(1) FIRST WORLD WAR – GREAT WAR 1914-1945

 

I mean, this one’s obvious, isn’t it?

It’s impossible to consider the Second World War except as a continuation of the First World War, or at least originating in the latter’s aftermath. After all, it’s effectively implied in the names.

Indeed, their continuity has become a matter of serious historical study, possibly more so as time passes from the twentieth century, for the two world wars to be looked at as one.

Some have argued for the two world wars as the Second Thirty Years War. Others have argued for the two world wars as the war of 1914-1945, two periods of fighting with a twenty years armistice between them – indeed, as Marshal Foch, the French supreme commander of Allied forces on the Western Front, was said to have proclaimed upon the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Note that Marshal Foch’s proclamation was not, as fashionable historiography tends to these days, because those terms were too harsh, but because they were too lenient – a viewpoint that I am increasingly inclined towards, or at least that the Versailles Treaty was not that bad.

Note also that Marshal Foch’s proclamation is apocryphal, attributed to him variously by the subsequent French prime minister (during the Second World War) Paul Renaud or by Churchill.

The Great War 1914-1945 was indeed the title of a book compiled from different historians writing on the continuity or parallels between the two world wars, most strikingly (heh) in the first volume, subtitled Lightning Strikes Twice.

Some of those parallels or that continuity are or is obvious, particularly the role of Germany that, unreconciled to its defeat in the First World War, took another swing at re-fighting the same war again in the Second. I am a fan of the Fischer Thesis – the argument by German historian Franz Fischer that Germany essentially pursued the same aims in both world wars, that is an imperial policy (or weltpolitik) for Germany to transform itself into a world power by a continental empire in eastern Europe and Russia (or Mitteleuropa).

The other obvious parallel or continuity is the defeat of Germany in both – lending itself to the thesis by my favorite Second World War historian H.P. Willmott of the myth of German military excellence. As he paraphrases Oscar Wilde (from the Importance of Being Earnest) – to lose one world war might be counted as misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. As I like to quip, all German leadership achieved in both world wars was their encirclement and attrition by enemies with superior resources.

And indeed, I am persuaded by Willmott’s thesis that, as demonstrated by both world wars, German military genius lay in fighting not war. That is, that in both world wars Germany demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of war, particularly the limits of military and national power – something Willmott observes Bismarck understood, but his successors who led Germany did not.

Even here, though, there are key points of distinction – perhaps foremost among them that Germany appeared to do substantially better in the Second World War than in the First. Ironically, that is because Germany followed a more Bismarckian political diplomacy prior to and at the outset of the Second World War, although that began to unravel once Germany committed itself to war, aptly enough as something Bismarck himself strove to avoid in his foreign policy once Germany was united.

Ultimately, Germany’s initial success was because it had its Brest-Litovsk moment from the First World War at the outset of the Second – the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, securing economic resources from the east and a free hand in the west.

That is, as opposed to achieving it too little and too late as it did with the original Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the newly formed Soviet Union in the First World War’s penultimate year of 1917 – after it had been effectively exhausted fighting on two fronts, and which ultimately led to decisive defeat on the Western Front.

On that point, the Soviet Union proved far more resilient and robust in the Second World War than its imperial Russian predecessor – and even its former self in 1917-1918 – in the First. Hence the ironic reversal that where Germany won on the Eastern Front and lost on the Western Front in the First World War, it won on the Western Front and lost on the Eastern Front in the Second.

Similarly, the United States had become stronger with a consequently larger role in the Second World War than it had in the First. One might quip that the Second World War was German romping about continental Europe crushing its smaller and weaker adversaries, until it drew the two true world powers in to crush it.

On the other hand, France proved far less resilient and robust in the Second World War, albeit something that was very much connected with the costs of fighting the First. That saw Germany achieve in a few weeks in 1940 what it failed to achieve in 1914 or indeed the four years of fighting that followed.

Another key distinction was in the roles of Italy and Japan that, formerly on the side of Allies in First World War, allied themselves with Germany in the Second – arguably a failure of Allied political diplomacy more profound than the appeasement of Germany itself, leading as it did to Italy and Japan each effectively adding a year to the war against Germany.

Once allied to Germany, Italy played a similar role to the former Austria-Hungary as Germany’s major European ally (and ironically Italy’s traditional adversary in the First World War and before) – down to the Germany description of each alliance as being “shackled to a corpse” – as well as to the Ottoman Empire against Britain in the Middle East, albeit from the opposite direction (west rather than east against Egypt).

Japan however played an entirely new role in Asia and the Pacific from anything comparable in the First World War – hence the Second World War assumed a truly global character well beyond that of the First World War, the latter sometimes being dubbed as a European Civil War.

I can’t resist including the somewhat cryptic quip by H.P. Wilmott that, paradoxically, WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the 19th century and WW1 was the first war of the 20th century. I understand that to mean WW2 was closer to 19th century wars, in part because the technology and technique of offensive mobility won out over defensive firepower and attrition – albeit briefly and with waning effect through the war’s duration – while its predecessor was more characteristic of the static 20th century wars of attrition that followed it.

Or alternatively, my own observation that WW2 was closer to the model of the Franco-Prussian War, at least in its European opening, or the Napoleonic Wars in its continuation within Europe. On the other hand, WW1 was closer to the American Civil War as the true precursor of twentieth century warfare, with the western front of the latter resembling the eastern theater of the latter, only with even more lethal firepower. Ironically, however, WW1 finished by armistice in a manner closer to the Franco-Prussian War except with France and Germany reversed, while the WW2 was fought to unconditional surrender like the American Civil War.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)