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Bezig met laden... July 1914: Countdown to Wardoor Sean McMeekin
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My thoughts on July 1914: Countdown to War http://meganeasleywalshauthor.blogspot.ie/2015/08/writer-wednesday-july-1914.htm... There are a few fine reviews preceding this one. So I will not try to recap the book (again). However, I have read several works on the origins of the First World War. This one has more in depth information on the day to day internal political and external diplomatic activity leading up the declarations of war in August, 1918. The part of the book I found most interesting was the final section "Epilogue: The Question of Responsibility". The author reviews in summary the part played by the various countries and their leadership to determine their contribution to the start of the war. I thought McMeekin had an interesting and novel approach to this question. Don't want to spill the beans...This book is definitely required reading for those interested the origins of the war history. This is an intriguing day by day account of events from the murder of the Austrian Archduke on June 28, 1914 through to August 3, 1914, when WW1 officially started. There was a lot of foolish and reckless behavior. Nobody seems to have liked the murdered archduke (except for Kaiser Wilhelm) and his death was not truly mourned. However, it was viewed as an insult to Austria for Serbia to condone the killing (there was strong suspicion, but no real proof for a while of the Serbian government's actual role). Austria felt it needed to take revenge on Serbia for the sake of its honor, and Germany (in McMeekin's words) gave it a "blank check" to do what it wanted. Unfortunately Germany did not supervise Austria and its leaders mishandled the whole thing. In the end Germany was between a rock and a hard place. A regional fight soon turned into a world war. France and Russia were plotting in the background too, even though Russia was probably more interested in getting Constantinople from the Ottomans. Great Britain was a wild card being preoccupied with Home Rule and having a large number of "Little Englanders" in the government. Only when Germany invaded Belgium did Britain really enter the fray -- Britiain felt an obligation to protect Belgium due to a treaty entered into in the early 1800's. Germany desperately wanted Britain (and France) to stay neutral. The randomness of history is clearly demonstrated -- who knew what when and what did they do about it -runs through the account. In the end, with 20/20 hindsight, we see a large number of times war could have been avoided, but wasn't. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderscheidingen
History.
Military.
Nonfiction.
HTML:When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand??s own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, ??It is God??s will.? Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict??much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events. As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand??s murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war??s outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved??from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré??sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand??s murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe??s countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain??s final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month??and a handful of men?? Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)940.3History and Geography Europe Europe World War I 1914-1918LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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