Transcript The Great War

The Road to War
World War I
The Russian Revolution
Treaty of Versailles
 Militarism
 Size of European militaries double between 1890 & 1914
 Alliances
 Austria, Germany, & Italy form the Triple Alliance in 1882
 England, France, & Russia form the Triple Entente in 1907
 Imperialism
 Race for remaining territory after 1880 created tension
 Nationalism
 Decline of Ottoman Empire led to Balkanization
 Serbs (Slavs) desire an independent Serbia
 Russia supports idea of Serbia; Austria-Hungary rejects it
Serbia
Triple Alliance in red; Triple Entente in gray
“The entire able-bodied population is preparing
to massacre one another; though no one, it is
true, wants to attack, and everybody protests his
love of peace and determination to maintain it,
yet the whole world feels that it only requires
some unforeseen incident, some unpreventable
accident, for the spark to fall in a flash…and
blow Europe sky-high.”
Frederic Passy, 1895
 Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914
 The assassin was a Serbian nationalist in a group called Young Bosnia
The assassin,
Gavrilo Princip,
was only 20
years old
 Austria-Hungary issued a list of ten demands to
Serbia called the July Ultimatum
 Serbia accepted 9 of the 10 demands
 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28,
1914
 Russia immediately mobilized its army
 “The Guns of August”
 Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914
 Germany declared war on France on August 3, 1914
 Great Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914
The Plan: Germany Wins
The Reality: A Stalemate
 The war quickly turned to stalemate as neither the
Germans nor the French dislodge the other from
the trenches they had begun to dig for shelter.
 Two lines of trenches soon extended from the
English Channel to the frontiers of Switzerland.
 The Western Front had been bogged down in a
trench warfare that kept both sides immobilized in
virtually the same position for four years.
"No Man's Land is pocketmarked
like the body of foulest disease and
its odor is the breath of cancer...No
Man's Land under snow is like the
face of the moon, chaotic, craterridden, uninhabitable, awful, the
abode of madness.
Wilfred Owen
Northern France by 1917
Clockwise from top left: Sikh soldiers in India, Chinese troops in Greece, African
soldiers in German East Africa, a Bermuda militia in London
 Ottoman Empire joins Central
Powers
 Attempt to regain territory in Balkan
peninsula
 Arab Revolt of 1916
 Arabs want independence from the
Ottoman Empire
 British promise military aid
 Revolt was unsuccessful due to the
lack of military support
 Arabs gain their “independence”
after World War I
T.E. Lawrence, leader of
the Arab revolt
 China was divided into spheres of influence prior
to World War I
 Japan entered the war as an Allied Power
 Seized German colonies in the Pacific & China
 Japan issued the Twenty-One Demands to China
in 1915
 Hoped to turn China into a protectorate of Japan
 Chinese government did not accept or reject the
demands
 Led to collapse of China’s military government
 Most involved tropical dependency
 Gandhi and other leaders supported the war
 Hoped to achieve self-government
 British promised to move towards self-government
after the war
 Provided loans & materials to aid the British war effort
 1.3 million Indians served as soldiers and laborers
 Over 100,000 casualties
“The moment Britain gets into
trouble elsewhere, India, in her
present temper, would burst
into a blaze of rebellion.”
William Archer
 New technology changes nature of warfare
 Over 8 million soldiers killed; over 19 million wounded
 Over 8 million civilians were also killed
World War I biplane
German U-boat
British Tank
Machine gunners w/ gas masks
 Definition of Total War
 Conflict in which the participating countries devote all
of their resources to the war effort
 Aspects of Total War
 Mandatory military conscription (a.k.a. the draft)
 Control of the economy & nationalization of industry
 Rationing of food and other essentials
 The Home Front
 Women, children, ethnic minorities, etc. are considered a vital
part of the war effort
 Propaganda
 Women in the Great War
 Worked in jobs traditionally held
only by men, who were at war (ex:
Factory workers, nurses, farmers)
 Strengthens suffrage movements
 Discovered the benefits of financial
freedom (some refused to return to
domestic service after the war)
 Rationing
 Food Shortages
 Diets Change
Left: German bread ration card
Above: U.S. Food Administration
propaganda posters
 380,000 African-Americans served in the army
 200,000 were sent to Europe; only 42,000 saw combat
 Germans sink the British
passenger ship, the Lusitania,
on May 7, 1915 – killing 100
Americans
 Zimmerman Telegram in Feb 1917
 A secret message sent between
German diplomats suggesting that
Mexico might want to join forces with
Germany and thereby regain the
territory it had lost to the US in the
Mexican-American War of 1846. It
was intercepted by the U.S.
 President Wilson and the U.S.
declare war on Germany on April
6, 1917
 One of the most devastating outbreaks of disease
in modern times
 Mass movement during World War I spread the
flu around the world
 Spread to the trenches of the Great War
 “Spanish” flu kills 30 million people worldwide
 Kills 550,000 in the United States
 Kills 12.5 million in India and China
 Russia withdraws in Feb. 1918
 Russian Revolution
 Treaty of Brest-Litvosk
 War of Attrition
 Almost no fighting occurs in
Germany
 Germany surrenders at 11:00 on
November 11, 1918
 Treaty of Versailles conference
starts January 1919
 Germany 1,935,000
 United States 116,516
 Russia 1,700,000
 Bulgaria 87,495
 France 1,368,000
 Belgium 45,550
 Austria-Hungary 1,200,000
 Serbia 45,000
 British Empire 942,135
 Greece 23,098
 Ottoman Empire 725,000
 Portugal 8,145
 Italy 680,000
 Montenegro 3,000
 Romania 300,000
 Japan 1,344
 Industrialization of Russia
 Used foreign investment to build factories
 Poor working conditions led to urban unrest
 Russo-Japanese War
 Russia was embarrassed by loss to Japan
 Revolution of 1905—”Bloody Sunday”
 Russian soldiers fire on unarmed protesters
 500-1000 people were killed
 Led to creation of the Duma
 Workers begin to
support the
revolutionary ideas of
Karl Marx
 Believed industrial
workers would
overthrow the czar
 Bolshevik party formed
in 1903
 Led by Vladimir Lenin
(right)
 World War I
 Russia was consistently defeated by Germany
 4 million casualties in the first year
 Demonstrates weakness of czarist rule
 Czar’s wife Alexandria runs the government while
husband leads the war effort
 Rasputin undermines her authority
 Defeats destroyed the moral of Russia troops
 Soldiers mutinied, deserted, or ignored orders
 Women in St. Petersburg led citywide strike March 1917
 200,000 workers joined the strike
 Soldiers sent to stop the strike joined the strikers
 Led to general uprising in Russia
 Czar was forced to abdicate his throne
 Provisional government established
 Led by Alexander Kerensky
 Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power in October 1917
 Motto was “Peace, Land, Bread”
 Immediate Reforms
 Ordered all farmland be distributed to peasants
 Control of factories given to workers
 Withdrew from World War I
 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
 Russian Civil War
 New Economic Policy
 Creates limited
capitalists reforms in
order to promote
agricultural and
industrial development
 Dies in 1924
 Battle for succession
between Leon Trotsky
and Joseph Stalin
 Goal was to create communist
state envisioned by Bolsheviks
 Collectivization
 Eliminate private farms in favor
of collective farms
 Kills millions of peasants
 Secures Soviet control of
countryside
 First Five-Year Plan (1928) focuses on iron, steel,
machine tools, and electricity
 Called for 1115% increase in coal production, 200%
increase in iron, and 335% in electric power
 Posted worker production in factories
 Workers who failed to meet production quotas were shot or
imprisoned in the Gulag
 Attempt by Stalin to eliminate political opposition
 Leading members of the Bolshevik party were executed
or sent to labor camps
 Stalin purged prominent military officials
 50% of a military officers were purged
 Historians estimate 10 to 20 million people died during
the Great Purge
 Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
 Reduction of weapons.
 People’s right to choose their own government.
 Organization of world nations to protect against
aggression.
 Allied Goals.
 The four major countries all had different ideas for a
peace treaty.
 France and Great Britain wanted to punish Germany.
 However, Great Britain did not want to weaken Germany.
 Italian leaders hoped to gain land.
 Disappointed that they were mostly ignored by the other
leaders.
 Council of Four
 British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George
 French Prime Minister
Georges Clemenceau
 Italian Prime Minister
Vittorio Orlando
 American President
Woodrow Wilson
Left to Right: David Lloyd
George, Georges Clemenceau,
Woodrow Wilson
 Not in Attendance
 Russia and Germany
 Italy and Britain
wanted territory
 France wanted to
punish Germany
 Italy and United States
left, leaving peace
settlement to France
and Britain
 France and Britain
created a severe treaty
that punished
Germany
 Germany had to:
 Return land to France
 Keep area near France,
called Rhineland,
demilitarized (no
military)
 Pay 32 billion dollars
 Agree to they were guilty
for the war
 New Countries
 Poland
 Finland
 Estonia
 Latvia
 Lithuania
 Czechoslovakia
 Austria
 Hungary
 Turkey
 Yugoslavia
 League of Nations.





Organization of world governments proposed by Wilson.
Established by the Treaty of Versailles.
Main goal was to encourage cooperation and keep peace.
Germany was excluded.
United States did not join.
 Ultimately weakened the League of Nations.
 Changes in Europe.
 Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Empire lands were broken up.
 Independent nations were created.
 Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Turkey.
 Other treaties signed with the defeated Central Powers.
 Many colonists who fought in the war heard the words
of the Allies leaders about the importance of freedom
and democracy.
 After fighting for colonial rulers they expected rights for
themselves.
 Wartime sacrifices did not win new freedoms.
 European powers split up lands controlled by Germans,
Austro-Hungarians, Ottomans.
 Redistributed them to other colonial powers.