Key dates in WWI, which started 100 years ago Saturday
June 28, 1914: A Serbian nationalist assassinates the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie.
July 28, 1914: Austria declares war on Serbia, prompting Russia to mobilize its forces against Austria and Germany. Within a week, Germany and Austria are at war with France, Russia and Great Britain.
Aug. 30, 1914: Relying on superior mobility of their train system, German forces destroy the Russian Second Army and end Russia’s hopes of capturing Berlin.
Sept. 12, 1914: The German offensive through Belgium and France is stopped by French and British troops short of Paris. Both sides begin digging in for what proves to be four years of trench warfare on the Western Front.
April 22, 1915: German troops launch the first major poison gas attack against French troops near Ypres and follow up with a second chemical attack on Canadian troops two days later.
May 7, 1915: A German submarine torpedoes and sinks the British passenger liner Lusitania, killing nearly 1,200 people including 128 Americans. The disaster helps turn American sympathy toward the Allies and prompts Kaiser Wilhlem II to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare.
Nov. 18, 1916: The five-month British offensive on the Somme River concludes, having gained six miles at a cost of 623,000 British soldiers killed, wounded and missing and 500,000 Germans killed, wounded and missing. The British employ crude tanks for the first time in the history of war.
Dec. 16, 1916: The nearly 10-month German offensive ends short of its goals at the fortresses in Verdun. About 143,000 German soldiers and 156,000 French soldiers are killed.
Feb. 1, 1917: Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare despite warnings it will bring the United States into the war.
March 2, 1917: Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicates, ushering in a pro-Western provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky.
April 2, 1917: Citing the U-boat campaign, President Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war on Germany, telling lawmakers in a joint session that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”
Oct. 26, 1917: Kerensky flees St. Petersburg, clearing the way for a Bolshevik government directed by Vladimir Lenin. The Bolsheviks conclude a peace treaty with Germany in which Russia loses vast swath of territory.
March 21, 1918: The Germans launch the first of three major offensives which gain large areas of France, but fail to knock the French and British from the war. By the summer, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers have arrived and help turn the tide of the war.
April 27, 1918: Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, flying a French-built biplane, shoots down a German Pflaz D biplane. Rickenbacker would destroy 26 German planes and balloons as America’s leading ace of the war.
Aug. 8, 1918: Under relentless Allied attacks, the exhausted German Army falls back from trenches it has held since 1914.
Nov. 9, 1918: Told the Army will no longer fight for him, Wilhelm II abdicates and flees to Holland. Friedrich Ebert, the head of the German Social Democratic Party, becomes chancellor and two days Germany signs an armistice that amounts to surrender.
June 28, 1919: On the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, German delegates sign the Treaty of Versailles in which Germany agrees to disband much of its army and navy, acknowledge responsibility for provoking the war, and cede large tracts of land to a newly created Poland in the east. The treaty’s harsh terms enrage Germans, a grievance Adolf Hitler exploits in the early 1930s as he seizes power.
They’re all gone now. Some went right away: A French officer whose father was a general was killed in Lorraine on Aug. 21, 1914. A German soldier whose mother was one of the great artists of her time was killed in Belgium on Oct. 23,1914.
Others lasted longer: American poet Alan Seeger, uncle of folk singer Pete Seeger, killed on the Western Front on July 4, 1916, fighting with the French Army. Quentin Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, was killed on July 14, 1918, when his fighter plane plummeted to earth.
Still others went much later, such as Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker of Columbus, America’s leading flying ace of the war, who died of pneumonia in 1973 in Switzerland. And finally, the last known survivor, 110-year-old Florence Green of Great Britain, who served in the officers’ mess for the Royal Air Force and who died on Feb. 4, 2012.
All were part of the carnage, the horror and the misery of the First World War, which erupted because of a couple of pistol shots fired 100 years ago Saturday, and ending in 1918 with the deaths of nearly 10 million people, including 6,500 soldiers from Ohio.
Fired by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo, the shots killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife on June 28, 1914. Following a month of stunning miscalculations by German, Austrian, French, British and Russian diplomats, war broke out, prompting British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to say in despair, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”
Even though anywhere from 20 million to 40 million people died in the flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919, World War I — known as the Great War at the time — traumatized civilization and wreaked vast changes on the world that last to this day.
“It is a transformative moment in history,’’ said Jennifer Keene, a professor of history at Chapman University in California. “The scope is so daunting that it makes it difficult for people to fully grasp.’’
Absent the Great War, there almost certainly would never have been a Soviet Union and a Cold War that cost trillions of dollars. Absent the Great War, it is inconceivable that an insignificant Austrian corporal could have seized power in Germany, launched the Second World War that killed 55 million, and presided over the unspeakable Holocaust.
The Great War hastened a shift in economic and military power from Europe to the United States, leading to what Time magazine founder Henry Luce dubbed the “American Century.” And without the Great War, Rickenbacker would have been known as a race car driver at the Indianapolis 500 as opposed to a national hero who later directed Eastern Airlines.
Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history at Oxford and author of the new book, “The War That Ended Peace,” said the First World War “accelerates’’ changes that already were taking place, although she said the “Bolshevik-type” Communists seized power in Russia in 1917 “and you wouldn’t have had that without the world war.”
“The United States was already a major economic power,” said MacMillan, a great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, the British prime minister in 1918. “The shift across the Atlantic happens because of the First World War, but it would have happened anyway.”
Impact widespread
The result of the Great War can be seen vividly today. The fall of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire ushered in the creation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania and ill-defined borders that caused conflict for decades.
The collapse of Germany’s Turkish ally directly led to today’s Middle East turmoil, where Keene said French and British diplomats tried “to create nations where nations had not previously existed.” Iraq, Syria and Lebanon emerged as new states even if they included an unworkable blend of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
The war shattered accepted norms of conflict, with the Germans demonstrating the greatest technological innovation in the race to the bottom. German Zeppelins bombed London, U-boats sank merchant ships without warning, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops employed chemical weapons on the Western Front in 1915.
Just a decade after Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton first flew an airplane, primitive biplanes flown by daredevils such as Rickenbacker and Germany’s Oswald Boelcke fired their machine guns at one another thousands of feet above the ground. John F. Ross, author of Enduring Courage, a new biography of Rickenbacker, describes the planes “as little more than controllable box kites with engines, flimsy contraptions of wood, fabric and baling wire.”
In the aftermath of a war in which life seemed so fleeting, young people in New York, Paris and Berlin publicly repudiated their pre-war inhibitions in favor of dancing, parties, illegal booze and drugs. Women, who earned the right to vote in America in 1920, declared their equality by wearing shorter dresses, and drinking throughout the night.
And the war provoked stunning changes in art and literature, including Ernest Hemingway’s grim “A Farewell to Arms,” which director Frank Borzage turned into a 1932 film starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. There was German director G.W. Pabst’s “Westfront 1918,’’ in 1930, and Lewis Milestone’s 1930 epic “All Quiet on the Western Front,” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s haunting novel.
“There is a sense that literature changes,” Keene said. “You begin to see a decline of a romantic glorification of war as a true test of masculinity. You would never have a writer like Hemingway before the First World War. Nobody would have understood what he was talking about.”
Throughout the past century, a consensus has emerged that the Great War was a pointless waste of human lives. The butchery in the trenches on the Western Front and on the vast plains of Eastern Europe ushered in a wave of pacifism that culminated in 1933 when students at the Oxford Union voted in favor of a pledge that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and country.”
Americans, disillusioned because the “war to end all wars” did not make the world “safe for democracy,” retreated into isolationism. A Senate investigation headed by Republican Sen. Gerald Nye of North Dakota captured the nation’s mood when the panel concluded that U.S. arms manufacturers had pressured President Woodrow Wilson into declaring war in 1917 against Germany.
The reluctance of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to confront the growing threat posed by Adolf Hitler’s Germany was in large part because Western European diplomats could not fathom another war. Yet a second and far more destructive war was looming.
“All wars are absolutely horrible for the people who take part of them but there are times when the alternatives to them are absolutely worse,” said Max Hastings, author of the new book, “Catastrophe – 1914: Europe Goes To War.”
Astonishing miscalculations
In the days after the archduke’s assassination, Germany urged its Austrian allies to deal swiftly with Serbia and the terrorists who murdered Franz Ferdinand. Russia vowed to defend Serbia and France stood by its Russian ally. When the Germans attacked France by marching through Belgium, Great Britain entered the war on the side of France.
The miscalculations by European diplomats were astonishing. German Chancellor Theobold von Bethman-Hollwegg and German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke saw their nation in 1914 trapped in a deadly vise by the Franco-Russian alliance. They failed to grasp that the rapidly growing German industrial power of 1914 eventually would dominate the continent, much as Germany does today.
“The Germans didn’t see what seemed obvious to others,” said Sean McMeekin, author of “July 1914: Countdown to War,” and a professor of history at Koc University in Turkey. “Bethman-Hollwegg and Moltke were ferocious pessimists. They should have been bursting with confidence.”
Germany, which Winston Churchill later would write “fought nearly the whole world, almost single-handed, and she had almost conquered,” might have won had its leaders not provoked the Americans into entering the war by resuming unrestricted submarine warfare.
“Until the U.S. entered the war, the Germans were winning,” said McMeekin, particularly in the East where Germany controlled large swaths of Russian territory, particularly Ukraine and what is now Poland, he said.
“More than two million Americans — including 225,000 from Ohio — were shipped to France, including Rickenbacker who quickly advanced from Gen. John Pershing’s driver to the Air Corps. During the final year of the war, he shot down 22 German planes and four balloons.
Under relentless pressure from the Americans, British and French, Germany collapsed in November 1918 in chaos and revolution, forcing the Kaiser to abdicate and forming a democratic government dominated by the Social Democrat Fritz Ebert. On the day of the armistice, David Lloyd George told the House of Commons he hoped “this fateful morning” came “to an end all wars.”
It was not to be. Twenty years later, the world was back at war.
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