The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War 1

by John Mosier

Book Overview

This challenging and controversial analysis of the war on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 reveals how and why the Germans consistently defeated the French and the British with one-half to one-third fewer casualties than the Allies, and how American troops in 1918 saved the Allies from defeat and a negotiated peace with the Germans.

Based on a decade of research into previously unused French and German sources, The Myth of the Great War...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060196769
• ISBN13: 9780060196769
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

very very good book

I read this book last week and just saw all the reviews(by british authors) mostly denigrating the book and i remembered one extremely APT phrase mosier puts in the first chapter of the book: "the casualty data in britain is surrounded in such confusion and controversy that even today most british analysts seem to beleive the argument is a subjective one on the interprtation of data" to respond to these: 1)like mosier i totally agree that british analysts like to hugely inflate losses to justify the TOTAL incompetence of the british army of ww1,mosier uses his sources carefully: 1)british war office,winston churchill,german reichs archive pre ww1,french war office archives the ironic thing is anyone who has read french books will generally not find these ludicrous statistics as can be found in british authors like sheffield who even today claim somehow that the somme was some sort of a victory and the german losses here were 600000 or so even 80 years after the actual event and given the huge amount of research available from charles bean(the australian author) in beans(who unlike these armchair authors actually visited the front) book states that is no battle aftermath did he find german bodies piled as huge as the british ones,and when he reuested responses from newspaper readers almost all who responded agreed to this analysis. Finally mosiers figures are correct and add up to from diverse sources: like mosier says only the dead are a good reflection of casualties,as a single soldier wounded 5 times is counted repeatedly in the wounded lists and hence is not an accurate reflection of the true damage ,and there is no reason why british official figures must be acceptable and not the german reichs archive numbers. mosier computes allied losses to roughly 2.2 million on the western front and germans as 970000 which compares to the reichsarchives .these figs clearly prove mosieres thesis never from 1914-1918 did any of the allied armies match the german tactical and operational superiority

A Good Look At How Controlling War Information Can Backfire

This books looks at how perceptions of the war written after the fact can color our remembrances of an event and cause us not to learn valuable lessons from the event. Through most of the war, the Allies were forced to color the reports from the front in order not to reveal how badly the war was going for them. This also prevented them from reviewing problems with strategy and tactics which would come back to haunt them in the next war. The best examples in the book of the cost of the policy is when you have the Germans will take a large area and the British and French will counter-attack and retake a small portion of the area, but will claim that they have reclaimed the whole area. Later, when they have fought long and hard (and costly) battles which do free the area, they are unable to claim the victory since they had claimed that they already held the area for a long time. This explains a lot of the problems that they would have with morale and the perception that they were not making progress later when they were. I would recommend this book for anyone who is interested in the First World War along with anyone who wants to see how goverments and armies can color reports for their own ends and then find there is loss of credibility caused by this action. Be sure to read other books on the war so that you can get a balanced view as well as see how the histories have been shaped by those won.

Germany was not truly defeated in WWI

John Mosier contends that the American forces commanded by General John J. Pershing saved the day. This sounds entirely plausible, if for no other reason, then the United States delivered an additional two million soldiers to the front. And let's not forget the Canadians also sent roughly 400,000 troops. I simply lack the background to delve deeply into the arguments surrounding the major World I battles. The author, though, did help me to better understand that Germany never really surrendered. In many respects, it was similar to a boxer decisively losing in the ring who is saved from defeat only by the judges prematurely ending the fight. What is an armistice? The dictionary provided by Answers on the web defines it as merely" A temporary cessation of fighting by mutual consent; a truce." General Fayolle's December 1918 quote is haunting: "The country (Germany) does not project an image of a vanished (vanquished?) people. Everything breathes order, prosperity, richness. Germany is not at all exhausted. If left alone, they will start the war all over again, in ten years, if not before." It was actually about twenty years, but Fayolle's central point is mostly on target. Germany still had a very high number of superb officers to carry out the future orders of the Nazi regime. The next war should have surprised no one. Lastly, Mosier also makes it abundantly clear that the United States was conned by the less than virtuous French and British governments. Germany may have not been guilt free, but it was not the villain as portrayed by the lying propagandists of our so-called allies. David Thomson Flares into Darkness

A very compelling challenge to popular WWI history.

This book has created a great amount of controversy. To be honest, if you are a WWI historian who is pro-French and pro-British, you are going to hate this book. If you are pro-German and pro-American, you will very much appreciate it. And if you want to insert yourself somewhere into this divide, this book will quickly get you there. The other reviews about this book say a lot: some are supportive, some are negative, and some are so negative as to be incoherent. Therefore, I will give you reasons why you should pay attention to this book, and you can judge this book as you like. First, Mosier is fluent in English, French and German. He has toured and surveyed most of the Western Front battlefields and examined many of the cemeteries. He has even visited the battlefields with modern military officers, who helped guide him in understanding the military value of the terrain. Therefore, he has been at the battlefields and knows the terrain on both a tactical and strategic level, and his knowledge and first-hand experience shows in the book. His tactical and military explanations, such as describing artillery and assault tactics, are approved as accurate by officers of many armies. Second, Mosier has access to German archives, and from these he brings very compelling pieces of information to the table. Each chapter is very thoroughly notated, with sources given at the end of every chapter. When one scans down these lists of sources, one will notice just as many entries from German sources as there are from French and British sources. As a historian of many fields, I am very cognizant of the fact that an overwhelming volume of WWI history comes from British sources. The inclusion of German sources in Mosier's analysis is very important in the WWI discussion, and one cannot discount sources from the Reichsarchiv in Berlin as propaganda without serious justifications. Third, the culmination of the book is Mosier's explanation of the events of 1918. After four years of war, why was Germany suddenly able to break apart the Western Front? Why did the British and French armies lose so much territory in the first half of that year? If the Germans could do that in 1918, why did they not do it earlier? And what impact did the US Army have on the Western Front at this point? Mosier offers his answers to these questions, with his well-researched justifications as well. I found this book to be a very cutting challenge to traditional WWI history. I also found that it cannot be swept under the rug very easily. The information in the book is very well notarized, sourced, studied and verified by other sources. I would introduce this book to students just to teach them the skill of using sources, footnotes and bibliographies in reports. Therefore, I would challenge other reviewers to re-write their reviews and explicitly justify why Mosier's sources are not accurate, and therefore deepen the conversation.

John Mosier sees through British propaganda on World War I

Prof. Mosier maintains that the English language literature on World War I has been largely duped by the war-time British propaganda ground out by the British high command and British or pro-British journalists to dupe British and world-wide public opinion and the war-time civilian British government. The opening weeks of the war quickly demonstrated how advances in weaponry, especially the machine gun and modern artillery, dramatically outdated the existing concepts of land war tactics. The Germans, already closer to the realities of modern war, reacted within weeks to develop new weapons and tactics; the French, recognizing the problem, eventually reacted, if more slowly and less completely; but the British scarcely ever gave a sign that there was a problem at hand; and relied on propaganda to paper over the problem, while making faint efforts to improve their weaponry, and almost no effort at all to modify their disasterous tactics that led to enormous casualties. (The one exception was the tank, but Mosier shows how it never proved to be a decisive weapon in WW I.) Prof. Mosier's book pulls togeather into a coherent system the impressions that I have developed over many years of study on this war. It also is consistent with recent comparative studies of WW I tactics, including Gudmundsson's "Stormtroop Tactics" and Samuels' "Doctrine and Dogma: German and British Infantry Tactics in the First World War". The book does not explain why the British high command was so uniquely disinterested in the survival of their troops, but it probably was in part a manifestation of the class warfare that still is a major factor in British society.I have an unusual resource for insight into the nuts and bolts of WW I weapons and tactical development in the correspondence between my grandfather and father all through the war, which I am currently transcribing and translating. My grandfather was a German General Staff officer who worked with 420 mm and 305mm howitzers in Belgium and Russia, while my father was in the sole unit that provided flamethrower capabilities to the German Army, serving in the Sturm Batallion Rohr, the original storm unit, and at Verdun and Caparetto, among other engagements. Their candid and obviously uncensored letters, plus an extensive body of recorded oral history and documents, underline the significant tactical superiority that units employing new weapons and flexible, aggressive tactics had over British, French, and Russian units. Prof. Mosier argues that the British, French, Russians, and assorted other allies had really menaged to lose the war, but that they were pulled through by massive American weapons, supply, and financial aid all through the war, despite our supposed neutrality, plus the arrival of a great army of fresh American soldiers who had been largely trained by some of the few French soldiers that actually understood the revolutionary tactics that had been largely developed by what might be termed the st