Althouse: "It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe."

June 27, 2014

"It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe."

Written 100 years ago in The Guardian.

And for The Annals of Just How Wrong You Can Be.

26 comments:

Ron said...: A long time ago I thought the NYT had a contest for schoolchildren to rewrite a historical headline, and the winner was "Archduke Ferdinand not assassinated1 WWI a mistake!"; 6/27/14, 3:16 PM
Paco Wové said...: I'm sure it was just a typo.; 6/27/14, 3:32 PM
MarkW said...: But it really wasn't a crazy prediction. People were caught unaware lazily vacationing in soon-to-be enemy countries. During that summer, there was no public groundswell for war -- a handful of demented German and Russian high officials were all it took (there were no great public debates, no parliamentary votes, nada). Unlike WWII, which could be seen coming for years, WWI was complete shock to most people.; 6/27/14, 3:47 PM
traditionalguy said...: WWI was the biggest mistake ever seen on earth. The European Aristocracy idiots in command had no idea what their new weapons could do, but that never stopped them for one second.

WWI instantly became a proud four year mutual suicide pact for Europe. And that's all it ever was.

Then the inbred Aristocrat idiots blamed the Jews for what they had done. And 15 years later authority loving Germans decided to restart it with better newer weapons.

Ironically, it was Hitler's fit of stupid anger at Serbian officers (called Yugoslavians) for assassinating a pro German group that lost the war. He wasted the military's time on crushing them, and that held up his Barbarossa invasion of Russia by 30 days. And that caused the Wehrmacht to stop 30 miles outside of Moscow when the Russian Winter came early and froze the machinery up.

The rest is history that is much loved by Putin's guys.; 6/27/14, 4:10 PM
Peter said...: Old English-language maps (and old New York Times articles) invariably refer to Serbia as "Servia." I'm not sure when the 'v' evolved into a 'b', let alone why.

But in any case, the Guardian's retrospective is lame: why not just reprint the 1914 text (and let the reader interpret it)?; 6/27/14, 4:20 PM
Peter said...: 'traditionalguy' said, "WWI was the biggest mistake ever seen on earth."

Europe's mutual suicide in WWI may have been bad news for Europeans (although it did clear away the clutter of some ancient empires that probably would have died messily anyway), but perhaps it was not such bad news for non-Europeans living in European colonies?; 6/27/14, 4:24 PM
Anonymous said...: Not all that bad by Grauniad standards, really.; 6/27/14, 4:42 PM
Anonymous said...: ..and Gavro Princip was too young for the death penalty. He got twenty years...He sentenced a whole generation of too-young-for-the-death penalty boys to a horrifying meat grinder.; 6/27/14, 5:14 PM
David said...: They were not all that wrong. The effect was not immediate. It took over a month and a series of other mistakes for war to come.; 6/27/14, 5:19 PM
chuck said...: The European Aristocracy

Is over general. I'd rank the countries with the most screwed up aristocracy thus, number one being the most deluded.

1) Austria-Hungary
2) Germany
3) Russia

Not all were stupid, the Germans were just crazy. They were victims of 100 years of bad German philosophy abetted by German academia.; 6/27/14, 5:22 PM
LL said...: That reminds me of this great scene.

Ian Faith: The Boston gig has been cancelled...
David St. Hubbins: What?
Ian Faith: Yeah. I wouldn't worry about it though, it's not a big college town.; 6/27/14, 5:25 PM
glenn said...: Actually the assassination was maybe a small factor. All the tinder was lying around just waiting for some excuse to light it. Some of Europe got rich on colonial empires, some united too late.; 6/27/14, 5:43 PM
Kirk Parker said...: What glenn said!

Presumably the slower pace of news in those days made the "vacationing in about-to-become-enemy-territory" folks less aware of how ripe for a conflagration Europe was.; 6/27/14, 6:07 PM
Drago said...: glenn: "All the tinder was lying around just waiting for some excuse to light it."

Not to mention that once a country in that era started to mobilize it's armed forces (which took quite a long time) it would have been extremely difficult to turn that mobilization off and then restart again.

If your enemies never stopped their mobilizations, then you would be at a tremendous disadvantage for a significant period of time. Perhaps a fatal disadvantage.

So all that tinder was lying around, the factors influencing the mobilization of troops was almost impossible to stop (given it's national scale inertia), and once those guys were all just hanging around it wasn't going to take much to trigger the actual conflict.; 6/27/14, 6:14 PM
traditionalguy said...: @Peter...Yes, fall out of a near death to European World Empires was the smell of victory in the morning among the other cultures.

Lawrence of Arabia is great history as well as a great film After Lawrence's defeat of the Turks, the British General in the film (Allenby) rode horseback into a small and stony ancient walled city called Yerushalayim and made it and the the surrounding area into a British Protectorate.

About that time a Jewish chemist who literally saved England by creating artificial nitrates for explosives after German U-boats had cut off shipments from Chile was offered any favor from the King and he asked and received a Declaration that Great Britain would look with favor upon creation of Jewish homeland in its new Protectorate...never expecting it would happen.; 6/27/14, 6:29 PM
Ambrose said...: Let's have a thought for poor old Crown Prince Rudolph. It might have all ended differently but for one event.; 6/27/14, 7:48 PM
sonicfrog said...: If the shots at Concord at the beginning of the United States Revolutionary War was "The shot heard around the world"... Then the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand was "The shot that shattered the world".

Some good comments.

To clarify, it's not that people were not expecting war. The civilian population was indeed caught off guard. But the European Governments knew something was brewing. Germany has been pining fr years to re-invade France and capture Paris, just as it had in the spectacular victory in 1871 over France, in which it gained Alsace-Lorraine as part of Frances surrender. Relations between Germany and the power of France and Britain were, at best, frosty leading up to 1914.

In the 30 plus years after the victory in Paris, the leaders of Germany felt they were never given the respect they deserved for that victory, and felt that they were still treated as a second hand power. The Schleiffen plan was made Germany's military blueprint for a rapid invasion of France through Belgium if the need arose.

Meanwhile The French were developing their own plans to defend against a German attack. Plan XVII was devised to counter a German attack from both Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine.

Britain, being the gentlemanly country that it was, during this time was doing all it could to placate both sides and prevent them from again going to war.

Also, on the assassination. Remember that it wasn't too long ago that anarchists were trying, and sometimes succeeding in their attempts to take out political leaders. So the specter of assassinations was not an unthinkable occurrence. It was always a possibility, and every leader in Europe knew that.

Long story short.... They all knew there was probably going to be a conflict soon or later between France and Germany. But they didn't expect it then, not triggered by that seemingly trivial event.

And they absolutely had no thought at all that any war could turn out to be as long and bloody as that one turned out. Like most of the other skirmishes in the 100 years since Napoleon, they expected the war to be done in a few to six months... The first few battles in World War 1 killed more people than were killed in the entire US Civil War! That's the thing no one saw coming.; 6/27/14, 7:58 PM
Rusty said...: 1914 Germany declares war on Russia and then immediately starts a war with France.; 6/27/14, 9:54 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: Sonicfrog is correct. Citizens who did not expect war or though it unthinkable weren't paying attention. This was an era when European nations used to perform exercises like mobilizing for war, sending their troops to the border (causing an emergency mobilization on the other side), only to have the troops stop just short of the border and return home.
The biggest tragedy wasn't the people killed on the front, it was the peace forged by the allies. Germany went into the peace talks assuming they would be allowed the keep the Eastern European lands Trotsky gave them when Lenin sued for peace in 1917. Indeed, the idea that Germany could pay the ruinous reparations demanded of her without the resources gained in the treaty of Brest-Livotsk was ridiculous.; 6/27/14, 10:09 PM
JPS said...: traditionalguy:

"About that time a Jewish chemist who literally saved England by creating artificial nitrates for explosives after German U-boats had cut off shipments from Chile"

I am drawing a complete blank on this - thought the shoe was on the other foot.

Fritz Haber (half Jewish, a convert to Christianity), just before the war, had invented his process to turn nitrogen gas plus hydrogen into ammonia. (Turning ammonia to nitric acid was then a solved problem.) A few years later, thanks to the efforts of the Royal Navy, the Germans couldn't ship in enough nitrate from Chile to make the explosives they needed, so Haber's work really helped keep them in the war.

Haber went on to play a big role in chemical warfare by the Kaiser's army. His wife, a serious pacifist, shot herself fatally with his service revolver, very probably in protest.

Near the end of his life (1933) he was on sabbatical in England - he didn't like where things were going in Germany - and Chaim Weizmann offered him the directorship of a research institute in Rehovot, Mandatory Palestine. He accepted, but died en route.; 6/27/14, 10:32 PM
Gahrie said...: but perhaps it was not such bad news for non-Europeans living in European colonies?

I'm willing to bet that the standard of living for the people in those colonized countries went down significantly after they were abandoned by Europe. (and hasn't recovered yet for most of them.; 6/27/14, 10:33 PM
Michael K said...: The Guardian, based on their hysterical global warming material, are no better at predictions than they were 100 years ago.; 6/27/14, 10:39 PM
traditionalguy said...: JPS....My mistake. Haber was the nitrate synthesizer that as you say aided the Germans. The Jewish chemist that saved England developed a process for mass producing cordite that was necessary for smokeless powder. I believe he was named Weissman.
Sorry for my old memories I needed to check them before hitting the comment button, but got short of time.; 6/27/14, 11:49 PM
Crimso said...: So basically they were asserting that the politics were settled and there was no more need for debate.; 6/28/14, 6:29 AM
MarkW said...: "Sonicfrog is correct. Citizens who did not expect war or though it unthinkable weren't paying attention."

It wasn't just ordinary citizens. Within a short time after the assassination, the story was on page 19 or out of the newspapers altogether. In July, the British and German navies were enjoying 'fleet week' celebrations together in a German port and were planning to get together again in Britain in August. Various military leaders were no more worried:

"Nor were the leaders of the great powers overly concerned. Ferdinand Foch, the commander of a critical French corps positioned along the German border, did not hesitate to go to his estate in Brittany...to spend what he expected would be a restful and uneventful summer. Similarly, British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey saw no reason to delay a planned fishing trip. Several military and political leaders were in fact vacationing in soon-to-be enemy countries. Nevertheless, they, too saw no reason to alter their plans. Serbian Army Commander General Radomir Putnik had been in an Austrian spa on June 28, four of his senior officers had been in Hungary, and Russian General Alexei Brusilov had been vacationing in Germany. None of them saw any reason to hurry home."

http://goo.gl/TeKa3V

There was nothing new about a Balkan crisis in 1914 -- there was pretty much always some kind of Balkan crisis (including minor wars), none of which had brought the European powers to the brink of war. So the people (on all sides) then thought the idea of going to war over the Balkans as far-fetched as we would have thought of the possibility of major European war erupting over Kosovo in the late 1990s. But had it happened everybody could have claimed in hindsight that the cold-war tinderbox had obviously been ready to explode and all it took was the small spark in Kosovo. Remember this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Pristina_airport; 6/28/14, 7:00 AM
cassandra lite said...: President Dewey could not be reached.; 6/28/14, 10:28 AM