Lang - First World War For Dummies

First World War For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester ( www.wiley.com ) in association with Imperial War Museums

This edition first published 2014

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Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Giving the war a name

Looking at what caused the war and who fought in it

Scanning the fronts and theatres of war

Breaking through in technology and medicine

Reviewing the course of the war

Working out why the war still matters today

You can find plenty of battles and generals and details in this book, and theyre all important to know about, but plunging straight into the events of the war can be a bit disorientating, especially if youre not quite sure of what else was happening in the period. So, in this chapter I try to give you a roadmap of the war, to explain who was fighting whom, where the fighting took place and to give you an overall shape of the way the war developed.

Thinking of the war having a shape might seem a bit strange if your picture of the war is essentially one in which soldiers spent their whole time sitting in the trenches, launching occasional suicidal attacks on the enemy lines. However, although it might not have seemed like it to the ordinary soldiers at the time, or to many people since, the war did have a shape and a direction: each side did try various ways to break through the enemy lines and to win. The generals and political leaders learned many hard lessons along the way and, believe it or not, they did try to avoid repeating their most disastrous mistakes. Of course, they didnt always succeed, but this chapter gives you an overview of what they were trying to do.

How about starting with the basics, like what exactly the war should be called? This might sound like a silly question, but its not. Wars dont come ready-packaged with a name on top: they usually get named after theyve happened and people often disagree sometimes quite sharply on what to call them. For example, what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War is, to the rest of the world, a little thing called the Second World War. The Russian name suggests that the war on the Eastern Front was the most important area of conflict and that the rest was just a sideshow. Seeing why some other countries may disagree isnt hard!

Even the dates of wars can be problematic. Most of the countries involved in the First World War went to war in 1914, but not all of them: Italy only entered in 1915, Romania in 1916 and the United States not until 1917. Most people think the war ended in 1918, but it didnt: the fighting ended then, but the war itself wasnt over (and it could have been renewed at any time) until the peace treaty was signed, which was in 1919. Some war memorials do carry the dates 19141919 and people often think its a mistake, but in fact those memorials are the ones that get it right!

While it was going on, people usually referred to the war as the European War or the Great War a name that people often still use today. (Of course, no one called it the First World War at the time for the very good reason that there hadnt been a second one then!) Towards the end, people sometimes referred to it as the War to End All Wars: the war had been so costly and so terrible that it had to have been fought for something. (Not surprisingly, after the Second World War, this phrase became something of a bad joke.) With similar optimism, US President Wilson sometimes called it a War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, though that certainly wasnt what anyone had in mind when they started it. Years later, after the Second World War, some people did refer for a while to the First and Second German Wars, which suggested that the Germans had been entirely responsible for them both, but the names havent lasted and were never entirely accurate anyway.

More recently, and especially in the non-western world, some historians have questioned the use of the term world war. The far-away quarrels between Austria-Hungary and Serbia or between Britain and Germany were of no interest to people in Africa or Asia, and they only got dragged into them by their European colonial masters. What was really happening, these scholars say, was a European Civil War the first of two. Its not difficult to see where this idea comes from, but it rather ignores the role played by non-European countries such as Japan, China, the United States and some of the South American states, which werent European colonies and which came into the war very much following their own agenda.