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History As It Happens
The Christmas Truce
00:55:47
Something remarkable happened as British, French, and German soldiers shivered in their trenches on Christmas Eve along a 20-mile-long stretch of the Western Front in 1914. Instead of killing one another, they met in no-man's-land to fraternize. They...
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- [00:00]
Patrick Gizza
Sign up for my weekly newsletter, free@historyasithappens.com or search for history as it happens on Substack. The three battalions in the line, like the rest of the British army, met the enemy in no man's land, exchanged the souvenir so precious to the hearts of the private riflemen, smoked German cigars and gave gaspers in return, speculated with philosophically minded Teutons upon the futility of the whole thing and upon the rumness of talking together today and killing each other tomorrow. Passed Boxing Day in the traditional spirit of sentimentality and resume the war hammer and tongs on the 27th. So wrote Reginald Berkeley in the History of the Rifle Brigade in the War of 1914-1918, published in 1927. Berkeley's touching recollection appears in the introduction of the Christmas Myth, Memory and the First World War by the historian Terry Blom Crocker, who sought to separate history from memory, reality from myth, relating to the remarkable occurrences on Christmas Eve 1914 on the Western Front, men shivering in their trenches thinking of home, five months into a war that had killed tens of thousands of soldiers on all sides. Already millions would be dead before the guns fell silent in November 1918, so it seems so out of place that men sent to kill would fraternize with the enemy instead. And the Christmas truce on the Western Front has indeed taken on mythic proportions. It is the subject of poems, books, songs and the film Joyu Noel, which came out about 20 years ago.
- [01:56]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Come on, Patrick Gizza Song.
- [02:00]
Patrick Gizza
In a Home.
- [02:19]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Good evening. Do you speak English?
- [02:23]
Patrick Gizza
Yes, a little.
- [02:25]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Wonderful. We were talking about a ceasefire for Christmas Eve. What do you think? The outcome of this war won't be decided tonight. I don't think anyone would criticize us for laying down our rifles on Christmas Eve.
- [02:43]
Patrick Gizza
In her introduction, Terry Blomkrocker writes about the film's attitude toward the war. All combatants were equally culpable for the conflict and yet equally innocent, as they had clearly been indoctrinated by their governments to hate their enemies. The film shows French and Scottish soldiers on the Western Front attacking a German trench in December 1914, an assault that results in many casualties but no gain of territory. Soon afterward, she says, on Christmas Eve the Germans place lit Christmas trees on their parapets. A soldier sings Silent Night and the men from all three countries walk hesitantly into the bomb cratered area between the trenches. The German, French and Scottish officers share a bottle of Champag and arrange for an evening ceasefire. The lower ranks exchange drinks, cigarettes and chocolate, and at midnight a Scottish Priest leads them all in a mass. So is that movie accurate? Does it even matter? What may seem so strange from our vantage today wasn't really unusual then. Short, informal truces happened often in the First World War.
- [03:47]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Good evening, Germans.
- [03:49]
Patrick Gizza
But we're not English.
- [03:50]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
We're. Gosh.
- [03:53]
Patrick Gizza
So why did the Christmas truce become such a powerful cultural touchstone? Dr. Terry Blom Crocker, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:02]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Hi. Nice to be here.
- [04:03]
Patrick Gizza
It's great to have you here. Your first time. You know, a glance at a map of the world these days and you'll see many front lines where there are soldiers wishing they could be home for Christmas or just be home, period. Just as they did in 1914, when, amid all the carnage and destruction on the Western Front, men stopped killing each other for a short time. A moment of humanity amid the madness of the war. Why do you think the story of the Christmas Truce, or maybe truces of 1914, why does this story still captivate the imagination?
- [04:37]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Mostly because it's been misrepresented. The actual event and what we believe happened. There's a very wide gap in between the two. And as a result, people fall in love with the myth because it's, you know, peace, love and understanding. Give me the Paul McCartney video. And they don't know what actually happened. Now, I think this is kind of sad because what actually happened was really fascinating in a lot of ways, but people would much prefer the myth a.
- [05:05]
Patrick Gizza
Little bit like the myth of the first Thanksgiving. There was a dinner or a feast between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians, but it took on a life of its own much later on, centuries later on. Is that what you're getting at here? Same kind of thing?
- [05:19]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Well, yeah, and the book I wrote about it actually traces the development of the myth. It starts by looking at what actually did happen. And then it shows how over the years, the myths about the truce built up. And you can see the changes based on things that had nothing to do with the First World War or the truce, based on prevailing political attitudes in the 20s and the 30s, in the 60s, you know, the Vietnam War had as much to do with the building of the myth of the Christmas Truce as the Christmas truce itself.
- [05:56]
Patrick Gizza
Oh, why is that? What happened there?
- [05:59]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
It's difficult to explain without tracing the whole thing, but basically what happened in the Christmas truce was on the Western Front in 1914. Various small truces occurred between the British and the German soldiers. They were all different, so nothing was centrally arranged. We're Talking about a 20 mile stretch of the front Nothing was centrally arranged, nothing was ordered to happen. It was just that in some cases the Germans started singing carols on Christmas Eve and the British joined in. In some cases in the next morning they called across, oh, if you don't shoot, we don't shoot. In some cases people went out into no man's land originally for the purpose of burying bodies that were there from a week before a battle that had occur six or seven days earlier. When you talk about the Christmas truce, what you're talking about is not a monolithic event, but you're talking about lots of tiny truces and they weren't even consistent across this 20 mile front. Half of the soldiers along that front did not participate. There were very limited ceasefires between the French and the Belgian troops and the Germans, which was the majority of the 250mile front at that point. As I said, the British only occupied that 20 mile front and this was for very good reasons. The British were fighting in the war but they weren't personally pissed off about the fact that their country was being occupied. The Belgian and the French soldiers were. So while they may have called across and said, we're not going to fire the Germans today, there was no larger truce than that. But in the British sector there was. That's why the truce occurred when it did. But it's also important to remember that the soldiers who may have enlisted at the beginning of the war in the heat of the moment saying, yes, we're going to go get the Germans, yes we're going to go get the British, are still hum in training camps at this point. The soldiers that were facing each other in line were professional armies. They were fighting because fighting was their job. They were told to fight by their government. And truces have been a fact of war for thousands of years. There were truces in the Trojan wars, for example. There was nothing unusual about a truce that was often for the purposes of burying bodies or recovering from the immediate aftermath of a battle. And this was in that sense no different. It was professional soldiers showing each other courtesy. They weren't really whipped up to white hot hate for each other. They were fighting because their countries were fighting.
- [08:30]
Patrick Gizza
But you mentioned Vietnam before in the 1960s.
- [08:34]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
What we have to remember is the attitudes towards war are very different from what they were a hundred years ago, 100 years ago. It wasn't that war was normal, but it was something that happened. Countries fought each other for whatever reasons. This was on a much larger scale than any war had been before. But in that sense people accepted war. It was Something that happened. Whereas the anti war feelings of the 1960s, due to changes in society, the reaction to the Vietnam War, you know, various things came together to make people very anti war. And at that point it was about the 50th anniversary of the First World War. At that point people started reexamining the First World War and saying, was this a necessary war? The idea is this is necessary. War is very much a modern idea. You know, in 1914, people were saying, should we go to war, shouldn't we go to war? But there was no war by itself as bad, except for a small number of conscientious objectors.
- [09:36]
Patrick Gizza
So these stories about the truce then, was that an attempt to try to recover something positive from this nightmare?
- [09:42]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Yes, that's basically it. There was a very famous TV show in Britain. It was broadcast in 1964. It was a 30 part history of the First World War. And that was the first time the Christmas truce got mentioned in a very big cultural phenomenon. And the people they interviewed for it insisted that it was a rebellion against the war. The people they interviewed, for various reasons, all had their own agendas there. If you go back and you read the original letters of the soldiers that participated, they all said the same thing in their letters home. Gee, that was fun. Gee, that was odd. Gee, that was unusual. But nobody said, oh great, that means should be over, or as a result, I hate war, or I see how stupid war is. These were not things that happened contemporaneously. That's things that people imposed upon the truce 60, 70 years later.
- [10:37]
Patrick Gizza
Your remark earlier about the necessity of war, there had been a consensus that World War I was terrible but necessary. And that is why when John Keegan wrote his book the First World War, the very first sentence of his book, the First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict that was somewhat controversial among historians at the time. I guess he wrote this book some 30 years ago. But he was right. It was unnecessary entirely.
- [11:02]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
All wars are unnecessary.
- [11:03]
Patrick Gizza
Yes, I would agree with that, yes.
- [11:04]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
There's no such thing as a war that just starts because, you know, by accident. I mean, if people go to war for various reasons or they tell themselves it's for various reasons, it's for power, it's for greed. Saying the First World War was an unnecessary war is as ridiculous as saying Second World War wasn't a necessary war. All Hitler had to do was not want to conquer the world and the Second World War wouldn't have happened because nobody else wanted it. You know, as soon as a country says, I Want to fight another country? Country has only two options. They roll over and hand over everything the first country wants, or they fight back.
- [11:42]
Patrick Gizza
When Keegan wrote this, it had to be. It had to be said, and he said, unnecessary, because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms had prudence or common goodwill found a voice. So we'll return to that in a little bit. I want to ask you, your background is in the legal realm. You're paralegal, you're retired now. Then you became a historian. Why this subject?
- [12:09]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Well, I was actually looking for a paper for one of my history classes. I was doing a PhD at the University where I worked, the University of Kentucky. I had read about the First World War. In fact, I'd read a book about the Christmas truce that presented the conventional narrative. And I thought to myself, well, that's interesting. For those who aren't aware of it, the conventional narrative is this was a rebellion against the war. The officers involved tried to repress it. News of the truce was censored in the papers so that the people at home would know that the soldiers were rebelling against the war, et cetera. All those things are, in fact, false. But I didn't know that at the time. So I thought, well, you know, journalists must have known about it, getting rumors from the front. So I was going to look in the newspapers at the time and see if they dropped any hints. You know, in the days before the Internet, that was the best a journalist could do if they were actually being censored. So I went and ordered the London Times on microfilm and, you know, started flipping around a few days after Christmas to see what happened. And I came across this big headline that said, peace reigns on the front. I thought, well, that doesn't look like censorship. And so I looked at a number of other papers, the Manchester Guardian, the Telegraph, some small local papers, and they were all printing letters that were sent home by men at the front. So obviously there was no censorship, even of the soldiers letters telling about the truce. I wrote a paper about the fact that the truce had been reported, you know, extremely well in the papers, and everybody was aware of it. And I wondered what other myths about the Christmas truths were, in fact untrue. So I started researching it further, and then I wrote my master's thesis on it. And then I eventually wrote my dissertation, and I did a lot of research that involved going over to London and reading all the soldiers letters that are Archived at the Imperial War Museum. Fantastic resource. And reading the newspapers. And then what I started doing was reading all the histories of the First World War that mentioned the truce starting in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, going all the way through the present. And I trace the development of the truce, the development of the myths about the truce over this hundred year period. So in the 20s and 30s, it was reported fairly consistently as just something that happened. It didn't have any major impact in the war. It was interesting. The soldiers involved really enjoyed it. They referred to it. It turned up in a lot of the regimental histories that were written after the war. I read the diaries of the regiments involved and they all mentioned it quite freely. This was something that happened in the war. Wasn't it interesting? Wasn't it unusual? It had absolutely no impact on the war. And that narrative continued throughout the 20s and 30s. Kind of dropped out in the 40s, because, of course, everybody was so focused on the Second World War that nobody was really thinking much about the First World War. And then early in the 60s, a British historian called A.J.P. taylor wrote a book basically blaming the First World War, specifically the Treaty of Versailles, for the Second World War. And obviously this was a smear that the First World War could never recover from. You know, the Second World War was, of course, the most awful conflict the world has ever known. 55 million people died in the course of it. You have the atom bombs, you have the concentration camps. If the First World War was to blame for this, the First World War must be a very bad thing indeed. And that's really when the narrative changed. And part of the narrative changing was the emergence of the Christmas truce as proof that the men involved in the war hated it and wanted to end it as soon as possible, and would have ended it except for the awful generals who were forcing them to continue it.
- [16:13]
Patrick Gizza
That's fascinating.
- [16:15]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
How does the present influence the past? How do we think about history once it's over? What happens when we bring our modern ideas and try and impose them upon the past?
- [16:26]
Patrick Gizza
Memory and history, they're different.
- [16:29]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
And the gap between them is what fascinates me. It wasn't until I started doing research for the original paper when I realized you could actually make a whole dissertation out of the gap between memory and history. And that subject has continued to fascinate.
- [16:44]
Patrick Gizza
Me ever since I've read one of AGP Taylor's books. I think it was a short military history of World War I. Yes, World War I was an important event on the way to the next clash but 20 years of history took place between 1919 and 1939, and a lot of other things happened that tilted the scales toward war again. So I agree with you. It's not fair to blame the Second World War entirely on the first. But. But it is of course, an important part of the whole story.
- [17:14]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
It's true that the peace following the First World War was fairly punitive and that because the Ottoman Empire and the Austria Hungarian Empire were completely destroyed by the First World War, also the Russian Empire, basically Germany was the only one left standing to take the blame and pay reparations. But paying reparations was absolutely not anything bizarre or untoward in the history of war at that point. In the Franco Prussian War in 1871, for example, the Germans imposed a huge financial penalty on the French and occupied part of northern France until the French paid it. And the French, instead of grumbling about how unfair it all was, well, it was unfair, obviously paid it faster just to get the Germans off their soil and did not turn around and start the First World War 20 years later. Just because you faced a punitive truce doesn't mean that your reaction has to be, let's blow the world up 21 years after that.
- [18:17]
Patrick Gizza
Margaret McMillan has poked holes in that theory or that idea that you can draw a straight line from 1919 to 1939. Certainly the treaty of Versailles was a psychological blow to the German people that the Nazis exploited. But again, a lot of other stuff happened there. The Great Depression happened. We can do a whole second podcast about that.
- [18:38]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
We certainly can. But one of the things I to point out is that the people that blame the Treaty of Versailles for the Second World War are kind of buying into Hitler's propaganda. I mean, he repeated that so often that, that the people in Germany believed it and we tend to accept as at least partly true. The fact is, the Germans did not pay back a lot of reparations at the time.
- [19:02]
Patrick Gizza
That's right. I was just about to say that they stopped paying them. Psychologically, though, I think it's. It is more important to understand it that way.
- [19:09]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
I agree. And it's also true that the Germans instituted inflation themselves to make their repayments less onerous and then couldn't control it, so it went into hyperinflation, which is a point that Neil Ferguson makes. I don't agree with about 99% of what Neil Ferguson says, but that one I do agree with.
- [19:30]
Patrick Gizza
I need to read his book about the causes of the First World War. I mean, there have been a million books written about the causes and the consequences of this war, and many of them are still contested. I think that's what makes it so fascinating. There's no argument over how World War II started. We all know how World War II started.
- [19:47]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Exactly. And that's what's interesting. You know, that there was a article in the Times, The London Times, that is back in 2014, where they asked 10 historians who started the war, and they got 10 different answers. One of them even said, Serbia, which is. That's just not what happened.
- [20:06]
Patrick Gizza
So he made a comment before about what the men thought and their attitudes toward the war itself and talking specifically about the professional armies that were sent into the field in 1914, before the appalling casualty numbers forced all types of replacements into the fray. I want to return to that subject in a little bit, but about the truce itself in the minds of the British public and, well, really all publics afterward, the life that it took on. How much of a factor was Christmas in all of this? I mean, if this truce happened in, I don't know, mid September, I guess, it probably wouldn't have been a big deal, right?
- [20:41]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Well, there were, in fact, truces that happened in the war. I ran across some in the war diaries where they had a group out and another group of British out and a group of German out, and they came across some bodies, and they saw the other side and they said, hey, we're gonna, you know, collect these bodies and bury them. And the Germans were like, fine, we'll come out and get our guys, too. So it wasn't even that it was unus in the context of the First World War. But of course, nobody writes about that because it happened in October 1914. And it is true that there were some truces on the Eastern Front, but they happened around Easter, which is a much more holy time in the Orthodox, Greek Orthodox religion.
- [21:21]
Patrick Gizza
So Christmas then was an important part of all of this. I mean, did they like. Like Christmas trees or they do any Christmas traditions? Because there's stories of, you know, soccer games in no Man's Land, things like this.
- [21:31]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Okay, well, the soccer games mostly didn't happen, and for a very good. In no Man's Land was full of shell holes. A lot of them had water in them. There were bodies out there. You couldn't play football. Football gets mentioned a lot because for the men in the trenches at the time, it would have been a very important pastime. But the context in which it gets mentioned is, oh, I heard that this Regiment 2 regiment Stam played football. So you found very Few cases of people having a kick about. They didn't have a ball. You can't play football on top of barbed wire, you know. Various reasons. But yes, Christmas was for Germans. It was very important for the British. The Germans sent lots, thousands of small Christmas trees up to the front to cheer up the soldiers. Of course, they all got tremendous packages from home. The same thing for the British. The British, every in the front line who was serving in France and Belgium at the time got a little orange brass box from Princess Mary with a card and tobacco inside. Cigarettes or pipe tobacco. So, yes, there was a very festive atmosphere there. And one of the things that did happen during some of the truces was they trade the contents of their Christmas boxes with each other.
- [22:48]
Patrick Gizza
The war that was being fought by this point versus what men had expected, what officers and publics had expected of the war when the guns of August started to fire, to borrow Barbara Tuckman's, the title of her book, what was expected then was not the reality that awaited the men. Let's get into that a little bit, because another important piece of this. When these truces took place, it was a much different war than it had been in the summertime. Trench warfare had set in on the Western Front. I'll just refer briefly to John Keegan again after November and the war of movement comes to an end and the trench lines are being dug, he said, south of Verdun. Neither side was to make any major offensive effort between September of 1914 and September 1918, over a stretch of 160 miles, effectively inactive because of the, as Keegan would say, existentially pointless nature of trench warfare. It just became so difficult to gain any ground. So it's a very long lead into a question here, Terry. There was a war of movement in the summertime, in the early fall. Pick it up from there.
- [23:58]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
The Germans expected a short war. They had something called the Schlieffen Plan, which I'm sure you've heard of, I'm sure most of your listeners have heard of as well. Their theory was that it would take Russia so long to mobilize that what Germany could do was smash France very quickly, which they had managed to do in the Franco Prussian War of 1871. Smash France very quickly, go through Belgium, where they expected minimal resistance, and once the French army was destroyed, wheel around and go up against Russia, they figured they could take the French in about six weeks and that would give them time to get to Russia before the Russian bear got to its feet and started attacking. This didn't Work for a number of reasons. They encountered a lot more opposition from the Belgians and the French than they expected. The British came in, and while they were a very small force in numbers, they were very, very solid professional army. So they were able to help hold the line against the Germans. But yes, in August and September, you basically had armies chasing each other with very little centralized direction. They were fighting, they were retreating. They were fighting, they were retreating in about mid October to end October, when the bad weather started coming. It was obviously getting very rainy because that part of the world is very rainy and cold. Everybody started digging in, and then they stopped dead. And the trouble with trench warfare is it very much favors the defensive. People think of it as one line of trenches facing another. In fact, that's not accurate. It's three lines of trenches facing three lines of trenches. The front trench is where the fighting comes from, but the rear trenches are where you keep your reserves, you keep your supplies, you cook your food and bring it up to the front lines through connecting trenches. And that's what made trench warfare so difficult to defeat. You could get across and take a trench. They did that during the Battle of the Somme. They did that during the battle of Ypres. Problem was that you then had to take the trench behind it and then the trench behind that, and that proved virtually impossible. You were too far from your guns. You couldn't shoot artillery into the trenches without killing your own men. It just made it impossible to defeat the system.
- [26:19]
Patrick Gizza
Offensive would always peter out for those reasons because you just didn't have tanks like you would have in the Second World War. There's no way to capitalize on the hole you created in the enemy's line.
- [26:29]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
You're exactly right. That's an excellent point. You didn't have tanks until much towards the end of the war, and you didn't really have the mass production of tanks that would have enabled people, enabled the armies to actually defeat the other side. So what you had was a war in which the defensive was always going to prevail. And it took a long time to recognize this. For one thing, as everybody knows, generals are always fighting the previous war. What worked in the previous war is what they think is going to work in this war. But it didn't because you had this very elaborate trend system. Yeah.
- [27:03]
Patrick Gizza
And the idea of the offensive, this lived on in the imagination, especially the officer corps and the British, they're probably not unique. But I do remember reading about Alexander Haig, or was it Sir John French was before him? Yeah. The idea of the Cavalry with men in their sabers breaking through the enemy line and collapsing the enemy line. No matter how many men were sent to their deaths fighting these futile offensives, the idea of the offensive lived on. And the French had a term. If you just had enough elan, you could break through. Your men are getting mowed down by machine guns and barbed wire and you tell them, just try a little bit harder.
- [27:41]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
To be fair, there were issues that prevented people from recognizing the problem. There was a shell shortage for 1914 and 1915, and even into 1916, factories in both sides couldn't produce shells fast enough. So they kept blaming the shell shortage for the reason they couldn't make enough of a dent in the other line for the armies to rush forward and take it. And they stockpiled them and they stockpiled them and they stockpiled them. And then you had the Battle of the Somme, where they had enough shells, but it turned out not to make the slightest bit of difference because at that point the German were two years old and incredibly well fortified. So when the artillery stopped, all that happened was the Germans came out from the fortifications and pulled out the machine guns and broke down the lines that were moving towards them. So there are reasons why the generals were so slow to catch on. But the fact is, army generals do tend to be slow to catch on. And that's a problem in every war. That's why the Vietnam War went on for all those years with nobody being able to gain an advantage because nobody could defeat the problem of jungle warfare.
- [28:52]
Patrick Gizza
You mentioned before the expectations of a short war. That again, of course, was based on past experience. Europe had a century of relative peace. There had been the Crimea War and the Franco Prussian War, but for a century there hadn't been any really long and bloody wars. And who would have signed up for a war that would have gone on for four years, debilitated all the powers who fought it, cost 10, 12 million lives, etc. But you know, well, the fact is.
- [29:18]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
A lot of people did sign up for that because when they first started recruiting, when Lord Kitchener first started recruiting in England, he had people signing up for three year terms.
- [29:29]
Patrick Gizza
I didn't know that.
- [29:30]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
So he knew that it wasn't going to be over by Christmas. And I think that the it will be over by Christmas is again, a bit of myth making. I haven't found a lot of support for that in the contemporaneous document.
- [29:42]
Patrick Gizza
Yeah, I was going to say there were voices who did warn about the possibility of a very long and brutal war. I Think von Moltke the Younger was one of those voices because of some of the points you made earlier. Technology favoring the defense. There had been trench warfare before in the American Civil War, maybe in the Crimean War. I don't know a lot about that, but there were people saying, you know, with industrialization and the ability to field enormous armies with almost unlimited amounts of ammunition, the shell shortage notwithstanding, this actually could turn into a really long war. But it's not really a question, but can you address just how ingrained was the idea that we can defeat the enemy quickly? I mean, there was the Schlieffen plan.
- [30:23]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Yeah, I mean, that was the German plan to defeat the enemy quickly. And that's why they were willing to risk a two front war, because they had a plan. Didn't work. But there you are. The fact is, the British, the French, the Belgians were all reacting to the situation. So it wasn't like they were going into it saying, we're going to be able to defeat the Germans in six months. They were improvising in reaction to what the Germans were doing. They were aware of the Schlieffen Plan. Certainly, of course, one of the things that defeated the Schlieffen Plan was the fact that Russia started mobilizing earlier, which of course helped push Austria and Germany into war. There are so many factors going on. We can see now that it was always headed to stalemate and it was always headed four years of stalemate. But it was very hard, I think, for people to see that at the time.
- [31:13]
Patrick Gizza
Something else too, that the fighting in the early months of the war upended visions of heroism, the nobility of fighting for one's country. War as a positive masculine expression. I mentioned before the idea of an officer on horseback wielding his saber and crashing through the enemy lines in a cavalry charge. There was a sense, was there not, that war was glorious, something even maybe to look forward to, but combat in the First World War.
- [31:43]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
There was nothing glorious about First World War combat. But I do want to talk a lot about these ideas.
- [31:49]
Patrick Gizza
Yes, please.
- [31:50]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
That is the reason that we think these now is we had so many people writing, so many British poets and novelists writing in the First World War based on their experience as junior officers. The junior officers tended to be drawn from a certain class of Brit. They were people who'd attended the public schools where they got classical educations, where they heard about the glories of Greece and of Rome. They knew enough history to think of, you know, Wellington beating Napoleon to romanticize the past. And they were articulate Enough to be able to sit and put their thoughts down in the forms that they'd been taught, the classical poetry, you know, the classical novel. But it's also important to remember what place they had. Most of them had some sort of officer's training at school. In the public schools they attended, which of course are private schools in Britain. They went through the Officers Training Course. As a result, when they volunteered for the army, they were put in the role of officers. They weren't necessarily trained to be effective officers, certainly not under the circumstances. They were thrown into the front lines the same as everybody else was. But they were in an unusual position. They weren't able to generate any orders on their own. They only had to implement the orders that came down from above. They saw what was going on. They saw that they were sending their men into carnage, and they had no choice but to do so. And they had no choice but to show an example to these men by rushing off with their swords uplifted and rushing across no man's land in front of them. So we're talking about a group of people who have the education and the knowledge to know about the glorious past, to see what's happening in front of them, to know that the generals are mucking it up pretty badly, and to have no choice, to have all these men on their conscience because they're the ones actually ordering them in. It was a horrible position for these guys to be in. A lot of them broke down, they suffered from shell shock. But a lot of them did use poetry in particular as their outlet for what they saw, their way of telling the world what was going on. And that poetry has very much shaped our understanding of the war. When we read it, we think of it as representative of all the soldiers in the war, rather than realizing it's representative of a very limited officer class that felt absolutely terrible and guilty about what they were doing.
- [34:31]
Patrick Gizza
I want to read a poem by Wilfred Owen, a British soldier, in a moment, but follow along.
- [34:35]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
He was a British officer. British officer, that's what's important. The soldiers, they just did what they were told. They didn't enjoy it, but they didn't have the responsibility for other men's lives on their conscience.
- [34:47]
Patrick Gizza
Another way. World War I really was the first modern war is it put an end to men going into battle in brightly colored uniforms. That's how the war began. We often think, and this is, is largely correct, the drab black and white, the trenches, men with helmets to protect their skulls from artillery. They weren't wearing helmets in the beginning Maybe wearing a trench coat. But in the very beginning, this was, like you mentioned, the Napoleonic wars, the armies, they had modern weaponry, but they looked like that 19th century relic, if you will. Brightly colored uniforms, drums and bands and flags waving. And you really would have thought that.
- [35:26]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
This was a lesson that they learned back in the American Revolution when the soldiers, the redcoats were marching down the road and the rebels were hiding behind trees and stone fences, shooting them wearing their drab colored clothing. This is 150 years later and the general still didn't figure out that you can't send somebody in a red coat out.
- [35:48]
Patrick Gizza
So here's Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action. He wrote several poems in 1917 and 1918. He wrote Bent double like old beggars under sacks, knock kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge till on the haunting flares we turned our backs and towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots but limped on bloodshot. All went lame, all blind drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots of gas, shells dropping softly behind. Gas, gas. Quick, boys. An ecstasy of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. But someone still was yelling out in stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime dim through the misty panes and thick green light as under a green sea I saw him drowning in all my dreams. Before my helpless sight he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you2 could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watch the wide eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face like a devil sick of sin. If you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the frame Froth corrupted lungs obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues. My friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie Dolce et decorum est propatria mori.
- [37:12]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
It's an amazing poem. He was an amazing poet. He also suffered from shell shock for a while and he was in the same recovery center is, I guess, the best way to describe it.
- [37:23]
Patrick Gizza
At rest home he's saying Sassoon now. I want to get to him in a minute. He's basically saying if you could see what it was like to die of poison gas attack on the Western front, you wouldn't think this is anything glorious about. About what we're getting out here.
- [37:37]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
And his poem was very much directed at the people at home, like the women who on the street handed out white feathers to men who weren't in uniform, calling them cowards for not joining us up. But it's also worth noting, people think of the First World War, for example. The soldiers went into trenches for four years and never came out. That's not true. They were rotated in and out of trenches every four or five days. I read an estimate that between leaves reserves training, a soldier spent maybe 100 days in trenches in the course of a year, and the rest of the time they were out of them. Of those hundred days, it was only two or three times a year that you were in a big offensive. Most of the time it was just a question of holding the trench and waiting for the snipers. Yes, the poison gas was horrible, although frankly, it did as much damage to the people setting it off as it did to the people receiving it. In those days, the wind was just as likely to blow it back in your own face and blind your own soldiers. So people talk about the experiences of the First World War and they think every day was like that for four years. No wonder it was so awful. No, every day was not like that for four years. The main complaint men had in the trenches was how bloody boring they were. They were sitting there playing cards, you know, for five days straight, taking turn on watch duty, bored out of their skulls, cold and wet and hungry.
- [39:04]
Patrick Gizza
No way to keep the water out of the trench. Mud everywhere. That movie, the new movie, the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, probably set the record in cinema for the amount of mud to do that movie.
- [39:16]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
It's certainly true. The trenches did improve dramatically after the first few months. British trenches were particularly bad because the Germans stopped and dug in first. They were usually on the high ground and the British on the low ground. I don't know if you've ever been to Belgium or northern France, but they're wet. I used to live in the Netherlands and it's a wet country. You don't want to be living in a trench there. After everybody figured out that the trenches were going to be there to stay for a while, they started building them better. There's a very interesting order from one of the generals in charge of a division saying, I went to the trenches today. They're a muddy mess. I don't understand why the engineers are not building them better. Let's at least get the men's feet out of the water. Let's put duck boards down. So there was a constant fight to improve the trenches so you could have a decent quality of life there. There was also the idea that the next breakthrough means that we won't need these trenches anymore. And so they never did as good a job making them livable as they could have been.
- [40:21]
Patrick Gizza
What a conundrum to have. So you mentioned Siegfried Sassoon. I learned about him from reading a book I have in my hands here, the Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fossil or Fusel. I've never been quite sure how to pronounce it.
- [40:35]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
I think it's possible. That's what I've heard.
- [40:37]
Patrick Gizza
And I mentioned Owen Wilson before. Owen Wilson is an actor's name. Did I get that right? Wilfred Owen.
- [40:42]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Wilford Owen.
- [40:43]
Patrick Gizza
I mentioned Wilfred Owen before Siegfried Sassoon. And whether or not they spoke for the majority of the men, you know, from our perspective today, they would seem almost like anti war figures, to borrow a modern term. You know, disillusioned, frustrated and against the war. Whereas some historians say, you know, it's not like anyone really wanted to be there. It was, of course, miserable and deadly. But that's not to say that they didn't want their side to win or that they wanted to end the war before, say, the French liberated all of their territory that had been occupied by the Germans in 1914.
- [41:21]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
One of the things we have to remember is just how dreadful life was for the poor, which made up the majority of people, working class people of those time. If you look at recruiting posters from before the war, they say, join the, you know, 12th Devonshire's, whatever. One of the things they advertise is you get three meals a day. People were joining the army just to get enough to eat. So if you're talking about somebody from the slums of Glasgow, for example, they were going to find life in the army much less shocking than somebody from an upper class upbringing. If people were warmly dressed, if they were getting three square meals a day, if they were getting paid regularly, all these things made their life better. So, you know, no one's going to pretend that the slums of Glasgow are worse than being in a trench with Germans shooting at you. But when they weren't in the trenches, their lives were much improved on what they would have been. So the fact that a certain class of people, the ones who wrote the poetry that Paul Fussell was writing about, found the war incredibly shocking, does not mean that everybody found the war incredibly shocking. And of course, even the ones that were against the war wanted their side to win. They just wanted it to happen sooner so that the war would be over.
- [42:43]
Patrick Gizza
Because there's that question, how could they continue to persist with this, as Keegan put it, existentially pointless combat for four years over no man's land, until finally the breakthrough in 1918 when the Americans joined the war in the west and the German offensives petered out. Well, one explanation, maybe it's the simplest explanation, is that because as horrible as it was, they didn't want to lose the war, they wanted to see it through to victory. It's easy to conflate the attitudes of these early 19th century men with, say, say American soldiers in Vietnam with peace symbols on their helmets.
- [43:20]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Yeah. No, the attitude in the 60s towards war was very, very different than the attitude towards war in the First World War. And that's certainly the case up to the end. Germany thought they could win. In fact, when the war ended, Germany was still occupying French and Belgian territory. The British and the French, well, the French in particular said, we're not giving up part of our country to surrender to the Germans. We did that once and it didn't work out. We lost Alsace Lorraine and the Germans were pissed off anyway. It was perceived that you couldn't just pack up and go home. You couldn't give up on your aim to conquer part of France, you couldn't give up on your aim to liberate part of France.
- [44:01]
Patrick Gizza
The principle of defense of national territory.
- [44:04]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
And the other point I wanted to make is we tend to overestimate the impact that Americans had on the war. Germany basically collapsed at the end because things were collapsing at home. There were strikes in the factories, there were shortages. They lost the support of the home front, which is again, gets back to Hitler's argument that the army won the war. They were just stabbed in the back by the politicians and the Jews. While the Americans provided a great morale boost to the British and the French, they didn't actually. They declared war in April 1917. They didn't start turning up on the Western Front in any kind of numbers till well into 1918. They weren't really engaged in battle until May and June of that year. And by that point the Germans were already retreating. They had them on the run.
- [44:54]
Patrick Gizza
There was no point in going on any further when you had unlimited amounts of doughboys coming over. But yeah, the Germans were defeated in the battlefield, there's no question about that.
- [45:01]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Oh, yeah, and the Americans certainly contributed to that, but I'm not sure they were as decisive a factor as we necessarily believe. There are a lot of other reasons. The French and the British started fighting a much more coordinated war, which enabled them to oppose the Germans better. And as I Said the German home front was collapsing and without supplies.
- [45:24]
Patrick Gizza
Yeah, the British and French did learn eventually from their mistakes. And they, as you say, fought a Wiser War in 1918, whereas the Americans made a lot of the same mistakes, mistakes the French and British had made in 1914, which explains why 100,000Americans were killed in a very short period of time.
- [45:41]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
It was actually more like 60,000.
- [45:44]
Patrick Gizza
60,000, that's my understanding.
- [45:46]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Yeah. It was a very interesting conflict. I read paper on the American fighting in the war. They wanted to keep the Americans separate. Pershing, that's his name, wanted to keep the Americans separate and to fight as a unified force, whereas the British and French wanted them propping up the British and French army, plugging the gaps in the hole. The British and French argument was that we've been doing this for four years, we know what we're doing. And Pershing's argument was, A, the Americans would never tolerate this, and B, yeah, you've been doing it for four years. It's not gotten you very far, has it? But eventually, when the big offensive started, yeah, the Americans were integrated into the British and the French armies. They never actually fought any battles entirely on their own.
- [46:30]
Patrick Gizza
Another war is raging in Eastern Europe today, and it's drawing comparisons, Terry, to the First World War. The sheer number of infantry that are necessary to fight these battles between talking Russia and Ukraine, turning towns and villages into piles of rubble, tens of thousands of casualties to take the pile of rubble. There are drones today. There were no drones in 1914-1918. What are your thoughts on. Well, number one, the comparisons between World War I and Russia, Ukraine, and number two, what are the correct lessons to draw today from that futile conflict over a hundred years ago?
- [47:07]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
All wars happen for the same reason, because somebody gets greedy. And if people stop being greedy, then wars would stop. To me, war is such madness. I mean, imagine a situation where you've got a car and your neighbor's got a car, and you decide you want two cars and your neighbor shouldn't have any. And you go over and say to him, give me your car. And he says no. And you say, okay, I'm going to beat the crap out of you, and then I'm going to take your car. The only way you'll get it back is if you beat me up harder. I mean, we would never tolerate behavior like this in any normal society. And yet we tolerate it between countries. Ukraine didn't start the war. Russia started the war because it wanted to subjugate Ukraine. And Ukraine very rightly knows what Subjugation by Russia means. It means the erasure of their culture to the extent that the Russians can manage it, the erasure of their language. The Ukrainians have been down this road before with the Russians, with the Germans, and they don't want to see it happen again. And so the only lesson you can learn from the First World War is the only lesson you can learn from any war. So I, you know, see the parallels between what's going on in Ukraine and the type of warfare you had in the First World War. But I don't think that there's a lesson to be learned from the First World War that you can directly apply to the situation.
- [48:26]
Patrick Gizza
Russia's war in Ukraine is, of course, entirely unnecessary. Russia could have had a normal relationship with its neighbor, as states do today, without going to what is Russia gaining through this? Right.
- [48:38]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
It's. It's crazy. Yeah, but it's just bonkers.
- [48:40]
Patrick Gizza
You know, at the same time though, even though I don't agree with it, you can still see the reason why Putin said he was doing this. Geopolitical, nationalistic, historical, etc. Of course he distorts history. All that aside, you can still see the reason, reason, even though we disagree. You go back to the July crisis in 1914, which was sparked by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The train of events in July leading up to the guns of August. It just doesn't make any sense at any point. As Keegan wrote, during that five weeks crisis, had reason prevailed? There is simply no reason to have a European wide conflagration over what had happened here. Here.
- [49:23]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Yes and no. I mean, my argument is that the First World War was caused basically for the same reasons as the Second World War. It was German aggression, you know, Serbia. Well, it wasn't Serbia. It was a Serbian nationalist who assassinated the Archduke.
- [49:38]
Patrick Gizza
Yeah, the crisis grew out of that assassination.
- [49:41]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
The crisis grew out of that. And so I'm basically, to sum up, the Archduke gets assassinated rather ineptly by a Serbian nationalist group group. Austria. Hungary says, we're pretty ticked off about this and here's a list of our demands that we want to fix them. And Serbia said, well, we can give in to 95% of this, but there's one that we're drawing the line at. I think it was what court the case was going to be heard in. That should have been the end of it. But the trouble was Austria, Hungary, Germany standing behind it, nudging it in the back, saying, go for it, go for it, go for it, for it. The war would not have happened if Germany had not wanted it to happen. The French didn't want it, the Belgians didn't want it, the British certainly didn't want it. The Serbians didn't want it. So you have a group of people who had no interest in going to war whatsoever, a group of countries, sorry, that had no interest in going to war whatsoever against two empires that very much had an interest in going to war. They thought it would solve a number of internal problems. As Adam Gopnik summed it up, and I'm trying to make sure I get this quote correctly. Germany went to war because they thought it would be like 1871, a quick defeat against the French. The French hoped with the British help it wouldn't be like 1871. The Russians hoped that it would solve a lot of internal problems they had. And the British hoped that it would be like the Napoleonic wars, which was a continental war with decisive action that ended it by Britain. So everybody went into it thinking they were getting what they wanted. Instead they got what they didn't want, which was a four year prolonged war that broke up the Ottoman Empire, that broke up the Austro Hungarian Empire, that broke up the German Empire, that eventually led, you know, through another world war to the end of the British Empire. You're talking about a war that destroyed the status quo in Europe very badly. No winners did of course create the instability that led to another war. But you're talking about it happening because there were countries that very much wanted it and Germany was the main country that very much wanted a war. They felt that they'd been hard done by in, in the race for colonies, that France and Britain had unreasonably large share of the world that they controlled, that they wanted more, they wanted respect, they wanted Germany first. All things we're hearing now and they wanted that war to happen.
- [52:16]
Patrick Gizza
The spark was the assassination. If it weren't, that may have been something else. Contingency in history is so fascinating sometimes it could be abused in analysis. But you know, had the Austro Hungarians did a sharp fast punishment of Serbia instead of fumbling their mobilization and taking, what was it, a month to decide what they were going to do. Had they just quickly dealt with the Serbia, we may not have had a European wide war.
- [52:43]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
You know, there are a lot of factors you can take out that would have changed things. I mean there are people that argue Russia would stayed out of entirely if, you know, the Russian royal family had not been so unstable. If the son had had hemophilia and letting Rasputin into their lives and, you know, all those things. So there are always a lot, lot of reasons. When I'm teaching about the First World War, I try to explain to people why things weren't nearly as stable they look. It was almost like I read this analogy in a history book somewhere. It was almost like there was this big cart and it's very heavy and it's got a lot of stuff piled on it and it's always tilting one way and tilting another. But, you know, they were always fixing it. There'd be a new treaty between, say, Germany and France that would govern a certain type of trade and that would plug in the hole and that would keep the cart upright for a while longer. But eventually things just got so unstable table the car collapsed.
- [53:43]
Patrick Gizza
I agree that Germany shares most of the responsibility. I did find Christopher Clark's book the Sleepwalkers How Europe Went to war in 1914 to be fascinating, although I know it's a controversial book because he takes more of a collective responsibility thesis. But Germany invaded Belgium, which is a neutral country.
- [54:01]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Oh, yeah. And, you know, Britain had a treaty that said, if you invade Belgium, we're going to fight you off. I mean, I did find that book, the Sleepwalkers, very interesting, but I didn't really think people were sleeping walking into war. I think a number of very deliberate choices were made that made the war.
- [54:19]
Patrick Gizza
Happen with their eyes wide open. Yeah. You know, it's funny, I've told friends the worst part of that book is the title, because they weren't sleepwalking. You know, the French gave the Russians a guarantee, not a blank check, per se, you know, like the, the Germans did with the Austro Hungarian Empire, but. Well, yeah, Again, part two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight of this conversation.
- [54:39]
Dr. Terry Blom Crocker
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, you talk about lessons to be learned from war. The lesson of the First World War is don't go to war to help out small, helpless nations. The lesson of the Second World War is, of course, you should go to war to help out small, helpless nations because if you let the warmongers swallow them up, they'll come for you next. So when you talk about lessons to be learned from war, the lessons of the first Second World War are radically different.
- [55:08]
Patrick Gizza
On the next episode of History as it happens, what are the correct lessons about the end of the Cold War? December 25, 1991, the final curtain came down on the Soviet Union. It was celebrated in the West. In our next episode, we're going to talk to somebody who lived through it, who witnessed it, who was born in Moscow in the 1950s, the end of the Soviet Union is celebrated by very few people in Russia today. That's next as we report History as it Happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up at History as it happens dot com.