The Great War and the Making of the Modern World

By Jeremy Black

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

Robert Warwick, Reviewer

In this well-researched volume the author describes with great detail and thoroughness the painful and costly lessons all participants needed to learn in order to conduct warfare in the modern world.

Jeremy Black states that the initial mindset and cultural expectation were that success in the field depended on spirited resolve and manly action fueled by patriotism and medieval notions of chivalry. The command staffs were slow to adapt to changing developments even though examples of these new techniques had been used before the outbreak of the war in 1914. For example, trench warfare and barbed wire were features of the Balkan Wars, but the Allies were of the opinion that they had nothing to learn from those theatres. The favored tactic of a frontal assault followed by a breakthrough died hard. The author stresses that it was not just the inherent advantage of defense that led to repeated failures but also the shortcomings in organization, supply, training, and, especially, communications. There was no effective wireless until 1917.

The Gallipoli campaign is a case in point. The author makes the observation that regardless of the value of the strategic objectives, the British had nowhere near the administrative and organizational skills necessary for such a complex enterprise. Advance intelligence of the terrain and enemy positions was lacking, as was experience in beach landing against a hostile shore. It was not until World War II that those techniques were perfected.

The author's interests extend to social and political turmoil throughout the world at the time. To the disappointment of the German High Command, there were no widespread uprisings in the colonial possessions of the European powers, although by 1917 new governments appeared in Cuba, Portugal, Greece, and Spain.

As the war proceeded through 1917 and continued in 1918, the improvements in fighting qualities acquired by the Allies versus the Germans brought about final victory. The Allies had made great advances in industrial production, weaponry, and innovative tactics, and thus the British and French outfought the enemy. But, the author notes, this fact was overshadowed in postwar history by the dramatic narrative of error and apparent futility that characterized the early years of the war.

For historians and researchers the commonplace explanation of the eventual outcome of the war is the collapse of the home front. In the German view especially, the stab-in-the-back theory prevails. Hitler's Germany owed much to a paranoid reading of the earlier conflict. In the U.S., the retrospective view was different. The author states that “…America's dominant narrative from the World War became one in which a failure to sustain the Great War commitment by acting as part of the League of Nations in the 1920s, or [to respond] to German expansion in the 1930s, helped cause the Second World War, and must not be repeated.”

Black makes excellent use of his extensive scholarship to trace the influences that the Great War had on nations and their later entry into the modern world. His clear insights and wide-ranging observations of The Great War and the Making of the Modern World are rewarding to anyone interested in this period are the impact it has had on subsequent history.

Robert Warwick