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The Pacifists and the Trenches
Corbis (1915)
Members of the Women’s Peace Party arriving in the Netherlands from America in April 1915 for the International Congress of Women, a four-day antiwar protest held at The Hague.By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Published: May 13, 2011
Woodrow Wilson’s fatuous claim about the European war of 1914-18 — sarcastically annexed by Adam Hochschild for the title of this moving and important book — was an object of satire and contempt even as it was being uttered. “A peace to end peace,” commented Sir Alfred Milner, that powerhouse of the British war cabinet, as he surveyed the terms of the Versailles treaty that supposedly brought the combat to a close. Increasingly, modern historians have come to regard that bleak November “armistice” as a mere truce in a long, terrible conflict that almost sent civilization into total eclipse and that did not really terminate until the peaceful and democratic reunification of Germany after November 1989. Even that might be an optimistic reading: the post-1918 frontiers of the former Ottoman Empire (one of the four great thrones that did not outlast the “First” World War) are still a suppurating source of violence and embitterment.
TO END ALL WARS
A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
By Adam Hochschild
Illustrated. 448 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
By Adam Hochschild
Illustrated. 448 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.
Related
Up Front: Christopher Hitchens (May 15, 2011)
Excerpt: ‘To End All Wars’ (May 15, 2011)
Henry Guttmann/Getty Images
Italian soldiers killed during an Austrian attack in the mountains near Cividale, circa 1917.In his previous works, on subjects as diverse as the Belgian Congo and the victims of Stalinism, Hochschild has distinguished himself as a historian “from below,” as it were, or from the viewpoint of the victims. He stays loyal to this method in “To End All Wars,” concentrating on the appalling losses suffered by the rank and file and the extraordinary courage of those who decided that the war was not a just one. Since many of the latter were of the upper classes, some of them with close relatives in power, he is enabled to shift between the upstairs-downstairs settings of post-Edwardian England, as its denizens began in their different ways to realize that the world they had cherished was passing forever.
No single narrative can do justice to an inferno whose victims still remain uncounted. Hochschild tries to encompass the global scope of the disaster, and to keep us updated with accounts of what was occurring at a given time in Russia and the United States, but his main setting is England and his chief concern the Western Front. In this hecatomb along the minor rivers of Flanders and Picardy, the British people lost the cream of their working class and the flower of their aristocracy. The poems of Wilfred Owen and Rudyard Kipling, in their contrasting ways, still have the power to touch the tragic chord of memory that Hochschild strives to evoke.
For men like the Earl of Lansdowne, who tried to propose a negotiated peace, the terrifying thought was the slaughter of the class of well-bred young officers. (Of the 10 grandsons of the Marquess of Salisbury, five were killed in action.) For others, like Fenner Brockway, Alice Wheeldon and John S. Clarke, the war represented the human sacrifice of those miners, railwaymen and engineers whose skills should have been used instead to depose the aristocracy and build a new society. For them, it was a matter of common cause among British, German and Russian workers, and for this principle they risked harsh imprisonment, punitive conscription and even death. Ironically, perhaps, the most renowned of these resisters was Bertrand Russell, a dedicated leftist who was harder to silence precisely because he was the grandson of an earl. Hochschild has done his level best to build a memorial to these dissenters, and is hugely to be congratulated on his hard work: as a buff on this subject, I thought I was the only one who knew about Clarke, an obdurate Marxist who earned his living as a circus impresario and lion tamer.
However, once the howitzers had started their bellowing, proletarian internationalism had a marked tendency to evaporate. Only Lenin and a handful of other irreducible revolutionaries bided their time, waiting for the war to devour those monarchs who had been foolish enough to start it. Meanwhile, fratricide was the rule. Under the fog of war, the Armenians (not really dealt with here) were put to the sword in the 20th century’s first genocide, and British artillery was used in Dublin streets to put down an Irish rising.
Ruthless as they were in the killing of others, the generals were also shockingly profligate and callous when it came to their “own.” In some especially revolting passages, we find Gen. Sir Douglas Haig and his arrogant subordinate Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson actually complaining when British casualties were too low, and exulting — presumably because enemy losses were deemed comparable — when they moved into the tens of thousands. What this meant in cold terms was the destruction of whole regiments, often comprising (as in the cases of Newfoundland and Ulster) entire communities back home who had volunteered as a body and stayed together in arms. They vanished, in clouds of poison gas, hails of steel splinters and great lakes of sucking mud. Or lay in lines, reminding all observers of mown-down corn, along the barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements against which they had been thrown. Like me, Hochschild has visited the mass graves and their markers, which still lie along the fields of northern France and Belgium, and been overwhelmed by what Wilfred Owen starkly and simply called “the pity of War.” (Owen was to die pointlessly as the guns were falling silent: his mother received the telegram as the church bells were ringing to celebrate the armistice — or better in retrospect to say “fragile cease-fire.”)
We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi. Again, Hochschild is an acute register. He has read the relevant passages of “Mein Kampf,” in which a gassed and wounded Austrian corporal began to incubate the idea of a ghastly revenge. He notes the increasing anti-Semitism of decaying wartime imperial Germany, with its vile rumors of Jewish cowardice and machination. And he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.
This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.
No single narrative can do justice to an inferno whose victims still remain uncounted. Hochschild tries to encompass the global scope of the disaster, and to keep us updated with accounts of what was occurring at a given time in Russia and the United States, but his main setting is England and his chief concern the Western Front. In this hecatomb along the minor rivers of Flanders and Picardy, the British people lost the cream of their working class and the flower of their aristocracy. The poems of Wilfred Owen and Rudyard Kipling, in their contrasting ways, still have the power to touch the tragic chord of memory that Hochschild strives to evoke.
For men like the Earl of Lansdowne, who tried to propose a negotiated peace, the terrifying thought was the slaughter of the class of well-bred young officers. (Of the 10 grandsons of the Marquess of Salisbury, five were killed in action.) For others, like Fenner Brockway, Alice Wheeldon and John S. Clarke, the war represented the human sacrifice of those miners, railwaymen and engineers whose skills should have been used instead to depose the aristocracy and build a new society. For them, it was a matter of common cause among British, German and Russian workers, and for this principle they risked harsh imprisonment, punitive conscription and even death. Ironically, perhaps, the most renowned of these resisters was Bertrand Russell, a dedicated leftist who was harder to silence precisely because he was the grandson of an earl. Hochschild has done his level best to build a memorial to these dissenters, and is hugely to be congratulated on his hard work: as a buff on this subject, I thought I was the only one who knew about Clarke, an obdurate Marxist who earned his living as a circus impresario and lion tamer.
However, once the howitzers had started their bellowing, proletarian internationalism had a marked tendency to evaporate. Only Lenin and a handful of other irreducible revolutionaries bided their time, waiting for the war to devour those monarchs who had been foolish enough to start it. Meanwhile, fratricide was the rule. Under the fog of war, the Armenians (not really dealt with here) were put to the sword in the 20th century’s first genocide, and British artillery was used in Dublin streets to put down an Irish rising.
Ruthless as they were in the killing of others, the generals were also shockingly profligate and callous when it came to their “own.” In some especially revolting passages, we find Gen. Sir Douglas Haig and his arrogant subordinate Gen. Sir Henry Rawlinson actually complaining when British casualties were too low, and exulting — presumably because enemy losses were deemed comparable — when they moved into the tens of thousands. What this meant in cold terms was the destruction of whole regiments, often comprising (as in the cases of Newfoundland and Ulster) entire communities back home who had volunteered as a body and stayed together in arms. They vanished, in clouds of poison gas, hails of steel splinters and great lakes of sucking mud. Or lay in lines, reminding all observers of mown-down corn, along the barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements against which they had been thrown. Like me, Hochschild has visited the mass graves and their markers, which still lie along the fields of northern France and Belgium, and been overwhelmed by what Wilfred Owen starkly and simply called “the pity of War.” (Owen was to die pointlessly as the guns were falling silent: his mother received the telegram as the church bells were ringing to celebrate the armistice — or better in retrospect to say “fragile cease-fire.”)
We read these stirring yet wrenching accounts, of soldiers setting off to battle accompanied by cheers, and shudder because we know what they do not. We know what is coming, in other words. And coming not only to them. What is really coming, stepping jackbooted over the poisoned ruins of civilized Europe, is the pornographic figure of the Nazi. Again, Hochschild is an acute register. He has read the relevant passages of “Mein Kampf,” in which a gassed and wounded Austrian corporal began to incubate the idea of a ghastly revenge. He notes the increasing anti-Semitism of decaying wartime imperial Germany, with its vile rumors of Jewish cowardice and machination. And he approaches a truly arresting realization: Nazism can perhaps be avoided, but only on condition that German militarism is not too heavily defeated on the battlefield.
This highly unsettling reflection is important above all for American readers. If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His memoir, “Hitch-22,” will be published in paperback next month.
A version of this review appeared in print on May 15, 2011, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Mortal Debate.
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To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion
A fresh look at the tragic ironies of World War I.By Randy Dotinga / June 27, 2011
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, By Adam Hochschild, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 480 pp.
It would all be over, the British thought, in a jiffy. In, out, and done. Wars could be slogs, mind you, but many were quick affairs that inevitably led to victory and honor enough to go around.
In fact, sending men into battle might be just what Britain needed to do to avoid going soft in the early years of the 20th century. “The severest war wreaks little practical injury,” declared a newspaper commentator who lacked the benefit of imagination or foresight.
Others feared the worst. There was the woman who’d seen the horror of deprivation and mistreatment during a war in South Africa, and the labor and women’s suffrage activists who watched helplessly as their causes evaporated amid an epidemic of European war fever.
But really, how bad could things get? Awful beyond anyone’s comprehension, shows author Adam Hochschild in To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, his gripping new book, an instant classic of military and social history.
Writers like Barbara Tuchman have expertly told the story of World War I, which we now see as a ridiculous, futile war launched by nations that plowed forward heedlessly into the abyss. But there’s still more to understand, and Hochschild uses his expert storytelling skills to take a fresh look at the fighting on both the front lines and the home front. Everyone comes alive in this tale – soldiers and politicians, peace activists and warmongers, bereaved families and a horrified British nation.
Much of the book focuses on those who fought against the war, either at first or later when its horrors became known. They were voices in the wilderness in the early days of the war, isolated even from their former allies on the left. “It required rare courage to resist,” Hochschild writes. (The volunteer soldiers and sailors, of course, had their own brand of courage.)
Among the elites, the glorious honor of war held sway at the beginning. “The Hun is at the gate!” proclaimed a war-crazed Rudyard Kipling, while a young sailor wrote that God had “matched us with his Hour … and wakened us from sleeping.” Both poets would discover war’s power to steal lives in their prime.
Hochschild, who finds the war to be abhorrent and unnecessary, is well versed in the role of new technology and the stupendous stubbornness of clueless generals. Simple barbed wire, of all things, played a huge role by stifling advances and contributing to the massive carnage. Tanks, machine guns, and poison gas added to the chaos as military leaders tried to focus on what they considered most important: their outdated and useless cavalry forces.
Through memoirs and letters, Hochschild captures the evolution of the war as its horrors slowly dawn on the troops and their families back in Britain, despite the efforts of propagandists and apologists.
At home, war opponents gained numbers over time as the government tried to push naysayers into prison (along with 6,000 conscientious objectors) while not creating martyrs to the cause. “It would be hard to find a more distinguished array of people ever behind bars in a Western country,” Hochschild writes, pointing to imprisoned protesters who became political leaders and even a Nobel Prize winner for literature.
Throughout the book, Hochschild captures intricate details from the love lives of those on all sides to the occasional bizarre irony, like a “top-secret devil’s bargain” that allowed the British to give rubber to the Germans in return for tens of thousands of pairs of binoculars. The deal, which helped both sides cope with shortages, throws Hochschild for a loop: What on earth were they thinking?
The question fills every page of “To End All Wars,” whose title reflects the great irony of the conflict. The only weakness is that the author focuses mainly on Britain and gives short shrift to the experiences of other countries.
Ultimately, the Great War would set the stage for the century to come: a revolution here, a defeated and disgraced country there, and new lines on maps that created boundaries out of thin air.
As Hochschild writes, “the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialized total warfare it inaugurated.”
We’ll never know if a bolder commitment to peace, wisdom, or morality would have saved the world or created an even larger mess. One thing is clear: We’re still paying the price for the folly and failure of a war that began much more than it ended.
Randy Dotinga is a regular contributor to the Monitor’s book section.
Join the Monitor's book discussion on Facebook and Twitter.
Buy this book from:
Others feared the worst. There was the woman who’d seen the horror of deprivation and mistreatment during a war in South Africa, and the labor and women’s suffrage activists who watched helplessly as their causes evaporated amid an epidemic of European war fever.
But really, how bad could things get? Awful beyond anyone’s comprehension, shows author Adam Hochschild in To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, his gripping new book, an instant classic of military and social history.
Writers like Barbara Tuchman have expertly told the story of World War I, which we now see as a ridiculous, futile war launched by nations that plowed forward heedlessly into the abyss. But there’s still more to understand, and Hochschild uses his expert storytelling skills to take a fresh look at the fighting on both the front lines and the home front. Everyone comes alive in this tale – soldiers and politicians, peace activists and warmongers, bereaved families and a horrified British nation.
Much of the book focuses on those who fought against the war, either at first or later when its horrors became known. They were voices in the wilderness in the early days of the war, isolated even from their former allies on the left. “It required rare courage to resist,” Hochschild writes. (The volunteer soldiers and sailors, of course, had their own brand of courage.)
Among the elites, the glorious honor of war held sway at the beginning. “The Hun is at the gate!” proclaimed a war-crazed Rudyard Kipling, while a young sailor wrote that God had “matched us with his Hour … and wakened us from sleeping.” Both poets would discover war’s power to steal lives in their prime.
Hochschild, who finds the war to be abhorrent and unnecessary, is well versed in the role of new technology and the stupendous stubbornness of clueless generals. Simple barbed wire, of all things, played a huge role by stifling advances and contributing to the massive carnage. Tanks, machine guns, and poison gas added to the chaos as military leaders tried to focus on what they considered most important: their outdated and useless cavalry forces.
Through memoirs and letters, Hochschild captures the evolution of the war as its horrors slowly dawn on the troops and their families back in Britain, despite the efforts of propagandists and apologists.
At home, war opponents gained numbers over time as the government tried to push naysayers into prison (along with 6,000 conscientious objectors) while not creating martyrs to the cause. “It would be hard to find a more distinguished array of people ever behind bars in a Western country,” Hochschild writes, pointing to imprisoned protesters who became political leaders and even a Nobel Prize winner for literature.
Throughout the book, Hochschild captures intricate details from the love lives of those on all sides to the occasional bizarre irony, like a “top-secret devil’s bargain” that allowed the British to give rubber to the Germans in return for tens of thousands of pairs of binoculars. The deal, which helped both sides cope with shortages, throws Hochschild for a loop: What on earth were they thinking?
The question fills every page of “To End All Wars,” whose title reflects the great irony of the conflict. The only weakness is that the author focuses mainly on Britain and gives short shrift to the experiences of other countries.
Ultimately, the Great War would set the stage for the century to come: a revolution here, a defeated and disgraced country there, and new lines on maps that created boundaries out of thin air.
As Hochschild writes, “the First World War itself has remained in our lives, below the surface, because we live in a world that was so much formed by it and by the industrialized total warfare it inaugurated.”
We’ll never know if a bolder commitment to peace, wisdom, or morality would have saved the world or created an even larger mess. One thing is clear: We’re still paying the price for the folly and failure of a war that began much more than it ended.
Randy Dotinga is a regular contributor to the Monitor’s book section.
Join the Monitor's book discussion on Facebook and Twitter.
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World War I
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the major war of 1914–1918. For other uses, see World War One (disambiguation) and Great War (disambiguation).
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Long-term causes of the war included the imperialistic foreign policies of the great powers of Europe, including the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, France, and Italy. The assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by a Yugoslav nationalist was the proximate trigger of the war. It resulted in a Habsburg ultimatum against the Kingdom of Serbia.[10][11] Several alliances formed over the previous decades were invoked, so within weeks the major powers were at war; via their colonies, the conflict soon spread around the world.
On 28 July, the conflict opened with the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia,[12][13] followed by the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France; and a Russian attack against Germany. After the German march on Paris was brought to a halt, the Western Front settled into a static battle of attrition with a trench line that changed little until 1917. In the East, the Russian army successfully fought against the Austro-Hungarian forces but was forced back by the German army. Additional fronts opened after the Ottoman Empire joined the war in 1914, Italy and Bulgaria in 1915 and Romania in 1916. The Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, and Russia left the war after the October Revolution later that year. After a 1918 German offensive along the western front, United States forces entered the trenches and the Allies drove back the German armies in a series of successful offensives. Germany, which had its own trouble with revolutionaries at this point, agreed to a cease-fire on 11 November 1918, later known as Armistice Day. The war had ended in victory of the Allies.
By the war's end, four major imperial powers—the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires—had been militarily and politically defeated and ceased to exist. The successor states of the former two lost a great amount of territory, while the latter two were dismantled entirely. The map of central Europe was redrawn into several smaller states.[14] The League of Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The European nationalism spawned by the war and the breakup of empires, the repercussions of Germany's defeat and problems with the Treaty of Versailles are generally agreed to be factors contributing to World War II.[15]
[edit] Etymology
During the Interwar period, the War was known by a variety of names in English-speaking countries. Besides being called the World War and the Great War,[16] which were the most common names, it was also referred to merely as The War, or The War in Europe,[17] the War of Nations,[18] the 1914 War,[19] or some variation on these and other names. Occasionally different names were used interchangeably within a single work, as in a Time article from 1924.[20] After the onset of the Second World War in 1939, the terms World War I or the First World War became standard, with British and Canadian historians favouring the First World War and Americans World War I. The notion that the "World War" was merely the first in a series was not a new idea at the time, however; it was first introduced in September 1914 by German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who claimed that "there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word."[21] The First World War was the title of a 1920 history by the officer and journalist Charles à Court Repington. In France and Belgium, the war was sometimes referred to as La Guerre du Droit (the War for Justice) or La Guerre Pour la Civilisation / de Oorlog tot de Beschaving (the War to Preserve Civilisation), especially on medals and commemorative monuments.[edit] Background
Main article: Causes of World War I
After 1870, European conflict was averted largely through a carefully planned network of treaties between the German Empire and the remainder of Europe orchestrated by Bismarck. He especially worked to hold Russia at Germany's side to avoid a two-front war with France and Russia. When Wilhelm II ascended to the throne as German Emperor (Kaiser), Bismarck's alliances were gradually de-emphasised. For example, the Kaiser refused to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890. Two years later, the Franco-Russian Alliance was signed to counteract the force of the Triple Alliance. In 1904, the United Kingdom sealed an alliance with France, the Entente Cordiale, and in 1907, the United Kingdom and Russia signed the Anglo-Russian Convention. This system of interlocking bilateral agreements formed the Triple Entente.[6]
On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb student and member of Young Bosnia, assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, Bosnia.[28] This began a period of diplomatic manoeuvring among Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, and Britain called the July Crisis. Wanting to finally end Serbian interference in Bosnia, Austria-Hungary delivered the July Ultimatum to Serbia, a series of ten demands intentionally made unacceptable, intending to provoke a war with Serbia.[29] When Serbia agreed to only eight of the ten demands, Austria-Hungary declared war on 28 July 1914. Strachan argues, "Whether an equivocal and early response by Serbia would have made any difference to Austria-Hungary's behaviour must be doubtful. Franz Ferdinand was not the sort of personality who commanded popularity, and his demise did not cast the empire into deepest mourning".[30]
The Russian Empire, unwilling to allow Austria–Hungary to eliminate its influence in the Balkans, and in support of its longtime Serb protégés, ordered a partial mobilisation one day later.[22] When the German Empire began to mobilise on 30 July 1914, France, resentful of the German conquest of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War, ordered French mobilisation on 1 August. Germany declared war on Russia on the same day.[31] The United Kingdom declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, following an "unsatisfactory reply" to the British ultimatum that Belgium must be kept neutral.[32]
[edit] Theatres of Conflict
[edit] Opening hostilities
[edit] Confusion among the Central Powers
The strategy of the Central Powers suffered from miscommunication. Germany had promised to support Austria-Hungary's invasion of Serbia, but interpretations of what this meant differed. Previously-tested deployment plans had been replaced early in 1914, but the replacements had never been tested in exercises. Austro-Hungarian leaders believed Germany would cover its northern flank against Russia.[33] Germany, however, envisioned Austria-Hungary directing most of its troops against Russia, while Germany dealt with France. This confusion forced the Austro-Hungarian Army to divide its forces between the Russian and Serbian fronts.On 9 September 1914, the Septemberprogramm, a possible plan which detailed Germany's specific war aims and the conditions that Germany sought to force on the Allied Powers, was outlined by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. It was never officially adopted.
[edit] African campaigns
Main article: African theatre of World War I
Some of the first clashes of the war involved British, French, and German colonial forces in Africa. On 7 August, French and British troops invaded the German protectorate of Togoland. On 10 August, German forces in South-West Africa attacked South Africa; sporadic and fierce fighting continued for the rest of the war. The German colonial forces in German East Africa, led by Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, fought a guerrilla warfare campaign during World War I and only surrendered two weeks after the armistice took effect in Europe.[34][edit] Serbian campaign
Main article: Serbian Campaign (World War I)
The Serbian army fought the Battle of Cer against the invading Austro-Hungarians, beginning on 12 August, occupying defensive positions on the south side of the Drina and Sava rivers. Over the next two weeks Austrian attacks were thrown back with heavy losses, which marked the first major Allied victory of the war and dashed Austro-Hungarian hopes of a swift victory. As a result, Austria had to keep sizeable forces on the Serbian front, weakening its efforts against Russia.[35][edit] German forces in Belgium and France
Main article: Western Front (World War I)
At the outbreak of the First World War, the German army (consisting in the West of seven field armies) carried out a modified version of the Schlieffen Plan, designed to quickly attack France through neutral Belgium before turning southwards to encircle the French army on the German border.[10] The plan called for the right flank of the German advance to converge on Paris, and initially the Germans were successful, particularly in the Battle of the Frontiers (14–24 August). By 12 September, the French, with assistance from the British forces, halted the German advance east of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne (5–12 September). The last days of this battle signified the end of mobile warfare in the west.[10] The French offensive into Germany, launched on 7 August with the Battle of Mulhouse, had limited success.In the east, only one field army defended East Prussia, and when Russia attacked in this region it diverted German forces intended for the Western Front. Germany defeated Russia in a series of battles collectively known as the First Battle of Tannenberg (17 August – 2 September), but this diversion aggravated problems of insufficient speed of advance from rail-heads not foreseen by the German General Staff. The Central Powers were denied a quick victory and forced to fight a war on two fronts. The German army had fought its way into a good defensive position inside France and had permanently incapacitated 230,000 more French and British troops than it had lost itself. Despite this, communications problems and questionable command decisions cost Germany the chance of early victory.[36]
[edit] Asia and the Pacific
Main article: Asian and Pacific theatre of World War I
New Zealand occupied German Samoa (later Western Samoa) on 30 August. On 11 September, the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force landed on the island of Neu Pommern (later New Britain), which formed part of German New Guinea. Japan seized Germany's Micronesian colonies and, after the Siege of Tsingtao, the German coaling port of Qingdao in the Chinese Shandong peninsula. Within a few months, the Allied forces had seized all the German territories in the Pacific; only isolated commerce raiders and a few holdouts in New Guinea remained.[37][38][edit] Early stages
[edit] Trench warfare begins
Main article: Western Front (World War I)
In time, however, technology began to produce new offensive weapons, such as the tank.[40] Britain and France were its primary users; the Germans employed captured Allied tanks and small numbers of their own design. After the First Battle of the Marne, both Entente and German forces began a series of outflanking manoeuvres, in the so-called "Race to the Sea". Britain and France soon found themselves facing entrenched German forces from Lorraine to Belgium's coast.[10] Britain and France sought to take the offensive, while Germany defended the occupied territories; consequently, German trenches were much better constructed than those of their enemy. Anglo-French trenches were only intended to be "temporary" before their forces broke through German defences.[41] Both sides tried to break the stalemate using scientific and technological advances. On 22 April 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans (violating the Hague Convention) used chlorine gas for the first time on the Western Front. Algerian troops retreated when gassed and a six-kilometre (four-mile) hole opened in the Allied lines that the Germans quickly exploited, taking Kitcheners' Wood. Canadian soldiers closed the breach at the Second Battle of Ypres.[42] At the Third Battle of Ypres, Canadian and ANZAC troops took the village of Passchendaele.
Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next two years, though protracted German action at Verdun throughout 1916,[44] combined with the bloodletting at the Somme, brought the exhausted French army to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts at frontal assault came at a high price for both the British and the French poilu (infantry) and led to widespread mutinies, especially during the Nivelle Offensive.[45]
Ludendorff wrote on the fighting in 1917,
On the battle of the Menin Road Ridge, Ludendorff wrote,The 25th of August concluded the second phase of the Flanders battle. It had cost us heavily ... The costly August battles in Flanders and at Verdun imposed a heavy strain on the Western troops. In spite of all the concrete protection they seemed more or less powerless under the enormous weight of the enemy’s artillery. At some points they no longer displayed the firmness which I, in common with the local commanders, had hoped for. The enemy managed to adapt himself to our method of employing counter attacks ... I myself was being put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings, and had exceeded all expectation.[48]
Around 1.1 to 1.2 million soldiers from the British and Dominion armies were on the Western Front at any one time.[50] A thousand battalions, occupying sectors of the line from the North Sea to the Orne River, operated on a month-long four-stage rotation system, unless an offensive was underway. The front contained over 9,600 kilometres (5,965 mi) of trenches. Each battalion held its sector for about a week before moving back to support lines and then further back to the reserve lines before a week out-of-line, often in the Poperinge or Amiens areas.Another terrific assault was made on our lines on the 20 September ... The enemy’s onslaught on the 20th was successful, which proved the superiority of the attack over the defence. Its strength did not consist in the tanks; we found them inconvenient, but put them out of action all the same. The power of the attack lay in the artillery, and in the fact that ours did not do enough damage to the hostile infantry as they were assembling, and above all, at the actual time of the assault.[49]
In the 1917 Battle of Arras, the only significant British military success was the capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadian Corps under Sir Arthur Currie and Julian Byng. The assaulting troops could, for the first time, overrun, rapidly reinforce and hold the ridge defending the coal-rich Douai plain.[51][52]
[edit] Naval war
Main article: Naval warfare of World War I
At the start of the war, the German Empire had cruisers scattered across the globe, some of which were subsequently used to attack Allied merchant shipping. The British Royal Navy systematically hunted them down, though not without some embarrassment from its inability to protect Allied shipping. For example, the German detached light cruiser SMS Emden, part of the East-Asia squadron stationed at Tsingtao, seized or destroyed 15 merchantmen, as well as sinking a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer. However, most of the German East-Asia squadron—consisting of the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, light cruisers Nürnberg and Leipzig and two transport ships—did not have orders to raid shipping and was instead underway to Germany when it met British warships. The German flotilla and Dresden sank two armoured cruisers at the Battle of Coronel, but was almost destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, with only Dresden and a few auxiliaries escaping, but at the Battle of Más a Tierra these too were destroyed or interned.[53]Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, Britain began a naval blockade of Germany. The strategy proved effective, cutting off vital military and civilian supplies, although this blockade violated accepted international law codified by several international agreements of the past two centuries.[54] Britain mined international waters to prevent any ships from entering entire sections of ocean, causing danger to even neutral ships.[55] Since there was limited response to this tactic, Germany expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare.[56]
The 1916 Battle of Jutland (German: Skagerrakschlacht, or "Battle of the Skagerrak") developed into the largest naval battle of the war, the only full-scale clash of battleships during the war, and one of the largest in history. It took place on 31 May – 1 June 1916, in the North Sea off Jutland. The Kaiserliche Marine's High Seas Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, squared off against the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, led by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. The engagement was a stand off, as the Germans, outmanoeuvred by the larger British fleet, managed to escape and inflicted more damage to the British fleet than they received. Strategically, however, the British asserted their control of the sea, and the bulk of the German surface fleet remained confined to port for the duration of the war.[57]
German U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between North America and Britain.[58] The nature of submarine warfare meant that attacks often came without warning, giving the crews of the merchant ships little hope of survival.[58][59] The United States launched a protest, and Germany changed its rules of engagement. After the notorious sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania in 1915, Germany promised not to target passenger liners, while Britain armed its merchant ships, placing them beyond the protection of the "cruiser rules" which demanded warning and placing crews in "a place of safety" (a standard which lifeboats did not meet).[60] Finally, in early 1917 Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, realising the Americans would eventually enter the war.[58][61] Germany sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the U.S. could transport a large army overseas, but could maintain only five long-range U-boats on station, to limited effect.[58]
World War I also saw the first use of aircraft carriers in combat, with HMS Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a successful raid against the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in July 1918, as well as blimps for antisubmarine patrol.[64]
[edit] Southern theatres
[edit] War in the Balkans
Main articles: Balkans Campaign (World War I), Serbian Campaign (World War I), and Macedonian front (World War I)
Serbia was conquered in a little more than a month. The attack began in October, when the Central Powers launched an offensive from the north; four days later the Bulgarians joined the attack from the east. The Serbian army, fighting on two fronts and facing certain defeat, retreated into Albania, halting only once to make a stand against the Bulgarians. The Serbs suffered defeat near modern day Gnjilane in the Battle of Kosovo. Montenegro covered the Serbian retreat towards the Adriatic coast in the Battle of Mojkovac in 6–7 January 1916, but ultimately the Austrians conquered Montenegro, too. Serbian forces were evacuated by ship to Greece.[67]
In late 1915, a Franco-British force landed at Salonica in Greece, to offer assistance and to pressure the government to declare war against the Central Powers. Unfortunately for the Allies, the pro-German King Constantine I dismissed the pro-Allied government of Eleftherios Venizelos, before the Allied expeditionary force could arrive.[68] The friction between the king of Greece and the Allies continued to accumulate with the National Schism, which effectively divided Greece between regions still loyal to the king and the new provisional government of Venizelos in Salonica. After intensive diplomatic negotiations and an armed confrontation in Athens between Allied and royalist forces (an incident known as Noemvriana) the king of Greece resigned, and his second son Alexander took his place. Venizelos returned to Athens on 29 May 1917 and Greece, now unified, officially joined the war on the side of the Allies. The entire Greek army was mobilized and began to participate in military operations against the Central Powers on the Macedonian front.
The Macedonian Front was mostly static. French and Serbian forces retook limited areas of Macedonia by recapturing Bitola on 19 November 1916 as a result of the costly Monastir Offensive which brought stabilization of the front. Only at the end of the conflict did the Entente powers break through, after most of the German and Austro-Hungarian troops had withdrawn. The Bulgarians suffered their only defeat of the war at the Battle of Dobro Pole but days later, they decisively defeated British and Greek forces at the Battle of Doiran, avoiding occupation. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September 1918.[69] Hindenburg and Ludendorff concluded that the strategic and operational balance had now shifted decidedly against the Central Powers and a day after the Bulgarian collapse, during a meeting with government officials, insisted on an immediate peace settlement.[70]
The disappearance of the Macedonian front meant that the road to Budapest and Vienna was now opened for the 670,000-strong army of general Franchet d'Esperey as the Bulgarian surrender deprived the Central Powers of the 278 infantry battalions and 1,500 guns (the equivalent of some 25 to 30 German divisions) that were previously holding the line.[71] The German high command responded by sending only seven infantry and one cavalry division but these forces were far from enough for a front to be reestablished.[71]
[edit] Ottoman Empire
Main article: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I
The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in the war, the secret Ottoman-German Alliance having been signed in August 1914.[72] It threatened Russia's Caucasian territories and Britain's communications with India via the Suez Canal. The British and French opened overseas fronts with the Gallipoli (1915) and Mesopotamian campaigns. In Gallipoli, the Ottoman Empire successfully repelled the British, French, and Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs). In Mesopotamia, by contrast, after the disastrous Siege of Kut (1915–16), British Imperial forces reorganised and captured Baghdad in March 1917.
The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, broke the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918. In six weeks, during virtually continuous operations, battles were successfully fought by British infantry and Australian, New Zealand, and British Light Horse, Mounted Rifle and Yeomanry mounted brigades. They campaigned across the Jordan River to Amman in the east and northwards to capture Nablus and Tulkarm in the Judean Hills, and followed the Mediterranean coast into the Jezreel Valley (Esdraelon Plain), where Jenin and Nazareth were captured, along with Daraa on the Hejaz railway, Semakh and Tiberias on the Sea of Gallilee, and finally Damascus and Aleppo. The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October, when two and a half Ottoman armies had been defeated and captured.
General Yudenich, the Russian commander from 1915 to 1916, drove the Turks out of most of the southern Caucasus with a string of victories.[74] In 1917, Russian Grand Duke Nicholas assumed command of the Caucasus front. Nicholas planned a railway from Russian Georgia to the conquered territories, so that fresh supplies could be brought up for a new offensive in 1917. However, in March 1917 (February in the pre-revolutionary Russian calendar), the Czar was overthrown in the February Revolution and the Russian Caucasus Army began to fall apart.
Along the border of Italian Libya and British Egypt, the Senussi tribe, incited and armed by the Turks, waged a small-scale guerrilla war against Allied troops. The British were forced to dispatch 12,000 troops to oppose them in the Senussi Campaign. Their rebellion was finally crushed in mid-1916.[76]
[edit] Italian participation
Main article: Italian Campaign (World War I)
Further information: Battles of the Isonzo
Militarily, the Italians had numerical superiority. This advantage, however, was lost, not only because of the difficult terrain in which fighting took place, but also because of the strategies and tactics employed. Field Marshal Luigi Cadorna, a staunch proponent of the frontal assault, had dreams of breaking into the Slovenian plateau, taking Ljubljana and threatening Vienna. Cadorna's plan did not take into account the difficulties of the rugged Alpine terrain, or the technological changes that created trench warfare, giving rise to a series of bloody and inconclusive stalemated offensives.
Beginning in 1915, the Italians under Cadorna mounted eleven offensives on the Isonzo front along the Isonzo River, northeast of Trieste. All eleven offensives were repelled by the Austro-Hungarians, who held the higher ground. In the summer of 1916, the Italians captured the town of Gorizia. After this minor victory, the front remained static for over a year, despite several Italian offensives. In the autumn of 1917, thanks to the improving situation on the Eastern front, the Austro-Hungarian troops received large numbers of reinforcements, including German Stormtroopers and the elite Alpenkorps. The Central Powers launched a crushing offensive on 26 October 1917, spearheaded by the Germans. They achieved a victory at Caporetto. The Italian Army was routed and retreated more than 100 kilometres (62 mi) to reorganise, stabilising the front at the Piave River. Since in the Battle of Caporetto the Italian Army had heavy losses, the Italian Government called to arms the so-called '99 Boys (Ragazzi del '99): that is, all males who were 18 years old. In 1918, the Austro-Hungarians failed to break through, in a series of battles on the Piave River, and were finally decisively defeated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in October of that year. Austria-Hungary surrendered in early November 1918.[78][79]
[edit] Romanian participation
Main article: Romania during World War I
In January 1918, Romanian forces established control over Bessarabia as the Russian Army abandoned the province. Although a treaty was signed by the Romanian and the Bolshevik Russian government following talks from 5–9 March 1918 on the withdrawal of Romanian forces from Bessarabia within two months, on 27 March 1918 Romania attached Bessarabia to its territory, formally based on a resolution passed by the local assembly of the territory on the unification with Romania.
Romania officially made peace with the Central Powers by signing the Treaty of Bucharest on 7 May 1918. Under that treaty, Romania was obliged to end war with the Central Powers and make small territorial concessions to Austria-Hungary, ceding control of some passes in the Carpathian Mountains, and grant oil concessions to Germany. In exchange, the Central Powers recognised the sovereignty of Romania over Bessarabia. The treaty was renounced in October 1918 by the Alexandru Marghiloman government, and Romania nominally re-entered the war on 10 November 1918. The next day, the Treaty of Bucharest was nullified by the terms of the Armistice of Compiègne.[82][83] Total Romanian deaths from 1914 to 1918, military and civilian, within contemporary borders, were estimated at 748,000.[84]
[edit] The role of India
Further information: Third Anglo-Afghan War and Hindu-German Conspiracy
Contrary to British fears of a revolt in India, the outbreak of the war saw an unprecedented outpouring of loyalty and good will towards the United Kingdom.[85][86] Indian political leaders from the Indian National Congress and other groups were eager to support the British war effort since they believed that strong support for the war effort would further the cause of Indian Home Rule. The Indian Army in fact outnumbered the British Army at the beginning of the war; about 1.3 million Indian soldiers and labourers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while both the central government and the princely states sent large supplies of food, money, and ammunition. In all, 140,000 men served on the Western Front and nearly 700,000 in the Middle East. Casualties of Indian soldiers totalled 47,746 killed and 65,126 wounded during World War I.[87] The suffering engendered by the war as well as the failure of the British government to grant self-government to India after the end of hostilities bred disillusionment and fuelled the campaign for full independence that would be led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and others.
[edit] Eastern Front
[edit] Initial actions
Main article: Eastern Front (World War I)
While the Western Front had reached stalemate, the war continued in East Europe. Initial Russian plans called for simultaneous invasions of Austrian Galicia and German East Prussia. Although Russia's initial advance into Galicia was largely successful, it was driven back from East Prussia by Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September 1914.[88][89] Russia's less developed industrial base and ineffective military leadership was instrumental in the events that unfolded. By the spring of 1915, the Russians had retreated into Galicia, and in May the Central Powers achieved a remarkable breakthrough on Poland's southern frontiers.[90] On 5 August they captured Warsaw and forced the Russians to withdraw from Poland.[edit] Russian Revolution
Main article: Russian Revolution (1917)
Further information: North Russia Campaign
Despite the success of the June 1916 Brusilov Offensive in eastern Galicia,[91] dissatisfaction with the Russian government's conduct of the war grew. The offensive's success was undermined by the reluctance of other generals to commit their forces to support the victory. Allied and Russian forces were revived only temporarily by Romania's entry into the war on 27 August. German forces came to the aid of embattled Austro-Hungarian units in Transylvania, and Bucharest fell to the Central Powers on 6 December. Meanwhile, unrest grew in Russia, as the Tsar remained at the front. Empress Alexandra's increasingly incompetent rule drew protests and resulted in the murder of her favourite, Rasputin, at the end of 1916.
In March 1917, demonstrations in Petrograd culminated in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the appointment of a weak Provisional Government which shared power with the Petrograd Soviet socialists. This arrangement led to confusion and chaos both at the front and at home. The army became increasingly ineffective.[90]
With the adoption of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Entente no longer existed. The Allied powers led a small-scale invasion of Russia, partly to stop Germany from exploiting Russian resources and, to a lesser extent, to support the "Whites" (as opposed to the "Reds") in the Russian Civil War.[93] Allied troops landed in Arkhangelsk and in Vladivostok.
[edit] Central Powers proposal for starting peace negotiations
[edit] 1917–1918
[edit] Developments in 1917
Events of 1917 proved decisive in ending the war, although their effects were not fully felt until 1918.The British naval blockade began to have a serious impact on Germany. In response, in February 1917, the German General Staff convinced Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to declare unrestricted submarine warfare, with the goal of starving Britain out of the war. German planners estimated that unrestricted submarine warfare would cost Britain a monthly shipping loss of 600,000 tons. The General Staff acknowledged that the policy would almost certainly bring the United States into the conflict, but calculated that British shipping losses would be so high that they would be forced to sue for peace after 5 to 6 months, before American intervention could make an impact. In reality, tonnage sunk rose above 500,000 tons per month from February to July. It peaked at 860,000 tons in April. After July, the newly re-introduced convoy system became extremely effective in reducing the U-boat threat. Britain was safe from starvation while German industrial output fell, and the United States troops joined the war in large numbers far earlier than Germany had anticipated.
On 3 May 1917, during the Nivelle Offensive, the weary French 2nd Colonial Division, veterans of the Battle of Verdun, refused their orders, arriving drunk and without their weapons. Their officers lacked the means to punish an entire division, and harsh measures were not immediately implemented. Then, mutinies afflicted an additional 54 French divisions and saw 20,000 men desert. The other Allied forces attacked but sustained tremendous casualties.[96] However, appeals to patriotism and duty, as well as mass arrests and trials, encouraged the soldiers to return to defend their trenches, although the French soldiers refused to participate in further offensive action.[97] Robert Nivelle was removed from command by 15 May, replaced by General Philippe Pétain, who suspended bloody large-scale attacks.
In December, the Central Powers signed an armistice with Russia. This released large numbers of German troops for use in the west. With German reinforcements and new American troops pouring in, the outcome was to be decided on the Western Front. The Central Powers knew that they could not win a protracted war, but they held high hopes for success based on a final quick offensive. Furthermore, the leaders of the Central Powers and the Allies became increasingly fearful of social unrest and revolution in Europe. Thus, both sides urgently sought a decisive victory.[98]
[edit] Entry of the United States
Main article: American entry into World War I
[edit] Non-Intervention
At the outbreak of the war the United States pursued a policy of non-intervention, avoiding conflict while trying to broker a peace. When a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans aboard, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson claimed that "America is too proud to fight" but demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships. Germany complied. Wilson unsuccessfully tried to mediate a settlement. However, he also repeatedly warned that the U.S.A. would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare, in violation of international law and U.S. ideas of human rights. Wilson was under pressure from former president Theodore Roosevelt, who denounced German acts as "piracy".[99] Wilson's desire to have a seat at negotiations at war's end to advance the League of Nations also played a role in the eventual decision to join the war.[100] Wilson's Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, whose opinions had been ignored, resigned in 1915, as he could no longer support the president's policy. Public opinion was angered at suspected German sabotage of Black Tom in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Kingsland Explosion.In January 1917, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. The German Foreign Minister, in the Zimmermann Telegram, told Mexico that U.S. entry was likely once unrestricted submarine warfare began, and invited Mexico to join the war as Germany's ally against the United States. In return, the Germans would send Mexico money and help it recover the territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona that Mexico had lost during the Mexican-American War 70 years earlier.[101] Wilson released the Zimmerman note to the public, and Americans saw it as casus belli— a cause for war.
[edit] U.S. declaration of war on Germany
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[edit] First active U.S. participation
The United States Navy sent a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join with the British Grand Fleet, destroyers to Queenstown, Ireland, and submarines to help guard convoys. Several regiments of U.S. Marines were also dispatched to France. The British and French wanted U.S. units used to reinforce their troops already on the battle lines and not waste scarce shipping on bringing over supplies. The U.S. rejected the first proposition and accepted the second. General John J. Pershing, American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) commander, refused to break up U.S. units to be used as reinforcements for British Empire and French units. As an exception, he did allow African-American combat regiments to be used in French divisions. The Harlem Hellfighters fought as part of the French 16th Division, earning a unit Croix de Guerre for their actions at Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Sechault.[105] AEF doctrine called for the use of frontal assaults, which had long since been discarded by British Empire and French commanders because of the large loss of life.[106]
[edit] Austrian offer of separate peace
In 1917, Emperor Charles I of Austria secretly attempted separate peace negotiations with Clemenceau, with his wife's brother Sixtus in Belgium as an intermediary, without the knowledge of Germany. When the negotiations failed, his attempt was revealed to Germany, resulting in a diplomatic catastrophe.[107][108][edit] German Spring Offensive of 1918
Main article: Spring Offensive
German General Erich Ludendorff drew up plans (codenamed Operation Michael) for the 1918 offensive on the Western Front. The Spring Offensive sought to divide the British and French forces with a series of feints and advances. The German leadership hoped to strike a decisive blow before significant U.S. forces arrived. The operation commenced on 21 March 1918 with an attack on British forces near Amiens. German forces achieved an unprecedented advance of 60 kilometres (37 mi).[109]British and French trenches were penetrated using novel infiltration tactics, also named Hutier tactics, after General Oskar von Hutier. Previously, attacks had been characterised by long artillery bombardments and massed assaults. However, in the Spring Offensive of 1918, Ludendorff used artillery only briefly and infiltrated small groups of infantry at weak points. They attacked command and logistics areas and bypassed points of serious resistance. More heavily armed infantry then destroyed these isolated positions. German success relied greatly on the element of surprise.[110]
The front moved to within 120 kilometres (75 mi) of Paris. Three heavy Krupp railway guns fired 183 shells on the capital, causing many Parisians to flee. The initial offensive was so successful that Kaiser Wilhelm II declared 24 March a national holiday. Many Germans thought victory was near. After heavy fighting, however, the offensive was halted. Lacking tanks or motorised artillery, the Germans were unable to consolidate their gains. This situation was not helped by the supply lines now being stretched as a result of their advance.[111] The sudden stop was also a result of the four Australian Imperial Force (AIF) divisions that were "rushed" down, thus doing what no other army had done: stopping the German advance in its tracks. During that time the first Australian division was hurriedly sent north again to stop the second German breakthrough.
Following Operation Michael, Germany launched Operation Georgette against the northern English Channel ports. The Allies halted the drive after limited territorial gains by Germany. The German Army to the south then conducted Operations Blücher and Yorck, pushing broadly towards Paris. Operation Marne was launched on 15 July, attempting to encircle Reims and beginning the Second Battle of the Marne. The resulting counterattack, starting the Hundred Days Offensive, marked the first successful Allied offensive of the war.
By 20 July the Germans were back across the Marne at their Kaiserschlacht starting lines,[113] having achieved nothing. Following this last phase of the war in the West, the German Army never regained the initiative. German casualties between March and April 1918 were 270,000, including many highly trained storm troopers.
Meanwhile, Germany was falling apart at home. Anti-war marches became frequent and morale in the army fell. Industrial output was 53 percent of 1913 levels.
[edit] New states under war zone
Main articles: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Democratic Republic of Armenia, Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and Democratic Republic of Georgia
In the late spring of 1918, three new states were formed in the South Caucasus: the Democratic Republic of Armenia, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Georgia, which declared their independence from the Russian Empire.[114] Two other minor entities were established, the Centrocaspian Dictatorship and South West Caucasian Republic (The former was liquidated by Azerbaijan in the autumn of 1918 and the latter by a joint Armenian-British task force in early 1919). With the withdrawal of the Russian armies from the Caucasus front in the winter of 1917-18, the three major republics braced for an imminent Ottoman advance, which commenced in the early months of 1918. Solidarity was briefly maintained when the Transcaucasian Federative Republic was created in the spring of 1918 but collapsed in May, when the Georgians asked and received protection from Germany and the Azerbaijanis concluded a treaty with the Ottoman Empire that was more akin to a military alliance. Armenia was left to fend for itself and struggled for five months against the threat of a full-fledged occupation by the Ottoman Turks.[115][edit] Allied victory: summer and autumn 1918
Main articles: Hundred Days Offensive and Weimar Republic
The Allied counteroffensive, known as the Hundred Days Offensive, began on 8 August 1918. The Battle of Amiens developed with III Corps British Fourth Army on the left, the French First Army on the right, and the Australian and Canadian Corps spearheading the offensive in the centre through Harbonnières.[116][117] It involved 414 tanks of the Mark IV and Mark V type, and 120,000 men. They advanced 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) into German-held territory in just seven hours. Erich Ludendorff referred to this day as the "Black Day of the German army".[116][118]
Meanwhile General Byng of the British Third Army, reporting that the enemy on his front was thinning in a limited withdrawal, was ordered to attack with 200 tanks towards Bapaume, opening the Battle of Albert, with specific orders "To break the enemy's front, in order to outflank the enemy's present battle front" (opposite the British Fourth Army at Amiens).[49] Allied leaders had now realised that to continue an attack after resistance had hardened was a waste of lives, and it was better to turn a line than to try to roll over it. They began to undertake attacks in quick order to take advantage of successful advances on the flanks, then broke them off when each attack lost its initial impetus.[119]
The British Third Army's 15-mile (24 km) front north of Albert progressed after stalling for a day against the main resistance line to which the enemy had withdrawn.[120] Rawlinson’s British Fourth Army was able to push its left flank forward between Albert and the Somme, straightening the line between the advanced positions of the Third Army and the Amiens front, which resulted in recapturing Albert at the same time.[119] On 26 August the British First Army on the left of the Third Army was drawn into the battle, extending it northward to beyond Arras. The Canadian Corps, already back in the vanguard of the First Army, fought its way from Arras eastward 5 miles (8 km) astride the heavily defended Arras-Cambrai area before reaching the outer defences of the Hindenburg Line, breaching them on the 28 and 29 August. Bapaume fell on 29 August to the New Zealand Division of the Third Army, and the Australians, still leading the advance of the Fourth Army, were again able to push forward at Amiens to take Peronne and Mont Saint-Quentin on 31 August. Further south, the French First and Third Armies had slowly fought forward while the Tenth Army, which had by now crossed the Ailette and was east of the Chemin des Dames, neared the Alberich position of the Hindenburg Line.[121] During the last week of August the pressure along a 70-mile (113 km) front against the enemy was heavy and unrelenting. From German accounts, "Each day was spent in bloody fighting against an ever and again on-storming enemy, and nights passed without sleep in retirements to new lines."[119] Even to the north in Flanders the British Second and Fifth Armies during August and September were able to make progress, taking prisoners and positions that had previously been denied them.[121]
In nearly four weeks of fighting beginning 8 August, over 100,000 German prisoners were taken, 75,000 by the BEF and the rest by the French. As of "The Black Day of the German Army", the German High Command realised the war was lost and made attempts to reach a satisfactory end. The day after that battle Ludenforff told Colonel Mertz: "We cannot win the war any more, but we must not lose it either." On 11 August he offered his resignation to the Kaiser, who refused it, replying, "I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended." On 13 August at Spa, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, the Chancellor, and Foreign Minister Hintz agreed that the war could not be ended militarily, and on the following day the German Crown Council decided that victory in the field was now most improbable. Austria and Hungary warned that they could only continue the war until December, and Ludendorff recommended immediate peace negotiations, to which the Kaiser responded by instructing Hintz to seek the mediation of the Queen of the Netherlands. Prince Rupprecht warned Prince Max of Baden: "Our military situation has deteriorated so rapidly that I no longer believe we can hold out over the winter; it is even possible that a catastrophe will come earlier." On 10 September Hindenburg urged peace moves to Emperor Charles of Austria, and Germany appealed to the Netherlands for mediation. On 14 September Austria sent a note to all belligerents and neutrals suggesting a meeting for peace talks on neutral soil, and on 15 September Germany made a peace offer to Belgium. Both peace offers were rejected, and on 24 September OHL informed the leaders in Berlin that armistice talks were inevitable.[121]
September saw the Germans continuing to fight strong rear-guard actions and launching numerous counterattacks on lost positions, but only a few succeeded, and then only temporarily. Contested towns, villages, heights, and trenches in the screening positions and outposts of the Hindenburg Line continued to fall to the Allies, with the BEF alone taking 30,441 prisoners in the last week of September. Further small advances eastward would follow the Third Army's victory at Ivincourt on 12 September, the Fourth Army's at Epheny on 18 September, and the French gain of Essigny-le-Grand a day later. On 24 September a final assault by both the British and French on a 4-mile (6.4 km) front would come within 2 miles (3.2 km) of St. Quentin.[121] With the outposts and preliminary defensive lines of the Siegfried and Alberich Positions eliminated, the Germans were now completely back in the Hindenburg Line. With the Wotan position of that line already breached and the Siegfried position in danger of being turned from the north, the time had now come for an Allied assault on the whole length of the line.
The Allied attack on the Hindenburg Line, begun on 26 September, included U.S. soldiers. The still-green American troops suffered problems coping with supply trains for large units on a difficult landscape.[124] The following week cooperating French and American units broke through in Champagne at the Battle of Blanc Mont Ridge, forcing the Germans off the commanding heights, and closing towards the Belgian frontier.[125] The last Belgian town to be liberated before the armistice was Ghent, which the Germans held as a pivot until the Allies brought up artillery.[126][127] The German army had to shorten its front and use the Dutch frontier as an anchor to fight rear-guard actions.
Meanwhile, news of Germany's impending military defeat spread throughout the German armed forces. The threat of mutiny was rife. Admiral Reinhard Scheer and Ludendorff decided to launch a last attempt to restore the "valour" of the German Navy. Knowing the government of Prince Maximilian of Baden would veto any such action, Ludendorff decided not to inform him. Nonetheless, word of the impending assault reached sailors at Kiel. Many, refusing to be part of a naval offensive which they believed to be suicidal, rebelled and were arrested. Ludendorff took the blame; the Kaiser dismissed him on 26 October. The collapse of the Balkans meant that Germany was about to lose its main supplies of oil and food. Its reserves had been used up, even as U.S. troops kept arriving at the rate of 10,000 per day.[130]
Having suffered over 6 million casualties, Germany moved towards peace. Prince Maximilian of Baden took charge of a new government as Chancellor of Germany to negotiate with the Allies. Telegraphic negotiations with President Wilson began immediately, in the vain hope that he would offer better terms than the British and French. Instead Wilson demanded the abdication of the Kaiser. There was no resistance when the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann on 9 November declared Germany to be a republic. Imperial Germany was dead; a new Germany had been born: the Weimar Republic.[131]
[edit] Armistices and capitulations
On 24 October, the Italians began a push which rapidly recovered territory lost after the Battle of Caporetto. This culminated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, which marked the end of the Austro-Hungarian Army as an effective fighting force. The offensive also triggered the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the last week of October, declarations of independence were made in Budapest, Prague, and Zagreb. On 29 October, the imperial authorities asked Italy for an armistice. But the Italians continued advancing, reaching Trento, Udine, and Trieste. On 3 November Austria–Hungary sent a flag of truce to ask for an Armistice. The terms, arranged by telegraph with the Allied Authorities in Paris, were communicated to the Austrian commander and accepted. The Armistice with Austria was signed in the Villa Giusti, near Padua, on 3 November. Austria and Hungary signed separate armistices following the overthrow of the Habsburg Monarchy.
Following the outbreak of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, a republic was proclaimed on 9 November. The Kaiser fled to the Netherlands. On 11 November an armistice with Germany was signed in a railroad carriage at Compiègne. At 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918 — "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" — a ceasefire came into effect. Opposing armies on the Western Front began to withdraw from their positions. Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was shot by a German sniper at 10:57 and died at 10:58.[134] American Henry Gunther was killed 60 seconds before the armistice came into force while charging astonished German troops who were aware the Armistice was nearly upon them.[135] The last British soldier to die was Pte George Edwin Ellison. The last casualty of the war was a German, Lieutenant Thomas, who, after 11 a.m., was walking towards the line to inform Americans who had not yet been informed of the Armistice that they would be vacating the buildings behind them.[136]
[edit] Allied superiority and the stab-in-the-back legend, November 1918
In November 1918 the Allies had ample supplies of men and materiel to invade Germany. Yet at the time of the armistice, no Allied force had crossed the German frontier; the Western Front was still almost 900 mi (1,400 km) from Berlin; and the Kaiser's armies had retreated from the battlefield in good order. These factors enabled Hindenburg and other senior German leaders to spread the story that their armies had not really been defeated. This resulted in the stab-in-the-back legend,[137][138] which attributed Germany's defeat not to its inability to continue fighting (even though up to a million soldiers were suffering from the 1918 flu pandemic and unfit to fight), but to the public's failure to respond to its "patriotic calling" and the supposed intentional sabotage of the war effort, particularly by Jews, Socialists, and Bolsheviks.A formal state of war between the two sides persisted for another seven months, until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on 28 June 1919. Later treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire were signed. However, the negotiation of the latter treaty with the Ottoman Empire was followed by strife (the Turkish War of Independence), and a final peace treaty between the Allied Powers and the country that would shortly become the Republic of Turkey was not signed until 24 July 1923, at Lausanne.
Some war memorials date the end of the war as being when the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919, which was when many of the troops serving abroad finally returned to their home countries; by contrast, most commemorations of the war's end concentrate on the armistice of 11 November 1918. Legally, the formal peace treaties were not complete until the last, the Treaty of Lausanne, was signed. Under its terms, the Allied forces divested Constantinople on 23 August 1923.
[edit] Technology
See also: Technology during World War I and Weapons of World War I
Artillery also underwent a revolution. In 1914, cannons were positioned in the front line and fired directly at their targets. By 1917, indirect fire with guns (as well as mortars and even machine guns) was commonplace, using new techniques for spotting and ranging, notably aircraft and the often overlooked field telephone. Counter-battery missions became commonplace, also, and sound detection was used to locate enemy batteries.
Germany was far ahead of the Allies in utilising heavy indirect fire. The German Army employed 150 and 210 mm howitzers in 1914, when typical French and British guns were only 75 and 105 mm. The British had a 6 inch (152 mm) howitzer, but it was so heavy it had to be hauled to the field in pieces and assembled. Germans also fielded Austrian 305 mm and 420 mm guns, and already by the beginning of the war had inventories of various calibers of Minenwerfer ideally suited for trench warfare.[141]
Much of the combat involved trench warfare, in which hundreds often died for each yard gained. Many of the deadliest battles in history occurred during the First World War. Such battles include Ypres, the Marne, Cambrai, the Somme, Verdun, and Gallipoli. The Germans employed the Haber process of nitrogen fixation to provide their forces with a constant supply of gunpowder, despite the British naval blockade.[142] Artillery was responsible for the largest number of casualties[143] and consumed vast quantities of explosives. The large number of head wounds caused by exploding shells and fragmentation forced the combatant nations to develop the modern steel helmet, led by the French, who introduced the Adrian helmet in 1915. It was quickly followed by the Brodie helmet, worn by British Imperial and U.S. troops, and in 1916 by the distinctive German Stahlhelm, a design, with improvements, still in use today.
| "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!... Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime... Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."- Wilfred Owen, DULCE ET DECORUM EST, 1917[144] |
The most powerful land-based weapons were railway guns weighing hundreds of tons apiece. These were nicknamed Big Berthas, even though the namesake was not a railway gun. Germany developed the Paris Gun, able to bombard Paris from over 100 kilometres (62 mi), though shells were relatively light at 94 kilograms (210 lb). While the Allies also had railway guns, German models severely out-ranged and out-classed them.
[edit] Aviation
- Main article: Aviation in World War I
[edit] Improvements in naval technology during World War I
Germany deployed U-boats (submarines) after the war began. Alternating between restricted and unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, the Kaiserliche Marine employed them to deprive the British Isles of vital supplies. The deaths of British merchant sailors and the seeming invulnerability of U-boats led to the development of depth charges (1916), hydrophones (passive sonar, 1917), blimps, hunter-killer submarines (HMS R-1, 1917), forward-throwing anti-submarine weapons, and dipping hydrophones (the latter two both abandoned in 1918).[153] To extend their operations, the Germans proposed supply submarines (1916). Most of these would be forgotten in the interwar period until World War II revived the need.[edit] Improvements in ground warfare technology in World War I
[edit] Flamethrowers and subterranean transport
Another new weapon, the flamethrower, was first used by the German army and later adopted by other forces. Although not of high tactical value, the flamethrower was a powerful, demoralising weapon that caused terror on the battlefield. It was a dangerous weapon to wield, as its heavy weight made operators vulnerable targets.Trench railways evolved to supply the enormous quantities of food, water, and ammunition required to support large numbers of soldiers in areas where conventional transportation systems had been destroyed. Internal combustion engines and improved traction systems for automobiles and trucks/lorries eventually rendered trench railways obsolete.
[edit] War crimes
[edit] Genocide and ethnic cleansing
[edit] Ottoman Empire
Main article: Ottoman casualties of World War I
[edit] Russian Empire
Main article: Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire
Approximately 200,000 Germans living in Volhynia and about 600,000 Jews were deported by the Russian authorities.[159][160][161] In 1916, an order was issued to deport around 650,000 Volga Germans to the east as well, but the Russian Revolution prevented this from being carried out.[162] Many pogroms accompanied the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War, 60,000–200,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire.[163][164][edit] "Rape of Belgium"
Main article: Rape of Belgium
In Belgium, German troops, in fear of French and Belgian guerrilla fighters, or francs-tireurs, massacred townspeople in Andenne (211 dead), Tamines (384 dead), and Dinant (612 dead). On 25 August 1914, the Germans set fire to the town of Leuven, burned the library containing about 230,000 books, killed 209 civilians, and forced 42,000 to evacuate. These actions brought worldwide condemnation.[165][edit] Soldiers' experiences
Main articles: List of surviving veterans of World War I, World War I casualties, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and American Battle Monuments Commission
[edit] Prisoners of war
Germany held 2.5 million prisoners; Russia held 2.9 million; while Britain and France held about 720,000. Most were captured just prior to the Armistice. The U.S. held 48,000. The most dangerous moment was the act of surrender, when helpless soldiers were sometimes gunned down.[169][170] Once prisoners reached a camp, conditions were, in general, satisfactory (and much better than in World War II), thanks in part to the efforts of the International Red Cross and inspections by neutral nations. However, conditions were terrible in Russia: starvation was common for prisoners and civilians alike; about 15–20% of the prisoners in Russia died. In Germany, food was scarce, but only 5% died.[171][172][173]
In Russia, when the prisoners from the Czech Legion of the Austro-Hungarian army were released in 1917, they re-armed themselves and briefly became a military and diplomatic force during the Russian Civil War.
While the Allied prisoners of the Central Powers were quickly sent home at the end of active hostilities, the same treatment was not granted to Central Power prisoners of the Allies and Russia, many of whom served as forced labor, e.g., in France until 1920. They were released only after many approaches by the Red Cross to the Allied Supreme Council.[177] German prisoners were still being held in Russia as late as 1924.[178]
[edit] Military attachés and war correspondents
Military and civilian observers from every major power closely followed the course of the war. Many were able to report on events from a perspective somewhat akin to modern "embedded" positions within the opposing land and naval forces. These military attachés and other observers prepared voluminous first-hand accounts of the war and analytical papers.For example, former U.S. Army Captain Granville Fortescue followed the developments of the Gallipoli Campaign from an embedded perspective within the ranks of the Turkish defenders; and his report was passed through Turkish censors before being printed in London and New York.[179] However, this observer's role was abandoned when the U.S. entered the war, as Fortescue immediately re-enlisted, sustaining wounds at Forest of Argonne in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, September 1918.[180]
In-depth observer narratives of the war and more narrowly focused professional journal articles were written soon after the war; and these post-war reports conclusively illustrated the battlefield destructiveness of this conflict. This was not the first time the tactics of entrenched positions for infantry defended with machine guns and artillery became vitally important. The Russo-Japanese War had been closely observed by military attachés, war correspondents and other observers; but, from a 21st century perspective, it is now apparent that a range of tactical lessons were disregarded or not used in the preparations for war in Europe and throughout the Great War.[181]
[edit] Support and opposition to the war
Main articles: Opposition to World War I and French Army Mutinies (1917)
[edit] Support
In the Middle East, Arab nationalism soared in Ottoman territories in response to the rise of Turkish nationalism during the war, with Arab nationalist leaders advocating the creation of a pan-Arab state.[183] In 1916, the Arab Revolt began in Ottoman-controlled territories of the Middle East in an effort to achieve independence.[183]
Italian nationalism was stirred by the outbreak of the war and was initially strongly supported by a variety of political factions. One of the most prominent and popular Italian nationalist supporters of the war was Gabriele d'Annunzio, who promoted Italian irredentism and helped sway the Italian public to support intervention in the war.[184] The Italian Liberal Party under the leadership of Paolo Boselli promoted intervention in the war on the side of the Allies and utilised the Dante Aligheri Society to promote Italian nationalism.[185]
A number of socialist parties initially supported the war when it began in August 1914.[186] But European socialists split on national lines, with the concept of class conflict held by radical socialists such as Marxists and syndicalists being overborne by their patriotic support for war.[187] Once the war began, Austrian, British, French, German, and Russian socialists followed the rising nationalist current by supporting their countries' intervention in the war.[188]
Italian socialists were divided on whether to support the war or oppose it; some were militant supporters of the war, including Benito Mussolini and Leonida Bissolati.[189] However, the Italian Socialist Party decided to oppose the war after anti-militarist protestors were killed, resulting in a general strike called Red Week.[190] The Italian Socialist Party purged itself of pro-war nationalist members, including Mussolini.[190] Mussolini, a syndicalist who supported the war on grounds of irredentist claims on Italian-populated regions of Austria-Hungary, formed the pro-interventionist Il Popolo d'Italia and the Fasci Riviluzionario d'Azione Internazionalista ("Revolutionary Fasci for International Action") in October 1914 that later developed into the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919, the origin of fascism.[191] Mussolini's nationalism enabled him to raise funds from Ansaldo (an armaments firm) and other companies to create Il Popolo d'Italia to convince socialists and revolutionaries to support the war.[192]
In April 1918 the Rome Congress of Oppressed Nationalities met, including Czechoslovak, Italian, Polish, Transylvanian, and Yugoslav representatives who urged the Allies to support national self-determination for the peoples residing within Austria-Hungary.[186]
[edit] Opposition
Pope Benedict XV, elected to the papacy less than three months into World War I, made the war and its consequences the main focus of his early pontificate. In stark contrast to his predecesor, five days after his election he spoke of his determination to do what he could to bring peace. His first encyclical, Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, given 1 November, 1914, was concerned with this subject. Seen as being biased in favour of the other and resented for weakening national morale, Benedict XV found his abilities and unique position as a religious emissary of peace ignored by the belligerent powers.
The 1915 Treaty of London between Italy and the Triple Entente included secret provisions whereby the Allies agreed with Italy to ignore papal peace moves towards the Central Powers. Consequently, the publication of Benedict's proposed seven-point Peace Note of August 1917 was roundly ignored by all parties except Austria-Hungary.[193]
In Britain, in 1914, the Public Schools Officers' Training Corps annual camp was held at Tidworth Pennings, near Salisbury Plain. Head of the British Army Lord Kitchener was to review the cadets, but the imminence of the war prevented him. General Horace Smith-Dorrien was sent instead. He surprised the two-or-three thousand cadets by declaring (in the words of Donald Christopher Smith, a Bermudian cadet who was present), that war should be avoided at almost any cost, that war would solve nothing, that the whole of Europe and more besides would be reduced to ruin, and that the loss of life would be so large that whole populations would be decimated. In our ignorance I, and many of us, felt almost ashamed of a British General who uttered such depressing and unpatriotic sentiments, but during the next four years, those of us who survived the holocaust-probably not more than one-quarter of us - learned how right the General's prognosis was and how courageous he had been to utter it. [194] Voicing these sentiments did not hinder Smith-Dorien's career, or prevent him from doing his duty in World War I to the best of his abilities.
E. D. Morel had been extremely suspicious of the secret diplomacy pursued by the British Foreign Office, and in 1911 he showed how a secret understanding between Britain and France over the control of Morocco, followed by a campaign in the British press based on misleading Foreign Office briefings, had stitched up Germany and very nearly caused a European war. In February 1912, he warned that "no greater disaster could befall both peoples [Britain and Germany], and all that is most worthy of preservation in modern civilization, than a war between them". Convinced that Britain had struck a second secret agreement with France that would drag the nation into any war which involved Russia, he campaigned for such treaties to be made public; for recognition that Germany had been hoodwinked over Morocco; and for the British government to seek to broker a reconciliation between France and Germany. In response, British ministers lied. The prime minister and the foreign secretary repeatedly denied that there was any secret agreement with France. Only on the day war was declared did the foreign secretary admit that a treaty had been in place since 1906. It ensured that Britain would have to fight from the moment Russia mobilised. Morel continued to oppose the war, was reviled in the press and physically attacked seven times for it, and eventually was imprisoned in 1917.[195][196]
At the end of July, 1914, when it became clear to the British government that the country was on the verge of war with Germany, four senior members of the government, David Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Sir Charles Trevelyan (Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Education), John Burns (President of the Local Government Board), and John Morley (Secretary of State for India), were opposed to the country becoming involved in a European war. They informed the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, that they intended to resign over the issue. When war was declared on 4 August, three of the men, Trevelyan, Burns, and Morley, resigned, but Asquith managed to persuade Lloyd George, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, to change his mind. The day after war was declared, Trevelyan began contacting friends about a new political organisation he intended to form to oppose the war. This included two pacifist members of the Liberal Party, Norman Angell and E. D. Morel, and Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour Party. A meeting was held, and after considering names such as the Peoples' Emancipation Committee and the Peoples' Freedom League, they selected the Union of Democratic Control. The four men agreed that one of the main reasons for the conflict was the secret diplomacy of people like Britain's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. The founders of the Union of Democratic Control produced a manifesto and invited people to support it. Over the next few weeks several leading figures joined the organisation. This included J. A. Hobson, Charles Buxton, Ottoline Morrell, Philip Morrell, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, Arnold Rowntree, Morgan Philips Price, George Cadbury, Helena Swanwick, Fred Jowett, Tom Johnston, Bertrand Russell, Philip Snowden, Ethel Snowden, David Kirkwood, William Anderson, Mary Sheepshanks, Isabella Ford, H. H. Brailsford, Israel Zangwill, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Konni Zilliacus, Margaret Sackville and Olive Schreiner. [197]
Ramsay MacDonald came under attack from newspapers because of his opposition to the First World War. On 1 October 1914, The Times published a leading article entitled "Helping the Enemy", in which it wrote that "no paid agent of Germany had served her better" than MacDonald had done. The newspaper also included an article by Ignatius Valentine Chirol, who argued: "We may be rightly proud of the tolerance we display towards even the most extreme licence of speech in ordinary times....Mr. MacDonald's case is a very different one. In time of actual war...Mr. MacDonald has sought to besmirch the reputation of his country by openly charging with disgraceful duplicity the Ministers who are its chosen representatives, and he has helped the enemy State....Such action oversteps the bounds of even the most excessive toleration, and cannot be properly or safely disregarded by the British Government or the British people."
Many countries jailed those who spoke out against the conflict. These included Eugene Debs in the United States and Bertrand Russell in Britain. In the U.S., the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 made it a federal crime to oppose military recruitment or make any statements deemed "disloyal". Publications at all critical of the government were removed from circulation by postal censors,[100] and many served long prison sentences for statements of fact deemed unpatriotic.
A number of nationalists opposed intervention, particularly within states that the nationalists were hostile to. Irish nationalists staunchly opposed taking part in the intervention of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.[198] The war began amid the Home Rule crisis in Ireland that had begun in 1912, and by 1914 there was a serious possibility of an outbreak of civil war in Ireland between Irish unionists and republicans.[198] Irish nationalists and Marxists attempted to pursue Irish independence, culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916, with Germany sending 20,000 rifles to Ireland in order to stir unrest in the United Kingdom.[198] The UK government placed Ireland under martial law in response to the Easter Rising.[199]
Other opposition came from conscientious objectors – some socialist, some religious – who refused to fight. In Britain 16,000 people asked for conscientious objector status.[200] Many suffered years of prison, including solitary confinement and bread and water diets. Even after the war, in Britain many job advertisements were marked "No conscientious objectors need apply".
The Central Asian Revolt started in the summer of 1916, when the Russian Empire government ended its exemption of Muslims from military service.[201]
In 1917, a series of mutinies in the French army led to dozens of soldiers being executed and many more imprisoned.
In Milan in May 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries organised and engaged in rioting calling for an end to the war, and managed to close down factories and stop public transportation.[202] The Italian army was forced to enter Milan with tanks and machine guns to face Bolsheviks and anarchists, who fought violently until May 23 when the army gained control of the city. Almost fifty people (including three Italian soldiers) were killed and over 800 people arrested.[202]
In 1917, Emperor Charles I of Austria secretly entered into peace negotiations with the Allied powers, with his brother-in-law Sixtus as intermediary, without the knowledge of his ally Germany. He failed, however, because of the resistance of Italy.[205]
In September 1917, Russian soldiers in France began questioning why they were fighting for the French at all and mutinied.[206] In Russia, opposition to the war led to soldiers also establishing their own revolutionary committees, which helped foment the October Revolution of 1917, with the call going up for "bread, land, and peace". The Bolsheviks agreed to a peace treaty with Germany, the peace of Brest-Litovsk, despite its harsh conditions.
In northern Germany, the end of October 1918, saw the beginning of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Units of the German Navy refused to set sail for a last, large-scale operation in a war which they saw as good as lost; this initiated the uprising. The sailors' revolt which then ensued in the naval ports of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel spread across the whole country within days and led to the proclamation of a republic on 9 November 1918 and shortly thereafter to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
[edit] Conscription
As the war slowly turned into a war of attrition, conscription was implemented in some countries. This issue was particularly explosive in Canada and Australia. In the former it opened a political gap between French-Canadians, who claimed their true loyalty was to Canada and not the British Empire, and members of the Anglophone majority, who saw the war as a duty to both Britain and Canada. Prime Minister Robert Borden pushed through a Military Service Act, provoking the Conscription Crisis of 1917. In Australia, a sustained pro-conscription campaign by Prime Minister Billy Hughes caused a split in the Australian Labor Party, so Hughes formed the Nationalist Party of Australia in 1917 to pursue the matter. Nevertheless, the labour movement, the Catholic Church, and Irish nationalist expatriates successfully opposed Hughes' push, which was rejected in two plebiscites.Conscription put into uniform nearly every physically fit man in Britain, six of ten million eligible. Of these, about 750,000 lost their lives and 1,700,000 were wounded. Most deaths were to young unmarried men; however, 160,000 wives lost husbands and 300,000 children lost fathers.[207]
[edit] Aftermath
Main article: Aftermath of World War I
[edit] Health and economic effects
The war had profound economic consequences. Of the 60 million European soldiers who were mobilised from 1914 to 1918, 8 million were killed, 7 million were permanently disabled, and 15 million were seriously injured. Germany lost 15.1% of its active male population, Austria–Hungary lost 17.1%, and France lost 10.5%.[210] About 750,000 German civilians died from starvation caused by the British blockade during the war.[211] By the end of the war, famine had killed approximately 100,000 people in Lebanon.[212] The best estimates of the death toll from the Russian famine of 1921 run from 5 million to 10 million people.[213] By 1922, there were between 4.5 million and 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the subsequent famine of 1920–1922.[214] Numerous anti-Soviet Russians fled the country after the Revolution; by the 1930s the northern Chinese city of Harbin had 100,000 Russians.[215] Thousands more emigrated to France, England, and the United States.
Diseases flourished in the chaotic wartime conditions. In 1914 alone, louse-borne epidemic typhus killed 200,000 in Serbia.[216] From 1918 to 1922, Russia had about 25 million infections and 3 million deaths from epidemic typhus.[217] Whereas before World War I Russia had about 3.5 million cases of malaria, its people suffered more than 13 million cases in 1923.[218] In addition, a major influenza epidemic spread around the world. Overall, the 1918 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people.[219][220]
Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann and fear that American Jews would encourage the USA to support Germany culminated in the British government's Balfour Declaration of 1917, endorsing creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.[221] A total of more than 1,172,000 Jewish soldiers served in the Allied and Central Power forces in World War I, including 275,000 in Austria-Hungary and 450,000 in Czarist Russia.[222]
In the aftermath of World War I, Greece fought against Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal, a war which resulted in a massive population exchange between the two countries under the Treaty of Lausanne.[225] According to various sources,[226] several hundred thousand Pontic Greeks died during this period.[227]
[edit] Peace treaties and national boundaries
After the war, the Paris Peace Conference imposed a series of peace treaties on the Central Powers. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war. Building on Wilson's 14th point, the Treaty of Versailles also brought into being the League of Nations on 28 June 1919.[228][229]In signing the treaty, Germany acknowledged responsibility for the war, and agreed to pay enormous war reparations and award territory to the victors. The "Guilt Thesis" became a controversial explanation of later events among analysts in Britain and the United States. The Treaty of Versailles caused enormous bitterness in Germany, which nationalist movements, especially the Nazis, exploited with a conspiracy theory they called the Dolchstosslegende (Stab-in-the-back legend). The Weimar Republic lost the former colonial possessions and was saddled with accepting blame for the war, as well as paying punitive reparations for it. Unable to pay them with exports (as a result of territorial losses and postwar recession),[230] Germany did so by borrowing from the United States. Runaway inflation in the 1920s contributed to the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the payment of reparations was suspended in 1931 following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression worldwide.
The Russian Empire, which had withdrawn from the war in 1917 after the October Revolution, lost much of its western frontier as the newly independent nations of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were carved from it. Bessarabia was re-attached to Greater Romania, as it had been a Romanian territory for more than a thousand years.[231]
The Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and much of its non-Anatolian territory was awarded to various Allied powers as protectorates. The Turkish core was reorganised as the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was to be partitioned by the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920. This treaty was never ratified by the Sultan and was rejected by the Turkish republican movement, leading to the Turkish Independence War and, ultimately, to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
[edit] Legacy
| ..."Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn.""None," said the other, "Save the undone years"... |
| — Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting, 1918[144] |
Main articles: World War I in popular culture and War memorial
The first tentative efforts to comprehend the meaning and consequences of modern warfare began during the initial phases of the war, and this process continued throughout and after the end of hostilities.[edit] Memorials
Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, is a United States memorial dedicated to all Americans who served in World War I. The site for the Liberty Memorial was dedicated on November 1, 1921. On this day, the supreme Allied commanders spoke to a crowd of more than 100,000 people. It was the only time in history these leaders were together in one place. In attendance were Lieutenant General Baron Jacques of Belgium; General Armando Diaz of Italy; Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France; General Pershing of the United States; and Admiral D. R. Beatty of Great Britain. After three years of construction, the Liberty Memorial was completed and President Calvin Coolidge delivered the dedication speech to a crowd of 150,000 people in 1926.
Liberty Memorial is also home to The National World War I Museum, the only museum dedicated solely to World War I in the United States.
[edit] Cultural memory
The First World War had a lasting impact on social memory. It was seen by many in Britain as signalling the end of an era of stability stretching back to the Victorian period, and across Europe many regarded it as a watershed.[234] Historian Samuel Hynes explained:A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.[235]
These beliefs did not become widely shared because they offered the only accurate interpretation of wartime events. In every respect, the war was much more complicated than they suggest. In recent years, historians have argued persuasively against almost every popular cliché of the First World War. It has been pointed out that, although the losses were devastating, their greatest impact was socially and geographically limited. The many emotions other than horror experienced by soldiers in and out of the front line, including comradeship, boredom, and even enjoyment, have been recognised. The war is not now seen as a 'fight about nothing', but as a war of ideals, a struggle between aggressive militarism and more or less liberal democracy. It has been acknowledged that British generals were often capable men facing difficult challenges, and that it was under their command that the British army played a major part in the defeat of the Germans in 1918: a great forgotten victory.[236]Though these historians have discounted as "myths"[235][237] these perceptions of the war, they are nevertheless prevalent across much of society.[citation needed] They have dynamically changed according to contemporary influences, reflecting in the 1950s perceptions of the war as 'aimless' following the contrasting Second World War, and emphasising conflict within the ranks during times of class conflict in the 1960s.[236] The majority of additions to the contrary are often rejected.[236]
[edit] Social trauma
The social trauma caused by unprecedented rates of casualties manifested itself in different ways, which have been the subject of subsequent historical debate.[238] Some people[who?] were revolted by nationalism and its results, and began to work towards a more internationalist world, supporting organisations such as the League of Nations. Pacifism became increasingly popular. Others had the opposite reaction, feeling that only strength and military might could be relied upon in a chaotic and inhumane world. Anti-modernist views were an outgrowth of the many changes taking place in society.
[edit] Discontent in Germany
The rise of Nazism and fascism included a revival of the nationalist spirit and a rejection of many post-war changes. Similarly, the popularity of the Stab-in-the-back legend (German: Dolchstoßlegende) was a testament to the psychological state of defeated Germany and was a rejection of responsibility for the conflict. This conspiracy theory of betrayal became common, and the German populace came to see themselves as victims. The Dolchstoßlegende's popular acceptance in Germany played a significant role in the rise of Nazism. A sense of disillusionment and cynicism became pronounced, with nihilism growing. Many believed the war heralded the end of the world as they had known it because of the high fatalities among a generation of men, the dissolution of governments and empires, and the collapse of capitalism and imperialism.Communist and socialist movements around the world drew strength from this theory and enjoyed a new level of popularity. These feelings were most pronounced in areas directly or harshly affected by the war. Out of German discontent with the still controversial Treaty of Versailles, Adolf Hitler was able to gain popularity and power.[242][243] World War II was in part a continuation of the power struggle never fully resolved by the First World War; in fact, it was common for Germans in the 1930s and 1940s to justify acts of international aggression because of perceived injustices imposed by the victors of the First World War.[244][245][246]
The establishment of the modern state of Israel and the roots of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict are partially found in the unstable power dynamics of the Middle East which resulted from World War I.[247] Prior to the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire had maintained a modest level of peace and stability throughout the Middle East.[248] With the fall of the Ottoman government, power vacuums developed and conflicting claims to land and nationhood began to emerge.[249] The political boundaries drawn by the victors of the First World War were quickly imposed, sometimes after only cursory consultation with the local population. In many cases, these continue to be problematic in the 21st-century struggles for national identity.[250][251] While the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I was pivotal in contributing to the modern political situation of the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict,[252][253][254] the end of Ottoman rule also spawned lesser known disputes over water and other natural resources.[255]
Further information: Sykes–Picot Agreement
[edit] Views in the United States
U.S. intervention in the war, as well as the Wilson administration itself, became deeply unpopular. This was reflected in the U.S. Senate's rejection of the Versailles Treaty and membership in the League of Nations. In the interwar era, a consensus arose that U.S. intervention had been a mistake, and the Congress passed laws in an attempt to preserve U.S. neutrality in any future conflict. Polls taken in 1937 and the opening months of World War II established that nearly 60% regarded intervention in WWI as a mistake, with only 28% opposing that view. But, in the period between the fall of France and the attack on Pearl Harbor, public opinion changed dramatically and, for the first time, a narrow plurality rejected the idea that the war had been a mistake.[256][edit] New national identities
Poland reemerged as an independent country, after more than a century. As a "minor Entente nation" and the country with the most casualties per capita,[257][258][259] the Kingdom of Serbia and its dynasty became the backbone of the new multinational state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia). Czechoslovakia, combining the Kingdom of Bohemia with parts of the Kingdom of Hungary, became a new nation. Russia became the Soviet Union and lost Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which became independent countries. The Ottoman Empire was soon replaced by Turkey and several other countries in the Middle East.
After the Battle of Vimy Ridge, where the Canadian divisions fought together for the first time as a single corps, Canadians began to refer to theirs as a nation "forged from fire".[262] Having succeeded on the same battleground where the "mother countries" had previously faltered, they were for the first time respected internationally for their own accomplishments. Canada entered the war as a Dominion of the British Empire and remained so, although she emerged with a greater measure of independence.[263][264] While the other Dominions were represented by Britain, Canada was an independent negotiator and signatory of the Versailles Treaty.
[edit] Economic effects
One of the most dramatic effects of the war was the expansion of governmental powers and responsibilities in Britain, France, the United States, and the Dominions of the British Empire. In order to harness all the power of their societies, governments created new ministries and powers. New taxes were levied and laws enacted, all designed to bolster the war effort; many have lasted to this day. Similarly, the war strained the abilities of some formerly large and bureaucratised governments, such as in Austria–Hungary and Germany; however, any analysis of the long-term effects were clouded by the defeat of these governments.
Macro- and micro-economic consequences devolved from the war. Families were altered by the departure of many men. With the death or absence of the primary wage earner, women were forced into the workforce in unprecedented numbers. At the same time, industry needed to replace the lost labourers sent to war. This aided the struggle for voting rights for women.[269]
In Britain, rationing was finally imposed in early 1918, limited to meat, sugar, and fats (butter and oleo), but not bread. The new system worked smoothly. From 1914 to 1918 trade union membership doubled, from a little over four million to a little over eight million. Work stoppages and strikes became frequent in 1917–1918 as the unions expressed grievances regarding prices, alcohol control, pay disputes, fatigue from overtime and working on Sundays, and inadequate housing.
Britain turned to her colonies for help in obtaining essential war materials whose supply had become difficult from traditional sources. Geologists such as Albert Ernest Kitson were called upon to find new resources of precious minerals in the African colonies. Kitson discovered important new deposits of manganese, used in munitions production, in the Gold Coast.[270]
Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles (the so-called "war guilt" clause) declared Germany and its allies responsible for all "loss and damage" suffered by the Allies during the war and provided the basis for reparations. The total reparations demanded was 132 billion gold marks, which was far more than the total German gold or foreign exchange. The economic problems that the payments brought, and German resentment at their imposition, are usually cited as one of the more significant factors that led to the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, payment of the reparations was not resumed. There was, however, outstanding German debt that the Weimar Republic had used to pay the reparations. Germany finished paying off the reparations in October 2010.[271]
[edit] Notes
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[edit] References
For a comprehensive bibliography see List of books about World War I- American Armies and Battlefields in Europe: A History, Guide, and Reference Book, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938, OCLC 59803706
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[edit] See also
- European Civil War
- List of last surviving World War I veterans by country
- List of people associated with World War I
- List of surviving veterans of World War I
- List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll
- Lists of wars
- Lists of World War I topics
- World War I casualties
- World War One – Medal Abbreviations
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