In 1988, in her preface to the twenty-sixth anniversary of the book’s second edition, Tuchman recounts how positive the reviews were when the book was published in 1962. Since she was “hardly known to the critics […] with no reputation for them to enjoy smashing, the book received instead the warmest reception."[27] One review in particular brought her to tears because it “elicit[ed] perfect comprehension”: Clifton Fadiman’s critic in the Book-of-the-Month Club Bulletin. He wrote that The Guns of August had “a fair chance [to] turn to be a historical classic” by displaying “almost Thucydidean virtues: intelligence, concision, weight, detachment. […] It is [Tuchman’s] conviction that the deadlock of the terrible month of August determined the future course of the war and the terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second Round. […] [O]ne of the marks of the superior historian is the ability to project human beings as well as events.”[27] In 1962, Publishers Weekly predicted the book “will be the biggest new nonfiction seller in your winter season”, which greatly surprised Tuchman but “as it turned out, they were right.”[28]
Indeed, all reviewers have praised her narrative style, even the academic historians who have raised a few pointed critiques to The Guns of August because Tuchman had erected a rigid, deterministic thesis by relying too heavily on sources that corroborated it, ignoring, misrepresenting or downplaying factors that undermined it and veiling it with an anti-German veneer, which could be partially explained by the context of her writing as 1962 was probably the height of the Cold War.
A unanimous praise of Tuchman's narrative style
The academic reviews of The Guns of August were published in two waves: for the first edition in 1962-63, and in 2013-14 on the hundredth anniversary of the start of the war and the associated 2014 re-edition of the book. Over these fifty years, Tuchman’s narrative style has been constantly praised:
- In 1962, the American historian Harold J. Gordon points out half a dozen major flaws but imparts in closing that Tuchman “brings together materials from a great many sources and binds them skilfully into a clear and understandable account.” [29] Fellow Samuel J. Hurwitz lauds her for writing “imaginatively, vividly, and even passionately, [with] a talent for making scenes of the past come alive, and the result is perhaps even larger than life.”[30] Professor John W. Oliver praises her ability to put the “reader [in] a box seat as he watches the opening drama.”[31] In 1963, Ulrich Trumpener, Professor at the University of Alberta, despite writing a very critical review of her book, notes that “in terms of sheer narrative power, The Guns of August is an admirable work.”[32]
- The American historian Samuel R. Williamson Jr. starts his 2013 critical review by praising “her narrative style [which] gives the reader a sense of intimacy with the events”[33] and closes it by quoting Harvard Professor Sidney Fay’s: “she had got the history wrong, but historians need to write like Tuchman or we will be out of business.”[34] In 2014, the Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, “was gripped from her wonderful first sentence. “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.” She adds further “When I first read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August in the autumn of 1963 it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor”, Tuchman has this “ability to bring the past to life, in part using what she called the corroborative detail” and is a “wonderful storyteller”; lastly MacMillan loves her “acerbic wit” and “sharp character sketches.”[35]
A deterministic thesis erected on biased views framed by the Cold War
The determinism of Tuchman’s thesis has been best expressed by two academic historians fifty years apart. In 1962, Professor Oron J. Hale of the University of Virginia was concerned by how Tuchman connects in a deterministic manner events that are several years, even several decades apart. He provides two such examples:
- “The naval side is inadequate [with] a chapter [out of context] on the British navy’s hunt for the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau in the Mediterranean and their escape to Constantinople. In a dubious chain of causation we are told that the Russian declaration of war on Turkey, in November, followed by Gallipoli, Suez, Palestine, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and "the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben.”[36]
- He concludes his review by noting that Tuchman’s “thesis that the failure of Plan 17 and the Schlieffen Plan, which produced stalemate in the West, was the mold that determined the future course of the war, the conditions of peace and of the inter-war period, as well as the "Second Round," is much too deterministic. The First World War - indeed all major wars - had many turning points. The year 1917, which brought Russian withdrawal and United States entry, was more decisive for the military outcome and the nature of the peace than was 1914."[37]
In 2014, Margaret MacMillan, who was greatly influenced by the book, ends her positive review on a similar note: “her main argument that entangling alliances and rigid military timetables caught Europe in a grip that led the powers inexorably towards catastrophe is no longer accepted by most historians.”[35]
This determinism is the result of four biases: i) the sources and historical research Tuchman relies upon, ii) the events she decided to exclude from her book, iii) the factors that she downplayed as they were weakening the strength of her thesis and iv) the bias she had against Germans, which is partially explained by v) the timing of the book, written in 1962 at the height of the Cold War.
Ignoring historical sources and research, and relying solely on key actors’ memories
Tuchman has ignored the major works on the origins of the war written by Sidney Fay, Luigi Albertini, Pierre Renouvin, Bernadotte Schmitt, George Gooch and William Langer. [34] [38] As Professor Gordon notes: “Forty years of historical research are ignored as the hundreds of thousands of documents that have been published by the governments of Europe.” [38] He is echoed by Professor Trumpener: “A wider utilization of primary sources would have been desirable. For example, neither the Russian and Italian document collection published since 1918 nor the captured German government files, a valuable new source, seem to have been consulted.” [39] Instead, as Professor Hale concludes, she relied on “controversial sources, which in many instances are not evaluated critically, [i.e. the retrospective works by statesmen and soldiers] rather than upon the solid general staff operational histories of the respective military establishments.”[40]
Misrepresenting key military events
There is a noticeable disbalance between the minimal treatment, when mentioned at all, of the key diplomatic and military events that took place in the Balkans and on the Austro-Russian fronts on one side, and the over-emphasis of the naval chases in the Mediterranean on the other. When it comes to the first Tuchman has disregarded in particular three developments:
- The Galician front - Although Tuchman recognizes that omitting the Austro-Hungarian / Serbian / Russian front was “not entirely arbitrary” and resulted from her decisions to strictly confine the book to August 1914, preserve “unity” and avoid “tiresome length”,[41] a few historians deplored these choices. For Professor Williamson, this “seems unforgivable [for] there would have been no war in the West if the Russians had not decided [...] to intervene in the war on behalf of Serbia and thus attack the Habsburg monarchy.”[42] Professor Hale challenges Tuchman on the rigidity of her time frame: “[d]uring the first week of September, concurrently with the battle of the Marne, massive Russian-Austrian engagements were fought in Galicia, with results as decisive and casualties equal to those of the campaigns in France or East Prussia. All this is excluded with consequent distorsion.” [40] Professor Trumpener even wonders whether it is “not obscuring some crucial issues to treat the opening Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Serbs and Russians [...] as mere side shows.” [43]
- The Austrian war plan - As a direct consequence of voluntarily ignoring the Galician front “[t]he Austrian war plan is entirely ignored and the Russian merely touched upon.” [38]
- The outbreak of the war - Oron J. Hale was “disturbed [by] the fragmented treatment of the outbreak of war. [...] The war originated in the Balkans [...] and from a local crisis grew into a general European war through the reckless diplomatic and military actions of Austrian and Russian authorities.” [40]
On the other hand, the chapter 10 dedicated to the Gloucester’s chase of the Goeben and the Breslau in the Mediterranean is “long and somewhat awkward” , “inadequate”, “out of context” [42] and contains “numerous inaccuracies and over-simplifications.” [39]
Downplaying key factors
Professor Gordon points out that Tuchman’s excessive focus on Germans’ villainy led her to pay “[l]ittle more than passing mention, if that, [..] to universally operating forces as nationalism, imperialism, trade rivalries, and militarism, in creating a situation where war was an increasingly acceptable solution for the problems of Europe.” [38] Professor Williamson adds: “Issues of civil-military relations, alliance structures, and the coordination of military planning receive Tuchman’s modest attention at most. The role of the public opinion is only fleetingly mentioned, and economic preparation for war, though noted, gets nothing more.” [34]
An anti-German bias
For Professor Trumpener, Tuchman’s “treatment of Imperial Germany is blatantly one-sided.” [39] She “[transforms] the Germans of 1914 into a nation of barbarians [...] invariably unpleasant, hysterical, or outright brutish”. Their “[a]rmies [march] like “predatory ants” across Belgium, soon reveal “the beast beneath the German skin”. The Germans [...] prefer “fearful models” [...] when they invade their neighbors. Suffice is to add that one of the German generals, Alexander von Kluck, duly emerges as a “grim-visaged Attila” and that that Prussian officer corps is, in any case, composed exclusively of “bullnecked” or “wasp-waisted” types.” [43]
Professor Gordon echoes Trumpener’s assessment: “The impression given is that the war was half the result of the fecklessness of the Kaiser and half the result of the unbelievably vicious character of the German people, who forced the war upon an innocent and peace-loving civilized world. [...] Mrs Tuchman’s hostility to all things German also seems to have led her to ignore such crucial developments as the Russian agreement not to mobilize against Germany and its violation.” [38]
Benefitting from fifty years of hindsight, Professor MacMillan is less stringent in her criticism of Tuchman’s negative preconceived opinion of Germans, merely stating that “[s]he is prone at times to absurd overstatements, for example that the German people were gripped by the idea that divine providence had destined them to be masters of the universe.” [35]
The context of the Cold War
Professor MacMillan continues explaining Tuchman’s anti-German bias as a consequence of “[h]er view that the Germans somehow wanted to impose their culture on the world [which] is surely a reflection of that great ideological struggle of her own time between the west and the Soviet bloc.” [35] Indeed, as professor Williamson, concurs: “By 1962 America’s strategic position had been significantly altered. The Soviet arsenal of nuclear missiles made the possibility of war increasingly likely. [...] Later in 1962, the Cuban crisis showed just how dangerous the chances of war might be. Not surprisingly leaders, writers and commentators looked back to 1914 to analyze what had gone wrong. [...] The American public firmly believed that the Germans were solely responsible for the Great War [...] a view of course reaffirmed by German behavior in the Second World War. ” [33]
