Comments on: History: The Durnovo Memorandum

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:42:53 +0000

Oh yes, imagine the reconstruction contracts…

By: Richard J

Richard J — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:56:40 +0000

I actually found a copy of that ‘un on a second-hand book stall a few weeks back (pedantically, the P/B edition of the sequel that retconned out a Shah-led Persia and a Soviet-aligned Egypt), which inspired my comment. Even in it, WW3 could only last for a few weeks before JH had to have the USSR collapse for no clearly defined reason. (Slightly spooky that he happened to choose a city in Byelorussia to get nuked…) The book itself holds up surprisingly well, actually – in some places, the bias of the regional expert consulted (particularly the insane gibberish w.r.t sub-Continental Africa) comes through, but in others, it still seems like a plausible route we were lucky to avoid.

Of course, Chris, it’s not so much procurement propaganda, as pro-TA propaganda…

(That said, it did make me wonder about the possibilities of a thriller/crime novel set in the present day, but in the aftermath of Hackett’s scenario.)

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:52:17 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Urquhart

I’ve always read Hackett as an example of defence procurement propaganda rather than prediction. YMMV.

One notable exception to the short war theory in 1914 was Kitchener, who was expecting it to last 3 years.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:43:05 +0000

See also Jan/Ivan Bloch, Polish/Jewish/Russian railway tycoon who correctly predicted in a mammoth book the course of the war, the tactics, the unprecendented scale of total mobilisation, and the final collapse into revolution. Winston Churchill’s “Military Aspects of the Continental Problem” accurately predicted how the 1914 campaign would pan out.

It’s eerily similar to how so many people (Calculated Risk, Setser, Krugman, Roubini, Ed Hugh…) correctly predicted the current financial crisis in some level of detail.

As far as unexpectedly long Warsaw Pact/NATO scenarios, General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War has the 3rd Shock Army being held up unexpectedly long, both sides running low on supplies, and the NATO navies tipping the balance by successfully bringing in the REFORGER convoys. Pity about Birmingham though…

By: Richard J

Richard J — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:52:42 +0000

I would, but the one hit on Google is, um, yours…

The other thing I find interesting about pre-WWI though is that experienced military minds expected a very short war, not out of optimism, but because they confidently expected to run out of munitions and men so quickly.

(Interestingly, this is pretty much the same logic as to why any Warsaw Pact/NATO confrontation was supposed to go nuclear so quickly – I do wonder how that would have panned out in practice.)

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:36:29 +0000

Nobody wanted to go to war (with the possible exceptions of Conrad and Moltke) but everyone wanted peace plus an outcome which was incompatible with everyone else’s. The lines in the sand overlapped.

This is why I find Ferguson’s attempts to reason away the long-term causes of the war, and to assign the short-term causes into the category of errors, rather frustrating.

There were some loud voices in the UK which did indeed see Russia as the root of all evil, especially on the left and within the Liberal Party. Check out ‘Urquartism’, for example.

By: Richard J

Richard J — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:29:54 +0000

Guilherme – I think you’re onto something – there’s seems to me to be a long-running strange vein of Anglophobia that Russians seem to prone to. Not very unusual in of itself, I’ll be honest, but the Russian form seems to view England as a determined cunning foe with a single-minded goal of humbling its eternal enemy, Russia… The lack of reciprocation from the English of this view never seems to bother them…

By: Tony Zbaraschuk

Tony Zbaraschuk — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:48:47 +0000

The other thing to note is that he almost completely ignores Austria, and Germany’s attachment to Austria. Realistically, a German-Russian rapprochment was only possible if Germany ditched Austria. (I suppose inspired diplomacy on all sides could have kept the Three Emperors’ League going, but if one thing is evident about the WW I run-up it is that none of Austria, Russia, or Germany had diplomats inspired by anything but the spirit of arrogant incompetence).

By: Guilherme Campos

Guilherme Campos — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:35:30 +0000

The weakness of the Russian military had become quite obvious after the defeat in the war with Japan. Also the existence of social upheavals after a defeat wasn’t new, since it followed France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. After reading the whole document I guess Durnovo was a sharp man with good knowledge of the weaknesses and political interests of the major players in continental politics, except for France and the UK. He seems do disregard that France was eager to regain power of Alsace and Lorraine lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian war. He also seems to think of the UK as the source of all evils in a similar fashion to what we see regarding the USA in the present.
The UK didn’t desire the end of the Kaiser’s Germany or the Tzar’s Russia, although it was interested in weakening them. (The royal families of the UK, Germany and Russia where close relatives) .
The assessment that war was inevitable seems, even today, largelly incorrect. If we follow the events after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Sarajevo we see that really no one wanted to go to war. (Niall Ferguson’s “War of the World” offers a good description of the start of the war).

By: ajay

ajay — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:07:39 +0000

Wasn’t it Leo Szilard, as a Hungarian schoolboy aged sixteen, who called the outcome of the war at its outbreak?
Going from memory, “I said that it was perfectly obvious how the war should end. It should end with the defeat of the German Empire, and also with the defeat of Russia. I admitted that I couldn’t see quite how this would happen, since they were on opposite sides… In retrospect I am amazed that, as a schoolboy with no knowledge of any countries other than Hungary, I was so confident in making this prediction.”
(from Richard Rhodes, “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”)