1917

Starred review from October 23, 2017
Stevenson (Arms Races in International Politics), chair in international history at the London School of Economics, adds a distinguished volume to his half-dozen major works on WWI. He focuses on the war’s forgotten year, when the nations of Europe desperately sought to escape the “war trap” they had dug since 1914. Stevenson presents this process as a study in contingencies: the hows and whys of decisions over whether “to intervene, to repudiate compromise, and to attack.” Each nation’s responsible decision-making parties were held in high regard, yet though their decisions weren’t uniformly disastrous, Stevenson writes, none fulfilled expectations. As the year opened the war “remained Germany’s to lose.” One Entente army after another “wasted itself in vain offensives”: France in Champagne, Britain in Flanders, and Italy on the Isonzo, while Russia’s post-czarist Provisional Government sought to prove it still deserved Allied support. But between January and November, unrestricted submarine warfare brought the U.S. into the conflict. The Bolshevik revolution then transformed Russia into a denier of Europe’s prewar order. Initiatives for a compromise peace collapsed and the war’s consequences spread far beyond Europe. Stevenson’s comprehensively researched and perceptively reasoned analysis stands apart from similar histories by showing that the conflict’s outcome was determined “not through blind impersonal forces but through deliberate will.” Illus.

November 1, 2017
Thoroughgoing study of the year that gave at least a hint of promise that World War I would indeed be the war to end all wars.By 1917, writes Stevenson (International History/London School of Economics; With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, 2011, etc.), the fighting on the western front had bogged down into mutual slaughter. In the battles surrounding Verdun alone, for instance, there were well over 1 million casualties, and the generals kept throwing bodies at the other line without a hope of winning. Even so, the German kaiser and British prime minister, among others, kept at it. Two signal events occurred to shake things up in 1917: the Russian Revolution occurred, soon to remove Russia from the fight, and the United States entered the conflict, pouring men and materiel into combat and ending the stalemate. Before this happened, however, the Central Powers and Allies were desperately seeking ways out of what Stevenson calls the "war trap"--"on one level the story of 1917 is of their efforts to escape it." But there was no real way out, leading to "the collapse of initiatives for a compromise peace" and the slaughters at Verdun, Caporetto, Passchendaele, and elsewhere. Ironies were attendant; by Stevenson's account, the U.S. might have done better to continue supplying the Allies with war goods than enter the fight itself, since the war industry lifted the country out of recession into an economic boom, and things might have turned out very differently in the Middle East had German overtures to the Zionist leaders been successful. American entry--which Woodrow Wilson took pains to say was to help France, not Britain--intensified at least some of the slaughter, too, since the German army was determined to break the European Allies before American troops could enter the theater.Stevenson examines the deeper implications of strategic and diplomatic decisions during the penultimate year of the conflict, casting a new light on events. Of considerable interest to students of the war and its tortuous aftermath.

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