Dispelling the myths of WWI
AEIdeas
World War II will never be hard for Americans to understand (except Pat Buchanan). We were attacked. We defeated horrific evil regimes, although we had to ally ourselves with one of them.
But I get the impression that World War I is a mystery for Americans and will remain that way. Why was Europe fighting? Why did we get involved? I won’t try to answer those questions here, but Max Boot does a great job of dispelling some wrong answers in his review of Max Hastings’ new book on the war. He writes:
For all its importance, World War I continues to be misunderstood by most ordinary people who have not yet caught up with the evolving consensus of historians. Three big myths, in particular, dominate the popular perception. First, that it was an accident, a war nobody wanted — a view immortalized in Barbara Tuchman’s beautifully written if factually questionable 1962 book “The Guns of August.” Second, that it didn’t really matter who won — that there was scant difference between the Central and Entente Powers. And third, that soldiers were needlessly sent to slaughter by unfeeling and cloddish generals — “lions led by donkeys” in the popular parlance.
Turning to another war about which Americans have chosen to remember very little, I highly recommend Hastings’ earlier book on the Korean War, controversially titled, “The Korean War.” And if you want to read just one book about why the US got involved in the Great War, I recommend the venerable classic by Ernest May, “The World War and American Isolation, 1914-1917.”
Would the U.S went to war had another country blocked off all imports of oil into our country which we so desperately in order to needed to survive? This is assuming the U.S. had no oil of its own. Stinson’s memoirs were very revealing as to how Pearl Harbor came about bring the U.S. into WWII. what was 3,000 or so lives lost in comparison to the huge profits to be made once the war started. I will never believe any war starts unplanned.
Bob, thanks for reading. There isn’t really space here for a full discussion of the “revisionist” literature on the US war in the Pacific, but I’ll say for the moment that our oil embargo is hardly aggressive compared to the brutal war Japan was waging in China.