The Great War, 1914-1918

Spencer Tucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134817498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An up-to-date and concise account of WWI for teachers and students looking for a balanced introduction. It details both the military operations as well as the development of war aims, alliance diplomacy and the war on the home front.

Chapter One
The background

Impetus for a general European conflict had been building for decades. Nationalism (the triumph of statism over internationalism and the desire of subject minorities for their own nation states), two hostile alliance systems, imperialist and trade rivalries, an arms race, and economic and social tensions all led many Europeans to welcome war as a unifying and “cleansing” force.¹ Certainly all the major powers bear some measure of responsibility for the war that began in 1914. ²

Nationalism was the major force behind the First World War, and nowhere was this more obvious than in Austria-Hungary, ruled since 1848 by Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Although the empire may have made sense economically, it was a racial mélange of at least a dozen minorities. Austria’s defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866 led to the Ausgleich (agreement) the next year. This allowed the Germans (23 per cent of the population) and the Magyars (19 per cent, the empire’s next largest minority and pre-eminent in Hungary) to dominate the empire’s other peoples. The Dual Monarchy was essentially two sovereign states that functioned as one in military, foreign, and tariff policies. ³

Slavic nationalism threatened the stability of the Dual Monarchy, and Serbia was its chief champion in the Balkans. Recognized as an independent state by the 1878 Congress of Berlin, Serbia shared both the Orthodox Christian religion and Cyrillic alphabet with Russia and enjoyed its support. Serbia had long sought to be the nucleus of a large state embracing all southern Slavs.

Vienna wanted to regain prestige lost in 1866 by expanding in the Balkans. In 1908, to diminish Serb influence and cut it off from access to the sea, the Dual Monarchy annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. This almost touched off war with Russia. Additionally, Austria-Hungary insisted on creating an independent Albania. These actions merely fired Slavic nationalism within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and the strongest personality of the House of Habsburg in more than a century, intended to overhaul the constitutional structure of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, through force if necessary. One solution he advanced was “Trialism”. This would have allowed Slavs to share power within the empire. He also toyed with recreating the Greater Austria of the 1850s with a single, centralized administration in Vienna directly responsible to the emperor. ⁴ It is thus impossible to say just what Franz Ferdinand would have done had he become emperor. There was a certain fatalism among the Dual Monarchy’s elite. As Count Ottokar Czernin, one of the Dual Monarchy’s last foreign ministers, put it: “We were bound to die. We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death and we chose the most terrible.”⁵

Germany, the pre-eminent European military power, was Austria-Hungary’s closest ally. The German Empire had come into being as a consequence of the Franco-German War of 1870–71. Having imposed a draconian settlement on France after that war, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck now sought to isolate France diplomatically by allying Germany with at least two of the other four great powers.

Bismarck first tried an arrangement with both Austria-Hungary and Russia, but this Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors’ League) shattered on Austro-Hungarian and Russian competition in the Balkans. Forced to choose between the two, in 1879 Bismarck selected Austria-Hungary as his principal ally. The Dual Monarchy was weaker and hence more susceptible to German influence; its large German minority also provided a linguistic and cultural affinity. Not prepared to cast Russia adrift, in 1887 Bismarck concluded a secret Reinsurance Treaty with that country. He promised German support in the Balkans to both powers. The potential conflict did not trouble him.

As long as Bismarck was chancellor of Germany, France remained isolated. Emperor Wilhelm I, whom Bismarck had dominated, died in 1888; his son Frederick III succeeded him. Frederick offered the promise of a new liberal era. But tragically for both Germany and Europe he died only three months later. ⁶ His son, 29-year-old Wilhelm II, then became emperor. Rash, headstrong, and a lover of all things military, Wilhelm soon clashed with Bismarck, who said that the impulsive new Kaiser was “like a balloon. If you don’t hold fast to the string, you’ll never know where he’ll be off to.” ⁷ In 1890 Wilhelm dropped Bismarck as chancellor and dramatically changed Germany’s foreign policy.

Relations with Russia were already frayed over Germany’s tightening of credit, but the situation was made worse when in 1890 Wilhelm ordered that the Reinsurance Treaty not be renewed. A rapidly industrializing Russia was forced to look elsewhere for foreign capital, and France was waiting. By 1894, despite Russian reluctance, the two countries had forged a military alliance against Germany.⁸ Thus by 1914 there were two mutually antagonistic alliance systems in Europe. The first, headed by Germany, included Austria-Hungary and an increasingly reluctant Italy (in the Triple Alliance of 1882). During the First World War, Germany and Austria-Hungary, located in the centre of Europe, would be known as the Central Powers. France and Russia formed the second alliance, to which Britain was informally linked. These three became known as the Entente powers, the Entente, the Allied Powers, or simply the Allies.

Bismarck, the master manipulator of nations and of his own people, steered a responsible course in international affairs, but when Wilhelm II assumed his personal rule everything came undone. The Kaiser sought to play world politics (Weltpolitik), and repeatedly declared that he was determined to make Germany not just dominant in European affairs but in the world. His desire for a German-dominated central Europe (Mitteleuropa) reversed Bismarck’s limited “Little German” (Kleindeutsch) policies. Wilhelm was not alone; many German civilian and military leaders dreamed of territorial aggrandizement that would allow Germany to compete successfully with other major world powers, particularly Britain and the United States. The treaties that Germany imposed on Russia and Romania late in the First World War indicate the steadfastness of these expansionist aims. As a latecomer to the ranks of the big powers, Germany was determined to exert its influence. Germany’s policies were at the least maladroit and heavy-handed.

The Kaiser also reversed Bismarck’s wise policy of not building a strong navy. A naval-building contest between Britain and Germany began in the mid-1890s.⁹ Although Berlin said the larger battle fleet was purely defensive, the navy’s principal proponents, Wilhelm II and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, actually aimed to challenge Britain, perhaps Britain and the United States together, for world mastery. ¹⁰

Wilhelm II’s precipitous actions alienated would-be allies and created a climate of uncertainty. Germans believed themselves encircled and denied their rightful “place in the sun”. Tirpitz warned of a British pre-emptive strike against his fleet; General Alfred von Schlieffen wrote of a Britain envious of German economic and industrial progress, a France yearning for revenge, Slav hatred of Teutons, and Italy lining up against Austria-Hungary. ¹¹ Bereft of allies save an increasingly weak Dual Monarchy, Germans saw their position as desperate. The theme of General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s 1912 book, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War) was “world power or decline”. Bernhardi wrote,

If we look at our general political position, we cannot conceal the fact that we stand isolated…. England, France and Russia have a common interest in breaking down our power. This interest will sooner or later be asserted by arms. If we wish to attain an extension of our power, as is natural in our position, we must win it by the sword against vastly superior foes. ¹²

Bernhardi’s book went through six printings by 1914.¹³

The economic transformation that Germany experienced after 1871 brought rapid social change as well. By 1914 German political parties and social classes were polarized. Although Bismarck’s constitution provided a veneer of parliamentary democracy, it actually vested power in the Kaiser and the military establishment. This produced domestic instability that included unrest among the working class, the rise of socialism, and the antagonism of most German political parties toward the government. A European war would offer the Kaiser the chance to recreate the glory days of 1871, when the nation was unified and seemed poised for a glorious destiny.¹⁴

France also looked forward to war. The 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt that followed the Franco-German War had str ipped it of Alsace and Lorraine and imposed an indemnity of 5 billion francs—more than twice the cost of the war to Germany. Frenchmen longed to avenge that result and regain the two lost provinces. France had found immediate gratification in empire building. Imperialist ambitions almost led to war with Britain in an 1898 standoff at Fashoda on the Upper Nile River in the Sudan. But in 1904 France and Br itain reached an agreement that ended decades of rivalry in North Africa and South Asia. Britain and Russia reached a similar arrangement in 1907.

Russia was beginning to flex its economic muscles and enter the modern age, although Nicholas II, tsar since 1894 and the most absolute of Europe’s rulers, would make no concessions to political change. Russia sought ascendancy in the Balkans and control of the Straits to insure free access from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. After its defeat by Japan in 1904–5, Russia had appeared incapable of waging a European war, but by 1912 it was regaining its capacity to fight. This triggered an unprecedented land-armaments race in Europe. Russian industrial and military growth, including plans for the construction of new strategic railroads, heightened the German sense of panic. In May 1914 Chief of the German General Staff General Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger) told Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow that in two to three years Russia would be rearmed and the Entente powers would then be so powerful that it would be difficult for Germany to defeat them. Germany had no alternative, he reasoned, but to seek a preven-tive war while there was a chance of victory.¹⁵

Britain followed its traditional pattern of involving itself in continental affairs only when necessary to preserve vital national interests or the European balance of power, but Germany’s decision to build a powerful battle fleet drove it to the side of France. With an ageing industrial plant, the British resented the surge in German industrial might and trade. By 1910 Germany produced annually some 13 million tons of steel; this was five million more than Britain and second only to the United States.¹⁶ With Germany leading the world in the new electrical and chemical industries, Britain saw its international commercial position in jeopardy. Although aligned with France and Russia, Britain’s sole military responsibility in 1914 lay in a 1912 agreement that placed it under moral obligation to protect the French coasts from German naval attack.¹⁷

Crises preceding 1914

Several crises almost led to general European war in the decade before 1914. Two of these, in 1904–5 and in 1911, involved the North African state of Morocco. France had been working to annex Morocco, which lay next to its territory of Algeria; Germany, with no vital interests in Morocco, threatened war if not consulted and compensated. Although it agreed only reluctantly to an international conference at Algeciras in 1906, the conferees awarded France most of what it sought.¹⁸

In 1908 another crisis, this time in the Balkans, almost brought war between Austria-Hungary and Russia, when the Dual Monarchy, authorized only to administer Bosnia-Herzegovina, annexed it. Russia, still reeling from its defeat by Japan, backed down and the crisis passed, but Bulgaria took advantage of the situation to declare its full independence from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey).

Balkan wars

As a vacuum invites something to fill it, Turkey’s decline invited war. In 1911 Italy invaded Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Libya) and seized the Dodecanese archipelago off western Anatolia. In 1912 and 1913 two regional wars raged in the Balkans. In the first of these, the Balkan states sought to take advantage of Turkish weakness to expel it entirely from the Balkan Peninsula. In October 1912 Montenegro declared war on Turkey. Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia followed suit. Although the Balkan states defeated Turkey they soon fell to quarrelling among themselves. In June 1913 Bulgaria, the big winner in the first war, attacked Greece and Serbia; the following month it was in turn invaded by Romania. Soon Turkey joined in against Bulgaria. A treaty in August 1913 finally put an end to the fighting, but both Balkan wars had threatened to draw in the big powers and almost led to world war.

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Serb nationalists, determined to prevent the possibility of Trialism in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, decided to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a plan advanced by the secret nationalist society “Union or Death”, better known as the “Black Hand”. Consisting of officers, officials, and intellectuals, it was led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrievic, chief of intelligence of the Serbian General Staff. Serb government involvement remains controversial, and Premier Nikola Pasic was probably not directly aware of the plot.¹⁹ Nonetheless, on 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip assassinated both Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg as they rode in an open car through the city. This event touched off the Great War.

Chain of events to war

Berlin and Vienna sought to use the assassination to their advantage. They wanted a localized Balkan conflict that would restore their prestige and open Turkey and eastern Europe to economic exploitation. After all, the Franco-German War of 1870–71 had proved profitable for Germany, and in 1914 both Berlin and Vienna viewed punitive war as a viable foreign policy option. To Vienna the assassination of Franz Ferdinand seemed almost providential. Emperor Franz Josef, Chief of the General Staff General Conrad von Hotzendorf, and Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold believed that the time had come to settle the Serbian question once and for all.²⁰

In order to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface
• Chapter One: The Background
• Chapter Two: 1914: The War of Movement
• Chapter Three: 1915: Stalemate and Trench Warfare
• Chapter Four: 1916: The Cauldron
• Chapter Five: 1917: The Turning Point
• Chapter Six: 1918: The End
• Chapter Seven: Other Theatres of War
• Chapter Eight: The Home Fronts
• Chapter Nine: The Peace Lost
• Notes
• Select Bibliography