Rating: 
Summary: The Tipping Point of the Great War...
Review: For a long while there seemed to be few books on World War One. Now there seems to be a provocative new title each month. John Mosier is an English professor at the University of New Orleans who came up with an innovative curriculum to study the two world wars. In this new book, which relies on a body of recent research drawn from fresh sources, Mosier depicts the Germans as superior in every way to the armies and leadership of the French and British. He maintains that the war had reached a tipping pint and that it was only the intervention of the Americans in 1917 and 1918 that insured the final victory of the Allies.
Rating: 
Summary: Controversially Boring
Review: As a junior in high school, reading a book as a required assignment, I might have a different attitude about it then people just picking it up for fun. We are actually studying the great war right now, and I think that my teacher covered it about as in depth as I need to know. I really enjoyed the preface and introduction, by that point I thought the book was going to be ok. Well after falling asleep multiple times after trying to get through endless pages of stats and seemingly slanted information, I wondered if I was going to make it. Some parts were interesting. I noticed that I would like one paragraph, and find out something new and interesting, then completely loose interest in the next paragraph. I actually did enjoy some of the detail because it added onto things I am learning about. Sometimes it got to be a little much, I enjoyed parts of the book, so eventually started just reading parts of the book. The interesting new approach and opinions also started getting me thinking.
Overall, I would recommend the book, but not for a light reading. If you are a diehard WWI or doing some kind of research it's a great book. It was fun to pick and choose parts too. I am glad I read it, but would warn people to objectify what they would be reading if for before taking it off the shelf
Rating: 
Summary: The Myth of a Good Book !
Review: I picked up this book at an airport and read it in a single session (you can do that on a 15 hour flight to the US !). In fact, once I started, I couldn't stop, but sadly that's not meant to be praise. It was more a case that I couldn't believe what I was reading! Of particular concern was the fact that Mr. Mosier attempted to justify his controversial thesis with an almost total reliance on secondary sources and a far too selective editing of even those sources for me to feel even slightly comfortable that I should take his points of view seriously. The biggest problem with the thesis is that it all falls apart in the early months of 1918. Given all that Mr Mosier has argued about the state of the Allied armies in 1916-17, and the superior battlefield prowess of the German Army, the release of the German Armies facing the Russians should have given the Germans the ability to defeat the Allies before the arrival of the Americans in strength. Their hammer blows staggered the British, but didn't break them....and German casualties reached the same peak as they had in 1914 when they were doing the attacking. In this review I intended to go into detail as to why I can't recommend this book, but on reaching this site I discovered that I had already been beaten to the punch (see Dr. Robert A. Forczyk's review amongst others). So rather than repeat the glaring inconsistancies contained in the text, I'll point you at some books that are worth tracking down because they present a compelling (and well researched) counterpoint to Mr. Mosier's ramblings on the causes of the war, performance of the BEF vs the German Army, and the contribution of the AEF to final Allied victory. "The Guns of August" by Barbara W. Tuchman. Written back in the '60s, but still the best narrative on the lurch towards war, as well as the first month of the conflict, including why the Germans actually had no Plan B to fall back on after the failure of the Schliefen Plan. "How the War Was Won: Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917-1918" by Tim Travers. Written by a Canadian who is neither an apologist for Haig, or a historian of the "Bungler" school. For a fair, well researched, and sympathetic treatment of the AEF, in the last year of the Great War, read "The Doughboys: America and the First World War" by Gary Mead. Incidently, if you want to understand, from a German perspective, why they didn't win the war, you could start with "The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 (Modern Wars)by Holger H. Herwig". Seems that the German Army suffered from many of the problems that afflicted the Allies on the Western Front. Little things like poor leadership, command problems, heavy casualties for no gain - funny that! If you like the sort of "flapping in the wind" polemic presented by Mr. Mosier, track down Denis Winter's "Haig: A Reappraisal" - you will love it !
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but stodgy
Review: John Mosier's essential thesis - that the German army was virtually unstoppable in WW1 before the arrival of the American GI - is both cogent and compelling. His revelation that 70% of casualties were due to artillery bombardment is remarkable, considering the stereotypical representation of massed troops going 'over-the-top' and being mowed down by enemy machine-gun and rifle fire. The pernicious role of propaganda in concealing the true extent of defeat from the public in both France and Britain in the conflict is clarified and his account of the development of heavy artillery pieces is lucid and comprehensive. The role of Sir Henry Wilson in cementing the Franco-British pact of June, 1906, a pact from which the British stood to gain remarkably little is discussed. So much for content.
The book is badly written, often unclear and poorly edited. The author presupposes a detailed knowledge of the development of the war, which this reviewer, for one, did not possess. Maps, diagrams and photographs, which have added much to the understanding of characters and events of the American Civil War, for example, are conspicuous by their absence here. The book is therefore limited in its readership to historians rather than the wide readership it richly deserves. For all that, go and buy it!
Rating:
Summary: The Myth of Objectivity
Review: Let me start with what I like about John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War. The book is well researched and written from the heart by someone who clearly has a great feel for the subject. Mosier does his utmost to rescue the American involvement in the First World War from the historical vacuum into which it has fallen in the nation's collective consciousness, and kudos to him for that. Mosier asserts the German army, man for man, was superior at a tactical level to that of its enemies. I agree. His best work on this is Chapter 2, where he analyses the development of combined arms tactics in Germany prior to the outbreak of the war. Subsequent chapters detail the ruthless application of these tactics. The problem is Mosier fails to explain that the greater the German triumph at the tactical level the worse their strategic situation became. At numerous points in the book I got the distinct impression Mosier was hoping the Germans would completely overwhelm the Allies and deal them the thrashing he clearly believes they deserved. Throughout the book Allied generals (with exceptions like Petain) are incompetent; Allied politicians are shortsighted and inept; Allied media are lying propagandists; Allied war aims are self serving and amoral. "Like the Serbians, whose fanatical quest for territorial aggrandizement had started the war, Rumanians dreamed of a greater Rumania," (p 254) Mosier says. "The Rumanian army's habits of occupation resembled those of the Mongol horde more than a modern army," (p 258) he adds. After being all but annihilated, the Rumanians are reduced to holding Jassy, a region that was "the cradle of that peculiarly Rumanian blend of apocalyptic religious nationalism and anti-Semitism," (p 260) Mosier concludes. The fact that Rumania is mentioned at all highlights another inconsistency; after informing us in the preface that the focus of the book will be on the critical western front, Allied hopes of decisive victory in the east being "entirely delusionary," Mosier devotes entire chapters to other fronts when it suits him. Chapter 13 details the destruction of Rumania. Chapter 15 records the Italian collapse at Caporetto. The great Italian victory at Vittoria Veneto the following year that broke Austria Hungary is not even mentioned, nor is the capitulation of Germany's other allies that year. Mosier blithely dances around other facts that might seem inconvenient for his purposes. He doesn't hold Germany responsible for the war; after beginning Chapter 3 with the sentence, "Serbia was the first of the combatants to declare a general mobilization," in a footnote, he asserts, "the sequence of mobilization indicates ultimate responsibility for starting the war." (p 64). And that's it. All the background we're given. Nothing about Austria Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, with Germany's full support, or any other diplomatic initiatives. If you knew nothing else about the war you would be forgiven for assuming it started because Serbia wanted to go to war with Austria Hungary, a country with an army fifteen times bigger than its own in 1914. The fact is, Germany - unnecessarily, and ultimately self-defeatingly - provoked Britain into entering the war, creating the conditions for unrestricted submarine warfare and therefore the mobilization of the United States against her, by invading Belgium. This strategic blunder - quite possibly the worst in the history of warfare - was more significant than any of Germany's tactical triumphs that Mosier lavishes such detailed praise upon. The significance is lost. So is any sense of moral outrage against Germany - after all, Mosier assures us, the French talked about violating Belgian neutrality, so they're equally guilty, right? After shifting the onus for the war to the Allies, Mosier lets Germany off the moral hook throughout his work. For example, he cites with admiration the devastating effects of German employment of chemical weapons at Ypres in 1917 as just another example of German ingenuity being harnessed to provide killing power. The only attention Mosier gives to the Allied campaign of economic warfare against Germany is to dismiss it in one sentence in one footnote: "The idea that Germany and Austria were brought to their knees by the 'blockade' is convincingly dealt with in Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War." (p 284). In fact, it isn't at all. Mosier also ignores the corpus of work related to the effects of the complementary Allied propaganda campaign inside Germany. So, the great German offensive of 1918 opens, and it's successful everywhere - no question of the troops burning out or outrunning their supply lines, oh no. And at the last moment, the Allies chestnuts are hauled out of the fire by the arrival of the Americans. In the engagement at Belleau Wood, "It was the American Second and Third Divisions, collectively, that stopped the German advance to the south, and thus saved France."(p 321). And in the next few sentences Mosier explains how: by the same bloody, head-on frontal charges that had cost the British and French so much over the past four years. And then the Americans, single-handedly, roll the Germans back. No mention of the contribution of their Allies other than their body counts - the British victory at Amiens and the "Black Day" of the German army sails right by. The British are utterly hopeless. They're even more racist than the Americans! (p 311). Amusingly, Mosier, who utterly spuriously describes Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War as "the first work of any intellectual substance on the general issues of the war to appear since Churchill," adds, "The reader will notice that Ferguson's arguments and mine frequently converge on the same conclusion, although using drastically different methods to arrive there." (p 362). Actually, Ferguson's point in emphasizing the tremendous human cost of the war is in order to argue it should never have been fought; Germany should have been given Europe in order to save the British Empire. Ferguson returns the compliment - "There is much in the work I really admire" he says in the blurb - but I'm not sure how Mosier accounts for Ferguson's opinion of American fighting qualities: "It was commonly claimed at the time (and some people still believe it) that the Americans 'won the war.' In reality, the AEF suffered disproportionately large casualties, mainly because Pershing still believed in frontal assaults, dismissed British and French training as over-cautious, and insisted on maintaining outsized and unwieldy divisions. The American First Army's operations against the Hindenburg Line (the Kriemhilde Stellung) in September-October 1918 were old-fashioned and wasteful." (p 312).
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting despite obvious flaws
Review: Mosier goes against the established scholarship in this book. It is at points a very well-researched and erudite account, but at other points there are glaring omissions: the impact of the influenza epidemic, the technological advances of the European allies toward the end of the war, the steady deterioration in the quality and quantity of German materiel, etc.
The near-imbecilic command decisions of some of the Allied commanders in the Great War's early stages are covered in detail. And Mosier does give credit to the French and British commanders who pioneered (or at least adopted) the more successful tactics that were to be later emulated by American military leadership. Further, history does concur with Mosier's stance on the European allies' general resistance to American military independance, Wilson's policy ambitions, and caution in settling post-war accounts.
The reader will find the events of the latest stages of the war glossed over, even endowed with an element of Americanized mystique. That's not to take away from the prowess or ingenuity of the United States' contribution to the Great War effort - on the contrary, Mosier makes it very clear (largely using French, British, and German sources) that America's intervention was decisive, necessary, and crucial to the eventual victory. It's just that, aside from the very telling raw statistics, Mosier's examples are more inspirational than decisive. For example, he describes smaller actions in which American casualties are proportionately large but in which American forces - by stubbornness, tactical prowess, and grit - secure small but significant victories. While such minor battles add up to larger gains when consolidated, and have a compounding effect on the morale of an opponent, the few examples Mosier can supply remain unconvincing.
So, ultimately, the book concludes without strongly making its stated case. Despite that, it is worth reading for the accounts of the incredible self-imposed slaughter of Allied infantry in the earlier stages of the war.
Rating:
Summary: Get it from the Library
Review: This book should not be the only book you read about WWI. It is a biased viewpoint of American prowess, German tactical capability and French and British incompetence. The good part of the book is in the beginning where the author goes into some detail about German tactics and especially the artillery used. He contrasts this mainly with the French, and uses some battles to illustrate the results. All this was enlightening and interesting. But (as several other reviewers have suggested) Mosier goes too far. He implies that the French barely learned as the war went on, that the Marne was not the victory/setback it really was, that the British remained almost uselessly incompetent. Further when he describes the American effort, he exaggerates the psychologic and tactical effect of the American efforts. He minimalizes the concurrent efforts of the Allies and neglects to examine the German state of affairs (exhaustion) after four long years of war. You get the impression that only the Americans could beat this German juggernaut. But even Mosier relates that the Americans were using French equipment and French as opposed to British training (although he partially explains away the former).
Rating:
Summary: Allied intelligence failure in the First World War
Review: This is a difficult book to review. On the one hand, it offers some interesting revisionist arguments and conclusions on the nature of the First World War and some keen insights into specific tactical issues. On the other hand, the author seems to needlessly stretch a couple of specific arguments into a full-length narrative of the conflict, which wasn't necessary and actually dilutes the impact of his case. Mosier's central thesis is somewhat unique and worthy of deeper examination. In short, this book is all about allied intelligence failure; more specifically, he argues, the Allies couldn't accurately count the German war dead. Mosier's case goes something like this: the Allied High Command sincerely believed that they were killing many more Germans in their attacks and bombardments than they were losing themselves (the reverse, of course, was true). Because they thought their attacks were succeeding in bleeding the Germans white (to apply the German philosophy of Verdun), the allies didn't believe innovation on the Western Front was necessary. Moreover, Mosier says, when it came to things they could count, they counted the wrong things (that is, they religiously tabulated and compared relative manpower, but not heavy artillery, which he argues was the decisive force on the western front). His conclusions on the overestimation of allied killing power, however, beg some other sticky questions. For instance, had the allies known the truth about how badly they were losing the body count, would they have sued for peace on terms favorable to the Germans in, say, 1915? How do we know that tactical innovation would have been the response rather than capitulation, especially if the reality of the situation had been known before Lloyd George took over the British government in December 1916? Mosier concludes that it was American money, men and material that saved the British and French from the consequences of their incompetence. His assessment of American combat performance on the Western Front is therefore generally more favorable than that depicted in most histories of the conflict and, in my opinion, is suspect. In closing, this book is difficult to recommend to anyone. The overview on allied versus German artillery is excellent and Mosier's focus on an often-overlooked German command (von Mudra) is interesting, but overall this book fails to satisfy.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent reappraisal of the war
Review: This is an excellent book. It is controversial in the history community because 1) it significantly downgrades the accomplishments of the French and BEF 2) it highlights the fact that in 1918 the Germans smashed the French and BEF and only the AEF was able to stop them 3) the casualty figures that justified the horrendous loss of life from the futile allied offensives such as the SOMME were complete lies 4) it highlights the fact that the French lied repeatedly about their successes and glossed over reality to make their cases.
Virtually every WW1 text book relies on the misstated casualty figures that this book demolishes. The readers that dislike this book want to hold on to their illusions about WW1 but in fact if the Germans were able to outfight the allies (except the AEF) while suffering significantly less casualties this is a key fact that ought to be widely noted.
Of course in the end the Germans were defeated, or more accurately, negotiated a peace with the Allies. The Germans were never beaten on their own soil and the entire war was fought away from Germany.
People familiar with the typical historical framework figure that 1) the French and British mainly beat the Germans 2) the Americans came in at the end and only accomplished a little. This book, relying on detailed appraisals of artillery, tactics, re-reading of maps and other information challenges the key assumptions.
Rating:
Summary: The myth of American invincibility
Review: While justifiably lambasting the bumbling , hidebound British and French armies for their gross stupidities and incompetences, Mosier has drawn the totally unconvincing conclusion that the US was responsible solely for winning the war, when Pershing and the AEF were no more than the sidekicks of the French, launching insignificant attacks in a quiet sector of the Front.
All in alll, a polemic packed with useful statistics but all the wrong conclusions.
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