100 years since the start of WWI

[J.D.]

Thought I'd kick something off about this because it's coming up and there is bound to be some interest and some interesting stuff around.

The 28th of June will be the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. As most people know, this was what led to the diplomatic crisis over the next month and culminated in the outbreak of war.

The first shots were fired by Austrian river boats at Belgrade - exactly one month later - on 28th of July, kicking off "The war to end all wars".

There are already lots of special publications on the shelves at local newsagents with interesting background material and I thought if anyone else has seen anything interesting, like upcoming documentaries, etc., you might like to post some links here. People like Chris Clark have already released books like "The Sleepwalkers" which try to explain the causes in detail and doubtless there will be many others of varying quality.

Of course, 6th of June is also the 70th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion - A.K.A. "D-Day" - but maybe someone would like to start another thread on that. Just a suggestion.

[Exar Kun]

I'm just finding it amazing how long ago the two world wars are now. When I was young I was pretty interested in both (although always WWII more so because of the increased technology) and there were still quite a few first hand witnesses of both. Now the youngest WWII vets are shifting into their 90s and their numbers are dwindling fast.

WWI was such a different war to what we're used to now in so many ways. One of the big things is that looking at it there aren't any real "bad guys". No Hitlers or Saddam Husseins, no blatant aggressors and defenders. Just a whole lot of "isms" and people who seemingly wanted to fight a war. Also, the course of the war had nothing like the huge swings one way and then the other that WWII did. Looking at how each side gained and lost ground you could almost say it could have gone anyway until late in the piece (although things were obviously different in the background).

Stepping back from how horrible the fighting was it's just a fascinating turning point in history. The last war that was between all of these monarchies and the way it set up WWII as well.

I'll certainly be diving into a few of the historical pieces that are written and aired over the next several years.

[J.D.]

The causes of WWI are not easy to understand. I guess the simplest way to put it is that a number of ill-considered treaties, which had flow on consequences the signatories were too blind to see, combined with feuding European families who were all related to each other, set up a tinder box which was waiting to explode. Nationalism and bloody-mindedness did the rest. In so doing, it laid the foundations for WWII. There is a legitimate argument that WWI did not really end until the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

I have often described WWI as a family spat which got out of hand. You sort of need to remember that you had the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia on one side and the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary,the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria on the other. Others, like Italy and Japan joined later on. Most of the rest you already know. Don't try to look for a bad guy because it makes understanding it too hard. Even the Kaiser, despite being a diplomatic dunderhead, probably gets a bit more flak *ahem* than he should.

One of the best books to read is Barbara Tuchman's classic "The Guns of August", which was written in 1962. Another I recommended in the book forum is "The Eastern Front" by Norman Stone. It was, until very recently, the only English language work on the subject. Get those two under your belt and you will be well primed for anything which comes up.

[richo]

Every time WW1 comes up the image that hit's me is the futility of charges and cavalry charges , Those poor buggers jumping of the wall to certain death or injury always gives me a lump in the throat .

[J.D.]

19th Century tactics against 20th Century weapons, principally the machine gun.

That was the stupidity of military leadership in 1914 and for a few years after that.

[Dr. Pain]

The aerial combat is hard to imagine. I know this clip is only a game but I guess it sums up that you can get so close to the end yet not quite get there. I also remember reading about three soldiers who got the Mons star. This was awarded to anyone who served with the establishment of their unit in France and Belgium between August 5th 1914, and midnight of November 22/23rd, 1914. They died on the morning of the 11th November 1918.

[youtube] [/youtube]

[J.D.]

The ship which fired the first shots: the river monitor Bodrog. She survives to this day, still plying the waters of the Danube as a gravel barge.

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?Article ... ryId=12395" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[J.D.]

Sarajevo today:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/293938b2-afcd ... z30HhZDpQy" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The author tries a bit too hard to blame Princip for triggering WWI. We know Princip was a catalyst but there were lots of catalysts (the First and Second Balkan Wars, for example). If it had been the way he claimed it was, you would have expected nothing more than a local scrap and plenty of huff and puff from both sides, as had happened previously. But the author doesn't explain why war broke out between France and Germany etc. We know why but the article tried a bit too hard to make it sound like history repeating itself in reverse. Again, there is no obvious villain, no obvious cause. Everyone basically chose war. Politically, because of the alliances and militarily, because they believed they had to in order to avoid a long war (putting it as "home in time for Christmas" is putting the cart before the horse). The alliances ebbed and flowed. Russia, for example, had been friendly with Bulgaria until they grew large enough to threaten their Black Sea access. France had fallen for Edward VII's entreaties and that left Germany at odds with Britain.

What I found interesting was the locals' modern view of it. That and the postage stamp size of the site where it happened.

Rebecca West, according to this article, made the point that nobody worked harder to get Franz Ferdinand and Sophie killed than they did, which I thought was a good point. I suspect it's one of those things that some leaders do - refusing to be intimidated by threats. Usually it results in nothing but on this occasion it ended badly. Franz Ferdinand's mission was to basically introduce a kind of federalism to what remained of the Habsburg Empire. Princip's objective was to avert it.

Wiki has a good article on the actual events of 28 June, 1914:

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

[Coopz]

Still rate WW1 as the stupidest and most downright ridiculous war of the modern age. Idiot generals stuck in the 19th century and cannon fodder sheep for soldiers.

[Dr. Pain]

Many lessons learnt that save lives today from WWI but it had to go to shit before it improved. The Somme is a good example. Slaughter on the first day that is most remembered. But just after that they started to weed out the old inflexible commanders. Then lessons learnt in artillery to better cover troop advancements such as a walking barrage. We got it right to a point by having men in our sector out of the trenches while the artillery barrage was still going so they could be at the wire when it ended. But the French nailed it in their part. An observer in each until with a phone spotting rounds and calling in fire support. We think that's WWII stuff but it was 1916.

[Dr. Pain]

I saw the following picture for the first time in an old 1970's encyclopaedia and I've never forgotten seeing it and trying to imagine it but I never could.



Call that a gun!...



and the mud of the second battle of Passchendaele

[Cutter]

Australia, Melbourne was one of the earliest confrontations.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-11/t ... -i/5083444
https://www.melbourneracingclub.net.au/ ... hot-of-wwi

[Dr. Pain]

There is some thought that not only did fort Nepean fire the first shot of WWI but it also may have fired the first shot in the Pacific theater of WWII.

[J.D.]

Part 1 of the three part SBS mini series 37 Days, tracking the July Crisis from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Consort Sophie in Sarajevo.

This is important viewing for anyone who truly wants to understand what happened and why everyone was in such a hurry to go to war. It is also important to understand that it was not the assassination which was the cause of war. It was the assassination which was the trigger for the July Crisis.

Required viewing.

[Dr. Pain]

It was the spark that lit the fire. The arms race had be going on for a while especially in terms of Dreadnoughts. Something was always going to trigger a war, it was just a matter of what.

[J.D.]

It wasn't quite as simple as that.

The leaders of Europe largely chose to go to war. Germany had given a lot of thought via the Schlieffen Plan, which was subsequently modified by von Moltke. To win against Russia, Germany had to first defeat France but the plan pre-supposed two things; firstly, that they would violate Belgian neutrality and secondly that Russia would not have time to mobilise before France was defeated. This was always the problem. They also knew that Russia was constructing railways at a great rate and that a significant increase in railhead capacity would be reached by 1916. Therefore, in a pre-emptive strike, they chose to go to war in 1914.

This was not necessarily a given either. Germany did not have to go to war with Russia, in 1914 or 1916. She chose to. The violation of Belgian neutrality was expected to bring a hostile response from Great Britain but the Germans knew that, at least in the early stages, it would be very difficult for Britain to mobilise enough units to provide any serious opposition.

Finally, there was no guarantee that the assassination would result in a European war. The Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 were nearly as likely to result in a major war but did not.

The best argument that war was inevitable was the personalities involved, particularly the Kaiser, Emperor Franz-Josef and Czar Nicholas II.

By the way, this week on 60 Minutes is a story about Gavrilo Princip:

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au//sto ... in-history" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[J.D.]

For those of you who are still interested, 37 Days has its own thread in the TV and Film forum.

http://www.arseforums.com/phpBB/viewtop ... 74#p379474" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This has links to the relevant episodes.

[J.D.]

One hundred years ago today; the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip on a Sarajevo street:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-28/o ... -i/5554108" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28062876" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-the-editors-28034372" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Commonly referred to as "the event which started World War I" it wasn't quite. As I have said earlier, what it did what to kick off a diplomatic crisis, the outcome of which was uncertain. It didn't have to end that way. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a page and a half on the assassination when their total news occupied 16 pages. It might have been the first "man made" global event.

The assassins were a small number of Serbian nationalist operatives who had walked 80 kilometres to Sarajevo from Belgrade. Princip himself was a small, weak, angry man who had been expelled from school for incitement and rejected by the komitadji, a band of Serbian Guerillas who were fighting the Ottoman Turks. The assassins were supplied with weapons by an organisation called "The Black Hand", which had military origins. The rest is history.

Princip died of tuberculosis in 1918.

One hundred years on from that fateful day in Sarajevo, historians are still analysing and debating the deeper causes of the conflict.

"The presumption that it was caused by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is one of the great furphies of history" says historian Paul Ham, author of 1914: The Year The World Ended.

He told ABC Radio's Conversations program: "Austria used the war to its own ends. It was a case for making war on Serbia. The death of the archduke could have been handled in all manner of ways."

Historians argue that the underlying causes of the war were varied and complex.

Balkan nationalism, an arms race, muscular colonial empire-building, political paranoia, simmering historical vendettas and even a deadly-efficient rail network, all played a part in propelling Europe down the rails and into the abyss of war.

- From the ABC.

[J.D.]

I also recommend, if youve nothing better to do, you keep an ear on Radio National today:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pro ... ng/5529044" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[ysu]

I'm sometimes a bit on the fence of how and how much to remember about wars, such as the world wars.
But things start coming to surface, things that weren't really talked about when I grew up, and definitely not taught at school.
And I'm sorry for this image here, but this is what made me start looking into this whole thing.
This is about a pogrom in Romania, one of the bloodiest ones. And nevermind who or why, but killing 13,000 people...and it's just a drop in a bloody ocean when you talk about the world wars. And not just that; but killing absolutely innocent civilians, kids, without mercy, without a second fucking thought.

jaszvasaripogrom.jpg

We humans are the biggest asses out there.

[Simone Gelli]

Immagine for a moment this planet without us...the human...

...it would be a fantastic,colorful,peaceful aquarium

...down with the humans.

[norbs]

http://codehesive.com/commonwealthww1/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[J.D.]

Have a think about this.

I have just been reading Max Hastings' book "Catastrophe". Not from the top drawer and not as scholarly as I'd like but quite readable.

What was the bloodiest single day of WWI?

If you're thinking the first day of the Somme, you'd be wrong and by some margin.

The beginning of WWI was marked by the repudiation of all the old tactics which had gone before but at massive cost in lives. Automatic weapons had made everything irrelevant. The French army had always worn dark blue tunics with red pants, despite it being known since the Boer War that this was an outmoded line of thinking. The origin of brightly colored uniforms was due to the nature of the fighting. At close quarters you could tell immediately who was fighting on whose side, in the manner of a football match. But the French officers insisted that it was good cran. The French 75mm field gun, the famous soixante-quinze, was originally designed without a protective shield for the crew. French gunners must look their enemy squarely in the face. Fortunately, they were spared this imbecilic thinking and the shields were installed. Generals still led their troops on horses. Bands played the advance under colorful banners.

The Germans had realised that grey-blue was harder to see and that the ranges of modern weapons made it necessary to deploy differently but even they lost thousands unnecessarily due to idiotic formation advances on emplaced machine guns.

On August 22, 1914, three weeks into the war, the French army lost 27,000 men killed in multiple actions across a small section of the front near the Ardennes. Led by generals on horses and bands playing patriotic tunes, they marched in the colorful unifomed up a narrow road, flanked on both sides by forest. They were mown down in their thousands by German troops waiting in the forest. In this action alone, in the bloodiest single day of WWI, the French lost 10,000 men, including two generals and 228 officers. 3800 were captured. Most of the unfortunate victims of this idiocy were the Chasseurs d'Afrique, colonial troops from Algeria and Morocco, whom the high command had designated for use in suicide attacks on the basis that they were more expendable than white French.

It is amazing that the French army recovered from this at all but they did. They soon realised that the traditional methods and the concept of cran was not merely outmoded but no longer affordable.

[Cursed]

The scale of the losses for the various battles during the war is what staggers me. There's one way I like to clarify to myself the scale of this, at least mentally -

1. Get your favourite jar/tin of small change.
2. Make a 10x10 grid of coins on a table.

That's 100 coins. Now, for the above example, imagine 270 of those grids of coins lined up side by side. Now imagine they're people. Now, imagine they're dead and strewn across the landscape.

Of course this doesn't have the same gravitas as the modern Australian tabloid TV measuring stick for populations - 27,000 is merely 27% of a capacity MCG crowd.

[J.D.]

I hate to say it but it doesn't have any gravitas here because no Australians were involved.

I've been trying to get this out for a while because people don't get it but they just nod with eyes glazed over.