“Military Doomsday Machine”? The Decisions for War 1914

Authors

  • Holger Herwig Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary

Abstract

This manuscript analyses the decisions for war taken in the capitals of the major powers of Europe, during July and August 1914. The July crisis triggered the greatest and most destructive event of modern history. It has become central to theories about the outbreak of war in the fields of international relations and strategic studies. It assesses the major theories used, over the past century, to explain these decisions, and compares them to the evidence on the matter.  It is argued that decisions for war were made by small groups of men in each capital, taken on instrumental grounds, based on realpolitik, deliberate—part of a move in a competition, which they thought they understood.  The system worked as intended, but with effects no one expected.

Author Biography

Holger Herwig, Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, University of Calgary

Born in Hamburg, Germany, on 25 September 1941, Dr. Herwig holds a dual position at the University of Calgary as Professor of History and as Canada Research Chair in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies. He received his BA (1965) from the University of British Columbia and his MA (1967) and Ph.D. (1971) from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Dr. Herwig taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1971 until 1989. He served as Head of the Department of History at Calgary from 1991 until 1996. He was a Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, in 1985-86, and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies at The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia in 1998. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany, he has held major research grants from the Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, NATO, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr. Herwig has published more than a dozen books, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Czech, German, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. He has written the prize winning The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918; and The Origins of World War I, with Richard Hamilton. Herwig has coauthored with C. Archer, J. Ferris, and T. Travers World History of Warfare; and with David Bercuson Deadly Seas; The Destruction of the Bismarck; and One Christmas in Washington. Bercuson and Herwig joined James Cameron for three weeks out in the Atlantic to produce "James Cameron's Expedition: Bismarck" for the Discovery Channel. As well, Herwig has teamed with Bercuson for three History Television projects: Deadly Seas (Screenlife 1998), Murder in Normandy (Paperny Films, 1999), and Forced March to Freedom (Paperny Films, 2001).

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Issue

Vol. 13 No. 4 (2011): Summer 2011

Section

Military Strategy in War and Peace