CORE OBJECTIVES
¦ EXPLAIN the origins ofthe FirstWorldWar.
¦ UNDERSTAND the circumstances that ledto trench warfare on the Western Front, and the consequences of the offensive strategy pursued by all sides.
¦ IDENTIFY the major effects of the war on civilian life.
¦ EXPLAIN the war's effects on territories beyond Europe's borders, in the Middle East, in Africa, and in Asia.
¦ UNDERSTAND the origins and goals of the Bolshevik movement in Russia and the circumstances that allowed them to seize power in 1917.
¦ IDENTIFY the people responsible for the final terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and understand its goals.
The battle of the Somme began on June 24, 1916, with a fearsome British artillery barrage against German trenches along a twenty-five-mile front. Hour after hour, day and night, the British guns swept across the barbed wire and fortifications that faced their own lines, firing 1.5 million rounds over seven days. Mixing gas with explosive rounds, the gunners pulverized the landscape and poisoned the atmosphere. Deep in underground bunkers on the other side, the German defenders huddled in their masks. When the big guns went silent, tens of thousands of British soldiers rose up out of their trenches, each bearing sixty pounds of equipment, and made their way into the cratered No Man’s Land that separated the two armies. They had been told that wire-cutting explosives would destroy the labyrinth of barbed wire between the trenches during the barrage, leaving them free to charge across and occupy the front trench before the stunned Germans could recover. To their horror, they found the barbed wire intact. Instead of taking the German trench, they found themselves caught in the open when the German machine-gunners manned the defensive parapets. The result proved all too eloquently the efficiency of the First World
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War’s mechanized methods of killing. Twenty-one thousand British soldiers were killed on the first day of the battle of the Somme. A further 30,000 were wounded. Because some British units allowed volunteers to serve with their friends—the “Pals Battalions”—there were neighborhoods and villages in Britain in which every married woman became a widow in the space of a few minutes. The British commanders pressed the offensive for nearly five more months, and the combined casualties climbed over a million. The German line never broke.
This contest between artillery and machine gun was a war that was possible only in an industrialized world. Before beginning the assault, the British had stockpiled 2.9 million artillery shells—Napoleon had only 20,000 at Waterloo. Although European armies marched off to war in 1914 with a confidence and ambition bred by their imperial conquests, they soon confronted the ugly face of industrial warfare and the grim capacities of the modern world. In a catastrophic combination of old mentalities and new technologies, the war left 9 million dead soldiers in its wake.
Soldiers were not the only casualties. Four years of fighting destroyed many of the institutions and assumptions of the previous century, from monarchies and empires to European economic dominance. It disillusioned many, even the citizens of the victorious nations. As the British writer Virginia Woolf put it, “It was a shock—to see the faces of our rulers in the light of shell-fire.” The war led European states to take over their national economies, as they set quotas for production and consumption and took responsibility for sustaining the civilian population during the crisis. By toppling the Prussian and Austrian monarchies, the war banished older forms of authoritarianism, and by provoking the Russian Revolution of 1917, the war ushered in new ones that bore the distinctive mark of the twentieth century. Finally, the war proved nearly impossible to settle; antagonisms bred in battle only intensified in the war’s aftermath and would eventually lead to the Second World War. Postwar Europe faced more problems than peace could manage.
In the decades before 1914, Europe had built a seemingly stable peace. Through the complex negotiations of Great Power geopolitics, Europe had settled into two systems of alliance: the Triple Entente (later the Allied Powers) of Britain, France, and Russia rivaled the Triple Alliance (later the
Central Powers) of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Within this balance of power, the nations of Europe challenged one another for economic, military, and imperial advantage. The scramble for colonies abroad accompanied a fierce arms race at home, where military leaders assumed that superior technology and larger armies would result in a quick victory in a European war. Yet none of the diplomats, spies, military planners, or cabinet ministers of Europe—or any of their critics—predicted the war they eventually got. Nor did many expect that the Balkan crisis of July 1914 would touch off that conflict, engulfing all of Europe in just over a month’s time.
The Balkan Peninsula had long been a satellite of the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century, however, Ottoman power became severely weakened, and both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian monarchy competed with one another to replace the Ottomans as the dominant force in the region. The region was also home to ambitious national movements of Serbs and Bulgarians who took advantage of Ottoman decline to declare their independence in the decades before the First World War. Russia, as the most powerful Slavic monarchy, was the traditional sponsor of these Slavic nationalist movements and had a particularly close relationship with Serbia. Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, sought to minimize the influence of Slavic nationalisms because they constituted a threat to its own multi-ethnic empire. In 1912 and 1913, the region was destabilized by two wars involving the Ottoman Empire and the independent Balkan states of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Montenegro. The Great Powers steered clear of entanglement and these wars remained localized. The alliance system could only ensure stability, however, if the Great Powers could maintain this posture of nonintervention. Once one of them became embroiled in a local conflict, the system of alliances would lead directly to a wider war.
The spark came from the Balkan province of Bosnia, a multi-ethnic region of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims that had been under Austrian rule since 1878. In Bosnia, members of the local Serb population longed to secede from Austrian rule altogether and join the independent state of Serbia. When Bosnian Serbs found their way blocked by the Austrians, some began to conspire with Serbia, and on June 28, 1914, a group of Bosnian Serbs assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand (18891914) as he paraded through Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.
Shocked by Ferdinand’s death, the Austrians treated the assassination as a direct attack by the Serbian government. Three weeks later, the Austrians announced an ultimatum to Serbia, demanding that they denounce the activities of Bosnian Serbs, abstain from propaganda that served their cause, and allow Austro-Hungarian officials to prosecute members of the Serbian government who they believed were involved in the assassination. The demands were deliberately unreasonable—the Austrians wanted war, to crush Serbia and restore order in Bosnia. The Serbs mobilized their army before agreeing to all but the most important demands, and Austria responded with its own mobilization order on July 28, 1914. Shaken from their summer distractions, Europeans began to realize that the treaty system they relied on for stability was actually leading to a much larger confrontation: Austria and its ally Germany were facing a war with Serbia, Serbia’s ally Russia, and by extension, Russia’s ally France.
Diplomats tried and failed to prevent the outbreak of wider war. When Russia announced a “partial mobilization” to defend Serbia against Austria, the German ministers telegraphed the French to find out if they intended to honor France’s defensive treaty with Russia. The French responded that France would “act in accordance with her interests”—meaning that they would immediately mobilize against Germany. Facing the dual threat from both sides that they had long feared, Germany mobilized on August 1 and declared war on Russia—and two days later, on France. The next day, the German army invaded Belgium on its way to take Paris.
EUROPEAN ALLIANCES ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR. ¦ What major countries were part of the Triple Alliance? ¦ Of the Triple Entente? ¦ From the map, why would Germany have declared war on France so quickly once Russia began to mobilize? ¦ According to the map, why were the Balkan countries such a volatile region?
THE BALKAN CRISIS, 1878-1914. ¦ What major empires were involved in the Balkans during this period? ¦ According to the maps, what was the major change in the Balkans between 1878 and 1914? ¦ What problems did nationalism, ethnicity, and race create in this region?
The invasion of neutral Belgium provided a rallying cry for British generals and diplomats who wanted Britain to honor their secret obligations to France and join the war against Germany. This was not a foregone conclusion—the Liberal government was opposed to war and acquiesced partly to avoid being voted out of office. Proponents of war insisted that to maintain the balance of power—a central tenet of British foreign policy—no single nation should be allowed to dominate the continent. On August 4, Britain entered the war against Germany.
Other nations were quickly drawn into the struggle. On August 7, the Montenegrins joined the Serbs against
Austria. Two weeks later, the Japanese declared war on Germany, mainly to attack German possessions in the Far East. On August 1, Turkey allied with Germany and in October began the bombardment of Russian ports on the Black Sea. Italy had been allied with Germany and Austria before the war, but at the outbreak of hostilities, the Italians declared neutrality, insisting that since Germany had invaded neutral Belgium, they owed Germany no protection.
The diplomatic maneuvers during the five weeks that followed the assassination at Sarajevo have been called a “tragedy of miscalculation.” Austria’s determination to punish Serbia, Germany’s unwillingness to restrain their
FRANZ FERDINAND AND HIS WIFE, SOPHIE. The Austrian archduke and archduchess, in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, approaching their car before they were assassinated.
¦ What made their deaths the spark that unleashed a general war in Europe?
Austrian allies, and Russia’s desire to use Serbia as an excuse to extend their influence in the Balkans all played a part in making the war more likely. Diplomats were further constrained by the strategic thinking and rigid timetables set by military leaders, and all sides clearly felt that it was important to make a show of force during the period of negotiation that preceded the outbreak of war. It is clear, however, that powerful German officials were arguing that war was inevitable. They insisted that Germany should fight before Russia recovered from their 1905 loss to Japan and before the French army could benefit from its new three-year conscription law, which would put more men in uniform. This sense of urgency characterized the strategies of all combatant countries. The lure of a bold, successful strike against one’s enemies, and the fear that too much was at stake to risk losing the advantage created a rolling tide of military mobilization that carried Europe into battle.
THE MARNE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Declarations of war were met with a mix of public fanfare and private concern. Though saber-rattling romantics envisioned a war of national glory and spiritual renewal, plenty of Europeans recognized that a continental war put decades of progress and prosperity at risk. Bankers and financiers, who might have hoped to profit from increased wartime production or from captured colonial markets, were among those most opposed to the war. They correctly predicted that a major war would create financial chaos. Many young men, however, enlisted with excitement. On the Continent, volunteer soldiers added to the strength of conscript armies, while in Britain (where conscription wasn’t introduced until 1916) over 700,000 men joined the army in the first eight weeks alone. Like many a war enthusiast, these men expected the war to be over by Christmas.
If less idealistic, the expectations of the politicians and generals in charge were also soon to be disproved. Military planners foresaw a short, limited, and decisive war—a tool to be used where diplomacy failed. They thought that a modern economy simply could not function amid a sustained war effort and that modern weaponry made protracted war impossible. They placed their bets on size and speed: bigger armies, more powerful weapons, and faster offensives would win the war. But for all of their planning, they were unable to respond to the uncertainty and confusion of the battlefield.
The Germans based their offensive on what is often called the Schlieffen Plan, named for Count Alfred von Schlieffen (SHLEE-fen), chief of the German General Staff from 1890 to 1905. Schlieffen called for attacking France first to secure a quick victory that would neutralize the Western Front and free the German army to fight Russia in the east. With France expecting an attack through Alsace-Lorraine, the Germans would instead invade through Belgium and sweep down through northwestern France to fight a decisive battle near Paris. For over a month, the German army advanced swiftly, but the plan overestimated the army’s physical and logistical capabilities. The speed of the operation—advancing twenty to twenty-five miles a day—was simply too much for soldiers and supply lines to keep up with. They were also slowed by the resistance of Belgian forces and by the intervention of Britain’s small but highly professional field army. Fearing the Russians would move faster than expected, German commanders altered the offensive plan by dispatching some troops to the east instead of committing them all to the assault on France.
World History
