World War One : The Global Revolution

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Introduction

“Thank God, it is the Great War!” General Viktor Dankl, commander designate of the Austro-Hungarian First Army, penned these words on July 31, 1914, the day it became clear that the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, stemming from the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand a month earlier, would not be resolved peacefully or limited to a Balkan war. Forty-three years had passed since the last war that matched European powers against each other and, like many European military officers of his generation, Dankl, then fifty-nine, feared he would serve his entire career without experiencing such a conflict. On August 2, when Dankl in another diary entry referred to the rapidly escalating conflict as “the World War,” he could not have imagined just how accurate the label would become: that the action would extend to the Far East, the South Pacific, and sub-Saharan Africa, that over a million men from the British and French empires would see action on European battlefields, that the United States would have an army of over 2 million men in France just four years later, or that European countries would account for a minority of the states participating in the postwar peace conference.

World War I as global revolution

The central thesis of this book is that World War I and the peace settlement that ended it constituted a global revolution. Like Dankl and the generals, the statesmen who led Europe to war in the summer of 1914 did not envisage the worldwide revolutionary consequences of the conflict whose onset they welcomed (or, at least, did so little to discourage). Though the emergence of the Bolshevik government in Russia would serve as a reminder that the world was not yet safe for democracy, old-fashioned authoritarian governments, Hohenzollern and Habsburg as well as Romanov, had no place in a postwar Europe that featured no less than eleven republics on a map redrawn from the Franco-German border deep into Russia, featuring a net increase of six independent states and the elimination of one traditional great power, Dankl’s own Austria-Hungary. Beyond Europe, the redistribution of former German colonies affected the map of Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific, while the demise of the Ottoman Empire brought the wholesale redrawing of boundaries in the Middle East and, in Palestine, the roots of the modern-day Arab–Israeli conflict, stemming from Britain’s conflicting wartime promises to the Zionist movement and Arab nationalists.

Beyond questions of boundaries and territory, the war would also revolutionize power relationships within European societies. In the Europe of 1914, most adult males lacked truly meaningful voting rights; aside from Portugal, which had just overthrown its king, France had Europe’s only republic, and among the other five European powers only Britain and Italy had fully functioning parliamentary governments. Only in Britain, and only recently, had there been a serious movement calling for the extension of women’s rights to include the vote. While the war strengthened the position of organized labor and provided unprecedented employment opportunities for women, most of the latter proved to be only temporary. Nevertheless, postwar Europe west of Soviet Russia consisted of democratic republics and constitutional monarchies, few if any restrictions on adult male suffrage still existed, and in their first postwar national elections, Germany and Austria joined Britain in conceding women the right to vote (with the United States following shortly thereafter). In postwar Russia the Soviet government went so far as to grant women the right to abortion on demand.

The war had an equally dramatic impact on Europe’s position in the world. White Europeans had enjoyed an unquestioned domination of the world of 1914, a world in which 40 percent of the human race was of European stock. Yet in 1919, the thorniest moral issue facing the peace conference concerned whether to include in the Covenant of the League of Nations a statement of global racial equality. Though proposed (somewhat disingenuously) by Japan, the debate reflected Europe’s loss of stature, both symbolically and demographically, in the world as a whole. Indeed, as an example of European fallibility, World War I sowed the seeds of the anti-colonial movement that erupted after World War II, by which time the population explosion in the non-Western world further reduced the relative weight of a Europe that had never recovered from the demographic shock of World War I, a war in which the overwhelming majority of the millions killed had been Europeans or of European stock.

Conceptualizing the “first” world war

By the first days of August 1914 many observers and participants joined Viktor Dankl in acknowledging the onset of a “Great War” or “World War,” the likes of which Europe had not seen since the end of the age of Napoleon a century earlier. The Napoleonic wars, and the wars for empire in early modern Europe, had featured worldwide action on the high seas and in the colonies, as well as on European battlefields, but by the end of August the scope and intensity of the unfolding conflict, in which most of the belligerents already had lost more men in a single battle or even a single day than in entire wars fought during the nineteenth century or earlier, led most to recognize that they were witnessing something unprecedented. In September 1914, in remarks quoted in the American press, German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel made the first recorded reference to the conflict as the “First World War,” in his prediction that the emerging struggle “will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.” The label “First World War” or “World War I” did not gain currency until after September 1939, when Time magazine and a host of other publications popularized its use as a corollary of the term “Second World War” or “World War II,” but as early as 1920 British officer and peacetime journalist Charles à Court Repington published his war memoirs under the title The First World War, 1914–1918. In the interwar years a handful of cynics and pessimists used “First World War” rather than the more common “Great War” or “World War,” to reflect their dismay that it had not been, as Woodrow Wilson had hoped, “the war to end all wars.”

The use of the term, since 1939, reflects our conceptualization of World War I as the precursor to World War II, a belief universal enough to accommodate not only polar opposite views of the nature of the causation (e.g., that World War II occurred because Germany had not been completely crushed during World War I, or that it occurred because Germany had been needlessly antagonized at the peace table afterward), but, more so, the remarkable diversity of lessons learned and applied by the countries, leaders, and peoples involved. Whereas in Germany and Russia the Nazi and Soviet regimes proved to be far more efficient and ruthless than their predecessors of 1914 in mobilizing their countries for war and seeing it through to the bitter end, regardless of the cost in human lives, the Western European democracies, the British Dominions, and Italy showed little desire to repeat the blood sacrifice of World War I, and in various ways tailored their strategies accordingly, disastrously so for France and Italy. The United States, whose people were not yet ready to embrace the mantle of global leadership at the end of World War I, a generation later rallied to the cause with great fervor after the shock of Pearl Harbor, while their leaders benefited from the experience of 1917–18 in mobilizing American resources to fight World War II. Of the considerable resources of the United States only its manpower made a difference in World War I, as the fighting ended before American industrial might could be brought to bear; thus, both Germany and Japan fatefully underestimated the war-making capacity and national resolve of the United States in World War II.

World War I and modern total war

No less than in the public and political realm, World War I produced radically different responses to the same lessons learned in military strategy, tactics, and operations. The bloody stalemate of the trenches on the Western front led Germany to develop the Blitzkrieg in order to eliminate static positional warfare, while France built the Maginot Line in an attempt to perfect static positional warfare. Thanks to the German example, which built upon the British example of the late summer of 1918, it became the norm in World War II for offensives by infantry to be supported by sufficient numbers of tanks and aircraft to avoid bogging down as they had in World War I, except in cases where the fighting was in or near a major city, or in the confined space of a Pacific island. World War II featured more lethal iterations of every weapon and battlefield tactic that had revolutionized warfare during World War I, with the notable exception of the use of poison gas.

The magnitude of death and destruction wrought by World War II far surpassed that of World War I, especially for civilian populations, yet from August 1914 onward World War I featured acts of brutality against non-combatants that presaged what would happen on a far greater scale a quarter of a century later. From the summary executions of Belgian civilians by German troops and Serbs by Austro-Hungarians, to the persecution and, ultimately, genocidal slaughter of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians, to the aerial bombing of London and other cities by German Zeppelins, civilian populations endured atrocities the likes of which Europe and its periphery had not seen since the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) marked the end of the Catholic–Protestant wars of religion. Meanwhile, at sea the indiscriminate sinking of millions of tons of Allied shipping by German submarines cost thousands of lives and foreshadowed the unrestricted submarine warfare campaigns of both sides in World War II, while the Allied (primarily British) naval blockade of the Central Powers brought malnutrition to the home fronts of Germany and Austria and, ultimately, illness and premature death to hundreds of thousands of their most vulnerable civilians. Remarkably, the home front populations not only endured these unprecedented hardships but, in most cases, became firmer in their resolve as the war dragged on. Indeed, while war weariness ultimately triggered the revolutionary collapses in Russia in 1917 and Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918, for most of World War I their civilians persevered just as their counterparts in the Western Allied countries did, rejecting the notion of a compromise peace that would render meaningless not just their personal privations but, more important, the deaths of their sons, brothers, fathers, and other loved ones. Such perseverance served notice to political leaders of the risk as well as the reward in mobilizing a country for a total war effort in the era of modern nationalism: a war could not be won without such support, but once governments received it, war became an all-or-nothing proposition, for their own people would not accept compromise as the reward for such sacrifices. The infamous remark attributed to Joseph Stalin during his great purges of the 1930s, that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic, could just as easily have been applied to the bloodletting of World War I and, indeed, would have been unthinkable if that bloodletting had not come first. World War I, in so many ways a global revolution, above all else redefined what people could accept, endure, or justify, and thus stands as a milepost in the human experience for the extent to which it desensitized so much of humanity to the inhumanity of modern warfare.