We’re nearing the end of the 100 years since the start of World War I. The London Telegraph recently ran a fine series of twelve articles by historian Saul David on the subject, with particular attention to the Kaiser’s need and strange desire to acquire control of the European continent by engaging in warfare that would give him control of the Balkans and ports on the Black Sea, with entry into the Mediterranean through the Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardenelles, as well as control of the western seaboard and ports of most of Europe.
Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to do empire-building, but he failed. He used the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife as an excuse to start his roll across Europe to acquire control of the European continent and its ports, with assistance from Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. Most of what I’ve found was glossed over in my high school history classes as if it didn’t matter. But it did matter. If you want to understand what followed slightly more than a decade after the end of World War I, and why things are the way they are now, you need to pursue this history.
This is a link to the archives of the London Telegraph’s original articles about World War I, published as the war progressed. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ww1-archive/
Here’s a link to historian Saul David’s series about the causes of World War I. He takes a closer look at how that war progressed.
I’m just glad that there is access to some of this now, because otherwise, it might sit moldering in drawers and on bookshelves, ignored by everyone but the curious like me. It’s my impression that the German troops went into the battlefield with no real understanding of why they were there. They were simply ordered to the front to fight a war that had no valid purpose, such as defense, behind it. The call-up for mobilization was done under orders of the Kaiser, who had fired Otto von Bismarck. There is, in that second Telegraph link, an article with a photograph that shows both military and civilian Germans in a crowd, listening to the mobilization orders, some of them looking rather bewildered. They answered the call, but to what purpose?
I think that the archived photo collections now online at those links, and those in this paragraph, can give you a better view than a single photo posted here. The famous Christmas Eve truce, a spontaneous pause in warfare by troops on both sides of the front lines, did take place on Dec. 24, 1914. The TIME collection at this link includes that brief pause in fighting. http://time.com/3643889/christmas-truce-1914/
World War I was a war of aggression by Germany, the same as was WWII, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as the excuse to make war. Germany had earlier signed a secret treaty of alliance with the Ottoman government in Turkey. Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary had already declared war on Serbia and the Black Hand over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb and member of the Black Hand, and wanted Germany’s aid in that conflict. The Kaiser gave it willingly.
Britain, France and Russia had formed the Triple Entente before 1914, and Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had formed the Triple Alliance.
The rulers of Britain (George V), Russia (Tsar Nicholas) and Germany (Kaiser Wilhelm II) were cousins. They knew each other quite well. The Kaiser, however, despised everything British including his cousin George V, did not really like his cousin Nicholas II, and had a love-hate relationship with his own mother, Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky. But now, without the previous interference of his British grandmother, the late Queen Victoria, nothing stood in the way of his starting what amounts to a family quarrel, one that cost many millions of lives in the end by warfare and the post-war spread of the Spanish flu, destroyed the legitimate governments of Russia and Germany, and opened the paths to Hitler’s Reich and Lenin’s establishment of the Communist party as the ruling government in Russia. See the Telegraph link above for the archived 1917 articles for Lenin’s tactic toward his British ‘allies’. An enlightening Telegraph headline from 1917 says that Lenin barred British citizens from leaving Russia.
In Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin made Ludwig Dürr his chief designer at the Zeppelin factory when the Count’s first engineer, Hugo Kübler, who had designed LZ-1, refused to fly in the airship he had created, which was named after Zeppelin.
The Kaiser saw the airships as more useful than airplanes because of their ability to carry large loads of munitions at low cost, and to go long distances at great heights with no interference. Planes of that time period such as the Sopwith Camel were unable to reach the heights at which the Zeppelins were used for bombing runs – as much as 11,000 feet – which meant that a machine gunner posted on a Zeppelin could easily take out a biplane before it ever got near the airship.
Franz Shrapnel was the developer of bombs carrying up to 2,000 pounds of shrapnel carried by the Zeppelin fleet. The largest such bomb was a 3,000 pounder. The airships were manned by machine gunners who could shoot down the planes trying to attack them during bombing runs. This worked until the UK’s biplanes were equipped with stronger motors that allowed them to climb high enough to attack the airships. (I thought you all might like to know the source of the term ‘shrapnel’.)
In Waiting For Daylight, H.M. Tomlinson describes the sight of the nighttime aerial bombardment as almost a distraction from seeing the Pleiades in the London night sky, when everyone had gathered in the streets because shrapnel bombs were falling from the sky, and searchlights were trying to find the airships. He reported that he could see sparks of fire on strings descending to the earth, and knew that they were shrapnel bombs brought across the Channel from Europe. There was a ‘lights out’ policy in effect at that time, to try to hinder the aerial bombing runs from the Germans, but the pilots of the Zeppelins used the ‘glow’ of the Thames as a guide for bombing raids. This was from 1915 to 1916.
The Battle of Cambria ended 12-4-1917. It was the successful use of tanks at Cambria by the British Army that brought this to a quick conclusion, much more successfully than the same attempts in the sticky, muddy fields of Flanders in the 1916 Battle of the Somme. They didn’t function at Somme as well as they could have. The tanks, running on treads copied from farm tractors, were far more successful at Cambria.
This introduction of British-built tanks was the real start of mechanized land warfare. J.R.R. Tolkien’s first sight of them and their destructive firepower partly inspired his descriptions of war losses and battle scenes in Lord Of the Rings.
While the United States avoided the European War in the beginning, there was a massive pro-war sentiment in the USA, that flared into demands addressed to Woodrow Wilson to enter that War when the Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat in the Atlantic. H. M. Tomlinson observes that Walt Whitman’s poems in Leaves of Grass somehow indicated that the USA was involved long before we arrived in Europe, and therefore, he could no long refer to Americans as latecomers to the War. Since the poems in the section titled ‘War Poems’ seem to have been written post-Civil War, I’m not sure how Tomlinson derived that connection, but I’ll accept it.
Essentially, Wilhelm II, who had fired Otto von Bismarck and let his leading Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff dictate policy, was an incompetent leader at best and a publicity-seeking attention hound, letting those two run the war while he himself lost the support of the military and the public, and was eventually forced to abdicate. His cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, was the same – out of touch with his own people and the military, making it far too easy for a malignant creature like Lenin to imprison him and his family and execute them by a firing squad. Wilhelm’s sloppy ideas of management resulted in his forced abdication from the German government and opened the door for Hitler’s seizure of power and the rise of the Reich. Nicholas’s incompetence and complete disconnection from the Russian people led to his overthrow and the slaughter of him and his entire family, while Lenin drove his brutal, murderous path into existence. And we know well the legacy left to us which followed these events.
I think H.M. Tomlinson describes it quite well:
“When the crafty but ignorant Russian generals got from the Czar the order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it, they did not know it, but that was when they released Lenin. And who on earth can now inveigle that terrific portent safely under lid and lock again?” – H.M. Tomlinson, Waiting For Daylight, 1922
Who, indeed?
