War and History

Europe’s Last Summer

Who Started the Great War in 1914?

by David Fromkin

Knopf, 336 pp., $26.95

A Storm in Flanders: The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918

Tragedy and Triumph on The Western Front

by Winston Groom

Atlantic Monthly, 272 pp., $27.50

The First World War

by Michael Howard

Oxford, 147 pp., $14.95

Castles of Steel

Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea

by Robert K. Massie

Random House, 865 pp., $35

Paris 1919

Six Months that Changed the World

by Margaret MacMillan

Random House, 624 pp., $16.95

THE FIRST WORLD WAR isn’t called the first modern war for nothing. It’s a cliché to say World War I is the root of World War II, the Cold War, even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it’s true. The fighting and the diplomacy, both prewar and postwar, of more recent conflicts are similar in many ways.

Even the current Iraq war bears some resemblance to World War I, although, yes, that stretches history a bit. But let’s go ahead and stretch. The parallels begin with the decision to fight. War in 1914 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were the result of choices made by a tiny group, who were not responding to a public clamor for war. As the British historian Michael Howard notes in “The First World War,” “it cannot be said that during the summer weeks of 1914, while the crisis was ripening toward its bloody solution, the peoples of Europe in general were exercising any pressure on their governments to go to war, but neither did they try to restrain them.” Once the war started, Europeans on both sides embraced it enthusiastically. Likewise in the United States last March, when President Bush ordered American forces to move into Iraq, the public was overwhelmingly supportive of the war.

At the outset, military expectations were the same then as now. All sides in 1914 forecast a short, successful war in which troops might be home for Christmas. That might actually have happened, at least for the Germans, if the Schlieffen Plan hadn’t been diluted, thus allowing the French to halt the German advance short of Paris. Four years of trench warfare in western Europe followed. Like Schlieffen, General Tommy Franks had a plan to conquer the enemy quickly. It had eight moving parts, in contrast with only one for Schlieffen, but it produced victory in Iraq in three weeks.

Even the motive for war was similar for Germany and the United States: to prevent a fate worse than a short war. The Germans were worried that the military buildup in Russia would soon leave Germany in a vulnerable position. Besides, financial reasons had forced the Germans to slow their attempt to catch up with Great Britain’s naval superiority. Bush, of course, had the reasonable fear that Saddam Hussein would slip weapons of mass destruction to terrorists targeting America or use them himself. In Bush’s defense, he had other, equally legitimate grounds for going to war. The Germans didn’t.

The similarities between Bush and President Woodrow Wilson, who brought America into World War I in spring 1917, are both real and imaginary. Neither came to office with a mandate for war–or anything else. Iraq was not a major issue in the 2000 election, and Wilson’s reelection campaign in 1916 trumpeted that he’d kept America out of the European war. Both won by extraordinarily narrow margins in elections whose outcome wasn’t known for days. Both became crusaders for spreading democracy around the world. Today Bush’s sermons on democracy are often called Wilsonian.

FOR BUSH AND WILSON, the war and, especially, the war’s aftermath fostered heated domestic opposition. Neither Republican Bush nor Democrat Wilson could get along civilly with members of the other party. Wilson was often called Britain’s poodle for siding with England. “Is this the United States of Great Britain?” an antiwar placard outside the White House asked. In Iraq, the roles are reversed, with British prime minister Tony Blair being attacked as Bush’s poodle for joining the invasion of Iraq. Both Wilson and Bush were faulted for mishandling the postwar phase: Wilson for his performance at the 1919 peace conference and later his failure to win Senate approval of the Versailles treaty, Bush for not extinguishing violent Iraqi resistance after Saddam fell.

Bush and Wilson even sound alike at times. It’s hard to tell from this excerpt from a State of the Union address which president actually delivered it: “Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present and immediate task is to win the war and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished.” Bush last year? Nope, it’s from Wilson’s address to Congress in December 1917.

Critics of Bush often cobble up accusations that the administration is suppressing opposition to the war in Iraq–but, in truth, it was under Wilson that there was genuine suppression in America. During Wilson’s presidency, dissenters were often prosecuted and sent to jail. Labor leader Eugene V. Debs is merely the most famous. Bush is also falsely accused of insinuating his opponents are unpatriotic–but, again, Woodrow Wilson was the real culprit. Wilson scorched citizens of German and Italian descent for being “hyphenated” Americans whose opposition to the war amounted to disloyalty.

WILSON LEFT OFFICE a broken man, but, after World War II, his reputation soared among historians. Had his bid for a League of Nations been ratified, World War II might have been averted, or so the thinking of many Democrats went. In 1962, a poll of historians listed him as the fourth greatest president.

More recently, Wilson has not fared as well. In “Paris 1919,” Margaret MacMillan’s account of the peace conference, Wilson is treated as a foolish idealist unable to negotiate effectively with such skeptics as French premier Georges Clemenceau and British prime minister David Lloyd George. Wilson wound up compromising in Versailles, then refusing to give an inch to congressional foes at home in the battle over the Versailles treaty–the worst of both worlds.

In the explosion of new books on World War I Wilson’s lost glory has not been restored. In “The Illusion of Victory,” Thomas Fleming treats him scornfully as a hypocrite, a demagogue, and the perpetrator of a “sham neutrality” that inevitably led America into war. Wilson is a peripheral player in “Castles of Steel,” Robert K. Massie’s masterful history of the naval struggle between Britain and Germany. But when Massie does address Wilson, he casts him as a religious zealot of “iron Calvinist principles” and a loner who routinely made major decisions without consulting his closest advisers, much less his cabinet. Wilson scarcely rears his head in “The Great War,” edited by Robert Cowley and consisting mostly of fine essays about battles, or in “Europe’s Last Summer” by Boston University professor David Fromkin, which persuasively assesses the blame for the start of the war.

EXTRAPOLATING FROM THESE BOOKS and others in the past few years on World War I, at least three important themes emerge. The first is that Wilson was a high-minded klutz, not a potential savior of the world misunderstood and mistreated by the French and British at Versailles. The second is that we no longer seem to have much difficulty figuring out who started the war: The Germans and Austrians are to blame. And the third is that the American role in winning the war has become more obvious. It’s now seen as pivotal to bailing out weary and disillusioned French and British forces and prevailing over demoralized Germans.

“The Illusion of Victory” is essentially an anti-Wilson screed. Fleming regards America’s entry into the war as unnecessary. He’s dubious of Wilson’s supposed passion for brokering a peace settlement. Fleming says Wilson’s attitude about war changed when he learned that America would have to become a combatant for him to take part in the postwar peace conference. How do we know? Fleming cites a comment by Wilson to Jane Addams and a group of peace activists who visited the White House. He told them the leader of a neutral country could only “call through a crack in the door.” This is pretty flimsy evidence.

Fleming is on stronger ground in castigating Wilson’s rigidity in promoting the Versailles treaty. Wilson haughtily rejected all amendments and never spoke to his best friend and most loyal adviser, Colonel Edward House, after he urged Wilson to be open to compromise. Nor did Wilson pay attention to his former secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, who declared at a Democratic dinner in February 1920 that amendments authored by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge were quite acceptable. The important task was to get the treaty approved and the League of Nations implemented. “It was one of the wisest statements William Jennings Bryan ever made,” Fleming writes. By then Wilson had suffered a stroke and the White House was being run by his wife Edith and his doctor. Their behind-the-scenes activity was “the greatest deception in the history of American politics,” says Fleming. The Wilson presidency ended on that note.

ON THE QUESTION of war guilt, Fromkin is unequivocal. The Germans and Austrians made preventing World War I impossible, because they actually wanted war. The assumption that everyone craves peace on acceptable terms wasn’t true for them in 1914. “Vienna did not merely want to get its way with Serbia,” Fromkin writes. “It wanted to provoke a war with Serbia. Berlin did not want to get its way with Russia. It wanted to provoke a war with Russia. In each case, it was war itself that the government wanted–or, put more precisely, it wanted to crush its adversary to an extent that only a successful war makes possible.”

“Europe’s Last Summer,” which traces the path to war day by day, is an enormously impressive book, a popular history brimming with fresh scholarship. Fromkin has tapped material from East German files, among other places, to buttress his point. One key to understanding why World War I occurred is realizing two wars were at stake, Fromkin says. The Germans backed Austria against Serbia simply to get Austrian support against Russia. And Austria sided with Germany to ensure the Germans would stymie any Russian attack as Austria obliterated Serbia. Neither Germany nor Austria was truly incensed over the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, often cited as the cause of the war.

For decades after World War I, French and British generals agreed on one thing: The Americans fought poorly and played little role. That notion is now all but dead. John Keegan in “The First World War” (1998) said the American entry provided “the sudden accretion of a disequilibrating reinforcement”–in other words, the straw that broke the back of Germany. John Mosier went further in “The Myth of the Great War” (2001). “America’s role in the war was absolutely decisive,” he wrote. “The string of German battlefield successes stopped abruptly on the entry into the line of the newly formed American divisions, the course of the war changed drastically, and . . . the General Staff of the German army recommended that Germany seek terms.” Winston Groom states flatly in “A Storm in Flanders” that “America turned the tide in favor of the Allies at the last minute.”

Fleming echoes that view. He says it’s “hard to believe” anyone would believe those bitter European generals today. “By the time the Americans arrived in 1918, the British and French armies were essentially beaten men,” according to Fleming. “Nothing else explains the mass surrenders during the German offensives of 1918. Only the Americans faced the Germans with undaunted confidence.” In “The Great War,” Cowley concedes that the American general John J. Pershing wasn’t a great battlefield strategist. He was, however, very successful at logistics. Pershing’s great feat was deploying, by October 1918, American soldiers at a rate of 300,000 a month. “Largely thanks to Pershing, it was the arithmetic of victory,” Cowley says admiringly.

I’VE PROBABLY SLIGHTED “Castles of Steel,” which will no doubt become the definitive book on naval operations in World War I. It’s a great book, highly readable, filled with detailed scholarship and evocative anecdotes. But it’s an eight-hundred-page doorstopper, and that’s too much for the average reader eager to learn more about the war. It’s gotten extravagantly favorable reviews, and they are deserved. But with “The First World War,” Michael Howard wraps up the entire war in 147 lucid pages. Groom ably tells the story of Ypres, a bloody centerpiece of the war, in 272 pages. For someone just starting to explore the war, Howard’s book or Groom’s is the place to begin.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.