Book: To End All Wars

Just started Adam Hochschild's history of the leadup to, and resistance to the First World War, the "war to end all wars" where the resulting damage was pretty near inconceivable (50% of all Frenchmen aged 18-25 were killed in the war!)

Up to WWI war was a gentleman's endeavor, with rules and tea breaks and honor and glory. Going in, the British expected to use their cavalry* like they had every other war.

The perfection of the machine gun changed all that.

During the leadup to the war women were lobbying for the vote in both the US and UK. Governors in both countries were reluctant to give it to them, lest they vote against entering the next war that everybody knew was brewing with Germany.

Would that it had been so.







* Huh, that's interesting. At first I typed "calvary" but spell-check didn't like it lower case. I'm not sure I ever noticed before that "cavalry" and "calvary" are different words!

Now that the Archduke of Austria-Hungary has been assassinated, I have to keep setting this book aside.

The rallying cries for swift revenge and decisive action are just a little TOO reminiscent of the rush to war in Iraq. Men with gnarled agendas and zero regard for human life.

NoCoPilot wrote:

The rallying cries for swift revenge and decisive action are just a little TOO reminiscent of the rush to war in Iraq. Men with gnarled agendas and zero regard for human life.

I hope the book makes it clear that these calls for revenge came from the people in power, not from the typical dudes and dudettes on the street. Far too many so-called history books leave out this extremely important facet of a belligerent response.

The book has gotten good again.

Adam Hochschild wrote:

French prewar planning had centered on the mystique of the attack: great masses of men filled with elan rushing forward in shoulder-to-shoulder bayonet charges or thunderous cavalry assaults that would strike fear into German hearts. Furthermore, France's troops went into battle in the highly visible blue coats and bright red trousers that had long made them the most flamboyantly dressed of Europe's foot soldiers. At a parliamentary hearing two years earlier, the minister of war had shouted down a reformer who wanted to eliminate the red trousers. "Never!" he declared. "Le pantalon rouge c'est la France!" Cuirassier cavalrymen in tall brass helmets with horsehair plumes made conspicuous targets in a different way: they were, commented a British officer wryly, "easy to see at long distance, as the sun flashed in all directions from their shiny breastplates. As the latter were not bullet-proof, it was difficult to understand their exact function." Zouave troops from France's North African colonies were easy to spot in red caps and baggy trousers of brilliant white. The French officers commanding the Algerian cavalry were singled out by their bright red tunics. And in case sight was not enough to guide enemy marksmen, there was sound as well: brass bands led many French infantry units on the attack (a practice also sometimes followed by the Germans). Massive French bayonet charges stalled in the face of German machine-gun and point-blank artillery fire that left shattered body parts, still clad in red, blue and white, littering the battlefield. In less than a month, nearly 300,000 of those well-dressed soldiers would be dead or wounded.

Which book is this again? It sounds great and I got an Amazon gift card for my birthday.

It's called "To End All Wars" by Adam Hochschild.

Adam Hochschild wrote:

More than any previous war, this one depended on huge quantities of industrial products and the raw materials needed to make them.  Among the more important goods was precision optical equipment -- aerial reconnaissance camera lenses, periscopes, rangefinders, telescopic sights for sniper rifles, and binoculars.  All were essential, particularly the last: when the lives of his men on the battlefield could depend on locating an enemy sniper or machine-gunner, every officer or NCO needed a reliable pair of binoculars hanging from his neck.  The British military, however, was running disastrously short of binoculars.

And so, in mid-1915 British authorities turned to the world's leading manufacturer of precision optics: Germany.

Before the war German companies like the famous firm of Carl Zeiss had been major exporters of top-of-the-line optical goods. From London an agent of the Ministry of Munitions was quietly dispatched to neutral Switzerland to propose a deal.  The answer from Germany was prompt and positive, and the outlines of an agreement were sketched out. [...]

And what did Germany want in return [...]?  Rubber, a commodity unavailable to Germany because of a tight blockade imposed by the Royal Navy.  Without rubber the Germans [...] faced the prospect of using steel tires on their army trucks, which rapidly chewed roads to bits.  The rubber, it was agreed, would be delivered to Germany at the Swiss border.

During August 1915 [...] the Germans  delivered to the British [...] some 32,000 pairs of binoculars.  Records that would show how long the trade continued, or how much rubber the Germans received in return, have disappeared.  More frustrating, there appears to be no written trace of what was in the minds of the men who negotiated this extraordinary agreement.  Were both the British and German business executives so eager for profit that nothing else mattered?  Or did the war have such all-encompassing momentum that, to better fight it, anything at all seemed justified, even trading with the enemy?

Or, at some level, have all modern wars become about selling war materiel rather than winning or losing?

I did not realize the Russian Revolution of March 17, 1917 was largely caused by the Tzar's shoddy handling of the First World War, with over a million soldiers lost in ill-planned and ill-equipped battles, privations at home from trying to supply the vast number of troops, and the apparent cluelessness of the royal family. Fascinating.

I'm nearing the end of this book. I have enjoyed it greatly -- the author has a very readable style and presents the facts with a dry humor. The near-universal madness which caused over 16 million (SIXTEEN MILLION!!!) men to slaughter each other -- for reasons and gains which none could articulate -- fairly boggle the mind.

There are many more quotable passages but I decided to stop making a pest of myself.

Never thought much about it before, but the author makes a solid case that the 1918 flu pandemic -- which killed 50 million worldwide -- was a direct result of the war. With millions of troops on the move, coming home or going on deployments, their immune systems already weakened by years of fighting under miserable conditions and half starved, they became couriers for the disease as they fanned out across the globe to their home states and beyond, packed tightly into trains and ships.

So, in addition to the 16 million dead and the 20 million wounded in the war, include the 50 million who died during 1918-20 of influenza to the casualties of the "war to end all wars."

You'd think we would've learned something.

I've always considered that there must have been a connection there. My mother was born in 1917 and her mother was a nurse at a hospital. I can recall my grandmother mentioning her concern about her newborn baby at the time because of the flu epidemic.

I saw an analysis somewhere (years ago) that related the expansion of the epidemic to a place in France. I can't remember where it was, but it was kind of a staging area for troop transport, and thousands of troops passed through, staying there briefly. The argument was that when the infection reached there, it passed to troops who were on their way home, and quickly radiated to a large number of places that otherwise wouldn't have been affected. The magnitude of the epidemic was thus multiplied manyfold, vastly increasing the death toll.

The genocide against Jews in WWII killed, what, six million Jews?

Well, WWI killed 16 million people, wounded 20 million more, and led to a pandemic that killed another 50 million.  That's over 14 times as many!!!

NoCoPilot wrote:

The genocide against Jews in WWII killed, what, six million Jews?

Well, WWI killed 16 million people, wounded 20 million more, and led to a pandemic that killed another 50 million.  That's over 14 times as many!!!

Well, you know how it is, the sequel is never as good.
I know, that was terrible but gallows humor and all.