hi I'm John Green and this is crash
course European history so leading up to
World War one Germany had promised to
back austria-hungary in any war whether
offensive or defensive and armed with
this so-called blank cheque of support
the austro-hungarian Hapsburgs issued an
ultimatum to Serbia
which the Hapsburgs blamed for the
assassination of their Archduke Serbia
accepted the harsh conditions except one
that austria-hungary would be allowed to
participate in the investigation of the
murder all reason for war is gone German
Kaiser William ii said and yet
austria-hungary and germany the Central
Powers both mobilized against Serbia by
the end of July
eager to crush the pesky Serbs and
believing that the war would be a local
and contained one he didn't go that way
[Music]
in a swirl of military activity Austria
and Germany mobilized their armies while
virtually simultaneously Russia came to
the defense of its allies Serbia France
mobilized to aid its ally Russia the
wild card was Britain which Germany
thought would not come to the aid of
Britain's frequent historical enemy
France and indeed Britain did not
immediately declare war which was a good
thing for the Anglophile German Kaiser
who did not want to declare war on his
cousin George King of England although
he didn't mind declaring war on his
cousin Nicholas Tsar of Russia oh what a
tangled web we weave when first we
practice hereditary succession as
discussed in our last episode Europe was
primed for all-out war by this time
millions of young men had been trained
in the conscription efforts of the past
decades and on the eve of full
mobilization of French nationalists
assassinated jhanjhar s who was a
powerful socialist and pacifist working
for peace a potent example of the rise
of violent nationalism already
established plans for military
mobilization were rolled out Russia
ordered full mobilization on July 29th
1914 after Kaiser William said all
reason for war is gone in point of fact
to the German General Staff had also
quickly mobilized for war these things
could happen really fast now that
military leaders had railroads and
automobiles to quickly move troops and
supplies and auxilary personnel let's go
to the thought-bubble Germany mobilized
on august 2nd following the Schlieffen
Plan according to the plan the main
German military units would proceed
through neutral Belgium and descend
through northern France to encircle
Paris from the West
then after quickly defeating France
troops would be moved to the lightly
defended Eastern Front where the slow to
mobilize Russian army would be quickly
knocked out the war would be over by
Christmas but the very first stage of
that plan involved marching through
Belgium unopposed which did not happen
indeed millions of people would die on
the Western Front in Belgium and France
the Central Powers plan was complicated
when the British joined France and
Russia after Germany broke Belgium's
neutrality to get to France
thus forming the so-called al
partners of the war also the Russians
mobilized much faster than many expected
moving swiftly to assist their French
ally and as a result scored notable
early victories against the Germans in
East Prussia however their generals were
less able than their German counterparts
and did not follow up on those victories
allowing the Germans to strike back
effectively the Germans regrouped under
generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff who
demanded the troops from the Western
Front be brought to the eastern one
thanks thought-bubble
so the war in the east became a
nightmare not just for soldiers but also
for civilians armies moved back and
forth across East Central and Central
Europe driving out abusing and killing
civilian populations in the turmoil of
conflict on the Western Front conditions
were less mobile settling into a grim
pattern of trench warfare
there was little movement or acquisition
of territory but massive casualties
because combatants all had access to
heavy weaponry including long-range
artillery and machine guns generals felt
that the decisive factor in achieving
victory was gonna be soldiers zeal and
their confidence spirit in battle they
believed that flashing sabers and lively
marching along with the cult of the
offensive would carry their forces to
victory
basically generals on all sides believed
that a vigorous attack rather than a
good defense would win the war this
meant that on the Western Front the
leadership regularly prepared and
executed massive attacks on enemy forces
which were extremely well defended
during the battles of Verdun and the
some literally millions of shells were
fired making for millions of casualties
and resulting only in stalemate soldiers
were ordered out of their trenches to go
over the top only to be mowed down by
intense machine-gun fire both the
battles of the Verdun and the some were
intended as these dramatic and
overwhelming efforts to definitively
knock out the enemy and both failed and
the trenches British soldiers began to
sing we're here because we're here
because we're here because we're here to
express their confusion and despair over
not knowing why they were fighting or
why they were being asked to go over the
top but still the generals
more attacks which led to more
casualties and almost no ground won or
lost the supply of young men to use in
this way seemed limitless the Central
Powers benefited when the Ottoman Empire
joined its side in October 1914 while
Italy joined the Allies in 1915 after
being promised major territorial gains
upon victory and combatants also
enlisted soldiers from colonies and
conscripted hundreds of thousands more
to do menial labor the French for
example forced some 100,000 Southeast
Asians and to the ranks of soldiers and
menial workers while approximately 1.5
million Indians served Britain with 74
thousand killed in battle many people in
colonial armies on the Western Front
were put into the very front ranks
meaning that they would be the first to
take machine-gun fire more than two
million Asian people and hundreds of
thousands of Africans in addition to
Australians and New Zealanders fought on
the many battlefields of World War one
as the war moved into the Middle East
Africa and East Asia and this meant that
life within these armies was often very
diverse with people from different
villages and nations and even continents
sharing life in the trenches by
encountering lots of different people
soldiers learned about other ways of
living than had reached them in their
mostly rural lives this included many
soldiers from colonies who learned much
about their colonizers technologies and
also about their barbarism and some
soldiers tried to recreate domestic life
in the trenches observing tea time or
attending to healing wounded or sick
comrades early in the war especially
they also sometimes fraternize with the
enemy in the famous Christmas truce of
1914 soldiers from both sides on the
Western Front left their trenches and
met in no-man's land
playing soccer exchanging mementos and
serenading each other the Germans don't
want to fight any more than we do said
one seasoned British soldier but despite
the fraternization the trenches were
largely hellish pits of corpses and
filth and excrement forced marches past
not over solid roads but over pathways
composed of dead bodies new technology
unfolded during the war which added to
the death count beginning in 1915
soldiers suffered blinding attacks from
mustard phosgene chlorine and other
poisonous gases developed in the rising
chemical industry airplanes picked up by
the Europeans faster than the Americans
fought one another at close range with
guns and began dropping bombs on cities
the firepower wielded by armies was so
destructive that journalists were not
allowed to photograph battlefield scenes
where mutilated and rotting corpses were
strewn for miles and where limbs and
other body parts hung stuck in trees but
artists such as German soldier otto dix
didn't seek to capture the soldiers
horror at the battlefield experience we
have a long history of romanticizing war
in our culture but World War one was
horrible the art historian Robert Hughes
has written of the peculiarly modernist
hell of repetition and by that measure
and so many others World War one was
hell amidst the chaos and brutality of
the war ethnic cleansing flourished
across Eastern Europe as armies targeted
Jewish people and Polish people to name
just two groups in the Ottoman Empire
Russians and their Armenian allies
slaughtered entire Muslim villages while
the Central Powers slaughtered Armenians
in a deadly back-and-forth and then in
the spring of 1915 the Ottoman
government ordered their troops to
eradicate Armenians more systematically
leading to the torture and death of an
estimated 600,000 to 1 million people
this wasn't a response to a specific
uprising of the Armenians it was a
genocide that deliberately aimed to
eliminate as much of the Armenian
population as possible war at sea was
also a deadly stalemate including the
deployment of battleships and submarines
on both sides in 1917 the German General
Staff resumed submarine attacks on
Allied shipping after having stopped the
practice for feared that the United
States might enter the war on behalf of
the Allied powers and then that spring
the United States responded by entering
the war on behalf of the Allied powers
but their participation was not
militarily effective until 1918 because
weapons needed to be manufactured and
recruits needed to be called up and
trained and transported to Europe in the
meantime Europeans were innovate
militarily especially by developing a
new tactic of concentrated attack at a
single point
this puncturing would allow the attacker
to move behind enemy lines but war
weariness was simultaneously bringing
civilian uprisings especially in Russia
mutinies especially among the French and
even starvation in cities like Vienna
Spanish Influenza a variety of flu that
often struck young and healthy people
was also beginning to attack troops and
yet amid all of this collapse rulers
firmly rejected peacemaking or even
compromise in 1915 a group of activist
women visited heads of state with a
peace plan which was dismissed but it
did reappear in altered form as US
President Wilson's fourteen points but
instead of peace kaiser William raged
only in the ruins of London will I
forgive
Georgey Georgey being his cousin King
George v of England and political leader
Georges Clemenceau of France called for
a quote war to the death which it
certainly was when Habsburg Emperor
Francis Joseph died in November of 1916
his subjects were too weakened to mourn
but his successor Emperor Karl did
eventually begin to seek the war's end
as did the German Reichstag in the
summer of 1917 I know it's not the time
for a joke but Emperor Karl moi
sometimes even in the darkest days
history just offers up the most
magnificent names alright back to the
war even as the politicians began to
waver military leadership remained
determined the Germans tried to puncture
allied lines in a spring 1918 offensive
but victory eluded them as the Allies
brought out airplanes and tanks and then
in the summer of 1918 the Allies
assisted now by American forces drove
the Central Powers eastward toward
Germany casualties for the six months of
German offensives reached two million as
their army disintegrated by January 1918
u.s. President Woodrow Wilson had issued
his affer mentioned fourteen points a
set of principles on which peace should
be based as the war continued taking its
grim toll its end began to look
plausible to many in the civilian
because Wilson called for a rational
settlement rather than a revenge driven
surrender by the autumn of 1918 not only
were soldiers deserting the Central
Powers civilians across Germany were
also in rebellion and so eventually the
leadership of Germany negotiated an
armistice on November 9th Kaiser William
fled his empire and on November 11th an
armistice was signed the war was over
sorta in the Habsburg Empire the various
ethnicities were declaring their
independence and Russians were mired in
their revolution which had broken out
the previous spring and the Ottoman
Empire was still fighting and would
continue to do so as Britain hoped to
take over Constantinople with the help
of its Greek American and other allies
so the end of the war to end all wars
did not actually feature an end even to
that war the extent of the loss of human
life in World War one is unknowable but
as historians dig into the evidence it's
clear that deaths were far greater than
initially calculated only now our
historians paying enough attention to
the war on the Eastern Front in large
part because the victors wrote the first
histories and did the first counting
wartime deaths including civilians are
loosely calculated at 40 million people
Joseph Stalin probably never said the
line often attributed to him that the
death of one person is a tragedy and the
death of a million people is a statistic
but it's too often true it's hard to
think of what 40 million deaths means
but here's one way of trying to conceive
of it more people probably died in World
War one than currently live in Canada
thanks for watching we'll see you next
time thanks for watching crash course
which is filmed here in the Jaden Smith
Studios in Indianapolis and thanks to
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