Understanding why the first nine months of the war went so well for Germany has to be broken down into constituent parts. The victories of the period are essentially three: over Poland, over Scandinavia, and over France and the Low Countries. The evidence suggests that the reasons for each of these three victories were quite …
Tag Archives: France
The Sixtus Affair
Several political, social, and economic realities impacted the home fronts in the nations engaged in World War I. For Austria-Hungary, perhaps the most substantive political event was the death of Emperor Franz Josef on November 21, 1916, after a reign of almost 68 years. The Emperor was quite old by the time the world broke …
On Paris and History
One of the moral dicta of history is the famous one from George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The advice is clear: history is told in part to teach of what went wrong in the past so we can avoid it in the present (and future). So far, …
Inevitable Historicity 