What Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' can teach us today

Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” was released in January 1962. Historian Robert Massie, in the 1994 Foreword, states that “The Guns of August was an immediate, overwhelming success. Reviewers were enthusiastic, and word-of-mouth quickly attracted readers by the tens of thousands. President Kennedy gave a copy to Prime Minister Macmillan, observing that somehow contemporary statesmen must avoid the pitfalls that led to August, 1914.”

The final paragraph of the author’s Afterward suggests why America’s President shared the book with the British Prime Minister: “After the Marne the war grew and spread until it drew in the nations of both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of world conflict no peace treaty could dissolve. The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back [Commmander in Chief of the French Armies on the Western Front, at the war’s outset, Joseph] Joffre told the soldiers on the eve [of the Miracle of the Marne]. Afterwards there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”

That a relative who is simultaneously my second, third and fourth-cousin was married to Tuchman’s nephew was mentioned, from the time that I was in college, but never the compelling content of her most enduring work. I was deprived of important insights.

One wonders the extent to which President Kennedy considered the quagmire that the Great War became — precipitated by bold action saving Paris from occupation, and France from defeat in August 1914 — when responding, in the face of conceivable nuclear face-off, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, nine months after publication of “The Guns of August.”

Was a debacle in Southeast Asia implicit in Tuchman’s treatise? Would President John Kennedy have avoided the hubris of his holdover advisors — notably Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy — and his successor — President Lyndon Johnson — considering nations which descended into hostilities, anticipating no more than six weeks of war, woozy with battle plans — words on paper — divorced from reality?  Were Cold Warriors aware of European parallels fifty years earlier?

Would Iraq and Afghanistan have been different were peaceful solution of diplomatic crises without belligerence was prioritized? Prussian military strategist General Carl von Clausewitz concluded, in his masterwork “On War,” that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.”

Alternatives abound.  While war is not always avoidable, war should be deemed the worst option, not the first option.

The lessons of the Great War — the tragedy of the United States Senate’s rejection of the Peace of Paris and its provision for a League of Nations — and wisdom subsequently shown — following failures leading the world into a worse war within a generation — established eighty years of stability, peace and harmony.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure":  Disturbing developments suggest that mechanisms implemented in the memory of living Americans might be abrogated.

Such outcome shall not serve anyone better; make anyone secure or safer. Bad actors will benefit — China, Middle Eastern Mullahs, North Korea and Russia among others.

Turning a blind eye to what the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other admirable alliances allow will not advance the world.

Barbara Tuchman offered crucial insights in her conclusion to “The Guns of August”:  The contemporary world — with its industrialization and instant communication — can initiate conflict quickly. Commitment to engagement and internationalism is more important than ever.

— Jay Wiener is a Jackson attorney.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' can teach us today