The Making of the First World War Read online

  Copyright © 2012 Ian F. W. Beckett

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beckett, I.F.W. (Ian Frederick William)

  The making of the First World War/Ian F. W. Beckett.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978–0–300–16202–8 (cl : alk. paper)

  1. World War, 1914–1918. 2. World War, 1914–1918—Influence. I. Title.

  D521.B377 2012

  940.3—dc23

  2012017209

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Trina, who alone knows how much this book is her creation

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  List of Abbreviations

  Introduction

  1 The Silent Conqueror

  2 The Widening of the War

  3 The Making of a Nation

  4 The Man and the Hour

  5 The Power of Image

  6 The Death of Kings

  7 The Ungentlemanly Weapon

  8 The Path to Revolution

  9 The Shadow of the Bomber

  10 The Promised Land

  11 The Moral Imperative

  12 The Last Throw

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Exhausted Belgian soldiers from a dog-drawn machine gun section pictured at Louvain during the retreat to Antwerp, 20 August 1914 (IWM Q53207).

  2 Enver Pasha meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II on the former German battle cruiser, Goeben, in Constantinople, October 1917 (IWM Q 23732).

  3 The scene at Anzac Cove at about 0800 hours on 25 April 1915, the Australian 4th Battalion coming ashore together with the mules of the 26th Indian Mountain Battery (IWM Q112876).

  4 The Ministry of Munitions' National Shell Filling Factory No. 6 at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, 1916 (IWM Q30018).

  5 Geoffrey Malins films British and French leaders leaving Beauquesne Chateau on 12 August 1916 (IWM Q950).

  6 The funeral procession of Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna, 30 November 1916 (IWM HU94385).

  7 Torpedoes being loaded onto a German U-boat at Bruges, 1917 (IWM HU107214).

  8 An apprehensive crowd outside the Winter Place in St Petersburg, 29 July 1914, the day before announcement of full Russian mobilisation (IWM Q828180).

  9 London as photographed from a Gotha bomber on 7 July 1917 (IWM Q108954).

  10 Arthur Balfour leaving No. 10 Downing Street, 1918 (IWM Q30737).

  11 President and Mrs Wilson in a carriage outside the Mansion House in London, 28 December 1918 (IWM Q58363).

  12 Hindenburg and Ludendorff with the Kaiser at German General Headquarters, 1916 (IWM Q23746).

  All photographs courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

  1 Exhausted Belgian soldiers from a dog-drawn machine gun section pictured at Louvain during the retreat to Antwerp, 20 August 1914.

  2 Enver Pasha (right) meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II on the former German battle cruiser, Goeben, in Constantinople, October 1917.

  3 The scene at Anzac Cove, c.0800 hours on 25 April 1915, the Australian 4th Battalion coming ashore together with the mules of the 26th Indian Mountain Battery.

  4 The Ministry of Munitions' National Shell Filling Factory No. 6 at Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, 1916.

  5 Geoffrey Malins films British and French leaders leaving Beauquesne Chateau on 12 August 1916: King George V walks ahead with President Poincaré, while Haig and Joffre come down the steps.

  6 The funeral procession of Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna, 30 November 1916. Emperor Karl and Empress Zita with Crown Prince Otto, and the kings of Saxony, Bavaria and Bulgaria.

  7 Torpedoes being loaded onto a German U-boat at Bruges, 1917.

  8 An apprehensive crowd outside the Winter Place in St Petersburg, 29 July 1914, the day before the announcement of full Russian mobilisation.

  9 London as photographed from a Gotha bomber on 7 July 1917. St Paul's Cathedral is clearly visible to the lower left.

  10 Arthur Balfour leaving No. 10 Downing Street, 1918.

  11 President and Mrs Wilson in a carriage outside the Mansion House in London, 28 December 1918.

  12 Hindenburg (left) and Ludendorff (right) with the Kaiser at German General Headquarters, 1916.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  QUOTATIONS FROM Crown copyright material in the National Archives appear by permission of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. I also wish to acknowledge my thanks to the following for allowing me to consult and quote from archives in their possession and/or copyright: The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum; the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge; the National Library of Wales; and the National Maritime Museum.

  My thanks also go to Heather McCallum of Yale University Press for her original encouragement to undertake this book after a discussion on Philip Bell's work on Twelve Turning Points of the Second World War, and also for her patience when the manuscript was delayed. My thanks for editorial support also go to Rachael Lonsdale and Tami Halliday. Two anonymous readers provided thoughtful feedback on the original proposal, and two more on the draft manuscript. I have also had the opportunity to test out various chapters on the students of the University of Kent.

  My greatest thanks go to my wife, Trina, for her sterling work in helping me to lighten my usual literary style.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AEF American Expeditionary Force

  AIF Australian Imperial Force

  ANZAC Australian and New Zealand Army Corps

  AWM Australian War Memorial

  BEF British Expeditionary Force

  CID Committee of Imperial Defence

  CUP Committee of Union and Progress (Turkey)

  GQG Grand Quartier Général (French General Headquarters)

  GHQ General Headquarters

  GPO General Post Office

  IWM Imperial War Museum

  LADA London Air Defence Area

  LCC London County Council

  NCO Non-Commissioned Officer

  OHL Oberste Heeresleitung (German General Headquarters)

  RAF Royal Air Force

  RFC Royal Flying Corps

  RNAS Royal Naval Air Service

  RSSILA Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia.

  SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German Social Democratic Party)

  TNA The National Archives

  TsVPK Tsentral'nyi Voenno-Promyshlennyi Komitet (Russian Central War Industries Committee)

  VPK Voenno-Promyshlennya Komitet (Russian War Industries Committee)

  INTRODUCTION

  AT FIRST sight, Nieuport on the Belgian coast is hardly inspiring. It seems to sum up one French general's description of Flanders in 1914 as a monotonous countryside with an air of melancholic sadness melting almost imperceptibly into the grey waters of the North Sea.1 Two shipping channels, three drainage canals and the river Yser
merge together at the ‘Goosefoot’. It is hard to imagine that one of the most significant events of the First World War took place here. Two small monuments begin to suggest the importance of this desolate spot: one to a Belgian engineer, the other to a veteran waterman characterised as the hero of the ‘flooding’. It might be thought that this celebrates saving the countryside in the manner of the apocryphal Dutch boy and the dyke. In reality, it is a celebration of flooding the Belgian countryside in October 1914.

  The story is little known outside Belgium. In Britain the story of 1914 is one of the British army's initial retreat from Mons in August, the advance to the Aisne, and then its battles around Ypres in October and November 1914, of a thin line of depleted and bone-weary units clinging on desperately in the face of mass German assaults. In France, it is the story of the great losses during the battles of the frontiers in August, and the ‘miracle’ of the Marne in September as the Germans began to retreat when almost in sight of Paris. An abiding image for the French is the despatch of troops to the Marne front in Paris taxicabs. For the Germans, it is the failure of the opening offensive and the time of the Kindermord – the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ – the loss of the supposed schoolboy corps committed to the attempts to break through the British lines at Ypres. This had a profound impact on the young Adolf Hitler, serving in the 16th (Bavarian) Reserve Infantry Regiment. Yet it is the inundation of the Belgian countryside between Nieuport and Dixmude that was one of the major turning points of the war. The Germans had seized Antwerp, Ostend and Zeebrugge, and were poised to break through to the Channel ports of Calais and Dunkirk. Had they done so, it would have had the same result as in 1940, spelling the imminent defeat of Belgium and France, forcing the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), leaving Britain isolated, and heralding the possibility of a German invasion of Britain. Instead, it was the start of four years of deadlock on the Western Front.

  In a war usually characterised as one of enormous casualties resulting from the massive application of modern technology, the impact of a ‘silent conqueror’ seems unlikely. Inevitably, it is the dramatic battles and the extraordinary loss of life that will occur to many as the most significant episodes of the First World War. But, as the flooding of the Belgian countryside illustrates, great battles may not be the most decisive events in a war. Even what seemed momentous political decisions at the time may not mean that much in the longer term. What, then, does constitute a pivotal point in war?

  The most momentous changes that occurred as a result of the global conflict between 1914 and 1918 may not only have been less obvious to those who experienced them, but also remain effectively hidden from those who focus later only on the immediate consequences of the war. In the context of war, consideration of significant turning points should embrace all aspects of conflict, whether military, political, socio-economic, or cultural. A longer-term perspective will identify moments of far more historical significance than the immediate circumstances pertaining to a specific event. Emphatically, what matters in the shorter or longer term may not be simply those events assumed to have affected the actual course of a war. In that sense, the study of the First World War yields examples of both relatively well-known and readily accepted contemporary decision points, and also those longer-term consequences of events that may not be as well recognised. This book, then, is intended to provoke debate on the wider consequences of war by suggesting alternate ways of identifying key moments in a conflict. The familiar and conventional ways of looking at the war's most significant events are deliberately contrasted with less familiar episodes that also changed the course of history in the shorter or longer term. Even the familiar event, however, can yield a new interpretation.

  War has an undoubted capacity to bring about long-term as well as short-term historical change. The First World War as a whole was a pivotal event globally that shaped the twentieth century through its unexpected scale, intensity, character, and dislocation of peoples. In Britain, for example, those who spoke of a ‘Great War’ in 1913 would have meant the struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France a century before. Both the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) were global conflicts, but their longer-term legacies were not as great as those of events between 1914 and 1918. This new global conflict destroyed four empires – those of Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey. While that of Germany was a recent construct, the others were of long standing. The consequences were profound, not least in the Middle East, whose politics today remain conditioned by events between 1914 and 1918. The war gravely weakened Europe's influence generally, even if the United States chose to wield its new-found power in financial rather than military or diplomatic terms. Without the First World War, communism would probably not have triumphed in Russia, or fascism been given its opportunity in Germany and Italy. In that sense, the world as shaped by the Great War endured until the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991. The Second World War further shaped global development, but along similar lines. But is it conceivable to contemplate the Second World War occurring without the First?

  It was a global event of unquestionable importance. Naturally, global war will always have a greater impact than more limited conflicts, though the second most destructive war in history after the Second World War was the Taiping Rebellion, an internal civil war in China between 1851 and 1866 that cost perhaps 20 million lives.2 Longer-term evolutionary and structural trends in history clearly need to be borne in mind alongside the immediate changes resulting from decisions made at a particular time, and pure contingency, in assessing the degree to which war either accelerated or, conceivably, hindered changes that would have occurred anyway over the course of time. Demography, for example, appears almost immune to the effects of war. There were approximately 10 million war dead in the First World War. Neither this, nor the estimated 21 million deaths from the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which had little connection with the war, had any discernible impact on the long-term demographic trend. Similarly, the estimated 57 million war dead of the Second World War were of little account in the long-term. The global population was about a billion by 1850; it had doubled by 1930; has since doubled again; and probably doubled again by the end of the first decade of this century. Scientific and technological development, or industrialisation and urbanisation, will also promote change whether stimulated by war or otherwise. Ideology has, too, played a significant part in shaping the modern world. The most dramatic long-term change will be more apparent in states that are defeated, occupied or newly created as a result of war. Through accidents of location, some states are likely to suffer far more disruption than others. States that emerge victorious also have less inclination to change, and are more likely to revert to pre-war practices.3

  What, then, of the great moments of decision or significance within a global conflict? ‘Decisive’ battle provides a ready metaphor. In the past, war has generally been interpreted in the light of contemporary events. Many British historians writing in the nineteenth century regarded the British system of liberal parliamentary democracy as the ideal form of government. They interpreted British history as an inevitable progression towards this particular end. In terms of military history, Sir Edward Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, published in 1851, exemplifies the same approach.4 Such ideas still play a major, if unwitting, part in ‘popular’ military history that depicts combatants either improving or declining over time, being technologically advanced or retarded, or one side learning the supposedly clear lessons of the past while the other either ignores or misreads them.

  Of course, there are military turning points in any conflict. Given that the popular image of the First World War in Britain remains one of mindless futility, it is perhaps inevitable that dramatic battles and the extraordinary loss of life involved – as on the Somme and at Verdun in 1916, or at Passchendaele in 1917 – will occur to man
y as the most significant events. But great battles may not be the most decisive events. Despite the British obsession with the first day of the battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, it was hardly a turning point in a military sense. Some of those historians who now look for a British ‘learning curve’ in France and Flanders between 1914 and 1918 have identified the Somme as marking its beginning. Some, too, have seen the de facto attrition strategy adopted on the Somme as significant in determining eventual victory. Such arguments are unconvincing.5

  By contrast, given its undoubted continued impact on the British psyche, 1 July 1916 can be seen as a cultural turning point, but for the fact that it is a relatively recently developed memory of the war. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was Passchendaele that aroused more controversy as a representation of all that was deemed wrong with the British conduct of the war on the Western Front. The Somme only re-emerged into the collective memory in the 1960s.6 While the first day of a major offensive has often caught the imagination, this is hardly true of the last day as continuing operations inevitably petered out. On the other hand, another military fiasco such as the landing of the Anzacs – the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – at Gallipoli in April 1915 was a much more significant contemporary cultural turning point. It established a real sense of antipodean identity with lasting cultural and political implications. Gallipoli would have been a different kind of turning point had the campaign succeeded. Even after the now much vaunted British achievements of the ‘Hundred Days’ between August and November 1918 – driving the German army back from the territory it had occupied since 1914 – the front line was still continuous.7