Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
27 of 33 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.
|
|
|
37 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Old material repackaged. Nicely. Read with care., July 16, 2002
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.
|
|
|
33 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Myth of Objectivity, February 22, 2003
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).
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by John Keegan
by Martin Gilbert
by Alistair Horne
