World War I History Articles

Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-11-2022

Getting a bit lost in the battles and events of the First World War isn’t hard, so this Cheat Sheet offers up a handy timeline that puts some of the war’s key events into order for you. It shows how events in different theaters of war related to each other and gives you a bird’s-eye view of the way the war developed as a whole. You'll also find a map that shows you locations of the war zones and key battles.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

In 1912 Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States. Wilson successfully kept Americans troops out of World War I during his first term. However American involvement became inevitable later on in World War I. As the European powers squared off in 1914 in what was to be four years of mind-numbingly horrific war, America managed to somewhat nervously mind its own business. Wilson, in fact, won reelection in 1916 using the phrase “he kept us out of war.” As time passed, however, the country began to side more often with Britain, France, and other countries that were fighting Germany. The sinking of the British passenger ship, Lusitania, by a German submarine in 1915, which resulted in the deaths of 128 Americans, inflamed U.S. passions against “the Huns.” Propagandistic portrayals of German atrocities in the relatively new medium of motion pictures added to the heat. And finally, when it was revealed that German diplomats had approached Mexico about an alliance against the United States, Wilson felt compelled to ask Congress for a resolution of war against Germany. He got it on April 6, 1917. The U.S. military was ill-prepared for war on a massive scale. Only about 370,000 men were in the Army and National Guard combined. Through a draft and enlistments, however, that number swelled to 4.8 million in all the military branches by the end of World War I. At home, about half of the war’s eventual $33 billion price tag was met through taxes; the rest was funded through the issuance of war bonds. Organized labor, in return for concessions such as the right to collective bargaining, agreed to reduce the number of strikes. Labor shortages drove wages up, which in turn drove prices up. But demand for goods and services because of the war soared, and the economy hummed along, despite government efforts to “organize” it. In Europe, however, no one was humming. American troops, like their European counterparts before them, found that modern warfare was anything but inspiring. The first U.S. troops were fed into the lines as much to shore up the morale of the Allies as anything else. But by the time the Germans launched their last desperate offensive, in the spring of 1918, more than 300,000 American troops had landed in France. By the war’s end in November, the number of Yanks had swelled to 1.4 million. Led by Major General John “Black Jack” Pershing, a celebrated veteran of the Spanish-American and Philippines wars, the U.S. forces, known as the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) fought off efforts by Allied commanders to push the AEF into a subordinate role as replacement troops. Starting with the battles of Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, and Belleau Wood in France, the AEF proved itself an able force. In September 1918, the Americans launched an attack on a German bulge in the lines near Verdun, France. U.S. and French troops captured more than 25,000 prisoners, and the German military’s back was all but broken. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, Germany called it quits, and the fighting stopped. American losses — 48,000 killed in battle, 56,000 lost to disease — seemed trifling compared to the staggering costs paid by other countries. Germany lost 1.8 million people; Russia, 1.7 million; France, 1.4 million; Austria-Hungary, 1.2 million; and Britain, 950,000. “The War to End All Wars,” as it was called, turned out to be just another test of humans’ aptitude for killing other humans in large quantities.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Many different battles were fought in the First World War and a case can be made for the importance of them all. This list includes some of the most important ones, which had an impact on the whole shape of the war. 1914 28 June: Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina 23 July: Austria-Hungary issues an ultimatum to Serbia 29 July: Austria-Hungary invades Serbia 1 August: Germany declares war on Russia 4 August: Germany invades Belgium; Britain declares war on Germany August: The Russians are heavily defeated by the Germans at Tannenberg; the British retreat from Belgium after holding up the German advance at the Battle of Mons September: The Germans are turned back from Paris after the Battle of the Marne; the Russians besiege the Austro-Hungarians at Przemysl October: The Race to the Sea – the Germans and the British and French try to outflank each other but end up with an unbroken line of trenches along the whole Western Front November: The German raider Emden is sunk by the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney; the Germans defeat a British invasion of German East Africa at the Battle of Tanga December: British and German soldiers declare an informal Christmas Truce amidst the deadlock of the Western Front 1915 March: The Allied naval attack on the Dardanelles commences; the Russians take Przemysl; the British attack on the Western Front at Neuve Chapelle April: Italy signs the Treaty of London and agrees to join the war on the Allied side; Allied troops land at Gallipoli; the Germans use poison gas during the Battle of Ypres May: The British passenger ship Lusitania is sunk by a German U-boat; the first Zeppelin raid on London takes place September: The Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, takes sole command of the Russian army October: Allied troops land at Salonika; British nurse Edith Cavell is executed in Brussels by the Germans; Bulgaria enters the war on Germany’s side October‒November: Austria-Hungary crushes Serbia 1916 February: Britain introduces conscription; the Germans attack at Verdun April: The British surrender at Kut al-Amarah, in Mesopotamia; the Easter Rising takes place in Dublin 31 May: The British and German fleets fight the indecisive Battle of Jutland off the coast of Denmark June: The Russian Brusilov Offensive breaks through Austrian lines in Poland; the Arab Revolt against Turkish rule begins 1 July: The Allies attack the Germans on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme August: Romania enters the war on the Allied side but is quickly defeated September: The British use tanks for the first time, in the Battle of the Somme December: David Lloyd George becomes the British Prime Minister 1917 January: The French General Nivelle launches his disastrous offensive February: The Russian Revolution overthrows Tsar Nicholas II April: Canadian troops take Vimy Ridge; the United States enters the war; after the failure of General Nivelle’s offensive, the French army mutinies June: The British take Messines Ridge; German bomber attacks are made on London July: The Kerensky Offensive – Russia’s last attack of the war – fails October: The British attack at Passchendaele; the Italians are defeated by the Austro-Hungarian army at Caporetto; the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia begins November: The British launch the first massed tank attack, against the Germans, at the Battle of Cambrai December: The British take Jerusalem from the Turks 1918 January: US President Woodrow Wilson outlines his Fourteen Points for peace March: The German Spring Offensive (The Kaiser Battle) begins; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk confirms Russian withdrawal from the war July: The German advance towards Paris is stopped at the River Marne August: The British attack at Amiens and push the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line September: French and American attacks on German positions take place in the Meuse-Argonne region October: The Italians attack the Austro-Hungarians successfully at Vittorio Veneto; the British defeat the Turks at the Battle of Megiddo and conquer Palestine November: The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, abdicates; an armistice is agreed between the Germans and the Allied commander, Marshal Foch 1919 January: The Paris Peace Conference opens 28 June: Germany signs the Treaty of Versailles

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.’ So go the words spoken each November on Remembrance Sunday in Britain, as the British pause to remember the dead of the First World War. Other countries hold similar ceremonies to honour their war dead. But what else should people remember from the First World War? What lessons can it teach? The pre-war plans didn’t work ‘No plan,’ said the great 19th century German General von Moltke, ‘survives its first contact with the enemy.’ Perhaps he should have added that it helps to have a good plan in the first place. The war plans of the Great Powers in 1914 were pretty poor. The French Plan XVII seemed to assume that they just needed to launch a raid across the border and the whole German Empire would fall to its knees. The Germans’ famous Schlieffen Plan was based on three assumptions that proved wrong: France could be defeated quickly (it couldn’t), Russia would take months to get ready for war (it didn’t) and Britain wouldn’t come into the war (it did). The Russian plan to invade eastern Germany came unstuck because the Russian army was hopelessly disorganised. The real tragedy is that the governments and high commands of 1914 believed in these plans: no one was to question or alter or cancel them, not even the Kaiser or the Tsar. Had their plans not been so rigidly fixed, history could have been very different. The war wasn’t fought for nothing In 1914 the German army launched an unprovoked attack on neutral Belgium and Luxembourg and went on to commit wholesale murder of civilians. Some atrocity stories undoubtedly got exaggerated for propaganda purposes during the war, but that doesn’t minimise the importance of what happened. If you believe the international law that states that countries that invade their neighbours and murder their inhabitants should be stopped, then the First World War, at least the war in the west, was every bit as justified as declaring war on Hitler’s Germany when it invaded Poland 25 years later. Armies took to using gas very easily Before the war gas was banned under the Hague Convention as a barbaric form of warfare. Yet as soon as the Germans used it at Ypres in 1915, generals in all armies simply changed their minds. Soon armies were using gas as if it were no different from any other weapon. One British general made the decision to use it by licking his finger to check which way the wind was blowing. The use of gas in the First World War is a terrible reminder of how easily war can lead people to start shifting their moral boundaries and doing things they were denouncing as utterly inhuman only months before. The war wasn’t fought just in Europe You can very easily fall into the trap of thinking of the First World War as an all-European affair, but it wasn’t. Fighting took place all over the world, in the Pacific, in central Africa and in the deserts of Arabia, as well as in Europe. Thanks to the Europeans’ global empires, men were recruited from every part of the globe. The trenches of the Western Front saw soldiers from India, North Africa, the West Indies, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, as well as the British, French, Americans and Germans, and the battlefronts of Salonika, Gallipoli and Palestine were equally multinational. Ships from Brazil and Japan escorted Allied shipping in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. The war certainly grew out of European politics, but it involved people from all continents, and they’re part of its story. The war wasn’t fought just on the Western Front The image of the First World War is so dominated by the Western Front that you can easily treat the other fronts as minor details. They weren’t. Of course, during the war huge arguments on both sides raged between ‘westerners’, who thought the Western Front was the only one that mattered, and ‘easterners’, who thought the war would be won or lost in the east. But whichever side you agree with, you still need to recognise the courage and sacrifices of the Eastern Front, the Italian front and the Balkan fronts. Men on these fronts were often fighting in conditions every bit as bad and as dangerous as those in France and Flanders, and casualties could be just as high. No front in the First World War had a monopoly on horror and loss. Women played a major role The First World War was the first war in which women made a major contribution to the outcome. Active women’s movements had existed in Britain, Germany and the United States before the war, and in all these countries large numbers of women worked in factories during the war, producing munitions for the troops. Women also started to take on other roles that had previously been filled by men, keeping public services such as the post or the buses going. Women were also needed to work on the land, especially in more traditional countries like Hungary or Italy, where opposition existed to women working in industry. Britain and the United States even created armed service units for women, and in Russia after the February 1917 revolution, women even served on the front line, though other countries drew the line at putting women in uniform and giving them guns. Women probably gained most emancipation in Britain, where they won the vote in 1918, followed a year later by women in the United States, and in Russia, where they gained equal rights with men through the revolution. Attrition didn’t work Attrition is what you resort to when all your plans have gone pear-shaped. The attacks on Verdun, the Somme and at Passchendaele all failed terribly, but the generals didn’t order the men to pull back or disengage: they had to keep on, attacking and attacking, almost regardless of loss. Instead of capturing strong points or outmanoeuvring the enemy, their aim was now to kill as many of the enemy’s men as you could. Some of the very worst conditions of the war resulted from commanders resorting to attrition. Eventually, the politicians had to overrule the generals and force them to rethink their tactics. Perhaps more than anything, attrition turned the war into a nightmare. The generals weren’t all donkeys Contrary to popular opinion in some quarters, some of the men in charge during the First World War, such as the British General Plumer, the Australian General Monash or the French Marshal Foch, were very able and did achieve great success. Of course, not all generals were so good: Nivelle proved a liability in 1917 and so did General Townshend, who had to surrender Kut al-Amarah to the Turks in 1916. But the generals on the Western Front were caught in a situation no military leaders had ever faced, and with new military technology that was developing at a bewildering rate. People often criticise the generals of the First World War for launching futile attacks for minimal gain, but they were on a very steep learning curve. The Allies won the war It’s worth pointing out that the Allies won the war, because many accounts of the war tend to overlook it entirely. After the war, Germans convinced themselves that they hadn’t lost the war really: they’d been ‘stabbed in the back’ by leftists and traitors and (you’ve guessed it) Jews at home. These arguments were utter nonsense, put about to hide the awkward fact that the German army was comprehensively defeated in the field: the Allied offensive in the summer of 1918 was one of the most devastatingly successful campaigns in military history. The reason the Germans asked for an armistice was precisely because they were afraid that the German army was about to collapse completely and the Allies would be able to march into the very heart of Germany. More recently, people have tended to think of the First World War just as slaughter with no ‘real’ winners and losers. You can certainly view it that way, but in strict military terms, no doubt exists in the matter: the Allies heavily defeated the Germans and their allies. The peace treaty was a disaster Five peace treaties were signed in 1919 with the defeated powers – Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey – and they all went wrong. The Treaty of Versailles with Germany was so harsh on the defeated side that it led many Germans to welcome Hitler into power in 1933 after he declared that he’d tear the treaty up. Austrians resented the fact that the Treaty of St. Germain reduced their country to a small rump and forbade them to join up with Germany: it’s no surprise that they welcomed Hitler to Vienna when he took the country over in 1938. Hungarians were outraged by the loss of their lands imposed by the Treaty of Trianon (and they still are); Bulgarians feel much the same about the Treaty of Neuilly. The Turks, too, felt they had a raw deal in the Treaty of Sèvres, but they challenged it and got a better deal at Lausanne a few years later. The peace settlement was supposed to have made the First World War a war to end all wars; instead it set the fuse for an even bigger world war just 20 years later.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

In some ways, the Second World War was even more terrible than the First World War: It introduced the world to heavy bombing, mass murder, genocide and the atomic bomb. Most of the leaders in the Second World War had served in the First World War. So what exactly was the relationship between the two world wars? The answer to this question is quite subtle, but important. The roots of the Second World War certainly lay in the First World War, but the First World War did not cause the Second World War. The destruction and losses of the First World shocked everyone; what left many people angry and bitter for long afterwards, however, was the peace settlement at the end of the war. The Germans were aghast at the way the Treaty of Versailles blamed them for the war, cut down their army and navy, carved off huge areas of their territory and made them pay reparations payments to the French and Belgians for the foreseeable future. To make matters worse, the Germans simply didn’t believe that they’d lost the war fairly. They believed that Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by communists and Jews at home, who’d overturned the government and betrayed Germany’s soldiers (this idea was complete tosh, by the way, but many Germans found it comforting). The Hungarians were equally furious about the way the Treaty of Trianon had taken so much land off them. And the Italians, despite being on the winning side, didn’t think they’d won anything like enough land from the peace settlement. This all meant that various countries had good reason to hate the peace settlement and to want to change it. It doesn’t, however, mean that these changes had to be brought about by war. In the 1920s, the German Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, set to work getting the Treaty of Versailles changed into something much more acceptable to the Germans. He made huge progress: he got Germany accepted into the League of Nations, he negotiated a much more reasonable way of paying War Reparations and he even started work on getting Germany’s borders extended. He died in 1929, so who knows whether he’d have succeeded. But if he had the Germans might well have decided they had no need to vote for Hitler and the Nazis. Just think how different history would have been! What really led to the Second World War wasn’t the peace settlement of 1919 but the worldwide economic slump of the 1930s. When times are really desperate, as they were at that time, people turn to extremist parties such as Fascists or Nazis. Once Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933 he got people to support him by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promising to tear it up. The British and French went along with this to start with, but finally, when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 (he said it was to regain land taken from Germany after the First World War) they reluctantly decided to go to war again. The First World War hadn’t caused the Second World War – but it certainly led to it.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Even people who don’t know much about the First World War tend to know the phrase ‘Lions led by donkeys’. It’s supposed to have been said by a German general about the British soldiers: It means that they were unquestionably brave but that their leaders were fools who threw the men’s lives away in pointless attacks. The best example of this sort of understanding of the First World War is probably the disastrous first day of the Battle of the Somme, when everything went horribly wrong and the cheerful, optimistic and eager young British recruits were mown down by German machine guns. That day – 1 July 1916 – is still regarded as the worst single day in British military history. The debate on the generals of the First World War tends to focus heavily on the British generals, even though other countries certainly produced some spectacularly unsuccessful leaders, such as the Italian General Cadorna, the French General Nivelle, much of the Russian high command and, at least at the very end of the war, Germany’s General Ludendorff. Although the public debate centres on British commanders, don’t forget these non-British examples of military ineptitude. The first people to expose the British generals to angry ridicule were the war poets, who blamed them for sending men into the appalling conditions of the Western Front. Later on, in the 1960s, many people looked back and saw parallels between the generals of the Western Front and the controversial tactics being used by American generals in the Vietnam War. Historians said that leaders such as Sir Douglas Haig or Sir John French – the British commanders on the Western Front – were foolish, stuck in their ways and uncaring about their men. Books started appearing with titles like The Donkeys or British Butchers and Bunglers of the Great War: it wasn’t difficult to work out what the authors of these books thought about the generals of the First World War! More recently, historians have looked in much greater detail at the problems the British generals faced. They’ve discovered that some of the accusations aimed at the generals aren’t really true: far from being stuck in their ways, they actually tried all sorts of new techniques and new technology to break through the deadlock of the trenches. They were facing a type of warfare that had simply never existed before, with completely new weapons like tanks, poison gas and aircraft. Some generals certainly took longer to master the new types of fighting than others, and they certainly made some ghastly mistakes, such as the attack on the Somme in 1916 and the disastrous attack at Passchendaele the following year. But they also had some big successes, especially the campaign in 1918 at the very end of the war, which was one of the most successful campaigns the British army has ever fought. Some generals, such as Plumer, Allenby and Monash, were very successful in their campaigns. It would be silly to pretend that the generals of the First World War were all successful or that all the criticism of them is wrong. But historians have to judge all the facts carefully and objectively, and doing that shows that some of the criticism is too sweeping and unfair. Many factors produced the ghastly conditions on the Western Front: Blaming everything on the generals isn’t right.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Many people have presented the First World War in books and films as the end of a Victorian ‘golden age’. Even the weather adds to that impression: many people have seen pictures of soldiers up to their knees in thick mud, whereas the years before 1914 – especially the long hot summer of 1911 – seemed to be full of sunshine and hope. This idea of a lost, more innocent world was reinforced by the memorials to the dead, which seemed to conjure up a ‘lost generation’ of young men, full of optimism and promise, who marched cheerfully off to war and never came home again. The girls they should’ve married often lived into old age, still carrying the memory of their lost loved ones. Their era, their world, had ended in 1914. The First World War certainly marked the end of an era for four mighty empires: Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. By 1919, the glittering court of Habsburg Vienna and the military pomp of the Kaiser’s Berlin were no more than memories. The Russian Revolutionaries shot the Tsar and cut Russia’s ties with its past to establish the world’s first communist state. It’s easy to see why many historians date the 20th century, as a distinctive period in its own right, from the start of the First World War in 1914 rather than from 1900. Of course, people at the time would’ve thought you were mad if you’d said they were living in a golden age. The years preceding the war saw desperate poverty and escalating violence. France was deeply split between left and right, and Russia was bubbling with revolutionaries and assassins, while Ireland seemed about to slide into civil war, probably taking the rest of the United Kingdom with it. In any case, what exactly is an era? Era is a term that historians apply to periods in the past to try to impose some sort of order and shape, but ‘eras’ and ‘ages’ are entirely subjective ideas: just because one historian thinks people were living through a particular era, it doesn’t mean other historians necessarily agree. You can see the Victorian era going right up to 1914, but some historians argue that the Victorian age (or era) had already died: all the main features of 20th-century life were in place long before the First World War broke out. No one nowadays seriously pretends that the years before 1914 were a ‘golden age’, but exactly when the old world died and the new world began is entirely a matter of opinion.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The finger-pointing about who caused the First World War began almost as soon as the war was over. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany accepted responsibility but the Germans angrily denied that the war was their fault. The French insisted that the treaty correctly apportioned blame, but the Americans were very wary of putting the whole blame for the war on one country, and within a few years the British had changed their tune too: David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, described the states of Europe as having somehow slid into war, with no one country more to blame than any of the others. In the 1920s and 1930s, governments of the countries who’d fought in the war started publishing vast collections of official documents, all designed to ‘prove’ that ‘Whoever started this war, it wasn’t us!’ These collections certainly produced lots more work for historians to do, but they didn’t settle the question, especially once the Second World War had broken out. ‘Look at that’, some people said, ‘Germans cause wars’. But as the dust settled, and Germany was divided between East and West during the Cold War, many people took a more sympathetic view: the Second World War had been caused by the Nazis, they said, so Germany couldn’t have caused the First World War. Then Professor Fritz Fischer came along with his theory and spoiled everything. In 1962, he published a book called Germany’s War Plans in the First World War which pointed out that, a month into the war, the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, had drawn up a list of all the territory Germany wanted to take over. ‘Look!’ said Fischer, ‘This shows that Germany wanted a war of expansion in 1914, just like Hitler.’ ‘Oh no it doesn’t,’ said his critics. ‘A list drawn up after the war started doesn’t count.’ So Professor Fischer delved further into the archives and came up with evidence that seemed to suggest Germany had been planning and hoping for war before 1914. Fischer’s theory didn’t win him many friends in Germany: German historians accused him of being a traitor to his country and they even tried to stop him going to America to talk about his work. But people in other countries were very interested. The question of who, if anyone, was to blame for the war still generates enormous controversy today. Many historians think Fischer produced powerful evidence of German warmongering, even if he let some other guilty parties, such as Austria-Hungary, off too lightly. But not everyone agrees: some people still think that blame should be spread fairly evenly across all the Great Powers of 1914 and that they stumbled blindly into war, like sleepwalkers, as the title of one such work puts it. And others argue that, because the European Great Powers all controlled large overseas empires, which they’d taken over by force, it hardly matters who set the war off: they were all as guilty as each other. The First World War may be long over, but the debate still goes on.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The fighting in the First World war was heavily concentrated in Europe and the Middle East. This map shows the main fronts of the war: the Western and Eastern Fronts, Gallipoli, Italy, Serbia, Salonika, Mesopotamia and Palestine.