The Guns of August
Published to immediate acclaim in 1962 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, The Guns of August is the classic account of the cataclysmic outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the 30 days of battle that followed. This opening clash determined the future course of the war and shaped the history of our century. Its tense drama continues to enthrall readers of Barbara W. Tuchman's magnificent best-selling work, now in 25th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author. In the summer of 1914, Europe with a heap of swords piled as delicately as jackstraws, and not one could be drawn out without upsetting the others. Still, statesmen, field marshals, admirals, kings, and patriots believed what they wanted to believe -- or what they feared not to believe -- and waited in profound ignorance for victory to reveal itself within a matter of weeks. Instead, the holocaust of August was the prelude to 4 bitter years of deadlocked war that cost a generation of European lives. The German, French, English, and Russian General Staffs had had their plans for war completed as early as 10 years before hostilities began. Germany intended to invade France; England had committed her army to cooperation with the French Army. France, bolstered by her alliance with Russia and her "entente" with Britain, designed her strategy in terms solely of the offensive and the attaque brusqueée. Russia planned a pincer invasion of East Prussia while the main German armies were involved in the West.
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What Hacker News says
- Re: "This looks to have gotten some dominoes rolling that may have contributed to WW1 " - people who believe this should read some history about beginning of WW1. I recommend starting with "The Guns of August".
- In a very different vein, I have read a number of books recently that feature a surprising amount of "scam and schemes":
- The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, about the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. A lot of people were scammed into settling the high plains by railroad salesmanship and other "real estate" scams.
- The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown. A book about the harrowing Donner Party. Scamming and scheming are what draw them out to that expedition.
- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. WW1 history but it boils down to the scheming of various men in the respective countries.
- The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, Daniel Yergin. The oil rush from America to the World. Scheming features prominently to say the least.
- The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman. The audio book is also great. The writing style is gripping and it's a very funny book despite being about a serious subject: WWI. It also gives a sense of how much pressure the leaders were under and how some managed while others simply broke as initial plans went awry. The author makes clear how individual decisions made huge differences and the entire outcome of the war could have been very different based on the personalities of those involved. These personality insights and descriptions really shine through. The book is not a definitive history of the start of WWI by any means but it is highly entertaining and reads quickly.
The chapters about Turkey can be skipped since they don't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. I found them boring.
- A good starting point would be Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations. He was a German Jewish emigre to the United States, and it was with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation that his book was used to create International Relations departments within universities across the United States in the immediate post-WWII period. Prior to Morgenthau and the Rockefellers, international relations was not its own discipline distinct from history, philosophy, law, jurism, etc. Morgenthau's book was the standard textbook for international relations for several decades, and in it he tries to outline European realpolitik for his liberal American audience. His is still probably the most literate, sophisticated, and nuanced international relations introduction.
On the topic of a systemic drive to increase ones power at the expense of others, leading to escalatory and conflictual international dynamics, your go-to book is John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. He is also in the realist school of thought like Morgenthau, although you'll find that his style of writing is much punchier and pugilistic than Morgenthau's.
On the attempt to build systemically de-escalatory effects at the international level, I would pick up a copy of G John Ikenberry's After Victory. He describes how victorious countries following major wars would create a new set of rules for the international system, and how at least some of those post-war regimes attempted to reduce the returns to power in order to increase the stability of the system and reduce perceptions of threat and insecurity by weaker states. Note that he worked in the State Department during Bush Sr administration and has that direct experience of attempting to ensure order and stability following the end of the Cold War.
If you want to read case studies in escalation toward a war that no single actor actually wanted, I recommend Stephen Van Evera's Causes of War with a focus on his study of WWI. It goes well paired with Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August.
- Normally I would say, “don’t be so sure”, but a book I just finished this weekend changed my mind: “The Guns of August”. I agree with you and do think the western world would be really hard to bring into a world war nowadays.
The amount the world and Europe in particular has changed since WWI is astounding. The entire world was deeply belligerent in a way that really surprised me and seems foreign to our modern sensibility. The only country of today that acts/thinks this way seems to be Russia, but leading up to WWI almost every single country in Europe was still planning for the conquest and destruction of their neighbors. Everyone (the major powers anyways) just assumed “ya, we’re gonna fight a huge multi-million person war and we’re gonna win.” I really don’t see that kind of belligerence in the minds of the world anymore.
Of course, there were some academics at the time of WWI saying the same thing, so…
- If you found The Guns of August interesting, you should have a look at The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Caldwell: 1914 read not through WW II but through the 1990s Balkan wars and Serbian irrendentism.
