Winston Churchill’s first volume of his history of World War I, The World Crisis, was published 100 years ago this spring, to much acclaim (and some derision). It was the first of six volumes Churchill would write about what was then called the “Great War,” which the American diplomat George F. Kennan rightly characterized as the “seminal catastrophe of the 20th century.” (RELATED: The Political Wisdom of Sarah Churchill)
Although not as well-known as some of Churchill’s other books —especially his six-volume work on World War II — The World Crisis, wrote Patrick J. Garrity in the Claremont Review of Books, “contains some of Churchill’s best prose and most astute strategic reflections” and should be regarded as “a template for understanding the causes of war more generally.” It combines brilliant writing, a keen grasp of British strategic history, and an understanding of the vicissitudes of war that should serve to temper the most ardent proponent of military adventures in our own time.
The History of Churchill’s The World Crisis
Churchill early in the war headed up the Admiralty, then, after the Dardanelles fiasco (which he had championed and for which he received the blame) fought in the trenches for several months as an officer on the Western Front. When he returned from the front, he served as minister of munitions and secretary of state for Air and War. He had previously written books on British wars fought on the North–West Frontier (what is now western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan), in Sudan, and in South Africa, where he had been both a reporter and a combatant. Churchill began writing The World Crisis in the latter months of 1920 and early 1921. He hired a literary agent, a technical adviser on naval matters, and a few research assistants and requested the Admiralty’s permanent secretary for access to his Admiralty papers. He told his friend Lord George Riddell that he found the research and writing “very exhilarating.”
Much of the early writing took place while Churchill vacationed in southern France. After losing an election in October 1922, Churchill was temporarily out of Parliament and able to devote even more time to completing the first volume. When the book appeared the following spring, demand was such that 4,000 additional copies were printed a few months after the original printing of 7,400 copies sold out. Both the Daily Telegraph and New Statesman praised the book. Others weren’t so kind. Lord Arthur James Balfour called the book “Winston’s autobiography, disguised as the history of the universe,” while another colleague said, “Winston has written an enormous book all about himself and calls it ‘The World Crisis.’”
Churchill Didn’t See the War Coming
Churchill titled his first chapter “The Vials of Wrath,” and there he penned what is perhaps the most memorable description of the horrors of World War I:
The Great War through which we have passed differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived with reason that their very existence was at stake. Germany having let Hell loose kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals often on a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.
Churchill recognized that the origins of the war could be traced to the collapse of the general European balance of power, which had been sustained by “the system [German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck] had maintained with consummate ability” since the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. The two key developments here were the signing of the “Dual Alliance” between Russia and France — what Kennan would later call the “fateful alliance” — and Germany’s decision to challenge Great Britain at sea. History for Churchill was rhyming:
Three separate times in three different centuries had the British people rescued Europe from a military domination. Thrice had the Low Countries been assailed; by Spain, by the French Monarchy, by the French Empire. Thrice had British war and policy, often maintained single-handed, overthrown the aggressor.
Yet few in Britain or elsewhere saw the storm coming. Sure, there were small wars — Britain fought the Boers in South Africa; Russia fought Japan in east Asia — crises in Morocco and Venezuela, and nationalist stirring in the Balkans, but the great powers of Europe were connected by trade, travel, and familial ties. The writer Norman Angell in 1909 in The Great Illusion posited that war was economically and socially irrational, and that economic interdependence would likely prevent the outbreak of a general European war. And as David Fromkin noted in his magnificent book Europe’s Last Summer, “The world of the 1890s and 1900s had been … a time of international congresses, disarmament conferences, globalization of the world economy, and schemes to establish some sort of league of nations to outlaw war.” The leaders and people of Europe expected “a long stretch of peace and prosperity … to go on indefinitely.” Yet beneath the facade of relative calm and peace, there existed, in Churchill’s vivid description, “a world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations through vistas of fathomless catastrophe.” Europe, Churchill wrote, was “on the road to Armageddon.”
Churchill in The World Crisis recounted Germany’s naval buildup and Britain’s response. Germany was endeavoring to become both the greatest continental power and at least the equal of Britain’s sea power — a development that posed an existential threat to Britain and her empire. And Germany’s rise was producing a confluence of strategic interests among other continental powers and Great Britain. In Churchill’s words, “Every threatening gesture that [Germany] made, every attempt to shock or shake the loosely knit structure of the Entente made it close and fit together more tightly.” And as in Horatio Nelson’s day against Napoleonic France, Churchill knew that it was British sea power above all that stood between Germany and “the dominion of the world.” “Everything,” he wrote, “depended upon the Fleet.”
Churchill himself was not immune to thinking that sanity among the great powers would prevail. After the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and the subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, Churchill recalled meeting with the German shipping magnate Albert Ballin and thinking that Serbia’s acceptance of most of the ultimatum’s demands would end the crisis. “I went to bed,” Churchill wrote, “with a feeling things might blow over. We had had … so many scares before. Time after time the clouds had loomed up vague, menacing, constantly changing; time after time they had dispersed. We were still a long way, as it seemed, from any danger of war.” But mobilization plans had been set in motion: “As the ill-fated nations approached the verge, the sinister machines of war began to develop their own momentum and even to take control themselves.”
Churchill had the fleet ready. After war was declared, the British army — one that would suffer untold losses on the Western Front —was safely transported to the continent. Germany was blockaded, and British naval forces watched for any movement of the German High Seas Fleet. British airplanes shot down Zeppelins and bombed German Zeppelin sheds in towns and cities. Stalemate and slaughter on the Western Front led Churchill to initiate the design and production of tanks. The German submarine threat required the Admiralty to take countermeasures. Through it all, Churchill took pride in the “ceaseless stream of troops and supplies to France … the world-wide trade of Britain proceeding almost without hindrance … [and] the intricate movement of reinforcements or expeditions escorted across every ocean from every part of the Empire.”
At the end of volume one, Churchill lamented the stalemate on the Western Front and searched for ways to overcome it, including forcing the straits at Gallipoli — a scheme that would lead to Churchill’s resignation from the government and that would haunt his reputation for the rest of his political career. Churchill initially wrote three more volumes of The World Crisis, followed by two additional volumes — one covering the Eastern Front and the other dealing with the aftermath of the war.
Churchill Provides Warnings for Today
Churchill biographer William Manchester compared The World Crisis favorably to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War and the memoirs of Talleyrand, Metternich, Bismarck, Ulysses S. Grant, and Henry Kissinger. T.E. Lawrence and John Maynard Keynes offered fulsome praise. J.H. Plumb, who compared Churchill’s writing to that of Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay, noted that history was the heart of Churchill’s faith. “[I]t permeated everything which he touched, and it was the mainspring of his politics and the secret of his immense mastery,” Plumb explained. “Few historians have experienced the drama of history so closely, so intimately as Churchill.” Manchester praised Churchill for being an “artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends.”
Today’s “vials of wrath” are playing out in Eastern Europe and the western Pacific Ocean. China, today’s rising power, has formed a strategic partnership with Russia, and both autocratic powers — armed with nuclear weapons — are flexing their geopolitical muscles in their respective regions. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine has brought the countries of NATO closer together, while China’s aggressive moves and military buildup has brought Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia closer with each other and with the United States — just as Germany’s rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries produced the Franco-Russian alliance and Britain’s return to the continent.
Today’s “world crisis” is fraught with even more danger than that of 1914. The United States is in many ways in the same geopolitical position as Great Britain was in the lead up to the Great War. The origins of today’s world crisis reach back to the early 1990s, when, after our Cold War victory over the Soviet Union, we celebrated our “unipolar moment,” dreamed about the “end of history,” became distracted in peripheral wars, and placed our hopes in China’s presumed abandonment of communism and its transformation into a status quo power. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Are We Officially in Cold War II?)
Like Great Britain in the early 20th century, we face a situation where a rising Eurasian great power has partnered with an increasingly aggressive Russia and also challenges us at sea. How we respond to China — and how China reacts to our response — will ultimately determine whether we can avoid the road to Armageddon.
Let us hope that our statesmen fare better than those of 1914, who plunged the world into war and set into motion developments that made the 20th century history’s bloodiest.