World War 1, published in 1971 by S. L. A. Marshall, discusses one of the most devastating wars of human history in a manner that is detailed yet concise, providing an informative overview. It should, of course, be noted that it has been discovered that S. L. A. Marshall was discovered to have blatantly lied about his own war experiences in many of his books. While this does cast a shadow over his reputation, I believe that World War 1 is still a worthwhile read, as I will completely refrain from discussing Marshall's “experience” in this summary.
Marshall begins the book by talking about the origins of the war. While WW1 is acknowledged by many historians as being entirely preventable, it is generally acknowledged that the first shots of the war occurred in Sarajevo, Serbia, on June 28, 1914. When the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, visited Sarajevo with his wife Sophie, they were both murdered by Gavrilo Princip, 19 years old at the time, a Serbian nationalist who was a member of the Black Hand, a terrorist organization. Marshall takes time to describe how the Serbians felt about Archduke Ferdinand, as they loathed him: “The people of Serbia viewed Francis Ferdinand as a threat to all they coveted, simply because he advocated ‘Trialism,’ or triple reorganization of the empire in place of the existing ‘Dualism’” (9). Marshall discusses that the assassination of Ferdinand and his wife shouldn’t have happened at all, as Princip and other members of the Black Hand were almost completely untrained when it came to firearms. The only reason Princip was able to kill them both was because the driver of Ferdinand’s carriage made a wrong turn on a curved street, which “put the party at a standstill within five feet of Gavrilo Princip, the seventh and most resolute of the assassins. He drew and fired instantly and the pistol snapped twice, with as little noise as if it had fired blanks” (11). Ferdinand was shot in the neck and Sophie was struck in the abdomen. Sophie collapsed almost immediately, and before Ferdinand died, he whispered “‘Es ist nichts,’” or “‘it is nothing,’” which would eerily predict the world’s attitude towards WW1 in the early stages of the war (12).
Marshall states that even though the assassination of Ferdinand and Sophie was a tragedy, it shouldn’t have caused WW1. Regardless, it did, for the alliances and rivalries which would create the Central Powers and the Triple Entente were already set in stone. When Austria-Hungary demanded justice from Serbia for the assassination of the Archduke (which also meant suspending some of the rights of Serbians), Serbia refused by mentioning national sovereignty. Not long after Sarajevo, many of the major countries of WW1 had already mobilized their soldiers, as the situation, to say the least, was tense: “Everywhere on the Continent mobilization was swift and sure, compared to the difficulties of all previous wars … Processing had been speeded up because it was believed that once mobilization began, war became inescapable” (43). To flesh out the situation, Marshall gives some statistics: “Toward France on August 3, Germany was already wheeling 1,500,000 men into line to field seven east armies,” “Across Europe more than six million men were getting orders and moving either toward the frontiers or to their support stations,” and “Austria-Hungary mustered forty-nine divisions in an initial mobilization of just under 500,000 men. When later she went to a full war footing, summoning the reserves, the number rose to 2,700,000” (43-44). When France learned of the mobilization of Germany, it realized that it was outnumbered, seeing that it only had 60% of Germany’s population when it came to armies, causing it to “call all able-bodied men to the colors. She began the war by mustering sixty-two divisions, or a total of 1,650,000 men, and later built up to 3,500,000 men, after heavy losses” (45). Britain hesitated to mobilize and to go to war, but did eventually participate after Germany cut through Belgium (therefore violating its neutrality) to reach France in the Schlieffen Plan.
In hindsight, people might find it surprising that most of the countries and people at the time predicted WW1 to be a short one (the general attitude stated that the soldiers would be back by Christmas), but it should be remembered that they had reasons for believing so. WW1 would change warfare entirely, for up to that point many devastating weapons like gatling guns had not been used in combat, causing many to harbor the illusion that it could be fought with old-fashioned weapons like bayonets. Many of those who volunteered to fight for their country didn't expect to be faced with mortars and bombs, which meant that they were totally unprepared for what would become a bloodbath. One of the few people who predicted the war to be a long one was a German general named Moltke, who stated that the war would be “‘long, wearisome’” (57). Ironically, even though he correctly believed the war was going to be devastating, he nonetheless executed the Schlieffen Plan, knowing that in doing so Germany would have Belgium, Britain, and previously neutral European countries as enemies: “If it was to be a protracted conflict, he was doing the worst possible thing in the beginning by giving the ultimate provocation to the greatest possible number of Germany’s enemies” (57). Germany successfully crossed Belgium, taking over fortresses such as Liege and Namur (which were thought to be virtually impregnable), but found itself in a diplomatic crisis, as previously isolationist countries like America gained a low opinion of them. Erich Ludendorff, a major German general, “was already complaining about armed resistance by Belgian civilians. German soldiers were to execute these so-called francs tireurs (civilian snipers) by the hundreds without trial; their wanton slaughter was the basis of the ‘Belgian atrocity’ stories, which in later years were discounted as propaganda” (61). The Germans also slaughtered Belgian priests without evidence, only worsening public opinion regarding them.
When the French fought the Germans, they were woefully unprepared due to their lack of understanding when it came to the sheer destruction modern weaponry could cause, leading to massive casualties. They were also unorganized, which caused only more trouble. Regardless, they won some victories, as in the Battle of the Marne in 1914, the French commander Joffre won a crucial battle. At first the Germans made progress, but the battle then reached a stalemate, causing the Germans to retreat to the Aisne. At the time of WW1, the Ottoman Empire was nicknamed the “sick man of Europe,” for while it had dominated other regions for centuries and was previously seen as the pinnacle of progress, internal conflicts (for instance, the janissaries, the Sultan’s bodyguard, decreased in quality) and external losses of land led to it to become a mere shadow of what it once was. Consequently, it joined the Central Powers for the sole sake of survival. The war definitively ended the Ottoman Empire, as the Central Powers would be beaten, not to mention that Turkey suffered from economic poverty: “The war ultimately cost Turkey one fourth of her population. Of 4,000,000 adult males, about 1,600,000 were called to service. A multitude of women, children, and old folk died of starvation and lack of medical care” (121). During this period, the leader of Turkey was a man named Enver Pasha who considered himself a general with the caliber as Napoleon, but was woefully delusional and unprepared to lead his country into a war. He made no initial plan for battles, and his strategies were ill-planned and ill-fought.
Enver Pasha eventually had a Turkish commander in Syria, Djemal Pasha, threaten the Suez Canal by crossing the Sinai desert with two divisions. Despite the initial success of the Turkish army, they had made the fatal mistake of overextension - they had conquered too much land and had too few troops to maintain control. The key principle of overextension would also rule trench warfare, as initial large gains in battles could be quickly lost as enemy troops would commonly regroup and launch counteroffensives. Regardless, the Turkish troops were “defeated more by overextension and lack of food and ammunition than by fire from the defenders” (125). Enver Pasha’s delusion that he was a great military leader would be further discredited in the Caucasus, as he decided to invade Russia during winter (the same mistake Napoleon made). The weather was so cold that more than 50,000 Turkish soldiers died of hypothermia while the rest of his army were crushed by the Russians. Before the battle, he had 150,000 soldiers, but that proved to be no match for “winter and 100,000 Russians,” since one full third of his soldiers froze to death (125). “After three ghastly weeks, it ended in a Turkish retreat. With the frozen bodies of their comrades, the wretched survivors left behind in the ice Enver’s dream of rolling back the Czar’s armies” (125). The Ottoman Empire during WW1 also conducted a genocide against its Armenian civilians, slaughtering 1.5 million. Like the victims of other genocides, the Armenians were blamed for many of Turkey’s problems, including military defeats: “In 1915 the Turkish Army tried to exterminate the Armenians. More than one million were slaughtered. By the thousands, Armenian women were violated. Children were sold into prostitution. Old folk were driven into the desert. Except for Germany, the civilized nations voiced their outraged protests” (123). Enver Pasha was never brought to justice for being one of the main instigators of the genocide.
In 1914, the Battle of Antwerp began when the Germans invaded the south of Belgium. Despite resistance from the British, Germany still succeeded. It was also around this time that the Western Front became firmly established, as Marshall describes that “By December, 1914, the Western Front had become consolidated along a 400-mile trench line from the North Sea to Switzerland” (136). The Western Front mainly relied on trench warfare, for it was one of the few reliable ways to protect soldiers from mortar and gunfire. Soldiers would live in trench systems, some complaining they had come for glory and had been met with a pigsty, and the fighting on the Western Front was hellish - entire landscapes were converted to battlefields, corpses would be left unattended, and there was little sanitation. The Western Front saw the deaths of at least 4 million soldiers, which gave rise to the phrase “The Lost Generation,” for the numbers of the young men of many European countries were severely depleted. To boost morale, some countries (including Germany) would group people from the same community with each other, causing them to be killed together on the battlefield when their turn came.
Paul von Hindenburg, the commander of Germany’s Army during WW1, ordered the opening of the Eastern Front to defend Austria while the Western Front was being fought, seriously straining Germany’s resources, as it had to fight both the French and the Russians. Germany, increasingly desperate, attempted to use biowarfare - mustard gas - to its advantage. On the morning of April 22, 1915, mustard gas, appearing as “two greenish yellow clouds, which gradually merged,” appeared to the Allied Army. All in all, more than 15,000 soldiers who were unfortunate enough to be caught in it experienced “slow death, excruciating invalidism, and shock panic” (167). 79,000 other soldiers died. Ironically, Marshall describes that some days before the attack a German deserter told the French that the “enemy line was fixed with tubes of asphyxiating gas placed in batteries of twenty for every forty meters of the front held down by the French Colonial Corps,” but those in command thought it to be a lie (168). Other powers proceeded to adopt biowarfare for themselves, and Germany, in an arms race, rushed to produce phosgene, which was twice as deadly as mustard gas.
Italy joined the war merely for land, and it fought on the side of the Triple Entente. Italy, “Surfeited with riches still to be earned,” “declared war against Austria on May 23, 1915, but didn't pronounce against Germany until August 27, 1916” (172). The army of Italy as a whole was rather ineffective, for Italy’s economy was struggling and didn't have enough modern weaponry. Consequently, it didn't pose a large threat against Austria. The Gallipoli Campaign lasted from February 19, 1915 to January 9, 1916, and it saw a Turkish victory over the Allied Forces. This was largely due to the geography, as Gallipoli was a peninsula fortified by the Turks - the Allies were forced to invade from the beaches. WW1 eventually spread to Africa, as many colonial governments knew that they could profit if they seized African lands during WW1 as colonial possessions. At the end of WW1, the Allied Powers and Britain beat the Germans thanks to the native people’s aid, and Germany lost its holdings of Africa, which would only exacerbate the economic crisis it would face once the Treaty of Versailles was agreed upon.
The Austrian Army, in one instance during WW1, marched through Galicia from May to September of 1915, and followed a scorched-earth policy to ensure victory. Many buildings and houses were destroyed, and by the end of the campaign, 4 million Poles were either slain or made homelessness. Marshall then talks about the Battle of Verdun, one of the most devastating wars of WW1. It was fought between France and Germany, and lasted from February 21, 1916 to December 18, 1916. In those months it is impossible to tell how many were killed fighting for small plots of land, but Marshall estimates that “France lost half a million soldiers - dead, wounded, missing, prisoners. Germany lost upwards of 400,000. Approximately forty million artillery rounds were spent by the two sides during the half-year battle at Verdun” (248-9). Marshall then moves on to the Battle of the Somme, a major meat grinder of WW1. Ironically, this terrible battle took place near the Somme, which was “a tranquil river” which was “shallow and marsh-bordered, spreading five hundred yards or more from shore to shore; its banks and small islets abound with rushes, osiers, and poplars, the haunt of blackbirds, herons, and other wild fowl” (257). The battle was between Britain and Germany, and relied heavily on trench warfare. In the first day of the fighting alone, the British had 60,000 people who “were corpses littering the field, dying men trapped in the beaten zone, burdens for the stretcher-bearers, or walking wounded” (258). A young French lieutenant who fought at Verdun spoke for most of the soldiers of WW1 when he wrote in his diary on May 23, 1916: “‘Humanity … must be mad to do what it’s doing,’” “‘What scenes of horror and carnage! … Hell cannot be so terrible.’” (265). And the French lieutenant was right - the Battle of the Somme involved more than 1 million casualties and more than 300,000 deaths.
America, for the most part, pursued an isolationist policy during WW1, but it eventually participated when it felt threatened by the submarine warfare of Germany. America sent to Europe what the Central Powers feared most - young, fresh soldiers who still had their morale intact. American soldiers were nicknamed “doughboys,” and the American Expeditionary Force (A. E. F.) was established. Russia eventually left the war because Czar Nicholas II, nicknamed “Bloody Nicholas” for his brutal repressions of protestors and mismanagement of the war, had lost his remaining popularity. The Bolsheviks promised the Russians that if they were to come into power, they would pursue Russia’s neutrality, and they delivered on that promise upon the Czar’s abdication. The Czar would later be executed with his family by the Bolsheviks, who wanted to leave nothing of the age of the serfs (though they would replace the Czar when it came to oppressing people). Russia, in order to establish neutrality, made a treaty with Germany at Brest Litovsk. In the treaty, Russia agreed to cede Poland and the Baltic states to Germany, and made similar concessions to Turkey. Russia then dropped out of the war and pursued a revolution within its borders.
On January 8, 1918, after numerous other campaigns and battles, Wilson impacted foreign diplomacy by giving a speech about the Fourteen Points. He demanded that nations should respect freedom of the seas, a free market, and peace once the war was over. When WW1 was over, this wasn’t to be the case, as America’s sovereignty was ruled to be more important than an increased chance of peace for the world by people nicknamed “irreconciliables,” which would allow WW2 to occur. American forces eventually pushed Germany’s territory back significantly, which would only worsen Germany’s militaristic standing, considering that it had lost many soldiers at that point like most of the countries of Europe. The end came in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which lasted from September 26, 1918 to November 11, 1918. This battle was also the largest one which the A. E. F. took part in. It is estimated that more than a million doughboys participated, and involved 26,000 deaths and more than 120,000 casualties. The purpose of the battle was to capture a key part of the German railway transportation system, and when the battle was won, Germany was finished. WW1 ended on November 11, 1918. It was nicknamed “Eleventh Hour” because the surrender took place in the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year. The losses had been catastrophic - “Almost ten million men and women had been killed in the fighting. More than six million had been crippled or invalided for life. There had been a victory of sorts, but what the victors celebrated chiefly was that mass death, after four years, had taken a holiday. The illusion was that all of humanity would profit by the great lesson” (455).
The Treaty of Versailles was dominated by four people - Woodrow Wilson of America, Lloyd George of Britain, Clemenceau of France, and Orlando of Italy. In the conference, Wilson wanted his Fourteen Points passed and for peace to be pursued. Orlando wanted territory for Italy, as that was the whole purpose it joined the Triple Entente during WW1 (and the same reason it would join the Axis Powers in WW2). Clemenceau wanted Germany to be severely punished and stripped of its military might, as France had suffered staggering casualties in WW1. “Germany, by signing the treaty, would acknowledge her sole responsibility for having caused the war. She would agree to turn over the Kaiser and other national leaders for trial as war criminals. She would agree, also, to pay for all civilian damage suffered by the Applied peoples during the war. The reparations bill was still being worked out, but a five-billion-dollar down payment would be required by May 1, 1921, and by signing the treaty, the Germans would put signature to a blank check covering the ultimate Allied estimate. It came out at thirty-two billion dollars” (471). It should be noted that at that time thirty-two billion dollars was more money than existed in the entire world, so it was literally impossible for Germany to fulfill that requirement, which would cause it to have difficulty finding investors.
Lloyd George eventually accepted the ludicrousness of the treaty, and “begged his colleagues to be more reasonable, cut reparations, revise the Eastern frontiers, and permit Germany to enter the League, instead of treating her as an outcast” (474). When he made his request for leniency, it wasn’t Clemenceau who denied him, but Woodrow Wilson, who feared that if Germany was to be allowed admittance into the League of Nations (this was before America voted against it), the League would lose all its credibility. The economic burden and humiliation placed on Germany at Versailles would lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler, who served in WW1 as a corporal on the German side. In the Munich Uprising of 1923, also known as the Beer Hall Putsch, which occurred from November 8, 1923 to 9 November, 1923, Hitler, with the help of Ludendorff, attempted to start a revolution in Bavaria. Hitler’s attempt to seize power failed miserably, as his supporters were crushed by the police: “Hitler broke his shoulder in a dive for the pavement. Eighteen of his men were dead from the fire; many others lay wounded” (483). Hitler was then condemned by a judge sympathetic to his cause to jail, and was thought to be no longer a threat. Or as Marshall put it: “Hitler, the fugitive, was expected to trouble them no more” (483).
Personal thoughts:
Although the reputation of S.L.A. Marshall is layered in scandal for his exaggerations of his own military experience, his writing is still informative, descriptive, and fast-paced. WW1 is a massive topic on its own, and to have a single book that attempts to provide a detailed description of it is a feat in itself. I appreciate that Marshall provided quotes from the generals in the war and statistics relating to the battles, for they truly flesh the battles out in all their grotesque carnage. However, the book would have been strengthened if more dialogue was taken from regular soldiers, as they were the ones who truly fought the war, so it would be interesting to hear what different soldiers from varying sides thought of the conflict. There are images in the book which help portray the situation, as well as maps for important battles, which are ultimately useful for readers interested in tracing out the timeline of the battles. I strongly recommend World War 1 for anyone interested in war, Europe, nationalism, and international relations.
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