World War I
The Great War

The shots that rang out on the streets of Sarajevo in June 1914 changed the world. A young Serbian assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. In retaliation, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Decades of simmering nationalistic hostilities quickly were unleashed. The principal belligerents on one side were Austria-Hungary and Germany, on the other, Britain, France, Russia, and, in 1917, the United States. Surpassing in scale all previous military conflicts, it was called simply "The Great War" -- until a war on a vastly greater scale erupted two decades later, whereupon it was demoted to simply the first of the World Wars.

In 1815, representatives of the Great Powers, most notably Prince Metternich of Austria, had met in Vienna to engineer a lasting postwar settlement. The resulting "Concert of Europe" was based on the restoration and maintenance of a European balance of power. After much diplomatic maneuvering it was agreed that France, its monarchy restored, would be readmitted to European society as a full partner rather than remaining a pariah state. War would be avoided by an informal balance of power among five roughly equal Great Powers: France, Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia. The great-power concert crafted in Vienna functioned remarkably well for nearly a century, interrupted only by the Revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War of 1854-56.

Even during the long peace, though, forces were at work to shatter the European balance. Conservative regimes attempted to restrain liberalism and nationalism forcibly, most notably when they crushed the Revolutions of 1848. Resentment smoldered throughout Europe. New ambitious regimes no longer saw their national interests served by the provisions of the Vienna settlement and attempted forcible revision of its terms. Meanwhile, the ongoing Industrial Revolution resulted in a shift of economic power to Central Europe, frightening the other nations and eroding the Continental balance of power. Additionally, the rapid pace of technological innovation added frightening new dimensions to warfare. Victory in the mid-nineteenth-century wars went to the power which best harnessed new technology.

With altered circumstances, peace did not long endure. Under the masterful leadership of Otto von Bismarck, Germany emerged as Europe's dominant power. The Prussian Chancellor used a series of limited wars against Denmark, Austria and France from 1864 to 1871 to weld the patchwork of German states into a powerful, unified nation. Bismarck was expert at limiting the scope of war to achieve limited objectives. He initiated war only after diplomatically isolating his opponent and terminated it before other European powers were tempted to intervene. Moreover, he never yielded to his Generals bent on total victory. Prussian forces, for example, could have crushed and occupied the Austrian state in 1866, but the Iron Chancellor declined to destroy a potentially useful ally. Although Bismarck claimed never to have read Clausewitz, his use of war for political aims ranks as, perhaps, history's best example of Clausewitzian principles in action.

After 1871 and the Treaty of Frankfurt, a rigid and precarious system of bipolar alliances and alignments temporarily restored the military balance among the major European states. The great-power Concert, however, was gone forever. Bismarck's policy was to avoid provocations, reassure neighbors, and divide potential adversaries. The result--even with two small and one fairly important war--was a period of general peace. Unfortunately, Bismarck's less-talented successors lacked his ability to impose a favorable peace on Europe or the desire to do so. After Emperor Wilhelm II fired the Iron Chancellor in 1890, the Continent drifted inexorably toward war.

Between 1890 and 1914, Europe drifted from a loose multipolar arrangement to a rigid and precarious bipolar system. Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a young power, sensitive about status and slights. It was not democratic: unification under Prussian auspices had meant the crushing of the once-powerful liberal German patriotic movement. Partly for this reason--the need to burnish legitimacy--Berlin was eager to show its people that it could be a "great power."

After Bismarck's forced retirement in 1890, German leaders, spurred by the new Emperor, Wilhelm II, decided to embark on a more ambitious policy that would enhance Germany's position and prestige as both a continental and a world power. The Kaiser and his advisers embarked on a program of national assertion, based on jealously of England and the vague demand for a "place in the sun" that quickly stirred conflict. Brash and even reckless, the Emperor's policy resulted in the creation of countervailing alliances. To compound the problem, Bismarck's successors proved much less adept than the Iron Chancellor at manipulating the balance of power to German advantage. Where Bismarck had usually been able to dominate Wilhelm I in matters of policy, Wilhelm II invariably held the upper hand after 1890. Germany?s actions stimulated international rivalries and provoked a series of great-power confrontations that ultimately resulted in war.

Berlin embarked on the building of a High Seas Fleet, based on the famous "risk fleet" concept, under which no power would want to risk battle with a German navy which could not beat them, but could harm them seriously. Aimed at intimidating Britain from participation in any European war, Bismarck had warned that building a navy would drive Britain into an alliance with France, which is exactly what happened. Berlin sought confrontations, as with France over Morocco. The German calculation was either that the other Powers would back down in a direct confrontation, or that Germany would win a lightning victory by dint of operational brilliance. The outbreak of World War I -- and Britain's rapid decision to join in -- disproved the first part of that calculation; four years of tragic bloodshed ending in German defeat disproved the second.

On 28 June 1914 the Austro-Hungarian successor to the throne, Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by a member of a band of Serbian conspirators. On 01 August 1914 war errupted between Central Powers [Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire] and the Entente [France, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Serbia].

The War was caused in part by a military doomsday machine, devised by war planners who lacked firm political guidance. General war came about because statesmen lost control over their military machines during an international confrontation. Before the War, Germany?s military leaders faced the difficult strategic problem of preparing for a two-front war. Their solution was to develop an audacious strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan. In an attempt to obtain a quick military decision, Germany employed the Schlieffen Plan at the War?s outbreak. When this quick decision failed to occur, Germany?s leaders found themselves embroiled in a grinding war of attrition against a powerful coalition of opposing states.

World War I, "the Great War," lasted from 1914 through 1918. The Western Front was stalemated by static trench warfare, in which hundreds of thousands of men died in senseless attacks, from the beginning of the war until the armistice of November 1918.

The First World War saw force used as a bludgeon rather than as Bismarck's precise instrument of policy. It was a conflict fought on an unprecedented scale, whose results bore little relation to its original purposes. Major developments in industrial capabilities, transportation, communications and weaponry vastly enlarged the geographic scale of war, yet stifled tactical and strategic innovation. Military and political leaders groped for ways to adapt to new conditions, incorporate new technology, restore decisiveness to the battlefield, and bring costs and benefits into proportion.

The Great War placed hitherto unimagined strain on the economic and social fabric of the warring states. War plans had been founded on the expectation of a short, decisive Bismarckian conflict. Instead, the warring powers found themselves in a bloody stalemate along hundreds of miles of static battle lines. Unwilling and unable to alter their political objectives, participants resigned themselves to a lengthy war of attrition. Leaders on both sides recognized that as compromise became less and less acceptable, complete collapse was the probable outcome for the losing governments.

Britain employed its sea power to defeat Germany through a blockade. With the exception of submarines, the German fleet spent most of the war in port as a "fleet-in-being" -- holding down a portion of the Royal Navy battle fleet. The German High Seas Fleet finally ventured out at the end of May 1916 to battle the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, but neither side scored a clear victory. At battle?s end, each fleet had lost several ships, but the British suffered more heavily in tonnage, by almost double. As late as 1918 the Grand Fleet deployed the bulk of its assets to escort convoys to Norway. The German decision to embark on an all-out submarine offensive to defeat Britain proved to be short-sighted. The Lusitania was torpedoed on 07 May 1915 with 1200 lives lost; 139 Americans were among them. By using submarines in this way, Germany?s leaders eventually provoked a war with the United States.

The German Army first used chlorine gas against the French Army at Ypres on 15 April 1915. Both sides found that phosgene was more effective than chlorine, and by the end of the Great War nearly 100,000 soldiers had been killed by poison gas, and over ten times that number injured.

While armies moved across the face of Europe, the United States remained neutral. In 1916 Woodrow Wilson was elected President for a second term, largely because of the slogan "He kept us out of war". On the last day of January 1917 the patience of President Woodrow Wilson broke, when Kaiser Wilhelm notified the American people that unrestricted submarine warfare would be commenced on the following day. Diplomatic relations were severed on 3 February, but the President decided to wait until the next overt act before asking Congress to declare war. He did not have long to wait. In February and March, several US ships were sunk and in March, the British Secret Service obtained the famous Zimmerman telegram, detailing German plans against the US under which Mexico was to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The note was deciphered and passed on to the Americans. Wilson sent his war message to the Senate on 02 April 1917 and war was declared four days later.

The US mobilized more than 4,000,000 troops, over 2,000,000 of whom were sent to battlefields in France under the command of Major General John J. Pershing. US Army and US Marine Corps units were integrated into joint infantry divisions. The Allies used combined campaigns successfully to wage land warfare in an environment of mass warfare and advanced technology. On the other hand, Germany, like Napoleonic France a hundred years earlier, failed properly to coordinate its land and sea power and eventually lost the war.

The 1918 offensive of the German army, carefully planned at Berlin, was intended to overcome the Allies before America could bring any effective number of her troops. To meet the successive German drives, which began 21 March 1918, the Allies under General Foch adopted the tactics of a slow and cautious retreat. In the July drive, General Foch felt himself strong enough to inaugurate a policy of counter-attack. The German's crown prince threw his forces forward in a slant across the Marne. Successive French-American attacks imperiled the position of the German army and brought about its retreat. The addition of America's forces to the war effort ended the bloody stalemate. German forces were undefeated in the field, although the allied nations had had some significant successes. But Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and German politicians were left to sue for peace.

When the fighting came to an end with the Armistice of November 11, 1918, more than eight million soldiers, including more than 50,000 Americans, had lost their lives. An estimated 12-million civilians also perished. During the Great War, German's losses were over 1,700,000 killed and over 4,200,000 wounded [out of a total population of over 65 million], while France suffered over 1,300,000 deaths and over 4,200,000 wounded. The percentages of pre-war population killed or wounded were 9% of Germany, 11% of France, and 8% of Great Britain. The United States suffered one-third of one percent (0.37%) of its population killed or wounded. An estimated total of 12-million civilians perished. The war ended without clear solutions, leaving future military and political leaders to grapple with a host of strategic, tactical and technological dilemmas.

The peace settlement of 1919 remains a controversial topic. The international order created by this settlement lasted barely twenty years. The 1919 Versailles settlement failed to establish a stable international order, illustrating that winning a war does not always mean winning the peace. In the aftermath of the war, huge changes occurred. The center of wealth transferred from Europe to the United States; the political map of Europe was significantly redrawn; and Germany was left in financial shambles, its people driven to the brink of starvation - a situation that helped lead to the rise of Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, World War Two.