Hey there, historians! We're back in the thick of the Great War, the one we now call World War One.
Previously, we witnessed colossal bloodshed on the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme,
and at this point, you might be thinking - will this senseless carnage ever end?
Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is yes,
the carnage ends eventually. The bad news is it gets a whole lot worse in the meantime.
Why? Because what began as a war confined only to Europe, soon erupted into a worldwide conflict
spanning four continents with fighting here, there, and pretty much everywhere.
Our guiding questions are: how did World War One expand beyond Europe to include Africa,
Asia, and North America; how did the concept of total war affect the nations involved;
and what factors finally brought the war to an end? Our big picture question is,
what did the Great War ultimately achieve?
As we learned previously, World War One began as a conflict between European powers within
their own tangled web of alliances. Turns out these alliances would help spread the
fighting to other continents such as Africa and Asia. Why? Because European nations had huge
colonies in these places and wanted to protect their interests there. Germany, for example,
controlled all or part of the African nations we know today as Togo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana,
Namibia, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. In total, an area four and a half times larger
than Germany itself. The colonies supplied Germany with vast amounts of cocoa, rubber,
palm oil, diamonds, copper, lead, cotton, and zeisel, a fibrous plant used for making rope.
The Allied Powers, particularly Britain and France, wanted to block Germany's access to these
resources by seizing its colonies. After months of fierce fighting, the British and the French,
with help from Belgian, Portuguese, and conscripted African troops, captured nearly
all of Germany's African territories. In Asia, Japan joined the Allied powers and declared war
on Germany to protect its interests in China and to contest Germany's colonies in the Pacific.
The Ottoman Empire did the opposite. It formed an alliance with Germany in exchange for money
and the promise of future Russian territory. In response to the German-Ottoman alliance,
the Allied Powers sent 480,000 troops from France, Britain, Ireland, Australia,
New Zealand, and Canada to take possession of Gallipoli, access point to Constantinople, the
Ottoman capital. The Ottomans put up ferocious resistance under the commander Mustafa Kamal,
who told his army men, "I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the
time it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our places."
The Allied campaign was a monumental disaster. After eight long months of
unbearable heat, swarming flies, lack of water, and horrific bloodshed,
the Allied Powers gave up. Nearly 50,000 of their troops were killed and another 200,000
were wounded, while 87,000 Ottoman soldiers lay dead.
Meanwhile, in North America, the United States was already involved in the war as
a major supplier of goods to the Allies. Then a German submarine sank the British passenger ship,
Lusitania, killing over a thousand people, including 128 Americans. That tragedy,
plus an intercepted German telegram proposing an alliance with Mexico against the United States,
pushed many Americans to support entering the war, including Woodrow Wilson himself who,
ironically, won his second term as president with the campaign slogan, "He has kept us out of War."
Pause here and write down your answer to our first guiding question. How did
World War One expand beyond Europe to include Africa, Asia, and North America?
If you wrote, through Colonial competition and the
complex network of alliances between countries, you're absolutely right!
Total war is the term used to describe a kind of warfare in which the participants are willing to
make any sacrifice in lives and other resources to win. The concept became important during World
War One as nations began using their whole populations, including women and children,
in the war effort. While men were typically drafted into the military,
women worked in war-related industries such as arms manufacturers, truck drivers,
radio operators, cryptographers, messengers, or ammunition testers.
This kind of mass mobilization helped countries sustain prolonged warfare, but it also placed a
huge strain on their economies. Governments, for example, increased taxes to keep the war
effort going. They also borrowed heavily, rationed goods, and implemented price controls, that is,
regulations establishing the maximum price to be charged for specific goods or services.
These policies often resulted in inflation and shortages which affected Allied and
Central Powers alike, with civilians on both sides having to wait in long lines for food.
On top of that, the Allies set up a naval blockade that kept imports like butter,
sugar, potatoes, coffee, fruit, and meat out of the hands of German civilians, who
suffered while the German government prioritized sending homegrown food items to its soldiers.
Total war also encouraged governments to produce propaganda to gain support and make citizens
compliant in the war effort. Large, full-color posters began appearing on city streets and in
classrooms in Europe and the United States calling for civilians to support the war,
donate to charities, buy war bonds, and celebrate victories. This kind of propaganda helped create a
sense of nationalism, which governments quickly seized upon to justify the war's continuation
to engage in censorship and to suppress the free speech of people with opposing views.
In the United States, for example, Congress passed the Sedition Act, which banned the use
of disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the U.S. government, its flag,
or its military that would lead others to hold negative views of America or its institutions.
Pause here and write down your answer to our second guiding question. How
did the concept of total war affect the nations involved?
If you wrote something like, it led to food rationing, propaganda,
nationalism, and changes to traditional gender roles, you're right again!
So what finally ended this giant tangled mess of a war? One factor was widespread
economic devastation. The Central Powers, with their supply lines cut by the Allied blockade,
were suffering severe shortages of food and other necessities. Another was sheer exhaustion from the
staggering loss of human life - about 20 million people in all. But the more immediate factors that
brought the war to a close were America's late entry, Russia's withdrawal, and Germany's military
collapse. America's arrival, only about a year before the war ended, brought additional troops,
firepower, and resources needed to help tip the balance of favor to the Allies.
In Russia, communist rebels led by Vladimir Lenin seized control of the government, withdrew from
the war, and negotiated their own peace agreement with Germany. Russia's exit allowed Germany to
send its Eastern Front troops to the Western Front to launch a new series of offensives against the
remaining Allies. Despite the effort, Germany's new offensives failed and its leaders were forced
to seek an armistice. That is, an agreement made by opposing sides in a war to stop fighting.
The war officially ended in 1918 with a pivotal agreement called the Treaty of
Versailles, which, as we'll see later, inflicted harsh penalties on Germany.
Pause here and write down your answer to our
third guiding question. What factors finally brought the war to an end?
If you wrote something like, economic devastation, staggering loss of human life,
America's late entry, Russia's exit, and Germany's military collapse, congratulations, you nailed it!
So what did the Great War ultimately achieve? Well, along with the mass casualties, economic
devastation, and a deep sense of disillusionment with the institutions and values that had guided
the world previously, World War One also brought about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian,
Russian, and Ottoman Empires. It also saw the emergence of new nations in Europe
including Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, and contributed, as we'll see later,
to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany.
The League of Nations, an international organization whose purpose was to maintain
and prevent future conflict, also grew out of World War One. Well-intentioned but ineffective,
it was dissolved in the 1940s and replaced with the United Nations, which is still in place today.
But ultimately, it was the Treaty of Versailles, with its heavy penalties
on Germany and its humiliation of the German people, that would soon give rise to a new
kind of leader and set the stage for a second worldwide conflict. We'll get into all that soon,
historians, but for now, keep your eyes open because history is everywhere.