Since smart people I respect seem to think so much of this VDH column, it seems necessary to point out some of the more fantastically crazy things Hanson says in that column:
Few believed that it was a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany; fought heroically by amateur French, British, and American soldiers who defeated the professionalism and skill of the German army (the most lethal land force that had yet appeared); and was a result of two different and largely antithetical visions of Europe. No one dared accept that the post-bellum failure to invade Germany, occupy Berlin, and demonstrate the utter lunacy of German militarism had caused World War II; the problem was that the victorious allies had been too mean rather than too fickle.
Yes, few believe these things, because these things are not true. WWI wasn’t principally a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany. It was the result of combined Austrian meddling, Russian folly, British hesitation and German diffidence. The problem with Berlin in the July crisis was its passivity in guiding its allies’ policies, not in its aggressiveness. German “aggressiveness” in the Schlieffen Plan was an unavoidable result of being encircled by the Franco-Russian alliance. Blame that on stupid Wilhelmine Weltpolitik and the decision to drop the connection with Russia, which you certainly can do, but spare us the lectures about German aggression. The two antithetical visions of Europe to which Hanson refers were the vision in which the Entente powers continued to dominate most of the world and the vision in which Germany would be permitted to join them as a first-rank power. Scary! It never ceases to amaze me how people can look at the vastly stronger, more powerful alliance in the Entente and see in it some poor victim of overmighty Germany and the allies that it had to carry for the duration.
Hanson’s “On to Berlin!” idea is stunning. To believe that this was even possible, much less desirable, by the time the Ludendorff offensive failed is to be quite wrong. It was possible to occupy Paris because Napoleon had been beaten in the field, but the treatment of the defeated party ensured that it was incorporated into the system of European powers and not treated with the harshness that its aggression might have seemed to merit. Not only does Hanson find the “Carthaginian peace” imposed on Germany lacking as a punishment, but he seems to think that humiliating and grinding the Germans under the boot even more would have stamped out German nationalism. This is shockingly wrong. What was the German response to the Napoleonic invasions and occupations? It was in part the creation and cultivation of German nationalism. Does anyone think, supposing it was actually possible to do (and the American public would never have tolerated prolonging the war to capture Berlin), that occupying Germany in the 1920s would have created a less bitter, less resentful, less nationalistic, less revanchist Germany? Does anyone think that a liberal democratic constitution imposed by the Allied sword directly would have been more acceptable to German nationalists than the one adopted by Germans after the Armistice? This would only have delayed the resumption of hostilities, but it would have ensured that the revenge meted out by the Germans on those who had occupied their country would have been even more severe. This is a perfect example of the problem with Hanson’s whole view: whatever the problem, it could have been solved by the application of even more force.
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May 21st, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Grumpy Old Man
I suppose Hanson thinks we should have Christianized them, too.
WWI was, as Robert Graves’s title hasit, Goodbye To All That, namely European civilization. It would have been better, all things considered, if the U.S. had stayed out, and Germany had won on points.
Bavaria the 49th state? I don’t think so.
Of course, Daniel, we know you make these quotes up. Even Marty Peretz is a figment of your Byzantine mind.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:42 am
Alexei
It is amazing that a military historian should make claims so radical, as if WWI had been nothing but a milder version of WWII. This is pure revisionism: Hanson might as well be fishing for supporting arguments in Russian or British WWI propaganda. Likewise, his two “antithetical visions of Europe” is a laughable conceit: the warring parties’ “visions” of post-war Europe differed primarily in the identity of the alliance that would dominate the continent.
Hanson ignores the fact that Germany was provoked into attacking France by Russia’s mobilization, which threatened to (and eventually did) leave Germany fighting both in the West and the East. Hanson should also be able to recall how the French post-war plundering of the German lands to the West of the Rhine (and, in general, French intransigence and vindictiveness) both proved that the Entente had no moral edge over the enemy whatever, and implanted despair, resentment and a thirst for revenge into many Germans.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:48 am
Daniel Larison
What I find amusing about the statements that I and others have quoted is that they come from an appeal to revive the study of military history, when it seems evident from this statement about WWI that Hanson not only wants people to learn military history, but he also wants them to learn false versions of it. Hanson’s main complaint here seems to be that the overwhelming consensus of WWI scholars do not endorse his preferences for skull-crushing ruthlessness as the proper counterfactual way to prevent WWII.
I didn’t get into the “two visions” bit very much. That was a big target. As you say, it was simply a question of which alliance dominated Europe. The old “autocracy v. democracy” nonsense that Entente governments started putting out and that Wilson promoted is not very credible as a description of the “visions” of the two sides. The “visions” were antithetical only in the sense that each side wanted to win, which tended to conflict with the other side’s desire to win, but they were otherwise not really very starkly opposed ideologically. (This would be where I normally point out that Germany created multiple quisling, er, young democratic national governments liberated from the cruel yoke yadda yadda yadda, but that would be piling on.)
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:32 pm
daninardmore
I used to think that at least Hanson’s credentials as a classics scholar were sound, but any more I have to wonder about that too.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Grumpy Old Man
I’ve always respected VDH. The “march on Berlin” thing gives me pause, though.
It seems exceptionally goofy.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Daniel Larison
Here’s the thing. Whatever other classicists think of him personally, he has apparently done quality work in classical Greek history and I don’t claim that he hasn’t. It’s when he ventures out into any other period of history or contemporary policy debates that he goes from a reasonably careful thinker to, well, the VDH we all know.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:06 pm
daninardmore
I guess it’s just another example of how someone can be sound, even great, in one field, and a crackpot when he ventures afield. Certain scientists come to mind, such as Carl Sagan.
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:25 am
Alexei
Daniel, the “young democratic” governments must have included the Central Rada in Ukraine, but what else?
From a different angle, if I were a military historian, I think I could come up with a credible (”one that better-known figures have promoted”) theory justifying the march on Berlin in 1918. I would claim that the Prussian state, from its inception as a kingdom in the 18th century, had been prone to military expansion; draw a continuous line from Frederick the Great to Bismarck to Wilhelm II to Hitler; and explain how, as early as in the Seven-Year War, Russia intended to annex Eastern Prussia, a plan that only came to fruition in 1945, when Prussia’s historical core was dismembered, and Brandenburg fell under Soviet control. To back this far-fetched continuity, I would stretch the line backward to Teutonic knights using the principality of Prussia as the outpost for expansion in the East Baltics. That would still be a rather dubious theory, of course.
May 23rd, 2007 at 7:14 am
Daniel Larison
Unless I am mistaken, the Germans also promoted Batlic national independence movements and helped to back an independent Finland. In fairness to these nations, they had already taken some of the initiative themselves, but for as long as Germany was in the war they provided troops to back these forces against communist forces (when those soldiers probably could have been put to better use almost anywhere else). Of course, they backed all of these peoples to serve as buffers and satellites, but if “national liberation” and “self-determination” were supposedly the “vision” of the Allies by the end, the Germans had already outdone them while the war was still going on.
May 24th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Alexei
Sure enough, Germany would support political movements it saw as subversive in Russia — politically, the weakest link in the Entente. Even after Brest-Litovsk, from the early 1918 to the Armistice, Germany supported newly-formed governments in Ukraine and the Baltics. German troops left Ukraine in late 1918, leaving it to the mercy of Ukrainian nationalists and then Bolsheviks. In general, the German occupation of 1918 was remembered as benevolent in Ukraine, which would lead some Ukrainian Jews to falsely assume, twenty-three years later, that Germans were not to be feared. The German-backed Skoropadsky government was perhaps the most efficient in the history of Ukraine as an autonomous entity.
The story is much more complicated in the Baltics, but the bottom line is that German troups helped Latvia to repel the Red Army, tried to seize power in Latvia and Estonia, largely on behalf of the Batlic Germans, but were defeated, which later led to Baltic Germans losing their land holdings in those countries, in exchange for a modest compensation.