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The Great War, generally known as World War I, began in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His assassination triggered a European war that lasted until 1918. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) battled against the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan, and the United States during the war (the Allied Powers). World War I saw unparalleled levels of bloodshed and destruction due to new military technology and the horrors of trench warfare. By the time the war ended, and the Allies declared victory, more than 16 million people had died, both soldiers and civilians.
Tensions had been building for years in Europe, particularly in the problematic Balkan region in southeast Europe, when World War I broke out. For years, a number of alliances including European countries, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and other parties had existed, but political unrest in the Balkans threatened to derail these arrangements. The spark that sparked World War I was struck at Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June twenty-eight, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. Princip and other nationalists fought to remove Austro-Hungarian control in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The killing of Franz Ferdinand triggered a fast-rising sequence of events. Austria-Hungary, like many other countries throughout the world, blamed the Serbian government for the assault and sought to exploit the catastrophe to finally settle the subject of Serbian nationalism.
While Russia backed Serbia, Austria-Hungary held off on declaring war until it had assurances from German monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would back them up. Leaders in Austria-Hungary anticipated that Russian involvement would involve Russia’s allies, France, and potentially the United Kingdom as well. On July fifth, Kaiser Wilhelm covertly committed his support, providing Austria-Hungary with a ‘blank check’ assurance of Germany’s assistance in the event of a conflict. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then issued an ultimatum to Serbia that was so harsh that it was practically unthinkable to accept. Convinced that Austria-Hungary was preparing for war, the Serbian leadership ordered the mobilization of the Serbian army and requested aid from Russia. On July twenty-eighth, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and Europe’s precarious peace swiftly collapsed. Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and Serbia formed a unified front against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.
Germany opened World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and facing Russia in the east, according to an ambitious military plan known as the Schlieffen Plan. German forces crossed the border into Belgium on August fourth, 1914. The Germans attacked the highly defended city of Liege in the opening combat of World War I, employing the most powerful weaponry in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to seize the city by August fifteenth. As they moved through Belgium into France, the Germans left death and ruin in their path, killing people and murdering a Belgian priest they suspected of instigating civilian resistance.
The First Battle of the Marne, fought from September sixth to ninth, 1914, pitted French and British forces against the invading German army, which had advanced to within thirty miles of Paris. The Allies halted the German advance and successfully counterattacked, forcing the Germans back to the north of the Aisne River. The setback ended Germany’s ambitions for a swift triumph in France. Both sides constructed trenches, and the Western Front became the backdrop for a terrible attrition battle that would endure more than three years. This campaign’s longest and most expensive engagements were fought at Verdun in February and December 1916, and the Battle of the Somme in July-November 1916. During the Battle of Verdun alone, German and French forces lost about a million losses.
On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian soldiers attacked German-held East Prussia and Poland but were repulsed at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914 by German and Austrian forces. Despite that win, Russia’s attack prompted Germany to shift two corps from the Western Front to the Eastern Front, which contributed to Germany’s defeat in the Battle of the Marne. When combined with the overwhelming Allied opposition in France, Russia’s massive war machine’s capacity to deploy relatively swiftly in the east ensured a longer, more arduous fight rather than the fast triumph Germany had planned for under the Schlieffen Plan.
From 1914 through 1916, Russia’s army launched many offensives on the Eastern Front of World War I but was unable to break through German defenses. Defeat on the battlefield, along with economic insecurity and lack of food and other necessities, fueled growing discontent among the majority of Russia’s people, particularly the impoverished workers and peasants. This heightened antagonism was intended toward Czar Nicholas II’s imperial rule and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra. The Russian Revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, destroyed the czarist government and put an end to Russian participation in World War I. In early December 1917, Russia signed an armistice with the Central Powers, releasing German forces to fight the surviving Allies on the Western Front.
When World War I began in 1914, the United States stayed neutral, following President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of neutrality while continuing to participate in business and shipping with European countries on both sides of the battle. However, maintaining neutrality was becoming increasingly difficult in the face of Germany’s unrestricted submarine aggressiveness against neutral ships, particularly those carrying passengers. Germany designated the waters surrounding the British Isles a war zone in 1915, and German U-boats sank many commercial and passenger ships, including several American ships. The sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania by a U-boat in May 1915, when it was heading from New York to Liverpool, England, with hundreds of American passengers on board, helped shift the tide of American public opinion against Germany. Congress enacted a $250 million armaments funding bill in February 1917 in order to prepare the United States for war. The next month, Germany sank four additional US commerce ships, prompting Woodrow Wilson to address Congress on April 2 and urge for a declaration of war against Germany.
With Europe largely at a standstill in World War I, the Allies hoped to win a triumph over the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the battle on the side of the Central Powers in late 1914. After a disastrous attack on the Dardanelles (the strait between the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea), British-led Allied troops launched a large-scale ground invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion was likewise a colossal disaster, and after suffering 250,000 losses, Allied forces conducted a full withdrawal from the peninsula’s coasts in January 1916. n Egypt and Mesopotamia, British-led forces fought the Ottoman Turks, while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops clashed in a series of 12 skirmishes along the Isonzo River, which marked the frontier between the two countries.
The First Battle of the Isonzo occurred in late April 1915, shortly after Italy entered the war on the Allied side. German reinforcements enabled Austria-Hungary to secure a decisive victory in the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, better known as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917). Following Caporetto, Italy’s allies stepped up to provide more help. Troops from the United Kingdom, France, and, subsequently, the United States landed in the area, and the Allies began to retake the Italian Front.
During the First Battle of the Marne, information relayed by pilots enabled the Allies to exploit weak places in the German defenses, assisting the Allies in pushing Germany out of France. On July 15, 1918, German troops started the war’s final offensive, fighting French forces with 85,000 American troops and elements of the British Expeditionary Force in the Second Battle of the Marne. Only three days later, the Allies successfully fought back the German attack and started their own counteroffensive. Result of heavy deaths, Germany was obliged to abandon a planned onslaught farther north, in the Flanders area running between France and Belgium, which was envisioned as Germany’s greatest hope of victory. The Second Battle of the Marne effectively shifted the tide of the war in favor of the Allies, who were able to retake most of France and Belgium in the months that followed.
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Allied leaders proclaimed their goal to construct a post-war society that would protect itself against future battles of similar devastation. Some hopeful participants even began to refer to World War I as ‘the War to End All Wars.’ However, the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, fell short of that ambitious ambition. With war guilt, enormous reparations, and refusal to join the League of Nations, Germany felt duped into signing the treaty, believing that any peace would be a ‘peace without victory,’ as President Wilson advocated in his famous Fourteen Points address in January 1918. In Germany, anger at the Versailles Treaty and its architects grew into a simmering hostility that would be regarded among the causes of World War II two decades later.
Millions of women entered the labor to replace males who went to war and those who never returned during World War I, causing immense societal upheaval. The first global war also contributed to the spread of one of the world’s deadliest pandemics, the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people. World Conflict I was also known as ‘the first modern war.’ During World War I, many of the technology today associated with military conflict, such as machine guns, tanks, aerial warfare, and radio communication was introduced on a vast scale.
Bibliography
- Hein, David. 2022. “The Great Books of the Great War.” Modern Age 64 (1): 38–45. https: search. EBSCOhost. com login. aspx?direct=true
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