The Learning Curve Sir Hew Strachan
[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts this week, Albert Cheng, and co-hosting with me this week is Alisha Searcy. Alisha, what’s up Albert? All is well, except that it’s super cold, but how are you? I’m good. I’m good. Yeah. We had our cold snap here too, but just in time for November and the winding down of fall and winter.
[00:00:46] But also for this week in particular, we commemorate Veterans Day, which was originally. Arm is to day to mark the end of World War I. So that explains our guest, Alisha. We’re gonna have Professor Hew Strachan talk to us about the First World War.
[00:01:01] Alisha Searcy: Yes. So first, let’s say Happy Veterans Day. Happy Veterans Week, right?
[00:01:06] We’ll celebrate the whole week and just thanks to all for your service to this country.
[00:01:11] Albert Cheng: That’s right. Yeah. And we, we wanna acknowledge those who are currently serving and for those who are, have since retired, we definitely appreciate their service and sacrifice. So let’s get on with this episode and let’s lean into Veterans Day and, and think about World War I. But before we do that, we’ve got some news to cover. Alisha, what’d you.
[00:01:30] Alisha Searcy: Well, this is not directly related to veterans, but the story that I wanna talk about this week is a piece that’s from the Fordham Institute, and it’s written by Kristen McQuillan and Robert Pondiscio. I think those are two familiar names to folks who do this work, but it’s entitled From Laws to Literacy.
[00:01:50] The Science of Reading needs more than Statutes to Succeed. And Albert, I felt like my toes were being stepped on just a little bit. Woo. Okay. Because I am a former policymaker and I lead an organization that supports current policymakers, and we believe in our organization that the greatest lever to transform public education is through policy.
[00:02:13] So I read with great excitement and curiosity. This piece, very well written piece that although stepped on my tellers a little bit, was absolutely right on in my mind. And so it just talks about, just as a title said, you know, it’s great that we have this movement around the country, and they call it a movement to focus on the science of reading, but they argue that we’ve gotta do more than.
[00:02:36] Talk about it past the policies, over 40 states have already passed it. You know, the question is, are we also going to teach the science of learning so students will actually learn how to read? Teachers will actually have the skillset to teach reading. There are a couple of really interesting one-liners in here.
[00:02:54] Very well written piece. And so I feel like I’m gonna be following up with the authors because I wanna talk more about this, but one of them is, and this quote actually comes from Rick Hess, who’s another one of my favorite people that I like reading that policy can make people do things, but it can’t make them do them well.
[00:03:09] So, very true. I think about as a, again, a former policymaker laws that I helped pass and worked really, really hard to get passed in the House, the Senate, and then signed by the governor, and then a few years later. It’s not being implemented properly. It’s not what I intended. And so that really spoke to me.
[00:03:29] Another one of the really interesting quotes in here is that good reading instruction is a practice, not a policy. It talks about the skills again, that students need and the practices that need to be in place when they’re being taught reading. And it’s more than just. Decoding. It’s more than just recognizing words.
[00:03:49] And so without going into all of the technical pieces of their recommendations for what needs to be in curriculum, which I completely agree with, it also talks about the importance of holding schools of education more accountable. And I bet you would have some things to say about that as well. That there are levers that are there from a policymaker standpoint, that there could be more accountability in terms of what.
[00:04:11] Schools of education are doing to prepare our teachers. Mm-hmm. Another one of my favorite quotes in here, to fulfill the promise of the science of reading, states must connect it to the science of learning. And I mentioned that a few minutes ago. It also talks about how state oversight of teacher prep programs is notoriously weak, but again, it’s where there is leverage.
[00:04:30] And so the last couple of quotes, reformers must shift from evangelizing to operationalizing. Creating professional cultures where evidence-based practice is the norm, not a novelty. Teachers will not internalize what they do not believe, and they won’t believe in practices that feel imposed rather than learned.
[00:04:50] And they talk about the greatest danger is not failure, but reversion, the quiet drift back to familiar with credited habits once the spotlight moves on. And then the final one, top down, pressure doesn’t produce bottom up mastery. And so again, this article is just chock full of great one-liners, but more important than that, it really calls us all to the map about, you know, we do this in my field, we do this policy making work.
[00:05:18] I spend a lot of time talking to lawmakers, but there’s also something to be said about the implementation part of it. So it made me question, what more can we do to make sure that we are connecting? Practitioners with policy makers to make sure the policy is right, but then also once it’s done, do we have the right accountability systems in place?
[00:05:38] Are we asking the right questions to make sure that the policy is more than just something on paper that’s forcing people to do something that they may or may not believe in? Like, what’s the buy-in process in the policy making process? What’s the buy-in after it’s passed? Really good questions that this raises for me.
[00:05:57] Mm. And it just reminds me that it’s great to have good laws, but if you’re not doing the right work behind it, is it really going to make the difference? Mm mm The question that all of us, I think need to answer.
[00:06:08] Albert Cheng: Well, I’m glad that article hit you that way and it really provoked that kind of thought, and I, and I hope it provokes a similar reaction to a lot of folks in your role, or you know, policy makers.
[00:06:17] So appreciate you sharing all that. Alisha, there’s some wisdom in that. Well, real briefly, I, you know, my article, I mean, this was a fun read and I don’t know if it’s too much inside baseball. I mean, you were talking about how the article landed for you, Alisha, as thinking about as a policymaker. This article landed and really stepped on my toes maybe well.
[00:06:36] Maybe not. I, I kind of liked it, but this article is addressed to academics. Yeah. The article was written by Dr. Richard Phelps, who’s a researcher on testing education policy research cartels. Any research not done by us is trash. Whoa. And what a title I know. But Dr. Phelps is, is raising this issue in academia where it’s.
[00:06:59] Easy for people in their silos of whatever discipline they’re in to be unfamiliar with the research that’s being produced in other departments and in other disciplines. And so he talks in particular about how psychologists actually have done tons of research about the effects of testing. And how some, you know, other social scientists, whether in economics or in the schools of education, they’re unfamiliar with that research and they go on to claim on one hand maybe that there’s no research on this, and so we’re the first to study this or.
[00:07:36] Even worse. There’s no research and so testing is bad to blatantly lie about it. Right? And so this is a pretty provocative article, and I think there’s a lot to think about, particularly for folks kind of in my shoes in the academy. You know, we’re finite beings as, as Dr. Phelps acknowledge at the end. And, and it’s impossible for us to keep track of every bit of research that gets produced, right?
[00:08:00] But we all, I think, ought to have some humility about. And not be so quick to say, we’re the first ones to do this kind of study. Certainly we gotta be honest and not say that there’s been no research on X. And so we should totally ignore it. You know, let’s do our due diligence, read outside of our fields, be interdisciplinary.
[00:08:20] I mean, there’s a lot to learn, I think, from other fields. And at the end of the day, look, we’re all in the same boat. Like we wanna pursue truth, we wanna, you know, uphold our, our values of academic freedom. In higher ed. Let’s do that. Well, and there’s something to be said about figuring out how to, how to do that better with our colleagues who are maybe in other departments.
[00:08:41] So I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe there’s a little bit more inside baseball, but. Anyway. Well,
[00:08:46] Alisha Searcy: it’s, it’s, it is definitely, I haven’t earned my PhD yet. Maybe one day You have. What I’m wondering is isn’t that a part of the process that you do research before you decide what your topic is or your focus area?
[00:09:00] Don’t you do the research to see what’s out there already and isn’t it part of the whole. Idea of doing research to kind of add to the body that already exists and to improve upon
[00:09:11] Albert Cheng: it. Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And I think the challenge is that we just produce stuff is produced as such a high clip and it’s impossible to, you know, see the full picture sometimes.
[00:09:24] Now, sometimes it’s, could be laziness, you know, it’s like, look. Just Google it. Yeah. I actually, Dr. Thompson, his article said like, you can do a Google Scholar search and find lots of stuff. Why is it that people miss that? So there’s something to be said about neglect here and something about also the limits of, of our humanity as finite beings to know everything too.
[00:09:44] But you’re absolutely right, Alisha. I, I think there’s room for growth among academics, and I, I include myself in this, you know, to like, Hey, let’s. Let’s be more charitable. Let’s try to read outside our field. What are other people saying? And let’s cite them in our own papers too, so that when people read our work, they, they don’t miss the other work that’s been there.
[00:10:02] So, you know, you’re on point, Alisha, and then there’s, there’s a lot more that could be said, but the gist of your reaction, I think there’s some truth to it.
[00:10:10] Alisha Searcy: Well, I’m positive that you are one of those researchers that does your homework and doesn’t look for taking the credit, so I don’t think you’re in that group.
[00:10:17] Albert Cheng: Oh, that’s very generous of you.
[00:10:20] Alisha Searcy: Just knowing you Albert, I just don’t believe you would do that. I think you’re very thorough and hardworking.
[00:10:25] Albert Cheng: So Well I try and if I’ve lighted anyone out there, I feel free to write me. I’m sorry. That was fun talking education. Let’s talk World War I. So stick with us.
[00:10:48] Sir Hew Strachan is Professor of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He’s an Emeritus fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Life fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His numerous award-winning books include the First World War Volume one. This and his other books formed the basis for the Definitive 10 part channel four BBC television documentary, sitz on War, a biography, and the Direction of War.
[00:11:17] Sir Hugh was a trustee of the Imperial War Museum from 2010 to 2018 and chaired the Imperial War Museum’s First World War Gallery’s advisory group. In 2016, he won the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement and Military Writing. STR was educated at rugby school and then read history at Corpus Christi College Cambridge.
[00:11:40] He holds an honorary degree from the University of Paisley. Was knighted in the New Year’s Honors list of 2013 for services to the Ministry of Defense and appointed the Lord Lieutenant of Tweeddale by her Majesty, queen Elizabeth ii. Well, professor Hugh Str, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
[00:12:00] Welcome. It’s a pleasure. I regard as one, the, uh, world’s foremost military historians and experts on war. And you wrote an award-winning book, the First War to War quite some time ago. And so here in the States, we are marking Veterans Day to commemorate arm this day. So could you start by giving us a brief overview of World War I specifically?
[00:12:20] Why was it perhaps the most important event of the 20th century?
[00:12:25] Sir Hew Strachan: Well, if you’re thinking it from an American perspective, it marks the moment when the US enters the world stage. It may have second thoughts about that after 1919, but in hindsight, it clearly sets the trend. It’s the first time that the new world comes to the rescue of the old.
[00:12:43] It’ll do it again. Of course. So that’s, I think, a pretty significant moment for the United States. It also marks the end of. Old empires. Woodrow Wilson, when he was president, established the principle that national self-determination should be the basis of the new world order. And that stuck with us in many respects.
[00:13:05] It’s also caused conflicts, but it meant that the empires that were multinational empires collapsed in the wake of that war. And then the third reason is the Russian revolution and the emergence of the Soviet Union. I mean, I think those three things in conjunction really changed the world order and in many respects was still grappling with its consequences.
[00:13:29] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s start at the beginning here, Sophie. Sophie, don’t die. Stay alive for our children. And those were the last words of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his wife as they were both assassinated. June 28th, 1914, in Sarajevo by Gabrielle Princip, a Bosnian Serve.
[00:13:49] Discuss that historical event and then the few of the contributing factors that led to the outbreak of the First World War.
[00:13:55] Sir Hew Strachan: Well, I think what the assassination of the Arch Duke illustrates is that this war did not begin as a World war. It began as a war in the Balkans. It began within the context of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and after the era apparent had been assassinated, it was not unnatural.
[00:14:16] Or indeed unpredictable, that Austria-Hungary would pursue some form of revenge for that. And the reason it has to do so is that Serbia, who is deemed to be behind the assassination, disputed, of course by the Serbs at the time, but Serbia. Was growing fast. It had grown as a result of the first Balkan war.
[00:14:38] It really doubled in size in that time, and it aspired to rule all the Serbs who were within the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well. So there is an immediate external threat, which is also an internal problem for for the Empire because it’s a multinational empire. What Australian Hungary does not want when it uses the assassination as a vehicle for a war with Serbia is a major European war, and it certainly doesn’t want a long wall as it knows it hasn’t got the strength to do that.
[00:15:08] So what happens in July, 1914 is a coincidence, if you like, of local ambitions to solve a local problem. In a limited war, which then drags in other powers and has European and ultimately global consequences because these other, the powers are themselves empires with colonial possessions and empires with global reaches, particularly Britain has.
[00:15:33] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s press into that issue. In July, 1914, Germany’s Kaiser Vim II wrote a memorandum in which he said, England, France and Russia have conspired to wage a war of annihilation against us. End quote, tell us about Kaiser Wilhelm II German militarism, but also to an earlier point, you were alluding to just the key European imperial rivalries that shaped the Great war.
[00:16:01] Sir Hew Strachan: I think it’s important to distinguish between the causes of the war in answering this question and the rivalries that emerged during the war. In many respects, this war happens by accident. At the beginning of January, 1914, Winston Churchill, who was then the minister for the Navy in Britain, said that actually that Europe looks pretty peaceful.
[00:16:23] And in particular, the tension between Britain and Germany seems to be on the decline. Relations are better than they been for some time. The fact that there is a war is in large part a product of the crisis Remaining extraordinarily short, European capitals are not in direct communication with each other, and when ambassadors report from one country to their own countries, that process takes a couple of days.
[00:16:52] Messages have to be encoded, decoded. Uh, it needs to be time for deliberation. And what all that means is in a fast moving crisis with many independent elements, this is not just a bilateral set of relationships, but a multilateral set of relationships. In late in European, late July 19 Walty, what happens is that the crisis gets outta control.
[00:17:16] Nobody is able to fashion it, and those who want to deescalate are always behind the curve. That applies particularly to Sir Edward Gray, the British Foreign Secretary. But the Kaiser two is actually outta the loop because he goes on his holidays on a Baltic cruise in July, 1914, and when he comes back, finds a situation where Germany is confronting the possibility of a two front wall and is quite frankly, app.
[00:17:43] I think what’s central here is to understand that Kaiser is a, it may be a figure of German militarism and certainly becomes that during the war, but he is not a strong, decisive leader. He himself is buffeted by events and he certainly is not the mastermind behind causing this war. For the sake, for example, of German Warings, the way in which he’s portrayed.
[00:18:07] During the war after it, and in the works of a well-known German historian Fritz Fisher in the 1960s, most historians have dispensed with that interpretation and see what’s going on in July, 1914, as a crisis in which Germany certainly plays fast and loose with the possibility of war. But always banking on the possibility that deterrence will work and that what they hope to achieve is the fragmentation of the alliance that has been formed between Britain, France, and Russia, which they hope can be achieved without actual fighting.
[00:18:42] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s get into some of the battles of the war. So the first battle of the mar was the key early battle in German’s military strategy. It was for a two funnel war against France and Russia first by, you know, swiftly defeating France. But then there was, uh, the, the Counteroffensive that the French and the British launched at the Mar.
[00:19:00] Uh, this occurred on September 6th through 12th, 1914, which forced Germans to retreat. Talk about the battle, you know, 500,000 plus casualties. What’s the significance of this battle and what happened?
[00:19:14] Sir Hew Strachan: Well, it is the battle that shapes the western front really for the rest of the war, because the expectation in many people’s minds would be that war of the future.
[00:19:25] Although it would involve mass armies, it would involve armies that possessed, uh, the product to industrialization. They’d have machine guns. Quick firing field artillery. These things would create fast swep zones, which would make it very hard to advance. Although all that had been anticipated, people still hoped that maneuver would be possible.
[00:19:48] And what happened in the first six, six weeks of the war on the Western front and indeed on other fronts, was indeed maneuvered exactly as anticipated on an enormous scale. And the consequence of that was in the relatively primitive state of communications between large units, that they lost control of the forces that they were leading, that the headquarters lost control and that matter, particularly for Germany as it’s on the offensive in August in the west, it also has.
[00:20:22] A force to space ratio. It’s advancing on a front that runs from Belgium to the border with Switzerland. And there is fighting all along that front, but as it advances into France, so it loses strength because it’s having to leave forces behind to occupy the ground that it has gained to guard its lines of communications, and in particular to deal with the Belgian army that’s hold up in Antwerp.
[00:20:47] And all those things mean that by the time they’re confronting the French with the support of the British. On the man on the 6th of September is they no longer have the strength to be able to cover the whole of that front. They create opportunities for the counter attack, and so the whole cycle of, if you like, maneuver, fire, and maneuver continues in a way that actually, of course ultimately becomes atypical of this war.
[00:21:11] Hmm. The time being. What it does is save France and it means that Germany will not achieve a quick victory. That this wall belong, and that too is going to be disastrous for Germany because the coalition that it leads cannot match the resources of the coalition formed initially just by Britain, France, and Russia.
[00:21:31] Albert Cheng: Let’s turn to Verdu and the Psalm. So again, two other key battles. Verdu late February to late December, 1916, and the battle of the Psalm July to late November, 1916. You know, I dunno if listeners picked up on the, the months that I just noted there, lengthy, brutal battles on the Western front with numerous casualties.
[00:21:51] I mean, ver dunes staggering. 700,000 casualties for the French and German forces over a million casualties at the battle of the Psalm. Could you offer some brief touchstones to better understand these two key battles?
[00:22:04] Sir Hew Strachan: I think the very fact you’ve called them battles is itself indicative of what has happened to war.
[00:22:09] Yes, that’s right. The battle Waterloo lasted a day. Yeah, Gettysburg lasted three days. These are battles that last the best part of a year in the case of and half a year. In the case of the song, moreover, this is grand, which will be, has been port over in 1914 and will be fought over again in 1917 and 1980.
[00:22:31] The gains on both sides. Are minimal and the losses, as you say, are enormous. What you would expect is that the effect of these battles would mean that there will be the possibility of negotiation. It’s a bit like looking at Russia and Ukraine today. Limited gains, heavy losses, attritional warfare. Why don’t they negotiate?
[00:22:55] But the core problem here is that those losses are so great. That they cannot have been in vain at this stage. There is still plenty to fight for in this war and the moral imperative to continue fighting. Is underwritten by the scale of loss, and that applies to both sides. On the Anton side, on the Sydor, the British, French, and Russians, there is a sense that they can’t negotiate because Germany still stands on the territory of most of Belgium and a large chunk of France, and also controls much of the Vulcans and of Russia.
[00:23:33] In other words, the negotiating position that they would have will be extraordinarily weak. And from the German point of view, there are things that Germany wants that neither France nor Britain in particular prepared to give up. That is to say Germany expects to be able to hang on to Celest rain, which originally acquired from France in 1871.
[00:23:55] For France, that’s now become totally unacceptable if they’ve gone to war for anything. Just from the recovery of that and for Britain, Germany expects to hold on to Belgium. But for Britain, a neutral Belgium is central in order to de neutralize German influence in the channel and in the North Sea, which is the crucial waterway between Britain and its wider empire.
[00:24:20] Alisha Searcy: Very interesting Professor. We’re talking about Germany. I wanna move to April of 1917 where Germany facilitated the return of the Communist revolutionary VI Lenin to Russia from his exile in Switzerland. And Germany’s goal was to use Lenin and the Bolshevik party to destabilize Russia and force it to withdraw from the war, which would allow Germany to concentrate its forces on the Western front.
[00:24:46] So can you talk more about Lenin and the Russian revolution’s impact on the first World War?
[00:24:52] Sir Hew Strachan: Yeah, certainly. And I think one of the. Immediate points that comes out from smuggling Lenin back into to Russia. He was in Switzerland when this happened, and he traveled in a so-called seal train through German territory to get him back to Petrograd, to St.
[00:25:09] Petersburg as it is now, and then in grad, of course, as it became under the Soviet Union. And what is extraordinary about this is here is an autocracy, a monarchy. With limited forms of democracy, with more democracy admittedly than Russia had in 1917, playing with Revolution and with communism and other forms of socialism in order to undermine an opponent without any moment of self-reflection, without, you know, appreciating that the dangers from this could hit Germany too, and could hit all other absolute powers.
[00:25:45] It’s not just Russia that’s vulnerable to the threshold, a revolution. And in a way, what Germany has done is stepped over a line which had kept order in Europe throughout most of the 19th century. After the French Revolution, the great powers when they met in Vienna in 1815, at the end of the Poon war, concluded the reason they’d faced 20 years of war was because of the French Revolution.
[00:26:10] Revolution had set war going within Europe. And therefore it was central in their thinking that war and revolution remain separate. What is striking in the first World War is first of all, that revolutionaries see that war could further the aims of revolution might well undermine autocratic and, and even liberal governments to the advantage of socialism and communism, but also saw.
[00:26:38] That this was a way of prosecuting the war, which could attract autocratic powers and therefore in due course undermine them as well. And the autocratic powers and the liberal powers are ready to do that just because they feel so threatened by the war itself. It becomes more important to fight this war than to ward off the danger of revolution.
[00:27:03] The Czar’s advisors, or the most conservative of them, certainly before 1914 had said, don’t enter this war because if you do, you’ll have revolution as Russia experienced in 1905. A country like Britain is prepared to use Revolution two. What is T Lawrence doing in the Ottoman Empire? He’s promoting an Arab Revolution promoting dissolution from within for the Ottoman Empire.
[00:27:28] So this is a, a war in which we call it revolution. But of course, what is happening is a mixture, both of international war and civil war with the revolutionaries within empires becoming proxies all. The enemy, belligerent powers. There’s something quite modern about all that, and the way in which we handle conflict, that fusion of civil war and international war.
[00:27:53] Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. So here’s something else that I found interesting. The Zimmerman Telegram, and this was something that in 1917, a secret message from Germany to Mexico. Proposing a military alliance against the United States during World War I Germany offered to help Mexico reclaim lost territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
[00:28:17] If Mexico would join the war, the plans of which British intelligence intercepted and decoded in this German telegram. So would you tell us about the Zimmerman Telegram and how this event significantly contributed to the US entry into the war?
[00:28:33] Sir Hew Strachan: Well, I think there were two aspects in answering that question.
[00:28:36] One is the British capacity to read signals intelligence, which it’d been doing since 1914. By the end of 1914, it had captured three German Codebooks. So we know the ultra story in the Second World War, but there is an equivalent First World War story. And it’s thanks to that decoding that Britain intercepts the Zimmerman Telegram, this proposal to support revolution, which would lead to the invasion of the United States from Mexico.
[00:29:05] And of course for Britain, this is a tremendous coup because the United States is not yet in the war. Britain and its allies are massively in debt to the United States are enormously dependent on the possibilities of munitions production coming from the United States for which they’re having to pay.
[00:29:23] And by the end of 1916, early 1917, because of what we’ve just been discussing, that is a say done on the som are feeling that they’re on the ropes. So to get the US in the war would be an enormous coup. From Woodrow Wilson’s point of view and from the United States’s point of view, Wilson has just been reelected as president.
[00:29:45] He has won on the banner headline, which said he was the president who kept the US outta the war. He himself didn’t make a virtue of that, but his supporters did. But once he becomes president, he realizes that if he is really committed to creating a new world order, which will. Ensure stability as he would see it, then the US will not be able to do that from the sidelines.
[00:30:10] He’s repeatedly offered to try to broker a piece He did so at the very beginning of the war in 1914, he did so again in 1915 and most conspicuously he did at the, so at the end of 1916, after the battles of Fed done and the Psalm and got nowhere. If he wants to shape and if the US wants to shape the new world order.
[00:30:32] It has to be a belligerent because only if it’s in the war will it be able to have a key role at the negotiations that follow the end of the war. So the Ziland Telegram works. In terms of justifying the US century to the war, we often talk about what’s happened at sea, that the Germans are waging, unrestricted UBO warfare, which has the effect of sinking American shipping and killing American civilians.
[00:30:58] The Germans have tried to be wary about that. Wilson hasn’t rise, risen actually to that. Bait ships have been sunk, but it hasn’t led the US into the war. Here is a direct threat. To the territory of the United States. That’s what Ziland Telegram carries, and that really brings the possibility of the war home.
[00:31:17] It’s not just going to remain confined to Europe and the other Sydor the Atlantic. So the Zimmerman Telegram is the final step. That can be used to bring the United States into the war and, and when Wilson goes to Congress and declares what his policy will be, that immediately commands approval in a way that probably three or four months before he would struggle to have achieved.
[00:31:43] Alisha Searcy: So I wanna talk about US Army General John Blackjack Pershing, who served as a commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, also known as the A EF during World War I from 1917 to 1920. Can you sketch for us Pershing’s military background and what’s considered the controversial insistence on maintaining the A EF as a separate independent fighting force, and then America’s larger role in the allied victory?
[00:32:13] Sir Hew Strachan: Perchings military background like that of most US Army officers before 1917 was, his experience was pretty limited. He’d just been commanding the expedition against Pancho Villa in in, in Mexico. This was conflict on a very different scale from what was happening on the battlefields of Europe. And indeed, that reflected the state of the US Army.
[00:32:36] It was not an army designed either for expeditionary war at scale, that is to say on the other Sydor the Atlantic, or indeed necessarily prepared for the level of mobilization to create an army big enough to match European army. It’s removal by this stage. Britain has, in 1917, about 5 million men under arms having gone from being quite a small army, but it’s taken two years to get there, and nobody really expects the US army to be able to be an influential player in this war till 1919.
[00:33:13] The Germans, in fact, are gambling on that because they just think it’ll take them too long to get a, a respectable army into the field. And to some extent, although the US DEF defines that expectation, it’s important to remember that what the US contributes immediately in 1917 is first of all, economic relief.
[00:33:33] That is to say the fact that the US is in the war. In the war eases ante worries about their doubt, eases the question as to whether the US will continue supply munitions to the ENT for which they’re about to reach full production. And secondly, the. The most immediate military support is not that of the army, but that of the navy, which is ready to sail almost immediately, and that eases the pressure created by submarines, by German Berts, and the Atlantic convoys in has been introduced and the US squadrons, which arrive in British waters the following month are able to contribute immediately to the Naval war in the Atlantic.
[00:34:14] As far as the a EF is concerned, the American expeditionary force is concerned. Perching has to stick to the notion that it should be an independent army, not just because he felt that, but because politically, the US Army needs to be an independent actor in order to ensure what Wilson is in this war fall, which is to be able to be an independent voice and a dominant voice.
[00:34:36] When it comes to the peace negotiations politically, the American Army has to fight independently. The trouble is in 1917 and even more in early 1918, early 1918, remember the Russian revolution has happened. The Germans are now able to focus on the Western front, and they launched five successive offensives on the Western front between March and July, 1918 Offensives, which gain considerable amount of territory, which ultimately deplete the German army to the point where it cannot continue fighting after the end of 1918.
[00:35:11] Mm. And with that happening, what the French and the British are hoping for is for American troops to be fed into their in armies as they arrive, which given the shipping problem and the problems of mobilization reflects the reality. They’re not all going to arrive at once. They’re going to arrive in bits and pieces.
[00:35:33] It’ll take time to build this army up. By the end of the war, by November, 1918, the US Army will be the largest army on the Western front. And what the allies are expecting is when that has happened, they’ll be able to win the war in 1919, or possibly at the latest 1920. They’re certainly not expecting victory in 1918.
[00:35:55] The independence of the US Army, the independence, the F, the fact that Pershing is commanding his own army. Means that what the allies have to do, and it’s reflected across the piece, not just in terms of Army organization, is they have, as they haven’t done before, to coordinate their commands so that they have sovereign commands.
[00:36:18] So yes, Persian commands, the Americans, hey commands, the British Philipp Bean will command the French and they need a Supreme Commander for all three. Independent national armies on the Western front and Fosh Frenchman is appointed to the Supreme Commander. And that pattern of ensuring coordination through a Supreme Commander or an allied organization is the way in which American sovereignty within the conduct of the war is accommodated, and in many respects, therefore, the US pressure.
[00:36:56] The determination to keep an independent army becomes an enormous asset for the overall coordination of the Allied War effort in 1918 itself.
[00:37:07] Alisha Searcy: Wow, that’s helpful. Professor. I wanna talk about weapons for a moment. World War i’s development of new weapons in the mass production of machine guns, tanks, poison, gas, aircraft, submarines, mobile X-ray units among other innovations made it.
[00:37:25] The first truly modern war. So can you talk about the first World War in terms of mechanized weapons and manufacturing and the financial considerations that shaped the final outcome of the war and the peace?
[00:37:41] Sir Hew Strachan: Many people expected the financial considerations to cause an early collapse of the war. The inability to continue to fund the war would stop it before anything else.
[00:37:51] The reality was that states fought this money through debt and they paid for it after the war was over. What is striking is that these are industrialized powers going to war. These are societies that have got railways, that have got mass production, that have harnessed the strength of coal, iron, and steel to be able to produce sophisticated weapons and to have the machine tools to produce them to identical specifications.
[00:38:21] So these are weapons, easy to repair of. Parts are broken, you can repair them. They are precision weapons. They can be mass produced. Armies before the late 19th century might have been able to generate mass by calling people up and conscripting them. But what they could not do was generate mass numbers of weapons for them to use because production was essentially done by skilled labor by artisans and was not the product of factory production.
[00:38:55] In the First World War. Factory production is what’s dominant. And the big shift is the adaptation of industries that are producing peacetime goods before 1914 into the production of what is needed for war the winter of 19 14 15. All the armies engaged in the war suffer a shell shortage. I’ve already referred to Russia and Ukraine, but it’s not unlike the experience of that first winter of 20 22, 23 after the major Russian invasion of Ukraine, when both sides were running outta shells and certainly Ukraine was running outta shells.
[00:39:35] Exactly. That happens in the winter of 19 14, 15. But what then happens is a massive conversion of industry from other forms of production to shell production. So in France, Citron and rno, for example, the car manufacturers are making shells. And that is a pattern which is repeated across other countries in Britain and in Germany, to extraordinary effect.
[00:40:03] Germany’s problem is that because of the economic war, waged by the coalition of Britain, France of Germany, and then with real devastation by the US as well when it enters the war. In April, 1917, Germany just does not have access to the raw materials, which were available outside the boundaries of the central powers of the alliance that it’s leading.
[00:40:26] And so by the end of the war, it is running out of things like rubber. Oil, high quality materials for reduction of ammunitions copper, for example, manganese. These things, it’s struggling to get hold of, and as a result, the war effort for Germany is hamstrung. Whereas for the Allies, war production is getting stronger and stronger at weak and weak month by month.
[00:40:54] Alisha Searcy: So here’s my final question. I’m gonna ask you to do a reading, but the First World War broke the empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, and it triggered the Russian revolution and provided the bedrock for the Soviet Union. It also forced a reluctant United States onto the world stage and revivified liberalism.
[00:41:15] You’ve written and you continue to say outside Europe, it laid the seeds for the conflict in the Middle East. In short, it’s shaped not just Europe, but the world in the 20th century end quote. So as we commemorate Armistice Day, would you briefly summarize, world War i’s Lasting legacy as well as what teachers, students, and the general public should remember most about this world changing event in human history.
[00:41:43] Sir Hew Strachan: It’s a war with which we still live the conflict in Gaza right now. People will refer back to the Bafa declaration of 1917, the moment when the then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Offa said that there’d be what we would now call a two state solution in Palestine. There should be territory for Jews and territory of war.
[00:42:02] The existing Palestine population, that’s still not being resolved. It’s something which Alpha Declaration was issued under the pressure of war itself, because there was a fear within Britain that Jews would support Germany if Germany advocated Zionism, and therefore Britain needed to be able to trump that.
[00:42:24] In other words, what is happening here is a sequence of short term crashes. Have long-term effects. Similarly, when Woodrow Wilson, the US President says, we need to allow for national self-determination. Uh, in other words, states would be formed that would be ethnically homogenous, perhaps even religiously similar, and that would reduce a degree of stability in the world.
[00:42:51] It didn’t actually produce that stability because no territory or very few territories were actually held by ethnically United peoples. There were always minorities there. It generated conflict. So what seemed to be a good idea at the time, the long reach of history has looked counterproductive. So this war, in some ways, spawns war.
[00:43:14] The claim is that it was the war to end all wars, the ambition of socialists in 1914, and the ambition which Wilson also cleaves to in 19 17, 18. And what Wilson is doing here is making sure that from his point of view, the world order would be small L capital liberal, rather than a communist or socialist world order.
[00:43:37] By 19 17 18, what the United States and the Allies are doing is not just fighting Germany and its allies, but becoming more and more aware of the threat of altruism and what that will mean for how they see their domestic structures and how they’re governed. And so to that extent, this is a war that sets the stage for the Cold War, which will follow the Second World War.
[00:44:03] None of that is evident in prospect. It just becomes clearer in hindsight.
[00:44:08] Alisha Searcy: Thank you for that. Well, professor, as we close, we would love to hear you read a passage maybe from one of your books or something else that’s important to you in this moment.
[00:44:20] Sir Hew Strachan: I am reluctant to read anything from my own books, partly because my one volume history of the First World War was written over 20 years ago, and some of my views have changed, but I have an essay that’s coming out this month, and if you’d like me to read something mine, I thought I might just read a paragraph from that.
[00:44:40] And it covers a theme that we’ve just been talking about. What I written is this, in the First World War, the pursuit of battle did not produce the sort of decisive victory that could independently shape a strategic outcome. By 1916, Fred, Dan, and the Psalm. Although both can’t be called battles made clear that the concept no longer conform with the patterns and expectations set at Roach and Ton.
[00:45:08] Those were battles fought by P the Great in the seven Years War, or even at Alet and Waterloo. The battles of Napoleon, the typical pre-industrial battle, have been fought on a single day and formed the centerpiece of a campaign or even of an entire war. The victors. Frederick the great Napoleon or Wellington were venerated as great commanders.
[00:45:33] By contrast, fighting in the first World War was protracted and took place currently over the same ground, especially on the western front. Bean was fought over in 1914, as well as in 1916 when the battle lasted 10 months, and the Psalm in 19 14, 19 16. The battle in this case lasted only five months. And 1918, these so-called battles were campaigns in themselves.
[00:46:01] Their heroes were no longer generals, but common soldiers. They had no results that were so self-evident as to be unequivocal or uncontroversial. Instead, they ended in indecision, exhaustion, and worsening weather Battle itself became the wearing out process. Thank
[00:46:22] Alisha Searcy: you so much for joining
[00:46:24] Sir Hew Strachan: us. It’s been a pleasure.
[00:46:25] Thank you very much for listening to me.
[00:46:28] Alisha Searcy: Of course. Your brilliance is captivating. We appreciate the time today.
[00:46:44] Albert Cheng: Well, Alisha, what a way to commemorate Veterans’ Day Arm this day. This is great history, so I really appreciate that interview. It is, and you know, as they
[00:46:52] Alisha Searcy: say, history is the best teacher. Yeah. You don’t always think about, well, I mean, you think about the leaders, the leadership, all of the experiences that we just talked about.
[00:47:02] You think about that in today’s time. Right. And so a very powerful interview. We thank him for being with us.
[00:47:09] Albert Cheng: I’d also like to leave you with the tweet of the week. This one comes from Education. Next. In case you missed it, international students need not apply. Amid shifting attitudes on immigration worldwide, major English speaking countries are erecting policy barriers to students from abroad.
[00:47:27] And Wow, Alisha, I don’t know. I mean I took a gander at this article and again, I don’t know about you, but we tend to focus, I know I do focus a a lot on US policy, but this was an insightful article to take a peek at what other countries are doing as well. So I wanna recommend this article for others to read as well.
[00:47:44] Definitely. Alright, well thank you Alisha for co-hosting as usual. Well, thanks for, you know, joining me as well. Great to be here. Yeah, that’s right. And next week join us for another episode. We’re gonna have Mike Miles, the superintendent of Houston Independent school districts to talk about all the things that he’s done there, in case you haven’t heard.
[00:48:05] So be sure to tune in until then. Be well. Have a great week. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneer Institute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.
