Can someone explain World War I to me?

Why? Too many muscle bound boys with too much time in their hands and nothing to do with their muscles.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

The core issue was one of self-determination competing with the goals of imperialism. The history of man is the story of conquest. What sparked WWI was the continued unresolved issues of who governed whom, what the lines on the map should look like, who controlled the resources, wealth and power and what the language and cultures of an area should be, that had gone on for centuries and even longer than that. This was compounded by an elaborate set of treaties and alliances between the various countries and empires that were involved, which were set into motion like falling dominoes once Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Accompanied by destructive technology on a scale never seen before, while still clinging to some old methods of warfare, it developed into a stalemate slugfest that went on for four years, 1914-1918. Once the tide had turned in favor of the Western Allies, an armistice was struck, The Treaty of Versailles, which left the vanquished German Empire broken and embittered, ultimately leading to WWII.

The Austria-Hungary Empire annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. This upset many of the Southern European Slavic peoples and also ticked-off the Russian Tsar. This area had long been battled over by Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia wanted to get out from domination by Austria and were looking to their Slavic ties to Russia to become a Yugoslavian state. In an attempt to destabilize Austrian control, terrorist groups (or freedom fighters, depending on your POV) like the Black Hand were formed. It was under this context that Princip, a Bosnian, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and his wife, Sophie). Oddly, Ferdinand was a progressive for his time and was looking toward more peaceful methods of resolution of minority grievances and more local rule within the Austrian Empire, to better insure the continuation of the empire for the time when he would become Emperor. Regardless, Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination and ultimately declared war on Serbia after first giving Serbia an unrealistic set of ultimatums, to which Serbia would never completely capitulate.

Thus the dominoes began to fall, with Germany on Austria's side and Russia backing the Slavs of Serbia, fueled by opportunism on Germany's side in an attempt to strike at Russia before she could build up an army that Germany could never defeat. France was Russia's ally and so . . . While Great Britain was not bound by treaty, they could not afford to remain neutral as they needed to stay on favorable terms with France and Russia, as they were invested in maintaining their world-wide empire, as well as preventing Germany from taking the dominant role in Europe. The rest of the world-wide conflict unfolded from here.

Perhaps the rest of this article will make more sense now, IDK. simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I Certainly there have been volumes written about all this and there are other theories, such as a pretense by Germany to become a bigger empire across the globe. While I may have played a little loose with some of the history, I think most of Western history takes a similar view.

If you'd rather watch a documentary, I would highly recommend the 2003 TV mini-series The First World War, available on DVD. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0426688/



"Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye." 2001: A Space Odyssey

To the best of my knowledge...

There were two alliances in Europe in the early 20th century, the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy). They didn't particularly like each other for a multitude of reasons, which resulted in an arms race. This culminated in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by the Serbians in 1914, which sparked the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia, the Russian declaration of war on Austria and the German declaration of war on Russia and France due to complex reasons. Italy didn't get involved. The reason it became a 'World War' is because of the countries' large empires.

The German plan was to quickly defeat France on the west before the Russians could mobilise and attack them from the east. They marched through Belgium, which inadvertently brought the British into the war due to an old and forgotten treaty between Britain and Belgium. This brought the German advance to a standstill, and led to the trench warfare depicted in Paths of Glory.


Nothing much happened between 1914-17, except for millions of deaths, mostly due to the awful conditions of the trenches and (arguably) the outdated views of the officers in this first 'modern war'. The Russians pulled out after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but by this time Germany and its allies were severely weakened and they had inadvertently brought America into the mix. By the time the US had brought any major number of troops over, the Germans were forced to surrender on the 11th November 1918, resulting in the Treaty of Versailles, which crippled Germany and basically set up the conditions for the rise of the Nazis.

About 40 million people were dead or wounded in all. A further 50-100 million people died of Spanish flu that was helped spread due to the war in 1918.

That's it in a nutshell.

An excellent book about how the war actually came about is Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August". It may be one of the most influential books of this century because of who it influenced. The insights in this book were well known to President Kennedy and he credited it with helping him avoid slipping into the same process during the Cuban missile crisis.

Just an additional point that very often gets over-looked regarding WW1....it was also a family argument that got out of hand. The King of Great Britain, the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar were all first cousins i.e grandsons of Queen Victoria. Her habit of marrying off her many children into the various national royal houses of the time unfortunately backfired, culminating in the horrendous years of 1914 - 1918. The existing tangle of treaties at the time meant that once one nation declared war on another a domino effect happened, dragging virtually the entire world into the war.

Read the book "To End All Wars, A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914 - 1918" by Adam Hochschild.

I do not feel like typing long essays. My short explanation for World War I is: unchecked nationalism.

The conditions leading up to WW1 were astoundingly similar to the Cold War. The only major difference is that one ended peacefully and the other ended with the largest war in history at the time.
Think back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. What would have happened if US ships torpedoed the Soviet ships? It could start a global war. That's exactly what happened when Franz Ferdinand (axis) was assassinated in Serbia (allied territory).