The First World War

The First World War began on the 29th of July, 1914, as Russia declared war on Austria following the Austrian invasion of Serbia. As the alliance system came into play, Germany and France found themselves at war, and on the 3rd of August, Germany launched a massive invasion of Belgium. Much to the surprise of the world, the Belgian army managed a creditable defense, holding the Germans outside of Liège for several days and ruining the careful timetable of the Schlieffen Plan. On the 8th of August, Liège fell, and had it not been for the arrival of the British and French expeditionary forces via Antwerp and the Lille-Bruxelles railroad, respectively, all Belgium might have fallen. As it was, Belgium only lost its eastern third to the German occupation forces, retaining the remainder thanks to hastily improvised defenses along the western shore of the Meuse and a rapidly growing Allied military presence in Brabant. In the east, a Russian offensive led to the brief occupation of East Prussia and parts of Poznán/Posen province, but was quickly expelled from German territory by the end of August. In the Middle East, Turkey's alignment with the Austro-Germans led to prompt declarations of war by the Allies -- including Egypt -- and a Russian invasion of northeastern Anatolia. In the Pacific, in the meantime, the isolated German colonies in the Pacific were quickly seized by Japanese, French, and Australians, while the German colonies in Africa were picked off virtually at leisure.

Each of the major four fronts of the First World War -- the Western, the Eastern, the Balkan, and the Turkish -- saw vastly different forms of warfare. On the Eastern Front, for instance, Austro-German technical superiority was sufficient to begin pushing back Russian armies, driving them out from Russian Poland by the middle of 1915 and making rapid inroads into the Ukraine and the Baltic region by 1916. Towards the end of 1916, the Russian situation began to deteriorate alarmingly, as shortages of matériel and the loss of many of Russia's most productive industrial regions to Austro-German occupation began to discredit the Tsarist government and make radical revolution look like the only way to save Russia from defeat.

The Balkan Front, in the meantime, can be said to have ended in March of 1915 after Austria defeated the last remaining Serbian army still under the control of the royal government. In short order, Serbia and Montenegro were transferred into Austrian puppet states, and harshly exploited for their resources of food, timber, and coal in order to support the Austro-German war effort. Many Serbs and Montenegrins refused to accept the fact of their countries' conquest, and formed partisan groups fighting against the Austrian occupation troops. In the course of vicious reprisals and growing famine, the Serbian and Montenegrin civilian populations suffered terribly. In October of 1915, Greece entered the war on the side of the Entente after the Bulgarian declaration of war against Serbia. The tough Greek army managed to hold the Austrian armies in Macedonia, while Anglo-French colonial troops began to mass inside Greece's frontiers.

The Turkish Front was so termed only by virtue of the fact that battles in three separate regions had the common goal over overthrowing the Ottoman Empire and allowing for the free passage of matériel from the Allies to Europe. In Arabia, Egyptian and French colonial armies began to advance on the western fringes of Turkish-held territory, promising independence to the Francophile Lebanese and the Arabs of Syria and Iraq in exchange for their support of the Franco-Egyptian invasion. The fall of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to Egyptian troops in the summer of 1915 proved to be a vital morale-booster for Egyptians and Muslims living in the other members of the Allies, and by the beginning of 1916 Turkish rule along the Empire's western flank had begun to crumble. In Mesopotamia, the British Indian Army managed only limited advances up the fertile Tigris-Euphrates valley against native hostility and epidemic disease. In northeastern Anatolia, though, the Russian Empire achieved its only significant military victory, as Russian troops supplied by the war industries of southern Russia pushed their way through Turkish defenses towards Lake Van and the Mediterranean coast. In revenge for these stunning victories, the Turkish government ordered the systematic genocide of Armenians -- like Russians, Orthodox Christians, but uninvolved for the most part in the Russian offensives -- in those territories still under its control. News of the appalling atrocities in the deserts of northern Syria quickly made its way worldwide, and played an important role in making world-opinion decidedly pro-Allied and anti-German.

Finally, on the Western Front, the war experience was immensely bloody and highly demoralizing. In the three other fronts of the First World War, one side usually had a far greater technological and/or numerical advantage over the other, and consequently was able to achieve victories relatively quickly. On the Western Front, though, both the German invaders and the British, French, Belgian, and assorted colonial defenders had roughly the same numbers, and the same general level of military technologies. As a result, a stalemate emerged. Throughout the fall and winter of 1914, each side had tried to push through the other side's defenses, only to find to its horror that the hitherto-vast armies sent into battle could easily be cut down by machine gun fire, artillery bombardments, and land mines. After an initial outburst of jingoist patriotism, the general public of the Western Allies had been appalled, and leading politicians in France and Belgium successful pushed the Allied Command to adopt a more purely defensive strategy. The German Empire, though, remained immune to German public sentiment and continued to launch massive invasions across the trenches lining the western shore of the Meuse only to come up with catastrophic defeat after defeat.

Although all of the combatants had large navies and considerable influence overseas, after the brief and successful campaigns against German colonies there was surprisingly little naval conflict. An Anglo-French blockade of Germany was enforced, with shipping headed for Germany redirected away from German ports and shipping intended for the neutral countries neighbouring Germany strictly limited in order to remove the possibility of surreptitious German imports of vital raw materials. As the First World War gradually progressed, Germany quickly began to run short on many of the raw materials that it needed to maintain its industrial-era military, not to mention its national economy. As food shortages became common across Austria and Germany, the German government saw Russia as a stop-gap and perhaps even long-term substitute. If Germans controlled the granaries of Ukraine, the oil fields of the Caucasus, and the forests of northern Russia, Germany could not only gain most of the resources it needed but could then promptly redirect German forces westward for a crushing offensive against the Western Allies. Beginning in August of 1916, two years after the First World War had begun, Austro-German forces began a mass offensive in the east against Russian forces. The overstrained Czarist armies broke in front of the disciplined Austro-German offensive, and by the spring of 1917 the armies could maneuver practically unimpeded in the Russian heartland. In March, the desperate Czarist government was forced to sign the Treaty of Gomel. This draconian treaty stripped Russia of vast amounts of territory -- Russian Poland and the Baltic provinces were to be directly annexed by Germany, while Ukraine, Belarus, and the 'Kuban were to be made into German puppet states, and Russia was to transfer to Turkey its Armenian and Georgian provinces. The ignonimy of Gomel -- and the general incompetency of the Czarist régime under Nicholas II -- sparked off a radical revolution in St. Petersburg the following month. The Russian monarchy was abolished by the radical new republican government, and new armies were raised by the government and by provincial warlords to continue the fight against the Austro-Germans. Russia's industrial weakness, though, prevented the revolutionary armies from having effect, and the Austro-German occupation of western Russia was unhindered by organized resistance.

The Austro-German victories on the Eastern Front were not matched by victories elsewhere -- in the Middle Eastern, Balkan, or Western Fronts. In the Middle East, French landings around Beirut and an Egyptian advance from Palestine towards Damascus met great success, while the Russian armies in Turkish Armenia amazingly managed to successfully fight on despite the disruption of their supply lines and their isolation from other Entente forces. The fall of Damascus in May of 1916 was an immense propaganda victory for the Entente in the Muslim world, as was the fall of Baghdad three months later to the British Indian Army. Slowly, the Ottoman Empire's forces in the field began to collapse.

The Balkan Front saw perhaps the most dramatic fighting of the entire war. In February of 1916, British colonial troops assaulted the Turkish position on the Dardanelles barring the sea route to southern Russia, while Greek, French colonial, and Serbian forces pushed northeast into Bulgaria and Turkish Thrace. In July the Bulgarian government sued for peace and was forced to put its railway network until the control of the Allies at the same time that the Dardanelles finally fell to the British colonial forces after scenes of appalling slaughter. By late September Greco-British troops were beseiging Constantinople itself, while Greek landings along the eastern shores of the Aegean, in the Greek settlements of Ionia, went uncontested. When winter fell, the Allies had managed to conquer most of Bulgaria, Turkish Thrace, and Ionia despite Turkish and Austrian resistance, while Serbian and French colonial forces had reoccupied Serbian Macedonia. The strained Austrian forces positioned in Serbia and Montenegro feared spring, for Austria's supplies of war matériel were finally running down, and separatism among Austria's non-German peoples was growing -- given a sharp enough defeat, the entire empire could fall apart.

On the Western Front, the British, French, and Belgian forces remained on the defensive. The terrible death tolls of the 1914 and 1915 offensives were still remembered, and despite the patriotic fervour of Belgians to regain the eastern portion of their country the Allied High Command refrained from mounting enormously costly offensives into German-occupied territory. The Western Allies fought a defensive war, inflicting huge casualties against successive waves of young German soldiers with few casualties of their own. They waited for a collapse of German organization and morale, and for the entry of the South American countries -- with their booming war industries and their untapped pools of manpower -- on their side.

Despite the harsh winter of 1916-17, the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean saw a series of decisive naval battles. In an attempt to choke off the transatlantic supply lines of the Western Allies, German U-boat submarines were dispatched to torpedo merchant vessels regardless of their nationality. Although Britain ran short on matériel for a time, the U-boat attacks on South American-flagged merchant vessels finally provoked the countries of South America -- first Brazil and Chile, then Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela -- into declaring war against Germany in January and February of 1917. Faced with the collapse of its  naval strategy and South American intervention against Germany, the desperate German government sent the German High Seas Fleet out into the North Sea to confront the British navy for control of the seas. In the Battle of Scapa Flow, in March, the British fleet managed to destroy the last remnants of German naval might at a heavy cost to itself. No more could Germany hope to cut off the supply lines of the Western and South American Allies -- any victory or stalemate that Germany could achieve would have to be achieved on the battlefields of Europe.

In February of 1917, the Romanian government announced its entry into the First World War alongside the Western Allies, thanks to the Anglo-French pledge that Romania could annex Romanian-populated areas of Transylvania and even Russian Moldavia. Romania's entry into the war immensely complicated the strategic plans of the Austrian High Command -- with Austrian military forces largely committed to defending German positions in Ukraine against Russian attack an occupying Serbia, Austria simply couldn't cope with yet another army entering the field against it. The Romanian declaration of war is generally considered to be the trigger for the secret decision of the Hungarian government to break away from the Austrian Empire as an independent kingdom. Representatives of the Hungarian government had secretly met with French agents in Berne, and had been promised that in exchange for Hungary's separation it could escape whatever post-war territorial changes and indemnities that might be imposed on the Central Powers, even gaining the non-Romanian areas of the principality of Transylvania. The May declaration of independence by the Hungarian Parliament, and the hurried coronation of the Magyarophile liberal Hapsburg King Mátyás, shocked the Vienna government and galvanized the non-German nationalities of Austria. Although the Austrian army tried to suppress the separatist uprising, the defection of Magyar army units to the side of the new kingdom prevented it from making significant headway. Émigré circles in Paris and Buenos Aires advocated the foundation of independent Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states, while even in the cities of the empire -- Prague, Bratislava, Zagreb, Ljubljana -- nationalist sympathizers openly prepared for a life outside of Austria. The death of Emperor Franz Josef in June took the heart out of the Austrian government, which slowly began to withdraw from the war. The Ottoman government sued for peace in July of 1917, and allowed Franco-British troops into Constantinople as it began to negotiate the peace settlement for Turkey.

The collapse of the Austrian war effort and the Austrian Empire in the spring of 1917 devastated the morale of German civilians. In 1914, ordinary Germans had been promised a quick and painless victory; now, three years later, after millions of war dead killed across Europe and privation at home, they were soon going to face victory. The fact that more than half of Russia's European territories were under German control to a population more concerned with the security of their homes that with an ephemeral eastern European empire. By the time that Austria collapsed, popular discontent with the conduct of the war had combined with a variety of other anti-establishment forces -- with democratic or republican forces that opposed the authoritarian rule of the German imperial government, with socialist forces that condemned the war as just another adventure of a fundamentally unjust socioeconomic structure, even with separatists who blamed the sufferings of their regions upon the Prussian-dominated German government and sought relief in independence.

By July, the South American expeditionary forces had massed in Belgium, behind the exhausted European armies of the Anglo-French and the Belgians, and the newly-raised colonial troops of the French. The Allies offensive of that month into German-occupied Belgium crushed the exhausted German defenders. The German High Command desperately tried to transfer armies from Russia to the Western Front and to mobilize the German National Guard, but the mass of Germans simply refused to obey the dictates of their discredited government. By the middle of August, the Allied armies reached the Belgian border and seized the city of Aachen. The disgraced Kaiser abdicated and fled to the Netherlands, while the German provisional government tried to hold off the invasion from the West. On the 28th of August, though, the Kingdom of Bavaria announced its secession from Germany, as did Saxony a week later.

Finally, on the 10th of September, after reports reached Berlin that the French 3rd Army had reached the Rhine, Germany surrendered to the Allies. The First World War was finally over, and the Versailles Peace Conference began.