 Bingo, two o'clock clock, this is ThinkTech. This is History Lens with John David and we love to talk to him about history. And today, because it's just a day after Veterans Day, a hundred years after the armistice ending World War I, we're going to talk about World War I, we're going to talk about how it started, how it proceeded, how it ended, and the lessons for humanity really that we learned. But I'd like to open with one thing, try to get you to talk about this. Bismarck put Germany together from a bunch of duchies back in the 1870s. And it was what, 30 years, 35 years after he did that, that we had Germany as an integrated country with everybody working together with a big national war plan affair that covered all possibilities around Europe. It was like a computer program, if this then that. The Schlieffen plan of 1905, that's correct. So they were doing that for a while. That's true. General Schlieffen was, he was the commanding general of the German Army and he put together this plan that in case there was an attack, in case it looked like war, then Germany would attack to the west, they would conquer France and then they would wheel their army very quickly and head to the eastern front and attack Russia. Oh, that's a pretty ambitious plan. Oh, it's a very ambitious plan. In the event itself, it didn't actually work. But that was the mood, wasn't it? That was the mood, right. And it wasn't just Germany. It seemed like Europe in general. That's right, it seemed like it wasn't a question of whether or not there would be war, it was more a question of when. Most European powers assumed there would be a war by 1912, 1913. Interesting. Yeah, so. So killing the Archduke in Serbia was just, it was like the Tonkin Gulf incident. Right, right. Or the sinking of the main. Exactly. No, no, that's right. Like the Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor incident. Yeah, the attack on Pearl Harbor, which started the Pacific War. So, yeah, we can actually bring up Franz and his wife, Franz Ferdinand. There he is. That's Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne and his wife, Sophie Ciotek. And they're actually in Sarajevo. This is June 1914. And the Archduke and his wife are there to welcome Bosnia into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians claimed this as a part of their empire in 1908. It had been a part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire's falling apart. And then the Austrians claimed it. Now, this enraged the Serbians who had their own state. The state of Serbia was independent as of 1873. And the Serbians, there were a lot of Serbians living in Bosnia. And the Serbians had this idea in 1912 and 1913. They actually fought a couple of wars in that in the Balkans to promote this idea of conquering areas where Serbians lived outside of Serbia and making it a greater Serbia for ethnic Serbs. So, there was this very strong, you see this in Russia today, actually, in its actions in Crimea and in some other areas in Ukraine, where the Russians have this idea of a greater Russia, where these ethnic Russians. Anyway, that's part of the prelude to the war. And so, Sophie and her husband are there to welcome Sarajevo and the Bosnians into the Austrian Empire. Quite a welcome they get. So, a little bit of a story. So, at this time, the European powers are poised against one another. I mean, you have the Russians and the French have signed a secret treaty by which they're going to defend one another in the case of a war. The Germans and the Austrians signed the same kind of secret treaty. And then later on, the English joined the French and the Russians. And later on, the Italians joined first the Germans and the Austrians. And then when the war goes badly, they switch sides. And they join the Allies. So, you've got to have a sense of humor. Well, it's a brutal, devastating war. It's tragic. It's hard to keep your sense of humor. But so, they're riding in this car through Sarajevo. And this bomb goes off in front of them. No one is, well, there are some people injured, but they are unharmed. So, they take off to the hospital to go visit these injured. And then they're going to go back into the crowd and back into the celebrations. And so, they're on the street lined with people, right? Imagine this situation where there are throngs of crowds waiting for these two. And the driver takes a wrong turn. It's true. He takes the wrong turn, and now the car has to back up in the midst of these throngs. And this car does not have reverse. You could bring the car up. Why don't we see a picture of the car? There it is. It's a 1913 staff, a stiffened graph. And it doesn't have a reverse gear. So, in that case, the security guards had to jump out and push the car backward. Well, it just so happened that at that moment, the Serbian Nationalists, who was there to kill the two of them, stood right next to them as the car was being pushed backwards. And that's how they died. And that's— They shot them. They shot them both dead. And that's how—then some other machinations, the Austrians threatened the Serbians, and then the Austrians go to war against the Serbians. And then, because the Serbians are allied with the Russians, the Russians mobilize against the Germans and the Austrians. The Germans then mobilize against the French. The French mobilize against the Germans. The English join the French. And all of a sudden, you know— You have World War I exploding into reality. Yeah, it's quite a beginning. And it just all happened fairly quickly, you know. That's right. And in the space from June to the end of July 1914, then—and there were some attempts to stop the war. The Kaiser called for a peace conference in London. The British foreign secretary, Lord Gray, was interested for a while, and then saw that the Hawks, the War Hawks in England, didn't want a peace conference and then backed down. So the war—so one of the lessons from World War I is that people should actually have the peace conference instead of going to war. The causes of the war were this, you know, this intense treaty system, the mobilization, the plans for mobilization as Jay, as you mentioned. And then there was this—there was competition over weaponry. There was an arms race that took place in the 1910s and teens, the 1900s and tens, and then there was imperial competition. There was competition over colonies in Africa and elsewhere. Imperialism was riding high worldwide. Imperialism was part of the causes of the war. So you put that all together and then you have this horrible, horrible conflagration. You have trench warfare. We've got a picture of the guys in the trench. There they are. And these things, the trenches were absolutely awful in World War I because they harbored disease. They had rats. There were all kinds of rats in the trenches and the rats were disease-ridden. So it was a very dangerous environment of millions upon millions of men died just from being in the trenches. And the trenches filled up with water. So these trenches were located in the lowlands area, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and in the fall, especially in the fall and the winter, then there was lots of rain. That area gets all kinds of rain that time of year. So the trenches would fill up with water and these soldiers standing in that water all the time and their feet would begin to rot away. That's what trench foot is. It's a form of gangrene. But you know why? This is sort of an odd way to do war. You find a trench and you stay in there and then an officer tells you to run over the hill and you get mowed down by a machine gun. What kind of a way is that to spend your day? It doesn't sound like a really effective military strategy. Good question. So the war itself is fought on with the assumption that it'll be like wars in the past. It'll be like the invasion of France, the Franco-Pression War of 1870, or it'll be like the American Civil War, where soldiers still lined up maybe 400 to 500 yards apart from one another and they charged one another. And the weaponry was such that if you stood 400 yards away from your opponent, then the field cannon couldn't, they could reach about that, but not much farther. So you could stand a little bit beyond the reach of the field cannon and you could actually gather your troops there and be pretty much unharmed. The basic musket in the Civil War, that musket ball flew about 80 yards. So you didn't have to worry about long-range snipers much or the rest of it, but technology really changes, of course, right? We all know this, that the technology, the killing technology dramatically increases in the late 19th century, early 20th century, so that now you have artillery that can throw shells 25 miles, not just 400 yards, then you have rifled weapons that can throw a bullet, you know, three, 4,000 yards a mile even. So, and then you have the machine gun, you have the introduction of the tank at the end of the war, less influential but still important. And so you have all these killing devices, which are just including the airplanes. The airplanes can drop bombs. So, yeah, you have, so the technology increases, but the way of fighting does not change. Well, you know, that's why you have this intense slaughter. You know, before the range was limited, now the range obviously was much greater. Right. So what do you do to avoid being pulverized by weapons that go further? You dig a hole. You dig trenches. And that's the way you ostensibly protect your troops against that greater firepower. That's right. But it really didn't work very well. No, it was awful. It was a slaughterhouse. And the old idea of a charge, an offensive charge, was still there. And that was a very bad idea, because you could much more easily defend yourself in a trench than you could by sending your men over the trench into the so-called no man's land between the German trenches and the American trenches. Or, pardon me, the, you know, I have a question. So 1914, the summer of 1914 and the guns of August, you know, yes, a few weeks after the period. Barbara Tuckman's book, The Guns of August, yes. Okay, so then we have a war and, you know, house of cards comes down, everybody's shooting each other. Right. They spend years in trenches between 1914, 1917. Okay, then lays American. We arrive. We have issues about going into the war or not. And there were things that provoked us to going into the war. That's true, yes. And finally, we get there. And we're singing songs and being happy and confident and all that. Well, happy unless you get mowed down. Unless you get mowed down, which happens shortly thereafter. Did we actually make a difference? Did we win the war for them? So this is the traditional interpretation of the end of the war. The United States declares war on Germany in 1917. And the reason why they do this is because Germany at the beginning of the war had pursued unrestricted submarine warfare. And in early 1915, they sank, they sank a cruise ship called the Lusitania. In a lot of America cruise ship was that's right. Passing. Well, it was, yeah, it was a cruise ship that had been outfitted to bring war supplies to England. It wasn't like machine guns and stuff, but medical supplies and that kind of thing. Yeah. And so it was considered to be a civilian ship at that point. And the Germans sank it. And lost a life. That's right. More than a thousand people died. And so the United States issues an ultimatum at that point says to Germany, look, you do this again, and we're going to join the war. And Germany backs down and says, okay, we will from now on renounce unrestricted submarine warfare. We will only target combatants. And that lasts for, you know, for about a year and a half. And then in early 1917, the problem is the United States has said it's going to be neutral in, you know, in attitude and in reality, and in reality, it's not neutral. We're sending a lot of money in England's way. We're sending material and eventually we begin to send war material to the British, much needed by the British. And so the German high command looks at this and they say, you know what, we're not winning the war. This is a problem for us. And the Americans are busy helping the British stay afloat. So we've got to go back and we've got to do some more damage in the Atlantic Ocean. So they resume unrestricted warfare, unrestricted submarine. Trying to stop the flow of material and all that. In 19, in early 1917. And this really puts the United States on something close to a war footing. Then in April 1917, the United States intercepts a telegram, a telegram that was intended for the German ambassador to Mexico. Hold on. Okay. You know, I'm getting that cliffhanger feeling all over me. Yes. That's John David and history professor. We have a cliffhanger. We'll talk about the telegram. We're going to find out exactly what that telegram said because that was instrumental in the United States entry into World War One. Okay. Oh, wow. We'll be right back. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, host of Hawaii Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring in the latest in what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Okay. We're back with John David and as we left this exciting story about World War One, there was a certain telegram that changed the course of history. The so-called Zimmerman telegram. All right, John. What's in the telegram? Zimmerman was the German foreign minister, sent a telegram to his ambassador in Mexico only it was intercepted. It got lost and then was intercepted, ended up in the hands of the American government. The telegram promised Mexico its old territory in the United States, California, New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Utah, parts of Colorado. Yeah, it promised that territory to Mexico if Mexico would attack the United States. Yeah. So this was the last straw. And this is when the United States declared. It's funny how a piece of paper like that. That's right. Which was really silly when you think about it. It wasn't going to happen. No, it wasn't going to happen. That was a real long shot. And so this made people wild and crazy. And up to that point, I mean, I remember that a large percentage of the immigrants who then populated the country were German. That's right. From the last half of the 19th century. Absolutely. And there's a lot of discrimination against Germans in World War One. Yeah. German, the language is banned in public places in Iowa. There are, you know, Germans are lynched, actually killed by vigilante mobs. At the same time, there were also Germans. Farmer who operated in the U.S. Honestly, not much. No, it was mostly that was mostly serious. That was mostly fabrication and fear, right? Fear fueled this anti-German attitude. So the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was a German, a German national, but he was a harmless guy. But he got interned. He got put into an internment camp. Yes. Shades of today. Well, there was this war fever going on in the United States. Shades of World War Two also. So that's the domestic side. On the international side, then it takes the United States a year to put its army together. The United States has a very small army and they're not prepared. So it's not until spring 1918 that the United States actually sends a fighting force to Europe. So they had let their army, the U.S. had let its army decline after the Spanish-American wars. Oh, yeah. After the civil war in the Spanish, that's right. It was not very big even during the Spanish-American war. Okay. So they had to ramp all of that up and ramp up war production and the rest of it. So there is this mobilization and then troops are sent in spring 1918. And the American troops are fresh. The thing about this war is it ground everybody down. It was such a vicious war. In one day, I believe in 1916, the British decide upon an offensive and they send their troops over the trenches into battle. They lose 60,000 men in one day killed. And the line of battle does not move an inch. So there's this it's really a slaughterhouse and it leads to this war exhaustion on the part of the British, the French and then of course the Germans on the Western Front. And the United States comes in, its troops are fresh. The Americans have access to tanks, French tanks. And the Americans, I think, really make the difference because the Germans are planning a big offensive in the spring and summer of 1918. The Americans fight that offensive off their high American casualties in that time period. And then in the late summer of 1918, they begin to push the German army back beyond the trenches towards the German boundary. And when the German army has to retreat back into its own homeland, then the high command of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, they realize the gig is up. And that's when they sue for an armistice. And that's the day that we celebrated a couple of days ago on the 11th. It's 11, 11, 1918. That's right. But this was an armistice, there's a lesson in the armistice too. If you humiliate a country, you're going to pay a price later. What was the humiliating? So of course it's complicated. History is complicated. I'll agree with that. So what happens is that the Germans don't just say, OK, we're done. They actually have a plan. The plan is to contact Woodrow Wilson, the American president, who has put forward a plan for the peace after the war called the 14 points. Some of those points say there should be no punishment to anyone in the war. There should be no victors. There should be peace without victory. That's Wilson's slogan. So the Germans like this idea because they're losing now, right? No punishment for the losers. And so they contact Wilson. And Wilson wants to put forward his 14 points. But the Allied powers, the French and the British, they're not interested in this. They're interested in blood because they lost millions of their soldiers, millions of their men. They lost so much in money. Had the Germans done really brutal things in the war, more than the others? Had there been war crimes? Had there been genocide? Had there been crimes against civilians? In general, no, but the Germans did use gas. They used a Seren gas, which was brand new, invented by a German Jew, Fritz Haber. And they used it. They used it against... As opposed to the others. The others did not use it. Well, they didn't have it. The other Allies didn't have this, at least at the outset. So yeah, that could be considered a war crime. So the Brits were ticked off at them? Well, it wasn't just the Brits. The French lost 25% of their young men, 25%, pardon me, 25% of their male population. So for a generation, you think about this, young men would have married, had babies, had productive lives. That was taken away from the French. So yeah, the French and the British were outraged. They didn't want any Wilsonian principles. So Wilson had to go back to the Germans and say, you know what, the 14 points are not going to work. We're going to accept your unconditional surrender, and we're going to accept the abdication of the Kaiser. This is the German King, Kaiser Wilhelm. So the Allies were asking a lot, but the Allies sexually had agreed, and Wilson agreed with this as well, that they were not going to negotiate with the Kaiser. The Kaiser had to be gone. And eventually, the Germans agreed to this. They don't really have a choice. So it goes back and forth in the middle of October and the end of October. And then, finally, there's an agreement, the Germans signed the armistice. And we can, we've actually got a picture of the armistice train car. So this is a picture of the car, the train car in which the armistice was signed, right there in the front is General Fock, pardon my language, but that's how it's pronounced in French. He's basically the commander of the Allied forces. And so he's there, and then you have some German commanders on the left, and you have some other officials. But the signing takes place in this car about, I think about 10 a.m. in the morning. Interesting tidbit. Hitler, when he conquers France, this car still exists. He gets a hold of this same carriage, this same train carriage, and he forces the French to sign their surrender in the same car. Well, it burned Germany. That armistice was really hard on them, at least they saw it that way. So it wasn't the armistice so much. It was the peace afterwards. It was the treaty that was negotiated in the winter and spring of 1919, signed in June 1919. And the Germans did not have a place at that table, the negotiating table. And the Germans, well, Sonian ideas were pushed aside by the Allied powers. Those are the high lofty ideals of a better world. That's right. Internationalism, no punishment for the Germans, no reparations for the Germans. So that was put aside. And there's actually a clause in the Versailles Treaty that states that the Germans were responsible for the end of the war, pardon me for starting the war. Yeah, so it was definitely blame the Germans at that point. And the Allied powers negotiated reparations. So the Germans actually had to pay reparations now, significant reparations. If the Germans had paid all of the reparations, they would have paid about $33 billion, which is this enormous sum of money. Especially in those days. Three times the GDP of the German economy before the war. So it was this, the Versailles Treaty document really deeply punished the Germans. It humiliated them, and it created the seeds for the rise of Nazism and the rise of World War II. Yeah, so it was a piece with victors and losers. Wilson's internationalist idea just were pretty much thrown out of the treaty. And so that's really one of the takeaways. The League of Nations had no significance. The League of Nations hadn't been created yet. So it was created out of the treaty. But nonetheless, the provisions of the treaty provided that Germany was strapped down, like a patient who wanted to leave, but was strapped to the table. And Germany had to pay its reparations every month. It ruined the German economy in the early 1920s. Germany ended up printing so much money that to buy a loaf of bread would cost you about four million Deutsche Marks, or Reichsmark, pardon me. And so it deeply damaged the Germans. And as I, again, the idea here, and I think this is quite true, the literature bears this out, that the punishment of the Germans led to an opening for somebody who was a nationalist who said, that treaty ruined us and we're going to get our pride back. And that's what Hitler said. And so that was a, it sounds like that was not a small cause of World War II. It was a significant one. I think that was the overlayment of World War II. It was this bitterness, this sense of bitterness. So if you want to look at how the treaty affected the rest of the 20th century, it's right there in the treaty. That's right. And what's interesting about it, it could have gone to Wilson, Woodrow Wilson was at the negotiations. He was the chairman of the negotiations, but he couldn't convince the French and the British to negotiate along Wilsonian lines. There was too much bitterness among their own population. And John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, he was actually there as a part of the British delegation. He so disagreed with the British approach of punishing the Germans that he quit the delegation, went home, wrote a book about it and published the book. Within six weeks, it was called The Consequences of the Peace and it predicted what would happen. It predicted that if you punish Germany, first of all, you would punish yourselves because Germany was the largest economy in Europe. So you couldn't trade with Germany that was strapped, that was under duress. And he saw the economic chaos that the 20s and the 30s, that resulted from the treaty in the 20s and the 30s. So how, looking back, John, today, we've had World War II. We've had the whole effect of the greatest generation. We've had, for a while, we had a pretty terrific economy. We had some smaller wars that demoralized us, Vietnam and all that. And here we are in 2018. It's 100 years later. How do we look back at this? We've concluded that it created, in many ways, World War II. And World War II really created the way things are today. So how do we look back at this today? So I think the paths that I was talking about, the Wilsonian path, well, the European powers do not take that path after World War I. But the Americans do after World War II. They take the Wilsonian path. The Marshall Plan. This is really a century created by Wilson. Now, the historians are still debating this, so some would disagree with me. But Woodrow Wilson's ideas drive American diplomacy and the American economy in the post-war period. Free trade, open diplomacy, you know, no secret agreements, kind of multilateral internationalism, the spread of democracy. So Wilson's ideas provided for all of that. And the Americans, with actually significant opposition, the Americans actually embraced the Wilsonian premises after World War II. It provided for unprecedented prosperity in the late, you know, the second half of the 20th century. It provided for an internationalist environment in the world that kept the world safer than it would have been, multilateral agreements, the United Nations, of course, the precursor to the United Nations, the League of Nations was Wilson's idea. So it created a world that prospered, and even though there were these conflicts that you mentioned, was still at peace. And so this is quite a remarkable achievement. It came 30-some years later after Wilson, but it still was a time that I think we're still in this time, actually. Yeah, I guess that'd be a great takeaway in this whole discussion. We're still in the same time. We're in the same bubble somehow from World War I. And, you know, and people, you and me included, have grown up in the notion that the Second World War was the war to end all wars, even though Wilson intended the First World War to end all wars. Well, that's true, yes, the Great War. And we thought that never again that, you know, the brutality of the Second World War was over and that we would be able to go forward and create a better society as he had imagined. But it just seems to me that that's kind of a fiction, a self-deception. The fact is that the human race, the human species, can have really terrible wars. In that case, it was only... You got to go dark on me, Jay. Yeah, I always do. And here we are thinking, it'll be fine. Is it fine? Looking back at these two wars, John, is it fine? Well, of course not. I mean, the wars were devastating. Millions of people died. You know, you have the Holocaust and World War II. You have between the wars, you have close to 70 million people disappearing from the planet just as casualties. So, no, it wasn't fine. It's awful. But I think my point is that we built a system after World War II that was, relatively speaking, a peace system, an internationalist system, a prosperous system economically. And that system, for all of its faults, has brought us to a time when we see unprecedented wealth in the world, when we see unprecedented safety, even though there are wars, people are not dying in the millions from wars, an unprecedented stability in the world, in an internationalist system led by the United States. So, I think we should think long and carefully before we abandon that system. It seems that the Trump administration might be suggesting that we could go back to a time of tariffs and, you know, kind of a winner, loser, zero sum, which is not Wilsonian internationalism. But I think there's grave danger with that. I'll be honest with you. I think some of Trump's ideas are very dangerous and threaten that internationalist system that the United States has led since the end of World War II. Just to add to that, there was a piece on NPR this morning about the Center for Strategic and International Studies where some fellow, Victor Cha, his name, and he's actually been on ThinkTech, and he did a study on North Korea and found that since Trump made his, you know, diplomatic moves, that's a euphemism, and sort of made peace according to him with Kim Jong-un. Fact is that Kim Jong-un has continued making nuclear missiles, and although he hasn't done any nuclear testing, he's way ahead of where he was a few months ago. So, you say, you know, sometimes it looks like we're in better shape, but actually there are indications that we're not. Well, here's the thing. It is a piece that included nuclear weapons, okay, and that part of the piece, part of the reason there was pieces, because the big countries, the superpowers actually had a nuclear arsenal and didn't want the other guy to use it. Deterrence. So it created a kind of deterrence that we've never had before in the world, and I think prevented wars. It's not the greatest kind of piece. It would be better to have a piece without nuclear, the nuclear threat without nuclear weapons. On the other hand, that's where we're at today, and rather than having wars in which nuclear weapons could be used, we have a system in which nuclear weapons are stockpiled. I don't know. You know, it's not great, Jay, but it's- I think there were people in- It could be a lot worse, let's say like that. People in Great Britain in the late 30s or 40s who believed that World War I was concluded, that Wilson was right, that the reparations had settled the Germans down, that they could enjoy their lives in a fine time until the bombs came down, when the V-2 rockets came down, and then they realized that it all caught up with them. And I think the lesson to take away from me is that you can't be complacent about this, that the species does have war in its historical past, and that we can live a great life and sit in the studio here, have a great time, enjoy our lives, but we cannot be sure that this sort of thing will not repeat. Your thoughts? No, sure, of course. I mean, there's no guarantee that we won't have another World War, but I think the nuclear stockpiles do provide a tremendous deterrence. Will there be another war in the future? Yeah, it's possible that we could have a World War, it might be between the United States and China, over the South China Sea or elsewhere, let's hope not, but both the United States and China have nuclear weapons. So what kind of a war would that be? Oh, you wouldn't even know it happened. Okay, that's a very dark... On that dark moment? John David, history professor, on that dark moment, we're done. Happy Veterans Day. Thanks, John.