ApolloHoax.net
Off Topic => General Discussion => Topic started by: Glom on September 03, 2014, 08:16:17 AM
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I watched the commemorations last month of the beginning of the First World War last month and have been working my way through the Wikipedia material on it.
It is quite a thought that one kid with his parochial issues (Austria-Hungary out of Bosnia) could have set off something so massive and devastating.
But in my reading, it does seem like Germany was spoiling for rumble so if it wasn't the assassination it would have been something else. Germany was afraid of Russia's rapid military growth and felt a preemptive war was the only way to avoid a worse war down the line.
Without the assassination, what if war did spark for a couple of years later? Might Russia's improved position have made it quicker? Or would the consequences have been worse with an expansionist Russia (what a ludicrous concept) dominating central Europe after conquering Germany?
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It's an interesting question. Certainly the peace in Europe at the time was incredibly fragile, and many nations were spoiling for a fight. A net of treaties and international agreements made a huge European war almost inevitable after what should have been a minor balkan issue. If it hadn't been Princip's bullet (which was itself an incredible chain of coincidences, since he had given up and it just happened that the driver took a wrong turn past the cafe he was sitting in) it surely would have been something else, and from what I have been able to gather about the situation in Europe at the time it wouldn't have been much later either.
However, I suspect the war would have run along very similar lines anyway. The main defning feature of that war was that it was the first major conflict where industry and transport made it possible for huge armies to stay toe-to-toe on the battlefield in the middle of nowhere for years at a time, constantly resupplying them with ammunition and weaponry. It was the first large scale war in which munitions could be made and sent out almost on a par with the rate of their use. It was the first large scale war in which the ranks of soldiers were swelled by whole male polulations of the combatant countries conscripted to the armed forces. Industry and science allowed paris to be shelled by a gun over 70 miles away. Industry and science allowed the aeroplane, only a decade or so old, to be used as a weapon of war. It was the first large-scale war in which military strategy could and did target areas other than the troops on the line. All of this would have been true whenever the conflict occurred, and I suspect this would have had a far greater influence on how the war progressed than much else.
But I could be talking a load of dingo's kidneys, of course.... :)
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I think the War was bigger than Princeps and Franz Ferdinand, and I agree that it would have happened soon anyway. If not for the assassination, then for some other reason.
It's amazing, though, to read about the general attitudes before the war, when people didn't think of it as necessarily a bad thing.
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But I could be talking a load of dingo's kidneys, of course.... :)
Not at all, the mechanization of killing is one of the prominent features of WWI, to me. Much as the mechanization of mass murder is to WWII. Its not that people had not wanted to do those things before, it is just that there was no way to do them until the industrial age had come to the fore. The realizations of the horrors we are capable of seem to have given pause to those who have experienced them, and their decedents. But it is not as if we are incapable of doing it all over again.
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There's a reason so much of the speculative fiction set from about 1885 or so on deals with someone creating a war. I certainly don't believe all wars are inevitable--there are more than a few that I could tell you exactly how to avoid!--but since the way to avoid World War I was for people to start talking and listening to sense, well.
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There's a reason so much of the speculative fiction set from about 1885 or so on deals with someone creating a war. I certainly don't believe all wars are inevitable--there are more than a few that I could tell you exactly how to avoid!--but since the way to avoid World War I was for people to start talking and listening to sense, well.
I think Captain Edmund Blackadder said it best :
....the real reason for the whole thing was that it was too much effort not to have a war.
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I think the War was bigger than Princeps and Franz Ferdinand, and I agree that it would have happened soon anyway. If not for the assassination, then for some other reason.
It's amazing, though, to read about the general attitudes before the war, when people didn't think of it as necessarily a bad thing.
My reading has given me the impression that most powers wanted to avoid it but Germany, feeling it was inevitable, would rather it happen sooner rather than later, when Russia's modernisation had been completed.
But in the July crisis, Germany was totalling egging on Austria-Hungary but we're trying desperately to make the Ultimatum, and their reaction to the Serbian response, look reasonable. They wanted to look like they were forced into war by the actions of others, ie by Serbia's intransigence or Russia's sabre rattling.
Maybe the German language Wikipedia has a different take on things.
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Robert Massie's Dreadnought and Castles of Steel offer an interesting perspective; showing how German naval policy essentially drove the United Kingdom into alliance with France and thus into the War...
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I watched the commemorations last month of the beginning of the First World War last month and have been working my way through the Wikipedia material on it.
I ended up taking the time to read through Wikipedia's article on the July Crisis as a result of a thread on Unexplained Mysteries. The article sharpened my thinking considerably.
It is quite a thought that one kid with his parochial issues (Austria-Hungary out of Bosnia) could have set off something so massive and devastating.
But in my reading, it does seem like Germany was spoiling for rumble so if it wasn't the assassination it would have been something else. Germany was afraid of Russia's rapid military growth and felt a preemptive war was the only way to avoid a worse war down the line.
Yes, this is my reading too. However the key thing for me is that the German government not only set out to make a war happen but also to present themselves as innocent victims, something which they generally got away with for several decades.
Without the assassination, what if war did spark for a couple of years later? Might Russia's improved position have made it quicker? Or would the consequences have been worse with an expansionist Russia (what a ludicrous concept) dominating central Europe after conquering Germany?
This is a tricky issue to determine. I suspect you're right - Russia was industrialising and building railways at a frantic rate in the decade or so prior to World War One. The object of these activities wasn't purely military - steel production has many uses other than bullets and battleships - but it certainly would have helped the Russian army cope with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
It's also interesting to consider that Russia may well have evolved into a more open parliamentary monarchy as the wealth from this industrialisation funded a growing middle class and (eventually) undercut what support the revolutionaries had.
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I think the War was bigger than Princeps and Franz Ferdinand, and I agree that it would have happened soon anyway. If not for the assassination, then for some other reason.
It's amazing, though, to read about the general attitudes before the war, when people didn't think of it as necessarily a bad thing.
My reading has given me the impression that most powers wanted to avoid it but Germany, feeling it was inevitable, would rather it happen sooner rather than later, when Russia's modernisation had been completed.
Yes, agreed again.
I wasn't aware of it until reading about it on Wikipedia, but in December 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm met with his senior politicians and generals to discuss Germany's strategic situation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Imperial_War_Council_of_8_December_1912)
Very simply, the generals wanted to attack Russia immediately, regardless of the lack of an excuse - that was how seriously they saw things. Supposedly Admiral Tirpitz wanted an 18 month delay to allow the completion of the widening of the Kiel Canal and the construction of a U-boat base on the island of Heligoland. Tirpitz got his way, and the government seems to have taken advantage of the extra year and a half to undertake a series of very deliberate steps to prepare for war.
But in the July crisis, Germany was totalling egging on Austria-Hungary but we're trying desperately to make the Ultimatum, and their reaction to the Serbian response, look reasonable. They wanted to look like they were forced into war by the actions of others, ie by Serbia's intransigence or Russia's sabre rattling.
Yes. If you read the July Crisis article you can see how the German deputy foreign minister, Zimmerman, instructed his ambassadors to tell their host governments that the German government had no idea what the Austrians were planning, even as they were helping the Austrians to make their Serbian ultimatum as outrageous as possible.
The key in this is that the Germans had definitely made up their minds to go to war with Russia, but were holding off their declaration of war as long as possible in the hope of hearing a clear signal from Russia. When they heard that Czar Nicholas had ordered mobilisation the German leadership were thrilled, as they were then able to present themselves to the Reichstag as the injured party, despite the fact that they'd been preparing to go to war with Russia almost from the start of the crisis.
The second thing worthy of note in this process is the way the business of "going to war with Russia" meant "occupy Luxembourg and Belgium in order to attack France". Even before the Serbian government had responded to the Austrian ultimatum the German government had sought permission from the Belgian government to march through their land in order to attack France.
I get the impression that a lot of people who don't really know much about World War One sort of assume that the countries went to war in some sort of orderly domino-like process. At the start it was - Austria threatened Serbia, so Russia threatened Austria, so Germany threatened Russia. You might think the next step was that France threatened Germany. In fact that wasn't the case: the French government (1) urged the Russians to act cautiously, (2) resisted early calls from the military to order mobilisation, and (3) ordered its troops on the German frontier to pull back ten kilometres to avoid the possibility of itchy trigger fingers bringing on a war by accident.
Instead, first the German ambassador to France threatened that Germany would attack France if Russia mobilised, and second the German Chancellor threatened that Germany would attack France if it didn't immediately renounce its alliance with Russia.
The Germans thus present themselves as being like a man in a bar who, on seeing someone spill a drink on his friend, immediately turns around and swings a punch at the drink spiller's colleague.
Regardless, I think it's important for people to understand these events in more detail, because I get the impression from the "domino theory on the outbreak of World War One" that the war broke out as a result of a lot of careless blundering by all parties. The more sinister reality is that there were diplomatic mechanisms in place to resolve crises such as the July Crisis which people like the British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey tried to use, but they were hamstrung by a German leadership group who very deliberately subverted the mechanisms in order to bring about a war.
In addition, this apparent confusion of the politicians leading to war is unfavourably compared with the vindictive attitude displayed by the Allied politicians after the war in assigning blame for the outbreak of war to Germany. This wasn't just victor's justice, it was in part based on a pamphlet written by the German Prince Lichnowsky, who'd been German ambassador in Britain during the July Crisis. He was at least partly aware of the duplicity of the German government and blamed the outbreak of the war on its actions.
Finally, there's the issue of Britain's involvement in the war, the suggestion being that Britain got dragged into a war which wasn't its business, using the excuse of the Belgian treaty. The reality is that Britain got involved in World War One because a German victory would have been dangerous for British strategic security even if it had stayed neutral. Britain's actions in 1914 were the same as they'd been for a couple of centuries, and would be for another couple of decades - join an alliance against any nation threatening to conquer Europe, as British strategic security lay in keeping Europe divided.
Maybe the German language Wikipedia has a different take on things.
Unlikely. The historian who brought this version of events to light was the West German Fritz Fischer. His findings basically confirmed Lichnowsky's assessment but also laid out the thinking behind the German government's actions.
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Zimmerman--now, there's a name that should be familiar to anyone who's studied US involvement in the war!
The name I've always enjoyed for World War I is "History's Biggest Family Squabble." It isn't strictly accurate, but it's amusing. And I have to admit that most of the detailed knowledge I have of the war comes from a book I know to be full of propaganda. It's Rilla of Ingleside, the last Anne of Green Gables book. It was written in 1921 and is about how Anne's family, including her now-adult children, get through the war--or don't, in one case. You can safely ignore anything it says about German atrocities, which reads rather like that one Black Adder episode, but there's quite a lot about battles and how it felt on the Canadian homefront.
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Zimmerman--now, there's a name that should be familiar to anyone who's studied US involvement in the war!
Yes, and in addition to getting his ambassadors to lie in order to help start the war, and trying to get Mexico to invade the USA in order to stop the USA supplying war material to the Allies, he also oversaw the process of transporting Lenin from Switzerland to Finland in 1917. It's not surprising that, according to one author, he can be considered "arguably the most destructive person of the twentieth century".
The name I've always enjoyed for World War I is "History's Biggest Family Squabble." It isn't strictly accurate, but it's amusing.
And reasonably accurate: Kaiser Wilhelm, Czar Nicholas and King George V were all cousins.
For me the amusing one was reading somewhere that a Vienna newspaper held a competition some time in the 1920s for the best newspaper headline. The winner was "Archduke Franz Ferdinand still alive - war fought by mistake". Though, to tie this back to Glom's OP, it seems fairly likely that if FF had survived, war would still have broken out within a year or so.
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Incidentally, I mentioned in an earlier post about the actions of the German government in deliberately and deceptively acting to bring about war. For the benefit of conspiracy theorists who think that Pro-Apollo Nutters like us automatically reject all conspiracy theories, this represents a clear case of a conspiracy theory I accept as real.
Of course, as the conspiracy doesn't involve either the American government or the British Royal Family it's probably not particularly interesting.
On the other hand, if you want a good conspiracy theory, how about this: Gavrilo Princip was a patsy, and the assassination was actually carried out by German Military Intelligence, in order to cause a war.
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I'm not up to the article on the Eastern front. Don't tell me how it ends.
Actually only semi joking because I don't actually know yet. I know Russia dropped out early to have a Revolution that I'm sure had no long term consequences whatsoever but the foreshadowing of the Treaty of Brest-litvosk in other articles suggests Russia didn't exactly withdraw as the clear Victor. Certainly Germany didn't experience the pincer movement it did in the sequel.
But I'll see how it ends soon.
The article on the Middle East was somewhat lost on me. Unlike the other major belligerents, the Ottoman Empire is pure anachronism now. It's interesting to read just how out of the league they were, getting completely pasted in the Middle East by the Allies while independence movements excised their European holdings. I'm sure I will get to the Turkish war of independence and find out how allied occupation of Istanbul turned out.
I was also interested to here Iraq referred to as such. It has become accepted fact with current events that Iraq was the pure fabrication of some British bureaucrat and the lack of ethnic sensitivity with the lines drawn on maps is what has brought us to this point. But it turns out Iraq did exist as part of the Ottoman Empire so while the lines were artificial, they weren't entirely random.
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And the war is over.
Sick to think that this was just the warm up round.
Seeing all the different campaigns, you see why it is a world war, despite being centrally between European powers. Those European powers were global, with colonies, possessions and dominions across the globe. War itself was throughout mainland Europe and encompassed most of the Middle East, but with secondary fights between the possessions in Africa and the Pacific. Then you have North America involved due to Canada place in the British Empire and eventually the USA of their own accord. Even South America got represented by Brazil.
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Without the assassination, what if war did spark for a couple of years later? Might Russia's improved position have made it quicker? Or would the consequences have been worse with an expansionist Russia (what a ludicrous concept) dominating central Europe after conquering Germany?
One possibility: World War II and the Holocaust would not have happened. Adolph Hitler would have been an obscure struggling artist. The Soviets would have been the first to land a man on the moon.
Or, World War II would have happened, but not until the 60's. There would have been no moon landings. Most of us would be dead or not ever born.
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I find it ironic that Princip, according to his shooting instructor and other witnesses, was a piss poor shot; while Franz Ferdinand was an accomplished marksman, having bagged many thousands of game animals.
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One possibility: World War II and the Holocaust would not have happened. Adolph Hitler would have been an obscure struggling artist. The Soviets would have been the first to land a man on the moon.
Or, World War II would have happened, but not until the 60's. There would have been no moon landings. Most of us would be dead or not ever born.
I tend to blame the Treaty of Versailles for World War II. Had the war ended differently, the second one might not have happened. Once that treaty was signed, a second was inevitable.
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I tend to blame the Treaty of Versailles for World War II. Had the war ended differently, the second one might not have happened. Once that treaty was signed, a second was inevitable.
At least it sure seems that way now.
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I tend to blame the Treaty of Versailles for World War II. Had the war ended differently, the second one might not have happened. Once that treaty was signed, a second was inevitable.
That's the contemporary view with historians, and the situation was compounded in Germany by the economic conditions of the 30s. The world was broke after the Wall Street crash, Germany was hit much harder because of reparations which polarised German politics between Communism and Fascism. Add to that the heady mix of Germany's shame with their loss of territory, the military free Rhineland imposed by the Allies, historical anti-semitism and you have the conditions for Hitler and his thugs to rise to power.
Hitler also used much of Versailles to propagate myths about German treatment at the hands of the Allied powers known as 'War Guilt Clause.' This is where Hitler seized upon German resentment that Germany had not actually been militarily defeated but was sold out by its politicians who accepted full responsibility for World War 1.
But then you know all this :)
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My favourite series of mystery novels was written between the wars; the main character is also something of an occasional diplomat. There are interesting bits and pieces dropped in that tend to confirm that a war was coming, and the author was not herself a diplomat. She was an academic.
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It is also interesting that long before the architects of Munich were laying Hitler's path for war, Churchill warned of acquiescence to fascist demands and where it would lead. He was deeply concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe long before Chamberlain held the piece of paper aloft. During his wilderness years he wrote extensively about the abyss that Europe was facing.
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My favourite series of mystery novels was written between the wars; the main character is also something of an occasional diplomat. There are interesting bits and pieces dropped in that tend to confirm that a war was coming, and the author was not herself a diplomat. She was an academic.
I asked my father who was a youngster during the thirties if they ever thought a second war was coming.
"Of course!" he said. "We knew it was coming for years."
"How?"
"Every time we saw a newsreel of thousands of people standing there chanting Hitler's name," he said. "And Hitler screaming about Germany regaining her greatness. We knew that wasn't going to lead to anything good."
So, it was there for those with eyes to see. I'm really more surprised by the number of very well-educated, well-connected people who saw those same demonstrations and didn't see anything alarming about them.
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"Every time we saw a newsreel of thousands of people standing there chanting Hitler's name," he said. "And Hitler screaming about Germany regaining her greatness. We knew that wasn't going to lead to anything good."
Quite a give away really. Predicting the war was one thing, but I wonder how many people would have predicted the genocide in the 1930s?
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"Every time we saw a newsreel of thousands of people standing there chanting Hitler's name," he said. "And Hitler screaming about Germany regaining her greatness. We knew that wasn't going to lead to anything good."
Quite a give away really. Predicting the war was one thing, but I wonder how many people would have predicted the genocide in the 1930s?
The mind can play funny tricks.
I once met someone through some friends at a party. Afterwards, someone said that they were horrified he'd been brought to the party. I knew that I vaguely hadn't liked this person, but asked why.
"Because he was talking about stealing cars for a chop shop!" the other person said.
The funny thing was, until they said that, though, I hadn't really registered what he was talking about. Instead, my mind had sort of gone, "Decent people don't steal cars, and definitely don't brag about it. He must be making a bad joke. Move along, nothing to see here..." But when it was pointed out to my face, I realized that no, he hadn't been joking.
I think Hitler was given the same treatment by a lot of people during the 30's. He couldn't really *mean* what he was saying, could he? It was just political posturing. Not even worth registering.
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At the beginning of 1918, Germany looked on the up somewhat. They'd pasted Russia with the Treaty of Brest-litovsk and held their ground in the West. The reversal of fortune came quite suddenly relatively speaking. No wonder the stab in the myth about the successful German military being betrayed by the politicians gained traction.
It was a reason why the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender at the end of the sequel was signed by the military commanders, so noone could allege they were sold out.
The great irony about German bitterness over the territorial losses was both that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was harsher than Versaille and that German irredentism in the 30s and 40s ultimately led to Germany getting an even harsher round of territorial losses through Potsdam. If Germany ever tried it again, all that would be left would be Dusseldorf.
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This is where Hitler seized upon German resentment that Germany had not actually been militarily defeated but was sold out by its politicians who accepted full responsibility for World War 1.
That was the "stab in the back" myth. Naturally, Jews held the knife.
Even the historians who have studied the Holocaust for their entire careers don't think the Nazis had planned it in advance quite the way it happened. It came in stages, and one does wonder what would have happened had the war not started and progressed when and how it did.
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Even the historians who have studied the Holocaust for their entire careers don't think the Nazis had planned it in advance quite the way it happened.
I fully agree. My knowledge is certainly not on a par with historians, but the literature I have read certainly suggests that the final solution was a process that took turns in reaction to events. There are various articles that suggest that the full horror of the final solution finally unfolded at Wannsee.
The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution is certainly worth a read.
I have also read Denying the Holocaust. So sad that the latter even had cause to be written.
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Yes, it is sad. One of the best documented historical events of the 20th century (except maybe for Apollo) and still some people refuse to accept it on ideological grounds.
Like a lot of people I do wonder how things might have been different had the war started at a different time, or if it had progressed differently. I can't even say whether the Holocaust would have been worse or better than it was.
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I went to Tower of London today. It was absolutely rammed. So many bloody tourists come to see the poppy moat.
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I hadn't heard of the poppy exhibition so I went and read about it. It seems quite simple, much like the Vietnam War memorial in Washington DC. And it seems to have the same effect on people.
All those poppies, 888,246 of them. And that's just the British losses, and just in WW1. Sigh.
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One possibility: [..] The Soviets would have been the first to land a man on the moon.
Without a Great War political revolution would probably still have happened in Russia, the empire was rotten, but there is no guarantee that the same gang would have ended on top.
That was pretty much a fluke as it was, and the Bolshevik position had been greatly strengthened by the deprivations of war. Constitutional democracy or a right-wing authoritarian regime are just as likely.
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So, it was there for those with eyes to see. I'm really more surprised by the number of very well-educated, well-connected people who saw those same demonstrations and didn't see anything alarming about them.
I've often thought the same, about Hitler and Mussolini. I see footage of them screaming and posturing, and I wonder if anyone at the time said, "Erm....?!"
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I find it ironic that Princip, according to his shooting instructor and other witnesses, was a piss poor shot; while Franz Ferdinand was an accomplished marksman, having bagged many thousands of game animals.
I didn't know that about Princip. But note what I said in reply #12: "...if you want a good conspiracy theory, how about this: Gavrilo Princip was a patsy, and the assassination was actually carried out by German Military Intelligence, in order to cause a war."
Hmmm, that might make a good thriller - British Secret Agent finds out that a German marksman is going to be in Sarajevo for a "holiday" at the same time as Archduke Franz Ferdinand...
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My favourite series of mystery novels was written between the wars; the main character is also something of an occasional diplomat. There are interesting bits and pieces dropped in that tend to confirm that a war was coming, and the author was not herself a diplomat. She was an academic.
Lord Peter Wimsey and Dorothy L Sayers?
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It is also interesting that long before the architects of Munich were laying Hitler's path for war, Churchill warned of acquiescence to fascist demands and where it would lead. He was deeply concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe long before Chamberlain held the piece of paper aloft. During his wilderness years he wrote extensively about the abyss that Europe was facing.
This is always a tricky question to discuss. It's been said that when German forces marched in the Rhineland in 1936, they were under orders to immediately retreat to the Rhine River if France raised any objections. The French government declined to call Hitler's bluff, and so his stocks rose within Germany.
The problem with Churchill's assessment is that, while accurate, the simple response of the governments of the time was to ask rhetorically how they were supposed to stop Germany.
Britain had started re-arming in about 1934, on the basis of an assessment by the Imperial General Staff that war would break out around 1939. Even at the time of the Munich Crisis in November 1938 the British and French were poorly prepared for war. They felt that time was on their side, and that delaying the outbreak of war would help them more than Germany. If this meant sacrificing Czechoslovakia then so be it - the extra time gained would allow the Allies to out-produce Germany.
For that matter, things weren't helped by large over-estimates of Germany's military forces in terms of both numbers and quality. People looked at the relative effectiveness of aircraft in particular in the civil war in Spain - German aircraft fighting for the Nationalists (such as the Me-109 and He-111) greatly outperformed the Soviet-supplied aircraft fighting for the Republicans - and drew obvious but incorrect conclusions.
This production difference was also what was behind the inactivity of the Allies in the Phony War. Not realising how weak the German forces in the West were in September 1939, the Allies were instead content to keep building up their resources, figuring that the decisive year of the war would be 1943. (It turns out they were right, but not in the way they thought.)
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I asked my father who was a youngster during the thirties if they ever thought a second war was coming.
"Of course!" he said. "We knew it was coming for years."
"How?"
"Every time we saw a newsreel of thousands of people standing there chanting Hitler's name," he said. "And Hitler screaming about Germany regaining her greatness. We knew that wasn't going to lead to anything good."
So, it was there for those with eyes to see. I'm really more surprised by the number of very well-educated, well-connected people who saw those same demonstrations and didn't see anything alarming about them.
That's interesting to hear, and I have no doubt it's true. There was certainly no shortage of people in Britain and France (and the USA for that matter) who were willing to fight fascism in the 1930s, with many striking their first blow with the International Brigades in Spain.
I wonder what my Dad (Australian) thought - he was 24 when war broke out, but he didn't sign up straight away. Instead, he and his brother both volunteered in May 1940, a few days after Germany attacked in the West.
It's worth pointing out, however, that while many people may have considered war inevitable through the 1930s, there was also a lot of support for Chamberlain's actions at Munich in 1938. In fact Chamberlain seems to have matched his actions to public opinion extremely well from this time until the declaration of war in September 1939: not only was he praised for his actions at Munich, but when in March 1939 Germany occupied the remains of Czechoslovakia (in breach of the Munich Agreement) Chamberlain offered British and French protection for Poland, exactly when public opinion in Britain turned sharply against Germany; and Chamberlain's decision to go to war in September 1939 also had broad public support. Chamberlain's problem was that his government didn't vigorously engage in the warfare he'd just committed the country to. (There was also the issue of failing to get Soviet support, but this was always an unlikely possibility given that the Soviets wanted a third of Poland's territory.)
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At the beginning of 1918, Germany looked on the up somewhat. They'd pasted Russia with the Treaty of Brest-litovsk and held their ground in the West. The reversal of fortune came quite suddenly relatively speaking. No wonder the stab in the myth about the successful German military being betrayed by the politicians gained traction.
The other part of it was that when the war ended in November 1918, the front line was still entirely in Belgium and France (barring a tiny sliver of Germany near the Swiss border). Stab-in-the-back proponents were able to point out that Germany had "surrendered" (even though it was initially presented only as a ceasefire) without the Allies occupying any part of Germany during the fighting.
It was a reason why the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender at the end of the sequel was signed by the military commanders, so noone could allege they were sold out.
Well, this, plus the fact that >90% of Germany was occupied by Allied and Soviet forces in May 1945 - apart from Norway, Denmark and bits of the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Yugoslavia the Reich just didn't exist.
Incidentally, it's worth noting that Germany was really the only Axis country which surrendered unconditionally, despite this being an Allied requirement from the Casablanca conference - both Italy and Japan were able to surrender with conditions.
The great irony about German bitterness over the territorial losses was both that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was harsher than Versaille and that German irredentism in the 30s and 40s ultimately led to Germany getting an even harsher round of territorial losses through Potsdam. If Germany ever tried it again, all that would be left would be Dusseldorf.
Agreed. I understand that Germany's harsh conditions in the Brest-Litovsk treaty was partly to maximise the amount of grain the Central Powers could extract from former Russian territory to feed starving citizens back home. However it's also worth considering that the peace conditions the German government was considering for France were almost as extreme.
In this context it's worth going back to the period leading up to World War One: there was a view among a lot of British liberals that war between nations was pretty much impossible given the value of international trade - war would be an economic disaster, with the victors almost as economically ruined as the losers, and thus no rational leader could possibly want it. In a way it could be seen as a pre-WW1 version of Mutually Assured Destruction, the concept which seems to have helped keep the peace during the Cold War.
However, what seems to have been missed by the liberals was that many in the German government seem to have been completely unconcerned by this possibility. Instead, the German view seems to have been that if they went to war and won, then all of Europe would be available to pay for German (and Austrian) reconstruction; that would be an economic disaster for the rest of Europe but simply the Darwinian price the losers would have to pay.
If my view is correct (and I have no idea whether historians think this) then I suspect that hypothetical German occupation of Europe following their hypothetical victory in WW1 would have been very similar to actual German occupation of Europe following Germany's actual victories in the early part of WW2. (One obvious difference would have been the treatment of Jews. This in turn leads to a number of dark places, such as how Jews would have been viewed and treated by disgruntled Britons and French.)
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Lord Peter Wimsey and Dorothy L Sayers?
Yup. Though one of the most interesting lines from a historic standpoint, in my opinion, comes from Gaudy Night, wherein one character says, "What this country wants is a 'Itler."