Sometimes in a long struggle, the players have a felt need to believe that it all means something: that the buddies they lost died for something important, that they made a difference… Sometimes it’s even true. But it ain’t necessarily so. A lot of wars are over nothing of long-term value or importance, and of course sometimes your side loses, which decreases the chance that your sacrifices have some kind of cosmic payoff. Sometimes this means the goals of the war somehow become more important as the cost increases, because they need to – sunk costs fallacy on steroids.
For example, if Meade had crushed the Army of Northern Virginia when it was pinned against the Potomac after Gettysburg, we’d all be better off, but the Civil War would occupy considerably less territory inside people’s heads today.
Or consider Vietnam: I’ve known people that were sure we were ” wearing down” the Soviet Union in Vietnam, even though we outspent them there by at least 20-1 – not even considering casualties !
In the Algerian War, the French ended up doing a lot of stuff that no true Scotsman* would even consider: lots of torture, lots of shooting civilians. As they got rougher, the imaginary future they were fighting for became ever more golden, ever more unrealistic – it was one in which the Algerians were fully integrated French citizens, something that had never made sense and was completely impossible after guys like Massu had used “all means necessary” to win the Battle of Algiers. The Paras at this point didn’t have much sympathy for the pieds noirs, who weren’t crazy enough to share that vision. But then those French officers had been through a lot – defeated by Germany, embarrassingly saved by the Anglo-Americans, losing in Vietnam: pre-adapted for nuttiness.
- except the Campbells, of course.
West Hunter 
“For example, if Meade had crushed the Army of Northern Virginia when it was pinned against the Potomac after Gettysburg, we’d all be better off, but the Civil War would occupy considerably less territory inside people’s heads today.“
Rhett Butler certainly would have missed an iconic kiss and memorable slapping if the war hadn’t dragged on long enough for him to belatedly enlist.
Dying young is rarely worth it.
Agreed.
Depends how many relatives one saves in the process.
You can usually save more relatives by helping them evade the draft.
True, enlisting isn’t a good way to save relatives. But there are other ways to die young.
Of course, the prevailing view is still that wars are fought over resources 😐
A bit hard to explain events like the Isonzo battles of WW1, though.
A nation’s esteem or “honor” also does not tend to increase after a defeat.
If WW1 had been shorter or less grim a lot of children’s authors would have written different books.
The works of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, AA Milne, and Hugh Lofting were all inflected by their wartime experiences (in different ways).
WWI was such big downer because all the death and suffering was seen as over nothing.
10 million deaths, and all that “we won” was some shitty armistice?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
If the Allies went all the way in, razed Berlin to the ground, hanged Kaiser, the Prussian aristocracy and officers, and again divided Germany into hundreds of garden gnome sized principalities, you can bet that “The Great War” will be seen as right and glorious enterprise.
Before WW2, Germany had a much better reputation.
The crimes you suggest would not have been viewed as justified.
The Kaiser (who wasn’t much of an asset for Germany) did abdicate, so why shoot him?
The Versailles treaty also limited the army to 100,000 men, abolished conscription and outlawed the general staff. The failure to intervene when the Rhineland was re-occupied occurred about two decades later.
As near as I can tell, the peace terms imposed on Germany were at just the wrong level of punitiveness: just enough to humiliate them and piss them off, but not enough to prevent them from rising again in fairly short order. Going to either extreme would probably have been better in the long run.
Yes, humiliating without really punishing was the wrong way to go, especially since Germany started the War, quite deliberately (well, the European part; they really didn’t want to fight ‘England’, as they called the British Empire).
And the won the post-war propaganda battle. Which is why in WWII, no terms were accepted except unconditional surrender with occupation. That wasn’t happening again, if FDR and Churchill had anything to do say about it.
Just a swag but I wonder if the Brits were already looking for somebody to balance against the French on the Continent by 1918, or if both Britain and France were already looking for a buffer against a more energetic Russia (depending on the outcome of the Revolution).
The Brits were mostly interested in denying Germany an overseas empire and a powerful fleet. A secondary objective was not to weaken Germany too much relative to France – the classical “balance of power” way of thinking.
By the late nineteenth century, it was clear that by every measure except military power and overseas colonies Germany had begun to overtake Britain and France as a European and world power. If the trend continued Germany would utterly dominate Europe industrially, commercially, economically, and eventually militarily. (Parenthetically, Europe’s other major monarchical state, Russia, had also begun rapid economic development, a trend which was ended by the Bolshevik Revolution.)
The respected American historian, Carroll Quigley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carroll_Quigley), claimed that an influential cabal of British leaders began planning war against Germany starting in the 1890s with the ultimate aim of utterly eliminating Germany as a threat to British supremacy. Quigley’s work is expanded upon and supported by Gerry Docherty and Jim MacGregor in two books, “Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War” and “Prolonging the Agony: How The Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-and-a-Half Years” (https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-History-Secret-Origins-First/dp/1780576307/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Hidden+History&qid=1571928431&sr=8-2 ; https://www.amazon.com/Prolonging-Agony-Anglo-American-Three-Half/dp/1634241568/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2/139-4025159-1434408?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1634241568&pd_rd_r=c6b310a2-34ed-4893-b245-91c3185a4611&pd_rd_w=wZetS&pd_rd_wg=UHnKK&pf_rd_p=09627863-9889-4290-b90a-5e9f86682449&pf_rd_r=62SF3D3GVPQR6C096EN2&psc=1&refRID=62SF3D3GVPQR6C096EN2)
One cannot claim to fully appreciate or understand the war aims of the Triple Entente and the Central Powers without familiarizing one’s self with Quigley’s work. It explicates many otherwise unfathomable aspects of WW I, e.g, Churchill’s desperate attempts to force the Ottoman Empire from neutrality and into an alliance with the Central Powers, e.g., the commandeering of the cruisers Sultan Osman and Reşadiye, for which Turkey had already paid, without any attempt at compensation (https://armingallsides.org.uk/case_studies/ottoman-navy-scandal/) and a secret protocol with Russia, which was contrary to traditional British diplomatic aims and which Britain intended never to implement, guaranteeing Russia control of the Bosphorus.
What nonsense.
What a compelling argument. Do you claim an expertise on these issues greater than that of Professor Quigley? Are you familiar to any degree with his work or that of Docherty and MacGregor? Were you even aware of the Sultan Osman and Resadiye incident before now?
Well, some of my relative advantage is smarts, some is knowing stuff, but more is simply not being insane.
Anyone that planned WWI might have bothered to build up a more powerful instrument than the BEF.
Utter bullshit, and German propaganda. Britain never had any plans to destroy Germany. Instead, Germany intended to become the world’s first and only super-power. They planned to destroy Russia’s and France’s power, then rule Europe.
They didn’t even hide this, their pre-war rhetoric was full of it.
The greatest mistake of not insisting on unconditional surrender was that they got to suppress the real records of what they were doing pre-war.
But then, this was all part of the War Against Western Civilization.
The Armistice was a huge mistake. Germany had to be made to SURRENDER, unconditionally, and live occupied. And its pre-war documents published, showing that yes, indeed, Germany started the Great War, and quite deliberately.
Failure to do those things led to Hitler and WWII.
17 percent of Frenchmen born between 1880 and 1899 died in WWI, hanging the Kaiser wouldn’t have brought them back. France did get Alsace-Lorraine back. Still, if you had asked the average Alsace-Lorrainer, “hey, we give your son a 17% chance of death to make this France again,” what do you think he’d say? It would have been far less costly for France to simply subsidize the emigration of Alsace-Lorrainers into France proper. It’s not like France had much cause to whine about the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, since it was taken as a result of a war they started.
Had they done as you said to Germany, they would have had to continually be on guard for German reunification. Assuming they would have done so, at least they aren’t threatened by Germany anymore, right? But this ignores that they could have achieved this simply by not being revanchist in the first place. Tell the rest of Europe “we have no revanchist claims, no desire to ally with any country with revanchist claims, we’ll fight if attacked but otherwise we’ll leave you alone if you leave us alone.” Were this to happen, Hitler would likely never have taken power, even if he or someone like him did, he’d have to consider that:
It would be much harder to rally public opinion against France if it made such a declaration. Though the German people didn’t much care about overruning Czechoslovakia in 1939, they would have had significantly more pacifistic attitudes if confronted with a non-threatening country which could actually fight back.
France is less of a threat, so aggressive energies should be turned toward other potentially aggressive powers.
In theory, preemptive war can be justified. In 90% of actual historical examples you’ll find it isn’t, and of the remaining 10% most are clear only in hindsight. It reminds me of a quote from some British officer at the beginning of the war, where he said quite lucidly that the war was pointless, that a generation of men would be slaughtered, and then went ahead leading men into battle for the rest of the war. The interpretation was supposed to be that he was an honorable soldier faithfully serving King and country. My interpretation was that Europeans would have been far better off had its men lacked such honor. But being an honorable soldier was high-status while running away from battle was low-status, so logical arguments didn’t go very far. It’s like education subsidies today. You can present evidence that people aren’t using the stuff they are taught, and don’t even remember it, but you just get increasingly incredible explanations about its supposed value. Because it’s high status and we want to show our respect for high-status people, and want our country and group to be high-status relative to other groups.
I wonder if the full story of the French mutinies of 1917 will ever come out. There’s a heck of a story waiting to be told there. Amazing, considering the detail with which the rest of the war has been covered.
More German horseshit. Germany intended to permanently cripple France in WWI.
The great Norm Macdonald’s father protested the Glencoe massacre by refusing to ever buy Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.
I consider myself an expert on Norm Macdonald’s oeuvre and I’ve never heard him tell this one. Do you have a link or reference?
McClellan has the best chance of crushing Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia after Antietam. He had nearly as many troops in reserve as Lee did as effective on the day after the battle. McClellan was incapable of crushing a cream puff let alone as tough a nut as Lee. But of course that was 1862 and there were still a lot of Confederate troops in other theaters that might have prolonged the war. It may have the best solution that the war went on until 65 and the South was thoroughly beaten. The solution that was missing from WWI.
The Germans were thoroughly beaten in WWI. Blackjack Pershing wanted the war to continue for just a little longer because the German army, and its leadership, was in collapse and, according to Martin Gilbert, Pershing thought it important for it to be recognized that the German army had actually lost. The Armistice left room for the Germans to claim that their army had not been fully beaten and that Germany had been stabbed in the back.
The reparations at Versailles were probably too extreme–Churchill thought so–but the concept of war reparations was hardly novel to Germans; they had demanded them from France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and from the Soviet Union at the Treaty of Brest Litovsk when Russia collapsed before the end of the war. Sauce–Goose–Gander. They wouldn’t have accepted them if they hadn’t known they were finished.
“McClellan was incapable of crushing a cream puff let alone as tough a nut as Lee.”
Yes, Little Mac was a moral coward. Notice the way he spent a day not attacking the Army of Northern Virginia, hoping Lee would run away. The world’s clearest case of moral cowardice.
His only battlefield successes were those achieved by subordinates, when he wasn’t around.
Greg, Interested in your opinion on this: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaax2083?fbclid=IwAR1CYmRG0FLhnBnGpBL8pSa0lXzzcp5IwNRh0zZIMW3TAkw8E9i50CBvsA0
Perfectly reasonable.
The Paras did do something that had important long term consecuenses, out of all that algerian madness.
They put De Gaulle (and his polical heirs) in charge of France for quite some time. They did regret doing it almost immedeatly though.
It is interesting to compare Bethman-Hollweg (German Chancellor in 1914) goals in the west and the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the EU. Belorus is the only major loss to the Germans in the East, and the Western goals only went to the Channel and the Pyrennes. So losing two wars did not keep the Germans from achieving the dominance they sought.
If the French got upset at German domination, what could they possibly do? Other than nuke the hell out of them, of course.
Germany doesn’t have much of a military at the moment. If they acted quickly, the French could probably take them down without the use of nukes. Oddly, even Israel probably has a better submarine force than Germany just now despite their subs being made in Germany.
“Belorus is the only major loss to the Germans in the East.”
I’d hardly call East Prussia and Western Poland ‘not major.’
No true Scotsman … well, not just excluding Campbells. Consider the sack of Aberdeen in 1644 by the Highland army of Montrose and of Alastair Mac Colla MacDonald, where (by Aberdonian accounts) the Highlanders killed every townsman they could get their hands on, and every woman who wept for the dead.
Complicating factors: the Highland army was Royalist, as (until the massacre) much of Aberdeenshire had been. Also, the Royalists lost that war.
Moral not entirely obvious.
“except the Campbells, of course.” LOL, litterally.
Any thoughts on the Barrington Declaration?