(08-11-2021, 02:23 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote:

(08-11-2021, 02:05 PM)The Real Marty Wrote: That actually is a pretty decent simplified explanation of how WW1 started.  

I've read several books in the last few months about it.   The more I learn about it, the more I think WW1 is the most important event of the last 150 years.   World War 1 destroyed the old order of Europe, triggered the Russian revolution, redrew the map of the middle east, and directly caused WW2.  And the amazing thing is, it came up out of nowhere.   No one expected it.   But it directly caused the century of warfare and conflict that followed it.  

If you study it, you can see why it happened.  But no one at the time could seem to see what was coming, and no one seized what were multiple opportunities to stop it.  Not only that, we still can't figure out who was to blame for what happened.  It's not enough to say the guy who shot the Archduke caused it.  He just lit the fuse.

Man, WWI is such a complicated mess. I still haven't quite figured it out, though, I admit that I haven't put much effort into it.

It was a horrifying and brutal war. Like Marty said, it was the catalyst to how the geopolitical world is shaped today.

Too lazy to read, I've been watching a lot of documentaries on it in the last few months. Right now I'm watching a multipart series of The Battle of the Somme. Talk about a meat grinder. Over 19,000 British soldiers KILLED on the first day, the majority of those before noon.

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