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The First World War, it was worse than you think…

In a Right Angle a while back, Bill described the First World War as the greatest tragedy in human history, a big, bold statement. Given that the Second World War killed far more people and saw both the Holocaust and Hiroshima it might seem obvious that the Second World was worse than the First, however, as Bill stated, the Second World War is very much the child of the First. Without the First the Second simply would not have happened. The origins of all wars can be traced back to previous events of course, but I would contend that in the case of the World Wars there is a strong case for regarding them as effectively one extended global conflict with a couple of decades hiatus between them.

So yes, Bill’s statement is justified not so much because of the terrible effects of the war itself at the time, but the various evil genies that were released during the war and in its aftermath, the ill effects that have shaped our world and which continue to affect us today.

First, let’s look at just how the 1914-18 war led to the 1939-45 war. Bill mentioned the Treaty of Versailles, where, in 1919, the victorious Allies imposed draconian measures on the defeated Germans. Measures so strict that they led to social and economic collapse and the rise of Hitler, or so the usual narrative goes. The narrative is not entirely wrong, the German people did suffer huge economic hardship after the war, and they did very much resent the war guilt imposed on them and the restriction on their country’s actions. However, Germany only ever made one payment (less than 10%) of the massive reparations imposed on it and the rest of Europe was hardly free of economic difficulties following the war. The “Versailles caused the Second World War” line is not wrong, but it misses out a big part of the story.

The other, often ignored but a least as important, part is that the First World War ended too soon. This might seem a bizarre statement to make about a war that is a byword for tragedy and human suffering but hear me out. At 11 am of the 11th of November 1918 the guns fell silent, the fighting stopped, but the war itself did not end. This was the Armistice, an end to military operations while a peace settlement was worked out. The war did not formally end until the signing of the Versailles treaty in June 1919. Indeed, my grandfather’s medals have “1914-1919” on them, as do many local war memorials. Although the stalemate of the trench warfare had been broken (something also often overlooked) and the Allied (especially the American and British) armies had the Germans on the run, the German army was still in the field, still fighting, wobbling and mutinous, but unbroken. Had the fighting continued it would have only ended one way, the Germans would have collapsed and been beaten in detail, pushed back into the Fatherland. Their high command was very well aware of this, hence the Armistice.

Many American, and some British generals did warn at the time that, painful though it would be, fighting on and destroying the German armies in field was a cruel necessity and that agreeing to a cease fire was a mistake. They prophesied that if peace came with the German army beaten, but unbroken, then the ghost of militarism in Germany would not be laid and could rise again. They argued that only by breaking the armies in the field, driving them back into Germany and beating them in Germany could that be achieved. This was no mere fringe opinion, in was shared by both General John J. Pershing, commanding the American forces and Field Marshall Douglas Haig, commanding the British. The French, and the politicians, however, did not agree.

I cannot blame those argued for an immediate peace. To reject the chance of an end to such horrors as the Somme, Verdun, and Passchendaele would have been simply impossible in democracies like the US, UK, and France. The French especially needed peace. The Western Front was mostly on their territory, and they had lost far more than Britain or the US, nearly 1.4 million men, over 3.5% of their population. Nevertheless, history has proved the hawkish generals right.

One very potent source of propaganda for Hitler’s National Socialists, pretty much their core belief, was Dolchstoßlegende, the “stab in the back” legend, the idea that Germany had not really been defeated militarily in 1918. It had been betrayed by a shadowy cabal of politicians and money men, Jews, and Bolsheviks. They used and developed the idea, but they did not invent it. The idea was widely and sincerely believed. In essence, the peace treaty was too harsh, but the war itself was not harsh enough.

This lesson was learned in the Second World War, after 1945 in the utterly overrun and devastated ruins of the Third Reich it was not possible for anyone in Germany to argue they had not lost the war.

It was not only in Europe that the seeds of the 1939-45 war were sown. Japan had been one of the Allies in the First World War. She had emerged from centuries of self-imposed isolation in the 1860s and embraced modernity with great energy and dedication. Japan learned modern naval warfare from the British and land warfare first from France and then from Imperial Germany. She proved to be adept at both and spent the late 19th century practicing her modern martial skills on the corrupt and crumbling Qing Empire of China. In 1904-5 Japan defeated the Russian Empire in Korea and Manchuria and annexed Korea in 1910.

Japan joined the war on the 23rd August 1914, and although she did not play a huge role in the fighting, Japanese units did take on roles and responsibilities in the Far East that freed up British units for service elsewhere. The Japanese navy operated in the Pacific, the China seas, and the Indian Ocean. Japanese Destroyers even did valuable anti-submarine service in the Mediterranean. In China, Japan captured the German held city of Tsingtao on the northern coast.

At Versailles the Japanese expected to reap the benefits of their efforts and be treated as equals. Although they did acquire some former German territories in the Far East and the Pacific, their delegation felt themselves side-lined and slighted, both politically and personally. Japan certainly did not gain anything like what she expected from the treaty. Through the 1920s and 30s the feeling that the western powers had treated Japan shabbily at Versailles was very much capitalised on by those who argued that Japan must carve out her own empire and reject the West, with results we know only too well.

Before launching themselves against the USA and the European colonies in the east, another outcome of Versailles was the stepping up of Japan’s dismembering of China. Apart from being a vile and violent campaign, this also had dire consequences we still live with today. Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist forces had to contend not just with the Japanese, but with Mao’s rebel Marxist forces too. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, with help (you won’t be surprised to learn) from the  Far Eastern Bureau of the fledgling Soviet Union.

Although theoretically also fighting the Japanese in the 1930s and 40s, Mao’s forces largely saved their strength for after the defeat of Japan (something Communist resistance movements did across Europe too). They made short work of the KMT once the Japanese threat was gone. The remains of the KMT retreated to the island of Formosa (Taiwan). Today the heirs of Mao in Beijing are closer than ever to acting on their stated aim of dragging Taiwan into the loathsome embrace of Marxism with Chinese characteristics.

Back to Europe. Bill outlined how the German government deliberately released the potent virus of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin into the ailing Imperial Russian state. A classic case of Karl Popper’s Law of Unintended Consequences. The Kaiser’s Germany had no love or sympathy for Marxism, but by sending Lenin the St Petersburg they hoped to bolster the radicals and cause Russia to withdraw from the war. Although the triumph of Lenin and his Bolsheviks over the moderate Kerensky did indeed take Russia out of the war, this was nothing like enough for Germany to win it.

During the 1920s, with a large and active Marxist state on the eastern edge of post war Europe, and with Communists active across the continent, the very real threat of Bolshevism led many decent folk to back National Socialists and Fascists as lesser evils and necessary bulwarks against Communism.

Marxists were not just content to put up posters and agitate. There were uniformed groups like the Rotfrontkämpferbund who were every bit as happy to use violence as the Nazis. In April 1919 there was even a very short lived Soviet Republic set up in Bavaria. Without the genuine threat of Communism, it is highly doubtful that Nazism and Fascism would have ever got off the  ground.

Less well known is the role of the German Foreign Office and Intelligence services in cultivating another horrible virus that has killed many thousands and continues to kill people around the world today.

As Kaiser Wilhelm II’s German Empire increasingly saw itself as a rival and potential enemy of the British Empire it was logical to look at potential weaknesses in that enemy. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Britain’s Empire had more Muslim subjects than the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which ruled the whole of the Middle East, including Arabia, with Mecca and Medina and whose ruler, the Sultan, was widely acknowledged as the Khalifa (Caliph), leader of all Islam.

It made sense for the Germans to cultivate Ottoman Turkey as a potential ally, especially as Turkey’s old enemy Russia, was also almost certain to be an enemy of Germany in any coming war. The British Empire had fought against Muslim Jihadi enemies from Afghanistan to the Sudan, so it also made sense to see what mischief could be inspired among Britain’s many Muslim subjects.

In 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm visited the Ottoman held Holy Land. He visited the Mausoleum of the Muslim hero of the wars against the Crusaders, Saladin (Salah ad-Din). The next day he made a speech in which he said.

“May the Sultan rest assured, and also the three hundred million Mohammedans scattered over the globe and revering in him their Caliph, that the German Emperor will be and remain at all times their friend.”

He was even reported as hinting heavily that he was himself a Muslim! Lord knows what the Lutheran Church back in Germany would have thought of that. Later, and much less publicly, the Kaiser’s secret agents travelled in the Muslim lands, posing as traders, archaeologists etc. but really spreading propaganda, hatching plots, and promising support to potential Muslim rebels. They were following in the footsteps of the Russian Tsar’s agents who had done much the same in the mid-1800s.

John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps, based his less well known novel, Greenmantle (published 1916), on the German efforts to foment trouble among Muslims within and on the borders of the British Empire. Although it is a fictional work, it draws heavily on facts, which as a former intelligence officer Buchan was well placed to know. The nonfiction author Peter Hopkirk looks at the same subject in his 1995 work Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire. Although the German efforts did not directly affect the war when it came, they did bear toxic fruit. It is no coincidence that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the great grand daddy of modern Islamic militancy, was founded in the years after the First World War. Before and during the Second World War Hitler continued the policy of encouraging and cosying up to militant Islam, meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and recruiting two Bosnian Muslim SS Divisions.

The Imperial German Intelligence service certainly did not invent militant Islam or Marxism, but their attempts to use both of these dangerous ideologies in their own interests did play a big role in weaponizing and spreading both movements in the modern world.

The Germans weren’t the only ones releasing genies from bottles. More unintended consequences came from the Anglo-French division of the defeated Ottoman Empire. As part of the war against the Turks Britain had supported a pan-Arab revolt against Turkish rule. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire most of Arabia was ruled (with Britain’s blessing) first by the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, and then, by Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the first king of the House of Saud. In 1938 oil was discovered in what was now the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. From an irrelevant out of the way place reliant on agriculture and revenues from pilgrims making the Haj to Mecca, Saudi Arabia was to become a by-word for wealth and influence. Wealth and influence held by a dynasty adhering to the especially militant and austere Wahabi school of Sunni Islam. The Saudis often fund the setting up and building of mosques in western countries, thereby helping to spread Wahabism among communities which traditionally held to less extreme forms of Islam. One notable example is the Ibrahim al Ibrahim Mosque at the southern tip of Gibraltar. Opened in 1997 it is one of the largest mosques in a non-Muslim country, the most southerly in Europe, and on the spot where Tariq Ibn Zayed first led the forces of Islam into Europe in 711 AD. I tend to call it the Declaration of Intent Mosque.

Other, sometimes rather haphazard, divisions of the former Ottoman territories after the war are still a factor today. The borders of the new countries often failed to take account of ethnic and religious realities on the ground. To be fair, it is unlikely that anyone could have drawn borders that would have pleased everyone and established lasting peace in the Middle East. It is nevertheless a fact that the Middle East we know today is the result of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the British and French attempts to create countries.

So, the First World War led pretty directly to the Communist triumph in Russia, to the rise of National Socialism, the Second World War and the Holocaust, Imperial Japan’s rejection of and aggression against the West, the Communist triumph in China, and the development and spread of militant Islam and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. It doesn’t stop there; the First World War really is the gift that keeps giving.

Just like the recent Covid inspired power grabs, the First World War was also a massive catalyst for the expansion of the state, in the UK at least. It was a total war, that required the martialling and direction of almost every aspect of life. After the war things were relaxed, but not completely. Some “emergency measures”, like restricted licensing hours, were not got rid of until this century and British Summer Time is still with us today. Again, the Second World War repeated and intensified this process. The establishment of a deeply collectivist state in the 1940s and 50s was possible because the British people had become accustomed to “The Man in the Ministry” telling them what to do. Again, like with militant Islam and Marxism, the drive towards collectivism was around in the years before 1914, but the war was the opportunity they needed to flourish.

The great historian, A.J.P. Taylor, in the introduction to his Effects and Origins of the Great War sums up the phenomenon.

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card…the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs…The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.”

So, the First World War was not only a massive and traumatic event that killed millions and changed the lives of all who survived it. The war unleashed demons that are still bedevilling our lives to this day. I think Bill’s statement that it was the greatest tragedy in human history is more than justified. 

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