Historian Reacts to Top 10 Misconceptions About World War 1 - THE GREAT WAR

welcome back everybody to another reaction video today we're going to go back to our good friend indy neidel over at the great war channel you also see him frequently in my reactions to sabaton history uh once again going to be a lot of great war world war one content coming to you in the coming weeks and months keeping my fingers crossed that nothing gets messed up messed up with travel and i can keep my plans to go to france sometime in late january keeping my eyes open though watching the news we'll see what happens i may have to put it off i really hope that doesn't happen but with that in mind i thought we would dive into their video about 10 the top 10 misconceptions about world war one as always if you're new to the channel i always put the link in the description to the original content creator i encourage you to support them for the work that they've done on this i only watch videos that are either highly recommended to me or that are from channels that i already know and love and unless i say otherwise these are videos i've never seen before occasionally i'll do a reaction to something i have seen but i'll always let you know that up front this is my first time seeing this one let's go ahead and dive into it [Music] there's been a lot more coverage of the second world war than the first as most of you are no doubt aware and we've noticed that probably because of that lack of coverage people have a lot of misconceptions about the first world war how and where it happened and who was fighting it and we're going to try to fix that today [Music] by the way if i haven't emphasized this enough this channel is fantastic i have not seen most of the videos but i've seen a lot of them and they cover the war week by week but they also do these specials like they did one that i watched a while back where he went and visited um i think it was the moosargon american cemetery which is on my list of places to go when i do go to eastern france and it was great visit it was really cool and i learned a lot to prepare for my own trip so this is this is one i'm excited to to get into though [Music] i'm indy neidel welcome to a great war special episode the top 10 popular misconceptions about the war number 10 russia was only a second grade military power in the first world war russia may have left the war after the revolution and certainly the great retreat and disasters like the battle of tannenberg don't exactly make the russian military record shine but the russian army was anything but a pushover at this time a hundred years ago they were just romping through eastern anatolia and the brucilov offensive and the innovative tactics it used came seriously close to knocking austria out of the war yeah so let's say this i mean russia gets this reputation as being basically throw manpower at the problem rather than being this well-trained elite fighting force but that doesn't mean there were pushovers uh did they have some pretty bad uh fights against the german army yeah but you know what so did a lot of people the germans had one of the best militaries in the world uh so comparing the two you know i mean like they said the russians really did have their way with the austro-hungarian empire uh it was only a lot of support from germany that kept that from being a complete disaster on the eastern front or even collapsing the entire austro-hungarian empire it certainly broke the back of their army the enormous growth and modernization of the russian military industry by 1916 was also nothing to sneeze at number nine everything has already been said about the war no no no stuff is being discovered all the time like that edith cavill actually was spying for britain or we're gonna do a video that's actually on my list of videos when i start when i get back into my forgotten history videos which i i've got my script pretty much done for the last part of um the forgotten history on uh reconstruction but edith cavill's on my list i've got a list of about five forgotten history episodes i want to do and i've started doing the research on her fascinating story executed by the germans for spying and for a long time it seemed like oh she was just a nurse she wasn't spying well she really was so it's a really cool story to get into um and yeah oh gosh yeah i mean all of history is this way we are constantly re-discovering or or changing our understanding about events that have been talked to death about uh because we make new archaeological discoveries or there are new understandings of things that are happening and we and we put you know new information together so there's never a place that we get to where we know everything about something in world war one honestly for as consequential as it was a world event i mean this is one of the most important events in human history we really don't talk about it that much just look at the movies we make about world war ii world war ii only happens because of world war one we don't nearly know enough about world war one elkenheim's claim that the battle of verdun was to bleed france to death is quite likely an invention after the fact yep files are being declassified even now a hundred years after the war who knows what we're going to find out number eight the germans were the bad guys in the war really since they were the bad guys in world war ii and wartime stories of the bloodthirsty huns circulated in allied media they had to be the bad guys right and they got all the blame at versailles in 1919 that has to count for something well not so much was it germany's fault that the whole house of cards came crashing down that the war escalated into the horror that it did not so much more than anybody else in europe who all had outdated ideas about the necessity of the war and how to pursue it yeah and i will say this um i agree 100 and if you guys have followed my channel for long you know i get really uncomfortable about the whole black and white good versus evil good guy bad guy thing even in world war ii uh yeah do i see the evil of the nazi regime for example absolutely but i i really don't like labeling every individual german soldier as evil as well a lot of these guys were just drafted kids that were just trying to stay alive and i will say this in world war one the germans brought a lot of that reputation on themselves the massacre of belgian civilians for example um you know the unrestricted submarine warfare things like that so um it was not without merit but there are always atrocities on both sides you know americans committed war crimes in world war ii uh just as the the germans were committing war crimes i mean nobody did it on the scale that the germans and the japanese did but there's always going to be evil on both sides sure you do have episodes like the rape of belgium but atrocities were committed by all sides of the armenian genocide and the massacres committed by the russians in east prussia in 1914 spring to mind just because somebody is the enemy doesn't mean that they're the bad guy sometimes there is no bad guy and you know you you talk to soldiers who fought in these wars and many of them will say the same thing they'll say you know i didn't hate those guys i was trying to stay alive and they were trying to kill me and i was trying to kill them so um you know but it was never personal i mean sometimes it was and i think probably more in the pacific theater it was or on the eastern front with the germans and the russians like in world war ii probably a lot more personal on both sides because of what went on but it wasn't always that way sometimes everyone is the bad guy number seven the war in the skies was a gentleman's war sometimes the flying aces like the red baron and billy bishop they were the rock stars of the war gliding above the carnage and fighting man-to-man and we've talked sometimes about the closest thing to the idea of knight hood probably comes into play here but yeah not not at all the same chivalrous thing chivalrously except again not so much they were fighting with machine guns and they were most often flying in formations by the second half of the war when the average life expectancy of the pilots could be measured in hours and never forget the perfect kill happened when the enemy never saw you coming number six world war one was a european war in the cold war not true it had its origins in europe and there were certainly a lot of the fighting done in europe but you know once the ottoman empire joined you should have a clue how it would spread even before that japan fought against germany the united states and brazil would eventually join the war there were battles in the south pacific and the south atlantic soldiers you got to remember that even though it is a european war by nature these european nations that are at war with each other have colonies in africa they have colonies in the south pacific and like you said brazil and japan and the united states are all belligerents in this war as well from every continent except antarctica would fight and of course there was fighting all over africa mainly by colonial overlords but there were fronts in persia mesopotamia libya and even the borders of india definitely a world war here number five the war was only fought in the trenches the trenches are the symbol of world war one and while they appeared on pretty much every front the vast trench networks were only really common on the western front and the deserts or the huge open spaces of the eastern front cavalry played a bigger role and huge trench system really probably the last major war that involves large numbers of cavalry we see some cavalry in world war ii um but by that point tanks had taken over things would have been most often impossible to maintain number four tactics during the war didn't change it's easy to think that tactics always change in a war though you know the american civil war in 1861 bear no bore no resemblance to the war in 1865. uh 1865 is more like world war one than it is like the beginning of the american civil war every war undergoes these changes as especially in world war one because you developed tanks in 1916 you've got the advent of um you know poison gas being used you've got more sophisticated use of planes happening submarines become more and more of a factor by the end of the war big changes from 1914 to 1918. looking at the week-by-week carnage how we cover it but if you look at tactics in 1914 and those in 1918 it would be difficult to find many real similarities the stalemate across the various fronts pretty much forced tactical innovation heck the war saw the advent of mechanized mobile warfare and certainly the techniques hitler's vermont used at the beginning of world war ii grew directly out of those used at the end of world war one number three navies did not play a real part in world war one well the biggest battle in naval history the battle of yutland happened in world war one but i i understand why people have that idea because other than the battle of jutland um which was huge and the future king george vi was an officer there uh on one of the ships for the british navy um but uh i think it's because there weren't many battles like that once that battle happened the germans basically you know kind of withdrew their fleet and kept it close to home for the rest of the war but the navy the allied navy may have been the deciding factor in the war it was their blockade of german ports that really brought germany to its knees uh britain's atlantic blockade of germany was a big factor that's like the third time in this video that i've said something when i paused literally seconds before he said it i swear it's not intentional in depriving germany of supplies there were countless naval skirmishes all over the war germany tried to turn the tide of war with unrestricted u-boat warfare and if you look at the mediterranean the major powers there were using their navies to block each other and i'll say this about the unrestricted submarine warfare it's another one of those things that people use to paint germany as the bad guys what choice did they have i mean really if i was in germany's position i think i'd have to do the same thing it's the best naval weapon they've got they're being blockaded they can't sustain this war forever without being able to import things into their country uh they really had no choice because you have the us even though they're not a belligerent in the war they're just sending tons you know thousands of tons of supplies to the allies across the sea what are you going to do i mean i i understand why they did it there were also great stories of german raiders like the move or the emden which you should definitely check out out there number two the german army wasn't defeated in world war one yes they were yeah they endured far longer than anyone could have imagined and their final offensives in 1918 were real forces to be reckoned with but the state of the army by the summer of 1918 was catastrophic in terms of supplies and morale yeah and that goes back to the whole uh blockade thing uh the home front was desperate the the western front was desperate the eastern front the war was basically over because russia was out of the war but by this time the u.s has gotten large numbers of men over a million men i think into the european theater and so it's really just a matter of time and the state of their allies was worse austria-hungary never really recovered after 1916. the ottoman empire had huge problems even before the war and the bulgarian army collapsed the german army did call for a cease-fire before the allies broke through the hindenburg line which they would have done number one world war one was mainly fought on the western front there was the eastern front the serbian front the italian front the salonica front and some of these fronts i mean serbia loses like what a third of their entire population in this war uh the italian front was incredibly bloody when italy joins the war on the side of the allies uh the fighting in the mountains there was brutal obviously you know i mean any war between germany and russia on the eastern front and austria hungary in russia is going to be brutal gallipoli the persian front the mesopotamian front the palestine front the libyan front the caucasus front the romanian front east africa southwest africa cameroon the war at sea the arab revolt did i did i miss anything the western front was but a fraction and not even a big fraction of the total of the first world war okay well that is my list for now now no doubt you have many things you disagree with or many others you'd like to add to the list please let us know in the comments and for anyone new to our channel you can find over 200 videos about world war one on our channel so yeah definitely check them out if you have any interest in learning more about world war one check it out indian eidel is one of my favorite uh historical storytellers in terms of how he presents the information i absolutely love it could listen to them all day there are nice you know bite-sized chunks like this so definitely worth your time i put a link in the description to this specific video and we will definitely be doing more of their content let me know your thoughts about what we just talked about in the comment section below please hit that like button subscribe if you're new and you haven't already done so we'll see you again soon thanks for watching you

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 149,014

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Id: c1YpPYXGr1A

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021