I still don't understand why everyone on this forum hates this book. I can't find any website denying the book's credibility, and the book is well sourced.
Couple of reasons.
First off, the book is part of that old-school...school that emphasized the Kaiser's role in diplomacy. (This school includes one of my professors. Which sucks.) Wilhelm, it is said, destroyed the European world order out of a combination of Freudian pique, a Napoleonic complex vis-a-vis the United Kingdom, bigotry, and general incompetence. He is blamed for destroying Bismarck's perfect alliance system and, at his worst (so the Fischerite
Sonderweg advocates go), he is blamed for Germany's premeditated use of the 1914 crisis to conquer the world.
This is flatly bogus. Germany was a parliamentary monarchy, not a tsarist autocracy. Even if the personal defects attributed to Wilhelm are genuine - a matter of subjective biography - he frankly did not have enough scope to exercise them even as Kaiser to make more of an impact on European diplomacy than already-extant trends. Anglo-German alliance was not sunk by the Kaiser. It was rendered impossible because the United Kingdom and Germany simply did not have any common interests, any real venues for cooperation. The only possible one, Russia, was rendered null and void by Germany's quite reasonable stance that getting involved in the Anglo-Russian Great Game would mean that Germany would have to bear the brunt (on land) of any fighting, while the British leisurely sailed to victory like they always did. Other, long-term factors wedging Germans and Russians apart, such as the effect of the "grain invasion" on East-Elbian German rye farmers and the ensuing tariff wars beginning in the 1890s, are generally glossed over in favor of one-shot pointless crap like the Kaiser bumbling about in Morocco or the Kaiser calling Germans "as badass as the Huns" or the Kaiser's
Daily Telegraph interview. Hell, even the oft-derided Anglo-German naval race, creating the so-called
Luxusflotte that did nothing useful in wartime but make Britain angry, had ceased to be a bone of contention after Germany unilaterally abandoned the race in 1912-3. (Conveniently ignored by Tuchman.)
The people who were pursuing confrontational diplomacy in 1914 were not the Central Powers, but rather the Entente. The Great Power system worked to preserve peace in large part because Great Powers didn't go to war with other Great Powers over small powers. In 1853, the British and French backed the Ottoman Empire against Russia and caused the most drastic series of wars and shifts in Continental political power since Napoleon. In 1859, the French backed Piedmont against Austria and continued the trend. In 1887, Austria-Hungary and Germany did not back Bulgaria against Russia and kept the peace. In 1909, Russia did not back Serbia against Germany and kept the peace. Russia's, and more specifically the Tsar's and Sazonov's, decision to treat Serbia's continuing prestige as a middle-rank power as a key Russian interest did more than any German or Habsburg initiative ever did to spark the July Crisis.
Much was made of the German "blank check" to the Habsburgs. Nobody ever seems to talk about France's "blank check" to Russia, or Russia's "blank check" to Serbia. (Admittedly, the second of these wasn't explicit; when Pašić made his leap in rejecting the ultimatum, he was gambling that Russia would intervene, and pandering to domestic critics to try to keep a lid on the civil war/coup that Dimitrijević was starting. So it's understandable in that context.) Russia's overall failure to manage the crisis effectively (that is, if they wanted peace at all) is usually explained away by earlier historians (incl. Tuchman) by a supposed Russian inability to only conduct partial mobilization due to the nature of their military system. This was decisively proved to be false as far back as the 1960s; Russia was better able than
any other power, including Germany and France, to mobilize against a variety of different scenarios. Anyway, the so-called "blank check" was not a way for Germany to goad Austria-Hungary into taking the decisive actions that German diplomats thought needed to be taken; it was a German abdication of responsibility. If blame is to be assigned to Germany for the outbreak of the First World War, it ought to be assigned to the recent widower
Kanzler Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (which is like kicking a sick puppy), who didn't take the hardline, drastic steps that Germany had taken in previous crises (see 1908-9) and let the Russians think they could get away with murder.
The real problem, as far as I'm concerned, is that Tuchman still operates in the context of the so-called "Schlieffen Plan" as described by Gerhard Ritter. That description is lunatic. Apparently we are expected to believe that the blueprint for the entire German army in the event of war was written down on a memo that contained no troop dispositions save vague outlines of divisions, employed more divisions on the "Right Wing" than comprised the entire German Army at that point, was kept in the house safe of two elderly German ladies for near of a decade, and was the sole war plan of the entire German military for nine years, during which time it only underwent minor modifications. This unlikely conclusion was decisively deflated as early as the 1970s and 1980s with the publication of several US Army articles on the workings of the Imperial German Greater General Staff, and finally put to rest by Terence Zuber's seminal 1999 article in
War in History, which eventually was expanded into the invaluable book
Inventing the Schlieffen Plan. If you want a real account of German war planning, look at Zuber's book or Strachan's book (more even-handed, or as a Zuberfag would say, more conservative), not Tuchman.
In general, I'd recommend different books if you want to read about the opening salvos of the First World War. The standard text is now Strachan's
The First World War Part I: To Arms, which has the benefit of being exhaustive and the drawback of being long as all hell. Showalter's
Tannenberg: Clash of Empires is fantastic for Russo-German prewar diplomacy and the Gumbinnen-Tannenberg-Masurian Lakes campaign, but does get bogged down in detail somewhat during the battles themselves (and the maps are pretty meh). The Battles of the Frontiers and of Mons recently underwent a drastic update after respective treatments by Zuber, which are highly readable if somewhat specific. Herwig,
The Marne 1914 is decent.
That said, Masada should probably not be so confrontational. w/e
