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And then of course one can argue that WWI doesn’t attract the attention of people because it had no positive outcome. A lot of people got killed setting up the landscape for an even more destructive conflict beginning in 1939.
World War II had a lot more people involved including about 11 million US service members. But it also defeated a truly ruthless regime and paved the way for a generation of peace and economic stability in Western Europe and established a bulwark against Communism.
The Twentieth Century was a disaster for ordinary Europeans. World War I and World II are really the same war with a twenty year armistice in the middle.
I would encourage anyone interested in this period to read a classic about the period just before the war. Its Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower. Tuchman also wrote The Guns of August which discusses the origins of the war.
The monarchs of Europe had become extremely decadent and could not see that the system of empires which controlled much of Europe had become outmoded. Most of them were related by blood which made the coming war seem even more absurd.
Much of what brought about the war was a system of alliances between different nations. France had fought Germany in 1870 and had marched to Paris. The French were determined that would never happen again and so they formed an Alliance with Russia. Russia got large loans and new railroads in exchange for a guarantee that if Germany ever invaded France that Russia would immediately attack Germany from the East.
Germany formed an alliance with the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Later, the Ottoman Empire or Turkey joined this alliance.
This particular system of alliances virtually guaranteed that a war would engulf the whole European continent if any two countries became involved in some kind of clash.
The industrial revolution that had occurred during the Nineteenth Century guaranteed that the war would be a bloody one fought with machine guns, modern artillery, airplanes, and at the end of the war, even tanks.
Ultimately, the whole continent was a powder keg that exploded in August 1914.
Casualties from the war were staggering. I am sure the Armistice of November 11, 1918 was an occasion for great joy in much of the world. I've seen pictures of people celebrating and they are very compelling. In my home state of Utah, I remember reading how a steam engine was brought down the trolley car tracks to the city center and the whistle was blown at exactly the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I see the jubilant faces of some of the people in those celebratory crowds. If only they could have seen ahead to 1939......
just a helpful little tidbit here..... there are a few places that are asking for our help in submitting stories of our relatives regarding their service in the Great War to End All Wars (sad to say that moniker didn't hold up under time) since this is a commemorative year for the end of that War..... here is a link to consider. I heard they are also interested in any memorabilia, diaries of your relative who might have served: https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/...f-service.html
i'm kinda bummed that tape recorders weren't a household item back when i was a kid in the 50's and my grandpop was endlessly telling me his war stories, as i just don't remember any of them any longer.
The Twentieth Century was a disaster for ordinary Europeans. World War I and World II are really the same war with a twenty year armistice in the middle.
I would encourage anyone interested in this period to read a classic about the period just before the war. Its Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower. Tuchman also wrote The Guns of August which discusses the origins of the war.
The monarchs of Europe had become extremely decadent and could not see that the system of empires which controlled much of Europe had become outmoded. Most of them were related by blood which made the coming war seem even more absurd.
Much of what brought about the war was a system of alliances between different nations. France had fought Germany in 1870 and had marched to Paris. The French were determined that would never happen again and so they formed an Alliance with Russia. Russia got large loans and new railroads in exchange for a guarantee that if Germany ever invaded France that Russia would immediately attack Germany from the East.
Germany formed an alliance with the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Later, the Ottoman Empire or Turkey joined this alliance.
This particular system of alliances virtually guaranteed that a war would engulf the whole European continent if any two countries became involved in some kind of clash.
The industrial revolution that had occurred during the Nineteenth Century guaranteed that the war would be a bloody one fought with machine guns, modern artillery, airplanes, and at the end of the war, even tanks.
Ultimately, the whole continent was a powder keg that exploded in August 1914.
Casualties from the war were staggering. I am sure the Armistice of November 11, 1918 was an occasion for great joy in much of the world. I've seen pictures of people celebrating and they are very compelling. In my home state of Utah, I remember reading how a steam engine was brought down the trolley car tracks to the city center and the whistle was blown at exactly the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. I see the jubilant faces of some of the people in those celebratory crowds. If only they could have seen ahead to 1939......
This is a good point. The Proud Tower does an excellent job, without actually introducing a theme, of showing the culture of Europe before the continent spiraled into madness. So, that's why no one wants to commemorate World War I. It was an obscene, inconclusive conflict in which nothing was resolved, Europe was bled white, and the groundwork was laid for even greater miseries to come in the Russian Revolution, a hundred brushfire conflicts and revolutions, World War II, the Holocaust, and the Iron Curtain.
It's really striking to read the novels of the late Edwardian period, writers such as Forster or Lawrence and then compare them to the Lost Generation writers such as Hemingway or Huxley or Dos Passos. The two periods were separate by one decade, but the writers of those periods speak with utterly different voices, one group largely a supporter of the existing social order while the other as a voice of the disenfranchised and cynical. And that's the real damage of World War I. It essentially called all the institutions of society into question, given how they all contributed to making Europe a gigantic abattoir. Seeing their institutions fail them, people began looking for alternatives, whether it was Fascism, Nazism, or Communism.
So little wonder Europe doesn't want to celebrate or even remember World War I. It marked their plunge from the forefront of the world stage and the beginning of a horror show that would last from the opening gunshots of Sarajevo to, fittingly enough, to the closing artillery salvos of Sarajevo. Who wants to remember that?
So little wonder Europe doesn't want to celebrate or even remember World War I. It marked their plunge from the forefront of the world stage and the beginning of a horror show that would last from the opening gunshots of Sarajevo to, fittingly enough, to the closing artillery salvos of Sarajevo. Who wants to remember that?
WW II would then be one more feature of that ongoing horror show which was not resolved until the end of the Serbian conflict. Despite this, it is greatly celebrated and remembered.
Taken individually, WW I did produce dramatic results. Three empires, the Germans, the Austria-Hungarians and the Russians, all went out of business permanently as a consequence. Unfortunately those imperial power vacuums were to be replaced by ideology oriented governments, fascists and communists.
WW II would then be one more feature of that ongoing horror show which was not resolved until the end of the Serbian conflict. Despite this, it is greatly celebrated and remembered.
Taken individually, WW I did produce dramatic results. Three empires, the Germans, the Austria-Hungarians and the Russians, all went out of business permanently as a consequence. Unfortunately those imperial power vacuums were to be replaced by ideology oriented governments, fascists and communists.
What you say is correct, except for one notable exception. World War I basically had a narrative, at least on the Western Front, of soldiers pointlessly charging across No Man's Land into machine gun fire. And while the breakups of Austria-Hungary's and the Russia's empires in Europe yielded a number of new countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, Finland, and the Baltic states, there was not much time to celebrate. The number of small brushfire wars that broke out immediately after the Armistice is breathtaking. Essentially, the guns never stopped firing east of the German frontier.
Meanwhile, after World War II, there was the narrative of liberation from the murderous regime of Adolph Hitler and the comparative peace that followed, at least in Europe. Yes, there was the Greek Civil War and the Soviet oppression of Eastern Europe. But comparatively little else in the way of conflict.
Taken individually, WW I did produce dramatic results. Three empires, the Germans, the Austria-Hungarians and the Russians, all went out of business permanently as a consequence.
Four: WW l also marks the end of the centuries' old Ottoman Empire. And we're still dealing with the aftermath of the collapse of that empire today in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Four: WW l also marks the end of the centuries' old Ottoman Empire. And we're still dealing with the aftermath of the collapse of that empire today in the Middle East and Central Asia.
I didn't include them because they were the exception to the empire-replaced-by-ideology. The Ottoman empire simply fragmented and the pieces were distributed by the British and French whose only concern was setting up stable governments which owed their existence to the foreign interventionists. They didn't really figure in the origins of WW II, as did the clash of competing ideologies. You are correct that we are still dealing with the consequences of that collapse and redistribution, but I don't see that as part of the WW I, WW II, Cold war, Serbian war continuum. There would be better linkage as WW I, Israeli Arab wars, 9/11 etc.
I think that you are probably correct with the above. Another factor is that WW II was the great good vs evil war, one where the US rode to the rescue of western civilization and beat back the fascists. It is more difficult to identify the good guys and the bad guys of WW I.
It is a shame that WWI is treated the way it is in modern culture. The aftermath of WWI began the modern age. Old systems were mostly out, the age of the nation state began. Sure, the underlying conflicts took nearly a century to be completely snuffed out, but there was an undeniable seismic shift in human civilization after 11/11/18. I'm proud to have at least played a small role in the final conflicts of that time period, the Yugoslav War in Bosnia and Kosovo.
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How very 'American' lol
