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Book descriptionWith the centennial of the onset of World War 1 upon us, I sought and found in this 2004 book a good choice for a one-volume history of the whole shebang. It is highly compressed into 340 pages, but is not wanting for covering the war in its world-wide aspect. With such a scope, we lose out on in-depth character assessment of major figures, but there are too many of them anyway. What we get instead is an effective framework of interpretation for hanging a lot of the facts and factions and sites of conflict. Each of ten chapters covers a theme, and in the process the reader is led to the perspective that for many of the participants the war was meaningful and worked to achieve the aims of big ideas. I appreciated that his credentials are sound as an Oxford historian involved in work in a massive trilogy on the war, the first volume of which “To Arms” came out in 2001. This more accessible synthesis created as a companion to a TV documentary, which I was pleasantly surprised to be available on YouTube(Intro; Chapt. 1). I was also reassured with a favorable reaction to the book in a New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik: Strachan is no drudge; he has a point to make and a message to deliver. His desire is to take the clichГ© image of the war, particularly the English oneвЂ"the war as Monty Python massacre, with idiot Graham Chapman generals sending gormless Michael Palin soldiers to a senseless deathвЂ"and replace it with something more like the image that Americans have of our Civil War: a horrible, hard slog, certainly, but fought that way because no other was available, and fought for a cause in itself essentially good.I was drawn in the first paragraph of Strachan’s preface:In Britain popular interest in the First World War runs at levels that surprise almost all other nations, with the possible exception of France. The concluding series of Blackadder, the enormously successful BBC satirization of the history of England, has its heroes in the trenches. Its humor assumed an audience familiar with chateau-bound generals, goofy staff officers and cynical but long-suffering infantrymen. The notion that British soldiers were вЂlions led by donkeys’ continues to provoke a debate that has not lost its passion, even if it is now devoid of originality. For a war that was global, it is a massively restricted vision: a conflict measured in years of mud along a narrow corridor of Flanders and northern France. It knows nothing of the Italian Alps or of the Masurian lakes; it bypasses the continents of Africa and Asia; it forgets the war’s other participantsвЂ"diplomats and sailors, politicians and laborers, women and children.I am glad to get a broader foundation, even if it tarnishes my impulse to judge that war is never worth its cost. I have long been under the sway of the image of the total waste and futility of the war as dominated by the story of the slaughter of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele and led to hate the cold blindness of generals like Douglas Haig. This has been reinforced by accounts written in the 20’s such as Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Robert Grave’s memoir “Goodbye to All That”, as well Faulks’ recent novel “Birdsong”. The dreadful defensive stalemate at the trenches was unfortunately what the generals faced, and the decisions to risk so many lives on a breakout against machine guns were transformed to the war of attrition and industrial exhaustion. Though Strachan doesn’t spend much time second guessing the generals, he doesn’t go quite as far as Gopnik in excusing them: “If a steering committee of Grant, Montgomery, Napoleon, and Agamemnon had been convened to lead the allies, the result would have been about the same.” With such losses, why weren’t there more voices to say “It’s not worth it; compromise in a negotiated peace”? Some seemed to think and believe that the massive loss of human life demanded total defeat of the enemy to make their loss worth something. Others would point to German and French intransigence over Alsace-Lorraine as the key barrier to Wilson’s 14 points for peace. Still others consider perpetuation of the war as bound to early visions of key leaders like Churchill on the spoils of empires that later got divided so richly in the Treaty of Versaille. I don’t get a clear answer on this question from Strachan, or else no dominant reason stands up as responsible for the tragic duration of four long years. He does make a point that only because the enough soldiers believed in the war and did not to mutiny was the war able to continue as long as it did.Strachan does put a dent in my comfort in the notion of inevitability of this war through reading that stopped on Tuchman’s “Guns of August” (1962). She implanted in my brain a picture of bumbling but warmongering empires which were so trapped by their nest of unstable alliances that of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo represented effectively a random spark to start the conflagration. Yes, a lot of leaders were already planning for war, but Strachan emphasizes how the war the Germans and Austrians wanted in 1914 was a restricted one to settle the fate of Serbia and that they were genuinely surprised over Russia’s mobilization in response. And the apparent roll-out of the invasion of France according to the 1905 Schlieffen Plan was not significant as an inflexible script for the Germans in Strachan’s view. Strachan also dispels the notion that the onset of the war was driven in a meaningful way by imperial ambitions of Germany, Britain, and France. However, for many of the other participants brought in through the extended conflicts of the Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Empires, the territorial integrity as nations and motivations for expansion did serve as a prime motivator. I was able to learn a lot more about the fates in the war of Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, and Greece and come to understand some of the causes and consequences of fighting taking place in Turkey, in Mesopotamia and Palestine in the Middle East, and at multiple sites in Africa. Obviously, just broad strokes, but vivid nonetheless.No matter how foolish the concept that this as “the war to end all wars”, the prospects for significant consequences did indeed lead to meaningful consequences:This is of course the biggest paradox in our understanding of the war. On the one had it was an unnecessary war fought in a manner that defied common sense, but on the other it was the war that shaped the world in which we still live. …The First World War broke the empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungry, and Turkey. It triggered the Russian Revolution and provided the bedrock for the Soviet Union; it forced a reluctant United States on to the world stage and revivified liberalism. On Europe’s edge, it provided a temporary but not a long-term solution to the ambitions of the Balkan nations. Outside Europe it laid the seeds for the conflict in the Middle East. In short it shaped not just Europe but the world in the twentieth century. It was emphatically not a war without meaning or purpose.…Within Europe, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland, and Lithuania had all achieved independence and a measure of definition before Woodrow Wilson even landed at Brest. …In Central and Eastern Europe war had effected change, and for those who sought such changes it continued to do so. Indeed, the United States’ own decision to intervene was confirmation of the same point. War could work.In a 2013 interview, Strachan warned planners of the centennial events that the commemoration was in danger of becoming sterile and boring. He calls for more than pity over a meaningless tragedy, and promotes discussion and education on a broader scope about the war. Strachan gets his wish on more debate about the Great War when the first broadside of this centennial year was fired by British Education Secretary Michael Gove in the The Daily Mail in January 2014. Titles alone tell a lot: --Gove: Why does the Left insist on belittling true British heroes?”--Editor: Michael Gove blasts Blackadder myths about the First World War spread by television sit-coms and left-wing academics • Education Secretary says war is represented as a misbegotten shambles • But he claims that it was in fact a just war to combat German aggression”--Actor (in The Guardian): Sir Tony Robinson hits back at Michael Goves first world war comments” • Actor who played Baldrick says Gove is irresponsible for saying Blackadder is leftwing and paints war as misbegotten shambles--Blogger (in History Extra): Is Blackadder bad for First World War history? --Columnist (in Huffington Post): Michael Gove attacked For Blackadder comments on Left-wing whitewash of WW1 history You can see for yourself the punch and affront and antidote to insanity in the parodies referred to:--Blackadder: Good Luck Everyone--Monty Python: Ypres 1914 skitThe First World War by Hew Strachan direct link download german android price
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