The Guns of August

The Guns of August, published 50 years after the outbreak of World War I, provided a history lesson wrapped in narrative prose. It was a book meant for public consumption and sold well due to its readability, and the public assumed it was a comprehensive analysis. Tuchman used “the vast majority of memoir material [that] had been published, as well as major collections of documents” to “give the reader a sense of intimacy with events” (Williamson Jr., Samuel R. “Revaluation: Fifty Years On: The Guns of August, Always Popular, Always Flawed.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 121, no. 1, 2013). Readers during the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War and just after the Bay of Pigs disaster, readily became engaged in Tuchman’s interpretation of the events leading to the first world war, as it looked like the US was very close to entering a third. The book also drew praise from reviewers at popular publications such as Publisher’s Weekly.

However, Tuchman’s analysis was not without its critics; for example, history professor Harold J Gordon argued that Tuchman’s account entirely overlooked historical scholarship on the war (Gordon, Harold J. “The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman.” Military Affairs, vol. 26, no. 3, 1962). More contentious was Tuchman’s depiction of the causes of the war, including her depiction of Germany:

In contrast to the popular acclaim received by the book, professional historians have from the start been equally critical of it. Some, such as the reviewer in the Journal of Military History (March 1963), praised its prose style but found the account based ‘only partially’ on the best available sources and castigate[d] its flagrantly ‘one sided treatment of Imperial Germany’ (Williamson).

While the Allies are painted as unready and lacking deftness in her book, Tuchman places much blame for the war squarely on the shoulders of the Germans, making them seem ruthless and barbaric. The reasoning Tuchman gives for Germany’s bloody march through Belgium has little to do with their Austro-Hungarian allies and their conflict with Russia/Serbia; rather, she focuses on German hubris and thirst for power as part of her broader contention that War Is Caused by Hubris, Not Inequity. This leaves “significant omissions” as to the prelude to war: “The war began in Eastern Europe. There would have been no war in the West if the Russians had not decided, for various reasons (altruism was not one of them), to intervene in the war on behalf of Serbia and thus attack the Habsburg monarchy” (Williamson).

The causes of WWI are still debated to this day, and even Tuchman’s critics would likely concede that Germany’s imperialist ambitions played a role. So too did French and British imperialism, however, as well as factors such as nascent independence movements in empires like Austria-Hungary. Ultimately, Tuchman’s account is a product of its own historical moment, inflected by WWI Allied propaganda about German aggression, World War II’s seeming vindication of that propaganda, and Cold War anxiety about Soviet expansionism, which the work projects onto Germany.