Forgotten war

TSAR NICHOLAS II GOT RUSSIA INVOLVED IN WWI

The Kremlin and hits civilian-clad historians recently ignited ideological battles over the causes and motive forces of World War II, which have swept over entire Europe. Against this backdrop, people somehow forgot about another event in the 20th century that played an equally important role for humankind. Another possible reason is that this year does not mark a landmark anniversary — just 95 years since the war broke out. Yet another reason for this forgetfulness may lie in the fact that WWI events appear to be so distant that they are no longer connected with the current problems. Or can it be that the world economic crisis coupled with global climate change makes the lessons from the past less appealing for the present?

Anyway, we should not forget that the World War I broke out on Aug. 1, 1914, engulfing all of the continents and spreading to all the oceans. This war quickly demolished the fixed notions about the frontline and the rear, the means of conducting warfare, the military ethics (such as it was), methods of governance and running the economy, and, finally, if you pardon the lofty words, the notions of good and evil, right and wrong. This war also for a long time suspended the dynamic-evolutionary tendencies of social development, replacing them with revolutionary outbursts, and led to the emergence of the first totalitarian dictatorship regimes and, at the same time, to liberation attempts made by a series of nations, including Ukraine, which were subject to imperial rule.

A few facts about WWI are in order. It continued for over four years — Aug. 1, 1914 through Nov. 11, 1918 — and involved 38 states with the total population of over one billion people (out of 1.8 billion living on the earth at the time). The death toll was 10 million people, while another 20 million were wounded or maimed.

In the early 20th century, two military-political blocs emerged in Europe — the Allied Powers (France, Britain, and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy). The former group was striving to assert its dominance, whereas the latter considered itself wronged and wanted to gain control over new territories outside Europe and redraw the European borders in its favor. Both alliances were building their military muscles, and their armed forces reached the maximum admissible size in peaceful time — nearly one percent of the total population. At the same time, these armies and fleets were for a long while used only as factors of political pressure rather than immediate military impact. No one, either on the top or at the bottom of society, wanted a big war, but the dynastic conceit of the former and patriotic sentiments of the latter groups significantly limited the room for political maneuvering.

The immediate cause that led to WWI was the Austria-Serbia conflict. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a member of the clandestine organization “Young Bosnia,” assassinated in Sarajevo Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, a member of the Habsburg dynasty and the Commander in Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Army. The Young Bosnia fighters were backed by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, chief of Serbia’s military intelligence service and head of a powerful international terrorist network.

Therefore, the ultimatum of July 23, which Austria-Hungary gave the Serbian government, was absolutely justified: it was about the liquidation of terrorist bases on the territory of the latter state. Serbia agreed to accept the terms, except for the one that envisaged the participation of the Austrian police in an investigation on the Serbian territory. The Serbs were urged to issue this denial by the Russian government, which declared its support for “brothers Slavs.” Furthermore, official Belgrade did not condemn the assassination and offered no condolences to the Austrian government, while Belgrade newspapers openly gloated over the event. So the Austria-Hungary declared war, and its trooped entered the Serbian territory in late July.

In its turn, the Russian government started military mobilization in a number of districts, which eventually led to total mobilization. In response, Germany also launched a mobilization campaign on August 1, and late that day the German ambassador handed over to the Russian minister of foreign affairs in St. Petersburg a note declaring war on Russia. Later in August, a note to the same effect was given to the French government. Germany invaded Belgium without prior notice, and this caused Great Britain to immediately join in. Soon Japan came down on the side of the Entente forces, while the Ottoman Empire joined the Austria-Germany alliance. (Meanwhile, Italy was bidding its time.)

At the beginning of the war, waves of chauvinism swept across the combatant states. In the Russian Empire, crowds looted stores owned by people with German surnames, St. Petersburg became Petrograd, and the famous Ukrainian linguist Yurii (George) Shevelov and his father, a colonel in the tsarist army, got rid of the “unpatriotic” surname Shneider. In Britain, the ruling Hannover dynasty adopted the family name of Windsor.

Initially, the German army was guided by so-called Schlieffen’s plan. (General Schlieffen headed German’s General Staff in 1891–1905.) According to this plan, in the case of a war on two fronts, the enemies had to be fought separately. At the early stage of the war, nearly 80 percent of Germany’s armed forces had to be concentrated in the west, while the rest were assigned to the east. After routing the French army within four to six weeks and capturing Paris, Germany had to transfer the troops to the east and inflict a crushing defeat on the Russian forces. This plan used Germany’s advantage in the amount and quality of weapons over the Entente and its mobilization readiness. The latter had greater material and human resources, which would give it a significant advantage in case of prolonged warfare.

Overcoming the fierce resistance of the Belgian army (Belgium remained neutral), the German troops rapidly advanced. The French army tried to stop them at the Franco-Belgian border but was defeated. The way to Paris was open; the French government left the capital and moved to Bordeaux. On September 5–12, a grandiose battle was raging on River Marne, to the northeast of Paris. The German command hoped to encircle the French and capture France’s capital. However, the French troops and the English forces, which had disembarked on the continent, repelled all attacks and counterattacked.

After a short while, the frontline was settled. It stretched for 600 kilometers — from the borders of Switzerland to the Atlantic Ocean. Prior to that, the war was based on maneuvering; now it was stationary: both sides dug hard into the ground, building multiple lines of trenches, fortifications made of wood, dirt, and concrete, and mine fields and rows of barbed wire in front.

At this time, two Russian armies tried to conquer Eastern Prussia on the Eastern Front in a flash but suffered a defeat after initial success; 135,000 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner, while General Samsonov, commander of the 2nd army, committed suicide. The Russians had better success in fighting Austria-Hungary: they captured Lviv, advanced to the Carpathian Mountains, and started to cross them in an effort to reach the Great Hungarian plain.

In the Balkans, the Serbian army surprisingly repelled the Austrian attack. After the Ottoman Empire joined the warfare, the Russo-Turkish front extended to 350 kilometers, and hostilities erupted in Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, and in a number of German colonies in Africa.

BARBED WIRE AND POISONOUS GASES

In November 1914 it was to everyone that the blitzkrieg both sides had hoped for fell through. The war transformed into a positional, trench-based standoff in which troop advancement was limited to several kilometers. To obtain control over short distances of such length, dozens of thousands of people were sacrificed to fierce shell and machine-gun fire. This frontline could have been overpowered only by the concentrated use of thousands of cannons, which would have leveled the enemy’s trenches with the ground. Instead, on April 22, 1915, near the Belgian city of Ypres, the German army carried out a gas attack, the first one in world history, which killed a third of the 15,000 English soldiers who were poised with chlorine.

In their turn, the Brits and the French tried to block passage through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles and, at the second stage of the operation, attack Istanbul from the sea. However, the troops’ landing was a failure that led to huge losses.

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire) after the Entente promised to transfer to it Trieste and other Austrian regions with Italian population, as well as offered Albania as its protectorate. Around the same time, following a preparatory bombardment on the Eastern Front, the German and Austrian troops attacked and overwhelmed the Russian defense. Within the next five months they occupied Galicia, Bukovyna, part of Volhynia, Poland, Lithuania, and part of Latvia and Belarus. The Russia army’s losses were huge: 850,000 men killed or wounded and 900,000 taken prisoner.

Later the front stabilized along the line from the Gulf of Riga to Romanian borders. Impressed by German victories, Bulgaria declared war on the Entente. Now the Ottoman Empire was able to communicate with its allies via the Bulgarian territory. A direct consequence of Bulgaria’s move was the defeat of Serbia by the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops.

The campaign of 1916 was launched on the Western Front. On February 21, the German troops mounted an offensive along a 40-kilometer stretch after fierce shelling. The main target was the fort of Verdun, the core of the French defense. However, after several months of bloody warfare and heavy casualties, the Germans advanced but only by seven kilometers. They managed to enter the ruins of Verdun’s central fort, but the several dozens of exhausted soldiers that did it had no physical or moral strength to continue the battle and retreated. Nearly a million soldiers and officers, both German and French, were killed in the Battle of Verdun, which lasted until December.

Capitalizing on the fact that Germany’s General Staff focused its attention on Verdun, the French and British troops mounted an attack near the Somme River, which led to the Battle of the Somme. The French artillery shelled the enemy’s positions for seven days, dropping nearly a ton of metal on each square meter. Seventy-nine English tanks were for the first time captured in this battle, but the German front withstood the onslaught. The battle ended with the total death toll of over 1.3 million people.

On the Eastern Front, the Russian armies commanded by General Brusilov overcame the Austrian-German resistance after a heavy bombardment and gas attack on June 4. After a short while, they again occupied most of Galicia and Bukovyna, reaching the Transcarpathian region. The troops advanced by 60 to 100 kilometers, taking nearly 400,000 men prisoner. However, this military force failed to build on its success and launch a strategic offensive as it lacked soldiers, ammunition, and provisions. Romania joined the Entente on August 16, but its armed forces were soon defeated, and most of its territory was occupied. Now the Eastern Front stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.

Apart from the Western, Eastern, and a number of other fronts, there was one more frontline on which the outcome of the war was being decided — the world ocean. For over half a century Great Britain had been reigning supreme there. Nevertheless, the German fleet challenged it: German cruisers were plowing all the oceans in 1914–1915, and on May 31 – June 1, 1916, the British and German fleets fought the largest naval battle in the history of civilization off the western coast of Jutland. The British fleet lost three battle cruisers and eight destroyers with the total tonnage of 114,000 tons, while the Germans lost a battle ship, a battle cruiser, four light cruisers, and five destroyers (60,000 tons in total tonnage).

Historians are split on which side won this battle in purely military terms, but from the political standpoint the winner was, no doubt, Britain. The German command decided not to risk heavy ships, and they remained moored until the end of the war without making any further attempts to break through the Entente-imposed naval blockade. Meanwhile, revolutionary sentiments were brewing among the sailors.

In contrast to this, Germany had the advantage in the underwater war. In February 1915, Berlin announced all the waters washing the coast of Great Britain to be combat zone. On May 7, the English liner Lusitania, which carried 1,196 passengers, including 128 Americans, was sunk by Germans. This was one of the biggest naval catastrophes. The US issued a fierce protest, scaring Germany into curtailing its underwater military activity. (It was resumed full-scale shortly thereafter.) In 1916, German submarines essentially unleashed unlimited warfare, sinking all ships off the coast of the British Isles.

REVOLUTIONARY UPHEAVALS AND AMERICANS IN EUROPE

The underwater war that killed hundreds of American citizens had a large impact on the public opinion in the US, which previously favored non-intrusion into the European affairs. In February 1917, the US severed diplomatic relations with Germany, and on April 6, the US Congress declared war on this country. A year later there were over two million well-armed American soldiers on the Western Front. This did not leave any chances for victory to the Central Powers, so Berlin resorted to the use of political instruments against the Entente. On April 24–30, 1916, independent forces rose up in arms in Ireland, counting on Germany’s support, but its shipment of weapons was intercepted by the British fleet. After the Russian revolution broke out in 1917, Germany’s General Staff and Ministry of Foreign Affairs significantly increased the amount of financing provided to the Bolshevik party, which wanted to pull Russia out of the war, as well as to various pacifist movements in the Entente countries.

The Russian democratic revolution in the early spring of 1917 came as a surprise to all the political entities inside and outside the empire. This was a spontaneous process of people’s self-organization in both Petrograd and the provinces. It would suffice to mention that a month before these events, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, who was at the time an emigre in Switzerland, publicly said he was doubtful that the politicians of his generation, i.e., aged 40 to 50, would live to see a revolution in Russia. However, radical Russian politicians were able to accommodate new developments faster than others and assumed the reins of the revolution — with German support, as has been mentioned above.

In general, the Russian revolution did not happen by chance: it is even strange that it had not occurred, say, a year earlier. All the social, political, and national problems in the Romanov Empire reached the limit, even despite industrial output growth and a significant increase in weapon and ammunition stocks and food supply. The utter inefficiency of the central government and the corrupt elite, two things that were inevitable in conditions of autocracy, did their thing. What followed was the purposeful decomposition of the army, the disruption of the rear, and sabotage of attempts at constructive resolution of the burning problems. Coupled with incurable chauvinist centralism of all Russian political forces, this made the crisis more acute than ever.

During the 1917 campaign, the Entente forces had to go on a massive offensive on all European fronts at the same time. However, the Russian army turned out to be unprepared for this, and so the Anglo-French attacks near Reims failed, and over 100,000 men were killed or wounded. The Russian troops attempted an attack in the direction of Lviv in July but were forced to retreat from Galicia and Bukovyna, while they gave up Riga virtually without a fight in the north.

The Battle of Caporetto in October had catastrophic consequences for the Italian army: 130,000 men were killed and another 300,000 were taken prisoner. British and French divisions were immediately moved from France by trucks, and it was this aid that made it possible to stabilize the front and avert Italy’s exit from the war. Finally, after the November coup in Petrograd, when Bolsheviks and leftist social revolutionaries seized power, a truce was declared (first de facto and then de jure) on the Eastern Front — and not only with Russia and Ukraine but also with Romania.

In other words, the utilization of military-political factors let the Quadruple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) sign a peace treaty with the Entente on favorable conditions. The year of 1917 and the first half of 1918 showed that this seemed possible. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed with the newly emerged Ukraine on January 27 and the peace treaty concluded with Russia of March 3 opened the way to the redeployment of a large number of troops to the West and the use of the sizeable food and raw-material resources that Germany and its allies received under these treaties for military purposes.

Between late March and early June, the German army launched three offensives on the Western Front. Losing hundreds of thousands of its soldiers, it crossed the Marne River and came to Paris within the shot of a long-range gun, the Paris Gun. Paris and London were suffering badly from night air raids, but the human resources of the Central Powers were near the limit, and the utterly flawed policy on Ukraine led to a massive peasant revolt in the summer, which made it impossible to redeploy more troops to the Western Front.

On July 18, 1918, the Entente forces mounted an attack and threw the German army back from the Marne River. On one day, August 8, 16 German divisions were defeated near Amiens. Field Marshal Paul von Hinderburg, Germany’s Chief of the General Staff, told Kaiser Wilhelm II that it made sense to sign a peace treaty. While Berlin hesitated, Bulgaria capitulated on September 29 under pressure from the Entente forces, and after a month Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire wanted to negotiate peace. In order to try and stop the advancement of the enemy, the German command decided to form several divisions made of sailors. This led to a sailor uprising, which began on November 3 in Kiel and spread to other fleet bases. It soon inspired workers and soldiers to rise up in arms in Berlin. On November 6, the Entente agreed to accept a German delegation to sign the truce treaty, and the next day it crossed the frontline. Meanwhile, the revolution was growing: on November 9, Germany was proclaimed a republic, and Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and fled to Holland. Finally, at the dawn on Nov. 11, 1918, Germany and the Entente signed the conditions of the truce. At 11 a.m. a signal was sounded to proclaim the end of World War I.

Contemporaries called World War I “Great” and were certain that nothing of this kind could happen again, because its death toll in Europe alone amounted to the losses in the wars over the previous two centuries. As a result of World War I, powerful empires broke up and new nation-states emerged. Entire generations and nations did not find a place for themselves in the post-war world, so authoritarian and totalitarian regimes began to emerge one after another. The fear of possible new military tragedies opened the way for those who wanted to wage these wars in the name of universal, undivided rule of some entity, be it the Third Reich or the Third International.