Coming up on the centennial of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, triggering The Great War, Christopher Doyle has a good column entitled, “World War I: A war too easy to forget.”
In contrast to America’s favorite wars (Revolutionary, Civil, and World War II), it’s a war that lends itself to hard questions:
From a Socratic perspective, World War I offers perfect material for asking hard questions. How, for instance, could a relatively inconsequential act of terrorism committed by a teenage extremist from the margins of Europe drag the great powers into conflict? Why did trenches and a pointless war of attrition develop and persist for more than four years on the Western front? How did the bombing of cities, mass conscription, modern propaganda techniques, poison gas and the starvation of civilians by blockade come to be seen as acceptable, even essential, behavior? Were troop mutinies and pacifist activities justified? Were peace advocates heroes? How about official measures to stop them: Were they ethical? Were any higher principles at stake? Did good prevail? And, of course, how did the botched peace result in the rise of the Nazis?
I’ve mentioned it before, but Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History has some good podcasts up on World War I in his “Blueprint for Armageddon.”
The ambiguity of World War I is, in my mind, more representative of the nature of war than are America’s greatest hits – particularly the mythologized versions of those wars.
Some good books on the start of WWI:
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings
The First World War by John Keegan
A tougher read, but more exhaustive is:
The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark.