THE TRAGEDY BEGINS: 2/8: Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Western-Front-History-Great-1914-1918/dp/B09NS2DT8X
In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, the acclaimed military historian Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. Drawing on French, British, German, and American sources, Lloyd weaves a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the Marne, Passchendaele, the Meuse-Argonne, and other critical battles, which reverberated across Europe and the wider war. From the trenches, where men as young as 17 suffered and died, to the headquarters behind the lines where Generals Haig, Joffre, Hindenburg, and Pershing developed their plans for battle, Lloyd gives us a view of the war both intimate and strategic, putting us amid the mud and smoke while at the same time depicting the larger stakes of every encounter. He shows us a dejected Kaiser Wilhelm II―soon to be eclipsed in power by his own generals―lamenting the botched Schlieffen Plan; French soldiers piling atop one another in the trenches of Verdun; British infantryman wandering through the frozen wilderness in the days after the Battle of the Somme; and General Erich Ludendorff pursuing a ruthless policy of total war, leading an eleventh-hour attack on Reims even as his men succumbed to the Spanish Flu.
1914
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the |
| 0:03.0 | the CBS In The World. I'm John Bachelor speaking to Professor Nick Lloyd, a reader in |
| 0:08.0 | military and imperial history at King's College London. His new book is The |
| 0:11.9 | Western Front. The History of the Great War, |
| 0:14.7 | volume one. We attend immediately to the larger than legend personalities of |
| 0:20.9 | the Four Powers, Germany, France, Britain and America as the final power. |
| 0:30.9 | We begin with Germany because a man named Molke, a man who is the relative of an earlier commander of German forces, is in charge of the Schleifen Plan in August of 1914 in conversation with the Kaiser. |
| 0:48.4 | And I learned from you, Nick, that the Kaiser favored Molteke, but Molkka was a man who was dealing with the |
| 0:56.8 | the ghosts of his ancestor and also of Schleifen. What do we need to know about |
| 1:02.2 | Molkka that he took it upon himself to alter the Schlefin |
| 1:06.4 | plan in the attack on Paris? |
| 1:10.9 | Yes, you've got the pressure on someone like Helmer von Mulker, the younger, |
| 1:15.3 | that's his title, is a full name, is enormous in 1914, and he's not up for it. |
| 1:20.5 | He's a man that is, as you say, bowed down by the weight of victory that his uncle achieved in 1870 and 71 in the Franco-Prussian War. And he is, you know, he is concerned about the plan, plan the Schlefin plan envisages a massive |
| 1:37.3 | attack through Belgium and the low countries that will essentially outflank the |
| 1:41.8 | French frontier the frontier fortresses the French |
| 1:44.9 | have built, get the French army into the open and destroy it in a grand battle of |
| 1:49.7 | development. It's one of the most ambitious military plans you'll ever likely to see. |
| 1:55.0 | But Malta, you know, he doesn't, he feels very vulnerable and he feels quite insecure about having to do it and ultimately doesn't have the nerve to actually put it into play in the way that Schlefin envisaged with that right wing that sort of swinging door would be as strong as possible. So Moltke begins to alter that, alter the balance of |
| 2:15.2 | forces so he puts a little bit more force in the south on his left so that it's not going to be as powerful. |
| 2:21.1 | And ultimately he is already having doubts about whether this can be done, whether |
| 2:26.0 | he can do it, what this is going to envisage. And so, you know, by mid-September he's essentially |
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