reasons why ww1 was pointless reasons why ww1 was pointless

During his later years, he tried to placate the French by encouraging their overseas expansion. [87] Social Darwinism, therefore, normalized war as an instrument of policy and justified its use. The last years of peacev.11. Debate over the country that "started" the war and who bears the blame still continues. Rather it alerts us to the complexity of the events that brought war about and the limitations of any thesis that focuses on the culpability of one actor."[106]. But 100 years ago we were constantly told that we were fighting evil men, with God on our side, and parts of that myth have persisted. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. After Serbia complied, the Kaiser made a congratulatory visit to Vienna to try to fix some of the damage done earlier in the year. All wars tell us something about the basest regions of human nature, the First World War (caustically named in 1918 by an English journalist who thought it would not be the last) more than most. Of course that ignores the fact that World War One was not caused by those evil Hun wanting to take over Europe but by events further East. The Absence of Grand Strategy in British War Planning before 1914", Bresciani, Marco. Cambridge University Press, 2017, p. 147, Hamilton, Richard F., and Holger H. Herwig. What Is Balkanization? Four Balkan states defeated the Ottoman Empire in the first war; one of them, Bulgaria, was defeated in the second war. Vol. Richard Hamilton observed that the argument went that since industrialists and bankers were seeking raw materials, new markets and new investments overseas, if one was strategically blocked by other powers, the "obvious" or "necessary" solution was war. But most recent histories depict it as a necessary fight against German militarism. The Balkan wars, pt.1-2 -- v.10,pt.1. European civilization shattered like a glittering chandelier fallen on a marble floor. There were many reasons for this, mainly the failure of the Schlieffen Plan Also new technology and . Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Nazism, 1918-1933. Each country stockpiled arms and supplies for an army that ran into the millions. The Evolution of American Isolationism. Biography of Czar Nicholas II, Last Czar of Russia. December 21, 2006. Krupp, a major arms manufacturer, started the war with 48 million marks in profits but ended it 148 million marks in debt, and the first year of peace saw further losses of 36 million marks. Did we behave like Angels on every occassion? World War I, the pointless war. Moreover, whoever lost the war would pay an indemnity and therefore have to cede some of its interests to the victor, whether in the form of the loser's directly controlled colonies or in their financial interests in nominally independent states. It's simplistic but provides a useful framework. Each country devised a mobilization system in which the reserves could be called up quickly and sent to key points by rail. In fact, in the decade before the war, the Habsburg lands passed through a phase of strong widely shared economic growth. Many countries had made alliances with one other. They were now armed with flame throwers, portable machine-guns and grenades fired from rifles. This saying was supposed to have come from senior German commanders describing brave British soldiers led by incompetent old toffs from their chateaux. The Germans assumed that Russia had decided upon war and that its mobilisation put Germany in danger, especially since because German war plans, the so-called Schlieffen Plan, relied upon Germany to mobilise speedily enough to defeat France first by attacking largely through neutral Belgium before it turned to defeat the slower-moving Russians. The Sinking of the Lusitania and America's Entry into World War I. Rockoff estimates the total cost of World War I to the United States at approximately $32 billion, or 52 percent of gross national product at the time. I was told yesterday as certain folks snarled,at me for my views, that the grandfathers of certain tweeters had fought in WW1 and that they had not regarded it as pointless. So begins the first chapter of the late historian John Keegan's The First World War. A Comparative Study of the July Crisis and Its Precursors." "[83] In German ruling circles, war was viewed as the only way to rejuvenate Germany. Moreover, general narratives of the war regularly misstate that Russia was allied to Serbia. Most histories of the Great War must deal with the Sarajevo murders in cursory fashion, but the focus on 1914 and the substantial scale of The Sleepwalkers allow for more detail. 5. [45] When the war came Sanders provided only limited help to the Ottoman forces.[46]. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. They look at such factors as political, territorial and economic competition; militarism, a complex web of alliances and alignments; imperialism, the growth of nationalism; and the power vacuum created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. [81] William Mulligen argues that Anglo-German antagonism was also about a clash of two political cultures as well as more traditional geopolitical and military concerns. Russia tended to support Serbia as a fellow Slavic state, considered Serbia its "client," and encouraged Serbia to focus its irredentism against Austria-Hungary because it would discourage conflict between Serbia and Bulgaria, another prospective Russian ally, in Macedonia. Thus, the alliance changed in character and Serbia now became a security salient for Russia and France. "The sooner the better. But now the guns are loaded and those who bear them have nothing to say about whom they shall shoot. ", Kapp, Richard W. "Divided Loyalties: The German Reich and Austria-Hungary in Austro-German Discussions of War Aims, 19141916. The alignment between Britain, France, and Russia became known as the Triple Entente. However, the Triple Entente was not conceived as a counterweight to the Triple Alliance but as a formula to secure imperial security between the three powers. That theory encouraged all belligerents to devise war plans to strike first to gain the advantage. Professor David Stevenson explains how the war came to an end, and why Germany accepted the harsh terms of the armistice. As the British Foreign Office official Eyre Crowe minuted: "The fundamental fact of course is that the Entente is not an alliance. Moreover, France clearly stated that if, as a result of a conflict in the Balkans, war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, France would stand by Russia. [104] Hence the metaphor "war by timetable.". The conclusion was that any war with Russia had to occur within the next few years to have any chance of success.[42]. However, this was recognised as important enough to the British that it was actively and strategically being managed through financing to share rail access, and through diplomacy not to share northern rail access to the Persian Gulf. World War One Trench Warefare. This might call for a tight focus on the summer of 1914, but Clarks narrative ranges back over decades. On June 28, 1914, a diplomatic crisis began that led in five weeks to the First World War, a cataclysm that claimed millions of lives and ruined countless more. It was "not that antagonism toward Germany caused its isolation, but rather that the new system itself channeled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire. [69] The largest and most lucrative uncolonized or semi-colonized territories at the time of the war were that of Persia (Iran), Turkey (including all of the pre-industrial territories of the declining Ottoman Empire), and most of China beyond the treaty ports. The Soviet states fell into such chaos it seemed even the threat of nuclear war . Imperialism is the expansion of a government's power through the conquest of new territories. It was the bloodiest war in history to that point, 3. [10] Lacking the capacity for Bismarck's strategic ambiguity, Caprivi pursued a policy that was oriented towards "getting Russia to accept Berlin's promises on good faith and to encourage St. Petersburg to engage in a direct understanding with Vienna, without a written accord. However, France was smaller than Germany in terms of population and industry and therefore many French felt insecure next to a more powerful neighbor. The 11 November Armistice was essentially a German surrender. 6. Jules Cambon, the French ambassador to Berlin (19071914), worked hard to secure a dtente, but French leaders decided that Berlin was trying to weaken the Triple Entente and was not sincere in seeking peace. In October 1913, the council of ministers decided to send Serbia a warning followed by an ultimatum for Germany and Italy to be notified of some action and asked for support and for spies to be sent to report if there was an actual withdrawal. Honestly, it's basically a weird combination of actual positive Christian values of unity and loving thy neighbor combining with a massive case of post world war 1 buyers remorse of getting to watch all of your friends die in a utterly pointless war only to go home and realize everything you loved and knew about your country was wiped away by . The system of geographical balances that had enabled local conflicts to be contained was swept away." Under blue skies in Sarajevo, terrorists with shadowy links to the Serbian government killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the rickety but splendid Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife. Decisions for war, 1914-1917. The British were "deeply annoyed by St Petersburg's failure to observe the terms of the agreement struck in 1907 and began to feel an arrangement of some kind with Germany might serve as a useful corrective. "I consider a war inevitable," declared Moltke in 1912. The Anglo-German naval race also isolated Germany by reinforcing Britain's preference for agreements with Germany's continental rivals: France and Russia.[64]. The treaty was notably less harsh than treaties that ended the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War and World War Two. Although it was inevitable, the horrific loss of life was pointless. Imperial opportunism, in the form of the Italian attack on Ottoman Libyan provinces, also encouraged the Balkan wars of 191213, which changed the balance of power in the Balkans to the detriment of Austria-Hungary. pt.2. Ferguson argues, "So decisive was the British victory in the naval arms race that it is hard to regard it as in any meaningful sense a cause of the First World War. Its aim was ostensibly to transform Germany into a global power through assertive diplomacy, the acquisition of overseas colonies, and the development of a large navy. The continental Great Powers' mobilization plans included arming and transporting millions of men and their equipment, typically by rail and to strict schedules. WW1 was thought to be a quick battle with hardly any resistance offered to the Germans. However, a strong candidate for the most pointless battle of all time was a European skirmish that purportedly took place from Sept. 21 to Sept. 22 in 1788. February 11, 2022. Poisonous gas filled a quarter of all the artillery shells fired on the western front in 1918. The commercial and financial elite recognized peace as necessary for economic development and used its influence to resolve diplomatic crises. "Austria-Hungary and the First World War. The Near East, 1903-9 -- v.6.