re: This year is the centennial of America's entry into World War I

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As much as I am happy we won WWI, the Ottoman's would of kept Islam from becoming radicalized

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The Ottoman Empire was already crumbling and would have collapsed sooner rather than later with or without WWI.

A nasty, nasty and pointless war.
The U.S. (and the British) should have put their efforts into stopping/ending it rather than entering it.

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The U.S. (and the British) should have put their efforts into stopping/ending it rather than entering it.

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They tried kinda but everything happened so fast and nobody had any idea how terrible it would become.

I have been listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Blueprint for Armageddon this past week. Worth a listen while driving. It's awesome. Very enlightening on the WWI history and stories that I have never heard.

Our perception of the First World War is colored by both the propaganda of the time and our perception of the Second. Germany were clearly the "bad guys" in WW2, and because of that combined with the efforts by all Allied nations to make the Huns look like monsters, we naturally assume they were just as bad in the First. This is demonstrably untrue. Germany was forced by its central position into a strategy of quickly attacking France in the event of a general war in an attempt to avoid being slowly strangled to death by war on two fronts. This allowed the Allied Powers to frame the Germans as aggressors bent on European hegemony, which was not their aim. They would have certainly demanded concessions had they won, but they were in no way a threat to the very institution of democracy, as they are sometimes remembered. There were truly no "bad guys" in WW1 - well, it's probably more accurate to say that there were truly no "good guys." Everyone was to blame for both starting and then needlessly prolonging a war that was clearly not going to accomplish anything commensurate with the price paid to win it.

Smedley Butler most likely had the right of it when he said, "War is a racket," and who would be in a better position to know? In war, perhaps more than in any other human endeavor, the old saw "follow the money" most definitely applies. Who benefited the most from continuing the Great War? Arms companies, most especially American arms companies. What happened when the huge economic bubble caused by massive arms spending burst after the war when the spending stopped? The Great Depression. What brought America out of the Depression? The Second World War, and more massive amounts of arms spending. And we avoided another Depression after the war by simply never stopping spending on arms. First it was to counter a Soviet threat that became less and less a reality as the decades passed. It was to continue a war in Vietnam that quite literally had no purpose or value to the individual Americans sent to fight and die there. It is now spent to bolster a permanent semi-war in the Middle East, against an enemy that has no face and therefore can never truly be defeated - a perfect boogeyman with which to frighten the American people. It is to the point now that needlessly wasting billions and billions of dollars every year on a military we don't need is so much a part of the national consciousness that to challenge it is to be labeled "unAmerican." Don't you respect the military, man? Why do you hate our veterans?

Smedley Butler was a great Marine and American, but his charges of of "War is a Racket"are largely based on an aversion to what Teddy Roosevelt and others supported: Namely a strong military to back up American global commerce. Since Butler saw the Banana Republic wars and Philippines Insurrection up close at a time when the U.S. was emerging as a global power, his opinion is understandable, but also arguably backward.He is sort of like the Williams Jennings Bryan of the military, in that he supported a national paradigm that was in its final throes. Great guy. Born in the wrong time.

World War I was the birth of the modern global order. It culminated in World War II( which was just a bigger, noisier sequel). These events overturned the world order created by the Napoleonic Wars and Treaty of Vienna 100 years earlier. Lo and behold, about 100 years later, we are in the midst of another global re-ordering and arguing about this and that in the "post war world"(still referring to a war that ended about 70 years ago). NATO, UN, the protected world of a neutered Western Europe. All that stuff is about to end.Hopefully not in as violent a way as the last two saecular shifts.

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In the eleven months between January and November 11, 1918, more than 116,000 Americans would be killed

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Are you sure this is correct and not "casualties?" I thought America lost 105,000 lives in WWI total. I could be wrong and could google, but I'm a bit drunk

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"Keep quiet. I am shot worse than you are, but I am not making any noise."

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That's a tough, young man.


I found his draft registration. Not sure if you have or want it?

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Germany didn't want to conquer Europe. It just wanted an empire and to be Britain's equal or be the first European country. It made the mistake of sending it's western divisions to Russia early in war. Would've knocked out France if it hadn't

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Germany had to send divisions east because Russian mobilization went faster than forecasted and worse yet the Russians launched an offensive into Prussia which spread widespread panic in Germany.

The real mistake the Germans made was in not keeping the right wing of their offensive into France strong and allowing a gap to open between 1st and 2nd army as they approached Paris. This gap resulted in what we know as The First Battle of the Marne.
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