227 - The German Wars, 1914-1945

The German Wars, 1914-1945
By Donald J. Goodspeed
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977, 520 pp. $17.50.

"Victory crumbled in our hands even as we seized it," writes Donald Goodspeed on the first page of his comprehensive and disturbing book on the causes and implications of the First and Second World Wars. What makes this book significant beyond its value as unusually well written history is its inexorable, if controversial, unfolding of the conclusions wrapped in these introductory words: ". . . the second half of the twentieth century gives indications of being not only very different from the first half, but even more ominous."

Goodspeed, a former member of the historical section of the Canadian General Staff who now teaches in Ontario, draws two sets of conclusions in The German Wars. The first group, though eventually dinned almost to silence by the knell of the book's final conclusions, is in itself highly interesting. Stating that the "truth … is always the first casualty in war," Goodspeed immediately presents five "general judgments" which in varying degrees modify and controvert what have become generally accepted notions about the two wars. The first is that the wars possess "an organic unity, and this unity has to be perceived before its component parts can properly be understood." The second is that "France, not Germany, was the power that desired and worked for a great European war in 1914." Thirdly, "the German Wars changed the world in ways that none of the combatant powers foresaw or desired and it therefore appears probable that warfare in an industrialized society is no longer an effective instrument of policy." (He adds that this conclusion "might seem to be an almost insulting statement of the obvious were it not that the statesmen of the world have clearly not accepted it as true.") The fourth thesis is that the political leadership of this century has been "so inadequate … that, unless it soon improves, the extinction of all human life on the planet is a probable result." The fifth conclusion, taken up at the end of the book with great effectiveness, is that the shadows cast by the German Wars "still darken all our futures."

Of the book's four parts-dealing in turn with the causes of World War I, the war itself, the era between wars, and World War II and its implications-the first seems to have been written with most relish.

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The surrealistic tangle of international motivations and escape-clause treaties is presented in a manner that is surprisingly clear and interesting. At the center of this era is Bismarck, but instead of the blood and iron militarist whom we expect, we find a powerfully shrewd statesman, wise enough to know Germany's limitations and adroit enough to play the powers against each other for the preservation of European peace. Quotations from the Iron Chancellor spark the pages of Book One. For example, on the German ally, Austria: "A Bavarian is a cross between a man and an Austrian"; and on the death of Wilhelm I "Alas for my grandchildren!" for the new kaiser, the impetuous Wilhelm II, was "like a balloon. If you don't keep fast hold of the string you never know where he'll be off to." But Lord Salisbury, the British foreign minister, took the old kaiser's death as the end of Bismarck's influence: "This is the crossing of the bar," he wrote; "I see the sea covered with white horses."

In Book Two the numbing, ghastly destruction of a generation is compared to Greek tragedy: "the audience can see the truth plainly, but the actors are blind; the chorus warns, but the warnings go unheeded; the key to it all is a fatal flaw in character." Goodspeed states the flaw in familiar terms: hubris, pride. The battlefields each presented "a nightmare landscape, featureless, evil-smelling, a gray waste of scum-coated water and mud," and on these twentieth century golgothas the unimaginable was lost: "What these casualties … really cost is in the truest sense imponderable-the problems that were never solved, the sons that were never born, the poetry that was never written, and all the valor that was heedlessly poured into the ground." Were the leaders who caused and waged war "no more than reflections of the society that had promoted them, given them power… ?"

The wisdom of Wilson's peace proposals was rejected in selfishness and anger by the victorious powers; World War II was the result of their guilt and error and of the lies used to bury the unanswered dead of World War I.

While the evil of Hitter and his regime is not at all overlooked("... Hitler himself was … a murderer, a liar, a terrible petit bourgeois barbarian without formal education or culture or honor or morality"), neither are the guilt and ineptitude of the Allies. Hitler's labelling of the pre-war British leaders as "little worms" Goodspeed judges to be "not too harsh"; "American public opinion on international affairs was both selfish and uninstructed"; the French were defeated by themselves before the war began; the entire world watched the overwhelming Russian invasion of courageous Finland with a sympathy that was utterly detached. Allied saturation bombing of Germany at the close of the war seems no more excusable that Hitler's terror siege of Britain, and "very few considered the moral aspect of the problem, although ethics can no more safely be neglected in war than in peace." Perhaps with a glance at silly Allied hubris, Goodspeed observes that the Germans regularly outfought the British, American, and Canadian forces.

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The theologian of history cannot help but be challenged and stimulated by The German Wars, if not by the matter of the wars themselves and the conclusions drawn, then at least by such passages as: "The historian, viewing the cataclysmic nature of the Russian campaign, the size of the armies, the violence of the clash, the extent of the agony, and the historic significance of victory or defeat, cannot escape a profound sense of awe that the outcome turned on so simple a miscalculation. Nor is it easy to avoid the thought that here we glimpse the workings of the hand of God." American policy at Yalta, self-evidently decisive for the postwar world, resulted from a theology about which the Protestant tradition has a great deal to say: "Men's views of history, like their ethics, are ultimately shaped by their metaphysics, and Roosevelt's only metaphysic was a liberalism whose premise was the perfectibility of man." A statement pertaining to the former imperial powers of the west could be connected firmly to the biblical witness: "The realization has gradually come home to them that though oppression is bad for the oppressed, it is in the long run worse for the oppressors."

The chill of the German Wars' implications settles over the end of the book like a pall:

Nuclear weapons may become available to private criminals, instead of (as up to now) merely public ones …

The great conflict of the twentieth century… has curtailed freedom in the democracies as well as in the dictatorships… liberty has all but bled to death.

In the "liberal" societies of the West the eunuchs are inheriting the earth … the questioning of values leads to the abandonment of sanctions, and the weakening of sanctions leads to the rejection of values. Nor is it surprising that the softness that has crept over the West since 1945 has been accompanied by cowardice and cruelty, the hallmarks of the soft. It is no accident that the same states that refuse to put a murderer to death have generally been ready to encourage the murder of unborn innocents.

Probably what the world is witnessing in this century is the death of a civilization … What was begun by murder is now being completed by suicide … The heirs of Christendom have become more materialistic than the dialectical materialists, and are therefore less vital and less able to sustain life.

Goodspeed's voice is Olympian and courageous in its objectivity, possibly prophetic in its implications, and hopefully hard in its warning against failure of the spirit:

In all this dark scene the only comfort lies in the hope of change, a change that must in some sense be a returning as well as a new venturing forth … There is still in the West a remembrance of higher values and some determination to return to them. If that determination can crystallize and manifest itself in time, the outlook will by no means be black, for whatever else the soft society may be able to do, it will be completely unable to defend itself.

Kent Gramm
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin