conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Short, History, War with the genre: History, Military?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'A Short History of World War I'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Short History of World War I
  Once more the job was entrusted to von Boehn's 7th Army, attacking along the Marne and up the eastern face of the Marne bulge to Reims. Mudra's 1st Army would support by attacking Mont Blanc, east of the city. Fifty-two German divisions should have little trouble breaking the Allied line and reaching Châlons, twenty miles in the rear. July 15 was the date, and as soon as the Germans had won this limited battle and taught the French to stay put, it was off to Flanders and victory!
  Foch and Pétain had a mixed bag with which to hold the impending drive. Along the front there were thirty-six Allied divisions, twenty-three French, two British, two Italian, and nine American. The over-sized United States divisions were still pretty green, but numerically they were equal to eighteen Allied divisions, so they represented a major addition, untried or not.
  Even more important than numbers was the fact that German morale was cracking now, and the most obvious manifestation of this was a steady trickle of deserters, who obligingly told their captors all about the coming attack, its timing, its direction, its strength, and everything else the Allies wanted to know. Deserters are so eager to please that they are not always reliable as sources of information, but there were enough of them now, and they told sufficiently coherent pieces of the story, for the Allies to know all about it.
  Therefore, just as with the fourth offensive, the counterbarrage began before the German barrage started and raked the attacking troops as they moved up to their jumping-off positions. Foch was also able to prepare a small counteroffensive force to use when he believed the Germans had passed the crest of their attack. They still fought well, however. Along the Marne they crossed the river and made a few bridgeheads; they hit the American 3rd Division from front, left, and right, and the division, with its flanking units pushed back, found itself fighting on three sides at once, one of its regiments earning the nickname, "the Rock of the Marne." To the east, nearer Reims, the Italians were driven back, but British divisions came in and helped stiffen the line. Over on the 1st Army's sector, in the supporting attack, the Germans got nowhere, and they gave it up before noon of the first day. On the Marne and around Epernay, they were fought out by the 19th and sullenly gave over. The fifth great German offensive ended in near despair; there was not to be a sixth.
  Through all these months of furious activity Ludendorff had been the dominant intelligence. Though Hindenburg was officially Chief of the General Staff, it was Ludendorff in his post as quartermaster-general who planned the attacks, controlled them, and indeed directed the larger issues of German policy and war-making. The aged field marshal had contented himself with grumping around headquarters, looking at maps and fiddling with troop strength figures. Now, as Ludendorff's last offensive was sputtering out and as Foch's first counteroffensive was beginning, Ludendorff went to talk to Hindenburg. He got cold comfort; he asked what Germany ought to do now. "Do? do!" Hindenburg bellowed. "Make peace, you idiot!"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In Woodrow Wilson's mind the supremely important item for discussion was the League of Nations, and it was to this project that he directed his main energies. Unhappily for him, other things kept getting in the way. The British, for example, immediately rejected his point on the freedom of the seas. It was as important for them to command the seas as it was for France to command the Rhineland, and they were not going to give that up in the name of some vague principle. As his own navy thoroughly agreed with Britain on this one, Wilson soon let that point drop.
  Having either resolved or set aside these difficulties, the peacemakers moved on to the covenant of the League of Nations. The chief difficulty about this, since everyone perforce had to agree that it was a good idea in itself, was that the French wanted the League to have a general staff and an army. Only when the Americans and British promised the subsequently stillborn mutual defense treaty did they give it up.
  Wilson then returned home to the United States during a short recess while all the major leaders attended to domestic problems. He found himself faced with a revolt in Congress, where a Republican Senate was violently hostile both to him and to the kind of commitments the League might entail. When Wilson returned to Versailles, therefore, his position was very much weakened, and he was forced to ask for a series of amendments watering down the League covenant. This allowed virtually everyone else to grind his own ax, and there was yet a further move away from any possibility of general reconciliation. The three major areas of disagreement eventually turned out to be reparations, the frontiers of Germany, and plums for the Italians.
  The reparations question not only dogged the conference, it remained one of the major bones of international contention until at least the Depression, and in a sense right up until the Second World War. Various commissions had striven mightily to deal with it at Versailles. The tradition of paying war damages was well established, and France had been forced to do this both in 1815 and again in 1870. Never before, however, had the damage been so tremendous or the costs so high. The problem centered around what should be counted as a war cost, and views ranged from those who wanted Germany to pay for reconstruction of damaged buildings and sunken shipping, to those who wanted her to pay widow's and children's pensions, all the costs of defeating her, and everything else they could think of. Even by the time the treaty was signed there was no agreement, and the Germans were constrained to accept the fact that they would pay a sum to be determined later. The whole question eventually tailed off into those esoteric realms of high finance that are incomprehensible to normal persons, where it got tangled up with Allied war debts to one another and especially to the United States, and it never was satisfactorily resolved.
  There was more agreement on the question of German frontiers, for virtually everyone was united on the idea that border states should be enhanced and Germany diminished. Many of these frontier questions were already touched upon in the territorial provisions of the Fourteen Points. They were also resolved by the independent action taken by claimants to statehood in the dying days of the war, so in spite of the peacemakers' efforts to establish fair and viable frontiers, they often found themselves merely accepting what had already been accomplished. They ended up with a large Poland, giving it access to the sea through the valley of the Vistula. This cut off East Prussia from Germany proper and became a constant complaint of later German leaders. In fact such a settlement was historically and ethnically just; until the partitions of the late eighteenth century, East Prussia had always been so detached from Germany. In a concession to German feelings, the city of Danzig at the mouth of the Vistula was organized as a free city and not united with Poland. The gesture of good will ultimately backfired, for Danzig became a major stalking point for Hitler later on.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In Woodrow Wilson's mind the supremely important item for discussion was the League of Nations, and it was to this project that he directed his main energies. Unhappily for him, other things kept getting in the way. The British, for example, immediately rejected his point on the freedom of the seas. It was as important for them to command the seas as it was for France to command the Rhineland, and they were not going to give that up in the name of some vague principle. As his own navy thoroughly agreed with Britain on this one, Wilson soon let that point drop.
  Having either resolved or set aside these difficulties, the peacemakers moved on to the covenant of the League of Nations. The chief difficulty about this, since everyone perforce had to agree that it was a good idea in itself, was that the French wanted the League to have a general staff and an army. Only when the Americans and British promised the subsequently stillborn mutual defense treaty did they give it up.
  Wilson then returned home to the United States during a short recess while all the major leaders attended to domestic problems. He found himself faced with a revolt in Congress, where a Republican Senate was violently hostile both to him and to the kind of commitments the League might entail. When Wilson returned to Versailles, therefore, his position was very much weakened, and he was forced to ask for a series of amendments watering down the League covenant. This allowed virtually everyone else to grind his own ax, and there was yet a further move away from any possibility of general reconciliation. The three major areas of disagreement eventually turned out to be reparations, the frontiers of Germany, and plums for the Italians.
  The reparations question not only dogged the conference, it remained one of the major bones of international contention until at least the Depression, and in a sense right up until the Second World War. Various commissions had striven mightily to deal with it at Versailles. The tradition of paying war damages was well established, and France had been forced to do this both in 1815 and again in 1870. Never before, however, had the damage been so tremendous or the costs so high. The problem centered around what should be counted as a war cost, and views ranged from those who wanted Germany to pay for reconstruction of damaged buildings and sunken shipping, to those who wanted her to pay widow's and children's pensions, all the costs of defeating her, and everything else they could think of. Even by the time the treaty was signed there was no agreement, and the Germans were constrained to accept the fact that they would pay a sum to be determined later. The whole question eventually tailed off into those esoteric realms of high finance that are incomprehensible to normal persons, where it got tangled up with Allied war debts to one another and especially to the United States, and it never was satisfactorily resolved.
  There was more agreement on the question of German frontiers, for virtually everyone was united on the idea that border states should be enhanced and Germany diminished. Many of these frontier questions were already touched upon in the territorial provisions of the Fourteen Points. They were also resolved by the independent action taken by claimants to statehood in the dying days of the war, so in spite of the peacemakers' efforts to establish fair and viable frontiers, they often found themselves merely accepting what had already been accomplished. They ended up with a large Poland, giving it access to the sea through the valley of the Vistula. This cut off East Prussia from Germany proper and became a constant complaint of later German leaders. In fact such a settlement was historically and ethnically just; until the partitions of the late eighteenth century, East Prussia had always been so detached from Germany. In a concession to German feelings, the city of Danzig at the mouth of the Vistula was organized as a free city and not united with Poland.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs. End with the sentence ' For the true picture of what the war did to those who fought it, that is the place to start.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Much has been written both on the problem of navalism and the Anglo-German rivalry, and also on naval operations during the war itself. The British official history is Sir J. Corbett and H. Newbolt, Naval Operations (London, 5 vols., 1920–31). A. J. Marder produced the classic study of the Fisher era in Fear God and Dread Nought (London, 3 vols., 1952–59). E. L. Woodward wrote a thorough study of the prewar rivalry in Great Britain and the German Navy (London, 1935), and Admiral von Tirpitz wrote My Memoirs (English edition, New York, 2 vols., 1919). General surveys of operations are in G. Bennett, Naval Battles of the First World War (London, 1968) and the more popularly written A. A. Hoehling, The Great War at Sea: A History of Naval Action, 1914–18 (New York, 1965).
  Jutland alone, as the greatest dreadnought battle ever, has inspired a substantial literature. Admiral Jellicoe wrote The Grand Fleet, 1914–16 (London, 1919) and Scheer countered with Germany's High Seas Fleet in the World War (English edition, New York, 1934). Most rivalry has centered, however, less around British and German than around British and British, and the great argument has been between those writers who supported the claims of Admiral Beatty's greatness, versus those who favored Jellicoe; though this might seem fairly petty in the aftermath of universal catastrophe, the controversy reached very considerable levels of acrimony in the years after the war, and certain Royal Naval officers had their careers jeopardized by taking the wrong side, whichever that happened to be. The American H. H. Frost wrote what was for long the standard study of The Battle of Jutland (Annapolis, Maryland, 1936), and L. Gibson and J. E. T. Harper did The Riddle of Jutland (New York, 1934). More recent are D. MacIntyre's Jutland (London, 1957), and G. Bennett's The Battle of Jutland (London, 1964), and an excellent study is J. J. C. Irving, The Smoke Screen of Jutland (London, 1966).
  Specific works deal with other battles. The Goeben and Breslau affair is covered in E. W. R. Lumby, ed., The Mediterranean, 1912–1914 (Vol. 115 of the publications of the Navy Records Society, London, 1970). Barrie Pitt wrote Coronel and Falkland (London, 1960) and G. Bennett did Coronel and the Falklands (London, 1962); Admiral Keyes dealt with the naval side of the Dardanelles in The Naval Memoirs of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes (London, 2 vols., 1935). Barrie Pitt wrote Zeebrugge: St. George's Day, 1918 (London, 1958), and D. Horn covered The German Naval Mutinies of World War I (New Brunswick, N. J., 1969). On what is probably the most famous single incident of the submarine war there is C. Simpson, The Lusitania (Boston, 1972), and there have also been studies of practically all the cruises of the different German surface raiders.
  A popular history of the war in the air is Quentin Reynolds, They Fought for the Sky (New York, 1957); a similar work is A. Norman, The Great Air War (New York, 1968). More specific studies are J. Morris, The German Air Raids on Great Britain, 1914–1918 (London, 1969), and K. Poolman, Zeppelins over England (London, 1960). As was the desert revolt, the air war was one of the places where individuality might be preserved, and several classic memoirs of the air aces have recently been reprinted by Doubleday in New York. These include W. A. Bishop's Winged Warfare (1967), D. Grinnell-Milne's Wind in the Wires (1968), J. T. B. McCudden, Flying Fury (1968), Rene Fonck's Ace of Aces (1969), and Eddie Rickenbacker's Fighting the Flying Circus (1965). Floyd Gibbons' The Red Knight of Germany (New York, 1927) is the first of a substantial literature on Baron von Richthofen alone.
  Finally, the cautionary note should be repeated that this list does just skim the surface. Many of these works contain very thorough bibliographies of their own; in addition to them, there are far more massive official histories than the British naval work, which is the only one mentioned by name. Many of the participants beyond the major ones noted here left memoirs; this was not only the most terrible war in history to date, it was also one which drew into it an enormous number of educated, highly literate men, and after the war the survivors produced a war literature, in poetry and fiction, that is unsurpassed in depth or feeling. For the true picture of what the war did to those who fought it, that is the place to start.