Tapper, on 23 May 2013 - 05:57 AM, said:
History nerd joke, meet real people. Real people, meet history nerd joke. WW 1 was trench warfare, so I kind of mixed that with mechanema's racial trait...
Have you read Fromkin's "The Peace to End All Peace"? He came across a fascinating cable message but couldn't prove that anyone read it.
Quick version: it's 1914. Everybody is building dreadnought class battleships. The Turks have 2 in British shipyards that are just a few weeks from being deliverable, but the Germans and Turks are playing footsy. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill decides to seize the two ships. News is released on a Sunday morning. The next day comes word that the Germans had signed a compact with the Turks over the weekend. Churchill assures Kirschner that the Turks cannot hold the Dardenelles and the Bosphorous without those battleships. That allows the Russians to move a few divisions to face the Germans, which forces the Germans to allocate more forces to their Eastern front, which causes the already risky invasion of the Low Countries and France to be undermanned. In the end Churchill is fired due in part to 'forcing the Turks into the German alliance by seizing their ships'.
Fromkin found a cable from the Ottoman ambassador to the UK dated the Friday before that weekend. Their spies have given the ambassador very solid information that Churchill is going to seize the ships. He also shows German cables leading up to the signing of the alliance that prove Germany wasn't all that interested in being allies with the Turks. Saturday, the Turks, apparently desperate offer to give the Germans the two battleships. The Germans, knowing their own timetable would allow them to take possession of the ships and move them to their own shipyards before the shooting starts, sign the deal with the Turks. But he couldn't find anything to even suggest that anyone in Turkey had actually read the cable.
So there is a possibility that the Turks suckered the Germans. But it's only a possibility. Maybe there's a diary in an attic somewhere but....
That's the kind of thing that makes studying history so much fun.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." - Viktor Frankl