I have enjoyed history for much of my life. Particularly when such profound consequences occur on the actions of one individual or act. From watching the Netflix miniseries The Crown and knowing that Edward VIII was a Nazi sympathizer, I have suggested that Wallis Simpson, the woman who he chose over being King, was just as important as Winston Churchill in saving Britain during those dark days.
After Dunkirk, Churchill was under tremendous pressure to seek an accommodation with Hitler. Could he have persevered with a King also urging him to seek that accommodation?
Similarly, how one act can have such profound consequences has amazed me. Surely the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand which was the fuse that plunged much of the world into “The Great War” fits that category. We are still living through the change that war brought – from the introduction of communism to redrawing the face of Europe, to Empires lost.
I remember during the early 70s, when I was in the Army stationed in Germany, I went to Vienna. It was such an eerie feeling, knowing that the population a third less than 1900, when it was the capital of 100 million people. Now it is the capital of tiny Austria. It was a strange feeling, walking around The Ring, and seeing these half-empty palaces.
So, yesterday I was reading my Wall Street Journal and their op-ed page had the money quote in regards to the falling of Syria’s Assad regime.
“…The October 7 Hamas massacre is turning out to be the miscalculation of the ages, leading to defeats of Mideast mayhem…”
Russia, who was close to Syria since the 1960s, was depleted and drained from their fighting in the Ukraine. They were unable to come to his aid when this rebel group achieved in 11 days what couldn’t be done in the last 13 years.
HAMAS and Hezbollah are, if not decimated, down on the canvas for the count. Israel has destroyed most of their leadership and stored munitions.
It remains to be seen if Russia can keep their port at Tartous which allowed them to project their power over the Mediterranean.
Iran is weakened, Syria’s future is at this time in flux, HAMAS and Hezbollah are severely weakened.
The leader of Syria’s rebels, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, was affiliated with al-Qaeda in years past, but he claims to have left that behind.
Time will tell.
We are certainly living in “interesting times”.
I was in Vienna a little while back and my impression was that it was a “hallowed out” city, once a capital of a great European empire now shrunk. I was in Bratislava later in the week ( a city I enjoyed though not as much as Prague) and when I mentioned it, one of the locals said the city was a great museum for tourists, international orgs, and secret negotiations but that’s about it
The Prater is alot of fun though, especially on a nice weekend afternoon for people watching
And also…
The fall of government in France.
The fall of government in Germany.
The attempted self-coup in Korea.
And judicial nullification of an election in Romania for alleged Russian interference.
Noel Coward agreed with your assessment of Wallis Simpson, who suggested statues be built to her. (Coward, close to the royals, had little respect for Edward VIII.)
Although I see 1914 as the inflection point for modern history I don’t think the Hapsburg Empire survives just because the Crown Prince decides to skip that fateful trip to Sarajevo. Although a (more or less) peaceful group of cooperating Great Powers did a pretty good job of keeping the world from going up in flames, there would always have been the voices saying “Hey, why do we take orders from London/Vienna/Paris/Berlin?” And the drive to autonomy just because you speak a different language or worship a different flavor of deity would have come anyway, and been accelerated – just as in our times – by the ability to reach more potential (jihadists/freedom fighters/patriots) by radio, tv, whatever comes next.
I don’t feel that managing the decline is relevant to the United States, but its probably the best the Hapsburgs and Ottomans could have expected. With the British Raj and the rather heavy handed French overseas presence following soon after.
But if that also meant no Lenin, Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeni, Pol Pot….humanity, take the W.
Tacitus:
I agree with you, based on listening to the History of the Great War podcast and descriptions of the July Crisis by John Keegan and G.J. Meyer. The hypothetical should not be going back in time to kill Hitler, but going back in time to stop the real most important man of the 20th Century, Gavrilo Princip, a stubby little nonentity responsible for the death of uncounted millions.
Franz Ferdinand was amenable to giving the Slavs a seat at the table in the empire, turning the dual monarchy into a three-way cartel. It wouldn’t have been easy or pleasant, but co-opting the Serbs would have bought the empire some time, and Franz Joseph was 84 and praying for death. All the great powers involved did not sleepwalk toward the war; on many levels, they wanted it to happen. Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum was intended to be refused. They were stunned that the Serbs accepted everything except the imposition on their sovereignty an Austrian-led investigation of the murder involved. Wilhelm II jumped at the chance to offer Austria the “blank check.” France and Britain had little interest in that part of the continent, but German’s mobilization allowed them to counter. Russia was still smarting from the pasting they’d taken at the hands of Japan, but they had designs on Poland and East Prussia. All these empires looking for a little more, given the excuse by a guy the army turned down because he wasn’t tall enough.
Maybe the Empire shatters anyway. Maybe a continental war starts anyway, but for a better reason. Not an assassination that barely made headlines in the area it took place. Maybe a war with a “legitimate” cause chastens Europe and Hitler never becomes anything but a second-rate painter.
Mitchell
Adolph could have easily been even less.
I spent some time memorably working on a casualty recovery dig in the Ypers Salient in 2018. Mass graves and live artillery shells everywhere. Records show that Cpl Hitler was a runner who frequently went back and forth over pretty much the same spot we were working ( outskirts of Wychatte). So…moving one’s head an inch one way or the other and history being changed is not a new phenomenon…
https://detritusofempire.blogspot.com/2018/05/digging-hill-80-fourth-report.html
Tacitus:
Wild pictures. Thanks for the link.
“After Dunkirk, Churchill was under tremendous pressure to seek an accommodation with Hitler.”
Would an accommodation have been a bad decision? That would have left Germany and the Soviet Union on their own to get on with mutual self destruction — with possible positive benefits extending down the ages — a unified Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, speaking either Russian or German; no NATO; no current proxy war in the Ukraine.
The lack of an accommodation with Hitler certainly led to the deaths of large numbers of English, the loss of their global Empire, and the decline of England into irrelevancy. The alternative might have been better.
I would be a bit cautious about consequences for a particular event or action. We tend to pick points out of the past and ascribe a meaning or motive to them that would be alien to them at the time. Reality is a pretty complex thing and even the people making the decisions would be somewhat amused about what the future thinks of them. Things aren’t that deterministic.
We could imagine what the world would be like if Trump didn’t turn his head that split second before the bullet would have hit him. All we know that the world would be different than it is now, certainly not better, it never is when a national leader is assassinated but what would the world be like?
Same with the assassination of Ferdinand in 1914. I would recommend Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers” who takes a more, well not different, but a more nuanced view of the years leading up to the assassination and shows that people on all sides realized that such a war would be catastrophic, but the lacked the ability that a Bismarck or Disraeli would have to maintain a modus vivendi whether before 1914 or during the summer thereof.
Clark uses a heuristic that I wish more historians would employ which is he constructs a cost-benefit rational actor model for people making decisions. The British Foreign Secretary Gray knew that Russia and not Germany was Britain’s primary adversary or at least an accommodation could have been reached with the Kaiser but because of Foreign Ministry politics he swung policy against Germany and toward Russia.
So here’s a more contemporary question. How different would the world look if the Democrats did poorly in the 2022 midterm elections as expected? At the time it was seen as a major defeat for both the Republicans, who were expected to win both the Senate and a decisive win in the House, and Trump as his personal picks for the Senate (Oz, Walker) performed poorly and probably cost the Senate
Didn’t turn out that way
Heading into the 2022 mid-terms, Biden was on the ropes and a poor showing could have very well led to the expected – which was his announcing he would not run in 2024. However the Democrats out-performed expectations, Biden claimed the credit, and announced his candidacy. How different would the 2024 election looked without Biden on the ballot and the Democrats had a full primary campaign?
So was the 2022 mid-terms good or bad for the Democrats? Depends on the meaning you ascribe to it
Take a different perspective on the Churchill-Britain-do we cut a deal with Hitler decision. For hundreds of years it was British policy to ensure that no European power would dominate the Continent as that would allow the new hegemon to project naval strength across the Channel. That’s why the British fought all those wars against Napoleon, it’s why they gave that guarantee of protecting the neutrality of Belgium.
That was still the default mindset in May-June 1940. Anybody hoping to come to terms would have to convince Britain to abandon her historic policy. All Churchill had to do was not so much persuade the British people and elites to adopt something strange, but to play for time and allow this traditional British genetic code to reassert itself. Churchill was a cavalry man and he understood what a rout looks like, the French had just succumbed to one because they allowed themselves to be spun out of their perceptual space. Churchill’s pretty words weren’t so much to persuade as to remind.
If Edward VIII tried to interfere he would have sparked a constitutional crisis on par of 1688 that he would have lost.
“We tend to pick points out of the past and ascribe a meaning or motive to them that would be alien to them at the time.”
…akin to Nassim Taleb’s “Black Swan” theory of events, …that certain events in retrospect, but in retrospect only, seem related and to “make sense.”
https://www.supersummary.com/the-black-swan/summary/
Mike: “Same with the assassination of Ferdinand in 1914. I would recommend Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers” …”
Another book worth reading is Edmond Taylor’s “The Fall of the Dynasties: the Collapse of the Old Order 1905-1922”. Taylor certainly makes the case that the regimes of the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary, the Hohenzollerns in Germany, and the Romanovs in Russia were all creaking at the seams. Europe was far from peaceful prior to 1914, and none of the rulers seem to have been gifted with competence. (Sort of like today, in a way)
Certainly, the situation did not have to end in the bloodbath of WWI — but the winds of change were blowing, and something was going to happen.
“Churchill was a cavalry man and he understood what a rout looks like, the French had just succumbed to one because they allowed themselves to be spun out of their perceptual space.”
Marc Bloch, who had fought in the first world war and served again in the second (later shot by the Germans as a resistant) said that the main problems was that ‘the metronomes at General Staff were set on too slow a speed’ (in modern language: the enemy got inside our OODA loop) Andre Beaufre, then a young Captain on the General Staff, was struck with the obsession with formal and ambiguous language…interestingly, Picasso somehow recognized this situation:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/72343.html
David – funny you mention OODA. John Boyd actually addressed the 1940 German offensive in his “Patterns of Conflict.” Boyd was criticized for his analysis because his critics thought he was relying too much on self-serving analysis of the German generals, In reality he was seeing the invasion and Blitzkrieg as a continuation of the German concept of Sturmtruppen from 1918.
The French never recovered from their detachment from perceptual reality because in part they lacked the geographic space and time to do so, also because as Bloch points out they lacked the mental agility in their general staff – Maginot Line was more of a mentality than a physical construct. The Germans were able to resume their offensive in June and finish off the French for good.
Churchill understood that the English Channel provided that geographic space and time the French lacked; the Germans at a conceptual level understood that they had a short period of time to politically consolidate the gains they won on the battlefield before the British recovered their poise. Routs are temporary phenomena, usually the ones defeated on the battlefield project the logic of that immediate tactical situation forward into the strategic future and end of defeating themselves.
As far as whether it would have been for Britain to have come to terms and thus avoid its ruination and bankruptcy, that decision was probably made in 1938 at Munich if not before. If Britain came to terms, it would have sacrificed the initiative for its survival to the Germans. Britain’s only chance to escape that dilemma, of deciding whether to fight a ruinous war or live under the threat of German hegemony, was probably lost for good at Munich (if not before) when Chamberlain sacrificed the Czechs, not only giving up a valuable ally in Czechs but alienating a potential ally in the Soviets and allowing Hitler to consolidate his position with the German military.
Munich was the last chance to do this on the relative cheap.
Years ago, I read William Manchester’s wonderful book, The Last Lion, which was a biography of Churchill. But he also delved into the politics of the 1930s, and I was astounded at the opportunities Britain and France had lost to defeat Hitler. But knowing the cost of WW1, Britain and France didn’t have the stomach for more confrontation. There is that famous video of a French pilot surveying the Western Front in 1919, and it looks like a moonscape.
I read too years ago that in 1938 the Czech Army was virtually the equal of the 1938 German Army.
I think too often when we ascribe subsequent events to a certain action it is easy to say that the events would not have happened but for the action. But I too believe that the Hapsburgs were doomed to extinction one way or another. Think too of the effects the Great Depression had on Europe. Whenever the Weimar Republic started to get on its feet, the French would demand more reparations, paving the way for a Hitler (if the art school in Vienna had only accepted this mediocre student!)
I believe the current events in the Middle East are almost as dramatic as the peaceful fall of the Iron Curtain. I can remember from 1962 when the Wall went up, the thought of traveling to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union was left to only the most adventuresome. I wrote a couple of blogs on my travels to Dresden and Berlin in 1992, which was a bit eerie in some ways, The Autobahn from Dresden to Frankfurt was a perfectly preserved 1938 Autobahn.
The East – East Berlin and Dresden, lacked the color of the West. You could still see pockmarks from bullets on the walls of buildings in East Berlin. In the old section of Dresden, you could still see blackened roofs from the 1945 firebombing, and the Frauenkirche was still a pile of rubble – in1992. Now I suspect all of that has been swept away.
BTW @David, I really enjoyed your recommended book, Adventures in Stasiland
@Tacitus, interesting pictures! They remind me of that find a couple of years ago when it was discovered an entire living area underground, almost perfectly preserved. Forget whether it was German or allied.
If you haven’t seen it, you would love a visit to the WW1 Museum in Kansas City, MO. You could spend a couple of days there.
https://www.theworldwar.org/
the great Powers were going to come to blows over some territory in time, this chenga row of Alliances were too brittle, the previous examples were Agadir and the Balkan Wars, the likes of Schleffen and Grey had designs, maybe it would be over the Ottoman territories, of course maybe Balfour might not have happened that way
Could there be an accomodation with Hitler, I don’t see it possible, even if Lord Halifax did,