Have I told you about WWI? The Basics.
It is immensely frustrating to be an average American interested in the history of World War I, because you are apparently alone. The curriculum of American military history skates a blurry path from the Civil War to World War II. This gap in general national memory means that almost the only sources for information about World War I are experts, who assume that their audience members are also experts. Average Americans don’t do World War I.
The unfortunate consequence is that the basics of the First World War get buried in complex lectures and deeply specific books, and it can be very difficult to form a general picture of the war. So for all those of you who, like me, are in danger of missing the forest for the trees, here’s the intro history lesson you never got in high school.
(I tried very hard to make this as brief as possible. For the skimmers among you, the barest bones in this bare bones summary are in bold.)
Let’s begin with a map.
World War I didn’t have a single cause. There were various historic grudges, political maneuvers, imperial ambitions, and even (royal) family dramas which had been building up over the previous decades. The details are fascinating and provide endless fodder for debate, but the basics are this: France and the U.K. were newly allied after centuries of ill will; various German states had been recently united as one empire and were looking to prove themselves; Russia was a largely agricultural economy dependent on exports who needed to protect her access to shipping channels at all costs; and the Balkans (that collection of Eastern European countries sandwiched between Austria-Hungary and Turkey) were in the process of breaking away from the larger empires, and were explosive.
The spark which ignited the tinderbox was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, by a Serbian nationalist in June 1914. What really should have been a regional conflict quickly got out of hand. This was a major theme throughout the war: seemingly minor actions grew disproportionately important, and even those in charge felt they could no longer predict or control what might happen next.
Declarations of war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary prompted a domino effect of nations joining the conflict, ostensibly to fulfill alliances, but mainly to protect what were seen as threats to their own interests. Russia supported Serbia, Germany supported Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire supported Germany, France supported Russia. The U.K. waffled for a while about whether to support France, but eventually concern for their vast colonial holdings swayed them, since they knew the Germans had serious imperial ambitions. They used Germany’s invasion of neutral Belgium as an excuse for joining the Allies. All these major players were involved by August 1914.
Germany mobilized faster than anyone, and used her superior railways to steamroll quickly through Belgium and into northeastern France. But German forces moved so rapidly that they outstripped their effective supply lines, and they were halted by the Allies (aided by Parisian taxis) in September in what became known as the Miracle of the Marne. At that point, both sides dug in. This was the beginning of the stalemate on the Western Front, and these lines would barely shift until 1918.
In the east, though still not fully mobilized, the Russians struck more quickly than anticipated. They advanced into Germany and Austria-Hungary as quickly as the Germans were moving into France, but were finally halted at Tannenberg.
In 1915, the British army swelled with volunteers convinced by Lord Kitchener’s famous posters (which later served as inspiration for the Uncle Sam recruiting posters used in the U.S. in WWII). These new recruits were introduced to the artillery, chemical warfare, and the mud of the Western Front at Ypres in Belgium. Germany, meanwhile, decided to link up with the Austro-Hungarians and concentrate their main offensive of 1915 in the Carpathians on the Eastern Front. They hoped a decisive blow might convince the Russians to back down and beg for peace. It didn’t work out that way, but the Central Powers did advance successfully through parts of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.
Also in 1915, in hopes of shifting the onus of the war from the stalemate in the west, Allied forces executed an amphibious landing at Gallipoli. They spent months there, often using the same tactics in the desert against the Turks that they employed in the mud of France against the Germans. In April, the British passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. Most of her passengers and crew were killed, including over a hundred Americans, which outraged the supposedly neutral American public. And Italy joined the war on the side of the Allies, opening up a third front in Europe along the border with Austria-Hungary, through some of the continent’s highest peaks.
1916 was the year of attrition. The Allies in the west prepared for a massive offensive, which Germany decided to preempt by striking first in February at the French at Verdun. By the battle’s end in December, two thirds of the French army had rotated through Verdun, where French General Nivelle famously remarked, “They shall not pass!” (Inspiration for Gandalf’s words in LOTR? It’s possible; Tolkien was a veteran of WWI…) With the French tied up, the British bore the brunt of the summer offensive on the Somme. In spite of a preparatory week-long artillery barrage, the first day of the battle, July 1, remains the bloodiest in British military history.
In the east, the Russians had initial success against the Austro-Hungarians in the June Brusilov Offensive. In addition to decimating the Austro-Hungarian forces, it succeeded in forcing the Germans to divert forces from Verdun. Unfortunately, those newly arrived German forces turned the tide on the Eastern Front, and the Brusilov Offensive too petered out into stalemate.
In 1917, thanks in large part to British decoding of the Zimmerman Telegram, the Americans joined the war. Unfortunately, the U.S. had a very small standing army and needed to recruit and train most of their soldiers, so despite declaring war in April, American troops didn’t begin arriving in force until the end of the year. The main European combatants, meanwhile, were facing increasing unrest and even mutiny at home and among the soldiers. General Nivelle’s ill-fated offensive at Chemin des Dames in the spring prompted widespread disobedience and desertion within the French army. This mutiny was largely kept from the press at the time, and was resolved by General Pétain by some key concessions to soldiers demands, and the brutal execution of certain carefully chosen ringleaders. Meanwhile, the Eastern Front fell apart with the start of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. By the end of the year, the czar was deposed, new Russian leadership had reached an armistice with the Central Powers, and they were negotiating peace at Brest-Litovsk. This left German forces free to concentrate on a new offensive in the west.
The Ludendorff Offensive began in early 1918, as the Germans hoped to defeat the battered Allies before their ranks swelled with fresh American troops. Using tactics they had perfected over the last three years, including the use of elite stormtroopers who exploited weak points in the enemy line, the Germans made greater gains than they had at any point since 1914. But they were again slowed by their inability to effectively supply their fast-moving line, and by the difficulty of moving quickly over ground that had been turned into a muddy wasteland by years of artillery shelling. In August the Allies, strengthened significantly by the newly arrived Americans, answered with their own Hundred Days Offensive. The Germans were pushed back again and again, and eventually asked for an armistice. There was some debate among Allied leaders about whether it would be wiser to keep pushing into Germany for a true victory, but war weariness in the armed forces and on the home front won out in the end. This engendered a feeling among the Germans, encouraged by their military leadership, that they were never really defeated. Some historians argue this feeling contributed to the rise of the Hitler and the Nazi party.
The Armistice took effect at 11 am on November 11, 1918. Peace was officially negotiated and the Treaty of Versailles signed the next year.
Last, some major takeaways about why this war is so important:
- It was the first modern war. None of the combatants had any idea what they were getting into. Many in Germany, France, and Britain believed in 1914 that the war would be over in a matter of months. Old fashioned beliefs about what could be accomplished with cavalry and the fighting spirit of a few brave men were shattered with the advent of mass casualties from artillery, chemical weaponry, and new machinery like tanks, airplanes, and submarines. In response, medicine advanced by leaps and bounds over the four years of the war, as medical staff perfected their technique by trial and error on the millions of wounded and sick men.
- Most of our ideas about the purpose of war originate here. The appalling casualty numbers and horrific new ways to wage war prompted widespread disillusionment at home. By the end of the war, governments were desperately trying to manufacture high ideals and motives for which they were fighting, though the war had begun as much to build and protect empires as anything else. At this point in history, the world developed a new and radical idea that the only justification for war is a higher moral purpose.
- It led directly to World War II, and thence to our modern world order. This war understandably gets overshadowed by its more recent, and somehow even more horrific, brother. But so much of the Second World War — its racial prejudices and efficient methods of slaughter, as well as its higher purpose of liberty, international cooperation, and human rights — had its birth in the First. Even after the end of the war, events continued to roll forward toward 1939 with what felt like unstoppable momentum.
