World War I Battlefields: Crash Course European History #33

Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So, leading up to World War I, Germany had promised to back Austria-Hungary in any war,

whether offensive or defensive, and armed with this so-called “blank check” of support,

the Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs issued an ultimatum to Serbia, which the Habsburgs 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.

It didn’t go that way.

[Intro] In a swirl of military activity, Austria and

Germany mobilized their armies while virtually simultaneously Russia came to the defense

of its ally, 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, czar 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, a French nationalist assassinated Jean Jaures, 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 29, 1914, just one day after Kaiser William said “All reason for war is gone.”

In point of fact, the German General Staff had also quickly mobilized for war; these

things could happen very fast now that military leaders had railroads and automobiles to quickly

move troops, supplies, and auxiliary personnel.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

[[TV-GERMANS IN FRANCE]]

1.

Germany declared war on France on August 2,

2. following the Schlieffen Plan.

3.

According to the plan, the main German military units would proceed through neutral Belgium

4. and descend through northern France to encircle Paris from the west.

5.

Then, after quickly defeating France,

6.

troops would be moved to the lightly defended eastern front

7. where the slow-to-mobilize Russian army would be quickly knocked out.

8.

The war would be over by Christmas.

9.

But the very first stage of that plan involved marching through Belgium unopposed,

10. which did not happen.

11.

Indeed, millions of people would die on the western front in Belgium and France.

12.

The Central Powers’ plan was complicated when the British joined France and Russia

after Germany broke Belgium’s neutrality to get to France,

13.

thus forming the so-called “Allied” partners of the war.

14.

Also, the Russians mobilized much faster than many expected,

15.

moving swiftly to assist their French ally

16. and as a result scored notable early victories against the Germans in East Prussia.

17.

However, their generals were less able than their German counterparts

18. and did not follow up on those victories,

19.

allowing the Germans to strike back effectively.

20.

The Germans regrouped under Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who demanded 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 in which there was little movement and 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 soldiers’

zeal and confident spirit in battle.

They believed 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 Somme, 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 Somme were intended as these dramatic and overwhelming

efforts to definitively knock out the enemy, and both failed.

In 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 ordered more attacks, which led to more casualties and little 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 into the ranks of soldiers

and menial workers, while approximately 1.5 million Indians served Britain, with 74,000

killed in battle.

Many people in colonial armies on the western front were put into the very front ranks,

meaning they would take the first machine gun fire.

More than 2 million Asians and hundreds of thousands of Africans, in addition to Australians

and New Zealanders fought on the many battlefields of World War I 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 recreated domestic life in the trenches, observing teatime and attending

to healing wounded or sick comrades.

Early in the war especially, they also sometimes fraternized 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, filth

and excrement.

Forced marches passed 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 fire power 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 did seek to capture the soldier’s horror

at the battlefield experience.

We have a long history of romanticizing war in our culture, but World War I 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 I was hell.

Amidst the chaos and brutality of the war, ethnic cleansing flourished across eastern

Europe as armies targeted Jews and Poles, 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 at 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 fear 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 innovating militarily, especially by developing a 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 the young and healthy, 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 U.S. President Wilson’s Fourteen

Points.

But instead of peace, Kaiser William raged “Only in the ruins of London will I forgive

Georgy.”

(Georgy being his cousin King George V.)

And political leader Georges Clemenceau of France called for a “war to the death.”

When Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph died in November 1916, his subjects were too weakened

to mourn.

But his successor Emperor Karl did eventually began 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?

Sometimes, even in the darkest days, history just offers up the most magnificent names

All right, 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 President Wilson had issued his aforementioned 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 leadership 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 9, Kaiser William fled his empire, and on November 11 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 I is unknowable.

But as historians dig into the evidence, it’s clear that deaths were far greater than initially

calculated.

Only now are 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 I than currently live in Canada.

Thanks for watching.

We’ll see you next time.