words in scarlet ink

In my bold and daring effort to continue educating myself on World War I (a huge gaping hole in my education that I complain about rather frequently) I listened Barbara W. Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Guns of August, which is a book about the first month of the war.

The first chapter brings together nine world rulers at Edward VII’s funeral (King of the United Kingdom) and discusses political alliances and diplomacy of the time. Chapters two through five detail military planning and strategy of the great powers prior to the war, and chapter six through the end of the book detail the first month of the conflict, separated into the geographical Eastern and Western fronts. There are a couple of chapters devoted to the war at sea, and each world leader of the time is introduced to the reader with their personalities and strengths and weaknesses discussed.

Tuchman touches on the recurring misconceptions and mistakes made during the initial stages of the war that had catastrophic consequences for Europe, including the idea that the war would be over quickly (based on certain views of military/civilian leaders that just turned out to be inaccurate, like morale would buoy an endless offensive).

The Guns of August is/was a highly influential book when it came out – supposedly President Kennedy was highly affected by the book and insisted his cabinet read it, and it affected his thinking during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s still frequently discussed although it’s fallen out of favor in more academic circles – I’ve read several (very long) threads on reddit about how it’s inaccurate and not a good history book (the argument being her thesis of how WWI began is no longer accepted by modern historians), with one of the arguments for it being that it’s a very good historical take on how we used to look at WWI. (The thing is, I never looked at WWI, so I have no idea).

Whether it’s a great history book or not, I enjoyed The Guns of August. I like Tuchman’s narrative style and I think a strength of the book is that it tells events in a timeline that makes it accessible to a more casual reader (like myself). I’m not a historian or a student looking to seriously study WWI, I’m more of someone looking for the outline of general picture of what happened and why on a more superficial level than a historian’s level. This book does that well and it supplements my other reading. I also like the title, but I suppose that’s not really a reason to recommend a book.