This podcast features an interview with Megan Good, the director of the J. Welles Henderson Archives and Library at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. The Independence Seaport Museum is currently the home of the U.S.S. Olympia – a vessel that served as Commodore George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish American War. By World War I the Olympia was no longer a match for the larger, faster ships born of the early 20th Century naval arms race, but she still had some important roles left to play. Whether her mission was diplomacy, humanitarian aid, or peacekeeping, the Olympia was kept busy during the war. Much beloved by the American public, after the war the Olympia would also be selected to carry the body of the Unknown Soldier of World War I back to the United States. In many respects, the Olympia has become a forgotten story of World War I.

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In the decades before World War I, all the European powers had secret plans to defend against invasion or to make preemptive strikes against their enemies. In Germany, the main war plan was the Schlieffen Plan. This plan grew out of a German fear of encirclement. Increasingly cut off from the rest of Europe by French, Russian, and British alliances, by the early 1900s Germany was geographically and politically isolated. The Schlieffen Plan developed as a military solution to this predicament. This plan anticipated a future war in which Germany would be surrounded by France and Russia. It was designed to enable Germany to fight both nations, but to avoid doing so simultaneously. When World War I began, a version of the Schlieffen Plan was implemented, but in the stalemate that ultimately developed, a victory meticulously planned on paper would be impossible to achieve.

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Otto von Bismarck once predicted that some “foolish” thing in the Balkans would start a major war in Europe – and he would prove correct in this belief. In an age of entangling alliances between nations, unrest in the Balkans would be enough to disrupt and twist the relationships between the major European powers and lead to a world war. The spark that would ignite this awful cataclysm would be a single act of terrorism in the Balkans – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. In different environment, the assassination would have been viewed as merely a tragic event – not a casus belli. But in the perfect storm that was Europe in the early 20th century, and in an atmosphere of saber rattling, the assassination changed the world.

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