Professor Mosier has written a curiously uneven book that improves after a perilously weak beginning to give the reader several insightful discussions of French and British campaigns, a provocative view of the American Expeditionary Force in France, and an epilogue that's sure to spark further discussion. Mosier's "damn-the-torpedoes," glib manner of expression will irritate some readers, but later portions of his book challenge some popular beliefs about the causes of French and British casualties, the competence of Allied versus German military preparedness and tactics, and the role played by the United States in The Great War.

First, however, the reader has to slog through six chapters of much pontificating on the opening moves of World War One, including an egregiously distorted description of the Battle of the Marne. And in the "How's That Again?" category, one finds on page 32: "...von Schlieffen was not bound to present his plans to the government for approval. And wisely so, because as he himself soon concluded, his plan was unfeasible." Then on page 35: "...in 1906, von Schlieffen... was replaced. So was his plan." Both statements are bald nonsense. In retirement, Schlieffen continued to have faith in and fine-tune his complex and innovative plan right up to his death in 1912. And not only did the Germans use his plan to great effect, they came to within an ace of knocking France out of the war with it! Only a wavering von Moltke's last-minute changes to it, coupled with an irrepressible von Kluck's dogged pursuit of General Lanrezac's Fifth Army north of Paris, prevented the entrapment of the French armies envisioned by Schlieffen.

Unfortunately, Mosier hits the reader with this sort of thing too often in the early going, but hang on, because from Chapter Seven onward, he gives us a better-thought-out narrative covering the ironies, heartbreaks, and impacts of several lesser known but important battles. Chapters 16 and 17 covering the period of the American Expeditionary Force's participation in the war are particularly rousing (given Mosier's penchant for the inflammatory comment) and provocative.

All in all, this is an entertaining book, but it must be used with extreme caution. And whoever was tasked with proofreading and editing the text at HarperCollins should be taken out, put up against a wall, and shot.

Let me start with what I like about John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War. The book is well researched and written from the heart by someone who clearly has a great feel for the subject. Mosier does his utmost to rescue the American involvement in the First World War from the historical vacuum into which it has fallen in the nation's collective consciousness, and kudos to him for that.

Mosier asserts the German army, man for man, was superior at a tactical level to that of its enemies. I agree. His best work on this is Chapter 2, where he analyses the development of combined arms tactics in Germany prior to the outbreak of the war. Subsequent chapters detail the ruthless application of these tactics.

The problem is Mosier fails to explain that the greater the German triumph at the tactical level the worse their strategic situation became.

At numerous points in the book I got the distinct impression Mosier was hoping the Germans would completely overwhelm the Allies and deal them the thrashing he clearly believes they deserved. Throughout the book Allied generals (with exceptions like Petain) are incompetent; Allied politicians are shortsighted and inept; Allied media are lying propagandists; Allied war aims are self serving and amoral. "Like the Serbians, whose fanatical quest for territorial aggrandizement had started the war, Rumanians dreamed of a greater Rumania," (p 254) Mosier says. "The Rumanian army's habits of occupation resembled those of the Mongol horde more than a modern army," (p 258) he adds. After being all but annihilated, the Rumanians are reduced to holding Jassy, a region that was "the cradle of that peculiarly Rumanian blend of apocalyptic religious nationalism and anti-Semitism," (p 260) Mosier concludes.

The fact that Rumania is mentioned at all highlights another inconsistency; after informing us in the preface that the focus of the book will be on the critical western front, Allied hopes of decisive victory in the east being "entirely delusionary," Mosier devotes entire chapters to other fronts when it suits him. Chapter 13 details the destruction of Rumania. Chapter 15 records the Italian collapse at Caporetto. The great Italian victory at Vittoria Veneto the following year that broke Austria Hungary is not even mentioned, nor is the capitulation of Germany's other allies that year.

Mosier blithely dances around other facts that might seem inconvenient for his purposes. He doesn't hold Germany responsible for the war; after beginning Chapter 3 with the sentence, "Serbia was the first of the combatants to declare a general mobilization," in a footnote, he asserts, "the sequence of mobilization indicates ultimate responsibility for starting the war." (p 64). And that's it. All the background we're given. Nothing about Austria Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, with Germany's full support, or any other diplomatic initiatives. If you knew nothing else about the war you would be forgiven for assuming it started because Serbia wanted to go to war with Austria Hungary, a country with an army fifteen times bigger than its own in 1914.

The fact is, Germany - unnecessarily, and ultimately self-defeatingly - provoked Britain into entering the war, creating the conditions for unrestricted submarine warfare and therefore the mobilization of the United States against her, by invading Belgium. This strategic blunder - quite possibly the worst in the history of warfare - was more significant than any of Germany's tactical triumphs that Mosier lavishes such detailed praise upon. The significance is lost. So is any sense of moral outrage against Germany - after all, Mosier assures us, the French talked about violating Belgian neutrality, so they're equally guilty, right?

After shifting the onus for the war to the Allies, Mosier lets Germany off the moral hook throughout his work. For example, he cites with admiration the devastating effects of German employment of chemical weapons at Ypres in 1917 as just another example of German ingenuity being harnessed to provide killing power.

The only attention Mosier gives to the Allied campaign of economic warfare against Germany is to dismiss it in one sentence in one footnote: "The idea that Germany and Austria were brought to their knees by the 'blockade' is convincingly dealt with in Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War." (p 284). In fact, it isn't at all. Mosier also ignores the corpus of work related to the effects of the complementary Allied propaganda campaign inside Germany.

So, the great German offensive of 1918 opens, and it's successful everywhere - no question of the troops burning out or outrunning their supply lines, oh no. And at the last moment, the Allies chestnuts are hauled out of the fire by the arrival of the Americans. In the engagement at Belleau Wood, "It was the American Second and Third Divisions, collectively, that stopped the German advance to the south, and thus saved France."(p 321). And in the next few sentences Mosier explains how: by the same bloody, head-on frontal charges that had cost the British and French so much over the past four years.

And then the Americans, single-handedly, roll the Germans back. No mention of the contribution of their Allies other than their body counts - the British victory at Amiens and the "Black Day" of the German army sails right by. The British are utterly hopeless. They're even more racist than the Americans! (p 311).

Amusingly, Mosier, who utterly spuriously describes Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War as "the first work of any intellectual substance on the general issues of the war to appear since Churchill," adds, "The reader will notice that Ferguson's arguments and mine frequently converge on the same conclusion, although using drastically different methods to arrive there." (p 362). Actually, Ferguson's point in emphasizing the tremendous human cost of the war is in order to argue it should never have been fought; Germany should have been given Europe in order to save the British Empire.

Ferguson returns the compliment - "There is much in the work I really admire" he says in the blurb - but I'm not sure how Mosier accounts for Ferguson's opinion of American fighting qualities: "It was commonly claimed at the time (and some people still believe it) that the Americans 'won the war.' In reality, the AEF suffered disproportionately large casualties, mainly because Pershing still believed in frontal assaults, dismissed British and French training as over-cautious, and insisted on maintaining outsized and unwieldy divisions. The American First Army's operations against the Hindenburg Line (the Kriemhilde Stellung) in September-October 1918 were old-fashioned and wasteful." (p 312).

The Myth of the Great War makes a good case for the performance of the German Army in WWI, and a fairly damning case against the French and British armies and their leaders. In spite of the promise on the cover, however, Prof. Mosier doesn't come close to proving (or explaining how) the Americans "saved the Allies" in his thin final chapters.

Mosier does well to make us re-examine the popular impression that both sides in the war engaged equally in senseless human-wave tactics. Although one might well quibble with his casualty statistics (as other reviewers have), my guess is that there is something to his argument that the Germans were less profligate with their manpower resources, and more quick to adapt to the punishing futilities of trench warfare. His discussion of equipment and tactics--as well as the early campaigns of the war--is quite compelling.

Mosier loses his way in a couple of respects, however. First, he gets himself into hot water whenever he wanders into strategic questions. Better not to discuss the pre-war diplomatic maneuverings at all than to dismiss as senseless Britain's alliance with France in a single, poorly reasoned paragraph. Mosier only nibbles around the edges of the intricate question of war responsibility, but surely it is not enough to note only that France and Russia ordered mobilization before Germany, without discussing why they mobilized. In such moments Mosier betrays a bit of pro-German bias that goes beyond admiration for military prowess.

Mosier is more seriously hampered by a lack of understanding of the belligerents' war aims and their diplomatic consequences. How else to explain his blithe reading of August-September 1914 as not only a tactical German victory, but a strategic one? Contrary to Mosier's speculationk, the goal of German war plan was not simply to seize a big chunk of Belgium and Northern France in order to fight a long war on someone else's soil. At best, it was a satisfactory fallback position (albeit one with serious diplomatic consequences) after the offensive stalled. In fact, the failure to knock out France in the initial campaign meant that the gamble was lost, and Germany would have to fight a two-front war that eventually exhausted its population, resources and will to carry on the struggle.

Throughout the book, Mosier pays very little attention to fronts other than the Western, and often underestimates the strain they posed on German manpower. At one point he argues that the detachment of two divisions from the German thrust through Belgium showed that the Germans had more than enough soldiers to execute their plans in the West (in fact, they were detached because of the seemingly desperate situation in the East). A few pages later we read that gaps in the German lines approaching the Marne made them vulnerable to counterattack and made a strategic retreat necessary (thus saving Paris). Those two divisions were surely missed then.

Throughout the book, Mosier oscillates between ridiculing the Allied attrition strategy, and occasional acknowledgments that Germany simply had no reserves to spare. The lack of manpower may not have caused the collapse the Allies kept hoping for, but it did frequently prevent Germany from following up tactical advantage with strategic success.

It is this failure to understand the relationship (and the difference) between strategy and tactics that causes The Myth of the Great War to crash and burn in its final chapters. Mosier seems to think that the "true" winner of a war is determined by adding up casualty figures and seeing which side sustained the most damage. By this measure, the Germans were on their way to winning in 1918 when the Americans showed up and tipped the numerical balance back in the Allies' favor. Maybe (even probably) true. But Mosier doesn't offer many convincing reasons why the Americans would have been qualitatively so much better than the British or the French. And he offers no reason at all why the Germans could not return to their defensive tactics of 1915-17 to stabilize the front and--given their supposed battlefield superiority--wear the Americans out. Instead he jumps ahead to the Armistice, which is represented as some kind of amicable German-American deal to stop the war on the basis of the Fourteen Points, to the chagrin of the British and French. That may have been what the Germans thought (or hoped) they were doing, but I doubt it. They didn't fight a war for four years and then call it quits without knowing it represented a huge defeat. Maybe they expected to be treated better for having fought so well. But that would have been naive. Which is what Mosier becomes when he equates casualty figures (or the proper maintenance of military cemeteries) with victory.

The best refutation of Mosier's book won't be found in these reviews. It can be found in a little treaty signed at Versailles. Fair or not, wise or not, it proved one thing: the Germans didn't win.