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Offline Asid

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The Centennial of World War I
« on: November 10, 2018, 03:19:57 PM »
The Centennial of World War I




The First World War Centenary is the centenary of the First World War, which started on 28 July 2014 with commemorations of the outbreak of the war and will continue until 11 November 2018.

2018 marks 100 years since the end of the First World War


In late July and early August 1914, the great powers of Europe embarked on a course of action that claimed millions of lives, toppled empires, and reshaped the political structure of the continent. The 2014 centennial of the beginning of World War I was, fittingly, commemorated with events in countries throughout the world. Projects included symposia, exhibits, theatrical presentations, re-enactments, and concerts. The Flanders region of Belgium, especially Ypres (where three battles took place), was a particular focus of such efforts, which included the newly reopened In Flanders Fields Museum. Leaders of several countries attended ceremonies in Liège and Mons on August 4. Commemorations of particular battles were scheduled to take place over the next four years, as each centenary arrived. Britain, France, and Italy each planned hundreds of different events, many of them intended to be educational. Although all of Europe was convulsed and scarred by the war, other countries also fought in the war and planned events to focus on that history. Australia and New Zealand, which contributed nearly 40% of their young men as soldiers, celebrated the ANZAC Centenary (marking the involvement of the joint force in that war). The U.S., which entered the war only in 1917, focused on educational outreach. All hoped that over the next four years, citizens would gain a greater understanding of the Great War, which, though it failed to end all wars, nonetheless wrought vast changes in every place it touched.


Ypres, Belgium 1918


World War I saw the debut of the tank and chemical weapons, the widespread use of machine guns and aircraft, improvements in artillery, and the pinnacle of the age of battleships. Military aircraft technology advanced rapidly during the war. Fighters such as the Fokker Eindecker, the Spad, and the Sopwith Camel captured the popular imagination, and their dogfighting pilots won fame far beyond the battlefield. Artillery literally shaped the battlefield. It ranged in size from the French 75-mm field gun to the massive 420-mm Big Bertha and the 210-mm Paris Gun. Infantry weapons included many repeating rifles. Machine guns were an especially lethal addition to the battlefield. Heavy guns such as the Maxim and Hotchkiss made “no-man’s-land” a killing zone, and Isaac Lewis’s light machine gun saw widespread use at the squad level and as an aircraft armament. Barbed wire, invented in the 19th century as a means of containing grazing animals, was a key element in defensive fortification. For the first time, chemical weapons, such as diphosgene and mustard gas, were employed extensively. Although tanks such as the British Mark I made their debut in World War I, they were used primarily in a supporting role.

Leading Up to the War.

In the years preceding the outbreak of war in 1914, the Balkan League—Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro—was formed under Russian auspices in the spring of 1912 to take Macedonia away from the Ottoman Empire. The First Balkan War began in October 1912, and the Balkan allies were soon victorious. Under a peace treaty signed in London on May 30, 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost almost all of its European territory, including all of Macedonia and Albania. Albanian independence was insisted upon by the European powers, and Macedonia was to be divided among the Balkan allies. The Second Balkan War began when Serbia, Greece, and Romania quarreled with Bulgaria over the division of their joint conquests in Macedonia. The Bulgarians were defeated, and a peace treaty was signed on Aug. 10, 1913. The political consequences of the Balkan Wars were considerable. Bulgaria, frustrated in Macedonia, looked to Austria-Hungary for support, whereas Serbia, which had been forced by Austria-Hungary to give up its Albanian conquests, regarded Vienna with greater hostility. Serbian nationalists thus turned their attention to the idea of “liberating” the South Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Dragutin Dimitrijevic, head of Serbia’s military intelligence, was also a founder and leader of the secret society Black Hand, which was pledged to this pan-Serbian ambition. Believing that the Serbs’ cause would be served by the death of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian emperor Francis Joseph, and learning that the archduke was about to visit Bosnia (then part of Austria-Hungary) on a tour of military inspection, Dimitrijevic plotted his assassination. Gavrilo Princip (who was trained in terrorism by Black Hand), his associate Nedjelko Cabrinovic, and four other revolutionaries awaited the archduke’s procession in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Cabrinovic threw a bomb that bounced off the archduke’s car and exploded beneath the next vehicle. A short time later, while driving to a hospital to visit an officer wounded by the bomb, Francis Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg, were shot to death by Princip.

Austria-Hungary, which the previous year had been assured of Germany’s support should it start a preventive war against Serbia, saw the crime as the occasion to take measures to humiliate Serbia and so to enhance its own prestige in the Balkans. The empire decided to present an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia and then to declare war, relying on Germany to deter Russia from intervention. When delivery of the ultimatum was announced, on July 24, Russia declared that Austria-Hungary had to not be allowed to crush Serbia. Serbia replied the next day, accepting most of the demands but protesting against two of them. Though Serbia offered to submit the issue to international arbitration, Austria-Hungary promptly severed diplomatic relations and ordered partial mobilization.

The War’s Outbreak.

War was declared on July 28, and the next day Austro-Hungarian artillery began to bombard Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. Russia then ordered mobilization against Austria-Hungary. On July 31 Germany sent a 24-hour ultimatum requiring Russia to halt its mobilization and an 18-hour ultimatum requiring France to promise neutrality in the event of war between Russia and Germany. Both Russia and France predictably ignored these demands. On August 1 Germany ordered general mobilization and declared war against Russia. The next day Germany sent troops into Luxembourg and demanded from Belgium free passage across its neutral territory. On August 3 Germany declared war against France. During the night of August 3–4, German forces invaded Belgium. Great Britain, which was committed to defending Belgium, on August 4 declared war against Germany. Over the next few days, Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia, Serbia against Germany, Montenegro against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and France and Britain against Austria-Hungary. By the end of the month, Japan had declared war against Germany, and Austria-Hungary had declared war against Japan and Belgium. The outbreak of war was generally greeted with confidence and jubilation by the peoples of Europe, among whom it inspired a wave of patriotic feeling and celebration. Few people imagined how long or how disastrous a war between the great nations of Europe could be, and most believed that their country’s side would be victorious within a matter of months.

The initial clashes between the French and German armies along the Franco-German and Franco-Belgian frontiers, collectively known as the Battle of the Frontiers, involved more than two million troops and resulted in victory for Germany. The staggering cost, however—more than 300,000 men on both sides were killed or wounded—would shatter the illusions of those who believed that the war would be a quick and easy affair. By early September the German army had advanced deep into northeastern France, Paris was preparing for a siege, and the French troops were exhausted from their 10–12-day retreat to the south of the Marne River. In what became known as the First Battle of the Marne, the French commander in chief, Gen. Joseph Joffre, decided to risk a counterattack. The French 6th Army attacked the flank of the German 1st Army, opening a gap between the German 1st and 2nd armies. The Allies immediately exploited this gap by sending in the French 5th Army and troops of the British Expeditionary Force, reinforced by 6,000 French infantrymen transported to the battle from Paris by 600 taxis. Within a few days the Germans began a general retreat that ended north of the Aisne River, where they dug in, and the trench warfare that was to typify the Western Front for the next three years began.

On the Eastern Front, greater distances and quite considerable differences between the equipment and quality of the opposing armies ensured a fluidity of the front that was lacking in the west. Urged by the French to take offensive action against the Germans, the Russian commander in chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, took it loyally but prematurely, before the cumbrous Russian war machine was ready, by launching a pincer movement against East Prussia. Two Russian armies, the 1st, which was under Gen. P.K. Rennenkampf, and the 2nd, under A.V. Samsonov, invaded German East Prussia in August 1914. Rennenkampf fought a successful action at Gumbinnen but failed to maintain contact with Samsonov. The German commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, making use of a plan devised by Lieut. Col. Max Hoffmann, threw all their strength against Samsonov’s isolated army near Uzdowo, just south of the historic site of Tannenberg. Under the Germans’ converging blows, Samsonov’s flanks were crushed and his centre surrounded during August 26–31. The outcome of this military masterpiece, called the Battle of Tannenberg, was the destruction or capture of almost the whole of Samsonov’s army. The history of imperial Russia’s unfortunate participation in the war is epitomized in the ignominious outcome of this battle.

The first Austrian invasion of Serbia was launched with numerical inferiority, and the able Serbian commander, Radomir Putnik, brought the invasion to an early end by his August victories on the Cer Mountain and at Sabac. By early September, however, the Austrians had begun a second offensive, against the Serbs’ western front on the Drina River. After some weeks of deadlock, the Austrians began a third offensive, which had some success in the Battle of the Kolubara and forced the Serbs to evacuate Belgrade on November 30, but by December 15 a Serbian counterattack had retaken Belgrade and forced the Austrians to retreat.

The entry of Turkey (or the Ottoman Empire, as it was then called) into the war as a German ally was the one great success of German wartime diplomacy. The arrival of two German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, in the Dardanelles on August 10 turned the tide. The ships were ostensibly sold to Turkey, but they retained their German crews. The Turks began detaining British ships, and more anti-British provocations followed, both in the straits and on the Egyptian frontier. Finally, the Goeben led the Turkish fleet across the Black Sea to bombard Odessa and other Russian ports (October 29–30). Russia declared war against Turkey on November 1, and the western Allies did likewise on November 5. In the winter of 1914–15, Turkish offensives in the Caucasus and in the Sinai Desert, albeit abortive, served German strategy well by tying Russian and British forces down in those peripheral areas.

In August 1914 Great Britain, with 29 capital ships ready and 13 under construction, and Germany, with 18 and 9, were the two great rival sea powers. The first significant encounter was on August 28, when a British force sank or damaged several German light cruisers and killed or captured 1,000 men at a cost of one British ship damaged and 35 deaths. On September 22 a single German submarine, or U-boat, sank three British cruisers within an hour; in October a British cruiser was torpedoed, and a British battleship was sunk by a mine. The Germans were able to threaten not only merchant shipping on the British trade routes but also troopships on their way to Europe or the Middle East from India, New Zealand, or Australia. The belligerent navies were employed as much in interfering with commerce as in fighting each other. Yet whereas the Allied blockade prevented almost all trade bound for Germany from reaching that country’s ports, the German submarine campaign yielded less-satisfactory results. The Germans sank neutral ships occasionally, and undecided countries soon began to adopt a hostile outlook toward this activity. Much more serious was the sinking on May 7, 1915, of the British liner Lusitania as well as the later torpedoing of two other liners, the Arabic and the Hesperia. The recurrent German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare was a major factor behind the U.S. declaration of war against Germany in April 1917.

The entry of the United States was the turning point of the war, because it made the eventual defeat of Germany possible. The U.S. production of armaments was enough to meet not only its own needs but also France’s and Great Britain’s. Although there were only 85,000 U.S. troops in France when the Germans launched their last great offensive in March 1918, there were 1.2 million there by the following September. In the east the Bolshevik Revolution of November (October, Old Style) 1917 spelled the end of Russia’s participation in the war. Eventually, on Nov. 11, 1918, the Great War came to an end.

The Aftermath.

The casualties suffered by the participants in World War I dwarfed those of previous wars: some 8.5 million soldiers died as a result of wounds, disease, or both. On even a quiet day on the Western Front, many hundreds of Allied and German soldiers died. Sir Winston Churchill once described the battles of the Somme and Verdun, which were typical of trench warfare in their futile and indiscriminate slaughter, as being waged between double or triple walls of cannons fed by mountains of shells. This kind of war made it difficult to prepare accurate casualty lists. Similar uncertainties exist about the number of civilian deaths attributable to the war. It was estimated that the number of civilian deaths was about 13 million—higher than the military casualties. These deaths were largely caused by starvation, exposure, disease, military encounters, and massacres.

The four years’ carnage of World War I was the most intense physical, economic, and psychological assault on European society in its history. When the war ended, much of northern France, Belgium, and Poland lay in ruins, and millions of tons of Allied shipping rested at the bottom of the sea. The foundation stone of prewar financial life, the gold standard, was shattered, and prewar trade patterns were hopelessly disrupted. Four great empires—the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, the Romanov, and the Ottoman—had fallen. Europe lost its unity as a culture and polity, its sense of common destiny and inexorable progress. The British tactician and historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart, writing for the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929), viewed the war’s outcome through a lens that was uncoloured by the later horrors of World War II:

“It is…futile to ask which country won the war; France did not win the war, but unless she had held the fort while the forces of Britain were preparing and those of America still a dream the release of civilization from this nightmare of militarism would have been impossible. Britain did not win the war, but without her command of the sea, her financial support and her army to take over the main burden of the struggle from 1916 onwards, defeat would have been inevitable. The United States did not win the war, but without their economic aid to ease the strain, without the arrival of their troops to turn the numerical balance, and above all, without the moral tonic which their coming gave, victory would have been impossible. And let us not forget how many times Russia had sacrificed herself to save her Allies; preparing the way for their ultimate victory as surely as for her downfall. Finally, whatever be the verdict of history on her policy, unstinted tribute is due to the incomparable endurance and skill with which Germany more than held her own for four years against superior numbers, an epic of military and human achievement.”

Written By: Michael Ray


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