WWI CRASH COURSE How WWI Started https www

WWI

CRASH COURSE! How WWI Started https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Cd 2 ch 4 XV 84 s Who Started WWI https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=_p. FCp. Ktw. Ck. I Archdukes, Cynicism, and WWI https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=_XPZQ 0 LAl. R 4

QUESTION

QUESTION How many of you have ever started an essay, and after hours of working on it –– realized it wasn’t coming together?

QUESTION… How many of you –– instead of changing course or starting over from scratch –– kept trying to make the essay work?

So… Why do we do that?

THESIS STATEMENT “Every paper you write should have a main point, a main idea, or central message. The argument(s) you make in your paper should reflect this main idea. The sentence that captures your position on this main idea is what we call a thesis statement. ” (http: //www. cws. illinois. edu)

QUESTION PT II What might be the consequences of a general refusing to change a failing strategy?

THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN

THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN The Great War https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=l. He. MPV 5 VDR 4

WHY THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN FAILED

1. Replacement troops did not have good equipment

2. Replacement troops were not well trained

3. The Belgians and French destroyed train tracks as they retreated. Those tracks had to be laid again. • Railway issues produced huge supply issues

4. Any mistakes or delays would cause the plan to crumble

5. The plan ignored Russian modernization

6. The whole Schlieffen Plan was inflexible

7. There was no alternative plan

8. This lack of alternatives doomed the Schlieffen Plan from the start

VOCABULARY: WAR OF ATTRITION “A prolonged period of conflict during which each side seeks to gradually wear down the other by a series of small-scale actions. ” (Oxforddictionaries. com)

WWI BACKGROUND “One constant among the elements of 1914––as of any era––was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true. ” Tuchman, 35

WWI BACKGROUND “…Every precaution had been taken except one –– flexibility. ” Tuchman, 40

FLEXIBILITY

CHARACTER

CHARACTER 1. the way someone thinks, feels, and behaves : someone's personality 2. a set of qualities that are shared by many people in a group, country, etc. (Merriamwebster. com)

FATE

FATE 1. a power beyond one's control that is believed to decide what happens 2. a final result (Merriamwebster. com)

QUESTION The historian Barbara Tuchman wrote: “Character is fate. ” What do you think she meant by this?

TUCHMAN “Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of selfdestruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour.

TUCHMAN “The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche …”

TUCHMAN “…who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest. ”

“What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute. ” ― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August

THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE – 2: 50 https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Spq. Vbl. MPRB 4

WORKS CITED Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. The Guns of August. Penguin Books, 2014.