Many others, including Australia, India and most African colonies, fought at the behest of their imperial rulers. But even the alliance theory is now considered overly simplistic by many historians. War came to Europe not by accident, but by design, argues military historian Gary Sheffield. Second, the governments in the entente states rose to the challenge.
A BBC documentary screened in , Royal Cousins at War , told the story of Wilhelm's difficult relationship with his parents and antipathy towards all things British and argues that this helped bring the world to the brink of war. Unlike many family feuds, however, disagreements between the royal cousins exacted a geopolitical price.
The engagement was disastrous for all three monarchs. The question of which country or countries caused the war is sometimes flipped on its head by scholars who have asked which countries — had they conducted themselves differently — could have prevented it. Sir Richard J Evans, Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge disagrees, arguing that Serbian nationalism and expansionism were the root cause of the conflict.
Despite widespread horror in the US over newspaper reports of German atrocities against civilians, the general feeling among in the early months of the conflict was that American men should not risk their lives in a European war. That all started to change in May , when a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the British passenger liner the Lusitania as it crossed the Atlantic, killing 1, of the 1, people on board.
The attack provoked shock and fury across the world. Among the dead were Americans, putting substantial pressure on the government to abandon its neutral stance on the conflict. Nevertheless, the pro-war sentiment in the US continued to fester - and when Germany announced plans to resume its naval strikes on passenger ships in January , it exploded.
Public opinion was further inflamed, writes Gregory, over the emergence of a telegram, supposedly from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman to Mexico offering military assistance if the US entered the war. Observers soon came to believe that the change in public feeling made US entry into the war inevitable, and eight weeks later Congress approved a resolution declaring war on Germany. The Royal Navy at the time was regarded as the most powerful in the world, although its primary purpose was not military, but the protection of trade.
A shipbuilding arms race with Germany began in , but Britain had gained a technological edge over its rival by , with the development of a new class of battleship — the dreadnought. Ultimately, Germany was unable to keep pace with the spending power of its rival and shifted attention away from its navy back to the development of its army.
Attempting to identify which nation or nations should be held accountable for the war is an exercise doomed to failure, Margaret MacMillan argues in her First World War history, The War that Ended Peace. None of this could be described as being any sort of natural right, and its lack was no great hardship for this a thrusting, prosperous, teeming, modern industrial power.
When conflict did come it was run on the Schlieffen Plan, updated since , which dictated an invasion of Belgium to outflank the French and whatever contemptuous little army the British might muster.
When it came to it, the Kaiser and his advisers made two errors. Like Hitler and General Galtieri later, this misjudgement was entirely their own fault.
The truth of course, is that the story of the 20th century — and of the preceding century — was a story of nationalisms, big and small. From the pursuit of national interest and territorial expansion by the Great Powers to the then-emerging national consciousness from Ireland to Serbia to Finland and back again, it was a human instinct that drove clash after clash, crisis after crisis, incident after incident.
Midth century it caught light across Asia and Africa, and for the past few decades has been fomenting dissent in South Sudan, Chechnya, former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Quebec, Catalonia, Corsica , two halves of Belgium, and, yes, even Scotland today. Nationalism is the obvious driver of war and terror, as well as peaceful divorces, but there was no antidote to it in — and, for all the benign influence of the UN, the EU, African Union and others, it remains as potent as ever.
This was the idea famously put forward by the first of the telly historians, A J P Taylor, in the s. He could deliver a perfectly worded, argued and timed lecture live on TV to a peak time audience — those were the days. The argument runs that the war was the ultimate triumph of the steam age: the fat, efficient system of railways reached almost every hamlet and village across Europe and, like most technical innovations, could be adopted for martial use with relative ease.
The technology and the newly developed logistical ability to move hundreds of thousands of troops and horses, plus supplies, to an enemy border meant that once one state had mobilised its troops, its neighbour would have to do the same — because not to do so would offer the side that was already on the move an immediate strategic advantage, and possibly decisively so in a lightning war.
Your troops could be languishing in their barracks, still scrambling to get their kit ready, whilst the enemy rapes and pillages your people and captures your capital.
In such circumstances, what would appear to a rational mind to be a mere precaution for war and a warning to the other side becomes de facto the first act of war. The scope for a cataclysm by accident — with uncomfortable echoes during the Cold War, and Korea today — was obvious. For the most part, the people of Europe greeted the outbreak of war with jubilation.
Most patriotically assumed that their country would be victorious within months. Russia, slow to mobilize, was to be kept occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces while Germany attacked France.
The Schlieffen Plan was nearly successful, but in early September the French rallied and halted the German advance at the bloody Battle of the Marne near Paris. By the end of , well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and neither for the Allies nor the Central Powers was a final victory in sight. On the western front—the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium—the combatants settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition.
In , the Allies attempted to break the stalemate with an amphibious invasion of Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in October , but after heavy bloodshed the Allies were forced to retreat in early The year saw great offensives by Germany and Britain along the western front, but neither side accomplished a decisive victory.
In the east, Germany was more successful, and the disorganized Russian army suffered terrible losses, spurring the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in By the end of , the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and immediately set about negotiating peace with Germany. Bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with an imminent invasion, Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in November Unfortunately, the peace treaty that officially ended the conflict—the Treaty of Versailles of —forced punitive terms on Germany that destabilized Europe and laid the groundwork for World War II.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Simmering racial tensions and economic frustrations boil over in New York City on the night of August 1, , culminating in what is now known as the Harlem Riot of During an altercation in the lobby of the Braddock Hotel, a white police officer shoots a Black soldier, Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl hiding out in Nazi-occupied Holland whose diary came to serve as a symbol of the Holocaust, writes her final entry three days before she and her family are arrested and placed in concentration camps.
Frank, 15 at the time, received the diary on
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