Italy should not have entered the war on the Allied side, if they were to enter the war at all.

"What "should" have happened in WWI?"

The young men of the various belligerent nations should've said "Fuck this, I'm not dying for king/kaiser/tsar so-and-so" and refused to fight. There can be no wars if the young men who are suckered into fighting and dying in them refuse to be played be the old men who 'wage' these wars.

It's an example of what happens when you get locked into alliances. It kept the peace for years because none of the countries wanted to start a war knowing that the others would come in to defend. When an incident occurred they were forced to respond as it escalated.

WW II showed that even though there were alliances, no one wanted to fight when Hitler started annexing. If he had headed east into the Soviet Union instead of west into France he probably could have taken out Stalin before anyone cared.

It wasn't completely pointless - it gave France and England the chance to betray Italy, in such a manner that encouraged the rise of Mussolini and Italy's alliance with the Nazis. Oh and it gave rise to the Treaty of Versailles - one of the worst ideas in history - to paraphrase Machiavelli, either don't harm your enemy too much, or completely destroy them - of course we went for the middle option and ended up with a Nazi government that almost conquered the entirety of Europe.

The war itself was just inevitable with capitalist/imperialist countries all wanting to be top dog, and not tolerating the rising power/power of the enemy.

People should have realised that they were part of a united European entity and consolidated their differences for economic prosperity - ie. they should've formed the EU sooner.

It's the same situation as today, people too busy worrying about American/Russian/Israeli interests and don't realise that we are part of a globalised economy and that the human species must learn to move forward as a whole if we are to survive.

I'm not sure how much the "locked into alliance" argument holds. Britain was doing quite well at keeping out, regardless of good relations with France and Russia, until Fritz invaded Belgium. After that we had no choice but to enter, in much the same way that we'd have no choice but to take action if someone invaded Belgium today.

The treaty of Versailles is also not the madness it was often made out to be. It was how it was enforced in later years that was the problem. For most of the 20s it worked nicely enough. Where it failed was in the lack of willingness to be flexible with the economic side when times became hard, combined with a bizzare reluctance to enforce the military restrictions aspect when it became inconvenient to do so.

I don't believe any of the statesmen of WWI wanted a general war. However each of their military planners believed fervently in the importance of mobilization timetables, and that if they allowed their opponent to mobilize ahead of themselves this would be a disaster, while if they themselves mobilized first this would lead to quick victory. Trying to assign war guilt is a fool's errand. All the major powers behaved more or less as expected in the circumstances.

A major mistake was the French adoption of Plan 17. Plan 17's major flaw was its insistence on an offensive through Lorraine. Victor Michel's plan predicted Germany's plan of attack to the letter. Had his plan been implemented Germany would have been thrashed in Belgium.

The Italian offensives along the Isonzo were an unmitigated disaster. Mounting an offensive across such difficult terrain would be severely difficult even for an army comprised mostly of experienced, well equipped mountain troops. Italy was poorly equipped and while it had some veteran mountain troops, not nearly enough. Sadly for the Italians they were led by a man who thought nothing of throwing away lives, Luigi Cadorna.

Italy could have easily stayed out of the war, but the opportunity for expansion was too great. The Entente offered Italy Istra, Dalmatia, and the Brenner Pass boundary. Furthermore, there was reason to believe that if Italy joined, Romania and Bulgaria would follow suit (they were as yet, neutral). If that had happened, there is a good chance Austria would have been crushed immediately.

The Russian war plan was coordinated with the French, which was problematic for Russia. The French strategy was to have as quick and heavy a Russian mobilization vs Germany as possible. Russia should have waged a defensive war. Logistically it was too difficult to launch the kind of rapid advance that they did. The Russian First and Second Armies were completely routed due to this folly. The German Ninth had great success throwing the Russians back from their early gains in Lemberg and elsewhere.

Austria obviously engaged in a confused and conflicted mobilization that cost it on the eastern front. Austria,as is well known, should have ordered its full mobilization to the eastern front, thereby preventing the early losses they experienced in Galicia.

Germany's great miscalculation was Britain's entry to defend Belgian neutrality. Of course Britain had commitments to Belgium, but Britain had never really committed a very large force to the continent. WWI would be the exception. Had it not been for Britain's entry, the Germans likely would have routed France early on and won the war decisively. Another German mistake was its unrestricted submarine warfare vs American merchant marine. Bringing the industrial production of America onto the side of the Entente would preclude any chance at victory. Consider in 1917 Russia was in chaos, mutinies were widespread in France, etc. Sure Romania joined the Entente but their participation was a disaster. In the spring of 1918 Germany was making some headway in Belgium and France but the arrival of American troops halted their momentum.

I think it is a good illustration of the dangers faced by the world as the status quo and balance of power shift. The alliance system worked well as long as the "big powers" were the only ones who cared, but once unified Germany began to grow into a power, that affected the balance ... Germany had de facto economic power that translated into military power and political influence, but that of necessity had to come from somewhere. The resulting balance was unstable and required only a small spark to trigger the explosion.

That is actually one of the beauties of Diplomacy ... if all seven players zealously guard the status quo, there will be a draw. If a weak player leaves a power vacuum and is taken advantage of, the rest have to act quickly to regain a balance ... if they do not, the newly more powerful country will grow in influence, upset the balance and at least threaten a solo.

By the way, the same status quo and changing balance of power issues are present in the real world today ... more in Asia than in Europe, but no less dangerous.

Long ago I read an excellent 30-volume "History of Europe" series writeen between 1895 and 1905. It consisted of 3-6 volumes each on the major powers of the time, and the repeated theme was that war is a thing of the past. They looked forward to a century of peace, progress and prosperity. Oops.

Dan Carlin currently has 2 episodes of Hardcore History out that deals with WW1. It's called Blueprint for Armageddon. So far it is over 6 hours of in-depth material. It's not wholly chronological, which some might see as a fault in what Carlin does.

From what I've explored, I get the impression that Germany felt stifled. As a country they missed out on a lot of the colonial expansion the other powers engaged in.

But Bismarck thought colonies were pointless and a waste of money. There's reason to believe, if you read Britain's reports on its possessions in West Africa and what not, that Britain felt the same way towards many of them. I mean the established powers couldn't have been too stifling if Belgium and Portugal were allowed to have possessions quite out of proportion with their power in Africa. As it was, Germany had Tanganyika, Rwanda/Burundi, Swahililand, the Kionga Triangle, Namibia and parts of Botswana, Cameroon, Togoland, New Guinea, and Samoa. Not exactly nothing. If they felt stifled, it would have far better to do battle for colonies in the colonial territories themselves than risk European-wide war. This, in fact, is essentially what kept the peace in Europe during much of the 19th century as well as after WWII (although they were no longer colonies, same principle). Germany had many opportunities to do just that, but remained passive. Germany remained neutral during the Boer war. They remained neutral during the Russo-Japanese war. They stayed out of Persia and Morocco, etc. They could have cause more trouble but they did not.

What *caused* the war in my view was a combination of the strategic encirclement of Austria-Hungary and the after-effects of the annexation crisis in 1908. Britain joined the Entente essentially to stave off pressure from France and Russia on their empire. Britain signed the Anglo-Russian convention to focus Russia's attention on Turkey and the Balkans instead of Afghanistan and India. The result was the expansion of the Balkan League, which was potentially drawing in the whole of the Balkans against Austria-Hungary. Furthermore French control of Morocco had pushed Italy to focus its attention eastward as well.

But while A-H was encircled, they had also enraged Russia with their conduct during the 1908 crisis over the Bosnia annexation. A-H needed great power approval for any kind of move like that, so they pulled a fast one on Russia, exchanging Bosnia for Russian use of the Bosphorus. But Russia had thought the annexation of Bosnia would take place sometime in the future, whereas it happened immediately, before Russia was able to consult France and Britain over the Straits. By the time Russia consulted Britain about the issue, Britain had refused to allow it because of the instability the Bosnian crisis caused. Russia then was forced to tell an incensed Serbia to back off of Austria-Hungary for now, so as to avoid war. However future promises were made that should Serbian interests be harmed by A-H in the future, Russia would be prepared to go to war. That's precisely what happened in 1914.

@Tolstoy

"The young men of the various belligerent nations should've said "Fuck this, I'm not dying for king/kaiser/tsar so-and-so" and refused to fight. There can be no wars if the young men who are suckered into fighting and dying in them refuse to be played be the old men who 'wage' these wars."

I find it hard to place any blame on those who served in previous wars. I was encouraged that the people of the UK and US probably prevented an escalation in Syria, but I'm a little more pessimistic than you. I think when young men and women refuse to go to war in the future the old men will just get by with fewer men/women and more drones and nucks.

Good analysis, Putin.

Agreed. Good analysis, Putin. Spot-on as far as I could tell.

I've recently taken an amateur's interest in WWI. Such a fascinating war. Thank God America stayed out of it as long as we did.

Also, it's a fascinating war for someone interested in the history of small arms like myself. Many weapons that would later be used in WWII were either designed or used in WWI, such as the M1911 pistol, the M1897 and M1912 Trench Guns respectively, the Thompson submachine gun, the M1917/M1919 family of general-purpose machine guns, and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle

The ubiquitous Browning .50 caliber heavy machine gun was originally intended to be an anti-aircraft gun for use in WWI

As I understand it, it was the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky who suggested the annexation to his Austria counterpart, in return for Austrian support in the question of Russia's access to the Turkish straits. There were enough other points of contention, but I don't think the annexation came as a surprise to some members of the Russian government.

I bumped into this fantastic analysis as well:

http://themetapicture.com/if-wwi-was-a-bar-fight/

"it was the Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky who suggested the annexation to his Austria counterpart, in return for Austrian support in the question of Russia's access to the Turkish straits."

That doesn't quite make sense for a couple of reasons.

1 - Turkey was experiencing a nationalist revolution. Austria was afraid that a nationalist government in Turkey would try and reclaim Bosnia, which it had 'provisionally' occupied since the Treaty of Berlin. It made all the sense in the world for Austria to use this opportunity to annex Bosnia.

2 - Izvolsky, after the meeting in Buchlau, showed no sense of urgency as to what was going on. He continued to go on holiday, while Austria prepared for immediate annexation. Furthermore Izvolsky was outraged at the news of annexation when he received it and desperately tried to put together an international conference to overturn this action.

I am not saying that Austria had to be coerced to annex Bosnia, which they occupied since 30 years, if I am not mistaken. I am just saying that Izvolsky used it to broker a deal, which eventually backfired, owing to the lack of support from Britain to change to status quo with regards to Russian access to the Straits and because he underestimated the resentment about the annexation in the Russian public opinion. He was calm, because at the announcement of the annexation the deemed himself in control of the situation, only when things went differently as he hoped, he changed tack and denied every knowledge of any deal and indeed hoped to convene the international conferences as you say, and here I agree, this could have been handled better by Austria-Hungary and Germany.

I can only give you Christopher Clark's, "The Sleepwalkers" as secondary literature for this point of view, but I think primary sources may be hard to come by and more importantly equally biased. In any case, he does cite Serbian 'secondary' sources for the lack of Russian support to Serbia. In fact it is even mentioned that Izvolsky informed the Serbian foreign minister at a meeting in Marienbad about the imminent annexation.

I can't find anything written anywhere that suggests Izvolsky proposed the annexation. I refer to Gordon Craig's Europe 1815-1914; Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesling's Conflict Among Nations; Luigi Albertini's Origins of the War. None of these suggests Izvolsky proposed the annexation. The standard account is that Izvolsky figured the annexation was to happen anyway, and had made public to the Austrians in 1907 that Russia wanted access to the Straits and so was willing to accept the annexation for that purpose. IThe Austrian ambassador Aehrenthal had come to power with then notoriously anti-Serbian Colonel Conrad von Hotzendorf, and annexing Bosnia would reduce the 'Serbian threat' to AH's territorial integrity. I could see Izvolsky agreeing, without authorization from St. Petersburg, to a deal over the Straits but proposing the annexation of Austria himself? And proposing it in such a way that Austria would not even bother asking permission from the signers of the Treaty of Berlin? I can't imagine him being *that* foolish and thinking that would work out. If Izvolsky proposed the annexation he most certainly would not have proposed the untimely independence of Bulgaria, which seemed all too coordinated with the Austria move to stave off any chance of Serbian territorial compensation and was certainly hostile to Russian interests.

Russia's lack of support was due to Germany backing AH to the hilt and threatening war with Russia if they insisted on pressing Serbia's demands. Russia lacked France's support on this and would have had to fight Germany and AH by themselves, so they backed down.

A lot of proponents of the Great Man theory here. Nobody puts this down to European growth and the industrial revolution?

I don't think industrialization made conflict an eventuality in Europe, no. Though, I thought Germany's fleet building activities had a bit more to do with heightening tensions than people here are giving credit.

"Nobody puts this down to European growth and the industrial revolution?"

That doesn't explain why the war occurred when it occurred and is a bit too deterministic.

"Though, I thought Germany's fleet building activities had a bit more to do with heightening tensions than people here are giving credit."

American and Japanese naval power were a much bigger problem for the UK. I don't think the UK ever doubted it could defeat the Germans in any kind of naval rivalry. The Anglo-German problem was going to happen regardless of German naval build-up, because the UK needed a good relationship with France and Russia to relieve pressure on Egypt and India respectively. The UK was going to pursue an appeasement policy towards Russia come what may on the naval front, and it was this policy that was going to inevitably lead to tensions between Germany and Britain. This is made clear by the fact that Germany effectively ended the naval race before the war broke out on terms favorable to the UK. Despite this, the UK went out of their way to engage in not-so-secret "secret" naval talks with Russia on the Baltic right before the war. The talks greatly antagonized the Germans but the point of them was to give a signal of cooperation to Russia.

"A lot of proponents of the Great Man theory here."

I think I'd like Diplomacy a lot less if diplomatic history were irrelevant.