The Great War, the forgotten war

Many of us today will think of the Greatest Generation, the men who served in the second World War. But a comparative few, unfortunately, will remember that many of the biggest heroes of World War II were also, like Patton himself, veterans of what was known as “the Great War,” World War I, a war that is currently marking its centenary, but that has largely disappeared from the American historical imagination.

Partly this is because we entered the war late. Partly it is because, so far as it is remembered at all, the war is often dismissed as pointless slaughter. And partly it is because there is in some circles the belief that American intervention was actually discreditable. Had we not intervened, the story goes, the European combatants would have made an equitable, negotiated peace, and Germany would never have elected Adolf Hitler and World War II would never have happened.

While it is true we entered the war late, our intervention was decisive in winning a war that the British and French would otherwise likely have lost. And the stakes for losing were immense. The German occupation of Belgium had been notoriously brutal. German terms for a negotiated peace with Russia, after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, were rapacious.

The Second Reich — the Kaiser’s Germany — was not the Third Reich, but the Second Reich already held the seeds of the Third. Both regimes believed in militarism and social Darwinism (which justified war and brutality). Their territorial ambitions in Europe were largely the same.

Perhaps most telling is the story of General Erich von Ludendorff, who, along with General Paul von Hindenburg, led the Second Reich in its final two years. He believed in “war socialism” and the German colonization of Eastern Europe. He was a social Darwinist and pagan who blamed weak-kneed Christianity for much that was wrong with the world. In postwar, post-monarchical Germany, National Socialism was not an aberration; it was the logical extension of what men like Ludendorff already believed. Ludendorff was, in fact, one of Hitler’s early political patrons.

Moreover, we should remember that the Second Reich directly threatened the United States with acts of sabotage, with its invitation to Mexico to invade America as Germany’s ally, and with its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral (American) shipping. Theodore Roosevelt, who was a foreign policy realist, memorably fumed that if Germany’s blockading of American ports and sinking of American ships were “not overt acts of war then Lexington and Bunker Hill were not overt acts of war … The Germans have killed as many, or almost as many, Americans as were slain at Lexington and Bunker Hill; and whereas the British in open conflict slew armed American fighting men, the Americans whom the Germans have slain were women and children and unarmed men going peacefully about their lawful business.”

America’s first crusade in Europe was as necessary as its second — and the Americans who fought in the first World War were heroes we should remember. Some, like General John. J. Pershing, began their careers fighting Indians. Others, like General Douglas MacArthur, led men in an atomic age. An artillery officer of the war, Harry Truman, became president. If World War II was, for the United States, “the good war” of “the greatest generation,” the training ground for the military leaders of that generation was “the Great War,” the first World War. As we remember our combat dead today, let us not forget them.

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.Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.