The Material Foundations of Coalition Strategy in the Great War
Greenwood, 2002, 373 + xiv pages, index, maps, tables, statistical appendices, IBSN 0 275 97299 2, $95 hardcover.
While this work is primarily one of supply and its role in winning The Great War, it is also a political history treatise aimed at debunking several strongly held views on American participation in and impact on the conflict. The most strenuously argued point is the author’s weakest: an attempt to establish French cupidity in deflecting General Pershing and the AEF from their original intention to attack toward in the Lorraine Basin Metz and not into the tactical morass of the Meuse Argonne. Stubbs posits several reasons for this French action including a wish to limit America’s military success and thereby its influence the post-war peace negotiations, as well as to protect the vulnerable Briey iron mines vital for post-war reconstruction. While some historians support Stubb’s thesis, most do not, tracing instead serious AEF planning for an advance on Metz to the creation in October 1918 of the Second American Army, not to planning for the September 1918 St. Mihiel offensive.
Stubbs is on much more solid ground when he points to sustained British and French efforts to minimize America’ military, financial and economic contribution to the victory as a way to reduce Woodrow Wilson’s post-war diplomatic clout. Still, this is largely a book about supply, industry and near total mobilization of civilian economies and societies. It is replete with useful maps, graphs and charts showing inter alia wartime overland, canal and sea transport capacities, munitions, gun and shell production, motor vehicle manufacturing, aircraft and ship building, casualty rates and orders of battle. Also highlighted are massive and often underrated American material contributions to victory through finance and industry, in supplying some three million tons of new merchant shipping, and fifty percent of the raw materials for French shell production in 1918 -- the latter being a specific and mutually-agreed trade off for French supply of artillery and aircraft to the AEF. Some of the statistics cited (many are estimates) are surprising; others are not. For example the industrial parity between the two competing camps (absent American inputs) is striking. All these facts and figures are vital to those who believe that amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics. In all, Stubb’s work is a valuable addition to the study of the 1914-1918 conflict.
Reviewer: Len Shurtleff
