53 pages • 1 hour read
John KeeganThe First World War
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Breaking of Armies”
Chapter 9, “The Breaking of Armies,” begins in 1917, finding the European battlefields not significant different from how they looked two years prior. Life went on with surprising normality on the Allied front, while the Germans oversaw an austere war economy. New military leaders took command in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, but today these leaders seem either callous or malicious, sending their troops to die by the countless thousands while they partook in long naps and sumptuous meals. Not everything can be chalked up to the incompetence of generals, as it was simply impossible to coordinate among forces in the way that subsequent technology like radio and satellites would allow, and the methods they had often broke down, making it impossible to develop a complete and accurate picture of the battlefront. Several efforts to improvise or innovate a way to achieve a breakthrough could not disrupt basic technological realities. Such explanations, however valid, were little consolation to the average soldier, and the mood was especially dark in France, even as its domestic economy adjusted to wartime conditions, whereas morale in Germany remained strong even as the quality of civilian life deteriorated. In Austria, the death of the emperor Franz Joseph in 1916 removed a rare source of unity among its patchwork of ethnicities, and in Britain the devastating losses suffered by volunteers at the Somme forced them at last to adopt conscription.
The first major collapse of morale came in France, as General Nivelle planned a new offensive around Chemin des Dames, behind which the Germans were reorganizing their position into formidable lines of defenses. Their reorganization left their reserves too far from the front, and a British offensive at Arras met with significant success, as Canadian troops seized the German high ground at Vimy Ridge. German preparations for the French assault at Chemin des Dames were much better, and after losing 29,000 dead in a single day, Nivelle was replaced by Philippe Pétain. Shortly thereafter, large contingents of French soldiers refused to fight anymore, and Pétain promised better conditions and a more defensive position. Thousands were court-martialed and nearly 50 executed, but the French army would not conduct another offensive for a full year.
An even greater catastrophe befell Russia in the early months of 1917. As agricultural production declined, thousands took to the streets of St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd during the war) to protest food shortages, and the war left the tsar with only a ragtag group of soldiers to enforce order. When these soldiers joined with the strikers instead of firing upon them, the tsar abdicated and the Russian Parliament (the Duma) formed a provisional government that shared power among political parties and local councils. The new government continued to prosecute the war, and Alexander Kerensky became a wartime leader. A new series of offensives in the spring were turned back, and at home, the leader of the Marxist Bolshevik party, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, returned to Petrograd after the German government granted him passage from Zurich, and he called for an immediate end to the war. As the German army marched up the Baltic coast, and the moderate leftist Kerensky struggled for power against conservative general Lavr Kornilov, the Bolsheviks launched a coup and seized control of Petrograd. Lenin announced an armistice, and Russia was effectively out of the war, and in the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks conceded a quarter of Russia’s population and a third of its arable land. With the Russian army disintegrating, a handful of officers assembled units to challenge the Bolsheviks, commencing nearly six years of civil war.
On the Italian front, Germany and Austria scored a crushing victory at Caporetto in late 1917 (memorably depicted in Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms). Earlier Italian successes on the Isonzo River left its rear completely exposed, and in an attack featuring Erwin Rommel, who would go on to fame in the Second World War, the Germans and Austrians drove deep into the Italian line and its army collapsed entirely. Like France, the Italians would not attempt another offensive until the end of the war.
In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 in part due to his promise to keep the nation out of the war. Sentiments changed first with the infamous Zimmermann telegram, a crude offer from Germany to Mexico of a recovery of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas in exchange for an alliance. The second and more decisive was the commencement of unrestricted submarine warfare, whereby German U-boats would target merchant shipping as well as warships as part of an event to cut off Britain’s maritime supply. In March 1917, German submarines sank three American merchant ships, and by early April the United States declared war. U-boats stepped up their efforts even more in response, putting a terrible strain on the Royal Navy.
With the German army out of position and much of its manpower still in Russia, General Haig decided to mount an offensive at the Ypres Salient, where the Germans had sophisticated and extensive defenses. After a 15-day bombardment consisting of four million shells, attacking British troops immediately ran into a German counterattack. Bad weather and fierce resistance continued to stall subsequent British attacks, and while the prime minister questioned Haig’s apparent wasting of men to little effect, he refrained from replacing him and so the offensive continued. The fronts of both armies pummeled one another over a narrow stretch of middle ground at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Passchendaele, as the British call the Third Battle of Ypres, would go down in history as an especially wasteful and pointless exercise. To make up for his failure to break the German line, Haig ordered another offensive at Cambrai with over 300 tanks, with infantry providing close support. Hoping to break through the four miles of German lines, the British center stalled when the Germans knocked out nearly all of their tanks, leaving the British and Germans each with a salient stretching into the other’s territory.
Chapter 10 Summary: “America and Armageddon”
Chapter 10, “America and Armageddon,” begins with the mobilization of the United States, which seemed like a minor power upon its declaration of war but soon proved capable of making a major contribution to the Allies. The British and the French assumed American units would fight under their command, but the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under John “Black Jack” Pershing insisted on its independence. To blunt the advantage of American involvement, the Germans planned a new set of offensives, hoping for a victory in the west to match their accomplishments in the east. In Russia, the Bolsheviks faced down an increasingly hostile environment while clinging to the belief that the workers of Europe would rally to their banner. They found some solace in Germany, where a million workers went on strike, but this effort was promptly put down. A fresh eruption of tensions between Germany and the Soviet government prompted a new German offensive, pointed in particular toward the oil reserves of the Caucasus mountains. Germany’s attack helped inspire an uprising by many of Russia’s long-suffering ethnic minorities, and the Western Allies all intervened in Russia as well, largely to prevent allied weapons shipments from falling into German hands. The Allies then became involved in an effort by Czech prisoners of war to escape across the entirety of Russia to the Pacific coast, which convinced the Bolshevik government that the Allies were seeking to undermine their power. Germany decided their desire to keep the antiwar Bolsheviks in power outweighed their fear of encouraging socialist revolution at home.
Having defeated Russia and Italy, the Germans prepared to bring their forces to bear in the West, especially before the Americans were able to arrive in force. Ludendorff sought an offensive that would tear through the Allied lines as had occurred in Russia, facing a British army exhausted from Passchendaele. The British suffered their first outright defeat on the Western Front, although the Germans paid a heavy price. Bickering ensued between the French and British, and the Germans celebrated a great victory, but their advance found the army enmeshed within the difficult terrain of the Somme battlefield. The Germans failed to clear the British from their high ground, again with high casualties. Ludendorff then pursued another offensive against French forces further south, where the US made their first major contribution to the front. Rapidly losing men at an unsustainable rate, Ludendorff resolved to push toward Paris while the kaiser imposed strict austerity on the home front. Facing too many fresh American troops, the offensive stalled, again on the Marne, leaving the German army on the brink of exhaustion. Falling back to the Hindenburg line, Germany began to seek an armistice, and soon the Austrian and Ottoman empires collapsed due to defeats and domestic uprisings. The kaiser pledged to fight on, but the reality of the situation proved inescapable, and he abdicated on November 9. An armistice followed two days later, and the combatants turned to mourning their dead, including many thousands whose bodies would never be recovered. Nor would the end of war bring about a true peace, as the breakup of empires unleashed ethnic tensions, and many Germans, convinced they were betrayed rather than defeated, prepared themselves for an eventual revenge.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
Given World War I’s well-earned reputation for static battles of attrition, the last two years of the war are remarkable for their decisiveness on all fronts. The success or failure of each of the major powers says a great deal about how the war was changing the international system. Europe before the war still exhibited the dynastic politics of medieval times, with heads of state often related by blood or marriage, and politics centered around a royal court. None of these states would survive the war. The Ottoman Empire had been in decline the longest, having already lost a massive chunk of its territory to Western powers and its government divided between the sultanate and the Young Turks making most policy decisions. The British-led Arab revolt, memorialized in the classic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), deprived it of its base in the Persian Gulf.
Shortly after the war, Mustapha Kemal, the victor of Gallipoli, abolished the empire and became head of a new Republic of Turkey that disbanded with the insular, religious traditions of the Ottomans in favor of a secular, modernist approach. Austria’s monarchy could not survive the rigors of modern war, and the victors of Versailles tried to piece together new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, which both reflected the ethnic composition of its inhabitants and provided a bulwark against a potentially resurgent Germany. In Russia, the demands of war eventually outpaced the sclerotic tsarist bureaucracy, and in Germany, the onslaught of the United States and the failure of the Ludendorff Offensives compelled the government to accept capitulation rather than continue the fighting on German soil. For Russia and Germany, the lesson of defeat was that there needed to be absolute unity between the front lines and the home front, turning the entire society into an armed camp if necessary. The Bolsheviks and later the Nazis would impose totalitarian discipline on their peoples in preparation for another clash with each other, the former regarding it as the next critical step in global proletarian revolution, and the latter regarding as the climactic phase of their mission to establish the supremacy of the Aryan races.
The victorious European powers could take little solace in their achievements. France was desperate to keep the Germans in an inferior position, but it was so traumatized by its wartime experiences that it shrank from confrontation, appeasing the early territorial demands of the Nazi regime and complacently placing its forces behind a set of fortifications known as the Maginot Line. The British had entered the war at the epicenter of global finance and left it critically dependent on Wall Street. The United States, as the only power to end the war stronger (as it would again in the next war), did little to take advantage of its favorable position and instead sought to extricate itself from European affairs until the outbreak of the Second World War rendered that option null and void. Keegan ends as he began, emphasizing how the outbreak of the Second World War was “a continuation of the first, and indeed is inexplicable except in terms of the rancours and instabilities left by the earlier conflict” (423). For all the horrors of the war, it did not shake the fundamental conviction that life was a Darwinian struggle for power and dominance, that states must seek to rule or else be ruled in turn. It would take still another conflict, one that so thoroughly exhausted Europe that it no longer retained the will or capacity to engage in another struggle for power, to convince the continent to instead seek the path of peace and integration.
