First World War

Background: alliances and the arms race

The foundation of the German Empire in 1871 unsettled Europe’s long-standing balance of power. The 1879 alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary became the Triple Alliance when Italy joined in 1882; on the other side came the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. These were not formal alliances obliging Britain to fight for France or Russia, but by settling colonial disputes in Asia and Africa they made British support for either in a future war a real possibility. 1 2

The arms race began at sea. Admiral Tirpitz’s fleet-building programme set out to rival the Royal Navy, but the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 made every existing battleship obsolete, and in 1911 Germany shifted spending from the navy to the army. When Germany enlarged its standing army by 170,000 men in 1913, France extended compulsory service from two to three years, and the Balkan states, Italy, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary followed. From 1908 to 1913 the military spending of the six major European powers rose by more than 50% in real terms. 1

The Balkans were the “powder keg of Europe”. Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908–1909 ended any chance of cooperation with Russia in the region, and the two Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 drove out the Ottomans only to leave resentment among the victors themselves. Vienna saw Serbian expansion as a threat to the empire’s existence, while Pan-Slav Russia regarded itself as Serbia’s protector. 1

Interpretations of the causes remain divided. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, Lenin called the conflict “an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war” in which capitalist powers at the monopoly stage fought to redivide a world they had already partitioned. In the 1960s the German historian Fritz Fischer argued that Germany’s conservative leaders had deliberately sought war, setting off a worldwide debate. Few historians accepted his thesis in full, but by the 1980s it was generally agreed that Germany’s share of responsibility was larger than that of the other powers. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (2012), by contrast, argued that no single country was to blame and that leaders stumbled into war through a chain of decisions whose risks they failed to see. 3 2 4

The July Crisis: from Sarajevo to Belgium

On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb, shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife. The assassins belonged to the Young Bosnia movement and had been armed by the Black Hand, a secret organisation within Serbian intelligence. Vienna resolved to punish Serbia militarily, and in early July Germany promised its unconditional support — the so-called “blank cheque” — while urging a quick strike before Russia could intervene. 1 5

On 23 July Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum of ten demands, framed to be unacceptable. Serbia ordered general mobilisation on 25 July but accepted every term except those allowing Austrian officials to take part in investigations and trials inside Serbia. Vienna treated this as rejection, broke off relations and on 28 July declared war and began shelling Belgrade. Russia ordered general mobilisation in Serbia’s support on 30 July. 1 5

The German General Staff had long planned for a two-front war. The Schlieffen Plan envisaged using 80% of the army to defeat France first and then turning on Russia, which made speed paramount. Germany sent Russia a 12-hour ultimatum on 31 July, and on 1 August the two countries were at war. Germany occupied Luxembourg on 2 August, declared war on France on 3 August and demanded free passage through Belgium; refused, it invaded early on 4 August. Britain, a guarantor of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 Treaty of London, sent an ultimatum demanding withdrawal, and when it expired at midnight Britain too was at war. 1 6

The belligerents: the Entente and its associates

The core of the Entente was France, the Russian Empire and the British Empire, joined in the summer of 1914 by Serbia, Montenegro and Belgium. Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August, seized Qingdao and Germany’s Pacific colonies, and in 1915 presented China with the Twenty-One Demands to extend its influence in East Asia. Italy, a member of the Triple Alliance, stayed neutral in 1914; promised Austrian territory in the Treaty of London of April 1915, it declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May. War with Germany came fifteen months later. 6 1 7

In March 1916 Germany declared war on Portugal, and Romania entered the war on 27 August with an eye on Transylvania. The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, but fought as an “associated power” rather than a formal ally. That year Greece, after the king was forced out, joined the Entente in June; the Republic of China declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary on 14 August. Siam (now Thailand) and Brazil also joined the Allied side in 1917. Liberia declared war on Germany on 4 August 1917, and Latin American states including Cuba, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti and Honduras also declared war. 6 8 9 7

The forms of participation varied. Brazil sent a naval division to join the British fleet at Gibraltar and a medical mission to Europe. China sent labourers rather than combat divisions: some 140,000 Chinese workers served the British and French. A state that only declared war cannot be weighed alongside the powers that put mass armies on the main fronts. 6 10

The belligerents: the Central Powers

The Central Powers were four states: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. Their origin was the German–Austro-Hungarian alliance of 1879. Austria and Hungary formed a single Dual Monarchy rather than two belligerents, and it opened the war by declaring war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Germany, fighting on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, became the centre of the coalition’s war effort. 1 6 7

The Ottoman Empire held back from formal entry for some months after the outbreak of war. On 29 October 1914 former German warships under the Ottoman flag bombarded Odessa and other Russian Black Sea ports, and in November the Entente declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Bulgaria, which had lost most of Macedonia in the Second Balkan War of 1913, joined the Central Powers by declaring war on Serbia on 14 October 1915. 11 6 1

Imperial mobilisation: dominions and colonies

Britain’s declaration of war automatically brought in its dominions and colonies. Dominions such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa controlled their own domestic policy and military spending but not their foreign policy. According to the National Army Museum, more than three million soldiers and labourers from across the empire served alongside the British Army. Some 620,000 Canadians enlisted and over 60,000 were killed; more than 410,000 Australians served in the Australian Imperial Force; New Zealand sent almost 100,000 overseas and lost around 18,000. Newfoundland, which joined Canada only in 1949, sent its own regiment. 6 12

In 1914 the British Indian Army was larger than the British Army itself. Some 1.27–1.3 million Indians served as soldiers and labourers, about 140,000 on the Western Front and nearly 700,000 in the Middle East. In Africa the West African Frontier Force and the King’s African Rifles carried the East African campaign, and at least 180,000 Africans worked in the Carrier Corps; South Africa, unwilling to arm Black South Africans, sent over 60,000 as labourers only. Indian National Congress leaders hoped wartime support would hasten home rule; when self-government did not follow, disillusion fed the campaign for full independence. 1 12

France too looked to its colonies to offset its demographic weakness. Having lost nearly 300,000 dead on the Western Front between August and December 1914 alone, it partly filled the gaps with colonial troops, over 500,000 of whom served on the Western Front in 1914–1918. Around 200,000 Senegalese Tirailleurs were raised in West Africa; more than 135,000 fought in Europe and 30,000 were killed. They fought at Ypres and Dixmude, in the recapture of Fort Douaumont at Verdun and on the Chemin des Dames, with especially heavy losses in Flanders and on the Chemin des Dames. 6 13

From movement to trenches: the land fronts, 1914–1916

The German armies swept through Belgium into northern France and came within 40 km of Paris. But at the Battle of the Marne on 5–12 September French troops and the British Expeditionary Force struck at a gap that had opened between the German armies, and the German First and Second Armies fell back to the Aisne. Each side then tried to turn the other’s flank in a “race to the sea”, and by the end of 1914 an unbroken line of trenches ran from the Channel to the Swiss border. Germany had failed in its central aim of avoiding a long two-front war. 14 1

The Eastern Front was more fluid. Russia advanced early into East Prussia as promised to France, but defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September forced it out of East Prussia. In Galicia the Russians defeated Austria-Hungary heavily, but by spring 1915 the Russians had been driven from Galicia, and the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive of May let the Central Powers invade Russian Poland. The Brusilov offensive, launched on 4 June 1916, inflicted irreparable losses on the Austro-Hungarian army, yet its cost in Russian lives was enormous and the exhaustion it left became a background to the revolution of the following year. 1 15

On the Western Front trenches, barbed wire, machine guns and artillery made attacking extraordinarily costly. On 22 April 1915 at Ypres the Germans used chlorine gas on a large scale for the first time; all the major belligerents went on to use gas, which caused about 1.3 million casualties and some 90,000 deaths. The Battle of Verdun, from 21 February to 18 December 1916, was the longest of the war, with an estimated 700,000 to 975,000 casualties on both sides. On the first day of the Somme, 1 July, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties including 19,240 killed; by 18 November more than three million men had fought there and over a million had been killed or wounded. 1 16 17

The sea and the southern fronts: blockade, U-boats, Gallipoli

Britain began a naval blockade of Germany soon after the outbreak of war and, by declaring foodstuffs contraband, cut the Central Powers’ imports. The German navy met the Grand Fleet at Jutland in May–June 1916 without a decisive result, and thereafter the High Seas Fleet was largely confined to port. Germany answered with submarines. After the sinking of the liner Lusitania in 1915 drew American protests, Germany promised not to target passenger liners. 18 1

On 1 February 1917 Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, aiming to sever Britain’s sea lanes before the United States could intervene. U-boats sank more than 5,000 Allied ships at the cost of 199 submarines, but losses fell sharply once escorted convoys were introduced in 1917. Blockade and submarine warfare shaped civilian life and the attitudes of neutrals more than any clash of battleships. 19 1

The Entente tried to knock the Ottoman Empire out by seizing the Straits, landing on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915. After the fleet failed to force the Dardanelles in March, landings began in April, but by the withdrawal in January 1916 each side had suffered some 250,000 casualties and the campaign had failed. Mustafa Kemal, who rose to prominence there, later founded the Republic of Turkey. In December 1914 at Sarıkamış the Ottomans had lost 86% of Enver Pasha’s 100,000-strong force. In Mesopotamia they defeated the British at the siege of Kut, but lost Baghdad in March 1917 and Jerusalem in December, while in June 1916 the British-backed Arab Revolt began. 11 1

Under cover of war the Ottoman government deported Armenians from the eastern provinces to Syria, in death marches and massacres. The exact toll is unknown, but the International Association of Genocide Scholars estimates around 1.5 million; Assyrians and Greeks suffered similar attacks. The Turkish government still denies the genocide, a position most historians reject. 1

Between 1915 and 1917 the Italian army under General Cadorna made repeated frontal assaults along the Isonzo, bleeding heavily for little gain. On 24 October 1917 Austro-Hungarian forces reinforced by German units broke the Italian Second Army at Caporetto with infiltration tactics and gas; the Italians fell back 150 km to hold the Piave, and the Boselli government fell. In the Balkans Serbia repulsed two Austrian invasions in 1914, but collapsed under the Central Powers’ offensive of October 1915, now joined by Bulgaria, and retreated across Albania. The surviving Serbian troops were evacuated to Greece and fought on from the Salonika front. 1 20

Total war at home: war economy, hunger, strikes and mutiny

The long war turned into total war, with the state directing production, labour and food. In every belligerent the government’s share of GDP rose, exceeding 50% in Germany and France. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who took over the General Staff in August 1916, launched the Hindenburg Programme to multiply munitions output, and the Auxiliary Services Act of the same year required every man aged 17 to 60 not already in the forces or war industry to perform national service. Women filled the places of men sent to the front, entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers — one background to the postwar extension of women’s suffrage. 1 21

Blockade, poor harvests and the diversion of farm labour and fertiliser to the war brought Germany the “Turnip Winter” of 1916–1917. Turnips replaced potatoes as the staple, and winter rations fell to 1,000 calories a day, a third of the 3,000 deemed necessary for an adult man. Hunger fed directly into labour unrest. After a strike in June 1916 against Liebknecht’s arrest and the “bread strike” of April 1917, a mass strike gripped Austria-Hungary from 3 to 25 January 1918, and in Germany more than a million workers downed tools demanding better living and working conditions, an end to the war and democratisation of the constitution. 22 23

The Berlin strike was organised by the Revolutionary Shop Stewards under Richard Müller, and workers’ councils were elected on a wide scale for the first time. The SPD leaders Ebert and Scheidemann joined the strike committee under pressure from the workers but worked to moderate it. Police and troops broke the strike; leaders such as Kurt Eisner, who had organised the munitions workers’ strike in Munich, were arrested, and many workers were drafted and sent to the front. Many of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of November 1918 followed the pattern of the January strike. 23

Entente armies and home fronts wavered too. When the Nivelle offensive, begun on 16 April 1917 with the promise of decisive victory within 48 hours, produced only heavy losses, a division’s refusal to attack on 3 May set off mutinies that touched nearly half the French infantry divisions on the Western Front. The soldiers held their trenches but refused to attack. Nivelle’s successor Pétain halted futile assaults and granted more leave, while 3,400 courts-martial sentenced 554 mutineers to death, 26 of whom were executed. In Ireland the Easter Rising began on 24 April 1916 and was crushed within six days; the execution of sixteen of its leaders instead swelled support for independence. 1 24 25

The socialists and the war

In August 1914 most socialist parties, for all their commitment to class struggle and internationalism, sided with their own governments. The parties of the Reichstag agreed to a Burgfrieden, a political truce, and on 4 August the SPD deputies voted unanimously for war credits — fourteen of the ninety-two had opposed them in the party caucus but bowed to discipline; the same day French socialists rallied behind the war in what became known as the union sacrée. Most Austrian, British and Russian socialists did likewise. 26 1

Opposition began with a few and widened. Karl Liebknecht cast the lone vote against the second war credits in the Reichstag on 2 December 1914 and was arrested in Berlin on 1 May 1916 after crying “Down with the war!”. Anti-war socialists meeting at Zimmerwald in Switzerland on 5–8 September 1915 blamed the war on reactionary capitalist governments and called for a peace without annexations or reparations; with the later conference at Kienthal they became known as the Zimmerwald movement. Some, like Eugene Debs in the United States and Bertrand Russell in Britain, were jailed for opposing the war. The collapse of the International and the splits of the Zimmerwald movement are told in The Collapse of the Second International. 27 26 1

1917: revolution in Russia and American entry

By the end of 1916 Russian casualties — killed, wounded or captured — approached five million, and the cities suffered food shortages and soaring prices. On 7 March 1917 a strike shut the Putilov works, Petrograd’s largest plant, and the next day International Women’s Day rallies turned into demonstrations for bread. When troops refused to fire on the crowds, Nicholas II abdicated. The Provisional Government pledged to fight on, but with power divided between it and the Petrograd Soviet, frontline soldiers grew ever more demoralised. The Bolsheviks, promising immediate peace, took power on 7 November; an armistice in December was followed on 3 March 1918 by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia left the war, losing 34% of the former empire’s population, 54% of its industrial land and 89% of its coalfields. The story continues in The February Revolution, The October Revolution and Brest-Litovsk and the German occupation of the East. Dates in this article follow the Gregorian calendar. 1 28 29

Neutral in 1914, the United States was nonetheless a major supplier of the Allies. Besides the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann telegram of 17 January 1917 — offering Mexico Texas, Arizona and New Mexico if the US entered the war — was decrypted by British intelligence and made public, turning opinion. Congress declared war on Germany on 6 April. President Wilson wanted the United States to shape the peace, and in January 1918 set out his vision of a new international order and a League of Nations in the Fourteen Points. The Selective Service Act of 1917 drafted 2.8 million men, and by the end of November 1918 two million soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces had crossed to France. 19 1 8

1918: the last offensives and the collapse of the Central Powers

With Russia out of the war and nearly fifty divisions freed in the east, Germany tried to force a decision before American troops arrived in strength. On 21 March 1918 Ludendorff opened the spring offensive with Operation Michael, driving the British front near Saint-Quentin back 60 km, and in five offensives the Germans again reached the Marne. But supply could not keep pace, the offensives ended in July, and Foch, Allied supreme commander since March, counter-attacked. On 8 August at Amiens Australian, Canadian, British and French troops with over 500 tanks broke the German line, and Ludendorff called it “the Black Day of the German Army”. In the Hundred Days Offensive that followed, the Allies breached the Hindenburg Line from 29 September. 30 1 6 31

The Central Powers crumbled from the south. On 15 September French, Serbian and Greek troops broke through at Dobro Pole on the Salonika front; the Bulgarian army collapsed, and on 29 September Bulgaria signed the Armistice of Salonica, the first of the Central Powers to leave the war. That same day the German Supreme Army Command told the Kaiser the military situation was hopeless. The Ottoman Empire, which had lost Damascus, signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October. 1

When the Italians opened the Vittorio Veneto offensive on 24 October, Austria-Hungary was already coming apart from within. In the last week of October independence was declared in Prague, Zagreb and Budapest, and Hungarian divisions demanded to be sent home. The imperial army disintegrated and the Italians took over 300,000 prisoners. On 3 November Austria-Hungary accepted the Armistice of Villa Giusti; after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, Austria and Hungary signed separate armistices. 1

In Germany Prince Max of Baden became chancellor on 3 October and asked President Wilson for an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. But when the naval command, without the government’s knowledge, ordered a final battle against the British fleet, sailors at Wilhelmshaven refused to sail on 30 October, and on 3 November revolt broke out in Kiel. Sailors’ and workers’ councils spread across the country within days; on 9 November a republic was proclaimed and Wilhelm II abdicated, as told in The German Revolution of 1918–1919. At 5 a.m. on 11 November the armistice was signed in a railway carriage in the Compiègne forest and took effect at 11 a.m. Germany had to withdraw west of the Rhine and surrender its fleet and weapons, while the naval blockade remained in force. Even on the last day 2,738 men were killed. 1 32 33

The cost, the debates and the aftermath

Death tolls vary widely with the method of counting. Commonly cited estimates give 15 to 22 million deaths, 9 to 11 million of them military and 6 to 13 million civilian. Clodfelter notes that “the generally accepted figure of noncombatant deaths is 6.5 million” while warning that civilian deaths are hazardous to estimate. Of the 60 million Europeans mobilised, some 8 million died; Germany lost 15.1% of its active male population, Austria-Hungary 17.1% and France 10.5%. Serbia is estimated to have lost over 1.2 million people including civilians and deaths from disease, nearly 30% of its population. 34 1 6

The cost of the blockade is also disputed. The German Board of Public Health claimed in December 1918 that 763,000 civilians had died because of it; a 1928 study put the figure at 424,000, and Jay Winter estimated 300,000 excess deaths after excluding influenza. Critics note that the German figure was produced amid a campaign to have the blockade lifted. The so-called Spanish flu, spreading from the spring of 1918, was accelerated by mass troop movements, but estimates of its toll range from 17 to 50 million and possibly as high as 100 million. Since disease, the 1918 pandemic included, caused about a third of all military deaths, the line between war deaths and influenza deaths is itself blurred. 18 35 34

Historians have long debated not only why the war began but why the Allies won, how far the generals were responsible for the enormous casualties, how soldiers endured the trenches and how far the home fronts accepted the war. In the 21st century a cultural turn has added new questions about occupation, the radicalisation of politics, race, gender and mental health. In postwar Germany the “stab-in-the-back” myth held that the army had not been beaten in the field but betrayed by a home front of strikers and revolutionaries; yet the German high command itself had conceded defeat at the end of September, and scholars still differ over how far the blockade hastened the collapse. 1 36 18

The armistice of 11 November halted the fighting on the Western Front; it was not a peace. The war brought down four empires — the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman — and with them the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 and the treaties beginning with Versailles, the new states such as Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the revolutionary wave of 1918–1919 and the crisis of 1923 are continued in The aftermath of the First World War. 1 33