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100 years ago today

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NutmegCT

NutmegCT

Great Pumpkin
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Sarajevo, June 28, 1914. Six assassins in the crowd, one succeeded, and two people are assassinated, leading to The Great War.

Gavrilo Princip under arrest:

gavrilo_2957116b.jpg



"The details were well recorded: how the first attacker lost his nerve as the cortege passed, how the next attacker threw a grenade that struck the limousine but did not harm the Archduke, how the royal party nevertheless continued with the visit, how three would-be assassins melted away into the crowd and how one, a 19-year-old peasant, stood his ground."

The Archduke and his wife were shot while on the way to the hospital to visit those injured in the initial (unsuccessful) attack a few hours earlier.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history...The-lie-that-started-the-First-World-War.html


 
Nice link (with video).

The story of all the assassins is really almost amusing. The second one threw a bomb under the car (leading from the train station to the city hall)... but it blew up two cars back and seriously injured an attache'. The Arch Duke was such an arrogant a-hole, they just kept going (this after many many warnings of assassins). He read a bloodied speech that was carried by the attache'. Finally, calmer heads said that the MUST deviate from the PUBLISHED route through town; but the orders were in German and the Czech driver didn't understand. They got stuck down the wrong road, and there in that café was Pricip. He was in the proverbial right place at the right time. They had to stop to back up and get on the new route. Pricip walked out and bang-bang... 2 dead.

They often say that all this started the war, but everything was really already in place. It would have surely have happened anyway. [The video does a nice job of making that point.]

My wife and I will be in Belgium for the commemorations of the "Guns of August" (as I'm a buff of this era)... and we'll be in Flanders Fields on about the time of the start of the war 100 years ago. It's a big deal there. We were visiting Verdun in June of 2012 and they were already gearing up for this year.

For some hilariously clever history-telling check on that "If WWI Was A Bar-fight": https://www.tentimesone.com/if-world-war-one-was-a-bar-fight/
 
I love that WWI as a bar fight bit; hilarious and pretty accurate too.
 
We can blame the Treaty of Versailles. Unfortunately for them, overstepping was as it always has been, always will be.

The" Sleeping Tiger" was awakened.

At this point the tiger is too well fed to react in a timely manner.
 
Archduke Ferdinand was actually a reformed-minded member of the House of Hapsburg. He knew the Austro-Hungarian Empire could not be held together much longer, and he was advocating a confederation of states within the Empire, giving each of the various ethnic groupings their own autonomous region, but under the "umbrella" of the Empire...not too much unlike the Commonwealth system of British colonies.

Europe in 1914 was a powder-keg. If the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand did not provide the spark, something else would have. For instance, the French were still smarting over the loss of the Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and were looking for any opportunity to reunite this region with the rest of France. Likewise the German High Seas fleet was looking for an opportunity to wrest maritime supremacy from the Royal Navy.

The problem with World War I was that it was fought with Civil War tactics using 20th century weaponry, thus creating the absolute bloodbath that the war was. Some say World War II was essentially a continuation of the First World War after a 20 year cease-fire.
 
SaxMan said:
Some say World War II was essentially a continuation of the First World War after a 20 year cease-fire.
Click to expand...

I've heard that from historians as well. One problem was that although the German military knew they were totally defeated, the German people didn't think so... and many considered the Treaty of Versailles unfair. A complete surrender might have helped. Needless to say Hitler took advantage of this (with the depression/inflation of the early 30s). Perhaps in a few hundred years the two wars will be considered one long one with a break (as you say).
 
And some say the Great War didn't end until the fall of the Communist states around 1990..

There's a thought ...
 
NutmegCT said:
And some say the Great War didn't end until the fall of the Communist states around 1990..

There's a thought ...
Click to expand...

Good points. There's a wonderful book that implies this - Margaret MacMillan' "Paris 1919" about the creation of the Treaty Versailles. BTW, she is a very good historian and the grand-daughter to Churchill (and it's a good read). Anyway, at that 5 months stretch of time, the world was quite literally divided up. This set the stage for later difficulties in eastern Europe (with the creation of a Czechoslovia and Balkan states), the middle-east, Africa, even the south Pacific, and obviously Germany! Of course Wilson tried to champion all this with David Lloyd George (England) and Georges Clemenceau (France). Even Kemal Ataturk (Turkey) showed up. It involved a heck of a lot of tough deal-making (with Wilson's 14 points).
Of course, the US congress never approved the deal.
 
Some interesting reading: "The Economic Consequences of the Peace", John Keynes, 1919. Helped turn the American people against both the Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations. Keynes felt much of the Treaty was unfair and overly punitive to the former Triple Alliance; he felt the economic hardships would lead to vast inflation (it did) and social instability (it did), and predicted the next European war would begin twenty years after 1919 (it did).

Also, at the end of the Great War, the Levant and Mesopotamia of tribal lands and local sheikdoms was carved up into artificial political states, each under the control of Great Britain or France. Tribal factions were never consolidated, including the Kurds, the Sunni, and the Shia, who continued to fight for individual independence from the state. The states were Iraq and Syria.

Certainly not as simple as I describe, but it's interesting to see how history "repeats".
 
NutmegCT said:
Certainly not as simple as I describe, but it's interesting to see how history "repeats".
Click to expand...

One of my favorite quotes: "'Twas ever thus..."
 
I'm reminded of that quotation... that I heard from George Will, but I think he got it from someone else... in referring to the Balkans (notably Serbia): "An area that produces more history than it can consume locally."
 
Interesting period of time, and as pointed out Emperor Franz Joseph really didn't care that his Nephew and wife were killed beyond the opening it provided to after Serbia. And once Austria Hungary rejected what was basically the surrender of Serbia, Since Serbia had accepted almost all the Empire's terms, the path was set, speeches and mobilization moved forward and finally Tannenberg started the killing the end of the summer.

And in hindsight you could say WW2 proved Wilson right when he advocated for kinder terms during the Versaille process.
 
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