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“Four year old article is terrific.” [Borges, post 1]

“...Americans have continued to believe that progress is built into history. …” [from the third paragraph of the Atlantic article]

With minor exceptions, Jay Winter’s article comes somewhat short of terrific. Most of it is revisionist hooey.

Winter hews dutifully to the Left/Progressive line that all combatants were equally “to blame,” and that the Allies knowingly begged for a rerun - courtesy of the Nazis - by being so “mean” in setting the terms of the Versailles Treaty; wrong on both counts.

In truth, Imperial Germany egged on the Austrians, then tossed aside every scrap of strategic insight (not to mention caution) by insisting on carrying out their Schlieffen Plan for a two-front war, which called for taking down the French first, before applying serious effort to Imperial Russia, then deemed to be the greater but slower-responding threat.

And what today’s goofy humanitarians assume about the Versailles Treaty is entirely uninformed by previous history: punitive treaties, requiring losers to pay sizable reparations and admit culpability, were an almost universal norm before 1900. The general public in the victorious nations would have dismissed their leaders as daft, had any “kindlier” treaty provisions been agreed to.

The UK did not maneuver anyone into the action. Indeed, in pre-invasion strategic/diplomatic internal discussions, the German leadership did not even bother to mention the possibility of British intervention by land forces - save to dismiss their importance. The onrushing German juggernaut would simply wipe any conceivable BEF off the map as it marched across Belgium into France.

British financial leaders have sometimes been blamed, right alongside the “international Jewish banking conspiracy,” with equally little substance to the complaint. It’s a matter of public record that of all UK interest groups, London’s financiers were the least supportive of British participation, and the most fearful about a negative result.

Some critics condemn the absence of American “evenhandedness” in trade: US/German trade shrank to nothing, while trade with the Allies increased. Fits neatly with the fantasies of Anglophobes, but in truth the country could not have maintained any commerce with the Germans: the Royal Navy kept command of the seas throughout the war, so the blockade against the Central Powers would have blocked American shipping bound for Germany just as it had stopped the merchant vessels of all other nations. If the US Navy had challenged the situation, it would have found itself at the bottom of the Atlantic shortly after.

Alert observers will note that critics of Allied response to the Central Powers rarely pose any alternatives that would have been helpful, to say nothing about being politically feasible, or even so much as technically possible. Were the French supposed to concede the loss of some of their most strategically critical, and industrially productive, regions? Were the British supposed to have granted the Germans free access to worldwide maritime commerce, as a reward for violating Belgian sovereignty, occupying 1/6 of French territory, and threatening everybody else?

The allegations of indifference to casualty rates and the sufferings of troops have been repeated so often that they have become “common sense” - received dogma, to acolytes of the academic/scholarly orthodoxy that has held sway since the 1920s. The lack of strategic flexibility and paucity of “imagination” on the part of Allied leaders is another common theme - without (of course) suggesting any alternative that could conceivably have been put into practice.

On a technical and tactical level, the technological advances that made such lethal firepower possible, the productivity of early 20th century industry that made such high rates of munitions expenditure possible, and the worldwide transport by mechanized rail and steamship which brought raw materials to the combatants to sustain such productivity, had not yet been matched by any other advances that would mitigate the carnage or shorten the war in other ways. Mobility on the battlefield was no better than it had been 100 years earlier, in the time of Napoleon. Electronic communications were just starting to be used. Battlefield surveillance and intelligence collection enjoyed improvements, in technique and in management, but were still primitive. Air power advanced but a small distance into the potential foreseen by writers like Jules Verne and H G Wells, a generation or more earlier.

All of which added up to a favoring of defense over offense: once a ground offensive was launched, the commander was cut off from current information about a fluid, fast-moving battle situation just at the very moment it became most critical to know things and make speedier decisions; he thus became just as impotent, just as helpless to affect the outcome as the lowliest private in his corps, divisions, regiments, and detachments.

The shortcomings were not remedied until other advances got made: in the reliability and load-carrying capacity of mechanized ground vehicles and aircraft, in radio, in the invention of radar, and in the creation of a more systematized exploitation of intelligence. Together, these technical improvements, on top of the firepower innovations that in many cases carried over unchanged from World War One, made Allied success in World War Two a reality.

At the end of the first edition of his single-volume history of the Great War, the late Sir John Keegan concluded starkly that its causes remained shrouded in mystery.