This thing probably has several errors in it, as I cobbled it together quickly, but it should still be mostly accurate.
World War I was the most destructive conflict in European history, or at least up until that point. It was fought between nations fueled and blinded by nationalistic pride, motivated by arbitrary causes and alliances.
World War I has a myriad of causes, and many can be traced back almost a century to the Council of Vienna. The council was made following the Napoleonic wars. Headed by figures such as Clemens von Metternich, it was meant to restore the balance of power to Europe. In doing so, the seeds of the alliances were sown.
Revolution would grip Europe twice, first in 1830, then in 1848. Following the massive second wave of revolutions, many more alliances between the monarchs and those in power began to congeal, creating an elaborate web of allegiance that got more complex as time wore on.
Then, in 1871, the German Confederacy, after kicking the tar out of France in a humiliating curb-stomp battle, proceeded to declare themselves an empire. This led to a slew of alliances as other nations tried to curry favor towards Germany, or wanted to keep the scales balanced. However, the rise of the Germanic Empire also led to the rise of nationalism, as now many nations had emerged with their own identities. Nationalism spread like an ideological plague, encouraging intolerance and xenophobia throughout thee continent. The Balkans, especially, with ethnic groups under the heel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, felt this especially hard.
The fuse was lit when a Serbian terrorist named Gavril Princip shot the Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary to death. Immediately Austria Hungary sent an ultimatum to Serbia to bait them into war. It worked. With war declared in the Balkans, Russia soon rushed to Serbia’s side as a result of both their ethnic heritage and the various arbitrary treaties. Now that Russia was in the war, Germany would be too, due to their alliance to Austria Hungary. And of course, Germany meant France, who challenged Germany and invaded. Germany invaded Belgium as a response to knock France out first. And with Belgium came Britain, not allied with the nation but involved because it was neutral. This shows clearly that the war was a contrived and pointless mess of nonsense.
On the Western Front, German troops attacked Liege, besieged the city, won, and moved onward. The French stopped them at the Marne, where they were pushed back into Belgium. Here both armies, unable to advance past one another and unwilling to give up ground, set up a terrifying labyrinth of trenches that spanned the length of Belgium, curved into France, and ended at the Swiss border. The army stopped dead.
Meanwhile in the East, the Russian advance towards Germany and Austria-Hungary was stopped dead at the Battle of Tannanburg. Named after the victory over the Teutonic Knights in the 1400s, the battle set the Germans up for a successful run in the East. After several months of scattered fighting, the efforts in the East became concentrated and specific, and Germany was soon pushing into the East, with successful battles in Poland. Their chief ally, Austria-Hungary, fared far worse. In the Battle of Galicia, Russian troops decimated the Austrians. The battle’s positive effects partially negated Tannenberg, which occurred at the same time, and kept Russia’s monarchy in the war.
Meanwhile, the Western front was in a state of perpetual stagnation. With the emergence of the trenches, no army could divide its forces to go around the trenches, and no army could land behind the trenches via planes due to technological impairments. As a result, there was only one method of advance: run into no-man’s land. The landscape on a trench warfare battlefield had two opposing lines of trenches. These lines were networks that focused around having supply trenches and front line trenches. The trenches linked up bunkers and barracks. The region between the lines was known as no-man’s land. This region was filled with barbed wire, mines, dead trees, craters, and, after assaults, thousands of corpses. Crossing it was suicide, as artillery barrages would rain in from the sky while machine gunners would fire from enemy trenches. Trench warfare was, for the soldiers, moments of great excitement in a sea of worried boredom. When there weren’t charges or assaults, the trenches had shells and mortar fire surrounding them.
Trench warfare brought about new innovations. Tanks were used to circumvent them, though they were nothing more than advanced cavalry meant to support infantry. Poison gas was another innovation, marking the start of biological warfare. Mustard gas agents and phosphorus bombs would coat the trenches with a foul stench that burnt the skin and lungs from its victims. It was a true living hell.
Battles on the Western Front were all useless and went nowhere. Ypres was the site of multiple battles that were inconsequential. At Verdun, over half a million men lost their lives so that the Germans could gain less than a mile. The Somme was an even larger battle that saw 7 miles of ground gained for almost a million men. Everything was fruitless, wasteful, and endlessly cruel.
The Eastern Front, meanwhile, was going through its own changes. Germany was winning a number of victories, but the main burden towards them was the fact that the East was using up valuable resources. Austria-Hungary, meanwhile, was doing poorly. Then, in 1916, the Russians launched one of the most dramatic battles of the war, the Brusilov Offensive. This attack was against the Austrian lines and broke through them, savaging the Austrian military in the process and pushing the armies of the Central Powers back. The attack was the last that Russia would successfully do in the war. The next year, their government imploded as revolutionaries stormed the nation, murdering the Czar Nicholas II and his family in a basement under Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.
With Russia out of the war, there was now a release of troops and materials to the West for Germany. The result was the Spring Offensive, which was the first major movement on the front since the March to the Sea and the Battle of the Marne.
Germany did not take into account, however, the involvement of another nation in the conflict. The United States of America was now involved due to a slew of reasons. During the earlier years of the war, the German U-Boats had been prowling the North Sea, sinking numerous ships, from passenger liners to merchants to warships. The most famous of these ships was the Lusitania. In 1915, she was sunk off the coast of Ireland, and 1198 people on the boat were killed. The Germans had torpedoed it due to a pact of arms that the British and Americans had made, but when the news of 128 dead Americans would enrage the Americans people and send the nation towards war, ending many of the ultra-isolationist factions of the population.
As numerous boats met their fate in the North Sea, America began to be drawn into the war more and more. Eventually they were allied with Britain in all but official terms. Then, the progress into war sped up. In 1917, there came a note, intercepted by the British, that was sent from Arthur Zimmerman to the Mexicans. It was essentially an appeal to alliance, one that contained language that would prove disastrous for Germany. The note essentially said that Germany could help Mexico regain the territory lost from the 1846 Mexican American War. How Germany would be able to assist a nation in civil war to attack a great power while tied down in two fronts with various colonial attacks across the globe is a mystery, but it was likely that the note was mostly an appeal to add an ally in Mexico.
America, however, didn’t see it that way. It might as well have been a declaration of war. Then there came the sinking of four ships, all of them American passenger liners. That and the Zimmerman note ended the vast majority of isolationists. The nation plunged into war in 1917.
However, Wilson had several massive obstacles to overcome. The first was the public’s opinion. A foreign war, one that America had prided itself for staying out of, was going to involve America’s troops in full scale. As the solution, the public was fed copious amounts of propaganda that churned out of the Creel organization. Such was the zeal that Americans were whipped into that Wilson found himself idolized to a point at which any action would result in letdown.
America’s population, now high on a similar propaganda fever that gripped the European states before 1914, surged towards war. Problem was, not everyone bought the nationalist drug. Dissenters still existed all across the nation, but more importantly, the German immigrants were a major problem. These immigrants became the suspects of everything from epidemics to sabotage. The response was the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917. This act made “espionage” illegal, and with the amendments of the “Sedition” Act passed in 1918, it became a tool of the government to weed out dissenters. (Fun fact: The Espionage Act is still in effect, albeit so watered down and modified throughout the ages that it’s unrecognizable.)
The American people who didn’t need to be weeded out by these acts were the backbone of American efforts in the war. The entire nation mobilized for the effort. However, there were still a few glaring issues, such as the fact that the United States had a number of domestic issues that refused to go away, and the fact that there was a very small army. The domestic issues of the era were mostly in the factories and in feminism.
The largest obstacle to the war was the lack of a large army for the United States. People simply didn’t want to enlist en mass as was predicted. So, Wilson was forced to call a draft. The draft ended the substitute system of the Civil War and resulted in the massive army of “doughboys” that went to war in France.
With a great deal of the men gone, the home front was dramatically changed. As this was the era of progressivism, something that Wilson himself championed greatly, workers at the time could now participate in organized and legal strikes. The espionage and Sedition Acts helped to quell many of these, and the draft soon took many of the old workers, as those eligible would either work of fight. Now, the empty jobs could be filled with two groups primarily: African-Americans and women. Women began working in jobs traditionally held by men, and African Americans began to migrate north to fill the factories, as the South was still very rural.
The women of the era now had many new opportunities. However, due to the “work or fight” rule, they didn’t fill the workplace as much as they would 25 years later. Despite this, this was still the era of the first wave of feminism. The focus began shifting to suffrage again, this time to keep it in the public’s eye. Wilson approved of it, but it wouldn’t become law until 1920, mostly due to the massive amount of upheaval that took precedence from 1917 to 1920.
At last America was ready to enter the war, but their army was still being trained. Meanwhile, things were turning bad in Europe. With the victory of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, Germany could divert their attention almost exclusively to the Western front. The result was the massive Spring Offensive of 1918. German troops busted through the lines with their new superiority. They took a great deal of land until they finally were stopped at, in a cruel repeat of the Race to the Sea, the Marne. This battle was different, however, as it involved American troops, who were now being deployed. These “doughboys” finally started the push back in the Hundred Days Offensive, which included the Battle of Argonne-Meuse.
The Hundred Days Offensive ended the Spring Offensive with a complete and utter route. The German troops were pushed back beyond the Hindenburg line, where they finally ended the war with their surrender. By this time, there was no other major ally to Germany; Austria-Hungary had been out as a major player from the start and the Ottomans were losing constantly. Thus Germany’s surrender was the definite end to the war.
That’s not to say that the war had a neat end. Unlike World War II, which ended conclusively and totally, World War I left a Europe falling apart politically, with multiple political factions duking it out. In Germany, there were riots and uproar, with cries of the “Stab-in-the-Back,” a conspiracy theory that stated that Germany lost the war due to a stab in the back deal from the German high command. The entire continent soon fell ill with Spanish flu, which spread like wildfire among the disorganized anarchy and killed many more than the war. Amid the chaos, there came the effort to conclude the war at last, the Treaty of Versailles.
The delegations of Paris were convened in the Palace of Versailles outside town. The attendees at these delegations ranged from most of the involved powers to delegate from most every other nation. However, one nation was deliberately left out of most of the planning: Germany. The defeated Central Power was kept away from the delegation table because France and England wanted to keep them as weak as possible and punish them for WWI.
The delegations were essentially headed by the “Big Four.” Each of them had
their own agenda. They were:
1. David Lloyd George of Britain, who wanted to keep his empire as imperialistic as before
2. Vittorio Orlando of Italy, who wanted to hold onto ghis ports on the Croatian ports and seize a piece of Austria
3. George Clemenceau of France, who wanted to punish Germany
4. Woodrow Wilson of America, whose goals were outlined in the 14 point
Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points were presented at the delegations to bring about the peace and stability that Europe was aiming for. They were as follows.
1. The discouragement of secret alliances between countries
2. Freedom of the seas in peace and war
3. The reduction of trade barriers among nations
4. General disarmament
5. Colonial settlements
6. The acceptance of the Bolshevik government
7. The restoration of Belgian territories in Germany
8. The evacuation of all French territory, including Alsace-Lorraine
9. Territorial changes for Italy
10. Dissolution of Austria-Hungary
11. The restoration of the Balkan nations
12. Free passage through the Dardanelle Straits
13. Independence for Poland
14. The League of Nations
Several of these points would be taken away, but the most valuable of them was reserved. The League of Nations was created, and it was accepted by most of the nations present, but getting it home was a major problem.
Back in the United States, the Republicans were thoroughly horrified with the idea of joining a “League of Nations.” To them, this represented the end of Westphalian Sovereignty (I'll have more on this later) and would force America to do a number of international duties that America would have no say over. Hatred, bile, and vitriol rose in Congress, and soon the Republicans began to attack the treaty. Then there came the most egregious examples of political attacks of the age. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of the Republican Party published a set of 14 reservations. These reservations all had to do with keeping America isolated and don’t need to be summarized in depth, as they were virtually all done as an attempt to water down the League and as a giant middle finger to Wilson. Now there came the massive political debate. Lodge and the Republicans were on one side, and Wilson and the Democrats were on the other. Deadlock gripped the entire congress, and kept it in a perpetual state of stagnation, meaning that until one side budged, nothing would happen. All Wilson had to do was accept some of Lodge’s points, and the Treaty of Versailles would be upheld as America joined the League. But because Wilson refused, the gamble was lost; all or nothing resulted in nothing. And what a nothing it was.
Because America failed to enter the League of Nations, the League was doomed to failure. The League of Nations had been built with the United States as one of the most important nations. The United States would provide the League with muscle and sheer power. Without it, the League was crippled. It spent two decades settling small matters and wars, al of them minor or simple affairs, with the largest being the Ruhr Crisis. But once the Axis Powers began to rise, everything went to hell.
However, this was but the last ingredient to add to the noxious elixir of chaos and vitriol that resulted after WWI. The main problems came from the Treaty of Versailles. Because of the sacrifice of many of the 14 points, and because of France’s ability to get their nationalist crap passed during the delegations, the entire treaty would result in disaster.
France’s punishment of Germany led to the Germans being completely unable to pay off their war debts. This led to the weak and fractured state of the Weimar Republic, whose economy couldn’t handle the stress of the debts and fell into total upheaval. And because the economy in Germany was dead, that meant that the political system would remain fractured and broken, which meant that it was easy for a political party with enough members to enter and change the face of Germany, and with it, history. Its leaders would use the League of Nations as an ideological punching bag and taunt it when it was powerless to stop them, and they would use another race, the Jews, as the scapegoats for the “Stab-in-the-Back” conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, the United States elected a corrupt president to replace Wilson and entered a decade of chaotic growth. America became financially involved in European economic affairs after the war, enough to end the Ruhr Crisis, but not enough to undo the damage done by the reparations laid out in Versailles. It would take the rise of a dictator and another World War to truly show how great the failure of the Treaty of Versailles truly was.
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