The First World War: Alliances, Battles, and Consequences
Alliances
An alliance is an agreement made between two or more countries to give each other help if it is needed. When an alliance is signed, those countries become known as Allies. A number of alliances had been signed by countries between the years 1879 and 1914. These were important because they meant that some countries had no option but to declare war if one of their allies declared war first. To try and balance the power in Europe, the major countries allied themselves into two groups:
- The Triple Alliance (also called the Central Powers): In 1882 Germany, Austria, and Italy formed an alliance. The Ottoman Empire joined in 1914. Italy switched sides in 1915.
- The Triple Entente: By 1907 France, Russia, and Britain had formed an alliance. In 1917 Russia withdrew from the Entente and the war, but the USA joined at about the same time.
The Italian Front
Before the outbreak of war in August 1914, Italy had sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary. However, tempted by offers of more land once the war was won, Italy entered the war in April 1915 on the side of the allies. The Italian front is the name given to the fighting that took place along the border between Italy and Austria. The Italians only managed to advance a short way into Austria. Between 1915 and 1917 there were twelve battles fought along the river Isonzo, just inside the Austrian border. After being defeated at the battle of Caporetto the Italians were pushed back.
Gallipoli
The Gallipoli peninsula is located in the south of Turkey. In 1915, the allied commanders decided to try to attack Germany by attacking her ally, Turkey. Allied soldiers, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, were sent to the Peninsula while British ships tried to force a way through the Dardanelles. The entire mission was a failure. The allies lost more than 50,000 men but gained hardly any land.
The War at Sea
Even before the war, Germany and Britain were involved in a naval race. Germany knew that she was unlikely to win a naval war against Britain and avoided naval conflict with Britain. Britain’s main naval tactic was to keep German ships in German ports and to block supplies from reaching Germany. Germany’s main naval tactic was to post u-boats (submarines) in the Atlantic ocean and to destroy ships taking supplies from America and other countries to Britain.
Warfare: Trench System and New Weapons
The war began with cavalry charges and open battles. Both sides realized that these tactics were useless against modern weapons. Soldiers had to dig trenches to protect themselves. Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches (long narrow holes dug in the ground), in which troops are largely immune to the enemy’s small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery. Trench warfare occurred when a military revolution in firepower was not matched by similar advances in mobility, resulting in a grueling form of warfare in which the defense held the advantage.
Conditions in the trenches were terrible. Men were living and fighting in cold, muddy, and rat-infested huts cut into the mud. Sanitary conditions in the trenches were quite poor.
End of the War
Although America did not declare war on Germany until 1917, it had been involved in the war from the beginning supplying the allies with weapons and supplies.
On May 2nd, 1915, the British passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo from a German submarine.
President Woodrow Wilson campaigned for a peaceful end to the war. He appealed to both sides to try to settle the war by diplomatic means but was unsuccessful.
In February 1917, the Germans planned to sink any ship that approached Britain whether it was a military ship, supply ship, or passenger ship. The United States declared war on Germany on April 6th, 1917. American troops joined the French and British in the summer of 1918. Rapid advancements in weapon technology meant that by 1918 tanks and planes were commonplace.
In 1918, Germany announced that if they were to win the war then the allies had to be defeated on the Western Front before the arrival of American troops. Although their offensive was initially successful the allies held ground and eventually pushed the Germans back.
By 1918 there were strikes and demonstrations in Berlin and other cities protesting about the effects of the war on the population. Socialists were waiting for the chance to seize Germany as they had in Russia. In October 1918 Ludendorff resigned and the German navy mutinied. The end was near. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on November 9th, 1918.
Consequences of the First World War
Casualties of War
After the War, most of the major European nations were bankrupt and millions were dead. The war had profound demographic consequences. About 750,000 German civilians died from starvation caused by the British blockade during the war. Diseases flourished in the chaotic wartime conditions. In addition, a major influenza epidemic spread around the world.
Changing National Boundaries
Four empires disappeared: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian.
- Austria-Hungary was partitioned into several successor states, including Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, largely but not entirely along ethnic lines.
- The Russian Empire, which had withdrawn from the war in 1917 after the October Revolution, lost much of its western frontier as the newly independent nations of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were carved from it.
- The Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and much of its non-Anatolian territory was awarded to various Allied powers as protectorates.