Redpill me on WW I

Complete Veeky Forums newbie here,

I see a lot of posts here claiming that the WW I is much more fascinating than the second one, but I never found the appeal.

I am familiar with the "history class perspective" (e.g. how it started, who fought whom, the aftermath) but I fail to see the interesting part in comparison to the WW II, which despite being pretty straight-forward, was full of captivating characters, strong ideologies and bizzare situations.

If you can't be bothered to paint the whole picture, at least give me the reason you find it so entertaining, I am sure I can educate myself from there.

Beware of German revisionists, they'll try to pin the war on anyone else.

it was russia's fault mostly. then germany.

Russia screwed over austria by not giving her the land (bosnia) that had been promised by russia after the russo-turkish war. Austria took bosnia anyways, as per the agreement, which created huge tensions. Eventually russia funded a coup in serbia which drastically altered the balance in the balkan states. Serbia used to be neutral/ pro austria. After the coup it was extremely pro russia and pro pan slavic. arch duke Ferdinand was treying to heal the wounds by being extremely liberal to the slavic nations, but was murdered anyways by a orginization that wasnt condemned by russia or even serbia.

Here's a big redpill:

The main Allied faction was France, not Britain
France stopped the Germans alone in 1914 and kept holding the Western Front alone until late 1916 when Brits finally got their shit together and began sending enough troops to be relevant
And even then, France was still the leading nation, Foch was the allied commander in chief and Germany gave its surrender to France

So next time, instead of strengthening the revisionist meme that have overrated britbongs as the symbol of WW1 (looking at you BF1), post a pic of French or German troops instead

I feel like my posts influenced your view of the subject, tho i don't agree with you completely. As you're the only other user i've seen mention Russian covert involvement.

Welcome to the bandwagon you cunt punting battlefield 1 player.

ive never avtually seen other anons discuss the slavic power vacuum problem that was occuring when the ottoman empire was falling, it was mostly something i learned from reading and discussing with historians. It is always understated how brutal the anti-Austrian propaganda was in russia and the slavic states.

The interesting part is that it pretty much brutally initiated Europe into the modern world. Warfare underwent drastic change, the map of the Europe and the Middle East was completely redrawn and there was an indelible scar left in the minds of Europeans when it came to war. For example, Britain and France lost more young men in the first world war than the second and (although I can't speak for France) if you mention the 'Great War' in Britain, people will immediately think WW1. Think of its effects on the major powers:

>Austria-Hungary dismantled
>Russia underwent a revolution
>Germany left in ruins
>Italy left seething with resentment
>French economy and industry devastated by war as well as a severe psychological effect
>Britain gains more territory but is weakened and exhausted
>US announces itself as a player in world affairs
>Ottoman Empire crumbled, creating a shit storm in the Middle East

See how relevant just about all of those consequences are for the causes of WW2 and the post-war world?

Neither was fascinating, both were horrible affairs. The Great War was more political, uncertain and looked unlikely to be so descructive at the time.

The most interesting part of WWI wasn't written down.

We don't know what happened in the Battle of the Frontier. We just don't. Even the local commanders didn't understand it, and most of them died before they could properly record it.

WWII can be understood as rogue states versus the World Order.

WWI was definitely rival World Orders fighting each other.

>Here's a big redpill
Not to anyone that's not British

The Karadjordjevic were pro Russian, the Obrenovic somewhat pro Austrian (rather they were calculating).
Apis who lead the may coup, and was later the leader of the black hand was reportedly seen meeting with Russian officials often (especially the Russian military attache).
His sudden trial and execution were also suspiciously close to the Russian provisional government taking power (which leads me to assume that people who backed him were gone when the Russian imperial government lost control).
However from the point of view of the Serbian citizens, the last Obrenovic king was a spoiled, retarded, tyrannical brat with parental issues, while the king that came to power was a war veteran (who fought in the initial bosnian revolt of 1875, and in the Franco-Prussian war) and avid fan of democracy, France, John Stuart Mill etc.
Juxtapose that with a brat who performed 3 coups just because he felt like it, married his mom's divorcee hand maiden, and tried to deport his mom in a bag when his dad came to visit.

>Austria-Hungary, Ottoman empire go bye bye, Middle East has power vacuum
>France, UK, Germany all exhausted from war
>Italy is basically butthurt and feels shafted after Versailles is put into effect, seeds of WWII in general planted
>US begins meteoric rise to world player status, first time a New World country could compete with the old power of the Old World, shock to Euros in general. Subtle butthurt
>Russia goes red, begin rise to rebuild to world power status

I can't understand which one is world order and which ones are rouge states. Please state.

The capitalist, or Anglo-American, or Western, world order and the communist, Russian, proto-world order allied to take down some rogue states.

If Germany or Japan had succeeded, they would still have to deal with the World Order that won WWI, the Western World Order that they were fighting. Germany had a shot at taking down the communists, and if they had, they'd take their place as a rival World Order in the Cold War. Japan may have gone Western, or allied with Germany, who knows.

>France stopped the Germans alone in 1914
This isn't really true. British actions at the Battle of Mons were vital for delaying the German advance, allowing the French time to regroup. The British also played a critical role in exploiting the gap in the German lines at the battle of the Marne.

Basicly between 1914 and 1918 war has changed on multiple levels. By 1914 you had new kinds of weapons but pretty outdated tactics, so lots of soldiers found their death before the western front turned into a stale "deadlock", since no breakthrough could be capitalized on, mainly due to lack of mobility and communication. So during the next years everyone tried to figure out the best strategy to make the war mobile again and decide the war, most of which led to huge fuckups, especially the french. 1918 Germany tried one final offensive with advanced stormtrooper and artillery tactics and managed to gain some ground. The allies meanwhile pushed ressources into tanks and pushed the tired germans back. Germany learned from this defeat and combined their attack tactics with the new tanks, airplanes and artillery, which resulted in the combined arms warfare which in turn was brought good results in the form of the "Blitzkrieg".

The evolution of war was astonishing:

During first week people thought it was still the Napoleonic era and they matched into enemy machine guns in colourful uniforms

A few years later - focus on artillery, appearance of chemical weapons, landships. Autonomous soldier squads like German "Stormtroopers" and Italian "Arditi".
War quickly shaped into our modern definition during the First World War.

Ww1 definitely inspired the most antiwar sentiment ever. Even thought ww2 contained more atrocities, that almost justified it, or at least fighting the nazis. After ww1 people saw whole generations dead and had no idea what they died for. Go watch all quiet on the western front, you can find it for free online. You get the sense of how soul crushing ww1 was for the world

First were less than 100,000 at the First Marne, while France and Germany both fielded over the million
They didn't do anything worth of note, Brits just love to exeggerate the deeds of the BEF in 1914 to compensate the patheticness of their numbers

Was WW1 the most pointless war ever?

Yes, but only because traitorous liberals allowed the Germans to rise again.

Currently taking a class on the military history of the two world wars. My professor told us that its because the Germans surrendered in ww1 on French soil, and the entente never actually got into germany, that allowed the stab in the back myth to proliferate and the nazis to rise

Don't worry, this thread will be over by Christmas.

Well yeah. Imagine your country hadn't even been invaded. You're just a soldier, you haven't even been pushed back yet and you think you're just waiting or the next offensive or something. All of a sudden you've lost, and that's it. Your country is paying over money, there are restrictions and you have land taken from you. And to make it all the worse now communists are rising up.

Or say you're a German civilian. Now we know they were starving like all hell. But it's not like World War 2 where they had these massive bombing campaigns devastating your town, your city or having your village blown up by artillery. You never had a foreign soldier in your soil, you didn't have to relocate to avoid the advancing army.

Other than keeping up the production, and having way less food life wasn't much so like that of a loser.

there have been a ton of pointless wars but none as devastating as ww1

not entierly relevant but I thought I would share this

im reading Orwells book "The Road to Wigan Pier" which is honestly extremely harrowing and interesting, I highly recommend it, anyways

Orwell mentions in the 2nd segment of the book (which is very different from the first which is his reporting) that when he used to walk through London streets he was put off the normal people, they were weak, ugly, of bad health, and he asked himself how people got like this.

Then he remembered the war, i just found the page in the book

>"puny limbs, sickly faces, under the weeping London Sky! Hardly a well-built man or a decent-looking woman, and not a fresh complexion anywhere.....even the guards its seemed to me...were not what they used to be. Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and mustaches like the wings of an eagle who strode across my childhood's gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud.

>If the English Physique has declined, this is in no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had anytime to breed.

i cant imagine that, seeing all of the best men, and then they just disappear far away from home

>Germany in ruins
We have only lost people and territory, but we were not in ruins

This reminds me of the theory that WW1 was a war between the anglo-american (or anglo-saxon) bourgeoisie and the german one. They wanted to settle who was going to be the ultimate ruler of the world. Germans lost and got rekt. And even after WW2, and all of the Cold War chaos we still live in an anglo-american-bourgeoisie dream.

This can be stated as an example for the BREXIT. Damn brits don't want to be dictated by the powerfull german economy.
It sounds good and odds are... it is mostly true.

>which despite being pretty straight-forward, was full of captivating characters, strong ideologies and bizzare situations.

Because it was the war which mixed both old-world zerg-like tactics, with the onset of modern technology.

It was the war which changed every other war afterwards.

We haven't seen a war on the scale of what they used to be before WWI, thanks to WWI, if that makes sense.

Also the war which they saw the usefulness of technology and it's ability to kill people? Shifted from a man-power style warfare to a technological one.

I feel bad for the elephant's ears

Except Britain was a secondary player
WW1 was primarily a war between Germany and France/Russia

Germany's fault.

>hurr let me create this political web of alliances so I can manipulate it and slowly dominate Europe
>oh shit we war now

>be Germany pre1914
>surrounded by france and Russia
>want to btfo england
>have option of building up an overseas empire and growing economically through trade
>decide to attempt to fight a war on 2 fronts with retard Austrians and backwards turks instead

Master race my ass

Got a question
What happened with France between WWI and WWII that made them go from such a valiant country fighting to the nail and tooth for their territory into such bend over nation in WWII?

Intense political turmoil at home. Too distracted by internal politics to worry about foreign affairs in the crucial time when they should have been stopping the rise of hitler/rearming. Also no one thought that the Germans could move that fast, through the black forest no less, with their tanks, not even the germans

Ww1 decimated the french men more tha any other Great power. That with low birth rate at the time made the government fearful of war, and then Maginot happened. A retard who thought ww2 would be ww1.2.
This plus how the french political parties were fragmented meant an impossible disadvantage against one race, one party, one people Germany which had a Solid population advantage.

Every thing can be summed as

"Germany started it"

there.

>have option of building up an overseas empire and growing economically through trade

I know Veeky Forumstorians are retarded but what the fuck made you think this at all? Germany got any land it could that wasn't already owned everyone else.

>it was russia's fault mostly. then germany.

Whoa, I can't believe you said that and this entire board didn't shit on you for believing Germany isn't 99.99999999999% responsible for everything that happened.

Bravo!

economic and political ruin fampai

Ok true

>le pointless war meme

Not any more pointless than any other war. Funny how WWII was MANY times more destructive when it comes to both lives and property and yet it's always depicted in a "warm fuzzy feeling" kind of way whereas WWI invatriably gets the "muh grim pointless conflict" treatment.

>proportionally more Jews fought for Germany than any other religion/ethnicity and Jews were prominently involved in parts of the war effort, like the development of chemical weapons
>100 years later people still blame them for Germany's downfall

France and Russia were certainly the most important in the European land war but Britain's navy was a deciding factor in the outcome of the war

The whole reason it became a world war is because there was more than 1 "web of alliances"

Though Wilhelm's clumsy diplomacy certainly helped set Europe up for such a conflict.

Thinking that time was on Germany's side reveals just how uninformed you are.

The German high command pushed for a war as soon as reasonably possible to pre-emptively cripple Russia. Russia was rapidly modernising and improving its infrastructure and had the Germans sat and waited they would have, in the event of a later war, been even more fucked than they already were historically.

In Wilhelm's perception, true or not, there was a struggle for Germany's existence and the French, Russians and especially the Brits were out to get him. Waiting would be idiotic in that situation.

>it was russia's fault mostly. then germany.
haha get fucked

>russia is meddling with austria
>BETTER INVADE BELGIUM AND FRANCE AND BRING BRITAIN INTO THE WAR
germans
not even once

>During first week people thought it was still the Napoleonic era
the character limit is not large enough to fit how many "NO"s it would take to properly reply to you

>be at war with giant country that I calculate will take ages to defeat
>they have an ally in my back that I calculate that I could take out by christmas
What should I do?

Do you know how the "web of alliances" which brought France and Russia (and later Britain) came to existence?

Because of the "fantastic" German diplomacy. They literally pushed the above countries - who had been rivals only a short while ago! - together. The German belligerence, meddling in foreign affairs, lack of interest in maintaining good relations (they literally refused to be on good terms with Russia) is what caused this "mythical web of alliances" to exist in the first place. They didn't just spring up overnight with everyone suddenly deciding to bully the Germans. It was chiefly the Germans' own doing that the power blocks before WW1 had formed the way they had.

It is literally like in that four panel comic with a guy riding a bike and sticks a piece of wood through one of his wheels.

>Do you know how the "web of alliances" which brought France and Russia (and later Britain) came to existence?
Did you even read the second line of the post you're replying to?

>If you can't be bothered to paint the whole picture, at least give me the reason you find it so entertaining, I am sure I can educate myself from there.
I like it because it's overlooked and Pop History is FILLED with absolute bullshit regarding it.

WW1 saw combined arms warfare, infantry small unit tactics, operational art, total war... all things ascribed to ww2 mostly. But ww1 had done them first.

>implying they wouldn't have entered the war anyways