A Different Perspective on The Great War

As a century passes after the end of the First World War, historians are naturally hard-pressed to write anything new about what is also known as the Great War, a war which destroyed empires, overturned the Old Order, and spotlighted a period of industrialized warfare and killing of which we are still part. Unlike some other recent authors, Afflerbach in On a Knife Edge has reached not for an interestingly narrow narrative of the War, but rather a different perspective, with perhaps a broader historical message which incidentally provides a more relevant discussion for our current times. Knife Edge does not deliberately raise its contemporary relevance in a direct way, but its narrative can be superimposed on our current events quite easily.

On a Knife Edge is a thorough scholarly work which examines the Central Powers’ defeat in the First World War from the German perspective, which is in itself valuable for English readers more familiar with British and American viewpoints of the victorious Allied Powers or Allies (also known as the Entente). Germany was the senior partner and linchpin of the Central Powers, thus defeat of the Central Powers required defeat of Germany. Knife Edge posits that despite what we are assured by hindsight, the Central Powers’ defeat was by no means certain. Professor Afflerbach proposes that at several occasions, with events upon a knife edge to go either way, Germany could have seized at least a tolerable compromise peace, instead of a defeat which would morph into the Second World War rematch. For major events which paint our ideological assumptions, a periodic review for hindsight bias is worthwhile to reconsider whether whatever we believe was inevitable was truly lacking viable alternative outcomes. Knife Edge provides such a review for the outcome of the First World War.

Knife Edge’s German-centric perspective does not suggest that the Old Order which had existed largely unchanged around the world for decades from the 19th Century would have survived completely intact; but the collapse of Russia into brutal Bolshevism, the overnight transfer from European to American preeminence, and the seething bitterness and fear which would foster the even more destructive Second World War might have been ameliorated. Knife Edge provides a valuable insight on how government decisions, even in a seemingly centralized autocratic environment, can still be a mass of near unaccountable confusion.

It is worthwhile to note that human societies often trade between strong centralized authority, which can risk incompetent or evil leadership, versus anarchic, decentralized and sometimes contrary factions which can lack coherence or even sense. In times of yearning for a strong charismatic leader, we should always beware of autocratic dangers, whether clothed by rump parliaments or nepotism steeped in tradition. Likewise, we cannot lazily and uncritically rely on popular democracy without awareness of possible manipulation and misinformation, particularly with our current artificial “intelligence” ability to fake videos and other “evidence”. Even without modern internet access and social networking, propaganda played a major role in the Western Democracies’ willingness to continue the meatgrinder which did not and could not “end all wars” as promised by the Allies.

While Prof. Afflerbach understandably lays the start of the First World War at the feet of the Central Powers and Russia, he notes that the unnecessary prolongation of the War must include blame on the other nations who chose to join the War, all of whom magnified the human loss and waste of resources. Knife Edge joins those who have found that the Great War was a largely unnecessary war, which should have been limited, but through the incompetent leadership of both sides became an excessive and near meaningless mutual conflagration. A single assassination event in Sarajevo was incompetently allowed to cause millions of needless deaths and the collapse of regimes which likely would have folded under their own weight or reformed over time without such a butcher’s bill.

One measure of incompetence was how slowly both sides learned the realities of trench warfare and the primacy of defensive tactics over offensive machismo, despite lessons already taught from the then recent Russo-Japanese War and even from the earlier American Civil War. Advocates of the defensive on both sides were often accused of cowardice and lack of initiative, accusations which then allowed a wretched waste of lives for a few more yards of shell-pocked dirt. Professor Afflerbach notes that the separate experience of aristocratic Staff Officers, cozy behind the frontlines compared to the troops suffering in trenches, exacerbated the delay in accepting the harsh realities. Similarly, we should beware of any policies enacted by those who are buffered from the policies’ negative consequences. In the First World War, even temporary successes can and did come with the evil of pointlessly prolonging the War.

Germany’s hero Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, for instance, would leverage their battle successes to limits past where their military abilities would fail. Germany, like many other combatants of the First World War, sorely lacked any genuine strategic plan for conducting a long attritional war. Once their initial military moves failed, leaders on both sides tended to fall back on simply throwing more of the same into the fire, or applying minor tweaks in tactics, certain that “this time it will work” - a not unfamiliar tendency in our own time of true believer ideological adherents despite their repeated historical failures.

Regardless of the shock of casualty rates early in the War, both sides continued to insist on their own ultimate victory, fed by the anger from the losses already suffered and by the hope raised from the opponents’ inability to achieve any immediate decisive victory. Greed for annexing new territories or retrieving lost territories further led both sides to continue fighting. Russia desired German-held Polish lands. France desired its lost Alsace-Lorraine. Britain eyed German colonies. Precious few belligerents on either side could claim a lack of acquisitive desires.

Even after Russia had lost its Czar, its fledgling democracy continued to fight, spurred on by Allied demands and by German intransigence, costing enormous casualties before the Bolsheviks finally sued for surrender. Here Professor Afflerbach points out that Allied demands that Russia stay fighting practically insured that Russia’s fledgling democracy would be destroyed by Bolshevism. The resulting Russian release of Allies’ secret agreements would weigh on the moral credibility of the Allied cause and spur skepticism of motives even years later when questioning the appeasement of Nazis. The Allies in their own pursuit for victory laid the groundwork for much further suffering.

Economics and war production form a large portion of Knife Edge, with the Allies holding a decided advantage throughout the War, especially with the British naval blockade of German trade. As often repeated historically, centralized planning by bureaucratic fiats easily proved counter-productive and damaged the overall economy in favor of directed war production. Even narrow successes such as increases in one munitions sector would often be complicated by neglect in another munitions sector, resulting in bottlenecks that affected final production. Professor Afflerbach points out that Germany repeatedly ignored economic realities, even trusting General Ludendorff’s ability to achieve victory in their final offensive, when the Allies by then had a decisive numerical advantage in the Western Front.

Germany repeatedly relied on tactical brilliance but had no viable strategic vision. The honest realization of Germany’s limited resources was held hostage to a belief in Germany’s military prowess. Victories such as at Tannenberg and Gorlice-Tarnów crippled the Russian army and sustained the Central Powers’ near delusional hopes of complete final victory. Professor Afflerbach shows that the political disputes between German domestic factions gave no single person the full blame of Germany’s defeat or prolonging of the War. Even though the German Kaiser was the theoretical centralized authority, the Kaiser was known to be ineffective, and his reliance on various German leaders often proved misplaced.

In a Germany, where challenging the superiority of its military would be an insult to an honored caste which had recently united the nation and defeated major foreign powers, the presumption of military superiority supported every over-optimistic prediction of military success. That arrogant presumption would in turn undermine any attempt at political or diplomatic solution.

Arrogance of German leadership easily translated to errors on multiple fronts. With a bureaucratic stupidity challenging the disastrous Chinese Communist Great Leap Forward which resulted in famine, Germany’s slaughter of pigs, because of the pigs’ supposed competition for food, ignored how pigs actually consumed food which people did not normally eat, and exacerbated Germany’s food shortage. Likewise, price controls skewed the market and disincentivized rational production in favor of more profitable produce, much as the Soviet Union and Maoist China found when they attempted their own controls. These lessons are too easily forgotten by constant siren calls for supposed equity through ever-more centralized government controls.

While the differences in available resources strongly suggest that the Central Powers could never have “won” against the Allies, there were at least opportunities during which the Central Powers had a knife edge chance to avoid utter defeat by negotiating a tolerable compromise. Professor Afflerbach suggests that better success with an improved version of the Schieffelin Plan, avoiding unnecessary invasion of neutrals and foregoing unrestricted submarine warfare, were all opportunities for Germany to have limited the War and kept a compromise peace possible.

Despite being knife edge possibilities, these were historically unforced errors by Germany. Strategic disasters, such as believing that invading neutral Belgium would result in a quicker victory but in fact helped drive British commitment against Germany when that nation's involvement was not certain; or that unrestricted submarine warfare would reciprocally starve the British, even when hampered by the Central Powers’ lack of submarines and the Allies’ ultimately greater resources, when in fact the policy helped drive the United States to enter the War, sealing Germany’s fate. Professor Afflerbach plainly showed that Germany’s policies such as the above were often incoherent decisions, not only failing their short-term objectives but also blindly leading to an exploitable image of German brutality. Germany’s attempt to impress forced labor from occupied Belgium to replace German workers not only foretold Germany’s brutal forced labor of the Second World War, but would prove economically inefficient and a propaganda disaster for the Central Powers. The difference being that during the First World War, Germany still had voices of dissent which opposed such programs at least on grounds of efficacy. The overall result was further demonization of Germany, and lessening any chance for a compromise peace, all for what were ultimately futile attempts towards victory.

The Allies were far from immune from such unnecessary gaffes, like the Allies’ gross underestimation of Ottoman strength which would lead to the Gallipoli debacle, or the delay on instituting Allied convoys against submarine warfare. Professor Afflerbach argues that due to their own incompetence the Allies were even on their heels at various times, acknowledged by some panicking Allied leadership, but the Central Powers either could not secure a complete military victory, or missed the chance to offer a peace. Professor Afflerbach points out, however, that the Central Powers’ December 1916 and July 1917 offers of peace were serious, even if half-hearted, and Allied rejection of those peace offers meant millions in additional pointless casualties. Indeed, once the Allies could sense their own inevitable victory, their rejection of any compromise solidified. Despite the additional costs, the Allies would demand a harsh victory, a harshness which would help spawn the Second World War. What could have stayed a limited war and subject to compromise, was expanded to a total war as each stab at a quick victory proved more entangled and costly. Limited objectives became wider as additional allies with their additional agendas complicated strategic political factors. Each expansion step taken for convenience would cascade into a greater morass from which compromise could not escape.

Demonization of the opposing side, common during any war, had further support from the underlying pre-war imperial competition for status: Germany’s naval race with Britain, France still smarting over its 1870 Franco-Prussian War defeat, Austria-Hungary’s Eastern European competition with Russia. And as the initial neutrality of the United States was shifted against Germany by effective Allied demonization of the Central Powers, coupled with American trade which greatly benefitted the Allies, the United States’ role as a potential mediator was lost.

The United States, led by President Woodrow Wilson, had its own part in the failed attempts at peace. While initially isolationist and neutral, America was drawn in partly through German unrestricted submarine attacks, partly through Central Powers’ failure to counter Allied propaganda, not the least of which was Germany’s inept attempt at a Mexican alliance against the United States. However, the United States’ entry was also tainted by the presumptive dominance of American influence, the unrealistic idealism of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and the unsurmountable American boost to Allied resources which doomed any Allied interest for a compromise peace. And, like the other combatants, the United States was not without its own warhawks desiring “complete victory”.

Professor Afflerbach points out that if the United States had stayed neutral in 1917, coupled with the Russian collapse, the Allies might have been more receptive to a compromise peace. However, Germany’s internal politics, such as its caste-protective Prussian three-tier electorate, the bureaucratic competition for status between its army and navy, and the domestic pressures of civilians suffering under the long war, led to the counterproductive policy of unrestrictive submarine warfare. While the policy promised victory, it actually insured defeat from United States intervention. As Professor Afflerbach notes, both Germany’s army and navy regularly gave over-optimistic estimates of probable successes, which prolonged the delusions of final victory while undermining German attempts at peace. Such was the hubris in the Central Powers that, even towards the end of war in 1918, some still held hopes of retaining some territorial conquests in an unachieved compromise peace.

Despite Germany’s presumption of its military superiority, by 1916 the War’s attritional nature and the resource advantages of the Central Powers’ opponents had made the Allies’ own presumption of eventual victory dominant. The United States entry, and the other neutrals like Brazil and China who followed the American lead, would seal that assumption. China would even send tens of thousands of laborers against the Central Powers, a significant aid when every major combatant army excepting the United States faced manpower shortages and were concerned with mutiny.

Professor Afflerbach states that Germany largely saw the War as a limited war, but the Allies were prepared for a “total war”. In the actual event, the First World War destroyed the Old Order on both sides, perhaps inevitably, but certainly in an all too bloody and wasteful manner due to the inflexible regimes of the time. Germany’s attempts at political reforms spurred by increasing unrest would be too little too late to satisfy either its foreign opponents or its domestic dissension. The Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarian Empire had long been dysfunctional and would be dissected following the War. The extreme class-conscious dissatisfaction across the West was already stirring before the War, but the utter brutality of the conflict plus the documentable incompetence of establishment leadership would cripple complacent credibility. The 1920s and 30s would be punctuated with world-wide unrest straining to accommodate the siren calls of far-left and far-right ideologies, ultimately leading to Nazism and the Second World War.

Knife Edge also glances on the difficulties of Wilsonian self-determination, a concept which continues to promote ethnic problems worldwide as a direct legacy of the somewhat misguided idealism of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Self-determination was and remains ambiguous in practice. Its idealism underlined the hypocrisy of the Allied colonial powers and laid the foundation for endless demographic conflicts even today. Self-determination’s inherent focus on ethnic identity begs for endless disputes as different ethnicities, through migration or different birth rates, inevitably vie for political power in the same territory. Eastern Europe’s imperial partitioning offered some redress of the immediate local problem during the First World War, but the issue existed globally. Even today, in regions where human rights are not primary over ethnic pride, genocide and ethnic cleansing can be a constant threat. Modern focuses on ethnicity over more basic fundamentals such as freedom of speech can run the risk of sliding into counterproductive conflict. Imperial Powers, because of their centralized structures and their inherent diversity during the First World War, were particularly vulnerable to such tribalism.

In a sense, the very durability of the Imperial Powers all had the same weakness of presuming wise leadership in their overly centralized systems which, during the War, were shown fractious and disorganized due to incompetence and in-fighting. Professor Afflerbach’s documentation of Germany’s internal debates makes a strong case that Germany’s entry into the War, and its prosecution even through to the armistice, was a series of near-unguided lurches. Those lurches might temporarily seem to succeed due to the Allies’ own incompetence, but led only to an even worse German situation the longer the War went on. Such a conclusion is similar to the suggestion that Japan’s Second World War attack on Pearl Harbor led from a similar chain of short-sighted choices which would ultimately doom Imperial Japan. Nonetheless, stupidity and incompetence are not excuses for failures in leadership. Professor Afflerbach’s condemnation is not merely on some technical incomprehension of technological changes which might be excused of laypersons, but on the wholesale disregard by statesmen and military leaders lacking a clear strategic objective for war.

This is not a lesson to be lost lightly in our time, over a century later, watching brutal drawn-out bloody conflicts, such as in the Middle East or between Ukraine and Russia. Long after the initial reasons for fighting may be forgotten, and even possibly twisted and distorted by ideology and propaganda, the original purpose in fighting might be outweighed by the value of simply stopping further bloodshed. Third party meddling for their own advantages, ideological purity, and egotistical blaming should matter less than stopping further waste. Arguments over which side “started” a war often fail to focus on what would actually “end” it.

On a Knife Edge provides a clear overview of the First World War from Germany’s perspective. Professor Afflerbach’s analysis of the domestic wrangling within Germany would be enjoyed by those with an interest in understanding government bureaucracies and decisions. Allied events and policies are covered for context but the focus on Germany is the more valuable history in Knife Edge. Germany’s failure is a warning for us all. While history is usually written by the victors about how a war was won, learning exactly how the loser lost can sometimes be more instructive. Knife Edge teaches a class in First World War history but has lessons for our current times.

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Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914, and All the World at War.

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Note: On a Knife Edge has been reviewed here before, see https://www.strategypage.com/bookreviews/2399.

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Note: On a Knife Edge is also available in e-editions.

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