Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It is quite noticeable that most of the rave reviews on this site (and Amazon.uk) come from readers who don't seem to know a great deal about the Great War (in one or two cases clearly motivated by anti-British animus), and the pannings come from those who do. The author doesn't do himself any favours by admitting that he hadn't known much about World War One before starting to research the book - a cynic might say that explains a lot. The book does contain some interesting material on the Franco-German War. The first thesis, that the Germans were tactically superior to the Allies, is largely true, for the first half of the war at any rate, but Mosier ruins his case by exaggeration, such as claiming that the British were "routed" at Mons, or that the Germans were not really beaten at the Marne, or that Verdun was a German victory. His knowledge of politics and diplomacy is painfully thin - he admits he cannot grasp what Britain gained from the Entente Cordiale (an ally against Germany's threat to dominate the continent - the same policy Britain had pursued against Louis XIV and Napoleon) or how the small (in 1914) BEF was of any importance to the French - it is perfectly arguable that the small BEF provided the extra margin needed for the narrow French victory at the Marne. In the final chapters he seems to think that the USA dominated the other Allies in 1918 the way she did in the 1940s, which is simply not so. Where the book really goes off the rails is in the sections dealing with the British (about whom he writes in a nasty, sarcastic tone which hardly indicates objectivity) and Americans. Far from exploding myths, he simply spreads old ones, common enough in popular accounts in English, although not in serious history books: namely that the British were uniquely useless and that the war was won by American victories on the battlefield. There is far less dispute about casualty figures than he seems to think, although it is true that British intelligence wildly overestimated the scale of German losses at the time. One almost suspects he trawled old books to find the highest figures for British losses, and the lowest for German, that he could find, rather than the ones which can be found in any serious up-to-date account. It is absurd for him to claim that mass slaughter of attackers was "exclusively British" - Allied loss rates in 1916-18, when Britain had taken over the main burden of the offensive, were far less bad than the French losses of 1914-15. This was due to the improvements in infantry and artillery tactics which the Allies had made by then (it is not true, as other reviewers on this site seem to think, that the BEF "never learned", or that the British did not make proper use of machine-guns, or that the Somme accomplished "NOTHING" (the Germans called it "the muddy grave of the German Army", and retreated to the Hindenburg Line to avoid a repetition. After 1916 the Germans were under no delusion that they were going to win the war by being on the receiving end of such batterings - hence in part their gamble to knock Britain out by unrestricted submarine warfare)). The gaps in his research can be seen in the bibliography - he dismisses the work of Paddy Griffith on British infantry tactics with a sneer (perhaps he did not read or understand them), and dismisses the entire corpus of scholarly work on the BEF as "without merit", whilst treating the secondary, populist work of John Laffin and Lloyd George's memoirs as serious sources. His praise of Pershing is overstated - he was doubtless an able man, but his clumsy tactics and excessive faith in the rifle (not unlike Douglas Haig in 1916) are a matter of record. American tactics were clumsy in 1918 for the same reason the British had been on the Somme in 1916: inexperience. His account of 1918 is ludicrous - the key thing to grasp is that the BEF were engaging and driving back the main mass of the German Army (90-odd divisions, when the Americans in the Argonne were fighting at most 35 or so). Mosier sneers at the high casualties suffered by the BEF, without mentioning that they were doing the brunt of the fighting at the time! The war would not have been won without American intervention. But the effect of this was on finance and morale, as well as the threat of what the American army might accomplish in future - not on the battlefield in 1918. Mosier could have produced a much better book after a few more years of reading and reflection. Far better and more accurate and balanced books are in print, both from the American and British perspective.