Professors Anthony & Jean McGinnis
Interview Transcript
History professors, University of Colorado
Personal Interview
History professors, University of Colorado
Personal Interview
Please outline each country’s agenda, especially the British “Balance of Power” policy.
Mrs. McGinnis - The balance of power was something that the British had developed during the 18th century, when they had allied themselves with Prussia, and then at the end of the century decided to ally themselves with the French; and their idea was that from that point on they would ally themselves with the second most powerful country in Europe, rather than [with] the most important. And that was a way to control the behavior in England, and in Europe, actually.
Mr. McGinnis – The French were primarily bent on revenge. Whatever happened, any kind of conflict, they wanted revenge on Germany because of the Franco-Prussian War, in which they were humiliated.
Mrs. McGinnis – That’s one of the immediate reasons, but also, when you think about what the French had been doing for the last century and a half, they had been attempting to expand to the north into the low countries and what (at one time) was called the Holy Roman Empire. They had been pushed back in every single instance. So for them to be pushed back again and humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War was altogether too much.
Mr. McGinnis – Germany wanted to make sure that everybody knew it was a Great Power, and Germany was always looking to expand eastward into Poland and that area; that was their purpose.
Mrs. McGinnis – And there was no western expansion there [for Germany], it was only eastern expansion, but on the other side of Austria and Poland are the Russians, and the Russians were just as keen to expand to the west. So there was a huge tension there as well.
Mr. McGinnis – Germany was potentially a great threat to Russia.
Mrs. McGinnis – Austria-Hungary was an empire in huge trouble, simply because of the diverse religious and/or ethnic groups that they had been busy trying to hold together. The Austrians had been forced to make concessions to the Hungarians, so it became the Dual Monarchy because of the ethnic difficulties there. They had also taken over Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were Slavic peoples that the Russians felt uniformly should be under the Russian umbrella (Mother Russia and Pan-Slavism).
Mr. McGinnis – And Russia, of course, was bent on defending the Slavic people against Austria; and like Germany, Russia was zealous to make sure everybody knew that it was a Great Power.
Mrs. McGinnis – And the Russians also had an agenda, which is what the Crimean War had been about; they were very definitely trying to extend themselves down through the Dardanelles to get into the Mediterranean, and actually to put pressure on both the British and the French in regard to the Suez Canal (which, in fact, was the direct route to the “jewel in the Crown,” India).
Did Russia have motives for mobilization besides protecting Serbia?
Mrs. McGinnis – I think that it was the expansion into the Mediterranean, and also applying pressure on the Suez Canal. And they wanted to get down to Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula. They were not totally pure about why they wanted to come down. The idea of Pan-Slavism was a way for them to sugar-coat what they definitely had in mind.
Mr. McGinnis – Of course, Austria was Germany’s ally, so going along with that is Russia’s fear of German expansion into Poland. But Russia and Austria were similar in that they were both declining powers. Even though they insisted they were Great Powers, they weren’t anymore. They were not industrializing like Germany, France and England were; they were not as wealthy; they were not as advanced; they were definitely declining, and there was a certain amount of resentment about anything that would show them not to be Great Powers like everybody else.
Mrs. McGinnis – They were losing economically. They had had a chance, Russia particularly, to expand technologically. And, in fact, they did not do it. They missed their chance. And they missed their chance for about twenty-five years, and then all of a sudden they really woke up, and it wasn’t what it ought to have been. They couldn’t even transport troops [because of narrow-gauge railways].
Mr. McGinnis – The example of what Russia was like was the Russo-Japanese War in the early part of the century. They didn’t have to do this at all, but they went to a huge expense of sending navies over to fight the Japanese, and they were absolutely humiliated. There was no reason for them to do it, but it was a matter of pride.
Mrs. McGinnis – Well, [the Japanese] sank the admiral’s vessel and the admiral went down. It was terrible. And nobody had ever heard of the Japanese. Who were these upstarts? And they completely [defeated] the Russians. The Russians were humiliated in that war, the Austrians had been humiliated by the war just immediately previous to the Franco-Prussian War (the Germans had come into Austria-Hungary), and then the French had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War. There were a lot of hard lessons that were being inflicted upon people who thought they were major players in Europe.
For how much of the escalation of war can leaders be held responsible?
Mr. McGinnis – In the case of Russia and Austria, they were major causes. Both the Emperor of Austria-Hungary and Tsar Nicholas II, with their advisors, helped to force ultimatums, to make sure that their countries’ reputations were established. Kaiser Wilhelm was always ready to go to war, too.
Mrs. McGinnis – But his advisors weren’t ready for him to do that. It really wasn’t Germany’s war, and that brings in the whole concept of entangling alliances – secret alliances which had not been published in a widespread fashion, which, after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, drew everybody in. You know why the Austrians were behaving the way they were when they declared war on Serbia. And they were also trying to muscle the Serbians, and they thought it was their chance; they didn’t realize the implications [of their decisions]. . . . Now the Russians did have a chance [to back out] – and you are familiar with Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August – when the German ambassador wept and begged the Russians not to honor their treaty [with the French]. And from then on, everybody was drawn in. And finally the British were drawn in, and the British were drawn in because of [Germany’s violation of the] neutrality of Belgium, which had been created in . . . [1839], and the British had signed a treaty saying that they would guard [Belgium’s] neutrality in perpetuity. So everybody was caught up in the war.
Mr. McGinnis – The alliances forced them to do it, of course it was [a matter of] honor to follow the alliance. Like Jean is saying, there were advisors debating both sides of these issues; some people were ready to jump into the war, and some people said, “Hold back,” but certainly the leaders were helpful because they were, in most cases, ready to go to war.
Mrs. McGinnis – And then there was a problem of blood relationships between the King of England, Edward VII, the Tsar of Russia, and the Kaiser. And because [members of] these royal families had all married daughters of Queen Victoria or Victoria’s son, Edward VII, there was a very interesting dynamic that was going on: the Kaiser firmly believed that his uncle, Edward VII, was deliberately attempting to encircle Germany. Edward would visit these German spas, and he did a great deal of diplomacy that was carried on at a social level. The Kaiser even referred to his uncle as “the great Satan,” and resented him terribly; so the Kaiser developed an interesting relationship with the Tsar, and you read the so-called “Willy and Nicky” correspondence, where the Kaiser is actually trying to lure the Tsar away from his close connection with Edward. So there were many, many things going on at the same time.
How important was honor?
Mr. McGinnis – The sense of honor among the upper classes in all of these countries was that they stayed by their word. It was the way you behaved, you never changed the way you behaved, and you always had this feeling of honor. Your appearance was everything. I think that the leaders of the time felt this way; and if it was going to be a war, then it was going to be a war. And they were just going to carry on the way they always had, stay by their word, and more than that, they were really unaware of how the world had changed. Not all of them were unaware, but many of them were – certainly the Tsar and the Kaiser. They were living in a world that had been around for more than a hundred years, in which they made the decisions, and nobody else did. Their advisors were there, but it didn’t matter, it was about their honor, and that kind of attitude was something that made backing down, changing their ideas or changing their word, very difficult.
Mrs. McGinnis – There is another way to explain as well. First of all, from medieval times, it was, in fact, the ruling classes that had supplied the armies. . . . The ruling classes maintained control of the army. They were the men that ran the army; and the officer corps in every one of these countries was composed of men from the aristocracy. They all had a code of behavior that they understood very clearly, and which was something that, depending on what country you were in Europe, had been in operation for 700 or 800 years. That’s an amazing tradition when you think about it. America has been a country for a little over 200 years, and [this tradition’s era] ends up being three times or four times [the length of time that America has existed]. And that attitude didn’t really diminish in Europe until after the Russian Revolution. . . . The awareness that something wasn’t working came after World War I, when everybody got home, and people woke up in the 1920s to this feeling that the guts of their society were gone. Not only had their young men died, 10% of the total population in England died in the Great War, and every one of the young men who had taken firsts and seconds in the various colleges, at Cambridge and Oxford, had died – the best and the brightest. There are some people who feel that even the leadership had been destroyed in the trenches in World War I. Then there was an international depression, and everything literally fell apart. And then look how many empires were left. Well, who was left? The Russian Empire was gone; the Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone; England was not in great shape; and look what had happened to Germany! Now, Germany came back again, but the mode Hitler used to establish himself after the War was that the Germans had been sold out. It was huge, it was cataclysmic.
Was the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum aimed at Russia as well as Serbia?
Mrs. McGinnis – I think it had to be; they weren’t just thinking about the Serbians. They were also attempting to put the Russians in their place, because, obviously, the Austro-Hungarians thought, “This is our territory, we will handle it as we care to, and the Russians [have] no say in it.” And, of course, the Russians did.
How aware were leaders of the ramifications of their decisions?
Mrs. McGinnis – They had no idea. When people take chances like that diplomatically, I don’t think anybody goes into the idea that terrible things are going to happen. The people that are being attacked do, obviously. But I think the leaders always thought that they could finesse it somehow.
Mr. McGinnis – There are a lot of people who have always said that the leaders weren’t aware of the destructive power of war. But that really depends. I read an article in the Military Historical Quarterly about this – in which the author’s point was that there is no way the leaders could not be aware of what war was like. It had been going on since the American Civil War. The American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War: all of those had illustrated new weaponry that was then used in World War I.
Mrs. McGinnis – War wasn’t on the Internet and it wasn’t on the evening news; during the Crimean War, there were people drawing pictures on the battlefield, so you had a sense of war being closer. That was one of the reasons why Victoria was so upset, because she read the Times every day, and saw what the war correspondents were sending in. But when you really think about it, it was the lack of communication that was the problem. They had the weapon, but did anybody know what that weapon was really going to do?
Mr. McGinnis – Well, this author’s point was that certainly the military leaders knew. They could not not know what these weapons did. The machine gun had been used since the end of the Civil War. Artillery was increasing. The thing they didn’t know much about was the use of the airplane. The two big weapons of World War I were the machine gun and artillery. But this was not part of their decision-making about whether they should send an ultimatum, or answer an ultimatum, or mobilize. They just carried right on without that knowledge. In a sense, you could say they chose not to be aware of it. They certainly did not know how bad trench warfare could get, and they certainly did not have experience with huge massive armies at this level, except the American Civil War. (Europeans knew about the American Civil War, because they had come over and watched it.) But the massive armies and the money spent on these armies in World War I made it much more terrible, because the amount of firepower, the number of soldiers and its total destruction had never happened before.”
Mrs. McGinnis – You also have to take it back to the idea that these countries had all become wealthy. Wars, up through the Middle Ages and into the early 19th century, had been very short. But because the countries were now wealthier, that meant they could afford to hold out longer. As the population in Europe grew starting in the 18th century (diet and sanitation were better, the birth rate went up, and people were living longer), you could call on a greater mass of humanity in order to keep fighting. And as long as you had the money, you could fight. So, suddenly these wars become longer and longer and longer, and killed more and more people.
Mr. McGinnis – People always say: “Why did they allow this to happen?” But they only say that because World War I was such a terrible war. The point is, all through history, people have always done this. America has done this in wars. We didn’t know how Vietnam would develop when we got into it, and we didn’t know how World War II would develop. There are always a few people who will be pressing and say, “We shouldn’t do this because…”, but on the whole, human beings don’t do that. They don’t go back and use history. It’s just not human nature. People use their emotions, and in World War I, it was very emotional on many levels, as far as why they should fight or not fight. Nationalism, “fight and die for the country,” etc. It all got involved. Much of it was not rational at all.
Mrs. McGinnis – Frankly, people never use history to inform themselves. And so we just keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. And these men did, too. They just had no idea that anyone would push them that far, because they were thinking in terms of total land they controlled, total population in their Empires, and the whole idea that national pride is exemplified by the rulers. And they were operating with bad advice over time as well.
Mrs. McGinnis - The balance of power was something that the British had developed during the 18th century, when they had allied themselves with Prussia, and then at the end of the century decided to ally themselves with the French; and their idea was that from that point on they would ally themselves with the second most powerful country in Europe, rather than [with] the most important. And that was a way to control the behavior in England, and in Europe, actually.
Mr. McGinnis – The French were primarily bent on revenge. Whatever happened, any kind of conflict, they wanted revenge on Germany because of the Franco-Prussian War, in which they were humiliated.
Mrs. McGinnis – That’s one of the immediate reasons, but also, when you think about what the French had been doing for the last century and a half, they had been attempting to expand to the north into the low countries and what (at one time) was called the Holy Roman Empire. They had been pushed back in every single instance. So for them to be pushed back again and humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War was altogether too much.
Mr. McGinnis – Germany wanted to make sure that everybody knew it was a Great Power, and Germany was always looking to expand eastward into Poland and that area; that was their purpose.
Mrs. McGinnis – And there was no western expansion there [for Germany], it was only eastern expansion, but on the other side of Austria and Poland are the Russians, and the Russians were just as keen to expand to the west. So there was a huge tension there as well.
Mr. McGinnis – Germany was potentially a great threat to Russia.
Mrs. McGinnis – Austria-Hungary was an empire in huge trouble, simply because of the diverse religious and/or ethnic groups that they had been busy trying to hold together. The Austrians had been forced to make concessions to the Hungarians, so it became the Dual Monarchy because of the ethnic difficulties there. They had also taken over Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were Slavic peoples that the Russians felt uniformly should be under the Russian umbrella (Mother Russia and Pan-Slavism).
Mr. McGinnis – And Russia, of course, was bent on defending the Slavic people against Austria; and like Germany, Russia was zealous to make sure everybody knew that it was a Great Power.
Mrs. McGinnis – And the Russians also had an agenda, which is what the Crimean War had been about; they were very definitely trying to extend themselves down through the Dardanelles to get into the Mediterranean, and actually to put pressure on both the British and the French in regard to the Suez Canal (which, in fact, was the direct route to the “jewel in the Crown,” India).
Did Russia have motives for mobilization besides protecting Serbia?
Mrs. McGinnis – I think that it was the expansion into the Mediterranean, and also applying pressure on the Suez Canal. And they wanted to get down to Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula. They were not totally pure about why they wanted to come down. The idea of Pan-Slavism was a way for them to sugar-coat what they definitely had in mind.
Mr. McGinnis – Of course, Austria was Germany’s ally, so going along with that is Russia’s fear of German expansion into Poland. But Russia and Austria were similar in that they were both declining powers. Even though they insisted they were Great Powers, they weren’t anymore. They were not industrializing like Germany, France and England were; they were not as wealthy; they were not as advanced; they were definitely declining, and there was a certain amount of resentment about anything that would show them not to be Great Powers like everybody else.
Mrs. McGinnis – They were losing economically. They had had a chance, Russia particularly, to expand technologically. And, in fact, they did not do it. They missed their chance. And they missed their chance for about twenty-five years, and then all of a sudden they really woke up, and it wasn’t what it ought to have been. They couldn’t even transport troops [because of narrow-gauge railways].
Mr. McGinnis – The example of what Russia was like was the Russo-Japanese War in the early part of the century. They didn’t have to do this at all, but they went to a huge expense of sending navies over to fight the Japanese, and they were absolutely humiliated. There was no reason for them to do it, but it was a matter of pride.
Mrs. McGinnis – Well, [the Japanese] sank the admiral’s vessel and the admiral went down. It was terrible. And nobody had ever heard of the Japanese. Who were these upstarts? And they completely [defeated] the Russians. The Russians were humiliated in that war, the Austrians had been humiliated by the war just immediately previous to the Franco-Prussian War (the Germans had come into Austria-Hungary), and then the French had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War. There were a lot of hard lessons that were being inflicted upon people who thought they were major players in Europe.
For how much of the escalation of war can leaders be held responsible?
Mr. McGinnis – In the case of Russia and Austria, they were major causes. Both the Emperor of Austria-Hungary and Tsar Nicholas II, with their advisors, helped to force ultimatums, to make sure that their countries’ reputations were established. Kaiser Wilhelm was always ready to go to war, too.
Mrs. McGinnis – But his advisors weren’t ready for him to do that. It really wasn’t Germany’s war, and that brings in the whole concept of entangling alliances – secret alliances which had not been published in a widespread fashion, which, after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, drew everybody in. You know why the Austrians were behaving the way they were when they declared war on Serbia. And they were also trying to muscle the Serbians, and they thought it was their chance; they didn’t realize the implications [of their decisions]. . . . Now the Russians did have a chance [to back out] – and you are familiar with Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August – when the German ambassador wept and begged the Russians not to honor their treaty [with the French]. And from then on, everybody was drawn in. And finally the British were drawn in, and the British were drawn in because of [Germany’s violation of the] neutrality of Belgium, which had been created in . . . [1839], and the British had signed a treaty saying that they would guard [Belgium’s] neutrality in perpetuity. So everybody was caught up in the war.
Mr. McGinnis – The alliances forced them to do it, of course it was [a matter of] honor to follow the alliance. Like Jean is saying, there were advisors debating both sides of these issues; some people were ready to jump into the war, and some people said, “Hold back,” but certainly the leaders were helpful because they were, in most cases, ready to go to war.
Mrs. McGinnis – And then there was a problem of blood relationships between the King of England, Edward VII, the Tsar of Russia, and the Kaiser. And because [members of] these royal families had all married daughters of Queen Victoria or Victoria’s son, Edward VII, there was a very interesting dynamic that was going on: the Kaiser firmly believed that his uncle, Edward VII, was deliberately attempting to encircle Germany. Edward would visit these German spas, and he did a great deal of diplomacy that was carried on at a social level. The Kaiser even referred to his uncle as “the great Satan,” and resented him terribly; so the Kaiser developed an interesting relationship with the Tsar, and you read the so-called “Willy and Nicky” correspondence, where the Kaiser is actually trying to lure the Tsar away from his close connection with Edward. So there were many, many things going on at the same time.
How important was honor?
Mr. McGinnis – The sense of honor among the upper classes in all of these countries was that they stayed by their word. It was the way you behaved, you never changed the way you behaved, and you always had this feeling of honor. Your appearance was everything. I think that the leaders of the time felt this way; and if it was going to be a war, then it was going to be a war. And they were just going to carry on the way they always had, stay by their word, and more than that, they were really unaware of how the world had changed. Not all of them were unaware, but many of them were – certainly the Tsar and the Kaiser. They were living in a world that had been around for more than a hundred years, in which they made the decisions, and nobody else did. Their advisors were there, but it didn’t matter, it was about their honor, and that kind of attitude was something that made backing down, changing their ideas or changing their word, very difficult.
Mrs. McGinnis – There is another way to explain as well. First of all, from medieval times, it was, in fact, the ruling classes that had supplied the armies. . . . The ruling classes maintained control of the army. They were the men that ran the army; and the officer corps in every one of these countries was composed of men from the aristocracy. They all had a code of behavior that they understood very clearly, and which was something that, depending on what country you were in Europe, had been in operation for 700 or 800 years. That’s an amazing tradition when you think about it. America has been a country for a little over 200 years, and [this tradition’s era] ends up being three times or four times [the length of time that America has existed]. And that attitude didn’t really diminish in Europe until after the Russian Revolution. . . . The awareness that something wasn’t working came after World War I, when everybody got home, and people woke up in the 1920s to this feeling that the guts of their society were gone. Not only had their young men died, 10% of the total population in England died in the Great War, and every one of the young men who had taken firsts and seconds in the various colleges, at Cambridge and Oxford, had died – the best and the brightest. There are some people who feel that even the leadership had been destroyed in the trenches in World War I. Then there was an international depression, and everything literally fell apart. And then look how many empires were left. Well, who was left? The Russian Empire was gone; the Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone; England was not in great shape; and look what had happened to Germany! Now, Germany came back again, but the mode Hitler used to establish himself after the War was that the Germans had been sold out. It was huge, it was cataclysmic.
Was the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum aimed at Russia as well as Serbia?
Mrs. McGinnis – I think it had to be; they weren’t just thinking about the Serbians. They were also attempting to put the Russians in their place, because, obviously, the Austro-Hungarians thought, “This is our territory, we will handle it as we care to, and the Russians [have] no say in it.” And, of course, the Russians did.
How aware were leaders of the ramifications of their decisions?
Mrs. McGinnis – They had no idea. When people take chances like that diplomatically, I don’t think anybody goes into the idea that terrible things are going to happen. The people that are being attacked do, obviously. But I think the leaders always thought that they could finesse it somehow.
Mr. McGinnis – There are a lot of people who have always said that the leaders weren’t aware of the destructive power of war. But that really depends. I read an article in the Military Historical Quarterly about this – in which the author’s point was that there is no way the leaders could not be aware of what war was like. It had been going on since the American Civil War. The American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Crimean War: all of those had illustrated new weaponry that was then used in World War I.
Mrs. McGinnis – War wasn’t on the Internet and it wasn’t on the evening news; during the Crimean War, there were people drawing pictures on the battlefield, so you had a sense of war being closer. That was one of the reasons why Victoria was so upset, because she read the Times every day, and saw what the war correspondents were sending in. But when you really think about it, it was the lack of communication that was the problem. They had the weapon, but did anybody know what that weapon was really going to do?
Mr. McGinnis – Well, this author’s point was that certainly the military leaders knew. They could not not know what these weapons did. The machine gun had been used since the end of the Civil War. Artillery was increasing. The thing they didn’t know much about was the use of the airplane. The two big weapons of World War I were the machine gun and artillery. But this was not part of their decision-making about whether they should send an ultimatum, or answer an ultimatum, or mobilize. They just carried right on without that knowledge. In a sense, you could say they chose not to be aware of it. They certainly did not know how bad trench warfare could get, and they certainly did not have experience with huge massive armies at this level, except the American Civil War. (Europeans knew about the American Civil War, because they had come over and watched it.) But the massive armies and the money spent on these armies in World War I made it much more terrible, because the amount of firepower, the number of soldiers and its total destruction had never happened before.”
Mrs. McGinnis – You also have to take it back to the idea that these countries had all become wealthy. Wars, up through the Middle Ages and into the early 19th century, had been very short. But because the countries were now wealthier, that meant they could afford to hold out longer. As the population in Europe grew starting in the 18th century (diet and sanitation were better, the birth rate went up, and people were living longer), you could call on a greater mass of humanity in order to keep fighting. And as long as you had the money, you could fight. So, suddenly these wars become longer and longer and longer, and killed more and more people.
Mr. McGinnis – People always say: “Why did they allow this to happen?” But they only say that because World War I was such a terrible war. The point is, all through history, people have always done this. America has done this in wars. We didn’t know how Vietnam would develop when we got into it, and we didn’t know how World War II would develop. There are always a few people who will be pressing and say, “We shouldn’t do this because…”, but on the whole, human beings don’t do that. They don’t go back and use history. It’s just not human nature. People use their emotions, and in World War I, it was very emotional on many levels, as far as why they should fight or not fight. Nationalism, “fight and die for the country,” etc. It all got involved. Much of it was not rational at all.
Mrs. McGinnis – Frankly, people never use history to inform themselves. And so we just keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. And these men did, too. They just had no idea that anyone would push them that far, because they were thinking in terms of total land they controlled, total population in their Empires, and the whole idea that national pride is exemplified by the rulers. And they were operating with bad advice over time as well.
~~~
Mrs. McGinnis – It was such a convoluted time, when you take all these elements into consideration. The growth of nationalism, the renewed expansion of colonies (for countries that were late to unify, such as Germany and Italy), the fact that all of the colonial “good stuff” was already taken and the Belgians, French and Italians went to Africa. The Americans are not in Africa, the British already owned India (why would they need anything else?). So they’re all playing catch-up with each other. There was also the rapid change in the growth of cities, and the fact was, that people were moving to cities because the quality of life was better in the cities than it was at home in the countryside. Everything was changing too fast.