This episode, we’re going to talk about the great depression.  

Last episode, we talked about the stock market crash of 1929, and mentioned that it was one of the causes of the Great Depression.  

The Great Depression left a very strong mark on the people who lived through it.  We’re getting to the point in history where a lot of us know people who have lived through the events that we’re talking about.  My grandparents, for example, lived through the Great Depression.  My parents were born during it.  If you know someone who lived through it, they will have very vivid memories of how hard things were for most people during that time.  It shaped people’s impressions of life, government, their country, and what mattered in life more than just about any other event of their lives.

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The 1920’s was a very prosperous time for America, and for much of the world. As I mentioned last episode, during the 20’s the American economy became the largest in the world.  

Yet postwar prosperity was precarious. Much of the American boom was a speculative affair. Fueled by optimism, and fueled by borrowing.  Customers were urged to buy on credit or to borrow from the banks, and thus the banks earned large profits. The stock market was riding high. But at any sign of a credit squeeze or a loss of confidence, everything was likely to collapse. Demand would fall, goods would pile up, and prices would plummet. This was precisely what happened on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929, the day of the Wall Street crash.  I’ll talk about that in a minute, but first, I need to talk about one of the weirder things about the 1920’s - prohibition.  

First of all, it’s a weird word.  Prohibition.  Obviously, it refers to prohibiting something, but why did it come to be associated only with the prohibiting of making or selling alcohol?  And why did America, a freedom-loving place, decide to outlaw AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, this one particular thing?  We’ve never had an amendment that outlawed prostitution, or drugs, or corrupt politicians, or driving at night in traffic with your high beams on, though I might support that one.
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Well, the war to end all wars was over.  After a period after several months, the surviving soldiers began to return home.  The Treaty of Versailles was signed, and Europe began to try to rebuild and re-organize.  The political and social landscape of Europe was very different after the war.  The Austro-Hungarian empire was gone, as was the Ottoman Empire.  Lots of lands and peoples had seen their geographical boundaries re-drawn, some of which were logical, and some of which ended up causing more trouble down the road.

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We’ve been here on World War I for seven episodes, if you count the 2 on the Russian and Soviet revolutions.  See?  I’m getting more concise.  It took me 10 episodes to get through the American Civil War.  This time, I tried to not get quite so bogged down in explaining the battles, even though that is one of the parts that is most interesting to me personally.  But now I get to explain a few last battles in World War I, and then some about how WWI shaped our modern world.  

And the big battle that is going to really end the war is the German offensive of the spring of 1918.  

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Well, last episode, we left the chaos of the eastern front and the founding of the new country of the Soviet Union.  In this episode, we’re going back to France and Belgium and we’re going to look at the turning of the tide on the Western Front.  And do you know what turned the tide?  Yep, several million farm boys from the United States.  This isn’t only going to change the war, it’s going to change America’s perception of itself.  

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здравствуйте, еще раз, товарищи.  добро пожаловать в советский союз

For Lenin, transforming a society from near feudalism to communism was a tall order.  To do that, you have to change a capitalistic economy into a centrally controlled economy.   You have to destroy private ownership of land, homes, and capital.  You have to destroy institutions that supported the capitalist system, like schools, universities, and government offices.  You have take full control of the media, and suppress any dissenting voices.  You have to control the police, the jails, the judicial system, and the armed forces.  It’s a lot like what the democrats were trying to do under Joe Biden.  

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здравствуйте, товарищи. добро пожаловать в русскую революцию.

One of the weirder and more catastrophic side effects of the First World War was what happened to Imperial Russia.  We’re about to see not just one but two Russian Revolutions, and then several years of civil war within Russia, that is going to leave the whole country in shambles for many years to come, and is going to set up some of animosity that will lead to World War II, the Chinese Communist revolution, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.  But before we get to all that, things are going to get really bad in Russia itself.

And before I get to what I have to say about the Russian Revolution, I need to say that there’s really no way that you can cover something as complex as the Russian Revolution in one 20 minute podcast, so I’ve broken this up into two revolutions, and two episodes. 

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One of the unique aspects of World War I was simply the huge scale of the battles, with numbers of soldiers, sailors, and even airmen that the world had not seen in a long time.  Some of the Roman battles back in the day involved over 100,000 men on each side. Way back in episode 8, on the Persian Wars, I mentioned that the Persian army under King Xerxes might have had as many as a million men.   But World War I dwarfed even this.  There were more than 5 million men on each side over the course of the war, and that was only on the western front, not counting the several million more involved on the eastern front and in other parts of the world.  

We’re going to look at several of these big battles today, including the bloodiest one of the war, the Battle of the Somme, which is going to feature the single bloodiest day of the war, and is one of the deadliest battles in human history.  In fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of battles between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II, the Battle of the Somme would be the deadliest, bloodiest battle in all of human history.  

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World War I was a very different war than all the other wars fought before it.  There main reason for this was that military technology had advanced incredibly quickly in the previous 50 years, as had manufacturing technology and capability.  Because of the advances of the industrial revolution, factories could now turn out rifles and cannons by the thousands, and bullets and shells by the hundreds of thousands.  And the weapons themselves could fire farther and more rapidly, and more accurately than ever before.  

Even though the technology of warfare had advanced dramatically, the strategy and tactics had not.  We talked a bit about this in the episodes on the American civil war, but World War I took it to a whole new level.  The real upshot of the changes in technology meant that an army that was well dug-in to a defensive position had a huge advantage over an army that was trying to attack them.  Men in defensive positions were relatively safe, but men advancing over open fields to attack the defensive positions were incredibly vulnerable to artillery, machine guns, and even just plain rifle fire.  

The military leaders of WWI knew this, but they didn’t really take it to heart until pretty late in the war.  So we’re about to go into about 4 straight years of brutal trench warfare on the western front. 

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Last episode, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian empire, all of Europe began to mobilize their armies, and move them to the borders of the countries around them.  

If you are the leader of a country, and your neighbor begins to mobilize an army right at your borders, what do you do?  Well, of course you let them in and put them up in nice hotels in your big cities, and give them all free benefits and eventually the right to vote, right?  Yes, of course you do.  No, when your neighbor sends an army to your borders, you put your army at the border as well, to protect your citizens and your country.  And that’s what was happening all over Europe.  And when two armies, who are trained to fight, are facing off against each other, it’s pretty likely that they are going to fight.  That’s what they are there for.  

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