Tuesday, 16 November 2021

[Content Warning - war, violence, hate, discrimination, social control] World War (part) One

In some ways, this could be considered Act Two in a “European Civil War” that started with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 as Act One, and ended with the Allies’ victory in World War (part) Two (or, maybe, the fall of the Berlin Wall - which is generally considered the end of the Cold War . . . ) ending  Act Three.

Acts One and Two in particular, raise the issue of people wanting to feel good about themselves. In the case of Act One, that was associated with the formation of a Prussian (nominally “German”) Empire from the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Federation. The German Empire was a flawed, nominal (perhaps what we would consider a partial) democracy headed by an Emperor. Nevertheless, people in that nation state seemed to largely be happy enough (content? [1] ) to be part of a new, separate nation . . . but, somewhere along the way, the Prussian (aka “German”) Empire decided it “had” to have (wanted) the same sorts of trappings of signs of “greatness” as other nation-state Empires (at that stage, mainly Britain, France, Belgium, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and the USA), including overseas “colonies” and a strong military - which led to a period of brutal expansion of colonial empires, including abuses by Belgium in the Congo, and the first genocide of the 20th Century by Germany in what is now Namibia, and an extremely expensive arms race - predominantly naval, but aspects such as the cost of some land army weapons contributed to holding the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.

The actual outbreak of this war was a tragic farce of extremely arrogant hubris, secrecy, naïve nationalism, political & military ineptness & incompetence, and Machiavellian manipulations referred to as “the July Crisis”.

The Germans opened hostilities with a (weaker) variation of their Schlieffen Plan, which was based on use of a rapid, overwhelming force striking - illegally - through Belgium with a view to knocking France out quickly and then focusing on defeating Russia.

This didn’t work for a number of reasons - including the weakening of their plan by Germany, and the resistance of Belgium, Britain, and France. After a few weeks, it settled into trench warfare, rather than a war of mobility, along what would be termed the Western Front, in France. This has partly been mischaracterised [2] (e.g., the slaughter of the Battle of the Somme was never about winning the war, it was about forcing Germany to transfer troops away from its attack on Verdun so the French could hold out there), but it did involve:

  • technological developments, including:

o   continued use of improved artillery, which had proven so devastating in the Napoleonic (officers had to be trained to place troops where they wouldn’t get in the way of their own cannons [this war also saw the development of tinned food [3] , which aided the use of large armies] ) and US Civil (which saw notable developments in signalling to control artillery, and use of limited resources to best effect [this war also saw the use of railways to significant effect] ) Wars;

o   tanks, as a reaction to artillery (the streaming series “Age of Tanks” [4] illustrates the foresight of some military personnel, with one proposal in the 1900s looking remarkably like modern tanks);

o   machine guns (which had actually been around and killing people for decades);

o   improved use of trenches (the use of trenches is known to a fair few people from the US Civil War, but their use against the British [combined with a shield to reduce visibility] was also a feature of the 1845 - 72 Māori Wars in New Zealand), including barbed wire;

o   rapid development of the use of the recently invented heavier-than-air planes;

o   development of submarines (which had been around for decades) and its use to sink civilian shipping (later, “without warning”);

  • tactical and strategic developments, including:

o   highly planned & organised coordinated attacks using multiple forms of weapons (artillery, tanks, aircraft, communication, etc);

o   French and later German development of what would be called blitzkrieg;

o   conscript/citizen armies to enable rapid replacement of the slaughtered, injured or incapacitated troops;

This war was also to see:

  • the aforementioned mass slaughters;
  • medical developments to attempt to deal with the horrific disfigurement it caused in some survivors, and clumsy initial fumbles with what we now know as PTSD (although much of the early responses could be characterised as similar to the unjustified scepticism around RSI);
  • war crimes (including various forms of aerial attack against civilians [who had long been targeted in war - e.g., by artillery, disease, and starvation in sieges] ), which contributed to attempts to ensure peace through the critically weakened League of Nations (although several of its organs continue to this day - including the International Court of Justice (formerly the Permanent Court of International Justice [5] ), the International Labour Orgtanisation [6] , and the World Health Organisation [7] [and the League perhaps set the scene for the improved United nations - partly by getting nations over the initial hurdle of coming to terms with the concept);
  • starvation of entire nations through the imposition of blockades;

Conflict also occurred on:

  • the eastern Front, largely Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia, and the Allies against the Ottoman Empire (which included the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, which contributed to the Armenian genocide that was historically so significant [in that the lack of an effective Allied response encouraged hitler to be abusive during World War (part) Two, and spurred Raphael Lemkin to invent the word genocide);
  • enough other places in the world (Africa and the Pacific) for it to be viewed as a global (or “world”) war (but not the first of those - that would possibly be the Seven Years War, but there are other possible contenders [8] );

The war also involved other aspects, such as:

  • progression of women’s rights, as women took over jobs that men had previously held (e.g., in factories);
  • remembrance in various forms (this had actually started in the UK after the Second Boer War [which led to improvements in the British Army to enabled it to make crucial shifts away from being colonial-focused to also reasonable capable of managing enemies of equal ability [9] ] );
  • the rapid spread of a devastating flu (first publicly acknowledged in Spain [which wasn’t involved in the war and thus didn’t have wartime censorship] and thus often misleadingly termed “the Spanish flu”), which killed more people (estimates range from 17 to 50 and some as high as 100 million deaths) than the Great War (also called “the War to End all Wars” . . . ) in less than two years - partly because so many people had been weakened by starvation, and partly because of the mass movement of armies, some of whom were infected;
  • the end of several Empires, the violent rise of bolshevism in Russia (in a second revolution, in October, 1917 - a few months after the first revolution which overthrew the Tsar [partly motivated by fears that Russia wouldn’t leave the war], and invasions by the Allies in 1919 [the book “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923” [10] argues that this war didn’t truly end until 1923] through northern Russia, with up to 180,000 troops [a fact well worth keeping in mind when considering current hostilities between modern Russia and “the West”), creation of tensions in West Asia that affect us today, the more peaceful rise of democracy in Germany, more momentum for decolonisation, and serious discontent - which set the scene for Act Two - in:

o   Italy (which had eventually joined on the side of the Allies [who were initially the triple Entente, later the Entente or Allies [11] ] after refusing to be part of the response by the Triple Powers [later the Central Powers [12] ], as it considered that to be about defence, not mutual belligerence);

o   Japan (which was the subject of truly disgraceful racism - largely initiated by my nation’s bigoted leader [Billy Hughes] who wanted to preserve the racist White Australia policy that had been a key part of Federation - so key that it saw moves to have human rights included thrown out); and

o   Germany (partly over the terms of the Versailles Treaty [the official “peace” treaty], and partly over ridiculous “stab-in-the-back” and “not defeated in the field” myths that hitler and others capitalised on).

The effects of this terrible war are shown partly by the counterfactual (“alternative”) history in the book “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives” by Richard Ned Lebow [13] , which chose a “good” (“best”) and “bad” (“worst”) example from wide range of possible paths to illustrate what was likely/unlikely to have happened if the war had not occurred.

Then there’s the numbers: around 15 to 22 million dead, military and civilian, and 23 million wounded . . .

 

For more on this topic (written by experts, rather than me), see:

o   trench warfare:   https://www.britannica.com/topic/trench-warfare,   https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zqhyb9q/articles/z8sssbk,   https://worldwaronetrenchwarfare.weebly.com/trench-warfare-in-world-war-1.html,   https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/wwi/trenches,   https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/trench-warfare/,   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trench_warfare&oldid=1053914881,   and   the TGW videos at https://youtu.be/P92guhd7d-8, https://youtu.be/HfKUd8bvQfc, & https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMU2-UiexaQ_pwpxxgQUdat;
and on the history of trench warfare:   https://worldwaronetrenchwarfare.weebly.com/trench-warfare-prior-to-world-war-1.html,   and https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/36935/taurangaika-pa, & https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Zealand_Wars&oldid=1053333770#Strategy_and_tactics (“The word pā means a fortified strong point . . . Puketapu Pā and then Ohaeawai Pā were the first of the so-called "gunfighter pā", built to engage enemies armed with muskets and cannons. . . . There were trenches and rifle pits to protect the occupants and, later, very effective artillery shelters. . . . They were cheap and easily built . . . and they were completely expendable. The British repeatedly mounted often lengthy expeditions to besiege a pā, which would absorb their bombardment and possibly one or two attacks, and then be abandoned by the Māori. Shortly afterwards, a new pā would appear in another inaccessible site.”);

o   barbed wire (missing from earlier forms of trench warfare):   https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/barbed_wire,   https://militaryhistorynow.com/2014/01/08/barbed-wire-war-how-one-farmers-innovation-changed-the-battlefield/,   and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barbed_wire&oldid=1052262086;

o   submarines:   https://www.britannica.com/technology/submarine-naval-vessel,   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Submarine&oldid=1054070715,   and the TGW video at https://youtu.be/W9cxQh773fI;

o   aircraft:   https://www.britannica.com/technology/military-aircraft/World-War-I,   https://historylearning.com/world-war-one/aerial-warfare-world-war-one/aircraft-world-war-one/,   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aviation_in_World_War_I&oldid=1055223482,   and   the TGW video at https://youtu.be/s1oxX4Q6ndo;

o   machine guns:   https://online.norwich.edu/academic-programs/resources/how-machine-gun-changed-combat-during-world-war-i,   https://period5team1.weebly.com/machine-guns.html,   https://youtu.be/B06izR0HWyc,   https://www.britannica.com/technology/machine-gun,   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_gun&oldid=1054652979#Maxim_and_World_War_I,   and   the TGW video at https://youtu.be/W9cxQh773fI;

o   artillery:   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quick-firing_gun&oldid=1036821274;

o   tanks:   the TGW video at https://youtu.be/zjj13U-j0_g;

and also:

 

[1] As stated above, this does raise the issue of what makes people happy. Buddhism is renowned for being focused on seeking a “true and lasting” version of happiness, but, for most people, it is more superficial - things like feeling physically attractive, socially connected, or being able to take a simplistic pride in the “bigness, “power”, or “badness” of groups people are part of - ranging from families through sporting club affiliations and membership of movements to the nations that those people happen to have been born in (or moved to).

[2] See, for instance, https://youtu.be/hs857RflCZE on “The Top 10 Misconceptions about World War 1”

[10] Pub. Penguin, 2016, ISBN 978-0-141-97636-5, Amazon https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01H6CT1CM/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2.

[13] Pub. Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, New York, ISBN 978-1-137-27853-1, Amazon https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GQ603DQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

[14] Pub. Estesagoras, S.L., 2014, ISBN 978-84-616-9978-0, Amazon https://smile.amazon.com/Summer-14-Diplomatic-Emilio-Campmany-ebook/dp/B00KZP9ACE/ref=sr_1_1.

[15] Pub. Penguin, 2014 (originally pub. 1962), ISBN 978-0-241-96822-2, Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IB43Q6C/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2.

[16] Pub. Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 978-0857206374 (paperback), Amazon https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B00B3VDVF6/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2.

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