July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin

When an assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, no one could have imagined the shocking bloodshed that would soon follow. Indeed, as award-winning historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might indeed have been avoided entirely had it not been for the actions of a small group of statesmen in the month after the assassination. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, these men sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A deeply-researched account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of the month that changed the course of the 20th

 

McMeekin’s sally into the ever-burgeoning genre of WWI origin stories does not refrain, as does historian Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, from apportioning blame for the outbreak of the war. This can be a tricky task for historians, complicated by documentary gaps about the July 1914 crisis, which indicate some of the power players involved destroyed or doctored evidence. Historian David Fromkin (Europe’s Last Summer, 2004) seized on this to indict Germany as the primary instigator of WWI. While hardly absolving Germany, McMeekin argues that the principal suspects are the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, and the French president, Raymond Poincaré, both of whom also altered evidence during the same period. McMeekin incorporates diplomatic exchanges among the powers, which both acknowledge responsibility and attempt to saddle their opponents with the brunt of it, and grants the Entente powers better success than the Triple Alliance at the high-risk, not to say cynical, operation of assigning blame for starting a continental European war. Alluding to historical controversies, McMeekin ably delivers what readers demand from a WWI-origins history: a taut rendition of the July 1914 crisis. --Gilbert Taylor