The First World War

[palo5]

A civilized post, haroldeye, but I disagree with a lot of it

Armed Neutrality happened because of the aggressive British habit of stopping any ship on the ocean they wanted, even if it was neutral. That was quite close to piracy and itself almost an act of war. Any reasonable person would disagree with British policy

Finland/Baltic States -- it looks like a land grab, but the intention was to buffer against invasion from the West. It worked in WW2, because Leningrad survived, despite the worst siege in history. And Stalin was right about the invasion from the West. It came, sure enough

Under different circumstances, I'm convinced Stalin would have returned Finland's eastern region, including Viipuri. He gave Hanko back before time

Concerning Crimea, why don't you go there and find out yourself, rather than believing propaganda? Nearly all the people there are Russian. I know USA is infuriated because they wanted bases there and hate Putin being successful, but that's no reason for Europeans to follow their disastrous foreign policy

How does this post relate to World War 1? Well, issues discussed here have roots in WW1. Some relate to why it happened and others to its results. So I ask for tolerance in moderation

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by palo5

It wasn't an Empire. There was political control of some countries for a couple of decades, but there was no colonization and huge ripoff of natural resources in the way European Empires did it

Hmm. Does Russia really have responsible environmental policies? America certainly doesn't, but, hand on heart Palo, hasn't Russian environmental policy been greed and vandalism as well? Where has the Aral Sea gone?

[palo5]

It's true, the environment has suffered deep neglect. Partly because of ignorance and incompetence, and partly due to lack of resources and incorrect allocation of resources

The Aral Sea is a bad case. But aside from human intervention to try and irrigate the desert etc, Central Asia has been losing whole waterways for at least as long as recorded history. At least they still have the mountains, otherwise there'd be almost no water at all

[tygrkhat40]

I just finished a book called Hidden History by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor. In it, they detail the existance of a secret cabal that worked behind the scenes of the British government from the late 1880's until World War I. In fact, they lay the entire blame of the First World War at the feet of this cabal, which they call the Secret Elite. Founded by Cecil Rhodes, the ultimate purpose of group was to unite the English speaking world under the Imperial government of Great Britain.

Among those who were involved directly with the cabal or were bought and paid for include Arthur Milner, Sir Edward Grey, Arthur Balfour, H.H. Asquith, Richard Haldane, Lord Nathan Rothschild, King Edward VII, King George V, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, Lord Frederick Roberts, Lord Kitchener, Admiral Sir Jacky Fisher, and many others. South African statesman Jan Smuts was associated with them, as well as American banker J.P. Morgan, Canadian PM William Mackenzie King as well as French and Russian officials.

Docherty and Macgregor make the case that Britian was the actual spark of WWI. The cabal felt that Germany was infringing on Britain's markets and the German navy was a threat to the British supremacy of the seas. In 1905, people representing Britain, France, Russia and Belgium made a secret accord which would allow Britain to come into Belgium in case of a German invasion. This accord was not made with the consent of either Parliament or the French legislature, but the Belgian king was in agreement. This made Belgium's neutrality moot.

From 1905 until 1914, there were several attempts to trick Germany into starting a war, but until the Secret Elite was able to manipulate the events in Sarajevo to make it look like Germany started it, Germany refused to take the bait. Indeed, the authors show that the only person wanting peace was Kaiser Wilhelm.

Among the events that the Secret Elite manipulated were the Panic of 1907 in the US, the Russo-Japanese War and the 1912 US Presidential election. They played both sides of the Russo-Japanese war and had several members of both the Conservative and Liberal parties in Britain in their pocket, which allowed them to keep their agenda moving through the government. In addition to Parliament, the military and the banking concerns, the Secret Elite also had a firm grasp of the press, with The Times and The Manchester Guardian fully behind them.

Docherty and Macgregor are preparing a second volume which will detail the Secret Elite's prosecution of the war. Intersetingly, I don't think the book is actually available in the US. The copy I read was bought on Amazon and the price on the dust cover said £20.00.

[haroldeye]

Not very good historians are they,

1. The creation of the High Seas Fleet had only one purpose to challenge the British control of the seas.

2. German industry had actually overtaken British manufacturing in the 1890's.

3. Britain was instrumental in setting up Belgium as a state and was a guarantor of Belgium neutrality from 1831 onwards.

4. The events in Sarajevo were nothing to do with the Germans. It was the Germans backing the Austrians that pushed Europe into war.

Still nothing like a good conspiracy theory. Tin foil hats anyone?

[tygrkhat40]

All I can say harold is to read the book.

[Dr Pepper]

A quick google search elicits that Docherty is not an historian-and I have not found any entry for the other author. The world is awash with books penned by people with theories but little academic background or rigor to back them. Remember 'The Holy blood and the holy Grail' nonsense-and the sequels, by Baigent, Lee and Lincoln? They too received a lot of unwarranted exposure too-for what turned out to be a load of rubbish for the gullible...

[scoundrel]

On 26th February 1918 the hospital ship HMHS Glenart Castle departed from Avonmouth, near Bristol and proceeded towards Brest, her destination. She was a Union Castle liner requisitioned by the RN and fitted out with wards and an operating theatre. She had been refitted after hitting a mine the previous autumn and this was her first voyage after the repairs. She had a large medical party, including 120 RAMC officers (doctors), most of whom would have been passengers rather than permanent staff: you dont need 120 doctors on one ship. Her permenent staff included a matron (Sister Kate Beaufoy); six nurses; eight RAMC other ranks who would have been the orderlies and porters. [source ~ Masonic Great War Project] She was due to take on several hundred wounded British Commonwealth soldiers and bring them back to the UK.

She left Avonmouth shortly after midnight and fishermen who saw her pass remembered that she was shining her red cross lights as required under the Hague Convention. It may have been a mistake. At 4am she was torpedoed by the German submarine UC56 and sank in less than ten minutes. She was ten miles south of Lundy Island when it happened. Her power failed instantly and she could not transmit a distress signal, so there was no immediate rescue response. Most of the lifeboats could not be launched as she listed heavily before sinking; seven lifeboats were launched from the port side. But the seas were running high in an Atlantic gale and some of the boats were swamped. At least one man lived from one of the swamped boats because a passing American destroyer, unaware that Glenart Castle had been sunk, saw him floating after daylight broke and were astonished when he reacted to their routine attempt to resusitate him and came back from the dead. The warship requested and received permission to divert from her mission and was joined by a French destroyer who had listened to the radio traffic and decided to participate in the search for survivors.

No lifeboats were found. A large number of dead bodies were recovered, and very troubling, some of them had gunshot wounds. It is likely that the U Boat did this in order to try to wipe the slate and prevent any survivors from telling tales; there is no way her captain did not know he was guilty of a war crime. It would be very hard to prove that without any eyewitnesses though. But Glenart Castle also had liferafts and 38 survivors were discovered on these; 29 RAMC people and 9 crewmen. None of the nurses survived.

In all, 29 people were saved, all of them RAMC personnel. Three days later, a British minsweeper found more bodies, including several nurses.





It is a fact that in WW1 the German Navy sank numerous British hospital ships, and it wasn't fog of war, it was intentional. The worst case was HMHS Llandovery Castle, a Canadian ship, sunk by U86 and with the loss of 240 crew, medical staff and patients. The Brittanic, sister to the Titanic, was sunk in this way, a hospital ship supposedly neutral and with special status in war. Unless we simply say the German Navy were exceptionally wicked people, which I suspect was not the case, one has to wonder why they did it.

One reason undoubtedly is that Britain did not obey the Hague Convention rules religiously all of the time. Britain needed to do that if she was to have a valid case to complain. Whether hospital ships were used to transport munitions I have no knowledge and I doubt if it was as crude as that. But certainly the hospital ships in the Galipolli campaign were used as troopships to bring soldiers forward and then as hospital ships to bring the wounded men back out. This was catagorically illegal.

The Governments undertake not to use these ships for any military purpose. ~ Hague Convention X, Article 4.

The German side would have had much less need for hospital ships than the British side.

British naval perfidy, some genuine and some only perfidy if you think war is a game of spillikins, was bound to annoy the German Navy. Q ships were naughty, no doubt about it. But war is Hell. As Captain Ericson says to his captive, the skipper of the U Boat he has just sunk, when this man foolishly sneers at the British for not fighting fair:

It was war. I'm sorry if it's too hard for you.

~ The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat.
The Germans had also instituted unrestricted submarine warfare because the British merchant marine refused to heave to and allow themselves to be sunk by submarines. They even executed a British ferry captain who had tried hard to ram the submarine which challenged him; executed for the crime of defending himself when attacked. But when it came to the use of hospital ships as troopships the German side were correct and were certainly had a right to retaliate.

The captain of UC56 was arrested and briefly imprisonned in the Tower of London after the Armistice, but the German postwar government stood up for him and pointed out that he was taken prisoner after the Armistice, directly against the Armistice rules, yet the British wanted to try him for breaking the rules of war. The British government thought about it and reluctantly let him go. If they could have proven that he shot survivors and sank lifeboats after the ship went down, I bet they would hanged, drawn and quartered him and fed him to the Tower ravens. But as it was, the case was not cut and dried, and the German captain could have brought up some embarrassing facts about the abuse of hospital ships while defending his conduct in the case of Glenart Castle.

He who comes to Equity must come with clean hands. ~ British legal maxim.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Ennath

Woodrow Wilson (not one of my favorite presidents, to put it mildly) was another elitist professor, who saw no incongruity between his statements and his actions.
He spoke of self-determination for all peoples, but apparently only if they were white. (He was a virulent racist who loved Birth of a Nation and had it shown at the White House.)
He was always convinced that he was absolutely in the right. Opposition to his policies during the war was to be considered treason. He rode roughshod over his fellow Allied leaders. (Clemenceau at the Peace Conference - "If Lloyd George thinks he Napoleon, President Wilson believes he is Jesus Christ himself.") He refused to compromise over the terms of the League of Nations in the peace treaty, despite Cabot Lodge's willingness to find some agreement.
Wilson was, in the end, the first of the great American Progressives, who sought to remake America into a land governed by "experts" such as himself. He maintained that the Constitution had been a big mistake. He was, ultimately, the beginning of the gloomy road to Barack Obama.

I feel a bit reserved about the implied reflection on President Obama, although Ennath's opinion is every bit as valid as mine. But what comes to me in re-reading this post is the Great Power rivalry which survived WW1 and which fatally undermined the League of Nations and led ultimately to the resumption of hostilities. There wasn't any love lost between the Allied leaders at the top level. Relations between the senior Allied leaders in WW2 were more cordial on the surface, and probably a bit more cordial in reality. I suspect that the difference lay in Britain's decline (and France's decline) as world powers. Churchill and FDR were more or less friends as well as allies, partly because FDR did not need to worry so much about Britain after WW2, and already realised she was going to be a useful future ally and sidekick, very much living in America's shadow and dependent on American support. In WW1 and just aftewards, Britain was still a great power and strong enough to be a threat to American interests.

[alessandro1]

Ottoman,Russia and Germany much lost,others less lost
war never brings a winner.

regards