Yost in KC
By Mitch Berg
Mark Yost in Kansas City writing on the new WWI Museum in the WSJ.
Indeed, it’s often facts and figures that overwhelm visitors. Here, the curators have chosen only the most pertinent–and illuminating–figures and presented them in a way that’s easy to understand. For instance, a giant chart lists the number of troops from each country and the number of casualties they suffered. Of the 8.4 million Frenchmen who went to war, 4.5 million were either killed or wounded. As a result, 1 out of 3 Frenchmen age 18 to 30 died by 1917.
By comparison, Britain lost only 2.3 million of its 10.5 million troops, but suffered its greatest single day of combat ever on the Somme in July 1916. After shelling German trenches for days, the British expected to stroll across No Man’s Land unopposed. What they didn’t know was that the Germans had steel and concrete reinforced bunkers–stollen–that protected them from even the most devastating British shells. When the shelling stopped, the Germans emerged from their bunkers unharmed and proceeded to mow down 58,000 British troops.
But most of all, the museum does something very important, notes Mark; it puts the US involvement in proper context:
America sent over about two million men and women, some 365,000 of whom were wounded and 50,000 killed. These numbers pale in comparison to the millions of British, French and German casualties. Indeed, the exhibit makes clear that it was our industrial more than our military might that determined the outcome of the war. More important, our entry had the greatest consequences after the war, marking a significant turn for the U.S. from isolationist to global player. President Woodrow Wilson proposed his 14-point plan and the League of Nations, the beginnings of an internationalism that still defines our foreign policy…A map showing 20,000 miles of new borders that were drawn as a result of the war features Palestine, which the British were pushing as a Jewish homeland, and a place called Iraq.
But perhaps the most telling–and lasting–quote comes from humorist Will Rogers: “You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you in a new way.”
Worth a read.
November 30th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Four great non-fiction books about WWI: _Goodbye to All That_ (Robt. Graves), _Storm of Steel_ (Ernst Junger),_The Story of World War I_ (Robert Leckie), and _The great Adventure_ (Pierce Fredericks).
The first two are memoirs of trench officers, one English, one German, with very different attitudes towards the war. _The Story of World War I_ is an example of a vanished genre; big picture books about war written for juvenile boys and intended to be stocked on the shelves of school libraries. Despite being written for a young audience (and being too focused on the American contribution) it gives a a good general outline of the theaters of the Great War, who was fighting who, and what their motivations were. It also has marvelous pictures that I’ve never seen reproduced anywhere else. The last book, _The Great Adventure_, is a short paperback that describes only the American involvement in WWI, with an emphasis on political changes within the United States 1914-1918. The core of our currently over centralized government (in my opinion) lies in the command and control economy Wilson master minded to meet the needs of Pershing’s expeditionary force in France.
The last two books are out of print and hard to find. Graves’ and Junge’s books are still readily available.