1914-1918
World War I was the defining event of
the twentieth century. Its unfinished political and military business
laid the foundation for an even greater world war that began in 1939.
Its impact on the great powers of Europe cleared the ground for the
peripheral empires, the United States and the USSR, which in turn
engaged in a third world war, a cold one, that ended only in 1989.
World War I marked the beginning of the end of Europe's moral and
material hegemony over the world. It heralded the rise of managed
economies. It opened the way to a technological revolution focused on
electronics and internal combustion engines.
These and all the other results of the
Great War were unintended consequences. Tensions among Europe's major
powers long antedated the actual outbreak of hostilities in 1914. War
was not only expected: by the turn of the twentieth century, it was
even desired in certain circles. The war's origins reflected economic
and imperial rivalries and alliance systems that encouraged mutual
belligerence. In that environment, rational calculation might
reasonably accept war as the best feasible alternative to a state's
political and military problems. Germany in particular believed by
1914 that a bid for continental hegemony and world power had a good
chance of success. Germany's ally Austria-Hungary saw its survival
contingent on destroying the South Slavic nationalism embodied in
Serbia. The entente powers, France, Britain, and Russia, in turn
decided that Germany could be stopped at reasonable cost. War thus
became the continuation of politics by other means. The assassination
of Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian
city of Sarajevo provided an excuse to settle fundamental issues of
European politics.
World War I was also in part an
accident. International rivalries were no worse in 1914 than in
earlier years. Instead a generation of mediocre statesmen and
second-rate soldiers proved unable to control the events that helped
generate the crisis that followed the assassination. Indeed, worried
about a belligerent public, they may have been less frightened of
making war than of not making war. In a matter of days, from
August 1 to August 4, the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary)
and the Triple Entente (France, Russia, and Britain) sprang at each
other's throats.
The participants agreed that the
conflict would be short. Despite their differences, the great powers
had enough in common socially, politically, and economically that the
Great War at least began as a civil war rather than a mutual struggle
for survival. Exponential increases in the destructive power of modern
weapons were accompanied by a widespread belief that modern societies
and modern psyches were too fragile to sustain the strain of war for
any length of time. Commitment of Europe's armies to all-out strategic
and tactical offensives were based on the premise that the war had to
be won quickly or not at all.
But Germany's Schlieffen Plan, the
French Plan XVII, Austria-Hungary's invasions of Russia and Serbia,
and Russia's two-pronged drive into Galicia and East Prussia all
produced casualties on scales unknown in Western civilization. Almost
150,000 Russians were lost in the Battle of Tannenberg alone. French
and German casualties in the war's first four months each exceeded
800,000. By year's end Russian troops had penetrated deeply into
Austria-Hungary. Most of Belgium and much of northeastern France were
in German hands. The conquests, however, were inconvenient: they were
too small to convince the losers that there was no alternative to
making peace, and too large to risk negotiation without making an
effort to recover them by force.
The generals learned much between
August and December of 1914. Railroad networks enabled the rapid
movement of large forces over long distances, but once out of boxcars,
soldiers still moved at foot speed. This fact by itself limited the
impact of success since reserves could block breakthroughs faster than
any momentary advantage could be exploited. Nor were victories easily
won. Firepower had been gridlocking battlefields since the final years
of the wars of Napoleon. Magazine rifles, automatic machine guns, and
rapid-firing field and heavy artillery gave the defense an advantage
unknown in the history of warfare. The year 1914 introduced a new
aspect to the problem. The sheer size of modern armies created
force-to-space ratios so high that even in the wider reaches of
eastern Europe, maneuver became almost impossible. Open enemy flanks
could not be enveloped because they either did not exist or did not
remain open for long. Nor did soldiers continue to stand heroically
upright and charge forward with bayonets fixed. Instead they dug. By
December 1914, a line of trenches no less formidable for being
improvised defined the Western Front from the Swiss border to the
English Channel, a distance of 470 miles. In the east, defensive
systems were less comprehensive—because the front ran for almost
double the distance—but proved almost as successful in defying
attacks. Moreover, the avoidance of stalemate called for levels of
genius foreign to the soldiers and the statesmen responsible for the
war's direction.
The entente powers possessed a
significant advantage in the resource race. Their control of the seas
enabled them to draw on the entire globe, whereas Germany and
Austria-Hungary were denied access to anything but their immediate
conquests. The discrepancy, however, must not be exaggerated. Europe
was still the focal point of the world's industrial system. Even the
United States supplied more raw materials than finished goods to its
French and British customers. In 1915 and for months to come, national
mobilization primarily involved for all the combatants utilizing and
developing their internal resources.
The question was, how could these
resources best be used? Germany and Austria-Hungary, like poker
players with a big stack of winning chips, were in a position to stand
pat. During 1915 the Central Powers did seek to remove Russia from the
war by diplomatic and military means. They inflicted over a million
casualties and advanced up to three hundred miles—but Russia refused
to give up. The moribund tsarist government could not afford the risks
of making a separate peace.
France and Britain faced three more
immediate dilemmas. The French army and the French government were
committed to recovering their occupied territory as quickly as
possible. At the same time Russia was making increasing demands for
support from its allies, as much for morale purposes as from material
need. Finally, Britain, which had initially hoped to limit its
continental commitments, found itself constrained instead to raise the
first mass army in its history, albeit through volunteering rather
than conscription, to match the French commitment to the stalemated
Western Front.
The next question concerned how best to
employ this force. Throughout 1915 the French dashed their army to
pieces in a series of attacks on increasingly sophisticated German
trench systems. Their demand that Britain participate in the process
was accepted by a British high command that believed the only way to
end the war was to smash the German army in a direct confrontation.
Their decision would condemn sixty thousand men to death or maiming in
the autumn Battle of Loos. As casualties mounted, however, the search
for a way around intensified. Winston Churchill, then first lord of
the Admiralty, argued forcefully, and convincingly, for an attack on
the Dardanelles (see Gallipoli Campaign). This operation, directed
against a ramshackle Ottoman Empire that had joined the Central Powers
unenthusiastically in November 1914, would open a supply route to
Russia, give the Allies a strong position in the Balkans, and convince
Italy to enter the war in return for generous promises of territorial
gains after the Central Powers' defeat.
It all seemed too good to be true—and
was. The Anglo-French expedition bogged down on the Gallipoli
Peninsula partly because of failures at high command levels, but also
because of impassable terrain and unexpectedly effective Turkish
resistance. The Allies suffered over a half million casualties before
finally evacuating the survivors in December 1915. The Italian
government, which had declared neutrality in 1914, finally joined the
Allies despite substantial popular opposition in return for the
promise of territory in the Adriatic Basin and the eastern
Mediterranean. The Alps, however, proved a formidable obstacle to an
inefficient Italian army that in 1917 was fighting no less than the
Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo River !
By 1916, in short, the Great War was
everywhere stalemated. Germany's colonies, with the exception of East
Africa, were in Allied hands. Germany's principal overseas naval force
had been destroyed off the Falklands in December 1914. But these were
mere pinpricks. In the aftermath of the Dardanelles fiasco another
British expeditionary force bogged down in Mesopotamia. The Turks
surrounded ten thousand men of the Indian army at Kut and, after the
longest siege in British history, forced them to surrender. An
Anglo-French expeditionary force sent to the Balkans found itself so
hemmed in around Salonika that the city was sarcastically dubbed the
war's biggest internment camp. The civil war might have become a world
war, but its focus remained in Europe.
With subtlety discredited, the major
combatants again proposed to end the war by direct methods. Germany's
chief of staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, proposed to draw the French army
into a killing ground around the old fortress of Verdun, trading lives
for lives until France was "bled white." Meanwhile, France and Britain
planned a joint offensive along the Somme River—an offensive whose
burden would be increasingly borne by the newly raised British armies.
Both operations ended in mutual disaster. At Verdun, French and German
losses totaled nearly 1.25 million, yet the lines in December 1916
remained almost where they had been when the German offensive began on
February 21. The Somme offensive, lasting from July 1 to mid-November,
gained a strip of territory about twenty miles wide and six miles deep
at the price of 420,000 British casualties and, often overlooked,
200,000 French. German casualty figures remain debated, but seem to
have approached almost 500,000.
By the year's end French manpower
resources were at the edge of exhaustion. The enthusiasm of Britain's
volunteers was giving way to resignation and cynicism. The German
army's superb cadre of regular officers and NCOs had been virtually
destroyed: the Somme, one officer wrote, became "the muddy grave of
the German field army." Yet this general war-weariness did not
generate a will to end killing that had by now become a mechanical
process. Efforts to initiate peace negotiations proved futile, not
least because by this time all the combatants had set the stakes so
high and suffered such huge losses that no one was willing to talk. It
is often overlooked that Europe's upper classes sacrificed their own
sons to a degree unknown before or since. Generals and statesmen were
also grieving fathers who could not accept the argument that their
children had died for nothing.
Instead, the combatants sought to
increase the scale of the fighting. By 1916 thousands of guns firing
millions of shells formed a necessary part of any attack. Battalions
that had begun the war with two machine guns now had six, nine, or
twelve. When sheer weight of metal did not produce decision, the
combatants took to technical innovation. On the ground, poison gas and
armored fighting vehicles took the field, yet neither could break the
tactical stalemate. Above the trenches, aviation technology developed
exponentially after August 1914, but the wire-and-strut biplanes were
still too limited in their capacities by 1918 to be more than a
limited auxiliary to the ground forces. At sea, the battle fleets
built at such cost spent most of their time in harbor, occasionally
emerging to engage in arm's-length duels like the Battle of Jutland on
May 31, 1916, but never taking serious risks. This caution had
psychological as well as military roots. When Winston Churchill called
Grand Fleet commander Sir John Jellicoe the only man who could lose
the war in an afternoon, he was recognizing that warships had become
not merely fighting entities but symbols of their respective states.
The Allied blockade was inflicting
increasing hardship on the Central Powers. Germany especially suffered
the domestic consequences of exponentially declining living standards
during 1916. But to seek victory through slow strangulation invited
the question of whether the Allies might not crack first. Even as
Verdun and the Somme raged in the summer of 1916, Russia mounted an
offensive that produced significant initial gains but then, like all
of its predecessors on every front, bogged down. In March 1917, the
tsarist government gave way to a republic. Its premier, Alexander
Kerensky, promised continued commitment to the war. Whether he could
transform words to deeds was at best questionable.
Then, from across the Atlantic, a new
hope emerged. The United States had initially sought to remain, in
President Woodrow Wilson's words, "neutral in thought, word, and
deed." However, a combination of emotional sympathy for the Allied
cause, close economic ties with France and Britain, and clumsy German
diplomacy convinced increasing numbers of Americans from the White
House downward that a German victory would eventually prove disastrous
for U.S. interests. Any lingering doubts were removed in January 1917,
when Germany announced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare,
sinking any ship under any flag that approached the British Isles. In
April, the United States declared war.
Seen in hindsight, the German decision
seems a fecklessly applied recipe for disaster. In German terms it was
a calculated risk. The United States possessed neither a balanced
fleet nor a strong army. Even if the Americans could create a credible
land force, German experts dismissed the possibility that it could be
transported across the Atlantic at all, much less in time to save
Britain from strangulation and France from itself.
Germany's prospects for victory seemed
to increase as French and British offensives undertaken on the Western
Front in 1917 proved more indecisive than Verdun and the Somme. In
April 1917, the French army suffered such a one-sided disaster on the
ridges of the Chemin des Dames that its hard-tried poilus
mutinied. In the fall it was Britain's turn, as division after
division vanished into the gelatinous mud of Flanders. The British
Expeditionary Force lost another quarter million men in exchange for a
few thousand yards of shell-churned ground and the ruined village of
Passchendaele. German losses were almost as heavy. It was nevertheless
clear that German defensive systems had become too complex, and German
defensive tactics too sophisticated, to yield readily either to brute
force or finesse. In the words of the new French field commander,
Philippe Pétain, it was necessary to wait for the Americans and the
tanks.
But would either arrive in time to
prevent Germany from springing through what seemed a final window of
opportunity? Well before Lenin's Bolsheviks gave it the coup de grâce
in November 1917, Kerensky's government was disintegrating. A Germany
by now completely dominated by its generals saw this as an opportunity
to create an eastern European sphere of influence impervious to
blockade—an empire that would restore at least the material losses
suffered since 1914. Troops poured eastward to occupy territories in
Poland, the Ukraine, even Finland. But the process of acquiring and
exploiting the new territories would take time, and time was something
Germany no longer possessed.
In October 1917, a joint
German-Austrian offensive shattered the Italian army at Caporetto,
inflicting 600,000 casualties—half of whom simply deserted. But once
again this tactical victory produced no political gains; Italy
remained in the war. Enough resources remained for one last blow. The
German high command decided on a series of tactically focused attacks
designed to split the French and British armies on the Western Front.
Perhaps the British might retreat to the seacoast. France might
consider peace on German terms. At worst, Erich Ludendorff expected so
to cripple his adversaries that Germany would have time to consolidate
its new continental position.
Hopes in this regard were enhanced when
on March 3, 1918, a Bolshevik government concluded at Brest-Litovsk a
treaty that gave Germany hegemony in central Europe. Eighteen days
later, the German western offensive began. Employing innovative
systems of artillery fire control combined with infantry tactics based
on bypassing enemy strong points, Ludendorff's March 21 attack
achieved initial successes that gave the Allies the courage of
desperation (see Ludendorff Offensive). An April offensive against the
British on the Lys River was briefly more threatening. For the first
time the entente accepted a supreme commander. Marshal Ferdinand Foch
proved more a coordinator than a generalissimo. Nevertheless, he was
able to secure higher levels of mutual cooperation than had previously
been the case—a particularly important factor given the insistence of
the Americans that their rapidly growing army play an independent role
in the war.
Meanwhile the German drive was coming
to a standstill, as much from physical and moral exhaustion as from
Allied countermeasures. By June the front had stabilized. In July the
Allies counterattacked. First it was the turn of the tanks. At
Soissons, exhausted French infantrymen—and American
reinforcements—followed the increasing numbers of armored vehicles
into German positions. On August 8, the British army used its armor to
rip open the German lines around Amiens. By this time the British had
learned how to combine fire and movement in set-piece attacks that
followed each other so closely that an exhausted German army had no
time to counterstrike or rally.
Meanwhile the Americans had taken the
field. The U-boats had been unable to stop their flow across the
Atlantic. By July 1918 over a million American troops were on European
soil with hundreds of thousands more arriving each month. In
September, with French help, the American First Army pinched off the
St.-Mihiel salient. In October it embarked on an offensive against far
more formidable positions in the Argonne Forest. Clumsy tactics, poor
commanders, and sheer inexperience led to high casualties, but the
Americans' will and enthusiasm were the final blows to a German army
that had long since exhausted both qualities. With defeat staring him
in the face, Ludendorff called for peace. For a few days Germany had
for the first time in its history a parliamentary government. Then a
wave of revolt swept the country. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated. His
senior generals sought retirement, leaving the newly established
Weimar Republic to face a victors' coalition neither willing nor able
to be generous in its days of triumph.
At 11:00
a.m. on November 11,
1918, the guns fell silent. About nine million men in uniform had
perished. Millions of other human beings would die in an influenza
pandemic whose impact owed much to the physical and emotional effects
of a war that left Europe in shambles. The success of the Bolshevik
Revolution, impossible without the war, drew an ideological line of
demarcation between the new Soviet Union and its neighbors. The
territorial changes in central Europe, largely a consequence of
Austria-Hungary's dissolution, created a network of weak, unstable
states. The Treaty of Versailles, with its territorial, economic, and
military demands, was widely viewed by Germans as imposing
intolerable, immoral burdens on a country that had fought in self-defense.
Adolf Hitler's promises to expunge the "disgrace" of 1918 contributed
significantly to his rise to power—and to the launching in 1939 of a
second war for the mastery of Europe.
Since the Great War, Europe has had
neither the will nor the means to sustain the process of expanding its
world influence that had begun in the fifteenth century. The mutual
destruction that began in August 1914 continues to cast its shadow.
Dennis E.
Showalter
