Book on Great War that could have saved world from nuclear catastrophe

In his introduction to his ‘Philosophy of History’, Hegel wrote: ‘What experience and history teach us is this – that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it’.

Was Hegel right in this assertion? Evidence is not lacking in support of his contention. However, is Hegel’s assertion always true?

In 1962 Barbara Tuchman published a book entitled ‘The Guns of August’ about the outbreak of the First World War which she attributed to bungling diplomacy.

It is possible that during the Cuban missile crisis a close reading of this book by both Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister of the day, and John F Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, helped to avert a nuclear war in October 1962

The book had been published by the Macmillan family’s publishing house earlier in the year. According to Alistair Horne, Macmillan’s official biographer, Tuchman’s book ‘profoundly affected him’.

During the crisis, two things were at the forefront of Macmillan’s mind: first, the unspeakable catastrophe of a world war which he believed would go nuclear very quickly and, secondly, his conviction that the conflict would come about through a combination of inadvertence and miscalculation, as he believed was the case in 1914.

As a veteran of the Great War, it was never far from Macmillan’s thoughts. His shuffling gait resulted from being wounded at Ginchy on September 15 1916. He suffered from the pain of that wound until the day he died.

His limp handshake was the result of being shot through the hand at the Battle of Loos the previous year.

The memory of his many friends and contemporaries who died during the war weighed heavily with him.

(As an old man. he told his grandson, the 2nd Earl of Stockton, that he had nightmares about only two things: ‘the trenches in the Great War and what would have happened if the Cuban missile crisis had gone wrong’.)

Kennedy was a veteran of the Second World War rather than the First. Like Macmillan, he too suffered from his wartime injuries for the rest of his life.

Like Macmillan, Kennedy was historically minded. He had studied history/international relations at Harvard and was the author of two historical works: ‘Why England Slept’ (1940) and ‘Profiles in Courage’ (1956).

Kennedy read Tuchman’s book in July and was so impressed that he gave copies to his cabinet and military advisors, instructing them to read it. Kennedy often quoted from it and wished every army officer to read it as well. Copies were despatched to every US military base in the world. Whether the target audience read the book of course is another matter.

Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, recalled that Kennedy explained that Tuchman revealed how Europe’s leadership bungled into war and that he was not going to do the same.

Kennedy’s reading of Tuchman ‘focused on a conversation between two German leaders [Bülow, the German chancellor prior to 1909, and Bethmann-Hollweg, his successor and the chancellor in July 1914], shortly after the outbreak of war.

“How did it all happen?” one [Bülow] asked.

“Ah,” the other [Bethmann-Hollweg] replied, “If only one knew.”

Kennedy told his White House staff members, ‘if this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war – and the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison and catastrophe – I do not want one of those survivors to ask another “How did it all happen?” and to receive the incredible reply: “Ah, if only we knew”.’

As the United States had never envisaged the deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, there was no plan in existence to deal with this scenario.

EXCOMM (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) identified a range of options:

• Do nothing: American vulnerability to Soviet missiles was not new.

• Diplomacy: Use diplomatic pressure to get the Soviet Union to remove the missiles.

• Secret approach: Offer Castro [the Cuban leader] the choice of splitting with the Russians or being invaded.

• Invasion: Full force invasion of Cuba and overthrow of Castro.

• Air strike: Use the US Air Force to attack all known missile sites.

• Blockade: Use the US Navy to block any missiles from arriving in Cuba.

The (US) Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously agreed that a full-scale attack and invasion was the only solution.

They believed that the Soviets would not attempt to stop the US from conquering Cuba. Kennedy, surely correctly, thought this improbable: ‘They, no more than we, can let these things go by without doing something. They can’t, after all their statements, permit us to take out their missiles, kill a lot of Russians, and then do nothing. If they don’t take action in Cuba, they certainly will in Berlin.’

Tuchman influenced Kennedy’s handling of the crisis in Cuba, especially the profound and unpredictable implications of rapid escalation. Kennedy was extremely wary of the advice of his military advisors and gave paramount importance to diplomacy.

In 1961 in his ground-breaking book ‘Griff nach der Weltmacht’, the German historian Fitz Fischer posited a different explanation for the outbreak of the Great War which held sway for several decades. He contended that the German government deliberately used the July Crisis, following events in Sarajevo, to advance plans for the creation of a German-dominated Europe (Mitteleuropa) and Africa (Mittelafrika). Although the Germans did not want a war with the British Empire, Fischer believed it was a risk they were prepared to take.

Fischer was published in English in 1968 as ‘Germany’s Aims in the First World War’.

Many books appeared to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 2014. Max Hastings’ ‘Catastrophe’ came down on the side of German premeditation but Christopher Clark’s ‘The Sleepwalkers’ and Margaret MacMillan’s ‘The War That Ended Peace’ favoured the bungling thesis.

If in 1962 Kennedy and Macmillan had read Fischer rather than Tuchman, they might have drawn very different lessons from history. Perhaps Tuchman did save the world from nuclear catastrophe.