THE
FIRST WORLD WAR
Part II
A New Kind of War
The Aftermath of Sarajevo
·
Why did Austria-Hungary blame Serbia for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination?
·
What actions did Austria-Hungary take against Serbia?
·
Why did Germany support Austria-Hungary?
·
Why did Russia support Serbia?
The spark that set off World War I was struck on June 28,
1914, with the assassination of the heir (next in line) to the Austrian
throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The archduke and his wife were visiting the
Bosnian town of Sarajevo, which Austria-Hungary
had annexed in 1908. While they were
driving through the narrow streets in their huge touring car, a 19-year-old
Bosnian student, Gavrilo Princip,
one of seven youthful terrorists along the route, shot and killed them.
Princip had been inspired by propaganda advocating the
creation of a greater Serbia
incorporating the Slavic areas of Austria-Hungary
within the Serbian state. Serbian officers
serving in a secret organization, “The Black Hand,” had assisted the
terrorists. Bosnia
was a hotbed of anti-Austrian feelings as the Bosnian Serbs sought to unite
with Serbia. The direct participation of the Serbian
government in the assassination could not be proven; yet members of the Serbian
secret service were known to have been involved in various anti-Austrian activities.
The legal technicalities of Serbia’s
involvement in the assassination were lost on Austria-Hungary
in their rush to put an end to the problem of Serbia
and the Bosnian Serbs once and for all.
Count Leopold von Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, believed
that the assassination in Bosnia
was a perfect opportunity to crush the anti-Austrian propaganda and terrorism
coming from the Serbs. Kaiser Wilhelm II
of Germany
assured the Austrians of his full support because he felt that everything
possible had to be done to prevent Germany’s
only reliable ally from being weakened.
Berchtold, therefore, received a “blank check” from Germany
promising unlimited support for any action Austria-Hungary
would choose to take against the Serbs.
German support was crucial for Austria-Hungary
because they feared that Russia
would intervene to protect their fellow Slavs, the Serbs.
Eager for a quick, local Austro-Serbian war, on July 23
the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry presented an ultimatum
(non-negotiable demand) to the Serbs.
Expecting the list of demands to be turned down, Berchtold demanded
unconditional acceptance within 48 hours.
Urged toward moderation by both Great
Britain and Russia,
Serbia accepted
all but two of the Austrian demands but at the same time began to mobilize its
army. Austria
declared the Serbian reply to be unsatisfactory and immediately began to
mobilize its own armed forces.
The Path To War
·
What Russian action forced Germany to declare war? Why couldn’t Germany wait to see what developed?
·
Describe the Schlieffen Plan.
What was the key to its success?
·
Why did Britain enter the war?
With Austria
and Serbia on
the brink of war, the Germans, having second thoughts, urged their ally to
negotiate with Russia. Russia
had realized that, if the Austrians succeeded in humbling the Serbs, Russia’s
reputation in the Balkans would suffer. “Russia
cannot allow Austria
to crush Serbia
and become the predominant power in the Balkans,” Tsar Nicholas II’s foreign
minister told him. The French, in the
meantime, assured the Russians of their total cooperation and urged full
support for Serbia.
Europe had now reached a point of
no return; the Austrians had committed themselves to the task of removing the
irritating Serbs, and the Russians could not permit this removal to
happen. Neither side would back down and
each had allies ready to come to its aid.
Fearful that the opportunity to punish the Serbs would soon expire,
Berchtold succeeded in convincing the 83-year-old Habsburg emperor,
Franz-Josef, that war was the only way to deal with Serbia. On July 28 the Austro-Hungarian Empire
declared war on Serbia.
As the possibilities of a general European war now seemed
certain, Germany
began to have second thoughts. Berlin
sent several frantic telegrams to Vienna. The German ambassador was instructed to tell
Berchtold that, “as an ally we must refuse to be drawn into a world conflagration
(bonfire) because Austria
does not respect our advice.” Had the
Germans spoken to their ally in such tones a month earlier, war might have been
avoided, but Austria’s mobilization had already moved the Russians to act. The Tsar ordered mobilization on July 29.
Germany
was now caught in a horrible dilemma.
Surrounded by potential enemies, the Germans had to move decisively or
face defeat. The Russian mobilization
threatened them because in the event of war with Russia
to its east, there would also be war with Russia’s
ally France in the west. The Germans
knew that Allied naval supremacy would cut them off from needed sources abroad
and realized that they needed to move quickly to avoid a prolonged two-front
war. In 1905 the Chief of the General
Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, had developed plans for Germany
to fight a two-front war against Russia
and France
simultaneously. Germany
planned to launch a lightning attack against France
(which could mobilize faster than Russia),
crush France,
and then return to meet Russia. The key to the Schlieffen Plan was a quick victory over France
before Russia
could mobilize enough troops to threaten Germany. The plan called for the German forces to
quickly outflank French defenses by sweeping through Belgium,
then wheel west of Paris and drive
the retreating French armies toward Alsace-Lorraine where they would be met by
another German army. Within six weeks,
the French would be destroyed and Paris
captured. Meanwhile, a small German
force would be holding the presumably slow-moving Russians on the Eastern Front
awaiting the arrival (via the excellent German rail system) of the victorious
western forces. When the Tsar ordered
his troops to mobilize, Germany
was now at the moment of decision. To
allow Russian mobilization to proceed without swift German action against France
would jeopardize their entire plan.
On July 31, Germany
sent an ultimatum to Russia
and France, demanding that Russia
cease its mobilization and France promise not to fight Germany. Russia
refused and France
only replied that they would act in their own interests. Feeling that they could not wait an longer
without totally destroying the Schlieffen Plan, Germany
declared war on Russia
on August 1 and on France
two days later. On August 2, the German
ambassador in Brussels delivered an
ultimatum to the Belgian government announcing his country’s intention to send
troops through Belgium,
in violation of the 1839 Neutrality Treaty.
The Belgian cabinet refused to grant permission and appealed to Britain
and France for
help. A majority of the British cabinet
initially had opposed involvement in the war, but with the news of the German
ultimatum to Belgium,
the tide turned. Sir Edward Grey, the
British foreign secretary, sent an ultimatum to Germany
demanding that Belgian neutrality be respected.
Germany
refused, and on August 4, Great Britain
declared war.
Arguing that Germany
and Austria-Hungary
were not waging a defensive war, Italy
declined to carry out its obligations under the Triple Alliance and for a time
remained neutral. Japan,
hoping to use the war as an excuse to seize German colonies in the Pacific,
joined the British, French, and Russians.
The Ottoman Turks, fearing Russia,
joined with Germany
and Austria-Hungary.
In the last days of peace, diplomats had tried desperately
to a avoid general war. Many broke down
and wept when it became apparent they had failed. Lord Grey himself noted in his autobiography
that one evening, just before the outbreak of the war, he watched the
streetlights being lit from his office window and remarked: “The lamps are
going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit
again in our lifetime.”
The Fighting Begins
·
What countries made up the Allies?
What countries made up the Central Powers? What advantages did each side have in the
war?
·
Describe the German attack on France.
·
Why was the Battle
of the Marne important?
How did the war change after this battle?
·
Why did Germany have to devote more resources to the Eastern Front than they had
anticipated prior to the war?
·
Why was the Western Front deadlocked by late 1914?
Although the terrible struggle that racked the world from
1914 to 1918 was fought mainly in Europe, it is rightly
called the First World War. In the four
previous centuries European powers had competed across the globe; however,
never had such enormous resources been brought together in a single
conflict. Altogether 27 nations became belligerents
(countries at war), ranging the globe from Japan
to Canada and
from Argentina
to South Africa
to Australia. The Central
Powers (German, Austria-Hungary,
Bulgaria, and Turkey)
mobilized 21 million men. The Allies (Britain,
France, Belgium,
Russia, and Serbia)
eventually called 40 million men to arms, including 12 million Russians. The two sides were, however, more equally
matched than the numbers would indicate, since the Russian divisions were often
poorly equipped and ineffectively used and the German army was clearly superior
to any other in the war. Also, Germany
and her allies also fought from a central position and were able to transfer
troops quickly and efficiently to various fronts.
The Allies had the advantages of greater resources of
finance and raw materials. Britain
maintained its naval dominance and could draw on its empire for support as Canada,
Australia, New
Zealand, and South
Africa quickly joined the war on Britain’s
side. In addition, because Germany was
effectively blockaded (prevented from trading) by the British Navy, the United
States, even though officially neutral for most of the war, served as a major
source of supplies for the Allies, but was prevented from trading with the Central
Powers.
All of the warring nations went into battle in a confident
mood. Each side was sure of its strength
and felt it had prepared carefully. Each
nation’s propaganda machine delivered reassuring messages of guaranteed
victory. All expected that the war would
soon be over, concluded in a few decisive battles. All countries generally believed that the soldiers
would be home by Christmas.
The initial German plan of the campaign was to defeat France
quickly in the west, while a small part of the German army and the entire
Austro-Hungarian army held off the expected Russian invasion in the east. The Schlieffen Plan at first seemed likely to
succeed. The swift German invasion of Belgium
at the beginning of August routed the Belgian army. The huge Belgian forts that defended their
frontier were decimated by German artillery.
One German artillery piece, known as Big Bertha, was capable of firing a
shell weighing an entire ton. Against
this firepower, the Belgian defenses stood little chance. As the Belgian army collapsed, citizens took
up the fight against the German invaders.
Snipers, known as franc-tireurs,
terrorized the advancing German troops.
Reprisals were swift as cities were burned and the Germans executed
suspected snipers. In order to deal with
the franc-tireurs, the Germans took
civilians hostage and executed ten for every German killed. Allied propaganda soon depicted the invading
Germans as beasts who violated the neutrality of “poor little Belgium,” and then proceeded to
commit unspeakable horrors. The Germans
unwittingly played into the hands of the Allied propaganda, boasting of their
brutality in the mistaken belief that a terrorized world would not dare to
stand in their way.
French war plans had envisioned a quick, heroic strike to
reclaim the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.
Armed with bayonets and wearing bright red trousers that were leftover
from a previous style of war, the French invasion was quickly destroyed in the
face of German artillery and machine guns.
In four days the French lost 40,000 men, 27,000 on August 22 alone.
The invading Germans, having swept through Belgium, rushed
onward, defeating the French at Charleroi and the British Expeditionary Force
of 90,000 men at Mons, causing the entire Allied line in Belgium to retreat all
the way back to the Marne River. Three
German armies advanced steadily to the Marne and crossed
it at several points. By early September
the Germans were so close to Paris
that they could see the top of the Eiffel
Tower. The fall of the French capital seemed so near
that the French government moved to Bordeaux
in western France.
The other part of the German strategy did not go according
to plan. This was due to the unexpected
speed with which the Russians mobilized in the east. The Russians assumed the offensive at the
very beginning of the war. In August
1914, two Russian armies, outnumbering their opponents four to one, advanced
into East Prussia and four
Russian armies invaded the Austrian province
of Galicia (today part of Poland). In East Prussia
a series of victories brought Russian troops within 350 miles of Berlin. On August 25, believing the victory had
already been won in the west, the German chief of staff, General Helmuth von
Moltke, dispatched six corps from France
to the Eastern Front to stop the Russian advance.
The German advance in France
had been weakened by the diversion of troops to the east and a critical change
in strategy. The French debacle in
Alsace-Lorraine tempted the Germans to abandon von Schlieffen’s most important
advice. Ignoring von Schlieffen’s admonition to keep
his northern flank strong, von Moltke weakened the right wing of his forces in
hopes of achieving a double breakthrough in both the north and the south. The victories at Mons
and Charleroi were also misinterpreted. The Germans assumed that the French were
beaten and in a disorganized retreat.
They abandoned their plans to sweep around Paris
and instead turned inward, short of Paris,
in hope of trapping the defeated French armies.
The Germans failed to realize that the French withdrawal had been a strategic
retreat, enabling the French General Joseph Joffre to reorganize his forces
along the Marne River
east of Paris. When they turned south, the Germans exposed
their entire flank to Joffre’s reformed forces.
As a result, the German advance was finally stopped in the Battle of the Marne, as two million men
fought between September 5-12, 1914.
With Parisian taxi drivers providing transportation for reserves coming
to the front, the French halted the German advance only 15 miles outside of Paris. After bitter fighting the Germans were forced
to pull back to a position 50 miles from Paris where both sides dug in,
beginning a fundamental change in the nature of the war. Both sides then engaged in “a race to the
sea” as they unsuccessfully attempted to outflank each other north of Paris
all the way to the English Channel. After over two weeks of desperate fighting
between the British and Germans at Ypres (pronounced Eee-pray), the two armies established
battle positions that stabilized, creating the “Western Front.” This solid
line of opposing trenches, which stretched for almost 500 miles from the
Channel to the Swiss Alps, was the scene for a grisly new war of attrition
(a conflict in which each side attempted to wear down the other). These lines were destined to remain almost
stationary for the next three years.
From the end of 1914 until nearly the end of the war in 1918,
the fighting consisted largely of trench
warfare, in which each side laid siege (an attempt to defeat the
enemy through encirclement and constant bombardment) to the other’s system of
trenches. These trenches consisted of
numerous parallel lines of intercommunicating trenches protected by lines of
barbed wire. Separating the two sides
was a devastated area of land known as “No Man’s Land.” This area was usually about 150 yards in
width, but in some areas the distance between the trenches of the opposing
sides was as little as eight yards. From
time to time one side or the other attempted to break through the lines. These frontal assaults, known as “Going Over
the Top,” consisted of sending wave after wave of infantry (foot
soldiers) into the teeth of enemy machine guns.
Soldiers could barely manage a slow trot due to the heavy pack of
equipment strapped on their backs that weighed between 70 and 85 pounds. In between the stark terror of attacks, life
in the trenches was a never-ending battle against mud, rats, and poor
sanitation caused by open latrines. In
the north, any attempt to dig further than a few feet struck water. One British soldier described his position as
“my little wet home in the trench.”
During the war on the Western Front, almost 50% of the casualties were
directly due to the horrible conditions in the trenches as men suffered from
various forms of skin disease (including “trench foot”) and communicable
diseases.
The Eastern Front
·
Why was the Battle
of Tannenberg important?
·
Who was Paul von Hindenburg?
·
Describe the fighting on the Eastern Front in 1914-1915.
·
When was Serbia conquered?
The war in
the east did not develop into the deadlocked trench warfare of the west. The
surprisingly swift Russian advance into East Prussia was stopped suddenly
stopped when a reinforced German army commanded by General Paul von Hindenburg decisively defeated the Russians in the
Battle of Tannenberg, fought on
August 26-30, 1914, south of Königsberg.
The Russian army had been split in two to avoid the Mansurian
Lakes and the Germans discovered
their weakness when they intercepted uncoded radio messages. Von Hindenburg’s skilled forces moved swiftly
southward and destroyed one of the two Russian armies under the command of
General Alexei Samsonov. 120,000 of the
200,000 Russians involved in the battle surrendered to the Germans. Samsonov told one of his staff officers, “The
Emperor trusted me. How can I face him
after such a disaster?” He then walked
into the woods and shot himself. Von
Hindenburg followed up this victory (Germany’s
largest in the war) by swiftly expelling the remaining Russian troops from East
Prussia.
By the middle of September Russia
had lost over 300,000 men and was never a threat to invade Germany
again. The Germans and Austrians had
driven the Russians out of Poland,
Lithuania, and Galicia
by the end of the year. More than
1,200,000 Russians were killed and wounded, and the Germans took nearly 900,000
prisoners. These defeats generated
rising criticism against the Tsar’s government and Russian morale deteriorated. Although the Central Powers could not force
an end to the fighting on the Eastern Front in 1914-15, the Russians lost so
many men and such large quantities of supplies that they were subsequently
(after this time) unable to play any decisive role in the war. The fighting in the east became secondary to
the main fighting in the trenches of the Western Front.
On the Serbian Front considerable activity took place in
1914-15. In 1914 the Austrians undertook
three invasions of Serbia,
all of which were stopped. The Serbs,
however, made no attempt to retaliate and invade Austria-Hungary. After Bulgaria
declared war on Serbia
in October 1915, Austrian troops finally advanced into Serbia. By the end of 1915 the Central Powers had
conquered all of Serbia
and eliminated the Serbian army as a fighting force.
The Western Front
·
Describe the fighting on the Western Front in 1915.
·
Why did Britain attempt an invasion of the Dardanelles? What was the result?
·
Why did Italy enter the war in 1915?
On Christmas
Day 1914 the men of the Western Front trenches observed an informal truce. Men from the opposing sides came out of their
trenches and exchanged gifts of food, beer, and cigarettes. It was one of the last human acts of the
war. By 1915 both sides knew that they
were trapped in a new type of war, one of horrible consequences. Single battles claimed hundreds of thousands
of lives. The toll during 1914 had come
to one and one-half million dead and wounded.
During 1915 the Allies were on the offensive as the Germans, who were
engaged in a heavy offensive on the Eastern Front, made only a single attack in
the west during the year. The principal
attempts in 1915 to force a breakthrough included a British attack at Neuve
Chapelle in March, which was only able to penetrate the first line of German
trenches. The Germans unsuccessfully
attacked Ypres in April using clouds of chlorine gas, the first time in history that
gas was used in this manner on a large scale. The stalemate (deadlock) of the
trenches encouraged both sides to develop innovative ways to break the
deadlock. One of the most horrible developments
of the First World War was the use of chemical warfare, such as various poison
gasses and liquid fire:
As yet the history has been written only in brief
bulletins stating facts baldly, as when on a Saturday in March of 1915 it was
stated that “In Malancourt Wood, between the Argonne and
the Meuse, the enemy sprayed one of our trenches with
burning liquid so that it had to be abandoned.
The occupants were badly burned.” That official account does not convey
in any way the horror, which overwhelmed the witnesses of the new German method
of attacking trenches by drenching them with inflammatory liquid. A more detailed narrative of this first
attack by liquid fire was given by one of the soldiers:
“It was yesterday evening, just as night fell, that
it happened. The day had been fairly
calm, with the usual quantity of bursting shells overhead, and nothing forewarned
us of a German attack. Suddenly one of
my comrades shouted, ‘Hallo! What is
this coming down on us? Anyone would
think it was petroleum.’ At that time we could not believe the truth, but the
liquid, which began to spray on us, was certainly some kind of petroleum. The Germans were pumping it from hoses. Our sub-lieutenant made us put out our
pipes. But it was a useless
precaution. A few seconds later incendiary
(fire) bombs began to rain down on us and the whole trench burst into flame.
It was like being in hell. Some of the men began to scream terribly,
tearing off their clothes, trying to beat out the flames. Others were cursing and choking in the hot vapour,
which stifled us. ‘Oh, my Christ!’ cried
a comrade of mine. ‘They’ve blinded
me!’ In order to complete their work
those German bandits took advantage of our disturbance by advancing on the
trench and throwing burning torches into it.
None of us escaped that torrent of fire. We had our eyebrows and
eyelashes burned off, and clothes were burned in great patches and our flesh
was sizzling like roasting meat. But
some of us shot through the greasy vapour which made a cloud about us
and some of those devils had to pay for their game.”
Although some of them had become harmless torches
and others lay charred to death, the trench was not abandoned until the second
line was ready to make a counter-attack, which they did with fixed bayonets,
frenzied by the shrieks which still came from the burning pit where those
comrades lay, and flinging themselves with the ferocity of wild beasts upon the
enemy, who fled after leaving three hundred dead and wounded on the ground.
Along five hundred miles of front such scenes took
place week after week, month after month, from Artois to the Argonne, not
always with inflammatory liquid, but with hand grenades, bombs, stink-shells,
fire balls, smoke balls, and a storm of shrapnel.
A combined attack
by the British and French in Artois
along the front between Neuve Chapelle and Arras,
in May and June, was preceded by a massive artillery attack that landed 18
shells on every yard of the German frontlines.
The Allied troops advanced 2.5 miles into the German trench system, but
at a cost of 400,000 men and still did not secure a breakthrough. A large-scale French attack in September on a
front of about 15 miles between Reims and the Argonne
Forest captured the Germans’ first
line of trenches, but was stopped at the second. In this battle the British used gas against
the Germans for the first time. The war,
which had begun for many of its soldiers as a glorious adventure had turned
simply into horror. In the words of a wounded
Indian soldier writing home from the Western Front in 1915, “This is not war,
it is the ending of the world.” Both
sides amassed huge casualties during the year’s fighting. France
lost 1.6 million men and Britain
300,000, while German losses were estimated at close to 900,000. Despite the cost, lines that had been
established in the west at the close of 1914 remained practically unchanged
during 1915.
In an attempt to expand the war beyond
the stalemated trenches of Western France, the British
attempted a major campaign to force open the Dardanelles (the strait that connects the Black and Aegean
Seas, allowing passage from Russia
to the Mediterranean), closed by Turkey
when it joined the Central Powers. This
plan, attributed to Winston Churchill,
then First Lord of the Admiralty, was designed to open up the sea route to Russia. Churchill hoped that a victory over the Turks
would enable the Allies to resupply their faltering ally, Russia. A rejuvenated Russia
could then help take the pressure off the British and French armies on the
Western Front.
The first British efforts, in February, were a
disaster. Three of their sixteen
battleships were sunk by Turkish gunfire and the rest were forced to
withdraw. Later British troops, assisted
by large numbers of Australian, and New Zealand
forces (known as Anzacs) landed on the narrow peninsula
of Gallipoli between the Dardanelles
and the Aegean Sea.
Here they faced well-planned Turkish defenses on the heights overlooking
the landing areas. After six months of
bloody fighting, the Allied troops were finally withdrawn. Over 250,000 Allied troops were lost without
gaining any advantage and Churchill was forced to resign.
The Allies’ only bright spot in 1915 was Italy’s
entry into their ranks. Italy
had remained neutral in August 1914 when it had defected from the Triple
Alliance. Italy
joined the Allies following promises made in a secret treaty in London
promising the Italians huge concessions of Austrian territory once victory had
been attained.
1916: Simply Slaughter
·
Describe the Battles of Verdun and the Somme.
German success in 1915 in
thrusting the Russians back from East Prussia,
Galicia, and Poland
enabled Germany
to transfer some 500,000 men from the east to the Western Front for an attempt
to force a decision in the west during 1916.
The German plan, as worked out by Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the
general staff of the German army, was to attack the French fortress at Verdun in
great strength in an effort to weaken the French by causing the maximum
possible number of casualties. This
forced the Allies to throw hundreds of thousands of men into battle. The slaughter, brought on by massed artillery
and infantry charges between the trenches, was immense and unprecedented in the
history of warfare. A young French Lieutenant wrote of its horrors:
Numb and dazed, without saying a word, and with our
hearts pounding, we await the shell that will destroy us. The wounded are increasing in numbers around
us. These poor devils not knowing where
to go come to us, believing that they will be helped. What can we do? There are clouds of smoke, the air is
unbreathable. There’s death
everywhere. At our feet, the wounded
groan in a pool of blood; two of them, more seriously hit, are breathing their
last. One, a machine gunner, has been
blinded, with one eye hanging out of its socket and the other torn out: in addition
he has lost a leg. The second has no
face, an arm blown off, and a horrible wound in the stomach. Moaning and suffering atrociously, one begs
me, ‘Lieutenant, don’t let me die. Lieutenant,
I’m suffering, help me.’ The other,
perhaps more gravely wounded, and nearer to death, implores me to kill him with
these words, ‘Lieutenant, if you don’t want to, give me your revolver!’ …. For hours, these groans and supplications
continue until, at 6 p.m., they die
before our eyes without anyone being able to help them.
For ten months the German attacks continued against the
French defenses. In August, von
Hindenburg replaced Falkenhayn as German chief of staff with General Erich Ludendorff as his top
assistant. Although the Germans captured
several outlying forts, the French, commanded by General Henri Philippe Pétain, rallying to the cry of “They shall
not pass!” were able to prevent the German capture of Verdun
itself. The total loss of wounded and
dead from Verdun eventually came to
approximately one million men.
To ease the pressure against Verdun,
the British army began an offensive in July along the Somme
River along the northern part of
the Western Front. A solid week of
artillery bombardment, consisting of a million and a half shells, preceded the
command for the British to go “over the top” and advance on the German
trenches. Their commanders had told the
soldiers that not a single German soldier could survive the bombardment, “You
will be able to go over the top with a walking stick, you will not need rifles… You will find the Germans all dead, not even
a single rat will have survived.” The
British officers were wrong. At 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, the first wave of men moved across “No Man’s
Land.” They were cut down like a field
of wheat being harvested. In one unit
from Canada, of
the 752 men who left the trenches, 684 (91%) were killed or wounded in the
first half-hour. The British losses were
catastrophic: 60% of the officers and 40% of the men became casualties the first
day of the Battle of the Somme
(the total British dead and wounded on the first day amounted to an astounding
60,000, almost all of whom fell before reaching the first German trenches). Despite these awesome casualties, the British
attacks continued for three months, but once again the drive did not bring
about a breakthrough. In the end, the
British advanced six miles, four less than their objective for the first day of
their attack. Total German losses at the
Somme were about 500,000, while the British and French
lost about 625,000 men.
Total War And The Home Front
·
How did the war affect life at home?
·
How did the attitudes of soldiers change between 1914 and 1916?
·
Why did efforts to make a peace agreement fail?
At the close of 1916, after more than two years of
fighting, neither side was close to victory.
Instead, the war had turned into a dreary contest of stamina, a far cry
from the glories promised by the propaganda of 1914. War was no longer fought between armies, it
was fought between the populations of entire countries and every citizen was
called to participate in the war effort in some way.
On the home front, rationing
was instituted to assure sufficient supplies for soldiers at the front. As men went off to fight, women took over
their jobs in the factories. Intensive
propaganda campaigns encouraged civilians to buy more bonds (in which
money was loaned to the government) and make more weapons. Countries unleashed a barrage of propaganda
inciting total hatred of the enemy, belief in the righteousness of the cause,
and unquestioned support for the war effort.
Civil liberties suffered, and in some cases distinguished citizens were
thrown into prison for opposing the war effort.
In Britain,
for example, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was imprisoned
for a short time for his pacifist (anti-war) views. Governments took over control of their
national economies, gambling everything on a victory in which the loser would
pay all the expenses incurred in the war.
Countries outlawed strikes and rigidly controlled industries.
At the beginning of the war
the predominant mood was one of flag-waving and enthusiasm. Even the international socialist movement,
whose policy it was to promote the unity of the workers of all nations, fell
victim to the rabid patriotism that infected the continent. Now workers of one country were encouraged to
go out and kill workers of the enemy country in the name of the state. In August 1914, at every level of society, there
was much idealism, sense of sacrifice, and love of country but no understanding
of the horror, death, and disaster that comes with modern, industrialized
war. British poet Rupert Brooke caught
the spirit in his poem “The Soldier:”
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s breathing English air,
Washed
by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
This early idealism, this
romantic conception of death in battle, gradually changed to one of war
weariness and horror. This growing mood
is best seen in “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” a poem written by a young British
officer, Wilfrid Owen, who himself would become a victim on the Western Front:
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns ....
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And
bugles calling for them from sad shires.
By the end of 1916 a deep
yearning for peace dominated Europe. Sensing this mood, leaders on both sides put
forth peace feelers. President Woodrow
Wilson of the United States,
at the time a neutral nation, attempted to bring about negotiations between the
belligerent powers that would, in his own words, bring “peace without
victory.” As a result of his efforts,
some progress was at first apparently made toward bringing an end to the
war. In December the German government
informed the U.S.
that they were prepared to undertake peace negotiations. When the U.S.
informed the Allies, Great Britain
and France
rejected the German proposals because the Germans refused to give up the territory
they had conquered on both fronts. After
the huge casualties that both sides had suffered in the first three years of
the war, it was almost impossible for either side to abandon the war without
achieving any gain. Although the war was
hopelessly stalemated, both sides saw little alternative to continuing the war
of attrition, hoping that the other side would give in first.
The War at Sea
·
Why did Germany use unrestricted submarine warfare?
·
What was the significance of the sinking of the Lusitania?
·
What was the Sussex Pledge?
Why was it issued?
·
What was the importance of the Battle of Jutland?
During the first year of the war no major naval
engagements took place in the Atlantic. Both the British and the Germans conducted
small raids against each other, but the main German fleet was unwilling to sail
out into the North Sea and challenge the might of the
British Navy. Britain
was content to maintain its blockade against Germany
and, as the war drug on, Germany’s
inability to trade by sea became more and more of a disadvantage.
Blockaded by the British fleet, the Germans attempted to
enact a similar blockade of Britain
with their submarines, known as U-boats. A major difference was that the British fleet
could simply turn away ships bound for Germany,
while German submarines could not risk coming to the surface to stop ships
bound for Britain. Due to the vulnerability of submarines on the
surface, the U-boats were most effective when they sunk all ships in their path
without warning; a practice known as unrestricted
submarine warfare.
The sinking by a German U-boat of the British passenger
liner Lusitania
on May 7, 1915 caused the loss of 128 American lives (and a total of 1,198
dead), leading to a controversy between the United
States and Germany
that almost precipitated (caused) war between the two nations. After the German sinking in the English
Channel of the French steamer Sussex in early 1916, with the loss of
additional American lives, Germany
feared that the continuation of unrestricted submarine warfare would bring the United
States into the war. In what became known as the Sussex Pledge, Germany
promised to cease its use of unrestricted submarine warfare. Although this promise calmed the calls for
war in the United States,
the German blockade of Britain
lost much of its effectiveness. While
the U.S.
strongly protested the sinking of ships by U-boats, it did little to protest
British interference with its right to trade with the Central Powers. German protests to the Wilson
administration were ignored as the U.S.
continued to maintain its right to trade with Britain
and France.
The most important naval engagement of the war was the Battle of Jutland, waged in the North
Sea on May 31 and June 1,
1916, between the British and the German fleets. Although the British losses, both in ships
and human lives, were greater than Germany’s, the German fleet returned to its
home ports and did not venture out to sea to give battle again during the
war. As a result, the British retained
their supremacy at sea and their blockade of Germany
continued.
The War in the Air
·
What role did aircraft play in the war?
·
What was a Zeppelin?
·
Who was the Red Baron?
World War I provided a great stimulus
(incentive) to the production and military use of aircraft, including the
airplane and airship (blimps filled with hydrogen gas). Aircraft were used for two principal
purposes: observation and bombing. In
connection with military operations on land, airplanes were used to observe the
location of the troops and defenses of the enemy and for bombing the enemy’s
lines or troops in action. A special
feature of the war was the first bombing raids conducted on important enemy
centers far removed from the battlefront.
An Officer of Royal Canadian
Flying Corps told of a 1915 bombing mission over the German trenches:
There were one hundred of us—fifty on a side—but we
turned the heavens into a hell, up in the air there, more terrible than ten
thousand devils could have made running rampant in the pit. The sky blazed and crackled with bursting
time bombs and the machine guns spitted out their steel venom, while underneath
us hung what seemed like a net of fire, where shells from the Archies
(Germans), vainly trying to reach us, were bursting. We had gone out early in the morning, fifty
of us, from the Royal Canadian Flying Corps barracks, back of the lines, when
the sun was low and my courage lower, to bomb the Prussian trenches before the
infantry should attack.
Our machines were stretched out across a flat
table-land. Here and there in little
groups the pilots were receiving instructions from their commander and
consulting maps and photographs.
At last we all climbed into our machines. All along the line engines began to roar and
sputter. Here was a 300 horsepower
Rolls-Royce with a mighty, throbbing voice; over there, a $10,000 Larone rotary
engine vying with the others in making a noise.
At last the squadron commander took his place in his
machine and rose with a whirr. The rest
of us rose and circled round, getting our formation.
Crack! At the
signal from the commander’s pistol we darted forward, going ever higher and
higher, while the cheers of the mechanicians and riggers grew fainter.
Across our own trenches we sailed and out over No
Man’s Land, like a huge, eyeless, pock-scarred earth face staring up at us.
There was another signal from the commander. Down we swooped. The bomb racks rattled as hundreds of bombs
were let loose, and a second later came the crackle of their explosions over
the heads of the Boches in their trenches.
Lower and lower we flew. We skimmed the trenches and sprayed bullets
from our machine guns. The crashing of
the weapons drowned the roar of the engines.
I saw ahead of me a
column of flame shoot up from one of our machines, and I caught a momentary
glance at the pilot’s face. It was
greenish-ash color.
His petrol (gasoline) tank had been hit. I hope the fall killed him and that he did
not burn to death.
From the middle of 1915, aerial
combat between planes or groups of planes of the belligerents was common. Because heroism was virtually impossible in
the trenches, fighter pilots, called “aces,” became the greatest heroes of the
war. Germany’s
Baron Manfred von Richthofen shot
down 80 Allied planes, making him the highest scoring ace of the war. Von Richthofen painted his plane blood red,
earning himself the nickname “The Red Baron.”
Despite the glory of air combat, the small planes made of plywood and canvas
offered little protection to the pilot.
The average life expectancy of new pilots on the Western Front was only
two weeks.
Despite the interest it generated, the air war had little
effect on the outcome of the war. By
1917 both sides realized that there was no end to the stalemate on the Western
Front in sight. Weary from three years
of fighting, both sides hung on, unable to defeat the other and unwilling to
agree to any settlement that would not provide for ample rewards to justify the
tremendous cost that the war had extracted from its population.
Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The Sycamore School, 1995. Revised 2000.