53 pages • 1 hour read
John KeeganThe First World War
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Predominance of Military Over Political Judgment
Keegan identifies one of the main causes of the war to be militaries wielding far greater influence than diplomats, especially in times of crisis. The militaries of the great powers were highly bureaucratized, rigorously trained in staff colleges, and able to call on large masses of conscripts. Meanwhile, diplomats were the beneficiaries of a “benevolent education” (26), with camaraderie among their international ranks but few institutional linkages that could ensure reliable communication when it was most needed. Part of the problem was secrecy: Generals were understandably fearful of their war plans falling into enemy hands, which was all the more dangerous when reliance on strict railway timetables made an army in transit extremely vulnerable. Yet this secrecy often prevented governments from knowing what their own generals were doing, an asymmetrical knowledge that gave generals considerable political influence. For example, Tsar Nicholas had initially wanted only a partial mobilization in 1914 to signal resolve without escalating the crisis, until his generals wore him down with the insistence that partial mobilization would not be enough to meet the inevitable German mobilization. This example also speaks to the importance of regime type; an absolute monarchy such as Russia might have formally vested power in the tsar but in fact gave the edge to whomever had the tsar’s ear. The kaiser and his generals maintained a firm control over military policy even as the Reichstag controlled the budget. Even in more formally democratic countries like the United Kingdom, the franchise was still limited and foreign policy remained the provenance of an aristocratic elite.
Once the war broke out, military considerations often defied political realities. All of the major combatants persisted in their belief that a decisive battlefield victory would end the war, no matter how many times an offensive resulted in disaster. With the heart of industry under German occupation, the French pursued offensive after offensive until substantial portions of its army effectively went on strike, earning it a full year of relative calm. General Douglas Haig followed up the calamitous offensive of the Somme in 1916 with another calamitous offensive in Passchendaele in 1917, scars on the British army that would never fully heal. The removal of Russia from the war in late 1917 convinced the Germans that victory was at hand, and they committed to a series of furious assaults and unrestricted submarine warfare. Only the intervention of the Americans could convey the impossibility of a military solution, and the armistice of November 1918 left Europe utterly depleted.
Incompetence and the Limits of Technology
In the popular imagination, the First World War is generally known for its utter futility. Its depictions in popular culture, from dramatic films like Paths of Glory (1957) and Gallipoli (1981) to the final season of the British sitcom Blackadder (1983), show callous generals thoughtlessly condemning thousands of troops to their deaths while they sit in palaces and enjoy wine with a luxurious dinner. Keegan argues that this idea is not entirely without a basis in reality. He writes, “the impassive expressions that stare back at us from contemporary photographs do not speak of consciences or feelings troubled by the slaughter over which these men presided, nor do the circumstances in which they chose to live: the distant chateau, the well-polished entourage, the glittering motor cars, the cavalry escorts, the regular routine, the heavy dinners, the uninterrupted hours of sleep” (312). Part of the problem was cultural; all of these men knew full well that modern war would involve heavy casualties and had so trained themselves not to dwell on sentimentality lest they shrink from the task at hand. They had also grown up in a different generation and so may not have realized the full scope of what was occurring, just as strategists in the Second World War did not comprehend the consequences of firebombing entire cities until after the war was over. In other words, the generals, who mostly hailed from older generations, were ill-equipped to operate their modern, and increasingly devastating, military systems, and instead ran the war as older leaders ran previous conflicts.
Yet Keegan does not allow incompetence to be the final word on these generals. While some (especially Haig) rank low in his estimation, an army led solely by incompetent people could not have sustained the campaigns of 1914-1918. A major part of the problem was that the technology had advanced rapidly in some aspects while remaining critically underdeveloped in others, offering a glimpse of strategic possibility that could not quite be fulfilled in practice. The extraordinary firepower of modern weaponry offered to bring utter ruin upon an enemy but not if they were sufficiently fortified. The defenders of Verdun would learn that “shellfire often sounded much worse than it was, and nerved themselves to sit it out and to repay the infantry attacks that followed with murderous small-arms fire” (283). The main problem was communication: Across vast fronts, it was simply impossible to maintain communication across the artillery, the air, and the infantry. Radio was not yet in existence, and telephone lines almost always broke down once the fighting started. Commanders were often aware of these limits, but they had to go on the offensive anyway, whether it was the French seeking to recapture their lost territory or Germany hoping to avoid a struggle of attrition they could not possibly win. Incompetence was rife, but the horrors of World War I were also a result of structural conditions.
The Composition of Armies and How they Function
The extraordinary suffering borne by the combatants of the First World War makes one wonder how any of these armies could have endured as long as they did and what finally constituted the last straw for those that ultimately broke. France is a useful example because so much of the worst fighting took place on their territory, and by the end of the war, “17 percent of those who served were killed” (423), a nightmarish figure for its relatively smaller population. The desire to retake territory from the Germans undoubtedly fueled much of France’s efforts, most notably the “sanctified battle” at Verdun where they outlasted the Germans in a grueling slugfest (282), fought over the same small patch of territory again and again and again. The Russian peasants who made up the bulk of Russia’s forces were “brave, loyal, and obedient” but were also “easily disheartened by setback, particularly in the face of superior artillery, and would surrender easily and without shame, en masse, or if [they] felt abandoned or betrayed” (141), helping to explain the millions of captured Russian prisoners at the end of the war who would slowly drift toward the various factions of the civil war. Germany’s morale remained high for the vast majority of the war, even as conditions on the home front grew dire, which would later provide ammunition to the Nazi myth that Germany had not in fact lost the war but had been betrayed by, in their view, Jews and socialists.
The year 1917 proved to be the year where many armies met their limits. French army units refused to fight but retained their discipline in other ways, never attacking their officers or losing unit cohesion. Their strike proved more an act of protest than military collapse. The same cannot be said for Italy, whose peasant soldiers fought with incredible bravery on the forbidding territory around the Isonzo River before ultimately succumbing at Caporetto. The Russian army stayed in the field while its home front collapsed, even attempting one last set of offensives before the Bolshevik seizure of power. Once the Americans arrived, “these fresh troops fought with a disregard for casualties scarcely seen on the Western Front since the beginning of the war” (409), unaccustomed as they were to its rigors. Ultimately, Germany gave in when it because obvious that they could not win, abandoned by their fractious allies and unable to sustain a campaign against an enemy whose ranks were daily swelling with American troops.
