Hew StrachanCritiques

Assigned reading for S&W at the NWC. Wish I could have read this in depth, but I was reading for WWII that same week and was only able to do a very light skim.

From the syllabus: Strachan presents a lucid account of this catastrophic conflict, providing essential background information for evaluating the policies and strategies adopted by Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. He counters traditional perceptions of the strategic deadlock on the Western Front by stressing the novelty of the war’s technology and the operational and strategic challenges faced by leaders on both sides.

Great book. This is a good book if you don't really know how the first world war got started, who the players were, or how it ended. A very good introduction on the war to end all wars

El contingut de Financing the First Worl War està extret del primer llibre del mateix autor -Hew Strachan- d’una col·lecció de tres sobre la Primera Guerra Mundial. La col·lecció ambiciona tractar el conflicte des de tots els punts de vista, també l’econòmic.

El llibre tracta un tema important –com es financia un increment monstruós i sobtat de la despesa pública durant un llarg període de temps -. Altres societats han hagut de fer front a circumstàncies semblants –la catalana entre 1936 i 1939- i fins hi tot la resposta pública actual davant el COVID-19 pot tenir-hi alguns paral·lelismes.

El punt fort del llibre –subministra una gran quantitat de dades- és també el punt fluix, atès que hi manca context i explicació del seu significat. El fet de que el contingut s’hagi extret d’un altre llibre és un problema, perquè sembla que ningú s’ha repassat bé el resultat final. Si bé cada capítol comença bé, amb explicacions que situen al lector, ben aviat s’entra en un espiral de dades per països que acaben produint una certa indigestió.

En alguns capítols s’ha de consultar el traductor de l’alemany amb més freqüència que el de l’anglès. Així, hem de trobar una forma autodidacta de familiaritzar-nos amb Weltpolitik, Burgfrieden, Matrikularbeiträge,.. això si, té el detall d’explicar el significat de Wehrbeitrag.

El llibre finalitza d'una manera abrupta, sobtada. L'últim capítol tracta sobre el finançament exterior de cada beligerant, i un cop acabada l'útima estadística, el llibre ha arribat al seu fi. Més que un llibre, semblen uns apunts sobre el finançament de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Apunts que estan molt bé, però hi manca alguna cosa perquè es converteixin en un llibre com cal.

He comparat aquest llibre amb el que podríem dir que és la seva seqüela, When Money Dies, d’Adam Fergusson, que narra l’hiperinflació de la república de Weimar, l’origen de la qual es el finançament del conflicte de 1914-1918. Si bé aquest últim llibre gaudeix d’una major notorietat i el seu contingut manté un major equilibri entre dades i explicacions, el to general és igualment àrid. Els dos llibres es complementen, i les explicacions d’un ajuden a entendre el que diu l’altre.½

Excellent short treatment of the First World War. Well worth reading

Zambia

An excellent, concise history of the First World War. It really explains how it wasn't just a European War and more importantly how it wasn't, for all those Powers involved, a needless or futile war, despite the fashionable notion held today that it was. Recommended.

Great book. This is a good book if you don't really know how the first world war got started, who the players were, or how it ended. A very good introduction on the war to end all wars

Great book. This is a good book if you don't really know how the first world war got started, who the players were, or how it ended. A very good introduction on the war to end all wars

Great book. This is a good book if you don't really know how the first world war got started, who the players were, or how it ended. A very good introduction on the war to end all wars

Great book. This is a good book if you don't really know how the first world war got started, who the players were, or how it ended. A very good introduction on the war to end all wars

A good concise short history of this monumental event. And it was an monument to man's futility of imposing his will, costing millions of lives in the process. Strachan covers the key points and strategies of the events and people behind them. One hundred years are passing now and it is hard to see at times what we learned.

If you only read one book about World War I, it needs to be this one. I think it should be required reading for all high school seniors- regardless of their academic track and barring that, at least all college freshmen. Highly recommend.

This is far more a contextual history than a descriptive narrative of events. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the details of even the most significant events, such as the October Revolution, the 1917 mutinies, the Rape of Belgium, and pretty much any battle one could name. And have a detailed map handy: a scale of 1 : 1 million was good, 1 : 2.5 million was not so good.

That said, a contextual history was, I think, more satisfying in the long run. This one devotes only 4 chapters out of 23 to operations on the western front. The other 19 address theaters worldwide, political maneuvering throughout the war on all sides, economic aspects of belligerence, and other things. I have a much greater appreciation of the "world" scope now. But it was not so satisfying as it might have been because the chapters (each by a different author) are of widely varying quality. Some are descriptive, some analytical, and some more lyrical than anything else; some do these things well, and some not so well. I did find the illustrations quite satisfying. I can't say exactly how, but they complement the text more than illustrate it.

Overall this is an OK book. I wouldn't buy it, though, not even used.

En tTour de force gennem 1. verdenskrigs historie i alle dele af krigen. Meget kompetent og interessant.

If you only read one book about World War I, it needs to be this one. I think it should be required reading for all high school seniors- regardless of their academic track and barring that, at least all college freshmen. Highly recommend.

An interesting, but somewhat unsatisfactory, book. It has some keen arguments and insights, though the (deliberate, as acknowledged in the acknowledgments) refusal to engage with other views about aspects of WWI is somewhat infuriating. Furthermore, this book is somewhat disjointed, and one would have to say that the chapters, and their various sub-sections, do not give the impression that they naturally follow on from each other. This is probably linked to the fact that the book is a companion piece to a TV documentary series. One would assume that that documentary itself could use other media aside from words (images, etc.), as well as repetition (there is generally a week between episodes after all), to link different sections. Here, repetition has been understandably eschewed. Yet, no compensating means of linking different sections has been employed.
Despite these faults, there are notable merits. Hew Strachan clearly has great strategic and tactical insight, and can see the linkage between, to adapt the popular cliché for my purposes, both the big picture wood and the small detail trees. It is also a noticeably less anglo-centric history of the war than I am used to seeing in this part of the world, providing admirable insight into French, Balkan and German war experiences (though I have the nagging feeling that small countries and territories could be better served, even within the limits of a 1-volume treatment? For example, Belgium goes missing for 4 years between the war's beginning and end, while Ireland, despite being a large and difficult chunk of the UK at the time, and one greatly affected by the Great War to boot, goes unmentioned). The author also has both a remarkable breadth of knowledge and a gift for conveying it to the reader.
Overall, the book is worth reading, but the casual historian should not use it as his/her sole guide to the Great War.½

I confess I didn't finish this. Half way through I wondered why I was reading it. It just didn't hold my attention.

Not the most exciting prose at times but very complete. If you want to know the interest rate on the third issue of Bulgarian war bonds, for example, this is the book for you.

Hew Strachan's The First World War is somewhat of a companion piece to the documentary series of the same name. It was interesting to read the book after watching the series, because the book preserves much of the thematic-vice chronological-approach of the series. While I thought that approach worked really well for tv, it made for slightly scattered reading and I was glad that I had already read a couple more straightforward histories of the war because the book, by necessity, jumped around in time and place quite a bit.

Highlights for me: Strachan's discussion of the development, refinement, and integration of new tactics and technologies of warfare (one of the reasons I find ww1 so fascinating in the first place), and his discussion in the final pages of the book about how the meaning and memories of the war changed over time-many participants in the war did not initially view it as the exercise in futility that they would later come to see it as. This latter point led Strachan, both in the book and in the documentary, to place a premium on using soldiers' contemporaneous reflections, rather than their later memories, when trying to capture the lived experience.

Only the first third of the book can be described as a biography, and this is the most accessible part. Clausewitz rose to major general and fought Napoleon, but never reached the highest command. Appointed head of Prussia's Military Academy in 1818, he spent the rest of his life writing and rewriting his massive work, which remained unfinished and was published posthumously. Few outside the country paid attention until Prussia's astonishing victory over France in 1870. (The first English translation was in 1873). Readers who know Clausewitz's maxim that "war is politics carried on by other means" will yearn for more insights, and the author provides these. Though generals often proclaim wars must end in absolute victory, Clausewitz asserted that in the real world annihilating the enemy is rarely possible and often a bad idea. Strachan works hard at defining what Clausewitz meant, comparing various writings, discussing precise meanings of German words, filling in textual gaps and quarreling with other interpretations.

Excellent explanation of what the belligerents were thinking as they fell into combat. It was a series of mistakes based on faulty assumptions.

With 1135 pages, and being only the first of a trilogy this is certainly the most extensive work on the First World War written so far. Being one of the leading scholars on the subject Dr Strachan, has created what will be the book to cite for every future writer remotely touching the subject, and a must-have in the book shelf of every history buff. But if these people will read the whole thing is a completely different matter. Being a person with more than a healthy interest in WWI, I must admit that it took me awkwardly long to finish the book, and I more than ones abandoned it for more relaxing reading. Its size and somewhat dry language makes reading it almost as an epic feat as writing it. So if history is not your profession, or your interest in WW I is less than fanatic, this might be to much for you.

This part of the trilogy (naturally) focuses the background and outbreak of the war, the initial battles of 1914, the war in Africa, the war in the pacific, how Turkey entered the war, Germanys global strategy and how the belligerent countries tackled the problems with industrial war and paying for the whole thing. As I pointed out before, it is amazingly extensive, and the different armies of 1914, with their weaknesses are well described. The more popular view of an effective, perfectly equipped and trained German army, meeting inept and conservative armies of France and Britain, is repudiated. The German army was as imperfect as the other ones and the Schleiffen plan would never have worked. The chapter about the war in Africa is also very good, giving a more comprehensive outlook on the war in this continent than other books have given. Actually, and surprisingly, there is one chapter I just don’t like. When Dr Strachan describes the origins of the war, he gives a rather orthodox version of it. It is more in line with “Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman than modern books that follow the path by Fritz Fischer, and thereby blame Germany and Austria for the outbreak. In other words Dr Strachan more or less repudiates some of the thesis of Fritz Fischer, but according to me he does so without giving enough arguments. The origins of the war are better described in Holger Hedwig’s “The First World war”, or Annika Monbauer’s “The Origins of the First World War”. But still, the over all judgment must be more than positive, since there is simply no other book that manages to cover the conflict in such all-embracing manner.
A four, but not more…

An excellent examination of the First World War. This book strikes a good balance between analysis of the sociopolitical causes and effects of the war, economic considerations, and personal accounts of the battles and aftermath of the Great War.

Strachan (modern history, Univ. of Glasgow; The Politics of the British Army, Oxford Univ., 1997), most familiar from his work in the London Times, has collected a remarkable series of essays on a variety of issues raised by the Great War. Although the essays are often difficult to read without a deep understanding of the period, they illuminate complex and often misunderstood territory. Gail Braybon's take on women's roles enormously complicates the idea of women as a monolithic class. Strachan's economic approach to mobilization and B.J. McKercher's discussion of economic warfare considerably expand and complement the more familiar tactical and strategic summaries. Many of the essayists take care to place the greatest event of that generation in the context of future events, both in the tactical and in the larger social sphere.

Companion to a TV documentary on the first world war. I found this book to be a great general overview of the first world war – not too detailed, not too scholarly but thoroughly researched and well written. The book is organized along themes, which mirror the structure of the documentary, and in this sense, the conflict is not treated in a strict chronological manner. Therein lies its strengths and weaknesses: for while it may lack clarity at times and jump ahead in the unfolding of events, the complexity and scale of the conflict perhaps calls for such a non-linear treatment. I was happy to see that the book did not exclusively focus on the western front and does show the worldwide dimension of the conflict. Color photos of the French colonial troops highlight that fact. The author also brings into play and adeptly illustrates some of the emerging trends: the clash of ideologies and civilizations, military strategies, the consolidation of nationalism in Europe and in its rise in the colonies, and the conflict’s consequences still reverberating to this day in the Balkans, Russia and the Middle East. Overall, an authoritative overview of the first world war, and a basis for further reading based on interests, perhaps time to tackle those histories the size of a telephone directory.½