My name is Indy Neidell, and welcome to our new channel "The Great War".
This show follows World War I, from July 28th 1914 to November 11, 1918, week by week exactly
100 years later, but in order for the initial weeks of the war to make more sense we’re doing
these prelude to war episodes to give you a little background...
All here on our new channel "The Great War"!
Do you know what happened 100 years ago last month? On June 28th, 1914,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. This was the little match that ignited the
bonfire of the First World War.
Now, it took a full month after the assassination for war to be declared and on July 28, 2014,
it is exactly 100 years since the beginning of World War I, or the Great War, as it was called,
or even The War to End All Wars.
And unlike pretty much every other World War I show ever, we’re going to
ignore Franz Ferdinand for the moment, and talk about some other stuff.
The consequences of the Great War were massive, and affected pretty much every person
in every country on earth. Four great empires ceased to exist, a bunch of new nations saw the light of day,
and the explosive growth of an extraordinary number of social movements,
such as internationalism or facism, changed the world’s political landscape forever.
Just in terms of technology, the Great War moved the world ahead by leaps and bounds.
Cars and planes had existed prior to the war, but by 1918 we had tanks and diesel fuel,
bombers and fighters, and large planes ready to be converted into the first airliners.
And the tragedies were enormous. Although completely accurate records are impossible,
the war caused close to 40 million casualties – killed or wounded –
including nearly 10 million dead soldiers in a world whose population was only a quarter of what it is now.
But why the Great War? Why start it? Why go through with it?
There had certainly been enough talk about a European war during the early parts of the
20th century, sometimes romantically, such as when military leaders who had never actually seen combat
thought about coming home covered in glory,
but most often it was talked about as a necessity, and this was driven by waves of revolutionary
sentiment, strikes and violent labor unrest,
and above all feverish nationalism, which together came to steer the course of Europe
in the early 20th century. Now we'll go into that in detail week by week.
Think about a German Europe. Not today, but 100 years ago.
It's a theme that was certainly tossed around back then, most spectacularly in the bestseller “Mitteleuropa”.
And I don't mean the Nazi kind of German Europe, but a true German influenced and culturally
and politically dominated Europe.
You see, Prussia, and then a unified Germany, had emerged as the leading power in Europe after
beating France under Bismarck in 1871, and things had just rolled on since then.
By 1914, Berlin was the cultural capital of Europe – where you went if you wanted to
study anything “serious”.
Words like Hertz, Röntgen, Mach, and Diesel all come from this period. And British cabinet
ministers, Russian Bolsheviks – they’d all studied in Germany, which had even replaced
England as the industrial giant of Europe. Many people, not just German, dreamed of a
German Europe or at least a multi-national German commonwealth. Now, this commonwealth could
protect itself from England or the US, could bring in raw materials from France and Scandinavia,
would have its own coal and steel production, and hopefully even colonies in North Africa
or in the Middle East, where there was oil.
It was an impressive dream, and it wasn’t that far-fetched, especially when you think about
what was going on outside of Europe at the time. See, Africa and India were basically being
run from Europe, China was ready to collapse, the Ottoman Empire looked ready to collapse.
What Germany really needed to do to succeed was to work with its German speaking neighbor to the south.
Germany had been allied with Austria since 1879. There was, though, a big problem with
the Austro-Hungarian empire because it was really shaky. Now there are several reasons for this,
but one big one that I’m gonna mention right here – Austria had a serious mismanagement problem.
Actually, when you look at the world around it, Austria was an anachronism.
The rest of Europe was going through a huge age of nationalism, but in Austria there were
15 different versions of the national anthem. Franz Josef, the emperor, had been on the throne since 1848
and he was 84 years old, and he too was very out of place in modern Europe.
And he made very questionable decisions.
In 1908, for example, he made the decision to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina,
which were nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. Now, this basically pissed everyone off,
especially the Ottoman Empire. There were protests from all of the great empires but especially
noisy protests from Bosnia’s neighbor Serbia, and I don’t know if it’s quite possible
for me to express just how much anti-Austrian sentiment there was among the Slavic nations
and peoples of the Balkans.
Now, looking back, you might have thought Vienna would have said, “okay, you guys can have
a sort of pan-Slavic nation under Vienna”, which might have cooled things off a bit,
but they didn’t do that. What they did instead was nothing at all.
You see, for years, Vienna had been trying to control its minority nations by basically
paying them off, to the extent that they had no money left for things like the army.
Austria spent less money on its army than England did, even though the Austrian army was ten times the size.
So they couldn’t afford to keep trying to buy them off, which didn’t work out anyway,
so Vienna basically did nothing and hoped there would be no catastrophic events.
That didn’t work out so good.
Now, does this sound really complicated? Well, it is. There hadn’t been a real European war
in over 40 years, war being kept at bay by a complicated and constantly shifting system
of alliances. Now, you should look it up yourself because it’s really interesting, but here’s the basics:
Germany and Austria-Hungary were two thirds of the Triple Alliance, right? Italy being the third
part at the time, but nobody really counted on them to help out in case of a war. Germany
and France had historically been at odds with each other, but even more so after Prussia
walked all over France in the Franco-Prussian War. France and England were allies, but it
turned out that in the early 20th century there were French contingency plans afoot
to invade England, and vice versa, so go figure. When Bismarck had run Germany, he had cultivated
Russian friendship, but that was long gone. Much of the German elite now openly looked down on Russia,
who allied herself with France when German industrial and military power really got going,
and The Triple Entente between England, France, and Russia became official in 1907.
The German Empire was friendly with the Ottoman Empire and a true Russian nightmare would be the
Germans in charge of the Dardanelles – through which Russia send up to 90 percent of her wheat exports.
Russia supported Serbia and all of the slavic peoples,
which meant that they were banging heads with both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire,
and everybody – EVERYBODY – was worried about another Balkan explosion. Whew.
That’s almost it, but not quite. Before I go, I’d like to mention the unique case of Germany and Great Britain.
Now, the Germans and the English admired each other culturally, industrially, and militarily.
Germany especially admired England’s vast overseas empire
and her navy, the greatest the world had ever seen, and many Germans were convinced that
the British navy was the key to her success, her power, and her empire.
Now, I'm going to quote historian Norman Stone:
“the last thing Germany needed was a problem with Great Britain, and the greatest mistake
of the 20th century was made when Germany built a navy designed to attack her”.
Pretty heavy words, but think about it: the Kaiser, who occasionally ruled Germany by decree,
totally ignoring the fact that the German people did not want war with anybody and admired and
respected the British, built a navy. A navy built for only one purpose – to challenge Britain.
Winston Churchill, at the time Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, suggested a mutual
pause in naval building, reasoning that for the British Empire a powerful navy was a necessity,
but for the German Empire a luxury. But Kaiser Wilhelm would not have it, and he built up the German navy.
That navy took a third of the German defense budget, which meant that Germany could not
afford a two front war against France and Russia if such a thing were to happen. And it also meant
that there were a bunch of giant battleships, sitting in harbors, thumbing their noses at England.
Now, there was substantial naval warfare, especially submarine warfare, between England and Germany
during the war, but these battleships didn’t do anything – they just sat there taking up
space the entire war until their crews finally mutinied. They had much more armor than British
ships, and they were really impressive, but they just sat there mocking England,
whose response was to out-build the German navy two to one and make further defensive
arrangements with France and Russia. That was interesting, right?
Ok, I’m gonna wrap it up here, but come back next time to see what was going on in
Serbia, Italy, and other sunny places with long cultural histories.
Don’t forget to subscribe to get each new episode and also, this show is available in German and Polish,
so if you or your friends want to watch it but English isn’t your first language,
links to those channels are below. One important thing before I go:
You may have some questions at this point. You may be wondering for example:
What about the economic situations in these countries or What about the possible threat of civil war in Ireland
or even Can you tell us about Conrad von Hötzendorf? Well there is one thing you need to keep in mind:
this show will run weekly for four and a half years and including special features will be around three hundred
episodes so all of your questions, hopefully, will be answered and explained, but it takes time with
such a huge project. We do welcome your comments and your questions, though, so bring em on!