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riggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, World War I began in August 1914 when Germany invaded Belgium and France. On the Eastern Front, Russia agreed to stop fighting late in 1917 following the Russian Revolution. The Western Front was stalemated in trench warfare for three-and-a-half years before the United States intervened in 1917 on the side of the Allies.
Several events led to U.S. intervention: the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger liner; unrestricted German submarine warfare; and the Zimmerman note, which revealed a German plot to provoke Mexico to war against the United States.
Consequences
1. Nearly 10 million soldiers died and about 21 million were wounded. U.S. deaths totaled 116,516.
2. Four empires collapsed: the Russian Empire in 1917, the German and the Austro-Hungarian in 1918, and the Ottoman in 1922.
3. Independent republics were formed in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Turkey.
4. Most Arab lands that had been part of the Ottoman Empire came under the control of Britain and France.
5. The Bolsheviks took power in Russia.
6. Under the peace settlement, Germany was required to pay reparations eventually set at $33 billion; accept responsibility for the war; cede territory to Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, and Poland; give up its overseas colonies; and accept an allied military force on the west bank of the Rhine River for 15 years.
Background
World War I killed more people–9 million combatants and 5 million civilians–and cost more money–$186 billion in direct costs and another $151 billion in indirect costs–than any previous war in history. Politically, it resulted in the downfall of four empires and contributed to the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917 and the triumph of fascism in Italy in 1922. The war allowed the United States to become the world’s leading creditor and industrial power. Its consequences included the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey and an influenza epidemic that killed over 25 million people worldwide.
In the French village of Chatel-Cherhery stands a memorial that describes the exploits of one of America’s World War I soldiers. “Armed with a rifle and pistol,” the monument reads, “…he silenced a German battalion of 35 machine guns, killed 25 enemy soldiers and captured 132.”
His name was Alvin Cullum York. He was born in a one-room log cabin in rural Fentress County, in the Cumberland Mountains of northern Tennessee. Even today, his home town of Pall Mall has only a single paved road. The third of 11 children, his father died when he was a boy.
When he was 27, York abandoned his hard-drinking, brawling ways and joined a fundamentalist church. A pacifist and a church elder, he registered for the military draft as a conscientious objector. During basic training, he went home to struggle with his conscience and ultimately decided that it was God’s will that he fight. On October 8, 1918, York, then a corporal, single-handedly killed 25 German soldiers and forced a German commander to order the rest of the battalion to surrender. Hollywood made his exploits into a 1941 movie entitled Sgt. York, starring Gary Cooper.
The real-life man lived a simple life. After the war, he turned down offers to promote products that would have earned him $500,000. He returned to Pall Mall and worked as a blacksmith. He used the royalties he earned from the film to found a high school in Jamestown, Tenn.
A recent list of the hundred most important news stories of the twentieth century ranked the onset of World War I eighth. This is a great error. Just about everything that happened in the remainder of the century was in one way or another a result of World War I, including the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, World War II, the Holocaust, and the development of the atomic bomb. The Great Depression, the Cold War, and the collapse of European colonialism can also be traced, at least indirectly, to the First World War.
World War I killed more people–more than 9 million soldiers, sailors, and flyers and another 5 million civilians–involved more countries–28–and cost more money–$186 billion in direct costs and another $151 billion in indirect costs–than any previous war in history. It was the first war to use airplanes, tanks, long range artillery, submarines, and poison gas. It left at least 7 million men permanently disabled.
World War I probably had more far-reaching consequences than any other proceeding war. Politically, it resulted in the downfall of four monarchies–in Russia in 1917, in Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1918, and in Turkey in 1922. It contributed to the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917 and the triumph of fascism in Italy in 1922. It ignited colonial revolts in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia.
Economically, the war severely disrupted the European economies and allowed the United States to become the world’s leading creditor and industrial power. The war also brought vast social consequences, including the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey and an influenza epidemic that killed over 25 million people worldwide.
Few events better reveal the utter unpredictability of the future. At the dawn of the 20th century, most Europeans looked forward to a future of peace and prosperity. Europe had not fought a major war for 100 years. But a belief in human progress was shattered by World War I, a war few wanted or expected. At any point during the five weeks leading up to the outbreak of fighting the conflict might have been averted. World War I was a product of miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication.
No one expected a war of the magnitude or duration of World War I. At first the armies relied on outdated methods of communication, such as carrier pigeons. The great powers mobilized more than a million horses. But by the time the conflict was over, tanks, submarines, airplane-dropped bombs, machine guns, and poison gas had transformed the nature of modern warfare. In 1918, the Germans fired shells containing both tear gas and lethal chlorine. The tear gas forced the British to remove their gas masks; the chlorine then scarred their faces and killed them.
In a single day at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, 100,000 British troops plodded across no man’s land into steady machine-gun fire from German trenches a few yards away. Some 60,000 were killed or wounded. At the end of the battle, 419,654 British men were killed, missing, or wounded.
Four years of war killed a million troops from the British Empire, 1.5 million troops from the Hapsburg Empire, 1.7 million French troops, 1.7 million Russians, and 2 million German troops. The war left a legacy of bitterness that contributed to World War II twenty-one years later.
On June 28, 1914, a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial Hapsburg throne, made a wrong turn. As the car came to a halt and tried to turn around, a nervous teenager approached from a coffee house, pulled out a revolver, and shot twice. Within an hour, the Archduke and his wife were dead.
Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old assassin, was a Bosnian nationalist who opposed the domination of the Balkans by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had received his weapon from a secret society known as the “Black Hand,” which was clandestinely controlled by the government of Serbia. Princip would die of mistreatment in an Austrian prison in 1918.
The assassination provoked outrage in Austria-Hungary, which wanted to punish Serbia for the assassination and intimidate other minority groups whose independence struggles threatened the empire’s stability. The assassination of the archduke triggered a series of events that would lead five weeks later to the outbreak of World War I. When the conflict was over, eleven million people had been killed, four powerful European empires had been overthrown, and the seeds of World War II and the Cold War had been planted.
A complicated system of military alliances transformed the Balkan crisis into a full-scale European war. Recognizing that any action it took against Serbia would create an international incident, Austria asked for Germany’s diplomatic and military support. Meanwhile, Russia, fearful of Austrian and German expansion into the Balkans, strongly supported the Serbs and began to mobilize its army.
This move made Germany’s leadership fear encirclement by Russia and France. Germany sent an ultimatum to France, asking it to declare its neutrality in the event of a conflict between Russia and Germany. The French, obligated by treaty to support Russia and still bitter over their defeat by Prussia in 1871, refused. When Russia failed to demobilize its forces, the German Kaiser agreed to war.
World War I caught most people by surprise. Lulled by a century of peace (Europeans had not seen a large-scale war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815), many observers had come to regard armed conflict as a relic of the past, rendered unthinkable by human progress. World War I shattered these dreams, demonstrating that death and destruction had not yet been banished from human affairs.
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI~AP NEWS
A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying nearly 170 people crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces. State television said all on board were killed.
The plane’s tail burst into flames in the air and the aircraft circled as if looking for a place to land before it crashed, an unidentified witness told the semi-official ISNA news agency.
The impact gouged a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered with smoking wreckage and body parts, according to photos from the scene. Footage aired on state TV showed a large chunk of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds, and emergency workers and witnesses picked around the shredded metal for bodies and flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.
The Caspian Airlines Tupolev jet had taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport Wednesday and was headed to the Armenian capital Yerevan. It crashed about 16 minutes after takeoff near the village of Jannat Abad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jaafarzadeh told state media.
At Yerevan’s airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and the sister’s 6- and 11-year-old sons, who were due on the flight. “What will I do without them?” she said, weeping, before she collapsed to the floor.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but Iran has frequent crashes that are blamed on poor maintenance of its aging fleet. Hossein Ayaznia, an aviation police official, said emergency workers were searching for the plane’s black box.
The deputy chairman of Armenia’s civil aviation authority Arsen Pogosian told reporters in Yerevan there were 154 passengers and 15 crewmembers on board the TU-154M. Earlier, Jaafarzadeh had put the number at 153 passengers and 15 crew, and the reason for the discrepancy was not immediately known.