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Radio War Nerd EP #441 — Why Germany Lost the First World War, feat. Mark Karau (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-29 22:20:53
Imported:
2024-04
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Guest: Mark Karau, historian

Recorded: April 25, 2024

With all the popular comparisons today between the Russo-Ukraine War and the First World War, we talk to historian Mark Karau about the most obvious question that's been oddly ignored: Why did Germany lose World War I?

First — We discuss neti pots & the Acela Corridor meltdown over the war on Palestinians

At 19:30 — We're joined by Mark Karau to discuss his book (and our topic), Germany's Defeat in the First World War: The Lost Battles and Reckless Gambles That Brought Down the Second Reich

Maps 

*The Schlieffen-Moltke Plan

*Schlieffen-Moltke outcome:

*First Battle of Marne, Sept 1914

Buy Mark Karau's book, Germany's Defeat in the First World War: The Lost Battles and Reckless Gambles That Brought Down the Second Reich

Related RWN episodes:-EP #155 - Turkey in WWI-EP #157 - The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, 1918-EP #160 - Poetry in WWI + Xinjiang Surveillance State

Total time: 1:57:36

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

GC

neti pots: only dangerous if you don't boil the water afresh each time AFAIK! Glad you're getting some relief. Looks like a great episode!

Jon Spiegler

Just be sure to use distilled water in a neti pot

NYCM&AHole

It’s cultural and genetic. That’s why they always make it to the semifinals of the World Cup and wash out

NYCM&AHole

University of $poiled Children (USC)

JBS

I'm a Humboldt alumni, it used to be called Humboldt State University but the consultants got to it, tore all the copper wiring out of the walls, and rebranded it a Cal Poly school

triplevalaska

I laughed when he says some eastern thing, called a netipot. He obviously doesn't watch much American TV, they use to have infomercials for those thing. If it works it works though

Neil Y

What a insightful episode! Thank you for finding the fantastic guest. The book is now on my reading list.

J P 3

There's an excellent book "Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire; 1871-1918" by Katja Hoyer that covers some of the pre-history of WWI. The contrast between Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II is really something else.

Blown Magnet

Excellent episode - great guest. The stuff about the German navy is hilarious.

Padraig Cooney

Point of order! They've won it 4 times and lost 4 other finals.

ukhc

Brilliant episode. You could tell John was having fun.

William

I love that the sheer stupidity of this lib president, trying to do this 4d chess move, has fucked things up even worse

William

I can’t remember if it was Barbara Tuchman or Adam Tooze, but Kaiser wilhelm was also a big fan of Alfred mahan’s book, which probably just fed into his desire to make Germany a world power

Patrick Link

I think I read somewhere that the Schlieffen plan was changed because the northern French road network couldn't support all the troops needed for it?

William

Anglos first reaction is to blockade, with questionable effectiveness, dual use products; some things never change

William

Also, Wilson was a naive bitch

William

Final comment- the sinking of the Lusitania wasn’t what caused the US entry into the war; the senate Nye committee found it was bankers pressuring Wilson to enter, to protect their loans. The Lusitania and the Zimmerman telegram were useful cover for that

NYCM&AHole

Well every so often the dog chasing the car catches it. We don’t know what Germany’s record would be if they fought a world war every 4 years.

NYCM&AHole

The first bank bailout.

Demented Avenger

Finally, getting to THE most important geopolitical event since Columbus didn't starve!

Michael S. Judge

John & Mark! The neti pot thing is only dangerous if you use unclean water. Anywhere you can get distilled water, you're good, & they sell little mass-produced ones with packets of saline rinse (to clear them gunk off'n yr skull holes) at every big pharmacy chain in the USA. I'm sure they'd have an equivalent at whatever CVS and Walgreen's are in Italy (possibly also CVS and Walgreen's, at this late date).

drizzly_november

The way the war’s still taught in schools really confuses the timeline, you learn about the Lusitania and immediately jump to war. I didn’t realize until college there were 2 whole years in between!

Christopher Small

Good episode. Yeah, I think when people say "the war was always unwinnable given the balance of power between the sides," that tends to gloss over the fact that the "sides" aren't a given, they're contingent. Germany in WWI did NEED to go into war as diplomatically isolated as it did. For that matter, a large part of the reason Germany got as far as it did in WWII was because it was so difficult to get everyone on-sides against them before Barbarossa. And it's not hard to imagine a scenario where Germany is able to survive the war because Churchill pushed through his stupid "let's bomb Baku" idea and poisoned the well on cooperation between the Western Allies and the USSR. I know you tried to avoid drawing parallels this episode, but this is all stuff that looks familiar as the US wills a Russia-China-Iran alliance into existence just by being so tactless and overbearing. Also, one last thought: it's a bit funny that the myth of the undefeated German army was able to persist post-war when you look at any front BESIDES the western front in the fall of 1918 and realize they were all in a state of complete collapse.

David Winn

Was just about to say this myself! They are useful, but make sure you don’t expose your various permeable membranes to gnarly stuff from the tap. Tap water is fine to drink, but absorbing it though the nasal cavity is a different matter

Brian Brain

There's a Lusitania museum on Old Head in the South of Ireland that's worth a visit. It's small (was there last year), but they plan to build it out more. I can't remember the details in full, but there were quite some questionable circumstances and responses to the sinking of the Lusitania. For instance, all private ships that headed out to save survivors were called back and prevented from responding. It was known there was uBoat patrolling that areand the captain was going abnormally slow. There are still questions around foreknowledge, intentional misaction, what was being carried, ensuring few witnesses, and so on in order to drag the US into war. Anyways, talked to a volunteer about it for 20 minutes, and she laid it out for me. Highly recommend.

a clash of purple

Why are the Germans so utterly convinced that they can take on everyone in the world at the same time and win? Are the English the only people in Europe who understand that you have to deal with your enemies one at a time? It's so baffling to me, even as an American. I mean, we antagonize more people than we should, from a cold-blooded realpolitik imperialist standpoint, but not everyone everywhere all at once.

a clash of purple

The idea that Germany was ever a competent military power really is a successful piece of propaganda cooked up by the British empire, before WWII, and by the Nazis and their American sympathizers, after WWII. Obviously they are genuinely very good at certain things, and it's not like they've never won a decisive battle, but really what they seem to be best at is squandering vast amounts of men and materiel on totally hopeless conflicts. And then lying about it afterwards and blaming all their failures on communists.

Christopher Small

German (i.e. Prussian) foreign policy was based on the idea, that to get ahead they had to 1. hit hard and fast in every war and 2. be completely opportunistic diplomatically. To be fair, this was rational, given Prussia's initially precarious position in the middle of a bunch of larger powers, and when they could deal with one or two rivals at a time it worked pretty well. When they faced cohesive alliances in a protracted war, on the other hand, it could be disastrous. It also made them blind to the more subtle long term things like soft power and subterfuge, which wasn't appealing to a bunch of militant junkers. If the Germans were half as good as spy work as the British thought they were, they really could have caused havoc. But they were completely inept. When some of the Irish militants the abwehr was working with started a small scale bombing campaign at the start of WWII they were like "what are you doing? You should be spying on airfields and stuff for us." Like, could you imagine what having a bunch of bombs going off in tube stations during the blitz would've done to morale? Because the Germans certainly couldn't. These were people who got a bunch of Indian recruits to the SS at a time when India was on the verge of insurrection and couldn't think of anything better to do with them but put them on patrol duty in France.

William

I am shocked to learn there may have been a conspiracy. Who could’ve let this happen?

Hans Anders

Very informative, very well structured. The best parallel with the Ukraine war may be the British loudly cheering on the heroism of an attacked people because it fit so neatly with British interests.

drizzly_november

Yeah, iirc there's a strong case that Churchill as Lord of the Admiralty knew a Uboat was prowling in the Irish Sea and took a hands-off approach, in hopes that it would attack a ship just like the Lusitania - filled with wealthy Americans. Then the US would have to jump in on Britain's side. It's been a while since I read it, and it's more a pop history, but Erik Larson's Dead Wake was pretty damning on Churchill's behavior there.

Vaderhader

Anyone else had the rwn feed explode in their app?

CR

First time, eh?

CR

Could you imagine having a state and military so fucking stupid and arrogant?

CR

I used tap water for years and my brain is only a little mushy. I suspect JD would prefer to just buy distilled water. I also prefer the squeeze bottle to the pot. And you can make your own solution easily once you run out of packets.

CR

Aha! That’s why China has been building all those roads and infrastructure around the world.

jg

“why does every ep start with twenty minutes on ailments?” [me five minutes later taking meticulous notes on netipots]

Kevin Walsh

Bismarck's personal style was apparently a mix of bullying and wheedling. (Kaiser Wilhelm I supposedly once said "Es ist schwer unter Bismarck Kaiser zu sein" - It's hard to be Emperor under Bismarck), and I often feel like his successors thought that this style was why he was such a successful diplomat, as opposed to his keen sense of what his counterparties might want from him.

HarshMalarkey

And now we're dunking on the Germans

David Andrews

It never really occurred to me to ask question "Why Germany lost WWI" . I always assumed it was because of manpower and resource shortages. This episode was very illuminating. Great job again, guys and Mark Karau was an excellent guest.

Jimothy Realname

John, I implore you to be cautious with the netipot. Make sure it's fully sterilized every time you use it, make sure you're using distilled water, properly prepared. It isn't common but you can get a brain-eating amoeba from those things

Alex Muir

One of the best War Nerd episodes! (mind you I say that about a helluva a lot of them...). The story of the German fleet was completely new to me - I always thought the Battle of Jutland was almost the end of the British navy rather than a bit of a blunder by the Kriegsmarine that was doing all it could not to get its "hair a bit mussed"... Another really interesting source on von Moltke is Correlli Barnett's "The Swordbearers", which describes how the Schlieffen-Moltke plan was almost aborted at the outset, when the British sent a diplomatic note to the Kaiser suggesting they might not go to war if the Germans slowed down their mobilization or something. Von Moltke had to spend hours convincing the Kaiser & the court not to as any disruption would throw all the mobilization timetables out & thousands of trains would simply not be able to move... Apparently von Moltke was so emotionally & morally shattered by the effort that he never really recovered, hence his loss of nerve after the Marne (all this from a very faded memory of the book). Ref also the storm troopers in Germany's 1918 offensive, apparently they got this idea from the Russians, who introduced the tactic in the 1916 Brusilov offensive, when the Russians smashed the Austro-Hungarian army & the Germans had to transfer many divisions from the Western Front to save the day (which gave the Western Entente armies some much needed breathing space). You're going to have to do a show on the the Eastern Front in WW1, one day, guys... Even less well known than the Eastern Front in WW2 (no doubt Annibale is an expert on it, though...).

Ellen Harold

I don't know how pertinent it is, but as a young reporter the American press gadfly George Seldes interviewed Field Marshal Hindenburg on the battlefield when Armistice was declared: "Born in 1890, George Seldes was a young reporter in Europe at the close of World War I. When Armistice Day came, he broke ranks with the obedient press corps and drove behind the lines of retreating German troops. For the rest of his life, he remained haunted by what took place next. Seldes and three colleagues secured an interview with Paul von Hindenburg, the German field marshal. Seldes asked what had ended the war. 'The American infantry in the Argonne won the war,' Hindenburg responded, and elaborated before breaking into sobs. It was an enormous scoop. But allied military censors blocked Hindenburg's admission, which he never repeated in public. The story could have seriously undermined later Nazi claims that Germany had lost the war due to a 'stab in the back' by Jews and leftists. Seldes came to believe that the interview, if published, 'would have destroyed the main planks of the platform on which Hitler rose to power.' But the reporters involved 'did not think it worthwhile to give up our number-one positions in journalism' by disobeying military censors 'in order to be free to publish.'" Seldes's newsletter "In Fact" was religiously followed by the reporting profession, and they agreed that he usually proved right in his assessments. But on one issue they thought he was a little crazy. He had worked out by analyzing medical reports in newspapers that smoking was associated with lung cancer, but when he reported this, nobody believed him! https://jeffcohen.org/docs/mbeat19950712.html

Mark Ames

Agree about eastern front in WW2. Bleeds into (so to speak) the Ru Civil War and other civil wars in that area.

xnfec

A bit late to this party but excellent episode. To add my tuppence worth; at the time, the royal houses of Europe were almost all German. Belgium in particular was Saxe-Coburg Gotha, the same as the British one. According to a book I read (the Three Emperors as I recall). Edward Grey was the most pro-German Foreign Sercretary the British had had for ages and even he was pro-war in the end. There are many anecdotes of life working with the Kaiser. Finally, one reason for the final German collapse I heard was to do with the situation in the Balkans. British soldiers withdrawn from Gallipoli and French troops were stationed in Greece, apparently doing very little and being much criticised for it. They were nicknamed the Gardeners of Salonika. They were up against a line contolled by the Bulgarians with some Germans. The German commander begged for re-inforcements from the eastern front but was refused. Under the cover of darkness, the French brought up and concealed many heavy guns. Finally, and attack was launched which allowed French Spahis (North African cavalry) to break through and find there was nothing between them and Berlin. According to Robert Graves, in Goodbye to All That, "it was hunger that broke Jerry" From the sound of this, I marval at the endless capacity of the Germans to be surprised! And they say the British were led by donkeys.

Alex Muir

I met an old Cockney wallpaper hanger who was a veteran of that Bulgarian campaign from Salonika ('the world's biggest prisoner of war camp' according to German propaganda). He drove a team of horses pulling a piece of heavy artillery through a lot of mud, from what I remember. "They were fierce fighters, them Bulgars, fierce fighters", he said, shaking his head, fiercely.

xnfec

My understanding of the article/book I read about this was that the Germans were trying to get the Bulgarians to fight on the Western Front but the Bulgarians were only really interested in their own sphere.