Ghosts of World War I

World War I caused the deaths 20 Million including 9.7 military fatalities involved in a war that could have been avoided, and one that changed civilization forever.    

Transcript

Ghosts of World War I

March 2024

“The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. … Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which, after years of struggle, not armies but nations broke and ran.”

Winston Churchill writing in 1923

“The First World War was at once piteous, in the poet's sense, and 'a pity'. It was something worse than a tragedy, which is ultimately something we are taught by the theatre to regard as unavoidable. It was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I 

About once every few years, I go back to World War I. I recently finished John Keegan’s epic on this conflict, The First World War. It is nearly impossible to capture the necessary details of a conflict involving so many nations in many places. Yet Keegan’s book, published in 1999, is surprisingly short for a conflict of this magnitude, coming in at a relatively compact 400 pages.  

Of the British action on the Somme in 1916, involving hundreds of thousands experiencing combat for the first time, Keegan writes, resulted in,

''The greatest loss of life in British military history. Together with the third Battle of Ypres, in July 1917 (better known as the Battle of Passchendaele, from the name of the Belgian village where it took place), where 70,000 British soldiers were killed and 170,000 wounded, the Somme broke the back of the old British Army, and more besides: 'The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.”

Of the French, who fought the Germans alongside the British on the Western Front, Keegan says this,

“The French, upon whose land it was fought and who lost 1.7 million men in action, can only be imagined. In 1918, there were 630,000 war widows in France and many tens of thousands of single women who would never marry -- they could still be seen as late as the 1960s, grown old, working at menial tasks in the public sector (clipping subway tickets, cleaning toilets), a gloomy reminder of the Great War, like the memorials to the dead on virtually every village square in the land.”

And as for Germany, World War I sowed the seeds for the level of dissatisfaction that would lead to the rise of Nazism and World War II. The energy of Britain and France had been so diminished during World War I that there was little fortitude to summon in the late 1930s when Hitler could have been stopped before rearming the nation. 

After thousands of years of monarchial rule, several new forms of government emerged. The houses of Habsburg, Osman, and Romanov all fell after the war. Minor Kings in Greece, Romania, and Serbia later followed. Some would be followed by military rule, such as in Turkey or communist Bolshevik totalitarianism in Russia.

In a review of the book for the New York Times by Tony Judt entitled, “The End of the World, A military historian explains why World War I Happened and how it changed everything.”

“John Keegan is a military historian, perhaps the best military historian of our day, and his new war history exemplifies his many strengths. It is elegantly written, clear, detailed, and omniscient. As a narrative, it is outstanding, telling the story of how the war began, was fought, and why the Allies won. Above all, Keegan conveys how it felt. To our eyes, World War I can seem mysterious: Why did such a pointless war occur? How could such useless carnage have lasted so long? Why did men continue to serve and fight in such unspeakable conditions? Keegan never plays down these concerns, but he addresses them in terms contemporaries would have understood.”

Yet Keegan, though an exceptional storyteller and historian, was not there. As a 15-year-old, I read BH Liddell Hart’s A History Of The First World War. I first started reading history in the seventh grade, but most of the books I had read contained second-party reporting of the events. Liddell Hart was not writing about the war through primary and secondary sources; he provided a firsthand account. On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Liddell Hart volunteered for the British Army, where he became an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in December and served with the regiment on the Western Front. Liddell Hart's front-line experience was relatively brief, confined to two short stints in the autumn and winter of 1915. He was sent home from the front after suffering concussive injuries from a shell burst. After being promoted to captain, he returned to the front for a third time in 1916 to participate in the Battle of the Somme. He was wounded three times without serious injury before being badly gassed and sent out of the line in July 1916. His battalion was nearly wiped out on the first day of the offensive on July 1, a part of the 60,000 casualties suffered in the heaviest single day's loss in British history. Note the use of poisonous gas as a weapon. Other novel tools of war in this conflict included machine guns, barbed wire, airplanes, and tanks.  

The millions of casualties suffered on the Western Front occurred along lines initially drawn in 1914 and, by March 1918, had barely budged. Defensive war technologies were so far ahead of offensive ones despite the best efforts of all the combatants. One harrowing account of the Battle of Verdun noted that if all the fallen were risen from the dead, there would be no place for the corpses to stand, so crowded would be the fields.  

Here are the brutal statistics. According to the Census Bureau who accumulated these numbers,

“The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was around 40 million. There were 19 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 9 million civilians. The Entente Powers (also known as the Allies) lost about 5.7 million soldiers while the Central Powers lost about 4 million.”

Not all of these were combat deaths.  

“Military casualty statistics listed here include combat-related deaths as well as military deaths caused by accidents, disease, and deaths while prisoners of war. Most of the casualties during WWI were due to war-related famine and disease. Civilian deaths due to the Spanish flu have been excluded from these figures, whenever possible.”

Historians often cite these stats, but as Stalin correctly noted, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” It is difficult to find a better example of this than World War I, yet each combatant was a single human being with the needs, wants, desires, and dreams we all hold dear.  

And here is an account written by British Solider Harry Wells, who, during the war, meets his brother, “Evidentally my brother had heard the reports for when he entered a trench at Le Basseee one morning in November and saw me there, he came to me, shook hands warmly time after time and almost cried with joy. ‘Thought you had gone under it.’ he said. ‘No, Robert,’ I said, ‘but I may tell you I have had some very narrow escapes.’ ‘Do you know Harry,’ he said. ‘I can hardly believe my eyes when I look at you. It seems to good to be true.” 

Dragoons officer Hubert Rochereau's name is commemorated on a war memorial in Bélâbre, his native village in central France, along with those of other young men who lost their lives in the First World War. However, Rochereau also has a much more poignant and exceptional memorial: his room in a large family house in the village has been preserved with his belongings for almost 100 years since he died in Belgium. The young officer's parents kept his room exactly as it was the day he left for the battlefront. When they decided to move in 1935, they stipulated in the sale that Rochereau’s room should not be changed for 500 years.

“This clause had no legal basis,” said the current owner, retired local official Daniel Fabre, who showed the room to the Nouvelle République newspaper. But nevertheless he and his wife, who inherited the house from her grandparents, have respected the wishes of Rochereau’s parents and will continue to do so.” 

Rochereau was 22 when he was killed.  

A few years ago, we had a remake of a German novel. Paul Bäumer is a fictional character and not a real person. However, his experiences are very realistic because they were based on the author, Erich Maria Remarque, and what he saw, felt, and did as a German soldier in WWI.

Stories of World War I affected me in a way that no other conflict had up to that time. The image of the lone British soldier traversing a barren landscape clad in a gasmask so that you cannot see his face is a haunting image. I have studied over a hundred wars, from Qin Shi Huang Di’s unification of China to the Ptolemies fighting Seleucids in the Levant, Atahualpa defeating his brother Huascar in the Incan Civil War, to the Crimean conflict in the middle 19th century. The first history book I read was about the battle of Iwo Jima, which led to a comprehensive study of World War II. Of all these, World War II is arguably one of the few we can call a good war. 

There was the appalling nature of the Nazi regime coupled with Japan’s naked imperial ambition. Both Germany and Japan's sense of racial superiority over the conquered, which led to so many horrific acts, made their destruction on the part of the Allies feel justified.  

There is no such moral aspect to World War I. There once was a time when American school books would talk of the rape of Belgium or the sinking of the Lusitania as examples of Germany’s many atrocities. Sins that Black Jack Pershing and the American Expeditionary force needed to avenge. The reality is a little different.  

Indeed, the Central Powers, led by Germany and including Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ottoman Turkey, all entered the war with imperial conquests on their minds. Yet France thirsted for revenge for a war that was 40 years in the past and the reclamation of two provinces. Britain did not appreciate Germany’s naval build-up that challenged British supremacy on the seas, something the island nation had enjoyed for over 200 years. Russia craved suzerainty over the Balkans, direct access to the Mediterranean, and a nationalistic cause to buttress the tottering Romanov dynasty. Even Italy, joining the war in May 1915, coveted Austro-Hungarian possessions on her border. The minor players from Bulgaria to Romania all desired to add land. Of all the combatants, Serbia might be the one case where aggression was perpetrated upon them. Yet even here, the small nation’s bellicose attitude towards Austria-Hungary, who had lost their imperial heir to an assassination from a Serbian national, was not without blemish.  

Whereas World War II began with Hitler’s (and the Soviet Union’s) invasion of Poland and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the precipitating event of the First World War was the noted assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the increasingly shaky Habsburg Empire. 

When the heir was killed, Austria-Hungary threatened Serbia, who in turn made some concessions that might have ended the conflict. But World War I was one where the confidence of the key players was so high that they could scarcely contemplate defeat. In the case of Austria, Hungary fears what a troublesome Slavic state like Serbia might instigate in the future. In 1914, the Habsburg Empire was a polyglot mixture of Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Romanians, Serbians, and Bosnians and ruled by Germans, who constituted less than 12% of the total population. A more vital state might have settled the assassination issue diplomatically. However, one of the lessons, or ghosts of World War I, is that weak nations trying to be strong are often the instigators of war. We see this today in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In World War I, Romanov Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, and the Habsburgs were all playing the game of war from a weak position. And even France, who less than 100 years earlier had conquered almost all of Europe, was in their slow decline from the leading power of Europe to one of second-class status.  

Indeed, only three powerful states were in the conflict, including Britain, Germany, and, later, the United States. Clearly, if Britain or Germany faltered early in the conflict, the war would have ended for the other’s benefit.  

Though historians love to cite the incident of Franz Ferdinand’s murder, I feel that it was more of a pretext than the critical event. Every political and military national leader believed that the war was to be quick, the Germans banking on their previous successes in the Franco-Prussian War, the allies’ belief in their numerical superiority referring to the Russian Army as a “steam roller.”  

This was a major miscalculation. Others abound in this conflict, including the advancement of technology in determining how wars were fought and the ability to properly manage the armies and the fleets participating in the war. The last great conflict fought on the continent of Europe was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which featured a Prussian/German Northern States combined army of 600,000 men facing a French army that was initially 250,000 but later grew to 900,000. These later French armies were ill-trained and lacked any experience, however. 

In August of 1914, the Germans mobilized over 1.9 million soldiers, with the majority initially deployed against France. Yet the ability to coordinate a mass of men of this magnitude had not caught up to the size of the armies. In one battle, it was noted that a company attacking at the battle of the Somme had to relay their progress and position back to a battalion command post and through regimental, brigade, and division headquarters. Each of these messages could take hours, and some never made it. 

This meant that a general, even at the division, much less army level, would need more sense of whether an attack was succeeding or failing, of whether to send in reinforcement or suspend the offensives. Often, the result was even when attacks were stalling; fresh troops were fed into battle, resulting in tens of thousands of needless deaths.  

It was little better with the fleets. Admiral John Jellicoe, commander in chief of Britain’s Grand Fleet, flew his flag in the Iron Duke, commissioned into the Home Fleet in March 1914 as the fleet flagship. She was armed with a main battery of ten 14-inch guns and was capable of a top speed of 22 knots. The Iron Duke could decimate any ship not built within 20 years and launch a shell nearly 24,000 yards. Yet the Grand Fleet still needed signal flags (!) to coordinate movements. The Battle of Jutland, one of the few significant fleet actions of the war, could have been won by the British without inadequate communication systems.  

One of the great military leaders of the 19th century, Helmuth von Moltke, who beat the Austrians in 1866 at the Battle of Koniggratz and then the French in the Franco-Prussian War four years later, had great insight into what was to come. He was referred to as the elder to distinguish him from his nephew, who had none of his uncle’s brilliance.   

“The days are gone by when, for dynastical ends, small armies of professional soldiers went to war to conquer a city or a province and then sought winter quarters or made peace. The wars of the present day call whole nations to arms... The entire financial resources of the State are appropriated to military purposes.”

Von Moltke would also have understood that armies of this magnitude would require an entirely different way to manage them. Conscripting and crafting armies of millions and then having them invade a nation’s entire frontier is one thing. However, appropriately directing them was something else; essentially, the generals of World War never overcame this weakness.  

Technology outstripping the human capacity for control is not foreign to our 21st-century mindsets. From Social Media to AI, we are now facing a domestic situation where we have no clue about how technology shapes our society. Nor will we have a clue in any future war. In one World War I sea battle, Admiral Christopher Craddock lived up to the British Royal Navy ethos of Horatio Nelson to take the offensive. The problem was that Craddock’s fleet was older than the German's. The result was the loss at the Battle of Coronel of much of Craddock’s fleet and his own life. While the British lost 1,600 men, the Germans did not lose a single ship and had only a few men wounded. It was the first British naval defeat since the War of 1812. Admiral David Beatty wrote his wife: “He was a gallant fellow, and I am sure put up a gallant fight, but nowadays, no amount of dash and gallantry will counterbalance great superiority unless they are commanded by fools. He has paid the penalty, but doubtless, it was better to have fought and lost than not to have fought at all.” Uh, no. Whether a single machine gun can destroy a company of attackers in trench warfare or the simple rule that the ship with the longer range will win, technology had outstripped the tactics, and even the mindset, of the commanders in World War I.

It is also one of those lessons I wonder if we have learned every time I see one of our magnificent aircraft carriers. These were the premier naval weapons in World War II, fought over 70 years ago, supplanting the World War I era battleship. Of the four super battleships deployed in World War II by the Germans and Japanese, the Bismark, the Tirpitz, the Musashi, and the Grand Yamato were partially or entirely sunk by air power. 

Today, the US boasts of the impressive Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy's newest and most advanced aircraft carrier. The Gerald R. Ford can do 30 knots or about 34 miles per hour. A smart Missile, however, can travel at Mach 10, or approximately 7,600 miles per hour. Hmmm…

I have included British, French, and German accounts of the war, but you may have noticed I left out Americans. I wanted to finish with a certain Lieutenant Ralph Waldo Tippet, my great uncle and my father's namesake. He was first wounded in May 1918 and then later returned to combat. On September 12, 1918, while advancing to locate a machine gun nest in the St. Mihiel sector, he was instantly killed by shrapnel. The American army was preparing for the Meuse Argonne offensive, which involved up to 1.2 million American troops, when he died. His name is still listed in the memorial chapel at his, and my, alma mater, Lawrence University. He would have been 27 on his death.    

Adds Keegan, 

"It is true that the Great War, by comparison with that of 1939-45, did little material damage. . . . Yet it damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilization also. Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law, and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles."

In Barbar Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, a work about Pre World War I Europe, this incomparable historian writes,

“The Old World had much that has since been lost, whatever may have been gained. Looking back on it from 1915, Emile Verhaeren, the Belgian Socialist poet, dedicated his pages, "With emotion, to the man I used to be.”