The War to End All Wars

Seegee, your history teacher was absolutely right. Mankind 's warfare with each other, has progresed, from the stone, knife, sword, cannon, rifle. By bomb, be it regular, or atomic. Now electronically by drone's. Yet, ironically they all believe religiously in peace. If they continue in this manner, they will wipe themselves off this world's map. Maybe 'Spanko's' should rule the world. For our crowd, seems to make more sense. By having a 'spanking good time'.

I'm also named after an uncle who fell in World War 1. He lied about his age and died at Ypres in Belgium. I visited the town a few years ago and found his name on the Menin Gate. My Grandmother received a telegram from the War Office informing her that he had been "missing believed killed" and never came to terms with the fact that his body had not been found. She even visited various military hospitals in the hope of finding her son. Apparently she was allowed to approach badly scarred and bandaged soldiers who were having difficulty communicating and utter the words "Hello Dick it's Mum." It must have been heartbreaking.

I share the mourning. When thinking about the First World War, it's important to realise that hardly any of the decision-makers - monarchs, ministers, generals - expected other than a short war, largely because they could no imagine how vast armies using expensive ordnance could be maintained in the field for years (the answer was rather simple - massive borrowing). If you apply the kind of reasoning about national interest that had been taken for granted up to that point, then it's not hard to see how reasonable and compassionate people as well as less reasonable people led their countries to war. Russia, for example, would lose all credibility amongst her allies if she didn't stand by Serbia. Britain was committed to defend the neutrality of Belgium. The Austrians were furious about Serbian fostering of groups we'd now call terrorist...and so on.

So when it became evident that the war was going to drag on and become a war of attrition, which made the original apparently substantial reasons for going to war seem inadequate, why did the leaders not open negotiations? In most cases, the answer seems to have been public opinion, whipped into war fever by the press, so anyone who suggested a negotiated peace was a traitor. Even in relatively undemocratic states like the German Empire, leaders will have been aware that the backlash touched off by anything less than victory could sweep them away - and from 1917 they had the example of Russia.

The tragedy of the war led to old certainties being questioned - which was healthy in the long run but itself contributed to the causes of the next war. Versailles was an uneasy compromise between those like the U.S. which wanted a settlement based on self-determination and the French who saw any concessions to Germany in particular as merely giving the enemy a leg up on the way to the next war. In my opinion the injustices were a major cause of the next war. The Germans, Turks and Austro-Hungarians had every right to contrast the high-flown allied declarations with the reality, but of course the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposed by Germany on the Bolsheviks showed just how ruthless a settlement would have been imposed if the outcome had been different.

One word about terminology. I prefer Remembrance Day to Veterans' Day because it was not only armed forces personnel who suffered and died; and remembrance, whatever we make of it, is what happens.

I'm incredibly grateful that I can sit here at my computer and feel safe thanks to the lads and lassies of our wonderful armed forces. God bless 'em all.

Well, when Germany signed the armistice in November of 1918, that effectively voided the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk--yet Russia received back absolutely none of the territory earlier ceded to the Germans, which was instead (along with territory seized from Austria-Hungary and Germany) used to create new nations in central Europe and the Baltic area.

The western Allies were obviously deeply offended over the new Soviet government of Russia (which officially became the U.S.S.R. in 1922) withdrawing its country from the conflict early in 1918, although Russia had simply collapsed internally from the war effort and couldn't effectively resist the German forces at that point, so they treated their one-time ally just as harshly as Germany had--even though the Russians had made tremendous sacrifices during the first three years of World War I, contributing heavily to the eventual Allied victory.

OTOH Romania, which had joined the Allied Powers in 1915. but had then been quickly knocked out of the war by the Central Powers and therefore made no substancial contribution to the Allied war effort, saw its geographic size doubled by the postwar treaties.

Anyway, had the United States stayed out of the conflict, I doubt that either side could've won a clearcut victory at that point--which might have been for the best in emphasizing the futility of war... --C.K.

The allies didn't abandon Russia, just the revolutionary parts of it. If the White Russians (some of which were supported by Allied Troops) had won then I'm sure that the new Czar would have been given back possessions in Eastern Europe.

During the civil war in Russia, the allies had forces helping out the White Russian side. There were:
50,000 Czechoslovaks, 70,000 Japanese, 40,000 British, 17,000 Poles, 13,000 Americans, 12,000 French and French colonials, 11,500 Estonians, 5,233 Canadians, 4,000 Serbs, 4,000 Romanians , 2,500 Italians, 2,300 Chinese, 23,351 Greeks, and 150 Australians fighting in Russia - and if they had won then Eastern Europe might have looked different.

But give land to the murderous Bolsheviks? The people who had forced Russia out of the war and allowed every German in the Eastern Army to show up on the Western Front? Never!

Goodgulf

Regardless of what regime had been leading Russia, the country couldn't have effectively continued the war at that point (early 1918), and doing so months earlier (under pressure from other Allied nations) is what caused the provisional democratic government of Alexander Kerensky to lose popular support in favor of the Bolsheviks, who were promising the people "land, peace, bread."

No matter what Russia's political leadership had been, AFAIC it staying in the war would've invariably resulted in German forces occupying Moscow by the summer of 1918.

Of course, the fact that Russia, under any government, could no longer fight effectively by early 1918 was an inconvenient truth which the British, French and American leaders chose not to acknowledge--hence their anger with the Bolshevik regime and their futile attempts to help the 'Whites' win the Russian civil war (1918-21).

The western Allies failed to support democracy in Russia by insisting that the Kerensky government keep the country fighting in spite of popular opposition to doing so (1917), and they failed to support democracy in Germany by forcing the harsh Treaty of Versailles on the leadership of the Weimar Republic (1919).

So much for "the war to make the world safe for democracy"... --C.K.

Goodgulf and CrimsonKid:

It's a little misleading to say the lands recovered from Germany when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was voided were "used" to create new nations. Some of the new nations already existed because of local uprisings and Poland in particular had a long history as an independent nation. The French had a long historical alignment with the cause of Polish independence and with the U.S. government's belief in self-determination, it's hard to imagine the allies intervening to suppress Polish, Baltic or Finnish independence movements. What might well have happened, even with a Tsarist government of Russia, would have been determination by war, which is what actually happened in Poland, which defeated the Red Army, or by the question of whether a battle-weary Russia was willing to throw troops into difficult struggles in Poland and Finland: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia would have been militarily a different matter.

While fear of the Bolshevik government was certainly a factor, I suspect the western allies would have put pressure on the Russians to make concessions.

What would have happened in the First World War without U.S. intervention is hard to assess, but the impact of U.S. intervention was less in actual battle than in making the German high command desperate because of the future American impact, thus encouraging the desperate but nearly successful offensive of Spring 1918 the failure of which led directly to German defeat. I suspect a draw by exhaustion was a very unlikely outcome as various factors - tanks, domestic semi-starvation, the drain on manpower - were making the deadlock less stable. Moreover, as I've mentioned, the political and media atmosphere was inimical to peace negociations. Once one side gained a decisive advantage, victory would have followed. What we can't tell is who would have gained that victory!

If it's hard to imagine a group of powers sitting down and redrawing a map, telling minor countries that they will have deal with the new boarders, just think of the Munich Agreement when France, Britain, and Germany redrew the German / Czech boarder.

Or how T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) did his best to keep his Arab allies in control of the land won in the Arab Revolt. After the war the negotiations in Paris everything of value the Arabs had captured went to the French and British while the useless desert was all that was left to them.

The Allies had encouraged the Poles, Czechs, etc to rise up against the Germans, but since they didn't keep their "you get this after the war" promise to Italy I can't see them losing sleep over Eastern Europe - other than not punishing their enemies enough. And the map was redrawn to punish those enemies - otherwise they would have left a land connection to East Prussia (a part of German that was completely surrounded by Poland.

Looking more closely at the Allied effort in Russia during the civil war, I was surprised to see that it had achieved one of its goals. Vast stockpiles of war supplies had been sent to Russia to help it fight the Germans and part of the Allied intervention was to get those supplies back - which they did. Mostly because the Russian government didn't have its act together enough to ship those supplies from the ports they landed in to the front line where they were needed. Another surprise was the number of mutinies by the various allied troops.

Goodgulf