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World War I


Dictionary: World War I
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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Dictionary
n. (Abbr. WWI)
A war fought from 1914 to 1918, in which Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy, Japan, the United States, and other allies defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria.



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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: World War I
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(1914 – 18) International conflict between the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey — and the Allied Powers — mainly France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and (from 1917) the U.S. After a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914, a chain of threats and mobilizations resulted in a general war between the antagonists by mid-August. Prepared to fight a war on two fronts, based on the Schlieffen Plan, Germany first swept through neutral Belgium and invaded France. After the First Battle of the Marne (1914), the Allied defensive lines were stabilized in France, and a war of attrition began. Fought from lines of trenches and supported by modern artillery and machine guns, infantry assaults gained little ground and were enormously costly in human life, especially at the Battles of Verdun and the Somme (1916). On the Eastern Front, Russian forces initially drove deep into East Prussia and German Poland (1914) but were stopped by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg and forced back into Russia (1915). After several offensives, the Russian army failed to break through the German defensive lines. Russia's poor performance and enormous losses caused widespread domestic discontent that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Other fronts in the war included the Dardanelles Campaign, in which British and Dominion forces were unsuccessful against Turkey; the Caucasus and Iran (Persia), where Russia fought Turkey; Mesopotamia and Egypt, where British forces fought the Turks; and northern Italy, where Italian and Austrian troops fought the costly Battles of the Isonzo. At sea, the German and British fleets fought the inconclusive Battle of Jutland, and Germany's use of the submarine against neutral shipping eventually brought the U.S. into the war in 1917. Though Russia's armistice with Germany in December 1917 released German troops to fight on the Western Front, the Allies were reinforced by U.S. troops in early 1918. Germany's unsuccessful offensive in the Second Battle of the Marne was countered by the Allies' steady advance, which recovered most of France and Belgium by October 1918 and led to the November Armistice. Total casualties were estimated at 10 million dead, 21 million wounded, and 7.7 million missing or imprisoned. See also Battles of Caporetto and Ypres; Fourteen Points; Lusitania; Paris Peace Conference; Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, Neuilly, Saint-Germain, Sèvres, Trianon, and Versailles; Edmund H.H. Allenby, Ferdinand Foch, John French, Douglas Haig, Paul von Hindenburg, Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, Erich Ludendorff, John Pershing.
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Military History Companion: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > Military History CompanionWorld War I (1914-18). Now usually abbreviated ‘WW I’, to the British it was until recently always ‘the Great War’. It was the first major conflict between European coalitions since 1815. Individual powers were not defeated in seemingly decisive battles because each had allies to take up the fight. Ranged against the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany, joined in November 1914 by Turkey and in September 1915 by Bulgaria) were those of the Entente. Originally consisting of Russia, France, and Britain, they were reinforced by Japan in August 1914, Italy in May 1915, Portugal in March 1916, Romania in August 1916, and Greece in June 1917. When the USA entered the war in April 1917, the nations of South America followed suit, as did China. Much of the rest of the world were colonies of the belligerents, thus it was indeed a global war.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 in a bid to reassert its authority as a Balkan power. Its determination was buoyed by the knowledge that it enjoyed the backing of its ally, Germany. But Serbia was supported by Russia, and Germany therefore confronted the danger of a war on two fronts, as Russia was allied to France. Determined to deal with France first, Germany needed Austria to engage Russia in Galicia. The result was that Austria-Hungary divided its forces, and suffered defeat on both fronts. The situation was partially redeemed by the Germans' defeat of two Russian armies in East Prussia. The Germans then shifted their efforts to the south, so as to give direct aid to the Austrians, and the two allies advanced into Poland in October. The offensive miscarried, partly owing to lack of co-ordination, but principally because the Russians crossed the Vistula westwards with comparable designs.

In the west the main German advance, swinging through Belgium in order to envelop the French, began on 18 August. The French, redeploying round Paris, together with the British, checked the now extended German armies on the Marne. Thereafter each side sought to get round the other's flank to the north. By October they had filled the space to the coast and heavy fighting around Ypres between then and mid-November failed to result in breakthrough.

The principal priorities of the British and French outside Europe were to contain the war by destroying the Germans' network of wireless stations and cruiser bases. Conversely, by extending the war to the Islamic peoples of central Asia and North Africa, Germany could threaten the colonies of their enemies. Her ally Turkey declared a jihad on 14 November 1914, while Britain had already landed an expeditionary force in Mesopotamia, and in March and April 1915 British sea and land forces attacked the Dardanelles. The Turks countered both threats, causing the British to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula at the end of 1915, and forcing the advanced elements of the Mesopotamian force to surrender at Kut Al Amara on 29 April 1916.

In Germany, Falkenhayn's first instinct was to renew the offensive in the west in 1915, but the need to support Austria-Hungary, the greater fluidity of the eastern front, and the pressure of Hindenburg and his supporters resulted in a concentration in the east. A joint Austro-German offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow (2 May 1915) unlocked Russian Poland and the tsar's shattered armies fell back to the Pripyat marshes. Falkenhayn hoped that the Russians would accept a separate peace so that the Germans could concentrate on the west. But alliance loyalty held. Moreover, the entry of Italy on the Entente side in May prompted the Austrians to divert their already inadequate forces to a third front on the river Isonzo. By September the German advance into Russia had exhausted itself, and Falkenhayn switched his attention to the Balkans. With Bulgaria as an ally, the Central Powers outflanked and overran Serbia. Britain and France finally sent troops to Salonika in October, too late to influence Bulgaria and too distant to give aid to Serbia.

Although the Germans had not won on the eastern front, they had gained sufficient breathing space to allow them to turn their attention back to the west. On 21 February 1916 they attacked the Verdun salient. Their initial target was the French army but Falkenhayn realized that the financial and industrial hub of the Entente was Britain. He therefore wanted submarine warfare to accompany the offensive on land, but Bethmann Hollweg opposed him for fear of America's reaction. Britain's surface ships confirmed their control of the exits from the North Sea in the less than decisive battle of Jutland, and so Germany continued to be denied direct access to oceanic trade. By June the German attack at Verdun had stalled, as had the Austrians' independent offensive against the Italians in the Trentino.

Both Britain and France had learnt from a series of offensives in the west, either limited in objectives or limited in effectiveness, in 1915. At the end of that year the Allies agreed that simultaneous attacks on all fronts were the way to drain the reserves of the Central Powers, given the latter's ability to operate on interior lines. On 4 June 1916 the Russians under Brusilov made quick initial gains against the Austrians in Galicia, so much so that Romania joined the Allies in August. Once again the Germans had to bail out their ally. The Anglo-French offensive was launched on the Somme on 1 July 1916. In the event, France's contribution, not least thanks to Verdun, was second to Britain's, and the latter now figured as a major player in land operations as well as at sea and on the stock markets. The Somme campaign continued until November for negligible territorial gains, but did enough damage to the German army to force the latter to retreat to the so-called Hindenburg Line in March 1917.

No power except Britain had anticipated being able to fight on into 1917, and even Britain was close to economic collapse, its international exchange strained by its arms orders in the USA and by the credit needs of its allies. However, Germany finally adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in February, and in doing so drove America into the war. With Romania all but overrun, and with Russia internally divided by revolution, the boost to the Allies was incalculable.

The Entente's master plan for 1917 was similar to that of 1916, but in the event only the British could sustain major operations on land, in the third battle of Ypres (July-November). It did not prevent the Germans capturing Riga on 1 September nor reinforcing the Austrians to achieve a near-breakthrough at Caporetto on the Isonzo front on 24 October. On 21 March 1918 the Germans applied similar principles to the Somme. It was the first of four offensives, falling also in Flanders, on the Aisne, and in Champagne. In making considerable territorial gains, the Germans extended their front while reducing their strength by almost a million men. Simultaneously they continued to advance in the east, competing with their Austrian allies in the Ukraine and the Turks in the Caucasus. The French counter-attacked in July and the British in August. Together with the Americans, they drove the Germans back in a series of individually limited but collectively interlocking offensives.

On 15 September the Anglo-French forces at Salonika attacked in Macedonia, forcing the Bulgars to seek an armistice by the end of the month. The whole of the Central Powers' Italian front was crumbling after the Austrian defeat on the Piave in June, and with the British pushing through Palestine towards Anatolia. The German high command itself initiated the request for an Armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points on 4 October, and, although it then tried to resume the war, it had begun a process which it could not now halt. After the war it would claim that the army was ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolution at home. The peoples of Germany and Austria-Hungary were indeed battered by food shortages and inflation, but the division between front and rear in what was a war of mass mobilization was essentially an artificial one.

Science and technology, mass production, and centralized government (see political economy) were key ingredients in determining the war's direction and destructiveness. But alongside modernity backwardness persisted. Major belligerents like Russia and Turkey were insufficiently developed as states to be able fully to mobilize the (predominantly peasant) manpower available to them. In the Middle East and Africa, if armies did not build their own railways, they remained reliant on the mule, the ox, and man himself.

The dominant image of the war is that derived from the trench warfare of its western front, snaking from Belgium on the Channel coast southwards to form a salient jutting towards Paris and then turning east along the Aisne valley through Champagne to Verdun; here it turned south once more, past the French frontier fortresses of Nancy and Belfort through the Vosges to the Alps. This front remained largely static from the autumn of 1914 to the spring of 1918. Its network of defensive trenches became progressively more deep and sophisticated. But the appearance of stability could be misleading. The trenches were not an end in themselves. Their tactical purpose was protection; their operational task was to enable ground to be held with fewer troops so that a masse de manœuvre could be created for deployment elsewhere. At the end of 1914 the Germans opted for the tactical defensive in the west in order to pursue a strategic offensive on the eastern front. Similarly the British continuously debated the merits of securing gains elsewhere rather than reinforce the deadlock on the major front.

Moreover, the static nature of trench fighting masked a continuous tactical struggle to regain mobility through the reintegration of fire and movement. The chief consequence of industrialization on the battlefield was a hail of fire, delivered by machine guns and by quick-firing field artillery. Forfeiting mobility to find cover, armies eased many of the supply problems which had dogged their predecessors, and so could use munitions with much greater abandon; in particular heavy artillery, hitherto reserved for the previously distinct phase of siege warfare, was deployed on the battlefield itself. Thus by 1915 and 1916 infantry attacks were preceded by massive artillery bombardments which sacrificed surprise. Lacking direct communication with the gunners, the infantry could not convert partial gains into breakthrough or breakout.

One long-run solution to this tactical dilemma was the tank, which combined fire and movement in a single weapon system, but in 1916-18 it was still too slow and too mechanically unreliable for deep exploitation. Much more important was the transformation in the application of artillery. Guns in quantity could fire shorter bombardments for the same effect; with consistent performances, particularly in the manufacture of shells by 1916 but also with the adoption of the contact fuse in 1917, infantry could advance close to the protective fire of the barrage. Even more important were the techniques of aerial reconnaissance, flash-spotting, and sound-ranging, which allowed targets to be identified without preliminary registration and—when combined with detailed survey and up-to-date meteorology—enabled predicted fire. Armies regained the potential for surprise. Furthermore, the infantry acquired more of its own firepower—principally through light machine guns and grenades but also through the use of flame-throwers and mobile trench mortars. In all armies the ratio of machines to men increased.

The essential precondition for such warfare was economic mobilization. Before the war many pundits imagined that the principal constraint on sustained operations would be war finance—that states would be unable to extend their credit. They were wrong: by borrowing from abroad, from their own citizens, and ultimately from themselves (through accepting treasury bills as security for currency issue), the belligerents postponed payment until after the war. The more pressing economic constraints were the availability of raw materials (especially for the blockaded powers of central Europe) and the conversion of industrial plant to munitions production. In the winter of 1914-15, all the armies experienced shell shortages as the combination of higher than expected consumption at the front intersected with the blockages consequent on the time lag in adaptation. The state—which had itself now become the principal purchaser—intervened to regulate the market. In Germany the Prussian war ministry established a raw materials office in August 1914, whose task was to seek out stocks of commodities vital to the war effort, and to allocate them so as to ensure their most efficient use. In Britain the ministry of munitions was created in 1915, and itself established its own regional factories. In general, although much of the rhetoric was collectivist, the principles which drove economic mobilization were derived from capitalism; profits, although regulated, were still considerable, and the arms manufacturers, even if in the guise of government employ, were responsible for the daily management of the war economy (see war and economic growth).

The war-generated industrial boom competed with the manpower needs of the armies. Organized labour was thereby handed a strong negotiating position, which it both grasped and partially forfeited in compacts with the state. In Britain in 1915 munitions workers agreed not to strike; in Germany the Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916 created an alliance between state, industry, and labour in which each felt it had conceded too much to the other. The real wages of males with skills vital to war production were eroded less by price inflation than those of white collar workers. Unskilled workers, by contrast, could be replaced by women, many of them not new to the workplace but diverted to munitions production from textile manufacture or domestic service.

The strength of the labour movement acquired fresh resonance in 1917. In May 100, 000 French men and women went on strike, affecting 71 industries; Germany experienced 531 strikes over the year as a whole, as opposed to 240 in 1916. Much of this activity was to do with working conditions, wages, prices, and food supplies. But mutinies at the front and, even more, the Russian Revolutions of March and November 1917 gave labour a political and anti-war dimension which socialist movements had sacrificed by their adherence to the nation-in-arms concept. The Bolsheviks called for a peace without annexations and indemnities, and published the secret agreements of the tsarist regime with its British and French allies, so showing that annexationist war aims were the objective not only of the Central Powers.

Hitherto the populations of the warring states had largely accepted the bigger ideas that underpinned their efforts. For Austria-Hungary it was a war to save a decaying empire, its multinationalism potentially riven by national self-determination; for Germany, the values were a counterpoint to the individualism that it saw as the legacy of Revolutionary France and the dominance of money-grabbing market forces in Britain and the USA; for France, it was a war for civilization; and for Britain for liberalism and the rights of small nations. In 1914 all the powers had been willing to fight for their great-power status, and all their peoples had been inspired by the needs of national self-defence. The doubts about these ideals, stoked by the length of the war and by its losses, were resolved, at least in part, by the entry of the USA and by the decision of Soviet Russia to seek terms with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in the New Year of 1918. The ‘Fourteen Points’ of US Pres Woodrow Wilson (Clemenceau commented drily that God had been satisfied with ten) reasserted in international relations the ideals of political liberalism—however much its domestic and economic underpinnings had been eroded by state intervention.

Moreover, by 1917 the Allied states had largely resolved the problems of wartime government. In France invasion made Joffre, the French C-in-C, a key force in civil affairs as well as in strategy. In Britain civilian direction of strategy was discredited in 1915, and soldiers dominated in 1916. Neither power had a body which integrated civil and military wisdom and which was capable of rapid decision-making. In December 1916, Britain created a war cabinet, itself the occasion and the consequence of the formation of Lloyd George's coalition government. Joffre was replaced by Nivelle at the end of 1916, and not until Clemenceau became premier in November 1917 did France's civil authority definitively reassert itself over the military. The offensives of 1917 discredited the generals of both nations to the extent that even their political allies were ready to acquiesce in their subordination.

The autocratic empires of Austria-Hungary and Germany, but also of the Entente's ally, Russia, had a more difficult problem to resolve. The junction of civil and military was the crown; in September 1915 Tsar Nicholas II, who had been dissuaded from doing so at the war's outbreak, became C-in-C. In Austria-Hungary the Emperor Franz Josef was too old to exercise such active responsibility, and his successor in 1916, Karl, was young and irresolute. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II believed strongly in his personal rule but had begun to lose his authority even before the war broke out. The complexities of strategy-making in modern war were incompatible with the simplifications of monarchy. Without the mediating efforts of the structures which political liberalism spawned, the autocracies lacked the institutions for easing civil-military discord. The German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, intrigued against the CGS Falkenhayn, using as his allies the commander on the eastern front, Hindenburg, and his COS Ludendorff. In August 1916 the kaiser was forced to concede to this pressure, and Hindenburg replaced Falkenhayn, with Ludendorff as 1st QMG. Thereafter the general staff's interpretation of strategy, with the conduct of a total war penetrating every aspect of national life, and with all the nation's resources deemed vital for its prosecution, meant that the army played an increasing role in issues of economic mobilization and political direction. Although Bethmann Hollweg resigned in July 1917 because he could no longer command the support of the Reichstag, his successors were the puppets of the army not of the assembly, and it was the army's loss of confidence in the monarchy that determined the timing of the kaiser's final abdication in November 1918.

Bibliography

Falls, Cyril, The First World War (London, 1960).
Herwig, Holger, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 (London, 1997).
Strachan, Hew (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford, 1998)
— Hew Strachan

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US Military History Companion: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > US Military History Companion
(1914 – 18)
Causes
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US Supreme Court: World War I
Top Home > Library > Law & Legal Issues > US Supreme CourtIs considered the first modern war because it involved the mobilization of entire populations. For the United States, it also represented a break with tradition because, for the first time, American armies were sent to fight on European soil. Believing the nation faced a crisis of unprecedented proportion, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress acted swiftly to extend the authority of the federal government after war was declared in April 1917. In May, the Selective Service Act instituted a wartime military draft. In June, the Wilson administration proposed the Lever Food Control Bill, which subjected fuel and food to federal regulation and which gave the president the power in an “extreme” emergency to dictate price schedules in any industry. Although congressional critics charged the measure gave the president dictatorial powers and violated the Tenth Amendment, it became law in August 1917. In November 1918, the War Prohibition Act banned the making and sale of alcoholic beverages during the war. Other statutes empowered the president to compel preferential treatment for government war contracts, to seize and run plants needed for the war effort, to operate the water and rail transport systems, and to regulate exports.

Through a combination of executive orders and federal statutes, the government was able to curtail sharply freedom of speech and the press. In April 1917, Wilson issued two executive orders, one creating the first large‐scale government propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, the other giving the government control of land and cable telegraph lines out of the country. In June 1917, the Espionage Act made it a felony to cause insubordination, interfere with enlistments, and transmit false statements that obstructed the military (see Subversion). It also established postal censorship and gave the postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, power (which he often used capriciously) to ban material deemed seditious or treasonable from the mails (see Postal Power). In October, the Trading with the Enemy Act created a Censorship Board to coordinate and make recommendations about censorship. It allowed censorship of mail or any other kind of communication with foreign countries. The Sedition Act of May 1918 (an amendment to the Espionage Act) sought to repress anarchists, socialists, pacifists, and certain labor leaders. The law made it a felony to disrupt recruiting or enlistments, to encourage either support for Germany and its allies or disrespect for the American cause, or otherwise to bring the United States government, its leaders, or its symbols into disrepute.

Critics charged that virtually every right guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution was nullified or abridged during the war. The Supreme Court, however, was not asked to pass judgment on the constitutionality of many of these statutes. Those cases that did reach the Court did so, with a few exceptions, only after the war had ended.

Chief Justice Edward D. White, a one‐time Confederate soldier from Louisiana and the president of a sugar company, led the Court during the war years and after. Joining White on the bench were Justices Joseph McKenna, a California lawyer appointed by President William McKinley; two Theodore Roosevelt appointees, William R. Day and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Willis Van Devanter and Mahlon Pitney, both appointees of William Howard Taft and two of the Court's most conservative members; and three Wilson appointees, Louis D. Brandeis (whose Judaism and advocacy for social causes made him anathema to conservatives), John H. Clarke, a progressive‐minded railroad attorney, and James C. McReynolds from Tennessee, who as Wilson's first attorney general had vigorously prosecuted antitrust cases. As a Supreme Court justice, McReynolds became a champion of property rights against the expansion of government regulation and thus proved far less liberal than Wilson had hoped.

Enlargement of Federal Power

Despite his Civil War record, White was strongly nationalistic on issues relating to states' rights and the war. Under his leadership, the Court did little to challenge the expansion of federal power. It upheld the Selective Service Act in January 1918 in Arver v. United States, known as the Selective Draft Law Cases. Writing for a unanimous Court, White said Congress had the power to “raise and support armies” and that the draft was not “involuntary servitude” as defined by the Thirteenth Amendment (p. 367). A few months later, in Cox v. Wood (1918), the Court refused relief to a man who sought discharge from the armed forces on grounds that the draft could not be used to force military service abroad. In Ruthenberg v. United States (1918), the Court rejected a claim by socialists that their constitutional rights had been violated. (The socialists had argued that at their trial for not registering for the draft, the grand jury and trial jury had been made up entirely of people from other political parties.)

A similar pattern of approving the enlargement of federal power appeared in other cases. Although the War Prohibition Act was passed after the armistice, the Court sustained its validity in the War Prohibition Cases of late 1919. Brandeis accepted the measure's legality under the federal war power and held that federal regulatory authority continued even after the armistice. The Court again upheld prohibition a few months later in Rupert v. Caffey (1920), rejecting the argument that the act encroached on the police power of the states. In Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. North Dakota (1919), a unanimous Court endorsed a section of the Army Appropriation Act of August 1916 that empowered the president to take over and run railroads during wartime. White noted that “the complete and undivided character of the war power of the United States is not disputable” and said that the federal government could override state rate controls that would be binding during peacetime (p. 135). The Court also turned back challenges to the Trading with the Enemy Act (Rumely v. McCarthy, 1919; Central Union Trust Co. v. Carvin, 1921; Stoehr v. Wallace, 1921) to government takeover of telegraph and telephone lines (Dakota Central Telephone v. South Dakota, 1919), and to use by the federal government of cable property during the war (Commercial Cable v. Burleson, 1919). The Court invalidated a section of the Lever Act dealing with unfair charges for food in United States v. L. Cohen Grocery Co. (1921), but it did not deny the federal government's right to fix prices during war. Rather, it contended that the Lever Act had not set clear standards for what constituted unreasonable prices.

Limits on Dissent

Not since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 had the national government limited dissent so severely as during World War I. The government prosecuted nearly twenty‐two hundred people under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and more than a thousand were convicted. No cases involving the constitutionality of these statutes came before the Supreme Court during the war, although lower federal courts upheld and interpreted the measures in several instances.

Several cases involving civil liberties came before the Supreme Court after the war. The Court upheld government security legislation, relying on the bad tendency test, which held that the prosecution did not have to establish a cause‐and‐effect relationship between an utterance and an illegal act. The mere intent of the speaker or writer was sufficient to establish guilt. Schenck v. United States (1919) involved a prosecution under the Espionage Act for distributing antidraft leaflets to American military personnel. The appellant, Schenck, argued that the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment, but the Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the law. Justice Holmes, who wrote the opinion, argued that free speech was not an absolute right (it would not, for example, “protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre, and causing a panic,” he said) and that during war the government could limit some utterances that might be acceptable during times of peace (p. 52). Holmes set forth the clear and present danger test to determine whether the words used in a given situation “caused” someone to violate the law. Although the phrase “clear and present danger” would later be used to shield some types of dissent, in Schenk Holmes employed it in a way that was consistent with the bad tendency doctrine. He believed that Schenck had intended to interfere with the draft in publishing the leaflets.

The Court sustained convictions under the Espionage Act in two other cases: in Frohwerk v. United States (1919), the editor of a German‐language newspaper was convicted for publishing articles that criticized the war and questioned the legality of the draft; in Debs v. United States (1919), the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was prosecuted for a speech in which he had praised people convicted for hindering enlistments. The Court sustained the conviction on grounds that Debs had intended to hinder recruiting. In writing the opinions in Frohwerk and Debs, Holmes made no mention of the clear and present danger principle. Before the year ended, however, he changed his position, thanks in part to the influence of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. When he dissented in subsequent cases, he interpreted clear and present danger in a way that broadened protection for dissent.

In Abrams v. United States (1919), the Court upheld the Sedition Act of 1918. Abrams and others were charged with publishing leaflets condemning the American expeditionary force in Russia and called for a general strike. Justice Clarke, writing for the majority, contended that the pamphlets sought to “excite, at the supreme crisis of the war, disaffection, sedition, riots, and … revolution” and were not protected by the First Amendment (p. 623). Holmes, joined by Brandeis, argued in dissent that the prosecution failed to demonstrate that the leaflets had any impact on the war effort. Publishing a “silly leaflet by an unknown man” was unlikely to present “any immediate danger” of obstructing, or even have a tendency to interfere with, the success of the government's armed forces. Holmes relied on the notion of a “marketplace of ideas” to justify his stand (p. 628).

Four months later Clarke joined Holmes and Brandeis in dissenting from the Court's majority in Schaefer v. United States (1920). The case involved a German‐language paper in Philadelphia that had published articles favorable to the German war effort that were generally unpatriotic in tone. Brandeis, in writing for the minority, thought the publications in question were relatively harmless and that their suppression imperiled free press as well as freedom of thought not only during the war but also in peacetime.

Pierce v. United States (1920) grew out of the government's wartime security legislation. Three socialists had been prosecuted for distributing an antiwar pamphlet. Justice Pitney, speaking for the majority, attacked one of the publication's arguments—that the war had economic roots—and contended that such material could only hurt the war effort. Once again, Holmes and Brandeis dissented, arguing that if statements of judgment and opinion could be prosecuted, then freedom of expression was imperiled, especially during national emergencies. In United States ex rel. Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co. v. Burleson (1921), the Court upheld the postmaster general's decision to exclude a socialist newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader, from the mails. In Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920), the Court upheld a Minnesota statute similar to the Espionage Act. While Holmes concurred with the majority in this case, White dissented, arguing that only Congress had power to legislate in this area. Brandeis also dissented, but on the grounds that the state law invaded civil liberties.

World War I accelerated the growth of nationalism in the United States, enhancing the authority of the federal government at the expense of the states and the power of the president relative to Congress. Through its decisions the Supreme Court endorsed these developments. One legacy from this period was the example that expanded federal authority provided for later national emergencies. Americans were more willing during the Great Depression and World War II to accept the idea that the national government and the president could deal with problems more effectively than could the individual states and Congress. World War I also initiated controversies about the meaning of the First Amendment. While the Court upheld the government's security legislation, the idea of clear and present danger, as applied in the Abrams case, opened the door—if only slightly—to stronger safeguards for dissent.

See also Presidential Emergency Powers; War.

Bibliography

David P. Currie, The Constitution and the Supreme Court: 1910–1921, Duke Law Journal (Dec. 1985): 1111–1162.
Paul L. Murphy, The Constitution in Crisis Times, 1918–1969 (1972).
Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (1987).
Fred D. Ragan, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and the Clear and Present Danger Test for Free Speech: The First Year, 1919, Journal of American History 58 (1971): 24–45
— Stephen Vaughn


US Military Dictionary: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > US Military Dictionary(1914-18) Essentially a civil war in Europe with global implications, World War I resulted in a shift of economic and cultural influences away from Europe, ultimately enabling new nations to emerge and encouraged others (notably the United States) to challenge Europe's international leadership. The fighting pitted Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire (together styled the Central Powers) against an alliance of Britain, France, Russia, Italy and, eventually, the United States. With the mobilization of 65 million troops, World War I was ultimately the most destructive military conflict in world history to that point.Triggered by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Bosnia-Herzegovina's capital, Sarajevo (allegedly by Serbian nationalists), open warfare grew from a series of strategic alliances that drew in powers that seemingly had little interest in this immediate cause. The Austrians, given unequivocal support by their ally, Germany, decided to crush Serbia's perceived challenge. Russia, fearing domestic uprisings in support of Orthodox Serbia, gave notice that it would support its coreligionists against Catholic Austria-Hungary. German military leaders, particularly Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen, sought to advance their own goals by using the crisis as a justification for attacking Russia's ally, France. That all these nations had been steadily arming over the previous years only further exacerbated the crisis, pushing them toward war. By August 12, all major powers had declared war, and Germany, challenging Belgium's declarations of neutrality, began hostilities by marching through the smaller nation in order to launch an attack on France. France and Britain responded by meeting the German attack. Acting on its own declaration of war, Russia launched an attack on Germany's eastern front.Within three weeks the engaged armies had fought to a virtual standstill. German troops destroyed an entire Russian army at Tannenberg (August 26-30). A week later, British and French stopped Germany's own flanking maneuver through Belgium in the First Battle of the Marne (September 5-9). Soon the western armies had constructed an almost continuous parallel line of defensive systems stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. Trench warfare, most prominent in France and Flanders, but existing in some areas of Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine as well, flouted attempts by Europe's military leaders to return to a war of maneuver by rupturing the enemy's front. To restore the offensive, both sides eventually introduced new weapons such as tanks and chemical warfare. High-explosive shells, recoilless carriages, optical sights, improved communications, and cannon ranges of 20 or more miles made indirect artillery bombardment the dominant force of the battlefield. The application of massive and increasingly sophisticated artillery fire proved to be the most effective means of reducing fortifications. But western defenses were so strong and thickly defended that, although it was possible to break into them, there remained severe limitations to any advance.In 1915, the Central Powers concentrated their resources on the eastern front. The vastness of that front, and the clear superiority of German artillery and leadership, made possible an advance of some 300 miles. Although Italy left its pre-war pact with Germany and Austro-Hungary to join the Allies in 1915, by the end of the year, Berlin dominated Central and southeastern Europe. British efforts to find a “way around” the western front ended in dismal failure in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. In 1916, Germany sought to break the stalemate in the west in the ten-month Battle of Verdun, deliberately seeking a decisive battle of attrition and will. To relieve Verdun, a massive Anglo-French offensive was launched on the Somme in July. Nevertheless, when winter ended the fighting, the western front had changed little. 1917 marked two important changes in the war. In October, Russian revolutionaries bolstered by public discontent over the country's dismal fortunes in the war overthrew the Tsar, and the new Soviet Union removed itself from the fighting. A perhaps more important shift occurred when the previously neutral United States joined the Allies against Germany. President Woodrow Wilson had attempted to keep the United States in a mediating position. Germany's attempt to quickly end the war by stopping U.S. shipments to the Allies through unlimited submarine warfare and secretly propositioning Mexico to attack (discovered when British code-breakers intercepted the Zimmerman Telegram) backfired and drew the United States into the conflict. Wilson's goals, however, differed from his allies' in that he advocated a plan for “peace without victory” he announced in January 1917 and further codified a year later in his Fourteen Points. United States troops, called the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), did relatively little to alleviate the military stalemate when they arrived on European soil. AEF commander-in-chief John J. Pershing planned to launch a win-the-war campaign in 1919. Early AEF actions were less than successful, however. Logistical chaos, flawed tactics, and inexperienced men and officers contributed to a disastrous start to the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September 26- November 11, 1918) and by the armistice Pershing's troops had moved just thirty-four miles. Nevertheless, although only involved in heavy fighting for 110 days, the AEF made vital contributions to Germany's defeat. With tens of thousands of “doughboys” crossing the Atlantic to reinforce the Allies, and with the AEF emerging as a superior fighting force, the exhausted and depleted German army appealed for peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points in early October.

As the Great War concluded with the armistice on November 11, 1918, the Allies were divided on how to construct the peace. American policy was directed toward the repudiation of power politics and the erection of a “permanent” peace. Wilsonianism promised an end to war primarily through democratic institutions, the end of secret diplomacy, self-determination for ethnic minorities, and most especially through a League of Nations. The war had destroyed the old balance of power in Europe, and the peace settlement made revisionist nations out of the two states that would soon dominate the continent, Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet, the peace settlement did not prove satisfactory. British and French insistence on reparations created lingering animosity within Germany. Likewise, the division of colonies and former Central Powers territories aggravated tensions in areas such as North Africa, the Balkans, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula. The United States, the greatest economic beneficiary of the war, helped make the peace, but with its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles refused responsibility for maintaining it. The war ended in a twenty-year truce instead of a “permanent peace.” The failure to achieve Wilson's unrealistic though desirable goal was hardly surprising, but another general war was not inevitable. World War II was caused by many factors, including the flawed peace settlement of 1919, the great Depression of the 1930s, and the psychological scars of World War I, which enfeebled the democracies. But the inability of the victorious powers, especially Great Britain and the United States, to work together to prevent the resurgence of German military power, was certainly one of the most important reasons for the resumption of war in 1939.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.


US History Encyclopedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > US History EncyclopediaThe United States did not enter World War I until April 1917, although the conflict had begun in August 1914. After an intense period of military buildup and imperial competition, war broke out in Europe between Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) and Britain, France, and Russia (the Allies). Turkey quickly joined the Central Powers and Italy joined the Allies in 1915.

Prelude to Involvement

Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson issued a declaration of neutrality. He was committed to maintaining open use of the Atlantic for trade with all the European belligerents. However, British naval supremacy almost eliminated American trade with Germany while shipments to the Allies soared. To counter this trend, German U-boats (submarines) torpedoed U.S. merchant vessels bound for Allied ports. In May 1915, Germans sunk the British passenger ship Lusitania, killing 128 Americans. Strong protest from Wilson subdued the submarine campaign, but it would emerge again as the war ground on and became more desperate. In late January 1917, Germany announced it would destroy all ships heading to Britain. Although Wilson broke off diplomatic ties with Germany, he still hoped to avert war by arming merchant vessels as a deterrent. Nevertheless, Germany began sinking American ships immediately.

In February 1917, British intelligence gave the United States government a decoded telegram from Germany's foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, that had been intercepted en route to his ambassador to Mexico. The

Zimmerman Telegram authorized the ambassador to offer Mexico the portions of the Southwest it had lost to the United States in the 1840s if it joined the Central Powers. But because Wilson had run for reelection in 1916 on a very popular promise to keep the United States out of the European war, he had to handle the telegram very carefully. Wilson did not publicize it at first, only releasing the message to the press in March after weeks of German attacks on American ships had turned public sentiment toward joining the Allies.

Gearing Up for War: Raising Troops and Rallying Public Opinion

On 2 April 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war and four days later all but six senators and fifty representatives voted for a war resolution. The Selective Service Act that was passed the following month, along with an extraordinary number of volunteers, built up the army from less than 250,000 to four million over the course of the conflict. General John Pershing was appointed head of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and led the first troops to France during the summer. Initially, the nation was woefully unprepared to fight so large a war so far from American soil. The task of reorganizing government and industry to coordinate a war and then of recruiting, training, equipping, and shipping out massive numbers of soldiers was daunting and would proceed slowly. The first serious U.S. military action would not come until April 1918, one year after declaration of war. It would take a gargantuan national effort, one that would forever change the government and its relationship to the citizenry, to get those troops into combat.

Although there is strong evidence that the war was broadly supported—and certainly Americans volunteered and bought Liberty Bonds in droves—the epic scale of the undertaking and the pressure of time led the government, in an unprecedented campaign, to sell the war effort through a massive propaganda blitz. Wilson picked George Creel, a western newspaper editor, to form the Committee on Public Information (CPI). This organization was charged with providing the press with carefully selected information on the progress of the war. It also worked with the advertising industry to produce eyecatching and emotional propaganda for various agencies involved in the war effort in order to win maximum cooperative enthusiasm form the public. Its largest enterprise was the Four Minute Men program, which sent more than 75,000 speakers to over 750,000 public events to rouse the patriotism of as many as 314 million spectators over the course of the war. The CPI recruited mainly prominent white businessmen and community leaders; however, it did set up a Women's Division and also courted locally prominent African Americans to speak at black gatherings.

Gearing Up for War: the Economy and Labor

The government needed patriotic cooperation, for it was completely unequipped to enforce many of the new regulations it adopted. It also had to maximize the productive resources of the nation to launch the U.S. war effort and prop up flagging allies. The War Industries Board was charged with gearing up the economy to war production, but it lacked coercive authority. Even the Overman Act of May 1918, which gave the president broad powers to commandeer industries if necessary, failed to convince capitalists to retool completely toward the war effort. The government only took control of one industry, the railroads, in December 1917, and made it quite clear that the measure was only a temporary necessity. In all other industries, it was federal investment—not control—that achieved results. The Emergency Fleet Corporation pumped over $3 billion into the nation's dormant shipbuilding industry during the war era. Overall, the effort to raise production was too little and too late for maximizing the nation's military clout. American production was just hitting stride as the war ended, but the threat that it represented did help convince an exhausted Germany to surrender.

The government also sought the cooperation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and involved its top officials in the war production effort, but very low unemployment emboldened union workers and it became difficult for the leadership to control the rank and file. Many workers connected Wilson's war goals—democracy and self-determination for nations—to struggles for a voice in their workplaces through union representation. However, the number of striking workers was lower in 1917 and 1918 than in 1916. The government hastily created labor arbitration boards and eventually formed a National War Labor Board (NWLB) in April 1918. The government had considerable success in resolving disputes and convincing employers to at least temporarily give some ground to the unions. When this novel arbitration framework disappeared along with government contracts in 1919, workers participated in the largest strike wave in the nation's history—over four million participated in walkouts during that year.

Women and African Americans in the War

For women workers the war also raised hopes, but as with labor as a whole, they were dashed after the conflict. The number of women working as domestic servants and in laundering or garment making declined sharply during the war, while opportunities grew just as dramatically in office, industrial, commercial, and transportation work. The very limited place of women in the economy had opened up and government propaganda begged women to take jobs. However, few of these new opportunities, and even then only the least attractive of them, went to nonwhite women. Mainly confined to low-skilled work, many women were let go when the postwar economy dipped or were replaced by returning soldiers. Although women did gain, and hold on to, a more prominent place in the AFL, they were still only 10 percent of the membership in 1920. The government made some attempts through the NWLB to protect the rights of working women, although it backed off after the war. But women fought on their own behalf on the suffrage front and finally achieved the right to vote in 1920.

African Americans also made some gains but suffered a terrible backlash for them. There were ninety-six Lynchings of blacks during 1917 and 1918 and seventy in 1919 alone. Blacks were moving out of the South in massive numbers during the war years, confronting many white communities in the North with a substantial nonwhite presence for the first time. Northward migration by blacks averaged only 67,000 per decade from 1870 through 1910 and then exploded to 478,000 during the 1910s. This Great Migration gave blacks access to wartime factory jobs that paid far better than agricultural work in the South, but like white women, they primarily did lowskilled work and were generally rejected by the union movement. The hatred that many of these migrants faced in the North forced them into appalling ghettos and sometimes led to bloodshed. In July 1917, a race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, left thirty-nine African Americans dead. The recently formed NAACP championed justice and democratic rights for African Americans at a time when black soldiers were helping to guarantee them for the peoples of Europe. Although job opportunities would recede after the war, the new racial diversity outside the South would not—and neither would the fight for equal rights.

Repression and the War

The fragility of a war effort that relied on a workforce of unprecedented diversity and on cooperation from emboldened unions led the federal government to develop for the first time a substantial intelligence-gathering capability for the purpose of suppressing elements it thought might destabilize the system. The primary targets were anti-capitalist radicals and enemy aliens (German and Austro-Hungarian immigrants). The former group was targeted through the Espionage Act of June 1917, which was amended by the Sedition Act in May 1918 after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia convinced the government to seek even wider powers to control public speech. The Department of Justice, through its U.S. attorneys and Bureau of Investigation field agents, cooperated with local and state authorities to suppress radical organizers. Many government agencies developed at least some intelligence capacity and the private, but government sanctioned, American Protective League recruited perhaps 300,000 citizen-spies to keep tabs on their fellow Americans. In this climate of suspicion, German-speaking aliens had the most cause to be afraid. War propaganda dehumanized Germans and blasted their culture and language. Well over a half-million enemy aliens were screened by the Department of Justice and were restricted in their mobility and access to military and war production sites. Several thousand enemy aliens deemed disloyal were interned until the conflict was over.

American Soldiers in Battle

The end of the war was nowhere in sight when U.S. troops first saw significant fighting in the spring of 1918, after the new Bolshevik government in Russia pulled out of the war in March and Germany switched its efforts to the western front. Under British and French pressure, General Pershing allowed his troops to be blended with those of the Allies—ending his dream of the AEF as an independent fighting force. Now under foreign command, American troops helped stop the renewed German offensive in May and June. The First U.S. Army was given its own mission in August: to push the Germans back to the southeast and northwest of Verdun and then seize the important railroad facilities at Sedan. The campaign got under way in September and American troops succeeded in removing the Germans from the southeast of Verdun, although the latter were already evacuating that area. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive to the northwest of Verdun was launched in late September and proved to be much more bloody. Although the German position was heavily fortified, well over a million American soldiers simply overwhelmed all resistance. This massive and relentless operation convinced the German command that its opportunity to defeat the Allies before American troops and industry were fully ready to enter the fray had been lost. As exhausted as the United States was fresh, the Central Powers surrendered on 11 November 1918.

In the end, two million American troops went to France and three-quarters of them saw combat. Some 60,000 died in battle and over 200,000 were wounded. An additional 60,000 died of disease, many from the influenza pandemic that killed over twenty million across the globe in 1918 and 1919. Many surviving combatants suffered psychological damage, known as shell shock, from the horrors of trench warfare. The casualties would have been far greater had America entered the war earlier or been prepared to deploy a large army more quickly.

Wilson hoped that after the war the United States would become part of the League of Nations that was forming in Europe to ensure that collective responsibility replaced competitive alliances. But America was retreating inward, away from the postwar ruin and revolutionary chaos of Europe. The government was suppressing radicals at home with unprecedented furor in 1919 and 1920 in what is known as the Red Scare. Progressive wartime initiatives that further involved the government in the lives of its citizens withered against this reactionary onslaught. But the notion of government coordination of a national effort to overcome crisis had been born, and the Great Depression and World War II would see this new commitment reemerge, strengthened.

Bibliography

Farwell, Byron. Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917–1918. New York: Norton, 1999. Focuses on military action.

Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States. West-port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980.

Kennedy, Kathleen. Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Luebke, Frederick. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.

McCartin, Joseph. Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Focuses on workers and war production.

Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Focuses on home front repression.

Venzon, Anne Cipriano, ed. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1995. Good general work.

Zieger, Robert. America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Stresses the home front.

Zeiger, Susan. In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.


Russian History Encyclopedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > Russian History EncyclopediaImperial Russia entered World War I in the summer of 1914 along with allies England and France. It remained at war with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey until the war effort collapsed during the revolutions of 1917.

In 1914 military theory taught that new technologies meant that future wars would be short, decided by initial, offensive battles waged by mass conscript armies on the frontiers. Trapped between two enemies, Germany planned to defeat France in the west before Russia, with its still sparse railway net, could mobilize. Using French loans to build up that net, Russia sought to speed up the process, rapidly invade East Prussia, and so relieve pressure on the French. Berlin therefore feared giving Russia a head start in mobilizing and, rightly or wrongly, most statesmen accepted that if mobilization began, war was inevitable.

On June 28, 1914, a nationalist Serbian student shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at Sarajevo. To most statesmen's surprise, this provoked a crisis when Austria, determined to punish the Serbs, issued an unacceptable ultimatum on July 23. Over the next six days, pressure mounted on Nicholas II but, recognizing that mobilization meant war, he refused to order a general call-up that would force a German response. Then Vienna declared war on Serbia, Nicholas's own efforts to negotiate with Kaiser William II collapsed, and on July 30 he finally approved a general mobilization. When St. Petersburg ignored Berlin's demand for its cancellation within twelve hours, Germany declared war on August 1. Over the next three days Germany invaded Luxembourg, declared war on France on August 4, and by entering Belgium, added Britain to its enemies.

The War of Movement: Summer 1914 - april 1915

Some Social Democrats aside, Russia's educated public rallied in a Sacred Union behind their ruler. Strikes and political debate ended, and on August 2, crowds in St. Petersburg cheered Nicholas II after he signed a declaration of war on Germany. Local problems apart, the mobilization proceeded apace as 3,115,000 reservists and 800,000 militiamen joined the 1,423,000-man army to provide troops for Russian offensives into Austrian Galicia and, as promised, France and East Prussia.

Although Nicholas II intended to command his troops in person, he was pressured into appointing instead his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich the Younger. Whatever its merits, this decision split the front administratively from the rear thanks to a new law that assigned the army control of the front zone. This caused few problems when the battle line moved forward in 1914 and early 1915. However, without the tsar as a civil-military lynchpin, it led to chaos during the later Great Retreat.

The Grand Duke established his skeleton Stavka (Supreme Commander-in-Chief's General Headquarters) at Baranovichi to provide strategic direction to the Galician and East Prussian offensives. These were to open on August 18-19 under the direct supervision of the separate operational headquarters of the Northwest and Southwest Fronts. Yet on August 6 Austria-Hungary declared war and on the next day invaded Russian Poland. This forestalled the Southwest Front (Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Armies, with 52% of Russia's strength) and it opened its own Galician offensive on August 18. Despite early enemy successes, the Front's armies trounced the Austrians and captured the Galician capital of Lvov (Lemberg) on September 3. A week later the Russians won decisively at Rava Ruska, and by September 12 they had foiled an Austrian attempt to retake Lvov. By September 16 they had besieged the major fortress of Przemysl and reached the San River. Resuming their offensive, they then pushed another 100 miles to the Carpathian passes into Hungary. Over seventeen days the Austrians lost 100,000 dead, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 prisoners, and 216 guns, or one-third of their effective strength.

The Northwest Front (First and Second Armies, with 33% of Russia's forces) was less successful. Ordered forward to aid the desperate French on August 13, Pavel Rennenkampf's First Army advanced slowly into East Prussia, was checked at Stalluponen, then defeated the Germans at Gumbinnen on August 20, and turned against Konigsberg. To the south, Alexander Samsonov's Second Army occupied Neidenburg on August 22, and all East Prussia seemed open to the Russians. But by August 23, when the new German commander Paul von Hindenburg arrived with Erich von Ludendorff as chief of staff, General Max von Hoffmann had implemented plans to defeat the Russians piecemeal. Accordingly, on August 23 - 24 the Germans checked Samsonov and, learning his deployments through radio intercepts, withdrew to concentrate on Tannenberg. When the Second Army again advanced on August 26, it was trapped, virtually surrounded, and then crushed. Samsonov shot himself, and by August 30 the Germans claimed more than 100,000 prisoners.

This forced Rennenkampf's withdrawal, and during September 9 - 14, he too suffered defeat in the First Battle of the Mansurian Lakes. Despite German claims of a second Tannenberg and 125,000 prisoners, the First Army escaped and lost only 30,000 prisoners, as well as 70,000 dead and wounded. The Germans then advanced to the Niemen River before the front stabilized in mid-September. Again alerted by radio intercepts, they fore-stalled a Russian thrust at Silesia by a spoiling attack on September 30. Counterattacking in Galicia, the Austrians then cleared the Carpathian approaches and relieved Przemysl before being halted on the San in mid-October.

The Russians, repulsing a secondary attack in the north, finally held the Germans before Warsaw. As the latter withdrew, devastating the countryside, the Russians again drove the Austrians back to Kracow and reinvested Przemysl. This set the pattern for months of seesaw fighting all along the front. In the north, despite German use of poison gas in January 1915, the Russian Tenth Army withstood the bloody Winter Battles of Mansuria and held firm until April. In the south, by December they again were deep into the Carpathians, threatening Hungary, and holding positions 30 miles from Kracow. When relief efforts failed, Przemysl finally fell (with 117,000 men) in March 1915, leaving the Russians free to force the Carpathians.

Meanwhile, on October 29 - 30, 1914, two German-Turkish cruisers had raided Russia's Black Sea coast. On declaring war, the tsar set up an autonomous Caucasian Front in which the talented chief of staff Nikolai Yudenich exercised real command. As he prepared the Caucasian Army to meet a Turkish invasion, the Turkish Sultan-Khalifa's call for jihad (holy war) fueled pro-Turkish uprisings in the borderlands. Then on December 17 Enver Pasha launched his Third Army, still in summer uniforms, on a crusade to recover lands ceded to Russia in 1878. By December 25 the Russians were fully engaged in the confused battles known as the Sarykamysh Operation. In twelve days of bitter winter combat Yudenich's troops, despite heavy losses, decisively crushed the Turks, and in January 1915 they invaded Ottoman Turkey.

During this period, the Russians held their own against three enemies in two separate war zones and showed that they had capable generals by routing two enemies and fighting a third, the Germans, to a draw. For most, the heavy losses at Tannenberg and other locations were overshadowed by the stunning victories elsewhere. Like other combatants, Russia was slow to recognize that it faced a long war, but it had avoided the trench warfare that gripped the French front. Yet Grand Duke Nikolai already had complained of shell shortages in September 1914. The government responded by reorganizing the Main Artillery Administration, and a special chief assumed responsibility for completely guaranteeing the army's needs for arms and munitions by both state and private production. If this promise was illusory, and other ad hoc agencies proved equally ineffective, for the moment the Russian command remained confident of victory.

The Great Retreat: May - september 1915

On May 2 the seesaw struggle in the East ended when the Austro-Germans, after a four-hour "hurricane of fire," broke through the shallow Russian trenches at Gorlice-Tarnow. This local success quickly sparked the disastrous Great Retreat. As the Galician armies fell back, a secondary German strike in the north endangered the whole Russian front. Hampered by increasing munitions shortages, rumors of spies and treason, a panicked Stavka's ineffective leadership, administrative chaos, and masses of fleeing refugees, the Russians soon lost their earlier conquests. Despite Italy's intervention on the Allied side, Austro-German offensives continued unabated, and in midsummer the Russians evacuated Warsaw to give up Russian Poland. Some units could still fight, but their successes were local, and overall, the tsar's armies seemed over-whelmed by the general disaster. The only bright spot was the Caucasus, where Yudenich advanced to aid the Armenians at Van and held his own against the Turks.

The munitions shortages, both real and exaggerated, forced a full industrial mobilization that by August was directed by a Special Conference for Defense and subordinate conferences for transport, fuel, provisioning, and refugees. Their creation necessitated the State Duma's recall, which provided a platform for the opposition deputies who united as the Progressive Bloc. Seeking to control the conferences, these Duma liberals renewed attacks on the regime and demanded a Government of Public

Confidence (i.e., responsible to the Duma). Yet by autumn Nicholas II had weathered the storm, assumed the Supreme Command to reunite front and rear, and prorogued the Duma. As the German offensives petered out, the front stabilized, and a frustrated opposition regrouped. With the nonofficial voluntary societies and new War Industries Committees, it now launched its campaign against the Dark Forces whom it blamed for its recent defeats.

Russia's Recovery: Autumn 1915 - february 1917

In early December 1915, Stavka delegates met the allies at Chantilly, near Paris, to coordinate their 1916 offensives. Allied doubts about Russian capabilities were somewhat allayed by a local assault on the Strypa River and operations in support of Britain in Persia. Still more impressive was Yudenich's renewed offensive in the Caucasus. He opened a major operation in Armenia in January 1916, and on February 16 his men stormed the strategic fortress of Erzurum. Retreating, the Turks abandoned Mush, and by July, the Russians had captured Erzingan. V. P. Lyakhov's Coastal Detachment, supported by the Black Sea Fleet, also advanced and on April 17 - 18, in a model combinedarms operation, captured the main Turkish supply port of Trebizond. In autumn 1916 the Russians entered eastern Anatolia and Turkish resistance seemed on the verge of collapse.

Assuming the mauled Russians would be inactive in 1916, Germany opened the bloody battle for Verdun on February 21. Yet increased supplies had permitted a Russian recovery, and on March 18, Stavka answered French appeals with a twopronged attack on German positions at Vishnevskoye and Lake Naroch, south of Dvinsk. Two days of heavy shelling opened two weeks of mass infantry assaults over ice, snow, and mud. The Germans held, and the Russians lost heavily but, whatever its impact on Verdun, this battle showed that trench (or position) warfare had arrived in the East. And like generals elsewhere, Russia's seemed convinced that only a single, concentrated infantry assault, preceded by heavy bombardments, and backed by cavalry to exploit a breakthrough, could end the deadlock.

Some saw matters differently. One was Yudenich, who repeatedly smashed the Turks' German-built trench lines. Others included Alexei Brusilov and his generals on the Southwest Front. Like Yudenich, they devised new operational and tactical methods that gained surprise by avoiding massed reserves and cavalry, and by delivering a number of simultaneous, carefully prepared infantry assaults, at several points along an extended front, with little or no artillery preparation. Despite Stavka's doubts, Brusilov won permission to attack in order to tie down the enemy forces in Galicia. When Italy, pressed by Austria in the Trentino, appealed for aid, Brusilov struck on June 4, eleven days before schedule. With no significant artillery support, his troops achieved full surprise on a 200-mile front, smashed the Austrian lines, and advanced up to eighty miles in some sectors. On June 8 they recaptured Lutsk before fighting along the Strypa. Again the Germans rushed up reserves to save their disorganized ally and, after their counterattack of June 16, the line stabilized along that river. In the north, Stavka's main attack then opened before Baranovichi to coincide with Britain's Somme offensive of July 1. But it relied on the old methods and collapsed a week later. The same was true of Brusilov's new attacks on Kovno, which formally ended on August 13. Even so, heavy fighting continued along the Stokhod until September.

Brusilov had lost some 500,000 men, but he had cost the Austro-Germans 1.5 million in dead, wounded, and prisoners, as well as 582 guns. Yet his successes were quickly balanced by defeats elsewhere. Russia had encouraged Romania to enter the war on August 27 and invade Hungarian Transylvania, after which Romania was crushed. By January 1917 Romania had lost its capital, retreated to the Sereth River, and forced Stavka to open a Romanian Front that extended its line 300 miles. This left the Russians spread more thinly and the Central Powers in control of Romania's important wheat and oil regions.

Yet the Allied planners meeting at Chantilly on November 15-16 were optimistic and argued that simultaneous offensives, preceded by local attacks, would bring victory in 1917. Stavka began implementing these decisions by the Mitau Operation in early January 1917. Without artillery support, the Russians advanced in fog, achieved complete surprise, seized the German trenches, and took 8,000 prisoners in five days. If a German counterstrike soon recovered much of the lost ground, the Imperial Army's last offensive shows that it had absorbed Brusilov's methods and could defeat Germans as well as Austrians.

By this date Russia had mobilized industrially with the economy expanding, not collapsing, under wartime pressures. Compared to 1914, by 1917 rifle production was up by 1,100 percent and shells by 2,000 percent, and in October 1917 the Bolsheviks inherited shell reserves of 18 million. Similar increases occurred in most other areas, while the numbers of men called up in 1916 fell and, by December 31, had numbered only 3,048,000 (for a total of 14,648,000 since August 1914). Yet their quality had declined, war weariness and unrest were rising, and, in late June 1916, the mobilization for rear work of some 400,000 earlier exempted Muslim tribesmen in Turkestan provoked a major rebellion. By 1917 a harsh winter, military demands, and rapid wartime industrial expansion had combined to overload the transport system, which exacerbated the tensions brought by inflation, urban overcrowding, and food, fuel, and other shortages.

Despite recent military and industrial successes, Russia's nonofficial public was surprisingly pessimistic. If war-weariness was natural, this mood also reflected the political opposition's propaganda. Determined to gain control of the ministry, the liberals rejected all of Nicholas II's efforts at accommodation. As rumors of treason and a separate peace proliferated, the opposition dubbed each new minister a candidate of the dark forces and creature of the hated Empress and Rasputin, whose own claims gave credence to the rumors. This "assault on the autocracy," as George Katkov describes it, gathered momentum when the Duma reopened on November 14. Liberal leader Paul Milyukov's rhetorical charges of stupidity or treason were seconded by two right-wing nationalists and longtime government supporters. The authorities banned these seditious speeches' publication, but the opposition illegally spread them throughout the army, and some even tried to suborn the high command. The clamor continued until the Duma adjourned for Christmas on December 30, when a group of monarchists murdered Rasputin to save the regime. Yet the liberal public remained unmoved and its press warned that "the dark forces remain as they were."

Revolution and Collapse: February 1917 - february 1918

Russia therefore entered 1917 as a house divided, the dangers of which became evident as a new round of winter shortages, sporadic urban strikes and food riots, and military mutinies set the stage for trouble. On February 27 the Duma reconvened with renewed calls for the removal of "incompetent" ministers, and 80,000 Petrograd workers went on strike. But the tsar, having hosted an Inter-Allied

Conference in Petrograd, returned to Stavka confident that his officials could cope.

Events now moved rapidly. On March 8, police clashed with demonstrators protesting food shortages on International Women's Day. Over the next two days protests spread, antiwar slogans appeared, strikes shut down the city, the Cossacks refused to fire upon protestors, and the strikers set up the Petrograd Soviet (Council). When Nicholas II ordered the garrison to restore order, its aged reservists at first obeyed. But on March 12 they mutinied and joined the rebels. The tsar's ministers were helpless before two new emergent authorities: a Provisional Committee of the State Duma (the prorogued Duma meeting unofficially) and the Petrograd Soviet.

This list now included soldier deputies, and on March 14 the Petrograd Soviet issued its famous Order No. 1. This extended its power through the soldiers' committees elected in every unit in the garrison, and in time in the whole army. For the moment, the Soviet supported a newly formed Provisional Government headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. When Nicholas tried to return to personally restore order, his train was diverted to the Northwest Front's headquarters in Pskov. There he accepted his generals' advice and on March 15 abdicated for himself and his son. His brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, followed suit, the Romanov dynasty ended, and the Imperial Army became that of a de facto Russian republic.

At first both the new government and soviets supported the war effort, and the army's command structure remained intact. Plans for the spring offensive continued, although the changing political situation forced its delay. By April antiwar agitation was rising, discipline weakening, and Stavka was demanding an immediate offensive to restore the army's fighting spirit. Hopes for success rose when Brusilov was named commander-in-chief, and a charismatic radical lawyer, Alexander Kerensky, War and Naval Minister. Finally, on July 1, the Southwest Front's four armies, using Brusilov's tactics, opened Russia's last offensive. Initially successful, it collapsed after only three days, and the Russians again retreated. In two weeks they lost most of Galicia and more than 58,000 officers and men, while a pro-Bolshevik uprising in the capital (the July Days) threatened the government.

Kerensky survived the crisis to become premier, while Lavr Kornilov, who advocated harsh measures to restore order, replaced Brusilov. The Bolshevik leaders were now imprisoned, underground, or in exile in Finland, but their antiwar message won further soldier-converts on all fronts. The Germans tested their own Brusilov-like tactics by capturing Riga during September 1 - 6, but otherwise remained passive as the revolutionary virus did its work. Riga's fall revealed Russia's inability to fight even defensively and helped provoke the much-debated Kornilov Affair. When Stavka ordered units to disperse the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky (whatever his initial intentions) branded Kornilov a traitor and used the left to foil this Bonapartist adventure.

Bolshevik influence now made the officers' position impossible. Desertion was massive, and units on all fronts dissolved. After Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky took power on November 7, the army became so disorganized that a party of Baltic sailors easily seized Stavka and murdered General Nikolai Dukhonin, the last real commander-in-chief. The army no longer existed as an effective fighting force and, with peace talks underway at Brest-Litovsk, the so-called demobilization congress of December sanctioned the harsh reality. In February 1918 the army's remnants mounted only token resistance when the Austro-Germans attacked and, despite desperate attempts to create a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, forced the Soviet government to accept the diktat (dictated or imposed peace) of Brest-Litovsk on March 3.

Conclusion

Western accounts of Russia's war are dominated by the Tannenberg defeat of 1914, the Great Retreat of 1915, and the debacle of 1917. Yet the Imperial Army's record compares favorably with those of its allies and its German opponent, and surpassed those of Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Despite many real problems, the same is true of efforts to organize the war economy. But the regime's failures were exaggerated, and its successes often obscured, by a domestic political struggle that undercut the war effort and helped bring the final collapse.

Bibliography

Allen, W. E. D., and Muratoff, Paul. (1953). Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828 - 1921. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Brusilov, Aleksei A. (1930). A Soldier's Note-Book, 1914 - 1918. London: Macmillan.

Florinsky, Michael T. (1931). The End of the Russian Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gatrell, Peter. (1986). The Tsarist Economy, 1850 - 1917. London: Batsford.

Golder, Frank A. [1927] (1964). Documents of Russian History, 1914 - 1917. New York: Appleton-Century; reprint, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

Golovin, Nicholas N. (1931). The Russian Army in the World War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Heenan, Louise Erwin. (1987). Russian Democracy's Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917. New York. Praeger.

Jones, David R. (1988). "Imperial Russia's Forces at War." In Military Effectiveness, 3 vols., ed. A. R. Millet and W. Murray. London: Allen and Unwin.

Jones, David R. (2002). "The Imperial Army in World War I, 1914 - 1917." In The Military History of Tsarist Russia, ed. F.W. Hagan and R. Higham. New York: Palgrave.

Katkov, George. (1967). Russia 1917: The February Revolution. London: Longmans.

Kerensky, Alexander F. (1967). Russia and History's Turning Point. New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce.

Knox, Alfred W. F. (1921). With the Russian Army, 1914 - 1917, 2 vols. London: Hutchinson.

Lincoln, Bruce W. (1986). Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914 - 1918. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Pares, Bernard. (1939). The Fall of the Russian Monarchy. New York: Knopf.

Showalter, Dennis E. (1991). Tannenberg: Clash of Empires. Hamden, CT: Archon.

Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (1983). The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914 - 17: A Study of the War Industries Committees. London: Macmillan.

Stone, Norman. (1975). The Eastern Front, 1914 - 1917. New York: Scribner's Sons.

Wildman, Allan K. (1980, 1987). The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—DAVID R. JONES

Columbia Encyclopedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Columbia EncyclopediaWorld War I, 1914-18, also known as the Great War, conflict, chiefly in Europe, among most of the great Western powers. It was the largest war the world had yet seen.
Causes

World War I was immediately precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. There were, however, many factors that had led toward war. Prominent causes were the imperialistic, territorial, and economic rivalries that had been intensifying from the late 19th cent., particularly among Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.

Of equal importance was the rampant spirit of nationalism, especially unsettling in the empire of Austria-Hungary and perhaps also in France. Nationalism had brought the unification of Germany by "blood and iron," and France, deprived of Alsace and Lorraine by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, had been left with its own nationalistic cult seeking revenge against Germany. While French nationalists were hostile to Germany, which sought to maintain its gains by militarism and alliances, nationalism was creating violent tensions in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; there the large Slavic national groups had grown increasingly restive, and Serbia as well as Russia fanned Slavic hopes for freedom and Pan-Slavism.

Imperialist rivalry had grown more intense with the "new imperialism" of the late 19th and early 20th cent. The great powers had come into conflict over spheres of influence in China and over territories in Africa, and the Eastern Question, created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire, had produced several disturbing controversies. Particularly unsettling was the policy of Germany. It embarked late but aggressively on colonial expansion under Emperor William II, came into conflict with France over Morocco, and seemed to threaten Great Britain by its rapid naval expansion.

These issues, imperialist and nationalist, resulted in a hardening of alliance systems in the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente and in a general armaments race. Nonetheless, a false optimism regarding peace prevailed almost until the onset of the war, an optimism stimulated by the long period during which major wars had been avoided, by the close dynastic ties and cultural intercourse in Europe, and by the advance of industrialization and economic prosperity. Many Europeans counted on the deterrent of war's destructiveness to preserve the peace.

War's Outbreak

The Austrian annexation (1908) of Bosnia and Herzegovina created an international crisis, but war was avoided. The Balkan Wars (1912-13) remained localized but increased Austria's concern for its territorial integrity, while the solidification of the Triple Alliance made Germany more yielding to the demands of Austria, now its one close ally. The assassination (June 28, 1914) of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo set in motion the diplomatic maneuvers that ended in war.

The Austrian military party, headed by Count Berchtold, won over the government to a punitive policy toward Serbia. On July 23, Serbia was given a nearly unacceptable ultimatum. With Russian support assured by Sergei Sazonov, Serbia accepted some of the terms but hedged on others and rejected those infringing upon its sovereignty. Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, rejected the British proposal of Sir Edward Grey (later Lord Grey of Fallodon) and declared war (July 28) on Serbia.

Russian mobilization precipitated a German ultimatum (July 31) that, when unanswered, was followed by a German declaration of war on Russia (Aug. 1). Convinced that France was about to attack its western frontier, Germany declared war (Aug. 3) on France and sent troops against France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Germany had hoped for British neutrality, but German violation of Belgian neutrality gave the British government the pretext and popular support necessary for entry into the war. In the following weeks Montenegro and Japan joined the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and Belgium) and the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). The war had become general. Whether it might have been avoided or localized and which persons and nations were most responsible for its outbreak are questions still debated by historians.

From the Marne to Verdun

The German strategy, planned by Alfred von Schlieffen, called for an attack on the weak left flank of the French army by a massive German force approaching through Belgium, while maintaining a defensive stance toward Russia, whose army, Schlieffen assumed, would require six weeks to mobilize. By that time, Germany would have captured France and would be ready to meet the forces on the Eastern Front. The Schlieffen plan was weakened from the start when the German commander Helmuth von Moltke detached forces from the all-important German right wing, which was supposed to smash through Belgium, in order to reinforce the left wing in Alsace-Lorraine. Nevertheless, the Germans quickly occupied most of Belgium and advanced on Paris.

In Sept., 1914, the first battle of the Marne (see Marne, battle of the) took place. For reasons still disputed, a general German retreat was ordered after the battle, and the Germans entrenched themselves behind the Aisne River. The Germans then advanced toward the Channel ports but were stopped in the first battle of Ypres (see Ypres, battles of); grueling trench warfare ensued along the entire Western Front. Over the next three years the battle line remained virtually stationary. It ran, approximately, from Ostend past Armentières, Douai, Saint-Quentin, Reims, Verdun, and Saint-Mihiel to Lunéville.

Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the Russians invaded East Prussia but were decisively defeated (Aug.-Sept., 1914) by the Germans under generals Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Mackensen at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes (see under Masuria). The Germans advanced on Warsaw, but farther south a Russian offensive drove back the Austrians. However, by the autumn of 1915 combined Austro-German efforts had driven the Russians out of most of Poland and were holding a line extending from Riga to Chernovtsy (Chernivtsi). The Russians counterattacked in 1916 in a powerful drive directed by General Brusilov, but by the year's end the offensive had collapsed, after costing Russia many thousands of lives. Soon afterward the Russian Revolution eliminated Russia as an effective participant in the war. Although the Austro-Hungarians were unsuccessful in their attacks on Serbia and Montenegro in the first year of the war, these two countries were overrun in 1915 by the Bulgarians (who had joined the Central Powers in Oct., 1915) and by Austro-German forces.

Another blow to the Allied cause was the failure in 1915 of the Gallipoli campaign, an attempt to force Turkey out of the war and to open a supply route to S Russia. The Allies, however, won a diplomatic battle when Italy, after renouncing its partnership in the Triple Alliance and after being promised vast territorial gains, entered the war on the Allied side in May, 1915. Fighting between Austria and Italy along the Isonzo River was inconclusive until late 1917, when the rout of the Italians at Caporetto made Italy a liability rather than an asset to the Allies.

Except for the conquest of most of Germany's overseas colonies by the British and Japanese, the year 1916 opened with a dark outlook for the Allies. The stalemate on the Western Front had not been affected in 1915 by the second battle of Ypres, in which the Germans used poison gas for the first time on the Western Front, nor by the French offensive in Artois-in which a slight advance of the French under Henri Pétain was paid for with heavy losses-nor by the offensive of Marshal Joffre in Champagne, nor by the British advance toward Lens and Loos.

In Feb., 1916, the Germans tried to break the deadlock by mounting a massive assault on Verdun (see Verdun, battle of). The French, rallying with the cry, "They shall not pass!" held fast despite enormous losses, and in July the British and French took the offensive along the Somme River where tanks were used for the first time by the British. By November they had gained a few thousand yards and lost thousands of men. By December, a French counteroffensive at Verdun had restored the approximate positions of Jan., 1916.

Despite signs of exhaustion on both sides, the war went on, drawing ever more nations into the maelstrom. Portugal and Romania joined the Allies in 1916; Greece, involved in the war by the Allied Salonica campaigns on its soil, declared war on the Central Powers in 1917.

From America's Entry to Allied Victory

The neutrality of the United States had been seriously imperiled after the sinking of the Lusitania (1915). At the end of 1916, Germany, whose surface fleet had been bottled up since the indecisive battle of Jutland (see Jutland, battle of), announced that it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to break British control of the seas. In protest the United States broke off relations with Germany (Feb., 1917), and on Apr. 6 it entered the war. American participation meant that the Allies now had at their command almost unlimited industrial and manpower resources, which were to be decisive in winning the war. It also served from the start to lift Allied morale, and the insistence of President Woodrow Wilson on a "war to make the world safe for democracy" was to weaken the Central Powers by encouraging revolutionary groups at home.

The war on the Western Front continued to be bloody and stalemated. But in the Middle East the British, who had stopped a Turkish drive on the Suez Canal, proceeded to destroy the Ottoman Empire; T. E. Lawrence stirred the Arabs to revolt, Baghdad fell (Mar., 1917), and Field Marshal Allenby took Jerusalem (Dec., 1917). The first troops of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), commanded by General Pershing, landed in France in June, 1917, and were rushed to the Château-Thierry area to help stem a new German offensive.

A unified Allied command in the West was created in Apr., 1918. It was headed by Marshal Foch, but under him the national commanders (Sir Douglas Haig for Britain, King Albert I for Belgium, and General Pershing for the United States) retained considerable authority. The Central Powers, however, had gained new strength through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Mar., 1918) with Russia. The resources of Ukraine seemed at their disposal, enabling them to balance to some extent the effects of the Allied blockade; most important, their forces could now be concentrated on the Western Front.

The critical German counteroffensive, known as the second battle of the Marne, was stopped just short of Paris (July-Aug., 1918). At this point Foch ordered a general counterattack that soon pushed the Germans back to their initial line (the so-called Hindenburg Line). The Allied push continued, with the British advancing in the north and the Americans attacking through the Argonne region of France. While the Germans were thus losing their forces on the Western Front, Bulgaria, invaded by the Allies under General Franchet d'Esperey, capitulated on Sept. 30, and Turkey concluded an armistice on Oct. 30. Austria-Hungary, in the process of disintegration, surrendered on Nov. 4 after the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto.

German resources were exhausted and German morale had collapsed. President Wilson's Fourteen Points were accepted by the new German chancellor, Maximilian, prince of Baden, as the basis of peace negotiations, but it was only after revolution had broken out in Germany that the armistice was at last signed (Nov. 11) at Compiègne. Germany was to evacuate its troops immediately from all territory W of the Rhine, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was declared void. The war ended without a single truly decisive battle having been fought, and Germany lost the war while its troops were still occupying territory from France to Crimea. This paradox became important in subsequent German history, when nationalists and militarists sought to blame the defeat on traitors on the home front rather than on the utter exhaustion of the German war machine and war economy.

Aftermath and Reckoning

World War I and the resulting peace treaties (see Versailles, Treaty of; Saint-Germain, Treaty of; Trianon, Treaty of; Neuilly, Treaty of; Sèvres, Treaty of) radically changed the face of Europe and precipitated political, social, and economic changes. By the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to acknowledge guilt for the war. Later, prompted by the Bolshevik publication of the secret diplomacy of the czarist Russian government, the warring powers gradually released their own state papers, and the long historical debate on war guilt began. It has with some justice been claimed that the conditions of the peace treaties were partially responsible for World War II. Yet when World War I ended, the immense suffering it had caused gave rise to a general revulsion to any kind of war, and a large part of mankind placed its hopes in the newly created League of Nations.

To calculate the total losses caused by the war is impossible. About 10 million dead and 20 million wounded is a conservative estimate. Starvation and epidemics raised the total in the immediate postwar years. Warfare itself had been revolutionized by the conflict (see air forces; chemical warfare; mechanized warfare; tank).

Bibliography

There is a tremendous amount of general and specialized literature on World War I. Classic accounts of the war are S. B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (rev. ed. 1930, repr. 1966) and B. E. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930, repr. 1966). Two short guides to the military history are B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War (1930, repr. 1963), and H. W. Baldwin, World War I (1962).

See also W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis (6 vol., 1923-31; repr. 1970); B. H. Liddell Hart, A History of the World War, 1914-1918 (1934); B. Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962); L. LaFore, The Long Fuse (1965); F. Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (tr. 1967); G. P. Hayes, World War I: A Compact History (1972); P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975); D. M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980); G. F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (1984); M. Ferro, The Great War (1987); T. Travers, The Killing Ground (1987, repr. 2004); D. Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (1988) and Cataclysm (2004); M. and S. Harries, The Last Days of Innocence (1997); H. Strachan, ed., World War I (1998) and, as author, The First World War (Vol. I, 2001) and The First World War (2004); N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (1999); J. Keegan, The First World War (1999); J. S. D. Eisenhower, Yanks (2001); E. D. Brose, The Kaiser's Army (2001); D. Fromkin, Europe's Last Summer (2004).


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Mideast & N. Africa Encyclopedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > Mideast & N. Africa EncyclopediaWar involving the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Montenegro, Japan, and the United States).

World War I (then called the Great War) began on 28 July 1914, when Austria declared war on Serbia (ostensibly because a Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the throne, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife on 28 June); on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia; on 3 August, Germany declared war on France; on 4 August, Germany invaded Belgium.

In retaliation and to aid an ally, Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August. The Russians crossed their western border at the Ukraine to enter Austro-Hungarian Galicia and pressed on to battle Germany, losing the Battle of Tannenberg (26 - 30 August), on what came to be called the Eastern Front. Germany marched on France in late August but was stopped in the First Battle of the Marne (6 - 10 September) on what came to be called the Western Front; here trench warfare ensued until March 1918.

In the Middle East, the leadership of the Ottoman Empire was divided among those who desired neutrality, those who wanted to join the Allies, and those who preferred to join the Central powers. The last group, led by Minister of War Enver Paşa prevailed. The Ottoman cabinet signed a secret alliance with Germany on 2 August. The next week the Ottomans purchased the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau, replacing two Turkish ships (being built by Britain but confiscated by Britain at the outbreak of war). Renamed Sultan Selim Yavuz and Midilli, they shelled Sevastopol and Odessa, Russian cities on the Black Sea, 28 October, bringing the Ottoman Empire into the war; Russia declared war on the Ottomans 4 November; Britain and France declared war on them 5 November. Germany dominated Ottoman military actions, with General Otto Liman von Sanders directing the army and Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the navy.

In November 1914, a British naval contingent bombarded the entrance to the Dardanelles, and in January 1915 the British organized to break through
the Turkish Straits (from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea at the Bosporus and Dardanelles). Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill convinced the war cabinet that an amphibious attack could accomplish this, thereby taking the Ottomans out of the war and opening a supply route to Russia. Britain's War Secretary Lord Kitchener sabotaged the plan by refusing to send the necessary land troops. Britain's navy unsuccessfully attacked in February and March; in April an Anglo-French army landed on the Gallipoli peninsula, where the Ottoman Turks caused heavy casualties to the Allies, which by then included Italian forces. The British-French-Italian forces almost broke through twice, but the lack of cooperation by the Russians at the Bosporus end of the Straits, faulty intelligence and, most of all, skillful tactics by the Turks and Germans led to a stalemate. The Allies withdrew from the Straits in January 1916.

Another area of major Middle Eastern hostilities was Egypt, under British protection since 18 December 1914. Khedive Abbas Hilmi II was deposed, and the British appointed Sharif Husayn ibn Ali to be sultan of Egypt. Cemal Paşa, Ottoman minister of marine, took over the Fourth Ottoman army - thereby controlling Syria, including Palestine. He sent his forces to make a surprise attack on the Suez Canal in February 1915; they crossed the Negev desert without detection. The Turkish forces could not hold the eastern bank of the canal and retired to the Sinai desert, maintaining bases in Maʿan, Beersheba, and Gaza. Cemal continued to raid the Suez Canal by air, forcing the British to keep a large force there, but in the end the British prevailed. A second assault on the canal was delayed until the summer of 1916 and failed totally. The Turco-German forces were on the defensive there until the end of the war, although in March and April 1917 they withstood a heavy British attack at Gaza, and moved to the offensive in the Yilderim Operation commanded by General Erich von Falkenhayn. But the Turko-German forces were defeated by a combination of factors, including the troops of British General Edmund Allenby (commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force), failure of some of their transport, and sabotage.

Major battles were fought in Russia, where in late 1914 the Turks attempted to take Kars and Batum. In the battles of 1915 and 1916 the Russians took Erzerum, Van, Trabzon, and Erzinjan. They were aided by Armenians - revolutionaries and irregulars. In 1916, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), commander of the Second Ottoman Army, joined the Third Army on the Caucasus front, but little was accomplished due to scarce ammunition, impossible conditions for transportation, and rampant disease. The two revolutions in Russia also affected the Caucasus front, as the Russian troops (except the Armenian and Georgian divisions) withdrew and went home to attend to domestic affairs in 1917. The Turks then occupied Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, but Georgian and German forces retook Batum. A Bolshevik-Armenian coup in Baku and the killing of ten thousand Turks there produced a Turkish drive to recapture the city in September 1918 and to kill many Armenians. At the end of the war, the Caucasus became the Allies' problem.

Iraq was the scene for the major hostilities of the Mesopotamia Campaign. British forces from India seized Basra before Turkey declared war. Traveling up to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Anglo-Indian forces under General Sir Charles Townshend took Kut al-Amara in 1915. In November, his army was defeated south of Baghdad and surrendered to the Sixth Turkish
Army at Kut al-Amara in April 1916. Halil Paşa erred in allowing the Anglo-Indian forces to remain in the south, for they reestablished their hold there, built a railroad, and under Britain's General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, retook Kut al-Amara in March 1917. Baghdad fell immediately after, and the Anglo-Indian forces headed north to Mosul (on the west bank of the Tigris), which they failed to reach by the time of the Mudros Armistice (30 October 1918).

Two national groups within the Ottoman Empire openly aided the enemy during the war: the Arabs and the Armenians. The Armenians followed the orders of the head of the Armenian Orthodox Church (who lived in Yerevan in the Caucasus) that the Russian czar was the protector of all Armenians. Some Armenians rebelled; in the region of Van and Erzurum, Armenians openly battled the Turks proclaiming an Armenian government in Van, April 1915 - which touched off the Armenian deportations and the massive killing of Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915/16.

Cemal Paşa's actions in Syria - in arresting and hanging about thirty Arabs in Beirut and Damascus 1915/16, many from prominent families, as well as his refusal to share grain with the starving Lebanese in 1916 - pushed many Arabs to desire independence from Ottoman Turkey. This desire was furthered by the proclamation of Arab independence by Sharif Husayn ibn Ali of the Hijaz in June 1916. Husayn's action was part of the outcome of the secret Husayn-McMahon Correspondence.

Another secret negotiation over the division of the Arab Middle East was the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France, Britain, and Russia. An open negotiation between the Zionists and the British had led to the issuance of the November 1917 pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration, concerning a "Jewish national home" in Palestine.

The failure of the German-Turkish campaigns led to the buildup of British troops in Egypt and their move into Palestine. General Allenby led his Egyptian Expeditionary Forces west of the Jordan river, and Jerusalem fell to them in December 1917. Joined by French military detachments, he moved north to take Lebanon, while Hijazi forces, aided by Colonel T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Colonel C. C. Wilson, and Sir Reginald Wingate, paralleled Allenby's actions east of the Jordan River. Damascus fell in October 1918 - and although Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and the Seventh Turkish Army held Aleppo, the armistice at Mudros ended all fighting, 30 October 1918.

Four years of war had devastated Ottoman Turkey, and the old order died. A new period for the Middle East began with the peace treaties, the rise to power in Turkey of Mustafa Kemal, the fall of empires, and the creation of new nation-states and spheres of influence.

Bibliography

Barker, A. J. The Bastard War: The Mesopotamian Campaign of1914 - 1918. New York: Dial Press, 1967.

Kedourie, Elie. England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914 - 1921. Hassocks, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1978.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

— SARA REGUER


Intelligence Encyclopedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > Intelligence & Security EncyclopediaWorld War I, which spanned a four-year period between 1914 and 1918, erupted as a result of the complicated European alliance system. The assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, by Serbian nationalists sparked pan-European conflict when Russia, backed by France, declared their intent to defend Serbia, should Austria declare war. The Austrian government, with its ally Germany, declared war on Serbia three days later. British forces joined the French and Russians, but the United States, home to large immigrant populations of all of the fighting nations, resolved to remain out of the conflict.

The United States declared its neutrality, but the nation harbored Allied sympathies. United States manufacture and trafficking of munitions and supplies to aid British and French forces angered Germany and Austria. The German Navy attacked American ships, potentially loaded with contraband, in the Atlantic, and sent intelligence agents to conduct sabotage operations within the United States. In 1917, German hostility prompted the United States to enter the conflict in Europe.

The war ended in 1918, followed by the formal surrender of German and Austrian forces with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. However, World War I forever changed modern warfare, introducing the concepts of total warfare and weapons of mass destruction.

National intelligence communities. At the outbreak of the war, many nations had weak or fledgling national intelligence communities. The French government and military both maintained trained intelligence forces, but no central agency processed intelligence information, or facilitated the distribution of critical intelligence information. Russia had special agents of the Czar, and secret police forces, but its foreign intelligence infrastructure was almost non-existent.

The United States developed stronger domestic intelligence and investigative services in the decade before World War I. However, the country's lingering isolationism and neutral posture in the war hampered the development of a foreign intelligence corps until the United States entered the war in 1917.

Britain had a well-developed military intelligence system, coordinated through the Office of Military Intelligence. British intelligence forces engaged in a range of specialized intelligence activities, from wiretapping to human espionage. The vast expanse of British colonial holdings across the globe provided numerous outposts for intelligence operations, and facilitated espionage. British forces were among the first to employ a unit of agents devoted to the practice of industrial espionage, conducting wartime surveillance of German weapons manufacturing.

Of all the warring nations in 1914, Germany possessed the most developed, sophisticated, and extensive intelligence community. The civilian German intelligence service, the Abwehr, employed a comprehensive network of spies and informants across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and in the United States. German intelligence successfully employed wire taps, infiltrating many foreign government offices before the outbreak of the war.

World War I forced most national intelligence services to rapidly modernize, revising espionage and intelligence tradecraft to fit changing battlefield tactics and technological advances. The experience of the war formed the first modern intelligence services, serving as forbearers of the intelligence communities in France, Britain, Germany, and the Untied States today.

Sabotage. German intelligence trained special agents, most of whom used professional or diplomatic covers in the United States, to conduct acts of sabotage against United States industries that aided the British, French, and Russian allied forces in the war. International rules of engagement limited the ways in which Germany and Austria-Hungary could provoke or attack the declaredly neutral United States. German high command desired to cripple United States aid capabilities, but not provoke the nation to enter the conflict. German undercover agents attacked railroads, warehouses, shipyards, and military instillations in 1914 and 1915. Agents attempted to make these attacks appear as accidents, but United States authorities caught several potential saboteurs before they destroyed property, unmasking the German plot. Anti-spy hysteria fueled public fear and anger regarding the acts of German saboteurs.

German and Austrian agents carried out more than 50 acts of sabotage against United States targets on American soil during the course of the war. Most of the attacks occurred in New York City and the region surrounding New York harbor. The most famous and devastating attack, the sabotage of Black Tom Pier, shook buildings and broke windows across New York City and suburban New Jersey. The July 29, 1916, explosion destroyed several ships and waterfront ammunition storage facilities. The attack decimated Black Tom Pier, the staging area for most shipments bound for the Western Front in Europe.

German sabotage attacks in the United States, while successful, only managed to strike at a handful of military and shipping targets. The United States government continued to aid British and French forces in Europe, but the attacks inflamed pro-war sentiment.

Communications and cryptology. Advancements in communications and transportation necessitated the development of new means of protecting messages from falling into enemy hands. Though an ancient art, cryptology evolved to fit modern communication needs during World War I. The telegraph aided long-distance communication between command and the battlefront, but lines were vulnerable to enemy tapping. All parties in the conflict relied heavily on codes to protect sensitive information. Cryptology, the science of codes, advanced considerably during the first year of the war. Complex mathematical codes took the place of any older, simple replacement and substitution codes. Breaking the new codes required the employment of cryptology experts trained in mathematics, logic, or modern languages. As the operation of codes became more involved, the necessity for centralized cryptanalysis bureaus became evident. These bureaus employed code breakers, translators, counterintelligence personnel, and agents of espionage.

The most common codes used during the war continued to be substitution codes. However, most important messages were encrypted. Encryption further disguised messages by applying a second, mathematical code to the encoded message. Encryption and coding both required the use of codebooks to send and receive messages. These books proved to be a security liability for the military. During the course of the war, four separate German diplomatic and military corps code books fell into the hands of British intelligence, compromising the security of German communications for the rest of the war.

Both the Germans and the British broke each other's World War I codes with varying success. The German Abwehr broke several British diplomatic and Naval codes, permitting German U-boats to track and sink ships containing munitions. British cryptanalysis forces at Room 40, the military intelligence code-breaking bureau, successfully deciphered numerous German codes, thanks in large part to the capture of German codebooks. In 1917, British intelligence intercepted a diplomatic message between Berlin and Mexico City, relayed through Washington. The message, known as the Zimmerman Telegram, noted German plans to conduct unrestricted warfare against American ships in the Atlantic, and offered to return parts of Texas and California to Mexico in exchange for their assistance. Discovery of the Zimmerman Telegram prompted the United States to enter World War I.

Cryptology, once the exclusive tool of diplomats and military leaders, became the responsibility of the modern intelligence community. After World War I, many nations dissolved their wartime intelligence services, but kept their cryptanalysis bureaus, a nod to the growing importance of communications intelligence and espionage.

Trench warfare and the evolution of strategic espionage tradecraft. The advent of trench warfare necessitated the development of new surveillance and espionage techniques to locate enemy positions and gauge troop strength. Crossing "no man's land," the area between trench fronts, was dangerous, and using human scouts proved costly to both sides in the early months of the war. Military intelligence officers instead relied on networks of local citizens for information on enemy advances and supply lines. Finding sympathetic locals was possible for both sides in the trenches of Northern France, as the battlefront crossed the linguistically and culturally diverse German-French region of Alsace-Lorraine.

The airplane was a new invention when war broke out in Europe. Though the device was unproven in war, German commanders recognized that air combat and aerial bombardment were the most significant war tactics of the future. Britain developed fighter squadrons of its own to combat the German air menace. Despite the fame of the German Red Baron and World War I aerial dogfights, airpower was a very small part of the war effort on both sides. However, low-flying airplanes proved invaluable surveillance and intelligence tools, permitting military command to obtain accurate and up-to-date information on enemy trench locations and fortifications. British forces experimented with aerial surveillance photography, trying several cameras, but the medium had little success during the course of World War I.

German and Austrian forces introduced the use of balloons to monitor weather patterns and deliver explosive charges. Sometimes, dummy balloons were sent across enemy lines so that scouts could monitor where individual balloons were shot down, thus mapping probable enemy strongholds. British and French forces soon reciprocated by using balloons of their own, but by the time they introduced the devices, balloons signaled the impending use of a far more sinister weapon, poison gas.

Chemical weapons. Although military strategists during the nineteenth century noted the potential use of poison gas on the battlefield, the development of the first, World War I–era chemical weapon happened by accident. Seeking to conserve TNT, British and German forces substituted two different agents, Lyddite and Dianisdine salts respectively, into their explosive charges. The chemicals produced a tearing agent and mild respiratory irritant, sending victims into violent fits of sneezing.

The French first developed strong tear gas agents for battlefield use in June 1914. French forces first employed the gas in the form of tear-gas grenades, in August 1914. German scientists created a similar agent, and were the first to research various types of poison gas for extensive battle use. In October 1914, the Germans fired the first gasfilled shells. A few months later, experiments with filled shells were unsuccessful. Gasses failed to properly vaporize on the Eastern Front during the freezing winter. Variable winds on the Western Front made dispersal of gasses difficult.

By 1915, the German, French, and British armies all sought to develop chemical agents that would help end the relentless stalemate of trench warfare. Outdated battlefield tactics ordered soldiers to charge fortified trenches, across open fields strewn with barbed wire. Military commanders hoped poison gas would help soften or destroy manned defenses, permitting successful seizure of enemy positions.

The first major use of strong poison gas was an asphyxiant and respiratory irritant, chlorine, at the Second Battle of Ypres. German forces mounted a heavy bombardment of the French, British, and Algerian Ypres Salient. In the evening, the firing grew more intense, and Algerian troops noticed a peculiar yellow cloud drifting toward the Salient. French military commanders believed the yellow smoke hid an oncoming German advance, so soldiers were ordered to stand their ground and man machine gun defenses. As a result, many men died and the Salient was broken, forcing the Allies to retreat.

Germany drew immediate criticism for its inhumane use of gas on the battlefield. German diplomats assured rival powers that poison gas would be used regularly against their forces, provoking further condemnation. Both sides of the conflict employed agents of espionage to spy on the production of new weapons. Informants told Allied authorities about the possible German use of chlorine gas at Ypres. After Ypres, intelligence personnel changed its tactics to obtain specific information on the gasses each side was producing, and how they intended to weaponize the chemicals.

The British government commissioned Special Gas Companies to create poisons for wartime uses. On September 24, 1915, Allied forces retaliated the initial German gas attacks. Setting some 400 chlorine gas canisters along the German lines at Loos, British forces began the gas attack at dawn. A few minutes after sunrise, the prevailing winds suddenly shifted, driving the cloud of gas back over British lines. The operation was disastrous, Britain suffered more causalities on the day than did Germany.

After the incident at Loos and several similar gas reversals, both British and German forces experimented with different means of delivering poison gasses to minimize friendly-fire exposure to the chemicals. The creation of stronger, more deadly agents, such as Phosgene (an asphyxiant) and later Mustard Gas (a blister agent that burned exposed skin and eyes), necessitated a remote delivery system. Gas canisters were dropped from balloons and airplanes, but the system was not always reliable and targeting specific locations was difficult. Advancement in ammunition design, and the chemical agents themselves, finally permitted chemical agents to be placed in the payload of long-range artillery shells.

Despite more efficient delivery mechanisms, chemical warfare eventually became less effective on the battle-field. All armies in the conflict quickly devised protective gear to shield soldiers from exposure to chemical agents. Cotton wraps dipped in baking soda and gas masks greatly reduced the number of casualties from most gasses, though they offered no protection from the increasingly used Mustard Gas. Battlefield toxins became more deadly, especially with the limited use of cyanide derivatives and prussic acid, a crippling nerve gas. However, protective clothing and gas masks limited mortality from rare gasses.

Better intelligence also helped combat casualties incurred from gas attacks. Intelligence aided troops in the trenches to reposition to avoid an impending attack. Identification of the type of gasses possessed by the immediate enemy corps further detracted from the element of surprise, upon which gas attacks heavily relied. Despite its diminished success, gas continued to be regularly deployed.

The legacy of World War I. By the end of World War I, over 100,000 people were killed, and one million injured, by poison gas attacks. Those injured often suffered debilitating injuries, creating further public ire for chemical weapons. Civilians were inadvertently injured by contaminated areas, especially by the long-lingering mustard gas. After the war, the newly established League of Nations moved to amend the international rules of engagement to disallow the use of poison gas. Though the motion gained public and diplomatic support, military leaders were hesitant to agree to a total ban on chemical warfare. In 1925, the Geneva Protocol outlawed the use of chemical and biological weapons in war against human targets. However, the treaty did not prevent their further use, and chemical and biological weapons attacks by rogue nations or terrorist organizations have now reemerged as a global threat.

The Armistice created the political map of Europe that sparked the powder keg of World War II. The German government collapsed under the weight of reparation payments and hyperinflation, only to emerge from economic troubles under the reign of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. In the East, small ethnic nations were combined into larger states, embittering nationalists that hoped the war would bring freedom from Austrian, Russian, or German domination. Russia began a tumultuous revolution in 1917, withdrawing from the war to concentrate on domestic affairs.

The legacy of World War I extends beyond World War II, however. Many nations participating in the conflict realized the necessity for some sort of permanent intelligence services, whether cryptology and surveillance units, or large government intelligence agencies. The nature of war, and the business of intelligence in wartime and peacetime were altered by the events of World War I.

Further Reading

Books

Gilbert, Martin. The First World War: A Complete History. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.


Law Encyclopedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > Law & Legal Issues > Law EncyclopediaThis entry contains information applicable to United States law only.


World War I was an international conflict primarily involving European nations that was fought between 1914 and 1918. The United States did not enter the conflict until April 1917, but its entry was the decisive event of the war, enabling the Allies (Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia) to defeat the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria). The leadership of President Woodrow Wilson led to both the conclusion of hostilities and the creation of the League of Nations, an international organization dedicated to resolving disputes without war.

The war began on July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. During the late nineteenth century, European nations had negotiated military alliances with each other that called for mutual protection. The Austria-Hungary declaration of war triggered these alliance commitments, leading to the widening of the war between the Allies and Central Powers.

During the next four years, the war was fought primarily on three fronts and on the Atlantic Ocean. The western front was in France, where Germany was opposed by France, Great Britain, and eventually the United States. The eastern front was in Russia, where Germany and Austria-Hungary opposed Russia. The southern front was in Serbia and involved Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and then moved into France. German forces were unable to achieve a decisive victory, however, and the war soon became a conflict of fixed battle lines. French, British, and German soldiers lived and fought in trenches, periodically making assaults on the enemy by entering the "no man's land" between the two sets of trenches. The use of machine guns, tanks, gas warfare, and artillery in these confined battlefields generated unprecedented human carnage on the western front.

Though Germany had more success on the eastern front, neither side had sufficient economic and military strength to achieve victory. In 1916 and early 1917, Wilson sought to bring about negotiations between the Allies and Central Powers that would lead, in his words, to "peace without victory." Wilson's efforts at first appeared promising, but German military successes convinced the Central Powers that they could win the war.

Germany's use of submarine warfare proved to be the key element in provoking the United States' entry into the war. In 1915 a German submarine had torpedoed without warning the British passenger steamship Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 persons died, including 128 U.S. citizens. Popular feeling in the United States against Germany was intense, leading to calls for declaring war on Germany. Wilson, however, sought a diplomatic solution. Though Germany rebuked his call for assuming responsibility for the tragedy, it did not sink any more passenger liners without warning.

Wilson abandoned his peacemaking efforts when Germany announced that unrestricted submarine warfare would begin on February 1, 1917. This meant that U.S. merchant ships were in peril, despite the fact that the United States was a neutral in the war. Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3 and asked Congress later that month for authority to arm merchant ships and take other protective measures. In mid-March German submarines sank three U.S. merchant ships, with heavy loss of life. Wilson called a special session of Congress for April 2 and asked for a declaration of war on Germany. Congress obliged, and on April 6, 1917, Wilson signed the declaration.

The United States immediately moved to raise a large military force by instituting a military draft. It took months, however, to raise, train, and dispatch troops to Europe. The first eighty-five thousand members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), under the command of General John J. Pershing, arrived in France in June 1917. By the end of the war in November 1918, there were two million soldiers in the AEF.

Germany realized that U.S. war production and financial strength reduced Germany's chances of victory. In March 1918 Germany launched its last great offensive on the western front. U.S. troops saw their first extended action in the Battle of the Marne, halting the German advance on June 4. During the second Battle of the Marne, U.S. and French troops again stopped the German advance and successfully counterattacked. The Allies began pushing back the German army all along the western front, signaling the beginning of the end of German resistance.

Wilson renewed his peace efforts by proposing a framework for negotiations. On January 8, 1918, he delivered an address to Congress that named Fourteen Points to be used as the guide for a peace settlement. The fourteenth point called for a general association of nations that would guarantee political independence and territorial integrity for all countries. In October 1918 Germany asked Wilson to arrange a general armistice based on the Fourteen Points and the immediate start of peace negotiations. Germany finally capitulated and signed an armistice on November 11, 1918.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles ended World War I and imposed disarmament, reparations, and territorial changes on Germany. The treaty also established the League of Nations, an international organization dedicated to resolving world conflicts peacefully. Wilson, however, was unable to convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty, because it was opposed to U.S. membership in the League of Nations.

World War I also saw the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The specter of a worldwide Communist movement generated fears in the United States that socialists, anarchists, and Communists were undermining democratic institutions. During the war, socialist opponents of the war were convicted of sedition and imprisoned. In 1920 the federal government rounded up six thousand aliens who it considered to be politically subversive. These "Palmer Raids," named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, violated basic civil liberties. Agents entered and searched homes without warrants, held persons without specific charges for long periods of time, and denied them legal counsel. Hundreds of aliens were deported.

See: Communism; socialism.


Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: Wartime Occult Phenomena
Top Home > Library > Religion & Spirituality > Occultism & Parapsychology EncyclopediaThe emergence of Spiritualism heightened interest in the separations and deaths caused by war. Thus it was not surprising that a number of stories of supernatural events should have crystallized around the international circumstances of World War I. Perhaps the most striking of these was the alleged vision of the Angels of Mons. The first account was the story in the London Evening News of September 14, 1915, by writer Arthur Machen describing a statement by an officer who had been in the retreat from Mons. This officer saw a large body of horse-men who later vanished. Machen suggested that they were the spirits of the English bowmen who had fought at Agincourt.

Although this story was fiction, it stimulated corroborative reports of phantom armies. The most significant of these were repeated by a Red Cross nurse, Phylis Campbell, who claimed to have heard several different stories of phantom soldiers. In his book On the Side of the Angels (1915), Harold Begbie repeated the claims that soldiers saw a vision of angels during the retreat from Mons and gives the narrative of a soldier, who states that an officer came up to him "in a state of great anxiety" and pointed out to him a "… strange light which seemed to be quite distinctly outlined and was not a reflection of the moon, nor were there any clouds in the neighbourhood. The light became brighter and I could see quite distinctly three shapes, one in the centre having what looked like outspread wings. The other two were not so large, but were quite plainly distinct from the centre one. They appeared to have a long, loose-hanging garment of a golden tint and they were above the German line facing us. We stood watching them for about three-quarters of an hour."

All the men in the battalion who saw this, with the exception of five, were killed. Begbie went on to say that a nurse told him that a dying soldier spoke to her of the reluctance of the Germans to attack the British line, "because of the thousands of troops behind us." It is believed this man had heard these claims from German prisoners and believed in the ghostly nature of those supporting hosts.

Ralph Shirley published a pamphlet titled Prophecies and Omens of the Great War (1914; 1915) dealing with various oracular utterances on the struggle.

Stories were also common in the early period of the war regarding the appearance of saintly and protective figures resembling the patrons of the several allied countries. Thus the English were convinced that in certain engagements they had seen the figure of Saint George mounted on a white charger and the French were equally sure that the figure in question was either Saint Denis or Joan of Arc. Wounded men in base hospitals asked for medallions or coins on which the likenesses of these saints were impressed in order to verify the statements they made.

Sources:

Brown, Raymond Lemment. The Phantom Soldiers. New York: Drake, 1975.

Machen, Arthur. The Angels of Mons: The Bowman and Other Legends. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915.

Stein, Gordon. Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.


History Dictionary: World War I
Top Home > Library > History, Politics & Society > History Dictionary
A war fought from 1914 to 1918 between the Allies, notably Britain, France, Russia, and Italy (which entered in 1915), and the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The war was sparked by the assassination in 1914 of the heir to the throne of Austria (see Sarajevo). Prolonged stalemates, trench warfare, and immense casualties on both sides marked the fighting. The United States sought to remain neutral but was outraged by the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 and by Germany's decision in 1916 to start unrestricted submarine warfare. In 1917, the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies and helped to tip the balance in their favor. In full retreat on its western front, Germany asked for an armistice, or truce, which was granted on November 11, 1918. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919, Germany had to make extensive concessions to the Allies and pay large penalties. The government leaders of World War I included Georges Clemenceau of France, David Lloyd George of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Woodrow Wilson of the United States. World War I was known as the Great War, or the World War, until World War II broke out. (See map, next page.)


German discontent over the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and over the Weimar Republic that had accepted its provisions, led to the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, who pursued warlike policies not adequately opposed by the rest of Europe. Thus, barely twenty years after World War I was over, World War II began.
A huge number of books, songs, and poems have been written about World War I. (See All Quiet on the Western Front; A Farewell to Arms; and “In Flanders Fields”.)
“Over There” was among the popular songs produced in the United States during the war.
American foot soldiers in World War I were popularly called doughboys.
November 11, the day the fighting ended, is observed in the United States as Veterans' Day.



Wikipedia: World War I
Top Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia"Great War" redirects here. For other uses, see Great War (disambiguation).
"World War One" redirects here. For other uses, see World War One (disambiguation).

World War I

Clockwise from top: Trenches on the Western Front; a British Mark IV Tank crossing a trench; Royal Navy battleship HMS Irresistible sinking after striking a mine at the Battle of the Dardanelles; a Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks, and German Albatros D.III biplanes
Date 28 July 1914–11 November 1918 (Armistice Treaty)
Treaty of Versailles signed 28 June 1919

Location Europe, Africa and the Middle East (briefly in China and the Pacific Islands)
Result Allied victory; end of the German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian Empires; foundation of new countries in Europe and the Middle East; transfer of German colonies to other powers; establishment of the League of Nations.

Belligerents
Allied (Entente) Powers

Russia (until 1917)
British Empire
United States (after 1917)
France
Italy
and others
Central Powers
Austria-Hungary
German Empire
Ottoman Empire
Bulgaria


Commanders
Leaders and commanders Leaders and commanders
Casualties and losses
Military dead:
5,525,000
Military wounded:
12,831,500
Military missing:
4,121,000
Total:
22,477,500 KIA, WIA or MIA ...further details. Military dead:
4,386,000
Military wounded:
8,388,000
Military missing:
3,629,000
Total:
16,403,000 KIA, WIA or MIA ...further details.

[show]v • d • eTheatres of World War I

European
Balkans – Gallipoli – Western Front – Macedonian Front – Eastern Front – Italian Front
Middle Eastern
Caucasus – Mesopotamia – Sinai and Palestine – Persia – Arab Revolt
African
South-West Africa – West Africa – East Africa – North Africa
Asian and Pacific
Other
Atlantic Ocean – Mediterranean – Naval – Aerial


World War I (abbreviated as WW-I, WWI, or WW1), also known as the First World War, the Great War, the World War (prior to the outbreak of the Second World War), and the War to End All Wars, was a military conflict that lasted from 1914 to 1918 which involved most of the world's great powers,[1] assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies, centred around the Triple Entente, and the Central Powers, centred around the Triple Alliance.[2] More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history.[3][4] More than 15 million people were killed, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in history.[5]

The assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, is seen as the immediate trigger of the war, though long-term causes, such as imperialistic foreign policy, played a major role. Ferdinand's assassination at the hands of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip resulted in demands against the Kingdom of Serbia.[6] Several alliances that had been formed over the past decades were invoked, so within weeks the major powers were at war; with all having colonies, the conflict soon spread around the world.

By the war's end, four major imperial powers—the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires—had been militarily and politically defeated, with the last two ceasing to exist.[7] The revolutionised Soviet Union emerged from the Russian Empire, while the map of central Europe was completely redrawn into numerous smaller states.[8] The League of Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The European nationalism spawned by the war, the repercussions of Germany's defeat, and of the Treaty of Versailles would eventually lead to the beginning of World War II in 1939.[9]

Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Chronology
2.1 Opening hostilities
2.1.1 Confusion among the Central Powers
2.1.2 African campaigns
2.1.3 Serbian campaign
2.1.4 German forces in Belgium and France
2.1.5 Asia and the Pacific
2.2 Early stages
2.2.1 Trench warfare begins
2.3 Naval war
2.4 Southern theatres
2.4.1 War in the Balkans
2.4.2 Ottoman Empire
2.4.3 Italian participation
2.4.4 Romanian participation
2.4.5 Fighting in India
2.5 Eastern Front
2.5.1 Initial actions
2.5.2 Russian Revolution
2.6 Wilhelm declares victory
2.7 1917–1918
2.7.1 Entry of the United States
2.7.1.1 Isolationism
2.7.1.2 Making the case
2.7.1.3 U.S. declaration of war on Germany
2.7.1.4 First active U.S. participation
2.7.2 Austrian offer of separate peace
2.7.3 German Spring Offensive of 1918
2.7.4 New states under war zone
2.7.5 Allied victory: summer and autumn 1918
2.8 Armistices and capitulations
2.8.1 Allied superiority and the stab-in-the-back legend, November 1918
3 Technology
4 War crimes
4.1 Genocide and ethnic cleansing
4.1.1 Ottoman Empire
4.1.2 Russian Empire
4.2 Rape of Belgium
5 Soldiers' experiences
5.1 Prisoners of war
5.2 Military attachés and war correspondents
5.3 Opposition to the war
5.3.1 Conscription
6 Aftermath
6.1 Peace treaties
6.2 Social trauma
7 Legacy
7.1 Memorials
7.2 Later conflicts
7.3 Discontent in Germany
7.4 New national identities
7.5 Economic effects
8 Cognate names for the war
9 See also
9.1 Media
9.2 Animated maps
10 Notes
11 References
12 External links


Background
Main article: Causes of World War I
In the 19th century, the major European powers had gone to great lengths to maintain a balance of power throughout Europe, resulting by 1900, in a complex network of political and military alliances throughout the continent.[2] These had started in 1815, with the Holy Alliance between Germany (then Prussia), Russia, and Austria–Hungary. Then, in October 1873, German Chancellor Bismarck negotiated the League of the Three Emperors (German: Dreikaiserbund) between the monarchs of Austria–Hungary, Russia and Germany. This agreement failed because Austria–Hungary and Russia could not agree over Balkan policy, leaving Germany and Austria–Hungary in an alliance formed in 1879, called the Dual Alliance. This was seen as a method of countering Russian influence in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire continued to weaken.[2] In 1882, this alliance was expanded to include Italy in what became the Triple Alliance.[10]

After 1870, European conflict was averted largely due to a carefully planned network of treaties between the German Empire and the remainder of Europe—orchestrated by Chancellor Bismarck. He especially worked to hold Russia at Germany's side to avoid a two-front war with France and Russia. With the ascension of Wilhelm II as German Emperor (Kaiser), Bismarck's system of alliances was 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 bi-national agreement formed the Triple Entente.[2]

HMS Dreadnought. A naval arms race existed between the United Kingdom and GermanyGerman industrial and economic power had grown greatly after unification and the foundation of the empire in 1870. From the mid-1890s on, the government of Wilhelm II used this base to devote significant economic resources to building up the Imperial German Navy (German: Kaiserliche Marine), established by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, in rivalry with the British Royal Navy for world naval supremacy.[11] As a result, both nations strove to out-build each other in terms of capital ships. With the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, the British Empire expanded on its significant advantage over its German rivals.[11] The arms race between Britain and Germany eventually extended to the rest of Europe, with all the major powers devoting their industrial base to the production of the equipment and weapons necessary for a pan-European conflict.[12] Between 1908 and 1913, the military spending of the European powers increased by 50%.[13]

Austria–Hungary precipitated the Bosnian crisis of 1908–1909 by officially annexing the former Ottoman territory of Bosnia Herzegovina, which it had occupied since 1878. This greatly angered the Pan-Slavic and thus pro-Serbian Romanov Dynasty who ruled Russia and the Kingdom of Serbia, because Bosnia Herzegovina contained a significant Slavic Serbian population.[14] Russian political maneuvering in the region destabilised peace accords that were already fracturing in what was known as "the Powder keg of Europe".[14]

In 1912 and 1913, the First Balkan War was fought between the Balkan League and the fracturing Ottoman Empire. The resulting Treaty of London further shrank the Ottoman Empire, creating an independent Albanian State while enlarging the territorial holdings of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. When Bulgaria attacked both Serbia and Greece on 16 June 1913 it lost most of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece and Southern Dobruja to Romania in the 33 day Second Balkan War, further destabilising the region.[15]

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.[16] This began a period of diplomatic manoeuvring between Austria–Hungary, Germany, Russia, France and Britain called the July Crisis. Wanting to end Serbian interference in Bosnia conclusively, Austria–Hungary delivered the July Ultimatum to Serbia, a series of ten demands which were deliberately unacceptable, made with the intention of deliberately initiating a war with Serbia.[17] When Serbia acceded to only eight of the ten demands levied against it in the ultimatum, Austria–Hungary declared war on Serbia 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".[18]

The Russian Empire, unwilling to allow Austria–Hungary to eliminate its influence in the Balkans, and in support of its long time Serb proteges, ordered a partial mobilisation one day later.[10] When the German Empire began to mobilise on 30 July 1914, France—sporting significant animosity over 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.[19]

Chronology
Opening hostilities
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 never tested in exercises. Austro–Hungarian leaders believed Germany would cover its northern flank against Russia.[20] Germany, however, envisioned Austria–Hungary directing the majority 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 plan which detailed Germany's specific war aims and the conditions that Germany sought to force upon the Allied Powers, was outlined by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.

African campaigns
Lettow surrendering his forces to the British at AbercornMain 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 remainder of the war. The German colonial forces in German East Africa, led by Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, fought a guerilla warfare campaign for the duration of World War I, surrendering only two weeks after the armistice took effect in Europe.[21]

Serbian campaign
Serbian Army during its retreat towards AlbaniaMain 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.[22]

German forces in Belgium and France
German soldiers in a railway goods van on the way to the front in 1914. A message on the car spells out "Trip to Paris"; early in the war all sides expected the conflict to be a short one.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) executed 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.[6] The plan called for the right flank of the German advance to converge on Paris and initially, the Germans were very successful, particularly in the Battle of the Frontiers (14 August–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 September–12 September). The last days of this battle signified the end of mobile warfare in the west.[6]

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 exacerbated problems of insufficient speed of advance from rail-heads not foreseen by the German General Staff. The Central Powers were thereby 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 obtaining an early victory.[23]

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 Battle 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.[24][25]

Early stages
Trench warfare begins
Main article: Western Front (World War I)
Military tactics before World War I had failed to keep pace with advances in technology. These changes resulted in the building of impressive defence systems, which out of date tactics could not break through for most of the war. Barbed wire was a significant hindrance to massed infantry advances. Artillery, vastly more lethal than in the 1870s, coupled with machine guns, made crossing open ground very difficult.[26] The Germans introduced poison gas; it soon became used by both sides, though it never proved decisive in winning a battle. Its effects were brutal, causing slow and painful death, and poison gas became one of the most-feared and best-remembered horrors of the war. Commanders on both sides failed to develop tactics for breaching entrenched positions without heavy casualties. In time, however, technology began to produce new offensive weapons, such as the tank.[27] 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 manoeuvre's, in the so-called 'Race to the Sea'. Britain and France soon found themselves facing entrenched German forces from Lorraine to Belgium's Flemish coast.[6] Britain and France sought to take the offensive, while Germany defended the occupied territories; consequently, German trenches were generally much better constructed than those of their enemy. Anglo–French trenches were only intended to be 'temporary' before their forces broke through German defences.[28] Both sides attempted to break the stalemate using scientific and technological advances. On 22 April 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans — (in violation of 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.[29] At the Third Battle of Ypres, Canadian and ANZAC troops took the village of Passchendaele.

In the trenches: Royal Irish Rifles in a communications trench on the first day on the Somme, 1 July 1916.The British Army endured the bloodiest day in its history, suffering 57,470 casualties including 19,240 dead on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Most of the casualties occurred in the first hour of the attack. The entire Somme offensive cost the British Army almost half a million men.[30]

Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next two years, though protracted German action at Verdun throughout 1916,[31] 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.[32]

Canadian troops advancing behind a British Mark II tank at the Battle of Vimy Ridge. A French assault on German positions. Champagne, France, 1917.Throughout 1915–17, the British Empire and France suffered more casualties than Germany, due both to the strategic and tactical stances chosen by the sides. At the strategic level, while the Germans only mounted a single main offensive at Verdun, the Allies made several attempts to break through German lines. At the tactical level, Ludendorff's doctrine of "elastic defence" was well suited for trench warfare. This defence had a relatively lightly defended forward position and a more powerful main position farther back beyond artillery range, from which an immediate and powerful counter-offensive could be launched.[33][34]

Ludendorff wrote on the fighting in 1917, "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."[35]

On the battle of the Menin Road Ridge Ludendorff wrote: "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."[36]

Officers and senior enlisted men of the Bermuda Militia Artillery's Bermuda Contingent, Royal Garrison Artillery, in Europe.Around 1.1 to 1.2 million soldiers from the British and Dominion armies were on the Western Front at any one time[37] 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.

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 were able for the first time to overrun, rapidly reinforce and hold the ridge defending the coal-rich Douai plain.[38][39]

Naval war
Main article: Naval Warfare of World War I
The British Grand Fleet making steam for Scapa Flow, 1914At 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, the bulk 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 encountered elements of the British fleet. The German flotilla, along with 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.[40]

A battleship squadron of the Hochseeflotte at seaSoon after the outbreak of hostilities, Britain initiated a naval blockade of Germany. The strategy proved effective, cutting off vital military and civilian supplies, although this blockade violated generally accepted international law codified by several international agreements of the past two centuries.[41] Britain mined international waters to prevent any ships from entering entire sections of ocean, causing danger to even neutral ships.[42] Since there was limited response to this tactic, Germany expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare.[43]

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. 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, out manoeuvred 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.[44]

German U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between North America and Britain.[45] The nature of submarine warfare meant that attacks often came without warning, giving the crews of the merchant ships little hope of survival.[45][46] The United States launched a protest, and Germany modified 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).[47] Finally, in early 1917 Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, realizing the Americans would eventually enter the war.[45][48] Germany sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the U.S. could transport a large army overseas, but were only able to maintain five long range U-boats on station, to limited effect.[45]

First U-boat of the German fleet surrendering near Tower Bridge, London, 1918.The U-boat threat lessened in 1917, when merchant ships entered convoys escorted by destroyers. This tactic made it difficult for U-boats to find targets, which significantly lessened losses; after the introduction of hydrophone and depth charges, accompanying destroyers might attack a submerged submarine with some hope of success. The convoy system slowed the flow of supplies, since ships had to wait as convoys were assembled. The solution to the delays was an extensive program to build new freighters. Troop ships were too fast for the submarines and did not travel the North Atlantic in convoys.[49] The U-boats had sunk almost 5,000 Allied ships, at a cost of 178 submarines.[50]

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.[51]

Southern theatres
War in the Balkans
Main articles: Balkans Campaign (World War I), Serbian Campaign (World War I), and Macedonian front (World War I)
The Entente in the Balkans. From left to right: soldiers from Indochina, France, Senegal, England, Russia, Italy, Serbia, Greece, and India.Faced with Russia, Austria–Hungary could spare only one-third of its army to attack Serbia. After suffering heavy losses, the Austrians briefly occupied the Serbian capital, Belgrade. A Serbian counter attack in the battle of Kolubara, however, succeeded in driving them from the country by the end of 1914. For the first ten months of 1915, Austria–Hungary used most of its military reserves to fight Italy. German and Austro–Hungarian diplomats, however, scored a coup by persuading Bulgaria to join in attacking Serbia. The Austro–Hungarian provinces of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia provided troops for Austria–Hungary, invading Serbia as well as fighting Russia and Italy. Montenegro allied itself with Serbia.[52]

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 toward 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.[53]

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.[54]

After conquest, Serbia was divided between Austro–Hungary and Bulgaria. Bulgarians commenced bulgarization of the Serbian population in their occupation zone, banishing Serbian Cyrillic and the Serbian Orthodox Church. After forced conscription of the Serbian population into the Bulgarian army in 1917, the Toplica Uprising began. Serbian rebels liberated for a short time the area between the Kopaonik mountains and the South Morava river. The uprising was crushed by joint efforts of Bulgarian and Austrian forces at the end of March 1917.

The Macedonian Front proved static for the most part. Serbian forces retook part of Macedonia by recapturing Bitola on 19 November 1916. Only at the end of the conflict were the Entente powers able to 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.[55]

Ottoman Empire
Main article: Middle Eastern theatre of World War I
A British artillery battery emplaced on Mount Scopus in the Battle of Jerusalem (1917).The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in the war, the secret Ottoman-German Alliance having been signed in August 1914.[56] 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, Turkey 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. Further to the west, in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, initial British setbacks were overcome when Jerusalem was captured in December 1917. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, broke the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918.

Russian forest trench at the Battle of SarikamishRussian armies generally had the best of it in the Caucasus. Enver Pasha, supreme commander of the Turkish armed forces, was ambitious and dreamed of conquering central Asia. He was, however, a poor commander.[57] He launched an offensive against the Russians in the Caucasus in December 1914 with 100,000 troops; insisting on a frontal attack against mountainous Russian positions in winter, he lost 86% of his force at the Battle of Sarikamish.[58]

The Russian commander from 1915 to 1916, General Yudenich, drove the Turks out of most of the southern Caucasus with a string of victories.[58] 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. In this situation, the army corps of Armenian volunteer units realigned themselves under the command of General Tovmas Nazarbekian, with Dro as a civilian commissioner of the Administration for Western Armenia. The front line had three main divisions: Movses Silikyan, Andranik, and Mikhail Areshian. Another regular unit was under Colonel Korganian. There were Armenian partisan guerrilla detachments (more than 40,000[59]) accompanying these main units.

Instigated by the Arab bureau of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Arab Revolt described in T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom was a major cause of the Ottoman Empire's defeat. The revolts started with the Battle of Mecca by Sherif Hussein of Mecca with the help of Britain in June 1916, and ended with the Ottoman surrender of Damascus. Fakhri Pasha the Ottoman commander of Medina showed stubborn resistance for over two and half years during the Siege of Medina.[60]

Along the border of Italian Libya and British Egypt, the Senussi tribe, incited and armed by the Turks, waged a small-scale guerilla war against Allied troops. According to Martin Gilbert's The First World War, the British were forced to dispatch 12,000 troops to deal with the Senussi. Their rebellion was finally crushed in mid-1916.[61]

Italian participation
Main article: Italian Campaign (World War I)
Austro-Hungarian mountain corps in TyrolItaly had been allied with the German and Austro–Hungarian Empires since 1882 as part of the Triple Alliance. However, the nation had its own designs on Austrian territory in Trentino, Istria and Dalmatia. Rome had a secret 1902 pact with France, effectively nullifying its alliance.[62] At the start of hostilities, Italy refused to commit troops, arguing that the Triple Alliance was defensive in nature, and that Austria–Hungary was an aggressor. The Austro–Hungarian government began negotiations to secure Italian neutrality, offering the French colony of Tunisia in return. The Allies made a counter-offer in which Italy would receive the Alpine province of South Tyrol and territory on the Dalmatian coast after the defeat of Austria–Hungary. This was fomalised by the Treaty of London. Further encouraged by the Allied invasion of Turkey in April 1915, Italy joined the Triple Entente and declared war on Austria–Hungary on May 23. Fifteen months later Italy declared war on Germany.

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. It was a Napoleonic plan, which had no realistic chance of success in an age of barbed wire, machine guns, and indirect artillery fire, combined with hilly and mountainous terrain.

On the Trentino front, the Austro–Hungarians took advantage of the mountainous terrain, which favoured the defender. After an initial strategic retreat, the front remained largely unchanged, while Austrian Kaiserschützen and Standschützen engaged Italian Alpini in bitter hand-to-hand combat throughout the summer. The Austro–Hungarians counter attacked in the Altopiano of Asiago, towards Verona and Padua, in the spring of 1916, (Strafexpedition), but made little progress.

Beginning in 1915, the Italians under Cadorna mounted eleven offensives on the Isonzo front along the Isonzo River, north east 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 (60 mi.) to reorganise, stabilising the front at the Piave River. Since in the Battle of Caporetto 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 Asiago Plateau, finally being decisively defeated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in October of that year. Austria–Hungary surrendered in early November 1918.[63][64]

Further information: Battles of the Isonzo
Romanian participation
Main article: Romania during World War I
Romania had been allied with the Central Powers since 1882. When the war began, however, it declared its neutrality, arguing that because Austria-Hungary had itself declared war on Serbia, Romania was under no obligation to join the war. When the Entente Powers promised Romania large territories of eastern Hungary (Transylvania and Banat) in exchange for Romania’s declaring war on the Central Powers, the Romanian government renounced its neutrality, and on 27 August 1916 the Romanian army launched an attack against Austria-Hungary. The Romanian offensive was initially successful, pushing back the Austro-Hungarian troops in Transylvania, but a counter attack by the forces of the Central Powers defeated the Romanian army and as a result of the Battle of Bucharest the Central Powers occupied Bucharest on 6 December 1916. Fighting in Moldova continued in 1917 until an armistice was signed between the Central Powers and Romania on 9 December 1917.

In January, 1918, Russia, allied to Romania, had to withdraw its troops from the Romanian front and Romanian forces got under their control Bessarabia. Although a treaty was signed by the Romanian and the Bolshevik Russian government following talks between March 5-9, 1918 on the withdrawal of Romanian forces from Bessarabia within two months, on March 27, 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 signing the Treaty of Bucharest on 7 May 1918. Under that treaty Romania was obliged to cease war with the Central Powers. Romania made small territorial concessions for Austria-Hungary, ceding control of some passes in the Carpathian mountains and granted oil concessions for Germany. On the other hand, the Central Powers recognized 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.[65][66]

Fighting in India
Further information: Third Anglo-Afghan War and Hindu-German Conspiracy
The war began with an unprecedented outpouring of loyalty and goodwill towards the United Kingdom from within the mainstream political leadership, contrary to initial British fears of an Indian revolt. India under British rule contributed greatly to the British war effort by providing men and resources. This was done by the Indian Congress in hope of achieving self-government as India was very much under the control of the British. The United Kingdom disappointed the Indians by not providing self-governance, leading to the Gandhian Era in Indian history. About 1.3 million Indian soldiers and labourers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while both the Indian government and the princes 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 totaled 47,746 killed and 65,126 wounded during World War I.[67]

Eastern Front
Russian infantry in the Brusilov offensive.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, they were driven back from East Prussia by Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September 1914.[68][69] 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.[70] On 5 August they captured Warsaw and forced the Russians to withdraw from Poland.

Russian Revolution
Vladimir Illyich LeninMain article: Russian Revolution of 1917
Further information: North Russia Campaign
Despite the success of the June 1916 Brusilov offensive in eastern Galicia,[71] dissatisfaction with the Russian government's conduct of the war grew. The 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 with 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.[70]

Signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (February 9, 1918) are 1. Count Ottokar Czernin, 2. Richard von Kühlmann and 3. Vasil RadoslavovThe war and the government became increasingly unpopular. Discontent led to a rise in popularity of the Bolshevik party, led by Vladimir Lenin. He promised to pull Russia out of the war and was able to gain power. The triumph of the Bolsheviks in November was followed in December by an armistice and negotiations with Germany. At first the Bolsheviks refused the German terms, but when Germany resumed the war and marched across Ukraine with impunity, the new government acceded to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. It took Russia out of the war and ceded vast territories, including Finland, the Baltic provinces, parts of Poland and Ukraine to the Central Powers.[72] The manpower required for German occupation of former Russian territory may have contributed to the failure of the Spring Offensive, however, and secured relatively little food or other war materiel.

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 in the Russian Civil War. Allied troops landed in Archangel and in Vladivostok.

Wilhelm declares victory
1917 German poster: Wilhelm II blames the Allies for fighting on.In December 1916, after ten brutal months of the Battle of Verdun, the Germans attempted to negotiate a peace with the Allies, effectively declaring themselves the victors. Soon after, U.S. President Wilson attempted to intervene as a peacemaker, asking in a note for both sides to state their demands. Lloyd George's War Cabinet considered the German offer as a ploy to create divisions amongst the Allies and, after initial outrage and much deliberation, took Wilson's note as a separate effort, signalling that the U.S. was on the verge of entering the war against Germany following the "submarine outrages". While the Allies debated a response to Wilson's offer the Germans chose to rebuff it in favour of "a direct exchange of views". Learning of the German response, the Allied governments were free to make clear demands in their response of 14 January. They sought restoration of damages, the evacuation of occupied territories, reparations for France, Russia and Roumania, and a recognition of the principle of nationalities. This included the liberation of Italians, Slavs, Roumanians, Czecho-Slovaks, and the creation of a "free and united Poland". On the question of security, the Allies sought guarantees that would prevent or limit future wars, complete with sanctions, as a condition of any peace settlement.[73]

1917–1918
Photographic documentation of combatEvents 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. Tonnage sunk rose above 500,000 tons per month from February to July. It peaked at 860,000 tons in April. After July, the reintroduced convoy system became extremely effective in neutralizing the U-boat threat. Britain was safe from starvation and German industrial output fell.

Haut-Rhin, France, 1917On 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. There upon the mutinies afflicted 54 French divisions and saw 20,000 men desert. The other Allied forces attacked but sustained tremendous casualties.[74] 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.[75] Robert Nivelle was removed from command by 15 May, replaced by General Philippe Pétain, who suspended bloody large-scale attacks.

The victory of Austria–Hungary and Germany at the Battle of Caporetto led the Allies at the Rapallo Conference to form the Supreme War Council to coordinate planning. Previously, British and French armies had operated under separate commands.

In December, the Central Powers signed an armistice with Russia. This released troops for use in the west. Ironically, German troop transfers could have been greater if their territorial acquisitions had not been so dramatic. 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 a 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.[76]

Entry of the United States
Isolationism
The United States originally pursued a policy of isolationism, avoiding conflict while trying to broker a peace. This resulted in increased tensions with Berlin and London. When a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans aboard, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson vowed, "America is too proud to fight" and demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships. Germany complied. Wilson unsuccessfully tried to mediate a settlement. He repeatedly warned the U.S. 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".[77] Wilson's desire to have a seat at negotiations at war's end to advance the League of Nations also played a role.[78] Wilson's Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, resigned in protest at what he felt was the President's decidedly warmongering diplomacy. Other factors contributing to the U.S. entry into the war include the suspected German sabotage of both Black Tom in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Kingsland Explosion in what is now Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

Making the case
In January 1917, after the Navy pressured the Kaiser, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain's secret Royal Navy cryptanalytic group, Room 40, had broken the German diplomatic code. They intercepted a proposal from Berlin (the Zimmermann Telegram) to Mexico to join the war as Germany's ally against the United States, should the U.S. join. The proposal suggested that if the U.S. were to enter the war then Mexico should declare war against the United States and enlist Japan as an ally. This would prevent the United States from joining the Allies and deploying troops to Europe, and would give Germany more time for their unrestricted submarine warfare program to strangle Britain's vital war supplies. In return, the Germans would promise Mexico support in reclaiming Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.[79]

U.S. declaration of war on Germany
President Wilson before Congress, announcing the break in official relations with Germany on 3 February 1917After the British revealed the telegram to the United States, President Wilson, who had won reelection on his keeping the country out of the war, released the captured telegram as a way of building support for U.S. entry into the war. He had previously claimed neutrality, while calling for the arming of U.S. merchant ships delivering munitions to combatant Britain and quietly supporting the British blockading of German ports and mining of international waters, preventing the shipment of food from America and elsewhere to combatant Germany. After submarines sank seven U.S. merchant ships and the publication of the Zimmerman telegram, Wilson called for war on Germany, which the U.S. Congress declared on 6 April 1917.[80]

Crucial to U.S. participation was the sweeping domestic propaganda campaign executed by the Committee on Public Information overseen by George Creel.[81] The campaign included tens of thousands of government-selected community leaders giving brief carefully scripted pro-war speeches at thousands of public gatherings.Ross, pp. 244-6 Along with other branches of government and private vigilante groups like the American Protective League, it also included the general repression and harassment of people either opposed to American entry into the war or of German heritage.[81] Other forms of propaganda included newsreels, photos, large-print posters (designed by several well-known illustrators of the day, including Louis D. Fancher and Henry Reuterdahl), magazine and newspaper articles, etc.[citation needed][neutrality disputed]

First active U.S. participation
Two United States soldiers storm a bunker past the bodies of two German soldiers during World War I. Digitally restored.The United States was never formally a member of the Allies but became a self-styled "Associated Power". The United States had a small army, but it drafted four million men and by summer 1918 was sending 10,000 fresh soldiers to France every day. In 1917, the U.S. Congress gave U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans when they were drafted to participate in World War I, as part of the Jones Act. Germany had miscalculated, believing it would be many more months before they would arrive and that the arrival could be stopped by U-boats.[82]

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 Force (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.[83] 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.[84]

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, a diplomatic catastrophe.[85][86]

German Spring Offensive of 1918
Main article: Spring Offensive
For most of World War I, Allied forces were stalled at trenches on the Western FrontGerman 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 (40 miles).[87]

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.[88]

The front moved to within 120 kilometers (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.[89] 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 and 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.

British 55th (West Lancashire) Division troops blinded by tear gas during the Battle of Estaires, 10 April 1918American divisions, which Pershing had sought to field as an independent force, were assigned to the depleted French and British Empire commands on 28 March. A Supreme War Council of Allied forces was created at the Doullens Conference on 5 November 1917.[90] General Foch was appointed as supreme commander of the allied forces. Haig, Petain and Pershing retained tactical control of their respective armies; Foch assumed a coordinating role, rather than a directing role and the British, French and U.S. commands operated largely independently.[90]

Following Operation Michael, Germany launched Operation Georgette against the northern English channel ports. The Allies halted the drive with limited territorial gains for Germany. The German Army to the south then conducted Operations Blücher and Yorck, 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 their first successful Allied offensive of the war.

By 20 July the Germans were back across the Marne at their Kaiserschlacht starting lines,[91] having achieved nothing. Following this last phase of the war in the West, the German Army never again regained the initiative. German casualties between March and April 1918 were 270,000, including many highly trained stormtroops.

Meanwhile, Germany was falling apart at home. Anti-war marches become frequent and morale in the army fell. Industrial output was 53% of 1913 levels.

New states under war zone
In 1918, the internationally recognised Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Democratic Republic of Armenia and Democratic Republic of Georgia bordering the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire were established, as well as the unrecognised Centrocaspian Dictatorship and South West Caucasian Republic. Later, these unrecognised states were eliminated by Azerbaijan and Turkey.

Further information: Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire
In 1918, the Dashnaks of the Armenian national liberation movement declared the Democratic Republic of Armenia (DRA) through the Armenian Congress of Eastern Armenians (unified form of Armenian National Councils) after the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. Tovmas Nazarbekian became the first Commander-in-chief of the DRA. Enver Pasha ordered the creation of a new army to be named the Army of Islam. He ordered the Army of Islam into the DRA, with the goal of taking Baku on the Caspian Sea. This new offensive was strongly opposed by the Germans. In early May 1918, the Ottoman army attacked the newly declared DRA. Although the Armenians managed to inflict one defeat on the Ottomans at the Battle of Sardarapat, the Ottoman army won a later battle and scattered the Armenian army. The Republic of Armenia signed the Treaty of Batum in June 1918.[92]

Allied victory: summer and autumn 1918
Main articles: Hundred Days Offensive and Weimar Republic
U.S. engineers returning from the front during the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918The Allied counteroffensive, known as the Hundred Days Offensive, began on 8 August 1918. The Battle of Amiens developed with III Corps Fourth British Army on the left, the First French Army on the right, and the Australian and Canadian Corps spearheading the offensive in the centre through Harbonnières.[93][94] It involved 414 tanks of the Mark IV and Mark V type, and 120,000 men. They advanced 12 kilometers (7 miles) into German-held territory in just seven hours. Erich Ludendorff referred to this day as the "Black Day of the German army".[93][95]

The Australian-Canadian spearhead at Amiens, a battle that was the beginning of Germany’s downfall,[96] helped pull the British armies to the north and the French armies to the south forward. While German resistance on the British Fourth Army front at Amiens stiffened, after an advance as far as 14 miles (23 km) and concluded the battle there, the French Third Army lengthened the Amiens front on 10 August, when it was thrown in on the right of the French First Army, and advanced 4 miles (6 km) liberating Lassigny in fighting which lasted until 16 August. South of the French Third Army, General Charles Mangin (The Butcher) drove his French Tenth Army forward at Soissons on 20 August to capture eight thousand prisoners, two hundred guns and the Aisne heights overlooking and menacing the German position north of the Vesle.[97] Another "Black day" as described by Erich Ludendorff.

Meanwhile General Byng of the Third British Army, reporting that the enemy on his front was thinning in a limited withdrawal, was ordered to attack with 200 tanks toward Bapaume, opening what is known as the battle of Albert with the specific orders of "To break the enemy's front, in order to outflank the enemies present battle front" (opposite the British Fourth Army at Amiens).[96] 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 and roll over it. Attacks were being undertaken in quick order to take advantage of the successful advances on the flanks and then broken off when that attack lost its initial impetus.[97]

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.[98] Rawlinson’s Fourth British Army was able to battle 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.[97] 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 being back in the vanguard of the First Army fought their way from Arras eastward 5 miles (8 km) astride the heavily defended Arras-Cambrai before reaching the outer defences of the Hindenburg line, breaching them on the 28 and 29 August. Bapaume fell on the 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 St. Quentin on 31 August. Further south the French First and Third Armies had slowly fought forward while the Tenth Army, who had by now crossed the Ailette and was east of the Chemin des Dames, was now near to the Alberich position of the Hindenburg line.[99] 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."[97] 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 were previously denied them.[99]

Close-up view of an American major in the basket of an observation balloon flying over territory near front lines.On 2 September the Canadian Corps outflanking of the Hindenburg line, with the breaching of the Wotan Position, made it possible for the Third Army to advance and sent repercussions all along the Western Front. That same day Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL) had no choice but to issue orders to six armies for withdrawal back into the Hindenburg line in the south, behind the Canal Du Nord on the Canadian-First Army's front and back to a line east of the Lys in the north, giving up without a fight the salient seized in the previous April.[100] According to Ludendorff “We had to admit the necessity…to withdraw the entire front from the Scarpe to the Vesle.”[101]

In nearly four weeks of fighting since 8 August over 100,000 German prisoners were taken, 75,000 by the BEF and the rest by the French. Since "The Black Day of the German Army" the German High Command realised the war was lost and made attempts for a satisfactory end. The day after the 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 and replied, "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, Chancellor and Foreign minister Hintz agreed that the war could not be ended militarily and on the following day the German Crown Council decided 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 Queen of Holland's mediation. 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 Holland for mediation. On the 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.[99]

September saw the Germans continuing to fight strong rear guard actions and launching numerous counter attacks on lost positions, with only a few succeeding 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 victory at Ivincourt on 12 September, the Fourth Armies 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 km) front would come within 2 miles (3 km) of St. Quentin.[99] 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 assault on the whole length of the line.

The Allied attack on the Hindenburg Line began on 26 September including U.S. soldiers. The still-green American troops suffered problems coping with supply trains for large units on a difficult landscape.[102] 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.[103] The last Belgian town to be liberated before the armistice was Ghent, which the Germans held as a pivot until Allied artillery was brought up.[104][105] The German army had to shorten its front and use the Dutch frontier as an anchor to fight rear-guard actions.

When Bulgaria signed a separate armistice on 29 September, the Allies gained control of Serbia and Greece. Ludendorff, having been under great stress for months, suffered something similar to a breakdown. It was evident that Germany could no longer mount a successful defence.[106][107]

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 rebelled and were arrested, refusing to be part of a naval offensive which they believed to be suicidal. 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. The reserves had been used up, but U.S. troops kept arriving at the rate of 10,000 per day.[108]

Having suffered over 6 million casualties, Germany moved toward 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 better terms would be offered than by 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.[109]

Armistices and capitulations
In the forest of Compiègne after agreeing to the armistice that ended the war, Foch is seen second from the right. The carriage seen in the background, where the armistice was signed, later was chosen as the symbolic setting of Pétain's June 1940 armistice. It was moved to Berlin as a prize, but due to Allied bombing it was eventually moved to Crawinkel, Thuringia, where it was deliberately destroyed by SS troops in 1945.[110]The collapse of the Central Powers came swiftly. Bulgaria was the first to sign an armistice on 29 September 1918 at Saloniki.[111] On 30 October the Ottoman Empire capitulated at Mudros.[111]

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 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, 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 is traditionally regarded as the last soldier killed in the Great War: he was shot by a German sniper at 10:57 and died at 10:58.[112]

Allied superiority and the stab-in-the-back legend, November 1918
In November 1918 the Allies had ample supplies of men and materiel; continuation of the war would have meant the invasion of Germany. Berlin was almost 900 miles (1,400 km) from the Western Front; no Allied soldier had ever set foot on German soil in anger, and the Kaiser's armies retreated from the battlefield in good order, though up to a million of them were suffering from the Spanish Flu and unfit to fight. Hindenburgh and other senior German leaders spread the story that their armies had not really been defeated, resulting in the stab-in-the-back legend.[113][114]

A formal state of war between the two sides persisted for another seven months, until 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 latter treaty with the Ottoman Empire was followed by strife (the Turkish Independence War) and a final peace treaty was signed between the Allied Powers and the country that would shortly become the Republic of Turkey, at Lausanne on 24 July 1923.

Some war memorials date the end of the war as being when the Versailles treaty was signed in 1919; by contrast, most commemorations of the war's end concentrate on the armistice of 11 November 1918. Legally the last formal peace treaties were not signed until the Treaty of Lausanne. Under its terms, the Allied forces divested Constantinople on 23 August 1923.

Technology
See also: Technology during World War I and Weapons of World War I
Armoured carsThe First World War began as a clash of twentieth century technology and nineteenth century tactics, with inevitably large casualties. By the end of 1917, however, the major armies, now numbering millions of men, had modernised and were making use of telephone, wireless communication,[115] armoured cars, tanks,[116] and aircraft. Infantry formations were reorganised, so that 100–man companies were no longer the main unit of maneuver. Instead, squads of 10 or so men, under the command of a junior NCO, were favoured. 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. She employed 150 and 210 mm howitzers in 1914 when the 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.[117]

Much of the combat involved trench warfare, where 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 Haber process of nitrogen fixation was employed to provide the German forces with a constant supply of gunpowder, in the face of British naval blockade.[118] Artillery was responsible for the largest number of casualties[119] 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.

The widespread use of chemical warfare was a distinguishing feature of the conflict. Gases used included chlorine, mustard gas and phosgene. Few war casualties were caused by gas,[120] as effective countermeasures to gas attacks were quickly created, such as gas masks. The use of chemical warfare and small-scale strategic bombing were both outlawed by the 1907 Hague Conventions, and both proved to be of limited effectiveness,[121] though they captured the public imagination.[122]

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 (60 mi), though shells were relatively light at 94 kilograms (210 lb). While the Allies had railway guns, German models severely out-ranged and out-classed them.

RAF Sopwith Camel.Fixed-wing aircraft were first used militarily by the Italians in Libya 23 October 1911 during the Italo-Turkish War for reconnaissance, soon followed by the dropping of grenades and aerial photography the next year. By 1914 the military utility was obvious. They were initially used for reconnaissance and ground attack. To shoot down enemy planes, anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft were developed. Strategic bombers were created, principally by the Germans and British, though the former used Zeppelins as well.[123] Towards the end of the conflict, aircraft carriers were used for the first time, with HMS Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a raid to destroy the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in 1918.[124]

German U-boats (submarines) were deployed after the war began. Alternating between restricted and unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, they were employed by the Kaiserliche Marine in a strategy 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).[125] 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.

British Vickers machine gun.Trenches, machineguns, air reconnaissance, barbed wire, and modern artillery with fragmentation shells helped bring the battle lines of World War I to a stalemate. The British sought a solution with the creation of the tank and mechanised warfare. The first tanks were used during the Battle of the Somme on 15 September 1916. Mechanical reliability became an issue, but the experiment proved its worth. Within a year, the British were fielding tanks by the hundreds and showed their potential during the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, by breaking the Hindenburg Line, while combined arms teams captured 8000 enemy soldiers and 100 guns. Light automatic weapons also were introduced, such as the Lewis Gun and Browning automatic rifle.

Manned observation balloons, floating high above the trenches, were used as stationary reconnaissance platforms, reporting enemy movements and directing artillery. Balloons commonly had a crew of two, equipped with parachutes.[126] If there was an enemy air attack, the crew could parachute to safety. At the time, parachutes were too heavy to be used by pilots of aircraft (with their marginal power output) and smaller versions would not be developed until the end of the war; they were also opposed by British leadership, who feared they might promote cowardice.[127] Recognised for their value as observation platforms, balloons were important targets of enemy aircraft.

Johnson's Nieuport 11 armed with Le Prieur rockets for attacking observation balloonsTo defend against air attack, they were heavily protected by antiaircraft guns and patrolled by friendly aircraft; to attack them, unusual weapons such as air-to-air rockets were even tried. Blimps and balloons contributed to air-to-air combat among aircraft, because of their reconnaissance value, and to the trench stalemate, because it was impossible to move large numbers of troops undetected. The Germans conducted air raids on England during 1915 and 1916 with airships, hoping to damage British morale and cause aircraft to be diverted from the front lines. The resulting panic took several squadrons of fighters from France.[123][127]

Another new weapon, flamethrowers, were first used by the German army and later adopted by other forces. Although not of high tactical value, they were a powerful, demoralizing weapon and 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 wheeled vehicles eventually rendered trench railways obsolete.

War crimes
Genocide and ethnic cleansing
Ottoman Empire
Main article: Ottoman casualties of World War I
See also: Armenian Genocide, Assyrian Genocide, and Greek genocide
The ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Empire's Christian population, with the most prominent among them being the deportation and massacres of Armenians (similar policies were enacted against the Assyrians and Ottoman Greeks) during the final years of the Ottoman Empire is considered genocide.[128] The Ottomans saw the entire Armenian population as an enemy[129] that had chosen to side with Russia at the beginning of the war.[130] In early 1915 a number of Armenian nationalist groups such as the Armenakan, Dashnak and Hunchak organizations joined the Russian forces, and the Ottoman government used this as a pretext to issue the Tehcir Law which started the deportation of the Armenians from eastern Anatolia to Syria between 1915 and 1917. The exact number of deaths is unknown, although Balakian gives a range of 250,000 to 1.5 million for the deaths of Armenians,[131] the International Association of Genocide Scholars estimates over 1 million.[128] The government of Turkey has consistently rejected charges of genocide, arguing that those who died were victims of inter-ethnic fighting, famine or disease during the First World War.[132]

Russian Empire
Main article: Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire
See also: Russian occupation of Eastern Galicia, 1914-1915, Volhynia, and Volga Germans
Approximately 200,000 Germans living in Volhynia and about 600,000 Jews were deported by the Russian authorities.[133][134][135] 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.[136] 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.[137][138]

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.[139]

Soldiers' experiences
Main articles: Surviving veterans of World War I, World War I casualties, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and American Battle Monuments Commission
The First Contingent of the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps to the 1 Lincolns , training in Bermuda for the Western Front, Winter 1914–15. One in four survived the war.The soldiers of the war were initially volunteers, except for Italy, but increasingly were conscripted into service. Britain's Imperial War Museum has collected more than 2,500 recordings of soldiers' personal accounts and selected transcripts, edited by military author Max Arthur, have been published. The museum believes that historians have not taken full account of this material and accordingly has made the full archive of recordings available to authors and researchers.[140] Surviving veterans, returning home, often found that they could only discuss their experiences amongst themselves. Grouping together, they formed "veterans' associations" or "Legions", as listed at Category:Veterans' organizations.

Prisoners of war
This photograph shows an emaciated Indian Army soldier who survived the Siege of KutAbout 8 million men surrendered and were held in POW camps during the war. All nations pledged to follow the Hague Convention on fair treatment of prisoners of war. A POW's rate of survival was generally much higher than their peers at the front.[141] Individual surrenders were uncommon. Large units usually surrendered en masse. At the Battle of Tannenberg 92,000 Russians surrendered. When the besieged garrison of Kaunas surrendered in 1915, some 20,000 Russians became prisoners. Over half of Russian losses were prisoners (as a proportion of those captured, wounded or killed); for Austria-Hungary 32%, for Italy 26%, for France 12%, for Germany 9%; for Britain 7%. Prisoners from the Allied armies totalled about 1.4 million (not including Russia, which lost 2.5–3.5 million men as prisoners.) From the Central Powers about 3.3 million men became prisoners.[142]

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.[143][144] Once prisoners reached a camp, in general, conditions were 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. 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.[145][146][147]

The Ottoman Empire often treated POWs poorly.[148] Some 11,800 British Empire soldiers — most of them Indians — became prisoners after the Siege of Kut, in Mesopotamia, in April 1916; 4,250 died in captivity.[149] Although many were in very bad condition when captured, Ottoman officers forced them to march 1,100 kilometres (684 mi) to Anatolia. A survivor said: "we were driven along like beasts, to drop out was to die."[150] The survivors were then forced to build a railway through the Taurus Mountains.

In Russia, where 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.

Military attachés and war correspondents
Main article: Military attachés and war correspondents in the First World War
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 like what is now termed "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.[151] However, this observer's role was abandoned when the U.S. entered the war, as Fortescue immediately re-enlisted, sustaining wounds at Montfaucon d'Argonne in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, September 1918.[152]

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 the not 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.[153]

An early recorded use of the term "World War" is attributed to a well-known journalist for The Times, Colonel Charles Repington, who wrote in his diary on 10 September 1918: "We discussed the right name of the war. I said the we called it now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war."[154]

Opposition to the war
Main articles: Opposition to World War I and French Army Mutinies (1917)
1917 - Execution at Verdun at the time of the mutiniesThe trade union and socialist movements had long voiced their opposition to a war, which they argued, meant only that workers would kill other workers in the interest of capitalism. Once war was declared, however, many socialists and trade unions backed their governments. Among the exceptions were the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Party of America, and the Italian Socialist Party, and individuals such as Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and their followers in Germany. There were also small anti-war groups in Britain and France.

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 1917 Espionage Act effectively made free speech illegal and many served long prison sentences for statements of fact deemed unpatriotic. The Sedition Act of 1918 made any statements deemed "disloyal" a federal crime. Publications at all critical of the government were removed from circulation by postal censors.[78]

Other opposition came from conscientious objectors – some socialist, some religious – who refused to fight. In Britain 16,000 people asked for conscientious objector status.[155] 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.[156]

In 1917, a series of mutinies in the French army led to dozens of soldiers being executed and many more imprisoned.

In September 1917 the Russian soldiers in France began questioning why they were fighting for the French at all and mutinied.[157] In Russia, opposition to the war led to soldiers also establishing their own revolutionary committees and helped foment the October Revolution of 1917, with the call going up for "bread, land, and peace". The Bolsheviks agreed a peace treaty with Germany, the peace of Brest-Litovsk, despite its harsh conditions.

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 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 and 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.[158]

Aftermath
Main article: Aftermath of World War I
American Red Cross nurses tend to Spanish flu patients in temporary wards set up inside Oakland Municipal Auditorium, 1918No other war had changed the map of Europe so dramatically—four empires disappeared: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and the Russian. Four defunct dynasties, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburg, Romanovs and the Ottomans together with all their ancillary aristocracies, all fell after the war. Belgium and Serbia were badly damaged, as was France with 1.4 million soldiers dead, not counting other casualties. Germany and Russia were similarly affected.

Of the 60 million European soldiers who were mobilised from 1914–1918, 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%.[159] About 750,000 German civilians died from starvation caused by the British blockade during the war.[160] By the end of the war, famine had killed approximately 100,000 people in Lebanon.[161] The war had profound economic consequences. In addition, a major influenza epidemic spread around the world. Overall, the Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people.[162][163] In 1914 alone, louse-borne epidemic typhus killed 200,000 in Serbia.[164] There were about 25 million infections and 3 million deaths from epidemic typhus in Russia from 1918 to 1922.[165]

Approximately 200,000 Germans living in Volhynia and about 600,000 Jews were deported by the Russian authorities.[134][135][166] 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.[167] 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.[168][169] The best estimates of the death toll from the Russian famine of 1921 run from 5 million to 10 million people.[170] By 1922 there were 4.5–7 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 1920–22.[171] Considerable numbers of anti-Soviet Russians fled the country after the Revolution; by the 1930s the northern Chinese city of Harbin had 100,000 Russians.[172]

Peace treaties
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 Versaille also brought into being the League of Nations on 28 June 1919.[173][174]

In signing the treaty, Germany acknowledged responsibility for the war, agreeing to pay enormous war reparations and award territory to the victors. The "Guilt Thesis" became a controversial explanation of events 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. 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 (a result of territorial losses and postwar recession),[175] Germany did so by borrowing from the United States, until runaway inflation in the 1920s, contributed to the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. The reparations were suspended in 1931.

Austria–Hungary was also partitioned, largely but not consequently along ethnic lines, into several successor states including Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as adding Transylvania from Hungary to the Greater Romania. The details were contained in the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon. As a result of the Treaty of Trianon 3.3 million Hungarians came under foreign rule. Although the Hungarians made up 54% of the population of pre-war Kingdom of Hungary, only 32% of its territory was left to Hungary. Fearing ethnic score settlings, 354.000 Hungarian fled the former Hungarian territories attached to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia between 1920-1924.

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 also re-attached to the Greater Romania as it had been a Romanian territory for more than a thousand years.[176]

The Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and much of its non-Anatolian territory was awarded as protectorates of various Allied powers, while the remaining Turkish core was reorganised as the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was to be partitioned by the Treaty of Sèvres in 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.

Social trauma
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The social trauma caused by years of mass slaughter manifested itself in different ways. Some people were revolted by nationalism and its results, and so they began to work toward 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.

The experiences of the war led to a collective trauma for all participating countries. The optimism of la belle époque was destroyed and those who fought in the war became known as the Lost Generation.[177] For years afterwards, people mourned the dead, the missing, and the many disabled.[178] The soldiers returning home from World War I suffered greatly from the horrors they had witnessed. Many returning veterans suffered from shell shock (also called neurasthenia).[179]

Legacy
Main articles: World War I in art and literature, Media of World War I, and War memorials
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.

Memorials
The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial in the SommeMemorials were erected in thousands of villages and towns. Close to battlefields, the improvised burial grounds were gradually moved to formal graveyards under the care of organisations such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the German War Graves Commission and Le Souvenir français. Many of these graveyards also have central monuments to the missing or unidentified dead, such as the Menin Gate memorial and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.

Surgeon Lt. Col. John McCrae of Canada, author of In Flanders Fields, died in 1918 of pneumonia.On 3 May 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed. At his graveside, his friend John McCrae, M.D., of Guelph, Ontario, Canada wrote the memorable poem In Flanders Fields as a salute to those who perished in the Great War. Published in Punch on 8 December 1915, it is still recited today, especially on Remembrance Day and Memorial Day.[180][181]

Later conflicts
The end of World War I set the stage for other world conflicts, some of which are continuing into the 21st century. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, pushed for socialist revolution.

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 public 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 in popularity. This disillusionment for humanity found a cultural climax with the Dadaist artistic movement. Many believed the war heralded the end of the world as they had known it, including the collapse of capitalism and imperialism. Communist and socialist movements around the world drew strength from this theory and enjoyed a level of popularity they had never known before. 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.[182][183] World War II was in part a continuation of the power struggle that was 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.[184] [185][186]

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 were born at the end of World War I.[187] Previous to the end of fighting in the war, the Ottoman Empire had maintained a modest level of peace and stability throughout the Middle East.[188] With the end of the war and the fall of Ottoman government, power vacuums developed and conflicting claims to land and nationhood began to emerge.[189] Sometimes after only cursory consultation with the local population, the political boundaries drawn by the victors of the First World War were quickly imposed, and in many cases are still problematic in the 21st century struggles for national identity.[190][191] While the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I was a pivotal milestone in the creation of the modern political situation of the Middle East, including especially the Arab-Israeli conflict,[192][193][194] the end of Ottoman rule also spawned lesser known disputes over water and other natural resources.[195]

Further information: Sykes–Picot Agreement
New national identities
Poland reemerged as an independent country, after more than a century. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were entirely new nations agglomerating previously independent peoples. 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.

In the British Empire, the war unleashed new forms of nationalism. In Australia and New Zealand the Battle of Gallipoli became known as those nations' "Baptism of Fire". It was the first major war in which the newly established countries fought and it was one of the first times that Australian troops fought as Australians, not just subjects of the British Crown. Anzac Day, commemorating the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, celebrates this defining moment.[196][197]

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".[198] 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 afterwards, although she emerged with a greater measure of independence.[199][200] While the other Dominions were represented by Britain, Canada was an independent negotiator and signatory of the Versailles Treaty.

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, new government ministries and powers were created. New taxes were levied and laws enacted, all designed to bolster the war effort; many of which have lasted to this day. Similarly, the war strained the abilities of the 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.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased for three Allies (Britain, Italy, and U.S.), but decreased in France and Russia, in neutral Netherlands, and in the main three Central Powers. The shrinkage in GDP in Austria, Russia, France, and the Ottoman Empire reached 30 to 40%. In Austria, for example, most of the pigs were slaughtered and, at war's end, there was no meat.

All nations had increases in the government's share of GDP, surpassing fifty percent in both Germany and France and nearly reaching fifty percent in Britain. To pay for purchases in the United States, Britain cashed in its extensive investments in American railroads and then began borrowing heavily on Wall Street. President Wilson was on the verge of cutting off the loans in late 1916, but allowed a great increase in U.S. government lending to the Allies. After 1919, the U.S. demanded repayment of these loans, which, in part, were funded by German reparations, which, in turn, were supported by American loans to Germany. This circular system collapsed in 1931 and the loans were never repaid.

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 laborers sent to war. This aided the struggle for voting rights for women.

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 1917–18 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.[201]

Cognate names for the war
Before World War II, the war was also known as The Great War, The World War, The War to End All Wars, The Kaiser's War, The War of the Nations and The War in Europe. In France and Belgium it 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.

The term used by official histories of the war in Britain and Canada is The First World War, while American histories generally use the term World War I.

The earliest known use of the term First World War appeared during the war. German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel wrote shortly after the start of the war:

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.[202]
—Indianapolis Star, 20 September 1914
The term was used again near the end of the war. English journalist Charles A. Repington wrote:

I saw Major Johnstone, the Harvard Professor who is here to lay the bases of an American History. We discussed the right name of the war. I said that we called it now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.[203]
—The First World War, 1914-1918 (1920), Volume I, Page 391.
See also World War I portal
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World War I

European Civil War
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Allied bombing runs over German lines Allied tanks advance in Langres, 1918

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[show]v • d • eWorld War I

European theatre: (Balkans · Western Front · Eastern Front · Italian Front)
Middle Eastern theatre: (Caucasus · Mesopotamia · Sinai and Palestine · Gallipoli · Persia)
African theatre: (South-West · West · East · North)
Asian and Pacific theatre: (Siege of Tsingtao)
Atlantic Ocean · Mediterranean

Major participants
(People) Entente Powers Russian Empire/Republic · French Empire: France, Vietnam · British Empire: United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa · Italy · Romania · United States · Serbia · Portugal · China · Japan · Belgium · Montenegro · Greece · Armenia · Brazil

Central Powers Germany · Austria–Hungary · Ottoman Empire · Bulgaria


Timeline Pre-conflicts Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) · Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912) · First Balkan War (1912–1913) · Second Balkan War (1913)

Prelude Origins · Sarajevo assassination · July Ultimatum

1914 Battle of the Frontiers · Battle of Cer · First Battle of the Marne · Battle of Tannenberg · Battle of Galicia · Battle of the Masurian Lakes · Battle of Kolubara · Battle of Sarıkamış · Race to the Sea · First Battle of Ypres

1915 Second Battle of Ypres · Battle of Gallipoli · Battles of the Isonzo · Great Retreat · Conquest of Serbia · Siege of Kut

1916 Erzerum Offensive · Battle of Verdun · Lake Naroch Offensive · Battle of Asiago · Battle of Jutland · Battle of the Somme · Brusilov Offensive · Conquest of Romania

1917 Capture of Baghdad · Second Battle of Arras · Kerensky Offensive · Third Battle of Ypres · Battle of Caporetto · Battle of Cambrai

1918 Armistice of Erzincan · Treaty of Brest-Litovsk · Spring Offensive · Hundred Days Offensive · Meuse-Argonne Offensive · Battle of Megiddo · Battle of Vittorio Veneto · Armistice with Germany · Armistice with Ottoman Empire

Other conflicts Maritz Rebellion (1914–1915) · Indo-German Conspiracy (1914–1919) · Easter Rising (1916) · Russian Revolution (1917) · Finnish Civil War (1918)

Post-conflicts Russian Civil War (1917–1921) · Armenian–Azerbaijani War (1918–1920) · Georgian–Armenian War (1918) · German Revolution (1918–1919) · Hungarian–Romanian War (1918–1919) · Greater Poland Uprising (1918–1919) · Estonian War of Independence (1918–1920) · Latvian War of Independence (1918–1920) · Lithuanian Wars of Independence (1918–1920) · Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–1921) · Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921) · Polish–Lithuanian War (1920) · Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) · Turkish War of Independence including the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1923) · Russian invasion of Georgia (1921) · Irish Civil War (1922–1923)


Aspects Warfare Military engagements · Naval warfare · Air warfare · Cryptography · Poison gas · Railways · Technology · Trench warfare · Total war · Surviving veterans

Civilian impact /
atrocities Casualties · Spanish flu · Rape of Belgium · Ottoman People: (Armenian Genocide · Assyrian Genocide · Pontic Greek Genocide) · Female roles · Literature

Agreements /
Treaties Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire · Sykes-Picot • St.-Jean-de-Maurienne • French-Armenian • Damascus • Paris Peace Conference · Treaty of Brest-Litovsk · Treaty of Lausanne · Treaty of London · Treaty of Neuilly · Treaty of St. Germain · Treaty of Sèvres · Treaty of Trianon · Treaty of Versailles

Consequences Aftermath · "Fourteen Points" · League of Nations


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