Review: Not Particularly Robust
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 28, 2013
I will give Paul Ham credit for a reasonable synopsis of Europe on "The Eve of War", however in the 80 odd pages of his thesis I find no new news... Paul attempts to suggest that many historians and political scientists have failed to construct what he has done.  This is simply not the case.  I merely need reflect back on my 10th Grade history class in a public high school as proof.  That war was essentially inevitable in 1914 is not as significant a point as KNOWING as they did that it was coming why didn't the royal families of Europe do more to stop it?  That a pathetic Serbian nationalist's actions could thrust nations so blindly into a cataclysm that ultimately led to the deaths of nearly a 100 million people (one should add those who died from the 1919 influenza epidemic and the Bolshevik takeover of Russia to Paul's estimate of 36 million direct deaths) and the collapse of a social order that was doing a great deal more than Ham gives credit for trying to change to accommodate societal needs such as healthcare, better housing, better wages, suffrage and so forth.  These leaders authorized the budgets that created the artillery, ships and millions of pieces of other equipment that fueled the war.  They were not as blind as Paul suggests to the lethality of the instruments they had created, otherwise why would they have created them?  So, while Ham writes a good thesis, he doesn't really add anything to this real question.  World War 1 should and could have been avoided whereas World War 2 was truly inevitable because of the leaderships of all the major European and Asian players that were created largely as a result of the last war's unfinished business.