Too Hungry at the Peace Table
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Too Hungry at the Peace Table Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy By David Stevenson Basic. 564 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history,...
...Another goal, consent of the governed, meant controlling the governors—never an easy task, and impossible after the Bolshevik Revolution...
...In its densely packed pages the general reader learns farmore about the combatant nations than is usual in such works, and less about purely military events...
...American readers will find his views on President Woodrow Wilson of particular interest...
...He thinks it did not keep the peace because of divisions among the winning nations...
...The one possibility for a durable peace was probably what Wilson himself had called a peace between equals—a negotiated settlement...
...scholars...
...But General Erich Ludendorff, by this time the de facto ruler of Germany, realized he had to win on the Western Front before the U.S...
...When the Versailles Treaty was hammered out, the Points were badly compromised...
...As the suffering increased, though, desires for revenge and compensation grew...
...Contrary to the publisher's claim, the book does not change our understanding of World War I; rather, it deepens our knowledge and offers many interesting interpretations of familiar subjects...
...He kept the Allies on a short leash financially, providing just enough funds to keep them going...
...From a military standpoint this made excellent sense, and when tried on a relatively small scale during Germany's spring offensives in 1918 it proved highly effective...
...Unlike many historians, Stevenson considers the Treaty neither impractical nor altogether unjust...
...Germany, suffering great duress, had to accept sole blame for the War, pay reparations, and lose a large amount of territory...
...That is true as far as it goes, and the author gives Wilson good marks for convincing the Allies to agree to the League ofNations...
...Since throughout the conflict little changed on the Western Front, this is no serious loss...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" UNLIKE most one-volume histories of World War I, Cataclysm pays close attention to the internal politics, economics, diplomacy, and other characteri sties of every great power...
...But any outcome would have been better than the results of the Versailles Treaty...
...The road from Versailles led straight to Hitler's rise and another even more terrible war...
...Nor does the author slight the secondary players— Austria-Hungary, Italy, Turkey, and Japan...
...No one can say what the terms would have been, let alone the course history might have taken...
...Once the Allies began a series of limited strikes in August, they gained ground and took prisoners in large numbers...
...Wilson consoled himself with the delusion that all would later be made right by the League of Nations...
...For Wilson the entire peace process was nothing short of a debacle, much of it self-created...
...Initially the great powers only had military aims...
...My own view is that the fundamental problem was the length of the War: The longer it lasted the more each side hoped to gain by winning...
...He realized Allied imperialism would be aproblem at thepeace table, but failed to anticipate the extent of the concessions the U.S...
...Moreover, Wilson thought an autonomous force would strengthen his hand with the Allies, who eventually gave in and assigned the AEF a quiet sector in Lorraine...
...A recent book on Wilson and the War (see "What Wilson Wrought," NL, May/June, 2003) calls him a "megalomaniac," not too strong a label considering that he envisioned himself as the world's savior...
...Allied greed repelled most Americans, who soon relapsed into their traditional policy of isolationism...
...One blames Germany because of its preWar belligerence and the fact that its mobilization plan entailed invading Belgium and France, while for France and Russia mobilization was the last step before war and did not itself guarantee an armed confrontation...
...They needed a great deal more money and a great many men...
...Even if he had done so, the postwar backlash against the Allies would have nullified them...
...The Allies assumed the Western Front would remain stalemated through 1918, giving the AEF time to train its green recruits...
...Army...
...Wilson so antagonized the Senate that it rejected both the Treaty and the League...
...Stevenson inclines toward the latter, but, as always, his reasoning is balanced and sophisticated...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...no matter how realistic Wilson's approach, Germany would have resented paying the loser's price...
...After Wilson had Congress declare war as an "associated" power rather than as an ally—implying that the U.S...
...Such treaties had actually been signed in Paris, but were never submitted to the Senate by Wilson...
...out of the War, there would have been a negotiated peace, probably after Germany's 1918 offensives frightened the Allies but came up short of ending the stalemate...
...joined the War, everything changed...
...As they saw it, the chief threat to the peace of Europe remained Germany, so it was necessary to maintain a military alliance between Britain, France and the United States...
...would have to make...
...Liberals at home felt betrayed by Wilson's failure to impose the Points...
...The inevitability of Wilson's ultimate failure became clear at a conference preceding the armistice...
...National selfdetermination is a principle all liberals endorse, yet it would prove a hopeless cause in areas such as the Balkans where diverse ethnic groups are intermingled...
...Once the U.S...
...Stevenson treats Wilson's War aims as rational despite their including freedom of the seas, a condition Britain would never agree to since it still ruled the waves...
...Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on the War's origins...
...Britain and France agreed to accept Wilson's Fourteen Points with major reservations, and the "Americans acknowledged that the Points were ambiguous...
...A pattern of disunity emerged that contrasted sharply with the wartime cohesiveness of the anti-German coalition, and this disunity gave Hitler his opportunity...
...What is now Iraq came under British rule, and it caused them nothing but trouble...
...David Stevenson provides all the details of the actual fighting the reader needs to know...
...Each succeeded, but they failed to break the Allied armies, leaving Germany severely weakened...
...As Stevenson points out, the French were satisfied because they would have units on both flanks of the American front, and Pershing was pleased because the arrangement allowed a direct rail link to the Atlantic ports where his men and materials would touch down...
...The American people, however, would not have tolerated foreign officers commanding their troops...
...The British andFrenchreceived most of Germany's former colonies and took control of the Middle East...
...Without American aid the Allies would have been forced to negotiate with Germany, as Wilson had advocated in his "Peace Without Victory" address to the Senate in January 1917...
...Instead of the 500,000 troops he had planned to draft, the U.S...
...The German front began to crumble, and though it had not collapsed when the armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, the end seemed so close that a new German civilian government accepted terms from Wilson that amounted to unconditional surrender...
...America's entry precluded that...
...Army at its peak would number 4 million men, half of them in France—a remarkable feat considering that it started virtually from scratch...
...Like many British historians, he takes a more charitable view of the President than is currently fashionable among U.S...
...He was wrong, too, in supposing money and warships were all the Allies would want from America...
...Although the author presents a wealth of information and a huge bibliography, it is the freshness and rigor of his analysis that makes Cataclysm the best history of the Great War to date...
...The folly of proclaiming that America's entry had transformed the conflict into a "war for democracy," or, more absurdly, a "war to end all wars," should have been evident at the time...
...troops arrived in strength...
...The Allies favored "amalgamation," integrating American units into the British and French armies...
...Russia, Japan and Italy became more or less estranged from the Atlantic powers, and America, France and Britain reached the limits of cooperation...
...He also agreed with General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), that there should be an independent U.S...
...The other school attributes the outbreak of hostilities to numerous factors—colonial rivalries, the arms races, the rigid continental alliance systems, poor political leadership...
...Victory came sooner than expected...
...Since that was manifestly impossible, neither the Germans nor Anglo-American liberals would ever embrace the Treaty...
...But he admits that both Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain erred by implying that the Treaty would result injustice being served...
...might make a separate peace—Britain and France came clean...
...Lacking adequate foreign intelligence, Wilson had overestimated the Allies and underestimated Germany...
...Stevenson correctly notes that Wilson entered the War primarily in hopes of shaping the peace, yet if the Germans had not commenced unrestricted submarine attacks he couldn't have persuaded Congress to back him...
...Conservative internationalists like Chairman Henry Cabot Lodge of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not like either the League or the Treaty and offered a simpler answer to the German question...
...To that end he launched five offensives, starting in March 1918...
...Had Wilson kept the U.S...
Vol. 87 • May 2004 • No. 3
