Weapons of War: The Pedersen Device—A Game Changer?

A Doughboy Aims an '03 Springfield Equipped with
the Pedersen Device

By James Patton

The U.S. Army’s standard issue M-1903 Springfield rifle in .30-06 (7.62x63mm) received a few technical innovations during World War I. The most common was the addition of optical sights, and perhaps the most unusual was the Pederson Device, a mechanism that replaced the bolt on a slightly modified M-1903 rifle designated the Mark 1, thereby converting it into a semi-automatic that fired a .30-18 (7.62 x 20mm) pistol-length cartridge fed from a detachable 40-round box-type magazine. The modification required milling an  ejection port into the receiver, which could only be done at the factory. The device itself was a complete blow-back semi-automatic pistol like the Remington 51, sans hand grip, forming a gun within a gun. This conversion dramatically increased short-range firepower, which would be useful for close-quarter fighting and hit-and-run raids. 

Soldiers could use their M-1903 Mark 1 rifles normally; then with a simple switching of the bolt, they had a semi-automatic that fired at a rate of 80 rounds per minute. This switch-over took about 15 seconds. (The five-shot .30 06 magazine didn’t even need to be unloaded.) Each soldier had  special pouches to store the bolts in and carried five loaded Pedersen magazines in another pouch. 

Comparing the Standard
'03 Round with the Pedersen Round

Critics pointed out that the 24”  barrel of the M-1903  would still be a handicap in close quarters. Indeed, all of the various weapons subsequently designed for this purpose have short barrels, like the Sten, the Uzi, or the HK MP5. Another criticism was that the magazine could be inserted backward, certainly a serious risk in heated combat.

The device was invented in 1917 by John Pedersen (1881–1951), who had been a long-time employee at Remington Arms. Before the contract was cancelled in 1919, a total of about 65,000 of his devices were made at the Rock Island Arsenal and Remington’s Bridgeport factory, along with 1.6 million of the magazines and over a million of the Mark 1 rifles with the ejection port. The U.S. government paid Pedersen a flat fee for the rights plus a per-unit royalty; he earned over $85,000 (about $1.8 million today). 

John Pedersen Holding an Adapted '03
(Without Magazine) and His Device (Left Hand)

No Pedersen Devices were ever issued to soldiers. Instead they all wound up in storage until 1931, when the government ordered them destroyed, probably to keep them away from criminals, although those folks  already had a lot of the .45 ACP Thompson sub-machine guns, which were sold without restriction from 1921 to 1934. Most of the Pedersen Devices were melted down, but some were evidently pilfered. Allegedly, the ones stored at San Antonio, Texas, were supplied to reinforce concrete in local sidewalks. 

Today only a few Pedersen Devices survive in private collections and museums, some of them showing signs of attempted destruction. Pedersen also designed similar bolts for both the U.S. produced M-1917 Enfield and the M-1916 Mosin-Nagant rifles, which in order to be used would also have required the Mark 1 ejection port modification to the rifles. Reportedly prototypes of these two devices were handcrafted by Remington but neither went into production. For those curious, this video demonstrates how to modify your Springfield for  the Pedersen Device:

Later, Pedersen designed a complete semi-automatic rifle, officially called the T1E3, but widely known as the Pedersen Rifle, which lost the competition to the Garand Rifle in 1932. Pedersen also designed a .276 (7 x 51mm) cartridge for the Army that testing demonstrated was superior to the .30-06, but the Chief of Staff at that time, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, quashed the program. He cited logistic constraints: (a) unnecessary cost—the army had huge stores of paid-for.30-06 ammo to use up and (b) complexity of supply chains—all of the machine guns and automatic rifles would still require the .30-06 ammo. It is also said that he personally regarded the 7mm bullet as  too small. 

During WWII Pedersen was a principal in the Irwin-Pedersen Arms Co., which was the original manufacturer of the M-1 Carbine (7.62 x 33mm), which wasn’t a Pedersen design. Although both the carbine and the Garand Rifle were badged as M-1s, they share only one non-essential part and they don’t use the same ammunition.  Most of the carbines were made by the Saginaw Gear Division of General Motors and were still in use in special circumstances up through the  early days of the Vietnam War. 

Pedersen Examining a Competitor's Garand Rifle,
Prototype of the M-1

The Soviet SKS semi-automatic rifle (7.62 x 39mm), introduced in 1949, bears a striking resemblance to the Pedersen Rifle, although the two are mechanically dissimilar. Pedersen also designed many shotguns and rifles  for Remington, mostly using pump actions. He was granted 69 patents in his lifetime. 

Sources include The American Rifleman, The Armory Life and The Rock Island Auction Co.

Here is a LINK to a more detailed article about the Pedersen device.

The Most Concise History of World War One Ever Written?

E.H. Gombrich

When, in the spring of 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne was visiting one of these newly conquered regions called Bosnia, he was murdered by a Serb in the capital, Sarajevo.

Austria’s generals and politicians thought at the time that a war with Serbia was inevitable. The dreadful murder had to be avenged, and Serbia humbled. Frightened by Austria’s advance, Russia was drawn in, whereupon Germany, as Austria’s ally, also became involved. And once Germany was in the war, all the ancient enmities were unleashed. The Germans wanted to begin by destroying France, their most dangerous enemy, so they marched straight across neutral Belgium to attack Paris. Britain, fearing that a German victory would make Germany all-powerful, now joined in as well. Soon the whole world was at war with Germany and Austria, and the two countries found themselves surrounded by the armies of the entente (meaning their allied enemies—those who had an understanding with one another). Germany and Austria, in the middle, were known as the ‘central powers’.

The gigantic Russian armies pressed forward, but were brought to a standstill after a few months. The world has never seen a war like it. Millions and millions of people marched against each other. Even Africans and Indians had to fight. The German armies were stopped when they reached the River Marne, not far from Paris. From this moment on, real battles, in the old sense, would only very rarely be fought. Instead, giant armies dug themselves in, and made their camps in endlessly long trenches facing one another.

Then, for days on end, they fired thousands of guns at each other, bursting out in assaults through barricades of barbed wire and blown-up trenches, across a scorched and devastated wasteland strewn with corpses. In 1915, Italy also declared war on Austria, despite having originally been its ally. Now people fought in the snow and ice of the mountains of the Tirol and the famous exploits of Hannibal’s warriors during their crossing of the Alps seemed like child’s play compared with the courage and endurance shown by these simple soldiers.

People fought each other in the skies in aeroplanes; they dropped bombs on peaceful towns, sank innocent ships, and fought on the sea and under the sea, just as Leonardo da Vinci had foreseen. People invented horrible weapons that murdered and mutilated thousands each day, the most terrible of which were gases that poisoned the air. Anyone who breathed them died in terrible agony. These gases were either released and carried to the enemy soldiers on the wind, or fired in the form of grenades which released their poison when they exploded. People built armoured cars and tanks which moved slowly and inexorably over ditches and walls, demolishing and crushing everything in their path.

The people of Germany and Austria were destitute. For a long time there was hardly anything to eat, no clothes, no coal and no light. Women had to queue for hours in the cold to buy the smallest piece of bread or a half-rotten potato. But just once there was aglimmer of hope. In Russia a revolution had broken out in 1917.

The tsar had abdicated, but the bourgeois government which followed wanted to continue with the war. However, the people were against it. So there was a second great uprising in which the factory workers, under the guidance of their leader, Lenin, seized power. They shared out the farmland among the peasants, confiscated the property of the rich and the nobility, and tried to rule the empire according to the principles of Karl Marx. Then the outside world intervened, and in the fearful battles that followed millions more people died. Lenin’s successors continued to rule Russia for many years.

The Germans were able to recall some of their troops from the eastern front, but this didn’t help them much because new, fresh soldiers now attacked them from the west. The Americans had decided to step in. Nevertheless, the Germans and Austrians held out for more than a year against overwhelming odds. By putting all their efforts into a last desperate attempt in the west, they very nearly won. In the end, however, they were exhausted. And when, in 1918, America’s President Wilson announced that he wanted a just peace in which each nation would determine its own fate, many of their troops gave up. So Germany and Austria were forced to agree to a ceasefire. Those who had survived returned home to their starving families.

The next thing that happened was that revolution broke out in these exhausted countries. The emperors of Germany and Austria abdicated and the various peoples of the Austrian empire – the Czechs and the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Poles and the Southern Slavs – declared themselves independent and founded individual states. Then, having understood from President Wilson that there was to be a peace treaty, and that negotiations were to be held in the ancient royal palaces of Versailles, St Germain, and the Trianon, Austria, Hungary, and Germany sent envoys to Paris, only to discover that they were excluded from these negotiations. Germany was held chiefly responsible for the war and was to be punished. Not only did the Germans have to surrender all the colonies and lands which they had taken from France in 1870, and pay vast sums of money to the victors each year, but they even had to sign a formal declaration saying that Germany alone was to blame for the war. The Austrians and the Hungarians fared little better. So this was how President Wilson kept his promises. (What you have just read is what I believed to be true when I wrote this account, but read my explanation in the final chapter of this book.)

Eleven million people died in that war and entire regions were devastated in a way that had never been seen before. The suffering was beyond imagination.

Source:  A Little of History of the World, Yale University Press, 1985

Our Favorite World War One Aviation Novels

From the Staff and Contributors of 

Roads to the Great War

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Readers are invited to add their own recommendations in the comments section below.  MH

India's Homefront at War

By George-Morton Jack

Originally presented on Scroll.in, 17 November 2018

On the evening of 22 September 1914, over a hundred artillery shells made in Germany rained on Chennai. Fired by an Imperial German Navy cruiser a mile offshore in the Bay of Bengal, they fell onto Burmah Oil facilities and merchant seamen in the port, and onto the High Court, the National Bank of India and other buildings in the city. The shells inflicted India’s first casualties of the First World War. The global conflict had arrived shockingly on the home front.

As the British Empire’s Asian giant in colonial chains, India had been dragged by London that August into the Allies’ world war on Germany. Come November, India was also set against the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Some 315 million people on the Indian home front would experience the war up to 1918 in myriad ways. But together they experienced one great effect of the war on Indian society—the connection of India with the wider world more than ever before.

Reception for Royal Visit, 1911

Wartime city life

If you walked the streets of a big Indian city between 1914 and 1918, reminders of the global war were ever-present. Cinemas from Mumbai to Kolkata showed British documentary and propaganda war films, such as the Battle of the Somme (1916). Meanwhile the imperial government plastered street-side buildings with colourful posters advertising its public offer of war bonds to finance the British war effort, a typical poster showing paper money transforming into machine gun bullets fired by a Sikh.

In Kolkata, the war bonds offer was reinforced in June 1918 by a thirty-feet long “War Tank”—not a real one, but a replica British Army Western Front tank, made of sheet-iron, a wooden frame and electric lights, and carried on a motor lorry chassis. The War Tank drove about the city centre and suburbs accompanied by a marketing team on foot, handing out leaflets in Bengali and Hindi that bore the tank’s image and proclaimed the bonds as a safe bet—yields were government guaranteed.

Then, every day of the war on city street corners, the sales of local and India-wide newspapers spread domestic war news. The press carried stories on the maharajahs from Kashmir to Mysuru who from 1914 poured their cash into British war coffers, for instance to purchase motor ambulances and hospital ships for wounded troops on the German and Turkish fronts. There were also newspaper appeals for Indian war charities, such as in 1915–16 for the Punjab Aeroplane Fund. This raised enough money from Punjabi bankers, students, artisans, and other donors to buy 51 armoured aeroplanes, all named individually after local towns, districts and rivers, such as Amritsar, Gujranwala, Sutlej, and so on.

Lahore Gate Peshawar, 1918

The Indian newspapers also reported the twists and turns of wartime politics, from international news of the Allies’ cause such as the United States 1917 entry into the conflict in the name of democracy against German militarism, to domestic developments in the Indian nationalist politicians’ freedom struggle.

Mahatma Gandhi included, the Indian politicians generally supported the British war effort in the hope of extensive postwar constitutional reform in return, expected to grant Indians democratic rights equal with Australians and the British Empire’s other white peoples. The Indian politicians’ strongest public statements in support of the war came in April 1918 at a special Delhi War Conference with the British. Here they tabled a widely publicised resolution to commit themselves fully to escalating India’s war effort—“I tender my support to it with all my heart,” said Gandhi.

At the time, much of India’s mobilisation on the home front was in the factories. For Indian industrialists, business boomed with government contracts to supply the Allied armies abroad. One of the biggest government contractors was Tata Steel. At its foundries at Sakchi (now Jamshedpur) in British India’s province of Bihar and Orissa, Hindu and Muslim workers sweated around the clock to produce military hardware for British use on overseas fronts—in total three million tons of steel, often converted into weaponry such as artillery shells to fire at the Germans and Turks in East Africa and Palestine, and 1,500 miles of railway track to stretch across the foreign fields of Iraq.

On the railways of India itself, troops trains were a common sight throughout the war, carrying a million Indian Army servicemen to their ocean transport ships for foreign duty—mainly illiterate Indian recruits from the villages of northern India’s plains, hills and jungles and their Himalayan environs. As the trains steamed into the major seaports, some city dwellers unfamiliar with the recruits’ home communities were at a loss to tell who they were, in Mumbai mistaking riflemen from Nepal as Japanese.

In the Villages

The villages the Indian troops came from were the home front’s bedrock. A minority of the Indian recruits left them for the army under coercion by local recruiters in British pay and bitterly resented.

Typical Indian Village During the War

Yet most of the army recruits from the villages were volunteers seeking British pay themselves, and were from Punjab above all. They entered military service primarily as young men out to help their peasant farming families survive the rural economy with its food shortages, plagues and wartime inflation. Service was also a means of easing the family’s tax burden under the exploitative colonial state—if a village provided dozens or even hundreds of recruits, the British reward was a collective tax cut.

The war’s grand total of 1.5 million Indian servicemen all of course served on the home front at one time or another. As they did so they were by no means politically passive. The ranks of several Indian regiments contained active dissenters and freedom fighters. From 1914 hundreds of Muslim troops in India deserted, the British suspected in sympathy with the Ottoman enemy they did not want to fight as Islamic brothers.

Clusters of Hindu and Sikh troops on home service then sided with violent revolutionary causes, and those caught doing so by the British were imprisoned or executed. One instance of 1915 involved Sikhs of the 23rd Cavalry who had joined the Punjabi Ghadar movement. They were caught red-handed when they bungled a multiple British officer assassination; they packed their homemade bombs too loosely on a regimental move, setting them off prematurely at a railway station and accidentally wounding five of their own.

Back in the recruits’ villages, news filtered in from the battlefields overseas of sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers killed by the Germans and Turks. Words can barely express the grief and anger felt by village families at lives lost for the British. Something of their utter despair has been handed down in painful Punjabi folk songs. “Without you I feel lonely here”, one song cries, “I shed tears, come and speak to me; All birds, all smiles have vanished...Graves devour our flesh and blood.”

The Days of the Raj Were Numbered

“India should be free”

By 1919, the majority of the Indian troops had returned home, bringing back from the foreign fronts their wounded bodies and minds; their souvenirs from German helmets of the Somme to African rhino horns and Turkish flags; and their war stories of sights of the oceans, Paris, and the great mosques of Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Mecca.

Yet they also returned with a brighter national future in their hearts. On overseas duty they had absorbed a strong measure of the Allies’ democratic ideals, developing their largely embryonic prewar senses of modern nationhood. “I felt that Indians should also enjoy freedom like the people of other countries”, said one Punjabi veteran, Narain Singh, having fought in West Asia. “When we were in France we felt that the French people were so lucky and enjoying their freedom”, commented another Punjabi, Mitt Singh. “So we also felt that India should be free, this war showed us the right path.”

For Gandhi and the wartime Indian politicians, 1919 was a year of British betrayal in India; the constitutional reforms they had bargained for since 1914 were not realised. Yet as national leaders, their war on the home front had accelerated and heightened their calls for self-government, laying the foundation for India’s freedom from colonial rule within 30 years.

1,492 Days—The Enemy Occupation of Antwerp

German Troops on Parade at Antwerp's Grote Market

The first German troops entered the city proper on the evening 10 October 1914, by which time the main remnants of the Belgian field army had regrouped around Ghent. The entry was by and large a calm affair with no resistance offered anywhere in the city itself. The German news media afterward printed movingly heroic scenes of street combat in the narrow streets of Antwerp, but these were (as often the case) simply confabulations, a news editor's fantasy. Inhabitants of Antwerp who hadn't fled the bombardment came out to look at the columns and columns of German and Austrian cyclists, infantry, cavalry, artillery, naval riflemen, and territorials. Musters and parades were held in front of the city hall.

The capture of Antwerp was heralded throughout Germany as a great victory and was celebrated by the ringing of church bells and displays of captured Belgian artillery in several cities. German estimates give 106 civilian houses destroyed during the bombardment of the city with fewer than 100 civilian deaths, 1300 Belgian artillery pieces taken intact, and food and military supplies worth several tens of millions of German marks captured. The German and Central Powers press made much of the fall of the city, for it was after all one of the largest harbors on the continent, with extensive shipyards and manufacturing facilities, not to mention a heavily fortified area. In the end, for the Germans, Antwerp was not much more than a consolation prize for failing to take Paris.

Military traffic downriver was completely closed off by the neutral Dutch authorities. This was strictly enforced, with no exceptions made of any kind. Commercial river traffic and trans-Atlantic emigration were allowed, but here the British blockade came into play.

Surveying the Damage from the Siege of the City

During the occupation years, Antwerp was used as a logistical hub, a military supply depot and manufacturing center, and also as an administrative location for a separate military occupation entity apart from the Etappe area and General Government. Due to the proximity to the Dutch border, it was also a notorious location for "spies," secret agents, persons of dubious allegiance, members of various resistance cells, and black market smugglers. So porous was the border between occupied Belgium and the Netherlands that in 1915 the Germans constructed an electrified barbed wire fence between the two countries, a world premiere of dubious accomplishment.

Belgium had never been self-sufficient in supplying adequate amounts of food for its ever-growing population, and the occupation years were especially lean, as not only imports were cut off but also local agricultural production was faced with requisitions. If not for Herbert Hoover's Committee for the Relief of Belgium, starvation would have been rampant in the country instead of "merely" severe shortages. Foodstuffs donated by this committee were mainly shipped to Rotterdam and from there transported by railway or inland barge to Antwerp as one of the main distribution points in Belgium. It was in many ways an asset for the German Army.

As an ocean port, not much at all happened during the war due to the effective British blockade. However, Antwerp was also an important inland waterway port, with barges running all over the place into northern France and the Netherlands and Germany itself. So that was still in business but at a lower key of course. And then there was heavy manufacturing in Antwerp, shipyards (e.g. the Cockerill Yards in Hoboken), heavy metal machinery production such as the Minerva Motor Company that built luxury cars before the war and armored cars during the siege, and all kinds of ship repair facilities and other manufacturing facilities that could be put to use supplying German armed forces in one way or another, even breweries and industrial-scale bakeries.

Antwerp's Occupiers at Work and Play

There were railways leading to the Etappe and frontline areas and canals as well. Antwerp had grain storage facilities, mills, sugar refineries. It had had an oil storage capacity in Hoboken with huge tanks that were both shelled by the Germans during the siege and afterward destroyed by the Belgian Army during the retreat to the sea.

Antwerp was also a welcome location for German soldiers to be stationed for periods of recuperation or to go on leave. As mainly a self-respecting harbor city, it boasted a gratifyingly abundant number of legal brothels as well as cafés and drinking houses galore. During the war German authorities also established an official spy school in the city, taking over a teaching institute for nurses in a fashionable city suburb in which to house the personnel. Its most famous, or infamous, member was a female German officer named Elsbeth Schragmueller, nicknamed "Frau Doktor" by her adversaries. She was credited with being an unscrupulous and immoral instructor in the fine arts of espionage, employing all manner of (mostly imagined) lewd and amorous techniques to extract information from unsuspecting and naive Allied officers and statesmen. Antwerp loomed large in the often feverish imagination of many a British or French counter-espionage officer, and tall tales of the escapades of the mysterious "Frau Doktor" abounded both during and after the war. (A highly fictionalized movie about her adventures as a spy was made in the 1930s.)

The last German troops evacuated Antwerp on 9 November 1918. King Albert would make a ceremonial state entry into Antwerp 10 days later.

Source: St. Mihiel Trip-Wire, June 2021

President Coolidge Thanks General Pershing for His Service to the Country

With General Pershing Standing, President Calvin Coolidge Signs a Bill for Veterans into Law

Washington, September 13, 1924

General John J. Pershing, General of the Armies, having this day reached the age of 64 years, is retired from active service in conformity with a requirement of an act of Congress approved June 30, 1882. 

In announcing the termination of this distinguished soldier’s active military career it is deemed appropriate to remind the country of his eminent services and of the nation’s obligation to one whose accomplishments contributed so largely to the defense of the world’s liberties. 

Entering the army as a commissioned officer after graduation at the United States Military Academy in 1886, he endured the hardships of the Indian campaigns then necessary for the pacification of the Western frontier. In the war with Spain he participated in the Santiago campaign in Cuba. In the Philippine Islands, after their acquisition by the United States, it fell to his lot to assist in the suppression of the native insurrection, and his remarkable success in bringing under control some of the most turbulent tribes is a matter of history.

Becoming a general officer in 1906, he was entrusted with many important commands, and when the unsettled conditions on the border of Mexico in 1916 made it necessary to send a military expedition into that country he was selected for its command. In exercising this command, as well as in the others that had fallen to him, he demonstrated his capacity for the highest military functions, and his selection as the Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in the World War was a natural consequence. 

His conduct of that high command fully justifies the selection as well as his elevation to the highest rank in our military service, which was conferred upon him permanently, under authority of a special act of Congress, in recognition of his fulfillment of his country’s expectations.

The American troops, under his command, by their presence, high qualities, and skillful management, assisted materially in the defeat of the Central Powers of Europe, which resulted in the freedom of civilization from autocratic rule. He is one of the very few officers who have held the rank of General in the permanent military establishment, and the one who has exercised supreme command over much the largest body of troops ever called into action by the United States Government.

His services to the world in the greatest conflict in which military forces have ever been engaged have been recognized through the award of the highest decorations by the governing authorities of Belgium, Great Britain, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Montenegro, Panama, Poland, Rumania and Serbia. 

Quote from General Pershing at the
National World War I Memorial

In his position as Chief of Staff since the termination of the world conflict he has been a mainstay to the Executive in preparing an army of modest dimensions to be the nucleus of any military force the country may be obliged to place in the field. He has taken a leading part in the development of the citizen components of the Army of the United States. 

General Pershing has already received from the Congress the thanks of that body and of the American people, and now I extend to him anew the thanks of the nation for his eminent services, and feel certain that I voice the sentiment of the entire citizenry of the Republic in wishing him long life, happiness and prosperity in the retirement he has so richly earned. 

CALVIN COOLIDGE

Globalization Was Supposed To Make War Impossible by Margaret MacMillan

Editor's Comment:  Since Dr. MacMillan wrote this article in 2013, our modern age of globalization has seen the Russia-Ukraine war, various Middle Eastern hostilities, and the embarrassingly executed American withdrawal from Afghanistan. MH

1906: Workers in the paint shop at the Daimler Motors Corporation near Stuttgart work on the chassis of a Mercedes-Simplex

From The Rhyme of History, The Brookings Institution, 2013

The one-hundredth anniversary of 1914 should make us reflect anew on our vulnerability to human error, sudden catastrophes, and sheer accident. So we have good reason to glance over our shoulders even as we look ahead. History, said Mark Twain, never repeats itself but it rhymes. The past cannot provide us with clear blueprints for how to act, for it offers such a multitude of lessons that it leaves us free to pick and choose among them to suit our own political and ideological inclinations. Still, if we can see past our blinders and take note of the telling parallels between then and now, the ways in which our world resembles that of a hundred years ago, history does give us valuable warnings.

Though the era just before World War I, with its gas lighting and its horse-drawn carriages, seems very far off and quaint, it is similar in many ways—often unsettlingly so—to ours, as a look below the surface reveals. The decades leading up to 1914 were, like our own time, a period of dramatic shifts and upheavals, which those who experienced them thought of as unprecedented in speed and scale. The use of electricity to light streets and homes had become widespread; Einstein was developing his general theory of relativity; radical new ideas like psychoanalysis were finding a following; and the roots of the predatory ideologies of fascism and Soviet communism were taking hold.

Globalization—which we tend to think of as a modern phenomenon, created by the spread of international businesses and investment, the growth of the Internet, and the widespread migration of peoples—was also characteristic of that era. Made possible by many of the changes that were taking place at the time, it meant that even remote parts of the world were being linked by new means of transport, from railways to steamships, and by new means of communication, including the telephone, telegraph, and wireless. Then, as now, there was a huge expansion in global trade and investment. And then as now waves of immigrants were finding their way to foreign lands—Indians to the Caribbean and Africa, Japanese and Chinese to North America, and millions of Europeans to the New World and the Antipodes.

Taken together, all these changes were widely seen, particularly in Europe and America, as clear evidence of humanity’s progress, suggesting to many that Europeans, at least, were becoming too interconnected and too civilized to resort to war as a means of settling disputes. The growth of international law, the Hague disarmament conferences of 1899 and 1907, and the increasing use of arbitration between nations (of the 300 arbitrations between 1794 and 1914 more than half occurred after 1890) lulled Europeans into the comforting belief that they had moved beyond savagery.

Norman Angell, Author of The Great Illusion

The fact that there had been an extraordinary period of general peace since 1815, when the Napoleonic wars ended, further reinforced this illusion, as did the idea that the interdependence of the countries of the world was so great that they could never afford to go to war again. This was the argument made by Norman Angell, a small, frail, and intense Englishman who had knocked around the world as everything from a pig farmer to a cowboy in the American West before he found his calling as a popular journalist. National economies were bound so tightly together, he maintained in his book, The Great Illusion, that war, far from profiting anyone, would ruin everyone. Moreover, in a view widely shared by bankers and economists at the time, a large-scale war could not last very long because there would be no way of paying for it (though we now know that societies have, when they choose, huge resources they can tap for destructive purposes). A sensational best-seller after it was published in Britain in 1909 and in the United States the following year, its title—meant to make the point that it was an illusion to believe there was anything to be gained by taking up arms—took on a cruel and unintended irony only a few short years later. . . For many in the upper classes prior to WWI, the world was changing too fast. 

Norman Angell and others failed to see was the downside of interdependence. In Europe a hundred years ago the landowning classes saw their prosperity undermined by cheap agricultural imports from abroad and their dominance over much of society undercut by a rising middle class and a new urban plutocracy. As a result, many of the old upper classes flocked to conservative, even reactionary, political movements. In the cities, artisans and small shopkeepers whose services were no longer needed were also drawn to radical right-wing movements. Anti-Semitism flourished as Jews were made the scapegoat for the march of capitalism and the modern world.

The world is witnessing unsettling parallels today. Across Europe and North America, radical right-wing movements like the British National Party and the Tea Party provide outlets for the frustration and fears that many feel as the world changes around them and the jobs and security they had counted on disappear. Certain immigrants—such as Muslims—come to stand in as the enemy in some communities.

Globalization can also have the paradoxical effect of fostering intense localism and nativism, frightening people into taking refuge in the comfort of small, like-minded groups. One of the unexpected results of the Internet, for example, is how it can narrow horizons so that users seek out only those whose views echo their own and avoid websites that might challenge their assumptions.

Globalization also makes possible the widespread transmission of radical ideologies and the bringing together of fanatics who will stop at nothing in their quest for the perfect society. In the period before World War I, anarchists and revolutionary socialists across Europe and North America read the same works and had the same aim: to overthrow the existing social order. The young Serbs who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at Sarajevo were inspired by Nietzsche and Bakunin, just as their Russian and French counterparts were. Terrorists from Calcutta to Buffalo imitated each other as they hurled bombs onto the floors of stock exchanges, blew up railway lines, and stabbed and shot those they saw as oppressors, whether the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary or U.S. President William McKinley. 

Today new technologies and social media platforms provide new rallying points for fanatics, enabling them to spread their messages even more rapidly and to even wider audiences around the globe. Often they claim divine inspiration. All of the world’s major religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have produced their share of terrorists prepared to commit murder and mayhem in their name. Thus we see the young offspring of Muslim parents from Pakistan and Bangladesh, even those born or raised in the United Kingdom and North America, going off to make common cause with Syrian rebels, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or one of the branches of al Qaeda in North Africa or Yemen, despite sharing almost nothing—culturally or ethnically—with those whose cause they have taken up.

At the national level, globalization can heighten rivalries and fears between countries one might otherwise expect to be friends. One hundred years ago, on the eve of World War I, Britain, the world’s greatest naval power, and Germany, the world’s greatest land power, were each other’s largest trading partners. British children played with toys, including lead soldiers, made in Germany, and Covent Garden resounded with the voices of German singers performing German operas. Moreover, the two nations shared a religion—the majority in both was Protestant—and family ties, right up to their respective monarchs. But all that did not translate into friendship. Quite the contrary. With Germany cutting into Britain’s traditional markets and vying with it for colonies and power, the British felt threatened. As early as 1896, a best-selling British pamphlet, Made in Germany, painted an ominous picture: “A gigantic commercial State is arising to menace our prosperity, and contend with us for the trade of the world.”

Many Germans held reciprocal views. Germany, they said, was due its place in the sun—and an empire on which the sun would never set—but Britain and the British navy were standing in its way. When Kaiser Wilhelm and his naval secretary Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz decided to build a deep-water navy to challenge British naval supremacy, the unease in Britain about Germany’s growing commercial and military power turned into something close to panic.

Erskine Childers’s 1903 best-seller, The Riddle of the Sands, described a German invasion plot, stirring British fears about their lack of military preparedness. Rumours spread, fanned by the new mass circulation newspapers, of German guns buried under London in preparation for war, and 50,000 waiters in British restaurants who were really German soldiers. For its part, the German government seriously feared a pre-emptive attack on its fleet by the British navy, and the German public had its own share of invasion scares. On several occasions before 1914 parents in coastal towns kept their children home from school in anticipation of an imminent landing by British marines.

Cooler heads on both sides hoped to wind down the increasingly expensive naval race, but in each country, public opinion, then a new and incalculable factor in the making of policy, pushed in the direction of hostility rather than friendship. Even the blood ties between the German and the British royal families, which might have been expected to ameliorate these mutual antipathies, did quite the opposite. Kaiser Wilhelm, that strange and erratic ruler, hated his uncle King Edward VII, “the arch-intriguer and mischief-maker in Europe,” who, in turn, dismissed his nephew as a bully and a show-off.

It is tempting—and sobering—to compare today’s relationship between China and the U.S. with that between Germany and England a century ago. Now, as then, the march of globalization has lulled us into a false sense of safety. Countries that have McDonald’s, we are told, will never fight each other. Or as President George W. Bush put it when he issued his National Security Strategy in 2002, the spread of democracy and free trade across the world is the surest guarantee of international stability and peace.

May 1915: After the German navy's sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania, in which 1,195 lost their lives, enraged Londoners attack a German immigrant's tobacco shop.

What happens when an established hegemonic power is challenged by rising powers? And what does it take to successfully manage such transitions?

Yet the extraordinary growth in trade and investment between China and the U.S. since the 1980s has not served to allay mutual suspicions. Far from it. As China’s investment in the U.S. increases, especially in sensitive sectors such as electronics and biotechnology, so does public apprehension that the Chinese are acquiring information that will put them in a position to threaten American security. For their part, the Chinese complain that the U.S. treats them as a second-rate power and, while objecting to the continuing American support for Taiwan, they seem dedicated to backing North Korea, no matter how great the provocations of that maverick state. At a time when the two countries are competing for markets, resources, and influence from the Caribbean to Central Asia, China has become increasingly ready to translate its economic strength into military power. Increased Chinese military spending and the build-up of its naval capacity suggest to many American strategists that China intends to challenge the U.S. as a Pacific power, and we are now seeing an arms race between the two countries in that region. The Wall Street Journal has published authoritative reports that the Pentagon is preparing war plans against China—just in case.

Will popular feeling, fanned and inflamed by the mass media in the same way that it was in the early years of the 20th century, make these hostilities even more difficult to control? Today the speed of communications puts greater than ever pressure on governments to respond to crises, and to do so quickly, often before they have time to formulate a measured response.

The Best Cavalry Charge Ever Depicted—Beersheba 1917

Yanks on the Western Front–Photo Album

The Doughboys Arrive

So Does Their Equipment

A French Officer Orients His American Counterparts

A New Airplane for the Air Service Delivered

Chow Time During Pre-Battle Training

Heading for the Front

Setting Up a Frontline Field Kitchen

German Prisoners

Firing a French 75

Motorized Artillery or Machine Gun (?)

American Casualties at Château-Thierry

Supply Column Following an Advance

Relieved and Heading to the Rear, Meuse Sector

Victory Parade in Paris, 14 July 1919

Source:  Penn State University Library World War I Glass Plate Stereographs.  View 385 slides HERE.

Burden of Guilt: How Germany Shattered the Last Days of Peace, Summer 1914

By Daniel Allen Butler

Casemate, 2010

 Reviewed by Robert Warwick

In this concise and lucid account Mr. Butler argues that step by devious step, during the month of July 1914, after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Germany worked behind the scenes to bring about a full-scale conflict. They inspired the Austrians to deliver impossibly harsh demands on the Serbs, which encouraged the Russians to mobilize, all the while lulling the British and French with deceptive protestations of Germany's peaceful and merely defensive intentions.

In private, in response to a request from the Austrians, the Kaiser offered full support to them in their conflict with the Serbs. This offer was reiterated and supported by the German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg. This expression then gained the support of the Austrian Emperor, who had been against the whole military operation and properly concerned about the Russian reaction. 

Significantly, the Germans did not tell the Austrians about the Russian-French mutual defense treaty. Von Berchtold, the Austrian foreign minister, went about preparing for war against Serbia, concealing from the world his intentions. Masking their true intentions, many of the leading figures, including the Kaiser, took their scheduled vacations, in order not to alarm foreign governments. But suddenly on 23 July, the Austrian note to the Serbs was delivered, and within a day the Austrian army began to deploy. 

But as troop trains were rumbling all over the European landscape, many key figures had regrets  and second thoughts. Even before serious fighting started in Serbia, von Berchtold observed the enthusiastic, patriotic crowds demonstrating in Vienna and considered that his goals for domestic unity had been pretty much accomplished. He began to have reservations about risking a wider  conflict. Bethmann-Hollweg also had a change of heart, and he regretted that he had supported the  "blank check" that the Kaiser had impulsively given to the Emperor. But it was the Kaiser that made  the most radical shift. Completely losing his zest for war, he raised objections to the plans and  searched for avenues for negotiations. 

At the beginning of August 1914, a day or two before the attack on France and Belgium was to begin, the Kaiser received a wire from Count von Lichnowsky, the German ambassador to Britain, reporting  a conversation that he had with Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign minister. Lichnowsky stated that the British were prepared to offer their neutrality as well as guarantee the neutrality of the French if Germany would pledge not to attack France.

Galvanized into action, the Kaiser immediately sent for General von Moltke, who alone had the power to countermand orders for the invasion. Here is the author's own description of that encounter: 

Holding up Lichnowsky's telegram triumphantly, the Kaiser …declared, "Now we can go to war against Russia only. We simply march the whole of our army to the East." 

…Von Moltke was stunned… All [he] could see was the abandonment of the Schlieffen Plan, … and to his mind this was synonymous with chaos. 

…He lied and said: 

"Your Majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised … Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete and once settled, it cannot be altered." 

But, as the author goes on to say, it could have been done. The deployment could have been altered, and von Moltke knew it. In ten years, every contingency had been considered by the General Staff and complete arrangements for a movement of troops to the east by rail were available. The jump-off time (for the assault in the west) was 7 p.m., 3 August 1914, and German troops began to move across the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg as scheduled. 

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After the war, the last minute changes of heart by so many of the major players in this tragic drama gained prominence.  The aggression by Austria, the mobilization dates of the Russians, and the phony news stories about French shelling across the border have tended to conceal German culpability and contribute to what became the popular explanation for the war: that the secret treaties and inflexible schedules dragged the nations into a conflict that no one wanted. With admirable clarity Burden of Guilt disposes of this misconception. This well-written account of the fateful days of July 1914 accurately conveys the dread and anxiety felt by the informed political and military leadership, contrasted with the celebratory patriotism of the excited populace. 

Robert Warwick