It's a pleasure to welcome professor Nick Lloyd. He's a professor of modern warfare at King's College London and the author of The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918.
Now the next part: The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918. And the content here is very unknown to me, so it's a great pleasure to learn what had often been mentioned as Russia vs. Austria-Hungary, always the Austrian-Hungarians were begging for German troops.
In our conversation three years ago about the Western Front, attention was paid to these men Hindenburg and Ludendorff, that they would eventually show up on the Western Front and be the drivers of the closing stages of the war when America got in.
Their reputation, however, was built on their conduct on the Eastern Front, which was all a mystery to me. This new book, enormously detailed and persuasive, introduces the Eastern Front, where the Germans won. That's critical to understand what we're about to describe.
Germany wins in the East. Their defeat, as we remember it 100 years or more later, was in the West.
We begin, however, not on a battlefield, but on the day of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914. His death triggers a cavalcade of decision making across this vast map of Europe.
Why? What was so brittle that Austria-Hungary at this moment that the aging monarch, Emperor Franz Joseph, felt he was compelled to grasp the sword after so many years of peace?
Watch the full interview above, or listen to an audio version below:
LINKS:
CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor on YouTube
The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 on Amazon
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