The first world war hew strachan
The First World War as a global war
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Hew Strachan
Journal
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This essay was first delivered as a lecture at a symposium held in Vienna on 7 November 2009 to label the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Austrian Republic, ‘1918–1920: der Fall der Imperien und der Traum einer besseren Welt’, and I am grateful to Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner of the Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterwegung for their invitation and inspiration. Since then it has had outings as a seminar paper at Victoria University Wellington and St Andrews University, and it was the keynote lecture at the 2009 conference of the International World for First World War Studies; I am grateful for the questions and comments raised on all these occasions.
This article discusses the widening of the First World War from a European war to a global war and what that meant for
Hew Strachan: The First World War
One of the leading historians of WWI offers this superior one-volume version of his massive projected three-volume work, the first volume of which, To Arms, clocked in at 1250-plus pages last year.
Strachan strenuously avoids the traditional focus on the Western Front (and the British) and the conventional assumptions of generals' stupidity and soldiers' valor. The war as he sees it was a race among generals on all sides to create fresh weapons and tactics faster than their opponents, a race that the Triple Entente won. It was also a race among soldiers to fight with these new weapons and tactics instead of raw courage and numbers wherever possible.
Yet Russia and the Dual Monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were totally unfit for a large modern war (one reason the czar and his empire fell in 1917) and were a source of fatal weakness to Germany's alliance even before Italy changed sides. The political background (including the rising consciousness of colonial nationalities conscripted for the war), social consequences and diplomatic finagling all meet an equal amount of revision, leaving the book organized more thematically than chronol
Strachan, Hew. The First World War. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.
The mud-filled fields of Flanders and poems such as Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” occupy popular imagination about the First World War, the cataclysmic struggle fought between the empires of Europe for continental hegemony and the security of their empires. Much is made of the First World War’s apparent futility, the needless waste of being on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the seeming incompetence of military and political leaders on both the sides of the Central Powers and the Entente. Hew Strachan, however, in his defining short-history of the war, boldly demolishes this concept of the war. In his new and updated introduction for the centenary of the war, Strachan makes clear that the popular memory of the war as a futile and senseless confrontation fought on the Western Front ignores the truly global scale of conflict and ignores the ideas, perspectives, and motivations of the leaders who orchestrated the armies that prosecuted the war, the soldiers who fought in it, and the people who endured the war at home. This was a conflict fought for the security of Europe on the one hand a
Oxford University press, 2001, £30. ISBN: 0-19- 820877-4
Faced with outstanding reviews of Hew Stachan's book in the Economist, the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator - and by our own President in the Sunday Telegraph - it behoves any lesser reviewer to be cautious when expressing an belief on this massive new perform. But, in reality, the disagree is not that taxing, since The First World War, Volume l, is incontestably the most important addition to the published work on the war for many years.
Although originally commissioned to replace C. R. M Crutwell's one volume A History o f the Great War (published by OUP in 1934), Hew Strachan's complete manuscript will stuff three on completion. Volume I, To Arms, comprises a large 1139 pages of text, supported by a 50- page bibliography and - that increasingly uncommon thing, an effective index. The second volume, No Quarter, will cover 1915 and 1916, the third, Fall Out, the last two years of the war.
The apparent adoption of a chronological approach is merely the valid skeleton to which Strachan attaches the muscles and sinews of a huge body of Fantastic War history, biography and account of battle. His exercise is to treat with, a
The First World War, Volume 1
World War I was the war which has had the greatest impact on the course of the twentieth century. The first generation of its historians had access to a limited range of sources, and they focused primarily on military events. More recent approaches have embraced cultural, diplomatic, economic, and social history. In this authoritative and readable history, Hew Strachan combines these perspectives with a military and strategic narrative. The result is an account that breaks the bounds of national preoccupations to become both global and comparative. The first of three volumes in this study, To arms examines not only the causes of the war and its opening clashes on land and sea, but also the ideas that underpinned it, and the motivations of the people who supported it. It provides pioneering accounts of the war's finances, the war in Africa, and the Central Powers' bid to widen the war outside Europe.