#38 1914 to 1945 Global Destruction

Who or What was responsible for the 1914-1918 war?

The period between 1914 and 1945 saw war break out across the world. These 30 years saw death and destruction on a scale that had never before been envisaged. And, while this period is behind us by over 100 years, it is still replayed in books and television almost as if it was yesterday. These wars are seared into the public mind as almost nothing else in history. As is so often repeated, history is written by the victors, and so it has been. Over the next few blogs, I will attempt to provide explanations and interpretations that many readers may find unfamiliar. I hope to show that these wars were all about the continuing struggle for global power. The first bout of global wars from the 1750s to 1815 had ended in Britain emerging as a global power. The second bout, from 1914 to 1945, end up with the USA as globally dominant.  

The first question is, why did war break out in 1914?

Step back for a minute and ask how on earth British, French, or German politicians allowed these disastrous wars to start, and once having started, to continue for 30 years. Consider that European countries had already created for themselves greater power and wealth than the world had ever known. France, Britain, and the Netherlands owned and controlled the largest empires in world history. What kind of madness dressed up as rationality, what kind of arrogance clothed in national chauvinism allowed politicians to destroy everything that had been created in the wars, revolutions, and social upheavals between 1914 and 1945?

It is important in a blog like this, where so much is almost beyond our imagination, not to exaggerate.

So consider the carnage over a 30 year period from 1914 killed:

• Between 45 and 55 million Europeans

• Between 25 and 30 million Asians

• Around 27 million Russians

Grasping these numbers as concrete reality, as human beings, as part of families, is impossible.

Rebecca Gordan’s writes in American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, a book on war crimes, that, “I grew up knowing that the heart of darkness lay in Nazi Germany.... that my own country (the USA) was a light to the nation, a beacon of righteousness.... we were wise and good".

Then consider that Britain and France together began the 1914 war owning and controlling up to one-third of the entire land area of the world. For France, this included a large part of northern Africa. Britain owned the Indian subcontinent - this includes today’s India, Pakistan, Burma, Shri Lanka - plus large parts of southern, western and eastern Africa, - this included Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Sudan; and the English settled most of Canada, Australia and New Zealand; not forgetting growing control of the Chinese continent. All of this was lost by the end of the hostilities.

What level of incompetence allowed this level of loss of life, and then at the end, the loss of empire?

Maps showing Africa in 1880 and 1913. By Somebody500, CC BY-SA 4.0 retrieved from Wikipedia.

This blog cannot provide firm answers to these questions. There are no shortages of explanations. Many fine British American and French historians have attempted an answer, and every conceivable angle has been examined. There are several problems. The 1914 war is now, in the 21st century considered ‘contemporary history’ and remains a subject of passionate debate. The so-called First World War is still captured on film, in novels, and art. How people imagine these wars still matters to a great many people. National pride continues to play a major role in how these conflagrations are perceived.

There is another angle that makes this question of overriding importance. If the leaders of Germany, Britain, or France were culpable - if they intentionally wished or even planned to have this war - then political legitimacy could be forever compromised.

British, French, German, and American historians all tell this story with an eye on national pride. Scholars writing that Britain was in some way responsible have received a hard time and their work a difficult reception. If they are scholars, they might lose their jobs; if they are established scholars, they are side-lined, and if they do not have scholarly jobs, then their work is ignored. We might look to the examples such as that Guido Preparata lost his job, Antony Sutton was side-lined, and William Engdahl alongside Jim MacGregor and Gerry Docherty are ignored by the Oxford and Cambridge historians. I will return to these authors in future blogs and the books they have written.

However, the pressing question remains: who or what was responsible for the 1914-18 war?

The generally acknowledged answer to our question goes as follows. Nobody on any side wanted war. Once Prince Ferdinand had been assassinated, the 1914 war just happened, and no one could stop it. At this point, tensions between the nations had risen too high and war could not be stopped once this precipitating event set things in motion. In brief, no one side could be held responsible.

For years after 1918 and then after 1945, Germany was blamed. Britain, France, and the USA had won; and as we all know, the victor writes history. It was widely admitted that there was an arms race between Britain and Germany from the 1890s; both sides were militarily prepared to some extent. As earlier blogs have discussed, Britain wished to control the seas and prided herself on her superior navy. Germany was obviously 'the young pretender'. She wanted colonies across the world and she wanted to compete against Britain.

There are three possible logical explanations for the 1914-18 war:

a. The war happened by chance before it could be stopped.

b. The German State was responsible

c. The British State was responsible

Below I examine the first of these explanations: the war happened by chance before it could be stopped. In the following blogs, I discuss the evidence that Germany or Britain were responsible.

The war happened by chance before it could be stopped

It has been agreed by most historians across all nations that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the main preceding event responsible for sparking the chain of events that led to the outbreak of war in 1914.

A fine recent work by Ian Kershaw To Hell and Back illustrates this proposition. Kershaw’s research led him to use expletives about the horrors of the 1914 war: “Europe’s era of self-destruction, immeasurable catastrophe, extraordinary violence, profound collapse of civilisation, maelstrom of destruction". Kershaw was clearly touched by the sheer awfulness of his subject.

He finds four interconnected trends that together led to the war:

• An explosion of ethnic and racist nationalism

• Irreconcilable demands for territory (he meant demands for colonial territory)

• Acute class conflict

• A protracted crises of capitalism

These, he argues, unleashed new forces of extreme nationalism and ethnic conflict, including competition for raw material resources, especially oil. The first part of To Hell and Back goes into detail on these. Kershaw makes many good points, including that the hatred of the Jews across Europe, who were used as a scapegoat, drove the rise in ethnic and racist nationalism. He also points out that the governing classes and the military remained throughout Europe in the hands of landed elites aristocratic families, some new dynasties, alongside new industrial and financial wealth. He correctly connects nationalism, racism and eugenics in the 30 years leading to the war. The idea of ‘purifying a nation’ was well accepted by leaders of all political views well before 1914.

He notes that Germany's ambition from the 1890s was to become a world power. And he makes a great deal of the alliances of the moment: Germany, Austro/Hungary - a major nation at that moment in time) - and Italy; while Britain had an alliance with France - her historic enemy - and Russia. He concludes:

“...nor should it be taken to imply that war when it came was an accident, a tragic set of errors an outcome desired by no one, an unforeseen and an unpredictable occurrence....when it came the will for war outweighed the desire for peace....and there was no evident drive to war by a single country as there was to be a generation later” (page 23)

So, we can all rest comfortably in our beds. Kershaw then takes 20 pages of text to describe ‘slithering into war' as he heads the argument. And, perhaps not surprisingly, his own country - Britain - had the least responsibility. Britain was, he argues, preoccupied by possible civil war in Ireland. And Britain had the least to gain from a European war. Britain, he argued, feared German domination of the continent as her standing as a great power would be diminished.

Kershaw is a fine historian, and his work is well worth reading. To Hell and Back makes a considerable case for the argument that nobody and no country was ultimately responsible for the 1914-18 war. However, to a large extent, Kershaw’s writings reflect the mainstream of history about the origins of the 1914 war, and they do not take into counter-evidence to the contrary.

Another recent well-researched book bringing in new evidence, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain's Rush to War by Douglas Newton, offers a similar conclusion:

“The fatal insistence that Britain's war was unavoidable is often rooted in a belief that Germans drive towards aggression was inexorable, and therefore any moderation on Britain's part would have only encouraged war .... He goes on.... the Russians did invade East Prussia, the British did seize German colonies.... The British certainly planned for the aggrandisement of Empire and the commercial ruin of Germany....The spoils.... sweeping plans for the newly inflated British Empire in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific” (Page 305)

Despite the book’s title, Newton argues that no country is ultimately responsible for the war. Much is made of the new powerful nationalisms. Newton aims to find political or military leaders responsible. As with all such books, it is well written and researched and it helps to focus on the forces and people of the time. Some were pressing to go to war; others were not. There is evidence on both sides: both sides lusted for new colonies; both sides were militaristic; both sides were simply carrying on the antagonisms of the past centuries, which this book emphasises. In the end, Newton concludes, both sides lost all that they had once gained. The book is inconclusive because he - like Kershaw and Margaret Macmillan - ignores the counter-evidence that is presented by historians such as Guido Preparata, Antony Sutton, William Engdahl and Jim MacGregor, and Gerry Docherty that I discuss in the following blogs.

What is indisputable is that Germany had risen very rapidly after unification in 1871 and demanded that she be treated as an equal with Britain and France: that she be allowed to colonise across the world. In British eyes, Germany was a dire threat. She was efficient, aggressive, scientifically adept, militarily resourceful, with a large pool of manpower, and willing to challenge Britain hegemony. She rapidly created a large marine zone in the North Sea and modernized her army. From Britain's point of view, German was a direct threat to her long-held global dominance.

Germany in the 1890s challenged British global hegemony, just as the USSR challenged US hegemony after 1945, and as China does today. Germany at this moment in history was the first of the challengers about whom should rule the world; a form of global conflict that reflects the essence of capitalism as a form of power, production, and destruction.

To defend herself, Britain had created an alliance with France and Russia, which threatened Germany from the west and east. The established historical narrative is that the war could not be stopped, the tensions were too high, both sides had prepared themselves for war and that in the end, both sides were equally responsible. The long-held narrative is that it only needed, a spark, some event to start the war, which is where the assassination of Prince Ferdinand comes in.

“Group of French 'Tommies' come straight out of the trenches to receive English decorations” National Library of Scotland
License: CC BY 4.0

Should we accept this story? After all, the world’s major nations have been prepared to go to war since the Cold War in the 1950s, but this has not occurred. As I address in the following blogs, a small number of historians have tried to argue quite differently.

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