Camp Gagnon - WORLD WAR 1 EXPLAINED: Hitler's Rise & The Real Cause

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Welcome to the inaugural live episode of Camp Gagnon in the tent! We have returning guest, World War expert and historian Benjamin Hett, to discuss what actually caused World War I, the rise of Hitler and everything you didn't know about the history of the world's first 'Great War'. Care to learn about World War II ? Check out Dr. Hett's first episode on Camp Gagnon: https://youtu.be/TM49BY_AQCI Shoutout to Prizepicks for sponsoring the show: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/ivHR/CAMP Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 5:10 Benjamin Is Back! 6:22 Europe Before The War 10:43 What Conflicts Lead To WW1 15:31 Spain During The War 16:24 Italy and German Alliance 20:36 Serbia + Ethnic Cleansing 28:00 Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand 40:06 Repercussions of Assassination 44:40 Russian/Serbia Alliance + Invasion of Belgium 52:13 British Support 54:39 Other Countries During War + Royal Families 1:05:44 What If Ferdinand Wasn’t Assassinated 1:06:48 Start Of The War 1:11:38 America During The War 1:16:50 First Battles of The War 1:19:18 WW1 Technology + Trench Warfare 1:27:13 Eastern Front Warfare 1:31:31 Kaiser Support 1:35:29 Total War Now vs Past 1:38:44 Use of Propaganda 1:44:29 Western Front in 1916 1:50:29 Shell Shock 1:56:59 Christmas Day Truce 2:00:32 How Tanks Changed War 2:03:14 Young Adolf 2:09:44 America’s Decision To Attack 2:15:14 The 3 Cousins 2:18:18 New Russian Rule + Vladimir Lenin 2:23:14 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk + Ideological Problems 2:26:31 Ending Of The War + Canadian Military 2:33:10 The Black Day + Signing Armistice 2:46:29 Negotiations + Life After War 2:56:38 League of Nations + Intentional Boundaries 3:04:08 America After The War 3:09:08 What’s Your Favorite WW1 Fact?

Dr. Hett, and we're live. How are you? I'm great, Mark. How are you? I'm doing excellent. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm really grateful and excited to do this. Obviously, you came on to talk about World War II a couple months ago. People loved it. For anyone that's not familiar with you, you are an esteemed Ivy League educated, as we were just talking about. Harvard-educated Ph.D. In history, you've written many books on World War I, 2, and the Cold War. and now you teach a Hunter college and today we're going to learn

about World War I. All right, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, this is a fascinating, a fascinating conflict. For me, I don't know really anything. I know Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he got killed, he was getting a sandwich or something. There was a sandwich involved.

This is the lore that I heard. I'm not sure about the sandwich, but okay. There's no sandwich involved? I heard they like stopped off for a sandwich and they caught him. Anyway, we'll get to that. And everyone was mad at each other and then this effectively creates the environment

that leads us into World War II. Also, Hitler's involved in this. He's like a young soldier. He was. Pretty much all the way through the war. Oh, whoa. Okay. So I want to talk about that.

Talk about like the trenches, trench warfare, what that was like. And yeah, I think this is going to be a lot of fun. So just take me through it. What is the state of Europe in the early 1900s and what is kind of like the ambient feeling amongst Europeans leading up to 1914? Yeah, okay.

That is a great place to start. So I think one way to think about this is that if you were living in Europe in, say, 1900 or 1905, a lot of what you're experiencing would be a lot like what we've experienced in recent years in several ways. There had been a long period of peace, at least peace in the sense of there had been a very long period without major wars between major countries. There had been 100 years almost since the last really big European war, the wars of Napoleon. There had been a few semi-major wars between Germany and France, for instance, or the Crimean War in the 1850s between France and Britain and Russia, but these weren't big systemic wars. All of the major European countries were acquiring big overseas colonies in that era, and sometimes

there were smaller wars in their colonial possessions. But basically, for the average European person, you know, they had experienced significant amounts of peace for several generations, and Europe was getting wealthier and wealthier and wealthier. well theory. It was a time of very rapid economic growth. And generally increasing political freedom, the degree to which ordinary people could vote, the degree to which European states were at least semi-democratic, if not full-on democratic, was increasing. So there were all these signs of progress. But there was also a kind of dark undertone, too. If you look at political life in Europe in that time, it was starting to become more violent in several ways. The rhetoric of politics was

becoming much more violent on right as well as left. You have more radical political groups who are articulating what they want in terms of violence. And you have groups that are acting on it. There were a number of countries where there were sort of militia groups of various kinds of political radicals or the anarchist movement, for instance, at the turn of the century, that was engaging in terrorism for political goals. There were right-wing groups in Russia called the hundreds that were doing this kind of thing. As I said, there were anarchists who operated basically as terrorists. They did some high-profile political assassinations in that time.

Yeah, I think McKinley was killed. Correct. Yes. Colgosh, right? Right. He was a famous anarchist that was like, I'm going to take out the president of the United States. Yes, exactly. The Empress of Austria was killed by an anarchist, you know, this kind of thing.

How would you classify the anarchist movement of this time specifically of, you know, the early 1900s? Was that like left, was it right wing, or was it sort of like apolitical? I guess it was probably closer to being left than anything. also, though, there are a lot of ambiguities. I mean, they wanted to, they had this sort of utopian vision of a society without, you know, without big institutions, without oppression. It looked more like a left-wing model than a right-wing model. Interesting.

Okay. And now, does the average, like, French citizen have an ambient awareness of the Napoleonic Wars? Like, it was obviously much before, but do they have, like, a remnant, like, oh, my great, great-grandfather fought in this? Like, do they have the scars of the wars, or is it, like, completely out of their mind? So it would depend, of course, a lot on a person's education or family history. I would suspect the average may be working person, probably not a lot. What they would probably know is there had been this great figure of Napoleon, you know, almost a century or a century in the past.

They probably would have, you know, distant family members who had fought, well, they would have distant family members who had fought in the war. they probably, by 1900 or 1910 or so, they probably wouldn't have any personal connection with anybody like that. So there's a sort of vague sense of there was this time of French greatness probably. That's, I suspect, what the average person would know. A more educated person, you know, a college educated person would probably have a lot more sort of idea of what the Napoleonic era had been about. Yeah, that's an interesting point. Like, it's interesting because as we talk into World War II a little bit, people remember World War I going into World War II, Oh, very much, yes.

Which led to a lot of sort of resistance of entering into that conflict. Like we have... Some, but then also some who wanted another conflict precisely because of how they remembered the first war. Interesting. But World War I, there's so much prosperity and peace. And I'm assuming, like, Industrial Revolution contributed to this greatly. Absolutely, yes. Interesting.

So what exactly are the conflicts that are brewing that lead up into 1914 with the assassination? Yeah, okay, great. So this is also part of the, I guess we could put this under the heading of what I said, there are darker under tones here to a lot of what's happening. And there were a lot of conflicts. What's interesting is that almost all of the conflicts that the European great powers had with each other. And when we're talking about the great powers of the world at that time, we're pretty much talking about Europe.

The United States, of course, has become, in terms of its wealth, a great power, but it's not yet kind of really entered into the world or developed a big military to operate as a great power. So we're basically talking about the European powers, which, especially over the preceding two or three decades, from about the 1870s on, had in particular really increased their sway over the non-European world.

There had been a huge expansion in European imperialism. Almost the entire continent of Africa, for instance, was swallowed up by European powers just in the 1880s. And also big chunks of Asia, big chunks of sort of the Pacific Oceania, and so on. these were all basically realms of European imperialism.

And one of the interesting things is, so the conflicts that the European powers had with each other, were generally about these overseas or imperial territories. There weren't that many conflicts between European powers that related specifically to something on the continent of Europe. So for instance, in what is today Afghanistan, Russia was sort of moving its influence down into that Central Asian region.

The British at that time were in control of India, and India was really strategically key to the British Empire, and they're starting to clash a lot in Afghanistan. And so Britain and Russia worry a lot about each other, but basically because of Afghanistan. And basically fighting like a proxy war, so to speak. Yes, absolutely. Interesting, which is not unlike, I guess,

what we're seeing today geopolitically. Not at all. Where you have these countries that are, you know, warring in different territories and sort of supporting different factions and letting the wars carry out elsewhere. Right, yes. Oh, that's really interesting.

And this then plays out into European alliances. I mean, one of the things that I think a lot of people know about the outbreak of World War I is that you have two alliance blocks. Confusingly, they are called the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. So, triple in each case. And these alliances, the Triple Entente is Britain, France, and Russia. And the Triple Alliance is Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Italy. And they're sort of rigid, as it turns out, except for Italy.

But those alliances really came about actually out of efforts to deal with the imperial conflicts, not really with conflicts in Europe. So, for instance, Britain and France had almost gone to war in 1898 over what is today's Sudan. And they eventually sort of resolve that conflict, which becomes kind of an alliance. It's not really aimed at Germany. It's aimed at solving their imperial problems. Same with Britain and Russia. They're trying to resolve their conflict over Afghanistan.

So they end up making an alliance, which becomes obviously part of this triple-ontante that they're in. But it's really about resolving conflicts in Central Asia. It's not really about Germany. But it ends up looking, especially to the Germans, you know, the Germans look around and they see, oh, now we're facing an alliance, which is, you know, France and Britain to our west and Russia to our east. And that looks like a hostile alliance aimed at us. So they start responding to that like it is a hostile alliance. And so the tensions grow. But the tensions are really kind of originating in imperial conflicts, not in sort of European conflict.

That's interesting. And I guess that would explain more so the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that we see later. Yeah. That's a long historical continuity, absolutely. Oh, that's really interesting. And it started there. And why Afghanistan specifically for the Russians, was it just because that was land that seemed like it was uncolonized that they could step into? Yeah. I mean, Russia had been expanding for several centuries. in this kind of imperial way, like sort of moving out from the central state, you know, and kind of core Russia and moving into particularly Central Asia or southeastern Europe. And so it's just part of that process. It's this accumulation of imperial territory, but all sort of tied to the, if you will,

the sort of mother country. Britain and France, also the Netherlands, Belgium, they did differently. They expanded overseas, so not territory, you know, contiguous to their own country. countries, but, you know, they expand all over the world, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, etc. That's interesting. Now, I've always wondered about Spain because I feel like they don't get talked about a ton with World War I. No, that's true. And why is that? And is it because a lot of their imperialism was like, you know, to the east? Well, the Spanish Empire had basically come to an end as you get to the 20th century. The last gasp of it really was the Spanish-American War in 1898,

in which the United States took from Spain, Cuba, and the Philippines. And that was pretty much it for the Spanish Empire. The Spanish Empire had been a big deal in the 15th, 16th centuries, but it was not a big deal by the 20th century. And Spain had kind of fallen out of the League of the Great Powers and stayed neutral, actually, in both World Wars. So it's interesting. Spain kind of comes on the stage of modern European history

with a few really important moments like the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, but it's mostly kind of a little below the radar in terms of these kind of big narratives about the World Wars. Interesting. And then Italy and Germany, obviously we see these two buddy up in World War II. You know what I mean?

That is obviously predicated from World War I. So what about those alliances and their sort of proxy imperial empires aligned them together? Well, it was always a bad fit, actually, between Italy and Germany, and you can actually see this, I think, in the sort of conduct of Italy

in those alliances. because technically when World War I starts, Italy is an ally of Germany. This roughly makes sense because the two countries had a somewhat similar pattern of historical development. They had become unified as nation states later than some of their neighbors. Italy in a process basically from the late 1850s up to 1871, Germany became unified in a process in the late 1860s up to 1871. These processes are related.

They have a lot to do with war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which both of them need to fight in order to get control of the territories that they want to have in their unified nation states. So there's a lot of similarities in the history between Italy and Germany, but Italy never quite fit. There, Italy had a sort of more, it was certainly a more democratic country at the time of World War I than either Austria or Germany. And you sort of see that because although an ally of Austria and Germany, once World War I starts, Italy says right away, we're going to stay out. We're going to stay neutral. And then about six months later, Britain and France pull Italy into the war on their side, basically by bribing a quite sleazy deal.

They bribe it in a secret treaty with an offer of territory when the war is over. So Italy switches to the allies. And so then when Italy starts fighting, it's fighting on the side of Britain and France. And then, of course, just to sort of fast forward a little bit, for complicated reasons that we may get to later, Italy becomes the first fascist state after World War I, and then kind of logically aligns with Nazi Germany for World War II and goes to war alongside Germany and World War II. But then when World War II sort of goes south for the Italians, the Italians overthrow their dictator in 1943, Mussolini.

He's overthrown in a coup, and Italy sort of switches sides and goes back to the Allies and says, oh, no, we actually want to be with you. Wow. There were German generals. I've seen post-war interviews with World War II German generals who would make jokes. to American interrogators and say things like, next time you have to have Italy again. I mean, I could have told you'd be a bad fit.

If you've ever met an Italian and a German, you'd be like, these people have nothing in common. That's definitely, just as a tourist in both places, that's kind of my sense too. You feed a German and you mean an Italian, you're like, yeah, there's a lot of romance in one of them and a lot of engineering in the other one. You know what I mean?

It is very, yeah, I don't see them getting along, just on a cultural level. I think they generally don't. Yeah, it's interesting. and they team up. Oh, that's fascinating. And then Italy is just, I guess, when you're in that position in war,

you're kind of like looking to align yourself with the power that will protect your power. So, yeah, yeah, flip-flopping everywhere. You know, there's a saying countries don't have friends, they have interests. And the Italians were sort of in a pragmatic way. I think Italian leaders were pursuing the interests they thought were good for Italy,

whichever way that might tend to go. Yeah. I mean, it's just so interesting, even as you're explaining this, you can just draw the parallels to today. Like, I don't know, I think it's an interesting point whenever we're talking about history, specifically World War I.

It's like, oh, this is 100 years ago. Like, this doesn't matter. I've heard people say this quote, like there's not multiple wars, there's only one war. And it just goes on forever. And that one war leads to conflicts and the next war that leads to conflicts and next war.

And it's just one long story of, you know, a struggle for power and influence and resources. I think that's certainly true. Whether that's true across all history, have to think about it. I think that's certainly true for the 20th century wars, though. There are very real continuities from World War I to World War II to the Cold War. And then today. And then in more complicated ways probably to today, yes, but yes. It's like a radio station. Yeah. The best of the 1900s, the 1940s and today. That's wild. Okay, so what exactly are the

Balkans doing? And why is Archduke Franz Ferdinand in this little place called Sarajeva? Why is this important? Yeah, I was about to say this is a fun story. Of course, it's not a fun story because it's multiple layers of tragedies, but it is an interesting story. All right, so let's talk a little bit about Serbia. Serbia had very recently become independent after many years of being under the rule of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire. It had become independent in 1878 as its own kingdom. And Serbia becomes kind of like the hot little kingdom on a mission. the Serbian leadership is really interested to expand the territory that Serbia controls in the Balkans. And they have this picture in their minds of creating a greater Serbia, or as they call it, something that would be a kingdom of the South Slavs.

In other words, the Slavic language peoples who live on the Balkan Peninsula. And they have a word for that in their language for the land of the South Slavs, which is Yugoslavia. So this is what they want to create. The problem here, or one of the problems, is that a lot of that territory that they want to create this bigger Serbia, this Yugoslavia, the territory belongs to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, for instance, areas like the states of Croatia or Slovenia, for instance, these are in the Austrian Empire. And also very faithfully, the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And so at the end of the 19th century, started the 20th century, sort of little aggressive Serbian. Serbia is really budding up against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Austrians are starting

to perceive Serbia as maybe their worst national security threat, partly because there are ethnic Serbs who live within some of those territories that are in the Austrian Empire, and some of them are quite psyched about the idea of breaking with Austria and joining Serbia. So it's creating an instability, and even worse, the example of Serbia pushing this nationalism and this vision of a Serbian state, not a multinational imperial state like Austria, but like a very nationally defined state. That is becoming an inspiration to other groups

within the very diverse Austrian Empire, which consists of people who are, you know, ethnic Germans around Vienna, but, you know, Hungarians, Czechs, because what's today, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are in that empire, so Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, a big chunk of Poland is in the Austrian Empire at that time. There are some Romanians, there are Italians, there are all these nationalities.

And Serbia is kind of an inspiration that you can fight against the Austrians and maybe break away from them. So the Austrians are starting to think by 1914, we really need to kind of take Serbia down to remove this threat. And they are literally planning a war with Serbia before things really blow up. Would they try to annex Serbia or would they just try to neuter them? They wanted, basically what they want to do is neuter it. They wanted to fight a war with Serbia, neuter it and sort of remove that threat to their, you know, territorial integrity.

Interesting. Now, the ethnic sort of placement of all these people, is that just a natural sort of like diaspora? Or is that an intentional placement by government leaders to put people in order to sort of sway sort of geographical factions? Yeah, it's an interesting question. In some ways, there's a little bit of both, but mostly it's natural in the sense of where people lived in, especially central and eastern U.S. Europe and the Balkans in those days. It basically reflected long historical patterns of a fairly natural settlement. And they're all speaking roughly the same language? Not at all. No, no. There are many different languages going on. There are many different religions. You know,

there are a lot of Roman Catholics in that region, but there are also Eastern Orthodox Christians. There are lots of Jews. Here and there, there are Protestant communities. So there's, and Muslim communities in a lot of what have been the Turkish Empire. So a lot of people in Bosnia, for instance, were in our Muslim. So it's a very, very complicated tapestry. And it's super complicated in any one geographical area. So, for instance, towns and cities across this whole region, no matter where you are, the towns and cities kind of tend to be German or Jewish in their settlement

or in some places like in Hungary, maybe Hungarian, whereas usually the countryside will have a different ethnicity. So, you know, for instance, let's take what's today the Czech Republic. Prague, the main city, is very German and or Jewish. And ethnic Czechs tend to live outside of the city. And this is a pattern you get across a lot of central and eastern Europe. That's interesting. I just think it's, again, an interesting parallel because I had read, I think it was Stalin,

had almost intentionally placed ethnic-speaking Russians around the border of Russia and into other countries like Ukraine, into Georgia, as a political tool that they can eventually annex these places, which you can see in obviously the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that there are certain, I guess, Ukrainians that are ethnically Russian that speak, you know, Russian that are like, yeah, we want to be annexed. And then obviously you have the Ukrainian government that's like, well, no, you can't invade us. But having the actual ethnicities placed in these places and people that actually speak the language is a major political tool that you can use. in order to try to gain more land and gain resources and gain ports, etc. It is a major political tool and you're right. Stalin did do that deliberately. Really, that's something that happens

with World War I and after World War I. So this whole sort of idea of deliberate population movements, whether it be to sort of move your people into a place to control it, which Stalin did, you're quite right throughout the Soviet Union, or to do what we now call ethnic cleansing. Both of those factors

are in play from World War I on, very much so. Because the outcomes effectively the same thing, is that if you're able to get rid of a group, then no one has claimed to it, so therefore we can take it, or if we put our people there, then now they have it, therefore we can take it. Right, exactly. Interesting. With the legacy, by the time you get through the whole quarters of the 20th century, by the time you get through World War I, very particularly World War II, the Holocaust, and then Soviet, you know, de facto, at least occupation of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with all the population movements that go on,

with economic cleansing and so on and refugee flows and genocide, all of those countries today are much more ethnically homogenous than they were, you know, 100 plus years ago. That's been the effect of, you know, a century and more of deliberate population movements

and ethnic cleansing. But if we go back before World War I, the whole area kind of from Germany, east and south in Europe, it's a really complicated sort of tapestry of different ethnicities and languages and religions. Wow.

So this is a gunpowder box. I can see more or less, you have all these proxy wars happening. You have this now independent Serbia, and they are proud as hell, and they are ready to go, and they want to create this, you know, sort of this Yugoslavic, you know,

empire that they can now expand into, and that is causing a major, you know, weight on the Austro-Hungrens. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's exactly right. And then into this, you mentioned the Archduke Franz Ferdin, So into this sails the poor Archduke and his wife Sophia.

And he's the Archduke of the Austrian Empire. So he's the heir to the throne. The emperor is this old guy named Franz Joseph, who by the time we get to World War I, Franz Joseph has been on the throne since 1848, if you can imagine that. He's been the emperor all the way through up to World War I. So he's an elderly gentleman by the time the war comes. He is actually beloved throughout the empire. even with all these sort of different ethnicities who kind of all hate each other by 1914.

But Franz Joseph is the one thing kind of holding it all together. He's very revered and beloved as this sort of symbol of the empire. But everybody is kind of aware that when he goes, and it can't be long, everyone knows he's an elderly guy. When he goes, there's going to be nothing else holding this together. He had bad luck with his heirs. He had a son named Crown Prince Rudolph who died in an absolutely sensational murder-suicide

in 1889. What? Yeah, because Rudolph was in love with a young woman who was not of the stature that, you know, a prince could marry. And so in 1889, knowing that he could never marry this young woman, well, he was already married, too, by the way, so he couldn't get divorced and marry this young woman. So he and the young woman, she was only 17,

her name was Mary Vizera. They go out to Prince Rudolph's hunting lodge, and Rudolph shot her and then shot himself. So that takes out the first heir to the throne. So then old emperor Franz Josef has to find another heir, and so he finds his, it was a nephew, I believe, Franz Ferdinand. So then he's the heir. And Franz Ferdinand actually has a variant of Rudolph's problem.

He too is married to a woman who's not of the social class level that is appropriate to marry someone who's the heir to the throne. And he's choosing these people? Like, these are not arranged marriages? I figure at this point, it would be like, hey, we have this, you know, you are royalty in this empire, so now you're going to marry royalty in this other empire. They didn't always marry who they were supposed to. Well, Prince Rudolph did marry who is supposed to, but wasn't in love with her,

and so has this affair with Marie Vatsera. Wow. The Archduke Franz Ferdin and married someone he kind of wasn't supposed to. And so, and then it's, there's this, like, ridiculous protocol in the Austrian court. there's all these things that it's like constantly insulting him and making him angry. When they go into dinner at a big state formal dinner, she can't go in on his arm because she's not at his status. So, you know, the heir to the throne, his own wife has to come into dinner like way behind him.

There's all these things that drive him crazy. So they're always happy the couple. They love each other. They actually have a great marriage and a great family life. They love their kids. I'm sure there's sort of endearing. There's less pressure on him because it's like, you're not even the air. You're like the nephew, you know what I mean?

He is the air now. At that point. But when he gets married, it's like, yeah, marry whoever you want, you know, because you're never going to be the king. You're never going to be the emperor. I'd have to double-check this, but I think he got married after he became the Arab. I'm actually not 100% sure about that. But in any case, if they go out of Vienna, Vienna's the capital, if they go out of Vienna, they're under less scrutiny and they can sort of, the protocol is in districts. They love going somewhere that isn't Vienna. Oh, no. This leads us to going to Sarajevo in 1914. They're quite happy to go there.

the thing is they're there on June 28th, 1914. And this is a date of great significance to Serbs. It's kind of Serbia's July 4th. It's their national day. In an odd sort of way, it commemorates the day in 1389 that Serbia was conquered by the Turks in what's called the Battle of Kosovo. So oddly, Serbia's National Day is its kind of historically most fateful defeat. But be that as it may.

they do consider it their national day. To this day. To this day. Oh, wow. So the Archduke and his wife, Sophia, are in Sarajevo on Serbia's national day. This is known in advance. It's planned. So meanwhile, we've talked about Serbia as this troublemaking country.

One of the things Serbia is doing, and this is quite modern, the Serbian military intelligence service is running a terrorist operation in Bosnia, which sort of belongs to Austria. Austria has annexed it anyway. The Serbians are running a terrorist operation there of ethnic Serbs, doing terrorist acts against the Austrians, as part of their campaign to try and break it away from Austria. So when they learn that the Archduke is going to be in Sarajevo

on of all days June 28th, they think this is a colossal insult to Serbs. And they basically decide, okay, we're going to whack him. Oh, wow. I mean, why would he do that? Like, why would he go on that day? In Russia's fact, it didn't look like a good move. Was it intentional?

Was there like a big parade? Like, oh. There's a big parade, yeah. Okay. So like, oh, the Archduke is going to come on our, you know, like national day. Yeah. So it was not some coincidence. He was like, it was not a coincidence, no.

Wow. And I actually wonder if there's even something that affects the psyche of the population when your national day is not necessarily a day of triumph, but a day of defeat. I bet you that builds into the people every year when they remember that day. it's not like, oh, yeah, we're the best. It's like, oh, we got beat and we got to get our get back. Like, I bet you it, it, like, emboldens them in a significant way. It might be.

I do think there's a kind of victim mentality that some of, in some of the nationalisms, not just the Serbs, in some of the nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe, it's sort of mixed with a victim mentality as opposed to a, you know, kind of triumphalist nationalism, which is, I think, more typical in the West. It's interesting. Like, I don't even know what the parallel in America would be. but like the day like the British did something bad to us in America, you know what I mean? Like I don't even know what that day would be and that that that would be our July 4th.

Yeah, that would be, it was not our independence day. It's like the day the British like, you know, decimated a bunch of people. Right. It's not a very American way of thinking about things. No, but I do, I could see if that was our day. Americans would be like, oh, we got a, like, they'd be pissed off. We're doing fireworks and they're like, we should be dropping those somewhere. You know what I mean?

Wow. That's interesting. So the Serbian military intelligence gets this group of young Bosnian Serbs. They're all like students, basically, gets them ready to go to assassinate the Archduke when he comes to Sarajevo. And so there he is. The Archduke is in Sarajevo on June 28th. He starts off visiting City Hall. They toss a bomb at him.

It misses, injures one of his bodyguards. And he's really angry. He kind of shoes out the security people and the Sarajevo officials. Basically, how could you be letting this happen? And then being in some ways kind of a good guy, he decides he wants to go to the hospital to visit the guard who was wounded. So he gets in his car, he's got a motorcade, and they drive to the hospital,

and here's where something fateful happens. They take a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac. And as it happens, one of the young Bosnians involved in this assassination plot was very dismayed that the bomb had failed, and he goes to a sidewalk cafe and sits down to have a drink and kind of like drink off his depression. Is the sandwich I was talking about?

Yeah. So then he's sitting there, and then he sees the motorcade drive right in front of him. The cul-de-sac they go into is right in front of this cafe. So the young man, his name is Gavrilo Princip. He sees this, and he recognizes who it is. And so he jumps right up. You know, the car has to, like, stop and then reverse.

So it's like virtually stationary. So he jumps right up, gets out his pistol, fires two shots, and kills two people with two shots, which people who shoot guns, especially with a pistol, tell me this is very hard to do. But faithfully, he managed to do it. His two shots kills the Archduke and the Archduchess of Sophia. Very sad as the Archduke is dying, he says to Sophia, Sophia, live for our children, but she dies too. Damn. And so that's that. I always like that. I always like that. to tell my students when I do this in class,

it's probably the most incompetent assassination attempt that ever actually succeeded. But succeed it did. Yeah, you've got to wonder, like, this guy's sitting there at a cafe and it's just like, man, like, we can't do anything right. Yeah. And then also just maybe the car pulls up, he's like, yo, God gives you a freebie every now to you.

You know what I mean? Like, that is, that is wild. You almost got to wonder, like, this was supposed to happen. You know what I mean? Like in some cosmic way, it's like... Well, there are, by the way, conspiracy theories about this. I don't think there's any validity to them, But there are some people, some historians have speculated, the security was so lax in Sarajevo and so incompetent that maybe Austrian officials wanted this to happen because they wanted a pretext to go to war against Serbia.

And this would be a pretty good pretext. I mean, that's logical. I just don't think there's evidence for it. It's probably not true. It's probably just incompetence and stupidity on the part of the local security. It's interesting. But it's an interesting idea. It's effectively like a false flag.

Like, hey, we will stage this event. This guy will get shut. maybe he dies, maybe he doesn't. But now we have perfect justification to now go neuter Serbia and we'll have no issue. Wow. That's really interesting. And the bodyguards, like, they were all investigated ostensibly? There was no recourse.

I don't think there was any actually really serious investigation. I mean, there was an inquiry into why the security failed. I doubt it actually affected the bodyguards themselves. I think it was more at an administrative level. And I think it's important to note. Again, this is 1914. Like assassinations of government officials is not a new thing. Again, I think for me at least, I look at history and I'm like, oh yeah, they had never even heard of this.

Like, no, they were people just like you and I. And they were thinking about national security threats and they had a security detail just like how presidents do today. And at this point, I mean, what, three American presidents had been assassinated? I think that's right. Yeah. Like they had seen what happens when these sort of things, you know, unfold. Yes. And I'm curious, the terror groups that were attempting to assassinate Archiege

Franz Ferdinand, their goal by assassinating him was just to disrupt the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were trying to take out the air to send a message. Like, what would you say in sort of short was their actual objective? So partly that, partly they just want to hit any Austrian target. But there was also a slightly more subtle strategic calculation. Franz Ferdinand was actually among the sort of Austrian elite. He was the one most sympathetic to ideas of opening up the empire a little bit to give local autonomy.

So, for instance, he was more in favor of letting Serbs within the empire have a bit more autonomy from central power in Vienna. And if you are Serbia, that's not what you want. You know, basically, we were kind of talking before. radicals always hate the center, right? No matter what kind of radical you are, you hate the center. The center's not good for you if you're a radical. If you're a radical, what you want, you want your enemy to be the radical on the other side, who's like an absolute enemy that you can paint as absolute evil.

You don't want your enemy to be this person in the middle, kind of saying, yeah, okay, I hear you. I get your issue. Let's talk about it. You don't want some moderate empath. It's like, yeah, you have some interesting points, but maybe we could reach an agreement. Right. You want someone just as vitriolic that's willing to battle you to emboldened. your base and justify what you're doing.

Yeah. So they took out the guy who was most moderate on Serbia within the Austrian power elite. Oh, wow. That's a really interesting ripple. He wasn't taken out because he was so radical and he was like, we're going to kill all the Serbs. He was taken out because he was like, hey, maybe we can work something out. Yes. Wow. Yeah. That is an important lesson of history. That is very interesting. And God knows we see this repeating over and over again in history. So now you've got a situation where This has happened. This assassination has happened. Everybody in the world, although there isn't evidence out yet,

but everybody in the world pretty much figures. The Serbian government's behind this. You can sort of draw that picture pretty easily. They had been blamed for other terror attacks that had happened already. Yeah, absolutely. Everybody knew this was kind of, I mean, this was the kind of thing they did.

And so probably they were behind this one. Which meant that everybody in the world thought, it will be, this is a little bit like, you know, after 9-11 in America, right? Like a lot of people in the world said, well, okay, sure, America's going to take a round out of Afghanistan now, and that's kind of how it is. Everybody thought that in 1914. It's kind of okay if the Austrians go after Serbia because of this. That's a legit reason. The problem, well, there were two problems then that came up. One is the Austrian Empire was notoriously slow-moving and kind of administratively incompetent, and they couldn't do anything very

quickly. It wasn't like, you know, the assassination is June 28th. It's not like on June 29th, they can send troops into Serbia. They need about, you know, six or eight weeks to get their army ready to do this. You got to get people. Yeah. Wow. And by that time, like the things have cooled down, the moods changed. It's, it looks a little less like, okay, that's a justifiable response. But you can't let a good crisis go to waste. Right. The other problem, though, is that it's not all of the Serbian government that's on side with this act of terrorism. It is very specifically the military intelligence, but the civilian government and the prime minister of Serbia, particularly the prime minister looks at this and he basically thinks,

oh no, he sees what's coming down the track at Serbia. And he tries to backpedal like crazy. So after about a month, the Austrians get it together to send an ultimatum to the Serbia is the ultimate has 10 points. It's like, you have to do this and this and this and this, or we're going to invade you. And the whole point of the 10 points is that no country could possibly accept them. They are meant to be unacceptable. So the Serbian government will say, no, we can't do this. And then the Austrians invade. But the Austrians then have this cover of like, oh, look, we tried. This is just war. You're like, hey, we try to negotiate and

they refuse negotiations. But it's sort of a fraudulent submission. Totally. But the Serbian prime minister, a guy named Pazich, is smart in a way, and he returns an answer to this basically like, yes, okay, fine, we agreed in nine of these points, and one of them, could we talk about it a little bit? We're not saying no, but could we just discuss this? And that's not the answer that the Austrians want. And indeed, Austria's allied Germany,

and particularly its emperor, the famous Kaiser Wilhelm II, Kaiser Wilhelm sees this response, and he says, oh, well, there's no reason for war now. Like, the Serbians have been reasonable. They've agreed. but the Austrians say, nope, and they declare war because it's war that they want.

Again, the moderate is not what they want. Right. They get a moderate guy in Serbia. Again, moderate at this time. Granted, they likely, you know, did this assassination, so not that moderate.

But ostensibly... Well, Posich and his people didn't. It was, you know, this... It was the military intelligence within the government, but not the civilian part represented by Possich. Oh, really?

Yeah. So the military intelligence was not communicating with the actual... Right. They're rogue. They're... totally rogue. Oh, wow. That's really interesting. And so are there two factions in Serbia?

Yes. Ah, I see. Okay. So now he has to take accountability for what this rogue faction did in his own country. Exactly. Interesting. Now, just to touch on this quickly, the gentleman who assassinated of France Ferdin, this was Princep. Prentzep. What happened to him? He was put on trial, as you might expect, and sent to prison and died in prison of tuberculosis in 1917. All right. Seems justified.

You can't kill people. Right. I'm fine with that. Wow. Okay. So what happens next? So then, now you have, you know, I should, actually first preface this by saying, I mean, the outbreak of

World War I is absolutely, absolutely insanely complicated. And in a way you have this, in a way, this little issue at the heart of it, which then interacts on a whole bunch of other things and brings in all the complexity. So you have this local conflict between the Austrian Empire and Serbia, which is now in full flame with the assassination and the Austrian response and the ultimatum and the Serbian response to the ultimatum. So there's going to be a war between Austria and Serbia. Now here's where it gets really complicated.

We were talking before about how there are two alliance networks in Europe, triple alliance and the triple on top. Now, Russia, of course, is a, in the triple entend with France and Britain. Russia also has, although it's not an alliance formally, Russia has a kind of special relationship with Serbia, which, by the way, it still does. Russia has always seen itself and still does

as kind of Serbia's big brother. This is because of sort of ties of similar language in the Slavic family of languages. Also similar religion. Serbs are generally Eastern Orthodox as Russians generally are. So there's a lot of sort of ties there. And there had been a few occasions.

There had been some diplomatic crises before 1914 in which Serbia was in some way in conflict with other powers like Austria and had looked to Russia for protection and hadn't gotten it. And so the Russians feel like, okay, this time our credibility is really on the line. We cannot let Serbia down this time. So the Russians make it very clear to the Austrians that an invasion of Serbia by Austria will bring Russia in to help defend Serbia. But now we are starting to really expand the problem because Austria isn't an alliance with Germany. So if Russia goes to war against Austria, it will also have to go to war against Germany.

And now it's going to get a notch more complicated. By 1914, Germany has only one plan for war. Now, Germany's strategic problem is that it borders on France and the West in particular, among the major powers. And in those days, there's no Poland on the map. So Germany borders directly on Russia in the east. So Germany's strategic problem is it has two quite big, powerful countries on east and west. It's kind of trapped, and they're their adversaries.

They're in a hostile alliance. So Germany feels the word they always use is encircled. And they know they have to deal strategically with the problem that any war they get into is probably going to be a war on two fronts against two powerful countries, which is a lot to have to deal with. So German strategic planners had spent a couple decades going back and forth. If war comes, what do we do? Do we try to defend in both places?

Or do we maybe attack one side or attack the other side, try and beat that side and then deal with the other side? Or form an alliance with one side and then use that to fight against the other side? Prior to the 1890s, they had dealt with this problem by basically staying in alliance with Russia. But when the famous architect of German unification, Alton Bismarck, was fired by the Kaiser in 1890, his policy had been stay close with Russia. That dropped out, and the people who followed Bismarck were not as adept at working that alliance, and they sort of let Russia slip away and become an ally of France. So by 1914, actually technically by 1913, Germany has come up, or German military planners have come up with the idea that our answer to our strategic dilemma is going to be to put all our eggs in attacking in the West.

The rationale for this is, apart from just that they're trapped in this impossible situation, but they figure if we can beat France first, France is an advanced industrialized country where the sophisticated rail network, it will be able to get its army to the front, like deployed into the front quickly. So we have to worry, if war comes, we have to worry about a threat from France like right away. Russia is a relatively backward country at that point. It was, Russia was by far the most economically, technologically backward of all the major European powers. And, of course, it's huge. So the Germans figure, when war comes, it'll take the Russians a while to get organized. They don't have a good rail network or good road network. They'll have trouble

organizing troops and sending them our way, it'll take them a while. So we put basically all our forces into knocking France out, knock France out in six weeks, then shuttle our troops across to Russia and we can sort of deal with Russia as it's just kind of waking up. Interesting. So this means, I mean, all that sort of makes sense. The problem that the Germans made, which is, it's hard to see how this could ever be a good idea, but the problem that they, the mistake that they made is that they only have one plan for war. You know, they think there's probably only one war they're going to get into, which is a war with France and Russia at the same time.

But they only have one plan. And the plan is send the entire army to attack France, except it's not even that. It's send the entire army to attack Belgium. Because their strategy is go through Belgium and then into northern France, kind of loop around Paris, and then attack the French army where it's going to be, which is on the French German border.

The French German border is highly fortified. on the French side. So it would be very hard to get across. But Belgium is just this big flat open plane. Interesting. And I think it's also worth it. There's also like some geographical barriers. There's like large forests and things like that. There are forests sort of in the south. Played a famous role in 1940 in a different war. But they're forests in the south in Luxembourg and southern Belgium. But sort of central and northern Belgium is just a big flat plane. Is that the same path that they end up taking in World War II? Well, World War II, they actually go through the forest, which is.

Right, and to get into France. Yeah, which is why it worked because no one expected it. Interesting. But World War I, they go through the plains of northern Belgium. But the thing is, Belgium is a neutral country, and to even top this off, back in 1839, Britain and France and Prussia, the big German state, which is the sort of ancestor of unified Germany, had signed a treaty saying they would all respect the neutrality of Belgium in the event of war. So the Germans are violating this treaty by planning to invade France via Belgium.

And that's the only plan for war they have. Basically, whatever military crisis arises that might involve Germany in a war, the answer is, invade Belgium with everything we've got. And did the Belgians or the French know this? They strongly suspected it. Wow. They pretty much, I mean, you could look at the map and if you're a military strategist, you could think it makes sense for the Germans to go there. It doesn't make sense for them to attack directly on the French. border with France where it's heavily fortified.

It's interesting that Belgium was so neutral despite their imperialist goals as well. I mean, at this point, they had already sort of decimated the Congo. Yes. But that didn't cause any type of proxy conflict with any of the European nation. Yeah, I think probably because being a relatively small country, it just didn't arouse the fears that the bigger European countries could arouse with each other. Interesting. Now, in Austria this time, Archduke is gone, but there's no power vacuum because the emperor is still there.

Correct. Is there a new air? There is a new air. Interesting. And who is this? He's the crown prince Carl, who does eventually become emperor. The old emperor of Franziosi finally dies in 1916, and so Carl succeeds him. When he succeeds, he succeeds to an empire that is falling apart as he comes into it.

And his rule lasts about two years until the empire does completely dissolve. Interesting. Wow. So these ripples go all through Europe. And everyone basically, like a Rube Goldberg machine, effectively fall into place. They're like all of these little locks that are kind of lined up with this one action, the butterfly effect, locks Russia into Serbia. Yes, exactly. The Germans are now locked in with Austria and now they're attacking Belgium. Yes. Which, of course, means by attacking France via Belgium, you are obviously opening up.

up a war with France. And you violated your treaty. And you violated the treaty. And so then the last piece of this is Britain. Now, Britain is in an alliance with France and Russia. But that doesn't necessarily mean, I mean, you can break a treaty or you can deploy, not deploy ground troops. You could rely on your Navy.

Britain has a powerful Navy. They might just fight the war with the Navy. But by invading Belgium, the Germans make it very easy. for the British government to go before Parliament, the British administration to go before parliament and basically say, look what barbarians these Germans are. They're violating the neutrality of brave little Belgium.

So we need to go to war to stand up for international law and treaty rights and so on. That's a more politically palatable message to the British than we need to go to war to help France because the British kind of don't love France. They've been historical enemies for about a millennium. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

But brave little Belgium hands the British a sort of perfect argument, for the British government, a kind of perfect argument to rally support behind not only joining the war, but joining the war and committing ground troops to the fighting in Western Europe. So in a way the invasion of Belgium helps the French. Like if they hypothetically in some alternate way were able to go directly into France, it'd be harder to get British support. Yes, it would be hard to get British support, much harder to get British ground troops. you might have gotten British support

in the form of the Navy, which might have been important, but basically winning a war with the Navy is a strategy to win a long war. And without ground troops, the Germans might have won a quick war against France. Wow. So invading Belgium was, as it turns out,

probably a massive strategic mistake for the Germans. And they did not anticipate that England would get involved, or Britain rather, would get involved. They either didn't anticipate, they thought Britain would stay out or they thought Britain wouldn't do much even if it came in. They didn't see it as a big deal.

This is so fun seeing all these pieces lock in place. Now, okay, just to go through a couple other countries specifically at this time, 1914. Yeah. Italy. What do they do? So the Italians are technically in an alliance with Austria and Germany. But being intermittently sensible about war, the Italians see this and they say, no, no, no, we're going to stay out. We're not having any part of this.

So when the war first begins, which, by the way, is in August, early August, 1914, when the fighting actually starts. It takes about six weeks or so from the assassination to get to the point of having a war. Okay. But Italy stays out. Switzerland? Switzerland stays neutral as it has stayed neutral for...

Shout out Switzerland. Solid. And then Spain, as we mentioned, are kind of reeling from their empire kind of imploding, but they're also just kind of staying neutral because they don't really have any... They don't have an alliance or they don't have the resources to support the alliance?

Both, actually. Okay. So they're just kind of... neutral as well. And then the Portuguese? So actually, interestingly, Portugal, this is a fun fact that probably nobody knows. Portugal is Britain's oldest continuous ally. There's been an alliance treaty between Portugal and Britain since the 15th century. But it was not one that committed them to entering the world. Although in fact, they did send some troops to the Western Front. Interesting. And that alliance was just like a political, I'm assuming like imperial trade alliance that they had formed?

I mean, it goes back to the age of exploration, and the ins and outs of it, I must confess, are not my wheelhouse, but I do know that that alliance had been there for a long time. Interesting. I'm trying to think, like, Greece, they're kind of, again, like, what is the state of Greece at that point? Greece actually does end up getting involved,

and this actually has a lot to do with the fact that the Turkish, or as it was then called, the Ottoman Empire, joins the war about a month after it starts on the side of Austria and Germany. And there's a long pattern of hostility between Turkey and Greece. So you get fighting there basically for that reason.

Oh, wow. Okay. Do you mind if we pull up this map really quick and just take a look? I just want to see, and I think it's actually helpful to kind of like get a visual. So this, okay, Romania, Bulgaria.

Are they neutral at this point in 1914, specifically? They start off being neutral. Romania eventually joins the war on the side of Britain and France. Bulgaria joins on the side of Germany. Oh, interesting. And what makes that split? A lot of it is actually,

it's a matter of sort of who your main enemy is, partly. So for instance, Romania really wants territory from Hungary. They have a long-running dispute over territory. So Hungary being part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So if you're against Austria-Hungary, that's going to kind of move you to be on the side of France and Britain. There are also kind of cultural ties between Romania and France in particular, historic cultural ties. Bulgaria, among other things, it had a German king, as in fact many European countries do, did and do.

really because historically, before it was unified, you know, the German-speaking region of Europe was a bunch of small states, mostly, that all kind of had their own royal family. And often you had unemployed royal family members in the German-speaking world. And if you're a country that's looking for a king, if for whatever reason you've just become independent or, you know, your royal family died out or something, and you need a king, and you need a king, Germany had historically been the King department store. No way. So all over Greece, Bulgaria, let's not forget Britain.

Yes. The British thing is so interesting. I mean, typically the British royal family, we know them as the Windsors. Yes. But actually, that's a totally fake name, which, by the way, they started using in World War I. Because to use their actual family, dynastic name, sounded bad when you're at war with Germany. They are, in fact, the house of Zaksakobogota. Wow, yes.

Very German. I've heard this before, and that's why they switched it. Yes. So technically the monarchial power in Britain at that time of World War I was ethnically German. Yes. Whoa. As late as, so King Edward the 7th, who was king from 1901 to 1910, as late as him, he spoke with a German accent. With a German accent?

He was addressing the English people? Yes. With a German accent. Yes. And the English were fine with this? I mean, it's the way it was. It's the king. Yes, you're fine with it. But you just assume like there's like this, especially in this time, I guess, you just assume that there's like this strong sense of like nationalism and that the English need to be led by the English and the Germans by the Germans.

And that is not necessarily the case? That is absolutely not. And what was the deal with the Germans? Like why did they become the department store? Is it just because they had good kings? It's because you had all these royal families in Germany because you had all these, you know, several dozen states within the German speaking world. which have mostly, you know, as of 1871, being consolidated into Germany. But, and even after that, you still had royal families in some of those days.

But anyway, you had all these royal families. And, you know, royal family, they're going to have several kids probably. And not all of them are going to be employed as the next king of, you know, Saxony or Archduke of this or that. And so you're going to have all these unemployed royals. And the thing about the way people thought about being a king in those days, it's kind of like CEOs of companies now. It's like if you are looking for a king, you need someone who is kind of already a king who has like royal blood, right? Interesting. Like a company looking for a CEO might hire someone who's been a CEO because that's what you want.

You want a CEO. Even if they were fired disgracefully from their former company. Yeah. You'd be like, well, they went to a good school and they understand CEO stuff. So we'll take them. But you can't just have like Joe Blow go and be a king. Like you need someone who has royal blood. So Germany is a place where you got a lot of folks with royal blood.

Lots of them, as I said, unemployed. So it's a natural place to go. There was an effort, by the way, just to drop back a little, there was an effort in 1870 by the Spanish to get a German king coming from the royal family that ruled Prussia, and thus the royal family that became the royal family that put up the emperors in Germany between 1871 and 1918, the dynasty called the Holenzelern.

They were going to get a Holenzelen to go and be king of Spain. And it was when the French objected to that, because they didn't want Hounzel and kings on either side of them, that a war sprung up between France and Germany, which led to the unification of Germany. Wow. And so in the Scandinavians, the Nordics, are they kind of neutral?

They stay neutral in World War I, yes. Interesting. And did they ever have any type of proximity to Russia, like sharing a border, obviously, that I can imagine has certain political implications? Yeah, well, so Finland, in the... those days was part of Russia. It was part of the Russian Empire. Oh, so Finland is a part of it. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. Wow. Okay. So the stage is set. I understand now how this is so

complicated and where everyone sort of lies and why. Okay. And now the fighting starts. Yeah. So we've gone from this like kind of local fight between Austria and Serbia to getting spread because Russia is going to come in, but Russia coming in means Germany is going to have to come in, but that means Germany's only plan is to attack France via Belgium. So that brings in France and Belgium, and then that's going to bring in the British too. So by the time, you know, the cliche has always said, the dominoes fall, but it does sort of work as a metaphor.

The dominoes all fall. And by the 4th of August, Britain is the last of the big powers to come in. When Britain declares war on the 4th of August, that's it. You've got World War I. Wow. I'm so excited to see how all this unfolds. Do you mind if we take a quick break? We can run to the bathroom really quick.

We're also going to check out a word from our sponsors that help make the show pop. possible. And also really quick, I just want to thank everybody that came out to the shows that I've been doing the past couple days. I was in Pots Town, PA. That was amazing. And then I was in Stanford, Connecticut last night. Thank you for everybody that came. It was absolutely amazing. So I appreciate y'all. We'll be back in like, you know, probably two minutes. And we're just going to hear a quick word from our sponsors. Thank you. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to help you make sports more fun. That's right. If you like watching sports, there's a way to make it 10 times more fun. And that is with prize picks.

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Let's get back to the show. And we're back. There's actually a question from the audience that they wanted to know. how much longer would the war have been delayed if Ferdinand was not killed? Oh, I love that question. I love these kinds of questions. You know, the honest answer is there's no way to know. I do think that the conditions in Europe were moving to something like this.

And if it hadn't been the assassination, it would have been something else. I mean, I can only guess, but I think a war of the kind that happened would have come within probably five years or so. Wow. Okay. Yeah. It seems like all the pieces were there and the tension was there. If it wasn't this, it would have been some other thing. You just needed to spark.

It didn't have to be the spark. Right. I mean, there had been a string of crises, diplomatic crises in about the decade before. So each time Europe got close to it and then the diplomats would figure something out and it would back away. But, you know, this was going to keep happening. And it's just a matter of time. One of these things, one of these crises was going to tip it over. Wow.

Okay. So now there's a full-fledged invasion. The Austrians are going into Serbia. The Austrians are going into Serbia, which flops, by the way. The Serbians actually repel them at first. The Austrian invasion is a complete flop. Oh, wow. Not a highly competent army.

I mean, that should be the end of the conflict. All right, we invaded you. You guys killed our guy and we couldn't get in. Boom, we're done. But by this time, the war is happening everywhere else. Yeah. Okay. So that first invasion is unsuccessful.

They come back and then they do succeed, but with German help later. And the Germans are simultaneously now already in Belgium? They're in Belgium. They're moving into Belgium, yes. Okay. And the Russians, somewhat messing up the German plan, the Russians turn out to be a little faster to getting their army going than the Germans had expected. And the Russians move right into the eastern parts of Germany, which in those days meant

East Prussia, which now is Poland, except for one little bit of it, there's actually Russia now. That's how far. Germany used to go, if we maybe see on the map, Germany used to go a lot farther east than it does now. You can see that black tail of Germany they're going way into what, even up to what today is Lithuania. Oh, interesting. So the Russians are getting into that East Prussian region, and the Germans have this emergency that they have to shuttle troops back there to deal with it. Meanwhile, the Germans are also moving into Belgium, and they have a problem there too, because they had expected the Belgians either not to fight back at all, to just let them pass through, or else to fight ineffectually. But then the Belgians, too, a little bit like the Serbians, although a small country, they put up a good fight. And they're not going to beat the Germans,

but they do slow them down. They slow them down a few days. And some military historians say, that might have been just enough to throw the whole German plan out, just the Belgian slowing them down a few days. Oh, wow. And, I mean, now the Germans are fighting a two-front war, basically. Yes, they're fighting exactly the war that they know is bad news for them.

Exactly what they're trying to avoid. Yes. Interesting. And then the British deploy their troops quite quickly as well. They deploy troops to Belgium. They get them going within a couple of weeks. Now, Britain is militarily very unlike the other European powers. We should stress this point.

All the continental European powers, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, even Italy, they have very large, armies in the sense of ground troops. They have big armies. When we talk about armies in that era, we talk about divisions. That's because a division is, all armies are organized into divisions. And in every European army, a division is about the same number of soldiers. A division in every army is about 12 to 15,000 soldiers. So we talk about armies having divisions. And to give you an idea of the scale, you know, Germany, France, Russia, they're deploying armies in the range of 50, 60 divisions. When Britain deployed, employees of force initially to Belgium, it sends what it calls an expeditionary force,

which is four in infantry divisions and one cavalry division. So it's a much, much smaller army than the others. But unlike the others, Britain's army is like our army now in America. It's an all-volunteer professional army. So these are, it's a small army, but these are highly trained, skillful professional soldiers who are making this their career. Whereas all of the other European armies are draft armies. They draft their young men at 18 or whatever. They do a couple of years of service maybe and then pass into the reserves and then can be called up in wartime. And so the continental European armies are all these like really big armies, but based on calling guys up who have done their service as young men and having these huge armies of reservists. So they're

less skillful. Interesting. So the British can kind of punch above their weight and they do. they first encounter the Germans in Belgium at a place called Mons. And although the British, in a sense, lose and get pushed back, they kind of lose well. They lose inflicting a lot of casualties and delay on the Germans. So the German plan is falling apart every which way. They're being slowed down in Belgium when they need to move really quickly. And the Russians are into East Prussia. So then meanwhile, on the other side, in late August of 1914, the

the Germans meet, the German army meets and stops the Russians at a major strategically important battle where they beat them and they push the Russians back. So at that point, the immediate threat to Germany's own security from the Russians has been neutralized. But still the war is not going as Germany kind of needs it to go. It sort of goes wrong from the beginning. Now, I know this is going to come up in a little bit, but America at this point, what are we thinking? So, this comes in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who was, of course, first elected to the presidency in 1912, political science professor, president of Princeton University, and then briefly governor of New Jersey, very high-minded, idealistic pacifist.

And Wilson gives a very eloquent speech when the war breaks out, in which he's a very eloquent speech. she says there's something as being too proud to fight. He's really, you know, looking down at war. In a sense, he's saying to be a real, you know, a real man, to be really dignified, is you stand apart from that. You don't get drawn into this squalid violence. And this is a very popular idea in America. Isolationism is a very widespread belief.

Most Americans think, why should we get involved in some European bloodshed? They're all nasty empires anyway. And so the United States kind of proudly stays out of the fighting. It certainly doesn't proudly stay out of supplying the combatants, especially Britain and France. United States supplies all kinds of equipment, food, and very importantly finance to the British and French to enable them to keep their war effort going. In theory, the Americans would also have sold stuff to the Germans. but in practice, to do that, the Germans would have needed to be able to get ships across the Atlantic to pick up things in American ports. And because of the power of the British Navy, that's not going to happen.

So the Germans are cut off from that. Interesting. But was there ever any type of conversation with the Germans and the Americans to be like, hey, maybe we could get something? Like, did that happen on the record? Or was that just sort of like a hypothetical? It basically remained a hypothetical. And indeed, the German government was always kind of. of hostile to the United States anyway. There was a diplomatic figure in the United States,

a military attach at their embassy named Franz von Pappen, who was actually organizing kind of sabotage and terrorist attacks in the United States. He was sort of caught doing this, and he was expelled. For what reason? What would be the reason to disrupt the U.S.? Well, partly because they wanted to cut off things that were being made for the British. But they didn't shy away from doing that on American soil. Interesting. I mentioned this in part, because a couple of decades later, Franz von Pappen would be arguably the most important guy involved in putting out of Hitler in power in Germany. Oh, wow. So, again, you see all these kinds of fateful seas being sewn in World War I that are going to come out later.

Oh, that's interesting. And now the American alliance with France and Britain is a trade alliance? Is that formalized in some type of, like, military conflict? It's not, it's actually technically never an alliance. even in 1917 when the United States does join the war the United States and particularly the Wilson administration make clear that we are not one of the allies we do not have an alliance with France and Britain

we are an associated power not an allied power so their desire to supply finances and weapons is like what is the purpose of that for Wilson like why is that beneficial to the American well it really doesn't even have much to do with the government it's about making money it's it's about bankers an industrialist making money by selling stuff to the brides. Making money on war? What?

That never happens. Gosh, yes. Dr. Hatt, that is, you're talking crazy right now. I know it sounds crazy, but... War is profitable? Yep. Wow. So it's genuinely just financial interest, which is why they would potentially supply the Germans

as well because they're like, yeah. Whoever's going to buy our stuff, we can supply them. Yes. The problem that does crop up, though, especially by 1917, to use a term that we've become familiar with in recent years, American banks, by that point, having loaned so much money to Britain and France, Britain and France have become too big to fail. So this is a bit of background noise. It's not the most important factor, but it is a bit of background noise in the United States entering the war in 1917, because for Britain and France to go down would then induce a financial crisis in America

because there are so many loans outstanding. Oh, there's a little bit of a sunk cost here. Absolutely. Oh, wow. And do you know roughly how much money? Like, is this like a massive expenditure that the Americans are pumping in here? Is it sort of like, you know, nominal? You know, I can't give you a dollar figure, but it would be safe to say it's massive. Wow. Okay. And, but as far as supplying financially, is this to like preserve these places as independent and friendly with the United States? Is that like what they're trying to do to make money down the road? Like, I understand supplying munitions because you actually can get paid from that. Yeah. But supplying the financial instruments. Well, that's making money too. I mean, you know,

because you're making interest on the loans, right? So. Oh, that's right. That's right. These are not just free dollars to use in your war. Absolutely not. We're going to come collect on this. I mean, that comes later in World War II, in the famous form of Lenleys. But in World War I, no, it's completely mercenary. Wow.

Anyone can get some money, but we got to get our pound of flesh. Wow. Okay, that's interesting. So America's isolationist, and we're like, okay, let's just stand back and see what happens. Okay. So now what are the major sort of battles and conflicts that happened, therefore, they get America into it? Yeah, okay. So, all right.

So let's just say maybe a couple of things about how the, the fighting unfolds. So, as I mentioned, the Germans did manage to stop the Russian advance in the east. Then they're pushing in the West. And in the fall of 1914, there is this time when militarily the war being fought in France and Belgium is open. You don't know how it's going to go. The possibilities are open. There are extremely high casualty battles.

In fact, a lot of people don't realize this, but the highest casualty year of the war was 1914. Oh, wow. The French plan is to attack across their border with Germany directly into Germany. They do this, and they have horrific casualties in these attacks. And then meanwhile, the Germans are meeting the French and the British like to the north as they swing through Belgium.

Eventually, after a little over a month, in September 1914, there's another of these really decisive battles called the Battle of the Marne. At this point, the Germans have gotten close to Paris. The Marne River is close to Paris. And the Marne is a battle involving all of the Germans, French and British. And after a few days, the French and British win

and they push the Germans back a little bit. And so this then kind of stops the German advance there in France. And then the rest of 1914 is taken up with what's called the race to, the sea. And again, you can sort of imagine if you look at the map and imagine these massive armies on both sides. And each then tries to sort of get around the other, like sort of do an end run this way. And then the other side says, well, I'll do an end run this way. And in this pattern, they kind of leapfrog

their way up to the Channel Coast. And so by Christmas 1914, there is a continuous front line running all the way from, you know, up on the sort of Channel Coast there, there's a little corner of Belgium that they're still hanging on to. Most of Belgium has been occupied by the Germans. And then the front line kind of goes in a huge kind of S-curve down through northern France and then down to the border with Switzerland. That whole area is what we call the Western Front, extremely densely packed with soldiers and with the continuous line of trenches running all the way along. Now, what can you say about the military technology in this war and why is it different than other wars and why do the trenches become so significant of this conflict?

Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer is that in terms of military technology, World War I takes place at a particular and actually quite dangerous moment in the sense that the Industrial Revolution that had been going for about a century by this point had created some new and highly destructive forms of weaponry, notably the machine gun and very heavy artillery, like very heavy and destructive cannon. The airplane was in its infancy,

not a super destructive weapon yet, but it was getting there. But really the machine gun and artillery are kind of the biggies at this point. Isn't there zeppelin bombing? There's zeppelin bombing. The Germans have zeppelin, which they use to bomb particularly towns in Britain.

Again, it's scary to people, but it's actually not terribly effective. They can't carry it that heavy a load. The zeppelins are very vulnerable. So that doesn't turn out to be such a, big deal. But machine guns and artillery are. About 60% of military casualties in World War I were caused by artillery. And a good share of the rest were caused by machine guns. And to your question, these are really kind of weapons of defense. Both artillery and machine guns are really effective

in terms of allowing you as one military force to defend against an attack from another. can cause super high casualties with those things if an army is like coming at you in an attack. But you can imagine like the invasion of like Normandy, I guess, or like having, you know, Germans sort of lined up in bunkers with their machine guns. And you can just mow people down as they come towards you. Right.

And the thing is there are, so World War I takes place at this moment where the military technologies of defense are at a very high level of killing power. Military technologies that particularly favor attack are coming, but they're not quite there yet. The two outstanding ones are the airplane and the tank. The airplane and the tank are going to change the equation again and give a bit of an edge to attackers as they develop. But at the start of World War I, airplanes are there, but they're very much

in their infancy. Tanks come along about halfway through the war, but they have a lot of development to go. By World War II, the plane and the tank are a super big deal, which is one reason why World War II frankly moves around a lot more in terms of the war. the combat. But in World War I, because of the fact that you've got machine guns and artillery, but you kind of don't really yet have the airplane and the tank, which will give mobility to armies. That's a fascinating distinction. You get what you get in World War I. You get a war that, at least the war here, the war on the Western Front doesn't move much. That is, that's, yeah, I never considered like weapons of defense and then weapons of attack. And I can see how this is

leading to trenches. Yes. So then if you're, if you have, I mean, these are armies of, of, hundreds of thousands and millions of men packed into a geographically fairly small area. The density of troops on the Western Front was really amazing. And because they are exposed to all this artillery fire and machine gun fire, with your troops stuck there, you've got to do something to try and keep them, at least most of them, alive most of the time, which leads to the trench. You dig a trench, and then you're pretty effectively in a trench. You're pretty effectively sheltered from machine gun fire.

you are sheltered from a lot, though not all, of artillery fire. You know, if an artillery cell drops right on you or drops near you, you're toast. But the trench will protect you, at least from shrapnel, it will protect you from blast to an extent. Interesting. I can understand why people would use these terms like meat grinder, where it's like it is just a wall of bullets. And if you're walking towards it, you're going to get mowed down. And so you build up a trench, you can fortify, you can get supply chains, and you can actually create lines on these fronts.

That makes so much sense. And so then the problem that commanders confront on both sides, this is where we are at the end of 1914. We've got this really static war that has stuck where it is in France and Belgium with these trenches and with the huge armies. And the question is, now what? Well, the answer of most generals is,

now what is we attack? And so the classic kind of World War I Western Front pattern is to order huge. huge infantry attacks from one trench to another. And remember, these trenches are running for hundreds of miles, parallel to each other, often very close together. The front line trenches were sometimes only 50 or 100 feet apart. A hundred feet.

Yeah. And in between this, what you call no man's land for a good reason, because that's the sort of neutral ground between the trenches. But the idea is, well, we have to attack across no man's land, attack to the other side's trench. And, you know, these trenches are getting fortified and more and more is time. goes by. The trenches become quite complicated. It's not just one trench. There are different lines. There's usually a front line trench, you know, a second line, a support line. And then there are

what they call communication trenches that run between the trenches so you can move your guys, you know, to the front line and back without them having to be up above ground. And these become these huge networks. They're defended also by barbed wire. You put a lot of barbed wire out in front of your trench. Obviously makes it hard to get through. And so then to attack in this situation, to attack across no man's land, toward the other side's trench with its barbed wire and the other side has machine guns and artillery, there's no way to do that that doesn't involve super high casualties. And so you get these battles being fought where both sides are doing this.

They're trying to attack in huge numbers into these well-defended positions. And generally speaking, they suffer horrific casualties with usually either no gain or very slight, gain in territory. Wow. The probably most absolutely kind of classic example of this comes about midway through the war when the British try a huge attack in a region called the Somme River Valley. So we speak about this as being the Battle of the Somme. And particularly the first day of the attack on the Somme went for months.

But the first day, which was July 1st, 1916, the British attacked with a little over 100,000 troops on the morning of July 1st. and the troops were ordered to get up out of their trench and then walk, not run, but walk, towards the German trench, which the British commanders thought would have been destroyed by an artillery barrage that had been going on for a week. But in fact, the barrage didn't destroy the German trenches, partly because those trenches and dugouts, too,

that they had were deeper than the British had imagined, partly because there were a lot of dutch shells, maybe as many as a third of shells maybe didn't fire. And they didn't know those? They didn't know it sufficiently. and also because the ground tended to be quite muddy because drainage works were destroyed and so on and so often shells would just sort of bury into the mud and explode

and not do any damage. Ah, interesting. And they also wouldn't cut the barbed wire. So for all of these reasons, the German trenches are pretty intact and so when the British attack on July 1st, 1916, the Germans just get right up out of their trenches and start shooting at them. The result, in one day, is about 60,000 casualties of which about 20,000 were killed and about 40,000 wounded,

which was up to that time and remains the worst day that the British armed forces had ever suffered in combat. You know, we think about that. 20,000 young men killed basically in a morning and another 60,000 wounded. And that's just one morning of the war. Wow. And that's all on the Western Front.

Now I'm curious, what does the Eastern Front look like? Like, what's happening there? So similar things except the Eastern Front, was a geographically bigger area. On the eastern front, you have Austria and Germany together fighting Russia. And also, of course, you have Austria and with German help fighting Serbia. But the main action is Austria and Germany fighting Russia. So you can kind of see on the map, it's a lot bigger geographic area, and there are fewer soldiers deployed.

So this means there is more movement. It's not as static. It's not as stuck kind of in the same place as the fighting in the west on the western front. and because Russia also much like Austria turns out to be militarily incompetent in World War I, it's a story of sort of slow but steady German and Austrian wins. So basically the Germans and Austrians kind of steadily roll the Russian forces back and advance into Russian territory. And Russia kind of steadily, militarily falls apart, which really is the

backstory to why there is a revolution in 1917. But that's a war. The Germans are basically winning, and it's a war of much greater movement than you see in the West. So that German bet that the Russian military would be a little bit incompetent, a little bit slow, proved to be eventually true, despite them mobilizing fairly quickly initially. They didn't really have the men or the strategy to sort of implement a real rolling front. They did have the men. They had the raw manpower, more than any other European country. But what they didn't have, they didn't have, they didn't have the, particularly the logistics. They didn't have the industrial base that the other powers had.

They're much less able to supply their troops. The famous thing you read in all the books is that Russian soldiers going into combat in World War I often didn't all have rifles. And the officers would say, wait till your buddy gets killed and take his rifle. Wow. This is the sort of ineptness of the Russian industrial machine to supply the troops and for the logistic kind of pipeline to keep food, weapons, armaments flowing to the trenches. That was actually the kind of main reason why the Russians performed quite badly.

Interesting. And yeah, I guess just geographically speaking, Russia at that time didn't really have a ton of ports. They weren't able to get finances from the Americans at the same degree. They were just a little bit more geographically isolated. Yes. Do they try to broker any deals with, you know, like China or Japan or any other countries, like, on that side, sort of on the eastern side? Well, in a sense, yes, China and Japan both joined the war on the side of the allies.

But then militarily, they didn't do too much. And actually, the funny thing is China and Japan joined the war actually really because they wanted to go at each other, even though they're on the same side, but both of them, their real adversary is the other. And each wants territory from the other. So neither of them proved to be very major factors in the war. Yeah, that's not a great alliance when, like, your two buddies that you bring in, hate each other. Yes.

Interesting. And they're kind of using this conflict as a way to further their own interests. Exactly. So they don't really help Russia in any way. They don't help, they don't help the British or French much either. Right. The one thing that they do, particularly the Japanese, what the Japanese do, and this says a lot about the setup over there, along the coast of China, there were a bunch of what we're called concession areas,

which Western powers had forced the Chinese to give. Like most of the Western powers, including the United States, had concession areas on the Chinese coast where they basically controlled the trade. And what the Germany had won too. And so the Japanese seized the German concession area in China. That was their kind of main aim. So, you know, it's not helping...

I see. It's sort of hurting Germany, but it's... It's not really helping anybody else except Japan. But it's really helping Japan get claim over Chinese territory that the Germans had. Yes. Oh, that's so interesting. Wow. Okay.

So on that eastern front, it's kind of stagnant, far less casualties, I imagine, because the... Yeah, definitely fewer casualties, less stagnant than the West, more movement. And the Germans are sort of slowly winning. Wow. Okay. I mean, that's interesting to me. And, like, the German military at this point, they obviously have finances because they had prosperity up until this time.

I guess the people really liked the Kaiser and the... There was a lot of, like, kind of support for him. Yes and no. The Kaiser was actually not very popular. And his popularity had been eroding significantly before the war for a bunch of reasons. But, you know, he was not an adept politician. Let's put it that way. Interesting.

And Germany politically was an odd mix. It wasn't a full-on democracy, but it wasn't a full-on authoritarian state either. it had an elected parliament that had some real power. But then it also had the authoritarian element in the Kaiser, whose office is hereditary, and you don't get to vote for Kaiser. And he picks his ministers, and so they're responsible only to him.

So there is an authoritarian element, along with the democratic element. But what happens in the war, which happens pretty much everywhere, is there's a lot of nationalism. And the nationalism isn't about the Kaiser or his government. It's about Germany and the German people. So one of the things the Kaiser has to kind of navigate is how do you deal with this nationalism?

It can work for you a bit in the sense that it motivates people to fight for the country. But that's a nationalism that's not really for him. It's not for the Kaiser and his government. There's a symbol of this, actually, is that on the German parliament of the Reichstag building in Berlin, in 1916, halfway through the war, the Kaiser grudgingly grudgingly, agreed to have letters, big letters be put across the main entrance of the Reichstag, which said to the German people. And he didn't want that because as an emperor, I mean, he's sort of not about the people. Like, any time where you sort of bring in the people into the conversation,

you're saying something kind of democratic. But because it's wartime and he needs the people to be, with the program, he needs the people to be serving in his army and working in his factories, etc. He's sort of forced politically to make concessions. And that's a kind of, there were other concessions he made too, but that's a kind of symbol of the concessions that's making. So they're in this sort of transitionary government going from like, I am the emperor and I tell everyone what to do to now this more like populist, democratic movement to say, the people tell you what to do. And the people have way more leverage because they're fighting your war. There's a funny thing. I mean, we call World War I or many historians call World War I the first total war,

meaning a war in which more or less everybody in society has to be involved to make the war kind of happen. If you're not a combat soldier, you're probably doing something on the home front, working in industry or something like that to aid the war effort. Men, women, children, everybody. And one of the paradoxical things about total war is it's oddly democratizing. It's bad for elites and it's good for popular power because, just as you were saying, people have bargaining power. Because basically you can say, if you're like a worker in a union or whatever, you know, for instance, or women. It's not a coincidence that women get the vote in a lot of countries right after World War I

because you can say, okay, you want me to do stuff for the war, I want some rights. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, if we are packaging all these ammo cans, you can't say that we don't have a say in what happens and where we go in war because we are fundamentally now entrenched in the war. Exactly. Wow. Yeah, I mean, because you have, as you're kind of alluding to, you have in all countries, basically women starting to take on very non-traditional

roles in industry, making shells, you know, making weapons, all kinds of stuff. And so they are basically in a position to say, okay, I've shown I'm a citizen, I'm serving the country. I'm not going to serve the country if you don't give me a vote. I mean, I've earned my vote. And that's a persuasive argument in a lot of countries. Of course, in America, in Britain and Germany, these are three countries where women get the vote, like right after the war. Oh, wow. That's so interesting. Yeah, I can see if I'm packaging things and be like, yeah, I need to do something. And I'm curious, like the way that this kind of transitions now, the idea that total war is now being implemented in all these countries, why is total war happening now versus, you know, 30 years before?

It's because of industrialization and that everyone can be a part of it? Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, I had the idea about 10 years ago. I was going to write a whole book just on that question. I may still someday, but basically the answer is yes, industrialization has gotten to a point where, you know, as we were talking about before, industry can supply the things like heavy artillery and machine guns. And as the war goes on, eventually tanks and planes, submarines, battleships. But that means workers are doing that too. So, you know, workers are in that way being drawn into the war effort far more than they would

ever have been into a pre-industrial war. Right. Because, yeah, back in the day, if it's like, okay, if we're going to go out to this field and we're going to fight it out with our muskets, it's like, what can I do 100 miles away? Nothing, really. Nothing, yeah. And but now it's like, no, no, we can supply, because there's a factory in your town that cans tuna. And now you can use that tuna canning factory to can bullets and send it around.

Or the canned tuna gets sent to the troops. I mean, you know, it could be that. But one way or another, you need the people to be either canning that tuna or converting the factory into making hang grenades or whatever. Oh, that's interesting. But there's also an interesting thing, which I think is an interesting contemporary parallel. There's a kind of information aspect to this, too, in that, in the, the, the, late 1800s, there had been a sort of series of revolutions in print technology that made it a lot cheaper to print newspapers, which meant newspapers were more affordable, which meant that more people

are reading them. Of course, we're in a time in World War I. We're still like pre-electronic media. So print newspapers, that's how information is going to get circulated. And the thing is, by World War I, to an extent without any parallel in history, you generally have literate populations who can consume information, they can consume news via a newspaper they can afford. And what goes with this is that also, you know, in Europe by World War I, in most countries, most men could vote.

Generally speaking, with a couple of small exceptions, women couldn't vote anywhere. But in almost every European country, even in Russia by that time, most men can vote. And again, this comes back to this aspect of total war that, you know, if your average guy can read a newspaper, have some information, and then probably have some ideas about politics, and then go and vote, well, it matters what they think. If you're the

government, it matters what they think. You know, you go back 100 years before that when most people were illiterate and couldn't afford a newspaper anyway and couldn't vote. If you're the government, you don't need to care what they think, basically. It's irrelevant. You need to care what a small elite things, but not the general people. But by World War I, politicians need to care what just about everybody thinks, because they need to mobilize them for war. And as voters, they're probably going to play some role in shaping political decisions. So you really need to keep them on board. So then you need propaganda. Andrea, photography, I guess, coming out of this time, too. That's absolutely right, too, yeah. So now in the newspapers, you can see photos of war,

probably for the first time ever? Pretty much. I mean, certainly in a major war, yeah. It's specifically in America as well. There were photographs of a kind in the Civil War in America. But yeah, certainly for major wars and certainly for major European wars, this is a new thing. And the technology exists, which is only new. It's within about the previous decade from World War I that you can print a photograph in a newspaper. Wow. And what can you speak to the propaganda piece?

Because now you have information getting disseminated amongst a democratic populace. Yeah. You've got to control the information that's getting to them. Yes. Because if all of a sudden they start seeing stuff either disinformation or the authentic truth that goes against your agenda, you're now at the will of the people. And they're going to be like, we're not going to fight this war. Right.

Right. And so there are all these sort of paradoxes here. So, like, I think we think of it as good if people are educated and the average people can read and they can consume a newspaper and they can vote. We think that's all good. And it is good. But the other piece of that is then, as I was saying a moment ago, the government that, needs to care what you think. And if the government needs to care what you think,

they're going to do something about it. So those same channels, those same information channels, can be used by governments then to shape what you think. And so this is why World War I is really kind of the birth moment of propaganda in its modern form. It's kind of the first big event in history, certainly the first big war in history

that takes place in what is kind of a mass media environment. And not coincidentally, it's the birth moment of propaganda. It's the birth moment of really systematic efforts by government to shape what people are thinking about the war, which, of course, involves several aspects. A, paint the enemy as the devil incarnate. So, you know, posters are great for this.

There are some famous ones. There's a famous American World War I poster when America comes into the war that shows this kind of big gorilla grabbing a woman and wearing one of those German, what they call Pickle-Hub helmets, the helmet with the spike. And the caption is,

stop this mad brute. Yes, I've seen this. So, like, the German is this, like, big gorilla who's just going to, like, grab and presumably rape a woman and, you know, carrying a club in the other hand. So there's that. You really demonize the enemy.

And then, of course, you really idealize your own cause. So, you know, about halfway through the war, people on the Allied side start talking about the war very differently. You know, we were talking before about how, you know, the British come in making the argument to their people, well, this is about the defense of Belgium. It's about the defense of treaty rights, international law, you know, okay, perfectly fine.

But as the war is going on, and as the casualty lists are going up, and you have these battles like the sum where like 20,000 guys die in a morning, and if you're the, you know, mother or father or sister or brother of those soldiers, are you going to say, oh, right on, you know, my son died for treaty rights. And it's not going to make the blood flow. So they start saying, they start making grander promises. You know, this is the war to end all wars.

This actually starts. The phrase is coined by the British science fiction writer H.G. Wells. Not everybody knows this, but it gets picked up by President Woodrow Wilson, and he sort of makes it his phrase. This is the war to end all wars. So this isn't just a war. This is a great crusade for a profoundly transformed world. out of which is going to come this world of permanent peace,

which will be anchored by an international organization, Woodrow Wilson's idea is to call it the League of Nations, so countries can discuss their differences instead of having wars, and every country will be a democracy, and it's going to be just this profound transformation. And so that seems like something maybe worth sacrificing for. That's a little more exciting. In the political state in America,

I don't think it can be understated that you have a country of immigrants, Yes. Many of them from Europe, many of them Germans. Yes. What is that doing now that there's information from this war getting sort of percoling through the United States? Yeah, that's a great question because, of course, lots of people in America are coming from countries who are either on the other side, like Germany or, you know, there would

have been lots of folks from the Austrian Empire. Or, of course, very significant ethnic group in the United States, the one that I'm half descended from is Irish. And the Irish, I can tell you from my own. own family. The Irish are super not thrilled about fighting any war alongside the British. Right. So, you know, and actually, certainly in those days, among people in the United States with roots in Europe, it's either Irish number one or in German two or they're around, German one, Irish two. Like those are the two really big ethnic groups. So those are two big ethnic

groups that aren't going to be really psyched about fighting a war with Germany. So there is, there is an aspect of selling the war that really has to be done to the American people when America comes in in 1917 because it's not sort of intuitive that all these people are going to want to have this war. Wow, which is where you get the idea is to say, look, we're going to do this one and then we'll be peaceful forever. You need to sell that idea. You need to sell the idea. You also need to sell. It's really interesting when you look at American propaganda from World War I, they are really selling the idea of a multicultural country coming together for a great cause. I've seen posters where it's like, you know, these are the men in an American unit, and they list a bunch

and names, and they very carefully picked names that are sort of every conceivable ethnicity, right? So it's like Schmidt and O'Flaherty and, you know, Leibowitz and Toscanini, you know. The first DEI. It's like, hey, everyone's represented and we're all in this together. Absolutely. Oh, that's so interesting. And so now on the Western front, leading up to 1917, it's still sort of stagnant. What are the first major movements where now these lines are having more casualties and actually touch it together? Yeah, so, okay, so they, there's a kind of interesting breakpoint in the war right about halfway through.

Like, kind of late in 1916, you see something happening in every country where you've had this stalemate now for two years. The casualties have been absolutely beyond any expectation at the outset. And the cost is astronomical, too. No one had imagined just how much this war was going to cost. This sounds really mundane,

but they're firing artillery shells all the time. You know, we hear about this in Ukraine in the war now, right? They run out of artillery shells. artillery shells are actually expensive. And it's a big industrial undertaking to make a lot of them. And for instance, the British Army had run out of artillery shells in 1915, which caused a huge scandal and actually caused the overturning of the administration. Oh, wow.

And that's probably why they're losing their fronts over there. Yeah. Why the Austrian were able to kind of move in. You know, so just the sheer cost of like making all the, you know, artillery shells, like mundane things, often bullets, barbed wire, to say nothing of the battleships, the tanks, all this stuff. It costs enormous amounts of money. And these sacrifices that you're asking for from your population are far vaster than you thought

they were going to be in 1914. So there's this moment where kind of every country goes through a thought process. Do we keep this going? Do we like press on all out for victory, knowing now what this is going to cost, or do we try to negotiate out of it? And there are some moves in 1916 to try and negotiate out of it. but they all flop because basically every country makes the decision or at least every government makes the decision

nope we're going to press on cost what it will we're going to go for victory and you see a pattern of political leadership changing in that sort of midpoint of the war you see much more hawkish leaders and governments coming into power in the main countries did the people want this generally these these transitions happen basically without direct it's not like they have an election in this changes. No, it's, it's, the European systems are, you know,

they're all parliamentary systems where you can change an administration without an election or they're monarchical. Germany becomes a kind of de facto military dictatorship, actually, because the Kaiser kind of gets pushed aside really by his military commanders who don't officially, but in fact, in practice, really take on the power. The two top military commanders are kind of running the country as a dictatorship. They're going out to win. In Britain, there's a change over. The prime minister who had been there at the start of the war was kind of burned out and he had a drinking problem

and he wasn't a great war leader. He gets pushed aside by a leader who's a lot more aggressive. Same thing happens in France. Much more aggressive, prime minister comes to power. And he's asked what his agenda is and he says, I make war. Wow. So this is like, this is what's happening.

The dials on everything. So we're halfway through the war. Maybe we can reach a negotiation. Everyone goes, nope, we're doubling down and we're putting in war hawks into every position. This also means you need the money for this. So there's also this moment where Britain and France, like in early 1917, Britain and France borrow even more enormous sums from the United States,

which pays for their battlefield operations in 1917, which go about as well as they did in 1916, by the way. There are these famous attacks where, you know, the British famously in a campaign known as the Passondale Offensive have kind of the same sort of casualties that they had on the Somme in 1916. The French are getting attacked at Verdun. This is one of the other, like, really famous Western Front battles. The Germans attack at Verdun.

And this is the logic of World War I. The Germans think, okay, what we need to do is kill all the French soldiers, and then we win, like basic military logic. So we need to get all the French soldiers to come out at a certain place so we can kill them. Verdun was a very symbolic fortress. It was where the French had suffered a critical defeat in their 1870, 71 war with Germany. and because of its symbolism, the Germans figure the French will really come out to defend Verdun. So we attack them at Verdun,

all the French soldiers come out, we kill them, and then we win. The one flaw in this thinking is that the German soldiers have to be there too, which means the French soldiers can kill them. And so what you actually get at the Battle of Verdun is a battle that lasts months and months and months, last most of 1916,

where basically both, sides inflict horrific casualties on the other. Both France and Germany come out of that with about a half million casualties each or very near a half million casualties each. Crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to convey the horror and, you know, it's being fought in the mud. You're fighting surrounded by the remains of the guys who have been killed. I mean, the horrors of it are just sort of beyond comprehension. So this is what's happening in 1960, 1917, you have these super high casualty battles. They're not moving the front line at all. they're just basically killing lots and lots of people.

Wow. And like just speaking on military technology, like the thing that always sticks out to me is these trench knives that you see. It's like these brass knuckles with a knife on it and there's like a, you know, a blunt end on the other side. That would be you're trying to run into another trench. You jump in and now you're basically doing hand-to-hand combat

in close range in an enemy trench. That would happen. Sometimes it would be, sometimes you would do a raid at night. you would just like at night undercover darkness you would kind of run across no man's land and cut the barbed wire and get into the enemy trench and sort of maybe kill a few guys with that kind of weapon and then go back so it could happen that way

or if you're doing one of these really big offensives where you know hundreds of thousands of guys are attacking into the enemy trench when you get into the enemy trench then you're going to be having that kind of hand-to-hand combat in the trench probably wow yeah just the brutality of it I think specifically this like the trench warfare is just you get this idea of shell shock. That's like the first time people are kind of aware of this. Just constant perpetual

artillery fire going over your head, seeing people dying. And people are really getting traumatized in a way that I don't know if it's happened in other conflicts. I'm curious what you think. Does this war, does it just bring to light the idea of shell shock or does it create it because the nature of heavy artillery? I suspect, I don't know, not being a psychiatrist or anything. I don't know, but I suspect the answer is a bit of both. The horrors of war, had been well known forever. I'm always struck by, I'm a sort of big fan of, in my non-professional role, I'm a big fan of Shakespeare.

And, you know, in Shakespeare's play, it's like in Henry V, for instance, is that there's an amazing scene right before the Battle of Agincourt, which is the center of that play, where ordinary soldiers are telling the English king Henry V, they're telling them some truth to power. And this one guy goes on about, like, the horrors of battle, and he says, there's few die well that die in a battle,

And he describes horrible wounds that people are getting. So this awareness had been there for a long time. And I suspect with that, if you had been one of the soldiers with Henry V at Aungkir in 1415, I suspect you might have come away with what we would call PTSD. But in World War I, the ability of weapons to inflict death on the battlefield is much higher. And the numbers of soldiers involved

is incomprehensibly larger than a medieval or an early modern battle. So at any rate, the scale of what they call shell shock then or what we would call PTSD now, the scale of it would have been much greater. And it is certainly, I think, the first time that medical practitioners are aware that this is the thing,

that you can suffer, you know, psychological trauma from being in combat. Wow. So now the ambient feeling towards the end of 1916, I imagine, is probably not great amongst the population, right? In every country, you've got war weariness. You're starting to get pollution. not necessarily full-on rebellion,

although importantly in one country you do, but you're starting to get unrest, political unrest, dissent, and all sides kind of feel it's not going well. And, you know, so you're heading towards trouble. I'm curious, does anyone come home, like in this time? Like, if you started fighting in 1914, and you do two years, right? And let's say you're a British soldier,

and you're in a trench, and you're seeing all your friends die, is there ever a point where you're like, okay, now I go back to my family? Or do you just stay there? No, you got, you would get leave. And in fact, if you read something I've probably spent much too much in my life doing, if you read like, you know, memoirs or letters or stuff from soldiers who are at the front, especially for the British whose home was close. Well, the French, their home was close to.

I've read more about British soldiers. Very common experience that you would get leave. And, you know, one morning you'd be at the front. you'd be in the trench, you know, getting shelled and probably with decomposing corpses around you and, you know, there's no sanitary facilities. You kind of throw your poop over the edge of the trench and, you know, there's rats running around. I mean, it's hard to convey just how awfulness is. So then, you know, they say, oh, so-and-so, you've got leave, train going. And a couple hours later, maybe you're in London at a nice restaurant having dinner. And one of the things that the soldiers

would write about a lot is the just massive reality gap between. them and civilians. Like you start really getting this thing like, you go see your family, and of course they're getting fed on a propaganda diet. Like the war's great, all the soldiers are happy at the front and we're gonna win soon. And the sanitized, the horrors are cut right out of it.

So your family thinks, oh, you must be having a jolly good time giving it to the hunt, right? And you've just come out of this horror and you're thinking, how can I even begin to convey this? And most soldiers would decide, I'm not going to try to convey this to my family, because I don't want them to know how awful it is. Wow. Like it's one thing you like lose a family member, your dad, your husband,

in this war, but now you're losing them even when they're there. They're coming home and they're not them. Yes. Right. And I can imagine they're sitting there and they're playing with their kids and they are either traumatized and then they're trying to cope with the trauma. I have no doubt like, you know, much like we see today, I don't think this is that different. But, you know, substance abuse, I'm sure people are drinking and trying to cope with the damage that they they just seen and witnessed, also knowing, oh, in a couple of weeks, I'm going to go back over there. That too. And just the closeness of it.

I mean, you're on a train for maybe a couple of hours and you're just back into regular life. What you often read in these kinds of memoirs, for instance, is soldiers would find it so difficult to be among their family that they would actually, they'd kind of want to go back. Yeah, I spoke to Sebastian Younger. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's brilliant and just a journalist and documentary. made Restrepo. And he spoke about PTSD in an interesting way. The PTSD is obviously what is endured in war, but furthermore, it's what happens when you're taken out of that environment and you get sort of inoculated back into society into a society that doesn't really understand

what happened. And you sort of lose your community, these guys that understand deeply what you're going through. You sort of lose like your purpose, and it can be a really isolating thing that it exacerbates the symptoms of PTSD. Yes, I think that's right. And I can imagine it's the same thing here. I mean, in this time, it must have been transformational. And I imagine that's probably affecting the effort at home. As more and more men are having leave,

there must be family saying, we've got to stop this. You know, oddly, I mean, yes and no. And of course, as always with human beings and human societies, it kind of depends where you are kind of in society and what your politics are. But on the whole, no, largely because of the information diet that civilians got,

they tended to be, I think it would be safe to say, they tended to be much more pro-war than the combat soldiers were. That's part of the gulf that opens up between soldiers and civilians is that often, and again, something you'll commonly read from soldiers from all countries involved

is they often felt, I got more in common with the guys over on that other trench than I do with the folks at home. Wow. So that's an interesting point. I've seen these famous pictures of like these recesses that take place. So like there's the infamous one of like the Christmas Day recess where these warring trenches of, you know, English and French

soldiers against these German soldiers just sort of stop. And they walk over and they greet each other and they play soccer for a little bit. They play soccer. They share pictures of their kids. They have a drink. They share cigarettes. Yeah. You know, and one of the many interesting things about all this is that Europeans in that time, no matter where you came from, at least certainly central and Western Europeans, you came from the same culture, more or less. Like, there's a lot that's common, well, I mean, Christmas, it's not a coincidence that this happens at Christmas, which they all have. And there are traditions associated with that. And, you know, if you were, and social class would be a factor too, but if you're like, for instance, if you're a middle class person,

if you're a middle class Brit, your life is probably a ton like a middle class room. And you've probably been to the same kind of school, your family has the same kind of values, you know, you're heading for the same kind of profession. You know, they lived in a very similar world. And so that's, that partly enables this kind of thing, like the famous Christmas trees, that there is actually a lot of cultural commonality that they have. It's like heartbreaking to think that these, these guys would just meet in no man's land and be like, what are we doing? And see you tomorrow. I'll be shooting at you. Like, it's like, I don't know, it genuinely makes me sad. Like, I'm like, And there's a sort of epilogue to that, which I find deeply moving in a memoir of a German soldier

who was in World War I, and that he wrote an autobiography, I think, in the 1950s or 1960s. And he describes, he actually became famous. He was a playwright and screenwriter named Carl Zuckmeier. If you're into old films, he wrote the screenplay for The Blue Angel, for instance. He did a lot of sort of famous stuff. But Zuckmeier wrote that he was once, this would be sometime in the 50s or 60s, I guess. he was in France and he watched like a Veterans Day parade

of French World War I veterans and he describes watching these guys who by now are sort of like fathers and grandfathers and they've kind of got a gunned and they've kind of got red face and they've gone bald and they're not the young man of World War I but he's watching these guys and thinking

these are my people these guys were at the front when I was like he feels this bond and he starts crying watching them and I find that incredibly moving yeah I mean again not to like underscore too much

but like these are young men. Like many of them are 16, 17. Like that's not uncommon. Technically, I think you had to be 18 to be in any of the armies, but lots of younger men snuck in. And, you know, you have to be young to do that for all kinds of reasons. I always think, now that I'm older too, I always think, you know, you'd never get me to fight at work

because I'm old enough to realize I can actually die. Yeah. But young people, and I think especially young men, sort of have this invulnerability. Like, young men think, oh, this can't happen to me. And so I think wars are possible because young men have that way of thinking. And that's a vantage, that's a closing window. You know, even a young man gets to be, I don't know what the magic number might be, maybe 30, and you think, oh, I can actually die.

And but until then, you can get an 18-year-old or a 19-year-old to go into combat. Yeah, you sort of need the arrogance of immortality to kind of to course through you to say like, yeah, you know, I'll be fine. Even if I get shot, I'll be okay. Yep. Wow. It's just heartbreaking to consider. And then as far as offensive weapons, you mentioned tanks and even U-boats at this point are now coming into play.

How do the tanks change these trenches? So the tank is one of the things that has the potential to change the balance and give the advantage back to the attack. And the concept actually comes, oddly enough, from Winston Churchill, who at the start of World War I was the cabinet member in charge of the British Navy in Britain in those days it was called the first lord of the admiralty it's kind of what we would call Navy Secretary in the United States

and he had a very fertile imagination he's always thinking of things and he was certainly smart enough unlike a lot of military commanders to perceive the problem with the Western Front these like attacks into overwhelming fires so he says well we got to figure out a way to get our guys across no man's land in one piece. So he thinks, why not sort of encase them in something that will sort of drive across no man's land and deliver them to the other side without getting shot at?

And so they, under the auspices of the Navy, actually, they start developing this thing. And they gave it a code name to kind of cover what it was. So they wanted to make it sound like they're just building like an oil storage tank or something, hence the term tank. By the time this had been developed and was ready for service, Churchill had been fired from his job as first Lord of the Admiralty, but the idea went ahead anyway.

And the British first used them on the battlefield in 1960, and it was a spectacular success. It worked perfectly. It worked beyond their expectations in terms of getting a lot of soldiers across no man's land in one piece. It worked so well. They had never seen this before. No, no.

It worked so well that the British weren't ready for it, and they weren't able to follow up. They should have been ready to, like, just break through the German line with the tanks and then just pour soldiers through that gap and break up. but they hadn't gotten that far. So they sort of lost the advantage. But it's like a little sign of what's going to come.

Because with the tank, it does give you the possibility of much greater mobility, both in terms of protecting your guys from firepower, but also just in terms of moving faster than a man can walk. And it makes possible, ultimately, the kind of famous German blitzkrieg of World War II, relying a lot on tanks and airplanes to move quickly. This is the seed of a different kind of war that's coming. And do the Germans develop tanks as well? They do, but not as much.

They never go with it quite as much as, and oddly enough, given what we know about World War II, well into the 20s and 30s, the British are the real tank innovators and the Germans are kind of behind. The Germans eventually catch up, obviously, later. But it remains basically a British thing, you know, certainly in World War I. Wow. Now, I just want to foreshadow a little. What is a young Adolf Hitler doing at this point leading up into 1917, the Americans entering to the war? So Hitler, of course, was originally from Austria.

He had left Austria to move to Germany in 1913, ironically because he didn't want to be drafted into the Austrian army because he hated the diversity of Austria. He hated the sort of multi-ethnic element of Austria. He didn't want to serve in an army that was about all these different groups. He wanted just to be a German. So he moved to Munich and southern Germany, which is where he was when the war broke out. And he wrote about this in his infamous memoir, my mind. about how excited he was when the war broke out. He writes something like, I fell on my knees and thank God who had allowed me to be alive in this

moment. And he volunteers right away for actually technically a Bavarian infantry regiment. Bavaria had an administratively separate army from the regular German army. Bavaria is kind of the Texas of Germany. So he joins this Bavarian units known as the List Regiment after its commander. And then he serves all the way through the war. He had a particular job. He was a battalion courier, which basically meant that he was supposed to run back and forth with orders from headquarters to the front line.

And that's a slightly less dangerous job than being a rifleman in a trench, but still a dangerous job. You know, these couriers would still get killed. He was wounded a couple of times. It is statistically amazing that he wasn't killed. I mean, he was at the front for almost the entire war. his unit went into action in the fall of 1914 even though he had just volunteered when the war broke out he got into combat by I think October

and he served all the way through right to the end almost all the time at the front basically nobody survived being at the front through all of World War I if you were at the front at the beginning basically one of two things was going to happen to you you were going to get killed at some point in the war

or you were going to get wounded such that they would pull you out and put you on some other kind of duty. Or I guess the third thing could be you would be promoted up out of combat frontline service. But one of those things was going to happen. Like basically nobody served in the trenches all through and survived.

Hitler did. The odds of that are, I don't know mathematically what the odds are, but they're incredibly slim. And was he doing something specifically to protect himself? Like, is it possible he was like not delivering messages? No, probably not. One thing he may have done,

people who have written about this have speculated, he was a couple times offered promotion. He never got promoted very high as it turned out. He was promoted right at the start of the war, early in the war, from a simple soldier to what in German is called Gefrita, which translates roughly as private first class, and that's as far as he got. He declined other promotions, possibly because he knew

that higher ranks suffered casualties at a higher rate. We know, for instance, that officers, if they were in the trenches, officers got killed at about three times the rate of enlisted men. Really? Yeah, because you're more conspicuous as an officer. You have to take a more conspicuous role on the battlefield. Usually officers had different uniforms, so they stick out. And so it may have been that Hitler wanted to avoid that.

He won a couple of decorations. He won the Iron Cross first and second class. The historian who has written, I think, most brilliantly about his time in the war, my friend Thomas Weber, says the officers would give medals to guys they knew, not necessarily guys that did brave stuff. Sure. And since Hitler, with his job, lived at the base, the officers knew him, which is maybe why he got these medals.

Interesting. That said, I don't think anyone would, I mean, Hitler served, if maybe he wasn't a superhero, he served honorably and sort of diligently through four years of war. And how did his time in the front lines, do you think, affected his mentality going into World War II? Like, were there specific moments of this conflict that you think cemented his strategy or sort of his ideology towards carrying out the war that will unfold later?

There's probably a couple things, and I should say that, you know, we obviously, we can't really see into that man's mind and heart. And I would venture to say, if you can see into that man's mind and heart and be worried about yourself. But so historians speculate. And, you know, if you asked, you know, a bunch of different historians, I think you'd get a and different answers to that question. But since you asked me, I'll tell you what I think, which is that I think maybe two things. One, although he never served at a high level, he never

served at a command level where he's thinking about the strategy, he comes out of this feeling that he knows war. And he certainly comes out of it feeling that he knows war maybe more than officers and commanders do. And this gives him a certain confidence and even arrogance in dealing with the military commanders he dealt with in World War II. He would often say to them basically you were a staff officer in the war. I was in the trenches. You know crap. I know what war is really like.

Oh, interesting. The other thing, it's a little more speculative. One historian, a British guy named Brendan Sims, has made this argument. And I think there might be something to it, is that, especially in the later part of the war, when the Americans were coming in, Hitler noticed the Americans. He noticed these guys who, because they're coming from America, which is wealthier, and a lot of them are farm boys. They tend to be bigger and healthier than European young men. So there's kind of physically impressive, and he also notices that a lot of them are ethnically German, because a lot of Americans were and are of German heritage. And he starts thinking about this, and he starts thinking about America as a threat.

America is a threat to Germany. And you can argue that he has a certain appreciation of American power, which also drives a lot of his strategy once he's in power and during the Second World War. were. Wow. I wonder if his time as a courier, if that affected him at all, that he's running these lines and, like, I wonder, is he able to access any of, like, the intelligence or the messages that are coming back and forth? It wouldn't be at a high level. I mean, the kind of messages he would be carrying would be, like, the officers order the guys in the trench, you know, go take that hill or that kind of thing. It wouldn't be any, you know, strategically significant thing. Interesting. Okay. So now what leads us into 1917, and ultimately, what are the main reasons that America's, like,

all right, we got to send over the boys. Yeah, okay. So we've got this stalemate we've been talking about. And 1917 is the year that it does crack open, or at least the things happen that are going to make it crack open. Yes, about America, so let's start with America. The Germans want to try to starve Britain into surrender. This is a theoretically very viable strategy. Britain is an island, of course,

and it has not been self-sufficient in food supplies since about 1800. Britain, since 1800, has had a much bigger population than you can feed from agriculture on the British Isles themselves. So it depends heavily on food imports. So if you could sink enough of the ships bringing the food imports to Britain, you could, in theory, starve the British into surrender. But this would mean sinking ships that were not only British, but other ships, i.e. American ships bringing supplies to Britain.

the Germans start doing this in 1915. They say, we're going to sink everything with our U-boats, by the way, because the Germans have a less powerful surface navy than the British, but they have a submarine fleet that they can use for this. So they say, we're going to use our submarines or U-boats to sink all merchant ships coming towards Britain. Famously, they sink a British liner carrying Americans, however, called the Lusitania, which almost, I mean, causes a crisis

in relations between Germany and America and could have brought America into the war. And after that, the Germans pull back a little bit. And they say, okay, we're not going to sink like neutral ships. But by 1917, they've come back to this idea, and they've decided, okay, the war's getting desperate, you know, this whole sort of like doubling down that we were talking about.

And so they decide, okay, we are going to sink everything, every ship heading towards Britain. They call it unrestricted submarine warfare, including American ships. They're going to start sinking American ships. And this is something that Woodrow Wilson and his administration find intolerable. They won't tolerate

German U-boats, sinking American ships, carrying stuff to Britain. Just to add a little juice to this, the Germans also come up with this absolutely insane idea of getting Mexico to attack the United States, for which they will be rewarded by getting back New Mexico. Wow. And they're communicating, the German foreign ministry

is communicating this by telegram to Mexico, and the British who have very good signal intelligence intercept the cable, and quite gleefully passed it to the Americans. Like look at what the Germans are thinking of doing. This is the famous document known as the Zimamon Telegram, because Zimamon was the Secretary of State

in the German Foreign Ministry who sent the telegram to Mexico saying, hey, guys, if you attack the United States, we'll give you a New Mexico. Wow. Do you think, so when a telegram is intercepted, does it make it through? Or is it? Yeah, it's like electronically, the telegram got through,

but electronically the British had captured the message. And what did the Mexican government at that time? What did they think of this? I mean, this seems like an insane undertaking. They were not crazy enough to try this. Yeah, it makes sense. And also for what? Like New Mexico? It seems like, I don't know, from Mexico's perspective, like they could lose a lot more than they could gain. Yeah, they certainly could. So they make that calculation. Probably would have. The Zimmerman Telegram is sort of the sensational thing, but actually it was really the unrestricted submarine warfare was the real thing that America couldn't accept that propelled the United States into entering the war. And so finally in April, 1917, Woodrow Wilson,

who, you know, again, was a pacifist, a guy who had said America was too proud to fight. He goes before Congress and asks for a declaration of war. This is how the Constitution is supposed to work. It hasn't worked like this in many decades. But in theory, the president is supposed to ask Congress for a declaration of war before going to war. And Woodrow Wilson did it. And the result was an overwhelming vote in favor of going to war. I believe one person, one House member voting against.

And then Wilson was cheered when he gave the speech. He was cheered by the members of the House and Senate. And showing, I think, something about him, he pulls one of his aides aside and he says, this vote that we've just had is sending thousands of boys to their death. It's not a thing to cheer. You know, it would be great if more presidents thought like that, I think. Wow.

He says this. So we acknowledge it, like, we kind of have to do this. They're attacking not only our supply lines, but also, you know, passenger ships like Lucitania. And then they're trying to stoke hostile. nation or you know, trying to stoke nations into hostility with America, and there's a financial component. So we are forced to sort of enter into this. Yes. But this is not good. Wow. I mean, that's a pretty leveled approach. It is. You know, there's lots of bad things you can

say about Wilson. He was absolutely extreme racist and, you know, all kinds of stuff. But there are good things you can say about him, too. And that's one of them. Wow. So with the United States coming into the war, the weight of the United States economy by this time, in key things like, for instance, ability to produce steel, which is vital for warfare, the weight of the American economy is basically equal to all of Europe.

So the United States coming into the war means the Germans are doomed. They are totally doomed, unless they can win very quickly before the United States can really bring the weight of its economic force and its population to bear on the battlefield. And the Germans understand this quite well.

Meanwhile, we were talking about Russia having a bad war, and it keeps having a bad war. And people are starving, soldiers are starving, people are starving in the cities. The Tsar, the ruler of Russia is seen as incompetent and corrupt and maybe even worse, maybe a traitor. He is related to the same royal family that everybody else in Europe is related to. He's related both to the Kaiser of Germany and the king of England. they're all cousins. There is a famous picture which shows Tsar and Nicholas with King George the 5th of Britain,

and you cannot tell which is which. They look like identical twins. Wow. It's really amazing. And he's married to a German princess, too. Like the Tsarina is a German princess. So there are a lot of allegations being cast around that the reason the war is going badly

is our rulers are traitors. And they don't even want to win. They're just, they're cozy with everyone. Happy to lose to the Germans because they're German. Oh, wow. A famous member of the Russian parliament, or Duma, gives a speech around this time, which he keeps coming back to this refrain. Is it incompetence or is it treason? And his point is it is treason.

But he says all these things that they're going badly in the war. Is it incompetence or is it treason? So this is a kind of sign of how things are going. And so eventually in what is then the capital, the city now known as St. Petersburg, Moscow was not the capital then. At that time, it was known as Petrograd. It's a city that's had a lot of name changes. By the way, because St. Petersburg, or in Russian, Zankt, Petroburg, is a very German name. It's the German word for Saint, Zankt.

And Petroburg is a German name for a town. In Russian, it would be Petrograd, Peter's city. So for wartime, they changed St. Petersburg to Petrograd. And then a few years later, after the Bolshevik Revolution, they changed it to Leningrad. And then when the communist fall, they move it back to... St. Petersburg. Anyway, that's where the capital is. And in that capital in either late February or early March, depending which calendar you want to use, the Russians are still on the old calendar at that time, there is initially a women's protest for International Women's Day. It's March

8th on our calendar now. And that protest kind of mushrooms into a big demonstration, and the Tsar sends soldiers out to crush it, but then, faithfully, the soldiers cross over it to join the protesters. And at that point, the Tsar knows he's basically cooked. If he can't have the military back him up in the face of protest, he's done. And why do they join the protesters? The military just felt... Everybody's fed up with the war. Everybody's starving.

The war's going badly. Super high casualties. And you're telling us to go, like, quell or even kill our countrymen. Meanwhile, you're going to send us off to war in two more weeks. So, no, we're going to join them. Wow. Russia had probably actually the highest, like, raw number of battlefield deaths in World War I, about 1.7 million.

Germany is close. They're about the same, but Russia's number might have been a bit higher. So the Tsar abdicates, and he is replaced by a very democratic government drawn from the Russian Duma, Parliament, which we call the provisional government. And for, you know, a little over six months, Russia is the most democratic country in the world. It's got this really democratic new government. They're totally reforming Russia. In retrospect, the mistake that they make in the provisional government is they want to keep the war

going against Germany. And the Russian people have had it with the war. They just won't keep fighting. So the war keeps going very badly, and Russian soldiers at the front are basically deserting. The army is like literally melting away. There's hardly anyone left to fight the Germans, because

they're just deserting. Meanwhile, there's this guy named Lenin, Vladimir Lenin, or his name was actually Julianov, Lenin was a kind of codename, and he's been living in exile in Switzerland. And a couple of weeks before the Tsar abdicated, Lenin said to a friend, we're not going to see revolution in Russia in our lifetime. And then the revolution comes, or at least the overturning of the Tsar comes. And Lenin figures, well, the provisional government could be overthrown. This may be a czar moment.

Lenin, I should say, is the leader of something called the Bolshevik Party, which is basically a communist party, sort of far-left radical. But his problem is he's in Switzerland and he needs to get to Russia. To get to Russia, he has to cross a lot of German territory. And there's obviously no way to do that, unless the Germans want you to. And here's the thing. The Germans are smart enough, certainly, to realize that if Lenin gets to Russia and leads a revolution against the provisional government, Lenin is an advocate of taking Russia out of the war. So this will solve the Russia problem.

You can get Russia out of the war, maybe if you can get Lenin to Russia. So the Germans get Lenin to Russia. Wow. They put him on a train from Switzerland across Germany to the Baltic Sea. He gets a ship from there to Finland and then train into St. Petersburg. I never knew that. That's why. Did Lenin broker the deal or did the Germans go to him and say, hey, let's get you over there?

You know, I don't know which one started it. But both were pretty game. I think the Germans might have initiated it actually. Wow. Now that you mentioned it. That is fascinating. So they just deliver Lenin right into Petrograd. And they say, hey, go to it.

Go do it. So he gets there in April 1917 and starts working towards a revolution. And basically, long story short, in, again, depending on your choice of calendar in October or November, October on the old Russian calendar or November on ours, he leads what's really a coup d'et tot, not really a revolution, but a coup d'etat in St. Petersburg or in Petrograd, and knocks over the provisional government and takes power in the capital. All right, so now Lenin and the Bolsheviks are in power in the capital, but it's a very big country which they have to control.

They start doing two things. One is they start negotiating with the Germans for a way out of the war. The other thing is they start fighting a civil war against the forces they have just deposed. The Bolsheviks are known as the Reds, commonly. Their opponents are known as the whites. So the Civil War is the Reds versus the whites. The whites are a kind of odd mixture. Some people who are loyal to the provisional government,

some who are loyal to the Tsar, some who are just basically brutal authoritarian. And the Civil War goes for about three years, highly, highly bloody. I've seen different casualties estimates, probably around 5 million people, And this is on top of the casualties that they've suffered for the last three years. And there's a famine that goes along with the Civil War.

So depending how you want to attribute these casualties, a lot of people die of famine, which probably wouldn't have happened without the Civil War. Sure. In the end, by about late 1920, the Bolsheviks have managed to win the Civil War, and now they are in control of what had been the Russian Empire, which pretty soon on a couple years later, actually, they rename as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to the USSR, or as we somewhat informally called it the Soviet Union. So that's the birth of the Soviet Union as a huge communist

country arising out of the wreckage of what had been the Tsarist Russian Empire. I mean, strategically from the Germans, I mean, like, brilliant. Like, you deliver this guy who will then divide the country and then either he will win, the Bolsheviks will actually take control of the government, which, in which case he's friendly with us and wants end the war and that will takes care of Russia, or they'll, he'll just bleed them and just start a war within. Right, exactly. And then our problem solved either way. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So that works perfectly for the Germans. So the negotiations take a while, but in March of 1918, Germany and Russia signed a treaty called the Treaty of Brestotovsk. It's a brutal treaty for the Russians.

I mean, the Germans really use their bargaining power. Basically, the Germans get control, of what is today the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus. They're either being run directly by the Germans, or in the case of Ukraine, they're kind of running it through a puppet state. But basically the Germans have control of all that. And Ukraine is super key because, you know, Ukraine is, it's often called the breadbasket of Europe.

The black earth of Ukraine, the highly fertile grain soil, it's a great resource to control that. So now with the resources of Ukraine available to them, and able to pull most of their troops out of the East. The Germans know now this is kind of the endgame. So we're in the spring of 1918. America's been in the war now almost a year. There aren't a lot of American troops at the front yet, but they're coming.

And our problem in the East is now done. Problem in the East is now done. Did Lenin agree to that treaty? Was he the one that signed it? I don't think he signed it. I think it was mostly negotiated by his lieutenant Leon Trotsky. And why did they agree to such lenient terms with the Germans? was it because they were grateful for the sort of power seizure,

or was it some other type of political factor? They had no choice. I mean, they just didn't have the bargaining power. They're fighting a civil war. They need the German problem to go away. So the Germans really have them over a barrel. There was debate, often bitter debate, within the Bolsheviks. Actually, there were some who were advocates of what they called,

like revolutionary defensism, which is they should keep fighting the Germans. But it was probably more realistic to think, no, whatever it costs, we need the German problem to go away so we can win our Civil War. And that's the sign that went out. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. I wonder if there's also like an ideological opponent, like if he is the sort of communist party.

I wonder if it, you know, it would put him in a difficult position to now be leading this sort of like authoritarian, you know, top down military regime fighting these, you know, quote, revolutionary battles with. with the Germans. Well, there's an ideological problem in probably a couple senses. One is that the Bolsheviks had expressly promised, their slogan was peace, bread, and land. Like they had promised to get out of the war. So, you know, it would be a politically bad move to go back on that. But the other ideological element that's kind of interesting is they expect, because of their communist beliefs, that their revolution will spark similar revolutions everywhere else.

that the working classes of Europe and the world will see the Russian example, and they'll say, hey, it can be done, you know, rise up, overthrow the bourgeoisie, et cetera, et cetera. And so-in Serbia seeing that revolution, they thought, oh, everyone else is going to get this idea. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Interesting. So they think this treaty with Germany is only a short-term problem anyway, because there's going to be world revolution, and then there will be world socialism, and it won't matter.

Wow. They, by the way, turned out to be wrong. I'm just, you know, spoiler alert. But so now we've got the end game of the war. It's April 1918. The Germans have moved a lot of troops to the West. The Germans know they've got a window basically to beat France and Britain in the West and maybe be secure against the Americans or else the Americans are going to come in force

and then it's pretty much over. So they launch a huge offensive on the Western Front. The Germans hadn't done this as much as the British and French. The Germans had been, I think, smarter about the Western Front. They hadn't attacked as much as the British and French had. over the whole four-year period, except for Verdun that we talked about. But now they do. Now they attack in a really big way.

And at first, their offensive goes quite well. They do manage to, on a couple of occasions, they do manage to break through British and French lines. They advance a long way. There's a point in 1918 where it looks like the British army might collapse. There's a point where it looks like the Germans might divide the French from the British and run to the channel with exactly what they did in 1940. And the British commander-in-chief field marshal, Sir Douglas Haig, puts out this kind of famous order of the day in which he says, it's very gloomy. He says, we have our backs to the wall.

Each of us must fight on to the end. You know, it doesn't sound like, you know, they're winning. Yeah. But then what happens to the German attack is what happened to kind of every attack in World War I. It's hard to keep the momentum going. It's so difficult to keep attacking in this kind of World War I scenario where you're like, walking towards machine gunfire. Your soldiers get tired,

your casualties mount up. You start maybe running, your supply lines get longer, it's harder to supply your guys. You can think of it as like pulling on an elastic. You pull on an elastic, and it might go quite quickly for a moment, and then you get to the point where the elastic,

it's like, it won't go any farther. And that's kind of what happened with World War I offenses. You would get to the point where the elastic has been stretched and you just can't keep advancing. And the Germans hit that point definitively in July.

They just couldn't go any far. And at that point, the wheels come off. In August, the British forces launched a big counterattack at a place called, a town called Amiens. Since I grew up in Canada, I feel I need to note it was actually the Canadian forces that delivered the attack at Amiens, which really broke the German forces there, and which the German deputy commander-in-chief, Eric Ludendorff, said, this was the black day of the German army. This is the day on which it became clear that we're militarily going to lose.

Oh, shout out to Canada, dude. That's awesome. Yeah. Ironically, my, uh, my great-grandfather landed also a Canadian in a Canadian platoon, I guess, on Normandy the day after D-Day. Oh, is that right? Yeah. I remember you mentioned before that you had a Canadian heritage. Yeah, he was there like right after. Wow. Yeah. So, dude, the Canadians are doing it. Actually, I will say, full disclosure, my Canadian grandfather, I'm mixed American Canadian heritage, my Canadian grandfather served in World War I, so I'm not a complete neutral party here. But I think historians would say, I think it is legit to say, the Canadian core it was called, there was a sort of tight Canadian formation of four divisions that always fought as a unit on the Western Front.

They were probably the most effective unit of their size on the Western Front during the war. They generally won their battles, and they won them by being innovative in tactics and winning by keeping the casualties relatively low by World War I standards, which is a big qualifier. But they won their battles effectively, which the British noticed. So after they did this the first time, the British commanders thought, hey, the Canadians are pretty good. So whenever they really needed to win, they would plug in the Canadian Corps. And that happened at Amiens in 1918, with the result that the Canadians did win against the Germans. Were Canadian troops deployed because of their sort of allegiance with England? Yes.

Okay. So that was before America even got involved. Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Canada was not, Canadians, I think, generally do not understand this at all. But Canada was not independent at that time, at least in foreign policy. It was independent in terms of its domestic affairs and it had its own government.

But when World War I broke out, the British colonial office sent a telegram to Ottawa saying, you're at war, send some soldiers. It was not up to Canadians. Australia as well, right? Australia as well, yes. Wow. And New Zealand and South Africa. What they called the Dominions were all ordered to participate. Oh, wow. It was actually, speaking of consequences of World War I, and again, I swear no Canadian knows this, but my dad was a Canadian history professor, so I know it. As a result of World War I and as a result of the sacrifices that Canadians, as well as Australians and New Zealanders made, the British, passed something called the statute of Westminster, which gave those countries full independence. Because of World War I? Yes. Oh, wow. That was in 1931. So if you ask the question, when did countries like Canada and Australia actually become really independent of Great Britain? The

answer is 1931. That's so interesting. Again, it goes back to this total war thing, right? Like women are supplying munitions. We're going to need some rights. And you have all these dominions that are supplying troops. We're going to need a little say in what happens to us from here on now. Yeah, and the British had also learned from all this experience. I mean, the Australians, I don't mean to short the other folks, too. Australians and New Zealanders were also really effective participants in the war. They generally fought more effectively than the British units. And the British were very aware of this, and they knew that, well, if it happens again, we'll need these guys.

So they needed to make concessions. Well, the Australians are crazy. They're down there fighting off spiders and stuff. You know what I mean? They're like, these trenches are nothing. Yeah. Like, they go to the trenches and they have PTSD from back in the spiders. Well, you know, actually, I mean, it's a non-trivial point.

These were generally all of those countries were countries where, you know, young men and men lived in outdoor life. I mean, they were countries where they weren't very urbanized or industrial. You made your living, like Canadians made their living, farming in lumber camps, mining. Killing beavers. Yeah. So, like, this actually translated quite well. This is that quite seriously. The skills that you would have from that translated quite well to fighting on the Western Front.

Right. as opposed to these posh, you know, English lads living in London. Even they're not posh. England was by far the most urbanized country at that time. So, you know, the English soldiers have a much greater tendency to be city boys one way or the other. If they're posh or not, but even if they're working class boys, they haven't seen a tree in their life. Right, you're growing up in London. Whereas these guys in the outback.

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So it actually did help. Yeah. Wow, that's crazy. So now how does this progress, this specific decisive, you call, the Black Day, is that what it was? The German commander Lundorf called it,

the Black Day of the German Army. So from that point on, that's August 8th, 1918, from that point on, and now there are a million American troops on the Western Front, too. Like, they have arrived by this point. And so the million American troops, and then the French and the British forces, British speaking broadly,

including the New Zealanders and Australians and Canadians, they all start pushing on the Germans. And there's a sort of, for several months, there's a sort of continuous set of attacks. They were clever about it. They would attack in different places. They would sort of keep pushing at different parts of the front.

So the Germans have to kind of keep guessing where is it going to come. Strategically, they're smart. And they have these tanks that at this point are... They do by now have tanks. Worked out. And they're using tanks quite a bit now. And aircraft have started to become a factor.

The British in particular are using aircraft in a kind of ground attack role. So they use planes to go in and attack German soldiers on the ground. Yeah. And in these trenches, I mean, an airplane is going to be catastrophic. Yeah, it could be, certainly.

Wow. And anything caught in the open, It's going to be like if you've got vehicles moving around, you know. A lot of military historians say if you look at the fighting in the last bit of 1918, you are now seeing a kind of preview of World War II. You're seeing a kind of fighting, which is changing now. There is this mobility element with tanks, with planes. They're thinking differently about attack tactics in all kinds of ways.

It's starting to look like the opener for World War II. And so they keep pushing the Germans back and pushing back. still no one quite thinks the war is going to end yet, at least on the allied side. They're making plans for 1919. They think, well, we'll push the Germans back a little bit and then we'll rest for the winter and then 1919 will finish it off. But meanwhile, Germany is collapsing. The German commanders know that they have lost.

And it's an interesting difference between World War I and World War II because in World War II, I would argue at least, that a lot of German military commanders and high highly placed Germans, understood by December 1941 that they were going to lose the war. But they kept fighting it for about three and a half more years after that until May of 1945, knowing all the while that they were probably going to lose. In World War I, they're much more rational. You know, as of August 8th, as I was saying, General Ludendorf, because the Supreme Commander, a guy named Hindenburg isn't that bright, Lundorf actually does all the thinking

for the army. So Lundorf realizes, oh, okay, we're going to lose. So they start thinking about how to get out of it. And the first thing that happens is that the military commanders decide it would be better if we actually were a democracy, better in the sense that then we can go as a democracy to Woodrow Wilson and say, hey, President Wilson, we're a democracy too. Now, how about we make peace and we'll get a better deal. Remember that whole League of Nations thing? Yeah, like we're down with that. So like let's make this happen.

So they basically, like by order of the military high command, Germany becomes a democracy. in October 1918. This would be a massive event in history if it hadn't been overshadowed by what came immediately after. But it was actually a big deal that Germany became full-on, meaningfully, a democracy. I can see how now this is setting the stage

for these ideological governmental battles that you have Lenin in the East saying, everyone's going to rise up, the workers are going to rise up, we're going to have a socialist revolution worldwide. And Woodrow Wilson is sitting there saying, oh, democracy is going to spread throughout the entire world.

set of this league of nations and every country will be democratic. That's exactly right. Lots of historians say that's actually the birth of the Cold War right there, that you have this sort of world conflict between kind of American-style democracy and, you know, Soviet-style communism, both born in 1917 in a way as world factors. And these battered, sort of abused nations in Europe that are basically up for grabs ideologically. Exactly.

Yeah. Caught between these two, you know, big forces. Wow. So, all right, so yeah, so Germany becomes a democracy. The German commanders know they're losing. Meanwhile, the wheels are coming off for Germany's allies. Austria, Hungary has fallen apart. Bulgaria, Turkey, they fall apart.

We haven't talked about this much, but there was fighting going on. The British and French were fighting in the Eastern Mediterranean against Turkey. They had moved troops up into Greece, and they're fighting in the Balkans against the Austrians there, against the Bulgarians. Italy had entered the war on the ally side in 1915. They're fighting the Austrians across the mountains. They're sort of between Italy and Austria there. And although the Italians had taken a lot of defeats, they're starting to win against the Austrians by then.

So, you know, Germany's allies are falling apart. Austria, Turkey are falling apart. Germany itself, the military commanders know they're losing. And then the sort of last act of this, well, the German military. commanders ask civilian politicians to start negotiating an armistice with the allies. Armistice is a key word there. Armistice means a truce, technically. It doesn't mean a surrender. It doesn't mean a peace treaty. It means a truce. And it's also key that the military commanders ask civilian politicians to do this.

Because normally an armistice would be negotiated between military commanders on or near the battlefield. But they ask civilian politicians to do it. And this is really diabolical. But they want the civilian politicians to have to carry the can for this later. They want, they want to be able to say, oh, these civilians negotiated this armistice. They negotiated this settlement of the war. Because they know the settlement is not going to be favorable for the Germans. Right. And so- And the military guys don't want to be blamed for it. Oh, wow. And why do these civilian guys take it? Are they just out-leverage? Like, they just sort of have to? They're sort of both patriotic and a bit naive. There are accounts of General Ludendorf going to the civilian politician who does most of

the negotiating. He was a member of the German parliament named Matthias Asperger, who led one of the main political parties. And Lindner goes to Erzberger and does this real sell job on him and says, you know, this is your hour to serve the fatherland. Are you ready to serve the fatherland? And Ersberg is apparently crying. It's so moving. Yes, yes, I will go and serve the fatherland and negotiate this thing. And I can imagine if you're like sort of the civil land. sort of politician, you can sell that pretty easily to say, like, you will get credit for, you know, saving the Germans, getting us out of this war. Like, you will be the one. Your name will go down in history. And in the very hierarchical society that Germany was with the military having such prestige,

for a guy like Asperger, who's from a fairly humble middle class background to have General Ludendorff say to him, you know, Matthias, now go serve the fatherland. Like, this is like beyond his wildest dreams. Poor guy. So, yeah. He's a patsy. Well, you know, sad story. He gets assassinated by far right activists in 1921 because he negotiated the armistice. That's the thanks that he gets from a grateful nation.

Wow. I mean, that is that is diabolical. Yeah, it is. So this is happening. So the negotiations are going on like late October, early November, negotiations are going on for an armistice. Meanwhile, the fighting is still happening. But then something else happens.

So Germany had spent a lot of time. building up a navy from the late 1890s up to World War I to try and kind of compete with the British. Their navy was not as big or powerful as the British, but it was big and powerful, but didn't actually do much in World War I. The U-boats did a lot, but the surface fleet, the battleships, et cetera, didn't do much. There was kind of one big sea battle with the British in 1916. It was kind of inconclusive in its result, and then they basically stayed at anchor in their ports through the whole war. So by 1918 with defeat obviously kind of coming, the German admirals think, oh my God, we just sat at anchor through the whole war, and now we're

going to lose, how utterly shameful. We have to go out now for death or glory. We're like, we're going to sail out and we're going to fight the British fleet, and we'll probably all get sunk and die, but, you know, we have to have our honor. So this is admiral thinking. But the guys running the ships, the crews are like, screw that. Oh, dude, I want to go home. Yeah. So there is a mutiny in the Navy at the German naval port of Kiel. And they just, the, the The sailors, the crews, they just refuse to go out. And then word of this starts to spread. And with all the exhaustion from the war, I didn't mention this, but the British had been

running a naval blockade of Germany since the war began, which had resulted in basically famine conditions in Germany. So people are hungry. Malnourished, sick, exhausted from the war, weak, the German people have had it. And so with the example of the naval mutiny at Kiel, people start doing this everywhere else. In German cities and towns, there are sort of similar uprisings. In the army at the front, finally, you get similar things starting to happen. And Germany just kind of breaks down.

A little bit like what had happened in Russia the year before. And so then out of this, there was a man who had been appointed a chancellor to run a democratic parliamentary government in October when Germany democratized. But he was a prince, a guy named Prince Max of Baden. And he sort of sees how things are going. And he thinks that to sort of stop the revolution from going further, it's important to bring the opposition social Democrats into a government and give them power.

And the social Democrats are fairly moderate. If you have them in power, you might keep more extreme kind of Russian-style Bolsheviks from launching a revolution and seizing power. in Germany. So basically, Prince Max hands the government over to the leader of the social democrats, the guy named Fritz Ebert, and

the Kaiser abdicates and runs away to Holland. This happens on the 9th of November. So on the 9th of November, Germany has become an even more full-on democracy. It had been a constitutional monarchy like Britain for like a month, and now it is a republic.

With a social democratic chancellor, like a left-of-center chancellor are in power. And the armistice negotiations are going on. So that's November 9th. The Social Democrats are in power. On the 11th, the armistice is signed and goes into effect. And they signed it and they agreed, you know, the few hours to go, it will come into effect at 11 a.m. in the morning on November 11th, you know, 11, 11, 11, 11. And so bizarrely, the sort of last bizarre bit of this thoroughly bizarre war, on the morning of November 11th, everybody knows the armisticeice is coming, but there's still fighting going on. And to return to the Canadian Corps, the Canadian Corps went into action to take

the Belgian city of Mons, where the British had fought their first battle in 1914. The commander of the Canadian Corps really wanted to end that way. He wanted the glory of saying, I took Mons on the last day, like this symbolic town. So a lot of boys, a lot of Canadian and German boys died on the morning of November 11th, hours before the armistice was going to come into effect. I mean, that's kind of admirable, admiral thinking as well. Like when you're talking about the Navy going out, like, let's go out in glory, they're doing the same thing. Hey, let's go out in glory. But because they're going to win, it's probably a little easier to convince those men, like, hey, the war is basically done.

These guys are just going to roll over. Let's go get back this town that was taken wrongfully. I mean, I think if I were one of the Canadians in that, I'd be thinking, nope, nope. Let's just sit this out. I'm going home. Let's quibble over ahead. Like you're up by, you know, like 10 points in a basketball game and you're going to go super hard. Like, you're already winning.

Like, you don't got to play that tight of defense, you know? Yep. That's, I mean, did they get it? They got it. All right. And then it was 11 o'clock and the war ended. Is that where 11-11 as a superstitious number comes from? Or was that already in, like, cultural superstition prior to?

You know, that's interesting. I've heard that superstition. I don't know if it comes from there, maybe, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, like, people say, like, oh, it's 11-11, make a wish. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I bet. I mean, unless they knew it, because that seems like a peculiar time.

I wonder if they just liked the sort of symmetry of it to say, like, oh, November 11th, let's do 1111. Yeah. It's kind of fun. They're in the armistice room just being like, this would be kind of cute. You know what I mean? This would be kind of a cute thing to do. Yeah. That's wild.

So 1111, it stops. It stops. Well, in the West. It's a little messier in the East. A lot of fighting is still going on. I mean, you still have the Civil War in Russia. There's border fighting between Germany and countries to its own. east. So there's now a country of Poland starting to emerge and Lithuania out of the Russian

Empire. And there's border fighting going on there, which still goes on for a few more years after that. And there is fighting between the Greeks and Turks, which actually still goes on until 1923, with all the hallmarks of a sort of full-on genocidal war, ethnic cleansing population expulsions and so on. So it's a little messier over there, but the war in the West ends in a sense quite neatly. You know, precisely 11 o'clock. So British. So British. Yep. And as far as the negotiations for this armistice, obviously you have the Social Democrat in Germany that is a part of it. And then you have Woodrow Wilson, the British and the French. Yes. And it's those kind of four groups, three and one making this treaty. Yes. And the armistice, the terms of it are just, hey,

stop fighting and then we'll figure out the actual treaty later. Well, hey, stop fighting, but also, you know, hand over, I mean, it's very harsh to the Germans, hand over a lot of weaponry. So for instance, the German Navy had to sail all their ships to the British Port of Scapa Flow, British Navy base of Scapa Flow, and turn their ships over to the British. They semi-did this.

They sailed the ships to Scapa Flow, and then they sank them there. The Germans sank their own ships. I mean, that must have been an insane sight to be a British citizen looking off from the distance, and you see these German boats coming in, like, all right, it's done, they're going to dock them here. And then they all just go and of the water. Did the men go down with the ships? I think they got the crews out and then sunk it after that.

Wow. So now what is the fallout of this? Obviously you have broad negotiations to try to like reassemble Europe in some capacity. Yeah. So now the allies and particularly the key ones, Britain, France, America, also Italy, Russia has dropped out because of the revolution and the civil war. They agree that there will be a peace conference in Paris. And so they agree to meet. They let Christmas go by and it starts in the new year in 1919. And the peace conference is very famous and no one ever has a nice word to say about it. You know, I think it's important to keep in mind that the politicians at this peace conference had a whole bunch of huge problems to solve, which were impossible. You have populations,

these are all democratic politicians, right? You have populations who have been whipped up through four years of suffering and casualties and propaganda to really hate the other side. So you have populations who want some kind of vengeance, particularly against the Germans. The British Prime Minister, the guy who came in in 16, David Lloyd George,

ran for a snap re-election as soon as the armistice was signed, and he campaigned on slogans like, squeeze the Germans until the pip squeak and hang the Kaiser. Wow. So he's really playing on that vengeance thing.

And, you know, there's a similar mood, They're probably even angrier mood in France. So on the one hand, the politicians are under pressure to deliver a settlement where Germany really does pay, you know, literally and figuratively. But they also, the more rational ones at least, also know for the long-term future, it would be better to sort of reconcile with the Germans, bring the Germans kind of back into the European family, so to speak, and have a peace settlement that is reasonable and will be durable for the future. And these principles are at war with each other through the whole thing. And what some historians have said is probably it would have been good to go really hard one way or the other. Like have a really draconian settlement, maybe break Germany up, like undo the unification, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Or go really into, okay, the war sucked, and now let's move on. Like no. Forgive and forget. Yeah, forgive and forget. And we'll fix you guys up and create a peaceful, you know, Germany. Yeah. And instead what they did, and you could probably even predict this from how political things go, what they did is something in the middle, a treaty that did have some harsh aspects,

although it was much less harsh than what the Germans had imposed on Russia the year before. It did have some harsh aspects, but it also left Germany basically a strong country. So, you know, Germany had to give up some territory, about 10% of its pre-war territory. There were other conditions like it had limitations on. the size of its armed forces. It couldn't have an army more than 100,000 men, which is quite small by the standards of that time. It couldn't have any air force at all. It was limited in the size of its navy. There would be occupation of parts of Germany for a number of years. And then maybe most importantly, the infamous paragraphs 231 and 232 of the Treaty of Versailles, which is the

treaty with Germany, paragraph 231 is what's called the war guilt clause. So Germany had to be to acknowledge that it was solely responsible for the war, which the Germans didn't believe. And most historians would say, although there's much debate about this, most historians would at least say, not solely responsible. Yeah, I mean, what happened to Austria, Hungary?

Well, exactly, or even Russia. There's lots of ways. There's lots of complexity in the outbreak of the war, and there's a fair amount of blame to go around if you want to do that. Germany, I think there's no getting around. Germany is heavily responsible. Yeah, as an instigator or an antagonizer in this conflict. But not solely.

But no German. Germans actually all sort of thought, well, we were attacked by everybody else. So, like, we were victimized. So that was really unpopular. But also, that clause was there. It was like, you know, a lawsuit. It's like finding of liability and then you pay damages, right? So that's kind of the finding of liability.

And then there's the damages. Paragraph 232 was what was called reparations. And under this, Germany had to pay a huge amount of money to the Allies, chiefly to Belgium and France and Britain for the damages it had, you know, allegedly caused during the war. And in the way of committees and governmental things, in the peace treaty itself, it didn't say how much. They sent it out to a committee. Oh, a committee will study this and decide how much Germany has to pay. So then the committee reported in 1921 and concluded that Germany had to pay a sum representing 132 billion gold marks, which in the exchange rate of the time is somewhere in the

range of 30 or 40 billion U.S. dollars. So a lot of money now, a lot, a lot of money in 1921. But then it didn't stick. The thing kept getting renegotiated. So the Germans start paying. But then there was a lot of resistance in Germany to paying. and a lot of protests by the government and sort of just deliberate non-compliance with things.

And to some extent, the Germans, the German government caused massive inflation in their own country just to make it harder for them to pay their reparations, basically. Interesting. And so then notoriously, there was hyperinflation in 1923. Lots of folks know about the 1923 inflation

where you see pictures in books or films of people going with, like, wheelbarrows of bills to buy a loaf of bread. At the height of it, November 1923, the German mark, which had been four to the U.S. dollar in 1914. In 1923, it's $4.3 trillion to the U.S. dollar. And the inflation was self-inflicted. Almost entirely self-inflicted, yes.

Wow. Just through monetary policy, that is wild. Wow. So at that point, and there's various other things, famously Hitler's Beer Hall push comes at this time. There's also a communist attempted uprising in Germany, all kinds of crisis. So the Allies agree to renegotiate the reparations. The initiative is led by an American businessman, also a vice-presidential candidate named Dawes.

And so then it's renegotiated to a lower annual payment. And then there are a bunch of other terms in what's called the Dawes Agreement. The Allies basically take over Germany's central bank. They have all kinds of regulations on Germany's central bank. and how the currency is going to be. They impose the gold standard. The currency is going to be on the gold standard. And there's rules for all this.

And a bank is created in Basel, Switzerland, called the Bank of International Settlements, to facilitate the reparations payments. And there's this whole complicated financial network that gets set up. And then it gets renegotiated again in 1929, again, an American businessman taking the lead, a guy called Owen Young.

And so this is called the Young plan in 1929, which lowers the payments again, the annual payments, but then spreads them out over a long period of time. to the Young Plan, Germany would be paying reparations until 1985. Wow. Yeah, wow. Wow.

And the German political right is now getting super furious about these reparations and this constant renegotiation, even though the renegotiations tend to be sort of benefiting Germany, but the whole thing makes them angry. So that is very far from being a piece of reconciliation. It's really making almost all Germans angry regardless of where they are politically. And it certainly hamstrings the German economy. It does hamstring the German economy, which it is sort of meant to do in some ways. The financial requirements were, in particular, meant to hamstring them for defense spending.

They want to make it impossible for the Germans to spend on armaments. And they succeeded in doing that as long as these arrangements lasted. Eventually, the whole thing sort of falls apart. When the Great Depression hits, the then-President Herbert Hoover introduced something called the Hoover Moratorium in 1931, under which the Germans won't make reparations payments. And then the Hoover moratorium is made permanent in 1932. And that's the end of reparations, actually. But by that time, they've done their damage.

It's a little late. It's a little late. And the sort of political backlash that they have contributed to is in full bloom by 1932. And the other part of this is that, although this has made Germany angry and in some ways limited what it could do, Germany is still there.

Like, basically, Germany is still there as the largest European state outside of Russia with the largest population outside of Russia, you know, serious industrial base, highly educated, industrious population. Like, it's still a very powerful country. They're just meeting. They're just missing a, I guess,

a crazy, enthusiastic leader. Right. And, you know, such a person might, in fact, come along, you know, again, spoiler alert. Wow. This is very interesting. I've always known, like, little pieces of this, and now it's all kind of,

making sense. As far as Woodrow Wilson's sort of League of Nations idea, that comes to fruition. It comes to fruition. It's included. It's a, it's, it's, the charter of the League of Nations is put right into the Peace Treaty. It's an element of the peace treaty. But then of course, famously, Wilson was, in many ways, he was an eloquent speaker and in some ways a charismatic leader.

But he kind of wasn't a good politician. And, you know, especially, you know, we've seen, you know, I've seen presidents who are really good at going to Congress and like slapping backs and twisting arms and either frightening people who are saying, oh, I bet you'd like this in your district or I bet you'd like this in your state. Maybe we can make it happen, but I need your vote. Lyndon Johnson classically is the president who was awesome at that at working Congress. And some presidents are not.

I think Barack Obama was not great at that sort of twisting arms and slapping backs thing. Woodrow Wilson was a bit like Obama in the sense that he wasn't good at that. So he comes home, and of course, treaties have to be approved by the Senate. So he takes the treaty with the League of Nations bit before the U.S. Senate. And probably he could have gotten a positive vote out of it, but he didn't handle the politics of it very well. He didn't like Republicans, and he had sort of kept them out on the whole process anyway. And the Republicans are mad at him. And so the treaty was voted down in the Senate.

So because of that, the United States couldn't sign the treaty. And the United States could not join the League of Nations. So the League of Nations comes into being, and the other allies, initially it's a club of the Allies. They keep the Germans out too for a while. But Britain, France, the other major allied countries, join the League of Nations. They create it. Eventually, they even let the Germans in in 1926, but the United States never joins. So, you know, the United States coming out of World War I is now very clearly the world's most powerful country by a wide margin.

And so having the United States not in the League of Nations hobbles it from the beginning. Interesting. It basically means the British have to kind of carry the load of being the major, you know, the major power supporting democracy in the world. And the enforcer of democracy. Exactly. And Britain now, Britain is exhausted by World War I and imperially overextended and not up to this role anymore. It doesn't have the might to be up to this role anymore.

And this is, I guess, more foreshadowing for Neville Chamber. sort of pacifistic, you know, hands-off approach when there's more aggression that happens in World War II. Exactly. Wow. This is fascinating. And then as far as Austria-Hungary, that breaks up? Yeah, Austria-Hungary is just unable to bear the strains of war.

As we said at the beginning, the Emperor Franz Josef dies in 1916, and there's no one to replace him with the same symbolic value. There are nationalisms in all the component parts of the empire. So as Austria-Hungary falls apart militarily, it also falls apart politically, and at the end of the war, movements emerged in sort of all the components to create their own nation-state. So there's a Czech movement, there's a Polish movement, and so on and so on, and so on. And all of these areas really just stake their own claim to autonomy. And they get recognized in the peace tree.

The Paris Peace Conference has to kind of work out a map of Europe. and the statesman doing this are mostly the Western statesmen who don't know much about Central Europe and there are all kinds of funny stories about, you know, how they're drawing maps with borders for countries that they know nothing about.

And they're like, oh, does this river go here? Or, you know, what they do. Is there any intentional malfeasance that goes along with this? Like, you hear about this happening in Africa when they sort of draw up lines after, you know, imperialism to sort of keep warring factions

in the same country so that they're constantly reliant on their, you know, like more powerful economic big brother, so to speak. Is that happening in Europe when they're sort of drawing these lines? It's really not. It's not intentional, but what it is is impossible. It's impossible. It's utterly impossible to draw lines on a map for the countries of central eastern Europe,

which would neatly enclose particular national groups. Kind of like, again, we were talking about a bit earlier. You know, I think you might imagine something that looks like a Swanson TV dinner tray. These things still exist. I had these when I was a kid. Where it's like, you know, you've got the vegetables in this neat little corner with borders and like the meat in this neat little corner with borders and the mashed potatoes in this neat little corner. And they're trying to do that in drawing the map of Europe. They're trying to have like a neat little TV dinner tray where like the Czechs will be here and the Poles will be here and the Hungarians will be here.

But you can't. And they'll never want to be German and the Germans will never want to annex this part of Poland and everyone will be happy. I mean, everything about this is impossible. People are so jumbled up in Central Europe. There are no lines you can draw that are. good. So for instance, to take my favorite example, the country that becomes Czechoslovakia carved out of the Austrian Empire. Well, okay, so in the name of the country, you would think, well, I guess it's Czechs and Slovakians. Okay, right there, that's two different ethnic groups who don't like each other much. Yeah. But it's even more complicated than that, because within Czechoslovakia, there's a big German minority. There are about three million. That's actually

more than Slovak's. Germans are the second biggest ethnic group in Czechos. It should be Czech Germany. Yeah, it should be. Kind of, but that's not the point. But the point of it is to create a national home for the Czechs and the Slovaks. There's also Hungarians, there's Poles, there's a couple letters I've gone blank on, but there's like a very complicated, diverse,

ethnic tapestry in this country, which is supposed to be, I mean, the idea is to create a homogeneous nation state. And what ends up happening is politics, all these countries become democracies coming out of the peace conference but politics gets conducted as politics between ethnic groups

that's true in Shuckles of Bakia but it's true in all the other new countries too they're carved out of the wreckage of these old empires and are new countries on the map Poland the same thing you know you have these very diverse ethically diverse linguistically diverse sometimes religiously diverse countries

where nobody much likes each other and the politics is conducted ethnically. It's generally not on kind of ideological or class lines. It tends to be ethnic. So you have a recipe for political instability, and you have a situation in which it's going to be difficult to keep democracy going in countries where there's so little felt common ground between the components of the population. And then you have this country of Germany that is strained and battered and angry and still very nationalistic. And going back to a point you made a moment ago, there are diaspora as ever.

were. So the biggest single minority group in this new central eastern Europe is Germans. There are German communities in almost all of these new countries. Wow. And they'd all kind of rather be in Germany. So you can see where this is going to be a problem. They're also Hungarian minorities in some of the other countries too. And Polish minorities like outside of Poland and so on and so on. So there are many groups of people who are not happy with where they are. And there's notably one big country that's not happy with its scattered diaspora all over the place.

Wow. Which is also setting up trouble for later. Now America's feeling as far as the end of the war, they feel like, oh, we save the day. We're the good guys. Is that kind of the sense? There is that feeling, I think, briefly, but there's a pretty bad hangover from the war.

There's a widespread feeling that, and this comes on pretty soon after the peace treaty and the sort of debacle with the Senate not approving the treaty or the League of Nations, there's a widespread feeling that the war was pointless, but even worse than pointless, like sort of aggressively futile, that, you know, sacrifices and heavy casualties have been born, only to make things just as bad as they had been, if not worse. It gets to be quite a common theme. in America on the left and the right in interesting ways that the war had basically just been fought for bankers and industrialists who had benefited from loans to Britain or the sale of weapons

and that ordinary people had paid the bill and that that should never happen again. So once this all settles in, you have a really powerful boost to what had already been there, which is American isolationism. And you get an interesting effort, especially in the 1930s, in the 1930s. in the 1930s there are three different acts of legislation that go through Congress called the Neutrality Acts. And it's almost funny. If you look at what the Neutrality Acts say, they are trying to sort of systematically prevent World War I. Like everything that has sort of brought America to being in World War I, they try to close that off.

So, you know, you can't sell goods, you can't sell manufacturing goods or whatever to a belligerent power, a country at war. because they thought, well, that had kind of led us in. American citizens can't sail on a ship of a country that's at war. We're not going to have another Lusitania, right? So you can see they're sort of going through and trying to like, they're almost literally trying to prevent World War I. But, of course, World War I had happened. And the problem is what they're legislating is of no help at all

in trying to prevent the war that is actually coming. I can see, but how do you have the force? site to necessarily know exactly what the features to get America into World War II will be. Of course. So I guess it is, you know, you're working with what you have. Yes. And it makes sense. It's like, yeah, yeah.

But so did they not end up giving loans in World War II at the beginning part? Did they honor that neutrality act? At the beginning, they did. This had to be overturned by legislation ultimately in the famous Len lease act in 1941. And so did America get paid back from all of its loans to England and Britain and France? No. Basically no. I mean, they were paid for a while.

They were never paid completely. And even in World War II, some Americans were still angry about this. It's like, well, they didn't pay our debts last time. Germany ended up paying, Germany had, the German government had borrowed a lot of money from the United States in the 1920s. That actually helped the Germans pay reparations.

There was this kind of weird transatlantic pipeline of money. Basically, American banks would lend to German governments. The German governments would pay reparations. to Britain and France. Britain and France would pay their debts to the United States, and so it would go. This held up until the Great Depression kind of ruined the whole thing.

So the same million dollars was basically paying off four million dollars of debt, so to speak. It was going here, it was going here, it was going back. That's interesting. And then after the Hoover moratorium, the Germans stopped paying reparations. But in more recent years,

after World War II, the German government did pay the United States interest on the loans that had taken out in the 1920s. And those payments just ended a few, years ago. I forget exactly when, but just quite recently, I remember reading somebody in the news that Germany had just paid its last, you know, interest. I remember that. Payment from those loans that they got to pay the reparations. So some Americans in World War

1 got extremely wealthy from this war. Do we know who any of them are? Sure. Are there any family dynasties that came out of this? Oh, God, I've just gone, who's the famous financier? Carnegie? The museum, like, on Madison Avenue. The museum on Madison Avenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His house, like, that guy, you know. Oh, interesting.

McCreys, could you look that up? I'm sure it'll just, I'm like, but it'll come to me. Sort of really eminent American. Not the Rockefeller's, Carnegie's, Vanderbilt's. No, like that, though, sort of bulbous nose. I'm trying to. The Morgans? Morgan.

J.P. Morgan. Oh, J.P. Morgan. Oh, interesting. They had financed a lot of it. Morgan was like heavily, heavily lending to the British, yeah. Oh, wow. And so then they had created like a sort of family dynasty in America from the payback of World War I. Yes. Fascinating. Well, it had been there before that, but World War I helped. Interesting. Wow. This is, I mean, this is fascinating. I feel like I understand the world a lot better.

I mean, this is your recall of this. Obviously, you're a scholar and historian and have written many books, but I'm just still so impressed sitting down for, three hours, three and a half hours, breaking down all of World War I. This is tremendous. Well, thanks. I have no hobbies, you see. Many years ago, I was a lawyer, and I hated my job as a lawyer, and my hobby was reading history books. And then I quit my lawyer

job and became a history professor and made my hobby my job, and now that's all I do. Yeah, I mean, just amazing. I really hope that the audience has enjoyed this conversation as much as I have. Thank you so much for doing this. If anyone is interested in sort of what is to come,

We've already done an episode on World War II. We sort of do the same thing and break it all down, beat by beat, going year by year and looking at all the countries and the average people as well as the leadership that goes into sort of the morbid, fascinating atrocity that is these great world wars. So I hope maybe we can learn a lesson from this. As we were saying before on the phone yesterday, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Yeah. I, you know, as a history professor, I always hope that we'll learn lessons from history, and I'm not hugely optimistic that we do. But hope springs eternal. Yeah, I guess we will learn lessons. It depends if they're the right lessons.

That's right. And we may learn lessons in the short term and then forget them over time. That happens too. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, thank you so much. I would love to do this again. I would love to talk about the Cold War and see what happens after World War II and, you know, into the time that I was born. You know, roughly. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. And if people are interested in finding things about you or trying to read your books, you were recently featured a Netflix documentary, which is awesome. Yeah, I'm on a Netflix documentary called Evil on Trial.

I always struggle with the title. Evil on Trial. The Nazis, there's six episodes. I'm fairly heavily to be seen in the first three and then a little bit in the ones after that. I have a website, Benjamin Carterhead.com, which has information on my books. and all that sort of thing. Well, Dr. Head, thank you so much. Can't wait to do it again.

All right, thanks. It's been a pleasure.