World War I (WWI) or the First World War, formerly called the Great War, was a major war centred on Europe that began in the summer of 1914 and lasted until November 1918. It involved all of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (centred around the Triple Entente) and the Central Powers. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history.More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of great technological advances in firepower without corresponding advances in mobility. It was the second deadliest conflict in Western history.
The assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was the proximate trigger of the war. Long-term causes, such as imperialistic foreign policies of the great powers of Europe, such as the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, France, and Italy, played a major role. Ferdinand's assassination by a Yugoslav nationalist resulted in a Habsburg ultimatum against the Kingdom of Serbia. Several alliances formed over the past decades were invoked, so within weeks the major powers were at war; via their colonies, the conflict soon spread around the world.
On 28 July, the conflict opened with the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia,followed by the German invasion of Belgium, Luxembourg and France; and a Russian attack against Germany. After the German march on Paris was brought to a halt, the Western Front settled into a static battle of attrition with a trench line that changed little until 1917. In the East, the Russian army successfully fought against the Austro-Hungarian forces but was forced back by the German army. Additional fronts opened after the Ottoman Empire joined the war in 1914, Italy and Bulgaria in 1915 and Romania in 1916. The Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, and Russia left the war after the October Revolution later that year. After a 1918 German offensive along the western front, United States forces entered the trenches and the Allies drove back the German armies in a series of successful offensives. Germany agreed to a cease-fire on 11 November 1918, later known as Armistice Day.
By the war's end, four major imperial powers—the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires—had been militarily and politically defeated. The latter two ceased to exist. The revolutionised Soviet Union emerged from the Russian Empire, while the map of central Europe was completely redrawn into several smaller states.[14] The League of Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The European nationalism spawned by the war and the breakup of empires, and the repercussions of Germany's defeat and the Treaty of Versailles led to the beginning of World War II in 1939
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HISTORY
Causes of World War I
The causes of World War I, which began in central Europe in July 1914, included many intertwined factors, such as the conflicts and hostility of the four decades leading up to the war. Militarism, alliances, imperialism, and nationalism played major roles in the conflict as well. However, the immediate origins of the war lay in the decisions taken by statesmen and generals during the July Crisis of 1914, casus belli for which was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife by Gavrilo Princip, an irredentist Serb.
The crisis came after a long and difficult series of diplomatic crashes between the Great Powers (Italy, France, Germany, Great Britain, Austria-Hungarian Empire and Russia) over European and colonial issues in the decade before 1914 that had left tensions high. In turn these diplomatic clashes can be traced to changes in the balance of power in Europe since 1867. The more immediate cause for the war was tensions over territory in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary competed with Serbia and Russia for territory and influence in the region and they pulled the rest of the Great Powers into the conflict through their various alliances and treaties.
The topic of the causes of World War I is one of the most studied in all of world history. Scholars have differed significantly in their interpretations of the event.
BACKGROUND
From the time of the Balkan Wars, which had increased the size of Serbia, it had been the opinion of leading Austrian officials (most notably the Foreign Minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold) that Austria would have to wage a "preventive war" to greatly weaken or destroy Serbia as a state in order to maintain the dual monarchy which held extensive Serb-populated Balkan territories. Between January 1913 and January 1914, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf advocated a preventive war against Serbia twenty-four times.
In November 1912 Russia, humiliated by its inability to support Serbia during the Bosnian crisis of 1908 or the First Balkan War, announced a major reconstruction of its military.
On November 28, in partial reaction to the Russian move, German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow told the Reichstag, the German parliament, that “If Austria is forced, for whatever reason, to fight for its position as a Great Power, then we must stand by her”.As a result, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey responded by warning Prince Karl Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador in London, that if Germany offered Austria a “blank cheque” for war in the Balkans, then “the consequences of such a policy would be incalculable”. To reinforce this point, R. B. Haldane, the Germanophile Lord Chancellor, met with Prince Lichnowsky to offer an explicit warning that if Germany were to upset the balance of power in Europe by trying to destroy either France or Russia as powers, Britain would have no other choice but to fight the Reich.
With the recently announced Russian military reconstruction and certain British communications, the possibility of war was a prime topic at the German Imperial War Council of 8 December 1912 in Berlin, an informal meeting of some of Germany's top military leadership called on short notice by the Kaiser.Attending the conference were Wilhelm II, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz - the Naval State Secretary, Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, the Chief of the German Imperial Naval Cabinet (Marinekabinett), General von Moltke - the Army’s Chief of Staff, Admiral August von Heeringen - the Chief of the Naval General Staff and (probably) General Moriz von Lyncker, the Chief of the German Imperial Military Cabinet.The presence of the leaders of both the German Army and Navy at this War Council attests to its importance. However, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and General Josias von Heeringen, the Prussian Minister of War, were not invited.
Wilhelm II called British balance of power principles “idiocy,” but agreed that Haldane’s statement was a “desirable clarification” of British policy.His opinion was that Austria should attack Serbia that December, and if “Russia supports the Serbs, which she evidently does…then war would be unavoidable for us, too,” and that would be better than going to war after Russia completed the massive modernization and expansion of their army that they had just begun. Moltke agreed. In his professional military opinion “a war is unavoidable and the sooner the better”. Moltke “wanted to launch an immediate attack”.
Both Wilhelm II and the Army leadership agreed that if a war were necessary it were best launched soon. Admiral Tirpitz, however, asked for a “postponement of the great fight for one and a half years” because the Navy was not ready for a general war that included Britain as an opponent. He insisted that the completion of the construction of the U-boat base at Heligoland and the widening of the Kiel Canal were the Navy’s prerequisites for war. As the British historian John Röhl has commented, the date for completion of the widening of the Kiel Canal was the summer of 1914. Though Moltke objected to the postponement of the war as unacceptable, Wilhelm sided with Tirpitz. Moltke “agreed to a postponement only reluctantly.”
Historians more sympathetic to the government of Wilhelm II often reject the importance of this War Council as only showing the thinking and recommendations of those present, with no decisions taken. They often cite the passage from Admiral Müller’s diary, which states: “That was the end of the conference. The result amounted to nothing.” Certainly the only decision taken was to do nothing.
Historians more sympathetic to the Entente, such as British historian John Röhl, sometimes rather ambitiously interpret these words of Admiral Müller (an advocate of launching a war soon) as saying that "nothing" was decided for 1912-13, but that war was decided on for the summer of 1914. Röhl is on safer ground when he argues that even if this War Council did not reach a binding decision - which it clearly did not - it did nonetheless offer a clear view of their intentions,or at least their thoughts, which were that if there was going to be a war, the German Army wanted it before the new Russian armaments program began to bear fruit. Entente sympathetic historians such as Röhl see this conference in which "The result amounted to nothing” as setting a clear deadline when a war was to begin, namely the summer of 1914.
With the November 1912 announcement of the Russian Great Military Programme, the leadership of the German Army began clamoring even more strongly for a “preventive war” against Russia.Moltke declared that Germany could not win the arms race with France, Britain and Russia, which she herself had begun in 1911, because the financial structure of the German state, which gave the Reich government little power to tax, meant Germany would bankrupt herself in an arms race. As such, Moltke from late 1912 onwards was the leading advocate for a general war, and the sooner the better.
Throughout May and June 1914, Moltke engaged in an “almost ultimative” demand for a German “preventive war” against Russia in 1914.The German Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, reported on a discussion with Moltke at the end of May 1914:
“Moltke described to me his opinion of our military situation. The prospects of the future oppressed him heavily. In two or three years Russia would have completed her armaments. The military superiority of our enemies would then be so great that he did not know how he could overcome them. Today we would still be a match for them. In his opinion there was no alternative to making preventive war in order to defeat the enemy while we still had a chance of victory. The Chief of the General Staff therefore proposed that I should conduct a policy with the aim of provoking a war in the near future.”The new French President Raymond Poincaré, who took office in 1913, was favourable to improving relations with Germany. In January 1914 Poincaré became the first French President to dine at the German Embassy in Paris. Poincaré was more interested in the idea of French expansion in the Middle East than a war of revenge to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Had the Reich been interested in improved relations with France before August 1914, the opportunity was available, but the leadership of the Reich lacked such interests, and preferred a policy of war to destroy France. Because of France’s smaller economy and population, by 1913 French leaders had largely accepted that France by itself could never defeat Germany.
In May 1914, Serbian politics were polarized between two factions, one headed by the Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, and the other by the radical nationalist chief of Military Intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, known by his codename Apis.In that month, due to Colonel Dimitrigjevic’s intrigues, King Peter dismissed Pašić’s government.The Russian Minister in Belgrade intervened to have Pašić’s government restored.Pašić, though he often talked tough in public, knew that Serbia was near-bankrupt and, having suffered heavy casualties in the Balkan Wars and in the suppression of a December 1913 Albanian revolt in Kosovo, needed peace. Since Russia also favoured peace in the Balkans, from the Russian viewpoint it was desirable to keep Pašić in power. It was in the midst of this political crisis that politically powerful members of the Serbian military armed and trained three Bosnian students as assassins and sent them into Austria-Hungary.
TIMELINE
July 31st | Start of the Third Battle at Ypres | |
October 24th | Battle of Caporetto – the Italian Army was heavily defeated | |
November 6th | Britain launched a major offensive on the Western Front | |
November 20th | ||
December 5th | Armistice between Germany and Russia signed | |
December 9th | Britain captured Jerusalem from the Turks | |
1918 | ||
March 3rd | The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Russia and Germany. | |
March 21st | Germany broke through on the Somme | |
March 29th | Marshall Foch was appointed Allied Commander on the Western Front | |
April 9th | Germany started an offensive in Flanders | |
July 15th | Second Battle of the Marne started. The start of the collapse of the German army | |
August 8th | The advance of the Allies was successful | |
September 19th | Turkish forces collapsed at Megiddo | |
October 4th | Germany asked the Allies for an armistice | |
October 29th | Germany’s navy mutinied | |
October 30th | Turkey made peace | |
November 3rd | Austria made peace | |
November 9th | Kaiser William II abdicated | |
November 11th | Germany signed an armistice with the Allies – the official date of the end of World War One. | |
Post-war – 1919 | ||
January 4th | Peace conference met at Paris | |
June 21st | The surrendered German naval fleet at Scapa Flow was scuttled. | |
June 28th | The Treaty of Versailles was signed by the Germans. |
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