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The Myth of the Great War : A New Military History of World War 1

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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.

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.....

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.

Let me start with what I like about John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War. The book is well researched and written from the heart by someone who clearly has a great feel for the subject. Mosier does his utmost to rescue the American involvement in the First World War from the historical vacuum into which it has fallen in the nation's collective consciousness, and kudos to him for that.

Mosier asserts the German army, man for man, was superior at a tactical level to that of its enemies. I agree. His best work on this is Chapter 2, where he analyses the development of combined arms tactics in Germany prior to the outbreak of the war. Subsequent chapters detail the ruthless application of these tactics.

The problem is Mosier fails to explain that the greater the German triumph at the tactical level the worse their strategic situation became.

At numerous points in the book I got the distinct impression Mosier was hoping the Germans would completely overwhelm the Allies and deal them the thrashing he clearly believes they deserved. Throughout the book Allied generals (with exceptions like Petain) are incompetent; Allied politicians are shortsighted and inept; Allied media are lying propagandists; Allied war aims are self serving and amoral. "Like the Serbians, whose fanatical quest for territorial aggrandizement had started the war, Rumanians dreamed of a greater Rumania," (p 254) Mosier says. "The Rumanian army's habits of occupation resembled those of the Mongol horde more than a modern army," (p 258) he adds. After being all but annihilated, the Rumanians are reduced to holding Jassy, a region that was "the cradle of that peculiarly Rumanian blend of apocalyptic religious nationalism and anti-Semitism," (p 260) Mosier concludes.

The fact that Rumania is mentioned at all highlights another inconsistency; after informing us in the preface that the focus of the book will be on the critical western front, Allied hopes of decisive victory in the east being "entirely delusionary," Mosier devotes entire chapters to other fronts when it suits him. Chapter 13 details the destruction of Rumania. Chapter 15 records the Italian collapse at Caporetto. The great Italian victory at Vittoria Veneto the following year that broke Austria Hungary is not even mentioned, nor is the capitulation of Germany's other allies that year.

Mosier blithely dances around other facts that might seem inconvenient for his purposes. He doesn't hold Germany responsible for the war; after beginning Chapter 3 with the sentence, "Serbia was the first of the combatants to declare a general mobilization," in a footnote, he asserts, "the sequence of mobilization indicates ultimate responsibility for starting the war." (p 64). And that's it. All the background we're given. Nothing about Austria Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, with Germany's full support, or any other diplomatic initiatives. If you knew nothing else about the war you would be forgiven for assuming it started because Serbia wanted to go to war with Austria Hungary, a country with an army fifteen times bigger than its own in 1914.

The fact is, Germany - unnecessarily, and ultimately self-defeatingly - provoked Britain into entering the war, creating the conditions for unrestricted submarine warfare and therefore the mobilization of the United States against her, by invading Belgium. This strategic blunder - quite possibly the worst in the history of warfare - was more significant than any of Germany's tactical triumphs that Mosier lavishes such detailed praise upon. The significance is lost. So is any sense of moral outrage against Germany - after all, Mosier assures us, the French talked about violating Belgian neutrality, so they're equally guilty, right?

After shifting the onus for the war to the Allies, Mosier lets Germany off the moral hook throughout his work. For example, he cites with admiration the devastating effects of German employment of chemical weapons at Ypres in 1917 as just another example of German ingenuity being harnessed to provide killing power.

The only attention Mosier gives to the Allied campaign of economic warfare against Germany is to dismiss it in one sentence in one footnote: "The idea that Germany and Austria were brought to their knees by the `blockade' is convincingly dealt with in Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War." (p 284). In fact, it isn't at all. Mosier also ignores the corpus of work related to the effects of the complementary Allied propaganda campaign inside Germany.

So, the great German offensive of 1918 opens, and it's successful everywhere - no question of the troops burning out or outrunning their supply lines, oh no. And at the last moment, the Allies chestnuts are hauled out of the fire by the arrival of the Americans. In the engagement at Belleau Wood, "It was the American Second and Third Divisions, collectively, that stopped the German advance to the south, and thus saved France."(p 321). And in the next few sentences Mosier explains how: by the same bloody, head-on frontal charges that had cost the British and French so much over the past four years.

And then the Americans, single-handedly, roll the Germans back. No mention of the contribution of their Allies other than their body counts - the British victory at Amiens and the "Black Day" of the German army sails right by. The British are utterly hopeless. They're even more racist than the Americans! (p 311).

Amusingly, Mosier, who utterly spuriously describes Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War as "the first work of any intellectual substance on the general issues of the war to appear since Churchill," adds, "The reader will notice that Ferguson's arguments and mine frequently converge on the same conclusion, although using drastically different methods to arrive there." (p 362). Actually, Ferguson's point in emphasizing the tremendous human cost of the war is in order to argue it should never have been fought; Germany should have been given Europe in order to save the British Empire.

Ferguson returns the compliment - "There is much in the work I really admire" he says in the blurb - but I'm not sure how Mosier accounts for Ferguson's opinion of American fighting qualities: "It was commonly claimed at the time (and some people still believe it) that the Americans `won the war.' In reality, the AEF suffered disproportionately large casualties, mainly because Pershing still believed in frontal assaults, dismissed British and French training as over-cautious, and insisted on maintaining outsized and unwieldy divisions. The American First Army's operations against the Hindenburg Line (the Kriemhilde Stellung) in September-October 1918 were old-fashioned and wasteful." (p 312).

The intention of this book is allegedly to do two things, both of which are wothy objectives:

1) To make greater use of non-English language, especially German, source material which has previously been neglected in histories of the war.

2) To draw more attention to the role played by American forces in the Great War.

Unfortunately, the bottom line is that, by any objective academic measure, it fails at both hurdles. For everything Mosier does right, he undoes his good work by doing something catastrophically wrong.
This book deserves an essay in itself to tackle the many things that are wrong with it, but I will try to confine myself to certain points.

- A main pillar of Mosier's thesis rests on casualty figures, but throughout the book he is apparently blissfully unaware that German casualty figures were calcultated in a different fashion to Allied ones.
- He apparently has no understanding of military reality or terminology. The Retreat from Mons is described as a "rout", which it categorically was not. We are informed bluntly that the British "lost" at Le Cateau, without any consideration of the objectives of fighting the battle (in fact, Smith-Dorrien achieved his objexctives, albeit as cost and it was a horrible blow for the Germans in strategic terms). Mosier's entire argument relies on his own idiosyncratic definition of what "victory" is. Which is unfortunate because it is plain wrong and would be treated as a joke by any serious historian or War Studies expert. I would criticise it as inflexible, but in fact in Mosier's hands it can show a remarkable flexibility when applied to making excuses for German failue or overblowing American success.
- The book's sourcing is shamefully bad. Rather than giving a proper bibliography we are treated to "An essay on the Sources" which a cynic might regard as a longhand attempt to disguise what is actually a rather thin selection.
- Mosier lambasts British sources as biased and useless. This is ironic as the only British (in fact two of the three are Australian, but whether Mosier is aware of this I'm not sure) sources Mosier accepts are three of books, each of which is ridiculously partial and has an enormous axe to grind. The first is the war memoirs of Lloyd George. That Mosier regards these as authoritative is a bad joke. They were written after the fact and are broadly viewed among the historical community as among the most partial and self serving political memoirs ever written. The second book, also with a political axe to grind, is "Haig's Command" by Denis Winter. This has rather more worth than LG's memoirs but has also been heavily criticised and quite neatly taken apart by Winter's fellow Australians Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson (themselves not exactly Haig's biggest admirers). Mosier conveniently doesn't mention the various debunkings of Winter's theories which have occurred, but justifies his absolute faith in the Winter text by stating "I believe him." Well that's all right then Professor... The third book, "British Butchers and Bunglers of the First World War" by the late Dr John Laffin does not even pass as a history book. It is more in the style of a polemic (as is Mosier's book, to be blunt). It is based ENTIRELY on secondary sources and Laffin's "proof" of his argument is a tiny and wildly selective group of quotes from Australian war veterans that is, frankly, shameful (similarly, Mosier's closing remarks on the "proof" that the Germans "won" is the fact that the Germans built more prominent comemorative statues and militaristic architecture than the British did). If any one chapter of Laffin's book had been presented as an undergraduate essay the tutor involved would have torn strips off the student who submited it.
- Mosier ignores anything that damages his argument. In some of his coverage of American tactical victories you would be forgiven for being under the impression that in their early battles the Americans did not go in behind waves of British tanks crewed by British soldiers and beinhd barrages provided by British guns with British gunners - you would be forgiven for not knowing this because Mosier doesn't seem to think this is worth mentioning. Having made a big thing about a) using German sources and b) supposed German technical superiority he then also makes no use of the large fund of German primary source material lamenting the superiority of Allied artillery and fire control systems. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the idea. These sorts of omissions occur on virtually every page.

I'd like to give this book an "A" for effort and a "D+" for results. But I don't even want to give Mosier that because it's actually a decidedly ignoble attempt. His tone throughout suggests a pre-established partiality and a complete abscence of academic objectivity. At some stages he borders on overt Anglophobia. Worst of all is his utterly contemptuous attitude towards academics who actually know their job rather better than he does. In fact, flicking through the final pages of the book as I write this review, I am startled afresh by just how amazingly arrogant and hubristic Mosier gets. The cherry on the top of the cake comes when Mosier claims that he and Niall Ferguson have come to the same conclusions. In the British hardback edition of the book, the dust jacket carries a cautiously positive review from Ferguson in which he praises Mosier for trying to dig up new sources but opens the review by saying "I profoundly disagree with Mosier's conclusions".

If you want to know about the American war effort in WW1 (and in fairness, it is an area that has been neglected rather more than it deserves to have been), read "The Doughboys" by Gary Mead. The next year should see the release of a number of books based on French and German sources (including new works on the neglected role of the French army). The clever money is on each and every one of them being better than this.

I would also refer people to the review on these pages by Dr Robert A. Forczyk, which strikes me as pretty much on the money and covers a few other points that are worth taking note of.

I actually found this book quite interesting and worth my time. The thesis is simply put that the Germans offered a far more flexible approach to tactical and operational problems encountered from 1914 on than the allies. Narrowly focused on that premise, the author supports his points well with in depth scholarship. Over and over again he recounts how the Germans grasped the technical concepts to overcome the tactical problems they were faced with from Belgium through Verdun and the Somme, and well into 1917.

In some ways Mosier falls in line with Paddy Griffin's thinking that there was no great tactical revolution from 1914-1918 due to the advent of the machine gun or other new weapons. Instead the changes and innovation were more gradual and dated back to the middle of the 19th century. Mosier points out repeatedly major differences between the Germans and allies with regard to artillery employment. His descriptions of the German, French and English artillery parks are right on target. The Germans had invested much in lighter field howitzers and mortars than the allies. And this difference would be to great advantage in the battles on the Western front. Mosier elaborates further on the mistaken Allied faith in shrapnel rounds to inflict damage on the enemy works. While today the true shrapnel round is all but gone (shrapnel we hear of today is just pieces of the HE shell itself, not pellets encased in the round as dating back to the 19th Century shells), at that day and age many artillerists felt shrapnel rounds were the most effective to use against infantry, cavalry, and general targets. There was even the belief that shrapnel would cut barbed wire, thus clearing no-man's-land for the advancing infantry. All was found to be faulty during the war years. Unfortunately, as Mosier brings out, the European Allies never seemed to have heeded this lesson. The Germans, and ultimately the Americans, did.

The second point of the book, and one that Mosier may get the most argument on, is the Germans were so much better tactically than the Allies that their casualty rates were much lower. I think Mosier presents some evidence to support this, but not enough to convince all. Clearly the Allies lost hundreds of thousands between battles like Verdun and the Somme, but the author contends in each case German losses were half to in some cases a third of the Allied tallies. And Mosier contends there was much obfuscation of the facts regarding the losses among the seats of power in the West. He alludes to cover ups that were perpetuated well past the war concerning the true losses of Britain and France. At the same time the Allies are said to have over estimated German losses by several factors. I am still not convinced of the former totally, but the later is definitely a point to consider. Clearly had the Germans faced the losses reported by the French and British high command in 1915-16 there would not have been a great offensive in by the Germans in the last year of the war. Germany would have been bleeding white. Even the additional troops from the East couldn't have off-set the losses the Allies thought they were inflicting.

Lastly, Mosier makes the point that the entry of the Americans tipped the balance, not so much just due to their raw numbers, but more so due to their approach to the battlefield. When I balance this against several other scholarly works on the AEF's record in the last year of the war, much of Mosier's writings strike a cord. I would also recommend "The War to End All Wars" by Edward Coffman and "Over There" by Frank Freidel for overall background on the AEF. But more along the thinking of Mosier, I'd recommend a read of Mark Grotelueschen's "Doctrine under Trial: American Artillery Employment in World War I." The US Army's Field Artillery branch practically re-invented itself from 1916 to 1918. Despite dead end trails such as the adoption of the French 75mm field gun, the Americans, uniquely among the Western Powers, seemed to have grasped the true application of field artillery on the modern battlefield. A lesson that the US Army would drive home with great affect from 1942 to 1945. To balance that branch, also read "An Uncertain Trumpet: The Evolution of US Army Infantry Doctrine, 1919-1941" by Kenneth Finlayson.

This goes beyond the true scope of the book, but I find it interesting that Pershing broke with the more "experienced" European commanders in his approach to combat on the Western Front. Pershing insisted on large American divisions, backed up with copious amounts of artillery and machine guns, to attack in very limited sectors to accomplish primary, secondary and tertiary objectives in turn. While still adhering to the "batter them with numbers" approach in some ways, in others this resembled the German approach to reducing the French lines at places like Verdun -- overwhelm them at one or two salient points, and thus nibble the enemy to a break.

Personally I find Mosier's stance on the last point rather refreshing. In schools and even institution of higher learning we are told the American contribution to World War I was fleetingly minor and only at the last stages of a conflict that had run it's course. Clearly that line of thinking is fraught with factual errors. The American involvement was instead the decisive turn in the war. Very few historians have made that stance, and even then only with stipulations and categorizations.

On the down side, the maps provided in the paperback edition were lacking in detail. Often the author would mention place names which were not displayed on any of the maps. Overall the book is a worthwhile addition to any military history library.

Professor Mosier has written a curiously uneven book that improves after a perilously weak beginning to give the reader several insightful discussions of French and British campaigns, a provocative view of the American Expeditionary Force in France, and an epilogue that's sure to spark further discussion. Mosier's "damn-the-torpedoes," glib manner of expression will irritate some readers, but later portions of his book challenge some popular beliefs about the causes of French and British casualties, the competence of Allied versus German military preparedness and tactics, and the role played by the United States in The Great War.

First, however, the reader has to slog through six chapters of much pontificating on the opening moves of World War One, including an egregiously distorted description of the Battle of the Marne. And in the "How's That Again?" category, one finds on page 32: "...von Schlieffen was not bound to present his plans to the government for approval. And wisely so, because as he himself soon concluded, his plan was unfeasible." Then on page 35: "...in 1906, von Schlieffen... was replaced. So was his plan." Both statements are bald nonsense. In retirement, Schlieffen continued to have faith in and fine-tune his complex and innovative plan right up to his death in 1912. And not only did the Germans use his plan to great effect, they came to within an ace of knocking France out of the war with it! Only a wavering von Moltke's last-minute changes to it, coupled with an irrepressible von Kluck's dogged pursuit of General Lanrezac's Fifth Army north of Paris, prevented the entrapment of the French armies envisioned by Schlieffen.

Unfortunately, Mosier hits the reader with this sort of thing too often in the early going, but hang on, because from Chapter Seven onward, he gives us a better-thought-out narrative covering the ironies, heartbreaks, and impacts of several lesser known but important battles. Chapters 16 and 17 covering the period of the American Expeditionary Force's participation in the war are particularly rousing (given Mosier's penchant for the inflammatory comment) and provocative.

All in all, this is an entertaining book, but it must be used with extreme caution. And whoever was tasked with proofreading and editing the text at HarperCollins should be taken out, put up against a wall, and shot.

The German army fought well from the first day of World War I and always adapted to new conditions quickly. The British and the French armies both fought stupidly at the beginning. The British Army learned nothing during the whole war, and the French army learned a bit, finally. The American Army learned how to fight before they went to the front, and then beat the hell out of the Germans. Thus ending the war.

That's Mr. Mosier's interpretation of World War I in Western Europe. He does not seem to mind that the German's killed all those civilians in Belgium and Northern France or that they violated Belgian neutrality at the start of the war. That is the difference between politics and war. My words, not his. He does not think it is important to mention that other authors have been over parts of this ground before him. Which is the difference between writing history for an academic audience and writing for the general public. My words, not his. Which doesn't mean you might not want to read this book.

The author of "The Myth of the Great War" goes too far. What probably would have made a good article summarizing several related themes about the war turns into a relentless anti-British and anti-French polemic, and finally a pro-American polemic. A polemic that looses its power because the reader begins to doubt the author's ability to honestly analyze the information he is looking at. And possibly starts looking at other sources of information. Which may agree with Mr. Mosier, by coming to the same conclusions he comes to. Before he did. Or may disagree with him, based on data he does didn't find. Or mention.

The part of this book I really liked was the author's insight into the early months of World War I in the west. While British training emphasized rifle fire and French doctrine the power of the bayonet, the Germans were equipping their army with modern howitzers larger than any in the French army. With these weapons the Germans were able to put devastatingly effective plunging artillery shells onto both enemy fortresses and enemy troops hidden behind and on top of hills. Mosier's writing about the superiority of artillery firepower of the Germans over the Allies and the impact of that superiority during the first months of the war is enlightening. And for the comparison of Germans with the French, it is well supported by both citations and pictures.

(The focus on a "comparison of the Germans with the French" is an important phrase here, because Mosier doesn't bother to compare German artillery with British artillery. About here in the book I began to suspect that the author was going to make his point even if he had to leave things out. Certainly Lyn Macdonald, writing in "1914, The Days of Hope" seems to think British artillery training and equipment was equal to that of the German. And Antulio Echevarria in "After Clausewitz" notes that the question of heavy howitzer or light field gun is not a new area of study.)

I found Mosier's look at the first German attacks in Belgium, the early Battle of the Frontiers, and the Battle of the Marne, and various battles on either side of Verdun in September 1914 intriguing. And compelling. He shows how early German superiority in artillery firepower and operations allowed the German army to blast its way through the Belgium fortresses around Liege and Namur before the French even began to react to the German violation of Belgium's neutrality. And how that superiority decimated the French and British armies in 1914 and led to a strategic situation in the west that helped assure German relative success until 1918. This part of the book is also supported by detailed citations, many in French and German. It is also supported by Mosier's on the ground investigation of some of the lesser-known engagements.

After its early successes the German army kept adapting. The number of artillery pieces in any given German military unit increased as the number of soldiers in a German division decreased. And the number of machine guns and small mortars, a German innovation, kept increasing too. In the author's view, this ability to adapt quickly was unique to the Germans. And later, to the Americans.

(There is nothing in "The Myth of the Great War" about the "cutting of the British division from 12 infantry battalions to 9 [which] resulted in a proportional increase in artillery and machine guns in relation to manpower". Yet this data is readily available in easily accessible sources, including - of all places - an article titled "The Morale of the German Arm, 1917-1918" in a book titled "Facing Armageddon, The First World War Experienced". Certainly this contradicts Mosier's dogmatic assertion that the British never learned anything during the war? Well, maybe it doesn't. But he should mention it and explain why it doesn't contradict one of his primary assertions.)

The quality of the book seemed to deteriorate the more I read. At the far extreme and the end of the book, the author's interpretation of events in 1918 is interesting. It involves continuing disdain for the French army and especially for the British army. This is out of line with much I have read about World War I. Mosier also reports that holding much of the American army out of combat during the winter and spring of 1918, so that the AEF could fight as a unit, allowed it to receive high quality training. And that training produced a fighting force superior to the Germans late in that year. But giving to the American army the role of breaking the German Army in battle is hard to believe. (See for example the small role assigned to the American Army in 1918 by Gregor Dallas in "1918, War and Peace".)

If, in fact, the American army won the war because of the training it received before entering battle, than I think that it could honestly be said that the time to get that training was earned at the expense of French and British dead. The proper way to account for this is beyond me. I wish Mosier had addressed this.

The book does have a large number typos, sentence fragments and spelling errors, as mentioned in other reviews. Whatever, the book provides a good summary of some extreme interpretations of World War I in Western Europe. Read it with care.

The Myth of the Great War is a fatally flawed revisionist account of WW1 that asserts that all previous accounts were distorted by Allied propaganda, faulty historiography, bias and selective use of facts. Mosier, an English professor whose writing style seems to demonstrate that higher education in Louisiana means successfully stringing together sentence fragments, asserts that the Germans won all the battles due to their immense superiority in artillery and tactical skill, but that the Americans reversed the tide of inevitable German victory. The author then employs German propaganda, faulty historiography, bias and selective use of facts to demonstrate that everyone who wrote about the war prior to him was either a fool or a liar. The level of intellectual dishonesty and objectivity that Mosier employs to validate and sensationalize his counter-intuitive hypothesis is astounding.

Right up front, readers with background in the First World War will begin to suspect Mosier's integrity by his flagrant and frequent use of exaggerations and deliberate concealment of relevant facts. Mosier asserts Germany's technological edge, in that "the German army entered the war using weapons that the British and the French simply didn't possess (hand grenades, mortars, motorized super-heavy artillery).." but he fails to mention that the Germans had only fifty small minenwerfer or that the British engineers had hand grenades just like the German pioneers. Nor does he mention that the British Stokes mortar introduced in August 1915 was far superior to German models and became the standard design up to the current day. Indeed, Mosier is constantly harping on German technological adaptiveness, but fails to mention that the Allies pressed steel helmets into service a year before the Germans, or the rapid introduction of gas masks to counter the new poison gas. Furthermore, Germany's failure to seriously pursue tank development is dismissed by Mosier as irrelevant since tanks were still mechanically unreliable. Mosier ignores Joffre's artillery program of 1915 that quickly began to rectify Allied deficiencies in that arm or the frequent use of super-heavy railroad guns. Mosier is also overly fond of exaggerated terms like "massacre," "destroyed, " "wiped out," or "annihilated" when referring to Allied losses. The author's repeated reference to Allied "kamikaze attacks" is gratuitously stupid.

Distortions are rampant in this account. Mosier asserts that, "Germany won the military struggle against its adversaries because Germany used its resources more intelligently." Really? What about the logistic infeasibility of the Schlieffen Plan, the huge waste of steel on a High Seas Fleet that spent most of the war at anchor and then mutinied, expensive Zeppelins and an indecisive attrition offensive at Verdun instead of finishing off Russia in 1916? Mosier is quick to assert German tactical success at the Marne in 1914, St Mihiel in 1914 and Verdun in 1916 - yet why did they always stop or withdraw at the hour of victory if Allied efforts were so ineffective? Indeed, Mosier never asks why German tactical success failed to produce a strategic success in any of their offensives in 1914-1916. The author also misunderstands the role of artillery in trench warfare; heavy artillery was only effective in defeating attacks in conjunction with barbed wire and inter-locking machine gun posts. Without an obstacle belt covered by machine gun fire, the German artillery would not have stopped Allied infantry attacks.

The only decent part of this account is the discussion of the post-Marne German attacks in Argonne and St Mihiel, which are usually ignored in other accounts. Mosier's account of the little-known 1915 struggle for the Buttes - the Vauquois and Les Éparges - is interesting but ignores better Allied efforts at Neuve Chapelle and Vimy Ridge in the same period. Furthermore, the author delights in detailing French losses but fails to mention "der Kindermord" (massacre of the Innocents) of German reservists at Ypres in late 1914.

Certainly the most blatant example of the author's dishonest approach is his use of the Tavannes railroad tunnel accidental explosion on 4 September 1916 that killed about 500-600 French troops to assert that, "this incident...suggests a lack of order in the French Army....in a well-organized and properly run army [i.e. the German Army] such things as the Tavannes tunnel disaster don't happen." It is inconceivable that an author who spent so much time walking around Verdun would be unaware of the German accidental explosion at Fort Douamont on 8 May 1916 that killed 600 troops. Why was the French accident an indictment of their army, but not the German accident? When it comes to the British, Mosier's narrative continually eschews objectivity. Mosier asserts that, "in the United Kingdom, with its traditions of a volunteer army, there had never been any pressure forcing the military to train efficiently..." What about the Haldane Commission of 1907 that affected major changes due to lessons learned in the Boer War? Mosier fixates on German General von Mudra as the originator of new combined arms tactics (ignoring Bruchmuller's artillery innovations) but completely ignores the "Monash Method" on the Allied side. The author dismisses Allied successes: "the capture of Vimy Ridge was an impressive accomplishment, but the army commanders were unable to follow it up properly." Mosier also asserts that, "the United States was a cobelligerent long before it declared war," but fails to mention the trips of the German blockade running submarine Deutschland to the USA in 1916 just months before American entry into war. Would a cobelligerent give Germany vital war material?

The author also has a annoying tendency for double-talk. Mosier asserts that, "Belleau Wood was a crucial engagement.." but on the next page, "Belleau Wood was an insignificant engagement.." What was it? At first, Mosier asserts that American general Pershing, "had the background for the task, which made him unique among the senior commanders of the war" and that Pershing was a general "when Petain, Foch and Haig .. were all still colonels." Actually, Haig was a major general in 1905 when Pershing was still a captain.

In the author's opinion the Germans defeated the Allies on the battlefield because they suffered far fewer military deaths and he goes on to try to explain why Germany still lost the war.

For most historians there are several reasons why the Germans eventually gave up fighting - and lost the war. (1) The Allies willingness and power to go on fighting. (2) The arrival of the Americans, and (3) reasons beyond the Western Front such as unrest in Germany, shortage of food and starvation, the affects of the British Naval blockade, and the collapse of Germany's allies.

For Professor Mosier only one reason counts; the arrival of the Americans and their success in military operations.

In denigrating the military effort of the Allies the author says the aim of the first German offensive in March 1918 was to disable the British and push them back forming a protective manoeuvring space so that further south the Germans could march on Paris against the French safe from attack on their flank from the British.

This is totally at odds with German planning and what German senior military figures said then and since. The aim of the Great March Offensive was to destroy the British and win the war. It failed.

The March Offensive concentrated 76 divisions - about 40 percent of the entire German strength on the Western Front - against 26 British divisions. It was the single biggest attack of the whole war. All that it achieved was a vast vulnerable German salient and, most important of all, considerable damage to Germany's own fighting power.

Other German offensives followed but none matched the March offensive in its scale. The last one was met by a fierce French counter offensive of 24 divisions including 2 American and 2 British and a spearhead of over 225 French tanks that produced the first demonstration that the German Army was on the road to defeat.

On the 8 August at Amiens the British Fourth Army recovered part of the salient lost in March. The achievement was not in the ground recovered which was of little value but in the destruction of the German forces and the record numbers of prisoners taken.

The German Official Monograph said of the Battle of Amiens: "the greatest defeat which the German Army had suffered since the beginning of the war was an accomplished fact. The total loss is estimated at 26,000 to 27,000. More than two-thirds of the total loss had surrendered as prisoners."

Professor Mosier dismisses Amiens saying, "It was successful because the Germans had already begun to withdraw". The Germans had a different view of the battle.

The final war-winning stroke from the Allies was a general offensive against the Hindenburg Line. Four army groups made the attack one of which included an American Army.

26 September - A French army and an American army in the Meuse-Argonne area.

27 September - The British First and Third Armies in Artois.

28 September - Belgium, French and British armies in Flanders.

29 September - The British Fourth Army, supported by the French First Army in the Somme region.

The American First Army took until the 10 October to fight its way up to the Hindenburg Line and did not break through until the 16 October when they reached the objectives set for the first day. Difficult country, keen but inexperienced troops, chaotic logistics, and German resistance, combined to put the Americans through their own short version of struggles like the Somme and Verdun with casualty rates comparable to those the Allies suffered and for much the same bad reasons.

The British Fourth Army broke the Hindenburg Line almost immediately and was clear of the German defensive system and in open country by the 5 October.

There can be no doubt about the scale of the part played by the French and the British in the military victory on the Western Front in 1918. The Americans had a big part, but it was not as Professor Mosier believes a one-man play.

The work is virulently anti-British. Nearly every time the British are mentioned sarcasm is added to criticism. At the Somme for example, the author says, "The natural boundary between the two armies was the Somme River. However, the BEF had thoughtfully left the swamps (on the northern side) to the French,... " This is also a good an example of the way the author twists things. Joffre insisted that the French were present on the northern bank of the Somme so that co-ordination between the armies would be easier than if the river ran between them.

In addition to the author's omissions and twists the book contains an amazing number of mistakes. It is altogether a faulty piece of history.