Warfare and Society in Europe

1898 to the Present

Michael S. Neiberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134338061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Warfare and Society in Europe, 1898 to the Present examines warfare in Europe from the Fashoda conflict in modern-day Sudan to the recent war in Iraq. The twentieth century was by far the world's most destructive century with two global wars marking the first half of the century and the constant fear of nuclear annihilation haunting the second half

1
FROM FASHODA TO SARAJEVO

Africa, alliances, and Agadir

On July 10, 1898 a French force of seven European officers and 120 Senegalese soldiers under the command of Major Jean Baptiste Marchand arrived at the fortified oasis of Fashoda in modern-day Sudan. Marchand had risen from the ranks and therefore was almost custom-made for fame in a Third Republic France suspicious of its own entrenched military officers. He had played a key role in the French conquest of West Africa and had taken charge of the expedition to extend French influence east to the Nile River. His arrival at Fashoda created a surge of patriotism badly needed in a country still suffering from its humiliation at the hands of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the aftershocks of the bloody civil war known as the Paris Commune that followed, and the enduring scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair. Marchand’s arrival at Fashoda seemed to usher in a new era of French glory at the expense of France’s long-standing rival, the British Empire.

If Marchand was the ready-made hero, Britain seemed an equally ready-made foe. Anti-British sentiment had been rising in France, partially due to colonial rivalry in Africa. German policy after 1871 encouraged French expansion in Africa, both to shift France’s focus from continental issues and to strengthen existing Anglo-French tensions. By encouraging French expansion in Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, Germany placed two of its main rivals on a potential collision course with one another. This policy seemed to be paying dividends as French and British interests clashed at Fashoda.

Horatio Herbert Kitchener, one of Great Britain’s rising military stars, was an ironic choice to change that situation. In 1898 he seemed to be acting in Germany’s interest by challenging the French position at Fashoda, but in 1870 he had volunteered to fight for France against the Prussians. Since then, he had become a veritable stereotype of the British colonial officer; his image later graced countless World War I recruitment posters. Between 1871 and 1898, he rose to become the commander of the Anglo-Egyptian Army and won a major victory at Omdurman in September, 1898, recovering Khartoum from the anti-imperial Mahdists. One of his junior officers in this campaign was a young volunteer named Winston Churchill. After that victory, Kitchener turned a small part of his force toward Fashoda, determined to win it back for the British Empire.

The stage seemed set for a major clash of French and British forces. Popular opinion on both sides of the English Channel clamored for war. Anglo-French relations deteriorated to their lowest point since Waterloo. Kitchener and Marchand both received orders from their respective governments not to back down. France’s foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, had been one of the organizers of the Marchand mission and supported a wider French sphere of influence in Africa. Like most Frenchmen, his initial response to the crisis was to dig in his heels and prepare for the worst. As the two nations began preparations for battle, Europe seemed ready for war once again.

Delcassé wanted to remove the British barrier to a French African empire, but he was more fearful of Germany. He was therefore a vigorous supporter of closer French links to Russia as a means of creating a two-front problem for the German military. A crisis between Britain and France could lead the former into an alliance with Germany, the nation virtually all Frenchmen saw as their most insatiable enemy. An Anglo-German alliance was a far more dangerous prospect for France than losing Fashoda. How, then, could Delcassé get France out of this predicament with its self-image intact, especially with French popular opinion in favor of war as the best method by which to recover its honor? “The problem,” Delcassé insightfully wrote during the crisis, “ is to harmonize the exigencies of national honor with the avoidance of a naval war we are in no position to fight.”¹

Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador in London, found a way out. He convinced Delcassé to accept a British proposal that promised to resolve the Fashoda impasse without war. France agreed to withdraw from Egypt and the Sudan in exchange for British recognition of Morocco as a French sphere of influence. The bargain cost Britain almost nothing, as they had little influence in Morocco anyway. In return the British were now masters of the Nile River and its Sudanese watersheds. Although they had to cede Fashoda to the British, France had been able to gain a Moroccan foothold that was much closer to home than the Sudan. Despite public clamor for an armed resolution to the crisis, cooler heads had prevailed. The two sides then began talks designed to lead to an agreement that would balance out the Triple Alliance (signed in 1882) of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The result was a tectonic shift in European affairs that completed the alliance system that went to war in 1914.

The alliance that emerged from the “ Spirit of Fashoda,” the Entente Cordiale of 1904, fell far short of a mutual defense pact. Nevertheless it formalized friendly relations between Britain and France and thereby revolutionized European diplomacy. “ With this act old animosities were buried, past humiliations forgotten, new cooperation and support pledged.”² The British and French navies could now look upon one another as potential allies rather than as a rivals.

Moreover, because the Dual Alliance of 1894 linked Russia and France, the Entente Cordiale opened a door for Anglo-Russian cooperation as well. In 1907 the Triple Entente linked all three nations into a system that reduced colonial tensions around the globe in the hopes of avoiding future misunderstandings like the one at Fashoda. Militarily, the continent’s largest army and the world’s most powerful navy had forged a linkage. It also linked France to both, vastly increasing French power and security.

Despite the alliance’s unpopularity with the British left (which distrusted the Tsar’s despotism) and the British right (which feared that an alliance might be accompanied by restricted freedom of action), the Entente Cordiale had much to recommend it. During Britain’s frustrating war in South Africa against the Boers (1899–1902), the British found that their “ splendid isolation” policy of not involving themselves in alliances had left them alone and increasingly unpopular. It took the British nearly three years and 500,000 men to defeat a guerrilla force that was never one-tenth as large as their own forces in South Africa. British policies of concentrating Boer families into camps made them a virtual international pariah. An alliance with Russia and France provided diplomatic support and helped to return Britain to equal status in the community of European nations.

The Entente Cordiale also gave Britain a chance to absorb the military lessons of the Boer War. British forces in South Africa suffered 30,000 casualties at the hands of determined, though amateurish, Boer rifle fire. The casualties that the British had suffered at the hands of relatively unsophisticated white settlers underscored the potency of modern firepower; the Boers had used modern magazine rifles and machine guns, some of them provided by Germany. In the years following the war, the British reformed their general staff and began making plans to create an expeditionary force capable of being deployed almost anywhere in the Empire or, if need be, onto the continent of Europe itself.

The insurgency in South Africa was just one of the national security concerns facing Britain at the turn of the century. Continental events frightened the British enough to want to avoid a repeat of the diplomatic isolation of the Boer War years. The growth of the German Navy was by far the most important of these events. Around the time of Fashoda, Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ambitious senior admiral, Alfred von Tirpitz, had begun a program to create a German High Seas Fleet that they expected would eventually be powerful enough to challenge and perhaps even defeat the British in a major battleship clash. German naval growth frightened the British public enough to support dramatic increases in naval expenditures. A wave of popular fiction that riveted the British public with vivid tales of German amphibious landings on the south coast of England stirred popular fears and helped to reenergize traditional British navalism.

The British were willing and able to meet the Germans ship for ship and even increase their edge, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In 1906, the British introduced the most powerful ship yet built, HMS Dreadnought. This revolutionary ship had modern nickel-steel alloy armor that was lighter than previous armors, enabling the ship’s powerful diesel engines to propel it at record speeds. Its 12-inch rotating turret guns could destroy any ship in the water without even getting within range of the guns on enemy warships. British opinion demanded even more dreadnoughts (as all ships of this type became known) than the admiralty had originally planned to build. Britain had already developed a “ two power standard” that pledged them to build a navy equivalent to the combined fleets of Europe’s next two largest powers. Dreadnought’s ability to render obsolete all other warships changed this calculus, but Britain’s desire to maintain its naval superiority did not change. Thus as Germany built dreadnoughts, Britain outbuilt them until the Royal Navy had a 20 to 13 advantage in dreadnoughts by 1914. The Royal Navy also enjoyed advantages of 102 to 41 in cruisers and 301 to 144 in destroyers.

Nevertheless, lavish spending on the Grand Fleet did not solve the problem of projecting power onto the European continent. As the French were fond of reminding their British allies, the Royal Navy would not be worth a single bayonet in a land war on the continent. The British therefore sought agreements with continental powers such as Russia and France, whose sizeable armies could balance their own naval strength and compensate for the small size of their professional army.

Because the Franco-British alliance lasted (albeit at times somewhat uneasily) through two world wars and a cold war it seems almost natural in retrospect, but its achievement was both surprising and unlikely. France and Britain were longstanding rivals. Although they had fought on the same side in the Crimean War (1854–1856), the experience had been less than pleasant, characterized by endemic Franco-British squabbling and a rather impolitic British decision to launch a major offensive on the fortieth anniversary of Waterloo. Great Britain had stood neutral in the Franco-Prussian War, angering many in France who had expected Britain to help mediate more lenient terms. Colonial rivalry further increased the tensions. French sentiment remained anti-British for many years after Fashoda, partly as a result of British conduct in the Boer War. Still, the advantages of working together and avoiding future Fashodas appeared manifest to both sides. In 1903 King Edward VII symbolized the new era of Franco-British amity with a high visibility state visit to Paris, where he was met by enthusiastic crowds wherever he went.

An alliance between Russia and Britain also had much to recommend it. Both nations were experiencing “ imperial overstretch” and looked to reduce their global commitments. Furthermore, as noted earlier, Russia’s tremendous army nicely complemented Britain’s powerful navy. The combination, many hoped, would deter Germany both on land and at sea. The Triple Entente also led to the resolution of Anglo-Russian disputes in Persia, allowing the British to reduce the amount of military resources needed to defend India. Russia could also remove a potential threat to their Central Asian interests and regroup and rebuild following their catastrophic defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of

1904–1905. Each side could now rule out the other as a potential rival and focus on new challenges.

It is an axiom of diplomacy that alliances hold together only in the face of a sufficient common threat. For the signatories of the Triple Entente, that threat was Germany. As a result of the Wars of German Unification, a new, powerful state existed in central Europe. Lightning victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870–1871) had united the German states and principalities under Prussian suzerainty. Relatively lenient treatment of Austria had left Germany not with a bitter foe, but an ally, solidified in the Austro-German alliance of 1879. In the years that followed, German industrial growth combined with an unusually influential military to remake the balance of power in Europe. This tremendous and rapid growth intoxicated German leaders, most notably Kaiser Wilhelm II, to seek even greater glories. Despite the powerful presence of the Royal Navy in the North Sea, a bitter and resentful France to the west, and a massive, if maladroit, Russian giant to the east, Germany dreamed of further conquests.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, who assumed the Hohenzollern throne in 1888, was the inheritor of the proud Prussian military tradition, but he lacked the skills necessary to follow in that tradition. He was blustery, indecisive, and committed to personal rule. He was also childishly envious of the power and wealth of his British cousins. The Kaiser’s decision to build his High Seas Fleet emerged partly from his own insecurity in relation to the British. His grandmother, England’s Queen Victoria, once described him as “ a hot-headed, conceited and wrong-headed young man.”³ It was an opinion that many in Europe’s ruling class shared. He dismissed Germany’s masterful diplomat and chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1890 and, as a result, his relationship with nations that Bismarck had carefully courted (most importantly Russia) suffered. French diplomats saw the Russo-German rupture and gladly stepped in to become Russia’s principal alliance partner. If the Kaiser thus complained that Germany was “ encircled,” it was largely by a noose of his own creation.

To slip that noose, the Kaiser set his expansionist aims on Morocco, where a major diplomatic coup might achieve spectacular results at home and abroad. In 1905 the Kaiser arrived in Tangier and spoke in favor of independence for Morocco. He had hoped to pressure Britain into backing off from its Fashoda era commitments to French control of the area and therefore show the Entente Cordiale to be worthless. With Russia absorbed by its war with Japan, the Kaiser hoped that his timing would isolate France from its other main ally as well. Moreover, by supporting Moroccan independence, he also hoped that Moroccan goodwill might help to establish a German naval base on the Atlantic Ocean, thus providing another outlet for the large navy that the Germans were then in the process of building. That navy needed an Atlantic port because of the ease with which the Royal Navy could bottle it up from the North Sea.

Social and domestic factors played a role in the Kaiser’s thinking as well. Germany’s left-leaning parties had been gaining significant ground (they became a majority in the Reichstag by 1912) and with that growth came opposition to a budgetary process that led to a 142 percent rise in defense spending between 1905 and 1914. The Kaiser and conservative groups inside Germany hoped that an international crisis could unite the nation behind the monarchy.⁴

Because of the Kaiser’s diplomatic clumsiness, German policy in Morocco produced almost the direct opposite result from what the Kaiser and his advisors had sought. Britain, France, and Russia presented a united front, rejecting American President Theodore Roosevelt’s offer of mediation and allowing France to continue its predominant role in Moroccan affairs. German bellicosity had frightened Britain enough to induce the first Anglo-French military staff talks in January, 1906. The following year, the British formally created the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) designed to facilitate the rapid deployment of an army onto the continent. Beginning in 1909 senior French and British officers visited one another’s staff colleges each year and attended annual maneuvers. While they shied away from direct joint planning, these visits allowed the leaders of the two armies to develop relationships that paid important dividends during World War I.

The Kaiser’s dispatch of a German warship to the Moroccan port of Agadir caused a second Moroccan crisis in 1911. Once again, France and Britain held firm together amidst widespread fears of war. The crisis revealed that the preparations made by France and Britain were inadequate should a similar future crisis spark war. While formal joint military planning was still anathema to both Britain and France, the two alliance partners took a significant step forward in 1912 when they signed a naval agreement that gave Great Britain the responsibility of securing the North Sea and France the responsibility of securing the Mediterranean. Britain could thus shift significant naval assets from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, increasing the already substantial force it had there and making any German forays out of their bases even more risky than before.

The two Moroccan crises had important ramifications on the domestic front as well. German failure to break the Entente only strengthened the power of the socialist opposition, threatening future military appropriations and forcing the Kaiser to find ways around his own legislature. By World War I he had managed to make the Reichstag virtually impotent in matters of military budgeting. He also came to rely on the advice of his generals much more than did any other European head of state. Germany was well on its way to the autocratic, military dictatorship that it had devolved to by the end of World War I.

Nationalism, alliances, and war plans

Nationalism, nineteenth-century Europe’s most important intellectual force, had many meanings in pre-war Europe and all of them contributed to the rising tensions of the period. Nationalism was a flexible ideology, useable by both the left and the right. All forms of nationalism argued for the distinct nature of a given group based on similarities such as religion, ethnicity, language, and history. Some Europeans, such as the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi and French Emperor Napoleon III, believed that Europe could not enter into a period of true peace and prosperity until each nation attained self-determination; thus (ironically enough) Napoleon III at first supported German unification. Garibaldi extended his ideology across the globe, fighting in South America and receiving acclaim from Abraham Lincoln, who offered him a command during the American Civil War.

Nationalists were most outraged by political boundaries within which fellow nationals were living under regimes that did not represent them. Thus Slavs opposed Austro-Hungarian rule over Slavic areas and sought to establish a Slavic state in southern Europe. Of course, this logic posed a mortal threat to the very existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, based as it was on a dizzying variety of mutually antagonistic ethnic groupings. Many senior Austro-Hungarian officials argued that a centrally controlled empire was the only way to prevent these groups from turning the Balkans into a perpetually war-torn area. To them, nationalism had to be stopped and Serbian support for a Slavic state had to be crushed.

Nationalism served as the most important cause of the two Balkan Wars, fought in 1912 and 1913. The First Balkan War in 1912–1913 pitted Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece (together called the Balkan League) against the Ottoman Empire. The Second Balkan War in 1913 pitted Bulgaria against its erstwhile allies. Building upon past glories and mythic histories, the nations of the Balkan League united to expel Ottoman forces from what they saw as their rightful territory. Bul...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• WARFARE AND SOCIETY IN EUROPE
• WARFARE AND HISTORY
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: FROM FASHODA TO SARAJEVO
• 2: WORLD WAR I, 1914–1917
• 3: WORLD WAR I, 1917–1919
• 4: THE INTERWAR YEARS, 1919–1939
• 5: WORLD WAR II, 1939–1942
• 6: WORLD WAR II, 1942–1945
• 7: WAR AND SOCIETY IN EUROPE, 1945–1989
• CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES