The Guns of August

The story in brief

Barbara Tuchman was a historian who worked outside the academy, and The Guns of August, published in 1962, made her famous. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1963. The book covers a short span: the plans, alliances and characters that led into the war, and then the first month of fighting, from the declarations of war in early August 1914 to the Battle of the Marne in September.

It opens in May 1910, at the funeral of King Edward VII of Britain, where nine kings rode behind the coffin. Tuchman uses the scene to show a European order about to vanish. She then turns to the war plans each power had prepared: Germany’s plan to defeat France quickly by sweeping through Belgium before turning east against Russia; France’s plan to attack directly into Lorraine; Russia’s commitment to invade East Prussia early to relieve its ally; Britain’s uncertain promise to send an expeditionary force. The second half of the book follows what happened when the plans met reality.

The decisions that made it

Germany’s plan, built around the strategy associated with Alfred von Schlieffen, required marching through neutral Belgium. Its authors assumed that Belgium would not resist seriously and that Britain might not enter the war over it. Both assumptions failed. Belgium refused the German ultimatum on 3 August, and its resistance at Liège, though brief, cost the Germans time. The invasion of Belgium gave Britain’s government the cause it needed to bring a divided cabinet and country into the war.

France’s leaders, committed to a doctrine of attack, launched their offensive into Lorraine and the Ardennes in the Battle of the Frontiers. French soldiers in red trousers advanced against machine guns and artillery and suffered enormous losses within weeks. The plan had not accounted for the main German blow coming through Belgium, and it took Joseph Joffre, the French commander, some time to recognise where the danger lay.

Russia, honouring its promise to its ally, invaded East Prussia earlier than its armies were ready. Poor coordination between its two armies, and uncoded radio messages that the Germans intercepted, led to the destruction of one army at Tannenberg at the end of August.

Germany’s commanders, worried about the Russian advance, moved two army corps from the western front to the east before the decisive battles in France, and then the German right wing turned east of Paris rather than enveloping it. The changes opened a gap that the French and British exploited at the Marne in early September. The German advance was stopped, and the war of movement turned into the war of trenches.

Tuchman also gives a chapter to the escape of the German battlecruiser Goeben, which slipped past British ships into Constantinople and helped draw the Ottoman Empire into the war on Germany’s side, widening the conflict far beyond Europe.

What the book sees in them

Tuchman’s central theme is the rigidity of plans and minds. The war plans were drawn up years in advance, timed to the hour, and built on assumptions that hardened into certainties. Once mobilisation began, the plans dictated the next steps, and political leaders found that they had few choices left. She shows commanders who stuck to doctrines in the face of evidence, and leaders who could not imagine that the war would be long.

She is also interested in character. The book is full of portraits: the anxious German chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke, the imperturbable Joffre, the touchy British commander John French. Tuchman shows how their temperaments shaped decisions as much as strategy did.

Her deepest point is about the gap between what people expected and what happened. Every power expected a short war. By the end of the first month, the losses had been so great, and the stalemate so firmly set, that no one could accept a peace that would make the sacrifice seem pointless. The war went on for four more years.

Since it was published

The book’s most famous reader was President John F. Kennedy, who read it in 1962, shortly before the Cuban missile crisis. During the crisis he told his brother Robert that he did not want anyone to write a book like it about their own decisions, and he pressed copies on friends and colleagues, including the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan. The episode is often cited as a case of history influencing a decision at a critical moment. The site’s idea page Groupthink and the Silence of Rooms discusses how Kennedy’s handling of that crisis differed from the Bay of Pigs.

Later historians have refined the picture. Some argue that Tuchman gave the war plans too much weight in explaining the war’s outbreak, and recent work, including Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, has paid more attention to the July crisis and to events in the Balkans that the book treats briefly. The account of the first month of fighting remains one of the most widely read military histories in English.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks what one’s plans assume, and whether anyone has checked lately. The German plan assumed Belgium would not fight and Britain might not join. The French plan assumed that spirit would overcome firepower. Each assumption was reasonable to its authors and catastrophic in practice. Any organisation with a long-standing plan should ask which of its assumptions would be most costly if wrong.

It also asks what happens when a plan leaves no room to stop. Mobilisation schedules were designed for speed, which meant they could not be paused for diplomacy. In business, too, commitments that are designed to be irreversible, from long contracts to launch dates, can remove choices that leaders later need. The idea page Irreversibility and the Value of Waiting explores the value of keeping options open.

And it asks what leaders do when the first results are bad. Many of the commanders in the book doubled down. A few, at the Marne, adapted. The difference decided the outcome.