{"id":572,"date":"2019-07-31T18:55:45","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T18:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/20thcenturyworldhis\/chapter\/the-great-war\/"},"modified":"2024-11-12T17:44:47","modified_gmt":"2024-11-12T17:44:47","slug":"the-great-war","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/20thcenturyworldhis\/chapter\/the-great-war\/","title":{"raw":"The Great War: World War I","rendered":"The Great War: World War I"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"471\"]\"periscope Australian soldier firing a periscope rifle from a trench at Gallipoli, 1915.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n
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Chapter Outline:\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n<\/header>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe Industrial Revolution Imperialism of the 1800s led to empires in competition for colonies, resources, labor, and trade across the globe by World War I. Once Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australasia had been colonized both coastally and inland, the world came dangerously close to war with regional conflicts threatening to expand into global catastrophes. The Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1907 are examples.\r\n\r\nWithin empires and states, even more tension was evident with a series of revolutions before World War I. Revolutions began in Russia in 1905, Mexico in 1910, and China in 1911 as examples. Power struggles over labor work conditions also hinted at a world about to come undone. Labor worker resistance to poor factory and farm conditions before World War I and during the War saw the women's power movement leading the way. Examples include women workers who led the 1908 Garment Strike in New York City pushing for better working conditions for children and females, as well as women's suffrage. By 1917 in Petrograd, Russia, factory and farm women led the protests on International Women's Day against wartime work conditions that helped topple the Tzarist government.\r\n\r\nThe result was a world on edge due to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Changes both accidental and purposeful. A set of alliances meant to keep the \"balance\" of power between and within empires, instead led the world into war once that balance was upset with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire heirs in 1914 by assassin Gavrilo Princep. Europe was the center of that tension partly because it was home to most of the global empires that carved up the globe into colonies in the 1800s.\r\n
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  1. And So It Begins\u2026<\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Declaration of War<\/li>\r\n \t
  3. The Technology of War<\/li>\r\n \t
  4. The US Joins The War<\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Mexico, Russia & The US<\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Support for The War<\/li>\r\n \t
  7. The Effects of War & \u201cThe Spanish Flu\u201d<\/li>\r\n \t
  8. Talks of Peace?<\/li>\r\n \t
  9. War\u2019s Aftermath<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n
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    And So It Begins...<\/h3>\r\nIn 1914, Europe had been officially \u201cat peace\u201d for nearly a century. However, the official peace covered a growing tension that was beginning to flare up into military conflict. Unification of Germany in 1870, after the Prussian-led victory over the French, had created a new nation with imperial aspirations in the middle of Europe. Bismarck\u2019s new nation competed with neighboring countries in industry, agriculture, and overseas empire-building. The existence of a strong, united Germany ended the careful balance of power created by the Congress of Vienna in its effort to reset the clock and redraw the map after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. France and Germany were enemies and sought alliances against each other. By 1914, most governments in Europe were preparing for an eventual war between these groups of allied nations, although no one knew what incident would bring the continent to battle. However, as early as 1888, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck<\/strong><\/em> had predicted that \u201csome damned foolish thing in the Balkans\u201d could initiate a widespread European conflict. He was proven correct on the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=20iVWP63KvI\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"399\"]\"Map Rival military coalitions in 1914: Allied Powers (Triple Entente) in green, Central Powers (Triple Alliance) in brown.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDuring World War One, the principal members of each of these alliances were the \u201cCentral Powers\u201d<\/strong><\/em>, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire<\/em> against the \u201cAllied Powers\u201d<\/strong><\/em>, which at the beginning of the war was called the \u201cTriple Entente\u201d<\/strong><\/em> after the original allies, France, Great Britain, and Russia<\/em>. Russia left the war in 1918, Italy<\/em> joined the allies in 1915, and Japan<\/em> was an additional ally on the French side. The United States<\/em> entered the war to support the allies in 1917.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GzCe4qg8K0E\r\n\r\nThe underlying causes of World War One were nationalism, opposition to foreign rule, and simmering rivalries between the Great Powers that were exacerbated by treaties requiring allies to enter a war once it began.\u00a0Previously, potential world conflicts had been avoided through negotiation among the Powers. Africa was divided among the European empires at the Berlin Conference in 1885, while \u201cSpheres of Influence\u201d were established in China in order to regulate trade.\u00a0However, such a \u201cConcert of Nations\u201d did not succeed in the Balkans.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]\"Wilhelm Portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1902.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe unification of Germany upset the balance of Europe.\u00a0Not only did the Deutsches Reich<\/em> aspire to become an imperial power like Britain, France, and Russia, it had rapidly built up its military and industrial power. By the first two decades of the twentieth century, Germany surpassed Britain to become the largest economy in Europe and second in the world. German scientists won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation beside the United States. By 1914, the German navy was second only to the British Royal Navy.\u00a0The new German emperor also dismissed Bismarck as Chancellor in 1890 and began looking for ways to make Germany a colonial empire, through a much more aggressive foreign policy than that envisioned by his chief advisor.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"299\"]\"\" \"The boiling point\", a cartoon published in Punch in October 1912.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWe must, however, understand that by the end of the nineteenth century, newly-independent nations of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro and Serbia separated the Muslim Ottomans from the Catholic Austro-Hungarians. The Orthodox Russians dreamed of reestablishing Constantinople in Istanbul, and felt a kinship with their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Serbs and Bulgarians.\r\n\r\nThe Balkan conflict Bismarck had predicted began in 1908 with the Austro-Hungarian takeover of Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire. Many Serbs lived in Bosnia, so Serbian nationalists wanted it to be part of Serbia. The Serbs and Bulgarians deepened their alliance with the Russians, who also wanted to check the expanding influence of the Austrians in the Balkans.\r\n\r\nThe independent nations of the Balkans fell into war in 1912-1913, first with the Ottomans, resulting in an independent Albania, and then with each other as ethnic and religious boundaries were contested. These were bloody conflicts that included attacks on civilian populations in waves of ethnic cleansing\u2014people living in this region would experience similar massacres in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War.\u00a0The Balkan armies on both sides dug into trenches as new arms and technology limited the movement of troops.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"400\"]\"Gavrilo Newspaper illustration of Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn an effort to strengthen Bosnian ties to Austria, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife made an official visit to the regional capital of Sarajevo on June 30, 1914.\u00a0A secretive Serbian nationalist group, that had been encouraged and supported by Serbian military officers, plotted the assassination of the royal couple as their motorcade made its way through the city. After some initial bungling, one of the conspirators, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip,<\/strong><\/em> shot and killed the Archduke and his pregnant wife.\r\n\r\nThe Austro-Hungarian government made a series of demands for restitution from the Serbian government. When Serbia refused, Austria decided to invade. Germany was bound by its treaty obligations to support any action taken by its ally Austria-Hungary. Austria\u2019s invasion of Serbia activated the European alliance system: Russia sided with the Serbs, France supported Russia, and Great Britain was allied with France.\r\n\r\n
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    Deceleration of War<\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"393\"]\"crowds Many Europeans celebrated the start of the war, believing it would bring glory and improve the standing of their nations.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAll of Europe\u2019s armies had been preparing for a continent-wide conflict since the unification of Germany in 1870. Most nations required some form of military service from all young men, so that thousands of trained reserve soldiers could be quickly called up. This rapid deployment meant that as soon as one side mobilized, the opposing side also had to mobilize in defense. Less time was available for calm decision-making as every nation rushed to arms. In July 1914, when Austria declared war and shelled the Serbian capital, Belgrade, Russia mobilized its military. Germany mobilized against Russia. Russia was allied with France, so France mobilized. Great Britain was allied with France, so Great Britain mobilized. The Ottomans sided with Germany as a counter to Russia. Italy, which had a\u00a0defensive<\/em>\u00a0alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, sat out of the first months of war, until its government decided to side with France, Great Britain, and Russia in early 1915.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"401\"]\"German German soldiers in a railway supply train on the way to the front in 1914. Early in the war, all sides expected the conflict to be a short one.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nWith the French-Russian alliance in mind, the German generals had been planning for years to initially fight a defensive war with Russia in the east and an offensive war with France in the west; holding off invading Russian armies while focusing on defeating the French first.\r\n\r\nIn the first months of the war, the Germans were successful in carrying out their strategy.\u00a0The German army on the eastern front was able to stop and even defeat the advancing Russians.\u00a0On the western front, the German government asked permission of neutral Belgium to pass through on their way to a surprise attack on France. When the Belgians rejected the request, German troops invaded and occupied Belgium in August 1914. The Germans advanced rapidly into France, but were halted by combined French and British forces, miles from Paris.\u00a0Both sides dug in, creating a network of opposing trenches that ultimately extended from the North Sea to the Swiss border.\u00a0Armies on both sides would be frustrated in their attempts to break through on this \u201cwestern front\u201d for the next four years.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_G4ZY66BG38&t=3s\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"400\"]\"\" German soldiers of the 11th Reserve Hussar Regiment fighting from a trench, on the Western Front, 1916.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAdvances in military technology caused the stalemate. Conflicts like the Crimean War and the U.S. Civil War had begun introducing better, more deadly weapons. The Charge of the Light Brigade had proven that cavalry was ineffective against dug-in artillery. And in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had perfected the use of machine guns, practicing on native populations in their colonies. By 1914 the armies of Europe had better weapons and better defenses: long-range artillery, machine guns, trenches, and barbed wire. And they were ready to use these on each other, rather than just on the so-called \"barbarians\" their empires ruled over.\r\n\r\nSince neither cavalry nor infantry could stand against machine guns, attacks in trench warfare began with massive artillery barrages to \u201csoften\u201d the other side before troops were sent out of their trenches, \u201cover the top\u201d into the no-man\u2019s land between their trenches and those of the enemy, with fixed bayonets to overwhelm any enemy soldiers who had survived the shelling. When their artillery had not \u201csoftened up\u201d the opposing forces enough, attackers would be met with enough machine gun fire to slow down any effective advance. During four long years of war, millions would either be severely wounded or killed in the \u201cno-man\u2019s-land\u201d that separated the opposing armies.\r\n\r\n
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    The Technology of War<\/h3>\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=k7v3cq1ZJjM\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"400\"]\"Serbian First Serbian armed airplane, 1915.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAirplanes, first developed by the Wright Brothers in 1903, proved their value in reconnaissance and later in strafing trenches with machine guns and dropping small bombs. Poison gases added another devastating weapon to trench warfare, while achieving no significant advantage. At least 1.3 million people were killed by gas attacks. Chlorine<\/em> and mustard<\/em> gas were two of the most common chemical weapons used by both sides in the war. In the case of mustard gas poisoning, the effects took 24 hours to begin and could take 4-5 weeks to die.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"398\"]\"Battle Japanese troops landing during the Battle of Tsingtao, where they captured the German position.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nEven before the entry of the United States in 1918, the war had become truly global. Japan was eager to be counted as a world power, and Japanese leaders seized upon the opportunity the war provided to improve their status in Asia. After taking control of German colonies in China and the Pacific in 1914, Japan sent the Chinese government a list of 21 Demands<\/strong><\/em>. The Chinese believed that giving in to Japan\u2019s demands would have basically resulted in China becoming a colony of the Japanese Empire. The Chinese government agreed to some of the demands, but leaked the list to British diplomats, who intervened to prevent a complete shift in the balance of power in Asia.\r\n\r\nIn Africa, Germany lost its colonies in the fighting. The German commander in East Africa, led a largely native African force in guerrilla tactics against Allied troops for most of the war.\u00a0 In eastern Africa, disrupted crop cultivation led to hundreds of thousands of deaths by starvation and disease.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"400\"]\"Australian Australian troops charging an Ottoman trench during the Anzac attack at Gallipoli, 1916.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Ottoman Empire controlled territory on either side of the Bosporus straits, which connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. In 1915, the Allies landed troops at Gallipoli, a peninsula on the European side of the Bosporus, about 200 miles (320 km) from the Ottoman capital in Istanbul. The plan was to take Istanbul, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war and open a third front against Austria-Hungary and Germany through the Balkans. However, the Turks held the high ground above the landing site chosen for the mostly colonial troops. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) troops were decimated, in a battle that marks the beginning of a sense of nationality in those countries. The anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, April 25th, is still celebrated as ANZAC Day. The disastrous plan nearly ended the political career of the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill<\/strong><\/em>.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"419\"]\"armenian U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's caption: \"Those who fell by the wayside. Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms\u2014massacre, starvation, exhaustion\u2014destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation\".[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe eleven month-long Gallipoli<\/em> invasion was even more important for the Turks.\u00a0The hard-fought victory was led by General Mustafa Kemal<\/em><\/strong>, who soon became a national hero and would go on to found the modern Turkish Republic and serve as its first president after the war.\r\n\r\nYet, at nearly the same time as the Gallipoli landings, the Ottoman government also decided to take action against the Christian minority in Armenia. Armenians had suffered from periodic pogroms in the decades preceding World War One. The Armenians were loyal subjects (many were serving in the army when the persecution began), but after an unsuccessful Russian attempt to invade Turkey from the east, some military leaders in the Turkish government accused the Armenians of collaborating with the Russian troops and decided to eliminate the Armenian population. Men were executed, while women and children were force-marched across the desert to Mesopotamia. Nearly one million died in what was the worst genocide of the 20th century before the Holocaust of World War II.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"400\"]\"Indian Indian bicycle troops at a crossroads at the Battle of the Somme, France.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe imperial powers drafted soldiers from their colonies into the fight. Many of the 18 million people killed in battle and 23 million wounded, were people ruled by the empires. Over 700,000 Indians fought for Britain against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. Indian divisions were also sent to Gallipoli, Egypt, German East Africa, and Europe. At least 74,000 Indians died in World War I.\r\n\r\nDespite all of the efforts for a breakthrough on the battlefields of France and Eastern Europe, the most effective strategy against Germany was the British-led naval blockade, which cut off grain and other food supplies from overseas.\u00a0The Germans, who had developed the most effective submarines and torpedoes, tried to blockade Great Britain and France by sinking incoming supply ships. This German naval strategy, however, risked bringing the United States into the war.\u00a0After the sinking of the passenger ship\u00a0Lusitania<\/em> in May 1915, when a hundred U.S. citizens were drowned a few miles from the Irish coast, some American public opinion began to shift in favor of entering the conflict. The German government quickly backed away from unrestricted submarine warfare against supply ships bound for the Great Britain and France.\r\n\r\n
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    The U.S. Joins The War<\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"401\"]\"peace Jane Addams and other American activists attending a peace conference in the Netherlands, 1915.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe United States had a long tradition of trying to avoid being drawn into the \u201cGreat Powers\u201d<\/em> conflicts of Europe. American attitudes toward international affairs reflected the advice given by President George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, to avoid \u201centangling alliances\u201d with the Europeans. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had gone further to establish the Western Hemisphere as the United States\u2019 area of interest, implying that the U.S. did not intend to intrude in the affairs of Europe. However, although the U.S. did not participate in international diplomatic alliances, American businesses and consumers benefited from the trade generated by nearly a century of European peace and the expansion of the transatlantic economy.\r\n\r\nAdditionally, by the 1880s and 1890s, millions of Europeans emigrated to the United States to work in factories and mines, or to establish farms in the West.\u00a0More Irish and Germans arrived, and also Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, and Jews from Eastern Europe. The U.S. needed and (largely) welcomed the newcomers, while America served as a \u201csafety valve\u201d for European nations with an excess of poor landless peasants.\u00a0The diversity among the immigrants in this American \u201cmelting pot\u201d helped bolster the case for U.S. neutrality in European affairs even as the war began.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"]\"J. Jack Morgan walking alongside his father J. P. Morgan in the last known photograph of the two together (ca. 1913).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nA foreign policy of neutrality also reflected America\u2019s focus on the building of its new powerful industrial economy, financed largely with loans and investments from Europe and especially London. However, U.S. dependency on foreign capital began to change during the war, when American bankers began making substantial loans to Britain and France. John Pierpont Morgan\u2019s successor, J.P. Morgan Jr., who had spent the early years of his career managing the family\u2019s bank in London, leveraged a friendship with British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice to have the Morgan bank designated as the sole-source U.S. purchasing agent for both Britain and France. J.P. Morgan and Company managed the Allies\u2019 purchases of munitions, food, steel, chemicals, and cotton; receiving a 1% commission on all sales. Morgan led a consortium of over 2,000 banks and managed loans to the Allies that exceeded $500 million (nearly $13 billion in today\u2019s dollars). Woodrow Wilson\u2019s Secretary of State, the populist-leaning William Jennings Bryan, objected to the loans and that by denying financing to any of the belligerents, the U.S. could hasten the end of the war. Yet, a quick end was not the goal at all! <\/em>As Thomas Lamont presented, the best result for America would be a long war that ended in German defeat and left the winners deeply in debt to the United States.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"431\"]\"Anti-war Anti-war protesters at the US Capitol in April 1917.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nLamont\u2019s prediction came true. Wall Street, in New York City, became and remains the financial capital of world, with international debt denominated in U.S. dollars, largely because of the loans made to the European Allies during World War I. U.S. agriculture also benefitted from the war raging in Europe. Drafted farmers could not farm and soon grain from the Great Plains of the United States was feeding British and French troops on the Western Front; bringing wealth to Midwestern agricultural communities. Farmers were soon purchasing new equipment and buying or renting additional land to produce more.\r\n\r\nDespite Wall Street bankers\u2019 interest in profiting on the European conflict, the U.S. federal government faced strong public opinion against<\/em> entering what Americans saw as a fight they had no stake in. Business leaders and social activists like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Jane Addams were pacifists. Poor southerners reminded America that \u201ca rich man\u2019s war meant a poor man\u2019s fight\u201d. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, denounced the war in 1914 as \u201cunnatural, unjustified, and unholy.\u201d And socialist pamphlets argued that \u201ca bayonet was a weapon with a worker at each end.\u201d Woodrow Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 on the slogan, \u201cHe kept us out of war.\u201d Yet, a month after his second inauguration, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany in April 1917.\r\n\r\n
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    Mexico, Russia, & The US<\/h3>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"400\"]\"Pancho Pancho Villa and members of the Division of the North.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe European powers had been building up their military capabilities for nearly a generation before the outbreak of war, and it was unclear whether the United States could mobilize rapidly. \u00a0In late 1916, border troubles in Mexico served as an important field test for modern American military forces and the National Guard. Revolution and chaos threatened American business interests when Mexican reformer Francisco Madero<\/strong><\/em> challenged Porfirio Diaz\u2019s<\/strong><\/em> corrupt and unpopular conservative regime. Madero was jailed, fled to San Antonio, and planned the Mexican Revolution. Although D\u00edaz was quickly overthrown and Madero became president, the Revolution unleashed forces that demanded more social change, especially in land reform, that the new liberal government was capable of delivering. New uprisings, led by Pancho Villa<\/strong> <\/em>and Emilio Zapata<\/strong><\/em>, broke out in rural Mexico. Reactionaries assassinated President Madero in Mexico City in early 1913, with the encouragement of the European and U.S. ambassadors, and a military regime was installed\u2014but social upheaval and a guerrilla war continued.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tYbM35u96lQ&t=3s\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=DHn1Egt6Xdg\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uel_RBJUHuU\r\n\r\nLiberal reformers soon established a republic, which actually made it easier for U.S. President Wilson<\/strong><\/em> to proclaim that the war was to \u201cmake the world safe for democracy,\u201d since a major ally was no longer ruled by an absolute monarch.\u00a0However, the democratic reformers in Russia were not as well organized as socialist revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin<\/strong><\/em>, who saw the end of tsarist rule as an opportunity to also defeat capitalism and creating a \u201cdictatorship of the proletariat\u201d. The revolutionaries and the soldier and sailors who supported them wanted to end Russian participation in the war.\r\n\r\nThe Russian revolution soon became a civil war between the \u201cWorkers\u2019 and Peasants\u2019 Red Army\u201d, formed by the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky<\/strong><\/em>, and the armies of the \u201cWhite Russians\u201d under several leaders, dedicated to restoring the Tsarist monarchy. To prevent the return of the Romanovs to power, the revolutionaries had the entire family killed in July, 1918. The revolutionaries also waged war on uncooperative peasants called Kulaks<\/em>, whom they accused of withholding grain from the Bolshevik government. Many of the Kulaks were Ukrainian, which contributed to an ongoing aggression toward the Ukraine by the new Soviet Union.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"402\"]\"army American, British, and Japanese Troops parade through Vladivostok on the way to providing armed support to the White Army.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Russian revolution soon became a civil war between the \u201cWorkers\u2019 and Peasants\u2019 Red Army\u201d, formed by the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky<\/strong><\/em>, and the armies of the \u201cWhite Russians\u201d under several leaders, dedicated to restoring the Tsarist monarchy. To prevent the return of the Romanovs to power, the revolutionaries had the entire family killed in July, 1918. The revolutionaries also waged war on uncooperative peasants called Kulaks<\/em>, whom they accused of withholding grain from the Bolshevik government. Many of the Kulaks were Ukrainian, which contributed to an ongoing aggression toward the Ukraine by the new Soviet Union.\r\n\r\nEven after World War One ended, the Allies, including the United States, supported the White Russians against the Bolsheviks, sending thousands of troops to support the counterrevolutionaries in Siberia between 1918 and 1920. Years later Josef Stalin, who fought on the Soviet side in the civil war, would remember this fact while negotiating with Britain and the U.S. during World War II.\r\n\r\n
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    Support For The War<\/h3>\r\nAs soon as the war began, governments on both sides moved quickly to portray the war effort as a success and to eliminate any sign of dissent. Britain censored mail sent by soldiers at the front to their families, instituting standardized postcards that allowed men in the trenches to choose from a menu of statements but not to write anything specific about their experiences. Society became completely focused on the war effort, and governments reorganized the economy around war production. The state also rationed food and strictly controlled the media (which at the time meant the press) to silence dissent and present news of the war that boosted the morale and resolve of the population.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"332\"]\"Debs Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs speaking against the draft in Canton, Ohio in 1918. He was arrested for sedition shortly thereafter.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe US government launched several laws to keep possible dissents in check. By 1919 even the authorities realized they had gone too far, and the U.S. Attorney General convinced President Wilson to commute the sentences of 200 prisoners convicted under the acts.\r\n\r\nOn another note, women on all sides served as nurses and medics, and worked in agriculture and industry to keep the economy going while men were away fighting. Many governments promised equal pay, although most did not make good on their promise. But women gained political influence, and achieved the right to vote in the U.S. and many European countries almost immediately after the war\u2019s end as a result of their contributions to the war effort.\r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vHmfU-5drtY\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n
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    The Effects of War & \"The Spanish Flu\"<\/h3>\r\n\"UncleThe European powers struggled to adapt to the brutality of modern war, with its advanced artillery, machine guns, poison gas, and submarines. Until the spring of 1917, the Allies possessed few effective defensive measures against German submarine attacks, which had sunk more than a thousand ships by the time the United States entered the war. The rapid addition of American naval escorts to the British surface fleet and the establishment of a convoy system countered much of the effect of German submarines. Shipping and military losses declined rapidly, just as the American army arrived in Europe in large numbers. Although many of the supplies still needed to make the transatlantic passage, the physical presence of the army proved to be a fatal blow to German plans to dominate the Western Front.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_571\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"400\"]\"The The Kaiser inspecting a communications trench on the western front, 1918.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn March 1918, Germany tried to take advantage of the withdrawal of Russia and its new single-front war before the Americans arrived, with the Kaiserschlacht<\/em> (Spring Offensive), a series of five major attacks. By the middle of July 1918, each and every one had failed to break through the Western Front. Then, on August 8, 1918, two million men of the American Expeditionary Forces joined the British and French armies in a series of successful counteroffensives that pushed the disintegrating German lines back across France. The gamble of the Spring Offensive had exhausted Germany\u2019s military, making defeat inevitable. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated at the request of the German military leaders and a new democratic government agreed to an armistice on November 11, 1918, hoping that by embracing Wilson\u2019s call for democracy, Germany would be treated more fairly in the peace talks. German military forces withdrew from France and Belgium and returned to a Germany teetering on the brink of chaos.\u00a0November 11 is still commemorated by the Allies as Armistice Day (called Veterans\u2019 Day in the United States).\r\n\r\nIn all between 16 and 19 million soldiers died in World War I along with 7 to 8 million civilians (before the influenza pandemic of 1919). Some of the worst battles were:\r\n