World War I (1914–18) CausesCauses of U.S. EntryMilitary and Diplomatic CourseDomestic CoursePostwar ImpactChanging Interpretations
World War I (1914–18): Causes Although the United States did not enter World War I until 1917, the outbreak of that war in 1914, and its underlying causes and consequences, deeply and immediately affected America's position both at home and abroad. In the debate on neutrality and later on peace aims, much was made of European secret diplomacy, which was rejected on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, of militarism and the escalating arms race before 1914, and of the impact of colonialism. Undoubtedly, all these factors contributed to the origins of the European catastrophe, but they do not explain why the war broke out when it did. This question can only be answered more precisely by looking at the political and military decision‐making processes in the last months, weeks, and days of peace in 1914.

After decades of debate about whether Europe “slithered over the brink” ( David Lloyd George's phrase) owing to general crisis mismanagement among all participant nations or because of the actions of a clearly identifiable group of people, the overwhelming majority consensus has emerged among historians that the primary responsibility rests in Berlin and Vienna, and secondarily perhaps on St. Petersburg. Judging from the documents, it has become clear that the German kaiser and his advisers encouraged Vienna to settle accounts with Serbia following the assassinations of the heir to the Austro‐Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife at Sarajevo in Bosnia‐Herzegovina on 28 June 1914.

By issuing a “blank check” to Austria‐Hungary on 5 July 1914, the German government took the first step in escalating a crisis that involved the risk of a world war among the great powers. This risk was high not only because these powers had been arming over the previous years, but also because they had regrouped into two large camps: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, Italy) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia). And when, after various diplomatic maneuvers, it became clear toward the end of July that such a world war might indeed be imminent, Berlin refused to deescalate although the decision makers there were in the best position to do so.

The Czarist government, as Serbia's protector, also had a role in this development; but it was primarily a reactive one after Vienna had delivered a stiff ultimatum in Belgrade and subsequently began to invade its smaller Balkan neighbor. So, while the main responsibility for the outbreak of war is therefore to be laid at the kaiser's door, the question of why he and his advisers pushed Europe over the brink continues to be a matter of debate. The German historian Fritz Fischer has argued that the kaiser's government saw the Sarajevo crisis as the opportunity for aggressively achieving a Griff nach der Weltmacht (Breakthrough to World Power Status), as the 1961 German version of Fischer's first, and highly controversial, book on the subject was entitled. The American historian Konrad Jarausch and others, by contrast, have asserted that Berlin's and Vienna's initial strategy was more limited. By supporting Austria‐Hungary against the Serbs, the two powers hoped to weaken Slav nationalism and Serb expansionism in the Balkans and thus to restabilize the increasingly precarious position of the ramshackle Austro‐Hungarian empire with its many restive nationalities. According to this interpretation, the assumption was that Russia and its ally, France, would not support Serbia, and that, after a quick localized victory by the central powers in the Balkans, any larger international repercussions could be contained through negotiation following the fait accompli.

It was only when this strategy failed owing to St. Petersburg's resistance that the German military got its way to launch an all‐out offensive, the first target of which would be Russia's ally, France. This was the sole military operations plan, the “Schlieffen Plan,” first developed by Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen, that the kaiser still had available in 1914. The alternative of an eastern attack on Russia had been dropped several years before. Worse, since the German Army was not strong enough to invade France directly through Alsace‐Lorraine, Helmut von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, had further reinforced the right flank of the invasion force with the aim of reaching Paris swiftly from the north. However, this could only be achieved by marching through Belgium, and it was this violation of Belgian neutrality that brought Britain into the conflict, definitely turning it into a world war.

In a further radicalization of his argument, Fischer asserted in his second book, War of Illusions (1973), that the German decision to start a world war had been made at a “War Council” on 8 December 1912, and that Berlin used the next eighteen months to prepare it. However, this view has not been generally accepted by the international community of scholars. Unless new documents supporting Fischer emerge, possibly from the Russian archives, the most plausible argument seems to be the one developed by Jarausch and others of a miscalculated “limited war” that grew out of control.

While diplomatic historians and political scientists have dominated the debate on the outbreak of World War I, social historians have more recently begun to examine the attitude of the “masses” in that summer of 1914. The older view has been that there was great enthusiasm all‐round and that millions in all participant countries flocked to the colors expecting to achieve victory no later than Christmas 1914. No doubt there was strong popular support, reinforced by initial serious misconceptions about the nature of modern industrialized warfare. But there have been recent challenges to this view, and it appears that divisions of contemporary opinion were deeper and more widespread than previously believed. French social historians have shown that news of the mobilization was received in some parts of the country with tears and consternation rather than joy and parades. In Germany, too, feeling was more polarized than had been assumed. Thus, there were peace demonstrations in major cities to warn Austria‐Hungary against starting a war with Serbia. And when the German mobilization was finally proclaimed, the reaction of large sections of the population was decidedly lukewarm. As one young trade unionist wrote after watching cheerful crowds around him near Hamburg's main railroad station on 1 August 1914: “Am I mad or is it the others?”

Considering the unprecedented slaughter that began shortly thereafter in the trenches of the western front as well as in the east, this was certainly a good question, and further research may well open up new perspectives on the mentalities of the men and women in 1914 and on the socioeconomic and political upheavals that followed, which ultimately also involved the United States as a participant.

Bibliography

Fritz Fischer , Germany: War Aims in the First World War, 1967.
Konrad Jarausch , The Enigmatic Chancellor, 1972.
Volker R. Berghahn , Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, 1973.
Fritz Fischer , War of Illusions, 1973.
James Joll , The Origins of the First World War, 1984.
John W. Langdon , July 1914, The Long Debate 1918–1990, 1991.
Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. , Austria‐Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, 1991.

Volker R. Berghahn

Bibliography

William Appleman Williams , The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959.
Ernest R. May , The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917, 1959.
Arthur S. Link , Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917, 1965.
N. Gordon Levin, Jr. , Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America's Response to War and Revolution, 1968.
Ross Gregory , The Origins of American Intervention in the First World War, 1971.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, 1985.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.

John Whiteclay Chambers II

Bibliography

B. H. Liddell Hart , The Real War 1914–1918, 1930.
Edward M. Coffman , The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I, 1968.
Donald Smythe , Pershing: General of the Armies, 1985.
Tim Travers , The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918, 1987.
Allan R. Millett , Over Where? The AEF and the American Strategy for Victory, 1917–1918, in Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Against All Enemies: Interpretations of the American Military from Colonial Times to the Present, 1988.
Timothy K. Nenninger , American Military Effectiveness in the First World War, in Military Effectiveness, Vol. 1: The First World War, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., 1988.
David Stevenson , The First World War and International Politics, 1988.
Robin Prior and and Trevor Wilson , Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson 1914–18, 1992.
John Keegan , A History of Warfare, 1993.
David F. Trask , The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918, 1993.
David R. Woodward , Trial by Friendship: Anglo‐American Relations, 1917–1918, 1993.
Paddy Griffith , Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916–18, 1994.
D. Clayton James and and Anne Sharp Wells , America and the Great War, 1914–1920, 1998.

David R. Woodward

Bibliography

David M. Kennedy , Over Here: The First World War and American Society, 1980.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I: 1917–1921, 1985.
David R. Woodward and and Robert Franklin Maddox , America and World War I: A Selected Annotated Bibliography of English‐Language Sources, 1985.
John Whiteclay Chambers II , To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America, 1987.
Ronald Schaffer , America and the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State, 1991.

Ronald Schaffer

Bibliography

Burl Noggle , Into the Twenties: The United States from Armistice to Normalcy, 1974.
Barry D. Karl , The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945, 1983.
Robert H. Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, 1985.
Klaus Schwabe , Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power, 1985.
Arthur Walworth , Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 1986.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, 1987.
Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser‐Schmidt, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, 1998.

Lloyd E. Ambrosius

Robert H. Ferrell

World War I. In August 1914, nobody living anywhere in the world could imagine a spectacle as violent as the one into which humanity was about to be plunged.The magnitude of the destruction in World War I (1914–1918) strained human comprehension. Yet the conflict proved only a prelude to an even more horrendous tragedy, World War II. The United States, after an initial period of neutrality, entered the war in April 1917 and played a decisive role in the final outcome and the peace settlement that followed.

Early Stages.

On 28 June 1914, a young Serbian nationalist shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria‐Hungary, and his wife Sophie, as they paid a state visit to Sarajevo, capital of the restive Balkan province of Bosnia. The assassination set in motion a complicated chain reaction. Austria‐Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, which precipitated Russia's decision to mobilize on 30 July. In turn, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France, the latter's ally, two days later. Great Britain entered the war against Germany on 4 August, and against Austria‐Hungary the following week.

Few Americans understood the origins or implications of these catalytic events, but they did not come “as lightning out of a clear sky,” as one U.S. politician wrote. To the contrary, in the years before 1914, European diplomats had constructed a precarious balance of power—the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, and Italy) on one side and the Triple Entente (France, Russia, and Great Britain) on the other—resting on a complex set of secret treaties. This division was rendered potentially calamitous by intense nationalism; by long‐standing imperial rivalries over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; by a massive military and naval build‐up forged by rapid industrialization; and by unstable domestic environments, especially in capitals where reactionary governments confronted rising vanguards of liberals and socialists. Ultraconservatives in Germany and Russia, in particular, seized upon the Balkan crisis and exploited patriotic fervor to subdue domestic political challenges.

Once the titanic struggle was underway, it did not take long for the human toll to mount. In September, during the first Battle of the Marne, the Allies and the Central Powers together sustained more than a million casualties. By the end of 1914, France alone counted 900,000 dead, wounded, or missing. In 1915, 330,000 French soldiers were killed and another million wounded. The corresponding figures for Germany were 170,000 and 680,000, and for Great Britain 73,000 and 240,000. The carnage resulting from the five‐month clash in 1916 between the French and the Germans over a single strategic objective (two forts near Verdun, France) equalled that of the entire American Civil War, or some 600,000 killed. By the time the Russian czar abdicated in March 1917, his country had suffered 3.6 million dead or otherwise incapacitated. Recent innovations in warfare—including machine guns, poison gas, submarines, and tanks—only added to the horror and outran the strategic calculations of elderly generals whose experience of war bore little relationship to the realities of the new technological age. In all, at least ten million people—mainly Europeans, but also hundreds of thousands of Asians and Americans—would go to their deaths as a consequence of the “Great War.”

The American Response: From Neutrality to Intervention.

When the war began, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation of neutrality, and his fellow citizens thanked heaven for the Atlantic Ocean. But geographic remoteness alone did not determine America's neutrality. A century‐long tradition of noninvolvement in European affairs and the self‐serving nature of the belligerents' war aims were equally important. Demography may have been even more decisive: according to the 1910 census, one‐third of the U.S. population consisted of immigrants and their children. This ethnic diversity, and particularly the large numbers of German Americans and Irish Americans, precluded an overwhelming national consensus one way or the other, notwithstanding a somewhat vague pro‐British sympathy felt by perhaps a majority of Americans.

The attempt to preserve neutrality posed innumerable problems for the Wilson administration. Great Britain imposed a naval blockade of the Atlantic and the North Sea to deprive the Central Powers of vital supplies, and the Royal Navy began to stop American merchant ships suspected of carrying contraband. In March 1915, a British Order in Council authorized the interdiction of all neutral commerce bound for Germany. The Wilson administration protested, invoking the principle of freedom of the seas. But the British were undeterred; subsequently, they went so far as to seize American parcels and mail on the Atlantic and to publish a “blacklist” of hundreds of U.S. businesses that allegedly traded with the Central Powers. By the summer of 1916, Anglo‐American relations had fallen to their lowest ebb since the British burned Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812.

For all of its severity, Allied economic warfare was more than matched by the German government's novel method of retribution. On 4 February 1915, Berlin commenced submarine (U‐boat) warfare against all enemy vessels, a policy that also imperiled American lives and commerce. Wilson's vow to hold Germany to “strict accountability” was soon put to the test. On 7 May 1915, a submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania without warning, off the southern coast of Ireland, drowning 1,198 men, women, and children—civilians all, among them 128 Americans. (Later research revealed that the Lusitania was also carrying a small cache of munitions bound for Britain.) With this seemingly wanton murder of innocents, in tandem with their trampling of neutral Belgium in their drive toward Paris, the Germans forfeited the contest for American public favor. Even so, the vast majority of Americans expected Wilson to keep them out of the war.

The U‐boat issue came to a tentative resolution in the spring of 1916, in the wake of another torpedo that severely damaged the unarmed French steamer Sussex in the English Channel. Four Americans were among the eighty casualties, and Wilson demanded that the Germans henceforth observe the rules of cruiser warfare—to “visit and search” enemy vessels before sinking them and to provide for the safety of noncombatants. Because Wilson did not insist that Germany abandon submarine warfare altogether, and because its fleet of twenty‐one U‐boats was not yet large enough to justify the risk of a diplomatic break, Germany, in the so‐called Sussex pledge of 4 May 1916, acceded to the ultimatum. For the rest of the year German‐American relations stayed on a relatively even keel. This unexpected accord outraged the British, especially when, in two days during October 1916, a long‐range German U‐boat sank nine Allied merchant ships off Nantucket while American destroyers looked on and then picked up the crews.

Nonetheless, the Central Powers continued to complain bitterly that the Wilson administration was pro‐British, citing America's economic ties with the Allies. Owing mainly to the British blockade, U.S. exports to Germany had plummeted from $345 million in 1914 to barely $2 million by 1916. During the same period, exports to England and France had shot up from $754 million to $2.75 billion. The administration also allowed American banks to finance this commerce through loans to the Allies. Yet, for the United States to have curtailed trade with (and loans to) the belligerent that enjoyed the advantage on the high seas would have been, under international law, an unneutral act in favor of the belligerent that did not. But those who doubted the commitment to neutrality, especially activists in the peace movement, complained of the policy's one‐sided effects and pointed to Wilson's endorsement of a military “Preparedness” campaign, which was led by large industrialists and bankers who stood to profit from increased spending on munitions.

In any event, neither the Central Powers nor the Allies wanted to provoke the world's most powerful neutral to armed retaliation. As each side made aggressive moves and well‐calculated concessions at critical moments, Wilson, for some thirty months, alternately protested and accommodated the belligerents' conduct, while striving to preserve American neutral rights and public sensibilities.

Wilson's adroit diplomacy enabled him to campaign for a second term in 1916 on the slogan, He Kept Us Out Of War! He could boast, as well, of recently having pushed through Congress an array of social justice legislation—the eight‐hour day for railroad workers, restrictions on child labor, and a progressive income tax weighted against corporations and the wealthy to pay for the military preparedness program. During the campaign he also championed American membership in a future association of nations, a theme that complemented his peace platform. On election day, a coalition of liberal reformers, progressive internationalists, and socialists swelled the normal Democratic vote. By a narrow margin Wilson prevailed over his Republican challenger, Charles Evans Hughes.

Although the election may have constituted a referendum on progressivism and peace, American neutrality remained fragile. The best way to avoid war, Wilson reasoned, was to bring about a negotiated settlement between the warring alliances. Twice, in 1915 and 1916, he had sent his emissary, Colonel Edward M. House, to Europe for direct (albeit futile) parlays with the belligerent governments. Successful at the polls, Wilson now decided on a bold stratagem for ending the conflict. On 22 January 1917, he went before the Senate and called for “peace without victory.” In this manifesto, the president offered a penetrating critique of European imperialism, militarism, and balance‐of‐power politics—the root causes of the war, he said. In their place, he advanced the vision of a new world order sustained by procedures for the arbitration of disputes between nations, a dramatic reduction of armaments, freedom of the seas, self‐determination, and security against aggression. The chief instrumentality of this sweeping program would be a league of nations.

But events were rushing forward with grim indifference to Wilson's interposition. One week later, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against all flags. With their U‐boats now numbering over 100, the German High Command gambled that the Allies would founder within a few months—before the United States could bring to bear sufficient force to tip the scales. In March, German submarines sank 600,000 tons of Allied and neutral shipping. Public opinion shifted markedly after three American vessels were sunk without warning and the Zimmermann Note (a sensational German plan to induce Mexico to invade Texas) came to light. By then, Wilson had reluctantly concluded that belligerency had been “thrust upon” the United States. In his war message to Congress, on 2 April 1917, he declared, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Americans, he went on, would be fighting “for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and the world itself at last free”—a program attainable, apparently, only through the crucible of war. By a vote of 82 to 6 in the Senate and 378 to 50 in the House, Congress approved the call to arms.

America at War.

The United States mounted a mobilization effort of phenomenal proportions. Newly created federal agencies coordinated every sector of the economy to harness America's agricultural and industrial might for military purposes. The War Industries Board, though shunning full‐scale state control, exercised unprecedented powers in organizing and stimulating production and superintended remarkable feats of miltary‐industrial output. The Railroad Administration took over and modernized the country's transportation system. The Fuel Administration regulated coal production and consumption to assure that the needs of the military and war plants were met. (Daylight saving time was introduced in March 1918 to conserve fuel.) The National War Labor Board, in order both to spur output and to avoid strikes, established a minimum wage and the eight‐hour day in most industries, and settled labor disputes almost always in favor of workers. The Food Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover, exhorted American families to observe “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays” and guaranteed farmers high prices for their commodities so that foodstuffs could be shipped to the Allies. Under the Selective Service Act, the size of the armed forces grew from 100,000 to five million within a year. Draftees and volunteers were hastily prepared in army training camps across the nation, and, in an innovation of great significance for the future, the War Department introduced large‐scale intelligence testing of recruits.

Any undertaking so enormous could not help but strain the nation's social and political fabric. Fifty‐six members of Congress had voted against the war resolution. Countless other Americans, many with ethnic roots in central Europe, had grave doubts about the crusade, while leading progressives and socialists divided up into pro‐ and anti‐war factions. To build support for the war and to discredit all things German, the administration created the Committee on Public Information, chaired by George Creel, to inaugurate an extraordinary propaganda campaign. An estimated 75 million pieces of pamphlet literature spread the official line on the war. Stirring poster art to encourage enlistments and homefront patriotism appeared everywhere; 75,000 “Four Minute Men” made speeches that were heard by tens of millions of people in theaters and other public gatherings. Movie stars such as Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford appeared at rallies to urge citizens to buy “Liberty Bonds.”

As a result, a tidal wave of anti‐German hysteria and superpatriotism known as “One Hundred Percent Americanism” swept the country. Local ordinances banned Brahms and Beethoven from concert halls and prohibited the teaching of the German language. Acts of political repression and violence, abetted by federal legislation such as the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, were committed against pacifists and radicals as well as German‐Americans. Dissenters expressed their views in public only at great risk. For example, for speaking against the war, the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson denied second‐class mailing privileges to left‐wing publications such as the Appeal to Reason, The Masses, and the Milwaukee Leader, virtually shutting them down.

For some, however, the war brought unaccustomed opportunity. The prohibition movement gained momentum in part because of the prominence of German‐Americans in the brewing industry. Anti‐prostitution crusaders succeeded in closing red‐light districts near military installations, including New Orleans' famed Storyville. The woman suffrage movement won its century‐long struggle for the right to vote, in part by invoking Wilson's rhetoric about democracy. At least one million women streamed into the workplace, augmenting the female labor force and taking all kinds of jobs traditionally reserved for men. Thousands of other women served in noncombatant roles in the military and in voluntary agencies such as the Red Cross in both Europe and America. As many as 500,000 African Americans left the South to find employment in northern industrial centers. But this migration into predominantly white communities such as St. Louis and Chicago spawned the worst outbursts of racial violence since Reconstruction. A similar blend of hope and humiliation awaited the 400,000 blacks who joined the military. Whereas France awarded the Croix de Guerre medal to many African Americans for courage under fire, the United States maintained a strictly segregated army and handed three out of four black servicemen a shovel or a potato peeler instead of a gun. Yet African Americans played a vital part, albeit in a segregated capacity, in unloading U.S. supply convoys at the French port of Le Havre.

As for the fighting itself, before American troops had begun to arrive in prodigious numbers, the Allied military position had been dealt a potentially mortal blow. In late 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power in Russia and pulled their ravaged nation out of the war, thus enabling the Germans to transfer an additional forty divisions to the Western Front. Because the Bolsheviks challenged both the Allies and the Central Powers to repudiate plans for conquest and imperial expansion, the military crisis also carried serious political overtones. It fell to Wilson to respond. In his celebrated Fourteen Points address of 8 January 1918, the president reiterated much of his anti‐imperialist “peace without victory” formula, once again making the League of Nations the capstone. Greeted by near universal acclaim, this statement of progressive war aims reassured doubters that their cause was just and their sacrifices worthwhile. The Fourteen Points became the ideological cement that held the Allied coalition together during exceedingly ominous days.

In March and April the Germans mounted a ferocious spring offensive across northeastern France. By May, as the Germans advanced westward several miles a day, the French government prepared to evacuate Paris. Just then, sizeable contingents of the American Expeditionary Force, which totaled some two million by summer's end, at last reached France. The American commander, General John J. Pershing, ordered his troops—untested, but fresh and well‐equipped—into action at Cantigny in May and at Chateau‐Thierry and Belleau Wood in June. Pershing later endured criticism for hurling masses of soldiers into combat and incurring very heavy casualties, especially at Belleau Wood; but, butchery or no, the Americans fought bravely and effectively. In an independent operation in September, the doughboys completely wiped out the salient at St. Mihiel, bringing the German assault to a standstill. By the end of the month, Pershing had amassed 1,200,000 men and hundreds of heavy guns and tanks along a two‐hundred‐mile‐long front in preparation for a climactic joint counteroffensive with the Allies. Pounding the Hindenburg Line, the combined armies pushed the enemy out of the Argonne Forest, across the Meuse River, and back toward Belgium and Germany. On 6 October 1918, the German government appealed to Wilson to facilitate an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. Although the Allied governments had previously declined to endorse the president's progressive peace program, they now assented. At 5 A.M. on 11 November, in a railroad car in the Compiègne forest, the Armistice was signed. Six hours later the guns fell silent.

Aftermath.

Deciding to take part personally in the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson seemed on the threshold of achieving his supreme ambition. In the meantime, however, a crucial mid‐term congressional election had taken place. The Republicans had mounted a fiercely partisan campaign against the Democrats, denouncing the Wilsonian peace plan as pacifistic and socialistic. The president answered by imploring the public to keep his party in power. When the Republicans captured both houses of Congress, they claimed that the voters had repudiated him.

In contrast to his domestic troubles, Wilson's arrival in France was triumphal. In Paris, London, Rome, and Milan, millions turned out to hail “the Savior of Humanity.” These extraordinary demonstrations strengthened his hand and helped to ensure the inclusion of the League of Nations Covenant (its drafting supervised by Wilson himself) as an integral part of the peace treaty. But “the Moses from across the Atlantic” paid a heavy price. His fellow peacemakers—Britain's David Lloyd George, France's Georges Clemenceau, and Italy's Vittorio Orlando—held grave doubts about “the New Diplomacy.” (“God gave us the Ten Commandments, and we broke them,” Clemenceau quipped. “Wilson gives us the Fourteen Points. We shall see.”) The statesmen of Europe exploited their acceptance of the Covenant to gain concessions on other contentious issues. During six months of acrimonious negotiations, the president was able to moderate some of the Allies' more extreme territorial and other punitive demands against Germany, but he was just as often compelled to compromise his principles. On the verge of physical collapse, he permitted the Allies to impose upon Germany an exorbitant reparations burden as well as a “war guilt” clause, saddling it with the moral responsibility for having started the war. Wilson's hope was that eventually the League would rectify the injustices contained in the Treaty of Versailles itself.

When he returned home in July 1919, the vast majority of Americans seemed to favor both the treaty and League membership. But an untoward combination of factors—ideological and partisan opposition in the Republican‐controlled Senate, a debilitating stroke that Wilson suffered, and the unraveling of his progressive coalition—dashed the president's great hope. Three times, in November 1919 and March 1920, the Senate voted on and rejected the treaty. The United States would never join the League of Nations, the capstone of Wilson's idealistic war aims. In the summer of 1921, the Republican administration of Warren G. Harding ratified a new peace treaty with Germany that embraced all the terms of Versailles, minus the League. For the United States the war at last officially came to an end.

Some 113,000 American soldiers died in the First World War—51,000 in battle, 62,000 from disease. The direct financial costs to the United States totaled $33 billion—one‐third raised by taxes, the rest by loans (mainly in the form of bonds). But the overall impact could not be calibrated in blood and treasure alone. Although the network of wartime agencies was quickly dismantled, the government's experiment in managing the economy provided important models that the New Deal would later adapt in combatting the Depression of the 1930s. Belligerency also released forces of intolerance and political reaction, including a postwar “Red Scare” that choked off the progressive reform impulse. In reaction to Wilsonian idealism, the country embraced a policy of noninvolvement in European politics during the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, the war had thrust the United States upon the world stage, transformed the nation into the world's leading creditor, and propelled it into a period of unprecedented overseas economic expansion—from Latin America to the Middle East to Asia.

The war and its aftermath profoundly affected American intellectual life as well. During the months of belligerency, most ministers, journalists, poets, and reformers had echoed Wilson's interpretation of the conflict as “the culminating and final war for human liberty.” But when it ended, the mood quickly gave way to disillusionment. In The Enormous Room (1922), the poet e. e. cummings captured the absurdity of bureaucratic officialdom in wartime, recounting his experiences in a French military prison on unfounded charges of espionage. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) presented a searing indictment of the war's ultimate futility and of the emptiness of wartime propaganda. World War I remains a watershed in American cultural history, separating the optimism and reformist energy of the Progressive Era from the alienation of many young writers and intellectuals in the 1920s.

Neither the Great War nor the twenty years' truce that followed remedied the deeper sources of Europe's political, economic, and social ills. Indeed, the death toll and destruction and the vindictive aspects of the Versailles Treaty helped create the conditions that led to an even more disastrous conflict in 1939. In retrospect, the ordeal was only the first terrible phase of a protracted struggle that would culminate in World War II, the Nazi Holocaust, and the advent of the nuclear age.
See also Antiwar Movements; Economic Regulation; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Department of Defense; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: Senate; Foreign Relations: The Economic Dimension; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Europe; Isolationism; Literature: Since World War I; Nativism; Pacifism; Peace Movements; Prostitution and Anti‐Prostitution; Socialism; Socialist Party; Temperance and Prohibition; Racism; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Arthur S. Link , Wilson, vols. III‐V, 1960–1966.
Arno J. Mayer , Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1967.
Edward M. Coffman , The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I, 1968.
N. Gordon Levin , Woodrow Wilson and World Politics, 1968.
Patrick Devlin , Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson's Neutrality, 1974.
Robert Ferrell , Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1985.
Paul Fussell , The Great War in Modern Memory, 1975.
David M. Kennedy , Over Here: The First World War and American Society, 1980.
Thomas J. Knock , To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, 1992.
Stephen Vaughn , Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information, 1980.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, 1987.
Kendrick A. Clements , Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman, 1987.
David Stevenson , The First World War and International Politics, 1988.
Ronald Schaffer , America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State, 1991.

Thomas J. Knock

WORLD WAR I

Imperial Russia entered World War I in the summer of 1914 along with allies England and France. It remained at war with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey until the war effort collapsed during the revolutions of 1917.

In 1914 military theory taught that new technologies meant that future wars would be short, decided by initial, offensive battles waged by mass conscript armies on the frontiers. Trapped between two enemies, Germany planned to defeat France in the west before Russia, with its still sparse railway net, could mobilize. Using French loans to build up that net, Russia sought to speed up the process, rapidly invade East Prussia, and so relieve pressure on the French. Berlin therefore feared giving Russia a head start in mobilizing and, rightly or wrongly, most statesmen accepted that if mobilization began, war was inevitable.

On June 28, 1914, a nationalist Serbian student shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at Sarajevo. To most statesmen's surprise, this provoked a crisis when Austria, determined to punish the Serbs, issued an unacceptable ultimatum on July 23. Over the next six days, pressure mounted on Nicholas II but, recognizing that mobilization meant war, he refused to order a general call-up that would force a German response. Then Vienna declared war on Serbia, Nicholas's own efforts to negotiate with Kaiser William II collapsed, and on July 30 he finally approved a general mobilization. When St. Petersburg ignored Berlin's demand for its cancellation within twelve hours, Germany declared war on August 1. Over the next three days Germany invaded Luxembourg, declared war on France on August 4, and by entering Belgium, added Britain to its enemies.

THE WAR OF MOVEMENT: SUMMER 1914–APRIL 1915

Some Social Democrats aside, Russia's educated public rallied in a Sacred Union behind their ruler. Strikes and political debate ended, and on August 2, crowds in St. Petersburg cheered Nicholas II after he signed a declaration of war on Germany. Local problems apart, the mobilization proceeded apace as 3,115,000 reservists and 800,000 militiamen joined the 1,423,000-man army to provide troops for Russian offensives into Austrian Galicia and, as promised, France and East Prussia.

Although Nicholas II intended to command his troops in person, he was pressured into appointing instead his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich the Younger. Whatever its merits, this decision split the front administratively from the rear thanks to a new law that assigned the army control of the front zone. This caused few problems when the battle line moved forward in 1914 and early 1915. However, without the tsar as a civil-military lynchpin, it led to chaos during the later Great Retreat.

The Grand Duke established his skeleton Stavka (Supreme Commander-in-Chief's General Headquarters) at Baranovichi to provide strategic direction to the Galician and East Prussian offensives. These were to open on August 18-19 under the direct supervision of the separate operational headquarters of the Northwest and Southwest Fronts. Yet on August 6 Austria-Hungary declared war and on the next day invaded Russian Poland. This forestalled the Southwest Front (Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Armies, with 52% of Russia's strength) and it opened its own Galician offensive on August 18. Despite early enemy successes, the Front's armies trounced the Austrians and captured the Galician capital of Lvov (Lemberg) on September 3. A week later the Russians won decisively at Rava Ruska, and by September 12 they had foiled an Austrian attempt to retake Lvov. By September 16 they had besieged the major fortress of Przemysl and reached the San River. Resuming their offensive, they then pushed another 100 miles to the Carpathian passes into Hungary. Over seventeen days the Austrians lost 100,000 dead, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 prisoners, and 216 guns, or one-third of their effective strength.

The Northwest Front (First and Second Armies, with 33% of Russia's forces) was less successful. Ordered forward to aid the desperate French on August 13, Pavel Rennenkampf's First Army advanced slowly into East Prussia, was checked at Stalluponen, then defeated the Germans at Gumbinnen on August 20, and turned against Konigsberg. To the south, Alexander Samsonov's Second Army occupied Neidenburg on August 22, and all East Prussia seemed open to the Russians. But by August 23, when the new German commander Paul von Hindenburg arrived with Erich von Ludendorff as chief of staff, General Max von Hoffmann had implemented plans to defeat the Russians piecemeal. Accordingly, on August 23–24 the Germans checked Samsonov and, learning his deployments through radio intercepts, withdrew to concentrate on Tannenberg. When the Second Army again advanced on August 26, it was trapped, virtually surrounded, and then crushed. Samsonov shot himself, and by August 30 the Germans claimed more than 100,000 prisoners.

This forced Rennenkampf's withdrawal, and during September 9–14, he too suffered defeat in the First Battle of the Mansurian Lakes. Despite German claims of a second Tannenberg and 125,000 prisoners, the First Army escaped and lost only 30,000 prisoners, as well as 70,000 dead and wounded. The Germans then advanced to the Niemen River before the front stabilized in mid-September. Again alerted by radio intercepts, they fore-stalled a Russian thrust at Silesia by a spoiling attack on September 30. Counterattacking in Galicia, the Austrians then cleared the Carpathian approaches and relieved Przemysl before being halted on the San in mid-October.

The Russians, repulsing a secondary attack in the north, finally held the Germans before Warsaw. As the latter withdrew, devastating the countryside, the Russians again drove the Austrians back to Kracow and reinvested Przemysl. This set the pattern for months of seesaw fighting all along the front. In the north, despite German use of poison gas in January 1915, the Russian Tenth Army withstood the bloody Winter Battles of Mansuria and held firm until April. In the south, by December they again were deep into the Carpathians, threatening Hungary, and holding positions 30 miles from Kracow. When relief efforts failed, Przemysl finally fell (with 117,000 men) in March 1915, leaving the Russians free to force the Carpathians.

Meanwhile, on October 29–30, 1914, two German-Turkish cruisers had raided Russia's Black Sea coast. On declaring war, the tsar set up an autonomous Caucasian Front in which the talented chief of staff Nikolai Yudenich exercised real command. As he prepared the Caucasian Army to meet a Turkish invasion, the Turkish Sultan-Khalifa's call for jihad (holy war) fueled pro-Turkish uprisings in the borderlands. Then on December 17 Enver Pasha launched his Third Army, still in summer uniforms, on a crusade to recover lands ceded to Russia in 1878. By December 25 the Russians were fully engaged in the confused battles known as the Sarykamysh Operation. In twelve days of bitter winter combat Yudenich's troops, despite heavy losses, decisively crushed the Turks, and in January 1915 they invaded Ottoman Turkey.

During this period, the Russians held their own against three enemies in two separate war zones and showed that they had capable generals by routing two enemies and fighting a third, the Germans, to a draw. For most, the heavy losses at Tannenberg and other locations were overshadowed by the stunning victories elsewhere. Like other combatants, Russia was slow to recognize that it faced a long war, but it had avoided the trench warfare that gripped the French front. Yet Grand Duke Nikolai already had complained of shell shortages in September 1914. The government responded by reorganizing the Main Artillery Administration, and a special chief assumed responsibility for completely guaranteeing the army's needs for arms and munitions by both state and private production. If this promise was illusory, and other ad hoc agencies proved equally ineffective, for the moment the Russian command remained confident of victory.

THE GREAT RETREAT: MAY–SEPTEMBER 1915

On May 2 the seesaw struggle in the East ended when the Austro-Germans, after a four-hour "hurricane of fire," broke through the shallow Russian trenches at Gorlice-Tarnow. This local success quickly sparked the disastrous Great Retreat. As the Galician armies fell back, a secondary German strike in the north endangered the whole Russian

front. Hampered by increasing munitions shortages, rumors of spies and treason, a panicked Stavka's ineffective leadership, administrative chaos, and masses of fleeing refugees, the Russians soon lost their earlier conquests. Despite Italy's intervention on the Allied side, Austro-German offensives continued unabated, and in midsummer the Russians evacuated Warsaw to give up Russian Poland. Some units could still fight, but their successes were local, and overall, the tsar's armies seemed over-whelmed by the general disaster. The only bright spot was the Caucasus, where Yudenich advanced to aid the Armenians at Van and held his own against the Turks.

The munitions shortages, both real and exaggerated, forced a full industrial mobilization that by August was directed by a Special Conference for Defense and subordinate conferences for transport, fuel, provisioning, and refugees. Their creation necessitated the State Duma's recall, which provided a platform for the opposition deputies who united as the Progressive Bloc. Seeking to control the conferences, these Duma liberals renewed attacks on the regime and demanded a Government of Public

Confidence (i.e., responsible to the Duma). Yet by autumn Nicholas II had weathered the storm, assumed the Supreme Command to reunite front and rear, and prorogued the Duma. As the German offensives petered out, the front stabilized, and a frustrated opposition regrouped. With the nonofficial voluntary societies and new War Industries Committees, it now launched its campaign against the Dark Forces whom it blamed for its recent defeats.

RUSSIA'S RECOVERY: AUTUMN 1915–FEBRUARY 1917

In early December 1915, Stavka delegates met the allies at Chantilly, near Paris, to coordinate their 1916 offensives. Allied doubts about Russian capabilities were somewhat allayed by a local assault on the Strypa River and operations in support of Britain in Persia. Still more impressive was Yudenich's renewed offensive in the Caucasus. He opened a major operation in Armenia in January 1916, and on February 16 his men stormed the strategic fortress of Erzurum. Retreating, the Turks abandoned Mush, and by July, the Russians had captured Erzingan. V. P. Lyakhov's Coastal Detachment, supported by the Black Sea Fleet, also advanced and on April 17–18, in a model combinedarms operation, captured the main Turkish supply port of Trebizond. In autumn 1916 the Russians entered eastern Anatolia and Turkish resistance seemed on the verge of collapse.

Assuming the mauled Russians would be inactive in 1916, Germany opened the bloody battle for Verdun on February 21. Yet increased supplies had permitted a Russian recovery, and on March 18, Stavka answered French appeals with a twopronged attack on German positions at Vishnevskoye and Lake Naroch, south of Dvinsk. Two days of heavy shelling opened two weeks of mass infantry assaults over ice, snow, and mud. The Germans held, and the Russians lost heavily but, whatever its impact on Verdun, this battle showed that trench (or position) warfare had arrived in the East. And like generals elsewhere, Russia's seemed convinced that only a single, concentrated infantry assault, preceded by heavy bombardments, and backed by cavalry to exploit a breakthrough, could end the deadlock.

Some saw matters differently. One was Yudenich, who repeatedly smashed the Turks' German-built trench lines. Others included Alexei Brusilov and his generals on the Southwest Front. Like Yudenich, they devised new operational and tactical methods that gained surprise by avoiding massed reserves and cavalry, and by delivering a number of simultaneous, carefully prepared infantry assaults, at several points along an extended front, with little or no artillery preparation. Despite Stavka's doubts, Brusilov won permission to attack in order to tie down the enemy forces in Galicia. When Italy, pressed by Austria in the Trentino, appealed for aid, Brusilov struck on June 4, eleven days before schedule. With no significant artillery support, his troops achieved full surprise on a 200-mile front, smashed the Austrian lines, and advanced up to eighty miles in some sectors. On June 8 they recaptured Lutsk before fighting along the Strypa. Again the Germans rushed up reserves to save their disorganized ally and, after their counterattack of June 16, the line stabilized along that river. In the north, Stavka's main attack then opened before Baranovichi to coincide with Britain's Somme offensive of July 1. But it relied on the old methods and collapsed a week later. The same was true of Brusilov's new attacks on Kovno, which formally ended on August 13. Even so, heavy fighting continued along the Stokhod until September.

Brusilov had lost some 500,000 men, but he had cost the Austro-Germans 1.5 million in dead, wounded, and prisoners, as well as 582 guns. Yet his successes were quickly balanced by defeats elsewhere. Russia had encouraged Romania to enter the war on August 27 and invade Hungarian Transylvania, after which Romania was crushed. By January 1917 Romania had lost its capital, retreated to the Sereth River, and forced Stavka to open a Romanian Front that extended its line 300 miles. This left the Russians spread more thinly and the Central Powers in control of Romania's important wheat and oil regions.

Yet the Allied planners meeting at Chantilly on November 15-16 were optimistic and argued that simultaneous offensives, preceded by local attacks, would bring victory in 1917. Stavka began implementing these decisions by the Mitau Operation in early January 1917. Without artillery support, the Russians advanced in fog, achieved complete surprise, seized the German trenches, and took 8,000 prisoners in five days. If a German counterstrike soon recovered much of the lost ground, the Imperial Army's last offensive shows that it had absorbed Brusilov's methods and could defeat Germans as well as Austrians.

By this date Russia had mobilized industrially with the economy expanding, not collapsing, under wartime pressures. Compared to 1914, by 1917 rifle production was up by 1,100 percent and shells by 2,000 percent, and in October 1917 the Bolsheviks inherited shell reserves of 18 million. Similar increases occurred in most other areas, while the numbers of men called up in 1916 fell and, by December 31, had numbered only 3,048,000 (for a total of 14,648,000 since August 1914). Yet their quality had declined, war weariness and unrest were rising, and, in late June 1916, the mobilization for rear work of some 400,000 earlier exempted Muslim tribesmen in Turkestan provoked a major rebellion. By 1917 a harsh winter, military demands, and rapid wartime industrial expansion had combined to overload the transport system, which exacerbated the tensions brought by inflation, urban overcrowding, and food, fuel, and other shortages.

Despite recent military and industrial successes, Russia's nonofficial public was surprisingly pessimistic. If war-weariness was natural, this mood also reflected the political opposition's propaganda. Determined to gain control of the ministry, the liberals rejected all of Nicholas II's efforts at accommodation. As rumors of treason and a separate peace proliferated, the opposition dubbed each new minister a candidate of the dark forces and creature of the hated Empress and Rasputin, whose own claims gave credence to the rumors. This "assault on the autocracy," as George Katkov describes it, gathered momentum when the Duma reopened on November 14. Liberal leader Paul Milyukov's rhetorical charges of stupidity or treason were seconded by two right-wing nationalists and longtime government supporters. The authorities banned these seditious speeches' publication, but the opposition illegally spread them throughout the army, and some even tried to suborn the high command. The clamor continued until the Duma adjourned for Christmas on December 30, when a group of monarchists murdered Rasputin to save the regime. Yet the liberal public remained unmoved and its press warned that "the dark forces remain as they were."

REVOLUTION AND COLLAPSE: FEBRUARY 1917–FEBRUARY 1918

Russia therefore entered 1917 as a house divided, the dangers of which became evident as a new round of winter shortages, sporadic urban strikes and food riots, and military mutinies set the stage for trouble. On February 27 the Duma reconvened with renewed calls for the removal of "incompetent" ministers, and 80,000 Petrograd workers went on strike. But the tsar, having hosted an Inter-Allied

Conference in Petrograd, returned to Stavka confident that his officials could cope.

Events now moved rapidly. On March 8, police clashed with demonstrators protesting food shortages on International Women's Day. Over the next two days protests spread, antiwar slogans appeared, strikes shut down the city, the Cossacks refused to fire upon protestors, and the strikers set up the Petrograd Soviet (Council). When Nicholas II ordered the garrison to restore order, its aged reservists at first obeyed. But on March 12 they mutinied and joined the rebels. The tsar's ministers were helpless before two new emergent authorities: a Provisional Committee of the State Duma (the prorogued Duma meeting unofficially) and the Petrograd Soviet.

This list now included soldier deputies, and on March 14 the Petrograd Soviet issued its famous Order No. 1. This extended its power through the soldiers' committees elected in every unit in the garrison, and in time in the whole army. For the moment, the Soviet supported a newly formed Provisional Government headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. When Nicholas tried to return to personally restore order, his train was diverted to the Northwest Front's headquarters in Pskov. There he accepted his generals' advice and on March 15 abdicated for himself and his son. His brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, followed suit, the Romanov dynasty ended, and the Imperial Army became that of a de facto Russian republic.

At first both the new government and soviets supported the war effort, and the army's command structure remained intact. Plans for the spring offensive continued, although the changing political situation forced its delay. By April antiwar agitation was rising, discipline weakening, and Stavka was demanding an immediate offensive to restore the army's fighting spirit. Hopes for success rose when Brusilov was named commander-in-chief, and a charismatic radical lawyer, Alexander Kerensky, War and Naval Minister. Finally, on July 1, the Southwest Front's four armies, using Brusilov's tactics, opened Russia's last offensive. Initially successful, it collapsed after only three days, and the Russians again retreated. In two weeks they lost most of Galicia and more than 58,000 officers and men, while a pro-Bolshevik uprising in the capital (the July Days) threatened the government.

Kerensky survived the crisis to become premier, while Lavr Kornilov, who advocated harsh measures to restore order, replaced Brusilov. The Bolshevik leaders were now imprisoned, underground, or in exile in Finland, but their antiwar message won further soldier-converts on all fronts. The Germans tested their own Brusilov-like tactics by capturing Riga during September 1–6, but otherwise remained passive as the revolutionary virus did its work. Riga's fall revealed Russia's inability to fight even defensively and helped provoke the much-debated Kornilov Affair. When Stavka ordered units to disperse the Petrograd Soviet, Kerensky (whatever his initial intentions) branded Kornilov a traitor and used the left to foil this Bonapartist adventure.

Bolshevik influence now made the officers' position impossible. Desertion was massive, and units on all fronts dissolved. After Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky took power on November 7, the army became so disorganized that a party of Baltic sailors easily seized Stavka and murdered General Nikolai Dukhonin, the last real commander-in-chief. The army no longer existed as an effective fighting force and, with peace talks underway at Brest-Litovsk, the so-called demobilization congress of December sanctioned the harsh reality. In February 1918 the army's remnants mounted only token resistance when the Austro-Germans attacked and, despite desperate attempts to create a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, forced the Soviet government to accept the diktat (dictated or imposed peace) of Brest-Litovsk on March 3.

CONCLUSION

Western accounts of Russia's war are dominated by the Tannenberg defeat of 1914, the Great Retreat of 1915, and the debacle of 1917. Yet the Imperial Army's record compares favorably with those of its allies and its German opponent, and surpassed those of Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. Despite many real problems, the same is true of efforts to organize the war economy. But the regime's failures were exaggerated, and its successes often obscured, by a domestic political struggle that undercut the war effort and helped bring the final collapse.

See also: brest-litovsk peace; july days of 1917; kerensky, alexander fyodorovich, kornilov affair; nicholas ii; stavka; tannenberg, battle of; yudenich, nikolai nikolayevich

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David R. Jones

WORLD WAR I

WORLD WAR I. The United States did not enter World War I until April 1917, although the conflict had begun in August 1914. After an intense period of military buildup and imperial competition, war broke out in Europe between Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) and Britain, France, and Russia (the Allies). Turkey quickly joined the Central Powers and Italy joined the Allies in 1915.

Prelude to Involvement

Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson issued a declaration of neutrality. He was committed to maintaining open use of the Atlantic for trade with all the European belligerents. However, British naval supremacy almost eliminated American trade with Germany while shipments to the Allies soared. To counter this trend, German U-boats (submarines) torpedoed U.S. merchant vessels bound for Allied ports. In May 1915, Germans sunk the British passenger ship Lusitania, killing 128 Americans. Strong protest from Wilson subdued the submarine campaign, but it would emerge again as the war ground on and became more desperate. In late January 1917, Germany announced it would destroy all ships heading to Britain. Although Wilson broke off diplomatic ties with Germany, he still hoped to avert war by arming merchant vessels as a deterrent. Nevertheless, Germany began sinking American ships immediately.

In February 1917, British intelligence gave the United States government a decoded telegram from Germany's foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, that had been intercepted en route to his ambassador to Mexico. The

Zimmerman Telegram authorized the ambassador to offer Mexico the portions of the Southwest it had lost to the United States in the 1840s if it joined the Central Powers. But because Wilson had run for reelection in 1916 on a very popular promise to keep the United States out of the European war, he had to handle the telegram very carefully. Wilson did not publicize it at first, only releasing the message to the press in March after weeks of German attacks on American ships had turned public sentiment toward joining the Allies.

Gearing Up for War: Raising Troops and Rallying Public Opinion

On 2 April 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war and four days later all but six senators and fifty representatives voted for a war resolution. The Selective Service Act that was passed the following month, along with an extraordinary number of volunteers, built up the army from less than 250,000 to four million over the course of the conflict. General John Pershing was appointed head of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and led the first troops to France during the summer. Initially, the nation was woefully unprepared to fight so large a war so far from American soil. The task of reorganizing government and industry to coordinate a war and then of recruiting, training, equipping, and shipping out massive numbers of soldiers was daunting and would proceed slowly. The first serious U.S. military action would not come until April 1918, one year after declaration of war. It would take a gargantuan national effort, one that would forever change the government and its relationship to the citizenry, to get those troops into combat.

Although there is strong evidence that the war was broadly supported—and certainly Americans volunteered and bought Liberty Bonds in droves—the epic scale of the undertaking and the pressure of time led the government, in an unprecedented campaign, to sell the war effort through a massive propaganda blitz. Wilson picked George Creel, a western newspaper editor, to form the Committee on Public Information (CPI). This organization was charged with providing the press with carefully selected information on the progress of the war. It also worked with the advertising industry to produce eyecatching and emotional propaganda for various agencies involved in the war effort in order to win maximum cooperative enthusiasm form the public. Its largest enterprise was the Four Minute Men program, which sent more than 75,000 speakers to over 750,000 public events to rouse the patriotism of as many as 314 million spectators over the course of the war. The CPI recruited mainly prominent white businessmen and community leaders; however, it did set up a Women's Division and also courted locally prominent African Americans to speak at black gatherings.

Gearing Up for War: The Economy and Labor

The government needed patriotic cooperation, for it was completely unequipped to enforce many of the new regulations it adopted. It also had to maximize the productive resources of the nation to launch the U.S. war effort and prop up flagging allies. The War Industries Board was charged with gearing up the economy to war production, but it lacked coercive authority. Even the Overman Act of May 1918, which gave the president broad powers to commandeer industries if necessary, failed to convince capitalists to retool completely toward the war effort. The government only took control of one industry, the railroads, in December 1917, and made it quite clear that the measure was only a temporary necessity. In all other industries, it was federal investment—not control—that achieved results. The Emergency Fleet Corporation pumped over $3 billion into the nation's dormant shipbuilding industry during the war era. Overall, the effort to raise production was too little and too late for maximizing the nation's military clout. American production was just hitting stride as the war ended, but the threat that it represented did help convince an exhausted Germany to surrender.

The government also sought the cooperation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and involved its top

officials in the war production effort, but very low unemployment emboldened union workers and it became difficult for the leadership to control the rank and file. Many workers connected Wilson's war goals—democracy and self-determination for nations—to struggles for a voice in their workplaces through union representation. However, the number of striking workers was lower in 1917 and 1918 than in 1916. The government hastily created labor arbitration boards and eventually formed a National War Labor Board (NWLB) in April 1918. The government had considerable success in resolving disputes and convincing employers to at least temporarily give some ground to the unions. When this novel arbitration framework disappeared along with government contracts in 1919, workers participated in the largest strike wave in the nation's history—over four million participated in walkouts during that year.

Women and African Americans in the War

For women workers the war also raised hopes, but as with labor as a whole, they were dashed after the conflict. The number of women working as domestic servants and in

laundering or garment making declined sharply during the war, while opportunities grew just as dramatically in office, industrial, commercial, and transportation work. The very limited place of women in the economy had opened up and government propaganda begged women to take jobs. However, few of these new opportunities, and even then only the least attractive of them, went to nonwhite women. Mainly confined to low-skilled work, many women were let go when the postwar economy dipped or were replaced by returning soldiers. Although women did gain, and hold on to, a more prominent place in the AFL, they were still only 10 percent of the membership in 1920. The government made some attempts through the NWLB to protect the rights of working women, although it backed off after the war. But women fought on their own behalf on the suffrage front and finally achieved the right to vote in 1920.

African Americans also made some gains but suffered a terrible backlash for them. There were ninety-six lynchings of blacks during 1917 and 1918 and seventy in 1919 alone. Blacks were moving out of the South in massive numbers during the war years, confronting many white communities in the North with a substantial nonwhite presence for the first time. Northward migration by blacks averaged only 67,000 per decade from 1870 through 1910 and then exploded to 478,000 during the 1910s. This Great Migration gave blacks access to wartime factory jobs that paid far better than agricultural work in the South, but like white women, they primarily did lowskilled work and were generally rejected by the union movement. The hatred that many of these migrants faced in the North forced them into appalling ghettos and sometimes led to bloodshed. In July 1917, a race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, left thirty-nine African Americans dead. The recently formed NAACP championed justice and democratic rights for African Americans at a time when black soldiers were helping to guarantee them for the peoples of Europe. Although job opportunities would recede after the war, the new racial diversity outside the South would not—and neither would the fight for equal rights.

Repression and the War

The fragility of a war effort that relied on a workforce of unprecedented diversity and on cooperation from emboldened unions led the federal government to develop for the first time a substantial intelligence-gathering capability for the purpose of suppressing elements it thought might destabilize the system. The primary targets were anti-capitalist radicals and enemy aliens (German and Austro-Hungarian immigrants). The former group was targeted through the Espionage Act of June 1917, which was amended by the Sedition Act in May 1918 after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia convinced the government to seek even wider powers to control public speech. The Department of Justice, through its U.S. attorneys and Bureau of Investigation field agents, cooperated with local and state authorities to suppress radical organizers. Many government agencies developed at least some intelligence capacity and the private, but government sanctioned, American Protective League recruited perhaps 300,000 citizen-spies to keep tabs on their fellow Americans. In this climate of suspicion, German-speaking aliens had the most cause to be afraid. War propaganda dehumanized Germans and blasted their culture and language. Well over a half-million enemy aliens were screened by the Department of Justice and were restricted in their mobility and access to military and war production sites. Several thousand enemy aliens deemed disloyal were interned until the conflict was over.

American Soldiers in Battle

The end of the war was nowhere in sight when U.S. troops first saw significant fighting in the spring of 1918, after the new Bolshevik government in Russia pulled out of the war in March and Germany switched its efforts to the western front. Under British and French pressure, General Pershing allowed his troops to be blended with those of the Allies—ending his dream of the AEF as an

independent fighting force. Now under foreign command, American troops helped stop the renewed German offensive in May and June. The First U.S. Army was given its own mission in August: to push the Germans back to the southeast and northwest of Verdun and then seize the important railroad facilities at Sedan. The campaign got under way in September and American troops succeeded in removing the Germans from the southeast of Verdun, although the latter were already evacuating that area. The Meuse-Argonne offensive to the northwest of Verdun was launched in late September and proved to be much more bloody. Although the German position was heavily fortified, well over a million American soldiers simply overwhelmed all resistance. This massive and relentless operation convinced the German command that its opportunity to defeat the Allies before American troops and industry were fully ready to enter the fray had been lost. As exhausted as the United States was fresh, the Central Powers surrendered on 11 November 1918.

In the end, two million American troops went to France and three-quarters of them saw combat. Some 60,000 died in battle and over 200,000 were wounded. An additional 60,000 died of disease, many from the influenza pandemic that killed over twenty million across the globe in 1918 and 1919. Many surviving combatants suffered psychological damage, known as shell shock, from the horrors of trench warfare. The casualties would have been far greater had America entered the war earlier or been prepared to deploy a large army more quickly.

Wilson hoped that after the war the United States would become part of the League of Nations that was forming in Europe to ensure that collective responsibility replaced competitive alliances. But America was retreating inward, away from the postwar ruin and revolutionary chaos of Europe. The government was suppressing radicals at home with unprecedented furor in 1919 and 1920 in what is known as the Red Scare. Progressive wartime initiatives that further involved the government in the lives of its citizens withered against this reactionary onslaught. But the notion of government coordination of a national effort to overcome crisis had been born, and the Great Depression and World War II would see this new commitment reemerge, strengthened.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Luebke, Frederick. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.

McCartin, Joseph. Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Focuses on workers and war production.

Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Focuses on home front repression.

Venzon, Anne Cipriano, ed. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1995. Good general work.

Zieger, Robert. America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Stresses the home front.

Zeiger, Susan. In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.

AdamHodges

See alsoInternment, Wartime ; Palmer Raids ; Riots ; Sedition Acts ; Women in Public Life, Business, and Professions andvol. 9:America's War Aims: The Fourteen Points ; Dedicating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier ; Peace and Bread in Time of War ; The War in Its Effect upon Women ; Letters from the Front, World War I, 1918 ; Lyrics of "Over There," 1917 .

World War I 1914–18, also known as the Great War, conflict, chiefly in Europe, among most of the great Western powers. It was the largest war the world had yet seen.

Causes

World War I was immediately precipitated by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. There were, however, many factors that had led toward war. Prominent causes were the imperialistic, territorial, and economic rivalries that had been intensifying from the late 19th cent., particularly among Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.

Of equal importance was the rampant spirit of nationalism, especially unsettling in the empire of Austria-Hungary and perhaps also in France. Nationalism had brought the unification of Germany by "blood and iron," and France, deprived of Alsace and Lorraine by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, had been left with its own nationalistic cult seeking revenge against Germany. While French nationalists were hostile to Germany, which sought to maintain its gains by militarism and alliances, nationalism was creating violent tensions in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ; there the large Slavic national groups had grown increasingly restive, and Serbia as well as Russia fanned Slavic hopes for freedom and Pan-Slavism .

Imperialist rivalry had grown more intense with the "new imperialism" of the late 19th and early 20th cent. The great powers had come into conflict over spheres of influence in China and over territories in Africa, and the Eastern Question , created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire, had produced several disturbing controversies. Particularly unsettling was the policy of Germany. It embarked late but aggressively on colonial expansion under Emperor William II , came into conflict with France over Morocco , and seemed to threaten Great Britain by its rapid naval expansion.

These issues, imperialist and nationalist, resulted in a hardening of alliance systems in the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente and in a general armaments race. Nonetheless, a false optimism regarding peace prevailed almost until the onset of the war, an optimism stimulated by the long period during which major wars had been avoided, by the close dynastic ties and cultural intercourse in Europe, and by the advance of industrialization and economic prosperity. Many Europeans counted on the deterrent of war's destructiveness to preserve the peace.

War's Outbreak

The Austrian annexation (1908) of Bosnia and Herzegovina created an international crisis, but war was avoided. The Balkan Wars (1912–13) remained localized but increased Austria's concern for its territorial integrity, while the solidification of the Triple Alliance made Germany more yielding to the demands of Austria, now its one close ally. The assassination (June 28, 1914) of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo set in motion the diplomatic maneuvers that ended in war.

The Austrian military party, headed by Count Berchtold , won over the government to a punitive policy toward Serbia. On July 23, Serbia was given a nearly unacceptable ultimatum. With Russian support assured by Sergei Sazonov , Serbia accepted some of the terms but hedged on others and rejected those infringing upon its sovereignty. Austria-Hungary, supported by Germany, rejected the British proposal of Sir Edward Grey (later Lord Grey of Fallodon ) and declared war (July 28) on Serbia.

Russian mobilization precipitated a German ultimatum (July 31) that, when unanswered, was followed by a German declaration of war on Russia (Aug. 1). Convinced that France was about to attack its western frontier, Germany declared war (Aug. 3) on France and sent troops against France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Germany had hoped for British neutrality, but German violation of Belgian neutrality gave the British government the pretext and popular support necessary for entry into the war. In the following weeks Montenegro and Japan joined the Allies (Great Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and Belgium) and the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). The war had become general. Whether it might have been avoided or localized and which persons and nations were most responsible for its outbreak are questions still debated by historians.

From the Marne to Verdun

The German strategy, planned by Alfred von Schlieffen, called for an attack on the weak left flank of the French army by a massive German force approaching through Belgium, while maintaining a defensive stance toward Russia, whose army, Schlieffen assumed, would require six weeks to mobilize. By that time, Germany would have captured France and would be ready to meet the forces on the Eastern Front. The Schlieffen plan was weakened from the start when the German commander Helmuth von Moltke detached forces from the all-important German right wing, which was supposed to smash through Belgium, in order to reinforce the left wing in Alsace-Lorraine. Nevertheless, the Germans quickly occupied most of Belgium and advanced on Paris.

In Sept., 1914, the first battle of the Marne (see Marne, battle of the ) took place. For reasons still disputed, a general German retreat was ordered after the battle, and the Germans entrenched themselves behind the Aisne River. The Germans then advanced toward the Channel ports but were stopped in the first battle of Ypres (see Ypres, battles of ); grueling trench warfare ensued along the entire Western Front. Over the next three years the battle line remained virtually stationary. It ran, approximately, from Ostend past Armentières, Douai, Saint-Quentin, Reims, Verdun, and Saint-Mihiel to Lunéville.

Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the Russians invaded East Prussia but were decisively defeated (Aug.–Sept., 1914) by the Germans under generals Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Mackensen at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes (see under Masuria ). The Germans advanced on Warsaw, but farther south a Russian offensive drove back the Austrians. However, by the autumn of 1915 combined Austro-German efforts had driven the Russians out of most of Poland and were holding a line extending from Riga to Chernovtsy (Chernivtsi). The Russians counterattacked in 1916 in a powerful drive directed by General Brusilov , but by the year's end the offensive had collapsed, after costing Russia many thousands of lives. Soon afterward the Russian Revolution eliminated Russia as an effective participant in the war. Although the Austro-Hungarians were unsuccessful in their attacks on Serbia and Montenegro in the first year of the war, these two countries were overrun in 1915 by the Bulgarians (who had joined the Central Powers in Oct., 1915) and by Austro-German forces.

Another blow to the Allied cause was the failure in 1915 of the Gallipoli campaign , an attempt to force Turkey out of the war and to open a supply route to S Russia. The Allies, however, won a diplomatic battle when Italy, after renouncing its partnership in the Triple Alliance and after being promised vast territorial gains, entered the war on the Allied side in May, 1915. Fighting between Austria and Italy along the Isonzo River was inconclusive until late 1917, when the rout of the Italians at Caporetto made Italy a liability rather than an asset to the Allies.

Except for the conquest of most of Germany's overseas colonies by the British and Japanese, the year 1916 opened with a dark outlook for the Allies. The stalemate on the Western Front had not been affected in 1915 by the second battle of Ypres, in which the Germans used poison gas for the first time on the Western Front, nor by the French offensive in Artois—in which a slight advance of the French under Henri Pétain was paid for with heavy losses—nor by the offensive of Marshal Joffre in Champagne, nor by the British advance toward Lens and Loos.

In Feb., 1916, the Germans tried to break the deadlock by mounting a massive assault on Verdun (see Verdun, battle of ). The French, rallying with the cry, "They shall not pass!" held fast despite enormous losses, and in July the British and French took the offensive along the Somme River where tanks were used for the first time by the British. By November they had gained a few thousand yards and lost thousands of men. By December, a French counteroffensive at Verdun had restored the approximate positions of Jan., 1916.

Despite signs of exhaustion on both sides, the war went on, drawing ever more nations into the maelstrom. Portugal and Romania joined the Allies in 1916; Greece, involved in the war by the Allied Salonica campaigns on its soil, declared war on the Central Powers in 1917.

From America's Entry to Allied Victory

The neutrality of the United States had been seriously imperiled after the sinking of the Lusitania (1915). At the end of 1916, Germany, whose surface fleet had been bottled up since the indecisive battle of Jutland (see Jutland, battle of ), announced that it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to break British control of the seas. In protest the United States broke off relations with Germany (Feb., 1917), and on Apr. 6 it entered the war. American participation meant that the Allies now had at their command almost unlimited industrial and manpower resources, which were to be decisive in winning the war. It also served from the start to lift Allied morale, and the insistence of President Woodrow Wilson on a "war to make the world safe for democracy" was to weaken the Central Powers by encouraging revolutionary groups at home.

The war on the Western Front continued to be bloody and stalemated. But in the Middle East the British, who had stopped a Turkish drive on the Suez Canal, proceeded to destroy the Ottoman Empire; T. E. Lawrence stirred the Arabs to revolt, Baghdad fell (Mar., 1917), and Field Marshal Allenby took Jerusalem (Dec., 1917). The first troops of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), commanded by General Pershing , landed in France in June, 1917, and were rushed to the Château-Thierry area to help stem a new German offensive.

A unified Allied command in the West was created in Apr., 1918. It was headed by Marshal Foch , but under him the national commanders (Sir Douglas Haig for Britain, King Albert I for Belgium, and General Pershing for the United States) retained considerable authority. The Central Powers, however, had gained new strength through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (Mar., 1918) with Russia. The resources of Ukraine seemed at their disposal, enabling them to balance to some extent the effects of the Allied blockade; most important, their forces could now be concentrated on the Western Front.

The critical German counteroffensive, known as the second battle of the Marne, was stopped just short of Paris (July–Aug., 1918). At this point Foch ordered a general counterattack that soon pushed the Germans back to their initial line (the so-called Hindenburg Line). The Allied push continued, with the British advancing in the north and the Americans attacking through the Argonne region of France. While the Germans were thus losing their forces on the Western Front, Bulgaria, invaded by the Allies under General Franchet d'Esperey , capitulated on Sept. 30, and Turkey concluded an armistice on Oct. 30. Austria-Hungary, in the process of disintegration, surrendered on Nov. 4 after the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto .

German resources were exhausted and German morale had collapsed. President Wilson's Fourteen Points were accepted by the new German chancellor, Maximilian, prince of Baden , as the basis of peace negotiations, but it was only after revolution had broken out in Germany that the armistice was at last signed (Nov. 11) at Compiègne. Germany was to evacuate its troops immediately from all territory W of the Rhine, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was declared void. The war ended without a single truly decisive battle having been fought, and Germany lost the war while its troops were still occupying territory from France to Crimea. This paradox became important in subsequent German history, when nationalists and militarists sought to blame the defeat on traitors on the home front rather than on the utter exhaustion of the German war machine and war economy.

Aftermath and Reckoning

World War I and the resulting peace treaties (see Versailles, Treaty of ; Saint-Germain, Treaty of ; Trianon, Treaty of ; Neuilly, Treaty of ; Sèvres, Treaty of ) radically changed the face of Europe and precipitated political, social, and economic changes. By the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to acknowledge guilt for the war. Later, prompted by the Bolshevik publication of the secret diplomacy of the czarist Russian government, the warring powers gradually released their own state papers, and the long historical debate on war guilt began. It has with some justice been claimed that the conditions of the peace treaties were partially responsible for World War II . Yet when World War I ended, the immense suffering it had caused gave rise to a general revulsion to any kind of war, and a large part of mankind placed its hopes in the newly created League of Nations .

To calculate the total losses caused by the war is impossible. About 10 million dead and 20 million wounded is a conservative estimate. Starvation and epidemics raised the total in the immediate postwar years. Warfare itself had been revolutionized by the conflict (see air forces ; chemical warfare ; mechanized warfare ; tank ).

Bibliography

There is a tremendous amount of general and specialized literature on World War I. Classic accounts of the war are S. B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (rev. ed. 1930, repr. 1966) and B. E. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930, repr. 1966). Two short guides to the military history are B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War (1930, repr. 1963), and H. W. Baldwin, World War I (1962).

World War I is considered the first modern war because it involved the mobilization of entire populations. For the United States, it also represented a break with tradition because, for the first time, American armies were sent to fight on European soil. Believing the nation faced a crisis of unprecedented proportion, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress acted swiftly to extend the authority of the federal government after war was declared in April 1917. In May, the Selective Service Act instituted a wartime military draft. In June, the Wilson administration proposed the Lever Food Control Bill, which subjected fuel and food to federal regulation and which gave the president the power in an “extreme” emergency to dictate price schedules in any industry. Although congressional critics charged the measure gave the president dictatorial powers and violated the Tenth Amendment, it became law in August 1917. In November 1918, the War Prohibition Act banned the making and sale of alcoholic beverages during the war. Other statutes empowered the president to compel preferential treatment for government war contracts, to seize and run plants needed for the war effort, to operate the water and rail transport systems, and to regulate exports.

Through a combination of executive orders and federal statutes, the government was able to curtail sharply freedom of speech and the press. In April 1917, Wilson issued two executive orders, one creating the first large‐scale government propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, the other giving the government control of land and cable telegraph lines out of the country. In June 1917, the Espionage Act made it a felony to cause insubordination, interfere with enlistments, and transmit false statements that obstructed the military (see Subversion). It also established postal censorship and gave the postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, power (which he often used capriciously) to ban material deemed seditious or treasonable from the mails (see Postal Power). In October, the Trading with the Enemy Act created a Censorship Board to coordinate and make recommendations about censorship. It allowed censorship of mail or any other kind of communication with foreign countries. The Sedition Act of May 1918 (an amendment to the Espionage Act) sought to repress anarchists, socialists, pacifists, and certain labor leaders. The law made it a felony to disrupt recruiting or enlistments, to encourage either support for Germany and its allies or disrespect for the American cause, or otherwise to bring the United States government, its leaders, or its symbols into disrepute.

Critics charged that virtually every right guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution was nullified or abridged during the war. The Supreme Court, however, was not asked to pass judgment on the constitutionality of many of these statutes. Those cases that did reach the Court did so, with a few exceptions, only after the war had ended.

Chief Justice Edward D. White, a one‐time Confederate soldier from Louisiana and the president of a sugar company, led the Court during the war years and after. Joining White on the bench were Justices Joseph McKenna, a California lawyer appointed by President William McKinley; two Theodore Roosevelt appointees, William R. Day and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Willis Van Devanter and Mahlon Pitney, both appointees of William Howard Taft and two of the Court's most conservative members; and three Wilson appointees, Louis D. Brandeis (whose Judaism and advocacy for social causes made him anathema to conservatives), John H. Clarke, a progressive‐minded railroad attorney, and James C. McReynolds from Tennessee, who as Wilson's first attorney general had vigorously prosecuted antitrust cases. As a Supreme Court justice, McReynolds became a champion of property rights against the expansion of government regulation and thus proved far less liberal than Wilson had hoped.

Enlargement of Federal Power

Despite his Civil War record, White was strongly nationalistic on issues relating to states' rights and the war. Under his leadership, the Court did little to challenge the expansion of federal power. It upheld the Selective Service Act in January 1918 in Arver v. United States, known as the Selective Draft Law Cases. Writing for a unanimous Court, White said Congress had the power to “raise and support armies” and that the draft was not “involuntary servitude” as defined by the Thirteenth Amendment (p. 367). A few months later, in Cox v. Wood (1918), the Court refused relief to a man who sought discharge from the armed forces on grounds that the draft could not be used to force military service abroad. In Ruthenberg v. United States (1918), the Court rejected a claim by socialists that their constitutional rights had been violated. (The socialists had argued that at their trial for not registering for the draft, the grand jury and trial jury had been made up entirely of people from other political parties.)

A similar pattern of approving the enlargement of federal power appeared in other cases. Although the War Prohibition Act was passed after the armistice, the Court sustained its validity in the War Prohibition Cases of late 1919. Brandeis accepted the measure's legality under the federal war power and held that federal regulatory authority continued even after the armistice. The Court again upheld prohibition a few months later in Rupert v. Caffey (1920), rejecting the argument that the act encroached on the police power of the states. In Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. North Dakota (1919), a unanimous Court endorsed a section of the Army Appropriation Act of August 1916 that empowered the president to take over and run railroads during wartime. White noted that “the complete and undivided character of the war power of the United States is not disputable” and said that the federal government could override state rate controls that would be binding during peacetime (p. 135). The Court also turned back challenges to the Trading with the Enemy Act (Rumely v. McCarthy, 1919; Central Union Trust Co. v. Carvin, 1921; Stoehr v. Wallace, 1921) to government takeover of telegraph and telephone lines (Dakota Central Telephone v. South Dakota, 1919), and to use by the federal government of cable property during the war (Commercial Cable v. Burleson, 1919). The Court invalidated a section of the Lever Act dealing with unfair charges for food in United States v. L. Cohen Grocery Co. (1921), but it did not deny the federal government's right to fix prices during war. Rather, it contended that the Lever Act had not set clear standards for what constituted unreasonable prices.

Limits on Dissent

Not since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 had the national government limited dissent so severely as during World War I. The government prosecuted nearly twenty‐two hundred people under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and more than a thousand were convicted. No cases involving the constitutionality of these statutes came before the Supreme Court during the war, although lower federal courts upheld and interpreted the measures in several instances.

Several cases involving civil liberties came before the Supreme Court after the war. The Court upheld government security legislation, relying on the bad tendency test, which held that the prosecution did not have to establish a cause‐and‐effect relationship between an utterance and an illegal act. The mere intent of the speaker or writer was sufficient to establish guilt. Schenck v. United States (1919) involved a prosecution under the Espionage Act for distributing antidraft leaflets to American military personnel. The appellant, Schenck, argued that the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment, but the Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the law. Justice Holmes, who wrote the opinion, argued that free speech was not an absolute right (it would not, for example, “protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre, and causing a panic,” he said) and that during war the government could limit some utterances that might be acceptable during times of peace (p. 52). Holmes set forth the clear and present danger test to determine whether the words used in a given situation “caused” someone to violate the law. Although the phrase “clear and present danger” would later be used to shield some types of dissent, in Schenk Holmes employed it in a way that was consistent with the bad tendency doctrine. He believed that Schenck had intended to interfere with the draft in publishing the leaflets.

The Court sustained convictions under the Espionage Act in two other cases: in Frohwerk v. United States (1919), the editor of a German‐language newspaper was convicted for publishing articles that criticized the war and questioned the legality of the draft; in Debs v. United States (1919), the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was prosecuted for a speech in which he had praised people convicted for hindering enlistments. The Court sustained the conviction on grounds that Debs had intended to hinder recruiting. In writing the opinions in Frohwerk and Debs, Holmes made no mention of the clear and present danger principle. Before the year ended, however, he changed his position, thanks in part to the influence of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. When he dissented in subsequent cases, he interpreted clear and present danger in a way that broadened protection for dissent.

In Abrams v. United States (1919), the Court upheld the Sedition Act of 1918. Abrams and others were charged with publishing leaflets condemning the American expeditionary force in Russia and called for a general strike. Justice Clarke, writing for the majority, contended that the pamphlets sought to “excite, at the supreme crisis of the war, disaffection, sedition, riots, and … revolution” and were not protected by the First Amendment (p. 623). Holmes, joined by Brandeis, argued in dissent that the prosecution failed to demonstrate that the leaflets had any impact on the war effort. Publishing a “silly leaflet by an unknown man” was unlikely to present “any immediate danger” of obstructing, or even have a tendency to interfere with, the success of the government's armed forces. Holmes relied on the notion of a “marketplace of ideas” to justify his stand (p. 628).

Four months later Clarke joined Holmes and Brandeis in dissenting from the Court's majority in Schaefer v. United States (1920). The case involved a German‐language paper in Philadelphia that had published articles favorable to the German war effort that were generally unpatriotic in tone. Brandeis, in writing for the minority, thought the publications in question were relatively harmless and that their suppression imperiled free press as well as freedom of thought not only during the war but also in peacetime.

Pierce v. United States (1920) grew out of the government's wartime security legislation. Three socialists had been prosecuted for distributing an antiwar pamphlet. Justice Pitney, speaking for the majority, attacked one of the publication's arguments—that the war had economic roots—and contended that such material could only hurt the war effort. Once again, Holmes and Brandeis dissented, arguing that if statements of judgment and opinion could be prosecuted, then freedom of expression was imperiled, especially during national emergencies. In United States ex rel. Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co. v. Burleson (1921), the Court upheld the postmaster general's decision to exclude a socialist newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader, from the mails. In Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920), the Court upheld a Minnesota statute similar to the Espionage Act. While Holmes concurred with the majority in this case, White dissented, arguing that only Congress had power to legislate in this area. Brandeis also dissented, but on the grounds that the state law invaded civil liberties.

World War I accelerated the growth of nationalism in the United States, enhancing the authority of the federal government at the expense of the states and the power of the president relative to Congress. Through its decisions the Supreme Court endorsed these developments. One legacy from this period was the example that expanded federal authority provided for later national emergencies. Americans were more willing during the Great Depression and World War II to accept the idea that the national government and the president could deal with problems more effectively than could the individual states and Congress. World War I also initiated controversies about the meaning of the First Amendment. While the Court upheld the government's security legislation, the idea of clear and present danger, as applied in the Abrams case, opened the door—if only slightly—to stronger safeguards for dissent.

See also Presidential Emergency Powers; War.

Bibliography

David P. Currie , The Constitution and the Supreme Court: 1910–1921, Duke Law Journal (Dec. 1985): 1111–1162.
Paul L. Murphy , The Constitution in Crisis Times, 1918–1969 (1972).
Richard Polenberg , Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (1987).
Fred D. Ragan , Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and the Clear and Present Danger Test for Free Speech: The First Year, 1919, Journal of American History 58 (1971): 24–45.

Stephen Vaughn

World War I

THE WORLD AT WAR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

World War I (1914–1918), known as “The Great War” at the time, marked a profound political, economic, and social shift in international relations. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has referred to 1914 as the de facto beginning of the twentieth century.

The triggering cause of the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb nationalists. This matter might have stayed an internal dispute in Austria-Hungary, but other states quickly took sides. Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and Austria-Hungary made up the Central Powers. Russia stood up for the Serbs, and was joined by France and Great Britain in the Triple Entente.

According to one interpretation of World War I, a rigid alliance structure drew reluctant states into what would otherwise have been a localized conflict. Many of the belligerents did have alliances binding them to a particular side. For example, both Britain and France had pledged to defend Belgian neutrality, which was violated at the beginning of the war by German invasion. However, all of the belligerents also had compelling national interests for participating in World War I, including concerns about national insurgency and perceptions of the European balance of power.

Nationalism drew belligerents into World War I in two ways. Russia defended Serbia at least partly in the name of pan-Slavism, or solidarity among Slavic peoples. The Ottoman Empire had a different concern. Like its Habsburg counterpart, the Ottoman Empire comprised a variety of national groups, all ruled by a single dominant national group. The spread of democracy and other egalitarian movements in Europe challenged the legitimacy of the old empires. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire experienced various national uprisings, including those by Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Armenians. By helping the Habsburgs resist nationalist insurgency, the Ottomans hoped to avert future problems of their own.

In addition, many states were concerned about the changing European balance of power. The pentagonal balance created at the 1815 Congress of Vienna had been relatively successful, both in keeping European conflicts manageable and protecting the interests of Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany (previously called Prussia), and Russia. By 1914, however, several of these states were not content with the existing balance of power.

For example, Germany was a latecomer to imperialism, a process dominated by France and Britain, and therefore perceived itself at a disadvantage in both power projection and resource extraction. Although overseas imperialism offered limited possibilities by the early 1900s, Germany began to pursue a policy (Drang nach Osten ) of increased economic and political influence in eastern Europe, thus “colonizing” the region. German leaders argued that this would balance French and British power.

France and Britain, however, did not perceive themselves as at an advantage vis-à-vis Germany. Germany had benefited tremendously from the Industrial Revolution, especially since its natural resource base was well suited to industrial production. In 1870, Germany ranked third in industrial production behind Britain and France. By 1914, Germany led them both by a substantial margin. Britain and France feared that Germany’s economic trajectory would soon render moot efforts at power balancing. To avoid German hegemony as a fait accompli, the other great powers would need to act quickly.

Russia, too, had balance-of-power concerns regarding Germany, with which it shared a tense history. The Drang nach Osten interfered with Russia’s domestic economy and trade with its neighbors. Furthermore, Russia had been at an enduring geopolitical disadvantage because it lacked warm water ports (i.e., ones in which the water does not freeze), which limited its military and commercial expansion. Defeating the Central Powers could mean Russian access to Germany’s Baltic ports and the Mediterranean Sea via Turkish straits.

THE WORLD AT WAR

Once the war began, its course was horrifyingly unique to European experience. Germany expanded the aggression outside of Austria-Hungary by implementing the Schlieffen Plan, a military strategy designed to prevent Germany from fighting on two fronts simultaneously. The existence of such a plan reflected the influence of prevailing social attitudes on military doctrine. The popularity of ideas such as Social Darwinism, a perversion of Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection then applied to human social interaction, bred a pan-European “cult of the offensive,” or fanatical confidence in initial aggression as the guarantor of victory. Darwin argued that organisms with traits well suited to their environment would be the most likely to survive and reproduce. The Social Darwinist ideal twisted this commentary to argue that powerful groups had the ability, even the right, to dominate weaker ones and to mold human relations as they saw fit. As a result, states generated extremely aggressive military grand strategies—their overall plans for using the military instrument of foreign policy. For example, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan called for the speedy conquest of France, via neutral Belgium, so German forces could then focus on an eastern front against Russia, which would mobilize relatively slowly for geographic and technological reasons.

The reality of World War I looked very little like the Schlieffen Plan. In early August 1914, Germany attacked Belgium. Reinforced by troops from Britain and France, Belgium tenaciously resisted German invasion. Russia, having anticipated conflict with Germany and availing itself of technological advances such as railroads, mobilized faster than Germany had anticipated. Within weeks, Germany found itself caught in a two-front war.

This conflict was unlike any Europe had seen before. A popular slogan claimed that soldiers marching off in August 1914 would be “home before the leaves fall from the trees,” but even after months the two sides had made little progress toward their war aims. Various conditions of the war made territorial conquest difficult. In the west, the extremely flat terrain of Southwestern Belgium provided little natural shelter. This encouraged trench warfare, the digging of passageways open to the surface, from which soldiers could attack with at least minimal cover. The introduction of barbed wire assisted in this process and in holding territory. Capturing territory from the trenches was difficult. Instead, World War I became a war of attrition, in which victory would be defined by exhausting the enemy’s resources rather than by superior mobility and territorial conquest. Military engagement frequently ended in deadlock, as when the 1916 German attack at Verdun preempted an Entente offensive on the Somme, but did not achieve the larger goal of crippling the French. Later that year, Britain launched its first major offensive of the war, at the Somme. In four months the Entente lost some 600,000 men while gaining only a few miles of territory. For years, neither side had an enduring battlefield advantage, although both expended unprecedented amounts of materiel and human lives. At least twenty million soldiers were killed or wounded during the war.

Military leaders introduced destructive new technologies, attempting to break the trench stalemate. Machine guns allowed for tremendous firepower and resulted in devastating casualties, as did tanks and submarines as new weapons platforms. Poison gas, introduced by Germany at Ypres in 1915, was difficult to control in deployment and undetectable until its effects were irreversible; gas caused pain, burns, other physical trauma, and death. These conditions eventually generated a sense of futility and ennui among many soldiers, and caused mutiny late in the war, such as that of the French army in 1917. One of the lasting consequences of these battle conditions was the emergence of “shell shock” (today known as post-traumatic stress disorder), which disabled thousands of soldiers who had survived the fighting.

On the eastern front, armies enjoyed greater mobility but suffered staggering casualties in the face of the technological innovations. In 1917 Russia withdrew from the conflict because of the Bolshevik Revolution. Britain and France appealed to the United States, which had been supplying their war effort for some time, to take Russia’s place. Although President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) had campaigned on a no-war platform, the economic significance, in particular of Britain and France, finally persuaded him to change his position. With the declaration of war by the U.S. Congress on April 6, 1917, the United States formally allied itself with Britain and France.

The new influx of American resources and personnel, beginning in earnest in the summer of 1918, was too much for Germany. Recognizing that Germany could not win a war of attrition against this energetic, well-supplied new enemy, the German navy mutinied, popular revolution led the Kaiser to abdicate, and the new government agreed to an armistice on the Entente’s terms. The agreement was signed on November 11, 1918, at 11: 00 a.m. For many Germans, the Entente victory seemed illegitimate. Germany had not been outmaneuvered on the battlefield and victorious Entente troops did not capture Berlin. Rather, the Entente seemed to have won by calling in outsiders to the dispute; this said nothing about Germany’s prowess vis-à-vis France and Britain.

Beginning in January 1919, the former belligerents met in Paris to formulate the peace treaty, known as the Treaty of Versailles after the palace in which it was signed. President Wilson attended the conference, to the surprise and consternation of many of his counterparts, making him the first sitting U.S. president to visit a foreign country. Two major goals of the treaty were to render Germany harmless and to avoid future problems with national insurgency. To achieve the first goal the victors implemented a number of programs targeting Germany, including reparation payments, disarmament, and neutralization of territory. To achieve the second goal, the victors promoted national selfdetermination for European ethnic groups, redrawing the map of eastern Europe so that the political boundaries more closely matched the homelands of ethnic groups.

SEE ALSO Colonialism; Darwinism, Social; Genocide; Imperialism; Isolationism; Monarchy; Nationalism and Nationality; Ottoman Empire; Patriotism; PostTraumatic Stress; Revolution; Russian Revolution; War; Wilson, Woodrow; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ferro, Marc. 1973. The Great War, 1914–1918. Trans. Nicole Stone. London: Routledge & K. Paul.

Fussell, Paul. 1975. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kennedy, David M. 1980. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

Keylor, William R. 2001. Germany’s Bid for European Dominance (1914–1918). In The Twentieth-Century World, an International History. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Van Evera, Stephen. 1984. The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War. International Security 9 (1): 58–107.

Lisa L. Ferrari

First World War. In August 1914 Britain ostensibly went to war against Germany because of the latter's unprovoked invasion of Belgium. In reality Britain fought the First World War to prevent Germany dominating Europe and, with the help of her Austrian and Turkish allies, threatening the British empire in Asia and Africa. Though from the outset British policy-makers recognized that co-operation with their Russian and French allies would be essential if they were to win the war, they were determined to give that co-operation strictly on their own terms, rendering only enough assistance to their allies to prevent them from collapsing. The men who made British policy during the war had reached maturity and formed their vision of the world in the late 1870s and early 1880s. They had learned to see Russia and France as Britain's most bitter imperial competitors and they did not forget that fact even after the German threat emerged in the decade before 1914. Their misgivings concerning their allies' ambitions played a major role in determining British war aims. They wanted a peace settlement which would reduce Germany's power and also ensure that neither Russia nor France could tilt the European balance against Britain or menace Britain's imperial possessions.

In 1914 the Asquith government believed that the war would reach its climax in 1917. Britain could achieve her objectives at least cost by allowing her allies to carry the weight of the continental land war with only token British assistance. Meanwhile the Royal Navy would undermine the German economy by blockade and Britain would offer financial help to her allies. Kitchener formed the New Armies in the belief that by the end of 1916 the armies of the other belligerents would be exhausted. His troops would be unbloodied and in 1917 Britain could intervene decisively in land war, crush Germany and her allies, Turkey, Austria-Hungary, and (after September 1915) Bulgaria, and impose Britain's peace terms on everyone.

This policy collapsed because France and Russia were not willing to fight for three years without British military support. By late 1915 the government had reluctantly accepted that if they failed to give their allies large-scale support on the continent, France and Russia might prefer to make a negotiated peace. But it was equally obvious that the cost of increasing Britain's commitment to the continental land war might be self-defeating. Some argued that if the New Armies were committed to a major allied offensive in France in 1916, losses could only be made good by conscription. But if more men were taken away from the civilian economy, Britain would be bankrupt before the enemy sued for peace. The British offensive on the Somme in 1916 was an enormous gamble. The government was wagering that the Entente could win the war before Britain went bankrupt.

The attack failed, for although both the British and German armies suffered enormously, the Germans had no intention of asking for peace terms. Instead they tried to starve Britain into submission by launching a campaign of unrestricted U-boat warfare against British shipping. This was the strategic situation which Lloyd George inherited when he became prime minister in December 1916. His aims were the same as Asquith's, but he was more aware than Asquith that he would have to work hard to sustain popular support for the war, for war-weariness was now rife in Britain. The armed forces were a serious drain on the economy, and nothing was more likely to undermine support for the war than shortages of food, fuel, and housing, especially if such shortages gave rise to the corrosive belief that ‘profiteers’ were making unfair gains from the war while the rest of the population suffered. But morale depended upon more than adequate supplies of food and fuel. Lloyd George knew that the people had to be convinced that their sacrifices were reaping tangible victories, and if they could not be won on the western front, they had to be gained elsewhere. One reason why he supported offensives at Salonika in Greece, in Palestine, and in northern Italy was his belief that a victory gained on one of those fronts would provide a much-needed stimulus to British morale.

The new government also knew that victory could only be achieved in co-operation with its allies. But in the spring of 1917 the pillars upon which British strategy rested began to crumble. In March 1917 the British greeted the first Russian Revolution with cautious enthusiasm, hoping that Russia would follow the same path as France in 1794; from the ruins of the tsarist regime would emerge a new military colossus. But news of the crumbling discipline of the Russian army meant that their hopes soon gave way to the fear that Russia would desert the alliance, and that the Germans would move large numbers of troops to the western front and break the allied economic blockade by gaining access to Russian food and fuel. In the mean time a large part of the French army mutinied, and although most French soldiers were ready to defend their trenches, they would not participate in further futile offensives. At sea German U-boats were sinking so many merchant ships that Britain was close to starvation. The only cause for optimism in the Entente camp was that in April 1917 the USA declared war on Germany. But any hope that the Americans would soon be able to throw their weight into the land war in Europe was quickly dashed. The USA had a tiny regular army and would not be able to deploy an appreciable force in France before 1918 or even 1919.

The debate about the future of British strategy in the summer of 1917 therefore concerned one question: what should be the new timetable for administering the knock-out blow against Germany? One option was to follow the French example. After the mutinies they had decided to remain on the defensive in the west for the remainder of 1917, and wait for 1918 and the Americans before trying to drive the Germans back across the Rhine. In the meantime the British might, as Lloyd George urged, divert troops to northern Italy. The Italians had entered the war on Britain's side in May 1915. If they could defeat the Austrians, and persuade them to make peace, they would destroy Germany's ambition of establishing an empire stretching from Hamburg, through Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, to Baghdad. The alternative was to permit the commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, to have his way and mount an offensive in Flanders. If Haig drove the Germans from the Belgian coast he would remove the threat of invasion, inflict a major defeat upon the German army, and take German pressure off France and Russia. Haig believed that he could force the Germans to sue for peace by Christmas 1917. The politicians doubted, but allowed him to try. They expected little military help from the French, but they were afraid that if the British did nothing, France would go the way of the Russians and collapse.

The third battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in July 1917 was a failure. Haig then launched a second offensive, using massed tanks, at Cambrai, but that also failed. In October Italy suffered a major defeat at Caporetto and in November the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and soon signed an armistice. The arrival of the American army was even slower than the British had anticipated. Lloyd George still believed that the war could be won only after the German army had been defeated on the western front but he also believed that, if the British mounted another large-scale offensive in France in 1918, their army would be exhausted, America would dominate the Entente in 1919, and America, not Britain, would dictate the peace treaty. He therefore decided that Britain must preserve her army and economic staying-power in 1918. The knock-out blow against Germany would be delayed until 1919, when the arrival of the Americans would give the Entente a crushing superiority.

In January 1918, and despite the opposition of his own generals, Lloyd George persuaded Britain's partners to agree to his new timetable for victory in 1919. In 1918 each partner would increase production of artillery, aircraft, and tanks in order to multiply the fire-power of her dwindling military manpower, and Britain would safeguard her own imperial interests in Egypt and India by defeating the Turks in Palestine. The British were not fighting only to re-establish the balance of power in western Europe, for Turkey's entry into the war on the side of Germany in November 1914 had made the First World War an Asiatic as well as a European war. In 1915–16 the British had mounted expeditions against Mesopotamia, Palestine, and at the Dardanelles to protect their Asiatic possessions. The war was a contest for the division of world power. The Germans wanted to replace Britain as a world power by creating a middle European empire. It was a war in which the British assessed victory or defeat by their success or failure in frustrating Germany's ambitions and by their ability to maintain their own security in western Europe and in India and the Middle East.

Lloyd George's timetable for victory in 1919 collapsed because in the spring of 1918 the Germans made their own final attempt to win the war before they became exhausted. Between March and July 1918 the survival of the Entente alliance was in doubt. At one moment the Germans threatened to divide the British army from its French ally. But by June the last German offensive had been stopped, and in July the Entente's armies began a counter-offensive, forcing the Germans back. The way in which the war ended surprised Britain and her allies. As late as August they were still preparing plans to continue fighting into 1919 and even 1920. As late as mid-October Haig did not think that the German army was so badly beaten that the German government would accept the armistice terms which the Entente wanted. When the armistice negotiations began in October the British had to consider several conflicting factors. Should they continue fighting into 1919, to invade Germany and inflict a Carthaginian peace upon the German people? Would such a settlement threaten the future peace of Europe by leaving the French too powerful and by making the Germans vengeful? Were the British people willing to fight for another year? Would the economic and political cost of doing so leave western Europe devastated and dominated by the USA? How could the allies devise armistice terms which would not be so harsh that the Germans would reject them but which would prevent Germany from gaining a breathing space after which it could start fighting again? It was only after weighing these factors they opted for an early peace and the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918, a year earlier than most British policy-makers had anticipated.

David French

Bibliography

Bourne, J. M. , Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (1989);
Turner, J. (ed.), Britain and the First World War (1988);
Wilson, T. , The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1986).

WORLD WAR I

War involving the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) against the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Greece, Romania, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Montenegro, Japan, and the United States).

World War I (then called the Great War) began on 28 July 1914, when Austria declared war on Serbia (ostensibly because a Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the throne, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife on 28 June); on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia; on 3 August, Germany declared war on France; on 4 August, Germany invaded Belgium.

In retaliation and to aid an ally, Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August. The Russians crossed their western border at the Ukraine to enter Austro-Hungarian Galicia and pressed on to battle Germany, losing the Battle of Tannenberg (26–30 August), on what came to be called the Eastern Front. Germany marched on France in late August but was stopped in the First Battle of the Marne (6–10 September) on what came to be called the Western Front; here trench warfare ensued until March 1918.

In the Middle East, the leadership of the Ottoman Empire was divided among those who desired neutrality, those who wanted to join the Allies, and those who preferred to join the Central powers. The last group, led by Minister of War Enver Paşa prevailed. The Ottoman cabinet signed a secret alliance with Germany on 2 August. The next week the Ottomans purchased the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau, replacing two Turkish ships (being built by Britain but confiscated by Britain at the outbreak of war). Renamed Sultan Selim Yavuz and Midilli, they shelled Sevastopol and Odessa, Russian cities on the Black Sea, 28 October, bringing the Ottoman Empire into the war; Russia declared war on the Ottomans 4 November; Britain and France declared war on them 5 November. Germany dominated Ottoman military actions, with General Otto Liman von Sanders directing the army and Admiral Wilhelm Souchon, the navy.

In November 1914, a British naval contingent bombarded the entrance to the Dardanelles, and in January 1915 the British organized to break through

the Turkish Straits (from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea at the Bosporus and Dardanelles). Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill convinced the war cabinet that an amphibious attack could accomplish this, thereby taking the Ottomans out of the war and opening a supply route to Russia. Britain's War Secretary Lord Kitchener sabotaged the plan by refusing to send the necessary land troops. Britain's navy unsuccessfully attacked in February and March; in April an Anglo-French army landed on the Gallipoli peninsula, where the Ottoman Turks caused heavy casualties to the Allies, which by then included Italian forces. The British-French-Italian forces almost broke through twice, but the lack of cooperation by the Russians at the Bosporus end of the Straits, faulty intelligence and, most of all, skillful tactics by the Turks and Germans led to a stalemate. The Allies withdrew from the Straits in January 1916.

Another area of major Middle Eastern hostilities was Egypt, under British protection since 18 December 1914. Khedive Abbas Hilmi II was deposed, and the British appointed Sharif Husayn ibn Ali to be sultan of Egypt. Cemal Paşa, Ottoman minister of marine, took over the Fourth Ottoman army—thereby controlling Syria, including Palestine. He sent his forces to make a surprise attack on the Suez Canal in February 1915; they crossed the Negev desert without detection. The Turkish forces could not hold the eastern bank of the canal and retired to the Sinai desert, maintaining bases in Maʿan, Beersheba, and Gaza. Cemal continued to raid the Suez Canal by air, forcing the British to keep a large force there, but in the end the British prevailed. A second assault on the canal was delayed until the summer of 1916 and failed totally. The Turco-German forces were on the defensive there until the end of the war, although in March and April 1917 they withstood a heavy British attack at Gaza, and moved to the offensive in the Yilderim Operation commanded by General Erich von Falkenhayn. But the Turko-German forces were defeated by a combination of factors, including the troops of British General Edmund Allenby (commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force), failure of some of their transport, and sabotage.

Major battles were fought in Russia, where in late 1914 the Turks attempted to take Kars and Batum. In the battles of 1915 and 1916 the Russians took Erzerum, Van, Trabzon, and Erzinjan. They were aided by Armenians—revolutionaries and irregulars. In 1916, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), commander of the Second Ottoman Army, joined the Third Army on the Caucasus front, but little was accomplished due to scarce ammunition, impossible conditions for transportation, and rampant disease. The two revolutions in Russia also affected the Caucasus front, as the Russian troops (except the Armenian and Georgian divisions) withdrew and went home to attend to domestic affairs in 1917. The Turks then occupied Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, but Georgian and German forces retook Batum. A Bolshevik-Armenian coup in Baku and the killing of ten thousand Turks there produced a Turkish drive to recapture the city in September 1918 and to kill many Armenians. At the end of the war, the Caucasus became the Allies' problem.

Iraq was the scene for the major hostilities of the Mesopotamia Campaign. British forces from India seized Basra before Turkey declared war. Traveling up to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Anglo-Indian forces under General Sir Charles Townshend took Kut al-Amara in 1915. In November, his army was defeated south of Baghdad and surrendered to the Sixth Turkish
Army at Kut al-Amara in April 1916. Halil Paşa erred in allowing the Anglo-Indian forces to remain in the south, for they reestablished their hold there, built a railroad, and under Britain's General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, retook Kut al-Amara in March 1917. Baghdad fell immediately after, and the Anglo-Indian forces headed north to Mosul (on the west bank of the Tigris), which they failed to reach by the time of the Mudros Armistice (30 October 1918).

Two national groups within the Ottoman Empire openly aided the enemy during the war: the Arabs and the Armenians. The Armenians followed the orders of the head of the Armenian Orthodox Church (who lived in Yerevan in the Caucasus) that the Russian czar was the protector of all Armenians. Some Armenians rebelled; in the region of Van and Erzurum, Armenians openly battled the Turks proclaiming an Armenian government in Van, April 1915—which touched off the Armenian deportations and the massive killing of Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915/16.

Cemal Paşa's actions in Syria—in arresting and hanging about thirty Arabs in Beirut and Damascus 1915/16, many from prominent families, as well as his refusal to share grain with the starving Lebanese in 1916—pushed many Arabs to desire independence from Ottoman Turkey. This desire was furthered by the proclamation of Arab independence by Sharif Husayn ibn Ali of the Hijaz in June 1916. Husayn's action was part of the outcome of the secret Husayn-McMahon Correspondence.

Another secret negotiation over the division of the Arab Middle East was the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France, Britain, and Russia. An open negotiation between the Zionists and the British had led to the issuance of the November 1917 pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration, concerning a "Jewish national home" in Palestine.

The failure of the German-Turkish campaigns led to the buildup of British troops in Egypt and their move into Palestine. General Allenby led his Egyptian Expeditionary Forces west of the Jordan river, and Jerusalem fell to them in December 1917. Joined by French military detachments, he moved north to take Lebanon, while Hijazi forces, aided by Colonel T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Colonel C. C. Wilson, and Sir Reginald Wingate, paralleled Allenby's actions east of the Jordan River. Damascus fell in October 1918—and although Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and the Seventh Turkish Army held Aleppo, the armistice at Mudros ended all fighting, 30 October 1918.

Four years of war had devastated Ottoman Turkey, and the old order died. A new period for the Middle East began with the peace treaties, the rise to power in Turkey of Mustafa Kemal, the fall of empires, and the creation of new nation-states and spheres of influence.

see also balfour declaration (1917); husayn– mcmahon correspondence (1915–1916); sykes–picot agreement (1916).

Bibliography

Barker, A. J. The Bastard War: The Mesopotamian Campaign of 1914–1918. New York: Dial Press, 1967.

Kedourie, Elie. England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1921. Hassocks, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1978.

Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 3d edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

sara reguer

World War I (1914–18) Essentially a civil war in Europe with global implications, World War I resulted in a shift of economic and cultural influences away from Europe, ultimately enabling new nations to emerge and encouraged others (notably the United States) to challenge Europe's international leadership. The fighting pitted Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire (together styled the Central Powers) against an alliance of Britain, France, Russia, Italy and, eventually, the United States. With the mobilization of 65 million troops, World War I was ultimately the most destructive military conflict in world history to that point.Triggered by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Bosnia-Herzegovina's capital, Sarajevo (allegedly by Serbian nationalists), open warfare grew from a series of strategic alliances that drew in powers that seemingly had little interest in this immediate cause. The Austrians, given unequivocal support by their ally, Germany, decided to crush Serbia's perceived challenge. Russia, fearing domestic uprisings in support of Orthodox Serbia, gave notice that it would support its coreligionists against Catholic Austria-Hungary. German military leaders, particularly Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen, sought to advance their own goals by using the crisis as a justification for attacking Russia's ally, France. That all these nations had been steadily arming over the previous years only further exacerbated the crisis, pushing them toward war. By August 12, all major powers had declared war, and Germany, challenging Belgium's declarations of neutrality, began hostilities by marching through the smaller nation in order to launch an attack on France. France and Britain responded by meeting the German attack. Acting on its own declaration of war, Russia launched an attack on Germany's eastern front.Within three weeks the engaged armies had fought to a virtual standstill. German troops destroyed an entire Russian army at Tannenberg (August 26–30). A week later, British and French stopped Germany's own flanking maneuver through Belgium in the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–9). Soon the western armies had constructed an almost continuous parallel line of defensive systems stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. Trench warfare, most prominent in France and Flanders, but existing in some areas of Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine as well, flouted attempts by Europe's military leaders to return to a war of maneuver by rupturing the enemy's front. To restore the offensive, both sides eventually introduced new weapons such as tanks and chemical warfare. High-explosive shells, recoilless carriages, optical sights, improved communications, and cannon ranges of 20 or more miles made indirect artillery bombardment the dominant force of the battlefield. The application of massive and increasingly sophisticated artillery fire proved to be the most effective means of reducing fortifications. But western defenses were so strong and thickly defended that, although it was possible to break into them, there remained severe limitations to any advance.In 1915, the Central Powers concentrated their resources on the eastern front. The vastness of that front, and the clear superiority of German artillery and leadership, made possible an advance of some 300 miles. Although Italy left its pre-war pact with Germany and Austro-Hungary to join the Allies in 1915, by the end of the year, Berlin dominated Central and southeastern Europe. British efforts to find a “way around” the western front ended in dismal failure in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. In 1916, Germany sought to break the stalemate in the west in the ten-month Battle of Verdun, deliberately seeking a decisive battle of attrition and will. To relieve Verdun, a massive Anglo-French offensive was launched on the Somme in July. Nevertheless, when winter ended the fighting, the western front had changed little. 1917 marked two important changes in the war. In October, Russian revolutionaries bolstered by public discontent over the country's dismal fortunes in the war overthrew the Tsar, and the new Soviet Union removed itself from the fighting. A perhaps more important shift occurred when the previously neutral United States joined the Allies against Germany. President Woodrow Wilson had attempted to keep the United States in a mediating position. Germany's attempt to quickly end the war by stopping U.S. shipments to the Allies through unlimited submarine warfare and secretly propositioning Mexico to attack (discovered when British code-breakers intercepted the Zimmerman Telegram) backfired and drew the United States into the conflict. Wilson's goals, however, differed from his allies' in that he advocated a plan for “peace without victory” he announced in January 1917 and further codified a year later in his Fourteen Points. United States troops, called the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), did relatively little to alleviate the military stalemate when they arrived on European soil. AEF commander-in-chief John J. Pershing planned to launch a win-the-war campaign in 1919. Early AEF actions were less than successful, however. Logistical chaos, flawed tactics, and inexperienced men and officers contributed to a disastrous start to the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September 26– November 11, 1918) and by the armistice Pershing's troops had moved just thirty-four miles. Nevertheless, although only involved in heavy fighting for 110 days, the AEF made vital contributions to Germany's defeat. With tens of thousands of “doughboys” crossing the Atlantic to reinforce the Allies, and with the AEF emerging as a superior fighting force, the exhausted and depleted German army appealed for peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points in early October.

As the Great War concluded with the armistice on November 11, 1918, the Allies were divided on how to construct the peace. American policy was directed toward the repudiation of power politics and the erection of a “permanent” peace. Wilsonianism promised an end to war primarily through democratic institutions, the end of secret diplomacy, self-determination for ethnic minorities, and most especially through a League of Nations. The war had destroyed the old balance of power in Europe, and the peace settlement made revisionist nations out of the two states that would soon dominate the continent, Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet, the peace settlement did not prove satisfactory. British and French insistence on reparations created lingering animosity within Germany. Likewise, the division of colonies and former Central Powers territories aggravated tensions in areas such as North Africa, the Balkans, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula. The United States, the greatest economic beneficiary of the war, helped make the peace, but with its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles refused responsibility for maintaining it. The war ended in a twenty-year truce instead of a “permanent peace.” The failure to achieve Wilson's unrealistic though desirable goal was hardly surprising, but another general war was not inevitable. World War II was caused by many factors, including the flawed peace settlement of 1919, the great Depression of the 1930s, and the psychological scars of World War I, which enfeebled the democracies. But the inability of the victorious powers, especially Great Britain and the United States, to work together to prevent the resurgence of German military power, was certainly one of the most important reasons for the resumption of war in 1939.

WORLD WAR I

World War I was an international conflict primarily involving European nations that was fought between 1914 and 1918. The United States did not enter the conflict until April 1917, but its entry was the decisive event of the war, enabling the Allies (Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia) to defeat the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria). The leadership of President woodrow wilson led to both the conclusion of hostilities and the creation of the league of nations, an international organization dedicated to resolving disputes without war.

The war began on July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. During the late nineteenth century, European nations had negotiated military alliances with each other that called for mutual protection. The Austria-Hungary declaration of war triggered these alliance commitments, leading to the widening of the war between the Allies and Central Powers.

During the next four years, the war was fought primarily on three fronts and on the Atlantic Ocean. The western front was in France, where Germany was opposed by France, Great Britain, and eventually the United States. The eastern front was in Russia, where Germany and Austria-Hungary opposed Russia. The southern front was in Serbia and involved Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and then moved into France. German forces were unable to achieve a decisive victory, however, ever, and the war soon became a conflict of fixed battle lines. French, British, and German soldiers lived and fought in trenches, periodically making assaults on the enemy by entering the "no man's land" between the two sets of trenches. The use of machine guns, tanks, gas warfare, and artillery in these confined battlefields generated unprecedented human carnage on the western front.

Though Germany had more success on the eastern front, neither side had sufficient economic and military strength to achieve victory. In 1916 and early 1917, Wilson sought to bring about negotiations between the Allies and Central Powers that would lead, in his words, to "peace without victory." Wilson's efforts at first appeared promising, but German military successes convinced the Central Powers that they could win the war.

Germany's use of submarine warfare proved to be the key element in provoking the United States' entry into the war. In 1915 a German submarine had torpedoed without warning the British passenger steamship Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 persons died, including 128 U.S. citizens. Popular feeling in the United States against Germany was intense, leading to calls for declaring war on Germany. Wilson, however, sought a diplomatic solution. Though Germany rebuked his call for assuming responsibility for the tragedy, it did not sink any more passenger liners without warning.

Wilson abandoned his peacemaking efforts when Germany announced that unrestricted submarine warfare would begin on February 1, 1917. This meant that U.S. merchant ships were in peril, despite the fact that the United States was a neutral in the war. Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3 and asked Congress later that month for authority to arm merchant ships and take other protective measures. In mid-March German submarines sank three U.S. merchant ships, with heavy loss of life. Wilson called a special session of Congress for April 2 and asked for a declaration of war on Germany. Congress obliged, and on April 6, 1917, Wilson signed the declaration.

The United States immediately moved to raise a large military force by instituting a military draft. It took months, however, to raise, train, and dispatch troops to Europe. The first 85,000 members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), under the command of General John J. Pershing, arrived in France in June 1917. By the end of the war in November 1918, there were 2 million soldiers in the AEF.

Germany realized that U.S. war production and financial strength reduced Germany's chances of victory. In March 1918 Germany launched its last great offensive on the western front. U.S. troops saw their first extended action in the Battle of the Marne, halting the German advance on June 4. During the second Battle of the Marne, U.S. and French troops again stopped the German advance and successfully counterattacked. The Allies began pushing back the German army all along the western front, signaling the beginning of the end of German resistance.

Wilson renewed his peace efforts by proposing a framework for negotiations. On January 8, 1918, he delivered an address to Congress that named Fourteen Points to be used as the guide for a peace settlement. The fourteenth point called for a general association of nations that would guarantee political independence and territorial integrity for all countries. In October 1918 Germany asked Wilson to arrange a general armistice based on the Fourteen Points and the immediate start of peace negotiations. Germany finally capitulated and signed an armistice on November 11, 1918.

The 1919 treaty of versailles ended World War I and imposed disarmament, reparations, and territorial changes on Germany. The treaty also established the League of Nations, an international organization dedicated to resolving world conflicts peacefully. Wilson, however, was unable to convince the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty, because it was opposed to U.S. membership in the League of Nations.

World War I also saw the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. The specter of a worldwide Communist movement generated fears in the United States that socialists, anarchists, and Communists were undermining democratic institutions. During the war, socialist opponents of the war were convicted of sedition and imprisoned. In 1920 the federal government rounded up 6,000 aliens who it considered to be politically subversive. These "Palmer Raids," named after Attorney General A. mitchell palmer, violated basic civil liberties. Agents entered and searched homes without warrants, held persons without specific charges for long periods of time, and denied them legal counsel. Hundreds of aliens were deported.

further readings

Macmillan, Margaret Olwen. 2002. Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. New York: Random House.

May, Christopher N. 1989. In the Name of War: Judicial Review and the War Powers Since 1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press

Murphy, Paul L. c1979. World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States. New York: Norton.

cross-references

Communism; "Fourteen Points" (Appendix, Primary Document); Socialism.

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

First World War In August 1914 Britain ostensibly went to war against Germany because of the latter's invasion of Belgium. In reality Britain fought the First World War to prevent Germany dominating Europe and, with the help of her Austrian and Turkish allies, threatening the British empire. The men who made British policy wanted a peace settlement which would reduce Germany's power and also ensure that neither Russia nor France could tilt the European balance against Britain or menace Britain's imperial possessions.

In 1914 the Asquith government believed that the war would reach its climax in 1917. Britain could achieve her objectives at least cost by allowing her allies to carry the weight of the continental land war with only token British assistance. Meanwhile the Royal Navy would undermine the German economy by blockade and Britain would offer financial help to her allies. This policy collapsed because France and Russia were not willing to fight for three years without British military support. By late 1915 the government had reluctantly accepted that if they failed to give their allies large‐scale support on the continent, France and Russia might prefer to make a negotiated peace. But it was equally obvious that the cost of increasing Britain's commitment to the continental land war might be self‐defeating. The British offensive on the Somme in 1916 was an enormous gamble. The government was wagering that the Entente could win the war before Britain went bankrupt.

The attack failed, for although both the British and German armies suffered enormously, the Germans had no intention of asking for peace terms. Instead they tried to starve Britain into submission by launching a campaign of unrestricted U‐boat warfare against British shipping. This was the strategic situation which Lloyd George inherited when he became prime minister in December 1916. Lloyd George knew that the people had to be convinced that their sacrifices were reaping tangible victories, and if they could not be won on the western front, they had to be gained elsewhere. One reason why he supported offensives at Salonika in Greece, in Palestine, and in northern Italy was his belief that a victory gained on one of those fronts would provide a much‐needed stimulus to British morale.

The new government also knew that victory could only be achieved in co‐operation with its allies. But in the spring of 1917 the pillars upon which British strategy had rested began to crumble. In March 1917 the British greeted the first Russian Revolution with cautious enthusiasm, hoping that Russia would follow the same path as France in 1794; from the ruins of the tsarist regime would emerge a new military colossus. But their hopes soon gave way to the fear that Russia would desert the alliance, and that the Germans would move large numbers of troops to the western front. In the meantime a large part of the French army mutinied. At sea German U‐boats were sinking so many merchant ships that Britain was close to starvation. The only cause for optimism in the Entente camp was that in April 1917 the USA declared war on Germany.

The debate about the future of British strategy in the summer of 1917 therefore concerned one question: what should be the new timetable for administering the knock‐out blow against Germany? One option was to divert troops to northern Italy. The Italians had entered the war on Britain's side in May 1915. If they could defeat the Austrians, they would destroy Germany's ambition of establishing an empire stretching from Hamburg, through Austria‐Hungary,Bulgaria, and Turkey, to Baghdad. The alternative was to permit the commander‐in‐chief, Sir Douglas Haig, to have his way and mount an offensive in Flanders. Haig believed that he could force the Germans to sue for peace by Christmas 1917. The politicians doubted, but allowed him to try.

The third battle of Ypres in July 1917 was a failure. Haig then launched a second offensive, using massed tanks, at Cambrai, but that also failed. In October Italy suffered a major defeat at Caporetto and in November the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and soon signed an armistice. The arrival of the American army was even slower than the British had anticipated. Lloyd George decided that Britain must preserve her army and economic staying‐power in 1918. The knock‐out blow against Germany would be delayed until 1919, when the arrival of the Americans would give the Entente a crushing superiority.

Lloyd George's timetable for victory in 1919 collapsed because in the spring of 1918 the Germans made their own final attempt to win the war. But by June the last German offensive had been stopped, and in July the Entente's armies began a counter‐offensive, forcing the Germans back. The way in which the war ended surprised Britain and her allies. As late as mid‐ October Haig did not think that the German army was so badly beaten that the German government would accept armistice terms. When the armistice negotiations began the British had to consider several conflicting factors. Should they continue fighting into 1919, to invade Germany and inflict a Carthaginian peace upon the German people? Would such a settlement threaten the future peace of Europe by leaving the French too powerful and by making the Germans vengeful? Were the British people willing to fight for another year? It was only after weighing these factors they opted for an early peace and the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918.

World War I (1914–18) A war fought between the Allied Powers – Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and Serbia – who were joined in the course of the war by Italy (1915), Portugal and Romania (1916), the USA and Greece (1917) – against the Central Powers: Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ottoman Turkey, and Bulgaria (from 1915). The war's two principal causes were fear of Germany's colonial ambitions and European tensions arising from shifting diplomatic divisions and nationalist agitation, especially in the BALKANS. It was fought in six main theatres of war. On the WESTERN FRONT fighting was characterized by trench warfare, both sides believing that superiority in numbers would ultimately prevail despite the greater power of mechanized defence. Aerial warfare developed from reconnaissance into bombing and the use of fighter aircraft in air-to-air combat. On the Eastern Front the initial Russian advance was defeated at Tannenberg (1914). With Turkey also attacking Russia, the Dardanelles expedition (1915) was planned in order to provide relief, but it failed. Temporary Russian success against Austria-Hungary was followed (1917) by military disaster and the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION. The Mesopotamian Campaign was prompted by Britain's desire to protect oil installations and to conquer outlying parts of the Ottoman empire. A British advance in 1917 against the Turks in Palestine, aided by an Arab revolt, succeeded. In north-east Italy a long and disastrous campaign after Italy had joined the Allies was waged against Austria-Hungary, with success only coming late in 1918. Campaigns against Germany's colonial possessions in Africa and the Pacific were less demanding. At sea there was only one major encounter, the inconclusive Battle of JUTLAND (1916). A conservative estimate of casualties of the war gives 10 million killed and 20 million wounded. An armistice was signed and peace terms agreed in the VERSAILLES PEACE SETTLEMENT.

World War 1 (1914–18) International conflict, also known as the Great War, precipitated by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbs in Sarajevo (June 28, 1914). Austria declared war on Serbia (July 28), Russia mobilized in support of Serbia (from July 29), Germany declared war on Russia (August 1) and France (August 3), and Britain declared war on Germany (August 4). World War 1 resulted from growing tensions in Europe, exacerbated by the rise of the German Empire since 1871 and the decline of Ottoman power in the Balkans. The chief contestants were the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France, and Russia). Many other countries were drawn in: Ottoman Turkey joined the Central Powers in 1914, Bulgaria in 1915. Italy joined the Western Allies in 1915, Romania in 1916 and, decisively, the USA in 1917. Russia withdrew following the Russian Revolution (1917). In Europe fighting was largely static. The Allies checked the initial German advance through Belgium at the Marne, and the Western Front settled into a war of attrition, with huge casualties but little progress. On the Eastern Front, the Germans checked the initial Russian advance, and overran Poland before stagnation set in. An Anglo-French effort to relieve the Russians by attacking Gallipoli (1916) failed. Italy and Austria became bogged down on the Isonzo Front. Campaigns were also fought outside Europe – against the Turks in the Middle East, and the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific. Only one major naval battle was fought, at Jutland (1916). The naval blockade of Germany caused severe food shortages and helped to end the war. An armistice was agreed in November 1918 and peace treaties were signed at Versailles (1919). An estimated 10 million people died in the war.

World War I, major conflict involving most of the nations of the world (1914–18), and sometimes called the Great War. It was an outgrowth of European territorial problems and nationalism, but the U.S. was finally brought to take an active part (April 6, 1917), the immediate cause being the unrestricted German submarine warfare upon Atlantic shipping. On the side of the British, French, Belgian, and other Allied forces, opposing Germany and the Central Powers, the American Expeditionary Force from October 23, 1917, until the Armistice (Nov. 11, 1918) participated in many battles on the western front, including such critical engagements as the battles of Cantigny, Château‐Thierry, Belleau Wood, Saint‐Mihiel, the Marne, and the Argonne offensive. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and a separate treaty of peace was signed by the U.S. and Germany at Berlin (Aug. 25, 1921).

The many works of American literature that deal with the war and its aftermath include Anderson and Stallings's What Price Glory?, E.E. Cummings's The Enormous Room, Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

WORLD WAR I

When the United States entered World War I (1914–1918) by declaring war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the global conflict had been underway for more than two and a half years. Also known as the Great War, World War I started as a result of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. What began as a skirmish between Austria-Hungary and Serbia (the archduke was killed in the Serbian city of Sarajevo) quickly snowballed into a massive conflict when these nations' more powerful allies joined the dispute. Europe's existing alliance structure pitted the Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—against the Triple Entente—France, Britain, and Russia. After provocation from Germany, whose naval fleets had begun to sink American merchant ships in British waters, President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) made the decision to mobilize U.S. troops.

Wilson's decision had immediate economic repercussions, as the U.S. government faced the task of raising money for the war effort. Analysts determined that the country would need upwards of $33.5 billion to finance its participation in the war, plus money for loans to European allies. With the War Loan Act (1917), Congress proposed that the U.S. would provide $3 billion in such loans, though the sum was later increased. Now it fell upon President Wilson and Congress to determine where the necessary money would come from. They offered a solution by passing the War Revenue Act (1917), which stated that 74 percent of funding for the war would come from taxation imposed on the highest individual and corporate incomes. With this bill Wilson and Congress demonstrated an intent to place the financial burden on the wealthy and to give a break to middle- and low-income individuals and families. A year later Congress passed another revenue act, which increased this burden on the nation's wealthiest, who were now called upon to provide 80 percent of funding for the war.

In another move designed to raise money, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a series of bonds called liberty loans. These were long-term bonds that promised to earn the holder 3.5 to 4.25 percent in interest. The campaign to sell the bonds was massive in scope. Liberty loan committees formed in all regions of the country, and spokespersons appeared in theaters, hotels, restaurants, and other public gathering places. Even clergymen contributed to the marketing effort, urging members of their congregations to support the country through liberty loan purchase. Banks stepped forward to lend money for liberty loans at rates lower than the interest on the bonds. The campaign was a tremendous success. Of the five bonds issued between May 1917 and April 1919 (the last of these was called a victory loan), all of them were oversubscribed.

Although participation in World War I required vast government spending, the country's domestic economy benefited greatly from the effort. Established in July 1917, a War Industries Board endeavored to tap the nation's industrial resources while protecting its basic economic infrastructure. A demand for supplies, weaponry, food, and other materials resulted in increased productivity among manufacturers and farmers. It was a boom time not only for large corporations, many of whose profits wildly multiplied, but also for farmers, who saw a rise in agricultural prices, and for blue-collar workers, whose wages increased. Businesses expanded their international markets by exporting goods to European ally countries. All in all, American industry profited enormously from increasing its production, exploiting its resources, and mobilizing its workforce.

Other participating nations, however, suffered more losses than gains during the course of the war. After the defeat of the Central Powers and the signing of an armistice in 1918, the Triple Entente and its allies pressed for reparations from Germany, which more than any other nation was held responsible for the war. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, placed the bulk of financial responsibility on Germany, and a Reparations Commission was established to determine the amount that the defeated Country would pay in damages to property and civilians. When the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the 1919 treaty, the United States forfeited its place on the commission, which decided in June 1920 that Germany would pay upwards of three billion gold marks a year for 35 years. The committee increased this amount in the following year, demanding a sum that Germany simply could not produce (indeed, in 1933 then-German leader Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) announced Germany's refusal to make further payments). Although the United States did not receive compensation for damages directly from Germany, it did collect payment on loans from its European allies, who derived these sums from German reparations.

American participation in World War I resulted in the loss of lives and a tremendous output of its financial resources. In addition to the $33 billion the U.S. government initially spent on the war, interest rates and veterans' benefits increased this sum to $112 billion. Yet the economic gains that were achieved during wartime far outweighed such losses. Between 1914 and the end of the decade, average annual incomes rose from $580 to $1,300. Moreover, the increase in international trade continued to raise profits for various industries. Propelled by the economic boost of war, America ushered in a new decade—the prosperous 1920s.

See also: War and the Economy, War Industries Board

FURTHER READING

Churchill, Allen. Over Here!: An Informal Re-Creation of the Home Front in World War I. New York: Dodd Mead, 1968.

Dictionary of American History. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976, s.v. "Liberty Loans" and "Reparation Commission."

O'Brien, Patrick. "The Economic Effects of the Great War,"History Today, December 1994.

Tompkins, Vincent, ed., American Decades: 1910– 1919. TK CITY: Gale Research, 1980–1989.

The Oxford Companion to American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966, s.v. "Liberty Loans."

First World War see World War I.

First World War See World War I

First World War, see World War I

First World War See WORLD WAR I.