Politics and the First World War - Professor Sir Richard Evans

well good evening everybody welcome to this latest lecture in our series on the first world war and I'm Richard Evans I'm also Provost of Gresham College and it falls to me to talk about war and politics in relation to the first world war and I've put up the famous quote there by the Prussian military theorist of the Napoleonic era Carl von Clausewitz who famously observed that war is the continuation of politics by other means and that means of course that you don't fight a war for its own sake it's inclusive itses view that war is an instrument of policy to be used to achieve specific aims and purposes a perfect example of how this dictum worked out in practice could be found in Bismarck's Wars of the 1860s there was Bismarck and all the price and generals all been reading cloud service it was part of general education in Prussia and Bismarck's wars were aimed to achieve German unification under Prussian leadership because Germany in the 1860s was a kind of collection of 39 states and a very loose organization called the German Confederation and each case of his Wars the war against Denmark in 1864 against Austrian ages 86 against France then in 1870 bismarck provided a retrospective in illustration of another famous dictum this time from a French politician from indeed Georges Clemenceau during the First World War Clemmie so famously said war is too serious a matter to be left to the soldiers and after the rapid victory of the Prussian armies over their Austrian opponents at the Battle of königgrätz in 1866 the generals flushed with victory unexpected victory and complete victory were keen to push on to Vienna but in a series of heated arguments that's femicide a series of heated arguments Bismarck stopped them he convinced the Prussian King Wilhelm the first that the aim of expelling Austria from the German Confederation and founding a new North German Confederation under Prussian leadership had been achieved and it was not necessary to go any further indeed politically very dangerous since the new Germany did not want to make an enemy out of the Austrians having the French isn't anything is bad enough notice relationship with Bismarck Wilhelm the first always gave in to his Chancellor's tantrums and threats of resignation as he once said it's tough being Kaiser under Bismarck but his grandson the headstrong Phil helm the second who succeeded in 1888 had other ideas within two years he'd got rid of Bismarck and embarked our course of his own building a big Navy designed to challenge the British in that all seen and open the way to the enlargement of Germany's rather miserable little colonial empire is a famous cartoon and punched by Sir John Tenniel Calder dropping the pilot there's Bismarck the pilot who steered Germany into existence there's the Kaiser looking extremely casual and supercilious watching him go down the steps as he's ready to sail the ship of state into uncharted waters unlike Bismarck who coined another famous phrase politics is the art of the possible and if you ever seen any dictionaries of quotations which ascribe that to are a butler they're wrong he pinched it from Bismarck he also said the artists station statesmanship is to steer a course on the stream of time so in other words Bismarck thought that the art of statesmanship was really to recognize the way things are moving and try and take advantage of them and he knew that nationalism was the great force of the 19th century you couldn't the world row against it you had to go with it and he used it to set up the new Germany the way he wanted it but unlike Bismarck who spent the 1870s and 1880s consolidating the new Germany's position internationally with a precarious house of cards of alliances the Kaiser viloma ii had no idea how precarious the new Germany's position in the world was or how dangerous it would be to upset the European status quo without a clear political reason for doing so and a rational strategy for putting his policy into operation just over a quarter of a century after Bill Hemmer second succession to the throne Britain and Germany were at war now class of its also observed that policy objectives often became obscured in what he called the fog of war armed conflict tended to develop its own logic military events frequently took an unexpected turn it required a strong hand to keep the generals under control indeed the elder multicart of the victor of 1866 and 1870 observed that the first thing any General had to do in the battle was to tear up his plans and make it up as he went along as the situation developed already in clouds of its his time the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had demonstrated the power of ideology political ideas of the French Revolution to inspire a lust for conquest cousin after Waterloo in 1815 so great was a general fear in Revolutionary Wars breaking out again with all their destructiveness that right through the 19th century the major powers got together time and again in what became known as the concert of Europe to solve international problems keep the balance of power and put the lid on popular revolutions now in the 18th century Europe's Wars were global in scale with anglo-french rivalry fought out in India and America as well as on the European continent after 1815 by contrast Britain's world hegemony underpinned by the unchallenged power of the Royal Navy and the industrial revolution in Britain helped ensure that European conflicts remain limited in scope as a result all the armed conflicts Europe experienced between 1815 and 1914 is a hostile American cartoon of the British power in 19th century but all the European conflicts of the 19th century were short in duration they involved only a handful of combatant nations they were fought within a very restricted geographical area the Russian Turkish Wars of the 1820s and 1870s the suppression of the 1848 revolution the Crimean War Wars of Italian German unification all of these were eventually brought to an end either by concerted international action or because the victorious side had clear and limited aims which it achieved here's another octopus suggesting the danger of Russia this is a French map from 1877 about the the russo-turkish war which was brought to an end after a short space of time by an instant concerted international action to push the Russians back from their ambitions to get an outlet to the Mediterranean now the states that fought these wars are obviously prompted to reform themselves to improve their effectiveness so Russia example after the Crimean War through its defeat embarked on a major series of reforms of the abolition of serfdom creation of new government ministries reform of the army and so on in fact nineteenth-century Wars often brought about regime change as in the unification of Italy and Germany or the creation of the Third Republic in France after the defeat of the Second Empire Napoleon the third by the Germans in the franco-prussian war in 1871 but beneath these changes there's a great deal of continuity as the central political institutions of one regime were carried on into the next so you can think of for example the electoral system in France which has carried over from the Second Empire to the Third Republic the Germany of Prussian institutional structures which has carried over first into the North German Confederation and then to United German Empire the absolutist power of the Tsar which survived the institutional reforms of the 1860s so in their own reforms and changes but there's a lot of continuity as well now is it rather lengthy per efforts to what I'm going to say because clearly the war that broke out in 1914 broke with this long-established pattern putting broke with everything that Europeans had been familiar with in the 19th century in the experience of the relationship of war and politics first of all the war that broke out in 1914 lasted for more than four years longer than any other war all the other Wars 19th century lasted two or even they're even shorter in the case of bhisma was just a few weeks it was fought not just in a limited area of Europe like the nineteenth-century Wars but it was fought in numerous locations across the globe it defied all attempts to limit it or bring it to an end until one side finally was forced to concede defeat so war between 1914 and 1918 but escaped the control of politics and began very quickly to exert its own momentum to its actual effects on politics were profound even cataclysmic for great empires collapsed and were replaced by radically different political regimes the Ottoman Empire the Russian Empire the German Empire the austro-hungarian Empire here you see a kind of before-and-after map you can see here the major changes in Central Europe Germany becomes smaller Poland comes into existence Latvia Lithuania Estonia you can see how in the austria-hungary is broken up into Czechoslovakia Austria Hungary Yugoslavia Romania becomes bigger the Turks the Ottoman empires pushed substantially out of out of Europe okay so this is the Great War in other words as it was known until the Second World War the Great War was unprecedented in scale and scope something completely new and it reversed the relationship between war and politics which Clausewitz had laid down as the most fruitful so why did the European order of the 19th century break down and give way to four years of unrestrained global conflict involving almost every notion on the European continent and others outside including Japan and eventually America so was this some kind of parallel was a repair allel of some sort with events in the present day there's a lot of writing and speculation last year as the anniversary came up about a rising power Germany in 1914 challenging a declining Empire Britain now people said it was China challenging America then as now nationalism was on the rise then as now a border disputes such as the dispute between China and Japan threatened to escalate into wider conflicts or in the Middle East or a century ago in Morocco but these parallels I think are specious the main reason for this I think lies in the enormous differences in the international order between 1914 and 2014 so if we go back to the turn of the century this is a First World War poster making fun of Balaam a second concert of Europe began to break down the rising power of Germany refused to play by the rules of the concert of Europe and it threw its weight around in the search for colonies what Vil am ii and his Chancellor Bernhard phone below called Vint politique or world policy the search as Bureau said for a place in the Sun for Imperial Germany and remember German colonies were South Africa Namibia Tanganyika now Tanzania Togoland Cameroon a little chunk of New Guinea and some islands in the Pacific called the Bismarck Archipelago this clearly wasn't enough for the leaders of Germany compared to the enormous world empires of the French and the British or even the Portuguese so a naval arms race with Britain ensued nothing like it had ever ham before in 1905 Czarist Russia was humiliatingly defeated in a war with Japan and turn its attention back to the European theater was not expanded through the late 19th century to Vladivostok and then down into Manchuria towards in the Pacific but it was now defeated by a war with in in the war with Japan - everybody's absolute surprise actually when I was teaching at university of east anglia and elderly and rather deaf professor in the next room was holding a class and the wards are rather thin and since he'd been an interrogator in the Second World War he taught by interrogation and he asked he would they were doing the right of Japanese warned he asked the students oh why why did you do he's a German Jewish professor vitally why did the Japanese defeat some Russians in the law is between Japan and Russia why did they have a naval victory and eventually a girl popped up and said well professor perhaps it's because they had more efficient ships he said what more fish and chips what US and then so one heard the most extraordinary things in their new University well what this did was it pushed the Russian turned them away from the Pacific and turned their attention back to Europe and austria-hungary is becoming more more nervous with the rise of Balkan and Slav nationalism within its borders a French were still thirsting for a revenge for the defeat of 1871 by the German so these powers all now looked for alliances to strengthen their respective positions and soon Europe was divided into two armed camps the Triple Alliance of Austria Germany in Ottawa German Italy and the triple on tante of Britain France and Russia this was I think in some ways parallel to the situation in Europe between 1947 and 1989 when again two armed camps faced each other in the Cold War but in 1914 Europeans had what seemed to us I think to being an irresponsibly positive attitude to war after decades of peace war it was widely thought in 1914 would be an adventure it would be like a duel fort or to assert manliness and honor any on a much bigger scale remember dueling was Kama common right across Europe and many novels you probably know which feature duels many politicians story pin the Russian Prime Minister column or so many others fought deals this time it was mostly by by pistols pistols at ten paces or twenty paces according to how severe the quarrel was onion written did you prove your manliness in a different way in other words on the cricket pitch which is the same effect a small hard round object coming towards you very fast this positive attitude to towards war was added to by social Darwinism as politicians and statesmen increasingly saw international relations in terms of the survival of the fittest nation in the competition for supremacy there's plenty of documentation of European statesmen thinking in these these terms the second world war of course discredited such ideas becoming with the atom bomb made politicians and people's much more cautious about how launching major armed conflicts but 1914 it could look back on European Wars in the 19th century and think that they were not terribly destructive why should the next war be destructive as well well since 1989 we have moved from a bipolar world and the Cold War through a brief unipolar period in the 90s to now an increasingly multipolar world and this kind of reverses the developments have characterized the years before 1914 year before 1914 Europe was moving from the unipolar world dominated by Britain to a multipolar situation and then finally a bipolar world between the two major alliance systems and of course like he to 1914 is that a local conflict triggers a much bigger one and this is much easier much more possible or likely even when you have a bipolar system of alliances but it's much less likely when there are several different players in the power game of international politics this is how this is an American cartoon a rather good one I think of how the First World War began with a smaller small quarrel beginning each side backs backs its clients and you have a major war and of course the international cooperation that had faded away with the demise of the concept of Europe before 1914 and it's the division of Europe revived after 1945 and it's still in existence today in many institutions from the United Nations to the European Union and conflict resolution mechanisms exist at many levels as they did under the concert of Europe but not from the turn of the century in this new bipolar system pain or the biggest difference between then and now lies I think in the fact that the first world war was not a war between European States it was a war between European between multinational States but above all a war between global empires a Scramble for Africa that began in the 1880s and extended to other parts of the world most notably the Pacific took some time to convert the territories carried out by drawing lines on the map in a conferences in Europe into real colonies kicking in an Africa the ashanti wars between the Ashanti and the British in West Africa there were nine of them I think and they lasted until the final British victory at the end of the century which is were tangling here with an advanced and militarily effective African empire which took very long time to subjugate the Boers in South Africa were only brought under probe all British rule in 1902 the Germans established control in East and West Africa in genocide Awards against the indigenous inhabitants which finished only in 1907 the Belgians established their cruel and sadistic rule over the Congo around the same time the Russians at this time was still constructing the trans-siberian railway to develop their recently conquered territories in central and eastern Asia and the European powers came to the realization that they would not be able to conquer China only during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 which created so much hostility and opposition became clear that costs of invading and dividing up the decaying Chinese Empire would be prohibitive so the colonial map of the world in other words in real terms was only completed the beginning of the 20th century and from this point onwards in this age of imperialism and colonization it was clear that new colonies could only be acquired by seizing them from other powers chief of these other powers of course was the decaying Ottoman Empire which still controlled most of the Balkans Middle East and North Africa and a few is that detonating the explosion of August 1914 was laid by the Italian invasion and annexation of the Ottoman province of Libya and the Dodecanese islands of the Anatolian coast three years before 1914 it's howling success in Libya convinced the emerging Balkan nations at the time had come for them to achieve independence or increase and consolidate their recently gone recently one nationhood and in the two Balkan wars of 1912 to 13 the Balkan nations you see them there on the map including Greece seized most of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire leaving them only a tiny piece of territory west of Istanbul and then fought each other the second Balkan war over the spoils now the first Balkan war when Montenegro an alliance with Serbia attacked northern Albania Italy and austria-hungary demanded their withdrawal Russia began to mobilize in support of the Serbs France declared its support for the Russians so already you can see in the first Balkan war 1912 the situation building up what other powers are sucked into these conflicts and it was only diffused by a British intervention resulting in the general international conference that guaranteed our independence for Albania as is an ominous kind of rehearsal but what happened in August 1914 - now in the intervening period the attention of Serb nationalists turned to Bosnia with its substantial population of ethnic Serbs 1908 had been incorporated into the absolute monarchy in a unilateral act of annexation that aroused fierce passions among Serb nationalists and of course the the Austrians did this in order to try and calm the situation and stop Serb national was extending into within their borders one particular Serb nationalist group the so called Black Hand a terrorist movement that in fact committed numerous atrocities during the Balkan wars took the opportunity to express this outrage by sponsoring the assassination of the heir to the austro-hungarian throne the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the 20th of June 1914 as he and his wife visited sorry ever the Austrians were determined on invading Serbia from a start desperately worried about the stability of their rule over the South Slavs unless as they said they taught the Serbs a lesson but the sense of weakness that fuelled Austrian aggression also made the Austrians where that it will be unwise to do this unless they had backing from Berlin German government without other major allies in Europe apart from the fickle and unreliable Italians who indeed did refuse to come in on their side in 1914 and came on in the other side some months later the German government agreed on the 6th of July issue the famous blank check to the Austrians promising unconditional support however it's be clear nobody at the time thought the Russians had actually intervened they weren't ready they were building up their armed forces their arms equipment and munitions and mobilization plans and so on would not be really ready until 1917 and the Russians are back down in the previous book on crisis I've just described of the year before nineteen twelve to thirteen they'd eventually backed down after British mediation and surely the Russians would not back a regicide they will not come in the side of somebody power or its clients or emissaries who had killed the heir to a throne and I know things any evidence for the aim of the claim that the Germans were using the crisis as an excuse for war with the Russians still less with the French when I 28th of June it was until late July that the European powers began to be aware of the danger of the conflict in the Balkans escalating on the 21st of July bitman Hovick the German Chancellor told his ambassadors we urgently desire a localization of the conflict even army chief on Moscow here with the Kaiser thought the Austria Austrians could beat the Serbs in a few days then make peace quickly at that on the 13th of July but the Austrians did not act quickly which is the main condition for localization Austrian Habsburg rule was once described famously as absolutism tempered by inefficiency and this was certainly the case in this crisis he was until the 23rd of July the Austrian government having taken weeks to secure the necessary agreement of its Hungarian counterpart issued an ultimatum to the Serbs to find and punish the assassins the Serbs indicated their willingness to give in on almost all points when on the 27th of July the Kaiser learned of the Serb response to the ultimatum he wrote this does away with any need for war but in fact of course the ultimatum was an excuse for war designed to be unacceptable and even a slight equivocation in the response and there was a good deal of it in the response from the Serbs would be taken in Vienna as a know and as a pretext for invasion which is exactly what happened now British opinion was initially Pro Austrian blaming the Serbs saying they had to arrest the perpetrators of the assassination prime minister asked with preoccupied with Allston still thought the UK would not be involved as later sat 24th of July the press agreed it would be ridiculous to get involved in this obscure quarrel while the French pressed the Russians to stand firm behind Serbia during a long planned French official visit to Russia the Montenegrin princesses married to two key Grand Dukes and Tsar Nicholas the seconds entourage kept telling them you're all going to go back alsace-lorraine Germany will be destroyed the French government clearly saw its opportunity to get revenge for 1871 and on the 23rd of July Russia and France agreed to defend Serbia but this failed in its aim of stopping the Austrians from pressing on they had no plan B their only plan was to invade the ultimatum expired on the 25th of July Austria no bolides on the 28th the Serbs had already mobilized Russian leader were keen to sublimate mounting content and terrorism at home the average life expectancy of a Russian government minister this time is about eight months setting into a patriotic crusade abroad and when the Russians started partial mobilization on the 29th of July the German leadership panicked the Germans Schlieffen Plan named after the former chief of the General Staff Alfred - designed to eliminate France before turning to Russia which is notoriously slow to mobilize and thus plan swine direction German army marched into Belgium with the intention of encircling Paris from the West pinning up the French armies against the frontier from behind a classic maneuver of encirclement French and Russians a toll gravy Foreign Minister in London that a clear British declaration of support would deter the Germans but the British Cabinet wouldn't allow this at a meeting on the 27th of July three-quarters of cabinet ministers opposed entering a war unless Britain was directly attacked only on the 2nd of August did grey persuade the cabinet that invasion of France and violation of Belgian neutrality would be a cause of spelly a reason for going to war and in the cabinet the threat of gray and Asquith resigning if this didn't happen was crucial when civil war was threatening and Ireland suffragette outrages were mounting at home the breakup of the government could not be contemplated so the reasoning behind the British decision to go to war can't be reduced to a simple response to German aggression naval arms race is no longer an issue by 1914 been won decisively by the British with the construction of the dreadnought class of heavily armed battleships which is a major reason why the German government switched funding to the expansion of the land army in 1913 and to British politicians and civil servants whatever some present-day politicians have claimed the threat was not a German ciao change to Western democratic values is a more general threat of Britain's position in the world on the 25th of July so err crow a senior foreign office mandarin advised should the war come and England stand aside one of two things must happen one either Germany and Austria win crush France and humiliate Russia what will then be the position of a friendless England or to France and Russia win what would then be their attitude towards England what about India and the Mediterranean so the war in this sense one goes with crows advice was fought as much to tame Russia and France as to oppose German aggression now you have British cartoon about British fears of the Russian bear making further advances towards Egypt and the Middle East or here you have Delhi colonial conflicts over over Morocco get again fear of the French what strikes about it strikes one about this chain of events is how none of the powers involved was actively working for a general war of conquest and aggrandizement even the Austrians the most belligerent of the European states in the crisis acted on the assumption that they would be left alone to conquer the Serbs they and the Germans assumed the Russians would not intervene the Germans assumed the British would not intervene but efforts to localize the conflict in contrast to the Balkan crisis of 1912 to 13 were very half-hearted by the time it became clear qinger decisive mediation was needed events had gone too far muddled and confusion reigned and as the politicians Dillard and squabbled the military took over pushing for mobilization in the belief that their moment had come so the First World War was not politics continued by other means but one single state in Europe began it with clearly formulated war aims or had any concerted organized vision of how it wanted it to end once the worid started however the belligerent nations quickly began to decide what they wanted from the conflict the most famous set of war aims is the German September program which was discovered in the German archives after the Second World War by the German historian for its Fisher with whom indeed I studied some time afterwards in Hamburg and his whole entourage of assistants and students had something of a crusading atmosphere of uncovering the huge extent of German war aims should been concealed up to that point here we have the September program as you can see they're going to annex substantial areas of Ty them economically to Germany they're going to satellite States it's going to be complete European domination Germany is going to be extended to include key industrial areas like Lorraine long very long we pre a the Luxembourg key parts of polish industry and so on it was a bid for world powers at Fisher and it included demands for huge annexations overseas as well but it never actually became official policy here you have the African aims again Grand Eisen creating a kind of German German Empire in Africa but this is none of this is actually official policies officious showed war homes are constantly disputed and debated hardline annexation is such as the people who produce this map are clashing those who have only wanted limited gains or indeed like the Social Democrats the Marxist the largest political party in Germany and Marxists wanted no annexations at all Kaiser's Germany was not a dictatorship any government required the assent of the elected national legislature the Reichstag for its policies and the largest party was the Social Democrats who wanted a piece without annexations now for them this was a defensive war waged against the threat of azureus Russian dictatorship regime they saw as backward barbarous anti-semitic and anti-democracy and here you have on the 28th of July still at this late hour massive socialist demonstrations in Germany against war is only when they were persuaded that it was a defensive war against the Russian Czarist despotism that they changed their minds and supported war credits Russia along with France was Britain's principal ally in the war a fact that gives the lie to claims that the war was fought from the beginning in defense of Western values and democratic freedoms here is a very hostile cartoon of the Russian take issue not only was Germany a good deal more democratic than and free than Russia but Britain Britain itself I think the restricted franchise meant that only the fuller that about 40 percent of adult males including probably majority of the soldiers have fought on the Western Front did not have the right to vote what these men believed they were fighting for their letters suggests was Britain and the British Empire and in fact the Great War was a global war six hundred and thirty thousand Canadian troops enlisted four hundred and twelve thousand Australians 1,450,000 Indian 128,000 Zealanders 136,000 South Africans and many of these including Indians fought on the Western Front 160,000 British colonial troops with 1 million bearers to carry their ammunition and so on fought the Germans in East Africa in fact most of the Indian troops fought the Ottomans in Mesopotamia lists about hundred and fifty thousand on the Western Front the fridge sent large numbers of African troops to Europe including 173 thousand soldiers from Algeria 134 thousand from West Africa sixty thousand from Tunisia 44,000 into China thirty-seven thousand from Morocco 34 thousand ramela Gasquet the Russians of course to play deployed large numbers of troops from their provinces in Central Asia so even in Europe this was a global war but it was 42 in Africa piccola Pacific in the Middle East his a inspection of Senegalese troops by the French for example the Germans lost almost all their colonies immediately French British and colonial forces conquered Namibia Cameroon and other German territories except for Tanganyika where a German force held out for much longer in the campaign describe entertainingly in William Boyd's novel and ice-cream war and in the classic film you may know starting as during a Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart the African Queen and another movie Lawrence of Arabia reminds us of the conflict in the Ottoman provinces of the Middle East and of course the disaster Gallipoli as itched starkly on public memory in Australia and New Zealand it on the gone that Japan was an ally of Britain in the great war and joined in the siege of Tsingtao a German treaty port in China now mainly known across the world as a site tsingtao brewery which produces a lager originally known before the First World War by the name of Gilmore Nia Japanese and Australian forces cooperated in the capture of the German colony of Kaiser Wilhelm's land in northeastern New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago for the Japanese this was an opportunity to test once more their military efficiency against European armies which stay and aim their tube sufficiently well to instill a belief in them that they could do the same thing on a much larger scale in the future virtually almost the only part of the globe inhabited part of the globe with any rate not involved in the conflict where the Americas and that change of course on the 6th of April 1917 when the United States entered the war on the Allied side the main reasons behind the USA's abandonment of neutrality were the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare the 9th of January which is designed to stop our supplies reaching Britain no matter where even if they were carried in a neutral American ships and the interception and publication of the Zimmermann telegram in which the German Foreign Minister offered Mexico help in reconquering Texas and the southwestern states in return for a military alliance with the Central Powers u.s. President Woodrow Wilson felt able to declare war at this point in April 1917 because the February revolution in Russia had toppled Czarist despotism and ushered in what looked likely to be a new democratic political system here is a portrait others are being thrown by the revolutionaries onto the fire this was of course a liberal revolution the Bolshevik Revolution didn't happen until much later in the year and this transformed the politics of the war by enabling the Allies to declare that it was a struggle for democratic values and a fight to build a better world this is the crucial turning point it's been in that sense and embarrassment for the Western Allies that Zara's despotism had been their main ally but now Sarris Russia was no longer there was a republic and it was enshrined in shrining democratic and liberal values that changed the politics of the war in the largest sense and less than a year later in January 1918 when the situation of Russia was still very unclear Wilson's fourteen points proclaimed the freedom of the seas International Cooperation open diplomacy the autonomy of the constituent nations of the Habsburg Empire the creation of a new polish state and the establishment of a legal League of Nations all these things Wilson proclaimed were major war aims now in what was presented as a moral and political as well as a military struggle these events of course had to be seen as part of a wider crisis in the conduct of the war the war placed enormous unprecedented unsuspected military economic and administrative strains on the Komet ins and these strains which breaking point towards the end of 1916 nobody expected it to go on so long and and to be so enormous ly expensive in every sense of the word in terms of lives nation's economy and social order I was clear that the war required more vigorous and more determined leadership if the stalemate on the Western Front was to be broken not only was the military situation difficult but the Morales civilians are suffering too and this is especially the case in Germany and austria-hungary when the Allied blockade was producing serious malnutrition and major food riots in the end in fact over half a million Germans died of malnutrition as a result of the blockade in August 1916 paul von hindenburg took over a chief of the German General Staff largely acting as the popular figurehead while the actual direction of the war was taken over by the quartermaster general Erich Ludendorff new efforts were made to centralize and boost war production with the Hindenburg program while it was largely Ludendorff here on the right who pushed forward the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Kaiser and the civilian government were effectively sidelined by the new military leadership at the same time the Social Democratic opposition in Germany split into moderate and Radical factions while the Catholics sent a party and the Liberals collaborated with the majority socialists in a joint parliamentary committee to push for political and electoral reform and in the spring of 1917 the Kaiser as a kind of yielding to this pressure and as a riposte to the new democratic program of the Allies issued his Easter proclamation at the prompting of Ludendorff promising the introducing of introduction of universal on equal suffrage manhood suffrage in Prussia which is covered a larger part of the German Empire so political reform here has been given by driven by military necessity Ludendorff did not believe in democracy at all and in fact his political views were extremely strange particularly after he came under the influence of his second wife who was a kind of a cultist and had some extraordinary peculiar ideas Ludendorff example took part with Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch 1923 but he saw that you had to promise democracy however insincere you might be in order to counter the Allied claim after the federal revolution in Russia that they were fighting for democracy against the German dictatorship so here military necessity you know the name of boosting morale firing up people's commitment drove political reform if every revolution in Russia aimed on similar lines to increase military performance boost domestic production of arms and ammunition by securing a greater commitment to the war on the part of the masses by involving them or any government in austria-hungary a death of the aged Emperor Franz Josef in November 1916 he'd been on the throne since 1848 brought his grandson Carla six to the throne he knowing the situation was now dire tried desperately to save his empire by negotiating a separate peace with France the Germans got rid of this and effectively took over Austria alienating the population of the empire and hastening its disintegration in Britain Asquith gave way in December 1916 to the far tougher and more determined figure of Lloyd George and in 1917 the leadership of the French war effort was taken over by Georges Clemenceau as similarly tough and uncompromising figure so in a space of a few months then the political situation was transformed as Carles six that's Lloyd George and there's Clemens so now by this time despite Woodrow Wilson's idealism winning the war become an end in itself a military necessity was trumping politics Russia the Bolsheviks under Lenin were determined to end the war because they knew it could no longer be effectively fought the German military leadership benefiting from the huge transfer of large numbers of troops from the Eastern Front to the Western Front after the defeat of Russia launched a massive spring offensive in 1918 that pushed the Allied forces back as you can see here but failed in the end to dent their morale and the advance ran out of steam generals of the First World War failed to realize on all sides that to put it simply the invention of barbed wire in 1874 and the portable machine gun a decade later decisively tilted the balance of warfare towards the defensive side examples of easy victories in the colonial wars which so many generals had participated was still fresh in their minds Bismarck's quickened triumphal Wars of the 1860s of the model but the First World War unlike these earlier wars had become a war between peoples as much as between armies a war of attrition in which the combatant nation with the richest resources and the best organized system for exploiting and deploying them I was going to win and here we are war between people's this kind of extreme dreamy violent and hostile as kind of cartoons expressed attitudes that were not there in the war between France Germany 1870 for example by the summer of 1918 Germany and Austria were exhausted Russia was out of the war American supplies and troops arriving in large numbers and most crucial of all Ludendorff realized the Allied production of tanks the armor that was clearly going to turn the balance of war in favor of the offensive side again was going to has outstripped that of Germany many times over in 1919 mainly because he knew that the jump that the Allied side would have thousands of tanks in 1919 against which the defense of the machine gun and barbed wire the trench would no it would not work that's why Ludendorff realized the war was lost and sued for peace well with the end of the war politics returned but in the peace settlement that followed it clashed fatally with military considerations driven by Wilson the negotiators established the League of Nations and apply the principle of national self-determination which by 1918 had become a means of hastening the war's end again military reasons by pushing forward the breakup of a house with Empire war steering politics again the successor states were unstable economically weak prone to quarrel with one another they contain significant national minorities that were another source of political instability despite the efforts of the French they were unable to form an effective barrier in in Europe to potential German expansionism nor were the new Europe established enough economic and political legitimacy to save democracy the new world of Wilsonian democracy had given way by the mid-1930s to dictatorships almost everywhere apart from Czechoslovakia and in Scandinavia and to bilateral and secret diplomacy between individual states treatment of Germany the peace settlement was largely dictated by the French desire to prevent another German bid for military supremacy which ensured that the German army was restricted 200,000 men tanks warships and combat aircraft were banned France got alsace-lorraine back territory was carved off for the new state of Poland a large reparations bill was imposed on the defeated nation to pay for the damage caused during four years of occupation of Belgium and northern France this did not however in the end fatally weakened Germany they did store up widespread and bitter resentments that Hitler and the Nazis were only two able to exploit when the financial and economic crash of the depression drove Germany into Hitler's arms in the early 1930s the peace settlement strengthened the British and French empires by transferring to them many of the colonies of the defeated powers Germany Africa the Pacific the Ottoman Empire the Middle East the British Empire actually reached its greatest extent after the first world war and it was still the predominant strategic consideration the minds of British politicians at this time in Britain the war was rightly remembered as a war fought by the Empire as a whole hence for example the absence of all Christian symbolism in the National War Memorial the Cenotaph in recognition of the multi-faith character of the Empire the rise of Hitler remilitarization the rhineland the Angelus of Austria all these seemed little local difficulties by comparison with the primacy of the Empire Britain strategic thinking thus when confronted with the possibility of war when Hitler threatened to invade Czechoslovakia 1938 the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain exclaimed in a radio broadcast to the people how horrible how fantastic incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing that was Czechoslovakia few hundred miles away he would not have said that over a similar quarrel in India or Australia the clouds of its war was politics pursued by other means Hitler politics was war perceived by other means from the start he intended to terror a peace settlement we are fighting new war this time for European domination far beyond anything previously dreamed up by the Kaiser Hitler's war was from the outset a racial war forced again fought against supposedly inferior groups who were to me ruthlessly exploited and killed in huge numbers the general plan for the east of 1941 envisaged up to 45 million Slavs being exterminated Hitler saw the Jews as Britain as Germany's principal enemy steering from behind the scenes the joint war effort Churchill Roosevelt and Stalin an extraordinary paranoid fantasy Hitler's war was an attempt to refight the war of 1914 to 18 but with radically different means he wanted from the outset to recreate the spirit of national unity in the people's community proclaimed by the Kaiser and I always started 14 and to avoid what he saw as establish revolutionaries in his war in his viewed caused Germany's defeat in 1918 was the other way around because the defeat came first in the revolution and then the revolutions were not Jewish he'll remember the first of all wars a humiliating defeat that had to be avenged it was without doubt of military victory for Britain the British Empire and Britain's allies but it wasn't a political victory it left major issues unresolved it brought new threats into being it unleashed unprecedented forces of violence and extremism leading directly to the rise of fascism and nazism anti-semitism dictatorship not least communism in Russia and beyond that death and destruction on an enormous Lee greater scale over the following decades now when we look beyond Britain becomes clear that the First World War was the Pandora's box of the 20th century letting loose unparalleled evil and destruction on the world thank you very much

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 204,944

Keywords: gresham. gresham talk, gresham lecture, gresham professor, gresham provost, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college tlak, gresham college talk, gresham college series, gresham series, sir richard evans, richard evans, wolfson college, history, modern history, war history, military hiustory, a level history, politics, political history, franz ferdinand, World War I (Military Conflict)

Id: 3GvaiCj_0X8

Length: 57min 59sec (3479 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Oh_Bloody_Richard]

That was fascinating, thanks for posting!

[u/Don_Quijoder]

TIL that Austria-Hungary actually tried to negotiate a separate peace with France in 1916.

Anyway, interesting lecture, OP. Thanks for posting it.