The War to End All Wars: World War I

The War to End All Wars: World War I (2010) is a non-fiction book for young readers by American author Russell Freedman. It tells the story of World War I for a teenage audience, beginning with the mounting political tensions in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and concluding with the war’s legacy, up to World War II. The text is supplemented by 118 images, including maps and contemporary photographs. Freedman, a veteran of the Korean War, dedicates the book to his father, who served in France during World War I.

Freedman begins by setting the scene in Europe at the turn of the century. He points out that even in the summer of 1914, most European commentators expected the peace which had reigned on the continent for a quarter-century to continue. The nations of Europe were increasingly economically interdependent, and the monarchs of the leading powers were close blood relatives. Alfred Novel, the inventor of dynamite, hoped that his invention would put an end to war, on the grounds that no nation would unleash its destructive power on human beings.

And yet, in the background tensions were growing. The last bout of European conflict in the 1870s had created an ambitious, aggressive new nation in Germany while leaving the French aggrieved at territorial losses. Seeking to establish themselves as a world power, Germany joined the race to colonize the world beyond Europe. To do so, it needed naval power, and the British government saw the Germans’ new fleet as a challenge to British naval supremacy. By 1914, the European powers were locked in an arms race at sea and on land.



Freedman explains the complex network of alliances through which the European nations hoped to defend themselves from one another. The stage was set for the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist group. Freedman points out that Austria’s response—invading Serbia—need not have had any consequences outside Serbia. It was the network of defensive alliances which permitted a political assassination to result in a global war.

Having set out the background to the war, Freedman turns to the experiences of soldiers. Quoting liberally from men who served in the war, he emphasizes that at the beginning of the conflict, most people—politicians, soldiers, and civilians alike, and on both sides—expected to win quickly and gloriously. Emotions were deliberately stoked as all nations encouraged their young men to fight. Propaganda appealed to nationalist sentiment, while dehumanizing opponents. Soldiers left home escorted by cheering crowds, waving their national flags.

No one, Freedman suggests, fully appreciated the power of modern weapons, many of them previously untested. Soldiers and officers trained in the cavalry charge found themselves ranged against machine guns and enormous, long-range field guns. Freedman sets out the horrific slaughter of the war’s beginning in stark figures. In the first month, 100,000 men were killed. By the end of the first year, 600,000 were dead.



Freedman describes the stalemate which ensued. On both sides, military commanders continued to throw men away in hopeless charges. Between times, their soldiers dug trenches and sniped at each other across a no man’s land strewn with barbed wire and corpses. Freedman discusses the effort on both sides to break the deadlock through technological innovation, leading to the development of the combat aircraft (initially designed in just a matter of weeks) and the tank.

Freedman devotes a great deal of space to describing life in the trenches, mostly in the words of the soldiers who lived it. We read extracts from the letters of a young German recruit who “didn’t think war would be like this.” A British soldier remembers smoking a pipe so his friend whose lower jaw had been “blown away” could smell the smoke. A French trooper declares, “Humanity is mad!”

Meanwhile, the fight goes on, as each side expends many lives to move the lines of the trenches a few hundred yards this way or that. Freedman describes the experience of going “over the top,” again mostly in soldiers’ own words: “You don't look, you see; you don't listen, you hear; your nose is filled with fumes and death and you taste the top of your mouth.”



Subsequent sections follow the development of the war from a broader perspective, examining the bloody battles at Verdun and the Somme as well as the naval campaign. The home front is also considered, as Freedman describes the growing unrest in Britain—and especially Germany—as the war deprived civilians of food and basic comforts.

The turning point of the war comes with the entry of the United States. Freedman explains that it took the US nearly a year to recruit enough troops for the fight. Their entry, however, decisively shifted the balance of power in the Allies’ favor.

Freedman closes his narrative by considering the aftermath of the war. He discusses the peace treaty signed at Versailles, tracing how its punitive terms lead directly to the outbreak of World War II a few decades later.



The book includes a bibliography, notes for each chapter, picture credits, acknowledgments, and an index.