Posted on 07/28/2014 9:21:30 AM PDT by Borges
Bender he is on his way sadly to tell you on that
He is Kaisher Wilhem here in the US
Actually that partly true
If Kaisher did win I think it be constitunarl monarchy both Russia and Germany heading to that part of world what heading to around time of WW1
If you look at character of last Russia Tsar he didn’t want be Tsar I think you could describe him as Russia/English Victoria Gentleman that is influence of his wife Tsarina Alexandra
If you want see good story on Royal families of Europe get DVD the Fall of Eagles came out in 1970s on Masterpiece theatre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles
Totally a***hole to his personal family like ransacking his parents bedroom to find incrimating evidence while his father was dying of throat cancer year later his mom was dying of breast cancer
If Tuchman was correct, the Russians mobilized faster than the Germans expected them to, which required the Germans to divert forces from France to Russia, giving the French a chance to dig-in and make a stand.
By the end of August 1914 the first trenches were dug, the pattern was set, and the Grim Reaper began his 4+ year, 10000 man-per-day harvest.
Ping.
I think the author was a little too sanguine about the general stability of Europe, and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in particular, in 1914. These were disintegrating under their proprietors' feet and some sort of storm was clearly on the horizon. It is a pity that Princip killed the one man who had a plan for the peaceful breakup of the former and the ability, after Franz Joseph's death, to carry it through. That might have avoided at least one major issue, Serbian independence. The Ottoman empire had been steadily losing ground in Europe since the high-water mark of 1683, and it was, after all, from them and not the Austrians that the Serbs first won their independence.
What happened, I think, was simply that too many parties had their own intentions for what they thought would be a limited war, and what actually eventuated was quite beyond the imagination, far less the control, of any of them. Europe had seen some pretty ghastly wars before it - the Thirty Years' War comes to mind - but nothing on the scale of the fully industrialized, total war fueled by a technology burst that was WWI. The Armistice that supplied a 20-year breathing spell turned out to be a botched effort but it is a miracle that it worked at all.
All IMHO and worth whatever ya paid to read it... ;-)
I tend to agree. The problem was, the last serious continental war was the Napoleonic when war tech was far more primitive. By WWI, the tech allowed them, in what would have formerly taken a generation to accomplish, to wipe out a generation in a few short years.
By the time they figured that out, it had already happened.
It’s been described as “Young men trying to wear-out machine-guns with their chests”.
Saturday is the 80th anniversary of the death of Hindenburg.
For all the miscalculation on the part of the German General Staff, the First Marne was a close-run thing. The supply-problems on the German Right Wing were causing delays which in turn created a gap in the line that the French & BEF exploited. So it took twin German failures at both the Strategic (how fast will the Russians move?) & Operational levels (how far & fast can I push my right-wing in the general wheeling movement?) to save Paris. Strategic considerations are always more important, so I'll go with Tuchman's analysis too. But it was almost a case where a little more military professionalism or a little luck could have retrieved the situation for Germany.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.