World War I

HerrKaiser,
Your posts are very informative. Thank you. My knowledge of WWI is very limited, I've spent more time studyig WW II. I do have a questions. During WWI, President Wilson (at least publicly) maintained a stance of isolationism in terms of U.S. involvement. As we all know, the U.S. finally did enter the war. I am wondering two things.
1. Would the outcome have been different had the U.S. maintained its isolation.

2. What, in your opinion, would have been the outcome had the U.S. jumped in sooner?

3. Why, in your opinion, did the U.S. find it necessary to intervene at all?

Basically, to make an analogy, the Germans incited a riot in the stadium, but all the spectators in the stands did not have to pour onto the field, enflame the situation, and fight like crazy people.

HerrKaiser,

While you're answering the above questions, please answer one more:

Are you suggesting that other European powers should have stood by and let Germany attack France unhindered?

(WWII could have been avoided, too, if those meddling Allied Powers had just let Hitler annex the Sudetenland and attack Poland without challenge.)  

     Alas with numerous complex alliances and treaties - war rather consists of nations all "starting to poor onto the field and fight like crazy people" to paraphrase HerrK.

     While initially Germany claimed that it was only supporting Austria's war on Serbia (a tricky bit of justification) to claim retribution for the death of Franz Ferdinand ( ) its practical reasons for war were far more complex.
Any insights?

rs

The sad thing was that, after all those young men sacrificed their lives, after three empires were destroyed, what did WWI accomplish.  If you ask me, Europe was left off worse than it had been in 1914.  Millions died or were displaced, and for what?  Look what this war did...

1.  Russia was cast into a Dark Age that would last for nearly seventy-five years.

2.  Germany was left with a weak and indecisive government, which eventually allowed the rise of Hitler and planted the seeds for World War II.

3.  The destruction of the aforementioned empires left a HUGE vacuum.  Granted some people profitted, the Czechs and the Poles, come to mind here, because they got independent homelands.  However, the victorious Allies made HUGE mistakes here.  The biggest was tossing other groups, the Serbs and the Croats, for example, into one country and basically telling them.  "This is your country now, deal with it!"   The bloody ethnic civil war of the 1990's was the result of this ill thought decision.  Maybe if the Allies had put those groups into separate countries, like they're in now, perhaps the 1990's civil was might not have happened.

No, as I see it, Europe was worse after the First World War, not better.  Tragic that it makes one ask what the hell was all that sacrifice for?

Tim
     What the first world war created was the new world of the 20th century.  It cleaned the stables of the hubris and detritus of ancient regimes.
Why America entered the war:  the basic answer was that they entered the war after the Germans torpedoed the Lusitania  and the more complex answer is that German brought them into the war as the Americans had been supplying the Allies with war materiel and food increasing the difficulty of beating the Allies.  

LEXI 4  On what would have happened if the Americans had not entered the war, the war would have gone on longer and perhaps Germany might have won.  If America had jumped in sooner, then perhaps they could have shipped materiel to Russia through Alaska and with enough basic equipment like machine guns, artillery, bullets and rifles, perhaps the Russians would have been more successful against the Germans.  There is also the prospect that American regiments could have come through Alaska or to Vladivostok to support the Russians on the Eastern Front (pre 1917).  In any of these scenarios, probably the war would have ended 1 to 2 years before it did and may not have been a trench war.

What the first world war created was the new world of the 20th century

Yeah, and what a horror story that world was.

It cleaned the stables of the hubris and detritis of ancien regimes

And replaced them with even worse regimes (hello Hitler and Stalin)

I have never believed that the war created the difficulties that became the 20th century.  I believe that it was the Treaty of Versailles and the arrogance of the Allies in punishing the Central Powers and everyone else they could think of.

The Allies saw a way to remake Europe and the Middle East into the form that suited them and they went for it.  They never considered that the people of the countries that they divided and recreated had nothing in common and did not want to be bound together under one government.

All the victorious Allies could think about was punishment and profit.

I have never believed that the war created the difficulties that became the 20th century.  I believe that it was the Treaty of Versailles and the arrogance of the Allies in punishing the Central Powers and everyone else they could think of.

The Allies saw a way to remake Europe and the Middle East into the form that suited them and they went for it.  They never considered that the people of the countries that they divided and recreated had nothing in common and did not want to be bound together under one government.

All the victorious Allies could think about was punishment and profit.

Well the First World War helped create the Soviet Union, and some time later, Nazi Germany.  Two 20th Century horror stories.  Neither would have existed without WWI.

However, Alixz, you are right about the Allies as well.  The world sure reaped a bitter harvest because of the seeds planted by the decisions made by those arrogant fools.


PS:  Thanks for fixing the above posts, Alixz

What the first world war created was the new world of the 20th century

Yeah, and what a horror story that world was.

It cleaned the stables of the hubris and detritis of ancien regimes

And replaced them with even worse regimes (hello Hitler and Stalin)

Correct and I might add at what cost were the so-called "stables" cleansed?

I might add at what cost were the so-called "stables" cleansed?

The cost...

1.  Millions of young lives lost on all sides.

2.  Millions more forced from their homes and made into refugees.

3.  The destruction of three empires that had kept peace and stability in Europe for a hundred years.

4.  The Russian people being thrown into a new Dark Age of oppression and misery that would last until the late 1980's.

5.  Germany being left with a weak and fragile government that allowed Hitler to eventually take power.

6.  Various ethnic groups whose fate were left in the hands of the victorious Allies who didn't care what happened to them, and took it upon themselves to redraw the map of Europe without consulting said ethnic groups.  The bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990's can be directly traced back to the Treaty Of Versailles.

A very high price indeed...

The vacuum left by the fall of those autocracies was filled by anarchy, totalitarianism and a lot of ideologies that were detrimental to the welfare of most people. Amazingly enough, the one person most responsible for the first world was was granted asylum in the Netherlands, where he lived in comfort and luxury until his death in 1941.  He considered Hitler to be the best type of German.

I didn't think that Kaiser Wilhelm II thought too much about Hitler.  I know that his son was an avowed Nazi (or Nazi supporter) and hoped to restore the monarchy by backing Hitler and the Nazis.

I also think that Franz Joseph of Austria was the main character in the beginning of World War I.  Oh, I know that Wilhelm was right there egging him on, but the rejection of the Serbian apology and Serbian acceptance of the Austrian terms came straight from the desk of Franz Joseph and his advisers.

And again, World War I didn't create the Nazi Party.  The horrible surrender terms dictated by the Allies at Versailles created the Wiemar Republic and the poverty and the horrible sense of failure and defeat for the German people.  The Allies stomped on Germany and her people and left them without dignity or self respect.  It only took 20 years for those same people to band together and rise up to take back what they had had taken from them.  If it wasn't Hitler, it would have been someone else.  But World War I did not lead Germany to World War II, the Allies who thought they were so righteous and superior did.

And again, World War I didn't create the Nazi Party.  The horrible surrender terms dictated by the Allies at Versailles created the Wiemar Republic and the poverty and the horrible sense of failure and defeat for the German people.  The Allies stomped on Germany and her people and left them without dignity or self respect.  It only took 20 years for those same people to band together and rise up to take back what they had had taken from them.  If it wasn't Hitler, it would have been someone else.  But World War I did not lead Germany to World War II, the Allies who thought they were so righteous and superior did.

I'm not sure this is true, actually, there's more than one theory about the origins of World War II. One of the most recent ones, and it is garnering some attention, is that far from being too harsh with Germany after the armistice, the Allies were not harsh enough. Precisely because Germany was not occupied by Allied forces, as was the case after World War II, and because up until the last moment of World War I the German army seemed to be doing reasonably well, the German people found it very difficult to accept that they had genuinely lost the war, fair and square. On the contrary, the myth grew among Germans that their army and their cause had been "stabbed in the back" by internal forces, primarily the Communists and the Jews, and that this betrayal accounted for their ultimate defeat on the battlefield. This was not only Hitler's own personal belief, but also the belief of many average Germans on the street. So of course in the 1920s and 1930s, before he became chancellor, Hitler found fertile ground for his paranoid theories about Jewish Bolsheviks and Jewish bankers conspiring to destroy Germany in the closing months of 1918. One of the major appeals of the Nazi party was that it both appealed to and promoted this myth of the "stab in the back."

Aside from that, I think there are other historical reasons for the rise of Hitler that have nothing to do with the Allies or the Treaty of Versailles. There were economic reasons; there were also political reasons, such as German political culture, which tended to favor authoritarian government, monarchy or dictatorship, as opposed to real democratization (German civil servants as a rule were pretty much against democracy, as Richard Evans's book The Coming of the Third Reich amply demonstrates, and you can't run a government effectively without a loyal civil service). There was also the overall brutalization and popularization of political violence that stemmed directly from World War I, and had little or nothing to do with the Treaty of Versailles.

You all make excellent points here, and they back up my claim that the First World War left Europe worse, not better, than it was in 1914.

Which echos what my Grandmother said that nothing was the same after the "Great War".  There is also the psychological effect the war had on people. The traditional faiths (religious and institutional) were shattered as well as the trust between the government and the governed. All the social restraints were also torn apart (including hem lines and corsets --viz, the "flappers" --  sounds facetious but it was symptomatic of deeper social currents). A person's position in society became fluid, no one knew their place and with this uncertainty came instability because the social verities no longer applied (and in fact entire social layers were exterminated as the "flower of Europe's youth" were killed off).  The speed of change accelerated compounding the problem.  The sense of optimism and the perfectibility of man was destroyed and instead a darker vision predominated which frankly continues to this day. One need only to look at the art and literature of the period "DADA", "Surrealism", Kurt Schlitters, George Grosz, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc.