The Lost History of 1914: Why The Great War Was Not Inevitable

Jack Beatty, “The Lost History of 1914: Why The Great War Was Not Inevitable”, 2012, Kindle Library, 400 pp. 

I found it amazing that 30% of this book is devoted to documentation, using new evidence of facts, many which contradict the conventional knowledge of what led to WWI--particularly the belief that the war was inevitable whether or not Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.  Beatty convincingly presents the assassination as the unique precipitant of the war.  He maintains: Had the assassination not occurred, the war would likely not have occurred.  Beatty shows how the later-warring countries just prior to August 1914 all faced their own problems and how any one of them—a military coup in Germany; Britain’s possible civil war erupting in Ireland; the murder of the likely next French premier, who sought peace with Germany—might have derailed the war. Europe’s ruling classes were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution.

My Notes:

Loc 148:  The Schlieffen Plan was “invented” by the postwar general staff to reclaim the reputation of Prussian martial genius from the ruin of defeat.  If von Moltke had not deviated from his predecessor’s invincible strategy, the German army would have crushed the Allies on forty days and won the war.  That was the legend.  Everyone swallowed it (including all historians to my knowledge).

Loc 1334:  Starting in 1894, the Russian state held a monopoly on the vodka trade.  By 1910, one third of its revenue (the equivalent of two trillion dollars in today’s U.S. budget) derived from the sale of vodka at state liquor stores.  In spite of the state’s dependence on this revenue, Russia (Nicholas) in 1914 banned the sale of liquor in all but first-class restaurants.  This prohibition deprived the state of 28 percent of their prior income, leaving Russia with unarmed soldiers and unfed citizens; the latter because peasants, to supply the black market, diverted grain from bread to vodka.  Thus Nicholas’s crusade helped bring on the bread riots in St. Petersburg in February 1917 that began the revolution that drove him from power.

Loc 1600: Since 1264, Ireland had had a parliament of some kind, losing it only after 1798, when the Irish with French troops fighting beside them rose up against their English overlords.  To prevent Napoleon’s meddling in their backyard again, Britain annexed Ireland in the Act of Union. Thus Home Rule became the aim of the Irish as one way they could live in some kind of dignity under the English system which was founded on the bayonets of 30,000 soldiers, encamped permanently in Ireland.

Loc 1643:  In 1908 the Catholic Church decreed that mixed marriages were void between Catholics and Protestants unless performed by a priest.  To help allay Protestant fears, the Home Rule act forbade the state from establishing any religion, but few Protestants put any faith in this.

Loc 1693:  “Orangemen,” referred to Ulster’s Scots Presbyterians.  They took their color from King William of Orange who saved them in 1689 when his forces arrived in time to lift the hundred-day siege of Derry by Catholic troops under King James.

Loc 1873:  Curragh Mutiny:  Though no direct orders of any kind were disobeyed, this occurred in March 1914 in Ireland when, led by Brig. Gen. Hubert Gough, 57 British cavalry officers at the Curragh camp near Kildare resigned their commissions rather than obey orders which they believed were aimed at coercing Ulster unionists into accepting home rule. When the government planned to deploy troops throughout Ulster against the possibility of armed unionist action, the commander‐in‐chief in Ireland, General Sir Arthur Paget, had conceded that officers domiciled in Ulster would be permitted to ‘disappear’ during this operation, but that no concession would be allowed otherwise, even for men like Gough with Irish family connections. The War Office refused to accept the resignations and told the officers that the government did not intend to take offensive action against Ulster. But this assurance was given without cabinet authority, by the secretary for war and the chief of the imperial general staff, both of whom were subsequently obliged to resign. Although the prime minister afterwards repudiated the assurance, in effect the affair meant that the army could not be used to quell Ulster opposition to home rule.  Irish Nationalists from this time forward had no faith in any protection by British forces.  It was now clear that civil war would occur if home rule passed as well as if home rule did not pass.

Loc 2141:  As it was, the Ulster crisis ranks as a cause of the world war rather than as a barricade to Britain’s participation in it.  Impending civil war in Ireland signaled Berlin that “Britain was so deeply mired…that the danger of its becoming involved in a continental war was negligible,” according to Rohl, the Kaiser’s biographer, who adds that “this grave miscalculation more than any other neutralized the deterrent effect till then implicit in the Triple Entente.”  As late as July 1914 the German Foreign Office believed the British were so occupied with the Ulster rebellion and unrest in Ireland that they would not declare war.  Germany believed France would fight but did not have the staying power.

Loc 2212:  When Wilson intervened in Mexico, in April 1914, no one could have guessed that he was plunging the U.S. into a stream of events that, in April 1917, would sweep it onto the stage of world history.  The U.S. would enter the European war through Mexico. 

Loc 2980:  In eleven months of searching, Pershing’s horse soldiers never found Villa, a failure that had a profound effect on world history.  The military incompetence of the U.S. seemed evident to the Germans.  “The U.S. not only has no army, it has no artillery, no means of transportation, no airplanes, and lacks all other instruments of modern warfare,” concluded the German press office.  This scathing assessment helped the military persuade the Kaiser that Germany had little to fear in loosing its U-boats on American shipping, Britain’s lifeline.

Loc 3366:  The shelling of Fort Sumter was the catalyst of the American Civil War, not its cause.  Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was an event of a different order.  It satisfied so many of the conditions necessary for the war.

Loc 4279:  WWI was never bloodier than between August 1914 and January 1915 when over a million men died in battle.  They were sacrificial offerings to a “cult of the offensive.”  The leaders had not learned the lesson taught by the heaps of bodies that repeating rifles, rapid firing artillery, and above all machine guns had decisively advantaged the defense over the offense in all the wars since the American Civil war.  Militaries prefer offense because it makes soldiers “specialists in victory” whereas defense makes them “specialists in attrition.”  Attrition takes time, it means a long war, it asks too much of politicians and publics. 

Loc 4350:  Moltke unleashed his offensive against France in August 1914 not from an expectation of victory in one battle (the mythical Schlieffen Plan), but out of fear that Germany would lose its power if it waited.  War was “now or never.”  “The prospect of the future seriously worried him,” the German Foreign Secretary Jagow wrote of a March 1914 meeting with Moltke.  “Russia will have completed her armaments in 2 to 3 years.  The military superiority of our enemies would be so great then that he did not know how he would cope with them.”  He asked Jagow “to gear our policy to an early unleashing of war.”  The assassination of Franz Ferdinand in June gave Moltke his chance.

Loc 4380:  Since 1904 French intelligence had known that to increase their offensive punch the Germans planned to use reserves as front line troops, but the French General Staff “manufactured fake German document” showing the opposite.  Thus the generals successfully lobbied to expand the regular army by adding an extra year to the two-term of French conscripts.  Plucked overnight from civilian life, reservists were suited to defense but only regulars were regarded as equal to the attack.