Thats good, you must now accept the following then;peterhof wrote:All genuine historical documents and unbiased opinions drawn from them.Terry Duncan wrote:Please advise everyone what you will accept in the way of evidence
Further sourced to the following; Kriegsarchiv Wien Nachiass b/61 (Hubka) Nr. 25. Wenn Kriegsgefahr droht, quoted in Rauchensteiner, Tod des Doppeladlers p. 75."When the Austro-Hungarian minister in Belgrade, Vladimir Baron von Giesl, returning to his post on 7 July after a vacation in France, reported to Berchtold for instructions, he came away with the very decisive order: “However the Serbs react to the ultimatum, you must break off relations and it must come to war.”" (Fellner in Wilson[ed] - p.15)
Three respected historians all agree the veracity of the above and have different outlooks on the war so cannot be accused of being biased in a particular way.
Errors of fact by Fay? Well from memory on just one issue, he identifies the wrong Ciganovic as being behind the assassination and states the information as coming from official Austrian sources rather than Hungarian newspapers. Fay said Albertini's work was more complete and had supplanted his own, and that he was unable to update his work further due to failing eyesight, so by that recommendation you probably should look in Albertini rather more. Note that it is not often that people cite Albertini's actual opinions, but do cite his work for the quotations and documents included in it. I only cite Albertini's opinions where they coincide with my own or are so close as to make excising them pointless when I am quoting a lengthy passage from the work. Fay might well be handy for some details, but if only because of the age of the work it needs to be checked against more modern works to see if anything else has come to light since.peterhof wrote:The problem here is that Strachan does support his 'opinions' and work in general quite comprehensively, if anything he tends to be rather mainstream and avoids extreme viewpoints. He is regarded very highly by other historians of WWI, as is Mombauer who also has the same conclusion from studying the German archives etc that you criticise Strachan for reaching. Just because you don't like it does not make their conclusion wrong.Terry Duncan wrote:Mere opinions unsupported by documents such as Strachan's quaint notion that Germany had decided to mobilize before being notified of Russian mobilization.and what you will dismiss out of hand just because it is not in an eighty year old book.
I must say that the following is quite apt;peterhof wrote:Sidney Bradshaw Fay published his two volumes in 1928/30 with a fourteenth printing in 1950 which includes 10 pages of Supplementary Notes. Some eighty years later, there are AFAIK no errors of fact that have been discovered in Fay's work. For this reason Fay has become my 'go to' reference historian for the cause of WW1. Albertini's work came later but does not improve on Fay and shows evidence of bias. If there is some compelling reason why Fay should not be cited, please state it.
ljadw wrote:AFAIK