School of War - Ep 155: Nick Lloyd on World War I’s Eastern Front

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

Nick Lloyd, Professor of Modern Warfare in the Defence Studies at King’s College London and author of The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918, joins the show to discuss the critical role of the eastern front in World War I. ▪️ Times      •      01:43 Introduction      •      02:09 “The soul of the war”     •      04:00 Before the fighting     •     05:59 War aims     •      10:51 Tannenberg     •      15:54 Hindenburg and Ludendorff     •      19:57 Scale     •      22:40 Combat     •      27:14 Munitions scarcity      •      32:10 Russian collapse     •      36:45 Lenin returns     •      40:42 Brest-Litovsk     •      44:16 Proto-lebensraum     •      47:20 The West     •      52:30 War as a way out Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Among the ironies of the First World War is that it was a conflict that began in Eastern Europe, in which the central powers then managed to win in the East, with the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917, only to then go on to lose when they overplayed their hand on the Western Front in 1918. What would have happened if the Germans had banked their winnings in the spring of of 1918 and sought a settlement in the West, rather than launching the doomed defensive to capture Paris that American Marines, among others, stopped along the banks of the Marn. To discuss this and other intriguing questions that had talked about World War I in the East, we've got Nick Lloyd on the show today. Let's get into it.

Can they stay? We continue to face a great situation in France. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter.

And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks so much for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today. Lloyd, who is Professor of Modern Warfare, King's College London, and the Defense Studies Department. He's written widely about the First World War. Most recently, the second installment of a trilogy he is writing covering the history of the war called The Eastern Front, a history of the Great War in 1914 to 1918. Nick, thank you so much for joining the show. Great to meet you and thanks

for having me on. What's the case for the war in the East being the essence or the actual center of the First World War? It starts there. Some of the main combatants have their principal war aims there. We, of course, I'm speaking to you from America. You're in the UK. Our thoughts naturally go to France and Belgium and the Western Front. But is that the real war? Is the Eastern Front the real war?

Well, I think it's certainly true that the Western Front is the decisive theater. That's where the ultimate sort of victory is won and defeat is made. But I think there's no doubt that the Eastern Front is the soul of that war in many ways. And obviously, as you said, that's where it's. It begins, obviously begins in the Balkans, but it drags in, you know, Russia, Germany, obviously, Austria. And that's where I think so many of the problems that will ultimately be devil European politics, you know, remains after the war. And so you have this, you know, whereas the Western Front, for all of the horrors of the Western Front and the horrors of trench warfare, it does end. And it ends in a victory for the Allied powers.

And you have that moment of silence where, you know, the guns fall. silent and, you know, France recovers their borders, you know, Belgium is liberated. It's not really like that in the East. And so the East is on a different time frame than the West in terms of what happens in the war. And it's also, you see the collapse of, you know, those three great powers that are controlled Central and Eastern New York, you know, for many, many years. So the yeast is very different and distinct. And I think it's one that I think repays a lot more attention than maybe it's got in the historiography. So maybe spend a moment, if you would, just telling us about how the eastern part of Europe

looks in the summer of 1914. Again, just to stick with our sort of Anglo-American frame of reference, we all kind of have received images of the summer of 1914, you know, from Philip Larkin and other sources out out west. Who are the major players in the east? What are their attitudes towards one and a number? other, what is life there like? Do people see a war coming? Are they as surprised as the, as the, as their received wisdom suggests they were surprised out West? Well, I think, you know,

you do have this idea of the sort of bell-ep-hoc, you know, period of Europe before the First War is a pinnacle of civilization in many ways of, you know, great images of the Habsburg Empire and the splendor of the royalty and the kind of Europe of the cafes of Freud, of philosophy of Beethoven and all this kind of images of Europe and obviously all that shattered by 1914. But obviously, if we look at the Balkans, where this war begins, the Balkans have just undergone two wars between 1912 and 1913 that had been, you know, terribly bloody, involved ethnic cleansing, had been, you know, actually brutal in many ways where you have powers that had fought alongside each other, suddenly turning on each other. So the Balkans

have been ripped apart shortly before the First World. So it wasn't always. Well, you know, Balkans had always been in a kind of area of conflict, but it has been controlled and dominated by various empires over the years. Obviously, you've got the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is a major power there. But obviously, the tension released the retreat of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans and the new states that are rising in its place. And then you have, you know, the Tsarist empire of Russia, imperial Russia is, of course, extremely powerful, very large.

It goes all the way, you know, obviously it's in Poland, but what we think of as Poland today is obviously part of the Tsarist Empire. And obviously, Germany. So there are those three main powers that really dominate the region. And obviously, they're falling out in 1914, you know, spells doom for that, all those different civilizations in that region. What are the, I want to talk about both war aims at the highest level, but then just to get into the story itself, the initial operational aims of the three major powers? What do you go in any order you like, of course, but Germany, Austria and Russia hope to get out of the war? And then how do they actually take a swing at it in 1914? Well, I mean, they all, you know, the idea of war is not, you know, a lot of states and a lot of

people in Europe had thought a war was coming. And there's a sense within European civilization at this time that war is good. War is sort of a national cleansing activity. It is important. And, you know, you get, this is not a cliche. This is a general sense that, war is necessary and helps the nation to become vibrant. And it's a demonstration of a nation's vitality. But obviously you have Austria, which is the century of this, which is a declining empire. It's been beaten by Russia. It's feeling the strain of, you know, a whole range of issues within the empire that's

threatening to splinter the empire apart into various different ethnic and national groups. And, you know, the actions of a rising sort of middle power or sort of, you know, middle, middle power in the Balkans, Serbia. And so the idea in Austria is that, you know, Serbia needs to be controlled. It needs to be put back in its box, really. And obviously, the assassination, you know, sparked chaos in the sense that this nation is really out of control. This is a gangster nation that needs to be put back. So the idea for Austria is that we need a war. We need to demonstrate our power to put Serbia, to punish Serbia and to demonstrate our virility and our control. If we don't, If we allow this insult and this assassination to take place and to go and punish, then it will mean

that Austria is a second-rate power declining. So, you know, they fear the destruction of the empire and the humiliation of the empire, and that war can avert that. And of course, the rule brings about the very thing that they had feared. And that's also true to a certain degree for the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire comes in because it is, in terms of the huge strains of the domestic fronts. You obviously have the growth of political parties, the Duma, which is set up, the imperial parliament. And so you have the rising proletarian, if I can use a sort of Bolshevik phrase, the sort of proletarian, industrial working class, particularly in St Petersburg, Moscow,

that are demanding rights that are antagonistic towards the imperial states. And, you know, obviously there's been a revolution in 1905. And so the Tsar is weak and feels weak in that sense. And therefore, when it feels, when it feels, when it feels, that its chief client state in the Balkans, Serbia is going to be essentially dismembered by Austria-Hungary. It feels it has to take a stand. And so it feels, it fears, being humiliated on the world stage where if they don't take a stand for Serbia, they'll be seen as a weak power or declining power. And so you can see from Russia and Austria-Hungary's perspective, however

misguided that that is, that there's reasons why war is seen as preferable in some way to the kind of messy compromises of politics and the reality of political life in those empire. Germany is a different one. Germany is the strongest power in Europe, the strongest military, the strongest economy, huge cultural economic achievement within Germany. But the people who run Germany are obsessed with almost a strange way with their own inferiority. And this doesn't just stem from the Kaiser. You obviously have someone like Hello von Moltter, who's the chief of the general staff in Germany, is, you know, very much fears the Allies in France and Russia, obviously, have made an alliance.

And they fear that actually Russia is getting very, very strong. So Russia is re-arming. Russia will be stronger than then militarily by about 19. according to their estimates at the time. And so they fear that actually a Russia that becomes more powerful will be very, very dangerous to Germany in any future entanglement in Europe. And so they feel they must support Austria. And also, Malk shows in the view that now is the best, now or never.

If we're going to go, we should go now, because if we wait, the Russians will be much stronger. And so even though Germany is so powerful and in many ways, it dominates Europe, there's a sort of a feeling of real insecurity within that leaders. And of course, what they want to do is how, well, at least the war is an opportunity to demonstrate their power and also get rid of opponents. domestic and foreign. I want to talk about the onset of major hostilities and then I want to linger for a bit, if you would, on the Battle of Tannenberg, which in the Marines, we were studying Renewer Warfare in my young officer days. This battle came up and it's fascinating because it brings to the four the German leadership that will, I mean, sort of ultimately lose the war in

1918, but they win this one and it makes them famous or helps to make them famous amongst other factors. What happens? Things go well for the Russians at the outset in what is now Poland, then what East Prussia, I guess, is what we're talking about to an extent. Help us understand the Battle of Tannenberg. Well, Tannenberg is probably the most well-known individual battle from the Eastern Front. It's a battle that's long, fascinated, military scholars, Dennis Schultz, of course, are an excellent book on Tannenberg. And I think Tannenberg sort of sets a scene in many ways for what will happen on the eastern front. And so the situation at the start of the war is obviously Austria,

he wants to fight Serbia, but it has to send most of its army north to hold the border in Galicia against the Tsar's forces. So Austria is split two ways. It wants to fight Serbia, but it has to deploy against Russia, because obviously Russia is the biggest army in the world at that point. And so then you have the German situation where Germany are going to send 80% of their army

to France and Belgium. And so the Germans are telling the Austrians, look, don't worry about Serbia. Put all your army to hold off the Russians, because we've only got a single army, the 8, in East Prussia. And so this holds no, this is not what the Austrians want to do.

But of course, they have to do it. So the dysfunction between Germany and Austria and 1914 is almost comical if it were not so tragic because the German war plan is set. Once it goes on, the army goes west. And so there is, you know, the situation here is the French are telling the Russians, look, don't worry about,

Austria, Austria of the weaker partner, we can deal with them at leisure. Put all of your army, put all of the force as much as you can against the Germans, because you'll never have a better chance of marching on Berlin. But it's like a mirror image of the central panels, but the Russians don't really want to do that. They don't necessarily have much, many territorial gains they want against. Okay, they'll take East Prussia, but it's not, you know, they would like to march into the Habsburg heartlands, bring their border up to the Carpathian.

And that's really where they want to go. And they know that they can beat the Austrians because the Austrians are weak. They lack firepower. Their divisions are not well trained. They're light. So none of these powers really fight the war. They want to fight. And so it's a sort of real chaotic start.

But the Russians do send two armies against into East Prussia. But it's not coordinated at all. And so, you know, first and second army, they're not coordinated. the communications kind of run out very quickly, and the two commanders, Stanton and Renan count, don't get on. And ultimately, they don't coordinate a proper invasion of East Prussia. They sort of do their own thing and hope that they will sort of join up at some point. What happens, of course, is the Germans obviously initially struggle a little bit

against the Russian First Army, but then they're able to redeploy and use the ground, particularly the swamps and forests at East Prussians. Russia to redeploy most of their army against the second army, which is coming from the south, coming from Poland. And they practiced this kind of maneuver multiple times in the years, you know, leading up to the war. So they're on home ground. They know the ground.

They have the lateral rail links so they can move troops quickly. So it's very well prepared. And ultimately, the Russians kind of blunder into the perfect trap that the Germans are always going to spring. And so they're able to surround the second army, Tampsonov's second army. And in these terrible swampy, forested ground where the Russian superiority in manpower just can't really be brought to bear. And three whole Russian corps are eliminated and Samsonov gets cat, well, he's about to

be captured, I think, and sort of saunter's off to a glade in the forest and shoots himself. And so the disaster at Tannenberg, which basically ends the invasion of East Prussia by the 30th of August 1914, so the last day of the battle. So not even the first month with the war is over, the Russians have suffered debilitating defeat. And from that point, the Germans always have that sort of air of superiority of moral supremacy over the Russians that never really goes. And so the Russians are just sort of horrified. And although they're made gains against the Austrians, you know, they're very aware of that northern flank in East Prussia. And so as an individual victory, it's a sort of masterpiece of operational art, we might say.

but ultimately dependent on the mistakes of the Russians as well as German tactical and operational excellence. Yeah. I mean, this is a battle that it echoes Ford in ways, both for the Germans and the Russians, I mean, just independently as an engagement that's consequential for both countries. And then for the Germans and for, I guess it's Hindenberg specifically, but maybe Ludendorf too, you'll tell me, you know, this is for them, right, sort of bringing into reality, into modern reality in 1914, this operational concept of, I've always said cannae, but then recently I've heard people say can I, and I'm very disoriented and doubting myself. I'm fascinated to hear how you pronounce it.

No one ever taught me Latin. But this notion of encirclement or double embellopment from classical warfare into the modern age in ways that then sort of foreshadows, you know, the great cauldron battles, the Eastern Front in the World War II. Talk a bit about that, if you would, and Hindenberg's interested in this concept and so forth. So, yeah, so there's two men that are all. Well, they're ultimately responsible for the operation of Tannenberg, is Paul von Hindenberg and his chief planning aide Eric Ludendorf. And these don't initially commanders of the 8th Army.

Juan Pritz is the commander, but when Pritzwitz sort of loses his nerve in the lead up to the battle, he gets very nervous. He wants to sort of retreat from East Prussia because he knows that the two Russian armies are converging. And so he's got rid of and they pull out of Hindenberg out of retirement. And they just pair him up with one of the most, what are they regarded, one of the most gifted staff officers, obviously gone through the General Staff Academy in Berlin. Eric Ludendorff, who's in Belgium, he's in Leij, put him on a train, they meet up. And they form this kind of military marriage where there's Hindenberg, who is the sort of public face or the frontman. And Ludendorff, who is a sort of prodigious fizzing spark of an intellect, constantly moving intellect is one, is our one. officer describes here. Hindenberg is the kind of grandfatherly figure that unflappable man.

He's never panics, never worries. And together, you've got Lundor's technical brilliance, although he's somewhat erratic and often needs Hindenberg's kind of steadying influence on him. So there's a moment of Tannenberg when they're moving the core into position and Lundorf's, they haven't really heard what's going on and Lunders getting very, very worried. And whether, you know, should we pull back? Should we, you know, are we going to do it? And Hindenberg just says, don't worry, you'll be fine. Just, you know, I'll take responsibility. We're going to do the plan.

And ultimately, that succeeds. And so then reputation is made. You know, the two men, you know, they drag victory from the, from the sort of jaws of defeat. Now, the plan for Tannenberg and all the operational work had been done by other people, but ultimately, Hindenberg looted all the people actually put it into effect. So, you know, the German army has been obsessed with this kind of cannae, is how I've always pronounce it, this battle, that's a Roman battle, double envelopment. And obviously,

the Schlefen plan itself, the Great March through Dauldron and France is an attempt. If not a double envelopment, then the aim is almost a sort of at least from one side, a complete involvement. So the idea of development has gone a long history in Prussian and then German operational and strategic thinking. And so, you know, they can do it at Hannibur, because the ground is good and they have the right circumstances. And what Hintabudabudov subsequently try and do on the Eastern Front is bigger Tannenberg's Mark 2 and 3 again and again and never quite pull it off because they just don't have the maneuverability or the marching power to march as quickly as they like. But Lundorf is all for doing this kind of thing. And this is obviously

a prefiguring, as you've said, of the kind of later concepts of things like Blitzkrieg in the German army. The question that just just occurred to me and maybe you'll tell me that sort of the premises of it are off. But, you know, it strikes me when we talk about, I mean, If we're talking about Hannibal, I mean, I haven't visited that battlefield, but I'm sure you can probably jog from one in one pincer to the other in a few minutes. You know, we just did a really interesting episode here on the show about the Battle of Antietam, which is a big battlefield. But again, you can you can cover it on foot without a great deal of trouble. The scale, the sheer scale of Tannenberg and kind of everything we're discussing, I mean, the notion that you're going to do double envelopment at the level of armies on the scale that we are discussing, did people? at the time reflect on how crazy this is?

Like what was the reaction to the scale of combat itself, of fighting and of operations, and the applicability of these sort of battlefield tactics that once upon a time were done, you know, again, within virtual shouting distance of one end to the next to the army, it's an exaggeration, but you know what I mean, to, you know, things that are provincial in scale,

at least in terms of where the maneuvers are, Yeah, and I think that's a great point. I mean, you know, Kana is a tactical small battlefield, you know, a few thousand individuals involved that obviously are talking about mass maneuvers. And the Austrians try and do this a number of times in August and September of 1914 in plains of Galicia, where at least the terrain is more suitable for it. But they can never really move fast enough. So they might be able to take out a core. They could maybe envelop a core. The cost of doing so is so great. And they can, they do sort of half involvement at Krasnick in basically the same time as Tannenberg's happening.

We managed to sort of, their deployments go wrong. They deploy wrongly from their plans, which actually helps them because the Russians have read all their plans and are expecting them in a certain era. And they're not, the Austrians aren't there. So they have a temporary superiority in manpower at one part one edge of the battlefield. And they're able to, they're able to almost do it. But of course, they can never really do that again. And once the sort of front settles down, it becomes much more difficult.

But having said that, the east is always, the scale is enormous, and that impresses itself upon every one it fights there. But it is more like the war they would expect, because there's always room for maneuver. There's not the kind of chronic deadlock you get in the West. And so there is always scope for operational maneuver in the east. And so in that sense, for German, Austria, and Russian commanders, it is more of the kind of war. that they expected to fight where they're going to have to march hard. There's going to be these kind of encounter engagements,

and then they'll have to maneuver again. When you look at the east and there are trenches and things in the east, there's fortifications, I think, but it's never at the level of the West. So the West is really the freakish example. The West is not normal. The West is a different environment. So the East is much more what commanders at the time would have expected war to be like. So there's no way to cover this subject matter without substantial,

elision and skipping around if we're going to stick to the normal time frame of the show. But suffice it to say, things go a little better for the Russians against the Austrians than they do against the Germans. But by the summer of 1915, there's a bit of a Russian collapse may overstated, but certainly a reset along lines, which I guess what, roughly the present-day borders of sort of Ukraine or Belarus, the Western borders are sort of where the new line is drawn, right, in terms of the front, by the fall of 15. Talk about how that comes to pass and just talk about, you sort of got into it just now about how maneuver remains a major factor in the east in a way it doesn't in the West. What else is happening just in terms of the

nature of the fighting new developments, new operational concepts, whether it's gas or other technologies that are used? You know, what's the fighting like in 1950? Well, it's, you know, the artillery density is much lighter than it is in the West. So there's these massive bombardments aren't really a feature of the East. I mean, they gets a little bit heavier in 1916, but broadly, the fighting is not, it's intense. So often it's infringement sort of advancing in these great sort of large packs and are actually getting struggling very, very badly and getting heavy losses. And so the Austrians run into trouble very early on,

and they're immediately asking to be bailed out by the Germans. And so this starts this process where the Germans feel they've done pretty well in the East. They've done Tanenberg. What more could have, what more could they have done? But obviously the Austrians are air in real dire strait. And so Germany then has to decide and then has to siphon off troops to the east. And so during the war, there's about a third of the German army is deployed in the east. And Falkenheim, who comes in in September of 1914, still believes that victory can be won in the West, can only be one in the West.

So he's not that impressed with the East. Hindenburg and Ludendorff are constantly harassing him for extra reserves. Because they say, look, we can win in the East. The Russians are there for the taking. we do these maneuvers and these development. But, you know, in a sense they're both right. Now, the war will ultimately be decided in the West. But Hindabendlundorf were right, the rushes can be taken.

So Falkenhind, you know, is in this bind. Ultimately, he sends reserves to bail out the Austrians because the Austrians are in dire straits. Just to give you casualties, in the first three months of 1915, the Austrians suffer almost 800,000 casualties. That's not August, September, 1914. That's January to March of 1915, almost 800,000 casualties.

It's unbelievable. So the Austrians are dying on their feet. And so the Germans then conducted offensive. Now, Falkenheim does not want to use Henderberg and Lundorf, doesn't trust them. So he attacks elsewhere on the front of the attack called Thorlis Tarnov in May of 1915. And this goes at the crucial part of the front. It cracks up in the front. The Russians simply count.

not respond quickly or not. They don't have the railways, they don't have the trucks, the lorries, the maneuverability. And so they find it very difficult to plug the gaps in the line that's you have this great retreat. The great retreat of 1915, which ultimately sees Poland and liberated if we can use that term, but it's effectively, you know, we're drawn from the empire. And then you get that line, really from what we would know is the Baltic states all the way down to the sort of western borders of Ukraine. And give or take it, that's where the front generally remains. And so After the great retreat, the Russian army, at least a million casualties, they really are struggling. They're lacking officers.

They're lacking boots. They're lacking rifles, really lacking basic equipment. Although they're not out of the war, you know, they really do struggle to come back from it. And again, this is only with about a third of the German army deployed. And their sort of excellence, their use of artillery, aerial spotting, the coordination between infantry and artillery. artillery is particularly good. They have a lot more shells. They have been medium and heavy guns. Some Russian artillery batteries have three shells every few days, three or four days. They might get another three, four shells. They have almost no shells. And so we have this idea of shell shortage.

The documents I've seen in the Russian situation is they don't call it shell shortage. They call it a shell hunger, which I think it's a better term. It's a sort of craving for ammunition that they go out. And so from this point, the, The Russian army is very, very badly handled and really struggles to recover. Well, this is obviously a subject with present-day resonance, the question of munitions shortages and countries not being prepared for the demands on their magazines. Of course, in World War II, the United States is not in World War I at the point we are discussing. In World War II, even before the United States enters the war after Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia,

we do a lot to supply the Soviets presumably in World War I. I guess the Brits are having their own munitions crisis, aren't they, as well? So let's just linger on this, if we would. How is everyone dealing with your munitions crisis? And, I mean, ultimately, the other allies that the Entente lets Russia collapse. You know, how much thought is given to sustaining the Russians as a means to winning the war? And how does it, I mean, we'll talk about the Russian Revolution in a minute, but it obviously all goes terribly awry. Is there an effort to supply the Russians at all in this?

Or is it every country for itself? Yeah. No, it absolutely is. I mean, they are very aware of that. I mean, clearly they're disappointed with Russian performance. You hoped a lot more would come from that. But obviously, in 1914 and 1950, the British is scrambling around to build their own factories. They don't have enough shells.

Neither does the French. And so they're placing most of the orders in the United States. They essentially get the entire U.S. economy back on its fee by these orders. And so there's a number of problems. One is a lot of the American factories are already full up with orders. They can't take any more orders because the British have bought them all. Obviously, you know, the British are trying to create their own stuff. So the Russians get shells from Japan, you know, the Japanese previous an enemy are now supplying them.

They do try and build their own factories, but of course that does take time. And there is a reluctance within the Tsarist regime to support. or promote industrial figures because the industrial figures say, well, if you want me to make a factory from scratch, I need to be guaranteed a certain amount of profits. And of course, they're never going to do that. They say, well, you need to do it anyway. We might give you. So these kind of wrangling about takes time.

And of course, at this period, 1914, 1915, and 1960, the Allies are really trying to get their own house in order. Now, they do try and supply Russia. Of course, the Gallipoli expedition. The attempt by Britain to knock Turkey out the war and go through the Dardanelles is there to resupply Russia, to allow them to more easily get supplies to Russia, whether that's ammunition or you bring wheat out and provide more supplies. That fails.

And so they can only go around the northern route, which is difficult. And of course, it's not really possible most of the winter. And of course, the other problem is even if you get lots of the supplies in land's orange angels, You know, it's not necessarily going to get to the front because the railway links are quite poor. And actually, what happens are the British are surprised in 1970, how much stop is still in on these kind of Arctic ports. They're just sort of left there.

So the difficulty of supplying and resupplying Russia is an enormous problem. They do try. Kitchener is on his way. The British Secretary of State War is on his way to Russia when he's killed in HATEMS, Hampshire when it gets sort of torpedo. or mind, never sure which one, but he's there really to try and gee them up and to give them better ideas. So the Allies do what they can, but ultimately the timing is against them and the Russians

obviously by really the summer of 1916, the Russian war is, you know, their war effort is basically over. Sorry for the really uninformed questions, but is the Dardanelles and Kalipoli, is that part of this as well, is the notion that we'll supply them to the Black Sea? Well, it's not in this volume. It will be in the third and final volume of my trilogy. Sure, but you'll cover it your third ground. But I mean, that's part of the operational design.

I think it's the first of January 1915 of the Grand Duke and the barn ministry in Russia sends a message to, you know, Kitchen and Strait of War, saying we would really appreciate some kind of demonstration at the Dartmouth. And that's then brought to cabinet. And then they then immediately see the opportunities that are, you know, I think it gets supplies through through to the Black Sea would have on the wall. So they do, you know, and obviously the British lose, you know, 200,000 casualties of deliberately, so that they really do try.

It's one of these amazing things where the British are then dying at deliberately to essentially give Constantinople to Russia, not to the British Empire. So, yeah, the British do what they can, the French do what they can, but it's never going to be enough. So the consequences of this really begun to be, well, reaped in 1917. Obviously, a lot happens in 1916. I don't mean to dishonor all of those events. But, you know, I would argue, I'd be curious to know what you think, that in this incredible period of history with so much happening,

such a consequential pivot for Europe and the world, the most consequential outcome seems to me to be the Russian Revolution in terms of the broad impact on the 20th century. At least it has to be in the top two or three at any sort of serious list. Kind of all of the governments we're discussing of the three major powers in the east are just seemed to me to be quite dysfunctional. I don't think we'd look at any of the three and say, you know, clean bill of health. This is just working exactly as everyone would hope. The Russians, of course, seem to take the prize in the end for being worst of the three, and it all falls apart.

Help us understand the sort of insane court politics that are involved here, the strange figure of Rasputin. You spend a fair amount of time in the book on this. How does Russia fall apart? Well, I think there's obviously been a lot of ink spilled on the Russian Revolution and the causes of that. What I try to do is integrate it with a battlefield story because I think that's really telling in terms of the loss of morale. You see, during 1915 and also during 1916 with the Russian army where they do try and they're a bit better in 1916. They have a Bruce Sillov offensive where they target the Austrians and they do well. They always tend to do well against the Austrians.

but they have, they utilised a lot of techniques that they got from the Western Front, you know, aerial reconnaissance. They have different types of bombardments, specific shells, specific targets, extensive effort on counter-battery fire to take out enemy gun. New infantry assault tactics, this kind of thing, which works very well against the Austrians, but ultimately the Germans kind of bail them out again, and so the offensive starts to dial. And so what you see is a sort of, there have been concerns about, you know, the royal family around Nicholas II for a while. And obviously, the figure of Rasputin becomes, you know, he's so well known, he's so famous within the way, instrumenters within the empire. And, of course, the Germans and the Austrians are playing on this, the dropping leaflets over the lines, which, of course, make all this kind of elude insinuation about Rasputin and what he's doing with the Tsarina and the imperial family. And this is very corrosive on morale, those growing concern at Rasputin is a German spy. And these are, these kind of, these concerns really, really buried themselves into, into kind of

the psyche. And of course, when it's played out with domestic problems, which starts off the kind of riots in Petrograd, this, this obviously sparks this, this kind of loss of control. And so ultimately, the senior commanders around Nicholas II, don't necessarily panic. But when they hear that they might lose control, Petrograd, they want to, they're very concerned about this and they don't necessarily have a lot of confidence in Nicholas II because they feel he's nice enough but he's not ruthless enough where he doesn't know what he's doing and he's not able to see the damage someone like Rasputa is doing to his name, his family.

And they ultimately essentially decide or they believe that if Nixon were to abdicate, this would calm the situation, this would allow a government of national unity to form that would allow for the prosecution of the war on better terms. that we would avoid these kind of distractions and we could get on with winning at war. And of course, that's not true at all because obviously once Nick has the second sort of let's go, then the glue that holds an empire together begins to crumble. And you have this incredible situation in 1917, which I detail on the book, where, you know, the army begins to fall apart quite literally from the moment the Tsar goes

because the soldiers, peasant soldiers had, you know, made a vow of service, this and have loyalty to the imperial throne to Nicholas II and its family. Then once that bow is broken, they have no loyalty to this new state, this new provisional government. And of course, the provisional government gets rid of the death penalty for mutiny and desertion, and so the desertion problem comes, and then agitators start rocking up at their headquarters, the Stavka, the supreme headquarters of the Russian army. Agitators take up buildings.

I start educating the men or the real causes of the war and the imperial war. and why they shouldn't fight it and all this kind of thing. And then you have this incredible situation where the senior, you know, senior generals, five-star generals just having to plead with ordinary soldiers to get them to fight on. And so the disintegration of the Russian army in 1917 is just, it's both tragic and horrifying, I think. Sorry, I missed all of this, the Germans and the Austrians aren't sitting around idly, as you pointed out with the propaganda around Rasputin. in a famously consequential act,

Russian agitators who have been limited exile are sent back to Russia, permitted to return to Russia by the Germans. Vladimir Lenin, the most prominent among them, something I did not realize until reading your book, and perhaps this is something that historians of the period always knew, but it was shocking to me.

Obviously, everyone knows that the Germans, you know, that Lenin's return has an aspect of German policy to it. I did not realize the extent to which he was funded by the Germans. You cited a figure equivalent to $1 billion dollars today that through proxies and middlemen, it wasn't clear to me the way you wrote it, how Whitting Lenin is about the source of these funds.

Maybe you can explain a bit more. But a billion dollars essentially under his control from Germany to agitate within Russia at this point. Yeah. I mean, they're not, I must say, they're not my figures. I take on Sean McMeekin's book on the Russian Revolution, who's a wonderful American story. He did a lot of work on this.

And obviously, these funds are go via Sweden. tracing it is very difficult. And of course, if you talk to socialists and Marxists about this, they get very, very agitated when you talk about German funding for Lenin. But it's absolutely true that he comes in to Petrograd and through the Sealed train. And they just buy this huge printing press with cash. They just run up. They buy it. And of course, then this, the Pravda and all the publications they make just starts flooding around. And so they're flush with cash. And Of course, where do they get cash? They get it from the German foreign ministry, which, of course, this is a bet, but they think it can work.

But it's interesting that, you know, Kaiser Karl, the Austrian Empire is against this. He does not want the Germans to be messing with people like Lenin. Whereas the Germans see things in more of a narrow operational sense. So this is an ideal thing to really poison the Russian war, I didn't get them to stop. Kaiser says, actually, these guys are very dangerous. You can't control someone like Lenin. and these guys, they want an end to all monarchies. So it might be the Russian enemy, but they're not your friend.

So you've got to be very careful when you deal with these kind of people. And of course, Carl is dismissed as being of any, you know, they don't listen to him. But they're very, the Russians are very nervous about Lenin. And they don't want to encourage him at all. But then, of course, they're not listened to. And this, what happens very quickly is Lenin gets out of control. And the Germans, people like Hinderberg think they can, Hinderberg and Lund, think they can, Hindabung-Luddin or think they can control them.

They control the Bolsheviks. And very quickly, they realize they cannot. They've unleashed something that they have great problems dealing with. So even when the Bolsheviks take over and you have the Treaty of Brassetots, which brings the Eastern Front to an end, they're constantly having to sort of check the Bolsheviks and saying, you do know you're defeated. You do know you have to do what we say. And the Bolsheviks will say, well, okay.

And then tomorrow they'll be still spreading propaganda. against Germany and trying to subvert their war after. And it won't be. And so at one point, Hinderberg-Lyodorov, actually, do we actually want to join forces with the white remnants of the old army, their enemy, to get rid of the Bolshevites? So it's absolute chaos. Well, so let's linger on this, because this is fascinating for just all sorts of reasons.

So this is the end of 1917 into 1918. The Bolsheviks take charge. There's a Russian civil war in the offing. But then let's focus on Bresla-Tovsk, because this is, the Germans win. They win the war in the East. And it was, you obviously spent a lot of time on this in the book, and we should talk about how astonishing it is that they win the war in the East only then the same year to lose the overall war.

But I guess one way to put it is, how do the two sides that the Germans on the one hand and the Bolsheviks on the other see the stakes in Bresla-Tovsk? I mean, obviously the Bolsheviks, I guess there's a sincere belief that global, revolution is coming. So they're seeing everything through that prism, that they have to hold on to what's theirs in Russia, but that's a springboard for what's coming for these Germans anyway. And then the Germans, on their side, I'm curious to know your thoughts on this almost like the ideological dimension of how they're now thinking about the East as the war draws to a close. What began as a sort of more limited conflict, you know, the people like to criticize the Treaty of

Versailles for its impositions on Germany. Well, it ain't got. nothing on what Breslahtovsk demands of the Russians. I mean, the Germans basically just take an amount of the Russian empire that would have made Hitler proud a few decades later. How are they thinking about the East and their vision of victory? There's a lot there. There was at least two enormous questions, but I'm curious to know your thoughts on all of us. Well, it's why Brestov's quite fascinating, because you should see the two sides sparring, where Germany is saying, look, you've been defeated. You need to do what we say. We're going to take these lands, if you don't, you know, we'll continue to fight.

But on the one hand, they are saying this, but they got their eye on the western front. And so the clock is ticking. So they need to get this done. They've also got the Austrians begging for peace because they're on their last legs. They're saying, we've got to get peace in the east. We can't continue. So the Germans have a strong hand, but the time is. And whereas the Bolsheviks are basically saying, well, look, you've got the upper hand here.

But we're the architect of global revolution. and your time will come. And yeah, you're powerful now, but you're not going to be powerful forever. And again, you get these sort of long ideas about what actually is self-determination anyway? And the Germans say to the Bolsheviks, look, you talk about, you know, we're taking these lands and we're not following an idea of self-determination, but you don't do it in Russia. You're concrete, you're marching into Ukraine. You're, you know, you're marching everywhere.

You have no interest in self-determination. You're a terrible dictatorship. And so you get this really interesting sparring of ideas until effectively the Germans just get bored of this. Then the bullshit basically say we're not going to sign any peace and walk out, which Max Hoffman, who's the German kind of main thing, sort of chief negotiated, it's sort of heard to mutter on heard of. What are these people doing? They're not playing the game. They've been defeated. So, and then Hindenberg-Lundsulf said, right, we'll go.

So at that point, they start marching towards Petrograd through the snow in the winter. And to say, actually, you know what, we're going to take out Lenin. We're going to seize them. So the German columns are going, and there's nothing to stop them. The Bolsheviks are frantically running around Petrograd, trying to get people to man the barricades and dig trenches. And none of the Bolshevik workers want to do this. They don't want to fight.

So there's no sort of communal solidarity with this. They don't want to do it. large parts of Petrograd would probably like the Germans to arrive. So there's this situation where in the Bolshevik camp there's two views. One is Lenin's view, we need to make peace now, or else the revolution's dead. And the others are saying we cannot agree to this terrible vindictive eventual peace. But ultimately Lenin succeeds and says, look, we have to have peace at whatever cost to safeguard the revolution.

And as soon as the ink is dry, we can work on undermining it, which is what they So it's a really fascinating end to the Eastern Front. And of course, it doesn't really end anything. It doesn't really bring anything to a conclusion. It just the war, and this is one of the great sort of main points of the book, I think, is the war in the East does not end. It just mutates. It changes.

Yeah. And you make another great, a closely related point, which is that the Germans, though, of course, they lose it all in the end. They remember their victory in the East. And it seems like something that can. be repeated to them, which which, which has, has stuck with me. Well, relatedly, let me, let me just sort of ask, as again, and I realize this is sort of getting into Fritz-Fisher territory, but, you know, do, do German war aims in the East evolve over the course of the

year? I mean, Breslahtovsk is such a bold grab of, of Eastern Europe. What, what did the Germans, these are not Nazis? This is the German Empire. This is the Kaiser. What did they plan to do with all of this? Well, I mean, these are, these ideas are premature at the time. You know, they isn't really that much idea. I think it's just a reflection. They've moved into these areas during the war because they had to bail out the Austrians. They moved in. And the actual experience of the East is quite disorientating for many Germans old, particularly when it come from the West. They come from the West to, I don't want to say much less civilized, but much poorer in the East. But it's also the landscape is much bigger. You know,

huge forests, almost primal forests in Poland and Great Plains. And so for many German soldiers, the East is disorientating and a strange landscape of people that speak strange languages. And obviously, there's settled Jewish populations in the region as well, which they come up against. And so the East becomes this sort of wild east, you know, like a wild west scenario where the rules don't really apply. It's not really civilized ground.

And they start to think about, okay, well, what if we reorder this? What if this landscape can be tamed by German efficiency, by German settlers? And so there are these sort of proto-Nazi views coming out by 17, 18, about what Germany might achieve in the East. And ultimately, it's sort of, you know, they're forced to bring all their troops home by, you know, by the peace agreement in November of 1918. And so that's ultimately what brings that to an end. But I think there's no doubt that their war arms do evolve and they realize what's possible

in the East. And they actually think, well, Falkenheim was wrong. We can win in the East. And in fact, you know, that's really where, you know, if the German High Command had been sensible, they would have essentially stopped the war then, not attacked in the West, and agreed to a 1914 return of borders in the West, evacuate Belgium, evacuate France, would have been very difficult for France and Britain to continue fighting. And they've worn in the East, they have a vast new empire. And they can then concentrate on either building the Russians up.

destroying them again and then taking it. So the very fact that Germany loses the First World War, when you look at it from the Eastern Front perspective, is absolutely incredible how they managed to lose it. Yeah. Because it just doesn't, it just doesn't really make any sense. But it's a, I think, a really fascinating part of the First World, which I think doesn't really get any attention at to Zernows. It's a fascinating counterfactual to think through, you know, what, what 20th century

history might have looked like had that been the play that they ran. But it's the victors of Tannenberg, isn't it? Who then, I mean, as an American, this next part of the story, which I guess is really in your first volume about the Western Front makes me proud. This is where the Americans come to the four. My old regiment in the Marine Corps fights in France at this time. My father's regiment in the Army fights in France at this time. They'll obviously well be for both of our times.

And the Americans play a role here. But what did they can see what the counterfactual you just outlined are people like Ludendorf and Hiddenberg and others, Falkenheim, are they thinking about this? and then consider it and reject it, or is it just a given? They're going to go for Paris. They're going to go for the throat out West because it's what they have to do.

Well, they're, you know, Hinderberg and Lundorf, things come full circle by 1918. The East is settled. They have a one front war, and they can now return to the West. And so there's that final moment where the problem with Hinderberg, Lundorf, is their decision to attack in the West is made late in the year in 1917.

We'd only Hinderberg-Lundorf and a couple of military staff officers like Chico's staff planning aids. It's no civilian present. So these are men that are military men closeted. They despise civilians. They despise politicians. And so any voices that might have cautioned them against doing this and saying, look, we cannot do any, we are reaching the end. We have to stop the war. We have to slow down.

We have to, you know, stop the game now. We have to come to terms with the Allies. We have to bring in and break apart the coalition and offer them some deal. We have to do this. There's no real consideration of that. And later that I've found, certainly with Hindaberg-Lundolf, their focus is on the battlefield. And so when they look at the maps, they conquer the east, they can bring back a million troops or how many it is.

They have a window of opportunity to all the Americans can strike and so they can do it. And they can come full circle. They can win in the West. We will do it like we did in Russia as Lundolde sprays. So, you know, they're a gambler that stays too long in a casino. Yeah. They should have walked out. They should have taken the winnings and exited the casino.

But the desire of the military staff, and that's the problem with they can only understand victory in a battlefield where they win operationally. And that's where trying to go back to those issues, if we have peace for the autonomy, you have to make some kind of compromise. It would get messy politically. Therefore, we can't do it. And so clearly they're thinking about the sacrifices they made on the Western Front. But, you know, any reasonable logical understanding would understand that you could not be, you certainly couldn't be the Americans. So they thought they had a wind of opportunity.

They went for it. And obviously, the confidence that they gained from the East to the war, they thought they could do it. So it's a close run thing, of course. You know, the Germans do make serious gains in the West in 1918, but it's just not enough. They just don't have the decisive superiority when they need it. And arguably, they never really would have had it. It just didn't have enough time and they just didn't have enough vampire. It didn't have tanks and trucks and things to move quickly.

So they could never really, they were never really doing. I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of visiting the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia. But it quite clearly points out there that the German offensive, was stopped essentially single-handedly by the Marine Brigade at Bellow Wood. It's been reported that there were some other things happening here and there across the front. The Army was doing something down at Chateau-Tier. We don't really know the details. But that's the story of July 1980.

I did pass it. I was in Virginia earlier in the year. I did pass it all my way to Fredericksburg. It is actually, I recommend it. It is actually a good museum, but obviously marine-centric and it's telling you. I believe that correct me if I'm wrong, but the roof, This is a kind of visual illustration of the raising the flag of the Ouijaima. Yes, yes, it is.

The same angle. That's, yeah. From the famous photograph. It's a very, I mean, you can't miss it as you're driving down I-95. It's very striking. Well, one last question, and I'll let you go. It's, you know, this point about, oh, they should have, they should have walked down at the casino. This is a classic problem of statecraft, isn't it?

Not only the operational grand strategic breach, which you describe, you know, not considering, not considering the full picture of when you're a military commander, but, Also, you know, just to bring this into the present day, debates about what should have happened in Ukraine in the last couple of years. You know, there was a kind of high point for those of us who are supporters of the Ukrainian cause towards the end of 2022 when the Russians were really in bad shape. And in retrospect, and we had Stephen Cockkin on the show just a few months ago who made this point. In retrospect, that was the time, Kotkin argues, to try to drive some sort of bargain that would have been had you hammered something out, you know, potentially. quite humiliating for the Russians and certainly probably better than if you were going to start now in October of 2024, better than what you could get today. But of course, at the time when things

are going well for us, for you, for the Ukrainians in the West, as it were, this doesn't really cross your mind. Like, now is when I'm going to strike the deal. Now I've got the wind of my back. I'm going to go for the gold. I'm going to go for the victory. So that's an observation. The question is, you know, we have very old-fashioned Russian imperial expansion going on here in 2024, things that some thought were relics of the past in terms of state craft and politics are obviously not. As a historian of the First World War in this part of the world 100 years ago, as you're doing your work, what do you come across that seems most relevant to you for people who are thinking about problems of war and peace today? I think the thing that I sort of

took from the experience of writing this and thinking about the Eastern Front was the statesman of 1914 thought they could use and control war. They thought war was an easy way out from having to make domestic political concessions. They didn't want to make. And so war was a way out. War could be controlled. War could be used to direct the Klausvitzian paradigm war is a sort of politics by all the means. And I think they're all guilty of really underestimating the dangers of war and how war is

this kind of a wild animal and then it can get out of control. And of course, they get out of control very, very early on. And they're those three powers. They sort of go off a cliff. You know, they're off Niagara Falls and they can never get back on it because war is. So the Tsar thought he could use war and direct it. But actually, you know, and the Austrians to the same degree, you know, it brought about the very thing that they had feared, which is the collapse of their empire's humiliation and the ending of an entire social order. That is what they feared.

And that is what war had brought about. And I think there's certainly parallels with Putin, the sort of sense that we need to act in Ukraine to be part, to be a great power or else will be humiliated on a world stage. And therefore, war can be used. And of course, war, you know, is a dangerous, it's a dangerous thing to use. And, you know, can be used in certain circumstances. But when you're talking about huge ambition to subdue entire countries, I think it's very, very dangerous. And so that's a parallel that I think is there with this kind of. arrogance about the reality of what you're trying to do and the difficulty you're going to have

in controlling this because things aren't going to go the way you want them to. It is going to be much more difficult to do the things you want to do than you assume they will be. And so that was a kind of parallel, I thought. But of course, there are obviously many similarities with the wars in surprising ways, you know, the Russians going into Lemberg, as it was then in 1914 and changing the signs to Russian language signs and making it. all the Ukrainians speaking Russian and, you know, this happens in 1914, of course it happens in 2022. So there's parallels there and shell shortages, trenches, you know, it's quite amazing how history

doesn't always repeat itself, but it rhymes. And there are lots of parallels with Ukraine and the first war in that way, which nobody he had really expected. Nick Lloyd, it's late where you are. Thank you so much for making the time. Author of the Eastern Front, The History of the Great War. 1914 to 1918. This is the second of three volumes. The Western Front is also out now. And we'll have the wider war out soon. We all hope. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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