The Yanks Are Coming! World War I: The War That Made the Modern World and the American Century : By H. W. Crocker III
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/388500/yanks-are-coming-h-w-crocker-iii
Most Americans, if they think about our role in World War I at all, likely think we entered the conflict too late to claim much credit, or maybe they think our intervention was discreditable. Some might say we had no compelling national interest to enter the Great War; or worse, our intervention allowed Britain and France to force on Germany an unjust, punitive peace that made inevitable the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party. Had we stayed out of the war, they might argue, the Europeans would have been compelled to make a reasonable, negotiated peace, and postwar animosity would have been lessened.
Americans are easily forgetful of history, but we should not forget the First World War or our far from discreditable role in it. American intervention was decisive in the Anglo-French victory, a victory that deserves celebrating.
The war shaped the lives of some of America’s greatest soldiers and statesmen — including George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman — and was hugely consequential. Without exaggeration one can say that it was the war that made the modern world.
It was the war that set the boundaries of the modern Middle East out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It was the war that saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had held together Mitteleuropa. It was a war that rewarded nationalism, which, perversely, had been the war’s original cause. It was the war that ended the Second Reich in Germany and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was a war that moved into the skies and under the seas. Men were set alight with flamethrowers and choked by poison gas. Infantry officers wore wristwatches to coordinate attacks. Trench coats became a military fashion accessory. And a Europe that could still see angels hovering over battlefields in 1914 was shell-shocked by 1919, full of doubts about the old chivalric ideals, prey to callow superstitions and pagan political movements.
It was the apparent collapse of the old ideals that helps explain what has become the popular view of the First World War — that it was a senseless, stupid struggle, the ultimate charnel house, the watchword for the obscenity and absurdity of war. The casualty lists were indeed horribly long. The victory that was won was indeed horribly mismanaged. But such casualty lists were inevitable in a modern war of European empires; and the mismanagement of the peace was not the soldier’s folly.
Part of the problem is a misguided, jejune nostalgia. Before the war, it is often said, was a graceful Edwardian summer absorbing the warmth of a Western civilization that had found — in its empires and global dominance, in its booming economies and steady social progress, in its stable institutions and its music, art, and literature — “its place in the sun,” to use Kaiser Wilhelm II’s phrase about Germany’s prewar empire. If the First World War had not happened, the story goes, Europe would have carried on in some sort of blissful stasis, progressive yet stable and pacific, and no terrible calamities would have occurred.
The Reasons Why
But those who class every modern evil as a consequence of the First World War seem to forget that Marx, Nietzsche, “Dover Beach” with its receding sea of faith, social Darwinism, nationalism, racism in Eastern Europe (Slav versus Teuton), militarism, Slavic terrorism, the Franco-Prussian War, the Balkan Wars, a crumbling Ottoman Empire, Russian designs on Constantinople, and the German Schlieffen Plan that envisioned the violation of neutral Belgium and an aggressive war against France as a military necessity in case of war against Russia (with such a two-front war considered inevitable) all preceded the guns of August 1914.
It is true that National Socialists (eventually) and Communists came to power in the wake of the First World War, but the evil that followed the war was no more inevitable than the good — and preventing the Second Reich’s forcible subjugation of continental Europe was indeed a good thing.
The First World War was not pointless. On the Western Front, that European scar that came to epitomize the war’s futility, France, Britain, and the United States successfully repelled an aggressor who had violated Belgian neutrality and planned to impose a not so very gentle domination on the Continent. The generals who achieved this feat were not insensate brutes who callously ignored the hecatombs on the battlefield. Few people believe the Second World War was a senseless war or that it was fought by idiotic generals. Yet far more lives were lost in the Second World War than in the First (more than 60 million versus about 17 million). The First World War generals of the Western powers achieved their victory in four years; the Allied generals of the Second World War took six. And if the First World War witnessed the collapse of the monarchies of Central Europe and saw the Bolsheviks seize power in Russia, at least the Western powers kept the Bolsheviks, preachers of world revolution, penned up within Russia’s borders. The Second World War ended with Eastern Europe in the hands of the Soviet Communists — Hitler’s former allies and the West’s adversary in the subsequent decades-long Cold War. In other words, the imperfect outcome of the First World War was no worse than the imperfect outcome of the Second, and both were better than if the Central Powers or the Fascist powers had won.
In its scope and in its consequences the war was a titanic event. Though the first American troops did not arrive in France until 1917, their valor tipped the scales. More than that, the young American officers and men who came to Europe — not just MacArthur and Patton, Marshall and Truman, but “Wild Bill” Donovan, Billy Mitchell, and Eddie Rickenbacker — shaped the arc of the American Century. General Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, began his career fighting Indians. One of his young officers, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, would end his career fighting Korean and Chinese Communists in an atomic age. The story of America’s soldiers of the First World War is a story well worth remembering.
— H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of The Yanks Are Coming! A Military History of the United States in World War I. This is an adapted excerpt from the book.
Comments are closed.
