supplied Verdun before the war, one was
in German hands and the other was under regular German artillery fire. This
left a road which ran from Verdun to Bar-le-Duc. The question was, could
motor transport, then in its infancy, supply an entire army? Pétain was
fortunate to have on his staff an engineer of genius, Major Richard. Richard
calculated how many trucks would be required to support the Verdun army
and went about gathering them. In no time he had assembled a fleet of
astonishing size – no fewer than 3,500 assorted vehicles. By 28 February,
25,000 tons of supplies and 190,000 men were brought along the road. By
June a vehicle passed every fourteen seconds. Those which broke down were
pushed into a side ditch and left for repair. Troops marched to Verdun in the
fields parallel to the road. A division of men was diverted simply to keep the
road in constant repair. Two-thirds of the entire French army in 1916 would
arrive at Verdun by this road. After the war it became known as the Voie
Sacrée. During the war it was called ‘the road’ and to the troops who
marched along it during the battle, we can speculate that its post-war
beatification would have been greeted with astonishment or derision or both.
Pétain also reorganised the defensive arrangements in the Verdun salient.
The area was divided into four and each placed under a Corps Commander.
Divisions were to spend just fifteen days in the line before being rested.
(This arrangement explains why such a high proportion of the French army
fought at Verdun. It may be contrasted to the German system of leaving
divisions in the line and replacing casualties with new drafts.)
After 25 February the intensity of the German offensive certainly fell
away. No doubt Pétain’s reforms, especially concerning the French artillery,
had much to do with this. However, the Germans were having artillery
problems of their own. Before the great attack on the 21st they had
developed plans for moving their guns forward to support the next phase of
the attack. These plans now came undone. The earlier bombardments had
ploughed up the ground over which the Germans needed to move their guns.
The weather conditions at Verdun in February – rain and sleet – ensured that
the ploughed-up ground was reduced to glutinous mud. Even though exact
positions had been designated for each gun, the German command found it
impossible to move them forward over this ground. The super-heavy
howitzers and mortars proved especially difficult. Some were moved but no
stable platform could be found. Others sank into the mire and because of
their great weight could not quickly be dug out. For these reasons the fire
support received by the German troops suffered a savage diminution and as a
result the first phase of the Verdun operation fizzled out.
This failure led to an agonising reappraisal on the German side. The
Crown Prince had always wanted to attack the left bank. Now the
devastating French artillery response in that area suggested to him that the
time had come to do it. With some misgivings Falkenhayn agreed. The left
bank of the Meuse is in some ways an easier proposition to attack than the
right. The original attack had to contend with ravines and gullies, with steep
ridges covered by woods. The left bank consists of more open country with
gently rolling slopes and grasslands. There is, however, a ridge that
dominates the entire area. At one end is the ominously titled Mort Homme,
at the other Côte 304, a name which also measures its height in metres.
On 6 March the German preliminary bombardment began. It was
devastating. One French division broke; the others conceded ground. Mort
Homme was in danger. A counter-attack was ordered, with the most drastic
consequences threatened should it fail. It went in on the 8th and did not fail.
Most of the ground lost was regained. On the right bank the Germans had
also attacked but made no gains. Interest returned to the left.
In fact for the next two months on the left the positions hardly moved.
Some of the most intensive fighting of the whole Verdun campaign was to
take place around the shattered slopes of the Mort Homme and Côte 304.
The line swayed back and forth some metres and then was re-established.
The terrible flamethrowers, introduced by the Germans on the first day, were
now marked by the French as targets of especial importance. For the
Germans wielding them they became suicide weapons. They were used less
and less. The terror had passed. The fighting went on throughout April and
into May. At stake were the prime French artillery concentrations behind the
ridge. On 3 May the Germans brought up fresh divisions and made one last
effort, their attack supported by 500 heavy guns. This time there was partial
success – Côte 304 was lost. This in fact proved the key to the ridge which
was rolled up from left to right. Mort Homme fell in this manner at the end
of the month. The Crown Prince now had the artillery observation areas he
had wanted. But his success had come at a fearful price. In this fighting,
German losses probably exceeded the French. It was a good question by the
end of May as to which army was being bled white.
The fighting also saw the end of Pétain’s intimate association with the
battle. Perhaps because of the losses on the left bank, perhaps because of his
success in stabilising the front, Joffre kicked him upstairs to command the
Central Group of Armies. The commanders on the spot would now be
General Robert Nivelle and his favourite Corps Commander, General
Mangin – nicknamed the Butcher. Their efforts to retake Douaumont at the
end of May were bloody fiascos. One suicidal counter-attack after another
was launched against the fort. The Germans were prepared. On one occasion
the French troops briefly held the top of the fort but they were driven back.
Mangin was sacked, Nivelle reined in.
The fighting at Verdun had by this point lost all sensible purpose. It should
have been obvious to the Germans that the price to be paid to gain the
additional seven kilometres of ground that they needed to take the city was
too high. There were obviously no easy victories to be had on the Meuse.
Nivelle and Mangin had at least demonstrated that the French army was far
from broken. Yet the failure of the French efforts and the additional
knowledge that the British were preparing a great offensive on the Somme,
led Falkenhayn into making another attempt on the right bank.
The offensive opened on 1 June. Much ground was gained by the
Germans. They had blanketed the French artillery with a new gas –
phosgene or Green Cross gas – against which existing gas masks were not
effective. The Germans were now able to approach Fort Vaux. The fort was
in fact a shell. It had no large guns at all and was defended under Major
Raynal by the remnants of a few companies. Nevertheless it held. Raynal’s
ragged garrison inflicted thousands of casualties on the Germans for little
cost. Lack of water supplies, criminally neglected in the pre-battle period,
eventually forced its surrender. The Germans inched towards Fort Souville,
one of the ring of forts that defended Verdun itself.
On 11 July, Souville was assaulted. But by now the French gunners were
equipped with more efficient gas masks. The Germans reached the fort but
were wiped out by French artillery fire. There would be no follow-up. The
Somme offensive had now opened and Falkenhayn had diverted ammunition
supplies to that area. Events in the East, as we will see, also drained
divisions away from the Western Front. Falkenhayn had in any case seemed
to grow tired of his own conception. Losses for both sides approached
250,000. There would be no more German offensives at Verdun.
This did not apply to the French. Nivelle was still there and Mangin had
returned. But this time Pétain was also involved in the planning. The former
commander insisted that any counter-attack be accompanied by the heaviest
of artillery bombardments. Super-heavy French guns were brought up. The
bombardment only began after 300,000 shells had been stockpiled. They
were employed on a narrow five-kilometre front to increase the
concentration of shells that would rain down on the Germans. The troops
would also advance behind a slowly moving curtain of shells fired by the
lighter guns. This was the creeping barrage, introduced at Verdun from
lessons learned at the Somme. The preliminary bombardment started on 19
October. On the 24th the infantry followed. The French had regained air
superiority, thereby blinding the German artillery. The attack was a success.
Fort Douaumont was regained. On 2 November Fort Vaux was taken. The
Germans were now back within a few kilometres from where they had
launched their offensive in February.
Although sporadic fighting broke out around the front at Verdun for
several months, the battle was in fact over. Losses, as far as they can be
established, were staggering. The French had lost 351,000, of whom
probably 150,000 were dead. If this did not amount to ‘bleeding white’, it at
least meant progress had been made by Falkenhayn towards that goal. The
problem was that he had bled his own army white as well. The Germans had
suffered almost as severely as the French; their casualties being 330,000, of
whom 143,000 were dead or missing. Given that Germany now faced two
great military powers on the Western Front, it was not at all certain that
Falkenhayn had brought the balance of loss out on the correct side.
The other great army to confront the Germans was that of the British. But
it was the lesser ally of the French – Tsarist Russia – which first responded
to the cry for help sent out by the French President (Poincaré) in May, at the
height of the fighting at Verdun. Russia was not yet ready to launch its
northern offensive against the Germans around Lake Naroch. But it was
prepared to consider an opportunistic attack against the Austro-Hungarians
on the southern section of the Eastern Front. In fact the Russians had been
preparing this attack even before Verdun, but they gained the maximum
kudos by seeming to respond to Poincaré. The commander on this section of
the front was General Brusilov, and he carefully noted the removal of some
veteran Austrian divisions for a new offensive against Italy. This attack,
which was launched on 15 May 1916, enjoyed considerable early success.
Two Italian defensive lines fell to the Austro-Hungarian commander
(Conrad) and 400,000 Italians were taken prisoner. For a moment it seemed
that Conrad would break out into the Venetian plain. Now the Italians also
appealed to Brusilov to commence his offensive. As they did so it just
happened that Conrad’s offensive was running out of steam because, as was
often the case in the Great War, his troops had outrun their artillery support.
Brusilov’s manner of attack defied the conventional methods. He did not
concentrate his forces against a particular centre but attacked on 6 June
along the whole southern front. Remarkably, he broke through. The Austro-
Hungarian forces, denuded by Conrad’s operations against Italy, collapsed.
In a month Brusilov had advanced ninety-six kilometres along the entire
front, capturing 300,000 prisoners along the way. No doubt if Brusilov had
attacked the Germans the result would have been very different. But he did
force the Germans to rush reinforcements from the Western Front to help
sustain their ally. However, like many another offensive Brusilov’s began to
lose momentum. Once again it was the lack of artillery support and in this
case supplies of all kinds that slowed his advance. In addition the Austro-
Hungarians had recovered from the surprise and were increasingly shored up
by German troops.
Meanwhile, the Russian High Command was uncertain how to respond to
Brusilov’s initial success. Should it divert troops to maintain the momentum
of the offensive or should it carry through its northern offensive as promised
to its Allies? Late in July the decision was taken to proceed with the northern
operation. This proved to be a mistake. In short order the Germans stopped
the offensive in its tracks. There would be no more Russian offensives in
1916.
Thanks to Romania, however, there would be a renewed German attack.
At the very time that the Brusilov offensive was slowing, the rulers of
Romania – which was just to the south of the Russian advance – considered
that their hour had come. In Churchill’s words, it had not only come, it had
gone. Romania entered the war on the Allied side just in time to encounter
the armies of Germany – commanded by Falkenhayn – who had been
replaced by the Kaiser as Commander-in-Chief by the combination of
Hindenburg and Ludendorff. The Romanians were defeated with astonishing
rapidity, Falkenhayn winning back all the ground gained by Brusilov in the
process. Great reserves of oil and wheat fell into German hands as a result.
With these vital raw materials secured, Germany was able to continue the
war indefinitely. Such was Romania’s contribution to the Allied cause.
Meanwhile back on the Western Front, where the war would be won or
lost, the British army was slowly building to a size where a considerable
offensive could be launched. It should be noted that this was a radical
departure from Britain’s previous wars. Rarely had Britain devoted such
large resources to ground forces in Europe. Now, with the French and
Russians under pressure, they were clearly required. By the summer British
forces in the West totalled around a million men. Where would their great
offensive be launched? The answer was astride the River Somme, with the
French to the south (and just to the north) and the British extending the front
further northward by twenty-three kilometres. Because of the strong German
defences in this area the choice of site for the new battle has attracted much
derision. Why launch an attack in an area just because it was the joining
point of the British and French armies? Yet it is not easy to find another
promising area for an offensive. Flanders was too lowlying, south of that lay
the industrial area around Lens – where a failed offensive had been launched
in 1915. Just to the north of the Somme front stood the formidable
fortifications around Vimy Ridge. Further south from the Somme lay hilly
and wooded slopes. In short, if the Somme seemed to have many
disadvantages so did everywhere else. At least a joint attack by the Allies
would force the Germans to defend a very wide front of attack.
But as the killing at Verdun proceeded, it became clear that the Allies’
front of attack would be narrower than at first thought. The continued
fighting at Verdun gradually leached away the French divisions that were to
have been committed to the Somme. In March the French were to have
thirty-nine divisions on the Somme, compared to the British fourteen, by the
end of April the French number had been reduced to thirty, by 20 May the
number was twenty-six, by the end of the month twenty. After that Joffre
refrained from estimating how many French divisions would assist the
British. The British by their own deductions correctly assumed that by the
time the offensive was launched there would be no more than twelve French
divisions to their south. In this way the Somme became mainly a British
campaign.
Not that any of this fazed the British commander Sir Douglas Haig. This
was to be Haig’s first battle in his new position. He had replaced Sir John
French after the failure at Loos. Since December 1915 he had been gradually
accumulating men and guns for the ‘big push’.
Haig’s notion, that he would launch his attack on a wide front, was
soundly based. In this way, the central troops at least, would be protected
from flanking enemy fire. But to attack on a wide front (in this case eleven
kilometres) it was necessary to accumulate massive amounts of ammunition
and guns to demolish the extensive German trench lines and fortified
villages faced by the British. Having accumulated all these munitions it was
also essential to ensure that the British artillerymen had sufficient skill to
deliver the shells with some accuracy onto the German defences. It would be
pleasing to report that Haig and his associates made the most exacting
calculations about shell numbers and conducted the most thorough review of
artillery methods to ensure that the artillery could and would do its job. It
would be pleasing but incorrect. Haig, rather like Falkenhayn at Verdun,
merely accumulated a number of guns and shells heretofore unprecedented
in the British army and assumed they would be sufficient.
And it was not just in numbers that the artillery would prove to be
insufficient. There were serious inadequacies in quality, type and manner of
delivery. In Britain, in order to fulfil Haig’s needs, the Ministry of Munitions
had made a number of dubious decisions. To increase output they abandoned
quality control, with the consequence that many shells either failed to
explode or exploded prematurely, thus destroying the gun that was firing
them. Moreover, it so happened that the majority of shells supplied to Haig
were shrapnel – that is they were excellent shells with which to cut barbed
wire entanglements or for dealing with troops in the open. They were useless
against deep trench defences and the dugouts beneath them in which the
majority of the German defenders on the Somme lurked. The British were
well informed by offensive patrols of these deep dugouts, but they failed to
grasp the implications for a bombardment consisting largely of shrapnel.
At one point in the planning of the operation, the army commander who
was to carry it out, General Rawlinson, seemed to grasp that the British
destructive efforts would be inadequate. He implored Haig to limit his
objective in the first instance to the first German defensive position. Haig
was having none of this. He planned to capture all three German lines. How
else could the four divisions of cavalry he had massed just behind the front
break through and gallop towards the coast, thus rolling up the German
defences in the northern sector of the Western Front?
Rawlinson could have suggested that such an operation on the Western
Front in 1916 was quite chimerical. He could have noted that massed cavalry
in the open were ideal targets for German machine gunners and artillerymen
and in the war so far no bombardment, including Falkenhayn’s at Verdun,
had managed to eliminate anything like the entire enemy defences. He could
have gone on to note that in any case there would be German weaponry of
the type that could devastate cavalry situated well behind the front and out of
range of the most ferocious of bombardments. He could have done these
things but he did not. When challenged by Haig, he retreated into convoluted
arguments about the difficulties green troops would have in advancing the
distances suggested by Haig’s plan. This was the wrong tack. Dead troops
whether green or experienced would not advance anywhere. This was the
issue and no one on the British side tackled it.
Consequently when the great offensive opened on 1 July it met with
disaster on a scale not yet seen on any opening day of any offensive on the
Western Front. (It would keep this dubious distinction for the remainder of
the war.) By the end of the day 57,000 British troops had become casualties
– about 40 per cent of all those engaged on that day. There was a time when
these horrific casualties were attributed to unimaginative infantry tactics
which had the troops advancing at a slow walk, shoulder to shoulder with the
view that these tactics had been imposed on the men by an unreasoning
command. In fact battalion commanders seem to have ignored any tactical
instructions from above and adopted their own measures, most of which
were very imaginative indeed. However, the type of infantry tactics
employed was supremely irrelevant in the face of unsubdued German
machine guns and artillery. In the face of this storm of fire it mattered little if
men walked or ran or did the Highland fling across no-man’s-land. What
mattered was that the inadequate and inaccurate artillery bombardment had
missed much of the German defensive systems and most of the German
batteries ranged on no-man’s-land. This left machine gunners (who took the
heaviest toll that day) free to emerge from the safety of their deep dugouts
and mow down the advancing troops at will. It is a melancholy fact that
about 10,000 British troops became casualties before they reached their own
front line. In the centre an entire division from III Corps hardly came to
grips with the enemy at all before they were slaughtered. The end result was
that by nightfall the British had gained a little ground on the south of their
front – where they were fighting alongside the French who were more
lavishly supplied with artillery and where the creeping barrage was
employed by some divisions for the first time – but no ground at all in the
centre or the north. To the south of the river the French made modest gains
but their efforts were always a side-show to Haig’s.
There was never any doubt that despite these losses the battle would be
continued. The French were still under pressure at Verdun and the lengthy
preparations made by Haig could hardly be broken off after twenty-four
hours. Joffre met with the British commander and ordered Haig to make a
second attempt to capture ground in the north, that is, to persist in an area
that had cost him 13,000 casualties on 1 July. Haig demurred and told Joffre
plainly that he did not take orders from him. Instead Haig proposed to keep
making ground in the south until he was in striking distance of the German
second defensive position. Joffre had no alternative but to agree.
Haig’s decision to reinforce success was sensible. The way he went about
these operations was, however, anything but sensible. During the next two
weeks Rawlinson’s Fourth Army made a series of narrow-front, small-scale
attacks which saw them inching forward. But they inched forward at great
cost because the tactics employed allowed the Germans to concentrate the
maximum amount of artillery against the small areas of the front under
threat. By these means several divisions – a notable one was the 38th Welsh
Division, raised due to the enthusiasm of Lloyd George – ceased to exist as
fighting forces.
On 14 July, however, Rawlinson scored a success. He was finally close
enough to the German second line to launch an attack. For this operation,
however, he adopted the expedient of a night advance. It caught the Germans
by surprise and a whole section of the German second line fell into British
hands. This augured well, but an attempt to push the cavalry through to
exploit the victory did not. The few troops from an Indian cavalry division
unlucky enough to get into position to charge the Germans were swept away
by machine gun and artillery fire. The idea that cavalry had a place on a
battlefield such as the Somme died hard.
To interpret what happened in the next two months on the Somme is one
of the hardest tasks in modern military history. On the left or north of the
front the Reserve Army, under General Gough and employing the Australian
Corps, after it had captured the German second position around Pozières,
made repeated attempts to move further north against a German strongpoint
called Mouquet Farm. This strongpoint was without real tactical significance
and was not eventually captured until September. Its fall, as could have been
predicted, meant nothing. The campaign, however, cost the Australian Corps
some 23,000 casualties and at the end it had to withdraw from the Somme
battle. Here was a good example of how to fritter away a strong fighting unit
for no purpose.
The Mouquet Farm operations had another peculiar feature. The direction
of advance towards the farm took the troops of the Reserve Army away from
the direction that the Fourth Army was attempting to advance. If either of
these armies made significant gains they would have separated themselves
from their companions. In the event the tactics employed by Haig and
Rawlinson saw to it that no great gains – or indeed gains that could even be
seen on a large-scale map – were made. The same miserable, small-scale,
narrow-front attacks that had characterised the period from 2 to 13 July were
used between 15 July and 14 September. But there was an added twist to the
story in this latter period. The Fourth Army itself was trying to advance in
two different directions at once. The left of the army was attempting to
proceed almost due north, while the right of the army was attempting to
advance east. Once again, any great forward move by either section of the
army would have seen it separate from the other. Once again the penny-
packet attack methods employed ensured that neither section moved at all.
Haig eventually noticed what was happening and endeavoured to persuade
Rawlinson to cease attacking in one sector until the other sector came into
line. He failed. Rawlinson seemed to be listening but kept on as though Haig
had not spoken. Haig then relapsed into silence. Meanwhile the battle
spiralled out of control. It cost the British around 100,000 casualties even to
capture one wood along the front (High Wood) because it was repeatedly
attacked by inadequate numbers of men supported by derisory amounts of
artillery. Only towards the end of the period were sufficient gains made on
the right to ensure that something like an adequate start line was reached in
time for Haig’s large attack on 15 September.
But this is only one side of the story. The Somme should not be looked
upon as a contest between British donkeys and an intelligent German
defence. There were donkeys on both sides. Falkenhayn had decreed that
any ground lost was immediately to be recaptured by counter-attack. So
small advances by small numbers of British troops were countered by
similar attacks by small numbers of German troops. In this manner
Falkenhayn, against the odds, managed to restore some kind of balance to
the casualty lists.
Moreover, the German troops were undergoing their own kind of hell.
When they were not exacting a toll on the ill-thought-out British attacks,
they were under continuous bombardment from the British artillery. The
Somme, despite the crude tactics used by Haig, reflected the arrival of
Britain as a major military power. This fact shocked the Germans, as did the
7 million artillery shells fired at them by the British between 2 July and mid
September. By 1916 Britain had assembled a mass army on a continental
scale and it was backed by what was soon to become the largest munitions
effort in the world. In addition, Britain’s financial connections and the fact
that its fleet could cut Germany off from the financial markets of the world,
gave it unimpeded access to the wealth of the United States. It is true that
some British assets had to be liquidated to pay for American raw materials
and financial support, but Britain had very deep pockets (4,000 million
pounds were available to it in foreign investments in 1914) and the Germans
could only watch as British war production reached new heights with
American help.
Meanwhile back at the front Haig had a surprise in store for the Germans.
The British had developed in secret a new weapon of war. This was the tank,
and Haig wished to employ it as soon as possible. For this he has been
castigated. It is claimed that had he waited until the new weapon was
available in the hundreds he might have scored a stunning victory, instead of
going off half-cocked with the fifty available to him in September. But in
using the tank in small numbers Haig was almost certainly correct. The
weapon was untried and to base a war-winning campaign on an untested
weapon would have involved the utmost peril. As it was, 50 per cent of the
tanks broke down before they reached the front line. If this had occurred on
a large scale a fiasco might have ensued.
In the event it was not the small numbers of tanks that ensured the battle
of 15 September would have only a very limited success, it was the way
Haig employed them. Sensibly, he concentrated his tanks opposite the
strongest section of the German front. Less sensibly, he decided not to fire a
creeping barrage, which by this time had become the standard form of
infantry protection in an attack, for fear of hitting the tanks. Yet even the
Mark I tank – employed here – could withstand some shrapnel and it would
therefore have been possible to fire the barrage across the entire front. What
happened during the battle was that some tanks failed to arrive due to
mechanical failure, so the enemy strongpoints opposite them were not
subject to any artillery fire at all. And as these points tended to hold nests of
German machine gunners, the defenders were able to take a fearful toll on
the attacking British troops. Only in the centre, where all the tanks arrived,
were they able to advance against the Germans with impunity. This area saw
German troops stream towards the rear in panic, and as a result some small
villages such as Flers fell into British hands. So some ground was gained
with the help of the tanks but at high cost.
In any case a subsequent battle on 25 September proved that on occasion
more ground could be gained without tanks if the traditional methods of
infantry protection were reinstated. By the 25th most tanks were out of
action. So, accompanied by a creeping barrage fired across the whole front,
the Fourth Army subdued the German defence and made reasonable ground
(in Great War terms) at modest cost.
Haig had now reached the crest of a ridge. Below lay more German
defences. But it was late in the campaigning season. Rain was sure to come
and the prospect of advancing into the valley before him, which must turn
into a sea of mud if the seasons remained true, was hardly appealing. But
Haig never hesitated to consider such matters. As he had often remarked
(and been proved wrong) German morale was teetering on the brink of
collapse. Why stop now when victory beckoned?
Victory of course made no such gesture. But Haig was stiffened in his
resolve to pursue the offensive by the support he was receiving from the
politicians in Britain. This is surprising. The small number of politicians
which made up the War Committee that ran the war was not filled with
unintelligent men. Asquith, Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and the rest were
some of the most prominent politicians of their age. Certainly, in Kitchener,
the Minister of War, they had a relic from the days of colonial warfare who
knew little about the industrial war developing on the Western Front, and in
General Robertson, Chief of the Imperial general staff (CIGS), they had an
adviser who saw it as his duty to support Haig whatever the circumstances.
Nevertheless, the civilians were not ciphers; they were well able to make up
their own minds on any issue. Yet before the Battle of the Somme they did
not ask and were not told about the type of offensive Haig had in mind or
exactly how he was going to use the munitions that had been supplied to him
by Lloyd George’s ministry. Once battle was joined, it might have been
expected that some kind of outcry would ensue from these civilised men
over the great slaughter on the first day. At their first meeting after 1 July
there is silence, partly because the full horror of the casualties had not yet
been revealed. But at subsequent meetings when the truth was apparent,
there followed only more silence. It is clear from the diaries of the secretary
to the War Committee (Hankey) that many members of it were uneasy about
the high casualty bill and the lack of substantial progress. Yet in Committee
the civilian members sat supine while Robertson assured them with blatantly
false figures that while it was true that Haig was suffering casualties, he was
inflicting a greater number on the Germans. When Winston Churchill, who
was then outside the Cabinet, produced a memorandum which refuted
Robertson’s figures and demonstrated that for every two casualties suffered
by the Germans the British suffered three, the response of the War
Committee was to send their congratulations to Haig on the splendid job he
was doing.
But as Haig paused in late September he made what could have been a
serious mistake. In early October he wrote to the War Committee and sought
permission to continue the offensive. Here was a chance for the civilians to
reassert their authority. It was not necessary for them to sack Haig. All that
would have been required was to thank him for the splendid results achieved
so far and order the battle closed because the campaigning season was
drawing to an end. By that time most members of the Committee were
thoroughly alarmed at the casualty total and perplexed that Romania could
be overrun when they had been assured that at the very least the Somme
offensive was pinning German troops to the Western Front. But in the event
they not only passed up this opportunity, they did not even discuss Haig’s
request in Committee. They had totally lost the will to question their chief
military adviser or their Commander-in-Chief in the West. The offensive
would continue. Haig could do what he liked.
Haig did precisely that. Despite the rain which had begun to fall on cue in
October, he made preparations for another gigantic offensive. This time the
objectives were around Arras, some 112 kilometres distant. Though Haig
had only managed to advance his front a little more than 16 kilometres in
three months, no one sought to question this aspiration. Five divisions of
cavalry were duly massed to exploit the victory, even though the horsed-
soldiers had found it difficult to wade through the mire even to get into
position. The artillery bombardment which accompanied this offensive was a
woeful failure. In the gloom and rain, guns could not be registered with any
certainty on distant targets. The creeping barrage could not be followed by
the troops for the simple reason that many of them found themselves stuck in
their muddy trenches. They could only stagger forward with the assistance of
their comrades. Meanwhile the creeping barrage had crept off into the
distance. Not only was Arras not in sight, but the German front trenches still
were. Ground gained started to be measured in feet, and on some sections of
the front even that proved too large a scale.
Then, in November, Haig was summoned to an Allied conference at
Chantilly. He was desperate to appear before this gathering with a victory –
any victory – under his belt. He therefore reactivated the long-forgotten
Reserve Army, now rebranded as the Fifth Army. Their objective was
Beaumont Hamel. No one pointed out that it had also been an objective way
back in July for the first day of the battle. Gough leapt at the chance. Despite
the weather, to which fog now added an additional impairment, due
preparations were made. Artillery support would be considerable despite the
difficulty the gunners would have in distinguishing the distant targets or
even friend from foe among the infantry. The battle has been considered a
success because after many travails Beaumont Hamel was taken. There are
two things to be said about this. First, it mattered little at this stage of
campaigning whether an insignificant village near the British front line
remained in German hands. Secondly, the cost of capturing this place was
considerable. About 10,000 men became casualties so that Haig could hold
his head high at Chantilly. This was not the price of glory; it was the price of
ignominy.
The Somme saw the martyrdom of the volunteer armies raised in Britain
between 1914 and 1916. During the campaign some 432,000 of them
became casualties. Of these probably 150,000 died and 100,000 were
wounded so severely as to never fight again. In all, twenty-five divisions of
British troops, about half of all those on the Western Front, were wiped out.
For this terrible price, Haig managed to inflict only 230,000 casualties on the
Germans. In addition, on the Allied side, the French suffered 200,000
casualties as they kept flank guard on Haig’s futile endeavours. In terms of
numbers alone then, there is no doubt who won the Battle of the Somme. It
was the Germans. Yet it is a reasonable assumption that this is not how it felt
to the enemy armies. They had suffered withering artillery attacks for some
five months from a quite unexpected source – the British. And added to their
casualties at Verdun, 500,000 men had been removed from the great engine
of the war for the Central Powers. In August, this accumulation of loss for
no apparent gain cost Falkenhayn his job. Nor were his successors,
Hindenberg and Ludendorff, in a position to go over to the offensive for
another fifteen months. Despite their casualties, the initiative at the end of
1916 still lay with the Entente.
The battles in 1916 were some of the largest seen in the melancholy tale of
men at war. Total casualties for the Verdun campaign were probably close to
700,000 men; for the Somme they were over 1 million. In the East and in
Italy the total bill was probably not far short of 1 million. The munitions
effort was also immense. The British alone at the Somme threw some 15
million shells at the Germans. Added to the French effort, the Allied total for
the Somme is probably around 20 million shells. Add to this an unknown
total of German shells and all those fired by all sides in the East, and some
idea of the enormous munitions effort expended by the European powers in
this period can be gauged.
Yet in other ways, to call the battles of 1916 episodes of total war is
misleading. Probably the maximum number of divisions employed in action
on any one day was that by the British on the first day of the Somme – that
is, fourteen divisions. The Germans probably employed ten divisions on the
same day and the French six. Thus on the most intensive day of fighting in
the West in 1916 just thirty divisions out of the two hundred deployed along
the Western Front were locked in battle. Yet even this picture overstates the
overall pattern of the fighting. The first day of the Somme and the first day
of Verdun (when far fewer than thirty divisions fought it out) were not
typical of either battle. On an average day on the Somme and at Verdun just
a handful of divisions were engaged in an attack, large battles being
followed by a rapid diminution in intensity. For most of the time, along most
of the Western Front, most divisions were not involved in an attack. The
mens’ lives were hardly comfortable as they could at any time be subjected
to artillery bombardments or trench raids of varying size and intensity. Yet
the picture hardly adds up to total war. What it does add up to is attrition, in
that the armies of all the combatants were being worn down. Of course this
was not what their commanders were trying to achieve. At Verdun it has
been suggested that Falkenhayn’s objective was really the city itself and his
‘bleeding white’ strategy a convenient fallback position. In all Haig’s major
offensives on the Somme, he aimed at rupturing the German line and
sending through the cavalry. This was his aim on 1 July, 14 July, 15
September and in the various battles of October. Attrition was what
eventuated when these overly ambitious plans failed. But attrition was never
a major aim of Haig’s, though he has become known as the attritional
general par excellence. He was not in fact a modern reincarnation of Ulysses
S. Grant, he was much more a Napoleonic romantic, who dreamt of moving
battlefronts, subjected to enormous cavalry sweeps. His men paid the price
for this romanticism in 1916. They would pay it again in the year that was
about to dawn.
5 1917: Global war
Michael S. Neiberg
A purgatory of souls
Sitting in the trenches of the Western Front on 30 December 1916 and
struggling to keep warm as he wrote a letter home, French soldier Marc
Boasson told his family that ‘life is a terrible burden. Never has the baseness
of human thought weighed on me so deeply. Life is an immense
responsibility.’ Although he did not know what 1917 might bring, Boasson
was certain that it would mean more senseless killing and more suffering in
the ‘hell of flesh and the purgatory of souls’ that the war had made out of
Europe.1 For soldiers the suffering was immense and seemingly without end,
but those on the home front suffered as well. The privations of that winter
were so intense that people remembered it, especially in Germany, as the
‘turnip winter’ and as one of the worst seasons of its kind in European
history.
As 1917 dawned, the logic of total war dictated that societies had no
choice but to fight on. Winning the war would require further monumental
sacrifices, but losing the war would mean accepting the devastating terms
that the enemy demanded. The war was now about survival, not ideals.
Looking at 1917 through the narrow lens of the war itself, the dominant
pattern is one of strategic futility and an inability by both sides to convert
their national power into victory. The year meant more blood and treasure
wasted to no greater strategic purpose, unless one accepts the cold logic of
attrition, which dictated that one side had to wear the other down through
large-scale battles before it could achieve victory. Although some historians
have attempted to find in attrition a war-winning strategy, none of the battles
of 1917 had attrition as its primary strategic purpose.2
With a few notable exceptions, therefore, the campaigns of 1917 were
strategic failures. Even those that achieved operational success, such as the
Canadian/British seizure of Vimy Ridge in April or the German/Austro-
Hungarian shattering of the Italian line at Caporetto in October, failed to
achieve any long-lasting strategic success. Although these battles previewed
what might be possible with proper planning and a bit of good fortune, the
larger story of the year revolved around the continuing inability to break
enemy lines then sustain that breakthrough. Both the French on the Chemin
des Dames and the British in Belgium fought battles that ground their armies
down without materially changing the situation in the West. That they also
ground down the German army is undeniable, but it does not change the fact
that at the end of the year the Allies believed themselves no closer to victory
than at the start. Indeed, many highly placed Allied generals believed
themselves to be much worse off in December than they had been in
January. None of them dared even to dream that victory might be attainable
in the year to come. Many more worried about defeat.
With a greater degree of perspective, one can see 1917 as a major
watershed in military history. The year began an important transition on the
battlefield; the battles of Cambrai, Riga and Caporetto represented the start
of a shift from the infantry-based age of mass assaults to the mechanical,
combined-arms approach that featured infantry working with aviation,
artillery and armour in various combinations. This transition showed the
fulfilment of the Industrial Revolution and its impacts on war. The second
transition marked the growth of the United States and Russia to
superpowers. Although few could have seen it at the time, 1917 represented
the beginning of the end of the European imperial system and the start of a
new system that, a generation later, would place the United States and the
Soviet Union in a position of power over Europe.
In January (or even December) 1917, the idea of America or Russia rising
looked like nonsense. Russia began the year as a badly weakened and
stumbling colossus, unable to use its enormous human and natural resources
to achieve victory. Although it had had some notable success on the
battlefield in 1916, it was nowhere near forcing Germany or the Ottoman
Empire out of the war, nor was it close to achieving any of its major war
aims. Instead, it was coming apart at the seams as the tsarist regime lost
legitimacy and the loyalty of its people. In February 1917, three centuries of
Romanov rule came to an ignominious end, replaced by a fragile provisional
government that, despite massive French and British aid, did not survive the
year. Rocked by revolution and on the verge of civil war, Russia in 1917 was
far from the great power that it would soon become.
Nor did the United States appear to be a rising superpower. When
Woodrow Wilson took his nation to war in April it had an army so pitiful
that it ranked behind that of Portugal. It had no tanks, no fully equipped
divisions, no experienced commanders, no modern training system and just
fifty-five airplanes. The army was also humbled by its failure to find the
Mexican bandit, Pancho Villa, despite the dispatch of 12,000 soldiers to do
the job. The Americans had no combat experience and, owing to Wilson’s
strict definition of neutrality, had sent no observers to the Western Front to
learn about the war first-hand. The Americans were also wracked by
organisational problems, endemic corruption in their arms industries and a
divided populace.3 The military was so unprepared for war that Senate
Finance Committee chairman Thomas S. Martin of Virginia replied to an
army major’s request for military funding with a horrified ‘Good Lord!
You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?’4 Martin and others
had expected the American contribution to Allied victory to be financial and
naval. Even he didn’t expect the American army to do much to influence the
outcome.
Nevertheless, 1917 marked changes so massive for both nations that it is
difficult to overstate them. Russia experienced two revolutions, the latter
arguably the most important revolution in European history since the fall of
the Bastille in 1789. Bolshevik Russia may have been no less authoritarian
or brutal than the aristocratic regime it violently overthrew, but it eventually
found a way to harness the energies and resources of the lands under its
control. In doing so, it both inspired and terrified millions of people across
the globe and set up a rivalry with the other beneficiary of 1917, the United
States.
For their part the Americans spent 1917 inconsistently and, at times,
unwillingly, becoming a world power. Although it demobilised its army after
the war, the United States emerged as the world’s unquestioned financial
power and industrial giant. The nation spent the interwar years reluctantly
lurching towards Great Power status. Although large sections of the
American population remained isolationist and the Great Depression dented
America’s global influence, after 1941 its leaders enthusiastically embraced
the vision Woodrow Wilson had set out in 1917 to use American power to
promote its own vision of democracy and freedom. That this vision
contained contradictions and self-serving aims has not stopped succeeding
generations from embracing it with a vigour that would have stunned the
Americans who set it in motion in the fateful year of 1917.5
A wasteland
The war was, of course, the primary catalyst of these changes. At the start of
1917, both sides remained mired in strategic paralysis. Contrary to the
assumptions of many strategists in 1914, neither side had broken financially
or morally under the stresses and strains of three years of modern war. The
pre-war beliefs of men like Norman Angell and Ivan Bloch that societies
could not stand prolonged war proved to be tragically false.6 Although at
tremendous human and financial cost, both alliances had remained
determined and capable of maintaining powerful armies in the field and
functioning economies to support them. New weapons had increased the
lethality of the battlefield, but not even tanks or new generations of airplanes
had made important strategic differences. By the beginning of 1917 neither
side appeared close to breaking, and there seemed to be no end in sight to the
war.
German strategists had still not found a solution to the essential two-front
dilemma that had haunted their general staff for decades. In 1916 they had
put their main effort in the West at Verdun while holding on to a defensive
posture in the East. The surprising success of the Russians in the Brusilov
offensive that summer put significant pressure on the Germans and, perhaps
more importantly, on their faltering Austro-Hungarian allies. The German
strategy was evidently not working, and German planners knew that a long
war put pressures on the German home front that it might not be able to
withstand for long. It was, after all, in Germany that the moniker ‘the turnip
winter’ had stuck.
The Germans therefore decided on a new command team and a new
strategy. In 1916, they had replaced General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief
architect of the Verdun catastrophe, with Generals Paul von Hindenburg and
Erich Ludendorff, the successful duumvirate from the Eastern Front. With
them came what Holger Herwig called ‘a new spirit and a new concept of
war’. The new German leadership envisioned not just hanging on, but
changing the momentum of the war and winning a complete victory to
provide Germany ‘monetary indemnities and vast territorial annexations’ to
justify the high German casualties of 1914–16.7
Their strategy depended on finding a way to buy some time to allow
Germany to recover from its losses and to shift its focus east once again.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff abandoned the previous concept of holding
every square metre of territory that the German army had captured since
1914. Instead, they sensibly evacuated exposed salients and terrain that was
difficult to hold. Doing so made the line easier to defend and required fewer
soldiers, an important consideration after the bloodletting of 1916. The
German army thus retreated to a straighter line protected by powerful
fortifications known collectively as the Hindenburg or Siegfried Line, itself
an impressive achievement of military engineering.
The new defences were formidable. Built largely with the forced labour of
prisoners of war, the line was in fact five different prepared positions that
covered 300 miles of the Western Front. Each set of defences ideally began
with a forward anti-tank ditch three yards deep and four yards wide,
followed by no fewer than five belts of barbed wire each four yards deep,
behind which sat the main killing section of the line. It contained steel-
reinforced concrete blockhouses that protected machine guns. Should any
enemy troops manage to get past these lines, they would have to face
modern trenches dug in zigzag fashion and virtually immune from howitzers
or grenades. They were linked to one another by communication trenches,
telegraphs and electrical lines and they contained field hospitals, command
posts and ammunition storage. Behind them stood artillery units to break up
attacking enemy formations from a distance.
The new plan required the Germans to cede more than 1,000 square miles
of hard-won territory in France, but it made strategic sense. The Germans
then devastated the land they abandoned, taking away everything they could
carry and destroying what they could not. As Ernst Jünger recalled, ‘every
village was reduced to rubble, every tree felled, every street mined, every
well poisoned, every creek dammed up, every cellar blown up or studded
with hidden bombs, all metals and supplies taken back to our lines . . . in
short, we transformed the land into which the enemy would advance into a
wasteland’.8 The French did not forget this intentional devastation when they
drew up peace terms the following year.
The Hindenburg Line further demonstrated the pattern that the defence
was much more powerful than the offence in 1917. Still, the Allies knew that
to win the war and to recover lost French and Belgian territory, they would
have to attack. Although the major Allied offensives of 1917 proved to be
failures, it is important to keep in mind that Allied generals did not have the
luxury of remaining on the defensive. Doing so would have given Germany
the time it needed to finish off the Russians and improve even further on the
defences they had created in the West. This essential dilemma does not
excuse the poor planning of the Allies in 1917, but it must be a factor in
explaining the failures in the battles of the Chemin des Dames (also called
the Nivelle offensive) and at the Third Battle of Ypres (also called
Passchendaele).
The Germans hoped that the new plan would buy them time and allow
them to blunt any major Allied offensive in 1917 in the West. They also
turned up the pressure on the British by resuming unrestricted submarine
warfare in January. They knew that the move risked antagonising the world’s
most powerful neutral nation, the United States, but they determined that the
gamble was worth it. Submarines could cut the British Isles from badly
needed imports and, they hoped, without Britain the French could not
continue the war. At first the gamble seemed to pay off as the Americans
responded not with a declaration of war but with the far lighter measure of
severing diplomatic relations. Tensions continued to build, however, and the
publication of the Zimmermann Telegram in March seemed to demonstrate
to the Americans that the Germans did indeed pose a clear and present
danger to the United States. President Woodrow Wilson asked the American
Congress for a declaration of war in April, with disastrous consequences for
the Germans.9
The small numbers of U-boats severely limited German effectiveness,
although their potential to cause harm continued to strike fear into Allied
maritime officials. In the words of the French official history, the Germans
had too few U-boats to win the war but had just enough to ‘permit discussion
of peace terms based on a “map of the war” increasingly favorable to
them’.10 Defeating the U-boats was thus a serious problem. The Allied
navies responded by implementing a convoy plan that ended the practice of
sending merchant ships across the Atlantic individually and with little
protection except the mercantile rights that the Germans were ignoring in
any case. Instead, the Allies sent the ships in groups, each of which received
protection from destroyers, which were fast and nimble enough to hunt down
submarines. After American entry into the war, the American and British
navies worked together to ensure the safety of transatlantic shipping. In the
end, North American goods and American soldiers crossed the Atlantic
safely throughout 1917 and 1918. The German submarine gamble had failed.
Another German gamble, however, succeeded beyond anyone’s
expectations. In March, Russian Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne as his
reactionary regime proved far too brittle to survive the demands of modern
war.11 A few weeks later, the Germans put thirty-two Russian radicals, most
notably V. I. Lenin, in a special train bound for Petrograd to foment a full-
scale revolution. Although he had not been in his native country for more
than a decade, Lenin’s rhetoric appealed to a segment of the Russian
populace that wanted change and an end to the war under almost any
circumstances.
The leader of the provisional Russian government, Alexander Kerensky,
hoped to prove Lenin wrong. Supported by the Allies and arguing that
Russian soldiers should continue to fight, Kerensky implored the Russian
army to remain loyal. He turned to General Alexei Brusilov, who had led
Russia’s successful offensives in 1916, in the hopes that Brusilov could
perform the trick once again. In July he led two Russian armies in a massive
offensive that enjoyed some early success but then fizzled out with men
deserting from the army by the thousands. The failure of the Kerensky
offensive led to a sharp decline in Russian morale and the virtual end of
Russian support for continuing the war. Russia’s middle class and moderates
soon found themselves assailed by radicals like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who
promised to end the war and reform Russian society amid cries of ‘Peace,
Land and Bread’.
The Germans took advantage of the chaos inside Russia by pushing east as
far as their supply lines would take them. Nevertheless, the Austro-
Hungarian army was showing signs of weakness, the German leadership
refused to send men or materiel from the West and the nightmarish vision of
repeating Napoleon’s mistake always remained vivid in the eyes of German
planners. By the end of the year the Bolsheviks had control of the Russian
government and the Germans decided that they could gain more from
negotiation than by enduring another Russian winter on the battlefield. In
December, they opened negotiations from a position of strength and in the
ensuing Treaty of Brest-Litovsk they seized more than 1 million square
miles of Russian territory, along with enough raw materials to compensate
for some of the losses suffered from the British blockade.
The German leadership hoped to realise great benefits from eliminating its
largest front, but events turned out to be more complicated than it had
anticipated. Political upheaval in Russia and in Ukraine made the Eastern
Front unstable, and resistance on the part of the local populace to German
seizures of grain threatened to prevent the Germans from taking everything
that they wanted. As a result, the Germans had to deploy more men in the
East than they had originally planned, even if major combat there had ended.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the same Bolshevik virus that they had injected
into the Russian body politic infected German soldiers, contributing to the
radicalisation of the once-loyal German left, which had now ‘found a new
model in the Bolshevik revolution’.12
On the Western Front, Allied strategy also took a new turn with a new
commander. The tired French commander General Joseph Joffre, long out of
ideas and having burned one too many bridges with his political masters,
was shipped off to the United States to encourage and advise the Americans.
His former protégé, the more energetic and intellectual Ferdinand Foch, also
went into eclipse, and received the largely pointless assignment to develop
war plans in the extremely unlikely event of a German invasion of France
through Switzerland.13 Both men were associated with the failed strategies
of 1915 and 1916. Joffre, who had fired dozens of French commanders in
1914, now found himself on the receiving end of such treatment. Foch spent
1917 dealing with the largely make-believe Swiss problem before going to
Italy in the wake of the Caporetto disaster in Italy, then returning to become
the French Chief of Staff by the end of the year.
Joffre’s replacement as the commander of the French army was the
confident and smooth-tongued General Robert Nivelle. A Protestant and
fluent English speaker (both rarities in the French High Command), Nivelle
and his innovative artillery methods received much of the credit for French
successes at the end of the Verdun campaign the previous year. His scientific
and aggressive methods seemed to stand in marked contrast to the slow,
slogging approach that Joffre, Foch and Henri-Philippe Pétain preferred.
Nivelle was not shy about the supposed superiority of his methods, claiming
‘The experience is conclusive; our method has proved itself.’14
Nivelle’s optimism was infectious among politicians who wanted
desperately to believe that he really had unlocked the secret to modern
warfare. Among those he charmed was the British Prime Minister, David
Lloyd George, who saw Nivelle as a viable alternative to British Field
Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, in whom Lloyd George was rapidly losing faith.
Lloyd George therefore agreed to Nivelle’s overall strategic direction for
1917 and forced Haig to conform to it in lieu of Haig’s preference for an
operation in Flanders. In mid January, Nivelle presented a plan to target the
giant salient from Arras in the north to Reims in the south that jutted towards
Paris. He sought ‘to fix the enemy at one point and then to attack another
point where we will penetrate and will march toward his reserves in order to
destroy them’.15 The British and French would jointly attack in the north as
soon as spring weather permitted, drawing German attention towards Arras
and the strategic heights nearby. The French would then use the methods
Nivelle had allegedly perfected at Verdun to open a hole in the difficult
terrain along the River Aisne. The rising ground around the river would pose
a challenge but, Nivelle supposed, the Germans would not be prepared to
face a determined attack there.
The politicians fell for Nivelle’s bravado, but most of his fellow generals
did not. Haig objected to being treated as a subordinate when he was, in
point of fact, senior to Nivelle. More importantly, French generals objected
to Nivelle’s operational plan, his lack of secrecy and the location of his
attack. The ridge Nivelle planned to assault was a veritable cliff topped by a
road, the Chemin des Dames, which afforded the Germans excellent
visibility into the valley below. There would thus be no chance of achieving
surprise. The ridge, moreover, featured two powerful defensive formations,
the Malmaison fortress on the western edge, and a stone quarry, the Caverne
du Dragon, that the Germans had converted into a subterranean stronghold.16
Professionals knew that the ridge would likely resist any attack because the
Germans had the advantage of exceptional high ground and positions that
were invulnerable to the kinds of tactical artillery bombardments that had
worked at Verdun.
More importantly, the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line
removed any strategic reason to attack the Chemin des Dames. Why attack
an area that the enemy was planning to evacuate voluntarily? Nivelle
protested that the aerial evidence showing the construction of the new
German lines proved nothing about German intent and that the Germans
would not under any circumstances evacuate positions that sat just seventy-
five miles from Paris. The French government was concerned enough about
the disagreement of many of Nivelle’s senior subordinates to start asking
questions. The new French War Minister, Paul Painlevé, who took office in
March, owed his new job to the fact that his predecessor, France’s legendary
imperial soldier General Hubert Lyautey, had resigned rather than assume
responsibility for a plan that he thought was amateurish and destined for
disaster. Painlevé, confused about the mixed signals he was hearing, even
took the unusual step of seeking out Haig to get his views on Nivelle.17
Painlevé did confront Nivelle, who defended his plan, despite the fact that
key details of it were well-known in circles that should not have been in the
loop. Nivelle pledged to achieve success in forty-eight hours or, he
promised, he would shut the offensive down. He also threatened to resign if
the French government did not back him, thereby creating a military crisis as
well as a diplomatic crisis because Nivelle had Lloyd George’s support.
Painlevé reluctantly gave in, and the offensive went ahead.
The first phase of the offensive involved an attack on a series of hills
known as Vimy Ridge. Overlooking the city of Arras, these hills were the
key to holding the entire sector. The Germans had spared little expense
improving upon the natural position that the high ground afforded. They had
dug deep defensive positions that German generals considered unbreakable.
The hills had also become symbolically important following a series of
bloody failures by the French army to take them in 1915. Although Nivelle
saw it largely in terms of a diversion from his own attack in the Chemin des
Dames, the attack on Vimy Ridge proved to be the only bright spot in an
otherwise dismal campaign.
The task fell to the British army and, through it, to the Canadian Corps. Its
commander was a relative amateur, a militia officer once under a cloud of
suspicion for alleged embezzlement of regimental funds, named Arthur
Currie. Portly and clean shaven, he did not fit in well with his aristocratic
and mustachioed British colleagues. Currie sought neither to emulate British
appearance nor methods. He had spent more time studying the successful
French methods at the end of the Verdun campaign than he had studying
British failures on the Somme. Inquisitive, independent to the point of
insubordination and meticulous, Currie emerged as one of the best Corps
Commanders of the war.18
Nivelle may have seen the Vimy Ridge attack as a diversion, but Currie
did not. Learning from Nivelle’s artillery methods and improving upon them,
Currie was able to give his troops adequate cover for the attack. He relied on
an artillery plan devised largely by the future British Chief of the Imperial
general staff in the Second World War, Lord Alanbrooke. Currie had trained
his men in their specific tasks and, in part because his own aims were
limited, he could match what he asked of them to the resources available. As
a result the Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge on 9–12 April 1917 was an
astonishing success. As Currie himself wrote to the Premier of British
Columbia, ‘We penetrated over six miles into the enemy’s defenses,
capturing all our objectives, and what is considered more remarkable still,
captured them all on time.’ Currie took particular pride in having a German
prisoner of war tell him that the Germans had considered Vimy
‘impregnable’ and a British general calling his corps ‘the wonder of the
British Army’.19 By any standard, the Canadian accomplishment was one of
the most impressive of the entire war.
The success at Vimy and the official announcement that the United States
had declared war on Germany raised both spirits and expectations for the
main part of Nivelle’s operation, the attack on the Chemin des Dames.
Launched on 17 April, despite poor weather and strong indications that the
Germans were fully expecting the attack, it gained some ground, but
manifestly failed to deliver what Nivelle had so loftily promised (Map 5.1).
Nivelle had expected tanks and airplanes to help make his artillery more
effective, but the cloudy, rainy weather grounded the planes and most of the
tanks broke down in the difficult terrain. As a result, German machine guns
remained virtually intact and they inflicted murderous casualties on
attacking French units. Nivelle continued to send in reinforcements in hopes
of breaking the lines, but that decision only increased the bloodshed. Instead
of gaining six miles, as Nivelle had promised, his attack gained less than 600
yards. Even combat-hardened units, like the elite Senegalese regiments,
broke and ran.
Map 5.1 The Nivelle offensive, April 1917.
Rather than stop the offensive after forty-eight hours as he had pledged to
Painlevé, Nivelle kept going. He may have believed overly optimistic reports
coming into his Headquarters that the Germans were ready to break, or he
may just have been intellectually incapable of stopping after having invested
so much into the offensive’s success. Whatever the reason, casualties
mounted to no apparent purpose. Having planned for 15,000 casualties,
French medical services instead had to deal with more than 100,000. With
Nivelle still unwilling to call a halt, the French government stepped in and
ordered the offensive stopped.
The failure of the Nivelle offensive carried with it important
consequences. It severely damaged French relations with the British, in part
because the British felt compelled to renew attacks around Arras to relieve
pressure from the French, and in part because Nivelle, who had once been so
free with information, refused to share critical details of the failure with
Haig’s headquarters. The disaster also undermined British support for French
proposals to create a unified command for the Western Front. British
generals were understandably reluctant to place their troops under foreign
command even before the catastrophe on the Chemin des Dames; after it,
they dug their heels in even deeper, with important consequences for 1918.
But the most important ramification of the failure of Nivelle’s grand plan
occurred among the French troops themselves. Furious at the gross
incompetence of their own leaders, thousands of them refused to attack. A
small but vocal few advocated revolution or mutiny, but most sought some
third option beyond outright rebellion and senseless slaughter.20 Exact
numbers remain hard to calculate, but it is clear that tens of thousands of
men refused to obey their officers’ orders to attack. Most of them remained
in their trenches, however, and pledged that they would still defend French
soil, but that they would no longer attack under such murderous
circumstances. They were also careful enough not to let the Germans
opposite them get a clear picture of what was happening just a few hundred
yards away.
At the same time, a wave of strikes hit French cities, with French workers
protesting inflation and their general lack of a voice in the wartime industrial
system.21 Although there were no direct causal connections between the two
movements, the strikes heightened fears inside the French army’s leadership
that pacifism, defeatism or, worse yet, communism, was spreading through
France. Initial beliefs by French leaders that the mutinies were the work of a
few malcontents and poor soldiers prodded by the far left proved unfounded.
Even excellent units and soldiers participated. One soldier, a future winner
of the Croix de Guerre, remained dedicated to France, but was deeply
disillusioned by its generals. ‘It is shameful’, he wrote home, ‘to see how we
are being led; I believe that they have no thought of finishing the war until
every man is dead.’22
The crisis demanded swift action. Nivelle was replaced by another hero of
Verdun, the taciturn General Henri-Philippe Pétain. Known as a defensively
minded general, he was a good choice and reasonably popular among the
men. He dealt harshly with soldiers who had threatened officers or
encouraged rebellion, but he also knew that the men had legitimate
complaints. He instituted major reforms in the French army, ranging from
better food and more leave to ordering French officers to spend more time in
the trenches with their men. He also began a reform of the French army
designed to make it a modern force that fought with artillery, armour and
aviation all working together to reduce casualties. As the French army itself
put it, ‘New Chief, New Plan, New Methods.’23
Pétain’s strategic vision aimed to use more force, mostly with artillery and
tanks, aimed at smaller goals. He wanted his offensives limited in both space
and time; if an offensive showed signs of failure, he would shut it down and
look elsewhere. Above all, he wanted to avoid long, attritional campaigns on
the 1915 and 1916 models. He ordered an end to all large-scale offensives
until his new tactical system was in place, although he did order smaller-
scale attacks in strategic areas, including Verdun and against the Malmaison
fortress on the Chemin des Dames. Most of these attacks were successful
and caused casualties that by 1917 standards were proportionate to their
accomplishments. Pétain thus brought calm to the French army and
implemented some of the important changes that made the army a fighting
force once again in 1918. He knew, however, that French manpower was a
dwindling resource and that the arrival of the Americans would be critical to
Allied success.
The mutinies in France and Russia proved that all armies, even those
defending their own homeland, had a breaking point. The Germans were to
learn this lesson a year later. They also proved, at least in the French case,
that even in circumstances as desperate as those of April and May 1917,
soldiers and the societies that supported them were unwilling to surrender. In
the 1930s, many observers argued that the First World War had broken
French martial spirit, but there was no irrefutable evidence that French
morale had broken in 1917. It was clear, however, that the French army was
unlikely to launch another major offensive for many months to come. It
needed time to rest, to regain military discipline and to learn Pétain’s new
system.
Failure in Flanders
Douglas Haig, the British commander, had received discouraging reports
about the French army, including some that suggested that French soldiers
were demanding peace and refusing to salute their officers. These reports
convinced Haig that the French army might not survive a German attack
against it. Without the French army, which occupied the majority of the
Allied line, the British could not hope to win. Haig concluded that his long-
desired offensive in Flanders offered the best way to draw the Germans
away from the French and give his ally the time it desperately needed.24 In
point of fact, the French army was not in as dire a position as Haig believed
it to be, but given the seriousness of the situation and the lack of information
forthcoming from French Headquarters, his fears were well founded. Haig
was also gaining confidence in his army, now better trained and more battle-
tested after its long weeks of fighting on the Somme in 1916. That army,
once filled with inexperienced civilians with no prior history of military
service, was now a larger, better-led force that Haig hoped could win the war
before the end of the year.
British politicians did not always share his optimism. David Lloyd George
in particular doubted whether the offensive would work and seriously
doubted whether Haig was the man to lead it. Lloyd George made noises
about his disapproval of the plan and threatened to divert resources needed
for it to other theatres, most notably Italy and Palestine. In the end, however,
neither the Prime Minister nor the War Cabinet did anything other than note
their disapproval of Haig’s plans and request that he not fight another long
and protracted campaign like the Somme.
The campaign to be known as Passchendaele or the Third Battle of Ypres
began auspiciously enough on 7 June when the British detonated a massive
and painstakingly dug set of mines under the Messines Ridge on the south
face of the Ypres salient. A tremendous explosion literally removed the ridge
from the Belgian landscape; people as far away as London heard and felt the
blast. Thousands of Germans were buried under the debris or killed by the
concussion. The offensive was off to an unexpected start that seemed to
augur success.
Thereafter, however, little went as Haig had planned. The British were
slow to exploit the shock of Messines, allowing the Germans to move
reinforcements into the area. Haig had placed in command of one of the
armies one of his protégés, Sir Hubert Gough. Gough came from a
distinguished military family, but he was completely unprepared for the
tasks Haig gave him. Haig’s intelligence officers also consistently misread
the situation, especially in their repeated assertions that German morale was
close to breaking.
Command confusion, strong German defences that better protected
soldiers from the effects of artillery and almost unprecedented levels of rain
further slowed British advances. Massive casualties mounted from both the
British and the French who fought in support, belying the notion that the
French army was incapable of combat operations. The small gains of muddy
Belgian fields did not come close to redeeming those losses, nor did they
match Haig’s ambitious goals for a breakthrough. German defences in depth,
arranged around pillboxes laid out in a checkerboard pattern, proved
effective (Map 5.2).
Map 5.2 Passchendaele: waterlogged areas.
The British adapted and scored local successes at places like Menin Road,
Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, but the campaign as a whole failed to
achieve Haig’s goals. As autumn brought worsening weather and shorter
days, British gains slowed to a halt. In one attack in late October the British
lost 2,000 men to move the line a mere 500 yards. In November Haig called
a halt to an offensive that had done little to improve the Allies’ strategic
situation. Nor had it attrited the Germans in proportion to British losses.
Recent estimates place British losses at 275,000 men against 200,000
Germans. Not only had the British failed to break through, they were
actually in a worse geographic position than they had been in July. They also
had fewer reserves with which to meet any future German offensives, such
as the one that came the following spring.25
A glimpse of the future

Three smaller battles of 1917 clearly looked forward and gave a glimpse of
warfare’s future. The first two were designed and executed by the Germans,
although the French and Italians had also been moving in similar directions.
Changes in the use of artillery were at the heart of the new methods.
Designed in large part by Germany’s Colonel Georg Bruchmüller, the new
artillery system used shorter and sharper barrages and included heavier
concentrations of poison gas. Bruchmüller’s system also emphasised shorter
barrages delivered with little advance warning in order to maintain surprise
and prevent the enemy from rushing reserves into the target area. These new
methods aimed more to disorient than to overwhelm.26 Into the breaches
thus created the Germans sent specially trained soldiers who would bypass
the enemy’s forward trenches in order to target the command and control
centres behind them. Once the enemy’s command system had been disabled,
German artillery could target the enemy’s reinforcements as they arrived and
regular German infantry could attack the enemy’s front lines with the odds
more in their favour.
This new system of infiltration tactics required highly trained infantry and
a new approach to artillery. It sought to win not by trading punches as in a
heavyweight fight, but by exploiting enemy weaknesses in something more
akin to a judo match. In September, in the first of the three battles, the
Germans used the new system to capture Riga. The operation was a
spectacular success, inflicting casualties at a six to one ratio and instilling
widespread panic in Russian ranks. The victory at Riga was enough to
convince the Germans to try again on a larger scale, setting up the second
forward-looking battle of 1917, Caporetto on the Italian Front.
That front had been mired in a bloody stalemate that cost both sides
enormous casualties without moving the lines much at all. Although the
Austro-Hungarian defenders managed to hold off repeated Italian offensives,
difficult fighting in mountainous terrain had taken its toll. The Germans
decided to test the methods used at Riga on the Italian Front, in the hopes of
helping their Austro-Hungarian ally and buying them time to regroup and
refit.
Launched on 24 October, the Caporetto offensive succeeded beyond the
Germans’ wildest imagination. Artillery destroyed Italian positions and the
rapid collapse of Italian lines caused a panic and rout that sent 1.5 million
Italian soldiers fleeing in disorder towards the presumed safety of the Piave
river. Italy lost an estimated 280,000 prisoners of war on top of thousands of
pieces of heavy equipment that soldiers could not take with them. Bad as it
was, the Italian defeat would have been even worse but for the fact that even
the Germans were surprised by their success and had made no plans to
pursue deep into Italian territory. Now, having seen the new system work
twice, the Germans exported it to the Western Front where it would
demonstrate tactical success once more in 1918.27
In the third battle, at Cambrai on the Western Front, the British sought to
exploit the one technological advantage they possessed over the Germans:
tanks. Both the British and the French had invested heavily in tanks but thus
far they had proven to be a disappointment due to mechanical problems and
a poor doctrine for using them. A group of young and innovative British
officers believed that the problem lay mainly in the unimaginative use the
British High Command had made of tanks. They argued that tanks could
supplement artillery barrages by using their strengths of surprise and
mobility; tanks, moreover, did not chew up the ground for the infantry as
artillery shells did. At the same time, British artillery had improved its
effectiveness through scientific advancements in targeting and accuracy.
At Cambrai on 20 November, the British used 476 tanks massed in teams
of three. They caused surprise and panic on the German side of the line in
large part because the Germans had no effective anti-tank weapons. The
tanks experienced mechanical problems but provided much-needed direct
fire support to infantry. A gap of five miles soon opened up in the German
lines, presenting Haig and the British command with exactly the scenario
they had worked so hard to create for three years. Tragically, though, they
had too few reserves to push through the gap and the British planners had
erred by not leaving any tanks in reserve to help keep the gap open. Even if
they had, the tanks did not have the ability to sustain such a breakthrough.
The British thus had a tantalising opportunity, but no tools with which to
exploit it.
Cambrai had thus been an enormous operational success, but one that the
British could not turn into a strategic success. Haig ordered the offensive to
continue despite diminishing returns and signs that the Germans were
preparing a counter-offensive to attack the badly exposed flanks of the
British lines. A furious German attack came on 30 November, catching the
British off guard and recovering almost all British gains from the previous
ten days. They even captured some ground that had been British on 20
November. The quick reversal of British fortunes prompted a court of
enquiry into the British defeat. Despite the failures, Cambrai pointed the way
to a future method of war based around armour. Men on both sides of the
lines internalised that lesson and used it in the interwar years to rewrite the
doctrines of land warfare.
The end of yet another frustrating year of war set up a race of sorts. The
key to 1918, most planners believed, was whether the Germans could move
men from the Eastern Front to the Western Front faster than the Americans
could land their fresh but hastily trained soldiers in France. If the Germans
won that race, and managed to implement their new artillery and infiltration
tactics on a wide scale, then they had a chance to win the war before the
Americans could make much difference. If, however, they failed, the arrival
of hundreds of thousands of fresh bodies would buy the Allies all the time
they would need to grind the Germans down through attrition, superior
firepower and the ongoing naval blockade that continued to cut deeply into
German food and fuel supplies.
Economics and the pressures that the war brought to bear on the German
people played a critical role in ending the war. Strikes, shortages and
accusations of profiteering were rampant in France and (to a lesser extent) in
Britain as well, but the democracies managed to keep the problem
manageable. In part, their ability to keep their economies functioning was a
function of determined and skilled civilians like France’s Minister of
Munitions, Albert Thomas, and Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (and
later Prime Minister), David Lloyd George.28 The Western Allies also
benefited tremendously from access to American credit and other forms of
financial assistance as well as raw materials from Asia, Africa and the
Americas.
By 1917, as America came formally into the war and the U-boat crisis
abated, the French and British could take maximum advantage of such
access. The Germans, by contrast, were reduced to taking resources from an
already impoverished Eastern Front.29 Moreover, rather than being able to
pool resources with allies as the British, French and Americans were doing,
the Germans had the additional responsibility of trying to prop up their
faltering Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman allies. The German economy was
simply incapable of meeting such a monumental challenge.
In Germany, furthermore, the military took over more and more of the
economic planning, with disastrous results. To planners in Berlin, much
more than to their counterparts in Paris or London, the civilian economy
became little more than an engine for providing resources to the army. In the
words of Jay Winter, once Hindenburg and Ludendorff took effective control
over the reins of the German government, ‘a different order of priorities
existed . . . The military came first, and the economy created to service it
completely distorted the delicate economic system at home.’30 Inflation ran
rampant, robbing Germans of both purchasing power and savings. A German
war bond purchased for 1,000 marks in 1914 was, by 1917, worth just 300
marks. Consumer goods and foodstuffs disappeared from German shelves as
the mismanagement of the German economy continued apace.31
Indeed the extent of the economic crisis in Germany raised serious doubts
about the ability of Germany to win the war in any meaningful sense,
regardless of what its armies did on the battlefield. Just as bread riots were
the proximate cause of the outbreak of revolution in Russia, the rise of
strikes and urban unrest in Germany raised a spectre of revolution at home
that terrified German leaders as much, if not more, than did defeat on the
battlefield.32 The events of 1917 proved that, in Winter’s words, ‘the price
civilians believed they could and should pay for victory or peace was not
limitless’.33 The superior ability of the French and British to manage their
home fronts thus played a critical role in delivering victory.
1917 in global perspective

As we look back on 1917 from the perspective of almost a century, global
patterns emerge and the events on the Western Front in that year seem less
important. Indeed, when seen through a wider and broader lens, 1917
appears less as the start of the final phase of the First World War and more as
the starting point of the wars that would shape the rest of the twentieth
century and beyond. Although 1917 marked the end of large-scale combat
operations in the East for the Germans, for the Russians it merely meant the
end of one war and the start of another. That war, the Russian civil war
which lasted until 1921, led to more deaths from combat and disease than
did the fighting of 1914–18. It ended with the triumph of the Bolsheviks, a
war between Russia and Poland that took Bolshevik armies to the gates of
Warsaw and the creation of a new colossus in Europe and in Asia, the Soviet
Union. Forged out of the crucible of two major wars, the USSR radically
changed the nature of global politics for most of what remained of the
twentieth century. The Cold War may not have begun in 1917, but it is easy
enough to see the seeds of it in that year.
Events in the Middle East in 1917 received far less attention at the time,
but in retrospect we can see the importance of the year for this troubled
region’s history. Looking for an alternative to the Western Front and anxious
to edge out France and Russia as imperial rivals, David Lloyd George
committed precious British assets to the conquest of the Middle East. British
forces advanced through Mesopotamia, avenging a horrible defeat suffered
in 1915 and taking Baghdad in March 1917. They also began an advance
through Sinai and Gaza, armed with tanks, airplanes and reinforcements that
Douglas Haig badly wanted in Europe. A rapid campaign utilising artillery
and cavalry to great effect led to the British capture of Beersheba in October
and Jaffa in November. Then, two weeks before Christmas, British forces
marched into Jerusalem. More than 400 years of Ottoman rule in the Arab
world was effectively over, even if, nearly a century of bloodshed in the
region later, no one has yet been able to form a consensus on what should
follow it.
The year 1917 did lead to an end to most of the fighting in another part of
the world, although that year in sub-Saharan Africa can hardly be called
peaceful. In November, the remaining African and German troops under
General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck left German-controlled territory. They
continued to evade British efforts until the end of the war. At the time,
people in both Britain and Germany saw his actions as heroic, leading as he
did a small band of dedicated men who evaded much larger forces through
very difficult terrain. But all he really did was extend a campaign that had
long lost its strategic purpose. Men (as well as women and children, because
African units often travelled as families) continued to die of disease and
exhaustion for no real reason. Casualty estimates for Africa are difficult to
obtain, but they surely reached into the hundreds of thousands. In the end,
Africans traded their German masters for new, often British, ones, ushering
in what some scholars call the second partition of the continent, and
furthering the transition into the final phase of European imperialism.34
Thus to understand 1917 we need to see the global impacts of a war that
left behind it the seeds of future conflicts around the world. From a military
perspective, the war both looked forwards, as in the use of armour and new
infantry tactics, and backwards, as evidenced at the Chemin des Dames and
at Passchendaele. If today we generally recall the latter more than the
former, it is largely because of the modern associations of the First World
War with futility and failure, much of it (fairly or unfairly) tied to the events
of 1917.
1 Quoted in Benoist Méchin, Ce qui demeure: lettres de soldats tombés au

champ d’honneur, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bartillat, 2000), pp. 254–5.
2 See David French, ‘The meaning of attrition, 1914–1916’, English

Historical Review, 103 (1988), pp. 385–405.
3 For an introduction into these problems see Linda Robertson, The Dream
of Civilized Warfare (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
4 Quoted in David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and
American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 144.
5 For a wonderfully eloquent introduction to the limitations of that vision

see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the
6 See Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London: Putnam’s Sons, 1910),
which argued that modern economies would break quickly under the strain
of war.
7 Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary,

1914–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1997), p. 229.
8 Jünger quoted in ibid., p. 251.
9 Jennifer D. Keene, World War I: The American Soldier Experience

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), p. 10. In March 1917, the
American people learned of the Zimmermann Telegram. It promised Mexico
generous financial help and the return of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico if
Mexico joined Germany in any future war between Germany and the United
States. It also posited a future anti-American alliance of Germany, Mexico
and Japan that terrified many Americans. The Mexican government
disavowed any interest in a German alliance, but the damage was done.
10 Ministère de la Guerre, État-Major, Service Historique, Les armées

françaises dans la Grande Guerre, Tome V, vol. II (Paris: Imprimerie
nationale, 1936), p. 32.
11 For a recent interpretation of the events that led to the Tsar’s downfall,
see Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), especially chapter 9.
12 Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918,

2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 157.
13 Elizabeth Greenhalgh sees the Switzerland assignment in more positive

terms. She covers the dismissal of Joffre and Foch in Foch in Command:
The Forging of a First World War General (Cambridge University Press,
2011), pp. 200–7.
14 Quoted in Robert Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and

Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005), p. 324.
15 Quoted in ibid., pp. 329–30.
16 There is a wonderful website on the Caverne that affords a terrific look

at its role in 1917: www.caverne-du-dragon.com/en/default.aspx. The
Caverne is also open for tours.
17 Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and
Letters, 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 277, entry
for 24 March 1917. Haig had his doubts about Nivelle but did not express
them to Painlevé, possibly because he did not want to speak badly about a
fellow soldier to a politician. Foch had done the same service for him when
Lloyd George had asked his opinion of Haig’s performance on the Somme.
Haig wrote then that ‘Unless I had been told of this conversation personally
by General Foch I would not have believed that a British Minister could be
so ungentlemanly as to go to a foreigner and put such questions regarding
his subordinates.’ Entry for 17 September 1916 quoted in ibid., p. 232.
18 See Tim Cook, The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of
Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2010).
19 Currie to Harlan Brewster, 31 May 1917, in Mark Osbourne Humphries

(ed.), The Selected Papers of Sir Arthur Currie: Diaries, Letters, and Report
to the Ministry, 1917–1933 (Waterloo, ON: Laurier Centre for Military and
Disarmament Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), p. 40.
20 The starting point for a study of this topic should be Leonard V. Smith,
Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry
Division during World War I (Princeton University Press, 1994).
21 See several of the essays in Patrick Fridenson (ed.), The French Home
Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1992).
22 Quoted in Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie
Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006), p. 205.
23 Les armées françaises dans la Grande Guerre, Tome V, vol. II, p. v.
24 Gary Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (London:
Aurum Press, 2011), p. 230.
25 Sheffield, The Chief, presents a relatively positive interpretation of these

events. A more critical perspective is in Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson,
Passchendaele: The Untold Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1996).
26 See David Zabecki, Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the
Birth of Modern Artillery (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
27 See Mario Morselli, Caporetto 1917: Victory or Defeat? (London:

Routledge, 2001). Among the most successful young German officers at
Caporetto was Lieutenant Erwin Rommel.
28 For more on Thomas and the French economy, see Leonard V. Smith,
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, France and the Great War,
1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 2.
29 For more see Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture,
30 Jay Winter, ‘Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919: capital cities at war’, in

Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris,
London, and Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 10–
11.
31 For much more on the German economy, see Chickering, Imperial

Germany and the Great War, pp. 102–7.
32 It is worth noting that the only term of the Armistice of 11 November

1918 that the German delegation tried to modify was the requirement to turn
over machine guns. They argued, successfully, that they would need the
machine guns to put down an expected revolution at home. In other words,
they wanted the machine guns to kill their own people.
33 Winter, ‘Paris, London, Berlin’, p. 17.
34 For a general introduction see Edward Paice, World War I: The African
Front (New York: Pegasus, 2008); Hew Strachan, The First World War in
Africa (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Giles Foden’s quirky but
enjoyable Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake
Tanganyika (New York: Vintage, 2006).
6 1918: Endgame
Christoph Mick
Introduction
Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde, Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust?
Süßer Friede,
Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!
On 1 January 1918, the liberal Austrian newspaper Neue Freie Presse in

Vienna began its leader with the second part of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied (1776). The article was titled ‘Dem Frieden
entgegen’ (‘Towards peace’). A peace treaty with Soviet Russia was
imminent and the author hoped that Britain and France would be forced to
make peace with the Central Powers. The newspaper did not expect a
triumphal victory but prepared the Austrian population for a peace without
reparations. It warned of difficult times ahead. After the war the peoples of
Austria-Hungary could expect to face a long period of austerity. The article
reflected the war weariness in Austria while at the same time it entertained
hopes that some sort of victory was still possible.1
German newspapers were more optimistic, as The Times also noticed. On
the front page of its first edition of 1918 it quoted the Frankfurter Zeitung:
Thus the prospect is that in the next six months, the decisive period
during which the Central Powers will with absolute certainty have the
strategic superiority, the eminently important period during which the
hopes which the Western Powers set upon America’s masses cannot in
any circumstances be fulfilled – in these coming months the Central
Powers will be enabled to concentrate almost their whole strength on
the Western front . . . This means the collapse of any hope on the part of
the Western Powers of success in a new offensive of their own on the
Western front . . . Thus the strategic conditions on the Western front
have been completely reversed. The war is turning against France.2
The Frankfurter Zeitung was not alone in expecting victory in 1918.

Regional newspapers such as the Freiburger Zeitung also hoped the tide
would turn in favour of the Central Powers, and christened the coming year
Friedensjahr (year of peace). Hopes for peace, not for victory, dominated the
front pages of German newspapers, but the envisaged peace was after a
German victory, not as the result of defeat.3
The two newspapers shared the optimism of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Third
Supreme Army Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) headed by
Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg but effectively led by the
First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff. Recent events on the Eastern
Front had lifted the spirits of the military and of the public. After three years
of heavy fighting, Russia had been defeated and was now in revolutionary
turmoil.
A peace treaty with Soviet Russia was signed in the Belorussian town of
Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, but the treaty only confirmed what
everybody had known since autumn 1917: that the Central Powers had won
the war on the Eastern Front. Since the armistice with Soviet Russia on 17
December 1917, it was only a question of time when more German divisions
would be directed to the Western Front. But there were problems of ambition
and of timing. Ludendorff shared the imperialist dreams of some of the
military, political and economic elite, and wanted to fully exploit the
collapse of the Russian Empire and the power vacuum it created by
expanding borders, promoting colonisation and securing German dominance
in Eastern Europe for the foreseeable future. These plans committed
approximately 1 million German soldiers to the western borderlands of the
Russian Empire. They were needed there to control and exploit the occupied
territory and – last but not least – for further advances into the Crimea and
the Caucasus.4 German ambitions and the volatile situation in the former
Russian Empire prevented the full weight of German military power from
being directed to the Western Front.
The timing was also crucial. The United States of America had entered the
war in April 1917, but the US army was still small and not yet ready for
battle. The entry into the war of the world’s largest economy had boosted the
Allies’ confidence. In its first edition in 1918, the Parisian daily newspaper,
Le Matin, published a collage of the Statue of Liberty and a ship with
waving American soldiers arriving in France. The collage was headed ‘1918
– L’Année Décisive – 1918’. Le Matin hoped that their new ‘brothers in
arms’ would sound the death knell for ‘German tyranny’.5 This optimism
was not shared by political and military leaders. While the German OHL
was hoping for victory in 1918, the Allies were expecting to defeat Germany
only in 1919 with the help of fresh US troops. The endgame of the war had
begun.6
Ludendorff was right that the war could only be won on the Western
Front, but the war could be lost on other fronts. The Austrian army needed to
hold the Italian Front otherwise Germany itself would be in danger. In 1917
Austria-Hungary was poised economically and politically on the brink of
collapse, but the conclusive victory in the Battle of Caporetto (Twelfth Battle
of the Isonzo) in October–November 1917 – achieved with the support of
several German divisions – gave the Austrian army some respite. A collapse
of the Macedonian (Salonica) front would force Bulgaria out of the war and
cut the connection between Germany and its Ottoman ally. A loss of the
Arabian Peninsula and Palestine would put further pressure on the Ottoman
Empire. Ludendorff took the risk, removed German troops from these fronts
and thus made them vulnerable to Allied offensives. He took a gamble,
placing all his hopes on the success of the spring offensive.
At first glance, the spring offensive was very successful. Never since 1914
had an offensive or better, a series of offensives, gained more territory. For a
moment military victory for Germany was close. Contemporaries and
military historians have debated why Germany’s superiority in materiel and
manpower in the spring of 1918 was not sufficient to defeat the Allies. The
German troops had been especially trained for this offensive, with their best
and strongest soldiers concentrated in attack divisions led by the best
officers and non-commissioned officers, whose abilities were seen as one of
the German army’s major strengths. The infiltration tactics, which made use
of specially trained shock (storm) troops (Sturmtruppen) and a much-
improved deployment of artillery, seemed to give Germany the edge.
Moreover, the plan had been devised and the offensive supervised by Erich
Ludendorff himself, who had made his name as the man behind the great
victories on the Eastern Front. So why did Germany not win the war in the
spring of 1918? We will come back to this question at the end of the chapter.
War aims and peace treaties

After Germany and Austria-Hungary had lost the war they placed their
hopes on the programme outlined by the American President Woodrow
Wilson at the beginning of the year. In his speech to Congress on 8 January
1918, Wilson listed Fourteen Points as the basis for a future peace. Wilson
wanted to counter the efforts of the Central Powers and win the support of
stateless nations in Eastern Europe. One of the underlying principles of his
speech was the right of self-determination of all nations. There was a certain
tension between this principle and some of the Fourteen Points. Wilson did
not apply the right of self-determination to Russia, as he still saw Russia as a
potential ally, and applied the concept only in part to the Ottoman Empire
and Austria-Hungary. Similarly to Lloyd George in his Caxton Hall speech
of 5 January 1918, Wilson did not demand the dissolution of both empires
but proposed autonomy for their nationalities. The speech disappointed the
Italian government, as Wilson was quite vague about the Italian war aims.7
He mentioned the restoration of Belgium and wanted to right the ‘wrong
done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine’, while
stopping short of giving unconditional support to this central French war
aim.
Point 13 referred to the creation of an independent Polish state with access
to the sea. This proved to be an efficient counter-measure to the Polish
policy (Polenpolitik) of the Central Powers. In 1916, they had promised
independence to Poland but without stating where the borders of this future
Polish state would be. A provisional Crown Council was installed in
Warsaw, a sort of Polish proto-government, but it was given only very
limited administrative powers. Germany never intended to give up the
territory acquired during the partitions of Poland; there were even plans to
expand it by annexing a strip along the border of Congress (Russian) Poland.
The best the Polish national movement could hope for from a victory of the
Central Powers was the unification of the Austrian crownland Galicia and
Lodomeria with Russian Poland under an Austrian prince. While this was an
attractive option for Polish patriots in 1915, this was no longer the case in
1918. After the two Russian Revolutions and Wilson’s speech, an Allied
victory guaranteed independence for Poland – a Poland which included
Congress Poland, Galicia and the Polish provinces of the German Empire.8
By 1918 Czechs and Slovaks were also hoping for an independent state.
The vague promise of more autonomy if the Central Powers won the war
was undercut by the very real possibility of independence in the event of an
Allied victory. The numbers of desertions increased, and Slovak and Czech
prisoners of war in Italy and Russia joined Czechoslovak legions formed to
fight against the Central Powers. In the Balkans the attraction of switching
sides was less obvious. There were quite a few supporters of the Yugoslav
idea in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina but the Slovenes and
Croatians in particular feared Italian ambitions. The Italian government
wanted to annex the north-eastern part of the Adriatic coast in return for
Italy entering the war on the side of the Allies. Slovenian and Croatian
soldiers therefore not only fought for the Habsburg Empire, they were also
driven to hold off the Italian army by national motives.
The October Revolution in Russia had effectively ended the war in the
East. The priorities of the revolutionary government were to remain in power
and propagate world revolution. On 8 November 1917 the new government
published its Decree on Peace, which called ‘upon all the belligerent nations
and their governments to start immediate negotiations for peace’. These
negotiations should begin without conditions and be based on the principle
of no annexations or reparations. The offer of peace also included the right
of self-determination of nations which – as later became clear – opened up
the possibility for manipulation. While the Western Allies rejected the offer,
the Central Powers accepted the note as a starting point for negotiations. On
17 December 1917 an armistice took effect, and one week later peace
negotiations began in Brest-Litovsk. The German delegation was not willing
to return any of the occupied territory and justified their peace offer with the
right of self-determination. On 9 February the leader of the Soviet Russian
delegation, Leon D. Trotsky, walked out of the negotiations without signing
the treaty. The Bolsheviks – at this point in time still in a coalition
government with the left socialist revolutionaries – were in a dilemma. The
chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir I. Lenin, wanted
to sign the treaty while the opposition, led by Nikolai I. Bukharin, wanted to
start a revolutionary war and take a gamble on a revolution breaking out in
Germany. Trotsky won the day with his formula of ‘neither peace, nor war’.
He was playing for time and hoped that the German commanders would not
dare to advance for fear of triggering a revolt by pro-Bolshevik workers in
Germany or even a rebellion by rank-and-file soldiers.9
There was dissension in the German delegation, in the main between the
Foreign Secretary, Richard von Kühlmann, and the Chief of Staff of the
German armies on the Eastern Front (Oberkommando Ostfront, for short:
Ober Ost), Major General Max Hoffmann. Kühlmann proposed more lenient
conditions, which would have left the option open for a future alliance with
Russia, but he lost out against Hoffmann who enjoyed the backing of the – at
this point – most powerful man in Germany, Erich Ludendorff. On 13
February 1918 Kühlmann argued in the Crown Council in Bad Homburg
against resuming fighting, but one day earlier the German army had crossed
the armistice line.
Hoffmann wrote in his diary that this offensive was the ‘most comical
war’ he had ever seen.10 His troops advanced along the railway lines without
meeting much resistance. Revolutionary Russia was in grave danger and
Lenin finally won a majority in the party’s central committee in support of
his position. A new Soviet delegation travelled to Brest to accept terms
which had been further sharpened. On 3 March 1918 a treaty was signed by
Soviet Russia on the one side and the Central Powers on the other (Map 6.1).
Russia lost most of its non-Russian western borderlands, including Congress
Poland and Finland – about 1.3 million square miles – together with a
quarter of the population and a quarter of the industry of the former Russian
Empire. The Soviet government had to renounce all territorial claims on
Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Courland and Ukraine, while Livonia and
Estonia – formally still part of Russia – would stay occupied by German
troops (Map 6.2). The Ottoman Empire received the territories which had
been lost in the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, and Soviet Russia had to accept
the independence of Transcaucasia. The Central Powers had already
recognised the independence of Finland and Ukraine and concluded a
separate treaty with the Ukrainian Rada even before signing the treaty with
Soviet Russia.11
Map 6.1 Advances by the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, 1917–18.
Map 6.2 Territorial divisions under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March
1918.
The German and Austrian public was elated by the peace treaty, and the
political, military and economic elites discussed plans to colonise and
economically exploit Eastern Europe. Most Germans and Austrians hoped
for Ukrainian grain as an end to hunger and, finally, for peace. The Social
Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) criticised the inherently imperialist
nature of the treaty but could not bring itself to vote against peace. Its
deputies abstained from voting and only the Independent Social Democratic
Party (USPD), which had split away from the SPD in April 1917, stuck to its
principles and voted against it. In violation – at least of the spirit – of the
treaty, German troops soon resumed their advance towards the Caucasus and
the Crimea.
Historiography on Brest-Litovsk usually focuses on three aspects of the
treaty: its meaning for the status of Russia as a Great Power, the tension
between state interests and revolutionary ideology in Soviet Russia and,
finally, the treaty as an indication of the overreaching nature of the German
war aims and as evidence for the continuity between Ober Ost and the
national-socialist Generalplan Ost. However, historians of the Great War,
German imperialism or the Russian Revolution usually ignore what Brest-
Litovsk meant for the nations involved. The defeat of the Russian Empire
was the precondition for the independence of half a dozen nations. Soviet
Russia lost territories where the majority of the populations were not keen to
become part of a Russian state, irrespective of the type of government. A
non-Bolshevik Russia might have been attractive to the Russian minority in
this region, perhaps even for some Belorussians and Ukrainians, but it held
no attraction for Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, Estonians or Latvians. In 1918
the political elites of these stateless nations were no longer satisfied with
autonomy within a reformed Russia but wanted independence. Finland and
Ukraine had proclaimed their independence soon after the Bolshevik
Revolution, while the Central Powers allowed national organisations to
develop in occupied Courland, Livonia, Lithuania and Estonia, albeit under
strict German control.12 After the war it was intended that these regions
either be ruled by or be closely allied to the German Empire. They were
intended to form a counterweight against Poland whose independence the
Central Powers had promised. After the German defeat the national
organisations either took power themselves or semi-legally delegated power
to new national authorities. From the perspective of these nations the victory
of the Central Powers thus did have its good side.13
Ukraine is an excellent example of the makeshift nature of German and
Austrian policies in Eastern Europe. The occupation of Ukraine was not the
result of a premeditated plan but a culmination of events into which the
Central Powers more or less stumbled.14 In January and February 1918
Russian and Ukrainian Red Guards tried to topple the Ukrainian
government, while a delegation of the Rada negotiated a separate peace
treaty with the Central Powers. The treaty was signed on 9 February 1918,
one day after the Red Guards had taken Kiev. In exchange for food,
especially grain, the Central Powers promised military aid. They divided
Ukraine into two zones of influence and occupied the country with about
450,000 men. The Red Guards were forced to retreat. On 28 April 1918
Ober Ost interfered in Ukrainian domestic policy and replaced the powerless
Rada by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, whose dictatorship depended entirely
on German and Austrian military support. The Austrian government wanted
to secure the Ukrainian crown for Archduke Wilhelm, hoping Ukraine could
serve as a counterweight to German ambitions,15 but the real power in
Ukraine lay with Ober Ost. For the multi-ethnic population of Ukraine
(Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles and others) the occupation was
ambivalent.
To a certain degree occupation restored order and protected the country
from a Soviet Russian invasion or a Bolshevik coup d’état, but the
population – after initially welcoming the German and Austrian soldiers –
soon became dissatisfied with the occupation. As the occupiers could not
rely on existing administrative structures, the transfer of resources had to be
organised by the troops. The troops lived off the country and tried to extract
more resources (especially food) from Ukraine. This led to local uprisings
which were crushed by German and Austrian troops, generating even more
disaffection. 16
Jewish minorities suffered numerous hardships at the hands of Russian
military and civil authorities. However, while before the Bolshevik
Revolution Jews fared fairly well in the territories occupied by the Central
Powers, increasing numbers of reports from the lands of Ober Ost linked the
Jewish population to Bolshevism. This anti-Semitic stereotype of ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’ poisoned the relationship between occupiers and Jewish
minorities without this yet being translated into systematic discrimination.17
In the interwar period, the imagination of the German political right
transformed the lands of Ober Ost, where for a period of one to two years
Germans had exercised nearly absolute power, into a Traumland Ost
(dreamland east), just waiting to be colonised and ruled by Germans. There
is a link between Ober Ost and the national-socialist Generalplan Ost, but
this link should not be overstated or regarded as a simple continuity. The
policy of Ober Ost was repressive, exploitative and imperialistic – but it was
not genocidal. 18
After dealing with Russia the Central Powers also defeated Romania, and
on 7 May 1918 a peace treaty was signed in Bucharest. Bulgaria received
Southern Dobrudja and part of Northern Dobrudja, while the rest of the
province was placed under joint Romanian and Bulgarian administration.19
Austria-Hungary was ceded control of the passes in the Carpathian
Mountains. Romania had to lease its oil wells to Germany for ninety years
and had to accept occupation for an indefinite period. The Central Powers
consoled Romania by recognising its union with Bessarabia, which had
previously belonged to the Russian Empire.20 On 27 August the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk was amended by the Treaty of Berlin. It reflected the ideology
of the German Fatherland Party and completely ignored more moderate
views within Germany. Soviet Russia had to renounce any claims to the
Baltic region, recognise the independence of Georgia, deliver all its gold
reserves to Germany and pay 5 billion marks’ compensation. Germany also
got the right to exploit the coal mines in the Donetsk basin. The Soviet
government never intended to honour the treaty, as it rightly expected that
Germany would lose the war. While in Brest-Litovsk the OHL had used the
right of self-determination as a fig leaf to cover its imperialist intentions, the
Treaties of Berlin and Bucharest showed what the world would have looked
like according to the ideas of ruling German elites. In the end, even the
German parliament had had enough of such open and reckless imperialism
and voted against the Treaty of Berlin.21
The spring offensive

Already prior to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the divisions on the Eastern
Front were being combed for physically fit soldiers below the age of 35.
Between November 1917 and the offensive on 21 March 1918, forty-four
divisions arrived in Belgium and France. Ludendorff was criticised for
leaving about 1.5 million soldiers, including large numbers of cavalry, in the
East (Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and Russia). These divisions had
less fighting value than the transferred divisions but could have freed up
other divisions for the attack.22 It could not be excluded, however, that either
the Bolsheviks in the interests of promoting a German revolution or White
forces supported by the Czechoslovak legions would resume fighting against
the Central Powers. Winston Churchill, the British Minister of Munitions,
even considered a possible new front against Germany in Russia,
underpinned by Japanese troops which had just landed in the Russian Far
East.23
But even without these additional divisions, in March 1918 the Central
Powers had a significant advantage (Map 6.3). A total of 191 German
divisions faced 175 Allied divisions. However, German divisions had fewer
men than British or French divisions so in terms of absolute numbers the two
sides were roughly equal: about 4 million soldiers.24 The Germans also had
superior numbers of artillery, even though this was less significant. The
superiority was not the result of a massive numerical advantage but of a
better fighting efficiency. This was not sufficient to launch a broad-scale
offensive but enabled the OHL to concentrate troops and firepower on some
portions of the front without dangerously weakening the rest of the front.
The element of surprise was therefore crucial. The main problem for the
German army was its lack of mobility. The Allies had ten times as many
lorries and the German divisions were also desperately short of horses.25
Map 6.3 German spring offensive, 1918.
The German army used combined-arms and infiltration tactics, which had
been successfully applied by General Oskar von Hutier in the Battle of Riga
and which were later tested at Caporetto and during the counter-attack at
Cambrai. There was a relatively brief period of artillery preparation before
attacks using hurricane bombardment with the aim of preventing the Allies
from learning early on where the major blow would fall. Lieutenant Colonel
Georg Bruchmüller, artillery commander of the Eighteenth Army, developed
a new method of directing fire without ranging shots. The artillery aimed its
fire at the enemy’s batteries, Headquarters and lines of communication.
Shortly before the infantry went over the top, shells with tear gas and poison
gas (mustard, phosgene or diphosgene) were fired and a creeping barrage
began, aimed not at destroying the enemy positions but at stunning the
enemy soldiers. Ludendorff concentrated the best soldiers into shock/storm
troops (Sturmtruppen). Organised in small units of between six and nine
men, these storm troopers advanced as quickly as possible behind the
creeping barrage, not bothering to destroy every fortified enemy position.
The objective of these storm troopers was to reach the enemy’s artillery
positions and Headquarters and destroy the lines of communication, creating
disorder and confusion among the defenders. Mobile troops, infantry
battalions with light machine guns, mortars and flamethrowers followed and
destroyed enemy strongholds. Finally, regular infantry was used to mop up
any remaining resistance. In the rear, troops with less fighting value held the
trenches and repulsed counter-attacks while the storm troops and mobile
troops advanced.26
The question now was where to attack.27 The German High Command
had experienced the resilience of French soldiers and shrank back from
taking on the French army at Verdun, the logical point for an offensive.
Ludendorff expected that the morale of the British soldiers after the costly
offensives of 1917 would be low, and decided to attack the BEF first. This
was a sensible choice, as the British army had a severe problem with
manpower. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George – possibly fearing that he
could not prevent his Chief of Staff, General Douglas Haig, from starting a
new offensive, held back reserves in Britain which were desperately needed
in France and Belgium. The divisions of the BEF were under strength, the
number of battalions per division was cut from twelve to nine.28
The Bavarian Crown Prince and Field Marshal Rupprecht and his Chief of
Staff, General Hermann von Kuhl, favoured an attack on the portion of the
front held by their army group. This would have meant an attack on the
Ypres salient, but every year in early spring heavy rain transformed the
battle-scarred landscape into a vast field of mud holes, making a quick
advance impossible. Ludendorff finally decided to attack in Picardy between
Arras and Saint Quentin where the ground dried out quicker after the winter
and spring rains. Here the German troops would have to cross the old
Somme battlefield. This was also very difficult terrain but not as muddy as
‘Flanders fields’. On a tactical and operational level the plan was well
thought out, but to win the war a clear strategic vision was necessary. That
this strategic vision was ‘blurred’ became evident when Rupprecht
challenged Ludendorff’s plan to attack at the Somme. Asked by the Bavarian
Crown Prince what his strategic objective was, Ludendorff referred to his
experience on the Eastern Front: attack, find the weak spots, use the
momentum and push forward. This gave the offensive a high degree of
flexibility but the inherent flaw of this plan was that the attack could splinter
into a number of advances without achieving a decisive victory.29
The first and main offensive was called Operation Michael after the
Archangel Michael, the patron saint of Germany. The offensive was also
dubbed the Kaiserschlacht (emperor’s battle). Ludendorff gave it the clear
strategic objective of breaking through the southern portion of the British
front, turning north, and making the British positions impossible by
simultaneously attacking the centre and the exposed southern flank. It could
have worked, but Ludendorff then took steps which were incompatible with
this strategy. Three German armies with sixty-seven divisions were in the
assault sector. The three armies had 6,608 guns and howitzers (almost 50 per
cent of all German guns on the Western Front), 3,534 mortars and 1,070
aircraft at their disposal. On the sixty-mile-long front the BEF only had
2,500 guns, 1,400 mortars and 579 aircraft.30 The artillery preparation began
on 21 March at 4.40 a.m. and lasted only five hours. Shells with mustard,
phosgene and tear gas were fired before the attack and thick fog disoriented
the defenders. In the original plan, the German Eighteenth Army should
have defended the left flank of the German Second and Seventeenth Armies,
which were expected to turn north-west after having destroyed the Cambrai
salient. The British Third Army’s positions, however, were well manned.
A total of fourteen divisions were defending a mere twenty-eight miles of
the front. The BEF held on to the strategically crucial Vimy Ridge and
prevented the German troops from reaching their objectives. Progress was
made but casualties on the German side were high. Haig had concentrated
his strategic reserves behind this portion of the front, as he could not afford
to lose much ground here.
The breakthrough came – unexpectedly – against the British Fifth Army
on the southern section of the British front. Only twelve divisions with 976
heavy guns were defending forty-two miles against forty-three German
divisions, which in turn were supported by 2,508 pieces of heavy artillery.
As the British had just taken over part of the front from the French army, the
principles of deep defence had not yet been fully applied. The rear positions
were not ready and about one-third of the troops were concentrated in the
front line. A considerable part of the Fifth Army was destroyed as a result of
the artillery fire and the first German assault. On the first day of the
offensive the Germans captured 21,000 British soldiers, and the total British
casualties were 38,512. But the German casualties were even higher –
40,000 men – a figure that could have served as a warning signal for the
OHL.31
Operation Michael had succeeded on one section of the front where a
strategic victory was beyond the possibilities of the German army.
Ludendorff, however, had the Eighteenth Army push on, not, as planned, in
a north-westerly direction but south and south-west. One of the reasons for
this was the stiff resistance of the British Third Army, but Ludendorff also
seemed to believe that the BEF had been beaten and that it was now time to
turn against the French army to prevent reinforcements being sent to the
British. He saw the chance to drive a wedge between the BEF and the
French army and inflict the deadly blow on the Allies he had hoped for.
Faced with this emergency, the opposition of Haig and Pétain against a
unified High Command was finally overcome. On 26 March Ferdinand Foch
was given the task of coordinating the actions of the British and French
armies. His mandate was extended on 3 April to include the American
Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Foch became Supreme Military Commander,
first on the Western Front and later of all Allied troops. As a strategic reserve
was missing, Haig and Pétain had previously agreed to help each other in the
event of a massive German offensive at either part of the front. It is still a
matter of dispute to what extent Pétain fulfilled his promises. Some
historians have followed Haig, who complained that the support was slow
and insufficient. Others have pointed to the fact that by the evening of 23
March, Pétain had sent fourteen divisions to repulse the German offensive.
By the 28th half of the French army was on the move and on 31 March
twenty-one French divisions were supporting the BEF. They helped stabilise
the thirty-six miles of front between the Somme and Oise rivers. Pétain had
refused to send even more troops as he expected a simultaneous German
assault in Champagne.32
Operation Michael had cost the British 177,739, the French 77,000 and the
Germans 239,800 casualties. Worrying for the Allies was the loss of 1,300
guns and the fact that 75,000 British and 15,000 French soldiers had been
taken prisoner. The German army had overrun the British defence on a fifty-
mile sector and gained 12,000 square miles of territory, but for Germany the
failure to achieve a strategic victory was nothing short of a disaster.33 The
front was pushed back forty miles in some areas, but neither had the BEF
and the French army permanently been separated nor had Amiens with its
important railway hub been taken.34 The German soldiers could see with
their own eyes that the soldiers of the BEF were much better supplied.
German soldiers often stopped to eat what they found in British trenches and
depots. Many soldiers were drunk and discipline suffered. This was a
recurring problem during the spring offensives. The British military
historian, Liddell Hart, even believed that the abundance of food and alcohol
found on the British side undermined the morale of the Germans and their
will to resist the Allied offensives in summer and autumn.35 It is highly
unlikely, however, that the German troops would have been able – even if
resistance had been weaker and less time had been spent on looting and
drinking – to sustain the attack long enough to deal a resounding blow to
either the French army or the BEF. The German troops were exhausted and
too far from the railway heads. The lines were overstretched, there was
insufficient motorised transportation and horses, and neither fresh troops nor
supplies could be brought forward quickly enough. This gave the Allies
enough time to reallocate resources, bring in reserve troops and stabilise the
front.
Operation Michael was the first of several offensives. On 9 April
Operation Georgette was launched, known in Britain as the Battle of Lys.
The attack area ranged from six miles east of Ypres to six miles east of
Béthune. The weakest portion of the front was defended by the British First
Army, where two undermanned and tired Portuguese divisions were placed.
The plan was to break through this portion of the front, take the important
railway junction Hazebrouck, push the British Second Army north to the
Channel ports and interrupt the British supply lines. On the first day the
German Sixth Army broke through the British battle zone along a front of
nine miles and advanced five miles. They were finally stopped by British
reserve divisions. Further north on 10 April four divisions of the German
Fourth Army pushed back the British Second Army which had sent its
reserves to help the First Army. The Germans advanced two miles along a
four-mile front and took Messines. On 11 April the British position had
become so precarious that Haig gave his famous ‘Backs to the wall’ order. In
a dramatic appeal to his troops he demanded that they defend every position
as further retreat might end in defeat. In the days that followed, the Germans
made further attempts to break through the British lines and achieved some
territorial gains, but with the help of French reserves the front could be
stabilised. Casualties were high, as here – where the BEF could not afford to
lose much ground – the defences were deep and heavily fortified.
Ludendorff stopped the offensive on 29 April. Since 21 March the German
army had suffered 326,000, the BEF 260,000 and the French army 107,000
casualties.36
Ludendorff now turned against the French army. The Operations Blücher
and Yorck, starting on 27 May, were meant to draw troops away from
Flanders and prevent French reinforcements being sent to the BEF where –
as before – it was intended that the major blow would fall. Pétain had
expected an offensive but no longer expected it at the Chemin des Dames.
Four exhausted British divisions had been transferred to this supposedly
quiet sector of the front to rest. Forty-one German divisions with 3,719 guns
at their disposal broke through the front held by the French Seventh Army
and three British divisions. The advance reached the River Marne and
German troops were now only fifty-six miles away from Paris. Ludendorff
could again not resist the temptation and German divisions facing the British
sector were sent in as reinforcements. On the evening of 28 May the British
and French lines were, for a short period, separated by a wedge forty miles
wide and fifteen miles deep. One day later German troops took Soissons. All
in all the German troops captured more than 50,000 French soldiers, 630
guns and 2,000 machine guns. The German army had suffered 105,370
casualties, the Allies 127,337.37 Paris was now within reach of artillery fire,
and panic broke out. The French government even considered leaving the
capital. The French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, declared in the
Chamber of Deputies that he would continue fighting even if Paris was lost:
‘I shall fight before Paris, I shall fight in Paris, I shall fight behind Paris.’
Once again logistical, especially transportation problems prevented the
German army from exploiting the strategic opportunities. The attack
divisions were exhausted and supplies, artillery and fresh troops could not be
brought forward quickly enough. Pétain was able to stabilise the front at the
River Marne. Eight American divisions participated in this battle under
French command. The relative success of Operation Blücher was sufficient
to tempt Ludendorff to launch another attack between Noyon and
Montdidier, Operation Gneisenau, on 9 June. The success was limited and
was followed by a successful counter-attack in which American troops also
took part. Some 1,000 German soldiers were captured.38
The days between 15 and 18 July represented the military turning point of
the campaigns of 1918 and, in a way, of the war. On 15 July the German
army attacked in Champagne. This time the French army had received
previous intelligence of the attack and the French artillery fired shell after
shell on the first line of the German trenches where the soldiers were
crowded together, waiting to go over the top. On the French side the first
line was only held by a few soldiers. The German fire was wasted on empty
trenches and positions. When the Germans attacked they ran into a trap in
the French battle zone and heavy casualties were inflicted on the attackers.
French and a few American divisions launched a successful counter-attack –
also using tanks – against the German Fifth and Seventh Armies on 18 July,
which forced the Germans to retreat to Soissons on the River Aisne. In four
days of fighting a total of 30,000 German soldiers had been killed.39
All in all, the German offensives had made considerable territorial gains,
but none of the strategic objectives had been achieved. The BEF and the
French army had neither been separated, nor had the British troops been
pushed back to the Channel ports, nor had Paris been taken. Other important
objectives such as the destruction of the Ypres salient or the capture of the
crucial railway hub of Amiens were not realised. The German army had
retaken old battlefields or territory which had been destroyed by its troops
during the tactical retreat to the Hindenburg Line (referred to by the
Germans as the Siegfried Line) in March–April 1917. The front had been
extended from 390 to 510 miles (by 25 July) and the Germans held positions
which still had to be fortified. The soldiers were much more vulnerable to
Allied attacks than in the fortified positions they had held before the spring
offensive. The German army had lost 800,000 men, including a high
percentage of its best soldiers. The German army was also hit by the first
wave of the Spanish influenza in June, three weeks earlier than the Allies,
which further weakened the German troops. Taking all these factors into
account, Churchill was right to state that the German army had been
defeated in a defensive battle. The subsequent Allied offensives (starting
with the counter-attack in Champagne in mid July) built on this defensive
victory and finished off a weakened and demoralised enemy.40
The black days of the German army

The strategic position of Germany, which had seemed so good in January
1918, deteriorated rapidly. Ludendorff was out of his depth. On 2 August he
ordered the German army to prepare for Allied attacks. He hoped that at
least the repeated blows and the high number of casualties suffered by the
defenders had made major Allied offensives impossible. He was not entirely
wrong. Foch, Pétain and Haig did not think that the war could be won in
1918, but they anticipated that counter-attacks and offensives with narrow
objectives could be effective and break the morale of the German army.41
The Allies now could draw on the experiences of their previous offensives
and on lessons learned from the German successes and failures earlier in the
year. Their superiority in terms of firepower was re-established in the
summer of 1918. Rupprecht realised much earlier than Ludendorff that
morale among the German soldiers was dropping. He heard about the
growing number of field post letters demanding peace. Soldiers complained
about the poor provision, the aerial superiority of the Allies and the growing
number of American troops.42 Even if desertion on the front was low it was
very worrying that up to 20 per cent of the troops ‘got lost’ on the way from
the Eastern to the Western Front.43
Foch devised a plan consisting of a series of attacks aimed at reaching
important railway hubs and improving the lines of communication. The
offensives were launched in rapid succession to prevent the OHL from
directing reinforcements to critical points. In contrast to the German strategy
of spring 1918 where storm troops advanced even without artillery support
to exploit the momentum of a breakthrough, the Allied attacks did not go
further than their artillery could reach. Only after the artillery had been
brought forward and was ready to fire was the offensive resumed. The
German tactics had resulted in quick territorial gains, but these tactics were
also responsible for high casualty rates and the exhaustion of the troops. The
Allied strategy was more suited to the conditions on the Western Front in
1918. On 4 August the French army retook Soissons and captured 35,000
German soldiers and 700 guns.44 The BEF began with an offensive at
Amiens, where the German troops had not had the time to build deep
defensive positions. The artillery and aerial superiority was overwhelming
and the assault troops were well equipped with Lewis guns and mortars.
Every battalion was accompanied by six tanks. The result of the attack was
an impressive victory. On 8 August, the first day of the offensive, the
German army suffered 27,000 casualties. Some 15,000 soldiers, a very high
percentage, surrendered. Ludendorff later called the day the ‘Black Day of
the German Army’.45 A further series of successful attacks followed. The
front did not collapse but collapse was near. Evidence for this is the
unprecedented number of German soldiers taken prisoner. In August 1918,
the German army had 228,000 casualties, 21,000 dead and 110,000 missing
(most of them captured). It was a sign of the declining morale that it was
now quite easy to take German soldiers prisoner.46 The American army had
the same experience. During their successful attack on the Saint-Mihiel
salient on 13 September, they captured 13,000 German soldiers.47 It was
only now that the Allies realised how weakened the German army really was
and that the end of the war was nearer than they had expected.
The Allies attacked with superior manpower, artillery fire and tanks, and a
much higher morale. The failure of the spring offensive and the success of
the Allied attacks were disastrous for the morale of German soldiers, and the
effect on the morale of the High Command was even more disastrous.
Ludendorff finally realised that the war could not be won but he still held
hopes that a peace with favourable conditions was possible as German
troops were standing in France and Belgium and controlled most of Eastern
Europe.48 Even now, neither the OHL nor the German government were
willing to give up Alsace-Lorraine.49 All the hopes of the OHL rested now
on the Hindenburg (Siegfried) Line with its strongly fortified trenches and
natural barriers.
The home front

While the armies on the Western Front prepared for the German spring
offensive the home fronts held. Between February and December 1917
German submarines had destroyed more than 4 million tons of British
shipping tonnage (world total losses: 6.238 million tons). But only for a
short moment in late spring 1917 did it appear as if this could force Britain
out of the war. The British shipbuilding industry had not fully replaced the
lost capacity, but better organisation and the use of American and neutral
ships allowed imports to rise by 8 per cent compared to 1916, and food
production was expanded considerably by recultivating pastures, which
reduced the volume of food imports.50 The British navy had developed
effective counter-measures against the threat of German submarines. Allied
destroyers accompanied convoys of merchant ships and made them less
vulnerable. In 1918 only 134 escorted merchant ships were sunk. Allied total
losses still made up 3.9 million tons, but ships with a total of 5.4 million
deadweight tons were built.51 Technological devices were developed to
detect submarines more easily and new ways were used to destroy them. Of
the 320 submarines which saw battle, 200 were sunk. The submarine war
was not able to starve Britain into submission nor did it prevent US troops
from being brought to France. Only in 1918 did Britain have to move to full
rationing, and bread was never rationed. In France, and even more so in
Italy, the food situation was not as good as in Britain but it was still better
than in Germany, not to speak of Austria, Bulgaria or the Ottoman Empire
where people starved to death.52
The Allied naval blockade was much more effective than unrestricted
submarine warfare had been. In 1918 ships from neutral countries were
intercepted and German goods, or goods destined for Germany, were
requisitioned. In 1916–17 the so-called ‘turnip winter’ had seen many
Germans going hungry; the winter of 1917–18 was slightly better but many
Germans were malnourished. It is difficult to tell how many Germans died
as a result of the naval blockade. Alvin Jackson calculated that 750,000
civilians starved to death or died as a result of diseases their weakened
bodies could not withstand. According to Richard Bessel and Gary Sheffield,
in 1918 alone 293,000 German civilians died as a direct or indirect result of
the naval blockade.53 Niall Ferguson questions these calculations but
without giving alternative numbers.54
Basil Liddell Hart believes that the naval blockade won the war for the
Allies. He argues that the blockade would eventually have forced Germany
to surrender, even without the costly offensives of 1916 and 1917. As some
British historians have pointed out, it is a bit of an exaggeration to state that
naval power had decided the war.55 Without the defeat on the Western Front,
Germany would have been able to continue fighting for a long period, as
transfers of food, raw materials and labour from the occupied territories in
Eastern Europe would have been organised more efficiently. It must not be
forgotten that French and British resources, too, were strained to the utmost,
and that there were moments when the governments of both countries feared
they would no longer be able to meet the needs of the army or the
population, and would have to seek a – probably unfavourable – peace.
Strike activity in Britain was throughout the war higher than in Germany, but
in critical moments the workers usually went back to work. In France,
between 13 and 18 May 1918, 100,000 workers were on strike in Paris alone
demonstrating for peace and and demanding clarity about the French war
aims. When the Germans resumed their offensives the strike died down.56
As a result of the worsening living conditions, on 28 January 100,000
workers in Berlin went on strike. Hunger, cold, war weariness and solidarity
with Soviet Russia – which was in a difficult situation after the temporary
breakdown of the peace negotiations – had mobilised the workers. A couple
of days later 400,000 workers were on the streets, demanding a peace
without annexations and reparations and the presence of workers’
representatives at the Peace Conference. Daily food consumption had fallen
from 3,000 calories in 1914 to 1,400 in 1918. The official rations covered
just 50 per cent of daily dietary requirements. The Berlin workers were
supported by strikes and demonstrations in other cities. Politicians of the
moderate Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands, SPD) joined the strike committees and tried to calm the
workers. Finally, pressed by Ludendorff, the German Chancellor Georg von
Hertling decided to end the strike by force. In Berlin, 150 ringleaders of the
strike were arrested and between 3,500 and 6,000 strikers were sent to the
front. The harsh crackdown by the government ended the strikes.57
Over the following months the German home front remained quiet. While
in 1917 667,229 workers had participated in 561 strikes, in 1918 before
November only 531 strikes with 391,585 participants took place.58 Everyone
seemed to be waiting for the outcome of the spring offensive but reports
from different regions of the Reich suggest that war weariness had grown
and had been transformed into a general hatred of Prussian militarism, the
junkers and war profiteers. The injustices of the provision system and the
profits made by some had embittered many people. The black market
flourished, but only the wealthy could afford to buy there. The unfair
distribution of food increased class tensions. Members of the middle class in
particular suffered. They were not – as part of the industrial workforce was –
indispensable for the war effort and thus did not receive higher rations. The
population felt that the burdens of the war were not being shared equally.59
The Burgfrieden (fortress truce) still held but everything depended on the
success of the spring offensive. The political landscape was polarised. The
reactionary German Fatherland Party, founded by Grand Admiral Alfred von
Tirpitz in 1917, had become a mass party and united forces resisting
democratic reform in Prussia and Germany. The party propagated war aims
which made a compromise peace with the Allies impossible. On the other
side of the political spectrum was the Independent Social Democratic Party
(USPD) which had split from the Social Democratic Party in 1917 and
advocated for a peace without annexations and reparations. The alliance
between the SPD, the liberal Progressive People’s Party (Fortschrittliche
Volkspartei) and the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum), which had supported
the Reichstag peace resolution of 19 July 1917, had been undermined by
disagreements about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Zentrum and
Fortschrittliche Volkspartei had supported the treaty while the SPD had
abstained from voting. The Foreign Minister, Richard von Kühlmann, was
forced to resign after he told the Reichstag on 24 June that it should not
expect ‘any definite end of the war based on a military decision alone’. He
was accused of defeatism and was replaced by Admiral Paul von Hintze.
Austria-Hungary and the Italian Front

While the German home front looked quite stable in spring and summer
1918, the situation in Austria-Hungary was different. The year 1917 had
already been a very difficult one for the double monarchy. The peoples of
the Empire were suffering from hunger. The war weariness had also infected
the army. The number of mutinies and desertions had increased dramatically.
On the plus side, the Austrian war aims had been mostly achieved: Russia
was defeated, Serbia was occupied, Romania had been overrun. In 1917 and
early 1918 the Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, and Emperor Karl
approached the Allies through intermediaries. A couple of secret meetings
took place, mostly in Switzerland. Karl even went so far as to hint that he
would support the French claim to Alsace-Lorraine, but finally he shied
away from risking the alliance with Germany. The German Kaiser and the
Third OHL did not intend to restore Belgian independence or to return
Alsace-Lorraine to France. And France and Britain would not make peace
without these two conditions being met.60
The victory at Caporetto had bought Austria-Hungary time, but in 1918
the urban population, especially in the Austrian part of the Empire were
suffering from hunger, industrial production was shrinking and the army in
Italy was badly supplied with clothes, equipment, food and ammunition. The
year 1918 brought even more internal turmoil, a radicalisation of the nations
within the Empire and a weakening of their allegiance to the Habsburg
dynasty. The economic situation had become desperate. Civilians in Austria
consumed just 23g of meat and 70g of potatoes per person per day. When the
government announced that it would cut the flour rations from 200g to 165g
per day, Viennese workers went on strike. By 17 January, 200,000 workers
were on strike. Two days later things had ground to a standstill in Bohemia
and in other parts of Austria. The workers even created councils (soviets)
following the Russian example. The government met some of the workers’
main demands (at least on paper) and promised more food. As a result the
strikes died down. But high hopes had rested on solving the food problem
with supplies from Ukraine and Poland and this hope was disappointed.
Requisitions in Congress Poland were intensified, but these supplies were far
too little to meet the needs of the Austrian-Hungarian army and the urban
population. Due mainly to a breakdown of transportation, in 1918 only
11,890 of the expected 1 million wagons of grain from Ukraine arrived in
Austria-Hungary.61
Supplies of rubber, aluminium, copper and zinc had almost dried up, and
monthly coal supplies were down 40 per cent. It proved to be impossible to
produce enough weapons and ammunition to replace those spent at the front.
The production of machine-gun bullets, for example, fell from 6 million to
1.5 million per day between autumn 1916 and early 1918. Despite the return
of Austrian prisoners of war from Russia, a manpower crisis weakened the
army. The High Command of the Austrian-Hungarian army calculated that it
was 600,000 men short, and the men-strength of many divisions had to be
almost halved.62 The food shortage in towns and cities in the Slavic
provinces of the Empire was even worse than in the Austrian heartland and
further undermined the loyalty to the state. All through the year, Austria-
Hungary stood on the verge of internal collapse. As long as the Germans
won victories the collapse could be avoided, but based on its own resources
alone Austria-Hungary would not be able to stay in the war much longer.63
After the catastrophe of Caporetto, Britain and France had sent troops to
stabilise the Italian Front. General Armando Diaz, who had succeeded
General Luigi Cadorna as Chief of the general staff of the Italian army, was
less reckless than his predecessor. He made sure that his soldiers were well
fed and equipped and had fewer soldiers executed or severely punished. He
was able to restore the morale of the Italian army.64
The Austrian offensive in June 1918 was started to prevent Allied troops
from being transferred to the Western Front, but the attack was not well
prepared and the way the offensive was executed did not make much sense.
Not enough shells were available for a prolonged bombardment of the Italian
positions, the Austrian soldiers were undernourished and many of them
weakened by disease. The divisions were under strength. To make a bad
situation worse, against the advice of the most able Austrian commander in
Italy, Field Marshal Svetozar Boroević von Bojna, the firepower of the army
was not concentrated on one portion of the front but divided between two
offensives for which the Austrian-Hungarian army was not strong enough.
The former Chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf,
attacked from the Asiago plateau and Boroević was ordered to attack at the
Piave river. Diaz had carefully ordered the defence and the Italian army
fought well and lost very little ground. The offensive cost the Austrian army
118,000 casualties and boosted the morale of the Italian soldiers. 65
In April 1918, as a secondary consequence of Karl’s earlier secret attempts
to negotiate a separate peace, his Foreign Minister, Count Czernin, had to
resign. For a couple of months all contacts to the Allies broke down. From
now on the fate of Austria-Hungary depended on a German victory.
Defeat on all fronts

Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to accept defeat. The
concentration on the Western Front and the attempt to expand German rule
far into the former Russian Empire had led to a weakening of other fronts.
The population was war-weary, inflation was high and food scarce. In 1918
Germany reduced its financial and material support to Bulgaria. The morale
of the Bulgarian soldiers deteriorated. Without substantial German help the
Bulgarian ally was unable to defend the Salonica front against Serbian and
Greek troops which were supported by French and British divisions. The
Allies, led by the French General Franchet D’Esperey, attacked on 15
September, and two weeks later Bulgaria had to ask for an armistice.
The Ottoman Empire was under pressure from the successful offensives of
the Commander of the (British) Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF),
General Edmund Allenby, and his Arab allies. The best Turkish troops were
operating in Transcaucasia and attempting to profit as much as possible from
the fall of the Russian Empire. By the end of 1917 the Ottoman Empire was
on the back foot in Palestine. Allenby took Jerusalem on 9 December while
Arab partisans pushed up from the south.66 The offensive only stopped after
the EEF lost several divisions which had been sent to the Western Front.
Reinforced by Indian, Canadian and Australian troops, Allenby resumed his
offensive in September 1918. In the Battle of Megiddo (19–21 September)
the Ottoman Turkish army was comprehensively beaten. In subsequent days
75,000 Ottoman Turkish soldiers were taken prisoner. The advancing EEF
met with hardly any resistance. The low morale of the soldiers fighting far
away from the Turkish heartlands corresponded to the worsening economic
situation at home. Inflation was high and people in Constantinople were
starving. Damascus fell on 1 October and Aleppo on 25 October. The
Ottoman Empire capitulated five days later.67
The Italian Chief of the general staff Diaz waited until October before he
attacked. The morale of the Austrian army had been undermined by Italian
propaganda and by learning about the Allied victories on the Western Front.
Diaz started the attack knowing that the future borders of Italy would also
depend on how far his troops would come. The Austrian army continued to
struggle with supply problems and a rapidly declining morale. Polish,
Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian soldiers knew that new
political options were available. Hungarian soldiers realised that the time of
the double monarchy was over and some units refused to go to the front. The
Italian army attacked on 24 October. The Battle of Vittorio Veneto ended
after five days of heavy fighting with a decisive victory. The Austrian army
was in dissolution. Many soldiers were killed while trying to escape. The
soldiers of the multi-ethnic Empire just wanted to go home. Due to a tragic
mistake by the Austrian High Command, which had failed to communicate
the correct date of the armistice to the troops, Austrian soldiers stopped
fighting twenty-four hours before the armistice took effect. In these twenty-
four hours 350,000 soldiers of the Austrian army were taken prisoner. Of the
430,000 Habsburg prisoners held by Italy on 11 November, a minimum of
30,000 died in prisoner-of-war camps. The number might even be much
higher. Alan Kramer states that the Italian army captured 468,000 Austrian-
Hungarian soldiers, of whom at least 92,451 or 93,184 died in Italian
camps.68
In September 1918 Emperor Karl and his new Foreign Minister, Count
Stephan Burian, realised that Germany had lost the war on the Western
Front. Burian and Karl contacted the Allies but their peace offer was
rejected. The Allies had given up any hope of separating Austria-Hungary
from Germany and no longer expected the Empire to survive the war. On 3
June Britain, France and Italy had expressed their full support for Polish,
Czech and Yugoslav statehood. Karl desperately tried to save his throne,
offering federalisation and democratisation of the Austrian part of his
Empire, but it was too late for reforms. Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian and
Slovenian subjects of the Habsburg Empire declared their independence on
29 October. The Serbian army helped other South Slavs to secure the borders
of future Yugoslavia.69
While Austria-Hungary was breaking down into its constituent parts, the
German army was still fighting. Between 27 September and 4 October the
Allies launched three successful offensives along the Western Front. The
strongly fortified Hindenburg Line could not be taken by surprise, but the
material superiority of the Allies made the difference. Over a 10,000-yard
front, 1,637 guns fired shells for fifty-six hours at the German defences. At
the Saint-Quentin Canal nearly 50,000 shells rained on every fifty yards
during the eight hours of the attack. Hardly any German soldier survived this
bombardment. On 29 September the British 46th Division broke through the
Hindenburg Line and the German positions further north were outflanked.
The German troops had to withdraw.70 Already in the days prior to this
breach the OHL had realised that the war was lost. The front still held but
the next attack could be the strategic breakthrough.
The news of the capitulation of Bulgaria was the final blow. Ludendorff
and Hindenburg informed the German Kaiser on 29 September about the
situation at the front. Ludendorff now believed that only an immediate
ceasefire would prevent a catastrophe and urged the Kaiser to appoint a
Chancellor who would have the support of the Reichstag. Ludendorff had
not suddenly become a democrat. He hoped that a democratic Germany
would get better terms but he also wanted the democrats, especially the
Social Democrats, to take the responsibility for the defeat. He was looking
for scapegoats for the disaster and blamed the lack of support the army had
received from the home front. And so the myth that the German army had
remained ‘undefeated on the battlefield’ was born – the myth that the army
had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by its enemies in Germany.71
Ludendorff and the Foreign Minister, Paul von Hintze, proposed to contact
the American President Woodrow Wilson, whose fourteen-point plan now –
facing defeat – seemed much more attractive than it had in January. The new
Chancellor appointed by the Kaiser was the more liberal Max von Baden,
who included representatives of the SPD, the Zentrum and the
Fortschrittliche Volkspartei in his coalition government. A few days later
Germany became a parliamentary monarchy. Ludendorff still believed that
the front could collapse any moment and urged the Chancellor to ask for an
immediate armistice. The German army faced unrelenting pressure from the
Allies but still held out. It withdrew where necessary but continued to fight.
What Ludendorff did not realise was that the Allied troops would have to
stop soon and regroup as their lines of communication were becoming
overstretched. The negotiating position of the new German government was
not good, but Ludendorff’s insistence on an immediate ceasefire made it
even weaker. In the night of 3 to 4 October, the German government sent a
message to President Wilson asking him for his help in arranging an
armistice based on the Fourteen Points. The Allies understood that the
German government considered the war lost. A public exchange of notes
between Wilson and the German government followed. In the first two notes
Wilson only demanded the immediate evacuation of Belgium and France
and an end to submarine warfare, but – after the intervention of Lloyd
George, Clemenceau and Orlando – he informed Max von Baden in his third
note dated 23 October about additional conditions. He strongly indicated that
the Allies were not willing to negotiate with the OHL or the Kaiser. Without
abdication and an end to the dictatorship of the OHL the Allies would insist
on capitulation.
The intentions of the Allies were clear – the terms should make it
impossible for the German army to resume hostilities. After learning about
the conditions Ludendorff was suddenly more optimistic about the ability of
the German army to continue fighting. He and Hindenburg sent – without
informing the Chancellor or the Kaiser – a message to the troop commanders
calling them to prepare for a final battle. Ideas of a levée en masse in
Germany were floated, but it was too late. The new government was no
longer willing to leave the fate of Germany and the lives of more young men
in the hands of irresponsible military commanders. On 26 October
Ludendorff was forced to resign and was replaced as First Quartermaster
General by Wilhelm Groener. The primacy of politics was restored and the
dictatorship of the Third OHL was finally over.72
As if to prove the point that German military leaders had acted
irresponsibly and completely lost contact with reality, on 30 October the
commanders of the German navy proposed sending the fleet to attack the
Royal Navy as its last heroic deed. The sailors refused and extinguished the
fires in the ships’ boilers. They created councils of sailors and joined up with
workers in Kiel. Soon councils of workers, sailors and soldiers (Arbeiter-,
Matrosen-und Soldatenräte) were being created all over Germany. On 7
November the king of Bavaria abdicated in Munich and a soviet (Räte)
republic was proclaimed. The German revolution had begun. After the
mutiny of the Kiel sailors (which had spread like wildfire through Germany),
the creation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, strikes and mass
demonstrations, it would have been irresponsible to delay the armistice any
longer.73
On 8 November a German delegation led by the Zentrum politician
Matthias Erzberger crossed the front and was brought to Foch’s train in the
forest of Compiègne. Marshal Foch had drafted the terms for the armistice
which were handed to the German delegation. The Germans were given just
seventy-two hours to accept or reject them. The German army would be
partly disarmed, all occupied territory in the West would have to be returned
within two weeks. The Rhineland would be demilitarised. The left bank of
the Rhine would be occupied by the Allies, and the Allies would also
establish several bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine. The German
fleet should be interned in harbours of neutral countries or handed over to
the British.74
The fighting continued during the exchange of notes between Max von
Baden and Woodrow Wilson and the negotiations in Compiègne. The
German troops still shot back and soldiers continued dying on both sides of
the front up until the very last moment. Max von Baden had authorised the
German delegation to accept any conditions and – unable to get new
directives from the government – Erzberger signed the Armistice agreement
on 11 November at 5 a.m. The Armistice took effect six hours later (Map
6.4).
Map 6.4 The Armistice, 1918, and position of opposing forces in France
and Belgium.
In the meantime events in Germany followed thick and fast. Kaiser
Wilhelm had escaped from revolutionary Berlin to the German army
headquarters at Spa, and dreamt of returning at the head of his troops to
quell the Revolution. There were now two power centres in Germany: the
OHL and the Kaiser in Spa and the civil government supported by the old
imperial and Prussian bureaucracy in Berlin. For a brief moment a military
coup was a real possibility.75 But after consulting with division commanders,
Ludendorff’s successor, Wilhelm Groener, had to inform Wilhelm that the
army no longer stood behind him. The Kaiser was told that soldiers would
follow their commanding officers ‘but not Your Majesty’. Having lost the
support of the military the Kaiser abdicated on 9 November for himself and
for his sons and fled to neutral Holland. On the same day Max von Baden
unceremoniously and unconstitutionally handed over the chancellorship to
Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the Social Democrats, while another prominent
Social Democrat, Philipp Scheidemann, proclaimed a German republic,
shortly before Karl Liebknecht, one of the leaders of the communist
Spartakusbund, proclaimed a German Räterepublik. The power was with the
new coalition government of SPD and USPD which could draw on the
support of the military. Right-wing groups did not resist the German
revolution as the military, politicians, junkers and heavy industrialists around
the Fatherland Party entertained hopes that it would be easier to obtain
tolerable armistice and peace conditions if democratically legitimised
politicians were negotiating with the Allies. The old elite was paralysed by
the defeat and reluctant to act, hoping that the moderate Social Democrats
would at least prevent a Bolshevik-style revolution.76
The new government (which called itself the Rat der Volksbeauftragten)
was confirmed by the Berlin Council of Workers and Soldiers, which
strengthened its legitimacy and revolutionary credentials. Its main tasks were
to negotiate the peace treaty with the Allies, to uphold public and economic
life and to prevent a communist revolution. The government needed the help
of the military for this last task. Both feared a communist revolution and the
government used loyal troops to fight the threat from the radical left. While
there was hardly any alternative to cooperating with the military and the old
bureaucracy, the social-democratic Chancellor made the mistake of
welcoming the returning troops as ‘undefeated on the battlefield’ (unbesiegt
im Schlachtfelde). This gave fresh credence to the Dolchstosslegende (myth
of the stab in the back). It helped the old elites to delegate the responsibility
for the defeat to the young German democracy. According to this view, it
was not the battlefront that had collapsed but the home front, and a plethora
of ‘Jews, Communists and Social Democrats’ had stabbed the soldiers in the
back. It was a lie but one that many Germans believed. At the end of the war
Jews and Democrats were already made the scapegoats for the defeat.77
Why did the Central Powers lose the war, or, why
did the Allies win?
Less than six months after the spring offensive which had begun with such
high hopes, the German and the Austrian emperors had abdicated, Austria-
Hungary was dissolved and the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of a
small strip of land west of Constantinople, had been reduced to its territories
in Asia Minor. But the Allied victory was not the result of the endemic
superiority of democracies over authoritarian regimes or a victory of the
principle of liberalism over authoritarianism. Without assistance from the
very authoritarian Russian Empire, the Western Allies would probably have
lost the war. There were several moments when twenty or thirty divisions
more would have made all the difference and a decisive German victory
likely. The Russian army attacked when the pressure on the Western Front
was highest. This was the case in late summer 1914, again in 1915 and
during the Brusilov offensive in 1916. After the defeat of Russia the entry
into the war of the United States saved the Allies.
Germany and Austria-Hungary were more disadvantaged by their federal
structures. It was difficult to raise taxation in Germany where the states
prevented the introduction of direct taxes on a national level, and in the
Habsburg Empire, Hungary was run almost like an independent country.
Hungarian politicians carefully guarded their prerogatives and were not
always inclined to make sacrifices for the good of the Empire.78
Between 1916 and 1918, however, the disaster for Germany was that the
Third OHL concentrated political and military power. Ludendorff may have
been – at times – a good military leader but he was an inept and short-
sighted politician. He did not realise the limits of German power and clung –
as did his like-minded friends in the German Fatherland Party – to
overreaching war aims even after the war had been lost. Given the Allied
superiority in manpower and material resources in 1918, a compromise
peace was the best the Central Powers could have hoped for. Defeat was
inevitable after the failure of the spring offensive, but neither the OHL nor
the political and economic elite were willing to accept the inevitable, which
meant the return of all occupied territories, the restoration of Belgium and
the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. They were full of illusions and clung to the
unrealistic hope that one of the next offensives would bring victory.79 On the
Eastern Front either a moderate peace with Soviet Russia or the full
application of the principle of the right to self-determination would have
strengthened the position of the Central Powers more than reckless
exploitation and plans for the region’s colonisation and economic and
political penetration.
The German political, economic and military leaders were convinced that
Germany’s future depended on becoming a world power and that only a
Siegfrieden (peace after victory) would make it possible to achieve this goal.
For them, Germany’s security and very existence as a European power was
at stake. They would not moderate their war aims or even concede territory
as long as they could make themselves believe that the Allies would crack
first.
Politicians on both sides faced the same problem. The loss of hundreds of
thousands, even millions of lives could be easier justified if their own side
won the war and if the peace treaty reflected this victory. Anything short of
realising the key war aims would have destabilised the political system.80
Only after the spring offensive had failed did some leading German
politicians and military commanders come to the conclusion that Germany
had to sue for peace before the Allies realised how weakened the German
army really was.81
The ill-conceived military dictatorship Germany had become was also
unable to strike a balance between the front and the home front.82 The
ambitious Hindenburg Programme succeeded in producing enough weapons
and munitions but failed to provide enough motorised vehicles, aircraft or
tanks and neglected the basic needs of the civilian population. Operation
Michael had also failed because of a lack of horses and motorised transport.
While at this point the French alone had 100,000 lorries along the Western
Front, the German army had only 20,000. New weapons systems also played
a role. Tanks did not win the war but they did help win some battles. In 1918
the French army had 3,000 tanks, the BEF even had 5,000. Germany had
produced just twenty heavy tanks; most of the tanks used by the German
army had been captured from the British.83 Moreover, the German economy
was not only producing for the German army. Without providing substantial
financial and material aid, without sending weapons, munitions and soldiers
to its allies, the various fronts would not have held. This meant straining
German resources to the utmost, but when the German aid was reduced in
1918 it did not take much for Germany’s allies to collapse. Once its allies
had been defeated it was impossible for Germany to resist much longer.84
The most important contribution of the United States to victory had
already started before the country entered the war. Lending money to Britain
allowed Britain to provide financial support to her Allies on the continent.
Food imports, especially imports of cereals from the USA and – also very
important – from Canada, made it possible to keep the economy going and to
feed the population. The Allies could draw on resources of manpower, raw
materials and food from the British and French Empires. Soldiers from
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, India and other parts of the
Empire helped to win the war. A total of 475,000 soldiers from the colonies
fought in the French army. The Central Powers had to rely on their own
manpower and material resources – imports from neutral European states
were important but were insufficient to satisfy demand. While the Central
Powers relied almost completely on land-based transportation, the American
and British merchant fleets and most neutral ships were at the disposal of the
Allies. While in 1918 there were some critical moments when food, coal or
other supplies were running dangerously low in France, Britain and Italy, all
these problems could be overcome or at least contained until the victory was
secure.85
But why did the Allies win the war in 1918 and not one year later?
Ludendorff has been disparaged for the way he handled the spring offensive
in 1918. Military historians have criticised him for changing his war plans as
soon as the opportunity arose instead of pursuing a coherent strategy.86 The
offensives were often tactically successful but did not achieve their strategic
objectives, and the high casualty rates decisively weakened the German
army. Neither the BEF nor the French army broke; the crisis in morale of
1916 and 1917 had been overcome, and the final successful defence of
Amiens, Ypres and Arras and the victory in the Second Battle of the Marne
had instilled new confidence in the Allied soldiers.
The contribution of the US army to the victory was important but its
significance was more psychological than military. The arrival of American
soldiers did do wonders for the morale of their British and French comrades.
General John Pershing insisted on creating an autonomous US army but
replied to urgent French and British requests by allowing 180,000 American
infantry soldiers (organised in US units) in May and 150,000 in June to join
the British and French armies. While the manpower resources of the Central
Powers were almost exhausted and losses could no longer be compensated,
the entry into the war of the United States guaranteed the Allies a seemingly
limitless supply of new soldiers. At the time of the Armistice about 1.5
million American soldiers were stationed in France and forty-two divisions
had been formed – divisions which had twice as many men as the British or
French divisions. Twenty-nine divisions had already participated in the
fighting.87
A further reason for Allied victory in 1918 was the manner in which their
offensives were carried out. Pétain and Haig set limited objectives and made
full use of their aerial and artillery superiority and the availability of tanks. A
fully intact German army might have been more difficult to beat, but the
German troops were battered, exhausted and no longer had a hope of victory.
Allied troops continued to attack until the very day of the Armistice, putting
the German front under permanent and relentless pressure. Within the space
of 100 days the Allies took 363,000 German soldiers prisoner (25 per cent of
the army in the field) and captured 6,400 guns (50 per cent of all German
guns on the Western Front). These numbers show both the effectiveness of
the Allied strategy and the low morale of the German soldiers.88
The disappointment on the German side was all the greater as soldiers and
civilians had begun 1918 with such high hopes and had expected that the
spring offensives would bring victory. Between March and May German
newspapers were full of reports about German successes. Later reports were
more sombre, but neither the general public nor the soldiers had been
prepared for an eventual defeat. By the autumn of 1918 the morale on every
level, from the military Headquarters to front-line soldiers, from politicians
to workers, had reached rock bottom. Morale is crucial in war, including the
morale of the High Command. Ludendorff’s morale broke – it was not the
reason for the collapse but reflected the mood in the German army. Ferguson
argues that it was not superior tactics which brought victory but the decline
in morale of the German soldiers.89 In October and November 1918 the
German front troops were still a fighting force even if discipline and morale
had suffered and desertion had increased dramatically. The revolution had
mostly affected the rear troops, where the authority of officers was being
challenged and councils of workers were being created.90 Even if German
soldiers had continued fighting, militarily this did not make sense. Germany
was defeated, even before the mutiny by sailors of the German High Seas
Fleet triggered the revolution. The home front collapsed after all hope of
victory had vanished.
The Armistice of 11 November ended the killing along the Western Front,
but in Eastern Europe the Great War was transmuted into a series of civil,
state-building and revolutionary wars. The sudden withdrawal of German
and Austrian-Hungarian troops left a power vacuum. Ukraine and Belarus
became battlefields in the Russian civil war; in the Baltic region Estonians,
Latvians and Lithuanians – supported by German Freikorps – defended their
countries against the Red Army; in East Galicia war was raging between
Poles and Western Ukrainians. The First World War was not the war ‘which
ended all wars’, not even for a short time.
1 ‘Dem Frieden entgegen’, Neue Freie Presse, 1 January 1918, p. 1. ‘I am

weary with contending why this rapture and unrest peace descending / come
ah, come into my breast’.
2 Frankfurter Zeitung, quoted in The Times, ‘Through German eyes’, 1

January 1918, p. 5.
3 P. W., ‘Vor dem Tore der Jahre’, Freiburger Zeitung – Zweites Abendblatt,
31 December 1917, p. 1.
4 Winfried Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918: Von Brest-Litowsk bis zum

Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (Vienna and Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag,
1966), pp. 93–207.
5 Le Matin, 1 January 1918, p. 1.
6 Bruno Thoss, ‘Militärische Entscheidung und politisch-gesellschaftlicher

Umbruch. Das Jahr 1918 in der neueren Weltkriegsforschung’, in Jörg
Duppler and Gerhard P. Gross (eds.), Kriegsende 1918 (Munich: R.
Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999), pp. 17–40.
7 Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front,
1915–1919 (London: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 336f.
8 David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford
University Press, 1988), pp. 192–8.
9 Ibid., pp. 200ff. On the negotiations see Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik

1918, pp. 13–29. On the discussions in Soviet Russia see Richard Pipes, The
Russian Revolution 1899–1919 (London: Fontana, 1992), pp. 576–605.
10 Max Hoffmann, War Diaries and Other Papers, 2 vols. (London: Secker
& Warburg, 1929), vol. I, p. 207.
11 Baumgart, Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, pp. 27ff.; Stevenson, The First

World War and International Politics, pp. 186–203.

University Press, 2000), pp. 176ff.; Stevenson, The First World War and
International Politics, p. 187; Abba Strazhas, Deutsche Ostpolitik im Ersten
Weltkrieg: Der Fall Ober Ost 1915–1917 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993);
and Hans-Erich Volkmann, Die deutsche Baltikumspolitik zwischen Brest-
Litovsk und Compiègne: Ein Beitrag zur ‘Kriegszieldiskussion’ (Cologne
and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1970).
13 In Ukrainian historiography Brest-Litovsk does not have such a negative

connotation as in Russian, Soviet or Western historiography. For example,
Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 3rd edn (University of Toronto, Press,
2000), 350ff.
14 On Germany’s policy towards Ukraine see Frank Grelka, Die

ukrainische Nationalbewegung unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft 1918
und 1941/42 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), pp. 75–92, 113; and Peter
Borowsky, Deutsche Ukrainepolitik 1918 unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Wirtschaftsfragen (Lubeck and Hamburg: Matthiesen,
1970).
15 On the policy of the Central Powers towards Ukraine and Poland see
also Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty and the Rise of
Modern Europe (London: Bodley Head, 2008), pp. 86–120; and Baumgart,
Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918, pp. 123f.
16 For the German and Austrian occupation of Ukraine see Włodzimierz

Mędrzecki, Niemiecka interwencja militarna na Ukrainie w 1918 roku
(Warsaw: DiG, 2000) and Snyder, The Red Prince, pp. 108ff. Also Christian
Westerhoff, Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Schöningh,
2012).
17 Grelka, Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung, pp. 223–38.
18 Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front, pp. 151–75; Manfred

Nebelin, Ludendorff: Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler, 2011),
pp. 193ff., 520; And Gregor Thum (ed.), Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder
vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2006).
19 Bulgaria demanded the full control of the province, which was granted in
a protocol dated 25 September 1918. This came to nothing, as four days later
Bulgaria capitulated to the Allies.
20 Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, pp. 203–5.
21 Winfried Baumgart, ‘Die “geschäftliche Behandlung” des Berliner
Ergänzungsvertrags vom 27. August 1918’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 89
(1969), pp. 116–52.
22 Sir Douglas Haig once said that six divisions on 26 March at Amiens or
on 10 April at Hazebrouck would have made all the difference. Also Hans-
Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV: Vom Beginn des
Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914–
1949 (Frankfurt am Main: C. H. Beck, 2003), pp. 154ff.
23 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918, 6 vols. (London:

Odhams Press Ltd, 1939), vol. II, p. 1331. On the intervention of the Allies
see Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, pp. 205–16.
24 David T. Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in the

Operational Level of War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 91. David
Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London:
Allen Lane, 2011), p. 36.
25 Martin Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918 (Stroud: Tempus,

2005), pp. 14ff.; Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, p. 36.
26 Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives, pp. 63–72; Stevenson, With our
Backs to the Wall, pp. 36ff.
27 On these discussions, see Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp.

24–49.
28 Gary Sheffield, ‘Finest hour? British forces on the Western Front in

1918: an overview’, in Ashley Ekins (ed.), 1918 – Year of Victory: The End
of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi, Auckland: Exisle
Publishing, 2010), p. 56. See also Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The
First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), pp. 224ff.
and Dieter Storz, ‘“Aber was hätte anders geschehen sollen?”’, in Duppler
and Gross (eds.), Kriegsende 1918, pp. 165–82.
29 Kronprinz Rupprecht von Bayern, Mein Kriegstagebuch, 3 vols. (Berlin:
Deutscher National Verlag, 1929), vol. II, p. 322; Zabecki, The German 1918
Offensives, pp. 97–123; And Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp.
38ff. See also Robert T. Foley, ‘From victory to defeat: the German army in
1918’, in Ekins (ed.), 1918 – Year of Victory, pp. 69–88.
30 A detailed analysis of Operation ‘Michael’ is in Zabecki, The German

1918 Offensives, pp. 113–73. See also Kitchen, The German Offensives of
1918, pp. 66ff., Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, p. 42. See also Der
Weltkrieg 1914–1918: die militärischen Operationen zu Lande. Bearbeitet
im Reichsarchiv, 14 vols. (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1925–44), vol. XIV, p. 104
and Erich Ludendorff, Meine Kriegserinnerungen, 1914–1918 (Berlin: E. S.
Mittler, 1919), pp. 474ff.
31 Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives, pp. 160ff.; Sheffield, Forgotten

Victory, pp. 224ff.
32 Hew Strachan, The First World War (Pocket Books: London, 2006), p.
300; Elizabeth Greenhalgh, ‘A French victory, 1918’, in Ekins (ed.), 1918 –
Year of Victory, pp. 89–98; Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, p. 58;
Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp. 77, 87ff.
33 Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, pp. 67ff. Kitchen cites these
casualty statistics: 230,000 German and 212,000 Allied soldiers: Kitchen,
The German Offensives of 1918, p. 99.
34 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 288ff.
35 Basil H. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War (London:

Papermac, 1970), pp. 396ff. Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp.
94ff., 100, 125ff.
36 Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives, pp. 174–205; Stevenson, With

our Backs to the Wall, pp. 67ff.; Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918,
pp. 99–136.
Backs to the Wall, p. 87; Liddell Hart, History of the First World War pp.
407–32; Martin Gilbert, The First World War (London: Henry Holt, 1994),
pp. 425–7.
Backs to the Wall, pp. 88–91; Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp.
158ff.
39 Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives, pp. 246–79; Gilbert, The First
World War, pp. 440–3.
40 Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. II; Wilhelm Deist, ‘The military
collapse of the German Empire: the reality behind the stab-in-the-back
myth’, War in History, 3 (1996), pp. 199–203; Sheffield, ‘Finest hour?’, pp.
54–68; André Bach, ‘Die militärischen Operationen der französischen
Armee an der Westfront Mitte 1917 bis 1918’, in Duppler and Gross (eds.),
Kriegsende 1918, pp. 135–44.
42 Rupprecht, Mein Kriegstagebuch, vol. II, pp. 424–30; Strachan, The First
World War, p. 311; and Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, p. 256.
Also Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914–1923
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), pp. 97ff.
43 Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, p. 185, 198ff. On desertions in

the German army and the BEF see Christoph Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten:
Desertion und Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914–1918
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998).
44 Gilbert, The First World War, pp. 447, 454.
45 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 310ff.; Stevenson, With our Backs to
the Wall, pp. 122ff.; J. P. Harris, ‘Das britische Expeditionsheer in der
Hundert-Tage-Schlacht vom 8. August bis 11. November 1918’, in Duppler
and Gross (eds.), Kriegsende 1918, pp. 115–34.
46 Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, pp. 122–33; Kitchen, The
German Offensives of 1918, pp. 260–78; Gilbert, The First World War, pp.
452–5.
47 Gilbert, The First World War, pp. 452ff.
48 Deist, ‘The military collapse of the German Empire’.
49 Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, pp. 222ff.;
Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, pp. 311–49.
50 On British society during the war see Jay Winter, The Great War and the
British People, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
51 Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, p. 339.
52 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, 1914–1918 (London: Basic Books,

1999), pp. 276f.
53 Alvin Jackson, ‘Germany, the home front: blockade, government and

revolution’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle (eds.), Facing Armageddon:
The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996), p. 575;
Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), pp. 35–44; Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World
War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), p. 93.
54 Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 276–81; Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, pp.
102f.
55 Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 253.

56 Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall, pp. 460–7.
57 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV, pp. 83, 143ff.;

Herwig, The First World War, pp. 378–81; Volker Ullrich, ‘Zur inneren
Revolutionierung der wilhelminischen Gesellschaft des Jahres 1918’, in
Duppler and Gross (eds.), Kriegsende 1918, pp. 273–84; Stevenson, With
Our Backs to the Wall, pp. 468–77.
58 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV, p. 135.
59 Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg: Deutsche Sozialgeschichte

1914–1918, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Fischer, 1978); English translation: Facing
Total War: German Society 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984); Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV,
pp. 70–93; Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 278f.
60 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 270–4.
61 Herwig, The First World War, pp. 354, 357, 361–5.
62 Ibid., pp. 356–60.
63 Ibid., pp. 352–73.
64 Thompson, The White War, pp. 328–68.
65 Ibid., pp. 356–78.
66 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 274–9.
67 Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in

the First World War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), pp. 169–206, 237ff.
68 Thompson, The White War, pp. 363ff. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of
Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 65.
69 Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, pp. 228f.
70 Robin Priors, ‘Stabbed in the front: the German defeat in 1918’, in Ekins
(ed.), 1918 – Year of Victory, p. 50.
71 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV, pp. 174–7. On the

myth of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ see Boris Barth, Dolchstosslegende und
politische Desintegration: Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten
Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003).
72 Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, pp. 222–7;
Michael Geyer, ‘Insurrectionary warfare: the German debate about a levée
en masse in October 1918’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp. 459–
527.
73 Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung:

Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918–1924, 2nd
edn (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz Nachf, 1985), pp. 34–61; Wilhelm Deist, ‘Die
Politik der Seekriegsleitung und die Rebellion der Flotte Ende Oktober
1918’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 14 (1966), pp. 325–43.
74 Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, pp. 229–36.
On the German revolution, the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles see
Klaus Schwabe, Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Friede (Düsseldorf:
Droste, 1971).
75 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV, pp. 184–97.
76 Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung, pp. 25–32.

77 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. IV, pp. 128–34. On
Hindenburg’s role during and after the war and the cult of the ‘victor of
Tannenberg’ see Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen
Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich: Siedler, 2009); Jesko von Hoegen, Der
Held von Tannenberg: Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg-Mythos (1914–
1934) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2007).
78 Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, pp. 416–19, 422.
79 Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp. 244ff.; and Michael

Epkenhans, ‘Die Politik der militärischen Führung 1918: “Kontinuität der
Illusionen und das Dilemma der Wahrheit”’, in Duppler and Gross (eds.),
80 Storz, ‘“Aber was hätte anders geschehen sollen?”’, pp. 51–97; Arno J.
Meyer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and
Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967).
81 Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918, pp. 48ff., 138, 161, 235, 244ff.
82 On the role of the military in German domestic policy during the war see
Wilhelm Deist (ed.), Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, 2
vols. (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1970), vol. I, part ii. Nebelin, Ludendorff, pp.
339ff.; Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the German
High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (London:
Taylor & Francis, 1976).
84 Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall, pp. 404–19, 431ff.; Gerald D.
Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany 1914–1918 (Princeton
University Press, 1966), pp. 513ff.; Nebelin, Ludendorff, pp. 245ff.

86 For example Sheffield, Forgotten Victory, pp. 226ff. See also Storz
‘“Aber was hätte anders geschehen sollen?”’, pp. 51–96.
87 Strachan, The First World War, p. 204.
88 Numbers taken from Gilbert, The First World War, p. 500.
89 Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 310–14; Gary D. Sheffield, ‘The morale
of the British army on the Western Front, 1914–1918’, in Geoffrey Jensen
and Andrew Wiest (eds.), War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of
Modern Armed Conflict (New York and London: New York University
Press, 2001), pp. 105–31. See also Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Enttäuschte
Erwartung und kollektive Erschöpfung: Die deutschen Soldaten an der
Westfront 1918 auf dem Weg zur Revolution’, in Duppler and Gross (eds.),
90 Scott Stephenson, The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and
the German Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
7 1919: Aftermath
Bruno Cabanes The end of the First World War cannot be easily demarcated
by a specific date. The war’s long-term effects were so devastating that it is
fair to say no clear dividing-line separates the war itself from the post-war
period; nearly 10 million men died, in other words, one in seven of all
soldiers; 21 million were wounded; millions of widows, orphans and other
grieving relatives were left behind to mourn their dead. The war’s aftermath
produced countless human tragedies; nearly every family continued to feel
the emotional and psychological effects for years to come.1 To take the
single year of 1919 and consider it as a specific historical subject in its own
right thus constitutes another way to question traditional chronology, which
tends to view the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and the subsequent peace
treaties as the two decisive markers in the return to peace. In reality, 1919
constitutes at most a step – but only a step – in what historians now call ‘the
transition from war to peace’, in French, la sortie de guerre. This term
refers to a transition period of several years, characterised by the return
home of soldiers and prisoners of war, the pacification of the belligerent
nations and the far slower demobilisation of minds and attitudes, or what is
also called ‘cultural demobilisation’.2 This process was far from
straightforward. It took place in a series of fits and starts, with periods of
simultaneous demobilisation and remobilisation, gestures of peace and
examples of the impossibility or refusal to demobilise.
Another difficulty in the complex transition from war to peace lay in the
wide variety of national circumstances . In France and Great Britain, 1919
was a year of military demobilisation and rebuilding. Returning soldiers had
to take up their civilian lives again, which was much more difficult for
some than for others. The state and charitable organisations established aid
programmes for victims of the war, while survivors tried to rebuild the ruins
of regions devastated by the conflict. But in other countries, 1919 meant
that outbreaks of violence were still occurring between armed factions and
against civilians: the occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops;
confrontations between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in
Germany; civil war in Russia and in Ireland; frontier struggles between
Greece and Turkey (1919–22), as well as Russia and Poland (1919–21), to
name only a few. All these conflicts, each deadly to some degree, prolonged
and magnified the effects of the First World War, to the extent that national
histories sometimes associate the Great War with later confrontations as
part of the same chronological sequence. The Greeks, for example, consider
that a single period of war began with the Balkan wars in 1912 and ended
ten years later, with the Greco-Turkish War. In 1919, some armies simply
changed enemies. Roger Vercel’s novel Capitaine Conan (1934), for
example, portrays veterans of the French unit known as the Armée d’Orient
engaging in the struggle against the Bolsheviks. In short, from the
standpoint of a ‘transition from war to peace’, it is almost as if the year
1919 represents only the beginning of a larger phenomenon: a slow and
chaotic demobilisation.
But 1919 was not only a step in an ongoing process: it was also a moment
– in the way that Erez Manela has described a ‘Wilsonian moment’, a short
period in which significant collective expectations coalesced. This occurred
not just in the Western world, as has long been thought, but also on a global
scale.3 Seen as the dawn of a new era, the peace treaties embodied
collective hopes for a profound change in international relations. New states
were coming into being or were reborn out of the ruins of the Russian,
Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires. During the first six
months of 1919, delegations from around the world came to Paris while
everywhere else, the public generally followed the peace negotiations with
great interest; they were major events in a globalised world. The signing of
the Treaty of Versailles, on 28 June 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors,
represented a kind of apotheosis. It was followed by the Treaty of Saint-
Germain-en-Laye with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Neuilly-
sur-Seine with Bulgaria (27 November 1919), then the Treaty of Trianon
with Hungary (4 June 1920) and the Treaty of Sèvres with Turkey (10
August 1920), itself revised in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923. In the
autumn of 1919, the campaign began for the ratification of the Treaty of
Versailles in the United States Congress, but the American Senate
ultimately rejected the treaty with a final vote in March 1920.4
The year 1919 to some extent symbolises all the hopes of the post-war
era: a new diplomacy based on world peace and collective security; major
transnational organisations like the ILO (International Labour Organisation)
established in Geneva early in 1919; recognition of the right to self-
determination. However, it was also a year of threats and disillusionment,
which weakened the dynamics of demobilisation.
The Treaty of Versailles, or the disappointed

dreams of Wilsonianism
On 28 June 1919, at 3.00 p.m. precisely, two German emissaries in
ceremonial dress entered the great Hall of Mirrors in the château of
Versailles and advanced to the centre of the room, escorted by Allied
soldiers. The emissaries were Hermann Müller, the new German Minister
for Foreign Affairs, and Johannes Bell, the Minister for Transport; they
were there to sign the peace treaty that would bring the First World War to
an end. ‘The whole affair was elaborately staged and made as humiliating to
the enemy as it well could be. To my mind it is out of keeping with the new
era which we profess an ardent desire to promote’, noted Colonel House,
diplomatic adviser to the American President, Woodrow Wilson.5 The
French Président du Conseil, Georges Clemenceau, had designed a veritable
Roman triumph. The two German emissaries had to proceed past a
delegation of gueules cassées, men with permanently disfigured faces, who
served as living reminders of the damage inflicted by the Central Powers.6
In a historic first, cameras filmed the signing of the treaty. ‘[The two
Germans] passed close to me. It was like seeing prisoners led in to hear the
reading of their sentence’, a British diplomat reported. Müller and Bell
returned to Berlin the same evening, while in Paris, captured enemy guns
were paraded through the streets.
The peace negotiations had opened five months earlier in the red and gold
Salon de l’Horloge at the headquarters of the French Ministry for Foreign
Affairs, located on the Quai d’Orsay. Clemenceau had chosen the date of 18
January 1919, the anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm I’s 1871 coronation. He
also insisted that the treaty be signed in the Hall of Mirrors, the very same
place where the German Reich had been first proclaimed. John Maynard
Keynes, a member of the British delegation, has left us a mordant portrait of
Clemenceau: ‘Silent . . . throned, in his grey gloves, on the brocade chair,
dry in soul and empty of hope, very old and tired, and surveying the scene
with a cynical and almost impish air.’7 In reality, recent historiography has
largely done justice to Clemenceau and called into question the ‘black
legend’ that tended to portray the French Président du Conseil (‘who felt
about France what Pericles felt about Athens’, in Keynes’s words) as the
man responsible for all the defects of the peace treaty.
The vanquished imperial powers and their successors – Germany,
Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey – were not invited, nor was Russia. In
this respect, the Paris Peace Conference differed significantly from the
negotiations of 1815, the great European peace conference of the previous
century. Another difference lay in the number of participating countries:
five at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, but twenty-seven in Paris. The
delegations themselves were far larger, comprising several hundred people
on average, accompanied by chauffeurs and secretaries, and there were
more than 500 journalists. In the words of Margaret Macmillan:
Between January and June, Paris was at once the world’s government,
its court of appeal and its parliament, the focus of its fears and hopes.
Officially, the Peace Conference lasted into 1920, but those first six
months are the ones that counted, when the key decisions were taken
and the crucial chain of events set in motion. The world has never seen
anything quite like this and never will again.8
The Paris Peace Conference was a carefully structured hierarchical edifice

in which the representatives of the Great Powers controlled the game. In
January and February 1919, two members each from the French, British,
Italian, American and Japanese delegations met under Clemenceau’s
chairmanship in the salons of the Quai d’Orsay. The Council of Ten, in
which the representatives of smaller countries also participated, gave way to
a Council of Four, with Clemenceau, the British and Italian Prime
Ministers, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and
Woodrow Wilson, the first American head of state to travel abroad during
his term in office. At the end of April 1919, it was mainly Clemenceau,
Wilson and Lloyd George who decided on the essentials, often after lively
discussions that revealed the tensions among the three men.9 Here, the
professional diplomats ceded their power to the politicians. Their influence
was felt instead within the fifty-two commissions that worked on a wide
range of technical issues: borders for the new states, the fate of ethnic
minorities and questions of reparations.
The procedures of the conference remained nonetheless somewhat
chaotic. No one had considered exactly how the negotiations would
progress, nor at what speed. Important members had other obligations that
required them to leave for long periods, such as President Wilson, who
returned to the United States for nearly a month in mid February. It was not
until mid April that an agenda was decided upon and minutes kept for each
meeting. In the end, the Peace Treaty and its 440 articles were drawn up in
great haste. The delegations of the victorious nations read over the text only
a few hours before it was sent to representatives of the defeated countries.
Each delegation leader had come to Paris with his own objectives; he
bore the weight of the expectations of public opinion in his own country.
But all the delegations shared a common concern: the fate of Germany in
post-war Europe. For France, both security and justice were at stake: ten
French départements had suffered from direct experience of battle or
occupation, and the entire nation had lost a quarter of its male population
between the ages of 18 and 27. Faced with such large-scale sacrifices,
endured by his nation for over four years, Clemenceau nonetheless showed
himself to be a realist. He confided to Raymond Poincaré, President of the
French Republic, ‘We will perhaps not have the peace that you and I would
wish for. France must make concessions, not to Germany but to her Allies.’
For the British, who suspected the French of harbouring ambitions to annex
the Rhineland, the reinforcement of French power in Europe was at least as
alarming as the matter of German power. The Prime Minister, Lloyd
George, sought to reconcile what he considered a just punishment for the
war crimes committed by the Central Powers with maintaining economic
harmony in Europe. Italy wanted to see the Allies keep the promises made
during the London Conference in 1915, notably, to give up the irredentist
territories of Trentino and Trieste, as well as Istria and Dalmatia. President
Wilson, for his part, had always thought that the peace should be a ‘just
peace’, based on a kind of moral pact that he called a ‘covenant’, that it
should not take place at the price of a severely weakened Germany and that
a distinction had to be made between the German people and their rulers,
who alone were responsible for the war.10
After the treaty was signed, Articles 231 and 232 became the most
frequent topics of debate. Article 231 assigned responsibility for the
damages suffered by the Allies to Germany and the Central Powers, while
Article 232 reached the conclusion that a guilty Germany owed reparations
for the damages that it had caused. It made no difference that the great
historian Pierre Renouvin, himself a veteran of the war, explained early on
that the terms ‘responsibility’ and ‘reparations’ should be understood not in
moral terms but in the terms of civil law.11 The fact remains that for the
Germans, and for most of the Allies, Articles 231 and 232 were seen as a
form of moral condemnation – no doubt all the more unacceptable to
Germany who itself had lost more than 2 million of its own soldiers. The
sting of this moral condemnation was compounded by a sense of
humiliation, shared by the Austrians, over their territorial losses and the end
of imperial grandeur.
To understand the Allies’ apparent harshness towards Germany, it is
important to take into account the moral climate of the post-war period and
especially the state of mind prevailing in Allied countries during the winter
of 1918–19.12 The discovery of the damage caused by the German troops
during their withdrawal in the autumn of 1918,13 the treatment meted out to
civilians in occupied regions and the handling of prisoners of war14 – in
other words, the renewed energy in 1918–19 of the theme of ‘German
atrocities’ – weighed heavily on the heads of state and diplomats at the
Paris Conference. Another issue was the attitude towards Kaiser Wilhelm
II, who had fled to the Netherlands and whom the Allies almost
unanimously viewed as one of the worst war criminals in history. It is
hardly surprising, then, that when French soldiers awaiting demobilisation
first heard the terms of the peace treaties, they spoke of these terms in their
letters home not as excessively harsh, but as not severe enough.15
The bibliography on the issue of reparations is vast. Beginning with John
Maynard Keynes’s pamphlet The Economic Consequences of the Peace, an
instant bestseller published in the summer of 1919, an early tendency
emphasised the disastrous consequences of the reparations on the German
economy and the young Weimar Republic. Conversely, in the aftermath of
the Second World War, Keynes found himself the subject of criticism,
particularly in a famous text by Étienne Mantoux, who reproached him with
simultaneously spreading the ‘black legend’ of the Treaty of Versailles,
provoking the American Senate to reject the treaty and inspiring an attitude
of appeasement towards Nazi Germany.16 A long historiographical tradition
resulted from this reversal of opinion,17 continued today in the recent works
of Niall Ferguson,18 who has observed that between 1920 and 1932, from
one negotiation to another, the reparations in fact paid by Germany never
represented more than 8.3 per cent of the nation’s gross national income –
and not the 20–50 per cent recorded by Keynes. Did Germany have the
means to pay? Certainly. Had Keynes allowed himself to be influenced by
the propaganda of German bankers? Probably. Nonetheless, the question of
reparations poisoned diplomatic relations throughout the interwar years;
their cost was the subject of endless negotiations in numerous subsequent
conferences and nurtured nationalist feeling in Germany.
In hindsight, the Treaty of Versailles, often presented as a victors’ peace,
was in fact a compromise peace: a compromise between Wilson’s idealistic
aspirations and a more realistic post-war approach; between the objectives
of each nation and the need for each one to manage its allies; and between
hatred for Germany, which reached its paroxysm at the end of the war, and
the need for the gradual reintegration of the vanquished countries into the
wider circle of nations. Indeed, the declared aim of the peace negotiations
in Paris was not only to chastise the nations held responsible for the
outbreak of war, it was also to implement the ideas advanced by Wilson in
his ‘Fourteen Points’ speech of 8 January 1918 and to banish war once and
for all.19 A young British diplomat, Harold Nicolson, noted: ‘We were
preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of
some divine mission.’20 The presence of the American President on
European soil gave birth to hopes in a way that no other foreign head of
state had ever been able to stir. Throughout the journey that brought him to
Paris, Wilson received an enthusiastic welcome. Upon his arrival in France,
the Mayor of Brest, where the American President landed on 13 December
1919, greeted him as ‘the Apostle of Liberty’ who came to liberate the
European peoples from their sufferings. In the words of the English writer
H. G. Wells early in the 1930s, ‘For a brief interval, Wilson . . . ceased to be
a common statesman; he became a Messiah.’21
While scholars of the history of international relations have devoted a
great deal of effort to exploring the European aspects of the peace
negotiations, the repercussions these negotiations had beyond the Western
world were neglected until recently.22 And yet the beginning of 1919 was
marked by the growing consciousness worldwide of a right to self-
determination, which first emerged in 1917 in the writing by Lenin and
Trotsky condemning the Russian Empire. Wilson later popularised this
principle in 1918 when he saw it as the expression of government by
consent.23 In practice, Wilson had in mind the territories of the three
empires – German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman – rather than Asian or
African colonies.24 Colonial soldiers were profoundly affected by their
discovery of Europe and by the traumatic experience of the war; they were
torn between pride at having fought, hope of seeing their situation improve
on their return and disillusionment at the inertia of colonial society. ‘When
the survivors returned home in 1918 and 1919, they faced a new social
phenomenon . . . the end of the myth of the invincibility and honesty of the
white man’, recalled Amadou Hampaté Bâ, a veteran of the Great War and
a writer, originally from Mali. He added:
Now, the black soldiers had experienced trench warfare alongside their
white companions. They had seen heroes and courageous men, but
they had also seen those men cry and scream with terror . . . And it was
then, in 1919, that the spirit of emancipation and the voicing of
demands began to appear.25
Messengers arrived at the Paris Peace Conference from almost everywhere,

bearing petitions in favour of votes for women,26 the rights of African
Americans and workers’ rights; there were spokesmen for those seeking
recognition of their right to a state, including Zionists and Armenians
among many others. A young sous-chef at the Ritz wrote to Woodrow
Wilson to claim independence for his state and hired a suit in the hope of a
private audience with him; this young man was the future Hô Chi Minh.
Dressed in Eastern garb, T. E. Lawrence served as translator and adviser to
Feisal, who had led the Arab uprising against Ottoman domination in June
1916 and would be the first King of Iraq after the war. Others had no
opportunity to come to Paris to defend the rights of their people, such as
Syngman Rhee, who had been refused a passport. In 1948, Rhee became the
first President of South Korea.
Thanks to developments in journalism in Egypt, India and China,
Wilson’s speeches were translated and his message widely diffused and
debated in nationalist circles, despite the censorship of colonial authorities.
Extracts from the Fourteen Points speech were learned by heart in some
Chinese schools.27 Acknowledging the triumph of Wilson’s ideas in India,
V. S. Srinivasa Sastri imagined how the American President would have
been welcomed in the Asian capitals: ‘It would have been as though one of
the great teachers of humanity, Christ or Buddha, had come back to his
home, crowned with the glory that the centuries had brought him since he
last walked the earth.’28 In January 1919, many saw the Paris Peace
Conference as a test of Western determination to see the right to self-
determination put into practice. The Chinese delegation, consisting of
young, westernised diplomats ( V. T. Wellington Koo studied at Columbia,
C. T. Wang at Yale), advocated for the transfer to China of former German
concessions. The setback in negotiations, which gave Japan control of the
Shandong Peninsula, ruined the hopes of the Chinese nationalists, who
refused to sign the peace treaty. Immediately, anti-Japanese demonstrations
broke out throughout China, particularly on 4 May 1919, when 5,000
Chinese students marched through the streets of Beijing. In mid April, the
Indian nationalist movement was repressed violently in the Amritsar
massacre, when the troops of the British general Sir William Dyer fired on
and killed several hundred demonstrators. Almost everywhere in Asia and
Africa, the Versailles Treaty aroused dismay and revolution after the high
hopes raised by Wilsonianism.
Recent studies of the Versailles Treaty have broadened our perspective to
striking effect, showing the aftermath of the war no longer in strictly
Western terms but on a worldwide scale. In the end, perhaps, the true failure
of the Treaty of Versailles and the turning point of 1919 can be located
beyond the borders of Europe and the battlefields of the Great War. By
ignoring the hopes of colonised peoples, and by refusing to ratify equality
between the races,29 the negotiators in Paris ran the risk of disappointing all
those who had placed their hopes in the doctrine of President Wilson. This
course of action subsequently fuelled nationalism and stirred the first
manifestations of Asian communism.30
A time for mourning and reflection
Internationally, the unfolding of the Peace Conference, its pitfalls and the
ratification or non-ratification of the treaties all defined the year 1919.
Nonetheless, the stakes of the immediate post-war period extended far
beyond the context of international diplomacy. For many families, 1919
was above all a year of waiting – for the return home of soldiers or
prisoners of war, for the identification of the bodies of missing soldiers, for
the return of those bodies already identified but who could not yet be taken
back to their family cemeteries, for the rebuilding of a house or a village
destroyed in the fighting. Only at the end of the summer of 1920 did French
law authorise the return of soldiers’ bodies. This repatriation, in the form of
entire trainloads of coffins, over a few months, undoubtedly marked a major
turning point in the life of many grieving families .
To better understand the chronology of 1919, we must therefore situate
the survivors of the Great War, whether civilians or veterans, in the context
of their domestic life. Demobilisation of the armies alone was a colossal
task, if only because of the numbers of men involved: 5 million in the case
of French survivors, 6 million Germans – many more than the number
mobilised in the summer of 1914. In the case of Great Britain and the
United States, demobilisation was a relatively straightforward process, even
if the return home was never fast enough for the demobilised men. In his
short story ‘Soldier’s home’, published in 1923, Ernest Hemingway
describes the varied types of welcome that greeted the waves of returning
soldiers:
By the time Krebs returned to his hometown in Oklahoma [in the

summer of 1919], the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much
too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been
welcomed elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of
hysteria. Now the reaction had set in. People seemed to think it was
rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the
war was over.31
In Germany, in a context of defeat compounded by political revolution, the

army literally fell apart in the space of two months. Nearly 500,000 German
soldiers left their units as soon as they were across the Rhine and made their
own way back to their families. Their homecoming was warmly celebrated,
in contrast to the later claims of Nazi mythology of the ‘stab in the back’.32
It was mainly in France that demobilisation dragged on, an interminable
process begun in November 1918, interrupted briefly in May–June 1919
and then relaunched and extended until early 1920. Following the principles
of egalitarian, republican rule, French military authorities decided to
demobilise according to age; but as the return of each age group depended
on the demobilisation of the preceding group, it was impossible for the men
to foresee exactly when they would return home. When reading their letters
from that year, 1919 appears as a kind of suspended time, somewhere
between war and peace. Some soldiers left to occupy the Rhineland, while
others remained in the barracks, waiting to be demobilised, their morale
worn away by boredom.
At the outset of 1919, both plans and worries shaped the future.
Demobilisation held the promise of a return to everyday life, but would
veterans really be able to return to their pre-war lives? Rumours ran through
the ranks of waiting soldiers about men who returned home to find
themselves abandoned by unfaithful wives, or ignored by indifferent
civilians. In France, the law of 22 November 1918 required each employer
to rehire his former employees – but in order for that to happen, both the
business and its owner had to have survived the war. Veterans originally
from the areas of France destroyed by the fighting returned home only to
find their houses in ruins. Sometimes their family home no longer existed,
and everything had to be rebuilt.33 It did not take long for the refugees who
had fled during the war to return home: the town of Liévin in northern
France, which had been entirely destroyed, already numbered 7,000
inhabitants by October 1919. In France, the Charte des sinistrés (Victims’
charter) of 11 April 1919 opened the way to substantial reparations for
victims of war damage. A true break with tradition in France’s
administrative history, this charter recognised the state’s responsibility for
the destruction caused by the war and established a form of national
solidarity for the victims .
The very concept of ‘war victims’ thus had to be redefined and with it,
rights to reparations. The Great War caused such vast losses that the entire
system of legal categories, as well as the aid structures already in place, had
to be brought up to date. In Great Britain it was mainly charitable
organisations that came to the aid of wounded veterans and grieving
families, while in Germany and France this role fell principally to the state,
which modernised nineteenth-century pension laws in order to meet the
new requirements of a conscript army.34 In May 1920, the Weimar Republic
voted in laws reforming the system for allocating pensions to disabled
veterans, widows and orphans.35 In France, the law of 31 March 1919
established a ‘right to reparations’ that accorded each disabled veteran,
whatever his military rank, the status of ‘war victim’, along with a pension.
Later, in 1923, jobs were reserved especially for disabled veterans. The
jurist René Cassin, himself severely injured in the war, was one of the
leading advocates of disabled veterans’ rights. At the same time, the United
States, which was still spending $2 million a year in pensions for veterans
of the American Civil War, sought to promote a new model based on the
rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, the development of specialised hospitals
(such as the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC) and a rapid return to
active life.36 ‘Rights, not charity’ was the slogan on which veterans’
organisations were based, a slogan that acquired increasing social
significance. The year 1919 saw the first great conferences of veterans’
associations, which subsequently joined forces with each other.
New rituals emerged in connection with the war memorials being built.
These rituals linked former soldiers and civilians together in honouring the
memory of the dead of the Great War.37 This nationalisation of the memory
of war very quickly came to hold a central place in national identities. In the
case of Australia and New Zealand, the war experience of the Anzac troops
became a true founding myth for these new nations.38 The summer of 1919
saw a series of great victory parades organised in the Allied countries: 14
July in Paris; 19 July in London; 22 July in Brussels; 10 September in New
York. On each occasion the ceremonies were associated with national
symbols: in Paris, the procession passed beneath the Arc de Triomphe; in
London, by way of denouncing enemy crimes, a wall was built consisting
of thousands of pointed helmets along the route of the parade. In New York,
where six successive parades were organised, thousands of wounded men
from the 1st American Division took part in the procession. At the head of
the column, soldiers on horseback carried banners such as: ‘First Division:
4,899 killed; 21,433 wounded.’ In Paris, 1,000 disabled veterans opened the
victory parade down the Champs-Elysées – an overwhelming spectacle,
illustrated by Jean Galtier-Boissière in his famous painting,The Victory
Parade, where a blind soldier advances, leaning on the shoulder of a
disabled veteran.
In every country, the construction of a national memory of the Great War
was inseparable from the memory of the war dead. The Prix Goncourt for
1919 was awarded to Marcel Proust for À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
instead of to the war novel by Roland Dorgelès, Les croix de bois (‘The
wooden crosses’), a decision which could be seen as a sign of continuing
‘cultural demobilisation’ – i.e., people wanted to read about something
other than the war. But 1919 was also the year of the great film J’accuse,
which opened in April. With gripping realism, the director Abel Gance
showed the dead of Verdun rising from the ground to return and haunt the
living and to assert, in the face of civilian immorality, that their sacrifice
had been in vain. Gance took up the theme of the ‘return of the dead’,
which expressed perfectly the mindset of the immediate post-war period:
societies tormented by the memory of the dead, and by a form of moral
responsibility imposed on them by the sacrifice of so many soldiers.39
This demand for loyalty to the memory of the dead was responsible for
the emergence of two contradictory kinds of discourse. Gance’s film
expressed a pacifist message that in the end became established as a kind of
shared culture in the second half of the 1920s: ‘nie wieder Krieg’, ‘Never
again war’, ‘Plus jamais ça’, in the former soldiers’ words. At the same
time, hatred of the enemy was still strong. A form of remobilisation can
even be seen in the immediate post-war period, delaying and hindering the
process of mourning: to turn the page on the war would be to betray the
dead. In France, probably more than in other Allied countries, the desire for
vengeance dominated public opinion. It was visible among the troops who
occupied the Rhineland, through the full range of humiliations imposed on
the German civilian population. In December 1918, the novelist Jacques
Rivière, a former prisoner of war who had initially adopted the Wilsonian
ideal of peace, published a text entitled L’ennemi. In his opening pages,
Rivière described his feelings towards the Germans:
What I reproach the Germans for is not primarily their deeds . . . My

complaint is more profound, it is their very being that I hate, or rather
the void of their being. What I resent most in the Germans is that they
are nothing.40
In how many grieving families did hatred of the enemy mark a large part of
the interwar years? In 1925, the great mathematician Émile Picard, who had
lost three sons during the war, argued that German scientists should
continue to be excluded from the International Research Council. Six years
since the end of the war represented ‘a very short time to throw a veil over
so many odious and criminal acts’ he explained, ‘especially when no regret
was expressed’.41
Transnational stakes in the aftermath of war

In the eyes of many Westerners, however, the most serious threat came from
the disintegration of the great empires of Central and Eastern Europe, and
from the growth of communism. Fear of the ‘Reds’, Bolsheviks and
revolutionaries profoundly affected many people. This fear was fed by the
massive strikes that occurred in many countries after the war. In France, the
Paris region witnessed the largest strikes in the history of the metalworking
industry, in the spring of 1919.42 The general strike in Winnipeg (15 May–
25 June 1919) unleashed by the inflationary surge of the post-war period,
was a major event in the history of the labour movement in Canada. In the
United States, 1919 alone saw nearly 3,600 examples of social conflict.
This ‘fear of the Reds’ could turn to madness, as when a bomb exploded on
Wall Street on 16 September 1920, leaving thirty-eight dead and hundreds
wounded.43 The attack, which remains unexplained, was initially attributed
to anarchists and later to Leninist agents.
Thus when Russian refugees flooded into Western Europe after the defeat
of the White armies in the Russian civil war (1919–21), their presence
inspired great anxiety. In the spring of 1919 more than 10,000 people,
including 6,000 soldiers and officers from the White armies, fled to Turkey
from Odessa. A total of 150,000 refugees followed after the defeat of
General Wrangel’s army in November 1920. The great majority of these
refugees, completely destitute, settled into crowded camps on the outskirts
of Constantinople, such as the camp installed near the battlefield of
Gallipoli, or they ended up on ships moored in the Sea of Marmara. As
Jean-Charles de Watteville of the International Committee of the Red Cross
noted in the course of a humanitarian mission in 1921:
The refugees could be compared to prisoners of war. Constantinople is

a prison from which it is impossible to escape. [The refugees] are
living in surroundings entirely strange to them, and this results in
increased mental demoralisation and a growing incapacity to work.44
The governments that had supported the White armies, particularly France
and Great Britain, sent food and aid before organising the evacuation of
Russian refugees to the Balkans – including some Armenians who had
escaped the genocide in 1915.
Other refugees crossed the Russo-Polish frontier, fleeing the wave of
pogroms in which around 10 per cent of Ukrainian Jews disappeared in
1919. The war between Russia and Poland (1919–21) also resulted in vast
population movements, initially of Polish citizens driven out of their homes
by the fighting, then of individuals departing to the West and fleeing the
famine gripping the valley of the Volga, Transcaucasia and the Ukraine in
1921. Two great floods of refugees, some from Poland and the others from
the Baltic states, thus ended up in Germany, mainly in Berlin, where more
than 500,000 refugees arrived in the autumn of 1920.45 The most
prosperous among them soon set off again, either to France, where 80,000
Russian immigrants settled in the early 1920s, or to Great Britain. For all
these refugees, one of the major problems was the absence of immigration
documents enabling them to cross borders. Some had identity papers from
the Russian Empire, which no longer existed; others had lost everything in
the civil war; and still others had lost their citizenship in a campaign
undertaken by the Soviet authorities in December 1921 against their
political enemies. A new legal category arose, that of the stateless person,
who lacked any of the rights belonging to citizens with a country of their
own.
The management of the refugee crisis consisted of several elements, one
philanthropic (providing aid, often as a matter of emergency, to populations
without any resources whatsoever) and the other legal (the rapid creation of
a legal framework setting out a form of international recognition for
stateless individuals was essential). The humanitarian element was
undertaken by many organisations such as the International Committee of
the Red Cross, which had played a major role in aid for prisoners of war in
1914–18, the Quakers, the Save the Children Fund, founded in 1919 by the
philanthropist Eglantyne Jebb, or Near East Relief. Humanitarian aid,
rooted in a long Anglo-Saxon tradition dating back to the nineteenth
century, expanded afresh at the end of the war. Nonetheless, action on the
ground remained relatively improvised, even as it increasingly mobilised
social activists and medical help.
At the legal level, the circulation of refugees clashed with identity
controls that were much stricter for foreigners since the establishment of the
international passport during the Great War. For stateless people, the only
solution was the establishment of an internationally recognised document
that would enable them to circulate freely and find work in other countries.
In July 1922, the ‘Nansen certificate’ was created, from the name of the
Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen who, since 1921, had served as the
League of Nations’ High Commissioner for Russian Refugees. This
document was not a passport, since it did not allow its holder to return to
the country that had granted it. Further, the beneficiaries of the Nansen
certificate were subject to the same restrictive laws on immigration as
others, such as the law on quotas adopted by the United States in 1921 and
1924. However, this document, soon extended to Armenians beginning in
1924 and then to Assyro-Chaldeans, represented a revolution in
international law and solidified what Dzovinar Kévonian has called ‘the
institutionalisation of the international humanitarian field ’.46
For many legal scholars in the 1920s, the transnational nature of the
questions arising during the transition from war to peace required a
profound redefinition of international law. The refugee problem, the return
home of prisoners of war, economic reconstruction, epidemics and the
distribution of humanitarian aid could no longer be dealt with solely within
a national framework. In their work, Herbert Hoover, Fridtjof Nansen,
Albert Thomas, René Cassin and Eglantyne Jebb, whether from a
humanitarian or diplomatic background, best illustrate this surge in the
spirit of internationalism.47 ‘We must deliberately and definitively reject the
notion of sovereignty, for it is false and it is harmful’, declared the jurist
Georges Scelle, who considered the First World War to have been ‘the
greatest event recorded by History since the fall of the Roman Empire’.48
Scelle, however, was one of the most radical voices among those thinkers
who challenged not the sovereignty of states in itself but their absolute
sovereignty. The birth of the League of Nations, ‘the first dawn of an
international judicial organisation’ in his words, thus raised great hopes,
even if international legal scholars were initially somewhat sceptical about
the real range of the organisation. In the absence of any sanction against
those who contravened international law, and in the absence of armed forces
capable of imposing peace, the League of Nations could not ‘attain the goal
of high international morality, the aim with which it had been founded’, in
the words of Léon Duguit. The new history of international relations has
studied extensively the limits of this new international order born of the
war: ‘The lights that failed’, to use Zara Steiner’s expression.49 But this
history has also stressed the breadth of the goals achieved towards better
world governance under the sponsorship of the League of Nations,
particularly in the social arena .50
From this point of view, one of the most dynamic organisations of the
post-war world was undoubtedly the International Labour Organisation,
established under Article 13 of the Treaty of Versailles and managed as of
1919 by the former French Minister for Munitions, Albert Thomas. His
agenda was broad. Even a brief examination of the questions on the
programme for the first labour conference in Washington, in October–
November 1919, is impressive: the eight-hour workday, unemployment,
protection for women before and after childbirth, no night work or
unhealthy work by women and children, the minimum age for industrial
work, etc., etc. Through the establishment of standards designed to improve
the living conditions of workers and to protect their rights, the ILO gave
substance to the belief in universal justice born from the ruins of the First
World War. In the first issue of the Revue Internationale du Travail,
published in 1921, Albert Thomas recalled that:
It was the war that made the legislation of labour a matter of

primordial importance. It was the war that forced governments to
undertake to abolish poverty, injustice and the privations from which
workers suffered. It was the war again that led organised workers to
understand that the action of legal protection, in taking all its powers
from the international field, was necessary to the realisation of some of
their aspirations.
The ILO was not only the heir to the reformist movements established
throughout Europe since the end of the nineteenth century; it also brought
together aspirations towards a better world, which were to be supported by
dialogue between unions and employers and the work of a new social group
in full expansion after the war: international experts. Behind this quest for
social justice lay the ambition for a world free from war. Si vis pacem, cole
justitiam was the motto of the ILO – ‘If you want peace, cultivate justice.’
For Albert Thomas and his team, coming from the ‘reformist nebula’ of
pre-war years, 1919 was clearly a turning point, the dawn of a new era. Yet
contemporary historians of the ILO increasingly tend to emphasise the
tensions between transnational ideals and the persistent rivalries among
nation-states, which deeply affected the inner workings of the institution.
The fact that Germany and the other Central Powers quickly joined the ILO
in 1919, did not mean that the painful memory of the war had faded.
Meetings between veterans’ groups from both sides were organised in the
immediate post-war period, to discuss the rights of disabled veterans. At the
first such meeting, Adrien Tixier of the ILO, himself severely wounded in
the war, commented:
I know from experience that it is not pleasant to meet people who not
long ago were firing bullets and grenades at you while you were firing
at them, but it is precisely in the interest of world peace that I judge
such meetings necessary.51
The pacification of minds within the framework of international

organisations was not self-evident, and in many countries, other kinds of
conflict – border wars, civil wars, etc. – prolonged the violence of the First
World War .
Post-war forms of violence: an experiment in

typology
In recent years, a new field of research has gradually come to the forefront
among specialists of the war: the Great War’s place in the twentieth century
and its impact on forms of violence after the war.52 In the tradition of
George Mosse ,53 some historians stress the process of ‘brutalisation’ that
occurred after the war, although it is not clear whether this phenomenon
mainly affects post-war societies and their political life, or former
combatants as individuals, or whether it affects all countries in similar
ways.54 The transfer of wartime violence to the post-war period is in fact a
complex mechanism and the terms ‘violence’ or ‘forms of violence’ are
used to designate very different realities: battles between regular armies, for
example, the Greco-Turkish War; ideological struggles against an ‘inner
enemy’, as in the case of the Russian civil war; liquidation of the war’s
legacy, such as the purge of collaborators in Belgium; violence perpetrated
by paramilitary groups, as seen in the counter-revolutionary repression in
Germany; acts of ethnic or community violence, as in Poland, Ireland, etc.
The specificity of these conflicts depended somewhat heavily on the
experience of individual nations in the First World War (conquest, invasion
or occupation? victory or defeat?), the ability of the state to channel or
redirect the violence deployed during the war and the nation’s place on the
world stage. A resurgence of violence in the colonies thus characterises the
post-war period, particularly in India, Egypt and Iraq in the case of the
British,55 and in Algeria and Indochina in the case of France.56
Several factors, sometimes working in concert, explain the violence of
the post-war period, namely, the repercussions of the Russian Revolution in
1917 in Russia and other countries, and the frustrations born of defeat. In
addition, national or ethnic tensions inherited from the disintegration of the
four great empires (German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman),
could take various forms: territorial claims, border tensions, populations on
the move . . . In this extremely diverse and complicated climate, a clear
delineation of any continuity between the ‘cultures of war’ in 1914–18 and
post-war violence is therefore far from straightforward. Different
approaches are often necessary: studies of local circumstances,57 the
progress of veterans and veterans’ groups, civilians who refused to move on
from the war,58 the possible reuse of tactics and weapons first used on the
battlefields and then in the 1920s, the gestures and language of violence, the
ideological legacy of myths born during the war – for example, the ‘myth of
the War Experience’ (George Mosse), the central element of the völkisch
ideology in Germany or Italian fascism. The Arditi in Italy, the Freikorps in
Germany and the Black and Tans in Ireland, all were veterans of the First
World War, while Béla Kun’s Republic of Councils in Hungary (March–
July 1919) was based on former prisoners of war returning from captivity in
Russia.
I will attempt a brief typology of post-war violence here. Certain forms of
violence were a direct consequence of whether a country had been
victorious or defeated in the war, and related to the implementation of the
Armistice conventions. The year 1919 saw the liberation of countries
occupied during the Great War and the occupation of the Rhineland by the
victors, which gave rise in both cases to violence against individuals and
property. Belgium witnessed the hunting down of collaborators, particularly
war profiteers and ‘shirkers’. In the spring of 1919, the Coppées, father and
son, major employers in Hainaut, were accused of enriching themselves by
supplying coal to the Germans. Their trial inflamed Belgian public opinion,
which considered that the law was not dealing severely enough with
collaborators. A similar emotion greeted the acquittal of several informers,
especially Gaston Quien, brought to trial in 1919 for having betrayed Edith
Cavell. In countries deeply divided by the war, as with the Flemings and
Walloons in Belgium in 1914–18, the immediate post-war period was a time
for settling accounts with wartime enemies. In Alsace, civilians of German
descent were expelled to Germany in the winter of 1918–19, even if they no
longer had any ties with that country.59 In the Rhineland, occupying troops
were known to play out, on a smaller scale, the confrontations of the First
World War: brawls with German civilians, destruction of the 1870 war
memorial at Ems, insults and humiliations for the Rhineland population .
In other cases it was the collapse of the structure of the state, combined
with material chaos, which lay behind the explosions of violence. In many
countries, the end of the war brought with it a collective traumatic shock,
and a reformulation of the ‘culture of war’ into the struggles between
counter-revolutionary and revolutionary movements.60 In Italy, the rise to
power of the Arditi and the fascist movement can broadly be explained by
the moral collapse of military and political elites during the Great War: the
nation was victorious, but the victory was incomplete and ambiguous,
insufficiently convincing to wipe out the humiliation of Caporetto.61 The
position of Germany was distinctive because here defeat was attributed to
treason, which facilitated the transformation of foreign war into civil war.62
In Berlin, 1919 opened with the Spartakist insurrection (5–11 January) and
the particularly brutal assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht by members of the Freikorps on 15 January. For several weeks
the streets of the German capital were awash with the violence of war. A
Berliner recorded in his diary that
The combat . . . began near the colonnade of the Belleallianceplatz,

then spread out against the snipers hidden on rooftops, before reaching
the strongly barricaded headquarters of the newspaper Vorwärts, with
its network of interior courtyards. People were using large-calibre
bombs and flamethrowers. The doors were blown open by hand
grenades and the defenders surrendered only on the approach of
assault troops. Three hundred prisoners were captured and one
hundred machine guns seized.
The German state no longer held a monopoly on legitimate violence. Its

army had been largely dismantled since the defeat. To deal with the
revolutionary threat, it depended on recently demobilised veterans, on
groups of students too young to have fought in the war but keen to use their
strength in the struggle against the ‘Reds’63 and on local militias, who
called for the destruction of the ‘Bolshevik vermin’. Everything seemed to
favour a radicalisation of political violence: the eschatological anguish
aroused by the defeat, the fear of contamination by communists or Jews, the
hope that the fraternity of soldiers in the trenches could be recreated against
a common enemy. ‘People told us that the war was over. That made us
laugh. We ourselves are the war’, declared a Freikorps volunteer.64 In this
climate, the government of the Weimar Republic renounced its pursuit of
those guilty of the double crime of the Spartakist leaders. At the funerals of
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, nearly 300,000 activists shouted
their anger against the Social Democratic government. The Freikorps,
officially dissolved on 6 March 1919, proceeded two months later to crush
the Munich ‘Republic of Councils’ in a bloody repression that resulted in
650 deaths. On the eastern margins of Germany, the Bolshevik threat was
equally present, and the Freikorps were used to counter the risk of
revolutionary expansion.
In Russia, the weakening of state power also opened the way for warlords
to take control, with their private armies pillaging, terrorising the
population and conducting repeated pogroms, such as in Ukraine.65 The
Allied intervention on the side of the White armies, in the context of the
civil war, further contributed to the radicalisation of the violence of war.
Faced with the intervention of a foreign force, which numbered nearly
20,000 men in 1919, and with the pressures of ‘internal enemies’ (White
partisans of the armies of Kolchak, Denikin or Wrangel; kulaks, i.e.,
prosperous peasants, and ethnic minorities), the Bolshevik regime sensed
that it was fighting for its survival. In this particular period of ‘War
Communism’ (1918–21), political splits between communists and (real or
supposed) counter-revolutionary opponents, currents of social antagonism
between urban and rural societies and ethnic struggles and national
confrontations all came together to sustain a climate of permanent and
varied violence. One such war, between Russia and Poland in 1919–21, left
250,000 dead. In a speech at Rostov-on-Don in November 1919, the
philosopher Piotr Struve, a former Bolshevik who rallied to the White
movement, stated that
The world war ended formally with the conclusion of the armistice . . .
In fact, however, everything that we have experienced from that point
onward, and continue to experience, is a continuation and a
transformation of the world war.66
During the so-called ‘peasant wars’ that broke out over the requisitions of
grain crops, the special forces of the Cheka, the political police, used
extreme brutality to crush rebellious peasants. Civilians massacred, villages
shelled, the use of mustard gas – all demonstrate the full extent to which the
practices of war inherited from the Great War were used on the home front,
along with a radicalised perception of the enemy within.67
The fourth and final element in post-war violence was ethnic. The
collapse of the Russian Empire first brought a surge in nationalist tensions
in the Caucasus, in the new Baltic states and in Poland. These tensions
tended to concentrate in smaller territories that carried symbolic weight,
such as the city of Vilnius, disputed by Poland and Lithuania, or the port
city of Memel, which the Treaty of Versailles put under the control of an
Allied commission. Poland and Lithuania both claimed Memel, and
Lithuania eventually took over the city in January 1923. The city of Fiume
was another example of territorial struggle. Accorded to the Croats68 under
the Treaty of London on 26 April 1915, Italy subsequently staked a claim to
Fiume during negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, citing the
presence of the city’s sizeable Italian community. On 12 September 1919
the nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied Fiume illegally with a
volunteer army, and for more than a year he headed a provisional
government that favoured returning the city to Italian control.
In 1919–20, signatories of the peace treaties aimed to limit the risks of
war by redistributing population groups, in the interests of building better
ethnic homogeneity. However, the complexity of the intermingling
languages, ethnicities and cultures, particularly in Central Europe and the
Balkans, meant that things remained extremely confusing. In addition, the
peace treaties set up clauses for the protection of minorities, which were
guaranteed by the League of Nations. Furthermore, the treaties required
each individual to settle in the country whose nationality he had adopted. In
total, around 10 million people left territories that had passed into the hands
of a third nation. The Greco-Turkish war which broke out in May 1919,
culminated in the capture of Smyrna by Kemalist troops, the burning of
Armenian and Christian neighbourhoods and the massacre of nearly 30,000
civilians in September 1922. The forced transfer of populations between
Greece and Turkey, undertaken under the auspices of the League of Nations
in 1923, was the most dramatic consequence of the ethnic violence that
broke out in the immediate post-war period, because it legalised an
ethnicised definition of territory .
In this context as well, paramilitary groups appeared; they were
responsible for much of the post-war violence. The distinctions between
civilians and combatants, already vague during the First World War,
completely vanished in this type of conflict. The Irish Civil War provides a
good example of this; both the insurrection of 1919 against the British and
the counter-insurrection were led by small groups that did not limit their
targets to other armed combatants. The wives and families of militants
fighting for independence were considered equally valid targets. British
soldiers, supported by the Black and Tans, committed numerous atrocities
against civilians. Conversely, the IRA conducted a policy of intimidation
and revenge against those whom it saw as traitors. The bodies of those it
executed were frequently left in a public place with the message: ‘Spy. By
Order of the IRA. Take Warning.’ In the end, the Irish Civil War produced
much heavier losses than the First World War did.69 Several factors were at
work here: the lack of compunction on the part of paramilitary troops, who
attacked civilians more readily than regular troops might have done; the
power of identity stakes in a war that radicalised positions on both sides;
and surely the brutalisation that the Great War seems to have brought in its
wake to the Europe of the 1920s .
Conclusion
The year 1919 did not mark the end of the cycle that began in 1914, nor,
indeed, did it illustrate any shifts in the violence of war. In many countries
the already strong tensions produced by the war seemed to expand in the
immediate post-war period, at the very moment when the diplomats from
all over the world were gathering together in Paris to negotiate the cessation
of hostilities. In the ruins of four empires destroyed by the Great War,
nationalism expanded. Revolutionary fever spread across Central Europe,
stirring counter-revolutionary movements of equal violence. Sometimes, the
First World War simply continued. Armies and combat tactics that had been
tested on the battlefields beginning in 1914 were transferred to the context
of domestic warfare and used against civilians. Sometimes, various states of
conflict coalesced. In the case of Russia, for example, four different kinds
of wars interconnected and fuelled one another: the war against Poland; the
war of the Bolshevik powers against the White armies and their Western
allies; the class war against the kulaks; and the repression of ethnic
minorities by the central powers in Moscow.
Was 1919 the year of peace or the year of an impossible transition from
war to peace? An appropriate visual metaphor to describe 1919 would be an
image of lines converging towards a vanishing point. Indeed, the year 1919
opens up various lines illustrating what would become, for several years, a
difficult transition from war to peace: a world agitated by powerful
ideological tensions between communism and liberalism; vast movements
of populations, harried by civil war, hunger or religious persecution; hatreds
inherited from the Great War . . . But 1919 was also the year of the Paris
Peace Conference, the founding of the League of Nations and the creation
of the International Labour Organisation; it was a moment when those who
lived through the war became aware that they were living in a globalised
world, when they aspired to reframe international relations accordingly. For
the survivors, 1919 was above all a time of waiting, grieving and
disillusionment. This was a time when many veterans and civilians came to
realise that they would never completely get away from war. In a letter
written to his friend Robert Graves in 1922, that is, during the post-war
transition period, T. E. Lawrence made this disturbing observation:
What’s the cause that you, and Siegfried Sassoon, and I . . . can’t get
away from the war? Here are you riddled with thought like any old
table-leg with worms; [Sassoon] yawing about like a ship aback: me in
the ranks, finding squalor and maltreatment the only permitted
experience: what’s the matter with us all? It’s like the malarial bugs in
the blood, coming out months and years after in recurrent attacks.70
When did 1919 end? No one knows.
1 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (eds.), Sortir de la

Grande Guerre (Paris: Tallandier, 2008).
2 John Horne (ed.), ‘Démobilisations culturelles après la Grande Guerre’,

14–18: Aujourd’hui, Today, Heute, 5 (Paris: Noêsis, 2002), pp. 43–53.

International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press,
2007).
4 John Milton Cooper, Jr., Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow
Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
5 Edward M. House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House Arranged as a
Narrative by Charles Seymour, 4 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1926–8), vol. IV, p. 487.
6 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘Die Delegation der “Gueules cassées” in

Versailles am 28. Juni 1919’, in Gerd Krumeich et al. (eds.), Versailles
1919: Ziele, Wirkung, Wahrnehmung (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2001), pp.
280–7.
7 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New

York: Macmillan, 1919), p. 32.
8 Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
(New York: Random House, 2001), Introduction, p. xxv.
9 Paul Mantoux, Les délibérations du Conseil des Quatre, 2 vols. (Paris:

CNRS Éditions, 1955).
10 Manfred F. Boemeke, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s image of Germany, the war-

guilt question and the Treaty of Versailles’, in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald
D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A
Reassessment after 75 Years (German Historical Institute and Cambridge
11 Pierre Renouvin, Histoire des relations internationales, 3 vols. (Paris:

Hachette, 1958, republished 1994), vol. III, p. 446.
12 Gerd Krumeich et al., Versailles 1919: Ziele, Wirkung, Wahrnehmung

(Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2001).
13 Michael Geyer, ‘Insurrectionary warfare: the German debate about a

levée en masse in October 1918’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), pp.
459–527.
14 Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre: humanitaire et culture
de guerre, 1914–1918: populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers
de guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 1998).
15 Bruno Cabanes, La victoire endeuillée: la sortie de guerre des soldats

français (1918–1920) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004).
16 Étienne Mantoux, La paix calomniée ou les conséquences économiques

de Monsieur Keynes (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). The first criticism came from
Jacques Bainville, in his famous response to Keynes, Les conséquences
politiques de la paix (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1920).
17 Sally Marks, ‘Smoke and mirrors, in smoke-filled rooms and the

Galerie des Glaces’, in Boemeke, Feldman and Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of
Versailles, pp. 337–70.
18 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Basic Books, 1998), chapter
14.
19 Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the

20th Century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006),
chapter 2.
20 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919 (London: Constable, 1933), pp.

31–2.
21 H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (New York: Macmillan,

1933), p. 82.
22 Erez Manela, ‘Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: dreams of East-

West harmony and the revolt against empire in 1919’, American Historical
Review, 111:5 (2006), pp. 1327–51.
23 Arno Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Democracy,
1917–1918 (New York: World Publishing Co., 1967).
24 Michla Pomerance, ‘The United States and self determination:

perspectives on the Wilsonian conception’, American Journal of
International Law, 70 (1976), pp. 1–27; William R. Keylor, ‘Versailles and
international diplomacy’, in Boemeke, Feldman and Glaser (eds.), The
Treaty of Versailles, pp. 469–506.
25 Quoted in Thomas Compère-Morel (ed.), Mémoires d’outre-mer: les

colonies et la Première Guerre Mondiale (Péronne: Historial de la Grande
Guerre, 1996), p. 64. On African veterans, see also Marc Michel, Les
Africains et la Grande Guerre: l’appel à l’Afrique, 1914–1918 (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 1982; republished, Paris: Karthala, 2003); and
Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the
First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).
26 In France, a law on votes for women was proposed in the Chambre des
Députés in 1919, and then abandoned in 1922. British and German women
won the right to vote in 1918.
27 Guoqi Xu, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National
Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.
245.
28 V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, ‘Woodrow Wilson’s message for Eastern

Nations’, quoted by Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, p. 55.
29 Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality

Proposal of 1919 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
30 Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1991), chapter 13.
31 Ernest Hemingway, ‘Soldier’s home’, 1923, in The Complete Short
Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner, 1987), pp. 109–
16.
32 Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993).
33 Hugh Clout, After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern

France after the Great War (University of Exeter Press, 1996); Frédérique
Pilleboue et al. (eds.), Reconstructions en Picardie après 1919 (Paris:
RMN, 2000); Eric Bussière, Patrice Marcilloux and Denis Varaschin (eds.),
La grande reconstruction: reconstruire le Pas-de-Calais après la Grande
Guerre (Archives départementales du Pas-de-Calais, 2000).
34 Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain

and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2001).
35 Sabine Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden: Kriegsinvalidität und

Körperbilder 1914–1923 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008).
36 Beth Linker, War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

(University of Chicago Press, 2011).
37 For a general approach, Stephen R. Ward (ed.), The War Generation:

Veterans of the First World War (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press,
1975); in the case of France, Antoine Prost, Les anciens combattants et la
société française, 1914–1939 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1977).
38 Alistair Thomson, ANZAC Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford

39 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in
European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 1.
On the presence of the war in German cinema in the 1920s, see also Anton
Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War
(Princeton University Press, 2009).
40 Jacques Rivière, L’ennemi (Paris: Gallimard, 1918).
41 International Research Council, Third Assembly, Brussels, 1925, cited

by Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, ‘Pas de Locarno pour la science: la
coopération scientifique internationale et la politique étrangère des États
pendant l’entre-deux-guerres’, Relations Internationales, 46 (1986), p. 183.
42 Jean-Louis Robert, Les ouvriers, la patrie et la Révolution, 1914–1919

(Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon/Les Belles Lettres, 1995).
On the birth of the French Communist Party, see Romain Ducoulombier,
Camarades: la naissance du parti communiste en France (Paris: Perrin,
2010).
43 Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its
First Age of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2009).
44 International Red Cross Archives, Geneva, CR 87 / SDN, 1921.
45 Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the

East, 1914–1922 (Cornell University Press, 2010).
46 Dzovinar Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs

européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004).
47 Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism,

1918–1924 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
48 Georges Scelle, Le pacte de la Société des Nations et sa liaison avec le
traité de Paix (Paris: Librairie du recueil Sirey, 1919).
49 Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History,

1919–1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
50 Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations: review essay’,

American Historical Review, 112:4 (2007), pp. 1091–117.
51 Archives of the International Labour Office, Geneva, A / B.I.T. MU 7 5

1, Tixier to Albert Thomas, letter dated 31 October 1922.
52 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New

York: Knopf, 1998); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Christian
Ingrao and Henry Rousso (eds.), La violence de guerre 1914–1945
(Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2002); and Roger Chickering and Stig
Förster (eds.), The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia and the United
States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a study of
recent historiography, see Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘The Great
War and paramilitarism in Europe, 1917–23’, Contemporary European
History, 19:3 (2010), pp. 267–73.
53 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World

Wars (Oxford University Press, 1990).
54 For a critical discussion of George Mosse’s book, see Antoine Prost,

‘The impact of war on French and German political cultures’, Historical
Journal, 37:1 (1994), pp. 209–17.
55 David M. Anderson and David Killingray (eds.), Policing and

Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–1965
(Manchester University Press, 1992).
56 This last area of research remains relatively unexplored at present, and
much remains to be done on the links between colonial violence and war
violence, both before and after the Great War. On the fear of the
‘brutalisation’ aroused by the Amritsar massacre, see Derek Sayer, ‘British
reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past and Present, 131:1
(1991), pp. 130–64; Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a peaceable kingdom: war,
violence and fear of brutalization in post First World War Britain’, Journal
of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 557–89; and Susan Kingsley Kent,
Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918–1931 (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 64–90.
57 A good example of comparative history can be found in Timothy

Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper
Silesia, 1918–1922 (Oxford University Press, 2010).
58 The micro-historical dimension appears particularly promising. See, for

example, Christian Ingrao’s study of the path taken by Oskar Dirlewanger,
from infantry officer in the First World War to Freikorps leader to head of a
Waffen-S.S. brigade made up of convicted criminals: Les chasseurs noirs
(Paris: Perrin, 2006).
59 David Allen Harvey, ‘Lost children or enemy aliens? Classifying the

population of Alsace after the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 34 (1999), pp. 537–54; and Laird Boswell, ‘From liberation to
purge trials in the “mythic provinces”: recasting French identities in Alsace
and Lorraine, 1918–1920’, French Historical Studies, 23:1 (2000), pp. 129–
62.
60 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,

Mourning and Recovery (London: Granta Books, 2000).
61 Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Fascism and violence in post-war Italy: political

strategy and social conflict’, in Wolfgang Mommsen and Gerhard
Hirschfeld (eds.), Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth and
Twentieth-Century Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 257–
74; and Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista, 1918–1925
(Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975).
62 This is the theory that George Mosse develops in Fallen Soldiers.
63 Christian Ingrao, ‘Etudiants allemands, mémoire de la guerre et

militantisme nazi: étude de cas’, 14–18: Aujourd’hui, Today, Heute, 5
(2002), pp. 54–71.
64 Quoted by Peter Gatrell, ‘War after the war: conflicts, 1919–23’, in

John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010),
p. 568.
65 Joshua Sanborn, ‘The genesis of Russian warlordism: violence and

governance during the First World War and the civil war’, Contemporary
European History, 19:3 (2010), pp. 195–213.
66 Quoted by Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s

Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), p. 2.
67 Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen & Unwin,
1987); and Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War
(Princeton University Press, 1994).
68 For a comparative approach to the question of minorities in relation to

national identity, see Tara Zahra, ‘The “minority problem”: national
classification in the French and Czechoslovak borderlands’, Contemporary
European Review, 17 (2008), pp. 137–65.
69 Julia Eichenberg, ‘The dark side of independence: paramilitary violence

in Ireland and Poland after the First World War’, Contemporary European
History, 19:3 (2010), pp. 221–48.
70 T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer, Robert Graves: Information About
Himself, in the Form of Letters, Notes, and Answers to Questions, Edited
with a Critical Commentary (London, Faber & Faber, 1938), p. 31.
Part II Theatres of War
Introduction to Part II
Robin Prior
As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, the military history of the Great
War is subject to national differences and differences between authors
writing about the same events. Nevertheless, the chapters also show a new
consensus which is far different from that prevailing at (say) the fiftieth
anniversary of the war. Then the military performance of the participants
would, in all probability, have been ranked in order of the so-called national
characteristics. Germany and Britain would have been placed at the top of
the list followed by France. The United States would rank highly with much
disagreement on its performance because of its late entry. Italy and Austria-
Hungary would come next followed by Russia and Romania with Ottoman
Turkey somewhere near the bottom. A list created now would not rank by
national characteristics but by levels of industrialisation. The list would not
look substantially different from the earlier one but at least would have a
foundation in hard statistics rather than stereotyping.
The chapters which follow reflect this new paradigm. For the war at sea
the earlier handwringing over Britain’s alleged failure to produce decent
Dreadnoughts is replaced by a recognition of its overwhelming mastery at
sea. Jutland, it now seems, was no close run thing. Whatever the
comparative losses, there was only one fleet patrolling the North Sea the
day after the battle and it was not the German. Nor did the Admiralty need
the intervention of civilians to prod them into convoy to counter the U-boat
campaign. The naval system worked and provided the solution.
As for the war in the air, it is no longer thought of as a ‘duel of eagles’ –
of one group of fighter ‘aces’ trying to shoot down another. The Red Baron
has given way to studies about the true purposes of air power in the Great
War – aerial spotting to more accurately direct artillery fire and the taking
of photographs to identify enemy defences and locate artillery positions.
In military matters the most marked increase in knowledge has come with
at least the partial opening of the Russian archives. Although much remains
to be done, the new information indicates that the armies of the Tsar fought
and were equipped much better than previously thought. To some extent,
what has emerged is that it was the lack of modern bureaucratic structures
and management techniques and a decent political system that proved fatal
to the Russian war effort.
The ‘lesser’ fronts are also being re-examined. Italy’s and Austria’s lack
of industrial clout have been exposed as a major factor in the stalemate, but
the lack of any available military techniques to achieve a decisive victory in
the terrain in which the war was fought seem equally important. There also
seems little doubt that had the major industrial powers of Europe fought in
such conditions the outcome would have been much the same. The political
structures of these two powers also clearly proved deficient to cope
effectively with the demands of major war, although to some extent this
view has been modified by the obvious but widely unappreciated fact that
both powers kept armies in the field for three and four years without total
disintegration.
A consensus also seems to have emerged about the war against Ottoman
Turkey. It is no longer seen as having the potential to affect decisively the
wider war. Moreover, the armies of the Ottoman Empire were not to be
easily defeated by the scraps of soldiers that remained to the British after
the demands of the Western Front had been met. Yet in the end the
industrial might of Britain eventually wore down the Ottoman Turks, but it
took four years and much effort to do it.
The major front and centre of attention remains the Western Front. The
view that commanders were ‘Donkeys’ for fighting there has long been
superseded. Few doubt that the war was won and lost on this front and
attention has instead shifted to how it was fought. Here there is only partial
consensus. Most scholars agree that the notion of the ‘Chateau General’
should be dismissed. Commanders were placed at appropriate locations at
the end of unprecedented communication systems. Most scholars also agree
that the generals were (perhaps) surprisingly good at logistical matters –
armies very seldom ran out of food or ammunition – even if the quality of
both commodities was highly variable. The role of weaponry in determining
the outcome of battles, and indeed the war, has at last received its due, with
the competence or otherwise of commanders judged by how they used the
weapons available to them. Here any consensus breaks down. Was Verdun
the first pure battle of attrition with the destruction of the French army as its
only aim? Which army learned the most from past experience and how was
that process applied to later battles? Who within an army proved capable of
drawing the correct lessons from past mistakes? Did the commanders worry
about the level of casualties that efforts such as Verdun, the Somme, Third
Ypres and the Chemin des Dames were inflicting on their own armies? All
that can be said about these matters is that the debate continues. Studies on
particular generals at various levels (army, corps and lower) are welcome
additions to the literature but have failed to have an impact on the weighty
questions listed above. My view is that these debates will continue without
resolution because of national perspectives, but also because of the widely
different views about human nature that historians will inevitably bring to
their subject.
What of the future? We can expect many further revelations from the
Russian archives and also from the archives kept by the lesser powers of
Austria and Italy and from those of the successor states in Eastern Europe.
My hope is that future work on the Western Front concentrates more on
technology rather than biography. Now we have a new biography of Haig
there should be a moratorium on any more for at least ten years. It is
extraordinary that although artillery inflicted about 60 per cent of all
casualties in the war there has been no serious study of it. The British
Ministry of Munitions (probably the determinant of victory on the Western
Front) deserves serious study. The participation of the United States in the
war could also come to maturity with some serious work on what
contribution America made to the final victory. This would at least be a
relief from books which start from the premise that the US won the war. It
will be interesting to watch over the next decade to see if any of these
challenges are taken up or if there will be new developments by academics
in a field that has all too often been left to amateurs.
8 The Western Front
Robin Prior
The Western Front – the static line of trenches and trench systems that
stretched from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel around Nieuport –
became one of the defining images of the Great War. Yet had the war plans
of the Great Powers come to fruition it would not have existed. The French,
with Plan XVII, were supposed to sweep through Alsace-Lorraine and drive
the German armies rapidly back into their own country – inflicting on them
such massive defeats that capitulation would soon follow. The Germans,
with the Schlieffen Plan, were to sweep through neutral Belgium, around
Paris and drive the French armies back upon their own frontier defences. A
rapid capitulation would also follow. These plans came to grief for a variety
of reasons. The French, advancing in great numbers in the open, soon
became victims of German machine gun and artillery fire. Their plan was
based on Napoleonic élan and little else. It took no account of defensive
firepower and within short order had ground to a halt. Over 300,000
casualties were suffered by the French in what became known as the Battle
of the Frontiers.
The Germans came to grief for slightly different reasons. Their plan had
been developed by the Chief of the general staff, General von Schlieffen, in
1905. Schlieffen had made it plain that his plan was a theoretical exercise
only and that Germany did not possess the manpower to put it into practice.
This major caveat became rather lost in the years after Schlieffen’s
retirement. The younger Moltke who replaced him modified the plan by
reducing the number of divisions that would constitute the right flank
sweeping through Belgium and increased the numbers who would defend the
German–French border. This at least made the plan possible to put into
effect because it took some notice of the capacity of the railway network to
transport the troops to the front. But it did not make it feasible. The troops
on the right wing had such large distances to cover that supply problems and
exhaustion soon set in. The huge mass proved incapable of traversing Paris
and slipped down to its east, pursuing what it thought to be the defeated
French and British armies. This left it vulnerable to counter-attack by troops
transferred by the French Commander-in-Chief General Joffre from his
failed eastern offensive to the west and south of Paris. These troops were
transferred by rail so arrived faster and fresher than the tired hordes of
marching Germans. These reinforcements proved sufficient for the Allied
forces to stop the Germans at the River Marne and even to drive them back.
Now began a new phase of the war that was popularly known as the race
to the sea, because the sea (or the English Channel) was where they were
forced to halt. In fact it was not the sea that the rival armies were racing for
but the open flank of their respective opponents. Neither side proved capable
of out-distancing the other to exploit an open flank. The last attempt had
been made by the Germans in November 1914. Then General Falkenhayn,
who had replaced Moltke – now deemed to have ruined Schlieffen’s grand
design – flung in his last troops in the form of masses of younger reservists.
These inexperienced troops attacked in rather the same manner as the French
had attempted in Alsace-Lorraine. They met the British army, concealed in
rudimentary trenches around the Belgian village of Ypres. The outnumbered
British stopped the German attack in its tracks with great slaughter.
Defensive firepower had once again proved too formidable for troops
attacking in the open to overcome. From this time lines of trenches were
gradually extended to the north and south and became continuous from the
Swiss border to the Channel. The Western Front had been created (Map 8.1).
Map 8.1 German operations in France and Belgium, 1914.
The problem of the Western Front was simple; the answer fiendishly
difficult. The problem was that to make ground men had to leave the security
of their trenches and attack an entrenched enemy across a strip of ground
that soon became known with some accuracy as no-man’s-land. This narrow
strip might vary in width from 10 to 1,000 yards. The enemy could bring to
bear on men attacking across these distances a formidable amount of
firepower. In the trenches themselves would lurk riflemen who could fire up
to fifteen rounds per minute. Even more deadly trench-dwellers were the
machine gunners. A modern machine gun could fire about 600 rounds per
minute and machine gun positions might be protected by steel plate and
eventually concreted dugouts. Further back – perhaps some 4,000 to 10,000
yards – would be placed the enemy artillery. For reasons that will soon be
explained, guns were not sufficiently accurate to hit small targets. But they
were accurate enough to fire shells with some degree of certainty into an
area as large as no-man’s-land, and this would be sufficient to wreak havoc
on formations of tightly packed men attempting to advance across it. In
contrast to this hail of fire from bullets, machine guns and artillery, the
attacking infantry were armed with a service rifle and (in the early years of
the war) a primitive hand grenade that was more likely to do damage to the
thrower than his target. Moreover, in short order, the attacking soldiers
would be required to face entanglements of barbed wire even before they
arrived at the hostile trenches. This product of industrial society proved just
as effective at keeping assaulting infantry out as it had previously been
keeping cattle and sheep in.
Finding the answer to the question of the tactical problem that resulted in
this firepower imbalance between attackers and defenders lay at the heart of
warfare on the Western Front between the end of 1914 and November 1918.
There was a solution that occurred surprisingly early to commanders on both
sides. The main weapons of destruction were the artillery and the machine
gun. The way to eliminate, or at least reduce to a tolerable level the fire from
these weapons was to bombard them with shells from friendly artillery. This
is what was attempted, especially by the British and the French, in the early
battles of 1915. But while the solution sounded simple on paper, in practice
there were many problems. The first was that neither the British nor the
French had guns in sufficient numbers which had the power to batter down
trench defences or fire the great distances that were necessary to eliminate
enemy artillery. Their pre-war armies had been munitioned for a mobile type
of warfare that required small guns that were highly manoeuvrable, short-
range and now without the destructive power that the new warfare
demanded.
But this was not the only problem with the artillery. At this period of their
development guns were not precision instruments. Shells fired from a typical
gun would not all land in the one place but be spread over an area of (say) 40
yards by 80 yards. This area was known as the 100 per cent zone of the gun.
This sounds highly technical but all it means is that if 100 shells were fired
from a gun under identical conditions all the shells could be expected to land
within this zone. One difficulty with this is immediately apparent – the
targets that the guns were required to hit were small. Trench lines were
deliberately designed to be as narrow as possible to present small targets to
enemy artillery. Single enemy guns at ranges of 10,000 yards or more were
extremely small targets. One way of overcoming these difficulties was to
possess a quantity of shells so huge that continuous firing from a gun must
direct some of them onto their designated targets. But in 1914 and 1915 no
munitions industry in the world was of sufficient size either to make this
quantity of shells or to make the number of guns required to fire them. And
by 1916, when the munitions industries of all the Great Powers were
expanding, so were the trench defences that they were supposed to demolish.
So in 1915, while an attacking army might have one main trench line and a
few supporting lines to attack, by 1916 even the front defences would
consist of whole systems of trenches of considerable strength all linked to
each other by communications trenches. And some thousands of yards
behind the front system there might be a second system and behind that yet
another.
If quantity of shells and guns was not a practical proposition, did the
answer lie in accuracy? If those shells that the attackers did possess could be
delivered with some precision onto their targets, could not the enemy front
be broken? But here too lay many difficulties. If we return to the 100 per
cent zone of a gun it will be recalled that shells would only land within that
zone if they were fired under identical conditions. But of course conditions
on a battlefield could and did change. The most changeable factor was the
weather. If a following wind sprang up during a bombardment the shells
would travel beyond the 100 per cent zone. If there were a sudden head wind
they would fall short. Shells would travel further on a hot day than when the
weather was cold because the air through which they travelled was slightly
thinner.
Numerous other factors affected the accuracy of a gun. There was the
wear imposed upon it by continuous firing. Then as a gun barrel began to
wear shells might wobble slightly as they passed through it, thus shortening
their range. Alternatively, the heat generated inside the barrel by a heavy
bombardment might cause the barrel to turn slightly upward and thus the
shells would travel further. In addition, all shells were not exactly the same
weight. In the case of an 18-pounder shell, the weight might vary by a
fraction of an ounce either way. The heavier the shell, the shorter its range,
and vice versa.
There was another problem with firing at distant targets. To fire with any
accuracy, establishing the exact position of the target on the surface of the
earth was critical. But in 1915 it was found that many maps of the
battlefronts had been drawn in the time of Napoleon and not accurately.
Even if the maps were only inaccurate by a few yards, this might nullify any
attempt to hit a distant gun. Aerial photography was one imaginative answer
to this problem. The battlefield could be mapped by aircraft carrying
primitive cameras and the images then used to create maps. But this science
was in its infancy. It was not fully realised that photographs taken from
different heights would produce maps of widely differing scales. Moreover,
a photograph of the earth was a flat image of a curved surface which
introduced errors of parallax. As a result, accurate maps were difficult to
produce and this had an inevitable effect on artillery accuracy.
Then there were problems of observation. If battles were fought in flat
countryside it might be extremely difficult to estimate whether shells were
hitting their targets or not. Distance imposed its own problem. Guns at great
distances were vital targets but they could not be seen by the naked eye. Or,
if the enemy had placed guns closer to the front they might conceal them
behind the lee of a ridge to prevent direct observation. One way around this
problem was to use aircraft equipped with radios. These planes could direct
the fire of the artillery even against distant targets. Both sides soon realised
that aerial observation was a vital matter. So if one side sent up aircraft to
spot for the artillery, the other side would send against them fighter planes
soon equipped with machine guns to shoot them down. Aerial battles known
as dog fights soon developed around spotting activity, and if a combatant
lost air superiority over a battlefield they lost their vital eye in the air.
Of course the weather could nullify all air activity. The Western Front was
not located in an area noted for its sunshine. Even in summer, low cloud and
rain could ruin observation, and yet battles had to be timed well in advance
in order to assemble the required troops and munitions. The days before a
battle were essential for the accuracy of a bombardment but were at the
mercy of the weather. In winter, of course, fog, sleet and snow might prevent
aircraft from even leaving the ground.
A battle of extraordinary interest illustrated the technical difficulties of
artillery and to some extent demonstrated how they might be overcome.
What makes the Battle of Neuve Chapelle even more exceptional is that it
was one of the first trench warfare encounters to take place on the Western
Front. In March 1915 the British IV Corps, led by General Rawlinson, were
to take some low hills, called with some exaggeration, Aubers Ridge. It was
originally to be a joint operation with the French but when Joffre declined to
participate the British went ahead anyway. Confronting IV Corps was the
small village of Neuve Chapelle, protected by a single trench and some
rudimentary barbed wire barricades. Rawlinson considered the problem and
sent raiding parties to examine closely the nature of the German trenches. He
then dug trenches of a similar nature well behind the British front and
bombarded them until they were destroyed. He then calculated exactly how
many shells and of what calibre were required to demolish the 2,000 yards or
so of trench that confronted him. The next step was to assemble the
appropriate number of guns that could fire these shells in rapid
bombardment, which would destroy the enemy trenches and not allow their
defenders time to recover. All this took place on 10 March 1915 and by and
large it worked. Except on the left of the line where there were observation
difficulties, the German trenches were destroyed and British troops were
able to capture them and consolidate their hold on the village. From then on
the plan collapsed. Rawlinson’s army commander General Haig insisted on
massing the cavalry to exploit the capture of the village. But one matter had
been beyond Rawlinson. His guns had not been able to locate or destroy
most of the German artillery located out of sight behind Aubers Ridge.
These guns began to take a toll on the soldiers and particularly the horsed-
soldiers, who in any case were having difficulty making their way forward
across ground intersected by trenches and littered with barbed wire
entanglements. Eventually the cavalry was withdrawn but not before three
days of futile endeavour and high casualties.
This battle provided clear lessons. After careful calculation it was possible
to break trench defences and make advances of 1,000 to 2,000 yards at
modest cost. But unless the enemy artillery had been neutralised, casualties
would rise in the days ensuing the initial victory. Moreover, cavalry provided
such large targets and were so difficult to manoeuvre across trench systems
that their very utility on a modern battlefield had been brought into doubt.
But there was another lesson as well to be drawn from Neuve Chapelle. If
gains could only be measured in distances of a mile, how many battles
would be required to be fought before the Germans were expelled from
French and Belgian soil? In the minds of the commanders this fact overruled
all others including common sense. They had been raised in a period where
defensive weaponry had not dominated battlefields. It was widely believed
that France had lost the Franco-Prussian War through a lack of élan on the
part of its infantry. If they looked back to any of the great commanders, it
was not to Grant who had worn down the Confederate armies by tactics
similar to those used on the first day at Neuve Chapelle; it was to Napoleon,
the master of mobile warfare. Even then it was conveniently forgotten that
Napoleon had lost his last battle because the British squares of infantry had
proved impervious to his cavalry tactics. The war on the Western Front
would therefore in its planning, although not in its execution, take a pre-
industrial form where decisive encounters were sought that would decide the
issue speedily.
So when Joffre came to make his plans for 1915 he sought grandiose
objectives on a Napoleonic scale. He would attack in Artois on a front which
extended from Vimy Ridge to Arras. If the ridge could be captured, he
reasoned, he could unleash his cavalry across the plains of Douai. They
would seize rail junctions vital to the supply of the German army in the
West. The whole of the German front must be thrown into disarray and a
spectacular victory – perhaps decisive – would follow. The British would
make a modest contribution to the battle by attacking just to the north of the
French.
The bombardment for the battle began on 9 May. There was some
sophistication in the artillery arrangements. An unprecedented number of
guns (over 1,000, 300 of them heavy calibre) had been assembled. They
attacked the German trench lines and the German batteries gathered behind
the ridge but revealed to the French by aerial observation. On the 16th the
infantry went in. Initially gains were made. The German line in this area had
been thinned of troops to assist the Austrians in the East. The Germans –
despite the seven-day bombardment – had been caught by surprise. A
French–Moroccan division even reached the summit of Vimy Ridge. Then
the iron laws of trench warfare started to assert themselves. Despite their
best efforts the French gunners had missed most of the enemy artillery
behind the ridge. Their fire now began to take a toll on the Moroccans and
eventually force them back. Further south the bombardment had missed
large areas of the German trenches altogether. And here the Germans were
well prepared. The French were driven back without securing a yard of
ground. On the flanks the British – neglecting the lessons of Neuve Chapelle
– used a lesser number of guns to attack stronger defences. Failure was total.
Joffre, against all reason, took heart from this battle. His troops had
momentarily held Vimy, one of the strongest positions on the Western Front.
He would try again. He did so later in May and again in June. In the latter
battle the intrepid Moroccans once more took Vimy Ridge. Once more the
untouched German guns drove them from it. The affair was over. Joffre’s
spring offensive had cost him 100,000 casualties. The Germans had suffered
but to a lesser extent. They lost 60,000. The front remained more or less
where it had been before the battle.
The losses incurred in this battle especially disturbed some politicians in
Britain. Churchill had always counselled against giant offensives in the West
where all that would be achieved would be ‘men chewing barbed wire’. Now
that his alternative plan at Gallipoli was under way, he wanted to divert even
more troops away from the Western Front. But the French, who with the
largest army continued to dictate strategy, thought otherwise. There would
be an autumn offensive that would succeed where the one in the spring had
not. Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War, reluctantly agreed, telling
his colleagues that ‘we must make war as we must, not as we would like’.
To make war as we must was more prophetic than Kitchener could have
imagined. The enormous defeat inflicted on the Russians at Gorlice-Tarnów
meant that some attempt must be made to divert troops away from them.
Joffre’s autumn offensive in the Champagne was the result. It was as barren
as his earlier attempt. The French – with a British add-on at Loos – managed
to bring sufficient artillery against the German front line to break it on a
five-mile front. But defences were becoming more sophisticated. The
Germans now had a second line of considerable strength some two to three
thousand yards behind the first. This line was largely untouched by the
French bombardment. Logic dictated that the French consolidate their gains
and stop. Instead Joffre pressed on. Four days later he was forced to stop
because of the enormous casualties inflicted on the French by fresh German
troops and the untouched distant artillery. To the north the British had fared
no better. Total Allied casualties in the autumn were 200,000 as against the
Germans’ 85,000. Attrition was working but hardly in the manner required
by the Allied commanders. One of them paid a heavy price. Sir John French,
who had led the BEF without distinction or imagination, was sacked. Sir
Douglas Haig, who the political leadership in Britain thought would be an
improvement, got the job.
There was a new weapon used by both sides which entered the fighting
during 1915. Poison gas (chlorine) was used by the Germans in the Ypres
salient in April. It had an immediate effect as the troops – deprived of the air
that they needed to breathe – fled back. The Germans followed up but were
stopped by unaffected troops and by the fact that they had run out of gas.
They thus incurred the odium of introducing a frightful new weapon without
having sufficient supplies to make it count. In any case their logic was
dubious. For three days in four along most sections of the Western Front the
wind blew from west to east – that is towards the German line. The Allies
therefore retaliated in the autumn with poison gas of their own. It achieved
little. Primitive gas masks were beginning to appear which filtered most of
the gas out of the air. In other areas the gas was dispersed by the wind. The
British managed the feat of releasing their gas when the wind was blowing
the wrong way, thus gassing their own troops instead of the Germans. Gas
would be used for the remainder of the war but it would never prove a
decisive weapon.
In some ways 1916 marked the apogee of the war on the Western Front.
Two of the largest battles ever fought – Verdun and the Somme – were
fought during that year. Each of these battles involved hundreds of thousands
of men and guns and munitions in prodigious numbers. The fact that made
such battles possible on the Western Front but not elsewhere is often
forgotten. The complex rail networks of Western Europe were employed by
both sides to bring men, food and fodder for the many horses that pulled the
guns and munitions close to their respective fronts. Then light railways, laid
with rapidity and skill, brought these necessary components of war to the
front lines. This was a feat of considerable magnitude. The commanders
might not yet be able to plan a battle efficiently but they ensured that their
men were fed and supplied with sufficient munitions, if not to advance, then
at least to beat off an attempt by the other side to advance.
Germany was the first to undertake an offensive in 1916. Their
commander General von Falkenhayn had watched will ill-disguised
impatience and jealousy while his rivals Hindenburg and Ludendorff scored
mighty victories on the Eastern Front against the Russians. Falkenhayn
thought – correctly as it happened – that the war would be decided in the
West. In late 1915 he put a plan to the Kaiser for an attack against the French
fortress city of Verdun. The aim of the plan was to capture what was thought
to be a vital point in the French line, but Falkenhayn hedged his bets. The
French would defend Verdun to the last, he argued. He was correct in this
except that given the prevailing doctrine on the French side they would have
defended any French objective to the last. Anyway, Falkenhayn reasoned
that even if he failed to make ground against Verdun the concentration of
artillery he planned to bring to bear would bleed the French army white. So
if he advanced he would be successful but if he did not advance he would be
just as successful. Such logic as there was in this won the Kaiser over – an
additional factor being that his own son would command the German Fifth
Army that would launch the attack.
The battle (which is dealt with in depth in Chapter 4 above) can be quickly
summed up. Falkenhayn assembled an unprecedented number of guns –
some 1,200. But he was asking of them an unprecedented task. They would
be required to bombard the two rings of forts that protected Verdun,
demolish the defended villages that also stood in the way and what trench
defences the French had been able to construct when the German
preparations for battle became obvious.
His one chance of success lay with the sloth of the French. After the
Germans had demolished the Belgian forces defending Antwerp in 1914, the
French had declared forts redundant and removed from Verdun many guns
and the garrisons that went with them. The warnings of local commanders
went unheeded, and when the Germans attacked in February 1916 many
forts such as Douaumont and Vaux, thought to be the last word in
fortification by the French public, were little more than empty shells.
Falkenhayn’s plan could no more escape the lessons of trench warfare
than any other. To establish the concentration of artillery needed to demolish
the French defences of Verdun, he concentrated his guns against the bulk of
them that were clustered on the right bank of the River Meuse. For a time
this succeeded. French defenders were blasted out of their positions as the
Germans slowly progressed. Then a new commander, General Pétain, a
master of defensive warfare, was appointed to rectify the position. Pétain
reorganised the French artillery on the left bank of the Meuse so that the
further the Germans progressed the more they exposed their flank to the
French guns. Fort Douaumont fell to the Germans but the French guns were
exacting such a fearful price on the attackers that Falkenhayn had to rethink
his tactics. He widened the attack to the left bank of the Meuse to deal with
the French guns and used a new variety of poison gas (phosgene) as well.
For a time the Germans once more gained ground, this time capturing Fort
Vaux. But the fact was that the Germans were increasingly having difficulty
in providing their troops with adequate fire support. The muddy ground
proved a barrier to moving the heavy guns forward. The French, on the other
hand, began to receive artillery reinforcements in numbers. And they were
able to supply their men and guns through a masterpiece of improvisation. A
continuous conveyer belt of trucks travelling along a single road for the first
time in history was able to supply an entire army. The Voie Sacrée – as it
was known after the war – kept the French in the battle. When the British
offensive at the Somme drew German reserves away from Verdun, new
commanders ( Nivelle and Mangin) were able to return to the offensive. By
November 1916 the Germans had been pushed back to within a few miles of
their start point. The battle had cost each side over 300,000 casualties. The
results were nil.
Meanwhile the British had been making plans that proved to be no better
than Falkenhayn’s. Their new Commander-in-Chief, General Haig, in
consultation with Joffre determined on a joint attack astride the River
Somme in Picardy. As planning proceeded, however, French troops
earmarked for the battle were leached away to Verdun. By May 1916 it was
clear that the offensive would mainly be a British affair.
Haig was confronted by three German trench systems some 2,000 yards
apart, although the third was in the process of construction and not of the
strength of the first two. In addition the Germans had fortified many villages
in the area and built deep dugouts – impervious to all but the heaviest of
shells – to protect their garrisons. Overall they had made the Somme one of
the most strongly defended areas of the Western Front. Haig consulted his
army commander General Rawlinson, of Neuve Chapelle fame, on the type
of operation that should be conducted. Rawlinson, rather reverting to the
Neuve Chapelle model, counselled that only the German first line should be
attacked. Once captured, the guns could be brought forward and a similar
attack made on the next German position. The object, he stated, was to kill
Germans, rather than gain ground. There was much sense in this. What
Rawlinson was advocating was true attrition. The British would overwhelm
a small area of ground with their artillery, ensuring that their casualties
would be fewer than the Germans’. If the dose was repeated often enough
victory would eventually follow. Haig rejected the idea entirely. He thought
not in terms of attrition but of gigantic Napoleonic cavalry sweeps that
would roll up the entire German position in the West. To unleash the cavalry,
therefore, all three German trench systems would have to be overwhelmed at
one blow. Here Haig was making a similar error to Falkenhayn. He had at
his disposal an unprecedented number of guns, but most of them were small
calibre. The heavy guns needed to demolish trenches and the dugouts in
which the German garrisons lurked were in short supply. In even shorter
supply were counter-battery guns – that is, guns that could neutralise the
German artillery. Haig counted the guns but he made no calculations
regarding their tasks. This was to prove fatal.
The battle opened on 1 July 1916 and was one of the great disasters in
British military history (Map 8.2). In attempting to demolish all the German
defences he managed to demolish very few of them. This left many German
machine gunners unscathed, much wire uncut and the German guns almost
entirely intact. The British infantry – who did not walk to their doom
shoulder to shoulder at a slow pace but rather attempted all manner of
innovatory tactics in attempting to traverse no-man’s-land – stood no chance.
Before lunch, at least 30,000 of the 120,000 committed had become
casualties, many before they reached their own front line. At day’s end the
toll was 57,000 casualties of which 20,000 were dead. Only in the south,
with the aid of a vast quantity of French artillery, did the British (and the
French) make some ground.
Map 8.2 The Battle of the Somme, 1916.
Logic proclaimed that the battle be halted and a radical reappraisal
conducted. Nothing of the kind happened. The French implored the British
to continue in order to relieve pressure on Verdun. Haig needed no
prompting. The battle would continue. This it did for almost five months.
There were a few encouraging signs for the British. It so happened that on
the first day some troops that captured the German front line did so behind a
curtain of shells that at the same time fell just in front of them and onto the
German front line. The ‘creeping barrage’, as it became known, then
progressed at a pre-determined pace so that the troops could arrive at the
German line as the shells were still falling on it. The defenders were thus
faced with the unpalatable choice of manning their weapons and risking the
falling shells or remaining in their dugouts and being set upon by the
attackers. Soon this type of infantry protection became standard in all British
attacks. It had its defects however. The guns still lacked the accuracy to
ensure that all shells fell just in front of their own infantry. So some
casualties were caused by shells landing short and those that landed too far
away provided no protection. Moreover, in the early days too few shells
were fired in the barrages, allowing some defenders to remain unattacked.
Worse still, the creeping barrage was not effective in bad weather. Muddy
conditions meant that troops had great difficulty in keeping pace with the
barrage, and low cloud and rain meant that the artillerymen and airmen had
difficulty in gauging where the shells were landing in relation to the
advancing infantry. Nevertheless, this was a significant breakthrough and
would remain the most effective method of infantry protection for the
remainder of the war.
A second British innovation was the tank – an armoured vehicle equipped
with a small gun or machine gun, generally impervious to rifle or machine-
gun fire and capable of smashing down barbed wire entanglements and
shooting up trench defenders. These machines were first tried at the Somme
at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette in September. They proved of variable
utility. Half of the fifty used broke down before they reached the enemy
front line. Conditions inside these primitive machines were appalling, with
temperatures rising to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Petrol fumes inside the tanks
also reduced the endurance of the crews. They did cause panic on some parts
of the front and allowed some villages such as Flers to be captured at modest
cost. But they were not weapons of exploitation. They could only proceed at
walking pace over good going and the churned up ground of most
battlefields meant that the going was often anything but good. The Germans
also adapted to the tank and in short order produced armour-piercing bullets
that made life inside these vehicles more precarious.
The creeping barrage and the tank sum up British accomplishments at the
Somme. For most of the battle small groups of troops struggled forward
against strong trench defences. They came on in the same old way and were
killed in the same old way. At one point in the battle Haig’s forces were
actually attempting to advance in three different directions. Only complete
failure prevented the British front from splitting into three widely separated
sections. The battle ground on into the autumn when rain had turned that
battlefield into an inland lake. Haig remained optimistic. In his world
German morale was about to collapse, although the evidence for this was not
obvious to an outside observer. In London, the government, though provided
with accurate statistics which demonstrated that it took three British soldiers
to kill two Germans, did nothing. Or rather, they allowed the battle to
continue and congratulated Haig on his achievements. What these
achievements amounted to was the unprecedented wearing down of his own
army. At the end of the battle British casualties amounted to over 400,000,
the Germans to over 200,000. The amount of ground gained was derisory –
about ten miles. The strategic gains amounted to nothing.
At the end of 1916 the Germans straightened their line on the Somme
front by withdrawing to prepared defences some miles in the rear (Map 8.3).
The British and French plodded forward over a countryside laid waste by the
enemy. The communications problems this caused meant that there would be
no resumption of the Somme offensive in 1917.
Map 8.3 German withdrawal, 1917, Operation Alberich.
Indeed on the Allied side the end of the old year heralded changes at the
top. Joffre was held to have shot his bolt. The lack of preparations at Verdun
and the lack of achievement at the Somme saw him replaced by General
Nivelle who, somewhat optimistically, was held to have done well in the
final counter-attack stage at Verdun. In Britain the changes were political.
Asquith was not thought to have the vigour to prosecute the war with
determination. He was replaced by Lloyd George, who immediately
promised to deliver to Germany the ‘knock out blow’. Yet Lloyd George was
no devotee of Haig. He regarded the Somme as a disaster for British arms
and sought offensives elsewhere. This proved fruitless. The Italians, when
approached, were not eager to see their men cast away in the prodigious
numbers that had characterised the offensives on the Western Front in 1916.
The Russians too were looking fragile. In the meantime General Nivelle had
developed his own plan for the Western Front. Lloyd George, without
studying the plan in any detail, immediately declared himself an enthusiast
for it. Its main attraction for him was that it was not to be conducted by
Haig. An attempt by the British Prime Minister to subordinate Haig to
Nivelle failed, though it managed to poison relationships between the
military and political leadership of Britain for the remainder of the war. In
the event Haig would be ‘guided’ by Nivelle for the duration of the battle, a
phrase so vague that in effect it meant nothing.
Haig would, however, kick off the offensive by attacking to the north of
the French around Arras in April 1917. The main French offensive would
follow on the Chemin des Dames in April. The planning for Haig’s offensive
indicated that some on the British side were still learning their jobs, but later
events would show that Haig himself could be excluded from this list. The
important phase of the attack would be made by the Canadian Corps on the
heights of Vimy Ridge. This formidable position required the most careful
artillery plan to reduce it. On this occasion such a plan, devised largely by
Major General Alan Brooke (the Alanbrooke of Second World War fame),
was provided. The combination of the creeping barrage, trench destruction
and meticulous counter-battery work were the hallmarks of the preliminary
bombardment. The Canadians, attacking on 9 April, captured the ridge. Haig
seized on this limited but important achievement to unleash his cavalry. He
had obviously learned nothing from the Somme, where for a brief moment a
few horsed-soldiers had pushed through, only to be mowed down by German
machine guns and artillery. A similar result occurred at Arras. The cavalry as
a weapon of exploitation were useless on the Western Front. They were shot
down in numbers without being able to hold a square foot of ground. Further
attempts to push the infantry through ran up against fresh German reserves,
held too far back initially but now arriving on the battlefield in strength.
Haig kept hammering away but to no avail.
On 17 April Nivelle’s offensive opened. Nivelle claimed to have the secret
to success on the Western Front. His artillery preparations certainly showed
an improvement on anything that the French had attempted on the Somme.
And Nivelle had promised that there would be no more attritional warfare. If
his method failed he would break off the offensive. This proved attractive to
politicians who had lived through Verdun and the Somme. But Nivelle’s
preparations for battle were only too evident to the Germans. Indeed a
raiding party had captured Nivelle’s entire plan. So the Germans withdrew
many of their divisions from the area to be bombarded and there constructed
new defences of great depth. Nivelle’s new artillery techniques therefore
largely bombarded ground devoid of German defenders. But Nivelle gained
sufficient ground to announce that victory was assured if his troops just
pressed on. After some weeks this ‘pressing on’ took on the appearance of
Joffre’s failed operations in 1916. This occurred first to the troops who were
conducting these increasingly futile attacks. Spontaneous acts of ‘collective
indiscipline’ broke out among the rank and file. No fewer than sixty-eight of
France’s 112 divisions contained at least some troops who refused to attack.
If this was mutiny, it was conditional. Most troops declared themselves
ready to hold the front against an enemy attack – they would not, however,
undertake any offensive operations of their own. The French government
declared the whole affair the work of agitators and revolutionaries, but they
acted quite differently. Some ringleaders were shot (the number varies
between fifty and seventy depending on which sources are consulted).
Notwithstanding these executions, the overall response was conciliatory. The
troops were promised better leave conditions, improved food and more rest.
Above all the offensive was called off. Nivelle was sidelined in favour of
Pétain, the general most careful with the lives of the ordinary soldier. This
ended the mutiny. But for the foreseeable future the French army would be
in no position to conduct a large offensive. The main burden of the war on
the Western Front now fell on the British.
This was despite the fact that a very large event had occurred in April
1917. The United States had entered the war on the Allied side. Provoked by
the sinking of American ships by German U-boats and by preposterous
German schemes to raise revolt in Mexico, Woodrow Wilson, the President
too proud to fight in 1916, took a united country to war. But the American
army was very small and would not appear in numbers on the Western Front
until 1918. This fact seemed to indicate a careful policy on the part of the
British until the Americans arrived. But that was not how Sir Douglas Haig
viewed events. He came forward with a plan for a gigantic offensive out of
the Ypres salient in Belgium. He would sweep through to the Belgian coast
and then turn south and roll up the whole German line. If this sounded like
the Somme with a sharp right turn instead of a left, it was. But Haig now
pronounced that he had the men and above all the munitions to accomplish
in 1917 what had eluded him the year before. Given his antipathy towards
Haig, it was surprising that Lloyd George agreed to this plan. On the other
hand, perhaps the Prime Minister thought that after all Haig might just
deliver the knock-out blow that he promised when he replaced Asquith. The
stage was set for the Third Battle of Ypres, or as it became known,
Passchendaele.
The preliminaries of this battle were promising. The Messines Ridge to
the north of the Ypres salient overlooked the ground to be crossed by the
infantry and had to be captured before the main operation could start. As it
happened, the British had been tunnelling under this ridge since 1915 and
placing great stores of explosives or mines in the shafts. All told, 1 million
pounds of TNT was in place by June 1917. General Plumer, in charge of the
Second Army at Messines, exploded them on 7 June 1917. At the same time
an enormous artillery bombardment was directed against the German
artillery. This combination of mines and shells enabled the British to capture
the ridge at moderate cost.
It might have been reasonably expected that the Fifth Army, which was
going to conduct the main attack, would have moved immediately to take
advantage of the rather shattered state of the Germans after Messines.
Nothing of the sort happened. There was a seven-week pause during which
Haig introduced a new commander for this army, General Gough, who had
done nothing so far in the war to mark him out for high command. His main
qualifications were that he was a cavalry general and a favourite of Haig’s.
Gough, Haig thought, would provide the drive to ensure that the cavalry
swept forward to the Belgian coast.
The battle started well enough on 31 July. The opening bombardment
showed some more sophistication than that of the opening day of the
Somme. A creeping barrage was fired along the entire front and there were
many more heavy guns to shell the German batteries. Gough made
reasonable ground, securing much of the Pilckem Ridge on the left of the
attack. However he made absolutely no progress against the Gheluvelt
Plateau on the right, an area that contained the greatest concentration of
German guns. On 1 August rain fell and continued to fall for the rest of the
month. The advantages Gough had – newer tanks, increased artillery
resources, the ability to fire an accurate creeping barrage – all went for
nothing, as the battlefield quickly became a quagmire. Troops drowned in
the mud. Low cloud meant that aircraft could not spot the fall of shell for the
guns. The troops could hardly get out of their trenches, let alone follow a
creeping barrage. Gough, however, remained optimistic, resorting when
failure could not be concealed to blaming the troops for their lack of vigour.
In a month the line hardly moved. This was too much even for Haig. Gough
was sidelined to command only the northern section of the attack. Plumer
was brought in to command the main event, which would be the capture of
the Gheluvelt Plateau.
Plumer made several crucial demands before he proceeded. He insisted on
time to ensure that his preparations were thorough and he insisted on a
period of fine weather. Nor, he insisted, would he aim for distant objectives
such as the Belgian coast or even the village of Passchendaele, some seven
miles distant, that was meant to be captured on the first day of battle. Haig
acquiesced. In three battles in late September and early October – Menin
Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde – Plumer captured the plateau. The
battles were perfect examples of the ‘bite and hold’ technique, where huge
amounts of artillery were fired against the German defences. The creeping
barrage was slowed and thickened so that troops could take the newest
German form of defence, the concrete pillbox. Then, when the infantry had
reached their objectives, which were usually no more than 3,000 yards away,
a standing barrage was fired in front of them for some hours. This negated
new German tactics, which involved thinning out their front lines to avoid
casualties and massing most of their troops well behind the front to counter-
attack before the British could establish themselves in their newly won
positions. To launch an effective counter-attack the Germans first had to
penetrate this barrage. They soon abandoned the attempt, the cost being too
high and the number of troops arriving at the new British front line being
insufficient to launch concerted attacks. Instead, during the last of the three
Plumer battles (Broodseinde) the Germans once more packed troops in the
front positions in an attempt to prevent the British from obtaining a hold. All
these tactics meant, however, was heavier German casualties as Plumer’s
bombardment destroyed these positions. And these battles produced another
hopeful sign. The six French divisions that were operating on the northern
flank of the British attack advanced with their Allies with considerable élan.
The trauma inflicted upon the French army by Nivelle was beginning to
wear off. Under suitable conditions the French could fight with tenacity and
resolve.
The German command had no answer to these tactics. The British artillery
resources overwhelmed them in the attack and prevented any kind of
counter-attack. The limited objectives ensured that the gains won could be
held. A formula to grind down the German army had been discovered and
successfully implemented. But the method required fine weather, and after
Plumer’s third stroke, that deserted the British. In October the rains returned
and so did the quagmire. But by now the British command, including
Plumer, had the bit between their teeth. The conditions that had ensured
success in September and October had gone, but the battle was pushed
forward on the usual grounds that German morale was on the verge of
cracking. No such happy event ensued. Instead the conditions of August
were repeated except that they were rather worse. The ground being fought
over was lowlying and the continual shelling had destroyed what remained
of the water table in this part of Flanders. The objective was now scaled
down to the Passchendaele Ridge, a feature of no tactical importance
whatever. The troops, in conditions which beggared the imagination, clawed
or crawled or swam their way forward. On 17 November Haig announced
that the Passchendaele Ridge had been secured. Actually it had not – all the
British had managed was to establish a tenuous hold on part of it. This
ground, gained at such cost (250,000 British casualties), had to be evacuated
in three days when the Germans attacked it the following year. A battle that
contained episodes of great promise, in the end proved as futile as those
conducted in 1916.
Yet the year would finish on a hopeful if ambiguous note. Well to the
south of Flanders laid an untouched area of ground around Cambrai. Quietly,
Haig assembled troops, tanks and artillery. The ground was firm, tanks were
to be used en masse and, of greater importance, new artillery techniques
were to be tried. Sound ranging – a method that increased artillery accuracy
and will be discussed in more detail later – was used. Other methods, also to
be discussed, added to artillery accuracy. These new methods meant that
there was no need to fire a preliminary bombardment, thus alerting the
enemy to an impending attack. An element of surprise had been returned to
the battlefield. These methods ensured that in the first instance the British
caught the Germans by surprise and made good ground at modest cost. If
Haig had halted he might have chalked up a notable success. But as always
the idea was to get the cavalry through. So the British infantry kept fighting
under more and more adverse conditions as the tanks broke down and the
artillery support became less sure. In the end, the Germans counter-attacked
these over-extended lines and recaptured almost all the ground initially lost.
Church bells had been rung in England to mark the initial success. Hands
were also soon wrung as failure rapidly followed. The British, however, had
learned some valuable lessons in 1917. The question was: would they apply
them in 1918 or would the Germans strike first?
The fact was that it was always likely that the Germans would strike the
first blow in the West in 1918. Haig had worn down the British army at
Passchendaele; the French were not yet ready to take the offensive after the
mutinies; and the Americans were not yet trained to play a major role.
Ludendorff, however, was very aware of the build up of American forces in
France and determined to strike before they could be fully deployed. In
addition Ludendorff was in a position to transfer troops from the Eastern
Front. The Bolshevik Revolution saw the exit of Russia from the war and
there were potentially millions of men available for redeployment to the
West. Typically, however, Ludendorff only transferred some of them. The
remainder was left to fulfil as yet unachieved German war aims in the East.
Where was he to strike? The south of the Western Front was quickly ruled
out because it was too mountainous. The French front was tempting, but no
great strategic objectives lay behind it. In any case Ludendorff had identified
Britain as the major foe, so he determined to strike at their section of the
line. There were two possible areas for an offensive. One was around Ypres
and was attractive because of its proximity to the Channel ports. But as
Passchendaele had demonstrated, the ground could be boggy. Between Arras
and Saint-Quentin the ground was much firmer and would dry earlier in the
year. This would allow an offensive in the early spring. Here is where the
Germans would make their first strike.
Ludendorff had at his disposal about 6,600 guns deployed along the
Western Front. To achieve a massive concentration of artillery he gathered
three-quarters of them on the front of the attack. He also massed his infantry.
No fewer than 750,000 men were also grouped opposite the British, and
these men would be used in a new way. The elite of his force would be
concentrated in storm troop divisions. They would not advance in coherent
linear formations as of old. Instead they would penetrate as deeply as
possible into the British defences, bypassing strongpoints and centres of
resistance without pausing for flank protection. These bypassed areas would
be captured by the ordinary infantry divisions that would follow the storm
troopers. The plan was that once the breakthrough had been made the
Germans would head for the Channel and then turn north, entrapping the
BEF and a proportion of the French and Belgian armies as well. Victory
must follow.
The number of guns available to the Germans allowed for a short
bombardment of incredible ferocity. The British rear areas and headquarters
would be deluged with shells in order to disrupt the functioning of
command. Then the guns would be turned onto the front system in an
attempt to stun the defenders just before the infantry support.
Historians have made much of the innovatory nature of these tactics, but
in some ways they bear a desperately old-fashioned look. To achieve his
objectives Ludendorff could not support his troops with artillery beyond the
initial phase. The big guns in particular would soon be left far behind. All
this meant that in short order the storm troops would be required to achieve
their objectives by their own efforts. What Ludendorff was attempting was
to win the battle (once the initial breach had been made) by infantry alone. It
might be thought that the time was long gone when a commander on the
Western Front would seek victory through his foot soldiers. Unless his foes
collapsed Ludendorff was risking the annihilation of his armies.
Ludendorff’s offensive opened on 21 March 1918 (Map 8.4). It fell on
weak British defences recently taken over from the French. Behind them
were few reserves because Haig had cast them away at Passchendaele. In the
south the storm troops quickly broke through. In a week they advanced forty
miles, thus bringing to an end the stalemate on the Western Front that had
lasted from late 1914. Soon they approached the important railway junction
of Amiens. Ludendorff’s tactics seemed to have worked. But soon the
crucial shortcomings in his method revealed themselves. The marching
German troops were nearing exhaustion. Casualties, especially in the elite
formations, had been heavy. The artillery was struggling to get forward. The
infantry had only light weapons for fire support. On the other side fresh
troops were being rushed to the battlefield by rail. These came mainly from
the French sector but also from the unattacked section of the British front
and even from Britain itself.
Map 8.4 The German offensive, 1918.
Thwarted in the south, Ludendorff turned north. On 9 April he attacked

just south of the Ypres salient. Once more there were immediate gains,
especially on the front of two bemused Portuguese divisions. But here too,
however, and for the same reasons as noted, the offensive ground to a halt.
The British army was battered but intact.
Nor were the Allies showing any inclination to give up the fight. At a
meeting at Doullens on 26 March, the French and British put national
differences aside and appointed General Foch as Supreme Commander of all
Allied forces on the Western Front. The symbolism here was important.
Foch was determined to see the war through to a successful conclusion.
There would be no capitulation while he remained in charge.
Ludendorff was now in a quandary. He had attacked the British twice and
failed. He now announced that as it was French reserves that had saved
Britain he must now attack the French. He did on 27 May in the Chemin des
Dames. His methods again won immediate gains, helped by the obtuseness
of the French commander, who had packed his troops into the forward
positions. Soon German troops were back on the Marne and in sight of Paris.
Then French reserves began to arrive and Ludendorff’s men ran out of
steam. Further attacks, now directed against Paris, followed. These were
partly thwarted by the intervention of the Americans at Chateau Thierry.
In all, Ludendorff launched five offensives in the West between March
and June 1918. All gained ground but none of it was strategically significant.
Indeed, the great bulges made in the Allied line meant that in July the
Germans were required to hold a front twice the length they had held in
March. And they were required to hold it with fewer men. These offensives
bore out the slogan of the French General Mangin: ‘Whatever you do you
lose a lot of men.’ Ludendorff had certainly done that. The offensives had
cost the German army 800,000 men. The Allies had themselves lost about
900,000 but they had greater manpower resources and were able to bear the
strain at least somewhat better. Nor had Ludendorff unlocked any key to
victory in the West. The breakthrough must be achieved by the artillery. That
much he knew. But as to what happened next he was as clueless as had been
Joffre and Falkenhayn in 1916.
Events that soon followed Ludendorff’s last offensive demonstrated that
the Allies were far from being a spent force. The French army, now
recovered from their nadir of the previous year, led the way. On 18 July two
French armies accompanied by 750 tanks fell on the flank of the salient
Ludendorff had created by his advances in May and June. The Germans
were immediately overwhelmed and ordered a withdrawal. The French
followed up by extending the front of battle. By August the Germans were
back on the Aisne.
After these efforts the French stalled. But the task was now to be taken up
by the British to the south of the Somme. In their forthcoming battle they
were to demonstrate just how much they had learned in the previous year –
at least at the intermediate levels of command. Concerning artillery
accuracy, a method tried at Cambrai came into its own. Sound ranging
consisted of a series of microphones placed across the front to be attacked.
These microphones could detect the muffled sound of the firing of a distant
gun. The sound waves were then plotted rather as a seismograph measures
an earthquake. These readings could then be compared and the exact
position of the gun established. By the time the battle began the sound
rangers had established the position of almost all the German batteries with
some precision. Other variations on already established techniques were also
implemented. The creeping barrage was to be fired across the whole front
using more shells than previously and proceeding at a rate that allowed for
various aspects of the advance to be checked. Moreover, now each batch of
shells was weighed before battle so that guns would not be rendered
inaccurate by firing shells of differing weights. In addition at least six
weather forecasts were being received per day by the batteries so that guns
could be recalibrated in order to adapt to the new conditions. And before
battle each gun was taken out of the line and tested for wear and adjusted
accordingly. What all this meant is that for the first time the guns had a
reasonable chance of hitting the targets for which they aimed.
The British infantry battalions now contained more firepower than ever.
Portable machine guns (Lewis guns) introduced in 1915, were now available
in number, as were grenades fired from rifles. Trench mortars accompanied
the troops in unprecedented numbers. So while infantry battalions contained
fewer men than in 1914 (such was the price of Haig’s failed offensives) they
contained more clout. Accompanying the troops would also be about 450
Mark V tanks, a weapon far more reliable than those used on the Somme and
in the battles of 1917. What all this amounted to was a weapons system – the
first in modern warfare – where each weapon supported the other and all
would be required to be neutralised to bring an attack to a halt.
All this had come about by the impressive efforts of the Allied munitions
industries. They had been able to replace all the equipment lost in the
prodigious German advances earlier in the year, and in many cases replace it
with better equipment. On the other side the situation was quite different.
The German economy, under the supervision of the military since
Hindenburg and Ludendorff had taken over in August 1916, had been run
into the ground. The general rule was that absolute priority went to the
military. In this fashion the German railway stock had been diverted to the
needs of the army and worn out. Nor were the military capable of running a
modern munitions industry, so the farcical situation arose where shell
factories were constructed out of the very steel that was needed to make the
shells. Some had then to be demolished to provide the shells that the
Germans desperately needed.
Fig. 8.1 Distribution of German forces 1914–18 by front.
On the battlefield the overall decline on the German side soon became
apparent. Because of the casualties caused by Ludendorff and his insane
obsession with obtaining his war aims on the Eastern Front, infantry
divisions in the West had to be reduced in size. But, unlike the British and
French, the Germans could expect no incremental increase in firepower from
Germany’s declining war industries. So when the Allies went over to the
offensive, the equipment lost by the Germans would not be replaced.
The British Fourth Army began its offensive on 8 August 1918. A small-
scale rehearsal for this larger battle (at Hamel) launched on 4 July, and
appropriately including American as well as Australian troops, had
demonstrated the efficacy of the new methods. Now they would be tried on a
large scale. South of the Somme the Canadian and Australian Corps would
attack. These were formidable fighting units. They had been out of the line
during the major German attacks earlier in the year and were at full strength.
To the north of the Somme, the British III Corps would provide flank guard
as would the French to the south. At the end of the day the Germans had
been driven back eight miles on a nine-mile front. The Allies captured 400
guns and inflicted 27,000 casualties on the Germans. Their losses were 9,000
men.
The key to this success lay in the new weapons system employed. Walking
over the ground after the battle, it was found that most German guns had
been accurately located by the sound rangers and blanketed when the
bombardment came down at zero hour. So this method of artillery location
obviated the necessity of firing a preliminary bombardment to locate the
enemy guns. Surprise had returned to the battlefield.
The other instrument which had stopped infantry attacks, the machine gun,
was neutralised by the creeping barrage which kept the heads down of the
defenders until they could be set upon by the attackers advancing close
behind the curtain of shells. Those missed by the barrage were cleaned up by
the troops firing rifle grenades and trench mortars from a flank. Finally the
tanks, unhampered by the hostile artillery, had also helped keep down enemy
resistance and in some cases had forced German soldiers to flee from the
battlefield. The tank was but one instrument of the weapons system, but
there is no question that it helped push the advance further than it would
otherwise have gone.
This battle marked a breakthrough in methods of waging war. If German
artillery and machine guns could be dominated, the stalemate of the Western
Front need never return. Whether the troops facing the Allies were of good
morale or poor hardly mattered if they were to be deprived of their main
weapons of resistance. Either the Germans had to discover a way of
thwarting these new methods or the end of the war was inevitable.
The Germans, though downhearted, still considered that they could
reintroduce the stalemate which might at least force a compromise peace on
the Allies. At Amiens their defences were rudimentary. But behind the front
stood the formidable Hindenburg Line, which after the Battle of the Somme,
the Germans had developed into a sophisticated defensive system. How
would the Allies’ new methods of attack stand up to this formidable
obstacle?
This question did not arise immediately. The Fourth Army continued on
its successful way in the days following Amiens. But after a few days its
attacks became more and more uncoordinated. Command was now more
difficult, many of the tanks had broken down, the system of sound ranging
took time to move forward, so the new German guns that had been rushed to
the area were more difficult to locate. Casualties rose as ground gained
diminished. Were we about to witness a repeat of the successful phase at
Passchendaele? Were Foch and Haig about to push their troops further than
they could reasonably go? The answer was no. Haig and Foch wished to
press on but they encountered stiff resistance from their lower order
commanders. General Currie, who led the Canadian Corps, indicated that he
might appeal to his own government if he was forced to continue. Rawlinson
backed him up. Haig, despite objections from Foch, backed down. He would
attack on another part of the front where preparations were well advanced,
but he would not push on at Amiens. With this Foch had to be satisfied.
So Amiens was closed down and a new front opened just to the north of it
involving the British Third Army. Using similar tactics it too made ground.
When that attack stalled, the First British Army was set in motion. By these
means the whole front moved forward one step at a time. The Germans were
being comprehensively outfought, as the seizure of the tactically important
Mont Saint-Quentin north of Amiens demonstrated, or they were forced to
withdraw to maintain a coherent front, as in Flanders. By the middle of the
month the outskirts of the mighty Hindenburg Line were reached.
The next series of battles saw the climax of the war on the Western Front.
The Americans and the French moved first. On 26 September they attacked
in the Meuse-Argonne region. So far the Americans had played only a small
role in the fighting. Even now they found the going difficult, as their
inexperienced armies came up against war-hardened German veterans.
Nevertheless, the attack made some progress, though at high cost.
But by then their efforts had been overshadowed by operations to the
north that commenced on 27 September and involved five British and two
French armies, the Belgian army and two American divisions of troops
fighting with the British. The Hindenburg defences were formidable. In
places they were three miles deep, with protecting wire and concrete
machine gun posts. In some sectors they were protected by steep-banked
canals. Against these obstacles there was no question of employing surprise
as had been used at Amiens and at other battles. A long bombardment was
necessary to destroy enough wire and machine gun posts to allow the
passage of the infantry. Also, because the Saint-Quentin Canal lay across the
main area of operations, tanks could only play a limited role.
But the Fourth Army (which once again was to play the major role) had
several advantages. It had captured the German defensive plans, it had the
same methods of artillery accuracy as at Amiens and the British munitions
industry had provided it with shells in unprecedented numbers.
The battle which started on 29 September revealed the potency of these
factors (Map 8.5). Counter-battery fire was as effective as it had been on 8
August, so most German guns had been neutralised at zero hour. Not all the
attack went well. In the northern sector, the powerful defences held up the
American and Australian attackers and thus deprived them of a supporting
barrage. Little progress was made. Events further south redeemed this lack
of progress. A British division supported by an unprecedented number of
artillery shells crossed the Saint-Quentin Canal and outflanked the German
defenders holding up the Australians and Americans. For each minute of this
attack, 126 shells from the field guns alone fell on every 500 yards of
German trench. And this intensity was maintained for the eight hours of the
attack. No defence could withstand this. The Germans fell back. The
Australian and American attack regained momentum and by 5 October the
Hindenburg Line – the last major German defensive line in the West – had
been breached.
Map 8.5 Breaking the Hindenburg Line, autumn 1918.
The Allied armies had now developed methods that could overcome the
Germans whether they lurked behind strong defences or were in the open.
There were limitations to the method. No attack could be pushed beyond the
point where it could be protected by the guns. So, between October and early
November, the Allies made a series of successful, if unspectacular, advances
along their entire front. By the beginning of November all the German
armies could do was to accelerate the speed of their retreat.
In a rare lucid moment, Ludendorff realised that the game was up. On 28
September he recommended making peace. He then changed his mind but
the newly appointed civilian government was not listening. They sought an
armistice, which was really a surrender on terms, the terms being Woodrow
Wilson’s Fourteen Points as modified by the British and French. The
Armistice was granted on 11 November 1918. Finally, all was quiet on the
Western Front.
It had taken the Allies an unconscionable time to learn the lessons of the
Western Front; that is, troops could not be pushed beyond the point where
the artillery could protect them. For far too long Haig and Joffre and Nivelle
and Foch thought that Napoleonic principles of war applied, that the war
would be won by gigantic offensives culminating in cavalry sweeps. For this
they had some excuse. In the past all armies had available to them weapons
of exploitation – usually the cavalry. In this war there was no weapon to
exploit a break-in. The tanks were too unreliable, the cavalry too good a
target for the machine gunners. Gaining ground was not as important as
wearing down the opposition. No Allied commander set out to do this. All
their battles were meant to win the war – or to go a long way towards it – on
their own account. Attrition was what occurred when these plans failed. But
at least in the end some on the Allied side did grasp the new realities. No one
on the German side had these insights. The main factor in wearing down the
German army was the Ludendorff offensives of 1918. These desperately old-
fashioned affairs wreaked havoc on Germany’s dwindling supplies of
manpower. No sense of what was possible ever seems to have occurred to
the German High Command. They would later complain about being
stabbed in the back by the collapse of the home front. In fact they were the
victims of their own folly. Their armies were out-manoeuvred and out-
thought by those of the Allies. That the military leadership of Germany
refused to recognise this truth would have dire consequences in future years.
9 The Eastern Front
Holger Afflerbach ‘Russia is not a country that can be formally conquered –
that is to say occupied – certainly not with the present strength of the
European States . . . Such a country can only be subdued by its own
weakness, and by the effects of internal dissension.’1 Carl von Clausewitz
had drawn this conclusion from Napoleon’s march on Moscow in 1812. He
concluded that Napoleon, if he wanted to make war against Russia, had done
everything right, but ‘the 1812 campaign failed because the Russian
government kept its nerve and the people remained loyal and steadfast’.2 It
is also of some importance that Clausewitz wrote about Napoleon’s Russian
campaign in his chapter on ‘The plan of a war designed to lead to the total
defeat of the enemy.’3
Clausewitz’s analysis proved to be right in the First World War too.

However, he was not the only one to believe that Russia could not be
subdued. As a result of the Napoleonic experience, this was a general belief
in Europe before 1914. There had been wars against Russia and the Tsarist
Empire had lost some of them, even major ones like the Crimean War or the
Russo-Japanese War, but it had fought them at its very periphery. Napoleon
was the last man who had tried to subdue the country and ‘his example did
not invite imitation’.4
One of the most important developments which the First World War
brought in its wake was that the notion that Russia could not be subdued
started to change – with enormous consequences for the history of the
twentieth century. No less important was the fact that the Russian
government, on the other side, relied for too long on the experience of
victory against Napoleon and other invaders, and disregarded any warning
that it could be brought down by inner weakness when there was still time to
leave the conflict with no, or only moderate, harm.
The Eastern Front is an enormous topic which deserves much more
research than it has received.5 This front stretched from 1914 to 1916 from
the Baltic Sea to the Romanian border (Map 9.1). After Romania entered the
war in late August 1916, it stretched even further, reaching as far as the
Black Sea. A huge number of battles and encounters took place in this vast
theatre of war, among them important events like the battles of Lemberg and
Augustow in 1914, the battle in the Carpathian Mountains in early 1915,
Vilna in 1915, Hermannstadt and Bucharest in 1916, Riga in 1917 and the
Kerensky offensive 1917, to mention only some of many encounters. Most
of these battles were closely linked with military operations or political
events in other parts of Europe, in other theatres of war like the Balkans, the
Dardanelles, Italy or the Western Front. Obviously there is also an ocean of
other questions which could be asked in this context.
Map 9.1 The Eastern Front, 1914–18.
Instead of trying to cover this vast ground, I will focus on only three
events which I hope will serve as examples to demonstrate some of the
larger military developments on the Eastern Front. First, I offer a short
description of three important battles on the Eastern Front – a battle
narrative; then, I want to show why they were turning points of this war and
how they influenced its duration and outcome. The encounters I have chosen
are the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914; the fall of Przemyśl in March 1915
and the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów in May 1915; and the Brusilov offensive in
June 1916. Together they changed the history not only of the Eastern Front
and of the First World War, but also of twentieth-century Europe.
Tannenberg
The first month of the war started with an important and impressive German
victory over the Russians – the Battle of Tannenberg, which was fought from
26 to 30 August 1914 in Eastern Prussia. The victory happened on a front
where nobody had expected it. During the first weeks of the war the largest
part of the German army moved through Belgium and northern France to
encircle the French army. Seven German armies fought in the West, while
only one army in the East defended Eastern Prussia. The Russians could not
focus on Germany alone, but had to take care of Austria-Hungary too. The
Russian High Command (Stavka) at Baranovichi, whose strongest figure
was General Danilov, the Quartermaster General, was relatively powerless,
blocked by intrigues – as Norman Stone has shown – and could not agree on
a main objective. The Russian army was split into two halves (fronts) which
operated with a very large degree of independence. Important decisions were
made by the commanders of these fronts.6 The north-western front was
commanded by Jakow Zhilinski; his three armies faced the German army.
The south-western front, with four armies, was commanded by Nikolai
Ivanov and faced the Austro-Hungarian army.7 The question of where to
start the main offensive caused great concern and a number of poor decisions
followed.8 Despite its being the smaller part of the Russian army, Russian
superiority on the German front was still substantial. The German Eighth
Army in Eastern Prussia seemed far too weak to offer effective resistance;
but this was, from the point of view of German Headquarters, not regarded
as necessary. The German war plan – commonly called the Schlieffen Plan,
though recently its authorship and even its existence has been a matter of
considerable controversy9 – required the defenders in the East only to delay
the Russian advance, until the victorious armies arrived from the West and
changed the strategic balance in the East. This was also what Moltke and his
Austro-Hungarian colleague, Conrad von Hötzendorf, had discussed before
the war; not only the Eighth Army, but also the Austrians expected speedy
German relief. It is remarkable and also characteristic of German pre-1914
military thinking about Russia, that there was no plan as to how this war in
the East could be fought and won after the supposed victory in the West. All
plans ended with the completion of operations in the West. We can suppose
that staff officers imagined being able to force Russia to conclude peace
after winning some decisive victories on the soil of the very western border
of the Empire, in cooperation with Austria-Hungary. No large-scale invasion
plans against Russia were extant, and all previous war plans against Russia
focused either on defence or on limited operations against Russian Poland.
Already in August 1914 things were not moving according to the German
plan. The Western Front looked fine and until early September victory in the
West seemed possible and imminent; but the Russian army mobilised much
faster than expected, and following urgent French demands it began
advancing towards Eastern Prussia. This created panic among the civilian
population. The fear seemed justified, especially from a military point of
view: ten-and-a-half German divisions fought against nineteen Russian
divisions, which were also superior in artillery.10 Only 173,000 German
soldiers were fighting on this front against 485,000 Russians – which meant
that the Russians had a superiority of 2.8:1.11 The first firefights brought
mixed results and the engagements were broken off by the German
commander Prittwitz von Gaffron. The German troops retreated and the
Russian ‘steamroller’ started to move westward into Eastern Prussia,
occupying German territory. The behaviour of Russian troops during the
occupation is at this moment the object of promising historical research,
comparing it to the atrocities committed by German troops in the West.12
Afraid of Russian cruelties, more than 800,000 Germans fled their homes
and moved westward.13 Long lines of refugees filled the roads, with carts
full of hastily collected luggage and household goods, sometimes even
followed by livestock. Occasionally this human traffic hindered the
operations of the German defenders. Cossacks sacked and destroyed 34,000
houses. Civilians as well as the general staff wondered if the Russians could
be stopped before they overran the whole of Eastern Prussia and perhaps
even Silesia. Prittwitz, in a moment of panic, wanted to retreat to the Vistula.
The younger Moltke was terrified and decided to change the command in
Eastern Prussia immediately. He sent his ablest strategist, Ludendorff, to the
East; Ludendorff was too junior to become an army commander. Paul von
Hindenburg took that roll, though he was ordered not to interfere with his
Chief of Staff.14 Prittwitz and his Chief of Staff Waldersee were sacked.
When Hindenburg and Ludendorff arrived by train in Eastern Prussia, they
found that the staff of the Eighth Army, among them Max Hoffmann,15 had
already sketched out an operation against the Russians which made good use
of weaknesses that were the consequence of the hasty Russian advance.16
Leaving aside the stories of Russian troops and staff stopped by well-
stocked wine cellars, there were several strategic weak points in the Russian
advance. Russian wireless messages were not encoded, but neither was some
of the German traffic; wireless operation was in its infancy. The Russian
plans were therefore accessible to the Germans.17
Of even greater significance was the way the terrain of Eastern Prussia
crippled the Russian offensive. The two advancing Russian armies, the First
(Njemen) Army commanded by General Rennenkampf and the Second
(Narev) Army commanded by General Samsonov, were divided by the
Masurian Lakes. If one of them was attacked at the right moment, the other
one would be unable to help straightaway. Of further help were the north–
south rail lines which worked entirely in German favour and helped to
deploy German troops with the necessary speed. The attack against the
Narev Army was led by Hindenburg, a figurehead who, thanks to his
phlegmatic nature, was a good match for his nervous Chief of Staff.
According to Hoffmann, Hindenburg was a military nullity (‘The guy is a
really sad fellow; this great commander and hero of the people . . . Never did
a man become famous with so little physical and mental effort’).18 The
recent research by Pyta and Nebelin on Hindenburg and Ludendorff has
confirmed this polemical assessment. Hindenburg was a mere figurehead,19
and the battle design was mainly the work of Ludendorff, Hoffmann and
other staff officers.
The success of German tactics exceeded all expectations, but was, as
Norman Stone rightly emphasises, the result not only of good German
soldiering, but also of sheer luck.20 On the one hand Samsonov’s army
pushed forward into the German trap and therefore played into German
hands, on the other the insubordination and uncoordinated manoeuvres of
German commanders like General François led to results which were not
planned, but successful nonetheless.21 The 153,000 German troops attacking
the Narev Army were numerically inferior against this Russian army of
191,000 men. But they could envelop large parts of the enemy’s army in the
Masurian swamps and lakes near Ortelsburg-Neidenburg-Hohenstein. The
Russian commander General Samsonov shot himself in despair, and his staff
fled by foot. Here was a battle which produced a ‘Cannae-style’ victory of
annihilation by encirclement.22 Over 100,000 Russians were captured;23 the
army destroyed; several hundred heavy guns and machine guns taken. The
result was not that Eastern Prussia was free of the enemy – Russian
occupation lasted until 1915 – but that the threat of a Russian offensive was
stopped for the moment. In addition, the other Russian army was attacked in
the Battle of the Masurian Lakes. This did not lead to the complete
annihilation of the Njemen Army, but to its retreat, with high losses.
For the German population of East Prussia, the initial Russian advance
into German territory had been a traumatic experience. Hundreds of reports
were written by local authorities and sent to the civilian Cabinet of the
Kaiser describing the huge devastation and expressing the gratitude of the
province for having been saved.
Given the numerical odds on the German side, contemporaries talked at
first about the ‘miracle’ of Tannenberg. Simultaneously a new story began to
be told, another interpretation of this victory which was responsible for an
important shift in German approaches to the war against Russia. Hindenburg
and Ludendorff had a great talent for self-promotion; indeed, Hindenburg
especially, despite being slow as a military leader and as an individual, was a
real master in so doing.24 The battle was given a highly symbolic name:
Hindenburg and Ludendorff suggested to Wilhelm II that it should be called
‘The Battle of Tannenberg’ after the defeat suffered by German knights at
the hands of a Polish Lithuanian army in 1410.25 In the immediate pre-1914
period the battle of 1410 was misinterpreted by nationalists as a symbol of
the eternal fight of Slavs against Germans. This was the Polish as well as the
German view. The Polish national painter Matejko had produced an
enormous painting of the battle, and four years before the outbreak of the
First World War the Polish population of Krakow had celebrated the fifth
centenary of the ‘Battle of Grunwald’ (as they called it), and it is said that
150,000 people attended. In August 1914, the Russian commander Grand
Duke Nicolai tried to create a ‘Slavic bond’ between Russians and Poles
with his ‘Grunwald Manifesto’ in an attempt to win the Polish people’s
support for the Tsar. Hindenburg showed that he was a child of his time
when he wrote: ‘The misfortune of 1410 is avenged, on the old
battleground.’
The victory of Tannenberg was of major significance. It gave Germany
time to organise its defence in the East, and indeed during the rest of the war
Russian forces were unable to defeat German troops in a major battle. But
the psychological consequences of this victory were even more important
than the practical ones. One aspect was the Hindenburg myth, the myth of
German invincibility, with its disastrous consequences for subsequent
German history.
In October 1914 Hindenburg and Ludendorff became commanders of the
German troops on the Eastern Front, as ‘Oberkommando der Deutschen
Streitkräfte im Osten’ (Ober Ost). They used their prestige and command in
sharp opposition to the Imperial German general staff. They started to
intrigue immediately, in the conviction that they knew the recipe for German
victory, but the others did not. They took over the leadership of the whole of
the German army in late August 1916. The defeat in 1918 and the ‘stab-in-
the-back legend’ were their responsibility. Despite the defeat, Hindenburg
became President of the Weimar Republic – and made Hitler Chancellor in
1933. The fruits of Tannenberg ripened disastrously in later years.26
The success of Tannenberg was important for another reason too. It was
the result of good German leadership, but also of luck and of huge mistakes
by an enemy who remained strong and would probably not commit the same
errors again. Indeed, Tannenberg was and remained the only successful
encirclement of a Russian army during the war. But a growing group of
German strategists, especially Ludendorff and his followers, interpreted
Tannenberg not as a victory which they had won under very favourable
circumstances, but as the result of their strategic genius. They believed they
now had a recipe for victory which could and should be repeated on a larger
scale. More than fifty years ago Jehuda Wallach called this notion ‘belief in
the battle of annihilation’, ‘Das Dogma der Vernichtungsschlacht’.27 Karl-
Heinz Frieser used similar terms in his book on 1940, entitled The Blitzkrieg
Legend,28 showing how a surprising and extremely lucky operational
success could be transmuted into proof of the validity of a belief in the battle
of annihilation, which could be repeated on the next occasion.
This position can be traced as early as late 1914 when, fuelled by
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Ober Ost and its followers advocated the idea
of an ‘Über-Tannenberg’, that is to say, a huge encircling operation against
the Russian army. The significance of the Battle of Tannenberg lies here: in
the gradual abandonment of the idea that it was impossible to subdue Russia;
a change which had monumental consequences. And yet even Hindenburg,
Ludendorff and Hoffmann did not believe, from one moment to the next,
that it was easy to defeat Russia. This would be a terrible oversimplification.
Their arguments have also to be seen in the context of a reckless power
struggle within the upper echelons of the German army.29 ‘Ober Ost’ saw the
difficulties and sometimes even the impossibility of defeating the Russians,
due to insurmountable problems of time and space. Hoffmann said in spring
1915: ‘It is impossible to annihiliate the Russians completely.’30
Nevertheless, after Tannenberg the impossible started to turn into the
thinkable.
To some extent, this bolder German attitude towards defeating Russia was
more surprising than a hesitant and cautious one. Respect, even fear, of
Russia’s enormous power was a part of the Prussian military heritage.
Frederick the Great, who owed his survival in the Seven Years’ War only to
the timely death of the Russian empress and the new Tsar’s abandonment of
the enemy coalition, was afraid of Russia’s growing might. Bismarck was
also always aware of Russian power and saw the secret of good politics ‘in a
good treaty with Russia’. Imperial Russia had started a huge rearmament
programme after the Bosnian annexation crisis which began the last round of
the pre-1914 armaments race31 and which created growing anxiety in
Germany. Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg said that in Russia ‘an
amazing economic development started in this huge empire, so well
equipped with inexhaustible resources, and at the same moment the Russian
army was reorganised in a manner never before seen.’32 He concluded on 7
July 1914, more than a week after the Sarajevo assassination, that ‘The
future belongs to Russia, which is growing and growing and is becoming an
increasingly burdensome nightmare for us.’33 The fear of this Russian
rearmament was also Moltke’s main argument for promoting a war ‘the
sooner the better’.34 Time, German strategists believed, was working in
favour of the Russians and the Entente, not of Germany. The growing fear of
the Russian ‘steamroller’ played an important part in the pre-1914 official
German mindset.35
Therefore it is remarkable that a single battle, a battle which did not
change Russia’s numerical superiority and which did not eliminate the big
Russian advantage of space, and which was furthermore outweighed by huge
Russian successes on the Austrian Front, could change these long-lasting
assumptions and begin to replace them with a growing feeling of German
superiority. Andreas Hillgruber has argued persuasively that German
attitudes towards Russia were marked by sudden swings between
contradictory perceptions of Russia as a ‘steamroller’ or as a ‘colossus with
feet of clay’.36 The year 1914 was one such moment when attitudes turned.
Symptomatic of German wartime attitudes towards Russians, Poles and
other peoples in the East,37 was a feeling of alienation from them mixed with
a sense of German superiority. A good example for this was the report by the
war correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Theodor Behrmann, who
described the 100,000 or so Russian prisoners of war captured in late August
1914 in Eastern Prussia:
The endless lines of Russian prisoners who passed my position offered

a monotonous picture of stupid suffering so that I started to feel pity for
this living cannon fodder. God knows, these here in front of me were no
captured lions or wolves. Tolstoy’s ‘Cholstomjer’ came to my mind, the
worn down horse, so thin that you can see its ribs, which looks around
with dreary eyes on its way to the slaughter house. . . . The Russian
farmer . . . is, in his real self, neither a hero nor a knight; he is not
fighting, he is only killing, murdering; hence his failure on the
battlefield, therefore also his cattiness, his senseless cruelties.38
Russia, so Behrmann believed, had not learned anything from the Russo-
Japanese War: the entire organism of the Russian army was rotten, the
officers gutless and scheming rear-echelon cowards. Behrmann claimed that
this had always been his opinion. Maybe; but the upper echelons of German
politics and the army had seen the Russian army very differently only a few
weeks before. But now, after Tannenberg, and close to the supposedly final
victory in the West, Bethmann Hollweg’s secretary compiled the ‘September
programme’. Its importance should not be overrated;39 but it shows that the
idea of creating buffer states in the west of the Russian Empire now became
a German war aim. Initially the demands were comparatively moderate, but
they tended to grow over the duration of the war.
Some believed it was possible to get rid of Russian military pressure on
Germany once and for all. This started with relatively limited plans for a
‘Polish border strip’40 and escalated during the war, thus mirroring military
developments. Tannenberg and the September Programme were the
beginning; the idea of being able to beat Russia came later, and the Peace of
Brest-Litovsk came at the end. But this was in the future. After Tannenberg
the idea was to beat the Russians in a second Tannenberg and to force them
to conclude a peace. Bethmann Hollweg formed an alliance with Ober Ost,
especially with Hindenburg. Ober Ost promoted the idea of a battle of
annihilation: the Russian army was obviously so bad that it could not resist
the German army. Ideas first raised in autumn 1914 of focusing now on the
Eastern Front, given the fact that the Western offensive had failed, and
starting a decisive operation there, culminated in summer 1915 in the plan to
destroy the Russian army in a gigantic encircling manoeuvre and to kick
Russia out of the war.41
But these plans, advocated by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, met the
resistance of officers trained in the Prussian tradition that Russia was too big
to be subdued. They thought and said that a battle like Tannenberg was not
easily repeatable, and saw also no solution for the geostrategic challenge of
the enormity of Russian space, especially while having to wage war on the
Western Front. Russian military doctrine since Kutuzov’s time was that only
the conquest of the entirety of Russia could force the country to conclude
peace, and this was an impossible task. Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn
thought that it was possible to have successes against the Russians, but that
Russia itself could not be subdued. He claimed that Napoleon’s example did
not invite imitation.42 He also thought that the Russians knew by now the
dangers of encirclement and would retreat, if necessary, into the vastness of
their territories.
But Hindenburg and Ludendorff, as well as Conrad von Hötzendorf, were
in favour of large encircling manoeuvres against the Russians, and for
Conrad, as well as for Ober Ost, the Polish salient was too big a temptation
not to try a large encircling manoeuvre. In general terms, since autumn 1914
the plans followed one basic idea. Conrad wanted to push north-eastwards,
Hindenburg and Ludendorff south-eastwards, then both armies would unite
east of Warsaw, cut off large parts of the Russian army and destroy them.
Falkenhayn thought this to be impossible: the Russians would escape the
encirclement, and he did not have the forces necessary for such a big
manoeuvre. He predicted that the Russians would retreat, if necessary, and
therefore escape any encirclement. Here we may note that Conrad was out of
touch with reality, even according to one of his defenders. Colonel Bauer
said of him, ‘His operational ideas were always broad in scope, but
unfortunately he overlooked the fact that the Austrian troops were unable to
realise them.’43
Falkenhayn was a sober strategist and followed another line: limited
successes against Russia followed by generous political offers. After
November 1914 he advocated a separate peace with Russia, and perhaps also
with France. Endless debates followed with Hindenburg and Ludendorff,
who thought that Falkenhayn was incompetent, jealous and a defeatist. In
one of their discussions, Falkenhayn repeated his belief that it was
impossible to defeat the Russian army: ‘We do not have the preconditions
for that, because it is impossible to try to annihilate an enemy who is
numerically far superior, who has excellent railway connections, unlimited
time and unlimited space to retreat, if necessary.’ When Hindenburg insisted,
repeating his opinion that the Russian army could be ‘annihilated’,
Falkenhayn replied sarcastically on 31 August 1915 that he doubted ‘that it
was possible, in any conceivable way, to annihilate an enemy who was
inclined to retreat, regardless of land and people, when attacked seriously,
and who has the vastness of Russia at his disposal’.44 Ludendorff called
Falkenhayn a criminal who was sacrificing the chance for a final victory, and
thought that he had to be fired; otherwise the war would be lost. Falkenhayn
favoured a political solution to the war; Ludendorff wanted to achieve a
victory in the East, then in the West. He did not favour compromises with
the Russians, ‘because we are strong’.45
Przemyśl: a Stalingrad of the First World War?

We have gone ahead of events. Now it is time to turn towards the southern
part of the Eastern Front where things took a very different turn. In August
1914 Austria-Hungary had begun an offensive against the Russians which
collapsed after some successes with great losses.46 German operations
against Russia in autumn 1914 were only partially successful. In the winter
of 1914/15, German and Austrian troops tried to complete a big encircling
manoeuvre, planned and advocated by Hindenburg and Ludendorff and also
by the Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, but it failed
too. One of the consequences of not succeeding was that the Austrian
fortress of Przemyśl, with a garrison of more than 130,000 men, remained
encircled by the Russians.47 The strategic dilemma posed by this fortress
was older than January 1915; it had started with Austrian defeats in early
September 1914 which were followed by the Austro-Hungarian retreat into
the Carpathians.
Przemyśl, commanded by General Kusmanec, was a huge fortress and the
decision was made to hold it instead of giving it up to save the troops. The
fortress was relieved once, but the Russians quickly began a second attempt
to envelop it, which they completed by 11 November 1914. The fortress was
so strong that the Russians did not try to assault it; they encircled it and
waited for it to run out of food and ammunition. They were helped by the
oversized garrison of Przemyśl: according to contemporary testimonies, half
of them would have sufficed to hold the fortress. Relief and breakout
attempts were poorly coordinated. The Austrian column sent to help got
stuck in high snow; the closest they came to it was about thirty miles. In
February 1915 the Habsburg High Command informed the fortress
commander that no further relief efforts would be attempted. The
commandant ordered his men to destroy equipment and surrendered to the
Russians on 22 March 1915. Nearly 130,000 men fell into Russian hands.48
The American war correspondent Stanley Washburn described long
columns of Austro-Hungarian prisoners, barely guarded by Russian soldiers,
marching in the direction of Lemberg.49 He voiced the same type of
stereotypes of the character of the defeated as Behrmann had advanced the
year before with reference to Russian prisoners. The uniforms of the
defeated were different, but the arrogance of the victors was identical.
The surrender of Przemyśl could easily have been a Stalingrad of the First
World War. It looked, initially, as if it were the beginning of the end of
Austria-Hungary and of the Central Powers. The Austrians were
understandably deeply depressed and felt the first pangs of the agony of
inevitable defeat. The neutrals too, especially Italy, started to believe that
Austria-Hungary was finished; the government in Rome made its fateful
decision to intervene in the weeks around Przemyśl’s surrender.50
The Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów

The reason that Przemyśl did not become the coup de grâce for Austria or
the Stalingrad of the First World War lay in the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów –
which was, perhaps, the most decisive military event on the Eastern Front
between 1914 and 1917 (Map 9.2). This battle is probably less known – at
least outside the camp of military historians – than Tannenberg or the
Brusilov offensive, but is perhaps even more important. It was one of the
most decisive battles of the entire First World War. It did not have the
consequence that the victors – Germany and Austria-Hungary – also then
won the war, but it enabled them to escape defeat and to be able to fight on
for more than three years. For Russia it was the beginning of the end –
Tsarist Russia never fully recovered from this blow.
Map 9.2 The conquest of Poland and the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów.
The logic of this offensive was closely connected with the Austrian defeat
at Przemyśl. Falkenhayn originally had no intention of becoming heavily
engaged on the Austrian part of the Eastern Front. He considered the
Western Front as the decisive theatre of war and there Germany was under
constant pressure from numerically far superior Allied troops. German
diplomats had other urgent agendas too; they wanted to force the general
staff to conquer Serbia so as to be able to get German supplies to the
Dardanelles where the Ottoman Turks were under heavy Allied pressure.51
But the surrender of Przemyśl seemed more important than helping the
Austrians. There were two main reasons: first, to avoid the collapse of this
essential ally and secondly, to deter the Italians and Romanians from
intervening on the Allied side. Falkenhayn thought that if Italy joined the
Entente that would mean losing the war, and Conrad (for once) agreed.52
After conquering Przemyśl, the Russian army tried to break through the
Carpathian front and invade Hungary. Conrad von Hötzendorf asked
urgently for German help to assist his weakening lines.
From a German perspective, there were several ways of helping the
Austrians. One was to assist with a comparatively small force, between one
and four divisions strong. This could have helped to stabilise the Austrian
lines and strengthen the most endangered parts of the front. This was what
Conrad suggested. Falkenhayn disagreed. He thought that this would not be
sufficient; he was also afraid that his precious reserves would disappear
piecemeal in the Austrian front lines and he would never get them back.
Falkenhayn favoured a different approach. He wanted to start a limited
German offensive, attacking frontally. The task would be to relieve Russian
pressure on the Austrians. After reaching well-defined and limited
objectives, he would be able to pull his troops out and use them elsewhere.
The units would return to his reserves and not be permanently bound to the
Austrian front. Falkenhayn was notoriously miserly with his reserves – with
very good reason. Reserves were the precondition for any sort of operational
planning, and reserves, or the building up of reserves, were the key problem
of the German general staff. All the reserves created in late 1914 by using
hastily trained volunteers had been used by February and March 1915 in
ultimately unsuccessful attacks on the Eastern Front. The German reserves
were now minimal and this severely limited the possibilities open to the
general staff. The Prussian War Ministry, however, had an idea how to create
new reserves. They suggested restructuring the divisions on the Western
Front, reducing the number of regiments per division from four to three,
reinforcing the remaining units with new soldiers and artillery and using the
freed regiments to form new divisions. By doing so, they were able to create
a new army reserve of fourteen divisions without dangerously weakening the
existing units. This number was not sufficient for any decisive operation in
the West, for which a minimum of thirty divisions was considered necessary,
but it was enough for a limited operation elsewhere. This new army reserve
was both the beginning and the precondition for an impressive series of
successes of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans.53
Falkenhayn began planning where to use his new reserves in late March
1915. He wanted to free ‘the front of the Austrian allies from Russian
pressure’; his additional aim was to destroy the Russian capability for further
offensives. But where to attack? Colonel Hans von Seeckt, who would have
a prominent role in the battle, later explained the reasons for Falkenhayn’s
choice of Gorlice. He argued that an attack on the German part of the
Eastern Front would not bring the Austrians the necessary relief. The eastern
part of the Austrian front – Bukovina and Galicia – was excluded because of
poor lines of communication. An attack in the Carpathians did not promise a
quick result. Therefore he decided on a frontal attack in the centre of the
Russian front, to fold back the entire Russian front in the Carpathians by
breaking through north of it; this was the War Minister Wild von
Hohenborn’s summary of the matter. Seeckt said afterwards that looking at
the map of the Eastern Front and bearing in mind the military and political
constraints, the place to attack had been an obvious choice.54
Everyone in the German general staff was broadly in agreement about the
operation; the only debate was over whether the attack should be launched
more to the north between Pilica and the Vistula, or to the south between the
Vistula and the Carpathian Mountains. Falkenhayn first favoured the
northern solution, but was convinced by his advisers that the southern
solution was more promising. The advantage of attacking in the area of
Gorlice-Tarnów in the direction of Lemburg was that if the breakthrough
was successful, the Russians would be unable to attack the flanks of the
German advance because it was protected by the Carpathians in the south
and the Vistula in the north. Advancing this way would mean placing the
Russian army in the Carpathians in a precarious situation by threatening
their flanks and their rear. They would be forced to retreat. The Russian lines
of communication in the Carpathians were poor and the terrain would hinder
any rapid Russian reorganisation. In a word: this was the ‘Archimedian
point’ of the entire Russian front. A successful attack would force the
Russians into a hasty retreat, if they were to avoid being enveloped from the
rear.
As always in military history, we have to ask what the defenders were
doing at this moment. If the danger was obvious, why did the Russians not
react before it was too late? This question was even more urgent because the
Russian army was already severely weakened by hard fighting in the
Carpathians. Nevertheless the Russian High Command did not abandon its
own attack there, underestimating both the danger and the Austrians (despite
being informed by Austrian deserters about the upcoming offensive55) and
hoping that Italy – which had in the meantime promised to enter the war at
the latest in mid May 1915 – would help out, so that both armies could crush
Austria, the Russians from the east and the Italians from the south-west. The
Russian High Command was ready and willing to give Austria the coup de
grâce. To be able to exert pressure in the Carpathians, they had even
transferred troops there from Galicia.
Therefore everything worked in favour of Falkenhayn’s plan. The Russian
front in Galicia was an obvious weak point and nothing was done to
strengthen it. The commander of the Russian Third Army, General Dmitriev,
knew that his army was going to be attacked. But the Russian High
Command, used to being victorious on this front, felt safe – too safe.
What happened in the meantime on the German and Austro-Hungarian
side? In mid March 1915 Falkenhayn asked Colonel von Lossberg, a
member of the Operationsabteilung, to check the possibilities for a
breakthrough in the region of Gorlice, and he asked the railway section of
the general staff to prepare the transport of four German army corps to
Gorlice.56 He also asked the German Liaison Officer to the Austro-
Hungarian general staff (the ‘Deutscher Militärbevollmächtigte’), General
von Cramon, to collect information in the greatest secrecy about road
conditions in the area and about the condition of the Russian army. Cramon
told him on 8 April 1915 that ‘the Russian Army . . . will not be able to
withstand an attack by superior forces’.57 Cramon thought that four army
corps were probably sufficient for the task. Falkenhayn kept Conrad von
Hötzendorf in the dark about his intentions until 13 April 1915. At this
moment German troops were already at the railheads preparing to be shipped
to Gorlice.
Lengthy debates about who was the ‘father’ of the success are therefore
futile; Seeckt claimed that it was Falkenhayn and he had very good reasons
for this judgement. Conrad was pleased to learn that he was getting German
assistance to help bolster his difficult military situation, but this did not stop
him haggling about questions of supreme command. After enervating
debates, Falkenhayn and Conrad agreed that a new German army, the
Eleventh, would be commanded by Generaloberst von Mackensen and his
Chief of Staff, Colonel von Seeckt, but would receive its orders nominally
from Conrad because they were fighting on the Austrian front. The Austro-
Hungarian Fourth Army would be under Mackensen’s command, too.
Falkenhayn had limited the aims of the operation: he wanted to free
western Galicia from the Russians and to advance to the Lupkow Pass.
These objectives seem very limited, especially if they are compared with the
final success of the operation, which exceeded them by far. But he had a
pressing feeling about the risks of this offensive, not only because of the
unclear attitude of Italy, but also and especially because of German
inferiority on the Western Front. In May 1915 1.9 million German soldiers
had to fight against 2.45 million British and French in this theatre of war.58
Understandably, Falkenhayn felt uneasy and was perpetually worried about
the Western Front.
The Central Powers were able to create substantial numerical superiority
in the area of attack. On the entire Eastern Front around 1.8 million Russians
were fighting against 1.3 million soldiers of the Central Powers.
Nevertheless, in the area of attack Falkenhayn and Conrad had created a
local superiority: seventeen infantry and three-and-a-half cavalry divisions
fought against fifteen-and-a-half infantry and two cavalry divisions of the
Russian Third Army. In numerical terms, 357,400 German and Austrian
soldiers attacked 219,000 Russians. The Central Powers also had
substantially more guns, a superiority that proved to be decisive: 334 pieces
of heavy artillery against the Russians’ 4, and 96 trench mortars where the
Russians had none.59 The Russians were also short of shells (more because
of disorganisation in Russian logistics than because of real shortages of
supply, in Norman Stone’s opinion).
On the morning of 2 May 1915, German and Austrian artillery fired for
four hours and the Russians could not reply. The Russian troops in the first
line and the reserves were annihilated before they could take part in any
fighting. Then the infantry attacked and achieved a breakthrough against
sometimes stiff Russian resistance. In three days three Russian lines of
defence were seized. The Russian defence was hindered by Stavka’s order
not to retreat because the Headquarters believed that this was a defeat of
purely local importance. This belief was shared throughout large parts of the
Russian army, where recognition of the magnitude of the defeat came
slowly.60 The commander of the Russian Third Army, General Dmitriev, had
suggested retreating to the River San. Not following this suggestion was a
huge mistake: the 11th Army was able to advance some 180 kilometres by
mid May, and the Russians lost some 210,000 men in a few days around
Gorlice, among them 140,000 prisoners of war.61
Kaiser Wilhelm II called the victory of Gorlice ‘a Napoleonic concept’,
and Falkenhayn received the Order of the Black Eagle. The battle was
undoubtedly a huge success. The material consequences were substantial and
the psychological ones even greater, especially for the Austrians. One
observer wrote: ‘Only someone who had experienced the deep depression
after the Carpathian battle can really understand what Gorlice meant [for the
Austrians]: relief from unsustainable pressure, relief from most serious
worry, the regaining of hope and new hopes for victory.’62
The breakthrough came too late to influence the Italian decision for
intervention, because the government in Rome had signed the Treaty of
London on 26 April 1915, only six days before Gorlice, and had already
promised to enter the war on the Allied side. But the victory of Gorlice gave
the Central Powers the chance to shoulder this additional burden, in the short
as well as in the longer run.63 Gorlice gave the Habsburg armies the forces
and, even more importantly, the self-confidence to face the new enemy and
to stop him close to the border.
The Gorlice attack reached its objective, the Lupkow Pass, on 10 May.
Things were going so well that Falkenhayn and Conrad decided to let it
continue and to abandon all other plans. Therefore Gorlice, originally a
limited operation, became a strategic one. The German Headquarters moved
to Pless in Silesia on 8 May, a decision which shows that the general staff
expected more decisive action in the East in the coming months. Indeed
Gorlice was the first of a series of victories on the Eastern Front arising from
the continuous progress of Mackensen’s army, forcing the Russians to retreat
in the Carpathians and later also in Russian Poland. The Russians started the
‘Great Retreat’ and saved their army, but had to give up Warsaw and Poland,
Lithuania and Courland. They left behind them ‘scorched earth’ and millions
of refugees (3.3 million followed the Russian army eastwards at the end of
1915).64 From May to September 1915 the Russian army lost 1.41 million
men; from the outbreak of war until the end of 1915, they had lost 2.2
million men.65
The losses were one important aspect of these events. Another equally
important element arose from their political consequences. Falkenhayn and
Conrad both suggested to their political leaders in late spring 1915 that the
military successes enabled them to offer Russia a generous separate peace.
Despite the favourable situation on the Eastern Front, they advised not
insisting on territorial concessions or war indemnities and wanted to offer
Russia an alliance and even free transit through the Dardanelles.66 But the
Russian government remained stubborn. The Tsar’s answer to German
overtures was that Russia was bound to its Allies and could not conclude a
separate peace: ‘My reply can only be a negative one.’ Diplomatic observers
reported that Russia did not feel beaten because the Russians did not
consider Courland or Poland as Russia, and felt able to continue the struggle
because of their vast territory.
This points to a very important argument. The Russians had a particular
interpretation of past military events. Looking back to the defeat of invaders
like Napoleon or Charles XII, they felt invincible and thought that the
vastness of space at their disposal made it impossible for them to lose a war
of invasion and impossible for their enemies to win. As has been said,
Clausewitz had considered two conditions necessary for a Russian success: a
firm government (the government in 1915 was firm, probably too firm) and
‘loyal and steadfast’ people. Here was the weak point. The Russian
government had grown out of touch with its own people and disregarded the
influence of growing internal difficulties and unrest and also its loss of
prestige and faith. There was also a growing feeling that for a multi-national
empire like the Russian one, time was running out.
The year 1915 was a crucial moment in which the Tsarist government
missed several excellent opportunities to quit the war under favourable, or at
least acceptable, conditions and thereby save the country from its monstrous
misfortunes later in the twentieth century. The reasons for this refusal were
the fear of being diplomatically isolated from the Western Allies and of then
being at the mercy of an arrogant and dominating Germany.67
This ill-fated Russian stubbornness also changed German attitudes. Plans
to move the German frontier further to the East – the ‘Polnische
Grenzstreifen’ – became more pronounced. Ludendorff started to conquer
the Baltic territories – he called them ‘his kingdom’ – and Bethmann
Hollweg was tempted to play the ‘Polish card’. The political context of
military events was now very different from what it had been before Gorlice.
In addition, the German advance brought their soldiers into close contact
with Eastern territories and their populations. As almost all the sources
show, they experienced feelings of estrangement, unfamiliarity and also of
disgust towards the ‘filthy’ or ‘dirty’ Eastern territories.68 Nevertheless
recent research on this topic rightly warns us not to overstretch the
continuities between the First and Second World Wars. German soldiers of
the First World War were generally friendly and accommodating towards the
Jewish population, with whom they shared a common language.69
The Brusilov offensive

During the Great Retreat, the Russians had lost a territory of the size of
France. Up to 7.5 million refugees were moving eastwards; these huge
numbers of refugees destabilised Russian society.70 The country was
experiencing deep economic problems: rolling stock was not being properly
maintained, food and ammunition were not where they were needed and
inflation was rising rapidly.71 The prestige of the government and the army
was severely damaged, but the leadership was still hanging on to the
example of Kutusov and did not lose hope of finishing the war victoriously.
Despite growing internal difficulties, the Great Retreat was for the
moment a military success.72 The Russian Commander-in-Chief, General
Alexejev, had shortened the long Russian front by giving up the Polish
salient, and as a result of their advance the Central Powers had serious
problems with their supply lines. This gave Russia the breathing space
needed to survive for another year and even to prepare new offensives.
Russia stayed in the war out of fear of isolation, because she was afraid of
being dominated by the Central Powers and because she felt bound to her
Allies. Therefore it is not very surprising that the last big success of the
Russians in this war was linked to a military campaign promised to their
alliance partners.
From 6 to 8 December 1915 the Allied military leadership met at
Chantilly to coordinate their strategy for 1916. The Allied Powers saw the
reason for the military successes of the Central Powers in 1915 – the defence
of the Dardanelles and of their front in France, the successes in Russia and
the conquest of Serbia – as the result of the ability of the Central Powers to
use interior lines to deploy troops rapidly, to build local superiorities and to
have reserves always where they were needed. To counterbalance this
advantage, the Allied Powers decided to attack on all fronts at the same time.
This would prevent the Central Powers from pulling out reserves at one
place to send them somewhere else; the pressure deriving from the large
numerical superiority of the Entente powers would be enormous and at some
point the Central Powers’ front would break. This was the hope behind a
collective endeavour which became more famous for its distinctive parts –
the Battle of the Somme starting in July 1916, the Isonzo battles on the
Italian Front, and the Brusilov offensive in the East (Map 9.3).
Map 9.3 The Brusilov offensive.
This attack, named after Alexei Brusilov, one of the ablest Russian
generals, was launched against the Austrians on the south-western front.
Originally the Russian main effort was to be directed against the Germans,
but a large attack in the north at Lake Naroch in March 1916 had failed
miserably. General Evert and his peers followed the example of the Western
Front and started the attack after heavy bombardments. As with all attacks in
the West, they failed. As a consequence, many Russian generals developed
an outspoken defeatist attitude and did not believe in success, perhaps rightly
so.
Brusilov, previously commander of the Russian Eighth Army and, since
March 1916, commander of the entire south-western front, had offered to
attack with his own reserves and finally got permission to do so. He decided
to use the element of surprise. He trained his troops very carefully – even
using models of Austrian trenches to train his soldiers – let them dig attack
trenches, but did not prepare for a long preliminary artillery bombardment.
He also decided to attack on an unusually large sector of the front, so
making it impossible for the Austrians to close down a local breakthrough
with troops from another sector of the front. His attack also started earlier
than the others, to relieve the Italians who were suffering an Austrian attack
in the Tyrol (the so-called punitive or ‘Strafexpedition’).
The most prominent feature of Brusilov’s attack was that it was conducted
without a significant numerical superiority. In the sector of attack some
600,000 Russians were fighting around 500,000 Austrians who were
entrenched and had an advantage in medium and heavy artillery.73 The
attack hit the Austrian lines on a large sector of the front, and very quickly
became a major success. The reasons for this are the subject of debate. The
impression contemporaries had of Russian superiority in artillery was ill-
founded. But there are two major explanations which do not exclude one
another. The first one is that Brusilov’s decision to use the element of
surprise instead of trying to amass an overwhelming superiority had worked.
Instead of concentrating all his forces on a small sector, carrying out lengthy
and heavy bombardments of the enemy lines before attacking them, and
therefore indicating his intentions long beforehand, Brusilov ordered his
troops to attack after a very short bombardment, on a very large sector of the
front, out of attack trenches which were dug in preparation beforehand. The
surprise worked perfectly; the Austrian Fourth Army (commanded by
Erzherzog Joseph Ferdinand) disintegrated and fled backwards; this led to a
similar fate for the Austrian Seventh Army (under General Pflanzer Baltin).
The Austro-Hungarian army lost around 200,000 men in a few days; many
of them surrendered.
Therefore one could argue, as Norman Stone does, that this success was
the consequence of revolutionary new tactics and able and imaginative
leadership. On the other side, the argument of Austrian weakness and
mistakes must be discussed. The Austrian trenches in this sector of the front
were excellent; they were inspected shortly before the attack began and were
considered to be of high standard.74 A German general, Stolzmann, had
visitied the Austrian trenches in March 1916 and concluded that a major
Russian success was out of the question, as long as the Russians did not
bring in huge reinforcements.75 But, as the in-depth analysis of the Austrian
troops and their commanders shows, there was a great deal of carelessness
and an atmosphere of a ‘holiday-camp’ on the Austrian side.76 Here we may
propose a hypothesis: on this part of the Austrian front, there was established
a well-developed version of the ‘live-and-let-live’ system Tony Ashworth
described as operating on the Western Front.77 The Austrian soldiers – from
the soldiers in the trenches up to the army commander – had made
themselves comfortable in the trench system.78 Brusilov’s new tactic did not
include a warning that preparations for a heavy attack were under way in the
weeks and months beforehand, so the attack came out of the blue. The
officers had not ordered attacks on the Russian entrenching parties, ‘no
doubt for fear they would be driven into troublesome minor action’79 –
reflecting an Austrian reluctance to engage in costly activism which was
another typical element of the ‘live-and-let-live’ system. The Austrian troops
had obviously thought that the war would end without seeing any major
activity on this front.
The Austrian High Command bore a large share of the responsibility.
Conrad von Hötzendorf was obsessed with punishing the Italians and had
pulled some of his best troops out of the Eastern Front to start an offensive
in the Tyrol. Therefore he had, as he admitted himself, ‘critically weakened’
the strength of the Eastern Front.80 The attack against the Italians (the
Strafexpedition) started promisingly, but ran aground quite quickly. Brusilov
could exploit Conrad’s mistake.
Therefore at least two factors were responsible for the Russian success:
the Austrian Front was vulnerable, and the Russians had a new tactic which
worked well. Brusilov was extremely successful in causing the Austrians
enormous losses. Falkenhayn did not want to help out with German reserves
– he was still fighting his ill-fated Battle of Verdun at the time – and first
forced Conrad to stop his offensive in Italy. Only when a real and complete
breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian army seemed to be both possible and
imminent did he start to help out with German troops. This help began with
German divisions that were supposed to give the Austro-Hungarian Front a
more rigid structure of resistance; these troops were called in the vernacular,
military ‘corsets’, or ‘Korsettstangen’ for the Austrians.
The next step was to establish a German High Command on the Eastern
Front. Conrad and Falkenhayn opposed this idea when it became clear that
Hindenburg would be the obvious choice. Falkenhayn knew that his
opponents from Ober Ost would make it impossible for him to dispose of
any reserves under their command, and therefore that such a command
structure would be an enormous obstacle to any further strategic planning. In
the end, with the Central Powers under enormous strain as a result of the
Brusilov and the Somme offensives, he and Conrad had to give way.
Hindenburg became commander of the largest part of the Eastern Front –
and shortly afterwards German Chief of Staff, replacing Falkenhayn himself.
The reason for Falkenhayn’s dismissal was the Romanian declaration of
war on 27 August 1916. The Romanian government long hesitated over this
step, but now the success of the Brusilov offensive seemed to be the death
knell for Austria, and therefore the Romanians wanted to get their share of
the spoils. The news of Romania’s declaration of war seemed to be the end
for the Central Powers. Falkenhayn had to go and Hindenburg und
Ludendorff were appointed to command the army in his place.
It became clear very quickly, though, that the Romanian danger was
completely overrated. German, Austrian and Bulgarian troops, invading
from the south under the command of Mackensen and from the west under
the command of Falkenhayn, conquered the largest part of Romania in a few
months. The poorly equipped Romanian army could not focus on one front
only but had to shift its troops back and forth, and was overwhelmed from
both sides. Bucharest was taken on 6 December 1916. Shortly afterwards the
Central Powers made a peace offer.
Norman Stone considered the entry of Romania into the war a major
liability for the Entente. Instead of deciding the war at a moment when
things seemed to be on the very edge, the country was overrun by the
Central Powers which afterwards squeezed raw materials out of the country
– raw materials which helped them, according to Stone, to continue the war
until 1918. For Russia, Romania was indeed a strain on its already over-
extended front lines and resources.
If Romania’s intervention was a consequence of Brusilov’s success, his
offensive must be considered a disaster and not praised, as it is by Stone, as
the ‘most brilliant victory of the war’.81 This is true in all other aspects
except one: Brusilov was indeed able to do much harm to the Austro-
Hungarian army. He damaged its fighting power in what may have been a
decisive way. In all other respects, his attack was a disaster in military as
well as political terms. In military terms, the Brusilov offensive and the
attack at the Somme failed to achieve their purpose and their strategic
objective – victory over the Central Powers. Germany and Austria-Hungary
won a defensive success of enormous magnitude. The events in the summer
of 1916 had proved that the entire forces of the Entente did not suffice to
overrun them.
And yet on the other hand, the success cost the Central Powers dearly,
with the feelings of deep exhaustion and material inequality overshadowing
any feeling of triumph, and seducing them to radicalise the seemingly
endless war. One step in this direction was to slam the door on a separate
peace with Russia. Here is another decisive feature of the Eastern Front: the
Central Powers offered Russia golden bridges to get out of the war. A
political settlement that ended the war on the Eastern Front years earlier
might have saved Russia from the consequences of total defeat, civil war and
the rest of the communist period of rule. But this was not to be; the moment
in which a compromise peace in the East was still in the air ended in October
1916.
Even before then, in August 1915, the Central Powers had occupied
Warsaw and Russian Poland. The question was what to do with them. On 19
August, Bethmann Hollweg produced his Polish proclamation and promised
the Poles their liberation from the ‘Russian yoke’.82 Despite this
proclamation, as long as there was hope of reaching a political settlement
with Russia, the fate of Poland was a question left open. After all, restoring
Polish independence would mean reopening the question of Polish territories
controlled by Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Central Powers’ plans
were not very imaginative and dealt only with the Russian share of Poland;
moreover, both Germany and Austria-Hungary started to haggle over who
should control Russian Poland in the future.83 The more stubborn the
Russians were, the more determined the Germans became to move forward
and try to use the Poles for their own future political designs in Eastern
Europe.
Plans for Poland were closely linked with the hope of creating a Polish
army against the Russians. Already in autumn 1915 the German general staff
had had this idea; it was realised in November 1916 when the Central
Powers proclaimed the foundation of a ‘Kingdom of Poland’, of course
without being able to promise something substantial to the Poles. The
Austrians fancied the so-called ‘Austro-Polish solution’, a unification of
Galicia and Russian Poland under Habsburg rule, which at least had the
logical advantage of answering the question of what would happen next with
Galicia. It had the disadvantage that Austria-Hungary was the weaker
partner in the alliance and yet asked for the bigger part of the spoils. The
question of Poland was a major conflict between Germany and Austria-
Hungary for the rest of the war. The story of the German and Austro-
Hungarian military government in Poland and in the Baltic is extremely
interesting per se, but cannot be dealt with here in any detail.84 But it is
worth mentioning that the Polenproklamation was a disaster in terms of
recruiting large numbers of Polish volunteers.
The Polish perspective on the First World War is somewhat different.
From the Polish point of view, the disastrous fight among the three empires
was a blessing because it led to the defeat of all three partitioning powers
and the resurrection of a united and independent Poland. From the
perspective of the Central Powers and of Russia, the likelihood of finding a
compromise peace was becoming more and more remote, though hopes of
realising it were still alive.
Here is the context in which to judge the effect of the Brusilov offensive
on the outcome of the war. Some give Brusilov praise. Norman Stone writes
that he was ‘the best type of commander – striking the fear of God into his
subordinates, but never to the point where they became terrified of
responsibility’,85 but his success can be compared with that of Ludendorff’s
offensive on the Western Front in 1918: a successful attack which did much
damage to the enemy, but which failed to achieve its objective. The Russian
government had for too long put its trust in the seeming certainty that the
history of the Napoleonic experience would repeat itself: that the vastness of
Russia would make it impossible for the Central Powers to win; that the
Russian army could always retreat; and that time and space were working
entirely in Russia’s favour. This was not true because Russia’s internal
situation took a turn for the worse and ended in catastrophe. It is undeniable
that Russia experienced economic growth during the war, but her war effort
was hindered by a transport crisis; rolling stock was in a poor condition,
grain and ammunition were available but not where they were needed, the
big cities were without supplies and the growing disorganisation and hunger
led to revolution in March 1917. The Tsar abdicated but the new
government, especially Kerensky, decided to fight on. In summer 1917
Kerensky started a new offensive against the Austrians, again led by
Brusilov, which had early successes – but they faded away rapidly.
Kerensky’s insistence on staying in the war threw the country into the abyss
of the second revolution, towards the Bolshevik takeover and finally to the
peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, which, poorly handled by the Russians,
completed the disaster on the Eastern Front.
Conclusion
The Eastern Front during the First World War is called ‘the forgotten
front’.86 The events are of a daunting level of complexity, in part because of
the multi-ethnicity of this theatre of war, and the numerous languages
necessary to understand the full implications and viewpoints and vicissitudes
of different nationalities.
The immediate as well as the lasting consequences of the fighting on the
Eastern Front are stark and fundamental. On the Eastern Front we find the
origins of the complete defeat of Russia and the collapse of its government
which had overstretched the military capacity of the country. The loss of the
war, connected with the revolution and regime change, was a result of the
relentness stubbornness of both the Tsarist regime and of the Kerensky
government. What Ludendorff did in Germany, the Tsarist government did
to a greater extent in Russia: both pushed the war effort beyond the capacity
of the army to win it. Germany, unlike Russia, never had an offer on the
table from its enemies to leave the war on the basis of the status quo.
Russia’s government had several of them and refused to save itself for
reasons which were, from an historical perspective, secondary compared
with the necessities of bailing out of a disastrous war. Therefore the first
reason for the catastrophic defeat of Russia on the Eastern Front was less the
inability to organise transport and logistics properly – one of Norman
Stone’s main points – but rather the blind determination to continue this war
while ignoring all signs of the coming catastrophe, in the hope that the story
of Napoleon and Kutusov would repeat itself. It didn’t, and the descent of
Russia into civil war and the communist period was the outcome.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire won the war in the East, but disintegrated
less because of the – comparatively minor – pressure exerted by the Italians,
but more because of the centrifugal powers of its nationalities. By early
1918, the Austrian army was the shell of an empire in the process of
dissolution.
On the German side, the outcome was equally disastrous, and for a reason
which led to further catastrophes a mere twenty-three years later. The notion
that Russia was ‘a house of cards’ and that it was possible to defeat her
decisively and completely was a precondition for the disastrous Operation
Barbarossa in 1941. Generals always plan the last war. In 1914–17, the
Russians thought about Kutuzov; in 1941 Hitler and his generals thought
about the Eastern Front in the First World War – and both showed that
history can be a very dangerous guide, if you trust too much in the value of
past success.
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard

and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1976), Vom Kriege (Bonn: Ferd
Dümmlers Verlag, 1980), p. 627. Translation changed by author for greater
precision.
2 Ibid., pp. 627ff.
3 Ibid., p. 617.
4 Erich von Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung 1914–1916 in ihren
wichtigsten Entschliessungen (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1920), p. 48.
5 This chapter on the Eastern Front 1914–18 will not try to cover all
important aspects of the events – there are far too many. For the essential
historiography, see the bibliographical essay to this chapter below.
6 Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London: Penguin, 1998),

p. 51.
7 Ibid.
8 Bruce W. Menning, ‘War planning and initial operations in the Russian

context’, in Richard F. Hamilton and Holger Herwig (eds.), War Planning
1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 80–142.
9 Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth (London: Oswald

Wolff, 1958). In 2002 the American historian, Terence Zuber, surprised the
world with the statement that there was no Schlieffen Plan: Terence Zuber,
Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871–1914 (Oxford
University Press, 2002). The controversy can be found mainly in War in
History, and has not yet come to its end: T. Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan
reconsidered’, War in History, 3 (1999), pp. 262–305; T. Holmes, ‘A
reluctant march on Paris’, War in History, 2 (2001), pp. 208–32; T. Zuber,
‘Terence Holmes reinvents the Schlieffen Plan’, War in History, 4 (2001),
pp. 468–76; T. Holmes, ‘The real thing’, War in History, 1 (2002), pp. 111–
20; T. Zuber, ‘Terence Holmes reinvents the Schlieffen Plan – again’, War in
History, 1 (2003), pp. 92–101; R. Foley, ‘The origins of the Schlieffen Plan’,
War in History, 2 (2003), pp. 222–32; T. Holmes, ‘Asking Schlieffen: a
further reply to Terence Zuber’, War in History, 4 (2003), pp. 464–79; T.
Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan was an orphan’, War in History, 2 (2004), pp.
220–5; Schlieffen Plan: R. Foley, ‘The real Schlieffen Plan’, War in History,
1 (2006), pp. 91–115; T. Zuber, ‘The “Schlieffen Plan” and German war
guilt’, War in History, 1 (2007), pp. 96–108; A. Mombauer, ‘Of war plans
and war guilt: the debate surrounding the Schlieffen Plan’, Journal of
Strategic Studies, 27 (2005), pp. 857–85; T. Zuber, ‘Everybody knows there
was a “Schlieffen Plan”: a reply to Annika Mombauer’, War in History, 1
(2008), pp. 92–101; G. Gross, ‘There was a Schlieffen Plan: new sources on
the history of German war planning’, War in History, 4 (2008), pp. 389–431;
T. Holmes, ‘All present and correct: the verifiable army of the Schlieffen
Plan’, War in History, 16:1 (2009), pp. 98–115; T. Zuber, ‘There never was a
“Schlieffen Plan”: a reply to Gerhard Gross’, War in History, 17:2 (2010),
pp. 231–49; and T. Zuber, ‘The Schlieffen Plan’s “ghost divisions” march
again: a reply to Terence Holmes’, War in History, 17:4 (2010), pp. 512–21.
In 2006 a major volume was published in which Schlieffen and Zuber’s
arguments were torn apart: Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard
Gross (eds.), Der Schlieffenplan: Analysen und Dokumente (Paderborn:
Schöningh, 2006).
10 Fritz Klein et al. (eds.), Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg, 3 vols. (Berlin:

Akademie Verlag, 1968), vol. I, p. 322.
11 Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918: die militärischen Operationen zu Lande.

Bearbeitet im Reichsarchiv, 14 vols. (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1925–44), vol. II,
p. 238.
12 Alexander Watson, ‘“Unheard of brutality”: Russian atrocities against

civilians in East Prussia, 1914–15’, Journal of Modern History, forthcoming.
See John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of
Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
13 Walter Elze, Tannenberg. Das deutsche Heer von 1914: Seine

Grundzüge und deren Auswirkungen im Sieg an der Ostfront (Breslau:
Ferdinand Hirt, 1928), p. 112; Peter Jahn, ‘“Zarendreck, Barbarendreck –
Peitscht sie weg!” Die russische Besetzung Ostpreussens 1914 in der
deutschen Oeffentlichkeit’, in August 1914: Ein Volk zieht in den Krieg
(Berlin: Herausgegeben von der Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, 1989), pp.
147–55.
14 Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg (Munich: Siedler, 2007); and Manfred

Nebelin, Ludendorff Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler, 2010).
15 Max Hoffmann, Der Krieg der versäumten Gelegenheiten, 2 vols.
(Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1923).
16 Max Hoffmann, Tannenberg wie es wirklich war (Berlin: Verlag für

Kulturpolitik, 1926).
17 Stone, Eastern Front, p. 51.
18 ‘Der Kerl ist ein zu trauriger Genosse, dieser große Feldherr und Abgott
des Volkes . . . Mit so wenig eigener geistiger und körperlicher Anstrengung
ist noch nie ein Mann berühmt geworden.’ Quoted in Karl-Heinz Janssen,
Der Kanzler und der General: Die Führungskrise um Bethmann Hollweg
und Falkenhayn (1914–1916) (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1967), p. 245.
19 Pyta, Hindenburg and Nebelin, Ludendorff.
20 Stone, Eastern Front, pp. 44–69.
21 Ibid.
22 See Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918, vol. II, pp. 242ff.: ‘Nach Leipzig, Metz
und Sedan steht Tannenberg als die gröβte Einkreisungsschlacht da, die die
Weltgeschichte kennt. Sie wurde im Gegensatz zu diesen gegen einen an
Zahl überlegenen Feind geschlagen, während gleichzeitig beide Flanken von
weiterer Übermacht bedroht waren. Die Kriegsgeschichte hat kein Beispiel
einer ähnlichen Leistung aufzuweisen, – bei Kannae fehlte die
Rückenbedrohung.’
23 Ibid., p. 243.
24 See Pyta, Hindenburg, passim, for the main idea of seeing Hindenburg
as an active manipulator of opinions and as a creator of his own image.
25 Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918, vol. II, p. 238.

26 Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis
(Oxford University Press, 2009), as the most recent book on the Hindenburg
myth.
27 Jehuda Wallach, Das Dogma der Vernichtungsschlacht: Die Lehren von

Clausewitz und Schlieffen und ihre Wirkungen in zwei Weltkriegen
(Frankfurt am Main: Bernard und Graefe, 1967).
28 Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legende: Der Westfeldzug 1940 (Munich:

R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995).
29 Ekkehard P. Guth, ‘Der Gegensatz zwischen dem Oberbefehlshaber Ost

und dem Chef des generalstabes des feldheers 1914/15: Die Rolle des
Majors v. Haeften im Spannungsfeld zwischen Hindenburg, Ludendorff und
Falkenhayn’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 35 (1984), pp. 75–111.
30 As cited in Karl-Heinz Janssen, Der Kanzler und der General: Die

Führungskrise um Bethmann Hollweg und Falkenhayn, 1914–1916
(Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1967), p. 90.
31 David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–

1914 (Oxford University Press, 1996).
32 Andreas Hillgruber, ‘Deutsche Russland-Politik 1871–1918: Grundlagen

– Grundmuster – Grundprobleme’, Saeculum, 27 (1976), pp. 94–108, 103.
33 Kurt Riezler, Tagebücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente, ed. Karl Dietrich

Erdmann (Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Band
48) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), p. 183.
34 Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn: Politisches Denken und Handeln im

Kaiserreich (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994), p. 147.
35 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Der Topos vom unvermeidlichen Krieg:
Außenpolitik und öffentliche Meinung im Deutschen Reich im letzten
Jahrzehnt vor 1914’, in Mommsen, Der autoritäre Nationalstaat:
Verfassung, Gesellschaft und Kultur des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990), pp. 380–406. See also Holger
Afflerbach, ‘The topos of improbable war in Europe before 1914’, in
Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds.), An Improbable War? The Outbreak
of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York and
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 161–82.
36 Hillgruber, Deutsche Russland-Politik 1871–1918, pp. 98ff.

38 Theodor Behrmann, Frankfurter Zeitung, August 1914.

kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961).
40 Immanuel Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914–1918: Ein Beitrag

zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg and Lubeck:
Matthiesen, 1960).
41 Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, pp. 259–65, 286–315.
42 Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, p. 48.
43 Quoted by Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Von “Schweinehunden” und

“Waffenbrüdern”: Der Koalitionskrieg der Mittelmächte 1914/15 zwischen
Sachzwang und ressentiment’, in Gerhard Gross (ed.), Die Vergessene Front:
Der Osten 1914/15: Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung (Paderborn:
Schöningh, 2006), p. 135.
44 Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, p. 309.
45 Ibid.
46 Stone, Eastern Front, pp. 70–121; Lothar Höbelt ‘“So wie wir haben
nicht einmal die Japaner angegriffen”: Österreich-Ungarns Nordfront
1914/15’, in Gross (ed.), Die Vergessene Front, pp. 87–120; Günther
Kronenbitter, ‘Von “Schweinehunden” und “Waffenbrüdern”: Der
Koalitionskrieg der Mittelmächte 1914/15 zwischen Sachzwang und
ressentiment’, in Gross (ed.), Die Vergessene Front, pp. 121–45.
47 Graydon A. Tunstall, Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of

1915 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010); Franz Forstner,
Przemyśl: Oesterreich-Ungarns bedeutendste Festung (Vienna:
Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1987).
48 Dennis Showalter, ‘By the book? Commanders surrendering in World

War I’, in Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan (eds.), How Fighting Ends:
A History of Surrender (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 279–97.
49 Stanley Washburn, On the Russian Front in World War I: Memoirs of an

American War Correspondent (New York: Robert Speller, 1982).
50 See Holger Afflerbach, Der Dreibund: Europäische Großmacht – und

Allianzpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Veröffentlichungen der
Kommission für die Neuere Geschichte Österreichs, Band 92) (Vienna:
Böhlau Verlag, 2002), epilogue; Holger Afflerbach, ‘Vom Bündnispartner
zum Kriegsgegne: Ursachen und Folgen des italienischen Kriegseintritts im
Mai 1915’, in Johannes Hürter and Gian Enrico Rusconi (eds.), Der
Kriegseintritt Italiens im Mai 1915 (Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2007), pp. 53–69; Holger
Afflerbach: ‘“. . . vani e terribili olocausti di vite umane . . .”: Luigi
Bongiovannis Warnungen vor dem Kriegseintritt Italiens im Jahre 1915’, in
Hürter and Rusconi (eds.), Der Kriegseintritt Italiens, pp. 85–98.
51 Volker Ullrich, ‘Entscheidung im Osten oder Sicherung der Dardanellen:
Das Ringen um den Serbienfeldzug 1915’, Militärgeschichtliche
Mitteilungen, 32 (1982), pp. 45–63.
52 Afflerbach, Falkenhayn, pp. 266–85.
53 Ibid., p. 286.
54 ‘Seeckt an das Reichsarchiv, 13.11.1927’, in Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918,

vol. VII, p. 439.
55 Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-

Ungarn und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1993), p. 212.
56 Oskar Tile von Kalm, Gorlice (Schlachten des Weltkriegs in

Einzeldarstellungen, vol. XXX) (Berlin: Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1930), p. 13.
58 Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, pp. 247ff.
59 These figures are from Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg, vol. II, p. 75.
60 Washburn, On the Russian Front, passim.
61 Holger Afflerbach, ‘Najwieksze Zwysciestwo Panstw Centralnych Wi

Wojnie ‘Swiatowej – Bitwa Pod Gorlicami’, in Andrzej Welc (ed.),
Militarne I Polityczne Znaczenie Operacji Gorlickiej W Dzialaniach
Wojennych I Wojny ‘Swiatowei (Gorlice: Tow. Opieki nad Zabytkami d.
Powiatu Gorlickiego i Upiekszania Miasta Gorlic z Okolica, 1995), pp. 85–
95, 92.
62 August von Cramon, Unser Oesterreichisch-Ungarischer

Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege: Erinnerungen aus meiner vierjährigen
Tätigkeit als bevollmächtigter deutscher General beim k.u.k.
Armeeoberkommando (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1922), p. 15.
63 Höbelt, ‘Österreich-Ungarns Nordfront 1914/15’, claims the Italians

were inefficient and the danger overrated; this is true only to a certain extent.
My arguments why Italy’s intervention had very important consequences for
the outcome of the First World War can be found in Holger Afflerbach,
‘Entschied Italien den Ersten Weltkrieg?’, in Rainer F. Schmidt (ed.),
Deutschland und Europa: Außenpolitische Grundlinien zwischen
Reichsgründung und Erstem Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), pp.
135–43.
64 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, ‘Von “Oberost” nach “Ostland”?’, in Gross

(ed.), Die Vergessene Front, pp. 295–311, 298.
65 Deutschland im ersten Weltkrieg, vol. II, p. 81.
67 Examples for this attitude can be found in the following: Alexander

Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs (London: Cassell, 1966); and Alexander
Isvolski, Recollections of a Foreign Minister (New York and Toronto:
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1921).
68 Liulevicius, War Land, passim.
69 Peter Hoeres, ‘Die Slawen: Perzeptionen des Kriegsgegners bei den

Mittelmächten. Selbst-und Feindbild’, in Gross (ed.), Die Vergessene Front,
pp. 179–200.
70 Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during

World War I (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005).
71 Stone, Eastern Front, pp. 194–231.

72 Ibid., pp. 165–93.
74 Ibid., p. 242.
75 Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918, vol. X, pp. 442f.
77 Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live
System (London: Macmillan, 1980). A similar analysis for the Eastern Front
seems urgent to me, for the single fact that, for example, all three Great
Powers had drafted around 1.5 million Polish soldiers and therefore the
question of unofficial ‘arrangements’ between Poles in the front lines is an
interesting one. Piotr Szlanta mentions that during Christmas 1914 Polish
troops on both sides of the trenches were singing Polish Christmas songs.
See Piotr Szlanta, ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg von 1914 bis 1915 als
identitätsstiftender Faktor für die moderne polnische Nation’, in Gross (ed.),
Die Vergessene Front, pp. 153–64.
78 Rudolf Jerabek, ‘Die Brussilowoffensive 1916: Ein Wendepunkt der

Koalitionskriegführung der Mittelmächte’, 2 vols. (PhD thesis, University of
Vienna, 1982). It is an excellent study which unfortunately was never
published as a proper book.

83 Still excellent, Werner Conze, Polnische Nation und Deutsche Politik im
Ersten Weltkrieg (Cologne and Graz: Böhlau Verlag, 1958); see also Heinz
Lemke, Allianz und Rivalität: Die Mittelmächte und Polen im ersten
Weltkrieg (bis zur Februarrevolution) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1977).
84 See Liulevicius, War Land, passim; Conze, Polnische Nation; and

Stephan Lehnstaedt, ‘Das Militärgeneralgouvernement Lublin: Die
“Nutzbarmachung” Polens durch Österreich-Ungarn im Ersten Weltkrieg’,
Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 61:1 (2012), pp. 1–26.
Lehnstaedt demolishes the idea of a more ‘benign’ Austrian attitude towards
the Poles (in comparison with German views and policies).
86 See the title of the quoted volume of Gross (ed.), Die Vergessene Front.
Nicola Labanca
A neglected front
In the best general and international histories, references to the Italian-
Austrian Front in the First World War are rare, and often inaccurate.1 The
responsibility for this neglect lies not only on the shoulders of international
historians, nor can it be explained only by the language barrier. The roots of
the problem are not only global but also local.
One reason was that, from very early on, there was both in Italy and in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, little of the institutional support the war effort
enjoyed elsewhere. This was not a popular war, as it was initially elsewhere,
and thus was easily forgotten. The Empire dissolved in 1918 and 1919, and
in Italy the rise of the fascist regime in the long run obscured rather than
deepened the memory of Italian participation in the Great War. For twenty
years the Italian dictatorship permitted the erection of imposing war
memorials and helped construct myths about the war, but the public and
private memories of war did not coincide. Later, during the Cold War, when
Italy and Austria become democracies, nationalist prejudices and language
barriers between Italians and Austrians for a long time prevented a dialogue
either among historians or in the general public. After the end of the Cold
War, two decades of national revival in former Eastern bloc countries did not
help, nor did the Yugoslav civil wars. All these factors made it difficult to
study and interpret the war effort of the Habsburg Empire. In a word,
national particularities – Italian and Austrian – obscured our understanding
of the Italian-Austrian Front in the Great War.
Another reason was the imbalance between the two sides. An ancient
empire faced a young nation-state, which defeated it. Vienna fought on at
least three fronts (Eastern/Russian, south-western/Italian and
southern/Balkan) while Rome, the last of the Great Powers, focused almost
entirely on its Alpine-Karst front; their war efforts were clearly very
different. Nonetheless they faced common challenges and sometimes found
similar solutions. It is clearly time to go beyond old national hostilities in our
understanding of a war whose hardships both populations shared.
A history of the Italian fronts is essential in creating a more
comprehensive and global interpretation of the history of the First World
War. The Western Front has dominated discussion long enough, though its
decisive position in the outcome of the war is not in doubt. Much about the
Great War becomes clearer once we shift our attention south and east to the
Italian-Austrian frontier.2
A battlefield different from the other fronts

The first distinctive element in this story is the terrain on which Italy and
Austria-Hungary fought. It was in many ways different from both the
Western and the Eastern Fronts. The line was not straight but described a
great double curve (a large S) about 600 kilometres long, with two major
highlights: the Austrian Tyrol-Trentino, penetrating up to the Po Valley, and
the Italian Friuli, framed by the Alps to the north and north-east and by the
Karst in the south-east. Looking at the theatre of war from west to east, there
were areas – such as Cadore – where passes and valleys were almost all
above 2,000 metres. The border was in the mountains 80 per cent of the
time, and often in the high mountains – sometimes, indeed, the mountainous
character of the terrain made the border impassable. This was the realm of
the ‘white war’, fought between snow and glaciers, between the Stelvio Pass
and the Adamello range of the Alps. Farther east, in the Carnic Alps, the
conflict took on the most celebrated form of mountain warfare, that of small
Alpine units.
Further east, in the valley from Bovec/Plezzo to Tolmino, dominated by
Monte Nero, and then to the plateau of Bainsizza and Gorizia, it began to be
possible for larger units to operate, even if their movements were hampered
by the River Soca/Isonzo, which runs through the valley. From the Austrian
side these positions could be seen as ideal positions to defend against
superior forces: in front of them, a great stream of water; at their back, a
ridge from where they could shoot Italians as if from a ten-storey house. In
some sense, Austrian positions were a land fortified by nature, with the
mountains a natural strength.
Finally, the last stretch was the realm of the Karst, or ‘Carso’ in Italian, a
barren terrain, with its characteristic erosion and sinkholes. It was a land
difficult to turn into a trench system, one in which artillery shelling produced
dangerous rock splinters. Here was a terrain controlled by the Italians on the
lower areas, but from which it was difficult to climb under the fire of
Austrian higher positions.
In a word, the Italian side was obviously and naturally disadvantaged,
made worse by the fact that the Empire had fortified strategic points in the
Trentino salient. In contrast, Italian fortifications were recent and poorly
constructed. On this front, lines of communications also favoured the
Austrians. There were only a few lines running from the Italian side, with a
single-track railway, which at the beginning of the war made it difficult to
move Italian troops up the line. In contrast, there were multiple lines and
railways on the easier Austrian side.3
From the very beginning, this terrain and these logistical constraints made
everything more rudimentary and more difficult on the Italian-Austrian
Front compared to the Western Front. The trenches system here was not the
same as the one in France and Flanders, and the contrasts were sharper on
the Italian than on the Austrian side. Later, when new tactics were put into
practice in 1916–17, or when battles of materiel (from big guns to tanks)
replaced at least partially human effort as in 1917–18, differences between
the Italian-Austrian Front and the Western Front grew sharper. Posing the
question of how to use tanks on the Karst, and how to make them cross the
Piave or the Isonzo rivers was not the same as posing the same question in
France or Belgium. The sheer diversity in topography made it more difficult
for international observers (and for later historians) to understand the
peculiarities of the Italian-Austrian Front: hence their relative undervaluation
of its special difficulties.
Different strategies and war aims

However, if topography drew Italy and Austria together on this mountainous
terrain, the war aims of the two sides were nevertheless worlds apart. Vienna
entered the war in July 19144 in order to preserve its own role in the Balkans
and Central Europe, under the illusion that it could win a short and local war
– a general belief at that time. But by 1916 Austria realised that it was in a
war of survival. Given this depressing general picture, Austria’s aim was to
come to terms with its former ally and now despised enemy, Italy.
On the other hand, Liberal Italy would rather not have entered the war, for
which the Liberal ruling elite knew it was quite unprepared.5 Therefore their
first line in 1914 was one of benevolent neutrality. Once in the war in 1915,
however, Sidney Sonnino and his allies saw the opportunity to use the war to
regain the Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, Istria and Dalmatia (in addition to
various colonial territories too). Because of these large ambitions the defeat
of the enemy, the Habsburg Empire, became its primary objective. Winning
the war, for the Italian ruling elite, was a matter of national identity, a way to
reconfirm Italian prestige as a Great Power. Austria could live without
defeating Italy, but Italy – the strictly conservative Italy of Sidney Sonnino
and of his nationalist supporters – would not survive a war without victory.
A political debate soon arose in Rome about whether they wanted to defeat
Austria or to dismember it, but overcoming Austria was the objective. Given
divergent war aims, which moved further apart after 1917, military strategy
in the two countries could not have been more different.
There was one aspect of the war they did share: both conducted the war
along lines different from the plans they had envisaged before summer 1914.
On the one side, in July 1914 General Luigi Cadorna, Chief of the Italian
general staff, had inherited a ‘piano di guerra’ from Alberto Pollio, who was
a strong supporter of the Triple Alliance including Austria: but it was a plan
for a defensive war. Between August and September Cadorna began to
prepare a new, offensive plan. On the other side, General Franz Conrad von
Hötzendorf had thought for years that Austria should have punished its
faithless ally: his plan was to take the offensive quickly and decisively
against Italy, with a combined attack from the Trentino and from the Isonzo,
even before that against Russia or Serbia. But, like the Italians, he too had to
change his mind, since by 1914 Serbia and Russia came first. Conrad was
therefore forced to fight Italy defensively.
The strategies of the two sides diverged immediately. The Habsburg
Empire was committed both on the Eastern Front against Russia, and on the
Balkan front against Serbia. There was also the risk of being asked to help
on the Western Front too, when the Italian Front settled into a defensive
stalemate in 1914–15. While occasionally taking on the offensive, including
the ‘punitive’ or Strafexpedition, on the Asiago front in 1917, Vienna
maintained a holding position until the preparation for Caporetto in late
1917. This was a strategy of maintaining the status quo, typical of a great
empire bent on holding its position of advantage.
For the smaller power, Liberal Italy, on the other side, war meant offensive
operations. Many in command of other European armies believed in the
‘spirit of the offensive’. It did not matter if it was put in terms of the ‘sacred
egoism’ of the nationalist Sonnino or the ‘Delenda Austria’ of democratic
interventionists: Italy had to attack. To ‘liberate’ Trent and Trieste, the most
democratic leaders among the irredentists called for offensives. To be sure,
after Caporetto in late 1917, Italy was momentarily forced on the defensive:
but soon another offensive became even more necessary, to regain the lost
territories – and to expand the nation to its rightful boundaries.
The end of the conflict pushed Austria and Italy even further apart. The
old Empire was destroyed and its territory divided. Italy, the last of the Great
Powers, came to Versailles – along with much more powerful Britain, France
and the United States – finally a decision-maker in Europe. For Italy, the
outcome of the peace was not as rosy as expectations at its outset.
Two (even if not entirely) different armies

Let us return to the matter of different strategies suiting different war aims.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy had two very
different military structures at their disposal. It was not so much the size of
the population of both countries respectively – about 50 million in Austria-
Hungary and 34 million in Italy – which made the key difference. Indeed,
the recruitment system of the two armies was based on a national and non-
local territorial conscription, which enabled Vienna to keep different
nationalities under control, and which in Rome helped reduce fears of past
regional divisions interfering with current military plans.
Even the size of the two armed forces facing each other was similar.
Austria before the war had a standing army of about 440,000, which
expanded to 2 million after the outbreak of the war. Italy had 275,000 men
under arms in peacetime, but by December 1914 its army had expanded to
over 1.1 million men. This apparent Austrian advantage paled though, since
Italy fought on one front, whereas Austria fought on three. The Austrian
problem in fighting the war is illustrated too by the fact that both Italy and
Austria spent the same proportion of their national income on military
expenditure before the war – 10.6 per cent.
Separating the armies too were different traditions, political roles and
professional cultures. In terms of traditions, for centuries the Austrian army
had been the bulwark of the throne and the Empire. In Italy the army was a
new creation from the period of Unification, and it embodied the strength of
the nation-state. Furthermore, the pre-war record of the Italian army was not
particularly glorious, not to mention its frequent use against labour unrest
and protest, from the state of domestic siege in 1898 to the ‘Red Week’ in
1914.
For these reasons, the political weight of the military within the state was
entirely different in the two countries. In Austria, as in Germany, the army
was very close to the emperor.6 In Liberal Italy, in peacetime Parliament and
in particular the minister of war played a more significant role in Italy than
in Austria. While there was resentment against the militarisation of politics,
Liberal Italy had some political resources to use against the creation of a
‘garrison state’ in the Prussian (and partly Austrian) model.7 Even while
weakened, Parliament continued to function in Italy while it was suspended
in Austria from 1914 to 1917. The political power of Franz Conrad von
Hötzendorf was hardly surprising in Austria; and neither was the less
powerful position in Italy of Luigi Cadorna.8
The social structure of the officer corps was also different. In Austria, as
everywhere, the aristocracy played a diminishing role, but one-quarter of all
officers who served during the war were still of noble descent. In contrast,
the Italian officer corps was much more bourgeois in character. But, more
important still, the national problem plaguing Austria did not exist in Italy.
The Austrian Emperor commanded not one but three armies: the united-
federal-permanent army (k.u.k. Heer), the two national militias
(Landwehren) – on the Austrian side ‘k. k. Landwehr’, on the Hungarian one
the ‘k. u. Honved’ – and the reserve army (Landsturm). These three different
identities never faded during the war, and at its end, this division helps
account for the dissolution of the Empire. Nevertheless, the officer corps
was mainly German-speaking Austrian, and the same was true in the
personnel running the Ministry of War.9
Nothing like this happened in Italy. There were still complaints about the
high percentage of posts Piedmontese officers occupied compared to officers
from other regions: but the Italian army did not have the national problem
that plagued the Austrian army.10
However, social and national homogeneity did not guarantee efficiency
and professional culture. The more middle-class nature of the Italian army’s
officialdom did not prevent Giovanni Giolitti from observing that the
military in Italy was a venue for the ‘naughty and deficient’ sons of the best
families. This was not without consequences: a strong conservative,
bureaucratic style circulated in Italian forces, slowing the pace of reform and
further imbedding traditional professional cultures in their old ways. In Italy,
for instance, it would have been very difficult to give junior officers wide
initiative in training, and then in combat itself, something Conrad had
believed in for years. Rather, much – perhaps too much – in Italy remained
in the hands of higher officers, with the aggravating consequence that in
Italy, non-commissioned officers were scarce.
In conclusion, the Italian Front was a theatre very different from that of
the other major sectors: the armies were different, their war aims and
strategies were different, the topography was completely different from the
Eastern and Western Fronts. To a number of foreign military observers (and
later to military historians) this created a peculiar situation, sometimes
difficult to understand. Stereotypes or prejudices about national character
stood in for considered analysis, or some concluded the Italian Front was
simply insignificant. This was a major error, since developments on this
front directly contributed to decide the outcome of the war.
Building a front, 1914

In July 1914 the Italian Front did not exist;11 it had to be created. While
politicians deliberated, the military were preparing. In Vienna, Conrad,
assuming that Italy had abandoned the Triple Alliance, planned an attack on
the ‘traitor’ by a pincer movement from the Isonzo and the Trentino. But in
Rome, Chief of general staff Alberto Pollio was in favour of staying in the
alliance, for which he was prepared to send three army corps to the Rhine to
fight against France. This plan dated from an 1888 secret agreement, but it
was suspended in 1911 because of Italian commitments in Libya.12 Only at
the end of August, when neutrality was on the line, did Pollio’s successor,
Cadorna, begin to prepare for war against the Habsburg Empire, while
telling his government the Italian army was not ready for it.
For Austria the war began with full military commitments on the Russian
and the eastern Balkan fronts. There was little to boast about in early actions
either in Serbia or in Galicia. In Italy, too, the war had started indirectly:
trade and exports had to change course; German investments had gone; the
military, as we saw, concretely prepared for war; the general political
atmosphere of internal politics was inflamed by a struggle between
neutralists (a majority in the country and in Parliament) and interventionists
(nationalist-imperialist or democratic). For these reasons, although there was
no fighting, an Italian-Austrian front began to exist: at least hypothetically.
War plans were unfolding: the Italian government spent about 2 billion lira
to enhance military preparedness between summer 1914 and spring 1915.13
In some sense, on both sides of the border these preparations were
inadequate. First let us consider the Italian side, preparing a future attack.
Having chosen to remain neutral, in July–August 1914 the Italian
government did not declare mobilisation, as the general staff had asked. The
Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra, feared that a military mobilisation
without a formal declaration of war could offer Vienna an excuse to attack
Italy while she was still unprepared. Politically correct it may have been, but
this choice made everything more difficult for Cadorna. For example,
gathering soldiers and mobilising the army, based on national and not
regional-territorial conscription, was difficult in a short time. Moreover, Italy
was still suffering from the large military expenditures for the war in Libya,
while its industry was much less developed and less specialised in the
production of weapons compared to Austria, both before and during the first
phase of the war.
But it was not just a matter of political decisions and industrial
backwardness: even military professional culture was part of the problem.
For example, Cadorna had received reports on how the war had been fought
on the Western Front between the summer of 1914 and the spring of 1915.14
But in February 1915 he still sent out a circular repeating old-fashioned
ideas of frontal attack, not considering that the novelty of trench warfare
required another approach. In one way this is not surprising. The Western
generals persisted with this approach (with varying degrees of
sophistication) until the end of the war. So when war was declared in May
1915, the Italian army had not updated its preparation for a war already nine
months old.
Across the border, 1915

On 26 April 1915, the Italian ambassador in London, Guglielmo Imperiali,
signed a secret pact with the Entente that in less than thirty days it would
deliver Italy to the Entente. Formally, with this act the Austrian front (for
Italy), or southern-western front (for Austria), was born.
For the Central Powers, the entrance of Italy into the war was a diplomatic
failure, threatening a military setback. In May 1915 the Habsburg Empire
was already busy on two fronts, while Italy represented a third. Austria still
had some demographic resources to mobilise, but its industrial–economic
resources were not unlimited, and it had to consider the dangers of internal
nationalistic turmoil. In addition, Italian intervention helped consolidate the
naval blockade of the Central Powers, and particularly of Austria, with
Rome dominating the Adriatic Sea.
Italy’s entry into the war rapidly led to strategic disagreements between
the two Central Powers. In Vienna, Conrad’s intention remained a pincer
attack on Italy from the Trentino-Tyrol and from the Isonzo; Berlin seemed
more concerned by the Eastern and Western Fronts, rather than the Italian
one, which irritated Vienna. Then, in the first phases of the war, the only
concrete military help Germany gave to Austria was the Bavarian
Alpenkorps. Without German support, Austrian forces were capable of
holding the line, though not without worries due to their poor military
quality and their ethnic composition. But they were certainly unable
numerically to conduct the offensive which Conrad had in mind.
In the very first days of the war on the Italian Front, there were about 28
divisions (7 more in reserve) on the Italian side and up to 25 on the Austrian
side, which meant for Italy (all the army included) 560 battalions, while
Austria – on that front – had 125 battalions in May 1915, and 275 in July
1915.
The Italian army’s task was apparently less daunting than the one the
Austrians faced. The Isonzo and Karst were the only front the Italian army
had to secure (apart from minor commitments in Albania, Libya and
Thessaloniki). Moreover, the war Salandra and Sonnino wanted to wage was
strictly national and – apart from some support in weapons, raw materials
and finances – Liberal Italy seemed reluctant to ask for additional troops
from its Allies.
In Rome too the High Command thought about a pincer attack, even if
smaller than Conrad’s one, but no less ambitious: from Villach to Trieste’s
Karst, thereafter, leaving the road open to Vienna and Ljubljana. Though
Italian political propaganda spoke of aiming at Trent and Trieste, in order to
win the war the military aimed, with some exaggeration, at Ljubljana and
Vienna.
It is apparent that on the Italian Front both sides’ aims were difficult to
realise and both sides lacked the strength to achieve them. Berlin did not
give troops to Vienna, and the latter never had enough to crush the Italian
army. On the other side, Italy was not able to achieve any initial advantage
of ‘sbalzo iniziale’. In the very first days of the war the Habsburg forces
generally retreated from the frontier – something that Rome claimed as a
first victory (which it was not). In fact Austrian battalions did so only to
move to a ‘military border’, that is, a line easier to defend. Italian
propaganda pretended that Austrian fortifications made it very difficult for
anyone to take the Austrian positions. Austrian propaganda justified inaction
itself by saying that Italian troops were quantitatively overwhelming. But in
fact, particularly in the earliest phase, Austrian fortifications were weak and
Italian troop levels were never adequate for a decisive attack, in part because
of the complication of mobilising an army based on national and not regional
conscription. Moreover, Italian troops were not supported by heavy artillery,
absent in the first years of the war, while the Austrian army was better
supplied. In this context, it is hardly surprising that dreams of a war of rapid
advances, strategic movements and invasions gave way to stalemate and
trenches.
Military operations
From 1915 onwards, Italian offensives can be subdivided into several phases
(Map 10.1). The front was too small to distinguish most battles by place
names, as in the Western and Eastern Fronts. Italians and Austrians then
began to number them. Four battles were launched on the Isonzo. Fighting
went on also on Trentino and in Carnia, but certainly the Isonzo took the
brunt of the fighting. The first battle took place between 23 June and 7 July,
the second between 18 July and 3 August, the third between 18 October and
4 November and the fourth between 10 November and 2 December, when
the weather was already freezing. These four battles of the Isonzo suited the
two commanders perfectly: Cadorna firmly believed tactically in frontal
attack, and Svetozar Boroević von Bojna was unwilling to yield even metres
of land. With minor gains to show for this effort, the Italian army suffered
200,000 casualties. Austrian losses were about 130,000.
Map 10.1 The war in Italy, 1915–18.
Some lessons had been learned, though, on the tactical level. For example,
in Austria’s judgement, already in the Second Battle of the Isonzo Italian
troops aimed at more realistic tactical objectives than in the first battle; at
least in some areas the infantry attack did not follow a heavy artillery
bombardment, disorienting the opponent; in the third battle, some low-level
military units avoided completely destroying all enemy positions and tried
just to pierce opposing lines of trenches; the third and fourth battles were
shorter than the first two, with fewer casualties in their wake. In the
meantime, the Austrians had improved their trench system, and the same
commander Boroević decided in some cases to save his troops by limiting
counter-attacks and concentrating on defence. But what was learned in one
sector was not shared in others. For Austria this was still a secondary front,
with many less than outstanding units, and Italy went on in not fully
understanding the novelty of the war, and not gaining knowledge about this
new kind of war from reports coming from the Western Front.
Manpower soon became a problem for the Austrians. In contrast, less-
industrialised Italy initially suffered a basic problem of a shortage of
armaments rather than a shortage of men. We will see that by the end of the
war these problems would have changed places: Italy would have sufficient
supplies of weapons and men, while Austria would have neither. But in 1915
the Italian army entered the war with only two machine guns per regiment,
while the Austrians had already two per battalion. Italy had plenty of light
artillery, useful in a war of movement, but very few pieces of heavy artillery
capable of breaking barbed-wired and articulated trench systems.15 This also
explains the high losses of Italian troops. They did not lack determination, as
the heavy Austrian losses on the defensive show. In fact, these casualties
weighed more on Boroević than on Cadorna, as a percentage, because of the
greater number of soldiers and units Italy could throw into the battle, and the
multiple engagements Austria faced.
At the general level, 1915 ended with the Central Powers having the upper
hand in Bulgaria and Serbia. But for different reasons, on the Italian Front
the two sides seemed unable to overwhelm each other, while problems of a
different order (industrial for Italy, demographic for Austria) loomed ahead.
Partial successes, 1916

With the new year the Italian Front had become much more challenging:
From the 35 infantry divisions, with 560 battalions and 515 artillery batteries
of 1915, the Italian army now fielded 43 divisions with 693 battalions and
1,122 batteries. It was also a year of clarification, because it was not until 27
August 1916 that Italy declared war on Germany. Formally, the front was no
longer only between Austria and Italy, but it was now fully integrated into
the European war.
In both official histories and national historiographies, the year 1916 is
often presented as a time of success, albeit partial. Indeed, Austria inflicted a
severe blow on Italy with its spring offensive from Trentino; and after that
the Italians conquered the important site of Gorizia, on the Karst front. And
yet both episodes proved to be very costly to the two armies. The fighting in
1916 highlighted the mutual deficiencies of Austrian and Italian forces, and
showed how different this front was from the Western and Eastern Fronts.
The stark difference between the Italian Front and the rest of the European
war was soon clear to Italian and Austrian officers and soldiers who fought
around the Adamello. This was a war in the mountains, where only small
units – and no large regiments and divisions – could operate. Digging a
trench in the snow and the ice was completely different than doing the same
thing in the hills of the Chemin des Dames or the plains of Verdun. Just
feeding and equipping combat units at those heights was a massive problem.
Modern technology was essential in this war. Assuring artillery supplies,
communications and food through baggage-trains made this ‘white war’ a
logistical nightmare. The accuracy of sniper fire, the cunning of the mine
war and especially the endurance of mountain troops deployed in ice caves
opened by explosives, gave this war its grim character.16
But if the ‘white war’ in the mountains was a basso continuo in the war on
the Italian Front from 1915 to 1918, the two most relevant episodes in 1916
were certainly the spring offensive and the Italian capture of Gorizia.
Historians now agree that the spring offensive was the last successful
Austrian battle of the war.17 However, it was not without its headaches.
After few positive results in 1915, Conrad was able to convince his Emperor
that crushing Italy would strengthen the prestige of Austria. He was not
successful alike in convincing his German ally that winning the battle with
Italy would create a strategic advantage for the Central Powers; for this
reason German engagement in the spring offensive remained restricted.
Then, when Conrad ordered the attack (15 May 1916) he had to amend his
previous strategic plan: he launched not a simultaneous move from east and
west, but only one attack from the Trentino; this was not a great Austro-
German joint attack, but only an Austrian assault with some German
support. In addition, he was wrong in not concentrating all his forces on one
point, and instead he dissipated them on a rather broad front. For all this, the
Austrian offensive did not break the Italian defences, and Conrad’s dreams
of arriving in Venice in six days faded rapidly. The punitive or
Strafexpedition (as it is known in Italy) stalled no later than 27 June for two
reasons: first, the strength of Italian positions and the ability of Cadorna to
inject reserves into the battle, and secondly, the Austrian difficulty in
transforming a trench war into a war of movement. Advancing infantry was
no longer protected by artillery, which was unable to move in sequence;
supplies did not arrive for the advancing troops and there was a shortage of
reserves. For all these reasons the offensive ran out of steam. Nevertheless,
Conrad gained the strategic surprise, and thereby presented a serious danger
to Italy: Austria threatened to descend to the plain and cut off supply lines
coming to the Italian Front of the Karst from the Po Valley, from its
industries and its agriculture – in a word, from the Italian hinterland.
The half-success of the spring offensive was further reduced by the Italian
counter-moves. After a few weeks Cadorna managed to take control of
Gorizia. By this, he threatened Trieste and complicated the defence of the
Austrian Karst. This Italian victory over the Austrians, in the sixth Italian
Isonzo battle, was due to the enormous investment of personnel and
resources ordered by Cadorna. Stocks of Italian artillery, after the shortages
of 1915, were now growing. Furthermore, after the humiliation of the spring
of 1916, which forced the government to fall, Liberal Italy needed a
successful summer. The fight was fierce, as seen from the number of losses
which, for the first time, were quite similar (51,000 Italian casualties, 40,000
Austrian). However, as in the case of the Austrian spring offensive, the
Italians were unable to move beyond Gorizia, bringing the offensive to an
end.
In both the Strafexpedition and in taking Gorizia, tactical gains did not
lead to a change in the strategic balance. The war on the Italian Front
continued more or less in late 1916 as it had eight months earlier. Italy, still
on the offensive, launched five other battles on the Isonzo: the Fifth from 11
to 29 March, the Sixth (the one for Gorizia) from 6 to 17 August, the
Seventh from 14 to 17 September, the Eighth from 10 to 12 October and the
Ninth from 1 to 4 November. The Italians gained some advantage but
suffered heavier losses, more than 280,000 men, while the Austrians lost
about 230,000. Again Cadorna, instead of concentrating his attack, had
chosen to keep repeating attacks at different points – straining enemy units
but also dissipating his own ration strength. The Italian command looked
less to take territory and more towards wearing down the Austrian lines.
This grignotage was costly on both sides.
National efforts and alliances

While in 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, the war was becoming
increasingly difficult to win, especially on the Western Front, the Italian
Front had become increasingly important for its two main contenders. For
Rome, after the fall of the centre-right government of Salandra and his
replacement by Paolo Boselli, with a broader political base (though never a
‘sacred union’), the prestige of the Liberal state was at stake in the war. The
effort required by the nation was increasingly heavy: about 5.9 million
Italians were mobilised throughout the conflict; 1 million were not assigned
to the army, for medical or other reasons. At the end of 1916, 2 million
Italian men were on the fighting front. If we consider that at the beginning of
the war the standing army numbered 900,000, and at the end of the conflict
the army’s ration strength was about 2.3 million, one can easily understand
the dimensions of the Italian war effort even before 1917.
For Vienna, after the Strafexpedition and after Gorizia, but especially after
the setbacks suffered on the Russian and Romanian fronts (inflicted by
Brusilov), a defeat on the Italian Front would have had very serious
consequences. Conrad had never forgotten Austria’s defeat either at
Königgrätz (Sadowa) in 1866, or at Solferino in 1859. In the context of the
First World War, losing again to the Italians would have been an unbearable
blow.
Moreover, the Italian Front was not isolated from the other fronts. Italy
and Austria were part of international alliances whose fate depended, to
varying degrees, on the Italian Front. They were both an integral part of a
wartime alliance. Italy depended heavily on economic and financial alliance,
but called for little (and nothing was given) at the military level. Austria’s
posture was rather different. The initial imbalance in military power with
Germany was severely aggravated by the defeats of 1916, to the point that
between September and December, it was said with regret in Vienna that
Austria had lost its military independence. The military command of the
alliance was passed to Kaiser Wilhelm II, that is to Ludendorff and
Hindenburg, and German staff officers were sent to advise Austrian units:
this subordination was not total but it was evident.18
Vienna also gained from this unequal partnership with its most powerful
ally: Austrian officers were trained in German units able to apply, from
winter 1916–17 onwards, lessons learned by the Germans on the Western
Front at the tactical level about attack and defence. The techniques of
infiltration, attack in small units and defence in depth, that together would
change war in the trenches of the Western Front in 1918, arrived on the
Italian Front a year earlier. The Austrians took these lessons to heart, helping
to explain the outcome of the Battle of Caporetto in late 1917.
The geographical peculiarities of the Italian Front remained decisive. In
the ‘white war’ and the stalemate in the high mountains, there was not so
much to learn from other fronts. That said, the Karst began to see some
changes in the efficiency of the Italian army facing the Austrians. The doyen
of Italian military historical studies, Giorgio Rochat, noted that in 1915 Italy
was at a tactical disadvantage vis-à-vis Austria, but that in 1916, the Italians
made up for it. As Rochat put it, the taking of Gorizia and in general the
battles of 1916 caused heavy casualties on both sides; and ‘the fact that the
losses were almost equal is a demonstration of the efficiency of Italian
artillery and of . . . the determined defence of Austrian trenches’.
What saved the Italians and the Entente was the fact that the war was a
total war, and that it could not be won solely on the battlefield. Mobilisation
of men and materials was not less decisive than military efficiency.
However, until 1918 and despite the defeat of Caporetto, Italy managed to
put armies in the field and equip them in a way Austria became increasingly
incapable of doing.
Morale
Manpower mattered, but so did troop morale. Especially after the great effort
of 1916, resignation rather than a belief in victory was widespread. After the
carnage of 1914 to 1916, securing the consent of soldiers was only possible
now through showing that the war was for something, that war aims were
real. But both armies on the Italian Front were slow in organising a
systematic propaganda effort directed at their own soldiers. In Italy this kind
of propaganda would appear only after Caporetto.19
And even if an effort at persuading men of the justice of their cause had
been made, would it have worked? Even in Cadorna’s army many soldiers
did not know what the war was for. In Conrad’s army – where higher literacy
rates would have made propaganda easier – different nationalities had
always remained unconvinced of the war aims of the Habsburg Empire.20
As everywhere else in the war, soldiers’ morale depended on many
variables: the layout of the trenches, the quality and quantity of armaments
and food, the efficiency of the military post: in a word, the degree of concern
from commanders about soldiers’ ‘welfare’ and of course the stiffness (or
slackness) of military discipline and courts-martial. Considering these issues,
it is clear that the Austrian army21 provided better conditions than did the
Italian,22 but not always. In 1917, when conditions got worse for Italian
soldiers, the space opened for ‘defeatist’ propaganda.23 Bad conditions
helped explain an increase in cases of self-mutilation and even of war
neuroses.
Military justice was active on the Italian Front. The Italian army opened
262,000 court cases and issued 170,000 condemnations. A total of 1,061
men were convicted of capital charges out of 4,280 accused, and 750 were
executed. To these deaths, at least 290 summary executions must also be
added.24 The total number of Austrian troops sentenced to death was at least
1,913 after a regular trial, and many more in the end.25 Taking the two sides
together, on the Italian Front, military courts executed more of their own
soldiers than did courts on other fronts, with the possible exception of
Russia. Perhaps executions served as a form of intimidation, but they
certainly did not improve the morale of the soldiers.
Above all, the strength and solidity of the Austrian army were undermined
by its own composition – three armies (permanent, Hungarian, reserve)
where orders could be given in three languages to soldiers of many
nationalities. Eventually, this factor proved decisive. There were deserters
who went home or who left the line (rather than surrendering to the enemy)
on every front: but towards the end of the war Austrian deserters were
exceptionally numerous, hundreds of thousands of men, who roamed the
country in bands. The ethnic divisions in the Austrian army provided an easy
target for Italian propaganda, especially after the ‘Congress of the peoples
oppressed by Austria-Hungary’ in Rome (8–10 April 1918), which ended in
the publication of a Pact of Rome. By this period of the war, it was clear that
morale mattered at least as much, if not more, than numbers. Setbacks in the
German offensive in France helped undermine Austrian troop morale even
further.
Fatigue, exhaustion and the big blow, 1917

The year 1917 was one of fatigue, if not exhaustion. French mutinies made it
evident that enough was enough for their armies on the Western Front at the
time of the Nivelle offensive: but the Italian Front was not so far away from
a similar outbreak of indiscipline. The year opened with an exceptionally
hard winter, which certainly did not contribute to letting the troops rest, from
the mountains to the Karst. Then it saw two more Italian Isonzo battles,
exceptionally hard-fought ones. Then came Caporetto.
This end of the year must not lead us to conclude that 1917 was full of
Austrian successes. First, the Austrian regime – unlike the Italian one – had
undergone significant changes between the end of 1916 and March 1917.
There was the death of Franz-Joseph, the accession of Karl I, the
replacement of Conrad by Arthur Arz von Straussenburg. More generally,
for the Central Powers, Austro-German hopes to exploit the Russian
Revolution and to liquidate the Eastern Front were undermined by the entry
of the United States into the war. The Entente would have fresh and
substantial armies at its disposal as well as the backing of American finance
and industry.
Meanwhile, on the military level, a decisive point had arrived on the
Italian Front. Cadorna could not be satisfied with the results achieved in
1916. Now he called his offensives ‘spallate’ (shoves), clearly aiming at
undermining – rather than destroying – the opponent, wearing him out, while
wearing out his own troops a bit less. Italian soldiers, in the meantime, could
make use of enhanced and abundant supplies of weapons. For these reasons
the Isonzo battles became shorter, even if more deadly – for the Austrians as
much as for the Italians. The Tenth (from 12 May to 8 June) launched 430
Italian battalions against an Austrian force half the size, and cost 160,000
casualties. The Eleventh battle (from 18 to 31 August) was even more
impressive, perhaps involving 600 Italian battalions, compared with about
250 on the Austrian side: but the cost for Italy was 160,000 men lost. On the
Austrian side, estimates of losses range from between 150,000 and 250,000
casualties.
The Eleventh battle earned the Italians the control of Bainsizza. But,
despite an exceptional new commitment of artillery, the casualties the Italian
side suffered were unprecedented – and once again inconclusive. Under
these conditions, speaking about lassitude, or the profound fatigue of the
troops, is just a euphemism. The mute rebellion of Italians soldiers against
the war and their commanders was growing, although it was not expressed
openly in a mutiny as in France.
On the other side, if possible, the weight of the losses was even heavier.
The Austrian Emperor was told by the civil and military authorities that the
army could not endure similar losses. In Vienna, the gnawing sense of a
possible defeat was evident.
It was for this reason that Berlin eventually agreed to help Austria in a
significant military way, to bolster her ally, now in serious trouble. In great
secrecy thousands of German troops were moved towards the Italian Front.
On its own part, Austria made available additional units for use on the Italian
Front, so that the joint offensive could form a strong invading force of about
350,000 men.26
In addition to the manpower and the artillery, new tactics proved decisive.
Following the lessons learned on the Eastern and Western Fronts, military
commanders from Berlin and Vienna agreed to start with a heavy but short
artillery barrage, supplemented by a large discharge of gas. New tactics of
infiltration were set, giving less control to senior officers and more
autonomy to junior officers and troops. A green light was given to small
units, operating in the bottom of valleys and not on the peaks of the
mountains, to act rapidly and to break opponents’ tactics and resistance. The
aim of this penetration in depth was to disrupt the enemy’s rear and then –
here was the masterstroke – to attack from the rear, and not to assault it with
a frontal and linear offensive. Infiltration was the exact opposite of
Cadorna’s approach to the Isonzo battles and his repeated and futile
‘shoves’, and infiltration had a stunning effect on Italian troops massed in
the front line in the offensive posture forced on them by their Supreme
Commander.
The attack started on 24 October.27 The Italian command, without a true
system of trenches and a flexible defence in depth, and devoid of significant
reserves in the rear, soon found itself obliged to order a retreat. Although
infiltration and disruption had occurred on only a small portion of the front
between Bovec and Tolmino, at Caporetto, the penetration of Austro-
German troops threatened to cut all the way to the Italian first line. Units
from ‘Area Carnia’, the Lower Isonzo Karst and even the Trentino were put
in danger.
To be true, the objective of the attacking generals – the Austrian Boroević
and the German Otto von Below, with staff officers such as Krafft von
Dellmensingen – was limited to the Tagliamento, just to force Italian troops
back to the political border from which they had started the war on 24 May
1915. What they could not imagine was that the Italian Front, in particular
the Second Army, would collapse so quickly, dragging with it the other
armies, back to the Piave. Infiltration completely bewildered Italian
commanders, cut communication lines and separated troops from their
chains of command, leaving them lost, without any idea how to fight and
against whom. Soldiers realised that the battle was lost and many cultivated
the illusion that maybe the war was over. Beaten or isolated, many threw
down their weapons and left the front. Some units fought, led by their junior
officers, but they could do nothing but retreat. Seeing the military wreckage,
local civilian populations in the area tried to escape the advancing enemy
forces. The roads then became very congested, with women and men en
route, in uniform or not, flocking to the bridges, from the mountains towards
the plain and the Po Valley. It was possible to stop them only once they had
passed the Piave, where Cadorna in the meantime had established a new line
of resistance. The battle was a catastrophe: 40,000 killed and wounded,
300,000 prisoners, 350,000 soldiers lost or wandering around as stragglers
and more than 3,000 pieces of artillery lost – fully two-thirds of the entire
Italian stock of heavy artillery and half of all middle-range guns in the
Italian arsenal (Map 10.2).
Map 10.2 Caporetto and after.
In a word, Caporetto nullified the extraordinary effort and expense of two

years of war. The front was shortened by almost 200 kilometres, the Italian
front line moved 140 kilometres to the west, about 38,850 square kilometres
of national territory were seized by the enemy and 2 million people were left
at the mercy of enemy occupation. The whole Italian war effort, on the
offensive since 1915, within two weeks became entirely defensive in order
to prevent the enemy passing the Piave to the Po river valley. If possible,
Cadorna eventually managed to worsen all this: in his statement on 28
October, instead of taking responsibility for the defeat, he accused soldiers
of not having fought for their country. Taken together, this was Caporetto
(Map 10.3).
Map 10.3 Retreat of the Italian army after Caporetto.
Immediately the view spread that Caporetto was a ‘military strike’ against
the war.28 In reality, the root causes of Caporetto were military. However,
they were intertwined with the general exhaustion of the troops, forced to
fight a war of attrition with very meagre results (apart from Gorizia, the
Bainsizza and some minor border changes). Against this thesis of the
military strike, more or less immediately another, second interpretation
arose: Italian soldiers did indeed fight at Caporetto.29 It is no surprise that it
was well received and corroborated retrospectively by the fascist regime,
and also very recently has returned to the scene. Intended to save the honour
of the Italian military, this second interpretation is, however, as partial as the
one it wants to counter. In fact it is at least as obvious that some units fought
and some officers commanded them, as it is that other units and officers
were able to retire without being overwhelmed and without breaks in the
chain of command. But it is hard to deny that the defeat of Caporetto led
Italian soldiers from the mountains and from the Karst to the plain, and that
many guns and uniforms were cast away in the general flight.
After the great victories on the Eastern Front, the German victory on the
Masurian Lakes (September 1914) and the Russian victory led by Brusilov
in south-western Russia and Galicia (September 1914), Caporetto was the
biggest and most unexpected victory of movement in the war to date.
Winner and loser, 1918

Tactically, Austria-Hungary and Germany had won. But let us pause for a
moment and consider what Italy had lost. Because of its dimensions,
underestimating Caporetto is truly difficult in the context of the history of
the Italian Front and of the Italian war. Yet a renowned scholar like Holger
Herwig called it a ‘cosmetic victory’ for Vienna.30 Why?
In Paris and London it was feared that an Italian defeat could lead to
disaster. That is why the Entente sent substantial military and economic aid
to Italy. The Italian government dismissed Cadorna, the Supreme
Commander who had lasted longer than any other in the entire war, and
replaced him with the more malleable Armando Diaz. The most important
support to Italy from the Entente, however, was not military but economic
and moral-political.
The Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, asked for fifteen
divisions from his Allies; Diaz asked for twenty. In the end six French and
five English divisions arrived. Their commanders, fearful that the virus of
the ‘caporettisti’ and defeatists could infect their own men, deployed these
units away from the front line. Meanwhile, however, before and during their
arrival, between November and December 1917 Italian soldiers held the line
on the Piave, against a final Austro-Hungarian attempt to cross the river – an
encounter in which Allied troops were not directly involved. Behind the
Piave, the new Italian High Command had to reorganise the whole army,
while the country was polarised between hardened supporters of a defence to
the bitter end and those who preferred a return of peace, many former
neutralists, and all who in various ways had opposed the intervention in the
war.
On the other side, Caporetto was a cosmetic victory for Vienna because it
allowed Austria to hide for a while the growing structural weaknesses of its
Empire. Undoubtedly, the Central Powers had won a major victory on 24
October; but thereafter, they did not make any progress on the Italian Front.
The fighting in the first half of 1918 produced no effect, the great attack on
the Piave from 15 to 22 June revisited the previous situation in the Karst, but
with reversed roles: the Austrian attackers lost 150,000 men, the Italian
defenders, 90,000. Above all, Austria was not able to break through. Like
the great German attack on the Western Front in March (the Kaiserschlacht),
what the Italians called the ‘Battle of the Solstice’ (15–22 June 1918) was
the last Austrian attempt at breaking through. After that, for Vienna, defeat
was certain: the date was not yet defined, but the outcome was sure. Austrian
failure confirmed on the Italian Front what the great German offensive
meant on the Western Front.
From 1915 to the end of 1917 Italy and Austria had shared many things,
perhaps more than the two national historiographies have acknowledged. But
after the reaction to Caporetto, Italian and Austrian destinies began to
diverge notably and irreversibly.
In fact, Austria then found itself in greater need of men, more men than it
had available, more weapons and more resources than its overstretched
domestic economy could supply. Italy, on the other hand, thanks to the
internal reaction of its ruling class and to the renewal of its war effort and
resistance, and thanks too to Allied support, was able to keep its men fed and
armed through an extraordinary effort of its industrial economy. On the eve
of the end of hostilities the Italian army had 2.2 million men in the field,
6,970 guns and 5,190 machine guns, with 650 airplanes (290 fighters, 74
bombers, 286 reconnaissance): a very large force, one that Austria could
neither afford nor sustain.
Life on the Italian home front in 1918 had not been easy, but in war the
comparisons that matter most are relative, not absolute, and life on the home
front in Austria was much worse. Since January, and even more since July,
after the failure in the ‘Battle of the Solstice’, the ethnic and national mix of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to fall apart. Nationalities rebelled,
workers went on strike, soldiers deserted or lost much of their military
efficiency. Between September and October, the Poles of Galicia, the
Czechs, Slovaks, Slavs, Croats and Hungarians began to distance themselves
from ‘German’ Austria. While the home front was collapsing, the fighting
front was in ruins. To stop total disaster, Emperor Karl issued his manifesto
of 16 October 1918 granting independence or autonomy to subject
populations. This was too little and too late.
If the Austrian situation was now desperate, Italy’s went from strength to
strength. The new Italian High Command successfully reconstituted and
shrewdly administered its forces. Already in the summer of 1918 the Allies
urged Italy to attack. But, fearing that his army was still weak, and that it
needed to avoid defeat at all costs, Diaz wanted to attack only with complete
assurance of victory. Thus he waited a substantial period of time. Between
September and October, while Austria was coming apart, Diaz remained
inert. He promised an attack on 15 October, but he postponed it. He moved
only on 24 October, a year after Caporetto: then he attacked decisively,
without accepting any request for an armistice coming from Berlin or
Vienna. This was the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. Even when Austria
surrendered on 3 November, he wanted to prove Italian strength and
humiliated the opponent, continuing to move forward to regain lands lost a
year earlier, stopping only in the afternoon of 4 November 1918 (Map 10.4).
Map 10.4 Lines reached by the Italian army in late 1918.
Most critics have refused to see Vittorio Veneto as a real battle, given the
state of dissolution of the Austrian army. The Austrians have always refused,
even in name, preferring to speak of a ‘third Piaveschlacht’. After June
1918, Austria was considered (and probably considered itself) beaten, and
this may have had a bearing on the Western Front and German moves there.
Vittorio Veneto has been frequently misinterpreted. A serious scholar, in a
serious study, wrote of this offensive as a joint Italian-Anglo-French move31
– one of the many cases in historical writing where international and national
stereotypes, and some lack of precise knowledge, completely betray the
author. For better or for worse, Vittorio Veneto was an Italian battle.
Exaggerating its size, a frequent feature of old nationalistic Italian
historiography, is also an error. This battle was a unique episode at the end of
the Great War.
The total cost of the conflict, however, was heavy for all. In the war as a
whole, Austria had mobilised 8 million men: 1.4 million had died, about 2
million had been injured, 1.7 million had been made prisoners of war, not
counting the nearly 4 million afflicted by illness or other conditions. Italy
had conscripted 5.9 million men, dismissing as unfit or leaving in the
factories about 1 million men. The country lost 600,000 men; 1 million had
been injured and the war left 280,000 orphans, not to mention widows. Yes,
Italy had won and Austria had lost, but war had devastated both countries.
Farewell to arms? Demobilisation, 1919

Formally, the war ended in November 1918. But for societies the effects of
the war ended much later. The demobilisation of armies took time. In Italy it
was completed in 1920; at the end of 1919 there were still 500,000 men in
the Italian army.32 In the former Habsburg Empire the war ended effectively
before the Armistice, at a time when the Imperial Army and political
institutions were dissolving.33
The end of fighting gave way to the two diverging post-wars. The
Habsburg Empire was not only defeated but destroyed. In the Balkan
territories, a new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes emerged. It became
the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. Czechoslovakia, Galicia and Bukovina
split off too.
Italy’s post-war fate might appear more stable – but it was not. Italy had
won, in spite of Caporetto, but the Liberal ruling class would not have time
for celebrations. The war had greatly weakened the Italian political system.
The conflict had led to an authoritarian transformation, reflected in the
limitation, if not silencing, of Parliament. Moreover, the brutalisation of men
and norms caused by the war would inspire a small movement, which chose
to militarise its party: the Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini.
In short, for domestic reasons Liberal Italy won the war but lost the peace.
Here again, even if the collapse of Liberalism had domestic origins, as in
Austria, external factors played a role. The decisions of the Conference of
Versailles rejected Italian claims for territory on the Adriatic, territory given
to the new Yugoslavia. Fascists claimed that Italy had been ‘victimised’ and
that the victory had been ‘mutilated’. A world war was over, but the
groundwork for another war had been laid.
Memory
In the minds of people, war took a much longer time to fade away. One
novelty of the Great War was its staggering human costs, which went beyond
the slaughter in the front lines, and was measured as well by the number of
soldiers and civilians who went mad on account of the war.34 For many the
war never ended.
Then there was an accounting to give. An event so grand had to be
explained. This gave origin to an exceptional tide of books and publications.
Both in Italy and Austria, generals were among the first to publish their
memoirs and to debate their own merits and responsibilities, perhaps more in
Italy than in Austria. But it was not the high command but officers and
reserve officers who were to establish national versions of the victory (in
Rome) and defeat (in Vienna).
Unlike in Germany, it was very difficult for Austrians to construct a stab-
in-the-back legend. The debacle of the last weeks, and especially days, of the
war made it impossible for soldiers to conjure up an image of an army that
fought until the bitter end.35 More marketable, and perhaps peculiarly
Austrian, was the creation of a mood of imperial nostalgia: a perfectly
understandable sentiment among the Austro-Germans, but to which the new
states and nations, equally understandably, were immune. All this made
more difficult a common understanding, after 1918, of the war fought by the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.36
In Italy it was the ghost of Caporetto that agitated the minds of the
military. Without explaining that defeat, it was difficult to explain the Italian
victory. In general, however, the prevailing narrative was set by reserve and
recalled officers (‘ufficiali di complemento’). It recounted the great national
effort made by civil society wearing the uniform of the nation in arms. In
short, this public narrative imposed the version of democratic
interventionism, a version that fascism was able to quickly adopt and adapt.
All the alternative memories of the war – the ones by isolated pacifists,
socialists and militant communists – were drastically limited in appeal. In
time, political developments further occluded the war on the Italian Front: in
Italy after 1922,37 in Austria, at the latest, by 1932. This silencing of
memories was another difference in the way the Italian Front receded from
view, compared to the war on the Western Front.
It is still difficult to say whether or up to which point the mass of soldiers
recognised themselves in the books written by their former generals or
officers, permanent or reserve. Maybe their memories of the war were
different. Maybe they took refuge in literature. But who told them or anyone
else about the Italian Front and its unique features? Henri Barbusse, Erich
Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway were neither Italian nor Austrian.
Studying history
A small section of publications on the war was by historians, and in
particular military historians. The sophistication of Austrian and Italian
historiography cannot be analysed in detail here, but something can be said
once again about shared and peculiar features on the two sides of the Italian
Front.
Obviously, Italian and Austrian military historians worked in two very
different contexts and had perhaps opposite tasks. In Austria they had to
explain the reasons for the defeat of an old empire; in Italy, the reasons for a
young nation’s problematic victory. In Austria, the official military report on
the war, published in 1930–9, could be seen at the same time as the last act
of the Empire and an effort to build a new nation (as its authors were
deprived of access to papers found outside the new Austrian government),
because of its taking an Austrian-national much more than imperial
perspective. In Italy, the exaltation of the national effort became, after 1922,
part of the political religion. This did not make it easier for the officers of the
post-war Historical Office of the general staff to explain realistically Italian
problems and defeats, as well as victories. Mussolini reportedly said in 1925
that the time of myths had come, not of history. Then the official report on
the Italian war stopped at the volume on 1917 in the mid 1930s, and it would
be resumed only in 1968, to be completed in 1988.
Only a few scholars tried to build bridges between these two nationalist
military histories, different but parallel. In the years between the two World
Wars, Luigi Cadorna (and afterwards Piero Pieri) and Krafft von
Dellmesingen wrote to each other, and their exchanges were published in
learned journals or newsletters.38 Apart from these initiatives, Austrian and
Italian military histories grew in mutual splendid isolation. This separate set
of trajectories – more than the language barrier – made it more difficult to
deepen our knowledge of the Italian Front, to spread it internationally to
countries other than Austria and Italy and to integrate it into the general
histories of the First World War.
Moreover, at the national level, both in Austria and in Italy, studying
military history remained unfashionable. After the Second World War, when
military history grew all over Europe, it took forty years for a major book to
emerge – Manfried Rauchensteiner’s publication of 1993.39 In Italy, things
were only slightly better. Piero Pieri published a short history of the war
between 1958 and 1965,40 and Piero Melograni a more comprehensive and
widely researched one in 1969.41 But to have histories of the Great War
other than the old myths, here and there still echoed by Melograni, it was
necessary to wait longer in Italy than it took in Austria: it took until the late
1990s, with the works of Giovanna Procacci (1997), Antonio Gibelli (1998)
and especially Giorgio Rochat and Mario Isnenghi (2000),42 whose
synthesis, twelve years after its publication, remains unsurpassed.
Conclusions
The Italian Front mattered in the final unfolding of victory and defeat in the
First World War. One scholar claimed that ‘Germany might indeed have
surrendered if it had not been able to count on Austria-Hungary.’ And yet the
same author claimed that ‘Italy brought less in benefits than a burden to its
great power Allies.’43 Both claims require revision. The progressive
weakening of Austria, in fact, had a direct effect on the central front in the
war, the Anglo-Franco-German Western Front. Let us not forget that out of
fifty months of war, the Italian army spent thirty-nine months reducing,
wearing out and degrading the Austrian army. No explanation of the
dissolution of the Dual Monarchy can ignore this fact, and that progressive
erosion helped doom the Central Powers in 1918.
On the other hand, it is true that a former multi-national empire and a
young nationalist kingdom were very different. But they had many more
common features than the two national historiographies – generally ignoring
each other – have long been willing to admit. In a transnational and global
history of the Great War, perhaps it is now time to reintegrate fully the story
of the Italian Front in the military and human chronicle of the conflict.
The author wishes to thank Dr Oswald Überegger (Hildsheim University)

and Matthias Egger (Innsbruck University): without their competent help,
the necessary bibliography of German-speaking literature would have been
more incomplete.
1 Exceptions to the rule are Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich and Irina
Renz (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003);
and John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010). The latter contains Giorgio Rochat, ‘The Italian Front,
1915–18’, pp. 82–96, and Mark Cornwall, ‘Austria-Hungary and
“Yugoslavia”’, pp. 369–85.
2 Jay Winter (ed.), The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009).
3 Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, 1914–1918, Hrsg. vom österreichischen

Bundesministerium für Heereswesen und vom Kriegsarchiv, 8 vols. (Vienna:
Verlag der Militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, 1930–8), vol. II, p. 352,
vol. V, p. 632; and Ministero della guerra, Comando del corpo di stato
maggiore, Ufficio storico, L’esercito Italiano nella Grande Guerra (1915–
1918) (Rome, 1927–88).
4 Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn

und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1993).
5 Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat, La grande guerra 1914–1918

(Florence: La nuova Italia, 2000).
6 Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, IN:

Purdue University Press, 1976), pp. 177, 180, 218, 198, 202.
7 John Gooch, Army, State, and Society in Italy, 1870–1915 (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1989); Giovanna Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella
Grande Guerra, con una raccolta di lettere inedite (Rome: Editori Riuniti,
1993); Giovanna Procacci, ‘La Prima Guerra Mondiale’, in Giuseppe
Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia, vol. IV: Guerre e
Fascismo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997); and Nicola Labanca, ‘Zona di
Guerra’, in Mario Isnenghi and Daniele Ceschin (eds.), Gli italiani in
guerra: conflitti, identità, memorie dal Risorgimento ai nostri giorni, vol. III:
La Grande Guerra: dall’Intervento alla ‘Vittoria Mutilata’ (Turin: Utet,
2008), pp. 606–19.
8 Hermann J. W. Kuprian, ‘Warfare – welfare: Gesellschaft, Politik und

Militarisierung Österreich während des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in Brigitte
Mazohl-Wallnig, Hermann J. W. Kuprian and Gunda Barth-Scalmani (eds.),
Ein Krieg, zwei Schützengräben: Österreich-Italien und der Erste Weltkrieg
in den Dolomiten 1915–1918 (Bolzano: Athesia, 2005); and Hermann J. W.
Kuprian, ‘Militari politica e società in Austria durante la Prima Guerra
Mondiale’, Memoria e Ricerca: Rivista di Storia Contemporanea, 28 (2008),
pp. 55–72.
9 Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary

1914–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1997); Richard Georg Plaschka, Horst
Haselsteiner and Arnold Suppan, Innere Front: Militärassistenz, Widerstand
und Umsturz in der Donaumonarchie 1918 (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte
und Politik, 1974), p. 35; and Ernst Zehetbauer, Die ‘E.F.’ und das Ende der
alten Armee: der Krieg der Reserveoffiziere Österreich-Ungarns 1914–1918
(Vienna: Staatprüfungsarbeit, Ist. f. öst. Gesch., 2000), pp. 7, 19, 24, 28, 64,
70, 77, 100, 133, 163.
10 G. Caforio and P. Del Negro (eds.), Ufficiali e società: interpretazioni e

modelli (Milan: Angeli, 1988); and Piero Del Negro, ‘Ufficiali di carriera e
ufficiali di complemento nell’esercito italiano della grande guerra’, in
Gerard Canini (ed.), Les fronts invisibles: nourrir fournir soigner (Nancy:
PUN, 1984).
11 Holger Afflerbach, Der Dreibund: europäische Grossmacht-und
Allianzpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2002).
12 Massimo Mazzetti, L’esercito italiano nella Triplice Alleanza (Naples:

Esi, 1974); Maurizio Ruffo, L’Italia nella Triplice Alleanza: i piani operativi
dello SM verso l’Austria Ungheria dal 1985 al 1915 (Rome: Ufficio storico,
Stato maggiore dell’esercito, 1998); and Nicola Labanca, ‘Welches
Interventionstrauma für welche Militärs? Der Kriegseintritt von 1915 und
das italienische Heer’, in Johannes Hürter and Gian Enrico Rusconi (eds.),
Der Kriegseintritt Italiens im mai 1915 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag,
2007), pp. 73–84.
13 Mario Montanari, Politica e strategia in cento anni di guerre italiane,

vol. II: Il periodo liberale, t. II, La grande guerra (Rome: Ufficio storico,
Stato maggiore dell’esercito, 2000).
14 Giorgio Rochat, ‘La preparazione dell’esercito italiano nell’inverno

1914–15’, Il Risorgimento, 1 (1961), pp. 10–32; and Giorgio Rochat, ‘La
convenzione militare di Parigi, 2 maggio 1915’, Il Risorgimento, 3 (1961),
pp. 128–56.
15 Filippo Cappellano and Basilio Di Martino, Un esercito forgiato nelle

trincee: l’evoluzione tattica dell’esercito italiano nella Grande Guerra, con
un saggio di Alessandro Gionfrida (Udine: Gaspari, 2008).
16 Luciano Viazzi, La guerra bianca in Adamello (Trent: Arti Grafiche

Saturnia, 1965); Luciano Viazzi, La guerra bianca sull’Adamello (Trent: G.
B. Monauni, 1968); Gunda Barth-Scalmani, ‘Kranke Krieger im
Hochgebirge: Einige Uberlegungen zur Mikrogeschichte des Sanitatswesens
an der Dolomitenfront’ and Luciana Palla, ‘Kampf um die Dolomitentiler:
Der Große Krieg im Grenzgebiet’, both in Mazohl-Wallnig, Kuprian and
Barth-Scalmani (eds.), Ein Krieg, zwei Schützengräben, pp. 341–60 and
361–76 respectively; and Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death
on the Italian Front, 1915–1919 (London: Basic Books, 2008).
17 Vittorio Corà and Paolo Pozzato (eds.), 1916, la Strafexpedition: gli
altipiani vicentini nella tragedia della grande guerra, preface by Mario
Rigoni Stern, introduction by Mario Isnenghi (Udine: Gaspari, 2003).
18 Manfried Rauchensteiner, ‘Österreich-Ungarn’, in Hirschfeld, Krumeich

and Renz (eds.), Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg, pp. 68, 76; Graydon A.
Tunstall, Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (Lawrence
KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 12, 209; Günther Kronenbitter,
‘The limits of cooperation: Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World
War’, in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey (eds.), Entangling Alliances:
Coalition Warfare in the Twentieth Century (Canberra: A.C.T., 2005), pp.
74–85; Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Austria-Hungary’, in Hamilton and Herwig
(eds.), War Planning 1914; and Wolfgang Etschmann, ‘Die Südfront 1915–
1918’, in Klaus Eisterer and Rolf Steinenger (eds.), Tirol und der Erste
Weltkrieg (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2011).
19 Mario Isnenghi, Giornali di Trincea 1915–1918 (Turin: Einaudi, 1977).
20 Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for

Hearts and Minds (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000).
21 Plaschka, Haselsteiner and Suppan, Innere Front, pp. 148, 90; Lawrence
Sondhaus, In the Service of the Emperor: Italians in the Austrian Armed
Forces, 1814–1918 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs and New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 104; and Mark Cornwall,
‘Morale and patriotism in the Austro-Hungarian army, 1914–1918’, in John
Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First
World War (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 175.
22 Giorgio Rochat, ‘Il soldato italiano dal Carso a Redipuglia’, in Diego

Leoni and Camillo Zadra (eds.), La Grande Guerra: esperienza, memoria,
immagini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), pp. 613–30; Enzo Forcella and
Alberto Monticone, Plotone di esecuzione: i processi della prima guerra
mondiale (Bari: Laterza, 1968); Lucio Fabi, Gente di trincea: la Grande
Guerra sul Carso e sull’Isonzo (Milan: Mursia, 1994); and Vanda Wilcox,
‘Generalship and mass surrender during the Italian defeat at Caporetto’, in
Ian F. W. Beckett (ed.), 1917: Beyond the Western Front (Leiden: Brill,
2009).
23 Bruna Bianchi, ‘La grande guerra nella storiografia italiana dell’ultimo

decennio’, Ricerche Storiche, 3 (1991), pp. 698–745.
24 Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella Grande Guerra; and Marco

Pluviano and Irene Guerrini, Le fucilazioni sommarie nella prima Guerra
Mondiale, preface by Giorgio Rochat (Udine: Gaspari, 2004).
25 Karl Platzer, Standrechtliche Todesurteile im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin

and Stuttgart: WiKu-Verlag, 2004).
26 Oskar Regele, Gericht über Habsburgs Wehrmacht: Letzte Siege und

Untergang unter dem Armee-Oberkommando Kaiser Karls I. Generaloberst
Arz von Straussenburg (Vienna and Munich: Herold, 1968), p. 68.
27 Nicola Labanca, Caporetto: storia di una disfatta (Florence: Giunti,

1997); and Manfred Rauchensteiner (ed.), Waffentreue – Die 12:
Isonzoschlacht 1917 (Vienna: Fassbänder, 2007).
28 Mario Isnenghi, I vinti di Caporetto nella letteratura di guerra (Padua:

Marsilio, 1967).
29 Paolo Gaspari, Le bugie di Caporetto: la fine della memoria dannata,

preface by Giorgio Rochat (Udine: Gaspari, 2011).
30 Herwig, The First World War, p. 336.
31 Tim Travers, ‘The Allied victories, 1918’, in Hew Strachan (ed.), The
Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 288.
32 Giorgio Rochat, L’esercito italiano da Vittorio Veneto a Mussolini
(1919–1925) (Bari: Laterza, 1967).
33 Reinhard Nachtigal, ‘The repatriation and reception of returning

prisoners of war 1918–22’, Immigrants & Minorities, 26:1–2 (2008), pp.
157–84.
34 Antonio Gibelli, L’officina della guerra: La Grande Guerra e le

trasformazioni del mondo mentale (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1991); and
Bruna Bianchi, La follia e la fuga: nevrosi di guerra, diserzione e
disobbedienza nell’esercito Italiano, 1915–1918 (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001).
35 Oswald Überegger, ‘Tabuisirung, Instrumentalisierung, verspätete

Historisierung: die Tiroler Historiographie und der Erste Weltkriege’,
Geschichte und region/Storia e regione, 11:1 (2002), pp. 129, 133; Christa
Hammerle, ‘“Es ist immer der Mann der den Kampf entscheidet und nicht
die Waffe”: Die Männlichkeit des k.u.k. Gebirgskriegers in der soldatischen
Erinnerungskultur’, in Hermann J. W. Kuprian and Oswald Überegger (eds.),
Der Erste Weltkrieg in Alpenraum (Innsbruck: Wagner, 2011), p. 36; and
Oswald Überegger, Erinnerungskriege: der Erste Weltkrieg, Österreich und
die Tiroler Kriegserinnerung in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Innsbruck: Wagner,
2011), p. 84.
36 Rudolf Jerabeck, ‘Die österreichische Weltkriegsforschung’, in

Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Erste Weltkrieg: Wirkung, Wahrnehmung,
Analyse (Munich: Piper, 1994), p. 955; and Oswald Überegger, ‘Vom
militärischen Paradigma zur “Kulturgeschichte des Krieges”?
Entwicklungslinien der österreichischen Weltkriegsgeschichtsschreibung
zwischen politisch-militärischer Instrumentalisierung und universitärer
Verwissenschaftlichung’, in Überegger (ed.), Zwischen Nation und Region:
Weltkriegsforschung im interregionalen Vergleich. Ergebnisse und
Perspektiven (Innsbruck: Wagner, 2004), pp. 63–122.
37 Gianni Isola, Guerra al regno della guerra! Storia della Lega proletaria
mutilati invalidi reduci orfani e vedove di guerra (1918–1924) (Florence: Le
Lettere, 1990).
38 Piero Pieri, La prima guerra mondiale 1914–1918: problemi di storia
militare, new edn, ed. Giorgio Rochat (Rome: Ufficio storico, Stato
maggiore dell’esercito, 1986 [1947]).
39 Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers.
40 Piero Pieri, L’Italia nella prima guerra mondiale (Turin: Einaudi, 1965).
41 Piero Melograni, Storia politica della grande guerra 1915–1918 (Bari:

Laterza, 1969).
42 Antonio Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani 1915–1918 (Milan:

Sansoni, 1998); Procacci, ‘La prima guerra mondiale’; and Isnenghi and
Rochat, La grande guerra 1914–1918.
43 L. L. Farrar, ‘The strategy of the Central Powers, 1914–1917’, in

Strachan (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War, pp. 28,
32.
Robin Prior
There is some irony in the fact that Britain, the country that mainly
prosecuted the war against Ottoman Turkey, had spent the last 100 years
attempting to prop up the ‘sick man of Europe’ against its foes. By the early
years of the twentieth century the position had changed. The Young Turk
Revolution in 1908 promised much but delivered little in the way of reform.
The Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 saw Turkey lose most of its European
possessions. In Europe it was now reduced to a small amount of territory
around Adrianople. Britain and France had been aware for some time of the
alienation of the tribes in the Arabian Peninsula from Turkish rule. Was the
Ottoman Empire finally on the brink of collapse? And if it did collapse
would the British in particular face a series of hostile states on the flank of
its communications with the East through the Suez Canal? Clearly, the
British would have an interest in events in the Ottoman provinces, and
France had a long declared interest in the fate of what are now the states of
Lebanon and Syria . Vultures seemed to be gathering before there was a
carcass to consume.
The Young Turk government was not unaware of British and French
interest in their fate. In an attempt to shore up their position they staged a
coup in Constantinople in 1913, centralising affairs under the triumvirate of
Enver Pasha (Minister of War), Jemal (Cemal in modern Turkish spelling)
Pasha (Minister of the Navy) and Talat Pasha (Minister of the Interior).
Enver, in particular, was pro-German. He had been Military Attaché in
Berlin and was a great admirer of German military efficiency. On the other
hand Jemal leaned towards the French and Talat towards the Russians. It
soon became clear however, that the Entente powers were not prepared to
accept Turkish conditions, which included the return of the Aegean islands
lost to Greece in the Balkan wars and the abolition of the Capitulations – the
series of tax concessions forced upon Ottoman Turkey by the powers. All the
Entente was willing to offer was a guarantee of Ottoman Turkish sovereignty
in the event of war.
The Central Powers could offer more. Liman von Sanders was head of the
German military mission in Turkey, and more assistance in retraining and
equipping the army was offered. This suited Enver, who as early as July
1914 had asked the Germans for an alliance which was signed on 2 August.
The outbreak of war in August put all these moves on hold. Turkey for the
moment put the German alliance in abeyance and declared its neutrality. The
Triumvirate were concerned that on the one hand Turkey’s great enemy,
Russia, had sided with the Entente, and on the other that this, added to the
strength of Britain and France, might mean that the Entente would win. The
Young Turks bided their time. By October they had definitely decided to
trigger the German alliance. The German ships Goeben and Breslau had
arrived in Constantinople after evading the British Mediterranean Squadron.
They made useful replacements for the two dreadnoughts being built for
Turkey by Britain, but withheld for its own use after the declaration of war
on Germany. The Germans now promised the Turks that they would abolish
the Capitulations and, if Greece intervened, restore the lost islands.
The incident which caused the outbreak of war is shrouded in mystery. On
29 October, Admiral Souchon, with the Goeben and Breslau (now with
Turkish names) bombarded Odessa and attacked Russian shipping in the
Black Sea. The Triumvirate had almost certainly agreed in secret to this
operation, and after it occurred dissidents within the government were
convinced to stay as a sign of national unity. On 2 November Russia
declared war, followed by Britain and France on the 5th. Indeed the British
fleet off the Dardanelles had bombarded its outer forts even before the
declaration of war.
It seems reasonable to conclude that neither Britain nor France wanted
war with Ottoman Turkey but they were prepared to do very little to avoid it.
Possibly they saw the break up of the Ottoman Empire as inevitable and
wished to safeguard their interests when it occurred. On the other side,
Enver, in particular, became convinced that the Central Powers would win
the war and that Ottoman Turkey’s long-term interests lay with them. This
was a fearful miscalculation that took little note of British sea power and its
determination to protect its communications with India. But all this lay a
long way in the future. Given that Britain and France were having a great
deal of difficulty even containing the Germans on the Western Front and that
the Russians had received an early thrashing at Tannenberg, exactly what
forces did the Entente have to spare to deal with Turkey and how were they
to be deployed?
In fact the war against Ottoman Turkey evolved piecemeal and over
disparate areas. In the initial phase (1914–15), with the exception of
Gallipoli, only relatively small forces were involved and many of these did
not originate in Britain. By the end of the war, however, 500,000 troops had
been committed against Ottoman Turkey and Egypt had become the greatest
base for British troops outside the homeland. There were four main areas of
British involvement against the Turks and although the operations in all four
areas overlapped at one time or another, they will be dealt with roughly in
chronological order – Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Sinai and the Arabian
Peninsula. The considerable conflict between the Turks and Russians has
been considered in Chapter 9 on the Eastern Front.
British involvement in Mesopotamia (now modern-day Iraq and to a lesser
extent Iran), although eventually successful, was a farrago of divided
counsel and indeterminate aims from the beginning. The usual reason given
for the British invasion of Mesopotamia was the protection of the oil
refineries around Abadan at the head of the Persian Gulf. No doubt this
played a part. But the principal reasons for intervention given at the time
were: a demonstration to the Turks that the British could strike them in any
part of their Empire; an encouragement to the Arab populations to rally to
Britain; and to safeguard British interests in the Persian Gulf, which was
seen as an outlier in the defence of India and without Arab support would
remain attached to Britain. Oil was mentioned, but the fact that the main
supplies were in the hands of a friendly sheik and that oil could also be
obtained easily from the United States, made this a lesser matter.
The initiative for intervention came from London – which in the light of
subsequent events had more than a touch of irony. Two divisions of the
British Indian Army (a composite force largely consisting of Indian troops
but with British officers and a ‘stiffening’ of a few British battalions) were
being transported across the Arabian Gulf to Europe for service on the
Western Front. On the insistence of the Cabinet (but to the annoyance of the
Viceroy, Lord Hardinge), a brigade of the 6th (Poona) Division was diverted
to the Gulf. It anchored off Bahrain on 23 October awaiting further
instructions. On the outbreak of the war with Turkey these instructions soon
followed – they were to be convoyed to the Shatt-al-Arab and proceed to
occupy Abadan.
Facing the British were two divisions of the Ottoman army, the 35th and
38th. They were not of the highest quality; the best troops being grouped
much closer to Constantinople. Each division contained about 5,000 men
and had thirty-two pieces of light artillery. Few of these troops, however,
were at the head of the Gulf, so the British were able to land without
difficulty. They then advanced several miles up river until they were two
miles northward of the oil installations. Abadan was safe.
However, by then the remainder of the 6th Division had arrived, and its
commander General Barratt had fresh orders. The better to protect Bahrain,
he was to occupy Basra. As it happened, this was not difficult. Intelligence
arrived that the Ottoman Turks were evacuating Basra. He immediately
dispatched several battalions of his force and on 21 November 1914, Basra
was in British hands.
At this point the factor that plagued British policy in Mesopotamia began
to reveal itself. Basra had been captured to protect Abadan; Querna , thirty
miles up river at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates, was now deemed
essential for the protection of Basra. A British expedition was sent north.
Querna, due more to the incompetence of the local Ottoman Turkish
commanders than the enterprise of the British, capitulated with its garrison
of 1,000 men on 9 December.
Another perennial factor that was to hamper the British was also revealed
at Querna. The floods that would turn the whole area of the two rivers into a
gigantic flood plain were imminent. Yet the British had little water transport.
They had a few small gunboats capable of carrying small garrisons and two
18-pounder guns, but that was all. Also, the waters were ubiquitous but
shallow. The only answer seemed to be to employ hundreds of local canoes
called bellums. These could hold around eight men who were required to
row them as well as fight. The weird addition of canoe-borne infantry thus
made its first (and surely last) appearance in the British army.
While the British were pondering their next move, the Ottoman Turks
were preparing to recapture Basra. They gathered a motley force at
Nasiriyah and began to march (or wade) towards their objective. The result
was a fiasco. The British had good intelligence about the approach of the
Turks and, reinforced with another division of troops from India, sallied
forth to attack them. Three days’ fighting in March saw the end of the
Turkish thrust. The Turks lost heavily and retreated towards Nasiriyeh . The
lack of transport meant that the British were unable to follow. The Turks
would survive to fight another day .
A more threatening Turkish move had already taken place – but at the
Suez Canal rather than Mesopotamia. The Canal Zone of course ran through
Egypt , which was still legally part of the Ottoman Empire but actually semi-
autonomous under a Khedive and actually (since 1883) controlled by the
British. The defence of the Canal Zone therefore fell to the Commander-in-
Chief of Egypt, General Sir John Maxwell. At his disposal were about
30,000 troops from the Indian Army and, from December 1914, a contingent
of Anzacs , supposedly on their way to Britain but due to crowded facilities
there, training in Egypt. A Turkish invasion force to attack the canal had
long been in preparation. By January 1915, 20,000 men and 10,000 camels
and a few pontoons had been assembled in the Beersheba area, under the
nominal command of Jemal Pasha but operationally controlled by the
wonderfully named General Friederich Kress von Kressenstein. The
organisation of this force was a far cry from the rabble around Basra .
Careful preparations in the form of adequate water and food supplies had
been made to cross the desert. Marches were made by night to avoid
detection and the heat. As a result of this efficient organisation the force
arrived at the canal in good shape.
When the Turks arrived at the canal, they soon found that organisation
was not enough. The defenders were well dug in along the banks of the
canal, which was on average 150 feet wide. The canal was interspersed with
some wider lakes but these were controlled by small British gunboats. The
Turks were therefore forced to scramble down the steep banks of the canal
and attempt to launch the small amount of small boats that they possessed.
There was never any prospect of success. Most pontoons were holed by rifle
and machine-gun fire before they reached the water. By 4 February it was all
over. The British awoke to find that the Turks had withdrawn in good order
back to Beersheba. The hoped-for rising of the Egyptian population against
the British had failed to materialise. By June 1915 Kress’s force had been
withdrawn from Sinai to reinforce Gallipoli. The canal was safe .
There was no attempt to pursue the Turks. The British forces lacked
mobility and supplies of food and water to traverse 100 miles of desert. They
were even short of camels. For the moment stalemate reigned in Sinai .
While the early operations in Mesopotamia had been proceeding and the
Turkish attack on the canal was being fought off, Winston Churchill, the
First Lord of the Admiralty, had been casting about to find a way to use the
navy to influence the war on land. A number of schemes put forward by him
all came to grief on two grounds. The first was that all Churchill’s naval
advisers thought the proposals risked ships from the Grand Fleet in mine-and
torpedo-infested waters. The second was that the War Office and its
formidable head, Lord Kitchener, insisted that there were no troops to land
anywhere.1
In January 1915, Churchill cast his eyes on Ottoman Turkey. A squadron
of British warships was guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles Straits and
Churchill put enough pressure on the Admiral in command, Carden, to get
him to reluctantly agree to attempt to force the Dardanelles. Churchill now
had an operation, and it would use only old battleships that could not stand
in a line of battle against the modern German types faced by Britain in the
North Sea. This factor would overcome much naval disapproval. And it
would not use soldiers – which would please the military. So on 13 January
he took the scheme to the War Council, a committee of the Cabinet which
oversaw the running of the war in Britain. The War Council was
enthusiastic. The ships would demolish the forts, proceed to Constantinople,
overawe the Turks and force them out of the war.
As it happened the attack by ships alone was a fiasco. Churchill has been
blamed for its failure, but the fact is that the quality of naval advice offered
to him by the experts at the Admiralty was lamentably low. These men could
have calculated, but did not, that the guns of the old ships were so worn and
inaccurate that they could not hit the forts (and the guns they contained) with
any accuracy.2 Moreover, even had the guns been demolished, little thought
had been given by the Admiralty to the problem of sweeping the minefields
that also protected the Straits. The sweeping force provided to Admiral
Carden consisted of nothing more than North Sea fishing trawlers, manned
with civilian crews. They were so slow that they could hardly reach the
minefield against the strong current flowing down the Dardanelles. The
result was that after two weeks some guns at the entrance of the Straits had
been demolished, not by the ships, but by landing parties of marines, and no
mines had been swept.
This indifferent progress led Churchill to prod Carden into making a major
assault with all his battleships on 18 March. Carden’s response was to
collapse and leave the task to his second in command, Admiral de Robeck .
No forts were demolished in this major effort and no mines swept, but one-
third of the Anglo-French force was sunk or disabled by a combination of
mines and gunfire. This failure marked the end of Churchill’s naval venture .
Already there had been voices inside the Admiralty and the War Council
calling for the commitment of troops to convert the affair into a true
combined operation. Now de Robeck added his voice with the statement that
the navy could not succeed alone.
Although one of the appeals of the naval attack initially had been that no
soldiers would be involved, there was no question that the decision-makers
in London would now call the whole thing off. An immediate search for
troops began, led by those such as the Secretary of State for War, Lord
Kitchener, who had claimed just a few weeks before that there were no
troops to be had for operations against Turkey. Within days, however, a
motley force was, after all, deemed to be available. It consisted of one-and-
a-half divisions of Anzac troops training in Egypt; the British 29th Division;
the last of the pre-war regular army, the so-called Royal Naval Division
(RND), raised from sailors surplus to the requirements of the Grand Fleet;
and a French division offered in the spirit of sharing the spoils if the
operation succeeded. This force totalled some 80,000 men, which was
deemed sufficient to overthrow the Ottoman Empire. So, in late March 1915,
preparations for turning Gallipoli into a combined operation commenced.
Some four weeks later the first landings took place (Map 11.1).
Map 11.1 The Gallipoli campaign.
The commander of the operation was to be General Sir Ian Hamilton, who
had been Kitchener’s staff officer in the South African War and had held the
unimposing post of Commander, Eastern Command, in Britain since the
outbreak of the war.
Hamilton had been dispatched to the Dardanelles just in time to witness
the failure of the naval attack. He soon developed a plan for landing his
troops. This plan was to some extent dictated by the topography of the
peninsula. There were few beaches along the rugged coast of the Aegean
side and the most obvious ones for effecting a landing – Brighton Beach
near Gaba Tepe and the beaches at Bulair at the neck of the peninsula – were
heavily defended. This left a number of small beaches at the toe of the
peninsula around Cape Helles and a narrow strip to the north of Gaba Tepe.
It soon became obvious that these beaches were too confined to land the
whole force at any one of them, so Hamilton decided to split his landings.
The Anzac force would land to the north of Gaba Tepe and the 29th Division
would land at five beaches near Cape Helles. That force, aided by the guns
of the fleet, would work northwards up the peninsula, while the Anzacs
advanced across the peninsula to prevent Turkish reinforcements reaching
their compatriots at Helles. To confuse the Turkish defenders, feint attacks
would be made by the Royal Naval Division at Bulair and by the French at
Kum Kale on the Asiatic coast.
This plan showed some imagination. By landing at six beaches Hamilton
hoped to confuse the Turkish defence and institute a rapid advance while the
Turks were off balance. But it also had some defects. At Helles, two
substantial forces were to be landed at Y and S beaches on the flanks of the
main landing at X, W and V. Short advances by these troops could have in
fact cut off all Turkish troops opposing the major landings. But this
promising scenario was vetoed by Hamilton and his staff. The force at Y and
S were given no orders but to await the arrival of the main force from the
south. They were to land, therefore, and remain in situ until the southern
landings succeeded. That they might contribute to this result more directly
apparently occurred to no one. This oversight was to have doleful effects on
the day of landing (Map 11.2).
Map 11.2 Anzac landing area.
In the north, the Anzac objective was clear enough – the troops were to
push across the peninsula, occupy the significant height of Mal Tepe and
intercept Turkish reserves heading south. The problem here was that no
order actually specified the exact position where the Anzac force was to
land. All that was said was that the force was to land north of Gaba Tepe but
south of Fisherman’s Hut. This was a distance of some one-and-a-half miles.
Yet Hamilton’s staff was not prepared to be more specific. Nor did
Birdwood’s staff seek clarification. It was as though the Normandy force had
been told to land somewhere between the Cotentin Peninsula and Caen.
Various expedients were adopted to transfer men from ship to shore. At
some beaches troops would be transferred from warships or cargo vessels to
lifeboats, which would be towed by trawlers until the water became too
shallow for the larger craft. The men would then row themselves ashore. At
V beach, where the main landing at Cape Helles would take place, 2,000
men would be landed from an old collier, River Clyde . The ship would be
grounded near Fort Sedd-el-Bahr and the men would debouch from sally
ports cut in the sides of the vessel. In this way it was hoped that the large
assaulting force could overwhelm the garrison before it could come into
action.
What forces could the Turks bring against Hamilton’s landings? The naval
attack ensured that the Gallipoli peninsula would receive reinforcements. By
18 March 1915 the Turks had decided to form a new Fifth Army of two
army corps (six divisions) under the command of General Liman von
Sanders, former head of the German military mission to Turkey. The landing
places on the peninsula would be guarded by III Corps with its 7th and 9th
Divisions. The 19th Division would be in central reserve, able to send troops
to the southern or northern area as required. The 5th Division and a cavalry
brigade were kept further back in the vulnerable area of Bulair. The XV
Corps was placed on the Asiatic shore with the 3rd and 11th Divisions
disposed near the main beaches. By the time of the Allied landings, the
Turks had about 40,000 men and 100 artillery pieces on the peninsula or
nearby. On the Asiatic side there were 20,000 infantry with fifty guns. In
addition, the mobile batteries of the Straits defences could be called upon –
about sixty guns in all.
The Turkish garrisons defending the peninsula were placed along the coast
in small outpost screens, well dug in with wire, in positions that overlooked
the most obvious landing beaches. These dispositions represented both
strengths and weaknesses. Most of the coastline from Morto Bay to Gaba
Tepe was covered by a thin screen of troops . However, these screening
garrisons were small in number and there was every chance that if they were
overwhelmed by the landing forces, counter-attacks would not be mounted
in time or in sufficient strength to force the invaders back into the sea.
On 25 April 1915, British and Anzac forces landed on the Gallipoli
peninsula (Map 11.3). Despite much muddle and incompetence on the
British side, the Turks did not manage to dislodge them. The feint attacks
were of dubious advantage; the landing of the French on the Asiatic shore
did not deflect the Turks. The French were eventually withdrawn and landed
at Helles alongside the British on 28 April. At Bulair, the appearance of
British ships off the coast caught the attention of Liman von Sanders. He
kept the Turkish 5th Division in the area at a time when it could have been
directed against the Anzac landing. This has often been portrayed as a
success for the feint. However, Sanders was so obsessed by the Bulair
position that he would have probably kept troops in the area even had there
been no feint .
Map 11.3 Deployment of Allied forces landing at Gallipoli, 23–25 April

1915.
At Helles the troops got ashore but at a fearful price. The main British
force was landed at W and V beaches at the very toe of the peninsula. Here
were the strongest Turkish garrisons (some concealed in the fort at Sedd-el-
Bahr) and strong offshore defences in the form of barbed wire and iron
stakes. All this was known to Hamilton, but in the prevailing doctrine of the
day it was thought best to hit the Turks where they were strongest rather than
try a more indirect approach. So, throughout the day, despite the mounting
casualties, reinforcements were directed towards W and V beaches. River
Clyde at V proved a doubtful expedient. Troops issuing from the sally ports
proved excellent targets for Turkish machine gunners and riflemen on shore
and by nightfall only some 200 men remained ashore unwounded. In the
end, it was weight of numbers that told. By the 26th the British had some
12,000 men ashore, with the Turks only several hundred in that area to
oppose them .
At what became known as Anzac Cove, contrary to legend, the troops
were landed within the vague parameters specified in the orders. The
tortuous country and some stubborn defence provided by the few hundred
Turkish troops who opposed the landing put paid to any rapid advance. Then
Turkish reinforcements began to appear on the battlefield. At the end of the
day the Turks were firmly ensconced on such dominating positions as
Battleship Hill, Baby 600 and Chunuk Bair on the left. They would not be
removed from some of these lodgements for most of the battle
This problem of fire support for the infantry would prove a perennial
difficulty at Gallipoli. The troops had very rudimentary artillery support,
especially in the early days of the campaign. After all, the main British army
on the Western Front was chronically short of guns and ammunition at this
time, and the Gallipoli forces were only provided with those munitions that
it was thought could be spared from the major battle.
Pushing on from the toeholds obtained at the landing or dislodging the
Allied troops from them would be difficult. This was demonstrated by the
Turks at Anzac on 19 May. There, under instructions from their political
masters in Constantinople to push the invaders back into the sea, the Turks
mounted one of the largest attacks of the entire campaign. Somewhere
between 30,000 and 42,000 infantry took part in an attack along the whole of
the Anzac perimeter. The Anzacs had hardly dug any continuous trench
lines, had little artillery support, and were outnumbered by at least two to
one. However, during the course of the attack they fired no less than 948,000
rounds of small arms ammunition, most of it from machine guns. It was
enough. The Turks suffered 10,000 casualties and gained no ground. It was
an omen of how devastating even small arms fire could be against troops in
the open, insufficiently supported by heavy guns.
By the end of May the campaign at Gallipoli had developed into a
slogging infantry battle. So, at Anzac, the small perimeter held by the
Australian and New Zealand troops remained virtually as it was on 19 May.
In the south, Hunter-Weston conducted the three poorly thought out battles
of Krithia that gained some unimportant ground at high cost. At the end of
June and in early July, there were more hopeful signs at Helles. Hunter-
Weston and the French commander General Giraud found that by pooling
their artillery resources and limiting their objectives to just a few lines of
Turkish trench, they could take small amounts of ground at reasonable cost. ‘
Bite and hold’ operations had arrived on the peninsula but their exponents
were soon to return home – Hunter-Weston due to exhaustion and Giraud
because he had been seriously wounded. At the very moment of their
departure a new plan was called for by Hamilton to employ new troops that
London had decided to dispatch to Gallipoli.
The debate to send reinforcements to Gallipoli was hard-fought and
encompassed the fall of the Liberal government and its replacement by a
coalition, which left Asquith as Prime Minister but included members of the
Conservative Party. This might easily have become the death-knell of the
Gallipoli campaign, as many leading Conservatives such as Bonar Law had
opposed the operation from the outset. But office had a sobering, or perhaps
paralysing, effect on the decision-makers. However badly the campaign was
proceeding, a decision to ‘cut and run’ was beyond the courage of the new
government. Not for the last time in military affairs, it was considered that
one more push (or ‘surge’, in contemporary terms) might do the trick. Three
divisions were to be sent to Hamilton, with a promise of two more should
they be required .
Hamilton now had to decide how to use this substantial reinforcement. He
had received a plan from the Anzac commander Birdwood that won his
favour. Birdwood conceived a left hook around the Anzac perimeter across
the difficult but undefended country to the north. A rapid swing to the left
would then seize the heights of the Sari Bair Ridge from Hill 971 to Chunuk
Bair. An attack would then be mounted down the ridge in concert with the
troops already at Anzac. The Turkish positions would thus be rolled up and
one of the reinforcing divisions would dash for the Narrows and seize the
forts. With these defences in Allied hands, the fleet could sail up to
Constantinople, the Turks would surrender and perhaps a gigantic Balkan
coalition could be formed against the Central Powers. As a coda to the plan,
Birdwood suggested that a force be landed at Suvla Bay and convert that
relatively flat area into a base of supply for all the forces in the north.
Birdwood’s plan held the day and during July it was developed and fine-
tuned by both the Anzac Corps Commander and by Hamilton’s staff at GHQ
. During this process, however, something peculiar happened. The Suvla Bay
aspect of the plan increased from a small landing to one that was to absorb
almost two of the three reinforcing divisions. This left Birdwood with just
his existing force and one new brigade to carry out the left hook, and the
more this movement was studied, the more troops it was thought to need.
Finally, all Birdwood’s forces would be absorbed in capturing the Sari Bair
Ridge. No one at Corps Headquarters or at GHQ seemed to notice that there
would now be no force available to cross the peninsula and seize the
Narrows. In other words, the entire objective of the new attack was the ridge.
Now there were many more ridges between Sari Bair and the Narrows, so
Birdwood’s plan had shrunk from a campaign-winner to one that promised
just a tactical success. And no one noticed.
The new campaign was slated to begin in early August when the troops
had arrived and had time to acclimatise. In any event, the Suvla landings
took place on 6 August 1915 as Anzac columns were winding their way up
the ravines to the Sari Bair heights .
The Suvla operation was carried out by the newly formed IX Corps
commanded by General Stopford, formerly the commander of the Tower of
London. It consisted of the 11th and 10th (Irish) Divisions of the New
Armies, formed by Kitchener on the outbreak of war. This operation has
been much misunderstood. Its purpose was to establish a base for the troops
in the north. It was to take out a few guns on the flank of the Anzac advance
and any spare troops were to advance along the heights, which overlooked
Suvla Bay, and attempt to aid the Australians in capturing Hill 971.
However, when Stopford looked at the plan he soon realised that his force
would be fully absorbed in driving the Turks back from the base, capturing
the guns and occupying the heights. Any thought of assisting the Anzacs was
dropped as impractical.
In some ways the landing at Suvla Bay showed an increase in
sophistication from those on 25 April. Purpose-built landing craft called
‘beetles’, with light armour and shallow draught, were used to bring the
troops from the larger ships to shore. In other ways, however, lessons were
not learned. The charts of the Suvla Bay area were not checked by an
offshore reconnaissance as the original landing places had been. As a result
many of the landing craft came to grief on uncharted reefs and it took some
hours to free them. Water supplies also met the same fate, and the lack of
water played a major role in slowing the advance inland on the first and
second days of the landing. Nor were the Turkish defences known in any
detail. One of the first battalions ashore spent some time in attacking an
undefended sand dune, only to be cut down by the defenders of their real
objective a little further inland. Moreover, the guns, which were a major
target for the first day, were found after much elaborate manoeuvring to be
non-existent. Then the boats bringing the 10th Division in lost their way and
deposited the troops right across the bay from the assigned area and thus
separated them from their commander.
Once ashore, matters did not proceed much more smoothly. Most of the
brigadiers showed a lack of initiative that almost amounted to paralysis.
Stopford, offshore on the HMS Jonquil, showed a similar lack of initiative.
Hamilton was too preoccupied with events at Anzac to notice that no
advance was taking place at Suvla. When he finally intervened, nine hours
after the landing, he managed to disrupt the advance that Stopford had
finally got around to organising. The result was that no advance at all was
made until late on the 8th. As it happened, none of this mattered. The Turks
had been taken by surprise and were as slow in organising a counter-attack
as the British were in advancing on the ridge overlooking the beach. By the
time the Turks arrived in strength on the 9th, the British were well-enough
established to beat them back with great slaughter. In the event, the Turks
could not drive the British back into the sea and the British could not capture
the high ground that seemed essential to make the base safe. In the end this
proved not to matter either. The Turks never possessed the artillery resources
to make the base area untenable. Although continuously under fire, the base
was established and remained established until the evacuation. Despite the
supine efforts of the British command and the muddle at the landing, Suvla
proved the one successful amphibious operation carried out by the Allies at
Gallipoli .
The attempted left hook at Anzac failed, but in circumstances where it
could be portrayed as ‘almost a success’. Failure in fact set in early. The
three columns making their way over unmapped territory in the dark soon
got lost. Only a small contingent of Ghurkhas and a party of New Zealand
troops got within hailing distance of the ridge. On the next day, due to
confusion on the Turkish side, some men from both groups briefly gained
two important heights on the ridge ( Hill Q and Chunuk Bair). However,
they were soon counter-attacked off by the considerable reinforcements that
the Turks had rushed to the area. On Hill Q the navy – whose fire had been
quite ineffectual in support of the troops – was accused of shelling off the
Ghurkhas and, indeed, these troops did take some friendly fire as they were
being counter-attacked. However, the fire almost certainly came from some
Anzac howitzer batteries, and in any case the grip of the Ghurkhas on the
ridge could not have been maintained in the face of the large number of
Turks that were brought against them.
It is these two incidents that have led some historians to claim that the
Anzacs ‘almost’ secured the ridge. This is not the case. The two points on
the ridge were open to enfilade fire from other points on the ridge. This fire
must, sooner or later, have driven the Anzacs back. If the ridge was to be
secured, it needed to be captured entire. Whether the Anzacs had sufficient
troops to accomplish this or whether the troops could have been supplied
with food, water and ammunition had they done so is extremely dubious.
The fact is the ridge was never held. The August offensive was no close run
thing, but a failure pure and simple.
This August 1915 attack was in fact the last hurrah at Gallipoli. Despite
two more divisions of reinforcements and some desultory efforts to capture
part of Sari Bair, the military effort was at an end .
Evacuation was discussed in London but there was a Cabinet rebellion.
British prestige, it was said, could not withstand such a humiliation. The fact
was that British prestige would hinge on whether Britain won the war, and it
was obvious to many that this issue would not be decided at Gallipoli. The
rebels were finally crushed by a visit by Kitchener to the peninsula where he
too recommended evacuation.
It only remained to extricate the troops. This was done in December 1915
at Anzac and in January 1916 at Helles. No troops were lost and this became
an occasion to boast of the resourcefulness of the Allies in fooling the Turks.
This had to stand in the place of victory. It was little enough to show for an
operation of eight months. Gallipoli had failed. Whether Turkey could now
be knocked out of the war depended on existing operations in Sinai and
Mesopotamia .
In Mesopotamia the situation seemed quite promising. With the arrival of
the new troops a general had been put in charge, a ‘thruster’ by the name of
General Sir John Nixon. Under him were grouped the 6th Poona Division
under General Townshend and the 12th Division under General Gorringe.
That Nixon would need all the troops he could get was soon apparent. In
April 1915 he received instructions from the Indian government that his
main task was now the occupation of the entire province (vilayet) of Basra .
This extended well beyond the territory so far captured and extended to
Nasiriyah in the north. In all it encompassed approximately 16,602 square
miles of territory. Even more alarming, their next instruction was to prepare
a plan for the capture of Baghdad . Only incidentally was the protection of
the oil pipeline mentioned. What all this portended, but was not clear to
either Nixon or London, was that the Indian government and particularly the
Viceroy Lord Hardinge had great plans for Mesopotamia. Indeed, they
intended to annex it once the war had ended in order to develop the country
and make it suitable to absorb the surplus populations of India. In short, it
would become an Indian colony. The sub-imperialists of Simla had the bit
firmly between their teeth.
To carry out these tasks Nixon reported that he would need more animal
transport, a light railway, armoured cars, aircraft and a huge increase in river
transport. But he sent these requests to London, which was unaware of the
growing ambitions of their colleagues in India. To make matters worse he
sent the requests through the ordinary post. When they eventually arrived, no
one in London realised that the demands, which they regarded as
extraordinary, were designed to fulfil the ambitions of the government in
India. Most were turned down.
Meanwhile, despite the priorities of India, Nixon had to delay all thought
of an advance until he had secured the oil pipelines which were threatened
by various Arabian tribes. Once Gorringe had achieved this he was ready to
advance. His first destination was Amara, some sixty miles from Basra.
Townshend’s canoe-borne troops, accompanied by three shallow draft
gunboats, set off in May and by 3 June Amara had surrendered. Nixon then
set off to Nasiriyah, with an ominous coda to his orders that this town would
be more secure if Kut-al-Amara, some 120 miles beyond and which lay
outside the Basra vilayet, was also captured .
Nasiriyah fell as easily as Basra and Amara. There was no doubt that these
easy victories emboldened Nixon to attempt to capture Kut-al-Amara which
he now regarded as a matter of ‘strategic necessity’. Reluctantly, the
Secretary of State (Austen Chamberlain) gave his approval for the next
advance. But he was unaware that the Indian government saw Kut-al-Amara
as merely a staging post for the ultimate prize of Baghdad .
One matter soon became clear: the commander who was to advance on
Kut-al-Amara was against the whole idea. While Gallipoli remained in the
balance Townshend thought gains made in Mesopotamia should be
consolidated. He knew that his force was chronically short of water transport
and that this might endanger his hold on Nasiriyah, let alone anything further
up river. Nevertheless, he had his orders. On 28 August his troops set off,
this time not by canoe – because the dry season had arrived – but by foot in
temperatures of 116 degrees Fahrenheit.
Moreover, the Turkish army was recovering. Two new divisions had
arrived and their overall commander Nureddin Pasha had dug formidable
defences on the left and right banks of the river seven miles from Kut-al-
Amara.
Townshend took a typically gloomy view of his chances to force these
defences. But a clever deception plan, which caused the Turks to concentrate
their men and guns on one side of the river while Townshend sent his main
force against the other, won the day. After hard fighting, on 28 September
the British found that the Turks had decamped. They had lost 4,000 men as
against Townshend’s 94 killed . A slow pursuit up river ensued to a point
where the British were within sixty miles of Baghdad. But the fact still
remained that the pursuit was too slow. The main Turkish army had once
again escaped.
The question now was Baghdad. Townshend and the War Office opposed
it. But soon the prospect of the evacuation of Gallipoli changed the minds of
the London decision-makers. By October the Foreign Secretary (Grey) was
speaking of a success in Mesopotamia as a suitable antidote. Typically the
Cabinet could not come to a definite decision, so they sanctioned a ‘raid’ on
Baghdad, whatever that meant.
Meanwhile Nixon blithely continued up river. This fact on the ground won
the Viceroy around. He sanctioned the capture of Baghdad if Nixon’s forces
were strong enough and promised two additional divisons at a time not
specified. Townshend therefore began the advance on 14 November. At
Ctesiphon (the ancient Assyrian capital) he defeated a Turkish force, but the
victory meant little. His troops had outrun their tenuous supply chain. So,
having arrived at the gates of Baghdad, Townshend promptly ordered a
retreat. And the retreat would continue until he could be assured of sufficient
supplies – that is, he would return from whence he had come, Kut-al-Amara.
He reached the town on 4 December and declared – not without reason – that
his force was exhausted. They would stand at Kut-al-Amara and if besieged
(which soon followed) await a relief column. The siege would last until May
1916. It was characterised by three lame efforts by Nixon to break through,
Townshend’s propaganda barrage blamed the siege on his superiors. The
eventual depletion of food supplies meant that capitulation was the only
option. In the end 13,000 men from the 6th (Poona) Division went into
captivity. Townshend, through no fault of his own, was treated well and
lived in relative luxury on an island in the Marmara. His men were less
fortunate. Decades before the German ‘death marches’ of the inmates of
concentration camps, the Turks used a similar policy on British prisoners
taken at Kut-al-Amara. About 10,000 men set out from Kut-al-Amara.
Marching across the desert in blazing heat with what seems wilful neglect,
most of these men died. Indeed the marches seemed so purposeless that this
appeared to be their only end. This episode gives the Turks the dubious
distinction of carrying out the first genocide of the twentieth century and
inventing the death marches as well.
The government in London quickly responded to the fall of Kut-al-Amara.
Nixon was sacked and a new man, General Maude, was put in charge . He
was to have four full-strength divisions – an accretion of 50,000 men to his
force. Also the port of Basra, sunk into a mire of inefficiency and ruin, was
reorganised. River transport capacity increased from 450 to 700 tons per day.
With this new force, Maude set off for Kut-al-Amara in December. The well-
equipped troops advanced in good heart, but the real success belonged to the
gunboats. Their fire reduced a Turkish retreat to a shambles. In January 1917
the British were back in Kut-al-Amara .
What followed was the inevitable pause as the British, even with
improved logistics, had outrun their supplies. But when his resupplied force
set out in March, it was not to be denied. The force was far too strong for
anything the Turks could spare in this area. On 9 March Baghdad was in
British hands .
The remainder of the Mesopotamia campaign was anti-climactic. Maude
sent columns beyond Baghdad but the Turks had recovered and offered stiff
resistance. Then, in mid November, Maude died of cholera. But his job was
virtually over. Allenby’s campaign in Palestine was now the main event, and
in 1918 the Mesopotamia campaign ground to a halt. There was a flurry of
activity in November when a British force raced ahead to secure Mosul
before the Armistice was concluded. But that was all. Attention had long
since shifted elsewhere .
It was the situation in Palestine which made Mesopotamia irrelevant, but it
has to be said that it was a long time coming. After the defeat of the Turkish
attack on the canal the British had cautiously moved into Sinai . An attempt
to dislodge them by Kress failed disastrously at Romani in August 1915. The
question now was: what was British policy in this area to be – attack or
consolidation? In fact it was to be a combination of both. Maxwell had been
despatched back to Britain and a new commander – Sir Archibald Murray,
former Chief of the general staff – took his place. Murray was a cautious
man and with some reason. He had no desire to fling a force across the
wastes of the Sinai Desert only to see it retreat through lack of supplies. In
this respect he was the opposite of his fellow generals in Mesopotamia. So
he would advance across the Sinai but only at the pace of the water pipeline,
a railway and an improvised wire-based road across the sand that
accompanied him. The pace of all this was glacial. By December 1916
British forces were still in Sinai near El Arish. They were now accompanied
by a formidable cavalry component in the form of the Desert Column and
the Anzac Mounted Division. Indeed, these forces played a major role in the
action at El Arish which saw Turkish forces expelled from Egypt.
The next prize was Gaza, the position which anchored the Turkish defence
of southern Palestine. Murray’s plan for the First Battle of Gaza was
imaginative. He would attack the city frontally while at the same time
outflanking it with his mounted troops. It started promisingly on 24 March
1917. The mounted troops carried out their role to perfection and were well
to the north of Gaza. But an intelligence failure led them to believe that the
frontal attack had gone disastrously wrong, which it had not. As a result the
mounted troops withdrew and the Turks were left in full possession of Gaza.
In London, the Cabinet was not pleased with this outcome and urged
Murray to try again. Murray pleaded lack of reinforcements and guns as a
reason to delay. But political pressure won out. The Second Battle of Gaza
commenced on 17 April with weapons such as a handful of tanks and poison
gas – the first time this weapon had been deployed outside Europe. (So
ineffective was the gas that it dispersed quickly in the warm desert air and
the Turks were unaware that it had even been used.) The plan was, however,
unimaginative. Three divisions were to assault Gaza frontally. This they did
to no effect whatsoever. British losses amounted to 6,500 men. Turkish
losses were only a third as much . That was the end of Murray. He had
proved an excellent administrator and a disastrous general. Lloyd George
wished to replace him with Jan Smuts , but when the South African turned
down the command, General Allenby , then commanding the Third Army on
the Western Front, got the job. It was to prove a fortunate circumstance.
Allenby was to discover that he had an energetic and sometimes
troublesome ally at the base of the Sinai Peninsula at Aqaba. This was T. E.
Lawrence and his Arabian Army, nominally commanded by Sharif Hussein
of the Hejaz. Hussein had been induced to join the war against Turkey in
1916. There had been an exchange of letters between Hussein and the British
High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon. These letters have a
certain desperate opaqueness about them but on the surface anyway they
promised Hussein certain territories around modern Syria and the Arabian
Peninsula in return for support. Hussein, with the encouragement of
Lawrence, then a member of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, was happy to oblige.
Arabian nationalism had grown in the nineteenth century and
disillusionment with Turkish rule had grown with it.
The Arab uprising against the Turks began in the Hejaz on 5 June 1916.
The Turks had just a single division in this area and Hussein and his four
sons – the most notable of whom was Feisal – were able to capture Mecca
within a few days. Feisal, who increasingly took the lead on the Arab side,
then besieged Medina, but his forces, though large in number, were short on
discipline and firepower and failed to take it.
The return of Lawrence to act as a kind of Chief of Staff to Feisal changed
the way operations were conducted. Lawrence developed a double strategy.
He would allow just enough material to pass down the Hejaz railway to
sustain the Turks but not enough to increase their strength. This would
confine most Turkish troops to the Hejaz while Lawrence with Feisal’s Arab
army advanced along the coast northward to Aqaba. Lawrence knew that it
was necessary to link up with British forces in Palestine as quickly as
possible if the Arabs were to have the territory seemingly promised them by
McMahon. And Lawrence knew this because he was privy to another
division of the Middle East decided by Britain and France under the Sykes-
Picot Agreement of May 1916. Under this plan France would be pre-eminent
in Syria and Lebanon, while the British would be the dominant power in
Palestine, Jordan, Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. Clearly, if this
agreement was put into practice there would be little room for the Arab
states already agreed to by the British. The best way, Lawrence considered,
to make certain that the Arabs got their due was for them to occupy such key
points as Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.
Lawrence accomplished his first purpose. With the aid of the Royal Navy,
Arab forces with British supplies advanced along the Red Sea coast and by 6
July 1917 were occupying Aqaba . The next question for Lawrence was how
the newly appointed Allenby would deal with the situation .
Allenby’s arrival saw an immediate lift in British morale. He stayed in
close touch with his troops and ensured that time was taken to prepare the
third assault on the Gaza–Beersheba position. This time the plan showed
some imagination. Gaza would be attacked frontally but only as a feint
attack. Meanwhile the mounted troops would seize Beersheba and its
precious water wells by coup de main. The main attack would then be
launched by British infantry on the centre right of the position. The Turkish
line would then be rolled up from Beersheba to Gaza while mounted forces
cut off any Turks attempting to flee. In all Allenby would have seven
infantry divisions, three mounted divisions and 300 guns. He would also
have air superiority due to new types arriving in the Middle East from
Britain.
The operation began on 31 October 1917. The Australian Light Horse
took the wells of Beersheba in a spirited charge, thus ensuring water supplies
for the centre-right force, which also captured its objectives without undue
difficulty. The attack on Gaza itself began on 1 November. It was an
unexpected success. Indeed, although designed as a feint, it turned the flank
of the whole Turkish line and forced a general retreat. On the right, Turkish
counter-attacks were beaten off, but lack of good supplies of water prevented
the mounted troops from cutting off the Turks. Nevertheless, the advance
continued but at a slower pace. Yet by 16 November the British had
advanced an average of fifty miles and were within striking distance of
Jerusalem .
Jerusalem presented a problem to Allenby. A city regarded as Holy by
three major religions could hardly be stormed. Allenby planned an encircling
movement to the east of the city but the Turkish defence was too strong and
it was beaten back. A second attempt to the west met with more success. The
Turkish Seventh Army with 16,000 defenders had to be overcome, but the
series of defeats already inflicted by the British had sapped its morale. So on
8 December, this potentially formidable fighting force withdrew from
Jerusalem and Allenby famously entered it bare-headed on foot on the 11th.
Lloyd George’s self-serving wish to present the capture of Jerusalem to the
British people by Christmas had been fulfilled.
Winter now settled over the area and the British army needed rest and
recuperation as well as resupply. Conventional operations were therefore
temporarily suspended. Lawrence meanwhile was continuing to launch
nuisance raids on the Turks. The most spectacular of these – the attack on
the Yarmuk railway bridge – failed. Nevertheless, Lawrence’s operations did
tie down a number of Turkish troops to the east of the River Jordan while
Allenby got on with the main business in Palestine. While Lawrence’s
contribution has been wildly overblown (mainly by himself) there is no
doubt that he played a role in the Turkish retreat.
In Jerusalem, Allenby began to plan his campaign for 1918. Several
factors delayed it. The first was the failure of the British to capture the
important junction of Amman to the east of the Jordan, but at least the
failure convinced the Turks to concentrate more forces in the area, taking
them away from the coastal strip along which Allenby always intended to
make his final thrust. The other factor was the situation in France.
Ludendorff launched the first of his great offensives on 21 March and
Allenby was soon required to free British units to stop the German advance.
On 23 March two divisions were despatched to the Western Front, followed
by artillery batteries and more battalions of troops as shipping became
available. Apart from small-scale raiding operations of dubious value, this
saw an end to major British activity in Palestine for four months.
In fact the next major British battle in Palestine did not take place until 19
September 1918. Allenby, having coaxed most of the Turkish forces to the
east of the Jordan, struck along the coast. The force at his disposal was
formidable. The British had 35,000 infantry, 9,000 cavalry and 383 guns on
a front of only fifteen miles. The Turks who faced them had just 10,000 men
and 130 guns. Before the battle the RAF had played a significant role. By
repeated bombing it had cut all railway traffic from the north to Palestine,
thus making reinforcement of the Turkish army virtually impossible. The
outcome of the battle was never in doubt. The preliminary bombardment
dropped 1,000 shells per minute on the Turkish defenders. The infantry
broke through near Megiddo (the ancient Armageddon) and this time the
cavalry did manage to encircle the retreating Turks. By 21 September the
Turkish Seventh and Eighth Armies had ceased to exist. Allenby, sensing
that victory was within his grasp, pressed on. The Third Australian Light
Horse entered Damascus on 1 October, closely followed by Lawrence’s Arab
forces, eager to stake their territorial claims. What followed was a
diminuendo. British troops followed the increasingly disintegrating Turkish
army to Aleppo, which was taken on 26 October without a shot. Armistice
negotiations commenced on the same day and were concluded on 31
October. The war against Turkey had been won .
The general consensus about this war is that it should not have been
fought; that in future years and decades the West lost more because of the
instability in the Middle East than if it had left the Ottoman Empire alone.
Despite its wide acceptance, doubt must be thrown on this argument. It is
certainly true that the Western powers acted with great duplicity against
those who would control the successor states to the Ottoman Empire. They
promised Lawrence’s Arabs one territorial settlement (the McMahon–
Hussein letters which promised Syria, Lebanon and perhaps Palestine to the
Arabs), while they acted quite otherwise in their own interests. Sykes-Picot,
as Lawrence and Feisal were to discover, trumped all this . It was to be the
French who ruled in Syria and in Lebanon , while the British took over
Palestine and effectively Iraq, although Feisal was to be the nominal ruler.
Yet another new state (Transjordan) was created to meet Arab aspirations,
but also placed under the effective control of the British. The Hejaz was
actually given to Hussein, but his tenure even there was to be short. In a
protracted war between 1919 and 1925, Ibn Saud drove him out and created
the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the Balfour Declaration in
1917 muddied the waters further by promising Jews a national home in the
area, while at the same time guaranteeing the Arabs their existing territorial
rights, an act of sophistry that has not yet played out .
What, it may be asked, could have created a greater shambles than these
acts? The answer is many things. The Ottoman Empire was in terminal
decline in 1914. There is little doubt that it would have collapsed in short
order even without the First World War. The result would have been perhaps
a different constellation of successor states than those created by the Western
powers. But it is hardly credible that these states would have been stable,
democratic or capable of living in harmony with one another. The result
would no doubt have been a different kind of shambles to that which we
have today in the Middle East, but that it would have been a shambles of one
kind or another cannot be doubted. Moreover, the discovery of large oil
reserves in the area in the post-war world would sooner or later have drawn
in the Western powers as their economies grew increasingly dependent on
those supplies.
Finally, it is difficult to feel pangs of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire.
This was the first state, bar the Kaiser’s in Africa, which indulged in
genocide in the twentieth century, the first state that marched prisoners
around the desert for the sole purpose of killing them. Moreover, even under
the enlightened Atatürk, over 1 million Greeks were expelled from Turkey
shortly after the war. In short, this is not a regime over which people should
grow misty-eyed. The continued existence of the Ottoman Empire, in light
of a putative German victory or a compromise peace, or its transformation
into a militant Republic tied to a victorious Imperial Germany, after 1918, is
a counter-factual we can all live without.
1 For this period see Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), chapter 1.
2 For this point see ‘Report of the committee appointed to investigate the
attacks delivered on the enemy defences of the Dardanelles’ Straits’
(London: Naval Staff Gunnery Division, 1921), p. 78. The report is
popularly known as the Mitchell Committee Report.
12 The war at sea
Paul Kennedy In the late 1920s a debate that had long been simmering broke
out openly, and to public bewilderment, as retired British admirals, naval
historians and newspaper editors quarrelled over the thing that obsessed
them most. The issue was this: why was the role of sea power in the Great
War not given higher renown; and, much more specifically, why had the
1916 Battle of Jutland not resulted in as crushing a defeat of the Kaiser’s
navy as Nelson’s brilliant 1805 Trafalgar battle had done to the combined
French and Spanish fleets? To the protagonists in this debate, all convinced
of A. T. Mahan’s argument about ‘the influence of sea power upon History’,
nothing else mattered. This was existential, not least because it raised the
awkward question of the future of large battle fleets in modern, technology
driven warfare. If they hadn’t won at Jutland, what was the point?
The problem was, and is, that all the participants in those angry debates,
and almost all later naval historians, fail to ask (and therefore address) the
really big question, which is: why did sea power itself play such a relatively
limited role in the Great War, as compared to its magnificent and undoubted
importance in both the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars and the
Second World War? Viewed from the broad sweep of History, humankind
has witnessed three massive, global and increasingly total wars since 1789,
and in the first and the third of those mighty contests maritime force was
critical. So, why do navies occupy only a secondary position in the unfolding
of the First World War? It is the purpose of this chapter to attempt an answer
to that conundrum.
As to the epic fighting between 1793 and 1815, perhaps Napoleon put it
best when he said, bitterly: ‘Everywhere I go, I find the English Navy in the
way.’ Of course he was finally defeated on land, at Moscow, in the Spanish
peninsula, at Leipzig and at Waterloo. But everyone at the time came to
appreciate the influence of sea power upon history, long before Mahan
popularised the phrase.1 The French navy was given an early mauling at the
Glorious First of June (1794), and never again contested the vital Western
Approaches or the English Channel. At Cape St Vincent (1797), British
tactical superiority over the Franco-Spanish fleets was manifest, as was
Nelson’s burgeoning genius. His accomplishment at the Nile (1798) – in
sending six of his heaviest ships to attack the anchored French fleet from the
shallow, landward side, while he attacked simultaneously from the seaward –
has no equal. In the previous year, Duncan had clobbered a much tougher
opponent, the Dutch navy, at the Battle of Camperdown (1797). The Royal
Navy then moved to control the Baltic and, helped by Nelson’s blind-eye
disregard of instructions, destroyed the Danish fleet at Copenhagen (1801).
The greatest moment came in October 1805 at Trafalgar, where Franco-
Spanish sea power was destroyed, and British naval mastery could be
advanced, in the Mediterranean, in the West Indies, off Finisterre and in the
Eastern Seas. Small wonder that the magnetic centre of London today is still
Trafalgar Square, with the one-armed admiral’s column and statue loftily
above it. Small wonder that his fighting genius intimidated a century of
latter-day admirals.
The importance of sea power in the Second World War was even more
striking. For how could one think of the eventual defeat of the Japanese,
Italian and German aggressor-states without the Grand Alliance (Churchill’s
phrase) wresting control of the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific? Stalin’s
mass peasant armies could resist invasion under extraordinary conditions,
but there was no way that they alone could bring down the Axis powers.
This could only come when that purely land struggle was joined by the
exertion of massive maritime force. Of critical importance was the (chiefly)
Royal Navy’s victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest-lasting fight of
all, and one upon which success in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and
the eventual Normandy landings, ultimately depended. And the gigantic
1941–45 campaign in the Pacific and East Asia was, by the very nature of its
geography, determined by combined air-sea power: when dozens of
American and British aircraft carriers stood off Okinawa in June 1945, the
message was clear. Symbolically, the Japanese High Command surrendered
on the poop-deck of the battleship USS Missouri, just as Napoleon had
delivered himself to the British in 1815 by boarding the battle-scarred HMS
Bellerophon.2
No comparable record is to be found in the story of the naval aspects of
the First World War. Was sea power worthless, then? No. It remained vital
for the survival of the island-nation, so dependent upon the inflow of
overseas supplies; by extension, it must have been vital for France, Belgium
and Italy, which relied upon the inflow of British-dug and British-convoyed
coal. It was also clearly vital for the extension of Japanese maritime
influence across the waterways of Asia and the Indian Ocean; eventually, a
Japanese destroyer squadron was to operate out of the Grand Harbour, Malta
.
But in the ways in which we usually measure the displays of offensive sea
power, the First World War offers a dismal record. Each aspect will be
discussed in more detail below, but a summary can easily be made now. Of
great fleet actions, there were hardly any, and the most promising, at Jutland
, was inconclusive. Of amphibious operations, that is, not mere coastal raids
but the large-scale and permanent emplacement of a full army onto enemy
territory, there was only the sad story of the Dardanelles expedition of 1915–
16, perhaps the most humiliating setback since the ill-fated Sicilian
Expedition by the Athenians. Of the struggle to either protect or disrupt
shipping lanes, the Allies had a mixed record, almost losing that campaign to
U-boat attacks in 1917 before surmounting the challenge in the year
following. The economic blockade of the Central Powers was, well, a
subject much misunderstood at the time, and still badly misunderstood today.
If there is one, single noticeable aspect to the history of sea power in the
1914–18 conflict, it must be the increasing restriction upon any fleet’s
freedom to operate off an enemy’s shoreline: the fast torpedo-boat, the
submarine and (perhaps especially) the naval mine had put paid to that.
Although battleships had to be retained if other Powers kept up their own,
less and less could such vessels be called collectively ‘mistress of the seas’.
The naval balance

The overall naval balance in August 1914 between the fleets of the Great
Powers helps to explain a lot, though by no means all, of this conundrum.
America was, obviously, not a player, and only British naval intelligence
kept an eye upon events in the New World. Given Italy’s early neutrality, the
Austro-Hungarian navy (3 dreadnoughts, 3 semi-dreadnoughts, 6 pre-
dreadnoughts, 7 cruisers, 18 destroyers, 61–70 torpedo boats, 10 submarines,
3 coast-defence vessels) found itself without an enemy, unless Anglo-French
warships were reckless enough to attack ports along the rocky, difficult
Adriatic shore; far better for the Allies simply to close the mouth of those
waters and establish the Otranto Blockade, which was to last throughout the
war .3 The Imperial Russian Navy (10 pre-dreadnoughts, 1 coast-defence
vessel, 12 cruisers, 25 destroyers, 72 torpedo boats, 22 submarines, 12
gunboats) was hopelessly divided between its Baltic, Black Sea and Far
Eastern fleets – ‘strong nowhere, and weak everywhere’, to use Frederick
the Great’s term. Since the Japanese navy (2 dreadnoughts, 1 battlecruiser,
10 pre-dreadnoughts, 4 coast-defence ships, 33 cruisers, 50 destroyers, 12
submarines) dominated the eastern seas, and since in any case Japan swiftly
entered the war in August 1914 as Britain’s ally, there was nothing for the
Russian ships to do on that maritime front.
The French navy, once representing the world’s second maritime power
since the late seventeenth century, was now strategically eclipsed.4 Apart
from having a fleet to secure its imperial possessions, Paris had invested in
sea power to oppose the Germans (which the British could do on their own),
keep Italy in its place (no longer necessary after the new alliance
restructuring) and assist Russia (geographically impossible after Turkey
entered the war in November 1914). It could participate in certain eastern
Mediterranean campaigns (Gallipoli, Salonica) and join, in a limited way,
anti-submarine patrols. But it was a navy without an enemy – the exact
opposite of its far more dominant partner, the French army.This brought
things down to where they were always going to be: the Royal Navy versus
the German High Seas Fleet, that is, surface warship encounters in the North
Sea and then, after 1917, U-boat versus Allied convoys and their escorts that
gradually extended across the Atlantic. In the first regard, the Royal Navy’s
material preponderance was impressive. The British fleet numbered 22
dreadnoughts, 13 dreadnoughts under construction, 9 battlecruisers in
service, 1 battlecruiser under construction, 40 pre-dreadnoughts, 121
cruisers, 221 destroyers, 109 torpedo boats and 73 submarines. The Germans
were fewer in nearly all of the classes above: 15 dreadnoughts, 5
dreadnoughts under construction, 5 battlecruisers in service, 3 battlecruisers
under construction, 22 pre-dreadnoughts, 8 coast-defence ships, 40 cruisers,
90 destroyers, 115 torpedo boats and 31 submarines .
Early actions, overseas and in European waters

Here, six vignettes will suffice to show the iron corset into which naval
operations had been forced in 1914–15: early Allied captures and victories
overseas; the ever-tightening grip of the blockades, from Dover, Scapa Flow
and Rosyth, upon the exits from (and entrances into) the North Sea; a bold
German fleet escape along the Mediterranean and into the safety of the
Bosphorus; a German victory, then an even more stunning defeat at sea, in
the waters of the South Atlantic; a harrowing British experience of the
disasters that would befall close-in blockades in the new age of U-boats, plus
the shock of German surface bombardments of towns along the Yorkshire
coast. Taken together – for there are far too many single populist narratives
with titles like ‘The Flight of the Goeben’ and ‘Coronel and the Falklands’ –
the geopolitical and naval topography of the First World War established
itself, and with only one exception (the Battle of the Atlantic after 1917)
scarcely changed before the German High Command requested an armistice
in November 1918.
The ruination and elimination of Germany’s overseas positions came fast
and total, and there were few surprises here, for the British ‘new’
imperialists, their self-governing Dominions and their allies in the French
Ministry for Naval and Colonial Affairs, had been obsessed for three
decades about German colonialism. The year 1884 was Bismarck’s ‘first bid
for colonies’; thirty years later came that youthful empire’s liquidation,
which had no chance at all once London and Paris had settled their own
imperial quarrels and formed a united front against Wilhelmine ambitions. It
is rarely recognised how much Grand Admiral Tirpitz played a part in the
creation of this geopolitical prison, but it was he who had fought with grim
determination against the deployment of greater German naval forces
overseas, arguing always, as he had done in his famous Memorandum of
1897, that the North Sea was the ‘lever’ by which a growing High Seas Fleet
would one day compel the British to concede equal world status to the
Second Reich. The result, as detailed below, was that the far-flung German
warships, however competently handled, were in 1914 at the mercy of a vast
imperial coalition which held all the cards in the renewed struggle for the
mastery of the Middle East, South Asia, the Southwest Pacific and all of
Africa.5
If German warships overseas were out-powered, so also were the spatch-
cocked, thinly held German colonies. When London and Paris announced
they were at war, rough plans to seize those German overseas territories
were already developed. With great delight New Zealand moved in on
German Samoa, while Australian forces took German New Guinea: both
Dominions had held an exaggerated fear of Prussians in the South Seas, and
now welcomed the chance to eliminate those alien presences. In West Africa,
superior French and British forces quickly moved into Togoland and the
Kamerun. The South Africans were equally keen to crush what they saw as
the threatening German hold over South West Africa (present-day Namibia),
though it took Smuts and Botha’s forces until 1915 to do so. Only in German
East Africa did that remarkable General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck lead far
larger numbers of South African, Indian and British troops a merry dance
around Mount Kilimanjaro until the Armistice itself, after which he returned
to a hero’s welcome in a morale-depressed Berlin.6
When one pulls back from this bustle of military and naval actions, a basic
strategic point emerges: there was not going to be a ‘war in the Eastern
Seas’, or a bitter struggle for Caribbean sugar islands, or even surface
actions off North Africa. The Germans were the great losers here, of course,
but so also were French justifications for having a large navy; so, too, at
least after the Falklands battle (below), were those Fisher-ite delusions about
turning the Royal Navy into a force built around fast, long-range
battlecruisers dominating the distant waters of the world. Scapa Flow, Dover,
Gibraltar and Alexandria did that nicely.
In the Far East the Japanese marched, as ever, to their own drummer,
seeing the European crisis as an opportunity further to expand their
influence. Qingdao and the province of Shandong, precariously held by
Germany, were invaded and possessed. Tokyo had used an expansive
interpretation of the revised 1907 Anglo-Japanese Treaty to enter the war on
the side of the Allies, and the British Foreign Office was somewhat surprised
at Japan’s boldness. To the cold, calculating, neutralist Americans, it was
Japan’s ready seizure of Germany’s island possessions in the Central Pacific
– the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Marianas – that caused strategic concern.
Still, the larger point would surely be about the disposition of these German
colonies when – or if – the war was won by the offshore Powers. It was
highly unlikely that any would be returned to Berlin; in the future, the pan-
Germans would head for the grain-fields of the Ukraine and the coal of the
Donbas instead .
These overseas campaigns were decided so relatively swiftly because of
course the German navy could not get out of the North Sea (and the Austro-
Hungarian navy had nowhere to go even if it managed to exit the Adriatic).
Once the British ultimatum expired on 3 August 1914, Royal Navy
squadrons closed off the Straits of Dover and the waters between Scotland
and Norway. At the same time, German submarine cables to the outer world
were lifted and snipped by specialist cable ships, and the Second Reich was
isolated, except to secondary strategic centres such as Scandanavia and the
Balkans. Not only could German warships not get out to reinforce positions
overseas, but German merchant ships could not get in, because of this
throttling blockade. Nor could neutral merchant ships make up the ‘gap’, for
they were escorted into British ports for inspection (and confiscation of
goods intended for Germany) before being released to Amsterdam, or
wherever. As is argued below, it is doubtful whether neutral sources could
supply the massive German demand for foodstuffs and raw materials in any
case, but the maritime blockade made that option moot.
Within the North Sea, however, the British naval policy still had flaws. It
should have been clear to all senior naval commanders that a ‘distant’
blockade based on Dover and Scapa Flow was the sensible strategy, with one
caveat. But the Admiralty had not given up on the folly of ‘close’ blockade,
and on 22 September 1914 disaster occurred, when three large, but elderly,
British cruisers ( HMSs Aboukir, Hogue and Crecy) were sunk within an
hour by a minuscule and obsolescent U-boat: a staggering 1,400 sailors were
sunk. As Corbett put it in his official history, ‘nothing so emphatically
proclaimed the change that had come over naval warfare’.7 Shortly
afterwards, in October, the brand-new dreadnought, HMS Audacious, hit an
enemy mine and sank quickly. From this time onwards, the thought of the
damage that submarines, torpedoes and mines could do to giant
dreadnoughts obsessed Commander-in-Chief Jellicoe’s mind. If his Grand
Fleet went to sea without minesweepers, it might crash into a newly laid
enemy minefield. If it went out preceded by minesweepers, they were
limited to a speed of ten knots, and thus very vulnerable to U-boats. And if
the British battlecruisers and the fast (Queen Elizabeth-class) battleships
steamed at full speed for safety’s sake or to catch the enemy, the fleet
destroyers that were supposed to be protecting them could not keep up,
except in the smoothest of waters.
This difficulty was accompanied by two other ones. First, it was a shorter
distance for the High Seas Fleet to steam over and bombard ports of the east
coast of England than for the Grand Fleet to get to that area from Scapa
Flow. Secondly, the year-long heavy mists and fog in the central North Sea
made sightings and communication so very difficult – this was not Cape St
Vincent or Aboukir Bay! The first problem was being gradually solved by
the decryption team in the Admiralty’s Room 40, for the German navy was
notoriously prolix in its ship-to-ship radio traffic as it readied itself to go to
sea. But that system was by no means perfect, and no one could solve the
problem of the North Sea fogs. Thus it was that when, on 15–16 December
1914, both fleets came to sea, as usual with the fast battlecruiser squadrons
ahead of the larger battlefleets, a comedy of errors took place. Admiral
Hipper’s battlecruisers shocked the British nation by bombarding
Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, then narrowly missed a British trap
due to poor messaging by Beatty’s flag captain to the cruisers scouting
ahead. But the British forward squadrons had also perhaps narrowly missed
encountering the entire High Seas Fleet, before its commander became
worried at massed destroyer/torpedo attacks and returned to Wilhelmshaven.
Both admiralties were furious at the lack of decisive action, but the fact is
that fleet commanders were now worried stiff at operating in the central
North Sea .
London ordered Beatty’s battlecruisers to relocate southwards to be based
at Rosyth in the Forth, and placed an enormous number of cruisers,
destroyers and submarines at Harwich. Nonetheless, this still was a
preventative action, for no one wanted to be out on the waters, except for
each sides’ submarines, which were getting ever bolder – the British ones
now moving to operate in the Baltic itself. The dangerous shallows of the
Dogger Bank, the threat of new minefields, the possibility of a destroyer
attack out of the mists and the sheer scariness of the submarine – one British
sub accidentally lost control, rose suddenly to the surface and caused a
number of German heavy warships to scatter in fright! – were now
intimidating. When war began, the proud signal went out that ‘The King’s
Ships are at Sea’, but they were less and less so. The contours of the
disappointing outcome of Jutland were already emerging in the first few
months of the surface war.
There was also disappointing news for the British in the Mediterranean,
although a better result in the South Atlantic. There were two small, but
significant, German flotillas abroad in 1914. The first consisted of the
modern battlecruiser SMS Goeben and its accompanying cruiser SMS
Breslau, under Admiral Souchon, and rather vainly called the
‘Mittelmeerflotte’. Starting in the western Mediterranean, they made an
intrepid voyage eastwards, pursued by a superior but cack-handed British
force, ending up safe and sound in Constantinople, and thereby unfolding a
much larger escalation of the war that would consume Turkey’s own
involvement on the side of the Central Powers, the isolation and slow
strangulation of Russia’s Black Sea as well as Baltic export trades and the
invitation to the British and French to expand across the entire Ottoman
Middle East. The British Admiral ( Troubridge) was not shot like his
eighteenth-century predecessors, because the Admiralty’s own instructions
had been so confusing; in fact, everybody’s radio messages had been
unclear. But all this confirmed the vast difficulties of conducting major naval
warfare after a century of relative peace, plus revolutionary technological
advances.
The second small, though modern and very powerful German battle
squadron overseas in 1914 was its East Asian flotilla, commanded by
Admiral Count von Spee and based at Qingdao, in North China. This was no
place to be when the Japanese navy, already dominant in these waters,
entered the conflict and took the German colony, while expeditionary forces
also seized the Caroline, Mariana and Marshall islands. Spee was therefore
already on his epic journey across the vast Pacific, always desperate for coal
and feeling like a fox hemmed in by ever-more hunting groups; but he had
two relatively fast armoured cruisers in the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, plus
some useful modern light cruisers – one of the advantages of Tirpitz’s new
navy was that it was, well, new. This was not the case with the many
scattered Royal Navy units in overseas waters: desperately slow pre-
dreadnought battleships, outdated heavy cruisers and lightweight smaller
craft. When Fisher pushed through his many naval reforms between 1904
and 1906, he argued for scrapping older warships, partly because he wanted
to get their seamen for the new North Sea squadrons, partly because those
vessels might be annihilated by a fast enemy raiding squadron, gobbling
them up as an armadillo gobbles up ants. There were still too many elderly
ships left when war broke out.
This was exactly what happened at the Battle of Coronel off the coast of
central Chile on 1 November 1914, when no less than five British warships
were sunk, with enormous losses, when surprised by Spee’s squadron. This
time, and since the defeat was so shocking, the reaction from London was
swift and massive, with the two fastest and most powerful battlecruisers,
HMS Invincible and HMS Inflexible, rushed from Scapa Flow to the South
Atlantic. If they met up with the German flotilla, as they did so on 8
December, the latter hadn’t a chance of surviving; now it was their turn to
meet their Maker, and the defeat was even more crushing than that of
Coronel. German light cruisers that escaped did so only for a while. The
southern oceans were at this time, and even as late as the Second World War,
a British-dominated world, with only an occasional German raider tiptoeing
into it, though never for long. The legendary light cruiser SMS Emden lasted
until she met up in the Indian Ocean with the Australian cruiser HMAS
Sydney, but that was just a romantic episode. This was not the Seven Years’
War, with its epic struggles for the West Indies, Canada and India.
What is the problem? Geography, geography,

geography
However random these naval actions off the Falklands, off Heligoland, off
Qingdao and in the Mediterranean might have seemed to readers of (say)
The Times in those six months, they actually pointed to a single conclusion
that would shape the maritime history of the First World War. That point was
that in the never-ending ‘ Mahan versus Mackinder’ debate over whether sea
power could shape global history and Great-Power politics,8 Mackinder had
the best of the argument regarding the 1914–18 struggles. In the Napoleonic
War, both views were right: the heady French expansionism could only be
checked, then defeated, by a combination of massive maritime power and
the deployment of geographically determined military force. And the same
was true, as we have argued above, for the Second World War, especially in
the struggle against Japanese expansionism. But in a mass-based industrial
conflict triggered off by an assassination in Sarajevo, followed by a German
invasion of Belgium and northern France, Russo-Habsburg clashes in
Galicia, German-Russian struggles at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes;
then joined by campaigns in Palestine and Iraq after Ottoman Turkey entered
the war in November 1914, then seventeen bloody battles around the Isonzo
river when Italy rashly came in the fray; the end-result was largely due to the
multiple exertion of land power. Of course control of the sea was important
for an insular, import-dependent Britain, and in turn for her seaborne
supplies of coal to both France and Italy by 1917 or so. But the powerful,
well-organised Germanic coalition was eventually brought to its knees by
what Foch and Joffre fondly referred to as ‘un effort du Sang’. Blood,
indeed.
It was not just that the titanic struggles on the Western, Eastern, Italian and
Balkan fronts overshadowed everything; it was also, painfully, that grand
and expensive navies never had a chance to display their unprecedented
armaments’ power. Given the size of the various nations’ fleets in 1914 (see
above), it was clear that the maritime balance of power could not radically
be changed as it was in, say, the Pacific War after, first, Pearl Harbor and
then, secondly, Midway. The navies of 1914 were mired in their geopolitical
destinies.
Germany was always in a geopolitical pickle, as anyone who had read
Carlyle’s classic biography of Frederick the Great would come to know: it
had Russia (or Russia-Poland) to the East, and France to the West;
sometimes it also had a hostile Sweden to the North, and a hostile Austria to
the South. By 1914 the latter two threats were gone, but in its creation of a
large North Sea fleet and its invasion of Belgium, Germany had bestirred an
even greater, much less conquerable foe: Britain and its Empire. Hobbled by
its ties to a fast-weakening Austro-Hungarian Empire, it now faced three
undoubted Great Powers, so that even its industrial strength and superbly
efficient internal lines of communication could not turn the balance. The
geopolitical consequences, especially the naval ones, were enormous. In so
many of his writings before 1914, perhaps especially in his now-neglected
classic, Britain and the British Seas,9 Sir Halford Mackinder had argued that
the Kaiser’s navy would be useless unless it obtained a preponderance of
numbers: as noted above, it did not. The Habsburg Empire was even more
hemmed in, and when Ottoman Turkey entered the war it was denied the
Mediterranean. Russian and German warships tussled in the Baltic, Russian
and Turkish warships tussled in the Black Sea and Italian and Austro-
Hungarian navies tussled in the Adriatic. It meant very little. Essentially, the
British and Japanese navies were sealing up the seas. That story would not
really change until Midway, in June 1942.
Gallipoli – and Okinawa

In their classic study of the US Marines and amphibious warfare in the
1942–5 Pacific campaigns, Isley and Crowl10 begin with a very blunt
comparison: ‘Success at Okinawa – Failure at Gallipoli’. Both were
extremely bloody amphibious operations, but the second ended in
catastrophe, and the former eventually yielded victory to the American
forces. Their point is not to boast about their beloved Marines, but to stress,
painstakingly, just how difficult an amphibious landing – any amphibious
landing – was. Ideally, an invading army likes to arrive in a safe, well-
organised port, as Pershing’s troops were to arrive in Le Havre and
Cherbourg, and Eisenhower’s into Glasgow. But enemy-held port cities are
usually very well protected, so the ships offshore are at a great disadvantage;
Nelson himself, perhaps thinking of the ill-fated British efforts to take
Cartagena (1741) with 20,000 men and 186 ships, believed that ‘ships
against forts’ was nonsensical. Going against a place as massive as
Constantinople in 1915 would be like going against London. If the Western
Allies were to take the Ottoman Turkish capital and give relief to their
increasingly weaker Russian partner, they would have to do it another way.
Moreover, the rashness of the Anglo-French campaign of 1915 had been
compounded by both governments swallowing Churchill’s argument that the
Straits could be forced chiefly by warships, assisted by some naval landing
battalions. Thus it was that on 18 March no fewer than eighteen British and
French capital ships (many redundant and detached from superfluous North
Sea duties) steamed into the narrows. Unfortunately for them, an aged
Turkish mine-layer – originally German, sent slowly down the Danube – had
laid ten lines of naval mines, upon which the unsuspecting Allied fleet
crashed. At the end of the day, three battleships were sunk (two British, one
French), another three knocked out of action and another four damaged. This
was a heavier loss than at Jutland, and led to all sorts of political
consequences. There was hereafter no prospect of giving direct support to a
floundering Russia. Ottoman Turkey was now an energised foe. The failure
of the naval attack caused the further stupidity of throwing British, French
and Anzac divisions onto the miserable, ravine-filled, thorn-bush-clad
hillside of Gallipoli, and then their eventual withdrawal in 1916. Why such
an epic failure?: because there had been no systematic preparation, there
were no specially equipped units, there was no command-and-control
system, little intelligence or deception and no central command position.
Army–navy control systems were awful. However one parses this, though,
the Admiralty had taken another bad hit.
The whole Dardanelles/Gallipoli operation was a monumental failure. No
wonder, then, that the US Marine Corps studied this campaign throughout
the interwar years. From our viewpoint, however, it was just another
example of the crimping of the influence of sea power in this new era of
mines, torpedoes, entrenched coastal gunnery, motor tropedo boats and
submarines. The German term for this type of warfare is Kleinkrieg (small
war), but by 1914–15 it had already become big warfare. Surface warfare in
the Mediterranean now became a sort of ‘dead sea’ for the first time in
thousands of years, although submarine operations would increase. When
the British and French made their next significant moves in this region, it
would be on land: Gaza, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Lebanon, Syria. The future
would belong to the Allenbys, the Lawrences, the Greenmantles; not to the
Troubridges or the Beresfords .
The North Sea and its constraints, 1915–18:

Jutland understood
Neither the German nor the British navies understood the North Sea, and the
French had no intention of going there. Flag signals were hopeless in the
mists. Morse messages via a flashlight from the Commander-in-Chief were
erratic. Radio messages had to be brief, and were therefore often ambiguous.
Jellicoe had the worst of it here. He had to take in messages from the
Admiralty that might no longer be up-to-date, assess from the Harwich
cruisers what was going on in the southern North Sea, try to keep in touch
with Beatty’s wayward battlecruisers, decide whether to send the fast
battleship squadron in advance of the Grand Fleet and pay attention to any
sightings of U-boats. Many years after the war, that rising, cocky star, Lord
Louis Mountbatten, began to appreciate how great had been Jellicoe’s
conflicting duties. By that stage, though, others regretted that he had not
been shot, like Byng, pour encourager les autres.
In January 1915, the two fleets clashed at last, although the Battle of the
Dogger Bank was more of a skirmish that an all-out fight (Map 12.1). The
German battlecruisers had come out in a tempting sort of ‘bait and switch’
game, but their much more powerful British equivalents, alerted by Room
40’s intercepts, were in waiting; the Bluecher was blown to bits and the
Seydlitz was reduced to a slow, limping mound of iron. The British rejoiced,
but the result was that the High Seas Fleet did not come out to the central
North Sea for another seventeen months – understandable perhaps, but
hugely frustrating when Europe’s armies were fighting life-and-death
struggles.
Map 12.1 Major naval engagements in the North Sea, 1914–16.
When the surface struggle in the North Sea resumed, the mutual desire for
a great victory was mixed again with their commanders’ mutual caution
about untoward losses in these new and unpredictable fighting conditions. In
one sense, the Battle of Jutland story is an easy one to tell, and it is amazing
that so much ink has been spilled upon it. The Admiralty’s now-famous
Room 40 picked up a heavy amount of German naval radio traffic inside and
outside the Jade anchoring base in late May 1916, concluded that a sortie by
the High Seas Fleet was impending and ordered Jellicoe at Scapa Flow,
Beatty at Rosyth with his battlecruisers and Tyrwhitt at Harwich with his
cruisers and destroyers, all to get under way. Scheer had sent Hipper with the
German battlecruisers ahead of the main High Seas Fleet, to scout out the
waters. The two battlecruiser forces fought a sort of renewed Dogger Bank
action in the mists as Scheer raced back to the main fleet, though inflicting
very heavy damage on Beatty’s lightly armoured and imprudently
provisioned vessels (sinking HMSs Queen Mary, Indefatigible and
Invincible – revenge for the Falklands!). No pre-war designer appears to
have realised that shells fired at extreme distances would be dropping almost
vertically onto the opponent’s thin decks, and the British had great stores of
munitions in very exposed positions.
Eager to settle matters, Beatty pursued Hipper then soon found himself
facing well over twenty German battleships . The hounds became the fox,
and Beatty ran to the north. Scheer’s pursuit itself was thrown into danger
when it then encountered Jellicoe’s far more powerful Grand Fleet . The
British signals system was appalling, while Scheer’s fleet carried out a well-
practised ‘main turn-around’ manoeuvre and headed for Wilhelmshaven. But
his destroyer flotillas rushed forward, intent upon a mass torpedo attack, and
Jellicoe ordered his own fateful order to turn around. By this stage the Grand
Fleet was in much confusion and it then returned home, its lookouts sighting
possible U-boats on all flanks. There was no second Trafalgar. Nor would
there be.
What should we make of this? First of all, the Royal Navy’s control of the
North Sea was not in question after Jutland. It lost more ships, especially
those thinly armoured battlecruisers (the same would happen to HMS Hood
against the Bismarck exactly forty years later), but nothing changed
strategically. As the New York Times put it, ‘The German Navy has assaulted
its jailer, but is still in jail.’ What else is to be said? If the High Seas Fleet
had lost fifteen capital ships, what would have changed? Would Haig have
pulled troops out of the Ypres salient to be tossed onto the insecure beaches
of the Frisian Islands? Absolutely not. If Jellicoe had lost fifteen capital
ships, would the German High Command pull divisions from the Western
Front just a week or so before the Somme offensive (1 July 1916) began, to
throw them at Yorkshire or Scotland? Absolutely not. All that Jutland did, on
the German side, was to increase the steady fall of Grand Admiral Tirpitz,
and push a desperate German High Command towards unrestricted U-boat
warfare, a new form of commercial blockade, but probably the only thing
that would bring America into the war. The British and German admirals of
1916 didn’t think like that. Few later historians do.
Fisher’s concept of very fast but lightly armoured battlecruisers was
clearly in shreds; they were great for destroying German armoured cruisers
in the South Atlantic, but not for a pounding battle fleet match in the North
Sea. Yet there were still more even faster, even lighter such vessels on the
stocks of British shipyards in 1916–18. Churchill, making his political
comeback after his own disaster at the Dardanelles, jokingly called them
HMS Improbable, HMS Dubious . . . etc. Until naval air power properly
came into its own, as late as summer 1944, powerfully armoured fast
battleships, however expensive, were the way to go. For example, the
Warspite took a terrible beating at Jutland, but survived; it would take
another beating from a glider-bomb off Rome in 1943 and another off
Walcheren in late 1944, part of its fourteen battle honours: a battlecruiser
couldn’t take that punishment. Still, the larger point was that all capital ships
were now really vulnerable – to plunging fire, to mines, to torpedoes, to
submarines, to destroyers and MTBs. And bomber aircraft were already in
some designers’ minds. The old tactical textbooks would have to be torn up.
Then there were serious questions to be asked about ‘the rules of the
game’, as Andrew Gordon called his innovative study of how possible
cultural inhibitions, together with clashing views over battle tactics, really
hurt the Grand Fleet’s enormous theoretical fighting power.11 It is easy to be
critical of Jellicoe’s ‘turn away’ order, and there were armchair strategists in
the 1920s who called for his court-martial. But how exactly did an admiral
command all his warships if they were no longer steadily sailing in parallel
lines at four knots and in fine weather (The Saints; Cape St Vincent), but
steaming at twenty knots in the fogs of the North Sea, with cruiser squadrons
scattered forwards for reconnaissance, destroyers trying to keep up and a
battered battlecruiser squadron either advancing into trouble or returning?
There seemed to be submarines all around, and the threat posed by the
torpedoes of Scheer’s destroyers was intimidating. How did one keep control
of all of this, except by implementing those so-frequently-rehearsed ‘turn
around’ and ‘turn forward’ manoeuvres? Drake, Hawke, Nelson and
Cunningham would have gone forward, brushing aside the destroyers.
Jellicoe deemed it wiser to back off for a while, and the battle was over.
It is not true, as the legend goes, that there were no further sorties by the
High Seas Fleet into the North Sea after Jutland. Two were made in 1917,
but they were hesitant and desultory, thus achieving nothing. A better raid
was made by cruisers against the so-called ‘Norwegian Ferry’. But the
strategic stalemate continued to the end of the war. The Grand Fleet
remained at Scapa Flow , with Beatty replacing Jellicoe as Commander-in-
Chief, and gloomy at the lack of action. ‘Grey Skies, Grey Seas, Grey
Ships’, says Beatty in a letter to his wife. As for the Germans, there was no
way they could break out of this strategic box until they had seized, say,
Brest and Bergen . That would come, but twenty-five years later.
The most significant act of war which happened in the North Sea in the
post-Jutland years was not a naval event at all. It occurred on 25 May 1917,
when twenty-one Gotha bombers made a successful daylight raid upon the
seaside town of Folkestone in Kent, killing 165 people and seriously
wounding another 432, all civilians. This, and the bombings of London that
followed, produced panic and riots, galvanising Lloyd George’s government
into providing barrage balloons, high-level guns and other defensive
equipment. When the French aviator, Louis Blériot, had flown across the
Channel in 1909, landing, symbolically, next to the great fort of Dover
Castle, the press had proclaimed that Britain was ‘no longer an island’. Now
it was really true, and there was nothing that the Royal Navy’s superiority in
capital ships could do about it.
Worse was to come, at least from the navalist perspective, for the Imperial
War Cabinet swiftly commissioned what was to be known as the Smuts
Report of August 1917 (named after its chief author, the former South
African general who was now a key member of the Cabinet). The report’s
key conclusion lay in a single paragraph:
unlike artillery an air fleet can conduct extensive operations far from,
and independently of, both Army and Navy. And the day may not be far
off when aerial operations . . . may become the principal operations of
war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may
become secondary and subordinate.12
Thus was the scene set for the creation of a third and rival service, the Royal
Air Force, in April 1918. Thus was the scene also set for those post-war
claims by the advocates of air power (one thinks here of Billy Mitchell,
Trenchard, Douhet) that battleships were things of the past, vulnerable and
ineffective. Now the admirals of the world had another set of critics, against
which the rigidity of their chiefly Mahanian upbringing gave them little
force of reply.
The German switch to U-boat warfare

So, with surface naval action in the North Sea essentially closed down, what
was left for the German High Command but to go for unrestricted U-boat
warfare, and not just against the limited trades of the North Sea, but further
afield, out into the Atlantic? If neutral citizens got in the way and died, did it
matter? One European army had already suffered 500,000 casualties at
Verdun, the other on the Somme. Why did neutral states matter? The
problem was that most of those neutral citizens were American, yet there
was little time given to that consideration when deciding where and how the
U-boat war was to evolve (Map 12.2). The Kriegsmarine had to cut the
Atlantic sea lanes, or Germany would never win the war. Hitler had the same
problem in 1941.
Map 12.2 Allied losses in the Mediterranean, 1917.
The other complex of problems, rarely addressed in the literature,

concerned those changes which the coming of ironclad ships made to
attitudes towards the capture or destruction of enemy vessels. In the age of
fighting sail, the purpose of engaging the enemy’s battle line was not to
destroy those vessels but to capture them! You dismantled their masts, your
boarding-parties ran across their desks and forced their crews to surrender;
you then towed the warships back home and made them your own, often
with roughly the same names – La Gloire became HMS Glorious. In the age
of iron and steel and high-explosive shells, you didn’t want to do this. What
on earth would the Royal Navy have done with a battered-to-pieces
Bismarck in June 1941? Even by the time of the Dogger Bank or Jutland, the
purpose was to sink the enemy.
In the same way, the takeover of an enemy-flagged merchantman, with a
cargo of value, would in ancient days have led to the captured crew being
seized, and then a skeleton crew being put on board the captive vessel and
sailing it to the nearest friendly port. Clandestine German commerce-raiders
could still do this, a bit, after 1914, but since their own crew sizes were
limited and there were few ‘friendly’ ports in the world, their actions made
hardly a dent on the 10,000-plus British-flagged vessels on the seas each
day. For U-boat commanders, this was a logistical and tactical nightmare.
Did one actually rise to the surface, signal to an Allied merchantman to stop,
require the crew to get into their lifeboats, sink the vessel and then bring the
indignant Laskars and Filipinos into the U-boat? The Hague Conventions
were utterly useless here. Obviously, one had to sink the merchant vessel,
and leave the scene.
One other lesson came from those days of sail. The Dutch could not get
their rich-laden East Indiamen through the Channel without protecting them
with fighting warships; the British could not get merchantmen from the New
World to Liverpool and Southampton without putting them in convoys. This
lesson had to be learned again in the First World War.13 So, here was another
boxed-in situation: the Germans had to sink Allied merchantmen on sight,
and the Allies had to return to the older operational concept of convoys.
When the latter plan was implemented, the U-boat threat was eliminated.
And America was now in the war, at huge cost to the Central Powers .
The return to convoys: the threat contained

Mahan and Corbett had made it very clear what the essence of sea power
was: it was not, at heart, about warship design or fire control, but about
‘command of the Great Commons’. This is fairly easy to explain, at least to
anyone who has seen sheepdogs herding sheep down an Anatolian hillside
into their pens, and turning to lunge at any predatory wolves. Corvettes,
sloops and frigates were shepherds of the oceans, indeed, against U-boat
groups which Doenitz (a First World War submariner) would later call ‘wolf-
packs’.
Protecting these flocks of merchantmen was vital to the supply of the UK.
At first, Germany’s aggressive policy seemed worth the risk of having
alienated Wilson and the US Congress. A scary total of 520,000 tons of
merchant shipping was sunk in February 1917, an amazing 860,000 tons in
April (Maps 12.3 and 12.4). British naval strategists obliged the
Kriegsmarine by having written studies which showed that grouping ships
together would actually entice enemy submarines to find the targets! Far
better to steam independently – and get sunk.
Map 12.3 Allied convoy routes in the Atlantic.

Map 12.4 British merchant shipping sunk, 1917.
Slowly, slowly, under pressure from Lloyd George himself, under pressure
from the new Ministry of Shipping, and under their own sensible
reassessments, the Admiralty turned towards the idea of convoys; after all, if
it worked for the vital French coal trades and the Norway routes, why not for
the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay? By December, losses were down to
400,000 tons; by the next spring, to less than 300,000 tons, a huge drop in
the percentage of total shipping being sunk compared to eight months earlier.
The shipping crisis was over, although the Royal Navy’s record here was
much less impressive than in the heroic Battle of the Atlantic months of
1943. This simply was another poor story of a failure to use sea power
properly .
Enter the United States navy, and its strategic

irrelevance
In April 1917, provoked by Germany’s unrestricted U-boat warfare, its
flirtation with Mexican irredentists and other follies, the United States
entered the war as an ‘associate power’ on the side of Britain and France,
just as the battered, dysfunctional, absolutist Russian regime was forced out
of the conflict. This turbulent switch of partners greatly benefited London
and Paris, however fearful French policymakers were of the loss of their
tsarist ‘anchor’ in the East, and however much Ludendorff would acquire
more lands by his treaty with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk in March
1918. For none of the flattened wheat-lands of the Ukraine could match the
two great American assets that really did turn the tide for the West. The first
was the ever-increasing flow of the double-sized US army and marine
divisions to the Western Front. This took time, of course, for the nation had
essentially been in a Rip-van-Winkle mode for half a century despite the
jingoism of its press and politicians. But by the spring of 1918 the build-up
of American forces in France was remarkable, causing all the other powers
to rethink their situation. It caused the French to see that they would win the
war after all, and thus stiffened their demands regarding a peace settlement.
It caused Lloyd George, Milner, Smuts and others in the British War Cabinet
to realise that the war must be won in 1918, before the Americans dominated
the world. It caused the Germans to realise that they must relocate as many
divisions as possible from the East to the West, and cast all their cards into
Ludendorff’s 1918 spring offensive – a Vabanque-Spiel, indeed.
The second American asset was money, money, money, in the form of
inter-Allied war loans. From now on, Belgium, Britain, France and Italy
could devote all their domestic capacities to war production without
bothering to pay for it. That reckoning would come in the heated debates
over war debts and reparations in the 1920s. At present, all that was desired
was victory in the field, which would come with the astonishingly swift
collapse of the front lines of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey in the
autumn of 1918. Everywhere their armies buckled and started moving home,
as the Russians had done before them.
The American navy (unlike in 1942–5) could add little to this, at least in
terms of altering the battleship balance in the North Sea. Despite the massive
anti-British prejudice in the service, a squadron of battleships was sent to
Scapa Flow under the unusually Anglophile Rear-Admiral Hugh Rodman,
backed up by the head of the US naval mission to Britain, Admiral William
Sims. Although the US navy was probably the second largest in the world by
this time (37 battleships, 7 coastal monitors, 33 cruisers, 66 destroyers, 17
frigates, 44 submarines, 42 patrol, 96 auxiliary and 160 surface warships)
and certainly the most expensively built, ton for ton, it had atrophied as a
fighting force. Its Atlantic-based vessels had not operated as a fleet for two
years, and its target practice and training was pathetic – it was a good job all
it had to do was to stay in Scapa and observe the surrender of the High Seas
Fleet the next year. Its destroyer flotillas made more of a difference,
operating out of Irish ports like Queenstown against the U-boats. Still, the
ancillary actions of the American navy were important in two regards,
usually neglected in maritime accounts: the laying of the gigantic minefields
across the northern stretch of the North Sea (the mines were laid at various
depths), to deter U-boats reaching the Atlantic; and the escorting of over
900,000 troops to France without losing a single one. There was nothing
wrong with navies being in a support role, when it mattered .
The curious myth of the Allied naval blockade and

the great German hunger
If there was one thing that navalists and the ‘British way in warfare’
protagonists like Liddell Hart had on the one hand, and Adolf Hitler and
Nazi propaganda had on the other, it was that the Allied (chiefly Royal
Navy) commercial blockade had throttled the life out of the German
economic machine and therefore had won the war. To the navalists, it was a
desperately clutched-at rationale that sea power worked, even without
Nelsonic victories. To Hitler, it was the reason for going eastwards, to grab
his needed ‘Lebensraum’. The Allies had imposed a naval blockade upon all
ships going to and from the Second Reich. The people of the Second Reich
were in a starving, desperate condition by mid 1919. Ergo, the Western
navies won the war.
This argument is ridden with holes: it doesn’t usually distinguish between
the pre-and post-Armistice blockade, it jumps far too fast to conclusions and
it has no economic sense to it. Perhaps the greatest cause of the German
‘hunger’ of 1918–19 was Ludendorff’s decision in early 1918 to requisition
all farm horses and other draught animals for logistical support of his last,
desperate offensive of the war; without those animals, German agriculture
was devastated. And the spring offensive was halted, after severe, bloody
and grinding contestations, with the British and the Americans throwing in
more and more reinforcements. But the Ludendorff autocratic regime – that
was what it was becoming – also lost on the home front, for the German
workers, sailors and soldiers could not take any more hardship. Without your
own food supplies, how can you fight on? (The Russian soldiers and workers
had given the answer a year earlier.) The stage was set for the uprisings of
November 1918, including the revolt of the German sailors against Scheer’s
manic ‘suicide operation’.14 But what had this internally induced food
catastrophe to do with the influence of the Allied navies upon the war?
Well, it is argued, without the throttles of the naval blockade, the German
people could have imported all the food they needed from neutral sources
(presumably this argument does not assume that Canada or Australia, losing
tens of thousands of men to German action, would be shipping their
foodstuffs?). But that is the greatest fallacy of all in this argument about the
naval blockade, and for the following obvious reasons. First, where would
the food come from? Ludendorff had completely destroyed the Ukrainian
grain-basket, Poland was a wasteland and Hungary a disaster. The American,
Canadian, New Zealand and Australian grain-baskets were on the other side,
and Argentina’s food stocks were tightly tied to Britain. There were NO
external supplies. Secondly, even if there were, who would have carried
them, who would have crewed them, how would they have been ordered,
who would have insured them? The British, American, Italian, Greek and
French merchant fleets probably comprised 85 per cent of the whole; and the
German fleet was rusted up. Its seamen were long gone. All German
undersea cable communications to the outside world were cut off by
specialist Cable & Wireless ships on 3 August 1914, so how could one order
a food shipment from, say, Montevideo? And Lloyds of London, which
insured German ships and cargoes before the war, was now hostile. Even if
the Americans, British and French had lifted their actual naval blockade, it
wouldn’t really have made a difference. There was nothing out there. The
Germans had starved themselves, most stupidly.
From time to time, an enterprising ‘blockade-runner’ would try to get
through, with its cargo of phosphate or copper ores. Most were seized at sea,
but it didn’t really matter whether they were caught or not. Their
contribution to Ludendorff’s grinding war demands would be really small. In
sum, all assertions about the grand or cruel effects of the Allied maritime
blockade are mythological. Nonetheless, it remains one of the greatest myths
in naval historiography .
Scapa Flow and the rendering of accounts

It was the most extraordinary event in the 3,000-year sweep of naval history;
more than Salamis, more than Lepanto, more than the Armada, in its way
more than Trafalgar. In the late morning of 21 November 1919, the British
light cruiser HMS Cardiff, having left the Firth of Forth several hours earlier,
flashed a signal to the oncoming battle fleet, received an acknowledgement
and turned to lead them in. She was leading in what was left (that is, what
could steam) of the High Seas Fleet, a force covered in rust and salt, shaken
by the recent mutinies: in all, nine dreadnoughts, five battlecruisers, seven
light cruisers and forty-nine destroyers (the U-boats surrendered separately,
chiefly into Harwich). American and British battleships then came out,
glowering, fully armed, to take up position on each side, and make the
German surrender more obvious than ever. It was all over. After the massive
Allied breakthroughs on the Western Front from August 1918 onwards,
Ludendorff realised that his bold springtime bid had fully lost its chance, and
advised Berlin to surrender; the Kaiser fled into the neutral Netherlands, and
the Second Reich was no more. The struggle had chiefly been won on land,
not at sea, though the artists’ renderings of Reuter’s great ships coming
across to the Scottish coast to surrender were inordinately impressive and
Turneresque. Surely sea power had prevailed? That the German vessels were
interred, with skeleton crew, in the massive base at Scapa Flow was
testimony enough.
What to do with the surrendered German battle fleet – that is, which Ally
got how many capital ships, how large a slice of the pie? – promised to be a
massively contentious item in the complicated peace settlement, but the
Germans settled that themselves. On the Sunday morning of 21 June 1919, a
secretly coordinated mass self-sinking saw all the German warships gurgling
to the bottom of the sea, with the British guard vessels rushing around and
shooting haphazardly. The French and Italian admiralties suspected that the
Royal Navy had connived at this act of maritime suicide, but that would be
giving Whitehall too much credit. After a while, all the Allies agreed that
this had been the best outcome possible. The only real beneficiary was a
Glasgow-based scrap metal merchant, who steadily raised and cut up the
German warships from Scapa’s chilly waters for the next thirty years.
Thus was the scene set for almost two decades of maritime retrenchment,
and for the rise of land-based dictators (Stalin, Hitler) who had little patience
with the writings of Mahan, Corbett or any of that ilk .
Reflections on a most difficult naval war

It was and is not the intention of this chapter to belittle the importance of the
First World War in the general history of sea power, broadly understood. On
the contrary, this was the conflict where – much, much more than in the
Crimean War, the American Civil War and the Italo-Austrian War, even
more than that of the Russo-Japanese War – the history of naval war-fighting
bumped into the varied impacts of the Industrial Revolution which, by their
essence, shaped and modified the contours of the influence of sea power
upon history. One could not expect those retired British and German
admirals re-fighting Jutland among themselves all through the 1920s, or the
amateur navalist historians of the 1960s,15 to grasp this historic shift,
because they did not have the training in world history and geopolitics to do
so. But it is disappointing to this author that so many recent naval historians
have never escaped from the arcana of matters such as fire-control,
battlecruisers, signals and intelligence, naval finance, procurement and
weapons design, as to distinguish the branches and trees from the larger
forest. It is rather sad: imperial history flourishes again, in many new forms,
while strictly naval history atrophies.
Still, if one stayed for a moment at the technological rather than the larger
geopolitical level, simply consider what new and deadlier weapons-systems
either had their birth pangs during this armed struggle, or were enormously
enhanced in their striking power, a power that could be transferred to lesser
as well as to more powerful navies. The naval mine came into its own,
creating ‘no-go zones’ that even Nelson would have marvelled at. By the
end of 1918 British advances in aircraft-carrier technology were reaching
forward to the possibilities only truly fulfilled in the Pacific after 1943. The
U-boat had moved from being a coastal defence craft – a sort of motor
torpedo boat with underwater capacities – to being the greatest commerce-
raider ever imaginable. The torpedo itself was stunning in its multiplicity of
launch platforms – MTBs, destroyers, aircraft, submarines and cruisers (the
dreadnought has come and gone; the torpedo lives afresh). And then there
was the coming of air power. Was it any wonder that the negotiators at the
Washington Naval Treaties of 1921–2 grappled desperately to understand all
this? The maritime world was turned upside down. The point is that you
cannot understand this particular revolution without going back to 1793–
1815, when naval fighting was understandable, and then coming forward to
1939–45, when naval fighting (say, the American advances upon the
Gilberts, Carolines, and so on) became understandable again. There was no
such clarity to First World War navies.
And simply because this was such a brave and bewildering new world, not
even the most thoughtful strategic critic drew all the correct lessons from the
naval war of 1914–18. How could one? For instance, some conclusions were
both half-right and half-wrong. Protecting merchant shipping in the Atlantic
and the North Sea by returning to the Napoleonic War practice of convoys
and escorts was absolutely the right thing to do, and the Second World War’s
grim battles for the sea lanes would only confirm such a decision. But
supposing, as the 1918 British Admiralty did, that the introduction of asdic
(sonar) had solved the challenge of detecting U-boats, missed the fact that,
as Doenitz’s wolf-pack tactics in 1939–45 showed, submarine attacks on the
surface still had not found their counter-measure. Successful code-breaking
by one side was going to lead to vastly improved encipherment by the other.
Radio detection techniques led to radio silence. Aircraft attacking warships
could be driven off by aircraft defending such fleets. Technology usually has
no favourites, and ‘lessons learned’ in one conflict may have to be unlearned
in the next. Which admiral of 1919 foresaw Taranto and Pearl Harbor? And,
just for comparison, which generals of 1919 foresaw anything like the Fall
of France?
What did it mean both to win and yet not feel a winner? To be sure, the
Japanese navy gained , and hugely, but Eurocentric maritime historians
scarcely think of that series of distant gains.16 The United States navy
gained, but it was building an enormous battle fleet in any case; to extreme
American navalists, the meaning of the various peace settlements of 1919 to
1923 across the globe was to ruin their ambition to be the clear Number One
naval power. Germany lost. Russia lost. Austria-Hungary also lost navally,
but hardly noticed that in the breakup of its own Empire. The French navy
felt eclipsed, the Italian navy felt robbed. There remained the Royal Navy,
both a winner and a loser. It had won because the island-nation had not been
invaded, it had protected the sea lanes between itself and the far ends of the
globe and it had been able to transport its troops to distant theatres of war.
But it felt it had not really succeeded because it had not properly
demonstrated its naval mastery. It had failed to crush the enemy’s main fleet.
There is a symbolic ending to this rather disappointing tale and it
occurred, properly enough, during that later, far more stirring and more epic
war at sea. As the story goes, the last two boats in the brand-new King
George V-class battleships were scheduled to be named HMS Jellicoe and
HMS Beatty, but the Prime Minister, Churchill, sensibly realised that those
titles might attract scorn in 1941–2, when the Home Fleet was flinging
everything into the hunt for the Bismarck and Cunningham’s Mediterranean
Fleet was fighting for its life off Greece and Crete, regardless of its heavy
losses. So the new battleships were named instead HMS Anson and HMS
Howe, after safe, steady, brave and successful eighteenth-century admirals of
the Royal Navy. One could now forget about the naval history of the First
World War.
1 A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1890).
2 The author has tried to capture the monumental nature of this struggle for
control of the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific seas in his recent book,
Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers who Turned the
Tide in the Second World War (New York: Random House and London:
Penguin, 2013), in chapters 1 (the Battle of the Atlantic), 4 (amphibious
warfare) and 5 (the war in the Pacific).
3 Those interested in more detailed statistics on the size of the each navy in
1914 should consult Paul Halpern, A Naval History of World War I
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).
4 Its size in 1914, though, was still considerable: 2 dreadnoughts, 6 semi-

dreadnoughts, 14 pre-dreadnoughts, 28 cruisers, 81 destroyers, 187 torpedo
boats, 67–75 submarines and 1 coast-defence vessel.
5 ‘Renewed’, because this global struggle among the European powers

probably first began during the age of Louis XIV and William and Mary,
continued through no less than seven major wars in the long eighteenth
century, resumed in a less violent form in the post-1871 scramble for
colonies and was only settled by the ‘ Entente Cordiale’ agreements of
1904–06, deals that were heavily driven by a mutual concern at the
perceived ambitions of Wilhelm’s Germany.
6 Leonard Mosley, The Duel for Kilimanjaro (London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson, 1963). It is one of the very few entertaining accounts of fighting
in 1914–18.
7 Julian S. Corbett, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents

by Direction of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence:
Naval Operations, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920–1),
vol. II, p. 389.
8 Paul Kennedy, ‘Mahan versus Mackinder: two interpretations of British
Sea Power’, in Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight
Studies (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 41–85.
9 Sir John Halford Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (London:
Heinemann, 1902).
10 Jeter A. Isley and Philip Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious
Warfare (Princeton University Press, 1951).
11 Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and the British Naval
Command (London: John Murray, 1996); there is nothing quite like it in
naval literature.
12 Quoted in Kennedy, Engineers of Victory, pp. 82–3.
13 Jay Winton, Convoy: Defense of Sea Trade 1890–1990 (London:

Michael Joseph, 1989).
14 Gerd Hardach, The First World War 1914–1918 (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), which is the best source here.
15 Richard Hough’s conclusion on p. 321 of The Great War at Sea 1914–

1918 (Oxford University Press, 1983) is perhaps the most egregious: ‘It is no
reflection on the prodigious and continuing effort and glorious courage of
the armies in France and the numerous other theatres of war, or of the airmen
who gave them such valiant assistance, to say that the Royal Navy provided
the greatest contribution to victory . . .’ This is asserted, but not proven, a
dogma but not an established fact.
16 The exception here is A. J. Marder, Old Friends, New Enemies: The

Royal Navy and the Imperial Japanese Navy, vol. I: Strategic Illusions
1936–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
13 The air war
John H. Morrow, Jr.
Pre-war
Flight offered the prospect of a new arena of warfare from its very origins,
and the adoption of captive observation balloons by European armies in the
latter half of the nineteenth century paved the way for their later acceptance
of powered flight, by leading to the formation of civilian aviation societies
and small military aviation units. The invention and evolution of small,
reliable and efficient high-speed gasoline engines in the 1880s and 1890s
enabled the invention of the dirigible in France in 1884 and the airplane in
the United States in 1903. In 1883, Albert Robida’s book, War in the
Twentieth Century, envisaged a sudden crushing air strike, while Ivan S.
Bloch’s 1898 treatise on warfare anticipated bombardment from airships in
the near future.
European armies acquired their first airships – the French army bought the
Lebaudy brothers’ non-rigid dirigibles, and the German army, Count
Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s gigantic rigid dirigibles – in the years 1906–08.
Noted Englishmen such as press magnate Alfred Harmsworth, Lord
Northcliffe and the Honourable Sir Charles Rolls of Rolls-Royce,
recognised, in the words of the former, that ‘England was no longer an
island’, although his conception of the threat as ‘aerial chariots of a foe
descending upon England’ indicated a classical, and unrealistic appraisal of
its nature.1 H. G. Wells’s popular tome, The War in the Air, published in
1908, dramatically portrayed the destruction of cities and, ultimately, of
civilisation by gigantic airships and airplanes in a future aerial conflict.
Other European authors proclaimed that aviation would bind nations
together and make war too terrible to endure. In any case, airships and
airplanes were just emerging from the experimental stage by the end of
1907.
In 1908, popular interest in aviation surged with a twelve-hour Zeppelin
flight and the first cross-country flight and closed circuit flights of more than
two hours by airplanes. In January 1908, Frenchman Henri Farman, flying a
Voisin biplane, took off under the plane’s own power to fly the first officially
monitored closed-circuit kilometre. On 30 October he made the first cross-
country flight, some twenty-seven to thirty kilometres, from Bouy to Reims.
French and German military observers considered these two achievements
signals of the birth of aviation sufficiently practical for military use. While
they acknowledged the Wright brothers’ astounding duration record of two
hours and twenty minutes aloft, the Americans’ airplane required a
launching apparatus and had flown over a manoeuvre field, not overland.
Even during these early days of aviation, international jurists deemed its
destructive potential significant enough to assess the ramifications of aerial
warfare for international law. They disagreed on the legitimate uses of
aviation for warfare – some were willing to allow aerial bombing but not
fighting, while others would permit reconnaissance, communications and
exploration but not bombing. Peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and
1907 included discussions of air warfare. In 1899 the dirigible’s potential as
a bomber led to five-year prohibitions against the discharge of projectiles
and explosives from balloons and against the bombing of undefended towns
and cities. Yet in the absence of effective and proven bombers, the French,
German and Russian representatives would not foreclose the use of new
weapons in warfare. In 1907 the conferees agreed only not to bomb
undefended towns and villages. The closer aircraft drew to being a useful
weapon, the closer international jurists edged to acknowledging its
legitimacy as a weapon. At the dawning of 1909, aeronautics stood on the
verge of acceptance by military establishments; the years 1909 to 1914
would witness its transformation into an embryonic instrument of modern
warfare.
In 1909 French achievements – Louis Blériot’s crossing of the English
Channel in July and the Reims aviation week in August – stimulated aviation
development, public enthusiasm and military interest across Europe. Military
aviation leagues and aero clubs became extra-parliamentary pressure groups
for military aviation, with highly placed patrons such as Prince Heinrich of
Prussia, Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich of Russia and First Lord of the
Admiralty Winston Churchill in Britain. European crowds of hundreds of
thousands of spectators thronged to see air shows, and aviators became the
popular heroes of the day as aviation displaced automobile racing as the
most popular sport.
The French army bought its first airplanes after Reims, and army
manoeuvres in September 1910 demonstrated that airplanes served
effectively for reconnaissance and liaison. In the French manoeuvres of
1911, airplanes located an enemy’s exact location sixty kilometres away and
prompted army officers to contemplate aerial fighting and bombing troops
arrayed in dense formation. In the Revue générale de l’aéronautique
militaire in 1911, Belgian officer Lieutenant Poutrin suggested that the aerial
bombardment of urban centres and government capitals could disorganise a
nation’s life and weaken its morale.2
While the French concentrated on airplanes, the Germans divided their
resources between airplanes and airships – the former for tactical
reconnaissance and the latter for strategic reconnaissance and possibly
bombing – although airships were unreliable, particularly in bad weather.
The German War Ministry, which regarded the airship as a symbol of
German aerial superiority and a political and military means of pressure on
foreign countries, refused to acknowledge the repeated failures of airships.
Ironically, across the English Channel, R. P. Hearne’s book, Aerial Warfare,
published in 1909, proclaimed that everything was at the mercy of the
Zeppelin, whose raids would destroy morale and disable military forces. By
1911 all the European powers were engaged in the development of military
aviation, while some observers predicted that the very fear of air war would
lead to the dissolution of armies and navies, and aerial warfare would be so
gruesome that war would die ‘of its own excesses’.3
In fact, after the Moroccan crisis of 1911 prompted expectations of
European war, armies began studying and testing aircraft armed with
machine guns and cannon and equipped to drop shells and fléchettes, six-
inch metal darts in canisters. The Michelin brothers launched an annual
bombing competition in 1912, and published brochures that advocated
bombing troops and supplies beyond the range of artillery. Despite such
initiatives, the French army went to war in 1914 with 141 airplanes intended
for reconnaissance, not combat.
In contrast, German Chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke,
desired to have as many airships as possible operational for a future war, and
held exaggerated notions of the Zeppelin’s ‘first-strike capability’. On 24
December 1912, he informed the War Ministry that
in the newest Z-ships we possess a weapon that is far superior to all

similar ones of our opponents and that cannot be imitated in the
foreseeable future if we work energetically to perfect it. Its speediest
development as a weapon is required to enable us at the beginning of a
war to strike a first and telling blow whose practical and moral effect
could be quite extraordinary.4
German aviation journals echoed Moltke’s sentiments, anticipating pinpoint

and unstoppable Zeppelin attacks on enemy targets in the dead of night.5
German war plans in 1913 placed dirigibles directly under the High
Command and army commands for strategic reconnaissance and bombing
missions, although the dirigibles performed only one bombing trial before
the war and the army had only seven of the monsters in the summer of 1914.
The German army did have 245 airplanes for tactical reconnaissance,
communications and artillery spotting.
Britain, lagging behind both France and Germany in its development of
aerial machines, did have in Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty,
a staunch supporter of aviation. The darling of the British aviation press,
Churchill, dubbed the ‘fairy godfather’ of naval aviation in January 1914,
proclaimed that aviation’s ‘great driving power is derived from its military
aspect and utility’ and that the ‘Navy and the Army . . . must be the main
propulsive force of aviation in this country’.6 Both navy and army agreed
that the airplane’s primary mission would be reconnaissance, although the
navy’s aviators yearned for a fighting aircraft as well.
In Italy, the visionary army major, Giulio Douhet, predicted aviation
would become the decisive element of modern warfare and supported
aircraft designer Gianni Caproni’s efforts to design and build a fleet of multi-
engine bombers for tactical and strategic missions. Every European power
facing the likelihood of war by 1914 had an army air service, with a smaller
naval service if its navy was large enough to require reconnaissance craft.
Yet four powers merit particular attention in the evolution of military
aviation: France, Germany, Britain and Italy. Military procurement spurred
the rapid development of aircraft and aero-engine manufacturers in France
and Germany, and to a lesser extent in Britain and Italy. Other countries
lagged behind. Russian inventor, Igor Sikorsky, designed a giant four-engine
biplane, the Il’ia Muromets, which flew 2,575 kilometres in six-and-a-half
hours in 1913, but Russian industry would struggle to manufacture the giant.
The United States, far away from an increasingly militaristic and bellicose
Europe, lacked the impetus to develop military aviation, although aviator
Glenn Curtiss excelled in the development of seaplanes and flying boats.
Clearly, doctrine often did not necessarily accord with the technological and
industrial state of aviation, as German expectations of the dirigible
illustrated. On the whole, however, a limited doctrine restricting the
aircraft’s use to reconnaissance and communications accorded well with the
state of aviation prior to the outbreak of war.
1914: An instrument of war

Starting with the Battle of the Marne in September 1914, French
reconnaissance planes played a key role in detecting the German army’s turn
to the north-east of Paris, thus enabling the French and British to strike the
Germans in the flank. At the tactical level, some artillery commanders used
aerial observation planes to direct artillery bombardments of enemy targets,
and the aircrews used the occasion to drop 90 mm shells and fléchettes on
the enemy.
In November, French High Command (Grand Quartier Général, or GQG)
began to consider the strategic bombardment of German industrial centres.
As early as 2 August, War Minister Paul Painlevé and industrialists such as
the Michelin brothers and aircraft builder Paul Schmitt, had expressed
interest in bombing Essen, the centre of the Krupp works in the Ruhr Valley
– a task beyond the capacity of the tiny air arm. On 23 November, however,
GQG formed four squadrons of Voisin biplanes into the First Bombardment
Group (GB1) of eighteen planes. This force struck the railway station at
Freiburg on 4 December, and was drawing up a list of important and
vulnerable targets by the end of the year.
The German High Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL) used four
Zeppelins in August and September for reconnaissance and bombing
missions against cities such as Antwerp, Zeebrugge, Dunkirk, Calais and
Lille. All four airships were destroyed by enemy action, the last during a
British bombing attack on its shed in Düsseldorf on 8 October. By the end of
the year the army had given up on the airship, but German naval airship
commander Peter Strasser remained determined to strike at England,
although he had no suitable ships.
German airplanes performed such critical reconnaissance on the Western
and Eastern Fronts – particularly in the East at Tannenberg where Russian
cavalry outnumbered German – that by the end of August the airplane had
developed from ‘a supplementary means of information relied upon
principally for confirmation’ to ‘the principal means of operational
reconnaissance – an important factor in forming army commanders’
decisions’.7 At the end of August, in two separate incidents, German pilots
dropped small bombs on Paris and a note advising Parisians that ‘The
German army stands before the gates of Paris. You have no choice but to
surrender.’8 Perhaps these feats should count as early, if unsuccessful uses of
the airplane for psychological warfare.
German parliamentary deputies reflected a sentiment in military,
diplomatic and business circles that favoured ‘breaking British resistance’
through aerial bombing. In late August, the German minister in Stockholm,
Franz von Reichenau, hoped ‘with all his heart’ that ‘Germany would send
airships and aircraft cruising regularly over England dropping bombs’ until
‘the vulgar huckster souls’ of those ‘cowardly assassins’ would forget ‘even
how to do sums’. The industrialist Walther Rathenau also advocated
‘systematically working on the nerves of the English towns through an
overwhelming air force’.9 The German High Command did form a bombing
corps under the fanciful and intentionally deceptive name, the Carrier Pigeon
Unit Ostende (Brieftauben Abteilung Ostende). However, as the Germans
never captured Calais, their bombers could not reach England and contented
themselves with raids on Dunkirk, French harbours and railroad junctions.
The British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) won the praise of BEF (British
Expeditionary Force) commander Sir John French on 7 September for its
‘admirable work’ in providing him with ‘the most complete and accurate
information, which has been of incalculable value in the conduct of
operations’.10 The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), stuck with the
unwelcome task of home defence, although the British navy’s precedence
over the army endowed the naval air service with nearly equal strength to its
military counterpart, interpreted its home defence mission aggressively and
struck Zeppelin sheds in Germany.
Such offensive efforts notwithstanding, aerial reconnaissance constituted
the airman’s essential contribution to warfare in 1914, although the airplane
would require further advances in photography and wireless telegraphy to
make it a truly efficient instrument of observation. Yet even in its embryonic
state, the airplane forced armies to conceal their activity more extensively. A
French artilleryman, pointing to a German aircraft over the Péronne road
near Albert early in October, commented to a British reporter, ‘There is that
wretched bird which haunts us.’11 In 1914 the bird of war had spread its
wings, casting its shadow over the battlefields of Europe. In 1915 it would
grow fierce talons to become a bird of prey, and the skies, like the earth and
seas below, would become an arena of mortal combat.
1915: The air weapon

In 1915, particularly in the latter half of the year, observation, pursuit and
bombing became distinct specialties. Aviation arms concentrated on
reconnaissance and artillery spotting, both of which improved markedly,
while pursuit aviation and aerial combat, despite significant strides,
remained less developed.
French GQG focused on aerial bombardment in an effort to carry the war
to the enemy. In 1915 and again in 1918, GQG concentrated on the
development of French bomber forces, emphasising bombers and more
powerful aero-engines. Aware that the war was becoming a conflict of
materiel, GQG selected industrial targets for a strategic bombing campaign
intended to shorten the war. The sturdy Voisin pusher biplanes that the
French employed in 1915 could carry 40-kilogram 155 mm artillery shells,
and from May through to September the French bombed such west German
cities as Ludwigshafen, Karlsruhe, Trier and Saarbrücken.
By July, German armed aircraft, including the new Fokker monoplane
fighter, were taking higher tolls of the slow and vulnerable Voisin and
Farman biplanes, although the French bombers now flew in groups in V
formation for defence. GQG responded by using the bombers increasingly
on night raids as extra long-range artillery against military targets right
behind the front. Night operations sacrificed speed for heavier bomb loads,
although they complicated navigation and decreased the precision and
intensity of the raids.
In early June, GQG proposed an air arm of fifty squadrons (500 bombers)
to attack Essen, the home of the Krupp works, but it required more powerful
bombers and thus more powerful engines. In July, and again in September,
the French Parliament’s aviation commissions demanded the bombardment
of German industrial centres and the construction of large long-range
bombers for the mission. Even a university professor wrote to the
government advocating an aviation arm of 1,000 planes each capable of
carrying a 300–400 kilogram bomb load to attack German communications,
stations, supply and munitions depots in the Rhine region around the clock.12
GQG, however, was renouncing its hopes for strategic aviation because of
the cost, materiel deficiencies and its awareness that Paris would become
Germany’s prime target for reprisal raids in any strategic air war.
In the winter of 1914–15, the German army and navy jockeyed to
undertake strategic attacks on England with dirigibles, the navy claiming
that the material and moral (morale) results of bombing London could
diminish British determination to prosecute the war. Two German dirigibles
did bomb the British coast in January 1914, but the Kaiser initially forbade
attacks on London out of concern for opinion in neutral countries,
particularly the United States. Late in April, the Kaiser consented to raids to
demoralise the population, damage war production and divert British
airplanes to home defence. During the year the Zeppelins grew larger and
more powerful, approaching 182 metres in length, with a volume of more
than 28,000 cubic metres, speed of 80.4 kilometres per hour and a bomb load
of over two tons (Map 13.1).
Map 13.1 Strategic bombing of Britain, 1914–18.
The loss of two army airships, one of which had staged the first bombing
raid on London the night of 31 May–1 June, prompted the army to transfer
its Zeppelins to the less heavily defended Eastern Front. The navy remained
determined to use airships to scout for the fleet and bomb England, and its
Zeppelins bombed London in August, September and October. In 1915
raiding Zeppelins dropped 1,900 bombs totalling just over 36 tons, killing
277 and wounding 645, and causing an estimated damage of £870,000. The
onset of winter halted the raids, but the navy prepared to continue its
campaign in 1916, as British airplanes were unable to intercept the fast-
climbing airships.
In 1915 the BEF’s Royal Flying Corps concentrated on tactical aviation,
artillery spotting and reconnaissance and aerial fighting, while the RNAS
continued its bombing raids on Belgian targets, particularly Zeppelin bases.
Members of the government and parliament, increasingly dissatisfied with
the air war effort, contemplated devastating aerial attacks on Germany. At a
meeting of the War Council on 24 February 1915, one member advocated an
air attack to distribute a ‘blight’ on Germany’s next grain crop, while another
preferred to burn the crop using thousands of little discs of gun cotton.
Winston Churchill preferred burning, while David Lloyd George, then
Minister of Munitions, averred that the blight ‘did not poison, but merely
deteriorated the crop’. The Prime Minister, Asquith, resolved to resort to
such measures only under extreme provocation.13 In a manifesto published
in the Daily Express, H. G. Wells, arguing that 2,000 planes, even if half
were lost, could demolish Essen more cheaply than the cost of the Battle of
Neuve Chapelle or a battleship, demanded a fleet of 10,000 airplanes with
reserves and personnel. Member of Parliament William Joynson-Hicks took
up the cudgels for a 10,000-or even 20,000-plane force to end the war with
reprisal bombing of Germany. The extent to which such preposterous
proposals exceeded industrial capacity and technological capability indicates
more than a touch of hysteria in the face of Zeppelin raids, but a more
reasonable demand to emerge from the debate focused on the formation of
an air ministry or air department.14
Ironically, only Italy, a small air power in comparison to the others, began
the war with a plane expressly designed as a bomber, the Caproni Ca1,
which the Supreme Command used for long-range reconnaissance and
bombing railroad junctions and stations. Behind the front, however, Giulio
Douhet’s superiors had removed him from command of the Italian aviation
battalion for exceeding his authority in authorising the Caproni bombers in
the first place. In July 1915, Douhet, undaunted, was sowing the seeds of
strategic bombing doctrine by advocating the formation of a huge group of
heavy airplanes for strategic operations against enemy military and industrial
centres, railroad junctions, arsenals and ports.15
In 1915 air arms became more sophisticated, performing specialised
functions at the front and adapting or developing new types to perform these
missions. Bombardment and pursuit, the aircraft’s new roles, prompted the
adaptation of suitable types – light craft for fighting and heavier ones for
bombing – but in general, the absence of powerful aero-engines enabling
large planes to carry defensive armament and greater bomb loads over longer
distances, limited bomber development. Yet in 1915 appeared all the
eminent issues of strategic bombardment – daylight versus night bombing
and attendant matters of accuracy and aircraft type, around-the-clock
bombing, appropriate target selection – that would continue through the
Second World War and even today.
Vocal demands on all sides for bombers captured the attention of civilians
and military alike, but the most significant development in aviation in 1915
was the beginning of fighter, or pursuit aviation. The appearance during the
summer of the Fokker Eindecker, a monoplane with a machine gun
synchronised to fire forward through the propeller arc, signalled the
beginning of the race for aerial mastery. By the end of 1915 an effective
fighting machine required speed and manoeuvrability, as well as fixed
forward-firing machine guns. The early pursuit pilots on all sides –
Frenchmen Roland Garros and Georges Guynemer, Germans Max
Immelmann and Oswald Boelcke and Englishman George Lanoe Hawker –
evolved fighting tactics to maximise their chances of becoming aerial
predators without falling prey to the enemy. They even recommended
technical improvements for fighter aircraft. Their efforts would make the
skies over Europe’s battlefields far more dangerous in 1916.
1916: A watershed in military aviation

The great land battles of Verdun and the Somme on the Western Front in
1916 necessitated the first major struggles for aerial control over the
battlefield, as fighter, or pursuit, aviation became necessary to prevent
enemy aerial observation and protect one’s own vulnerable observation
planes over and behind the lines. Here again the fundamental choices of
fighter escort of reconnaissance or bombing airplanes arose – close
protection of one’s own planes or constant sector patrols to sweep the skies
clear of enemy planes. Verdun demonstrated that aerial mastery over and
behind the battle lines was essential to the progress of the land battle and
required a concentration of fighter forces to achieve it. On the other hand,
aerial control remained transitory and incomplete depending upon the
shifting concentration of force at points of penetration of airspace over the
battlefield, and it was thus practically impossible for either side to attain
absolute security.
By October 1916, French tactical bombing in daylight over enemy lines
would practically cease because of the heavy casualties German fighters
exacted. Until then, GQG had targeted German industrial centres – first
chemical and powder plants and metallurgical shops, and then munitions and
armaments plants – within a 300-kilometre radius of the French
bombardment group’s base at Malzéville near Nancy. Raids struck railway
stations, blast furnaces and even airfields, but the losses on raids even
escorted by French fighters became too prohibitive and forced a shift
exclusively to night attacks. In December 1916, GQG’s new bombardment
programme limited targets to within 160 kilometres of Nancy, in particular
the metallurgical shops of the Saar-Luxembourg-Lorraine region, as French
bombers’ performance in fact barely enabled them to reach those targets.
Behind the front, a triangular struggle over control of aviation production
programmes among GQG, the War Ministry and parliamentary aviation
subcommittees continued, as French aviation lurched from crisis to crisis
and programme to programme in the political arena. At least in the
procurement realm, French military administrators rationalised the research
and procurement offices in their attempt to improve aircraft types and
manufacture.
In 1916, French observation squadrons, like their bomber counterparts,
suffered from the use of outmoded, outclassed and thus highly vulnerable
airplanes. One Voisin squadron chose a snail as its emblem, while fragile
Farman biplanes burned easily because of the gas tank’s location directly
above the hot engine.16 These numerous army corps squadrons bore the
brunt of the mounting losses the expanding French air service experienced in
1916.
French fighter aviation excelled in 1916, as pursuit groups formed,
featuring such aces as Georges Guynemer and Charles Nungesser flying
light, manoeuvrable Nieuport biplanes, armed with a Lewis machine gun
attached to the top wing and thus firing over the propeller arc. Yet, as of the
summer of 1916, the Nieuport could barely manage against new German
fighters, and as 1916 drew to a close, the French air arm faced 1917 with a
desperate need for modern airplanes. Fortunately, although it had taken a
year, two French manufacturers had designed such planes – Louis
Béchereau’s SPAD fighter, powered by the revolutionary Hispano-Suiza
150-hp. V8 watercooled engine, and Louis Breguet’s reconnaissance/tactical
bomber framed of duralumin and steel tubes for lightness and strength. The
former, in SPAD 7 and 13 versions with ever-higher horsepower Hispano-
Suiza engines, would power French fighter aviation to the end of the war,
while the Breguet 14s, powered by Renault 300-hp engines, would
spearhead the resurgence of French tactical bombardment in 1918.
As French fighter aviation excelled, particularly in the first half of 1916,
so its opponent, the German fighter arm, desperately needed a new fighter
airplane to replace its obsolescent Fokker monoplanes, which the Nieuports
easily outclassed. Max Immelmann fell to his death in combat, and
Germany’s remaining star pilot, Oswald Boelcke, was withdrawn from the
front to preserve German morale. Boelcke took the occasion to draw up the
‘Dicta Boelcke’, guidelines for aerial fighting that still apply today: seek the
advantage before attacking; attack from the rear, if possible with the sun at
one’s back (thus the Allied dictum of two world wars, ‘Beware the Hun in
the sun’); carry through an attack keeping the opponent in sight and firing
only at close range; if attacked from above, turn and meet the adversary; and
never forget the line of retreat over enemy territory.17
If Verdun had been difficult for the German air service, the opening of the
Battle of the Somme brought disaster, as the British and French air services
outnumbered the German by a three-to-one ratio. In mid September,
however, Oswald Boelcke returned to the front with fighter units equipped
with the new Albatros D1 twin-gun fighter, a sleek, sturdy and powerful
killer that wrested aerial supremacy from the British and French. Although
Boelcke, with forty kills to his credit, fell to his death on 28 October after a
collision with a comrade, he bequeathed his dicta and his most adept pupil,
Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen.
The Germans now concentrated their strength on the Somme front and
reorganised the air service during the summer and fall to reflect the
increased importance and specialisation of function of the aerial units.
Fighter units (Jastas, short for Jagdstaffeln) became a new elite. Flight units
(Fliegerabteilungen) divided into two types of armed two-seat single-engine
biplanes (C-planes). The former were equipped with special cameras for
long-range reconnaissance and the latter designated for artillery observation.
Embryonic ground-support squadrons (Schutzstaffeln) of light, well-armed
and highly manoeuvrable CL-planes flown by ground attack fliers
(Infanterieflieger), protected observation planes and conducted ground
attacks in offensive or defensive roles. Lastly, a few bomber units (Kagohl,
or Kampfgeschwadern der OHL) under the OHL were now equipped with
twin-engine Gotha bombers for longer-range striking power.
On 8 October 1916, the German High Commanders, Paul von Hindenburg
and his Chief Quartermaster Erich Ludendorff, established a Commanding
General of the Air Forces (Kogenluft, or Kommandierer General der
Luftstreitkräfte) directly subordinate to them. The next month the aviation
staff officers assigned to German army commands became Aviation
Commanders with the authority to employ their units tactically. A cavalry
general, Ernst von Hoeppner, became Kogenluft, but the key to the future of
German aviation lay with his subordinates, his Chief of Staff Colonel
Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen and the procurement chief, Major Wilhelm
Siegert, who had guided the rise of German aviation since early 1915 as
chief and deputy chief of field aviation. The elevation of the air forces in the
German command hierarchy coincided with the proclamation of the
Hindenburg Programme, which decreed total mobilisation in an all-out effort
to win the war. Thomsen requested and received from Ludendorff special
status for aviation procurement in Germany’s total mobilisation, as the army
prepared to face the increasing war of attrition over the Western Front. Army
aviation had clearly assumed a position of major importance in the German
military hierarchy, and Thomsen abandoned army Zeppelin operations
because of their high costs and negligible results.
The German navy, on the other hand, increased its Zeppelin raids on
England during 1916, now employing gargantuan airships nearly 198 metres
long, with a gas volume of nearly 56,000 million cubic metres and capable
of carrying a bomb load of some five tons at 96 kilometres per hour. The
naval airship commander Captain Peter Strasser set out to destroy England,
to deprive it ‘of the means of existence through increasingly extensive
destruction of cities, factory complexes, dockyards . . . railways, etc.’.18 Yet
by the late summer of 1916 the Zeppelin could no longer elude more
powerful British fighters equipped with explosive and incendiary bullets,
and the increasing losses of Zeppelins indicated that the time of the Zeppelin
as a bomber had passed, although Strasser was determined to persevere.
Now the Zeppelin’s major duty became scouting for the High Seas Fleet,
which also acquired capable armed floatplanes, built by designer Ernst
Heinkel at the Hansa-Brandenburg works, that would give the British a rude
shock over the Flanders coast in 1917.
As Britain prepared to take the offensive in 1916, RFC commander
General Hugh Trenchard was initially concerned about inadequate aircraft
and aircrew training. Nevertheless, the RFC quickly seized the initiative
from the start of the Somme offensive on 1 July and dominated the skies
over the battlefield, as Trenchard determined to fight the Germans over their
own territory. RFC pilots flew constantly on ‘contact’ patrols to support
infantry operations, on photographic observation missions to direct artillery
fire and on tactical bombing missions. These missions cost unparalleled
casualties because of the poor performance of the RFC’s obsolescent two-
seat biplanes. Confronted with resurgent German fighter forces in the fall,
Trenchard did not relent, instead hardening his determination to conduct a
‘relentless and incessant offensive’ up to 30 kilometres over German lines
regardless of losses.19 British aircrews found themselves caught in a vicious
circle: equipped with inferior airplanes, they fell casualty to German fighters
so quickly that their replacements arrived at the front with increasingly
inadequate training, which rendered them in turn even easier cannon fodder
for German fighter pilots.
The RNAS meanwhile pursued its bomber offensive against Zeppelin
sheds and German airfields in spring 1916 using new Sopwith two-seat
biplanes, and by the fall had placed one of its three wings of twenty-four
aircraft at Luxeuil, near Nancy, where it joined the French in a first joint raid
against the Mauser factory at Oberndorf. The fall’s foul weather soon closed
further operations. In England, the Admiralty and War Office grappled over
control of wartime aviation, particularly strategic bombing and the
production of powerful aero-engines for bombers, which the RNAS refused
to relinquish to the RFC. Inadequate British aircraft and engine production
forced reliance on a hard-pressed French aviation industry, but developments
towards the end of the year boded well for the future. Rolls-Royce was
starting to hit its stride in delivering its superlative, if highly complex
combat engines, the 200-hp. (later 275-hp.) Falcon and the 275-hp. (later
360-hp.) Eagle for fighters and bombers respectively. Britain’s three most
famous fighters – the Sopwith Camel, the SE5 and the Bristol F2 two-seat
reconnaissance fighter – appeared in the latter part of 1916 and would serve
through to the end of the war. The first De Havilland DH-4 single-engine
day bombers and Handley-Page 0/100 twin-engine night bombers also
appeared at year’s end.
In 1916, Italy had the most operational multi-engine bombers, as the
Caproni factory delivered 136 tri-motored bombers powered by increasingly
powerful Fiat engines during the year. Raids of up to fifty-eight bombers
struck Austro-Hungarian railway stations and even the city of Trieste. While
strategic bomber aviation formed the centrepiece of the Italian aerial effort,
its staunchest advocate, Giulio Douhet, left a memorandum criticising the
Italian war effort on a train, and found himself duly sentenced to one year in
prison in October. There he would have time to write, and ultimately he
would be exonerated in 1920.
The year 1916 became a watershed in the First World War, as Verdun and
the Somme dashed both sides’ hopes for imminent victory. These battles also
marked the true beginning of aerial warfare, as the combatant powers
committed to building and wielding larger air forces to attain aerial
superiority. France took the lead in industrial mobilisation, as its aero-engine
production far outdistanced Germany and England because of France’s early
mobilisation of its automotive industry to manufacture aviation engines. The
aerial policies of the major powers reflected these industrial realities and
their basic military strategies. British and French air policy and overall
military strategies were offensive, the British more relentlessly than the
French. The Germans, in danger of being overwhelmed numerically on the
Western Front, reorganised and elevated their aviation forces in importance,
husbanded their resources, fought defensively and planned to concentrate
their aviation forces to seek occasional mastery limited in time and space. In
1916, with the pre-eminence of fighter aviation, the air services provided the
European combatants with their most revered heroes – aces like Albert Ball,
Oswald Boelcke and Georges Guynemer – youth who epitomised the
national will to sacrifice in the monstrous struggle on the Western Front. The
era of the individual ace would last into 1917, but individuals would soon
find themselves submerged in the burgeoning aerial war of attrition, as the
deployment of aviation forces en masse became indispensable to the conduct
of war.
1917: An aerial war of attrition

In early April 1917, the French commander General Robert Nivelle launched
an ill-fated assault on the River Aisne, at the Chemin des Dames, where the
Germans had already withdrawn to their recently constructed Hindenburg
Line. At GQG Nivelle exhorted, ‘The aerial victory must precede the
terrestrial victory of which it is both part and pawn. It is necessary to seek
out the enemy over his own territory and destroy him.’20 The offensive, in
the air and on land, turned into an abysmal failure, with high casualties and
few results, other than Nivelle’s removal and the refusal to conduct any
further suicidal attacks by French army units.
General Henri-Philippe Pétain succeeded Nivelle and promptly confined
the army to limited offensives, husbanding his infantry while wearing down
the German forces with superior artillery, aviation and assault tanks. Pétain
informed the Minister of War, Paul Painlevé, on 28 May: ‘Aviation has
assumed a capital importance; it has become one of the indispensable factors
of success . . . It is necessary to be master of the air. The obligation to seize
aerial mastery will lead to veritable aerial battles.’21 By December 1917,
Pétain sought certain aerial mastery, first against the anticipated German
offensive of 1918, by using the tactical bomber defensively: ‘[I]n great mass,
systematically, with continuity, on the enemy’s rear along the front of attack,
it is perfectly capable of paralysing the offensive.’22 Furthermore, in an
Allied offensive, he anticipated that his bombers could attack enemy lines of
communication and prevent the Germans massing their troops to block
attacks.
French and German aviation commands concentrated their fighter forces
in steadily larger formations, but the French fighter pilots, imbued with a
sense of ‘knightly’ individualism and independence that such aces as
Guynemer, Nungesser and René Fonck embodied, were reluctant to embrace
the new massed tactics. Jean Villar’s memoir, Notes of a Lost Pilot,
lamented: ‘[T]he veterans want to hunt individually, through overconfidence
and a desire to work on their own; the novices imitate them through vanity
and ignorance. And both finish by being killed.’23
At least French fighter pilots had the SPAD as a mount. Observation and
bomber crews flew planes that were cannon fodder. GQG concentrated on
battlefield aviation in 1917, but some bomber commanders yearned to strike
Germany and regretted the feeble state of French strategic aviation. In April,
Captain Kérillis longed for reprisal raids to ‘strike the morale of the enemy,
to intimidate him’. Kérillis believed that a fifty-plane raid on Munich ‘would
have flung enough German entrails on the pavement of the city to give the
torpedoers of the Lusitania and the arsonists of Reims pause for
reflection’.24 Pétain did not consider German morale susceptible to reprisal
raids and feared their degeneration into a cycle of atrocities. The French air
staff, which understood that Kérillis’s sanguine fantasies were out of the
question, in 1917 and 1918 planned to concentrate on accessible and
vulnerable targets within 160 kilometres of Nancy, while acknowledging that
destruction of such targets would be ‘problematical’.25
In the French political arena at the beginning of 1917, parliamentary
deputies were concerned about an increasingly debilitating schism between
GQG at Chantilly and the War Ministry and politicians in Paris. Fortunately,
in March, Minister of War Paul Painlevé appointed as Under-Secretary of
Aeronautics Daniel Vincent, a radical socialist who had served as reporter of
the aviation budget in parliament and earlier as an observer in a Voisin
squadron. Radical socialist deputy, J. L. Dumesnil, who succeeded Vincent
as reporter of the aviation budget, would again succeed Vincent as Under-
Secretary five months later and serve to the end of the war. These two men
did much to improve aviation, as they struggled to mesh GQG’s ever-
escalating demands for airplanes with the materiel and manpower resources
of the rear. Finally, the appointment of Georges Clemenceau as Prime
Minister in mid November meant that France had now acquired a civilian
dictator in the person of ‘The Tiger’, who planned to control all such matters
from above. Despite such political and bureaucratic instability during 1917,
compounded by labour unrest in French industry, the French aircraft and
engine factories increased production, aided by the procurement
bureaucracy’s decision to concentrate on the production of SPAD fighters
and their Hispano-Suiza engines and Breguet bombers and their Renault
engines. The results of their labour would become evident in 1918.
In 1917 the German air service, like the army, pursued a defensive
strategy on the Western Front. Fending off the French attack at the Chemin
des Dames and the British attack at Arras, German fighters fought only over
their lines, while lone, high-performance two-seat biplanes flew high-
altitude photographic reconnaissance missions over enemy lines. The
fighters’ toll of British aircraft in April 1917 caused the month to be known
as ‘Bloody April’, as German fighter units led by Manfred von Richthofen
and equipped with the superior Albatros D3 fighter, ripped into British two-
seaters over German airspace. By the summer, however, SPADs, SE5As,
Sopwith Camels and Triplanes and Bristol fighters easily outclassed the
latest Albatros D5s, and not even the introduction of the first Fokker DR1
triplanes offset the Allied aerial superiority. Still, high above the front,
expert long-range reconnaissance crews received superior airplanes,
particularly Rumpler C-types, which could perform such missions at 6,096
metres with little loss of altitude. They thus evaded British and French
interceptors or, if the Germans chose to fight, held their own against even the
newest Allied fighter planes.
Far below these altitudes, at ground level the Battle of Arras also
witnessed the debut of German aerial ‘infantry’, ‘battle flyers’, or, as these
aviators preferred to be called, ‘Storm fliers’ (Sturmflieger). Filling the ranks
of the Schutzstaffeln formed in late 1916, the Storm fliers, who were non-
commissioned officers and soldiers, many of whom had served in the
trenches, supported the infantry on offence and defence with machine guns,
grenades and fragmentation bombs. Mounted in small, strong, light and
highly manoeuvrable two-seat Halberstadt and Hannoverana biplanes, they
ranged over the front at 600 metres altitude, then descended to strafe enemy
troops, batteries, strongpoints and reserves from 100 metres above the
trenches, in the dead zone between the artillery fire of both sides. On days
when heavy rain and low cloud grounded other aviators, these determined
crews of anonymous aviators from the ranks flew under the low ceiling
below 100 metres over the ‘rue de merde’, or ‘shit street,’ as they called the
front, to support their kin on the ground, the anonymous front-line infantry.26
As the war continued they also received AEG, Albatros and Junkers
armoured infantry planes, the last of which was the first all-metal airplane.
The Junkers J1 ‘Möbelwagen’, or ‘furniture van’, was slow and ungainly, but
impervious to machine-gun fire from the ground.
In Germany’s strategic air war against Britain, Kogenluft launched a
bomber campaign named ‘Turk’s Cross’, with thirty-six Gotha twin-engine
bombers and a few gigantic four-or five-engine Rplanes (Riesenflugzeuge),
in late spring 1917. By summer, losses over England or from crashes upon
landing forced the bombers to strike at night, and Kogenluft decided to cut
its losses and allocated precious materials to fighter, not bomber
construction. Naval Airship Commander Peter Strasser, however, persevered
fanatically, lightening the giant Zeppelins to fly up to 6,096 metres, where
crews suffered from cold and oxygen deprivation, and unanticipated gale-
force winds scattered the airships all over Western Europe. At the end of
1917, Strasser was ordering even larger Zeppelins, thus expending
Germany’s scarce resources to wage a separate strategic campaign,
uncoordinated with the army. At least the navy seaplane fighter fleet,
equipped with Hansa-Brandenburg two-seat twin-float monoplanes, regained
command of the air from English flying boats over the Flanders coast from
Zeebrugge to Ostende.
In the German rear, with the new year came the understanding that the
Hindenburg Programme’s total mobilisation had only partially succeeded, as
material and labour shortages prevented the aviation industry from meeting
production goals, while the lapse in German fighter development undid their
razor-thin qualitative superiority. Ludendorff planned a great German
offensive to win the war in 1918, before the might of a mobilised United
States fell upon Germany. To this end, on 25 June 1917 Kogenluft declared
the America Programme, primarily to double the number of fighter
squadrons to eighty. Yet only a month later the OHL warned that Germany’s
economic situation made complete fulfilment of the programme doubtful.
Shortages, strikes and transportation delays plagued a German economy
strained to the breaking point.
British fortunes during 1917 began with RFC commander Trenchard’s
determination to stage an ever more vigorous offensive, thrusting patrols far
behind enemy lines to raid supply depots and troop assembly points, which
culminated in ‘Bloody April’. At least if the RFC was taking a beating in the
air, BEF commander General Douglas Haig acknowledged the efficiency of
the RFC’s artillery, photographic and contact patrols and their importance
for the land battle.27 After suffering disturbingly high casualties during the
summer and early fall, which elicited much criticism of the offensive
policies from the airmen who flew the patrols, the RFC’s superior fighter
aircraft enabled its pilots to gain the advantage over their German opponents.
Day bomber crews received the speedy DH4 bomber, deficient only in the
location of its main fuel tanks between pilot and observer, impairing
communication.
Britain’s position in the tactical air war thus improved in 1917, but it
lacked a strategic riposte to the German air assault that began in May. The
Admiralty redirected the naval wing from ineffective strategic raids to assist
the RFC on the front, yet many British officials, including Haig and
Trenchard, persisted in overestimating the damage strategic raids inflicted
upon German materiel and morale even at night, when crews had difficulty
hitting targets smaller than a large town.28 If the navy was relinquishing
strategic bombing over land, its acquisition and modification of American
Glenn Curtiss’s large twin-engine flying boats enabled systematic anti-
submarine patrols from naval air stations that covered some 10,360 square
kilometres of the North Sea.
In British political circles the German raids provoked an intense desire not
merely for defence, but also for retaliation. The British War Cabinet assigned
South African soldier-statesman, J. C. Smuts, to assess the situation in two
reports, the second of which advocated in August an independent, unified air
service to gain overwhelming aerial predominance in order to carry the war
to Germany, strike its industrial centres and lines of communication and win
the war.29 The Ministry of Munition’s aviation and aircraft supply chief,
William Weir, firmly believed that British industry could supply sufficient
planes to equip a greatly expanded air force, and everyone had tired of the
wasteful RFC-RNAS rivalry over industrial output. Unfortunately, Weir’s
enthusiasm outran his discretion, and no surplus of production materialised.
In fact, British aero-engine production failed miserably, except for bright
spots such as superlative Rolls-Royce engines. The year ended with the
matter of a unified air service unresolved.
In Italian aviation the Caproni bombers continued to hold centre stage,
carrying out wave attacks against enemy front and rear areas in support of
infantry offensives during the battles along the Isonzo river. The collapse of
the Italian Front at Caporetto and retreat to the Piave river during the
disastrous Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, forced the bombers to undertake
repeated ground attacks in an effort to stem the enemy tide. The Caproni
works at Taliedo was building one biplane and one triplane bomber daily
with completely standardised wing construction, while Fiat steadily
manufactured more and more powerful engines. Giulio Douhet and Gianni
Caproni were advocating an Allied fleet of strategic bombers. Writing from
prison in June, Douhet called for Allied production of 20,000 airplanes in
order to bomb enemy cities.30 He anticipated, incorrectly, that the United
States, which had entered the war in April, would contribute 12,000 aircraft.
The potential industrial giant across the Atlantic was totally unprepared to
serve as an arsenal of democracy.
In 1917 the airplane rapidly evolved into a multi-faceted weapon of war,
undertaking missions from close air support to strategic bombing. The
differing nature of the major air forces emerged clearly during the year. The
RFC, relentlessly aggressive, carried the fight to the Germans regardless of
circumstances, denigrating the significance of high losses while touting them
as proof of the service’s contribution to the war effort. It replaced its losses
with men from the Dominions, took delivery of new fighter aircraft,
surmounted the mid-year crisis by the fall and soared into 1918 anticipating
an enhanced ability to bomb strategic targets in Germany with a unified air
force. The French air service pursued a more circumspect offensive policy to
conserve dwindling manpower, as its army confined itself to limited
offensives after the debacle at the Chemin des Dames. Pétain had taken a
pragmatic approach to strategic bombing, prioritising targets and assessing
bombing effectiveness based on military results, not calculations of the
effect on morale like the British. Now the French army was concentrating on
the combination of the SPAD 13 pursuit plane and the Breguet 14 tactical
bomber to regain French aerial ascendancy over the front in 1918. The
German air service, like its army, fought a defensive war over the Western
Front, but the OHL also undertook a strategic air offensive against England,
along with its unrestricted submarine warfare, in an attempt to drive England
from the war.
By 1917 the British and German commands believed that ground attack
aircraft proved a powerful weapon in battle. British fighter pilots assumed
responsibility for ground attack, although they reviled the duty and engaged
in random, uncoordinated and individual strafing missions. In contrast, the
Germans developed suitable airplanes for ground attack and manned them
with former infantry, who valued the task. The French did neither, and
lagged far behind in ground attack operations. The airplane’s heightened
military importance and its expansion of military roles coincided with
heightened aviation mobilisation by all powers in order to wage the bitter
war of attrition. This rapid evolution of air power demonstrated the signal
importance of aero-engines, the heart of the airplane, and France displayed
best the ability to manufacture high-powered aviation engines in quantity.
In Britain and France aviation mobilisation occasioned much political
strife. The British administration of aviation was as highly politicised and
personalised as the French, but the former system was not wracked by
ministerial instability as was the constantly shifting French government.
Parliament played an important role in aviation in both countries, as
representatives desired strategic air arms with which to bomb Germany. In
France, where the army’s control of aviation was a given, the deputies
interpellated and intrigued to get their way, to no avail. In Britain the air
lobby pressed for an independent air force, which the Lloyd George
government established in order to resolve the army–navy conflict over
aviation, and to give the Prime Minister an independent ally in his struggle
for control against the army and BEF commander Douglas Haig.
Compared to these complex situations, the authoritarian German system
made the German military aviation bureaucracy a paragon of stability, as the
same officers presided over the air service and aviation production from the
beginning to the end of the war. In light of serious shortages of materiel and
manpower in a blockaded country, such stability and unity was more
imperative for Germany than the Allied Powers. Furthermore, the lack of
coordination on the Western Front between the English and French air forces
enabled the German air service to survive, despite the Allies’ increasing
numerical superiority. Allied coordination would be necessary to bring
American forces to bear against Germany as quickly as possible, and any
joint strategic air offensive would necessitate inclusion of Italian planes and
engines to attain as much aerial superiority over the Western Front as
possible. French military and political leaders, however, were not prepared
to wage strategic air warfare, while the British cared little for inter-Allied
strategic coordination.
1918: To the bitter end

As the year 1918 opened, the French army commander Pétain, emphasising
the importance of concentrating aerial forces, planned to destroy enemy
aviation to gain definitive aerial mastery over the battlefield and directly
behind the front in tactical offensive operations. During the defensive
struggle against the German March offensive, bomber and fighter aviation
supported French ground forces in constant operations over the battle zone.
In April and May, when French fighter protection waned, GQG formed the
Aerial Division of day bombers and fighters for tactical operations over
enemy lines. Although the reluctance of French army commanders to liaise
with the Aerial Division limited its effectiveness, it continued its offensives
and formed the nucleus of American General ‘Billy’ Mitchell’s 1,400-plane
strike force in the American offensive at Saint-Mihiel in the fall. In fact, it
was primarily the French, and to a lesser extent the British, who trained and
equipped most of the squadrons of the US Air Service.
The Breguet 14 proved to be an outstanding tactical day bomber and high
altitude photographic reconnaissance plane for distances up to ninety-six
kilometres behind the lines, as well as being a sturdy artillery observation
craft. The Breguet and Salmson 2A2 radial-engined biplane finally gave
French army corps pilots a fighting chance against German fighters. Night
bombers remained a weak link in French aviation throughout 1918, but the
French had no further plans to conduct strategic bombing operations and
instead struck at German railroad traffic in iron ore within seventy-two
kilometres of the front. The French army, preoccupied with the war at the
front, opposed both strategic aviation and an autonomous air force. In May,
long-range heavy bombers appeared last on Pétain’s list of priorities for
aircraft types.
On the home front, the politics and administration of French aviation
stabilised considerably in 1918, as the Prime Minister, Clemenceau, and
Minister of Munitions Louis Loucheur supported GQG before the
parliament. Up to the very end of the war, French parliamentary deputies
harped on the absence of a strategic air arm, ignoring the fact that France
possessed the world’s largest air fleet on the Western Front, with 4,000
planes and 2,600 in reserve, and was in the process of producing more
airplanes (52,000) than either Britain (43,000) or Germany (48,000), and
more aero-engines (88,000) than the other two powers (Britain and Germany
each had 41,000) combined.
The German air service began the March offensive effectively, but then
found itself increasingly overwhelmed by Allied numerical superiority in
1918. The German fighter squadrons, grouped into larger formations of
some sixty airplanes, labelled ‘circuses’, took delivery of the superlative
Fokker D7, whose BMW 185-hp. high compression engine and thick wing
granted it superiority over all Allied challengers to the end of the war.
Manfred von Richthofen, with eighty kills to his credit making him the ace-
of-aces of the First World War, fell in combat in April, thus meeting the fate
that greeted practically all of the top ‘aces’, with the exception of Frenchman
René Fonck. The German air arm, short of experienced pilots and fuel and
severely outnumbered by the Western forces, spent the last days of the war
retreating from airfield to airfield. The OHL relinquished its strategic
bomber campaign in May to assign all bombers to tactical raids over the
Western Front. The flaming death of Peter Strasser, after his Zeppelin was
shot down over England, ended the navy’s Zeppelin campaign. Aircraft and
engine production flagged in the face of material and labour shortages,
ensuring defeat in a war of attrition. Similarly to army fighter forces,
German naval fighter forces possessed a superior craft in Heinkel’s Hansa-
Brandenburg floatplanes, but never enough to perform its various missions
over the Channel and the North Sea. By the end of the war, German front
line airplanes had declined from some 3,600 in January to 2,700, and the
looming winter of 1918–19 would have brought all production to a crashing
halt due to coal, material, fuel and food shortages.
The RFC confronted the German offensive initially at a disadvantage in
March 1918, but despite heavy losses, which it could replace, the RFC had
regained aerial ascendancy by the end of the month. With the British
introduction of the tank in numbers in 1918, the army assigned aerial
squadrons to the tank corps, to develop aircraft-armour liaison and to
neutralise German anti-tank artillery. Starting with an offensive against
Amiens in early August, the British army, coordinating its tank, artillery and
airplane forces, advanced inexorably for the rest of the war. From the
beginning of 1918 to the Armistice, British fliers carried the war to the
Germans in constant offensives over enemy territory. They paid for this
dominance with high casualties until the very end. As one fighter pilot
calculated, a pilot’s life in France during 1918 averaged under six weeks, to
be terminated by nervous exhaustion, crashes, injury, capture or death.
The tactical air war consumed the bulk of the air arm’s attention and
resources to the end of the war, although the creation in April 1918 of the
Air Ministry, the Royal Air Force (RAF) and an Independent Bombing Force
under ‘Boom’ Trenchard often receive disproportionate attention from
historians because of the controversial and political nature of the new
aviation establishment. In fact, Secretary of State for Air, William Weir,
planned to build the Independent Force to conduct a massive aerial offensive
against German cities, and in September he wrote to Trenchard: ‘I would
very much like it if you could start up a really big fire in one of the German
towns . . . The German is susceptible to bloodiness.’31 Meanwhile,
Trenchard considered the Independent Force under his command as a
‘gigantic waste of effort and personnel’, and proceeded to ignore directives
from the Air Ministry to strike at chemical factories and iron and steel works
in favour of striking at tactical targets such as airfields and railways.32 The
sole achievement of the Independent Force was to divest naval aviation of its
focus on strategic bombing and force the navy to concentrate on fleet and
anti-submarine patrol duty. The Ministry of Munitions did succeed in
mobilising the aviation industry, which with nearly 350,000 workers was the
world’s largest at the end of the war. The RAF split its forces between the
Western Front and far-flung imperial bases stretching to the Middle East,
and its long logistical ‘tail’ meant that it was the world’s largest air force in
terms of personnel at the end of the war.
Finally, Italian military and naval aviation dominated its Austro-
Hungarian enemy in 1918. Giulio Douhet returned to aviation to serve as
Director of Aviation in a General Commissariat established in April 1918,
but he retired from the army in June aged 49 in order to write. Caproni
manufactured 330 bombers in 1918, the last 290 powered by three 200-hp.
engines, double the power of the early Capronis. Both the English and
French rejected Caproni bombers for use on the Western Front, and no
Allied strategic bombing campaign ever occurred.
Conclusion
In August 1914 the European powers had gone to war with rudimentary air
services and embryonic aviation industries. Once airplanes proved
themselves as a means of reconnaissance and, most importantly, of artillery
spotting, air commanders required more of them to conduct effective aerial
operations and prevent enemy aerial reconnaissance. The second aim led to
armed aircraft and then the development of specialised pursuit, or fighter,
aircraft. The battles of Verdun and the Somme forced the codification of
aerial combat tactics and brought home the importance of mass. The size of
the air services and aviation industries consequently spiralled rapidly
upwards. Airplanes became more specialised in function, although the basic
wartime types remained the two-seat, single-engine, all-purpose biplane and
the single-seat, single-engine pursuit biplane. All the aviation commands
contemplated strategic bombing to damage enemy production and morale,
but early aviation technology limited size, speed, load, range and accuracy of
navigation and bombing that would not be overcome until the middle of the
Second World War, twenty-five years later.
Military aviation did not determine the outcome of the First World War,
but the airplane did establish its very real significance in support of the army
and especially the artillery on the battlefield. Airplanes served on all the far-
flung fronts of the war, although the heat and humidity of Africa and the
Middle East made the life cycle of wood and fabric biplanes short indeed.
Control of the airspace over the battlefield became essential to victory in the
First World War, just as it would be in the next world war. Strategic aviation
in fact played little role in the 1914–18 conflict, although it seemed to offer
the key to victory in future wars. The fighter pilots and ground attack
aircrews evolved the basic techniques employed for the rest of the twentieth
century, and many of those young airmen became the aerial commanders of
the Second World War. In both strategy and tactics the air war of 1914–18
portended the larger aerial struggle of 1939–45.
The war of the masses bequeathed to them a new individual hero, the
aviator, in particular the fighter ace – honoured as a demigod, object of a
secular holy cult – whose fame and heroism were quantifiable, measured in
terms of his number of conquests, or ‘kills’, although the figures were
usually inflated. This very circumstance prompted disproportionate attention
to fighter aviation, when the lessons of the battlefields of 1914–18 proved
the worth of the airplane as a tactical weapon for observation, artillery
spotting, bombing and strafing in the land battle. The fighter was necessary
primarily to protect these other airplanes in the performance of their duties,
but aerial fighting took on a life of its own, above the fray.
Theory and wishful thinking after the Great War focused on strategic
aviation and nearly drove the lessons of tactical aerial importance and
success from the minds of post-war observers. The more post-war aviation
theorists speculated on the ability of strategic bombardment to force enemy
capitulation by bombing cities, wrecking war industry and civilian morale,
the less they seemed to remember the contributions of battlefield aviation.
Giulio Douhet was the most eminent of these theorists. His work, The
Command of the Air, encapsulated in 1921 the claims for strategic air power
that striking directly at civilian centres with bombs or chemicals would bring
states to their knees because civilians could not withstand such pounding.
Such assertions sprang less from the limited and inconclusive experience of
1914–18 and more from inductive speculations and extrapolations. Sir
William Weir’s desire to ‘start up a really big fire in one of the German
towns’ sowed the seed of RAF Bomber Command’s devastating fire raids of
1943–5, which cost Bomber Command and German civilians horrendous
casualties, without ending the war as the theorists had claimed. Victory in
1939–45, in fact would require tactical air power to support ground and
naval forces and the more precise targeting of key strategic industrial and
transportation sites, which confirmed the actual experience of the air war of
1914– 18.
1 Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers,

1902–1909 (Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 19.
2 Philippe Bernard, ‘A propos de la stratégie aérienne pendant la Première

Guerre Mondiale: mythes et réalités’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine, 16 (1969), pp. 354–55.
3 Felix P. Ingold, Literatur und Aviatik: Europäische Flugdichtung (Basel:

Birkhäuser Verlag, 1978), pp. 96, 104, 116–17.
4 Kriegswissenschaftliche Abteilung der Luftwaffe (KAdL), Die

Militärluftfahrt bis zum Beginn des Weltkrieges 1914, 3 vols., 2nd rev. edn,
ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Frankfurt am Main: E. S. Mittler,
1965–6), vol. II, p. 86.
5 Jürgen Eichler, ‘Die Militärluftschiffahrt in Deutschland 1911–1914 und

ihre Rolle in den Kriegsplänen des deutschen Imperialismus’, Zeitschrift für
Militärgeschichte, 24:4 (1985), pp. 407–10.
6 Flight, 5:10 (7 March 1914), pp. 248–9.
7 John R. Cuneo, Winged Mars, 2 vols. (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service

Publishing Co., 1942–7), vol. II, pp. 92–4.
8 Charles Christienne et al., Histoire de l’aviation militaire française (Paris:

Charles Lavauzelle, 1980), p. 88.
9 John H. Morrow, Jr., German Air Power in World War I (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 16–17.
10 Peter Mead, The Eye in the Air: History of Air Observation and
Reconnaissance for the Army 1785–1945 (London: HMSO, 1983), pp. 51–8.
11 Flight, 3:41 (9 October 1914), p. 1026.
12 Bernard, ‘Stratégie aérienne’, pp. 359–60. Correspondence of Flandin to

D’Aubigny, 21 Sept 1915, File A81, Service Historique de l’Armée de l’Air
(SHAA, in service historique de la Défense (SHD)).
13 File AIR 1/2319/223/29/1–18, National Archives (NA), Kew.
14 Flight, 7:26 (25 June 1915), pp. 446–8, 455; Flight, 7:30 (23 July 1915),
pp. 525–6, 539–42; and Flight, 7:43 (22 December 1915), pp. 798, 802.
15 Frank J. Cappelluti, ‘The Life and Thought of Giulio Douhet’ (PhD

thesis, Rutgers University, NJ, 1967), pp. 67–110 passim.
16 Louis Thébault, L’Escadrille 210 (Paris: Jouve, 1925), pp. 29, 49, 53, 59.
17 Johannes Werner, Boelcke: Der Mensch, der Flieger, der Führer der
deutsche Jagdfliegerei (Leipzig: K. F. Köhler, 1932), pp. 158–68.
18 Douglas H. Robinson, Giants in the Sky: A History of the Rigid Airship

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), p. 122.
19 Trenchard, ‘Short notes on the Battle of the Somme 1 July–11 November

1916’, File MFC 76/1/4, Trenchard Papers (TP), Royal Air Force Museum,
Hendon (RAFM).
20 ‘L’aéronautique militaire française pendant la Guerre de 1914–1918’,

vol. II: ‘1917–1918’, Icare, revue de l’aviation française, 88 (Spring 1979),
p. 17.
21 Guy Pedroncini, Pétain: général en chef 1917–1918 (Paris: PUF, 1974),

pp. 41, 57.
22 Ibid., pp. 41–2.
23 Lieutenant Marc [Jean Béraud Villars], Notes d’un pilote disparu (1916–
1917) (Paris: Hachette, 1918), translated into English by S. J. Pincetl and
Ernst Marchand as, Notes of a Lost Pilot (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1975), pp.
211–21.
24 Bernard, ‘Stratégie aérienne’, p. 363.
25 AEF account of the aviation plan of bombardment, 18 November 1917,

AIR 1/1976/204/273/40, National Archives, Kew; and Pedroncini, Pétain,
58.
26 Georg P. Neumann (ed.), In der luft unbesiegt (Munich: Lehmanns,

1923), pp. 79–91, 166–75.
27 Correspondence Haig GHQ no. O.B./1826 to Secretary, War Office, 18
May 1917, AIR 1/2267/209/70/34, NA.
28 George Kent Williams, ‘Statistics and Strategic Bombardment:

Operations and Records of the British Long-Range Bombing Force during
World War I and their Implications for the Development of the Post-War
Royal Air Force, 1917–1923’ (PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1987), pp. 45–
64, 186.
29 MFC 76/1/1, TP, RAFM.
30 Cappelluti, ‘Douhet’, pp. 138–45.
31 Weir to Trenchard, 10 September 1918, MFC 76/1/94, TP, RAFM.
32 Williams, ‘Statistics’, pp. 233–51, 257, 260–2.

Gary Sheffield and Stephen Badsey Issues of command are at the centre of
present academic discourse on the military history of the First World War.
This chapter examines one aspect of this topic: command at the strategic
level, concentrating on certain important themes rather than strategy per se,
and on the major belligerents. It is impossible to examine strategic
command in isolation, so where necessary reference has been made to
operational and even tactical command issues.
Definitions
Modern definitions of what constitutes strategic command derive chiefly
from nineteenth-century military thought and practice, but have only
recently reached their present form as part of a wider taxonomy of conflict.
While there are obvious risks in applying these definitions to an earlier age,
it was the experience of the First World War that gave the greatest impetus
to their development. As the war progressed, deficiencies were exposed in
the thinking and institutions of both the Allies and the Central Powers, and
how they responded to these deficiencies became an important part in
determining victory, with innovations being made usually in response to
specific crises.
From a wide range of similar definitions, strategic command in war may
be defined as ‘the management of command: the assessment and
dissemination of information and orders needed to direct military force’.1
Already in 1914, the image of a general on horseback personally
commanding his forces had been something of a myth for some time. Too
often the reality was of a man at the end of a telephone in an office behind
the lines, struggling to make decisions based on scraps of information that
were incomplete, out of date and, not infrequently, plain wrong. A well-
known analogy sees a system of command and control in terms of the
human body, with the commander and staff as the ‘brain’ making decisions
conveyed by systems and procedures as the ‘nervous system’ to the
‘muscles’ or fighting formations.2 For this reason, there is an increasing
awareness among historians of the importance of studying staffs and the
‘control’ aspect of command alongside generals and admirals. Command in
this sense, as it evolved in the course of the war, was as much a matter of
the bureaucracy and technology of communication and staff procedures as
personal military leadership, although many generals combined both
functions in themselves.3
This is not to suggest that in the First World War personalities and
matters of temperament, and even health, did not play a part in strategic
command, given the enormous strains under which generals and admirals
were often placed. Both Moltke in 1914 and Ludendorff in 1918 suffered
from what would now be called nervous breakdowns under the pressures of
command, while Joffre was renowned for his calm, phlegmatic fortitude.
While personal command styles differed, from the desk-bound Moltke to
Sir John French, who at Loos attempted to command on horseback away
from his headquarters, the ‘Mask of Command’ – the ability to keep a calm
exterior no matter what the military situation – was all-important to a
general’s credibility and authority. But with armies so large, it was difficult
for commanders to impose their personalities on them, and charismatic
strategic leadership was at a discount, with the arguable exception of figures
such as Hindenburg and Kitchener who were elevated by the press to the
status of national heroes.4
One definition of strategy is that it constitutes ‘the use of armed force to
achieve the military objectives and, by extension, the political purpose of
the war’.5 Conventionally it is subdivided into ‘grand’ and ‘military’
strategy. Grand strategy is concerned with the pursuit of national interests
and overlaps with policy, involving not only a military dimension, but also
much wider logistic, social and technological aspects. Military strategy
includes the raising, developing, sustaining and use of military forces, to
attain grand strategic – that is political – objectives.6 This concept of a
national grand strategy involving a military component, and the need for an
awareness of military strategic issues being part of the business of
government, was largely undeveloped before the First World War. Although
naval and maritime strategic thinking included considerations of industry,
commerce and trade as a matter of course, this was seen as a largely
separate sphere of activity.7 In the mid eighteenth century, a simple binary
model of strategy and tactics was applicable: on campaign, strategy
consisted of manoeuvring ‘unitary’ armies or fleets until they faced one
another, and at this point tactics – the deployment for and fighting of battle
– took over. Since then, military doctrines have come to recognise three
‘levels’ of war, with the operational level inserted between strategy and
tactics. The First World War represents a point in this transition, and at the
time the term ‘strategy’ had a meaning closer to military campaigning than
to its much wider modern meaning.8 These distinctions are far from trivial:
demands by generals at the height of the war that they should be given the
manpower and materiel to fight their battles without political interference
derived ultimately from the view that authority over military operations, as
distinct from grand strategy, lay with them.
In 1914, the German army had the clearest idea of the operational level of
war, and its distinction between what would now be seen as military
strategy and operations was unusually porous; strategic commanders
frequently strayed into the operational level, and vice versa.9 Both Moltke
as Chief of the general staff, and Conrad von Hötzendorf in the same
position in the Austro-Hungarian army, had grand strategic roles which
crossed over into foreign policy (both had pressed for a pre-emptive war
before 1914), but on the war’s outbreak they assumed the role of essentially
operational level commanders.10 A phrase often used of German generals is
that they took decisions for ‘purely military reasons’, meaning to gain an
operational or tactical advantage in disregard or disdain of political, grand
strategic or logistical considerations. The Russian army, which traditionally
shared ideas with the Germans, also had the concept of an operational level,
but this made minimal impact on its performance in the early campaigns of
the war.11 Only in the 1916 Brusilov offensive could Russian commanders
be said to have demonstrated a grasp of operational art as well as military
strategy.12 The French, and occasionally the British, used ‘grand tactics’ to
mean a transitional level between strategy and tactics, broadly equating to
the operational level; but the French did not ‘specify a function for the
operational level and failed to distinguish clearly between operations and
tactics’.13 Joffre, Nivelle and Pétain, as successive Commanders-in-Chief of
the French army at GQG (located just north of Paris at Chantilly after
1914), carried out functions from the high political level to the operational.
The British did most to maintain the separation between strategy and
operations: first Kitchener (who also held military rank as a field marshal
but no active military command) as Secretary of State for War, and then
from late 1915 Robertson and Wilson as successive Chiefs of the Imperial
general staff (CIGS), acted primarily at the grand strategic level, but they
also had influence over, and sometimes active involvement in, military
strategy.14 Sir John French, as Commander-in-Chief of the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, functioned as an
operational level commander with political responsibilities towards his own
government and his French and Belgian allies. His successor, Sir Douglas
Haig focused primarily on military strategy and sometimes on operations,
but he also had influence at the grand strategic level, working closely with
Robertson and Wilson, and being frequently consulted by the British War
Cabinet.15 Individuals such as Joffre and Haig held multiple political,
strategic and operational responsibilities that in later wars would be
routinely divided between two or three separate high-ranking posts.
On the Western Front on the outbreak of war in 1914, the Germans
mobilised seven armies and the French mobilised five armies, each larger
than, but broadly comparable to, an early nineteenth-century ‘unitary’ army;
meaning that, in terms of scale alone, Moltke and Joffre faced
unprecedented problems in strategic command. Each army typically
contained between two and four corps, and modern theory regards the
normal level of operational command as corps or army level. Partly to deal
better with their Allies, the French rapidly improvised an intermediary level
of command, placing Foch as Joffre’s ‘adjoint’ in charge of an ‘army group’
including the BEF and the Belgians. The lack of this intermediate army
group level of command was also identified by the Germans as one of the
factors in the failure of their command structure leading to their defeat in
the Battle of the Marne. Thereafter army groups became standard in the
French and German armies, representing the upper level of operational
command, shading into strategic command. The BEF under Haig had four
or five armies, and could be regarded as an army group in itself.16
The nineteenth-century background

The major belligerent powers of the First World War were mass
industrialised empires with powers, resources and a degree of organisation
scarcely conceivable even a century beforehand. A critical part of this
development was the impact of technology and industrialisation on all
aspects of society, with an increased separation of human functions, both in
the sense that industrial workers were no longer expected to produce their
own food and clothing within the home, and in the rise of separate
professions, managerial classes and a structured bureaucracy. One
consequence was a major increase in the size and destructive firepower of
armies, as the military manifestation of the mass industrialised state. The
first attempts to create military command and control structures for armies
began in the later eighteenth century, and the armies of Napoleon I, which
had staffs at army, corps and divisional level, had a distinct advantage over
their enemies as long as they remained relatively small.17 But as armies
grew in size, from about 1809 onwards the possibility of achieving an
Austerlitz, the annihilation of an enemy army in a single battle, became
increasingly remote. In March 1905 the Japanese were victorious in the
Battle of Mukden, the largest battle of the Russo-Japanese War, but their
attempt to win a decisive battle of annihilation through a double
envelopment of the ninety-mile-long Russian positions failed, not least
because it proved too difficult to coordinate five widely dispersed armies
consisting of more than 200,000 men.18
The introduction from the 1820s onwards of steam power in the form of
rail transport and steamships revolutionised the mobilisation and transport
of soldiers and materiel, but only at the expense of increasing difficulties in
supply and movement that could only be addressed by bureaucratic
systems.19 The development of telegraph networks in the 1830s, followed
by the telephone over shorter distances in the 1870s and radio telegraphy in
the 1900s, also made it possible for political leaders in their capitals to
communicate directly and rapidly with operational level commanders in the
field, with major consequences for strategic command. Generals resented
what they saw as interference by politicians, in the way that Lincoln and
Stanton used the telegraph to issue orders directly from Washington in the
American Civil War, although higher military headquarters also used the
telegraph to communicate with separated armies, as Moltke the Elder did to
some effect in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars.20 In the First
World War, French and Haig were the first British army commanders in
history to conduct their battles while still being within a day’s travel of
London and in constant telegraph contact with their government. Radio
telegraphy also brought about a fundamental change to naval strategic
command; as Admiral Sir John Fisher declared in 1912, ‘Wireless is the
pith and marrow of war!’21 Fleet commanders such as Jellicoe and Scheer
at the Battle of Jutland in June 1916 were directed and provided with
intelligence by radio signals from their respective Admiralty headquarters
on the mainland that were critical in determining the battle’s outcome.22
The belief that it was part of the function of a political head of state to
lead its armies into battle declined after Napoleon I, in favour of the rival
idea that political leaders and governments should make war and peace, and
organise their country’s wider war effort, but that they need have no great
understanding of, or command over, the technicalities of military strategy
and operations. As the nineteenth century progressed, Clausewitz’s
‘paradoxical trinity’, separating the functions of a country at war into the
spheres of the political leadership, the army and the people, became the
philosophical expression of the claims made by an emerging
institutionalised military leadership to its own sphere of professional rights
and responsibilities. The last rulers of major powers to exercise even
notional command of their troops on a battlefield were King Wilhelm I of
Prussia and Emperor Napoleon III of the French in 1870 in the Franco-
Prussian War, and the boundaries of where civil and military authority lay
became an even greater issue later in the century. Military professionalism
was largely interpreted as concerned with the mechanics of deploying and
moving armies and navies, and as separate from wider issues of politics and
government.23 But as the impact of new technologies and of
industrialisation on warfare increased, so the organisation, equipment and
training of armies and navies in peacetime became only the most important
of the many areas in which military professionalism interacted with civilian
government and with the wider requirements of both state and society.
Difficult civil–military relationships in the American Civil War and German
Wars of Unification were early illustration of these emerging tensions;
while Gambetta’s organisation of the Third Republic for war à l’outrance in
the later stages of the Franco-Prussian War also gave early indications of
the extent to which both state involvement in society and political
involvement in military strategic command might be necessary in future
wars.24
The strategic command relationships between civilian and military
authorities in each of the major belligerents in the First World War were
shaped first of all by the place of the armed forces within each country’s
nineteenth-century political traditions. In Germany, the ministers for war
and for the navy were serving generals and admirals, while in France and
Britain the equivalent posts were held by civilians, closely advised by the
professional heads of the services. During the later nineteenth century, the
armies of all major powers adopted some version of a centralised military
staff organisation, based on the German general staff, to plan future strategy
and wars. This was followed by equivalent naval staffs, although the
German Imperial Navy did not form its SKL (Seekriegsleitung), the
equivalent of Army Supreme Command (Oberste-Heeresleitung, or OHL),
until August 1918.25 But no major power developed the institutional
mechanisms to resolve these civil–military issues; if anything, the
separation between grand strategy as an aspect of government and
diplomacy, and military strategy as a general staff prerogative, grew greater.
Even mechanisms for coordination between each country’s army and navy
remained rudimentary. In France, Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary,
all of which had peacetime conscription for raising mass armies on
mobilisation, the relationship between political and military needs, such as
what percentage of the workforce and of industrial production should be
allocated to the army and navy, were managed as issues of mainstream
domestic politics.
In all major belligerents, the absence of grand strategic coordination
between diplomacy and the war plans of armies and navies played a critical
part in the crisis of 1914 leading to the outbreak of the war. In France, the
appointment of Joffre as Commander-in-Chief in 1911 was accompanied by
reforms giving him authority over the High Command and the general staff
(Grand Quartier Général, or GQG) and the Supreme War Council (Conseil
Supérieur de la Guerre); but although Joffre was required to present his
plans to the Supreme Council of National Defence (Conseil Supérieur de la
Défence Nationale), which included prominent ministers, in practice his
was the decisive voice in French military strategy before the war.26 Britain,
as a maritime imperial power without conscription, was unusual in the later
nineteenth century in creating an embryo political–military institution for
advising on grand strategy, which by 1904 had evolved into the Committee
of Imperial Defence. In 1909 the professional head of the army was given
the title Chief of the Imperial general staff (CIGS), although there was no
actual imperial staff in the sense that positions for officers of the Dominions
or the Indian Army were not included in its structure. Although some
preliminary war planning took place in Britain, a nineteenth-century
practice that continued until the First World War was that on deployment
the Secretary of State for War gave broad ‘instructions’ to a Commander-in-
Chief in the Field who was then responsible for his own plan of campaign,
bypassing the CIGS.27 This only changed when Robertson became CIGS in
December 1915, insisting that he should be sole military adviser to the
British government, and that orders to field commanders should come
through and from him.28 Even so, Robertson regarded Haig, who succeeded
French as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF in the same month, as the senior
member of their partnership, and rather than the general staff in London
being clearly responsible for military strategic issues, its authority over both
strategy and operations overlapped with that of BEF GHQ in France.29
France and Britain, as imperial powers, also established in the nineteenth
century a tradition of senior officers acting as proconsuls, taking political
and grand strategic decisions on their own authority or with minimal
reference to any political leadership, as Kitchener did at Fashoda in 1898.30
Something of this tradition was also visible in Pershing’s actions during the
Mexican Expedition of 1916–17. Away from the industrialised war of the
Western Front, French and British campaigns in the Balkans and against the
Ottoman Empire in the First World War had many characteristics of this
colonial war tradition, and in all major belligerents, senior officers often
distinguished between their own patriotism and the extent to which they
recognised the authority of a particular government or minister. The
appointment of Sarrail to command the Allied forces at Salonica in October
1915 had as much to do with his diplomatic as his military skills, while
once in place his persistent disregard of his orders from Joffre and demands
for more troops helped bring about a major change in the French strategic
command structure, with Joffre being appointed ‘Commander-in-Chief of
the French Armies’ on all fronts in December 1915.31 Allenby’s
appointment to command the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in June 1917
was made in the absence of any agreed British military strategy towards the
Ottoman Empire, and he exercised both military command over his multi-
national force (which included British, Indian, Australian, New Zealand and
French troops) and had dealings with his Arab nationalist and French allies
through to the end of the war, very much in the British proconsular
tradition.32 In the German army, a rather different tradition existed of senior
officers on campaign defying the orders of the general staff, despite the
efforts of Moltke the Elder to eradicate it.33 This form of high-level
insubordination still continued in the First World War, notably in the
behaviour of Hindenburg as commander of Higher Headquarters East (Ober
Ost) on the Eastern Front in 1914–16.34 An extreme case of a German
officer defying orders, both in terms of geographical distance and the
strategic consequences of the actions of a junior commander, was
Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who, despite
the civil government’s plans to maintain neutrality for German East Africa,
pursued a substantial military campaign chiefly against British imperial
forces that lasted the duration of the war.35
Military strategic command

At the start of the war no belligerent had a clear national grand strategy, or
war aims beyond a desire for the total defeat of its enemies. The main
concerns of each country’s civilian government were to maintain support
for its actions as a continuation of peacetime domestic politics and
diplomacy, together with the economics of how to fund the war and manage
the massive disruption caused by mobilisation; or in the case of the British
and their Empire, the creation of a new mass army initially through
voluntary recruitment. Military strategy in 1914 was subsumed into
operations, in the sense that the opening moves were largely pre-determined
by implementing plans for mobilisation and deployment drawn up before
the war. While the Austro-Hungarian and Russian war plans included
options at the operational level depending on which opponents they would
be fighting, all of the belligerents’ plans were based on a strategic
offensive.36 The most successful of these war plans were also the most
developed but also the most informal, those of the British Royal Navy and
French navy, in rapidly limiting any naval threat from the Central Powers
almost entirely to the North Sea and the Mediterranean, allowing the Allies
almost complete freedom of the seas. Both the blockade of Germany and
the free flow of materiel and men into Britain and France which followed,
were constant and critical factors in the war. The Germans, in particular,
hoped for a short and decisive war, but although the predominating elite and
professional views in most countries were that the war would be long and
hard, no institutional mechanisms were in place for the management of
economic, societal and technological mobilisation, all of which became
increasingly necessary after 1914.37
Consequently, the progress of the war saw the emergence of several
‘civilian warlords’, who were not primarily military men but had a major
input into strategy, most obviously Winston Churchill as First Lord of the
Admiralty in 1914–15, David Lloyd George as British Prime Minister from
late 1916 and Georges Clemenceau, who became his French counterpart a
year later. Clemenceau specialised in visiting the front to see conditions at
first hand, to inspire troops and to engage with generals, not least to manage
the difficult triangular relationship between himself, Foch and Pétain.38 By
contrast, US President Woodrow Wilson did not wield the authority of
Commander-in-Chief with any relish or success, either in preparing for war
or in contributing to strategic command.39 Equally unsuccessful in
combining supreme political and military authority was Tsar Nicholas II,
who took personal command of the Russian army in August 1915, based at
general staff (Stavka) Headquarters at the town of Mogiliev, rather than in
the field.40 Only monarchs of the smaller belligerents, such as Albert I of
Belgium or Peter I of Serbia, exercised direct battlefield command through
their staffs.
Kaiser Wilhelm II as Commander-in-Chief of the German army also
deployed some distance from the fighting front in 1914, with his Imperial
Headquarters (Grosses Hauptquartier) described as a combination of a
supreme military council and an imperial court. But although Army
Supreme Command (OHL) was part of Imperial Headquarters, in reality it
was Moltke as Chief of the general staff at OHL who exercised power over
military strategy. Prior to the war, in strict constitutional terms there was no
German army or German general staff, since the armies of the individual
German states, including Prussia, retained their distinctive identities; but in
practice the Prussian general staff in Berlin both functioned and was
described as the German general staff, and after the first months of the war
any distinction between individual states’ armies was largely lost.41
Although Wilhelm’s role in operational planning was almost entirely a
constitutional fiction, his contribution to strategy was still significant. He
had an umpiring role when German military, naval and political authorities
disagreed, and he was influential both in appointing individuals to senior
posts and removing them. Both Moltke and Falkenhayn were Wilhelm’s
appointees, and he sustained Falkenhayn in his position in the face of much
criticism, until the collapse of German strategy in August 1916 forced him
reluctantly to withdraw his support. Wilhelm’s personal and institutional
military authority declined after Hindenburg became Chief of the general
staff in succession to Falkenhayn, dealing directly on military strategic
matters with his opposite numbers in the other Central Powers, Austria-
Hungary, Bulgaria and Ottoman Turkey, and taking grand strategic
decisions on military strategic or operational grounds. But even so, Wilhelm
retained a power of veto by which he could halt, or at least retard, a course
of action of which he disapproved.42
After the failure of all the initial war plans to win decisively in 1914, no
country on either side had complete control of either its own grand strategy
or military strategy. But Germany’s domination of the Central Powers
meant that both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which entered
the war in November 1914, rapidly adopted a strategy based on the
expectation of sharing in an eventual German victory. In theory Germany
and Austria-Hungary, the core Central Powers, should have been well
prepared for fighting in alliance, having been allies since 1879, but mutual
political suspicions and German concerns about the military effectiveness
and reliability of Austria-Hungary had prevented them from formulating an
integrated combined war plan. Although in the years immediately prior to
the outbreak of war matters had improved superficially, with Moltke and
Conrad holding annual meetings, neither pushed for unity of command in
the event of war, and they failed to maximise the military strategic
advantages available to longstanding alliance partners.43 Conrad also failed
to adjust his strategy in the light of Moltke’s plain warnings that the main
German effort would be made against France, and thus only limited support
could be offered to Austrian offensives in the East. In 1914 the two allies
fought ‘parallel war(s)’ against Russia ‘without a common plan or in
concert’; but with mutual suspicion and recriminations, and belated
recognition of the consequences of the failure to coordinate their war
plans.44 During 1915 a creeping form of de facto unity of command
emerged by default on the Eastern Front, the product of a series of Austro-
Hungarian military disasters which reduced the Habsburg army to a very
weak state and led to the Germans colonising their allies’ formations with
commanders, staff officers, regimental officers and even NCOs. The
Germans also asserted dominance at high command level: although initial
proposals for unity of command foundered in November 1914, German
generals commanded in practice for the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive in May
1915; Mackensen’s German Eleventh Army, which included Austrian
formations, was technically subordinated to both OHL and its Austrian-
Hungarian equivalent, but Conrad was unable to give orders to Mackensen
unless they were approved by Falkenhayn. The catastrophic defeat of
Austro-Hungarian forces in the Brusilov offensive next year consolidated
German dominance, and in September 1916 a United Supreme Command
(Oberste-Kriegsleitung) under Hindenburg and Ludendorff was created for
the Eastern Front. Although one Army Group remained nominally under
Austro-Hungarian command, its real command was exercised by a
relatively junior German officer, Colonel Hans von Seeckt.45
German officers also played a major role in command and staff positions
in the Ottoman army. However, the traditional Western view, that Turkish
military success at Gallipoli in 1915–16 owed much to German command,
is overly simplistic. Important preparatory work and training had already
been carried out by Ottoman officers before the arrival of the German
commander General Liman von Sanders to take over the Ottoman Fifth
Army on 26 March 1915. Considerable credit for the initial Ottoman
containment of the Allied landings on 25 April belongs to Brigadier-
General Esat Pasha, the commander of III Corps, and his capable Turkish
subordinates. This is not to deny that Liman and other German officers
(who included technical advisers sent to pass on to the Turks lessons and
techniques from the Western Front) were important. Rather, Ottoman
success was founded on a partnership between Turks and Germans. The fact
that Ottoman orders processes, logistics and doctrine were closely based on
German originals greatly aided the integration of the two sides.46 Indeed, in
the last stage of the campaign, ‘Ottoman and German commanders seemed
to be essentially interchangeable parts in an effective machine.’47
After Gallipoli, German commanders and staff officers continued to take
critical roles in Ottoman forces. In late 1915, the Ottoman general staff,
responding to setbacks in the Mesopotamian theatre, asked Field Marshal
Colmar von der Goltz to take command there. Von der Goltz had served
with the Ottomans in the 1890s, and his behaviour on arriving in theatre is
suggestive of a continuing Ottoman/German partnership. He left his
Ottoman subordinate Nurettin to continue to besiege the British/Indian
force in Kut-al-Amara instead of taking command himself, giving Nurettin
considerable latitude in his operations.48 A command partnership also
developed in Palestine, where by 1917 the strongest and most effective
Ottoman formation was Army Group F or ‘Yildirim’, a German-Austrian-
Turkish formation commanded by Falkenhayn.49
On the Western Front, the first clashes of 1914 confirmed pre-war
expectations that the vast armies of millions, deployed along the length of
the common frontier, could only be commanded with the most extreme
difficulty. Although the telegraph and telephone, and even wireless
telegraphy, worked well for communication between fixed points, they were
of limited effectiveness in commanding marching troops, and military
strategic commanders relied mostly on gallopers, carrier pigeons, or
existing staff training and procedures. The German war plan in the West
(best described as the ‘Schlieffen–Moltke Plan’), was hugely ambitious,
deploying seventy-three divisions.50 Moltke bore a share of the
responsibility for its failure; he was too remote from his subordinates, both
physically at OHL in Koblenz (later moving forward to Luxembourg), but
also in deciding against even attempting to maintain close supervision of his
army commanders, one of whom, Kluck of the First Army, flagrantly
disobeyed OHL’s orders. The contrast with Joffre at GQG was stark. The
French Commander-in-Chief kept up a stream of messages and orders,
demanding information, keeping abreast of the situation by telephone and
using his motorcar to carry out personal visits. He actively intervened to
sack subordinates in large numbers, and perhaps most importantly, never
lost sight of the bigger picture. It is indicative of French and German
methods that in September 1914, while Joffre personally made the
strategically critical decision to counter-attack on the Marne, the equally
critical German decision to withdraw was taken by Bülow as commander of
the Second Army, on the recommendation of Lieutenant Colonel Richard
Hentsch, a general staff officer acting as Moltke’s representative; neither
Bülow nor Kluck attempted to contact Moltke directly on the decision.51
The contrasting roles of Joffre and Moltke offer evidence that Clausewitz’s
concept of a contest of wills between individual commanders remained
valid under the circumstances of the First World War.
Once trench warfare began on the Western Front, the problems of
strategic command changed considerably. With subordinate headquarters
and formations static rather than mobile, communications were more
straightforward, with headquarters being connected by elaborate telephone
networks. But this produced further problems: by 1916, a subordinate army
of the BEF required an average daily load of 10,000 telegrams, 20,000
telephone calls and 5,000 messages to function at all. Moreover this wire-
based system ended in the front-line trench, and lacking effective portable
radios, command on the battlefield was difficult in the extreme.52 The
issues involved in military strategy also multiplied under the strain of the
war. When planning the Somme offensive in 1916, Joffre and Haig each
had to take account of not only agreement with their own government and
detailed military coordinated planning, but also what reserves of trained
soldiers would be available against the demands of other fronts and the
civilian workforce, whether Britain or France could produce and import the
required military materiel, and what technological innovations might be
available. There was also a host of other factors including logistics, the state
of training of the troops, and their morale and discipline, the latter factors
being closely linked to the provision of food, recreation facilities, the postal
service and leave. The nature of war thus demanded that as an integral part
of strategic command, senior generals became ‘war managers’, a previously
almost unknown function in military thought.53 Perhaps Pétain’s greatest
achievement as Commander-in-Chief in 1917–18 was to nurse the French
army back to health after the mutinies following the Nivelle offensive.54 By
contrast, Conrad was a failure as a war manager; in launching a series of
offensives in the Carpathians in early 1915, he failed (or refused) to see that
the tasks he had set his armies were beyond their capabilities. Factors such
as the weakness of units, the fragile morale of troops who lacked equipment
and even uniforms, logistic challenges, problems of campaigning in
mountainous areas in winter and lack of artillery were ignored during
planning, and the resulting defeats proved highly damaging to the Austro-
Hungarian army.55
Pershing, as Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces
(AEF), offers another example of a failure of war management. He was
convinced that his French and British allies’ approach to war fighting,
which from painful experience was, by the second half of 1918,
underpinned by the heavy use of artillery firepower, was flawed, and that
attacks by infantry should continue to dominate the battle. This was a
reversion to the tactics that had proved disastrous in the early years of the
war, and Pershing’s insistence caused unnecessarily high casualties among
US troops in the last weeks of the war. His imposition of this doctrine, in
the face of plentiful evidence that it was unsuitable, is a sobering reminder
of the importance and breadth of a strategic commander’s purview.56
Increasing reliance on artillery, and so on industrial production and
logistics, was central to the strategies of attrition – the wearing down of
enemy strength and morale – that prevailed on the Western Front after
1914. For some commanders such as Joffre and Haig, attrition was the
means to an end, the restoration of mobile warfare in which traditional
methods could be applied to achieve victory. But the greatly increased
lethality of firepower and size of armies, when compared to all previous
experience, led some generals by about 1916 to a belief that traditional
views on the importance of strategy and even operations had become
irrelevant; that what mattered was inflicting massive casualties on the
enemy forces, in the expectation of weakening them so that they could no
longer adequately defend their positions, bringing about a collapse in
morale, and a dislocation of the ‘nervous system’ of control. Although this
view was held by some commanders and staff officers in all armies, it
became most widely accepted within the German army. As early as 1914
Falkenhayn had discarded the idea of decisive battle, and at Verdun in 1916
his strategy was based on the principle that attrition was an end in itself, and
that the French army was to be bled to death, principally by artillery fire.57
Falkenhayn’s vision of controlled attrition delivering military strategic
victory proved impossible to achieve, and the Battle of Verdun cost both
sides dearly. His replacement by the duumvirate of Hindenburg and
Ludendorff in August 1916 marked the rejection of this approach. But as de
facto military strategic commander on the Western Front thereafter,
Ludendorff demonstrated that he too rejected the Napoleonic paradigm, and
privileged attrition. He gave orders prior to the March 1918 Kaiserschlacht
offensive that ‘we talk too much about operations and too little about tactics
. . . all measures have to concentrate on how to defeat the enemy, how to
penetrate his front positions. Follow-on measures are in many cases a
matter of ad hoc decisions’, adding in his memoirs that ‘tactics had to be
considered over pure strategy’.58 Ludendorff’s failure in 1918 to think in
strategic terms and his neglect of the issue of logistics, in particular the
critical importance of Amiens as a rail communications and supply hub for
the Allies, was an important contribution to his failure to convert tactical
success into strategic victory.
Grand strategy and coalition command

The year 1914 came to an end with the absence of strategic victory on
either side, or any immediate prospect of one. At the level of grand strategy,
the famous remark attributed to Clemenceau in 1919 that ‘war is too serious
a business to be left to generals’59 went to the heart of the new civil–
military relationships that then evolved, as domestic political, industrial and
manpower considerations interacted with the unprecedented demands of
military strategy and operations. In France and Britain the civilian political
leadership kept control throughout the war, but increasingly military
strategy became an issue for protracted negotiation between politicians and
generals. The most testing episode came for the British in January 1917 at
the Calais planning conference, at which the Prime Minister, Lloyd George,
despairing of British strategy, attempted to place the BEF under the
command of Nivelle as the new French Commander-in-Chief, relegating
Haig to an administrative role and bypassing Robertson as CIGS. The
British generals promptly threatened to resign, which would have collapsed
Lloyd George’s coalition government. A compromise was patched up
whereby the BEF remained an independent force under Nivelle’s strategic
direction for his next planned offensive only.60 Such compromises on both
sides, however reluctant, were the key to both French and British civil–
military strategic direction of the war, in which Clemenceau’s skilful
handling of his own generals contrasted with Lloyd George’s maladroit and
counterproductive manoeuvring against Robertson and Haig.
Two particularly blatant challenges to civilian political strategic authority
on the Allied side are worthy of note. The de facto Italian Commander-in-
Chief from 1914–17, Luigi Cadorna, pursued his favoured strategy safe in
the knowledge that he had near-total independence from the government in
Rome, beating off attempts to make him change course. It was only
following the military disaster of Caporetto in 1917 that the government felt
strong enough to dismiss Cadorna.61 Similarly, at the end of October 1918,
Pershing defied his own government by calling for the Allies to abandon
plans to offer Germany an armistice in favour of the complete and total
defeat of the German army, behaviour which highlights the influence of
German military traditions on US army thinking even at this date.62
These problems only arose in countries with strong traditions of
democracy and civilian primacy over military affairs.
In Germany, military imperatives continued to prevail over the concerns
of the civilian leadership, and from August 1916 onwards under
Hindenburg, the general staff increasingly assumed control of domestic
government in the name of military necessity.63 Germany, more than any
other belligerent, had a tradition of the first loyalty of senior officers being
the preservation of the armed forces and their values as a way of life, rather
than seeing the army (or navy) and military strategy as instruments of state
policy. This was reinforced by strong strains of German militarism and
romanticism; on the outbreak of war in 1914, Falkenhayn as war minister
recorded that, ‘Even if we go under as a result of this, still it was
beautiful.’64 The crisis of the defeat of Germany and the collapse of its
armed forces in autumn 1918 resulted in two very dramatic acts of
usurpation of governmental authority by senior officers. At the end of
September, convinced that the German army on the Western Front was
defeated and in danger of imminent collapse, Ludendorff demanded from
Kaiser Wilhelm that negotiations for an armistice should begin, and that a
new government consisting of the political opponents of the general staff
should be appointed. The armistice negotiations themselves were conducted
by civilians and by generals who were not members of the general staff
hierarchy. The ‘stab in the back myth’ (Dolchstosslegende), that the
German army had been undefeated but betrayed, was not a post-war
rationalisation: it was the essential mechanism for ending the war by
transferring blame for German defeat away from the military leadership of
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the general staff.65 The most charitable
interpretation of Ludendorff’s actions is that he believed that a proud and
intact army was needed to keep order as Germany was threatened with
revolution. More prosaically, the general staff cared more about preserving
itself, in order to fight the next war, than it did about its country.
The High Command of the German Imperial Navy exhibited very similar
behaviour at the end of October 1918. Rather than accepting the fact of
defeat, Scheer as chief of SKL drew up plans for a final ‘death battle’ in
which the High Seas Fleet would break out of harbour and head for the
English Channel (the Flottenvorstoss). While the military rationale for this
plan was that a naval victory would improve the German negotiating
position with the Allies over the armistice, the political intention was that
the Imperial Navy would both preserve its honour and improve the chances
of its continued existence in a defeated post-war Germany. Neither Kaiser
Wilhelm nor the new German government was informed of Scheer’s
intentions, and the plan backfired disastrously when the High Seas Fleet
mutinied instead, contributing to Germany’s collapse.66
To the French and British, following their almost complete success at sea
in 1914, the Western Front was their greatest priority, and they needed to
coordinate their military strategies there to an extent that (like much else
about the First World War) was unprecedented in alliance warfare; but this
was an evolutionary and tortuous process. The grand strategies of both
countries were also transformed by the entry of the Ottoman Empire into
the war in November 1914, severing strategic communications with Russia
and opening up a large secondary campaign theatre. The confused strategic
decision-making process and subsequent failures of strategic command in
the 1915–16 Dardanelles campaign painfully exposed the weaknesses of
both the existing British approach and of Anglo-French cooperation, which
compared unfavourably to the relatively effective Ottoman strategic
response.67 The Allied failure in the Dardanelles also showed that the long-
recognised difficulties and complexities of opposed amphibious operations
– landing and sustaining ground forces from the sea – had grown vastly
greater under the new conditions of industrialised warfare, and that a very
high level of combined strategic and operational planning between armies
and navies would be needed in future. Despite repeated British plans to
exploit their naval superiority to outflank the Germans on the Western Front
with an amphibious landing, this was never attempted other than a brief raid
on Zeebrugge in April 1918.
With multiple fronts, and both large naval and land campaigns to manage,
the development of British institutions for grand strategic command began
with two improvised civil–military councils of war held by the Prime
Minister, H. H. Asquith, on the war’s outbreak, followed in November 1914
by the creation of a small War Council; the Committee of Imperial Defence
also continued in its advisory role. In June 1915 the change to the new
Asquith coalition government led to the War Council being renamed the
Dardanelles Committee, and then the War Committee after January 1916
with Robertson as CIGS as its military adviser; it reached its final form as
the War Cabinet with the new coalition government under Lloyd George in
December 1916. It was to the War Committee and War Cabinet that Haig
presented his plans for military strategy in 1916–18.68 For France, although
the political–military Supreme Council of National Defence remained the
ultimate authority, military strategy continued to be made at GQG. As well
as being made Commander-in-Chief of all French forces in December 1915,
Joffre also pressed unsuccessfully for strategic command over the forces of
all the Western Allies, including Italy, which had entered the war in May.69
The need for Britain and France to balance the priorities of the Western
Front with the Dardanelles led to their first joint political–military strategy
conferences of the war, held in Calais and Chantilly in July 1915. Results
were inconclusive, but the foundations for unified command between them
had at least been laid. The high point in Allied military strategic
coordination came in December 1915, with a grand strategy conference at
Calais followed by a military strategy conference at Chantilly, where it was
agreed that all the Allies should launch major offensives in early summer
1916 on the Western, Eastern and Italian Fronts, with the intention of
preventing the Central Powers from moving their reserves by rail from one
front to another to meet the attacks. Although dislocated by the German
pre-emptive attack at Verdun in February 1916, this decision produced the
Brusilov offensive, the Somme offensive and the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo,
as the only occasions in the war in which Allied military strategy was
coordinated in this way. Strategic coordination on the Western Front was
achieved between the British and the French, attacking side by side on the
Somme, involving some forty-one meetings at army level or higher between
March and the start of the offensive in July. But the actual result, in the
French assessment, was that rather than acting in unison they had ‘react[ed]
constantly the one on the other, but are not sufficiently homogeneous’.70
Uniquely among the Allies, British military strategic command also had
to deal with the national contingents of their Empire: the Dominions of
Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand and South Africa, and the
Indian Army. In military affairs, the British relationship with their Empire
had many of the characteristics of alliance warfare, as Dominion-contingent
commanders had the right of appeal to their home governments, and the
British were sensitive to both Dominion and Indian political issues. While
the organisation of British armies and corps on the Western Front changed
according to circumstances, by late 1917 the Australian Corps and the
Canadian Corps had become permanent formations under their own
national commanders. This increasing importance of the Dominions was
reflected in the Imperial War Conference in March 1917, leading to the
creation of an Imperial War Cabinet of the heads of government of Britain
and the Dominions.71
The French saw Allied unity of military strategic command as an aim in
itself, with the self-evident proviso that the commander should be a French
general, and that France’s voice should dominate. For the British, the issue
of unity of command was almost entirely subsumed in their own national
civil–military struggle. Much of the impetus for greater strategic
coordination also came from the impact of the German unrestricted
submarine campaign on British and French strategy on the Western Front,
and the pattern of Allied failures and defeats throughout 1917. Having been
so successful in 1914, the Royal Navy saw no reason to change a command
structure that was both separate from that of the British army, and largely
independent of political control. This changed markedly in 1917, when the
German submarine campaign posed a threat not only to Allied naval
dominance but also to the civilian war effort through losses to merchant
shipping, and to strategy on the Western Front, playing an important part in
the decision to launch the Third Ypres offensive.72 The Royal Navy’s
protracted objections to introducing protected convoys for merchant ships
were overcome by civilian political pressure and the entry of the United
States into the war in April, providing an early opportunity for Allied
cooperation. Generally, alliance warfare at sea proved much easier to
manage than on land, with broad agreements being reached on strategy and
on a division of responsibilities, while individual ships and squadrons could
be placed under the overall command of an ally without losing their
autonomy. One illustrative case is the Imperial Japanese Navy, which
largely acted independently of the other Allies in the Pacific, but took part
in convoy escort duties, and from May 1917 onwards stationed a squadron
of destroyers and cruisers at the British naval base of Malta in the
Mediterranean. Although nominally independent, in practice this squadron
took part in anti-submarine operations under the British Commander-in-
Chief Malta, Admiral George A. Ballard.73 Air power, as the new third
element in warfare, evolved from almost nothing in 1914 to become an
important, often essential, part of both land and sea warfare, and was
gradually integrated into armies and fleets. Changes in the British
governmental and military command structures over winter 1917–18,
culminating in the creation of the Royal Air Force in April 1918 as the
world’s first independent air force, were made partly in response to the
crisis caused by German bombing of British cities and the need to provide a
new organisation for defence and retaliation, but were also very much part
of continuing civil–military tensions.
In response to the crises of 1917, the Anglo-French-Italian Rapallo
conference in November created the Supreme War Council, a political
organisation with permanent military advisers, based at Versailles with a
mandate to oversee and advise on national grand strategies including
finance, food, munitions, transportation and naval – principally anti-
submarine – warfare, and to review national military strategic plans.74 This
was far from true Allied unity of command: Russia was excluded from the
Rapallo conference as it was on the verge of collapse into revolution; the
United States was initially excluded as an ‘Associated’ rather than Allied
Power, and the smaller Allied nations, Belgium, Romania, Serbia and
Portugal, were also not represented. The almost immediate change in the
French government, with Clemenceau becoming Prime Minister, also meant
a greater assertion of civilian control over grand strategy and over GQG.75
Lloyd George expected to use the Supreme War Council’s authority over
both British and French reserves on the Western Front as a way of
controlling Haig, and his insistence that the CIGS should not also be the
Supreme War Council’s permanent military adviser led to Robertson’s
resignation in February 1918 and replacement by Wilson with reduced
authority. The impact of these civil–military struggles on military strategy
became apparent with the initial British defeat in the March 1918
Kaiserschlacht offensive, and the need for coordinating the British, French
and also the American response. Pershing temporarily disregarded his
political instructions, which were to use his troops in battle only as a unified
national army, and instead allowed them to fight as part of larger French
and British formations. At two Anglo-French political–military meetings, at
Doullens in March and Beauvais in April, the latter including the
Americans, Foch as French army Chief of Staff and permanent adviser to
the Supreme War Council was placed in charge of coordinating military
strategy on the Western Front with the title of ‘General-in-Chief of the
Allied Armies’, a politically sensitive position that was similar to Joffre’s in
1914 in the extent of its official authority, which was extended to the Italian
Front in May.76 This arrangement continued up to the Armistice, and Foch’s
firm but tactful approach as Generalissimo, which recognised the practical
limitations of his authority and national sensitivities, was a great asset to the
Allies in 1918.77
Conclusion
The diversity of military strategic command problems of the First World
War, among land, sea and air warfare, between differing fighting fronts and
between countries and alliances, means that no single generalisation may be
easily made regarding their nature, or their solution. The considerable
attention paid by present military historical discourse on the First World
War to issues of command reflects both these diversities and a recognition
of the vital need to understand strategic command issues in the war. The
difficulties faced by generals and admirals in reconciling their military
strategies with larger national and alliance grand strategies, and in coping
with the complexities of civil–military relations, had precedents in many
previous wars. But the sheer scale of mass-industrialised warfare in 1914–
18, including both the potential of newly developed technologies and –
particularly in the sphere of communications – their limitations, was indeed
without precedent. Moreover, the complexities faced in strategic command
in the First World War would never be faced again in the same way, as
political and military methods and structures were developed in the war’s
aftermath that, if they could not resolve the critical issues faced by
industrialised states at war for their survival in the Second World War, did
at least reduce the frictions which these issues caused, and the burdens
placed on any one individual. The institutions and systems of strategic
command that emerged in response to various crises of the First World War,
together with the necessity for both political and military leaders to become
war managers, both chiefly on the Allied side, provide an important part of
the explanation for the war’s wider nature and conduct, and for its eventual
outcome.
1 Quoted in G. D. Sheffield, ‘Command, leadership, and the Anglo-

American experience’, in Sheffield (ed.), Leadership and Command: The
Anglo-American Military Experience Since 1861 (London: Brassey’s, 2002
[1997]), p. 1.
2 See, e.g., Spencer Wilkinson, The Brain of an Army: A Popular Account

of the German general staff (London: Constable, 1895).
3 See John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987); and
Berndt Brehmer, ‘Command and control as design’,
www.dodccrp.org/events/15th_iccrts_2010/papers/182.pdf, accessed 5
August 2012.
4 Richard Holmes, The Little Field Marshal (London: Jonathan Cape,

1981), pp. 303, 305; and Michael Howard, ‘Leadership in the British Army
in the Second World War: some personal observations’, in Sheffield (ed.),
Leadership and Command, pp. 119–20.
5 Peter Paret, ‘Introduction’, in Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy

from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton University Press, 1986), p.
3.
6 These definitions are informed by reading of various modern British, US
and Australian doctrine publications, and Michael Howard, ‘The forgotten
dimensions of strategy’, Foreign Affairs, 57:5 (1979), pp. 975–8.
7 For examples of this lack of understanding see Richard F. Hamilton,

‘War planning: obvious needs, not so obvious solutions’, in Richard F.
Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (eds.), War Planning 1914 (Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 15–18. For naval and maritime strategic
thinking see Jon Tetsuro Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching
Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). See also Nicholas
Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First
World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
8 Antulio J. Echevarria II, ‘Clausewitz: toward a theory of applied

strategy’, Defense Analysis, 11:3 (1995), pp. 229–40, reproduced at
www.clausewitz.com/readings/Echevarria/APSTRAT1.htm. The persuasive
central argument of Claus Telp, The Evolution of Operational Art 1740–
1813 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 2005), pp. 1–2 places the emergence of
operational art in the later eighteenth century; for older arguments placing
the key developments in the 1860s–1870s see, for example, Michael D.
Krause, ‘Moltke and the origins of operational art’, Military Review, 70:9
(1990), pp. 28–44; and Bruce W. Menning ‘Operational art’s origins’,
Military Review, 77:5 (1997), pp. 32–47.
9 David T. Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in the

Operational Level of War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 29.
10 Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: Architect of the

Apocalypse (Boston, MA: Humanities Press, 2000), pp. 82, 86, 88; Annika
Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War
(Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 106–12; and Holger H. Herwig,
The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–18 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1997), pp. 9–11, 20.
11 Jacob W. Kipp, ‘The origins of Soviet operational art 1917–1936’, in
Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips (eds.), Historical Perspectives of
the Operational Art (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2005),
pp. 215–16.
12 See Timothy C. Dowling, The Brusilov Offensive (Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 175–6.
13 Robert A. Doughty, ‘French operational art: 1888–1940’, in Krause and

Phillips (eds.), Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, p. 101; and
Brian Holden Reid, Studies in British Military Thought (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 70.
14 George H. Cassar, Kitchener’s War: British Strategy from 1914 to 1916

(Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2004), passim; David R. Woodward, Field Marshal
Sir William Robertson: Chief of the Imperial general staff in the Great War
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); and Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry
Wilson: A Political Soldier (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 219–28.
15 For examples of Haig’s involvement at the grand strategic level see

Gary Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (London:
Aurum Press, 2011), pp. 265, 331.
16 See Andy Simpson, Directing Operations: British Corps Command on

the Western Front 1914–18 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2006).
17 Robert M. Epstein, Napoleon’s Last Victory and the Emergence of

Modern War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994), p. 24.
18 Robert M. Citino, Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to

Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899–1940 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of
Kansas, 2002), pp. 71, 96–8; and Richard Connaughton, Rising Sun and
Tumbling Bear: Russia’s War with Japan (London: Cassell, 2003), p. 289.
19 Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the
Present (New York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 153–234.
20 Krause, ‘Moltke and the origins of operational art’, p. 113; and Martin
van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1985), pp. 107–9.
21 Quoted in Brian N. Hall, ‘The British Army and wireless

communication 1896–1918’, War in History, 19:3 (2012), p. 290.
22 See Hew Strachan, The First World War: A New Illustrated History
(New York: Viking, 2003), pp. 199–200; and Paul G. Halpern, A Naval
History of World War I (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).
23 Van Creveld, Technology and War, pp. 3, 161. See also Dennis E.
Showalter, ‘Mass warfare and the impact of technology’, in Roger
Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and
Mobilization on the Western Front 1914–18 (Cambridge University Press,
2000), pp. 73–4.
24 See James M. McPherson, Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as

Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Michael Howard,
The Franco-Prussian War (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1961).
25 David Stevenson, 1914–1918: The History of the First World War

(London: Penguin, 2004), p. 491.
26 Holger H. Herwig, The Marne 1914: The Opening of World War I and
the Battle that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2009), pp.
55; and David Stevenson, ‘French strategy on the Western Front, 1914–
1918’, in Chickering and Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War, pp. 299–300.
27 Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, FirePower: British Army

Weapons and Theories of War 1904–1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982),
pp. 43–8; and Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 118–43.
28 John Gooch, The Plans of War: The general staff and British Military
Strategy c.1900–1916 (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 323–30.
29 Dan Todman, ‘The Grand Lamasery revisited: General Headquarters on

the Western Front 1914–1918’, in Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman (eds.),
Command and Control on the Western Front: The British Army’s
Experience 1914–18 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2004), pp. 39–70.
30 George H. Cassar, Kitchener: Architect of Victory (London: William

Kimber, 1977), pp. 98–100.
31 Sarrail’s appointment was also related to his domestic political views

and rivalries with Joffre; see Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French
Strategy and Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
32 Matthew Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East

1917–1919 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1999), especially pp. 23–42, 158–
63.
33 Citino, The German Way of War, pp. 174–82.
34 William J. Astore and Dennis E. Showalter, Hindenburg: Icon of

German Militarism (Washington, DC: Potomac, 2005), pp. 23–36; and
Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and
Ludendorff Conduct World War I (New York: W. Morrow, 1991), pp. 151–
60. See also Citino, The German Way of War, pp. 174–82.
35 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 80–4 argues that the conflict
between Lettow-Vorbeck and the colonial governor Heinrich Schnee has
been exaggerated, but that Lettow-Vorbeck’s ‘purely military’
considerations won Schnee over; see also Lawrence Sondhaus, World War
One: The Global Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 114–
20.
36 See Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1975), pp. 37–91.
37 For the importance of these factors see Howard, ‘Forgotten

dimensions’, pp. 975–8.
38 Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command (New York: Free Press, 2002), pp.
66–79.
39 Robert H. Ferrell, ‘Woodrow Wilson: a misfit in office?’, in Joseph G.

Dawson III, Commanders in Chief: Presidential Leadership in Modern
Wars (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993), pp. 65–86. For an
alternative view that is much more favourable to Wilson, see Arthur S. Link
and John Whiteclay Chambers, II, ‘Woodrow Wilson as Commander-in-
Chief’, in Richard H. Kohn (ed.), The United States Military Under the
Constitution of the United States, 1789–1989 (New York University Press,
1991), pp. 319–24.
40 For Nicholas II’s Stavka see Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917, pp.
187–93.
41 Herwig, The Marne 1914, pp. xiv, 120, 313.
42 Holger Afflerbach, ‘Wilhelm II as Supreme Warlord in the First World

War’, in Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Diest (eds.), The Kaiser: New
Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge University
Press, 2004), pp. 201–3, 206–16; and Robert T. Foley, German Strategy
and the Path to Verdun (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 122–3,
257–8.
43 Holger H. Herwig, ‘Asymmetrical alliance: Austria-Hungary and
Germany, 1891–1918’, in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey (eds.), Entangling
Alliances: Coalition Warfare in the Twentieth Century (Canberra:
Australian Military History Publications, 2005), pp. 57–61; Günther
Kronenbitter, ‘The limits of cooperation: Germany and Austria-Hungary in
the First World War’, in Dennis and Grey (eds.), Entangling Alliances, pp.
79–80; Dennis E. Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914
(Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004 [1991]), pp. 67–8.
44 Richard DiNardo, Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign, 1915

(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), p. 8.
45 Herwig, ‘Asymmetrical alliance’, pp. 65–9; and DiNardo,

Breakthrough, pp. 37, 41–3.
46 These two paragraphs are based heavily on the pioneering work of

Edward J. Erickson. See his Gallipoli: The Ottoman Campaign (Barnsley:
Pen & Sword, 2010), pp. 35–40, 42, 178–9, 185–7.
47 Ibid., p. 182.
48 Ibid., p. 177; and Edward J. Erickson, Ottoman Army Effectiveness in

World War I: A Comparative Study (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 86.
49 For the formation and composition of Yildirim (or Jilderim) see General
[Otto] Liman von Sanders, Five Years in Turkey (Nashville, TN: Battery
Press, 1990 [1928]), pp. 173–84; and Erickson, Ottoman Army
Effectiveness, pp. 115–16. Erickson argues that Ottoman–German tensions
in Palestine had become evident by late 1918 for a variety of reasons,
including resentment at apparent German downgrading of the importance of
the Palestine theatre (p. 144).
50 Mombauer, Moltke, pp. 51, 65.

51 Herwig, The Marne 1914, pp. 267–86, 294, 311–14; and Annika
Mombauer, ‘German war plans’, in Hamilton and Herwig, War Planning,
pp. 72–5.
52 Van Creveld, Command in War, p. 158.
53 A sense of the breadth of Haig’s work can be gained from his wartime
diaries and correspondence. For a selection, see Gary Sheffield and John
Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).
54 Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory, pp. 363–8.
55 Graydon A. Tunstall, Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War

of 1915 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 51, 68–9,
212.
56 Mark E. Grotelueschen, The AEF Way of War: The American Army and
Combat in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.
31–9, 48–50.
57 Robert T. Foley, ‘“What’s in a name?”’: the development of strategies

of attrition on the Western Front, 1914–1918’, The Historian, 68:4 (2006),
pp. 730–8, 772; and Foley, German Strategy, pp. 180–258.
58 Both passages quoted in Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives, p. 29;

see also Foley, German Strategy, pp. 82–126.
59 This remark, or variations on it, is also attributed to Talleyrand and to

others; its exact provenance is uncertain.
60 David R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (Newark, NJ:

University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 116–59.
61 Brian R. Sullivan, ‘The strategy of decisive weight: Italy 1882–1922’,
in Williamson Murray et al., The Making of Strategy (Cambridge
University Press, 1994), pp. 36–9; and Mark Thompson, The White War:
Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919 (London: Basic Books,
2008), pp. 154–6, 245. For Cadorna’s strategy and possible alternatives, see
John Gooch, ‘Italy during the First World War’, in Allan R. Millett and
Williamson Murray, Military Effectiveness, vol. I: The First World War
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 165–7.
62 Russell F. Weigley, ‘Strategy and total war in the United States:

Pershing and the American military tradition’, in Chickering and Förster
(eds.), Great War, Total War, pp. 343–5.
63 For examples of civil–military relations in the major belligerents, see,

e.g., David French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–16 (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1986) and The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition 1916–
1918 (Oxford University Press, 1998); Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory; Jean-
Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Oxford: Berg,
1985); and Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War 1914–
1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
64 Quoted in Herwig, The Marne 1914, p. 29.
65 Herwig, The First World War, pp. 425–8, 440–2; Sondhaus, World War
One, pp. 433–4; and David Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War
1914–18 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 243–9.
66 Halpern, A Naval History of World War I, pp. 444–6; Stevenson, 1914–

1918, pp. 491–3.
67 Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010 [2009]), passim; Erickson, Ottoman Army
Effectiveness, p. 20; and Erickson, Gallipoli, p. xv.
68 For details of the final form of the War Cabinet see French, Strategy,
pp. 17–26.
69 Stevenson, ‘French strategy on the Western Front, 1914–1918’, pp.

302–25; and Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Victory Through Coalition: Britain and
France during the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.
23–41.
70 Quoted in Greenhalgh, Victory Through Coalition, p. 71; a table of the

Anglo-French planning meetings is in the same book, pp. 57–9. See also
William Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the
Making of the Twentieth Century (London: Little, Brown, 2009).
71 French, Strategy, pp. 62–4, 255–7.
72 See Andrew W. Wiest, Passchendaele and the Royal Navy (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1995).
73 Tomoyuki Ishizu, ‘Japan and the First World War’, paper delivered to
the conference ‘Asia, the Great War, and the Continuum of Violence’,
University College Dublin, May 2012; with gratitude to Professor Ishizu for
this information.
74 Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 285–8; Greenhalgh,
Victory Through Coalition, pp. 163–85.
75 John V. F. Keiger, ‘Poincaré, Clemenceau, and the quest for total

victory’, in Chickering and Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War, pp. 247–
79.
76 Greenhalgh, Victory Through Coalition, pp. 192–203.

77 Michael S. Neiberg. ‘The evolution of strategic thinking in World War
I: a case study of the Second Battle of the Marne’, Journal of Military and
Strategic Studies, 13:4 (2011), pp. 9–11, 16–18. More generally, see
Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Foch in Command (Cambridge University Press,
2011).
Part III World War
Introduction to Part III
Jay Winter and John Horne
The huge advantage the Allied Powers had from the very outset of the war
arose from the stock of capital, human and material, which they had
accumulated in imperial expansion throughout the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Both the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires
mobilised resources within Europe, but the Allied empires and
dependencies spanned the globe. In particular the British Empire operated
on both formal and informal levels, with powerful friends and holdings in
independent countries like Argentina and the United States. The French
Empire drew substantial numbers of soldiers and labourers from Africa and
Asia, but the British Empire and Dominions provided even more black,
brown and yellow men for military service or for support in auxiliary units
behind the lines.
The only equivalent in the Central Powers to a multi-ethnic and multi-
national mobilisation was that of the Ottoman Empire. But such efforts,
while important, cut across the process of Turkification which was the
objective of the triumvirate which ruled Ottoman Turkey, and which was
responsible for the Armenian genocide, an event demonstrating the
destruction of human capital of a kind which the Nazis repeated two
decades later.
Imperial mobilisation meant cultural transfer on a global scale. Those
who had out-migrated from Britain to the New World and the Antipodes
returned ‘home’, as it were, and brought with them their skills and their
determination to see the conflict through to victory. Some saw this
movement towards Europe as one of the largest waves of ‘tourism’ in
history. Too many of the ‘tourists’ died to accept this formulation, but there
is little doubt that the experience and knowledge derived from imperial
participation in the war had long-term consequences of the first magnitude.
Hô Chi Minh in Paris during and after the war was but one of the major
leaders of the twentieth century whose presence in Europe as young men
marked their lives thereafter.
The 1914–18 conflict was both the apogee and the beginning of the end
of imperial power. First went the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
Empires, but thereafter the other imperial powers – Britain, France and
Russia recast as the Soviet Union – became slowly, but surely, incapable of
maintaining their imperial holdings. Economic constraints mattered, but so
did the determination, evident after 1918, of the subalterns to break their
ties with the ‘mother country’. Decolonisation after the Second World War
was an extension of trends in motion after the First. The last empire to go
was the Soviet Empire, in 1991, an outcome revealing the long shadow of
the Great War on the twentieth century.
John H. Morrow, Jr.
The First World War had its origins in the era of imperialism. It was fought
by imperial powers to determine who would dominate Europe and the wider
world, and concluded with the preservation of European imperialism for
another generation.
Origins
In the 1880s a new era of imperial history began, the era of the ‘New
Imperialism’, in which primarily European powers, and the United States
and Japan, further expanded their dominion over the globe. A ‘new
navalism’ arose, as American Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s classic, The
Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), which was based
on the British experience, extolled to a receptive international audience the
importance of capital ships – battleships and battlecruisers – and great sea
battles of annihilation to achieve global hegemony. The reasons and
justifications for imperial expansion varied: the pursuit of raw materials and
markets, geopolitical advantage from the conquest of strategic territories
and increased national prestige. European states, led by Britain and France,
and the United States and Japan, endowed with superior technology, naval
and military power and, most fundamentally, ‘surplus’ population,
conquered much of Africa and Asia.
The ‘New Imperialism’ sprouted from, and in turn exacerbated, the racist
nationalism prevalent in Europe and the rest of the Western world in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century. In an era of the ascendancy of doctrines
purported to be ‘realist’ or ‘scientific’, devotion to the nation-state acquired
‘scientific’ rationalisations, exemplified by social Darwinism and scientific
racism. Humans were warlike and competitive; war, an alleged response to
evolutionary pressures, was a biological necessity. Metaphors of ‘a
relentless struggle for existence’, the ‘survival of the fittest’ and the ‘law of
the jungle’ now applied to human conflict. The so-called ‘white’ races
defined Jews and the ‘coloured’ peoples of the world such as Africans and
Asians as inferior and dangerous, to be banished, barred, subordinated,
subjugated or exterminated. The military victories, conquests of great
territories and the subject peoples themselves became evidence of the racial
and moral superiority of the conquerors. The irony, of course, lay in the fact
that the imperial conquests resulted not from superior courage or virtue, but
from superior technology, which the imperialists accepted as proof of their
God-given greatness. Europeans transmogrified technological superiority
into biological and even theological necessity; it was God’s will that
Europeans conquer and civilise, or exploit, the ‘lesser’ peoples of Africa
and Asia and, if necessary, ‘sacrifice’ or exterminate them in the name of
progress. Imperialists believed that extinction awaited the ‘inferior races’;
consequently, they were merely hastening the course of civilisation by
weeding out, or deliberately annihilating, these ‘inferiors’. Colonial or
‘little’ wars against ‘uncivilised’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘savage’ peoples were
necessary, as Theodore Roosevelt, staunch racist, militarist and imperialist,
explained in 1899, because ‘In the long run civilized man finds he can keep
the peace only by subduing his barbarian neighbor; for the barbarian will
yield only to force.’ The duty of superior civilised races was consequently
to expand in ‘just wars against primitive races’.1 Charles Darwin
contemplated ‘what an endless number of the lower races will have been
eliminated by the higher civilized race’ in the not too distant future. 2
Inventions, especially those in the military realm, found immediate
application in the conquest of native populations. Cannon-armed gunboats,
rapid firing artillery, the Maxim gun, the repeating rifle, smokeless powder
– such weapons gave European intruders a crushing superiority. Lead-cored
dumdum bullets, patented in 1897 and manufactured initially in Dum Dum
outside Calcutta, exploded on contact, causing large, painful wounds that
dropped charging warriors in their tracks. Europeans used them in big game
hunting and in colonial wars; conventions prohibited their use in conflicts
between civilised states.3 Even the airplane, though just in its infancy,
offered prospects for future use in colonial ventures. By 1910 the British
government clearly recognised the implications of the airplane for colonial
domination and white imperial supremacy. The Committee of Imperial
Defence directed the War Office to consider the use of the airplane ‘in war
against uncivilized countries such as the Sudan, Somaliland, and the
Northwest Frontier of India’. In 1913, Charles Grey, editor of The
Aeroplane, suggested the use of the airplane ‘for impressing European
superiority on the enormous native population’. In March 1914, Winston
Churchill endorsed a possible joint project of the Colonial Office and the
Royal Navy whereby the white population would employ aircraft to control
and threaten the Empire’s native populations to confront the ‘distinct
possibility’ of black uprisings. 4
Yet what barrier or boundary would ensure that imperialist states would
not one day employ these weapons against one another? European
expansion entailed the disappearance of entire peoples and the
appropriation of their land, securing ‘Lebensraum’, or living space, but
Hitler’s usage of the term was applied to Europe itself. Struggle between
races was essential to progress and to avoid decay, as the superior would
necessarily win. Within races, inferior types needed to disappear, as the
increasing popularity of eugenics in the Western world during this epoch
demonstrated. Europeans would not necessarily be immune from attempts
at conquest on their own continent.
As the conquered territories became part of the power bloc of European
empire, the integral nature of empire linked mother country to imperial
possession in a complex, varied and yet seamless web. The importance of
India, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’, to Britain, explained Lord Curzon in 1901,
was critical: ‘As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the
world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third rate power.’5
Indian markets bolstered the British economy, and the 220,000-man-strong
Indian Army led by British officers policed the Empire and enabled the
British to avoid conscription at home, until the British refusal to use Indian
soldiers against a white opponent, the Boers in South Africa, forced the
mother country to use British, Irish and Australian soldiers during the Boer
War of 1899–1901.
John A. Hobson’s work, Imperialism, first published in 1902, warned of
the deleterious effects of empire on the imperialists. The wars fostered an
‘excess of national self-consciousness’ among the imperial powers; the
process of imposing ‘superior civilization on the coloured races’ would
‘[I]ntensify the struggle of the white races’. Finally, the ‘parasitism’ of the
white rulers’ relationship to the ‘lower races’ gave rise to the most ‘perilous
device’ of ‘vast native forces’ commanded by white officers and the
possible ‘dangerous’ precedent of using these forces against another white
race.6
Eight years later, in 1910, a book appeared in France that bore out
Hobson’s concerns and indicated the permeability of the boundaries
between Europe and empire in plans for future war – General Charles
Mangin’s study, La force noire. France’s declining birth rate required it to
find other sources of men. Mangin proposed sub-Saharan Africa, whose
valorous warriors had achieved significant feats of arms in the past and
stood ready to repeat them for France. The objections of others
notwithstanding, Mangin, a swashbuckling colonial officer who had fought
in Africa and Indochina during his career, had no hesitation about sending
his African soldiers to fight in France. The French defeat in the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870–1 had driven Mangin’s family from its ancestral
home in Lorraine to migrate to Algeria, but, like other colonial officers, he
never lost sight of Europe. In their minds, imperial and European
battlefields were intertwined – a French African army would counter the
Teutonic threat on the Rhine and gain revenge against Germany. Already
the French army planned to bring North African soldiers – Algerians and
Moroccans – to France in case of war. The war itself would make the Force
noire a reality.7
The very culture of the imperialist age created an atmosphere in which
European upper-and middle-class youth quite literally yearned for war, the
ultimate violent sport. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, hero of the Boer War,
founded the Boy Scouts to transform the puny offspring of industrial
society, who had failed in large numbers to qualify for service in the Boer
War, into sturdy potential warriors.8 Garnet Wolseley, Britain’s most
admired soldier, considered war ‘the greatest purifier’ of an ‘overrefined . .
. race or nation’. The British Empire required an ‘Imperial Race’, purged of
‘effeminate’ and ‘degenerate’ traits. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of
Sherlock Holmes, mused in August 1914, ‘a bloody purging would be good
for the country’.9 The founders of the German boy scouts (Pfadfinder) were
veterans of the vicious Herero War in South West Africa. The Germans, like
the British, feared that urban life weakened young men, so the German
youth movement, the Wandervogel, sponsored escape into the purity of
nature, while the Jungdeutschlandbund (Young Germany League)
militarised youth work. Historian Derek Linton concludes that these
organisations were ‘very much products of the age of imperialism’, which
made war seem ‘a heroic and glorious game, a test of a generation, and an
escape from . . . urban life’. 10
Imperial conquest and interaction affected Europeans’ perceptions of
themselves and other Europeans. They not only divided the world into
races, but also conflated nationality with race as they warily eyed one
another. Constant references to the Anglo-Saxon, Gallic, Teutonic or Slavic
‘races’ dotted the literature of the time. Continental imperialists, pan-
Germans and pan-Slavs, in their respective determination to unite all ethnic
Germans in one German state and all Slavs under Russian leadership,
would upset the status quo in Central and Eastern Europe to achieve their
goals. Once the Europeans divided themselves into separate and unequal
‘races’, what was to prevent the extension of the brutal attitudes towards
‘coloured peoples’ to other Europeans for the sake of progress and survival?
After all, the future of one’s inherently superior races and culture, and thus
of civilisation, was at stake. The intertwined sentiments of nationalism,
racism and imperialism thus rendered Europe and the world a more volatile
place at the turn of the twentieth century. As historian John Whiteclay
Chambers II observed, ‘The ruthlessness of colonial warfare, with its lack
of restraints, would return to haunt Europe in the slaughter of World War
I.’11
Between 1905 and 1914, with the background of arms races on land and
sea between Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one hand and Britain,
France and Russia on the other, two flashpoints gave rise to intermittent
crises that heightened the tensions among the powers: Morocco and the
Balkans. Both regions had once belonged to the Ottoman Empire, now
considered the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ as its power receded. Both were the
sites of imperial contests: Morocco, primarily between the French and
Germans; the Balkans, between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian
Empires. In the Moroccan crises in 1905 and 1911, French and Spanish
initiatives in their spheres of influence prompted German demands,
reinforced in 1911 by a display of gunboat diplomacy, for equal access or
compensation. Both times Britain responded to German bullying by
standing firmly with the French, resulting in the German paranoia of
‘encirclement’, a French nationalist revival and the very rapprochement
among Britain, France and Russia that Germany feared. After the Second
Moroccan Crisis, some Europeans began to believe that war was inevitable
and launched further extensive preparations for it.
The First Moroccan Crisis of 1905 gave rise to deliberations in the British
Admiralty about countering the German threat. Historians have generally
focused on the naval construction race, naval plans to land a force on the
continent, or plans for an economic blockade of Germany. Captain C. L.
Ottley, Director of Naval Intelligence and then Secretary to the Committee
of Imperial Defence, informed First Lord Reginald McKenna in 1908 that a
blockade offered a ‘certain and simple means of strangling Germany at sea’,
and that in a protracted war ‘grass would sooner or later grow in the streets
of Hamburg and widespread dearth and ruin would be inflicted’.12 In fact,
as historian Nicholas Lambert demonstrates, the ideas of Ottley and others
in the Admiralty went far beyond naval blockade to economic warfare,
which would entail ‘unprecedented state intervention in the workings of the
national and international economies’ to ‘harness not only Britain’s naval
power but also her monopolistic control over world shipping, finance, and
communications’.13 Although such ideas ultimately proved too radical and
disruptive to the world economy in general and the United States in
particular, their very existence shows how far some naval planners were
prepared to go to defeat Germany.
A critical offshoot of the Second Moroccan Crisis was that the Italian
government, stimulated by French success in Morocco, determined to
conquer its own slice of North Africa from the Ottoman Turks, in Libya.
The campaign would constitute a direct attack on the Ottoman Empire. In
April 1911, the Italian Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti, who recognised
that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was integral to European peace,
observed:
And what if after we have attacked Turkey the Balkans begin to stir?
And what if a Balkan clash provokes a clash between the two power
blocs and a European war? Can it be that we could shoulder the
responsibility of putting a match to the powder?14
Such musings did not prevent Italian aggression in September and a

victorious war that lasted a year. Yet Giolitti’s queries proved prescient. The
Ottoman Empire was a critical factor in European peace, and the trail of the
origins of war would lead, as he had foreseen, from North Africa via the
Ottoman Empire into the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, and ultimately the
confrontation between Serbia and Austria-Hungary that did put the match to
the powder. Giolitti, furthermore, was not alone in his willingness to run the
risk of a major war; virtually all of his peers in the governments of Europe
were willing to gamble with Armageddon.
Successive Balkan crises leading to war began in 1908–9, when Austria-
Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and agreed to compensate the
Russian government by approaching Britain to achieve an enduring aim of
Russian foreign policy – access to the Straits of Constantinople connecting
the Black Sea to the Aegean and ultimately the Mediterranean Sea. Austria-
Hungary reneged on its commitment, and only German intervention on
behalf of Austria-Hungary forced the enraged Russians to back down. The
Russians, however, then launched a military reform and expansion that
would make the Russian army the most powerful in Europe by 1917. In
October 1912, the Balkan League – Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and
Montenegro – prodded by the Russians, declared war on the Ottoman
Turks, and quickly defeated them, practically driving them from Europe.
The peace satisfied no one, and a second Balkan war ensued, in 1913, from
which the Serbs emerged strengthened to confront the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, and with future assurances of support from the Russian Empire.
The stage was now set for the assassination of Austro-Hungarian
Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and the July crisis that precipitated Europe into
war, a crisis that can only be understood in the context of imperialism. All
the imperial powers eyed one another predatorily and warily, intent on
expanding or defending their empires. Captain Ottley’s plans indicated the
likelihood that a future war with Germany would become a war to destroy a
rising competitor on the continent. Nearly every power – Britain, France,
Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, even Italy and Serbia – covetously eyed
the Ottoman Empire and its far-flung territories. Historian Mustafa
Aksakal’s study, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914, points out that the
Ottoman government viewed the events from the Balkan wars in 1912
through to the crisis of July 1914, ‘in the context of Russian intentions to
seize control over Istanbul and the Ottoman Straits’. The Young Turks,
Aksakal explains, reeling in the aftermath of the disastrous Balkan wars,
‘feared Russia’ and thus sided with Germany.15
The Russian Empire’s role in the origins of the war has recently drawn
particular attention from historian Sean McMeekin, who pointedly suggests
that after the Italian and Balkan wars from 1911 through 1913, the First
World War was plausibly ‘The War of Ottoman Succession’, and that
consequently, ‘it was Russia’s war even more than it was Germany’s’.
Russia also directly challenged Ottoman Turkey with its Armenian reform
campaign of 1913–14, which McMeekin labels ‘a scarcely disguised Trojan
horse for the expansion of Russian influence in Turkish Anatolia’, as
preliminary to its plans to seize Constantinople and the Straits. Russian
imperialists, he asserts, were ‘dead serious’ about dismembering Turkey
and Austria-Hungary, whose army Russian generals considered a ‘paper
tiger’.16 In fact, McMeekin labels the assumption that Russia went to war
on behalf of Serbia ‘naïve’. All the powers assumed that Ottoman Turkey
was doomed, and Russia sought to fulfil its national interest of controlling
Constantinople and the Straits and was willing to contemplate provoking a
war to gain the Straits.17 McMeekin’s study demonstrates clearly that an
interpretation of the origins of the Great War through the lens of
imperialism prevents a simplistic attempt to blame any single power for the
origins of the war. Even the Young Turks, who had seized control of the
Ottoman Empire in 1908, planned to restore its imperial glory and
harboured grandiose designs – at Russia’s expense. Russian generals were
not the only observers who considered Austria-Hungary vulnerable. Both
friend and foe alike deemed the Dual Monarchy, with its volatile mix of
nationalities and ethnic groups, the next empire likely to disintegrate. Even
Britain and France, the leading imperialist powers, were determined to
expand their empires.
Furthermore, the British plans for economic warfare, when viewed along
with the extremist proclamations of pan-Germans and pan-Slavs that the
other had to disappear, offer ample indication that a coming war might
destroy the traditional order of the Great Powers. In an era of rampant
imperialism, challenges to the existing international order elicited extreme
responses that entailed the subjugation or destruction of one’s opponents
and the conquest of their peoples and empires. The European powers went
to war in 1914 to determine who would control not only Europe, but also
the world, and civilian and military leaders of all the powers were culpable
and complicit in causing the war. The war’s major fronts would lie in
Europe, but its imperial aspects were factors on all fronts: Europe, the
Ottoman Empire, Africa and East Asia. In order to impose some semblance
of order on global events that were sometimes related, this chapter will
proceed one continent at a time in the above order.
Europe
On the Western Front, Britain and France in particular had access to their
colonial empires for manpower and materials. Both factors were important,
but manpower posed the more volatile difficulty because of the issue of
race. In 1914 the British and French both deployed colonial troops on the
Western Front: the British, Indian infantry and cavalry; the French, North
African infantry. The danger of employing colonial soldiers in Europe lay
in the threat that their encounters with Europeans might pose to the colonial
order. The Indian Army comprised mainly illiterate peasants from the north
and north-west frontiers, whom the British deemed the most ‘martial’ races.
The deliberate recruitment of the least-educated Indians was intended to
minimise the penetration of ‘dangerous’ Western ideas into their minds. The
arrival of Indian soldiers in England prompted the army and government to
control their access to white society, in particular white working-class
women, as stereotypes portrayed both the Indians and the women as highly
sexual. Yet all the regulations in the world could not ensure absolute
separation, so British censors concentrated on suppressing accounts of sex
with white women and slighting references to whites in order to preserve
white prestige in India.18 In contrast, white Dominion soldiers never faced
such restrictions in any theatre. Canadian and Anzac soldiers ran amok in
London, the former achieving the highest levels of venereal disease of any
Entente troops on the Western Front.
Indian combat service with the British on the Western Front culminated
in 1915. The British had dispatched Indian Army expeditionary forces in
the fall of 1914 to Basra, Egypt and East Africa, but primarily to France,
where they entered combat in October 1914. They suffered heavy losses
and the brutal cold of the European winter undermined morale, but in 1915
some 16,000 British and 28,500 Indian soldiers of the two Indian cavalry
and two infantry divisions of the Indian Corps participated in British attacks
at Neuve Chapelle in March, Festubert in May and Loos in late September.
The Indian Corps figured prominently at Neuve Chapelle, where their
attack resulted in the loss of 12,500 men, and further debilitating losses at
Loos undermined their effectiveness as assault infantry or shock troops, the
favourite use of colonial troops on the Western Front. The prospect of
another winter led the British to send the remnants of the infantry divisions
to Mesopotamia, although the cavalry divisions remained until spring 1918.
As the Indian infantry departed, the British turned to forces from the
white Dominions to fulfil their manpower needs . After serving at Gallipoli
in 1915, the Australian and New Zealand forces, or Anzacs, formed into the
five divisions of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and would
demonstrate their superb fighting qualities on the Western Front from 1916
through to 1918. In fact, in 1917 and 1918 Britain’s freshest and most
aggressive soldiers came primarily from Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. These soldiers performed particularly well in the offensives of
1918, as they became Great Britain’s manpower reserves and shock troops
on the Western Front. The Canadian Corps, in particular, could justifiably
claim to be the best large unit on the Western Front during the campaign
that ended the war.19
The British absolutely refused to use African, or ‘aboriginal’, soldiers in
Europe or outside Africa, although they did send numbers of African and
Asian labour battalions directly from the colonies to the continent. The
presence of Indian soldiers in England posed sufficient concerns; the
presence of Africans would have been insufferable. In France, however,
notwithstanding the objections of the colonial governor of West Africa
about the debilitating loss of manpower, Mangin wanted more shock troops,
and Senegalese Deputy Blaise Diagne, who had been elected to Parliament
in May 1914, regarded the service of African soldiers as an avenue to gain
more rights in the colonies. He consequently argued that originaires, black
inhabitants of the four urban communities in Senegal who already
possessed greater legal rights and privileges than other Senegalese, should
be integrated into metropolitan units (units from the French Métropole, or
mother country) with white Frenchmen. The law of 19 October 1915
conscripted originaires and incorporated them into French units, and by the
law of 29 September 1916 these Senegalese would become French citizens.
Senegalese originaires in predominantly French units were treated as
Frenchmen, but the army attempted to prevent contact between the greater
number of Senegalese tirailleurs and French women. Nevertheless,
tirailleur non-commissioned officers or decorated soldiers often developed
the same relationship with French women and families as the originaires.20
In the bloody battles of attrition at Verdun and on the Somme in 1916, the
French deployed increasing numbers of black African troops. Mangin
employed his African soldiers for the repeated attacks the French army
launched at Verdun in the spring of 1916. Ultimately, on 24 October,
Moroccan and Senegalese assault troops of the French Colonial Army
retook the key fortress of Douaumont, the loss of which, at the start of the
Verdun battle in late February, had signified the great success of the
German offensive. In the British and French attack on the Somme on 1 July
1916, the First Corps of the French Colonial Army included twenty-one
Senegalese battalions. French officers encouraged the Africans to close with
the Germans with knives and French soldiers with the bayonet, which
incurred needless casualties. General Pierre Berdoulat, commander of the
Colonial Army Corps, believed that the Africans’ ‘limited intellectual
abilities’ made them useful ‘for sparing a certain number of European lives
at the moment of assaults’.21
The word ‘sparing’ appears frequently in commanders’ references to the
expenditure of Senegalese instead of French lives. In April 1917, Mangin’s
colonial soldiers – Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese – served as one
spearhead for the major attack planned at the Chemin des Dames by new
French Commander-in-Chief Robert Nivelle. Nivelle demanded as many
Senegalese soldiers as possible, to ‘permit the sparing – to the extent
possible – of French blood’. The French commander of a Senegalese
regiment declared that his soldiers were ‘finally and above all superb attack
troops permitting the sparing of the lives of whites, who exploit their
success behind them and organise the positions they conquer’. A battalion
commander voiced similar sentiments, advocating the use of the Force
noire ‘to save, in future offensive actions, the blood – more and precious –
of our [French] soldiers’.22 On 16 April some 25,000 Senegalese, the core
of Mangin’s assault force, attacked the German lines. Among the few troops
to penetrate the German lines, the first wave suffered grave casualties –
6,000 out of 10,000 soldiers. Nivelle’s attack ended in failure and provoked
French soldiers to refuse to attack, and French morale in general reached its
lowest point of the war in mid 1917.
The French also deployed Madagascan and Annamite (Indochinese)
troops as labourers and truck drivers behind the Western Front and as
combat soldiers in the Near East. By 1916, 10 per cent of France’s rapidly
expanding labour force was foreign or colonial labourers. That year the
government began to import large numbers of non-white workers, and race
became an issue in the factories and farms on the French home front in
1917. Some 78,500 Algerians, 49,000 Indochinese, 35,500 Moroccans,
18,000 Tunisians and 4,500 Malagasy worked in France. Historian Guoqi
Xu points out that 140,000 Chinese labourers formed the largest and
longest-serving group on the Western Front from 1917 to 1920. The
Chinese government had sent them as part of a grander plan to establish a
link between China and the West in hopes of regaining Shandong from the
Japanese and forestalling future Japanese incursions – in vain, as it turned
out.23
The French War Ministry’s Colonial Labour Organisation Service
regimented the urban workers, forming them into labour battalions and
housing them in isolation like prisoners of war. The government tried to
separate the colonials from French women to prevent sexual contact, but
marriages between French women and colonial workers increased.24 The
Service feared the workers would gain a ‘taste for strong drink and white
women’, as well as experience with strikes and unions, all of which would
upset established hierarchies in the Empire by returning a seasoned body of
radicals to the colonies.25 In fact, by importing no women of colour, the
French government created exactly what it feared by concentrating large
numbers of French women and colonial workers in the absence of white
men and non-white women. The circumstances did lead to outbreaks of
racial violence in the spring and summer of 1917.
France’s 600,000 colonial soldiers did not face the resentment that the
workers incurred. After all, as their officers constantly reiterated, they were
sparing the lives of Frenchmen, who regarded foreigners as replacements to
release them for military service and to break strikes. In December 1917 the
French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, who vowed unrelenting war
against the Germans, sent a recruiting mission of 300 decorated West
African officers and men to draft more African soldiers to fight in France.26
In 1918 Blaise Diagne, appointed Commissioner of the Republic in West
Africa, took charge of recruitment. Diagne considered the ‘blood tax’
(impôt du sang) a means for Africans to achieve equal rights, while French
officials still focused on saving French lives. Colonel Eugene Petitdemange,
commander of the Senegalese training camp at Fréjus in the south of
France, planned to use his ‘brave Senegalese . . . to replace the French, to
be used as cannon fodder to spare the whites’. Even Clemenceau, convinced
of the debt that Africans owed France for its ‘civilisation’ and of the
necessity to avoid further French sacrifice, told French senators on 18
February 1918, ‘Although I have infinite respect for these brave blacks, I
would much prefer to have ten blacks killed than a single Frenchman.’27
Diagne, however, extracted concessions from the French government for
improved conditions in Africa and higher status for soldiers, including
French citizenship upon request for distinguished tirailleurs. To Diagne,
‘those who fall under fire, fall neither as whites nor as blacks; they fall as
Frenchmen and for the same flag’.28 In ten months Diagne recruited more
than 60,000 soldiers, and on 14 October Clemenceau commissioned him to
prepare to have 1 million Senegalese troops by spring 1919 in order for
Mangin to form a shock army which would amalgamate French and
Senegalese soldiers . Only Germany’s surrender forestalled the total
realisation of Mangin’s Force noire, although much to Germany’s chagrin
and the outrage of Britain and the United States, the French stationed West
African soldiers in the post-war occupation of Germany as a reward for
their service and a demonstration of French power to them which might
dissuade them from radicalism when they returned to Africa.
Concentration on the British and French should not preclude notice of
events on the Eastern Front starting in 1915, when the German army,
having overrun Poland, now began to enter the Baltic states, an area of
some 65,000 square miles that dwarfed Prussia. Death’s Head Hussars,
wrapped in their grey cloaks, came to bring order, culture and civilisation to
the primitive peoples of its newly acquired feudal fiefdom, Ober Ost.
German soldiers conjured up images of themselves as Landsknechte in this
‘war land’. German commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich
Ludendorff ruled their new colony with an iron hand, using press-gangs of
prisoners of war and native inhabitants to exploit the region’s gigantic
reserves of lumber, and sealing it off from the Eastern Front. The army
mapped the region, re-established transport routes, registered everyone for a
system of passes, generated propaganda and took control of education in
order to produce a population respectful of German authority and might.29
Here was a foreshadowing, if far less murderous and rabidly racist – the
army regarded the Jews as useful liaisons to the more ‘primitive’ peoples –
of Hitler’s drive to the East in the Second World War. In the tumult of the
post-war era, German Freikorps units, composed mainly of former soldiers,
would remain in the Baltic region to fight the Bolsheviks.
The Ottoman Empire

Next to Europe, the Ottoman Empire provided the focal point of imperial
conflicts whose outcomes still directly affect our world today. The Turks
secretly allied with the Germans in early August 1914. Two German
cruisers, hotly pursued by the British in the Mediterranean, escaped through
the Straits to Constantinople, then under the Turkish flag bombarded
Russian Black Sea forts in October, thus announcing Ottoman entry into the
war. The Entente powers seized the strategic initiative against the Ottoman
Empire by attacking it in the Caucasus, at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia,
but the Caucasus front against the Russians would be the Ottomans’ main
front through 1916.
The Ottoman Turks lost an army in the winter of 1914–15 in the
Caucasus Mountains, and then anticipated a Russian offensive. A division
of Christian Armenians fought with the Russian army against the Turks and
then declared a provisional Armenian government on Russian territory in
April 1915. Russia’s willingness to use Ottoman Armenians as a ‘fifth
column’ rendered them ‘pawns in a ruthless game of empire’ that led to the
Ottomans’ Armenian genocide beginning in 1915.30 The Ottomans, who
had massacred some 200,000 Armenians in 1894–6 and another 25,000 in
1909, believed that the Armenians and the Russians were actively
conspiring to raise a revolt of the Armenian population in eastern Anatolia.
The Ottoman army and the ruling party formed a ‘Special Organisation’ to
control any separatist movement, and then it deployed officers to lead units
of brigands and convicts, an ‘army of murderers’, to ‘destroy the Armenians
and thereby do away with the Armenian question’.31 When the anticipated
Russian offensives and sporadic armed resistance by Armenians began in
spring 1915, the Ottomans crushed the rebels brutally and in June deported
Armenians en masse away from the Russian border and permanently to
Mesopotamia and Syria. In the process, the Turks massacred, raped and
brutalised Armenians and marched them into the desert to die.32 Despite
warnings from the Entente powers about punishment for ‘crimes . . . against
humanity and civilization’,33 the Special Organisation continued its
slaughter of the Armenians for another two years, ultimately killing some
800,000 Armenians, as the Russo-Ottoman war continued until the collapse
of the Russian Empire in 1917.
Long before then the Turks had to turn their attention to confront the
British, and ensuing events in the Middle East occurred, the consequences
of which resonate to this very day. Britain’s declaration of war reversed its
traditional policy of protecting the Ottoman Empire as a barrier against
Russia. The British government in London now determined to destroy the
Ottoman Empire and use parts of it to lure Italy and the Balkan states into
the war on the Entente side. They even contemplated allowing the Russians
access to the Straits. British Secretary of State for War Lord H. H.
Kitchener presumed that after the war the British would have to control
most of the former Ottoman Empire, specifically the Arab part. Kitchener’s
men in the Arab Bureau in Cairo were already proposing to install a puppet
Caliph, likely the Sharif and Emir of Mecca, Hussein Ibn Ali, and his two
sons Abdullah and Feisal, through whom the British would reign.
The British government, with First Lord of the Admiralty Winston
Churchill playing a leading role, decided to attack the Dardanelles with a
substantial naval force to eliminate the Ottoman Empire and open a supply
route to Russia. The Turks were waiting, having mined the straits and
reinforced the forts there with mobile artillery. In mid March, when the
naval force attempted to ‘force the Narrows’, it lost three battleships sunk
by mines and six other capital ships were damaged. With British prestige at
stake, Kitchener ordered Australian and New Zealand (Anzac), British and
Indian troops under the command of General Sir Ian Hamilton to assault the
Gallipoli peninsula, with the support of French forces. All gained a
foothold, but that was all. Lieutenant Colonel Mustapha Kemal, the 34-
year-old commander of the Turkish 19th Division, led a regiment of his
men in a counter-attack with fixed bayonets against the Anzacs that beat the
invaders off the high ground. For the next eight months, both sides launched
ferocious and suicidal attacks and counter-attacks against the other. Men
who survived the shells, machine-gun fire and frenzied hand-to-hand
combat died of diseases such as malaria, dysentery and enteric fever in the
summer’s oppressive heat. In the winter, as raging winter storms drowned
soldiers in their trenches, a new commander, General Sir Charles Monro,
recommended withdrawal which, when it ended in early January 1916,
proved to be the Entente’s greatest success of the campaign. The Entente
had suffered some 265,000 casualties; the outnumbered Turks, 218,000.
The Australian media interpreted the heroic performance of the Anzacs at
Gallipoli as a seminal event in the birth of Australian and New Zealand
nationalism, and starting in 1916, Australians celebrated 25 April as Anzac
Day, ‘the natal day of Australia’s entrance into the world’s politics and
history’.34 After the war, Gallipoli would become the symbol of Australian
national identity as it became a sovereign Dominion. Gallipoli proved
equally important in the evolution of modern Turkish nationalism, as it
heralded the rise to fame and leadership of Mustapha Kemal, who would
become the symbol and the leader of post-war Turkey.
The disaster at Gallipoli gave new impetus to a British invasion of
Mesopotamia that had begun in 1914. Unlike the British government in
London, the British government in India, long accustomed to regarding the
Russians as the greatest threat to Indian security, would tolerate neither
Russian access to the Straits nor a unified Arabia in any form. Instead, it
focused on protecting British interests, particularly the pipeline, refinery
and terminal of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Mesopotamia and the
Persian Gulf, as the Royal Navy had begun its transition from coal to oil in
1911. British imperial forces consequently took the offensive, and then,
lured by the prospect of seizing Baghdad, advanced 115 miles up the Shatt-
al-Arab channel to the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and took
the city of Kurnah in early December.
In early 1915, Indian Army forces moved further inland up the river
system to eliminate Turkish threats to oilfields across the border in Persia.
The British imperial forces used a variety of shallow-draught boats to
navigate the marshy, three-foot-deep waterways of the interior in their hunt
for Arab sailing vessels, or dhows, engaged in supplying the growing
Turkish forces. A Turkish counter-attack in April ended in a disastrous rout,
and prompted the 6th Indian Division under Major General Charles
Townshend to attack further up the River Tigris to seize Kut-al-Amara, and
then up the River Euphrates in the west to seize Nasiriyah. Summer heat
and disease notwithstanding, British imperial forces had advanced 140
miles inland on the waterways, and now Baghdad beckoned irresistibly. The
Indian Army sailed another 180 miles to seize Kut-al-Amara, as the Turks
retreated to fortified positions at Ctesiphon, thirty miles below Baghdad.
Late in October, the War Committee in London, in accord with the Raj,
the British government in India, determined to strike for Baghdad to sever
German communications with, and thus intrigues in Persia and Afghanistan,
and to salvage prestige in the Muslim world lost at Gallipoli. In late
November Townshend’s division assaulted Ctesiphon, only to encounter
Turkish artillery that drove the division back down the river, where
Townshend and his troops found themselves under siege in Kut-al-Amara
by Ottoman forces in December. The British imperial forces surrendered on
29 April 1916 and were marched off into captivity. They had overreached,
and turned victory into defeat in the ‘Bastard War’.
In February the British War Office assumed ‘paternity’ of the
Mesopotamian campaign from the British government of India, and sent
new officers and massed supplies. A new commander, Lieutenant General
Sir Stanley Maude, began a methodical and steady advance towards Kut-al-
Amara in September, then attacked up the River Tigris in December and
entered Baghdad in March 1917. In the fall he resumed his offensive to
capture as much of Mesopotamia as possible, although he himself died of
cholera in November 1917. In 1918 the British imperial forces continued
their advance through Mesopotamia and ended a war that had started so
badly by occupying the oil-rich city of Mosul on 1 November.
As the Gallipoli and Mesopotamian disasters unfolded in 1915,
Kitchener’s advisers in the Arab Bureau in Cairo devised an ‘Egyptian
Empire’ scheme, in which High Commissioner Kitchener would rule a
single Arab state through two figureheads, the Sharif of Mecca as spiritual
leader and the monarch of Egypt as political front. The Arab Bureau
convinced itself and then the Cabinet in London that the Arabs in the
Ottoman Empire might fight with the British if they could enlist Hussein,
who was proposing himself as ruler of the Arab world. The British army
would have to invade Syria and Palestine, since Hussein had no forces or
unified political following, but such a move would threaten French interests
in the Middle East. Mark Sykes, the staunchest proponent of this imperial
plan, consequently met with François Picot, French colonial expert, in late
1915, and hammered out the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in May 1916. In
essence, Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman Empire. France would
rule or control Lebanon and Syria, while Britain would control
Mesopotamia and the part of Palestine with ports connected to
Mesopotamia.
In June 1916 Hussein, who was receiving funds from the Turks and the
British, declared an Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire with only a
few thousand tribesmen and no army. While Sykes began popularising the
concept of the ‘Middle East’, the British funded the revolt and sent
missions, one of which included a small, quiet, junior intelligence officer
named T. E. Lawrence, who would become British liaison to Hussein’s son
Feisal, who commanded the tribesmen in the revolt. 35
Lord Kitchener, who had not valued the Middle East, died when the
cruiser Hampshire, taking him to Russia, sank from a German mine in June
1916. In the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who had replaced
Herbert Asquith in December 1916, Britain gained a leader who valued the
Middle East for its own sake and as a route to Egypt. Determined to
establish British hegemony there, he ignored the Sykes-Picot Agreement
and ordered British imperial forces in Egypt to attack in order to establish
British power in Mesopotamia and Palestine. In March the Imperial War
Cabinet in London plotted the post-war reconfiguration of the British
Empire. Not only did it entail the independence of the white Dominions of
South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it also sought to connect
the Empire in Africa and Asia. Palestine and Mesopotamia would provide
Britain with the land bridge connecting the two continents and creating a
continuous empire from the Atlantic to the mid Pacific Oceans. Lloyd
George also sought Palestine for a Jewish homeland, and a Jewish Palestine
would become the ‘bridge between Africa, Asia, and Europe’. On 2
November, as British forces attacked towards Jerusalem, British Foreign
Secretary Arthur Balfour conveyed to Lord Rothschild the government’s
intention to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a
declaration that the United States and France later approved. What had
begun in 1915 as a sideshow, namely the war against the Ottoman Empire,
had now become the main theatre of Lloyd George’s imperial policy.36
The Ottomans repulsed the first two British offensives in the spring, but
in June 1917 General Sir Edmund Allenby, commissioned by Lloyd George
to deliver Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the people at home, arrived
from the Western Front to command the British forces. Allenby attacked in
late October and entered Jerusalem on 9 December . The Arab Revolt under
Feisal’s leadership emerged full-blown in 1917, in the process transforming
little Lawrence into the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Although its
military significance paled before Allenby’s brute force, its political
implications proved significant. When Allenby launched his offensive in
October, Feisal’s Arab forces protected Allenby’s right flank. Later in 1918
Allenby waited to take the offensive to conquer the rest of Palestine and
advance towards Damascus, Syria until September, while Feisal’s tribesmen
continued to harass the Turks and seize their transport lines. Allenby
entered Damascus on 2 October and swept on 200 miles to Aleppo by 26
October, bringing the Syrian campaign to a victorious close.
Africa
The global war of the empires in their African colonial possessions began
simultaneously with the war in Europe in 1914. Entente colonies promptly
invaded their German neighbours, although German colonial governors had
pleaded, in vain, for neutrality. The Germans had also argued against the
use of African troops in colonial warfare to forestall black men killing
white men, but ultimately all the imperial powers mobilised their African
subjects either as soldiers or labourers to such an extent that the war
actually depopulated some regions.
The British government planned to seize German colonies as spoils of
war. In the opinion of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, the British
Cabinet ‘behaved more like a gang of Elizabethan buccaneers than a meek
collection of black-coated Liberal Ministers’.37 In August 1914 the German
colonies in West and East Africa, which possessed key ports and powerful
wireless stations, were attacked by colonial forces from surrounding French
and British colonies, Indian forces and white South African and Rhodesian
forces. These forces crushed the German colonies of Togoland, Cameroon
and South West Africa rather handily between 1914 and 1916.
German East Africa was larger in area than France and Germany
combined, and surrounded by British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies.
Initial neutrality between the British and German governors yielded to
small offensives by both sides in September. In November, a British
Imperial Expeditionary Force of 8,000 British and Indian troops landed at
the port of Tanga, its commander, Major General A. E. Aitken, vowing to
make ‘short work of a lot of niggers’ and to ‘thrash the Germans before
Christmas’.38 Aitken was the first, but not the last, to underestimate his
opponent, Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his
Schutztruppe of a total of 260 European officers and non-commissioned
officers, 184 African non-commissioned officers and 2,472 African
soldiers, or askaris. Aitken lost the ensuing clash and his command, as
Lettow-Vorbeck, outnumbered eight to one, counter-attacked and routed the
Indian troops with minimal loss to his own men . The war in East Africa
was just beginning. Lettow-Vorbeck acknowledged that defeat was
inevitable, but wanted to prolong the struggle as long as possible to deflect
Entente forces from the Western Front. He restricted his forces to guerrilla
warfare, and by the end of 1915 his little army had grown to 3,000 white
and 11,000 black soldiers. The British, in contrast, refused to arm black
men on a large scale in East Africa, and formed no new King’s African
Rifle battalions in the west in 1915.
In February 1916, South African Jan Smuts assumed command of British
imperial forces in East Africa, right after a German force of 1,300 had
routed a 6,000 man force of Indians, Africans, English, Rhodesians and
white South Africans, the last of whom, new to war, had turned and run in
the face of a bayonet charge by yelling German askaris. Smuts launched
40,000 men against Lettow-Vorbeck’s 16,000, but capture as much land as
he might, Smuts could not run his German opponent to ground and destroy
the German colonial army. Lettow-Vorbeck’s askaris, or ‘damned kaffirs’
(niggers) as Smuts called them,39 proved to be better soldiers in the bush
than Smuts’s white or Indian troops. Disease and parasitic infestations, from
chiggers to guinea worm, plagued all the soldiers, regardless of rank or
colour, while the steadily moving struggle consumed tens of thousands of
porters who carried the soldiers’ equipment. The war depopulated the
region, created social instability, destroyed already primitive
communications and transportation and often led to famine. As 1916
continued, Smuts acquired more black soldiers from West Africa, whose
effectiveness he grudgingly acknowledged by replacing white South
Africans with a Nigerian Brigade. By fall 1916, British imperial forces
numbered 80,000 men against Lettow-Vorbeck’s 10,000, but the German
force continued to elude its pursuers.
In January 1917 Smuts relinquished his command, proclaimed the defeat
of the German resistance, and in March joined the Imperial War Cabinet
conference in London at Lloyd George’s invitation. Yet the fighting in East
Africa continued, as Smuts’s successors substantially increased the number
of African soldiers. After a pitched battle in mid October 1917, Lettow-
Vorbeck withdrew and invaded Portuguese territory; the British Empire had
finally driven him from German East Africa. As 1918 began, the British
imperial forces were now more than 90 per cent black, either African or
West Indian. With the British in hot pursuit, the dwindling German forces
plundered Portuguese supply depots, re-entered German East Africa in the
fall of 1918, and then marched north-west into Northern Rhodesia. Lettow-
Vorbeck learned of the German surrender on 13 November, and on 25
November he surrendered his tiny army of 1,300 men, the last German
force to do so.
While the imperial forces waged war against one another, African
rebellions against the imperial powers remained isolated. The British easily
crushed a small uprising in Nyasaland in East Africa in January, and beat
back an invasion of Egypt by the Senussi brotherhood from Libya. French
soldiers suppressed another revolt in southern Tunisia. The colonial powers
suppressed information on the scope of these conflicts and the brutal
suppression of the rebels, which would have demonstrated the hypocrisy of
their condemnation of German pre-war atrocities in Africa.40
Yet one struggle, the Volta-Bani War in French West Africa from late
1915 through to 1917, demonstrated the potential extent and savagery of
these struggles. The onset of the war in Europe drained French and native
forces from the region, and the violent and impulsive French colonial
administration attempted first to repress the Muslims and then to conscript
local men. The villages of the region declared war on the French colonial
administration, and in a series of escalating battles in which the well-armed
colonial forces killed thousands of tribesmen, the warriors, who were
determined to persevere despite their losses, repelled the French, shattering
the myth of their invincibility.41
The French, wretchedly frustrated by their failure to crush the tribes,
amassed more soldiers and artillery and proceeded to wipe entire villages
off the map, transforming the region into a ‘desert’ and destroying the tribes
and their food sources throughout 1916. After a final sortie early in 1917
essentially finished the war, the French continued to execute captured rebel
leaders throughout 1917. The French had mobilised the largest force in their
colonial history – some 2,500 West African tirailleurs and 2,500 auxiliaries
with cannon and machine guns – to subdue villages with a total population
of some 8–900,000 inhabitants. They slaughtered an estimated 30,000
villagers in a ‘total war’ in their successful ‘pacification’ of the Volta-Bani
region. 42
East Asia
As the British focused on their German opponent in Europe, they needed
support in East Asia and in the Pacific and Indian Oceans; they turned to
their Japanese ally for assistance. The Royal Navy needed assistance
protecting the global sea lanes and British merchant ships from German
raiders, supporting overseas expeditions against the German colonies and
transporting Dominion and colonial troops to wartime theatres. When the
British government requested Japanese naval assistance, the Japanese,
recognising the war in Europe as an opportunity for expansion in China and
the Pacific, responded enthusiastically. The Japanese army coveted further
territory and influence in China, while the navy eyed Germany’s Pacific
possessions – the Marshall, Mariana and Caroline islands. Japan ordered
Germany to clear eastern waters and surrender its leasehold of Kiaochou in
China’s Shandong province. On 23 August, Japanese forces, wasting no
time in case of a short war in Europe, landed on the Shandong Peninsula
and captured the port of Qingdao. When the President of the Chinese
Republic, Yuan Shikai, declared the German territory in Shandong a war
zone, the Japanese army seized this cloak of legitimacy to occupy the entire
province, which in turn prompted Yuan to demand their total withdrawal.
Clearly, Japanese assurances to Western powers that they merely intended
to drive the Germans out of China and seek no territorial aggrandisement
were moot.
In January 1915 the Japanese government presented the Chinese with
Twenty-One Demands, which included recognition of its rights in Shandong
and the extension of its lease on Manchuria for ninety-nine years. The most
extreme demands would compromise Chinese sovereignty, grant the
Japanese economic supremacy in China and make the Chinese government
dependent on Japanese advisers and police officials. The Japanese
government ultimately withdrew the extreme demands and agreed to
relinquish some of their territorial acquisitions, and the Chinese government
agreed to the ultimatum in May 1915.43
Yuan persisted in challenging Japanese privileges and authority in
Manchuria, Mongolia and Korea, and the Japanese government decided in
March 1916 to aid Chinese opposition movements. The Japanese
government was now supporting Yuan symbolically while inciting
opposition against him as it tried to increase Chinese dependence on Japan
and secure Great Power recognition of Japan’s pre-eminence in Asia .
Behind the scenes, an increasingly impatient Japanese army command
contemplated provoking a civil war as an excuse to subdue China. In fall
1916 a new Japanese Cabinet under General Terauchi Masatake used loans
to the Chinese government to increase its influence, and successfully
encouraged the Chinese government to sever ties with and declare war on
Germany, all with the aim of gaining European recognition of its dominion
over former German territories at a future peace conference. With the
virtual elimination of the European powers from Asia, both the Japanese
army and navy were also increasingly concerned during 1917 about an
eventual conflict with the United States over the Pacific and East Asia. 44
The Japanese force that deployed to Siberia in July 1918 in the Entente
intervention to contain the newly formed Bolshevik government in Russia –
some 80,000 soldiers in comparison to the 10,000-man forces that the
British, French and United States sent – indicated the intent to strengthen
Japan’s presence on the Asian continent. Japanese governmental officials
had already contemplated a major incursion into North Manchuria and
Siberia in order to extend the Japanese Empire into northern Asia and
reduce Siberia to a client state. The Japanese clearly planned to fill the
vacuum in East Asia caused by the collapse of the Russian Empire in order
to become a great imperial master like Great Britain and the United States.
The army also pursued continental expansion with the domestic goal of
securing primacy over the navy, which was facing an expanding American
fleet in the Pacific that justified a greatly increased budget.
Ultimately Japan gained Shandong province and control of former
German possessions in the South Pacific, but its wartime intrigue and self-
aggrandisement in East Asia aroused the concerns of Great Britain and the
United States . On the other hand, the Western powers’ tendency to ignore
the Japanese delegation at Versailles and their rejection of Japan’s proposed
non-discrimination covenant in the post-war treaties, indicated the West’s
continued perception of the Japanese as a second-rank power and people,
and infuriated the Japanese.
Conclusion
The Great War of 1914–18 began and ended as a global conflict that
imperial powers waged in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Great
Britain and France, with overseas colonies and control of the seas, relied on
their possessions for men and materials to fight the war in Europe. The
German government had stridently protested its encirclement by the Entente
after 1905. By the end of 1914 that potential encirclement was not merely
continental, but global, and Germany ultimately lost all of its overseas
possessions ; its thirty-year effort to gain a ‘place in the sun’ was in a
shambles. The sheer complexity of the global conflict meant that its issues
would elude simple solutions.
European and native soldiers of the empires had fought in Europe and
around the globe. As the war eroded the traditional prohibition against
using coloured troops from the colonies to fight against Europeans, it
heightened the fear of white people towards peoples of colour. The
monstrous slaughter of Europeans and their use of colonial soldiers to fight
even along the Western Front, aroused the spectre of the demise of
European supremacy. This very fear further exposed the true nature of
imperialism in its insidious exploitation of coloured peoples through
division, conquest and continuing repressive violence. The participation of
African and Asian troops in the slaughter of white men, their access to
white women in ways theretofore unimaginable and, finally, the French use
of Senegalese soldiers in the post-war occupation of western Germany – all
threatened the traditional imperial order of racial supremacy.
The war and the Russian Revolution, the latter the work of egalitarian
Jewish Bolshevism, or ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, as conservatives in the Western
world labelled this new threat, exacerbated racial fears in the Western
world. Anti-Semitism was rife, as fears that Bolshevism would penetrate
the colonial world, undermine European power and destroy a racist,
capitalist and imperialist world prompted racist theorists to propose the
annihilation of the threatening ‘inferior’ races. The war thus heightened the
imperialist racism already evident in the pre-war Western world. American
Lothrop Stoddard’s book, The Rising Tide of Color against White World
Supremacy, published in 1920, lamented the irreparable losses of
genetically superior white men in the Great War. Other races would view
the divisions of the European war as a sign of weakness, and Asians –
Japanese, Chinese and Indians – might unite and assert themselves. The
French use of African troops in Europe compromised and posed the worst
danger to European superiority.
In light of these pervasive fears, it is not surprising that only the white
Dominions – Australia and New Zealand, Canada and South Africa –
became sovereign states and achieved autonomy within the British Empire.
The Entente did not consider offering national self-determination to the
coloured peoples of their empires. The war had drawn some 1.5 million
Indians into military service for the British Empire and brought heavy
taxes, war loans, requisitions of grain and raw materials and inflation, but it
did not bring independence or even autonomy. Instead, the British resorted
to repression and violence during and after the war to maintain their power
in India, culminating in the Amritsar massacre of 1919. Such acts propelled
the rise of Mahatma Gandhi, who launched a non-violent Non-Cooperation
Movement. The British responded to any outbreaks of violence by crushing
the movement and imprisoning Gandhi for six years in 1922.
Jan Smuts designed the mandate system of the League of Nations as a
substitute for annexation of Germany’s former colonies to appease
Woodrow Wilson.45 Europeans deemed Class A mandates the Arab regions
of Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, Syria and Lebanon eligible for
independence at some indeterminate future time, but with no say in the
matter. Class B and C Mandates in Africa and the Pacific faced no prospect
of independence, although Blaise Diagne convened a Pan-African Congress
in Paris that proclaimed the right of self-determination for African
peoples.46 Hô Chi Minh, a waiter in Paris during the Peace Conference,
petitioned for the freedom of Indochina as his countrymen had served on
the Salonica front and laboured in France, but to no avail.
African-American intellectual, W. E. B. DuBois, was an organiser and
participant in the Pan-African Congress of 1919, and although he pleaded
eloquently for the right of self-determination for African peoples, the
American colonial expert at the Paris Peace Conference, historian George
Louis Beer, declared, ‘The negro [sic] race has hitherto shown no capacity
for progressive development except under the tutelage of other peoples.’47
The United States, which supported the mandate system and even acquired
some Pacific islands in the bargain, never joined the League of Nations and
assured itself of the immunity of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which
asserted America’s claim to dominate the Western Hemisphere, from any
general agreements.
More critically, as Lothrop Stoddard’s book on the concern over the
demise of the white race suggested, white Americans viewed African
Americans with the same prejudiced attitudes with which their European
counterparts viewed the coloured peoples of the world. African-American
soldiers had served primarily as labour troops, because of the fears of white
Southerners in particular that arming black soldiers would enable them to
challenge Jim Crow upon their return. If Amritsar symbolised the British
repression of Indians, the race riots and lynchings of black Americans,
including soldiers in uniform, that dotted the United States during the war
and into the post-war years, were intended to disabuse African Americans
of any ideas of improved, not to mention, equal rights that they hoped to
attain through loyally serving their country. A popular American song
jovially intoned, ‘How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after
they’ve seen Paree?’ With murderous violence; answered white mobs
lynching black soldiers throughout the South and burning black residential
and commercial neighbourhoods to the ground in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In January 1919 the British Empire reached its zenith, with more than a
million additional square miles, primarily in former Ottoman domains, as
Lloyd George laid claim to dominance in the Middle East. In April 1920 the
British and French agreed secretly to monopolise the oil supplies of the
Middle East, and in July the French took control of Syria and would later
rule in Syria and Lebanon. After riots in Egypt and Egyptian demands for
complete independence in 1919 and revolt in Iraq in 1920, an over-extended
British government granted both limited autonomy in 1922. That same year,
Britain assumed the League mandate over Palestine, west of the River
Jordan, while Eastern Palestine became Jordan.
More than a million African soldiers had fought on various fronts, and
even more Africans served as porters or bearers. Most West and East
African soldiers, though they no longer feared Europeans and had often lost
respect for imperial power and prestige, essentially sought to resume their
lives.48 The war in Africa had led to famine, disease, destruction and
depopulation, and had redrawn the imperial map of Africa, but it also
imparted a new sense of black African nationalism and sowed ideas about
‘self-determination of peoples and the accountability of colonial powers’,
which would influence events later in the twentieth century.49 West Indian
soldiers’ service in their regiments in Africa and the Middle East stimulated
the rise of black nationalism, as they began the struggle for national
liberation in the British West Indies. 50
Thus did the war of 1914–18, far from fulfilling Wilson’s adage that it
would make the world safe for democracy, end by protecting and enhancing
the global rule of whites over other races. Still, violence in Egypt, India,
Korea and China in 1919 and after exposed the fissures in the imperial
world. The costs of the war weakened the imperial powers to an extent not
clear at the Armistice, but the war both strengthened and weakened the
imperial framework as a transnational system of white domination. Indeed,
the beginning of the end of empire can be dated from 1919. The
achievement of the aspirations for freedom and independence of the
coloured peoples of the world would require another global war of an even
greater magnitude in 1939–45.
With the end of the war and demobilisation of the armed forces,
advocates of the new air arm confronted the challenge to justify and
preserve air forces amid economic pressures and challenges from the older
services. In Great Britain, the Royal Air Force, under the leadership of
Chief of Air Staff Sir Hugh Trenchard, survived the post-war reductions
through a policy of ‘air control’, policing the far corners of the British
Empire more cheaply and effectively than the army. The successful use of a
few RAF bombers to locate, then bomb and strafe, the camp of the ‘ Mad
Mullah’ in Somaliland in 1919 and 1920, and ultimately drive him into
Ethiopia where he died, convinced the British government to enlarge the
RAF’s role in policing the Middle East. The RAF further stationed two
squadrons in Ireland for population control, ‘to fly low over the small
villages and inspire considerable fear among the ignorant peasantry’.51
Such events in Ireland, Africa and the Middle East demonstrated that the
wartime progress of military aviation enabled the realisation of British pre-
war visions of imperial domination through airplanes.
The other colonial powers followed suit. The French, Italian and Spanish
governments all employed airplanes to bomb, strafe and even drop poison
gas on rebellious native populations in North Africa during the colonial
wars of the 1920s. This practice culminated in fascist Italy’s invasion of
Ethiopia in 1935, during which Italian warplanes did all three to Ethiopian
soldiers and civilians. The great war for empire had perfected more
effective weapons – aircraft and poison gas – for European powers to use to
control and annihilate native populations during the 1920s and 1930s. Thus
what is now termed ‘asymmetrical war’, juxtaposing high-tech white armies
against low-tech non-white populations, was born in the aftermath of the
Great War. Its ravages have marked the century which has passed in ways
which ought to make us pause. The long shadow of the 1914–18 war can
still be seen today.
1 Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.),

Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–
1914 (Washington: German Historical Institute, and Cambridge University
Press, 1999), pp. 246, 392.
2 D. P. Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology
of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War (Cambridge
3 Sven Lindqvist, ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into
the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York:
New Press, 1996), pp. 2–3.
4 Thomas A. Keaney, ‘Aircraft and Air Doctrinal Development in Great

Britain, 1912–1914’ (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1975), pp. 147–8.
5 Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of

Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 220.
6 John A. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1965 [1938]), pp. 11, 154–7, 174–5, 159, 282, 211, 222, 227, 136–7, 311–
12.
7 Charles J. Balesi, From Adversaries to Comrades-in-Arms: West Africans

and the French Military, 1885–1918 (Waltham, MA: African Studies
Association, 1979), passim.
8 Hobson, Imperialism, p. 214.
9 Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the

Coming of World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp.
6–8, 59–61. See also Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain,
1640–1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 236–7.
10 Boemeke et al. (eds.), Anticipating Total War, p. 187.
11 Ibid., p. 247.
12 Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 232.
13 Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic

Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012), pp. 124, 130.
1984), p. 164.
15 Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman

Empire and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 3,
190.
16 Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 4–5, 12, 21.
17 Ibid., pp. 28, 31–2, 34–5.
18 Philippa Levine, ‘Battle colors: race, sex, and colonial soldiery in World
War I’, Journal of Women’s History, 9:4 (1998), p. 110. See also David
Omissi (ed.), Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18
(London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 27–8, 104, 114, 119, 123.
19 Shane B. Schreiber, Shock Army of the British Empire: The Canadian

Corps in the Last 100 Days of the Great War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997),
pp. 133, 139.
20 Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the

First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999), pp. 66, 106–86
passim.
21 Ibid., p. 139.
22 Ibid.
23 Guoqi Xu, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the

Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 1–6.
24 Laura Lee Downs, Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the

French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 60.
25 Tyler Stovall, ‘The color line behind the lines: racial violence in France
during the Great War’, American Historical Review, 103:3 (1998), p. 746.
26 Balesi, Adversaries, p. 90.
27 Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom, pp. 139–40.
28 Ibid.

30 McMeekin, Russian Origins, p. 242.
31 Panikos Panayi, Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings

in Europe, North America, and Australia during the Two World Wars
(Oxford: Berg, 1993), pp. 57–8.

the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), pp. 95–104.
33 Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the

Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (University of Chicago Press, 1992),
p. 148.
34 John F. Williams, ANZACs, the Media, and the Great War (Sydney:
University of New South Wales Press, 1999), p. 110.
35 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry
Holt, 1989), pp. 168–98.
36 Ibid., pp. 267–301.
37 Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, MD:

Naval Institute Press, 1994), p. 83.
38 Byron Farwell, The Great War in Africa, 1914–1918 (New York: W. W.

Norton, 1986), pp. 163, 165.
39 Ibid., p. 266.
40 Mahir Şaul and Patrick Royer, West African Challenge to Empire:

Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 2001), pp. 1, 14, 24–5.
41 Ibid., pp. 127–72.
42 Ibid., pp. 212, 230, 4–5.
43 Chris Wrigley (ed.), The First World War and the International
Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000), p. 115.
44 Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the

Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
pp. 119–53, 157–80.
45 Manfred F. Boemeke et al. (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A

Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 572,
578, 584.
46 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–

1918 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 574–8.
47 Boemeke et al., Treaty of Versailles, pp. 494–5.
48 Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstsrom, pp. 187–205, 215, 229–35; M. E.

Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 135–8, 164–6, 203–6, 229–35; and James
J. Mathews, ‘World War I and the rise of African nationalism: Nigerian
veterans as catalysts of political change’, Journal of Modern African
Studies, 20:3 (1982), pp. 493–502.
49 M. Crowder, ‘The First World War and its consequences’, in A. Adu

Boahen (ed.), General History of Africa, vol. VII: Africa under Colonial
Domination: 1880–1935 (London: Heinemann Educational for UNESCO,
1985), pp. 283–311.
50 W. F. Elkins, ‘A source of black nationalism in the Caribbean: the revolt

of the British West Indies regiment at Taranto, Italy’, Science and Society,
34 (1970), pp. 99–103.
51 United States Military Intelligence, 1917–1927, 20 vols. (New York:

Garland, 1978), vol. XI, Part 2, p. 626.
16 Africa
Bill Nasson It is fairly commonplace for historians of modern Africa to see
the two world wars, although European in origin, as watersheds in the
history of the continent in the twentieth century. In one crucial – and general
– respect, the significance of the First World War in African history was its
place in the chronology of European colonisation. The war broke out at a
pivotal moment when the leading colonial states were seeking to consolidate
their territorial grip and to entrench their authority after the immense
upheavals and sprawling violence of the previous two to three decades,
linked to the imperial ‘Scramble for Africa’. That great incursion into, and
conquest of, the continent had been achieved virtually without warring
between competing European interests. In the sense of their ordering of
colonial arenas, the conflagration which erupted in 1914 can be considered
as marking the culmination of the Scramble, and as finally tidying up and
sealing the phase of European partition of the continent.
The war was, in the words of one authoritative recent history, ‘the end of
the beginning’.1 Or, in other earlier words, those of another notable historian
of Africa, the First World War may well be viewed as marking the final
‘high point of the reign of crude force’, lowering the curtain on the turbulent
era of conquest and confirming colonial ‘consolidation’.2 If Europe’s own
settlement of 1919 was fated not to last for long, overseas, the partitioning
settlement of a pacified Africa by its colonial powers would go on to endure
for rather longer, setting the confines within which Africans would have to
live.
Inextricably bound up with the experience of the First World War itself,
and intrinsic to its outcome in the region, was the attainment of the
fundamental objectives of colonial administrations, whose reach had at times
been exceeding their grasp. During the conflict, or in its early aftermath,
remaining pockets of African resistance or armed opposition to European
encroachments were conclusively subdued, and the stabilising of colonial
regimes and the formation of uncontested military power and general
security was attained.
While not matching this in overall magnitude, there are, perhaps, at least
four other striking features of Africa’s entanglement with the 1914–18 war.
First, and perhaps most self-evident, is that it was the second of two great
imperial exceptions. The first essentially European war ‘fought amongst and
profoundly affecting African populations’ had been the major war waged by
Britain to subdue Boer republicanism, the Anglo-Boer War, or South African
War, of 1899–1902.3 A second feature, inescapably quixotic in nature, is that
the first and last shots of a war which was won and lost in Europe were
discharged on opposite sides of the African continent. Thirdly, for many
regions and numerous inhabitants, the absorption into a global war was
virtually imperceptible, and its impact on life barely felt. Indeed, for some
remote and unconnected rural communities, the war simply passed over their
heads. If some shortages came after 1914, such hardships were no more than
customary, given the instabilities of local ecological systems. Moreover, the
nature of colonial control that these people experienced in 1918 was more or
less unchanged from what it had been in 1913, for instance. In that respect,
not only were the battlegrounds of the First World War here ‘less murderous’
than on Europe’s Western Front or Eastern Front.4 For millions of people,
the war would probably not have registered in their consciousness, let alone
run across their faces.
Equally, at the same time, some of those large tracts of Africa that were
locked most directly into the war were not without their share of its more
harrowing circumstances of acute civilian suffering and loss of life, as fallen
soldiers and labouring carriers and porters dropped into the soil of their
native bush as well as into the fields of Europe. Lapping down, here the war
triggered a series of what might be termed ‘knock-on’ events, processes and
implications for colonial societies and economies across stretches of the
continent. That larger tremor is the fourth and deepest inroad made by the
European war, as respective imperial powers set about trying to extract the
maximum manpower and material resources from their colonial
dependencies, and, in the case of British South Africa, a compliant
Dominion ally yet also a satellite with its own sub-imperial national
ambitions.
The declaration of European hostilities had immediate African
consequences, as Britain and France lost no time early in August in turning
upon Germany’s lightly held West African colonial territories of Togoland
and Kamerun. British entry into the war had ended any prospect of the
conflict being confined to a European theatre. In effect the opening round of
the First World War, this minor West African campaign was undertaken by
British forces from the Gold Coast and French forces from Dahomey.
Striking from the west and the east, these swift invasions terminated an early
flurry of tortuous but stagey transactions between Allied and German
colonial officials about sparing West Africa through the possibility of some
regional armistice. Although almost all of the killing and dying would end
up being borne by colonial African soldiers, European administrators were
nervous about gambling with their inviolate position of dominance – who
knew how Africans might react to the unsavoury spectacle of white men
bloodying one another?
Little more than a sandy coastal sliver, Togoland was pocketed easily by
the Allies. Kamerun, however, proved a harder nut to crack. Its mountainous
interior with its densely forested approaches provided its 1,000 German and
over 3,000 African troops under General Karl Zimmermann with stiff
defensive prospects, and the swaying contest for the colony dragged on until
February 1916, when the last of the last-ditch German defenders
surrendered. It ‘stuttered’ to an end.5 The French film director, Jean-Jacques
Annaud, satirised this spurting little West African war in his 1976 anti-
militarist black war comedy, Noirs et blancs en couleur (‘Black and white in
colour’), a story of dozy French and German colonists who eventually
discover from the arrival of newspapers, several months old, that their
countries are at war. Dutifully, they cease trading and other cross-border
transactions to become adversaries in an ineptly conducted skirmishing war.
Mindful of conserving their own valuable lives, they conscript cheap local
Africans to do the fighting.6
Berlin’s colony further south, German South West Africa, also occasioned
early mobilisation and invasion by enemy forces. At the beginning of
August, Britain’s newest Dominion, the post-1910 Union of South Africa,
was requested by its Colonial Secretary, Lewis Harcourt, to render London
what he termed, memorably, ‘a great and pressing imperial service’.7 This
was to mount a snap expedition to seize the harbours and to snuff out the
wireless stations of neighbouring German South West Africa, in order to
counter Berlin’s naval threat in the South Atlantic Ocean. Again, with a
minuscule mounted infantry garrison, backed by a handful of paramilitary
police and a scratch contingent of reservists, this enormous colony (virtually
twice the size of the German Empire in mainland Europe) was poorly
defended. Its vulnerability was due not only to its massively exposed
frontiers that were impossible to plug. Such defence preparedness as there
was focused almost entirely on the spectre of possible internal African unrest
in the light of the Herero rising of the early 1900s, rather than on the meeting
of any external attack, let alone a combined land and amphibious assault by
a strong and well-armed invader.
For German South West Africa’s governor, Theodor Seitz, and his handful
of senior officers, there was not much more to pin hope on than South
Africa’s domestic war-related troubles rumbling on and delaying an invasion
of the territory until Germany could prevail in Europe, and then divert
military resources to shore up its south-western position. Granted, the
German colony had been given a little breathing space by the war not getting
off to a good start within the Union’s divided white Afrikaner-Anglo
minority. A strategic pin on the board of British imperial defence, with the
Ottomans an ally of the Germans and the Suez Canal route to India and
Australia thus at risk, South Africa’s sea lane around the Cape of Good Hope
‘resumed its former importance’.8 The country’s Dominion status bound it
constitutionally to follow the Crown on international decisions on war or
peace. Its government was also, in any event, pro-war.
But, unlike the white settler dominions of the Pacific, in 1914 it lacked an
emphatic popular mandate for war. Before an invasion could be got
underway, there was a surge of anti-war Afrikaner nationalist opposition to
be faced down and an insurrectionary 1914–15 Afrikaner Rebellion to be
suppressed. That accomplished, with its assembly of vastly stronger forces,
superior transport, supplies and equipment, South Africa overwhelmed its
German opponents in a few short months, forcing surrender in July 1915.
Following the first armistice of the First World War, German South West
Africa passed effectively into South African hands and military rule under
martial law until the early 1920s. Part of an ambitious African expansionist
strategy fuelled by wartime opportunity, for the Union government conquest
implied ‘entering the prestigious adult world of colonial power’. 9
With its combined death toll of just over 200, this engagement in South
West Africa was, like the campaigning in West Africa, a relative sideshow
compared to the spread and depth of armed hostilities in eastern and eastern-
central zones, where the local violence of the war was felt at its most
devastating. It was there that the conduct of fighting was most bitter and
unrelenting, where the regional consequences of economic and social
disintegration were most extreme, and where agonisingly drawn-out
campaigning easily equalled the duration of the war in Europe and provided
a version of its attritional aspects. The enormous dislocation, waste and
brutality of a campaign which snaked across the region between British East
Africa and Portuguese East Africa, thrusting across into north-eastern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland, are a far cry from the romanticised or
mythologised representations of the conflict in this part of the continent,
which remain a staple of the war as imagined in more popular visual and
literary culture. The quintessential film reflection has long been the inland
gunboat bravado of John Huston’s 1951 The African Queen, set in German
East Africa in September 1914, while Peter Yates’s 1971 Murphy’s War, with
its skulking German raider and river battle, reprised the Second World War
as The African Queen had the first. A measure of recent literary reflections
would include William Boyd’s 1982 An Ice-Cream War, dealing with what
the novel’s dustjacket calls ‘a ridiculous and little-reported campaign being
waged in East Africa’, although this picaresque satire is not short on
mordant irony and grubbiness. To it could be added the overlapping
evocation of Giles Foden’s 2004 Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre
Battle of Lake Tanganyika, in which a band of predictably intrepid and
eccentric British misfits set out to wrest control of Lake Tanganyika from
prowling German warships. In effect, the grim East African conflict
becomes a watery war of white men, its toll that of those individual patriotic
adventurers who had pushed their luck too far.
In reality, for the Allied forces which were engaged in criss-crossing
combat with German forces manoeuvring down from East Africa into south-
eastern Africa and across into central areas, there was precious little
experience of a freshwater war of the waves. If it was a sideshow to
Flanders, it was still a large sideshow, a deadly contest of ‘tip and run’ in
which the overall death count ‘exceeded the total of American dead in the
Great War’.10 Even after Tanganyika was eventually overrun and firmly
occupied by his enemy, the German commander Colonel Paul Emil von
Lettow-Vorbeck led a rump of tenaciously loyal troops on a gruelling
campaign of attrition, darting through the coastal Portuguese East African
colony of Mozambique, Nyasaland and the deep north-east of Northern
Rhodesia. Rarely letting up in its winding movements, Lettow-Vorbeck’s
force of German schutztruppen and African askaris kept British, British
African, South African, southern Rhodesian, Belgian and even Portuguese
forces engaged for months and then years, entangling as well as tiring out his
adversaries through adroit tactical improvisation, sometimes inviting minor
set-piece confrontations, at other times carrying on bush fighting, turning to
glancing blows and headlong flight to save the day (Map 16.1).
Map 16.1 The war in East Africa, 1917–18.

Although massively outnumbered by the combined Allied forces, this rag-
tag assembly of experienced regular askaris, foxy turncoats who had
swopped sides by decamping from the British King’s African Rifles and
clutch of steady and proficient schutztruppen infantrymen and officers, was
always able to remain ahead of a pursuing enemy through bush experience
and exertion. Although ground down by 1918 to around 150 Germans and
about 4,400 African askaris, carriers and other labouring camp followers,
including women, Lettow-Vorbeck’s force retained its core cohesion, due in
part to its Swahili-speaking commander’s iron command. His obsessive
immersion in long and hard campaigning had as its fanciful objective the
tying down of substantial Allied forces which might otherwise have been
turned against Germany on the Western Front.
Although the ruthless Lettow-Vorbeck is now no longer seen as an
audacious exponent in Africa of classic guerrilla warfare, the fact that his
loyal askaris remained in the field with him was, perhaps, due not only to
the shooting or hanging of any deserters. For he adapted shrewdly to the
traditional African mode of warfare to which many of his troops would have
been accustomed: incorporated in the marching columns of his command
was a throng of spouses, children and personal domestic porters, who
provided aid, sustained an orderly social network as part of existence in the
field and propped up morale, as homesickness was eased by coupling the
home front to the front line. It meant that German worries were not so much
over rates of desertion by their askaris, as these were relatively low due to a
combination of fear and cultivated loyalty, but more about some of the less
welcome aspects of conducting operations as a family mission. As a
grumbling Lettow-Vorbeck recorded in his glowing 1920 reminiscences, it
had been frustrating trying to get female followers to stick to ‘a regular
marching order’, and impossible to cure many of his loyal askaris of the
habit of going ‘into battle with their children on their shoulders’.11 That,
though, was evidently not too great a hindrance, as in Africa Germany was
never formally defeated. Lettow-Vorbeck only laid down arms on 25
November, having to overcome his disbelief that the war had ceased in a
French forest a fortnight earlier. So ended the final recorded hostilities of the
First World War.
The East African campaign was an enormous and costly slog through
mostly unmapped fetid swamplands, dense bush, thickly wooded forests,
gouging scrub and imposing hills and mountains. In an operational theatre,
individual soldiers had always to be on their guard against collisions with
elephants, hippos, giraffes, lions, leopards or venomous black and green
mamba snakes. The deadly enemy beyond the flap of your bush tent could
turn out to be a feline carnivore, and crossing the Rufiji river in south-
western German East Africa entailed dodging crocodiles. Africa’s river
systems were not those of the Somme. A forbidding environment was
rendered even more sapping by belts of tsetse fly and, for humans,
debilitating parasitic illnesses like malaria, typhoid and dysentery. The rainy
season served up its own version of Passchendaele mud, leaving men, even
higher up in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, slithering about in an impassable
morass. In their geographical scale and environmental extremities, fighting
and logistical conditions in Africa had no equivalent elsewhere.
The sinews of war in protracted East African campaigning came from
impressment, with both sides conscripting many hundreds of thousands of
Africans into labouring service as heavy porters and carriers, hauling
munitions, stores, food supplies and other army equipment on short rations
through appalling tropical weather . With draught animals and motor
vehicles being mostly useless in bush terrain, Britain alone employed at least
1 million porters. Riddled with respiratory and intestinal diseases, perilously
exposed and malnourished transport conscripts suffered ‘appalling
deathrates’.12 On the German side, the death rate among African carriers and
their family camp followers has been estimated at around 350,000, with the
British fatality count not too far behind.13
As ranging hostilities assumed cycles of rippling intensity, the
transformative and destructive violence of the war flooded into local pastoral
and arable economies, uprooting the homesteads of smallholder farmers and
choking commercial trade routes which usually conveyed grain and other
cash-crops. With Germany’s forces in Africa conducting war particularly on
the cheap, its small army, never more than about 15,000–strong, settled into
wholesale plunder. Rampaging forces requisitioned cattle, grain and other
edible crops at will, and conscripted young and sometimes even older men,
provided they seemed able-bodied. To deny succour to one or other
approaching side, many villages were also torched, their crops burned and
cattle run off when they could not be seized. The inevitable consequence of
such wholesale wrecking was an acute food shortage after 1916 which
verged on famine, in the view of some scholars.14 With virtually anything
that could be consumed being picked off, populations were left to subsist on
roots and, on horrifically extreme occasions, to turn to cannibalism. In
addition to labouring conscripts, some 300,000 civilians in German-occupied
territories are estimated to have perished.
Dire food shortages gnawed away until 1918 and beyond in areas
burdened – either directly or indirectly – by combat operations, with the
highlands of German East Africa especially severely affected. In their
common resort to scorched-earth tactics, both sides had recent thorough
colonial experience upon which to draw. In the same East African region, the
Germans had cut their teeth just a few years earlier suppressing the 1905–7
Maji-Maji rebellion, while, in South West Africa, the suppression of a mild
revolt had produced the punitive and genocidal Herero War of 1904–7,
conspicuous for laying waste and for the grisliness of concentration camps.15
For their part, the British knew well how effective their recent scouring of
the Boer farmlands of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had been in
ensuring that they would prevail over a guerrilla enemy in the South African
War of 1899–1902. If anything, as a kind of colonial preamble to the First
World War, Africa in the 1900s witnessed ‘the introduction into state
practice and political discourse of extreme forms of militarised brutalism
against civilians’.16
The diseases which felled transport auxiliaries and swept through battered
villages were, inevitably, dwarfed by the scale of the Spanish influenza
epidemic which coursed through large tracts of eastern, western, central and
southern Africa in 1918 and 1919. Its virulent bacteria carried down to
African coastal areas from Europe, and the influenza spread inland rapidly,
inserting its feverish presence into the numerous arteries of transport and
communication that had been laid down to ferry supplies, soldiers and
communications from the imperial metropole. The lines – both short and
long – implanted by the war provided ready rural channels through which
the deadly influenza could be carried across the entire continent, to every
port, urban location, mining compound and rural village. There are,
unsurprisingly, no precise figures for African mortality, although there is a
reasonable estimate of 2.38 million deaths, representing between 3 and 5 per
cent of the population of every African colonial territory.17
When it came to fighting, in one fundamental way there was no great
difference between opposing sides in their running of armed hostilities. Save
for a light dusting of European officers, comparatively tiny numbers of
regular white troops and Britain’s deployment of Indian Expeditionary Force
units, the soldiers who faced each other were all African. Indeed, Britain,
unlike France, restricted its cheap and plentiful African troops to ‘campaigns
within Africa’, where warfare always boiled down to ‘upholding the colonial
order’.18 The insertion of Indian Army regiments into the African arena
remains overlooked in accounts which stress how ‘the experience of the
Great War radically altered’ sepoys’ perceptions of Europe, and that the
‘First World War can hardly be said to represent typical colonial warfare as it
existed in India in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.’19 In
Africa, though, it was, arguably, quite the contrary. The distances, blistering
heat, incessant movement and almost total absence of large set-piece battles
endowed campaigns there with a colonial ambience that would have been far
from unfamiliar to soldiering Indians.
When it came to soldiering, though, it was almost always Africans whom
colonial states had in mind. In neither Paris nor London was their ever much
sense that metropolitan troops might be required to sacrifice in defence of
empire. From the outset, in their search for local combatants, European
administrations resorted to an almost enslaving form of conscription across
large swathes of the continent, a practice which became systematic, harsh
and often brutal. From their West African territories, the British recruited
infantry to serve on the opposite side, in East Africa. Recruiters in French
West Africa and North Africa scoured coastal forest and savannah regions,
plucking younger men from virtually every accessible peasant village for
army service. For most, theirs would not even be an African war, to be
comprehended and made sense of within familiar horizons, for wartime
would collapse the boundary between imperial France and its colonial
dependencies.
Even before hostilities, pushy French colonial army officers like General
Charles Mangin had been advocating the despatch to Europe of a Force
noire as a contingency for a shortage of fighting men because of France’s
falling birth rate. The ‘valorous warriors’ of sub-Saharan Africa who ‘had
achieved significant feats of arms in the past’ would ‘stand ready to repeat
them for France’.20 The notion of colonies rallying to save the mother
country became a potent symbol of the binding loyalties of empire.
Ultimately, over 150,000 West Africans were extracted to be transported to
the Western Front in both France and Belgium, there to be jammed in as
compensatory belligerents for the increasingly horrendous losses of the
home French army. In addition to this, French colonial authorities also
recruited tens of thousands of other fighting tirailleurs from Morocco and
Algeria. Europe took the lives of over 30,000 of these, killed in action, while
immersion in combat and exposure to the intensities of a war-torn France
stirred the political consciousness of others.
Conscription for an incomprehensible foreign war did not turn out to be all
plain sailing, as those who were targeted did not necessarily all stand up
straight to be measured. There were, to be sure, compliant conscripts. For
unskilled young men, itching to escape the suffocating patriarchal authority
of village elders, the army presented comparatively well-rewarded
employment. For others who enlisted, war service offered the chance to
retrieve a warrior identity which had shrivelled away after colonial conquest.
The war was also a wily business in Africa, employment in it at times
involving a rich tapestry of personal fabrication. British ethnic recruitment
preferences in Nyasaland for the Yao, soldiers of ‘the martial spirit’,
encouraged volunteers for the local battalions of the King’s African Rifles to
cultivate a strutting military aesthetic, claiming the character of a Yao
masculinity known to be sought after . Once in the ranks, loyalties could turn
out to be gossamer thin, and there were, as already noted, soldiers who
served both British and German sides during the lengthy East African
struggle. Regional migrant labour channels in British West Africa and in
southern Africa also became enmeshed in military enlistment. In their
sweeps for volunteers, recruiters had to make their way within them, with
the result that many in the Gold Coast Regiment were not from British
Africa but from the French territory of Upper Volta, while ‘60 to 70 percent’
of Rhodesia Native Regiment soldiers in the First World War ‘originated
from other territories’.21
More prominent than joining up, however, were the various kinds of
resistance which met increasingly forceful efforts to raise recruits, especially
with growing recognition ‘that the French system of commandant
administration had entirely coopted local chiefs, making them enforcers of
French demands’.22 At their most extreme, these included acts of self-
mutilation by recruits to render them incapable of service. Increasingly
common was mass flight by young men, who often fled over colonial
borders or hid out in remote refuges until ravenous French recruiting
sergeants had turned their gaze elsewhere. Between 1915 and 1917, tens of
thousands of potential conscripts from territories like the Cote d’Ivoire and
French Sudan flocked to the Gold Coast and other neighbouring British
colonies, secure in the knowledge that the British did not conscript their
African subjects for trench service in Western Europe.
The instinctual resort to short-term migrations of non-compliance, the
turning of backs in protest was, of course, an old habit in ducking
burdensome peacetime colonial demands for taxes and labour levies. Once
again, a harried peasantry turned less to overt resistance and more to slippery
avoidance of the colonial grip and the subversion of its claims, the
quintessential ‘weapons of the weak’.23 In that sense, for many ordinary
Africans the experience of being squeezed by recurring army recruitment
drives after 1914 was part of a familiar picture, the newest resented round in
a cycle of onerous tribute impositions.
Aside from the tactic of trying to outrun the grasp of the war, there were
also scattered peasant revolts or insurrections as predatory recruiters pushed
too hard against recalcitrant communities. For many French West Africans,
conscription rapidly acquired a notorious meaning, the metaphorical menace
of the impôt du sang, a bodily ‘blood tax’. Sullen restiveness spilled over
into an inevitable routine incidence of desertion and petty insubordination
among men once in uniform, especially marked among French North
African soldiers. Most African troops might have put up with brutality,
callousness, bungling and shortages on their side, as did their metropolitan
counterparts, but for some the deteriorating terms of survival on the
European front broke the limits of personal endurance.
While the African war was associated with risings and rebellions against
its demands, chiefly conscription, in some ways the depth of disaffection
also represented the dragging out of older and more entrenched animosities,
simmering away since the period of the Scramble. In that sense, again, in
some of its consequences the First World War was not simply a sudden
rupture, tearing at a colonially pacified continent. For there was always a
duality to post-1914 grievances about treatment: some of these had been
lurking there since the last years of the nineteenth century. The war was,
among a myriad of other things, the architect of their intensification.
Militant, fire-eating brands of African-inflected Christianity stamped their
apocalyptic imprint on a patchwork of rural societies, capturing and
cultivating a popular millenarian temper. In volatile British Nyasaland,
where wholesale conscription had come early and where losses in the early
campaigns against the Germans had been high, the distinctively dignified
figure of John Chilembwe, a towering evangelical preacher, whipped up a
fleeting utopian uprising against colonial authority in 1915. Two years later,
discontented chiefs in the south-east, egged on by clamouring spirit
mediums, ignited the Makombe rising in central Mozambique. These and
other war-related eruptions did much to dash contemporary missionary
hopes of Africans settling themselves within the paternalism of an imperial
civilising mission.
To the south, the Union of South Africa’s declaration of an unprovoked
offensive against German South West Africa helped to tip a body of more
wild-eyed Afrikaner nationalist republicans into an armed insurrection.
There, the dutiful Dominion government of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts was
far from having won over a largely isolationist Afrikaner society, much of it
coursing with anti-British imperialist, pro-German, anti-Anglicised Union or
straightforward anti-war sentiment. Hit by landlessness and poverty,
inflamed by the incandescent Old Testament prophecies of British imperial
implosion by a famed religious visionary, Niklaas ‘Siener’ van Rensburg,
and led by a knot of disaffected and disloyal generals who had swiftly shed
their khaki, around 11,000 mostly poorer rural Afrikaners renovated their
Anglo-Boer War commando heritage and rode out to topple the government,
in a despairing lunge by the socially marginal and the politically estranged.
Not for nothing has a recent authoritative account characterised it as a
‘desperate rebellion’.24 Seditious Afrikaner Christian fundamentalists, who
thought that the war would open the way to a reclaiming of a lost republican
independence, went the same way as yearning Africans who succumbed too
readily to wartime ecstasies of anti-colonial redemption. Their spurts of
rebellion were speedily extinguished.
Being less outwardly combative in nature, other religiously inflected
wartime blossomings were able to endure on the margins. Thus, British and
French West Africa also witnessed the emergence of independent Christian
movements which brought out their disaffected followers against the
intruding European war. While peaceable by inclination and inclined more
towards defensive withdrawal, a kind of spiritual secession from wartime
and its hated exactions, these local religious formations still took on a
powerful millenarian tone, their growling dissidence looking towards a
coming apocalyptic moment. From Northern Rhodesia in central Africa
across to the Gold Coast and the Cote d’Ivoire, African religious leaders
who not only expressed, but defined themselves in the language and imagery
of the Bible, stood up to ram home the cataclysmic meaning of the times.
Theirs was a moral imperative to repudiate or even to disobey the colonial
order. And, on that basis, the need was for readiness as the plague of
European rule receded, to embrace the imminent end of the sinful world and
to welcome the second coming of Christ. On the more sober end of that
scale, in South Africa there was the ironic gaze of the Xhosa Christian
educationist, D. D. T. Jabavu. Early in September 1914, he declared wryly
that African people ‘were taken by surprise’ to find ‘that the European
nations who led in education and Christianity should find no other means
than the sword and accumulated destructive weapons to settle their
diplomatic differences’.25
Alongside, and occasionally interpenetrated with these ripples of dissent,
was a molecular range of other risings, some of them highly organised.
Between 1915 and 1917 these included armed resistance against British and
French colonial authorities in the British Niger protectorates and in
Dahomey. And to the south-east, the Barwe along the Portuguese East
African border with Southern Rhodesia rebelled against the flailing
Portuguese in 1917 and 1918, by then haemorrhaging food provisions and
stores through Lettow-Vorbeck’s easy plundering of their garrison depots.
Never fully subterranean, but always drifting along and ignitable, were the
throbbing Islamic militancies of French North Africa, which also criss-
crossed the French-controlled West African savannah region. Militant Islam,
which had long coloured political life across these areas in the modern era,
served as the incubus of a string of localised rebellions in colonies to the
west and to the north, including the unleashing in 1916 and 1917 of the
Kaocen revolt, a series of repeated attacks against the French by Muslim
Tuareg warriors, for whom wartime instabilities provided a chance to try to
settle earlier pre-war scores.
On a score of another scale, there was also the Ottoman Empire, with
Turkey having of course entered the war on the German side late in 1914.
This had immediate implications for Africa. There, it can and has been
argued that once ‘holy war’ was declared by the Sultan-Caliph, the Germans
‘had had high hopes that all Islam would rise against the British’.26 On the
other hand, it could be suggested equally that the Germans themselves may
well have been rather relieved that a crusade of that sort never got started –
after all, what the Ottoman zealots had envisaged was an indiscriminately
universal anti-colonial jihad, with the whole European colonial world in its
sights. If that failed to materialise, the outbreak of European war certainly
still brought the probing Ottomans an opportunity to try to regain territory
lost across North Africa to France and Britain. Troublesome anti-
conscription outbursts peppered Algeria, while in the French protectorate of
Morocco there were anti-colonial revolts orchestrated by Abd al-Malik,
reputedly fanned by the Germans.
Also embroiled with the Germans – as well as the Ottomans – by whom
they were funded and equipped, were the Sanusiyya or Senussi Muslim
formation, which had earlier resisted French expansion in the Sahara
between 1902 and 1913, and had also fought vigorously against the Italian
colonisation of Libya, starting in 1911. Resilient and effective exponents of
guerrilla warfare, the concerted Sanusiyya intervention proved to be more
than a handful for the jumpy Italians, whose hold on Libyan territory at this
stage was still far from firm. Sure enough, early in 1915 Italian forces in the
northern Libyan province of Misurata were defeated by Sanusiyya
insurgents. Several months later, emboldened and fast-moving fighters
extended their field of offensive operations across the Libyan frontier and
launched themselves at the British in Egypt.
For the frustrated Allies, something serious was required to bring a
worsening diversionary conflict to a halt. It appeared in 1916, with the
accession as Libyan monarch of Sidi Muhammad Idris al-Sanusi, a pliable
pro-British figure who sought to come to terms with a developing crisis of
meandering hostilities on two fronts. In 1917, a ceasefire and then armistice
were negotiated with Libya’s Italian colonisers on the basis of an acceptance
of their existing local ascendancy, a power which was anyway confined
largely to coastal regions. Similarly, in Egypt, Sayyid Idris pulled up the
disrupting Sanusiyya incursion and sealed more peaceful relations with the
British . This cessation of hostilities did not, however, extend to more
vulnerable parts further to the south. There, commencing in 1916, the
Sanusiyya assaulted remote bases in the French Sahara and also lunged at
colonial strongposts in Niger. Caught on the back foot there, the French had
to enlist supporting British West African forces to assist in repelling these
daring incursions.
While the war brought European powers in North Africa a fluctuating
contestation of their position, disputed zones and, at times, a seemingly
endless swirl of rebellion and raiding, it also handed London and Paris the
spur of necessity to tighten the hold of their colonial presence. In the Sudan,
with an eye on rocky wartime circumstances north of the Sahara, the infidel
British flexed some muscle to push their control westwards. There, Ali
Dinar, the ruler of the sultanate of Darfur, had been flirting alarmingly with
the Ottomans, the Libyan Sanusiyya and the Germans since 1915, a nerve
that prompted the British governor of the Sudan, General Sir Reginald
Wingate, to bring the wayward territory to heel. In March 1916 he
despatched a punitive expedition, the British Western Frontier Force (soon
dubbed the ‘waterless fatigue force’ by British troops in its ranks) which
swiftly subdued the sultanate, killing Ali Dinar himself.27
At the same time, heedful of what was set to remain a potentially turbulent
Muslim region, the Scottish-born Wingate was sufficiently canny to avoid
any further showdowns, reaching out to restore stability by breaking bread
with the dominant Sufi orders of the Sudan. France similarly managed to
disperse the worst of the storm-clouds gathered in Morocco and Algeria by
pursuing much the same kind of rapprochement with key local interests. The
outcome, in terms both broad and brief, was some neutralisation of the threat
of rampant Islamic forces through the attainment of a nervous stability, a
delicate equilibrium which just about held.
Beyond all this was the wartime crisis which Africa experienced as the
sector of an imperial economy. To varying degrees, most of the more
fledgling colonial economies experienced multiple strains and an overall
setback. Most obviously, the volume of internal continental trade fell off
sharply, notably the previously buoyant commerce that had tied together the
interests of German, French and British colonies in West Africa, and the
Anglo-German exchanges in East Africa of sisal, coffee, rubber and other
cash-crops. Hamburg ceased being a port for South African frozen beef,
dried fruit and ostrich feathers. Furthermore, the prices of some export
produce declined sharply as Africa felt the pinch of a more general global
downturn. Another hardship at the same time was fast-rising wartime prices
for basic European imports to which many African consumers had become
habituated. These also became subject to severe supply shortages, as the
diversion of European plant towards military production slashed the output
of civilian industrial goods and mass household commodities for colonial
markets. To compound a tight situation, attacks on merchant shipping by
raiders disrupted the flow of overseas trade.
For their part, colonial administrations screwed down hard on produce
prices and wages, controls which hit the living standards of producers and
workers, as neither party was able to benefit much from the increasing
demand for certain key raw materials after 1914, as Europe’s industrial
economies limbered up for war-making. Inevitably, economic hardship and
social distress soon became widely felt, with intensifying want adding
further fuel to outbreaks of social upheaval. Social misery combined with
other lacerating forces that struck at the well-being of many Africans – army
conscription, forced labour service, the pillaging of peasant homesteads and
the incineration of arable and pastoral lands, the requisitioning of goods and
even the compulsory cultivation of prescribed crops dictated by the war-
effort demands of this or that colonial power. Where the war hit hardest – as
in parts of East Africa – it ripped the heart out of agrarian livelihoods.
Yet the economic impact of the war and the costs of adjustment to it were
not everywhere a case of countries running into very heavy weather. In the
industrialising far south, while South Africa suffered inflationary increases
in the cost of imports, soaring prices and chronic shortages of common
British imports such as blankets and confectionery stimulated local
manufacturing, as import substitution powered a brisk expansion of what
had previously been a distinctly moribund local secondary industry. If the
officers of the Union’s expeditionary infantry brigades may still have sailed
off for Marseilles or Mombasa with British Jaeger or Pringle apparel, their
blankets, candles and processed foods were now being supplied by local
factories. Elsewhere, there were handsome increases in the country’s old
export staples such as maize, wool and meat, accompanied by a meteoric rise
in the volumes of brandy, rum and other spirits shipped to Britain. Brandy
rocketed from a faint sniff of 42 gallons in 1913 to almost 40,000 gallons by
1917.28 By any measure, this part of the African empire did its bit to keep up
spirit rations for Britain’s mass working-class armies.
Notwithstanding the bite of occasional patches of drought, more
prosperous white commercial farmers were in clover, with their agricultural
house magazines exulting in increased yields in response to calls to fill the
stomachs of vast Allied armies. These gains from war-induced agricultural
expansion, stretched further by an infusion of government finance to boost
productive capacity, came partly at the expense of what was left of the
country’s struggling African peasant cultivators and sharecroppers. With
diminished access to fertile land further choked off by the segregationist
1913 Land Act, against which the recently formed South African Native
National Congress had shelved its protest campaign in 1914 as a gesture of
wartime patriotism, the plight of marginal smallholders worsened. Coming
on top of the gnawing hunger caused by harvest failures in drought
conditions after 1914, immiseration funnelled Africans from the countryside
into civilian wage labour or into non-combatant South African Native
Labour Contingent military service overseas.
While many of the Union’s rural Africans buckled, another marked effect
of the war’s dislocations was a sudden advance in the modernisation of the
continent’s major industrial infrastructure, as electrification, transport and
supply were given urgent new impetus. With labour, there was something of
a parallel movement. In the economic heartlands, such as the Witwatersrand,
the number of male African industrial workers doubled between 1916 and
1919, while the employment of white female factory operatives increased at
almost the same rate, as the departure of white soldiers on expeditionary
service sucked in civilian women who, of course, laboured on lower pay.
The 1914 scramble by thousands of patriotic immigrant British miners and
artisans for army service in white imperial labour legions, opened doors to
more than one kind of wartime worker substitution. In Johannesburg mines,
vacant semi-skilled jobs, usually reserved by the job colour bar for white
labour aristocrats, were filled by experienced black mineworkers at much
lower wages. A boon as it cheapened the cost of labour, this dilution of the
industrial colour bar by the controlling Chamber of Mines was acclaimed as
the industry’s bold response to the patriotic need to sustain national
economic strength in war.
A large difficulty, however, was that unionised white workers were not
blind to the implications of wartime adaptation, and between 1916 and 1918
the gold mines were rocked by agitation over the security and privileged
status of white mineworkers’ jobs. Thousands of those involved were new
Afrikaner mineworkers, landless poor whites who had taken up the slack
created by the exodus of fighting volunteers to Europe and East Africa.
Having acquired a workplace anchorage, in due course they held on against
wholesale displacement by returning ex-soldiers after 1918. At the beginning
of 1914, roughly a third of white mine employees had been ‘colonial-born’
rather than ‘overseas-born’, in the classic lexicon of white Dominion
identity. By 1918, that largely Afrikaner proportion had risen to over half. As
the war’s distant campaigns carried off large numbers of home country
immigrants and their descendants, it is possible to see it as having quickened
the pace at which South Africa’s minority white working class was turning
increasingly indigenous or ‘national’ in its composition.
Inevitably, gold production – and how to deal with it in wartime – was
accorded high priority by the British. A vital strategic commodity, bullion
was the lynchpin of the entire imperial coupling between the world’s largest
gold producer and London, with the Witwatersrand mines stocking the Bank
of England with over two-thirds of its precious metal reserves on the
outbreak of war. Wasting no time, the Bank sealed an agreement with South
Africa’s mining houses for its mineral to be sold exclusively to Britain at a
fixed 1914 rate, frozen for the duration of what was not expected to be a
long war.
At the time, it seemed mutually opportune. The bedrock of the global
sterling system, precious gold supplies would not have to run the shipping
hazards of German raiders but would be stored in an impregnable South
Africa, while London would provide financial cover for most of the purchase
cost until safe transportation could resume. The Union would gain not only
from a guaranteed war price for its prize export commodity, but from British
credit to ease the funding of its African and European expeditionary war
effort. Britain’s share of its Dominion deal was no less – if not more –
satisfactory. The war notwithstanding, it was assured of a steady wartime
increase in its gold reserves, the key global financial position of the City of
London would be preserved and the Bank of England would also be able to
advance its handily priced surplus gold to neutral countries in wartime at a
rising world price.
In fact, as would soon enough become clear, for the mineowners the
freezing of the gold price was not a secure bet, for it backfired. As the value
of sterling kept shrinking, by 1916 the costs of essential equipment and
stores on which the gold industry was dependent had risen precipitously. In
addition, militant unionised white labour was able to capitalise on a scarcity
of skilled labour to force through hefty wage increases as well as reduced
working hours, so that gold output in 1918 was actually lower than its 1914
level. Hammered by spiralling costs and unable to inflate the cost of their
commodity in response, mining capitalists were saddled with a major slump
in profits. With Britain unwilling to budge on the price terms of its gold
agreement, by 1917 the grumbling industry was denouncing the crippling
effect of an intolerable European war on normal economic life and on the
industrial health of a Greater South Africa on the continent. The conflict not
only strained relations between London and the owners of the Witwatersrand
gold fields. Domestically, their burden of sliding profitability and declining
production left them itching to free themselves of the millstone of costly
white labour. Their attempt to cheapen that cost, an assault on the entrenched
position of unionised workers that led to the traumatic Rand Revolt of 1922,
was a direct legacy of wartime troubles. Even as deeply sheltered a region as
the industrial Transvaal was unable to escape being buffeted by the war,
experienced there as a financial stranglehold.
In some important respects, the shape which the First World War took in
Africa was acquired in an atmosphere which gathered not only within the
continent but also outside. In that sense, it amounted to being both an
internal settling of accounts between enemy colonial powers and an extra-
mural war over Africa, directed by Allies so beset by mutual political
suspicion and disregard that coordination arrangements and understandings
were scarcely worth their paper. Belgium suspected Britain of wanting to
deprive it of any conquered territory from the East African conflict, if not of
scheming to dispossess Brussels of its existing colonies at the end of
hostilities. For the British, the Belgians were risky as they might use any
captured enemy territory as a colonial bargain if it ever came to stealthy
negotiations with Germany for a separate peace. Then there was Portugal,
undoubtedly the only European imperial state for whom the war in Africa
counted for far more than in its heartland. But, financially shaky and with
the war domestically unpopular, the Portuguese were too consumed by fear
of the political repercussions of any colonial defeats to plunge in properly
against the Germans. Lisbon’s tepid blustering about its part in campaign
cooperation did nothing to dispel British scepticism, with its forces held in
disdain as a liability in constant need of propping up. Unlike Portugal, South
Africa fancied greater things but these came to nothing. The Portuguese
declined to trade the colonial ports and colonial labour of Mozambique for
South West Africa in a territorial swop proposed by the Union. And in the
former German East Africa, its aspirations for a slice (along with those of
Belgium and Portugal) were rebuffed by Britain, secure in its hold on
Tanganyika.
At another imperial level across Africa, the war era witnessed the final
consolidation of European-imposed colonial structures which, in the
immediate post-war years, furnished systems of ruling authority that were
positioned more strongly to administer political subjects, to exploit the
potential of varied economic environments and to employ technologically
and organisationally more efficient means to implant a secure and stable
colonial order. As revealed by its early 1920s aftermath and onwards, the
conflict heralded a major realignment of post-conquest conditions, ones
which demonstrated the high-water mark of a maturing colonial rule.
The lurching, violent decades of the post-1880s Scramble were, in effect,
swallowed by the First World War.29 Its early legacy was that of an imposing
pax colonia, as the imperial work of pacification was almost entirely
completed by the time that Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck and his die-hard
askaris grudgingly consented to surrender to the South African General Jaap
van Deventer at the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika on 25 November
1918. By and large, the flaring up of rebellion and insurrection had been
extinguished, and with it the final flickerings of tactics of armed resistance
in the hope of regaining an aboriginally independent identity. Beyond that,
levels of rural banditry, smuggling and urban crime had also been severely
diminished. With the screwing in of a colonial peace, in most of Africa the
economic improvisations and social changes associated with a market
economy and merchant capitalism could roll on. With that road secured and
fully open by the beginning of the 1920s, ‘soldiers repaired to their barracks,
and market forces became more important than – or at least as important as –
rapid-firing machine guns’. As the show of flourishing militarism receded,
‘the commercial economy was now to define colonial society’. 30
Equally, the preceding shock of the world war left an ineradicable
impression on many societies and communities. Naturally, it cut deepest into
those who felt the extremities of its impact, be they the calamitous loss of a
grain harvest to rampaging German askaris in Portuguese East Africa, or the
strong-arm diversion of Senegalese tirailleurs towards the sea, to be
wrenched away from home soil and shipped off to France; an alarming
crossing of the water which saw some of them gripped by a claustrophobic
crisis of inherited memories of the transatlantic slave trade’s Middle
Passage. Indeed, ‘the war caused the largest movement of Africans from
their home continent since the TransAtlantic Slave Trade’.31 For men taken
from land-bound peasant societies which had never developed a long-
distance seafaring tradition of their own, the first taste of the war was that of
an engulfing transgression, having been committed mostly against their will
to the intimidating unknowns of the Atlantic Ocean.
No doubt, too, colonised Africans who had witnessed, sometimes at close
quarters, Europeans slaughtering one another, would not easily forget so
shocking a spectacle, nor the hardships and degradation wrought upon
European life by the conflict. By shattering the imaginative boundaries
‘between colony and metropole’, the scale of the war ‘undermined the
privilege of the colonial authority to singly determine the portrait of the
colonial power offered for consumption’ by its subjects.32 Nor would some
soldiers and auxiliaries labouring in the depots forget their European
encounter with Europeans. French West African troops felt the racist force of
German hostilities which depicted them as sub-human. And the embattled
host metropolitan society for which they were sacrificing themselves had its
own currents of racist thinking and behaviour. In army service, there was the
routine exposure to a predictable dribble of petty inequalities, discriminatory
treatment and racial contempt. Even in positive propaganda imagery,
embracing them as overseas colonial patriots who had hastened across the
Mediterranean to save French home soil, Moroccan and Algerian troops
were depicted as brutish and bloodthirsty cut-throats, straining at a leash.
Yet, for all that, for some there was a wartime realisation that Europeans
in Europe were not necessarily always the same as Europeans in Africa: at
times, there was, also, always a certain duality to how they were perceived
and treated in the hub of the empire that had claimed them. While not many,
there were bars, women and local homes with open doors which lubricated
fraternisation and social familiarities between African soldiers and European
civilians. That was not always allowed to remain a matter of live and let live.
In the case of the South African Native Labour Contingent, the arrangement
between the Union government and Britain’s War Office was that its African
service corps would be barred from becoming familiar with local civilians
lest it expose them to the contagion of social equality, subverting the
habitual discipline of segregation. To ensure subordination and control,
members of the Contingent found that their European living circumstances
had been made less unfamiliar – they were, quite simply, just Africanised. In
rear depots such as Dieppe and Rouen, men officered by white superiors
from the Union’s Native Labour Bureau were cooped up in closed workers’
compounds, modelled on those used to house migrant labourers on the
diamond mines of Kimberley and the Johannesburg gold mines. Still, in
wartime Europe the strongholds of segregation were never able to replicate
the peacetime rigidities of colonial life, as racial boundaries were tested or
crossed in myriad ways by the friction of weary black soldiers chafing for
changed and improved circumstances.
On this front, part of the stock of Africans’ more general war memories
would have been those of having witnessed not merely the harsh
ambivalence of colonial rule’s ‘civilising mission’, but also the shortcomings
and flaws of a weakened European population which was seemingly unable
to resolve its war on an all-European basis. As the Japan Times observed on
3 December 1918, the war could not but have disrupted conventional
perceptions of racial solidarity in an imperial world, for ‘on the one hand,
the white races were at war with each other. On the other, the British were
bringing Indians to fight in Europe and the French were recruiting Africans,
South East Asians and Pacific Islanders. Japan was allied to Britain, while
Ottoman Turkey fought alongside Germany and Austria.’ 33
Nor was this all within the disturbed and manic European universe that
was inimical to Africans’ expectations. Not least was the foreign manner and
ferocity of the waging of the war itself. Rural warriors versed in their own
agrarian rhythms of highly personalised warfare – violently competitive
nineteenth-century conflicts over control of the ivory trade, for the
acquisition of firearms or slaves, for pasture lands, or for prestigious booty
and the gaining of symbolic tribute – were unlikely to forget quickly the
protracted privations as well as the utter strangeness of their immersion in an
industrial war. For many African combatants at the front, the cultural
peculiarity of the conflict lay in it having been pre-eminently a war of
excess, its deadliness rarely slackening and then only to be renewed. In that,
it was beyond comprehension. Above all, perhaps, this was militarism
without the insulation of familiar symbolism and ritual, such as the religious
doctoring of bodies before battle. Nor did war-making hinge upon time or
climate: armies did not break off because it was night-time, a rainy season or
the harvest cycle into which their hands had to fit. After the wars of Africa’s
part-time militias, fought for commercial gain or direct personal benefit, the
unrelenting momentum of the First World War was profoundly
disconcerting.
Its unsettling experience also helped to fertilise the field of very early
African proto-nationalist organisations and semi-political associations which
were linked to the formation of distinctively modern identities of populist
protest, wrapped in a mild creed of petitioning, deputations and declarations.
For many of the discontented, those impulses of political protest against the
confiscatory regimes of colonial rule had been rising in the wake of
European invasion and conquest, some years before 1914. But the war
buttressed anti-colonial politicisation, charging the political life of greater
numbers of people with new dimensions of dissent. Although its overall
scale ought not to be exaggerated, and historians now attach less weight than
did earlier scholarship to the role of war veterans in protest politics, its social
reach was still not inconsiderable.
In addition to mission-educated, westernised Africans who had been
drawn in to occupy basic administrative and clerical jobs vacated by whites
who had volunteered for military duties, the social and political sensibilities
of urban workers and peasants were also touched. Having felt the effects of
the war, Africa’s principal remembrancers had their known worlds stirred
and even subtly tilted by their experiences. After 1918, their disillusion with
what they saw as conservative, archaic and compromised systems of African
chiefly rule, working hand-in-glove with colonial power, began to search for
a coherent shape as the expression of newly roused and newly educated
African voices, wanting to register their worth and to challenge social and
political exclusion.
In one sense, the 1919 Versailles Conference simply swept Africans into
the margins of history as it resolved the fate of Germany’s occupied colonies
by handing them on as Mandate territories to the victorious Allies. These
were to be held in paternalist trusteeship, with a humanitarian securing of
African interests in lengthy preparation for eventual self-government. Thus,
the First World War produced a concoction of European guardianship rather
than a bluff imperialism, whatever the irony of the fact that the most
powerful members of the new League of Nations were also the two greatest
colonial states, Britain and France. From them there was now ‘lip service, at
least, to the ideal that colonies would be held in trust until the native peoples
could stand on their own’.34
Pending that time, with neither precedent nor promise, some of a
vanquished Germany’s lost African territories were even sliced up before
being handed out. Britain and France shared Togoland. While the French
administered their share of the spoils separately, in due course the British
incorporated their portion into the neighbouring Gold Coast. France acquired
over three-quarters of Kamerun as Cameroon, with Britain picking up the
remainder which bordered its Nigeria protectorate. With the closing of
German East Africa, Tanganyika became a British Mandate. In that
territory’s hinterlands, the German possession of Rwanda-Urundi, situated
on the north-eastern fringe of the Belgian Congo, became the responsibility
of Belgium. Lastly, there was confirmation of some gain for the sub-imperial
ambitions of the Union of South Africa and its wartime claims to having
realised a steady and self-reliant white nationhood. In Southern Africa, the
new conquistadors of colonial guardianship came not from London, Paris or
Brussels but from Pretoria, as the former territory of German South West
Africa was placed under South African administration.
Yet, in another quarter, something else was stirring in the shadow of
European map-making and the devising of League of Nations Mandate
classes for those pieces of Africa that had once been German. By making
self-aware African elites more cognisant of their position in the world, and
by clearing the ground for the formation of a new modern era of protest
identities, the deliberations at Versailles, including US President Woodrow
Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the subsequent covenant of the League of
Nations, caught the ear of politically connected groupings. For modernising
clusters, wartime seemed to have clarified the basis of their general
predicament, with the war having been akin to a ‘national’ experience well
before the imaginative construction of any of their nations.
Thus, across parts of British West Africa there were mounting calls for
greater representation of the skilled and the literate in local government.
Much further south, the South African Native National Congress (forerunner
of the African National Congress) went somewhat further in responding to
global ideas about rights, democracy and nationalism as the terminus of
peace-making. Petitioning the Crown in vain for the right to its own
representation at Versailles, the movement underlined Africans’ wartime
contribution and sacrifice, reminding King George V, as their natural
protector, that just as the subjects of the Habsburg Empire could now
anticipate national freedom under the principles of the peace, Africans, too,
had a just claim upon the right to self-determination and freedom from
discrimination and oppression. Equally, that was not the only way in which
the First World War registered a greater global awareness upon some of the
continent’s inhabitants. However disheartening the outcome of the war for
the radical Afrikaner nationalist paper, Het Volk, all was not lost, its readers
were reassured. For the conflict had still ended in ‘a victory for
republicanism, as in any case America was really responsible for the
victory’.35 Such were the dreams of not living by empire when it was exactly
that into which a great war had just locked Africa more securely than before.
1 R. J. Reid, A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present (Oxford:

Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 191.
2 B. Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of

African Society since 1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 112.
3 T. Ranger, ‘Africa’, in M. Howard and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The

Oxford History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2002), p.
266.
4 P. Murphy, ‘Britain as a global power in the twentieth century’, in A.

Thompson (ed.), Britain’s Experience of Empire in the Twentieth Century
(Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 38.
5 G. Graichen and H. Grunder, Deutsche Kolonien: Traum und Trauma

(Hamburg: Ullstein Verlag, 2007), p. 323.
6 B. Nasson, ‘Cheap if not always cheerful: French West Africa in the

world wars in Black and White in Colour and Le Camp de Thiaroye’, in V.
Bickford-Smith and R. Mendelsohn (eds.), Black and White in Colour:
African History on Film (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), pp. 148–56.
7 See G. l’Ange, Urgent Imperial Service: South African Forces in German

South West Africa, 1914–1915 (Johannesburg: Ashanti, 1991).
8 A. Lentin, Jan Smuts: Man of Courage and Vision (Johannesburg:

Jonathan Ball, 2010), pp. 30–1.
9 M. Wallace, A History of Namibia (London: Hurst & Co., 2011), p. 216.
10 E. Paice, Tip and Run: The Untold Story of the Great War in Africa
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), p. 3.
11 P. von Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa: The

Campaign for German East Africa in World War I (Nashville, TN: Battle
Press, 1996), pp. 233–4.
12 J. Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, 2nd edn (Cambridge

13 See, for instance, M. E. Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the
First World War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); R. Anderson, The
Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign, 1914–1918 (Stroud: Tempus,
2004); Paice, Tip and Run; and B. Vandervort, ‘New light on the East
African theater of the Great War: a review essay of English-language
sources’, in S. M. Miller (ed.), Soldiers and Settlers in Africa, 1850–1918
(Amsterdam: Brill, 2009), pp. 287–305.
14 Reid, Modern Africa, p. 192.
15 D. Olusoga and C. W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s

Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber &
Faber, 2010); Wallace, Namibia, pp. 155–82; and R. Gerwarth and S.
Malinowski, ‘Hannah Arendt’s ghosts: reflections on the disputed path from
Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42:2 (2009), pp. 279–
300.
16 J. Hyslop, ‘The invention of the concentration camp: Cuba, southern

Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907’, South African Historical Journal,
63:2 (2011), p. 263.
17 N. P. Johnson and J. Mueller, ‘Updating the accounts: global mortality of

the 1918–1920 Spanish influenza epidemic’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, 76:1 (2002), p. 110. I am indebted to Howard Phillips for drawing
my attention to this reference.
18 D. Killingray, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World

War (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010), p. 5.
19 H. Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British

Imperial Culture, 1875–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 200.
20 J. H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War: An Imperial History (New York:

Routledge, 2004), p. 17.
21 R. Marjomaa, ‘The martial spirit: Yao soldiers in British Service in

Nyasaland (Malawi), 1895–1939’, Journal of African History, 44:3 (2003),
pp. 413–32; and T. Stapleton, ‘Extra-territorial African police and soldiers in
Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), 1897–1965’, Scientia Militaria, 38:1
(2010), pp. 101, 106.
22 M. Thomas, The French Empire at War, 1940–45 (Manchester
23 J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
24 A. Grundlingh and S. Swart, Radelose Rebellie? Dinamika van die

1914–1915 Afrikanerebellie (Pretoria: Protea Boekehuis, 2009).
25 Imvo Zabantsundu, 8 September 1914.
26 N. Stone, World War One: A Short History (London: Penguin, 2007), p.

57.
27 J. Slight, ‘British perceptions and responses to Sultan Ali Dinar of

Darfur, 1915–16’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38:2
(2010), p. 241.
28 Union of South Africa, Report of the Acting Trade Commissioner for the
Year 1919, U.G. 60–020 (Cape Town, 1920), pp. 14–15.
29 For that transition, see ‘Africa and the First World War’, special issue of
Journal of African History, 19:1 (1978); M. E. Page, Africa and the First
World War (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987); and H. Strachan, The First
World War in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2004).
30 Reid, Modern Africa, p. 195.
31 T. Stapleton, ‘The impact of the First World War on African people’, in

J. Laband (ed.), Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Africa: From Slavery
Days to Rwandan Genocide (Pietermaritzburg: University of Kwazulu-Natal
Press, 2007), p. 130.
32 J. E. Genova, Colonial Ambivalence, Cultural Authenticity and the
Limitations of Mimicry in French-Ruled West Africa, 1914–56 (New York:
Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 41–2.
33 Quoted in M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line:

White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality
(Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 282–3.
34 Wm. Roger Louis, ‘The European colonial empires’, in Howard and

Louis (eds.), Oxford History of the Twentieth Century, p. 94.
35 Quoted in Bill Nasson, Springboks on the Somme: South Africa in the

Great War, 1914–1918 (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007), p. 243.
Mustafa Aksakal
War debris: with an axe and a bomb, İsmail dies

in a cemetery
On Tuesday, 19 October 1920, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, in the
little village of Çay near Çanakkale (Gallipoli), 7-year-old Ferhad, a mute
(dilsiz), came running to his friends, gesturing with great excitement about a
shell he had found in the cemetery. A group of eight children followed
Ferhad to examine the shell. Seventeen-year-old İsmail, the son of Ali of
Limnos, who had brought along an axe, stood over the shell and struck it.
The resulting explosion killed him in an instant, along with Hüseyin, son of
Mehmed, and seriously injured their five friends. İsmail and Hüseyin had
survived the Great War, but it killed them all the same.1
The First World War in the Middle East claimed at least 2.5 million other
Ottoman lives, or about 12 per cent of the Empire’s entire population,
mostly civilians, and – though it is impossible to know for sure – probably
many more, perhaps as many as 5 million.2 The material and environmental
devastation caused by the war has never been assessed, and the war’s
civilian experience has still not been studied in any detail. But even with all
the questions still remaining, it is clear that the mayhem and suffering
unleashed by the war incinerated the Empire’s social fabric, assuring that it
would take a long time, perhaps a century or more, before the region could
recover from the destruction, and before an integrated history, one that takes
the war for the human tragedy it was and without making it the exclusive
story of a particular national group, could be written. In many ways, the
war’s full history has remained covered up by war debris as well, and it
continues to be no less explosive than the shell that killed the two curious
boys in Çay.
Thus, while the main problem confronting most authors of new studies on
the First World War is synthesising the mass of scholarship produced by
nine decades of research, for the modern Middle East the problem looks
rather different: the challenge here is to establish a coherent narrative and
interpretation based on scholarly ground that remains relatively untrodden,
not least because it is a political minefield, where the stakes are unusually
high.
The study of the First World War has been impeded first of all by the
politicisation of the late Ottoman period, especially scholarship on policies
towards Christian minorities – of which the Armenian case is emblematic
and one whose legacy continues to affect Turkey’s domestic politics and
foreign relations. Another impediment, not unconnected to the first, has
been the limitations on the availability of primary sources. Access to the
region’s military archives has been restricted. As the literate segment of the
Ottoman population remained in the single percentage points throughout the
war, personal narratives of their experiences by soldiers and civilians in
letters and diaries are not sufficient to make good the gaps in the official
record. And if these obstacles were not enough, historians face the
challenge of writing about a vast empire that was home to peoples speaking
more languages than any one scholar can master: Arabic, Greek, Hebrew,
Kurdish, Ladino, Western Armenian and, most important, Ottoman Turkish
– a bureaucratese composed of a mixture of Turkish, Arabic and Farsi
words and phrases, and dead now for more than eighty years. Finally, for
many of the participating nations, other subjects have ranked higher on
national historical agendas. In Arab historiography, for example, the war
has been overshadowed by the subsequent mandate regime imposed by the
League of Nations and the conflict over Palestine. Similarly, in Turkish
historiography, assessments of the war have taken a backseat to the history
of the Kemalist Revolution and attempts at secularisation and
democratisation.
As a result, beyond a small group of specialists, nearly a century after it
took place the war as experienced in the Middle East has remained largely
unknown. Those who do remember the Ottomans typically think of them as
the owners of a peripheral stage on which the main actors were outsiders:
Germans declaring jihad; Australians and New Zealanders perishing on the
Gallipoli peninsula; Sykes and Picot parcelling out the Arab lands (into
future Western ‘mandates’); T. E. Lawrence setting the spark for the so-
called Arab Revolt; and Lord Balfour’s letter, pledging British support for
‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.3
In most Western histories, the one aspect of the war in which Ottomans
themselves played an active role is the Armenian Aghet (Arm.:
catastrophe). And yet, these events of the war, as significant as they are, are
told in isolation from each other, and without the deeper Ottoman context
they deserve.4
The historical oblivion into which the Ottoman war has been consigned
seems all the more curious given that observers at the time often expressed
their belief that the war was all about the region: ‘The present war
undoubtedly was largely a war for the control of Asia Minor’, wrote one
contributor to the British The Nineteenth Century and After in 1916.5 In the
Russian Duma, the delegates averred that the war was, after all, a war for
Constantinople.6 We need not take them entirely at their word – Russia
entered the war, after all, for a variety of reasons – in order to note that the
Ottoman Front was never just a sideshow. Bringing the Ottoman experience
back into our understanding of the First World War, however, is not to
reassert an importance clear to contemporaries, and even less, to offer an
‘Ottoman’ point of view (even assuming that there was such a thing), but to
deepen existing histories of the war, and in such a way that the Near Eastern
theatre, the Ottoman state and the millions of Ottoman peoples become
subjects in their own right.
While European scholars have been writing from a Europe that has laid
down its weapons, emphasising the tragic – and, increasingly, the
unnecessary – nature of the war, in the Middle East, the war’s memory is
entangled with foundational stories of independence struggles and national
liberation that both preceded 1914 and continued, in some cases, long after
1918.7 In the Arab Middle East, the war is associated with Jemal Pasha’s
iron-fisted regime in Syria, where the Ottoman term for ‘mobilisation’
(seferberlik) continues to be remembered with a shudder today.8 It is also,
and perhaps especially, as Salim Tamari has shown, remembered for the
Great Famine. No sooner had a plague of locusts descended in 1915, and
seemed to eat up every green shoot, than the state requisitioned much of the
remaining grain supplies, while an Anglo-French naval blockade prevented
relief from arriving from outside. The result was widespread starvation by
December 1915.9 In Syria, one out of seven people had died by war’s end.
The famine’s contribution to the Arab Revolt in 1916 cannot be
underestimated. For even as the population starved, conscription continued,
stretching not only Ottoman administrative capacity but also Ottoman
legitimacy to the breaking point.10 Every sign of Arab disaffection,
however, brought down the wrath of the Ottoman state, which demanded
unflinching loyalty from all its populations and meted out punishment
where it could not obtain it. The potential for an Ottoman future with equal
rights and citizenship for all ethnic and religious groups living inside the
Empire had still existed, however faintly, before 1914.11 But during the
years of the war this potential was now snuffed out and locals embraced
alternatives to Ottoman rule.12
On the Anatolian peninsula, the region that became the Turkish Republic
in 1923, disloyalty among Christian and Kurdish populations was presumed
from the outset, and punishment, in the regime’s view, had to be pre-
emptive, including the ‘accidental’ shooting of Armenian soldiers suspected
of preparing to desert.13 The Christian population plummeted from roughly
20 per cent to 2 per cent of the Anatolian population, in a programme
implemented by the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP), the government in power during the war years. The CUP justified
this pre-emptive retaliation by referring to what they perceived to be the
Great Powers’ repeated assaults on the Ottoman Empire since the early
nineteenth century. They became convinced that European diplomacy was a
fixed game, yielding only military defeats, territorial losses and European
support for the independence of the Empire’s Christian minorities. From
territories lost, moreover, came millions of Muslims, victims of ethnic
cleansing from the Black Sea region, the Caucasus and the Balkans, now
living as refugees in a shrinking empire. By July 1914, for the leaders of the
CUP – many of whom themselves hailed from the Balkans – this history
had produced a deep sense of violation, victimhood and humiliation that
legitimised retaliation and self-defence against their remaining Christian
minorities at any cost. Their view was not the only view, of course, as
opposition parties, most notably the Liberal Union, had called for a
programme of decentralisation and a greater level of regional self-rule
within the Empire. But after 1913, these parties had been silenced or sent
into exile.
Thus it should not surprise us that the Ottoman ‘successor states’ in the
Middle East, not to mention the Greeks and the Armenians, have their own,
competing stories about what took place. Nor should it come as a surprise
that the Turkish Republic, founded in 1923 and conceiving of itself as much
a ‘successor state’ to a defunct empire as Poland or Czechoslovakia,
fostered its own memory of the war, a narrative that, while differing from
the others, just as strongly delegitimised Ottoman rule – often using, in fact,
the same orientalising, ‘Sick Man of Europe’ tropes as nineteenth-and
twentieth-century European observers. And, as with the other narratives, the
Turkish narrative too remains deeply tied to the state’s own legitimacy
today. It portrays the transition from empire to republic as a moment of
monumental rupture – a clean break – despite what scholars have shown to
be the many continuities in leadership and policies. Intervention in 1914 is
presented as the deed of one man, Enver Pasha, the Minister of War. A ‘war
hawk in thrall to Germany’ – and, in some versions, ‘to hare-brained’
dreams of Turkish expansion into Central Asia – Enver, the narrative
claimed, had ‘more or less single-handedly pushed the empire into a war’
that no one else wanted.14 But the Turkish narrative of the war takes a
different turn from Kennan’s ‘seminal tragedy’, one that engendered
Europe’s economic collapse, Bolshevism, fascism and another world war.15
If getting into the war – as personified by Enver – is remembered as a
disaster, surviving the war and getting out of it – as personified by Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk – is remembered as the great national triumph, the Turks’
‘finest hour’. In Turkey’s collective memory today, the Ottomans lost the
First World War; the Turks won it.
It is important to subject such memories to historical scrutiny. Regarding
the first part of the traditional, monochromatic Turkish narrative, how the
Ottomans got into the maelstrom when they were not part of the original
quarrel: archival evidence and the occasional dissident memoir have put to
rest the picture of ‘Enver Did It!’ The First World War itself is ‘the era least
explored’ in the scholarship on Turkey, and yet, it was not only ‘the most
traumatic but also the most formative and important period in modern
Turkish history’.16 The Ottoman state’s wartime policies and the profound
social, political and especially demographic developments that occurred
during the war, not only made the Turkish nation-state possible in the first
place but also defined its character ever since.
These policies required the raising of a national army based on mass
conscription, and they assured, until very recently, the army’s unrivalled
role in post-war Turkish politics. These policies also included the social and
ideological mobilisation of the Muslim civilian population, a mobilisation
that, to a very real extent, created the ‘Turkish nation’ – as did, by
subtraction, the elimination by murder and forced expulsion of minority
populations who were deemed to be liabilities – enemies within – and
established the myth that this nation was homogeneous. It was the war that
allowed Ottoman leaders, beginning in 1914, to create a National Economy
(milli iktisat), one based on Muslim businesses, in explicit contrast to what
was perceived as the previous dominance of trade and finance by Christians
and Jews and their European protectors.17 Yet even with the celebration of
all these gains for the ‘nation’, the wartime suffering of the entire civilian
population as a result of disease, famine and starvation imbued Turkish
memory with its own narrative of anguish and victimhood.
Provincialising the First World War in the Middle

East
In the case of the Ottoman Empire, there is good reason to speak of a ‘ten-
year-war’, beginning in 1911 with Italy’s grab for the Ottoman Dodecanese
Islands and Trablusgarp, today’s Libya, and ending with the victory in 1922
of the Ottoman armed movement over the Greek army – that part of the
Ottoman Empire on which the Turkish Republic would be established in
1923 under the presidency of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk, after 1935).18 But
contextualising the First World War in the Middle East must go much
further than acknowledging that the Ottoman state had been at war since
1911.
Any interpretation of the Ottoman First World War hinges on how we
assess Ottoman–European interaction throughout the nineteenth century,
and on where we place the Empire on a spectrum of two extremes: at one
end, an example, in today’s parlance, of a failed state, one that took out
loans it could not repay, oppressed its subjects, violated non-Muslim
minorities, remained hostile to international norms and thus precipitated
Great Power intervention and paved its own road to destruction; at the other
end, a ‘Victim of Western Imperialism’, always groaning under the
predatory practices of the European Great Powers that sought its partition,
in a game known as the ‘Eastern Question’, ever since Catherine the Great
set her eyes on ‘Tsargrad’ and Napoleon Bonaparte declared that whoever
possesses Constantinople could govern the world, but even so, ‘a largely
successful experiment in multinationalism that was destroyed by the great
powers in World War I’.19
Few scholars today would embrace whole-heartedly either end of the
spectrum, but most studies can be classified as gravitating towards one of
these two poles. Those studies that cast the Ottoman Empire as a failed state
– ‘a landscape of oppressed nations’20 – explain the growing European
involvement in the region, which culminated in occupation during and after
the First World War, as the result of a growing vacuum of power and
authority that the Powers, as the custodians of global order, had no choice
but to fill. On the other hand, studies that depict the Empire as the victim of
imperialism ascribe Ottoman policies and ethnic violence too readily to
external factors only, while failing to acknowledge the suffering the
Ottoman state itself inflicted. The difference lies partly in sources. Listening
exclusively to European diplomats, travellers and expats could lead a
historian to assume that the Empire was an obsolete entity whose
shortcomings made intervention inevitable, just as listening exclusively to
Ottoman voices encourages a picture of rapacious predators bent on
destroying Ottoman rule.
The spectrum problem cannot be solved by locating a purportedly true, or
correct point on the scale, but only by discarding the scale altogether,
because it is a false one to begin with. Taking seriously both the effects of
imperialism and the nature of the Ottoman state is crucial. In fact, the two
sides were inseparable, the one constituting the other as they developed
over time. The Ottoman state would not have treated its minority
populations as ruthlessly as it did over the course of the nineteenth and into
the twentieth century without the effects of European imperialism and the
fear of being subjected to severe interference. Nor would European policies
have taken the form they did without the repressive paths chosen by the
Ottoman state. European imperialism and Ottoman response, together,
produced the Empire’s ‘zones of genocide’.21 Throughout this process
European diplomacy fuelled within the Empire a new type of identity
politics based on religion and ethnicity that proved explosive. Advocating
minority and national rights could also mean advocating or sanctioning, if
implicitly, population exchanges, ethnic cleansing and genocide.22
Acknowledging this history as a shared process is not to excuse Ottoman
actions, as Donald Bloxham has stressed,23 but to see Europeans and
Ottomans as ‘all swimming in those waters . . . of the ocean of history’. 24
Mobilisation
Surrounded by a crowd of weeping wives, mothers and children, Ali Rıza
reported for duty near where he was born, in the vicinity of the north-
eastern Anatolian city of Erzincan, answering the authorities’ call for
mobilisation issued on 3 August 1914. Twenty-seven at the time, within a
few weeks, Ali Rıza found himself surrounded by snow and freezing cold,
infected with dysentery and discharging blood ‘in my urine and from my
bottom’, and, a few days later, secreting blood through his mouth. Within
those same few weeks he had witnessed the first victims succumb to
dysentery, before ever encountering the enemy. ‘The poor wretches’, he
noted in his diary on 3 October 1914. The Empire had not yet entered the
war. But they were on their way through the mountains to Sarıkamış, where
in January up to 80 to 90 per cent of the Third Army would perish, in one of
the worst military disasters in Ottoman history. Ali Rıza was a common
soldier, even if the fact that his older brother was a doctor and officer meant
that he was assigned to the medical corps, where he was assistant to the
battalion doctor. His brother’s position also meant that he had at his
disposal some cash, enabling him to purchase food and additional clothing
during these initial trying weeks of mobilisation. As Ali Rıza’s unit
marched east, bread was produced in the bakeries of villages they passed, in
ovens fuelled with cow dung, which slowed down the process to an
agonising speed. Four days into his unit’s first engagement, on 11
November – the very day the Ottoman state issued its declaration of jihad –
two of Ali Rıza’s comrades froze to death in what would become a routine
end to the lives of common soldiers.25
Too often their tragedy is glossed over with the Ottoman triumph of
Gallipoli or rejected outright in the light of the brutal Ottoman policies
towards Christian populations that culminated in the destruction of
Anatolia’s Assyrians and Armenians. Yet the extreme deprivation, poverty,
exposure to disease and lawlessness enabled such policies of destruction.
By this time, as Ali Rıza saw, many had already deserted – there would be
at least half a million of them by the end of the war, or one out of every six
conscripted.26 Orders were given to have deserters shot on the spot, to
oblige anyone else contemplating fleeing the colours to cease such thoughts
immediately. Desertion, already significant and humanly understandable,
would be in fact the first charge levied against the Armenians. And where
would deserters go? By December 1914, Armenians in the ranks were being
singled out as potential defectors to the Russian side and were already being
shot pre-emptively – ‘accidentally’, as the saying went. Ali Rıza also had
become filled with anger at Armenians, swearing, on 17 January, after the
Sarıkamış campaign had already taken the lives of tens of thousands,
although through horrific conditions as much as Russian action, to ‘poison
and kill 3 or 4 Armenians in the hospital’. He could not believe that
Armenians and Turks would be ‘brothers and fellow citizens’ once again
after the war; the campaign to invade Russian territory at Sarıkamış, waged
in extreme winter conditions during December 1914 and January 1915, had
been too much.27 Ali Rıza’s feeling that the war was severing irreversibly
the ties that had held together the Empire’s ethnic and religious groups for
centuries proved devastatingly accurate.
The official figures released in 1921 by the Ministry of War, and self-
admittedly incomplete, showed the total number of conscripts as 2.85
million. This estimate excludes, however, hundreds of thousands, both men
and women, conscripted into labour battalions as well as those fighting with
irregular formations, primarily in eastern Anatolia, consisting of Kurdish
men under Kurdish leadership. Another reason to suspect that the 2.85
million number undercounts Ottoman conscripts is that in March 1917, the
Ministry of War had given cumulative conscription as 2.855 million, with
over eighteen months of fighting still ahead. The official casualty estimates
of 325,000 dead and 400,000 wounded must be considered with equal
scepticism.28 A recent attempt at recalculating Ottoman casualties showed
771,844 dead, with over half succumbing to disease; a mortality rate of
around 25 per cent.29
The state faced a constant shortage of manpower as it tried to fill its rank
and file, a task made more difficult by the fact that military authorities
questioned the loyalty of large segments of the populations on ethnic and
religious grounds, even though the Ottoman Parliament, opened in 1908,
had made military service mandatory for all men regardless of ethnic or
religious background in 1909. The Empire’s Christian and Jewish
communities had responded to the law in a variety of ways. Some, such as
the sons of Jewish middle-class families in Jerusalem, initially embraced
military service in a spirit of civic Ottomanism following the Young Turk
Revolution of July 1908, subsequent elections and the apparent arrival of
representative government.30 Others, especially Greek-Orthodox Ottomans,
simply never presented themselves to the authorities.31 The ethnic and
religious composition of the Ottoman army has not been reconstructed with
any precision. While the commonly used figure of Arab conscripts is
300,000, or 10 per cent of the total number of men mobilised, a recent study
suggests that recruits from the Empire’s Arabic-speaking provinces may
have comprised over 26 per cent. Archival evidence shows that of the
49,238 men who had deserted in Aydın province between August 1914 and
June 1916, about 59 per cent were Muslim, 41 per cent non-Muslim.32
Hagop Mıntzuri, like Ali Rıza, was born near the city of Erzincan, either
in the same year or one year earlier. On 3 August 1914, the day the Ottoman
state called up all men between the ages of 20 and 45, Hagop found himself
on a visit to Istanbul, without his family. Immediately conscripted as a
baker, a job he had done for many years, Hagop would not see his wife,
Vogida, or any of his four children, Nurhan aged 6, Maranik aged 4, Anahit
aged 2, or baby Haço, ever again. They, along with Hagop’s 55-year-old
mother, Nanik, and his 80-year-old grandfather, Melkon, and all the other
Christians of the village, had been deported, never to be heard from again.
The Mıntzuris were Armenians. 33
Battle
The men of state in charge of formulating high policy saw a potential
collusion between the Empire’s minority populations – Christians, but also
Jews, Arabs, Kurds – and the Entente powers. And the Ottomans had their
own version of their German ally’s anxious obsession with Einkreisung,
their putative encirclement. They feared Russia’s desire for control over the
Ottoman Straits and its designs on eastern Anatolia, a region stretching
from the Russian Caucasus to the eastern Mediterranean and heavily
populated by Armenian Christians and Muslim Kurds. Russia threatened
the Empire north and east, while, since the late nineteenth century, Britain
had ensconced itself in Egypt and the strategically vital Cyprus, a presence
that could be expanded to the Empire’s southern, Arabic-speaking regions,
connecting British South Asia and Egypt. In the Empire’s geographic
centre, French influence over autonomous regions in Syria and British
support of Zionism in Palestine posed further challenges to the deep sense
of insecurity and imperial weakness that dominated the halls of power in
Istanbul. Syria, moreover, was vulnerable from the Mediterranean and,
further to the east, Iraq could be reached by the British from Basra and from
Persia by both British and Russian forces, as those two powers had
partitioned Persia, first, politically, in 1907 and then, militarily, in 1911,
shaking the ground not only in Tehran but also in Istanbul.
In the face of this geo-strategic plight, the Ottoman leaders transformed
the July crisis into an opportunity for a military alliance with a Great Power,
Germany, which they hoped would provide the Empire with an umbrella of
long-term protection, a period of imperial consolidation after the war, even
if it meant that, in the shorter term, the Ottomans might have to do battle
once again.
The Minister of War, Enver, who held the title of ‘pasha’, bestowed on
the Empire’s highest officials, had cut his teeth as a young officer fighting
guerrilla-style warfare in Ottoman Macedonia against Bulgarian and Greek
revolutionaries. When Italy occupied Libya in the fall of 1911, Enver again
led regular and irregular troops against the Italians, who responded by
showering the Arab population with propaganda:
Let it not be hidden from you that Italy (may Allah strengthen her!), in
determining to occupy this land, aims at serving your interests as well
as ours, and at assuring our mutual welfare by driving out the Turks. . .
. They have always despised you. We, on the other hand, have studied
your customs and your history. . . . We respect your noble religion
because we recognize its merits, and we respect also your women. . . .
There is no doubt that with God’s help, we shall drive the Turks out of
this country.34
The Pope, moreover, ‘blessed the Italian fighters and praised God for
helping them to replace the Crescent with the Cross in Libya’.35 Among the
officer corps and the politicised classes these experiences, from the Balkans
to North Africa, created a sense of crisis about the Empire’s territorial
security, which appeared attainable to many only through the display of
military strength, and war if necessary.36 As one paper put it: ‘We must now
fully realise that our honour and our people’s integrity cannot be preserved
by those old books of international law, but only by war.’ 37
On 28 July 1914, in a cipher classified ‘very urgent’, the governor of
Edirne province, Adil, alerted the Ministry of the Interior to Bulgarian troop
movements along the border and asked for news on the worsening
international constellation. Interior Minister Talat, already one of Istanbul’s
most powerful men, replied immediately: ‘Austria has declared war. We
think the war will not remain local but spread. My brother, we are working
day and night to protect ourselves from harm and to take advantage of the
situation to the best of our abilities.’38 On 2 August 1914, Talat sent out
mobilisation orders to provincial governors:
Because war has been declared between Germany and Russia our
current political situation has become very delicate. It is probable that
Russia will engage in hostile action and efforts against our borders in
order to continue its policies and influence in the Caucasus and Persia.
Therefore, as has already been instructed previously, all necessary
measures for the completion of mobilisation are to be implemented
immediately and without delay and with the greatest diligence and
speed and whatever steps and measures are necessary for war and an
attack on us must be undertaken right now and reports submitted
regularly.39
For all their alarm, to the Ottoman leadership what would become the
Great War appeared first as a great opportunity, an opportunity to secure a
long-term military alliance with Germany that would survive the war and
afford the Empire international cover. Their hope was to be able to sit on
the alliance and to sit out the war. To obtain the alliance, Minister of War
Enver had succeeded in convincing Berlin that his army would be able to
contribute significantly to the German war effort, and that it would be able
to do so immediately. By mid October 1914, however, the Ottomans had
still not moved, despite having drawn on German gold, shells and guns, a
German military and a naval mission of thousands of personnel and
specialists and two German men-of-war, the battlecruiser SMS Goeben
(renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim) and the light cruiser SMS Breslau (renamed
Midilli), anchored in the Dardanelles since 10 August. With German assets
came German pressure, however, to the point of threatening the rupture of
the alliance by late October. At this point the Ottoman leaders resolved to
open fire, in a spectacular night operation culminating in the sinking of
Russian ships on the Black Sea and the bombardment, from the sea, of the
Black Sea cities Sevastopol and (the once Ottoman) Novorossiysk on 29
October 1914. 40
The Ottomans had launched this attack without a declaration of war, in
the manner of Japan’s strike against Russia in 1904 (and Greece’s on the
Ottoman Empire in 1897). The Black Sea raid was followed by two equally
bold campaigns. The second of these campaigns, led by Jemal Pasha, the
commander of the Fourth Army based in Syria, and the one more closely
watched in the West, targeted the Suez Canal and British Egypt. The first,
led by Enver Pasha himself, aimed at retaking the three Ottoman provinces
lost to Russia in 1878 – Ardahan, Batumi and Kars – and had the advantage
from the German perspective of diverting Russian troops away from the
Habsburgs’ eastern front. Ardahan and Kars would in fact be returned to the
Empire before the war ended, to become part of the future Turkish
Republic, but only after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and only after the
Ottomans’ disastrous attempt to encircle Russian forces near Sarıkamış,
located just across the border in territory ceded to Russia in 1878. Opening
in December 1914, the operation by mid January 1915 had turned into a
full-blown rout of the Ottoman Third Army.
Ottoman intelligence had followed closely the Russian troop
concentrations, estimating, in August 1914, Russian strength on the
Ottoman border in eastern Anatolia at about 100,000 men.41 There was not
only some hope that Russian Muslim populations of the Caucasus would
support the Ottoman invasion, but also that both Afghanistan and Persia
would come in on the Ottomans’ side.42 Moreover, Ottoman agents were
sending reports in December 1914 of the feeble conditions that marked the
Russian formations on the other side of the border. Agents estimated
Russian strength at Sarıkamış to be around 50,000 and the men to be on
half-rations and hungry, ‘begging in the streets’ and poorly equipped. The
Tsar, it was said, had been in Tiflis and had to be evacuated.43 Within a
week, by 6 January 1915, this picture had shifted drastically, and it was
clear that the Ottoman offensive had not only been beaten back but Enver’s
forces had been destroyed. 44
Both campaigns, in the east into Russia and the south into British-held
Egypt, aimed at territories with predominantly Muslim populations, and
they attempted in both to employ Islam as a tool to mobilise those
populations on the Ottomans’ behalf. The territory on the Ottoman–Russian
border, however, with large Christian populations on both sides, morphed
into a ‘bloodlands’, as both empires deported and killed populations
suspected of disloyalty. In January 1915, perhaps as many as 30 to 45,000
Muslims were killed inside the Russian border, and some 10,000
deported.45 As staggering as these figures are, they would be dwarfed in
1915 and 1916 by Ottoman deportations and summary executions of, first,
Christian and, later, Kurdish populations.
The proclamation of jihad against the Entente represented the Ottoman
state’s effort to mobilise both soldiers at the front and society at home.
There had been no declaration of jihad during the Balkan wars, as such a
policy would have alienated the Empire’s non-Muslim peoples. By
November 1914, however, this consideration was no longer valid for the
decision-makers in the CUP, and they used the jihad declaration in an
attempt to bind the Empire’s Muslim populations closer to the state,
especially in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Empire. That Berlin pushed
the Ottoman government for such a declaration, because it hoped that
Muslims all over – in British Egypt and India, in French North Africa, in
the Russian Caucasus and Central Asia – would rise up in rebellion, has
sometimes obscured the Ottomans’ own purposes for instrumentalising
Islam in general and jihad in particular. The forces sent to invade Egypt, for
example, were presented on postage stamps as ‘The Islamic Army of Egypt,
Savior of Conquered Lands’,46 and those sent into Russian Baku in 1918 as
‘The Caucasus Army of Islam’.47
Muslim populations sympathised with the Ottoman war effort when
Ottoman victory promised to improve conditions or advance local agendas.
The Nationalist Party in Egypt, for example, actively worked together with
the Ottomans in their attempt to throw the British out of Cairo. Muhammad
Farid, the Nationalist Party leader, hoped for a national revolution at home
against British rule, and the formation of a regional alliance, backed by
Germany, against the three powers of the Entente. While Farid objected to
the Arab Revolt, he eventually also became deeply disappointed by Jemal
Pasha’s rule in Syria and growing expressions of Turkish nationalism.48
Fraternity with the German-Ottoman cause persists to a degree in Egyptian
memory. Yasin, a character in Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, set in Cairo,
‘wished the Germans would win and consequently the Turks too’. But then
he shakes his head in utter frustration: ‘Four years have passed and we keep
saying this same thing.’49 While resentment of British rule ran deep among
‘ordinary Egyptians’, as evident in popular folk songs and plays, for
example, armed resistance would not erupt until 1919.50
Failures at the front were compounded by acute shortages of food in all
parts of the Empire, but especially in Syria, whose inhabitants suffered from
an Anglo-French naval blockade. In Syria, these dire conditions combined
with an outbreak of locusts in 1915 that left over half a million dead – in
part by famine-related disease – by the war’s end. As the disaster was
unfolding, the French consul in Cairo alerted his government to the fact that
tens of thousands had starved to death and suggested providing relief
through food shipments. The British response, however, was unequivocal:
‘His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs expresses his earnest
hope that the French Government will not encourage any such scheme. . . .
The Entente Allies are simply being blackmailed to remedy the shortage of
supplies which it is the very intention of the blockade to produce.’ The
French concluded that their British allies ‘consider the famine as an agent
that will lead the Arabs to revolt’.51
By the end of 1915, for some that breaking point appeared imminent. In
Jerusalem, Private İhsan noted in his diary on 17 December 1915: ‘If the
government had any dignity, it would have saved wheat in its hangars for
public distribution at a fixed price, or even have made it available from
military supplies. If these conditions persist, the people will rebel and bring
down this government.’52 But the extreme impoverishment suffered by the
people of Syria and Palestine pushed society to the brink of collapse rather
than revolution. On 10 July 1916, İhsan’s spirit of resistance had turned into
resignation:
I can hardly concentrate. We face both a general war and an internal

war. The government is trying (with futility) to bring food supplies,
and disease is everywhere. It’s been over a month now since I have
written anything in my diary. Jerusalem has not seen [worse] days.
Bread and flour supplies have almost totally dried up. Every day I pass
the bakeries on my way to work, and I see a large number of women
going home empty-handed.53
The government in Istanbul proved poorly equipped to respond to the crisis

and left its mitigation to Jemal Pasha, the regional boss and commander of
the Fourth Army based in Damascus, who prioritised his soldiers in the
allocation of supplies.
The food crisis gripped the Empire as a whole, however, and very early in
the war. In fact, as early as October 1914, before the Ottomans had become
a belligerent, reports started arriving in the capital complaining about the
lack of food. Nor was there seed available to be planted for the next season.
The governor of Edirne warned the government that he could not assume
the responsibility for the ‘famine and starvation’ that would be certain to
befall the people of his province. He therefore put the Interior Ministry on
notice that if no seeds were provided it would become necessary to seize
available seed supplies, and that he, the governor, would begin with
collecting those supplies left behind by the Christians of Edirne who had
now ‘departed for Greece’.54 Military authorities everywhere saw no
alternative but to requisition available civilian food supplies. By the spring
of 1916, military storage facilities had become depleted as well.55 The War
Ministry pressured the government to resort to more extreme methods in
securing the necessary collection of food for the army. ‘We are unable to
provide our soldiers even with a quarter of their meat ration. Their physical
strength is withering away, as our doctors are reporting daily. The disastrous
effects of these conditions on the war have already become apparent. Please
take urgent measures for the securing of our meat supply.’ The War
Ministry demanded an annual supply of 67 million kilos of meat, ‘requiring
4,666,000 [sic: 4,466,000] heads of sheep, at 15 kilos each. These sheep
will be difficult to secure by purchasing them.’ 56
While the state’s military machine ate up men by conscripting them, it
left behind an insufficient number of capable workers to maintain
agricultural production at levels that could sustain both an army and the
civilian population at large. Feeding troops, moreover, clearly was the
state’s priority. The deportation of many men from eastern Anatolia left that
area particularly vulnerable. In a cipher from July 1915, the commander of
the Third Army requested the assignment of thousands of soldiers to
agricultural work, as ‘all Muslims have been conscripted and the Armenians
in their entirety [kâmilen] have been deported’. Without such a labour force,
Mahmud Kâmil went on, the region would descend into ‘dearth and famine’
and render his army without supplies, and possibly have ‘catastrophic’
consequences.57 By 1917 the manpower problem had become so acute that
the War Ministry requested information from the provinces as to the
number of available 12-to 17-year-old boys.58
Private İhsan, the soldier serving in Jerusalem, did not live long enough
to see the keys of his city handed over to the British. On 9 December 1917,
Jerusalem surrendered, and two days later, General Edmund Allenby
entered Jerusalem through Jaffa Gate, on foot, in a gesture of symbolic
humility. The city’s inhabitants cheered the apparent arrival of peace. But
with the expulsion of Ottoman rule came necessarily the unpredictability of
how and by whom the newly ‘liberated’ regions of the Empire would be
governed. Initially, it seemed, a new order would be established through a
deliberative process defined by Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-
determination and a new international body, the League of Nations. The
reprieve, however, did not last long, and in Palestine the population
understood quickly that the old Empire, swept away by the war, was being
replaced by a new one, with its own imperial aims yet to unfold. The United
States’ special agent to the region, William Yale, who would serve on the
King-Crane Commission charged with a fact-finding mission to Syria after
the war, reported as early as April 1918:
It is rather significant that Palestine, where there has been so much

suffering and privation, and where the disaffection with the Turkish
regime was so great in 1916 and 1917, that nearly every Arab talked
open treason against the Ottoman government and longed for the
deliverance of their country from the Turks, there should be in the
spring of 1918, soon after the British occupation, a party, which,
according to British political agents, wished to live in the future under
the suzerainty of Turkey. The sentiments of this party cannot be
altogether explained by an inherent dislike of Europeans and the very
natural Muslim desire of wishing to be under a Muslim ruler. There
undoubtedly enters into these sentiments of this party the belief that
under Turkish rule the Zionists would not be allowed to gain a stronger
foothold in Palestine than they now have. 59
Indeed in 1914, after several waves of Jewish immigration, primarily from

Europe, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at around 6 per cent. At
this point an independent Jewish state in Palestine was on the agenda of
only a minority of the Jewish population there. The majority urged the
recent immigrants to take up Ottoman citizenship, to serve in the Ottoman
military, to work together with the local Muslim and Christian population
and thereby to build a Jewish community within the House of Osman, the
Ottoman Empire. These views found expression in the widely circulated
daily ha-Herut, which carried on the occasion of Istanbul’s call for
mobilisation the patriotic speech of a Jewish conscript: ‘From this moment
we are not separate people [individuals]. All the people of this country are
as one man, and we all want to protect our country and respect our empire.’
60
But with Ottoman collapse looming, even appearing imminent at such

times as the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, this outlook disappeared, and for
the first time Theodor Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state appeared
compellingly viable. The conditions of the war made this sea change
possible. Institutions such as the Anglo-Palestine Bank together with the
United States provided war relief directed for the Jewish population of
Palestine. The British government promised ‘a national home for the Jewish
people’ in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, even as they were
actively encouraging Arab independence in their negotiations with Sharif
Hussein of Mecca. The war had given rise to a radically new power
relationship in Palestine.
The end
The lack of adequate food both at home and at the front rendered soldiers
and civilians highly susceptible to disease. About 14 per cent of all soldiers
mobilised succumbed, with dysentery and typhus being the most lethal.61
The great number of casualties, displaced people and forced migrations
produced long-term socio-economic consequences: urban populations, for
example, did not return to pre-war levels until the early 1950s.62 In
Anatolia/Turkey, living standards dropped dramatically, as GDP in the
1920s stood at about half that of pre-war figures.63 The war’s
transformative effects on Syria were no less profound, as it left behind an
equally devastated landscape and a ‘shattered social order’.64
In the post-war limbs of the now-dismembered empire, the regimes
quickly adapted to the new political realities and each appropriated its own,
and often more than one, version of a usable Ottoman past. The military
insecurity and national vagueness in which the new regimes were born gave
rise to military dictatorships that presented themselves as safeguards of both
territorial security and national unity. In Turkey, the military society that
took root during the years of the First World War never returned to its
former civilian self. The war shaped the Turkish Republic and the Kemalist
period in fundamental ways. A basic textbook used in military high schools
in 1926, for example, opened with the following lines: ‘Wars have now
become wars fought by the entire nation. Times have changed. Wars are no
longer fought by the army alone. All women and men, each member of the
nation, must take on a duty and a role according to his or her age and skills
that will serve the war.’65 Nearly identical lines could be found in European
textbooks as well, of course. Unlike in most of Europe, however, in Turkey
the sense of internal and external enemies has remained a central feature of
the political culture, as in all the former lands of the Ottoman Empire for a
century.
1 Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi;

hereafter BOA), DH. EUM. AYŞ 47/17, 25 October 1920.
2 James L. Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of
War, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 77.
Unfortunately for those desiring specific numbers of wartime casualties,
Gelvin’s ‘approximately 5 million’ war casualties covers the years 1914–23
and includes Egypt. The Ottoman population in 1914 stood at around 21
million, not including Egypt, and at around 25 million including Egypt.
3 British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord [Walter]

Rothschild, 2 November 1917.
4 For an exception see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide:

Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
(Oxford University Press, 2005), and his ‘The First World War and the
development of the Armenian genocide’, in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma
Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide:
Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University
Press, 2011), pp. 260–75.
5 J. Ellis Barker, ‘The future of Asiatic Turkey’, The Nineteenth Century

and After: A Monthly Review, 79 (January–June 1916), pp. 1221–47, for the
quote see p. 1225.
6 9 February 1915. I am grateful to Professor Robert Geraci for his

assistance with the Duma proceedings.
7 Michael Provence, ‘Ottoman modernity, colonialism, and insurgency in

the Arab Middle East’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 43
(2011), p. 206.
8 Hanna Mina, Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family, trans.

Olive Kenny and Lorne Kenny (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2004), pp.
5–9, and Najwa al-Qattan, ‘Safarbarlik: Ottoman Syria and the Great War’,
in Thomas Philipp and Christoph Schumann (eds.), From the Syrian Land
to the States of Syria and Lebanon (Beirut and Würzburg: Ergon, 2004), pp.
163–73, for a captivating discussion of the various derived meanings of the
term in Greater Syria – including its use as synonym for death, starvation,
forced exile and ‘to go off and never come back again’.
9 Salim Tamari (ed.), Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s Diary and the Erasure
of Palestine’s Ottoman Past (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011), p. 142.
10 Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal

Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia
11 Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews

in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2011), pp.
1–19.
12 See, for example, the diary of Ihsan Turjman, in Tamari (ed.), Year of
the Locust, p. 156.
13 Ali Rıza Eti, Bir Onbaşının Doğu Cephesi Günlüğü, ed. Gönül Eti
(Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2009), p. 104; for the
deportations of Armenians and Kurds from Diyar-ı Bekir province in
eastern Anatolia, see Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey:
Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 55–169.
14 Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman

Empire and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 1.
15 George Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-

Russian Relations, 1875–1890 (Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 3.
16 Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation-Building: From the
Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 48.
17 Zafer Toprak, İttihad-Terakki ve Cihan Harbi: Savaş Ekonomisi ve
Türkiye’de Devletçilik, 1914–1918 (Istanbul: Homer Kitabevi, 2003), pp.
1–16.
18 See the Preface, for example, of Stanford J. Shaw, Prelude to War, vol.
I: The Ottoman Empire in World War I, Turkish Historical Society, no. 109
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006), p. xxxiii; İsmet Görgülü and İzeddin
Çalışlar (eds.), On Yıllık Savaşın Günlüğü: Balkan, Birinci Dünya ve
İstiklal Savaşları: Orgeneral İzzettin Çalışların Günlüğü (Istanbul: Yapı
Kredi Yayınları, 1997). Çalışlar’s diary actually begins with the Balkan
wars in 1912 rather than the Italian war.
19 Espoused by Donald Quataert and, in his words, ‘many others,’ review

of Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity,
State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman Empire (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), in American Historical Review, 107:4
(2002), p. 1328.
20 James Renton, ‘Changing languages of empire and the Orient: Britain

and the invention of the Middle East, 1917–1918’, Historical Journal, 50
(2007), p. 649.
21 Mark Levene, ‘Creating a modern “zone of genocide”: the impact of

nation-and state-formation on eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923’, Holocaust and
Genocide Studies, 12 (1998), pp. 393–33.
22 Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris system: international

politics and the entangled histories of human rights, forced deportations,
and civilizing missions’, American Historical Review, 113:5 (2008), p.
1316: ‘It is not an accident, nor mere hypocrisy, that leading statesmen such
as the Czechs Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Beneš and the Greek prime
minister Eleutherios Venizelos (let alone Winston Churchill and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt) could move without missing a beat from strong
advocacy of democracy and human rights to active promotion of
compulsory deportations of minority populations.’
23 Donald Bloxham, ‘The First World War and the development of the
Armenian genocide’, in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and
Norman M. Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide (Oxford University
Press, 2011), pp. 260–84.
24 Edward W. Said, ‘Clash of ignorance’, The Nation, 22 October 2001.
25 Ali Rıza Eti, Bir Onbaşının Doğu Cephesi Günlüğü, pp. 26 and 46.
There is a significant range for the casualty numbers of the Third Army at
Sarıkamış, as well as its original strength. See Hikmet Özdemir, The
Ottoman Army, 1914–1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield, trans.
Saban Kardaş (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2008), pp. 50–
67; and Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse
of the Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge University
Press, 2011), p. 125. Reynolds gives the strength of the Third Army as
95,000 men, Özdemir as 112,000.
26 For a thorough treatment of the topic, based on research in the Archives

of the Turkish general staff, see Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman
Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: between Voluntarism
and Resistance (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 247–309. I thank Professor
Beşikçi for allowing me to cite his manuscript.
27 Ali Rıza Eti, Bir Onbaşının Doğu Cephesi Günlüğü, pp. 104 and 135.
28 Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower, pp. 113–15.

the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 237–43.
30 Campos, Ottoman Brothers, p. 87.
31 Fikret Adanır, ‘Non-Muslims in the Ottoman army and the Ottoman

defeat in the Balkan war of 1912–1913’, in Suny, Göçek and Naimark
(eds.), A Question of Genocide, p. 117.
32 Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower, pp. 253–4.
33 Fatma Müge Göçek, The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State

and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2011), pp. 198–205. For his memoirs, published posthumously in
Turkish, see Hagop Mintzuri, İstanbul Anıları, 1897–1940, trans. Silva
Kuyumcuyan, ed. Necdet Sakaoğlu (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1993; 2012), p.
133.
34 G. F. Abbott, The Holy War in Tripoli (London: Longman’s, Green,

1912), pp. 193–4.
35 Rachel Simon, Libya Between Ottomanism and Nationalism (Berlin:

Klaus Schwarz, 1987), p. 87.
36 Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War, pp. 19–41, 93–118.
37 Ahenk, 13 October 1912, quoted in Zeki Arıkan, ‘Balkan Savaşı ve

Kamuoyu’, in Bildiriler: Dördüncü Askeri Tarih Semineri (Ankara:
Genelkurmay Basımevi, 1989), p. 176.
38 BOA, DH. ŞFR 43/127, 28 and 29 July 1914.
39 BOA, DH. ŞFR 43/141, 2 August 1914, Talat to the governors of

Erzurum, Adana, Aydın, Bitlis, Halep, Diyar-ı Bekir, Sivas, Trabzon,
Kastamonu, Mamuret-ül-aziz, Mosul, Van, Bolu, Çanik, Kale-i Sultaniye
and Antalya.
40 Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War, pp. 119–87.

41 BOA, DH. ŞFR 435/40, 3 August 1914; BOA, DH. EUM. VRK 12/60,
4 August 1914.
42 BOA, DH. ŞFR 437/83, 17 August 1914.
43 BOA, DH. ŞFR 455/124, 28 and 29 December 1914.
44 BOA, DH. ŞFR 456/112, 6 January 1915.
45 Reynolds, Shattering Empires, p. 144; and, on the Second World War,

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York:
Basic Books, 2010).
46 Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and

Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), p. 189. See the cover illustration for the stamp.
47 Reynolds, Shattering Empires, pp. 220–2.
48 Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr. (ed.), The Memoirs and Diaries of Muhammad

Farid, an Egyptian Nationalist Leader (1868–1919) (San Francisco: Mellen
University Research Press, 1992), pp. 6–7.
49 Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, trans. William Maynard Hutchins and

Olive E. Kenny (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), p. 56.
50 Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through

Popular Culture (Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 98, 117–33.
51 Thompson, Colonial Citizens, pp. 19–23. For quotes see p. 22.
52 Ihsan Turjman, in Tamari (ed.), Year of the Locust, p. 143.

53 Ibid., p. 154.
54 BOA, DH. SYS 123–9/21–3, 13 October 1914.
55 BOA, DH. İ. UM. 93–4/1–48, 13 March 1916.
56 BOA, DH. İ. UM. 93–4/1–48, 20 March 1916.
57 BOA, DH. İ. UM 59–1/1–38, 15 July 1915.
58 BOA, DH. UMVM 148/53, 9 June 1917.
59 Quoted in Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem

Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press, 2011), p.
145, from ‘The situation in Palestine’, 1 April 1918, CM/241/33, Report no.
21, 11–13, Central Zionist Archives.
60 Quoted in Jacobson, From Empire to Empire, p. 27.
61 Erik J. Zürcher, ‘The Ottoman soldier in World War I’, in Zürcher, The
Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to
Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), p. 187.
62 Istanbul’s population in 1914 was about 1 million, of which 450,000

were Christian. See Çağlar Keyder (ed.), Istanbul: Between the Global and
the Local (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 10, 146, 175.
63 Michael Twomey, ‘Economic change’, in Camron Michael Amin,

Benjamin C. Fortna and Elizabeth B. Frierson (eds.), The Modern Middle
East: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 528.
64 Thompson, Colonial Citizens, p. 19.

65 Cemil Tahir, Askerliğe Hazırlık Dersleri ([Istanbul:] Harbiye Mektebi
Matbaası, 1926), p. 1.
18 Asia
Guoqi Xu The Great War has been studied from every possible perspective,
from its wider significance to particular issues and incidents; yet knowledge
about the important role Asia played in the conflict and the war’s profound
impact on Asian societies remains at best limited. If the world has not yet
fully realised the deep connection between Asia and the Great War, Asians
have not yet fully understood its legacy and impact on their history and the
development of their nations. In this chapter I aim to fill this remarkable gap
in the First World War literature by highlighting the multi-layered
involvements and perspectives of various Asian nations on that ‘great
seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century.
This chapter will weave together the diplomatic, social, political, cultural
and military histories of China, Vietnam, India and Japan in a comparative
way by focusing on the shared experiences, aspirations and frustrations of
people from across the region. I will especially pay attention to questions
such as how the various Asian involvements made the Great War not only a
true ‘world’ war but also a ‘great’ war, and how that war generated the
forces that would transform Asia both internally and externally. We might
call the nineteenth century a ‘long century’ in Asia and the twentieth rather a
short one, with the First World War serving as the dividing-line. In other
words, from an Asian perspective, the twentieth century started in earnest at
the outbreak of the Great War. Due to concerns with thematic coherence and
space limitations, this chapter will largely focus on the Western Front and on
the four above-mentioned nations. Many other important areas and issues
will have to be left untouched.
News of the European war reaches Asia

In 1914, the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese zodiac cycle, the ‘guns of
August’ declared the coming of a Great War. Although the war began as an
essentially European conflict, Asians grew both excited and worried when
the news of its outbreak reached them. The seeds of what would become a
deep interest in the European war had actually been planted in 1895 in the
cases of China and Japan, while India and Vietnam – colonies of Britain and
France, respectively – could only follow their colonial masters when they
joined the fight.
The outbreak of a European war was a God-sent opportunity for the
Japanese. Japan, like China, had been in almost a total isolation until
Western powers forced it to open to the outside world in the mid nineteenth
century. Unlike China, Japan soon decided to join the Western system and
follow in Western footsteps with the launching of the Meiji Restoration in
1868. Some Japanese elites openly suggested that Japan leave its Asian
identity behind, and emulating Western ways became both fashionable and
national policy. Inoue Kaoru, an influential Japanese politician, declared,
‘We must make our nation and people into a European nation and European
people.’1
In less than a generation, Japan had become confident enough about
turning itself into a Western-style empire that it took on China, formerly the
economic and cultural giant of Asia. In 1894 war broke out between China
and Japan, and by 1895 the Chinese had been soundly defeated. The war
made Japan a major power in East Asia and an empire with its first colony
Taiwan, which China was forced to cede. The war also laid the groundwork
for Japan to acquire a second colony by forcing China to abandon Korea,
traditionally a Chinese tributary state. Japan seemed to be bound for a major
international military game.
The 1894–5 Sino-Japanese War further planted the seeds for Japan’s direct
entry into the Great War nearly twenty years later. Germany had played a
leading role in the so-called triple intervention subsequent to the Sino-
Japanese conflict, in which the Germans ‘advised’ the Japanese to return to
China the Liaodong Peninsula, which Japan had forced China to cede. This
infuriated the Japanese, who became determined to find a way to take action
against Germany. One Japanese newspaper’s headline, ‘Wait for another
time’ clearly conveyed this sentiment.2 In 1902 Japan achieved a major
diplomatic coup by signing an alliance treaty with Britain, which at that
point was preparing for possible war with the Germans. On the basis of the
relationship created with this treaty, when war broke out in 1914 Japan
managed to insert itself into the war. With this background one might say
that Japan had been preparing for this opportunity since its war with China
in 1895. Japan became an imperial power in 1895 when antagonism between
the Entente and the future Central Powers began to intensify.
As a rising power in Asia, Japan was determined to become a leading
player in international politics. But Japan’s efforts faced some resistance
from the Western powers. It would have been difficult for Japan to fulfil its
growing ambitions without external help, and so the outbreak in August
1914 was considered by many Japanese to be a great opportunity. The
Japanese had been waiting for their chance, and now with the European war,
the magic moment had arrived. No wonder elder statesman, Inoue Kaoru,
hailed the news as ‘divine aid of the new Taisho era for the development of
the destiny of Japan’.3 Four days after Britain’s entry into the war, on 8
August 1914, Japan decided to declare war on Germany, though the official
declaration of war was not announced for another week.
Getting revenge for being forced to give up the Liaodong Peninsula was of
course a convenient excuse for the Japanese. As Baron Kato, the Japanese
Foreign Minister, explained to one American journalist in 1915:
Germany is an aggressive European Power that had secured a foothold

on one corner of the province of Shan-tung. This is a great menace to
Japan. Furthermore, Germany had forced Japan to return the peninsula
of Liao-tung under the plausible pretense of friendly advice. Because of
the pressure brought to bear on us, Japan had to part with the legitimate
fruits of war, bought with the blood of our fellow countrymen. Revenge
is not justifiable, either in the case of an individual or a nation; but
when, by coincidence, one can attend to this duty and at the same time
pay an old debt, the opportunity certainly should be seized.4
Japan’s real goal was to expand its interest in China while the major powers
were occupied in Europe. The biggest payoff for Japan would be kicking
German interests out of Asia and establishing itself as the dominant power in
China. As I will explain in detail later, China was then in the process of
becoming a republic, as a way to renew and strengthen itself in the face of
modern threats. Japan was determined to make China a dependent before
that transformation could be completed. The Okuma Cabinet declared,
‘Japan must take the chance of a millennium’ to ‘establish its rights and
interests in Asia’.5
The European war also served Japanese domestic politics because the war
could be used as a national rallying point.6 The death of the Meiji Emperor
in 1912 meant the end of an era and the weakening of the existing political
order. For some influential Japanese, Japan lost national purpose in the post-
Meiji years, and its entry into the war would instil in the Japanese people
some sense of higher purpose. Joining the Great War thus would help Japan
to achieve three goals: revenging itself on Germany, expanding its interests
in China and rejuvenating its domestic politics.
If the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5 set the stage for Japan’s involvement
in the Great War, it also nearly sealed China’s fate. The Chinese defeat in
1895 meant many things. It certainly subjected the country to much more
extensive foreign control, but its psychological impact was even greater. The
Sino-Japanese War compelled the Chinese leadership to think seriously
about their destiny and the value of their civilisation; more importantly, it
caused them to question their traditional identity. That war awakened the
Chinese from what Liang Qichao, an influential author and thinker of the
late Qing and early Republican period, called ‘the great dream of four
thousand years’.7 The sense of frustration, humiliation and impotence in the
face of Western incursions and a westernised Japan provided powerful
motivation for change. The devastating loss to Japan thus served as both a
turning point and shared point of reference for Chinese perceptions of
themselves and the world. Chinese elites, no matter what their attitude to
their tradition and civilisation, agreed that if China was to survive, it must
change. And major change indeed arrived with the 1911 Revolution, when
the venerable dynastic system was overturned and a republic established,
after the examples of the United States and France.
Under the powerful sweep of these changes and with a burning desire to
become an equal member in the family of nations, China abandoned the
institutions of Confucian civilisation and transformed itself from a cultural
entity that had no official name, despite its long history, to become the first
republic in Asia. Nationalism and social Darwinism replaced Confucianism
as the defining ideologies in China. In the period between 1895 and 1914
profound changes took place politically, culturally and diplomatically.
Although during much of the First World War period the Chinese people
suffered from political chaos, economic weakness and social misery, it was
also a time of excitement, hope, high expectation, optimism and new
dreams. This may be compared to the Warring States era in ancient Chinese
history. The clash of ideas, political theories and the prescription of national
identities provided high stimulation to China’s ideological, social, cultural
and intellectual creativity, and produced a strong determination for change.
These changes would motivate and push China to participate in the new
world order and become an equal member in the family of the nations. Like
the Japanese, the Chinese considered the outbreak of the European war to be
an opportunity, or more precisely, a weiji (crisis). The term weiji combines
two Chinese characters: danger (wei) and opportunity (ji). As Europe’s
‘generation of 1914’, too young and innocent to suspect what bloody rites of
passage awaited them, went off to war, the new generation in China
experienced a sense of weiji at the challenge of dealing with new
developments in the international system. China recognised the danger of
becoming involved in the war involuntarily, given that the belligerents all
controlled spheres of interest on Chinese territory. With the collapse of the
old international system, China could easily be bullied by Japan, and its
development thwarted. Yet despite the dangers, the European war also
presented excellent opportunities. It could bring changes to the international
system that would provide China with the chance to join the larger world.
China might even inject its own ideas into shaping the new world order.8 For
contemporary Chinese like Liang Qichao, the war offered more opportunity
than danger. Liang argued that the First World War presented China a once-
in-a-thousand-years opportunity. For Liang, the key reason for China’s
joining the war was to enhance its status in the new international situation; in
this way China would not only survive in the short term, but would have an
easier time being accepted into the international community in the long
term.9 The problem was how to take best advantage of this opportunity.
Liang argued that if China exploited the situation properly, it could finish the
process of becoming a ‘completely qualified nation-state’ and prepare for a
quick rise in the world. 10
To prevent the war from spreading to Chinese territory, China’s
Republican government on 6 August declared its neutrality. China would
remain officially neutral until spring 1917. But this neutrality was only an
expedient measure, a strategy intermediate to making a better move; China
was prepared to give up its neutrality the moment a new opportunity arose.
Modern-minded Chinese officials were especially enthusiastic about the
prospects of China’s active involvement in the war. As some have observed,
these officials, ‘with a knowledge of foreign diplomacy, took an immediate
interest and combined to exhort the conservatives to action’.11 Zhang
Guogan, an influential government official, suggested to the then Prime
Minister, Duan Qirui that the European war had such importance for China
that it should take the initiative of declaring war on Germany. This might not
only prevent Japan from taking the German concession on Qingdao in the
short term, but would be a first step towards full participation in a future
world system. Duan responded that he supported the idea of joining the war
and was secretly preparing for this move.12
Liang Shiyi, who served in many powerful positions in the government
and was Chinese President Yuan Shikai’s confidant, also suggested in 1914
that China join the war on the Allied side.13 Liang told the President that
Germany was not strong enough to win in the long term, so China should
seize the opportunity to declare war. By doing so, Liang reasoned, China
could recover Qingdao, win a seat at the post-war Peace Conference and
serve other long-term interests. Liang was famous for his foresight and
shrewdness; indeed, some close observers called him ‘the Machiavelli of
China’.14 In 1915 he argued again, ‘The Allied Powers will win absolutely.
[That is why] we want to help them.’15 In one of his hand-written notes
dated in November 1915, he insisted that the ‘time is right [for China to join
the war now]. We won’t have a second chance.’ 16
If the main motivation for Japan joining the war was to expand its control
in China, China’s key reason to join the war effort was to counter Japan.
Japan was China’s most threatening and determined enemy. Only by joining
the war might the Chinese gain leeway to resist and recover their national
sovereignty. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the question of how to deal
with German concessions became a concern for China and Great Britain, but
especially for Germany and Japan. As a semi-colonised country, where
powers like Germany and Britain had carved out spheres of interest, China
was bound to be dragged into the war one way or another. Therefore, it
would be better to take the initiative and join the war.
China’s social transformation and cultural and political revolutions
coincided with the First World War, and the war provided the momentum
and opportunity for China to redefine its relations with the world by
inserting itself into the war effort. Moreover, the era of the First World War
represented, as James Joll has noted, ‘the end of an age and beginning of the
new one’ in the international arena.17 It signalled the collapse of the existing
international system and the coming of a new world order, an obvious
development that fed China’s desire to change its international status. The
young republic’s weakness and domestic political chaos provided strong
motivation to enter and alter the international system. The 1911 Revolution
forced the Chinese to pay new attention to changes in the world system, and
the Great War was the first major event to engage the imagination of Chinese
social and political elites. Changes in the Chinese worldview and the
destabilising forces loosed by the war set the stage for China to have a hand
in world affairs, even though there seemed to be no immediate impact on
China itself (Map 18.1).
Map 18.1 The war in Asia.
The positions of Vietnam and India in 1914 differed from those of China
and Japan due to their colonial status. Neither could make its own policies or
pursue its own options. In the Vietnamese case, outbreak of the war in
Europe did not command much attention, and the discussions and
deliberations regarding the impact of the war on Vietnam were limited and
inconsequential. But the Vietnamese, like the Chinese, had become deeply
affected by the ideas of social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century,
which spurred them to figure out a new direction for Vietnam. Although
colonial control may explain the limited effect of Vietnamese efforts at
political reform, ‘events that occurred during and immediately after World
War I wrought a real transformation of Vietnam’s political elite and
educational system, which in turn brought into the open further schisms in
the Reform Movement’.18 Hô Chi Minh, the future communist leader, wrote
in 1914 to one of his friends and mentors:
Gunfire rings out through the air and corpses cover the ground. The five
Great Powers are engaged in battle. Nine countries are at war . . . I
think that in the next three or four months the destiny of Asia will
change dramatically. Too bad for those who are fighting and struggling.
We just have to remain calm.
He soon realised that he needed to go to France to take the pulse of the larger
world and to understand the role his country might play when the world was
at war. 19
Like Vietnam, India’s involvement in the war was largely a by-product of
its inclusion in the British Empire, not as a decision directly made in India’s
own interest. Indian nationalists were not in a position to make decisions on
international relations. As a colonial master, Britain at first did not imagine it
would need Indian help. The fighting, after all, was in Europe and between
European peoples. But the British soon realised that they would have to
mobilise Indian resources if they hoped to survive the conflict. Indian
involvement in the war, even under British direction, was important to
Indians for at least two reasons. First, it pushed to the fore Indian relations
with the outside world. In their colonial past, the world had come to mean
little, and Indian political elites rarely gave extensive thought to international
and military affairs before the war. Their involvement in the war was ‘the
first time the people of Hindustan were brought to a realization of their
relation to the rest of the Empire’.
Secondly, Indian involvement in the war sparked thinking about India as a
nation and the rise of Indian nationalism. In 1914, India could not be
considered a fully constituted nation, but seemed rather an agglomeration of
many races, castes, and creeds ‘who tolerate one another, but who have little
in common’. But the war threw open a new world and helped the Indians
‘realize their strength’. The British decision to seek Indian assistance seems
to have ‘furnished a common cause for which all could work, irrespective of
racial distinctions or beliefs’. Thus the war gave the cause of nationalism
and Indian identity ‘a decided fillip’.20 For Captain Amar Singh of the
Indian Army, for example, his service in the Great War was an opportunity
to fulfil his duty and ‘express his sense of honor and nationhood’. He was
gratified that Indian troops would have a chance to fight alongside European
troops. He expected India to gain in stature as a result, a view of the war that
was common among knowledgeable Indians.21 Practically all prominent
Indian politicians supported the British war recruitment effort. Mahatma
Gandhi was one of them. Many of them linked support for the war to
Indians’ right to equality as citizens of the British Empire, and they hoped
that Britain would reward India with a greater voice in its own governing
once the war was over.
Even British authorities recognised the serious implications of the war.
The Times History of the War in 1914 explains:
The more they [Indians] learned of the goodness of our Western
civilization and the higher, especially, we raised the standard of our
native Indian Army, the stronger became the pressure upon us from
below, seeking some outlet for the high ambitions which we ourselves
had awakened. Looking only at the military side of the question, no one
conversant with the facts could fail to see that the time was at hand
when we could no longer deny to a force of British subjects, with the
glorious record and splendid efficiency of our native Indian troops, the
right to stand shoulder to shoulder with their British comrades in
defence of the Empire, wherever it might be assailed.22
The war thus opened some Indians’ eyes to the outside world and allowed
them to dream and set high expectations, as world politics were changing
and their so-called mother country was engaged in a major war. When the
‘king-emperor’ asked for Indian help, India responded positively, especially
so in the case of the educated class who saw in the war an opportunity.
Ahmed Iqbal, the distinguished poet, reflected what was on the minds of
elites when the war broke out:
The world will witness when from my heart Springs the storm of
expression; My silence conceals
The seed of aspiration.23
China, India, Japan and Vietnam in the Great War

Japan and China, with their strong expectations of advantages, and India and
Vietnam, out of both colonial duty and budding nationalism, all became
deeply involved in the European war almost immediately. As pointed out
earlier, Japan had inserted itself into the war the very month hostilities
began. Japan’s ultimatum demanded that Germany transfer its Chinese
concessions to Japan, and when Germany refused, the Japanese launched an
attack on Qingdao in Chinese territory. Japan contributed larger forces than
Britain to fighting the Germans in China: 2,800 British and 29,000 Japanese
troops engaged the Germans at Qingdao. Interestingly, Indian troops also
joined the British and Japanese, so they got a taste of fighting even before
they travelled to Europe to join the war effort. Even more interestingly, the
Japanese military effort ended at Qingdao’s fall, with about 2,000 Japanese
casualties. On 11 November 1914, Qingdao was transferred from German to
Japanese control.
In terms of actual fighting, only the Indians and Vietnamese took part by
sending military forces. Although India held an unequal and inferior place
under Great Britain, Indian soldiers contributed significantly to the British
war effort. They ‘served as an enormous reservoir of men in the Allied
cause’,24 and India made the largest contribution of any British colony or
Dominion in terms of sheer numbers. Both military and labour forces
travelled to Europe to help the colonial motherland in the war. More than
130,000 Indians arrived in France over the course of the war to work side by
side with their colonial masters. Casualties, declining morale and doubts
about the wisdom of using non-white troops in Europe led to the permanent
withdrawal of the India Corps from the Western Front at the end of 1915.
But many Indian soldiers continued to serve in East Africa, Mesopotamia,
Palestine and Egypt until the end of war, with Mesopotamia as India’s main
theatre of war, where the majority of Indian military forces and labour corps
stayed, and heavy casualties took place. On the part of Vietnam, during the
war about 49,000 Vietnamese soldiers and 48,000 workers were recruited for
the French war effort, and the majority of them went to France, to serve
predominantly on the Western Front.25 By the end of the war, 1,797
Vietnamese had lost their lives, and the Indian forces in various theatres of
the war had lost 53,486. 26
Japan’s meagre military support for its allies made sense since its true
motive was expanding its interests in China. As the Europeans exhausted
each other in battle, Japan would become more important to both sides,
which would give Japan a free hand in Asia. So although Japan was
technically at war with Germany, it treated Germans who lived and worked
in the country well. As one American at the time observed, ‘The Japanese
have not disturbed any German residents in Japan – all are welcome to stay
and continue their occupations as before – even the German editors are so
very “continuing” in their way of writing, that they publish most outrageous
and hostile editorials daily. We wait in amazement to see how much longer
Japanese magnanimity will ignore such a breach of common sense and press
laws.’27 Because its true focus was China, the Japanese war effort
immediately shifted with Qingdao’s fall, to concentrate on its expansion in
China.
On 18 January 1915, Japan presented China with the infamous ‘Twenty-
One Demands’. These reveal the Japanese ambition essentially to colonise
China while the major powers were not in position to prevent it. The
demands consisted of five sections with a total of twenty-one articles. The
most serious and demanding section was the fifth, which demanded that
China appoint Japanese advisers in political, financial and military affairs,
and that the Japanese take control of Chinese police departments in
important places across China. These demands were so severe that some
called them ‘worse than many presented by a victor to his vanquished
enemy’.28 Obviously, the Japanese meant to make China a vassal state.
Japan’s demands presented the biggest challenge yet to China’s survival
and its desire to become a full-fledged nation-state. The Twenty-One
Demands fully exposed Japanese ambitions in China and helped China to
focus on the direction the country should head in terms of its war policy. If
Japan provided China with a crisis of national identity by defeating it in
1895, the demands it presented in 1915 not only aroused Chinese national
consciousness, they also helped the Chinese identify the first specific goal
their response to the First World War should achieve: a place at the post-war
Peace Conference. Although China had earlier expressed its intention to join
the war, it was only after the Twenty-One Demands that sufficient
momentum had gathered for the government to make concrete steps towards
that goal . Among the many countries that participated in the war, China was
perhaps the most unusual. No neutral country had linked its fate with the war
so closely, had such high expectations and yet had been so humbled by the
experience. The Chinese declaration of war on Germany and Austria-
Hungary in August 1917 might not be considered significant in world
affairs, but it was an extremely important event for China.
This was the first time in modern history that the Chinese government
took the initiative to play an active role in affairs distant from Chinese
shores. China’s participation was also the first time in modern history that
China came to the aid of the West on such a grand scale. Its strategy for
participation in the European conflict indicated that China was ready to be
part of the world and join the family of nations as an equal member. Its
declaration of war on Germany and Austria-Hungary on 14 August
coincided with the eighteenth anniversary of the Powers’ entry into Beijing
during the Boxer Rebellion. By entering the war, China did recover some
degree of sovereignty, one of its major war aims. After breaking off relations
with Germany and Austria, the Chinese government was able to finally
assert itself against a European power: the navy confiscated German vessels
in Chinese ports and Chinese police immediately took over German and
Austrian concessions.
Perhaps no single foreign policy initiative had a stronger impact on
China’s domestic politics and society than its policy on the First World War.
But instead of enjoying the fruits of its first major independent diplomatic
programme, China tasted bitter social disorder, political chaos and national
disintegration. Disputes over the war-participation policy exacerbated
factionalism, encouraged warlordism and led to civil war. In the wake of
China’s declaration in 1917, a series of bizarre episodes – the dissolution of
parliament, the restoration of the Qing Emperor, the frequent comings and
goings of new governments, the dismissal and returns of Duan Qirui and the
resignation of President Li Yuanhong – followed one after another. And the
ironies go beyond the domestic realm. China’s deadly enemy was Japan, but
the Chinese joined the same side as Japan. Germany was China’s declared
enemy, but the ‘declared’ war between China and Germany was phoney
because there had been no fighting and Germany was not the intended
enemy. Germany became a victim – or vehicle – in China’s grand strategy.
Germany was in fact a friend in disguise since it helped China springboard
into the world arena.
A key to understanding these seemingly contradictory developments is the
Chinese obsession with their international status and the government’s
strategy to use its war policies to recover the sovereignty it had lost to Japan
and other powers since the Opium War. Although China was eager to send
military forces to Europe after its official entry into the war, only France was
interested in having Chinese troops join the fighting. Japan strongly opposed
this, while Britain was not very excited at the prospect. Due to lack of
transportation and funding and lukewarm interest, China failed to land
soldiers in Europe. Instead, its largest contribution was sending 140,000
Chinese workers to support the British and French war efforts. 29
For the Chinese, sending labourers to Europe was key to their strategy of
taking part in the post-war Peace Conference and so to joining the
community of nations as a full member. As early as 1915, China worked out
a labourers-as-soldiers scheme, designed to create a link with the Allied
cause when its official entry into the war was uncertain. To strengthen its
case for claiming a role in the war, the Chinese vigorously promoted the idea
of sending labourers to help the Allies. This programme was the brainchild
of Liang Shiyi, who called it the yigong daibing (literally, ‘labourers in the
place of soldiers’) strategy.30 When Liang Shiyi began thinking about his
plan, his main target was Britain, with a suggestion that entailed use of
military labourers, not hired workers. If Britain had accepted this proposal,
China would have been fighting on the Allied side in 1915. But Britain
rejected the idea immediately and so Liang had turned to France. One reason
for the rejection was British domestic politics. For Britain, the issue of
Chinese labour in South Africa had been a crucial one in the years before the
war, and the protection of ‘white labour’ at home and in the Empire was
crucial to understanding why the British trade unions were so determined to
oppose using Chinese workers in the war, especially in Britain (Map 18.2).
Map 18.2 Sources of manpower for British Labour Corps, 1914–18.

As the Chinese reeled from the blow of Japan’s Twenty-One Demands in
1915, the French faced a manpower crisis: how to continue the deadly war
on the battlefield while maintaining the home front? When China offered
help, the French immediately began planning how to get the Chinese into
France. Eventually, about 40,000 Chinese workers were recruited and
transported to France. By 1916, when Britain’s future was at stake, British
arrogance had been replaced in part by desperation. In an address to the
House of Commons on 24 July that year, Winston Churchill made the
following speech: ‘I would not even shrink from the word Chinese for the
purpose of carrying on the War.’31 British military authorities started to
recruit Chinese in 1916 and about 100,000 Chinese arrived in France during
the wartime to support the British war effort. Due to the widespread
protectionist consensus among the British working class, the British
government indeed insisted that Chinese labour should be treated in quasi-
military fashion and not be allowed into Britain. Many Chinese under British
supervision stayed in France until 1920, and most of the Chinese under the
French stayed until 1922. The Chinese were the last of the British labour
forces to leave France.32 In other words, among all the foreign countries
involved, China sent the largest number of workers to France and their
workers stayed there longest.
In 1916 Britain also turned to India for civilian labour resources. The first
Indian labour group of 2,000 men left for Europe in May 1917.33 In June
1917, another group of 6,370 men arrived in France. They were soon joined
by about 20,000 new men from India.34 In 1915 France started to mobilise
and recruited French Indochinese labourers for the war effort.35 Like the
Chinese, most of the Vietnamese who went to France went either to escape
poverty or seek adventure. But unlike China, there was resistance among the
Vietnamese. French recruitment of soldiers and workers was met with riots
and other forms of resistance throughout Cochinchina; most such events
were led by members of religious sects and secret societies.36
The Great War was a total war, fought on both the battlefield and the home
front; on the Western Front it consumed fighting forces and other human
resources on a vast scale. The Chinese, Indians and Vietnamese thus must be
counted an important part of the war for their huge human resource
contributions. The Chinese seemed to be experts at digging trenches. One
British officer testified that among the 100,000 men under him – English,
Indians and Chinese – the Chinese dug on average 200 cubic feet per day,
the Indians 160 and the Tommies 140. Another British officer supported that
observation: ‘In my company, I have found the Chinese labourers
accomplish a greater amount of work per day in digging trenches than white
labourers.’37 Most workers’ main duties were to maintain the munitions
supply lines, clean out and dig the trenches and clear conquered territory .
Besides digging trenches, three Chinese labour companies were involved
exclusively in working with the most advanced weapons of the war, the
tanks.38 The employment of Chinese for highly skilled work in the tank
corps was unprecedented, since such roles were normally reserved for white
workers. Besides their skills, the Chinese were often praised for their
efficiency and bravery. General Ferdinand Foch called the French-recruited
Chinese ‘first-class workers who could be made into excellent soldiers,
capable of exemplary bearing under modern artillery fire’.39
The Indians and Vietnamese were also praised for their hard work and
sacrifices. During the German offensive of March 1918, an Indian labour
corps was commended for their work and behaviour when forced to leave
camp at a moment’s notice. The men’s withdrawal was carried out with
‘admirable steadiness’; there was no panic, though in some cases they had to
endure shell-fire, attacks by aerial bombardment and machine-gun fire, both
by day and by night. Whenever called upon, they halted and even turned
back to work at the loading of stores on trains, lorries and wagons. ‘One
Company assisted the wounded with a hospital train and performed this
work – for which they had no training – in such a manner as to win high
praise from the Medical Officers.’40 By the end of the war, at least 4,000
Indochinese had served as drivers, transporting men and supplies at and near
the front. During the Battle of the Somme, Indochinese drivers remained at
the wheel for thirty-six hours straight without displaying any more fatigue
than did their French counterparts. There were suggestions that Indochinese
drivers were easier on the machinery than their French colleagues, and the
upkeep of trucks driven by the former cost less than a quarter of that for
vehicles driven by French soldiers. They also drove safely, having
successfully avoided any fatal accidents. One observer noted, ‘intelligence,
calmness, skill, aptitude for precise tasks seemed to be the chief qualities of
the Indochinese’.41
Everyone suffered, but the Chinese were more used to the cold weather of
the French winter than the Indians and Vietnamese, who had major
difficulties. The Chinese rarely complained about the weather, but the
Indians and Vietnamese frequently suffered terribly from the cold. On 27
December 1917, an Indian labourer wrote in a personal letter from France:
You enquire about the cold? I will tell plainly what the cold in France is
like when I meet you. At present I can only say that the earth is white,
the sky is white, the trees are white, the stones are white, the mud is
white, the water is white, one’s spittle freezes into a solid white lump.42
Many Vietnamese were also startled at the cold: ‘It was so cold’, one
Indochinese wrote, ‘that my saliva immediately freezes after I spit it on the
ground.’ Another wrote, ‘The chill of winter pierces my heart.’43 Of the
Chinese tolerance for the cold, Captain A. McCormick observed, ‘One thing
surprised me about them. I thought that they would have felt the cold more
than we did, but seemingly not, for both when working and walking about,
you would see them moving about stripped to the waist.’44 Being more
effective, skilled and much tougher, the Chinese were more widely sought
after than their comrades from India and Vietnam.
For most Asians, the journey to France was largely a journey of hardships
and suffering. Seasickness, disease, poor conditions and bad food were
major complaints. Some Vietnamese had to sleep with livestock on their way
to France. Many Asian workers were treated badly and had only tattered
clothes to wear. Long hours and food shortages were common for the
Indochinese workers. One Vietnamese complained, ‘There has been no rest,
not even a Sunday off.’ Another Vietnamese labourer reported that the only
food he had for two weeks was ‘one loaf of bread’.45 Most of these men
served at the front or near front zones and thus sustained casualties and even
lost their lives. About 3,000 Chinese died either on their way to Europe or in
Europe. Almost 1,500 Indian workers died during their service in France,
most of them from illness.46 By the end of the war, 1,548 Vietnamese
workers had died.
Despite the fact they came to support the British or French or both war
efforts, Chinese, Indians and Vietnamese all suffered from European racism
while in France. Among the British, the widespread assumption was, ‘Asians
and Africans were children, to be firmly dealt with for their own good.’47
The official code ‘forbade any hint of sentimental sympathy with colonial or
subject peoples. Sternness in dealings with the heathen became a virtue
never to be compromised; they were children to be judged, ruled, and
directed. And yet mixed with this arrogant belief in racial domination one
often finds elements of profound ignorance concerning, say, Oriental or
African customs and cultures.’48 They were even criticised for certain
special habits or customs. Vietnamese sometimes blackened their teeth
because they thought black teeth made them attractive. But this practice also
made them a target of ridicule by the French and created confrontations.
Indians were sometimes teased for not eating beef and other customs. British
racist attitudes about ‘Indian natural inferiority’ to the white men were
widespread. Due to racial stereotypes, some French thought the Vietnamese
were not physically strong enough to do the solid kinds of work the white
race could perform. General Joffre maintained that the Indochinese ‘do not
possess the physical qualities of vigor and endurance necessary to be
employed usefully in European warfare’.49
Interestingly, despite French racism, it seems that both the Chinese and
Vietnamese were popular with Frenchwomen. They often sought out
Chinese or Vietnamese workers because they had money and were kind.
Love and intimacy led to marriages. By the end of the war, 250 Vietnamese
had married Frenchwomen and 1,363 couples lived together without the
approval of the French authorities or parental consent. Although we do not
have an exact figure, it is safe to say that many Chinese had sexual relations
with Frenchwomen and some later married them. Frenchmen obviously
disliked the fact their women were marrying Chinese or Vietnamese. A
police report from Le Havre dated May 1917, noted that some local
Frenchmen were not happy to see Chinese workers there and even rioted
against them. According to the report, the French were disappointed with the
high war casualties their country had sustained:
It is frequently said (in the munitions factories), that if this continues,

there will not be any men left in France; so why are we fighting? So
that Chinese, Arabs, or Spaniards can marry our wives and daughters
and share out the France for which we’ll all, sooner or later, get
ourselves killed at the front. 50
Although the war’s positive impact and influence on Vietnamese national
development was not as strong as on India or China, still we can discern
some changes in peoples’ thinking and expectations, especially with respect
to Vietnamese who were in France during the war. As one scholar has
suggested recently, the First World War marked a turning point in the history
of French Indochina. For many Vietnamese, the journey to France meant
more than answering the mother country’s call; it was also an eye-opening
learning experience. While in France, many of them were eager to learn,
observe and study. Near Marseilles there was an Indochina club where
Vietnamese could write letters home and socialise with fellow Vietnamese.
The club provided magazines, newspapers and teas free of charge. The
Alliance Française provided social services and organised cultural activities
for Vietnamese workers and soldiers in France. The members of the Alliance
offered free French lessons, and by the end of the war about 25,000 men had
benefited from this programme.51 The Indochinese were enthusiastic about
opportunities to learn French while in Europe. One corporal in the cavalry,
named Le Van Nghiep, was so proud of being placed second out of sixty
candidates in the exam for the elementary certificate in French, that he wrote
to a friend in Hanoi and asked him to publish an article about his success in a
local paper along with his picture. The letter ended up in the desk of a
French censor, who commented that this Vietnamese had carried his
language studies ‘rather far’ and his ‘modesty is fading’.52
Through learning, study and close observation, the Vietnamese who went
to France ‘were transformed, and in many cases radicalized, in varying
degrees by their experiences’. Their experiences and observations in France
and back home later, motivated many of them to fight to change the status
quo. As one scholar suggested, ‘By recruiting men from Indochina, France
had inadvertently set in train events that would eventually contribute to the
loss of its Indochinese colonies.’ Hô Chi Minh even tried to join the French
army at that time. Although it was not clear whether Hô Chi Minh fought in
the war, he became a popular figure among his compatriots in France, and
political tracts under his name were distributed among them advocating
independence for Indochina.53
For Vietnamese men, even sex and marriage with Frenchwomen
symbolised their coming of age and national awakening. Some, despite their
status as colonial subjects living in France, believed they were no different
from Frenchmen living in Indochina, marrying local women and frequenting
local brothels and cabarets.54 After the war, about 2,900 Vietnamese soldiers
and workers remained in France.55 The widespread practice among
Vietnamese of pursuing romantic relations with Frenchwomen made a deep
impact on their psychological and national consciousness. It demonstrated
that they could cross the old boundary between colonials and masters; they
could challenge the colonial order and political taboos established by the
French in Vietnam.56 Some Indochinese men openly characterised their
sexual relations with Frenchwomen as political activity. For these
Indochinese, sex with Frenchwomen was ‘like a revenge on the European,
the Frenchman who down there causes old Indochina to blush and incites
jealousy’. Such attitudes among the Indochinese, many of whom would
eventually return home, presented a significant potential threat to the
colonial order. According to one scholar, ‘The likely effect of such inter-
racial relationships on the status of Frenchwomen in the colonies was
apparent. If these women were supposed to be pillars of the community
there, embodying French ideas about civilization and domesticity and
defining the boundaries that separated colonizers from colonized’, these
relationships would present ‘a significant potential threat to the colonial
order.’57 The Vietnamese experience in France made them feel no longer
inferior to the French, and they began to question and resent French
dominance in Vietnam.58
Relations between Frenchwomen and Vietnamese men worried French
authorities deeply, and they tried to put a stop to them. One Indochinese man
was imprisoned for fifteen days for ‘daring to fall in love with a French
girl’.59 The French authorities were also concerned about the photographs
Indochinese sent home of themselves in the company of white women. As it
turned out, besides dating Frenchwomen, Vietnamese frequently sent home
images of them, sometimes nude ones. Sergeant Major Ho sent his brother in
Indochina letters he received from Frenchwomen, telling him to save them
as ‘sacred things’ that the sergeant could, upon his return, show to European
colonial masters who did not believe his stories and who might mock him
for his pretensions to relations with white women.60 For the French, such
proof of inter-racial contact was damaging to ‘our prestige in the Far East’,
so French censors confiscated any such images as they could find. Censors
were quite candid about the ultimate consequences for public order and
French rule in the colonies: examples like Sergeant Ho’s ‘deplorable
attitude’ would lead the population of Indochina to think that the French
lived in a ‘shameful debauchery’. As Indochinese men gained the kind of
experience, skills and, in some cases, education that would make them
leaders in their societies in the post-war years, French authorities feared that
these men would return to Indochina with new ideas and be less
‘submissive’ to ‘their traditional discipline’. They instructed the colonial
government in June 1918 to interrogate and maintain close surveillance on
returning soldiers. 61
Large numbers of Vietnamese went to France to support their colonial
masters’ war effort, and had the opportunity to observe and interact with
Westerners directly. This opportunity allowed them to compare and contrast
the French with others. Some Vietnamese had opportunities to interact with
American soldiers when they came to each other’s assistance during battles.
The personal letters of Vietnamese soldiers reveal their impressions. One
wrote that the American army was ‘the strongest and the most powerful
among the allies’. Another wrote that the Americans were ‘fierce fighters’.
The third one even made the shocking suggestion that the French were not
tough fighters: ‘The presence of the Americans on the battlefield restored the
confidence of the Vietnamese.’62 It is interesting to point out that many
Chinese had daily contact with the Vietnamese. In spite of language
difficulties, the Chinese and Vietnamese got along well and at times
developed close bonds . Whenever the Chinese got into fights with Africans,
with whom the Chinese seemed to have ongoing difficulties, the Vietnamese
joined in against the Africans. The French government did not want the
Vietnamese to be infected by Chinese ideas of patriotism and nationalism
and tried hard to keep them separate. 63
The Chinese were also strongly influenced by their European experiences.
Since Chinese workers were part of China’s grand strategy for renewal and
for promoting its international status, many other agencies besides the
government became involved in their journey and experiences. One of them
was the Young Men’s Christian Association. When Chinese labourers
arrived in France, the YMCA took a hand in shaping and influencing their
lives. The YMCA secretaries, most of them elite Chinese who had graduated
from Western universities, helped their countrymen learn to read, become
informed and devise cultural entertainments for themselves.
During the war, many of China’s best and brightest went to France
because they had fallen under the spell of Woodrow Wilson’s call for a new
world order and the promise of a better world system from which China
could benefit. They wanted to devote their knowledge, energy and
experience to help jumpstart that new world order. Yet their worldview and
understanding of China were very different from that of the labourers. They
helped the workers by writing letters, teaching them to read and giving them
the means to understand the world and Chinese affairs. Perhaps most
importantly, they were determined to make the labourers into better citizens
of both China and the world. The experiences of these elite scholars and
talented students helped them develop a new appreciation for the Chinese
working class, spurred them to find solutions to Chinese problems and
changed their perceptions about China and its future. While the labourers
learned from their own experience and from the YMCA workers and other
Chinese elites who worked with them, the Chinese labourers also taught a lot
to the Chinese elites. They would eventually become new citizens of China
and the world, and developed a new understanding and appreciation of their
republic and its position in the world. The Chinese workers in France were
mostly common villagers who knew little of China or the world when they
were selected to go to Europe; still, these men directly and personally
contributed to helping China transform its image at home and in the world.
Their new transnational roles reshaped national identity and China’s
internationalisation, which in turn helped shape the emerging global system.
From their experience of Europe in a time of war and their work with the
American, British and French military, as well as fellow labourers from
other countries, they developed a unique perception of China and of world
affairs. Further, future leaders such as Yan Yangchu, Jiang Tingfu, Cai
Yuanpei and Wang Jingwei, among others, through their work with the
Chinese workers in Europe, became convinced that China could become a
better nation through a new understanding of their fellow citizens.
Like the Chinese and Vietnamese, Indian experiences and direct contacts
with Westerners in Europe also collectively gave rise to new perceptions
about Eastern and Western civilisations. General James Willcocks,
commander of the Indian Corps, wrote in a letter to the viceroy, Lord
Hardinge: ‘Our Indian soldiers serve for a very small remuneration; they
were serving in a strange foreign land; they were the most patient soldiers in
the world; they are doing what Asiatics have never been asked to do
before.’64 To a great extent, the war service for Indians was a way of
salvaging national prestige.65 The war experience gave Indians fresh
confidence and political awareness. As one Indian veteran later pointed out,
‘When we saw various peoples and got their views, we started protesting
against the inequalities and disparities which the British had created between
the white and the black.’66 One Indian elite member pointed out, ‘The war
has changed us very much. It has changed the angle of vision in India as well
[as] in England.’67 One sepoy wrote home, ‘You ought to educate your girls
as well as your boys and our posterity will be better for it.’68 Amar Singh
told his Indian officers that ‘this is the first time we Indians have had the
honour to fight Europeans on their own soil and must play up to the
Government that has brought us up to this level’. Reflecting in October 1915
on the Indian troops present in France, Singh wrote in his diary, ‘They must
see it through whatever happens. It is on them that the honour of India rests.
India will get tremendous concessions after the war which she would not
have gained otherwise – at least not for several years to come.’ In November
1914, he wrote in his diary, ‘Ever since my coming to France I have been
admiring and studying the avenues these people have in their towns as well
in the country seats.’ By June 1915 he was planning ahead, ‘Since coming to
France I have been awfully impressed with the forests and avenues and often
think what I could do in this line in my own place [back in India.]’69 As
Annie Besant, who founded the India Home Rule League in 1916 declared,
‘When the war is over . . . we cannot doubt that the King-Emperor will, as
reward for her glorious defence of the Empire, pin upon her [India’s] breast
the jeweled medal of Self-Government within the Empire.’ Mahatma Gandhi
also suggested that change should be more easily earned through the war
effort: ‘It was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands
while the war lasted.’70
It seems that the Indian war experience clearly ignited their national
consciousness. The new Indian national awakening forced the British
colonial authority to make some concessions. The 1917 British Declaration
for India was one of them. The declaration, publicised in August 1917 in the
name of the Secretary of State for India, promised constitutional reforms in
1919 and to promote ‘the increasing association of Indians in every branch
of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing
institutions’.71 Critics might suggest this high-sounding declaration was an
empty promise, and the war and Indian sacrifices only brought India high
inflation, a devalued currency and increased taxation. Still, even
symbolically, the declaration must be viewed as a positive development in
the long term. It announced the beginning of a new relationship between
India and Britain, and that change occurred largely due to the war and
India’s contributions. By promising and allowing India to enjoy a level of
self-rule, the 1917 declaration can be argued to be a major step on India’s
long journey to independence, no matter how small that step was or however
half-hearted the British concessions were. As Timothy C. Winegard recently
wrote, ‘The First Word War was, more so than its 1939–45 counterpart, the
decisive chapter of the twentieth century for the Dominions. It forever
altered the configuration of the empire and, through momentous Dominion
participation hastened the realization of full nationhood, both legally and
culturally.’72
Besides contributing human resources, Asian countries also provided
other important forms of assistance. For instance, besides ejecting German
forces from Qingdao and German Micronesia in the South Pacific, Japan
provided naval support against German commerce raiders in the Pacific and
protected convoys of Australian and New Zealand troops from the Pacific to
Aden. The Japanese navy also hunted German submarines in the
Mediterranean and Japan provided shipping, copper, munitions and almost 1
billion yen in loans to its allies. India sent 172,815 animals and 3,691,836
tons of stores and supplies largely for the British war effort. In addition,
these Asian countries raised substantial sums of money by selling war bonds,
and these were turned over to the British and French governments.73 China
even sent to Britain large numbers of rifles that were moved secretly through
Hong Kong. Some Asian women even got involved in the war. A few
Vietnamese women volunteered to work in the health services or at factories
in France ‘by the side of our French sisters’. There were even reports of
female Indochinese workers in workers’ camps in France.74 Seventy-five
Japanese nurses travelled to France to work during the war. 75
Although it is difficult to say whether India and Vietnam benefited
materially from the war due to their colonial status, both China and Japan
did achieve certain economic advantages. Japan enjoyed substantial
economic growth: its net income from freight had been less than 40 million
yen in 1914. By 1918 it was over 450 million yen. As for the commodity
trade, average annual exports over the four war years were some 330 million
yen larger than imports, while between 1911 and 1914 imports had exceeded
exports by an annual average of 65 million yen. Overall industrial
investment during the war multiplied seventeen times as enhanced profits
were ploughed back into new development. Total production output in Japan
grew from 2,610 million yen to 10,212 million yen in 1918.76 Employment
in industry increased accordingly. In Japan the industrial population nearly
doubled between 1914 and 1919. More importantly, during the war, for the
first time since the end of the nineteenth century, Japan was able to record
significant trade surpluses and helped created balance-of-payments surpluses
for the first time since the opening of the country. 77 China similarly
benefited. Although it did not see trade surpluses during the war, Chinese
trade deficits declined visibly. One can argue that the war helped China
enjoy a bit of a boom and provided a foundation for China’s golden age of
capitalism.78
In short, Asians both benefited from and contributed to the Great War in
many important ways. Their participation had made the war truly great and
worldwide in scope, but more importantly, it marked a major turning point in
political development and identity of Asians across the region. The
collective excitement among the war’s participants for the prospects of the
post-war Peace Conference further indicates the war’s importance to Asia.
Asians at the post-war Peace Conference

American President Woodrow Wilson’s blueprint for the post-Great War
world order raised high hopes among the Chinese, Indians, Koreans and
Vietnamese. Even the Japanese looked forward to the discussions of the
post-war Peace Conference and the resulting new world order. The Japanese
hoped the Paris Peace Conference would seal their long-cherished
aspirations to be recognised as the dominant Asian power, and they hoped
the Great Powers would give Japan’s recently gained interests in China an
international stamp of approval. More importantly, the Japanese hoped that
Western powers would now accept Japan as a full equal. On that point, they
were bound to be disappointed.
True, Japan was treated as one of the top five powers at the Peace
Conference and was awarded its spoils in China. But Japan’s call for a racial
equality clause, a proposal it put forward with Chinese support, was rejected.
When Japan first raised the racial equality issue on 13 February 1919,
Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo expressed his support for this proposal
even though China did not want to be distracted from its main focus.79 On
11 April, when Japan made another proposal on the issue, China again
supported it, arguing that the proposal should be incorporated into the
official peace treaty.80 Ironically, it was Woodrow Wilson who, as chair of
the League of Nations Commission, eventually blocked the inclusion of this
clause in the final treaty. As one scholar has recently pointed out, ‘Perhaps
the most glaring contradiction to the universalist message of Wilson’s
wartime pronouncements on self-determination was his record on race
relations in the domestic American context’, which was rife with racial
assumptions and racist attitudes.81 The Japanese were disappointed with
Wilson and some called him ‘an angel in rhetoric and a devil in deed’.82
Japanese disillusionment extended to three other fronts: the League of
Nations, increasing Anglo-American solidarity in East Asia and the Pacific
and the 1924 US Alien Immigration Act.83 This disillusionment and sense of
betrayal may help account for Japan’s later go-alone policy and expansionist
drive into China. Japan remained outside the white power club and
continued to share second-class status with fellow Asians.
To make the situation worse, Japan was going through its own version of a
national identity crisis. While the Chinese found the nineteenth-century
world order terribly wrong, Japan was praised as the ‘pioneer of progress in
the Orient’ for the successful adoption of the trappings of Western
civilisation with special determination to emulate Germany. But the war and
new world order forced Japan to conclude that it might have followed the
wrong model – after all, Germany was now a denounced and defeated
nation.
Like the Japanese, the Chinese experienced both expectations and
disappointment at the post-war Peace Conference, and theirs was much
deeper since China had pinned so many hopes on the war and the post-war
world. The Chinese had been preparing for their chance at the Peace
Conference since 1915, because they knew their country was so weak it had
little other means to force any adjustments from the Great Powers. With its
official declaration of war against Germany and the large number of
labourers sent to Europe to support the Allies, China had earned its seat at
the conference, but only as a third-rank nation, having two seats for its
delegation while Japan had five. In many respects, Japanese success at the
conference automatically meant failure for China. Even so, the Chinese took
full advantage of the opportunity and managed to inject substantially new
content and perspectives into the Peace Conference discussions and the
emerging new world order.
Although not all Chinese believed in Wilson, feelings ran high at the
dramatic conclusion of the war. Chinese students in Beijing went to the
American Legation where they chanted, ‘Long live President Wilson!’.
Some of them had memorised and could easily recite his speech on the
Fourteen Points. Chen Duxiu, dean of the School of Letters at Peking
University, a leading figure in the New Cultural Movement and later a co-
founder of the Chinese Communist Party, was so convinced of Wilson’s
sincerity that he called Wilson ‘the number one good man in the world’.84
For Chen, the end of the First World War was a turning point in human
history, ‘Might is no longer reliable, justice and reason can no longer be
denied’, wrote Chen.85 Reflecting the widespread expectations and feelings
among the Chinese, the Chinese took every possible step they could to push
for recovery of lost territories at the Peace Conference. This aim had been
prominent in Chinese thinking even before the opening of the conference. Of
course, the direct return of Shandong was one of these grand goals and
objectives. Unfortunately, China did not achieve its goals and even failed to
regain Shandong. This led to an outburst of anger against the United States
and Wilson. Some Chinese complained that Wilson’s new world order had
not come to China. Chen Duxiu wrote in disgust that Wilson had proved to
be an ‘empty cannon’ whose principles were ‘not worth one penny’. 86
Students across China openly expressed their disappointment at the failure of
Wilsonianism. College students in Peking cynically joked that Wilson had
discovered a jolting new formula for the idealistic Wilsonian world order:
‘14 = 0’.87 Such was the outrage at home that China became the only
country which refused to sign the Versailles Peace Treaty.
What happened at the Paris Peace Conference sparked the May Fourth
Movement, a key turning point in modern China’s national development.
When news of China’s failure to win back Shandong reached China on 4
May, a body of over 3,000 students from across Peking rallied and tried to
meet with the Allied ministers in the capital to appeal to them on China’s
behalf.88 The May Fourth Movement marked the end of any all-out efforts
by China to join the liberal Western system, efforts that had begun by
China’s seeking to join the First World War. With the May Fourth
Movement, the Chinese sense of trust in the West had been replaced by
feelings of betrayal and disillusion, and by a determination among many
Chinese to find their own way.89 No matter how we judge China’s war
contribution and effort, by studying China in the Great War, we can at the
very least add a new dimension to our collective memory of the war, its
human tragedy and its significance. China took the opportunity the Great
War provided to radically readjust its relations with the growing community
of nation-states at the turn of the twentieth century.
For India, Korea and Vietnam, all colonies with no official representations
at the Peace Conference, Wilson’s national self-determination ideas sounded
very attractive. They were understandably excited at the outset of the Peace
Conference. In 1919, Nguyen Ai Quoc (literally ‘Nguyen who loves his
country’) appeared in Paris. This stranger would later become famous as Hô
Chi Minh. He was very active in Paris, and in September 1919 even had an
audience with Albert Sarraut, the recently returned Governor-General of
Indochina. Hô used the opportunity the Peace Conference provided to lobby
for Vietnam and distributed a petition entitled ‘The Demands of the
Vietnamese People’ to delegations at the Paris Peace Conference. The
petition was clearly influenced and motivated by Wilson’s ideas, but it was
not radical at all politically. It did not ask for independence but rather for
autonomy, equal rights and political freedom for the Vietnamese. It called
for the following: a general amnesty for all native political prisoners; reform
of Indochinese justice by granting the natives the same judicial guarantees as
Europeans; freedom of the press and opinion; freedom of association;
freedom of emigration and foreign travel; freedom of instruction and the
creation in all provinces of technical and professional schools for indigenous
people; replacement of rule by decree with the rule of law; election of a
permanent Vietnamese delegation to the French parliament, to keep it
informed of the wishes of indigenous people.
This was not the last time Ho Chi Minh would follow the American lead.
The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, issued after the Second World
War in 1945, was ‘[t]he most clearly patterned’ on the American Declaration
of Independence.90 Unfortunately for Ho and Vietnam, his petition was
ignored, although Colonel House, Wilson’s close confidant at the Peace
Conference, politely acknowledged its reception. The French, however,
dismissed Ho’s petition as a ‘libel’, prompting Ho to depart for Moscow and
Bolshevism.
There are sources that suggest that many of Ho’s ideas in 1919 came from
his contacts with Korean nationalists in the United States and Paris; Ho is
believed to have borrowed heavily from the Korean independence
movement. 91 The Great War did not have a significant impact on Korea, nor
did it cause Koreans significant economic hardship. But the war nonetheless
served as a major turning point in Korean history, due to the high
expectations generated over the post-war Peace Conference. Excited by
Wilson’s ideas, in the spring of 1919, prominent Korean religious and civic
leaders signed a declaration for Korean independence. Over the following
months, more than a million people in Korea participated in demonstrations
for independence. This series of events was called the March First
Movement. This movement may not be considered a success, since it did not
achieve its goal of gaining international recognition for the cause of Korean
independence, nor even the more modest goal of raising the question of
Korea officially at the Paris Peace Conference. Still, it signalled the
beginning of modern nationalism in Korea. In other words, as had happened
with the Chinese May Fourth Movement, ‘March First transformed the
Korean national movement and helped to shape its subsequent identity and
development.’ 92
The Indian nationalist movement experienced a sea change during the war.
The Indian National Congress had been a pillar of the Empire until 1914, but
once the war was over, it became its determined enemy. The spring of 1919
in India was also a ‘crucial watershed, in which the national movement
swung decisively towards the goal of terminating British rule in India’.
Mahatma Gandhi ‘shifted in 1919 from a position of firm if critical support
for Indian membership in the British Empire to one of determined opposition
to it’. When the war was over, Indians expected great things from the Peace
Conference proceedings. They called Wilson an ‘ancient Asian sage’, a
‘Christ or Buddha’ returning to his ancestral home. One Indian wrote to
Wilson: ‘Honoured Sir, the aching heart of India cries out to you, whom we
believe to be an instrument of God in the reconstruction of the world.’ Nobel
Laureate Rabindranath Tagore was a great admirer of Wilson and wanted to
dedicate his 1917 book, Nationalism, to him. Lajpat Rai expressed the hope
that an ‘immediate grant of autonomy to India and other countries under the
rule of the Allies’ would follow the conference’. When the Indian National
Congress convened in December 1918 for its annual session, it adopted a
resolution that demanded that India be recognised by the Powers as ‘one of
the progressive nations to whom the principle of self-determination should
be applied’. 93
Although Indian voices were largely ignored and their dreams were
dashed when the new world order was planned by major powers in 1919,
one can argue that India’s experience in the Great War and in the post-war
Peace Conference indirectly prepared it for full independence after the
Second World War.
Conclusion
The story of the First World War is one of tragedy, ironies and
contradictions. This applies to Asia as well. The war had a lot to do with
empires, but China, which had destroyed its own empire, struggled to realise
a republic and a nation-state. Over the course of the war, the last Chinese
emperor returned to the throne and another Chinese politician dreamed of
becoming emperor; neither succeeded, though. Japan used the war to
strengthen its imperial claims while emerging nationalist movements in
Korea, India and Vietnam tried to escape their imperial masters’ control and
secure national independence. The war was about defeat and victory. China,
a partisan on the side of the victors, was treated like one of the vanquished at
the post-war Peace Conference . Japan was a victor and saw its status in the
world improve substantially. But its gains actually carried the seeds of its
eventual destruction.
The Great War brought about an abrupt end to the nineteenth-century
world system and opened opportunities for a general reordering of world
affairs. Having suffered a great deal under the existing world order, Chinese,
Koreans, Indochinese and Indians pinned high hopes on the creation of a
new system. For educated Asians, the Great War represented the moral
decline of Europe; but they were all disappointed at the outcome of the war’s
aftermath and quickly became disillusioned with the post-war order. China,
India and, to a certain extent, Vietnam, in 1919 were fundamentally different
from the way they had been in 1914 – socially, intellectually, culturally and
ideologically. The sea changes that had taken place occurred to a great extent
because of war experiences and broad dissatisfaction with the Paris Peace
Conference. The war also served as a turning point in Japanese history.
The First World War years coincided with a period of tremendous change
within Asia as China struggled to become a nation and India started its long
journey to independence. While China and Vietnam eventually followed a
socialist path, in Japan, the Great War gave rise to a new sense of national
pride that would eventually lead the Japanese to adopt military methods to
challenge the West outright.
In the existing scholarship on Asia, the First World War has been
appraised as a ‘lost war’, an ‘ignored war’ or a ‘forgotten war’. In Asian
countries few people understand the significance of Asian involvement.
Though not as devastating as in the case of Europe, their involvement
transformed the meaning and implications of the conflict both for Asia and
for the rest of the increasingly connected world system. It also helped begin
the long journey towards national independence followed by many Asian
countries. In short, the Great War was a milestone in Asian history which
remains seriously under-appreciated and under-researched, even today.
I am deeply grateful for Jay Winter and John Horne’s comments and
suggestions. John Horne also provided valuable help in granting me access
to Trinity College Dublin’s great library collections when I was writing this
chapter. Robert Gerwarth deserves to be thanked for forcing me to sharpen
my thinking on this topic when, as the editor in chief of the Oxford
University Press’s multi-volume studies of the war period, he convinced me
to write a book on Asia and the Great War, and also for his generosity in
inviting me to serve as a visiting professor at University College Dublin’s
Centre for War Studies, where I worked on this topic. I also have to express
my gratitude to Santanu Das, Akeo Okada, Jan P. Schmidt and Radhika
Singha, who were very kind in providing original and other sources and their
own work (some even unpublished) for me to consult and use. As always, I
am in deep debt to Terre Fisher for her crucial and great editing skills.
1 Akira Iriye, Japan and the Wider World (London: Longman, 1997), p. 5.
2 S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 (Cambridge

3 Frederick Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great

War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 35.
4 Samuel G. Blythe, ‘Banzai – and then what?’, Saturday Evening Post,

187:47 (1915), p. 54.
5 Ikuhiko Hata, ‘Continental expansion, 1905–1941’, in John W. Hall et al.

(eds.), The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. VI: The Twentieth Century
(Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 279.
6 For the best study on this issue, see Dickinson, War and National
Reinvention.
7 Liang Qichao, ‘Gai ge qi yuan’ (‘The origins of reform’), in Yinbing Shi

Heji (Beijing: Zhong hua shu ju, 1989), p. 113.
8 For details on China and the Great War, see Guoqi Xu, China and the
Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and
Internationalization (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
9 Liang Qichao, ‘Waijiao fangzhen zhiyan – can zhan pian’ (‘Critical talk
about tendencies in [Chinese] foreign policy – the question of [China’s]
participation in the war’), in Yinbing Shi Heji, vol. IV, pp. 4–13.
10 Liang Qichao, ‘Ouzhan zhongce’ (‘Some preliminary predictions about

the European war’), Yinbing Shi Heji, vol. IV, pp. 11–26; see also Ding
Wenjiang (ed.), Liangrengong Xiansheng Nianpu (‘Life chronology of Mr
Liang Qichao’) (Taipei: Shi jie shu ju, 1959), p. 439.
11 ‘China’s breach with Germany’, Manchester Guardian, 23 May 1917.
12 Xu Tian (Zhang Guogan), ‘Dui de-au canzhan’ (‘China’s declaration of

war on Germany and Austria’), Jindaishi ziliao, 2 (1954), p. 51.
13 Feng Gang et al. (eds.), Minguo Liang Yansun Xiansheng Shiyi Nianpu
(‘Life chronology of Mr Liang Shiyi’) (Taipei: Commercial Press, 1978), pp.
194–6.
14 Michael Summerskill, China on the Western Front (London: Michael

Summerskill, 1982), p. 30.
15 Feng Gang et al. (eds.), Minguo Liang Yansun Xiansheng Shiyi Nianpu,
pp. 271–2.
16 Ibid., p. 289, Su Wenzhuo (ed.), Liang Tanyu Yin Ju Shi Suo Cang Shu
Hua Tu Zhao Yin Cun (Hong Kong, 1986), p. 208.
1984), p. 1.
18 Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese

Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 30–1.
19 Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (Cambridge University

Press, 2007), p. 12.
20 DeWitt Mackenzie, The Awakening of India (London: Hodder &

Stoughton, 1918), pp. 18–21.
21 DeWitt C. Ellinwood, Between Two Worlds: A Rajput Officer in the

Indian Army, 1905–1921, based on the Diary of Amar Singh (Lanham, MD:
Hamilton, 2005), p. 356.
22 The Times History of the War in 1914 (London, 1914), p. 153.
23 Mackenzie, The Awakening of India, p. 159.
24 Ellinwood, Between Two Worlds, pp. 358–9.
25 Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the

French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008), p. 27.
26 DeWitt C. Ellinwood and S. D. Pradhan (eds.), India and World War I

(Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1978), p. 145.
27 Columbia University manuscript library: Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, correspondence 44, box 395: On 2 September 1914,
letter to James Brown Scott of the Endowment.
28 Cyril Pearl, Morrison of Peking (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967), p.

307.
29 For details on China’s labourers in Europe, see Guoqi Xu, Strangers on

the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
30 Feng Gang et al. (eds.), Minguo Liang Yansun Xiansheng Shiyi Nianpu,
p. 310.
31 Parliamentary Debates, Commons (84) (10–31 July 1916), p. 1379.
32 ‘General statement regarding the YMCA work for the Chinese in

France’, March 1919, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of
Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis (hereafter cited YMCA Archives) as box
204, folder: Chinese laborers in France reports, 1918–1919.
33 John Starling and Ivor Lee, No Labour, No Battle (Stroud: History Press,
2009), p. 258.
34 Ibid., p. 25.
35 Kimloan Hill, ‘Strangers in a foreign land: Vietnamese soldiers and

workers in France during World War I’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony
Reid (eds.), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (University of Wisconsin Press,
2006), p. 259.
36 Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, pp.

30–1.
37 YMCA, Young Men’s Christian Association with the Chinese Labor

Corps in France, YMCA Archives, box 204, folder: Chinese laborers in
France, p. 14.
38 Controller of Labour War Diary, July 1918, National Archives, Kew,

WO 95/83.
39 General Foch’s secret report to the Prime Minister, 11 August 1917, in

Archives de la Guerre, service historique de la Défense, château de
Vincennes, 16N 2450/GQG/6498.
40 Starling and Lee, No Labour, No Battle, p. 260.
41 Fogarty, Race and War in France, pp. 65–6.
42 Letter 628, in David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 342.
43 Hill, ‘Strangers in a foreign land’, p. 261.

44 Captain A. McCormick files, 02/6/1, 207–208, Imperial War Museum,
London.
45 Kimloan Hill, ‘Sacrifice, sex, race: Vietnamese experiences in the First

World War’, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War
Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 58.
46 Starling and Lee, No Labour, No Battle, p. 260.
47 V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and
White Man in an Age of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), p. 153.
48 Nicholas John Griffin, ‘The Use of Chinese Labour by the British Army,
1916–1920: The “Raw Importation,” its Scope and Problems’ (PhD thesis,
University of Oklahoma, 1973), p. 14.
49 Fogarty, Race and War in France, p. 45.
50 John Horne, ‘Immigrant workers in France during World War I’, French
Historical Studies, 14:1 (1985), pp. 57–88.
53 Hill, ‘Sacrifice, sex, race’, pp. 62–5.
56 Hill, ‘Sacrifice, sex, race’, p. 60.

57 Fogarty, Race and War in France, pp. 202–12.
60 Ibid., p. 222.
61 Ibid., pp. 220–5.
63 Chen Sanjing, Lu Fangshang and Yang Cuihua (eds.), Ouzhan Huagong

Shiliao (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindai shi yanjiushuo, 1997), pp.
380–1.
64 Ellinwood, Between Two Worlds, p. 365.
65 Santanu Das, ‘Indians at home, Mesopotamia and France, 1914–1918:

towards an intimate history’, in Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War
Writing, p. 74.
66 Ibid., p. 84.
67 Ellinwood and Pradhan (eds.), India and World War I, p. 22.
68 Das, ‘Indians at home’, p. 83.
69 Ellinwood, Between Two Worlds, pp. 370–404.
70 Das, ‘Indians at home’, p. 73.

71 Ellinwood and Pradhan (eds.), India and World War I, pp. 21–2.
72 Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and

the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 11.
73 Ellinwood and Pradhan (eds.), India and World War I, p. 143.
74 Hill, ‘Sacrifice, sex, race’, p. 55.
75 Jan P. Schmidt, ‘Japanese nurses in WWI’, unpublished article.
76 Kenneth D. Brown, ‘The impact of the First World War on Japan’, in

Chris Wrigley (ed.), The First World War and the International Economy
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2000), pp. 102–7.
77 Iriye, Japan and the Wider World, pp. 22–3.
78 For details on this point, see Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of
the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
79 David Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris: With Documents, 21

vols. (New York: Appeal Printing Company, 1924–6), vol. I, p. 205, entry
for 26 March 1919; see also David Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, 2
vols. (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1928), vol. I, p. 336.
80 For Koo’s support, see ‘Lu Zhengxiang telegram to Waijiaobu’, 13

February 1919, 12 April 1919, in Zhongguo she hui ke xue yuan, Jin dai shi
yan jiu suo, Jin dai shi zi liao bian ji shi, and Tianjin shi li shi bo wu guan,
Mi Ji Lu Cun (‘Collections of secret documents’) (Peking: Zhong Guo she
Hui ke xue chu ban she, 1984), pp. 82–3; 129.

82 Ibid., p. 197.
83 Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality

Proposal of 1919 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 171.
84 Chen Duxiu, Duxiu Wencun (‘Surviving writings of Chen Duxiu’)

(Hefei: Anhui renmin chu ban she, 1987), p. 388.
85 Chen Duxiu, ‘Fa kan ci’ (‘Preface for a new magazine’), Mei Zhou Ping
Lun (Weekly Review), 1:1 (1918).
86 Mei Zhou Ping Lun, 20 (4 May 1919).
87 Zhong Guo She hui ko xue yuan Jing dai shi yan jiu so (ed.), Wu Si Yun
Dong Hui Yi Lu (‘Recollections of the May Fourth Movement’), 2 vols.
(Beijing: Zhong guo she hui ko xue chu ban she, 1979), vol. I, p. 222.
88 Liang Jingqun, ‘Wo su zhidao de wusi yundun’, Zhuanji Wenxue, 8:5

(1966).
89 For the broad impact of the May Fourth Movement in Chinese history,
see Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern
World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
90 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 134.
91 Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years (University of

California Press, 2003), pp. 11–18.
92 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, pp. 213.
93 Ibid., pp. 213, 175, 9, 77–8, 92–6.

19 North America
Jennifer D. Keene The war in Europe had an immediate and direct impact
on North America. The United States and Canada acted on their strong
cultural, economic and political ties to Britain by contributing men, money
and material to the Allied side. Mexico, long the site of economic
competition between the United States, Britain and Germany, found itself at
the centre of diplomatic intrigues which climaxed with the Zimmermann
Telegram. Relations with Europe, however, only tell one side of the North
American story. Within North America, populations shifted northwards to
compensate for labour shortages once the war curtailed European
immigration. To meet the Allies’ escalating demands for industrial and
agricultural products, Canada openly recruited US-based farm and factory
workers, promising high wages and cheap transport until the US entry into
the war dried up this labour stream. US labour agents turned southwards as
well, fuelling the movement of southern workers to northern industrial
centres with similar enticements. The 500,000 African Americans who
joined this migratory wave (known as the Great Migration) set in motion a
political and cultural reordering that transformed the racial landscape within
the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans also migrated to the
United States, mostly to escape the political and economic turmoil caused
by the ongoing Mexican Revolution.
These demographic shifts are just one example of how considering North
America as an entity during the First World War offers the alluring
possibility of breaking away from the strictures of the normal nation-state
approach to studying the war, presenting an opportunity to consider the
war’s regional and global dimensions. Uncovering the full scope of ‘North
America’s War’ requires evaluating Britain’s dominant position in the
global political economy, North America’s contribution to the fighting,
international relations within North America and how North American-
based events and initiatives affected the course of the war and the peace.
Great Britain in North America
Britain’s stature as the world’s largest imperial power, centre of the
financial world and dominant naval force, meant that its entry into the war
affected nearly every nation in some way. Indeed the cultural, political and
economic ties that bound the United States and Canada to Great Britain
distinctly shaped the war experience of these two North American nations.
As citizens of a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire,
‘Canadians had no choice about their involvement in the war, but they did
have a voice when it came to deciding on the extent of their participation’,
notes David MacKenzie.1 The United States declared itself a neutral nation
in 1914, but its financial and political elite offered aid to Britain that
affected the course of American neutrality almost immediately. Taking
advantage of these bonds, Britain moved quickly to facilitate economic
mobilisation in Canada and the United States by establishing a robust
munitions industry where none had previously existed. By managing a
coordinated network that secured contracts, purchased machinery, inspected
factories and transported goods overseas, Britain successfully funnelled
North American resources towards its own shores and away from Germany.
The strong US-British trading and financial wartime relationship evolved
naturally from pre-existing bonds. ‘Britain was by far America’s largest
pre-war trading partner’, Robert H. Zieger points out.2 Less than six months
after the war began, the House of Morgan, the financial powerhouse run by
the J. P. Morgan bank, signed on as the purchasing and contracting agent for
the British government within the United States. Over the next two years,
the House of Morgan worked closely with British officials to award more
than 4,000 contracts worth over $3 billion to American businesses.3
Between 1915 and 1917 US exports doubled, with 65 per cent going to
Great Britain.4 In 1916 the British Foreign Office evaluated Britain’s
dependency on the United States, reaching the alarming conclusion that for
‘foodstuffs, for military necessities and for raw materials for industry, the
United States was “an absolutely irreplaceable source of supply”’.5 This
booming trade in rifles, gunpowder, shells and machine guns also benefited
the American economy by pulling it out of recession, and created the
industrial infrastructure that would eventually support the US war effort.6
The Anglophile House of Morgan aided the British cause even further by
lending the British government enormous sums and putting pressure on
other American banks to deny loans to Germany.7 The money flowing from
American coffers to the British bolstered the entire Allied side, as the
British in turn loaned money to other Entente nations like France and
Russia, that could not secure American loans on their own. The $250
million per month that Britain spent in the United States by 1916 (mostly to
bolster the sterling–dollar exchange rate to keep commodity prices in
check), ‘reflected a dependence on American industry and on the American
stock market which in German minds both justified the submarine
campaign and undermined the United States’ claim to be neutral’, writes
Hew Strachan.8
In November 1916, this flow of US credit suddenly appeared in jeopardy
of drying up. The Federal Reserve Board warned the House of Morgan to
refrain from making unsecured loans to Britain, which by this point had
nearly extinguished the gold reserves and securities used as collateral for
US loans. ‘Lack of credit was about to crimp and possibly cut off the
Allies’ stream of munitions and foodstuffs’, John Milton Cooper, Jr.
contends, a scenario only averted by America’s April 1917 entry into the
war.9 Hew Strachan remains more sceptical about any potential rupture in
this financial partnership. Cutting off war-related trade with Britain would
have sent the American economy into a recessionary tailspin, he argues.
Strachan goes so far as to suggest that in the long run, continued US
neutrality might have benefited the Allied side more than American
belligerency, since its ‘financial commitment to the Entente’ had already
‘bound the United States to its survival and even victory’. 10 As a
belligerent the United States now competed with Britain for American-
produced munitions and foodstuffs to supply its own army.
Great Britain also called upon Canada to produce iron, steel, artillery
shells and chemical weapons. In 1914 Canada boasted only one munitions
factory. Over the course of the war, a British-run Imperial Munitions Board
(IMB) oversaw the creation of nearly 600 factories to produce shells, fuses,
propellants and casings. ‘Close to a third of the shells fired by the British
army in 1917 were Canadian-made’, notes Desmond Morton.11 Booming
Canadian textile, farming and lumbering industries helped pull the
Canadian economy out of a pre-war recession, profits that Canadians used
to purchase the domestic war loans floated by the Canadian government.
Unlike Britain, Canada did not require massive loans from the United States
to finance its war effort. Britain’s desire to spend American loans in
Canada, to the benefit of the Canadian economy, required a demonstration
of reciprocity. In 1917, for instance, Britain only secured approval for using
US-government loans for Canadian wheat purchases by promising to send
at least half of it to American flour mills for processing.12
The cultural ties between the United States, Canada and Great Britain
were very much in evidence throughout the war. Within the United States,
Great Britain unleashed a ferocious propaganda campaign which
emphasised German atrocities in Belgium and the loss of civilian life during
Germany’s forays into unconditional submarine warfare. British blockade
practices arguably killed more civilians than Germany’s unconditional
submarine warfare, but German propaganda never found an equally
compelling way to arouse American ire.13 The Germans increasingly gained
a reputation as the enemies of civilised mores. A good case in point was the
overwhelming success that Britain had framing how Americans viewed the
Lusitania sinking.
On 7 May 1915 a German U-boat fired a torpedo into the Lusitania, a
British passenger ship that Germany claimed was carrying munitions. The
ship sank in less than twenty minutes, and the 1,198 victims included 128
Americans.14 Germany noted that official newspaper notices had warned
Americans to stay off ships headed to the war zone, but British propaganda
successfully presented the attack as another example of Germany’s
inhumanity . US-based British agents distributed thousands of
commemorative coins, which, they claimed, the German government had
manufactured. In reality a private German citizen had created the coin,
which showed a skeleton, representing Death, selling tickets above the
caption, ‘Business above all’, to satirise the Allied willingness to endanger
civilian lives while conducting a profitable arms trade. The original coins
were stamped 5 May, not 7 May, a mistake that the British seized upon to
accuse Germany of premeditated murder in the propaganda pamphlet that
accompanied the coin duplicates.
The war strengthened Canada’s cultural ties to Great Britain, even as it
gave rise to Canadian nationalism. Over the course of the war Canada
began to see itself, ‘if no longer as a British colony, then at least as a British
North American nation’, notes Paul Litt.15 English-Canadians openly called
themselves British, not to deny or dismiss their Canadian nationality, but
rather to express their enthusiasm for British liberal democracy,
membership in the British Empire and British cultural traditions. Canadians
used phrases like ‘British civilisation’, ‘British justice’, ‘British citizenship’
and ‘British fair play’ to express a British-Canadian ethno-nationalism that
‘was imbued with a handful of assumptions about what kind of country
Canada should be’, according to Nathan Smith, which meant, among other
things, English-speaking and white.16
Not all North Americans supported aiding Great Britain’s war effort,
however. Dissenters in the United States and Canada emphasised North
America’s geographic distance from Europe, arguing that the Atlantic
served as a natural barrier that protected the continent from the possibility
of an amphibious German invasion. These isolationists stood ready to
defend their territorial borders, but found the idea of sending armies outside
the Western Hemisphere unsettling. Throughout North America, scepticism
flourished in ethnic and economic communities that had strong political
reasons for opposing or limiting participation in the war. Isolationist
sentiment within the United States was particularly strong among German
Americans and Scandinavians in the Midwest, Irish Americans and the rural
South. These populations embraced isolationism for a variety of reasons:
support for relatives in Germany, religious objections, hatred of Great
Britain and distrust of the eastern financial elite making loans to the Allies.
Appeals to protect the British Empire failed to sway many French
Canadians, who worried that wartime mobilisation would accelerate Anglo-
Canadian nation-building. French-Canadian elites pledged support to the
war, but many others embraced an ethnic-based North American
nationalism that prompted them to resist fighting an overseas war.
Concerned that the wartime push towards Anglo-conformism threatened
their cultural autonomy and civil liberties, French Canadians proved
reluctant to enlist and openly opposed conscription.
Critics of isolationism countered that it was not the Atlantic Ocean that
protected North America, but the British navy. Canada and the United
States benefited tremendously from the blanket of protection that British
control of the seas offered to its former and present colonies, they argued.
Britain maintained this naval dominance (with only occasional challenges
from German U-boats) throughout the war by controlling shipping lanes,
blockading the North and Baltic Seas through patrols and mines and
providing ships to transport goods to Europe. Early 1917 was one crucial
period when Germany threatened to gain the upper hand at sea. In February
1917 Germany resumed unconditional submarine warfare, knowing that this
decision was likely to bring the United States formally into the war.
Germany gambled that a relentless U-boat assault on shipping would force
Britain and France to capitulate before the United States could offer much
help on the battlefields. The sharp increase in German submarine attacks
once it resumed unconditional submarine warfare (reaching a wartime high
of 2.2 million tons from April–June 1917) left British Admiral John Jellicoe
pessimistic over Britain’s future capacity to wage war. Canadian-born US
Admiral William Sims offered the solution – instituting a convoy system
that relied on US destroyers (rather than Britain’s slower battleships) to
accompany groups of ships crossing the Atlantic. The use of convoys meant
that in 1918, for the first time since 1915, Allied shipbuilding exceeded
losses at sea. ‘Better than almost any other single factor, the convoy system
reveals the truly global nature of World War I’, writes Michael Neiberg. 17
During the war the United States switched from being a debtor nation,
dependent on British financing for its industrial development, to a creditor
nation that did more than lend money to belligerents to fund purchases of
American goods. When British financiers began liquidating their assets
throughout the underdeveloped world to fund the war, American bankers
and industrialists seized on the chance to finance and construct mines,
railroads, factories and oil fields throughout the Western Hemisphere.
America’s geographical location vis-à-vis Mexico became a distinct
advantage that aided its penetration into markets previously dominated by
Britain. Accelerating a shift already underway, US imports to Mexico rose
from 49.7 per cent of all imported goods to 66.7 per cent, while the British
market share dropped from 13 per cent to 6.5 per cent from 1913 to 1927.18
Canada underwent a similar shift from borrower to lender, the result of
credits extended to Britain for purchases of wheat and munitions.
Yet the war also laid bare the American and Canadian dependence on
British purchases of its crops and manufactured goods for sustained
prosperity – allowing Britain, at least for the time being, to retain its
position as the epicentre of the international political economy. The twin
effects of ‘Britain’s multiple centrality to the world economy [which] gave
her critical leverage in moving resources toward the Allies and away from
the Central Powers’ and ‘the United States’ awesome productive capacity’,
produced a combination that was difficult for Germany and her allies to
match, Theo Balderston concludes.19 The outcome of the war seemingly
reinforced Britain’s world supremacy, as evidenced by its ability to call
upon a variety of resources (men, money and material) from North America
to defeat its European enemies.
North America’s military experience

Both the United States and Canada entered the war unprepared. In 1914,
Canada possessed a regular army of just 3,000 with 70,000 in volunteer
militias. The Canadian Corps would eventually total four divisions, with a
fifth division broken up to provide replacements. Overall, 619,000
Canadians served during the war, with 424,589 serving overseas, out of a
population of 7.5 million people. 20 The situation was not much better
within the United States in 1917, when the nation declared war with
approximately 300,000 troops (federal and state) available. Eventually the
United States would raise a force of 4.4 million, with nearly half of these
serving overseas, out of a population of 103 million people.21 Overall, each
nation suffered a comparable number of casualties, with 66,665 Canadians
and 53,402 Americans killed in battle. The discrepancy was evident in the
proportions that these numbers represented, nearly 11 per cent of the
Canadian forces and 1.2 per cent of the US military.22
The United States and Canada raised their forces differently. The United
States adopted conscription immediately and eventually drafted 72 per cent
of the armed forces. With this decision the United States broke with its
tradition of fighting first with volunteers and only using conscription to fill
the ranks when enlistments lagged. Introducing conscription after the nation
suffered heavy losses on the battlefield would increase the likelihood of
mass protests against the draft, American officials reasoned, aware that the
nation had been sharply divided over entering the war. Canada opted to wait
until replacement needs became acute, only turning to conscription in 1917
to raise nearly 100,000 troops.23 The ability to apply for exemptions helped
make the draft more politically acceptable within the United States and
Canada. The majority of draft-eligible Americans and Canadians publicly
registered for the draft, and then retreated to the privacy of their homes to
fill out a form requesting an exemption. The pockets of outright opposition
to conscription reflected pre-existing ethnic and regional schisms. Draft
resistance occurred primarily in American southern rural communities that
had opposed entering the war, and within French-speaking Quebec, which
resisted the government’s attempts to use wartime military service to
underscore Anglo-Canadian dominance. Some Québecois even evaded
conscription by fleeing across the border to New England French-Canadian
textile communities. This immigrant community saw no contradiction
between sending its own sons off to fight in the US army while
simultaneously offering refuge to French-Canadian draft-dodgers. 24
The time it took to raise, transport and train troops from North America
meant that these armies did not actually enter the front lines until months
after their respective nations entered the war. Initially both the Americans
and Canadians fought under the tutelage of the more experienced French
and British armies. Canada and the United States faced similar pressure to
raise troops that could be amalgamated into the British and French armies,
but domestic nationalistic sentiment and concerns about how European
generals were conducting the war caused each to develop an independent,
national army instead.
Unhappiness with the British decision to launch a counter-attack using
Canadian troops after Germany’s first mass gas attack during the Second
Battle of Ypres ensured ‘that the 1st Division became the core of Canada’s
national army rather than an “imperial” formation drawn from a dominion’,
Terry Copp concludes.25 In April 1917, all four Canadian battalions went
into action for the first time at the Battle of Arras, when they took Vimy
Ridge. General Arthur Currie was credited with the victory and in June
1917 given command of the Canadian Corps. The Canadians became
convinced that they were an elite fighting force which could succeed where
the British and French could not. ‘In those few minutes I witnessed the birth
of a nation’, Brigadier-General A. E. Ross declared after the war, a notion
that has provoked much debate ever since.
Canadians placed tremendous faith in Currie (the first Canadian to attain
the rank of full general) to use Canadian soldiers effectively and prudently
while maintaining a certain degree of autonomy on the battlefield. General
John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces
(AEF), faced similar expectations within the United States. Seeking to
demonstrate his own leadership abilities on the battlefield, Pershing
steadfastly resisted any formal amalgamation of the American army into the
Allied forces. An independent US army met Wilson’s larger political goals
as well. Pershing sailed to France with clear instructions from the American
Secretary of War, Newton Baker, ‘to cooperate with the forces of the other
countries employed against the enemy; but in so doing the underlying idea
must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and
distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be
preserved’.26 Wilson depended on having a strong, visible and independent
American presence on the battlefield when the Allies won the war. The
United States needed to play a major role in the fighting, Wilson believed,
to guarantee him a prominent voice in fashioning the peace, which, after all,
was one of the primary reasons the President had led the nation into war .
The Americans never gained complete independence (they were always
dependent to some degree on Allied logistical assistance), but by the fall of
1918 the AEF did occupy its own sector of the Western Front.
Americans and Canadians claimed that their troops embodied a new
brand of masculinity born on the frontier, which emphasised aggression,
ingenuity and individualism. These traits supposedly separated North
American soldiers from their class-bound, weary European counterparts. In
1917, the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, unsuccessfully
proposed that the Canadian army take the lead in training the American
army, ‘because Canadians, like Americans, did not have an aristocracy that
placed birth over merit’.27 American military training doctrine explicitly
underscored the differences in temperament between American and
European soldiers, identifying individual rifle marksmanship and ‘open
warfare’ as the hallmarks of the American fighting man. ‘Berlin cannot be
taken by the French or the British Armies or by both of them. It can only be
taken by a thoroughly trained, entirely homogeneous American Army’,
General H. B. Fiske, the head of the American Expeditionary Forces
training programme, told his colleagues.28 The preference for rifles over
heavy artillery remained the bedrock principle of US army doctrine that in
Pershing’s mind defined the American ‘way of war’.
Both the United States and Canada also felt that their military
contributions and valour went underappreciated by Britain and France. The
fear that Britain might not adequately document the Canadian war effort led
to the creation of a Canadian War Records Office that collected materials
and publicised Canadian military feats to Canadian and English audiences.
Likewise an outpouring of nationally focused books, articles and films in
the United States left Americans with the clear impression that the United
States had practically won the war single-handedly. The feeling of being
junior partners in a European-led coalition no doubt caused some of this
chest-thumping. More importantly, the political desire of the United States
and Canada to parlay their wartime participation into greater influence
within the new world order also necessitated impressing Britain and France
with the contribution each nation had made to the Allied victory. The exact
contributions of American and Canadian troops to the overall Allied victory
continue to excite debate on both sides of the Atlantic to this day.
The increased importance of the Dominions to the British war effort led
to the Imperial War Conferences in 1917 and 1918 which gave Dominion
Prime Ministers or representatives a chance to negotiate how their
economies and armies contributed to the war effort. The Dominions also
sent their own delegations to the Peace Conference, then signed and ratified
the peace treaties individually.29 The leading American negotiator, Colonel
Edward House, welcomed this development, viewing any fracturing within
the British Empire as positive for the United States. The Canadian Prime
Minister, Borden, ‘deliberately brought the point of view of North America
to the councils of the empire, a point of view that reflected the growing
identity of Canadian and American interests’, notes Borden’s biographer,
Robert Brown.30 At the Peace Conference Borden experimented with a new
international role as mediator between the two most powerful English-
speaking world powers. In a manner of speaking, Canada had a foot in both
camps, and saw itself as uniquely positioned to explain North American
concerns to Britain and its Dominions and British Empire worries to
America. Borden intervened several times to fashion compromises when
American and British delegations clashed on treaty details, arguing
especially forcefully (if futilely) against hefty German reparations to avoid
antagonising the United States. ‘Part of this was self-interest: a reoccurring
nightmare in Ottawa was that Canada might find itself fighting on the side
of Britain and its ally Japan against the United States’, Margaret MacMillan
asserts.31 The shared ancestry, language, literature, political institutions and
beliefs made a potential alliance between the United States and Great
Britain ‘sufficient to ensure the peace of the world’ if the League of Nations
failed, Borden told Lloyd George.32 This plan never came to pass, but
Borden’s sentiments revealed that at the level of high diplomacy, relations
between Britain and Anglo-North America emerged intact from the war.
The US and Canada: comparisons and relations

Comparing the war experiences of the United States and Canada uncovers
an array of parallels that helped define the North American experience of
war. These comparable paths underscore similarities in settlement patterns,
political ideals and economic development. The national identities of the
United States and Canada traced their political and demographic origins to
the white-settler Anglo communities that had originally colonised the
continent. This vision of national identity ignored the other demographic
realities that had peopled North America: slavery, Spanish and French
colonisation and large-scale immigration by non-Anglo peoples in the early
twentieth century.
Throughout the war, the United States and Canada grappled with
organised protests by marginalised minorities. The ongoing struggle for
racial equality within the United States sparked racial riots, lynching and
wide-scale state surveillance of African-American political organisations
and periodicals. Over 400,000 African Americans served in the military,
with 89 per cent placed in noncombatant, labouring roles. ‘The attempted
exclusion of African Americans from a national memory of the war
complemented larger attempts to marginalize African Americans as citizens
from the polity’, notes Chad Williams.33 The Canadian government’s
campaign to suppress bilingual schools, begun in 1912, stoked fears within
Quebec that wartime military service would turn into one more vehicle that
eliminated French-Canadian culture and autonomy. The lagging French-
Canadian enlistments (estimated by the British War Office as the lowest in
the Empire), draft evasion and the anti-conscription 1918 Easter riot in
Quebec City, all attested to the vibrancy of this ethnic conflict. ‘A war that
many thought could unite French and English Canadians had proved
everything to the contrary’, Patrice A. Dutil concludes.34 Rather than
breaking down the physical, cultural and political separation between the
majority and minority populations, the war reinforced the isolation of these
minority communities . Native peoples served in both the American and
Canadian armies, an experience that provoked a contradictory mix of
pressure to assimilate while in uniform and then, once they returned home,
opportunities to revive traditional warrior ceremonies and traditions. The
longstanding view of Native Americans as a ‘vanishing race’ fuelled an
array of home-front assaults on Native American communities, as
government agents in the United States and Canada leased indigenous lands
to non-Indians as part of the drive to maximise wartime crop, mineral and
livestock production. These minority groups thus ended the war with new
sets of grievances over their poor treatment by the majority culture, amid
fresh evidence that the federal governments in each nation intended to
maintain the status quo.
The transatlantic labour market that linked North America to Europe had
funnelled nearly 3 million people to Canada from 1896–1914 and over 8
million Europeans to the United States from 1900–09. Only British subjects
could enlist in the Canadian army, consequently recruits came
predominantly from the Anglo-British community, both Canadian and
British-born. The ethnic composition of the military thus reaffirmed the
‘British’ identity of Canada. Besides putting their own German immigrant
population under surveillance, Canada took concrete steps to protect its
borders from the large anti-British immigrant populations residing in a
neutral United States. Canadian fantasies that German spies might
somehow entice German-American or Irish-American communities to
conduct guerrilla raids, caused Canadian authorities to keep 16,000 soldiers
stationed along the border, part of a 50,000-man force that remained at
home to repel any direct attack on Canadian soil.35 Once the United States
entered the war, the need for such a strong southern border defence
evaporated, allowing Canada to send reinforcements to France at a critical
moment in the fighting. Within the US army, foreign-born soldiers (who
had declared their intent to become citizens) composed nearly one-fifth of
the wartime force, contributions to the war cause that helped recent
immigrants from Allied nations assimilate into the mainstream culture.
Throughout the early twentieth century, native-born and immigrant
workers moved freely back and forth across the US-Canadian border,
helping solidify transnational bonds between labour unions, socialist groups
and the radical Industrial Workers of the World that caught the attention of
intelligence services in both countries. In the post-war period, Canadians
and Americans accused recently arrived immigrants from southern and
central Europe of diluting North America’s Anglo racial and cultural
heritage. These immigrants were also charged with importing radical,
Bolshevik ideologies that threatened capitalism and representative
democracy. Protecting North America from Bolshevism became a joint US-
Canadian endeavour, with the two governments sharing information about
suspect labour groups throughout the war and during the post-war Red
Scare. 36
Culturally, economically and politically there was little reason for conflict
between the United States and Canada. Diplomacy helped maintain
tranquillity along the northern border of the United States. By 1914 an
embryonic bilateral US-Canadian relationship allowed for direct
negotiations (albeit with British oversight on the Canadian side). In the
early twentieth century, several international commissions began tackling
the traditional causes of conflict (settling formal boundaries, access to
fisheries and agreed use of shared rivers and lakes) between the United
States and Canada. These permanent commissions operated outside the
formal diplomatic channels still controlled by Britain, and their founding
coincided with the closure of the last remaining British garrisons in North
America in 1906. Canada was now responsible for resolving disputes,
diplomatic and military, with the United States. The temporary appointment
of an independent wartime Canadian representative within the British
Embassy in Washington, DC, made Canada the only British Dominion that
had the ability to talk directly to the US government. These developments
paved the way for wartime cooperation and the eventual establishment of
formal diplomatic relations in 1927.37
Cultural connections reinforced these growing diplomatic ties. A steady
stream of US-produced movies, magazines, newspapers, books,
advertisements and music poured into Canada. The sheer number of
products created for the much larger American audience and the efficient
railroad distribution networks that transported them throughout Anglo-
North America, made it difficult for distinctly Canadian cultural offerings
to thrive. American touring companies regularly included Canadian cities
and towns on their itineraries, exposing Canadians to a full range of
American circuses, vaudeville shows, minstrel acts and Wild West shows.
These facts dismayed the Canadian cultural elite, but the general public
avidly consumed American movies and music with little debate or
reflection before the war. The influx of British imports also hampered the
development of Canadian cultural traditions, as many middle-and upper-
class Canadians actively sought to maintain and cultivate this cultural
connection to mother England.
The war, however, temporarily disrupted this benign cultural relationship
between Canada and the United States. The first fissures appeared when
Canada entered the war and the United States remained neutral. Wartime
Canada avidly consumed Canadian-authored books explaining the war,
along with British films like the Battle of the Somme (1916). ‘Had
American mass culture been merely inadequate, perhaps such [British]
import substitutes would have seen Canadians happily through the war
years’, notes Paul Litt. ‘But in fact, American cultural products were not
merely lacking – they were offensive.’38 Heightened Canadian patriotism,
along with pride in fighting as part of the British Empire, suddenly made
Canadians aware of how much flag-waving and jingoism permeated US-
produced films, songs, books and plays. Canadians chafed at the tone of
moral superiority that America adopted as a neutral nation, well aware of
the profits flowing into US coffers from the healthy munitions trade.
French-Canadian Senator Napoléon Belcourt aptly summarised Canadian
views towards US neutrality: ‘mere money making is after all but a very
poor, indeed a very miserable compensation for the loss of national prestige,
national honor, caused by neglecting or ignoring modern solidarity, the
solidarity of civilized mankind’.39 America’s entry into the war helped ease
these cultural tensions, but ‘during the 1920s and 1930s, no Canadian forgot
that Canada, with one-tenth the population, had more killed and wounded
than the United States’, noted historians John Herd Thompson and Stephen
J. Randall. 40
Conflict between Mexico and the United States

In 1916 it appeared more likely that the United States would go to war with
Mexico than enter the Great War. Mexican politics had been in upheaval
since the Mexican Revolution began in 1910. The United States played a
direct role in the revolution, temporarily intervening in 1914 with a landing
in Veracruz that helped bring a new leader, Venustiano Carranza, to power.
As Carranza fell out of favour with the Americans, his supporters hatched
the Plan of San Diego, which called for a series of raids into US border
towns to kill all the Anglo-Americans living there and incite an uprising
among the remaining Mexican-Americans and blacks.41 A Mexican
invasion was to follow to establish Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado
and California as independent republics that could opt to join Mexico. The
plan fell apart when the US government got wind of it. An increased troop
presence along the border dealt effectively with the few guerrilla raids
attempted in 1915. On 9 March 1916, however, the anti-Carranza Mexican
revolutionary, General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, attacked Columbus, New
Mexico with a force of 500, killing eighteen Americans. Villa intended to
provoke the United States into invading Mexico, hoping to weaken
Carranza’s constitutional government by exposing its inability to prevent a
US violation of Mexican national sovereignty. German operatives in
Mexico helped finance these rebel activities, expecting a border war to
distract the United States from the European conflict.
As Villa (and Germany) anticipated, Wilson answered this first attack on
American soil since the War of 1812 by sending a 14,000-man
expeditionary force into Mexico without Carranza’s permission or approval.
Another 140,000 National Guardsmen (state-controlled militias mobilised
into active federal service) and regular army troops patrolled the border.42
‘The deeper the expedition penetrated, the more Mexicans suspected that
the dreaded Yanquis were bent on conquest’, John Milton Cooper, Jr. notes.
These suspicions led to a series of clashes between US troops and
governmental forces, including a firefight in Carrizal on 21 June 1916.43 In
the wake of this clash Wilson prepared a request for congressional authority
to occupy northern Mexico, which he subsequently abandoned upon
learning that American soldiers had fired first. This was the closest the two
countries had come to war since the Mexican-American War of 1846–8.
In contrast to American reluctance to enter the European war, Wilson
faced strong pressure from some cabinet officials and Congress to go to war
with Mexico in 1916. Realising that formal hostilities would lead to a
lengthy war, Wilson and Carranza agreed instead to appoint a mediation
commission that paved the way for the withdrawal of US troops on 5
February 1917 . In 1916, Wilson ran for re-election with the campaign
slogan, ‘He kept us out of war.’ Most historians equate the phrase with
Wilson’s handling of the Lusitania crisis, but Democrats campaigning for
Wilson gave equal weight to Mexico during their stump speeches.44 Wilson
offered many reasons for wanting to avoid a border war, including
suspicions that those pushing for armed intervention really wanted
improved access to Mexican oil, which British and American business
interests had long vied to control. Wilson also knew that having half a
million troops bogged down in Mexico would severely hamper the creation
of an American expeditionary force if the United States went to war with
Germany. ‘Germany is anxious to have us at war with Mexico, so that our
minds and our energies will be taken off the great war across the sea’,
Wilson told his personal secretary.45
The Mexican punitive expedition failed in its stated goal of capturing
Villa, but ‘its real purpose was a display of the power of the United States’,
Secretary of War Newton Baker asserted.46 The US military, under-strength
and under-equipped in comparison to the European armies fighting along
the Western Front, gained important experience fighting its first sustained
campaign since the 1898 Spanish-American War. The invasion’s
commander, Brigadier General John J. Pershing, would go on to lead the
wartime army, carrying the lessons learned from Mexico to France. The
incursion gave the army its first test mobilising National Guard troops and
readying them for combat, along with practice mounting the surveillance
and logistics needed to maintain an army on the move. None of this went
particularly well or smoothly in Mexico, a harbinger of the challenges
ahead. These problems helped preparedness advocates win some funding to
enlarge, reorganise and modernise the nation’s military in the days leading
up to America’s entry into the First World War. Those determined to avoid
any involvement in the European war had steadfastly opposed preparedness
as one step removed from intervention. The armed clash with Mexico,
however, allowed the preparedness faction to argue that the nation needed a
stronger military to protect its borders.47 The National Defense Act of 1916
increased the size of the peacetime army and federal supervision of state
troops, and laid the groundwork for federal mobilisation of the economy –
measures designed with the European war in mind. Visions of men going
into battle without enough machine guns or flying airplanes that routinely
crashed (as in Mexico), prompted Congress to appropriate more money for
both.
Viewing the Zimmermann Telegram within the context of Mexican rebel
border raids, the San Diego plan and armed clashes between US and
Mexican troops, helps illuminate Germany’s decision to send the telegram,
and the subsequent US outrage. The Zimmermann Telegram proposed that
Mexico ally with Germany to recoup territory lost in the mid nineteenth
century, if Germany and the United States went to war. ‘Mexico’s hatred for
America is well-founded and old’, German Foreign Minister, Arthur
Zimmermann, assured his German colleagues, citing the American
military’s recent poor performance chasing Villa to predict a long, drawn-
out war between Mexico and the United States that would keep American
troops tied down in North America. 48 Zimmermann’s enthusiastic
endorsement of this proposed German-Mexican alliance represented a
complete change of heart. Only a year earlier he had rejected Mexico’s offer
to house German U-boat bases to avoid a rupture in US–German relations.
In January 1917, however, Zimmermann believed that the German decision
to resume unconditional submarine warfare would be likely to bring the
United States into the war. By sending the secret telegram, Zimmermann
inadvertently played a major role in ensuring American belligerency once
the British intercepted, decoded and then passed the telegram on to the
American government. The telegram’s publication in March 1917 unified a
previously divided American public in favour of war with Germany. ‘The
note had its greatest impact in precisely those areas of the United States
where isolationism and thus opposition to U.S. involvement in the war were
particularly strong: the Southwest’, writes Friedrich Katz; border states
where the recent troubles with Mexico loomed the largest.49
The aftershocks of the Zimmermann Telegram went beyond prompting
US entry into the war. Within North America the note threatened further
damage to US–Mexican relations, as Carranza hedged on his response.
Publicly denying that he had ever received the telegram, Carranza privately
contemplated the likelihood of another American invasion, what kind of
military aid Germany could reasonably give and his advisers’ assessment
that the proposal was unworkable. On 14 April 1917, eight days after the
United States declared war on Germany, Carranza told the German
ambassador to Mexico that he intended to remain neutral.
As Wilson wanted, Mexico adopted a new constitution in 1917 that
allowed for universal suffrage and land reform. But Carranza also moved to
reassert national control over Mexican natural resources, especially oil and
minerals. His government imposed higher taxes, required landowners to get
official approval before selling land to foreigners and added a constitution
clause that conferred ownership of all underground resources to the nation
rather than the landowner. These measures had little immediate effect. The
Mexican government made no effort to enforce this constitutional clause,
and foreign warships ensured that oil fields along the Gulf coast continued
to produce record amounts of oil for the Allied war effort. Reports that the
Americans were seriously considering a limited occupation of Mexican oil
fields, the ban on American loans to Mexico and a US embargo on arms,
food and gold, however, prompted Carranza to continue ongoing, if
fruitless, conversations with German officials for the rest of the war about a
possible alliance. In the spring of 1919, the possibility of war between the
United States and Mexico loomed once again. American oil interests and
some members of Wilson’s administration began plotting a coup with
Carranza’s opponents, all the while pressuring Wilson to break diplomatic
relations. Coinciding with the incapacitating stroke that rendered Wilson
bed-ridden for months, these plans went nowhere. The drumbeat of
criticism in the press and Congress nonetheless strained relations with
Carranza until his eventual overthrow by the military in the spring of 1920.
50
The North American origins of Wilsonianism

The United States had long seen the Monroe Doctrine (an 1823
pronouncement by President James Monroe that the Western Hemisphere
was off-limits to future colonisation by other world powers) as a
commitment to guarantee the sovereignty of newly independent nations
throughout the Western Hemisphere. Wilson’s predecessors had already
enlarged the scope of the Monroe Doctrine to include the 1904 Roosevelt
Corollary (which justified US regional policing to prevent ‘wrongdoing’)
and strengthen the US regional economic presence through dollar
diplomacy. Wilson now attempted to apply the principles of the Monroe
Doctrine globally. The wording of Wilson’s famous ‘Peace without Victory’
speech of 1917, which proposed a negotiated settlement to the world war,
explicitly presented the American experience in the Western Hemisphere as
a model for future international relations. ‘I am proposing . . .’, Wilson
stated, ‘that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of
President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to
extend its polity over any other nation or people, but that every people
should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development,
unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the powerful.’
Wilson’s willingness to intervene militarily to make Mexico and the
Caribbean ‘safe for democracy’ served as a ‘rehearsal for preparing the
nation for the grand task of global reconstruction’ that Wilson would
attempt once the United States entered the world war, Akira Iriye argues.51
Many of the ideals that Wilson would go on to trumpet through his 1918
Fourteen Points address and at the Versailles peace negotiations, he initially
proposed to improve US relations with its southern neighbour. Hoping to
teach Mexicans ‘to elect good men’, Wilson floated a proposal for a Pan-
American Pact that would allow the United States to work in concert with
Argentina, Chile and Brazil to promote democracy, settle disputes and
guarantee borders within the Western Hemisphere. ‘ Although nothing came
of the Pan-American pact, its provisions contained language and ideas that
Wilson would use in the Covenant of the League of Nations’, Cooper
notes.52 The limits that Wilson imposed on regional interventions and his
attempt to devise a method of collective security to handle disputes within
the Western Hemisphere revealed that, ‘in the Wilsonian way of war, the
limits of force were equal in importance to the power of force’, asserts
Frederick S. Calhoun. 53
Wilson ultimately failed to convince isolationists within the United States
(who clung to the Monroe Doctrine as a way to limit US involvement in
world affairs) that the time had come for active participation in the League
of Nations. His opponents argued that joining the League of Nations would
threaten US regional dominance and embroil the nation in ‘entangling
alliances’ that would lead to involvement in future European wars. The
desire to define its own foreign policy unilaterally and to continue relying
on North America’s physical distance from Europe to maintain diplomatic
and political independence, ultimately prevailed over Wilson’s suggestion
that the United States take on more formal responsibility as the world’s
guardian of democracy and humanity. Participation in the world war thus
only reaffirmed America’s view of itself as a North American nation.
Conclusion
The war noticeably amplified American influence within the Western
Hemisphere and the increased integration of North American economies
and politics. The trend towards regional integration under the leadership of
the United States did not go unchallenged. In 1919, Mexican President
Carranza vocally disputed Wilson’s claim that the Monroe Doctrine
benefited nations seeking to determine their own futures . Instead, he
assailed the policy as extending the imperial reach of the United States
within the Western Hemisphere by imposing ‘upon independent nations a
protectorate status which they do not ask for and which they do not
require’.54 Carranza instead proposed pan-Hispanic cooperation to curb US
hegemony in the region, foreshadowing future ideological disputes over
whether America was a ‘good neighbour’ or ‘imperialist’ in the Western
Hemisphere. Carranza unsuccessfully urged smaller and weaker Central
American nations to join together to prevent the United States from
intervening unilaterally in their domestic affairs. He had better luck
fostering a strong sense of Mexican nationalism built upon a legacy of
wartime tension with the United States.
Canada’s embrace of imperial nationhood revealed its commitment to
evolve as a nation within, rather than in opposition to, the British Empire.
The centrality of the memory of the First World War within Canada helped
reinforce its sense of solidarity with other Dominions whose national
identities became inextricably linked to their battlefield experiences. No
sense of shared wartime sacrifice bound the United States and Canada
together in the post-war period. Instead, the memory of the war took quite
different trajectories on each side of the border. The decentralised way in
which American communities commemorated the war prevented any
unifying collective memory of the war from taking root. The absence of a
national monument to the war in Washington, DC, stands in notable
contrast to the dominating presence of the Peace Tower and the National
War Memorial in Ottawa. These sites of memory strengthened Canada’s
cultural identification with the British Empire, a relationship which
bestowed economic benefits as well. The 1932 Ottawa Conference, for
instance, established a five-year privileged trading relationship among
Britain and its Dominions at the height of the Great Depression (much to
America’s irritation).
Overall, however, the war accelerated the coordination of the American
and Canadian diplomatic goals and domestic policies, strengthening
bilateral relations between the two nations. To the south, the war unsettled
US–Mexican relations, ultimately prompting the United States to use force
to assert its economic, political and military dominance. Whether the
process was rocky as in the case of US–Mexican relations or relatively
smooth as between the United States and Canada, the economic and
political integration of North America was one of the key global legacies of
the First World War.
1 David MacKenzie, ‘Introduction: myth, memory, and the transformation

of Canadian society’, in Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War:
Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown (University of Toronto Press,
2005), p. 3.
2 Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American
Experience (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 12.
3 Ibid., pp. 30–1.
4 Paul A. C. Koistinen, Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political

Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 121.
5 Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918

(Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 81.
6 Both the United States and Canada expanded agricultural production to
meet Allied demand. Low-interest loans encouraged farmers to increase
their production through mechanisation or buying more land. The high
prices negotiated for overseas wheat and cotton sales made the increased
debt seem negligible, but in the 1920s declining crop prices depressed the
American and Canadian farming industry. These ‘sick’ economic sectors
intensified the severity of the economic depression that swept the world in
1929, revealing how long North America suffered the aftershocks of the
global economic mobilisation during the First World War.
7 After the United States entered the war, the government took over
financing the Allies and lent them nearly $11 billion during the period of
active fighting and reconstruction. ‘Less than $1 billion of the money lent
by the American government was ever repaid, but all of the approximately
$3 billion owed to private U.S. investors was’, writes Paul A. C. Koistinen,
Mobilizing for Modern War, p. 135.
8 Hew Strachan, The First World War (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 228.
9 John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York:

Knopf, 2009), p. 373.
10 Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. I: To Arms (Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 991.
11 Desmond Morton, Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great

War, 1914–1919 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989), p. 82.
12 Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918, pp. 172–4.
13 Alan Kramer estimates that 478,500–700,000 German civilians

(depending on the source) died from blockade-related starvation and disease
as compared to 14,722 British merchant seamen. Alan Kramer,
‘Combatants and noncombatants: atrocities, massacres, and war crimes’, in
John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012),
pp. 195–6.
14 The Lusitania sinking set off a firestorm of debate within the United
States over whether neutrality gave Americans the freedom to travel
unmolested into the war zone. Wilson’s decision during the Lusitania crisis
to define neutrality as a status that guaranteed neutral nations unassailable
rights (rather than a pledge to treat both sides equally) ultimately set the
United States on a collision course with Germany.
15 Paul Litt, ‘Canada invaded! The Great War, mass culture, and Canadian
cultural nationalism’, in Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War,
p. 344.
16 Nathan Smith, ‘Fighting the alien problem in a British country: returned

soldiers and anti-alien activism in wartime Canada, 1916–19’, in James E.
Kitchen, Alisa Miller and Laura Rowe (eds.), Other Combatants, Other
Fronts: Competing Histories of the First World War (Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2011), p. 305.
17 Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global History

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 292.
18 Rosemary Thorp, ‘Latin America and the international economy from

the First World War to the world depression’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. VI: 1870–1930 (Cambridge
19 Theo Balderston, ‘Industrial mobilization and war economies’, in Horne

(ed.), A Companion to World War I, p. 229.
20 Robert K. Hanks, ‘Canada: Army’ and James Carroll, Robert K. Hanks

and Spencer Tucker, ‘Canada: Role in war’, in Spencer C. Tucker (ed.),
World War I: A Student Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio,
2005), pp. 257–9.
21 Jennifer D. Keene, World War I: The American Soldier Experience
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2011), pp. 33, 163.
22 Newfoundland was a separate colony during the war, so its

disproportionately high casualty rate is not included in these figures. The
8,500 men who enlisted in Newfoundland represented nearly 10 per cent of
the adult male population. Of these, 3,600 were either killed or wounded.
23 J. L. Granatstein, ‘Conscription in the Great War’, in Mackenzie (ed.),

Canada and the First World War, p. 70.
24 Christopher Capazzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the
Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), p. 41.
25 Terry Copp, ‘The military effort, 1914–1918’, in Mackenzie (ed.),

Canada and the First World War, p. 43.
26 United States Army in the World War, 1917–1919, 17 vols. (Washington,

DC: Center of Military History, 2001), vol. I, p. 3.
27 John English, ‘Political leadership in the First World War’, in

Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War, p. 80. Mitchell A.
Yokelson, Borrowed Soldiers: Americans under British Command, 1918
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), pp. 76–7.
28 Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of

America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2001), p. 106.
29 Robert Aldrich and Christopher Hillard, ‘The French and British

Empires’, in Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I, p. 532.
30 Robert Craig Brown, ‘Canada in North America’, in John Braeman,

Robert H. Brenner and David Brody (eds.), Twentieth-Century American
Foreign Policy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), p. 359. See
also Robert Craig Brown, ‘“Whither are we being shoved?” Political
leadership in Canada during World War I’, in J. L. Granatstein and R. D.
Cuff (eds.), War and Society in North America (Toronto: Thomas Nelson &
Sons, 1971), pp. 104–19.
31 Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
(New York: Random House, 2001), pp. 47–8.
32 Quoted in ibid., p. 48.
33 Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American

Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2010), p. 301.
34 Patrice A. Dutil, ‘Against isolationism: Napoléon Belcourt, French

Canada, and “La grande guerre”’, in Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First
World War, p. 125.
35 Granatstein, ‘Conscription’, p. 66. According to John Herd Thompson

and Stephen J. Randall, the US-based German military attaché considered
such attacks, but the only actual case of German sabotage that originated on
American soil damaged a railway bridge in New Brunswick; John Herd
Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States:
Ambivalent Allies, 4th edn (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,
2008), p. 94.
36 Donald Avery, ‘Ethnic and class relations in Western Canada during the
First World War: a case study of European immigrants and Anglo-Canadian
nativism’, in Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War, pp. 286–7.
37 Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, pp. 71–9, 96–7.
38 Litt, ‘Canada invaded!’, p. 338.

39 Quoted in Dutil, ‘Against isolationism’, p. 122.
40 Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, p. 98.
41 James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the

Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1992).
42 War Department, Annual Reports 1916, 3 vols. (US Government

Printing Office, 1916), vol. I, pp. 13, 23, 189–91.
43 Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, p. 320.
44 Ibid., p. 322.
45 N. G. Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response

to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 311.
46 War Department, Annual Reports, 1917, 3 vols. (US Government

Printing Office, 1917), vol. I, p. 10.
47 Russell Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York:

Macmillan, 1967), p. 348.
48 Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States
and the Mexican Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 351.
49 Ibid., p. 361.
50 Mark T. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the

Western Hemisphere, 1913–1921 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press,
1986), pp. 147–9, 152–3.
51 Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations,
vol. III: The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945 (Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 37–8.
52 Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, p. 246.
53 Frederick S. Calhoun, Power and Principle: Armed Intervention in

Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), p. 251.
54 Gilderhus, Pan American Visions, p. 146.

20 Latin America
Olivier Compagnon The First World War has long been considered a non-
event in the history of contemporary Latin America, far from the main
theatres of military operations. The only exception came in the form of two
naval battles off the southern coasts at the end of 1914: a German victory
over the Royal Navy at Cape Coronel on 1 November and the British
victory at the Falkland Islands on 8 December, which gave the British
control of Cape Horn. The subcontinent was spared the blood-letting which
afflicted the main belligerent nations, and the score of states south of the
Rio Grande were seen as distant spectators of the first total conflict. This
was unlike the African and Asiatic colonial regions which were involved in
the great mobilisation of the imperial capitals, and would finally suffer only
passing economic consequences or distant echoes of propaganda from the
two coalitions. In no case did the 1914–18 war appear as a significant
rupture in the long course of a Latin American century routinely seen
through the prism of two great turning points: the economic crisis of 1919
and the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
On the basis of a view of the Great War which gave pride of place to
military matters, and from a representation of Latin America as a peripheral
world region, this generally accepted historiographic view at least partially
accommodates some well-known facts about the relationships between
former Spanish and Portuguese colonies and Europe in the early twentieth
century. In fact, the density of migrational ties between the two sides of the
Atlantic, and the integration of the subcontinent into the worldwide
financial and commercial markets since around the 1870s – like the
intellectual cult of the Old Continent among most elites since the time of
their national independence – all indicate a need to re-evaluate the effects of
the Great War in Latin America.1 The historian’s examination of the
archives immediately reveals the war as an omnipresent element in the
national and religious press in all countries, in the very prompt attention
that it received from governments and chancelleries, the mobilisation of
important social sectors and the scale of intellectual output devoted to it, not
only from 1915 onwards but until the end of the 1930s. Although we must
therefore take care not to consider the region as a single whole, and to take
into account the specificities of each national experience of the war as part
of a reasoned comparison, the First World War nonetheless must be
appreciated as an important moment in the Latin American twentieth
century. It needs to be reassessed in its multiple dimensions.2
Neutrality in 1914
In the first days of August 1914, as the flames spread across Europe, all the
Latin American nations declared their neutrality towards the nations at war.
Unusual, in view of the recurrent diplomatic cleavages which had been a
feature of inter-regional relations since the winning of independence, this
managed consensus survived until 1917 and arose from a number of causes.
Unanimously, the war was first perceived as an exclusively European
matter – even though protectorates, colonies and Dominions automatically
joined the war alongside their ‘mother country’. The Latin American
diplomats en poste in the European capitals, most of whom had viewed the
assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo as a simple item of
news, saw the growing flames as the logical end point in the old Franco-
German rivalry, the clash between imperial ambitions and territorial matters
intimately linked to the assertion of nationalities. All these were stakes
related only to an ‘Old World’ rationale. According to the teachings of the
Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the basis of non-interference by the young
American states in European affairs in exchange for European non-
interference in American matters, the American hemisphere should not
become involved in this Old World struggle. In the press or in diplomatic
exchanges, the bloody ventures that were the consequences of imperialism
or the crystallisation of nationalisms were denounced without any thought
of involvement in the conflict. Like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, it
seemed distant and certain to be short-lived. In fact, this reaction to the
flare-up in August 1914 reflected the relative indifference of Latin
Americans towards the concert of European nations that emerged from the
Congress of Vienna. One of a few marginal voices to see clearly what was
coming was the Argentinian writer Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), who at
the end of 1912 had published a series of chronicles in the daily newspaper,
La Nación (Buenos Aires), in which a European war was judged
unavoidable in the short or medium term.3
To this first level of analysis of Latin American neutrality in 1914 were
added economic considerations of prime importance for the profitable
investing nations, mostly exporters of raw materials – agricultural or mining
– and importers of manufactured products, structurally dependent on the
outside world. Over the previous two decades, many of South America’s
northern states had seen the United States replace Europe’s industrialised
countries as prime partners in finance and commerce. They felt less directly
threatened by the flames in Europe. In 1914, Mexico, Central America,
Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti thus held 74.5 per cent of the
United States’ direct investment in Latin America, while the remaining 25.5
per cent was divided among the ten independent countries of South
America. At the same date, Mexico and Central America were dependent
on the United States for 62.7 per cent of their exports and 53.5 per cent of
their imports. The situation was, however, very different in South America,
where the European nations – with Great Britain in the lead, but also
Germany since the last years of the nineteenth century and France to a
lesser degree – remained by far the leading investors and commercial
partners. Uruguay and Argentina depended on the United States for only 4
per cent and 4.7 per cent respectively of their exports, and 12.7 per cent and
14.7 per cent of imported goods. On the eve of the war, 24.9 per cent of
Argentinian exports went to Great Britain, 12 per cent to Germany and 7.8
per cent to France, while 31 per cent of the imports of these countries came
from Great Britain, 16.9 per cent from Germany and 9 per cent from
France. In this context, a declaration of war – whether against the Entente
or the Alliance – would necessarily lead to alienating strategic economic
partners and would weaken the strong growth that had been characteristic of
the region for several decades.4
Finally , the fear of reopening the question of the nation’s homogeneity if
it were to intervene in the war was not without significance in a region
which, since the second half of the nineteenth century, had seen a massive
degree of immigration from Europe and where some foreign communities
still only had a very relative sense of belonging to their new home country.
The scope of this argument should of course be adjusted in the case of the
Andean states (Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia) or of Central
America, where the influx of European migrants was infinitely smaller than
in the south of the subcontinent. Of the 8–9 million Europeans who sailed
for Latin America between the 1820s and 1914, nearly 50 per cent settled in
Argentina and 36 per cent in Brazil, the remaining 14 per cent choosing
above all Cuba, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile.5 Depending on the scale of
these migratory streams, the possibility of a break-up of these melting pots
on the occasion of a European war was more present in the thinking of the
political elites, because the early twentieth century was a time of
widespread questionings of identity in these young migrant nations –
notably at the time of the independence centenaries which were celebrated
in 1910 throughout most of Hispanic America. Chile is an example, where
the many German colonies watched jealously over their inheritance, while
in Argentina the substantial Italian community mobilised massively after
May 1915. Brazil had a community of around 400,000 people of Germanic
origin, mainly settled in the southern states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa
Catalina and Rio Grande do Sul, who were considered to be very poorly
integrated and, since the end of the nineteenth century, had been observed
by the intellectual leaders with lively distrust. Since then, neutrality was
seen at least as much a necessity of internal politics as a preference in
external policy. This attitude was stronger when the national political
context was particulary unstable, as in Mexico where the revolution sparked
off in 1910 had generated a civil war that entailed strong tensions in
relations with the United States .
The mobilisation of communities of foreign origins

and of intellectuals
Governmental neutrality and the relative indifference of the press in the first
weeks of the war did not prevent early mobilisation in certain sectors of
society. Faced with orders for military mobilisation sent by the diplomatic
representatives of the belligerent nations in Latin America, and widely
distributed in the community press, European immigrants were undoubtedly
the first to be touched by the war, providing a remarkable insight into their
sense of integration into the host societies. Although the great majority of
Germans (or of those with Germanic origins) of military age could not cross
the Atlantic because of the offshore naval blockade which was rapidly
established around Latin America, French and British immigrants
responded as conscientiously as possible to the call. Yet the total figures
drawn up by Paris and London at the end of the war showed the very
limited results of this mobilisation. Only 32 per cent of the 20,925 men born
in France and living in Argentina, of military age in the classes of 1890–
1919, seem to have reached the front, 2,834 of them being exempted or
rejected, and 12,290 unsatisfactory in some way. As for the sons of
Frenchmen born in Argentina and enjoying dual nationality, probably
numbering between 40,000 and 50,000, only 250 to 300 seem to have
embarked for Europe – fewer than 1 per cent of the total. Although
submitted to strong pressure within community associations, the Italians
who went to join the war in Europe appear to have been proportionately still
less numerous, although there is no reliable quantitative study available that
deals with the whole of Latin America.6
From these facts, it would, however, be wrong to conclude that most
immigrants of European origin were indifferent to the war. This would be to
underestimate the immense mobilisation undertaken by their press,
charitable organisations or other associations, which spent the years 1914–
18 with their eyes fixed on their European mother countries. The press in all
the communities portrayed the very deep emotions stirred by the conflict,
despite the separation of thousands of kilometres. Among the score of
German-language newspapers published in Brazil at the beginning of the
war, from the anticlerical Germania in São Paulo to the very Protestant
Deutsche Post in São Leopoldo, via the Kompass in Curitiba, all honoured
the moral purity of the war initiated by the Reich in the first days of August
1914. All followed the sequence of military operations through to 1918
with passion and attention – some of them launching editions in Portuguese
in order to encourage Brazilian feeling in favour of the Reich’s cause.7
Although they did not contribute to the war effort physically as much as the
European belligerents would have liked, the communities of foreign origin
were also quick to establish sites of memory directly linked to the war.
Having paraded noisily in the streets of Buenos Aires, São Paulo or Mexico
to celebrate Rome’s joining the war on 23 May 1915, the Italian
communities took to the streets each year on the same date to sustain the
war effort ‘back home’, and publicly commemorated each important
military advance until the decisive Battle of Vittorio Veneto. Above all, the
immigrants and descendants of immigrants contributed massively to charity
ventures and charitable works throughout the war. Patriotic committees and
other community associations could be counted in their hundreds, in
existence before the war or created especially in wartime to organise fund-
raising and displays of support for one or other of the nations at war. In
Argentina, for example, the Comité Patriótico Francés was responsible for
the many displays of charitable welfare which received almost daily
publicity in the Courrier de la Plata. Shortly after Italy joined the war, the
Italian community of Salvador de Bahi organised a Comitato Pro-Patria and
collections and subscriptions, notably for men permanently handicapped by
the war.8 In Buenos Aires, it acted as the relay point for loans floated by the
Italian government to finance the war effort, through bodies as varied as the
Pompieri Volontari della Boca, the Primo Circulo Mandolinístico Italiano or
the Associazione Italiana di Mutualitá ed Istruzione. More evident in the
southern ‘cone’ of South America and Brazil than in the rest of Latin
America, and fundamentally urban, this mobilisation of the communities of
European origin during the Great War remained constant from the end of
1914 to the Armistice in November 1918 – even, in some cases, into the
1920s – and played a decisive role in the gradual involvement of the Latin
American societies in the conflict.
Once the illusion of a short war had vanished, currents of opinion also
emerged, beyond these more or less immigrant communities, which clearly
leant towards one side or the other, although without challenging
governmental neutrality. By way of the press, through conferences or by
means of specially created associations, the intellectual elites played a
front-line role in the crystallisation and diffusion of representations of a war
which was setting fire to what they saw as the heart of the civilised world.
In effect, following their independence in the early nineteenth century, most
Latin American elites had rejected the models represented by Spain and
Portugal, imperial powers henceforward held up to the most severe
contempt. They looked instead towards the enlightened world as
represented by Northern Europe. Under various headings, France, Great
Britain and Germany then became the incarnations of modernity, the
beating heart of a civilisation whose values were the finest guarantees of a
reasoned advance in the former Iberian colonies. In discourse and in
practice, this Europe was now the pattern on which public policies were
shaped, the matrix for all cultural effort, a guide in everything which
illuminated the future of societies. Published in Chile in 1845 and very
widely diffused through all the nations of the region during the following
decades, the Facundo of the Argentinian writer Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento (1811–88) – subtitled Civilización y Barbarie – had endowed
this Euro-worship with its fictionalised manifesto and definitively set up the
Old Continent as the modernising totem.9
In these circumstances, the early mobilisation of Latin American
intellectuals is no surprise, and reflects the geography of the dominant
points of intellectual reference. The vast majority of them, in fact, were
outspoken advocates of the Allied cause, basing their feelings
fundamentally on the blind cult of France which was considered as the
source of every freedom, as well as the cradle of letters and the arts, and the
supreme location for every form of modernity. As a legacy of the nineteenth
century and the ‘tropical Belle Epoque’,10 the afrancesamiento of the elites
explains why their dominant image of the war represented the clash
between eternal and glorious French civilisation on the one hand, and
German barbarity and militarism on the other. On 3 September 1914 the
Uruguayan writer and politician José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917), whose
essay ‘Ariel’ (1900) had been immensely popular with Latin American
intellectual youth, published a text in the daily newspaper La Razón
(Montevideo), assimilating the cause of France to that of humanity. In
March 1915 the Liga Brasileira pelos Aliados was created in Rio de Janeiro,
and brought numerous writers and politicians together to raise Brazilian
awareness of the Entente cause. Its President, the famous writer and
diplomat, José Pereira da Graça Aranha (1868–1931), whose
Germanophobic novel, Canaã, brought him great fame on its publication in
1902, transmitted this representation of the war in his inaugural speech,
declaring that ‘from the unleashing of the war, we have come to France,
moved by the same instinct which in this war has shown the renewed battle
of barbarity against civilisation’.11 Throughout the war, several
publications, from the revue Nosotros in Buenos Aires in 1915 to the daily
paper El Universal in Mexico in 1917, published the results of enquiries
among the nation’s leading intellectual figures who confirmed the
commonly shared wish to see the courage of the poilus rewarded. A good
indicator of this pervading francophilia, strengthened by the massive
distribution of more or less fantastic accounts of the atrocities committed by
the Germans during the first weeks of the war, can also be seen in the flow
of volunteers enlisting in the French army, which was without equivalent in
the armies of the other belligerents: between 1,500 and 2,000 individuals
for the whole of the year, most of them literate, from the urban oligarchies
and sometimes living in Paris, who proved their readiness to spill their
blood in defence of the ideal of civilisation as represented by France. This
followed the examples of the Colombian, Hernando de Bengoechea, or the
Peruvian, José García Calderón, killed in action in May 1915 and May 1916
respectively.
It is still important to deal carefully with a body of opinion of which the
outline remains blurred and which is without doubt less homogeneous than
has sometimes been accepted. The great majority of sympathisers with
Germany were committed figures who openly supported the cause of the
Central empires or who, at least, claimed a strict intellectual neutrality –
nonetheless combined with a Germanophilia in the context of the majority
support for the Allies. This applied particularly to jurists and philosophers,
often trained in the spirit of German science, such as the Argentinians
Alfredo Colmo (1878–1934) and Ernesto Quesada (1858–1934), military
men persuaded by the concept of Reichswehr supremacy, or members of the
Catholic hierarchy for whom a French defeat would be just punishment
after the teaching interdict laid on religious congregations in 1901 and the
separation of Church and State in 1905. Further, the sense of being, on
balance, favourable to the Allies, often forged through the press, also
deserves to be set in context in terms of the monopoly held by the Havas
and Reuters agencies in the transmission of news and the many pressures
exercised on these agencies by the propaganda services of the Entente
powers. Finally, the particular case of Mexico should be mentioned, where
the hostility shown by many intellectuals in the case of the military
interventions by the United States during the 1910 revolution, generally
brought them closer to the German cause – as witnessed in the editorial line
of a daily such as El Demócrata (Mexico) – even before Washington joined
the war.12 Nonetheless, it remains true that the cultural prestige enjoyed by
France in Latin America at the dawn of the twentieth century, combined
with the financial and commercial domination still exercised by Great
Britain across the whole region, naturally encouraged a majority of the
elites to wish for the triumph of Paris and London rather than of Berlin and
Vienna – at least until 1917.
War, economy and societies
To the extent that the nineteenth century had been a time of accelerated
integration of Latin America into world markets, and spectacular growth in
its commercial and financial relations with Europe, the economic effects of
the war were quickly felt. Suspension of the gold standard for currency by
some belligerent nations in the first days of August 1914 immediately
raised the spectre of monetary instability. In order to avoid a banking panic,
many governments temporarily suspended the activities of exchange
bureaux and banned the export of gold bullion. However, these emergency
measures did not prevent an immediate inflationary trend which was to last
until around 1920. In addition, many European banks – notably British –
fell in with the injunctions of their government, demanding the prompt
repayment of loans granted to Latin American countries and annulling those
which were being negotiated. The long-term loans to Brazil, which
represented a total of $19.1 million in 1913, consequently fell to $4.2
million in 1914 and zero in 1915. The war context was also responsible for
a considerable reduction in the flow of direct investment from Europe, and
affected a certain number of activities such as mining, railway construction
and the modernisation of urban transport systems. United States capital
funds could partially replace the traditional financial partners of Latin
American states from 1915, but it was not until the 1920s that a volume of
foreign investment comparable to that of the Belle Epoque was recovered.
Seen from the financial angle, the Great War thus corresponded to a phase
of shrinking investments and shortage of capital.13
More generally, the place of the conflict in the economic history of
contemporary Latin America has resulted in numerous polemics, in which
the stake has been to determine whether the years 1914–18 represented a
phase of take-off, characterised by an acceleration of industrialisation, or on
the contrary a period of contracting activity interrupting development in the
secondary sector, which had begun cautiously in the final years of the
nineteenth century. In a book which was for long a classic of the theory of
dependence, André Gunder Frank attributed the underdevelopment of the
region to its historically unequal exchanges with the ‘First World’. He
observed that the two world wars, marked by a weakening in the financial
and commercial relations between Latin America and its traditional
partners, could be seen as periods of real economic take-off, in that this
would have enabled a break from the prevailing rentier logics, and initiated
a dynamic of import substitution.14 Although mentioned in many texts, this
interpretation has been convincingly refuted. In the case of São Paulo, for
example, Warren Dean has shown that the reduction in coffee exports from
August 1914 hobbled the process of the accumulation of capital – which
had effectively been at the root of local industrial expansion since the 1890s
– and that the war restricted expansion despite the continued growth in
many industrial enterprises from the mid-war period until 1920.15 In
emphasising the case of Argentina, Roger Gravil has also vigorously
challenged Frank’s assertions, showing that the secondary sector did not
stop shrinking throughout the war because of a contraction in trade with
Europe which was balanced by investments and the North American
market, a shortage of labour and of a lack of capital equipment and rising
energy costs.16
The chief effect of the war concerned the circulation of goods and
assumed that it was possible to distinguish short-term effects from the long-
term. During an initial phase, which lasted until the beginning of 1915, the
shortage of shipping and the sudden shortage of commercial credit
handicapped the usual transatlantic patterns of trade; substantial stocks built
up and the price of many raw materials collapsed. As the economies of the
nations at war changed direction to meet the needs of the war, however, a
balance became established which, despite cyclical variations, was
maintained until the beginning of 1919. On the one hand, the European
need for strategic war products and basic food supplies destined for soldiers
as well as civilians, created a rapid rise in trade and stimulated the exports
of certain Latin American countries: Mexico with its oil, Bolivia with tin,
Peru with copper and wool, Chile with its nitrates, Cuba with sugar, or
Argentina with its meat and grain, all saw substantial growth in income
from exports. On the other hand, countries without resources that were
considered strategic – for example the great coffee exporters like Brazil,
Colombia or Venezuela – could not genuinely profit from the rise in
markets because of the reduction in transatlantic traffic, and suffered a clear
drop in their trading balance throughout the war. In return, the European
nations which normally supplied everyday consumer goods and capital
equipment to Latin America were unable to meet the demand because of
changes in their own economies. Although certain products from the United
States partially made up for the shortage in traditional suppliers, Latin
American imports rose in price and fell away in volume to the extent that
the whole subcontinent was in a position of commercial surplus in 1915.
This entailed a brutal fall in national income in states which were broadly
founded on import rights. Further difficulties in honouring the servicing of
debt and strong inflation characterised the full period of the war.17
Elsewhere, the sustained demand for strategic products from European
belligerent nations and the increase in the prices of raw materials, did not
lead to all the financial surpluses expected, given the limits imposed on
maritime trade.
The Allies did all they could to prevent the Central Powers from gaining
access to Latin America’s immense resources, trying to control European
neutrals potentially capable of acting as intermediaries and, in March 1916,
establishing the famous ‘black lists’, an index of Latin American businesses
and trading companies either under German control or considered as such.18
At the same time, the German declaration of all-out submarine warfare
early in 1917 made the Atlantic crossing even more dangerous, resulted in
serious shipping losses and discouraged a certain number of shipowners,
who saw losses by torpedo increasing dramatically. Within the entire Latin
American region, the sectors associated with the export of strategic
products were thus great beneficiaries of the Great War, but for more than
four years the nations had to deal with an extremely precarious financial
situation. With the expansion of local artisan or industrial activity capable
of making up for the drop in European imports limited to a few urban or
harbour districts, the populations suffered from shortages and the growing
cost of many everyday consumer goods. To this was added the abrupt halt
in immigration, which crucially had contributed to the growth of internal
markets and had fuelled economic growth with a cheap and plentiful labour
force. In consequence, although the Great War undoubtedly ensured the
elites’ growing awareness of the structural dependence which threatened
their economies, and consequent drawbacks, it cannot be considered a key
moment in the industrialisation process in Latin America.
Finally, to the extent that they affected people at the very core of their
daily lives from the end of 1914, and increasingly from the first quarter of
1915, the economic effects of the Great War were, of course, not without a
role in the widespread growth of social agitation between 1915 and 1920.
From the outbreak of the war, many states tried to calm the financial crisis
with the creation of new taxes – for example, in Peru where the sale of
tobacco and alcohol was heavily taxed in September 1914. In the large
Brazilian cities the prices of basic food products (flour, rice and oil) rose by
between 10 and 35 per cent in the second half of 1914. In Buenos Aires,
inflation reached 50 per cent for food products, 300 per cent for textiles and
538 per cent for coal between 1914 and 1918. Shortages affecting a whole
range of consumer goods normally supplied by Europe were felt
everywhere, but urban circles and the emerging middle classes, the main
consumers of this imported modernity, characteristic of the Latin American
Belle Epoque, were more affected than most rural people. Nonetheless, the
latter also felt the effects of the war, for example in Brazil or Venezuela, in
Colombia and some countries in Central America where the crisis in the
coffee economy, brutal and long-lasting, considerably limited the demands
of the workforce in this sector and stimulated a first wave of rural exodus
which the cities could not absorb. More generally, the restrictions on trade
led to the disappearance of many jobs, the appearance of chronic
unemployment and a general lowering of real wages, despite the negative
migratory balance of the second half of the 1910s. In Buenos Aires, 16–20
per cent of the population of working age thus faced a shortage of jobs
during the war years. In São Paulo, the wages of workers in the O
Cotonofício Rodolfo Crespi textile factory fell by 50–70 per cent between
1913 and 1917. These facts taken together help to explain the great number
of strikes and social protests, as thousands of people demonstrated against
fiscal pressure in Arequipa in southern Peru in January 1915, up to the 196
work stoppages recorded in Argentina in 1918, via a general strike which
paralysed São Paulo in July 1917. Often repressed with violence, most of
these movements explicitly associated their claims with the war, and called
for peace in Europe at the same time as increased wages or better conditions
at work.19
Because it seriously endangered the economic growth of the preceding
decades, but also because it contributed to the hardening of the social
question and the renewed challenge to the established order, the Great War
thus imposed its reality on the Latin American governments despite its
distance from them and the initially proclaimed neutrality. From that point
of view, it was not only the foreign communities and intellectuals who took
a sustained interest in the war, as in the second half of 1914, but large
sectors of Latin American societies which suffered directly from the
worldwide upsets arising from the state of war.
Omnipresent in the press from 1915, the war was also visible everywhere
in daily life and popular culture, as in certain compositions in the literature
of Brazilian cordel, many stage plays in Argentina, some Germanophile
slogans painted on ceramics of the Bolivian Altiplano by an Aymara Indian,
or the production of childen’s games based on the European war.20
Although in the current state of research it is not possible to confirm the
existence of a real war culture in Latin America, there is no doubt that the
European war sent its shock waves fully and quickly to the other side of the
Atlantic Ocean.
The great turning point of 1917

Diplomatic archives, both European and Latin American, reveal the scale of
involvement of the main European belligerents in Latin America from 1914
onwards. Through the closest possible control of information in the press,
the massive distribution of propaganda in Spanish and Portuguese – through
the traditional written media or cinema newsreels – or tempting promises
about the new world which would emerge from the war, public opinion was
informed about the relevance of the struggle under way. In addition, the
goodwill had to be sought of governments which had already strongly
asserted their refusal to join the war, but whose economic collaboration
could in the end prove decisive.21 In this general setting, 1917 brought
spectacular activity in the Latin American chancelleries and marked an
essential break in a whole series of developments.
Mexico was at the heart of the tensions between Germany and the United
States which intensified after the Zimmermann Telegram was sent. On 16
January the German Foreign Minister addressed a secret telegram to his
ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, encouraging him to conclude
a German–Mexican agreement against the United States in exchange for
which Mexico would recover Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, lost after
the war of 1846–8 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Intercepted by the
British, this document was decisive in the collapse of relations between
Washington and Berlin.22 Furthermore, the unrestricted submarine warfare
decreed by Germany in January had an even greater effect on the trade
activities of most Latin American states and led some governments to
reconsider their position in relation to Berlin. Finally, the break in
diplomatic relations between the United States and the Reich in February,
then Washington’s declaration of war two months later, overturned the
situation on the scale of the entire hemisphere.
In fact, the neutralist consensus of Latin America observed in August
1914 did not survive the United States’ declaration of war on 6 April 1917.
In the same year, Panama and Cuba (April), then Brazil (October), also
declared war on Germany, followed in 1918 by Guatemala (April), Costa
Rica and Nicaragua (May) and Haiti and Honduras (July). Six other
countries broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, although without
declaring war: Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Uruguay, El
Salvador and Ecuador. At first, the positions adopted from April 1917 by
the different states in the region made it possible to construct a map of the
zones of North American influence. With the exception of Brazil, the
nations at war were all located in Central America or the Caribbean, which
in the space of a quarter of a century had become a private hunting ground
of the United States.
Since its emancipation following the war between the United States and
Spain in 1898, Cuba – which joined the war only a few hours after the
United States, on 7 April, and from where several dozen drafted soldiers
were to depart to the European battlefields – was a de facto protectorate,
because of the Platt Amendment approved by the American Congress in
March 1901 and introduced into the Cuban constitution on 22 May 1903.
Cuba suffered three US military interventions between 1906 and 1917.
Seized from Colombia in November 1903 in order to put an end to the
rivalries between Europeans and Americans over the project for the
transcontinental canal – officially inaugurated on 15 August 1914 – Panama
emerged as a political creation of the United States, pure and simple, while
Nicaragua and Haiti were occupied by the Marines from 1912 and 1915
respectively. All these elements proved that for these countries, joining the
war could not be seen as a deliberate choice of foreign policy, but rather
illustrates the political and diplomatic dependence to which US policy had
reduced them since the external projection of the manifest destiny at the end
of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s.23
The case of Brazil, on the other hand, was different. Shaken by the fall in
its exports throughout the entire war and by the torpedoing of merchant
ships like the Paraná, the Tijuc and the Macaú in April, May and October
1917 by German submarines, Brazil had objective reasons for joining the
Allied camp. Joining the war also provided Brazil with the opportunity to
assert itself as the favoured partner of Washington, in the line of the policy
led by the Baron de Rio Branco – Minister for External Relations from
1902 to 1912 and a great partisan of a lasting alliance between Rio and
Washington – and as the natural leader of Latin America. In fact, while
revolutionary Mexico could not claim to play a major role on the
international scene, and Chile held back from declaring war on Germany in
view of the substantial political influence and numerical size of the
German-origin immigrant community, the First World War was a privileged
moment for observing Rio’s strategies towards hegemony over the
subcontinent and, more generally, the relations of internal power in the
Latin American region. A telegram to the presidency of the Republic in July
1917 from the Foreign Minister, Nilo Peçanha, thus enjoined the Brazilian
government to join the war in the wake of the United States in order to meet
the urgent expectations of London, Paris and Washington, but also to avoid
being overtaken by another South American nation. Concerned to play a
substantial role on the international scene – with an eye to the end of the
war – Brazil was thus to prove itself a much more cooperative ally than its
neighbour Argentina, determined in its neutrality. It was, therefore, in the
light of these various arguments of a diplomatic nature, but also in the hope
of increasing sales of its coffee, of which stocks were continuing to
accumulate – in 1917, 6 million sacks were piled up in the Santos docks
waiting for buyers and transport – that Rio’s declaration of war on the side
of the Allies on 26 October 1917 should be interpreted. Participation in the
war effort was nonetheless very limited, as much due to the relatively late
declaration of war as to the limitations of the Brazilian army. Apart from
thirteen officer airmen who joined the Sixteenth Group of the Royal Air
Force, Brazil sent a medical mission to France which operated in the rue de
Vaugirard in Paris until February 1919. Above all, the Divisão Naval em
Operações de Guerre (DNOG) was integrated into the British naval force. It
consisted particularly of the cruisers Bahia and Rio Grande do Sul and the
anti-submarine ships Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba and Santa
Catarina, under the command of Rear-Admiral Pedro Max Fernando de
Frontin, with a force some 1,500 strong. This force left the north-east in
July 1918, and was decimated by the Spanish flu during its stopover at
Dakar in September. Finally, the naval force entered Gibraltar on 10
November in an ever-diminishing state and was unable to take any part in
the fighting. Nonetheless, Brazil thus found itself in the victors’ camp and,
as such, participated in the peace negotiations.
Of the twenty states in the region, only six – Argentina, Mexico, Chile,
Venezuela, Colombia and Paraguay – did not finally break off relations with
the Central Powers. The maintenance of this absolute neutrality did not
prevent the majority of them from gradually turning towards the Allies for
reasons above all of economic pragmatism, as in the case of Argentina. In
power until 1915, President Victorina de la Plaza had been concerned to
hold on to the European markets in all their diversity at any cost. Despite
the shooting of the Argentinian vice-consul in Dinant without apparent
motive by the Germans in the first weeks of the war, or that the Presidente
Mitre, a merchant ship flying the blue-and-white flag, but owned by a
branch of the Hamburg Sudamerikanische Dampfschiffahrtgesellschaft, was
accepted in port by the British in November 1915, the flabbiness of protests
as to their neutrality was evident. In 1916, the coming to power of the
radical Hipólito Yrigoyen – the first President of the Republic elected by
male universal suffrage after the Sáenz Peña law of 1912 – did not
challenge the choice of neutrality, but changed the situation to the extent
that Argentina now envisaged playing an active role in the diplomacy of
war. In 1917, when the United States was piling on the pressure for the
whole of Latin America to join the war, and Argentina ceased trading with
the Central Powers through the intermediary of European neutrals,
Yrigoyen envisaged a conference in Buenos Aires with the neutral states of
Latin America, thereby provoking fury in Washington. The obstinate refusal
of the President to declare war – despite urgings to the contrary from
Congress – nonetheless turned into goodwill towards Paris and London
from January 1918, when Argentina signed a commercial treaty with France
and Great Britain, with a view to the export of 2.5 million tons of wheat
before November. Henceforward in favour of supplying the Allies and
concerned primarily with the health of her external trade, the position of
Argentina could then barely be distinguished from the unarmed engagement
with the Allies of countries in Central America and the Caribbean. The
more or less tacit tipping of governmental sympathies towards the Allies –
in Buenos Aires as elsewhere – did not prevent the years 1917 and 1918
from being marked by growing anxiety over a possible United States
expansion into Latin America under cover of the war. Caught between the
diplomatic intrigues of Germany, the wish to counterbalance the
omnipresence of Washington since the beginning of the revolution and the
need to sell its oil to Great Britain, the Mexico of President Venustiano
Carranza – in power between 1915 and 1920 – chose to frame an
equidistant position between the two coalitions in being until November
1918, despite the tensions existing at the very heart of its government
between those who leaned towards the Allies in the name of the old
afrancesamiento and those who would be ready to yield to the siren voices
in Berlin, out of dislike of the United States.
Finally, even after Washington declared war, 1917 also marked a turning
point in that the war became a major issue everywhere in domestic politics.
In Argentina, the gulf between supporters and opponents of President
Yrigoyen was the object of a semantic slippage from the beginning of the
year and gradually turned into a confrontation between neutralistas and
rupturistas .24 In Brazil, a French diplomat reported in May 1918 that the
world crisis was even affecting local elections: two of the candidates for the
position of Senator for the state of São Paulo took the nation’s participation
in the war as the central argument of their campaign. In Cuba, the state of
war led the government of President Mario García Menocal to introduce a
law in August 1918 to make military service obligatory, thereby arousing
great anger in public opinion which was largely hostile to conscription.
Directly or indirectly, the war became a fundamental matrix of policy in
Latin America until the end of 1918.
World war and national identity

News of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 was greeted with relief and
enthusiasm by the press, political leaders and public opinion throughout
Latin America. On the one hand, it enabled a vision of a return to normality
in international economic life in the short or medium term, a recovery of the
growth characteristic of the Belle Epoque and, as a result, a calming of
social conflict. Alternatively, the propositions formulated by Woodrow
Wilson in January 1918, designed to establish lasting peace in the world,
had aroused great hopes for the settling of latent conflicts in the Latin
American region – such as that which set Chile and Peru and Bolivia at
odds (the latter having lost its access to the sea at the end of the 1879–84
Pacific War) and the possibility of better-integrated international relations
within the subcontinent. However, circumstance at the end of the war
dispelled the optimism that reigned in the final weeks of 1918, and
strengthened a series of identity crises which had emerged during the war.
In the first place, the turning point in the war decade and the 1920s was
not matched by a corresponding return to the world economic order of pre-
1914. All the nations of Latin America returned to growth, as the currency
was gradually restored to gold convertibility. Maritime trade was
normalised and the volume of exports and imports increased rapidly, but
they also had to settle with the new role and status of the United States as a
consequence of the Great War. In 1918, the US took 45.4 per cent of Latin
American exports, up from 29.7 per cent in 1913, and supplied 41.8 per
cent of the region’s imports, against 24.5 per cent on the eve of war.
Although this stronger commercial tendency tended to decline through the
1920s, while remaining clearly greater than in 1913, this increased
commercial presence brought a degree of financial hegemony. It rested on
direct United States investment in the region between 1914 and 1929 –
from $1,275.8 to $3,645.8 million – and the great increase in the largest
Latin American cities of banks whose mother houses were in New York.25
As observed by many intellectuals at the beginning of the 1920s, from the
Peruvian Victor Haya de la Torre (1895–1979) to the Argentinian Manuel
Ugarte (1875–1951), the war had not only failed to change the structural
dependence of Latin American economies on the outside world, but it had
additionally redistributed the cards in such a way that the United States now
possessed powerful financial and commercial weapons on top of the
military power that Washington had regularly exercised in the region since
the 1890s. From this came numerous questions about the future of Latin
American states, apparently condemned to live in the shadow of their
northern neighbour after having lived under Europe’s economic
guardianship throughout the nineteenth century.
Elsewhere, the hopes in the coming of a new international order were
swiftly dispelled in the 1920s. Present during the peace negotiations, the
representatives of the Latin American states which had declared war on
Germany were unanimous in their complaints at the lack of attention paid
by Paris, London and Washington to the positions that they were defending,
and the attempts at manipulation from which they frequently suffered.26
After the first assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva in November
1920, the experience of the states admitted was very similar, and generated
profound scepticism about the new international order. Through the voice of
its delegate, Honório Puyrredón, Argentina argued that the victory did not
benefit her, and turned its back on the Geneva organisation from December
1920, disappointed at the fate reserved for neutrals and defeated nations in
an assembly supposed to promote an ideal of universal peace. Peru and
Bolivia followed suit in 1921, failing to obtain a settlement of frontier
disputes which had occupied most of their diplomatic activity since the
1880s. Brazil in turn left the League in 1926, weary at not being able to
obtain the permanent seat on the Council which it coveted. As for
revolutionary Mexico, considered a pariah in international relations, it was
not invited to take a seat in the organisation at the time of its constitution
and was not able to participate in its work until 1931 – by which date the
hopes of perpetual peace as envisaged at the end of the war were already no
more than sweet and distant utopian dreams. 27
From the ensemble of these economic and diplomatic facts, should it be
concluded that the Great War did no more than reinforce the peripheral
status of Latin America in the concert of nations, and signify the simple
transition from the European wardship of the nineteenth century to that of
the United States from the 1920s? The answer is probably no, if the
question is considered from the angle of cultural history, and if one returns
to representations of the war among the elites of the region. In effect, the
initially dominant concept in which the European conflagration signified
confrontation between an eternal French civilisation and German barbarity
was gradually replaced by a sense of a general European failure. In an
article published by the satirical revue Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires) on
22 August 1914, the Argentinian philosopher José Ingenieros (1877–1925),
of Italian origin, interpreted the recent failed expectations of the Old World
as a ‘suicide of the barbarians’. Two years later, the Mexican anthropologist
Manuel Gamio (1883–1960) published his Forjando Patria, in which he
commented ironically on the futile combat being played out between France
and Germany – as would be repeated, in 1919, by the Brazilian writer José
Bento Monteiro Lobato (1882–1948) in his chronicles published in the
Revista do Brasil. Indeed, the examples of disenchantment about Europe
after 1916 and 1917 could be counted in their hundreds and in every Latin
America country, and more still in the 1920s and 1930s. How could a
continent considered to be the incarnation of the values of civilisation and
modernity have sacrificed 10 million of its sons in the mud of the trenches?
What had happened to the ideals of human progress and the cult of
rationality that it could have produced such mass violence? From that point,
the suicide of Europe logically rendered null and void the concept so
characteristic of the nineteenth century and the Belle Epoque – even if the
latter had already been heavily challenged before 1914 – according to
which any form of modernity could only come from the Old Continent.
‘Europe has failed. It is no longer up to her to guide the world’, asserted the
Argentinian jurist and writer Saúl Taborda (1885–1944) in 1918.28 Fed by
the wide distribution in Latin America of the ‘decadentist’ European
literature of the immediate post-war period – from Der Untergang des
Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler to La decadenza dell’Europa by
Francesco Nitti, via La crise de l’esprit by Paul Valéry – the rupture was
essential in the mimetic reflexes which had naturally been current until
then, and invited renewed reflection on the true identity of the young
nations born at the dawn of the nineteenth century out of the ruins of
Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.
In very concrete terms, disenchantment with Europe was reflected first in
a hardening of the national paradigm directly linked to representations of
the Great War. The political terrain thus acquired multiple parties and
movements which exalted each nation’s grandeur and purity, reinventing its
mythic origins and defining the new conditions of a collective destiny in a
radical alternative to Europe.29 Heralds of ‘Argentinianism’ in the 1920s
and 1930s, Leopoldo Lugones, Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957) and Carlos
Ibarguren (1877–1956) – to cite only three of many – were attentive
observers of the Great War, and each in his own way exercised himself to
redefine the contours of the ‘race’ and the ideal political regime to
guarantee its perpetuation.
The 1920s and 1930s were also marked by cultural nationalism, reflected
in the work of the Mexican mural artists who stopped reproducing the
dominant pictorial styles of Europe to paint their true national identity –
native-born and mixed race as much as white and Iberian – right through to
Brazilian modernism. The dominant figure of this aesthetic movement
launched in São Paulo in February 1922, and claiming the entirely new
creation of a national art, Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) dedicated his
earliest poems to the war, in a collection published in 1917 entitled Ha uma
gota de sangue em cada poema, and analysed the recent aesthetic
turbulence in Brazil in a work of 1929:
With the end of the war of 1914, all the arts took on a fresh force. Was
this an influence of the war? Of course. The four years of carnage were
bound to precipitate matters. New governments rose up, new scientific
thinking and new arts.30
In the long period of the building of Latin American nations, the Great War
was thus an essential stage. It was also paradoxical, in that it was precisely
the great carnage resulting from the exacerbation of European nationalisms
which became the catalyst for Latin American nationalisms. However, the
interrogation of identities emerging from the war could equally transcend
the nationalistic frame to promote other possible ways of creating a sense of
belonging. In the trajectory of a Manuel Ugarte, convinced from the first
years of the twentieth century that the future of Latin America must lie in
solidarity between its different national elements in the face of the threat of
the United States, the years 1914–18 marked both a change of direction and
led them to assert ever more strongly the need for Latin American unity.31
Conclusion
Study of the years 1914–18 in Latin America remains a historical work in
progress. Although national experiences of the war, such as those of
Argentina and Brazil, are becoming better known, many unnoticed corners
remain and await researchers to examine them. What about the mobilisation
of societies in Colombia or Bolivia, countries of which we know nothing or
nearly nothing of their relationship with the Great War? Their intellectuals
were as strongly Francophile as elsewhere in Latin America, but their
immigrants of European origin were infinitely less numerous than in the
southern ‘cone’ of the subcontinent. What about attitudes to the distant
conflagration in the eminently rural world of Central America, where the
vast majority of the population was illiterate at the beginning of the
twentieth century? How were the war years experienced in Haiti, so closely
linked to France both historically and linguistically, but occupied militarily
by the United States since 1915? What microanalysis was at work in the
reception and representations of the conflict between the national
framework – reduced to capital cities and major cities in most cases – and
the various local levels? All these questions remain unanswered, though the
stakes far exceed the simple documentary dimension. In effect, to build a
true comparative history of the years 1914–18 in Latin America would
enable us to avoid the hazards of a rise in over-hasty generalisation based
on the mistaken view that the region was culturally uniform, and naturally
homogeneous. Such an enterprise would confirm – if confirmation were
needed – that the first total war was truly a world event, in that no region of
the planet, or nearly none, was spared, independently of the geography of
military operations. Finally, to re-evaluate more precisely the place of the
Great War at the heart of the Latin American twentieth century, would
naturally invite a rethinking of the commonly accepted periodic definition
based on the rupture points of 1929 and 1959 and, notably, redefine the
1920s and 1930s which were the matrix of so many later developments.
With the coming of the centenary of the Great War, the challenge is
certainly great – but it deserves to be examined collectively.
It would be right, moreover, to question the motives for the oblivion
which hid the Great War in Latin America until very recently. Of course,
the region did not pay the blood price and did not suffer the extreme losses
and mourning which confronted the societies of the principal belligerent
countries. The men who enlisted voluntarily, and other migrants of
European origin summoned to serve under the flag of their mother country,
who have sometimes left the mark of their experience of mass violence,
were not enough, some eight or ten thousand kilometres from the slaughter-
houses of the Somme, to perpetuate the memory of the Great War. Of
course, the Second World War created a curtain in Latin America as well as
in Europe, and helped to conceal the period of 1914–18 behind a veil,
which can still be seen in the school textbooks of many countries.
Nonetheless, there are also genuine historiographic reasons for this
oblivion. In Latin America even more than elsewhere, the discipline of
history consisted in the nineteenth century of the strict framework of young
states issuing from the struggles for independence. It virtually never looked
beyond the national frontiers. Until very recently, comparative history and
the writing of national history into a global history were extremely rare,
leading to an inward-looking pattern of writing history which has made it
possible to ignore, or almost ignore, seismic shocks such as the two world
wars. From this point of view, the contemporary rediscovery of the Great
War in Latin America is equally capable of encouraging new approaches to
the history of a region far less peripheral than is often appreciated, and
routinely part of the rest of the world since the end of the fifteenth century.
1 For a general overview on the history of Latin America at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Latin America, vols. IV and V: c.1870–1930 (Cambridge
2 The works devoted to a comparative history of the Great War on the

scale of the whole of Latin American are rare: see Olivier Compagnon and
Armelle Enders, ‘L’Amérique latine et la guerre’, in Stéphane Audoin-
Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande
Guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bayard, 2004), pp. 889–901; and Olivier
Compagnon and María Inés Tato (eds.), Toward a History of the First World
War in Latin America (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, and Madrid:
Iberoamericana, 2014). Some old works supply precious information: see,
for example, Gaston Gaillard, Amérique latine et Europe occidentale:
L’Amérique latine et la guerre (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1918); and Percy
Alvin Martin, Latin America and the War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
3 These articles are collected in Leopoldo Lugones, Mi beligerancia

(Buenos Aires: Otero y García Editores, 1917). On anticipations of war in
Europe, see, in particular, Emilio Gentile, L’apocalisse della modernità: la
Grande Guerra per l’uomo nuovo (Milan: Mondadori, 2008).
4 For the ensemble of the figures given, see Victor Bulmer-Thomas, La
historia ecónomica de América Latina desde la Independencia (Mexico:
Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica, 1998), pp. 95, 189–92.
5 On this point, see Magnus Mörner, Aventureros y proletarios: los

emigrantes in Hispanoamérica (Madrid: Mapfre, 1992).
6 Hernán Otero, La guerra en la sangre: los franco-argentinos ante la

Primera Guerre Mundial (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009); and María
Inés Tato, ‘El llamado de la patria: Británicos e italianos residentes en la
Argentina frente a la Primera Guerra Mundial’, Estudios Migratorios
Latinoamericanos, 71 (July–December 2011), pp. 273–92. On the topic of
comparison with the British in Uruguay, see also Álvaro Cuenca, La
colonia británica de Montevideo y la Gran Guerra (Montevideo: Torre del
Vigia Editores, 2006).
7 Frederick C. Luebke, Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of

Cultural Conflict During World War I (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana
State University Press, 1987).
8 See the commemorative volume published by the Italian colony in Bahia:

Per la guerra, per la vittoria, 1915–1919 (São Paulo: Fratelli Frioli, n.d.).
9 On this point, see Annick Lempérière, Georges Lomné, Frédéric

Martinez and Denis Rolland (eds.), L’Amérique latine et les modèles
européens (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998); and Eduardo Devés Valdés,
‘América latina: civilización barbarie’, Revista de Filosofia
Latinoamericana, 7–8 (January–December 1987), pp. 27–52.
10 To follow the expression of Jeffrey Needle, A Tropical Belle Epoque:

Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro
11 Quoted by Gaillard, Amérique latine et Europe occidentale, p. 41.

12 See Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United
States and the Mexican Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1981); and
Esperanza Durán, Guerra y revolución: las grandes potencias y México,
1914–1918 (Colegio de México, 1985).
13 Bulmer-Thomas, La historica ecónomica de América Latina, pp. 186–7.
14 André Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
15 Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin,

TX: University of Texas Press, 1969).
16 Roger Gravil, ‘Argentina and the First World War’, Revista de História,
54 (1976), pp. 385–419.
17 For this data in full, see particularly Bulmer-Thomas, La historia

ecónomica de América Latina, pp. 185–95. See also Bill Albert and Paul
Henderson, South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War
on Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile (Cambridge University Press, 1988);
and Frank Notten, La influencia de la Primera Guerra Mundial sobre las
economías centroamericanas, 1900–1929: Un enfoque desde el comercio
exterior (San José: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central
and Universidad de Costa Rica, 2012).
18 On the black lists, see in particular Philip A. Dehne, On the Far Western
Front: Britain’s First World War in South America (Manchester University
Press, 2009).
19 For these, see Clodoaldo Bueno, Política externa da Primeira

República: os anos de apogeu – de 1902 a 1918 (São Paulo: Paz e Terra,
2003), p. 468; Juan Manuel Palacio, ‘La antesala de lo peor: la economía
argentina entre 1914 y 1930’, in Ricardo Falcón (ed.), Nueva historia
argentina, vol. VI: Democracia, conflicto social y renovación de ideas,
1916–1930 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2000), pp. 101–50; Héctor A.
Palacios, Historia del movimiento obrero argentino, 4 vols. (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Gráfica Mundo Color, 1992), vol. I, pp. 106–25; and Maria Luisa
Marcilio, ‘Industrialisation et mouvement ouvrier à São Paulo au début du
XXe siècle’, Le Mouvement social, 53 (October–December 1965), pp. 111–
29.
20 See Idelette Muzart dos Santos, ‘La représentation des conflits

internationaux dans la littérature de cordel, 1935–1956’, in Denis Rolland
(ed.), Le Brésil et le monde: pour une histoire des relations internationales
des puissances émergentes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), pp. 148–78;
Osvaldo Pelletieri (ed.), Testimonios culturales argentinos: la década del 10
(Buenos Aires: Editorial del Belgrano, 1980); Rodrigo Zarate, España y
América: proyecciones y problemas derivados de la guerra (Madrid: Casa
Editorial Calleja, 1917), p. 375; and Manuel Buil, Juego de la Guerra
Europea (Buenos Aires: s.e., 1917).
21 On the case of Mexico, see Ingrid Schulze Schneider, ‘La propaganda

alemana en México durante la Primera Guerra Mundial’, Anuario del
Departamento de Historia, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 5 (1993),
pp. 261–72.
22 On this point, see Barbara Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (New

York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965); also Katz, The Secret War in Mexico.
23 On the origins of the United States’ Latin American policy, see John J.
Johnson, A Hemisphere Apart: The Foundations of United States Policy
toward Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990).
24 On this point, see María Inés Tato, ‘La disputa por la argentinidad:
rupturistas y neutralistas durante la Primera Guerra mundial’, Temas de
Historia Argentina y Americana, 13 (July–December 2008), pp. 227–50.
25 Bulmer-Thomas, La historia ecónomica de América Latina, pp. 189,

192.
26 See, for example, Yannick Wehrli, ‘Les délégations latino-américaines
et les intérêts de la France à la Société des Nations’, Relations
internationales, 137:1 (2009), pp. 45–59.
27 On Latin America and the League, see particularly Thomas Fischer, Die
Souveränität der Schwachen: Lateinamerika und der Völk erbund 1920–
1936 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). On the particular case of Brazil, see
Eugênio Vargas Garcia, O Brasil e a Liga das Nações (1919–1925): vencer
ou não perder (Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul,
2000).
28 Saúl A. Taborda, Reflexiones sobre el ideal político de América

(Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Universitario, 2007 [1918]), p. 121.
29 As was very well shown by Patricia Funes, without necessarily taking

the full measure of the role of the Great War in this dynamic, in Salvar la
nación: intelectuales, cultura y política en los años veinte latinoamericanos
(Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2006).
30 Mário de Andrade, Pequena história da música, 8th edn (São Paulo:

Livraria Martins, 1977 [1929]), p. 194.
31 For these facts on the war as a whole as a break in identity, see Olivier
Compagnon, ‘1914–18: the death throes of civilization: the elites of Latin
America face the Great War’, in Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle (eds.),
Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill,
2004), pp. 279–95.
Part IV Rules of Engagement, Laws of War and
War Crimes
Introduction to Part IV
Annette Becker and Annie Deperchin
It is a paradox that at the very time when a concerted effort was made to
outlaw war, its explosive character grew radically and led to destruction on
an unprecedented scale. This is one of the fundamental contradictions raised
by the First World War.
The resolution of this paradox, if it exists, must be sought in the acts of
the victors who, at the end of the war, tried to apply recently formulated
norms of the laws of war, themselves in the process of development. The
Treaty of Versailles in 1919, for the first time in history, arrayed the
defeated powers in a legal judgement of their responsibility for the outbreak
of the war and for having violated the rules in international law for the
limitation of violence in wartime. No one contests that this response on the
part of the victors was inadequate, not only because the outcome of this
indictment was not what they had expected, but also because international
justice itself, and the precise concepts it needed to act with authority, were
not yet in existence.
In effect, the impact of the Great War on international law, and on the
violence the law was intended to circumscribe, must be placed in a wider
time span. Atrocities and massacres long before the war had left their mark
on public opinion, which found them more and more unacceptable in terms
of a civilised ideal, and provided a basis for sanctions against the
perpetrators. But in 1914 and after, atrocities and massacres became
violations of human rights. After 1945, such acts were subject to legal
definition of a specific kind, bearing in mind the crimes in question: crimes
against the peace, war crimes, the crime of genocide and crimes against
humanity. Ironically, the evolution of peoples’ wars as opposed to dynastic
wars made violence against the ‘other’ as a member of a minority group
within a state more vicious and widespread. This was perfectly evident
during the Great War. At the heart of conflicts between states there emerged
the possibility of the physical elimination, through different measures, of
those deemed incapable of sharing a national destiny. That possibility
became reality with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman
Turkish state in 1915. The term genocide, first used by Raphael Lemkin in
1944, must be used here, since the term arose from his long reflection in the
interwar years on the massacre, deportation and extermination of
Armenians during the Great War.
The transnational approach we have adopted to analyse different facets of
wartime violence permits us to see more clearly the legal and the political
stakes in the effort to identify war crimes. To do so enables us better to
understand the phenomenon of the violation of rights, and of German
atrocities, within the ensemble of diverse reprisals and other acts of
violence committed on every front and by every combatant force.
John Horne War has always been subject to religious and moral
prescriptions (the ‘laws and customs of war’) which seek to codify its
conduct and limit its violence. Yet the changing nature of that violence,
owing to the evolution of both technology and culture, means that such
norms are breached in every new conflict. They also result in polemic as
each side blames the other for committing excesses while excusing or
justifying its own. Afterwards, coming to terms with the new types and
thresholds of violence produced by the war entails redefining what is
considered legitimate conduct, reinforcing but also modifying the
underlying principles. Yet the polemic lingers, especially as the victors have
the greater say in who is to blame for what.
The First World War is a good example of this dialectic of norm, conflict
and revision and of the passions and polemics that accompany it. The
conduct of war had been legally codified by international agreement to an
unprecedented degree in the half-century before 1914. During the war, for
the first time, the habitual charge that the enemy committed atrocities was
translated into charges that could be tried under international law. This led
to the attempt to create tribunals for war crimes following the war.
Although a failure, this opened the way to Nuremberg and Tokyo after the
Second World War. The conventions on the conduct of war were also
revised during the interwar period. But rather than serving as a lesson, the
atrocities of the Great War turned out to be a harbinger of even greater
violence in the future.
Before the war

During the nineteenth century, several developments made the idea that
warfare was subject to moral norms more prominent than ever before.
Enlightenment thinkers such Emmerich de Vattel and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau had first insisted that ordinary soldiers and sailors, as the subjects
of the state which alone had the legal authority to make war, were not
personally liable for the violence they committed in its name, and so were
entitled to humane treatment once they ceased fighting. But the idea was
honoured more in the breach than the observance during the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars. It was only in the conflicts of the mid nineteenth
century that a growing humanitarian spirit urged that all wounded soldiers
and prisoners of war (POWs) should be treated decently without regard to
the side they had fought on. These principles were enunciated by the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), founded in 1864, and
enacted by successive Geneva Conventions. Reducing the suffering of
soldiers was the hallmark of a ‘civilised’ era.
No less significant was the distinction between soldiers and civilians.
This had also been the subject of religious and philosophical prescription
for centuries, but campaigning armies routinely mistreated civilian
populations. Nineteenth-century sensitivities to the status of women and
children reinforced the idea that civilians were innocent bystanders who
should be protected. However, French revolutionaries countered this
aspiration when, with the levée en masse in 1793, they imagined a Nation in
Arms mobilising the whole population and all its resources. It took well
over a century (with an early version in the American Civil War) before
something like this vision of total mobilisation was realised in the two
world wars, but it worked to dissolve rather than reinforce the distinction
between soldier and civilian. For once universal military service became the
norm, the male citizen or subject, mobilised as a reservist in time of war,
became the basis of the armies of millions that fought the two world wars.
Moreover, in the face of invasion or occupation, he might also act as an
irregular soldier. Guerrilla warfare had deep historical roots, but it re-
emerged as a concomitant of political activism in the Napoleonic Wars, the
American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, when French irregulars,
or francs-tireurs, resisted the Germans. Potentially, all adult men were the
enemy.
The mobilisation of human and material resources imagined by the levée
en masse went further and made the entire population, since it participated
in the war effort, a potential military target for the enemy. Naval blockade
began as a maritime siege, but both Britain and France used it during the
Napoleonic Wars as a form of economic warfare. Reconciling it with the
freedom of the seas and the right of neutral powers to trade in wartime
became an increasingly thorny issue given the growing economic
interdependence of the world in the nineteenth century. Just as the
distinction between combatants and noncombatants was strengthened in
principle, these converse developments threatened to blur it.
One further feature of the nineteenth century, the industrialisation of
military technology, also raised ethical issues. With high explosives, rapid-
firing guns and dense rail networks feeding the front, the battlefield became
ever more lethal for soldiers. Since destroying a legitimate enemy was the
essence of combat, this did not necessarily infringe the norms of war even if
casualty rates increased. However, chemical weapons broke a taboo – that
of killing men like animals or pests – and so posed the question of whether
some weapons were so inhumane that they should be banned on the
battlefield. Developments in military technology also exposed civilians to
new threats, such as more destructive bombardment of besieged cities and,
with the birth of air power, attack from the skies.
The idea of codifying the conduct of war in all the above regards in the
name of civilised values was advocated by an influential ‘peace movement’,
which had emerged in the century following the Napoleonic Wars. It was
favoured by liberals and the left, but also found support among
conservatives who wished to limit the potentially radical effects of war on
politics. While the principal aim of the movement was to prevent war, it
also sought to instil humanitarian restraints on the conduct of war. A series
of international meetings addressed both issues in the half-century before
1914, culminating in two peace conferences organised at the behest of Tsar
Nicholas II in The Hague in 1899 and 1907. As Fyodor Fyodorovich
Martens, the Tsar’s international lawyer, put it in a declaration adopted by
the 1899 conference:
It is our unanimous desire that the armies of the civilized nations be

not simply provided with the most murderous and perfected weapons,
but that they shall also be imbued with a notion of right, justice and
humanity, binding even in invaded territory and even in regard to the
enemy.1
Generals and admirals, however, were hard to convince. The German army
was especially reluctant because it saw land war in Europe as vital to the
preservation and extension of German power. It also feared democratic and
revolutionary warfare, such as the franc-tireur resistance it had met in
1870–1. Yet reconciling the right of patriotic subjects to participate in a
levée en masse, including irregular warfare, with the obligation on the
military to respect noncombatant civilians, proved one of the most
contentious issues, and not least because small countries, such as Belgium
and Switzerland, relied on citizen militias for their defence. The German
military (like many others) saw war as the preserve of professionals in
command of regular forces. If a ‘people’s war’ was the ultimate horror,
repression was justified in order to secure victory without disorder.
The British responded similarly regarding the naval warfare that was the
key to their military security. Blockade and the control of neutral trade with
enemy belligerents was as live an issue as that of a ‘people’s war’ at the
Hague Conferences and at the London Naval Conference in 1909. While
Britain made some concessions to the right of neutral states to trade with
belligerent powers in non-essential goods, it retained the authority to decide
what fell into the forbidden (contraband) category, and by virtue of its
maritime supremacy to decide the level of blockade that ultimately affected
civilian living standards in the targeted countries. British naval opinion was
no less reluctant than German military opinion to limit its conduct of war.
Before 1914, then, the ‘laws and customs’ of war had been reformulated
in the humanitarian spirit of the age, but with military and naval
establishments showing a marked dislike at having their hands tied in
wartime. Governments shared their reluctance but had to reckon with a
strong current of public opinion that favoured the humane treatment of
wounded soldiers, prisoners and civilians. International law played a crucial
role. Hague Convention IV Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on
Land (1907) (hereafter Hague Convention IV) summarised Geneva law on
the neutrality of medical personnel, the obligation to care equally for all
wounded combatants and the right of soldiers and sailors to surrender as
POWs and to be accorded the same material care as their captors. Civilian
involvement in combat proved deeply controversial, with the Germans
opposing it outright. But after strong pressure from Belgium and
Switzerland, supported by France, civilians were allowed to resist an
invading army (but not an occupation) provided they did so in an open,
orderly fashion and carried some mark of their combatant status. The
primacy of national allegiance in the age of nation-states was recognised by
the exemption of an occupied population from having to work for the
enemy’s military effort and thus against its compatriots. The same stricture
applied to POWs. New weapons were addressed in several ways. The right
to bombard towns under siege, irrespective of collateral civilian damage,
remained. But firing on undefended cities was prohibited, as was targeting
properly marked hospitals, religious buildings and monuments.
Indiscriminate bombing from the air and the use of poisoned gas were also
banned.2
All the major powers ratified the convention and incorporated it into their
military manuals. While there was no international court to enforce it, the
influence of the convention was apparent in the way that public opinion in
much of Europe and North America accepted the new norms – although the
colonies remained a different moral universe. The Balkan wars of 1912–13
reinforced the strictures against the unrestrained conduct of war. The
humane treatment of wounded soldiers and POWs was a test of civilised
conduct that both sides seemed to pass in the first war between the Balkan
League and Ottoman Turkey. However, the ethnic bitterness of the brief
second war between Bulgaria and its former allies in 1913 saw brutality
towards enemy soldiers and ‘atrocities’ against civilians as villages were
destroyed and their inhabitants massacred. European opinion was shocked.
In June 1914, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded
that in the second conflict: ‘National jealousy and bitterness, greed for
territorial expansion, and mutual distrust were sufficient to initiate and push
forward the most uncalled for and brutal war of modern times.’3 But it also
assumed that public opinion and rule of law would make such conduct less
likely in the ‘civilized world’.4
In 1915, Freud (with two sons and a son-in-law at the front) wrote that
the European war that had broken out the previous year had brought
‘disillusionment’:
It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law which in

peace-time the states had bound themselves to observe; ignores the
prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service [and] the
distinction between the civil and military sections of the population . . .
The civilized nations know and understand one another so little that
one can turn against the other with hate and loathing. Indeed, one of
the great civilized nations is so universally unpopular that the attempt
can actually be made to exclude it from the civilized community as
‘barbaric’.5
Freud expressed the widespread shock at the indiscriminate violence and

disregard for the ‘laws of war’ generated by the First World War, which
called into question Europe’s very claim to stand for ‘civilized’ values. He
also noted that each side blamed the other, rather than war as such, for this
state of affairs, with Germany being especially vilified. The norms of
warfare in the pre-war period served to judge the escalating violence of the
war but also to blame the enemy for the worst transgressions, which
occurred in various contexts – war on land, invasions and occupations, the
home front, war at sea and war in the air.
War on land
Land warfare immediately revealed that the protected status of the
legitimate combatant – the soldier or sailor who was wounded or taken
prisoner – was far from secure. The French accused the Germans of using
the Red Cross flag as a ruse in battle and of executing an ‘immense
number’ of wounded soldiers, perhaps due to the punishing advance
required by the Schlieffen/Moltke Plan.6 In one case, it is clear that the
commander of the German 58th Brigade (Sixth Army), Major General
Stenger, instructed his men not to take prisoners in Lorraine in late August
1914.7 However, while the killing of wounded soldiers and surrendering
prisoners occurred, it is hard to say on what scale. It was certainly not
German policy.
Once the fronts had stabilised, the logistics of dealing with the enemy
wounded and prisoners became easier, though big offensives and the more
mobile warfare of the Eastern Front in 1915 opened the way for renewed
violation of Geneva and Hague law in both regards. Yet accusations that the
enemy flouted the laws of war and fought in a ‘barbaric’ manner favoured
reciprocal transgressions. Solomon Ansky, the Russian Jewish war
correspondent, noted that progressive-minded Russian officers who had
begun the war observing their own army’s commitment to the Hague
Convention on land warfare reacted to supposed German ‘atrocities’ against
soldiers and civilians alike by ‘arguing that the Russians had to respond to
the German cruelties with even greater ones – like shooting explosive
bullets and taking no prisoners. And soon these convictions evolved into an
overall theory: war is war, and if you want to win, you have to be merciless
. . . [ and] exterminate the enemy.’8 In Britain, France and Germany, too,
tales of the maltreatment of wounded soldiers and POWs provoked anger
over enemy barbarity.
While the laws of war concerning prisoners and the wounded remained
uncontested in principle (unlike in the Second World War, when they did
not apply to the Nazi–Soviet or Japanese campaigns), their application
amidst claim and counter-claim of illegal treatment fluctuated for several
reasons. The first was reprisal. Among many examples, the Germans
considered the French use of some POW labour in its North African
colonies an infringement of international law, and retaliated by subjecting
selected French POWs to a harsher work regime. This the French
denounced in turn.9 The second factor was economic and military need.
Labour shortages afflicted both sides and the sheer number of POWs made
them a valuable resource. While POW labour was used on work not directly
connected to the war, it was also employed by both sides behind the lines,
especially on the Western Front, and thus against the prisoners’ compatriots,
at risk to their own lives and in defiance of Geneva and Hague law.
Prisoners of the Central Powers worked in harsh conditions in Russia,
though neglect was as common as repressive discipline. Finally,
deteriorating conditions in Russia and within the Central Powers from 1916
meant that POWs, who were low priority, faced neglect, which stood in
growing contrast to their more equitable material treatment in Britain and
France. In all these cases, POWs were symbols of enemy inhumanity. In
1915, for example, the failure of the German authorities to treat a serious
outbreak of typhus in POW camps resulted in British and French protests
against what were seen as deliberate ‘atrocities’, and in charges of war
crimes once the war was over.
Yet the logic of reprisal may also have worked to limit brutality. In the
German case, the mortality rate for prisoners of war was 3 per cent for the
British and French, 5 per cent for Russians but nearly 30 per cent for
Romanians. National stereotyping may have contributed to this differential
outcome.10 But it was also due to the threat of reciprocity. This was low in
the case of Romania (defeated in autumn 1916) and of Russia (most of
whose prisoners were Austro-Hungarian), but high with regard to Britain
and France. Retaliation may thus have brought more restraint in the
treatment of POWs than the principled application of international law or
inspections by the ICRC, though these continued to embody the norms of
civilised treatment.
One particular asymmetry in combatant status between the two sides
arose from the contested use of non-European soldiers. The British and
French both deployed colonial troops in Europe with the French bringing
half a million soldiers to the Western Front, mainly from North and West
Africa. The Russians, in addition to the Cossacks, recruited men from
Central Asia. In a quarrel that went back to 1870, when Bismarck and
Moltke the Elder had condemned the French use of North African soldiers,
the Germans objected to colonial troops fighting in Europe as barbaric.
They alleged in particular that French West African soldiers mutilated
Germans with knives and machetes and took body parts as trophies. While
there was nothing in Geneva or Hague law to cover it, German military and
political doctrine declared the use of such soldiers to be a prime example of
an Allied atrocity. 11
Yet for all the mistreatment of protected combatants, the overwhelming
violence of land warfare in 1914–18 occurred within the norms of Hague
law. The dominant mode of combat in Europe (with the partial exception of
the Eastern Front in 1914–15) was improvised siege warfare in open
country. The technical advances used to try and break the siege (artillery,
flamethrowers, aircraft and eventually tanks) caused most of the military
deaths but did not break international law. The exception was poisonous
gas, first developed and used successfully by the Germans in the Ypres
salient on 22 April 1915, but countered by increasingly effective gas masks
and copied by the Allies from autumn 1915. The German military claimed
on a technicality that it had not breached Hague Convention IV, since this
forbade the ‘diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’ by ‘projectiles’,
whereas the Germans at first used canisters. But the effect was the same,
and both then and in August 1917, when the Germans deployed the more
deadly mustard gas, the Allies condemned them for violating the laws of
war, but invoked self-defence and legitimate reprisal to use the same
measure. After the war they made no attempt to try the Germans for
violating the Hague Convention by initiating the use of gas (Fritz Haber, its
German inventor, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918). Yet
although gas caused fewer than 3 per cent of military deaths in the war, its
ability to kill or incapacitate en masse, along with each side’s silence about
its own use of the weapon, meant that public opinion saw it as a major
transgression of how war should be conducted. It was banned anew by
international law in 1925. 12
Invasions and occupations

We have seen that the noncombatant civilian was just as important as the
wounded or captured soldier or sailor in contemporary understanding of the
‘laws of war’. In reality, the highly organised and largely static fronts that
resulted from trench warfare meant there was less scope for soldiers and
civilians to encounter each other in combat situations than was the case
during the Second World War, with its mobile fronts, military resistance and
guerrilla activity. It is thus all the more striking that the issue should have
become so prominent in the contemporary imagination during the Great
War as a primary signifier of enemy ‘atrociousness’.
The immediate reason for this was the invasions with which the war
began and which, though untypical of the conflict, posed the issue of
civilian involvement in combat just as the moral agenda and predominant
imagery of the war were being created. This initial phase supplied about a
third of the war crimes with which the Allies charged enemy subjects once
the conflict was over.
The most notorious case was that of the German armies invading
Belgium and France in August–October 1914. Convinced that they faced a
widespread ‘people’s war’ led by the priests and civic leaders, they
responded by attacking the inhabitants in many localities, killing some
6,500, mainly in Belgium and the French department of the Meurthe-et-
Moselle. They also raped and pillaged, and destroyed over 20,000
buildings, mainly by arson, striking fear into the population. In a third of
the 129 major incidents in which ten or more civilians perished, the
Germans forced the locals to act as human shields when they advanced. In
the worst cases (such as at Andenne, Tamines and Dinant in Belgium),
towns and villages were laid waste and civilians were executed
collectively.13
In fact, as some German sceptics and astute minds in the Allied countries
soon came to realise, there was no ‘people’s war’. But the bulk of German
soldiers believed the contrary in a collective delusion that began with the
first incursion into Belgium and swiftly spread back to Germany itself,
convincing even the Kaiser and the Supreme Command of its reality.
Highly nervous German soldiers interpreted every unidentified shot and
strange event as the work of Belgian and French francs-tireurs, in what the
leading Belgian sociologist, Fernand van Langenhove, writing for the
Belgian government-in-exile in 1916, came to understand was a myth-
cycle.14 The Germans had summoned up their own worst fears derived from
the Franco-Prussian War, and since their military doctrine prescribed harsh
reprisals against a spontaneous levée en masse, these became a matter of
military orders and even preventive violence. Where the German army and
government angrily accused the Belgians and French of waging the worst
kind of illegitimate warfare, the latter rightly pointed out that even had there
been resistance of the kind alleged by the Germans, much of this would
have been legal under Hague Convention IV. They accused the Germans in
turn of conducting war by terror in contravention of the laws of war and
elementary morality. Few saw like van Langenhove that while German
actions amounted to war crimes, they had been based on a genuine belief in
francs-tireurs.
Along with the question of who started the war, the ‘German atrocities’
of 1914 did more than any other issue to articulate the conflict’s
significance. The Allied countries pilloried German military conduct in
what has traditionally been seen as a campaign of manipulative
‘propaganda’. Recent research has shown this to be more complex. The
Belgian, British and French governments published multiple reports based
on the interrogation of their own soldiers, civilian refugees and German
prisoners, which conveyed much of the truth of what had happened. But
they attributed the most stereotypical motives to the enemy. Myths
demonising German behaviour – such as the Belgian babies whose hands
had been sawn off by German bayonets – flourished in the press and
popular imagery. But they often originated with terrified civilian refugees,
and government censorship sought to restrain rather than encourage them.
Under pressure from disapproval in neutral states, the German government
tried to counteract the negative propaganda by conducting its own enquiry.
But faced with growing doubts about civilian resistance in 1914, it doctored
its official report so as to sustain the original charge.15 The bitterly
contested truth of the German atrocities shows how the laws and norms of
war were used both as a measure of real actions and also as a means of
condemning the enemy in a conflict that abolished moral neutrality.
Charges of guerrilla resistance marked other invasions, too. As the
Russians entered East Prussia in 1914, German refugees related tales of
brutal Cossacks and collective reprisals. In fact, two of the worst cases for
which clear documentation exists consisted of the reverse – German
military depredations against Polish civilians in the towns of Kalisz and
Czestochowa, just over the border in Russian Poland.16 While brutality by
Russian troops in East Prussia did occur and was sometimes prompted by
accusations of civilian resistance, it was spasmodic and not driven by a
Russian delusion of a German ‘people’s war’. Even the Prussian Interior
Ministry concluded that panicky German civilians had exaggerated the
brutality.17 The Russian invasion of Austrian Galicia and Bukovina over the
following winter and spring prompted widespread violence against the
inhabitants, notably Jews, in a series of pogroms. Despite Austrian protests,
the total number of civilians allegedly killed by Russian forces amounted to
only sixty-nine, though in the absence of detailed research the figures,
which may have been higher, must be treated cautiously.18
Altogether more systematic was the violent treatment of the population
by the Austro-Hungarian army during its invasions of Serbia. Precisely
because it aimed to punish the Serbs collectively for the ‘terrorist’
assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and to destroy Serbia as a
nation-state, the Austro-Hungarian military was predisposed to see the
entire population as made up of terrorists and bandits who were liable to
rise up in a treacherous levée en masse. Considering itself the pillar of law
and civilisation in a barbaric region, the High Command was initially
unwilling to engage in mass punishment and instructed the army to observe
Hague Convention IV even though Serbia was not a signatory. But it
insisted that atrocities, such as the poisoning and mutilation of Habsburg
soldiers, would be met with the ‘harshest reprisals’. Akin to the German
army’s conviction that it faced a ‘people’s war’ in the West, the Austro-
Hungarian forces imagined they faced unrestrained warfare even on the part
of Serb regular soldiers. While Balkan traditions of guerrilla warfare
provided some substance for this belief (where in Belgium and France there
was none), the Austro-Hungarian response was disproportionate, with
hostage taking, arson and summary executions, including of women and
children.
This prompted the Serb government in turn to accuse Austria-Hungary of
treating its civilians with brutality. The Swiss lawyer and Serb sympathiser,
R. A. Reiss, who investigated the matter on its behalf, calculated that over
3,000 Serbs had perished in the two invasions of 1914 (which ended in
Austro-Hungarian defeat) and in the final, successful invasion of late 1915.
However, in the absence of new research, this, too, remains an estimate.19
The Bulgarian occupation of the southern portion of the country (which had
been part of Ottoman Macedonia until 1913) renewed the tit-for-tat ethnic
violence begun in the Second Balkan War as the Bulgarian army tried to
extirpate Serb and Greek influence. Atrocities remained a burning issue for
the Serb government-in-exile, and it charged both Austria-Hungary and
Bulgaria with war crimes in 1919.
The common factor in all these cases (aside from the inter-ethnic violence
of Bulgarians and Serbs) was the overturning of the distinction between
soldiers and civilians in situations of combat. In reality, civilian resistance
was marginal in 1914–15, with the partial exception of Serbia, because vast
regular armies continued to seek a conventional outcome. Even in the Serb
case, some of the misunderstanding arose from reservists who were short of
uniforms in an army exhausted by the Balkan wars, and who thus appeared
to be ‘bandits.’ More important than the reality, however, was the fantasy of
a ‘people’s war’ which was rampant in the German and Austro-Hungarian
armies, and possibly present in the Russian army during the invasion of
East Prussia. This expressed the deep fear of the military elite and ordinary
soldiers that future warfare might degenerate into terror and revolution. It
led to real violence against civilians by way of reprisal or pre-emption.
Although occupations had received less attention than invasions before
1914, owing to the widespread expectation of a short war, it was evident
that they too caused tensions between soldier and civilian, as the French
recalled only too bitterly from 1870–3. The legal position remained grey.
Hague Convention IV had tried to provide civilians with some protection. It
restricted the occupying force’s right of military requisition and financial
imposition, forbade the use of civilian labour for the war effort and enjoined
respect for the culture and religion of the occupied. In reality, the military
and administrative law of the occupier prevailed.
Unexpectedly, the military stalemate in 1914–15 brought a sizeable part
of Europe under the control of the Central Powers for an indefinite period.
Germany held most of Belgium and northern France, Russian Poland, a
zone covering eastern Poland and parts of modern-day Belorussia and
Lithuania (known as Ober Ost) and, from late 1916, two-thirds of Romania.
In 1918 Germany’s military writ also ran in the Ukraine and the Baltic
region. Austria-Hungary held Serbia and from late 1917 north-eastern Italy.
Although not on the scale of the Second World War, ‘occupied Europe’ was
a reality and it offered fertile terrain for charges of atrocity and war crimes.
How international law applied to the occupations is taken up in Chapter 23
below. Suffice it to say here that for the first two years the Germans
administered their territories with some reference to Hague law. But by
1916 the ‘totalising logic’ of the war led to more brutal forms of
occupation, and galvanised Allied outrage at German ‘barbarity’ in several
regards.
From the start, the Germans used the occupied regions for their war
effort, especially in the zones behind the front (Etappengebiet), which were
subject to the operational needs of the army, as was the case in northern
France, part of Belgium and Ober Ost. Initially, the military tried persuasion
to find the necessary labour. But by 1916 the clear material advantage of the
Allies forced the Germans to gear up their economic effort. Where the
British and French could draw on their empires, bringing hundreds of
thousands of colonial and Chinese workers to France, the Germans made
more systematic use of labour across the occupied regions, conscripting
workers for agriculture, industry and, in the Etappengebiet, war work.
The principle of coercion did not necessarily run counter to Hague
Convention IV, especially since all wartime states established varying
degrees of control over ‘manpower’ (the term dated from 1915). But
forcing labour to work directly for the occupier’s war effort did infringe the
rights of the occupied, and civilians in Belgium and France, at least, were
acutely aware of this.20 Two developments provoked particular outrage,
however, both in the occupied regions and internationally. The first was the
deportation of large numbers of men to work as militarised labour on a
variety of tasks both in the Etappengebiet and elsewhere in the occupied
regions. Conditions were severe, leading to high mortality. But sending
60,000 workers from Belgium, and perhaps twice that number from the
Government General of Poland and from Ober Ost, to labour in Germany
was another step again. In the Belgian case, international protest ended this
experiment in ‘slavery’ by early 1917 (though men were still sent to work
behind the lines in France), but it continued for the Poles, who had no
national government to protest on their behalf.21
The second ‘outrage’ was the extension of coercion to women in the
zones the German army controlled directly, something that no state during
the First World War (including Germany) dared impose on its home
population. While this happened incrementally in both Ober Ost and
northern France, the Germans drew dramatic attention to their practice
when, in April 1916, troops descended on the major industrial conurbation
of Lille and rounded up unemployed women and girls at gun-point,
transporting them to the countryside for agricultural labour. While the
measure marked a new threshold of brutality, the Germans claimed they
were simply trying to make the best use of a poorly employed workforce.
But it provoked uproar in France (where the government usually remained
reticent about conditions in the occupied territories) and resulted in protests
to Germany because of the gender of those arrested. Women incarnated the
civilian as victim in war. Especially in France, where universal military
service meant that adult men had been mobilised before the invasion, the
more than 2 million people left in the occupied region were
disproportionately female, which is why tales of rape during the invasion
assumed a symbolic power beyond their incidence. The violation of the
nation was equated to violation of women. Enemy control over women’s
bodies as well as the conquered territories remained a powerful subtext of
the occupation, which the events of Lille dramatised. French outrage was
still palpable when Lille was liberated in 1918.22
Resistance to enemy occupation was diverse and extensive (it was
estimated after the war that 1,135 members of Belgian escape and
intelligence networks were executed or died in captivity).23 But it had no
legal protection under Hague law, so that its repression was not a war crime
even if sympathisers considered it an outrage. In one notorious case, the
Germans were entitled to punish the British nurse Edith Cavell in 1915 for
having run an escape network for Allied soldiers in Brussels, but what
shocked contemporaries was the imposition of the death penalty on a
woman. Heroism and victimhood combined to create a martyr.
Internment was different. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians took
civilians from the occupied territories to camps in Germany and Austria on
a large scale (including women and children) both in response to the
‘people’s war’ during the invasions and also as a measure of security or
punishment during the occupation. The Russians did likewise. Seventy
thousand Serbs were interned by the end of 1916, 100,000 French and
Belgians for the whole war, and as many Germans in Russia.24 The civilian
‘concentration camp’ had become a veritable institution and, as in the case
of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the logic was often that of reprisal as
well as repression. The procedure as such was not illegal any more than was
the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ (i.e., those who found themselves on
enemy soil when war broke out). But the conditions in which it was carried
out might well be, since the occupying power was responsible for the well-
being of the occupied population. Hence civilian internees came within the
ambit of the ICRC and other humanitarian agents (neutral states, the
Vatican). Internment struck contemporaries as a new phenomenon, and the
frequently harsh conditions of detention led to charges of maltreatment by
the detainees’ own governments.
Forced labour by both sexes, deportation and internment on a substantial
scale, along with the complete subjection of the economy to the ‘military
necessity’ of the occupier, seemed to Allied opinion a return to the barbarity
associated with the Thirty Years’ War, or even the fall of the Roman
Empire. In March 1917 it culminated in Operation Alberich, the planned
retreat by four German armies on a sector of the Western Front fifty miles
long and twenty-five miles deep to the fortified Siegfried Line. This had
been built using 26,000 POWs and 9,000 French and Belgian forced
labourers. The Germans forcibly evacuated 160,000 civilians and totally
destroyed buildings and infrastructure so that, according to the orders of the
First Army, ‘the enemy will arrive to find a desert’.25 The misgivings of
many in the German military, including Crown Prince Rupprecht who
commanded the operation, showed the sense of transgression of the
accepted conduct of war, as did the anger of the French. Ordinary soldiers
reoccupying the abandoned zone were appalled at the destruction, including
the apparently wilful cutting-down of fruit trees, while politicians declared
their intention to exact reparation for a major violation of the ‘laws of war’.
Overall, the logic of the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation regimes
had, by the second half of the war, abolished the protected status of civilians
and hinted at what Michael Geyer has called the ‘elements of a totalitarian
syndrome’.26
The home front

The logic of national identity that presided over the cultural and political
mobilisation for the war, and which resulted in the internment of ‘enemy
aliens’, also risked exposing home minorities to harsh treatment. The
vulnerability of religious and national minorities had loomed large in
humanitarian concern before the war, especially regarding the Ottoman and
Russian Empires. The massacres of Christian Bulgarians and Armenians
with the connivance of the regime had provided one of the main excuses for
the Great Powers to intervene in Ottoman Turkey in order to protect
minorities. Pogroms against Jews in the Pale of Russia in the early
twentieth century provoked international condemnation. Yet while such
cases contributed to the language of ‘atrocity’, they had not usually been
associated with war. Hague law said nothing about how a belligerent state
should treat its own people.
As the Ottoman Empire entered the war in late 1914 and suffered a series
of military setbacks in spring 1915, the Young Turks who ran the war effort
triggered the measures that led to the destruction of the Armenians,
including pillage, murder and expulsion to the desert. By 1916, about a
million of the 1.8 million Armenians had perished. Made vulnerable by
Russia’s mobilisation of its own Armenians, the Ottoman Armenians (along
with other minorities) became the ‘enemy within’ which the regime purged
in pursuit of a wartime community defined in terms of Turkish ethnicity and
Islam.
Observers in Germany, the Allied states and the USA knew that the
violence differed in kind and scale from pre-war massacres. As early as 24
May 1915, Britain, France and Russia accused the Ottoman government of
committing a ‘crime against humanity’. This was the first time that the
formulation had been used as an accusation between states, and though it
had no legal status (that would only come with the Second World War) it
tried to convey the collective nature of the crime in which an entire ethnic
or religious group was indiscriminately targeted because of its identity.
Reasonably accurate casualty figures of 800,000 were retailed in the press,
and two respected British academics, James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee,
drew up a detailed report for the Foreign Office in 1916 stating that ‘a
gigantic crime [had] . . . devastated the Near East in 1915’. The French
Minister of Education was in no doubt that the Young Turks had attempted
to ‘exterminate the Armenian race’.27
Yet despite being a quantitative leap in wartime violence towards
civilians, the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians was subject to what
Donald Bloxham has dubbed ‘the great game of genocide’ (the term
genocide, publicly formulated only in 1944, has been retrospectively
applied to the episode by historians and governments).28 Germany remained
silent for fear of embarrassing its Turkish ally, while the Allies subordinated
their condemnation of Ottoman Turkey to that reserved for Germany.
French and British politicians and intellectuals gave the issue less attention
than more minor transgressions by the main enemy, and also argued without
evidence that Germany was behind the destruction of the Armenians. Even
the USA, which was still neutral when the genocide occurred and well
informed of its true nature by Henry Morgenthau, its ambassador in
Constantinople, combined moral denunciation with political inertia. The
inertia was reinforced when it joined the war, since the fate of Ottoman
Turkey became a vital diplomatic issue, not to be jeopardised by precipitate
action .
A similar need to fit moral humanitarianism to the exigencies of wartime
is apparent in Allied reaction to the maltreatment of civilians by the Russian
army during its Great Retreat from Galicia and Bukovina in 1915, at the
same moment as the genocide in Turkey. The Russian High Command
forcibly deported some 3 million inhabitants, both from the region it had
occupied and also from the tsarist territories it had to abandon, targeting
ethnic minorities, especially Jews, many of whom were Russian subjects,
and raising fears of a resurgence of pre-war anti-Semitism. Liberal opinion
in Russia and the need to resolve the chaos caused by the refugees
prevented this turning into reality. Prompted by Jewish lobby groups, the
British government applied discreet pressure behind the scenes. But there
was no question of publicly denouncing ‘Allied atrocities’. 29
War at sea and in the air

Naval warfare during the First World War turned out to be as much of a
surprise as land warfare. The absence of a modern Trafalgar to settle the
issue between the costly capital ships that had driven the pre-war naval
arms race, echoed the failure of land armies to achieve a modern-day
Waterloo. Fields of high-explosive mines parcelled out the sea into a
maritime no-man’s-land, controlling access to the enemy’s coast. While not
a new weapon, the submarine became an effective long-range predator and
an alternative instrument of attack to battleships, especially on merchant
shipping. Yet it was less these developments in themselves than their
application to the old issue of naval blockade that caused controversy. For
the deadlock of the main battle fleets, none of which could risk defeat by
taking on its opponent, turned blockade into the main form of naval
warfare, especially in an extended war between modern states that relied on
global commerce.
Blockade was a legitimate weapon of war but two issues had dominated
the pre-war debate on it: the permissible level of confiscation of enemy
trade and the right of neutral powers to conduct that trade. The British, as
noted, were reluctant to admit any restraint on their freedom to blockade,
although the potential diplomatic fallout from offending neutral countries
led to caution. The Admiralty itself opted initially to maintain the
distinction between war goods and non-war goods, the former being
forbidden as contraband, and to let neutral ships carry non-war goods to
enemy ports. Yet from the start the Royal Navy set up a broad blockade of
the western approaches to Germany, whose legal status, by comparison with
the traditional ‘close blockade’, was unclear. Abundantly clear, however,
was its potential to become the maritime siege of an entire enemy nation.
Matters came to a head rapidly. The German government condemned the
British goal as an atrocity. ‘England treats us as a besieged fortress’,
protested Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on 4 February 1915. ‘They want
to starve a people 70 million strong. Is it possible to imagine a more
barbaric way of waging war?’30 By way of reprisal, Germany declared the
waters around Britain and Ireland open to unrestricted submarine warfare,
meaning that vessels carrying civilians could be sunk without warning. The
British immediately declared such behaviour a violation of the rights of
civilians under the laws of war, and riposted with the Reprisals Order,
which imposed a total ban on all goods travelling to and from Germany.
They also pressured neutral countries to observe the blockade. The British
case seemed to be dramatically vindicated by the torpedoing of the
Lusitania off the coast of Ireland on 6 May 1915, with the loss of 1,198
passengers, including a number of American citizens. Diplomatic prudence
forced Germany to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare until the
gathering pressure of Allied material superiority led the military leadership
to renew it from February 1917. Yet submarines found it hard to conduct
‘restricted’ warfare in the intervening period, since they could not take on
board the crews of the shipping they sank and they put themselves at risk
(especially from armed merchant ships) if they surfaced to warn of an
impending attack.
By a reciprocal but opposed logic both sides broke new ground in
targeting civilians. But each did so in ways that had important implications
for the charge of enemy ‘atrociousness’ and its impact on neutral opinion.
Whether or not the Allied blockades of Germany or of Austria-Hungary and
Turkey in the Mediterranean contributed largely or solely to the hunger that
all those societies were experiencing by the end of the war, is discussed
elsewhere in this history. Germany claimed that this was the case and also
justified the increasingly harsh treatment of occupied Europe by the same
argument (‘The attitude of England makes the feeding of the population
more and more difficult’, proclaimed the German commander to the
population of Lille during the round-ups in 1916).31 In 1923 a Reichstag
commission of enquiry concluded that the blockade had caused the death of
some 750,000 vulnerable German civilians, to which submarine warfare
was a legitimate response. The figures are inflated and the causes of
German malnutrition involved much else, such as food distribution
policies.32 But the British government and Admiralty undoubtedly aimed to
starve the societies of the Central Powers of everything they could in order
to force their surrender, and they were able to do so in a way that went far
beyond the impact of the Napoleonic blockade a century earlier.
Yet precisely because the method was slow and incremental and its result
conditioned by other factors, the ‘hunger blockade’ grabbed the headlines
far less effectively than the sinking of merchantmen and passenger ships
with the direct and indiscriminate loss of civilian lives. As Woodrow
Wilson, significantly failing to grasp the real point of the British blockade,
remarked:
It is interesting and significant how often the German Foreign Office

goes over the same ground in different words and always misses the
essential point involved, that England’s violation of neutral rights is
different from Germany’s violation of the rights of humanity.33
Allied outrage at German behaviour in this regard was a potent litany of

sunken vessels (Lusitania, Sussex, Leinster . . .) which all lost passengers
and crews. Allegations of naval war crimes figured in the charges brought
against Germany after the war. 34
Aerial warfare raised a different set of issues, which it shared with long-
range artillery bombardment, but the common thread with naval warfare
was how war eroded the protected status of civilians. As we saw, Hague
Convention IV did not ban the shelling of cities under siege (though it
exempted certain categories of clearly marked building), but focused
instead on outlawing the destruction of ‘open’, or undefended, cities. In
effect, it distinguished between combatant and noncombatant centres, and
accepted the traditional view that civilians in the former might be hit by
enemy fire. Although a few cities underwent conventional siege during the
war ( Przemyśl in Austrian Galicia in 1914–15, Kut-al-Amara in
Mesopotamia in 1916), the stabilisation of the fighting fronts in effect
extended siege warfare to entire societies, as the Allies made clear with the
naval blockade. Logically, the home front as a whole became a potential
target. Yet indiscriminate bombardment of ‘innocent’ civilians remained a
powerful taboo whether conducted by warships, long-range guns or aircraft.
The issue surfaced from the very start. In late 1914, German warships
shelled undefended seaside towns on the east coast of England while the
German army also bombarded towns just behind the Western Front (such as
Nancy), though whether the target in this case was military or civilian
remained ambiguous. Later in the war, the heavy German gun ‘Big Bertha’
shelled Paris randomly, the worst incident occurring when it struck the
church of Saint-Gervais on 29 March 1918 during a Good Friday service,
killing seventy-five people, many of them women and children. The British
and French considered such attacks (which they were not in a position to
reciprocate) to be illegitimate: ‘such a crime committed in such conditions
and on such a day . . . arouses condemnation in consciences everywhere’,
declared the Archbishop of Paris in relation to Saint-Gervais.35 Yet it was
long-range bombing by aircraft that dramatised the issue and exposed most
clearly the choices involved.
From the outset both sides bombed military installations well behind the
Western Front, and by spring 1915 French and British aircraft attacked war
industries in the Ruhr and the major cities of western Germany. Civilians
were killed but this was inadvertent. Simultaneously, however, the German
military used their technical lead in airships, which initially had a greater
range than airplanes, to target London and south-eastern England in raids
whose principal aim was to terrify civilians and disrupt the domestic war
effort. Retaliation was rapid, and in June 1915 French aircraft killed thirty
people and wounded sixty-eight when they attacked Karlsruhe , the
peaceful capital of Baden . In a spiral of reprisal, German Zeppelins and
later Gotha bombers continued to attack Paris, London and other civilian
centres, while French and British aircraft mounted retaliatory raids on major
German cities as far afield as Munich. Similar developments took place on
the Austro-Italian front.
Technical limitations restricted the damage – some 740 people died and
1,900 were injured in Allied bombing raids on Germany.36 But the logic
was clear. In addition to striking industrial targets that could legitimately be
considered part of the enemy’s economic effort, air power was deployed
against civilians as such. Two German aviators forced down over London in
1917 explained that while they could clearly identify targets such as the
Admiralty and the War Office, their objective was also to demoralise
ordinary Londoners, especially in the East End, so that it mattered little if
their bombs went astray.37 The British War Cabinet, for its part, believed
that indiscriminate bombing would help ‘depress the morale of the German
people’.38 There was little evidence to support this assumption any more
than there would be during the Second World War. On the contrary,
civilians discovered a new form of siege experience in blacked-out towns
and cities, finding their way to underground shelters and listening to enemy
aircraft, bombs and anti-aircraft fire overhead until the ‘all clear’ sounded.
They became communities under fire. If this paled by comparison with the
experience of mass aerial bombing twenty-five years later, it struck the
contemporary imagination forcibly as evidence that in this regard at least
the distinction between combatant and noncombatant had been abolished.
After the war

After the war came the reckoning. Reflecting the hold of international law
on definitions of ‘atrociousness’, the Allies were determined to charge the
enemy legally for its transgressions. Reparations for physical and financial
damage were based on the principle of compensation, and figured
prominently. Just as significant in 1919–21, however, was the idea of
criminal responsibility for the way in which the war had been prosecuted, as
well as for causing it in the first place, which meant upholding the legal and
moral norms that had been flouted. This was the goal pursued by the Allies
in Articles 227–30 of the Treaty of Versailles, which provided for the
extradition from Germany of all those accused of ‘violating the laws and
customs of war’, and for an international tribunal if they were sought by
more than one power.
Belgium, Britain and France, plus four other powers, eventually
presented an extradition list relating to 1,059 war crimes. The different
categories indicate the Allied sense of enemy ‘atrociousness’ at the war’s
end. Thirty-eight per cent of the accusations (405) concerned the invasion
of Belgium and France in 1914, mainly related to civilians. Forty-five per
cent (477) involved crimes of occupation – cruelty to civilians, deportation,
forced labour and destruction during the retreats of 1917 and 1918. The
other 17 per cent (177) dealt with combat, including naval crimes and
mistreatment of POWs. In all, the erosion of the distinction between
combatants and noncombatants was far more important than the threat to
POWs and wounded soldiers, which accounted for 14 per cent of the total
(151), and the ‘German atrocities’ of 1914 remained emblematic of enemy
barbarity.39
The German military bitterly resented what they perceived to be a slur on
their honour. Resisting extradition, they extracted a compromise by which a
small number of high-profile Allied charges would be brought by German
prosecutors before the German Supreme Court in Leipzig. When held in a
blaze of publicity in 1921, this first attempt at quasi-international war
crimes proceedings turned into a display of nationalist support for the
German officer corps. The most serious cases were dismissed and the
Belgian and French delegations left in disgust. The proceedings suffered
from the unavoidable animosities of the aftermath of war.
The Allies were genuinely outraged at what they continued to see as
barbaric behaviour stemming from German militarism. This viewpoint was
understandable insofar as the political role and military culture of the
German army predisposed it to use war to resolve the difficulties of the
Second Reich and to brook no obstacles in doing so. In a conflict that they
had been instrumental in unleashing, the German military more than any
other confronted some of the key issues that transformed the nature of war.
In the process they discarded the norms of war embodied in Hague law by
crushing what in fact was an imaginary civilian uprising in 1914, extracting
with increasing harshness the labour and economic value from their
occupied territories, and conducting scorched earth warfare of extreme
severity.
The Allies blamed the Germans for such transgressions all the more
easily in that (with the partial exception of the Russians) they never had to
confront these situations themselves. In other regards – chemical weapons,
naval warfare, aerial bombardment – the two camps transformed the face of
war reciprocally. And while the economic difficulties and political strains
experienced by the Central Powers and Russia explain in large part the
worsening fate of the POWs under their control, both sides violated the
Geneva and Hague Conventions in their use of prisoners. Yet the logic of
total enmity led each side to see the other as solely responsible.
As during the war, there was also a hierarchy of culpability that turned on
the importance of the enemy, not the atrocity. The British prevailed on the
post-war government in Constantinople to prosecute some of those involved
in the Armenian genocide in 1919–20. Yet great power rivalries in the
Ottoman Empire (which was on the point of disintegration) and stiffening
resistance by the alternative nationalist regime in Ankara led to the early
abandonment of this effort, though not before seventeen death sentences
had been handed down, largely in absentia.
In the political circumstances of the post-war period, the Allies did not
have the power to impose their retrospective moral and legal vision of the
war on their former enemies. Germany remained too powerful and German
opinion resented what it saw as ‘victors’ justice’. It was with the Leipzig
trials in mind that the Allies determined during the Second World War that
the international tribunal to judge Nazi war crimes would be held under
their control in a totally defeated Germany. As it was, the ‘German
atrocities’ of 1914 and the Allied ‘hunger blockade’ in particular, remained
unresolved issues that kept wartime enmity alive in the early 1920s.
This did not prevent attempts being made to revise the provisions of
Hague and Geneva law in order to take account of the transgressions of the
Great War. But despite intense debates at the ICRC, the League of Nations
and elsewhere, the results were mixed and ultimately limited by the reality
that much of the violation of the ‘laws of war’ in 1914–18 resulted not only
from enemy ‘atrocity’ but also from the changing nature of war itself.
Consequently, self-interest and the fear of being at a military disadvantage
qualified the desire to limit the violence of war.
Progress was greatest on the core issue of the wounded or captured
combatant, with two new Geneva Conventions in 1928 that addressed some
of the weaknesses revealed by the war. Even here, ideological antagonism
threatened the idea of humanitarianism in war when the USSR declined to
sign up to ‘bourgeois’ international law. On the issues which had generated
most war crimes charges and the greatest moral outrage during the war,
progress was small. Apart from the Geneva protocol banning gas, there
were no agreements of importance on aerial bombing (which merged with
the fear of gas in the public mind), naval warfare or invasions and
occupations, despite a much greater international revulsion against war in
the second half of the 1920s than before 1914. But that was the paradox.
Once it was over, the war itself, not the enemy, became for many the real
horror, and it was summed up by the suffering of the soldiers, not the
civilians. The wartime language of atrocity, distorted though it was by the
logic of enmity, had addressed the underlying trend towards a ‘total war’
that abolished the distinction between soldier and civilian. That is why it
would re-emerge, transformed, in response to the even greater violence of
the Second World War.
1 Quoted in Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of

the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1980), p. 165.
2 James Brown Scott (ed.), Texts of the Peace Conferences at The Hague,
1899 and 1907 (Boston and London: Ginn & Co., 1908), pp. 209–29.
3 George F. Kennan (ed.), The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie

Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections
on the Present Conflict (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1993), p. 265.
4 Kennan (ed.), The Other Balkan Wars, p. 271.
5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Thoughts for the times on war and death’ (1915), in
The Penguin Freud Library, vol. XII: Civilization, Society and Religion
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 64–5.
6 Rapports et procès-verbaux d’enquête de la commission instituée en vue

de constater les actes commis par l’ennemi en violation du droit des gens
(hereafter French Commission), third and fourth reports (Paris, 1915), pp.
10–23 (p. 14 for the quotation).
7 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of

Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 194–5.
8 Solomon Ansky, The Enemy at his Pleasure: A Journey through the

Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War I (New York: Henry Holt,
2003), p. 116.
9 Georges Cahen-Salvador, Les prisonniers de guerre (1914–1919) (Paris:
Payot, 1929), pp. 56–62.
10 Alan Kramer, ‘Combatants and noncombatants: atrocities, massacres

and war crimes’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I
(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 193.
11 Völkerrechtswidrige Verwendung farbiger Truppen auf dem

europäischen Kriegsschauplatz durch England und Frankreich (Berlin,
1915), translated as Employment, Contrary to International Law, of Colored
Troops upon the European Arena of War, by England and France (Berlin,
n.d.).
12 The 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of
Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Warfare, in
W. Michael Reisman and Chris T. Antoniou (eds.), The Laws of War: A
Comprehensive Collection of Primary Documents on International Laws
Governing Armed Conflicts (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 57–8.
13 For the above figures concerning the German invasion, see Horne and
Kramer, German Atrocities, pp. 435–50.
14 Fernand van Langenhove, The Growth of a Legend: A Study Based

upon the Accounts of Francs-Tireurs and ‘Atrocities’ in Belgium (1916;
translated from the French, London: Putnam’s Sons, 1916).
15 For the reports, see Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, pp. 229–61.
16 A. S. Rezanoff, Les atrocités allemandes du côté russe (Petrograd: W.

Kirschbaoum, 1915), pp. 120–65; and Immanuel Geiss, ‘Die Kosaken
kommen! Ostpreussen im August 1914’, in Geiss, Das deutsche Reich und
der Erste Weltkrieg, 2nd edn (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1985 [1978]), pp. 60–1.
17 Geiss, ‘Die Kosaken kommen!’, pp. 62–3; and Denis Showalter,
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1991), p. 159. For
more credence to widespread Cossack atrocities, see Holger Herwig, The
First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–18 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1997), p. 128.
18 Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, pp. 82–3.
19 R. A. Reiss, Report upon the Atrocities Committed by the Austro-

Hungarian Army during the First Invasion of Serbia: Submitted to the Serb
Government (London: HMSO, 1916); and Reiss, Réponses aux accusations
austro-hongroises contre les Serbes (Lausanne and Paris: Payot, 1918). For
the most recent estimates, see Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and
Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University
Press, 2009), pp. 44–61.
20 Archives Nationales (Paris), F23 14, evidence of repatriated French

civilians.
21 Fernand Passelecq, Déportation et travail forcé des ouvriers et de la

population civile de la Belgique occupée (1916–1918) (Paris: PUF, 1928);
Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre mondiale
(1997; translation from the Dutch, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 222–30;
and Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture,
22 Georges Gromaire, L’occupation allemande en France (1914–1918)

(Paris: Payot, 1925), pp. 247–93; Liulevicius, War Land, p. 73; and French
Commission, tenth report, 31 October 1918.
23 Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la Première Guerre Mondiale, p. 242.
24 For the figures, see Gumz, Resurrection and Collapse of Empire; and
Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande Guerre: humanitaire et culture de
guerre, 1914–1918: populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de
guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 1998), pp. 232–3.
25 Michael Geyer, ‘Retreat and destruction’, in Irina Renz, Gerd Krumeich

and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.), Scorched Earth: The Germans on the Somme
1914–1918 (2006; translation from German, Barnsley: Pen & Sword,
2009), pp. 141–56 (here p. 151).
26 Ibid., p. 149.
27 James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the

Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of
Falloden by Viscount Bryce (London: HMSO, 1916; new edn, Reading:
Taderon Press, 2000), p. 649; Paul Painlevé, Minister of Public Instruction,
and the Illustrated London News, 16 October 1915 (800,000 victims), both
quoted in Annette Becker and Jay Winter, ‘Le génocide arménien et les
réactions de l’opinion internationale’, in John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre
totale: le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), pp. 291–313 (pp.
300–1).
28 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism,

Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford
29 Peter Holquist, ‘Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs en

1915: causes et limites’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 191–219.
30 Frankfurter Zeitung, 6 February 1915, quoted in Gerd Krumeich, ‘Le

blocus maritime et la guerre sous-marine’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre
totale, p. 177.
31 French Commission, tenth report, p. 62.
32 Cited by Krumeich, ‘Le blocus maritime’, p. 178.

33 Quoted in A. C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany (London:
HMSO, 1937), p. 446.
34 French Commission, seventh report, listing over 200 French vessels

sunk.
35 Jules Poirier, Les bombardements de Paris (1914–1918): avions,

gothas, zeppelins, berthas (Paris: Payot, 1930), pp. 229–31.
36 Christian Geinitz, ‘The first German air war against noncombatants:

strategic bombing of German cities in World War I’, in Roger Chickering
and Stig Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on
the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.
207–25 (p. 207, overall figures, p. 212, Karlsruhe).
37 Second Interim Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Breaches of the

Law of War, 3 June 1919, quoted by Best, Humanity in Warfare, p. 269.
38 Quoted by Geinitz, ‘Strategic bombing’, p. 213.
39 Bundesarchiv, Berlin, R 3003 Generalia/56, as categorised in Horne and

Kramer, German Atrocities, pp. 448–9.
22 Genocide
Introduction
In Europe the First World War marked a lethal culmination of the
imperialism of the modern nation-states and the end of the great dynastic
land empires that dated from the late Middle Ages. The characteristics of the
conflict itself, including not just developing strategic, tactical and
geopolitical considerations, but the psychological, material and socio-
political consequences of total war, are vital in explaining the extremity of
policies against a range of civilian populations on both sides. Nevertheless, it
was the conjunction of war and pre-existing ethno-political ‘problems’ that
produced genocide and other extensive crimes perpetrated against population
groups. Accordingly, the main and final focus of this chapter, which is a
study of the murder of the Ottoman Armenians and other Anatolian
Christians during the First World War, incorporates an account of pre-war
state–minority relations.
Our contention is that there were two, related cases of outright genocide in
the 1914–18 conflict: the deportation and murder of the Armenians, or the
Aghet, and the fate of the Ottoman Syriac Christian populations (sometimes
called ‘Assyro-Chaldeans’), which is known in the survivor communities as
Sayfo. Use of the word ‘genocide’ is still inflammatory in relation to the
First World War, because of a lack of clarity about the applicability of the
term, deliberate obfuscation and a vitiating confusion of moral, legal and
historical criteria. In order to elucidate key conceptual issues, we will begin
in the following section by considering its applicability to the Armenian
case.
Like any other concept, ‘genocide’ must have limits to its applicability in
order to serve the analytical purpose of differentiation, but there is nothing in
the idea of meaningful distinction that precludes the idea of borderline cases.
Genocide is on a continuum of strategies of mass destruction about which
historical scholarship has much to say without reaching a consensus on a
number of important points, and there are often good intellectual (as well as
moral) reasons for making connections as well as distinctions between
different modalities and goals of destruction. We recognise the problems
caused for historical scholarship by a preoccupation with the distinction
between genocide and non-genocide, and so this chapter is more concerned
with historical contextualisation than overt comparison and sharp contrast.
Accordingly, once we have addressed the technical conceptual issues around
‘genocide’, and before we address the Ottoman cases that unequivocally
qualify, we consider a range of cases of mass violence from the First World
War records of a range of participants. We loosely dub these ‘sub-genocidal’
and ‘pre-genocidal’ episodes.
Genocide: a concept, its uses, abuses and

limitations
The primary obstacle in identifying genocide in the First World War is
political rather than scholarly, notwithstanding the fact that the term
‘genocide’ was only invented and enshrined in international law later on, in
1944 and 1946 respectively. First, ‘genocide’ is a social scientific term as
well as a legal term, and if some legally positivistic principle of anachronism
were applied to prevent its retrospective application, then that would also
apply to other social scientific concepts that we routinely apply to times
before the term was invented: concepts such as feudalism, for instance. This
is patently silly. Secondly, even in strictly legal terms, the only thing that the
principle of anachronism would complicate is the punishment under law of
perpetrators of genocide whose crimes occurred avant la lettre. This issue is
not pertinent in the case of the First World War.
If we take the ‘in whole or in part’ clause of the UN genocide convention,1
as that clause refers to population groups that are targeted for destruction ‘as
such’, qua groups, then, judged proportionately to the Armenian population
in 1914 and most other instances of communal destruction before and since,
the Armenian case is not some controversial borderline instance of genocide,
but an absolutely clear-cut manifestation of genocide. It is of no matter that a
few Armenian populations were left relatively unscathed by deportation and
murder. After all, a strike against a large enough part of the victim group is a
strike against the entirety of the group, as soon as one imagines, as
perpetrators of such crimes generally have done, that the target group is a
coherent, monolithic entity with a critical mass and an agenda. Such
perpetrators construct victim groups for themselves; by extension they make
calculations about the level of destruction necessary at one and the same
time (for they are thought of as the same thing when abstract entities are
reified) to destroy the group as a significant entity now and in the future and
to prevent it from carrying out its alleged agenda.2 Since the alleged agenda
of the Armenian population was the provision of a fifth column for the
Entente armies pursuant to staking the claim for Armenian autonomy in
eastern Anatolia, that purported agenda was fatally crippled along with the
collective body by the comprehensive obliteration of Armenian population
centres in eastern Anatolia. In this context it is perfectly explicable that, say,
fractions of Armenian communities survived in western cities, given the
proximate reasons of the attitude of local Ottoman and German
representatives (in İzmir, where many Armenians were nevertheless
deported) and the impossibility of deporting a whole community under the
gaze of the outside world (in Istanbul, where those born outside the
community were nevertheless deported).3 Besides, whatever the claims of
those writing under the influence of Turkish nationalism, deportations were
indeed conducted throughout western Anatolia and from ‘European’ Thrace.
For Turkish nationalist propagandists, and for those fewer scholars who
broadly accept the scale of the Armenian fate but reject the applicability of
the epithet ‘genocide’, the issue of the Ottoman state’s destructive intent is
critical, and related to the issue of destructive intent is the question of
motive. Both considerations are tied together over the question of the timing
of the decision(s) for the measures of destruction. The desire of those
seeking to exculpate the regime is to present it as purely reactive in the face
of a perceived wartime security threat, as opposed to acting in an
ideologically proactive capacity. The proposition that the anti-Armenian
measures were entirely reactive in inception ignores the violent and
discriminatory history of pre-war (peacetime) action towards the Armenians
and the state’s (or the Young Turk committee government’s) new anti-
Christian economic and demographic agenda that it had begun to implement
by force before August 1914. But even if we were to accept that dubious
proposition of pure reactivity, this would not remove issues of
(dis)proportionality and (in)discriminacy in the measures carried out. Many
apologetic positions remain predicated on the idea of collective Armenian
guilt, and as such reproduce the viewpoint of the perpetrators themselves, as
they assimilate all bearers of Armenian identity to some political agenda – a
move that is in fact an important precondition for genocide. ‘Softer’
mitigations of Young Turk policy will depict collective measures as
unfortunate because indiscriminate, but at the same time as somehow
realistic under emergency conditions in which discrimination was not
possible, and as ameliorated by the government’s measures of care for the
deportees. The proposition here is that such mass murders as are admitted
are attributed not to the governing regime and its agents, barring perhaps
some ‘loose cannons’ in the ranks of the latter, but to uncontrollable
elements of the eastern Anatolian Muslim population. But even if this
position had solid basis in the evidence, which it does not, it would not
account for the way the regime had foreseen and thus effectively intended
what those measures entailed in practice .4
Jurisprudence has codified common-sense concepts like inferable intent
and indirect (or oblique) intent precisely in recognition that while intent may
not be pre-announced in specific terms, patterns of action speak to prevailing
assumptions, and certain actions have predictable results irrespective of the
intentions that the implementers claim to have. If, via a remarkable faith in
the good offices of the Committee of Union and Progress, one continues to
believe that the central government was not implicated in the repeated mass
murder of the deportees, even though it continued to systematically deport in
the knowledge of such murder, then the deportation destination – the deserts
of Iraq and Syria – is sufficient indicator of lethal intent, as we shall hear
directly from the prime orchestrator of the genocide. But that faith would
anyway have to be accompanied by a disregard for or wilfully naive reading
of a significant body of evidence bequeathed by the perpetrators, some of
which is coded in euphemism or worded in the interests of plausible
deniability, as well as a vast corpus of non-Ottoman witness sources
(including those of the Ottoman allies Germany and Austria-Hungary, and
the neutral USA).5 Ultimately it is impossible for those denying inferable
genocidal intent directed against the Armenian population in general, or
relating it to a pragmatic agenda of wartime security in the provinces
bordering Russia in the spring of 1915, to explain such atrocities as the mass
burning alive of orphans in the deserts in 1916, and myriad other murderous
assaults over a vast area and many months against people of all ages and
both sexes.
Preoccupation with the applicability of ‘genocide’ has perhaps had its
greatest impact on historical writing in this area of proving intent. In
response to the agendas of those who want to deny that anything
approaching genocide took place in 1915–16, some scholars of Armenian
history have sought to find the moment, decision, blueprint – perhaps prior
to the war, and certainly prior to spring 1915 – with which to prove Young
Turk intent for everything that followed from that point. This pastiche of
some facets of legal thought, using the inappropriate model of the lone
criminal who puts his plan on paper prior to packing a gun and to shooting
his victim, obscures the nature of genocides as political processes. Such
processes develop incrementally as a result of multiple decisions and inputs
over significant periods of time, out of reciprocal relations between
metropolitan regime centres and policy implementers ‘in the field’, and via
the interaction of ideological outlook and contingencies. To recognise this is
to concede no ground to the deniers. Any claim that the destruction of the
Armenians when it unfolded was not a genocide, simply because there might
not be unequivocal evidence of genocidal intent prior to, say, the major
deportation orders of May 1915, is as wrongheaded as the suggestion that
the Nazi ‘final solution’ was not a genocide because it was not inscribed
before the invasion of Poland in 1939 or even the USSR in 1941, that all
Jews within German reach were to be murdered.
The unusually extensive character of the Armenian genocide is indeed
sometimes masked by contrast with the even more extensive Nazi German
assault against Jews in the Second World War. Using the Holocaust as a
legal, historical or, come to that, normative, benchmark for qualification as
genocide is one of the favoured tools of many of those who argue against the
applicability of the word genocide to the Ottoman treatment of the
Armenians in the First World War. But such an approach runs counter to the
clear intentions of the progenitor of the neologism ‘genocide’ ( Lemkin, for
whom the Armenian case was vital in the conceptualisation of the crime),
the very wording of the convention with its depiction of genocide as a
repeated blight on humanity, the great majority of social scientific enquiries
into the phenomenon and the conclusions of the most notable legal experts to
have examined the Armenian case.6 One of the unfortunate effects of
promoting the Holocaust to benchmark is to further the idea that all
perpetrators of genocide must be like the Nazis, all genocidal states must
look like modern Germany. Another is to trade on a concept of the Holocaust
as a firmly pre-planned, always centrally determined and absolutely all-
encompassing crime in a way that recent specialist scholarship has drawn
into question. It is to create a benchmark that does not in all respects even
work for the benchmark case.7 That said, it is often forgotten in the rush to
point out differences between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust that
Nazi leaders prosecuted at Nuremberg for crimes including the murder of the
Jews were charged with ‘crimes against humanity’, not ‘genocide’, which
had yet to pass into international law – and ‘crimes against humanity’ was
precisely the term that the Entente used in their official pronouncement of
May 1915 to describe Ottoman policies towards Christians.
One legitimate area of scholarly disagreement about the nature of
genocide concerns the concept of ‘destruction’ of a group. An influential
strand, bolstered by the jurisprudence of the genocide convention, puts
emphasis above all on physical destruction. Even here, emphases differ on
the relative weight that should be given on the one hand to existential
destruction, namely murder and acts detrimental to physical survival and
reproduction, and on the other hand spatial destruction (forced removal,
‘ethnic cleansing’), with the courts – and the present authors – tending to
require a significant element of the former. Another area of disagreement
concerns the weight that should be given to cultural destruction as opposed
to physical destruction, where the former concerns attacks not on the
physical bodies of members of the groups, but on the conditions of their
communal existence and reproduction, such as language rights and cultural
institutions.
These distinctions are ideal type; slippage may occur between (a) the two
sorts of physical destruction and (b) either of those and manifestations of
cultural destruction. To be sure, the relative scale, intensity and manifest aim
of any given type of destruction remain important. To take the matter of
‘cultural genocide’ (if there is such a thing), the importance of scale,
intensity and manifest aim requires us to be cautious, in order not to expand
the concept to a point where it loses utility, say, in the matter of considering
consumer goods as agents of ‘cultural genocide’. To take distinction (a),
there is clearly an analytical difference between a massacre committed with
the intention of encouraging a population to flee a certain space where there
is indeed somewhere safer to flee or be deported to and a massacre
conducted to eliminate a captive population, and the difference in death tolls
between such situations is likely to be very great.8 Blends of and slippages
between different modalities of destruction are, however, more characteristic
of messy reality, with its dynamic, evolving situations and multiplicity of
actors and agendas. Different combinations and intensities of types of
destruction may be witnessed in the war records of a number of participants,
and they helped contour the landscape in which the Armenian genocide
occurred.
A landscape of sub-genocidal and pre-genocidal

violence
For every case of outright genocide, however defined, there are more
instances of unrealised genocidal potential, as well as policies and actions
with some ‘family resemblances’ to genocide. Moreover, it is common for
genocidaires to target multiple groups, even if their policies of persecution
or destruction are uneven in severity and varied in manifestation. For
instance, in the Ottoman case, from spring 1916 onwards, hundreds of
thousands of Kurds were deported from eastern areas near to the war front
and dispersed by settlement in western Anatolia. The deportations were
conducted by the same office within the Interior Ministry that had
orchestrated the earlier, murderous Armenian deportations. The specific
goals of the policies were distinct: in the Kurdish case the goal was forcible
assimilation within the collective body of ‘Turkic’ Sunni Muslims at the
point of relocation, so while the death toll was nevertheless high because of
logistical issues, the Kurds were neither deported to areas where life was
impossible nor attacked en route.9 Nevertheless, the fate of these Kurds was
linked to that of the Armenians by the developing ideology of Turkish ethno-
nationalism (Turkism) and the associated belief that some populations were
inherently more reliable in the new Turkified order than others.
To take one further step, an essential component of the outlook of the
Ottoman rulers by 1915–16 was that some of the ‘reliable’ peoples moved
into areas vacated by Armenians and Kurds were themselves Muslim victims
or descendants of victims. Victimhood had been imposed during expulsion
from now Christian-, formerly Ottoman-ruled lands in the Balkans,
especially since the ‘Eastern Crisis’ of 1875–8 and more recently in the
Balkan wars of 1912–13, and from the Caucasus, especially since the
Crimean War and again the ‘Eastern Crisis’. These expulsions would almost
all fit the description of what has latterly been called ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Some of the killers of the Armenian deportees sprang from the milieu of
recent and previous refugees, as did some of the most murderous Ottoman
officials, such as Dr Mehmed Reşid, governor of Diyarbekir province, while
some of the highest-ranking members of the Committee of Union and
Progress and its post-war nationalist successor movements were natives of
recently lost territories, notably the top leaders Talat Pasha and Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk. The very organisation that conducted the Armenian
deportations, what became the IAMM, the Directorate for the Settlement of
Tribes and Immigrants, had been set up during the Balkan wars to deal with
the influx of hundreds of thousands of desperate people from what had been
the core land of the Ottoman Empire since the fourteenth century. The tale of
the muhacir (refugees) and the IAMM indicates some sort of transmission
belt of anti-civilian, state-minority violence across boundaries, reminding us
of the important international context of mass atrocity.
For all these reasons, our chapter is mindful not just of the broader
population policies of the Ottoman state, but the violent political landscape
of a very large part of ‘greater Europe’ from the Baltic to the Black Sea and
the eastern Mediterranean. The most extensive anti-civilian violence
occurred in the lands of the older dynastic land empires in the east, south-
east and east-central parts of the continent, where battlefronts were least
stable, ‘population problems’ most toxic and, ultimately, where state
frameworks fell under greatest pressure to act for their survival.
Clearly the turmoil of the Romanov and Ottoman Empires in particular
did not correspond neatly to the 1914–18 parameters of the Great War stricto
sensu, the conflict which is the main subject of this volume and chapter. The
wars of the late Ottoman Empire extend to the conclusion of the Greco-
Turkish conflict in 1922, as did ethnic and religious killing. We would also
have needed to go beyond 1918 in order to consider the Russian civil war, as
well as the Polish-Ukrainian and Russo-Polish wars. Each of those conflicts
witnessed extensive atrocities against civilian populations, including anti-
Jewish pogroms committed by most parties, though genocide as such is not
identifiable in any. The small but vicious wars for territory and population
homogeneity in Transcaucasia from 1818–1920 reunite the Ottoman and
Russian trajectories, because the condition for temporarily independent
Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani state agendas was the inability of either
of the traditional regional powers to command that space prior to the
reconfiguration of the Romanov Empire as the USSR and the residual
Ottoman Empire as the Republic of Turkey.
If the First World War in Western Europe was free of genocidal atrocities,
we can detect some continuities outside Europe between wartime violence
and pre-war violence towards non-white colonial populations. While the
nation-state combatants provided little in the direction of genocide during
the 1914–18 war, one episode may have had some of the requisite
characteristics. In the Upper Volta region of France’s African empire, French
forces with significantly superior weaponry responded to a massive revolt
mounted from late in 1915 against imperial impositions including
conscription. The precise death toll of the ‘Volta-Bani War’ is unknown. At
least 30,000 Africans from the resisting communities were killed on or
immediately around the battlefield in engagements that were often very one-
sided in bodycount, but there were smaller confrontations, beyond the major
pitched battles, of which no records exist. Taking into account the nature of
the known French measures, which included literal obliteration of villages,
the use of women and children as hostages and the destruction of the
agricultural and pastoral basis of life for entire communities, the total
mortality figure was surely vastly greater.10
In the European theatre of operations, some of the most murderous
dynamics in the period operated along ethno-religious cleavages, from the
Ottoman murder and expulsion of Armenian Christians to the Russian
assaults on Jews and Muslims. Fantasies linking betrayal by ‘enemies’
within borders with fear of downfall and defeat were as important as the real
threats posed by war, and in both the Ottoman and Romanov war efforts,
suspicions of subversive intent were inflated beyond all reason; some
internal populations were easier to stigmatise than others, though, and this is
where older religious stereotypes obtained most clearly.
One sphere in which newer and older preoccupations met is the economic.
Friedrich List’s old doctrine of national economy (in Turkish milli iktisat)
appealed to a number of polities trying to move the levers of economic
control into the hands of – as they saw it – ethnically ‘trustworthy’ middle
classes. European Jewish and Ottoman Christian communities alike provided
particular targets for state-sponsored expropriation as well as popular
plundering under conditions of war, given the commercial and financial
functions into which some of their number had been channelled by the
traditional norms of the dominant populations.
A clear illustration of the power of fantasy is the continent-wide paranoia
about Jewish influence and subversion that was given such a boost by the
Bolshevik Revolution but was already present throughout the war and on
both sides. From the outset of the war Jews were removed by Russian forces
from areas near the front, and the conquest of Habsburg territory saw the
Russian army and its Cossack regiments as well as elements of local
populations engaged in pogroms against Galician and Bukovinan Jews in
September 1914. The imaginary Jewish ‘internationale’ was scapegoated for
early Russian military failures and targeted ‘pre-emptively’, as in the mass
deportations of Russian Jews that occurred in the face of the Austro-German
offensive of spring 1915.11
A combination of anti-Semitism, insurgency paranoia and licence to
pursue economic and demographic reorganisation at a crisis moment in the
spring of 1915 lay behind the deportation eastwards, not only of up to a
million Jews, but hundreds of thousands of Volhynian and other ethnic
Germans (who were dubbed ‘colonists’ on account of the circumstances of
their earlier settlement). The conditions of deportation, at times by railway,
could be deadly under wartime conditions, though much hinged on the
destination. By the time that the major Armenian deportations began in
spring 1915, the Russian authorities in the Caucasus had also considered
mass deportation of Muslims from the provinces bordering the Ottoman
Empire, against the backdrop both of massacres of Muslims in the area by
Russian troops, including Cossacks , and the collaboration of at least a few
thousand Caucasian Muslim fighters with Ottoman forces, and smaller,
targeted deportations. Despite having about as much (and thus as little)
proximate ‘justification’ for such expansive measures as their Ottoman
counterparts, the deportations did not, however, occur.
Why not? Russian policy did not become totalising, according to Peter
Holquist, because, despite the great wartime power of the military, Russia
remained an authoritarian state run along bureaucratic and functional rather
than radical political lines. Amongst other things, this framework enabled
something like a realistic threat assessment of the political state of the
Transcaucasian Muslim communities – something that was utterly lacking in
Ottoman policy towards the Armenians.12 A structural explanation based on
disunity between military and civilian authorities is also provided by
Alexander Prusin to account for the fact that tsarist anti-Jewish policy did
not progress from spatial destruction to existential destruction in spring–
summer 1915.13
Both Holquist’s and Prusin’s explanations offer important contrasts with
the contemporary Ottoman regime, but they are not entirely uncontested, and
can be qualified by consideration of additional explanatory factors and other
wartime episodes. In the case of Russian Jewish policy, Mark Levene
suggests that the same Judeophobia that stimulated Russian atrocities,
deportation and dispossession also served to temper Russian policies once
the Russian leadership felt that international – ‘Jewish’ – pressure was being
brought to bear. Such ‘strategic’ thinking was of a piece with the British
offer of a Jewish national home in the Ottoman Palestinian territory Britain
had earmarked for post-war control. Here, as Levene has also shown, the
idea was that the policy would attract ‘international Jewish support’ for the
Allied war effort and away from that of the Central Powers.14 (Of course the
libellous German Judenzählung, or ‘Jew-count’ of serving soldiers of 1916,
shows how little Berlin felt itself allied with world Jewry, as does the ease
with which German and other Jews were made scapegoats for the final
German defeat in the war.) As to actions against Muslims, it was only a year
later that the bloodiest tsarist campaign of the war targeting civilians began,
against Islamic populations in central Asia.
The extremity of the violence – even by Russian military standards – of
the campaign of murder and dispersal against the Kyrgyz and Kazakh
Dungan populations of the Semireche region is again only explicable
conjuncturally. Harsh repression followed a revolt against conscription,
including the slaughter of recently arrived Russian settlers; but the state
response had a distinctly colonialist tinge, and as such was characterised by
the same sorts of violence that other European states had hitherto tended to
reserve for their extra-European colonies. For the native population, the
imperatives of total war, expressed through conscription, reinforced the
existing logic of increasing state penetration into a periphery, and both were
rejected at the same time. The Russian response, whose impact is known in
Kyrgyz collective memory as the Urkun, issued in perhaps 100,000 direct
deaths and the departure of hundreds of thousands of refugees, some of
whom escaped to Chinese Turkestan, while many others perished in the
exodus. This repressive episode was aimed not just at ending the insurgency,
but at securing the region under Russian control for the long term.15
A combination of long-and short-term factors was to prove even more
comprehensively destructive in the Ottoman Empire from 1915–16. The
course of Ottoman genocide during the First World War was certainly
closely linked to developments in the conflict, especially in this case in the
eastern Mediterranean and on the Caucasus–eastern Anatolian fronts. As
regards Ottoman history, however, the violent ethnic polarisation by the First
World War contrasts sharply with the earlier emergence of a unique set of
reforms instituted in the quest to modernise the Empire by an ambitious
synthesis of Western ideas and the previous history of the multi-religious and
multi-ethnic character of Muslim rule. Of these reform programmes the most
urgent and contentious on the eve of the Great War concerned the eastern
provinces of Anatolia, areas largely populated by Kurds and Armenians and
bordering the Russian Empire. Thus we move to the central case of this
chapter.
War and genocide in the Ottoman Empire

At the time of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, reform-oriented groups
as different as the ‘Young Turks’, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation
(ARF), American missionaries and Zionists all hoped for a constitutional
Ottoman Empire which would frame the future of the Middle East. Even in
this pre-war period, however, the enthusiastic common departure of 1908
was followed by boycott movements and press campaigns against Ottoman
Christians, as external and internal tensions increased. Among young and
educated Turkish-speaking Muslims and in the cohort of Young Turk
activists in the early 1910s, a new ideology of radical, though not yet violent,
Turkism loomed large, and with this the belief that an apocalyptic moment in
the history of Turkish survival had arrived. Deeply frustrated, and
acquainted with war since the Italian usurpation of Ottoman Libya in 1911
and then the Balkan wars, Young Turk activists saw the outbreak of the
world war as an opportunity to forge a ‘new deal’ internally and in their
external relations.16
The central committee of the Young Turk Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP) controlled the Ottoman government as the result of a putsch
of January 1913. Its members were the first revolutionary komitajis of the
twentieth century to accede to the reins of an empire. Radical ideologists
gained civilian power, foreshadowing future radical phenomena in Europe.
Before the Bolshevik Revolution, no other regime in greater Europe
exercised violence of a comparable kind, scale and scope against a group of
its own citizens during war as did the Young Turk regime, which obliterated
the distinction between civilian and military targets and systematically
cultivated propaganda and hatred against domestic populations.
In terms of internal politics, the Ottoman reform programme of 1908 had
depended on cooperation between the ARF and the CUP.17 In particular, it
depended on the establishment of security and the restitution of property in
the eastern provinces, or, in contemporary terminology, it depended on the
solution of the Armeno-Kurdish agrarian question.18 Anti-Armenian
pogroms in Cilician Adana in April 1909, after a counter-coup by Islamist
elements in the capital, helped rend the new Young Turk–Armenian fabric.
The pogroms were reminiscent of the Anatolia-wide massacres of
approximately 100,000 mostly male Armenians in 1895.
The 1895 massacres had been the culmination of complex social and
political developments over about three generations. The uprisings in the
Balkans from 1875 and the consequent Ottoman-Russian war of 1877–8 had
led to dramatic territorial losses in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Cyprus, all
sealed at the Berlin Congress in 1878. As a consequence, the new sultan
Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909) considered the more inclusive political
principles of the earlier Tanzimat reform period a failure, and set on policies
no longer designed to increase the equality of Christians but to empower the
Muslims in Asia Minor , which was increasingly the Empire’s core land
given the territorial losses of previous decades. Abdulhamid II obstructed
reforms in the eastern provinces because he feared they would lead to more
British or Russian influence or the territorial autonomy of the Christians, as
had happened in the Balkans. The Armenians, on the contrary, insisted on
the reforms promised in Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty. When those reforms
failed to appear, educated young Armenians founded revolutionary parties
which championed armed rural self-defence and an activism informed by
socialist and nationalist revolutionary ideas and directed against Ottoman
authorities and Armenian notables. The 1895 massacres of Armenians took
place against this background, and as an immediate reaction to a first
detailed reform plan finally initiated by European diplomacy. Armenian land
and property was seized by Kurds and other Muslims, and reform plans were
again adjourned.19
While the programme of the party then most involved in revolutionary
action, the Hntchaks, advocated an independent socialist Armenia for all
inhabitants in the predominantly Kurdo-Armenian eastern provinces, the
ARF or Dashnak party, which prevailed after the 1890s, set on an Armenian
future within a reformed Ottoman state. As restitution and reform in the
eastern provinces did not transpire after 1908, the ARF announced the end of
its alliance with the CUP in August 1912, two months before the first Balkan
war began. At the end of the same year, Armenian representatives contacted
foreign diplomats to press for reforms.20
Like the Hamidian government two decades before, the CUP government
finally signed the reform plan on 8 February 1914. It divided the eastern
provinces into northern and southern parts; put them under the control of two
European inspectors, to be selected from neutral countries; prescribed
publication of laws and official pronouncements in local languages;
provided for an adequate proportion of Muslims and Christians in councils
and police; and transformed the Hamidiye, an irregular Kurdish cavalry that,
since its creation in 1891, had threatened non-Sunni groups in the eastern
provinces, into cavalry reserves.21 The signed plan was not in itself a first
step towards Armenian autonomy, nor towards Russian annexation.22
Nevertheless, leading CUP members had already signalled to their former
revolutionary brothers of the ARF, as they had called themselves mutually,
and to other Armenian representatives that by broaching the issue of reform
internationally, they had crossed a red line with regard to a common future.23
In spring 1914, after hesitant steps towards population exchanges with its
Greek and Bulgarian neighbours in the Balkans, on the Ottoman western
coast, the CUP began to implement an agenda of anti-Christian demographic
engineering diametrically opposed to the spirit of the reform plan for the
east. The paramilitaries of its newly founded ‘Special Organisation’
terrorised and expelled from the Aegean littoral some 200,000 Rûm (the
Greek-or Turkish-speaking Ottoman Christians of the Greek Orthodox
Faith). When on 6 July the Ottoman parliament discussed the expulsions,
Talat, Minister of Interior, member of the CUP’s central committee and the
most influential politician in the Ottoman 1910s, emphasised the need to
settle the Muslim refugees of the Balkans in those emptied villages. If they
were sent to the vast deserts of Syria and Iraq, he added, they would all die
of hunger. Those deserts were precisely the destinations of the Armenians
deported the following year.24
The international crisis of July 1914 saved the regime from a diplomatic
backlash against the expulsion, and gave it room for manoeuvre and the
opportunity to finally win over a formal ally. In autumn 1914, however, the
Empire’s German ally, eager to win over neutral Greece, insisted that acts of
violence against Rûm henceforth be avoided. Approximately 300,000 Rûm
were removed from different coastal regions to the interior in the course of
the First World War, beginning in February 1915, and while some of the
deportees suffered very violent attacks, they were neither systematically
massacred nor sent into the desert.25
The German attitude to an alliance with the Ottoman Empire changed
from the negative in late July 1914, when War Minister Enver Pasha made a
proposal to the German ambassador Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim. Fears
of an Ottoman alignment with the Entente had arisen, and Kaiser Wilhelm
stressed that they must seize the opportunity to gain Turkey as an ally.26 The
secret alliance was concluded on 2 August 1914. Under its shield, the Young
Turk regime began to implement its own domestic agenda and, despite being
the junior alliance partner, improved its bargaining position vis-à-vis a senior
partner eagerly anticipating Ottoman action against Russia, when the
German campaign in northern France turned into stalemate. For their part,
the Germans, who had been involved in the reform negotiations, did not
seriously anticipate the launching of a campaign of extermination, and
certainly did little of substance to prevent it. Indeed, on 6 August,
Wangenheim portentously accepted six new Ottoman proposals, among them
the abolition of the hated capitulations and ‘a small correction of her
[Turkey’s] eastern border which shall place Turkey into direct contact with
the Moslems of Russia’.27 In contrast to Germany, Russia insisted on the
continuation of the Armenian reforms in negotiations about the eventuality
of an alliance; Russian representatives detected a lack of German sincerity
with regard to the Armenians.28
Strong pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist propaganda began to appear in the
Ottoman press in early August 1914.29 Together with the suspension of the
reform plan, this discourse alienated and intimidated the Ottoman non-
Muslims, in particular in the eastern provinces, from the outset of the
conflict. At the same time the regime started to make plans for joint
hostilities with Russia. Bahaeddin Şakir, a senior CUP member and chief of
the Special Organisation, invited the leaders of the ARF to lead an anti-
Russian guerrilla war in the Caucasus, aimed at preparing a future Ottoman
conquest.30 Dr Paul Schwarz, a German agent in Erzurum, proposed that the
Armenians sabotage the oil field of Baku. The Russian-born German
socialist and proponent of milli iktisat (and architect of Lenin’s return to St
Petersburg in 1917), Alexander Helphand, who used the name ‘Parvus’,
propagated a comprehensive plan of anti-tsarist insurrection in Russia’s
peripheral populations.31 However, the ARF balked at these plans and stated
that all Armenians should remain loyal to the country in which they lived.
Attempts at insurrection in the Caucasus without the ARF began in
August,32 while in September the regime announced the abrogation of the
Capitulations and obtained large sums of money from Germany to prepare
for attack. Though the Empire only officially entered the war in November,
in August the Ottoman army began to mobilise and requisition to an
unprecedented degree – this was but one early illustration of how, while less
industrial, the World War was more ‘total’ in the Ottoman world than in
Europe, being fought with every means at the state’s disposition both
outwards and inwards. The requisitions particularly hit non-Muslims in the
eastern provinces. Units of the Special Organisation began early on to
terrorise and loot Armenian villages on and beyond the eastern frontier.33
Ottoman troops, together with Kurdish tribal forces, attacked Persian Urmia,
110 kilometres east of Hakkâri in the province of Van, spreading anti-
Christian jihad propaganda. Christians on the Ottoman and the Persian sides
of the frontier looked to Russia for protection. From August 1914, Russia
built up a local Persian–Christian militia based on Christian Armeno-Syriac
solidarity.34
German-led Ottoman vessels attacked installations on the northern side of
the Black Sea at the end of October. In reaction, Russia declared war and its
Caucasus army crossed the frontier at Erzurum, but stopped before Turkish
defences. Unsatisfied by his generals’ defensive attitude and accompanied
by his German Chief of Staff, Bronsart von Schellendorf, but against the
advice of Liman von Sanders, head of the German military mission, Enver
Pasha himself took the command for an offensive towards the Caucasus
against numerically inferior Russian forces. On the first days of 1915 this
campaign failed catastrophically in the snowy mountains of Sarıkamış. Half
or even more of the 120,000 soldiers perished, and epidemics began to
spread among the survivors and in the whole region.35
In early 1915, the campaigns with irregular forces led by Enver’s brother-
in-law Jevdet and Enver’s uncle General Halil in northern Persia spread
violence against Armenian and Syriac villages, but again failed in their
military objectives. The Ottoman forces were decisively defeated in the
Battle of Dilman in mid April, near to a place where hundreds of non-
combatant Christians had been executed in March. General Andranik
Ozanian’s Armenian volunteer brigade in the Russian army participated in
the battle.36
As a consequence of these defeats at Sarıkamış and Dilman, the pan-
Turkist dream, which had galvanised the mobilisation in August 1914,
turned to trauma in winter and spring 1915. The long eastern front was
brutalised and religiously polarised. Irregulars and regulars, militias and
forces of self-defence were engaged in low-intensity warfare that took a
heavy toll on civilians. Many Armenians fled to Russian Armenia, among
them several thousand young Armenians who became volunteers in the
Russian army. Most Christians in the eastern provinces had lost any trust in
the government. Armed Christian forces, where possible, tried to rely on
Russian help. Best known is the Russian relief of the Armenians in Van in
mid May 1915. Since 20 April, after massacres in Armenian villages and the
murder of Armenian individuals from Van, Armenian activists had resisted
Jevdet’s repression. Once relieved, they acted vengefully against Van’s
Muslim civilians, massacring many and so contributing to the flight of much
larger numbers.37 The failed campaigns and the chaotic situation at the long
eastern front infuriated CUP leaders and made the local Armenian and
Syriac Christians an easy target for the Ottoman propaganda of jihad.38
In contrast to the east, the Ottoman army in the west commanded by
Liman von Sanders won its first decisive victory against the Entente naval
offensive at the Dardanelles on 18 March. The widely propagated news of
the victory and thus the securing of Istanbul had, according to the Austrian
military attaché in Istanbul, Joseph Pomiankowski, a tremendous
psychological impact on both the Turkish populace and the Young Turk
leaders, who henceforth displayed a mixture of self-reliance and brutal
chauvinism.39
Committee policies radicalised in the context of a general brutalisation of
war in spring 1915. Apart from the attack on the outer forts of the
Dardanelles and then the Gallipoli landings in late April, let us mention the
use of poison gas on the battlefields in Belgium in April; submarine warfare
against civilian vessels, e.g., the Lusitania in May 1915; anti-German riots in
Britain and Moscow; the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive; the intensification of
tsarist policies against Jews and ethnic Germans on Russia’s western front;
and the Russian military presence in eastern Anatolia and northern Persia.
Henceforth, as Jay Winter has emphasised, the General War was called the
Great War, a more total war than ever before.40
In such a military and psychological setting, the Committee government
began to converge on a comprehensive anti-Armenian policy, becoming
more radical at almost exactly the time that the tsarist regime discounted the
most radical measures against its Transcaucasian Muslim population.
Minister of the Interior Talat coordinated the developing policy in three main
phases: first, the arrest of Armenian political, religious and intellectual
leaders in April and May 1915; secondly, from late spring to autumn, the
removal of the Armenian population of Anatolia and European Turkey to
camps in the Syrian desert east of Aleppo, excluding Armenian men in
eastern Anatolia who were systematically massacred on the spot; thirdly, and
finally, the starvation to death of most of those in the camps and the final
massacre of those who still survived. New research in the Ottoman state
archives and military archives proves the new language and measures
applied to the Armenians in a number of dispatches sent in this period.41 As
in other genocides, however, including the ‘final solution of the Jewish
question’, there is no ultimate single order, but a whole complex of
meetings, orders and acts from February/March through May that, taken
together, amounted finally to the destruction of the Armenian nation in Asia
Minor (Map 22.1).
Map 22.1 The Armenian genocide.
In two long, seminal ciphered telegrams of 24 April to the provincial

governors and to the army, with reference to Van and a few other places,
Talat defined the situation in Asia Minor as that of a general Armenian
rebellion, of Armenians helping the enemy’s war efforts and of revolutionary
committees that had long since wished to establish Armenian self-
determination and now believed they could achieve it as a result of the
war.42 Provincial and military authorities, and in particular special CUP
commissaries sent to the provinces, henceforth spread propaganda
throughout Anatolia of treacherous, infidel Armenian neighbours who
stabbed Muslims in the back.43 In the night of 24 to 25 April, at the precise
time of the Allied landing on Gallipoli, security forces began to arrest
Armenian elites throughout Anatolia, starting with Istanbul, and to question,
torture and murder most of them. Various Ottoman army sources of spring
1915 from the provinces certainly do not support the claim of a general
uprising, albeit that there were indeed instances of sabotage and some
resistance to policies of oppression and massacre as well as the
aforementioned desertions, while the Russian-Armenian volunteer battalions
were clearly an incendiary element.44 On the same day, 24 April, a telegram
from Talat to Jemal Pasha, military governor of Syria, announced that
henceforth Armenians should be deported not to Konya, as had been the
limited case of the Armenians expelled from Cilician Zeytun in March, but
to northern Syria.45
Without mentioning the Armenians explicitly, a provisional law of 27 May
– the parliament had been closed on 13 March, giving the CUP the freest of
free hands – allowed repression and mass deportation if national security
were at issue. The law served as legal cover for the comprehensive removal
of Asia Minor’s Armenians. Although it did not limit removal to clearly
defined zones, and although the Entente publicly warned the Ottoman
authorities of future punishment for crimes against humanity on 24 May,
German officials still did not anticipate or counter the risk of an Empire-
wide anti-Armenian campaign. On the contrary, they approved removals in
the war zones, tried to appease German friends of the Armenians and
regional experts and, in early June, backed a public Ottoman denial of what
was unfolding in the east.46
The German approval of supposedly limited removal in the eastern
provinces was a decisive breakthrough for a regime which a few months
previously had found itself strictly bound to implement, under partly
German pressure, a monitored co-existence of Christians and Muslims,
Armenians, Syriacs, Kurds and Turks in eastern Asia Minor. Indeed, in a few
instances German officers on the ground signed or approved removals. The
best-documented case is that of Lieutenant Colonel Böttrich, head of the
railway department of the Ottoman general staff. Against the will of the civil
direction of the Baghdad Railway, he signed an order of deportation for
Armenian employees of the railway, though he knew well in October 1915
that this would involve the death of most or all of them.47 As early as mid
June 1915, Enver’s confidant, Hans Humann, the German naval attaché of
the German embassy, stated that ‘the Armenians are now more or less
exterminated because they conspired with the Russians. This is hard, but
useful.’48 Ottoman propaganda succeeded in the provinces in creating the
impression that the removal was German doctrine, though as the anti-
Armenian measures progressed, German diplomats did mount limited and
generally ineffectual protests. After his employee, Dr Mordtmann, had had a
frank conversation with Talat, ambassador von Wangenheim began to
understand in mid June 1915 that the supposedly limited removal from the
war zones, for which the CUP government had secured German support, was
part of a fully fledged programme of removal-cum-extinction throughout
Asia Minor.49 ‘The expulsion and relocation of the Armenian people was
limited until 14 days ago to the provinces nearest to the eastern theatre of
war’, Wangenheim finally wrote to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg on 7 July,
but ‘since then the Porte has resolved to extend these measures also’ to many
other provinces, ‘even though these parts of the country are not threatened
by any enemy invasion for the time being. This situation and the way in
which the relocation is being carried out shows that the government is
indeed pursuing its purpose of eradicating the Armenian race from the
Turkish Empire.’50
The removal of the Armenians from eastern Asia Minor mainly took place
from May to September, and from western Anatolia and the province of
Edirne in Thrace from July to October 1915. In eastern Anatolia, men and
youngsters were mostly massacred on the spot, with those in the army –
mostly already separated into unarmed labour battalions – also killed. At the
Dardanelles and in Arabia, Armenian soldiers continued to fight in the
Ottoman army. Removal from the west included the men and some of the
deportees went by train. Women and children from central and eastern Asia
Minor endured starvation, mass rape and enslavement on their marches.
In certain places, in particular the province of Diyarbekir under governor
Reşid, removal amounted to the massacre of men, women and children even
before they reached the provincial boundaries. On 28 September 1915,
Reşid sent a telegram to the Minister of the Interior, proudly stating that he
had removed 120,000 Armenians from his province.51 On 19 October a
friend named Halil Edib, vice-governor of the district of Mardin in the
province of Diyarbekir, telegraphed his congratulations for the kurban
bayramı (religious holiday), saying, ‘I kiss your hands, you who have gained
us the six [eastern] provinces and you have opened to us access to Turkestan
[a key pan-Turkist term] and to the Caucasus.’52 The authorities of the
province of Diyarbekir treated all Christians in a similarly murderous
manner.
As early as 26 October 1914, Talat had ordered the governor of Van to
remove the Christian Syriac population in Hakkâri near the Persian border.
He considered this population unreliable, and wanted to disperse it among a
Muslim majority in western provinces. He could not, however, implement
this early policy of removal and dispersal in autumn 1914,53 and did not
transform it into a general policy of removal-cum-extermination as in the
case of the Armenians. Compared to Armenian policy, indeed, centralised
Syriac policy remained little articulated. In June 1915 the regime
nevertheless applied a policy of destruction against the Syriac enclave in
Hakkâri and also against villages near Midyat that reacted against Reşid’s
anti-Christian extermination. The German officer Scheubner-Richter, a
member of the unit involved, considered the Syriac struggle to be ‘a not
unjustified defence by people who feared meeting the same fate as most
Armenians’.54 The villagers were ordered to submit to deportation. The
Ottoman army could not defeat Azakh, but in the case of Hakkâri, two-thirds
of about 100,000 Syriacs perished, while the others managed to escape to
Russian-held territory.
Irrespective of the precise position of Talat about the Syriac future, the
way in which Ottoman forces attacked the Syriac population in the provinces
of Van and Diyarbekir and in northern Persia amounted to genocide.55
Rather like the Romanies in relation to the European Jews under Nazi rule,
the Syriacs/Assyro-Chaldeans were not at the centre of the perpetrating
state’s agenda, but nevertheless were widely killed when encountered. An
authority in this area, David Gaunt presents statistics to the effect that
250,000 Syriacs were massacred or killed in fighting out of a pre-war
population of 563,000 in the Ottoman Empire and Persia, though it is clear
that precise figures are impossible to obtain.56 Most Christians, Armenians
and Syriacs were massacred in, or removed from, the eastern provinces from
spring 1915.
Several hundred thousand destitute Armenian deportees arrived in Syria in
the summer and autumn of 1915. Most of the survivors were not resettled, as
had been promised, but isolated in camps and starved to death according to
rules followed by the Ministry of Interior that their local or regional
demographic proportion must not exceed 2, 5 or 10 per cent.57 Those who
nevertheless survived were massacred in 1916. Ali Fuad, the governor of
Der Zor, who had helped the deportees to make a new life, was replaced in
July 1916 by the hardliner Salih Zeki, who organised the killings. According
to an Ottoman source, 192,750 deportees concentrated near Der Zor, among
them many children, were killed in the second half of 1916.58 Only recently
have scholars published witness accounts of the extreme horror of this
‘second phase of the genocide’ (in the phrase of Raymond Kévorkian) and
studies on limited efforts to help the victims.59
The major group of survivors were 100,000–150,000 Armenians whom
the CUP triumvir Jemal Pasha settled in southern Syria, converting them to
Islam. A number of the survivors worked as forced labourers in military
factories.60 The destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was
symbolically completed on 11 August 1916, when the Armenian
community’s National Constitution (Nizâmnâme) of 1863 – the backbone of
a ‘menacing’ Armenian dynamism according to the official news agency
Millî – was abolished, and with it the Tanzimat principle of equality-cum-
plurality.61
In contrast to the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s, conversion only
warranted survival in 1915–16 if the Ministry of Interior permitted it
according to the demographic rationale that underlay its vision of Turkish
sovereignty in Asia Minor. Conversion of religious identity and confession
of faith was secondary to this rationale; or, as the governor of Trabzon put it
at the beginning of July 1915, ‘an Armenian converted to Islam will be
expelled as a Muslim Armenian’.62 This policy was a clear break with
Muslim religious and imperial tradition, and so conversion with survival in
Anatolia was a sensitive issue for the Ministry of Interior, which resolutely
pursued its goal while trying to manage Muslim sensibilities and realities in
the provinces. In contrast to some military doctors in the CUP reputed to be
atheists, Talat was a practising Muslim.63 During the main period of removal
from July to October 1915, he prohibited conversion with few exceptions. 64
Concerning the death toll, still the most reliable of the widely varying
figures is that more than half of the nearly 2 million Ottoman Armenians
alive in 1914 were killed in 1915–16. An important contribution to the
discussion on the extent of the killings was the publication in 2008 of Talat’s
notebook, complete with demographic figures. Talat considered the Ottoman
Armenian population in pre-1915 Asia Minor to be 1.5 million, of which he
claimed to have removed more than 1.1 million.65 According to the statistics
of the Armenian Patriarchate, the Ottoman Armenian pre-war population
numbered slightly more than 2 million. Raymond Kévorkian, who has
worked on detailed Armenian demography across the genocide period,
estimates that two-thirds of about 2 million Ottoman Armenians were killed,
that is, approximately 1.3 million people.66
Beside ‘Jemal’s Armenians’, few deportees had been able to escape and
reach Aleppo. More important was the earlier escape to Erzincan and
Erzurum, occupied by the Russian army in 1916. Thousands of Armenians
had found refuge among the Alevis in mountainous Dersim in 1915 and
were able to cross the Russian lines in 1916. Others had fled beyond the
Eastern Front and returned with the advancing Russian army, which
retreated after the October Revolution in November 1917. Unable to stop the
return of Young Turkish rule, Armenian militias on the retreat committed
massacres against Muslims, including the Alevi population, which did not
support them then in that region.67 By this time, such massacres were only
one manifestation of a much wider set of inter-communal crimes committed.
The fluctuation of the Caucasus/eastern Anatolian front and the
infrastructural devastation of the region created tremendous insecurity for all
– though again in particular for the Armenian population, among which were
hundreds of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918 allowed the relaunch of pan-
Turkist schemes and raised the spectre of further Armenian extermination.
Russia lost a huge part of her western Empire to Germany, but also, as in
Article 4, the north-eastern corner of Asia Minor that it had acquired in the
Berlin Treaty in 1878. In the eyes of the independent Social Democrats in
the German Reichstag, this treaty threatened the Armenians hitherto under
Russian protection in the Caucasus. The German Foreign Office confirmed
in June 1918 the advance of Ottoman troops far beyond the agreement of
Brest-Litovsk. More than a million people were in danger, according to
Matthias Erzberger, by then a leader of the democratic opposition in the
Reichstag.68 He added that Talat’s promise of protection was worthless.
Enver’s uncle, General Halil (Kut), in fact openly threatened to annihilate
the Armenians even in Caucasian Armenia.69
The resolution of the world war on the Western European, southern
Balkan and Syrian fronts prevented a further Ottoman advance in the
Caucasus. The Republic of Armenia, declared on 28 May 1918, hoped to
regain a part of north-eastern Anatolia via post-war diplomacy, but the
related Treaty of Sèvres of August 1920 was not implemented. Armenia was
then involved in wars with both Georgia and Azerbaijan, the latter
particularly marked by anti-civilian violence by Armenian as well as Azeri
forces. Soviet troops finally prevented eastern Armenia from being crushed
by the Turkish nationalist forces that again advanced towards Erevan in
1920. In southern Asia Minor, around 150,000 Armenian refugees, who had
resettled in Cilicia after 1918, fled when French forces retreated in 1921.70
The price of ‘success’

While visiting Berlin in August 1918, Talat, now Grand Vizier as well as
Minister of the Interior and of Finance, realised that the war was lost, but
consoled himself that ‘we have given Anatolia the form of a national home
and suppressed the elements of subversion and discord’.71 This would be the
basis for the future of that region. In contrast to the elites of the other
empires collapsing in the 1910s, the Young Turks anticipated and
successfully prepared the elements of a future that would preserve their
group’s hold on power. Despite their defeat, and with the exception of a few
top leaders lost to the cause, the Young Turks formed the political, military
and bureaucratic elite during the Greco-Turkish War and in the Republic of
Turkey founded in 1923. Genocide thus successfully served the political
project of an exclusively Turkish national home (Türk Yurdu) in Asia Minor.
The founders of the nation-state, both the cohort under Talat Pasha in the
1910s and the cohort under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the interwar period,
preserved the hegemony of Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims who had been
politically predominant in the Ottoman Empire. Until the end of the Cold
War, their master narrative of modern Turkish renewal against tremendous
odds largely influenced international historiography, along the way
suppressing research on Young Turk crimes against humanity.72 That
intellectual situation has now changed markedly.
The Young Turks’ worldview was more ethno-religious and cultural than
the Nazis’ more biological and ethno-racial ideology, though both were
social Darwinist in character.73 In both cases, young imperial elites and
(would-be) saviours of empire traumatically had lived through and witnessed
the loss of power, prestige, territory and homes in their youth. Driven by the
angst of ruin, they succeeded in establishing a single-party regime that
allowed them to implement revolutionary policies of change, including the
expulsion and extermination of domestic ‘enemy’ groups. The removal of
the Armenians was the most systematically murderous episode in an
evolving campaign of demographic engineering in Turkey from 1913
onwards. With few exceptions, all Anatolian Christians were also excluded
from the Turko-Muslim national struggle for Asia Minor after 1918 and,
both demographically and culturally, from the construction of the new
Republic of Turkey. The presumption that certain populations were
inherently problematic by virtue of their identity ultimately underpinned a
‘successful’ model for eliminating the issue of minorities through forced
resettlement. This rationale was condoned by Western diplomacy in the 1923
Treaty of Lausanne, with Britain in particular using ‘population exchange’ as
a way of washing its hands of a demographic problem it had such a hand in
creating by its earlier support of the Greek army of occupation and then by
the policy of ‘pacification’ in Anatolia.
Behind the sanitised rhetoric of ‘population exchange’ lay hideous human
realities, not least because for the vast majority of Ottoman ‘Greeks’ to
whom the language of exchange was applied, the Treaty of Lausanne was
just confirmation of a fait accompli. Only 190,000 were transferred in the
sense meant, of the up to 1.25 million Christians – mainly ‘Greek’ Orthodox
Christians from western Anatolia and the Pontus – who left Asia Minor for
Greece, most of whom were quite literally fleeing for their lives. The Greek
occupying presence in western Anatolia from May 1919 had served to
further Athenian and Anglo-French geopolitics, but its use as a
counterweight to Kemal’s revived nationalist movement led to full-scale war
in 1921–2. The Greek army and its collaborators committed numerous
massacres against civilian populations and destroyed infrastructure vital to
the life of many, especially in the scorched-earth retreat, but they met a foe
that was at least as ruthless and ultimately, in its success, even more violent.
The Turkish nationalist army drove the Greek forces back to the sea, and
with them swathes of the remaining Christian population, murdering large
numbers of them in the process and others through forced labour. A further
mass exodus of terrorised Christians occurred after the conclusion of the
war, but before the period scheduled for the (allegedly) orderly ‘transfer’.
Some 356,000 Muslims were ‘transferred’ in the other direction across the
Aegean, often in terrible conditions. Like many of the Christian arrivals in
Greece, these Muslims found themselves alienated by their new
surroundings and with little in common with their co-religionists – thus
giving the lie to the essentialism that had so shaped their fates.
Lausanne replaced the Treaty of Sèvres (itself a settlement that might well
have entailed the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from within the borders of
new states created in the fringes of Anatolia) and tacitly endorsed the logic
of Young Turk policy even if not all its manifestations. Military ‘facts’
created new political realities. At once revisionist and avant-garde, the
‘Lausanne paradigm’ provides one bridge from a Wilhelmine Germany, on
the whole deeply embarrassed by the genocide by its junior partner, to a
Nazi Germany that endorsed and adopted multiple genocides in the Second
World War.
A non-genocidal Ottoman decade would have required Ottoman neutrality
in 1914 as well as the Young Turks’ will to continue Ottoman reform and to
build up Asia Minor together with the Ottoman Christians. Instead, they
pursued a maximalist, war-related desire of imperial restoration and even
pan-Turkist expansion as well as the ideal of Asia Minor as a Turkish home.
Once they had been frustrated about the first, they turned to their second
goal and opted for unprecedented violence against fellow citizens. Ottoman
neutrality might have drastically shortened the First World War and thus
even might have forestalled the Bolshevik Revolution.74 For this
counterfactual course to have played out, the CUP would have had to heed
the advice of prudent people like CUP member Cavid Bey, instead of
activists like Enver Pasha or prophets of world war and world revolution like
Alexander Helphand-Parvus.
Counterfactuals demonstrate that contemporaries had choices. In the case
of the CUP in 1915–16, the choices are evident. In the face of overwhelming
evidence it is no longer intellectually viable for historians to doubt that
genocide took place in Anatolia during the First World War. Here is one of
the most terrible chapters in the history of a conflict, the character and
dimensions of which changed the nature of warfare.
The authors would like to thank Mark Levene, William Schabas and the
volume and series editors for their comments on drafts of this chapter. They
thank Ahmet Efiloğlu for the statistics on the expulsions and deportations of
Rûm.
1 Where the ‘in part’ clearly means ‘in substantial part’.
2 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide:
Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990);
and Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, vol. I: The
Meaning of Genocide (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
3 Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton
4 The incorrect notion of removal limited to the eastern provinces, of purely

temporary security measures and purely temporary confiscation of property
has made its way up to some contributions to a recent issue of Middle East
Critique, 20:3 (Fall 2011).
5 See the bibliographical essay to this chapter below.
6 The legal concept of genocide is the focus of William Schabas’s Genocide

in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, 2nd edn (Cambridge University
Press, 2009). Schabas deals with the Armenian case in, inter alia,
Unimaginable Atrocities: Justice, Politics, and Rights at the War Crimes
Tribunals (Oxford University Press, 2012).
7 The clearest recent instance of contrasting the two cases is the book by the
Turkish diplomat Yücel Güçlü, The Holocaust and the Armenian Case in
Comparative Perspective (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2012). For observations that Guenter Lewy, in his The Armenian Massacres
in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City, UT: University of
Utah Press, 2005), seems to make the Holocaust into the paradigm of
genocide, see Hans-Lukas Kieser’s review in Vierteljahreshefte für
Zeitgeschichte – Rezensionen in den sehepunkten, 7 (2007), p. 29. For the
limits of Lewy’s approach as it might be applied to the Holocaust, see Mark
Levene’s review of another of Lewy’s works – in this case arguing that the
Nazi murder of Europe’s Roma and Sinti did not constitute genocide, in
Journal of Contemporary History 37:2 (2002), pp. 275–92.
8 Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: ‘Ethnische

Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2011).
9 Fuat Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Müslümanları İskân Politikası, 1913–

1918 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001), pp. 139–55; Jakob Künzler, In the
Land of Blood and Tears (Arlington, MA: Armenian Cultural Foundation,
2007), pp. 67–9; and Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey:
Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 107–22.
10 Mahir Şaul and Patrick Yves Royer, West African Challenge to Empire:
Culture and History in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 2001), including pp. 2–5, 24–5 on scale and some tentative
comparative considerations. Thanks to Mark Levene for drawing attention to
this episode: see his The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I: Devastation: The
European Rimlands, 1912–1938 (Oxford University Press, 2013) for
additional contextualisation.
11 Eric Lohr, Nationalising the Russian Empire: The Campaign against
Enemy Aliens during World War One (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003); Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia
during the First World War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1999); Alexander V. Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and
Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 2005); and Peter Holquist, ‘Les violences de
l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs en 1915: causes et limites’, in John
Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–15 (Paris: Tallandier,
2010), pp. 191–219.
12 Peter Holquist, ‘The politics and practice of the Russian occupation of

Armenia, 1915–February 1917’, in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek
and Norman M. Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and
Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011), pp. 151–74, especially pp. 158–63.
13 Prusin, Nationalising a Borderland, p. 56.
14 Mark Levene, ‘The Balfour Declaration: a case of mistaken identity’,

English Historical Review, 107 (1992), pp. 54–77. On Russian Jewish
policy, see Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I.
15 Edward D. Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954); for the deeper
colonial context, see also Richard Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917:
A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1960).
16 The CUP triumvir Jemal Pasha is outspoken on this point: Djemal

[Jemal] Pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman 1913–1919 (London:
Hutchinson, 1922), pp. 353–54.
17 Dikran M. Kaligian, Armenian Organization and Ideology under

Ottoman Rule, 1908–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2011).
18 Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘Réformes ottomanes et cohabitation entre chrétiens

et Kurdes (1839–1915)’, Etudes Rurales, 186 (January 2011), pp. 43–60.
19 Jelle Verheij, ‘Diyarbekir and the Armenian crisis of 1895’, in Joost

Jongerden and Jelle Verheij, Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir 1870–
1915 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 85–145; and Jelle Verheij, ‘Die armenischen
Massaker von 1894–1896: Anatomie und Hintergründe einer Krise’, in
Hans-Lukas Kieser (ed.), Die armenische Frage und die Schweiz (1896–
1923) (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 1999), pp. 69–129.
20 Rober Koptaş, ‘Zohrab, Papazyan ve Pastırmacıyan’ın kalemlerinden

1914 Ermeni reformu ve İttihatçı-Taşnak müzakeleri’, Tarih ve Toplum Yeni
Yaklaşımlar, 5 (Spring 2007), pp. 159–78.
21 Plan published in Turkish in Yusuf H. Bayur, Türk inkılâbı tarihi, 3 vols.

(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu basımevi, 1991), vol. II, part 3, pp. 169–72; in
French, taken from the Livre orange russe, no. 147, in André N.
Mandelstam, Le sort de l’empire ottoman (Lausanne: Payot, 1917), pp. 236–
38; first draft and final plan in German in Djemal Pascha, Erinnerungen
eines türkischen Staatsmannes (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922), pp.
340–51. See Zekeriya Türkmen, Vilayât-ı Şarkiye Islahat Müffettişliği
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006).
22 In the eyes of the CUP and of nationalist Republican historiography,

however, it was. See Bayur, Türk inkılâbı tarihi, vol. II: 3, pp. 172–7. Talat
Pasha’s, Halil Bey’s and, in particular, Jemal Pasha’s memoirs, which
reproduce both the final plan and the first Russian draft, prove the critical
importance of this point: see Hatıraları ve mektuplarıyla Talât Paşa, ed.
Osman S. Kocahanoğlu (Istanbul: Temel, 2008), pp. 38–44; İsmail Arar
(ed.), Osmanlı mebusan meclisi reisi Halil Menteşe’nin anıları (Istanbul:
Hürriyet Vakfı, 1986), pp. 173–6; and Djemal, Erinnerungen, pp. 337–53.
23 Koptaş, ‘Zohrab’, pp. 170–5.

24 Fuat Dündar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian
Question (1878–1918) (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010),
pp. 78–9; figures from Ahmet Efiloğlu.
25 Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 97–123; figures from Ahmet
Efiloğlu.
26 For the alliance with Germany and its implementation, see Mustafa
Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the
First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 93–118; and
Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914–1918 (Princeton
27 Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, p. 28.
28 Aksakal, Ottoman Road, pp. 107–8 and 127–30. For Gulkevich’s

telegram of 27 January 1914 see Sbornik diplomaticheskikh dokumentov:
Reformy v Armenii, 26 noiab: 1912 goda–10 maia 1914 goda (Petrograd:
Gosudarstv. Tipografija, 1915), doc. 148, pp. 165–174; with thanks to Peter
Holquist for the reference.
29 Erol Köroğlu, Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in

Turkey during World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); and Tekin Alp,
Türkismus und Pantürkismus (Weimar: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1915).
30 Raymond Kévorkian, Le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob,

2006), p. 221.
31 Wolfdieter Bihl, Die Kaukasus-Politik der Mittelmächte: Ihre Basis in

der Orient-Politik und ihre Aktionen 1914–1917 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag,
1975), p. 66; Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘World war and world revolution:
Alexander Helphand-Parvus in Germany and Turkey’, Kritika: Explorations
in Russian and Eurasian History, 12:2 (2011), pp. 387–410; and Hans-Lukas
Kieser, ‘Matthias Erzberger und die osmanischen Armenier im Ersten
Weltkrieg’, in Christopher Dowe (ed.), ‘Nun danket alle Gott für diesen
braven Mord’ – Matthias Erzberger: Ein Demokrat in Zeiten des Hasses
(Karlsruhe: G. Braun Buchverlag, forthcoming, 2013).
32 Kévorkian, Le génocide, pp. 274–82.
33 Hans-Lukas Kieser, Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in

den Ostprovinzen der Türkei 1839–1938 (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2000), pp.
331, 335–336, 445; and Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian
Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 136–8.
34 David Gaunt, ‘The Ottoman treatment of the Assyrians’, in Suny et al.

(eds.), A Question of Genocide, pp. 244–59, here p. 249.
35 Maurice Larcher, La Guerre Turque dans la Guerre Mondiale (Paris:

Chiron & Berger-Levrault, 1926), pp. 367–436; Joseph Pomiankowski, Der
Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches: Erinnerungen an die Türkei
aus der Zeit des Weltkrieges (Vienna: Amalthea-Verlag, 1928), pp. 98–105;
and Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in
the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 57.
36 Kévorkian, Le génocide, p. 285.
37 Kieser, Der verpasste Friede, pp. 448–53; and Bihl, Kaukasus-Politik, p.

233. Muslim witness accounts in Justin McCarthy, Esat Arslan, Cemalettin
Taşkıran and Őmer Turan, The Armenian Rebellion at Van (Salt Lake City,
UT: University of Utah Press, 2006), pp. 247–51.
38 David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian

Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias
Press, 2006), p. 63.
39 Pomiankowski, Zusammenbruch, p. 154.

40 Jay Winter, ‘Under the cover of war: the Armenian genocide in the
context of total war’, in Jay Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian
Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 37–51, here p.
41.
41 Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 158–93.
42 For the telegram to Enver Pasha, see T. C. Genelkurmay Başkanlığı,

Arşiv belgeleriyle Ermeni faaliyetleri 1914–1918 (‘Armenian activities in
the archive documents 1914–1918), 2 vols. (Ankara: Genelkurmay Basım
Evi, 2005), vol. I, pp. 424–5; the analogous telegram to the provinces is
translated in Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 186–7.
43 For example, in Eskişehir in the west (see Ahmed Refik, İki komite, iki
kital (Ankara: Kebikeç, 1994 [1919]), pp. 28–46) or in Urfa in the south-east
(see Künzler, Blood and Tears, pp. 16 and 21).
44 Arşiv belgeleriyle Ermeni faaliyetleri 1914–1918, vols. I and II reviewed

by Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘Urkatastrophe am Bosporus: Der Armeniermord im
Ersten Weltkrieg als Dauerthema internationaler (Zeit-)Geschichte’, Neue
Politische Literatur, 2 (2005), pp. 229–31; and Donald Bloxham, The Great
Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the
Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2005), chapter 2.
45 The Turkish Republic Prime Ministry General Directorate of the State

Archives, Directorate of Ottoman Archives (ed.), Armenians in Ottoman
Documents (1915–1920) (Ankara: Prime Ministry General Directorate of the
State Archives, 1995), p. 26.
46 Political Archives of the German Foreign Office (Politisches Archiv des

Auswärtiges Amts, Berlin, hereafter ‘PA-AA’): Botschafter Wangenheim an
PA-AA/R14086; Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes:
Bericht über das Schicksal des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei während
des Weltkrieges (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919), pp. v–vii; and Trumpener,
Germany and the Ottoman Empire, pp. 209–10.
47 PA-AA/BoKon/171, 1915–11–18-DE-001.
48 Humann quoted in Hilmar Kaiser, ‘Die deutsche Diplomatie und der

armenische Völkermord’, in Fikret Adanır and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds.),
Osmanismus, Nationalismus und der Kaukasus: Muslime und Christen,
Türken und Armenier im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Reichert,
2005), pp. 213–14.
49 PA-AA/R14086, 1915–06–17-DE-003. English translation on the

website www.armenocide.de
50 PA-AA/R14086, 1915–07–07-DE-001.
51 General Directorate of the State Archives (ed.), Armenians in Ottoman

Documents, p. 105.
52 Cited in Nejdet Bilgi, Mehmed Reşid [Şahingiray], Hayatı ve Hâtıraları

(Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1997), p. 29. For more on Halil Edib, see Uğur
Ü. Üngör, ‘Center and periphery in the Armenian genocide: the case of
Diyarbekir province’, in Hans-Lukas Kieser and Elmar Plozza (eds.), Der
Völkermord an den Armeniern, die Türkei und Europa (Zurich: Chronos
Verlag, 2006), pp. 71–88, here p. 73.
53 Order transliterated and translated in Gaunt, Massacres, p. 447; Hilmar

Kaiser, ‘Genocide at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire’, in Donald
Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide
Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 365–85, here p. 371.
54 Paul Leverkühn, Posten auf ewiger Wache: Aus dem abenteuerreichen

Leben des Max von Scheubner-Richter (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt,
1938), p. 83.
55 Gaunt, Massacres, p. 188; Kévorkian, Le génocide, p. 463.

56 Gaunt, ‘The Ottoman treatment of the Assyrians’, p. 245.
57 Dündar, Crime of Numbers, pp. 113–19; and Akçam, The Young Turks’
Crime, pp. 242–63.
58 Raymond Kevorkian, ‘L’extermination des Arméniens par le régime

jeune-turc (1915–1916)’, in Encyclopédie en ligne des violences de masse,
(22 March 2010), consulted 24 August 2012: www.massviolence.org/L-
extermination-des-Armeniens-par-le-regime-jeune-turc-1915, 57.
59 Aram Andonian, En ces sombres jours, trans. Hervé Georgelin (Geneva:

Métis Presses, 2007); Hilmar Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor: Death,
Survival, and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915–1917 (Princeton,
NJ: Gomidas Institute, 2002); and Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘Beatrice Rohner’s
work in the death camps of Armenians in 1916’, in Jacques Sémelin, Claire
Andrieu and Sarah Gensburger (eds.), Resisting Genocide: The Multiple
Forms of Rescue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 367–82.
61 See André Mandelstam, Le sort de l’Empire Ottoman (Lausanne and

Paris: Librairie Payot, 1917), p. 284.
62 German consul in Trabzon, Bergfeld, to the Reichskanzler on 9 July

1915, PA-AA/R14086.
63 Hasan Babacan, Mehmed Talât Paşa, 1874–1921 (Ankara: Türk Tarih

Kurumu, 2005), p. 48.
64 Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime, pp. 296–301.
65 Murat Bardakçı (ed.), Talât Paşa’nın evrâk-ı metrûkesi (Istanbul:

Everest, 2008), p. 109.
66 Kevorkian, ‘L’extermination’, p. 57.
67 Ahmet Refik, İki komite, iki kitâl, pp. 47–82; Kieser, Der verpasste
Friede, p. 396; and Richard G. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia
(Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1971), pp. 20–5.
68 Erich Matthias (ed.), Der interfraktionelle Ausschuss 1917/18, 2 vols.

(Düsseldorf: Droste, 1959), vol. II, p. 410.
69 Hamit Bozarslan, ‘L’extermination des Arméniens et des juifs: quelques

éléments de comparaison’, in Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik Schaller
(eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah (‘The Armenian
genocide and the Shoah’) (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2002), pp. 322–3; and
Kévorkian, Le génocide, pp. 859–76.
71 Quoted in Muhittin Birgen, İttihat ver Terakki’de on sene: İttihat ve

Terakki neydi? (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2006), p. 460. Birgen was the
chief-editor of Tanin and a personal counsel of Talat.
72 Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, Part 3; Hans-Lukas Kieser,

‘Armenians, Turks, and Europe in the shadow of World War I: recent
historiographical developments’, in Kieser and Plozza (eds.), Der
Völkermord an den Armeniern, die Türkei und Europa, pp. 43–60.
73 For comparative approaches see the bibliographical essay to this chapter

below.
74 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, ‘The Second Constitutional Period, 1908–1918’, in

Reşat Kasaba (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. IV: Turkey in the
Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 62–111, here p. 94.
23 The laws of war
Annie Deperchin It was not a failure of law which led to the Great War. On
the contrary, the conflict was framed by law from its outbreak to its
conclusion, despite various violations of the rules of war. Such a
paradoxical situation demands explanation. From the middle of the
nineteenth century the international laws of war were framed slowly and
patiently. Despite these developments, on the eve of the First World War
these laws were still incomplete and fragile. Although they were broken in a
generalised way between 1914 and 1918, the laws of war nonetheless
remained a constant point of reference in the ‘lawful war’ (guerre du droit)
in which all the warring nations believed they were engaged. As a result, at
the end of the war this concept appeared as part of a peace claimed by the
Allies to be a victory of law and justice. They thereby created for the first
time a set of propositions in both penal and civil law concerning the
responsibilities of states at war.
The slow gestation of the international laws of war

Most states regulated the behaviour of combatant troops in operation well
before the First World War, with laws applicable to the armed forces
grouped in codes which condemned forms of conduct considered
undesirable. Killing outside combatant action and pillage, for example,
were generally forbidden in the aim not of humanising war but of assuring
military discipline. They did not constitute a universal set of laws of war
applicable to all potential belligerents.
Approaches
The determination to suppress violence as the way to settle differences
between nations is the ultimate aim of the laws of war. This concept must
be retained in any analysis of the evolution of international law, through a
mixture of idealism and pragmatism. This pacifist aim is anchored in two
lines of approach which are not mutually exclusive. The first can be defined
as ‘compassionate’ because it arises from sensitivity to the sufferings
caused by wars; this is mainly the approach of pacifists following the line of
Bertha von Suttner, who in 1889 asserted in Die Waffen nieder (‘Lay down
your arms’) that war is a crime. The second approach, the rationalist
approach, arose from consideration of the cost of modern warfare in terms
of lives and destruction, lessons learned from the wars of the second half of
the nineteenth century. Although the latter approach was to be reflected
judicially in the theories of natural law, according to which certain elements
of law are universal (because they are born of rationality and human
sociability), the former created the energy which made it possible to put
such principles into concrete form. From this fusion of approaches emerged
an international code of the laws of war which arose out of the braiding
together of incomplete standards dictated by the urgent need to take action
to limit sufferings and those norms which, more systematically, attacked the
root of the problem: war itself, which must be eradicated.
Whatever the nature of norms, their force required their formal
implementation among nations. In effect, their development shows that
even if nations ended up accepting a corpus of law, with more or less
conviction, its effectiveness was not so much a function of compromise as
of their recognition (or not) of the supremacy of international law. In order
to understand how the Great War affected law, a fundamental legal question
must be addressed: how to justify the superiority of these norms over the
will of nations? If the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648, signed to bring an end
collectively to the Thirty Years’ War, the first ‘European war’, were the
foundation on the international scale of recognition of the equality and
sovereignty of nations, how could international law assert itself over them?
The basic question: does international law apply

to states?
In this respect, judicial thinking drew very extensively on the seventeenth-
century work of Grotius in his On the Law of War and Peace (1625). In this
he defined natural law as consisting of ‘the principles of sound reasoning
which make us recognise that an action is morally honest or dishonest
according to the match or necessary mismatch it has with the reasonable or
sociable nature of Man’. In other words, natural reasoning imposes rules on
human relations outside all social authority. International law combined
with natural law is not the creation of nations: it precedes them and through
their powers of reasoning, states discover it. Emmerich de Vattel took the
concept forward: his Law of Nations, published in English in 1758, declared
rules to be unconditionally obligatory which until then had been considered
certainly beneficial, but still not compulsory.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the idea developed that the
progress of a state in the eyes of civilisation was measured by its capacity to
proscribe violence. Enlightened minds, sensitive to the human suffering
inescapable in war, threw themselves into the struggle against war, which
was less and less seen as the normal way to settle conflicts when diplomacy
– in other words, politics – had failed to resolve them.
The struggle was initially undertaken very pragmatically, in the setting of
the battlefield where the distress of the wounded was inescapable. It was
driven by the forceful energy of Henry Dunant and was the outcome of an
interview with Napoleon III, which by chance took place on the battlefield
of Solferino in 1859. As a result of seeing the butchery (40,000 men dead
and wounded) and the wholly inadequate practical help for the sufferings of
the soldiers of both sides, Dunant devoted the rest of his life to ensuring that
the wounded were deemed to have rights, whatever their nationality. On 22
August 1864 the first international Convention was signed by twelve
nations; other nations would join later. The twelve met at the invitation of
the Swiss federal government, as proposed by organisations set up by
Dunant to provide aid for wounded soldiers. This Convention ‘for the
improvement of the condition of soldiers wounded during combat’ was a
decisive turning point in the evolution of the law. From that time on, efforts
in the struggle against war turned to the development of written norms
which nations undertook to respect. No superior authority had developed
these norms or could observe their implementation; still, the idea grew
stronger despite its controversial character that, according to the maxim
pacta sunt servanda (‘laws which must be obeyed’), the engagements freely
undertaken by states had the strength of law. Such undertakings established
an international law constraining nations, as would happen under a
supranational law drawn up by an institution placed above them.
Nonetheless, the legal application of this theory was difficult to
implement because, although nations could see that international law
represented an ideal which it was right to support in the light of their own
particular interests, they were generally reluctant to accept its constraint in
practice. In consequence, for each nation war took on the character of an
exercise of free will, not open to legal interpretation if applied and still less
to sanction, if not. The law must restrict itself to informing belligerents as to
how war was to be declared and ended, what rules must be respected in the
conduct of hostilities and how the rights of neutrals should be respected,
without approaching the question of knowing when – or why – it was
legitimate to go to war. Leaving aside questions of the legitimacy of war, it
was left to natural law and its moral approach to the problem to decide
whether or not a particular war was justifiable.
Acceptance of these norms occurred through the exchange of documents
by delegates authorised to do so in international conferences. The ever-
increasing number of their undertakings added further weight to the move
towards a degree of universality. From then on, any nation which failed to
respect rules of which the content and text had been discussed and accepted
collectively found itself in danger of being deemed outside the circle of
civilised states. This was an outcome wanted by no one; hence the
importance of the choice of questions to appear on conference agendas.
Indeed, these protocols took on added importance, because by limiting the
freedom of action of states in war in certain respects, they pointed towards
regulation to come.
The development of the Treaties of Westphalia evidently enabled the
establishment of a balance of the advantages conceded to each state, as well
as a collective approach to problems, which represented the best way to
limit conflict. In 1868 the personal initiative of the Tsar took this objective
further, in establishing the regular convening of meetings as part of the
customary framework for nations to discuss the limitations of weaponry.
The conference that he called at St Petersburg ended not with a convention
signed by all the states, but with a shared declaration which dealt only with
the banning of one weapon, ‘any projectile weighing less than 400 grammes
which would be explosive or charged with a fulminant or inflammable
materials’. The result may seem very modest. It must, however, be
remembered that fear of bullets, designed to explode within the body, was a
central obsession for the military at the time. If it was not a revolution in the
limitation of weapons, which was the desired result, it was nonetheless a
matter of importance. Weaponry was one of the most sensitive issues on the
table, and the very considerable progress represented by this shared
declaration on this particular topic has not been properly emphasised. Nor
has the range of signatures assembled: with the exception of Brazil, they
were all European and represented virtually all the belligerents in a
potential European war. The conference also showed that preliminary
reflection on matters of doctrine would enable national representatives to be
more effective in the necessarily limited period of their meetings. It was to
this need that eleven professors of law wished to respond when they met at
Ghent in 1873. Acting entirely on their own initiative, they decided to
found the Institute of International Law. The following year, once more on
the initiative of the Tsar, a first effort in thinking about collective regulation
was tried out at the Brussels Conference. Again, this did not result in a
collective undertaking, because the object of the conference was purely to
deliberate on the Russian proposal, which was submitted as a working basis
for discussion. The instructions of the governments were very precise in
this respect. As a result the conference agreed a text in the form of a
structured ‘Project for an international declaration on the laws and customs
of war’, consisting of fifty-six articles supported by comments from the
delegates on points of disagreement.
The final protocol was signed on 27 August 1874. As much in the
subjects which it approached (ways of harming the enemy, sieges and
bombardment, spies, prisoners of war and, above all, questions linked to
occupation and the nature of being a belligerent) as in the search for a
precise formula for the presentation of the text, this conference established
the future laws of war. Its work inspired the jurists of the Institute of
International Law. At their congress in Oxford, on 9 September 1880, they
published the Manual of the Laws and Customs of War on Land, in the form
of a small code designed to make it easier for each nation to disseminate
knowledge of the laws of war among the military. It aroused interest and
discussion, but was in no way made obligatory, for this would have required
a clear political will. This determination emerged at the conference that met
at The Hague in 1899, where the Manual was used as the working basis of
deliberations. Twenty-six powers sent delegates to the conference, jurists
and military experts, and signed the final act. The corpus that developed
included conventions, declarations and proposals which the states agreed
formally to activate thereafter.
From the common declaration to the congress was a step of great
significance, particularly in the context of a multi-lateral convention
through which nations committed themselves in relation to each other. Their
number gave force to the total sum of signatures, to the extent of perhaps
creating a form of transcendence in relation to the sovereignty of nations.
At the same time, some sensitive subjects had been debated, not least the
law applicable to occupied territories. The considerable contribution of the
Institute of International Law in the construction of the emerging legal
structure was honoured by the award of the fourth Nobel Peace Prize in
1904.
Nonetheless this structure remained unfinished, and its completion was
the object of a second conference which met at The Hague in 1907, on the
initiative of the United States. The intention was to address the question of
war, the source of all suffering, which preceding conferences had sought to
cut back to the roots and eliminate. The question took this form: how could
nations be prevented from turning to war to settle their differences? The
judicial tool of arbitration, instituted in 1899, provided the solution which,
they believed, must now be rendered obligatory and therefore effective.
Eight years after the first conference to which the title of ‘peace
conference’ had been applied, forty-four nation-states – that is, the great
majority at the time, including a number of non-European powers – placed
their signature at the foot of the convention. One wonders if the scale of the
feat was grasped at the time: forty-four nations had agreed to rules which
would restrict their action in war by reference to specific protocols and
norms.
Work continued thereafter, despite difficulties, and the task was certainly
not over. Many questions remained in suspension, and the norms elaborated
had to be made explicit. For this ongoing project, a Peace Palace was built
at The Hague and inaugurated in 1913. Another conference was proposed
there, to be held in 1914 or 1915.
On the eve of war: an incomplete and fragile legal

framework
To avoid war: arbitration and its limitations
What the delegates wanted to see emerging from the conferences at The
Hague was the abolition of war. Ideally, when a dispute arose between
them, nations would submit to jurisdiction to settle the points at issue and
thus spare the suffering war entailed in all its forms. In other words, it was a
matter of transposing the existing mode of settling litigation which already
existed in domestic law to the international level. Arbitration then seemed
the most suitable way to proceed because it was the most straightforward to
set up. The principle was accepted in 1899 and a permanent Court set up in
the following year. Between 1900 and 1907, however, it adjudicated in only
four cases. This was a modest total in relation to the international tensions
and great crises that escaped its intervention, for example in Tangier in
relation to Morocco, because that was resolved at an international
conference (Algeciras, 1906). The 1907 Peace Conference at The Hague
therefore adopted as its chief objective the development of international
arbitration.
In 1914, four methods were open to the nations concerned for the
peaceful resolution of conflicts: good offices, mediation, an international
commission of enquiry and international arbitration. The two first
procedures had more to do with diplomacy than with justice, since they
consisted in reconciling opposing claims and pacifying resentment before it
could endanger peace. The international commission of enquiry must allow
light to fall impartially on facts which were presented by the nations in
opposition to each other. Nothing prevented this commission from adopting
the role of conciliator, but the limitation of its competence to disputes which
did not engage either honour or the essential interests of the parties quite
sharply circumscribed its opportunities to intervene. The 1907 Convention
stipulated that the Court of Arbitration, now to be known as the Special
Court of Arbitration, must be accessible at all times . Nonetheless, no
jurisdiction had existed which was available to nations in disagreement. The
Court consisted of the permanent list of potential arbitrators (four names
specified for six years by each signatory nation) from which, in a case of
crisis, the states concerned were invited to select two arbitrators (only one
of whom was of their own nationality). They in turn were to designate the
President of the Court who would try the case in question. The Court must
be set up within two months. During this time, recourse to arbitration being
consensual, the states in dispute must draw up a case for arbitration, setting
out the point at issue to be settled and the timing for instruction, or for
presenting the full argument in writing. The case then came to trial and the
judgement notified to the nations in dispute, which undertook to execute it
in good faith; no appeal was envisaged.
The originators aimed at a procedure which would inevitably prevail
through its flexibility and impartiality; but as often happened with an aim to
provide a maximum of guarantees, this mechanism was onerous and
lengthy to put into action compared to the urgency of and popular attention
to international crises requiring rapid settlement. Further, it proved
impossible to reach consensus on making arbitration compulsory. In
addition, for those states using arbitration as a delaying tactic, military
mobilisation was authorised in parallel with the legal proceedings. This
possibility, combined with the optional nature of arbitration, meant that the
chances of a judicial settlement of the point at issue were remote. In fact,
the Special Court of Arbitration tried only eleven cases between 1907 and
1914. The nations in conflict did not turn to it in the Agadir Crisis in 1911,
nor to prevent the Balkan wars of 1912–13. Moreover, after Agadir, the
French President Poincaré proposed a conference in London to avoid the
conflict extending into Europe – proof that, on the eve of the Great War,
recourse to arbitration in an important crisis had not yet entered political
custom. To think that it might be possible to avoid war was no more than a
pious hope; and it was better to return to the rules on the conduct of war in
order to limit the damage and suffering of those caught up in it.
Limiting the cruelties and hardships of war:

regulating its conduct
The written and agreed legal corpus on the conduct of war was extended
rapidly over the five decades between the first Geneva Convention in 1864
and the outbreak of the First World War. The Geneva Convention for the
Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the
Field, dated 6 July 1906, was agreed after the convention signed at The
Hague on 29 July 1899 and before the second Hague Convention of 18
October 1907. Most of the regulations concerning the conduct of war on
land had been established in 1899, and the 1907 conference was arranged in
part to make progress in the regulation of war at sea. This effort opened the
way to the signing of eight conventions dealing with various features of this
aspect of warfare:
Convention VI: The Status of Enemy Merchant Ships at the Outbreak of
Hostilities Convention VII: The Conversion of Merchant Ships into
Warships Convention VIII: The Laying of Automatic Submarine Contact
Mines Convention IX: Bombardment by Naval Forces in Time of War
Convention X: Adaptation to Maritime War of the Principles of the Geneva
Convention (concerning the wounded) Convention XI: Certain Restrictions
with Regard to the Exercise of the Right of Capture in Naval War
Convention XII: The Creation of an International Prize Court Convention
XIII: The Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War
Overall, the judicial corpus of The Hague after 1907 was supposed to
protect prisoners, occupied populations – personally, and their possessions –
and combatants, in the case of war either on land or at sea. The use of
certain weapons was forbidden: apart from the explosive bullets which had
been in question since 1868, in particular this included gas in various forms
and projectiles launched from any kind of flying device. The use of other
weapons was regulated, such as the laying of underwater mines. According
to the principle inherited from the Enlightenment, with conflicts concerning
only the nations actually at war, neutrals should not suffer any
consequences except in relation to Conventions V and XII, relating
respectively to the duties of the Powers and of neutral persons in cases of
war on land and at sea.
To complete the legal structure relating to maritime warfare, a conference
in London in 1909 concluded on 26 February with a protocol. Discussions
continued the following year and concluded, on 19 September 1910, with a
specific convention on the establishment of the International Prize Court,
instituted during the 1909 conference. There was much more to be done in
this field, but it is important not to underestimate these achievements.
Those who had laboured long to establish this immense body of law
could legitimately feel cautiously satisfied: there were regulations framed
for all the domains that could be affected by war. And yet these pacts
required ratification and then implementation. The Russian delegate at the
two conferences at The Hague, Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens, was keenly
aware of the gaps in these documents. In order to proscribe zones of
illegality, he had the somewhat extraordinary idea of including a paragraph
in the preamble to the final act of the conference, which became
immortalised under the name of ‘the Martens clause’:
Until a more complete code of the laws of war has been issued, the
High Contracting Parties deem it expedient to declare that, in the cases
not included in the Regulations adopted by them, the inhabitants and
the belligerents remain under the protection and rule of the principles
of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among
civilised peoples, from the laws of humanity and the dictates of the
public conscience.1
Thus the principles of natural law in the form of ‘the laws of humanity’,
understood here in the sense of collective morality as of personal ethics, and
the customs of war, applied in all matters that had not been the object of
written agreed norms. This is a staggering extension of the position, well
beyond the political thinking of the states who signed the Hague accords.
Although jurists had no illusions as to the constraining power of these
principles, the reference made to them in an act signed by the great majority
of nations proclaimed a future, soon to arise, when an infringement of the
laws of war would remove the offender from the limited danger of moral
sanction alone and expose it to legal sanction.
Obstacles to the effectiveness of international law

The effectiveness of the international laws of war came up initially against
material obstacles. The first was the question of the sanctions risked by a
state and individuals in violation of its provisions. The introduction at
conventions of sanctions in the event of violation of the laws of war made
the nations hesitate to ratify them, and so the question did not figure on the
conference agendas in 1899 and 1907. Nonetheless, the various conventions
contained plenty of references to the responsibilities of those who violated
any specific clause. In respect of nations at war, the sanction introduced in
1907, on the initiative of Germany, to Article 3 of Convention IV (on the
laws and customs of war on land), as developed in the Regulations annexed,
provided that, ‘A belligerent party which violated the provisions of the said
Regulations shall, if the case demands, be liable to pay compensation. It
shall be responsible for all acts committed by persons forming part of its
armed forces.’ So strongly did they wish to believe in the law that jurists
saw in this provision an important innovation, extending beyond the real
possibilities which it offered. In fact, how could it be envisaged that a
victim – a wounded combatant or prisoner of war, an inhabitant of an
occupied region – could take legal action against the nation responsible for
his situation? This might be conceivable in theory, but in practice the
difficulties in the way of activating this responsibility can easily be
imagined. Located in the Convention itself, this Article was expected to
sanction all the regulations which followed, and notably the obligation for
each signatory nation to give instructions to its troops to apply the laws of
war effectively. Yet as war loomed, a number of nations, including
Germany, had still not conformed to this obligation, since the sanction
provided in the Convention would have to be applied by someone; the
question was, who? By whom, indeed, could it be put into operation and
how?
The absence of a legal power sanctioning violations of law and of an
executive power to enforce the execution of decisions was a second
material obstacle to the effectiveness of accepted norms. Immediately
before the war of 1914, nations were already cooperating over the form of
international administration assuring the application of conventions which
regulated relations between states in civil matters. Certain of these,
concerning free circulation on rivers (Commission for the Navigation of the
Rhine in 1815, Commission of the Danube in 1856), unions or offices were
set up in services such as the International Telegraph Union (1865), the
Universal Postal Union (1888), the Railways Union (1890), the
International Office of Public Health (1904) or the International Office of
Public Hygiene (1907). These ventures reinforced the notion of a ‘society
of nations’ located above the nations themselves. Although the expression
‘Society of Nations’ figured in the text of 1907, in that case it reflected only
the awareness of a growing interdependence between what were then
termed civilised nation-states.
Legal thinking in this field ripened gradually, for example in the
foundational thinking of Léon Bourgeois. The first French delegate at the
two conferences at The Hague, in his book Solidarité (1896), and above all
in Pour la Société des Nations (1910), Bourgeois proposed the introduction
of a tribunal of nations which would be given the task of watching over
respect of international law. If this structure had existed at the time of the
First World War, it would have required some means of coercion to be
effective, in other words armed force. All this presupposed a degree of
coordination of international relations which did not yet exist.
The way in which the laws of war were received nationally may have
constituted another obstacle to their implementation; the reaction of
politicians and the armed forces to the adoption of the regulations is
indicative of deep-rooted attitudes rendering remote the chances of their
application in the case of war. At the political level, each nation agreed to
make an effort to ‘humanise’ war, but on condition that the norms adopted
would not interfere with its security or impede its victory. At the Brussels
conference in 1874, the first conference assembled on the general theme of
the laws and customs of war, the nations’ ambivalence was perceptible
behind their delegates’ behaviour. They feared that their representatives,
carried away by the collective dynamic, might overstep the limits of their
instructions. Each government reminded its delegates that the conference
must only reflect on the proposal of a convention submitted by Russia,
without deciding on its adoption, since any decisive vote was excluded. It
would revert afterwards to the nations to validate the project or otherwise.
This project, the outcome of a consensus which was implicit, was indeed no
longer known as a ‘draft convention’, but rather a ‘draft declaration’ to be
interpreted with the delegates’ reservations included in the protocols of the
sessions. As indicated by the final protocol, the delegates undertook only a
‘conscientious enquiry’ which would, they hoped, be useful for the future.
At The Hague in 1899, as in 1907, all contributions from national
delegates, who held the status of plenipotentiaries, expressed their caution
over certain norms. Their instructions were very precise, particularly on
subjects which ran counter to national interests. In this context, historians
often refer to the German attitude, expressed in 1899 by Colonel Gross von
Schwarzhoff, in connection with the regulation of war on land. On the laws
and duties of occupiers and occupied people, for example, the German
attitude (fresh with the memory of the francs-tireurs, or snipers, of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870) was rooted in the logic of the occupier, and
pushed for the adoption of regulations which favoured the occupier rather
than the occupied. This was evident at the 1907 conference, where the
regulations were to be spelled out more precisely. General Marschall von
Bieberstein opposed Article 44, which forbade compulsion in order to
obtain military information from the occupied population.
On the other hand, very little attention has been paid to the British
attitude when it came to regulating maritime warfare. This regulation,
proposed by the United States in 1856 at the Paris Conference, was not
considered because of its rejection by Great Britain. In 1899 it was again
put aside due to British objections that it was not part of the formal
conference agenda. But it can be observed, perhaps through a sort of
‘conference magic’ that the British stance evolved with time. In the course
of these conferences they finally accepted that interests seen as vital would
be the object of discussions. The 1907 Conference therefore approached the
topic of maritime warfare (two of the four commissions were working on
this theme), although Great Britain still expected to frame the regulations in
such a way that their meaning would suit her own interests. In British eyes,
its island setting made the naval dimension of warfare crucial: its coasts
must be protected and the sea kept clear of the enemy. The question of
neutral nations’ use of the sea was studied very closely, together with the
capture of shipping and merchandise, entailing debate on contraband and
blockade in wartime. It was all the more difficult to gain consensus on these
points in that the doctrinal attitudes taken by the British differed materially
from those of the continental nations, which were also unable to reach
agreement between themselves. Most of the nations wished for the
inviolability of neutral and enemy private property of ships and
merchandise in transit to be recognised as corresponding to the ban on
pillage in war on land. Britain, however, saw the law of capture as essential
to its national defence, and wanted the prohibition of war contraband
suppressed and its own rules of blockade to be imposed. The British
conceded that to be effective a blockade must be legal, but the condition of
an effective blockade was more easily fulfilled under the British doctrine
than under continental doctrines, with the result of immobilising fewer
ships. On the question of war contraband, agreement was obtained on
absolute contraband (a list of goods unequivocally applicable to the war
effort), thanks to the efforts of the special committee constituted to settle
these problems, but consensus was not achieved on the list of relevant
contraband goods. With the divergences remaining too substantial,
questions of blockade and war contraband were finally postponed to the
next conference, with the wish expressed that this meeting would develop a
regulation relating to the laws and customs of war at sea analogous to that
of war on land. The discussion was taken up again at the conferences held
in London in 1909 and 1911, and the International Prize Court, the first
supranational tribunal in history, was instituted to act as an appeal court on
decisions handed down by the national jurisdictions on prizes. The text for
this was not ratified, notably by Great Britain. The international
conventions were not in fact framed for direct national application: to
acquire legal force they must be ratified and domestic laws brought into line
with international dispositions. On the eve of the war, by different means,
Britain, like Germany, succeeded in escaping norms which were
inconvenient, or in bending those which had been adopted to the meaning
which favoured them.
Ignorance of the law was no excuse. But what scope could the
international laws of war have if only jurists and, perhaps, politicians, were
familiar with them? In order for the law to have a chance of being applied
where and as it should be, the armed forces must be fully conversant with it.
Francis Lieber was the first to spell out this point. His Instructions for the
Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field, issued on 24
April 1863, assembled the principles of the laws and customs of war then in
operation in a text of 157 articles which became known as ‘The Lieber
Code’. It was very soon being read far beyond American frontiers, notably
in judicial circles, and spurred the move from customary laws of war to
written laws. Manuals of international law appeared in France, the
Netherlands and Russia by 1877, for the use of officers in the army on land.
But it was precisely the pragmatic vision of the Lieber Code which inspired
the Institute of International Law to issue its Manual of the Laws of War,
known as the Oxford Manual, in 1880; later, in 1913, this extended to the
Manual of Maritime War. It was to serve as a model for the directives
which nations must give their troops, and we can see over the ensuing years
how the rules of the laws of war gradually entered military training
instructions. In Spain, for example, the ‘ Regulation for Field Service, 5
January 1882’ contained a section devoted to human rights and the laws of
war, including the points debated at the Brussels Conference in 1874. In
Britain, the Manual of Military Law, written by Lord Thring in 1883 for the
use of officers – without being official in the strict meaning of the term –
was published under the auspices of the War Office and contained a chapter
devoted to the ‘Customs of War’. In 1890, Portugal added to its ‘Interim
Regulation on Field Service’ a section devoted to law in a time of war. The
same occurred in Italy with its ‘Regulations on Field Service’ of 16
September 1896. Although in France the 1893 edition of the Manual of
International Law for the Use of Army Officers indicated the rules for good
conduct during hostilities, they lacked the official element that would have
made them enforceable. To take the law forward and to harmonise
behaviour, Article 1 of the Convention of 1899 therefore required nations to
instruct their armed land forces to conform to the recently adopted
regulation on the laws and customs of war on land. The place of this
Article, the first to be signed under the Act, shows that the negotiators
assessed the extent to which the application of the regulations adopted was
affected by their diffusion. This Article could also have been placed last to
achieve a logical extension of the negotiations, but the aim was to show
clearly that the humanisation of war began with the nations’ determination
to make it happen.
The Russian jurist, Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens, Russian delegate to
Brussels and then The Hague, deplored the failure to press hard enough for
the adequate integration of the norms of constraint and enforcement laid
down in 1899, and regretted that this obligation had not been combined
with a time-scale for its formal application. In France, the 1899
Conventions had been ratified swiftly (by a presidential decree of 28
November 1900) and reached the Minister for War six months later, but
military instructions were not issued to implement its clauses. It should not
be surprising, given the efforts of the Tsar to develop them, that it was in
Russia that this integration was carried out officially and promptly. The
Imperial Prikaz no. 409 of 14/27 June 1904, ordered the placing of the
instructions on the laws and customs of war as an annex to the ‘Regulation
on Field Service and Instructions for Detached Combat in all Forms’. The
first section was addressed to officers (forty-four articles in seven chapters),
the second presented eleven articles in a very simple and paternalist
manner, addressing the ordinary soldier in familiar style to tell him what he
should do and avoid; it was closer in spirit to the Ten Commandments than
to the laws of war.
In the period after the 1899 conference, a virtually complete silence on
international law characterised the instructions given to the armed forces in
both Germany and Austria-Hungary. The edition on field service in the
German army of 1 January 1900 remained silent on the laws of war, apart
from the already well-established clauses of the Geneva Convention of
1864 in the section devoted to health services. This was precisely the tenor
of the Austro-Hungarian regulation of 15 March 1904. In fact a course of
state law (Rechtslehre), designed for the use of officers in the Academies of
Vienna and Leipzig, was published on the orders of the War Ministry in
1899, but although the laws of war were dealt with here in its fourth
section, this was very theoretical in form compared to the much more
important section on national law.
But it was above all the publication in 1902 of the Kriegsbrauch im Land
Kriege (‘The laws of continental war’) by the historical section of the
German High Command, in a collection of studies prepared for officers,
which provoked anxiety in international legal circles. The nature of written
law was denied to the laws of war, presented as having only a moral and
optional nature. Deprived of legal power, only the fear of reprisals could
guarantee its application, in other words the enemy’s use of force. Further,
the High Command warned officers against humanitarian tendencies which
for decades had degenerated into what they termed ‘a sensitivity if not
sentimentality’, and announced that in war, ‘true humanity often dwelt in
the straightforward use of its forms of severity’.
For the German High Command, a conflict throughout its duration
suspended the law because the military imperatives to ensure victory
rendered its application impossible. The manual referred to the declarations
of St Petersburg and Brussels, but ignored the norms set out and accepted
by Germany in 1899. This led the French jurist, Alexandre Mérignhac, to
conclude, at the end of an article published in 1907: ‘What a formidable
question-mark this mentality poses for those who, French or others, will
have dealings with Germany in future wars!’ 2
War, and laws put to the test

The ‘legal war’
The war began with a flagrant violation of law by Germany, that respecting
the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg. France and Great Britain
immediately located that breach in a wider legal framework: by failing to
respect the Treaty of London (19 April 1839) and the Fifth Hague
Convention of 1907, Articles 1, 2 and 10, Germany had flouted all
international law . These belligerent acts provoked Great Britain to enter the
war, and Germany was expelled from the ranks of civilised nations. The
German government was well aware of what was at stake. On 3 August
1914 the German ambassador to Paris, Wilhelm von Schön, delivered the
official declaration to the French Foreign Office. Knowing that German
troops were about to cross Belgium, he anticipated events and declared it to
be a legitimate violation of neutrality because French aviators had begun by
flying over Belgian territory that same morning. It was known later, as
admitted by Germany, that this was not true.3 Indeed, the German
government acknowledged the violation. In his speech in the Reichstag on 4
August, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg declared: ‘Our troops have
occupied Luxemburg, perhaps already trodden Belgian soil. This is contrary
to the prescriptions of international law . . . This illegal action – I speak
openly – we shall seek to repair this illegal action which we are committing
as soon as our military goal is achieved.’4
When the Chancellor addressed the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir
Edward Groschen, on the same day, he managed to aggravate Germany’s
situation, asserting that it was inconceivable that Britain should enter a war
purely because of one word: ‘Neutrality’ – a treaty being no more than ‘a
scrap of paper’. The Allies rose up at what they considered to be
monumental cynicism, and the legal debate then opened between jurists of
both sides. In his speech to the Reichstag, the Chancellor had acknowledged
the violation, but justified it under the theory of necessity: ‘Sirs, we are
under the necessity to defend ourselves and necessity knows no law . . .
France could wait; but we could not! An attack on our flanks on the lower
Rhine could have been fatal to us . . . Faced with such a threat as this, you
do what you can.’ 5
On the legal level, necessity is a justifying fact, that is a material or moral
constraint (the Nostand concept) which may, by explaining a form of
conduct, remove all moral responsibility – but did it, even so, constitute the
right (the Notrecht concept) to commit an illicit action? For the Allies, the
response was negative, because to accept the contrary would be to accept
the arbitrary nature of force. In German doctrine, it was positive. The stakes
of the debate were very important: it was a matter of determining how far a
norm could be violated without the transgressor being declared ipso facto
responsible.
The German doctrine can be explained by the influence of the Hegelian
hierarchy of values to the domain of law, in which any conflict of interests
is solved through the comparison of the values in question, the least
important being sacrificed. During the war, the jurist Josef Kohler in his
leaflet Not kent kein Gebot (‘Necessity knows no law’) undertook to
demonstrate the existence of a law of necessity (and not of fact), applying a
rule in German public law to international law: if a right of property is in
danger, the owner who violates the property of another engages neither his
criminal nor his personal responsibility (Articles 54 CP and 904 BGB).
States therefore possessed the right, derived from the right of sovereignty,
to preserve their integrity by means of war, an essential interest which was
superior to the right of neutrality: when the legal organisation does not
supply the means to resolve the conflict, the law must bend and give way to
the victor: ‘factum valet’. This analysis explains why the German delegates
maintained so strongly that these rules on the conduct of war must be taken
to their limit: to the extent that the necessities of war allow. It was said later
that there was proof of German premeditation: in reality, they encountered
no opposition on this point during the conferences, perhaps out of ignorance
of the consequences of the German legal doctrine. During the war, the latter
deployed ingenuity in assimilating state need (Staatnotwendigkeit) and
strategic or military need (Kriegsnotwendigkeit) to the necessities of the
war.
The great Belgian jurist, Charles de Visscher, maintained in vain that this
showed confusion of policy and law, that the specific internal interests of a
belligerent do not constitute a right and therefore cannot be upheld against
other nations; Germany, like the Allies on their side, was convinced that it
was undertaking the war by right. Germany found itself forced to violate
Belgian neutrality because it was the only way in which to break its
encirclement. Its survival (Germany’s right to integrity recognised by
international law) took precedence over the Belgian right to neutrality.
Bethmann Hollweg’s speech to the Reichstag on 4 August 1914 was thus
self-explanatory, and it becomes simpler to understand the allusion,
disastrous at the level of media interpretation, to ‘scraps of paper’.
The conduct of war: legitimate defence and
reprisals
The legal debate was equally intense concerning the generalised violation
of civilian rights which was part of the German invasion after the
unconstrained violation of Belgian and Luxembourger neutrality. All the
belligerents clothed their own transgressions of the law in legal
justifications – in other words: how did they escape from the law while still
claiming to respect it?
Legitimate defence and reprisals constituted the justifications adopted by
both sides in the war. Legitimate defence was based on an immediate and
proportionate reaction to an act of aggression, and underlay German
defence after the events at Louvain on 25–27 August 1914. To the Allies,
the destruction by fire of part of the town and the execution of civilians
became symbolic of the ‘German atrocities’ perpetrated in Belgium and the
north and east of France. These stirred up indignation, particularly among
other neutrals, whose opinion had to be ‘managed’.
Not surprisingly, the German and Belgian versions of events were
completely at odds with each other. The Belgians considered that the laws
of war had been violated, and the Germans, who saw themselves as victims
of snipers, maintained that this same right authorised legitimate defence in
the form of the destruction of houses from which they had been fired on and
the execution of civilians found in them. Shortly thereafter, Belgium and
France (decree of 23 September 1914) named commissions of enquiry
charged with amassing proof of questionable German activities (some 6,500
executions of civilians, destruction and looting on a grand scale) with the
intention of bringing those responsible to trial at the end of the war. Reports
were issued (eleven reports for the entire war in France), and the practice of
appointing commissions of enquiry stretched to the Eastern Front (the
Kristov Commission in Russia, for example).
There is some reason to affirm that the laws of war were violated
everywhere and by all the warring nations. Germany felt obliged to publish
a White Book on 10 May 1915, under the title, The Conduct of the War by
the Belgian People in Violation of International Law, based on an enquiry
undertaken among German soldiers and Belgian eyewitnesses. The Grey
Book, entitled Response to the German White Book, written from an
enquiry of the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Belgian Minister
of Justice, appeared in 1916 to refute its conclusions.
The violation of the laws of war was not limited to the war on land. From
October 1914 the leaders of the German war fleet expressed their
commitment to unrestricted submarine warfare. The opinion of Admiral
von Pohl was identical to that of the general staff in 1904: ‘The more
energetic the war, the sooner the end and the less the sacrifice of wealth and
human lives.’6 But the reluctant Bethmann Hollweg did not give way until
1915, when the effects were felt of the blockade operated by the British: the
waters of Great Britain and Ireland were declared a war zone, and any
enemy warship or merchant ship which ventured into them would do so at
its own risk. For Germany, the submarine war was justified by the right to
reprisals because the blockade as practised by Britain contravened
international law. If indeed the reprisals infringed the law in harming the
innocent, it was in response to a previous violation and with the aim of
stopping it.
The neutral nations also condemned the blockade. The risk of the capture
of shipping and merchandise – seizures almost always justified by the
captor state’s national jurisdiction – now extended to the risk of their
destruction by submarines, as in the case of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915.
After a period of calm, the intensification of the blockade in 1916 was
countered by the return of unlimited submarine warfare in February 1917,
justified this time by necessity. As expressed by Ludendorff, it was a matter
of national life or death: ‘Our situation created in respect of the German
people a military duty to practise it.’
In practice, reprisals provoked a series of infringements of the law, with
each belligerent invoking a previous violation to justify its actions. The
diplomatic note sent by the French government to all the representatives of
the powers in Paris on 14 August 1914, illustrates clearly how the spiralling
violations of the law began in the thinking of belligerents, and for the
French, it moved beyond the original infraction of violating Belgian
neutrality: ‘The French government . . . maintains all reservations as to the
reprisals which it might be led to undertake against an enemy so little
concerned with a given promise.’7 Each warring nation believed in its own
status as the victim of an initial violation on the part of the enemy. In
certain cases the fear of reprisals no doubt limited practices that ran counter
to conventions, notably in relation to prisoners of war, but reprisals served
above all as justification; under this heading they contributed to the
brutalisation and totalisation of the war.
Peace under the law: sanctions and frustration

Once the war ended, the legal task was that of creating a peace which,
because of its just foundations, would ensure that war would never again be
possible. The laws of peace which American President Wilson stood for
represented a peace without victory, that is without territorial acquisitions,
and recognised the law of nations. Its principles were proclaimed in the
Fourteen Points, which served as a contractual basis for the signature of the
Armistice on 11 November 1918. For the Allies, the laws of peace
presupposed in the first place a just peace, responding to the sufferings of
the populations who were the victims of Germany and its allies. Those
responsible must be specified and bear the consequences of their conduct in
the treaties which would lay down the terms of their responsibility. From
the Entente powers’ perspective, Germany was designated as bearing the
principal, if not the exclusive, responsibility; under the pretext that it had
placed itself outside the law by failing to respect treaties, it was not
admitted to negotiate the peace terms.
The question of responsibility was central to the Paris Conference which
opened in January 1919, and it proved to be legally delicate. On their desks
the plenipotentiaries found a memorandum entitled ‘Examen de la
responsabilité pénale de l’empereur Guillaume II d’Allemagne’. At the
request of Clemenceau it had been drawn up by the Dean of the Faculty of
Law in Paris, Fernand Larnaude, in collaboration with Louis de la Pradelle
and two professors of criminal law, A. Le Poittevin and M. Garçon. For the
first time in history, a head of state had to take responsibility for a war that
his country was accused of having provoked. But the legal tools were
lacking to make this case, and the jurists, who were not blinded by
patriotism, knew this, since the question of responsibility was posed at the
very beginning of the war. In effect, the crime of aggression did not exist,
and nor did the category of ‘war crime’ itself.
The German jurist Johann Casper Bluntschli was the first to have used
the expression ‘war crime’, in his publication Das moderne Völkerrecht der
civilisirten Staten,8 in relation to the snipers of the Franco-Prussian War of
1870, but the term had no normative status. On the eve of the Great War,
the question of responsibility did not appear central to jurists, who wrote
little on the topic. The Swiss jurist Gustave Moynier focused his thoughts
on how to condemn, through an international legal institution, only the
infractions of the Geneva Convention. At the time of the Balkan wars the
jurists had picked up the many violations of international law with respect
to the wounded; but the Balkan peoples, being considered semi-barbarians,
who must be helped to evolve under the guardianship of more advanced
nations, were not seen by these condescending jurists as belonging to the
nations subject to international law, an attribute of civilisation.
It is also true that the reports on these violations (notably the Carnegie
reports) did not engage minds at the time of their publication shortly before
the outbreak of the First World War. In 1908 a French magistrate, Jacques
Dumas, proposed a synthesis in the Revue générale de droit international
public. In this analysis, violations could be open to four types of sanction:
moral (the judgement of international opinion, notably in the case of a
refusal to submit to arbitration); material (as in retaliation and reprisals, in
the form of a peaceful blockade, making the war itself serve the law which
would change its nature); civil sanctions (i.e., reparations: it introduced the
principle of proportionality to the damages suffered); and penal sanctions in
respect of politicians. Wisely, it abstained from specifying the legal
foundations of these sanctions. His analysis is interesting because it
prefigures the approach of many others to this question during and after the
war, an approach marked by the influence of French jurists. But for the time
his conclusion was optimistic; in a fine example of positive belief, he wrote
that:
above all these sanctions floats still that which we name despite the
fact that no text names it, the force of opinion. It is not wrong to say
that the undertakings made at The Hague by all the powers worthy of
the name find themselves from now on guaranteed against a large
number of risks, perhaps even against the great majority.9
Specifically, however, Dumas did not stop there . The hypothesis of the
violation of the laws of war had been foreseen in the conventions, with the
sanction provided for in the form of an indemnity to be paid by the
contravening state to the nation-victim of the violation. There was no
question of a fine – in other words, a penal sanction – but of responsibility
of a civil nature. Further, neither the amount nor the mode of calculation
was indicated, nor indeed the authority which would enforce these
decisions. In these circumstances, it may be concluded that only violations
attributable to a conquered state would be sanctioned, and probably in the
form of the lump sum indemnity which, traditionally, victors imposed on
their conquests through peace treaties. This sanction, introduced at the
request of the German delegate, nourished the theory of premeditation: the
supposition that Germany would have tried in advance to evade the
consequences of its responsibility in the knowledge that it would violate the
law. Examination of the minutes of sessions of the two conferences equally
invite the consideration that Germany in fact saw itself as the victim of
behaviour which terrified it: the disloyal attitude of the occupied civilian
populations. At the penal level, the obvious legal conclusion was that
violations of the laws of war were based on national laws and their
jurisdiction. During the war, at a moment when the ‘German atrocities’
raised the question of responsibility, the great French internationalist, Louis
Renault, came to the same conclusion.
At the legal level, everything was thus said well before the end of the
war. Given the state of international law, sanctioning the responsibility of
the leaders and of direct authors of infractions of the rights of non-
combatants, was illusory. No precise norm existed before the facts (which is
the requirement in penal law, being restrictive in its interpretation and by
virtue of the principles of non-retroactivity), nor were there international
tribunals in existence entitled to judge them.
However, at its heart, as if to show that the question was central, the
Treaty of Versailles contained a sequence of Articles (numbers 227 to 229)
which, under the heading of ‘Sanctions’, established an ad hoc victors’
justice. These reflected the legal embarrassment of the Allies. They are well
known. Wilhelm II, accused of offending against the moral and sacred
authority of treaties, would be judged by an international Allied tribunal.
Those responsible for violations of the laws of war would be extradited in
order to be tried by the Allies’ national military tribunals, which would be
of mixed national composition when the crimes concerned several states.
The outcome is also well known: the Netherlands refused to extradite
Wilhelm II, who was to die in exile at Doorn. The Allies disagreed over the
composition and extent of the lists of guilty men to be supplied by
Germany. Finally, in January 1920, taking all lists together, some 850
people, included a number of great names from the German political,
military and scientific worlds, were called for, particularly by the French,
the Belgians (three-quarters of the accused), the British, the Italians and
Yugoslavia. The Weimar government refused their extradition, which was
not surprising: it is extremely rare for a state to extradite its nationals and a
fortiori in the context of the indignation aroused in Germany by the
publication of the Allied demand.
A compromise was found, which had been proposed by Germany some
months earlier: in order to avoid aggravating the situation of the fragile
Weimar Republic, those responsible would be judged in Germany by the
High Court of Leipzig. Forty-five people appeared to answer for crimes
seen as symbolic of the German conduct of the war. The briefs and bills of
indictment were developed by the Allies (eleven for France, fifteen for
Belgium, seven for Great Britain, twelve for Italy, Poland, Romania and
Yugoslavia). The crimes with which the forty-five were charged principally
concerned ill-treament of prisoners. The massacre of civilians was the most
substantial of the accusations from Belgium (Andenne-Seilles) and France
(Nomény, Jarny), the naval criminality of the submarine war in those from
Great Britain (particularly the torpedoing of the hospital ships Dover Castle
and Llandovery Castle) and, to a lesser extent, Italy. France also registered
its belief that the execution of wounded men on the battlefield (the Stenger
case) constituted a war crime. The great majority of these crimes were
committed at the beginning of the war.
The prosecutor was unwilling to sustain most of these accusations, and
the Court released most of the accused. Six men were convicted but
received very light sentences and were acclaimed by the public, while the
representatives of foreign delegations were harassed and left the town. The
case provoked a diplomatic incident between France and Germany and
illustrated the limits of national justice in the repression of war crimes.
Immediately after the Leipzig cases, the Supreme Council decided to set
up a commission dealing with what were termed the ‘guilty men of the
war’. Representatives of the legal worlds of France, Great Britain, Belgium
and Italy met to consider the result of the Leipzig proceedings. Their task
was to present proposals on the individuals claimed by the Allied
governments under Article 228 of the Treaty of Versailles, and on the lines
of conduct to be observed in the application of this clause of the treaty. Its
conclusions, handed down on 7 January 1922, were not in any way
surprising: the verdicts of the Leipzig Court were not satisfactory. Certain
of the accused were acquitted when they should have been found guilty, and
the sentences of those condemned were deemed inadequate.
The commission favoured the continuation of the cases before Allied
national jurisdictions better able to render justice. The German government
was again required, as in 1920, to hand over the accused men to the Allied
Powers. At the refusal of the German government, the Allies rejected
extradition and retained the right to try criminals in absentia. The French
government felt that British solidarity with its Allies was cooling, in
particular with France, over how to pursue the cases. Aware that extradition
of those charged was politically unattainable, it sought a solution which
would offer public opinion the necessary reassurance. The concept was then
tried in France and in Belgium until 1925, of cases of trials in absentia on a
large scale before military courts, at the end of which the accused were
convicted.
Overall, however, no one – neither victors nor vanquished – was satisfied
with the legal treatment of the war. The former had achieved nothing but a
parody of justice, while for the latter the responsibility imposed by the
victors on them was seen as flagrantly unjust. This popular resentment
helped give birth to a nationalist, and then a national-socialist campaign to
reverse the verdict, in law and then in battle.
Still the legal history of the conflict was important. For the first time in
history the outcome of a war was followed by a search for moral and legal
responsibility for its ravages. No doubt the immaturity of the legal system,
and above all the political inability – amply fed by war cultures – to exceed
national perceptions of their own suffering during the war, help account for
the incomplete legal resolution of the First World War. Nonetheless, by
1918 war itself was no longer seen as a normal way to settle a conflict
between nations, and not all kinds of conduct in waging it were acceptable
any longer.
It is important here to include another facet of the search for justice in
wartime and after: the legal moves towards sanctioning Turkey for what we
now term the Armenian genocide. This crime could have been seen solely
as an internal matter for the Turks, open to criticism, no doubt, but not
involving any international sanction for acts of war. However, Article 230
of the Treaty of Sèvres signed with Turkey stated that its authors must take
responsibility before an international Allied court. This provision of the
treaty would not be applied. The Turkish government had moved ahead to
judge those responsible in cases where the principal accused could the more
easily be condemned to death because they were tried and convicted in
absentia. One man was actually executed for violating Turkish military law.
And yet, in extending the field of protective norms to all civilians on the
basis of their status as human beings, the Treaty of Sèvres stepped beyond
the laws of war and was the first stage of the road leading to the
proscription of crimes against humanity. In the Geneva accords of 1926,
war was set outside the law, introducing the category of the crime of
aggression.
Although legal tools have evolved little, a further threshold was crossed
at the end of the Second World War. At Nuremburg the Allies, favoured by
an admittedly different context, boldly created a retroactive criminal law
and an ad hoc jurisdiction to try those who from then on were legally war
criminals. From that time the idea has been accepted that a war which
breaks out, whether international or civil, will trigger legal consequences
for those responsible. The shadow of the Great War is still with us today.
1 ‘Préambule de la Convention concernant les Lois et Coutumes de la

guerre sur terre conclue à La Haye le 29 juillet 1899’, in Ministère des
Affaires étrangères, Documents diplomatiques: Conférence internationale
de la Paix (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1900).
2 A. Mérignhac, ‘Les théories du Grand Etat-major allemand sur les “Lois
de la guerre continentale”’, Revue générale de droit international public, 14
(1907), p. 239.
3 Belgian Foreign Office (ed.), Livre gris, no. 21 (Berne: Wyss, 1915); and
L. Renault, ‘Les premières violations du Droit des Gens par l’Allemagne
(Luxembourg et Belgique)’, in L’œuvre internationale de Louis Renault
1843–1918 (Paris: Éditions Internationales, 1920), vol. III, p. 407.
4 Renault, ‘Les premières violations’, p. 419.
5 Ibid.
6 Philippe Masson, ‘La guerre sous marine’, in Jean-Jacques Becker and

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre
(Paris: Bayard, 2004), p. 438.
7 Ministère des affaires étrangères, Livre jaune, no. 157.
8 Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Das moderne Völkerrecht der civilisirten

Staten (Nördlingen: C. H. Beck, 1872), pp. 358–9.
9 J. Dumas, ‘Les sanctions du droit international d’après les conventions

de La Haye de 1899 et de 1907’, Revue générale de droit international
public, 15 (1908), p. 580.
24 Visual essay: Global war
Jay Winter
Picturing war
Roland Barthes established a useful framework in which to understand the
power of photographs with multiple meanings and with affective force. He
distinguished between the ‘studium’, or common knowledge, and the
‘punctum’, or the arresting detail or aspect of a photograph that gives it
enduring power. The ‘studium’ is something we ‘perceive quite familiarly as
a consequence of my knowledge, my culture; this field can be more or less
stylized, more or less successful, depending on the photographer’s skill or
luck, but it always refers to a classical body of information’.1 In other words,
a photograph can confirm what we already know, or in the case of
propaganda, what we are supposed to know.
Photography, though, has the power to escape from conventional limits.
Photos may ‘say’ something which its creator or sponsor did not want to say
or did not want us to see. Usually this escape from received wisdom or from
a message we are supposed to receive is made possible by a visual detail or
facet of the photograph which makes it odd, uncanny, puzzling. This act of
breaking through the official surface of war photography happens in an
instant, and at times, without our realising it happens. We reach, in Barthes’s
language, the punctum, the piercing of conventional imagery. When that
happens, ‘The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This
time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my
sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene,
shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.’2
War photography is a vast terrain of images which describe what we are
supposed to see, the studium, and the punctum, what arrests us in a striking
and sometimes alarming manner. In this photographic essay, I try to point
out the power of photographs to convey global war not as convention but as
unusual, out of the ordinary, strange. I do so in three sets of images. Each
group shows the vast sweep of the war, its tendency to move millions of men
in unlikely encounters across the world, and to create new weapons to injure
and to kill the enemy.
First, a caveat: there is a major debate about the propriety of showing
photographs of dead bodies; it occurred during the 1914–18 war too. C. E.
W. Nevinson had one of his realistic paintings of a dead British soldier
censored, and displayed it in London with the tag ‘Censored’ completely
covering the body in question. Military censors were similarly vigilant. Is
this stance one of respect for the dead, or rather of sanitisation of the war?
We use such photos here, in part because soldiers, and in this case doctors,
took them and displayed them in their own photo albums for viewing after
the war. But we also use them to pose the question as to the limits of war
photography itself. Does an image of a dead soldier reproduced show
disrespect for the dead? Does using such photographs incline us on the
slippery slope to voyeurism? Or do such images bring back the landscape of
battle in an unadulterated form? Each reader will have to make up her mind
on these questions.
A world at war
Much of transnational history focuses on population movements, refugee
flows and the transport of labour around the world. The Great War was
probably the largest moment of displacement to date in global history, and it
occurred over a short time and after a thirty-year period of out-migration
from Europe to the Americas and the Antipodes, numbering perhaps 30
million people. The numbers on the move in the 1914–18 conflict were
greater still. There were 70 million men in uniform fighting usually at a
considerable distance from home, and assisting them were millions of white
and non-white labourers.
The ethnic, racial and national mix of war was of staggering dimensions.
The illustrations show Africans from all over the continent in a German
prisoner-of-war camp, with their nationalities displayed as a key (Fig. 24.1).
The encounter between this wounded Senegalese soldier and a German
medical orderly on a French battlefield shows what imperial and
transnational warfare was all about (Fig. 24.2). So does the modern laying
on of hands by a British soldier, signing on this Indian recruit by fingerprint
(Fig. 24.3). The need for medical care brought together this Egyptian doctor
and a Vietnamese labourer suffering from beri-beri (Fig. 24.4). Those
beyond help included Muslim soldiers buried in graveyards all over Europe.
The African contribution to the defence of France was saluted in popular
culture too, sometimes in racial stereotypes, but at other times (Fig. 24.5),
with literally a touching affection .
Fig. 24.1 Soldiers of the French Empire in a German prisoner-of-war

camp, 1917.
Fig. 24.2 French African soldier transported to a German casualty clearing
centre for the evacuation of the wounded, 1914.
Fig. 24.3 Indian soldier signing up for military service with his thumb
print.
Fig. 24.4 Egyptian physicians treat an Asian labourer for beri-beri.
Fig. 24.5 Postcard of a black French soldier with a white nurse.
The unlikely juxtapositions of war were captured by soldiers themselves,

some of whom produced photo albums for their families and perhaps also for
their own reminiscence. One French physician, Dr Beurrier, captured in
photos his time on the Isle of Vido, dealing with the sick and wounded
opposite the town of Corfu. His self-portrait opens his portfolio of
photographs, many of which show dying or dead Serbian soldiers, with
whom he had to deal daily (Fig 24.6). One he entitled ‘Charon’s barque’
(Fig. 24.7); it shows the steady gaze of the physician on our frail remains. A
thousand miles away, in Volhynia on the Eastern Front, a Jewish physician
from Vienna, Bernhard Bardach, found himself in contact with a very
different group of his co-religionists. The poor Jews of the Pale of
Settlement had little in common with Bardach, a painter as well as a
photographer. He photographed them at prayer (Fig. 24.8) from a cultural
distance. Examining Jewish prostitutes for venereal disease in this remote
part of what is now western Ukraine was an unlikely destination for a
Viennese doctor (Fig. 24.9). Note the woman in the window on the right
looking at prostitutes shielding their faces from the camera.
Fig. 24.6 Dying Serbian soldier, Isle of Vido, near Corfu.
Fig. 24.7 Charon’s barque, Isle of Vido, Corfu.

Fig. 24.8 A Jewish family in a field, Volhynia.
Fig. 24.9 Jewish prostitutes, Volhynia.
The second facet of the world war which photographs highlight is the
sheer variety of landscapes of battle that soldiers and sailors faced for fifty
months of combat. If we shift our optic away from the Western Front, we
can see vastly different topographies. In Fig. 24.10, we see a Hungarian
mountain corps unit scaling the sheer cliff faces of the Italian Front. The
freezing terrain of the ‘white war’ is evident in Fig. 24.11. It shows the white
war on the Kosturino Ridge on the Macedonian front. Evacuating the
wounded from this terrain was extremely difficult, both here and on the
Austrian Italian Front. The Eastern Front was huge; to describe its variety is
impossible, since its length would describe a line extending from Scotland to
Morocco. Still Dr Barbach gives us some sense of its endlessness in his
photographs (Fig. 24.12), and also of the devastation which attended fighting
in villages and towns all over what is now Poland and the Ukraine (24.13).
Fig. 24.10 Austro-Hungarian mountain troops in the vertical war on the
Italian Front.
Fig. 24.11 The white war, the Kosturino Ridge on the Macedonian front.
Fig. 24.12 All quiet on the Eastern Front, Volhynia.
Fig. 24.13 Destroyed village on the Eastern Front, Volhynia.
The air war created new possibilities and new vistas in which fighting
took place. Bardach caught the mix of old and new in his photograph of
horses dragging an airplane to a destination on the Eastern Front (Fig.
24.14). The global reach of the naval war was truly extraordinary. HMS
Inflexible started the war in the Mediterranean, and helped sink two
armoured cruisers during the Battle of the Falklands in 1914. In Fig. 24.15
we see her rescuing German sailors after the battle. In 1915 she shelled the
Dardanelles, but was damaged by enemy fire. Back in service in 1916, she
took part in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Nothing could better illustrate the
global character of the war than Fig. 24.16, showing a Japanese cruiser in
protective duty off the coast of Vancouver.
Fig. 24.14 Airplane hauled by horses, Volhynia.
Fig. 24.15 HMS Inflexible, near the Falkland Islands, 1914.
Fig. 24.16 A Japanese cruiser off the coast of Vancouver, British
Columbia, 1917.
Mud was the colour of much of the combat terrain of the Western Front,
and mud was the colour of the men forced to fight there. In Figs. 24.17 and
24.18 we can see the odd character of a landscape resembling the dark side
of the moon after a celestial flood. Horses sunk to their chests and men
dwarfed by mountains of mud described a kind of war difficult to convey
and even more difficult to endure. The ‘puncta’ in photographs of the
Western Front arise from uncanny mixtures of the ordinary and the surreal.
Fig. 24.19 shows half a horse in a tree, and in many instances, the suffering
of animals brought out the humanity of soldiers, who could express emotion
about horses more easily at times than about men (Fig. 24.20). It is not at all
surprising that there were charitable events at home to collect money for sick
and injured horses; they were an integral part of the most industrialised war
in history (Fig. 24.21), not at all made redundant by the selective appearance
of the tank (Fig. 24.22), more readily accepted in Allied armies than by the
Central Powers.
Fig. 24.17 Horses stuck in the mud, Western Front.

Fig. 24.18 Passchendaele, 1917.
Fig. 24.19 The uncanny: part of a horse in a tree.
Fig. 24.20 Horses bringing provisions and supplies to soldiers on the
Western Front.
Fig. 24.21 Poster announcing a Grand Carnival in aid of sick and wounded
war horses, December 1917.
Fig. 24.22 A broken-down tank near Passchendaele, 1917.
The third way in which photographs can introduce us to the radically new
character of the First World War is by showing the extent to which the
deployment of new weapons and new tactics challenged the laws of war.
Flame-throwers (Fig. 24.23) were chemical weapons, but much more radical
weapons were introduced early in the war. Under pre-war international
protocols, the use of poison gas weapons was deemed illegal. Starting in
1915, all armies developed stockpiles of such weapons and deployed them.
First came chlorine, then phosgene and then mustard gas, and they all added
to the horrors of the battlefield, without changing the strategic balance in any
sector. Their effectiveness depended more on the wind direction (Figs.
24.24–24.25) than on gas masks and other counter-measures hastily adopted
for men and animals alike (Figs. 24.26 and 24.27). Medical photographs
showed the ravages caused by these weapons (Fig. 24.28), and helped the
case for outlawing them after 1918.
Fig. 24.23 Flame-throwers on the Eastern Front.
Fig. 24.24 Gas attack on the Western Front, I.
Fig. 24.25 Gas attack on the Western Front, II.

Fig. 24.26 French soldiers with gas masks.
Fig. 24.27 Mules and soldiers wearing gas masks.
Fig. 24.28 A soldier wounded by mustard gas.
The treatment of civilians was just as worrying, in that military and

paramilitary operations in 1915 and after tore up the laws of war. Those laws
were trampled on in the case of the abuse and murder of Jewish communities
in Galicia by retreating Russian forces, and by the deportation and murder of
perhaps 1 million Armenians in Anatolia, ordered by the ruling Ottoman
Turkish triumvirate. Photographic evidence – some gathered by outraged
German soldiers and physicians in Turkey – enables us to see the aftermath
of genocide (Figs. 24.29 and 24.30). Photographs also open up the world of
humanitarian aid throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East, which was
another element of the global war (Fig. 24.31). Transnational generosity
extended to many groups of refugees, those who had lost everything and
were on the move by the millions during and after the war.
Fig. 24.29 Children who survived the Armenian genocide, Erevan, 1919.
Fig. 24.30 American aid for the survivors of the Armenian genocide, 1919.
Fig. 24.31 Food aid carried by a camel column for victims of the famine in
Russia.
Photography is part of the essential documentation of war. Its strength is

to have captured moments – moments of horror or wonder, or just a sense of
the uncanny mix of the familiar and the bizarre. The portability of the
camera created vast private archives, enabling us to escape from official
photography, and to have a glimpse of the enormous character of war from
the standpoint of the observer, the person captivated by the detail of a
photograph, the punctum, the shock of recognition at seeing not clichés and
stereotypes, but traces of the strange face of war itself .
1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.

Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), pp. 25–7.
2 Ibid., p. 27.
Fig. 1 German colonial clock: Our future lies on the seas.
Germany’s late-comer status as an imperial power was a source of irritation
to her leaders and a call to action to create in Africa and Asia a presence
appropriate to the leading industrial nation in Europe.
Fig 2 Exhibition on German East Africa Leipzig 1897
Fig. 2 Exhibition on German East-Africa, Leipzig, 1897.
Orientalism was imbedded in all imperial projects. The cross on the image at
the top suggests that Germany was engaged in both a ‘civilising mission’
and one which would provide raw materials and markets for German
industry.
Fig. 3 Sir Edward Grey’s juggling act: dangerous diplomacy.
A French critique of the smugness of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir
Edward Grey. He stands like a bell boy on the tip of the European balance of
power, juggling explosive international problems, without the slightest
concern or idea as to what he is doing. Secret treaties protrude from his
pocket.
Fig. 4 German toy model warship.

Naval power had extraordinary popular appeal in the pre-war years. This
model ship was a kind of advertisement to generate wide support for the
finance of this effort, which ultimately failed. Germany antagonised Britain
while never coming close to matching British naval power.
Fig. 5 Jean Jaurès assassinated.
The newspaper Jaurès used to disseminate his message of peace and justice
announces his death at the hands of a right-wing fanatic on 31 July 1914,
removing thereby the one internationally respected socialist leader who
could have led a campaign to stop the war. Jaurès’s own views were not
clear, but without him, the anti-war movement collapsed.
Fig. 6 Great Britain Declares War, Daily Mirror, 5 August 1914.
Britain’s declaration of war is announced in this popular newspaper with
reassuring images of naval power – called ‘Neptune’s imps’ – and two
admirals flanked by the new Secretary of War, Lord Kitchener, and the head
of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal Sir John French.
Fig. 7 Britain and France giving Germany a final rinse on the Marne, 1914.
A French caricature of the Kaiser being given a final washing by a French
soldier with the aid of 75 mm cannons, and a British soldier about ‘to put the
kybosh on the Kaiser’, as a popular song of the period had it.
Fig. 8 Allied military leaders 1914, painted ceramic plate.
(From left to right clockwise) General Paul Pau, Commander of the French
Army in Alsace, Marshal Joffre, Grand Duke Nicholas, and Field Marshal
French, in 1914.
Fig. 9 German military commanders 1914, painted ceramic plate.
All combatants took confidence in the brilliance of their military and naval
commanders at the outbreak of the war. Here is Germany’s military
leadership in 1914, surrounding Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Fig. 10 Two British naval victories, 1914.
Global war at sea, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. The top portrays
the destruction of the marauding German light cruiser Emden by the
Australian cruiser Sydney, south of Sumatra on 9 November 1914. The lower
shows the destruction of the Scharnhorst, Admiral von Spee’s flagship near
the Falkland Islands, on 8 December 1914. These victories did little to alter
the balance of power in the war, but served to bolster public morale
nonetheless.
Fig. 11 Hindenburg and Ludendorff celebrating the victory at Tannenberg.
The German army’s decisive victory in late August 1914 crushed the
Russian invasion of East Prussia. A brilliant plan created by staff officer
Max Hoffmann was executed by the newly appointed commanders,
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who thereby became national heroes.
Tannenberg was chosen as the name of the battle, since it had been the site
of a medieval defeat of Teutonic warriors, now symbolically reversed.
Fig. 12 Dardanelles defended, 1915, ceramic plate.
The German army and navy provided the Ottoman forces with the weaponry
and training used to defeat the Anglo-French attempt in March 1915 to force
the straits of the Dardanelles and thereby to knock the Ottoman Empire out
of the war. Here is a celebratory German plate commemorating their victory.
Fig. 13 German sailors in Ottoman uniforms on horseback.
German soldiers and sailors served as advisers and trainers to the Ottoman
army and navy throughout the war. This had positive outcomes initially.
Nevertheless, the Ottoman army suffered staggering casualties in the war.
Best estimates are over 700,000 who were either killed or died of disease,
and 400,000 wounded. Nineteenth-century sanitary conditions and poor
nutrition added to deaths inflicted by twentieth-century weapons.
Fig. 14 HMS Chester with damage from the Battle of Jutland.
The Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916) was technically a draw. The
British Navy suffered severe damage to capital ships, but kept the blockade
of the German Imperial Navy intact.
Fig. 15 Pitcher: Haig, the man of push and go.
A ‘toby jug’ or beer mug, with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig sitting on a
tank with ‘Somme’ written on its gun. The title ‘push and go’ on the base of
the toy is a partisan joke. Haig supporters stole the phrase coined by
supporters of his arch-enemy, Lloyd George. Haig certainly pushed, but the
front did not go.
Fig. 16 Air war: Captain Guynemer in flight.
Having fifty-four ‘kills’ of enemy aircraft to his name, Guynemer was one of
the great French aviators of the war. He was shot down and killed over
Belgium on 11 September 1917.
Fig. 17 Air war: biplane over Compiègne.
Photographs from airplanes provided detailed images of enemy lines and
troop movements. Here we can see the trench system near Compiègne,
France, in stark relief. By 1918, the coordination of artillery by aerial
reconnaissance and triangulation enabled the Allies to finally break the
stalemate on the Western Front.
Fig. 18 German soldier near Fort Vaux at Verdun.
Verdun was a battle which pushed men beyond the limits of human
endurance. Lasting ten months in 1916, it was the longest battle of the war.
Here a German infantryman deployed near Fort Vaux takes aim next to a
dismembered French soldier, identifiable only by his helmet.
Fig. 19 Péronne town hall destroyed, 1917.
A postcard of the destroyed town hall of Péronne, on the Somme front.
When German troops withdrew in 1917, they left nothing of use intact. It is
possible that the building was hit by Allied shelling. On the demolished first
floor is a placard, which says ‘Don’t be angry just be amazed.’ The French
postcard has an alternative, and lighter, translation.
Fig. 20 Panel left on destroyed town hall of Péronne by German soldiers,
1917: ‘Don’t be angry just be amazed’
The Australian troops who occupied Péronne after the German withdrawal
of March 1917 kept this placard and donated it to the Imperial War Museum
in London, which, much later, returned it to Péronne, where it now is
displayed in the Historial de la Grande Guerre.
Fig. 21 The decorated ceiling of the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice
destroyed by Austrian fire.
One of the glories of Venice, the Scuola di San Rocco was hit by Austrian
fire from aircraft or artillery after the Italian retreat from Caporetto in late
1917. Its ornate ceiling suffered extensive damage, as did many other
buildings in Venice.
Fig. 22 Statuette of Lenin.
Lenin marching into the future is the subject of this small sculpture. The
motif of movement was essential to revolutionary art.
Fig. 23 ‘Anti-Semitism is the enemy’: Russian revolutionary poster.
The portrayal of reactionary forces – aristocrats, priests, generals and the
rich – as pigs and other animals drove home the point that the failure of the
old regime would no longer be covered by anti-Semitic campaigns and
pogroms. The Revolution took anti-Semitism to be its enemy.
Fig. 24 Black American troops in France.
Over 100,000 black Americans served in combat in France. They served in
segregated units. Another 250,000 were drafted but were not deployed
overseas. On demobilisation, these veterans returned to racial hatred and
race riots at home no less severe than those they had known before the war.
Fig. 25 Allied signatories of the Armistice at Compiègne, 11 November
1918.
The moment of victory. General Foch, second from the right (number 1), is
carrying an attaché case with the document of capitulation just signed by the
German delegation on 11 November at 7.30 a.m.
Fig. 26 Homecoming.
This embroidery shows the joy of the reunion of mother and child with the
father, who had spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Saxony. An
imprisoned soldier, unable to fight, has used a traditionally female art to
express his relief at liberation.
Fig. 27 Commemorative plate: U-boat 9.
The sailors who served in German U-boat 9 commemorated their years
together in many ways, including commissioning this painted porcelain
image of their ship at sea. Probably made in Meissen, this plate celebrated a
submarine which sank three British cruisers on 21 September 1914.
Fig. 28 Model submarine made of bullets.
The ingenuity of artisans in uniform extended to the conversion of an
infantryman’s bullets and copper scraps into the hull of a small submarine.
Fig. 29 Figurine of an African soldier.
The dignity of African soldiers who served in French forces is evident in this
carefully designed figurine, with weapon, cloth puttees and uniform.
Fig. 30 North African soldier’s family war album.

A collage of photos of a North African Zouave and his family shows how
ubiquitous were images recalling the military service of colonial troops.
Fig. 31 Model airplane.
Recycled wire and bits and scraps of metal enabled an anonymous artisan
metalworker in uniform to create his own private airplane as a distraction
from the terrestrial war.
Bibliographical essays
1 Origins
Volker R. Berghahn
There are innumerable studies on the larger and deeper origins of the First
World War, some of which are being mentioned in this chapter and also in
the next one by Jean-Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich. While James
Joll’s volume, discussed in the Introduction to Chapter 1 above, continues
to provide a good starting point, the more so since Richard Wetzel has
updated the first edition, the following passages contain a number of
additional titles that readers may find helpful as they try to understand the
complexities of the subject. The annotations follow the thematic structure of
the text.
Domestic politics and foreign policy

Those interested in the interaction of domestic politics and foreign-policy
making may wish to start with Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). The classic work in this
interaction in the case of Germany is Eckart Kehr, Economic Interest,
Militarism and Foreign Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1977). This perspective is being continued in Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985). For the
French case: Gerd Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve
of the First World War (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1984) and Alfred Cobban, A
History of Modern France (London: Penguin, 1963), especially the chapters
on the Republic’s attempts to stabilise the political system in the 1870s and
1880s. On the pressures exerted increasingly by national movements, see
Paul M. Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (eds.), Nationalist and Racialist
Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (London: Macmillan,
1981).
Imperialism
For an anthology on imperialism that contains a number of essays trying to
conceptualise this phenomenon for the modern period, see Roger Owen and
Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London:
Longmans, 1972). On British colonialism it is still worthwhile to consult
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, Africa and the Victorians (London
and New York: Macmillan, 1961), not only because they discuss the
interaction between the metropole (London) and the periphery (in this case
the Sudan), but also because they introduced the distinction between an
earlier ‘informal imperialism’ and a later ‘formal’ one that involved direct
occupation and administration. On Belgian colonialism see Adam
Hochschild’s study, discussed in the text. On German colonialism, in
addition to Isabel Hull’s book (discussed in the text) and Sebastian Conrad
(in the notes), see also Helmut Bley, Namibia under German Rule
(Hamburg: LIT-Verlag, 1996).
Culture
The classic study on high culture is Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980). Unfortunately this is not a
comprehensive study of Austro-Hungarian culture but a collection of
essays. But if the reader begins with Schorske’s really quite wonderful first
essay on the ‘Ringstrasse’ in the optimistic days of the mid century, the
later essays on the growing pessimism and sense of decadence are all the
more intriguing. On the German side, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of
Cultural Despair (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965). The study by
Edward R. Tannenbaum (cited in the text) is invaluable because it deals
both with high culture and the avant-garde as well as with popular culture in
pre-1914 Europe more widely.
Armaments and war preparations

Here again are quite a number of relevant studies, some of which have
already been mentioned in the text and notes. Next to Samuel R.
Williamson’s and Volker R. Berghahn’s, three other studies that appeared in
the same Macmillan series on the Origins of the First World War are by
John Keiger (on France), Zara Steiner (on Britain) and Dominic Lieven (on
Russia). Indispensable still: Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1975). But contrast with Konrad H. Jarausch’s biography of
Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg (The Enigmatic Chancellor (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972). He examines the localisation
argument. Important also: Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the
Origins of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Robert
Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds.), The Coming of the First
World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), F. R. Bridge, The Habsburg
Monarchy among the Great Powers, 1815–1918 (New York: Berg, 1990);
Manfred Boemecke et al. (eds.), Anticipating Total War (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1996); Paul M. Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great
Powers, 1880–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979) and The Rise of the
Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Ashfield
Press, 1987). Finally, because this anthology is also concerned with
problems of pre-1914 political culture: Holger Afflerbach and David
Stevenson (eds.), An Improbable War? (New York: Berghahn, 2007).
2 1914: Outbreak
Jean-Jacques Becker and Gerd Krumeich
Never have the origins of a war precipitated a debate as important and
enduring as that on the outbreak of the First World War. It has been
political, ideological and historiographical in character. There have been so
many different strands to this debate that it is difficult to distinguish
between polemics and history.
In the 1920s, the central issue in the debate on war origins was the
question of ‘responsibilities’. This matter became central from the moment
the German government signed the Versailles Treaty which affirmed that
Germany was solely and totally responsible for the war. In the early days,
the key participants were less historians than journalists, retired military
men and intellectuals of more or less good faith. A good guide to this phase
is Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Controversies
and Consensus (London: Longman, 2002). What is striking is that this
polemical moment also provided the occasion for the publication of studies,
more political than historical, which went beyond the debate over
‘responsibility’.
Reflections on what happened in July 1914 reached a level which merits
the admiration of historians today. Three historians stand out: Bernadotte
Schmitt, Pierre Renouvin and Jules Isaac. On this phase of the debate see:
Jacques Droz, Les causes de la Première guerre mondiale: essai
d’historiographie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973); and the more recent
interpretation of Annika Mombauer, The Origins, pp. 78–118. On Pierre
Renouvin, see the historiographical study on the war by Jay Winter and
Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914
to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2005) (the French version
appeared under the title Penser la Grande guerre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
2004)). A remarkably complete and influential essay is that of Samuel R.
Williamson and Ernest R. May, ‘An identity of opinion: historians and July
1914’, Journal of Modern History, 79 (2007), pp. 335–87.
Following the first generation of First World War historians was the
Italian journalist and political figure, Luigi Albertini, whose study of ‘July’,
published in Italian in 1942–3, was based not only on all available sources
but on interviews with former leaders still alive. See his Origins of the War
of 1914, trans. Isabella M. Massey, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University
Press, 1952–7). This study is still alive in today’s debates, though few
acknowledge it. Albertini had the merit of establishing with as great a
degree of precision as possible the chronology of diplomatic moves on all
levels. His aim was to establish who knew what and when. To be sure, this
cannot account for everything; it cannot establish how various moves were
interpreted, and neglects that which was neglected at the time, but it is an
indispensable aid against anachronism.
Albertini’s scholarship was not well known – it appeared in English
translation only in the 1950s – but we hear its echoes in the violent
controversy arising from the publication in 1961 of Fritz Fischer’s Griff
nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1964), which caused a sensation
in Germany and in the international scholarly community. Fritz Fischer
aimed to show that Germany wanted the war long before she provoked it in
1914. This was a war which seemed to be necessary for her to become a
world power, or more precisely, a dominant world power. Contrary to prior
claims, Fischer did not find many new sources on the basis of which he
analysed the July 1914 crisis. What he did was to read through his personal
optic a series of well-known and long-established documents. He owed
much to the research of Albertini. Useful on the international dimensions of
the Fischer controversy are Mombauer, Origins, pp. 127ff. and Winter and
Prost, The Great War, pp. 468ff.
There was one new source which fuelled the ‘Fischer debate’ in the
1970s. It was the diary of Kurt Riezler, principal secretary of the German
Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg. This document was known to exist, but
had been held privately in the family ever since. Mombauer, Origins, pp.
155–60, is useful on this source.
The Fischer thesis on sole German responsibility for the outbreak of war
in 1914 requires a comparative analysis of the actions of each of the
belligerents, accomplished by historians in an impressive list of books on
individual countries and the origins of the war. These studies modified
considerably our understanding of the July crisis. For this moment in
scholarship, see Marc Trachtenberg, ‘The coming of the First World War: a
reassessment’, in Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton University
Press, 1991), pp. 47–99.
With the arrival of research on ‘mentalities’ in the 1960s and 1970s, there
occurred a real paradigm change in approaches to this topic. Now historians
of the twentieth century followed Bloch and Febvre in trying to understand
the structures of feeling and thought of contemporaries in 1914. The first to
do so was the British historian, James Joll, in his inaugural lecture at the
London School of Economics in 1968. His theme was ‘the unspoken
assumptions’ of the leaders of 1914, and his views can be followed in the
1968 edition of his inaugural lecture published by the London School of
Economics in pamphlet form. The task of the historian, Joll said, was both
difficult and unavoidable. It was ‘to re-create the whole climate of opinion
within which political leaders in the past operated, and to discover what
were the assumptions in the minds of ordinary men and women faced with
the consequences of their ruler’s decisions’ (p. 13). Joll later developed a
new paradigm concerning the ‘mood of 1914’. In his pioneering work on
the Great War he showed that the decisions of July 1914 rested on
sentiments formed earlier, and that the war they unleashed was one that was
beyond their imagination at the time. On Joll’s ideas, see Williamson and
May’s essay in the Journal of Modern History, cited above. Joll’s view does
not preclude detailed analysis of decisions taken and of responsibilities on
different levels for the outbreak of the war. Instead its advantage is the
avoidance of anachronism, of using our perspective to judge that of others,
a practice which Marc Bloch termed a mortal sin in history.
Other historians reached conclusions similar to Joll at roughly the same
time, though most recognise that it was Joll who led the way. This was
particularly true in the case of Wolfgang Mommsen, who had played an
important role in the Fischer controversy, and whose reflections on the
‘topos of inevitable war’ in the minds of the German leadership appeared in
1980 and was soon translated into several other languages. See his two
essays: ‘Die deutsche Kriegszielpolitik 1914–1918: Bemerkungen zum
Stand der Diskussion’, in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse (eds.),
Kriegsausbruch 1914 (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1967), pp. 60–100; and
‘The topos of inevitable war in Germany in the decade before 1914’, in
Volker R. Berghahn and Martin Kitchen (eds.), Germany in the Age of Total
War (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 23–45.
Similarly pathbreaking was the work of Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914,
Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la
Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), on public opinion in
France at the moment of the outbreak of the war, which permitted the
historical study of the genesis of the union sacrée. Later, Richard Hamilton
and Holger Herwig brought together a series of essays on Decisions for
War, 1914–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), where
they moved in a different direction, setting aside questions of social
structure or mentalities, to concentrate solely on ‘the men on the spot’, the
men who took the decisions. They disclosed ‘that the decision makers . . .
sought to save, maintain, or enhance the power and prestige of the nation’
(p. 20). It is evident that such a framework, subtly, perhaps subconsciously,
reintroduces the notion of ‘mentalities’, in which social-Darwinian notions
informed beliefs on the need to defend the nation.
It is striking that the mix of military plans and political decisions little
concerned historians of responsibility for the war. To be sure, everyone
knew there was a Schlieffen Plan, but the older historiography never
established when and to what extent this plan was decisive in framing
concrete decisions. These scholars were content to describe pre-
mobilisation and mobilisation, partial and general in the last days of July.
The best synthesis is still Steven E. Miller et al. (eds.), Military Strategy
and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton University Press, 1991),
and especially the chapter in this collection written by Marc Trachtenberg,
‘The meaning of mobilization in 1914’, pp. 195ff.
The puzzle of mobilisation was also at the heart of the work of the French
scholar Jules Isaac, for whom the German decision during the crisis was
marked by a degree of incoherence, responsibility for which he attributed to
General Moltke. On this point, see Isaac’s Un débat historique: 1914, le
problème des origines de la guerre (Paris: Rieder, 1933), p. 157. This
matter is significant, and suggests that we can find the key, and perhaps the
decisive key, to Russian, German and French decisions in considerations of
military ‘necessity’. The research of Gerhard Ritter on German militarism
(see his monumental The Sword and the Sceptre: The Problem of Militarism
in Germany, vol. III: The Tragedy of Statesmanship: Bethmann Hollweg as
War Chancellor 1914–1917 (London: Allen Lane, 1972)) helped establish
the validity of this interpretation. This view was further fortified by the
work of Volker Berghahn, whose analysis of the July crisis distinguishes
political, economic, military and intellectual factors (see his Germany and
the Approach of War in 1914, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993)).
Last but not least, the important work of David Stevenson on armaments
before the Great War concludes with a chapter on the ‘militarization of
diplomacy’ during the July crisis: see his Armaments and the Coming of
War: Europe 1904–1914 (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 366ff.
To what extent can one say that military opinion prevailed in the war
crisis? With respect to France, the question remains open and acute. Were
Poincaré, President of the Republic, and Paléologue, French ambassador to
Russia, primarily worried about preserving the Franco-Russian alliance, or
were they prepared to risk everything to honour military accords? This
latter position is that of Gerd Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France
on the Eve of the First World War (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1984); see also
his ‘Raymond Poincaré dans la Crise de Juillet 1914’, in La politique et la
guerre (Mélanges Jean-Jacques Becker) (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 2002), pp.
508–18. Or did they have their own considerations facing a Germany
worried for years about encirclement, real or imagined? This is the thesis of
Stefan Schmidt, Frankreichs Außenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914 (Munich:
R. Oldenburg Verlag, 2009). John Keiger’s synthesis (France and the
Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1983)) leaves these
questions open. But, as M. B. Hayne has shown in The French Foreign
Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898–1914 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), it is essential to recognise that there is no evidence
of military pressure placed on French political leaders during the July crisis.
In the case of Russia, we are much less well informed. There is research
still to be done on the real impact of military planning on political
decisions, a question on which there is still no consensus today. On this
point, see Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), whose views are
questioned by Volker Berghahn in Chapter 1 of this volume; and Keith
Neilson, ‘Russia’, in Keith Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914 (London:
UCL Press, 1995), pp. 97–120.
Nevertheless, the research of Holger Afflerbach and of Annika
Mombauer has given us much on which to interpret the correlation between
military and political decisions. They have shown that the German military
elite played a much larger role in the decisions taken in the July crisis than
we have thought until now. See Holger Afflerbach, Falkenhayn: Politisches
Handeln und Denken im Kaiserreich (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag,
1994); Annika Mombauer, ‘A reluctant military leader? Helmuth von
Moltke and the July Crisis of 1914’, War in History, 6:4 (1999), pp. 417–
46; see also her essay on the ‘July Crisis’ in her book Helmuth von Moltke
and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
To be sure, Fischer and his students wrote of German ‘militarism’ and on
the desire among the war party to impose its views on the political
leadership. But Mombauer goes further in saying: ‘It is striking to what
extent military concerns and reasoning had become common currency,
accepted without question by civilians and determining their decision
making’ (Mombauer, ‘Reluctant military leader’, p. 421). The views of
Hew Strachan move in the same direction. See his ‘Towards a comparative
history of World War I: some reflections’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift,
67 (2008), pp. 339–44. Mombauer shows striking similarities between the
long-term, pessimistic attitude of Moltke, the Chief of the Imperial General
Staff, and that of Bethmann Hollweg. Doubting time and again that
Germany could win a quick and decisive victory, Moltke still told everyone
within hearing range that Germany had to go to war and ‘the sooner the
better’. Wolfgang Mommsen had come to a similar interpretation of
German thinking in the July crisis; see his essay on ‘The topos of inevitable
war’. Mombauer and Stig Förster separately showed that many German
military leaders did not believe a war would be short and victorious; so
much for the ‘short war illusion’ of which other historians spoke when
looking at the war crisis. For Förster’s formulation, see his ‘Der deutsche
Generalstab und die Illusion des kurzen Krieges 1871–1914: Metakritik
eines Mythos’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995), pp. 61–98.
The problem remains to determine the extent to which a phobia about
‘encirclement’ was the decisive element in the war crisis of 1914.
This point brings us back to the beginning of this bibliographical essay.
Joll invited historians to think about what kind of war the leaders of 1914
were capable of imagining. It is in this domain that there remains much
work still to be done. Cataclysms of the order of Verdun or the Somme
could not have been in their minds, even if we find – from Moltke to
Bethmann Hollweg or from Bebel to Sasonov – fears of the eventual
destruction of Europe, a kind of seven years’ war, in the terms Bebel used
in 1911, entailing the destruction of millions of young men in a future war.
In reflecting on the writings of actual military leaders both before and
during the July crisis on the war or wars to come, we do not find a hint of
what later would unfold on the battlefields of the Great War. It is in this
kind of terrain that we can see why Jean-Baptiste Duroselle termed the
Great War as ‘incomprehensible’ (see his La Grande guerre des Français:
1914–1918: l’incompréhensible (Paris: Perrin, 1994)). The war prepared for
in 1914, the war undertaken in 1914, was utterly remote from the war
Europe and the world had to live through from 1915 to 1918. To chart the
difference between the war imagined and the real war to come is a kind of
‘counterfactual history’, a task which still awaits us.
Finally, there is the brilliantly told and abundantly documented study of
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
(London: Allen Lane, 2012). While masterful, it tells an anti-Fischer tale
with a bias against Serbia and towards Austria–Hungary and Germany,
whose decision-makers vanish from the narrative at decisive moments in
1914.
3 1915: Stalemate
The historiography of the First World War has rarely defined its chronology
year by year. Many studies of this kind have encountered difficulties as a
result, particularly in relation to 1915, caught as it is between 1914, with the
outbreak of war and the first major operations, and 1916, the year of the
great battles of materiel. This second year of the war is thus frequently
isolated within studies that are wider in theme or national interest, and
which consider the totality of the war. Such examples are not followed here.
The choice of works cited below represents a selection among studies in
which the year 1915 is seen as central.
For a rare study of 1915 as a whole, see Lyn Macdonald, 1915: The
Death of Innocence (London: Headline, 1993). A recent study adopts the
problématique of the years 1914–15 as a fundamental turning point, treating
1915 in depth from a new perspective: John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre
totale: le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010). (Note in
particular the substantial general introduction.) At the narrative level, the
chapters dealing with the military history of 1915 can be consulted in two
major studies: John Keegan, The First World War (London: Hutchinson,
1998) and Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1983).
The following general work, apart from its structure, picks out clearly
certain key events of 1915, at least from the British point of view, both on
the home front and on the battlefields. The point of view is narrative and
analytical, but the chapters are short: Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of
War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1986). (See in particular Parts 2, 3 and 5, for the military aspects and Part 4
for the home front.) Certain military aspects of the year 1915 have been the
subject of specific studies, notably Gallipoli: George Cassar, The French
and the Dardanelles: A Study of the Failure in the Conduct of War (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1971); Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Basarin and Hatice Basarin,
Gallipoli: The Turkish Story (London: Allen & Unwin, 2003); Jenny
Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester University Press, 2004); and
Victor Rudenno, Gallipoli: Attack from the Sea (New Haven, CT: Yale
The year 1915 is also very evident in a work which is fundamental on
matters relating to the Eastern Front, both in its military aspects and the
home front: Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London:
Penguin, 1998).
By reason of the date of Italy’s entry into the war, 1915 is a strong
presence in Antonio Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani, 1915–1918
(Milan: Sansoni, 1998).
On the use of gas, 1915 was a decisive period, well studied in the two
following works: L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in
the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Olivier Lepick, La
Grande Guerre chimique, 1914–1918 (Paris: PUF, 1998).
On matters concerning civilian populations and the different forms of
assault that they suffered in 1915, historiography has recently been very
considerably enhanced. On the occupations during the ‘long 1915’ in a
comparative study, a fundamental synthesis can be found in Sophie de
Schaepdrijver, ‘L’Europe occupée en 1915: entre violence et exploitation’,
in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 121–51.
On refugees in the Russian Empire, a crucial question in 1915, see Peter
Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First
World War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.) On Russian
anti-Semitic acts of violence: Peter Holquist, ‘Les violences de l’armée
russe à l’encontre des Juifs en 1915: causes et limites’, in Horne (ed.), Vers
la guerre totale, pp. 191–219.
On the ‘battle of words’ which, very particularly in 1915, took over from
the ‘German atrocities’ of 1914, see a fundamental book: John Horne and
Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
On the German blockade in 1915: Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger:
The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press, 1985); Gerd Krumeich, ‘Le blocus maritime et la guerre sous-
marine’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 175–90.
On the vital question of the Armenian genocide, the following stand out:
Arnold Toynbee, Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1915) (the great report by the British historian, then
aged 26, which was published in November 1915 and which was the first
book on the genocide); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
(Oxford University Press, 2005); Raymond Kévorkian, Le génocide des
Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006); Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of the Turkish Responsibility (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the
Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the
Caucasus (Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1995); and Yves Ternon, Les
Arméniens: histoire d’un génocide (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996).
Two studies of the economic mobilisation examine a significant
development in 1915: R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George
and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 (London: Cassell, 1978); and L.
H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914–
1917: A Study of the War Industry Committee (London: Macmillan, 1984).
On the scientific and technological mobilisation in 1915, an essential
synthesis can be found in Anne Rasmussen, ‘Sciences et techniques:
l’escalade’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 97–117.
4 1916: Impasse
Robin Prior
For those with French, the appropriate volumes of the official history, Les
Armées Françaises dans la Grande Guerre (Paris: Imprimerie nationale,
1922–39) with their massive supplements of documents, are indispensable.
For the Germans the Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkreig 1914 bis 1918, vol. X is
good on detail, less reliable on interpretation.
It is sad to report that there are few modern studies of Verdun written by
the French. The best book is still therefore Alistair Horne, The Price of
Glory: Verdun 1916 (London: Macmillan, 1963), although its frequent
references to so-called parallel events in the Second World War make it
somewhat anachronistic. To English readers it is still essential. Ian Ousby,
The Road to Verdun (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002) is an attempt to
integrate the battle into wider French society. It does not always succeed.
Anthony Clayton, Paths of Glory: The French Army 1914–1918 (London:
Cassell, 2003) has chapters on Verdun. It is a brave attempt at an overview
of the French but must be used with care as some of its very basic facts are
wrong. Malcolm Brown, Verdun 1916 (Stroud: Tempus, 1999) is, as might
be expected, strong on the experiences of the individual soldier. David
Mason, Verdun (Moreton-in-the Marsh: Windrush, 2000) is a useful
summary. Its place of publication seems weirdly appropriate. Georges
Blond, Verdun (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965) is one of the few French
studies of the battle to have been translated. It is well worth study. I found
the Michelin Guide, Verdun and the Battles for its Possession (Clermont
Ferrand, 1919) useful to grasp the topography of the battlefield.
Pétain, because of later events, has received much attention. Nicholas
Atkin, Pétain (London: Longman, 1997) and Richard Griffith, Marshal
Pétain (London: Constable, 1970) are balanced accounts. Pétain’s version,
Verdun (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1930) is also more balanced in
its appraisal of the battle than might be thought. In French, Guy Pedroncini,
Pétain: le soldat et la gloire, 1856–1918 (Paris: Perrin, 1989) is the
essential work. Of the other French generals there is virtually nothing in
English. Joffre, The Memoirs of Marshal Joffre, 2 vols. (London: Geoffrey
Bles, 1932) are as devoid of insight as was Joffre himself in 1916. For
another view of the political dimensions of the French war effort see J. C.
King, Generals and Politicians: Conflicts between France’s High
Command, Parliament and Government (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1951). A more modern study of French strategy is
provided in Robert Doughty’s Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and
Operations in the Great War (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2005).
On the German side, Falkenhayn’s General Headquarters 1914–1916
and its Critical Decisions (London: Hutchinson, 1919) must be read with
forensic care. Much more reliable is Crown Prince Wilhelm, My War
Experiences (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1922). Robert Foley, German
Strategy and the Path to Verdun (Cambridge University Press, 2005) is an
excellent account of the development of attrition. More generally there is
Ian Passingham, All the Kaiser’s Men: The Life and Death of the German
Army on the Western Front 1914–1918 (Stroud: Sutton, 2003).
For the Somme, the starting point for English-speaking readers must be
Sir John Edmonds, Military Operations: France and Belgium 1916, volume
I, and Captain Wilfrid Miles who wrote volume II. They were published by
Macmillan in 1932 and 1938 respectively and are far more critical of Haig’s
generalship than might be thought.
There are many studies of the battle. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The
Somme (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005) is one
of the most recent. For a different perspective, Gary Sheffield’s The Somme
(London: Cassell, 2003) is recommended. Peter Hart’s The Somme (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2008) is strong on the personal experiences of the
soldiers. A. H. Farrar-Hockley, The Somme (London: Batsford, 1964) is an
older study with many insights. Peter Liddle, The 1916 Battle of the
Somme: A Reappraisal (London: Leo Cooper, 1992) doesn’t reappraise
much of interest. William Philpott, Bloody Victory (London: Little, Brown,
2009) is a useful reminder that the French also took part in the battle. In
what sense the Somme can be seen as a British victory is more problematic.
Elizabeth Greenhalgh’s chapter on the Somme in her book Victory Through
Coalition (Cambridge University Press, 2005) is a more judicious
treatment.
There have been (too?) many studies of Haig. The definitive published
version of his War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 is edited by Gary
Sheffield and John Bourne (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005). John
Terraine’s Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell, 1963)
still has merit, although it glosses over Haig’s failings. Denis Winter’s
Haig’s Command (London: Viking, 1991) is too full of conspiracy theories
to be taken seriously. Duff Cooper’s Haig, 2 vols. (London: Faber & Faber,
1935–6) was useful until editions of Haig’s diaries appeared and
demonstrated how selectively Duff Cooper had used them. Sir John
Davidson’s Haig: Master of the Field (London: Nevill, 1953) fails to
convince. Gary Sheffield’s The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army
(London: Aurum Press, 2011) presents a viewpoint different from my own.
A series of battlefield guides to the Somme published by Leo Cooper and
written by diverse hands should not be neglected. There are far too many to
mention individually here, but they often contain remarkable insights into
the terrain and difficulties thrown up by sections of the battlefield.
On the artillery, Jackson Hughes’s tragically unpublished thesis, ‘The
Monstrous Anger of the Guns: British Artillery Tactics on the Western
Front’ (PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1994) should be consulted. The
British official history, Martin Farndale, History of the Royal Regiment of
Artillery: The Western Front (London: Royal Artillery Institution, 1986) is
almost worthless for the Somme. Much better is the unpublished draft
history by Brigadier Anstey, languishing in the Artillery Institution
Archives in Greenwich. Lawrence Bragg et al., Artillery Survey in the First
World War (London: Field Survey Association, 1971) is essential for those
trying to come to grips with the technical side of the subject.
The chapters on the Somme in Winston Churchill’s World Crisis
(London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923) have been too heavily criticised.
Much material was supplied to him by James Edmonds, and his dissection
of the casualties of the Somme is as good a study as can be found. I discuss
it in Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ As History (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
Lloyd George’s War Memoirs must be read with caution and in conjuction
with Andrew Suttie, Rewriting the First World War: Lloyd George, Politics
and Strategy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
The memoir literature is too detailed to deal with here. John Bickersteth
(ed.), The Bickersteth Diaries (London: Leo Cooper, 1996) is particularly
harrowing. Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme (London:
Allen Lane, 1971) is a kind of collective memoir. It enjoys a classic status
but almost all of Middlebrook’s military judgements can be called into
question.
5 1917: Global war

Michael S. Neiberg
This bibliography avoids general histories that cover the entire war in an
effort to focus on the main events of 1917. The following three volumes are
dedicated exclusively to the year and have the added advantage of looking
at the problem globally: Jean-Jacques Becker, 1917 en Europe: l’année
impossible (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1997); Ian F. W. Beckett (ed.),
1917: Beyond the Western Front (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and Peter Dennis
and Jeffrey Grey (eds.), 1917: Tactics, Training, and Technology (Canberra:
Army History Unit Press, 2007).
The American entry and first year of the war for the United States are the
subject of a number of books. Grotelueschen is particularly valuable for the
military aspects. Kennedy is a classic and Keene is most appropriate for a
student audience. These all provide a good introduction to the topic: Justus
Doenecke, Nothing Less than War: A New History of America’s Entry into
World War I (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011); Mark
Grotelueschen, The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in
World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jennifer D. Keene, World
War I: The American Soldier Experience (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 2011); David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War
and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and
David Trask, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918 (Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993).
There is less scholarly attention to the events of 1917 in Russia than one
might suppose. There is even less attention to the events of the Eastern
Front in that year. McMeekin offers a recent analysis based on exhaustive
primary work in numerous archives. Liulevicius offers a provocative and
compelling thesis. All of these are useful: W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage
Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1986); Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern
Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I
(Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins
of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011);
and Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols.
(Princeton University Press, 1980–7).
Perhaps not surprisingly, there is much more scholarship about events on
the Western Front in 1917. There remains considerably more debate about
British strategy and the Passchendaele campaign than about most other
battles that year. Smith’s book is one of the best on the events of this crucial
year. It focuses on one French division as a way of explaining the mutinies
that followed the Nivelle offensive. There is still no definitive biography of
Nivelle himself. See the following: Martin Kitchen, The Silent
Dictatorship: The Politics of the German High Command under
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (London: Croom Helm, 1976);
Guy Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917 (Paris: PUF, 1967); Robin Prior
and Trevor Wilson, Passchendaele: The Untold Story (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1996); Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and
Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World
War I (Princeton University Press, 1994); Tim Travers, How the War Was
Won: Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front
1917–1918 (London: Routledge, 1992).
The Italian Front has received increased scholarly attention of late. So,
too, has the Middle Eastern front, although much of the discussion there is
on the post-war political ramifications of the Balfour Declaration (issued in
1917) and the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The former famously
promised British support for a Jewish homeland after the war while the
latter divided the region into British and French spheres of influence.
Studies of the Italian and Ottoman Fronts include: George Cassar, The
Forgotten Front: The British Campaign in Italy, 1917–1918 (London:
Hambledon, 1998); Edward Erickson, Ottoman Army Effectiveness in World
War I: A Comparative Study (London: Routledge, 2007); Elie Kedourie,
England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire,
1914–1921 (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956); Mario Morselli, Caporetto
1917: Victory or Defeat? (London: Routledge, 2001); and Jan Karl
Tannenbaum, France and the Arab Middle East, 1914–1920 (Philadelphia:
American Philosophical Society, 1978).
Finally, several historians have turned their attention to the experience of
non-British units on the Western Front in this year. For Canada especially,
1917 was a critical year. Australia and New Zealand, although more
commonly identified with Gallipoli, in fact suffered more casualties at
Passchendaele. See the following for a guide to this part of the war: Tim
Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918
(Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008); Glyn Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele:
The New Zealand Story (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2000); Geoffrey Hayes,
Andrew Iarocci and Mike Bechtold (eds.), Vimy Ridge: A Canadian
Reassessment (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007; and
the still classic study by Bill Gammage: The Broken Years: Australian
Soldiers in the Great War (Canberra: Australian National University Press,
1974).
6 1918: Endgame
Christoph Mick
Histories of the Great War include chapters on 1918, but often they are
tagged on almost as an afterthought. Many important economic, social and
cultural transformations had already begun before 1918 and were not
completed by the time the war ended. In November 1918 the war on the
Western Front was over but it still continued in large parts of Eastern
Europe, and peace treaties with the Central Powers were only signed in
1919. The year 1918 is therefore, in many ways, a year of transition. As
many important publications on the war and the immediate post-war period
are discussed in other bibliographical essays of this volume, I will – with a
few exceptions – be focusing on literature which is specifically dedicated to
the year 1918.
The battles of the Marne and the Somme, of Verdun, Ypres and
Passchendaele have traditionally attracted greater attention by historians
than the German spring offensives or the Allied victories in the summer and
autumn of 1918. This has only changed in the last few years. In 1999, an
edited volume was published in Germany which gives an excellent
overview of the ongoing discussions about the military, political, social,
economic and cultural history of the last year of the Great War: Jörg
Duppler and Gerhard Paul Gross (eds.), Kriegsende 1918: Ereignis,
Wirkung, Nachwirkung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1999).
A comprehensive history of 1918 was published by David Stevenson.
The book covers all theatres of war and also includes chapters on morale,
the home fronts, the war economy and submarine and naval warfare: David
Stevenson, With our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918
(London: Allen Lane, 2011).
Two excellent studies discuss the military and (Martin Kitchen) political
aspects of the German offensives: Martin Kitchen, The German Offensives
of 1918 (Stroud: Tempus, 2005); and David T. Zabecki, The German 1918
Offensives: A Case Study in the Operational Level of War (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2006).
The best overview of the events on the Italian Front, which includes
seventy pages on the year 1918, is Mark Thompson’s The White War: Life
and Death on the Italian Front, 1915–1919 (London: Basic Books, 2008).
An indispensable work on the domestic situation in Austria-Hungary in
1918, which also covers the situation in Germany, is Holger H. Herwig, The
First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1997).
German historiography after the Second World War has been more
interested in the transition from the ‘silent dictatorship’ of Hindenburg and
Ludendorff to the democratic Weimar Republic than in the spring
offensives and subsequent German defeat. The question whether post-war
Germany would have had a better chance of developing into a peaceful and
democratic nation if there had been more transformation and less continuity,
or whether the opposite is true, is still hotly debated. The leaders of the two
social democratic parties in particular have come in for a lot of criticism.
Could they have done more to disempower the old elites, to hold them
accountable for the defeat and to achieve greater democracy and more
social justice? For this discussion see Bruno Thoss, ‘Militärische
Entscheidung und politisch-gesellschaftlicher Umbruch: Das Jahr 1918 in
der neueren Weltkriegsforschung’, in Duppler and Gross (eds.), Kriegsende
1918, pp. 17–40.
Scott Stephenson analyses the curious fact that the soldiers on the
Western Front remained disciplined up to the very end and only rarely
participated in soldiers’ councils and the German revolution: Scott
Stephenson, The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and the
German Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
The work by Deist still offers the best concise discussion of the reasons
for the German military collapse: Wilhelm Deist, ‘The military collapse of
the German Empire: the reality behind the stab-in-the-back myth’, War in
History, 3 (1996), pp. 186–207.
A comprehensive discussion of the fatal role of the ‘stab-in-the-back’
myth during the Weimar Republic is provided in Boris Barth’s
Dolchstoßlegende und politische Desintegration: Das Trauma der
deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste,
2003).
Two new political biographies of leading figures of the Third OHL have
been published in recent years. Manfred Nebelin argues that Ludendorff,
and not Wilhelm II, was the link between Bismarck and Hitler, stating that
Ludendorff’s views were closer to those of Hitler than to Bismarck’s ideas.
See Manfred Nebelin, Ludendorff: Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich:
Siedler, 2011). Wolfram Pyta argues against the view that Hindenburg was
just a figurehead: Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen
Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich: Siedler, 2009).
The First World War plays a key role in many national narratives. As the
British Expeditionary Force was in itself a supranational army, it should not
come as a surprise that historians with different national backgrounds tend
to focus on the important contribution of their respective national units for
victory. A good overview of such ‘national histories’ of the war is given in
the essays of the following edited volume: Ashley Ekins (ed.), 1918 – Year
of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi,
Auckland: Exisle, 2010).
American historians tend to stress the contribution of the American
Expeditionary Force while British and French historians often highlight the
naivety and inexperience of American officers and soldiers, the
organisational deficits and the unnecessarily high casualty rates. A
discussion of this is given in Meleah Ward, ‘The cost of inexperience:
Americans on the Western Front, 1918’, in Ekins (ed.), 1918 – Year of
Victory, pp. 111–43.
The ‘blame game’ which was played during the war between British and
French military commanders continues in historiography. Many historians
of British military history tend to follow the argument put forward by Sir
Douglas Haig that the BEF did not receive sufficient support from the
French army during the Michael and Georgette offensives. They often
marginalise the French contribution to stopping the German offensives and
ignore the fact that it was the French army’s defensive victory in
Champagne and the success of the subsequent counter-offensive which
helped turn the tide. Historians of French military history depict British
generals as incompetent and often panicking. According to their
interpretation the BEF had to be bailed out by the French. All historians are
agreed that the soldiers themselves were extremely resilient. In 1918, not
only soldiers of the BEF, but also French, Italian, German and Austro-
Hungarian soldiers kept on fighting and pushing themselves to the limits of
their physical and mental endurance.
Different opinions about who contributed most to repulsing the German
offensives and the subsequent victories are discussed in (and expressed by)
the following essays (all in Ekins (ed.), 1918 – Year of Victory): Robin
Prior, ‘Stabbed in the front: the German defeat in 1918’, pp. 27–40; Gary
Sheffield, ‘Finest hour? British forces on the Western Front in 1918: an
overview’, pp. 41–63 and Elizabeth Greenhalgh, ‘A French victory, 1918’,
pp. 95–110. An ongoing debate among historians of British military history
is the question of the ‘learning curve’ of the BEF. Did General
Headquarters and the generals learn from the failed offensives of 1916 and
1917 or not? Gary Sheffield in particular argues that the failure of the
German spring offensive and the following victories is evidence enough
that there was a steep ‘learning curve’, and that Haig and Co. were not
‘donkeys’ who led ‘lions’ (the British soldiers) as many critics believed, a
view still shared by a considerable part of the British public: Gary
Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities
(London: Headline, 2001).
The Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest do not feature much in
histories of the Great War. Monographs on the peace treaties and on
German and Austrian occupation policies in the region are usually
published by historians of Eastern Europe, not by historians of the Great
War.
One exception is David Stevenson, who discusses the political context of
the peace treaties and the armistice in chapter 5 of his book: The First
World War and International Politics (Oxford University Press, 1988).
The classic study on German war aims in Eastern Europe and the political
context of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is given in Winfried Baumgart,
Deutsche Ostpolitik 1918: Von Brest-Litowsk bis zum Ende des Ersten
Weltkrieges (Vienna and Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1966).
The best book on the German occupation policy and one which also
discusses the cultural dimensions and post-war implications of German rule
in Eastern Europe (focusing mostly on Lithuania) is Vejas Gabriel
Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and
German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
For German policy in and towards Ukraine, see Frank Grelka, Die
ukrainische Nationalbewegung unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft 1918
und 1941/42 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005) and Włodzimierz
Mędrzecki, Niemiecka interwencja militarna na Ukrainie w 1918 roku
(Warsaw: Wydawnictwo, 2000).
7 1919: Aftermath
Bruno Cabanes
The study of the aftermath of the Great War covers three specific fields of
research. To begin with, the historians associated with the Historial de la
Grande Guerre (the Museum of the Great War) in Péronne, Somme, have
studied the war’s traumatic memory and the impact the conflict had on
violence in the twentieth century. Secondly, the history of international
relations has been significantly revitalised in recent years, as illustrated by
Zara Steiner’s standard work, The Lights that Failed: European
International History, 1919–1933 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005). Lastly, transnational history has addressed the global problems of the
1920s – humanitarian crises, refugees, the development of networks of
experts and the international recognition of new human rights and new
standards. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (eds.),
Sortir de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Tallandier, 2008) offers a ground-
breaking overview of the transition from war to peace, with its chapters on
each belligerent country in the wake of the war.
On Woodrow Wilson and Wilsonianism, see Arno J. Mayer, Politics and
Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at
Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967); Thomas J. Knock, To End
All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton
University Press, 1995); Francis Anthony Boyle, Foundations of World
Order: The Legalist Approach to International Relations (1898–1922)
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian
Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial
Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Leonard V. Smith, ‘The Wilsonian challenge to international law’, Journal
of the History of International Law, 13 (2011), pp. 179–208.
For a study of the workings of the Peace Conference, see Margaret
Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York:
Random House, 2003). For a critical reading of the Treaty of Versailles, see
Manfred F. Boemeke et al. (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment
after 75 Years (Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Gerd
Krumeich (ed.), Versailles 1919: Ziele, Wirkung, Wahrnehmung (Essen:
Klartext Verlag, 2001).
On veterans of the Great War, see Stephen R. Ward (ed.), The War
Generation: Veterans of the First World War (Port Washington, NY:
Kennikat Press, 1975); Antoine Prost, Les anciens combattants et la société
française, 1914–1939 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation des Sciences
Politiques, 1977); and Bruno Cabanes, La victoire endeuillée: la sortie de
guerre des soldats français (1918–1920) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004).
On veterans’ pacifism, see Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent:
Pacifism in France, 1919–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1991); Sophie
Lorrain, Des pacifistes français et allemands pionniers de l’entente franco-
allemande, 1871–1925 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Andrew Webster, ‘The
transnational dream: politicians, diplomats and soldiers in the League of
Nations’ pursuit of international disarmament, 1920–1938’, Contemporary
European History, 14:4 (2005), pp. 493–518; and Jean-Michel Guieu, Le
rameau et le glaive: les militants français pour la S.D.N. (Paris: Presses de
Sciences Po, 2008).
On disabled veterans, see Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds:
German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s
Bodies, Britain and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Sophie Delaporte, Les gueules cassées: les blessés de la face de la Grande
Guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 1996); David A. Gerber (ed.), Disabled
Veterans in History (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and
Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001);
Jeffrey S. Reznick, ‘Prostheses and propaganda: materiality and the human
body in the Great War’, in Nicholas J. Saunders, Matters of Conflict:
Material Culture, Memory and the First World War (London and New
York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 51–61; Sabine Kienitz, Beschädigte Helden:
Kriegsinvalidität und Körperbilder 1914–1923 (Paderborn: Schöningh,
2008); Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War
(University of New South Wales Press, 2009); and Beth Linker, War’s
Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (University of Chicago Press,
2011).
On the memory of the Great War, see Annette Becker, Les monuments
aux morts: mémoire de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Errance, 1988); Jay
Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European
Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Daniel J.
Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (University of
Chicago Press, 1999).
On the return to private life and on gender, see Mary Louise Roberts,
Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France,
1917–1927 (University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Bruno Cabanes and
Guillaume Piketty (eds.), Retour à l’intime au sortir de la guerre (Paris:
Tallandier, 2009).
On war widows and orphans, see Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss:
Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Olivier Faron, Les enfants du deuil: Orphelins et
pupilles de la nation de la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: La
Découverte, 2001); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Cinq deuils de guerre:
1914–1918 (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 2001); Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out:
How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the First
World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Erica A.
Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the
Remaking of the Nation After the Great War (New York University Press,
2012).
On the creation of international organisations, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back
to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, 112:4 (2007), pp.
1091–117; Sandrine Kott, ‘Une “communauté épistémique” du social?
Experts de l’I.L.O. et internationalisation des politiques sociales dans
l’entre-deux guerres’, Genèses, 2:71 (2008), pp. 26–46; Gerry Rodgers,
Eddy Lee, Lee Swepston and Jasmien Van Daele (eds.), The International
Labour Organization and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919–2009 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press and Geneva: International Labour Office,
2009); Jasmien Van Daele et al. (eds.), ILO Histories: Essays on the
International Labour Organization and its Impact on the World in the
Twentieth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010) and Isabelle Moret-Lespinet
and Vincent Viet (eds.), L’Organisation internationale du Travail (Rennes:
PUR, 2011).
On human rights in the wake of the Great War, see Barbara Metzger,
‘Towards an international human rights regime during the interwar years:
the League of Nations’ combat of traffic in women and children’, in Kevin
Grant et al. (eds.), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and
Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
pp. 54–79; Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, René Cassin (Paris: Fayard,
2011); and Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of
Humanitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
On the question of minority groups, see Carol Fink, Defending the Rights
of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority
Protection (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Tara Zahra, ‘The
“minority problem”: national classification in the French and Czechoslovak
borderlands’, Contemporary European Review, 17 (2008), pp. 137–65.
On refugees, see Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in
the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1985) and Claudena M.
Skran, Refugees in InterWar Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995). See also Philippe Nivet, Les réfugiés français de la
Grande Guerre, 1914–1920 (Paris: Economica, 2004); Nick Baron and
Peter Gatrell (eds.), Homelands: War, Population, and Statehood in Eastern
Europe and Russia, 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Catherine
Gousseff, L’exil russe: la fabrique du réfugié apatride (Paris: CNRS
Éditions, 2008); and Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border:
Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2010).
On refugees in the Near East, the standard work is Dzovinar Kévonian,
Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: les acteurs européens et la scène
proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 2004). See also Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘The League of
Nations’ rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern
humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review, 115:5 (2010),
pp. 1315–39.
On the violence of the immediate post-war period, see George Mosse,
Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990). For a critical evaluation of Mosse’s book,
see Antoine Prost, ‘The impact of war on French and German political
cultures’, Historical Journal, 37:1 (1994), pp. 209–17; John Horne (ed.),
‘Démobilisations culturelles après la Grande Guerre’, 14–18: Aujourd’hui–
Today–Heute, 5 (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 2002), pp. 49–53; Peter Gatrell,
‘War after the war: conflicts, 1919–1923’, in John Horne (ed.), A
Companion to the First World War (Chichester and Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 558–75; and Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘The
Great War and paramilitarism in Europe, 1917–23’, Contemporary
European History, 19:3 (2010), pp. 267–73.
8 The Western Front

Robin Prior
There is no one book which covers the Western Front as a whole, which
given the diverse source material and the size of the archival record, is not
surprising. Readers will have to turn to the bibliographies of particular
years in this volume or as a point of entry start with some of the general
books on the Great War listed here. All contain considerable sections on the
Western Front.
General histories which cover the Western Front in some detail, are
David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), an excellent modern study, and Hew
Strachan, The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford
University Press, 1998). Strachan’s The First World War, vol. I: To Arms
(Oxford University Press, 2001) should be consulted for the early
development of the Western Front. When completed this will be a definitive
study. S. Tucker’s The Great War 1914–18 (London: UCL, 1998) is a rather
neglected good modern overview. The First World War by Robin Prior and
Trevor Wilson (London: Cassell, 1999) has many chapters on the Western
Front, as does Trevor Wilson’s The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the
Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Polity Press and Oxford: Blackwell,
1986). John Keegan’s The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998) is
surprisingly hard going. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Basic
Books, 1998) is in itself a pity. It demonstrates the danger of historians
moving into areas about which they know little. So does J. Mosier, The
Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I (London:
HarperCollins, 2001). It is certainly a new history of something. Whether
that something is the Great War is more problematical. Gerard Groot, The
First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) adds little. More
interesting is A. Millett and W. Murray (eds.), Military Effectiveness, vol. I:
The First World War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988). This contains many
shrewd judgements on why some powers fared better than others on the
Western Front. Marc Ferro, The Great War 1914–1918 (London: Routledge,
1973) is a treatment of the war from a Marxist perspective. It is rather a
historical curiosity now. Other studies are now too old to recommend.
Anyone who thinks C. R. M. F. Cruttwell’s A History of the Great War
1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936) has anything to offer has not
read it recently. All A. J. P. Taylor’s War By Timetable (London:
Macdonald, 1969) proves is what nonsense an eminent historian can get
away with. His The First World War: An Illustrated History (London:
Penguin, 1966) should be read for the captions on the photographs but for
nothing else. A sound illustrated history is J. Winter, The Experience of
World War I (London: Macmillan, 1988). B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the
First World War (or other various titles) (London, 1932) tries to
demonstrate that the Western Front was the last place in which the war
should have been fought. The presence there of the German army presents a
problem for this thesis. Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and
Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1997) is worth
reading for the chapters on the Western Front from the point of view of the
Central Powers. John Terraine’s The Western Front, 1914–1918 (London:
Hutchinson, 1970) is very biased towards Haig. Robin Prior and Trevor
Wilson have dealt with one commander’s experiences between 1914 and
1918 in Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry
Rawlinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
More specialised studies on aspects of the Western Front are Paddy
Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of
Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press,
1994). ‘Art’ might be pitching it a bit high. S. Bidwell and Dominick
Graham, Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War 1904–45
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1982) should not be neglected for its chapters on
the technical side of fighting on the Western Front. John Terraine’s White
Heat: The New Warfare (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1982) has some
useful chapters on the Western Front. Guy Hartcup, The War of Invention:
Scientific Developments 1914–1918 (London: Brassey’s, 1988) is an
interesting but slightly superficial book on an important subject. On one
particularly nasty aspect of the war of invention, L. F. Haber, The
Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986) is particularly important. Tim Travers, in his The
Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front, and the Emergence of
Modern Warfare (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), sometimes confuses the
historiography of the war with its history. Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop
Tactics: Innovation in the German Army 1914–1918 (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1989) fails to explain why such an innovative army lost the war. It
is still, however, essential reading on German battle tactics. The same praise
and criticism can be directed at Timothy Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine:
the Changes in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War (Fort
Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, 1981). M Samuels, in his
Command or Control? Command, Training, and Tactics in the British and
German Armies 1888–1918 (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1995),
demonstrates that the German army must have emerged victorious from the
Great War. Some Germans believed it at the time but no historians should
believe it now. Altogether more important is G. C. Wynne, If Germany
Attacks: The Battle in Depth in the West (London: Faber & Faber, 1940).
Note the date of publication, which overshadowed the appearance of this
important volume. E. D. Brose, The Kaiser’s Army: The Politics of Military
Technology in Germany During the Machine Age 1870–1918 (Oxford
University Press, 2001) has many useful insights from the German
perspective of the Western Front. R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds.), Great
War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front 1914–1918
(Cambridge University Press, 2000) is a useful volume of essays. B.
Rawling’s Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps
1914–1918 (University of Toronto Press, 1992) has implications for trench
warfare that extend beyond the Canadians. Charles Messenger’s Trench
Fighting, 1914–1918 (London: Pan, 1973) is a popular but useful account.
It should be studied by anyone wishing to know about the nature of trench
warfare. On the logistics of the Western Front, Ian Brown’s British
Logistics on the Western Front 1914–1919 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992) is
a good study of a neglected area. Martin van Creveld has also dealt with
some logistical aspects of the Western Front in his Supplying War: Logistics
from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
9 The Eastern Front

Holger Afflerbach
The most important single book on the Eastern Front is Norman Stone’s
The Eastern Front (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975). Stone has
excellent and detailed knowledge and understanding of the events on the
German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian sides, and his book is
indispensable as a guide to military events on the Eastern Front. He focuses
mainly on the shortcomings of Russian generals and of Russian military
organisation and administration. Dennis Showalter offers a short and useful
overview on the Eastern Front in ‘War in the East and Balkans, 1914–18’,
in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), pp. 66–81. A very useful collected volume on ‘the
forgotten Front’ was edited by Gerhard Gross, Die Vergessene Front: Der
Osten 1914/15: Ereignis, Wirkung, Nachwirkung
(Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich: Schöningh, 2006). This work takes a
comprehensive approach to events, not limiting its analysis to military
developments only, and it is regrettable that it stops in 1915.
The operational history of the Eastern Front fills many substantial
volumes. The chapters of the official German history of the war, Der
Weltkrieg 1914–1918: die militärischen Operationen zu Lande. Bearbeitet
im Reichsarchiv, 14 vols. (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1925–44; vols. XIII–XIV new
edn, Koblenz, 1956), as well as the relevant parts of Oesterreich-Ungarns
letzter Krieg, 1914–1918, 15 vols. (Vienna: Verlag der
Militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, 1931–8), cover the events in much
detail. The Reichsarchiv published several volumes on single battles
(Schlachten des Weltkriegs in Einzeldarstellungen, for example on
Tannenberg or Gorlice). More a collection of sources than memoirs in the
normal sense of the word, is Franz Conrad v. Hötzendorf, Aus meiner
Dienstzeit 1906–1918, 5 vols. (Vienna: Rikola, 1921–5). Very useful is
Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn
und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz/Vienna/Cologne: Styria Verlag, 1993),
covering events on the Austrian fronts, and Holger Herwig, The First World
War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London: Edward Arnold,
1997). See also Gary Shanafelt: The Secret Enemy: Austria-Hungary and
the German Alliance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). On
Russia, see Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols.
(Princeton University Press, 1980–7) and William Fuller, The Foe Within:
Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
An in-depth modern analysis of the events on the Eastern Front has to
offer solutions to the problem of multi-ethnicity and sources in at least ten
different languages. That alone makes a comprehensive analysis of the
fighting which looks at events from a ‘transnational’ viewpoint very
difficult. The role of army and command structures is important and a
comparison tempting. For the German side, Holger Afflerbach,
Falkenhayn: Politisches Handeln und Denken im Kaiserreich (Munich: R.
Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994), offers a discussion of the strategic questions on
the Eastern Front from 1914–16. A full-scale comparison (Gross (ed.), Die
Vergessene Front, is a very good start) has to deal with the fighting and the
experience of the soldiers, with weaponry and problems of equipment,
supply and logistics. Much work is needed before the events in the East will
be covered as well as those on the Western Front (see Robin Prior, Chapter
8 in this volume).
The fate of POWs (Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War:
Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002) has
recently attracted some attention, and so have the consequences of military
advance and retreat, scorched earth politics and plundering of the civilian
population. Of particular importance here is Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire
Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2005). Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the
Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World
War I (Cambridge University Press, 2000), is a beginning, but deals more
with German occupation than with the views of the inhabitants of these
‘war lands’.
The role of public memory and remembrance – ‘a Fussell of the Eastern
Front’ – is missing, though a beginning has been made (Karen Petrone, The
Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2011)). Doing this in a multi-national, comparative way would be an
extremely challenging task.

Nicola Labanca
In many general histories of the First World War, the military history of the
Italian Front has long been neglected. Still, in recent years, some historians
have returned to this theme. See, for instance, Hew Strachan (ed.), The
Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford University Press,
1998); John Keegan, The First World War (New York: A. Knopf-Random
House, 1999); Ian F. W. Beckett, The Great War, 1914–1918 (Harlow:
Longman, 2001); Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker
(eds.), Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: histoire et culture
(Paris: Bayard, 2004); and David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World
War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004). But even here,
accurate references are often not available or are imprecise.
The Italian side of the story is largely ignored in literature written for the
general public too. No serious recent single book on Italian participation in
the war is available in a language other than Italian. A notable and recent
exception is Mark Thompson’s The White War: Life and Death on the
Italian Front, 1915–1919 (New York: Basic Books, 2009). When an Italian
translation of the Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre by Audoin-Rouzeau
and Becker was published (La prima guerra mondiale, ed. Antonio Gibelli
(Turin: Einaudi, 2007)), a number of new articles, written by Italian
historians, were introduced, presumably for the Italian readership. The
Italian story, therefore, remains apart from the general history of the war.
More complex is the question about the nature and range of Austrian
publications on the Italian Front. There is much in the fundamental work by
the Canadian historian Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and
Austria-Hungary 1914–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1997), and in the
German language, of course, Austrian books are fully available. (Now even
in French: see the recent Max Schiavon, L’Autriche-Hongrie dans la
Première Guerre mondiale: la fin d’un Empire (Paris: Soteca, 2011)). But
even these works do not always help readers to understand the imperial and
multi-ethnic complexities of the Austrian Dual Monarchy/Empire. We need
to know in more detail the story of Slovenians, Croatians, Serbs and Czechs
under and against Austria during the war – something that many recent
general histories of the Habsburg Empire do not provide.
All this means that international appreciation of the two wars (Austrian,
Italian) fought on the Italian Front still rests on old knowledge, not always
revised by recent research. All this said – and denounced – in the last
decades important and new studies have become available. The old gap
between local–traditional and international–new research is already a thing
of the past.
The best place to start for an understanding of the Austrian side is
Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-Ungarn
und der Erste Weltkrieg (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1993); for a starting point on
the Italian side, the best is Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat, La grande
guerra 1914–1918 (Florence: La nuova Italia, 2000).
Historiographical debates are ongoing. For Austria, see Günther
Kronenbitter, ‘Waffenbrüder: Der Koalitionskrieg der Mittelmächte 1914–
1918 und das Selbst-bild zweier Militäreliten’, in Volker Dotterweich (ed.),
Mythen und Legenden in der Geschichte (Munich: Ernst Vögel, 2004), pp.
157–86; and Hermann J. W. Kuprian, ‘Warfare – Welfare: Gesellschaft,
Politik und Militarisierung Österreich während des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in
Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig, Hermann J. W. Kuprian, Gunda Barth-Scalmani
(eds.), Ein Krieg, zwei Schützengräben: Österreich-Italien und der Erste
Weltkrieg in den Dolomiten 1915–1918 (Bozen: Athesia, 2005). And for
Italy see Antonio Gibelli, La grande guerra degli italiani 1915–1918
(Milan: Sansoni, 1998); Giovanna Procacci, ‘La prima guerra mondiale’, in
Giuseppe Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto (eds.), Storia d’Italia, vol. IV:
Guerre e fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997); and Bruna Bianchi, La
follia e la fuga: nevrosi di guerra, diserzione e disobbedienza nell’esercito
italiano, 1915–1918 (Rome: Bulzoni, 2001).
A good ‘point of contact’ with ongoing studies at the national level may
be found in collective, edited books. For Austria see the already quoted
Mazohl-Wallnig, Kuprian, Barth-Scalmani (eds.), Ein Krieg, zwei
Schützengräben; and Hermann J. W. Kuprian and Oswald Überegger (eds.),
Der Erste Weltkrieg in Alpenraum (Innsbruck: Wagner, 2011). For Italy the
most recent and impressive collection is Mario Isnenghi and Daniele
Ceschin (eds.), La Grande Guerra: dall’Intervento alla ‘vittoria mutilata’
(Turin: Utet, 2008) (being the third volume of a five-volume series edited
by Mario Isnenghi on Italiani in guerra: Conflitti, identità, memorie dal
Risorgimento ai nostri giorni (Turin: Utet, 2008–10), ranging from the
Risorgimento up to today).
The best available literatures, by Rauchensteiner and Isnenghi–Rochat
and new research alongside them, have revised and superseded the first
narratives and official histories of the war: Österreichischen
Bundesministerium für Heereswesen und vom Kriegsarchiv (ed.),
Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, 1914–1918 (Vienna: Verlag der
Militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, 1930–8); and Ministero della
guerra, Comando del corpo di stato maggiore, Ufficio storico, L’esercito
italiano nella grande guerra (1915–1918) (Rome, 1927–88).
Among many topics most researched in the last decades, the debate on
the consent/dissent of soldiers has attracted some attention in Austria and in
Italy, but probably less than in other countries. This happened for different
reasons: in Austria because of the relative advance of studies in the field of
‘new military history’ in the last two decades; in Italy – on the contrary –
because the subject had already been deeply studied between the end of the
1960s and the 1970s (actually it was the point of rupture of the new studies
on the First World War in respect of the old ‘patriotic’ historiography and
tradition), so that nowadays it does not sound so exciting to young scholars.
In any case see, for Austria, the most important review article is by Oswald
Überegger, ‘Vom militärischen Paradigma zur “Kulturgeschichte des
Krieges”? Entwicklungslinien der österreichischen
Weltkriegsgeschichtsschreibung zwischen politisch-militärischer
Instrumentalisierung und universitärer Verwissenschaftlichung’, in Oswald
Überegger (ed.), Zwischen Nation und Region: Weltkriegsforschung im
interregionalen Vergleich: Ergebnisse und Perspektiven (Innsbruck:
Wagner, 2004), pp. 63–122. Two different approaches to the Italian war
may be found in Giovanna Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella
Grande Guerra, con una raccolta di lettere inedite (Rome: Editori Riuniti,
1993); and Mario Isnenghi, La tragedia necessaria: da Caporetto all’Otto
settembre (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999). An interesting new point of view is
in Federico Mazzini, ‘Cose de laltro mondo: una contro-cultura di guerra
attraverso la scrittura popolare trentina, 1914–1920’ (PhD thesis, University
of Padua, 2009).
Another important topic, not by chance, is about ‘borderlands’, regions
that suffered (and changed) borders because of the war. This is the case of
Trieste, and even more of the Trentino. A very important chapter of this
story is that of inhabitants of the Trentino, who during the war mainly
fought on the Austrian side – of course, obliged by Austrian conscription –
but were sent by Austria to fronts far away from the Italian one. A vocal
minority of ‘irredentisti’ volunteered in the Italian army. Some of the most
innovative research comes from this regional approach. In Austria,
Innsbruck University (alongside Vienna and Graz) is the central force. In
Italy, much of this complex ‘border story’ has been studied by a wonderful
network of historians from Rovereto and Trento, first grouped in an
extremely interesting review, Materiali di lavoro. They produced a number
of interesting publications, and now work in and around a network of
historical museums in that region. Somehow in the middle, at
Bozen/Bolzano, Süd Tirol/Alto Adige, another very active
interregional/international network is grouped around the review
Geschichte und region/Storia e regione.

Robin Prior
Serious readers should start with the Official History of each of the three
main campaigns discussed here. These are for Palestine: George McMunn
and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. I: From the
Outbreak of War with Germany to June 1917 (London: HMSO, 1928) and
Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II: From June
1917 to the End of the War (London: HMSO, 1930); for Gallipoli: Cecil
Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations: Gallipoli, 2 vols. (London:
Heinemann, 1929–32); and for Mesopotamia: F. J. Moberley, Military
Operations: Mesopotamia, 4 vols. (London: HMSO, 1923–7). The
Australian official history, Henry S. Gullett, The Australian Imperial Force
in Sinai and Palestine (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1944), though rather
romantic on the Light Horse, is more readable than its British equivalents.
More digestible reading on the Palestine campaign can be found in
Anthony Bruce, The Last Crusade: The Palestine Campaign in the First
World War (London: John Murray, 2002). This is the best modern study of
the campaign. General Archibald Wavell, The Palestine Campaign
(London: Constable, 1928) is an excellent book and has stood the test of
time well. David Woodward, Hell in the Holy Land: World War I in the
Middle East (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006) tells the
story from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier, but has some shrewd
remarks on the strategy and tactics of the campaign. Matthew Hughes’s
Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East 1917–1919 (London: Frank
Cass & Co., 1999) is a clear account of the finalities in Palestine.
Unfortunately, there is no similar study of Archibald Murray’s strategy and
tactics. Alec Hill, Chauvel of the Light Horse (Melbourne University Press,
1978) is one of the best studies of any commander in the Middle East.
On Lawrence of Arabia it is difficult to know where to start. Some
authorities regard Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom essential reading and
a modern classic. I am not one of them, but there are many editions always
in print. A more modern (and moderate) study is Lawrence James, The
Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990).
It is also difficult to know where to begin on Gallipoli. The author of this
chapter has written a study, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press, 2009), which even he thinks will do
no such thing. I find C. E. W. Bean’s volumes of the Australian official
history virtually unreadable. There is, however, a great deal of information
to be gleaned from them. Tim Travers, Gallipoli 1915 (Stroud: Tempus,
2001) is particularly strong on the historiography of the campaign. Alan
Moorehead, Gallipoli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956) is superbly
written but desperately out of date. Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli
(London: Batsford, 1965) was the standard study for many years. It should
now be treated with caution for the author’s orientalist views of the Turks,
his strange views on the Australians and his ludicrous optimism on the
prospects of the campaign. Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli
(London: Macmillan, 1985) is a fine study of the soldiers during the
campaign. Michael Hickey, Gallipoli (London: John Murray, 1995) doesn’t
add much. There are no studies of the Gallipoli commanders – Hamilton,
Birdwood, Hunter-Weston – that can be recommended. John Lee has
written A Soldier’s Life: General Sir Ian Hamilton (London: Macmillan,
2000). Only those interested in the development of military hagiography
should read it. George Cassar, The French and the Dardanelles (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1971) holds the field in this area, although it is more about
politics than military operations. Eric Bush, Gallipoli (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1975), written by one who was there, but long after the event, is
still worth reading, as is Cecil Malthus, Anzac: A Retrospect (Auckland:
Whitcombe & Tombs, 1965). Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli
(Manchester University Press, 2004) is a first rate investigation into the
ever-growing and increasingly baffling Anzac Myth. On the naval side,
Keyes’s memoirs (The Fight for Gallipoli: From the Naval Memoirs of
Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Roger Keyes Baron, 1872–1945 (London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode, 1941)) are self-serving to the point of desperation and cannot
be recommended. Nor can almost anything else about the naval aspect of
the operation. Readers can seek out the Report by the Mitchell Committee
in AWM 124 in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. It is by far the
most analytical study of the naval failure.
On the Turkish side, the Turkish General Staff have rendered into a kind
of English, A Brief History of the Canakkale Campaign in the First World
War (Ankara, 2004). Edward Erikson is owed a debt of gratitude by anyone
trying to come to grips with the Ottoman army. His Ordered to Die: A
History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, CN:
Greenwood Press, 2001), although perhaps too glowing about the fighting
power of the Turkish army, is essential. I find him totally unconvincing on
the prospects of the naval attack.
On Mesopotamia the point of departure for many years has been A. J.
Barker, The Neglected War: Mesopotamia 1914–1918 (London: Faber &
Faber, 1967). It must now give way to Charles Townshend, When God
Made Hell (London: Faber & Faber, 2010). Its subtitle is too long to be
given here, but it is a superb study of the military and political aspects of
the campaign. It corrects many myths, especially regarding Townshend (the
author is not a relative). The other Charles Townshend should not be
neglected. His My Campaign in Mesopotamia (London: Thornton
Butterworth, 1922), despite its shrill tone, makes a reasonable case. Ronald
Millar, Kut: Death of an Army (London: Secker & Warburg, 1969) is good
on the great siege. Russell Braddon’s book on the same subject (The Siege
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1969)) retains not a shred of credibility after the
dissection it receives by the modern Charles Townshend. There are no
modern studies of the careers of the other Mesopotamian generals. Nixon
and Maude seem to have fallen into an historiographical crevasse. Wilfred
Nunn’s Tigris Gunboats (London: Melrose, 1932) is useful, although the
author has no conception of the weirdness of the events described.
Alexander Kearsey, A Study of the Strategy and Tactics of the
Mesopotamian Campaign 1914–1917 (London: Gale & Polden, 1934), is
full of military insight, as is Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East:
The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921 (London: Bowes &
Bowes, 1956). Its conclusions should be read in the light of my conclusions
in this chapter. Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country,
1914–1932, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) puts the
whole political scene in perspective. Also good on the politics of the
campaign is Paul Davis, Ends and Means: The British Mesopotamian
Campaign and Commission (London and Toronto: Associated University
Presses, 1994).
12 The war at sea

Paul Kennedy
One begins, as usual, with the official histories and then next, in deference,
with the memoir literature of the leading participants in what was called
‘the Great War at Sea’. By comparison with the magnificent, scholarly and
vibrant official histories of the Second World War, these ones make for
poor, apologetic and dull reading. The plain reason is this: that the official
histories of the loser navies have little to say except that they did their best
under impossible circumstances; while those of the winners seek to explain
why their demonstration of naval mastery was nonetheless far less than
expected and desired. For the lesser naval powers, this was not such a
psychological problem, for what could the official historians of Austria-
Hungary and Italy do but point to their country’s geopolitical constraints,
and then agreeably turn to a detailed discussion of minor operations in the
Adriatic? (Hans Sokol’s Oesterreich-Ungarns Seekrieg (Zurich: Amalthea-
Verlag, 1933) is a nice exception.) Almost the same dilemma presented
itself to the French historians: the Royal Navy held the North Sea and
Channel, the Mediterranean was friendly waters and the great French
struggle was on land. The US navy wished to present its naval contribution
as epic, and a stepping-stone to greater things, but a battleship squadron at
Scapa Flow and tentative beginnings at anti-U-boat warfare were really not
so thrilling.
It was only in Britain and Germany that post-mortems on the war at sea
provoked interest and great controversy, because in each country so much
was at stake. In Germany the issue was not so much about whether the High
Seas Fleet had done well – it had performed very competently under bad
geopolitical and numerical circumstances. It was, rather, whether the overall
Tirpitzian strategy of a ‘Fleet Against England’ had made any sense at all or
whether, the next time around, the Fatherland should break out via Norway,
as it was to do in 1940. The German official naval history prefers not to
discuss that matter. In Britain, and for reasons described in the main chapter
text, the debate was much more existential, which meant that as fine a
historian and strategic thinker as Sir Julian Corbett could make no impact
through the History of the Great War: Naval Operations, vols. I and II
(London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1921), when the Admiralty insisted
that it was to be their official account and analysis of things, not his –
Beatty’s interference here is inexcusable. The end result is thousands of
pages, and lots of sketches of, say, the Fifth Battle Squadron turning to the
left in the Jutland mists.
The memoir literature is even worse; at least the official histories give
many incontestable facts. One looks in vain for an equivalent to Grant’s
Memoirs of the American Civil War, or to General William Slim’s Defeat
into Victory (on the 1942–5 Burma Campaign), perhaps the best war
memoir ever. No matter whose autobiographies one reads – Scheer’s,
Hipper’s, Sims’s, Jellicoe’s, Beatty’s, Bacon’s and so on – together with
those of their dutiful interwar biographers, the critical general reader is
dulled by their incapacity to step outside their own shoes and be brutally
objective. One approaches Filson Young’s With Beatty in the North Sea
(London: Cassell, 1921) with the same dull feeling as one approaches the
dentist. Vice-Admiral Dewar’s The Navy from Within (London: Victor
Gollancz, 1939) is like a fresh breeze by comparison. Perhaps we should
not expect that much; autobiographies of Second World War air force
generals have much the same mind-numbing effect.
There is one bright light here. It is the various volumes of the
extraordinary and precious editions of The Navy Record Society (London,
annually, since 1893). There is nothing like this set of unadulterated and
reprinted original documents in the world, with at least a dozen edited
volumes that pertain to the naval dimensions of the First World War –
central command, regional operations, intelligence, Anglo-American naval
relations, the private papers of Fisher, Jellicoe, Beatty and Keyes. But they
are what they are: raw, wonderful documents. They need their interpreters.
Even the most navy-focused historians would agree that the older,
generalist, ‘Blue Water’ writers – one thinks here of Richard Hough’s The
Great War at Sea, 1914–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1983) and
Geoffrey Bennett’s Naval Battles of The First World War (London:
Batsford, 1968) – are hopeless. There is not a critical bone in their bodies.
All of them are happiest when discussing naval actions, few though they
were. All of them conclude by stating that, at the end of the day (sic), sea-
power was decisive. The evidence provided is limp.
Mahan told us, the navalists assert, that sea power was all-important. The
war came after Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914. Sea power was
applied. Ergo, it was decisive, because Germany finally lost. Battleship
actions were hard to find between 1914 and 1918 but, still, the economic
blockade prevailed. That’s all one needed to know. Even military historians,
as in Basil Liddell Hart’s The Real War: 1914–1918 (London: Faber &
Faber, 1930), buy into that. Those far-off, distant ships ground the enemy
into shreds. Obviously, the present author is deeply sceptical of this
presumption.
The best single-volume history of the war at sea is Paul Halpern’s
wonderful A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute
Press, 1994). This scholar’s coverage of all the belligerent navies – of
Austria-Hungary, the British Empire, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Russia
and the United States – and his terrific bibliography are a godsend to
scholars, and supplant hundreds of earlier works. Here is the forest as a
whole, not the individual trees or branches. And the maps are great. But it
ends, abruptly, with the surrender of the High Seas Fleet to the Allied
navies in the Firth of Forth on 21 November 1918. ‘The naval war was
over’, Halpern concludes (p. 449). There are no reflections, no summation,
no attempt to draw up a balance-sheet from someone who is undoubtedly
the most knowledgeable naval historian of the First World War.
There are finely grained studies of naval expenditures, technology, global
strategy, logistics and all those vital, hitherto-neglected fields, but it seems
to this critic that the deeper these superb scholars (I include Nicholas
Lambert, Jon Sumida, James Goldrick, Barry Gough and Greg Kennedy in
this pantheon) dig into the archives, the less chance they have of looking at
the naval war as a whole, and of seeing it in the overall context of the First
World War, let alone the whole sweep of Western military–technological
history since the coming of the steam engine, the railway and the aeroplane.
Even the magnificent five-volume history by my former mentor, Arthur J.
Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow (Oxford University Press,
1961–70, 1978), shows how a very fine historian can become a prisoner of
the Admiralty archives.
One single recent work stands out in breaking the mould, and that is
Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval
Command (London: John Murray, 1996), because it enters into the mental
universe of those naval leaders who found 1914–18 naval warfare so
difficult to understand. Yet it is an exception. One wonders why this branch
of history has become so sterile and inward-looking over the past decades,
and why we seem to have lost track of the broader principles clearly
delineated in such works as Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond’s Statesmen
And Sea Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), which itself reaches back
to the great Julian S. Corbett’s Some Principles of Maritime Strategy
(London: Longmans, 1911). Sea power is best understood not as exciting
battlefleet exchanges or arcane fire-control techniques, but as control of the
Great Commons. Apart from the frightening German U-boat actions against
Allied shipping in 1917, soon to be countered by convoys, this was not a
problem, at least, nothing like as scary as the years from 1941 to 1943. And
the short-ranged High Seas Fleet was never a problem after Jutland.
The best brief analysis of what still needs to be done is by the fine
Australian scholar, James Goldrick, in ‘The need for a New Naval History
of the First World War’, Corbett Paper No.7 (Corbett Centre for Maritime
Studies, Kings College London, 2011), but even he does not appreciate the
cruel fact that the First World War was not a good war for the influence of
sea power upon history. He suggests instead more research on naval
logistics, manpower, communications . . . But what doth that availeth if
young historians come out with a deep study (say, on naval mines) and can’t
answer the basic questions: ‘So what?’ How does maritime history affect
the great subject of History itself? Only last year (2012) did Nicolas A.
Lambert’s book Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the
First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) rise
above this tunnel vision.
This author ‘had a crack’ at this issue almost forty years ago, in The Rise
and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London and New York: Allen Lane,
1976). There is, alas, little that has been published since that time which
addresses the big problem of sea power’s relative impotence in this terrible,
world-shattering war. J. H. Hexter once divided historians into ‘splitters’
and ‘lumpers’. So far, the historiography of the war at sea between 1914
and 1918 definitely belongs to the splitters. It is time for some lumping.
13 The air war

John H. Morrow, Jr.
The best overarching works on the air war of 1914–18 are John H. Morrow
Jr.,’s exhaustive volume, The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from
1909 to 1921 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009 [reprint
of the original edition published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in
1993]) and Lee Kennett’s shorter and more anecdotal study, The First Air
War, 1914–1918 (New York: Free Press, 1991).
French military aviation, despite its signal importance in the First World
War, has not received the attention it merits. The most important work on
the subject remains the relevant chapters in the official volume by Charles
Christienne et al., Histoire de l’aviation militaire française (Paris: Charles
Lavauzelle, 1980), which the Smithsonian Institution Press published in
English under the title A History of French Military Aviation in 1986.
German military aviation receives due attention in John Morrow’s
consecutive works, Building German Air Power, 1909–1914 (Knoxville,
TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1976) and German Air Power in World
War I (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Douglas H.
Robinson’s book, The Zeppelin in Combat: A History of the German Naval
Airship Division, 1912–1918 (London: Foulis, 1962) traces the dramatic
and ill-fated history of the German naval airship campaign against England.
The history of British air power in the First World War has received the
most attention in the literature in English, starting with the only official
history to see the light of day after the war, Sir Walter Raleigh’s and H. A.
Jones’s six-volume work, The War in the Air (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1922–37). More recent popular and informative studies include Denis
Winter’s illuminating book, The First of the Few: Fighter Pilots of the First
World War (London: Penguin, 1982) and Peter H. Liddle’s anecdotal work,
The Airman’s War 1914–18 (Poole, Dorset: Blandford, 1987). For a fine
study of wartime air policy, the reader should see Malcolm Cooper’s work,
The Birth of Independent Air Power: British Air Policy in the First World
War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986). For a study of early Italian aviation,
see Piero Vergnano’s book, Origins of Aviation in Italy, 1783–1918 (Genoa:
Intyprint, 1964).
Richard P. Hallion’s book, Rise of the Fighter Aircraft, 1914–1918
(Annapolis, MD: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co., 1984), offers a fine
study of fighter, or pursuit aviation. Authors have devoted much attention to
the warplanes of 1914–18 but little to the important history of the engines
that are the heart of those aircraft: see the relevant chapters of Herschel
Smith’s A History of Aircraft Piston Engines (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower
University Press, 1986 [1981]). Curators of the National Air and Space
Museum published the following outstanding volume on the air war based
on the Museum’s outstanding exhibit on the First World War: Dominick A.
Pisano, Thomas J. Dietz, Joanne M. Gernstein and Karl S. Schneide,
Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1992).
Some of the books written by and about the fighter pilots of 1914–18
have become classics: Cecil Lewis’s autobiographical study, Sagittarius
Rising (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2009 [1936]); V. M. Yeates’s novel
based on his wartime experience, Winged Victory (London: Buchan &
Wright, 1985 [1936]); Edward Mannock’s diary, Edward Mannock: The
Personal Diary of Maj. Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock, introduced and edited by
Frederick Oughton (London: Spearman, 1966); Manfred von Richthofen’s
memoir, The Red Fighter Pilot (St Petersburg, FL: Red & Black, 2007
[1918]); James T. B. McCudden’s memoir, Flying Fury (London: John
Hamilton, 1930 [1918]); Eddie V. Rickenbacker’s Fighting the Flying
Circus (New York: Doubleday, 1965 [1919]); and John M. Grider’s War
Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator, ed. Elliot White Springs (Garden City,
NY: Sun Dial Press, 1938). Adrian Smith has written perhaps the sole
analytical study of these legendary aces in his book, Mick Mannock, Fighter
Pilot: Myth, Life, and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
Two more recent studies of First World War aviation are Peter Hart’s
books, Bloody April: Slaughter in the Skies over Arras, 1917 (London:
Cassell, 2007) and Aces Falling: War above the Trenches, 1918 (London:
Phoenix, 2009). Such books demonstrate the continuing power of First
World War aviation to fire the imagination of another generation of readers.
Gary Sheffield and Stephen Badsey
Command remains an under-studied aspect of military history. In part, this
is because of problems of definition. Leadership and command are related
but not identical concepts. A seemingly promising title, John Keegan, The
Mask of Command (New York: Viking, 1987) actually deals mainly with
leadership. Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985) is one of the few books to deal specifically
with command. It retains its value, although it is showing its age; in
particular, van Creveld’s chapter on the British army on the Somme needs
to be read in conjunction with more recent work on the subject. See also G.
D. Sheffield (ed.), Leadership and Command: The Anglo-American
Military Experience since 1861 (London: Brassey’s, 2002 [1997]).
Work on strategic command in the First World War is similarly patchy.
Three collections of essays, Peter Paret et al. (eds.), Makers of Modern
Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton University Press,
1986); Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (eds.),
The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (Cambridge University
Press, 1994); and especially Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), Great
War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front 1914–18
(Cambridge University Press, 2000) contain material of relevance. Richard
F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (eds.), War Planning 1914 (Cambridge
University Press, 2010) is also very useful. Alliance command issues for
either side are presently under-researched, but a good starting place for the
Anglo-French alliance is Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Victory Through Coalition:
Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge University
Press, 2005). For the war at sea, see Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of
World War I (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994) and Andrew
Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command
(London: John Murray, 1996).
Some major figures in the Central Powers command hierarchy have been
well served by historians: see Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von
Hötzendorf: Architect of the Apocalypse (Boston, MA: Humanities Press,
2000); and Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the
First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Holger Afflerbach’s
biography, Falkenhayn (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996) has yet to be
translated into English. This should be read in conjunction with Robert T.
Foley’s important book, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun
(Cambridge, 2005), which takes issue with some of Afflerbach’s findings.
British grand strategy and military strategy are well dealt with in two
books by David French: British Strategy and War Aims 1914–16 (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1986) and The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition
1916–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1998). Those interested in key British
strategic commanders may consult a number of useful books, including
George H. Cassar, Kitchener’s War: British Strategy from 1914–16 (Dulles,
VA: Brassey’s, 2004); Richard Holmes, The Little Field Marshal: A Life of
Sir John French (London: Cassell, 2005 [1981]); David R. Woodward,
Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: Chief of the Imperial General Staff in
the Great War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Douglas Haig remains
intensely controversial. For two very different views, see J. P. Harris,
Douglas Haig and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
and Gary Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army
(London: Aurum Press, 2011).
For Italy, there is some background material in John Whittam, The
Politics of the Italian Army (London: Croom Helm, 1977) which deals with
the pre-1915 period. Mark Thompson, The White War (London: Faber &
Faber, 2008) is an excellent recent survey of Italy’s war that contains much
relevant material. The US commander John J. Pershing can be approached
through Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2007 [1986]). French commanders are much
better served: see Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and
Operations in the Great War (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2005) and Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Foch in Command (Cambridge University
Press, 2011). Guy Pedroncini has written extensively on Pétain, e.g.,
Pétain: le soldat et la gloire, 1856–1918 (Paris: Perrin, 1989). Edward J.
Erickson’s work, which draws on Ottoman material and modern Turkish
studies, has transformed Western knowledge of the Ottoman army.
Although not primarily concerned with the strategic level, his Ottoman
Military Effectiveness in World War I: A Comparative Study (London:
Routledge, 2007) contains much of interest.
Of the vast number of operational studies, only a handful can be
mentioned. These include David T. Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives:
A Case Study in the Operational Level of War (Abingdon: Routledge,
2006); Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front:
The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914–18 (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992); Graydon A. Tunstall, Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter
War of 1915 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010); Holger H.
Herwig, The Marne 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that
Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2009); Richard DiNardo,
Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign, 1915 (Santa Barbara, CA:
Praeger, 2010); and Dennis E. Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires,
1914 (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004 [1991]).

John H. Morrow, Jr.
Two general studies of the First World War that take a global or imperial
approach are John H. Morrow, Jr.’s The Great War: An Imperial History
(London and New York: Routledge, 2004) and Hew Strachan’s study, The
First World War (London: Penguin, 2005). Avner Offer’s The First World
War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) offers
penetrating insights into the global nature of the war from an agrarian
perspective.
For an understanding of the origins of the war within the context of
imperialism, John A. Hobson’s classic, Imperialism (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1965 [1902]) remains an indispensable
starting point. On a related topic, D. P. Crook’s book, Darwinism, War and
History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the ‘Origins of Species’
to the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1994), focuses on the
contribution of Darwinism to the bellicose and imperialist atmosphere
leading to war. An insightful work on the stress that empire imposed on
Great Britain is Aaron L. Friedberg’s The Weary Titan: Britain and the
Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton University Press,
1986). Pre-war British plans to wreck the German economy employing
Britain’s unique global power are the subject of Nicholas A. Lambert’s
tome, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First
World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Sean
McMeekin’s invaluable study, The Russian Origins of the First World War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), exemplifies how an
imperial perspective prevents simplistic attempts to blame a single power
for the First World War. The role of the policies of the Ottoman Empire in
the war’s origins has received thorough attention only in Mustafa Aksakal’s
monograph, The Ottoman Road to War: The Ottoman Empire and the First
World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Some of the best works on imperialism concern France, which, alongside
Britain, brought its colonial subjects to Europe to fight and work. Richard
S. Fogarty’s book, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the
French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008), is the latest and most comprehensive of works that include From
Adversaries to Comrades in Arms: West Africans and the French Military,
1885–1918 (Waltham, MA: African Studies Association, 1979) by Charles
J. Balesi, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First
World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999) by Joe Lunn and Tyler
Stovall’s pathbreaking article on race in wartime France, ‘The color line
behind the lines: racial violence in France during the Great War’, American
Historical Review, 103:3 (1998), pp. 737–69. Guoqi Xu’s fascinating book,
Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) sheds light on a hitherto
ignored group of workers in France.
In regard to Britain and India, the former’s most significant imperial
possession, see Philippa Levine’s article on race and gender in Britain,
‘Battle colors: race, sex, and colonial soldiery in World War I’, Journal of
Women’s History, 9:4 (1998), pp. 104–30; David Omissi’s informative and
moving edited collection of the letters of Indian soldiers, Indian Voices of
the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1999);
and Richard J. Popplewell’s book on British intelligence operations in and
about India, Intelligence and Imperial Defense: British Intelligence and the
Defense of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass & Co.,
1995).
On the war in Africa, see the general studies, The Great War in Africa,
1914–1918 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986) by Byron Farwell, and Melvin
Page (ed.), Africa and the First World War (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1987). The revelatory monograph by Mahir Saul and Patrick Royer, West
African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-Bani
Anticolonial War (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001), examines a
significant rising against the French in West Africa. Melvin Page’s book,
The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First World War (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2000) and James J. Mathews’s article, ‘World War I and
the rise of African nationalism: Nigerian veterans as catalysts of political
change’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 20:3 (1982), pp. 493–502,
shed light on developments in British colonial Africa.
For readers interested in the military history of difficult British
campaigns against the Ottomans, see Charles Townsend, Desert Hell: The
British Invasion of Mesopotamia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011) and Peter Hart, Gallipoli (Oxford University Press, 2011). On
the all-important topics of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, see
Michael A. Reynold’s book, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of
the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge University
Press, 2011) and David Fromkin’s readable study, A Peace to End All
Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern
Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1989). Finally, the unique horror and
harbinger of an even more monstrous Holocaust, the Armenian genocide,
receives due attention in two recent books: Raymond Kévorkian, The
Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and
Tamer Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton
16 Africa
Bill Nasson
The volume of writing about Africa and 1914–18 still remains
comparatively modest. Addressing the impact of the war on the entire
continent entails paying attention to a literature on weighty general themes
of empire and colonialism, and taking account of a wide spectrum of
military, political, social, economic, religious, cultural and ethnic and racial
dynamics. For here the war was both an external European imposition and a
conflict shaped by the impulses of varied African societies.
At an introductory world war level, although many histories of 1914–18
either ignore Africa or barely touch it, a few of the more recent which seek
to place the continent in a wider picture are Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett,
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (London: BBC Books,
1996); John H. Morrow, Jr., The Great War: An Imperial History (New
York: Routledge, 2005); Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A
Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and
William Kelleher Storey, The First World War: A Concise Global History
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
For Africa overviews, see the special ‘World War I and Africa’ issue of
the Journal of African History, 19:1 (1978); Michael Crowder, ‘The First
World War and its consequences’, in A. Adu Boahen (ed.), Africa under
Colonial Domination, 1880–1935, UNESCO General History of Africa,
vol. VII (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 283–311;
M. E. Page (ed.), Africa and the First World War (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1987); David Killingray, ‘The war in Africa’, in Hew Strachan (ed.),
The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford University
Press, 1998), pp. 191–212; and Hew Strachan, The First World War in
Africa (Oxford University Press, 2004).
On West Africa, see Michael Crowder and Jide Osuntokun, ‘The First
World War and West Africa, 1914–1918’, in J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael
Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1974),
vol. II, pp. 484–513. On the British colonial side, there is Akinjide
Osuntokun, Nigeria in the First World War (Harlow: Longman Ibadan
History Series, 1979). For French colonies, there are excellent studies of
soldiering experience in Marc Michel, L’appel a l’Afrique: contributions et
réactions a l’effort de guerre en A.O.F. (1914–1919) (Paris: Publications de
la Sorbonne, 1982); Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The
Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa, 1857–1960 (Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann, 1991); and Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese
Oral History of the First World War (Oxford: James Currey, 1999).
On East and Central Africa there are both appraisals and more specialised
local and thematic studies. A first-rate guide is Bruce Vandervort’s
historiographically assured ‘New light on the East African theater of the
Great War: a review essay of English-language sources’, in Stephen M.
Miller (ed.), Soldiers and Settlers in Africa, 1850–1918 (Amsterdam: Brill,
2009), pp. 287–305. For military campaigning and the totality of the war’s
effects, see Melvyn E. Page, The Chiwaya War: Malawians and the First
World War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); Edward Paice, Tip &
Run: The Untold Story of the Great War in Africa (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2007); R. Anderson, The Forgotten Front: The East African
Campaign, 1914–1918 (Stroud: Tempus, 2004); and Anne Samson, Britain,
South Africa and the East African Campaign, 1914–1918 (London: Frank
Cass & Co., 2006). A perceptive recent depiction of Africans under German
command is Michelle Moyd, ‘“We don’t want to die for nothing”: askari at
war in German East Africa, 1914–1918’, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race,
Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2011),
pp. 53–76.
Modern specialist literature on North Africa is notably sparse, and for
insights readers should consult histories of the region as well as of affected
countries, such as Dirk Vanderwalle, A History of Modern Libya
(Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Robert O. Collins, A History of
Modern Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
On southern Africa, see Simon E. Katzenellenbogen, ‘Southern Africa
and the war of 1914–18’, in M. R. D. Foot (ed.), War and Society (London:
Longman, 1973), pp. 161–88; N. G. Garson, ‘South Africa and World War
I’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8:1 (1979), pp. 92–116;
Albert Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the
First World War (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987); and Bill Nasson, Springboks
on the Somme: South Africa in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Johannesburg:
Penguin, 2007).
On war-related rebellions and uprisings, see George Shepperson and
Thomas Price, Independent African: John Chilembwe and the Nyasaland
Native Uprising of 1915 (Edinburgh University Press, 1967); Sandra Swart,
‘“A Boer and his gun and his wife are three things always together”:
republican masculinity and the 1914 rebellion’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 24:2 (1998), pp. 116–38.

Mustafa Aksakal
For the pre-war international context, see Nazan Çiçek, Turkish Critics of
the Eastern Question in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris,
2010); Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse
of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge University
Press, 2011); and Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
(Oxford University Press, 2005).
On social conditions, see Yiğit Akın, ‘The Ottoman Home Front during
World War I: Everyday Politics, Society, and Culture’ (unpublished PhD
thesis, Ohio State University, 2011); Melanie Tanielian, ‘The War of
Famine: Everyday Life in Wartime Beirut and Mount Lebanon (1914–
1918)’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2012);
Part I in Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights,
Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000); and Yavuz Selim Karakışla, Women,
War and Work in the Ottoman Empire: Society for the Employment of
Ottoman Muslim Women, 1916–1923 (Istanbul: Ottoman Bank Archive and
Research Centre, 2005).
On conscription and the lives of soldiers, see Mehmet Beşikçi, The
Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between
Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Yücel Yanıkdağ,
‘Educating the peasants: the Ottoman army and enlisted men in uniform’,
Middle Eastern Studies, 40:6 (2004), pp. 91–107, and his Healing the
Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914–1939
(Edinburgh University Press, 2013). On disease, see Hikmet Özedmir, The
Ottoman Army, 1914–1918: Disease and Death on the Battlefield, trans.
Saban Kardaş (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2008). For
operational history, see Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of
the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2001) and his Gallipoli: The Ottoman Campaign, 1915–1916 (Barnsley:
Pen & Sword, 2010).
For the Committee of Union and Progress – the party in power – see M.
Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–
1908 (Oxford University Press, 2001); Nader Sohrabi, Revolution and
Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Iran (Cambridge University
Press, 2011); M. Naim Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the
Military and Ottoman Collapse (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000); and Erik J.
Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation-Building: From the Ottoman
Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). On economic
conditions and war financing, see Zafer Toprak, İttihad-Terakki ve Cihan
Harbi: Savaş Ekonomisi ve Türkiye’de Devletçilik, 1914–1918 (Istanbul:
Homer Kitabevi, 2003).
On intervention, see Handan Nezir Akmeşe, The Birth of Modern
Turkey: The Ottoman Military and the March to World War I (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2005); F. A. K. Yasamee, ‘The Ottoman Empire’, in Keith Wilson
(ed.), Decisions for War, 1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995); and Mustafa
Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the
First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
On local and regional politics, imperial citizenship and nationalism, see
Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism
in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997); Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem
Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse University Press, 2011);
Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in
Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2011); Janet
Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone
(Stanford University Press); and Kamal Madhar Ahmad, Kurdistan during
the First World War, trans. Ali Maher İbrahim (London: Saqi Books, 1994).
On ethnic violence, deportations and Armenians, see Ryan Gingeras,
Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire,
1912–1923 (Oxford University Press, 2009); Uğur Ümit Üngör, The
Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–
1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma
Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide:
Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University
Press, 2011). On statistics, see Fuat Dündar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of
Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878–1918) (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2010).
On the press and propaganda, see Thomas Philipp, ‘Perceptions of the
First World War in the contemporary Arab press’, in Itzchak Weisman and
Fruma Zachs (eds.), Ottoman Reform and Muslim Regeneration (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2005); Gottfried Hagen, Die Türkei im Ersten Weltkrieg:
Flugblätter und Flugschriften in arabischer, persischer und osmanisch-
türkischer Sprache aus einer Sammlung der Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990); and Erol Köroğlu,
Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey during
World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
For first-hand accounts, see Salim Tamari, Year of the Locust: A Soldier’s
Diary and the Erasure of Palestine’s Ottoman Past (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2011); Ian Lyster (ed.), Among the
Ottomans: Diaries from Turkey in World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011);
and Hanna Mina, Fragments of Memory: A Story of a Syrian Family, trans.
Olive Kenny and Lorne Kenny (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2004
[1975]).
On memory and continued effects, see Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp and
Stephan Dähne (eds.), The First World War as Remembered in the
Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag and
Orient-Institut Beirut, 2006); Fatma Müge Göçek, The Transformation of
Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the
Modern Era (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and Michael Provence, ‘Ottoman
modernity, colonialism, and insurgency in the Arab Middle East’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 43 (2011), pp. 205–25.
18 Asia
Guoqi Xu
The field of Asia and the Great War is largely a virgin land, and we still do
not have a rigorous treatment of this topic from a comparative perspective.
What we do have are uneven studies of the topic related to individual Asian
nations.
On China, Guoqi Xu’s China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a
New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge University
Press, 2005 [2011]) provides a general history of China and the war from an
international history perspective. Guoqi Xu’s Strangers on the Western
Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011) studies the long-ignored but important journey of
140,000 Chinese workers from their homes in Asia to the Western Front
during the Great War, and the roles they played in the histories of both Asia
and the world.
On Japan, Frederick Dickinson’s War and National Reinvention: Japan in
the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999) is an excellent study of the war’s impact on Japanese political
development and her role in the war. For Japan’s ‘racial equality’ clause in
the Paris Peace Conference negotiations, see Naoko Shimaz, Japan, Race
and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge,
2009).
The scholarship on India and the Great War seems to be relatively
extensive. Yet an authoritative volume on India and the war has not yet
emerged. For personal perceptions and observations on the war, see David
Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
1999) and DeWitt C. Ellinwood, Between Two Worlds: A Rajput Officer in
the Indian Army, 1905–1921, Based on the Diary of Amar Singh (Lanham,
MD: Hamilton, 2005); Santanu Das’s, ‘Indians at home, Mesopotamia and
France, 1914–1918: towards an intimate history’, in Santanu Das (ed.),
Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge University Press,
2011), brings a fresh and new perspective into our understanding of the
history of India and the Great War.
Scholars have just turned their attentions to the study of Vietnam and the
Great War. Most scholars in this field focus on its colonial aspects. A good
example is Richard Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in
the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2008) which has an excellent discussion of Vietnamese labourers in
France during the Great War. Kimloan Hill’s work is an important step
forward. See her book Coolies into Rebels: Impact of World War I on
French Indochina (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2011), based on her doctoral
dissertation, and her articles ‘Strangers in a foreign land: Vietnamese
soldiers and workers in France during World War I’, in Nhung Tuyet Tran
and Anthony Reid (eds.), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 256–89, and ‘Sacrifices, sex,
race: Vietnamese experiences in the First World War’, in Das (ed.), Race,
Empire and First World War Writing, pp. 53–69.
On Asia and the post-war Peace Conference, the best book is Erez
Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International
Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), which has excellent discussions on China, India and Korea and their
roles and interests in the post-war world order.
19 North America
Jennifer D. Keene
There are no transnational North American histories of the First World War.
National histories predominate, while histories focused on international
relations focus heavily on Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a new world order.
David Mackenzie (ed.), Canada and the First World War: Essays in
Honour of Robert Craig Brown (University of Toronto Press, 2005)
contains a series of excellent essays by leading scholars that challenge older
interpretative paradigms of the war’s impact on Canada. Desmond Morton,
Marching to Armageddon: Canadians and the Great War, 1914–1919
(Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989) is the classic study of Canada’s
war. Robert Craig Brown and Ramsey Cook, Canada, 1896–1921: A Nation
Transformed (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974) contains five chapters
dealing with the First World War which offer perhaps the best synthetic
overview to date. In considering the entire span of US-Canadian relations,
John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United
States: Ambivalent Allies, 4th edn (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 2008) view the First World War as a turning point. On Canadian
commemorative practices, see Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory,
Meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997). Tim
Cook’s two volumes on the Canadian military trace the evolution in tactics,
strategy and fighting prowess over the course of the war: At the Sharp End:
Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–1916 (Toronto: Viking, 2007) and
Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War, 1917–1918 (Toronto:
Viking, 2008). Timothy Winegard explores the experiences of native
peoples within Canada in Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and
the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and For King and
Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War (Winnipeg: University
of Manitoba Press, 2012).
Excellent overviews of America’s war effort include David M. Kennedy,
Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1980); Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War
I and the American Experience (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); and
Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921 (New
York: Free Press, 2001). For more insight into the home front, civil rights
and mobilisation, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World
War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008); Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War and
the Remaking of America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001); and Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African
American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010). Recent work on the American combat
experience includes Edward G. Lengel, To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-
Argonne, 1918 (New York: Henry Holt, 2008) and Mark Grotelueschen,
The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in World War I
(Cambridge University Press, 2007). Steven Trout traces the disjointed
American memorialisation of the war in On the Battlefield of Memory: The
First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941 (Tuscaloosa, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 2010).
Historians documenting America’s evolving foreign relations during the
war pay close attention to Mexico, but almost uniformly ignore relations
with Canada. One exception is Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the
Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985). Insightful
discussions of America’s evolving relationship with Mexico are found in
John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York: Knopf,
2009); N. G. Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s
Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press,
1968); Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States
and the Mexican Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Mark
T. Gilderhus, Pan American Visions: Woodrow Wilson in the Western
Hemisphere, 1913–1921 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1986).
Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. III:
The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945 (Cambridge University Press,
1993) considers how the war fits into America’s gradual rise as a world
power in the first part of the twentieth century.
20 Latin America
Olivier Compagnon
The effects of the Great War on Latin America form a complex and still
developing field of historical research. Among recent attempts at synthesis
are: Olivier Compagnon and Armelle Enders, ‘L’Amérique latine et la
guerre’, in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Jean-Jacques Becker (eds.),
Encyclopédie de la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918 (Paris: Bayard, 2004), pp.
889–901, and Olivier Compagnon, ‘1914–18: the death throes of
civilization: the elites of Latin America face the Great War’, in Jenny
Macleod and Pierre Purseigle (eds.), Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in
First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 279–95. This second
article is an analysis of the reception of the conflict by the intellectual elites,
and an evaluation of the war as a turning point in identity in the cultural
history of contemporary Latin America.
For an earlier synthesis, see Bill Albert and Paul Henderson, South
America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil,
Argentina, Peru and Chile (Cambridge University Press, 1988). There are
other important national studies surrounding the question of intervention
and the political effects of wartime developments. These three are important
contributions: Francisco Luiz Teixeira Vinhosa, O Brasil e a Primeira
Guerra mundial (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 1990). This is the most complete
work on Brazil in the First World War, above all, founded on an analysis of
diplomatic sources. See also Freddy Vivas Gallardo, ‘Venezuela y la
Primera Guerra mundial: de la neutralidad al compromiso (octubre 1914–
marzo 1919), Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Políticas, 61
(1981), pp. 113–33, and Ricardo Weinmann, Argentina en la Primera
guerra mundial: neutralidad, transición política y continuismo económico
(Buenos Aires: Biblio, Fundación Simón Rodríguez, 1994). Weinmann’s is
an important work on Argentina and the Great War, with a focus in
particular on the radical presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen from 1916 on.
Many scholars have approached the impact of war on Latin America in
terms of her economic history. The most complete presentation of the
economic consequences of the conflict in this region is Victor Bulmer-
Thomas, La historia ecónomica de América latina desde la Independencia
(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica, 1998), chapter 6, pp. 185–228.
Another notable study is Roger Gravil, ‘Argentina and the First World
War’, Revista de História (27th year), 54 (1976), pp. 385–417. Here is a
careful analysis of the economic consequences of the Great War in
Argentina. Another contribution is Marc Badia I Miro and Anna Carreras
Marin, ‘The First World War and coal trade geography in Latin America
and the Caribbean, 1890–1930’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas,
45 (2008), pp. 369–91. On Peru, see Victor A. Madueño, ‘La Primera
Guerra mundial el desarrollo industrial del Perú’, Estudios Andinos, 17–18
(1982), pp. 41–53. And on Central America, see Frank Notten, La
influencia de la Primera Guerra Mundial sobre las economías
centroamericanas, 1900–1929: Un enfoque desde el comercio exterior (San
José: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central/Universidad
de Costa Rica, 2012).
The British side of the story, with an emphasis on economic issues, is the
focus of Philip A. Dehne, On the Far Western Front: Britain’s First World
War in South America (Manchester University Press, 2009). Based on
British archives, this is a study of relations between Great Britain and Latin
America putting the accent on the economic stakes and supplying valuable
data on the black lists. See as well Juan Ricardo Couyoumdjian, Chile y
Gran Bretaña durante la Primera Guerra mundial y la postguerra, 1914–
1921 (Santiago: Editorial Andres Bello/Universidad Católica de Chile,
1986). And on expatriates to Uruguay, see Álvaro Cuenca, La colonia
británica de Montevideo y la Gran Guerra (Montevideo: Torre del Vigia
Editores, 2006).
Others with European origins were mobilised too. See Emilio Franzina,
‘La guerra lontana: il primo conflitto mondiale e gli italiani d’Argentina’,
Estudios migratiorios latinoamericanos, 44 (2000), pp. 66–73, and
Franzina, ‘Italiani del Brasile ed italobrasiliani durante il Primo Conflitto
Mondiale (1914–1918)’, História: Debates e Tendências, 5:1 (2004), pp.
225–67. These are two fundamental articles on the mechanisms of
mobilisation at a distance among the substantial Italian community in
Argentina and Brazil. Other groups are treated in Frederick C. Luebke,
Germans in Brazil: A Comparative History of Cultural Conflict During
World War I (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press,
1987). This is a remarkable study of the communities of Germanic origin
established in the northern states of Brazil between 1914 and 1918. See as
well Hernán Otero, La guerra e la sangre: Los franco-argentinos ante la
Primera Guerra Mundial (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009).
Cultural historians have entered this field as well. One Chilean poet’s
response to the war is the subject of Keith Ellis, ‘Vicente Huidobro y la
Primera Guerra mundial’, Hispanic Review, 57:3 (Summer 1999), pp. 333–
46. A brief study of the treatment of the war in 1914 and 1917 in two daily
papers in Rio de Janeiro, the Correio da Manha and the Jornal do
Commercio is available in Sydney Garambone, A Primeira Guerra Mundial
e a imprensa brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2003). See also Olivier
Compagnon, L’adieu à l’Europe: L’Amérique latine et la Grande Guerre
(Argentine et Brésil, 1914–1939) (Paris: Fayard, 2013).
On the political history of the war period and its aftermath, there are a
number of useful studies. On Argentina, María Inés Tato has offered these
interpretations of domestic political conflict and the war: ‘La disputa por la
argentinidad: rupturistas y neutralistas durante la Primera guerra mundial’,
Temas de historia argentina y americana, 13 (July–December 2008), pp.
227–50; ‘La contienda europea en las calles porteñas: manifestaciones
civices y pasiones nacionales en torno de la Primera Guerra Mundial’, in
María Inés Tato and Martin Castro (eds.), Del Centenario al peronismo:
dimensiones de la vida politica argentina (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi,
2010), pp. 33–63; and ‘Nacionalismo e internacionalismo en la Argentina
durante la Gran Guerra’, Projeto História, 36 (June 2008), pp. 49–62.
On the press, we have: Patricia Vega Jiménez, ‘¿Especulación
desinformativa? La Primera Guerra Mundial en los periódicos de Costa
Rica y El Salvador’, Mesoamérica, 51 (2009), pp. 94–122; and Yolanda de
la Parra, ‘La Primera Guerra Mundial y la prensa mexicana’, Estudios de
historia moderna y contemporánea de México, 10 (1986), pp. 155–76.
On the vexed question of relations with the United States and the war, a
good place to start is Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the
United States and the Mexican Revolution (University of Chicago Press,
1981). This is a classic study on diplomats, both European and North
American, in Mexico in the double context of the revolution and the Great
War. There are two older studies, still worth reading: Barbara Tuchman, The
Zimmermann Telegram (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965); and Joseph
S. Tulchin, The Aftermath of War: World War I and U.S. Policy toward
Latin America (New York University Press, 1971), an old but still valuable
decrypting of inter-American relations after the war.
On the League of Nations and Latin America, see Thomas Fischer, Die
Souveränität der Schwachen: Lateinamerika und der Völkerbund, 1920–
1936 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). This is a complete and richly
documented analysis of the Latin American presence in the League of
Nations. The French side of the story is explored in Yannick Wehrli, ‘Les
délégations latino-américanes et les intérêts de la France à la Société des
Nations’, Relations internationales, 137:1 (2009), pp. 45–59.

John Horne
The topic addressed in this chapter involves legal, cultural and military
history. On the legal side, an indispensable history of international law and
the conduct of war is Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern
History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1980). For the relevant texts, two useful collections are Adam
Roberts and Richard Guelff (eds.), Documents on the Laws of War, 2nd edn
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 [1982]) and Michael Reisman and Chris
Antoniou (eds.), The Laws of War: A Comprehensive Collection of Primary
Documents on International Laws Governing Armed Conflicts (New York:
Vintage, 1994). The proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899
and 1907 may be found in James Brown Scott (ed.), Texts of the Peace
Conferences at The Hague, 1899 and 1907 (Boston and London: Ginn &
Co., 1908). On the Leipzig war crimes trials in 1921, see German War
Trials: Report of Proceedings before the Supreme Court in Leipzig
(London: HMSO, 1921); James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The
Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War
(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1982); Annie Deperchin-
Gouillard, ‘Responsabilité et violation du droit des gens pendant la
première guerre mondiale: volonté politique et impuissance juridique’, in
Annette Wieviorka (ed.), Les Procès de Nuremberg et de Tokyo (Brussels:
Éditions Complexe, 1996), pp. 25–49; and Gerd Hankel, Die Leipziger
Prozesse: Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung
nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003). On the
trials of perpetrators of the Armenian genocide in Constantinople, see Taner
Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord: Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die
türkische Nationalbewegung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1996).
On the cultural meaning of ‘atrocities’ and the ways in which they
designated the enemy as well as the crimes allegedly committed, see John
Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001). So far, there is
no equivalent study for the Eastern Front, though for the Russian invasion
of East Prussia, see Imanuel Geiss, ‘Die Kosaken kommen! Ostpreußen im
August 1914’, in Geiss, Das deutsche Reich und der Erste Weltkrieg, 2nd
edn (Munich: Piper, 1985 [1978]). On the allegations and reality of
atrocities during the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia, the best work is
Jonathan Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg
Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 44–61. For the
legality and reality of the protected status of the POW, see Heather Jones,
Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France
and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Works that look at the interplay of the cultural construction of the enemy
and the exactions against occupied civilian populations are, for the Western
Front, the pioneering works of Annette Becker, Oubliés de la Grande
Guerre: humanitaire et culture de guerre: populations occupées, déportés
civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Éditions Noêsis, 1998) and Les
cicatrices rouges, 14–18: France et Belgique occupées (Paris: Fayard,
2010); and Sophie de Schaepdrijver, La Belgique et la première guerre
mondiale (1997; translation from the Dutch, Brussels: Peter Lang, 2004);
and for the Eastern Front, Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the
Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World
War I (Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a detailed contemporary
study of the deportation of Belgian labour to Germany (written for the
Belgian government in exile), see Fernand Passelecq, Déportation et travail
forcé des ouvriers et de la population civile de la Belgique occupée (1916–
1918) (Paris: PUF, 1928). An important essay on the applicability or
otherwise of international law to the German occupations in Belgium and
France is Annie Deperchin and Laurence van Ypersele, ‘Droit et
occupation: les cas de la France et de la Belgique’, in John Horne (ed.), Vers
la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), pp.
153–74.
On violence against home populations, see, for the Russian retreat in
1915, Peter Holquist, ‘Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs
en 1915: causes et limites’, in Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 191–
219, and Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during
the First World War (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999),
esp. pp. 15–97. The Armenian genocide is dealt with in Chapter 22 of this
volume, but for its subordination to Great Power relations and the relative
view taken of it by the Allies (compared to the greater vilification of
Germany), see Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide:
Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians
(Oxford University Press, 2005) and Annette Becker and Jay Winter, ‘Le
génocide arménien et les réactions de l’opinion internationale,’ in Horne
(ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 291–313.
There is no satisfactory cultural history of the claims and counter-claims
surrounding the Allied blockade and German submarine campaigns, but see
Gerd Krumeich, ‘Le blocus maritime et la guerre sous-marine’, in Horne
(ed.), Vers la guerre totale, pp. 175–90. On the moral and legal dimension
of the air war, in addition to Best, Humanity in Warfare, see Christian
Geinitz, ‘The First German air war against noncombatants: strategic
bombing of German cities in World War I’, in Roger Chickering and Stig
Förster (eds.), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the
Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 207–
25.
Much of the discussion of ‘propaganda’ during the First World War still
adopts the uncritical use of the term from the 1920s, itself a negative
reaction against the supposed manipulation of minds during the Great War.
For an attempt to think about constructions of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ in the
polarised circumstances of wartime, see John Horne, ‘“Propagande” et
“vérité” dans la Grande Guerre’, in Christophe Prochasson and Anne
Rasmussen (eds.), Vrai et faux dans la Grande Guerre (Paris: Bayard,
2004), pp. 76–95.
The military and political context for each of the themes treated in this
chapter is discussed elsewhere in this history, notably in Volume I: Chapter
12 (War at sea) and Chapter 13 (The air war); Volume II: Chapter 11
(Prisoners of war) and Chapter 18 (Blockade and economic warfare); and
Volume III: Chapter 8 (Refugees and exiles), Chapter 9 (Minorities),
Chapter 10 (Populations under occupation) and Chapter 11 (Captive
civilians). Finally, for another overview from a somewhat different
perspective, see Alan Kramer, ‘Combatants and noncombatants: atrocities,
massacres and war crimes’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World
War I (Chichester and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 188–201.
22 Genocide
There is now an impressive scholarship based on extensive Ottoman
documentation as well as Armenian and other primary sources. Raymond
Kévorkian’s The Armenian Genocide: a Complete History (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2011) is a hugely detailed historical account of almost every aspect
of the genocide. See also his analysis, including detailed timeline, ‘The
extermination of Ottoman Armenians by the Young Turk regime (1915–
1916)’, in the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence at
www.massviolence.org. Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime Against
Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman
Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012) is the most recent of the author’s
book-length engagements with the topic. His and Vahakn N. Dadrian’s
Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York:
Berghahn, 2011) also contains much relevant evidence. Hilmar Kaiser has
written many authoritative essays, including the primary-source-based
overview, ‘Genocide at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire’, in Donald
Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide
Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 365–85. Fuat Dündar’s Crime
of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878–1918)
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2010) looks at issues around
the genocide from a demographer’s perspective; his İttihat ve Terakki’nin
Müslümanları İskân Politikası, 1913–1918 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları,
2001) sheds light on aspects of demographic engineering and the historical
context from the Balkan wars onwards. Uğur Ümit Üngör’s The Making of
Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford
University Press, 2011) considers the fate of the Armenians based on a
detailed case study of the Diyarbekir province. His and Mehmet Polatel’s
Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian
Property (London: Continuum, 2011), details the plunder of the victims.
Hans-Lukas Kieser’s Der verpasste Friede: Mission, Ethnie und Staat in
den Ostprovinzen der Türkei 1839–1938 (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2000),
considers the genocide period and the background from the beginning of the
Tanzimat reform period onwards.
Non-Armenian victim groups are considered in some measure in most of
the above works. The fate of the Syriacs is the focus of David Gaunt’s
Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern
Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), and is
treated in the second chapter of Üngör’s The Making of Modern Turkey.
Like Kieser’s Der verpasste Friede, Üngör’s work also considers Young
Turk and then Kemalist policies of violence and assimilation against the
Kurds. On continuities between the Young Turk regime and the later
republican regime, see Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation
Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2010.) On the international context, see Donald Bloxham, The Great
Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the
Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2005). Wolfgang Gust (ed.),
Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16: Dokumente aus dem
Politischen Archiv des deutschen Auswärtigen Amts (Springe: zu Klampen!
Verlag, 2005) presents German diplomatic documents illustrating German
responses and eyewitness accounts of the reality of the situation in Asia
Minor. (Gust’s website www.armenocide.net/ reproduces these documents
and includes English translations.) Artem Ohandjanian’s multi-volume
edited collection, Österreich-Armenien, 1872–1936: Faksimilesammlung
diplomatischer Aktenstücke (Vienna: Ohandjanian Eigenverlag, 1995) does
much the same for the diplomatic records of the Dual Monarchy. For other
key international diplomatic eyewitnesses, see Ara Sarafian (ed.), United
States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide 1915–1917 (London:
Taderon Press, 2004). Amongst the plethora of contemporary accounts,
especially detailed and systematic is Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des
armenischen Volkes: Bericht über das Schicksal des armenischen Volkes in
der Türkei während des Weltkrieges (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919).
Of a number of edited collections three merit particular mention: Ronald
Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (eds.), A
Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman
Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hans-Lukas Kieser
and Dominik Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die
Shoah/The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zurich: Chronos, 2002).
Richard Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the
Armenian Genocide (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999)
combines useful historical essays with studies of Turkish denial.
For attempts to put late Ottoman genocide and other cases discussed in
the chapter into a wider context, see Kieser and Schaller (eds.), Der
Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah; Donald Bloxham, The Final
Solution: A Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Mark Levene,
The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I: 1912–1938 and vol. II: 1939–1953 (Oxford
On Russian violence towards minorities during the war, see Edward D.
Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1954); Eric Lohr, Nationalising the Russian
Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War One
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Peter Gatrell, A Whole
Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Alexander V. Prusin,
Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in
East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press,
2005); and Peter Holquist, ‘Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des
Juifs en 1915: causes et limites’, in John Horne (ed.), Vers la guerre totale:
le tournant de 1914–1915 (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), pp. 191–219. Holquist’s
essay in Suny et al. (eds.), A Question of Genocide, compares Russian
wartime policy towards Transcaucasian Muslims with Ottoman policy
towards Armenians. For important remarks on context, see Michael A.
Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Russian and
Ottoman Empires, 1908–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
On the other episode considered in this chapter, see Mahir Şaul and
Patrick Yves Royer, West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History
in the Volta-Bani Anticolonial War (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press,
2001).
Material related to the chapter as a whole is considered in this history in
Volume I: Chapter 17 (Ottoman Empire) and Chapter 21 (Atrocities and
war crimes); Volume II: Chapter 23 (The wars after the war); and Volume
III: Chapters 8–11 (in the section ‘Populations at risk’).
23 The laws of war

Annie Deperchin
Consultation of the official documents is the best way to approach the laws
of war and to understand the stages of their development and the difficulties
encountered. The debates on various questions can be studied in these texts:
Actes de la Conférence de Bruxelles de 1874: Sur le projet d’une
convention internationale concernant la Guerre (Paris: Librairie des
Publications législatives, 1874); Ministère des Affaires étrangères,
Deuxième Conférence internationale de la Paix 1907: Documents
diplomatiques (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1908); Ministère des Affaires
étrangères, Conférence internationale de la Paix 1899: Documents
diplomatiques (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1908).
To understand legal reasoning on the laws of war, there is an old work,
but one which has lost none of its relevance. It deals with the evolution of
the laws in all their dimensions from 1864 to 1899 and draws up the
account of how lawyers dealt with the wars of its period: F. de Martens, La
paix et la guerre (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1901).
On the violations of the laws of war and their legal treatment, two recent
works are helpful. In English, there is an important study by two Irish
historians, focusing on the opening stages of the war, but with an analysis
dealing with violations of the law and how societies responded to them:
John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001). In German,
from a specialist in the contemporary laws of war and giving a full judicial
approach to the Leipzig cases, there is Gerd Hankel, Die leipziger Prozesse:
Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und ihre strafrechtliche Verfolgung nach dem
Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003).
Index
Cumulative index for Volumes I, II, and III.

Abadan I.299–300
Abd al-Malik I.447
Abdu’l Baha III.426
Abdulhamid II (red sultan) I.598 II.18
Abdullah, son of Hussein I.419
aborigines (Australian) III.165
absolutism II.577–8 584–93 605
determinants II.578–9
see also conscientious objectors
Abyssinia II.605
Académie des Sciences II.450 III.404
War Committees II.443
Adamello range I.267
Adams, Jane II.595
Adams, John Estremont III.425
Adamson, Agar III.15
Adana I.594–6
Addams, Jane II.595 596 III.112
Adil, governor of Edirne province I.471, 475
Adler, Friedrich II.13 42
Adler, Victor II.13 42 646
adolescence III.29
adolescents, recruitment of III.31–2
Adréani, Henri III.495
Adrian, Louis II.248 265
advanced dressing stations (ADS) III.294–5
AEG II.307 315
Aerial Division (French) I.371
aerial photography I.208–9
aerial warfare II.374–7
laws relating to I.580–2
Afghanistan I.31
Africa I.131, 423–6
and the Ottoman Empire I.447
black nationalism in I.430–1, 432
diseases I.442
economy I.449–53
effect of war upon I.434–5, 450–2
governance of II.10
imperialism in I.433–4
imposition of colonial structures I.453
influences I.445
Land Act (1913) I.450
post-war division of/repercussions I.456–8
pressed labour I.440
reaction to Treaty of Versailles I.181
recruitment of troops from I.82, 442–5
settlement of accounts between colonial powers in I.452–3
use of aircraft in I.407, 431–2
African Queen, The (1951) I.437
African soldiers I.407, 414–15, 428, 640–1 III.627
commemoration of III.553–4
cultural unfamiliarity of European war/war experience I.455–6
racism and segregation I.454–5
recruitment of/conscription I.442–5
African Americans I.430, 522 III.163–4
mutiny II.197–9 202
Afrikaner Rebellion (1914–15) I.436, 445–6 III.427
Agadir Crisis (Moroccan Crisis) (1911) I.621 II.15
Agamben, Giorgio III.258
agrarian economy, state intervention II.383–95
Ahmed Cemal see Jemal Pasha
aide des colonies à la France, L’ (Henri Desfontaines, 1917) III.487
Aimer, Kenneth Walter III.63–4
air warfare I.40, 208–9, 318, 366, 367, 373–5, 398–9 III.124
attacks on industrial targets I.359
bombing of London I.337, 356 III.106
discussions on legitimate use of I.350
dog fights II.169
ground attack I.370
Turk’s Cross campaign I.367
aircraft I.641 II.164 168–9
development of II.245
evolution during 1917 I.369–70
German units I.361, 366, 367
invention of I.349
raid on Folkestone I.337
research II.445–6
seaplanes/flying boats I.353, 368
testing armed I.351
use of in colonial domination I.406–7, 431–2
aircraft carriers II.245 255
Airship Destroyer, The (1909) III.476
aircraft models AEG armoured infantry plane I.367
Albatros armoured infantry plane I.367
Albatros D1 twin-gun fighter I.361
Albatros D3 fighter I.366
Blériot XIII II.241
Breguet 14 fighters I.360, 369, 371, 372
Bristol F2 I.363
Bristol fighters I.366
Caproni Ca1 bomber I.358, 369, 373
Curtiss biplane II.241
De Havilland DH-4 I.363
DH4 bomber I.368
Farman biplanes I.355, 360
First Bombardment Group (GB1) I.353
Fokker monoplane fighter I.355, 360
Fokker D7 I.371, 372
Fokker DR1 I.366
Fokker Eindecker I.359
Gotha twin-engine bombers I.337, 367
Halberstadt biplanes I.366
Handley-Page 0/100 twin-engine night bombers I.363
Hannoverana biplanes I.366
Hansa-Brandenburg I.367
Il’ia Muromets biplane I.352, 353, 375
Junkers I.367
Nieuport biplanes I.360
Rplanes (Riesenflugzeuge) I.367
Rumpler C-types I.366
Salmson 2A2 radial-engined biplane I.371, 372
SE5 I.363
SE5A I.366
Sopwith biplanes I.363
Sopwith Camel I.363, 366
Sopwith triplanes I.366
SPAD fighters I.360, 365, 366, 369
Voisin biplanes I.353, 355, 360
airships I.349–52, 581–2
see also Zeppelins
Aisne, River I.118, 152
Aitken, Major General A. E. I.423–4
Aizsargi (Latvian) II.657
Akhmatova, Anna III.413 448
Aksakal, Mustafa, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914 (2008) I.411
Aktion, Die (magazine) III.411 452 473
Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier) III.401
Alanbrooke, Lord I.120
Åland Islands II.571
Albania II.556 557 566
forced labour III.273
Albert I of Belgium I.387 II.79 497 665 III.141
Albert-Birot, Pierre III.338
Albertini, Luigi I.40 II.66
Aldington, Richard III.471
Death of a Hero (1929) III.465
‘The case of Lieutenant Hall (extracts from a diary)’ (1919) III.174
176
Aleppo I.160, 318
Alevi I.610
Alexander, King of Greece II.20
Alexander I, King of Serbia II.19 75
Alexander III, Tsar II.11
Alexander Mikhailovich, Grand Duke of Russia I.350
Alexandra (Feodorovna) of Hesse (wife of Tsar Nicholas II) II.12 29
38 102–3
Alexejev, General I.257
Alexinsky, Dr Tatiana III.130–1
Alexis (son of Tsar Nicholas II) II.12
Algeria I.448
recruitment from I.443
Ali Dinar I.448
Ali Fuad I.609
Ali Riza (Ottoman soldier) I.467
All Quiet on the Western Front (film, 1916) III.465 468 469 471 638
see also Remarque, Erich Maria
Allantini, Rose, Despised and Rejected (1918) III.113–14
Alleman, Jacques, Melancolia III.543
Allen, Clifford II.588–9 599
Allenby, General Edmund I.160, 315, 316–19, 385, 422–3
enters Jerusalem I.476 III.424
Allied Maritime Transport Committee II.306
Almanach Dada III.524
Alphonso XIII, King of Spain III.340
Alps I.267
see also Carnic Alps
Alsace (film, 1916) III.495
Alsace, expulsion of civilians I.192
Alsace-Lorraine II.504 505 509–11 514–16 533 535 537 611–12 617
al-Sanusi, Sidi Muhammad Idris I.448
Alsthom electrical works (St-Ouen) III.86
Alston, Edith III.369
Altrichter, Friedrich II.175
Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) II.330 338 339
Amara (Mesopotamia) I.312–13, 420
Amara, Michael III.199
Amasya Circular (22 June 1919) II.215
ambulances III.141–51 297
âme du bronze, L’ (1917) III.496
American Battle Monuments Commission III.551 573 579
American City, The III.533
American Civil War I.381, 382 II.95 198 296 590 III.628
casualties III.561
prisoners of war II.270
American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) I.149, 392, 519–20
logistics II.221–2 232–4 237 238–9
American Legion III.602
American Peace Foundation II.600
American Peace Society II.580
American Psychological Association III.407
American soldiers, distinction from European soldiers I.520
American Union against Militarism II.601
American Women’s Hospitals III.133
Amiens I.153–4, 169
German defences I.229
railway junction I.226
significance as BEF supply centre II.235–6
Amish III.433
Amman I.318
ammonia, Haber-Bosch process II.445
amnesia III.326
Ampezzano III.191
Amritsar massacre I.181, 429, 430 II.139 200–1
Amsterdam Fortress II.562
anarchism III.418
Anatolia I.462–3, 478, 607 II.216–17 627 629–30
Andenne I.569
Anders, Günther III.522
Andersen, Hans II.79
Anderson, Dr Louisa III.129
Andler, Charles III.404
Andrade, Mário de I.336
Andrej, Bishop of Ufa III.425
Angell, Norman I.113 II.596 598–9
The Great Illusion (1910) I.25
Anglican Church III.421
demonisation of the enemy III.423–4
Anglo/German naval arms race I.26–30
Anglo-Palestine Bank I.477
Anglo-Persian Oil Company I.420
Anglo-Portuguese Treaty II.553
animals commemoration of/used for III.544 556
provision for II.226–8
see also horses
annales de la guerre, Les (No. 13) (documentary) III.479–80
Annamite (Indo-Chinese) troops I.413
Annaud, Jean-Jacques, Noirs et blancs en couleur (Black and White in
Colour) (1976) I.435
Annemasse III.188
Ansky, Solomon (Shimon) I.566 III.269
anti-Bolshevism II.643–50 662
Antier, Chantal III.132
Anti-Preparedness Committee II.601
anti-Semitism I.428 II.361 393 645–6 662 III.226 228 239
Antwerp I.213, 353 II.557
civilian departures from III.189–90
Anzac Cove (Gallipoli) I.303–6, 307–8, 309, 310–12
Anzac Day I.420 III.67
Anzac Fellowship of Women III.529
Anzacs I.413, 414
at Gallipoli I.300, 303–7, 419–20
Apollinaire, Guillaume III.267 338 350 449 457 464 507 518
death of III.522
‘La petite auto’ III.507–9
in Picasso’s Trois musiciens III.526
propaganda work III.453
Appert, General III.86
Aqaba (Sinai) I.316–17
Arab Bureau I.421
Arab Revolt I.316, 422, 423, 460, 474 II.78 111
famine and I.462
Arabian army I.316–17
Arabian Peninsula I.299
Arabs I.461
in Ottoman army I.469
peace negotiations II.630–2
arbitration I.620–1
Arc de Triomphe II.379 III.546
Architectural Review III.532
Ardahan I.472
Ardant du Picq, Colonel Charles Jean Jacques Joseph II.175
ardennais de Paris et de la banlieue, L’ III.199
Arendt, Hannah III.257
Arequipa (Peru) I.545
Argentina I.554 II.542
displays of charitable support in I.538
economy I.542
European immigration I.536
exports I.543
French mobilisation I.537
and League of Nations I.551
neutrality I.548–50, II.558 572–3
Sáenz Peña law (1912) I.549
social unrest I.544–5
trade with I.535
Argonne, Battle of the III.443
Arizona I.526
Arkhangelsk II.558
armaments, production of I.89–90
Armenia II.629 631
Armenian concentration camps III.270–2
Armenian genocide I.65–7, 77–8, 89, 196, 418–19, 576–7, 585, 586–
91, 602–11, 642–3 II.112 124 128–9 669 III.225–6 270–2 281 630–1
concentration camps III.270–2
death toll I.610
prosecutions for I.583–4
refugees from I.187, 188 III.202–9
rescue of children III.61–2
sanctions against Turkey for I.637–8
second phase/deportation I.588, 609–10
treatment of children III.42–3
Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) I.597–601
Armenian soldiers I.607 III.233
animosity towards/‘accidental’ shooting of I.460, 468
Armenians II.627 III.186 218 239
conversion to Islam I.609–10
elite, arrest and interrogation of I.604
massacre of (1895) I.597–8 609 II.19
massacre of Muslims I.610, 611
in Ottoman army III.233
peace negotiations II.631
resistance and religion III.428
wars with Georgia and Azerbaijan I.611
Armistice Day II.380 381 III.373 597
Armistice negotiations see peace negotiations
armoured car II.241
arms race, naval I.26–30
Army Nurse Corps III.288
Army of Salonica II.18
Arnaud, Émile II.576–7 600
Aron, Raymond II.92
Arras I.107, 118, 119, 121, 169, 219
aerial warfare I.366–7
Battle of I.519 II.183
casualties II.183
use of tanks II.170
Arrow Cross movement (Hungarian) II.660
art exhibitions III.511
artillery II.156–7 221
Big Bertha I.581
changes in use of I.126–7
effects of II.248
German in spring offensive I.224
heavy railway guns II.245
increasing reliance on I.392–3
new techniques I.223, 227
problems with I.207–11
production of shells II.242 448
shortage of at Gallipoli I.308
Soixante-Quinze (75 mm) field gun II.221 242 244
artists demobilisation III.523–6
on the front line III.511–14
home front III.510–11
and memorials III.532
mobilisation/enlistment III.509–10
and religion III.520–3
representations of war II.664–5
Artois I.67, 68, 210
air warfare at I.366–7
use of gas I.70
arts, the, pre-war development in I.24
Asia colonialism in I.21
effect of Spanish flu III.336
hopes for a new world order I.510
reaction to Treaty of Versailles I.181
Asia Minor I.598
removal of Armenians from I.604–7
askaris I.438–40, 453
Asquith, Herbert Henry I.57, 106, 217, 309, 396, 422, 423 II.17 24–5
56–7 508 III.49 224
Asquith, Raymond III.49
Assyrian Christians, massacre of I.76
Assyro-Chaldeans I.188
atheism III.418 421
Atlantic, Battle of the (Second World War) I.322
atrocities III.159–60
attrition, strategy of I.392–3
Aube, Admiral II.256
Aubers Ridge I.209–10
Auckland Memorial Museum III.63–4
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane III.125 616
Augspurg, Anita II.596
Augustow, Battle of I.235
Austerlitz I.381
Australia I.429
commemorative sculptures III.542
German animosity in III.263–4
peace movement II.589
recruitment of troops from I.82
war experience and national identity I.184
war memorials III.528–9 537 548
War Precaution Act III.265
Women’s Peace Army II.596
Australian Imperial Force (AIF) I.414
Australian War Memorial II.381
Austria I.40–1
Ballhausplatz II.70–2 80
China declares war on I.491
Christian Democrats II.41
food shortages I.158–9
historiography I.294–5
home front I.290
House of Deputies II.40–1 43
House of Lords II.40–1
Imperial Council (Reichsrat) II.40–1 42–3
Imperial Council for Bohemia and Moravia II.41
national war effort I.280–1
new boundaries II.622–3
Parliament II.40–3 64
post-war finances II.425–6 431–2
Provisional National Assembly of German-Austria II.43
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Treaty of II.621–3
Social Democrats II.41
spring offensive (1916) I.279
strikes I.135
war aims I.269–70
war strategies I.269–70
Austria-Hungary I.33
in 1917 I.135
agrarian economy II.386–8 393 394
annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina I.411
break-up of I.161
civil−military relations II.113–16
confinement of merchant fleet II.465
cosmetic victory of Caporetto I.288–9
credit II.408
declares war on Serbia and Russia I.39
economy II.299
expenditure, estimated total costs II.415
and the fall of Przemysl I.246–8
financial mobilisation II.412–13
food shortages I.155 II.133 480 612 III.17 88–9
government II.13–14 28–9
and international law I.628
and the Italian Front I.158, 266
Italians, evacuation of III.190–1 195 201–2 213–14
Jewish refugees in III.204
Kriegs-Getreide-Verkehrsanstalt (War Grain Agency) II.387 393
lack of combined war plan with Germany I.388–9
military influence I.271
monarchy II.620–1 623
mutinies II.133 204–7
peace associations II.582–3
peasants, discontent II.387–8
political reasons for losing war I.167
public expenditure, pre-war II.409–11
public reaction to Peace Treaty (1918) I.138–41
recruitment system I.270–3
refugees III.198
revolution in II.132–4
role of in the July 1914 crisis I.41–52, 54–6, 59, 63
Romanian enmity II.546
shortage of armaments and men I.277–8, 289
signs Armistice II.30
strategic war plans I.386
strikes II.133 609
taxation II.418 431
Wilson recommends break-up of II.524
Austrian Peace Society II.582
Austrian-Hungarian Bank II.418
Austro-German-Russian front II.152
Austro-Hungarian army I.270–3
Fourth Army I.235–41, 253
Seventh Army I.259
burial of casualties III.570–1
desertion from II.180
discipline and punishment II.178
and dissolution of the Habsburg Empire II.133–4
Jews in III.232
minority groups in III.230 233–5 239–40
morale I.282–3
poor leadership of I.391–2
propaganda and morale II.101–2
shortage of armaments and men I.277–8
treatment and use of prisoners of war II.267
treatment of Serbian civilians I.571–2
use of chaplains II.191–2
Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) (1867) II.40
Austro-Hungarian navy I.323–4, 327
dreadnoughts II.254
mutiny II.205
Sankt Georg (cruiser) II.205
Austro-Italian front I.71, 266 II.152
trenches II.154
auxiliaries III.140–51 628
Azerbaijan II.629
Bâ, Amadou Hampaté I.179

Baarenfels, Eduard Baar von II.653 654
Bab, Julius III.450
Babel, Isaak III.466
Baby 600 (Gallipoli) I.308
Bad Homburg conference (1918) II.84
Baden I.581
Baden, Prince Max von I.162–3, 164 II.30 49–50 122 531–2
Baden-Powell, Sir Robert I.408
Badische Anilin-und Sodafabrik (BASF) II.452 479
Baghdad I.131, 299, 312, 313–14, 420–1 II.630
Bahaeddin Şakir I.597, 601
Bahrain I.299–300
Baijna Bashta III.61
Baines family, grief of III.381
Bainsizza I.267, 284
Baïonnette, La III.517
Baker, Ernest III.403
Baker, Herbert III.572
Baker, Mark II.401
Baker, Newton I.519, 527 II.108
Baker, Philip II.585
Baku I.601
Balderston, Theo I.517
Baldwin, Frederick II.241
Baldwin, Roger II.591
Balfour, Arthur I.106, 357, 422 II.84 86 470
letter re Jewish home I.460
and science II.444
Balfour Declaration I.319, 477 II.86 509 628
Balfourier, General I.95
Balkan front Austro-German success on I.72–3
trenches II.154
Balkan League I.32, 47, 411 II.15
Balkan wars (1912–13) I.33, 297, 411, 592 II.128 153
(1912–15) I.572, 572, 621 II.15–16 506 625 III.631
use of machine guns II.155
violations of international law I.634
Balkans I.409
attacks upon civilians I.74
crises in I.411
Russian refugees I.187
Ball, Albert (pilot) I.364
Ball, Hugo III.524
Balla, Giacomo III.516
Ballard, Admiral George A. I.398
Ballin, Albert I.30
Baltic Sea II.465 558 563
Banat II.502
Bank of England I.451 II.409 413–14
Bank of France II.413
Bank of the Netherlands II.414
banking crisis (2008) III.621
Bara, Joseph III.31
barbed wire I.66–7, 206, 210 II.161 166 III.259
‘barbed wire disease’ III.225
Barbusse, Henri I.294 III.448 467 472
Le feu (Under Fire) (1916) III.13 454 455 472 638
Barcelona, food protests II.367
Bardach, Dr Bernhard I.641
Barker, Pat III.60–1
‘Regeneration’ trilogy III.328
Barlach, Ernst III.531
The Avenging Angel III.509
Barocek, Karel III.280
Baroni, Eugenio, Monumento al Fante III.372–3
Barral, Pierre III.58
Barratt, General Sir Arthur I.300
Barrault, Jean-Louis III.61
Barrès, Maurice III.414 437 456–7 463
Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France (1917) III.440
Barry, John III.348 350
Barthel, Max III.455
Barthélemy, Joséphine III.102
Barthes, Roland I.639
Barthou, Senator Louis III.172
Baruch, Bernard II.108
Basra I.300–1, 312–13, 470
war cemetery III.627
bataille syndicaliste, La III.123
Battisti, Cesare III.462
Battle of the Frontiers I.204
Battle of the Somme, The (film, 1916) I.525 III.490
battlefield pilgrimages III.376–8
Battleship Hill (Gallipoli) I.308
Batumi I.472
Bauer, Captain Hermann II.265
Bauer, Colonel I.246
Baum, Peter III.462
Bavaria I.45 II.538
religion in III.422
Bavarian Peasants League (Bayerischer Bauernbund) II.388
Bayer II.452
Bazili, N. A. II.80
Beatty, Admiral Sir David I.328, 334–5
Beatty, Bessie III.123
Beauchamp, Leslie III.362
Beaumont I.94
Beaumont Hamel (Somme) I.94, 107–8 III.490
casualties I.108
Newfoundland battlefield memorial III.553
Beauvais, meeting at I.399
Beauvoir, Simone de III.35 611
Béchereau, Louis I.360
Beck, Max von III.195
Becker, Annette III.536 541 551 616
Becker, Jean-Jacques I.41 II.55 III.447
Beckmann, Max III.327 511 514 520 522
Beer, George Louis I.429
Beersheba I.131, 301, 317
equestrian monument III.626
Beethoven, Ludwig van II.370
Fifth Symphony III.510
Behrmann, Theodor I.244, 247
Bei unseren Helden an der Somme (With our Heroes on the Somme)
(film, 1917) III.490–1
Beijing (Peking) I.491, 506–7
Beirut I.474
Belarus I.171
see also Belorussia
Belcourt, Napoléon I.525
Belfast Peace Agreement (1998) III.625
Belgian Committee for the Help of Refugees III.189 194
Belgian Étappes III.247–8
Belgian Labour Exchange III.197
Belgium I.111
African territories I.457
attacks upon civilians I.569–71, 582
conflict with Britain over African territories I.418–19
French refugees in III.189
geographical location of II.574
Germany’s Flemish policy (Flamenpolitik) III.409
hunting of collaborators in I.155
invasion of I.57, 59 III.245–6
National Committee for Relief III.248
neutrality, German violation of I.629–31 II.497 555–6 557 574
occupation of I.75
population exodus III.189–201 215
reconstruction of III.604
support for international law on conduct in war I.564
‘tax on the absent’ III.190
Wilson’s proposals for II.611
Belgrade I.72, 75
city council III.249
suppression of news II.372–3
Beliaev, General III.262
Bell, A. C. II.472
Bell, Johannes I.174
Bellows, George III.513
Belorussia II.657 III.212
Below, Otto von I.285
Belt strait II.563
Beltring, Hans III.640
Belzer, Allison III.134
Benda, Julien II.458 III.416–17
Benedict XV, Pope I.79 II.83 515 III.62 429–30 443
Bénès, Edvard II.206 525–6 608–10
Bengoechea, Hernando de I.540
Benjamin, Walter III.467 509 642
Bennett, Arnold III.402
Benoist-Méchin, Jacques III.472
Beogradske novine (newspaper) II.372
Berchtold, Count Leopold I.41, 44, 45, 51 II.13 14 70 72
bereavement III.37–8 44–5
Berezovka prisoner-of-war camp II.279
Bergen I.337
Berger-Levrault (publisher) III.455
Bergson, Henri III.399 404 406 418
Berlin III.621
air show II.374–5
cultural propaganda II.369
food rationing II.365 III.109
food riots II.366–7
Neue Wache II.381
strike I.156–7 II.349 352
Unknown Soldier memorial III.612
war exhibitions II.370
Berlin, Treaty of (1918) I.611 II.521
Article 61 I.598
Berlin Academy II.443
Berlin Congress (1878) I.598
Berlin Council of Workers and Soldiers I.166
Berlin University III.404
Berliner Tageszeitung III.450
Bern Accords II.272–4
Bernal, J. D. II.458
Berne II.581 596
Bernegg, Theophil Sprecher von II.569
Bernhardi, Friedrich von, Germany and the Next War I.24
Bernhardt, Sarah III.495
Bernstorff, Count Johann von II.76
Berthelot, Philippe II.77 81
Bertie, Sir Francis II.86
Bertry II.277
Besant, Annie I.502
Beseler, Hans von III.247 249
Bessarabia I.143
Bessel, Richard I.155
Bethlehem Steel II.483
Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von I.36, 256, 607 II.14 16 46 116–21
acknowledges violation of international law I.629–30
alliance with Ober Ost I.245
on Belgian neutrality II.555–6
Bette, Peggy III.20 27
Bettignies, Louise de III.123
Bettingen, Frida III.380
Beurrier, Dr I.641
Bialystok III.212
Bickersteth family III.53 606
Bieberstein, General Marschal von I.625
Central European Economic Union II.500
diplomatic negotiations II.79
dismissal II.48
on Dutch imports II.470
and the July crisis I.45, 47–58, 55–6, 57–8, 60
on naval blockade I.579, 632
Polish proclamation I.262
relationship with military commanders II.27 28
on Russia I.243
September Programme II.506–7
von Moltke’s memorandum to I.62–4
vote of no confidence II.44
Biernacki, Tadeusz, My, Pierwsza Brygada (We Are the First Brigade)
III.449
Bieser, Hubert III.297 328
Bild-und Filmamt (BUFA) III.481 490
Binet-Valmer, Guillaume III.449
Binyon, Laurence III.505 545
biologists II.457
Birdwood, General Sir William I.305, 309
Birmingham, refugees in III.61 198
Bismarck, Otto von II.11 94–6 583
colonialism I.19–20
nationalism I.19
Bissing, Moritz von III.247
‘bite and hold’ technique I.222, 308
Blache, Joseph Vidal de la III.407
Black Army II.648
Black Sea I.329, 602 II.18 556 558
blockade II.465 480–1 488
raid I.472
Blackadder Goes Forth (BBC TV series) III.328
Blackmore, J. A. III.369
blackouts II.375
Blackpool III.192
Blast (magazine) III.394
Blaze o’ Glory (film, 1929) III.471
Blériot, Louis I.337
Blixen, Karen III.267
Bloch, Ivan S. I.113, 349
The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political
Relations (1899) I.24–5 II.382
Bloch, Marc II.156 158 III.342
blockade I.79–81, 84, 87, 155, 323, 327, 562, 564 II.461–6 III.630
after the Armistice II.534–5
after unrestricted submarine warfare announced II.466–7
aims of II.463–5
applications of rules relating to I.578–80
Black Sea II.465 480–1 488
as cause of German hunger II.471–5
condemnation of I.632
diplomatic issues II.78–9
effect on agrarian economy II.384–6
effect on German trade II.477–9
effect on Middle East I.460, 474
myth of I.343–5
neutral states and II.466–70
policy II.465 466
regulation of I.626–7
Bloem, Walther III.453
Blok, Alexander III.473
Blomfield, Reginald III.572
Cross of Sacrifice III.536 553 573 581
Menin Gate memorial III.552
Bloomsbury Group III.410
Bloxham, Donald I.466, 577
Blue Rider Almanac III.506
Blunden, Edmund III.445 637
Bluntschli, Johann Caspar I.634 II.483
Boasson, Marc (French soldier) I.110
Boccioni, Umberto III.521
Boelcke, Oswald I.360–1, 364
Boer War (South African War, 1899−1902) I.23, 407, 434, 441 II.153
155 262
Boggende, Gijsbert Den III.432
Bohain-en-Vermandois III.277
Bohemia II.613
Boine, Giovanni III.394
Bois des Caures I.94
Bokovoy, Melissa III.375
Bolimov, Battle of II.259
Bolivia I.554 II.572
breaks relations with Germany I.547
exports I.543
Bologna II.404
Bolsheviks I.130, 137 II.30 36 122 210 604 610 656 III.633
alleged influence on Nazis II.643
citizen-soldiers II.208–10
coup I.116–17 II.84 103 130
and Jews I.142–3
military exemption provision II.592
peace negotiations II.609–10
socialist pacificism II.599–600
support for the war II.37
Bolshevism, fear of II.661–2
Bomberg, David III.512
Bon, Gustave Le III.407
Bonar Law, Andrew I.309 II.57
Bone, Phyllis III.544
Bonnet, Emile II.592
Boorowa, war memorial III.643
Booth, Walter R. III.476
Bordeaux Conference (1914) I.83
Borden, Mary III.173
Borden, Sir Robert I.520, 521–2
Born, Max II.455–6
Boroević von Bojna, Field Marshal Svetozar I.159, 160, 277, 285
Borsi, Giosué III.421–2 437
Bosch, Carl II.479
Boselli, Paolo I.280 II.26
Bosnia-Herzegovina annexation of I.33, 53, 411 II.19 583
population I.42
refugees from III.201
Boston Globe III.150
Botchkareva, Maria (Yashka) III.123 151–2
My Life as a Peasant, Officer and Exile (1918) III.146
Botha, Louis I.326, 445
Bӧttrich, Lieutenant Colonel I.606
Boudot, Edouard II.600
Boulanger, Lili III.510
Boulanger, Nadia III.510
Bourassa, Henri III.428–9
Bourbon Parma, Prince Sixtus von II.513 516
Bourgeois, Léon I.624–5
bourgeois revolution II.126
Bourgin, Hubert III.406
Bourke, Joanna II.276 311
Bousson, Marc (French soldier) I.110
Boutroux, Émile III.404
Boutry, Edgar, Melancholia III.543
Bovec I.267, 281, 285
Bowman, Isaiah III.408
Boxer Rebellion I.491 II.11
boy scouts I.408–9
Boyd, Thomas III.471
Boyd, William, An Ice-Cream War (1982) I.437
Boylston, Helen III.171–2
Bradford, war memorial III.129 538
Braga, Teófilo III.398
Bragg, Sir William II.444 454
Brancusi, Constantin III.643
Brändström, Elsa II.273
Braque, Georges III.516
Brătianu, Ion II.20 546–7
Braunau III.191
Braunschweig, strikes II.349
Brazil I.554, 618
declaration of war I.547–8, 550
economy I.325–8
exports I.543
German newspapers in I.537–8
immigration I.536
Liga Brasileira pelos Aliados I.540
loans to I.541
military support I.548
naval support I.548
neutrality II.555
Brecht, Bertolt III.36
Breguet, Louis I.360
Bremen II.132
strikes II.349
Bremerhaven II.132
Breslau (Wrocław) II.361
Brest I.337
Brest-Litovsk I.72
negotiations II.84 122
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of I.117, 134, 137–44, 264, 335, 342 II.353 513
520–1 536 608–10 628
German disagreement over II.49
German military and II.28
German territorial gains following III.245 252
Soviet walk-out II.30
Breton, André III.505 526
Brett, Dorothy III.363
Briand, Aristide II.22 23–4 31 77 81 83 498 509 511 III.615–16 617
secret negotiations II.514–15
Briand−Lancken affair II.515
Briant, Colonel I.94
Briefs, Goetz III.90
Brighton Beach (Gallipoli) I.303
Brion, Hélène III.112
Britain aerial policy I.364, 370
Afghanistan I.31
African colonies I.457
aid to veterans and families I.183
air raids II.376
Aliens Restriction Act (1914) III.222–3 262
American aid I.105
anti-German riots I.603
anti-Semitism in III.229
Belgian refugees III.190 192 194–201 236
and Canadian munitions industry I.514
Chinese labourers I.492–4
cinema III.482–4
civilian mortalities II.487
civil-military relations II.99–100
coal-mining industry II.310
Committee of Imperial Defence I.384, 396, 407
conscription II.57 99 330–1
Conservative Party II.56–9
credit II.421
and Cyprus I.470
damaged relations with France I.121
debate to send reinforcements to Gallipoli I.308–9
decision to go to war I.38
declares war on Germany I.39, 57
demobilisation I.172–3
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) II.449 451
development of aircraft I.352, 363
diplomatic service II.71 73–4
diplomats II.68
divorce III.28
in Egypt I.470
enlistment of physicists II.443
financial demobilisation II.429
financial mobilisation II.413–14
financial support and trade with US I.512–14
financial support from US II.419
fiscal system I.86
Food Production Department II.392
food queues II.335
food rationing II.365
General Strike (1926) II.429
German community in III.222–5 227
Germany’s challenge to naval superiority I.26–30
government/Parliament II.17 24–5 55–9 64–5
grand strategy I.384, 396–7
House of Commons II.55–9
House of Lords II.55–6
imperialism and colonialism I.429, 430–1
Indian labourers I.494
industrial chemists II.444
Industrial Revolution I.17–18
industry II.307–8
initial support of France I.59
interest in Turkey I.297–8
internment III.224–5 268
introduction of the tank I.105–6
invasion of Mesopotamia I.131, 299
and the Italian Front I.159
joint political−military strategy with France I.397
Labour Party II.56–9 83 347 580 599
lead-up to war I.57–9 II.17
Liberal Party II.56–9
as a major military power I.90
manufacturing industry II.311
Maurice debate II.58
Medical Research Council II.451
merchant shipping II.305
military strategic command of Dominions I.397–8
military v. civilian leadership I.393–4
Ministry of Munitions I.83, 373 II.311 329 444
mobilisation II.303
munitions production II.444 449
munitions requirements II.297
offensive on the River Somme I.100–9
opinion of Serbia I.57
and the Ottoman Empire I.419, 430–1
peace movement II.577–8 579 584–9 597–9
post-war finance II.430–2
production of armaments I.90
rationing I.155
realisation of war aims II.535
rebuilding I.172–3
recruitment of troops/compulsory conscription I.82
refusal to use African soldiers in Europe I.414
regulation of maritime warfare, attitude to I.626–7
Representation of the People Act (1918) II.58–9
reprisals against prisoners of war II.275
Reprisals Order (1915) I.80
‘Scheme S’ II.565
shipping II.219–20
signs alliance treaty with Japan (1902) I.481
social unrest II.135
and South African gold mines I.451–2
standard of living II.341–5
state control of railways II.304–5
strikes I.156 II.56–7 310 331 349–55
suffragette movement II.56
support from Japan I.426–8
support from the Empire I.169
taxation II.421 430
trade unions II.56–7 58 329–31 338 339–40 345–8
Trading with the Enemy Acts III.223
Treasury Agreement II.311
Two-Power Standard I.26
Union of Democratic Control II.83
US propaganda campaign I.514–15
use of immigrant labour III.235–6 240
War Committee I.106–7
war economy I.83, 86
war memorials III.533–4
War Office Cinema Committee (WOCC) III.483
British Admiralty blockade strategy II.463–4
Board of Invention and Research II.444
frustration at contravention of blockade II.467
Naval Intelligence Department II.463
Room 40 I.334 II.448
Trade Division II.464
British army adaptation to flooding in Mesopotamia I.300
cavalry I.219, 223, 315
conscientious objectors II.588
demobilisation I.182
discipline and punishments II.178–9
enlistment campaign II.24–5
executions for desertion III.166
in Ottoman Empire II.629
Indian I.299, 420–1
infantry at the Somme I.216
Irish in III.232
Jews in III.231
men of German origin in III.230–1
motivation II.181–2
officer corps II.188–9
recreation II.187–8
Spanish flu III.301
treatment of wounded III.294–5
use and treatment of prisoners of war I.221 II.267
British army formations First Army I.150, 230
Second Army I.150
Third Army I.148, 230
Fourth Army I.103, 104, 229, 230, 231
Fifth (Reserve) Army I.103–4, 107, 148, 221 II.234
III Corps I.102, 229
IV Corps I.209–10
Australian Corp I.103–4, 229, 397
6th (Poona) Division I.299, 312, 314, 420–1
12th Irish Division I.312
16th Irish Division III.625
29th Division I.303
36th Ulster Division III.625
38th Welsh Division I.103
46th Division I.162
1st Gordon Highlanders II.277
5th Light Infantry (Indian) II.199–200
9th Regiment III.545
Anzac Mounted Division I.315
Australian Light Horse I.317, 318
Desert Column I.315
Durham Light Infantry II.183
Gurkhas I.311
Gold Coast Regiment I.444
Indian cavalry I.103, 413–14
Indian infantry I.413–14
King’s African Rifles I.438, 443
Rhodesia Native Regiment I.444
Royal Naval Division (RND) I.303
South African Scottish Regiment III.548
West Indies Regiment II.201
British Declaration for India (1917) I.503
British Expeditionary Force logistics II.224–39
offensive at Amiens I.153–4
British Fact and German Fiction (documentary, 1917) III.483–4
British Legion III.555 602
Women’s Section III.599
British Medical Journal III.321
British (Royal) Navy I.26–30, 79–80, 348
Brazilian support II.564
command structure I.398
control of the North Sea I.334–6
convoys for protection of merchant shipping I.339–42, 347, 516–17
II.487
decryption I.328
in the Dardanelles I.301
informal strategic plans I.386
integration of Brazilian Divasão Naval em Operações de Guerre
(DNOG) I.548
Japanese assistance I.426, 503
King George V-class battleships I.348
‘Landships Committee’ II.263
in Latin America I.533
protection of dreadnoughts I.28–9
protection to North American colonies I.516
reluctance to incorporate limits on conduct of war I.564
submarines I.80, 115, 116, 154, 155, 324–5, 328, 333, 336, 343,
347, 503, 579, 632 II.256
British Royal Army Medical Service (RAMC) III.288 297
training manual III.306
British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) I.354, 356, 368–9, 372
British ships Brazilian I.548
HMS Aboukir I.327
HMS Anson I.348
HMS Argus (aircraft carrier) II.255
HMS Audacious I.327
HMS Bellerophon I.322
HMS Cardiff I.345
HMS Crecy I.327
HMS Dreadnought II.253–5
HMS Hogue I.327
HMS Howe I.348
HMS Indefatigible I.334
HMS Inflexible I.329, 642
HMS Invincible I.329, 334
HMS Jonquil I.310
HMS Queen Mary I.334
HMS Sydney I.330
HMS Warspite I.336
SS Mendi III.556
British West Indies I.431
British Western Frontier Force I.448
Britnieva, Mary Bucknall, One Woman’s Story (1934) III.136–7 138–9
Brittain, Vera III.358 365–7 370 460 596 611
Testament of Youth (1933) III.341
Britten, Benjamin III.523
Brixton cemetery (South Africa) III.548
Broadberry, Stephen II.211
Broch, Major Rudolf III.570–1
Brock, Peter II.591
Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich Graf II.87 619
Brocklesby, Bert II.589
Brockway, Fenner II.587 588–9 599
Brodie, John L. II.249 265
Bröger, Karl III.455
bronchitis II.487 III.345
Broodseinde, Battle of I.125, 222
Brooke, Major-General Alan I.219
Brooke, Rupert III.379 450 460–1
‘The Soldier’ (1915) III.459 460
brothels II.133 668 III.104–5 117 159–60
Brown, Robert I.521
Bruchmüller, Colonel Georg I.127, 146
Bruges III.190
Brumaire submarines II.258
Brunschvig, Cécile III.85–6
Brusilov, General Alexei I.99–100, 116, 257–64 III.145
Brusilov offensive I.113, 167, 256–64, 287, 389, 397 II.103
casualties II.160
Romanian support for II.546
strategic command at I.379
tactics II.160 166
Brussels Conference (1874) I.625, 627
‘brutalization thesis’ II.641
Bryan, William Jennings II.601
Bryant, Louise III.123 148
Bryce, James I.577
Buber, Martin III.435 443
Buchan, John II.86
Bucharest, Battle of (1916) I.235
Bucharest, capture of I.261
Bucharest, Treaty of (1918) I.143–4 II.520–1 536 610
Buckler, William II.85
Budapest II.609 623 654
soldiers return to II.653
Buek, Otto III.411
Buelens, Geert III.465
Buenos Aires I.544–5
Buk, Yakov III.147
Bukharin, Nikolai I. I.137
Bukovina I.292, 571, 577–8 II.502
Bulair, landings on the beaches at I.303–7
Bulgaria I.32, 72, 81, 143 II.19 502 547–8
armistice I.171 II.530
alliance with Ottoman Empire II.625–6
defeat/forced out of the war I.135, 160, 162
food shortages I.155
mourning and commemoration III.375–6
Neuilly, Treaty of II.625–7
at Ottoman border I.471
population exchange with Greece II.626
surrender II.30
territories lost II.626
war crimes I.565, 572 III.252–3
‘Women’s Revolt’ II.604–5
Bulgarian Front II.152
Bulletin des écrivains de 1914 III.457
bullets, exploding I.616, 622
Bulow, Bernhard, von I.28, 29–30 II.14
Bülow, General Karl von I.391
Bund Neues Vaterland (New Fatherland Alliance) II.602 III.411
Bunin, Ivan III.397
Burcur, Maria III.374 382
Burian, Stephan (Istvan) I.52, 161 II.80
Burnet, F. M. III.354
Burnley, war memorial III.538
Burritt, Elihu II.577
Burt, Thomas II.597
Busse, Carl III.450
Butterfield. Herbert I.58
Buxton, Dorothy III.62
Byng, Admiral John I.334
Byron, Lord George III.460
Cabanes, Bruno III.607
Cabaret Voltaire III.523
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (film, 1920) III.325
Cable & Wireless ships I.44, Cadore I.267
Cadorna, General Luigi I.159, 269, 271, 273–4, 277, 279–80
at Caporetto I.264–5
challenge to civilian political strategic authority I.394
dismissal of I.288 II.26
and politicians II.101
post-war correspondence I.294
spallate (shoves) I.284, 285
Cahalan, Peter III.236
Cai Yuanpei I.501
Caillaux, Henriette I.56
Caillaux, Joseph I.56 II.511 513 516
Cairo I.474
Calais I.353
conferences at I.397
Calcutta II.365
Calhoun, Frederick S. I.530
California I.526
California Institute of Technology II.442 447
Callister, Sandy III.362
Calmette, Joseph I.56
Calvinism III.427–8
Cambon, Jules II.81–2
Cambon, Paul I.48 II.81–2 510
Cambrai I.128 II.166
Cambrai, Battle of I.111, 128, 146, 223
use of tanks II.170
Cambridge Magazine II.447
Cambridge, Christian peace gathering II.586
Cameron, Anna M. III.135–6
Cameroon (Kamerun) I.423, 435, 457
Camp Devens, flu epidemic III.346–7
Camp Funston (Kansas) III.337
Campbell, W. W. II.447
Camus, Albert III.61
Canada I.429
Art Memorial Fund III.529
British cultural ties and nationalism I.515, 531–2
conscientious objection II.579 591
conscription II.591
contribution to war I.511
divorce III.28
draft resistance in I.518–19
economy I.514
French-Canadian opposition to war I.515–16
internment III.266
mail to III.11–12
munitions industry I.514
perception of wartime influence I.520–1
recruitment of soldiers I.518–19
regular army I.517
relationship with US I.524–5, 532
reliance on British trade I.517
southern border defence I.523
strikes I.186
suppression of bilingual schools I.522–3
war memorials III.539
Canadian Battlefield Memorial Commission III.552
Canadian Corps I.120, 219, 229, 397, 413, 414, 517–18, 519–21
Canadian Expeditionary Force Battle of Mount Sorrel III.15–16
ethnic composition I.523
leave III.21
Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry III.15
see also Canadian Corps
Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force II.201
Canadian War Records Office I.520
Canberra II.378 381
Cannadine, David III.382
Canudo, Ricciotto III.449
Cape Coronel I.561
Cape Helles (Gallipoli) I.303–6, 307
British Memorial to the Missing III.551
Cape Horn Cape of Good Hope I.436
capitalism I.23, 24
Caporetto, Battle of (Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo) I.111, 127–8, 135,
158, 270, 281, 285–7, 369, 394 II.102 122 166 204
casualties I.280, 286
evacuation following III.191 201 214
Italian surrender following II.172 181 277 III.174
Caproni, Gianni I.352, 369
Caproni factory I.363, 369, 373
Capus, Alfred III.172
Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires) 552
Carden, Admiral S. H. I.301–2
Carinthian Defensive Battle II.622
Carles, Émilie III.78
Carli, Mario III.449
Carlier, Dr III.276–7
Carnegie, Andrew II.600
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace I.565 II.358 600
Carnegie Foundation III.605
Carnia I.276, 285
Carnic Alps I.267
Carol I, King of Romania II.19–20 546
Caroline Islands I.326–7, 329, 426
Carpathians I.72, 391
battle in I.235
choice to attack I.251–2
importance of equipment and supplies II.232–3
weather conditions II.159
Carranza, Venustiano I.526–7, 528–9, 549
Carrère, Jean III.500
Carrick, Alexander III.300
Carrier Pigeon Unit Ostende (Brieftauben Abteilung Ostende) I.354
Carso II.168
Cartagena (1741) I.332
Cartier, Denise III.105
Case of Sergeant Grischa, The (film, 1930) III.471
Caselli, Guiseppe III.514
Casement, Roger II.287
Casey, Private Edward III.166–7
Cassin, René I.183, 188 III.64–5 603
Castelnau, General Noël de I.95 III.49 441
Castle, William Ivor II.664
Castro, General Pimenta de II.20
casualties I.68–9, 152 II.171 III.48 563–7
African I.131
American I.518
Australian I.103–4 III.65
Austro-Hungarian I.71, 161, 277, 280, 284, 289, 291
British I.102–3, 104, 108, 125, 148, 149, 150, 151, 216, 217, 223,
313 III.65
Canadian I.518
civilian III.563
French I.98–9, 108, 121, 149, 150, 151, 211–12, 211 III.565
German I.98–9, 108, 125, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 211, 217,
226–7, 247 III.564–5
German attack on I.151–2
Hungarian I.259, 284
Indian I.489–90
Italian I.71, 127, 277, 280, 284, 289, 291
Ottoman I.308, 313, 420, 468
Polish III.563–4
Russian (1915) I.72, 254, 255
Serbian II.136
use of gas I.70
use of knives I.69
casualty clearing stations (CCS) III.295
catarrhal epidemic III.345
Catherine the Great I.465 II.241
Catholic Peasants League II.388
Catholicism III.419 420
opposition to conscription III.429
and peaceful mass resistance III.428–9
Catholics, mourning and III.381 382
Cattaro mutiny II.205 217 609
Caucasus mountains I.418–19, 592 II.629
Cavell, Edith I.74, 192, 575 III.123 254 426–7 440 541
Caverne du Dragon (Chemin des Dames) I.118
Çay (Gallipoli) exploding shell incident at I.459–60
Cecil, George III.595
Cecil, Lady Violet III.595–6
Cecil, Sir Robert II.78 86
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand III.467
Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) (1932)
III.327 465
Cemal Pasha I.461, 472, 475 see Jemal Pasha
cemeteries III.378 552 570–86 602 642
American III.573–4 579–83
Australian and New Zealand III.578 581
Austro-Hungarian III.570–1
British III.574 579–83
French III.579–83
German III.583–5
Italian III.583–5
Cendrars, Blaise III.326 350 449
Cenotaph (London) III.373 537–9 544
cenotaphs II.380 III.63–4 538
censorship II.663 III.98
of letters III.12–13 15 21 22 210
literary figures and II.512 III.452–3
cinema I.185, 546 II.188 193 370 664 III.185 326 403 473–505 534
638 671 683
Central America I.554
economy I.544
trade with US I.535
Central Organisation for a Durable Peace II.596
Central Powers attempts to win over neutrals II.501–6
in defeat III.612–13
diplomatic negotiations between II.499–501
war aims II.506–7 III.249–53
Centrale des Métallurgistes Belges III.198
Centre Party (Zentrum) I.157, 162
cerebro-spinal meningitis III.352
CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoro) II.345 347
Chadderton (Manchester), war memorial III.538
Chagall, Marc, Homage to Apollinaire (1912) III.506
Chalon-sur-Marne cemetery III.571
Chamberlain, Austen I.313 III.615
Chambers, John Whiteclay Jr. I.409
Champagne I.67, 68
Chantilly, interAllied conferences I.73, 92, 107, 397
chaplains III.440
Chaplin, Charlie III.403 485 487 498
Charleroi, Battle of II.263
Charles (Karl) I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary I.284 II.28–9 30 31 42–
3 582 III.234
and Armistice II.621
military relations II.115–16
peace initiative II.83 85 513–14
resignation II.43
Chateau-Thierry III.133
Chayanov, Alexander, Theory of the Peasant Economy (1923) II.406
Chemical Society of London II.443
Chemical Warfare Service II.451
chemical weapons research II.444–5
Chemin des Dames (Nivelle offensive), Battle of I.41–52, 111, 115,
118–24, 132, 150, 219–20, 219, 226, 364, 391 II.98 514–15
casualties I.121
mutinies following II.202–4
use of colonial soldiers at I.415
use of tanks II.170
chemists II.444 445 451 454 457
Chen Duxiu I.506–7
Chesterton, G. K. III.397
Chevalier, Gabriel III.300
La peur (1930) III.465
Chicago Peace Society II.601
Chicherin, Georgy II.89
Chickering, Roger II.448 471–2 582 584 III.421
Chiesa, Giacomo Paolo Giovanni Battista della see Benedict XV
childhood III.29
children III.29–45
educational mobilisation III.33–4 43
effect of damaged fathers/loss of fathers III.59–61
effect of separation and bereavement III.29–30 36–8 44–5
effect of war violence on III.40–3
employment of III.38
forced labour III.42
gender barriers III.34–5
humanitarian aid III.61–2
lack of food and provisions III.38–40
orphanages III.59 61
tales of heroic III.125–6
used as incentive for mobilisation III.31
war discourse aimed at III.32–6 43
Chile I.548 II.542
division within II.572
exports I.543
immigration I.536
location and neutrality II.558
saltpetre to Germany II.475 477
Chilembwe, John I.445 III.428
China I.426–7, 431 II.670
belief in President Wilson I.506–7
Communist Party I.506
declaration of war I.491 II.552–3
diplomatic service II.69
economic advantages of war I.504
experiences of the labourers sent to Europe I.501
governance II.10
Japanese ambitions for I.482, 490–1 II.105
May Fourth Movement I.507, 509
neutrality I.484 II.552–3
the opportunities of war I.483–5
and origins of Spanish flu III.340
recognises need for change I.482–5
representation at the Paris Peace Conference I.180–1, 505–7, 509–
10
supply of labourers to Europe I.492–4
supply of labourers to Western Front I.416
supply of rifles I.503
Tiananmen Square III.632
war with Japan (1894–5) I.480–3 II.104
war policy I.491–2
Chinese Labour Corps II.665
Chinese labourers I.414–15, 492–4
and gender identity III.164–5
exhumation and reburial of remains III.577
expertise I.494–5
influence of European experiences I.501
killed by Spanish flu III.642
popularity with Frenchwomen I.497–8
relations with Africans I.500
relations with Vietnamese I.500
resilience to cold I.496
Chisholm, Mairi III.127 141
Chittenden, Russell II.450
chlorine gas I.212, 642 II.168 259 260 445
cholera, Spanish flu mistaken for III.343
Christadelphians II.589 III.433
Christian X, King of Denmark II.563
Christians, persecution of I.77
Chunuk Bair (Gallipoli) I.308, 309, 311
Church of Christ III.443
Church, James Robb III.169–70
churches appearance of patriotism III.425–6
promotion of acceptance of war III.420
wartime pressures on III.440–1
Churchill, Winston I.70, 100, 107, 145, 152, 211, 386 II.453
use of aircraft to subdue colonies I.380
air strikes on German crops I.357
on Amritsar massacre II.200
blames Jews for European revolutions II.646
on the blockade II.465
on Chinese I.494
decision to attack Dardanelles I.419
Gallipoli II.100
and Imperial War Graves Commission policy III.575
naval matters I.332, 335, 348
use of navy to influence war in Turkey I.301–2
‘New Liberalism’ II.463
and science II.444 451 456 457
submarines II.257
on submarine warfare II.486
support of aviation I.350, 352
tanks II.263
CIAMAC III.603
Cine-Journal review III.478
cinema III.471–2 475 638
documentaries and newsreels III.476–93
fiction III.493–6
pre-war III.476
‘citizen soldiers’ II.190 195 204 208–10
Citroën Quai de Javel factory, female workers II.334 337
production-line work II.338
City of London I.451 II.409 413–14
loans to Germany II.468
civilians artistic depiction of III.519
attacks upon/mistreatment of I.73–8, 87, 569, 642–3 III.245–6 631–
2
death rates III.49–50
displacement of III.268–70
effect of occupying regimes upon III.253–6
internment I.575 III.257–81
religious faith III.439–40
repatriation of III.188
see also refugees
Civilisation (film, 1916) III.496
Clam-Martinic, Heinrich II.42
Clark, E. III.354
Clarke, J. H., England Under the Heel of the Jew (1918) III.229
Class, Heinrich III.252
Clausewitz, Carl von I.234, 255, 391 II.196 202 208 539
on policy and war II.91–3
paradoxical trinity I.382
Von Kriege (1832) III.155
Clemenceau, Georges I.45, 53, 151, 163, 366, 371, 393, 399 II.22 24
85 87 263 511 516 535 665 669 670
aims at the Paris Peace Conference II.616
and Austria-Hungary II.524 527–8
‘defeatism’ speech II.24
and Emperor Karl (Charles I) II.115
handling of generals I.394
industrial relations II.352
on civil v. military relations II.91 96 98–9
on German unity II.538
at the Paris Peace Conference II.619
plans for Russia II.537
recognition of Russia’s foreign nationals II.529
recruitment of African soldiers I.416–17
religious contempt III.442
Rhineland policy II.537–8
speech 11 November 1918 II.535
Syrian agreement II.630
and the Treaty of Versailles I.174–6, 633
visits to front I.386–7
Clémentel, Étienne II.510
Cleutt, Frances III.296
clothing II.230
Clyde Workers’ Committee II.348
Clydeside industrial dispute II.339 352 355
shipbuilding II.340
union activity II.348
coal-mining industry II.309
Coates, George III.641
Cobden, Richard II.579 580
Coblenz II.535
Cochin, Denys II.23 24
Cocteau, Jean III.526
Coissac, Georges-Michel III.500
Cold War III.620 628
Collette (Willy) III.496–7
Colmo, Alfredo I.540
Cologne II.535
Colombia I.337
economy I.544–5
exports I.543
neutrality I.548
colonial soldiers III.627
accusations of barbarity I.568
experiences of I.179–80
relationships with white women III.117
use of I.413–18, 428
economies of I.21–2
Colorado I.526
Combes, Henri II.600
commemoration II.377–81 III.358 592 595 628 638–9
Australia III.67
Books of Remembrance III.549
Italy III.551
in schools III.41
writers, poets and III.464 474
see also war memorials
commemorative sculptures III.539–44
Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (1815) I.624 see Imperial
War Graves Commission
Commission of the Danube (1856) I.624
Committee for Refugees of the Department of the Nord III.193
Committee for the Relief of Belgium II.558
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Ottoman Empire) I.463,
592, 597–610 II.109–11 124 III.202
common-law couples III.9–10
Commonwealth War Graves Commission III.578
communication technology I.381–2, 390–1
communism, fear of I.186, 193–4
Compton, Karl II.454
Compton-Hall, Richard II.257
History of Spiritualism (1926) III.382
concentration camps I.575 III.191 257–81 546
culture and creativity within III.278–80
Concert of Europe, collapse of II.506 516–17
conflict resolution I.620–1
Congar, Yves III.273
Congo Basin, exploitation of I.18–19, 20, 21
Congo Conference (1884) I.20
Congregationalists III.432
Congress of Berlin (1878) I.42
Congress of Vienna (1815) I.535 II.517 606 634
Connolly, James III.428
Conrad (Austro-Hungarian commander) see Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad
von
conscientious objectors II.577 578 579 584–93 605 III.113–14 158
432–3
Japan II.583
Consenvoye German War Cemetery III.584
Constantine I, King of Greece. II.19 20 503 548–9
Constantinople I.71, 160, 302, 309, 329, 332, 465
British occupation of II.214–16 629
coup (1913) I.297
Russian plans to control I.412
troops positioned near I.299
Constitutional Democrats (Kadety) (Russia) II.35–6 39
Constructivists III.637
contraband II.466–9
laws relating to I.626–7
Cook, Tim III.32
Cooper, John Milton, Jr. I.513, 526
Cooper, Sandi E. II.581
Copenhagen Convention (1857) II.563
Copenhagen Fortress II.562 563
Copp, Terry I.519
Coppée, Baron II.83
Coppées (father and son), trial of I.173
Corbett, Julian I.327, 339
Corfield, Frederick and Mary III.19 20–1 23
Corfu III.122
Cormons III.139
Coronel, Battle of I.329
Cortright, David II.578
Cossacks I.595 II.648
Costa Rica, declaration of war I.547
Côte 304 (Verdun) I.96–7
Côte d’Ivoire I.444, 446
Cotta (publishers) III.454
Council of Workers and Soldiers (Soviet) II.40
Courland I.72, 141
Court of Arbitration I.621
Cove, Ethel III.18–19
Cove, Wilfrid III.13 18–19
Coventry food queues II.335 352 380
strikes in II.331
Coventry Ordnance III.81
Cramon, General von I.252
Crayford Works, strike II.354
Creel, George III.403
creeping (rolling) barrages I.216, 219, 221–2, 227, 229 II.166
Crimean War I.592
Crna Ruka (The Black Hand) /Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death)
I.43
croix de bois, Les (film, 1931) III.471
Croix de Feu movement II.660
Crowe, Eyre I.58
Crowl, Philip I.331
Cru, Jean Norton III.447 450 470–1 473
Du témoignage (1930) III.470 471
Témoins (1929) III.470
Ctesiphon (Mesopotamia) I.73, 314, 421
Cuba concentration camps III.259 280
declaration of war I.547
immigration I.536
military service I.550
Cuban missile crisis III.621
Cubists/Cubism III.508 515–17
cultural demobilisation I.172 III.615–16
Cultural Federation of German Scholars and Artists (Kulturband
Deutscher Gelehrter und Künstler) III.397
cultural genocide I.590–1
cummings, e. e., The Enormous Room (1922) III.468
Cunningham, Admiral Sir Andrew I.348
Cunningham, Ebenezer II.586
Curie, Marie II.435 III.133 142 401
Currie, General Arthur I.120, 519
Curtiss, Glen I.353, 368
Curzon, Lord I.407 II.444
Cuttoli (Corsica) III.347
Cuxhaven II.132
cyclists, commemoration of III.545
Cyprus I.470
Czech Legion II.206–8 288 613
Czech national aspirations I.137
Czech National Committee/Council I.78 II.525–6 613
Czech Republic, established II.43 622
Czechoslovakia I.292 II.527–8 622 III.614 624
Czernin, Count Ottokar Graf von I.158, 160 II.29 42 83 84–5 115 515
516
Czestochowa I.571
D’Annunzio, Gabriele I.195 II.101 III.394 449 608

La beffa di Buccari (1918) III.372–3
d’Aosta, Duc III.134 583
D’Esperey, General Franchet I.160
Dada movement III.473 523–5 526–7 637
Dadeshkeliani, Princess Kati III.144
Dahomey I.435
Daily Mail II.373 III.158
Daily Mirror II.666
Daimler II.356
Dalbiez Law (1915) II.328–9
Dalmatia I.269
Damascus I.160, 318 II.630
Damousi, Joy III.595 616
Daniel, Ute III.75 89 90
Danilov, General I.237
Danube I.72
Danzig II.617
strikes II.352
Dardanelles I.70–1, 77, 323, 603, 642 III.631
Armenian soldiers I.607
Britain’s decision to attack I.419–20
failures of strategic command I.396
naval attack I.301
Darfur I.448
Darrow, Margaret III.125 126 132
Darwin, Charles I.406 III.418
Darwinism, social I.483, 487, 612 III.258 260 418
Das Tagebuch des Dr. Hart (1916) III.495
Dauzat, Albert III.343
David, Eduard II.45
Davies, H. W. C. III.403
Davis, Belinda II.471–2 III.88 91 109
Davy, Georges III.370
daylight saving time II.668
Deak, Istvan II.205
Dean, Warren I.542
death/the dead III.48–50 561–3
burials III.568–73
calculating numbers III.563–7
effect on the living III.594–8
exhumation and reburial of III.576–8
informing families of III.567–8 574
poets and III.458–64
the unidentified or missing III.579 583 597–8
see also cemeteries
Death’s Head Hussars I.417
Deauville, Max III.472
Jusqu’à l’Yser (1918) III.468
La boue des Flandres (1915) III.469
Debelyanov, Dimcho III.461
Debout le morts! (1916) III.495
Debs, Eugene II.670
Debussy, Claude III.515 516
‘La berçeuse héroïque’ (1914) III.510
‘Noël pour les enfants qui n’ont plus de maison’ (1915) III.512–13
Declaration of London II.464
‘defence in depth’ tactic II.163 167
Degrelle, Leon II.660
Degrutère, Maria III.104
Dehmel, Richard III.448 453
Zwischen Volk und Menschheit (1919) III.472
Del Rey, General III.428
Delbrück, Clemens von II.79
Delcasse, Théophile II.22 81
Dellmensingen, Krafft von I.285
post-war correspondence I.294
Delluc, Louis III.475 496
Delta hospital ship III.136
Delville Wood, South African memorial III.553
DeMille, Cecil B. III.485
The Little American (1917) III.102
demographic change I.18–17
demonisation of the enemy III.423–4 427
Dene, Edmund II.71
Denhoff-Czarnocki, Wacław III.449
Denikin, Anton, General II.645 648
Denmark II.394 542
defensive plans II.563
geographical location and neutrality II.558
Grosserer Societet (Merchants’ Guild) II.48
Industriråd (Industrial Council) II.567
military arrangement with Germany II.569
pacifism II.593
trade and home consumption negotiations II.567
trade with beligerents II.559–60
US exports to II.422 469
Dent, Olive, A V.A.D. in France (1917) III.169
Der Heimat Schikengrab (The Trenches of Home) III.485
Der Kinematograph III.490–1
Der Sturm (magazine) III.461–2
Der Zor I.609
Derby, Lord II.330
Derby Scheme II.330
Dersim I.610
desertion II.179 III.166
Desfontaines, Henri III.479 487
Despeara (The Awakening) III.452
Desruelle, Felix III.543
Desvallières, George III.523
Deuringer, Alois III.16
Deutsch-Chilenischen Bund (German-Chilean League) II.572
Deutsche Bank II.483 III.223
Deutsche Lichtbild-Gesellschaft (DLG) III.481
Deutsche Reichsbank III.451 482
Deutscher Landarbeiter-Verband (DLV) II.404
Devambez, André III.514
Devarenne, Alexandre III.486
Deventer, General Jaap van I.453
Dexter, Mary III.126
Diagne, Blaise I.414, 416–17, 429
Diana, Princess of Wales III.556
Diaz, General Armando I.159, 161, 288, 290 II.26 102
Diaz, Jean (film character) III.325–6 498
Dieppe I.455
Diesel, Rudolf II.256
Diller, Baron III.248
Dilman, Battle of I.602
Dimitrievic, Colonel Dragutin I.43
Dimitrova, Snezhana III.375
Dimmel, Georg III.406
Dinant I.569
diphosgene gas I.146
Direction de Service Automobile III.142
Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants (Ottoman
Empire) I.592
Dirr, Pius III.400
discipline, military II.177–81 195
workforce III.86
diseases III.289 292 300–3
in Africa I.442
among prisoners of war II.278 283
in Britain II.487
in concentration camps III.271
in Italy II.481
prevention III.302–3
related to hunger and malnutrition II.461
research II.446
venereal II.668 III.25
Disraeli, Benjamin II.69
divorce III.28 50
Dix, Otto III.327 511 514 516 519 641
(The Butcher’s Shop) III.525
Rue de Prague III.525–6
Diyarbekir, removal of Armenians from I.607–8
Dmitrieff, Elizabeth III.124
Dmitriev, General I.252, 254
Dmowski, Roman II.525–6 529
Do Broni (‘To Arms’) III.449
Döblin, Alfred II.638
Dobruja II.610 625 626
doctors III.288–9
authority of III.291–2
exhaustion and pressures/standards of care III.296–7
extra duties of III.290
women as III.128–40 300
Doehring, Bruno III.420
Doenitz, Admiral Karl, wolf-pack tactics I.339, 347
Dogger Bank I.79, 328
Battle of the I.334
‘Dollar-Sterling-Block’ II.419
Dollard, Catherine III.9
Domansky, Elizabeth III.56–7
domestic violence III.174
Dominican Republic breaks of relations with Germany I.547
trade with US I.535
Dominions, recruitment of troops from I.82
Donaldson, Walter III.174
Donato, Rosa III.124
Donnan, F. G. II.443
Donson, Andrew III.155
Dorgelès, Roland III.453
Les croix de bois I.184 III.23 471 598
Dormans French National Cemetery III.582
Dorr, Rheta Childe III.123
Doty, Madeleine III.123
Douai I.210 III.189
Douaumont, Fort (Verdun) I.92–3, 94–5, 97, 98, 213
Douaumont ossuary III.551 580 598 625
chapel at III.582
Douchy III.487
Douglas internment camp III.225
Douhet, Major Giulio I.352, 358, 363, 369, 373
The Command of the Air (1921) I.361–2
Doukhobors II.579 591
Doullens meeting (26 March 1918) I.226, 399 II.24
Doumergue, Gaston II.82
Dover Castle I.337
Doyle, Arthur Conan I.408 III.397 402 436 598
Draffin, Malcolm Keith III.63–4
dreadnoughts I.28–9, 34, 39, 298, 327 II.242 253–5
non-deployment of II.244
Dresdner Bank III.223
Duan Qirui I.484, 491
Dublin see Easter Rising (Dublin)
DuBois, W. E. B. I.429
The Crisis II.198
Duchamp, Baptiste III.322
Duchamp, Marcel III.517–18
Duchamp-Villon, Raymond III.509
Duchêne, Gabrielle II.597
Duchess of Westminster’s War Hospital (Le Touquet) III.315
Duchy of Kurland and Semigallia III.249
Dufy, Raoul, The End of the Great War (1915) III.509
Duguit, Léon I.189
Duhamel, Georges III.472
Duhem, Pierre III.405
Duma (Imperial) (Russian Parliament) II.13 29 34–40 102
Dumas, Jacques I.634–5
dumdum bullets I.406
Dumesnil, J. L. I.365
Dumoulin, George II.354
Dunant, Henry I.617
Dunbar-Kalckreuth, Frederick Lewis III.230
Dunkerley, William Arthur see Oxenham, John
Dunkers III.433
Dunkirk I.353
Dunnico, Herbert II.586 599
Dunsmore (Warwickshire) III.545
Durandin, Catherine II.19
Dureau, Georges III.478
Durkheim, André III.369–70
Durkheim, Émile II.453 III.49 369–70 402 403
on religion III.418
Durova III.124
Durst, Ruth III.171
Düsseldorf I.353 II.375
Dutch navy I.322
Dutil, Patrice A. I.522
Dwinger, Erich Edwin III.474
Dyer, Brigadier General Reginald E. H. II.139
dysentery I.467, 478 II.283 III.289 293 302
Dyson, Will III.519
East Africa I.423–5 III.628

campaign I.437–40 II.123–4
economy I.417
environmental hazards I.440
food shortages I.441
Maji-Maji rebellion (1905−7) I.441
malaria III.289 292
East Asia I.426–8
East Prussia I.235–41, 571 II.617
rail network II.232
refugees from (interned in Russia) III.201 267
East-Central Europe, post-war conflicts II.639–43
Easter Rising (Dublin) II.135 139 377 III.220 233 428 625
Eastern Crisis (1875–8) I.592
Eastern Front I.66, 235, 264–5, 286, 641
Austro-German success on (1915) I.71–2
battle and tactics II.158–60
civilian attacks I.74–5
prisoners taken II.269
sickness and medical care III.292–3
see also Tannenberg, Battle of; Gorlice-Tarnów, Battle of;
Przemysl, fall of; Brusilov offensive
Eastman, Crystal II.601
Ebert, Friedrich I.164 II.31 212 III.49 613
Eccles, Henry II.218
Echo de Paris III.457
Eckardt, Heinrich von I.546
economic warfare II.462–70 477 488–9
German II.483–7
see also blockade
economies II.295–6 321–4 423
agrarian II.383–95
business structures II.314–16
colonial (pre-war) I.44
commodity trade and II.306–9
immediate impact of war on I.82–7, 129–30 II.300–2
and manpower needs II.302–4
political II.318–21
post-war III.609–11 633–4
state and industry II.309–14
transport and II.304–6
weight and allocation of resources II.316–18
Ecuador, breaks off relations with Germany I.547
Eddington, Arthur II.458
Ede refugee camp III.195
Edgerton, David II.437
Edinburgh, commemoration in II.380
Edinburgh Memorial Chapel III.546 548
Edirne I.475
Edward Arnold (publisher) III.455
Egypt I.300–1, 430, 470 II.670
invasion of Libya, by Senussi brotherhood I.425
Nationalist Party I.474
revolution in II.138–9
Egyptian Empire scheme I.421–2
Egyptian Expeditionary Force I.160
Ehrenburg, Ilya III.466
Ehrlich, Paul III.398
Eichhorn, General von III.255
Eindhoven III.197
Einstein, Albert I.470 III.411 413
Eisner, Kurt II.388 646
Ekaterinoslav III.206
El Arish I.315
El Demócrata (Mexico) I.541
El Salvador, breaks off relations with Germany I.547
El Universal (Mexico) I.624
Electrical Trade Union (ETU) II.340
electrotherapy III.321–4
Elgar, Sir Edward, The Spirit of England III.505
Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land (1922) III.358
Elizabeth, Queen III.556
Emden, Richard Van III.32
Encephalitis lethargica (sleeping sickness/Von Economo’s disease)
III.352–3
Endell Street Hospital III.129
Engels, Friedrich II.620
Engineering Employers’ Federation II.339
English Channel I.205
Englishwoman III.123
Enloe, Cynthia III.121
Entente Cordiale (1904) I.28, 326 II.616
enteritis III.301
Entringen (Germany) memorial III.545
Enver Pasha I.297, 298, 463–4, 470–3, 600, 602, 606 II.18 30 74 110–
13 551
epidemics I.76
Epp, Franz von II.654
Ernst, Max III.526
Erzberger, Matthias I.164, 611 II.27 47 83
Catholicism III.431
murder of II.213
Erzincan I.467, 469, 610
Erzurum I.601, 602, 610 II.215
Esat Pasha, Brigadier-General I.389
Escande, Mathieu III.21
Essad Effendi III.427
Essen II.359
air attack on I.353, 355–6
Esser, Johannes III.307 473
Estienne, Colonel Jean-Baptiste II.262–3 265
Estonia I.133 II.656–7
Etaples III.341
mutiny II.201–2 217
Ethiopia, Italian invasion of (1935) I.432
ethnic cleansing I.591–2
eugenics I.407
Eupen-Malmedy II.617
Euphrates, River I.420
flooding caused by I.300
Europäische Bibliothek (European Library) III.472
Europe, pre-war cultural mood I.22
Evans, Richard III.378
Evert, General I.257
Evian III.188 220
Excelsior, L’ III.484
executions/death penalty III.166
exhibitions II.370–1
Exploits of a German Submarine U-35, The (La croisière de l’U-35)
(film, 1918) III.493
Expressionist movement III.461
Fabrication des bombes Wanderen (torpilles) aux usines Niclausse

(film) III.486
Fackel, Die (The Torch) (magazine) III.412
Fage, Andre III.198
Fairbanks, Douglas III.485
Faisal, King II.630
Falkenhayn, General Erich von I.47, 100, 205, 214, 389, 395 II.118–19
on alliance with Vienna II.500
on artillery bombardments II.448
attack on Verdun I.90–3, 96, 97–9, 101, 109, 392 II.119
and Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów I.248–55
on defence of the mountains I.268
Ottoman hatred of II.113
paper on Grand Strategy I.90–1
replacement of I.113, 260–1
Somme I.104, 390
strategic command I.392
on success against Russia I.245–6
support from Kaiser Wilhelm II I.387
on trenches I.67
Falkland Islands I.533
Falklands, Battle of the I.642 II.485
families affected by mortality III.48–9
authority/balance of power in III.56–8
effect of damaged veterans on III.59–61
family history, interest in I.3
importance of finding missing relatives III.65–7
importance of letters III.52–6
informed of deaths III.567–8 574
post-war III.41 119 173–5
public aid for III.61–2
reclaiming of bodies III.573–6
state aid for III.107–8
state involvement in III.58–9
Far East I.326–7
Farewell to Arms, A (film, 1932) III.471
Fargniers III.606
Farman, Henri I.350
Farnborough, Florence III.126 137–8
Farrar, Geraldine III.485
Farrar, Lancelot I.37
fascism II.660 III.614 624
fascist movement II.405 III.607 608
Fashoda I.384
fathers/fatherhood III.53
mourning of III.367–70
Fatima, appearance of the Virgin Mary at III.430–1
Fay, Sydney I.40
Fayolle, Émile, Cahier Secret III.441
Federal Reserve Bank II.422
Federated Hungarian Soviet Socialist Republic II.623 649
Federation of British Industries II.316
Federterra II.404–5
Fedorenko, Vasia III.162
Fedortchenko, Sofia III.472
Feisal I.180, 316, 319, 419, 422, 423
Feldbauer, Max III.513
Feldman, Gerald D. II.382 431 433 435 III.610
Felixmüller, Conrad III.641
Fell, Allison III.132
Fellowship of Reconciliation II.586 III.432
femme française pendant la guerre, La (1919) III.486
Fénéon, Félix III.506
Ferchaud, Claire III.423
Ferdinand I, Emperor II.12
Ferdinand I, King of Bulgaria II.19 30 626
Ferdinand I, King of Romania II.546
Ferguson, Niall I.155, 178 II.276 311
Ferry, Jules I.19, 21
fertility III.51
Fery-Bognar, Marie von III.128
Fescout, Henri III.476
Festubert I.413
Feuillade, Louis III.494 499
Fiat Lingotto factory III.92
FIDAC III.603
Fielding, Rowland III.15
Figaro, Le II.372 III.172 404
film industry III.475
films see cinema
finance II.408–9
credit II.416–23 430–1
demobilisation II.424–30
estimated total costs of the war II.415
gold standard II.412–14 425 428–9
mobilisation and II.409–14
post-war II.430–3
pre-war public expenditure II.409–11
public II.430
taxation II.416–31
Finland I.141 II.634 649
civil war (1919) II.289 649
Fischer Controversy II.495
Fischer, Emil II.435 452 III.390 398
Fischer, Fritz I.36, 46, 47, 56 III.620
Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961) I.40–1 II.66
Fisher, Admiral Sir John I.28, 335, 382 II.253 255 464
Fisherman’s Hut (Gallipoli) I.305
Fiske, General H. B. I.520
Fiume II.20 III.608
flame-throwers I.69–70, 94, 97, 642
Flanders I.100, 118, 124–6
declared independent III.249
Flasch, Kurt III.451
Flers I.105
Flers-Courcelette, Battle of I.216
fleur des ruines, La (1915) III.494
Foch, Ferdinand I.117, 119, 148, 226, 230, 380 II.24 87 98 237 535
armistice terms I.164
becomes General-in-Chief of Allied Armies I.399–400
on Chinese labourers I.495
on the importance of morale II.174
religious faith III.441
on technology II.240–1
Foden, Giles Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake
Tanganyika (2004) I.437
Fodoreanu, Jeana Col. The Woman Soldier (Femeia-Soldat, 1928)
III.127 176
Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm III.411
Foerster, Wilhelm Julius III.411
Folkestone, air raid I.337
Fonck, René I.365, 372
food queues II.335–6 366 667–8
food shortages II.364 667–8 III.17–18 88–93 109–11
effect on children III.38–40
Germany, causes of II.471–6
food, soldiers requirements II.224–5
forced labour III.251 271 272–5
Ford (Hueffer), Ford Madox III.452–3
The Good Soldier III.452–3
Parade’s End III.453 468
Ford, Henry II.601
Ford, Lena Guilbert III.96
Forward (newspaper) II.372
Forward (Scottish ILP journal) II.603
France activity immediately prior to the outbreak of war I.56–7
aerial policy and politics I.363–4, 370, 371
African colonies I.457
agrarian economy II.390–1 394
alliance with Russia I.53, 59 II.15–17
and the Italian Front I.159
and the Volta-Bani War I.425–6
armaments, production of I.89–90 II.245–6 297
Army Commission II.54 64
attacks upon civilians in I.569–71, 582
Belgian refugees III.190 192–201
Chamber of Deputies II.50–4
Charte des sinistrés (Victim’s Charter) (1919) I.183
Chinese labourers I.492–4
cinema III.476–80 484 486–7
civilian mortality rate II.482
Colonial Labour Organisation Service I.416
colonialism I.21
Comité d’Études de Paris III.407
commemorative statues III.542–3
Committee for War Studies and Documentation (Comité d’Études et
Documents sur la Guerre) III.403–4
concerns over effectiveness of blockade II.468
Confédération générale du Travail (CGT) II.52
credit II.419–20
culture of victory III.613–14
desire for vengeance I.185–6
development of bomber forces I.355, 359–60, 366, 371
Dreyfus Affair II.35–6 51 III.239
economy II.317
effect of Nivelle offensive on British relations I.121
evacuations and displacement of civilians III.187
financial mobilisation II.413 427
fiscal system I.86
food shortages I.155 II.364
foreign workers II.332
German occupation of I.75
government II.15–16 21–4
implementation of international law I.628
imports and exports II.482–3
in Syria I.470
industry II.308
internment/internees III.262 267–8
joint political−military strategy with Britain I.397
lack of confidence in the war I.121–4
Manual of International Law for the Use of Army Officers (1893)
I.627
martial law II.97
military strategy I.383–4
Ministry of Armaments III.86
mobilisation II.245–6 303
munitions production II.312–13
nationalism I.19
observation squadron I.360
pacificist associations II.600
Parliament II.50–5 64–5
peace movement II.582 592–3
peasants II.391 394
Plan XVII I.204 II.222
policy of laicité (religious indifference) II.51
policy on restoration of bodies to families III.575–6
post-war objectives II.535–6
president (position of) II.50–1
radicalism II.582
reaction to German armament I.33
reaction to Sarajevo attack I.45
rebuilding I.172–3
recruitment and exemption from military service II.327–8
recruitment of troops I.82
religion/Catholicism III.421 422–3
repatriation of soldiers’ bodies I.181–2
reprisals against prisoners of war II.275–6
return of soldiers/veterans to I.183–4
Sacred Heart issue III.422–3 436
scientific research laboratories II.452
Senate II.50–4
SFIO (socialist party) II.582 600
social unrest II.134–5
socialist movement II.97–8
strikes I.123, 156, 186 II.349–55
support from the colonies I.169
Supreme Council of National Defence I.396
taxation II.420
trade unions II.345–9
use of airplanes to dominate North Africa I.432
use of colonial labour I.415–16
use of immigrant labour III.237–8 240
use of prisoners of war II.332
Vietnamese labourers I.494, 495–500
war economy I.83–4, 86
war memorials III.13 537 547 553–4
Franck, Richard III.409
Franco-British War Time Commission II.231
Francois, General I.240
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) I.22, 37, 382, 535 II.94 95 582–96
Franco-Russian Alliance (1891–3) II.517
Frank, André Gunder I.542
Frank, Leonhard III.298
Frank, Ludwig III.229
Frankfurt, effect of Spanish flu III.351 353
Frankfurt, strikes II.352
Frankfurter Zeitung I.133–4
Franz-Ferdinand, Archduke I.51, 53
assassination of I.41–3, 46–9, 411, 534 II.11 620
as martyr III.394
retaliation for assassination of I.571
Franz-Joseph, Emperor I.46, 51, 61 II.11 12–13 14 28 31 113 114
death of I.267 II.42 115 204
and parliament II.41
Frederick II (the Great) I.243, 324 II.11
Freiburg II.365
air strike I.353 II.376–7
blackout II.375
Freie Soldat, Die III.323
Freikorps I.193–4 II.212–14 217 656–7 III.176 608
French army African soldiers in I.408, 413, 414–15
at the Somme I.100–1
Bureau for Military Information (BIM) III.477
Cinematographic Section (SCA) III.477
death penalty/execution II.666
faith of leaders III.441
first airplanes I.350–1
Jews in III.231–2
mutinies II.134–5 202–4
nettoyeurs des tranchées (trench cleaners) II.276
officer corps II.189
Photographic Section (SPA) III.477
Plan ‘H’ II.565
reconnaissance aircraft I.351
refusal to attack I.220
retake Soissons I.153
Spanish flu III.335
Three Year Law (1913) I.59–60
treatment of prisoners of war II.267
in Turkey I.303
French army formations Seventh Army I.151
XX Corps I.95
XXX Corps I.94
22nd Regiment of Colonial Artillery (RAC) III.335
French Association of Surintendantes (factory welfare supervisors)
III.85
French Étappes III.247–8
French National Labour Office (ONT) III.197
French navy I.322, 348
dreadnoughts II.254
informal strategic war plans I.386
and submarines II.256
French Sudan I.444
French, Sir John I.101, 212, 381 II.25 99
strategic command I.377, 379
French-Canadians dissent amongst I.516, 522
Freud, Sigmund I.23, 24, 565–6 III.323–4 331 405 594
Frey, Daniel, three dimensions of neutrality II.557
Fried, Alfred II.584 602
Friedrich Karl, Prince of Prussia III.49
Friedrich, Ernst II.635
War against War III.10
Friends’ Ambulance Unit II.585 588
Friends’ Service Committee II.585 588
Friez, Otto III.513
Fritzsche, Peter II.371
Friuli I.267
Fromelles Battle of III.66
cemetery III.65–6
mass graves III.578
Fromkin, David II.633
Fulda, Ludwig III.397
funerals III.359–60
Furnes III.141
Fussell, Paul III.380 446 447 471 550
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) III.636
Futurists (Italian) III.394 508 516 521 637
Initial Manifesto III.507
Fyn (Funen) II.563
Gaba Tepe (Gallipoli) I.303–6

Gaffron, Prittwitz von I.238
Gal, Yann Le III.328
Galicia I.72, 292, 571 II.79 208
Jews in I.75, 577–8 II.103
Russian treatment of civilians in I.577–8
Gallieni, General II.23 III.142
Gallipoli peninsula I.70, 77, 89, 299, 303–12, 389, 418–19 II.152 628
III.627
casualties I.420
cemeteries III.581
debate to send reinforcements to I.308–9
difficulty of amphibious landings at I.331–3, 603
evacuation from I.311–12
landing of troops I.71
political intervention II.100
sickness and medical care III.289 292
trenches II.154
use of reinforcements at I.309–11
Galloway Kyle (Erskine Macdonald Ltd) (publishers) III.455
Galopin, Alexandre III.197
Galsworthy, John III.397
Galtier-Boissière, Jean, The Victory Parade I.184
Gambetta, Léon I.382
Gambiez, Fernand II.240
Gamio, Manuel, Forjando Patria (1916) I.552
Gance, Abel I.185 III.325–6 494 498–9
Gandhi, Mahatma (Mohandas K.) I.429, 488, 509 II.139 200
García Calderón, Jose I.540
García Menocal, President Mario I.550
Garçon, M. I.633
Garric, Robert III.611
Garrison, William Lloyd II.580
Garros, Roland (pilot) I.74
gas I.69–70, 87, 89, 97, 127, 146, 212, 213, 603, 642 II.168 259–61
445
consequences of III.138–9 140–1
dropped by airplanes I.430
speed of introduction of counter-measures II.247
use of and international law I.568–9
at Ypres I.519 II.259–60
gas gangrene III.300
gas masks I.70, 97, 212, 568 II.260
Gatrell, Peter II.644
Gauchez, Maurice III.465
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri III.521
Gaulle, Charles de II.286
Gault, Hamilton and Marguerite III.24
Gaumont (film company) III.482 493 499
Gaumont, Léon III.477
Gaunt, David I.608
Gay, Hannah II.451
gaz mortels, Les (1916) III.494
Gaza I.131, 315–16, 317
Geddes, Eric II.234
Geissen University, psychiatric hospital III.296
Gemelli, Agostino III.406
gender identity III.153–77
gender, reinforcement of barriers III.34–5
Geneva Conventions I.562, 564, 566, 583–4, 622–3, 628, 634, 638
II.270–1 289
Genevoix, Maurice III.562
genocide I.577, 585–91
contribution of concentration camps to III.270–2
destruction (of groups) concept I.590–1
potential for I.596
see also Armenian genocide
Gentioux, war memorial III.550
geographers II.457 III.407–8
geologists II.446 449–50 456
George V, King I.458 II.17 III.442 483 545
George, Stefan III.394
Georgia I.143 II.629
Germain, José III.472
German Americans I.516, 523 III.220–8
German army accused of war crimes I.582–3
airplanes and airships I.351–2, 351, 581–2
Alpenkorps I.275
attacks upon civilians (1914) I.569–71
cinemas and morale III.487
consumption of munitions II.297
discipline and punishments II.178–9
final attacks on and surrender I.152–4
high level of insubordination I.385
illness III.301
infantry I.224–6
Jews in III.231
logistical problems II.238
Militarische Film-und Photostelle III.481
mobilisation of/expansion I.32–3
morale I.152–4, 170 II.130–1
motivation II.181–2
officer corps II.189
‘Patriotic Instruction’ II.192–3
shock/storm troops (Sturmtruppen) I.146, 224–6 II.166 660 III.608
Spanish flu I.152
surrender I.150
treatment of prisoners of war I.566
treatment of wounded III.295–6
use of Russian prisoners of war II.267
German army formations Second Army I.148
Fourth Army I.150
Fifth Army I.152, 213
Sixth Army I.150
Seventh Army I.152
Eighth Army I.237–8
Eleventh Army I.253, 389 II.233
Seventeenth Army I.148
Eighteenth Army I.148 II.235
58th Brigade (Sixth Army) I.566
German High Seas Fleet I.325
Bluecher (ship) I.334
East Asian flotilla I.329
in the North Sea I.334–6
reluctance to accept humanitarian restraints I.563–4
surrender of I.345–6
German Historical Museum (Berlin) III.623
German Imperial Navy dreadnoughts I.28–9, 34 II.254
expansion of I.26–30
failure against British I.79–80
in Turkey I.298
mutiny I.163–4, 395 II.131–2 211
policy II.484
SMS Breslau (Midilli) I.298, 329, 472 II.18 465 552
SMS Emden (German cruiser) I.330 II.485
SMS Gneisenau (German battleship) I.329 II.485
SMS Goeben (Yavuz Sultan Selim) I.298, 329, 472 II.18 465 552
SMS Karlsruhe (German cruiser) I.355, 581 II.484
SMS Scharnhorst (German battleship) I.329 II.485
SMS Viribus Unitis II.651
submarines II.257
Zeppelin raids I.362
see also submarine warfare
German Occupation of Historic Louvain, The (newsreel) III.483
German Peace Society II.584 602
German Society for Internal Medicine III.304
German War Graves Commission (Volksbund deutsche
Kriegsgraberfursorge) III.552–3 584
German Wars of Unification I.382
Germanophobia III.226 238–9
German-speaking populations (Central/Eastern Europe III.218
Germany aerial policy I.364, 370–1
African colonies I.423–4, 436–7, 456–7
agrarian economy II.384–6 393 394
air raids II.376
anti-Semitism III.229
armaments production I.89
and Armenian reforms I.600
‘blank cheque’ I.46 II.72–3
Bundesrat II.13 43–4 118
‘Case J’ II.565
Catholicism/Catholic influence in III.418 431–2
Central Pacific colonies I.326, 329 II.104 105
Centre Party II.44 47
China declares war on I.491
cinema III.480–2 484–5
coal-mining industry II.309–10
commemorative statues III.543
conscription II.120
control of rail network II.305
Council of People’s Deputies II.50
credit I.86 II.417–18 468 568
culture of defeat III.597 612–13 623–4
deaths relating to hunger and malnutrition II.461
decision to declare war on Serbia I.33–6
declares war on Portugal II.554
declares war on Russia and France I.39
decline in trade II.477–9
Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (Fatherland Party) movement I.157, 166,
167 II.48 III.252
development of airplanes I.371, 372
diplomatic service II.71 74
diplomats II.68
dispute over use of men as workers or soldiers II.328–9
divorce rate III.28
economic pressures I.129–30
economic warfare II.483–7
economy II.317
effect of blockade I.80–1, 84, 155
Eltzbacher commission II.471 475
employment of immigrants III.237 240
employment of prisoners of war II.332 III.89
employment of women III.89–90
exports to US II.468–9
financial mobilisation II.412
food distribution, inequality of II.475
food queues II.335–6
food shortages I.80–1, 155, 343–5 II.364 460–76 604 612 III.17 88–
9
forced labour from occupied regions I.573–4
foreign workers II.332
geopolitics I.331
government and Parliament II.43–50 64 117–18 120–4
grain production II.474
hunger strikes II.46
Imperial Chancellor (role of) II.43 44
Imperial Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils II.50
imports, source of II.474
Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) (Unabhängige
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) I.140, 157, 162 II.46 49 354
industry II.308–9
instigation of Russian Revolution I.116–17
international law, attempts to influence I.625
international law, failure to adhere to I.628–33
internment III.262
invasion of Belgium I.57, 59 II.497 555–6 557 574 III.245–6
iron and coal II.476
Japan, early relations with I.480–1
July 1914 crisis I.44–64
Kaiser Wilhelm Stiftung für Kriegstechnische Wissenschaft
(KWKW) II.452
lack of combined war plan with Austria-Hungary I.388–9
Landeskundlische Kommission of Warsaw (1914) Kriegsgeographie
(war geography movement) III.407
Majority Social Democrats (MSPD) II.46
Manifesto of the 93 (‘Appeal to the Civilized World’) II.439–41
III.397 398–9 413
merchant fleet, loss of II.465
military power and government II.13–14 27
morale I.170 II.460–1
mourning and commemoration in III.378–9
mutinies II.211–14
National Liberals II.48
naval expansion/challenge to Britain I.26–30
occupation of Baltic states I.417–18
occupied territories III.244–5
Office of Raw Materials of War (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung-KRA) I.84
oil imports II.476–7
opposition to the war I.79
pacifist movement, indifferent II.583–4 593 602–3 III.433–4
peasants, discontent II.385–6
post-war finances II.424–6 430–2
post-war violence in I.193–4
pre-war culture I.22
pre-war plans for food security II.470–1
Progressive People’s Party (Germany) I.157 II.48
propaganda III.484–5
public reaction to Peace Treaty (1918) I.138–41
Qingdao, attack on I.489
readiness for war I.40–1, 60
rearmament/expansion of the army I.32–3
reasons for losing war I.167–71
refugees in I.187
Reichstag (Imperial Diet) (Germany) II.13 27–8 43–50 117–18 120–
4
religion III.420 421
reprisals against prisoners of war II.275–6
response to shortages II.479–80
response to the demands of Treaty of Versailles II.619–20
reunification III.620
revolution II.130–2
Russian Empire, policy towards II.526–7
social welfare III.91
Spartacus League II.50
spring offensive (1918) I.135–6, 145–52
state food policy II.475
state intervention in industry II.313
strikes I.156–7, 163–4 II.131 349–55 604
submarine gamble I.115–16
support of Ottoman Armenian policy I.606–7
taxation II.417 424 430
territories and resources lost II.617
trade unions II.44–5 345–8 354–5
trade with neutrals during blockade II.467–70
unrestricted submarine campaign I.398
war economy I.84, 86
war guilt II.617–19
war in South West Africa I.21, 436–7
Wilhelmstrasse II.89
youth organisations I.408–9
Geyer, Michael I.576 II.144
Gheluvelt Plateau I.221
Ghent I.618 III.190
Gide, André III.193 390
Gilbert, Caroline III.549
Gilbert, Charles Webb III.555
Gillies, Harold III.307
Ginn, Edwin II.600
Ginzburg, Carlo III.502
Giolitti, Giovanni I.272, 410–11 II.20 26 101
Giono, Jean III.467
Le grand troupeau (1931) III.465 470
Giorno, Il III.123
Girard-Mangin, Mme III.130
Giraud, General I.308
Giraudoux, Jean III.327
Glasgow III.61
protest movements I.79
Gleason, Helen III.141
Gleichen, Lady Helena III.134–5
Gleichheit, Die III.123
global economy II.295–7
Goba, Alfreds (Latvian refugee) III.212–13
Godfroy, Léonie III.126
Goebbels, Joseph II.217
Goebel, Stefan (Stephan) III.372 543
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wandrers Nachtlied (1776) I.133
Goethels, George II.234
Gold Coast I.446
Goldman, Emma III.113
Goldscheid, Rudolf II.430
Goltz, Field Marshal Colmar von der I.390 II.111 112 III.212
Gömbö, Gyula II.654
gonorrhoea III.26
Goncharova, Natalia, Images mystiques de la guerre III.509
Gordon, Andrew I.336
Goremykin, Ivan L. II.14 35 37
Gorizia I.267, 278–81, 281, 397 III.134 135–6
Gorky, Maxim III.397 412
Gorlice-Tarnów, Battle of I.72, 89, 211, 248–56, 603
German command at I.389
importance of equipment and supplies II.232–3
political consequence I.255
Gorringe, Major General Sir Frederick I.312
Goschen, Edward II.555
Gosse, Edmund III.518
Gotha bombers I.337, 581
Gouda refugee camp III.195
Gough, General Sir Hubert I.103, 108, 125
at Passchendaele I.221
Gouraud, General II.158
Gourmont, Rémy de III.456 457
Graça Aranha, José Pereira da I.540
Gramsci, Antionio III.609
Granados, Enrique III.522
grand strategy I.393–400
Grand-Leez, war memorial III.175
Grande Illusion, La (film, 1937) II.286
Grant, General Ulysses S. I.210
Grant, Duncan III.410
Gravil, Roger I.542
graves III.569–73
marking of III.535–7
mass III.569–70 578 583
religious representation on III.535–7
Graves, Robert I.197 III.166 176 230 379 471–2
Goodbye to All That (1929) III.153–4 440–1
Grayzel, Susan III.76 172
Graz II.652–3
Great Depression II.323 660
Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) I.179, 191, 592, 612 II.363 III.226
Greece I.32 II.502–3 548–9 625
expulsion of Rûm by Ottomans I.599–600
government and policy II.20
Greek Orthodox Christians, transfer of to Greece I.613
population exchange with Bulgaria II.626
population exchange with Turkey II.632 III.226
Greeks III.218
Green, Corporal R. C. III.66
Gregory, Adrian III.381
grenades I.69 II.155 250–3
tear gas II.260
Grey, Charles I.407
Grey, Sir Edward I.38, 48, 57–8, 313 II.17 100 469
diplomacy II.70 73–4 81 504
grief III.379–80 381 458–64 595–6
Grierson, Hugh Cresswell III.63–4
Griffith, D. W. III.497
Grimm, Ervin III.397
Gris, Juan III.516
Grodno I.72
Groener, General Wilhelm I.163, 164 II.212 460–1 487
Gromov, Mosei Georgievich, For St George (1927) III.466
Groschen, Sir Edward I.630
gross domestic product (GDP) II.298–9
Gross, Lucien II.592
Grossman, Rudolf II.583
Grosz, George III.294 520 522 643
Grotelueschen, Mark II.221
Grotius, On the Law of War and Peace (1625) I.616
Grouitch, Slavko III.149
Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of I.546
Guatemala, declaration of war I.547
guerrilla warfare I.562
Guesde, Jules II.22
Guitton, Pastor II.592
Gulbransson, Olaf III.517
Gumilev, Nikolai III.413 448
Guoqu Xu I.416
Gurkhas III.165
Gurney, Ivor III.467
Gustav V, King of Sweden II.572
Guynemer, Georges (pilot) I.74, 360, 364, 365
Guyon, Charles III.125
Gwiżdż, Feliks III.449
Haber, Fritz I.568 II.444 445 452 455 479 III.398 415
wins Nobel Prize II.458 III.417
Haber-Bosch process II.445 449 479
Hachette, Jeanne III.125
Hachette (publisher) III.455
Hacker, Hanna III.137
Hackett-Lowther ambulance unit III.126 141
Hackney, memorial III.535
Hadamard, Jacques III.403
Haeckel, Ernst III.398
Hagedorn III.220
Hagop Mintzuri I.469
Hague, The Conference (1930) II.426
Conventions (1899/1907) I.563, 564–84, 619–21, 622–9 II.72 270–4
332 III.273
International Congress of Women (1915) II.596 602 III.112
International Criminal Court III.629
Haguenin, Professor II.514 515
Haig, Sir Douglas I.101–9, 131, 146, 148–9, 148, 152, 169, 170, 212,
230, 368, 370, 381 II.201 456
attrition I.392
‘Backs to the wall’ order I.150
Battle of the Somme I.214–17
and the British Legion III.602
Cambrai I.128, 223
chaplains placed for morale II.192
Flanders offensive I.123
and Neuve Chapelle I.209
opposition to women’s service III.132
and politics II.99–100
relations with David Lloyd George I.118, 217–19, 220, 393–4 II.25
religious faith III.441–2
strategic command I.380, 391, 396
Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) I.219–23
Haiti I.554
trade with US I.535
Hakkâri I.608
Halbmondlager (crescent moon camp) II.287–8
Halbwachs, Maurice III.401 593
Haldane, J. B. S. II.455
Haldane, Lord Richard I.29–30, 32 II.99
Hale, George Ellery II.442 447 450 453 III.415
Halévy, Élie II.325
Halil Edib I.607
Halil, General I.602, 611
Hall, Margaret III.127
Hall, Richard II.128
Hall Caine, Sir Thomas III.485
Hallé, Guy III.169
Hallett, Christine III.132
Hamburg I.449–50 II.132 464
Hamilton, General Sir Ian I.303–9 III.540–1
Hammarskjöld, Hjalmar II.572
Hankey, Maurice II.86 88 464
Hann, Hein und Henny (film, 1917) III.485
Hanover Technical Institute II.249
Hansa-Brandenburg works I.362
Hansenclever, Walter III.467
Hara Kei II.64
Hara Takashi II.106
Harcourt, Lewis I.436
Hardie, James Keir II.599
Hardinge, Sir Charles I.299, 312, 502 II.81 88
Hardy, Thomas III.402
Harmsworth, Alfred I.349
Harnack, Adolf von III.420
Harnack, Ernst von III.413
Harper, Florence III.124
Harrison, Charles Yale, Generals Die in Bed (1930) III.465
Harrison, Mark II.211
Hartlepool I.328
Hartley, Marsden III.517
Hartney, Lieutenant Colonel Harold, Up and At ’Em (1940) III.167–8
Hartwig, Nicholas (Nikolai) II.15 72
Harwich I.328
Hašek, Jaroslav III.472
Hassidic Judaism III.434–5
Haumont I.94
Hausen, Karin III.27
Haussman, Conrad I.51
Havas news agency I.541
Havelberg concentration camp III.277
Haverfeld, Evelina III.61
Hawker, George Lanoe (pilot) I.74
Hawthorn Ridge (Somme) III.490
Hazebrouck II.235
Hazebrouck junction I.150
health insurance III.299
Healy, Maureen III.17 88 91
Hearne, R. P., Aerial Warfare (1909) I.351
Hearts of the World (Cœurs du monde, film, 1918) III.497
Hebdo-Film III.478
Heeringen, Josias von I.31, 32
Heinkel, Ernst I.362, 372
Heinrich, Prince of Prussia I.350
Heinz, Friedrich Wilhelm (Freikorps veteran) II.212
Heipel (Austrian internee) III.279–80
Hejaz I.316, 319
Hejjas, István II.654
helmets II.157 243 246
steel II.247–50
Helmholtz, Hermann von III.392
Helphand, (Parvus) Alexander I.601
Helsinki II.634 649
Hemingway, Ernest I.294 III.472
A Farewell to Arms (1929) III.465 471
Soldier’s Home (1925) I.182
Henderson, Arthur II.25 57 599
Hentsch, Lieutenant Colonel Richard I.391
Herero War I.408, 436, 441
Hermannstadt, Battle of I.235
Hertling, Georg von I.156 II.28 49 85
Hertz, Alice III.414
Hertz, Robert III.414
Hervé, Gustave II.582
Hervil, René III.495
Herwig, Holger I.113, 288
Herzl, Theodor I.477
Hesse, Hermann III.401
heterosexuality III.156–7
Heuzé, André III.495
Heymann, Lida Gustava II.596
Higgins, Henry Bournes III.367–8 370
Higgins, Mervyn Bournes III.367–8
Higham, Robin II.437
Hildebrand, Klaus I.26
Hill 971 (Gallipoli) I.309, 310
Hill Q (Gallipoli) I.311
Hillgruber, Andreas I.244
Hindenburg Line (Siegfried Line) I.114–15, 119, 152, 162 II.163
German defences at I.229, 230–2, 364, 575
importance of logistic support in assault on II.237–8
Hindenburg Programme I.168, 362, 367 II.120–1
Hindenburg, General Paul von I.90, 100, 113, 134, 212, 281, 387, 389,
393 II.80 85 87 188 448–9 III.442
Battle of Tannenberg I.239–46
charismatic leadership I.377 II.665
on defeat III.613
establishes a Commanding General of the Air Forces I.361–2
increasing control over domestic government I.394
insubordination I.385
and military command II.118 119–23
relationship with Bethmann Hollweg II.27–8
replaces Falkenhayn I.261
ruling of Baltic states I.417
statue of III.511
Hindus III.438–9
Hine, Lewis III.641
Hinton, James II.356
Hintze, Admiral Paul von I.157, 162 II.86–7
Hipper, Admiral Franz von I.328, 334–5 II.211
historians III.403–4
Hitler, Adolf I.59, 242, 265, 338, 343, 407, 418 II.605 III.617 620 632
Mein Kampf (1924) III.458
Hô Chi Minh I.180, 429, 487, 499, 507–8
Hobart, war memorial III.528 532–3
Hobhouse, Emily II.595 603
Hobhouse, Stephen II.588–9
Hobson, J. A., Imperialism (1902) I.407
Hodges North, Katherine III.131 141 143–4
Hodgkin, Henry II.155 250–3 586 595 III.432
Hoeppner, Ernst von I.361
Hoff, Raynor III.542
Hoffman, Major-General Max I.138, 239–40
Hofmannstahl, Hugo von III.394
Hohenborn, Wild von I.251
Holland, Canon Henry Scott III.424
Holliday, Margaret III.127
Hollings, Nina III.134
Holocaust I.589–90
Holquist, Peter I.595 II.393
Holstein, Fritz von II.11
Holsworthy concentration camp III.263 265
creativity within III.278
Holtzendorff, Admiral Henning von II.527–8
Holzminden concentration camp II.287 III.276–7
home front III.96–8
economic stress III.17–21
morality III.606–7
state intervention III.107–11
violence on the III.100–7
Homes for Better-Class Belgian Refugees III.94
homosexuality III.156
Honduras, declaration of war I.547
Hoover, Herbert I.188 III.61
Hoover War Collection III.408
Horne, John I.87 II.172 347 III.159 164
horses I.642 II.171 261 III.54–5
provision for II.226–8
Horthy, Miklos II.623–4 649 651 654
hospital ships III.136 298
hospital trains III.298
hospitals III.128–41 146 294–7
hostages III.276–7
Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad von I.34–5, 41–2, 51, 55, 61, 99, 159, 238,
272, 281, 389 II.13 113–15
and the Battle of Gorlice-Tarnów I.250–5
dismissal of II.28
failure as a war manager I.391–2
on the importance of morale II.174
plan to attack Italy I.269–70, 273, 275, 279
replacement of I.284
the Strafexpedition (Italy) I.260, 270, 279
strategic command I.378–9, 388
tactics against the Russians at Tannenberg I.245–6
Hough, Richard I.346
Houlihan, Patrick III.425
House of Morgan I.512–13
House, ‘Colonel’ Edward Mandell I.174, 521 II.76 87 88 107 504 550
Houston mutiny (riot), 1917 II.197–9 202 217
howitzers II.156
Hoyos, Count Alexandre I.46–7 II.14 70 72
Huddersfield, pacifism in II.589
Hueffer, Ford Madox see also Ford Madox Ford Hugenberg, Alfred
III.481
Hughan, Jessie Wallace II.590
Hugo, Victor III.550
Hull, Isabel I.21
humanitarian aid I.187–9 III.61–2 93–4 193–4
humanitarian laws I.564–6
Humanité, L’ III.448
Humann, Hans I.606
Hungarian National Army II.654
Hungary I.167
new boundaries II.623–5
Transylvanian refugees II.654
and the Treaty of Trianon II.623–5 657
see also Austria-Hungary
Hunter, Private Thomas, grave of III.546
Hunter-Weston, Major General Aylmer I.308
Hurley, Frank II.664
Hussein Ibn Ali, Sharif I.316, 319, 421–2, 477 II.78
Huston, John I.437
Hutier, General Oskar von I.146 II.166
Hutterites II.591 III.433
Hutton, Dr Isabel Emslie III.151
Hyde Park, war memorial III.541
Hyde Park Corner, Royal Artillery Memorial III.454 542
Hynes, Samuel III.447
Ibanez, Blasco, Les quatres cavaliers de l’apocalypse (film, 1921)

III.495
Ibarguren, Carlos I.336
Ibn Saud I.319
Ihsan Turjman, Private I.475, 476
Iliad, The III.155
Illustrated London News III.151
Illustration, L’ II.666 III.151 453
Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges 1914–16 III.128
Immelmann, Max (pilot) I.74, 360
Imperial College London II.451
Imperial Diet (Russian) II.34–5 37
Imperial Munitions Board (IMB) I.514
Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire III.533
Imperial Russian Navy I.324
blockade of the Bosporus II.465–6
confinement of II.465–6
dreadnoughts II.254
submarines II.256 257
Imperial War Conference (1917−18) I.398, 521
Imperial War Graves Commission II.379 III.376 552 553 572–3 579–
81 586 see Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Imperial War Museum (London) II.379 III.409
Imperiali, Guglielmo I.274
imperialism I.19–21 II.199–201
‘new’ I.405–6
impossible pardon, L’ (film, 1918) III.495
Ince, Thomas Harper III.478
Independent Bombing Force I.372–3
Independent Labour Party (ILP) II.587 589 599
India I.431 II.670
expectations from Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference I.509
importance of to Britain I.407
involvement in war, importance of I.487–9
nationalism I.487, 503, 509
Non-Cooperation Movement I.429
plans for Mesopotamia I.312–13
repression of nationalist movement I.181 II.139
India Home Rule League I.502
Indian Army I.413–14, 489
in Africa I.442
mutiny II.199–200
policing of empire I.407, 431–2
Indian labourers and suffering in cold weather I.496
racism towards I.497
Indian National Congress I.509 II.139
Indian Ocean I.330
Indian soldiers I.502 III.627
execution of III.166
religion and III.438–9
Indianapolis, war memorial III.546
Industrial Revolution I.17–18
Industrial Workers of the World I.524
industrialisation I.380–1
Indy, Vincent d’ III.511 516
infiltration tactic (German) II.166 181
influenza see Spanish flu
Ingenieros, José I.552
Inglis, Dr Elsie Maud III.127 128–30
Inglis, Ken III.534
Inoue Kaoru I.480, 481
Institute of International Law I.351
manuals I.627
Institute of Psychical Research III.436
intellectuals, dissidence III.410–12
Intellectuals’ Memorandum on War Aims (Intellektuellendenkschrift
über die Kriegsziele) III.397
Interallied Sanitary Commission (1919) III.352
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) II.657–9
International Arbitration and Peace Association II.576 597
International Arbitration League II.597
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) I.187, 562 II.272–4
III.122 134 210 272
on imprisonment of civilians III.49 260–1 263
planning of cemeteries III.572
International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace II.596
International Dada Fair III.525
International Labour Organisation I.174, 189–90, 197 II.637
international law I.564–6, 622–3 II.72
application to states I.616–20
‘crimes against humanity’ I.590
German violation of I.628–33
manuals I.616
Martens clause I.623
neutral rights II.542–3
obstacles to the effectiveness of I.623–9
sanctions for violating I.634–8
International Office of Public Health (1904) I.624
International Office of Public Hygiene (1907) I.624
International Peace Bureau II.581 595
International Prize Court I.623, 626
International Research Council (IRC) II.439 III.415
International Scientific Unions II.439
International Socialist Bureau II.581
International Telegraph Union (1865) I.624 II.72
International Women’s League II.92–3
International Women’s Suffrage Alliance II.596 III.112
International Workers of the World II.602
internment I.575 III.224–5
internment camps III.201 224–5
see also concentration camps
Iorga, Nicolae III.452
Ioteyko, Josefa III.407
IRA I.196
Iran I.470
see also Persia
Iran/Iraq War (1980–8) III.628
Iraq I.319, 430, 470, 588
revolution in II.139
see also Mesopotamia
Ireland III.625–6
anti-war opposition II.100
Catholic Church and conscription III.442
Home Rule campaign II.56
insurrection II.135 139
minorities in III.232–3
RAF in I.431
violence II.670
see also Easter Rising
Irish Americans I.516, 523
Irish Civil War I.196
Irish National Party II.56
Irish Parliamentary Party III.233
Iriye, Akira I.530
Iron Guard (Romanian) II.660
Isaac, Jules I.40, 54 III.417 586
Isle of Man, internment camps III.225 268
Isley, Jeter A. I.331
Ismail Enver Pasha see Enver Pasha
Isonzo (river) I.71, 273 II.26
battles on I.276–7, 280, 284, 397 II.101
casualties I.71, 277, 280, 284
evacuees from III.191
see also Caporetto, Battle of; Gorizia
Istanbul I.470
Istria I.269
Italian army I.270–3, 275 II.101–2
desertion and draft-dodging I.283 II.172 181 401
discipline and punishment II.180–1
mobilisation of men and armaments I.277–8, 289
morale I.282–3 II.101–2
propaganda and morale II.193
surrender I.283 II.172 181
Italian artillery, lost at Caporetto I.286–7
Italian Étappes III.248 249
Italian-Austrian Front I.19, 127–8, 295–6
alliances and I.281
Austria-Hungary and I.158, 266
battles on the I.276–7
building (1914) effect of the Battle of Caporetto I.286–7
fatigue on I.283–4
military justice I.273–4, 283
partial successes on (1916) I.278–80
terrain I.267–8, 281
trench system I.268, 277
use of infiltration I.281, 285, 285–6
Italian-Turkish War I.274, 465, 470, 471, 597
Italy I.40–1, 81 II.20
agrarian economy II.394–5
air raids II.376
anti-fascist resistance III.624
Arditi III.174 449 608
attack on Ottoman Empire in Libya (1911) I.410–11, 470–1
civilian health and mortality II.481–2
claims for Dalmatia and Fiume II.619
competition over alliance with II.501–2
decision to intervene I.248, 254
design and development of aircraft I.352, 358, 363, 369, 369, 373
entry to the war II.75–6
Fascist Party/fascist movement I.292 II.635 660
food shortages I.155 III.91–3
and Germany I.46
government of war II.25–6
historiography I.294–5
imports II.481–2
industrial mobilisation II.331
martial law II.101
measures against foreigners III.223
military influence I.271
Ministry of Armaments and Munitions II.331
national war effort I.280
neutrality I.59 II.544–5
opposition to Serbia I.44
peace movement II.583
political system II.101
post-war unrest and violence I.292 II.655
recruitment system I.270–3
refugees in III.191 195 201–2
‘Regulations on Field Service’ I.627
signs secret pact with the Entente and entry to the war I.274–5
social unrest II.135
strategies I.269–70
strikes II.353
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier III.546 599
trade unions II.345–8
war aims I.269–70
war memorials III.377 537
Iur’eva, Sofia Pavlovna III.127–8
Ivanov, Nikolai I.237
Ivanovo-Vosnesensk II.346
J. P. Morgan Bank I.512

J’Accuse (film, 1919) I.185 III.325–6 498–9
Jabavu, D. D. T. I.446
Jackson, Alvin I.155
Jacobs, Aletta II.596
Jaffa I.131, 476
Jagger. Charles Sergeant III.541 542
Jagow, Gottlieb von I.35, 47, 57 II.14 73 77 79–80
Janco, Marcel III.524
Janowitz, Morris II.175
Janz, Oliver III.462
Japan I.181, 326–7 II.18 75 552–3 III.634
ambitions for expansion in China I.490–1
ambitions to become Western-style empire I.480, 510
animosity towards Germany I.480–1
attack on Qingdao I.489 II.552
civil−military relations II.102–4 124–5
Constitutional Association of Friends (Rikken Dōshikai) II.63
economic advantages of war I.504
economy II.106
Emperor, role of in government II.62–3
enters the war I.324, 481–2
forms alliance with Britain I.481
governance of II.10
importance of to both sides I.490
Meiji Restoration I.480 II.62
Mukden Incident (1931) II.106
pacifism in II.583
Parliament II.62–4
and peace negotiations I.505–6 II.619
post-war isolation II.636
prisoner-of-war camps II.269
relations with US II.105
support from I.426–8
treatment of Germans in I.490
troops sent to Siberia II.106
Twenty-One Demands (from China) II.80 105 553
women’s war effort I.503–4
war with China I.480–3 II.104
war with Russia I.381 II.102–3 153 155 262
Japanese navy I.324, 329, 347, 398, 412, 503, 642 II.221
submarines II.257
Jasic, Bishop of Ljubljana III.426
Jaurès, Jean I.36, 60 II.52 97 582
jazz III.517
Jebb, Eglantyne I.188 III.62
Jehovah’s Witnesses II.593
Jekyll, Gertrude III.572
Jellicoe, Admiral Sir John Rushworth I.327, 334, 382, 516 II.486–7
Jemal (Cemal) Pasha I.297, 301, 461, 472, 475, 605 II.18 30 109–12
Jeřábek, Čestmír III.472
Jerusalem I.131, 187, 317, 422–3, 476 II.628 630
food shortages II.368
suppression of newspapers II.372
Jessel, George III.156
Jeunet, Jean-Pierre III.328
Jevdet Bey I.602
Jewish Bolshevism (Judeo-Bolshevism) I.142–3, 428
Jewish National Home I.422, 460, 470, 476–7, 595, 597 II.86 509
III.208
Jews I.641 II.361 III.186 217–18 239
and Bolshevism I.142–3
genocide (Second World War) III.630
humanitarian aid for III.62
in host armies III.231
in Second World War I.589–90
loyalty to host nations III.434–5
mass expulsion of I.76–7
offered a national home I.319
paranoia relating to influence of/deportation of by Russians/Russian
policy I.594–6, 603 III.268–70
population in Palestine I.476–7
refugees III.204 209 211
Russian Revolution and II.645–50 662
treatment of in Galicia I.75, 642–3 II.103
Jiang Tingfu I.501
Jim Crow laws (US) I.430 II.198–9 202
Joan of Arc III.124–5 162
Joan the Woman (film, 1916) III.485
Joffre, General Joseph Jacques Césare I.61, 69, 92, 93, 94, 97, 100,
103, 205, 209, 220 II.17 22 97–8 III.441
appointment as Commander in Chief I.383–4, 385
attrition I.392
carrier of Spanish flu virus III.343
Champagne offensive I.211–12
literary contribution III.510
logistics II.222
planning of Somme offensive I.391
and provision of helmets II.249
relations with Gallieni II.23
replaced by General Nivelle I.217
sent to United States I.117
strategic command I.379, 380, 391, 397
temperament I.377
on the Vietnamese I.497
Vimy Ridge I.210–11
Johannesburg cenotaph III.555
gold mines I.450
Johannsen, Ernst, Vier von der infanterie (1930) III.471
Johnson, Sergeant Henry III.164
Joll, James, The Origins of the First World War (1984) I.16–17, 485
The Unspoken Assumptions (1968) I.41, 61
Jordan, David Starr II.600–2
Jordan, Edwin III.354
Jordan, River I.430
Jorge, Ricardo III.352
Jouhaux, Léon II.348
Jourdain, Henry III.155
Journal, Le III.495
Journal de Genève III.459
Journal des réfugiés du Nord III.198
journalists III.408
Joyeux Noel (film, 2005) III.425
Joynson-Hicks, William I.358
Julian, Rupert III.498
July crisis I.39–64
imperialism and I.411
Ottoman Empire and I.470
Jung Siegfried (film, 1918) III.485
Jünger, Ernst I.114 II.155 III.10 467–8 472 474 487 632
Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis (1928) II.143
Storms of Steel (1920) III.468
Jury’s Imperial Pictures III.482
Jus Suffragii III.123
Jutland I.40
Battle of I.321, 323, 328, 334–6, 642
use of radio telegraphy at I.382 II.254
juvenile delinquency III.39–40 43
Kačak movement II.657–9

Kaden-Bandrowski, Juliusz III.449
Kaes, Anton III.325
Kahn, André III.9
Kahnweiler, Daniel III.516
Kaitseliit (Estonian) II.657
Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes II.445 451
Kaiserschlacht offensive (1918) I.147–50, 289, 393, 399
Kalgoorlie III.264
Kalisz I.571
Kamara, Kande III.168–9
Kamerun see Cameroon
Kancher, E. S. III.214
Kandinsky, Wladimir III.506 507 523–06
Improvisation 30 (Canonen) III.506
Kansas City, war memorial III.546
Karadjordjević, King Alexander II.659
Karadjordjević family II.19
Karl I, Emperor I.158, 160, 161
Kars I.472
Karst (Carso) I.278–81, 279, 285, 289
Kartitsch II.405
Kato Takaaki II.75 80 105
Kato, Baron I.481 II.18
Katsura Taro, General II.105
Kattegat II.563
Kauders, Walter III.323–5
Kaufmann, Dr Fritz III.321–2
Kautsky, Karl II.66
Kautt, William II.135
Kazan Cathedral III.425
Keiger, John I.56
Keller, Alfred III.535
Kelly, Catriona III.32
Kemnitz, Arthur von II.77
Kennan, George F. I.16, 463
Kennedy, George Studdert (Woodbine Willie) III.420
Kennel, Pierre II.592
Kennington, Eric III.513
Kenyon, David II.226–8
Kenyon, Sir Frederick III.572
Kerensky, Alexander I.116, 264 II.52 208 213 III.426
approval of female soldiers III.144–5
Kerensky offensive (1917) I.235
Kérillis, Captain I.365
Kerr, Philip II.86 89
Kessler, Count II.514 515
Kevles, Daniel II.435
Kévorkian, Raymond I.610
Keynes, John Maynard I.175, 178 II.408 III.410
Khalil Pasha II.111
Kiaochou I.426
Kieger, John I.56
Kiel, sailors revolt II.132 211 614
Kiel Canal I.34 II.565
Kienthal Conference (1916) II.353 599
Kiev I.142
Kilimanjaro, Mount I.326, 440
Killinger, Manfred von II.653
King Visits his Armies in the Great Advance, The (film, 1916) III.483
King, Mick III.165
King’s Park (Western Australia), commemorative tree planting III.549
Kinsky, Countess III.122
Kipling, John (Jack) III.596 597
Kipling, Rudyard II.442 III.380 394 397 550 575 596
Kirtland, Helen Johns III.124
Kisch, Egon Erwin III.453
Als Soldat im Prager Korps/Schreib das auf Kisch! (1929) III.453
Kitchener, Lord Horatio Herbert I.106–7, 211, 301, 302, 310, 384
II.462
charismatic leadership I.377
death of I.422
and the Egyptian Empire scheme I.421–2
grand v. military strategy I.379
imprisonment of South Africans III.260
orders assault on Gallipoli peninsula I.419
plans for Ottoman Empire I.419
and politics II.99
voluntary enlistment campaign II.24–5
Kleist Prize III.456
Klemm, Wilhelm III.297
Kluck, General von I.390
Klychkov, Sergei, The Sugary German (1925) III.466
Knobelsdorf, General I.91, 93
Knockaloe internment camp III.225 230
Knocker, Elsie (Baroness T’Serclaes) III.127 140 141
Flanders and Other Fields (1964) III.141 172–3
Koch, Robert III.349
Kogenluft I.367
America Programme I.367
Kohl, Helmut III.625
Kohler, Josef I.630
Kokoschka, Oskar III.507
Kokotsov, Vladimir II.14
Kolchak, Admiral Aleksandr II.648
Kollantai, Alexandra III.76
Koller, Christian III.235 236
Kollwitz, Käthe III.364–5 370 380–1
memorials III.529
The Elders III.380
The Mothers III.523
The Parents III.374 596 643
Kollwitz, Peter III.596
Königgrätz (Sadowa) (1866) I.281
Konya I.606
Korea I.427, 431 II.670
independence movement I.508–9
Korkina, E. P. III.172
Körner, Theodor III.460
Kosovo II.657–9
civilian attacks I.74
Kosovo Polje, Battle of (1389) III.375
Kostyleva, Valentina III.156
Kovno III.228
Kozlowski, Dr. III.323
Kozma, Miklós II.653
Krabov submarine II.254
Kraepelin, Emil III.287
Kramer, Alan I.161 II.276 285 III.159 217 424
Krasnoyarsk prisoner of war camp II.279
Kraus, Karl II.144 III.412
Krauss, Henri III.495
Kress von Kressenstein, General Friederich I.301, 315 II.111
Kries, Wolfgang von III.248
Kristov Commission I.632
Krithia (Gallipoli) I.308
Kronstadt naval mutiny II.210
Krupp steelworks I.353, 355–6 II.334
Kuhl, General Hermann von I.147
Kuhlman, Erika III.379
Kühlmann, Richard von I.138, 157 II.28 30 83–5 515
Kuhnert, Adolfo Artur III.472
Kum Kale (Gallipoli) I.30
Kun, Béla II.206 289 623 646 649
Kuncz, Aladar, Le monastère noir (1934) III.278
Künstler, Franz III.592 620
Kuo Mintang II.10
Kurdistan II.629
Kurds I.462–3 II.627 630–1
attacks on Armenians I.78
deportation of I.591–2
Kurland, deportations from III.205
Kurnah I.420
Kusmanec, General I.247
Kut-al-Amara (Mesopotamia) I.73, 312–13, 313–14, 390, 420, 421,
580 II.111 284–5 III.574 627
Kutcher, Arthur III.448
Kutuzov, Mikhail I.245, 257, 264
Kwantung Army II.106
Lacerba (magazine) III.394

Lafayette We Come! (film, 1917) III.494
Lahy, J. M. III.407
Lake Naroch I.92, 99, 257
Lambert, George III.519
Lammasch, Heinrich II.43
Lamprecht, Karl III.400
Lancet, The III.315 328 346
Lancken, Baron von der II.83
Lange, Willy III.584
Langemark, Battle of III.596
mass grave III.580
Langenhove, Fernand van I.570
Lansdowne, Lord II.513
Lansing, Robert II.76 85 87 530
Laqueur, Thomas III.376
Larnaude, Fernand I.633
Larousse (publishers) III.463
Larronde, Carlos III.463
Lascelles, Alan ‘Tommy’ III.54–5
Latin America I.544
charitable support from immigrants I.538
economy I.541–4, 550–1
German sympathisers I.540–1
governance II.9–10
immigration from Europe I.536
immigration stopped I.544
imports and exports I.535, 550–1
intellectual elite, mobilisation of I.538–41
Italians I.537
mobilisation of European communities I.537–8
neutrality I.534–6, 548–50
post-war I.550
propaganda I.546
social unrest I.544–5
war culture I.545–6
Latvia II.137–8 656–7 III.214
Latzko, Andreas III.302
Launoy, Jane de III.296
Laurencin, Marie III.267 507
Lausanne, Treaty of (1923) I.173, 613–14 II.632 III.226
Lavisse, Ernest III.403–4 457
Lawlor, Private D. M. III.66
Lawrence, D. H. III.540
Lawrence, Dorothy III.124
Lawrence, T. E. I.180, 197, 316–19, 415, 422, 423, 460 III.472
Lazio II.400
Le Havre III.197
Le Van Nghiep (Vietnamese soldier) I.498
Le Vieil-Armand cemetery III.584
chapel III.582
League of Free Nations Association II.598 602
League of Loyal Women (South Australia) III.600
League of Nations I.189, 195–6, 197, 429, 430, 457, 476 II.83 505 517
636–7 III.603 615 616
and Abyssinia II.605
aid to Armenian children III.61–2
and Austria II.425
and disease III.356
Latin America and I.551–2
and Saarland II.617
League of Nations Commission I.505
League of Nations Society II.597–8 599 601
League of Nations Union II.598
League to Enforce Peace II.601
leave III.21
effect on children III.38
Lebailly, C. III.325–6
Lebanon I.297, 319, 430 II.628 630
Lebedev, Vladimir III.509
Lebel rifle II.250
Lectures pour tous, 1916 III.124
Leeds III.192
Lee-Enfield rifle II.250
Léger, Fernand III.511 520
Legien, Carl II.355
Lehmbruck, Wilhelm III.521
Leighton, Roland III.289 366
Leipzig food consumption II.365
strike II.349 352
war crime trials I.583, 584, 636–7 II.289
Lekeux, Martial, Mes cloîtres dans la tempête (1922) III.468
Lemartin, Léon II.241
Lemberg (Lvov) I.72 III.147
radical nationalism II.363
Lemberg, Battle of I.235
Lemkin, Raphael I.89, 589 III.281
Lemnos, hospitals III.292
LeNaour, Jean-Yves III.25
Lenard, Philip II.442
Leni, Paul III.495
Lenin, V. I. I.116, 137, 138, 179 II.30 37 83 84 130 210 322 513 519–
20 529 536 580 III.394
peace negotiations II.60–1 595 599 603 605 609
revolution defeatism III.428
Lens I.100
Lentulov, Aristarkh III.517
Leon, Xavier III.370
Leopold II, King of the Belgians I.20, 21
Lersch, Heinrich III.455
Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly III.124
Lessing, Doris III.59–60
Lessing, Theodor III.287
Lest we Forget (film, 1917) III.494
letters III.52–6 114–15 637
announcing loss III.56
between couples III.10–27 115 157
between fathers and children III.37
Jammerbriefe (moaning letters) III.17–18
Lettow-Vorbeck, General Paul von I.131, 326
in East Africa I.424–5, 438–40, 447, 453 II.123–4
insubordination I.385
Leuna, chemicals factory II.479
levée en masse I.562
Levene, Mark I.595
Lever, Charles III.155
Levine, Isaac Don III.146 151
Levy, Hyman II.453
Lewis guns I.227
see also machine guns
Lewis, Sam M. III.174
Lewis, Wyndham III.519
lewisite gas II.260
Lex Bassermann-Erzberger I.32
Li Yuanhong, President I.491
Liang Qichao I.482, 483–4
Liang Shiyi I.484–5, 492
Liaodong Peninsula I.481
libraries III.408
Libya (Trablusgarp) Italy’s occupation of I.464, 470–1, 597
Senussi fight against Italian colonisation of I.447–8
lice III.298 301
Lick Observatory II.450
Liddell Hart, Basil I.149, 156, 343 II.455
Lidin, Vladimir, The Grave of the Unknown Soldier (1931) III.466
Lieber Code I.627
Lieber, Francis I.627
Liebknecht, Karl I.165, 193–4 II.50 211 213 349 602–3 604 670
Lieth-Thomsen, Colonel Hermann von der I.361
Lieven, Dominic II.138
Liévin I.183
Lille I.353
commemorative sculpture III.543
transportation of women workers from I.574
war memorial III.554
Liller Kriegszeitung III.157
Limbourg III.197
Lincoln, Abraham I.381
Lindemann, Frederick II.457
Linden, P. W. A. Cort van der II.566
Linton, Derek I.409
List, Friedrich I.594
literacy III.446–7
literary prizes III.456
literature and gender roles III.155–6
Lithuania I.72, 141, 529 II.529 657 III.214
Lithuanian Riflemen Union II.657
Litt, Paul I.515, 525
Little, Major Arthur West, Fron Harlem to the Rhine (1936) III.164
Little, Roger W. II.175
Litvinov, Maxim II.84
Liulevicius, Vejas III.248
Liverpool III.192
Livonia I.141
Lix, Antoinette III.125
Llandudno, Christian peace gathering II.586
Lloyd, David III.377
Lloyd George, David I.83, 103, 106, 129, 146, 163, 340, 386, 396, 522
II.57–9 84 443 487 508 524
agrarian policy II.392
air attacks on Germany’s crops I.357
Caxton Hall speech (1918) I.136 II.86
diplomatic advice II.85–6
and French demands II.535
goals at the Paris Peace Conference II.616
and Haig I.124–5, 217–19, 220, 370, 393–4, 399 II.99
heckled by Glasgow workers II.603
industrial disputes II.339 351–2 355
limits on neutral imports II.468
and the Middle East I.131, 422, 430
Pacific colonies I.426, 428
at the Paris Peace Conference I.175–6
peace negotiations II.88–9 515
plans for Germany after the Armistice II.537
recovery of trade with Russia II.537
religion III.442
support for General Nivelle I.118, 119
and Supreme War Council I.399
total war policy II.463
on the victory parade III.596
War Memoirs I.40
Lloyd Wright, Frank I.23
Lloyds of London I.344
Lobato, José Bento Monteiro I.552
Locarno II.89
Locarno Treaties (1925) III.615
Locchi, Vittorio, ‘Sagra di Santo Gorizia’ (‘Festival of Santa Gorizia’)
III.462
Lochner, Louis II.601
Lockhart, Robert Bruce II.84
Lodge, Oliver III.436
logistics II.218–39
Lombard Peace Union II.583
London air attacks on I.581–2 II.375 III.106
commemoration in II.379
food queues II.366
German population II.362
strikes II.331 354
Treaty of (1839) I.629
Treaty of (April 1915) I.254 II.20 79 502 545
underground II.375–6
victory parade I.184
London Conference (1915) I.176
London Declaration (1914) II.496
London Film Company III.483
London Naval Conference (1909/1911) I.564, 626
London Peace Society II.579 585–6
Löns, Hermann III.448
Loos I.101
Indian Corps I.413
use of gas I.70
Lorentz, Henrik Antoon III.412
Los Angeles Times III.123
Lossberg, Colonel von I.252
Loucheur, Louis I.371
Loudon, John II.558
Louvain I.631 II.373
burning of university library II.440
Lübeck II.132
Ludendorff, General Erich I.90, 100, 113, 134–6, 156, 162, 167, 212,
232, 256, 281, 318, 389 II.48 49 80 85 87 448 488 III.442
attack on Verdun I.212–14
‘battle of materiel’ (Materialschlacht) II.168 448
Battle of Tannenberg I.239–46
on cinema III.481–2
on cultural policy III.409
demand for Armistice negotiations I.395 II.30 530–1
establishes a Commanding General of the Air Forces I.361–2
on expansion of Germany army I.31
final Allied attacks and surrender I.152–4, 345
on military v. civilian leadership II.92–3 116–23
morale of I.170
on morale II.174
nervous breakdown I.377
on Spanish flu III.342
relationship with Bethmann Hollweg II.27–8
requisition of horses I.343
ruling of Baltic states I.417
significance of Amiens II.235–6
Spring offensive (1918) I.138, 145–8, 150–1, 169, 223–7
strategic command (attrition) I.393
support for naval policy II.486 487
on tactics II.181
on tanks II.170 264
and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk I.342
on unrestricted submarine warfare I.632
use of infiltration tactic II.166
Lüders, Marie-Elisabeth III.89
Ludwig, King of Bavaria III.125
Ludwigshafen I.355
Lugones, Leopoldo I.336, 535
Lunn, Joe III.627
Lupkow Pass I.253, 254
Lusitania, sinking of I.74, 80, 514–15, 579, 603, 632 II.485 544–5 601
III.224 227
cinematic depiction of III.494
Lutheranism III.421
Luttrell, Emily III.528–9
Lutyens, Edwin III.572
Cenotaph I.47, 52, 55, 64 III.596–7
Civil Service Rifles memorial III.549
Stone of Remembrance III.536 573
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing III.552 554
Luxburg, Count Carl von II.572
Luxembourg II.510–11 574
geographical location of II.574
German invasion of II.556 557
Luxemburg, Rosa I.193–4 II.212 213 610 670 III.112
Luxeuil I.363
Luzzatti, Luigi III.195
Lvov, Prince George II.30 III.425
Lyautey, General Hubert I.119 II.23
Lynch, Frank III.542 581
Lynker, Moriz von I.47
Lys, Battle of (Operation Georgette, 1918) I.150
Maastricht III.198
MacMahon, Patrice de II.50
Macaú, torpedoing of the I.547
McCormick, Captain A. I.496
MacCurdy, John T., War Neuroses (1918) III.154–77
McCurdy, John II.241
MacDonald, Ramsay II.24 598 599
McDowell, John III.490
Macedonia II.547 625 626 III.627
civilian attacks I.74
malaria in III.289
post-war violence II.657–9
Macedonian front (Salonica), collapse I.135
McGee, Isabella III.80–2 93
Machado, Bernadino II.20
Machen, Arthur III.436
Machin, Alfred III.476
machine guns I.205–6, 205–7 II.155–6
portable (Lewis guns) I.227
Macke, Auguste III.56 521
Macke, Elisabeth III.56
McKenna, First Lord Reginald I.410 III.224
Mackensen, General August von I.253, 255, 261, 389 II.259 III.442
MacKenzie, David I.512
McKenzie, Robert Tait, The Homecoming III.540
Mackinder, Sir John Halford I.330, 353 II.528
Britain and the British Seas (1902) I.331
McLaren, Barbara, Women of the War (1918) III.130
McMahon, Sir Henry I.316, 319 II.78
McMeekin, Sean I.412
Macmillan, Chrystal II.596
Macmillan, Margaret I.175, 521
McNeile, Herman Cyril (‘Sapper’) III.455
see also Sapper
Mączka, Józef III.449
‘Mad Mullah’ (Mohammed Abdullah Hassan) I.431
Madagascan troops I.415
Mädchenpost III.125
Madelon, La (film, 1918) III.496
Magdhaba, Battle of III.367
Magnard, Albéric III.521
Magyars II.621–2 623
Mahan, Captain Alfred Thayer I.321, 326, 339, 405
Maheux, Angeline III.16 18 26
Maheux, Sergeant Frank III.8 12 16 18 19
Mahfouz, Naguib I.474
Mahmud Kâmil I.476
Mahmud Shevket, Grand Vizier II.109–10
Maier, Charles III.610
main d’œuvre feminine dans les usines de guerre, La (film, 1916)
III.486
main dressing stations III.295
Maine Sailors and Soldiers Memorial (1926) III.372
Mainz II.535
Maison de la Presse III.408
Makepeace, Clare III.26
Makhno, Nestor II.648
Maklakov, Nicolai I.54
Mal Tepe (Gallipoli) I.304
Malaparte, Curzio III.449
malaria II.283 481 III.289 293
Malcolm, Lt Douglas, trial of III.23–4
Malevantsy II.592
Malevitch, Kazimir III.510 513
Malins, Geoffrey III.490
Malkki, Liisa III.207
Malmaison fortress (Chemin des Dames) I.118, 123
Malta I.323
Malvy, Louis II.24 III.423
Manchester III.61 609
Spanish flu in III.334
strikes in II.331 352 380
Manchuria I.427
Manela, Erez I.173
Mangin, General Charles I.97–8, 214, 226, 414–15, 417, 443
La force noire (1910) I.408 III.165
Manifesto of the 93 (‘Appeal to the Civilized World’ (1914)) II.439–
41 III.397 398–9 413
Manikau Heads (New Zealand) war memorial III.545
Mann,Thomas, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of an
Unpolitical Man) (1919) III.395
Mannerheims, General Carl II.649
Mannheim, strikes II.352
Manning, Frederic II.182–3
Her Privates We (1930) III.465
Mannix, Cardinal III.429
Mansfield, Katherine III.362–4 370
Mantoux, Etienne I.178
Manual of International Law for the use of Army Officers (1893) I.627
Manual of Maritime War (1913) I.627
Manual of Military Law (1883) I.627
Manual of the Laws and Customs of War on Land (1880) I.619
Manual of the Laws of War (Oxford Manual) (1880) I.627
Manuel, King of Portugal II.20
maps, battlefront I.208
Mărăeşeşti, Battle of III.146 161
Marc, Franz III.506 507 512 521
Forms in Combat (1914) III.506
Les loups (1913) III.507
Marcel, Pierre III.426 477
March, William, Company K (1933) III.465
marching songs, misogynistic III.153 159
Mardiganian, Aurora III.208
Maria Adelheid, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg II.556
Mariana Islands I.326–7, 329, 426
Marinetti, Filippo III.401 449
Zang Tumb Tuum (1912–14) III.507
Marne, Battle of I.169, 353 II.22 154 506 III.300
failure in the command structure and I.380
logistics II.222
munitions used at II.297
Marne, River I.151, 205, 226
Marocaine, Fathima la III.128
marraines de guerre (godmothers of war) III.116
marriage III.6–28
rates III.50–1
marseillaise, La (song) III.496
Marshall, Catherine II.596
Marshall Islands I.326–7, 329, 426
Marten, Howard III.410
Martens, Fyodor Fyodorovich I.563, 623, 628
martial law II.93 97 101
Martin, Louis III.102
Martin, Thomas S. I.112
Martino, Giacomo de II.75
Martonne, Emmanuel de III.407
Marwick, Arthur III.132
Marx, Karl II.648 III.72
Marxists I.23, 24
Masaryk, Tomas II.206 525–6 613 640
Masatake, General Terauchi I.427
Masreel, Franz III.523
Massis, Henri III.395
Masson, Maurice III.6–8 13–15
Masterman, Charles III.402 610
Masurian Lakes I.46, 239–40, 287
Mata Hari III.123
Matejko, Jan I.241
mathematicians II.445
Matin, Le III.124 172
Matisse, Auguste III.277
Matisse, Henri III.516
Matscheko, Franz von II.72
Maude, Lt General Stanley I.314, 421
Maudite soit le guerre (film, 1914) (Cursed Be War!) III.476
Mauny, Léa III.14
Maurice, General Sir Frederick II.58
Maurras, Charles III.394
Mauser factory (Obendorf), air raid on I.363
Mauser K98 rifle II.250
Mauthausen prisoner-of-war camp II.278
Max Rascher (publisher) III.472
Maxe, Leo III.229
Maxwell, General Sir John I.300, 315
Mazower, Mark II.65
medical boards III.293–4
medical practices III.298–9
Mediterranean Sea I.329
naval war II.481–2
Meeson, Dora III.519
Megiddo, Battle of I.160, 318 III.426
Méheut, Mathurin III.519
Mehmed Said Halim Pasha II.110 111
Mehmed Talaat Pasha see Talaat Pasha
Mehmet V, Sultan II.18 110
Mehmet VI, Sultan II.215
Mehrtens, Herbert II.438
Meidner, Ludwig, Cities under Bombardment (1912) III.506
Meiji (Mutsuhito), Emperor II.10 105
Melbourne food protests II.365 367 378
Shrine of Remembrance III.546
Memel I.195
memorial buildings III.533–5
memorial towers III.539 546
Mendès-Catulle, Jane III.596
Menin Gate III.552 579
Menin Road, Battle of (1917) I.125, 222
Mennonites II.577 579 590–3 III.433
Mensdorff, Count II.86
Mensheviks II.35 82
mental illness III.225
see also shell shock
Mercanton, Louis III.495
merchant shipping, protection of I.339–42, 347 II.305–6
Mercier, Cardinal, Archbishop of Mechelen III.435
Mercure de France (magazine) III.456
Mères Françaises (film, 1917) III.495
Mervyn Bourne Higgins Bursary Fund III.368
Mesopotamia I.131, 299, 312–15, 418–19, 420–1 II.630 III.289
see also Iraq
casualties I.313
Messines Ridge I.125, 220–1
mining attack II.449–50
use of tanks II.170
Messter, Oskar III.480
Messter-Woche (‘Messter’s Week’) III.480
Metropolitan III.148
Metzger, Colonel Josef I.34–5
Meurthe-et-Moselle I.569
Meuse, River I.93, 95, 96, 213
Meuse-Argonne region American and French attack on I.230
logistics issues II.237–8
use of tanks II.171
Mexican Revolution I.526
Mexican-American War (1846–8) I.526
Mexico I.61–4, 511, 531, 548 II.542
conflict with United States I.525–9 II.60
exports I.543
German aid/alliance I.526, 528–9, 546
Germany sympathy I.541
neutrality I.548–50 II.558 571
plan of San Diego I.526, 528
US imports to I.517, 535
Meyer, Jessica III.10
Michael offensive see Operation Michael
Michaelis, Georg II.28 48–9
Michelin brothers I.353
Mickiewicz, Adam III.460
Middle East I.131, 422, 430–1, 461 II.533
casualties I.459–60
Midyat I.608
Mierisch, Helene III.160
migration III.51–2
Milev, Geo III.467 473
Groszni Prozi (‘Ugly Writings in Prose’) III.467
‘Meine Seele’ (‘My Soul’) III.467
Militärwochenblatt I.28
Military Inspector for Voluntary Nursing III.133
military justice II.178–81 666 668–9 III.166
Military Service Acts (1916) II.330 587 589
military strategic command I.386–93
military technology, industrialisation of I.563
Military Virtue Medal III.146
Miliukov, Paul II.82 130
Miller, G. A. II.453
Millerand, Alexandre II.22 23 97 III.477
Millikan, Robert II.447
Millon, Abbé Gaston III.440
Mills, William II.252 265
Milyukov, Pavel N. II.35–6 37 39–40
Milza, Pierre II.26
Ministry of Munitions II.311 329
Health of Munitions Workers Committee III.83–5
training for women III.82
Ministry of National Service II.331
minorities III.216–17
dispersed III.217
exploited III.221 235–8 240
immigrants III.219
integrated III.220 221 230–5 239–40
localised III.218–19 239
memorials for III.542 583
persecution of III.220 221–9 238–9
Minsk I.72 II.656 III.228
miracles III.436
Mirbach, Count II.650
Miroir, Le II.666 III.128
Mitchell, General ‘Billy’ I.371
Mitchell, Lt A. III.66
Mitrinovic, Dimitri III.506
Mitteleuropa II.506–8 523 III.407 621
Mitterrand, François III.625
Mitterndorf III.191
Mittler (publisher) III.468
Mladost (Slovenian Catholic monthly) III.420
Moede, Walther III.407
Mogiliev I.387
Moisin-Nagant rifle II.250
Molokans II.592
Moltke the Elder, Helmuth von (uncle of Helmuth von Moltke) I.37,
55, 61, 385 II.94–6
use of telegraph I.381
Moltke, Helmuth von I.31, 47, 238, 239 II.16 17 27 116–18 125
on economic warfare II.483
and failure of the Schlieffen Plan I.390–1
fear of Russian rearmament I.243
on the inevitability of war I.55–6, 61
invasion of France and Belgium I.36
modification of the Schlieffen Plan I.204–5
nervous breakdown I.377
occult religion III.442
power over military strategy I.387
preparation of airships for war I.351–2
strategic command I.378–9, 380, 388
on war against Serbia I.34, 35, 52
Mombauer, Annika I.41, 55
Mommsen, Wolfgang I.41, 60
Monelli, Paolo III.472
Moneta, Ernesto II.583
Mongolia I.427 II.553
Monro, General Sir Charles I.420
Monroe Doctrine (1823) I.22, 430, 529–31, 534
Monroe, President James I.526
Mons III.189
‘angels’ of III.436
Mont Saint-Quentin I.230
battle at III.368
Montague, C. E. III.448
Monte Nero I.267
Monte Pasubia I.641
Montenegro II.625
Montreal Patriotic Fund III.10
Monument aux Fusillés III.543
Monument to the Unknown Hero (Serbia) III.354 374
Moraes, Pina de III.472
morale I.282–3 II.174–95
comradeship and maintenance of ‘primary groups’ II.182–6
discipline and II.177–81 195
leadership and II.188–90
motivation and II.181–2
and mutiny II.197
and provision for basic needs II.186–7
recreation and II.187–8
religion and I.181
training and II.177
use of cinema to boost III.486–7
use of propaganda for II.194–5
Morando, Pietro III.641
Morane, Léon II.241
Moravia II.613
Moravian agreement (1905) II.634
Mordtmann, Dr I.606
Moreau, Émilienne III.125
Morel, E. D. II.83 598
Morgan, Anne III.605
Morgan’s Bank I.86
Morgenthau, Henry I.577
Morning Post II.598
Moroccan Crisis (1911) I.28, 31, 48, 351, 409–10 II.506
Morocco I.473
Morse code I.334
Morte Homme I.96–7
Morto Bay (Gallipoli) I.306
Morton, Desmond I.514
Morvan, Jean David III.328
Moscow anti-German riots I.603
German population II.362
peace association II.583
protest movements III.608
Mosse, George I.191 II.165 III.616 627
Fallen Soldiers (1990) II.641
motherhood, representation of on war memorials III.372–3
motorised transport II.226–9 232 237
Mott, F. W. III.319–20 321 331
Moudros Armistice II.30 80 214 533
Mount Sorrel, Battle of III.15–16
mountain warfare I.278, 281
Mountbatten, Lord Louis I.334
Mouquet Farm I.103–4
mourning III.358–84 592–3
collective III.596
intellectual community and III.416
of individuals III.361–71
poetry and III.380
religion and III.381–3
ritual of III.594–5
MOVE (Hungarian National Defence Union) II.654
Moynier, Gustave I.634
Mozambique (Portuguese steamship) III.334
Mozambique I.438
Makombe rising I.445
Spanish flu in III.334
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus II.370
Mukden, Battle of (1905) I.66, 381
battle tactics II.153
mud I.221, 222–3, 642
Mueller, Georg Alexander von I.36
Muenier, Pierre-Alexis, L’angoisse de Verdun (1918) III.451
Muhammad Farid I.474
Mukden Incident (1931) II.106
Müler, Anita III.210
Müller, Hermann I.174 II.620
Muller, Konrad Felix, Soldier in Shelter III.520
Mumford, Lewis II.457 III.533
The Culture of Cities (1938) II.376
Munch, Edvard III.514
Munich II.372 653 III.543 609
munitions production II.300–1 338
requirements II.297
women’s role in III.80–2
Munitions of War Act (1915) (Britain) I.79 II.311 329–30 345 347 351
Munro, Dr Hector III.141
Münsterberg, Hugo III.428–9
Murray, Sir Archibald I.315–16
Murray, Dr Flora III.129
Murray, Gilbert III.402
The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey (1915) III.403
Musakov, Vladimir, Kurvari Petna (‘Blood Stains’) III.468
museums III.409
music III.505 509–11 517
Musil, Robert III.394 539
Muslims III.218
call to support war effort III.427
Indian III.438–9
refugees III.203
Russian I.595, 596
transfer of to Greece I.613–14 III.226
Mussolini, Benito I.292 II.101 655 660 III.214 430 583 607 608 624
632
Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) I.419, 464, 465, 592, 612 II.111 138 214–17
629–30 631 651
mustard (yperite) gas I.146, 568 II.168 260 445
Muste, A. J. II.590
mutiny II.196
myalgia III.301
Myers, C. S. III.315–18 319–21 328 329
Mygatt, Tracy II.596
Nación, La I.535
Nagymegyer concentration camp I.272
Namibia, imprisonment of Herero and Nama people III.259
Namier, Lewis III.402
Nansen, Fridtjof I.188
Nansen certificate I.188
Napoleon I (Bonaparte) I.210, 264, 381, 382, 465
on the English navy I.321
Russian campaign I.234
Napoleon III I.37, 382, 617 II.9
Napoleonic Wars II.606
Narrows, the (Dardanelle Straits) I.309
Nash, John III.520
Nash, Paul III.520 642
Nasiriyah I.300, 312–13, 421
National Assembly of Austria III.323
National Council of Czech Countries II.525–6
national defence bonds, promotion of III.484–5
National French Women’s Council III.85–6
National League of Jewish Frontline Soldiers III.231
National Physical Laboratory (London) II.454
National Registration Act (1915) I.82 II.330
National Review III.229
National Socialism II.660
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies III.82 128
nationalism I.19 II.363 606 III.216
radical III.608
Nationalists (Russia) II.34 38
nationality principle II.524 525–30
Native Americans I.523
natural law I.616–17, 618, 623
naval mines I.346
naval war crimes I.578–80
naval warfare I.564, 641–2
regulation of I.622, 626–7
violations of I.632–3
navalism, new I.405
Nazarenes II.579 593
Nazi Party II.214
Nazis I.589–90 II.641–4 III.527 616
Eastern Front III.633
foreign policy III.623
removal of memorials III.531
Near East Relief I.188
Neiberg, Michael I.517
Nékloudoff, Anatol II.15
Nelson, Lord I.322, 332
Nemitz, Captain A. V. II.81
nephritis III.301
Nernst, Walther II.442 443 445 452
Netherlands II.542
agrees not to export to Germany II.466
Anti-War Council II.596
Belgian refugees III.189 194–201
credit II.423
effect of financial mobilisation II.414
financial demobilisation II.428
geographical location and neutrality II.557–8
home-produced food exported to Germany II.469–70
loans II.418
neutrality and domestic policy II.569
pacifism II.593
pre-war public expenditure II.411
taxation II.423 430
trade and home consumption agreements II.565–6
trade with belligerents II.559
war expenditure II.422
Netherlands Overseas Trust Company (NOT) II.566 568–9
Neue Freie Presse I.133
Neuilly-sur-Seine, Treaty of (1919) I.173 II.615 625–7 657
neurological conditions III.310
Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation II.601
Neutrality League II.596
Neuve Chapelle, Battle of (1915) I.68, 209–10
Indian Corps at I.413
Nevinson Christopher R. W. I.640 III.516 519
Paths of Glory (1917) III.521
New Cultural Movement (China) I.506
New Delhi, ‘India Gate’ III.546
New England Non-Resistance Society II.580 590
New Guinea I.326
New Mexico I.526
New York II.483
victory parade I.184
New York Times III.125 150 424
New Zealand I.429
commemorative statues III.542
conscientious objection II.579
conscription and conscientious objectors II.589–90
and German Samoa I.326
Newbolt, Sir Henry III.541 550
Newbury race-track internment camp III.268
Newfoundland battlefield memorial III.553
newspapers II.371–3
censorship II.374
trench III.454
newsreels III.476–86
British III.483–4
censorship III.479–80
French III.476–93
German III.480–2
Nèzider concentration camp III.272
Nguyen Ai Quoc see Hô Chi Minh
Nicaragua, declaration of war I.547
Nicholai, G. F. II.443
Nicholas, Hilda Rix III.519
Nicholas II, Tsar I.53, 61, 64, 387, 473 II.31 34–5 73 102–3
abdication of I.116, 264 II.30 32 82 519
approval of female soldiers III.144
disillusion with II.207–8
and Parliament II.34–5 38 39
personality and governance of II.11–12
pre-war Peace Conferences I.563, 618–19
refusal to negotiate with Berlin II.10
religion III.442
takes command of the army II.29
Nicolai, Georg Friedrich III.411
Nicolle, C. III.325–6
Nietzsche, Friedrich III.418 421
Nightingale, Florence III.124
Nikolai, Grand Duke Nikolaevitch I.241 II.102–3
Nikolsk Ussurisk II.279
Nitti, Francesco, La décadence de l’Europe (1923) I.553
Nivelle, General Robert I.97–8, 117–23, 214, 219–20 II.23 91–3 604
on aerial warfare I.364
supersedes Haig I.393–4
use of Senegalese to ‘spare’ French troops I.415
Nivelle offensive see Chemin des Dames
Nivet, Philippe II.15
Nixon, General Sir John I.312–14
Nizhny Novgorod III.206
No-Conscription Fellowships (NCF) II.586 587–90 596 III.410
Nobel Prizes II.441 458
Nolde, Baron Boris II.81
Nolte, Ernst II.643
no-man’s-land I.66–7, 205, 216 III.138
Non-Combatant Corps II.588
North Africa, recruitment of soldiers from I.443
North America Bolshevism and I.524
demographic shifts I.511
North Caucasus II.388
North China Herald III.164
North Sea I.322, 325–8
aid raid over I.337
Northcliffe, Lord I.349 II.86
Northern Ireland III.625–6
Northern Rhodesia I.446
Norton-Griffiths, Colonel John II.477
Norway II.542
pacifism II.593
trade negotiations II.567–8
trade with belligerents II.559–60
Nostros (Buenos Aires) I.540
Notre-Dame-de-Garaison internment camp III.267
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, French National Cemetery III.582
Novicow, Jacques II.576
Novorossiysk I.472
Nowosielski, Sophie III.146 147 152
Noyes, A. A. II.443
Noyr, Lola III.93 126
Nungesser, Charles (pilot) I.75, 365
Nunspeet refugee camp III.195
Nureddin Pasha I.313
Nuremberg I.590, 638
nurses III.93–4 126–7 128–40 160–2 173 288 296–7 300
Nyasaland I.425, 437, 438, 445
recruitment from I.443
uprising III.428
O’Hare, Kate Richards III.113

Oates, Beatie III.18 20
Oates, Herbert III.8 12 18
Ober Ost I.141–3, 241–3, 245, 417 III.103 242–5 248 274–5
Obrenovic family II.19
occupied territories III.242–5
civilian populations in III.253–6
forced labour camps III.272–5
long-term war aims for III.252–3
non-compliance and resistance of civilians in III.254–6
regimes imposed upon III.103–5 243–4 247–9
short-term war aims for III.249–52
Océan hospital, L’ (De Panne) III.296
Octobrists (Russia) II.34 36 38
Odessa, bombardment of I.298
œuvre, L’ III.454
Offer, Anver II.218 471
oilfields, attacks on II.476–7
Okinawa I.322, 332
Okuma Shigenobu II.105
‘Oo-La-La! Wee-Wee’ (song) III.156–7
Operation Alberich I.575–6
Operation Barbarossa I.265
Operation Blücher I.150–1
casualties I.151
Operation Georgette (Battle of Lys) I.150 II.235
Operation Gneisenau I.151
Operation Michael I.147–50, 168 II.122 234 III.122
casualties I.149
Operation Yorck I.150–1
Opinion (magazine) III.395
Opium War I.492
Oppenheimer, Franz III.229
Oppman, Artur III.448
Orange Free State I.441
Order of Karageorge III.148
Order of Leopold II III.141
Order of the Karađorđe’s Star III.151
Organizacja Bojowa (Frakcja Rewolucyjna) III.142
Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele I.163, 289 II.26 102
at the Paris Peace Conference I.176 II.89 616
Ormsby, George and Margaret III.8
letters between III.12 15 19–20
Orthodoxy/Orthodox Church III.381–2 425–42
Osborne, Eric II.472–3
Ostend III.190
Ostwald, Wilhelm II.440–2 443 450 III.398
Osztenburg, Gyula II.654
Otranto Blockade I.324
Ottawa I.521
war memorial II.378 381
Ottawa Conference (1932) I.532
Otte, T. G. I.38
Ottley, Captain Charles L. I.410, 411 II.464
Ottoman army I.160
command partnerships with Germans of I.389–90
conscription to/mobilisation of I.467–9
death from sickness III.565
discipline and punishment II.178
disease I.478
ethnic composition of I.469
at Gallipoli I.303–11 II.111
in Mesopotamia I.299–300, 313
prisoners of war recruited for II.287–8
at Suez Canal I.300–1 II.111
treatment of prisoners of war II.284–5
Ottoman army formations Fifth Army I.306, 389
Seventh Army I.317, 318
Eighth Army I.318
19th Division I.419
35th Division I.299–300, 313
38th Division I.299–300, 313
Ottoman Empire I.41, 72, 329 II.18 627–32 III.631
alliance with Germany I.298, 418, 471–2, 600
Allied interest in the decline of I.297–8
Anatolian peninsula (Turkish Republic) I.462–3, 478, 607 II.216–17
627 629–30
Armenian massacre (1895) I.597–8 II.19 609
Armenian reforms I.597, 601
Armistice II.628
and Britain I.419
in the Caucasus mountains I.418–19 II.111
Christians I.462–3, 469
civilian casualties III.563
civil−military relations II.109–13 124
concentration camps III.270–2
conscription I.464, 467–9
coveted by powers I.411–12
death march of British prisoners I.314
decision to join the war II.551–2
economic consequences of the war I.478
effects and casualties of war I.459–60
effects of European imperialism on I.465–6
entry to war I.396, 418 II.628
ethnic composition of I.469
expulsion of ethnic minorities I.591–2
expulsion of Rûm I.599–600
Great Famine I.155, 462, 474–6 II.112 368
Great National Assembly II.631–2
Greek Orthodox in I.469
Italian attack on (1911) I.410–11
and July crisis I.470
Kurds I.462–3, 468, 591–2
labour shortages I.469, 476
Liberal Union I.463
Misak-i Millî (National Pact) II.215
Muslim refugees I.463
Muslim sympathy I.474
National Economy (milli iktisat) I.464
pact with Russia II.631
partitioning of I.421
policies towards Christian minorities I.460, 576–7
post-war I.478
proclamation of jihad I.467, 473, 474
revolutions caused by break up of II.138–9
Russian refugees I.186–7
Russian threat to I.470
sanctions relating to Armenian genocide I.637–8
Sèvres peace treaty II.629–32
surrender II.30
at war I.470–7
war narrative I.463–4
War of Liberation (1919–23) II.659
see also Armenian genocide
Ottoman soldiers I.467
Ouvrier, Adrien III.519
Owen, Wilfred III.328 379 460 467 472 637
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’(1917) III.451–2
Oxenham, John, All’s Well (1915) III.450
Oxford, John III.341
Oxford Manual see Manual of the Laws of War
Oxford University III.403
Ozanian, General Andranik I.602
Pacelli, Eugenio III.431

see also Pius XII, Pope
Pacific Ocean I.329
Japanese naval support in I.503
pacificists (reformists) II.577–8 593–603 605
determinants II.579–84
liberal and radical II.597–9
socialist II.599–603
pacifism III.432–4
anti-war II.603–5 III.112–14
definitions II.576 III.410–12
narratives III.459–60
see also absolutism; pacificists
Paeff, Bashka III.372
Paganon, Jean II.592
Page, Walter Hines II.76 82
Paget, Lady Louise III.130
Paget, Sir Ralph II.81
pain, correct way to bear III.168–72
Painlevé, Paul I.119, 121, 330, 353, 364 II.22 24 511
‘Sacred Heart’ issue III.423
secret negotiations II.515
Pál, Prónay II.654
Pale of Settlement III.228
Paléologue, Maurice I.53 II.73
Palestine I.160, 315–19, 421, 430 II.636 670
agreement II.628–9
food shortages in I.475
as Jewish homeland I.422, 460, 470, 476–7, 595, 597 II.86 509 628–
9
Palestine Orphans Committee III.62
Pallier, Jeanne III.142
Palmer, Douglas III.25
Palmerston, Henry II.580
Pams, Jules III.193
Pan-African Congress (1919) I.429
Panama, declaration of war I.547
Pann, Abel III.269 514
Panthéon de la Guerre III.511
Papini, Giovanni III.394
Paraguay, neutrality of I.548
para-military movements II.660–2
Paraná, torpedoing of the I.547
Paris air attacks on I.581 II.376 III.105
attacks on German/Austrian stores II.364
blackout II.375
cultural propaganda II.369
food protests I.382
shelter from air raids II.376
strikes II.80 81 83
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier II.352 III.457 500 546 597
Victory parade I.184
war gardens II.366
Paris Conference (1856) I.626
Paris Exhibition (1900) I.23, 24
Paris Peace Conference (1919) I.174–81, 195, 197, 429, 633–4 II.87–9
615 633
Chinese at I.505–7
Japanese at I.505–6
Latin America at I.551
North American representation at I.521–2 II.61
see also Neuilly-sur-Seine, Treaty of; Saint-Germain-en-Laye,
Treaty of; Sèvres, Treaty of; Versailles, Treaty of
parliaments II.33 64–5
Austria II.40–3
France II.50–5
Japan II.62–4
Russia II.34–40
Pašić, Nikola I.43–4 II.19 75
Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres) I.115, 125–6, 132, 220–3, 222–3
II.168 III.294
Passos, John Dos One Man’s Initiation (1920) III.468
Three Soldiers (1921) III.468
Pasteur Institute III.349
Patch, Harry III.592 620
Pathé (film company) III.475 482
Pathé, Charles III.477
Patočka, Jan III.280
Patriotic Auxiliary Service Law (1916) (Germany) II.317 345 347 348
351
patriotism II.190–1
Patterson, David K. III.355
peace conferences see Hague Conventions (1899/1907); Paris Peace
Conference
peace movement II.577–8 579–84
pre-war I.563
see also pacificists
peace negotiations I.232 II.530–41
see also Paris Peace Conference (1919)
Peace Negotiations Committee II.599
Peace Palace (The Hague) I.620
‘peaceful penetration’ tactic II.167
Pearse, Patrick III.428
peasants discontent amongst II.385–6 387–8 391
economic preferences (Russia) II.389–90
economy II.393–5
labour III.77–9
prosperity of (in France) II.394
reaction to declaration of war II.395–6
relationship with agricultural workers II.402–5
Pease, J. A. II.585
Peçanha, Nilo I.548
Pedersen, Susan III.24
Péguy, Charles III.463
Pelabon Works (Twickenham) III.197
Penck, Albrecht III.264 407
Pendant la bataille (film, 1916) III.495
Perduca, Maria III.135
père la victoire, Le (film, 1918) III.496
Péricard, Jacques III.457
Perovskaia, Sophia III.124
Perret, Léonce III.494
Perris, G. H. II.576
Perrot, Michelle III.37
Perry, Heather III.308
Pershing, General John I.169, 170, 519–20
and the American Legion III.602
defies US government I.394, 399
demands for troops II.108–9
failure as a war manager I.392
Mexican Expedition 1916–17 I.384, 527
on war monuments III.552
Persia I.77
see also Iran
Persian Gulf I.299
Peru II.572
breaks off relations with Germany I.547
exports I.543
taxes I.544, 545
Pervyse, Belgium III.141
Pétain, General Henri-Philippe I.95–8, 118, 123–4, 148–9, 150, 151,
152, 169, 170 II.24 98 604 III.423
on aerial warfare I.364, 369, 371
‘defence in depth’ tactic II.167
propaganda documentary III.479–80
request for more cinemas III.486–7
strategic command I.379, 391
Peter I, King of Serbia I.387 II.19
Peterborough Advertiser III.546
Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline II.595–6
Petitdemange, Colonel Eugene I.417
Petrograd II.39 82–4 103 129–30 519 III.425
commemorative pageant II.378
food queues II.335
food riots II.367–8
protest movements III.608
refugees III.189
Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies II.599
strikes II.351 352
Petrograd Soviet II.208–9 598–600
Petrone, Karen III.466
Petrovna, Valentina III.145
Pfeiffer, Richard III.325
Pfemfert, Franz, ‘Lines from the Battlefield’ (‘Verse vom
Schlachtfeld’) III.452
Pflaum, Private R. H. III.66
philosophers III.406
phosgene (Green Cross gas) I.97, 146, 213, 642 II.168 260 445
photography I.639–43
official war II.664–6
psychic III.383
physicists II.439–41 442 443 445 447–8 453 454 455 456
Piave, River I.127, 286, 369
attack on (15−22 June 1918) (Battle of the Solstice) I.289
casualties I.289
Picard, Émile I.185 III.401
Picardy I.147
evacuations and departures from III.188
Picasso, Pablo III.516
stage curtain for Parade (ballet, 1917) III.526
Trois musiciens (1921) III.526
Pichon, Stephen II.85 87
Pickford, Mary III.102 485
Picot, François I.421
Pictorial News, The III.483
Pierce, Ethel III.139
Pigou, A. C. II.319
Pilckem Ridge I.221
Pilsudski, Josef II.656 III.142 449
Pireaud, Paul and Marie III.8 13–14 19 22 24 115
Pirenne, Professor Henri III.278 400
Pittsburgh Agreement (1918) II.613
Pittsburgh, Treaty of II.613
Pius XII, Pope III.430 431
Plan XVII I.204
Planck, Max II.439–41 458 III.397 398 413
Platoon (film, 1986) III.638
Plaza, Victorina de la I.549
Plessen, General Hans von I.47
Ploesti II.477
Plumer, General I.221
capture of the Gheluvelt Plateau I.221–2
Plunkett, Joseph III.428
pneumonia III.346
Po Valley I.267, 279, 286
poetry see war, poetry
Pohl, Admiral Hugo von I.632 II.485
poilus de la revanche, Les (film, 1916) III.494
Poincaré, Raymond I.53, 56, 58, 59, 99, 176 II.15–17 22 24 70 97 368
509 516
declaration of war II.52
diplomacy II.73
‘Sacred Heart’ issue III.423
Poirier, Léon III.523
Poittevin, A. Le I.633
and the Nivelle offensive II.514–15
Poland I.72, 76, 262–3, 641 II.485 524 525–6 656–7 III.212 249 625
calls for an independent state I.136–7
expulsion of Jews I.76–7
female soldiers III.146
gains Posen, Upper Silesia and West Prussia II.617
German cultural policy in III.409
reconstruction III.604
Poles III.186
Polish Legions III.449
Polish National Committee II.525–6 529 III.210
Polish refugees I.187 III.204
Polish Women’s Voluntary Legion III.146
Polish-Ukranian War I.593
political mobilisation I.18–19, 20
Pollio, Alberto I.269, 273
Polygon Wood, Battle of (1917) I.125, 219
Pomiankowski, Joseph I.603
Ponticelli, Lazare III.620
Pope, Jesse, Who’s for the Game? (1915) III.452
Poplar, commemorative sculpture III.543
Popolo d’Italia, Il II.660
Popper, Karl II.458
Popular Association for Freedom and Fatherland (Volksbund für
Freiheit und Vaterland) II.48
Porcelli, Pietro III.542
Porten, Henny III.485
Portugal II.20–1
African colonies I.438–40, 452–3
laws of war I.627
neutrality II.553–4
Posen (Poznan) II.617
post-traumatic stress disorder III.135–6
Pottendorf III.191
Potter, Jane III.469–70
Pouctal, Henri III.494 495
Pour la victoire (film, 1916) III.484–5
Poutrin, Lieutenant I.351
poverty II.423
Pozières I.103–4
Pradelle, Louis de la I.633
Presbyterians III.432
Prévost, Michel III.151
Priestley, J. B. III.595
Princip, Gavrilo I.42–3
prisoner-of-war bureaux II.274
prisoner-of-war camps II.266 277–80
prisoners of war II.266–90
African III.642
cataloguing of II.274
conversion to side of captors II.287–8
cultural activities of II.280–1
death, rates and causes of II.283–5 286
discipline and punishment II.285–6
disease I.567 II.278 283
escape II.286–7
food supplies I.81 II.273 274
Geneva Convention and protection of II.270–1 289
illness III.302
international law protecting I.564 II.270–2
killing on capture of II.276–7
labour I.567 II.266–8 281–3 332 III.89
negligence of II.277–8
officers II.286
postal service for II.279–80
post-war response to mistreatment of II.289
psychological problems II.286
repatriation of II.288–9
reprisals against II.274–6
treatment of II.267–8
violations/applications of international law I.566–8
Prix Goncourt III.454 456
Prizren III.202
Procacci, Giovanna III.92
profiteering II.356–7 361
Progrès de la science française au profit des victimes de la guerre: une
grande découverte du docteur Vincent (film, 1916) III.492
Progressive Bloc II.37–40
Progressives (Russia) II.35–6
Prokoviev, Sergei III.523
propaganda II.77–8 86 374–5 667 III.98 391
aimed at children III.36
aimed at women III.99–100
cinema and III.475 476–8
cultural II.368–71
intellectuals and III.393–417
literary figures and III.452–3
and photography II.663
prisoners of war used as II.280
sexual violence and III.101–3
to boost morale II.192–5
in United States II.109
use of children in III.31
use of German atrocities as I.47
Prosser, Howard Kemp III.520
Prost, Antoine I.41 II.383 III.48 530 537 628
prostitutes/prostitution III.26 104–5 131 149–50 159–60
protest movements I.79
Protestantism III.419
and war resistance III.432–3
Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903, 1921) II.646
Proust, Marcel III.267
À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (1919) I.184
Prusin, Alexander I.595
Prussia, Dreiklassenwahlrecht (three-class franchise) II.44 46
Prussian War Ministry, Raw Materials Section
(Kriegsrohstoffgesellschaften (KRA)) II.307
Prussian army I.156
Przemysl I.72, 580
casualties I.247
fall of I.246–8
Pskov III.206
psoriasis III.314
psychoanalysis III.324
psychological injury/ailments III.290 310–34
delusional states III.314
distinction from neurological conditions III.310
nervous collapse III.313
paralysis III.312–13
stupor III.311–12
tremors III.313
underlying causes of III.314–15
see also shell shock
psychologists II.453 457 III.406
public health II.668
publishers III.408 454–6
puissance militaire de la France, La (documentary, 1917) III.479
Punch III.517
Pupin, Michael II.442
Purseigle, Pierre II.136
Putilov Armaments Works II.130
Putkowski, Julian II.202
Putna, war memorial III.642
Puyrredón, Honório I.551
Pyle, Gerald F. III.355
Qingdao I.326, 329, 347, 484–5, 489, 503 II.104 105 552
prisoners captured at II.269
Quai d’Orsay II.68–72 73
Maison de la presse II.77–8 85
Quakers I.187 II.577 578–9 585 588 589 591 III.215 432–3
Quebec I.518, 522
Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service III.132
Querna I.300
Quesada, Ernesto I.540
Quidde, Ludwig II.602
Quien, Gaston I.192
race, and gender identity III.163–6

Rachamimov, Alon II.269 299 III.122
racism III.488
and mutiny II.197–9 200
towards Asian labourers I.497
racist nationalism I.405–6, 428
Radiguet, Raymond, Le diable au corps (The Devil in the Flesh) (film,
1923) III.600
radio messages I.334, 334
radio telegraphy I.381–2
Radoslavov, Vasil II.547
Rageot, Gaston III.74
Rai, Lajpat I.509
rail networks II.231 304–5
Railways Union (1890) I.624
Rampallo, Cardinal III.429
Ramsay, Sir William II.439 441–2 III.394
Ramuz, Charles-Ferdinand III.394
Randall, Stephen J. I.525
Rankin, Jeannette II.60
Ransburg, Niklaas ‘Siener’ van I.445
Rapallo conference (1917) I.399
Rapallo, Treaty of (1922) II.213
rape III.101–3 150 159–60 208 629
presence of children III.42
Ras al-Ayn concentration camp II.285 III.271
Rasputin, Grigori II.12 29 39 103
Ratcliffe, Samuel K. III.400
Rathenau, Walther I.84, 354 II.79 213–14 307 445
Rauter, Hanns Albin II.652–3 654
Rauth, Philipp III.304
Ravel, Gaston III.494
Ravel, Maurice III.523
Ravished Armenia (film, 1919) III.208
Rawlinson, General Sir Henry I.101–2, 103–4, 209
advises Haig I.214
Rawson, Hugh and Mary III.22–3
Raynal, Major I.98
Razón, La (Montevideo) I.539
reconstruction III.604–6
recruitment I.81–2
‘red armbands’ III.273–4
Red Army II.210 644 647 656–7
Jews in III.231
Red Cross flag, German misuse of I.566
Red Cross see International Committee of the Red Cross
Red Guards II.647 649
Redipuglia cemetery III.583–4
Redslob, Edwin III.460
Reed, John III.123
Reeves, Sybil III.139
refugees I.186–8 II.136–7 III.100–1 186–7 213–15
Armenian III.202–9
Belgian III.189–201 213 215 236
care of III.192–5 205–8 215
French III.187
integration of and hostility experienced by III.195–201 206–7 220
Italian III.190–1 195 213–14
Latvian III.209
Lithuanian III.209
Polish III.189–90
repatriation of III.200–1 211–13
Russia and Eastern European III.203–15
Reger, Max, A Patriotic Overture (1914) III.510
Reichenau, Franz von I.354
Reichsbank II.412 417–18
Reichsbanner Schwartz-Rot-Gold III.602 603
Reicke, Georg III.397
Reims I.118
departure of civilians from III.188
cathedral III.424 478 495 513
reconstruction of III.605 606
Reiss, R. A. I.572
religion and art III.520–3
and endurance of the war III.435–42
faith of leaders III.441–2
at the outbreak of war III.418
representation on graves/memorials III.535–7
resistance to enemy war effort III.427–35
Remarque, Erich Maria I.294 III.297
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) III.465 468 469 471 638
remembrance III.63–4
Remington, gun manufacturer II.483
Renaissance d’Occident (journal) III.465
Renault, Louis I.635
Renault factory II.349
Rennenkampf, General I.239
Renner, Karl II.622 634
Rennles, Caroline III.81 84
Renouvin, Pierre I.40, 51 II.12 66
Rensburg, Niklaas ‘Siener’ van I.445 III.428
Rentier Kulike’s Flug zur Front (‘Rich Mr Kulike Flies to the Front’)
(advertising film, 1917) III.485
Republic of Turkey II.632 651
founding of I.612
post-war violence in II.659
reserve occupations III.114
Reşid, Dr Mehmed I.592, 607–8
resistance I.574–5
Rethondes, Armistice of II.532–4 536 540
Retish, Aaron II.406
Reuchsel, Amédée, La cathédrale victorieuse (1919) III.513
Reuter, Ludwig von I.345
Reuters I.541
Revista do Brasil I.552
Rexist movement II.660
Reynold, Gonzague de III.394–407
Rhee, Syngman I.180
rheumatism III.301
Rhinehart, Mary Roberts III.123
Rhineland II.524 533 535
demilitarisation of II.617
Hitler’s reoccupation of III.617
occupation of I.192
treatment of civilians I.185, 192–3
Rhodes, Cecil I.20
Rhodesia I.437, 438
Ribot, Alexandre II.16 22 24 84 528
Richard, Major I.95
Richards, John III.163–4
Richthofen, Manfred von (the Red Baron) I.40, 366, 372 III.469
Riehl, Alois III.397
Riemanns, Henriette III.137 300
Riezler, Kurt I.49–51 II.79
rifles II.155 250
Riga II.137–8 166 656–7 III.212
ethnic relations in II.363
Riga, Battle of I.111, 127, 146, 235
Rigadin III.487 496
Rihbany, Abraham III.422
Ringer, Fritz II.436
Rio Branco, Baron de I.547
Rio de Janeiro I.540
River Clyde (Royal Navy ship) I.306, 307
Rivers, W. H. R. III.328
Rivière, Dujarric de la III.349
Rivière, Jacques, L’ennemi (1918) I.185
RMS Leinster III.556
Robeck, Admiral de I.302
Robert, Jean-Louis II.343 347 353 354 434
Roberts, Frank III.368–9
Roberts, John III.368–9 370
Roberts, Richard III.432
Robertson, General I.106–7, 394, 396
becomes Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) I.384
resignation I.399
Robida, Albert, War in the Twentieth Century (La guerre au vingtième
siècle) (1887) 1.13.2
Rochat, Giorgio I.281–2
Rocky Mountains, internment camps III.266
Rodd, Sir Rennell II.75
Roderwald, W. III.230
Rodman, Rear-Admiral Hugh I.343
Rodó, José Enrique I.539–40
Rodzyanko, Mikhail V. II.35 39
Rogers, Lawrence III.13 15–16 24 26–7
Rogers, May III.20 24 26–7
Roggevelde cemetery III.374
Rojas, Ricardo I.336
Rolland, Romain II.592 III.412 523
Au-dessus de la mêlée (1915) III.459–60
Rolls, Sir Charles Stewart I.349 II.241
Rolls-Royce I.363
engines I.369
Romagne-sous-Monfaucon (Meuse) cemetery III.573 582
Romains, Jules, Les hommes de bonne volonté 1932–47 II.339
Romania I.100, 107, 143–4, 235 II.502 546 625 III.626
commemoration III.378
entry into the war I.261 II.119
government II.19–20
occupying regime III.248
peace settlements II.610
Romanian army I.261
Romanies (Gypsies), internment of III.218 268
Rome Conference (1916) II.499
Rome, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier II.379
Römer, Josef Beppo II.654
Ronarc’h, Admiral Pierre-Alexis III.141
Röntgen, Wilhelm III.398
Roosendaal III.190
Roosevelt Corollary (1904) I.529
Roosevelt, Theodore I.406 III.510
Roper, Michael III.115
Roques, General II.23
Rose-France (film, 1919) III.499–500
Ross, Brigadier-General A. E. I.519
Ross, Corporal J. H. III.66
Roßbach, Gerhard II.654
Rosyth (Scotland) I.328
Roth, François II.14
Roth, Joseph III.472
The Spider’s Web (1923) II.638–9
Rotherham, strikes in II.331 352 380
Rothschild, Lord Walter I.422
Rottenberg cemetery III.548
Rottnest Island internment camp III.263
Rouault, Georges, Miserere (1927) III.522
Rouen I.455
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques I.561
Roussel, Henri III.496
Rowe, A. P. II.454
Royal Air Force (RAF) I.318, 372
Brazilians in I.548
creation of I.337, 399, 431
Royal Army Medical Corps III.132 167
and the spring offensive (1918) I.146–52
Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS) I.354, 356
offensive against Zeppelin sheds I.363
Royal Society of London II.442 450
War Committee II.443
Royaumont Abbey, hospital at III.128
Royce, Henry II.241
Royden, Maude III.432
Rozenblit, Marshal III.210
Rubner, Max II.476
Ruby, Harry III.156
Rufiji (Tanzania), river I.440
Ruhleben camp III.262
Ruhr II.557
air attacks on I.581
Franco-Belgian occupation III.613–15
rumours II.373
Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria (Field Marshal) I.147, 153, 576
II.488
rural labourers II.402–5
Russell, Bertrand II.408 443 455 458 588 670 III.411 417
Russia agrarian economy II.388–90 393
alliance with France II.15–17
and Afghanistan I.31
and Armenian reforms I.600–1
and the Balkan wars I.411
and the July 1914 crisis I.42, 43, 46–51, 53–64
anti-Semitism III.239
Armenian reform campaign (1913–14) I.412
attack on the Eastern Front (May 1916) I.99
campaign against Muslims in Kyrgyz/Kazakh Dungan Muslims
I.596
civil−military relationship II.102–3
Committees of War Industries I.85
defeat Ottomans at Sarıkamış I.39–40, 602–3
economy II.299 316–17
exclusion from Rapallo conference I.399
famine (1921–2) II.647
February Revolution II.367–8
food riots III.110–11
food shortages II.129–30 367–8 480–1 604 III.91–3
governance of II.13–15 29
growth in power of I.111–13
integration of international law I.628
internment III.262
Jewish policy I.594–6 II.103
Leninism II.519–20
measures against enemy aliens III.223–4
Ministry of Agriculture II.389
mobilisation I.39–40 II.303
Orthodox Church III.425–6 442 641
Parliament II.34–40 64
peace movement II.583 592
peasant wars I.195
population displacement III.268–70
post-war violence in I.194–5
protection of Christians I.602–3
public expenditure, pre-war II.409
rail network II.305
reaction to German armament I.33, 34–6
refugees in III.203–15
role in the origins of the war I.412
‘scorched earth policy’ I.74, 76
strategic war plans I.386
strikes I.78 II.346 349–55
use of Christian Armenian troops I.418–19
use of prisoners of war for labour II.282
war economy I.84–5
War Industry Committee II.37
war with Poland I.130–1, 187, 194
Wilson’s proposals for II.611–12
Russian army accusations of brutality I.571
and international law/Hague Convention I.566
Armenians in III.233
atrocities in Eastern Prussia I.238–9 III.246
desertion from II.172 180
female soldiers III.144–6 162
medical services III.292
officer corps II.189–90
punishments II.178
treatment of prisoners of war II.267–8
Russian army formations First (Njemen) I.239–40
Second (Narev) I.239–40
Third I.252
21st Siberian Rifle Regiment III.145
25th Tomsk Reserve Battalion III.145
Russian casualties (1915) I.72
Russian civil war (1917–21) I.130–1, 171, 191, 593 III.608
refugees from I.186–7 III.100 211–12
Russian Empire, fall of II.29–30
Russian front II.152 260
Russian Great Retreat (Eastern Front) I.72, 75, 256–7 II.136–7
Russian Jews, massacre of I.76
Russian Revolution (1905) II.127
(1917) I.116–17, 130, 137–8, 428 II.29–30 39 103–4 129–30 643–9
effect on political system II.102–4
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) I.381 II.102–3 153 155 262
Russolo, Luigi III.507
Russo-Polish wars I.593
Rutherford, Ernest II.435 442 444 447 454
Ruyssen, Theodore II.600
Rwanda, genocide III.629
Rwanda-Urundi I.457
Ryabushinsky, Pavel P. II.36
Sa’d Zaghoul II.139
Saarbrücken I.355
Saarland II.509–11 524 617
Saatmann, Ingeborg II.64
Sacred Heart (cult) III.422–3 439 441
Saganov, Sergei I.53
Saïd Halim Pasha II.18
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Treaty of (1919) I.173 II.425 615 620–3
Saint-Gervais I.581
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence internment camp III.267
Saint-Saëns, Camille III.516
Salandra, Antonio I.274, 280 II.20 25–6 75 101 544–5
Salih Zeki I.609
Salonica I.72, 385 II.363–4 III.292–3
Salzburg II.388 393
Samara III.206
Samoa I.326
Samogneux I.94
Samsonov, General I.239
Samsonova, Helen P. III.140
San Francisco Exposition (1915) III.405
sand fever III.293
Sanders, General Otto Liman von I.48, 298, 306, 389, 602, 603 II.110
552
Ottoman dislike of II.110 113
Sandes, Flora III.148–9 151 152 161–2 173 211
Sandham Memorial Chapel (Burghclere) III.523
Santos, Lucia III.430–1
Sandovich, Saint Maxim III.425
São Paulo I.542, 545, 553
Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile) III.455
Sergeant Michael Cassidy R.E. (1916) III.198
Sarajevo I.41–3, 46–9, 53, 62 II.620 III.620
Sargent, John Singer, Gassed (1919) III.520
Sari Bair Ridge (Gallipoli) I.309–10, 309
Sarıkamış I.39–40, 77, 467–8, 472–3, 602–3
Battle of III.225
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie
(1845) I.539
Sarrail, General Maurice I.385 II.503–6
Sarraut, Albert I.508
Sarton, George II.458
Sassoon, Siegfried I.197 III.66 328 379 467 518 519 552 638
Memories of an Infantry Officer (1930) III.465
Saturday Evening Post III.123
Saudi Arabia I.319
Saumoneau, Louise II.592 III.112
Sauter, Anna III.125
Sava I.72
Save the Children Fund I.188 III.62 215
Savigny, Paul II.592
Saving Private Ryan (film, 1998) III.638
Sayers, Dorothy L. III.327
Sayre, John Nevin II.590
Sayyid Idris (King Idris I of Libya) I.448
Sazonov, Sergius (Sergei) I.43, 53, 54, 61, 461 II.12 14 15 70 73
formulation of Russia’s war aims II.80–1
Scandinavians, in America I.516
Scapa Flow I.327, 336, 345–6 II.21
Scarborough I.328 III.105
Scates, Bruce III.597
Scavenius, Erik II.567
Scelle, Georges I.188–9
Schafer, Dietrich III.397
Scheer, Admiral Reinhard I.334–6, 382
plans for final ‘death battle’ I.395
Scheidemann, Phillipp I.165 II.31 50 211
Schellendorf, Friedrich Bronsart von I.602 II.111 112
Scheubner-Richter (German officer) I.608
Schiele, Egon III.522
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang II.652 III.613
Schlieffen, Alfred von I.37, 204 II.296
Schlieffen Plan I.36, 37, 55, 56, 63, 204–5, 237–8, 390, 566 II.296
logistics II.222
Schmalzigaug, Jules III.516
Schmitt, Bernadotte I.40 II.66
Schmitt, Carl II.9 663
Schmitt, Florent III.523
Schmitt, Paul-Otto I.353
Schmitt-Rotluff, Karl III.522
Schnee, Heinrich II.123–4
Schoenberg (Schönberg), Arnold II.370 III.506
Schӧn, Wilhelm von I.629
Schonberger, Bianca III.125 133
schools, war effort III.33–4
Schumann, Robert II.370
Schuster, Sir Arthur II.443 447
schutztruppen in East Africa I.424, 438 II.123
Schwarz, Dr Paul I.601
Schwarzhoff, General Gross von I.625
Schweitzer, Albert III.267
Schwerd, Friedrich Magnus II.249
Schwimmer, Rosika II.595 601
science II.434–9
nation-based/nationalism and III.392–3
scientific internationalism II.438
scientists and ‘shell crisis’ II.444
scorched earth policy/tactics I.74, 76, 441
Scots (Highland) III.165
Scott, Sir Walter III.155
Scottish Free Presbyterians III.421
Scottish National War Memorial II.380 III.544
Scottish Women’s Hospitals III.61 122 127 128 207
scurvy III.301
Second International II.581–2 584 599 III.98
Second World War III.620 622–4 629
importance of sea power I.322
psychiatric casualties III.329–30
Sedd-el-Bahr, Fort I.306, 307
Seeckt, Colonel Hans von I.251, 253, 389
Seeger, Alan III.449 461 473
Seider, Reinhard III.88
Seidler, Ernst von II.42
Seignobos, Charles III.404
Seine-Inférieure III.197
Seitz, Theodor I.436
Sembat, Marcel II.22 31
Semenov, Grigory II.648
Semireche region I.596
Senegalese soldiers I.414–15, 417, 428, 640
tirailleurs I.443, 454
Senussi (Sanusiyya) movement I.425, 447–8
revolt III.427
September Programme I.244–5 II.466
Serbia I.32, 41–58, 61, 62, 72 II.547 625
Allied support for II.497–8
Austria-Hungary declares war on I.39
Bulgarian occupation of I.572
civilian society III.247
Germany’s decision to declare war on I.33–4
monarchy/royal dynasty II.18–19
mourning and commemoration III.374
occupation of I.75
occupying regime III.249
population displacement III.202
refugees III.214
treatment of civilians by Austro-Hungarian military I.571–2
Serbian army, death march of Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war
II.285
Serbian Red Cross Society III.61
Serbian Relief Fund III.61 207 211
Front Line Field Hospital III.129
Serra, Renato III.462
Service de santé aux armées III.132
Sevastopol I.472
Seven Years’ War II.221
Seventh-Day Adventists II.589 593 III.434
Severini, Gino III.516
Sèvres, Treaty of (1920) I.173, 611, 613 II.615 629–32 III.578
sexual violence III.159–60
sexuality III.22–7 156–7
infidelity III.23–6
morale and female III.116–17
nurses and III.131
Seydlitz (ship) I.334
Shandong I.326, 426–7, 507 II.552
Shatt-al-Arab channel I.299, 420
Shaw, George Bernard III.411
Sheffield III.192
food queues II.335
strikes in II.331 352 380
union activity II.348
Sheffield, Gary I.155
shell shock III.311–33
attitude towards those suffering III.158–9
cinematic and literary depiction of III.325–8
classification of III.320–1
identification of as a condition III.315–18
symptoms and diagnosis III.311–15
treatment III.318–25
under-reporting of III.329–32
women and III.332
shelter II.230–1
Shenk, Gerald III.163
Shigenobu Ōkuma II.10
Shils, Edward A. II.175
Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich III.466
Quiet Flows the Don (1934) III.466
Shot at Dawn Memorial (Staffordshire) III.555
Shoulder Arms (film, 1918) III.498
Shub, Anna III.148
Siberia I.210, 427 II.670
Sicily III.201
Sidgwick & Jackson (publishers) III.455
Siebert Benno von (German spy) I.48
siege warfare I.568
Siegert, Major Wilhelm I.361
Siegmund-Schultze, Friedrich III.432
Siemens II.315
female workforce II.334
Sikhs III.165
Sikorsky, Igor I.353, 374–5
Silesia, strikes II.352
Simcoe (Ontario), memorial tower III.539
Simmonds, Emily III.122
Simonet, Benjamin III.13–15 16
Simons, Anne III.568
Simont, José II.664
Simplicissimus III.517
Simpson, Private, statue III.544
Sims, Admiral William I.343, 516–17
Sinai I.131, 299, 315
Sinclair, May III.127 141
Singapore mutiny II.199–200 202 217 III.427
Singh, Captain Amar I.488, 502
Sino-Japanese War (1894–5) I.480–3 II.104
Sint, Oswald II.405–6
Sironi, Mario III.513
Sisters of Mercy III.134
Sivas II.215
Sixte, Prince Henri of Bourbon-Parma II.83 85
Sixtus Affair II.115 513 613
Sjælland (Zealand) II.563
Skoropadskyi, Hetman Pavlo I.142 III.212 249
Slades Green works III.81
Slataper, Scipio III.462
Sloggett, Sir Arthur III.320
Slovak national aspirations I.137
Slovakia II.613
Slovenia, Catholicism in III.420–1 426
Smale, Catherine III.380
smallpox III.303
Smith, Adam III.72 94
Smith, Sir George Adam III.437
Smith, Leonard V. III.466–7
Smith, Private Len III.436
Smithfield meat market, war memorial III.545
Smorgen (Belorussia) III.641
Smorgen, Battle of III.123
Smuts, Jan Christiaan I.316, 326, 368, 424–5, 429, 445
Smuts Report (August 1917) I.337, 368 II.86
Smyrna II.363 632 659 III.226
Greek occupation II.215
Snijders, General C. J. II.570
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) I.19, 29, 36, 140, 156, 162
II.44–8 117 118 213 584 602
see also Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD); Majority
Social Democrats (MSPD)
Socialist Revolutionary Party II.82
Société Suisse de Surveillance II.566
Society of Friends see Quakers
sociologists III.406
Soffici, Ardengo III.449
Sofia II.625–6
Soissons I.151, 152
soldatki (soldiers’ wives) II.401–2 III.110–11
soldier statues III.539–41
soldiers amputation and III.306–8 331
burial of III.568–73
death and III.561–3
experience of killing III.562–3
facial disfigurement III.306–8 331
female III.144
heart ailments/conditions III.303–5
illness/sickness III.290 300–3 566
leave III.21 38
leisure activities III.447
masculinity III.154–77
medical fitness of III.290–1 293–4
missing, location of bodies III.65–7
return to civilian life III.616–17
sexual relationships III.22–7
underage III.31–2
venereal disease III.25–6
see also morale; wounded soldiers
Solferino (1859) I.281, 617
Sologub, Fyodor III.394
Solvay Physics Conference II.442
Somaliland I.431
Sombart, Werner, Händler und Helden (‘Merchants and Heroes’)
(1915) III.395
Somme, Battle of the (1916) I.41–52, 92, 97, 100–9, 146, 214–17, 397
II.448 508
artillery II.157
black African troops I.415
as breeding ground for flu virus III.341
casualties I.216, 217 III.65
cinematic depiction of III.489–92
duration II.168
logistics and I.212
memorial III.552 554
munitions used I.108
supply problems II.233–4
use of aircraft I.361, 374
use of machine guns II.156
wounded III.297–8
see also Operation Michael
Sonnino, Sidney I.269 II.20 75 101 545
Sorley, Charles III.592
Souchon, Admiral Wilhelm Anton I.298, 329
Souilly prisoner-of-war camp II.283
sound ranging I.223, 227
South Africa I.326, 429, 436–7
commemorative sculptures III.542
concentration camps III.259–60 280
economic impact of war and relative prosperity of I.449–50
gold mining I.450–2
Native Labour Contingent I.450, 455
post-war I.421
Rand Revolt (1922) I.452
rebellion in I.445–6
South African Native National Congress I.450, 458
South African War see Boer War
South America, trade with I.535
South Atlantic I.329
South Tyrol I.269
South West Africa I.423
South West Africa campaign I.436–7
Southard, E. E. III.319
Southborough Commission (1922) III.329
Souville, Fort I.98
Soviet Russia, commemoration III.627–8
fall of III.620 633
New Economic Policy (NEP) II.210
peace treaty signed I.134, 137–8
Soviet Union Decree on Peace I.137–8
Spain II.542
division within II.570–1 574
neutrality and diplomatic negotiations II.558
‘Regulation for Field Service, 5 January 1882’ I.627
revolutionary unrest II.135
Spanish flu and III.340
Spanish flu I.152, 442 II.283 III.49 301 334–57 619
aetiology III.348–50
contagiousness of III.346–7
effect in Britain II.487
effect in Italy II.482
effect on Brazilian force I.548
effect on German population II.461
effect on the outcome of war III.342
in Bulgaria II.626
mortality from III.354–6
nature of/presentation and diagnosis III.345–6
populations targeted by III.348
public and military management of III.351
theories regarding origin of III.338–41
treatment III.349–50
Spanish-American War (1898) I.527
Sparticist League II.50 211
Sparticist uprising II.212 213
Special Court of Arbitration I.621
Spee, Admiral Maximilian Graf von I.329 II.484
Spencer, Stanley III.523
Spengler, Oswald, Decline of the West (Der Untergang des
Abendlandes, 1918) I.553
Spielberg, Steven III.638
spiritualism III.382–3 436–7 598
Splivalo, Anthony III.263–4
spring offensive (1918) I.145–52, 166
Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil II.76 82 86
spying/spies III.122–3 152 255
Jews as III.228
refugees as III.199–200
squadristi movement (Italy) II.660
Srinivasa Sastri, V. S. I.180
St George’s Cross III.145
Saint Isaac’s Cathedral (Petrograd) III.426
Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne II.86
St John’s Ambulance Brigade III.129
Saint-Mihiel, American offensive I.371
Saint-Mihiel, war memorial III.176
St Petersburg I.618
Saint-Quentin Canal I.232
Stahlhelm steel helmets II.249 III.602 603
Stalin, Josef II.210 634
Starhemberg, Ernst Rüdiger von II.654
Stars and Stripes III.454
Stavka I.254
Stawell Girls Remembrance League III.530
steam power I.381
Stegen, Johanna III.31
Stein, Lorenz von II.63
Steiner, Zara I.189 II.70
Steinlen, Théophile III.514 519
Stelvio Pass I.267
Stenger, Major-General I.566 II.271
Stevenson, David II.437
Stibbe, Matthew III.224
Stimson, Julia III.133
Stinnes, Hugo II.79 355
Stinnes–Legien agreement (1918) II.354
Stites, Richard III.448
Stobart, Mabel St. Clair III.129
Stockdale, Melissa K. III.145
Stockholm Conference (1917) II.354 599
Stockholm Protocol (1915) II.272
Stoddard, Lothrop The Rising Tide of Color against White World
Supremacy (1920) I.428, 430
Stöcker, Helen II.602
Stoff, Laurie III.144 162
Stolypin, Pyotr A. II.14 34
Stolzmann, General von Paulus I.259
Stone, Norman I.237, 240, 253, 259, 261, 264
Stone, Oliver III.638
Stoney, Edith III.130
Stopford, General Sir Frederick I.310
Stouffer, S. A. II.175 182
Strachan, Hew I.46, 54, 63, 513–14 II.485
Strachey, Lytton III.410
Strafexpedition (Italy) I.260, 270, 279
see also Battle of Asiago Straits agreement (1914–15) II.80–1
Straits of Dover I.327
Stramm, August III.461–2
Strasser, Captain Peter I.353, 362, 367, 372
strategic command definition of I.376–80
telecommunications and I.390–1
strategy, grand and military I.377–8
coordination of I.383–5
Strauss, Richard III.370 523
Straussenburg, Arthur Arz von I.284
Stravinsky, Igor, Souvenirs d’une marche boche (1915) III.510
street shrines III.535
Stresemann, Gustav II.47 III.615 617
stretcher-bearers III.294
strikes I.186 II.349–55 404–5 III.198
post-war III.608–9
Struve, Piotr I.194
Stumm, Baron Wilhelm von I.57 II.87
Stürgkh, Karl Graf von II.13 41–2 114
Stürmer, Baron Boris II.29 38
Stuttgart, strikes II.349
submarine warfare I.40, 79–80, 115–16, 154–5, 323, 335, 337–9, 398,
516, 528, 547, 578, 579, 603, 632–3 II.60–1 121 443 466–7 470 485–7 512
cable ships I.327
effect on Latin America I.544, 546
propaganda film of III.493
submarines (U-boats) I.346
development of II.241 245 255–9
detecting I.347
Sudan III.629
Sudan, Sufi orders of I.421–2, 448
Sudermann, Hermann III.397
Suez Canal I.73, 297, 300–1, 436, 472 II.111 627
Suire, Maurice II.240
Sumida, Jon II.218
Sun Yat-Sen II.10
Sunni Muslims I.591
supply of labourers I.494
Supreme War Council I.399–400
Surrealism III.505 526
Suttner, Bertha von II.582
Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms) (1889) I.616
Suvla Bay I.309–11 III.545
Suvorov, Alexander II.241
Swan, Annie S., Letters to a War Bride (1915) III.99
Swan, Robert III.160
Sweden II.418 542
activists (aktivisterna) II.571–2
geographical location and neutrality II.558
German war literature, readership of III.473–4
imports from US and contraband exports to Germany II.422 467 469
national policy and neutrality II.571–2
proposed alliance with Norway II.560–1
trade with belligerents II.559 568
Swinton, Ernest II.262–3
Swiss Alps Fortress II.562
Switzerland II.78 418 542 574
Obersten-Affäre (the ‘Colonels’ Affair’) II.569–70
trade negotiations II.566–7
Sydney (Australian cruiser) II.485
Sydney, war memorial II.378 III.542
Sykes, Mark I.421–2
Sykes−Picot plan (agreement) I.316, 319, 421, 460 II.508 628 629
Syria I.297, 319, 421, 430, 470
Armenians deported to I.588, 606, 609–10 II.112
effects of war I.457
famine I.460, 474
Syriac Christians (Assyro-Chaldeans) Sayfo I.585, 608–9 see genocide
Szczerbińka, Aleksandra Piłsudska III.142–3
Szeged II.623
Szögyény-Marich, Count László I.47
Tablettes, Les III.523

Taborda, Saúl I.552
Taft, William Howard II.601
Tagliamento river (Italy) I.285
Tagore, Rabindranath, Nationalism (1917) I.509
Taishō (Yoshihito), Emperor II.10 105
Taiwan I.480
Talaat (Talat) Pasha I.297, 471, 592, 599, 604–12 II.18 30 110
Tallinn II.656
Tamari, Salim I.462
Tamines I.569
Tanga I.423
Tanganyika I.457
Lake I.437, 453
tanks I.105–6, 168, 216–17, 229 II.169–71 241 247 261
A7V II.263
at Cambrai I.128
Lancelot de Mole II.261
Mark A Whippet II.664–5
Mark V I.228
Renault F T II.263
Russians captured at II.277
Tannenberg, Battle of I.235, 298 III.511
use of airships I.354
Tarde, Alfred de III.395
Tardieu, André II.88 III.606
Târgu Jiu (Romania) war memorial III.145 643
Tatham, M. III.207
Tatiana Committee for the Relief of War Victims III.205 208
Tayler, Alfred III.59–60
Taylor, A. J. P. II.57 72 578 580
Taylor, Marguerite III.531
Taylorism (scientific management) II.338–40
tear gas I.146 II.259
technological superiority I.406
technology and weapons military scepticism II.240–2
stagnation in development of II.244 253–5
Tehran I.470
telegrams I.391
see also Zimmermann Telegram
telegraphs I.381–2, 390–1
diplomacy and II.69–70
telephone I.381, 390–1
Templemore prisoner-of war-camp II.269
Temps, Le III.500–1
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord III.550
Teodoroiu, Ecaterina III.145 161
Terauchi Masatake, Marshal II.105
Tereshchenko, Mikhail II.82
Teresino Palace hospital III.138
Teschen (Teshyn) II.656
Teslar, Józef Andrzej III.449
tetanus III.298 300
Texas I.526
Thébaud, Françoise III.132
Thiepval war memorial III.552 554 579
Third (Communist) International III.609
Third Republic (French) I.91
Thirty Years War I.616
Thomas, Albert I.84, 129, 188, 189–90 II.22 23 312 319 III.406
and female workers II.337 369
industrial relations II.346 349 356
and munitions crisis II.328
Thomas, Evan II.590
Thomas, Norman II.590
Thompson, John Herd I.525
Thomson, Sir J. J. II.439 455
Thrace II.547 626
Thurstan, Violetta III.130
Tiepolo II.376
Tigris, River I.73, 420
flooding caused by I.300
Tijuca, torpedoing of the I.547
Times History of the War (1914–20), The I.488
Times, The I.133–4 II.372 439 III.106 125 158 398 403 424 450 460
596
tirailleurs I.443 see Senegalese soldiers
Tirard, Paul II.538
Tirpitz, Alfred von I.47, 157 II.118
concerns over potential blockade II.470–1
fall of I.335
Memorandum (1897) I.325
naval expansion plan I.20, 26–9, 30, 32, 34
on war against Serbia I.34
submarines II.256
Tischler, Robert III.552–3 584
Tissot-Monod, Dr III.130
Tisza, Count István I.44, 51–2 II.13 113
Tixier, Adrien I.190
TNT, effects of III.80–2
Togoland I.326, 423, 435, 457
Tokyo I.326
Tolmino I.267, 281, 285
Tolstoy, Leo II.580 583 III.411
Tolstoyans II.592
Tonks, Henry III.642
Topical Budget (film company) III.482
torpedoes I.347 II.256
Torre, Victor Haya de la I.551
Törring, Count II.79
Totskoe prisoner-of-war camp II.278 312
Touring-Club de France III.486
Tournai III.254
Townshend, Major General Charles I.312, 313–14, 420–1
Toynbee, Arnold J. I.577 III.271–2
trade unions II.329–31 345–9 354–5
objections to female labour II.338
protection of skilled labour II.339–40
rural workers II.404–5
Tradevi, Princess III.99
Trafalgar, Battle of I.322
Trafford, Nurse de III.170
trains, transportation and care of wounded III.298
Traitement des troubles nerveux fonctionnels dans le service du
docteur Clovis Vincent (film, 1916) III.492–3
Transcaucasian wars (1818–1920) I.593
Transport and General Workers’ Union III.82
Transvaal I.441, 452
Transylvania II.502 546
trench diaries III.13–15 449
trench fever III.301 345
trench foot III.301
trench mouth III.301
trench warfare II.154
tactics II.160–6
Trenchard, General Hugh I.362, 368, 373, 431
trenches I.66–9, 205–7 II.223
Austrian I.259–60, 277
Chinese labourers and I.494–5
design I.207
in mountainous regions II.161–2
in the snow I.278
Italian-Austrian Front I.268
sanitation II.230
shelter II.230–1
supply system to II.231–2 237
underground shelters II.162
use of geologists in construction of II.446
use of telecommunications in I.391
Trentino I.267, 269, 273, 276, 278, 285 II.20
evacuation from III.191
Trevelyan, C. P. II.598
Treviso II.376
Trianon, Treaty of (1920) I.173 II.615 623–5 657 III.624
Trier I.355 III.296
Trieste I.269, 279 II.20
air raids on I.363
Trinity College, Cambridge III.432
Triple Alliance I.46, 59 II.20
Triple Entente I.31, 59 II.67 496–9
attempts to win over neutrals II.501–6
diplomatic negotiations between (1914–15) II.496–9
war aims II.507–9 514–15
Trotha, General Lothar von III.259
Trotsky, Leon D. I.137–8, 179 II.84 210
internment in Canada III.268
Troubridge, Admiral Ernest I.329
Trout, Steven III.469
Trowbridge, Augustus II.454
Trubetskoi, Count G. N. II.75
Trudoviks Party (Russia) II.35
Tschirschky, Count Heinrich von I.45
Tsingtao see Qingdao
Tuareg warriors I.447
tuberculosis II.283 461 481 487 III.49 302
Tübingen cemetery III.540
Tuchman, Barbara III.594 621
Tucholsky, Kurt III.643
Tunisia I.425
Tupitso, Antonina III.145
Turin II.135
food shortages II.481
Turkey see Ottoman Empire; Republic of Turkey
Turkish army see Ottoman army
Two-minute silence III.373
Tyne Cot cemetery III.579 581
typhoid fever III.292 293 303
typhus I.478, 567 II.278 283 III.129 271 301–2 343 449
Tyrol I.267
Tyrrell, Sir William II.81
Tyrwhitt, Admiral Sir Reginald I.334
Tzara, Tristan III.524
U-boats see submarines
Uden refugee camp III.195
Udet, Ernst (pilot) III.167
UFA (Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft) III.482
Ugarte, Manuel I.551, 554
Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death)/Crna Ruka (The Black Hand)
I.43
Ukraine I.141–2, 171, 342, 641 II.208 402 485 524 529 656
agriculture II.388
civil war between Whites and Reds II.648
famine deaths II.647
independence II.610
occupying regime III.248 249
Ukrainian Jews I.187
Ukrainians III.186 209
Ullrich, Volker I.57
Ullstein-Kriegsbücher (‘Ullstein War Books’) III.454
Ulster Unionists III.233
Un obus sur Paris (film, 1912) III.476
Ungaretti, Giuseppe III.449
Ungern-Sternberg, Roman von II.648
Union Fédérale (UF) III.602–3
Union Metallic Cartridge Co. II.483
Union Nationale des Combattants (UNC) III.602
Union of Awakening Hungarians II.654
Union of Democratic Control (UDC) II.598–600
union sacrée (1914) III.460
United Kingdom agrarian economy II.391–2
Parliament II.55–9
United Nations, war crimes tribunals III.580 629
United States absolutism II.587
Academy of Sciences II.450
agrarian economy II.393
Alien Immigration Act (1924) I.505
alliance with Mexico I.528–9
Anti-Enlistment League II.590
British propaganda campaign I.514–15
civil liberties II.109
Committee for Public Information II.109 III.403
competition to win alliance with II.503–6
conflict with Mexico I.525–9 II.60
conscientious objection II.579 587
conscription II.108
contributions I.511
diplomatic relations II.69 76–8
dreadnoughts II.254
economic relations with Europe I.22
economy II.108–9
Enquiry, by Wilson’s advisers II.88
entry into the war I.115, 120, 134–5, 167, 220 II.21
entry to war II.512
exclusion from Rapallo conference I.399
expenditure, pre-war II.409
exports to neutrals II.467 469
films/cinema III.496–8
financial demobilisation II.426–8
financial mobilisation II.414
financial support from I.129, 169, 342, 512–14 II.107 317 419
government/parliament II.59–62
growth of power I.111–13
House of Representatives II.59–60
immigration barriers III.52
imports to Mexico I.517
isolationism in I.515–16
and Japan I.427 II.105
military financial system II.411
Morale Section II.193
National Defense Act (1916) I.528
National Research Council II.448 450 III.415
neutrality II.549–51
pacificists II.600–2
peace associations II.579–80
perception of wartime influence I.520–1
post-war social conflict I.186
pressure on Latin America to join war I.549
propaganda II.109 III.403
racism I.429–30
rail network II.305
relationship with Canada I.524–5, 532
reliance on British trade I.517
repatriation of bodies III.573
scientific contribution II.447–8 450–1 454
Senate II.59
Spanish flu III.337 340
state of the army on entry to the war I.112
struggle for racial equality I.522
supply and production problems II.310–11
taxation II.421–2
trade embargo on Netherlands II.470
trade with Britain I.512–14
trade with Latin America I.550–1
treatment of veterans I.184
War Industries Board II.108
war loans II.422
war memorials III.533 546 551–2
war relief for Jews in Palestine I.477
United States army conscription I.518–19
contribution of I.169–70
death sentence in II.178
doctors III.288
ethnic composition I.523–4
Medical Corps III.133
Nursing Corps III.133
psychiatric treatment in III.318
segregation in II.198
Signals Corps II.448
Spanish flu III.301
United States Congress II.59–62 64
Espionage Act (1917) II.61
National Defence Act (1916) II.107
Sedition Act (1918) II.61
Selective Service Act (1917) II.108 590 III.433
and the Treaty of Versailles I.173–81
United States navy I.342–3, 347
USS Missouri, battleship I.322
Universal, El (Mexico) I.540
Universal Peace Congress II.595 603
Universal Postal Union (1888) I.624 II.72
University of Ghent III.409
University of Toronto, Memorial Tower III.539
University of Warsaw III.410
Unknown Soldiers commemoration of II.379–80 381 III.373 457 538
546 597 612 625
literature relating to III.500
power of III.597–8
Unruh, Fritz von, Opfergang (1919) (‘The Road to Sacrifice’) III.453
472
Unzufriedene, Die (newspaper, 1924) III.174
Upper Silesia II.656
Upper Volta I.593
urbanisation I.17–18
Urmia I.602–3
Uruguay I.535 II.555
breaks off relations with Germany I.547
immigration I.536
Üsküb III.130
Ustashe movement (Croatia) II.657–9 660
vaccination III.302–3
Valensi, Henry, Expression des Dardanelles (1917) III.515–16
Valéry, Paul III.634–5
La crise de l’esprit (1919) I.553
Vallagarina III.191
Vallansa III.191
Valois, Georges III.472
Valsugana III.191
Van I.602–3, 604
Van uprising I.77
Vatican II.91 273
Vattel, Emmerich de I.561
Vaughan, Victor C. III.338 354
Vaux, Fort (Verdun) I.98, 213
Vendée III.422
Vendémiaire (film, 1918) III.499
venereal diseases II.668 III.25–6 117 301
Venezuela economy I.327
exports I.543
neutrality I.548
Venice, air raids II.376
Venizelos, Eleftherios II.503 548–9 III.442
Veracruz I.526
Vercel, Roger, Capitaine Conan (1934) I.173
Verdun I.41, 73, 90–9, 100, 101, 103, 113, 118, 123, 212–14, 357, 397
II.119
armaments assembled for I.91
black African troops at I.415
casualties I.98–9, 108
departure of civilians from III.188
duration I.146
Falkenhayn’s strategy at I.392
forts I.92–3
logistics I.212
use of aircraft I.359, 374
weather conditions I.96
Verdun military hospital III.130
Verdun, vision d’histoire (film, 1928) III.523
Versailles Conference (1919), Africa and I.456–8
Versailles, Treaty of (1919) I.39, 89, 173–81, 177, 189, 195, 582, 635
II.214 426 536 615–20 III.415 615 636
Very Long Engagement, A (film, 2004) III.328
veterans bonds formed by/fictive kinship ties III.62–5 595
disabled, provision for III.58–9 600–1
memoirs III.637
movements III.594–8
and remembrance III.598–9
return to pre-war life and treatment by nations I.183–4
Viatka province II.383 389
Vickers, arms manufacturer II.327
strike II.330–1
Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy II.20 101 400 III.430
Victoria, Queen II.11
Victoria national memorial III.537 539
victory parades I.184
Vidal-Naquet, Clémentine III.9
Vienna anti-Semitism in III.232
ethnic minorities in II.361–2
food queues II.366
food shortages II.480 III.110
strikes II.609
Vietnam I.486–7
influence of war on national development I.498–500
military contribution I.489–90
at the Paris Peace Conference I.507–8
supply of labourers I.494
women’s war effort I.503–4
Vietnamese Declaration of Independence (1945) I.508
Vietnamese labourers I.494, 495–500, 641
racism towards I.497
relationships with French women I.497–500
suffering from cold I.496
Vietnamese soldiers I.640
Vildrac, Charles III.412
Villa, General Francisco ‘Pancho’ I.90, 526–8
village societies, changes in II.382 395–405
Villa Giusti, Armistice of II.30 533
Villalobar, Marquis de II.83
Villar, Jean, Notes of a Lost Pilot (1918) I.365
Ville-Evrard hospital III.328
Viller-Bretonneux memorial III.582
Villers-Cotteret, hospital III.128
Vilna (Vilnius) I.72, 195 II.656 III.212 228
Battle of I.235
Vimy Ridge I.100, 111, 119–20, 119, 148, 210–11, 219, 519
casualties I.211
memorial III.551 582
Vincent, C. P. II.471–2
Vincent, Clovis III.287 291 322
Vincent, Daniel I.365–6
violence, post-war forms of I.190–6
Virgin Mary, manifestations of III.430–1
Visscher, Charles de I.631
Vistula, use of gas I.70
Vittorio Veneto, Battle of I.161, 290–1, 538 II.26 204
Viviani, René I.43, 53 II.16–17 22 31 73 97 498
Vladivostok II.465 537
prisoner-of-war camp II.269
Vladslo cemetery III.643
Voie Sacrée I.95, 214
Vossische Zeitung II.371
Volga, River II.647
Volhynia III.212 228
Vollmer, Jörg III.469
Vollotton, Félix III.518 571
Voloshin, Maksimilian II.592
Volta-Bani War I.425–6, 593
Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) III.297
Vuillard, Édouard III.519
Wafd movement II.139

Wagna III.210
Wagner, Richard II.370 III.511
Wagner-Jauregg, Dr Julius III.323–5
Walden, Herwarth III.461–2
Waldeyer, Wilhelm III.397
Wall Street Crash (1929) III.621
Wallach, Jehuda I.242
Wang, C. T. I.181
Wang Jingwei I.501
Wangenheim, Hans Freiherr von I.600, 607 II.74
war archives III.408
war babies III.116–17
war crimes Germans brought to account for I.582–3, 635–7
use of term I.634
war documentaries III.476–93
censorship III.479–80
war experience and national identity I.184
war memorials I.184 II.378–80 III.175–6 371–6 582–3 596–8 642
architecture III.535–9
avenues of honour III.534 545 549
calls for III.528–33
crosses on III.535–7
for ethnic minorities III.542 583
names on III.547–51 628
national III.551–4
and the passage of time III.554–6
permanence of III.550–1
siting of III.544–7
utilitarian debate III.533–5
war photographers III.124
war poetry III.445–7 474
grief, mourning and III.379–80 458–64
terms and associations relating to III.457–8
War Propaganda Bureau III.402
War Refugees Committee (WRC) III.194
War Relief Societies III.116
Ware, Fabian III.533–5 574 580
Wargelin, Clifford II.133
Warsaw I.262–3
Unknown Soldier III.625
Central Civilian Committee III.246–7 249
Warwick Trading Company III.482
Washburn, Stanley I.247
Washington Naval Treaties (1921–2) I.347
Watenpaugh, Keith III.61
water, requirements and transportation of II.229–30
Watteville, Jean-Charles de I.186
Waxweiler, Professor Emile II.79
weapons I.69–70, 406, 642 II.155–8 665–6
anti-tank II.247 264
imbalance between attackers and defenders I.205–7, 227–9
invention of new II.245 259–61
production of II.338
projected time and choice of II.246
regulation as to the use of I.622
see also artillery
weapons technology II.240–2 264–5
innovation II.244–5 255–9
research II.445–6
‘retro-innovation’ II.243–4 247–53
Webb, Captain Matthew II.467
Weber, Max I.23, 60 II.47 212 456
on religion III.418
Wegner, Armin III.271
Weimar Republic II.426 635
Weir, William I.361, 368, 373
Weizmann, Chaim II.446
welfare state III.633–4
welfare supervisors III.83–7
Wellington House (War Propaganda Bureau) II.77–8 86 III.402 452
Wellington Koo, V. K. I.181, 505
Wellington, memorial tower III.539
Wells, H. G. I.179 III.397 402
call for air fleet I.358
The War in the Air (1908) I.349 II.374
Welsh miners’ strike I.79
Wenckebach, K. F. III.304
Wenke, John III.265
Wertfreiheit (value-neutrality) II.436 III.129 398 401
Werth, Léon III.412
Wesbrook, Stephen D. II.176
West Africa I.326, 398, 435 III.629
British recruitment of troops from I.443
economy I.449
Kaocen revolt I.447
post-war I.457
West African soldiers III.165 627
West Indian soldiers I.431
mutiny II.201
West Kirby, war memorial III.549
West Prussia II.617
West, Rebecca, Return of the Soldier (1918) III.326
Western Front I.41, 65–7, 67–8, 73, 204 II.151–2
prisoners of war taken II.269–70
reconstruction III.604–6
strategic command of I.390–3, 396
tactics II.161–6
use of Chinese labourers I.416
Westfront 1918 (film, 1930) III.471
Westmacott, Captain T. H. III.166
Westminster Abbey, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier II.379 III.538 597
Westphalia, Treaties of (1648) I.616, 620
Weyler y Nicolau, General Valeriano III.259
Wharton, Edith, Le livre des Sans-Foyer (1916)(The Book of the
Homeless) III.510
Wheatley, Rebecca III.597
Whitby I.328
White Army II.644 647–8 649
White Lund factory III.80
‘white war’ I.278, 281
Wiene, Robert III.325
Wiese, Kurt III.265
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von III.397 401
Wilhelm I, King of Prussia I.382 II.94
Wilhelm II, Kaiser abdication and exile I.164, 345 II.30–1 132 211
alliance with Turkey I.600
Allies’ opinion of I.177
Armistice I.395
authorises bombing raids I.356
decision to declare war against Serbia I.33–4, 36 II.14
dismisses Bethmann Hollweg II.48
Easter message (April 1917) II.46–7 347
escapes extradition I.635–6
estimation of Britain’s potential to go to war I.57
expansion of naval fleet I.27
Imperial Headquarters (Grosses Hauptquartier) I.387–8
and the July crisis I.47, 52, 55, 64
and military leadership II.116 118–22
and parliamentary government II.49–50
personality and governance of II.11
prohibits attacks on passenger ships II.485
reaction to the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand I.45
religion III.442
silver jubilee II.127
speech (4 August 1914) I.175, 281 II.27 45 484 III.420
strategic contribution I.387–8
on the victory at Gorlice-Tarnów I.254
Wilhelm zu Wied, Prince II.556
Wilhelm, Crown Prince I.93, 96–7
Wilhelmshaven I.335 II.132 211
Willard, Émile III.450
Willcocks, General James I.502
Williams, Chad I.522
Williams, Sarah III.439
Williamson, Samuel I.41–52, 55, 63
Willis, William III.126
Wilson, Admiral Sir Arthur II.256
Wilson, Sir Henry I.379, 399
Wilson, Woodrow I.112, 115, 220, 387, 429, 431 II.21 31 60–2 656
III.636
and Asia’s hopes in I.504–9
‘Atlantic’ policy and new diplomacy II.521–5 540–1
on the British blockade I.580
call for League of Nations I.476 II.595 601
call for new world order I.501
Congress speech (January 1918) I.113
contraction of flu and the peace negotiations III.342
decision to enter the war II.550–1
diplomatic relations II.76–7 82 87
Fourteen Points I.162, 178–81, 180, 232, 457, 530, 633 II.61 85 88
96 518 522 530–4 611–12 621 633 656 III.240
and French demands II.535
on German Americans III.228
and Habsburg monarchy II.613
and the Houston mutiny II.199
influence II.512
and League of Nations I.530–1 II.517
and Mexican conflict I.526–9, 530
neutrality II.107 503–6 550–1
Pan-American Pact I.530
peace negotiations I.163, 164, 176–7, 178–81 II.610–11 612 616
‘Peace without Victory’ speech (1917) I.530
plans for Germany after the Armistice II.537
relations with military II.107–9
religion III.442
on science II.457–8
translation of political goals I.519–20
Wimsey, Lord Peter III.327
Winchester II.483
Wingate, Jennifer III.372
Winegard, Timothy C. I.503
Wingate, General Sir Reginald I.448
Wingfield, Nancy M. III.374
Winkler, Heinrich August II.610
Winnington-Ingram, Arthur, Bishop of London III.423–4
Winnipeg, general strike I.186
Winnipeg’s Soldiers’ Relatives Association III.530–1
Winter, Jay II.343 383 434 461 III.344 361 371 382 460 470 499 530
539 595
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995) III.583 637
Wir Barbaren (We, the Barbarians) (film, 1915) III.481
Wirth, Wilhelm III.407
Wiseman, Sir William II.82
Wismar II.132
With a Skirmishing Party in Flanders (newsreel, 1915) III.483
With British Forces in France (newsreel, 1915) III.475
Witherspoon, Frances II.596
Witkop, Philipp III.437 463
Witte, Count Sergei II.14
Wittgenstein, Paul III.523
Wittner, Lawrence S. II.578
‘Wobblies’ II.602
Wolf, Christl III.17–18
Wolseley, Garnet I.408
women allowance paid for unpaid domestic labour III.73
anti-war activism III.112–13 118–19
celibacy rates III.51
charitable work III.115–16
and displacement III.100–1
emancipation III.75–7
food protests II.367–8 III.92
food shortages and morale III.109–11
in commemorative sculpture III.541–2
in fighting units/combatants III.124–6 127–8 144 162
in occupied territories III.104
journalists III.123–4
and mourning III.360–1 362–7
peace initiatives II.595–7
propaganda aimed at III.99–100
recruitment to fighting units II.667
and religion III.419 439–40
and remembrance III.598–9
role in peacetime transition III.611–12
sexual abuse of III.42 101–3 150 159–60 208 629
sexuality III.116–17 131 611
spies III.123
state measures to support motherhood III.108
strikes II.351
suffrage III.74–5 98 112 119
treatment of by occupying forces I.574
welfare supervisors III.83–7
widowhood III.27 361 599–600
see also women’s war work
Women’s Automobile Club (Club Féminin Automobile) III.142
Women’s Battalion of Death II.667 III.123
Women’s Hospital Corps III.129
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom II.597 III.112
Women’s Legion III.486
Women’s National Service League III.129
Women’s Overseas Hospital of the USA III.133
Women’s Peace Party II.596
Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps III.129
women’s war work II.333–8 667 III.72–95
agricultural II.398–402 III.77–9
auxiliaries III.140–51
childcare facilities III.87
cinematic depiction of III.485–6
commemoration of III.203–15
health and welfare III.83–7 91
industrial III.79–82
medical professions III.126–7 128–40
unwaged 7 III.76–7 88 89–95
see also nurses
Woodbine Willie (George Studdert Kennedy) III.420
Woodsworth, J. S. II.591
Woolf, Leonard II.598
Woolf, Virginia II.598
Mrs Dalloway (1927) III.326–7
Woolwich Royal Arsenal II.334
workers/workforce II.325
composition II.332–41
dilution of II.338–40 352 380 603
hours worked II.340–1
living conditions II.341–5
patriotic pacifism II.353–5 361
profits made from exploitation of II.356–7
recruitment to and exemption from front line duty II.326–31 361
383 III.114
wartime elevation of II.359
see also women’s war work
working-class ‘Tories’ I.19–20
Workmen’s Peace Committee II.597
World Alliance for Promoting International Peace and Friendship
through the Churches II.595
World Disarmament Movement III.368
World Federation of Churches III.433
wounded soldiers III.289 305–6
abdominal wounds III.293
infections III.300–1
movement of III.293
rights of I.617
stages of treatment III.294–7
transportation of III.297–8
Wrangel, General Piotr I.186 II.648
Wright brothers I.350
Wünsdorf prisoner of war camp II.287–8
Wylie, Neville II.543
Xu Guoqi I.416
Yale, William I.476–7

Yamagata Aritomo, Marshal II.104
Yamamoto Gombei, Admiral II.105
Yan Yangchu I.501
Yanushkevich, General Nikolai II.102–3
Yao soldiers I.443–4
Yarmuk railway bridge I.318
Yates, Peter, Murphy’s War (film, 1971) I.437
Yealland, Lewis III.287
Yerkes, Robert III.407
The New World of Science (1920) II.457
Yerta, Marguerite III.103
YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) I.501 II.277 III.487
York, Alvin III.443–4
You! recruitment film (1915) III.483
Young Turks movement I.77, 411, 412, 576, 597 II.18 30 551 627
III.630
policy I.587–8 II.110 III.202
Revolution (1908) I.469, 595, 597
Young Men’s Christian Association see YMCA
Young Women’s Christian Association III.116
Young, Joe III.174
Ypres I.67, 169, 205
Cloth Hall III.67 606
commemoration in II.379
evacuation of civilians III.190
memorial III.551
Second Battle of I.519 II.168
Third Battle of (Passchendaele) I.115, 125–6, 132, 220–3 II.168
III.294
use of gas I.70, 89, 212, 568 II.168
use of tanks II.170
Yrigoyen, Hipólito I.549–50 II.573
Yser, Battle of the III.190
Yuan Shikai I.426–7, 484 II.10
Yugoslavia I.161 II.527 III.624 629
creation of I.292
post-war III.614
Yurlova, Marina III.140 141 150
Yurova, Nadezhda III.124
Yver, Collette III.123
Zabern Affair (1913) II.44

Zadkine, Ossip III.520
Zahra, Tara III.17
Zakharova, Lidiia III.138
Zasulich, Vera III.124
Zeebrugge I.353, 396
Zeiger, Susan III.133 139
Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von I.349
Zeppelins I.349, 351–2, 351, 353–4, 362, 367, 372 II.374–5 III.105–7
Zetkin, Clara III.112
Zeytun I.606
Zhang Guogan I.484
Zhenskii vestnik (‘Women’s Herald’) III.123 127
Zhenskoe Delo III.123
Zhilinski, Jakow I.237
Zieger, Robert H. I.512
Ziemann, Benjamin III.79 422
Zimmermann, Arthur (Alfred) I.47, 57, 528–9, 546 II.14 48 77–8 80
83
Zimmermann Telegram I.115, 511, 528–9, 546 II.21 77 107 551
Zimmermann, General Karl I.435
Zimmerwald Conference (1915) II.92 353 595 599 603
Zoeller, Carl III.265
Żuławski, Jerzy III.449
Zweig, Arnold, The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927) III.471 472
Zweig, Stefan III.298 412
Zwischeneuropa II.620 635 III.407

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Holger Afflerbach is Professor of Central European History at the

This is true both within a generation of historians and between

3 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Allen Lane, 1976).

4 Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I

6 For some discussions of the emergence of transnational history, see Akira

7 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the

9 For the story of the creation of the Historial, see Collections de

Industrialisation, demographic change and

Political mobilisation and domestic politics

my cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to

The economies of pre-1914 European colonialism

The German naval challenge to British hegemony

The shift towards the pre-1914 European arms

Preparing for a preventive war in 1914

In all these discussions the industrial and commercial elites of Europe

3 See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

4 See, e.g., Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Domestic origins of

5 Quoted in Edward Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation before the Great

6 Quoted in Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig: Hase and Koehler,

7 Quoted in Tannenbaum, 1900: The Generation, p. 348.

8 Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of

11 Friedrich von Bernhardi, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Stuttgart:

13 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London: Putnam’s Sons, 1910).

15 Klaus Hildebrand, ‘Imperialismus, Wettrüsten und Kriegsausbruch

16 Quoted in Volker R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in

17 Ibid., pp. 50ff.

18 Jonathan Steinberg, ‘The Copenhagen complex’, Journal of

19 See Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1971),

20 Quoted in H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, 1892–

22 Helmuth von Moltke, Erinnerungen, Briefe, Dokumente (Stuttgart: Der

23 Quoted in Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 4 vols.

25 Isabel Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II: 1888–1918

26 Quoted in Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf: Droste,

27 See Peter-Christian Witt, Die Finanzpolitik des Deutschen Reiches von

28 See John C. G. Röhl, ‘An der Schwelle zum Weltkrieg: Eine

30 Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, 5

31 Quoted in Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, p. 584.

33 See Wolfgang Schieder (ed.), Erster Weltkrieg (Cologne: Kiepenheuer

34 Quoted in John C. G. Röhl, ‘Admiral von Müller and the approach of

35 Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des

37 See Stig Förster, ‘Facing people’s war’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 2

39 T. G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign

In return, all participants with the exception of the President of the

Nonetheless, Austria-Hungary could not act without German acquiescence,

To realise the military measures that we envisage, it is extremely

Helen McPhail translated this chapter from French into English.

1 Jules Isaac, Un débat historique: 1914, le problème des origines de la

3 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London: Nicholson & Watson,

4 Isaac, Un débat historique, p. 21.

5 Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des

6 James Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions (London: Weidenfeld &

8 Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘The topos of inevitable war in Germany in the

9 Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the Great War: Controversies and

10 Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la grande Guerre, un essai

11 Samuel R. Williamson, Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First

12 Samuel R. Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy: France and

13 Manfried Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers: Österreich-

14 Apart from the works of Williamson and Rauchensteiner, see the

15 See Immanuel Geiss (ed.), Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch Eine

19 Die österreich-ungarischen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch (Berlin:

20 Szogyeny, report on the meeting, 6 July, ibid., p. 19.

21 Konrad Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor: Bethmann Hollweg and

22 See particularly Klaus Wernecke, Der Wille zur Weltgeltung

23 See particularly Stephen Schröder, Die englisch-russische