{"id":849,"date":"2023-03-23T00:31:07","date_gmt":"2023-03-23T00:31:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/western-civilization-antiquity-to-1650\/chapter\/chapter-7-world-war-i\/"},"modified":"2023-03-24T20:25:01","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T20:25:01","slug":"chapter-7-world-war-i","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/western-civilization-a-concise-history-cccs\/chapter\/chapter-7-world-war-i\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 7: World War I","rendered":"Chapter 7: World War I"},"content":{"raw":"

Those who survived it called World War I \"The Great War\" and \"The War to End All Wars.\" \u00a0While they were, sadly, wrong about the latter, they were right that no war had ever been like it. \u00a0It was the world's first mechanized, \"impersonal\" war in which machines proved to be much stronger than human beings. \u00a0It devastated enormous swaths of territory and it left the economies of the Western World either crippled or teetering. \u00a0To make matters worse, the war utterly failed to resolve the issues that had caused it. \u00a0The war began because of the culmination of nationalist rivalries, fears, and hatreds. \u00a0It failed to resolve any of those rivalries, and furthermore it was such a traumatic experience for most Europeans that certain otherwise \u201cnormal\u201d people were attracted to the messianic, violent rhetoric of fascism and Nazism. <\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Background to the War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

The single most significant background factor to the war was the rivalry that existed between Europe\u2019s \u201cgreat powers\u201d by the beginning of the twentieth century. \u00a0The term \u201cgreat power\u201d meant something specific in this period of history: the great powers were those able to command large armies, to maintain significant economies and industrial bases, and to conquer and hold global empires. \u00a0Their respective leaders, and many of their regular citizens, were fundamentally suspicious of one another, and the biggest worry of their political leadership was that one country would come to dominate the others. \u00a0Long gone was the notion of the balance of power as a guarantor of peace. \u00a0Now, the balance of power was a fragile thing, with each of the great powers seeking to supplant its rivals in the name of security and prosperity. \u00a0As a result, there was an ongoing, elaborate diplomatic dance as each power tried to shore up alliances, seize territory around the globe, and outpace the others.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

While no great power deliberately sought war out, all were willing to risk war in 1914. \u00a0That was at least in part because no politician had an accurate idea of what a new war would actually be like. \u00a0The only wars that had occurred in Europe between the great powers since the Napoleonic period were the Crimean War of the 1850s and the wars that resulted in the formation of Italy and Germany in the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s. \u00a0While the Crimean War was quite bloody, it was limited to the Crimean region itself and it did not involve all of the great powers. \u00a0Likewise, the wars of national unification were relatively short and did not involve a great deal of bloodshed (by the standards of both earlier and later wars). \u00a0In other words, it had been over forty years since the great powers had any experience of a war on European soil, and as they learned all too soon, much had changed with the nature of warfare in the meantime.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In the summer of 1914, each of the great powers reached the conclusion that war was inevitable, and that trying to stay out of the immanent conflict would lead to national decline. \u00a0Germany was surrounded by potential enemies in France and Russia. \u00a0France had cultivated a desire for revenge against Germany ever since the Franco-Prussian War. \u00a0Russia feared German power and resented Austria for threatening the interests of Slavs in the Balkans. \u00a0Great Britain alone had no vested interest in war, but it was unable to stay out of the conflict once it began.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"800\"]\"Map Once the war began, the Triple Entente of Russia, France, and Britain faced the Central Powers of Germany and Austria. \u00a0Italy was initially allied with the Central Powers but abandoned them once the war began, switching sides to join the Entente in 1915.[\/caption]\r\n

In turn, the thing that inflamed jingoism and resentment among the great powers had been imperialism. \u00a0The British were determined to maintain their enormous empire at any cost, and the Germans now posed a threat to the empire since Germany had lavished attention on a naval arms race since the 1880s. \u00a0There was constant bickering on the world stage between the great powers over their colonies, especially since those colonies butted up against each other in Africa and Asia. \u00a0Violence in the colonies, however, was almost always directed at the native peoples in those colonies, and there the balance of power was squarely on the side of Europeans. \u00a0Thus, even European soldiers overseas had no experience of facing foes armed with comparable weapons.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The nature of nationalism had changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth century as well. \u00a0Not only had conservative elites appropriated nationalism to shore up their own power (as in Italy and Germany), but nationalistic patriotism came to be identified with rivalry and resentment among many citizens of various political persuasions. \u00a0To be a good Englishman was to resent and fear the growth of Germany. \u00a0Many Germans came to despise the Russians, in part thanks to the growth of anti-Slavic racism. \u00a0The lesser powers of Europe, like Italy, resented their own status and wanted to somehow seize enough power to join the ranks of the great powers. \u00a0Nationalism by 1914 was nothing like the optimistic, utopian movements of the nineteenth century; it was hostile, fearful, and aggressive.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Likewise, public opinion mattered in a way it had never mattered earlier for the simple fact that every one of the great powers had at least a limited electorate and parliaments with at least some real power to make law. \u00a0Even Russia, after a semi-successful revolution in 1905, saw the creation of an elected parliament, the Duma, and an open press. \u00a0The fact that all of the powers had representative governments mattered, because public opinion helped fan the flames of conflict. \u00a0Newspapers in this era tended to deliberately inflame jingoistic passions rather than encourage rational calculation. \u00a0A very recognizably modern kind of connection was made in the press between patriotic loyalty and a willingness to fight, kill, and die for one\u2019s country. \u00a0Since all of the great powers were now significantly (or somewhat, in the case of Russia) democratic, the opinions of the average citizen mattered<\/span> in a way they never had before. \u00a0Journalism whipped up those opinions and passions by stoking hatred, fear, and resentment, which led to a more widespread willingness to go to war.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Thanks to the nationalistic rivalry described above, the great powers sought to shore up their security and power through alliances. Those alliances were firmly in place by 1914, each of which obligated military action if any one power should be attacked. \u00a0Each great power needed the support of its allies, and was thus willing to intercede even if its own interests were not directly threatened. \u00a0That willingness to go to war for the sake of alliance meant that even a relatively minor event might spark the outbreak of total war. \u00a0That is precisely what happened.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In 1914, two major sets of alliances set the stage for the war. \u00a0German politicians, fearing the possibility of a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously, concluded an alliance with the Austrian Empire in 1879, only a little over a decade after the Prusso-Austrian War. \u00a0In turn, France and Russia created a strong alliance in 1893 in large part to contain the ambitions of Germany, whose territory lay between them. \u00a0Great Britain was generally more friendly to France than Germany, but had not entered into a formal alliance with any other power. \u00a0It was, however, the traditional ally and protector of Belgium, which British politicians considered a kind of toehold on the continent. \u00a0Finally, Russia grew increasingly close to the new nation of Serbia, populated as it was by a Slavic people who were part of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. \u00a0The relationships between Great Britain and Russia with Belgium and Serbia, respectively, would not have mattered but for the alliance obligations that tied the great powers together.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Those alliances were now poised to mobilize armies of unprecedented size. \u00a0All of the great powers now fielded forces of a million men or more. \u00a0Coordinating that many troops required detailed advanced planning and a permanent staff of high-ranking officers, normally referred to as the \"general staff\" of a given army. \u00a0In the past, political leaders had often either led troops themselves or at least had significant influence in planning and tactics. \u00a0By the early twentieth century, however, war plans and tactics were entirely in the hands of the general staff of each nation, meaning political leaders would be obliged to choose from a limited set of \"pre-packaged\" options given to them by their generals.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Thus, when the war started, what took all of the leaders of the great powers - from the Kaiser in Germany to the Tsar in Russia - by surprise was the ultimatums they received from their own generals. \u00a0According to the members of each nation\u2019s general staff, it was all or nothing: either commit all forces to a swift and decisive victory, or suffer certain defeat. \u00a0There could be no small incremental build ups or tentative skirmishes; this was about a total commitment to a massive war. \u00a0An old adage has it that \u201cgenerals fight the last war,\u201d basing their tactics on what worked in previous conflicts, and in 1914 the \u201clast war\u201d most generals looked to was the Franco-Prussian War, which Prussia had won through swift, decisive action and overwhelming force.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Start of the War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

The immediate cause of the war was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. \u00a0Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Habsburg throne, a respected Austrian politician who also happened to be friends with the German Kaiser. \u00a0Ironically, he was also the politician in the Austrian state with the most direct control of the Austrian military, and he tended to favor peaceful diplomacy over the potential outbreak of war \u2013 it is possible that he would have been a prominent voice for peace if he had survived. \u00a0Instead, he was assassinated not by Austria's rivals Russia or France, but by a young Serbian nationalist.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Serbia was a new nation. \u00a0It had fought its way to independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and its political leaders envisioned a role for Serbia like that Piedmont had played in Italy: one small kingdom that came to conquer and unite a nation. \u00a0In this case, the Serbs hoped to conquer and unite the Balkans in one Serbian-dominated country. \u00a0Austria, however, stood in the path of Serbian ambition since Austria controlled neighboring Bosnia (in which many Serbs lived as a significant minority of the population). \u00a0Thus, the last thing Austrian politicians wanted was an anti-Austrian movement launched by the ambitious Serbs.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In 1903, a military coup in Serbia killed the king and installed a fiercely nationalistic leadership. \u00a0Serbian nationalists were proud of their Slavic heritage, and Russia became a powerful ally in large part because of the Slavic connection between Russians and Serbs (i.e. they spoke related languages and the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches were part of the same branch of Christianity). \u00a0Russia also supported Serbia because of Russian rivalry with Austria. \u00a0Serbian nationalists believed that, with Russian support, it would be possible to create an international crisis in Austrian-controlled Bosnia and ultimately seize Bosnia itself. \u00a0The Serbs did not believe that Austria would risk a full-scale war with Russia in order to hold on to Bosnia.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Among the organizers of the coup that had murdered the king and queen were a group of Serbian officers who created a terrorist group, The Black Hand. \u00a0In 1914, The Black Hand trained a group of (ethnically Serbian) college students in Bosnia to assassinate an Austrian politician when the opportunity presented itself. \u00a0That happened in June of 1914, when Franz Ferdinand and his wife came to visit the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. \u00a0In a fantastically bungled assassination, Franz Ferdinand survived a series of attacks, with some of his would-be killers getting cold feet and running off, others injuring bystanders but missing the Archduke, and others losing track of where the Archduke's motorcade was.\r\nFinally, quite by accident, the Archduke's driver became lost and stuck in traffic outside of a cafe in which one of the assassins was eating a sandwich. \u00a0The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, seized the opportunity to stride outside and shoot the Archduke and his wife to death.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"953\"]\"Group The leaders of the Black Hand, the conspiracy responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sparking the beginning of World War[\/caption]\r\n

Serbia's assumption that Austria would not risk war proved to be completely wrong. \u00a0The Austrian government demanded that Serbia allow Austrian agents to carry out a full-scale investigation of the assassination; Serbian honor would never allow such a thing. \u00a0Austrian troops started massing near the Serbian border, and the great powers of Europe started calling up their troops. \u00a0Germany, believing that its own military and industrial resources were such that it would be the victor in a war against France and Russia, promised to stand by Austria regardless of what happened. \u00a0Russia warned that Austrian intervention in Serbia would cause war. \u00a0France assured Russia of its loyalty. \u00a0Only Britain was as-yet unaccounted for.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

No one was completely certain that a war would actually happen (the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, left for his summer vacation as planned right in the middle of the crisis, believing no war would occur), but if it did, each of the great powers was confident that they would be victorious in the end. \u00a0A desperate diplomatic scramble ensued as diplomats, parliaments, and heads of state tried at the last minute to preserve the peace, but in the end it was too late: on July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia, activating the pre-existing system of alliances, and by August 4 all of the great powers were involved. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Thanks to the fact that Germany invaded through Belgium, Great Britain declared war on Germany and its allies. \u00a0In addition to Germany and the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire soon joined their alliance, known as the Central Powers. \u00a0Opposing them was the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia. \u00a0Smaller states like Italy and Portugal later joined the Triple Entente, as did, eventually, the United States.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Early War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

There was a mixture of apprehension and, in many cases, enthusiasm about the onset of war among civilians and soldiers alike. \u00a0Many felt that the war would resolve nationalistic rivalries once and for all, and almost no one anticipated a lengthy war. \u00a0Wilhelm II anticipated \u201ca jolly little war\u201d and it was widely thought in France and Germany that the war would be over by Christmas. \u00a030,000 young men and women marched in Berlin before war was even declared, singing patriotic songs and gathering at the feet of statues of German and Prussian heroes. \u00a0Everywhere, thousands of young men enlisted in the military of their own volition. \u00a0There were some anti-war protests in July, mostly organized by the socialist parties in the name of socialist internationalism, but once the war was actually declared those protests abruptly stopped. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

The most symptomatic moment of the defeat of socialism by nationalism as rival ideologies was the fact that 100% of the socialist parties of Europe supported their respective countries in the war, despite hard and fast promises before the war that, as socialists, they were committed to peace. \u00a0Whereas pre-war socialists had argued vociferously that the working class of each country was a single, united class regardless of national differences, that internationalist rhetoric largely vanished once the war began. \u00a0Wanting to be seen as patriots (whether French, German, or British), the major socialist parties voted to authorize the war and supported the sale of war bonds. \u00a0In turn, the radical left of the socialist parties soon broke off and formed new parties that continued to oppose the war; these new parties were typically called \u201ccommunists\u201d whereas the old ones remained \u201csocialists.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\r\n

War, for many people, represented a cathartic release. \u00a0War did not represent real bloodshed and horror for the young men signing up \u2013 they had never fought in real wars, except for the veterans of colonial wars against much less well-armed \u201cnatives\u201d in the colonies. \u00a0War was an ideal of bravery and honor that many young men in Europe in 1914 longed for as a way to prove themselves, to prove their loyalty, and to purge their boredom and uncertainty about the future. \u00a0A whole generation had absorbed tales of glory on the battlefield, of the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the conquests overseas. \u00a0Depending on their nationality, they were either ashamed and angry or fiercely proud of their country\u2019s performance in past wars. \u00a0As a result, many saw a new war as a chance to settle accounts, to prove once and for all that they were citizens a great power, and to shame their opponents into conceding defeat. \u00a0France would at last get even for the Franco-Prussian War. \u00a0Germany would at least prove it was the most powerful nation in Europe. \u00a0Russia would prove that it was a powerful modern nation\u2026and so on.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The war itself began with the German invasion of France through Belgium. \u00a0German tactics centered on the \u201cSchlieffen Plan,\u201d named after its author, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, who had devised it in the first years of the twentieth century. \u00a0The Schlieffen Plan called for a rapid advance into France to knock the French forces out of the war within six weeks. \u00a0Subsequently, German troops would be whisked back east via railroads in time to engage Russia, as it was believed that it would take the Russians at least that long to mobilize their armies. \u00a0It not only called for rapid mobilization, but it required the German military to defeat the French military at an even more rapid pace had the Prussian forces forty years earlier in the Franco-Prussian War.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"775\"]\"Map The Schlieffen Plan, in theory. \u00a0In reality, while it met with initial success, French and British troops succeeded in counter-attacking and pushing back the German advance.[\/caption]\r\n

The first taste of the horror of the war to come was the German invasion of Belgium. \u00a0Belgium was a neutral country leading up to the war, and German planners had expected Belgium to surrender swiftly as German troops advanced rapidly toward France. \u00a0Instead, Belgian soldiers fiercely resisted the German invasion. \u00a0In turn, German troops deliberately massacred civilians, destroyed towns, and raped Belgian women. \u00a0Thousands of Belgian refugees fled to Britain, where they were (to the credit of the British government and civilians) welcomed and housed. \u00a0The bloodshed shocked the sensibilities of the French and British reading public and emphasized the fact that the war might go very differently than many had first imagined. \u00a0Britain swiftly declared war on Germany.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

While the first few weeks of the German invasion seemed to match the ambitions of the Schlieffen Plan, they soon ground to a halt. \u00a0A fierce French counter-attack stopped the Germans in Belgium and Northeastern France in late September. \u00a0 Simultaneously, the Russians surprised everyone by mobilizing their forces much more quickly than expected, attacking both Germany and Austria in the east in late August. \u00a0In the autumn of 1914 the scale of battles grew to exceed anything Europe had witnessed since the Napoleonic Wars (which they soon dwarfed). \u00a0To their shock and horror, soldiers on all sides encountered for the first time the sheer destructive power of modern weaponry. \u00a0To shield themselves from the clouds of bullets belched out by machine guns, desperate soldiers dove into the craters created by artillery shells. \u00a0In the process, trench warfare was invented.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The weapons that had been developed in the decades leading up to the war, from enormous new battleships known as dreadnoughts to high-explosive artillery shells and machine guns, had all seemed to the nations of Europe like strengths. \u00a0The early months of the war revealed that they were indeed strong, in a sense, being far more lethal than anything created before. \u00a0Unfortunately, human bodies were pitifully weak by comparison, and as the death toll mounted, the human (and financial) costs associated with modern warfare shattered the image of national strength that politicians and generals continued to cling to. \u00a0Those generals in particular stuck to their favored, and outdated, tactics, sending cavalry in bright uniforms to their deaths in hopeless charges, ordering offensives that were doomed to fail, and calling up every soldier available on reserve. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

That Christmas, in a well-remembered symbolic moment, a brief and unauthorized truce held on the Western Front between Entente and German forces long enough for French and German soldiers to climb out of their respective trenches and meet in the \u201cno man\u2019s land\u201d between the lines, with a German barber offering shaves and haircuts to all comers. \u00a0By then, both sides were well aware that the conceit that the war would \u201cbe over by Christmas\u201d had been a ridiculous fantasy. \u00a0Never again in the war would a moment of voluntary peace re-emerge; while they did not know it for certain at the time, the soldiers faced four more years of carnage to come.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Evolution of the War<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

On the Western Front of the war, it was the trenches that defined almost everything in the lives of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. \u00a0An English officer and poet later wrote that \u201cwhen all is said and done, this war was a matter of holes and ditches.\u201d \u00a0While they began as improvised, hastily-dug ditches, the trenches involved into vast networks of fortified rifts that stretched from the English Channel in the north to the Swiss Alps in the south. \u00a0Behind the trenches lay the artillery batteries, capable of hurling enormous shells for miles, and farther back still lay the command posts of the high-ranking officers who fruitlessly conceived of new variations on a constant theme: hopeless charges against the impregnable enemy position.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The tactical problem facing both sides was due to the new technologies of war: whereas in past wars the offensive strategy was often superior to the defensive strategy, things were entirely reversed in World War I. \u00a0Because of trenches, machine guns, mines, and modern rifles, it was far more effective to entrench oneself and defend a position than it was to charge and try to take the enemy\u2019s position. \u00a0It was nearly impossible to break through and gain territory or advantage; the British phrase for an attack was \u201cgoing over the top,\u201d which involved thousands of men climbing out of their trenches and charging across the no man\u2019s land that separated them from the enemy. \u00a0While they were charging, the enemy would simply open fire with impunity from their trenches, and without exception not a single offensive captured a significant amount of territory between 1915 and early 1917. \u00a0As a single example, one British attack in 1915 temporarily gained 1,000 yards at the cost of 13,000 lives.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In turn, and in stark contrast to the early dreams of glory to be won on the battlefield, soldiers discovered that their own competence, even heroism, had been rendered irrelevant by the new technology of warfare. \u00a0Because warfare was so heavily mechanized, the old ideal of brave, chivalric combat between equals was largely obsolete. \u00a0Men regularly killed other men they never laid eyes on, and death often seemed completely arbitrary - in many cases, survival came down to sheer, dumb luck. \u00a0No amount of skill or bravery mattered if an artillery shell hit the trench where a soldier happened to be standing. \u00a0Likewise, if ordered to \u201cgo over the top,\u201d all one could hope for was to survive long enough to be able to retreat.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Thus, the experience of war in the trenches for the next three years was a state of ongoing misery: men stood in mud, sometimes over a foot deep, in the cold and rain, as shells whistled overhead and occasionally blew them up. \u00a0They lived in abject terror of the prospect of having to attack the enemy line, knowing that they would all almost certainly be slaughtered. \u00a0Thousands of new recruits showed up on the lines every month, many of whom would be dead in the first attack. \u00a0In 1915, in a vain attempt to break the stalemate, both sides started using poison gas, which was completely horrific, burning the lungs, eyes, and skin of combatants. \u00a0The survivors <\/span>of poison gas attacks were considered to be the unlucky<\/span> ones. \u00a0By 1917, both sides had been locked in place for three years, and the soldiers of both sides were known to remark that only the dead would ever escape the trenches in the end.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"800\"]\"Photograph Soldiers in a trench in 1915.[\/caption]\r\n

Individual battles in World War I sometimes claimed more lives than had entire wars in past centuries. \u00a0The Battle of Verdun, an enormous German offensive that sought to break the stalemate in 1916, resulted in 540,000 casualties among the French and 430,000 among the Germans. \u00a0It achieved nothing besides the carnage, with neither side winning significant territorial concessions. \u00a0The most astonishing death count of the war was at the Battle of the Somme, a disastrous British offensive in 1916 in which 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded on the first day alone \u2013 there were more British soldiers killed and wounded in the first three days of the battle of the Somme than there were Americans killed in World War I, The Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. \u00a0Ultimately, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 420,000 British casualties (meaning either dead, missing, or wounded to the point of being unable to fight), 200,000 French casualties, and 650,000 German casualties. \u00a0One British poet noted afterwards that \u201cthe war had won\u201d the battle, not countries or people.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In this context of ongoing carnage, even the most stubborn commanders were forced to recognize that their dreams of a spectacular breakthrough were probably unachievable. \u00a0Instead, by 1916 many of the war\u2019s top strategists concluded that the only way to win was to outspend the enemy, churning out more munitions and supplies, drafting more men, committing more civilians to the war effort at home, and sacrificing more soldiers than could the other side. \u00a0At its worst, commanders adopted an utterly ruthless perspective regarding their own casualties: tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths were signs of \u201cprogress\u201d in the war effort, because they implied that the other side must be running out of soldiers, too. \u00a0This was a war of attrition on a new level, one that both soldiers and lower-ranking officers alike recognized was designed to kill them in the name of a possible<\/span> eventual victory.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Eastern Front and the Ottoman Empire<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

Things were different in the east, however. \u00a0In contrast to the essentially static nature of trench warfare on the Western Front, the Russian, German, and Austrian armies in the east were highly mobile, sometimes crossing hundreds of miles in an attempt to outflank their enemies. \u00a0The Russian army fought effectively in the early years of the war, especially against Austrian forces, which it consistently defeated. \u00a0While Russian soldiers were also the match of Germans, however, Russia was hampered by its inadequate industrial base and by its lack of rail lines and cars. \u00a0The Germans were able to outmaneuver the Russians, often surrounding Russian armies one by one and defeating them. \u00a0A brilliant Russian general oversaw a major offensive in 1916 that crippled Austrian forces, but did not force Austria out of the war. \u00a0In the aftermath, a lack of support and coordination from the other Russian generals ultimately checked the offensive.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

By late 1916 the war had grown increasingly desperate for Russia. \u00a0The Tsar\u2019s government was teetering and morale was low. \u00a0The home front was in dire straits, with serious food shortages, and there were inadequate munitions (especially for artillery) making it to the front. \u00a0Thus, the German armies steadily pushed into Russian territory. \u00a0A furious defense by the Russian forces checked the German advance in the winter of 1916 - 1917, but the war was deeply unpopular on the home front and increasing numbers of soldiers deserted rather than face the Germans. \u00a0It was in this context of imminent defeat that a popular revolution overthrew the Tsarist state - that revolution is described in the next chapter.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, long considered the \u201csick man of Europe\u201d by European politicians, proved a far more resilient enemy than expected. \u00a0As described in the chapter on Imperialism, in 1909 a coup of army officers and political leaders known as the Committee of Union and Progress, but more often remembered as the \u201cYoung Turks,\u201d seized control of the Ottoman state and embarked on a rapid program of western-style reform (including a growing obsession with Turkish \u201cracial\u201d identity at the expense of the Empire\u2019s other ethnicities). \u00a0With war clouds gathering over Europe in 1914, the Young Turks threw in their lot with Germany, the one European power that had never menaced Ottoman territories and which promised significant territorial gains in the event of a German - Turkish victory. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In 1915 British forces staged a full-scale invasion of Ottoman territory which rapidly turned into an outright disaster. \u00a0In a poorly-planned assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula near Constantinople, hundreds of thousands of British Imperial troops (including tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders recruited to fight for \u201ctheir\u201d empire from half a world away) were gunned down by Turkish machine guns. \u00a0In the months that followed, British forces failed to make headway against the Ottomans, with the Ottoman leadership rightly judging that the very survival of the Ottoman state was at stake in the war.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"442\"]\"Poster An Australian propaganda poster calling for volunteers.[\/caption]\r\n

In 1916, however, British forces focused their strategy on capturing the eastern stretch of the Ottoman Empire: Mesopotamia, the site of the earliest civilization in human history (which became the country of Iraq in 1939). \u00a0The British made steady progress moving west from Mesopotamia while also supporting an Arab nationalist insurgency against the Ottomans from within the Ottoman borders. \u00a0By 1917 Ottoman forces were in disarray and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire looked all but certain. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Even as British and French politicians began plans to divide up the Ottoman territory into protectorates (dubbed \u201cmandates\u201d after the war) under their control, however, the Young Turk leader Mustafa Kemal launched a major military campaign to preserve not Ottoman but Turkish <\/span>independence, with the other ethnicities that had lived under Ottoman rule either pushed aside or destroyed. \u00a0In one of the greatest crimes of the war, Turkish forces drove hundreds of thousands of Armenians from their homes across deserts to die of abuse, exhaustion, hunger, and thirst when they were not slaughtered outright. \u00a0To this day, the Turkish government (while admitting that many Armenians died) denies what historians have long since recognized: the Armenians were victims of a deliberate campaign of genocide, with over one million killed.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Women in the War (and Afterwards)<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

World War I transformed, at least during the war itself, gender roles. \u00a0The total commitment to the war on the part of the belligerent nations left numerous professional positions vacant as men were dispatched to fight. \u00a0Women responded by taking on jobs that they had been barred from in the past, as doctors, mid-level officials and executives in private enterprise, and in wartime production in factories. \u00a0Suffrage movements temporarily suspended their agitation for the vote in favor of using their existing organizations to support the war effort in the name of patriotism. \u00a0Thousands of women joined the war effort directly as nurses, in many cases serving near or even in the trenches on the Western Front. \u00a0The famous scientist Marie Curie (the first women to win a Nobel Prize - she won a second a few years later) drove an ambulance near the front lines during the war.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

In many cases, the labor shortage led to breakthroughs for women that simply could not be reversed at the war\u2019s end. \u00a0Having established the precedent that a woman could work perfectly well at a \u201cman\u2019s job\u201d (as a competent streetcar conductor, for example) certain fields remained at least partially open to women after the war concluded in 1918. \u00a0Other changes were cultural in nature rather than social. \u00a0For example, the cumbersome, uncomfortable angle-length dresses of the pre-war period vanished (along with corsets, the very model of impracticality and discomfort), replaced by sensible, comfortable dresses and skirts. \u00a0Women cut their hair short in \u201cbobs\u201d for the first time both for fashion and because short hair was more practical while working full-time for the war effort. \u00a0The war, in short, required<\/span> gender roles to change primarily for economic reasons, but women embraced those changes as forms of liberation, not just side-effects of their new jobs.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

While it was not always a straightforward case of cause-and-effect, there is no doubt that women\u2019s participation in the war effort did have a direct link to voting rights after the war. \u00a0One by one, most European countries and the United States granted the vote to at least some women in the years that followed the war. \u00a0One striking example is Belgium, where only <\/span>women who were widowed, had lost sons, or had themselves been held captive during the war were granted the vote initially. \u00a0Some countries stubbornly resisted this trend - France rejected women\u2019s suffrage entirely until after the period of Nazi occupation in World War II - but there can be no doubt that, overall, the cause of women\u2019s suffrage was aided immensely by the patriotic service of women during WWI.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Late War<\/span><\/h2>\r\n

World War I was fought primarily in Europe, along the Western Front that stretched from the English Channel south along the French border to the Alps, and on the Eastern Front across Poland, Galicia (the region encompassing part of Hungary and the Ukraine) and Russia. \u00a0It was a \u201cworld\u201d war, however, for two reasons. \u00a0First, hundreds of thousands of troops from around the world fought in it, the most numerous of which were citizens of the British Empire drawn from as far away as India and New Zealand. \u00a0Second, military engagements occurred in the Ottoman territories of the Middle East, in Africa between European colonial armies, and in Asia (albeit at a much smaller scale). \u00a0Japan even supported the Entente war effort by taking a German-controlled Chinese port, Tsingtao.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The other major power involved in the war, the United States, was a latecomer to the fighting. \u00a0The United States was dominated by \"isolationist\" sentiment until late in the war. \u00a0Most Americans believed that the war was a European affair that should not involve American troops. \u00a0America, however, was an ally of Britain and provided both military and civilian supplies to the British, along with large amounts of low-interest loans to keep the British economy afloat. \u00a0In 1917, as the war dragged on and the German military leadership under the Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg recognized that the nation could not sustain the war much longer, the German generals decided to use their new submarines, the U-Boats, to attack any vessel suspected of carrying military supplies to the British or French. \u00a0When ships carrying American civilians were sunk in 1917, American public sentiment finally shifted and the US declared war on Germany in April of 1917.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The importance of the entrance of the United States in the war was not the superiority of American troops or technology - American soldiers were as horrified as anyone when they first encountered modern, mechanized warfare. \u00a0Instead, the key factor was that the US had a gigantic industrial capacity, dwarfing all of the great powers of Europe put together, and millions of fresh troops that could be called up or drafted. \u00a0Germany, meanwhile, had been totally committed to the war for almost three years, and its supplies (of money, fuel, munitions, food, and people) were running very thin. \u00a0Most German civilians still believed that Germany was winning, but as the carnage continued on the Western Front, the German general staff knew that they had to achieve a strategic breakthrough.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

By 1918, it was clear to the German command that they were at risk of losing, despite the military resources freed up when the Bolshevik Revolution ended Russia\u2019s commitment to the war. \u00a0The Germans had been able to fight the French and British to a standstill on the Western Front, but when the US entered on the side of the British and French, it became impossible to sustain the war in the long run. \u00a0The only hope appeared to be one last desperate offensive that might bring the French and British to the negotiating table. \u00a0Thus, German forces staged a major campaign in the spring of 1918 that succeeded in breaking through the western lines and coming within about 40 miles of Paris, but by then German troops had outpaced their supply lines, lost cover, and were now up against the combined reserves of the French, British, and Americans. Another attempted offensive in July failed, and the Entente (and American) powers began to push the German forces back. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Back in Germany, criticism of the Kaiser appeared for the first time in the mainstream press, and hundreds of thousands of workers protested the worsening economic conditions. \u00a0In late September, the head of the German General Staff, Ludendorff, advised the Kaiser to sue for peace. \u00a0A month later, the Reichstag passed laws making the government\u2019s ministers responsible to it instead of the Kaiser. \u00a0Protest movements spread across Germany and the rapidly-collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire, as nationalist movements declared independence in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

On November 11 of 1918, a voluntary commission of German politicians led by the German Socialist Party (SPD) formally sued for peace. \u00a0The Kaiser, blaming socialists and Jews for \"stabbing Germany in the back,\" snuck away in a train to Holland, where he abdicated. \u00a0The top generals of the German General Staff, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, themselves the authors of the myth of the \u201cstab in the back,\u201d did their best to popularize the idea that Germany \u201cwould have won\u201d if not for sabotage perpetrated by a sinister conspiracy of foreign agents, communists, and (as with practically every shadowy conspiracy theory of the twentieth century) Jews. \u00a0In fact, if the commision of German politicians had not sued for peace when they did, French, British, and American troops would have simply invaded Germany and even more people would have died.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

The Aftermath<\/span><\/h3>\r\n

The aftermath of the war was horrendous. \u00a0Over twenty million people, both soldiers and civilians, were dead. \u00a0For Russia and France, of the twenty million men mobilized during the war, over 76% were casualties (either dead, wounded, or missing). \u00a0A whole generation of young men was almost wiped out, which had lasting demographic consequences for both countries. \u00a0For Germany, the figure was 65%, including 1.8 million dead. \u00a0The British saw a casualty rate of \u201conly\u201d 39%, but that figure still represented the death of almost a million men, with far more wounded or missing. \u00a0Even the smaller nations like Italy, which had fought fruitlessly to seize territory from Austria, lost over 450,000 men. \u00a0A huge swath of Northeastern France and parts of Belgium were reduced to lifeless fields of mud and debris. <\/span><\/p>\r\n

Politically, the war spelled the end of three of the most venerable, and historically powerful, empires of the early modern period: the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire of Austria, and the Ottoman Empire of the Middle East. \u00a0The Austrian Empire was replaced by new independent nations, with Austria itself reduced to a \u201crump state\u201d: the remnant of its former imperial glory. \u00a0France and Great Britain busily divided up control of former Ottoman territories in new \u201cmandates,\u201d often creating new nations (such as Iraq) without the slightest concern for the identities of the people who actually lived there, but Turkey itself achieved independence thanks to the ferocious campaign led by Mustafa Kemal, or \u201cAtat\u00fcrk,\u201d meaning \u201cfather of the Turks.\u201d \u00a0As noted above, revolution in Russia led to the collapse of the Tsarist state and, after a bloody civil war, the emergence of the world\u2019s first communist nation: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. \u00a0While Germany had not been a major imperial power, it also lost its overseas territories in the aftermath of the war. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The American president Woodrow Wilson, hoping to prevent future wars on the scale of World War I and, as importantly, to present an appealing anti-communist vision for a peaceful global order, helped to organize a new international body: the League of Nations. \u00a0The idea behind the League was that it would work against reckless international aggression and war, coordinate diplomatic and economic relationships, and protect the \u201cright of self-determination\u201d of peoples around the world. \u00a0Instead, the League was quickly revealed to be weak and ineffectual, consistently failing to act when nations launched wars of invasion (starting the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in northern China, in 1931), handing out territories in Africa and the Middle East to European imperialists instead of to the people who actually lived there, and failing to attract the membership of the very country whose leader had proposed it in the first place: the United States. \u00a0Instead of inspiring confidence and hope, the League appeared to many as the symbol of international dysfunction.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

For surviving soldiers everywhere, the psychological damage from years of carnage and desperation left wounds as crippling as those inflicted by poison gas and artillery strikes. \u00a0From the euphoria many felt at the start of the war, the survivors were left psychologically shattered. \u00a0The British term for soldiers who survived but were unable to function in society was \u201cshell shock,\u201d a vague diagnosis for what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. \u00a0Whereas P.T.S.D. is now understood as a grave psychological issue that requires medical and therapeutic intervention, it was considered a form of \u201chysteria\u201d at the time, a deeply gendered diagnosis that compared traumatized soldiers to \u201chysterical\u201d middle class women suffering from depression. \u00a0While the numbers of shell shock cases were so great that they could not be ignored by the medical community at the time, the focus of treatment revolved around trying to force former soldiers to somehow \u201ctough\u201d their way back to normal behavior (something that is now recognized to be impossible). \u00a0Some progress was made in treating shell shock cases by applying the \u201ctalking cure,\u201d an early form of therapy related to the practices of the great early psychologist Sigmund Freud, but most of the medical community held to the assumption that trauma was just a sign of weakness.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Likewise, there was no sympathy in European (or American) culture for psychological problems. \u00a0To be unable to function because of trauma was to be \u201cweak\u201d or \u201cinsane,\u201d with all of the social and cultural stigma those terms invoke. \u00a0Any soldier diagnosed with a psychological issue, as opposed to a physical one, was automatically disqualified from receiving a disability pension as well. \u00a0Thus, many of the veterans of World War I were both pitied and looked down on for not being able to re-adjust to civilian life, in circumstances in which the soldiers were suffering massive psychological trauma. \u00a0The result was a profound sense of betrayal and disillusionment among veterans.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

This was the context in which Europeans dubbed the conflict \"The War to End All Wars.\" \u00a0It was inconceivable to most that it could happen again; the costs had simply been too great to bear. \u00a0The European nations were left indebted and depopulated, the maps of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn as new nations emerged from old empires, and there was a profound uncertainty about what the future held. \u00a0Most hoped that, at the very least, the bloodshed was over and that the process of rebuilding might begin. \u00a0Some, however, saw the war\u2019s conclusion as deeply unsatisfying and, in a sense, incomplete: there were still scores to be settled. \u00a0It was from that sense of dissatisfaction and a longing for continued violence that the most destructive political philosophy of the twentieth century emerged: fascism.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\n

Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/h3>\r\n\r\nBlack Hand<\/a><\/span> - Creative Commons License<\/span>\r\nSchlieffen Plan<\/a><\/span> - Public Domain<\/span>\r\nAlliances<\/a><\/span> - Creative Commons License<\/span>\r\nSoldiers in Trench<\/a><\/span>- Public Domain<\/span>\r\nAustralian Propaganda<\/a><\/span> - Public Domain<\/span>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n ","rendered":"

Those who survived it called World War I “The Great War” and “The War to End All Wars.” \u00a0While they were, sadly, wrong about the latter, they were right that no war had ever been like it. \u00a0It was the world’s first mechanized, “impersonal” war in which machines proved to be much stronger than human beings. \u00a0It devastated enormous swaths of territory and it left the economies of the Western World either crippled or teetering. \u00a0To make matters worse, the war utterly failed to resolve the issues that had caused it. \u00a0The war began because of the culmination of nationalist rivalries, fears, and hatreds. \u00a0It failed to resolve any of those rivalries, and furthermore it was such a traumatic experience for most Europeans that certain otherwise \u201cnormal\u201d people were attracted to the messianic, violent rhetoric of fascism and Nazism. <\/span><\/p>\n

Background to the War<\/span><\/h2>\n

The single most significant background factor to the war was the rivalry that existed between Europe\u2019s \u201cgreat powers\u201d by the beginning of the twentieth century. \u00a0The term \u201cgreat power\u201d meant something specific in this period of history: the great powers were those able to command large armies, to maintain significant economies and industrial bases, and to conquer and hold global empires. \u00a0Their respective leaders, and many of their regular citizens, were fundamentally suspicious of one another, and the biggest worry of their political leadership was that one country would come to dominate the others. \u00a0Long gone was the notion of the balance of power as a guarantor of peace. \u00a0Now, the balance of power was a fragile thing, with each of the great powers seeking to supplant its rivals in the name of security and prosperity. \u00a0As a result, there was an ongoing, elaborate diplomatic dance as each power tried to shore up alliances, seize territory around the globe, and outpace the others.<\/span><\/p>\n

While no great power deliberately sought war out, all were willing to risk war in 1914. \u00a0That was at least in part because no politician had an accurate idea of what a new war would actually be like. \u00a0The only wars that had occurred in Europe between the great powers since the Napoleonic period were the Crimean War of the 1850s and the wars that resulted in the formation of Italy and Germany in the 1850s, 1860s, and early 1870s. \u00a0While the Crimean War was quite bloody, it was limited to the Crimean region itself and it did not involve all of the great powers. \u00a0Likewise, the wars of national unification were relatively short and did not involve a great deal of bloodshed (by the standards of both earlier and later wars). \u00a0In other words, it had been over forty years since the great powers had any experience of a war on European soil, and as they learned all too soon, much had changed with the nature of warfare in the meantime.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1914, each of the great powers reached the conclusion that war was inevitable, and that trying to stay out of the immanent conflict would lead to national decline. \u00a0Germany was surrounded by potential enemies in France and Russia. \u00a0France had cultivated a desire for revenge against Germany ever since the Franco-Prussian War. \u00a0Russia feared German power and resented Austria for threatening the interests of Slavs in the Balkans. \u00a0Great Britain alone had no vested interest in war, but it was unable to stay out of the conflict once it began.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Map
Once the war began, the Triple Entente of Russia, France, and Britain faced the Central Powers of Germany and Austria. \u00a0Italy was initially allied with the Central Powers but abandoned them once the war began, switching sides to join the Entente in 1915.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In turn, the thing that inflamed jingoism and resentment among the great powers had been imperialism. \u00a0The British were determined to maintain their enormous empire at any cost, and the Germans now posed a threat to the empire since Germany had lavished attention on a naval arms race since the 1880s. \u00a0There was constant bickering on the world stage between the great powers over their colonies, especially since those colonies butted up against each other in Africa and Asia. \u00a0Violence in the colonies, however, was almost always directed at the native peoples in those colonies, and there the balance of power was squarely on the side of Europeans. \u00a0Thus, even European soldiers overseas had no experience of facing foes armed with comparable weapons.<\/span><\/p>\n

The nature of nationalism had changed significantly over the course of the nineteenth century as well. \u00a0Not only had conservative elites appropriated nationalism to shore up their own power (as in Italy and Germany), but nationalistic patriotism came to be identified with rivalry and resentment among many citizens of various political persuasions. \u00a0To be a good Englishman was to resent and fear the growth of Germany. \u00a0Many Germans came to despise the Russians, in part thanks to the growth of anti-Slavic racism. \u00a0The lesser powers of Europe, like Italy, resented their own status and wanted to somehow seize enough power to join the ranks of the great powers. \u00a0Nationalism by 1914 was nothing like the optimistic, utopian movements of the nineteenth century; it was hostile, fearful, and aggressive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Likewise, public opinion mattered in a way it had never mattered earlier for the simple fact that every one of the great powers had at least a limited electorate and parliaments with at least some real power to make law. \u00a0Even Russia, after a semi-successful revolution in 1905, saw the creation of an elected parliament, the Duma, and an open press. \u00a0The fact that all of the powers had representative governments mattered, because public opinion helped fan the flames of conflict. \u00a0Newspapers in this era tended to deliberately inflame jingoistic passions rather than encourage rational calculation. \u00a0A very recognizably modern kind of connection was made in the press between patriotic loyalty and a willingness to fight, kill, and die for one\u2019s country. \u00a0Since all of the great powers were now significantly (or somewhat, in the case of Russia) democratic, the opinions of the average citizen mattered<\/span> in a way they never had before. \u00a0Journalism whipped up those opinions and passions by stoking hatred, fear, and resentment, which led to a more widespread willingness to go to war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the nationalistic rivalry described above, the great powers sought to shore up their security and power through alliances. Those alliances were firmly in place by 1914, each of which obligated military action if any one power should be attacked. \u00a0Each great power needed the support of its allies, and was thus willing to intercede even if its own interests were not directly threatened. \u00a0That willingness to go to war for the sake of alliance meant that even a relatively minor event might spark the outbreak of total war. \u00a0That is precisely what happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1914, two major sets of alliances set the stage for the war. \u00a0German politicians, fearing the possibility of a two-front war against France and Russia simultaneously, concluded an alliance with the Austrian Empire in 1879, only a little over a decade after the Prusso-Austrian War. \u00a0In turn, France and Russia created a strong alliance in 1893 in large part to contain the ambitions of Germany, whose territory lay between them. \u00a0Great Britain was generally more friendly to France than Germany, but had not entered into a formal alliance with any other power. \u00a0It was, however, the traditional ally and protector of Belgium, which British politicians considered a kind of toehold on the continent. \u00a0Finally, Russia grew increasingly close to the new nation of Serbia, populated as it was by a Slavic people who were part of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. \u00a0The relationships between Great Britain and Russia with Belgium and Serbia, respectively, would not have mattered but for the alliance obligations that tied the great powers together.<\/span><\/p>\n

Those alliances were now poised to mobilize armies of unprecedented size. \u00a0All of the great powers now fielded forces of a million men or more. \u00a0Coordinating that many troops required detailed advanced planning and a permanent staff of high-ranking officers, normally referred to as the “general staff” of a given army. \u00a0In the past, political leaders had often either led troops themselves or at least had significant influence in planning and tactics. \u00a0By the early twentieth century, however, war plans and tactics were entirely in the hands of the general staff of each nation, meaning political leaders would be obliged to choose from a limited set of “pre-packaged” options given to them by their generals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, when the war started, what took all of the leaders of the great powers – from the Kaiser in Germany to the Tsar in Russia – by surprise was the ultimatums they received from their own generals. \u00a0According to the members of each nation\u2019s general staff, it was all or nothing: either commit all forces to a swift and decisive victory, or suffer certain defeat. \u00a0There could be no small incremental build ups or tentative skirmishes; this was about a total commitment to a massive war. \u00a0An old adage has it that \u201cgenerals fight the last war,\u201d basing their tactics on what worked in previous conflicts, and in 1914 the \u201clast war\u201d most generals looked to was the Franco-Prussian War, which Prussia had won through swift, decisive action and overwhelming force.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Start of the War<\/span><\/h2>\n

The immediate cause of the war was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. \u00a0Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the Habsburg throne, a respected Austrian politician who also happened to be friends with the German Kaiser. \u00a0Ironically, he was also the politician in the Austrian state with the most direct control of the Austrian military, and he tended to favor peaceful diplomacy over the potential outbreak of war \u2013 it is possible that he would have been a prominent voice for peace if he had survived. \u00a0Instead, he was assassinated not by Austria’s rivals Russia or France, but by a young Serbian nationalist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Serbia was a new nation. \u00a0It had fought its way to independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and its political leaders envisioned a role for Serbia like that Piedmont had played in Italy: one small kingdom that came to conquer and unite a nation. \u00a0In this case, the Serbs hoped to conquer and unite the Balkans in one Serbian-dominated country. \u00a0Austria, however, stood in the path of Serbian ambition since Austria controlled neighboring Bosnia (in which many Serbs lived as a significant minority of the population). \u00a0Thus, the last thing Austrian politicians wanted was an anti-Austrian movement launched by the ambitious Serbs.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1903, a military coup in Serbia killed the king and installed a fiercely nationalistic leadership. \u00a0Serbian nationalists were proud of their Slavic heritage, and Russia became a powerful ally in large part because of the Slavic connection between Russians and Serbs (i.e. they spoke related languages and the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches were part of the same branch of Christianity). \u00a0Russia also supported Serbia because of Russian rivalry with Austria. \u00a0Serbian nationalists believed that, with Russian support, it would be possible to create an international crisis in Austrian-controlled Bosnia and ultimately seize Bosnia itself. \u00a0The Serbs did not believe that Austria would risk a full-scale war with Russia in order to hold on to Bosnia.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the organizers of the coup that had murdered the king and queen were a group of Serbian officers who created a terrorist group, The Black Hand. \u00a0In 1914, The Black Hand trained a group of (ethnically Serbian) college students in Bosnia to assassinate an Austrian politician when the opportunity presented itself. \u00a0That happened in June of 1914, when Franz Ferdinand and his wife came to visit the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. \u00a0In a fantastically bungled assassination, Franz Ferdinand survived a series of attacks, with some of his would-be killers getting cold feet and running off, others injuring bystanders but missing the Archduke, and others losing track of where the Archduke’s motorcade was.
\nFinally, quite by accident, the Archduke’s driver became lost and stuck in traffic outside of a cafe in which one of the assassins was eating a sandwich. \u00a0The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, seized the opportunity to stride outside and shoot the Archduke and his wife to death.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Group
The leaders of the Black Hand, the conspiracy responsible for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and sparking the beginning of World War<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Serbia’s assumption that Austria would not risk war proved to be completely wrong. \u00a0The Austrian government demanded that Serbia allow Austrian agents to carry out a full-scale investigation of the assassination; Serbian honor would never allow such a thing. \u00a0Austrian troops started massing near the Serbian border, and the great powers of Europe started calling up their troops. \u00a0Germany, believing that its own military and industrial resources were such that it would be the victor in a war against France and Russia, promised to stand by Austria regardless of what happened. \u00a0Russia warned that Austrian intervention in Serbia would cause war. \u00a0France assured Russia of its loyalty. \u00a0Only Britain was as-yet unaccounted for.<\/span><\/p>\n

No one was completely certain that a war would actually happen (the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, left for his summer vacation as planned right in the middle of the crisis, believing no war would occur), but if it did, each of the great powers was confident that they would be victorious in the end. \u00a0A desperate diplomatic scramble ensued as diplomats, parliaments, and heads of state tried at the last minute to preserve the peace, but in the end it was too late: on July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia, activating the pre-existing system of alliances, and by August 4 all of the great powers were involved. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thanks to the fact that Germany invaded through Belgium, Great Britain declared war on Germany and its allies. \u00a0In addition to Germany and the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire soon joined their alliance, known as the Central Powers. \u00a0Opposing them was the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia. \u00a0Smaller states like Italy and Portugal later joined the Triple Entente, as did, eventually, the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Early War<\/span><\/h2>\n

There was a mixture of apprehension and, in many cases, enthusiasm about the onset of war among civilians and soldiers alike. \u00a0Many felt that the war would resolve nationalistic rivalries once and for all, and almost no one anticipated a lengthy war. \u00a0Wilhelm II anticipated \u201ca jolly little war\u201d and it was widely thought in France and Germany that the war would be over by Christmas. \u00a030,000 young men and women marched in Berlin before war was even declared, singing patriotic songs and gathering at the feet of statues of German and Prussian heroes. \u00a0Everywhere, thousands of young men enlisted in the military of their own volition. \u00a0There were some anti-war protests in July, mostly organized by the socialist parties in the name of socialist internationalism, but once the war was actually declared those protests abruptly stopped. <\/span><\/p>\n

The most symptomatic moment of the defeat of socialism by nationalism as rival ideologies was the fact that 100% of the socialist parties of Europe supported their respective countries in the war, despite hard and fast promises before the war that, as socialists, they were committed to peace. \u00a0Whereas pre-war socialists had argued vociferously that the working class of each country was a single, united class regardless of national differences, that internationalist rhetoric largely vanished once the war began. \u00a0Wanting to be seen as patriots (whether French, German, or British), the major socialist parties voted to authorize the war and supported the sale of war bonds. \u00a0In turn, the radical left of the socialist parties soon broke off and formed new parties that continued to oppose the war; these new parties were typically called \u201ccommunists\u201d whereas the old ones remained \u201csocialists.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

War, for many people, represented a cathartic release. \u00a0War did not represent real bloodshed and horror for the young men signing up \u2013 they had never fought in real wars, except for the veterans of colonial wars against much less well-armed \u201cnatives\u201d in the colonies. \u00a0War was an ideal of bravery and honor that many young men in Europe in 1914 longed for as a way to prove themselves, to prove their loyalty, and to purge their boredom and uncertainty about the future. \u00a0A whole generation had absorbed tales of glory on the battlefield, of the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the conquests overseas. \u00a0Depending on their nationality, they were either ashamed and angry or fiercely proud of their country\u2019s performance in past wars. \u00a0As a result, many saw a new war as a chance to settle accounts, to prove once and for all that they were citizens a great power, and to shame their opponents into conceding defeat. \u00a0France would at last get even for the Franco-Prussian War. \u00a0Germany would at least prove it was the most powerful nation in Europe. \u00a0Russia would prove that it was a powerful modern nation\u2026and so on.<\/span><\/p>\n

The war itself began with the German invasion of France through Belgium. \u00a0German tactics centered on the \u201cSchlieffen Plan,\u201d named after its author, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, who had devised it in the first years of the twentieth century. \u00a0The Schlieffen Plan called for a rapid advance into France to knock the French forces out of the war within six weeks. \u00a0Subsequently, German troops would be whisked back east via railroads in time to engage Russia, as it was believed that it would take the Russians at least that long to mobilize their armies. \u00a0It not only called for rapid mobilization, but it required the German military to defeat the French military at an even more rapid pace had the Prussian forces forty years earlier in the Franco-Prussian War.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Map
The Schlieffen Plan, in theory. \u00a0In reality, while it met with initial success, French and British troops succeeded in counter-attacking and pushing back the German advance.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first taste of the horror of the war to come was the German invasion of Belgium. \u00a0Belgium was a neutral country leading up to the war, and German planners had expected Belgium to surrender swiftly as German troops advanced rapidly toward France. \u00a0Instead, Belgian soldiers fiercely resisted the German invasion. \u00a0In turn, German troops deliberately massacred civilians, destroyed towns, and raped Belgian women. \u00a0Thousands of Belgian refugees fled to Britain, where they were (to the credit of the British government and civilians) welcomed and housed. \u00a0The bloodshed shocked the sensibilities of the French and British reading public and emphasized the fact that the war might go very differently than many had first imagined. \u00a0Britain swiftly declared war on Germany.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the first few weeks of the German invasion seemed to match the ambitions of the Schlieffen Plan, they soon ground to a halt. \u00a0A fierce French counter-attack stopped the Germans in Belgium and Northeastern France in late September. \u00a0 Simultaneously, the Russians surprised everyone by mobilizing their forces much more quickly than expected, attacking both Germany and Austria in the east in late August. \u00a0In the autumn of 1914 the scale of battles grew to exceed anything Europe had witnessed since the Napoleonic Wars (which they soon dwarfed). \u00a0To their shock and horror, soldiers on all sides encountered for the first time the sheer destructive power of modern weaponry. \u00a0To shield themselves from the clouds of bullets belched out by machine guns, desperate soldiers dove into the craters created by artillery shells. \u00a0In the process, trench warfare was invented.<\/span><\/p>\n

The weapons that had been developed in the decades leading up to the war, from enormous new battleships known as dreadnoughts to high-explosive artillery shells and machine guns, had all seemed to the nations of Europe like strengths. \u00a0The early months of the war revealed that they were indeed strong, in a sense, being far more lethal than anything created before. \u00a0Unfortunately, human bodies were pitifully weak by comparison, and as the death toll mounted, the human (and financial) costs associated with modern warfare shattered the image of national strength that politicians and generals continued to cling to. \u00a0Those generals in particular stuck to their favored, and outdated, tactics, sending cavalry in bright uniforms to their deaths in hopeless charges, ordering offensives that were doomed to fail, and calling up every soldier available on reserve. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That Christmas, in a well-remembered symbolic moment, a brief and unauthorized truce held on the Western Front between Entente and German forces long enough for French and German soldiers to climb out of their respective trenches and meet in the \u201cno man\u2019s land\u201d between the lines, with a German barber offering shaves and haircuts to all comers. \u00a0By then, both sides were well aware that the conceit that the war would \u201cbe over by Christmas\u201d had been a ridiculous fantasy. \u00a0Never again in the war would a moment of voluntary peace re-emerge; while they did not know it for certain at the time, the soldiers faced four more years of carnage to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Evolution of the War<\/span><\/h3>\n

On the Western Front of the war, it was the trenches that defined almost everything in the lives of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. \u00a0An English officer and poet later wrote that \u201cwhen all is said and done, this war was a matter of holes and ditches.\u201d \u00a0While they began as improvised, hastily-dug ditches, the trenches involved into vast networks of fortified rifts that stretched from the English Channel in the north to the Swiss Alps in the south. \u00a0Behind the trenches lay the artillery batteries, capable of hurling enormous shells for miles, and farther back still lay the command posts of the high-ranking officers who fruitlessly conceived of new variations on a constant theme: hopeless charges against the impregnable enemy position.<\/span><\/p>\n

The tactical problem facing both sides was due to the new technologies of war: whereas in past wars the offensive strategy was often superior to the defensive strategy, things were entirely reversed in World War I. \u00a0Because of trenches, machine guns, mines, and modern rifles, it was far more effective to entrench oneself and defend a position than it was to charge and try to take the enemy\u2019s position. \u00a0It was nearly impossible to break through and gain territory or advantage; the British phrase for an attack was \u201cgoing over the top,\u201d which involved thousands of men climbing out of their trenches and charging across the no man\u2019s land that separated them from the enemy. \u00a0While they were charging, the enemy would simply open fire with impunity from their trenches, and without exception not a single offensive captured a significant amount of territory between 1915 and early 1917. \u00a0As a single example, one British attack in 1915 temporarily gained 1,000 yards at the cost of 13,000 lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

In turn, and in stark contrast to the early dreams of glory to be won on the battlefield, soldiers discovered that their own competence, even heroism, had been rendered irrelevant by the new technology of warfare. \u00a0Because warfare was so heavily mechanized, the old ideal of brave, chivalric combat between equals was largely obsolete. \u00a0Men regularly killed other men they never laid eyes on, and death often seemed completely arbitrary – in many cases, survival came down to sheer, dumb luck. \u00a0No amount of skill or bravery mattered if an artillery shell hit the trench where a soldier happened to be standing. \u00a0Likewise, if ordered to \u201cgo over the top,\u201d all one could hope for was to survive long enough to be able to retreat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, the experience of war in the trenches for the next three years was a state of ongoing misery: men stood in mud, sometimes over a foot deep, in the cold and rain, as shells whistled overhead and occasionally blew them up. \u00a0They lived in abject terror of the prospect of having to attack the enemy line, knowing that they would all almost certainly be slaughtered. \u00a0Thousands of new recruits showed up on the lines every month, many of whom would be dead in the first attack. \u00a0In 1915, in a vain attempt to break the stalemate, both sides started using poison gas, which was completely horrific, burning the lungs, eyes, and skin of combatants. \u00a0The survivors <\/span>of poison gas attacks were considered to be the unlucky<\/span> ones. \u00a0By 1917, both sides had been locked in place for three years, and the soldiers of both sides were known to remark that only the dead would ever escape the trenches in the end.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Photograph
Soldiers in a trench in 1915.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Individual battles in World War I sometimes claimed more lives than had entire wars in past centuries. \u00a0The Battle of Verdun, an enormous German offensive that sought to break the stalemate in 1916, resulted in 540,000 casualties among the French and 430,000 among the Germans. \u00a0It achieved nothing besides the carnage, with neither side winning significant territorial concessions. \u00a0The most astonishing death count of the war was at the Battle of the Somme, a disastrous British offensive in 1916 in which 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded on the first day alone \u2013 there were more British soldiers killed and wounded in the first three days of the battle of the Somme than there were Americans killed in World War I, The Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. \u00a0Ultimately, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 420,000 British casualties (meaning either dead, missing, or wounded to the point of being unable to fight), 200,000 French casualties, and 650,000 German casualties. \u00a0One British poet noted afterwards that \u201cthe war had won\u201d the battle, not countries or people.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this context of ongoing carnage, even the most stubborn commanders were forced to recognize that their dreams of a spectacular breakthrough were probably unachievable. \u00a0Instead, by 1916 many of the war\u2019s top strategists concluded that the only way to win was to outspend the enemy, churning out more munitions and supplies, drafting more men, committing more civilians to the war effort at home, and sacrificing more soldiers than could the other side. \u00a0At its worst, commanders adopted an utterly ruthless perspective regarding their own casualties: tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths were signs of \u201cprogress\u201d in the war effort, because they implied that the other side must be running out of soldiers, too. \u00a0This was a war of attrition on a new level, one that both soldiers and lower-ranking officers alike recognized was designed to kill them in the name of a possible<\/span> eventual victory.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Eastern Front and the Ottoman Empire<\/span><\/h3>\n

Things were different in the east, however. \u00a0In contrast to the essentially static nature of trench warfare on the Western Front, the Russian, German, and Austrian armies in the east were highly mobile, sometimes crossing hundreds of miles in an attempt to outflank their enemies. \u00a0The Russian army fought effectively in the early years of the war, especially against Austrian forces, which it consistently defeated. \u00a0While Russian soldiers were also the match of Germans, however, Russia was hampered by its inadequate industrial base and by its lack of rail lines and cars. \u00a0The Germans were able to outmaneuver the Russians, often surrounding Russian armies one by one and defeating them. \u00a0A brilliant Russian general oversaw a major offensive in 1916 that crippled Austrian forces, but did not force Austria out of the war. \u00a0In the aftermath, a lack of support and coordination from the other Russian generals ultimately checked the offensive.<\/span><\/p>\n

By late 1916 the war had grown increasingly desperate for Russia. \u00a0The Tsar\u2019s government was teetering and morale was low. \u00a0The home front was in dire straits, with serious food shortages, and there were inadequate munitions (especially for artillery) making it to the front. \u00a0Thus, the German armies steadily pushed into Russian territory. \u00a0A furious defense by the Russian forces checked the German advance in the winter of 1916 – 1917, but the war was deeply unpopular on the home front and increasing numbers of soldiers deserted rather than face the Germans. \u00a0It was in this context of imminent defeat that a popular revolution overthrew the Tsarist state – that revolution is described in the next chapter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, long considered the \u201csick man of Europe\u201d by European politicians, proved a far more resilient enemy than expected. \u00a0As described in the chapter on Imperialism, in 1909 a coup of army officers and political leaders known as the Committee of Union and Progress, but more often remembered as the \u201cYoung Turks,\u201d seized control of the Ottoman state and embarked on a rapid program of western-style reform (including a growing obsession with Turkish \u201cracial\u201d identity at the expense of the Empire\u2019s other ethnicities). \u00a0With war clouds gathering over Europe in 1914, the Young Turks threw in their lot with Germany, the one European power that had never menaced Ottoman territories and which promised significant territorial gains in the event of a German – Turkish victory. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1915 British forces staged a full-scale invasion of Ottoman territory which rapidly turned into an outright disaster. \u00a0In a poorly-planned assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula near Constantinople, hundreds of thousands of British Imperial troops (including tens of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders recruited to fight for \u201ctheir\u201d empire from half a world away) were gunned down by Turkish machine guns. \u00a0In the months that followed, British forces failed to make headway against the Ottomans, with the Ottoman leadership rightly judging that the very survival of the Ottoman state was at stake in the war.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Poster
An Australian propaganda poster calling for volunteers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1916, however, British forces focused their strategy on capturing the eastern stretch of the Ottoman Empire: Mesopotamia, the site of the earliest civilization in human history (which became the country of Iraq in 1939). \u00a0The British made steady progress moving west from Mesopotamia while also supporting an Arab nationalist insurgency against the Ottomans from within the Ottoman borders. \u00a0By 1917 Ottoman forces were in disarray and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire looked all but certain. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even as British and French politicians began plans to divide up the Ottoman territory into protectorates (dubbed \u201cmandates\u201d after the war) under their control, however, the Young Turk leader Mustafa Kemal launched a major military campaign to preserve not Ottoman but Turkish <\/span>independence, with the other ethnicities that had lived under Ottoman rule either pushed aside or destroyed. \u00a0In one of the greatest crimes of the war, Turkish forces drove hundreds of thousands of Armenians from their homes across deserts to die of abuse, exhaustion, hunger, and thirst when they were not slaughtered outright. \u00a0To this day, the Turkish government (while admitting that many Armenians died) denies what historians have long since recognized: the Armenians were victims of a deliberate campaign of genocide, with over one million killed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Women in the War (and Afterwards)<\/span><\/h2>\n

World War I transformed, at least during the war itself, gender roles. \u00a0The total commitment to the war on the part of the belligerent nations left numerous professional positions vacant as men were dispatched to fight. \u00a0Women responded by taking on jobs that they had been barred from in the past, as doctors, mid-level officials and executives in private enterprise, and in wartime production in factories. \u00a0Suffrage movements temporarily suspended their agitation for the vote in favor of using their existing organizations to support the war effort in the name of patriotism. \u00a0Thousands of women joined the war effort directly as nurses, in many cases serving near or even in the trenches on the Western Front. \u00a0The famous scientist Marie Curie (the first women to win a Nobel Prize – she won a second a few years later) drove an ambulance near the front lines during the war.<\/span><\/p>\n

In many cases, the labor shortage led to breakthroughs for women that simply could not be reversed at the war\u2019s end. \u00a0Having established the precedent that a woman could work perfectly well at a \u201cman\u2019s job\u201d (as a competent streetcar conductor, for example) certain fields remained at least partially open to women after the war concluded in 1918. \u00a0Other changes were cultural in nature rather than social. \u00a0For example, the cumbersome, uncomfortable angle-length dresses of the pre-war period vanished (along with corsets, the very model of impracticality and discomfort), replaced by sensible, comfortable dresses and skirts. \u00a0Women cut their hair short in \u201cbobs\u201d for the first time both for fashion and because short hair was more practical while working full-time for the war effort. \u00a0The war, in short, required<\/span> gender roles to change primarily for economic reasons, but women embraced those changes as forms of liberation, not just side-effects of their new jobs.<\/span><\/p>\n

While it was not always a straightforward case of cause-and-effect, there is no doubt that women\u2019s participation in the war effort did have a direct link to voting rights after the war. \u00a0One by one, most European countries and the United States granted the vote to at least some women in the years that followed the war. \u00a0One striking example is Belgium, where only <\/span>women who were widowed, had lost sons, or had themselves been held captive during the war were granted the vote initially. \u00a0Some countries stubbornly resisted this trend – France rejected women\u2019s suffrage entirely until after the period of Nazi occupation in World War II – but there can be no doubt that, overall, the cause of women\u2019s suffrage was aided immensely by the patriotic service of women during WWI.<\/p>\n

The Late War<\/span><\/h2>\n

World War I was fought primarily in Europe, along the Western Front that stretched from the English Channel south along the French border to the Alps, and on the Eastern Front across Poland, Galicia (the region encompassing part of Hungary and the Ukraine) and Russia. \u00a0It was a \u201cworld\u201d war, however, for two reasons. \u00a0First, hundreds of thousands of troops from around the world fought in it, the most numerous of which were citizens of the British Empire drawn from as far away as India and New Zealand. \u00a0Second, military engagements occurred in the Ottoman territories of the Middle East, in Africa between European colonial armies, and in Asia (albeit at a much smaller scale). \u00a0Japan even supported the Entente war effort by taking a German-controlled Chinese port, Tsingtao.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other major power involved in the war, the United States, was a latecomer to the fighting. \u00a0The United States was dominated by “isolationist” sentiment until late in the war. \u00a0Most Americans believed that the war was a European affair that should not involve American troops. \u00a0America, however, was an ally of Britain and provided both military and civilian supplies to the British, along with large amounts of low-interest loans to keep the British economy afloat. \u00a0In 1917, as the war dragged on and the German military leadership under the Field Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg recognized that the nation could not sustain the war much longer, the German generals decided to use their new submarines, the U-Boats, to attack any vessel suspected of carrying military supplies to the British or French. \u00a0When ships carrying American civilians were sunk in 1917, American public sentiment finally shifted and the US declared war on Germany in April of 1917.<\/span><\/p>\n

The importance of the entrance of the United States in the war was not the superiority of American troops or technology – American soldiers were as horrified as anyone when they first encountered modern, mechanized warfare. \u00a0Instead, the key factor was that the US had a gigantic industrial capacity, dwarfing all of the great powers of Europe put together, and millions of fresh troops that could be called up or drafted. \u00a0Germany, meanwhile, had been totally committed to the war for almost three years, and its supplies (of money, fuel, munitions, food, and people) were running very thin. \u00a0Most German civilians still believed that Germany was winning, but as the carnage continued on the Western Front, the German general staff knew that they had to achieve a strategic breakthrough.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 1918, it was clear to the German command that they were at risk of losing, despite the military resources freed up when the Bolshevik Revolution ended Russia\u2019s commitment to the war. \u00a0The Germans had been able to fight the French and British to a standstill on the Western Front, but when the US entered on the side of the British and French, it became impossible to sustain the war in the long run. \u00a0The only hope appeared to be one last desperate offensive that might bring the French and British to the negotiating table. \u00a0Thus, German forces staged a major campaign in the spring of 1918 that succeeded in breaking through the western lines and coming within about 40 miles of Paris, but by then German troops had outpaced their supply lines, lost cover, and were now up against the combined reserves of the French, British, and Americans. Another attempted offensive in July failed, and the Entente (and American) powers began to push the German forces back. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Back in Germany, criticism of the Kaiser appeared for the first time in the mainstream press, and hundreds of thousands of workers protested the worsening economic conditions. \u00a0In late September, the head of the German General Staff, Ludendorff, advised the Kaiser to sue for peace. \u00a0A month later, the Reichstag passed laws making the government\u2019s ministers responsible to it instead of the Kaiser. \u00a0Protest movements spread across Germany and the rapidly-collapsing Austro-Hungarian empire, as nationalist movements declared independence in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On November 11 of 1918, a voluntary commission of German politicians led by the German Socialist Party (SPD) formally sued for peace. \u00a0The Kaiser, blaming socialists and Jews for “stabbing Germany in the back,” snuck away in a train to Holland, where he abdicated. \u00a0The top generals of the German General Staff, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, themselves the authors of the myth of the \u201cstab in the back,\u201d did their best to popularize the idea that Germany \u201cwould have won\u201d if not for sabotage perpetrated by a sinister conspiracy of foreign agents, communists, and (as with practically every shadowy conspiracy theory of the twentieth century) Jews. \u00a0In fact, if the commision of German politicians had not sued for peace when they did, French, British, and American troops would have simply invaded Germany and even more people would have died.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Aftermath<\/span><\/h3>\n

The aftermath of the war was horrendous. \u00a0Over twenty million people, both soldiers and civilians, were dead. \u00a0For Russia and France, of the twenty million men mobilized during the war, over 76% were casualties (either dead, wounded, or missing). \u00a0A whole generation of young men was almost wiped out, which had lasting demographic consequences for both countries. \u00a0For Germany, the figure was 65%, including 1.8 million dead. \u00a0The British saw a casualty rate of \u201conly\u201d 39%, but that figure still represented the death of almost a million men, with far more wounded or missing. \u00a0Even the smaller nations like Italy, which had fought fruitlessly to seize territory from Austria, lost over 450,000 men. \u00a0A huge swath of Northeastern France and parts of Belgium were reduced to lifeless fields of mud and debris. <\/span><\/p>\n

Politically, the war spelled the end of three of the most venerable, and historically powerful, empires of the early modern period: the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire of Austria, and the Ottoman Empire of the Middle East. \u00a0The Austrian Empire was replaced by new independent nations, with Austria itself reduced to a \u201crump state\u201d: the remnant of its former imperial glory. \u00a0France and Great Britain busily divided up control of former Ottoman territories in new \u201cmandates,\u201d often creating new nations (such as Iraq) without the slightest concern for the identities of the people who actually lived there, but Turkey itself achieved independence thanks to the ferocious campaign led by Mustafa Kemal, or \u201cAtat\u00fcrk,\u201d meaning \u201cfather of the Turks.\u201d \u00a0As noted above, revolution in Russia led to the collapse of the Tsarist state and, after a bloody civil war, the emergence of the world\u2019s first communist nation: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. \u00a0While Germany had not been a major imperial power, it also lost its overseas territories in the aftermath of the war. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The American president Woodrow Wilson, hoping to prevent future wars on the scale of World War I and, as importantly, to present an appealing anti-communist vision for a peaceful global order, helped to organize a new international body: the League of Nations. \u00a0The idea behind the League was that it would work against reckless international aggression and war, coordinate diplomatic and economic relationships, and protect the \u201cright of self-determination\u201d of peoples around the world. \u00a0Instead, the League was quickly revealed to be weak and ineffectual, consistently failing to act when nations launched wars of invasion (starting the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, in northern China, in 1931), handing out territories in Africa and the Middle East to European imperialists instead of to the people who actually lived there, and failing to attract the membership of the very country whose leader had proposed it in the first place: the United States. \u00a0Instead of inspiring confidence and hope, the League appeared to many as the symbol of international dysfunction.<\/span><\/p>\n

For surviving soldiers everywhere, the psychological damage from years of carnage and desperation left wounds as crippling as those inflicted by poison gas and artillery strikes. \u00a0From the euphoria many felt at the start of the war, the survivors were left psychologically shattered. \u00a0The British term for soldiers who survived but were unable to function in society was \u201cshell shock,\u201d a vague diagnosis for what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. \u00a0Whereas P.T.S.D. is now understood as a grave psychological issue that requires medical and therapeutic intervention, it was considered a form of \u201chysteria\u201d at the time, a deeply gendered diagnosis that compared traumatized soldiers to \u201chysterical\u201d middle class women suffering from depression. \u00a0While the numbers of shell shock cases were so great that they could not be ignored by the medical community at the time, the focus of treatment revolved around trying to force former soldiers to somehow \u201ctough\u201d their way back to normal behavior (something that is now recognized to be impossible). \u00a0Some progress was made in treating shell shock cases by applying the \u201ctalking cure,\u201d an early form of therapy related to the practices of the great early psychologist Sigmund Freud, but most of the medical community held to the assumption that trauma was just a sign of weakness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Likewise, there was no sympathy in European (or American) culture for psychological problems. \u00a0To be unable to function because of trauma was to be \u201cweak\u201d or \u201cinsane,\u201d with all of the social and cultural stigma those terms invoke. \u00a0Any soldier diagnosed with a psychological issue, as opposed to a physical one, was automatically disqualified from receiving a disability pension as well. \u00a0Thus, many of the veterans of World War I were both pitied and looked down on for not being able to re-adjust to civilian life, in circumstances in which the soldiers were suffering massive psychological trauma. \u00a0The result was a profound sense of betrayal and disillusionment among veterans.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was the context in which Europeans dubbed the conflict “The War to End All Wars.” \u00a0It was inconceivable to most that it could happen again; the costs had simply been too great to bear. \u00a0The European nations were left indebted and depopulated, the maps of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn as new nations emerged from old empires, and there was a profound uncertainty about what the future held. \u00a0Most hoped that, at the very least, the bloodshed was over and that the process of rebuilding might begin. \u00a0Some, however, saw the war\u2019s conclusion as deeply unsatisfying and, in a sense, incomplete: there were still scores to be settled. \u00a0It was from that sense of dissatisfaction and a longing for continued violence that the most destructive political philosophy of the twentieth century emerged: fascism.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Image Citations (Wikimedia Commons):<\/span><\/h3>\n


\nBlack Hand<\/a><\/span> – Creative Commons License<\/span>
\nSchlieffen Plan<\/a><\/span> – Public Domain<\/span>
\nAlliances<\/a><\/span> – Creative Commons License<\/span>
\nSoldiers in Trench<\/a><\/span>– Public Domain<\/span>
\nAustralian Propaganda<\/a><\/span> – Public Domain<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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