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midnight77 posted:He hasn't been this insulting to the Hohenzollerns or the Hapsburgs, so it might just be that. Still, it is interesting learning that, for instance, Imperial Germany had no other mobilization plans beyond the Schlifen plan, in that a mobilization necessarily, because of time tables, involved invading Belgium. They literally had no contingency plans. They had numerous plans over the preceding decades that were constantly evolving. Due to the political and strategic situation (two front war, Russia gaining strength) they had mostly abandoned those other plans and focussed on the so-called Schlieffen Plan. The plan for a focus on Russia, while staying defensive against France had only been retired in 1913.
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Apr 29, 2024 23:30
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DTurtle posted:Yes and no. This is correct, I'd also note that the original "Schlieffen Plan" that Schlieffen wrote up in 1905 was for a one-front war against France and had some meaningful differences from the 1914 plan. The term is often misused when talking about German WWI planning because a lot changed after Moltke replaced Schlieffen.
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Apr 30, 2024 00:17
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It's easy to imagine someone in the General Staff sniffing and explaining that you only need one mobilization plan if it's the right one.
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Apr 30, 2024 00:35
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Anyway if you are interested in WWI I super recommend you dig out Gerhard Ritter's Sword and Sceptre book. It's very big and thick, and I don't know if anything is outdated in it, but he had an unique look into the extremely dysfunctional and darkly comedic German government process. Ritter's probably weakest when he tries to assess the thinkings of the allies, for once, but his stuff on the Germans is really great and rarely considered in English language books. It's really overturned my understanding of the submarine war.
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Apr 30, 2024 00:43
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And also like the military planning is only one aspect of it, German diplomats tried really hard to get Russia to stay out of it; and so on.
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Apr 30, 2024 00:53
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Zorak of Michigan posted:It's easy to imagine someone in the General Staff sniffing and explaining that you only need one mobilization plan if it's the right one. I mean, that’s kind of true. They were just 31 years too early for it.
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Apr 30, 2024 02:07
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Why? You can always make more sons of Osman if you really need them, and coups and rival claims are very, very dangerous to the Sultan, much more so than having an ill-prepared heir. (It won't be your problem, you've ascended to Paradise!) I'm going to guess it's I,Claudius, but I remember someone speculating that the reason Augustus chose Tiberius as his heir and Tiberius, Caligula, was that by having someone a bit less pleasant that yourself inheriting your empire means your reign appears more glorious by comparison. Probably more an issue if you have reason to think you'll be deified of course. That said, I'd like to visit the Emperor Germanicus timeline, or the one where Titus lasts more than a year.
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Apr 30, 2024 02:51
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midnight77 posted:He goes on a lot about the murder of heirs, their confinement without education, the harems, and the general drunkenness and debauchery of the sultans up to 1914. He mentions one sultan that would just shoot at random people from the palace walls. Is it above-baseline horrific if an aristocracy sets its baselines as "the second sons who survive get absolutely no functional learning, just servant girls"?
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Apr 30, 2024 03:30
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I forget who said this but, the reason Justinian's heirs couldn't do what Justinian did is because they inherited an empire that Justinian had set up for himself to run. I think you could apply this to Augustus as well. Roman bureaucracy was tiny by comparison to say Han China, but a long term sitting Emperor is going to create serious inertia that his successor was going to struggle with, regardless of their talents. A ship the size of the Roman Empire is going to turn like a supertanker in rough seas.
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Apr 30, 2024 03:32
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Elissimpark posted:I'm going to guess it's I,Claudius, but I remember someone speculating that the reason Augustus chose Tiberius as his heir and Tiberius, Caligula, was that by having someone a bit less pleasant that yourself inheriting your empire means your reign appears more glorious by comparison. Probably more an issue if you have reason to think you'll be deified of course.
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Apr 30, 2024 06:39
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Hot take: the Schlieffen/Moltke plan was probably actually the best plan Germany could have come up with without having someone with prescience on staff. With the benefit of hindsight the optimal plan is possibly to go entirely defensive on the West, do whatever it takes to keep Britain out of the war as long as possible, and try to pull off and exploit a Big Tannenberg in the East. France throws away a large chunk of its army to no effect in its 1914 campaigns and you continuously offer peace and maybe concessions on Alsace-Lorraine. This of course all requires you to be gay black Imperial Germany etc etc.
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Apr 30, 2024 08:07
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Alchenar posted:Hot take: the Schlieffen/Moltke plan was probably actually the best plan Germany could have come up with without having someone with prescience on staff. That's pretty much what every Kaiser Wilhelm SI does over on AH.com.
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Apr 30, 2024 08:14
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Alchenar posted:Hot take: the Schlieffen/Moltke plan was probably actually the best plan Germany could have come up with without having someone with prescience on staff. Even so, for a few hours on August 1, Emperor Wilhelm II. wanted the German Army to go with the (abandoned) plan of attacking Russia first, because he received information that Great Britain and France would stay neutral if Germany respected the neutrality of France. This turned out to be a misunderstanding and so the Schlieffen-Plan was implemented.
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Apr 30, 2024 09:54
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I've been looking for books that analyze and critique the conduct of single modern wars from a grand strategic perspective, and I've honestly been having a surprisingly hard time of it, even for WWII. O'Brien's How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II mostly looks to be focused on applying an economic lens, though that in itself is a worthy topic.
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Apr 30, 2024 10:39
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Aren't wars won with logistics?
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Apr 30, 2024 10:46
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FPyat posted:I've been looking for books that analyze and critique the conduct of single modern wars from a grand strategic perspective, and I've honestly been having a surprisingly hard time of it, even for WWII. O'Brien's How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II mostly looks to be focused on applying an economic lens, though that in itself is a worthy topic. When Titans Clashed by Glantz - about USSR v Nazis - may be what you're looking for.
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Apr 30, 2024 15:44
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Cessna posted:When Titans Clashed by Glantz - about USSR v Nazis - may be what you're looking for. It is a fantastic overview of WW2 from the Soviet view. Since it is based on tons and tons of stuff from Soviet archives, it really shows "How the Red Army stopped [and defeated] Hitler" (that's the sub title and my addition in the square brackets). It covers everything from the creation of the Red Army after WW1 up to the end of WW2. It is quite readable and short (only 290 pages). If you want more detail after that, Glantz has other books focusing on certain periods of the war or even single campaigns or battles with much more detail. For a broader overview, "Stumbling Colossus" covers why the Red Army was almost destroyed in 1941 and "Colossus Reborn" covers in extreme detail how the Red Army recovered from that and became the premier land force on the planet by 1943 (60 pages on the course of the war, 70 pages on the "Soviet military art", 200 pages on all the various component forces of the Red Army, 100 pages on the leadership, 70 pages on the soldiers, 100 pages of notes, and an index of 60 pages). DTurtle fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 15:57
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Germany should probably not have gone to war in 1914 or at any later date. But it's hard to imagine what European history would have been with a gay pacifist Germany.
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Apr 30, 2024 16:32
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Nenonen posted:Germany should probably not have gone to war in 1914 or at any later date. But it's hard to imagine what European history would have been with a gay pacifist Germany. If you really want to dig into why Germany was so bellicose in 1914 there’s really no replacement for Fischer’s Germany’s War Aims in the First World War It’s old but it’s a classic for a reason. (I’ll also throw in my usual comment about the English language title being a master class in loving up a translation. “Grab for world power” is more akin to what it was in German and highlights the core argument well)
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Apr 30, 2024 16:54
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Went to the British Cemetery on Ocracoke Island.        
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Apr 30, 2024 17:08
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Cyrano4747 posted:Oh, gotcha. See if you can get someone to pull the source from the print version, then. That will go a long way to answering your question. A World Undone posted:Throughout the three and a half centuries from the death of Suleiman until the Great War, only one sultan displayed some of the fire and strength of the men who had built the empire. This was Murad IV, who reigned from 1623 to 1640. He became sultan when he was only ten years old—too young to have been incapacitated by the Cage—and he grew into a man of immense courage and physical power. He was the first sultan since Suleiman to be a soldier, leading his army into Persia, where he savagely put down an uprising. He was also even more insanely cruel than most sultans. In just one year of his reign, 1637, some twenty-five thousand of the empire’s subjects were executed, many of them by Murad’s own hand. He claimed the right to kill ten innocent people per day, and occasionally he would sit on the wall of his palace shooting randomly at passersby. At night he would make incognito visits to the taverns of Constantinople, where anyone found smoking would be executed on the spot. “Wherever the sultan went,” says Noel Barber in his book The Sultans, “he was followed by his chief executioner, Kara Ali, whose belt bulged with nails and gimlets, clubs for breaking hands and feet, and cannisters containing different kinds of powder for blinding.” The only specific citation for that block is A World Undone posted:“Wherever the Sultan went”: Barber, 85. A World Undone posted:Barber, Noel. The Sultans. News York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.  but there are no sources cited (there is a list of works consulted but no specific citations.)
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Apr 30, 2024 17:20
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Even if all that is true, it seems kinda unfair to use one extremely crazy guy in the early 1600s as a exemplar of what the leaders of the Ottoman empire were like in a podcast about WW1. For context on how this started:midnight77 posted:I’m listening to a world undone about the first world war and was wondering. In the background section on the Ottomans, the author says a lot of things about how horrific the Ottoman rulership was after Suleiman the magnificent. Is his description of this accurate given that he says they were quite frankly, some of the worst people alive.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:29
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gohuskies posted:Even if all that is true, it seems kinda unfair to use one extremely crazy guy in the early 1600s as a exemplar of what the leaders of the Ottoman empire were like in a podcast about WW1. For context on how this started: To clear up a point of confusion that I had earlier on, it's not a podcast he's listening to an audio book. But yeah, that's a pretty garbage citation. Maybe all that's true, but that's the kind of thread that I've tugged on in other areas to find it disappeared into nothing. It's also pretty standard for the kind of pitfalls that I discussed earlier when you have a journalist with an MA in English Lit writing history.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you really want to dig into why Germany was so bellicose in 1914 there’s really no replacement for Fischer’s Germany’s War Aims in the First World War Enh, Ritter shits on Fischer a lot and I get the general feeling he's right. Fischer seems to attribute more to malice what can be better explained by incompetence and rear end-covering.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:40
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OK, so I looked up that Noel Barber guy who wrote the book in the 70s where that claim came from originally: quote:Noel Barber (9 September 1909 – 10 July 1988)[1] was a British novelist and journalist. Many of his novels, set in exotic countries, are about his experiences as leading foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail. So. . . yeah. Another journalist / novelist writing history books. Maybe it's rooted in something solid. For all I know he was in a museum in Istanbul that had a huge display about this dude's peasant shooting habit and took notes. Maybe it's just poo poo he was told in a bar in Morocco while recovering from a citation-needed stabbing. That's one of the real problems with these kinds of books, when they work their way into broader use they can become absolute dead ends due to a lack of proper citation of claims.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:43
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It's pretty clear that Murad IV was a crazy dude but like, there's been plenty of crazy European monarchs that did insane stuff. I get a kind of orientalism vibe about how all the sultans were so wacky and crazy and despotic and cruel. I'd take that with a sizeable grain of salt. There were peaks and valleys of competence in the transformation era. The Koprulu vizier era is generally decent, for example, and I don't think Suleiman II or or Ahmed II was particularly worse than a European monarch of the time. The Ottomans had some unique challenges with agnatic seniority, in that the heir to the throne was going to be (cp) relatively aged in most cases. Therefore you have a lot of short reigns and intrigue and limited opportunity to consolidate power. Good monarchs are likely to die quickly. The Kafes was certainly a better solution than the prior solution, which was "the remaining brothers fight it out in a civil war until one wins."
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Apr 30, 2024 17:48
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Also a poo poo load of brothers murdering brothers, often personally. The Kafes seems downright humane given what came before it.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:02
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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LOL, the Daily Mail. Even a Yank like me knows that its two nicknames are the Daily Fail (for its reporting standards) and the Daily Heil (for its political alignment).
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Apr 30, 2024 18:03
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Fangz posted:Enh, Ritter shits on Fischer a lot and I get the general feeling he's right. Fischer seems to attribute more to malice what can be better explained by incompetence and rear end-covering. It's been a long, long time since I touched Ritter so I'm not going to dig in too deeply on this hill, but Ritter was one of Fischer's chief opponents during the so-called "Fischer Controversy" where everyone was arguing over German war guilt for WW1, prompted mainly by Fischer's book (hence the controversy's name). What's important to understand about Ritter is that he was a very conservative nationalist, and post-war he was really troubled by the idea that Germany's crimes meant that people couldn't be patriotic any more. The arguments over WW1 war guilt became incredibly bitter precisely because of the assessment that Hitler and all of his evils came about because of how that war shaped Europe and Germany in particular. If WW1 was some kind of horrible accident that everyone just stumbled into blindly then while specific Germans might be culpable for committing atrocities during the NSDAP's reign, the country as a whole suffered what can only be described as the historical version of a natural disaster. Europe walks blindly into this awful war, the Allies are maybe a little too harsh in the peace, and the breakdown of the 19th century political order spawned by the war releases both Fascism and Communism. Germany is caught up in the whirlwind and while atrocities are committed they are the fault of the specific people, and we can look back to the Imperial Era for some kind of pre-Hitler touchstone. However, if WW1 is largely caused by a belligerent Imperial Germany pushing to become a global power, then what comes down the pipe is also their fault. German nationalism itself is to blame for Europe's awful early 20th century. Germany, as an entity, is no longer one nation among many caught up in a disastrous 30 years but the source of that destruction. Fischer also makes specific claims about continuity between government and policies in the Empire and the Third Reich that, frankly, I think are correct. So if you're a conservative nationalist who wants to rehabilitate German patriotism all of this is problematic in the extreme. Ritter intervened in the 60s, for example, to get a government travel grant to the US for Fischer revoked on the grounds that it would be horrible if a generation of Germans grew up feeling the couldn't be patriotic. He ended up going on the trip after a bunch of American and German-American academics clubbed together to fund it. It gets a bit more complicated than that. I'm painting with some very broad strokes and German historiography is a loving rat's nest. Ritter was also a huge critic of the cruder forms of Sonderweg history that were going on, and I think he was correct in that. Fischer loved to get way out on that limb, and I think he was fundamentally wrong there. Martin Luther doesn't lead to Hitler. But at the end of the day, I'd say that the general consensus today falls much more on Fischer's side of the ledger than Ritter's specifically regarding foreign policy in the two decades leading up to the war, although you'll have no difficulty in finding people who want to draw the line somewhere between the two and nuance both of their arguments. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 18:08
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Saul Kain posted:Went to the British Cemetery on Ocracoke Island. Briefly breaking cover - speaking as a CWGC staff member, thank you for visiting! (And hopefully you had a chance to show your thanks to the US Coastguard for their work on the site too, they do fine work on Ocracoke.)
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Apr 30, 2024 18:18
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FMguru posted:LOL, the Daily Mail. Even a Yank like me knows that its two nicknames are the Daily Fail (for its reporting standards) and the Daily Heil (for its political alignment). And excuse the double post here, back to being a goon again, but yeah, the Daily Mail is a scabrous fascistic welt on the arse of British media, never trust a single thing it says.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:19
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Random historian fun fact: Both Ritter and Fischer were members of the Nazi party. Fischer was likely a committed Nazi, although there is an open debate over what that means, exactly. By all indications post-war he was horrified at what had happened and really dug in on how, exactly, Germany went down that disastrous path. Ritter was also an early supporter of the Nazis, but in that way that a lot of conservatives though they would be useful pawns to outflank the leftists. He was a party member but did things like attend the funerals of Jewish scholars and was generally considered to be on the wrong side of the fence. Not quite throwing molotovs through Gestapo windows, but still an example of "quiet resistance" that you will see cited in discussions of life under the Nazis. Post war he jukes the other direction and tries to rehabilitate German conservatism. I know the whole "X is a land of contrasts" thing is a dog tired meme at this point but German post-war historians are, in fact, a land of contrasts.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:20
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Serpentis posted:And excuse the double post here, back to being a goon again, but yeah, the Daily Mail is a scabrous fascistic welt on the arse of British media, never trust a single thing it says. My favorite fact about the Daily Mail is that it was heavily criticized for overly imperialistic and heavy-handed reporting that called into question its objectivity. . . . . . while reporting the loving Boer War. Can you loving imagine what kind of reporting makes a late Victorian Englishman sit up and say "by jove, that might be a touch imperialistic and warmongering  "
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Apr 30, 2024 18:24
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Wasn't the Boer was noticeably more controversial than most english imperialist wars because of the skin color of the Boers. I feel like I've heard this somewhere
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Apr 30, 2024 18:27
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While Germany's imperial ambitions obviously shoulder a lot of the blame for the outbreak of the war, it has to be said that it did kind of happen as a confluence of factors that enabled those ambitions to come to fore. After all, the Morocco Crises, for example, did not lead to war, even though they occurred in a world state far more favourable to German colonial ventures. In the immediate run-up to WWI, it seemed like German militarism was on the wane, and the Scramble for Africa was put to rest. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand created a once-in-a-lifetime situation where the Austrians could act in the Balkans from a moral high ground, the Russians appeared unlikely to intervene, the British and French were distracted by their own crises, and in the event of a war, Germany could count on Austria-Hungary to at least try to pull its own weight. Everyone expected a lengthy diplomatic argument ending with Austria getting some kind of concession from Serbia and things going back to status quo, just like in the case of Morocco, the Great Game (which ended in convention just seven years prior), the Fashoda crisis, the Balkan wars (contained to the region through Great Power diplomacy), and so on. The Germans decided the odds were favourable on their roll of the dice, and Austria-Hungary went for broke in Serbia, while Russia chose war. But if Gavrilo Princip never went for the sandwich, the conditions for those gambles would not have occurred, and quite possibly would never be replicated.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:My favorite fact about the Daily Mail is that it was heavily criticized for overly imperialistic and heavy-handed reporting that called into question its objectivity. . . Sadly, judging the current content of the Daily Mail against the sorts of articles you see preserved on sites like British Newspaper Archives, the exact words may have changed but the reporting ethos/standards really have not.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:27
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PittTheElder posted:Also a poo poo load of brothers murdering brothers, often personally. The Kafes seems downright humane given what came before it. Hell, Suleiman the Magnificent killed his own kid. And before the Kafes, yeah, a purge of all age-of-majority sons, brothers, uncles, cousins etc was de rigeur. Seems a lot more humane to let them chill in a gilded cage, plus then you're less likely to run out of Osmans.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:28
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Just dropping this classic off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TIKYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Hell, Suleiman the Magnificent killed his own kid. And before the Kafes, yeah, a purge of all age-of-majority sons, brothers, uncles, cousins etc was de rigeur. Seems a lot more humane to let them chill in a gilded cage, plus then you're less likely to run out of Osmans. Yeah it's wild to imagine how deranged these Great types must have been (and probably still are), fun to remember that Constantine, idolized by European elites everywhere for centuries, was also a big name in the familial murder scene.
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Apr 30, 2024 18:35
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Gaius Marius posted:Wasn't the Boer was noticeably more controversial than most english imperialist wars because of the skin color of the Boers. I feel like I've heard this somewhere Not heard that one before. There was a strong grass-roots / local committee push led by the Liberal Party against the war from the start decrying it as being nothing more than a capitalistic greed moment to secure the gold/diamond deposits in the Republics, but that didn't really make much headway. (This sadly doesn't surprise me, given that the 1895 Jameson Raid which was a key factor in starting the war was an absolute case study of that and the British government notably failed to really punish any of the survivors for it.) It's not really until the back half of 1901 after the 1900 election victory rush for the Unionists (overwhelmingly pro-war, they called it the "Khaki election" for a reason) had faded and news of the scorched earth tactics / proto-concentration camps being used by the Brits and the guerilla warfare tactics used by the Boers had really started trickling back and bubbling up in the home presses that strong anti-war feeling starts coming up in earnest. (Opposing the war was how David Lloyd George first really cut his teeth in Parliament, funny enough.)
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Apr 30, 2024 18:37
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Part of the reason I lean so far into Fischer and recoil at the argument that Europe blundered blindly into WW1 is that that denies the agency of the politicians who, at the end of the day, were the only ones in that clusterfuck who DID have agency. WW1 wasn't a hurricane or a volcano. It wasn't some act of god that just happened. It wasn't even an accident, even a negligent one, like an improperly secured pile of bricks tipping over and hurting someone at a workplace. It was the result of things that people did for reasons of their own and to further agendas of their own that, taken as a whole, led to the largest disaster to befall Europe in a century. Hell, the largest disaster to befall the entire world in at least, what, three centuries? if we count WW2 as a knock-on effect. My industrial accident example wasn't picked randomly, either. Post-WW2 there were German historians flat out describing the Nazi years as an "occupational accident" using the exact same vocabulary that you would use to describe someone losing a hand doing inherently dangerous factory work. And that's bullshit. I frankly find it offensive, which is a large part of why I react like this. You can absolutely allocate blame and responsibility for both world wars. Fischer has his issues. It's a book from the 60s, and if you're looking to poke holes in this section or another you'll have no difficulty. But it was incredibly important at the time for turning that argument around and saying that yes, actually, the politicians of the late 19th and early 20th century were responsible for the world that they helped shape and their decisions did, in fact, shape what happened in the summer of 1914 and they are, at the end of the day, responsible for that. And from there you can begin interrogating why those particular people were in the decision making roles that they had, what interests they were representing, and what this says about the larger social and political fabric of their countries at that time. Now, if you really want to nuance Fischer you can do that by pointing out that the poo poo Germany was doing at the time wasn't unique and in large part was simply trying to conduct international politics the way that the UK and France already were and that the US and USSR would in the coming century. But that doesn't make Germany any less culpable for rolling those dice than American domino-related fears absolves the US of responsibility for Vietnam.
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Apr 30, 2024 19:19
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