20 Commonly Held Myths About WWI That Experts Have Debunked

World War I, or the Great War as it was known to those who lived through it, was undoubtedly one of history’s most brutal conflicts. But over the years a variety of so-called facts about the war have entered the public consciousness. All too many of these are downright false — wholly unsupported by the evidence. How long did soldiers spend in the trenches? What was the real story about the timing of when America joined the war? Wasn’t it only white men who fought? Read on to find out the truth...

20. Soldiers spent years in trenches

With good reason, we look back on the trench warfare of World War I with horror. Living conditions could barely be described as primitive. Men were crammed together in underground bunkers with little sanitation; they were often cold and frequently wet. Not to mention the fact that violent death was an ever-present threat. But although the war lasted for four years, no soldier spent that whole period in unbroken service on the front lines.

A system of rotation

Army commanders recognized that their men could only put up with the intolerable conditions in the front-line trenches for limited periods. And that’s why a system of rotation was introduced. For most of the time, a combat unit would spend no more than ten days in a month in the trenches, and less time than that right on the front line. At other times, they would be garrisoned in rear areas, enjoying essential respite from the most dangerous trenches.

19. America joined the war too late

It’s perhaps mostly British and French commentators that have accused the Americans of joining WWI too late to make any real difference to its outcome. But the assertion is not backed up by actual historical evidence. So said author Nick Lloyd, writing for the History Extra website. He contended that President Woodrow’s decision to lead his nation into war “was of enormous consequence.”

American troops were crucial

Despite its ostensible neutrality until 1917 America had already provided vital material support to the British and French. But once the U.S. joined the war, it was the massive numbers of troops committed to battle on the Western Front that tipped the balance against the Germans. By the end of the Great War, some 2 million Americans had served in Europe: about 50,000 of those lost their lives. Lloyd’s stark conclusion ran, “Without U.S. involvement the war may even have ended in a German victory, either in 1917 or 1918.”

18. WWI was the bloodiest war in history at the time

World War I is best remembered for the horrifying scale of slaughter on the battlefields. So it comes as no surprise that many people believe that it must have seen the highest number of casualties of any conflict up until that time in history. But, it turns out that contention is another of the Great War myths. 

The Taiping Rebellion

As British historian Dan Snow pointed out on the History Hit website, a hideously bloody war had been fought in China some 50 years earlier than WWI. The Taiping Rebellion lasted some 14 years and the fatality estimate for that conflict puts the number of deaths at between 20 and 30 million. By contrast, during the Great War a total of some 17 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives.

17. The US was neutral until 1917

Until it formally entered the Great War in 1917, the U.S. maintained a strict neutrality. Or at least that’s what many would have you believe. The truth is this neutrality was far from as rigid as some think. And that was despite the fact that, as the Washington Post newspaper reminded us, Woodrow Wilson ran for a second presidential term in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”

Trade with Britain

The truth was that in private Wilson was keen to see a German defeat. His government largely turned a blind eye to the fact that throughout the war American companies were selling goods and lending money to the British hand over fist. By the war’s end, the British had spent some $3 billion on American goods, including arms. On the other hand, thanks to the British naval blockade, trade with Germany was almost non-existent. U.S. objections to that were at best half-hearted.

16. WWI was the worst of all conflicts to fight in

There’s a powerful mythology that the miseries and privations of WWI, especially in the trench warfare of the Western Front, are unrivalled by any other conflict. But one British historian, Max Hastings, has poured scorn on that idea. He wrote on the History Extra website that WWI was far from the “worst battlefield experience in history.”

Horrors of WWII’s Eastern Front

To support his view, Hastings cites the Eastern Front in WWII, which pitched the Soviets against the Nazis. One estimate has it that 40 million soldiers and civilians died in that conflict. Hastings believes that the WWI Western Front got its inaccurate reputation from “a new breed of citizen-soldiers who had not seen combat before and were stunned and appalled by the misery of the battlefield.”

15. British soldiers were “Lions led by donkeys”

The memorable phrase “lions led by donkeys” actually came into wide usage long after the war’s end. British historian Alan Clarke was the man who made the words so well-known in his 1961 book The Donkeys. He claimed they had been first said by senior German officers during the war. But many historians believe that Clarke created the quote. In any case, how fair is the phrase, which assumes that the British were led by incompetent and even cowardly generals?  

Generals in combat

Snow reminds us that in fact more than 200 British generals were killed, captured or wounded during the conflict. So perhaps they were not so cowardly! There’s another key piece of evidence that disputes the idea of a useless British military leadership. That’s the indisputable fact that the Germans were roundly defeated by 1918.

14. Young Americans universally obeyed conscription law

When the U.S. made the momentous decision to enter the Great War, the nation’s government did something that had not happened since the Civil War. It brought in conscription to the armed forces. On the day this measure came into effect an astonishing 9 million men and more registered for call-up. But there were another 3 million Americans who never did put their names down for conscription, as the law said they should. 

Escaping over the border

So compliance with the conscription law was far from universal. On top of the 3 million who never registered, 338,000 who did register failed to present when called up or deserted after enrollment. Very few of the unregistered men were ever prosecuted, with many said to have slipped over the border to Mexico. Perhaps surprisingly, proportionately more Americans resisted Great War conscription than avoided the draft during the Vietnam War roughly 50 years later. 

13. Machine guns caused the most casualties

A stereotypical view of combat during WWI sees soldiers clambering out of their trenches into No Man’s Land during an attack. The result is that the infantrymen are mown down in their thousands by machine-gun fire. Although undoubtedly such weapons caused many casualties, they were not in fact the main source of death and wounding. What caused more casualties than any other single weapons system was artillery.

Artillery slaughter

According to the National WWI Museum and Memorial website, some 60 percent of battlefield casualties during the conflict were caused by artillery fire. When a shell exploded in a trench, shrapnel could cause multiple deaths and serious injuries. And the amount of artillery fire was prodigious. On day one alone of the Battle of Verdun in 1916 the Germans fired 1 million shells at the French.

12. The war was fought in Europe alone

The best-known battlefields of WWI lay in the Western Front in Belgium and France. But that ignores the Eastern Front, where the Germans fought protracted battles with the Russians until the Russian Revolution of 1917 effectively ended that nation’s involvement in the conflict. But it’s all too easy to forget that the Great War raged in many other parts of the world, not just western and eastern Europe.

Africa and the Middle East

There was, for example, fighting in the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey, threw in its lot with the Germans, resulting in fighting in modern-day Iraq. There were also battles around the Suez Canal in Egypt. Elsewhere in Africa, fighting broke out in Dar es Salaam in modern-day Tanzania, in Cameroon, and in Togo. Far as these lands were from the European theaters of war, they were still heavily impacted by the conflict. 

11. Only white men fought in the war

The idea that only white Europeans fought in the Great War could hardly be further from the truth. The conflict was, after all, a world war. For a start, two of the main participants in the war had empires that girdled the world: Britain and France. And the British and French authorities were not slow to use troops from every corner of the imperial territories. 

Africans and Indians

Soldiers came from India and the Caribbean to fight on the Western Front under the British flag. Some 1.3 million Indian soldiers served with the British during the war, and about 74,000 lost their lives. And the French used 500,000 African troops from their territories, most of whom fought in Europe. Then there were African-Americans who served on the Western Front, albeit in strictly segregated units and seldom on the front line. But the men of the Harlem Hell Fighters Regiment fought fiercely on the Western Front and were collectively awarded the French Croix de Guerre.

10. Women played no part in WWI

It’s true that French, British, and American early-20th-century attitudes towards women meant that they played no part in front-line combat. Yet that did not mean that they had no part to play in the war effort: far from it. The U.S. Army Nurse Corps and other groups such as the American Red Cross had more than 3,000 women working in hospitals in France during the war.

Women in combat

The British and Americans might not have allowed women to serve in combat, but other nations did. Women from Serbia, Bulgaria, Russia and Romania all fought on the front line. One Russian outfit led by Maria Bochkareva earned the title of the Women’s Battalion of Death. Bochkareva had personally begged the Tsar to be allowed into combat and her battalion eventually fought on the frontline in 1917.

9. Germany was starved into defeat

After the war, some claimed that Germany had never truly been defeated on the battlefield. The country only capitulated because it was on its knees economically, laid low by the highly effective British Royal Navy’s blockade. The sanctions had prevented essential imports of war materials and, crucially, food. But, in truth, Germany supplied some 75 percent of its nutritional needs domestically.

An army defeated

So although there were undoubtedly shortages due to the blockade, these were not severe enough to cause defeat. And on the battlefield, Germany was well and truly beaten. After launching a massive but ultimately unsuccessful Western Front assault into France in early 1918, the Germans were pushed back by Allied counter-offensives. The German Army was finished, the Kaiser abdicated, and the war was over.

8. Britain’s officer classes did not pull their weight

There’s a persistent myth that does the rounds claiming that British officers escaped the worst ravages of trench warfare on the Western Front. They were instead enjoying safe and comfortable billets well away from the brutal carnage of artillery and machine gun fire. But is there actually any truth to this? According to the evidence, the answer is a resounding ‘No’. 

Carnage among officers

In raw numbers, there were indeed more casualties from the lower ranks than among the officer class, generally recruited from the British social elites. But that was because there were more privates than officers in the British Army, as is the case in any military. But proportionately, the officers suffered more than their men. Some 17 percent of officers were killed in the war, but only 12 percent of other ranks lost their lives. 

7. Generals failed to adapt their tactics

World War I, it can be said, was the first full-scale industrialized conflict, particularly on the Western Front. So it’s little surprise that generals and staff officers took some time to adapt to this new and unknown type of warfare. At the start of the war, men had charged on horseback. And ill-equipped infantry attacked determined soldiers dug into machine-gun pits with predictable results.

Embracing new technology

But as the war rumbled on, there were radical changes in both tactics and technology, some of them evolving at breakneck speed. Tanks, for example. The time these steel monsters took to go from concept to deployment on the battlefield was just a matter of two years. And aircraft became increasingly common on the Western Front both for combat and vital reconnaissance. So it’s unfair to claim that military authorities were unwilling to engage with new ideas.

6. The British people were keen to go to war

There’s a potent legend that the British people were champing at the bit for a chance to fight the Germans in the summer of 1914. There’s even a term for this supposed phenomenon, “jingoism.” But how close to the truth is this idea of a British public spoiling for a fight to the point of irrationality? British historian Dr. Catriona Pennell takes a far more nuanced view.

No lust for war

Writing on the History Extra website, Dr. Pennell pointed out that in fact when war broke out British people reacted “with a sense of shock and surprise” — that’s hardly an expression of jingoistic zeal. And, Pennell continued, although the British “accepted the need for Britain to fight, this did not equate to a blindly enthusiastic lust for war.”

5. The Treaty of Versailles was unduly punitive

After the Great War ended in November 1918 came the peace talks. A defeated Germany was forced to accept various constraints and punishments under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919. The agreement included a loss of some 13 percent of German territory, with various nations gaining land including France, Belgium and Poland. Teutonic military strength was also severely curtailed, and the defeated power also had to take responsibility for starting the war. 

Harsher treaties

There have been those who have claimed that the Versailles settlement was unduly harsh and ultimately led to the outbreak of WWII just 20 years later. But, as Snow points out on History Hit, other treaties after wars in Europe were much more severe. For example, after WWII, Germany was occupied, its industrial base dismantled and many leading Nazis were imprisoned or executed as war criminals.

4. Shell shock was not recognized in WWI

There’s a commonly held belief that shell shock was not recognized as a genuine condition during WWI. But the truth is that many soldiers who cracked under the intolerable pressure of sustained combat and artillery bombardment were treated with some compassion as suffering from a mental breakdown. Yet others were charged with desertion, and even shot. Tragically, 346 British soldiers were executed during the war for either cowardice or abandoning their posts.

Not “ordinary lunatics”

All the same, that statistic does not mean that shell shock went entirely unrecognized. Writing on the History Extra website, historian Fiona Reid pointed out that the British War Office stated that soldiers suffering from mental disorders “should not be treated like ordinary lunatics.” And as many as 80,000 men were diagnosed with psychological problems. Some deserters, but certainly very far from the majority, were executed. Others, meanwhile, were treated as mental patients. 

3. Only the land war was important

Much of the literature and many of the histories of WWI deal almost exclusively with the conflict on land. But there was also intensive fighting at sea. There were huge set-piece naval battles and there was also a bitter submarine war. As the History website pointed out, the three-day Battle of Jutland in the North Sea involved some 250 ships and 100,000 sailors.

U-boat havoc

Historically, the British Royal Navy had enjoyed international dominance over the world’s seas and it used that to its advantage by blockading Germany’s merchant trade. This caused very real food shortages in Germany. On the other hand, German U-boats played havoc with British shipping, both naval and merchant. In just the months from February to April 1917 German submarines sank in excess of 500 merchant craft.

2. Few civilians died in WWI

In general, we think of WWI as a conflict where huge bodies of soldiers faced off against each other in either trench warfare or full-scale, sometimes suicidal, assaults. But it was not just men in uniform who faced death and destruction in the Great War. Many civilians also fell victim to the brutalities of the struggle.

Civilian casualties

Writing on the History Extra website, historian Heather Jones freely admitted that we have no entirely dependable figures for the number of civilian casualties during WWI. Jones cited one estimate that sais about 500,000 German civilians died from malnutrition during the war. Then there were 1 million Armenians deported from their homeland by the Ottoman Empire, many of whom perished. Those two examples alone indicate the scale of civilian fatalities.

1. African Americans backed the war

Some historians have asserted that African-Americans were keen to fight in the war because they believed that it could lead to improvement in their position in U.S. society. The argument, it’s said, was that if black people showed themselves to be willing and brave fighters, the segregation rife in many parts of America would be swept away. In fact, many prominent African-Americans took a very different view.

Segregation

Many questioned why people of color should fight to preserve freedom and democracy across the Atlantic when they enjoyed neither at home? What’s more, the segregation in everyday life was equally prevalent in the U.S. Army at the time, with strict separation of races. Indeed, African-American soldiers were seldom allowed into combat, instead being forced into low-status roles.