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World War I: Central Powers

Guide covering World War I, including USA's involvement, allied powers, causes of the war, and trench warefare.

Central Powers

Perspectives

The Schlieffen Plan

With the creation of the Franco-Russian Alliance and the failure of the Reinsurance Treaty in the late nineteenth century, Germany needed a strategy for fighting a two-front war. In response, Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen produced a study that represented the apex of modern military planning. His Memorandum for a War against France, which incorporated a mechanized cavalry as well as new technologies in weaponry, advocated that Germany concentrate its field army to the west and annihilate the French army within a few weeks. For generations, historians have considered Schlieffen's writings to be the foundation of Germany's military strategy in World War I and have hotly debated the reasons why the plan, as executed, failed. In this important volume, international scholars reassess Schlieffen's work for the first time in decades, offering new insights into the renowned general's impact not only on World War I but also on nearly a century of military historiography. The contributors draw on newly available source materials from European and Russian archives to demonstrate both the significance of the Schlieffen Plan and its deficiencies. They examine the operational planning of relevant European states and provide a broad, comparative historical context that other studies lack. Featuring fold-out maps and abstracts of the original German deployment plans as they evolved from 1893 to 1914, this rigorous reassessment vividly illustrates how failures in statecraft as well as military planning led to the tragedy of the First World War.

The Sleepwalkers

One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I. Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict. Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart.

Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler

In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, Comrades Betrayed forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.

The Neglected War

In the summer of 1914 Germany's Pacific colonies were a quiet backwater of its empire. But the shots of Sarajevo shattered the Pacific as well as Europe. Within weeks of the outbreak of World war I Western Samoa - German territory to be taken in the war - New Guinea, and the Micronesian lands, were occupied by Australian, New Zealand, and Japanese forces. Current historiography claims that World War I made little difference to the indigenous populations of the Pacific and that this change in colonial masters had little effect on those they ruled. The Neglected War challenges this interpretation. World War I and its aftermath, Hermann Hiery claims, had a tremendous effect on the Pacific Islands, Hiery details the policies pursued by Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, showing how each viewed and treated the indigenous populations. Administered by military officers with little civil oversight, the new colonial regimes employed the mandates they had received at the Paris Peace Conference with impunity. Hiery's scrupulous review of the evidence, gathered from largely unknown primary sources, has uncovered a story of masquerades and coverups, negligence and duplicity, leading in some cases to full blown atrocities. Most of all, he tells the story of Pacific Islanders ,how they coped with the dramatic changes brought about by the war, and how they tried to influence its consequences. Many Islanders were fully aware that their political destiny was to be redefined after the war, and a few even saw it as an opportunity to achieve independence. This is also the story of their failure. Behind the evidence gathered here lie fundamental questions. How important are the differences in the nature of particular colonial regimes, and what effect do such differences have on indigenous peoples? How do indigenous peoples interpret disparities in colonial rule? This revisionist work addresses these issues while shedding light on a crucial time in the history of the Pacific.