The Legacy of the Kaiser’s War
We’re nearing the end of the 100 years since the start of World War I. The London Telegraph recently ran a fine series of twelve articles by historian Saul David on the subject, with particular attention to the Kaiser’s need and strange desire to acquire control of the European continent by engaging in warfare that would give him control of the Balkans and ports on the Black Sea, with entry into the Mediterranean through the Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardenelles, as well as control of the western seaboard and ports of most of Europe.
Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to do empire-building, but he failed. He used the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife as an excuse to start his roll across Europe to acquire control of the European continent and its ports, with assistance from Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary. Most of what I’ve found was glossed over in my high school history classes as if it didn’t matter. But it did matter. If you want to understand what followed slightly more than a decade after the end of World War I, and why things are the way they are now, you need to pursue this history.
This is a link to the archives of the London Telegraph’s original articles about World War I, published as the war progressed. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ww1-archive/
Here’s a link to historian Saul David’s series about the causes of World War I. He takes a closer look at how that war progressed.
I’m just glad that there is access to some of this now, because otherwise, it might sit moldering in drawers and on bookshelves, ignored by everyone but the curious like me. It’s my impression that the German troops went into the battlefield with no real understanding of why they were there. They were simply ordered to the front to fight a war that had no valid purpose, such as defense, behind it. The call-up for mobilization was done under orders of the Kaiser, who had fired Otto von Bismarck. There is, in that second Telegraph link, an article with a photograph that shows both military and civilian Germans in a crowd, listening to the mobilization orders, some of them looking rather bewildered. They answered the call, but to what purpose?
I think that the archived photo collections now online at those links, and those in this paragraph, can give you a better view than a single photo posted here. The famous Christmas Eve truce, a spontaneous pause in warfare by troops on both sides of the front lines, did take place on Dec. 24, 1914. The TIME collection at this link includes that brief pause in fighting. http://time.com/3643889/christmas-truce-1914/
World War I was a war of aggression by Germany, the same as was WWII, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as the excuse to make war. Germany had earlier signed a secret treaty of alliance with the Ottoman government in Turkey. Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary had already declared war on Serbia and the Black Hand over the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb and member of the Black Hand, and wanted Germany’s aid in that conflict. The Kaiser gave it willingly.
Britain, France and Russia had formed the Triple Entente before 1914, and Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had formed the Triple Alliance.
The rulers of Britain (George V), Russia (Tsar Nicholas) and Germany (Kaiser Wilhelm II) were cousins. They knew each other quite well. The Kaiser, however, despised everything British including his cousin George V, did not really like his cousin Nicholas II, and had a love-hate relationship with his own mother, Queen Victoria’s daughter Vicky. But now, without the previous interference of his British grandmother, the late Queen Victoria, nothing stood in the way of his starting what amounts to a family quarrel, one that cost many millions of lives in the end by warfare and the post-war spread of the Spanish flu, destroyed the legitimate governments of Russia and Germany, and opened the paths to Hitler’s Reich and Lenin’s establishment of the Communist party as the ruling government in Russia. See the Telegraph link above for the archived 1917 articles for Lenin’s tactic toward his British ‘allies’. An enlightening Telegraph headline from 1917 says that Lenin barred British citizens from leaving Russia.
In Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin made Ludwig Dürr his chief designer at the Zeppelin factory when the Count’s first engineer, Hugo Kübler, who had designed LZ-1, refused to fly in the airship he had created, which was named after Zeppelin.
The Kaiser saw the airships as more useful than airplanes because of their ability to carry large loads of munitions at low cost, and to go long distances at great heights with no interference. Planes of that time period such as the Sopwith Camel were unable to reach the heights at which the Zeppelins were used for bombing runs – as much as 11,000 feet – which meant that a machine gunner posted on a Zeppelin could easily take out a biplane before it ever got near the airship.
Franz Shrapnel was the developer of bombs carrying up to 2,000 pounds of shrapnel carried by the Zeppelin fleet. The largest such bomb was a 3,000 pounder. The airships were manned by machine gunners who could shoot down the planes trying to attack them during bombing runs. This worked until the UK’s biplanes were equipped with stronger motors that allowed them to climb high enough to attack the airships. (I thought you all might like to know the source of the term ‘shrapnel’.)
In Waiting For Daylight, H.M. Tomlinson describes the sight of the nighttime aerial bombardment as almost a distraction from seeing the Pleiades in the London night sky, when everyone had gathered in the streets because shrapnel bombs were falling from the sky, and searchlights were trying to find the airships. He reported that he could see sparks of fire on strings descending to the earth, and knew that they were shrapnel bombs brought across the Channel from Europe. There was a ‘lights out’ policy in effect at that time, to try to hinder the aerial bombing runs from the Germans, but the pilots of the Zeppelins used the ‘glow’ of the Thames as a guide for bombing raids. This was from 1915 to 1916.
The Battle of Cambria ended 12-4-1917. It was the successful use of tanks at Cambria by the British Army that brought this to a quick conclusion, much more successfully than the same attempts in the sticky, muddy fields of Flanders in the 1916 Battle of the Somme. They didn’t function at Somme as well as they could have. The tanks, running on treads copied from farm tractors, were far more successful at Cambria.
This introduction of British-built tanks was the real start of mechanized land warfare. J.R.R. Tolkien’s first sight of them and their destructive firepower partly inspired his descriptions of war losses and battle scenes in Lord Of the Rings.
While the United States avoided the European War in the beginning, there was a massive pro-war sentiment in the USA, that flared into demands addressed to Woodrow Wilson to enter that War when the Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo from a German U-boat in the Atlantic. H. M. Tomlinson observes that Walt Whitman’s poems in Leaves of Grass somehow indicated that the USA was involved long before we arrived in Europe, and therefore, he could no long refer to Americans as latecomers to the War. Since the poems in the section titled ‘War Poems’ seem to have been written post-Civil War, I’m not sure how Tomlinson derived that connection, but I’ll accept it.
Essentially, Wilhelm II, who had fired Otto von Bismarck and let his leading Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff dictate policy, was an incompetent leader at best and a publicity-seeking attention hound, letting those two run the war while he himself lost the support of the military and the public, and was eventually forced to abdicate. His cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, was the same – out of touch with his own people and the military, making it far too easy for a malignant creature like Lenin to imprison him and his family and execute them by a firing squad. Wilhelm’s sloppy ideas of management resulted in his forced abdication from the German government and opened the door for Hitler’s seizure of power and the rise of the Reich. Nicholas’s incompetence and complete disconnection from the Russian people led to his overthrow and the slaughter of him and his entire family, while Lenin drove his brutal, murderous path into existence. And we know well the legacy left to us which followed these events.
I think H.M. Tomlinson describes it quite well:
“When the crafty but ignorant Russian generals got from the Czar the order for mobilizing the armies, and issued it, they did not know it, but that was when they released Lenin. And who on earth can now inveigle that terrific portent safely under lid and lock again?” – H.M. Tomlinson, Waiting For Daylight, 1922
Who, indeed?
Category: Historical, Politics
I find looking at Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren interesting and a great opportunity for sarcasm. Her offspring have appeared in the ruling houses of Greece, Spain, Denmark, Romania, Russia, Norway, Germany, and others.
Yes, and Elizabeth II of England married her cousin Philip who was born on the island of Corfu, and was originally Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.
Interesting and informative. Thanks, Ex!
Thank you, AW1Ed. It’s a little long, but there was no real reason for Wilhelm to start a war in the first place, other than feeding his useless ego. And look what followed at the end of it.
Was he Wilhem Klink’s dad who ran the Stalag where Hogan was imprisoned???
I read somewhere that Werner Klemperer made it a stipulation that he would quit the show if Klink ever wasn’t an idiot. Plus he was actually a virtuoso violinist who deliberately played like shit while in character as Klink, just to reinforce the fact that Klink was an idiot.
I’ve heard the same, and that he was Jewish. Would only do it on the condition the Germans were made to look like fools.
Burkhalter and the I forgot his name the gestapo guy with the mustache was also Jewish and as actors, they played the parts great.
I don’t think anyone would argue that Victoria’s legendary reign set the stage for everything that happened in Europe in the 20th century.
I absolutely love the story of the Christmas truce. No matter where a soldier hails from, we all have remarkably similar stories.
I think that WWI is largely overshadowed by WWII in modern history books, particularly here in the US since we came out of it as such a superpower. We cannot forget WWI for the horrors of life in the trenches and the start of chemical warfare.
WWI has always been in an interesting topic for me due to the dichotomies. Before (and even after) cavalry was on horseback, bayonets were more than a symbolic tool, but yet it was the start of mechanized warfare, the first uses of tanks, and the first uses of airpower. Even the naval technology of the time was rapidly changing. The dreadnoughts (which wouldn’t look entirely out of place in a port today to a casual observer) were only ten years or so old. They fought alongside ships with sail rigging.
WWI was the first “modern” war and the last “old-style” war.
You have to wonder if somehow, Wilhelm had been stopped before he started his war, would WWII have followed? And would it have followed the same path that history records?
Probably not in the same way. The Japanese sure had a chip on their shoulder and looking for some way to prove themselves.
However all the post-war turmoil in Europe that toppled all the centuries old monarchies and led to communism and socialism across the continent (Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, the breakup of Austria-Hungary) wouldn’t have happened. If it did happen it would have been a much more gradual change. Within a few years of the end of WWI all those countries had new fascist governments. They all felt the need to rebuild their countries and gain back what they had lost (pride, territory, et al).
“Joyeux Noel” was released in 2005 – a fictionalized version of the Christmas Truce on 1914:
American soldiers on horseback fought in Afghanistan in 2001. Check out the book: “Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan”.
For anyone interested in WWI, this youtube channel has been running a week by week program on the war’s 100th anniversary since 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar
Ex, there are a couple of points in this that could use clarification.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria wasn’t the result of some random crazed guy. It was actually part of an organized plot by the Serbian intelligence group “Black Hand.” The Austrians had a legitimate reason to be very pissed at the Serbs.
It can be argued that the Russians triggered the war in late July 1914 by being first to put their army on alert and declaring they would defend Serbia. One apparent rationale was that there were a lot of ethnic Slavs in that area of the Balkans.
How the Germans reacted to events was the result of contingency planning by the German general staff. Because France was an ally of Russia, meaning a potential two-front war for Germany, the German strategy called for the invasion of France first using the Von Schlieffen Plan. This involved a sweep through the low countries using a very tight timetable.
The Von Schlieffen Plan could have worked except the Germans made a miscalculation. Belgium had declared neutrality, which the Germans thought would result in them being allowed free passage through the country. It didn’t happen.
There’s a common misperception that the sinking of the Lusitania caused the U.S. to enter the war, but that’s not strictly true. The British liner carrying American passengers was torpedoed by a German submarine off Ireland in May of 1915. The U.S. didn’t declare war on Germany until January 1917. What set off the declaration was two things: 1) Germany’s announcement that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare, and 2) the Zimmerman telegram which showed Germany trying to recruit Mexico as an ally in return for potential Mexican control of parts of the American Southwest.
Perry, there simply was not enough room for all of that!!!! (Heehee!)
However, the Black Hand was part and parcel of the plot, and Princip was, indeed, one of several people involved.
I think you will agree, however, that if Frederick (Wilhelm II’s father) had not died prematurely, the war could have been delayed or might not have happened. It appears that the aftermath of the WWI provided Hitler with the opportunity to continue what had already been started by the Kaiser.
But there is simply not enough room here to go into all of that!!! The amount of information available from archived materials is something that we should all be aware of.
A great source for personal memoirs and other historical books about World War One is a website called “Manybooks”. The books are all out of copyright and are free to download in multiple formats. Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive are also good sites. There is some fiction mixed in especially period pulp novels but most is non-fiction. A good one that I read a while back was “Liege on the Line of March”.
I really enjoy first person accounts.
http://manybooks.net/titles/bigelowg3026430264-8.html
Thanks, Bill! I’ve made a note of that!
Kaiser Bill had a massive inferiority complex regarding his uncle, King Edward VIII, that extended to Eddie’s heirs. He was butthurt over not being heir to the British Empire but rather to the second-rate (in his mind, anyway) Hohenzollerns of Prussia. And he was butthurt over his left arm being stunted due to his somewhat-botched birth. The dude had issues. He wanted an empire. He already had one, thanks in no small part to Otto Von Bismarck, but it wasn’t the British Empire, so it wasn’t good enough. He had a pretty badass army, but it was landlocked in the middle of Europe, so it wasn’t good enough, either. The Reichsmarine was sufficient to Germany’s peacetime needs, as German naval power had never needed to range far outside the Baltic, but it wasn’t the Royal Navy, so he dumped tremendous funds, more than he could afford, into a drastic expansion of his fleet, even though his infrastructure and landlocked culture really didn’t have a chance at outbuilding or outsailing the island superpower that ruled half the globe. Von Bismarck, hawkish though he was, was a solid statesman who knew when to bluff, raise, call, and—most importantly—fold, but Willie wasn’t a boss who liked being told “no,” so out he went. Wilhelm had ambitions going every which way. In addition to Africa, China, and local territory he wanted to snatch from his neighbors, he was eyeing New England like a rapist at a strip club, and had the Winterarbeit plans drawn up (and postponed and reworked every time the US Navy exercised its frustrating tendency to launch another battleship that could and would fuck up a German invasion fleet) for an invasion and annexation of the US east coast. Winterarbeit was allegedly supposed to go forward in 1915 (whether it actually would have is another question; Von Tirpitz and the other admirals seemed to recognize that the plan would have some sustainability issues and were apparently rather passive-aggressive about it), but der Kaiser’s attention span was sufficiently short that a pissing contest between an ailing vestigial empire (Habsburg Austria-Hungary) and pissant… Read more »
Interesting; I didn’t know things were going well for the Russians on the land side of the Russo-Japanese War; I just knew they lost badly at sea.
One note: I think it was Edward VII who ruled after his mother, Queen Victoria, and Edward VIII who abdicated to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.
The book “Dreadnought” by Robert K. Massie is a good source of the build up to the war. Also, mentalfloss.com has been reviewing the buildup to and the war itself in a series for the past five years or so.
Not “well” per se, but they fought a solid defensive campaign and were inflicting unsustainable losses on the Japanese, who borrowed their way into bankruptcy to finance the war and were only weeks away from collapse when Tsar Nick finally said, “Fuck this, you can have it.”
Thank you, TOW! It’s stuff like this that is never addressed in history classes. You have to dig it up on your own.
Let’s continue the discussion!
Great post, Ex!
Real History seems foreign to most Americans.
Thank you, OldSoldier54. I have never understood why the connection was not made in my high school history classes between Wilhelm’s failure and the rise of the Reich, and how it literally let a gaping hole for Lenin to bulldoze his way through to overthrow the Russian government.
We have to learn from these things, or they will be repeated, and I think that NONE of us want that.
Thank you for a very interesting history lesson. Thumbs up and huzzah to you, Ex.
You’re very welcome, RM1, and thank you!
From what I have heard from others…so many American History classes in high school get bogged down and spend so much time in the Colonial era and the Civil War that they end up trying to cram World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam War into the last two weeks of the school year, when the teacher and students have about shut down anyway.
Sounds like things haven’t changed one bit since I went to high school. I learned more about the Roman Empire in Latin classes than I did in World History!
When I was in 10th Grade, the US History class briefly mentioned Little Big Horn as the only thing of note about the Frontier Indian Wars. Never mind that it was dozens of individual overlapping conflicts with hundreds of tribes over an entire continent spanning over a century.
At the time, I said, “Really? So what about some guys named Tecumseh, Geronimo, or Quana Parker? How about Sand Creek, Adobe Walls, or Fort Phil Kearny? Why was Paloduro Canyon such a big deal to the Comanche?
Blank stare.
That’s before we even get into the 20th Century. WWI was the Lusitania narrative, plus “they weren’t nazis yet!” I mentioned the Zimmerman Telegram, Lafayette Escadrille, Belleau Wood, and Alvin York.
Blank stare.
I don’t want to discuss the shitshow that was their coverage of WWII. They skipped Korea altogether and Vietnam was about Woodstock and how cool the hippies were.
US History my ass.
History as taught spent more time on the Revolution and Civil War than anything else, left with the impression that the US didn’t do much in WWI, League of Nations was where we “shone” (yes, sarc), and ran out of time for anything more.
Family tree research actually turned up more history than the class. Had never heard of Great White Fleet, turns out a great grand uncle was a sailor with that fleet. Grandmother’s cousin married an Army officer, KIA on Nov 5 1918 in France. Great grand uncle died of Spanish flu, didn’t realize it reached Detroit. Great grandfather’s brother stayed behind in England, ended up in the British army. He died in 1917 in Iraq (after surviving Gallipoli!), is buried just outside Baghdad. I had no idea there even was a Mesopotamian Campaign..
You have to ask if things might have been different, e.g., a shorter war, if Wilson hadn’t been such an isolationist. He had to be pushed into it, from what I read.
The outcome was that the Treaty of Versailles (Paris:1919) gave Stalin what he wanted, which should never have been allowed to happen.
What did Stalin want?
He wanted control of all of eastern Europe.
He didn’t get it from the treaty of Versailles.
Thanks for the history lesson, EX-PH2! You post some great stuff.
As for the Italians throwing in with the Kaiser, that was true at first. But they ended up fighting with the allies and suffered over a half million casualties.
Rommel’s book “Infantry Attacks” describes some of the action in the Northeast Italy/Julian Alps area.
Thank you, Commander, and have a nice holiday!
According to the link you provided and other sources, it is debatable whether the war was solely a product of German aggression. There was plenty of guilt and stupidity to go around. As the saying goes, “Winners write the histories”.
“The Sleepwalkers” is one good source (my opinion, anyway) source, though difficult to read. Solzhenitsyn’s “August 1914”, although a novel, is also interesting and enlightening.
The invention of shrapnel is generally credited to Henry Shrapnel, a British officer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Shrapnel
“… letting those two run the war while he himself lost the support of the military and the public”
Considering the results of that war for Germany, it kind of argues against the argument that generals should run wars instead of civilians.
Hindenburg, and his faithful Indian companion Ludendorf, didn’t run the war until about mid 1916 when Hindenburg replaced von Falkenhayn as Chief of the General Staff. Hindenburg played a major role in renewing unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, bringing the US into the war.
Thanks for that link. I had no clue it was called shrapnel after an inventors name. Learning lots of new stuff here today!
The demise of the Ottoman Empire is a much overlooked component of the Great War.
We are still dealing with the aftermath of that collapse, and the subsequent partition by the victors.
A man named Mustafa Kemal (Attaturk) played an essential role. His efforts at building a modern secular democracy are now largely trashed by a would-be Caliph, with no small assist by former president zer0.
And -that- may lead to the -next- European bloodbath.