All this and World War I

I read a lot of books. Since I started my blog back in 2009 (jeez!) I’ve blogged about a lot of books. It occurred to me that I could add some extra posts here by occasionally reposting collecting book reviews that fall under a common theme. In this case, WW I

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War by Robert K. Massie caught my attention because I love reading about the Victorian era and I’m also fascinated by the strange, lumbering march that Europe took to the killing fields of WW I. Unfortunately I also love books that are focused on their topic; this one’s crammed to the bursting with loosely related facts. It’s not about the coming of the war as much as the previous 60 years of politicis in England, Germany (England gets more detail) and France, not to mention the colonial disputes and naval rivalries (Britain saw Germany strengthening its navy as a direct threat) that made it tougher for the two nations to come into accord. Plus biographies of every prime minister and major politician, in far more detail than I needed. And where Battle Cry of Freedom‘s in-depth exploration of 1800s US politics clearly showed how the Civil War eventually became inevitable, I finished with no idea how much of what Massie writes about really related to the Great War. A useful reference but a tedious, meandering read.

During Christmas 1914, a truce broke out along the  front, as immortalized in the movie Joyeux Noel. In The Christmas Truce: Myth, Memory and the First World War, Terri Blom Crocker argues that the popular image of the truce — defiant soldiers on both sides asserting their mutual humanity, followed by reprisals from outraged superior officers—is a myth. As the author shows, the forces on the front in 1914 were career soldiers rather than volunteers or draftees; they weren’t disenchanted by the brutality of war because they’d never been enchanted in the first place. Many of the soldiers supported the war; many officers supported the truce, if only as a practical measure buying both sides time to shore up their defenses. A good book, showing how the myth grew as the view of WW I grew bleaker (looking back after WW I, historians saw the Great War as a pointless exercise whose aftermath led to Hitler and the Holocaust).

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin shows how the roots of the conflicts continuing to tear apart the Middle East go back to the misconceptions of the Allied Powers in the Great War. The allies believed the Young Turks who’d taken over the Ottoman Empire were puppets of Jewish interests; that if Britain controlled the right religious leaders, they’d control the Middle East entire; and so on. The officers on the front lines made their own share of errors: Fromkin concludes the Navy could have taken Constantinople and avoided the disastrous Gallipolli campaign but the commander got cold feet and decided to wait for the Army instead.

The end result? A longer war, a badly designed peace and a failure to enforce the peacetime settlement Europe wanted due to a reluctance to keep a massive presence in the area (though America’s more recent occupation in Iraq shows that a heavy occupation force might not have been a game changer), feuding among the allies, resistance among men in the field (a lot of British officers opposed England’s support for a Jewish homeland) and continued misunderstanding (David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism discusses a lot of the same misconceptions). Dry and very detailed, but interesting.

Rereading DC’s Enemy Ace as part of my Silver Age reread, I began wondering if there was any truth to the idea pilots saw themselves as modern-day flying knights. That led to me reading Marked for Death: The First War in the Air by James Hamilton-Paterson, which argues the modern perception of the air war as heroic single combat (in contrast to the brutality of trench warfare) has blinded most historians and fiction-makers to how lethal it was. Not only could you die from an enemy bullet, planes were unstable, often defective, easily exploding or snapping, and pilots didn’t get parachutes (primarily, though not entirely, due to the military brass worrying they might not fight as hard with an easy out).

In answer to my question, this shows that yes, Von Hammer’s gentlemanly conduct wouldn’t have been out of line with reality (though as the war dragged on, it was in shorter supply), and neither would his grim certainty that the “killer skies” would sooner or later claim him and everyone else who challenged them. An excellent history though Hamilton-Patterson’s outrage that Peanuts treats the Red Baron as a fit figure for humor just made me roll my eyes.

The Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationalism by Richard Slotkin is eerily familiar in portraying a WW I America where anything less than “100 percent Americanism”—i.e., absolute unquestioning loyalty and support for the war—was regarded as treasonous and where many whites (“Nordics” in the language of the time) were convinced that nonwhites simply couldn’t be true Americans. Slotkin follows the heroic wartime exploits of the Harlem Hellfighters (a black NYC battalion) and the Melting Pot Battalion (composed of New York Irish, Italians, Jews and Chinese) as they performed spectacularly despite white skepticism and lack of support. The battalions believed dedicated military service would confirm them as Americans, which proved tragically false as the country veered towards anti-immigration, anti-labor and accepted lynching as a necessary element of white supremacy.

Switching to fiction, I’ve heard many people say the British strip Charley’s War by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhon is one of the great war comics. After reading V1, I’m in agreement. The story starts out with Charley Bourne enlisting at 16; the recruiting office pegs him as too young but hey, they need men …

Once in France, Charley gets to experience group loyalty, danger from poison gas and snipers, more danger from officious, incompetent superiors, and the German horror when Britain introduces a new weapon of mass destruction — a rolling armored nightmare machine called a “tank.” I’m not a war comics fan but this was amazing stuff. A shame my library doesn’t have the rest of the series, as it’ll take longer if I have to buy it.

And now, one movie: Mills identified Oh, What a Lovely War! (1969) as his favorite anti-war film so I watched it earlier this year. While French director Francois Truffaut argued you can’t make an anti-war film that’s truly anti-war — it’ll always look exciting and cool — I think this one pulls it off.

Based on a successful stage show, this starts with the diplomats and leaders of pre-war Europe watching Austria move into the Balkans following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, all the while agreeing that a continent-wide war would be a bad thing but there’s zero chance of that (I suspect the playwright has read Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, which emphasizes how naively optimistic Europe was about the looming conflict). Then we bounce around from music-hall numbers to soldiers in the field to the high command scoffing that the body counts aren’t an issue to more music … one reason it works, I think is that we see very little actual war footage and most of that is people getting shot and dying so there’s little on-screen heroism. With a cast that includes Ian Holm, Juliet Mills, Gerald Sim, Anthony Ainley, Edward Fox, Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, Jack Hawkins, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith and John Mills. “So many women look depressing in mourning.”

Covers by Gil Kane (t) and Joe Kubert.