Week 13: Europe at War

Lecture Outline:

1. Outbreak of the War

2. The triple stalemate

3. Scale of the conflict

4. Mobilisation

5. Ending the War?

The Guns of August: (Outbreak of the War)

• 28 June 1914: Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Austria) assassinated in Sarajevo

  • Same night declared war on Serbia

• 30 July 1914: Russia mobilises

• 1 August 1914: France and Germany mobalise, Germany declares war on Russia

Positive Anticipation of the War

• Military wise, countries were getting ready for war with constantly revising plans

• People wise, war was seen as an antidote to

The 3 phases of the war:

Historians argue that the war happened in 3 phases:

1914: War of movement
1915-1917: Stalemate
1918: War of Movement (Again)

Historians also argue that there were 3 elements The triple stalemate:

• Military

• Domestic

• Diplomatic

Consequences of the War

• 10 million dead

• Series of disasters that lead to WW2

• Economic destabilisation: Great depression, payments debt, inflation etc.

• Political destabilisation: Russian revolution, Italian Facism, Nazism in Germany

WW1 As a global War:

• Can be argued to be an Imperialistic war as it involved all major empires

  • A lot of countries in its respective empires were supplying troops I:e

  • French Colonial troops; 15% Death rate

Military Mobilisation:

• The idea of a citizen army came to be

• In Britain, conscription was only introduced in 1916 - 2.6 million British troops were volunteers

• In Germany, 500,000 volunteered in the first months of the war

• Rise of propaganda

• 80% of men in France and Germany fought

• 60%-50% of men in Britain and Turkey fought

• Women enter the workforce - 2 million women brought into ammunition in Britain

  • Allies were better at bringing women into the workforce

• Russia also had women enter the workforce and made the Women’s Death Battalion 1917

Domestic Politics:

• Strength of pro-war consensus

• Circumstances of the July Crisis enabled both sides to argue that the war was defensive

  • Drastic change to art and a “defence’ or greater importance placed on defence of culture. Artists began being heavily censored

• "Short-war illusion”

• Living standards maintained - played a huge part to the continuance of war

• Continuing confidence on both sides that they could win

  • Both sides hanged on and rejected many diplomats as if the war was to finish now both sides would see it as an indecisive end to the war and therefore would lead to war again in a few years.

Diplomatic

Incompatible war aims - Central Powers

• Germany - September program

• The west: Annex Luxemburg

Incompatible war aims - The Allies:

• Britain: German colonies and navy, restore Belgian independence, weaken Germany relative to

• France and Russia

1917- Stalemate weakened

• Failure of Allied spring offensives and German submarine campaign

• Growth of peace movement, mutinies (France), revolution (Russia)

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

End of the War:

• Unsettling of empires

• Ethnicization of populations

• Violent political cultures, 1918-1922

• Beginning of European civil war?