War by Timetable? The Railway Race before 1914

[Daniel Julius]

This is fascinating.  Thank you, Jill

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 5:29 PM, grladams at teleport.com <
grladams at teleport.com> wrote:

> I tried to send the full text of this article, It is a piece about A J P
> Taylor and his research on the origins of WWI; specifically Railways being
> a catalyst.
>
> War by Timetable? The Railway Race before 1914
> by David Stevenson
> Past and Present, No. 162 (Feb., 1999), pp. 163-194
> [This article consists of 32 page(s) which I can access off JSTOR, but I
> believe that the Pynchon-l doesn't let me do such a big file.]
> ----snip the intro----
> A. J. P. Taylor's most provocative legacy was his insistence on the
> roles of accident and inadvertence in the outbreak of both world
> wars. If his The Origins of the Second World War stated the case for
> 1939, he disseminated that for 1914 in his best-selling The First
> World War: An Illustrated History and via his lectures and broadcasts,
> as well as in his War by Timeetable: How the First World War Began.2'
> No Great Power, he contended, wanted a major war in the summer
> of 1914, the political points at issue were negotiable, and the
> fundamental
> force for conflict was technical, in the shape of the European
> armies' war plans. Like his friend and adviser, Sir Basil Liddell Hart,
> Taylor highlighted the inflexibility of the Powers' mobilization
> arrangements. The imperative of winning if war broke out, he urged,
> had overwhelmed that of preserving peace. Precautions taken to
> inhibit war turned out to provoke it.3
>
> Taylor made no secret of his proselytizing purpose. He warned
> that military deterrence was a fragile basis for international stability.
> He foresaw the danger of a third war of miscalculation, this time fought
> with nuclear weapon. He therefore combined his stress on inadvertence with
> a dash of technological determinism, derived from the centrality of
> railways in pre-1914 strategy. This was not determinism in a crude or
> simple sense: he used 'railway timetables' as a shorthand for a planning
> system that governments themselves had created. None the less, he
> portrayed
> the mobilization and deployment programmes of the early twentieth century
> as foreshadowing
> the ballistic missile arsenals of his own time.'
>
> Indeed, the metaphor of military technology as a runaway train, hurtling
> humanity to
> disaster, had surfaced in the 1860s and by the turn of the century was a
> commonplace thought. Several recent commentators have questioned whether
> the 1914 war was
> 'inadvertent', as have others with reference to that of 1939. On the
> contrary, Fritz Fischer and his followers have held that Germany's
> calculated aggression caused the
> First World War as well as the Second til recently, rival emphases on
> miscalculation and premeditation have dominated this historical debate.
>
> Railway construction and operation programmes, because of their long lead
> times and heavy expense, are potentially an excellent test of both the
> premeditation and the miscalculation approaches. Although historians have
> intensively researched the diplomatic and strategic aspects of the war
> plans of the belligerents, they have neglected their technical and
> logistic
> underpinning.  This article seeks to remedy this deficiency and to
> reappraise the contribution made by technology to the 1914 tragedy,
> examining developments
> over the previous generation as well as at the outbreak of hostilities. It
> begins with the role assigned to railways in the Great Powers' pre-war
> preparations.
>
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