The%20Great%20War%20and%20its%20Legacy%20Tracy%20Rosselle,%20M.A.T.%20Newsome%20High%20School,%20Lithia,%20FL

1
The Great War and its LegacyTracy Rosselle,
M.A.T.Newsome High School, Lithia, FL

• The causes and outcomes of The Great War and
  why it came to be called World War I

2
Leading up to 1914 Long-term causes

• Imperialism
• Nationalism
• Militarism
• Alliances

3
Imperialism

• The tensions from 19th-century European
  imperialism spilled into the 20th century, as
  rivalries continued to percolate over the
  extension of empires that is, European colonies
  in Africa and Asia.
• Also, in East Asia, Japan was a strengthening
  imperial power in its own right.

4
Nationalism

• With the unification of Italy and Germany in the
  second half of the 19th century, a sense of
  nationalism arose among other ethnic groups
  (e.g., Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Bosnians).
• Widespread desire to redraw national boundaries
  ? but in absence of agreement, how are claims
  settled? Traditional answer conquest and war.

5
Militarism

• An arms race had begun among European nations, as
  fighting units were increasingly mechanized and
  more lethal than ever.
• Among the new tools of war machine guns, tanks,
  poison gas, submarines, Zeppelins and airplanes.

6
Militarism (cont.)

• Most notably, increasingly industrialized
  Germany had come to rival the power
• of Britain and its vaunted navy.

7
Militarism (cont.)

• Germanys more aggressive posture came about when
  Kaiser Wilhelm II forced Bismarck to resign as
  chancellor in 1890. Bismarck had declared Germany
  a satisfied power and wanted to balance power
  in Europe through alliances but the new Kaiser
  was really into the military.

8
Alliances

• Mutual distrust among the great powers of Europe
  ? military alliances (open and secret
  agreements) in case of armed conflict
• Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy
• Triple Alliance
• France, Russia and (informally) Britain
• Triple Entente

9
Short-term memory check What were the long-term
causes of The Great War?
10
1914 The immediate spark

• On a tour of southern Balkan provinces, the heir
  to the Austrian throne was assassinated. Archduke
  Franz Ferdinand, along with his wife, Sophie,
  were shot at point-blank range in Sarajevo by
  Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian Slav nationalist
  and member of the Black Hand a secret society
  committed to ridding Bosnia of Austrian rule.

11
A fatal, and fateful, shot

• Austria blamed Serbia, issued a list of demands
  and threatened war.
• Serbia, knowing it was protected by fellow Slavs
  in the Russians, didnt back down.

12
Alliances kick in

• Austria, assured that Germany would back it if
  Russia intervened, declared war on Serbia on July
  28, 1914 exactly one month after the
  assassination of Ferdinand.
• Russia mobilized troops and like clockwork the
  alliance system was triggered to disastrous
  consequences.

13
Within days

• Serbia, Austria, Russia, Germany, France and
  Britain had entered the war. Many people at the
  time held romantic notions about war, about the
  nature of progress. They were convinced it would
  be a neat and quick war. They were wrong.

14
The major combatants

• Central Powers
• Germany
• Austria
• Bulgaria
• Ottoman Empire
• Italy abandoned its Triple Alliance partners and
  joined the Allies in 1915, having been promised
  Austrian territory.

• Allies
• Great Britain
• France
• Russia
• Britains imperial dominions Canada, Australia,
  New Zealand and South Africa also fought.
• The United States joined in 1917 the year that
  Russia dropped out, signing a treaty with Germany.

15
Turn to p. 844 in Patterns

• In your spiral notebook, summarize the History
  in Depth feature about the Armenians.

16
Germanys plan for two fronts

• Since the 1890s, Germanys basic strategy against
  the emerging alliance of France and Russia was
  the Schlieffen Plan, which, when devised, made it
  clear to the Reichstag that more funds for a
  larger military was required. The Schlieffen
  Plan, then, can be seen as another cause of the
  Great War but something specific that could be
  categorized under militarism or alliances.

17
The plan thwarted

• The Schlieffen Plan called for a majority of
  German troops to quickly invade France through
  neutral Belgium and take Paris within six weeks
  before the Russians could react and mobilize on
  the Eastern Front. But Belgium put up more
  resistance than anticipated, and Russia got its
  act together by responding in a matter of days.
  Germany then faced what it never wanted a
  two-front war.

18
Stalemate and a propaganda coup

• Illegal invasion of Belgium ? effective Allied
  propaganda labeling Germans as barbarians
• While German troops got to within sight of Paris,
  the Allies in part because Germany had to pull
  some troops back to the Eastern Front with Russia
  made a stand at the Marne River.
• On the Western Front, from then on, both sides
  were evenly matched and military technology
  favored the defensive.

19
Trench warfare

• One of the most
• horrific styles of
• combat in history
• By end of 1914,
• 500 miles of trenches,
• bunkers, barbed wire
• and virtually no
• movement but plenty
• of casualties

20
Europeans disillusioned

• The death and destruction led to disillusionment
  as war lost its romanticism.
• Sad, eloquent descriptions of trench warfare in
  such works as All Quiet on the Western Front

21
A moment of death one of millions
Moment of Death
22
Turn to p. 857 in Patterns

• Read sources B and C and answer question 3 in
  your spiral notebook.

23
The Eastern Front

• The Central Powers Germans, Austrians,
  Bulgarians and Ottoman Empire fought a more
  fluid war on the vast Eastern Front with a poorly
  equipped, largely non-industrialized foe the
  Russians.
• By 1917, Russia was crippled by war
• the army was in tatters and beginning to mutiny
• food shortages led to demonstrations in the
  streets of Petrograd (St. Petersburg)

24
Revolution in Russia

• In spring 1917, as Russia was nearing virtual
  meltdown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne,
  ending three centuries of Romanov rule.
• An internal struggle for power between a
  provisional government and Bolsheviks (led by
  Lenin), who wanted to discontinue the war
  immediately, ensued.

Vladimir Lenin in Red Square

25
Revolution in Russia (cont.)

• Bolshevism with its Marxist ideology won out
• Russia signed Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with
  Germany in March 1918.
• treaty gives Germany one-third of Russian land
  (Baltic states, the Caucasus, Finland, Poland and
  the Ukraine), which contains one-fourth of its
  population but gives time for the new Bolshevik
  regime to deal with Russias internal problems.

26
What is likely to happen now that Russia is
exiting the war?
27
Total war

• For countries still fighting, civilians
  including women were involved in the war
  effort too.
• Governments controlled industry, used propaganda
  and rationed food, strategic materials and
  consumer goods.
• War required conscription The belligerents of
  The Great War eventually drafted more than 70
  million men.

28
Americans tip the balance

• The United States finally enters the war in 1917.
• Race to get fresh American troops past German
  submarines before Germany could redeploy troops
  from the Eastern to the Western Front.
• In Second Battle of the Marne, 2 million U.S.
  soldiers tip the balance in favor of the Allies.

29
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
eleventh month

• Ultimately, an exhausted Germany accepted an
  armistice (a truce in anticipation of signing a
  peace treaty), which took effect at 11 a.m. on
  Nov. 11, 1918.
• This conclusion to hostilities that Germany did
  not surrender and suffer outright defeat along
  with the fact that fighting never took place on
  German soil eventually undermined the post-war
  German government because the German people
  became outraged at what they perceived as gross
  inequities in the peace settlement.

30
The Paris Peace Conference

• After the war, the Big Four Britain, France,
  Italy and the United States as well as
  representatives from all over the world seeking
  some say in how to settle issues stemming from
  the war, met for months in Paris.
• Clash between Woodrow Wilsons idealism, on the
  one hand, and the more vengeful posture of David
  Lloyd George (Britain) and especially Georges
  Clemenceau (France).

31
Russia in the background

• Russia did not have a voice in the Paris Peace
  Conference, but among the concerns for those
  reshaping the world map in Paris fear of
  Bolshevism spreading to Western Europe, where
  radical socialism and even anarchism were already
  flaring.

32
Wilsons Fourteen Points

• Wilson wanted to make the world safe for
  democracy by establishing a generous peace,
  reflected in his Fourteen Points
• End to secret treaties
• Freedom of the seas
• Free trade
• Arms reduction
• Decolonization
• New borders drawn according to self-determination
  of national groups
• Establishment of international dispute-resolution
  body called the League of Nations

33
The Treaty of Versailles

• The most important of the five post-war treaties
• Reflected Lloyd Georges and Clemenceaus desire
  to make Germany pay for the war (Article 231
  war-guilt clause)
• Established League of Nations but U.S. never
  joined (or signed the treaty, for that matter),
  greatly weakening its potential effectiveness

34
The Treaty of Versailles (cont.)

• Terms for Germany, creating a legacy of hatred
  among the German people
• Loss of territory
• 13 of land (25,000 square miles) home to 6
  million people
• Alsace and Lorraine back to France
• Rhineland, borderland between France and Germany,
  occupied until 1935, demilitarized in perpetuity

35
The Treaty of Versailles (cont.)

• Loss of colonies
• Germanys colonies stripped, placed under Allied
  trusteeship
• Wilson prevented France and Britain from
  colonizing them outright
• Disarmament
• Army allowed only a token force
• No military aircraft, submarines, battleships,
  heavy artillery
• War payments
• Germany to pay full cost of the war (32 billion)
  over 40 years

36
The treaties from Paris

• From Habsburg territory, Germany and Russia, new
  nations were created according to
  self-determination
• Yugoslavia (Land of the South Slavs)
• Czechoslovakia
• Poland
• Finland
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Estonia

37
Europe, before the war
38
Europe, after the war
39
An unsatisfactory peace

• Although new nations were created, other
  countries felt cheated even betrayed by the
  peace settlements. Mandates were established
  throughout Asia and Africa, whereby the League of
  Nations would supervise the areas until they were
  prepared for independence. But people in these
  places thought the mandate system looked an awful
  lot like old-fashioned European colonialism.

40
An unsatisfactory peace (cont.)

• Germans interpretation of mandate system merely
  a division of colonial booty by the victors.
• Arab nationalists outraged by broken promises
  made during the war
• instead of their own nations carved out of the
  former Ottoman territories, mandates by the
  French in Lebanon and Syria by the British in
  Iraq and Palestine.

41
An unsatisfactory peace (cont.)

• The practical problem of using self-determination
  to set up national boundaries was illustrated
  by Czechoslovakia Czechs and Slovaks made up
  just 67 of the population, while Germans totaled
  22, Ruthenes 6 and Hungarians 5.
• Iraq was established without regard to historic
  tensions among its constituent Kurds, Sunnis and
  Shiites.

42
An unsatisfactory peace (cont.)

• And two Allied powers Japan and Italy felt
  shortchanged as well. They had entered the war
  with the promise of new territory after victory,
  but the peace settlement left them with less than
  theyd hoped. They, along with Germany, would
  eventually make up the Axis Powers the Allies
  would fight in World War II.