Hew Strachan, The First World War

The more I write - mostly on the job, but also in blogs and for my own use - the more I'm convinced that intelligent brevity is the paramount quality of good writing. I'm especially impressed, then, by academic works which are brief, pointed, and still useful, such as Hew Strachan's recent book, The First World War.

Really a precis of a much bigger (three-volume) work on the Great War, The First World War is an exceptionally concise and informative overview of the entire war. With clean prose, Strachan makes two main points about the war. First, the 1914-1918 conflict, like its successor twenty-one years later, was a truly global struggle which involved large-scale warfare in Asia, Africa, and on the high seas, as well as across Europe, from Russia to Italy to France. Strachan is especially effective at showing how the war in Africa epitomized the larger war, for it was there that the powers' colonial ambitions were most nakedly and brutally displayed. Though he rarely delves into "drums & trumpets" military history, Strachan does effectively use tactical accounts of battles and campaigns to illustrate his themes. His examination of the Allies' invasion at Gallipoli stands out, serving not only to educate the reader about that disastrous campaign but about the internal state of the waning Ottoman Empire - in whose domains, Strachan shows, the Germans attempted to incite jihad against Britain, France, and Russia!

Strachan's second argument is that, despite postwar conclusions to the contrary, the Great War was far from meaningless, either at the time or afterwards. Certainly, millions died who needn't have perished if the powers had been able to either avert the war or end it before November 1918, but that counterfactual does not obscure the fact that all of the major belligerents felt, from 1914 through the Armistice (and afterward, all the way to Versailles) that the war would and should determine key aspects of the European and world situation: Germany's continental role, the shape of global colonialism, the strength of political and economic liberalism, and so forth. The poetic-tragic interpretation of the war as a meaningless waste of life and treasure, Strachan shows, was a minority view during the war and only arose afterwards when the peace proved more difficult and, in some ways, harsh than the war itself.

Beyond those two argumentative strengths, the book is worthwhile in numerous other ways. More adeptly than many military historians, Strachan explains the political economy of the main combatants' home fronts, especially relating to industrial production. He demonstrates that a contested and fuzzy kind of liberalism united the main Allies. He's got a novelist's eye for the eerie detail - like the fact that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on their wedding anniversary. And, stunningly, Strachan includes a number of rare color photographs from the war years. All in all, this is an exceptionally good history which merits the attention of virtually anyone interested in the history of the twentieth century broadly, or in military or political history more specifically.