1. COLLEGE - LIMASSOL BUSINESS STUDIES European History Lecture 8

2. Topics  The outbreak of the War: War in the West 1914-1917.  Battles of Marne, Verdun, Somme.  The Eastern Front 1914-1916.  Defeat of Russia.  The Italian Front 1915-1917 and the Gallipoli Campaign.  The War in the Middle East and at Sea.

3. Topics  The Intervention of the United States and the End of World War I.  The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles.

4. The outbreak of the War: War in the West 1914-1917.  During the first days of August 1914, more than 5 million young European men responded almost without opposition to military call-up.  Many of them boarded the troop trains with genuine enthusiasm.  The bands, banners, and young women with flowers were not mere widow dressing.

5. The outbreak of the War: War in the West 1914-1917.

6.  Each government had been remarkably successful in portraying the other side as the aggressor.  In London German shops were damaged in London, and German music was dropped from orchestra programs.  In German many people felt they were defending German Kultur against the sly mercantile English and the decadent Slavs and French.  The Frenchmen went to war convinced that they were defending humanitarian liberty against the booted Prussians.

7. The outbreak of the War: War in the West 1914-1917.  All the ethnic groups of the troubled Austro- Hungarian Empire except some South Slavs and Czechs rallied with enthusiasm to Switzerland.  The Russians turned away from strikes and domestic opposition in August to face a common enemy.  The degree of popular enthusiasm surprised even the Russian rulers.

8. The outbreak of the War: War in the West 1914-1917.  The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu proved mathematically that a war in Europe could not last more than six months.  The British Admiralty had stocked only a six- months’ supply of naval fuel oil.  Most of the soldiers who boarded troop trains in August 1914 were certain that they would be home by Christmas.

9. Crowds outside Buckingham Palace cheer King George, Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales following the Declaration of War in August 1914.

10. The First Battle of Marne  On September 4, German armies crossed the Belgium frontier.  Moltke began to execute the Schlieffen Plan: The Germans wanted to take Paris.  The French armies made an effort to recapture Alsace-Lorraine.  By the first week of September 1914, the Germans had reached the River Marne and the French government had fled Paris for Bordeaux.  Some German units covered twenty to thirty miles a day on foot.

11. The First Battle of Marne  The French-British counterattack from September 6 to 10, has became known as the First battle of the Marne.  General Joseph Joffre French Commander whose legendary appetite and sound sleep during the German advance helped steady French nerves, coolly waited for the moment to strike back.  Moltke was ill and indecisive kept distance with his army commanders.

12. General Joseph Joffre French Commander

13. The First Battle of Marne  Under General Alexander von Kluck, the German First army exposed two vulnerable spots to the watchful Joffre.  Kluck wheeled east of Paris, exposing his flank to the German forces in Paris that were now left outside the trap.  Next, when he turned part of his army to face the danger from Paris he opened a gap between his own force and the next German army to the east.

14. Alexander von Kluck

15. The First Battle of Marne  On September 6, the French reserves in Paris were rushed out in the city’s entire taxi fleet to attack Kluck’s exposed flank;  The first units of the British Expeditionary Force pushed cautiously into the gap between Kluck and the German Second Army.  By September 10, the Germans had fallen back along the Marne, and Paris was saved.

16. The First Battle of Marne: French soldiers waiting for assault behind a ditch

17. Battle of Verdun  The Battle of Verdun was one of the longest and bloodiest battles in human history.  The battle was between German and French forces and took place from February 21, 1916 to December 18, 1916. The location was around the city of Verdun in the northeastern part of France.

18. Battle of Verdun

19.  In the end of 1915, Falkenhayn as Moltke’s successor, proposed to reopen the campaign in the west with a plan calculated to increase the French casualty rate.  The target chosen was the French city of Verdun: strategically the vital hinge where the front turned southward along the Meuse River.  A historically strongpoint whose southward loss would cripple French spirit.

20. Erich von Falkenhayn

21. Battle of Verdun  On February 21, 1916, the Germans began a massive artillery barrage designed to obliterate the French trenches protecting Verdun.  General Philippe Petain of the French military effort stated: ‘They shall not pass’.  In the end the Germans didn’t pass but the cost was staggering.  Those who lived were often maimed physically and mentally.

22. General Philippe Petain ‘They shall not pass’.

23. Battle of Verdun  More than 400, 000 on both sides did not escape with their lives.  The German army had been bled white just as much as the French.  The greatest of all First World War battles had consumed the young men of a medium- sized town each morning and afternoon for ten months.

24. Battle of Verdun

26. Battle of Somme  The Battle of the Somme took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 on either side of the river Somme in France.  The British Army, mount a joint offensive with the French Army against the German Army, which had occupied large areas of France since its invasion of the country in August 1914.

27. An overall view of the front in the region of the Somme before the battle.

28. Battle of Somme  Sir Douglas Haig prepared the classic piercing operation.  A ferocious artillery barrage of eight days’ duration was supposed to open the way for three cavalry divisions to pass through.  One-half of the men and three-quarters of the officers were either killed or wounded.  The British gained a mere 120 square miles for 400,000 casualties, and the cavalry could never go into action.

29. The Eastern Front 1914-1916  In 1915 the Germans came to the aid of their allies in the east.  General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff used their new prestige to extract reinforcements from the High Command.  A fresh German-Austrian force battered an opening in the Russian line in Galicia on May, 2, 1915, initiating one of the great retreats of Russian history.

30. General Paul von Hindenburg

31. General Erich Ludendorff

32. Defeat of Russia.  Demoralized and short of ammunition, the tsar’s armies reeled back out of Galicia 300 miles into Russian territory, until winter finally terminated operations.  The great Russian retreat of 1915 nevertheless cost European Russia 15 percent of its territory, 10 percent of its railroads, 30 percent of its industries, and nearly 20 percent of its population.  The Russian army’s casualties are said to have amounted to 2.5 million killed, wounded, or captured.

33. The Italian Front 1915-1917 and the Gallipoli Campaign.  The Entente found itself blocked from sea contact with Russia and saw its colonial holdings threatened.  The British and French reacted with the landing at Gallipoli in April 1915.  After Bulgaria’s entry into the war on the Central Powers' side and Serbia’s defeat in October 1915, the Allies considered the peninsula untenable, and withdraw from Gallipoli in January 1916.

34. The Italian Front 1915-1917 and the Gallipoli Campaign.  The Allies also successfully outbid the Central Powers in the effort to bring Italy into the war.  Italy had declared its neutrality on August 3, 1914.  Italian participation in the war became more desirable to both sides.  Although Italy had signed treaties with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1882, the Entente could better accede to Italian ambitions in the Austrian alpine and Adriatic regions.

35. The Italian Front 1915-1917 and the Gallipoli Campaign.  Italian Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnini signed the secret Treaty of London with Britain and France on April 16, 1915.  Italy joined the war on the Entente side and opened an additional southern front against Austria-Hungary.

36. The Italian Front 1915-1917 and the Gallipoli Campaign.  In exchange for declarizing the war on the Central Powers, Italy was to receive important gains in the Alps (the Italian-speaking Trentino and part of the German-speaking Tirol up to the Brenner Pass), the head of Adriatic Sea, the Dodecanese Islands, and the south coast of Turkey, as well as compensation in Africa if Britain and France made gains there.

37. The Gallipoli Campaign.

40. The War in the Middle East and at Sea.  From the first hours of war, Britain and France used their naval superiority to destroy German warships.  The heavy German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were finally run down and sunk by a superior British force off the Falklands in December 1914, and the Dresden was sunk off Chile in March 1915.

41. Scharnhorst

42. Gneisenau

43. The War in the Middle East and at Sea.  There remained no effective obstacles to an Allied blockade of Germany and Austria-Hungary.  It was expected that the Central Powers would be unable to sustain a long, modern war without imports from overseas.  In retaliation, Germany used its submarine fleet to impose a counter blockade.  On February 4, 1915, the German governor declared the area around Britain, Ireland and northern France a war zone within which any ship, even neutral would be torpedoed without warning.

44. The War in the Middle East and at Sea.  After the sinking of some passenger ships had the effect of creating a strong current of prowar opinion in the United States.  The following September, German submarine action in the Atlantic was restricted to avoid further complications with Washington.

45. World War I at Sea - Naval Battles

46. The Intervention of the United States and the End of World War I.  In the end of the war all the nations were exhausted.  In 1918, America’s President Wilson announced that he wanted a peace in which every nation would determine its own fate, many of their troops gave up.  Germany and Austria were forced to agree a ceasefire  Those who had survive, returned home to their starving families.

47. The Intervention of the United States and the End of World War I.  There was to be a peace treaty, and the negotiations were to be held in the ancient palace of Versailles, St. Germain and the Trianon, Austria, Hungary and Germany sent envoys to Paris, only to discover that they were excluded from these negotiations.

48. President Wilson

49. The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles.  The Paris Peace Conference was an international meeting convened in January 1919 at Versailles just outside Paris.  Purpose: to establish the terms of the peace after World War.  Thirty nations participated.  The Big Four: the representatives of Great Britain, France, the United States, and Italy.  Formulation of the Treaty of Versailles: a treaty that articulated the compromises reached at the conference.

50. The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles.  It included a plan to form a League of Nations that would serve as an international forum and an international collective security arrangement. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was a strong advocate of the League as he believed it would prevent future wars.

51. The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles.  Germany was subjected to strict punitive measures under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.  The Germans had to surrender all the colonies and lands which they had taken from France in 1870, and pay sums of money to the victors each year.  They also signed a formal deglaration saying that Germany alone was to blame for the war.  The Germans accepted responsibility.  The Austrians and the Hungarians fared little better.

52. The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles.

53. References  Gombrich, E., H. A little history of the world. 2 nd edition, 2008.  Paxton, O.,R., 1997. Europe in the Twentieth Century.