On the night of the 13th of August 1961 the Government of East Germany began to build the Wall that divided Berlin isolating its Western part within the Communist Eastern block.In 1962, Barbara Tuchman published her Guns of August and the following year it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.As many years separate Tuchman’s book from the events she discusses as years separate us from the time its publication: about half a century.Those two lots of five decades each may explain two different reactions. On the one hand Tuchman’s choosing as her premise the accountability of Germany and her (sole?) responsibility for the horror of the war, and on the other hand our wider questioning and possibly a more skeptical reception of her views. The stereotypical view of the Germans as supremely efficient and dangerously single-minded is well alive in Tuchman’s interpretation when she wrote her account during the Cold War. This coined idea is still alive but in a different mode. Currently it induces us to think that thank god we have Merkel (originally from the communist Germany) to steer Europe democratically through its (capitalistic) mess, and alleviates us when having to accept Germany winning the World Cup for the fourth time this year. Our understanding of that war has also moved away from focusing on one-sided culpabilities.Tuchman begins her book with the stages that led to the outbreak of the war concentrating on the four great powers only: UK, Germany, France and Russia. Even Austria and the Balkan troublesome maze are just perfunctorily mentioned. For a broader look at the geographic extension of the conflict we have to look elsewhere. The bulk of her history is what the title says, the combat that took place at the very beginning of the war, starting with the last week of July and ending with the first of September of 1914.In that she does an excellent job. She dissects the period spelling out the accumulation of decisions, many mistaken, which clumsily succeeded each other during those dreadful days. She focuses on three arenas: the Eastern and Western Fronts, and the Mediterranean. After explaining very well two of the major military strategies, the Schlieffen Plan for both the Eastern and Western fronts and the Plan XVII--with all their quirks and twists as well as the aberrations in the personalities of those who designed them--, she proceeds to show how they failed. Her chapters on the invasion of Belgium and northern France are unforgettable. The brutality of the German armies in the way they treated the civilians and the cities, leaving in our memories the unforgivable destruction of Louvain and its treasures, as well as the emblematic Reims cathedral in ruins, is the strongest support she could use for postulating Germany as the nation responsible for the war.She devotes less attention to the Eastern front. She focuses on what has been called the Battle of Tannenberg , and in her account it serves mostly to prove how the Schlieffen plan had a faulty design. To support the Eastern front the Western was too quickly weakened.She closes in with the Battle of Marne and she again proves to be an engaging narrator. Building up tension with the approach to Paris she provides a felicitous ending to that episode with the striking story of the heroic taxi drivers transferring the men to the front.The section I found most instructive was the one devoted to the Mediterranean. She creates great suspense in the way she narrates the persecution of the German battle cruiser Goeben by the various ships of the Allies. The British blundered; they did not realize the direction the Goeben was pursuing until it was too late. When the German cruiser succeeded in its race and reached the Dardanelles, this prompted the Ottoman Empire, until then neutral, to side with the Central Powers. The result was that Russia was cut-off from her access to the Mediterranean ports and her trade was blocked. Her exports/imports dropped by 98/95% respectively paving the way for the continuing growth of domestic troubles until three years later their revolution exploded.This episode has an additional interest. In its chapter one can read: That morning there arrived at Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester’s action against the Goeben and Breslau. Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau. One of those three children was Barbara Wertheim (later Tuchman).Apart from the Pulitzer this book is exceptional because it played a determinant role. Margaret MacMillan has underlined in one of her recent interviews that John F. Kennedy read it during the time when he had to deal with the Cuban missile crisis, and it made him much more aware of the difficulty of controlling when the unexpected happens, so that he made everyone else in his Cabinet and his top military leaders read the book.Tuchman’s tendency to rely too much on national stereotypes, which detracts from the credibility of her research and interpretation, is thereby compensated by the role her analysis played in later events. And to use another cliché, books that do change people’s lives, have to have their own special place in our libraries.
Phew, this was a difficult book to digest in the audiobook format. Neither is it easy to digest in a paper book format. It is dense. It is detailed. Names and places and battles are thrown at you in rapid succession. You have to remember who is who, which corps is fighting where and its number, the title of each commander and more. You do not have time to stop and think and recall what was told to you minutes/pages or even hours/chapters before. You need more than a detailed map because you don’t have much time to spend looking at that map. What you need most of all is a good memory, a good knowledge of history and geographic knowledge before you even pick up the book. OR you can read this book to begin learning and accept that there will be parts that go over your head. That is what I did, and I enjoyed much of it, but I also spent time exasperated since there were sentences I had to think about and ponder before I understood their implications. I had to rewind and write notes and search on the internet.Does this mean I regret reading it? My response is emphatically no.Much of the book is set in Belgium and France. (It also covers the Eastern Prussian Front.) I have been to many of the towns, cities, citadels, squares, forests and rivers named. Knowing the history of what happened where I have walked is special to me. I am a bit unsure if it would mean as much to one who has not been there. If you have been in the Ardennes you immediately understand the difficulty of moving artillery around there. Having walked in Leuven, Dinant, Mons, Charleroi and Namur, to name a smattering, when you hear of the burning and sacking and murder of hostages, you more intimately understand. I believe my own experiences, rather than the writing made the events real. It is important to know that this book is focused primarily on the military battles of the first month of the war. Why? Because what happened then set the course for the four years that followed. You might as well be told that the primary focus is military because that will not appeal to all. The start of World War One is all about the idiosyncrasies of generals. It is about a lack of communication. It is about men who have decided on a plan and from that they will not budge.The narration by John Lee was fine, but he does not speak slowly and that might have made things a bit easier. Some say he speaks with a Scottish dialect. That is fine by me!I will tell you why I liked this book. I now have the basics for how the war started. I appreciate knowing what has happened to the people living around me here in Belgium; I understand them better. I understand why they so quickly capitulated in the Second World War. Today there is so much squabbling going on between the Flemish and the French people of Belgium. It was wonderful to see how in the First World War they fought united, as one people, for their independence and very existence. I needed to learn of this.
What do You think about The Guns Of August (2004)?
I've been reading a fair bit about dubya dubya 2 recently but my knowledge of dubya dubya 1 consists of what I dimly recollect from school. That is: arms race, Franz Ferdinand, something something, the Somme, gas gas quick boys, Versailles. I also remember visiting the massive marble monument the Canadians built at Vimy ridge. The 21 years separating 1918 and 1939 are not a great length of time. There's something to be said for the thesis that the two world wars should be understood as one extended conflict with a brief breather in the middle. Hitler's invasion of France in 1940 bears more than a passing resemblance to the Schlieffen plan. With the fall of three major empires: the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian, the first world war probably has a greater claim than the second to the title of "the defining event of the twentieth century". Tuchman is gifted at spinning a narrative and at vividly describing the key personalities. The book is extremely readable, even rollicking. On the other hand she has a fetishistic obsession with the minutiae of troop movements where I would be more interested in overarching and underlying socio-political themes. There's relatively little here about nationalism and imperialism, domestic politics or popular opinion of the war. Practically all we get on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is Bismarck's prescient quip that the Great War would be kicked off by "some damn foolish thing in the Balkans".As an easy introduction for someone who knows little about the first world war, it's excellent. For more depth and substance there are doubtless other places to look (I'll take recommendations).
—howl of minerva
I've read some books on WW II recently, and realized I don't know much about WW I - so decided to remedy that with this Pulitzer Prize winner, considered by many to be one of the best histories ever written. It's a broad and comprehensive treatment of the month preceding the start of the conflict, and the first month of the war itself. Listening to the audiobook made everything seem a bit sterile and unimaginative and complicated at first, but it picked up as I got more into it. I think this is another example of a book that's harder to listen to than to read.I've always known that the war started when the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian. But this book lays out the complexities of that event and the international relationships that came into play as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and other countries were drawn in by their alliances. It's a remarkable overview of the people who made decisions, the political climates and motivated them, the military leaders who directed the combat, the methodologies of trench warfare and combat techniques, and the transitions that turned what everyone expected to be a brief conflict into a long and deadly war.
—David
4 to 4.5 stars.Thanks to Barbara, I now know more about the first month of World War I than all my previous half-century of accumulated, absorbed knowledge. Not only do I know more, but I understand the how. How Europe ended up in a terrible stalemate and war of attrition that lasted four more years. The why will have to wait until I can read her other history The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. On August 23rd, I attended a discussion of The Guns of August sponsored by the Kansas City Public Library, the Kansas City Star's FYI Book Club and hosted at the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial. There were many attendees from all over the Kansas City metro area and we attempted to stay focused on Tuchman's novel, not straying to far before or after. A great hour of discussion on an excellently researched and composed history of the outbreak of the Great War. Immediately prior to the discussion, we were escorted through part of the museum by Senior Curator Doran Cart, who showed us, up close and personal, some of the actual guns (7.5 to 15 cms from Germany, France and Great Britain) in use during August 1914. For more comments and photos, read the rest of my review here at my blog. I will update this review as I attend various events and discussions over the next two months as part of the Great War Great Read program (see link below for more details). Read as part of the Great War | Great Read program sponsored by the Kansas City Public Library in August 2014.
—Jon
