Britain's entry into WW1 'biggest error in modern history', says historian

Britain could have lived with a German victory in the First World War and should have stayed out of the conflict, a historian has claimed.

Historian Niall Ferguson described it as the biggest error in modern history, the Guardian reported.

He explained that there was no immediate threat to Britain, which could have faced a Germany-dominated Europe at a later date on its own terms, instead of rushing in unprepared leading catastrophic costs.

Ferguson called it remarkable that Britain created an army more or less from scratch and then sent it into combat against the Germans, a recipe for disastrous losses.

Ferguson claimed that even if Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have had a pretty massive challenge on its hands trying to run the new German-dominated Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British Empire in naval and financial terms.

Ferguson said that given the available resources that Britain had in 1914, a better strategy would have been to wait and deal with the German challenge later when Britain could respond on its own terms, taking advantage of its much greater naval and financial capability.