Page 30 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • June 5, 2013 Britain, and Germany. The British propagandists mentioned the German campaign against the Herero tribe in present-day Namibia, where Herero murders of German settlers -- some of the murder victims were swindlers, bullies, and crooks, others innocent victims -- led to an invasion where Herero warriors, who mutilated the German dead, were shot on sight. Herero women and children fled to the desert and often died of thirst or typhus, which killed people on both sides. Five years before the Herero War of 1904-05, the British had “concentration camps” where the wives and children of Boer combatants died in vast numbers. Responsible counts suggest that about 16,000 Boers and 21,000 Africans died in the British camp, and a much smaller number of Herero died in the German camps once they gave themselves up. The “extermination” of the Herero is a factual non-starter: The tribe still exists and the Herero greet one another with German military titles and take delight in vacations to Germany. The Boer War was so outrageous that French and German volunteers joined the Boers and fought against the British. The fact that a French-Russian Alliance had not originally included Britain speaks for itself. Britain’s only ally was Japan, whose job it was to keep Russia out of Britain’s Chinese holdings and, above all, out of India. Do give Strachan credit for honesty. He mentions Russian murders in East Prussia just as he mentions German murders in Belgium. He also points out what many people today find startling: The Jews of the Russian Empire, after unchecked Tsarist outrages against Jews, were glad to see the Kaiser’s Germans, in particular the assimilated German Jews, some of whom were officers. One photograph shows German and Austrian officers, soldiers, and nurses, in full uniform and with a scattering or decorations, celebrating Chanukah in formerly Russian Poland in December 1916. This is not a photograph much seen elsewhere. Strachan used it. This is to his credit. When Strachan moves away from Europe and Africa, he becomes less dependable. He mentions Britain’s selfserving alliance with Japan for the protection of India and British holdings in China, but some details are sketchy. He depicts “Inoue Kauro” -- he reverses the man’s name and spells the first name wrong -- as seeing World War I as a golden opportunity for a race war against the whites, and somehow projects that Japan was more interested in an alliance with Russia. No one who understands Japanese politics could take this seriously. Russia, before and after the Bolshevik Revolution, was Japan’s constant bugbear. The Japanese did everything they could to maintain their alliance with Britain and their covert alliance with the United States. Japan seized Shantung from Germany, which had seized it from China in 1897, and this is palpably the reason Japan went to war with Germany. At the end of the book, Strachan has Japan keeping Shantung. Not for very long. In 1922, after Chinese protests led to the founding of the Chinese communist movement, Britain and the United States took Shantung from Japan and handed it back to China at the Washington Naval Conference. They also demanded that the Japanese be satisfied with building three new battleships for every five battleships the British or the Americans built. The concept had shifted from three-nation dominance of the world’s oceans to two-nation dominance, with Japan’s bitter acceptance. The British let the Anglo-Japanese treaty lapse. Patrick Buchanan has argued that Britain felt they had America and could now dump Japan, but Americans declined the role of policing the British Empire and the Japanese felt that had been tricked. Strachan claims that the Australians agitated against inserting a clause proclaiming racial equality in the charter of the League of Nations, but the opposition came not from Australia, but from the United States and Canada. The last thing the isolated Australians wanted was trouble with Japan. The final irony, also missing, is that China, having been kicked around by everybody, refused to join the League of Nations and signed a separate peace with Germany. The Chinese also hired German military instructors because the Germans were less objectionable to them than the “white faces” -- Britain -- or the “red beards” -- Russia. Both China and Japan -- today the second and third greatest economies on Earth -- spent a lot of time sulking after World War I. If they had gotten along with one another better, peace in Asia might have been assured. Close to the conclusion of “The First World War,” Strachan raps off a fairly amazing statement: “The Second World War is inexplicable without knowledge of the First, but there is no evitability linking (The Treaty of) Versailles and the ambitions of the peacemakers to its outbreak.” Versailles managed to offend both the Italians, who never got what they hoped for after serious losses, and the Japanese, who felt downright insulted. Both Italy and Japan had been on the Allied side in World War I. Next time, they were not. Versailles also made it impossible for any post-war German government bound by the treaty to defend its own space and the rest of Europe from the Bolsheviks, which led to several short-lived German-Russian alliances, the last and worst of which led to the invasion of Poland and Britain and France declaring war. How did Versailles not lead to World War II? Leo Tolstoy once said that in an argument, the Frenchman is right because he has reason, the German because he knows the facts, the Russian because of his inner feelings, and the Englishman -- because he is English. Strachan’s book is factual and the facts are accurate. The incongruous conclusion could be called the Oxford Factor.
I recently read “The First World War” by Sir Hew Strachan, Chicele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford University. It seemed the perfect book to read around Memorial Day. Everybody blamed everybody else for starting World War I. However, Strachan’s theory is so absurd that it is almost certainly true. The real culprit, he says, was Austrian Foreign Minister Franz Conrad von Hoetzendorf, who had an obsessive mission of his own. He was madly in love with Gina von Reininghaus, who was married and had six children, and wanted to make points with the devoutly Catholic Kaiser Franz Josef by presenting Gina as his new wife after the divorce. Hoetzendorf favored the war with Serbia as a glory grab that could win him points. Strachan notes that Hoetzendorf thought he could beat up on Serbia -- where the killers of Franz Ferdinand, the heir whose murder triggered the war, had been nurtured -- in three months with the sole help of Bulgaria. His plot backfired: Russia backed Serbia and Germany backed Austria, and this led to an invasion of France through Belgium to knock France out of the war and save East Prussia, if not Berlin, from a Russian invasion. Strachan is factually responsible when he sticks to Europe and Africa, and points out some anomalies in the frantic flag-waving that sent the Doughboys off to the trenches. One factual number: The British official history attributed 772,736 deaths by starvation in Germany during the war to the British blockade that kept the outside world from shipping foodstuffs to Germany. He asserts that the German diet was more monotonous than deficient, yet he admits that death rates among the invalids under full-time care soared, because whatever food was available went to the soldiers and the war workers in the factories. The concept that the British blockade starved a huge number of innocent people is one that requires courage, but Strachan makes it, despite some palliation about the black market and inept rationing. All the American public ever used to hear about was the U-boats. They first started sinking merchant ships only after the blockade started to starve German civilians. Strachan also states that the German invasion of 1914, meant to knock France out of the war so the Germans could concentrate on Russia, led to the shooting of 5,521 civilian suspects in Belgium and another 896 in northern France. He also notes that the French shot a number of suspected spies, most of them probably not guilty, in a nearpanic during the first weeks of the war. Other authors, notably Thomas Fleming and Phillip Knightly, have dealt in greater detail with the fact that the more lurid German atrocities reported in the British press were almost entirely fake. A more comprehensive view by Strachan might have noted that, despite the German killing of frequently harmless civilians, the Belgians, as a nation, had slaughtered 100 times as many people in Africa at the turn of the century as the Germans had in Belgium, and the whole world knew about it due to protests by churchmen in America,
The Oxford Factor as seen from outside
Grateful group
During the annual Memorial Day service, members of the Franklin Lakes Fire Department presented a plaque for dedicated service to Chaplain Reverend Juel Nelson, who has been assigned to a new church. Pictured are Captain Tom Pianettini, Captain. Ron Meyers Jr., Assistant Chief Ryan Dodd, President Jim Webb, Rev. Nelson, Chief Denny Knubel, Lieutenant Chuck Bohny, and former Chief of Fire Prevention Jack Willer.