Was World War I unnecessary

Answer 1

This is a very complex question. In the sense that it may be argued that all wars are, to some extent, unnecessary, then Yes, WW1 was unnecessary. It was a stupid war fought for a stupid reason that went on for an irrational amount of time and killed an appalling number of people.

On the other hand, if you ask, “Was World War 1 inevitable,” I think it may be argued that the answer is also Yes, WW1 was inevitable in the circumstances. If Gavrilo Princip had not shot the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo in June, 1914, then some other spark, perhaps in some other year, would have set it off, because Europe was tangled in alliances and up to its eyebrows in weapons and militant people who wanted to use them. The Nationalists and the Militarists had been playing war games for more than 40 years. The time was overripe for a real war.

The European powers had been in an arms race ever since the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. In brief, the French tried to invade Prussia over the issue of the Prussian King William I’s refusal to apologize for trying to “sneak” a member of his family, the Hohenzollerns, onto the vacant throne of Spain. This action would have put German-born kings on the thrones of the countries on both eastern and western borders of France, a situation which the French could justifiably have some concern over, but the real cause of the French declaration of war was that [A] Wilhelm I refused to apologize and [B] his Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck, deliberately altered a transcript of the meeting between Wilhelm and the French ambassador to make the meeting sound more heated than it really was. The upshot was that Napoleon III of France, feeling insulted, declared war on Prussia in 1870 and got his tail handed to him by the Prussians, who captured him and his whole army at the Battle of Sedan. Once the Prussians had won the “glorious little war,” they declared William (Wilhelm) the First Emperor of the Second Reich (Empire) of a now-united Germany — the Germany of both WW1 and WW2.

France was forced to surrender after Paris itself was surrounded and shelled. France was pressed into a humiliating peace by the Germans, who had further outraged the French by crowning their new Kaiser in the Hall of Mirrors at the French Palace of Versailles. France lost the region of the Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans, which was a grave insult (again) to the French, who seethed for years and craved “revanche” (revenge).

Fast forward to 1914: Germany, united, had become a major player in European power politics, and by 1914, Wilhelm I’s grandson, Kaiser (Emperor) Wilhelm II, was a not-awfully-bright little tin soldier who loved to play at war. For example, he wanted a big navy to rival Great Britain’s because he was jealous of his cousin, King George. Moreover, he insisted that in all the German war games, the armies he “commanded” had to “win,” but the reality was much darker: Wilhelm II was surrounded by militarists who were very seriously planning the next inevitable war with the hereditary enemy, France. Notably, the Chief of the German General Staff, Alfred Graf (Count) von Schlieffen, had developed a plan which deliberately violated the stated neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg, with two German armies swinging like a hinged gate down through Belgium to invest Paris.

France, meanwhile, was also full of militarists who were busy planning the next inevitable war to regain the Alsace-Lorraine and French Honor, stained by their humiliating defeat by their hereditary enemies, the Germans, in 1871. They eventually developed Plan XVII, which essentially emphasized the French Army’s staying on the offensive, using the French fighting spirit (“élan”) instead of fortresses, which the French at least partly blamed for the loss of the Franco-Prussian war.

The French knew, however, that they could not win single handedly against the Germans, so they had a treaty with the English that if the Germans violated Belgium the English would come in on the French side. The Austrians, meanwhile, had a treaty with the Germans that if the Austrians got into it with the Russians the Germans would come in on the Austrian Side. The Russians had a treaty with the Serbians that if the Austrians or the Germans got into it with the Serbians, the Russians would come in on the Serbian side. After some 40 years of uneasy peace, all the European states, big and small, were in some way linked together like a group of mountain climbers roped together on the edge of a crevasse: if one went over, he would tend to pull all the rest in with him.

Which is exactly what happened. On June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Princip was a member of an anti-Austrian student society. The Austrians demanded that the Serbs arrest and punish all the members of the society, which the Serbs were not quick enough to do, so the Austrians declared war on Serbia. The first man had fallen into the crevasse. The Russians had to mobilize against Austria because they had a treaty to protect the Serbs. Another man down the crevasse. Then the Germans had to declare war on the Russians because they were obligated by treaty with the Austrians, and so on, one after another the European states plunged into the crevasse of what became WW1.

Thus, WW1 was both unnecessary and inevitable. The Schlieffen plan almost succeeded in investing Paris again, just as in 1871, but was stopped at the last minute by the Miracle of the Marne, in which Parisian taxicabs were actually used to haul fresh French troops, five to a cab, to the front. The original French Plan XVII against the German center in the Alsace-Lorraine was a dismal failure, but by finally stopping the Germans on the Marne, the French and their British allies insured that the ensuing 475 miles of trenches on the Western front would mean four years of stalemate, with tens of thousands of men dying to take and retake a few yards of shell shocked ground again and again and again. Picture two bull elk with their antlers locked, in mortal combat, until both die. Ultimately, though, the Americans were dragged in on the Allied side and we tipped the balance against the Central Powers, (primarily Germany, Austria and Turkey).

The upshot of that was the extremely, bitterly punitive-against-the-Germans Treaty of Versailles, which played a leading role just 20 years later in a resurgent Germany, now under Nazi Dictatorship, trying to take over the world. But that’s another story. CGH.