Was America Ever in Danger of a Military Dictatorship?

I recently read a jaw-dropping chapter in Thurston Clarke's JFK's Last Hundred Days. Historians are fairly unanimous in appraising the Cold War stakes of October 1962 as bordering on nuclear holocaust. The issue was over revelations that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear-tipped warheads in bases in Cuba. What is new in Clarke's account (to this reader at least) was just how worried President Kennedy was over the likelihood of a military coup in Washington resulting from the Cuban crisis.

Kennedy's top negotiator with the Russians was his own brother, Attorney General Robert (Bobby) Kennedy. Bobby told his Russian counterpart, “The President is in a grave situation, and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba.”

Bobby urges the Russian ambassador (Dobrynin) to accept the president's offer (U.S. will remove its missiles from Turkey if the Russians do the same in Cuba) or else,

"If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.”

Now, as I was reading this passage I thought the Kennedys were trying to scare the Russians into removing the Cuban missiles with the dreaded specter of a hard-lined military coup in the U.S., a coup that would place trigger-happy generals in power, who would then invade Cuba and nuke the Soviet Union. Surely this was a scare tactic not out of tradition for an American president? (Eisenhower had threatened to use nukes when negotiating with the North Koreans to agree to a ceasefire. Later, Nixon would successfully convince the North Vietnamese that he was a madman in order to get them to sign a ceasefire.)

Just when the author allowed me to travel down this line of reasoning, he abruptly blew my mind:

"But what is certain is that by the fall of 1962 the president not only believed a coup was possible, but had repeatedly discussed its likelihood."

As an avid reader of presidential history, that notion is shocking. You will not find another biography of another American president who was as concerned about being overthrown by a military coup as Kennedy. To my present knowledge Kennedy was the only one with the slightest worry about a coup.

Thurston Clarke takes the reader through a list of prominent journalists, government officials, and even Hollywood actors with whom Kennedy openly shared his fear of the military taking over the country. Shortly after the Cuban crisis, a novel called Seven Days in May was released and made into a major Hollywood film starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, among other big names. Its author, Fletcher Knebel, was inspired by discussions with high ranking officials in the army and air force who openly discussed their own concern that a military takeover could be in the offing. Kennedy met with the author and the producers of the film to implore them to use the project as a means to warn the American people.

What made John F. Kennedy uniquely afraid of a military coup?

Kennedy got off to a bad start with the military (and CIA) early in his presidency. He reluctantly signed off on the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation that involved an amphibious invasion of Cuba using a mere 1,500 or so exiles provided with air cover, which Kennedy cancelled at the last minute. It was a huge failure and an awful beginning of a presidency. Kennedy blamed the generals and they blamed him (for nixing the air support).

In the year and months separating the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, the highest ranking military officials drew up detailed plans for the overthrow of Castro, the most insidious of which can not be summarized or paraphrased. It was called Operation Northwoods. Here's an excerpt of Clarke's analysis:

On March 13, 1962, six months before the publication of Knebel’s book, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sent Secretary of Defense McNamara a top-secret memorandum proposing Operation Northwoods, a program of clandestine actions designed to provide what the chiefs called “adequate justification” for the United States to invade Cuba. It resembled the incursions by German troops dressed in Polish uniforms that Hitler used as a pretext for invading Poland. The chiefs recommended a “logical build-up of incidents” that would “camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility of a large scale,” and “place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba.” To accomplish this, they suggested “well-coordinated incidents” at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in the airspace over Cuba, and on the U.S. mainland. At Guantánamo, anti-Castro Cubans dressed in Cuban Army uniforms would be “captured” by U.S. forces after pretending to attack the base. “Blow up ammunition inside the base,” the Northwoods memorandum recommended. “Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage). . . . Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. . . . Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock victims.” The chiefs also proposed what they called a “Remember the Maine” incident that involved blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay or destroying an unmanned drone vessel in waters off Havana, and blaming Castro. “The U.S. could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation . . . to ‘evacuate’ remaining members of the non-existent crew,” they suggested. “Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” The memorandum’s most disturbing paragraph began, “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” which might entail “exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots.” It continued, “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”

Wow, try to let that sink in for a moment - the joint chiefs of staff - the highest ranking military officials submitted a plan that proposed fomenting terrorism - murder - against people living in America, all in the name of creating a pretext for regime change in Cuba? I had to re-read that passage several times in order to believe it!

I just have to say, I am not a reader who cares for conspiracy theories. I have nothing but contempt for such books and television documentaries. I think they reveal more about the psyche of the people writing them than they do about the subjects they portray. Conspiracy theory prays on the gullible and the under-educated.

Regardless, there is nothing theoretical about Operation Northwoods and it reveals a lot about the psyche of our nation's top military leadership during the most dangerous period of the Cold War. Kennedy not only rejected this abomination of memo, he fired the chairman of the joint chiefs.

After reading these unspeakable passages of non - theoretical conspiracy to commit murder on the American people, it is not a huge leap of the reader's imagination to understand President Kennedy's fear of a military coup to topple him from power. If the top brass of the United States military was willing to murder and otherwise terrorize innocent Americans in the name of patriotic duty, what would restrain them from contemplating the assassination of a president standing in their way?

I happen to believe the United States had ample justification for regime change in Cuba, but Kennedy was facing a real threat to American freedom and security coming directly from those who swore oaths to protect and preserve it. Thank God for leaders like him and Eisenhower who preceded him. Lesser men may have altered the course of American freedom for ill.

Does any of this shed light on why Kennedy was murdered in Dallas? If we haven't found out in fifty years, I doubt we ever will, in spite of all the phony books and videos out there claiming they know. It may have been the result of a higher conspiracy or it may simply have been what the known facts show - a hit job by a nutcase with a high-powered rifle, shooting from a window at a slow-moving target in an open car.

Did MacArthur Waste American Lives in the Pacific?

I am only writing about this because it keeps coming up in Second World War literature. I first learned about this issue in an undergrad college course I took on World War II several years ago. Douglas MacArthur comes across as a capable commander in both the Second World War and the Korean War. Regardless, any conversation about MacArthur has to reckon with his ego, which was more than just an unsavory character-trait. MacArthur's ego seems to have been a major driving force in US military policy and strategy in the Pacific theater of World War II. I would hate to think the lives of American soldiers were wasted on a strategy grounded on ego rather than military necessity. With that in mind, this discussion question is worth examining.

MacArthur's record in the battles of the South Pacific is on the whole exemplary, but the question is, did those battles have to be fought in the first place? Did the bloody fighting on Peleliu and the Philippine islands help shorten the war against Japan?

The answer is no.

MacArthur proposed a Philippines campaign to the president after the Mariana islands were secured in July 1944. Consider this passage from Antony Beevor's book on the war,  

"Marshall and the air force chief ‘Hap’ Arnold, on the other hand, knew that MacArthur’s pet project would not hasten the end of the war in the Pacific in any way. With the Marianas secured, they now had their air bases for attacking the Japanese home islands." (Underline Added)


In July 1944, MacArthur was the only top-tier military official who advocated a campaign of liberation in the Philippines. Marshall, Nimitz, and many others preferred a more direct path to Japan via the Marianas now that Saipan and Guam were secured. This Central Pacific strategy offered a bee-line to Japan, by-passing all the Japanese-occupied strongholds in the South Pacific.

MacArthur's motive was personal. He had been the commander of US and Filipino armed forces in Manila when the Philippines was attacked by the Japanese in December 1941. In early 1942, he abandoned the remnants of his garrison on Bataan, leaving them to suffer the 'death march' without him. MacArthur left on a presidential order, but the defeat and the manner in which he departed the Philippines stung his ego and threatened his reputation as a commander. Besides, who could forget his highly dramatic broadcast in which he vowed to return?

MacArthur ultimately prevailed in making the case to President Roosevelt that the US had an obligation to liberate the Philippines as a matter of honor if for nothing else. MacArthur's argument was grounded in the fact that the Philippines had been a US protectorate and therefore the Americans had a moral duty to honor its security commitment to its ally.

1944 was an election year. Perhaps the timing of MacArthur's lobbying for a South Pacific campaign swayed the president because in July, Roosevelt was concerned that his lead over his challenger was slipping in the polls. FDR may have thought it imprudent to make an enemy of a media darling like MacArthur. Whatever the case, MacArthur got his way. Antony Beevor writes,

"the joint chiefs of staff agreed at the Octagon conference in Quebec that MacArthur could go ahead. He should start with the island of Leyte in the eastern Philippines in October. All preliminary operations were cancelled, with one exception, the capture of Peleliu in the Palau Islands some 800 kilometres to the east of Leyte."

It was decided that the campaign would kick-off with a landing on Peleliu on September 15, 1944. The idea was to knock out the Japanese airfield in four days of combat and then move westward to the Philippines with the rear cleared of major enemy activity. Admiral Nimitz believed, mistakenly, that the island was lightly defended. Instead of a four-day mop-up, it took nearly a month to end major combat operations and another month for the island to be deemed secure.

During my college course in 2006, I was required to read E.B. Sledge's memoir of the Pacific war as a soldier in the Marines. Unfortunately, I do not have the book in front of me for direct quotation, but his description of the combat scene on Peleliu will never leave me.

In With the Old Breed Sledge describes his landing craft being hung-up on coral reef and having to bail-out under a hail of gunfire. Sledge and his comrades had to crawl across the razor-sharp coral to get to the beach. He describes the experience at Peleliu as an absolute hell. Antony Beevor explains,

"Peleliu, less than eight kilometres long and less than three wide, looked on the map like the skull of a crocodile’s head with its jaws slightly open. It consisted of a hilly spine of sharp coral along the north-west shore, a flat centre on which lay the airfield, and mangrove swamps on the south-east shore. The island was ringed with coral reef which made the use of landing craft impossible. Only the amtracs could get over them."

So picture Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan on the hell-zone at Omaha beach. Now, picture Tom Hanks having to crawl across jagged coral on his belly, bullets wizzing above and around him, just to get to the hell-zone on the beach. Beevor echoes Sledge by telling us,"For marines who had fought in most of the island battles, Peleliu was the worst." After securing the beachhead, the Marines had to "get to grips with the defenders , the marines first had to cross the airfield and deal with blockhouses and barracks, which had been turned into a concrete fortress. In the opinion of many, Guadalcanal now seemed like a holiday outing."

In a later passage, Beevor wraps up the damage as follows, "Clearing Bloody Nose Ridge was an arduous affair in which grenades and flamethrowers were vital tools. Its caves provided the Japanese with interlocking fields of fire, and the fighting was such that the bulk of the island was not cleared until the end of September. It was not finally secured until the end of October. By then the 1st Marine Division’s casualty rate had risen to 6,526 , of which 1,252 were killed. And the 81st Division, which had to be brought in as reinforcements, lost another 3,278. Yet Peleliu could have been bypassed altogether. It was one of Nimitz’s rare mistakes."

Folks, this is what it took for MacArthur's Philippines campaign just to begin! 

World War II was perhaps the last war in which supreme generals were celebrities on par with movie stars. Bernard Montgomery even autographed pictures for his fans as his army made its way through Sicily. Perhaps the most sickening example of American ego trumping military necessity was personified by General Mark Clark, who diverted Allied troops away from the crucial opportunity of trapping the German armies in central Italy in order to capture Rome- a prize of newspaper- making value, but of no military value. How many more thousands of Allied troops had to die in Italy to pay for Clark's selfish pursuit of glory!

All told, the Philippine invasions cost the Americans more than 62,000 casualties with nearly 14,000 dead. What if those battles didn't need to be fought?

In the run-up to the landings in the Philippines, its desperate people chaffing under Japanese occupation were inundated with leaflets and buttons emblazoned with the picture of Douglas MacArthur and the words "I Shall Return!" Doubtless, the expectation to Filipino and American prisoners that MacArthur was on his way, gave them hope to hang on a little longer. Perhaps honor and commitment really were good enough reasons to divert American strength away from a speedy knockout of Japan in order to liberate populations dear to Americans, but the role personal glory played in the decision-making of placing American soldiers in harm's way has never been thoroughly known by the American people, a people so enamored with their triumph in the Second World War.

Underappreciated History: Hitler's Biological War in Italy

Most of us World War II buffs know Hitler liked Mussolini and saved his neck after the Duce was deposed by his people. But what is less known is the terrible vengeance Hitler exacted on the Italians for doing away with Mussolini and surrendering to the Allies. As soon as King Victor Immanuel placed the Duce under arrest, Hitler poured panzers into northern Italy, sent paratroopers to break-out Mussolini from jail, and flooded the country with the unholy organ's of Himmler's SS. Jews were rounded up wherever found and shipped off to the death camps. Civilians were murdered for the slightest provocation, real or imagined. The Germans seized the population's food and starvation was rampant. For the Americans and British making the Anzio landings in January 1944, a special surprise was in store for them:

"Although the Germans had not prepared conventional military defences, they had deliberately wreaked environmental sabotage on the area. At vast expense in the 1930s, Mussolini had drained the Pontine Marshes and settled 100,000 Great War veterans to farm the reclaimed land. Mosquitoes, which had plagued the region, were virtually eliminated. After the Italian surrender, two of Himmler’s scientists planned revenge on their former ally. They had the pumps turned off to flood much of the area again and destroyed the tidal gates. They then introduced the malaria-carrying breed of mosquito, which could survive in brackish water. The German authorities also confiscated stocks of quinine, so that the disease spread. The inhabitants not only found their land and homes wrecked, but more than 55,000 contracted malaria the following year. It was a clear case of biological warfare."

Historian Antony Beevor, excerpt from The Second World War

Audio Discussion: When Did Hitler Begin Losing World War II?

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Please Note: Dunkirk is in France, six miles from the Belgian border.

Endangered History Figure: Joseph Stalin

This is surprising to those of us who love history, but Stalin is in danger of becoming forgotten among the younger generations whose understanding of history is in many cases dim in general. The history channel, educators, and media culture have done a wonderful job of keeping the public informed of Adolf Hitler and his malignant role in the shaping of world history, but Stalin, the world leader who armies and weapons utterly crushed Hitler's empire, cast the iron curtain throughout Eastern Europe, and waged the Cold War, is underrepresented in the history education most of our youth receive.

This discrepancy was brought to my attention while reading a short and new bio on the Soviet dictator by Paul Johnson, called Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer. Johnson writes in his introduction:

"I have undertaken this short life of Joseph Stalin because I have discovered that among the youth, he is insufficiently known. Whereas Hitler figures prominently in the mass media, and Mao Tse-Tung's memory is kept alive in the continuing rise in power of the communist state he created, Stalin has receded into the shadows. I shall bring him forth and shine on him the pitiless light of history."

With that bang, Johnson kicks off his fast-paced and engaging short biography. I managed to knock out the audio version in two commutes to and from the school where I teach. I loved it so much, I started it over and listened to it again during the following two commutes. This gem of an extended essay can be bought cheaply on kindle and is a great resource in bringing the grand and merciless legacy of Joseph Stalin to our awareness.

History Update: Did Europe Sleepwalk Into World War I?

"What happened was not war by accident, but war by ill-conceived Austrian design with German support."

Max Hastings in Catastrophe 1914

There is a view that the royals and statesmen of 1914 stumbled blindly into World War I. Christopher Clark has written a book about the subject entitled Sleepwalkers. My own view is that the men of 1914 were not stumbling into war blindly, but rather, they made the war what it was out of the sum total of their foolish gambles. Austria gambled that German backing would deter Russia from intervening while the Austrians crushed Serbia.  The Germans made the same gamble. The Russians gambled that they could put armies in the field before they were organized, trained, and supplied properly because they could count on the French to knock out the Germans from the west. The French made the reverse gamble. All of these gambles crashed and burned.

Hastings echoes my own view about the stakes involved in the defining conflict of the twentieth century. He's a British author who does not share the common view among his British peers that the war was for nothing. He seems to take aim at the Niall Ferguson thesis that Europe would have been better off if the British had sat back and watched the Germans conquer. Hastings writes that even though the Germans may have begun the war without specifically defined goals, they soon made clear how they intended to behave toward the vanquished once victory was achieved.

"The aim of the war is to provide us with security guarantees from east to west for the foreseeable future through the enfeeblement of our adversaries." -Bethmann Hollweg, German chancellor, September 1914. Hastings goes on to provide the itemized list of annexations and reparations the chancellor outlined in his draft on war aims. Much of it involved the disarmament of France, German control of Belgium and Holland, vast areas of Eastern Europe added to Germany, a customs union designed as a vehicle for German dominance of Europe, etc.

Heated Perspectives: FDR

Most of my friends are conservatives - there are a few liberals here and there but most are right-leaning. Those friends who are into history tend to despise FDR with a passion. One such friend emailed me in response to my post about the FDR book by Jean Edward Smith and wrote,

"The first one here on FDR would not get a nice  comment as I can’t think of a thing he did beneficial to the country. His New Deal was a disaster prolonging the Depression and then sneaking us into WWII and his racism –I’ll stop there."


I won't name the author of that comment even though he's the kind of friend who probably wouldn't mind being named. In fact, he would probably wear that quote with pride. That comment didn't bother me in the slightest but it provoked this post because over the years I have struggled to get a grip on FDR and I must say, after reading quite a bit on him, he's a total mystery. The guy never wrote anything. No one could get a straight answer out of him on most subjects. The people closest to him didn't understand him or have any idea of where they stood with him. People talk about Richard Nixon being sneaky and secretive, but Nixon wore everything on his sleeve! He was an open secret! Not so with FDR. Despite having a remarkable story of combating polio and becoming president in spite of it, one has very little understanding of what made FDR tick. Biographies on him tend to be kind of dull and tedious because the very man is missing in the narrative!

Conservative hatred of FDR stretches back to conservative-leaning authors. Paul Johnson's Modern Times and A History of the American People are incredible books. Great stuff. However, every time the author mentions FDR, he never misses an opportunity to beat him with a stick - even going so far as blaming him for the onslaught of communism in East Asia. I mean, I get Yalta...but East Asia too? Johnson won't give FDR an ounce of credit for anything positive.

Despite this intense hatred of FDR, he continues to be ranked among the top three greatest presidents of all time. Liberal propaganda? If so, than how come George Washington and Abe Lincoln are just as often ranked in the number 1 and number 2 positions? Is George Washington adored by modern day liberals? The same ones who complain about his slave-owning and so-called capitalistic greed? How about Lincoln? I've heard plenty of liberals tear into him for his supposed cynical motives for ending slavery.

Could there be another reason FDR is ranked so highly despite the strong negative conservative feelings? The guy must have done something right. Maybe not everything, but something. The best I can come up with is that FDR played a huge role in bringing America into its modern-day role as world superpower during the Second World War. His lend-lease policy forced the British to transfer the basis of their ocean-going dominance of the world to the Americans. He played a role in the Bretton Woods conference which tied world currencies to the American dollar, paving the way for America's postwar prosperity. His G.I. bill prevented returning servicemen from swamping the job market and made a college education possible for an entire generation. I could go on, but I want to keep this post brief.

The New Deal had its share of failures, but the FDR legacy is both wide and deep. All efforts to tear him down in the historical rankings will be futile. I think a more fertile ground for criticism is in the New Deal programs themselves rather than an over-arching attack on FDR as a president.

History Update: Was Germany To Blame For World War I?

I've written about this in greater detail in an earlier post, but my mind has drifted back to the issue because I'm listening to the audio version of Max Hastings' new book Catastrophe 1914. It seems when Germany's kaiser gave Austria the so-called 'blank cheque' to do what they saw fit in punishing Serbia over the archduke's assassination, the Germans were thinking the balkan crisis would be a local war. The Kaiser didn't start freaking out until the Russians started mobilizing their armies. That's the stage when the Kaiser started having second thoughts. Max Hastings characterizes Serbia as a rogue state that couldn't contain the violence radiating out from it.

Video Discussion: Cannibalism in World War II

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History Talk With Jason: Why World War 1 Fascinates Me EVEN MORE Than World...

History Talk With Jason: Why World War 1 Fascinates Me EVEN MORE Than World...: Whenever I meet new people and they ask what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a teacher and suddenly they are fascinated with m...

Good-to-Great Read

FDR (Random House; 1 edition: 2007) by Jean Edward Smith.

Never a hero among conservatives and constitutionalists, FDR nonetheless contributed mightily to the power and prestige of America in the world. Smith's book makes this case in spades!

Smith is the same author as for the Eisenhower book mentioned below. After reading both books, I honestly found Ike's story to be an even more compelling one than FDR's. The Second World War provided Eisenhower with a unique opportunity in military history, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, making him a power player on par in Roosevelt. Eisenhower's presidency was also more interesting than FDR's, especially with all the behind the scenes, knife-edge Cold War moments in which Ike was forced to decide whether or not to use nukes! Meanwhile, the American public thought he was just playing golf. Anyway, the FDR book is good too, though not as gripping as the Eisenhower book.

Good Read

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789 - 1815 (Oxford University Press, USA: 2009) by Gordon S. Wood.

A long overdue, in-depth treatment of the years following the revolution, when America rapidly became too democratic for the Founders' tastes. It was a time of great uncertainty and restlessness as America struggled to find a footing in a world dominated by a vengeful Great Britain and a turbulent France.

Outstanding Read!

Eisenhower In War and Peace (Random House: 2012) by Jean Edward Smith.

Incorporates the latest scholarship and overturns many distortions about Ike's record in the military and in the presidency. It is an important reappraisal that places its subject high in the rankings of great leaders.

Good Read

Decision Points (Crown: 2010) by George W. Bush.

Political memoir is always self-serving. Yet, this book is a sincere explanation of the how and why governing the choices made by President Bush. It fills key gaps of understanding about a turbulent decade.

Good Read I've Enjoyed

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Simon & Schuster; 1 Edition: 2003) by Walter Isaacson.

A magisterial, readable, and inspirational book about the most democratic Founder. Isaacson places Franklin in both his time and our time!

Good Read

Andrew Jackson: The Man and His Times (Doubleday; First Edition: 2005) by H.W. Brands.

A demagogue of the type feared by the Founders, Jackson was America's first common man president. Whatever you think of him, any man who carries dueling pistols to defend his wife's honor makes for a page-turning biographical subject! Brands does a remarkable job of steering a fair and balanced course in this exploration of a hugely polarizing historical titan.

What I've Read

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (Knopf; 1 edition: 2007) by Joseph J. Ellis.

Makes the most succinct argument about what the Founders actually "created" that was new and spectacular in the world. Among these creations are: the first colonial nation to win independence through a revolt; a constitution that has endured longer than any other; institutional legitimacy of dissent through political parties.

Why World War 1 Fascinates Me EVEN MORE Than World War 2

Whenever I meet new people and they ask what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a teacher and suddenly they are fascinated with me. It always catches me off guard because in my more disillusioned moments I think of how society is always beating up on teachers. Yet as soon as someone finds out I'm a teacher, they want to know all about it: what school I work at, what grade I teach, what the kids are like, and so on. When they ask what subject I teach and I tell them social studies they looked puzzled.  When I break it down into the categories of history, government, economics, and geography, they hone in on history and start telling me about what they've seen on the history channel and what their favorite subject is. For most it is World War 2-it even beats out the Civil War, which is surprising considering I live so close to Atlanta.

Don't get me wrong, I've read my share of World War 2 and I never seem to tire of it- but World War 1 has always had a strong pull on me. Lately, I can't stop reading about it and seeking out new books on the subject. There are five reasons for this:

1. Americans are obsessed with World War II and are willfully neglectful of World War 1. I find this stark disproportionate interest fascinating. Americans did not even have a national World War 1 memorial until the one designated in DC was established in 2014, but even the least interested television viewer is spellbound by the Hitler specials and the D-Day films. Admittedly, World War 2 films are better than World War 1 films. But there could be decent WW1 movies if more effort was put into their production. What explains the disproportionate American interest between the World Wars? For one thing, America had a longer and deeper involvement in the Second World War (1941-1945). From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki there was three and a half years of large-scale American military operations. For most of the First World War (1914-1918), the Americans were neutral, and even after they joined the Anglo-French Entente to form the Allied Powers, American armies were not involved in major combat operations until the summer of 1918. They helped turn the tide in favor of Allied victory, but less than six months remained of the war. There was not as much American home-front attachment and sacrifice to WW1 as there would be for WW2.

Also, World War 1 took place in an era before both radio and television. Most Americans were unable to follow the progress of WW1 while it was unfolding. By contrast, in WW2, Americans were glued to the radio for news on the war and from at least 1943 onward, they went to the movies to watch newsreels showing live combat footage. Let's also consider that WW2 has always carried with it a widespread feeling that it was a war that had to be fought - the "good war." There is something hopeful about the sacrifices made at Normandy and elsewhere, especially in hindsight, when you know the outcome solved something. Everyone can agree that the world is better off without Nazi Germany, for example. On the flipside, there is something horribly hopeless about the battles of the First World War. Millions of men were ground-up in the most god-awful combat situations in a stalemate that lasted three years. So many lives were wasted defending every inch of ground and for what? So that the world could do it all over again twenty years later! The tragedy seems magnified when you behold the fact that 16 million people died in a conflict that resolved nothing.

2. As hellish as the landings on Normandy were, and they were pretty awful, that operation lasted only one day. Gallipoli, the World War 1 amphibious equivalent, lasted for more than six months! Can you imagine the horrors of Normandy lasting six months? How can a man endure such a nightmare? This is a fascinating concept. And after studying what a disaster Gallipoli was (it ended in failure and took twenty years for Winston Churchill's political career to completely recover from it) it makes you appreciate the success of Normandy all the more! If you want to imagine all the ways D-Day could have gone wrong, Gallipoli is the answer. No wonder it took the Allies so long to open the second front in WW2! Winston Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of WW1. He was the brains behind the Gallipoli ordeal in 1915. He wasn't the only leader to have his hands in the planning of the operation but he was the original promoter of the scheme. To me, Churchill was to Gallipoli what Eisenhower would be to Normandy. I have to imagine Churchill instructing Ike, Do this, don't do that! (More about Gallipoli in #5 below).

3. The causes of WW1 are more interesting and rife with controversy than the causes of  WW2. The riddle of the Second World War is not a riddle at all. It's an open and shut case: Hitler wanted war at a time when no one else in Europe did.  There have been plenty of revisionist attempts at casting the blame on other actors. Some blame the world's shadow bankers for underwriting the munitions purchases that made the killing possible. But to me that's just capitalism responding to a demand. And who created the demand? Hitler. All of my open and honest queries into the origins of WW2 have led me back to Hitler. The causes of the First World War are far more complicated, and therefore more interesting.

Historians and nations have long established a consensus on why World War 2 was fought and which actors were to blame. No such consensus has ever or will ever be reached for WW1, making the subject forever alive with controversy and new scholarship arguing this angle or that angle. You could spend a lifetime just going through the research that has been done on the causes of the war alone, not to mention the other fascinating topics surrounding the war.

Who's to blame for World War I? The Serbs are a good candidate. They supplied the terrorist organization that murdered the Austrian archduke and heir to that country's throne. Many people blame the Austrians for overreacting by responding to the assassination with a full-scale war on Serbia (although, I'm sympathetic of the Austrians for having to continually endure security threats from the Serbs).

The Germans have been the target of much blame. They could have restrained their allies, the Austrians, and taken a real diplomatic leadership role that undoubtedly would have diffused the crisis. That ball was dropped when Germany's emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, gave the Austrians the infamous "blank cheque", assuring the Austrians of Germany's full support no matter what course of action they took regarding the Serbs.

Germany's part in this is really fascinating because the Germans were the key that turned the Serb crisis into a World War. The Kaiser was no Hitler. He was certainly not a warlord in the same sense of the term. He was just a petulant child-man who always whined that the other leaders of the world didn't love and respect him enough. So, like any insecure kid determined to prove his worth, he shook his fist and tried to bully his way into gaining respect, with disastrous international consequences. He went around telling everyone that "England will respect me more" if he built a German naval fleet to revival that of Britain's Royal Navy. Predictably, he failed. The main reason he failed is because first-rate naval fleets are incredibly expensive not only to build, but also to maintain. Germany was already maxing out their military expenditures on their army, the best trained and equipped in the world. The Kaiser simply couldn't afford to have the world's best army and navy at the same time.

Shortly before the outbreak of the war, the Kaiser abandoned his naval dream, accepting that he simply could not outspend the British on the latest and greatest battleships. (The British had no need to spend much on their army: they were all-in for the navy). More importantly, his little arms race had made an adversary out of the British. Whatever war the Kaiser got himself into, the British were sure to be on the opposing side.

The Russians have received their share of blame. They had a similar alliance with the Serbs that the Germans had with the Austrians. When the Serbs were under threat of Austrian invasion, the Russians guaranteed they would go to war for them.

At this stage, the Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, had the ball thrown into his lap. He didn't have as good a shot at stopping this thing as the Kaiser had had. He simply couldn't stand back and watch the Austrians crush his best ally in Eastern Europe. He had to do something.  He called for a mobilization of his armed forces. Whatever anyone thinks of that move, it raised the stakes and the scope of the imminent conflict. To Germany, Russian mobilization was as good as a declaration of war and the Germans issued an ultimatum threatening war unless the Russians stop mobilization. Just as the Tsar couldn't afford to watch the Austrians crush the Serbs, the Kaiser couldn't afford to allow the Russians to crush the Austrians. Both parties were now caught in a trap. They couldn't escape the dilemma of What kind of ally would I be if I let my best ally be steamrolled by a country that doesn't share my interests?

As I stated above, the Kaiser was no Hitler. He didn't want a war. After he saw the danger of what was shaping up, he tried very hard to put the toothpaste back into the tube. He began imploring the Austrians to settle for a solution to the Serb problem short of war. His previous "blank cheque" to the Austrians was a bluff. The kind of bluff an insecure bully would make. The Austrians turned out to be the first party to call that bluff and by the time he let it be known he harbored second-thoughts events had already moved beyond his control. The Kaiser was thus committed to fighting a larger-scale war against the Russians (and because of that, the French) all because he foolishly allowed the Austrians to write Germany's foreign policy during the Serb crisis.

If the Kaiser is guilty of starting World War I it is not because he was a warmonger - but rather - an irresponsible and lousy statesman way out of his depth in the arena of international diplomacy. But that's the price Germany paid for having its top leader chosen based on birthright instead of merit. The Kaiser was completely unqualified and unfit to lead Europe's most dynamic nation in the affairs of the world. The same can be said of the Tsar, a man who rose to become the master of the world's largest empire based on nothing more than the fact that his father had previously held that responsibility. Nicholas II didn't even want the job! Consequently, he chose to devote all his energy to being a devoted husband and father to his immediate family and scratched his head when his advisers told him what decisions he should make in the best interest of Russia.

The quality of the world's leaders in 1914 has added another layer to the blame-game. The statesman making the big decisions were a weak lot. Gone were the Bismarks, the Mitterniches, the Talleyrands who had preserved the European peace for a hundred years since the fall of Napoleon.  In their place was a generation of degenerates who either didn't want the responsibility thrust on them or used it in dangerous gambles and postures designed to frighten other nations into giving them their way. This created an unstable atmosphere that would take on a momentum of its own once the first trigger was pulled.

Dan Carlin not only contrasts the leaders of 1914 with their forebears, but also with their World War II successors. He points out that all of the top leaders in WW2 were formidable men: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, de Gaulle, Churchill, and Roosevelt. Whatever anyone thinks of them as men, they all undeniably had talents that propelled them to the world's stage. By contrast, the rulers of 1914 would never have been in a position to impact the fate of nations if their job qualifications had required merit or any other talent. They were simply born into it and their parents and tutors did not make much effort in preparing them for world leadership.

Scary, huh? This is part of why WW1 fascinates me. The leaders of the world pushed civilization into a war none of them wanted and they wielded arsenals with deadlier killing power than anything history had seen. They were consciously aware that the imminent war would be nasty. It turned out to be exponentially worse than any of them had imagined. It also cost the crowned heads their thrones. Their countries were to be dismembered and in the case of the Tsar, he would lose his life and all his family members would be wiped out. Even though they expected the war to be brutal, they at least hoped it would be short, home before Christmas. It wasn't. It would last 4 years and grind up 15 million lives.

World War I first grabbed hold of me when I read Norman Davies' 1,200-page history of Europe back when I was 22. It was my initial attempt at expanding my content knowledge after discovering I wanted to become a history teacher. I was spell-bound by his chapter on the diplomacy leading up to World War I. As a hindsight observer I found it impossible to read the moves and counter-moves of the European actors as each of them set-up the time bomb that was to become WWI. I read every bit of it with a sense of impending doom. Afterwards, I re-read it and re-read it again and couldn't help thinking why didn't they all see what was in store for them and why didn't they just try to stop it?

After years of investigation and after reading more books on the subject, the best answer is time. By the time the actors saw the writing on the wall it was too late. For years leading up to 1914, Europe had settled into a divided camp. The divisions were based on genuine national interests. The national interests of the French, Russians, and British on one side were diametrically opposed to the national interests of the Germans and Austrians on the other side. For years, good and skilled statesmen (the German leader Otto von Bismark comes to mind) managed to work out a series of compromises that kept periodic crises from escalating. But as we've already established, the leaders of 1914 lacked the skill and nuance to stop the time bomb.

By the time the Kaiser began hectically firing off urgent messages to the Austrians and Russians those nations were already mobilizing for war and they told the Kaiser they were powerless to stop the machine. While he was trying to absorb the magnitude of what was happening around him, his generals were in his face saying, "Hey, your majesty. We've got to start moving! The Russians and French have already begun marching. We'll be faced with a two-front war unless we get moving!"

The military staffs of all these countries had plans and timetables that had been worked out in war games and strategy briefs for years leading up to 1914. For the Germans everything depended on speed. They expected the Russians to be slow and cumbersome in the gathering of their armies. To prevent the trap of a two-front war, the Germans had to mobilize and deploy their armed forces faster than their enemies. They would first send seven massive armies on a rapid, hammer-like strike through Belgium and crash down on the French - the idea was to get the German 1st and 2nd armies to slip around the French left, get into the rear, and then shove the entire French line into the teeth of the armies of the German center, shattering the French in a classic double-envelopment. This entire campaign would have to be wrapped-up in a mere 3 weeks! And just when the slow but massive Russian juggernaut got rolling, the Germans, with lighting speed, would have to transfer their entire armed forces to the east to deal with the Russians.

Time - the critical resource that all the major actors had run out of by August 1914. Time tables and knock-out blows, and transferring masses of soldiers and supplies from one theater to another. This explains why once the trigger was pulled, there was really no going backward. To me, this is the most frightening thing about 1914. It was a diplomatic perfect storm - an Armageddon scenario. The men of 1914 were not wicked or bad men. There was no World War I equivalent of Hitler. No great villain of the same order. The world leaders of 1914 were just fools. Can you imagine if those fools had nuclear weapons in their arsenals? It could have been the end of the world? For crying out loud, they used poison gas on each other - on a continuous basis! How stupid was that? Could this perfect storm ever happen again? Why not? We already have the tools to make WW1 look like child's play. All we need is another generation of idiots running the world and...you get the picture. This could happen at any time. That's why I find it fascinating.

After the Germans and Russians failed to stop Armageddon the ball next landed in France's lap. It just so happened that the French had an alliance with the Russians that committed them to assist militarily in the event of war with Germany. Why Germany? Because the French had been nursing a grudge against the Germans for beating them over shared border territories - Alsace and Lorraine- in 1870. After the Russians began mobilizing, the Germans asked the French their intentions and were coldly told that "France will consider her interests." The Germans knew what that meant when the French began mobilizing. Subsequent events would put the war on French soil for practically the entire war. The heartland of French industry would be under German occupation and the landscape of northern France would become a bombed-out expanse of craters and stubs that were once forests. The French would play the victim card for all it was worth in the propaganda war and they would be vengeful at the peace conference at Versailles. But in 1914, they were tripping over themselves to fight Germany. It is hard to see them as an innocent.

There are a school of historians, Niall Ferguson among them, who blame the British for making World War I as long and as costly as it became. Ferguson argues that the British should have sat back and let the European thing play itself out quickly and that it would have been better to let the French fall and for German imperialism to take its course. He believes that the wonders of German technology and education would have ushered in a twentieth century golden age for Europe - an alternative timeline in which the horrors of Verdun, the Somme, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, the Holocaust, and the Cold War never would have happened.

Ferguson's revisionism is persuasive. The German 1st and 2nd armies would certainly have flanked the French left in Belgium had the 1st army not crashed into the British Expeditionary Force at Mons. Even though the British had to retreat from that battle, they did so in good form, and denied the Germans access to the French flank. The French high command had been utterly neglectful of their left flank, even before the British arrived in that sector. This was a willful blindness on their part. They simply ignored all the alarming intelligence about the massive size of the German 1st army (the head of the hammer) and instead threw the bulk of their forces into suicidal assaults on the better-gunned German center and left armies. 

The British had therefore ruined the German timetable. To make a very long and complicated story short, the Germans on one side and the French and British on the other had to dig-in for what would be a horrendous siege war along a line stretching from Switzerland to the English channel. Gigantic and inconclusive slugfests all along that line would play themselves out in a futile tragedy for three years and bury a generation of European men! For the Germans, this is not to mention the fact that the Russians had mobilized faster than expected and their armies were already menacing East Prussia. The war was barely two weeks old and the Germans were already fighting on two fronts.

Without the British shoring-up the French, none of that, not to mention the rest of the ghastly history of the twentieth century would ever have taken place. For a full treatment of Niall Ferguson's revisionist take on this, see his book The Pity of War. It provides food for thought and it is well-argued. Nevertheless, I am not in the Ferguson camp. The British simply could not afford to watch the Germans knock-out France, conquer Europe, and hope that German ambitions would not be augmented by such a massive geopolitical transfer of wealth and power in the direction of Berlin. After the Kaiser's recent stunt with the naval arms race, the British were no mood to take their chances.

Britain's foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, took a lot of heat from critics accusing him of sleeping on the job while the continental European powers went to war over the Serb crisis. This is not unlike the criticism leveled at practically all the big players involved on all sides of the war, statesmen and generals alike. World War One ruined a lot of reputations. It was just so terrible of an ordeal that the finger pointing has gone on ever since.

I am a lot more sympathetic because everyone involved was grappling with events moving with a hurricane-like momentum. There was no historical precedent for the diplomatic storm that created the First World War: politically, militarily, or technologically.

Edward Grey never had a shot at stopping the Serb crisis from becoming a general European war. The war was going to be fought whether or not the British became combatants. The best thing Grey could do was what he did. He discovered the pretext for British entry on the French side: the German violation of Belgium's neutrality.

The Belgium factor explains British foreign policy not only in WW1 but also in WW2, the Napoleonic Wars and for all of history stretching back to at least the 1600's. Great Britain is just an island. The English channel shields it from the kind of land invasions that have swept back and forth across Europe since the Middle Ages. British foreign policy has always had one security goal above all: to never allow any European power to dominate the continent. This explains why the British had to fight Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler. During the Cold War, they were worried about the enormous military capability of the Soviet Union for all the same reasons.

If any one continental power - be it France, Germany, or Russia - could knock out all the others, the resources and geopolitical positioning thus achieved would put Britain on the invasion list with the resources to make it successful. Hitler's Germany, after the fall of France in 1940, posed the gravest threat in this sense but that's a story for another blog post. You get the picture, the British had no real choice about entering the First World War.

British foreign policy was played with chess-like nuance. Whomever was the strongest continental power at a given time was the queen, and all the pieces between Germany and England were variously knights, bishops, rooks, and pawns. There is no "king" piece accept what we might metaphorically term one's own national sovereignty.  For Britain, the enemy queen in 1914 was Germany. Britain's queen was its own Royal Navy. Its rook was France. Its bishop was its continental force, the BEF. I'm not sure what its knight was, but there was a pawn positioned to be the trip-wire that would activate Britain's other pieces.

That pawn was Belgium. In the years before 1914, as the British saw the continental board shift, they sought to back-up the sovereignty of key buffer countries between the big players. Poor Belgium had the unfortunate fate of being the buffer between the alpha ambitions of France and Germany (from a British security standpoint). The German war plan involved crashing through Belgium on its way to France and the pre-war British treaty guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality proved a good enough pretext for British entry in the war.

4. The combat was more bizarre and freakish than anything in a science fiction film.  Picture a shell-hole. What does your mind see? Something like a crater or a hole made by a meteor? Now, picture that hole thirty-feet deep with straight sides. Suppose you fall into that thing or dive in to take cover. What is that fall going to feel like? How are you going to get out of that thing?

Did I mention the bottom of that hole is filled with water and mud seasoned with the putrid carcasses of two of your buddies? Are you going to take a drink of that filth? Of course you are because you are already extremely dehydrated because the supply people haven't been able to bring up rations and water through to the front lines because the shelling and gunfire has been too intense. At any rate, everyone's been too preoccupied to notice you've fallen into this pit of horror.

As you take a sip of the carcass and mud-flavored cocktail you're probably not noticing there's something else in the brew. A yellowish substance resembling pollen is swirling among the filth. It is the solidified form of poison gas that was washed into the shell hole from the rain, adding yet another toxic ingredient to the cesspool you've fallen into. A minute later, another enormous shell hits one side of your existing shell hole, blowing you to bits and making an already enormous and weird shell hole an even larger and weirder shell hole.

All across the landscape of this battlefield are other monstrosities blown into the earth just like this one, resembling the surface of the moon except the way the moon would be if its meteor holes were filled with mud, liquified human remains, and solidified poison gas. Here and there are hills with the tops blown off them and the new, scarred and jagged tops are continually burning and glowing like ciders, but also like mini-volcanoes. The sky is foggy with smoke. All around are tangles of broken razor wire. One commentator, Dan Carlin, likens the image to Mordor in the Lord of the Rings. It isn't Mordor though. It is the Battle of Verdun, about a hundred and sixty miles east of Paris. J.R.R. Tolkien was a soldier in the First World War. Perhaps, his combat experience gave him inspiration for the hellish setting of Mordor.

5. The war took place in a techno-tactical dead zone between the 19th and 20th centuries. This helps explain how the war became so nasty and futile. When studying the various maps of the war at each stage, there is a tendency to look at the moves and counter-moves of the armies and to think why didn't the French, British, or Germans follow-up this or that breakthrough and end the war in a swift stroke? If war was purely a game of chess, that is precisely what would have happened, and the war would've been over-with before the first Christmas. But chess pieces don't get tired. They don't get thirsty or hungry. They don't get wounded. They don't run out of ammunition. They don't get low on artillery.

There were many moments when each side achieved a breakthrough on the Western Front but the breakthrough either couldn't be exploited because the effort that produced it was so great that not enough men were available to move into the gap, hold it, and be in a position to deepen it or to get into the enemy's rear. Tactical victories in the First World War often turned into "pyrrhic" victories, meaning, they cost more than they were worth.

This line of analysis leads us to the techno-tactical dilemma the combats found themselves in. The World War II buff looks at World War I battles with a frustrated eye. When reading about these inconclusive battles one always thinks, man - why didn't they use tanks or aircraft to good affect, they had them, right?

Yes and no.

In World War II, the armored badass Flying Fortresses and Spitfires flying and fighting in an aerial version of ground armies was far into the future from a World War I vantage-point. The First World War was barely a decade removed from the Wright brothers. And the planes everyone flew were rickety-looking things you can imagine Orville and Wilbur flying. No armor. Just some wood thrown together. Stick a gun on there and you're good to go, right? How about no. Even though we are familiar with the World War I exploits of the Red Baron, those fights were skirmishes, tests if you will, to discover the capabilities of aircraft in a combat situation. They was no war-winning strategy involving aircraft that was available to the generals of World War I.

The same exact thing applied to tanks. For most of the war the Germans had no tanks of any kind. Only belatedly did they begin tank production, deploying only 20 in the whole war. The British were the forerunners of tank development. The tank was first introduced in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, but it moved slow. Its armor was poor, making its fuel tank extremely vulnerable to explosion when hit by enemy fire. To make matters worse, tanks were not deployed in formations. Instead they were deployed willy-nilly as a means of wrecking barbed wire. Churchill was an early advocate of the tank. He shook his head when reading about its lackluster use at the Somme, wondering why General Haig didn't deploy them in formations.

General Haig failed to see the potential of the tank at the Somme because old habits die hard. Haig, like his French counterpart Joffre, was a creature of the 19th century who clung not only to the tactics of a by-gone age but more importantly - the values.Values are harder to let go-of than obsolete tactics. What these old-fashioned men valued were the manly sacrifices of the warrior code they and their forebears had held dear as far back as the Middle Ages.

The warrior code meant that war was a glorious affair between gentleman warriors. The gentleman warrior lived to put himself in harm's way - to willingly die - for the love of his country. To do so was the ultimate expression of manly devotion to country. To die in such a manner was not wasteful but heroic. That is precisely why the French went into the First World War wearing bright red trousers in their uniforms. French officers wore white-feather plumed caps - not helmets! They commanded their men on their feet - not hunkered down avoiding shell and machine gun-fire.

To get down on the ground and avoid enemy fire was to these 19th century gentlemen an act of cowardice, not valor. It didn't occur to them that it might be better to live and continue the fight by other means instead of allowing your brave men to be mown and blown down like stacked bowling pins. Even the German infantry began the war not with helmets, but with spiked leather caps. Boy, were they all in for a painful and costly lesson!

General Haig still believed in the cavalry. By the time of the Battle of the Somme, the First World War had already rendered the cavalry obsolete. Back in the old days, when an infantry achieved a tactical breakthrough causing an enemy to retreat, the retreating enemy would be cut to pieces by cavalry (horses run faster than men). But in the First World War, how do you send your cavalry after a retreating enemy infantry when that infantry turns around and sprays its machine gun-fire in the direction of your on-coming cavalry? The smart answer is you don't.

With cavalry neutralized and tank development/tactics twenty years into the future, how do you flank the enemy and therefore exploit a tactical breakthrough? The WW1 answer - you try sending your infantrymen after them. Does that work? Not really. Why not? Well, the on-coming infantry men can only run as fast as the retreating one and if the retreating one is as good at staying in order as Western Front armies were, than they could usually gain enough distance to be able to turn around and establish a new defensive line. This is the techno-tactical dead zone that produced deadlock on the Western Front.

To their credit, the generals on both sides did start thinking outside the box. That explains the introduction of the airplane, the tank, and poison gas. Unfortunately, every one of these innovations were used haphazardly as test-drives. The commanders were unable to think of a war-winning use for any of them. There was no integration of these technologies in a supporting role for infantry attacks - that is until 1917 at the earliest, and 1918 more comprehensively.

When the Germans introduced poison gas for the first time on the Western Front at the 2nd Battle of Ypres in 1915, they did so in the spirit of lets try this and if we like it, we will make better use of it later. To their astonishment, the gas attack took the British completely by surprise. The first line of them watched curiously as the yellow fog drifted over to them. When they collapsed clutching their throats in a death agony, the units behind them turned around and ran for their lives.

The Germans had thus achieved a breakthrough on the western end of the Allied line. Did they exploit it? No. Why not? They hadn't expected a breakthrough and hadn't prepared for the opportunity. Moreover, the German infantry had no desire to charge into the breach while the gas still hung in the area. By the time they moved forward, the British had re-established their defensive position.

Thereafter, poison gas would be a regular feature of the First World War but it never again showed the war-winning potential it had demonstrated at 2nd Ypres. This pattern repeated itself with all the other technological innovations brought to the challenge of breaking the deadlock. Each time one army brought a new toy to the game, they did so with the attitude that they would test it once and if they liked it they would make better use of it later. But by the time later came around, the element of surprise was gone and the other side had taken counter-measures to deal with the new threat and the deadlock reasserted itself.

Artillery - more than any other weapon in the First World War - was the chosen instrument the generals used to break the deadlock. Just before a major offensive, the idea was to bring up the biggest and baddest guns and spend five or more days blasting the hell out of the enemy's entrenchments. Just when the enemy's defenses were blown to smithereens, you then send your infantry over the top, charge across no man's land and take the enemy's positions. If the previous artillery barrage did its intended job, the enemy should be either dead or shell-shocked into a weak resistance. The British artillery barrage at the Somme was the biggest of its kind. We're talking a hail of shells - millions - remember the mordor craters at Verdun?

Unfortunately, the artillery barrage never quite did the trick. The Germans were masters of trench warfare. They had honeycombs of those things dug into the earth. By 1916, Germans trenches were state of the art - running water, electric light, even wallpaper. No matter how many monster shells General Haig lobbed at them, enough Germans were sure to be alive and coherent enough to turn their machine guns at the oncoming waves of British infantrymen - who had no cover!

Consequently, the Somme has been seared into the British consciousness as synonymous with senseless slaughter. On the first day alone, the British suffered 60,000 casualties! 21,000 of them were dead, most of them in the first hour of the infantry attack! It was and remains the single bloodiest day in all of British military history. British casualties on the Somme - Day 1 - equal the total number of American casualties in the entire Vietnam War! Let that sink in for a moment!

As I said above, I'm more sympathetic than most people about the challenge the First World War posed to the commanders trying to grapple with it. There was no handbook for them to turn to. The dynamics of World War I were completely unprecedented. The American Civil War contained lessons First World War commanders could have learned about what happens when 19th century tactics meets something approaching modern gunnery. But to their defense, nothing in European history prepared them for the Western Front of World War I. Oh, you want to go after your enemy's flank? What if there is no flank? What if the front is a veritable wall of entrenchments running from the Swiss Alps to the English channel? There is no flank... If you want to break through that wall, you have to ram it with your infantry in a frontal assault - the dreaded last resort of military commanders in all previous wars - except in this war, it is the only way you can gain any ground!

A modern reader would love to take a time machine to the Western Front and drop off a copy of World War II tactics to help the commanders figure out the way to break the deadlock. But the very reason a World War II handbook even exists today is because of the mistakes, the trials and errors of those armies of 1914 - 18, and the solutions those very old-fashioned and bullheaded commanders eventually figured-out at a horrendous cost. That growth process fascinates me. I like to see how those 19th century soldiers and commanders learned how to fight in the 20th century.

The deadlock eventually broke in the spring of 1918 but it was not the British or the French that broke through. It was the Germans. And when the Germans broke-through they did so in a manner that kind of foreshadows the blitzkrieg of World War II. Instead of a 5-day artillery bombardment that turns the battlefield into a pulp that makes the infantry's job harder than necessary, the Germans of 1918 unleashed a short but intense barrage (not longer than a few hours) that created a smoke and shell screen for the infantry running close behind it. When the Allied soldiers could see into the smoke, they found German infantry charging right at them!

When the Allies, now joined by the Americans, counterattacked in the late summer and fall of 1918, their tactics were even closer to the World War II formula. Shorter bombardments screening infantry attacks, tanks breaking through and by-passing strong points forcing the enemy to retreat in order to avoid encirclement, etc. Aerial warfare still had a ways to go. Poison gas would never be used again. Of all the potential the new technologies promised, poison gas was the most horrific and the least effective. Once unleashed, its direction was at the mercy of the wind - often killing as many of one's own troops as those of the enemy. It was the struggles of the First World War that made the handbook of the Second World War. What happens when you attack Normandy, take away air cover, take your naval ships out of there as soon as you drop off your ground troops, and you turn off your radio communications because you didn't have it in 1915?

What you end up with is Gallipoli - Churchill's admittedly creative but failed solution to the deadlock by sending navy ships to run the gauntlet of Turkish defenses around Istanbul to conquer the Black Sea and keep the Russians supplied so they can hammer the Germans on the Eastern Front.

What if Patton's 3rd Army tried breaking-out of the Normandy beach-head without armored tank divisions and air support? He would have re-fought the Battle of the Somme where General Haig tried and failed to break the Germans with artillery and infantry.

Concluding Thoughts

The First World War is a gigantic subject. What I've outlined above are just the big reasons I am hooked on it. I haven't said anything about the dreadful peace treaty of 1919 that set the stage for the Second World War. I haven't breathed a word about how the war sparked the Russian Revolution and put Communism on the map. The Cold War really began in 1917 - not 1945. Nor have I gotten into the Eastern Front combat of World War I, in which huge clashes took place between the Germans and Austrians on one side and the Russians and Serbs on the other. Inexcusable, right?  I haven't said jack about how the First World War re-drew the maps of Europe, Russia, and the Middle East.These are all reasons why the First World War deserves at least as much popular interest as the Second World War.

Books I've Read On The Subject

Hew Strachan's The First World War

A good overview in the neighborhood of 300 pages. Strachan tries to do equal justice to all the fronts: Eastern, African, and so on. I enjoyed the book but I kept thinking, give me more Western Front. I'm a Western Front guy because that's where most of the combat took place. It's where the huge armies were concentrated. It's where the First World War commanders learned the painful lessons. The Western Front is where the war was won and lost. Strachan wets your appetite but leaves you hungry.

James L. Stokesbury's A Short History of World War I

Fills-in some of the gaps untouched by Strachan. The only problem with condensed treatments like this is that the First World War is such an enormous subject that even a short version is dense.

Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August

A Pulitzer-winning account of the war from its causes to the opening clashes. Even though this is technically a work of popular history, I do not recommend it to the beginner. The opening battles of the war were among the most complicated in all of military history not least because they were happening on multiple fronts all at the same time. While the British and French were retreating from Mons and the French frontier and were getting ready to counterattack along the Marne, the Germans on the Eastern Front were clashing with the Russians at Tannenberg in East Prussia. By the way, the Battle of the Marne has got to be the single most complicated battle in military history! Tuchman is wonderful but not as a starting point.

G.J. Meyer's A World Undone

Far and away my favorite book on the First World War! Lots of miniature background essays interspersed throughout the book to provide context. Battles are told with the passionate flair of a journalist - a quality historians unfortunately lack. Great stuff here! Everything you want to know! Red meat for the history buff  - start to finish.

Before reading any of these books, I full-throatedly recommend going to i-tunes and downloading Dan Carlin's podcast Blueprint for Armageddon for FREE. It is a 6-part series and is a beautiful thing to listen to in the car if you - like me - have a long commute to and from work. I also listened to it with my earbuds while grocery shopping. Carlin explains the First World War in a way that is exciting and lucid. He provided me with frameworks for understanding what is otherwise a dauntingly difficult subject. After listening to Carlin, I went back and re-read sections of the above books and found all of them more accessible than I did the first time around.

It also doesn't hurt to check out good novels. Fictionalizations of the people and events can make history vivid and unforgettable. Here is a recent one that is both engaging and historically accurate: