Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Provocative Polemic, January 6, 2003
This review is from: The Myth of the Great War : A New Military History of World War 1 (Hardcover)
The Myth of the Great War makes a good case for the performance of the German Army in WWI, and a fairly damning case against the French and British armies and their leaders. In spite of the promise on the cover, however, Prof. Mosier doesn't come close to proving (or explaining how) the Americans "saved the Allies" in his thin final chapters. Mosier does well to make us re-examine the popular impression that both sides in the war engaged equally in senseless human-wave tactics. Although one might well quibble with his casualty statistics (as other reviewers have), my guess is that there is something to his argument that the Germans were less profligate with their manpower resources, and more quick to adapt to the punishing futilities of trench warfare. His discussion of equipment and tactics--as well as the early campaigns of the war--is quite compelling. Mosier loses his way in a couple of respects, however. First, he gets himself into hot water whenever he wanders into strategic questions. Better not to discuss the pre-war diplomatic maneuverings at all than to dismiss as senseless Britain's alliance with France in a single, poorly reasoned paragraph. Mosier only nibbles around the edges of the intricate question of war responsibility, but surely it is not enough to note only that France and Russia ordered mobilization before Germany, without discussing why they mobilized. In such moments Mosier betrays a bit of pro-German bias that goes beyond admiration for military prowess. Mosier is more seriously hampered by a lack of understanding of the belligerents' war aims and their diplomatic consequences. How else to explain his blithe reading of August-September 1914 as not only a tactical German victory, but a strategic one? Contrary to Mosier's speculationk, the goal of German war plan was not simply to seize a big chunk of Belgium and Northern France in order to fight a long war on someone else's soil. At best, it was a satisfactory fallback position (albeit one with serious diplomatic consequences) after the offensive stalled. In fact, the failure to knock out France in the initial campaign meant that the gamble was lost, and Germany would have to fight a two-front war that eventually exhausted its population, resources and will to carry on the struggle. Throughout the book, Mosier pays very little attention to fronts other than the Western, and often underestimates the strain they posed on German manpower. At one point he argues that the detachment of two divisions from the German thrust through Belgium showed that the Germans had more than enough soldiers to execute their plans in the West (in fact, they were detached because of the seemingly desperate situation in the East). A few pages later we read that gaps in the German lines approaching the Marne made them vulnerable to counterattack and made a strategic retreat necessary (thus saving Paris). Those two divisions were surely missed then. Throughout the book, Mosier oscillates between ridiculing the Allied attrition strategy, and occasional acknowledgments that Germany simply had no reserves to spare. The lack of manpower may not have caused the collapse the Allies kept hoping for, but it did frequently prevent Germany from following up tactical advantage with strategic success. It is this failure to understand the relationship (and the difference) between strategy and tactics that causes The Myth of the Great War to crash and burn in its final chapters. Mosier seems to think that the "true" winner of a war is determined by adding up casualty figures and seeing which side sustained the most damage. By this measure, the Germans were on their way to winning in 1918 when the Americans showed up and tipped the numerical balance back in the Allies' favor. Maybe (even probably) true. But Mosier doesn't offer many convincing reasons why the Americans would have been qualitatively so much better than the British or the French. And he offers no reason at all why the Germans could not return to their defensive tactics of 1915-17 to stabilize the front and--given their supposed battlefield superiority--wear the Americans out. Instead he jumps ahead to the Armistice, which is represented as some kind of amicable German-American deal to stop the war on the basis of the Fourteen Points, to the chagrin of the British and French. That may have been what the Germans thought (or hoped) they were doing, but I doubt it. They didn't fight a war for four years and then call it quits without knowing it represented a huge defeat. Maybe they expected to be treated better for having fought so well. But that would have been naive. Which is what Mosier becomes when he equates casualty figures (or the proper maintenance of military cemeteries) with victory. The best refutation of Mosier's book won't be found in these reviews. It can be found in a little treaty signed at Versailles. Fair or not, wise or not, it proved one thing: the Germans didn't win.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
62 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pick Your Own Sources- Selective History at its most dangero, July 27, 2001
This review is from: The Myth of the Great War : A New Military History of World War 1 (Hardcover)
This is a well written book with some new and interesting sources, but Professor Mosier has let himself down badly with some very inaccurate conclusions based on selective quotes. For example, among his many egregious omissions, I suspect from the very last sentence of the book that he has never visited the Menin Gate or been to a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in the BEF sector of the Western front. The book reveals serious areas of omission caused by either selectivity or just plain ignorance. His account misses out in several key areas: 1. The German view of 1918. Has he never heard of Hindenburg's quote, "...Our first great [defeat/disaster] from which there could be no recovery ..." about the Amiens offensive of 8 August 11918? [Ludendorf called it "the black day of the German Army."] 2. The role of the the British Royal Navy in the long strategic blockade of Imperial Germany which MUST get a mention in " a new history of WW1". Has he never heard of the Turnip Winter? 3. Serious errors of fact - von Moltke DID have a pyschological collapse in 1914, as his correspondence reveals. Mosier has clearly not checked his facts or read all the sources. 4. The very silly remark [in the essay on sources] that Niasll Fergusson's 'The Pity of War' is "the first book on WW1 to have any serious intellectual content since Churchill's World Crisis...". This is just plain ill informed - has he not read any of John Keegan's or Correlli Barnett's books? If he has, does he really claim that the BBC's Reith lecturer and a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge have got it badly wrong, and if so, how and where? 5. There are some serious errors and discrepancies in the comparative casualty figures. I suspect that the Prof doesn't include all the German stats because he is not aware of the unique method the German used to caculate them in 1914 -18: see the work of Gary Sheffield and Paddy Griffith. I was very disappointed that such an ill judged book could go out as a true history of 1914 - 1918. No reasonable commentator can possibly argue that it was the threat of American men and arms that drove Ludendorf and Hindenburg to their last desperate gamble of the 1918 spring offensives to finish off the war before the Americans were able to put a full army into the field. But to claim that Belleau Wood and the AEF at the Meuse Argonne were 'the decisive battles of the war' is plain wrong and NOT supported by all the evidence. Sir John Monash for one would not agree. Nor would the French after Mangin's ferocious counter offensive of 18 July 1918 at Villers Cotterets. Most important of all, nor did the Germans at the time! The professor needs to read a little more of ALL the historical source material... Pity: he does write well: but then a Professor of English should.....
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
66 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A few good bits, but mostly very poor., January 23, 2004
It is quite noticeable that most of the rave reviews on this site (and Amazon.uk) come from readers who don't seem to know a great deal about the Great War (in one or two cases clearly motivated by anti-British animus), and the pannings come from those who do. The author doesn't do himself any favours by admitting that he hadn't known much about World War One before starting to research the book - a cynic might say that explains a lot. The book does contain some interesting material on the Franco-German War. The first thesis, that the Germans were tactically superior to the Allies, is largely true, for the first half of the war at any rate, but Mosier ruins his case by exaggeration, such as claiming that the British were "routed" at Mons, or that the Germans were not really beaten at the Marne, or that Verdun was a German victory. His knowledge of politics and diplomacy is painfully thin - he admits he cannot grasp what Britain gained from the Entente Cordiale (an ally against Germany's threat to dominate the continent - the same policy Britain had pursued against Louis XIV and Napoleon) or how the small (in 1914) BEF was of any importance to the French - it is perfectly arguable that the small BEF provided the extra margin needed for the narrow French victory at the Marne. In the final chapters he seems to think that the USA dominated the other Allies in 1918 the way she did in the 1940s, which is simply not so. Where the book really goes off the rails is in the sections dealing with the British (about whom he writes in a nasty, sarcastic tone which hardly indicates objectivity) and Americans. Far from exploding myths, he simply spreads old ones, common enough in popular accounts in English, although not in serious history books: namely that the British were uniquely useless and that the war was won by American victories on the battlefield. There is far less dispute about casualty figures than he seems to think, although it is true that British intelligence wildly overestimated the scale of German losses at the time. One almost suspects he trawled old books to find the highest figures for British losses, and the lowest for German, that he could find, rather than the ones which can be found in any serious up-to-date account. It is absurd for him to claim that mass slaughter of attackers was "exclusively British" - Allied loss rates in 1916-18, when Britain had taken over the main burden of the offensive, were far less bad than the French losses of 1914-15. This was due to the improvements in infantry and artillery tactics which the Allies had made by then (it is not true, as other reviewers on this site seem to think, that the BEF "never learned", or that the British did not make proper use of machine-guns, or that the Somme accomplished "NOTHING" (the Germans called it "the muddy grave of the German Army", and retreated to the Hindenburg Line to avoid a repetition. After 1916 the Germans were under no delusion that they were going to win the war by being on the receiving end of such batterings - hence in part their gamble to knock Britain out by unrestricted submarine warfare)). The gaps in his research can be seen in the bibliography - he dismisses the work of Paddy Griffith on British infantry tactics with a sneer (perhaps he did not read or understand them), and dismisses the entire corpus of scholarly work on the BEF as "without merit", whilst treating the secondary, populist work of John Laffin and Lloyd George's memoirs as serious sources. His praise of Pershing is overstated - he was doubtless an able man, but his clumsy tactics and excessive faith in the rifle (not unlike Douglas Haig in 1916) are a matter of record. American tactics were clumsy in 1918 for the same reason the British had been on the Somme in 1916: inexperience. His account of 1918 is ludicrous - the key thing to grasp is that the BEF were engaging and driving back the main mass of the German Army (90-odd divisions, when the Americans in the Argonne were fighting at most 35 or so). Mosier sneers at the high casualties suffered by the BEF, without mentioning that they were doing the brunt of the fighting at the time! The war would not have been won without American intervention. But the effect of this was on finance and morale, as well as the threat of what the American army might accomplish in future - not on the battlefield in 1918. Mosier could have produced a much better book after a few more years of reading and reflection. Far better and more accurate and balanced books are in print, both from the American and British perspective.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
