Joseph Micallef - Understanding World War I: A Concise History

With the official demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991, we could claim, finally, to have won World War II. Now the problem was to win World War I. As the Cold War glaciers retreated, they exposed the detritus of this earlier conflict, suspended during the superpower competition, but now unfrozen. Nowhere was this truer than in the Balkans, where the synthetic compound that was Yugoslavia could no longer be held together, or the Middle East, where the detonated Ottoman Empire continued to emit decay products. Thus, we cannot begin to understand todays world, or our strategic choices in this world, unless we know something about World War Ior even better, quite a lot about it.

Joseph Micallef has given this short work an appropriate title. It is, in fact, concise. But reading it leads to a surprisingly comprehensive understanding of the First World War. This is so because his short book deals with every facet of the conflictits historical setting, its economics, its politics, its psychologyand not just its military aspects. Few authors could so authoritatively put the story of World War I inside the history of western civilization.

And when it comes to more-or-less purely military matters, this book certainly incorporates rich detail, but situates it in wide-ranging and inclusive context. In our thoughts, we often place the war in Flanders Fields, or the soggy northeast of France. Micallef certainly tells that tale, but reminds us also of battles fought in the hills and plains of northern Italy, in the forests of Central Europe and the deserts of the Middle East, in Africa and Asia, and even of the echoes of battle heard in the Western Hemisphere. Our primary mental image may be of thundering artillery barrages fired over men trapped in mindless, bacterial trench warfare. Micallef is vivid when describing their plight, but in addition writes cogently about a war of maneuver at sea and in the air. The ancient and honorable charge with fixed bayonets is thoroughly described, and alongside it the impact of modern industrial technology: the war of chemistry, of balloons, of train schedules, of tanks, of machine guns finally synchronized with propeller blades.

This brief work by Joseph Micallef is the best shortcut I know to an understanding of this momentous conflict. It is informative without being academic. It is nicely written, full of well-turned phrases. And it is as accurate as those bullets fired into the breasts of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who started the whole thing.

As this is written, we enter the mid-teens of the twenty-first century, shortly to begin a four year remembrance, the centenary of The Great War, The War To End All War, the war that shaped and changed our worldindeed literally revolutionized it. We will want to read as much as we can so as to appreciate our march through the calendar that recalls and memorializes the weighty events of a century earlier. But if you have to settle for just one book, this is it.

General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF (RET.)