Alexander Watson

‘Self-Deception and Survival: Mental Coping Strategies on the Western Front, 1914-18’

This article reinvestigates German and British soldiers’ impressive resilience during the first world war. Rather than following previous historiography’s societal and military-institutional approaches, it focuses on combatants’ psychology. Men coped overwhelmingly successfully by failing to recognize fully the front’s disempowering and dangerous nature. Fears were repressed or minimized with black humour. Through religion and superstition, imagined order was imposed on the chaotic environment, while optimistic reasoning and exaggerated faith in personal control encouraged individuals to overestimate their survival chances. These ‘positive illusions’ protected men from unnecessary strain, sustained combat motivation and may even have raised life expectancy at the front.

Unheard-of Brutality: Russian Atrocities against Civilians in East Prussia, 1914-1915

OnAugust 11, 1914, a week and a half after war had broken out betweenGermany and Russia, a terrified crowd from the East Prussian border village of Radszen appeared at the office of the local district administrator. That morning, the people told him, there had been a clash between a German cavalry patrol and a larger Russian force in their village. When the Germans withdrew, the Russians had burned down almost every building and had “begun to beat us and to shoot at us.” Four villagers had been killed, five wounded; the rest had fled in panic. Similar accounts of violence against civilians multiplied once border skirmishes gave way to full-scale invasion in the middle of August. As tsarist troops poured across East Prussia’s eastern and southern borders, penetrating deep into its interior, frightening reports of civilians tortured and murdered, officials arrested, and farms and villages set ablaze attracted the attention of state authorities. On the eve of the Battle of Tannenberg, as East Prussia’s fate hung in the balance, the Reich’s alarmed deputy chancellor, Clemens Delbrück, telegraphed the Prussian government from Army General Headquarters: “Russians annihilating property and lives of population in the occupied areas with unheard-of brutality.” This article examines whether East Prussia did, in fact, suffer “unheard-of brutality” at Russian hands during the invasions of 1914–15. German complaints

Culture and Combat in the Western World, 1900-1945

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance during the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time, this issue was ignored by academics, who contended that martial prowess derived principally from military institutions. During the last fifteen years, however, it has received increasingly sophisticated consideration. The article identifies two main approaches. Firstly, historians, usually focusing on one society or army, have argued that cultural values and assumptions affected individuals’ behaviour on the battlefield. Upbringing, employment, and religion have all been cited as influential in moulding soldiers’ resilience and motivation. Comparison of the research reveals, however, that while these factors had some minor impact, combatants’ common humanity and the efficacy of military institutions were of far greater relevance in determining conduct under fire. Nonetheless, as analysis of the second historiographical approach attests, culture was not without considerable importance, for military organizations themselves were shaped partly by their societal and political environments. Although western armies were structurally similar and subject to both international and internal influences, societal culture impacted on their composition and ethos, accentuated or retarded their institutional functioning, and thereby acted as an indirect but often crucial determinant of martial performance.

`For Kaiser and Reich': The Identity and Fate of the German Volunteers, 1914-1918

Historiography on the volunteers has maintained that most were young, aggressive, ‘war enthused’ men from the Wilhelmine educated elite, who quickly became disillusioned or broke down when faced with war’s ghastly realities. By analysing a sample of 2584 volunteers from 36 units, examining unpublished letters and diaries, and studying the volunteers’ battle performance, this article questions these beliefs. It argues that in fact volunteers came from a wide urban background, that most were motivated to enlist by defensive patriotism, not aggressive ‘war enthusiasm’, and that military ill-preparedness, not unrealistic combat expectations, accounts for the volunteers’ high psychiatric casualty rates.

Managing an 'Army of Peoples': Identity, Command and Performance in the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1914-1918

This article examines the officers who led the Habsburg Army during the First World War. It highlights the complexity of their identities, demonstrating that this went well beyond the a-national – nationalist dichotomy in much historiography. It also argues that these officers’ identities had a profound impact on how their army functioned in the field. The article first studies the senior command in 1914–16, showing how its wartime learning processes were shaped by transnational attitudes. These officers had belonged in peace to an international military professional network. When disaster befell their army at the outset of the First World War, it was natural for them to seek lessons from foreign armies, at first from their major enemies, the Russians, and later their German allies. The second half of the article explores the changing loyalties of the reserve officers tasked with frontline command in the later war years. It contends that the officer corps’ focus on maintaining social and educational standards resulted in an influx of middle-class junior leaders whose conditional commitment to the Empire and limited language skills greatly influenced the Habsburg Army’s record of longevity but mediocre combat performance.

David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918

For a man driven ‘by his own sense of mortality and belief in his own unlimited power the set-back, however temporary, was intolerable’ (672). After Munich, Hitler was determined not to be restrained from war when the next opportunity – Poland – came. By then, German rearmament had been in progress for some years. The Wehrmacht would achieve impressive results in the first years of World War II, but was, as Steiner correctly states, by no means the mechanized juggernaut that has often been portrayed. Just like soldiers from all ages, ‘the vast majority of German soldiers would go to war on foot’ (834). In that sense, they differed little from the Roman legions or Napoleon’s Grande Armée. According to Steiner, the demise of the Weimar Republic and the triumph of Hitler proved the motor force of destructive systemic change. It was Hitler’s decision to go to war. His response to Germany’s difficult situation was to launch his war, ‘in spite of, or perhaps because of, the long-term impossibility of matching the combined production of the western industrial powers’ (1043). History would prove him right. That Germany could once again make a bid for European domination as it had done in 1914, was brought about, according to Steiner, by the fact that some of the causes of World War I were not resolved by the peacemakers, who, most importantly, left Germany’s power base fundamentally intact. That would be different after World War II. It was not only realpolitik which determined the outcome of the 1930s. In Steiner’s convincing view, ideological assumptions affected the way statesmen and their advisers saw the world about them. For example, it mattered that Chamberlain hated war and believed that wasteful arms races led to conflict, or that Hitler believed in Social Darwinism, Lebensraum and the Aryan race. Although these views may have been the highest and most despicable nonsense, they at least partly determined Hitler’s policy, especially with regard to the Jews. In 1939, when Steiner ends her book, the Holocaust was as yet unimaginable. In the conclusion, the author apologizes for the great number of pages she has used. She should not have: her thorough analysis, skilful handling of the sources and convincing argumentation, has made The Triumph of the Dark a stimulating and rewarding affair.

Review: Jay Winter (ed.), The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On, Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press, 2009; x + 219 pp.; £17.95 pbk; ISBN 9780826218728

Here he is rather more convincing. He demonstrates that, over several issues – conscription, efficient prosecution of the war, Ireland, state intervention – the party took ideologically charged positions, and his repeated demonstration that ‘wartime patriotism’ inhibited dissentient views, and in some cases (as with Ireland) allowed significant alteration, is compelling. These ideological stances – for instance, Conservatives would accept state interventions that assisted efficient war conduct, but not those that simply interfered with personal choice for ‘social’ purposes – were mixed with strong pragmatism. The party, Keohane shows, always operated with the next election in mind. Acceptance of coalition government, therefore, represented both ideological (patriotic) commitment and assumptions that a 1915 election would harm Conservative prospects (chapter 2). Similarly, attitudes to electoral reform are impressively shown to have been governed both by moral views that certain groups ‘deserved’ the franchise, and a pragmatic realization that the party’s patriotic reputation enabled exploitation of the temporary ‘soldier’s vote’. Endorsement of the female franchise, meanwhile, depended on inserting limits that privileged women most likely to support Conservative candidates. My only criticism of what is really Keohane’s most significant contribution is the absence of a single mention of Stuart Ball’s work in the book, despite Ball’s obvious relevance to the ideology/pragmatism question. Arguably, Keohane’s book would have been braver and less controversial had it been entitled ‘The Party of Ideology’ – braver because such a label would have invited (even demanded) robust dissent, but more honest because this, rather than patriotism, seems to be the core of his argument. As a contribution to the historiography of patriotism and national identity (or the broader history of Britain’s war) the book lacks depth, but to the political history of Conservatism it is a welcome addition.

Voluntary Enlistment in the Great War: a European Phenomenon?

The outbreak of the First World War was marked throughout Western Europe by a flood of volunteers wishing to enlist in their countries’ armed forces. The hundreds of thousands of young men who queued around barracks and outside recruiting stations across the continent during the first month of hostilities formed a defining feature of the legendary “August experience”. For decades, historiography cited their existence as evidence of a widespread “war enthusiasm” propelling belligerent populations to battle in 1914.1 Recently, however, more detailed research has demonstrated that Europeans’ reactions to war were far less euphoric and more complex than previously assumed. Jean-Jacques Becker’s ground-breaking 1914: Comment les Francais sont entres dans la guerre sensitively gradated the French populace’s varying reactions at the outbreak of hostilities, highlighting the mood swing away from predominantly negative emotions, such as anxiety and consternation, to patriotic resolution once mobilization actually began.2 In Germany, too, Jeffrey Verhey, Benjamin Ziemann, and Wolfgang Kruse have demonstrated that only a minority felt “war enthusiasm” as conflict loomed; depression and apprehension were far more common, especially among industrial workers and countrymen.3 British responses to the approaching crisis were equally unenthusiastic. Adrian Gregory has noted the existence of much pro-neutrality sentiment and argued that most Britons were cognizant of modern conflict’s perils. Public support coalesced only once war had been declared and, as on the continent, was based on grim patriotic resolve rather than jingoistic “war enthusiasm”.4