As another response to the stalemate on the Western
Front, both sides looked for new allies who might provide
a winning advantage. The Ottoman Empire, hoping to
drive the British from Egypt, had already come into the
war on Germany’s side in August 1914. Russia, Great
Britain, and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire
in November. Although the Allies attempted to open a
Balkan front by landing forces at Gallipoli, southwest of
Constantinople, in April 1915, the campaign was a disaster.
The Italians also entered the war on the Allied side
after France and Britain promised to further their acquisition
of Austrian territory.
By 1917, the war that had originated in Europe had
truly become a world conflict. In the Middle East, the
dashing but eccentric British adventurer T. E. Lawrence,
popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia (1888–1935),
incited Arab princes to revolt against their Ottoman
overlords in 1917. In 1918, British forces from Egypt destroyed
the rest of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle
East. For these campaigns, the British mobilized forces
from India, Australia, and New Zealand. The Allies also
took advantage of Germany’s preoccupations in Europe
and lack of naval strength to seize German colonies elsewhere
in the world. Japan seized a number of Germanheld
islands in the Pacific, and Australia took over German
New Guinea (see Chapter 5).
Most important to the Allied cause was the entry of
the United States into the war. At first, the United States
tried to remain neutral, but that became more difficult
as the war dragged on. The immediate cause of U.S. involvement
grew out of the naval conflict between Germany
and Great Britain. Britain used its superior naval
power to maximum effect by imposing a naval blockade
on Germany. Germany retaliated with a counterblockade
enforced by the use of unrestricted submarine warfare.
Strong U.S. protests over the German sinking of passenger
liners—especially the British ship Lusitania on May 7,
1915, in which more than one hundred Americans lost
their lives—forced the German government to suspend
unrestricted submarine warfare in September 1915 to
avoid further antagonizing the Americans.
In January 1917, however, eager to break the deadlock
in the war, German naval officers convinced Emperor
William II that the renewed use of unrestricted submarine
warfare could starve the British into submission
within five months, certainly before the Americans could
act. To distract the Wilson administration in case it
should decide to enter the war on the side of the Allied
powers, German Foreign Minister Alfred von Zimmerman
secretly encouraged the Mexican government to
launch a military attack to recover territories lost to the
United States in the American Southwest.
Berlin’s decision to return to unrestricted submarine
warfare, combined with outrage in Washington over the
Zimmerman telegram (which had been decoded by the
British and provided to U.S. diplomats in London),
finally brought the United States into the war on April 6,
1917. Although American troops did not arrive in Europe
in large numbers until 1918, U.S. entry into the war
gave the Allied Powers a badly needed psychological
boost. The year 1917 was not a good year for them. Allied
offensives on the Western Front were disastrously defeated.
The Italian armies were smashed in October, and
in November 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
(discussed later in this chapter) led to Russia’s withdrawal
from the war, leaving Germany free to concentrate entirely
on the Western Front.
World History
