The First World War
by JOHN KEEGAN
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Book Summary Information
Author: JOHN KEEGANEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 1999-05-11
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 496
Book Reviews of The First World War
Book Review: A fine military look at World War I
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book back-to-back with Sir Martin Gilbert's work of the same name. They're both fine books; they're completely different.
Gilbert looks at every aspect of the war, from the politics to the poems written by the men in the trenches, some of which he reprints. Gilbert spends many pages dwelling on the war's carnage - not only the huge number of casualties but the many whose bodies were blown to bits, never recovered, or found unidentifiable.
Keegan's book by contrast is a military history, and a fine one. No poems here. From Gilbert I learn what effect huge casualties had on the societies which suffered them, but from Keegan I learn more about why those casualties happened.
World War I became a stalemate, not only because artillery became too powerful for infantry to stand up to (the Germans near war's end were able to shell Paris from 75 miles away) but because generals, he finds, were effectively blind, deaf and dumb.
Communications had not gone through the same technology revolutions. Radio was in its infancy. Early telephone systems were clunky and fragile, their wires across battlefields invariably broken as soon as combat began. Runners were often killed.
Generals guided from the rear not out of cowardice but because they supervised huge fronts; no front position could put them close to all the action they commanded. They couldn't see the front, they couldn't get news of it, and they couldn't get orders through to it.
Artillery couldn't coordinate with the infantry it supported. Keegan gives many examples of battles going awry for these reasons. Shelling would begin, and when it ended infantry would advance. When infantry broke through, military strategy normally dictates continuing the swift advance to press the advantage. But if they did, they'd run into the shelling pattern for the next round of artillery, and had no way to communicate to the rear that they were doing unexpectedly well. And they had no way to get authorization for it. So they'd halt. By the time the army got organized to let them advance, a whole day might have passed, and they'd have lost their advantage as the enemy would have by then stabilized and reinforced its line.
Because of the chaos, generals would increasingly lay intricate patterns of movement and shelling, which were increasingly hard to keep to in the fog of war, and just worsened the problem.
Keegan does a fine job laying out the war's predicate in military terms. The chain reaction which set the war moving, leading to Austria's ultimatum to Serbia and invasion thereof, is usually represented as a diplomatic matter, but the reasoning behind it was military. It had eerie echoes of the Cold War's nuclear standoff, where the scariest scenario was that the fear of one side launching first would cause the other to actually do so, rather than lose their nuclear deterrent, and so start a nuclear war that wasn't really necessary. Use it or lose it, as it was called.
Here, Germany faced the rigorous and intricate timetable imposed by the brilliant but flawed Schlieffen Plan: Germany couldn't fight a two-front war, but it could, if it kept to the clockwork of its plan, defeat France in 40 days and then turn to face Russia, which would take that long to mobilize its huge army in its huge country. Germany couldn't waste a moment beginning its troop movements. Russia, with its logistics problems, couldn't afford to stop moving troops once it started, and couldn't afford to let Germany or Austria make huge gains in its west before it got the strength of its army up front. France had little space it could afford to give up to a German thrust and had to respond quickly if it felt an attack imminent.
Keegan dissects each year of the war and each major action. What is most interesting is how Germany managed to lose this war: it dominated most actions on most fronts and had the most creative and audacious generals.
Summary of The First World War
The battles on land, sea and in the air form the narrative heart of this World War I study, along with new interpretations of the military events and insights into the way the modern world was shaped by what happened between 1914 and 1918.Despite the avalanche of books written about the First World War in recent years, there have been comparatively few books that deliver a comprehensive account of the war and its campaigns from start to finish. The First World War fills the gap superbly. As readers familiar with Keegan's previous books (including The Second World War and Six Armies in Normandy) know, he's a historian of the old school. He has no earth-shattering new theories to challenge the status quo, no first-person accounts to tug on the emotions--what he does have, though, is a gift for talking the lay person through the twists and turns of a complex narrative in a way that is never less than accessible or engaging.
Keegan never tries to ram his learning down your throat. Where other authors have struggled to explain how Britain could ever allow itself to be dragged into such a war in 1914, Keegan keeps his account practical. The level of communications that we enjoy today just didn't exist then, and so it was much harder to keep track of what was going on. By the time a message had finally reached the person in question, the situation may have changed out of all recognition. Keegan applies this same "cock-up" theory of history to the rest of the war, principally the three great disasters at Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The generals didn't send all those troops to their deaths deliberately, Keegan argues; they did it out of incompetence and ineptitude, and because they had no idea of what was actually going on at the front.
While The First World War is not afraid to point the finger at those generals who deserve it, even Keegan has to admit he doesn't have all the answers. If it all seems so obviously futile and such a massive waste of life now, he asks, how could it have seemed worthwhile back then? Why did so many people carry on, knowing they would die? Why, indeed. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk
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