First World War For Dummies

Seán Lang

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118679975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From the Somme to Gallipoli to the home front, First World War For Dummies provides an authoritative, accessible, and engaging introduction to the War to End All Wars. It takes a global perspective of this global conflict, proving insight into the actions and motivations of the participants and how each nation's story fits into the wider one.

Coverage also includes:

• The origins of the war and a snapshot of what the world looked like at the beginning of the 20th century
• The battles of Western Europe, and action in the Southern and Eastern Fronts
• The war at home — the civilian war, propaganda, opposition, politics, protests, and more
• 1918: The German spring offensive, the Allied success and the beginning of the end
• The Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and the effect on the future

First World War For Dummies is the go-to source for readers seeking to learn more about the fundamental event of the 20th century.

Part I

Origins of War

For Dummies can help you get started with lots of subjects. Visit www.dummies.com to learn more and do more with For Dummies.

In this part…

• Find out why the assassination of one European statesman caused the nations of Europe to throw themselves at each other’s throats.
• Understand the background to the outbreak of war in 1914, the Great Powers of Europe and their people, and how Europeans dominated the world.
• Discover how Europe, the continent that prided itself on its sophisticated culture and civilisation, plunged the world into the most destructive and ghastly war in world history.

Chapter 1

The First World War: An Overview

In This Chapter

Giving the war a name

Looking at what caused the war and who fought in it

Scanning the fronts and theatres of war

Breaking through in technology and medicine

Reviewing the course of the war

Working out why the war still matters today

You can find plenty of battles and generals and details in this book, and they’re all important to know about, but plunging straight into the events of the war can be a bit disorientating, especially if you’re not quite sure of what else was happening in the period. So, in this chapter I try to give you a roadmap of the war, to explain who was fighting whom, where the fighting took place and to give you an overall shape of the way the war developed.

Thinking of the war having a ‘shape’ might seem a bit strange if your picture of the war is essentially one in which soldiers spent their whole time sitting in the trenches, launching occasional suicidal attacks on the enemy lines. However, although it might not have seemed like it to the ordinary soldiers at the time, or to many people since, the war did have a shape and a direction: each side did try various ways to break through the enemy lines and to win. The generals and political leaders learned many hard lessons along the way and, believe it or not, they did try to avoid repeating their most disastrous mistakes. Of course, they didn’t always succeed, but this chapter gives you an overview of what they were trying to do.

I Name This War … Er, What Should We Call the War?

How about starting with the basics, like what exactly the war should be called? This might sound like a silly question, but it’s not. Wars don’t come ready-packaged with a name on top: they usually get named after they’ve happened and people often disagree – sometimes quite sharply – on what to call them. For example, what the Russians call ‘the Great Patriotic War’ is, to the rest of the world, a little thing called ‘the Second World War’. The Russian name suggests that the war on the Eastern Front was the most important area of conflict and that the rest was just a sideshow. Seeing why some other countries may disagree isn’t hard!

Even the dates of wars can be problematic. Most of the countries involved in the First World War went to war in 1914, but not all of them: Italy only entered in 1915, Romania in 1916 and the United States not until 1917. Most people think the war ended in 1918, but it didn’t: the fighting ended then, but the war itself wasn’t over (and it could have been renewed at any time) until the peace treaty was signed, which was in 1919. Some war memorials do carry the dates 1914–1919 and people often think it’s a mistake, but in fact those memorials are the ones that get it right!

While it was going on, people usually referred to the war as the European War or the Great War – a name that people often still use today. (Of course, no one called it the First World War at the time for the very good reason that there hadn’t been a second one then!) Towards the end, people sometimes referred to it as the War to End All Wars: the war had been so costly and so terrible that it had to have been fought for something. (Not surprisingly, after the Second World War, this phrase became something of a bad joke.) With similar optimism, US President Wilson sometimes called it a War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, though that certainly wasn’t what anyone had in mind when they started it. Years later, after the Second World War, some people did refer for a while to the First and Second German Wars, which suggested that the Germans had been entirely responsible for them both, but the names haven’t lasted and were never entirely accurate anyway.

More recently, and especially in the non-western world, some historians have questioned the use of the term ‘world war’. The far-away quarrels between Austria-Hungary and Serbia or between Britain and Germany were of no interest to people in Africa or Asia, and they only got dragged into them by their European colonial masters. What was really happening, these scholars say, was a ‘European Civil War’ – the first of two. It’s not difficult to see where this idea comes from, but it rather ignores the role played by non-European countries such as Japan, China, the United States and some of the South American states, which weren’t European colonies and which came into the war very much following their own agenda.

Strictly speaking, the First World War wasn’t even the first world war! The religious wars between Protestants and Catholics that ravaged Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries also saw fighting in Central America, India and the Pacific. The first wars to be planned on a global scale were the European wars of the 18th century, which were fought in North America, in India and on the all the world’s oceans as well as in Europe. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars involved serious fighting in India, the West Indies, North Africa, the Middle East, Canada and the United States. So what people call the ‘First’ World War was actually the fourth or fifth! On the other hand, all these ‘world’ wars were really European wars that spread around the world, so maybe they’re better off with the names they have.

All things considered, I’m going to stick to ‘First World War’ in this book, because at least everyone knows what you’re referring to by that name, even if they don’t like it.

Analysing the Causes

The war was so destructive and its consequences were so far-reaching that it’s hardly surprising that many people – and not just historians – have asked how on earth it started in the first place. This question hasn’t been without its controversy.

Historians at war

When the war ended the political leaders on the winning side thought it was quite easy to work out how the war began: it was all Germany’s fault. They even wrote that claim into the peace treaty and made the Germans sign it (see Chapter 17). Then, after the war, historians started ploughing their way through thousands and thousands of diplomatic memos and telegrams and papers and letters in the archives to prove who caused the war. And the answer was: Germany! Or maybe Austria. Or maybe the British Foreign Secretary. Or else the Russians. It all depended on which documents you read.

These disagreements may come as a surprise to you, but this is how history works. Very seldom do you find a piece of evidence that definitely proves something; usually, a document’s significance depends on the different ways historians interpret it. All too often historians – like anyone else – can read into the evidence what they want to see, rather than what’s actually there!

An accident waiting to happen …

In the years after the war, some historians liked to argue that no one caused the war. They argued that the outbreak of war was inevitable and that the countries all just somehow slid into it. Or, if you prefer, they were all equally self-interested and therefore equally to blame.

The trouble with this argument is that nothing in history is inevitable until it happens (otherwise, you might as well blame fate or the stars and have done with it). What makes history so interesting is precisely that people often don’t act in their own best interests. Every country stood to lose heavily from the war, and they all did. So maybe the ‘accident waiting to happen’ idea raises more questions than it answers. Let’s try Plan B.

… or was villainy afoot?

When the Second World War started in 1939 some people began asking: what is it with the Germans and their invading-the-neighbours addiction? Other people said that starting the Second World War didn’t prove that Germany had started the First World War as well. And then in the 1960s a German (yes, German) historian called Fritz Fischer started producing what appeared to be documentary proof that the Germans had definitely been planning the First World War. Ever since then the debate has raged, though generally scholars accept the broad outline of Fischer’s argument nowadays ‒ except, understandably, in Germany. (I say more about how and why the war started in Chapter 3.)

Reviewing the Combatants

The war involved a huge range of countries from all parts of the world, from the Great Powers – the strongest and most powerful countries of all – to the most humble of colonial territories. Allow me to introduce you to some of them. (I look at them in greater detail in Chapters 2 and 3.)

The Central Powers

Germany and its allies dominated the centre of the continent and, after the war had started, they came to be known as the Central Powers.

Germany – nation most likely to succeed

Germany was the one to watch. The German army was highly organised and it was run by a sort of military ministry called the General Staff, in which hundreds of highly professional officers studied all the possible permutations for war and worked out how to win them all. It was also building up a powerful fleet. Germany’s erratic Kaiser (emperor), Wilhelm II, declared that Germany wanted its ‘place in the sun’, but the other Great Powers wanted to know just what that meant in practice.

Austria-Hungary – one state, two kingdoms

Once Austria had been one of the great titans of Europe, but it had been crushed by Napoleon and then badly shaken by a series of revolutions, from which it had never recovered. The proud Hungarians, who had been merely a province of the old Austrian Empire, demanded and got equal status with the Austrians, and so in 1867 the curious dual monarchy of ‘Austria-Hungary’ was born. This dual monarchy idea is complex, but woe betide anyone who got it wrong! Within the dual monarchy, Austria was an empire, with an emperor, but Hungary was a kingdom, with a king. Since the emperor and the king were the same person, it meant he held two different titles, had two different crowns and two different...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Origins of War
• Part II: Europe at War, 1914–1916
• Part III: A World at War
• Part IV: Home Fronts
• Part V: Armistice and Aftermath, 1917–1918 and Beyond
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Cheat Sheet
• Supplemental Images
• More Dummies Products