We received the following press release. --RL
A controversial revision of the combat history of World War I, THE MYTH OF THE GREAT WAR: A New Military History of World War I (Hardcover; Publication Date: May 2001; HarperCollins; Hardcover; $30) by John Mosier challenges the accounts of two generations of distinguished historians arguing that their works are based on flawed premises, incomplete information and distorted logic. He goes on to show how and why the Germans decisively beat the French and British, who were eventually saved from defeat by American troops in 1918.
Based on more than a decade of research in French and German archives previously not used, in THE MYTH OF THE GREAT WAR, Mosier concludes that much of what we know about World War I is simply wrong. He reveals what he believes actually happened on the battlefield during World War I, as opposed to what French and British commanders and governments have claimed. Based on painstaking research of battlefields, terrain, casualty figures, and many previously neglected French and German sources, Mosier describes and analyzes numerous campaigns and shows why conventional accounts of major battles such as the Marne and Verdun are incorrect.
Turning up surprising facts, Mosier’s account shows that German weapons, tactics, training and leadership were consistently superior and why the endless ineffective attacks mounted by the French and British with inferior weapons and battle tactics resulted in mindless slaughter and defeat. In fact, the German losses were one-half to one-third less than those of the Allies. Also discussed in depth are the major military leaders on both sides-Joffre, Petain, Foch, Gallieni, French, Haig, Wilson, von Moltke, Ludendorff, von Falkenhayn, von Mudra, Pershing, among others.
Provocative, controversial, and extensively researched, THE MYTH OF THE GREAT WAR questions how the Allies were able to ignore the truth and pass their own propaganda on as historical fact. A shocking and absorbing assessment of the military realities of World War I, Mosier’s account will force historians to reconsider our understanding of the Great War.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Mosier is a professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans. Fluent in French, his background as a military historian dates from his role in developing an interdisciplinary curriculum for the study of the two World Wars, a program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT WAR:
A New Military History of World War I
By John Mosier
HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: May 2001
0-06-019676-9; $30
An Interview with John Mosier
Your book makes two very controversial claims: the Germans basically won the war on the battlefield, and American intervention in the war was decisive. What’s the evidence for the first claim?
I started with the casualty figures. Traditionally historians have shied away from an analysis of them, but they’re clear cut and persuasive. For every German soldier killed on the Western front, almost three Allied soldiers died. But since Allied claims for success always rested on the opposite argument--that the imbalance went the other way--by their own arguments, they lost the war.
Nowadays the claim is always made that the war was a stalemate, that hardly any territory changed hands. Verdun is the key example. Every history book claims that by the end of 1916, the Germans were right back where they started from. But the American Army’s maps, and French records, show this wasn’t true. It was all propaganda. In August of 1917, Pétain launched a major offensive to try to regain what had been lost, but even then, the Germans still kept a lot of it until September of 1918.
Information about other major German gains was suppressed: Saint Mihiel and Belgium in late September and October of 1914, for example. Whenever the Germans mounted an offensive they seized large areas, and these areas were of strategic importance. Most Allied victories, such as Cambrai, are the result of manipulating the dates of the operations.
Historians tend to gloss over German successes elsewhere, even though these had a terrific impact on the Western Front. There was the occupation of Belgium (1914), Serbia (1915), and Rumania (1916), with the attendant destruction of their armies. In 1917, they inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the allies in Italy. All places where the Allies aimed to defeat the Germans by over extending their resources, so the Western front would collapse.
But certainly there were Allied victories, like the Marne, or battles where the Germans lost heavily, like the Somme.
There was no Battle of the Marne. There were half a dozen engagements spread all the way from just north of Paris to the southeast of Verdun--most of what was then the front, in fact. The French basically lost each separate engagement. When the Germans, quite sensibly, regrouped so they could attack again, the French rolled them all together and claimed they had won. Within a week after the “defeat” of the Marne, the German Army mounted what was probably the most successful offensive operation of the war, and captured all of the key ground between the Meuse and the Moselle rivers south of Verdun, and they mounted two more major operations immediately after that.
No one has ever pretended that the Somme achieved anything. The ground captured was strategically worthless. The Allies turned it into a victory by claiming that they had inflicted great losses on the Germans. Not coincidentally, those losses were computed to be the same as the Allied losses, but the figures had been fabricated. Churchill pointed this out in The World Crisis, by the way, and was smeared. Subsequent British apologists then made torturous arguments to “prove” that German casualties were horrendous, and greater than Allied losses which was entirely false.
If the German victory is so clear cut, why is it that the war is always seen as a series of Allied triumphs?
You have to remember that there was no independent press coverage of the war after a few brief weeks in August of 1914. For a long time, journalists weren’t even allowed near the front lines. Not even the president of France was allowed up there except under very carefully controlled circumstances. So Allied propagandists could say anything they wanted--no one could contradict them.
The Allied leadership firmly believed they were winning, because that’s what they were constantly told by the military. It wasn’t until the middle of 1916 that the civilians began to realize the war was not going the way the military claimed it was. When André Maginot stood up in the Chamber of Deputies and announced that German casualties were no greater than French casualties, there was complete pandemonium. Even then, Lloyd George was never able to assert control over the military to the extent that Churchill or Roosevelt later were, and the situation in France was even worse.
Also, the British invented a particularly potent form of propaganda, and Wilson followed suit. Although there was some sensationalistic stuff, both countries co-opted their historians, their intellectuals, who wrote works that appeared to be objective historical accounts, factual, very believable. Take John Buchan's four volume history of the war, which came out in 1921. In every sense it looks like a “hHistory,” but Buchan was the second head of British propaganda operations. The British considered Frank Simonds, who wrote a history which came out while the war was still in progress, as an “unofficial interpreter . . . who can be relied upon to present matters in their most flattering light.” Everyone who came along afterwards used these early accounts.
Where did you get the idea for this book?
I was going to write a sort of guidebook. If you wanted to visit medieval cathedrals, there were dozens of guides, but if you wanted to look at modern history in Europe, you were on your own. I started with Verdun, because it was, I discovered, the largest intact battle site in Europe. So I was in one of the twenty odd Verdun cemeteries, and I look around, and all the grave markers say either 1917 or 1915. There was hardly anyone there from 1916, when everyone said the battle was fought.
So I started trying to reconcile this with what I had read, and since I was in France, this meant reading French sources, and it was like . . . I don’t want to exaggerate, but at the time, it was like one of those stories where you’re suddenly in a parallel universe. And the more I dug, the more incredible it got, until I came to the stage where I said, well, you have to regard everything you’ve read as unproven.
Doesn’t it bother you to have written a book that many people will see as a defense of Germany and the superiority of the German military?
Oftentimes the Germany of 1914-1918 is judged as though it was the Germany of 1939-1945. This is a view that has been pushed hard by several generations of Marxist historians, especially in Germany, but there isn’t any evidence for it at all.
One of the first things you notice about German military cemeteries of the war is the surprisingly high incidence of Jewish markers. This was, after all, the culture that nurtured Mahler and Freud and Kafka and Wittgenstein. The existence of such figures, together with men like Fontane, Brahms, Wagner, the Mann brothers, is simply not compatible with the idea of the German and Austrian empires being repressive pre-totalitarian states.
Traditional accounts portray a devastated and defeated country; implicitly Hitler, like Stalin, built a great power out of the ruins. In reality, Germany wasn’t destroyed. It kept its army intact, and built on its successes. The military victories of 1939-40 came out of the successes of 1914-1918. The evidence is pretty clear.
Your book contradicts every idea we have about World War One. Does it bother you to be arguing against some of the most distinguished historians of this century?
One reason it took me so long to write this book was that it took me a long time to feel comfortable about this, one reason I spent so much time trying to figure out where these scholars had gone wrong. But if you take any one point, you’ll find some very knowledgeable people who do agree with me.
Take the casualties, for instance. Abel Ferry was on to this in late 1916. He was a French deputy, had been in the cabinet, had access to official reports. So was Winston Churchill. So was André Maginot. These people were all privileged witnesses. In two cases they were combat veterans as well. They had access to the data. So did the statisticians in the British War Office, whose work is routinely ignored, particularly by British historians.
Or take my claim that the Allies misrepresented their progress. I’m not the only person who thought that. So did Lloyd George, who was prime minister from late 1916 on through the end of the war. And about many of the other points, how poorly trained the French were, for instance, or how there was no real plan, just read Fayolle’s secret diary. He was one of France’s best generals.
Frankly, a great deal of the data is pretty cut and dried. Joffre printed all the basic data on artillery in his memoirs. A lot of data was simply suppressed. When Joffre's memoirs were translated into English, the opening chapters, in which he reveals the deficiencies of the French army, disappeared. So we have historians suppressing or ignoring data prepared by their own government, which is true in this country as well. A great many people have simply ignored data that blows holes in their arguments. Hence my respect for Niall Ferguson (The Pity of War).
But Ferguson himself takes strong exception to your major point, that it was American intervention that won the war.
A sensitive issue for the British. But it’s based on emotions, not facts. By October of 1918 the AEF was the largest Allied army. Most Americans are flabbergasted to learn that we had over two million men in Europe at that point. There’s this great British myth that ‘they’ broke through the German lines in the fall of 1918 and won the war. That’s just wishful thinking. In the last four months of the war they lost more men than they did on the Somme. French casualties were almost as bad. The war ended when the Germans contacted President Wilson and said they would agree to an armistice based on his Fourteen Points, not because they had been defeated in battle.
The other point, which most English historians simply ignore, is that the Allies were heavily dependent on our aid even before we entered the war. The primary ingredient in explosives for shells was TNT. To make TNT, you have to have toluene. In 1914 the primary source of toluene was as a coke byproduct, coal tar. The French had bought their toluene, which in French is toluol, from the Germans and the Belgians. Moreover, at the end of September 1914, the Germans had occupied about three quarters of France’s coke production region.
So the French had to turn to us and buy it. Toluene production increased in the United States from 350 tons per month in 1914 to 3,000 tons per month by April of 1917. By the end of the war it had doubled, to 6,000 tons per month. The British could produce their own toluene pretty well, so this wasn’t an issue for them. But it was for the French, and the French did most of the fighting. Toluene wasn’t the only war materiel we sold to the Allies. Probably about half of the British rifles used in the war prior to 1917 came from Remington and Winchester.
So you're saying the United States wasn't really neutral?
President Wilson and his close advisers certainly weren't. Wilson was an anglophile and a germanaphobe, as were most of the men in the United States who influenced public opinion. From the very first, Wilson let the US violate all the concepts of neutrality. American companies were making everything for the British from rifles to heavy guns. Neutrals don't sell weapons to one side during a conflict, particularly when the weapons are being bought with money the belligerents are getting from the neutral country in question. It should be remembered here that William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, resigned as a result of what he perceived as the skewed treatment given the Allies. The justification given by Wilson's apologists is that he genuinely felt that our interests lay with Great Britain and that Germany was an evil empire. But sincerity or conviction can't be the basic test.
What do you think of the military commanders on both sides?
Pershing was a big surprise. He was a much better commander than he's usually thought to be, and Americans ought to thank him for his refusal to let American soldiers be dumped into British units and slaughtered.
If Pétain had died in 1933 or so, every village in France would have a place Pétain. He's the only senior Allied commander who actually seems to have understood modern warfare. It was his misfortune to see the next war.
Von Moltke the Younger and von Falkenhayn, the first two German commanders, seem a good deal more competent than is usually claimed. Most of Ludendorff's achievements, on close inspection, turn out to have happened before he took over, and the evidence is unquestionable that he suffered a series of mental collapses during 1918.
Joffre seems better than he's sometimes made out to be, although on the Allied side, compared to Foch and Haig, virtually anyone appears competent. No one can lay claim to being a great commander if his achievements rest on the slaughter of his own men. The best commanders of the war are men who remain virtually unknown, such as Fayolle for the French and von Mudra for the Germans.
In talking to you about your research, I get the feeling that the terrain over which the war was fought, and particularly the tens of thousands of graves, had a great emotional impact on you. Is that true?
Absolutely. And I'll tell you what the impact was--a conviction of the necessity to try to tell their story as accurately and completely as possible. I don't think anyone now living can grasp what those experiences were like, but we can certainly honor their memory by telling the truth about what happened.
Goethe said that without judgment all the knowledge in the world is nothing, but some of the judgments bothered me a great deal. It’s painful for me to say some of those things. I mean, in the bois d’ailly, there’s an ossuary, and there’s a little plaque at the side that was put up, it says ‘to our dear papa, who disappeared in these woods in April of 1915.” And I’m saying that his death was probably needless, it was the result of bungling.
So the moral questions trouble me a great deal. As Treblinka survivor Samuel Rajzman said, "the facts speak for themselves." So I tried to do that, and I would stand in some cemetery with five thousand graves, and tell myself, I want to be able to face those men, regardless of what side they fought on, face them and say, "this is what I think happened, it's as close to the truth as I could get."
The Myths of The Myth of the Great War
The main myth exposed in the book is that the Allies won on the battlefield, and that in October of 1918 Germany had been decisively beaten.
In reality, over the first four years of the war, the Germans mostly won every battle outright or fought the Allies to a costly draw, inflicting heavy casualties on the Allies in the process.
Other myths the book demolishes.
- The French and British won the war on their own. Without the two million American soldiers in France, without the six thousand tons a month production of high explosives, the Allies would have lost the war.
- America was forced to enter the war after repeated German violations of our neutrality. In the thirty months before America entered the war, the United States produced enormous amounts of munitions and war materièl for Great Britain and France, and then loaned them the money to make those purchases, all in violation of our claims to be neutral. William Jennings Bryan, one of the country's most distinguished politicians, resigned his position as Wilson's Secretary of State in protest at Wilson's policies of supporting the Allies while publicly claiming to be neutral
- The British Army bore the brunt of the most serious fighting. The British Army held down only a small part of the Western Front, roughly 15 per cent, for almost the entire war.
- Both sides suffered the same losses. On the Western Front the Allies lost between two and three soldiers killed for every German fatality.
- The war went on four years without either side gaining appreciable amounts of territory. German conquests were significant: Saint-Mihiel, the Channel Ports, the Woëvre, Ypres, Verdun, the Vosges, and in the Argonne.
- Germany was committed to a plan developed by von Schlieffen decades before the war. The actual plan the Germans executed was developed by Ludendorff, von Moltke's operations chief, in 1913.
- Great Britain was forced to enter the war owing to the German violation of Belgium's neutrality. In 1906, France and Great Britain had secretly agreed that a British army would be landed in France if France was attacked. The French themselves planned to attack through Belgium.
- A reliance on the doctrine of the all-out offensive made France suffer heavy losses. French losses were caused by poor training, bad leadership, obsolete weapons, and the lack of any coherent doctrine at all.
- The armies of 1914 were technologically backwards. The Germans entered the war with hundreds of airplanes which were used to direct their artillery fire from motor drawn heavy weapons. Both the French and the Germans deployed tens of thousands of trucks and cars, and were moving infantry units by truck within the first months of the war.
- Both sides possessed the same weapons. The Germans entered the war with three times as many heavy guns as the Allies, including modern long recoil howitzers and infantry mortars which the French Army did not possess. Both flamethrowers and poison gas shells were used by the Germans years before the Allies had them.
- There were no new tactics in this war. Early on, the Germans developed new small unit tactics so they could take enemy territory with small losses. By 1916, only the British were still using suicidal human wave attacks
- The Allies could have broken the "deadlock of the trenches" had they deployed tanks early in the war. Allied tanks were too slow and under powered to be effective on the battlefield; most of them broke down for mechanical reasons and those that made it across the start line were destroyed by German anti tank gunners.
- After the French Army mutinied in April of 1917, the British had to continue the war by themselves. The most successful offensives mounted by the French Army were in August and October of 1917.
- Although the Germans were initially successful at Verdun, by the end of the year they had been thrown back to where they had been before the start of the battle. At the end of 1916, they still had most of what they had conquered, and were not dislodged until the American offensives of September 1918.
- The war ended as a result of successful British offensives which defeated the German Army in the field. In the fall of 1918, the Germans conducted a skilful retreat, inflicting casualties on the French and British worse than anything they had previously experienced.
- Verdun was the bloodiest battle of the war. French and British losses were much higher on the Somme, in Champagne, and at Passchendaele. German losses at Verdun were surprisingly low.
Back to 2nd Quarter 2001 List of News Items
Back to Master List of News Items
Back to Master Magazine List
© Copyright 2001 by Coalition Web, Inc.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com