In 1998 British historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book called "The Pity of War" in this book he claims that there are 13...

Daily reminder Britain's troops were all professional and were the decisive factor on the western front.

>muh 3 million school teachers and street weepers we gave guns

rofl

He sounds like the lindybeige of the 90s. those are a lot of claims so Im sure at least some are correct

Reminder that at the Marne, all the BEF did was holding a small part of the line while helped by 150,000 French (more than twice the BEF numbers) and all this while 900,000 other French troops were doing decisive stuff all over the place so the battle could be won

Reminder that despite being a professional force, the BEF never particularly shone and got utterly destroyed within a year (despite only being sent fighting in tame areas by the French due to their irrelevant numbers)

>That British foreign policy was driven by legitimate fears of Germany
>That the pre-1914 arms race was consuming ever larger portions of national budgets at an unsustainable rate
>That World War I was, as Fritz Fischer claimed, a war of aggression on the part of Germany that necessitated British involvement to stop Germany from conquering Europe

>That propaganda was successful in making men wish to fight
>That most soldiers hated fighting in the war

Wew, you really need to be a historian to nail these points. Truly an amazing expert.

Reminder that France would have lost at the Marne without Britain, reminder Britain starved nearly half a million German civilians to death, reminder Britain pretty much solo beat the Ottomans at the same time as beating the Germans.

>MUH MUH MUH 1915 were nothing of note happened

>that France would have lost at the Marne without Britain,
>reminder Britain pretty much solo beat the Ottomans at the same time as beating the Germans.
How can the British be so bare of humanity to rob its French and Russian allies of their achievements?

>reminder Britain starved nearly half a million German civilians to death,
How precisely were the French going to do that when the negotiations between France and Britain had assigned only the British of patrolling the North sea, and only the French the Meditarrenean sea. The British congratulate themselves for their blockade a whole heap, and sneer at the French for not having contributed there, but they know to forget conveniently that they'd agreed with the French that they would be tasked with the Mediterrenean.

>Reminder that France would have lost at the Marne
Reminder that this has already been proven wrong itt
The BEF made up for 5% of allied troops at the First Marne and wasnt decisive in any way

>reminder Britain starved nearly half a million German civilians to death
Reminder that the blockade only started to matter by late 1917 when Germany had exhausted its ressources fighting France and Russia

>reminder Britain pretty much solo beat the Ottomans at the same time as beating the Germans.
Reminder that the Ottoman theater was irrelevant as shit, and that even there Russia did most of the job

>That most soldiers hated fighting in the war
Most soldier accounts of the war show enjoyment of the conflict overall. All Quiet on the Western Front is from a vocal minority.

shut the actual fuck up you fucking faggots

stop trying to put the other down and accept ww1 was a combined effort

Of course I will, but when the British also acknowledge that they were only of the facets of a trio of a nations, rather than trying to also hoard the glory for themselves.

They were the weakest facet btw

>inb4 "anecdotal evidence" but
Did you never ask to know from your grandmother what her grandfather would've thought of the war?

They were much stronger than Russia

After 1917, maybe

They lost around 75% of the same number of casualties as France did. More if you include colonies. They imposed the devastating naval blockade on Germany, and kicked the shit out of the turks in the Levant and Mesopotamia, as well as providing huge amounts of food and guns for Russia.

meant to reply to

Wrong Britain was entirely irrelevant. They might as well have just stayed out of the war.

Why did you tag me?

My great grandfather fought in it. I've read some of his writings and I was passed down the Browning Auto-5 that he used to kill Krauts during the Hundred Days. Either way, that's irrelevant. All Quiet on the Western Front and the like are from a vocal minority. This isn't really up for debate as we have the journals, letters, books, etc. to corroborate that. Fucking Ernst Junger got injured like, what, 7 times? He loved the war.

Nice argument.

Accident.

>Browning Auto-5
Belgian or American?
Again, I don't mean to be rude, but there'll be an enormous in how I treasure the opinions of your grandfather depending on whether he was Belgian or American.

>This isn't really up for debate as we have the journals, letters, books, etc. to corroborate that.
Interesting but wouldn't have the soldiers been dishonest to be approved by the censors, and have quietened the fears of their family?

>but there'll be an enormous in how I treasure the opinions of your grandfather depending on whether he was Belgian or American
The Belgian military didn't use the Auto-5, so take a guess. You're the one who brought up anecdotal shit in the first place, so I'm not sure why it fully matters.

>but wouldn't have the soldiers been dishonest to be approved by the censors
>the censors
Censors can't stop post-war literature, though it was drowned out by media narratives (understandably desu). To say that the soldiers hated the war is demonstrably false. To say the countries overall hated the war is true. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The French revisionism in the board it's too extreme

>muh French boogeyman!!!

Reminder that not everyone who likes France is French
Pic related

>You're the one who brought up anecdotal shit
True, and I apologize for now drowning our little argument in my petty accusations, but can't you see why I wouldn't appreciate the views from someone who'd only lived the Hundred days as much as those from another who'd endured the entire trench-like state which is especially what people mourn nowadays. Also, Auto-5s were manufactured in Liège to my knowledge, and were brought to battle by the Belgians.

>Censors can't stop post-war literature,
Right, I'm again defeated, but can you point me to any litterature that celebrates the war, and isn't Junger's work? In France, the most esteemed veteran author is Céline, and he satirizes the war for its horror and randomness, then Sassoon and Owen in Britain who mourn all the horror of the war, and Hemingway for the US who vocalizes hating the war all throughout his book.

>To say that the soldiers hated the war is demonstrably false.
But why do we always bring up France and Britain performed especially poorly by the start of WWI as its soldiers remained traumatized from the idea of being brought back to fight the Germans?

What?

>all the butthurt brits

He's right. People here give credit to France for literally everything.

There have been unironic 'France Worship' Threads. if that does not spell bias to you I don't know what will.

butthurt wehraboo detected

Nice non argument.

>bias
Eh, there might be that pervading the board, though more than not, that is rooted in peeps here broadening their insights from what they're taught at school ("le France lose wars xd"), and then trying to be trying to be contrarian against it, obviously in clear retaliation to sites such as 9gag or reddit where Germans regularly have their dicked sucked.

Also France has its plethora of things to inspire awe from users, but I agree that some threads here exaggerate that a bit too far.

Rupert Brooke, von Lettow-Vorbeck, Alvin York, Julian Grenfell. What you have to realize is that the famous anti-war writers were injured and putting out works in newspapers before the war was even over. They were more famous because they issued a work that the public already assumed to be true (and didn't want to hear otherwise) before the people who deemed otherwise got a chance to. The All Quiet on the Western Front mentality was cemented before many works to the contrary could be submitted. You see the same Winter Soldier myth come to the U.S. during Vietnam.

I don't mind people liking France. it's a great country.

What they need to stop doing is attacking England and Germany with it. All 3 countries have achieved great things.

>Ferguson claims Germany was Europe's most anti-militarist country
Lol

>le attack a man and not his argument memay
also, trench warfare WAS hell. It mightn't be as bad as it's made out to be, but it was in any no way pleasant.

I havent been here for long, but from what I've seen, these arguments mostly start with Brits (or people LARPing as Brits) shitting on France

I've been here around 18 months. They don't. There are British nationalists here who attack France, no doubt, but there are lots of threads every week mocking or attacking Britain, as well as people putting it down in the threads.

>What you have to realize is that the famous anti-war writers were injured and putting out works in newspapers before the war was even over. They were more famous because they issued a work that the public already assumed to be true (and didn't want to hear otherwise) before the people who deemed otherwise got a chance to.
Oooh that is pretty interesting actually. Maybe I might pipe down now. Though it escapes me how in the world one would be happy with being assigned within a trench for a week, to await a death that might either be imminent from a falling shell, or to never come, but which racks your nerve whichever of those occur, and to then run at the enemy in assaults that even the commanders know have almost not even the slightest chance of being a success.
I'm caricaturazing on a lot of metrics, of course, but even a more nuanced version of that can't strike me as something I'd be
happy to be enrolled in.

You should seriously read Storm of Steel.

France is barely talked about in us schools. They joke comes from ww2 and the iraq war

Wouldn't a stormtrooper of course lead a live fleets less between boredom and nervousness than the average soldier? Because that's what strikes me as the scariest element in the war: that despite being always inches from death, there remain ways for to be bored and disheartened all the way through, essentially even leveraging away the "at least i'm hoping my country :)))" motivation.

Or does Junger talk about his time before being a stormtrooper.

Then substitute "taught at school', with "taught on the internet".

doing this for my country*

>Or does Junger talk about his time before being a stormtrooper
The book covers his entire war experience, from beginning to end.

>This isn't really up for debate as we have the journals, letters, books, etc. to corroborate that.
Must be a hell of a task to aggregate all those sources. Whose work are you basing your assertion on?

>Its a 'French posters accuse Brits of trying to take all the glory but really we honour our dead every single year in a huge way whereas the French don't give a shit' episode

Ah yes lets see an accomplished historian who wrote many books and did rigorous research versus one anonymous ape on the internet who is handwaving his entire works

Your post and assering that he isn't isnt reputable, is not reputable, and you can fuck yourself with this autistic mindset where you think you can win any argument with this tactic

you have no academic or moral right to handwave because you are an unqualified ape

>Your post and assering that he isn't isnt reputable, is not reputable

Not him, but he's right, Niall Ferguson is not a reputable historian. He's "classically-trained" in that he's lectured at Harvard and studied at Oxford, but he eschewed an academic career and most of his content is like a slightly more highbrow Cracked - meme pulpy stuff like "The Five Killer Apps Of Western Power" and other vapid Christmas stocking bait.

Reminder that the brits AND french got their shit pushed in by Bulgaria of all countries,

/thread

>>Ferguson claims Germany was Europe's most anti-militarist country

l m f a o

I honestly get feeling look at that list he came up with as much shit as he could so he could capitalise on success of one or two to go "hey i got x and y right so the rest of the set is good too"

>Niall Ferguson is not a reputable historian

you can say this just like i can say the world is flat but that doesnt make it true mate

Throw yourself off the edge of the world thanks

jesus. Okay:

Niall Ferguson writes pop history and thus the arguments he puts forward are generally polemically or commercially motivated rather than for peer review or academic consideration

Is that a more autism-friendly way of conveying the fact that he's not a reputable historian?

>tfw the word polemic popped up in my head when i saw his name and I didn't bother responding seriously to the fucktard who considers him an actual historian

>it's another 'British posters accuse anyone who likes France to be French' episode

See

You like France because Veeky Forums tells you to.

>makes list of common myths about WW1
>"HURR GREAT LIST IDIOT THESE ARE ALL COMMON MYTHS! SOME EXPERT!"

>implying frogs arent the ones who throw shit at Britain 25% of the time (the rest are either Americans, Germans or Irish)

this

>britain contributed nothing to ww1 hurrr

France wouldnt have lasted until 1916 without them. This doesnt mean that Britain single handedly won the war by acknowleging that fact.

Black and white thinking is so fucking prevalent on Veeky Forums

>accomplished historian
>did rigorous research
So, not Niall Ferguson

>France wouldnt have lasted until 1916 without them

Britain literally contributed to jack shit on the Western Front until mid 1916
France would have lasted until at least 1917 even without Britain

Claiming that Britain wasn't essential in WW1 is dumb, but so is claiming that France would have fell before 1916 if not for Brits

I find it very hard to believe that France would have been able to survive a war on its own against the Central Powers for that long. Possible? Sure. But unlikely. Firstly, the Germans would have had naval supremacy in both the North Sea and the Atlantic, which would enable them to blockade French ports from either British or American goods. Secondly, the large casualties suffered by the British in 1915 would have to be suffered by the French instead, on top of all the other battles and casualties that the French would have suffered, this would have stretched them to breaking point. Third, morale. Could the French have suffered a blockade and all those casualties with the knowledge that no foreign help was coming? I doubt that Italy would have joined the war on the French or Russian side, considering the balance of power would have been well and truly in Germany's favour. This would free up Austro-Hungarian troops for the Russian Front, and that would in turn bring more Germans over to the West.

Considering the fact that the Mutinies of 1917 happened even with Britain as a French ally, all those factors listed above would have compounded that effect and would have made it happen both sooner and more dangerously for France. By early 1916, could a solo France have fought Verdun and then launch the Somme campaign to take the pressure off? I sincerely doubt it.

>Britain literally contributed to jack shit on the Western Front until mid 1916
"Literally"? So Ypres, Neuve Chapelle and Loos are just imaginations of the eternal Anglo?

I know you must idolize France, but honestly believing that France could have both managed their own battles in the south whilst racing the Germans to the sea and fighting them in the north alone until 1917(!) is bordering on delusional.

the eternal anglo strikes again

>In 1998 British historian Niall Ferguson

Stopped reading right there. Whatever it is he was just trying to sell books.

>"Literally"? So Ypres, Neuve Chapelle and Loos are just imaginations of the eternal Anglo?

In the First two battles of Ypres, Allied forces were overwhelmingly French
The only one that was really British was the third one and it was in 1917

As for Neuve Chapelle and Loos, these are small ass battles that involved less than 100,000 troops
The fact Brits have to put the emphasis on these irrelevant mini-battles when real battles opposing millions of French and Germans were occuring at the same moment gives an idea of how irrelevant Britain was on the Western Front for the first two years of the war

German casualties by sector in 1914-1916.

>Ferguson claims Germany was Europe's most anti-militarist country

Stopped reading right there

Damn, didn't know that the French had inflicted so much more casualties to the Germans at the Somme than Brits did
British propaganda really made a good job at fooling people into believing it was a British battle

Only at the first battle of Ypres were there more French than British troops. The rest were mostly British.

>The fact Brits have to put the emphasis on these irrelevant mini-battles when real battles opposing millions of French and Germans were occuring at the same moment gives an idea of how irrelevant Britain was on the Western Front for the first two years of the war

Yet those "irrelevant mini-battles" would have had to have been fought by French troops instead, stretching manpower thinly. Neuve Chapelle was a wake up call for both the Germans, who hurriedly brought reinforcements to the British sector away from the French, and the French themselves, who now realised that the BEF was more than just an auxiliary force, but one that was now capable of fighting the Germans independently. Loos had a similar effect, insofar as it stopped the Germans thinking that the BEF would be a solely defensive fighting force, so they switched reserves which could have been used against the French in the south to the north incase of the British launching another attack.

Most of it seems to address things people who learned beyond Battlefield 1 and Our World War, already knew were cultural memes and propaganda.

As for "trench warfare was the most horrific thing ever" argument, it seems to be a mixed bag, between almost cheerful accounts by soldiers like Ernst Junger, that demonstrate a now alien state of mind and approach to warfare, both morally and philosophically, and "woe is me" narratives, more common in British media and literature.

>If Britain didn't join the war in 1914, France would have been eventually defeated.
>Britain joining had no real effect

>Germany posed no threat to Britain before 1914, and that all British fears of Germany were due to irrational anti-German prejudices
Which is exactly why the British did nothing until the Germans tried to call their bluff on leave Belgium alone or else.
Germans were the aggressors.
Hall Germany also declared war on France

The Somme actually was thought of as a joint operation for the French and the British when it was being corroborated, and there were the same number of French and British divisions assigned there when the offensive was to be urged on. The French, some of those men having been hardened by Verdun, and the artillery having by then become on par with that of the Germans, were able to devastate the German lines in the shelling that lasted almost a week to have preceded the battle. There’s also others that sometimes might bring forward that the French had easier German lines to pounce into, that their casualties might not be too high especially with Verdun elsewhere tearing into the French’s manpower. Anyways, the French captured almost all of their objectives when the offensive started, and for them it became a “run-of-the-mill” battle, while to the British who were slaughtered on the first day, their artillery having been useless, the battle then lapsed into becoming a symbol for weakly thought out offensives. Remember that the first day of the Somme is to this day the day where the most British soldiers ever died. Hence why the British have to fellate themselves over it, while to the Germans and the French, Verdun is *the* battle of the war.

>Remember that the first day of the Somme is to this day the day where the most British soldiers ever died. Hence why the British have to fellate themselves over it, while to the Germans and the French, Verdun is *the* battle of the war.
So each remembers costly battles? No need to bring /int/ retardation into an otherwise well considered post.

>No need to bring /int/ retardation into an otherwise well considered post.
Aren't I also saying that the French and Germans also fellate themselves to Verdun. My hearty apologies though if there was the appearance that I was sneering at the British for doing it, but not the French and Germans.
nani

Sorry, that's the way I read it Fucking over Veeky Forums tbqh, it's full retard most of the time, it should be a hobby not a chore.

It's nice to see anons make mistakes and apologise for them on this autistic dick-waving mess of a board.

Am back, mind you a bit late. Anyways glad we could both acknowledge that we were being idiotic.

Aren't we cute together :3?

>Europe's most anti-militarist country
>Has timetables detailing the invasion of a neutral country before the war´s even started