World War I

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Also called "World War One", "The Great War", and "WWI", this was the first world-wide war on the planet Earth.


From July 1914 to November 1918, planet Earth's major countries were at war with each other. Counted as one of the deadliest conflicts in Earth's history, an estimated 9 million people were killed in combat, while over 5 million civilians died from military occupation, bombardment, hunger, and disease. The war was divided into roughly three alliances: France, Russia, and Britain; Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; with Russia and the United States of America coming in later (on opposite sides). The former created the "Allied Powers," with the former creating the "Central Powers."


Facing a war on two sides, German strategy in 1914 was to first defeat France, then shift its forces to Eastern Europe and knock out Russia. However, Germany's advance into France failed, and the Eastern Front was far more fluid, with Austria-Hungary and Russia gaining and then losing large swathes of territory. Shortages caused by the Allied naval blockade led Germany to initiate unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917, bringing the previously neutral United States into the war on 6 April 1917. The Allied Powers launched the Hundred Days Offensive and although the Imperial German Army continued to fight hard, it could no longer halt their advance.


Towards the end of 1918, the Central Powers began to collapse. Isolated, facing the German Revolution at home and a military on the verge of mutiny, the new German government signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918, bringing the conflict to a close. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 imposed various settlements on the defeated powers, with the best-known of these being the Treaty of Versailles.



Background

For most of the 19th Century, the major European powers maintained a tenuous balance of power among themselves. After 1848, this was challenged by a variety of factors, including the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War. In order to isolate France and avoid a war on two fronts, the League of the Three Emperors was formed between Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany. The League was dissolved, due to Austrian concerns over Russian influence in the Balkans, an area they considered of vital strategic interest. Germany and Austria-Hungary then an alliance, which Italy joined a few years later. British and Russian support for France against Germany reinforced the relationship, and increased Anglo-German estrangement, deepening the divisions that would erupt in 1914.


Technology

This war made wide use of telephones, wireless communication, armored vehicles, and aircraft. Artillery also evolved for the sake of this war, creating light automatic weapons, submachine guns, and flamethrowers. Sound detection was now used to locate enemy batteries. Chemical warfare was a distinguishing feature of this conflict, most notably the use of chlorine and mustard gas. Gas masks were used to counter these attacks, and chemical warfare was outlaws by multiple conventions.


Aftermath

As a result of the war, four empires disappeared: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian. Numerous nations regained their former independence, and new ones were created. A formal state of war between the two sides persisted for another seven months, until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany in 1919. For the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the state of war ceased under the provisions of the Termination of the Present War (Definition) Act 1918. There also grew an amount of academic focus on the causes of war in general, and on the elements that could make peace flourish.


Germans felt blame was unjustly placed on them and their country, causing a growing resentment. Supporters of the powerful Nazi party waved banners of domestic treason, and international conspiracy, in an attempt to galvanize the German nation into a spirit of revenge. Like a Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany sought to redirect the memory of the war to the benefit of its own policies.


Casualties

Out of the 60-million European military personnel mobilized, 8 million people were killed, 7 million left permanently disabled, and 15 million considered "seriously injured." Soldiers that suffered horrific facial injuries were subject to social stigma and marginalization.


Diseases flourished in the chaotic wartime conditions. There were louse-borne epidemics, deaths caused by infections, a sharp rise in malaria cases, and a major influenza epidemic across the world. Furthermore, the social disruption and widespread violence of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the ensuing Russian Civil War, sparked more than 2,000 pogroms in the former Russian Empire, mostly in Ukraine. An estimated 60,000–200,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities.


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