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Landships II -> Landships WW1 Forum -> On the Great War in general -> Great War "Impossible" - I.S. Bloch
Post Info TOPIC: Great War "Impossible" - I.S. Bloch
James H


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Great War "Impossible" - I.S. Bloch
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Came across a mention of this fellow in Men, Ideas, and Tanks by Paul Harris. I'd never heard of him before.

PH quotes from The Land Ironclads, in which one of H.G. Wells's tank men refers to someone called "Bloch", with no further explanation. It turns out that he is Ivan Bloch, a Polish banker who studied the state of military development at the turn of the 20th century and came to conclusions that almost precisely foresaw the Great War - trenches, industrial warfare, armies of millions, dominance of the defence, collapse of empires, revolutions, etc. It says something that no less a person than Wells was impressed by him.

Unfortunately, Bloch decided as a consequence that a future war was therefore impossible. Whilst it is clear that his final summation was, quite obviously, wrong, his understanding seems to have been far in advance of the military men and politicians of the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Bloch

There's an awful lot of it, but his theory can be read here:
http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/resources/csi/Bloch/BLOCH.asp#THE%20WARS%20OF%20THE%20FUTURE

It's spooky.

-- Edited by James H at 01:49, 2008-01-03

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Roger Todd


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RE: Great War "Impossible" - I.S. Bloch
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Bloch wrote a six-volume opus published in 1898 in St Petersburg, 'War of the Future'. It was translated into varying numbers of volumes in English, French, German and Polish, and was widely read (despite what some would say).

The English translation is a single-volume book, 'Is War Now Impossible?', with a lengthy preface in the form of an interview with Bloch conducted by W T Stead (a leading radical journalist of the day, now generally only remembered as having gone down with the 'Titanic').

It's an incredibly comprehensive book, replete with tables and diagrams. This may be unsurprising, given Bloch's background in economics.

The 1991 edition has an interesting new preface by Prof Brian Bond, late of King's College London (this edition in fact was published in association with King's), in which he makes the following observations:

Remarkable as Bloch's general forecast was (most famously that in the war of the future, the shovel would be as important as the gun, as the opposing armies dug into trenches), his book only seemed to forecast conditions on the Western Front. The Eastern Front never became bogged down to the same degree.

Also, he forecast that being an agrarian nation, Russia would be best placed to withstand the attritional war of the future...

Finally, Bond notes that '...as scholars like Sir Michael Howard have pointed out, professional soldiers did not need a civilian such as Bloch to warn them about the hazards of firepower and the risk of a tactical deadlock. But their job was to find solutions and make war 'winnable' - and quickly - before Bloch's dire warning about the collapse of civil and military morale could occur.' Also, strictly speaking, '...Bloch never argued that war was impossible, merely that it had become so costly and uncontrollable as to be irrational.'

Nevertheless, for all those caveats, Bloch's analysis was truly remarkable, and astonishing in the detail into which he went.

-- Edited by Roger Todd at 02:04, 2008-01-03

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Lafettenheini


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Great War "Impossible" - I.S. Bloch
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And how told R.J. Gatling to his granddaugter ?

" I invented the gun to make war so horrible that it would end wars "

Maybee Bloch had knowledge about the horrors about the civil war also told as the first
modern war, that he could imagine what happens in a european one .

Amazing to be remembered here at Bloch, whom i know as a Philosoph since college-times.
But i never heard about his statements about war.
I must have a look in my old school-books James -but not in a year or two.



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Lafettenheini


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Sorry ,i mixed him up with Ernst Bloch who was born 1885.

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James H


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Yes, Bloch analyses the Prusso-Danish and Austro-Prussian Wars, as well as the ACW, to which he refers as The War of Secession.

He seems to have had much in common with Albert Stern; a financier, Jewish, extremely well-connected, and on speaking terms with many people in high places. His thoughts on the role of the citizen in the military-industrial complex are pure Marx. Easy to see why those who wanted to were able to link Jews with Communism and sedition.

A number of sources refer to the failure of European military establishments to recognise the significance of the ACW. Bloch says the following:

"Those savage encounters do not deserve the name of war," exclaimed a well-known European General, "and I have dissuaded my officers from reading the published accounts of them."

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