First World War

First World War. The first world war of the twentieth century raged from 1914 to 1918. Every statesman and senior commander in the Second World War vividly remembered the first; all major policies were influenced by it.

The conflict began in July 1914 with an Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia. Russia indicated such strong support for Serbia that Germany declared war on Russia, and on Russia's ally France; the German war plan involved an immediate invasion of neutral Belgium. The UK therefore entered the war also, against Germany, in defence of the Belgian neutrality that all the European Great Powers had long guaranteed. By mid-August 1914 there was a European civil war raging, with Germany and Austria-Hungary (‘the Central Powers’) allied against the ‘Triple Entente’ of Russia, France, and the British Empire (‘the Allies’). Most of Belgium was quickly overrun by the Germans, in circumstances that gave rise to a series of atrocity stories—enough of which were later proved untrue to delay Allied acceptance during the Second World War that the Final Solution was actually happening.

Encounter battles in north-eastern France soon led to a tactical stalemate: a vast fortress line of trenches, well wired in, called the Western Front, stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. In an effort to break the stalemate, Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty) instigated an attack on the Dardanelles, which was ill-managed, and after eight months' bitter fighting failed. No doubt, Churchill's knowledge and appreciation of the Royal Navy's Intelligence Division's work on the decryption of German signals during the First World War alerted him to the potential value of Bletchley Park at the start of the Second.

The Western Front stalemate was catastrophically expensive in men and in munitions for both sides. British generals in 1939–45 never forgot how many of their own contemporaries had been killed there, and were extra anxious to avoid another national bloodbath. It also bred a defensive frame of mind which led to dependence on the Maginot Line and a total inability to cope with the mobile warfare the Germans fought in 1939 and 1940.

German attempts in 1915 to break the stalemate by the use of poison gas, then a new weapon, only encountered Allied retaliation in kind; the fact that chemical warfare was not employed during the Second World War was due to the mobility of the combatants, not for any reasons of morality. The stalemate was broken at last in August 1918 by Allied artillery and infantry working in combination with the newly invented tanks. Artillery barrage fire, brought to new heights of concentration in 1942–5 (see artillery, 2) was invented on the Western Front in 1915 by, among others, Brooke.

Japan had entered the war beside its then ally the UK at the end of August 1914, and Japanese warships operated as far west as the Mediterranean; the Japanese army stayed in Asia.

Italy, previously Germany's ally, came in against it in 1915, opening a southern front in the Austrian Alps. Turkey and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers; Romania, in 1916, joined the Allies—and was swiftly defeated. Greece tried to remain neutral, but French and British troops fought Turks and Bulgars on Greek soil round Salonika, 1915–18, and Greeks fought Turks in Asia Minor in 1920–2. There was more movement on the Eastern Front than on the Western; Russia retired from it in 1917 after two successive revolutions, liberal in March and communist in November, had sapped the will to fight, and was crippled by civil war until 1922.

At sea, there was only one main fleet action, the battle of Jutland ( 31 May– 1 June 1916), after which the German fleet hardly put to sea again. A German U-boat offensive almost starved out the British in 1917, but convoys defeated it, and U-boat depredations brought in the USA also on the Allied side (but as an ‘associated’, not an allied power) in April 1917. (Roosevelt was then assistant secretary to the US Navy, much concerned with the U-boat war.) The near disastrous delay in organizing convoys in the First World War ensured they were quickly introduced at the start of the Second.

Air operations were still in their infancy. Portal, Harris, and Göring all took an active part in them. Lighter-than-air craft proved vulnerable to fighter attack, and were rarely used again in war (but see blimps); though no effective counter to airborne bombing by heavier-than-air craft was developed.

Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary surrendered in turn in the autumn of 1918. In the west, the German Army was beaten in the open field by an Anglo-French army under a French C-in-C, Foch, with the prospect of unlimited American reinforcements to back it. An armistice was signed at Compiègne in November 1918; fighting at once stopped. A peace congress in Paris produced the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919 as part of the Versailles settlement; although reviled as excessively harsh in Germany, it was much milder than the peace the Germans had imposed on defeated Russia at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. Germany's defeat produced a belief on the part of most Germans that the soldiers at the front had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by subversives who had betrayed their country. This obsession created a social environment in which the seeds of such organizations as the euthanasia programme and the People's Court were allowed to take root long before the Nazis ever came to power.

M. R. D. Foot