Why you should stop believing this WW1 myth

The Austrian Hungarian soldier under Konrad von Hötzendorf walked into the Carpathian without winter clothes and shoes with cardboard soles.
Tens of thousands Soldiers froze to death and were even eaten by wolves without ever engaging the Russians.
And Enver Pasha (I think it was him) sent Ottoman forces into the Caucasian mountains and it was almost the same story there.
Incompetence killed tens of thousands Ottoman soldiers. (And the Armenians had to pay for it)

Then we also have the Allies in Gallipoli, which is its own can of worms.

I think the Utter and Complete obliteration of the Concept of Trench Warfare in WWII with France being overrun in weeks makes the Mud and Blood from WWI look pointless and useless.

French losses in the first two years were so horrendous that they can only be explained by extreme callousness and incompetence. It was clear right from the beginning that their tactics were fundamentally wrong.

Perhaps you should also note that the British Army lost Literally hundreds of General Officers above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel during WW1, more than any other army of the time. Many many Generals included. Many of those "Lions" were generals and Colonels, killed and wounded, leading at the front of their units.

There are some issues with this.
1) The photograph of the Thumbnail is NOT an image of British generals or staff officers, it is the famous photograph of Hindenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Ludendorff from 1917. While Wilhelm certainly could be classified as a donkey, both Ludendorff and Hindenburg most assuredly as products of the German Great General Staff were NOT. It is quite disingenuous to use that photograph.
2) The German Great General Staff was designed to produce the most capable assistants for the generals, who sometimes got their command due to their nobility. It functioned admirably in that respect and produced some of the most remarkable strategists and tactitians, who, as chiefs of staff to corps and army commanders did most of the heavy lifting for their commanders and were sometimes the actually driving force. Ludendorff, loathsome though I find him, was one of the finest staff officers this system produced, Max Hoffman and Fritz von Loßberg comes to mind. Due to the influence of these staff officers, who actually had the right to go over the tops of their nominal superiors' heads directly to the surpreme warlord, the instances of really bad generalling on the German side were far and between.
3) In his seminal work "On the Psychology of Military Incomptence", Norman Dixon outlines a number of really bad British generals who should never have been in charge of a Squad, let alone a corps or army without adult supervision. Now, agreed, they were not the majority, but many of the British generals displayed a "not invented here" attitude, that their colleagues from the colonies with their fresh viewpoints and insights really resented. The British generals did learn, but they could have arrived at some insights much quicker and without the horrifying consequences. That said, no, they weren't donkeys either.

The real donkeys were those diplomats who were so unqualified in doing their jobs.

So was it a meat grinder where posh generals that didn't know what they were doing sent men to die for no other reason than because it was commanded? Yes, yes it was.

My grandfather fought in Ypers (pronounced 'Wipers' by the British tommies). He had his left arm shreaded by shrapnel in the winter of 1917. The doctors wanted to amputate his arm, or 'fuse' the bones together, so that it would be permanantly straight. He wouldn't let them do either. So they operated and gave him a ball to squeeze to build his muscles up in his left forearm. He spent many months in a hospital in Croydon, recovering...

Makes sense a british government organisation would say "the aristocracy weren't that bad" but hey I'm Australian what do i know about plebs being sent to their deaths for the king?

Lions led by donkeys

You end by admitting that Hague was "often overoptimistic" about what his troops could achieve, and that he "carried on many attacks past the point of diminishing returns." That being so, and given the extraordinary numbers of British - and commonwealth, colonial and allied - casualties that resulted throughout Hague's several years in charge in WW1, how is the idea of lions led by donkeys (or at least one donkey) a myth?

Identifying that Hague's approach would have resulted in far fewer British casualties if e.g. artillery support had worked better, surely doesn't alter the analysis that Hague exercised spectacularly poor judgment in his over-optimism and in carrying on past the point of diminishing returns despite the failure of artillery to achieve what he had wanted.

Imagine a general orders an infantry attack based on assumptions that the ground will be firm and good to run on, but it turns out that unbeknownst to the general, the ground is a quagmire or sheet ice, and the general's troops become sitting ducks and are massacred by machine gun fire as a result. It might be true that if the ground conditions had been good, the general would have acheived victory with minimal casualties. But that doesn't mean the general is not at fault for the casualties, due to his ordering an attack based on unempirical, unfounded assumptions, due to his failure to ensure the latest and most accurate intelligence preceded the attack, and due to his failure to halt the attack as soon as it became clear (or ought to have become clear) that actual conditions rendered the attack suicidal.

Also - Hague going round with what appears to be a rather fragile "travel decanter" made of glass, does not seem to be particularly strong evidence of his proximity to his troops or to the fighting. A bottle made of tin or even silver - anything more durable than glass - might have been a different story.

It's easy for future generations to criticise the past - after all, they've never had to live it, so could never understand the ins and outs of the numerous unique situations at the time.

Why no mention of the Americans? Was their late arrival not a factor?

They weren't led by Donkeys. They were led by human beings, aka homosapiens.

I don't see how any of this negates the narrative. All these problems were foreseeable.

Imagine having a guns but you sent your men to charge the heavily fortified territory. Its just dumb and stupid.

Even you said it as a timely strategic thing. Is just similar when the Japanese charge and say Bazai while being machine gunned by the Americans.

Poor leadership and initiative at low-level command and lack of coordination between infantry and artillery caused the majority of losses in the early stages of the Great War. Once these shortcomings were fixed with the introduction of combined arms operations and better command & control at all levels (introduction of new weapon systems and subsequent development of tactics attached to it), the tide and the chacracter of the war started to change dramatically. But, this was achieved after paying a heavy price for the awful slaughter...

The whole thing start to finish was an incompetent mess.
HOWEVER it's impossible to realise this if you live at the time. They had tunnel vision. They couldn't back up, and try a different approach. Everything was locked in for this debacle. It was inevitable.
Today, only Russia would conduct a war like this. And isn't that going well.
Adapt and overcome is the mantra now.

Why didn't the rulers of each country sit round a table and resolve their differences without involving all these men. I don't care how much spin this guy puts on it. The whole thing was a disgrace to a generation, another unnecessary war caused by over inflated egos up the ranks.

WWI - expendable lives sacrificed on the altar of imperial ambition. Pointless madness! But that's human aggression for you! Donkeys led by donkeys.

As an Aussie I disagree. Dumped in the wrong place & butchered.

It is not "Lions led by donkeys" rather "Lions led by asses".

More lies from the bourgeoisie. They were led by donkeys from the ruling class who used working class men to make the rich even richer.

They were still donkeys,
1. they started the fighting with old tactics because that is all thry knew. They were psrt of a boys club that didnt get a diverse range of experience and views.

2. Generals like monash knew the Somme was a doomed operation just from the lack of planning and weather forecast.

3. Fresh blood like monash came with new ideas such as combined arms and they were tge ones to put tanks to better use. Monash kicked off the 100 day war by planning a towns capture down to the minute.

4. Monash considered the British leadership a joke but he knew the British enlisted were a reasonable fighting force.

5. Monash knew how to be a general in WW1 because he was Knighted in the field, the first time someone had been knighted on a battlefield in 200 years

4.

Did the Russians learn nothing from the Russo Japanese War? (Or did anyone?)

Britain should have stayed well out of WW1. The statement led by donkeys does not refer just to the generals dictating the battle plans, it extends all the way up the ladder to Parliament and the King. Idiocy across the board, idiocy that was often rewarded to ensure we continued to be led by idiots. Churchill is a prime example. After the disaster of Gallipoli he should have been shunned permanently from public life, but no, our leaders are impervious to failure, so his continued progression to the top job was in no way impeded by the catastrophic death toll and loss of ships in the Dardanelles. Haig was a sociopath, as shown by his enthusiasm for the use of concentration camps during the Boer war. I can only imagine what the descendents of those few families that made it out of the British run South African concentration camps thought when they saw Haig throwing millions of British soldiers into the western front meat grinder. Britain should have stayed well and truly out of WW1, if we had done so we would have remained a far more civilized and prosperous country. What WW1 does show however, is how subservient the British population are to their ruling class, since the establishment were able to remain largely in place even after having been responsible for a whole generation of lost men. People are always surprised by the way empires decline, wondering why the rot is never reversed, and the answer is because the families responsible for the failure are never replaced.

Nearly 1000 commonwealth soldiers were killed on the final day of fighting when command knew the war was to end at 11 o'clock. Just one example to show how the military elite showed contempt for the lives of soldiers throughout ww1. The label of 'donkeys' is too kind for these monsters.

Fact being - many of these Lions only spoke quietly, once home, among close family - feeling ironically guilty for doing so!

I agree with most of the thrust of this video. What didn't help Haig and his contemporaries was the public reliance in the 1930s on the war poets where their output was taken to be historical truth regardless of the context or circumstances when they were written. Let's not forget, most frontline troops had a very narrow view of what was happening and why. How many poems were written by senior officers? Thousands turned up at Haig's funeral. Maybe that is a better judgment on him. Also Clarke has a lot to answer for...

By the second year of the war, almost every field officer was a veteran with field experience. The expansion of the officer corps came from the junior officers who had survived those brutal first battles.

So damn glad I eventually grew up to realize there is absolutely NOTHING romantic about war. (Unfortunately I also grew up to realize that the deeper and more REAL reasons as to WHY war of such magnitude happens to START WITH is not EXACTLY what I have been told about in my public school history classes-- and of course "Hollywood" had to to throw in its "2 cents" as well, making dopes like me dream of becoming "real men" and "war heroes".....Not to mention the TOY industry cranking out lots of "war toys", for little boys, if not to romanticize war, at least make it seem "entertaining" and/or "fun".)

But yeah--WW1 was I understand it now, was particularly gruesome in its bloodletting, and with the mud and the trench life in general, quite exquisite in its Hellishness even if one was NOT fighting for one's life, but just for basic food/warmth/dryness/cleanliness/comfort.

2000 men died within the last few hours of World War One … because The Donkeys ordered them to fight on to the last minute.

I would say if anyone deserves the moniker of "lions lead by donkeys" It's the Grech troops in the summer 1914 offensive.

'The Trench' remains undefeated 100 years still going strong 💪🏽

Oh, and we were led by donkeys. Jolly old chaps with scant regard or knowledge of modern warfare.

Again we have the establishment attempting to rewrite history and make out that WWI was actually really necessary and they had no choice, which goes against all the facts on the ground. This was an imperialist war with countries fighting tor power and territory and eventually dividing it all up between themselves. This is what all wars are fundamentally about. It was a class war with a ridiculous diregard for how many lives were lost as long as those in power achieved their aims. Stop pretending it was anything else.

This still doesn’t say why there was a war- because two kings and two governments wanted one and sent everyone else out to die to them.
Totally different from WWII where Britain and Democratic allies were under attack by a murderous man on one side.

One was an arms race gone wrong, the other one was curbing a brutal murderous imperialist.

Feel free to discuss this with me, I’m here to learn as much as I am to give my opinion.

The elites back in that day were extremely brave and they had a culture of leading from the front.

oh how the elites try to erase stories of the lower man

History gets reexamined and reframed every couple years and changes according to the culture, ideas and politics of the day. 100 years from now someone will make a documentary that reexamines and reframes WW1 again with supposed new insights. History is a agreed upon lie.

Of course ‘Imperial War Museums’ thinks it’s a myth that a load of civilians were massacred for now good reason under the orders and control of leaders who were safe in their bed chambers and had no regard for the average person. How convenient.

The US should never been involved with this war

Literally had the Russo-Japanese war 10 years before. There was a whole manual to read up on around massive casualties using the same tactics on land based mass attacks

Not a myth: a quote from Max Hoffmann head of Imperial German Intelligence.

You mean myth"s"? It's not black and white. Some generals are not donkeys, while some others are not donkeys

Excellent work. If Douglas Haig wasn't up to the job in Lloyd George's opinion, why didn't he fire him?

I highly doubt that modern bureaucrats would have dealt with a spectacular technological revolution as well as the WWI generation did. Very easy to point fingers from the benefit of hindsight.

I don't believe anyone calls them donkeys. I believe they say their lack of long term global strategy was the issue tying everything. Being critical of these generals is the most nuanced view. Please don't try to rewrite history.

You want to be ‘more nuanced’ you say?? Well then, I guess I should revise my views a bit, to the more nuanced: they were despairing sheep, led by pompous incompetents, governed by brutal oafs, hellbent on bathing Europe in blood.

It’s almost as though simple populist mainstream catch all narratives are never true when matched with nuanced academic analysis. Who’d have thought?

WW1, as WW11,WERE ABOUT ENRICHING THE WORLD ELITE ,once again, the masses were deceived and manipulated for the benefit of the few.The two world wars are only two examples of the endless misery humanity has suffered for the sake of their leader's. The misery list is endless and ranges from war ,forced famine,medical crisis, and more recently "natural" disaster ,since globalists can now control weather.Puur evil and manipulation ,and it's time to expose these monsters .