The First World War as a Global War

A shot in Sarajevo

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo. Five weeks later most of Europe was at war. Four years later, about 9 million soldiers were dead, four empires had collapsed, and the map of Europe, Africa and the Middle East had been redrawn.

In Grade 10 (CHC2D) you studied Canada's war: Vimy Ridge, conscription and the home front. Here you will look at the war as a global event: who fought, why, and how it changed the world.

Why did a murder become a world war?

Historians separate long-term causes (conditions that made war likely) from the immediate cause (the spark). A common memory aid is M-A-I-N:

• Militarism: Germany and Britain raced to build battleships; most continental powers had huge conscript armies and detailed war plans. Germany's Schlieffen Plan called for attacking France through Belgium.
• Alliances: the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain) faced Germany and Austria-Hungary. Alliances meant a local crisis could pull in every great power.
• Imperialism: rivalry for colonies and markets, for example two crises over Morocco (1905 and 1911).
• Nationalism: Serbian nationalists wanted to unite South Slavs, threatening multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary; French people wanted back Alsace-Lorraine, lost in 1871.

After Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, declared war on Serbia (July 28). Russia mobilized to support Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia and France, and invaded Belgium. Britain declared war on August 4, 1914, which automatically brought in its empire, including Canada.

Historians still argue about responsibility. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles blamed Germany and its allies. Some later historians (such as Fritz Fischer in the 1960s) also stressed German aims; others (such as Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, 2012) argue that leaders in several capitals shared responsibility.

New technology, new kind of war (E1.2)

Industrial technology made this war deadlier than any before:

• Machine guns and artillery made attacks across open ground extremely costly. On the Western Front, armies dug trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland.
• Poison gas: Germany released chlorine gas at Ypres in April 1915. Both sides then used gas.
• Tanks first went into battle on the Somme in September 1916.
• Aircraft began as scouts and became fighters and bombers.
• Submarines: German U-boats sank merchant ships, including the liner Lusitania (May 1915). Unrestricted submarine warfare helped bring the United States into the war in April 1917.
• Medicine also changed: blood transfusions, X-rays and new surgery saved many soldiers, and plastic surgery grew out of treating facial wounds.

A world war, not just a European war

• Colonial soldiers and workers: more than a million men from India served in France, Gallipoli, Mesopotamia and East Africa. France recruited about 200 000 soldiers from French West Africa (the tirailleurs sénégalais). Britain and France also brought in about 140 000 Chinese labourers to dig trenches and unload ships.
• Africa: British, Belgian and Portuguese forces fought German forces in East Africa until after the armistice. Both sides forced huge numbers of Africans to carry supplies, and tens of thousands of these carriers died of disease, hunger and overwork.
• The Ottoman Empire joined Germany in late 1914. Allied troops, including Australians and New Zealanders (ANZACs) and the Newfoundland Regiment, failed to take the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915–1916. A young Ottoman officer there, Mustafa Kemal, later founded modern Turkey. During the war the Ottoman government carried out the Armenian Genocide, which you will study in the lesson Genocide and Crimes against Humanity.
• The Middle East: Britain encouraged an Arab Revolt (1916) by promising support for Arab independence, while secretly agreeing with France to divide the region (the Sykes–Picot Agreement, 1916) and issuing the Balfour Declaration (1917) supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine. These contradictory promises are covered in The Modern Middle East.
• Asia and the Americas: Japan joined the Allies and seized Germany's colony at Qingdao in China and its Pacific islands. The U.S. and Brazil joined the Allies in 1917.

The end of the war and a deadly flu

Revolution took Russia out of the war (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 1918). Germany's last great offensive failed, the Allied Hundred Days pushed German forces back, and Germany signed an armistice on November 11, 1918. Germany's emperor had already abdicated.

As the war ended, an influenza pandemic, often called the "Spanish flu", spread around the world in 1918–1920. Estimates of its death toll vary widely; many historians use a figure of around 50 million, more than the war itself.

The peace: Paris, 1919

The victors met in Paris in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles with Germany was signed on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo.

• War guilt: Article 231 made Germany and its allies accept responsibility for the war's loss and damage.
• Reparations: Germany had to pay. In 1921 the bill was set at 132 billion gold marks.
• Territory and military: Germany lost Alsace-Lorraine, land to the new Poland and all its colonies. Its army was limited to 100 000 men.
• League of Nations: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proposed it in his Fourteen Points, but the U.S. Senate refused to join.
• Mandates: Germany's colonies and the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands were handed to Britain, France, Japan and others as mandates, colonies in all but name.

Wilson spoke of self-determination: the right of peoples to choose their own government. Colonized peoples took him at his word. A young Vietnamese activist (later known as Ho Chi Minh) sent a petition for Vietnamese rights to the conference. Japan proposed a racial equality clause for the League's covenant; it was blocked. Self-determination was applied mostly to Europeans. In 1919, protests broke out across the colonized world: in Egypt, in Korea (the March First Movement against Japanese rule), in India, and in China, where students protested on May 4, 1919, after the conference gave Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan.