The Making of the First World War

by Ian F W Beckett

  Chapter 4 The Man and the Hour

  Apart from the official history, the principal modern sources for the Ministry of Munitions are Chris Wrigley, ‘The Ministry of Munitions: An Innovatory Department’, in Kathleen Burk, ed., War and the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914–1918 (London, 1982), pp. 32–56; and R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–16 (London, 1978). The military and political background are traced in David French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 1905–15 (London, 1982), idem, ‘The Military Background to the Shell Crisis of May 1915’, Journal of Strategic Studies 2 (1979), pp. 192–205; idem, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–16 (London, 1986); Clive Trebilcock, ‘War and the Failure of Industrial Mobilisation, 1899 and 1914’, in Jay Winter, ed., War and Economic Development: Essays in Memory of David Joslin (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 139–64; John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915–18 (New Haven, CT, 1992); M. D. Pugh, ‘Asquith, Bonar Law and the First Coalition’, Historical Journal 17 (1974), pp. 813–36; and Cameron Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, July 1914 to May 1915 (London, 1971). From an extensive literature on businessmen in government, see Keith Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989); John Turner, ed., Businessmen and Politics (London, 1984); and John McDermott, ‘"A Needless Sacrifice”: British Businessmen and Business as Usual in the First World War’, Albion 21 (1989), pp. 263–82. There is an even more extensive literature on labour relations, including Gerry R. Rubin, War, Law and Labour: The Munitions Acts, State Regulation and the Unions (Oxford, 1987); and Alistair Reid, ‘Dilution, Trade Unionism and the State in Britain during the First World War’, in S. Tolliday and J. Zeitlin, eds, Shop Floor Bargaining and the State (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 46–74. For women, see Arthur Marwick, Women at War, 1914–18 (London, 1977); Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (London, 1981); Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munition Workers in the Great War (Berkeley, CA, 1994); and Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London, 1998).

  Chapter 5 The Power of Image

  For the Battle of the Somme, see Nicholas Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda during the First World War (London, 1986); idem, ‘Film Propaganda and its Audience: The Example of Britain's Official Films during the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 18 (1983), pp. 463–94; idem, ‘Cinema, Spectatorship and Propaganda: The Battle of the Somme and its Contemporary Audience’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 17 (1996), pp. 5–28; idem, ‘"The Real Thing at Last”: The Battle of the Somme and the Domestic Cinema Audience in the Autumn of 1916’, Historian 51 (1996), pp. 4–8; idem, ‘Through the Eye of the Camera: Contemporary Cinema Audiences and their “Experience” of War in the Film, Battle of the Somme’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle, eds, Facing Armageddon (Barnsley, 1996), pp. 780–98; Roger Smither, ‘"A Wonderful Idea of the Fighting”: The Question of Fakes in “The Battle of the Somme"’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 13 (1993), pp. 149–68; idem, ‘Watch the picture carefully and see if you can identify anyone’, Film History 14 (2002), pp. 390–404; Stephen Badsey, ‘Battle of the Somme: British War Propaganda’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 3 (1983), pp. 99–115, revised as ‘The Battle of the Somme (1916): The Film of the Battle’, in Stephen Badsey, ed., The British Army in Battle and Its Image, 1914–18 (London, 2009), pp. 107–36; Toby Haggith, ‘Reconstructing the Musical Arrangement for The Battle of the Somme’, Film History 14 (2002), pp. 11–24; Luke McKernan, ‘Propaganda, Patriotism and Profit: Charles Urban and British Official War Films in America during the First World War’, Film History 14 (2002), pp. 369–89; Nick Hiley, ‘Hilton DeWitt Girdwood and the Origins of British Official Filming’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 13 (1993), pp. 129–48; J. Hodgkins, ‘Hearts and Minds and Bodies: Reconsidering the Cinematic Language of the Battle of the Somme’, Film and History 38 (2008), pp. 9–19; and Alastair Fraser, Andrew Robertshaw and Steve Roberts, Ghosts on the Somme: Filming the Battle, June–July 1916 (Barnsley, 2009). For British propaganda generally, see Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London, 1977); Michael Sanders and Philip Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18 (London, 1982); and Gary Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester, 1992). For the cinema, see Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I (Madison, WI, 1997); Michael Paris, ed., The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present (Edinburgh, 1999); Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp, eds, Film and the First World War (Amsterdam, 1995); Andrew Kelly, Cinema and the Great War (London, 1997); and Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness (London, 1979). On photography, see Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London, 1989).

  Chapter 6 The Death of Kings

  Among older works, A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918 (London, 1948) is still useful while, from the perspective of the dynasty, Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Habsburg (London, 1963), can be updated with Alan Palmer, Twilight of the Habsburgs (London, 1994), and Steven Beller, Francis Joseph (London, 1996). The wider problems of the empire are covered in R. A. Kahn, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918, 2 vols (New York, 1983), and Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 (London, 1989). Austria-Hungary's part in the outbreak of war is covered in Samuel Williamson, Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (London, 1991), while Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: Architect of the Apocalypse (Boston, 2000), deals with that central figure. For the general war effort see Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary (London, 1997); Robert Kann, Béla Király and Paula Fichter, eds, The Habsburg Empire in World War I (Ithaca, NY, 1977); and Manfred Rauchensteiner, Der Tod des Doppeladlers (Graz, 1994). The endgame is traced in Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: Essays in Political and Military History, 1908–18 (Exeter, 1990), and Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary (Basingstoke, 2000). Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire (Cambridge 2004), provides a vivid picture of increasing tensions, while the difficulties of the alliance with Germany are dealt with in Gerard Silberstein, The Troubled Alliance: German-Austrian Relations, 1914–17 (Lexington, KY, 1970), and G. W. Shanafelt, The Secret Enemy: Austria-Hungary and the German Alliance, 1914–18 (Boulder, CO, 1985).

  Chapter 7 The Ungentlemanly Weapon

  The best overviews of Germany's war experience are Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–18 (Cambridge, 1998), and Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–18 (London, 1997). For German naval policy, see Rolf Hobson, Imperialism at Sea (Boston, 2002), and Gary Weir, ‘Tirpitz, Technology and Building U-boats’, International History Review 6 (1984), pp. 174–90. British attitudes are covered in Christopher Martin, ‘The Complexity of Strategy: Jackie Fisher and the Trouble with Submarines’, Journal of Military History 75 (2011), pp. 441–70; and Christopher Bell, ‘Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution Reconsidered’, War in History 18 (2011), pp. 333–56. The best guide to the evolution of maritime law with respect to Anglo-American relations is John W. Coogan, The End of Neutrality: The United States, Britain and Maritime Rights, 1899–1915 (Ithaca, NY, 1981). More specialist studies of the submarine decision include Holger Herwig and David F. Trask, ‘The Failure of Imperial Germany's Undersea Offensive against World Shipping, February 1917-October 1918’, Historian 33 (1971), pp. 611–36; Holger Herwig, ‘Total Rhetoric, Limited War: Germany's U-boat Campaign, 1917–18’, in Roger Chickering and Jurgen Förster, eds, Great War, Total War (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 265–79. Cultural aspects of submarine warfare are covered in Duncan Redford, The Submarine: A Cultural History from the Great War to Nuclear Conflict (London, 2010); and Michael Hadley, Coun
t Not the Dead: The Popular Image of the German Submarine (Montreal, 1995).

  Chapter 8 The Path to Revolution

  Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–17 (London, 1975) remains indispensable for the Russian conduct of the war, while the collapse of the Russian army is traced comprehensively in Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1980–1987). Lewis Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilisation in Russia, 1914–17: A Study of the War-Industries Committee (London, 1984) deals with one aspect of wartime mobilisation. R. B. McKean, The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907–17 (London, 1977), sets wartime events in context while the most recent, and best, overview of Russia's war experience is Peter Gatrell, Russia's First World War: A Social and Economic History (Harlow, 2005). The wartime role of Nicholas and Alexandra is best analysed from their wartime correspondence, now fully available through Joseph Fuhrmann, ed., The Complete Wartime Correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, 1914–17 (Westport, CT, 1999). Their correspondence and other documents for the period from March 1917 onwards are also reproduced in Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs (New Haven, CT, 1995). Of the many studies of the Russian Revolution, a useful guide is Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990), while there is a sweeping overview in Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (1996). One particular aspect of revolutionary evolution is traced by both Norman Saul, Sailors in Revolt: the Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917 (Lawrence, KS, 1978), and Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet: War and Politics, 1917–18 (London, 1978). The best overview of the resulting civil war between 1917 and 1921 is Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (London, 1987).

  Chapter 9 The Shadow of the Bomber

  The German bombing campaign has been the subject of a number of popular accounts including H. G. Castle, Fire Over England (London, 1982), A. P. Hyde, The First Blitz (Barnsley, 2002); C. M. White, The Gotha Summer (London, 1986); and N. Hanson, First Blitz (London, 2008). Each and every raid is catalogued in Christopher Cole and E. F. Chessman, The Air Defence of Britain, 1914–18 (London, 1984). Ian Castle has produced two especially well-illustrated accounts for the general reader, London, 1914–17: The Zeppelin Menace (Oxford, 2008), and London 1917–18: The Bomber Blitz (Oxford, 2010). For pre-war fears of air attack, see Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859–1917 (Manchester, 1992). The evolution of air defences is covered in Alfred Gollin, ‘A Flawed Strategy: Early British Air Defence Arrangements’, in R. J. Q. Adams, ed., The Great War: Essays on the Military, Political and Social History of the First World War (London, 1990), pp. 31–37; Marian C. McKenna, ‘The Development of Air Raid Precautions in World War I’, in Tim Travers and C. Archer, eds, Men at War: Politics, Technology and Innovation in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1982), pp. 173–95; and John Ferris, ‘"Airbandit”: C3I and Strategic Air Defence during the First Battle of Britain, 1915–18’, in Michael Dockrill and David French, eds, Strategy and Intelligence: British Policy during the First World War (London, 1996), pp. 23–66. For the Smuts Report, see John Sweetman, ‘The Smuts Report of 1917: Merely Political Window Dressing?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 4 (1981), pp. 152–74; and Malcolm Cooper, The Birth of Independent Airpower: British Air Policy in the First World War (London, 1986). British retaliation is covered in S. F. Wise, ‘The Royal Air Force and the Origins of Strategic Bombing’, in Travers and Archer, eds, Men at War, pp. 151–8; Christian Geinitz, ‘The First Air War against Non-combatants: Strategic Bombing of German Cities in World War I’, in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds, Great War, Total War (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 207–25; and George Williams, Biplanes and Bombsights: British Bombing in World War I (Maxwell, AL, 1999).

  Chapter 10 The Promised Land

  General accounts of British policy in the Middle East include David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, 2nd edn (New York, 2001). The classic account of the Balfour Declaration is Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London, 1961), but Stein should now be supplemented by Ronald Sanders, The High Walls of Jerusalem (New York, 1983), and Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London, 2010). Contrasting views are expressed in Mayir Vereté, ‘The Balfour Declaration and Its Makers’, Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1970), pp. 48–76; Jehuda Reinharz, ‘The Balfour Declaration and Its Maker: A Reassessment’, Journal of Modern History 64 (1992), pp. 455–92; Mark Levene, ‘The Balfour Declaration: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, English Historical Review 108 (1992), pp. 54–77; James Renton, ‘The Historiography of the Balfour Declaration: Toward a Multi-causal Framework’, Journal of Israeli History 19 (1998), pp. 109–28; and William Mathew, ‘War-time Contingency and the Balfour Declaration of 1917: An Improbable Regression’, Journal of Palestine Studies 40 (2011), pp. 26–42. Its relationship to Anglo-Jewry is traced in Stuart Cohen, English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895–1920 (Princeton, NJ, 1982), and David Vital, Zionism: The Crucial Phase (Oxford, 1987). The wider issues of Palestine are covered in Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine, 1914–18 (London, 1973), and the same author's Palestine: A Twice-promised Land (New Brunswick, 2000).

  Chapter 11 The Moral Imperative

  There are many studies of American wartime diplomacy including David Trask, The United States in the Supreme War Council: American War Aims and Inter-allied Strategy, 1917–18 (Middletown, CT, 1961); Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight (Oxford, 1974); Robert Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I (New York, 1985); Kendrick Clements, Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman (Boston, 1987); idem, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (Lawrence, KS, 1992); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, DE, 1991); and David Esposito, The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson: American War Aims in World War I (Westport, CT, 1996). Inevitably, several studies cover Wilson's aims at the Paris peace conferences, and the failure of the US to ratify the Versailles Treaty, including Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe, 1914–18: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, NJ, 1957); Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (New York, 1986); Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective (Cambridge, 1987); and John M. Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge, MA, 2001). The most recent interpretation of the impact of Wilsonian rhetoric in the Middle East and Far East is to be found in Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anti-colonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007). The most detailed biography of Wilson is Arthur Link, Wilson, 5 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1947–65). As in his Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Arlington Heights, IL, 1979), Link remains a dedicated defender of Wilson's record.

  Chapter 12 The Last Throw

  On German strategy and civil-military relations, see Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–18 (London, 1976), and Robert Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the First World War (London, 1994). The 1918 offensives are covered in Martin Kitchen, The German Offensives of 1918 (Stroud, 2001), and David Zabecki, The German 1918 Offensives: A Case Study in the Operational Level of War (London, 2006); and that on the Lys in Chris Baker, The Battle for Flanders: German Defeat on the Lys, 1918 (Barnsley, 2011). The evolution of German operational and tactical methods is covered by Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–18 (New York, 1989); Timothy Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Change in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War (Leavenworth, KS, 1981); Martin Samuels, Command and Control? Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888–1918 (London
, 1995); David Zabecki, Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the Birth of Modern Artillery (Westport, CT, 1994); and the classic G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks: The Battle in Depth in the West (London, 1940), now available in an unexpurgated edition (Brighton, 2010). There is now a great deal of contrasting material on German military morale, including Wilhelm Deist, ‘The German Army, the Authoritarian Nation-state and Total War’, in John Horne, ed., State, Society and Mobilisation in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 160–72; idem, ‘The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality Behind the Stab-in-the-Back Myth’, War in History 3 (1996), pp. 186–207; Alex Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–18 (Cambridge, 2008); Hew Strachan, ‘The Morale of the German Army, 1917–18’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle, eds, Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London, 1996), pp. 383–98; Robert Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge, 2011); and Scott Stephenson, The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and the German Revolution of 1918 (Cambridge, 2009).

  INDEX

  Abbas Hilmi II, Khedive, (i)

  Abdülhamid II, Sultan, (i), (ii)

  Abdullah, Emir, (i), (ii), (iii)

  Acres, Bert, (i)

  Aisne (1914), Battle of the, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

  Aitken, Max see Beaverbrook, Lord

  Albert I, King, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

  Albrecht of Württemberg, Duke, (i)

  Aldebert, Colonel, (i)

  Alekseev, Mikhail, (i), (ii)

  Alexandra, Tsarina, (i), (ii), (iii)

  Al-Faruqi, Muhammed Sharif, (i)

  Alfonso XIII, King, (i)

  Ali Abdullah Pasha, (i)