Yes, and nobody was in the habit of putting anybody on trial for actions taken in a war at the time. The Entente didn't even manage to try Wilhelm after the war. "Should" was a moral statement, not a legal one and not one based on what could plausibly occurred.
Yes, the Battle of Sphakteria was unusually small by Greek standards, because it was more or less the 'clean-up' from the Battle of Pylos a few months before, a medium-sized naval battle that ended with the Spartans in question holed up on Sphakteria taking refuge from the Athenian fleet.I doubt that peltasts alone defeated that small regiment of Spartans, which only played a role due to having a number of Homioi which Spartans had to think of due to many reasons. Athens had clear naval superiority at the time, and Sphakteria is a tiny island that seemed to be heavily forested during the Peloponnesian war.
People point to the use of lightly armed troops and missile units during this battle by Demosthenes, the Athenian general, as indicative of a continuum of development in warfare. Demosthenes, it is said, honed Greek light infantry tactics during the Aitolian campaign in 426, then deployed them to perfection against the Spartans on Sphakteria the following year. Following from his example, the later Athenian general Isokrates then used light infantry to great effect against a Spartan mora at the Nemea during the early stages of the Korinthian War three decades later; Isokrates, Iason of Pherai, and eventually Philippos II developed Greek missile infantry to the level that they would take in the Makedonian syntagma during the campaigns of Alexander.
I think this explanation is awfully simplistic and teleological. Lightly armed troops were also notably scattered and crushed by unaided hoplites repeatedly during these wars. Unsupported peltasts or psiloi rarely achieved the sort of success that Isokrates found at the Nemea; Demosthenes had the success he did in Aitolia and Akarnania precisely because he operated in a rudimentary combined-arms framework. And Kyriakos is right: Demosthenes and Kleon also employed hoplites and enjoyed naval supremacy for the Battle of Sphakteria. They also may have benefited from a bizarre incident during which a scouting party accidentally burned the forest on the island down, revealing the Spartans' hiding spots. One doesn't need to resort to the missile infantry narrative to explain Athenian success on Sphakteria. They enjoyed such an overwhelming superiority that Spartan defeat was, if not preordained, extremely likely.
It wasn't Sphakteria; I don't think that anybody's positively identified the event the Spartans cited. For reference:Kyriakos said:
Philokles' presence in the aftermath of Aigospotamoi makes it fairly unlikely that he served at Sphakteria, and there is no record in Thoukydides of the Athenians having committed any kind of atrocity there. Since the men sent overboard were from captured ships, it would have had to have been in the aftermath of Pylos, not Sphakteria, anyway. I think that it's more likely that the event in question took place during the campaign of Aigospotamoi, or perhaps even during the battle itself, rather than twenty years before.Xen. said:
Nobody has denied that German atrocities did take place during the war. I openly acknowledged them with the reference to Louvain. But nothing the Germans did during the war compares with Britain's illegal blockade, a weapon explicitly designed by Britain's political and military leadership to attack Germany's civilian population. The only thing that comes close is Germany's U-boat campaign after 1917, but the damage the Germans inflicted during that year and a half pales in comparison to what the British did during the entirety of war and during the cease-fire. Over half a million German civilians died as a result of the blockade, and I defy you to find anything that the Kaiserreich did that stacks up to that.
The German atrocities in 1914 that you mention are more on a par with what the Russians did during their brief incursions into Galicia and East Prussia, in terms of scale and relevance. They're not even in the same league.
Unless rhetoric has become a war crime as well, I don't see what a speech made by one man fifteen years before the war on an entirely different subject has to do with the relative atrocities committed by the Entente and by the Central Powers during the war.
It's also nice that you mention how Germany violated Belgian neutrality without bringing up how Britain and France violated Greek neutrality, fomented a civil war on Greek soil, and fought a war on Greek territory until they had a puppet government that would accede to their wishes. And how you don't bring up the attempted Entente gang-rape of the Ottoman Empire in 1914. That, ah, stuff flows both ways. Even Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality was partially based on the entirely correct premise that if the Germans didn't do it first, the French and British would do it later. As it was, the British did violate Dutch neutrality during the Siege of Antwerp, but nobody cared, apparently.
And then, well, if we want to get into war guilt, we kind of have to start with Sergey Sazonov, Raymond Poincaré, and the "Period Preparatory to War". But, you know, that would require reading books by Albertini, or McMeekin, or Clark, not just eating up Tuchman's factually wrong depiction of the July Crisis.
This isn't an attempt to exculpate Germany for doing what it did, but rather to show that the Entente was no better, and that "a plague on both your houses!" is a more reasonable response to the Great War than a claim that a German victory would be materially worse than one by the Entente.
