norman stone the eastern front 1914 1917

The Russian General Staff, who studied their defeat at the hands of the Japanese intensely, declared in 1910 that given developments in military technology, no future war could last more than a year. Students of the Second Boer War (1900-1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) reached similar conclusions. The most frequently cited example was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, where the Prussians’ ability to move troops rapidly to concentration points and bring heavy artillery to bear resulted in a French defeat within, essentially, six weeks.

New technologies like the machine gun and advances in heavy artillery, they reasoned, gave the attackers such firepower that static defenses could not hold out long. Most military leaders and politicians, along with the general public, assumed that any conflict would be short. The background of diplomacy and Franco-British control over Tsarist decision-making is not explored, but as a military analysis the book is penetrating and thoroughly enjoyable.In August 1914 European military thinkers still worshipped in the cult of the offensive.

Against this background, the German commander Ludendorff in particular is derided for puffing his tactical gains into brilliant strategic breakthroughs. Stone sees Russian military entropy in the context of the general problem of WW I: Nineteenth century progress could provide mass armies with food and railroads but, past the rail terminals, communications and mobility were still primitive, especially for the Russian side. Petersburg administrators, who in any case were largely devoted to obsolete ''fortress'' concepts. The book presents intricate but lucid mappings of the factions within the Tsarist government and army-power slipped to far-flung commanders, away from the St. Russian output of key materiel expanded during the war, and its large, modern industries were not themselves to blame for the economic chaos which, to Stone's regret, produced the November revolution of 1917. His two most important arguments: the shortage of shells blamed by the Russians for their defeats by the Germans was essentially a problem of army command and supply structures, not a ''crippling material weakness'' on the part of the Russian economy and, indeed, the Russian economy itself was suffering a crisis of growth, not decline. Stone proceeds to dispatch the cliches one by one. An elegant study of an aspect of WW I-the Russian campaign against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians-which has generally been relegated by military historians to a series of overworked postscripts.

Norman stone the eastern front 1914 1917