MAX HASTINGS
(Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings)
1914 was the outbreak of WWI in which all the belligerents had very different interests and reasons for war—even allies on the same side greatly differed as to their motivation for fighting.
This was the point of view that was adopted by the Western Allies about the German Nazis and collaborators in the other European nations. However, not everyone agreed at the time with this policy. Lord Russell, the British Nuremburg Prosecutor resigned over this policy. He had case files against over 100,000 Nazi’s who had committed war crimes that he was not allowed to pursue. There was one Western county that did not follow this policy—Norway. They actually tried, convicted and jailed 10 percent of their entire population for collaboration. Their rehabilitation was just fine without the services of these criminals and they became the richest per capita country in the West including the U.S. The issue will be debated by historians of each generation.
On that single day, 27,000 French Soldiers were killed in battle. The French Generals, with little understanding of the then modern weapons and their power, sent whole divisions on a bayonet charge and they were just mowed down by the latest German versions of machine guns. They assumed that if they failed to take a German position defended by machine guns, it was only because they had not sent enough men to make the charge. Each successive failure produced another charge with even more men.
Referring to the totally inadequate diplomatic communications in the political confusion and crises that led up to the First World War. None of the countries really wanted a large war, but the diplomatic communications were so bad that all operated on the assumption that the others were moving against them and they had to defend themselves or their treaty allies and there were very few opportunities to discern what other countries would do and all of Europe and much else of the world slipped out of control.
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL FRHistS is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of numerous books, chiefly on defence matters, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion.
