Michael S. Neiberg. Fighting the Great War: A Global History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xx + 395 pp. $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02251-5; $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-01696-5.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (School of Social Sciences, Northwestern State University of Louisiana)
Published on H-German (May, 2007)
World War I and the Birth of the Twentieth Century
In this impressive one-volume study, Michael Neiberg provides readers with a well-written overview of the key military events of the First World War and their broader implications for the evolution of modern industrial warfare and the military-political complexes of the belligerents. While devoting ample material to the Western Front and its main traumas of the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele, to name a few, Neiberg also includes effective surveys other major theaters of the war that may be less familiar to students, such as the Eastern, Balkan, Italian, Middle Eastern and African Fronts. In so doing, Neiberg presents an insightful yet accessible overview of the First World War and the extent to which it has shaped important aspects of twentieth-century world history.
Not surprisingly, Neiberg devotes much of his book to the events on the Western Front with chapters on the defining battles of the Marne, Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele, through the German offensives of 1918. Additionally, Neiberg gives the major commanders and political leaders, particularly those of the Allies, colorful and often sympathetic portrayals. Indeed, one of his major points is to "debunk the conventional stereotype of the unfeeling general, safe behind enemy lines, blithely ignoring the casualty figures presented to him" (p. 70). It was thus the stalemate on the Western Front that authorized British War Secretary Kitchener to transform the British military from a volunteer professional fighting force to a "mass citizen force with intimate links to the larger society" (p. 74). Moreover, the carnage of trench warfare and the unprecedented casualties resulting from a largely defensive war forced the Allies to break their generals' exclusive monopoly on military decision-making in favor of increased civilian influence. "The result," Neiberg writes, "was a dynamic, if occasionally confrontational, relationship that helped the Allies win the war" (p. 280). Among the most important outcomes of these new arrangements was the formation of a joint Allied command structure for the war's final year, led by French general Ferdinand Foch, which provided a new model for modern warfare and greatly facilitated the integration of John Pershing's American troops in 1918. Notably significant in light of the present-day nature of American power was Pershing's unwillingness to allow his soldiers to be integrated into an international command structure.
Neiberg's treatment of the German war effort is, with some justification, less sympathetic, as readers are presented with the usual litany of dubious personalities, including Wilhelm II, Paul von Hindenberg, Erich Ludendorff, and Erich Georg von Falkenhayn. Neiberg also views the war in Europe as an Allied effort to contain German expansionism, which he also largely blames for the war's outbreak, an issue that perhaps deserves a broader historical debate rather than simply being treated as accepted fact. Nevertheless, Neiberg cannot avoid emphasizing the major innovations, however brutal, the Germans introduced to twentieth-century warfare, including the use of chemical weapons and the incorporation of mobile, elite units fighting alongside regulars behind and around enemy lines. Neiberg attributes special significance, however, to two elements of the German war effort, namely, its economic war with Britain in the North Atlantic and the introduction of attrition warfare at Verdun. The use of submarines against the British Blockade, he maintains, completely upended the traditional rules of naval warfare, since "they did not permit escort, and they had no room in which to store contraband goods or safeguard a ship's crew. They could only either sink a ship or let it pass" (p. 133). It was thus the United States' frustration with these new circumstances of naval warfare that led to its declaration of war against Germany in spring 1917. Finally, Neiberg isolates the 1916 Verdun offensive, the brainchild of the "ruthless" Falkenhayn, as a foreshadowing of what much of warfare would become in the twentieth century: "He [Falkenhayn] did not care about breaking enemy lines, capturing territory, or advancing on communication nodes. He sought instead to kill Frenchmen faster and more efficiently than they could kill Germans" (p. 159).
Among the most significant contributions of Neiberg's work, particularly within the scope of a one-volume study, is the incorporation of the conflict's other major theaters and their long-term effects on twentieth-century history. Especially illuminating in light of current events are the campaigns involving the Ottoman Empire on multiple fronts, particularly in the Caucasus against Russia and in the Middle East against Britain. These fronts are of particular interest because it was largely out of fear that Turkey's Armenian population would support its Russian enemy that the Ottoman army instituted a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing of Armenians now considered by most historians to be the first modern genocide. On another front, the British embarked on a major campaign against the Ottomans in the Middle East with the goal of expanding the British sphere of influence in the region, while the Ottoman response was to "define the war as a pan-Islamic struggle against the Christian allies" (p. 140), in the hopes that doing so would secure the support of the empire's Arab population as well as incite a rebellion among the Muslims of British India. When Britain ultimately reneged on its initial promise to allow the creation of independent Arab states in the Ottoman Empire's former Middle Eastern territories in favor of British and French control of the newly created Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Mesopotamia, and Syria, the outcome was, according to Neiberg, a "Gordian knot that the British could not possibly cut. The Middle East's tortured twentieth century had been born" (p. 149). Students are likely to benefit from learning about this accessible connection between the First World War and the tumultuous contemporary American involvement in the region.
While Neiberg's focus remains largely on the military history of the war, the obvious constraints of a one-volume study notwithstanding, it is somewhat disappointing that, given the exhaustive historiography available, he generally neglects the important connections between the pressures of total war and popular mobilization on the home front. Neiberg indeed raises this issue in the first chapter when he declares that the "victors of World War I were the democratic states of Great Britain, France, and the United States," because they "depended less on the authority of antiquated monarchical systems. As a result, they did not experience revolutions" (p. 7). This statement therefore invites at least a brief treatment of the critical role that public opinion played in the wartime evolution of Germany and especially Russia. The installment of the Hindenburg-Ludendorff "dictatorship" in 1916, the replacement of Theobard von Bethmann-Hollweg with Georg Michaelis as chancellor, and the dramatic escalation of Germany's war aims, whose evolution from 1914-18 Neiberg never clarifies, were all examples of the Wilhelmine state's concession to popular forces. Belinda Davis, for example, has provided an alternative view of Michaelis, who was chosen specifically because of his popularity among the Berlin population and his ability to oversee effective food distribution in face of the British Blockade.[1] Also absent is the Reichstag's passage of the Peace Resolution in July 1917 calling for an immediate peace without annexations, an indication of resurgent parliamentary influence in the German government. Neiberg thus presents a now familiar and somewhat superficial image of wartime Germany as an authoritarian monolith controlled by ruthless annexationists. In a similar vein, students might also be somewhat confused by Neiberg's brief treatment of the Bolshevik Revolution, which he essentially presents as Germany's successful attempt to erode the Russian war effort from within by sending the Lenin "Beelzebub" across the Eastern Front. It is indeed rather surprising that Neiberg neglects to mention the dramatic popular developments between March and November 1917, namely the formation of workers' and soldiers' soviets and the peasant revolutions that provided the public underpinnings of the Bolshevik seizure of power. In both instances, Neiberg might have served his audience better if he had emphasized the collisions between military-political authority and popular mobilization in the monarchies of central and eastern Europe and their far-reaching results.
Note
[1]. Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 214.
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Citation:
Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Review of Neiberg, Michael S., Fighting the Great War: A Global History.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13142
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