To End All Wars

Adam Hochschild, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-18", Houghton Mikfflin Harcourt,”, 2011, 377 pp plus 32 pgs of notes.

This book covers WWI from the British perspective with an emphasis on the organizations and people who opposed the war. My notes and analysis mostly ignores this opposition aspect; not because it was uninteresting or unimportant, but because it does not lend itself to my note taking (some excuse, huh?). Read the book if you want the opposition details.

WWI should not have been fought, and once started should have had a negotiated settlement; no-one really had a compelling interest to fight. Of course, as in all wars, it was thought that it would be over in a few weeks and would be a great adventure. However when casualties mounted, it could not then end with negotiations as this would demean the sacrifices the dead had already made. For more than three years the Western front (500 miles long) remained locked in place, burrowed into trenches with dugouts sometimes 40 feet below ground.

The terrible loss of life still astounds: in addition to the 20,000 dead, on the first day of the Somme offensive another 36,000 British troops were wounded. As the war went on, more than 35 percent of all German men between the ages of 19 and 22 were killed. For France, one half of all Frenchmen aged 20 to 32 were dead when it was over. (In 1998 I visited the battlefield of Verdun where 1 million were casualties). Today, the poor are disproportionately represented in war; but in WWI the war was particularly devastating to the ruling classes. On both sides, officers were far more likely to be killed than the men whom they led over the parapets. It is too much to detail the fight the military leaders made to retain the cavalry and the lance as a major component of the fighting forces—they had some machine guns but the cavalry was thought to be much more important.

My Notes:
Pg. 18: You would think that military leaders of WWI would be aware of how lethal the machine gun is to massed soldiers marching toward it. In Britain’s 1898 Battle of Omdurman some 10,800 Sudanese lay dead and at least 16,000 more had been wounded. The British lost only 48 dead. In a few hours the British had fired some 500,000 machine gun bullets at the Sudanese.

Pg. 48: Rudyard Kipling, for someone whose writing was so widely loved, the poet and novelist was a man of many dislikes. Among them were Germans, democracy, taxes, labor unions, Irish and Indian nationalists, socialists, and women suffragettes.

Pg. 82. Although the assassination in Sarajevo was the spark that started the war, Austria had long been looking for an excuse to attack Serbia, the three basic causes were:
• The pair of rival alliances that obligated some countries to come to the aid of others in case of war. Amazingly, Britain had no formal treaties binding it to intervene. Its’ problem would come from its’ guarantee of Belgium’s neutrality.
• The pressure felt by all the major Continental powers to mobilize their large forces of trained reservists who would triple or quadruple the size of any peacetime army. Mobilizing an army in 1914 required several weeks: reservists had to be called up, get to their bases, and collect their riffles and equipment; then millions of men, their weapons, and tens of thousands of tons of food and supplies had to be deployed to wherever the fighting was expected to be. The very time necessary for mobilization, however, was something inherently destabilizing, for if the other side looked about to mobilize, and you did not do so, you would be at a fatal disadvantage.
• Lastly, was the tremendous advantage gained by any country that attacked first, for this guaranteed that the fighting would at least begin on another country’s territory.

Pg. 149: All armies censor mail coming from soldiers at the front, but the British had a special postal unit of Urdu-speakers censoring mail going TO Indian soldiers, to screen out letters supporting independence.

Pg. 155: The mighty guns of the behemoth dreadnoughts that Britain had invested so many billions in building were useless against the real naval threat from Germany—the submarine. (Various pe-1914 British admirals had grumbled that submarines were ‘un-English,’ or the weapon of cowards who refused to fight like men on the surface; one had called for captured submarine crews to be hanged as pirates.) These submarines sent 227 British merchant ships to the bottom of the ocean in 1915.

Pg. 161: The Germans needed rubber and the British needed high-grade binoculars. A bargain was struck. During 1915 the Germans delivered 32,000 pairs of binoculars; the records are lost about how much rubber was delivered.

Pg. 167: British generals continued to deny the power of the machine-gun and the use of barbed wire as well as the superior position of defense over offense. A memo after the battle of the Somme and Loos declared “The introduction of the Machine Gun has not, in the opi9nion of the General Staff, altered the universally accepted principle that superior numbers of bayonets closing with the enemy is what finally turns the scale.”

Pg. 194: Battle of Jutland May 31 1916: Britain’s navy suffered from the same peculiar mismatch as the army between firepower and communications. The admirals wee inexplicably reluctant to use the new wireless sets their ships were equipped with. They preferred blinking lights at night, and, by day, the tradition-hallowed system of colored signal flags dating from the day of sail, both of which were difficult or impossible to see through rain squalls and the dense smoke from both funnels and guns. The battle was a draw but it did not break the British blockade of the continent.

Pg. 213: In September 1916 the British launched their new secret invention, the tank. Finally, it appeared something that could get through the barb wire had been created. However, of the 49 machines that lumbered into the first engagement, all but 18 broke down before or during the fighting, or got stuck in deep shell craters, becoming sitting ducks for enemy artillery.

Pg. 214: It would be too easy, however, to see the Somme solely as a monument to the thick headedness of Douglas Haig. The Germans brought their own kind of fatal stubbornness to the battle, principally through a disastrous order issued by Chef of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn that ‘not one foot of ground should be lost. This meant that whenever a British attack did succeed in gaining a patch of earth, the Germans tried to retake it, often marching directly into machine-gun fire just like their foes. There were more than 300 of these counterattacks which resulted in the German losses equaling the Allies.

Pg 233: The British military, like most armies, replicated its society, and every officer had a personal servant. In addition, each General, Colonel, Major, and many Captains had their horse and groom. These were pretty much useless in the war effort except for a once-a-fortnight canter. (A British soldier was thrown in jail for writing this and trying to send it to the newspapers through the censor; this soldier had been in London some weeks before and could have just dropped it off at the paper and avoided the censor).

Pg. 247: In 1917 Germany decided to gamble by declaring unlimited submarine warfare. They believed that the U.S. could not enter the war in less than six month’s time to cause a difference. The U.S. army had a standing army that ranked only seventeenth in the world in size. Measured in tonnage, the Germans sank more than 880,000 tons of merchant shipping the month of April 1917 alone, a pace of destruction high enough to eliminate every single cargo ship on the world’s oceans in less than three years. The first convoy was deployed on May 10, 1917 when 17 merchant vessels and their escorts set off for England from Gibraltar, and, at a time when more than 300 ships a month were being torpedoed, not a single ship in the convoy was sunk.

Pg. 267: Zimmermann Telegram: The German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a telegram Mexico trying to induce them to join the war by promising them Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The British decoded this message and turned it over to the press in the U.S. Soon after, U-boats sank three American merchant ships, drowning many sailors and prompting an outcry in Congress and the press. On April 7, 1917, the U.S. declared war on Germany. The U.S. ships immediately joined the Allies and made the convoy system all the more effective.

Pg. 315: The only real election the Bolshevik’s ever participated in January 1918, they won just under a quarter of the vote. The next true election would be 70 years later. This was the same year that Britain gave the vote to women. In the same bill, the new law enfranchised almost all men over 21—over 19 if they were in the armed forces. However, as so many men had been killed, there was a fear that women would be a majority of the voters. Therefore the bill only enfranchised women over 30; property and other qualifications excluded about 22 percent of these women over 30.

Pg. 327: At the end of May 1918 the Germans launched a powerful surprise offensive northeast of Paris, preceded by two million artillery shells fired off in less than five hours. In three days, the Germans pushed panicked Allied troops back 20 miles, advancing with such speed that they captured a French military airfield with all its planes still on the ground. They were finally stopped 37 miles from Paris.

Pg. 330: A new wave of German attacks in early June 1918 stalled when they reached the natural barrier of the Marne River and encountered fierce resistance from newly arrived American troops at Chateau-Thierry and in the wheat fields around Belleau Wood. The several weeks of fighting at Belleau Wood were the largest American battle since the Civil War. By the time it was over, in late June, some three-quarters of a million U.S. troops were in Europe, with ship loads more arriving almost daily. The balance of forces on the Western Front was now changed for good. The Germans suffered half a million casualties in the five months following the launch of tis offensive. There were few reinforcements left except the overage and the very young, and so the retreat began. The German high command began to fear that if army discipline and morale collapsed, something even worse than an Allied victory could occur: revolution at home. By September the combined Allied forces on the Western Front had grown to some six million men, nearly one-third of them American.

Pg. 332: On August 8, 1918, the British and French launched a powerful new offensive. The British had finally learned how to integrate the various new technologies of war: the tanks, to crush barbed wire so the infantry could get through; triangulation spotting of German artillery fire by recorded sound waves, so as to lay down counter-fire and knock out enemy guns; manufactured radio traffic, to fool the Germans into thinking large numbers of troops were being moved elsewhere; camouflage, to mislead observation planes; flights by massive fleets of aircraft, to mask the noise of troops moving into position for an attack. Haig had at last come to understand that war was now a complex industrial process. He had even reduced the five cavalry divisions to three!

Pg. 341: The Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918 at 5am, to go into effect 6 hours later. Senselessly, on this final half day of the war, after the peace was signed, 2,738 men from both sides were killed and more than 8,000 wounded.

Pg. 347: Even by the most conservative of the official tabulations, more than 8.5 million solders were killed on all fronts. More than 21 million men were wounded and 65,000 veterans were still receiving treatment for shell shock ten years after the war. Higher than the military toll were the civilian war deaths, estimated at 12 to 13 million.