"The Great War"?

 

 It can be said that The twentieth century didn’t begin in 1900. In many ways, it began in 1914, when a gunshot in Sarajevo set off a chain reaction that would bring down empires, redraw continents, unleash revolutions, and leave millions of people struggling to make sense of a world that no longer seemed to follow the old rules. The Great War was at once a catastrophe and a turning point—not simply a contest of armies, but a collision of ambitions, ideologies, technologies, and societies whose consequences extended far beyond the battlefield.

Inspired by a recent read, I've compiled a list of books about World War I that are worthy of note and worth sharing.  The books collected here explore World War I from the margins as well as the center: the rivalries and miscalculations that made war possible, the lives it disrupted, the social transformations it accelerated, and the cultural and political wreckage it left behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike remind us that history isn’t just what happened in the trenches. It’s also what happened to the people who went to war, those who stayed home, and the generations who inherited the world it made.

(Italics indicate that the text is a publisher's blurb.  Otherwise, these are my original Histocrats reviews.)

First the  spark that lit the powderkeg:

The Trigger:  Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War.  Tim Butcher.  Grove Books, 2015, 352 pages.

            Journalist Tim Butcher’s book, The Trigger:  Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War traces the life of Gavril Princip, the nineteen year old who assassinated the Archduke.  I wrote about Butcher’s last book, Blood River, his book following Stanley’s expedition on the Congo River to find Livingstone in an earlier blog. The Trigger  follows a similar template.  Butcher travels to rural Bosnia to begin the story of Princip, a boy from a poor subsistence farming family  whose descendants still live in the tiny village, much as they have for generations and follows his path from there to Sarajevo, then Belgrade, then back to Sarajevo for the fateful act.  Butcher is a great storyteller and a consummate old-school journalist, and it comes through in his work.  First, he immerses himself in research and then he talks to people and faithfully tells their stories.  However, the book is not just about the assassination.  Butcher himself was a war correspondent who covered the Balkans in the 1990s.  He manages to weave the story of the assassination into the intricate fabric of the Balkans, a region shaped by hundreds of years of conflict.  It’s a fascinating read.

Now, about those long-term causes:

 

Dreadnought:  Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War.  Robert K. Massie.  Vintage Books, 2007.  1040 pages.  

Militarism and imperialism are two of those long-term causes.  The Europeans, especially the British and the Germans, raced against each other to build and to equip their armies and navies with the latest, and deadliest, technology made possible by industrialization.  Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Robert K. Massie has written a richly textured and gripping chronicle of the personal and national rivalries that led to the twentieth century's first great arms race. Massie brings to vivid life, such historical figures as the single-minded Admiral von Tirpitz, the young, ambitious, Winston Churchill, the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bulow, and many others. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in his powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, DREADNOUGHT is history at its most riveting.

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel:  Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I.  Douglas Brunt.  Atria Books, 2023. 384 pages.

(This one is kind of a tangent, but the development of diesel engines had an unmistakable impact on militarism and WWI, and the mystery of Diesel's death is incredibly interesting.)

Like the author, Douglas Brunt, I initially knew next to nothing about Rudolf Diesel, what a diesel engine actually is, or how the invention of the engine was really one of the greatest technological advances in human development.  I also had no idea that Diesel's body was fished out of the North Sea in 1913.  He was on a steamship headed from Belgium to the UK when he mysteriously disappeared.  Was it an accident, suicide, or murder?  

Diesel's engine was absolutely revolutionary. It was powerful and efficient. It cut down on noxious fumes and smoke created by burning coal and traditional petroleum products. It could power factories and vehicles. It allowed for immediate starts.  It could be fueled by nut or vegetable oils. It transformed military and commercial navies, provided more power and speed, saved space once taken up by tons of coal, eliminated the need for many refueling stops and for the dozens of crewmen who were normally required to shovel coal, and making submarines more feasible.  All of these factors made Rudolf Diesel the leading engineering superstar of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Did his engine also make him the target of a murder plot?

The chief suspects were very powerful men.  John D. Rockefeller saw the diesel engine as an existential threat to his business and to his fortune.  Kaiser Wilhelm II was determined to make Germany a world superpower, taking over the UK's supremacy.  Although his ancestral home and home for much of his life was Germany, Diesel preferred to think of himself as a "citizen of the world" rather than a German.  He worked to make his technology accessible in every country.  He was on his way to the UK to offer support to that country's growing submarine development program.  Did Rockefeller of Wilhelm decide to eliminate the engineer ?

Douglas Brunt's book is an excellent biography of Diesel, and it tells the story of the engine's development, both the science and the business, without bogging down into too much technical detail.  He explains the significance of the engine and expertly puts it into the context of the age, the eve of WWI, with great insights into the lives and personalities of Rockefeller and Wilhelm, with sketches of Edison, Ford, Marconi and others along the way.  Finally, he puts forward his own theory as to what happened.  I highly recommend this book.

Three classics, which would be great starting points for a WWI deep dive:

The Proud Tower:  A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914.  Barbara W. Tuchman.  Macmillan, 1966.  

The classic account of the lead-up to World War I, told with “a rare combination of impeccable scholarship and literary polish” (The New York Times)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August

During the fateful quarter century leading up to World War I, the climax of a century of rapid, unprecedented change, a privileged few enjoyed Olympian luxury as the underclass was “heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate.” In The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close. 

The Guns of August.  Barbara W. Tuchman.  Macmillan, 1962.  511 pages.

In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I.

This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and how horrible it became.

Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on the turning point in the year 1914, the month leading up to the war, and the first month of the war. With fine attention to detail, she reveals how and why the war started and why it could have been stopped but wasn't, managing to make the story utterly suspenseful even when we already know the outcome.

A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, The Guns of August will not be forgotten.

The First World War.  John Keegan.  Knopf, 1999.  

The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation.

Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent.

But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable."

By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history.

A few individuals and units representing the foot soldiers' non-fiction stories:

 

The Harlem Hellfighters.  Max Brooks and Caanan White.  Del Rey, 2014. 272 pages.

From bestselling author Max Brooks, the riveting story of the highly decorated, barrier-breaking, historic black regiment—the Harlem Hellfighters

In 1919, the 369th infantry regiment marched home triumphantly from World War I. They had spent more time in combat than any other American unit, never losing a foot of ground to the enemy, or a man to capture, and winning countless decorations. Though they returned as heroes, this African American unit faced tremendous discrimination, even from their own government. The Harlem Hellfighters, as the Germans called them, fought courageously on—and off—the battlefield to make Europe, and America, safe for democracy.  

In THE HARLEM HELLFIGHTERS, bestselling author Max Brooks and acclaimed illustrator Caanan White bring this history to life. From the enlistment lines in Harlem to the training camp at Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the trenches in France, they tell the heroic story of the 369th in an action-packed and powerful tale of honor and heart.

All Blood Runs Red:  The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard --- Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy.Phil Keith and Tom Clavin.  Hanover Square press, 2019.  399 pages.

The incredible story of the first African American military pilot, who became a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer.
Winner of the Gold Medal for Memoir/Biography from the Military Writers Society of America
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history.
After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun.
All Blood Runs Red is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the twentieth century and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence and luck forged a legendary life.

Great-Uncle Harry:  A Tale of War and Empire.  Michael Palin.  Random House Canada, 2023.  336 pages.

You might know Michael Palin as a member of the great Monty Python comedy troupe or maybe from one or more of his excellent television travel series, but Great-Uncle Harry is a bit of a departure for Palin because it's a very personal family history, a quest in a way, decades in the making.  During the height of the Monty Python days, Palin's family inherited a collection of diaries, photos, and letters, a treasure trove of family documents.  Many of the items had to do with his Great-Uncle Harry, the brother of his grandfather.  Harry had never really been spoken of in the family before.  In fact, Palin had not known he had a Great-Uncle Harry, but he discovered that Harry had been one of thousands of young British men killed in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme.  Palin was intrigued, but life intervened.  Only in recent years did he decide to really dig deep and try to discover who Harry was.  This book is the result.  The finished product is an engrossing story, told of course with Palin's wit, not just of one victim of the Great War, but of the British Empire, as the subtitle foreshadows.  The reader is drawn in for glimpses of British education, class system, and society as a whole through Harry's eyes, and Harry comes across as an ordinary, average bloke kind of flailing around and trying to find his place and fit in a rapidly changing world. Palin makes a real connection, not complete but at least a connection, to a family member he never knew and makes him accessible to the rest of us as well.

And now, the fictional side:

All Quiet on the Western Front.  Erich Maria Remarque.  Little, brown, and Company, 1929.  250 pages.

THE classic anti-war novel, written by a veteran and unique for American readers because it's from the German point of view, and so anti-war that it was banned and burned by the NAzis when they came to power.  Set in the throes of The Great War's terrifying trenches, All Quiet on the Western Front casts the reader in the shoes of the Patriotic soldier Paul Bäumer. His naïve allusions of war's nobility and sense of adventure are demolished in the face of indifferent industrial warfare. Though unfolding more than a century ago, Erich Maria Remarque crafts a timeless exploration of the impact of war on the human spirit and the ugly truth of survival. Acclaimed in its own time, the story obliges itself to be read by each new generation, lest we forget its lessons and find ourselves in our own "War to End All Wars."  Truly a classic read for all.

Johnny Got His Gun.  Dalton Trumbo.  J.B. Lippincott, 1939.  309 pages.

THE American anti-war novel?  Definitely ranking with The Red Badge of Courage, MASH, and Catch-22.  Written by Trumbo in order to persuade Americans to stay out of World War II, but set in WWI.  This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. This is no ordinary novel. This is a novel that never takes the easy way out: it is shocking, violent, terrifying, horrible, uncompromising, brutal, remorseless, and gruesome...but so is war.  Johnny Got His Gun holds a place as one of the classic antiwar novels. First published in 1939, Dalton Trumbo's story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in World War I - he "survives" armless, legless, and faceless, but with his mind intact - was an immediate best seller. This fiercely moving novel was a rallying point for many Americans who came of age during World War II, and it became perhaps the most popular novel of protest during the Vietnam era.

Fall of Giants.  Ken Follett.  Viking, 2010.  1008 pages.  Book 1 of the Century Trilogy.

Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. .

The recent read that prompted me to do another WWI books blog:

The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. Lindsey Fitzharris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. 336 pages.

This is one of the best and most unique books about World War I that I have ever read, hands down. World War I was a war like no other war that had been fought before. Despite the optimistic predictions on both sides that hostilities will be over within a few weeks, or a couple of months at most, it became obvious rather quickly that industrialization and invention expanded humanity's capacity for unleashing total destruction and death, and that capacity wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured, and medicine struggled to keep pace. Here, medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris explores the particular story of the surgeon Harold Gillies. Gillies saw that there was a huge need for facial reconstruction, and he assembled a dedicated and extremely talented of surgeons, nurses, dentists, artists, and prosthetic makers that revolutionized the relatively new field of plastic surgery. They developed techniques that made life possible for men whose faces were destroyed. Not only did they pioneer the fields of plastic surgery and prosthetics, but their work also greatly impacted the fields of psychiatry and anesthesiology, as well as many specific treatments and procedures like blood transfusions. It's a fantastic story about human ingenuity, empathy, strength, determination, and perseverance in both the medical figures and the wounded men. It also makes the absolute horrors of the trenches vivid and unforgettable. Don't worry about getting lost in military history or deep medical jargon; it is extremely accessible and a fast read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in WWI, medical or scientific history, or just for anyone looking for a great story.

The impact of World War I on the homefront during and immediately after the war:

American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis. Adam Hochschild. Mariner Books, 2022. 432 pages.

    American Midnight was published in October 2022 by Adam Hochschild. I admire Hoschschild's writing, but he tends to write about dark topics. King Leopold's Ghost is about the atrocities committed by the Belgians in the Congo, and Spain In Our Hearts is about the Spanish Civil War. American Midnight is about America during World War I into the early 1920s, specifically about the anti-war, pro-civil rights, and pro-labor union movements active during the time, and the all-out war waged against them by local, state, and federal governments and by citizen-vigilantes.

    From Amazon: "From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor

    The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.  

    This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought against it: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now."

    Hoschschild tells stories that I had never heard, stories that are never told. I learned a lot from this book, and it will probably end up being one of my best reads of 2023. I was a little disappointed when Hoschschild's political bias was made abundantly clear in the epilogue. To be fair, there were hints of his leaning throughout the book, but it was blatant in the epilogue, and he even makes a couple of intentionally misleading statements. I would still recommend the book to those looking for truth.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. Isabel Wilkerson. Random House, 2010. 640 pages.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • LOS ANGELES TIMES’S #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES

“A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

“What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”—Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize • The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction • The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize • The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut • Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize

FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • Dayton Literary Peace Prize

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Newsday, The Daily Beast

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Economist, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.

Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.

And, finally, a decade after the war, there was a major shift in international diplomacy, inspired by the horrible destruction of "The War to End All Wars," and there was actually hope that that epithet might prove true.

The Internationalists:  How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.  Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro.  Simon & Schuster, 2017.  608 pages.

A bold and provocative history of the men who fought to outlaw war and how an often overlooked treaty signed in 1928 was among the most transformative events in modern history.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal the world over. But the promise of that summer day was fleeting. Within a decade of its signing, each state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war. And in the century that followed, the Peace Pact was dismissed as an act of folly and an unmistakable failure. This book argues that that understanding is inaccurate, and that the Peace Pact ushered in a sustained march toward peace that lasts to this day.

The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact by placing it in the long history of international law from the seventeenth century through the present, tracing this rich history through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians and intellectuals—Hugo Grotius, Nishi Amane, Salmon Levinson, James Shotwell, Sumner Welles, Carl Schmitt, Hersch Lauterpacht, and Sayyid Qutb. It tells of a centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships.

The Internationalists examines with renewed appreciation an international system that has outlawed wars of aggression and brought unprecedented stability to the world map. Accessible and gripping, this book will change the way we view the history of the twentieth century—and how we must work together to protect the global order the internationalists fought to make possible.