Abstract
Reviewed by: Michael S. Neiberg, United States Army War College, Carlisle, PA, USA
Naturally enough, historians most often think of major events in time. The great insight of Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War is to challenge us to consider the last years of the war in space as well. At the moment that the United States entered the war in April 1917, there were active fighting fronts in France and Belgium, the Middle East, the Balkans, Italy and Ukraine. Seeing the war to a final and successful conclusion forced the Allies to think about how to prioritize not just time but space. In this insightful and thought-provoking book, Meighen McCrae analyzes how they did so, giving us new intellectual tools to understand an old problem.
Her lens into her topic is the minutes of the Supreme War Council (SWC), a bureaucratic organization designed by the Allies to coordinate grand strategy and to help solve crucial, if seemingly mundane, problems like supply. The SWC became necessary late in the war as the Allies came belatedly to realize that they had to treat the war as a unified whole rather than as discrete theatres. They needed a way to develop synergy between themselves and to compensate for the weaknesses of individual armies. For example, the United States could provide raw manpower, but not the materiel needed to supply them, much of which came from France. The SWC gave the Allies a body to distribute resources to the coalition, not just to the individual states within it. As a result, the SWC turned a fissiparous group of states with generally shared strategic aims into the first true modern coalition.
The SWC, created in the dark days of late 1917, was first and foremost a bureaucratic solution to a military problem. It had no commander. Instead, it ran by a series of committees that contained the most senior Allied political and military representatives. As such, it reached its decisions by consensus rather than by directive. Perhaps not surprisingly, McCrae argues that the military committees worked more effectively because they were united around the common and rather obvious goal of defeating the enemy. The political committees, on the other hand, suffered from a lack of agreement among the major partners about how the post-war world should look.
In McCrae’s analysis, the SWC is largely an instrument whereby the Allies could share their power on the western front as a coalition, while pursuing their national strategies on the periphery. In essence, while the French, British, Americans, Italians and Belgians all agreed on the importance of defeating the Germans, in the other parts of Eurasia they had divergent goals and uneven distributions of power. The SWC became the means by which the Allies hoped to resolve such problems.
Like all bureaucracies, the SWC was slow, inefficient, and imperfect in balancing the competing demands made upon it worldwide. Having underestimated German strength in 1917 and early 1918, the Allies reacted by overestimating how much longer the Germans could continue to fight. Even with American manpower flooding into France in 1918, the SWC thought almost until the end that they would have to fight in 1919. Quite obviously, the central theatre would be in France and Belgium, but what of the other theatres? What would victory look like in a fragile place like the Balkans, where all of the trouble had begun in the first place? The French saw the region as strategically vital, the British saw it as secondary, and the Americans as unimportant.
The SWC was probably never going to find lasting answers to long-term political problems. Its work, however, was interrupted by the sudden and unexpected decision by the German Army to ask for an armistice in November 1918. The leaders of the SWC were ready to think about an armistice, a military agreement between armies to end the fighting. They were far less ready to think about the political conditions needed to bring about a more durable peace. As a result, the SWC as a body could help the politicians think through how to force the enemy armies to lay down their arms, but little else. In the end the politicians were still overwhelmed by the obligation of trying to put an entire world back together. Thus did the Paris Peace Conference end up trying (and ultimately failing) to solve problems across the entire globe. As Meighen McCrae so ably shows in this fine book, we need to see this process not just in time but in space as well.