World War 1: A History From Beginning to End

by Henry Freeman

Europe was divided into two major alliances: The “Triple Entente”, an Anglo-Russian agreement between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the “Triple Alliance”, which was formed of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Italy.

To this day, there’s still a debate among historians as to which of a plethora of possible events led to the outbreak of the First World War. The most commonly agreed cause, and perhaps the most seismic event, was the assassination of the Arch Duke of Austria-Hungary.

On June 28th, 1914, Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie Chotek of Austria, were assassinated whilst on a state visit to Sarajevo, in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia. The assassin was a nineteen-year-old nationalist: Gavrilo Princip.

Christmas brought a brief truce to The Western Front. Allied and Central forces climbed out of their trenches and played sports, ate and drank together and played music––which provided festive respite from the bitter winter conflict. However, the truce was very short lived, and in the days that followed, enemies who had become friends retook their arms and aimed their sights at one another.

The first ever bombing raid in Britain occurred on the 19th of January, carried out by two German zeppelins––giant airships filled with hydrogen. The zeppelins dropped a number of bombs on Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and Kings Lynn, which resulted in four civilian deaths and heavy destruction to buildings.

On the Eastern Front, German forces began using chemical weapons––a new device of death designed to bring a more resolute and quick ending to battles. The Germans unleashed xylyl bromide on the Russian forces at the Battle of Bolimów, but the attack backfired when the wind blew the chemical back over German lines. Luckily for the German forces, a combination of cold weather and the primitive concentration of the deadly mist prevented the xylyl bromide from doing too much harm. In reaction to the failed chemical assault, the Germans called off the attack.

The Ottoman Empire began the annexation of up to a million Armenians from its Turkish regions––leading to the Armenian Genocide. The Armenians had suffered long and terrible persecution, and were viewed by the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire as a people of differing religious and political allegiances. The able-bodied Armenian men were subjected to conscription, hard labor and murder. The women, children and elders were driven into the Syrian Desert without food or water and left to die. The genocide prompted outrage from the Allies who decreed the annexation a crime against humanity.

In the final days of April, republicans in Ireland launched an insurrection against the British forces in protest of British rule. The six-day revolt became known as the Easter Rising, a rebellion which saw thousands of Irish revolutionaries fight to gain an independent Ireland––free of monarchical and British governmental rule. The British promptly extinguished the uprising, which led to the unconditional surrender of the republicans on the 29th of April. Over five hundred were killed and over three thousand arrested, many of whom played no part in the uprising. After the surrender, many of the leaders of the revolt were executed for their role in the uprising. Ireland remained under martial law until 1920 when the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act came into effect.

The first stage of the brutal Battle of the Somme commenced on July 1st. Initially, the Allied forces made some significant gains against the compromised German defenses. However, as the bloody day moved on, the Germans dealt the British a tremendous defeat. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, British forces lost over nineteen thousand troops; over thirty-eight thousand more were injured. It remains one of the bloodiest days in modern military history.

In mid-January, British intelligence intercepted a communication from the German Foreign Office. The communication was decoded and revealed a telegram sent by the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Alfred Zimmermann, to the German embassy in Mexico. This infamous missive became known as the “Zimmerman Telegram”, revealing a proposition of alliance between Germany and Mexico; Germany would provide the necessary support for an attack on the southern states to reclaim historic land taken from Mexico by the United States. The telegram was quickly dispatched to the US government. The plan was announced to the US public and demand for US intervention increased pressure on Washington to re-evaluate its position of neutrality.

On June 13th, a squadron of twenty-two Gotha G.IV bombers carried out the first bombing raid on London using airplanes (previous bombing raids over England had been carried out by zeppelins). The bombs killed over a hundred and fifty people and wounded a further four hundred.

On November 7th to the 8th, the Bolshevik party in Russia, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, staged the October Revolution, which dissolved the Russian provisional government and supplanted it with a Marxist-Soviet government. The revolution put an end to Russian involvement in the Great War, and shortly after the takeover, Russia signed an armistice agreement with Germany.

By the end of May, a fresh and relatively inexperienced American division captured the village of Cantigny from the Germans, which instilled Allied confidence in American forces. At that point in the war, over seven hundred thousand American troops had arrived in France, with a daily arrival of over ten thousand US troops to support the Allies.

The Spring Offensive provided some early success for the Germans, but by the summer it was starting to wane as over a million American troops had arrived in France to support the Allies.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. Armistice had been declared; the brutal war was finally over.

The war had rallied the Russian people against the ruling dynasty and replaced it with a Marxist-Soviet government under the command of Lenin––it was the beginning of the spread of socialism across the world.