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One of the reasons the Eastern Front is not in people memory is probably in part due to the names: Przemyśl was as big a fortress as Verdun and caused the Russians all kinds of headaches. But The Battle of Verdun commits itself to memory better than The Battle of That Place No One Can Pronounce.

This was a different understanding of the Paris Peace Conference and the resulting treaties (!) than I have ever heard before! All of the other explanations focused strictly on the Versailles Treaty with the Germans. Mention was occasionally made of the continued conflicts in other areas beyond the German treaty, but no explanations or details were given to broaden the understanding of the larger picture of the multiple problems in the rest of the world. I am really interested now in learning about this larger picture! Thanks so much!

Don’t like Billy Mitchell, ‘eh? He probably wouldn’t like you either l! 🤣🤣

This is absolutely delightful, Brett. Thank you so much for your amazing presentation, your wonderful book, and moreover you ebullient sense of humor.

My grandfather worked for the missouri pacific rr in falls city nebraska maintaining locomotives when ww1 started for the united states in 1917 he joined the us army did bootcamp in new mexico and went to france as a us army railroad engineer they were some of the first americans to arrive over there and they did not come back untill 1919

Excellent lecture! Going to get the book.

Look up the Battle of Amiens, August 8 1918 which Ludendorff called the Black day of the German army in the war. The Australian and Canadian corps advanced 8 miles in a day and began the 100 day advance which ended with the armistice on November 11.

Fantastic program

Always loved you guys' work.

How did Falkenhayn not consider that he could manage to bleed the French army but with a high risk of bleeding the German army at the same time? However, he was far from being an idiot. Okay, it's easy to write it more than a hundred years after the battle...

I'd always been a little ambivalent with the typical conventional wisdom that Jutland was "indecisive" or "inconclusive"; thanks for that perspective on its larger significance. It's easy to see why that perception dominates, of course. And it's easy to see how British opinion - whether among the public at large or within the UK govt and RN - was rather dissatisfied. But, "continuation of a status quo in which your navy already decisively dominates anyway" has to be counted as a strategic success, does it not? No matter how unsatisfying it may have been on an operational or tactical level. Another way to look at it might be that Jutland could not have been anything OTHER than strategically "indecisive", regardless of tactical outcome. If Jellicoe does win the tactically "decisive" victory which so many have said for a century that he should have, does that really change anything in the big picture? It's hard to see how it would have. It's not as if Britain would have been able to "blockade harder" than it was doing anyway. It's also not as if it was really the HSF which primarily denied a realistic amphibious threat to Germany's North Sea and Baltic coasts...submarines, mines, robust coastal defenses/artillery, and simple geography/hydrography seem to have been larger - or at very least equal - factors. It seems to me that a "decisive" (and necessarily far bloodier) Jutland would still have meant just what it did in the actual event: preservation - but no real improvement - of a status quo which already heavily favored Britain. So the only real difference would have been "merely" a lot more ships sunk and many thousands more British and German sailors killed. One could perhaps argue that Jutland's historical outcome - relatively light losses given the mammoth forces involved - was actually the best-case result for both navies. Short of the battle simply not having been fought at all, of course. Very much a "hindsight 20/20" take from a century-later perspective, I admit.

My Great Uncle was in the 320th infantry 80th division and was killed in action on the first day of this campaign.

My Great Uncle was in the 80th division 320th regiment on the front line during this war. He was killed in action on the first day.

(31:45) The Grand Fleet, expecting a torpedo attack, turns away from the Hochseeflotte when it makes an about turn - and thus loses contact. A 'Jutland watcher' for many years, I only recently learned in another YT video that turning away from a torpedo attack was the Standard Operating Procedure in the Royal Navy at the time of Jutland. Of course, the pertinence of that SOP is a matter of debate (a torpedo hit in the propellers is the worst thing that can happen to a battleship), but for a Navy man a SOP is a SOP! If it is true that turning away was the SOP at the time of Jutland - and I wish Dr Kuehn could confirm - I can't see how Jellicoe could be blamed for implementing it in such critical circumstances.

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Here Horlice-Tarnow Offensive was called the most successive battle of The Eastern Front. How about Faustschlag?

It is interesting to watch how researchers accentuate on ethnic and linguistical diversity of A-H and at the same time doesn't pay atention to russian empire which was even more diverse. It is clear that russians doesn't give a fuck to all peoples of their empire. But come on if A-H paid attention to that issue then they had less problems with that issue. And by the way only thing A-H soldier must know were 80 German words to understand commands. So don't make the big deal out of that matter More to say people in multiethnical/multicultural regions which were in A-H deal with each other pretty well. So why they couldn't get along if they put them in uniform? A-H army was formed on territiorial basis. People from the same region became the part of the same formation at least at the start of the war A-H had defincies and disadvantages byt that was not one of them How about colonial soldiers of France or Britain. They all knew English or French? How all that non-French troops on Western Front were coordinated with each other and with French?

Keep the audio not too loud and that video would be great thing to sleep

this is very good

History doesn't repeat, it rhymes, is an excellent point of view

Excellent presentation! I loved to see all the old photos and newspaper clippings. Well done.

My paternal grandfather, Thomas M. Hewitt, jr. Was a a member of the Original Lafayette Escadrille 😎

At a good 12 minutes in, I'm really curious if the speaker is actually going to give any decent argumentation for his categoric statement that imperialism was NOT one of, if not THE main (hehe) reason for WW1. I am however not feeling very confident he will, seeing as he followed that up with the statement that nationalism was not at all a reason for the soldiers to go into war and die for their nation/country. That is just totally irrelevant to the point, namely the causes of WW1. As if however the soldiers felt had any influence on the people making the decision to go to war, the same people who set up the whole tangled web of alliances that made conflict almost impossible to avoid. And also the very same people who created, maintained and benefitted from their respective empires, and who consequently absolutely refused to let go of it, no matter how many millions they had to send to the abattoir. The sentiments, political convictions and willingness of the common man has no place in this discussion, and using it as an argument to support your point is intellectually dishonest, not to say completely ridiculous.

The USA has only always gained greatly by setting up a world in which others fail. The faster the rest of the world realizes this, the better. *Washington DC power mongers employ the divide and rule technique of power.* In the past, and as one of the Big Three at Versailles, they covertly set up Europe for failure, masked behind overt expressions of "fighting for freedom and democracy." In reality, Versailles was a covert implementation of the divide and rule technique. _Europe was divided, with a ruling._ This strategy is often misunderstood, in narratives composed mostly of "being friends" or "being rivals/enemies", even though it only means that one can gain greatly if others are divided and fail. It _is_ as simple as that. "Friends" or "enemies" play no role: if others fail, the own systems gain. After Europe failed, the final domino stone Washington DC actively toppled was the British Empire. After two world wars, with countless emerging struggles in the colonies, so by 1945 the already seriously weakened and overextended Great Britain was an easy pushover... When Europe failed, as all states fought to mutual exhaustion, who gained most? From "Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire." -- Michael Hudson, 2nd edition 2003 "What actually occurred was that Britain and other countries became hopelessly indebted to the United States once again (edit: during World War 2) ... “We have profited by our past mistakes,” announced Roosevelt in a speech delivered on September 3, 1942. “This time we shall know how to make full use of victory.” This time the U.S. Government would conquer its allies in a more enlightened manner, by demanding economic concessions of a legal and political nature instead of futilely seeking repayment of its wartime loans (of World War 1). The new postwar strategy sought and secured foreign markets for U.S. exports, and new fields for American investment capital in Europe’s raw materials producing colonial areas. Despite Roosevelt’s assurances to the contrary, Britain was compelled, under the Lend-Lease agreements and the terms of the first great U.S. postwar loan to Britain, to relinquish Empire Preference and to open all its markets to U.S. competition, at a time when Britain desperately needed these markets as a means by which to fund its sterling debt. Most important of all, Britain was forced to unblock its sterling and foreign-exchange balances built up by its colonies and other Sterling Area countries during the wartime years. Instead of the Allied Powers as a whole bearing the costs of these wartime credits to British Empire countries, they would be borne by Britain itself. Equally important, they would not be used as “blocked” balances that could be used only to buy British or other Sterling Area exports, but would be freed to purchase exports from any nation. Under postwar conditions this meant that they would be used in large part to purchase U.S. exports. (page 115/116) By relinquishing its right to block these balances, Britain gave up its option, while enabling the United States to make full use of its gold stock as the basis for postwar lending to purchased generalized (primarily U.S.) exports. At a stroke, Britain’s economic power was broken. What Germany as foe had been unable to accomplish in two wars against Britain, the United States accomplished with ease as its ally.(Page 117) Furthermore, under the terms on which it joined the International Monetary Fund, Britain could not devalue the pound sterling so as to dissipate the foreign-exchange value of these balances. Its liability thus was maximized - and so was America’s gain from the pool of liquidity that these balances now represented." (end of) *Only ONE attribute decides whether a system is THE DIVIDER, or becomes a part of "the divided": POWER.* After 1945 London was turned from its role of "divider of the world" into the role of "one of the divided" (the role of FAVORITE junior partner, the "peaceful handover of power" and related "special relationship"-narrative. "Special"-relationship in a power balance. These Washington DC power mongers must be rotfl...) Whatever... If your state or nation is "not at the table," you are "lunch" (Anthony Blinken). The dividers telling everybody in no uncertain terms, that their interests and even their lives don't count. *There is no doubt that Washington DC is attempting to repeat this "success" (pov) in the rising powers of Asia. The strategy can be observed to be implemented in the same way as was set up post-1900 in Europe, but in Europe the "buck catchers" (John Mearsheimer theory) were Great Britain and France. Today, it is India being used in the same role as France was 100 years ago. In case of a wider war in Asia, as India is set up against China, qui bono if _all_ lose?* The technique Washington DC employed up to the year 2000, is an almost exact repeat of the technique they used to overpower Europe around the year 1900: DIVIDE AND RULE. Divide and rule *creates* all that follows in its wake: 1) The terrorist. 2) The state of terror. 3) The terror state.

The comparison of numbers of victims of atrocities on the eastern front with those in France and Belgium around 33:00 ... Although the speaker said the numbers in the west are not to be bagatelised, that IS kind of what you do when you simply state that the victim numbers in the east were at least tenfold. I'm quite convinced that when you set off total victim numbers against total population and square miles of the area in which those numbers occured, you will find the atrocity victims in the west at least on par with the east, if not higher because of higher concentration of incidents. Anyhow, a very enjoyable presentation.

I wonder why the dirigibles were never used on the British fleet....?

You did make a great presentation; however, you unfortunately must be a little mitigated in your acceptance of youtube comments because whether or not Chris Clark or even as extreme as Ferguson are 'right', they would never get support becuase the comments here are really representations like Fox or CNN about views people had before they even listened to a point of view. I listened to Sir ____who I cannot remember acknowledge his bias before speaking and multiple times was against yet respectful towards mcmeekin. Thank you as a presenter for not pandering to the people who see what they want. Thank you for showing that the doves became hawks in a moment was not ideology but the Machiavellian blood and iron. But above all, thank you for showing that historians can be passionate but unbias

I love this episode. Dr. Stone is great and the topic is one of my favorites.

I believe the Archduke’s driver had trouble turning around when the wrong turn was realized because the car DIDN’T have a reverse gear.

Chris you were amazing. You will be missed.

This guy has a lot of opinions that's for sure. He may be the worst lecturer chosen for this entire channel.

Great lecture

‘The German Fleet has assaulted its jailer, but it is still in jail.’ A famous quote but sums up Jutland perfectly. A couple of other points which are worth mentioning. In English Law dead men can't sue so I suspect that any attempt to sue for reputational damage would fail. Secondly, and this is pertinent to the US, a key thing that happened after the US declaration of war in April 1917 is the sending of Battleship Division Nine to Scapa in Nov 1917. That added four dreadnaughts to the strength of the Grand Fleet ...

Great lecture

Great lecture

I knew about the big names in this lecture but this was very informative. Very well done. This is one of the most informative lectures in the entire channel

Music is about telling a story

I'm from Jerusalem Israel. Originally from San Francisco California

Thank you. Great lecture.

Thank Mr skeltal

The treaty was the biggest cock up in modern times!

WWI started out pure ego and WWII started out pure evil.

And again today they are doing the exact same thing again with the war between Iran, Arabians, Turkish, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Russia against Israel, the Turks are trying to destroy Armenia again.

I am not Armenian nor do I have family who have married into the people. But I stand with them and I pay them homage to the great evil that was done to them. And even today the same people are doing the exact same thing again. How many more will be destroyed?

2:19 I know it’s not ideal, but these virtual experiences allow many people to see great knowledge like this. Thank you.

A stalemate - questionable. Germany could not change the blockade, the strategic situation remained unchanged, but by counts of men and ships lost Scheer won that battle, sry. Plse do not mix the tactical outcome of a battle and he strategic situation of a war. Otherwise you have to declare the bloody defeat at the Somme as a victory as well. Battle lost for the Brits - not by far a decisive loss for them neither a decisive win for Kaiser' battlefleet.

Never really agreed with the Easterners, those among the British who wanted to fight in the 'classic' British way. Fact is the Western Front was the primary and main land front of the war. Had the British NOT sent so many men to fight in France and Belgium it is debatable whether France could have held on. Had France been knocked out of WWI then it was lost.... I think the Easterners, both then and now fail to realise that fact.