"...When one considers the overall lack of tactical and strategical imagination of WWI..."

No. That is a common but false view.

These men were confronted by situations far worse than they could have imagined possible, even though, contra the mythology, they had studied the wars before 1914 and they knew quite a bit about the effects of the new weapons.

The British, French and Germans all introduced innovations throughout the war. There was no failure of imagination. There was to the contrary a desperate and ceaseless effort at improvisation. World War I was the seedbed of technical and doctrinal innovation that set the pattern for warfare down to the current day.

The French and British leaders are accused of making "pointless" attacks, a view made in a vacuum, a supposed lack of imagination. But looking at each case, rather than generalities, the question becomes much harder. To pick one example: Why did France persevere with costly attacks in 1915? Historians have condemned these "wasteful" efforts, with seemingly good cause. Were the generals stupid? Oblivious to the loss of hundreds of thousands of men? Was Joffre a moral monster or an imbecile or both? Unlikely. Why then? Because their ally, Russia, was being cut to ribbons by the Germans, and was begging them for help, and they needed to help and support their ally Russia in any way they could. The French commanders had only bad options and they took the lesser one -- suffer high casualties, possibly save Russia, so the Germans cannot put their full weight against France. None of us would like to be the man standing in a room full of officers, waiting for orders, looking at you, knowing that the lives of thousands of your soldiers will be lost, and that the fate of your country turns on your decision.

These men faced challenges and had responsibilities beyond what any of us will ever have to endure. We must avoid the temptation to be armchair Napoleons, where arrows on maps show later generations what seem to be "obvious" solutions. We must use cultivate and use our historical imagination, cast ourselves back to July 1914, or July 1916, and look forward, into the void of the future, the black and impenetrable fog of war, not knowing, not seeing the consequences to come, only knowing what we know, having lived what we have lived up to then, and from that standpoint try to understand these people and the decisions they made. When I do that, I find it hard to cast the first stone at men like Haig and Joffre.

Posted by: Lexington Green on October 7, 2007 3:08 PM

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who feels that way about Keegan's book on The First World War. Keegan turned a very interesting topic into a very hard slog. [It reminded me of Kissinger's quip that a benefit of being famous is whenever you are boring at a dinner party the other people think it's their fault.] Thanks for bringing this up. It has sparked some great recommendations from various readers.

Posted by: Michael Wade on October 7, 2007 3:37 PM

I read the book and liked it. For another view, try Sir Basil Liddell Hart's, The Real War."

Posted by: Ned on October 8, 2007 10:57 AM

Test, due to losing a long comment the other day.

Narr

Posted by: Nar on October 8, 2007 11:27 AM

I have been a Keegan fan for ages, but I have to agree with Steve Sailer. Keegan is excellent when he talks about concepts and styles of warfare. That is why "The Face of Battle", "The Mask of Battle", "History of Warfare" etc are so good. But he is not as good in writing straight narrative history. Sailer is probably right - the WW I and WW II books are probably something his agent and publisher sold him on.

Posted by: Reid Farmer on October 8, 2007 11:40 AM

Um sorry, that's "The Mask of Command". It occurred to me after my earlier comment that each of us who struggles in some form of endeavor has things we do well and others that we don't do so well. Keegan is the same. To those who say Keegan is "overrated" I would say that it is similar to saying something like, "Mark Rothko's portraits REALLY suck."

Posted by: Reid Farmer on October 8, 2007 4:43 PM

Looks like I should try again. Keegan is, as has been noted by others, pretty spotty. When he's good--as in Face of Battle and Mask of Command--he's very good, and when he's bad--WWI,
Fields of Battle (the one about American history?)--he's atrocious. His account of Shiloh in the last-named is such a hash I was embarrassed for him, and I thought his History of Warfare was marred beyond redemption by a wilfull misreading of Clausewitz.

The WWI book was thoroughly unbalanced as far as coverage of the different years and geographical areas. IIRC, he spends about half the book on the first year of the Western Front.

I'll second others' suggestion to read Ferguson's Pity of War. Another revisionist take, one that's loathed by many because the author is not even a historian like Ferguson but a mere literature prof, is John Mosier's Myth of the Great War.

Narr

Posted by: Narr on October 8, 2007 5:33 PM

Ever since you posted this, I've been tempted to go back and look through my copy of Keegan on WWI. But I haven't, so I can't discuss his writing stylistically.

What I remember positively from his book, however, was:

(1) His analysis of why the Von Schlieffen plan was never gonna work (insufficient mobility of marching footsoldiers to execute the giant wheel envisioned and deal with an unsubdued Paris) which suggested that things got started with a huge miscalculation.

(2) He was pretty even-handed on the fundamental technological limitations that the generals on the Western Front faced: to wit, that the only tool they had to deal with entrenched machine guns, i.e., artillery, couldn't adjust to changing battlefield conditions because of a lack of speedy communications, a problem obviated a couple years after the war by the development of portable radios.

So he seemed to make a reasonable effort on the substance front, whatever his failings on the style front.

To skip over to Lexington Green's comment, I would have to say I agree. Most wars are fought with the technology available before the war that has been thoroughly mastered by the various armed forces involved. This was largely the case for, say, the Civil War or WWII. In WWI, on the other hand, there was an endless list of new technologies introduced during the war: the airplane, the tank, gas warfare, etc., to say nothing of fairly radical advancements in utilizing artillery and portable machine guns. This makes WWI a very different organizational problem than, say, WWII.

What I took from a lot of reading on WWI was mostly that it was a huge case study in diffusing new approaches through monstrously large organizations and then managing their use effectively--and WWI armies even got a lot better at that, after some initial groping around.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on October 9, 2007 3:25 PM

Fellow Teaching Company addicts can join my Yahoo groups and phpbb forums:

Some of my new Yahoo groups:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Teaching_Company_Users/?yguid=317656331
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Teaching_Company_Users_Professor/?yguid=317656331
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Teaching_Company_Users_Subject/?yguid=317656331

Teaching Company forum:
http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/index.php

Robert Hazen's "Origins of Life" forum
http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=17

Doug van Orsow
moderator

Posted by: Doug van Orsow on October 25, 2007 6:42 AM






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