After reading, “The Guns of August” by Barbara W. Tuchman, I have a new appreciation for World War I and, more specifically, its opening days. The author won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for her work on this book and it is easy to see how the committee came to their decision for the award. “The Guns of August” is a strong historical work on the starting moves of World War I and I highly recommend this book for reading and study for years to come.
Ms. Tuchman’s aim in the book is to focus the reader’s attention on August 1914. She begins her work by explaining the world political situation in the years preceding that date. She details relationships, disagreements, and jealousies between the monarchs of the time, which fuel the tensions prior to the war. She also outlines how the military agreements add to the domino effect as all of Europe becomes involved in the war. All of my life, I was taught that the war started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. While that fact is true, this book demonstrates how little this event plays into the entire conflict, except for being an excuse for war.
“The Guns of August” explores in-depth the decision by Germany to invade Belgium. In truth, there was little deliberation to invade the neutral country. The Germans knew all along that they would go through Belgium. The book highlighted the discussion of the Belgian Government to allow uninhibited movement through the country or to deny the German Army the right to pass. The Belgian Government chose to defend its neutrality and deny the Germans quick access to France. This act brought to the discussion the question of how the British would respond. The British ultimately decided to enter the war in support of Belgium and consequently to fight a common enemy alongside France. The author’s analysis of these decisions and the repercussions of their decisions highlighted the many different aspects of how decisions made during these early weeks resulted in ruthless fighting once the war began.
“The Guns of August” truly deserves its place as a military classic and I recommend it as a book to understand the First World War. In many ways, I think that there is much misunderstanding or even disregard to this war because of its ambiguous beginnings. This misunderstanding and disregard, compounded with the stalemate of several years of fighting, makes the war unimaginable. The author brings these events to life through her detailed descriptions of the events that not only led to the war but also led to the stalemate. The book, at times, becomes a little confusing because of the amount of detail that she places in her description. However, this large amount of scholarly detail eventually adds to her credibility as she develops her analysis of what actually happened in that first month of the war. As I thought about the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I, last year, I placed this book on my reading list. The selection of this book did not disappoint me in anyway and fulfilled my desire to understand how “The Great War” began.
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