World War I (1914-1918)

World War I (abbreviated WWI), also known as the First World War, the Great War and "The War to End All Wars" was a global military conflict that took place mostly in Europe between 1914 and 1918. more...

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It was a total war which left millions dead and helped to shape the modern world.

The Allied Powers, led by France, Russia, the British Empire, and later Italy and the United States, defeated the Central Powers: Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.

Much of the fighting in World War I took place along the Western Front, within a system of opposing manned trenches and fortifications (separated by an empty space between the trenches called the "no man's land") running from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. On the Eastern Front, the vast eastern plains and limited rail network prevented a trench warfare stalemate from developing, although the scale of the conflict was just as large. Hostilities also occurred on and under the sea and — for the first time — from the air. More than nine million soldiers died on the various battlefields, and millions more civilians perished.

The war caused the disintegration of four empires: the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian. Germany lost its overseas empire, and new states such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were created, or recreated, as was Poland.

World War I created a decisive break with the old world order that had emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, which was modified by the mid-19th century’s nationalistic revolutions. The results of World War I would be important factors in the development of World War II 21 years later.

Causes

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife, in Sarajevo. Princip was a member of Young Bosnia, a group whose aims included the unification of the South Slavs and independence from Austria-Hungary (see also: the Black Hand). The assassination in Sarajevo set into motion a series of fast-moving events that escalated into a full-scale war. However, the causes of the conflict were multiple and complex.

Arms races

The naval arms race that developed between Britain and Germany was intensified by the 1906 launch of HMS Dreadnought, a revolutionary warship that rendered all previous battleships obsolete. (Britain maintained a large lead over Germany in all categories of warship.) Paul Kennedy has pointed out that both nations believed in Alfred Thayer Mahan's thesis that command of the sea was vital to a great nation.

David Stevenson described the armaments race as "a self-reinforcing cycle of heightened military preparedness", while David Herrman viewed the shipbuilding rivalry as part of a general movement towards war. However, Niall Ferguson argues that Britain’s ability to maintain an overall advantage signifies that change within this realm was insignificant and therefore not a factor in the movement towards war.

Read more at Wikipedia.org