Category Archives: war

by | 7 November 2026 · 5:26 am

The Second Sick Man of Europe, 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 287-290:

For Austria-Hungary, the Balkan Wars changed everything. Above all, they revealed how isolated Vienna was and how little understanding there was at the foreign chancelleries for its view of Balkan events. St Petersburg’s hostility to the empire and its utter disregard for Vienna’s interests in the region could be taken for granted. More worrying was the indifference of the other powers. The reluctance of the international community to see that Austria faced genuine security threats on its southern periphery and had the right to counteract them reflected a broader shift in attitudes. The western powers had traditionally viewed Austria as the fulcrum of stability in central and eastern Europe and thus as a power that must be preserved at all costs. But by 1913, this maxim no longer appeared so compelling. It was undermined by the tendency – which swiftly gained ground among the Entente states after 1907 – to think of Europe in terms of alliance blocs, rather than as a continental geopolitical ecosystem in which every power had a role to play. The anti-Austrian animus of much political reportage in Britain and France during the last pre-war years reinforced this tendency by spreading the view that Austria-Hungary was an anachronistic and doomed entity, or, as the Serbian papers put it, the ‘second sick man of Europe’ (after the Ottoman Empire, to which this epithet was more commonly applied).

Particularly alarming was the lukewarm nature of German support. Berlin firmly endorsed a policy of confrontation with Serbia in October 1913 – at a time when support could be offered at little risk of a broader conflict – but its record was otherwise patchy. In February 1913, when troop strengths on both sides of the Galician border were so elevated that war seemed imminent, even the military urged caution. Moltke wrote to his colleague Conrad von Hötzendorf, assuring him that while Germany would not hesitate to support Austria-Hungary against a Russian attack, ‘it would be difficult to legitimate German intervention in a war provoked by Austria, for which there would be no understanding in the German people’.

One of Vienna’s chief concerns was the attitude of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Far from urging his government to solidarity with the Austrians, Wilhelm forbade the Foreign Office in Berlin to participate in any action that ‘might impede the Bulgars-Serbs-Greeks in their victorious progress’. The Balkan Wars, he argued, were part of a world-historical development that was going to drive Islam back out of Europe. If one allowed the Balkan states to consolidate themselves at the expense of Turkey, this would create the basis for a stable array of entities that in due course might form a confederation of some kind, the ‘United States of the Balkans’. Nothing could be better suited to the preservation of the peace, the buffering of Austro-Russian tensions and the emergence of a new regional market for German exports. And Wilhelm continued to expatiate in this vein. During the crisis of November 1912 over Serbian access to the Adriatic, Wilhelm explicitly rejected the notion that the German government had any obligation to support Vienna against Belgrade. To be sure, the current changes on the peninsula were ‘uncomfortable’ for Vienna, but he would ‘under no circumstances consider marching against Paris and Moscow for the sake of Albania and Durazzo’. On 9 November, he even proposed to the Foreign Office that it should urge Vienna to place Albania under the suzerainty of a Serbian prince.

There was little comfort in these quixotic speculations for the harassed decision-makers in Vienna. At a secret conference with his friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 22 November 1912, Wilhelm did express his readiness to support Austria’s position on the Serbian troop presence in Albania, even at the risk of war with Russia, but only if it were certain that neither Britain nor France would intervene; an isolated Russia, he added, would be extremely unlikely to risk such a conflict. Yet even these mildly encouraging signals were cancelled out three days later by official messages from Bethmann Hollweg and Kiderlen-Wächter to the effect that Germany would seek a multilateral solution. In February 1913, when the Balkan winter crisis was at its height, Wilhelm wrote a letter to Franz Ferdinand urging that he seek a negotiated de-escalation with Russia on the grounds that the matters at issue were not important enough to justify a continuation of the current armed stand-off. On 18 October, when the Albanian crisis was seething, Wilhelm conceded in a conversation with Conrad that the situation might ‘finally’ have arrived ‘in which a great power can no longer look on but must reach for the sword’. Yet only ten days later, he was telling the Austrian ambassador in Berlin that Vienna should mollify Belgrade by bribing the leadership with large cash gifts (‘from the king downwards they can all be had for money’), military exchange programmes and improved terms of trade. In December 1913, Wilhelm assured the Austrian envoy in Munich that ‘a few millions’ would suffice to buy Berchtold a firm foothold in Belgrade.

In a report dispatched on 25 April 1914, Fritz Count Szapáry, a foreign ministry high-flyer and specialist in Austro-German relations now serving as minister in St Petersburg, painted a bleak picture of recent German Balkan policy. The solid German backing that had helped to bring the Bosnian annexation crisis to a close in March 1909 was a thing of the past, Szapáry declared. What had replaced it was – Szapáry quoted the mealy-mouthed jargon of the decision-makers in Berlin – a ‘conflict-free dialogue directed towards the consolidation of economic-cultural activity zones’. All of Berlin’s forward positions vis-à-vis Russia had been abandoned, and Berlin took no steps whatsoever without first consulting St Petersburg. During the Balkan Wars, Germany had compromised the Austrian position by joining the chorus of support for déinteressement, pressing Vienna to accept Serbian conquests and provocations. It all amounted to the wholesale ‘sacrifice of Austria-Hungary’s Balkan interests’. This was a rather histrionic view of the matter, coloured by Szapáry’s Hungarian apprehensions at Russia’s deepening support for Romania, but it captured a widely felt mood of frustration at the failure of Berlin to deliver any real leverage on the Balkan peninsula. Especially galling was the haste with which Berlin had endorsed the Treaty of Bucharest, thereby depriving Austria of the opportunity to better the position of Bulgaria, which the Austrians, but not the Germans, viewed as a potential counterweight to Serbian power.

This sense of isolation, coupled with the repeated provocations of 1912–13, in turn heightened the readiness in Vienna to resort to unilateral measures. There were signs that the resistance to militant solutions among the key decision-makers in Vienna was waning. The most conspicuous sign of the change in mood was the decision to recall Conrad at the height of the Russian mobilization scare. ‘You must again become Chief of the General Staff,’ the Emperor wearily informed the general at an audience on 7 December 1912. After his reinstatement Conrad continued, of course, to counsel war, but that was nothing new. More worrying was the diminishing resistance to extreme measures among the other key actors. During the autumn of 1912, nearly everyone (including the Hungarian prime minister Tisza) at one point or another favoured a policy of confrontation backed up by the threat of military action. A notable exception was Franz Ferdinand, who warned Berchtold in a forceful letter of 12 October against allowing the monarchy to be dragged into Conrad’s ‘witches’ kitchen of war’. There was also Russia to think of, and Bulgaria, and the Germans, who would presumably shrink from any high-risk démarche. As for Belgrade, Franz Ferdinand added, the only people there who sought a conflict were the regicide war party (the party that, unbeknown to him, would slay him eight months later). He did not, he concluded, believe there ‘existed any necessity’ for war. The pressure to wage it came exclusively from those servants of the Austro-Hungarian crown who ‘consciously or unconsciously worked to damage the monarchy’. And yet, on 11 December 1912, during a meeting of senior officials with the Emperor at Schönbrunn palace, even Franz Ferdinand broke with his accustomed support for peace at any price to advocate a military confrontation with Serbia.

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Filed under Austria, Balkans, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 6 November 2026 · 6:35 am

Rapid Realignments in the Balkans

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 278-279:

The loan had become a dangerous tool wielded by the alliance blocs. This weaponization of international credit was nothing new, but its deployment in this instance locked Bulgaria into the policy of the Triple Alliance, just as Serbia had been integrated into the political system of the Entente.

What was happening in the Balkans was nothing less than the reversal of the old pattern of allegiances. In the past Russia had backed Bulgaria, while Austria-Hungary looked to Belgrade and Bucharest. By 1914, this arrangement had been turned inside out. Romania, too, was part of this process. By the early summer of 1913, Sazonov was inviting the government in Bucharest to help itself to a piece of Bulgaria in the event of a Serbo-Bulgarian war. The time was ripe for such an overture, because the Romanians resented what they saw as Vienna’s flirtations with Sofia; King Carol of Romania also resented Austrian opposition to the Treaty of Bucharest, which he saw as his personal diplomatic achievement. The deepening rapprochement between St Petersburg and Bucharest was formalized on 14 June 1914 when the Tsar visited King Carol at Constanţa, on Romania’s Black Sea coast. It was an occasion heavy with symbolic freight. The only foreign representative to receive a decoration from the hands of the Tsar was the French minister to Romania, Camille Blondel, who had, as it happened, only recently been awarded a high decoration by King Petar of Serbia. Present at the festivities was Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian minister to Bucharest, who interpreted the day as the public consummation of Romania’s ‘realignment towards the Triple Entente’.

The consequence was a further drastic diminution of Austria-Hungary’s political influence on the peninsula. Romanian irredentism would now be deflected away from Bessarabia, where it conflicted with Russian interests, and oriented towards Transylvania, where it would threaten the integrity of the Habsburg monarchy. There were, of course, limits to Romania’s willingness to be coopted to Russian objectives. When Sazonov asked the Romanian premier and foreign minister Ion Brătianu what attitude Romania would adopt ‘in the event of an armed conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary, if Russia should find itself obliged by circumstances to commence hostilities’, the Romanian statesman, ‘visibly shocked’ by Sazonov’s question, gave an ‘evasive reply’. When pressed further, however, Brătianu conceded that Romania and St Petersburg had a common interest in preventing ‘any weakening of Serbia’. That was enough for Sazonov. The Russo-Romanian rapprochement thus constituted, as a French ministerial report observed, ‘a new means for Russia of applying pressure to Austria’. But perhaps the most striking feature of this restructuring of Balkan geopolitics was how quickly it came about. This was not a phenomenon of the longue durée, which would have taken years to undo, but rather a short-term adjustment to rapid changes in the geopolitical environment. In November 1913, Sazonov had told the Belgian minister in St Petersburg that he believed the current Bulgarian reorientation towards Vienna was likely to be shortlived – it was the work of one particular parliamentary faction, supported by the mercurial King Ferdinand, ‘for whom we have not one atom of respect’. Given time, the new Balkan alignment might just as quickly have made way for further adjustments and new systems. What matters is that this particular pattern of alignments was still in place in the summer of 1914.

Serbia was now Russia’s salient in the Balkans. There was nothing necessary or natural about this state of affairs.

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Filed under Austria, Balkans, Bulgaria, economics, France, Germany, Hungary, nationalism, Romania, Russia, war

by | 5 November 2026 · 5:02 am

War on Ottomans Began World War I

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 243-244, 249-250:

The cascade of wars that brought mayhem to the Balkans began in Africa. It was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 that flashed the green light for the all-out Balkan assault on the Ottoman periphery. Unlike Egypt (now British) and Morocco (now effectively French), the three vilayets later known as Libya were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The totally unprovoked Italian attack on these last Ottoman African possessions ‘broke the ice’, as one contemporary British observer put it, for the Balkan states. There had been talk for some years of a joint campaign to drive the Turks out of the Balkans, but nothing in the way of practical measures. Only after Italy’s assault were the Balkan states emboldened to take up arms. Looking back on these events in 1924, Miroslav Spalajković, the former political head of the Serbian foreign ministry in Belgrade, recalled that it was the Italian attack on Tripoli that had inaugurated the process that had led to the war: ‘all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first aggression’.

Italian diplomacy had been trying to secure an Italian sphere of interest in North Africa since before the turn of the century. In the summer of 1902, under the terms of the Prinetti–Barrère Accord, Rome and Paris had secretly agreed that in the event of a major redistribution of territory, France would take Morocco, while Italy would be granted a free hand in Libya. The agreement ratified a process of rapprochement with France, the arch-rival in northern Africa, that had been underway since 1898. A note from London in March 1902 helpfully promised that Britain would ensure that ‘any alteration in the status of Libya would be in conformity with Italian interests’. These agreements exemplify a policy of concessions that was designed to loosen the hold of the Triple Alliance on Italy, its most unreliable component. It was in keeping with this approach that Tsar Nicholas II agreed the ‘Racconigi Bargain’ of 1909 with King Victor Emmanuel III, in which Russia acknowledged Italy’s special interest in Libya in return for Italian support for Russian policy on access to the Turkish Straits.

Selling a policy of invasion and annexation to the politically active part of the Italian public was not difficult. Colonialism was on the march in Italy, as it was elsewhere, and the ‘memory’ of Roman Africa, when Libya had been the bread basket of the empire, assured Tripolitania a central place on the kingdom’s colonial horizons. In 1908, the modest Ufficio Coloniale in Rome was expanded and upgraded to the Direzione Centrale degli Affari Coloniali, a sign of the growing weight of African concerns within government. From 1909 onwards, the nationalist Enrico Corradini, supported by the nationalist organ L’Idea Nazionale, campaigned energetically for an imperialist enterprise focused on Libya; by the spring of 1911 he was openly demanding a policy of invasion and seizure. It was widely believed within the political elite that Italy needed somewhere ‘fruitful’ in which to plant her departing emigrants. Even the socialists were susceptible to these arguments, though they tended to shroud them in the language of economic necessity.

Until the summer of 1911, however, Italy’s leading statesmen remained faithful to the country’s ancient axiom that Italy must not provoke the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. As late as the summer of 1911, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti was still firmly rejecting calls to adopt a more aggressive position vis-à-vis Constantinople on a range of issues relating to the governance of Ottoman Albania. It was the French intervention in Morocco that changed everything. The Italian foreign ministry believed it had excellent grounds for demanding a quid pro quo in Libya. In view of France’s ‘radical modification’ of the situation in the Mediterranean, it would now be impossible, an Italian foreign ministry senior official pointed out, to ‘justify’ a policy of continuing inaction ‘before public opinion’.

It was Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Entente, rather than Italy’s allies within the Triple Alliance, that encouraged Rome to take action.

…

Underlying the disarray of the Triple Alliance was a development of even more fundamental importance. In mounting her assault on Libya, Italy had the more or less reluctant support of most of Europe. This in itself was a noteworthy state of affairs, for it revealed how comprehensively the pro-Ottoman European coalition had dissolved. In the 1850s, a concert of powers had emerged to contain Russian predations against the Ottoman Empire – the result was the Crimean War. This grouping had reconstituted itself in different form after the Russo-Turkish War at the Conference of Berlin in 1878 and had regrouped during the Bulgarian crises of the mid-1880s. It was now nowhere to be seen. In the opening phase of the Italian war, the Ottoman Empire had sought an English alliance, but London, reluctant to alienate Italy, did not respond. The two Balkan Wars that followed then broke the concert beyond repair.

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Filed under Balkans, Italy, Mediterranean, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey, war

by | 4 November 2026 · 5:31 am

War Powers in Europe Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 239-241:

Even if we were to assume that the foreign policies of the pre-war European powers were formulated and managed by compact executives animated by a unified and coherent purpose, reconstructing the relations among them would still be a daunting task, given that no relationship between any two powers can be fully understood without reference to relations with all of the others. But in the Europe of 1903–14, the reality was even more complex than the ‘international’ model would suggest. The chaotic interventions of monarchs, ambiguous relationships between civil and military, adversarial competition among key politicians in systems characterized by low levels of ministerial or cabinet solidarity, compounded by the agitations of a critical mass press against a background of intermittent crisis and heightened tension over security issues made this a period of unprecedented uncertainty in international relations. The policy oscillations and mixed signalling that resulted made it difficult, not just for historians, but for the statesmen of the last pre-war years to read the international environment.

It would be a mistake to push this observation too far. All complex political executives, even authoritarian ones, are subject to inner tensions and oscillations. The literature on twentieth-century US foreign relations dwells at length on intra-governmental power struggles and intrigues. In a brilliant study of the US entry into the Vietnam War, Andrew Preston shows that while Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy were reluctant to wage war and the State Department was largely opposed to intervention, the smaller and more nimble National Security Council, which strongly favoured war and operated beyond congressional oversight, narrowed down the president’s options on Vietnam until war was virtually unavoidable.

Yet the situation in pre-First World War Europe was different (and worse) in one important respect. For all the tensions that may evolve within it, the American executive is actually – in constitutional terms – a very tightly focused organization in which responsibility for executive decisions in foreign policy ultimately falls unambiguously upon the president. This was not the case for the pre-war European governments. There were perennial doubts about whether [Foreign Secretary] Grey had the right to commit himself as he did without consulting the cabinet or Parliament; indeed, these doubts were so pressing that they prevented him from making a clear and unequivocal statement of his intentions. The situation was even fuzzier in France, where the balance of initiative between the ministry of foreign affairs, the cabinet and the presidency remained unresolved, and even the masterful and determined [President] Poincaré faced efforts to shut him out of the decision-making process altogether in the spring of 1914. In Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent in Russia, the power to shape foreign policy flowed around a loose human circuitry within the hivelike structure of the political elite, concentrating at different parts of the system, depending upon who formed the more effective and determined alignments. In these cases, as in Germany, the presence of an ‘all-highest’ sovereign did not clarify, but rather blurred the power relations within the system.

It is not a question, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, of reconstructing the ratiocinations of two superpowers sifting through their options, but of understanding sustained rapid-fire interactions between executive structures with a relatively poor understanding of each other’s intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliances) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia. The volatility inherent in such a constellation was heightened by the fluidity of power within each executive and its tendency to migrate from one node in the system to another. It may be true that dissent and polemics within the diplomatic services could have a salutary effect, in that they raised questions and objections that might have been suppressed in a more disciplined policy environment. But the risks surely outweighed the benefits: when hawks dominated the signalling process on both sides of a potentially conflictual interaction, as happened in the Agadir crisis and would happen again after 28 June 1914, swift and unpredictable escalations could be the result.

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Filed under Austria, Balkans, Britain, democracy, France, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, U.S., USSR, Vietnam, war

by | 31 October 2026 · 8:45 am

Visiting Poland’s Cemeteries

In anticipation of All Saints’ Day, last week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes an article about Unusual Polish Cemeteries by Anna Cymer. Here are some excerpts.

We normally visit cemeteries to bury our nearest and dearest, but many notable graveyards in Poland also possess exceptional atmosphere, history and architecture.

Powązkowski Cemetery, Warsaw

The oldest cemetery in the capital opened in 1790, covering an area of two hectares, which has since grown to 44. Two years later, Dominik Merlini (court architect to King August III and Stanisław August Poniatowski, and creator of both the Palace on the Water in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park and the Królikarnia Palace) designed the Church of St Charles Borromeo, built on one side of the cemetery. Its decorated white towers still overlook the area today.

Around a million people lie buried in Powązkowski Cemetery. Its most famous section is the Avenue of the Heroes, the final resting place of many distinguished Polish historical, cultural and scientific figures. There are centuries-old tombs, for example those of Hugo Kołłątaj and soldiers from the time of the Kościuszko Uprising, as well as numerous graves of more recently deceased artistic celebrities, including Julia Hartwig and Wojciech Młynarski.

…

Old Cemetery, Łódź

Built in 1855, this mixed-denomination cemetery perfectly reflects the formerly multiple cultures of Łódź. To this day, it contains Catholic, Evangelist and Orthodox graveyards. Buried here are famous 19th-century Łódź industrialists, people who aided the city’s development, social activists, lawyers, doctors and cultural figures.

More than 200 of the cemetery’s headstones are listed monuments, and many of them are fine examples of sculpture and small-scale architecture. The cemetery’s grandest monument is the Karol Scheibler mausoleum, erected in 1888 in the form of an immense, neo-Gothic chapel designed by Edward Lilpop and Józef Dziekoński.

…

Old Jewish Cemetery, Wrocław

Jewish cemeteries in Poland were forgotten and neglected for many decades. Fortunately, in recent years, some of them have been tidied up and are now not only final resting places of the dead, but also precious monuments. One of the most beautiful is the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, which dates back to the latter half of the 19th century. Since affluent Jewish people (including some living outside Poland’s current borders) chose to be buried in this cemetery, many impressive monumental, decorative mausoleums and gravestones were erected. One can even find small-scale examples of Moorish and Egyptian architecture. The Old Jewish Cemetery, now a subsidiary of the City Museum of Wrocław, covers 4.6 hectares and contains around 12,000 headstones.

…

Mennonite Cemetery, Sosnówka

In the late 16th century, the Mennonites – followers of a branch of Protestantism who had previously lived in the Netherlands – were forced to flee persecution in their country. Some settled in formerly tolerant Poland, particularly the Lower Vistula Valley. Sosnówka in the Grudziądz district has one of the few remaining Mennonite cemeteries in Poland. It probably came into use around 1690, and some remnants of 17th-century gravestones have survived. A sign by the cemetery gate lists its most noteworthy historical relics:

The original layout is clearly visible, as are numerous headstones of outstanding artistic value (the oldest dating from 1691, 1836, and 1861) and a relic of the main gate.

Muslim Cemetery, Kruszyniany

Over 600 years ago, a Muslim minority inhabited lands belonging to Poland. From the latter half of the 17th century onwards, the Tatar community had its own cemetery in Kruszyniany. Its oldest surviving gravestone dates from 1699. Interestingly, the site continues to be used for Muslim burials. In one section, next to an 18th-century wooden mosque, headstones over 300 years old stand alongside completely modern ones.

Lipowa Street Cemetery, Lublin

The history of the Lipowa Street Cemetery in Lublin dates back to 1794. From the outset, it always contained a range of nations and religions, and there are still Catholic, Evangelist and Orthodox gravestones today. From a historical point of view, the latter section of the cemetery is particularly valuable. Apart from more than 500 ancient headstones, there is also the Church of the Holy Maidens Bearing Fragrances, built in the early 20th century – a two-storey, five-domed brick chapel in the Russian-Byzantine style that, despite its fairly small size, boasts all the major elements of Orthodox architecture.

Lemko Cemetery, Świerzowa Ruska

Świerzowa Ruska in the Low Beskids was a Lemko village, probably founded in the late 16th century. In the early 20th century, the village numbered almost 500 residents and had its own school and Orthodox church – but the villagers were resettled in 1947, and the abandoned buildings fell into disrepair. The former village later became part of Magurski National Park and was inaccessible for many years, even to tourists. But in 2015, paths were created, along with an eight-stop educational trail that allows one to discover the history of the Lemkos who lived there and visit the local cemetery, which has been preserved to some extent. Today, 20 gravestones (some from the 19th century), wooden crosses and sculptures are all that remain of the people who inhabited this area for several hundred years.

We visited many cemeteries among other historical sites in Poland during our year there, and one of the unheralded sections of any cemetery in eastern Poland (and even a little country cemetery in Transnistria that we visited) was a section for Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Germans, helping to “liberate” them. Lots of war dead are buried in Polish cemeteries from World War I and World War II, including many Unknown Soldiers. All Saints’ Day is the time of year when candles are lit and flowers are placed all over Polish grave markers.  The Jewish cemetery in Kielce, like many everywhere, was destroyed during World War II, and partially restored with the help of expatriate donors. Its gates remain locked and there is often a police car parked within sight of the entrance.

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Filed under Germany, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, USSR, war

by | 20 October 2026 · 4:43 am

Balkan Wars Before World War

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 42-45:

At the end of September 1911, only six months after the foundation of Ujedinjenje ili smrt!, Italy launched an invasion of Libya. This unprovoked attack on one of the integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire triggered a cascade of opportunist attacks on Ottoman-controlled territory in the Balkans. A loose coalition of Balkan states – Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece – mounted parallel assaults on Ottoman territory, thereby starting the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913). The result was a momentous victory for the Balkan allies over the Ottoman forces, who were driven out of Albania, Macedonia and Thrace. In the Second Balkan War (June–July 1913), the belligerents fought over the spoils of the first: Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania fought Bulgaria for territories in Macedonia, Thrace and the Dobrudja.

The impact of these two wars is discussed in more detail in chapter 5. For the moment, it suffices to note that their most conspicuous beneficiary was Serbia, which acquired central Vardar, including Ohrid, Bitola, Kosovo, Štip and Kočani, plus the eastern half of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (the western half fell to Montenegro). The kingdom’s territorial extent increased from 18,650 to 33,891 square miles and its population grew by more than one and a half million. The acquisition of Kosovo, the mythscape of Serbian national poetry, was a cause for great rejoicing, and since the kingdom now shared a border with Montenegro to the west, there was the prospect that Serbia might, through a political union with its neighbour, secure a permanent access to the Adriatic coast. Moreover, Serbia’s conduct of the war appeared to show that the years of military investment financed by French loans (there was another big one from a consortium of French banks in September 1913) had not been in vain. Three hundred thousand troops had been put into the field within three weeks of the first mobilization order. The Serbian army was now, as one foreign observer noted, ‘a factor to be reckoned with’, and Serbia itself a major regional power. Dayrell Crackanthorpe, the British minister in Belgrade, reported on the mood of public elation: ‘Serbia feels that she has, so to speak, attained her majority and [. . .] can pursue a national policy of her own.’ The kingdom’s political elites were currently ‘passing through a phase of extreme self-satisfaction’; everywhere in the press and in public debate, Serbian successes in the field were contrasted with ‘the failures of Austrian diplomacy’.

For many of those in the territories newly conquered by Belgrade, the imposition of Serbian rule brought harassment and oppression. The freedom of association, assembly and the press guaranteed under the Serbian constitution of 1903 (Articles 24, 25 and 22) were not introduced into the new territories; nor was Article 13 revoking the death penalty for political crimes. The inhabitants of the new areas were denied active or passive voting rights. In other words, the conquered areas acquired, for the moment, the character of a colony. The government justified these decisions on the grounds that the cultural level of the new territories was so low that granting them freedom would endanger the country. In reality the chief concern was to keep the non-Serbs who constituted the majority in many areas out of national politics. Opposition newspapers such as Radičke Novine and Pravda were quick to point out that the ‘new Serbs’ had actually enjoyed better political rights under the Turks than they did under Serbian administration.

On the Serbian side, this was a war in two kinds, fought not only by regular army units, but also, as so often in the past, by partisan bands, comitatjis, and other freelance fighters. In the newly conquered areas, the collusion between official authorities and informal groups had appalling consequences. There was much arbitrary destruction of Turkish buildings, such as schools, baths and mosques. British consuls managed to limit the damage in some instances by persuading the local Serbian military commanders that this or that building dated back to the empire of Stepan Dušan and was thus a part of the Serbian national patrimony; this ruse succeeded, for example, in the case of the beautiful sixteenth-century Turkish bridge in Macedonian Skopje (Üsküb).

In October and November 1913, the British vice-consuls in Skopje and Monastir [now renamed Bitola] reported systematic intimidation, arbitrary detentions, beatings, rapes, village-burnings and massacres by the Serbs in the annexed areas. ‘It is already abundantly evident,’ Vice-Consul Greig of Monastir reported, ‘that Moslems under Servian rule have nothing whatsoever to expect but periodical massacre, certain exploitation and final ruin.’ Eleven days later, he filed a further report warning that the ‘Bulgarian and especially the Moslem populations in the districts of Perlepe, Krchevo and Krushevo [were] in danger of extermination by the very frequent and barbarous massacres and pillage to which they are subjected by Servian bands’. By the end of the month, ‘pillages, murder and outrages of other kinds by bands of Servian comitajis and persons in league with them’ had created conditions of near-anarchy. Albanians and other Muslims, Bulgars, Vlachs and Jews, the vice-consul reported in December, dreaded the prospect of subjection to ‘a penniless state’ that seemed bent on ‘draining every community of its means of existence to an extent unknown in the blackest days of the Turkish regime’. From Bitola in the south, near the Greek border, the British vice-consul reported that the old municipal officials had been replaced by a new cohort of corrupt ‘Servian ex-propagandists’ whose ringleaders were ‘(1) an ex-barber, spy and Serbian agent [. . .] and (2) a local Serboman of unmentionable profession called Maxim’. ‘Nothing,’ Greig concluded, ‘could be more favourable to the enemies of Servia than the reign of terror set up by this clique.’

What is interesting about these reports is not merely their disturbing content, but the scepticism with which they were received by the British minister Crackanthorpe, a man of pronounced Serbophile sentiment. Crackanthorpe, whose most important source on the events unfolding in the annexed areas was ‘a Servian officer of his acquaintance’, accepted the official denials of the Belgrade government at face value and tried to mute the impact of Greig’s dispatches from Monastir by suggesting to the Foreign Office that the vice-consul was the dupe of hysterical refugees and their tall tales. Already, one might argue, the events unfolding in the Balkans were being viewed through the geopolitical lens of the alliance system, in which Serbia figured as a friendly state locked in a gallant struggle with fearsome neighbouring Austria-Hungary. It was only the cumulative detail of the reports emerging from the annexed areas, combined with corroborating accounts from Romanian, Swiss and French officials that persuaded the British Foreign Office that the news of Macedonian atrocities should not be dismissed as Austrian propaganda.

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Filed under Austria, Balkans, Britain, France, Italy, migration, military, nationalism, Turkey, war

by | 17 October 2026 · 5:44 am

Wartime Memory Wiped Clean, 1945

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 397-400:

ON AUGUST 17, 1945, three days after the emperor announced on the radio Japan’s total defeat, Prince Higashikuni became the first (and most probably the last) prime minister chosen from the imperial house. It was up to him to disarm the nation, hand over the country to the Allied occupation forces, sign the document accepting Japan’s unconditional surrender, and, most critically, raise the morale of the thoroughly devastated nation.

The prince was a good orator who spoke simply and convincingly. On September 5, addressing a parliamentary session that included American GIs in the audience, Higashikuni insisted that the Japanese not dwell on the question of how the war was started and instead look forward. He proposed that the whole nation of one hundred million was to blame and so the whole nation had to repent. This was the same nation that had been told, until very recently, to fight until the bitter end, armed only with spears and helmets of bamboo. Higashikuni’s argument had some merit, especially in the late summer of 1945, when so much work lay in front of the Japanese people. But his words set the tone for Japanese leaders as well as those who followed them to overlook the most basic question of responsibility: Who was responsible for starting the war? The suggestion that the war might have been unnecessary was too difficult for any Japanese to accept, having lost so much and so many in the war. But this neglect, legitimized as a matter of official policy, in turn encouraged the general temptation to do away with various other kinds of responsibility, such as coming to terms with its war crimes and remembering the war after it was over.

This, of course, does not mean that people could forget what they had lived through. Contrary to received opinion, some serious attempts have been made in Japan to examine aspects of the country’s wartime past. Soldier U, who lived to be eighty-four, had enough time to reflect, discreetly and quietly, on his experiences. Though he never discussed any of them in his lifetime, he cared enough to leave a written record, unbeknownst even to his family.

Yet by claiming that every Japanese was to blame for the war, Higashikuni implied that nobody was to blame, fudging and diluting the real responsibility of the leaders who brought Japan to that momentous decision. Prince Konoe, who resurfaced as a public figure in Higashikuni’s cabinet, was doubtless the first to support this line of argument. Conservative politicians, in power for most of the postwar period, were only too happy to inherit such a partial and incomplete rendering of Japan’s past. Despite the efforts of some individual citizens, academics, and journalists to have a more honest debate, it is difficult to deny that Japan’s official impulse has been to look away from what is undesirable and unpleasant in its history. And this pattern was perpetuated as much, if not more, by what Kafu had so astutely noted on the eve of Pearl Harbor as the fundamental indifference to politics among many Japanese, absorbed as they were by their “primary pursuit … to pass one day at a time without encountering too much trouble,” as by the misplaced desire of some politicized right to impart glory to Japan’s lost war.

In 1952, Gone with the Wind was finally released to general audiences in Japan, and it became a huge box-office hit. Many Japanese identified with the spirited, impetuous, and indomitable southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, who remained determined to rise above any obstacles, even after having lost almost everything that mattered to her. Her celebrated last words, “After all, tomorrow is another day,” resonated with the generation of postwar Japanese trying to glimpse a better future through the wreckage of war. That was exactly what Japan opted to do—and that is why the past, with its improbable story of how the war came to pass, became another country.

I remember seeing two U.S.-made war films during my youth in Japan. The first was in 1959 or so in Aomori, where my brother and I went (by ourselves by train) from Kyoto to visit another missionary family with boys our age. The film was about the Korean War, maybe Pork Chop Hill, and I remember wondering whom the Japanese audience members might have felt more sympathy for: the Americans, the South Koreans, the North Koreans, or the Chinese. In the mid 1960s, I remember seeing The Bridge Over the River Kwai in a Japanese theater in Kobe, where I was in high school. I wondered how many survivors of the wartime generation, if any, were in the audience. Among my very earliest wartime-related memories in Japan was the sight of Japanese army veterans dressed in white but wearing their green field caps (略帽), perhaps missing a limb, begging from passersby in inconspicuous sheltered places, like pedestrian underpasses. Japan’s veterans who survived their wars in Asia and the Pacific received very little public support. See my blogpost on Rehabilitating Japanese War Veterans.

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by | 16 October 2026 · 6:36 am

Japan’s Homeland Disasters in 1944-45

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 394-397:

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1944, the anticipation of worse things to come on the home front led to a new policy. The government, still under Tojo’s leadership, announced an evacuation program for primary schoolers from thirteen metropolitan cities. The children, ranging in age from eight to twelve, were moved to the countryside, where they lived in large groups; for many, it was the first time away from their parents. They were usually put up in extremely rudimentary and overcrowded rooms of Buddhist temples or traditional inns. In all, about eight hundred thousand city children experienced this collective evacuation, characterized by perpetual hunger, homesickness, and spartan living. It would form a major part of their generational memory.

Newspapers and magazines saw the evacuation program through rose-colored glasses; they reported that the children were enjoying fresh country air and featured photos of their smiling—though clearly undernourished—faces. One photo showed a group of small boys squatting on the bathroom floor in a big circle, each scrubbing the back of the boy in front of him. They look to be having fun, but their astonishingly skinny naked bodies make one wonder how they had any energy left for smiling, let alone back scrubbing.

Without access to food other than whatever little was given them, the evacuated children suffered from hunger first and foremost. The greatest pastime for them was to draw food. “Sponge cakes, dumplings, pastries, shortcakes, caramels, rice crackers … we drew them all—absolutely every snack in this world one could remember,” one woman recalled. “Then we showed them to one another and enjoyed discussing how wonderful they would taste if we really were to eat them.” Complaining, unhappy letters home were systematically discouraged, and their teachers checked all mail before it was sent out. State censorship and confiscation of correspondence, legalized in October 1941, were exercised even at this level voluntarily.

This haphazard evacuation program was a direct response to the threat of a U.S. landing on the Japanese mainland, which seemed especially likely after the United States captured Saipan, fifteen hundred miles south. The island fell on July 7, 1944, and more than 55,000 Japanese, including civilians, died there. (Made a Japanese mandate by the League of Nations in 1920, Saipan had a Japanese population, including colonial Taiwanese and Koreans classified as Japanese, of 29,348 in 1943.) Vice Admiral Nagumo and other navy commanders ordered their soldiers to “die a hero’s death” and to become the “Pacific seawall” against the United States. Nagumo set a precedent by committing suicide on July 6, before the island’s conquest. The same “ultimate sacrifice” was also expected of civilians in the absence of any protection offered by the military. Too many chose death over surrender, sometimes coaxed by the remaining Japanese soldiers, who made sure that nobody was to suffer the shame of being taken captive.

The haunting proof of patriotic allegiance was captured on film by the U.S. Marines. Civilians, many of them women and some with babies and children, stumbled toward the edge of volcanic cliffs to make their final leaps. One can feel their slight hesitation and momentary fear as they looked down into the abyss of black seawater. But by sheer force of determination, they overcame their fear and jumped. “Banzai!” (“Live forever!”—or, more accurately in this case, “Long live the emperor!”) was often the last word of those loyal subjects of the empire. More civilians would commit suicide on the islands of Tinian, Guam, and Okinawa in the face of the U.S. advance. Japanese losses in the Pacific were so great that they could not be kept a secret any longer. The Saipan calamity was reported to the Japanese nation on July 18, 1944, along with the resignation of the Tojo cabinet. Two days after Tojo’s fall, on July 20, Operation Valkyrie, the most nearly successful of all the assassination attempts on Hitler, was carried out. With renewed fanaticism, the Führer would continue to lead Germany until his suicide.

…

Meanwhile, life had to carry on, and children continued to be evacuated. On August 22, 1944, about seven hundred children, in transit from Okinawa to Kagoshima, perished at sea. The U.S. submarines were already that close. The ill-orchestrated evacuation program ended in March 1945, and city families were urged to make individual arrangements to ensure the safety of their children. Family reunions were often brutally short-lived. Many children from Tokyo were sent back home just in time to experience the worst (but not the last) air raid unleashed on the city: the one in the early-morning hours of March 10, …

With the destruction of almost every Japanese city and the constant announcements of soldiers’ deaths, Japanese morale could not have been lower. Surviving death—from disease, hunger, or the incendiary bombs that grilled alive newborns and old people alike—had become the utmost national priority. A distraught mother who embraced her baby to the point of suffocation while seeking shelter during a bombing raid, a schoolgirl trying to float her way to safety down a river filled with dying people clinging to her, people navigating heaps of charred bodies as they looked for their missing family members—stories like these were becoming all too common. The Meiji Palace, where the imperial conferences had taken place, was burned down in May 1945, forcing the leaders to hold the final two imperial conferences before Japan’s unconditional surrender in an air-raid shelter.

Life in the countryside was less pressed, though things were scarce. Toddlers innocently competed with one another to collect plant roots, a substitute staple for rice, and grasshoppers, an invaluable available source of protein and calcium for growing children. Students were sent into the forests for pine sap to make gasoline (which never quite worked), and all households were ordered to turn in their metal, including buckets and ladles, to make airplanes. “We must be losing the war,” said one farm boy at the time, deducing that the government wouldn’t otherwise sink so low as to take utensils from poor people’s kitchens. But uncomplaining, and with a degree of fatalism, the nation endured the horrid times as if it were dealing with a series of relentless natural disasters rather than man-made ones.

In the midst of all this, a very select group of Japanese, mainly military officers but also some filmmakers, university students, and other civilians, had a rare chance to see films that the British had left behind in Southeast Asia. One of them was Gone with the Wind. The Japanese were amazed by the quality, technical superiority, and glamour of the nearly four-hour-long saga. They wondered how they could possibly defeat a country that had managed to produce such an astonishing film. (Another film left behind was Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose quality far surpassed that of Japanese animation technology.)

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by | 15 October 2026 · 5:00 am

Japan-U.S. Prisoner Exchange, 1942

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 385-387:

On the night of June 18, 1942, the Gripsholm of the Swedish American Line set sail from New York with a group of Japanese nationals aboard who had been detained in various makeshift camps, including one on Ellis Island. The Japanese government, in return, had dispatched the Asama Maru from the port of Yokohama, and later the Italian ship Conte Verde from Shanghai, carrying North and South American nationals home. Some of the notable faces among the Japanese group were Nomura and Kurusu. On the day of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the two men endured the most unnerving public humiliation imaginable for any diplomat. To ensure the success of the military operations in Hawaii and Malaya, the Japanese government kept the two ambassadors completely in the dark about its decision to go to war. They were notified of Tokyo’s intention to terminate diplomatic relations only hours before the attack.

The Japanese embassy’s inability to cope with the last-minute nature of Tokyo’s instructions did not help Nomura and Kurusu in their final mission of communicating to the White House the end of diplomacy, either. Tokyo had ordered Nomura and Kurusu to see Hull at 1:00 p.m., shortly before the first bomb was to be dropped on Pearl Harbor. Because the diplomatic communication, consisting of fourteen parts, was late in being typed up for delivery, the two Japanese diplomats were shown into Hull’s office at 2:20 p.m., utterly unaware that their country had already attacked the United States.

…

IN THE MONTHS that followed the opening of the war in the Pacific, Nomura, Kurusu, and other Japanese nationals awaited deportation in cramped resort hotels that had been turned into temporary detention camps (luxurious lodgings compared with the internment camps that many Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent were forced to live in). In Hot Springs, Virginia, and then in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Kurusu had ample time to reflect on what had gone wrong in his last-minute quest to secure peace between the two countries.

…

It was not until the summer of 1942 that Kurusu learned what had really been going on during those last ten days before Japan’s attack. In Japanese-occupied Singapore, where the Gripsholm made a brief stop, Kurusu heard army officers recount how difficult it was for them to prepare for attacks in the run-up to the war since the military leaders in Tokyo had not decided to go to war until November 26.

ON JULY 20, 1942, the Gripsholm, having picked up and crammed aboard even more detained Japanese in Rio de Janeiro, entered the port of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) in Portuguese Mozambique. Two days later, the Asama Maru and the Conte Verde, flying Japan’s Rising Sun flag, anchored at the same port in the Indian Ocean. It was there that the actual citizen exchange between the warring parties took place. The Japanese from North and South America quietly organized themselves and resettled on the two ships coming from Japan. There was no direct contact between the people from the Allied and Axis camps. But while waiting at the port, Nomura and Kurusu both spotted the tall figure of Ambassador Grew in the other group. He recognized them, too. Kurusu immediately recalled his interview with Grew the night before his departure for Washington in early November of the previous year. The uneasy physical distance between them was ample proof of the peace that had eluded them. The three men took their hats off in silent acknowledgment of one another.

The ships carrying the Japanese nationals reached Yokohama, Kurusu’s hometown, on August 20, 1942. By then, Japan’s preponderance at sea was declining precipitously. The balance of power had been tipped. From June 4 to 7, the Imperial Japanese Navy fought one of the most devastating naval battles in modern history, the Battle of Midway. The same men who planned the Pearl Harbor attack conceived of the Midway strategy, hoping to eliminate the United States from the Pacific once and for all. The operation ended in disaster for Japan. By this time, the Japanese military code had been broken by the United States (whereas at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, only the diplomatic code had been broken). The Japanese navy was dragged down from its glorious pinnacle only six months after it had reached it.

All this was unknown to most Japanese.

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by | 14 October 2026 · 5:59 am

Ambassador Kurusu Profile

From Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta (Vintage, 2013), pp. 337-340:

DESPITE HIS UNQUESTIONED INTELLECT and experience, Kurusu was an unfortunate choice in a public relations sense. To the outside world, Kurusu was known only as the man who signed the Tripartite Pact, having been photographed next to Hitler at the height of German-Japanese friendship. He was actually strongly opposed to the pact but was obliged to sign it as Japan’s ambassador to Germany in the autumn of 1940. Kurusu never wanted the Berlin job and had turned it down several times. He was ready to retire after his tenure in Belgium, where he was posted from 1936 to 1939. His time in Brussels coincided with the outbreak and intensification of the China War under the first Konoe government. He tried in his capacity as ambassador to initiate a settlement of the China conflict through the mediation of the Belgian and French governments. He knew that Japan lacked any coherent plans for that war and, more damningly, an effective leader. The escalation, in his words, came about because “the government always allowed itself to be dragged along by the faits accomplis in the field without any prospects of long-term solution.” Worse, there was “no coordination within and between the army and the navy” and everyone was “preoccupied with saving face and evading responsibilities.”

Kurusu could not have envisioned that things would get so bad so fast when he and his family, along with a crowd of enthused spectators, welcomed the record-setting Kamikaze aviators at the Brussels airport in April 1937. Kurusu accepted the ambassadorship to Berlin in 1939 only in the hope that he might prevent Japan’s diplomatic course from going further astray. Once in Berlin, he continued to seek ways to settle the China War through the third-party intervention of Germany. But just as things seemed to be moving in the right direction, Konoe, in his second premiership, recognized Wang Jingwei’s China, thereby alienating Chiang Kai-shek forever.

Kurusu was soon left out of all key communications between German and Japanese officials. Hitler’s government judged that Japan could not be wooed sufficiently through Kurusu, and the agreement on the Tripartite Pact was hastily reached between Matsuoka and a German envoy visiting Tokyo. Nonetheless, because Kurusu was photographed standing side by side with Hitler, his reputation became forever tainted.

Kurusu was so disgusted by that and other experiences in Germany that he requested to be relieved of his post and was allowed to leave Berlin in February 1941. Back in Japan, he led the life of a recluse, turning down government appointments, including a position in Tojo’s cabinet. Kurusu, however, could not reject the emergency call to Washington. A peaceful settlement of U.S.-Japanese differences was something he truly desired. He was pro-Anglo-American at heart. Perhaps as the son of the successful industrialist who had developed the cosmopolitan port of Yokohama, he had the appreciation of mercantile liberalism in his blood. The port town served as the window to the world during Japan’s rapid modernization and was known for its unsentimental, practical people like Kurusu.

Kurusu also had a personal stake in the future of the United States and Japan. He was married to an American from New York City born to British parents (her father was an Anglican clergyman). Kurusu wanted to do everything in his power to avoid a war between the two countries that meant the most to his family. It was to be a perilous mission. There were some on the Army General Staff who openly said they wished Kurusu’s plane would crash. With such ill wishes behind him, he departed for Taiwan in the early morning of November 7.

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