Author: T. Hunt Tooley

On the Western Front a hundred years ago, a furious and decisive campaign was in progress. The great German Spring Offensive, often and rightly called the Ludendorff Offensive, was well into the process of launching about three million combat troops against the Allied lines. The Offensive would last from March 21 to July 18, 1918. The combined butcher’s bill for both sides in the three-month struggle would amount altogether to over a million and half men killed, wounded, captured, or missing. The twin objects of the German assault were to break the stalemate and end the war. The attack achieved the … Continue reading →

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Since the beginning of the centennial of World War I, I have been writing a series of essays about the war as the memory of events passes us by–a hundred years later. But as we approach the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, I find it nearly impossible to delimit my thoughts on this profound event in the history of the human race as if it were only a passage of the war, like the Somme, or American intervention, or the internment of enemy aliens. There are so many narrations of the “event” itself. There are so many answers to the … Continue reading →

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T. Hunt Tooley is chairman of the department of history at Austin College and an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute. In this interview with The Austrian, Dr. Tooley examines what we can learn today from the First World War.  THE AUSTRIAN: It has now been 100 years since the United States entered the First World War. Was getting involved in foreign wars in this way a break from past policy, or was the US already going in this direction? HUNT TOOLEY: I used to think of American intervention more in terms of a break from the past. The Spanish-American War episode seemed a precursor for international interventionism, and … Continue reading →

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[This is the third post in a series. see Part One and Part Two.] In the early sixties, German historian Fritz Fischer famously raised an intense historiographical controversy by asserting, in his book Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for World Power), that Germany did, in fact, bear the major responsibility for starting the First World War, a claim that had long since been discredited as Allied propaganda. The ensuing decades-long “Fischer Thesis Controversy” had its own life and meaning. In terms of the present series about American intervention into the Great War, I bring it up to introduce the conception of explicit … Continue reading →

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[Editor’s Note: This is part 5 of a multi-part series.] On April 6 — a hundred years ago —  the United States declared war on Germany. The history of America’s entry into the Great War is complex and profound. It has intrinsic drama, no matter what one’s attitude about the rights and wrongs of U.S. participation in the war–and there have been many. Wartime Allied propaganda had Americans believing the Germans were solely guilty, and that the conflict was a war for democracy, when the most autocratic country in Europe, Russia, was on the Allied said. American entry, of course, was a … Continue reading →

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This short piece continues series on some “Deeply Momentous Things” — that is, American intervention in the First World War. (See Part One.) As the first installment has shown in a general way, the background of the war among Europe and its extensions (Canada, Australia, etc.) is crucial to understanding how the United States would eventually declare war on the Central Powers. More specifics on this issue will help us understand just what the might of the United States meant to the warring powers. European leaders on both sides hoped to change the dynamic of the war in January 1917. … Continue reading →

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Three-quarters of a century ago, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an attack on the Soviet Union across a front 3,000 miles long. Barbarossa moved the war into its global stage. It prefigured the final alliance system. It moved the Final Solution to the industrial level of killing. It helped bring the United States into the war, and certainly opened the floodgates of “pre-Lend-Lease” from the United States to Stalin’s Russia. As Ralph Raico has pointed out, the presidential powers inherent in Lend-Lease amounted to one of the great expansions of power in American history. On this … Continue reading →

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