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Dreylad posted:MacMillan argues in her book that Wilhelm kept writing about how he hoped for peace, firing off letters to the other rulers about how this crisis was dreadful and we all need to work together, but when it came time to actually make a decision about whether or not to push towards war throughout the crisis, he either didn't act or didn't choose a peaceful solution. That's about as close as I've seen to "The Kaiser wanted peace." Wilhelm was pretty much an idiot and may have had actual mental problems that led to his sporadic behavior.
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Feb 22, 2014 00:48
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Wilhelm was pretty much an idiot and may have had actual mental problems that led to his sporadic behavior. Didn't he develop depression after that stupid interview he did?
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Feb 22, 2014 00:50
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Kavak posted:Didn't he develop depression after that stupid interview he did? Could you be a little more specific about which stupid interview? I kid, I kid; I know you meant the disastrous Daily Telegraph interview.
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Feb 22, 2014 01:24
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Comstar posted:So after the disasters in everyone's empires, why did Austria-Hungry not fall into revolution, or have their army go on strike like the French army did in 1917? Austria-Hungary was partitioned. Austria had a period of serious unrest which ended in a republic which was eventually overthrown and blargh, and Hungary had a "peaceful" revolution when the social-democrats and communists joined their seats in the new Hungarian parliament and wrote a new constitution before being promptly crushed by reactionaries. A lot of the Balkans territory was effectively annexed by the Serbs, forming Yugoslavia. If what you're asking is how they managed not to succumb to internal pressure during the war, probably in the same way as the other major belligerents; a lot of the potentially seditious elements were dying in droves at the front, the entrenched elites didn't really mind the war so much, and they kept hoping that they could actually win. The Russian revolution erupted because Russia seriously needed a revolution (and once people realised that they could throw the Tsar, they also realised that they could end the war), and the French have had a history of aggressive activism and strikes since the first republic.
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Feb 22, 2014 15:11
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Anyone remember the Young Indiana Jones tv show? They had a few episodes set during World War 1, including one at the clusterfuck that was the Battle of Verdun. Those episodes, and Tardi's comics on the trenches, formed a lot of my early ideas of what the war was like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBqD7UHncVo
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Feb 22, 2014 16:27
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Kemper Boyd posted:I think the summarization in Blackadder Goes Forth was pretty good. To paraphrase: Makes you wonder just how loving insane MAD was/is.
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Feb 22, 2014 18:08
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Orange Devil posted:Makes you wonder just how loving insane MAD was/is. MAD has worked somewhat better in practice. The thing is that if things go south you can surrender to an army with your country intact. Can't do the same to a nuclear arsenal.
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Feb 22, 2014 22:04
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Neat thread! I've recently become fascinated by World War 1, mostly because of how wonderful the books are. Here are some recommendations: Both Robert Massie's Dreadnought and Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers have already been recommended in this thread, and with good reason. Dreadnought is nominally about the naval race between Germany and Britan in the run-up to the war, but is really a sprawling personality-driven popular history of the period. (The HMS Dreadnought does not arrive on the scene until the story is more than half over.) It's incredibly engaging, although the Anglo-German focus does mean that Massie's tale of the war's origin is framed around two countries that were at the periphery of the Balkan Crisis that brought about the war. I also wonder whether Massie's love of a compelling narrative sometimes leads for him to over- or under-emphasize events to better serve the plot. Clarke's narrative in The Sleepwalkers is much more balanced (both in terms of nations covered and in terms of viewpoint) and is only slightly less engaging. I also support the recommendations for Barbra Tuchman's classic The Guns of August and John Keegan's The First World War. (And I would recommend Massie's Dreadnought follow-up Castles of Steel to anyone interested in the war at sea.) However, I give my strongest recommendation to Andrew Gordon's The Rules of the Game, an incredibly detailed account of the Battle of Jutland that is also the story of how British Naval culture and attitudes in "the long calm lee of Trafalgar" were responsible for the the Royal Navy's various catastrophic and near-catastrophic blunders during the battle. Gordon has little to say about how the war came about or how it was conducted, but he has much to say about military culture. (And, really, about any management culture. Business school students should be reading this instead of Sun Tsu.) It is a testimony to Gordon's skills as an author that he can make so many pages about signal protocols seem so interesting.
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Feb 22, 2014 23:29
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Someone mentioned the spanish flu and I was wondering if it had an effect in hastening the end of the war. Also was it spread so easily because of the war?
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Feb 22, 2014 23:31
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Orange Devil posted:Makes you wonder just how loving insane MAD was/is. It sometimes almost feels like WWI was the turn of the century equivalent of MAD - once diplomacy had failed and all of the heads of state had pushed the metaphorical button, it set off a series of events that committed everyone's armed forces into actions that would eventually grind them all down to nubs and no one could stop it, even it was happening in very very slow motion compared to the mere hours of a nuclear exchange. effectual posted:Someone mentioned the spanish flu and I was wondering if it had an effect in hastening the end of the war. Also was it spread so easily because of the war? It definitely had an effect on the war, as it killed so many people that it contributed to further draining the strength of the affected nations - this was at a time when the blockade on Germany had been going on for a while now.
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Feb 23, 2014 04:40
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Mass starvation in Germany due to the blockade was a bigger deal. At least that has always been my understanding.
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Feb 23, 2014 06:14
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Shbobdb posted:Mass starvation in Germany due to the blockade was a bigger deal. At least that has always been my understanding. Oh yes, no argument there whatsoever. I wasn't speaking as if it was some kind of competition, only that the Allies were (marginally?) better equipped to deal with a pandemic.
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Feb 23, 2014 06:24
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Dreylad posted:MacMillan argues in her book that Wilhelm kept writing about how he hoped for peace, firing off letters to the other rulers about how this crisis was dreadful and we all need to work together, but when it came time to actually make a decision about whether or not to push towards war throughout the crisis, he either didn't act or didn't choose a peaceful solution. That's about as close as I've seen to "The Kaiser wanted peace." It should be remembered that as the July Crisis was coming to a head, everybody basically was entering arsecover-mode. A lot of the statements and letters from various politicians in that period were basically designed to preemptively prove that their own country didn't want a war and more imporantly didn't start the war. Therefore one can't really prove much going by such statements.
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Feb 23, 2014 16:42
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Install Windows posted:At the start, we were just trading with anyone, though over time it both got harder to get stuff over into the Central Powers (after all, most of the alllied powers were simply more convenient to send to at the first place, and then naval interception started). Of course by war's end, hell even by the time the US officially declared war, there was a lot more trade to the "allied" nations. The US actually had such large amounts of trade and loans with the Allied powers that a congressional committee in the 1930's (the Nye Committee) found it to have been a significant (if not the main) influence on why the US entered the war in the first place.
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Feb 23, 2014 17:33
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Cerebral Bore posted:It should be remembered that as the July Crisis was coming to a head, everybody basically was entering arsecover-mode. A lot of the statements and letters from various politicians in that period were basically designed to preemptively prove that their own country didn't want a war and more imporantly didn't start the war. Although it's true that there was a lot of rear end-covering and you can't go by what politicians put in their letters to other politicians, I think it's fairly safe to say that the kaiser genuinely didn't want a war, but was manipulated and out-maneuvered by the militaristic elements of the Imperial German government. Remember, his government wanted him out of the way so badly that they told him to go ahead and take his vacation to Norway in the midst of the crisis because that would send a message to the world that Germany did not consider going to war over Serbia a possibility, and he actually did it. I think it's a lot more believable that the kaiser was stupid and emotionally stunted, and that made it easy for guys like von Moltke (who wanted to do the Schlieffen Plan so bad) to move events toward war. After Serbia accepted the ultimatum, the kaiser was delighted, but his government was pressuring Austria to attack Serbia anyway. That's the reason I keep returning to France's blank check to Russia and the Russian mobilization against Germany. Russia's mobilization was an absolutely boneheaded move that, in an era where the prevailing military doctrine relied on speed and overwhelming force in the vein of 1870, virtually guaranteed that Germany would attack before having to face a fully-mobilized Russian army. The German government was desperate to make it look like Russia had started the war, and the mobilization gave them that excuse, both in hopes of keeping Britain neutral, and because the only way the Socialists would support war was if Germany were attacked by Russia.
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Feb 23, 2014 19:13
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Cerebral Bore posted:It should be remembered that as the July Crisis was coming to a head, everybody basically was entering arsecover-mode. A lot of the statements and letters from various politicians in that period were basically designed to preemptively prove that their own country didn't want a war and more imporantly didn't start the war. On this note, we should also remember that at the 11th hour when everyone had mobilized and indeed after Austria had already declared war on Serbia and started it offensive, both Germany and France tried to stall their declarations of war so that the other would be seen as "the aggressor" who fired first. As I recall, France blinked first and declared war about an hour or so before Germany did. Shbobdb posted:Mass starvation in Germany due to the blockade was a bigger deal. At least that has always been my understanding. Hunger absolutely was more of a deciding factor than the influenze, though that epidemic broke earlier among the German army than elsewhere as they had been on short rations for so long. It was one of the several contributing factors for why the Ludendorff offensives ran out of steam, in fact. The effects of prolonged rationing was so severe both materially and psychologically on the homefront that the next time around, Hitler was very slow to introduce food controls as he remembered how they had eroded civilian support in the first war, and also because he was an idiot.
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Feb 23, 2014 19:24
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Captain_Maclaine posted:On this note, we should also remember that at the 11th hour when everyone had mobilized and indeed after Austria had already declared war on Serbia and started it offensive, both Germany and France tried to stall their declarations of war so that the other would be seen as "the aggressor" who fired first. As I recall, France blinked first and declared war about an hour or so before Germany did. Don't forget that before the declaration of war between Germany and France, Germany had already begun to invade Belgium.
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Feb 23, 2014 19:38
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VitalSigns posted:Don't forget that before the declaration of war between Germany and France, Germany had already begun to invade Belgium. What a strange way to mention Germany's move to defend Belgian neutrality from French aggression. No, seriously. That's more or less what the Kaiser said to justify the invasion to King Albert, who's response was a slightly more polite version "that's a steaming pile of bullshit, Bill."
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Feb 23, 2014 19:48
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Comstar posted:So after the disasters in everyone's empires, why did Austria-Hungry not fall into revolution, or have their army go on strike like the French army did in 1917? I heard that there were cases, where entire units put down arms and started marching home (they were all shot in the end), though I cannot offer citation. There were also nationalistic defections, ranging from individual soldiers sneaking across the front to battalions marching in broad daylight to jon the Russian empire. As for revolutions. Austria-Hungary was so ethnically fragmented that the state ethnicities would lose a lot in any revolution. Other ethnicities were just supressed by force.
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Feb 23, 2014 21:17
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Captain_Maclaine posted:What a strange way to mention Germany's move to defend Belgian neutrality from French aggression. Especially since the British had just explicitly asked France and Germany if they considered ever invading Beligum. France said no quickly while Germany demurred.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:21
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For a war that was hardly black and white, Germany did seem to go out of their way to be really dickish about things.
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Feb 23, 2014 23:26
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I was doing some digging, and I though about putting the reparations at Versailles in comparable terms. The initial treaty (which I will roll with for now) was 132 billion marks or in today's terms 442 billion dollars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles). In 1925, their gdp was roughly $350 B in 2014 dollars ($45b in 1960 dollars, another figure from 1913 is $237 B in 1990 dollars.) The treaty terms themselves at least in terms of the 1925 economy (which actually was after a relative recover from 1918) was 126% of GDP, this was in addition to any other debts. By 1921, in reality this was reduced to 50 B marks or 46% of 1925 GDP (omitting "C" bonds), and in the end Germany paid 20 B or 20% of GDP. I certainly welcome some better data, but it gives a perspective on exactly the type of weight that was being put on post-war Germany. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Feb 24, 2014 |
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Feb 23, 2014 23:51
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Along those lines, you can read Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace for a contemporaneous view of what Versailles meant. I'm about halfway through it, and it's a bit of a slog once you start getting to his back of the envelope estimates on coal and iron output (for instance) but he does a good job of breaking down why the harshness of the treaty would strangle German republicanism in the crib. He also says that the Allies pretty much reneged on their Armistice terms; the Germans thought they were getting Wilson's Fourteen Points, but by the time of the peace conference France was able to shove what Keynes calls a "Carthaginian peace" down everyone's throats.
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Feb 24, 2014 00:14
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I wonder what posters here would have Clemenceau to do. Declare victory and french bankruptcy? It is bit easier to be wise and accommodating, when the streets are not baying for the German blood and the countries are not threatened by collapse.
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Feb 24, 2014 12:32
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So I ran across this on youtube while looking at videos totally unrelated to the First World War, funny how that happens sometimes. It's okay, I don't really know how well the series is, I did end up watching the video he had for Capitalism and Socialism and it was middle of the road. Overall I'd say it's on par for something for High Schoolers, or getting a starting point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPZQ0LAlR4
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Feb 24, 2014 13:42
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Gladi posted:I wonder what posters here would have Clemenceau to do. Declare victory and french bankruptcy? It is bit easier to be wise and accommodating, when the streets are not baying for the German blood and the countries are not threatened by collapse. Even if you grant the need for giant reparations, the Allies went about it in a particularly dumb way by dismantling the country instead of just quoting an indemnity figure to be paid (a la 1870).
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Feb 24, 2014 14:42
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Agronox posted:Even if you grant the need for giant reparations, the Allies went about it in a particularly dumb way by dismantling the country instead of just quoting an indemnity figure to be paid (a la 1870). This is what gets me about the people that go on about how Versailles wasn't that bad, it's not as much about the amount owed it's about how they wanted to be repaid.
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Feb 24, 2014 16:24
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Eh, the stupid thing about the Versailles settlement is that people think that the harsh settlement directly caused Nazi's and WWII. It was certainly a nice propaganda piece, but things actually were getting better in Interwar Germany before everywhere went to poo poo in '29.
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Feb 24, 2014 19:51
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Eh, the stupid thing about the Versailles settlement is that people think that the harsh settlement directly caused Nazi's and WWII. It was certainly a nice propaganda piece, but things actually were getting better in Interwar Germany before everywhere went to poo poo in '29. I don't think it's that crazy (apart from the "hurr hyperinflation" types).The Weimar Republic entered the world under heavy duress when it would've made a little more sense for the Allies to nurture it. A mistake we almost repeated with the Morgenthau Plan.
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Feb 24, 2014 20:25
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Agronox posted:I don't think it's that crazy (apart from the "hurr hyperinflation" types).The Weimar Republic entered the world under heavy duress when it would've made a little more sense for the Allies to nurture it.
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Feb 24, 2014 20:46
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Unluckyimmortal posted:What does "hurr hyperinflation" mean, anyway? The (relatively popular) opinion that the Nazis got to power because of hyperinflation caused by Versailles. The hyperinflation crisis mostly happened in 1923 and was long gone by the time the Nazis were getting big electoral returns.
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Feb 24, 2014 20:51
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I'm surprised many people actually believe that. On the other hand, missing the first couple years of the Roaring Twenties certainly couldn't have helped.
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Feb 24, 2014 20:57
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Agronox posted:I don't think it's that crazy (apart from the "hurr hyperinflation" types).The Weimar Republic entered the world under heavy duress when it would've made a little more sense for the Allies to nurture it. It made things harder, but there's no way to point to Versailles and say that Germany was essentially guaranteed to have a strongly Nationalist revanchist government that was going to kick off another World War. To say that it does ignores everything that actually happened in Germany between the wars, and actually misses the single greatest lesson that should have been learned: Austerity Does Not Work.
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Feb 24, 2014 21:02
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Zohar posted:The (relatively popular) opinion that the Nazis got to power because of hyperinflation caused by Versailles. The hyperinflation crisis mostly happened in 1923 and was long gone by the time the Nazis were getting big electoral returns. Yeah, it was the great depression that directly caused the rise of the Nazis, hyperinflation was a part of cluster of factors that lead to the far and hard right gaining increasing strength during the early 1920s. (Classic example: Beer Hall Putsch, The Nazis were promptly banned though of course.) The DNVP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_National_People%27s_Party though went from 10.3% of the vote in 1919 to 20.5% in December 1924 (they were almost the largest party in the May 1924 election).
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Feb 24, 2014 21:03
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Ardennes posted:Yeah, it was the great depression that directly caused the rise of the Nazis, hyperinflation was a part of cluster of factors that lead to the far and hard right gaining increasing strength during the early 1920s. (Classic example: Beer Hall Putsch, The Nazis were promptly banned though of course.) The hyperinflation also caused the bizarre phenomenon of 'Inflationsheiliger' or inflation prophets, who were basically charismatic nutcases with ultra-extreme political views who briefly garnered huge followings during the period. In fact Hitler was originally viewed as one of them, I think. Michael Burleigh talks about one of them in Sacred Causes, Ludwig Haeusser or 'Louis the Christ, King of Germany and Emperor of the World': "On one occasion a very drunk Haeusser leaned over the lectern in the middle of a public lecture and vomited over the audience, whereupon several young women rushed to get mops and buckets to preserve the stomach contents of 'the saviour'." And one of his speeches: quote:Blood! Blood! Blood! Blood! 
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Feb 24, 2014 21:27
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PittTheElder posted:It made things harder, but there's no way to point to Versailles and say that Germany was essentially guaranteed to have a strongly Nationalist revanchist government that was going to kick off another World War. To say that it does ignores everything that actually happened in Germany between the wars, and actually misses the single greatest lesson that should have been learned: Austerity Does Not Work. What happened in Germany, then? What made the Great Depression bring down the republic? What brought the Nazis to power, instead of the DNVP, or the communists? I know this is kind of outside the scope of the thread, but I'd like to get some kind of consensus on what Versailles was and was not responsible for.
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Feb 24, 2014 21:51
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Ardennes posted:I was doing some digging, and I though about putting the reparations at Versailles in comparable terms. That's around 2-3% of GDP per year, large but not economy destroying large.
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Feb 24, 2014 22:20
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Soviet Space Dog posted:That's around 2-3% of GDP per year, large but not economy destroying large. I would actually disagree especially since Germany also had other debts, and that we are talking about a budget rather an economy.
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Feb 24, 2014 22:40
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Ardennes posted:I would actually disagree especially since Germany also had other debts, and that we are talking about a budget rather an economy. France transferred roughly 20% of GDP in 3 years after the Franco-Prussian war, it didn't cause France to explode.
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Feb 24, 2014 22:48
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Kavak posted:What happened in Germany, then? What made the Great Depression bring down the republic? What brought the Nazis to power, instead of the DNVP, or the communists? I know this is kind of outside the scope of the thread, but I'd like to get some kind of consensus on what Versailles was and was not responsible for. Farmers. Right wing Farmers in 1930 stopped voting for the likes of the DNVP, because the Nazis were promising better tariffs, price controls and subsidies for agrarian regions, while the DNVP was doing jack poo poo. A lot of Nazi propaganda during 28-30 went against government and other right wing parties cures for the latest crises. These were talking about cutting services and subsidies, Nazis were promising the opposite. In 1930 the Nazis went from the fringe to a party with a large representation, in terms of voters and members of parliament. From then on many people saw the writing on the wall. There was attempts to ban people from joining and participating in the Nazi part, and Communist party. In 31 they even found documents from nazi members that mentioned a violent coup against the republic, but nothing was done because Hindenburg would never deport Hitler, and by that point various Junkers were "okay" with Hitler. He wasn't a communist, neither a social democract, so he couldn't be that bad. The paramilitary wing of the nazi party was still banned though. In the end it came down to Hindenburg. In 32 with the Presidential elections, much to the dissatisfaction of the old general, right wing parties all put forward their own candidates, and Hindenburg became the candidate for Catholics and socialists(in his mind). Hindenburg blamed the then chancellor Brunning for failing to unite the conservative movement, and of trying to give away agrarian land to the poor.(Hindenburg himself was a junker) Hindenburg gets rid of Brunning and puts his own conservative friends in charge of the republic, namely Franz von Papen. Papen and other ministers decided that the republic was over and started to dissolve the system, something that Hitler was banging about years before. Papen and cohorts then looked on to Hitler and his party as the right man/people for the job of fighting Communism, and removing once and for all republicanism from Germany. The ban of the paramilitary wings was lifted. This immediately ended up backfiring when the Nazis started killing people on the streets, and making their riots public. Despite all this the Left still was around, and now Papen was feeling the noose on his neck. So Papen comes up with an idea. He has a talk with his friend Hindenburg, and makes a deal with him. Hitler would become chancellor, but he could only have two ministers, the rest had to be conservatives and Papen himself would be vice-chancellor. Hitler agreed, rest is history. So really, we ended up with Nazis cause a WW1 ex-general was more afraid of social democrats and communists, than he was of fascists.
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Feb 24, 2014 23:09
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