13 World War I: 1914

After the opening battles, few observers fully appreciated the destructive implications of a long war using modern weapons, with the ability of nations to concentrate fighting forces and materiel as never before in history.

The governments succeeded in keeping the bad news out of the general population.
The techniques of military defense proved to be superior to those of offense, which was an unexpected aspect of this war.
The trenches, which in the West developed into intricate networks surrounded by barbed wire and defended by machine guns, proved nearly unbreachable.
The war dragged millions to their deaths and millions more to agony and destitution.

Modern industrial symbolism is reflected in the term "machine gun".

The "fat" or "big" howitzers of the Germans became symbolic after they destroyed Belgian fortifications.
World War I was more industrial than any previous war, and it was also more all-consuming, as never before in European history.
The main issue was not the new weaponry.
The importance of some was overstated in later accounts.

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Most of the fighting was done by soldiers on the ground.

They said victory would come if more courage and strength were applied.

They sent wave after wave of men out of the trenches, only to see them cut down by machine-gun fire.
The lines of battle rarely moved more than a few hundred yards.

The generals, who went to bed each night after eating well, have been written about.

Many common soldiers, who were enduring the cold and wet of the trenches, also had a stubborn belief in their cause.
They seemed to embrace the rhetoric of righteous struggle against demonic enemies in the opening years of the war.
Before the draft was instituted in Britain, enthusiastic volunteers went to army recruiting stations.

As the war continued without a clear prospect of victory for either side, there was a lot of uncertainty and a lack of planning for a long war.

The General turned his attention to the eastern front in order to save the Austro-Hungarian armies.
In 1915, Russia's armies were driven into a massive retreat, 300 miles into the interior of Russia, after the brilliant initial successes at Tannenberg of Germany's armies.
More than 2 million Russian soldiers were captured, wounded or killed.
Germany's military would rule over 20% of Russia's population over the next several years.

It was only natural that the fleets of Britain and Germany would meet in titanic battles, but here too they were closer to a stalemate.

If the war was to be lengthy, naval considerations were important.
France and Britain wrongly believed that a blockade would weaken Germany and cause it to file for peace.
Many neutral countries, such as Holland, Sweden, Norway, andDenmark, whose economies were dependent on trade with Germany, protested as did the Americans.
The rights of neutrals became a big issue.

In February 1915, the Germans declared the western approaches to the British Isles and to northern France to be a zone of war, and neutral ships that entered that zone could expect to be attacked.

For the next two years, Germany curbed its submarine warfare after President Wilson warned that any such acts in the future would be considered deliberately unfriendly.

The German leaders believed that they were justified in using extreme measures to defend themselves in a desperate war for survival and for a passenger liner to be carrying munitions was a cynical ruse.

The Americans would follow in the footsteps of the Germans when it came to passenger ships carrying weapons.
The distinctions between civilians and armed forces were breaking down.

The naval high command in Germany was hesitant about challenging the British in the open seas.

The blockade of the North Sea was intended to be weakened by Germany's damage to the British fleet.

The only full-scale battle of battleships was the Battle of Jutland.
It was large, involving some 250 ships.
It could be considered a victory for the Germans, since they sank more ships than the British, but it was a British victory since the German fleet never again challenged the British fleet in this way.

The horrors of war reached a stage previously unimaginable in the battles of Verdun and the Somme.

The French fortress of Verdun was surrounded by German forces on three sides and was the focus of von Falkenhayn's plan to concentrate enormous fire-power.
100,000 shells poured into the Verdun fortress in the first hour of the German bombardment.
In the next five months, both France and Germany put enormous resources into this battle.
On both sides of the Somme river, the German army and the Franco-British forces fought a battle.
Tanks were used for the first time in military history.

The Germans and the French were both bled white by the failure of the Germans to take Verdun.

There was little military advantage to one side or the other.

The British launched their first major offensive close to the Somme river on July 1 in order to reduce the pressure on Verdun.

The battle began with a five-day bombardment of the German forces.
The battles along the Somme resulted in over a million casualties.
The futility of trench warfare and the madness of modern industrial warfare can be seen in the battles of Verdun and the Somme.
Millions of people died or were wounded in the two years of war in the north of France.
The generals were working on new offensives.

The battles of 1916 made a difference in one way: The men continued to fight, but more like machines, concerned with trying to survive.

Keeping up discipline among soldiers and civilians became a priority for those in power.
Soldiers did what they could to avoid front-line service, even to the extent of wounding themselves, and those not yet drafted into service were more inclined to look for ways to avoid it.
Strikes by workers grew as did class resentments.
People on the battle front wereumbling about the easy lives of the civilians.
Anger on the right and left in Germany was directed at the "half-English" monarch, who many believed was losing his mind.
In late 1917, the tiger took over and instituted a dictatorship similar to the military dictatorship in Germany.

Dramatic change was seen on the eastern front in 1917.

The war had petered out in Russia.
The tsarist regime was unable to muster its military forces for long periods of time.
Russia's armies, made up mostly of peasant recruits, were ill-trained, poorly led, and often provisioned with disgrace, by late 1916.
In the autumn of 1916, the forces of order were unable to contain bread and coal riots in the capital, initially led by housewives.
Government troops refused to follow orders after initially firing on the protesters.
Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael, who promptly abdicated in turn.
The Romanov dynasty collapsed like a house of cards.

The story of World War I will be fully addressed in the next chapter.

At first, the implications of these events on Russia's war were not clear.
The people were in power and the leaders of the government spoke of a more efficient and vigorous military effort.
Since Russia had overthrown its corrupt, autocratic rulers, it became more acceptable for the Americans to enter the war on the side of the Entente, as part of a war for democracy, not one of competing imperialisms.

Some of Russia's new leaders explored the possibility of a peace deal, but without success, which was unsurprising given the uncertainty about who was actually in power in Russia.

peace negotiations held little appeal for the German generals because they believed they could still win the war.
It was obvious that the majority of Russia's soldiers were against renewing the conflict, even against their own officers.

France and Britain were alarmed by the breakdown of authority in Russia.

In February 1917, the German generals decided to return to unrestricted submarine warfare as part of a plan to push for victory again by concentrating forces in the west.

Even if the Americans declared war, Germany could defeat the French and British forces before American aid became significant.

The French had a plan.

The French Nivelle offensive turned into another bloody fiasco, this time in the French army.

The hero of Verdun was called in to gain control of the situation, which he did with a combination of suppression and promises that no new offensives would be launched until the Americans arrived.

It took many months before the American forces could reach Europe in adequate numbers, but the intervention of the United States on the side of the ENTente marked another sig nificant change in 1917.

The majority of the American population was against American participation in the war.
Many of the various ethnic groups in the United States sympathized with the Central Powers.
Germany did not do well in the propaganda war because the Americans got a lot of their news from British sources.

The actions of the tsar's armies on the eastern Front had been equally bad.

The United States was hostile to Britain over its blockade and Britain's suppression of the Irish Easter Uprising in 1916 made many Irish Americans angry.
Americans did not experience the fear of invasion that most Europeans did because of the isolationist position.
Americans had plenty of time to ponder the war's millions of deaths and the seeming futility of trench warfare.

The speed with which American opinion changed to support interven tion seems almost unbelievable.

The news on March 1, 1917 of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram, a deciphered note from Germany, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back, as the Germans' resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which meant a sharp increase in the loss of American merchant shipping and

Wilson needed to be able to present American participation in this war as protecting national interests but also as a matter of high moral principle.

He presented a list of values that "we have always carried nearest to our hearts," including liberal democracy, the rights of small nations, and making the world safe for free peoples.

Even if Britain's record in dealing with small nations was hardly above reproach, Wilson's own long-standing pro-British sympathies played a role.

The kind of world that might result if the Central Powers prevailed over the Entente was calculated.

One might say that this shift is one of the most significant of modern times.

Europe's affairs were entered by the United States.
World War I was a war for democracy against autocracy.
The United States started a ruthless persecution of Americans who continued to oppose the war.

It may be seen as typical of the ill-informed and poorly conceived directions taken by Germany's leaders that Zimmermann tried to lure Mexico into supporting Germany.

After the revolution in Russia, German workers staged mass strikes to protest the privatizations they were facing.
In July 1917, the Reichstag passed a "Peace Resolution" that favored the immediate opening of negotiations that would lead to a settlement without territorial annexations.
The resolution was dismissed by the military and political right in Germany.
They were playing with events in Russia.

The signing of separate peace with the Central Powers in March 1918 gave Germany's military leaders further confidence that they could still achieve a total victory, since they could move most of Germany.

By early 1919, the leaders' call for revolution to spread from Russia to the rest of Europe and the world was dismissed as ludicrous, but at the time, few western observers believed that the Communist regime could last more than a few months.

There was a development in November 1917 that was of profound historical significance.

The idea of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine was championed by the British government.
The text of its single paragraph seemed to be inconsistent in its goals, on the one hand favoring a Jewish homeland in an area populated by an overwhelming Arab majority, and on the other stipulating that nothing should be done to undermine or diminish the rights of that majority population.
After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in 1916, Britain, France, and Russia had spheres of influence in the Middle East.
Palestine was not to be administered by Britain alone.
Many believed that the goal of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine was implicit in the Declaration, although no mention was made of it.

The British government was concerned that Germany might make a similar declaration, which is one of the reasons why they embraced this initiative.

It was important to have Jews on the side of the Entente because most British leaders believed they had a powerful influence on world affairs.
The principle of extending sympathy to Europe's Jewish population was not accepted by Arab observers.
The Arabs were treated in such a cavalier manner that they could be expected to fight back.
If the Arabs could not be reconciled to Jewish settlement in Palestine, the future of Zionism was bleak.
For the rest of the century, such a peaceful reconciliation would be impossible.
The need for such a place of refuge grew rapidly in the following decades, as will be described in future chapters.

The German army made rapid advances into the north of France in the spring of 1918, nearly twice as large as they had been in August 1914.

They paid a huge price in lives - nearly a million German soldiers fell from March to July - and each advance proved short-lived.
The gamble that France could be defeated before the Americans arrived was a bad one, although it was not until June 1918 that American troops clashed with the German army.

A quarter-million American soldiers were arriving each month by June, and it was widely understood that the American potential was tremendous.

The German advance was halted by the help of nine American divisions.
The counteroffensive in September pushed the dispirited German forces back toward the prewar borders.

The allied French, British, and American forces were poised to invade Germany, according to the General.

The government asked for a peace settlement based on the Fourteen Points that Wilson had announced in January 1918.
His later claim that Germany's army was "stabbed in the back" by politicians was outrageously false.
The war-time controlled press in Germany made it seem like defeat came out of the blue for many Germans.
Wilson had stipulated that he would only deal with leaders who represented the German people, and so a new, moderate chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, came to power, more or less representing the center-left parties that had backed the Peace Resolution in July 1917.

The revolutionary forces were building.

They were told to attack the British in a last-ditch battle.

After being told by his generals that he no longer had the confidence of Germany's troops, he took a train to the Netherlands and stayed there for the rest of his life.

A German "Council of People's Commissars" was formed on November 9 after a republic was proclaimed.
The title chosen for this body was strikingly similar to that used by the Bolsheviks when they assumed power in the name of the soviets in 1917.
The German Council of People's Commissars was made up of all social democrats.
It looked like a German revolution, called a "Soviet Germany," was in the making.

Efforts to convey the wide-ranging implications of World War I inevitably fall short.

There are rows of crosses under which the remains of hundreds of thousands of young men lie in military cemeteries in northern France.
The World War I memorial in the town squares of France have lists of local men who died at the front.
France's losses in the Franco-Prussian War were not as bad as they looked.
Comparable remarks can be made for other countries.

The "Great War" was a term used to describe much of European history in the twentieth century.

The scars of war were either points of honor or shameful.
The war was the most noble thing they had ever experienced.
By the end of the war, the Americans had lost 115,000 men, more than half of them through disease, as the American entry tipped the balance in favor of the Entente powers.
The European nations counted 10 million dead in combat and 20 million wounded from August 1914 to November 1918.

The price the Americans paid for this war was relatively small.

The Americans were responsible for six of the hundred shells fired by the armies of the Entente.

At the end of the World War I, the United States was stronger, more productive, and richer than when it entered it, because no battles were fought on American territory.

It became Europe's creditor because of being a debtor nation.

The European nations involved in the war were less powerful, less productive, and less rich than they had been in 1914.
Europe's population had experienced terrible privations and now faced a menacing future, but most Americans remained well fed and comfortably housed.

The former Russian Empire was in a bad shape when the country plunged into a civil war in 1917, and things would get worse from there.

The new rulers of the former Russian Empire had a revolutionary vision for the world.

The experience of war and the long-term memory of it are emphasized in the following books.