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A review by socraticgadfly
1918: War and Peace by Gregor Dallas
challenging
slow-paced
1.5
RIDDLED with errors of both fact and interpretation.
Long-time followers of mine know that I'm a serious WWI buff. When I saw this hefty book at the library, I figured it was definitely worth a read.
It's not.
On the errors of interpretation? Seeing, around page 180, his assumption that Germany’s stated war aims pre-1918 were non-negotiable flipped on a light bulb. On this and “belligerent Germany,” he appears to rely way too much on Fritz Fischer, partially to totally rejected by many modern historians who have written about World War 1 in the 21st century. Both he and Fischer’s top disciple, Imanuel Geiss, are in his bibliography.
Errors of fact?
Dallas first claims France’s 1914 parliament was the most peace-loving in history, and also talks up President Poincare. He totally ignores, or deliberately shunts aside that Poincare totally worked around Prime Minister Viviani (and the Foreign Ministry) during the July Crisis.
He next talks about how peace-loving Britain was at this time. Not so much. The Liberal Imperialist government, from Campbell-Bannerman on in the late 1900-aughts, had been shoveling money to Belgium to pay for its rearmament. Ignores also that the most Eurocentric members of the 1914 Cabinet, led by Grey, wanted to declare war even without a German invasion of Belgium.
Back to errors of interpretation, but also partially errors of fact? About 50 pages later? The claim that the “glue” for the Entente before WWI started, in the last couple of years before it started, was fears of German warmongering. In reality, right up to the July crisis, relations within the three Entente nations remained fluid.
He has errors outside of WWI as well. Writing in 2001, Dallas claims that only two US midterm congressional elections were earth-shaking: 1866 and 1918. He had 6-7 years of insight to analyze 1994 by this point. Anyway, post-2001, he’s even more clearly wrong.
And no, Hughes didn’t outpoll Wilson by half a million votes in 1916. Rather, it was the other way around.
The capper, at which point I stopped reading?
Dallas said that the House of Windsor was the House of Hanover pre-1917. This would of course be news to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, his wife Queen Victoria, their son King Edward VII, and his son, King George V, who changed the family name specifically because of its German sound.
I stopped reading at this point.
Long-time followers of mine know that I'm a serious WWI buff. When I saw this hefty book at the library, I figured it was definitely worth a read.
It's not.
On the errors of interpretation? Seeing, around page 180, his assumption that Germany’s stated war aims pre-1918 were non-negotiable flipped on a light bulb. On this and “belligerent Germany,” he appears to rely way too much on Fritz Fischer, partially to totally rejected by many modern historians who have written about World War 1 in the 21st century. Both he and Fischer’s top disciple, Imanuel Geiss, are in his bibliography.
Errors of fact?
Dallas first claims France’s 1914 parliament was the most peace-loving in history, and also talks up President Poincare. He totally ignores, or deliberately shunts aside that Poincare totally worked around Prime Minister Viviani (and the Foreign Ministry) during the July Crisis.
He next talks about how peace-loving Britain was at this time. Not so much. The Liberal Imperialist government, from Campbell-Bannerman on in the late 1900-aughts, had been shoveling money to Belgium to pay for its rearmament. Ignores also that the most Eurocentric members of the 1914 Cabinet, led by Grey, wanted to declare war even without a German invasion of Belgium.
Back to errors of interpretation, but also partially errors of fact? About 50 pages later? The claim that the “glue” for the Entente before WWI started, in the last couple of years before it started, was fears of German warmongering. In reality, right up to the July crisis, relations within the three Entente nations remained fluid.
He has errors outside of WWI as well. Writing in 2001, Dallas claims that only two US midterm congressional elections were earth-shaking: 1866 and 1918. He had 6-7 years of insight to analyze 1994 by this point. Anyway, post-2001, he’s even more clearly wrong.
And no, Hughes didn’t outpoll Wilson by half a million votes in 1916. Rather, it was the other way around.
The capper, at which point I stopped reading?
Dallas said that the House of Windsor was the House of Hanover pre-1917. This would of course be news to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, his wife Queen Victoria, their son King Edward VII, and his son, King George V, who changed the family name specifically because of its German sound.
I stopped reading at this point.