Chapter 3

In This Chapter

Understanding the events leading to the Great War

Following battles on the eastern and western fronts

Watching war in the rest of Europe, Africa, Asia, and on the high seas

The First World War, or Great War as it was known at the time, was so destructive and caused so much suffering that it shattered the participants’ national pride and confidence in their leaders. The war saw fighting in Russia, Turkey, Arabia, Iraq, Palestine, China, East Africa, the South Atlantic, the Pacific, and the North Sea, as well as in the trenches of France and Belgium. The Great War introduced the world to such marvels of modern science as bombing from the air, submarine warfare, poison gas, and death by machine gun. Welcome to the twentieth century.

A Powder Keg: Events Leading to the Great War

For years before 1914, the Great Powers of Europe had been sizing up to each other, signing military alliances which said that if one of them was attacked, its allies had to help. A strong sense of tension persisted in Europe, like children needing to burn off energy. And the way nations burned off energy in those days, at least according to the theorists, was to have a good war.

That idea may seem a bit drastic, but it seemed self-evident to people at the time. Many of the wars in Europe over the decades preceding the twentieth century had been short and decisive, thanks to modern technology such as railways and rapid-fire rifles. Statesmen were confident that they could take on even their most powerful neighbours, use state-of-the-art weaponry and techno-gadgets to run rings round them, dictate a peace settlement, and be home in time for the victory parade and tea. So when the expected war finally broke out in late July 1914, people really did think it would all be over by Christmas.

However, Europe’s leaders and generals had forgotten three important points:

Just because countries had been beaten easily in the past didn’t mean they would necessarily collapse so easily next time. France had lost badly to the Germans in 1871, but by 1914 it had recovered and was bent on revenge.

All that technology would only win you a quick victory if you had it and your enemy didn’t. No one had thought about what would happen if everyone had the latest hardware.

Some recent wars had indeed been short, but others hadn’t. The Crimean War (1854–56), the American Civil War (1861–65), and the Anglo–Boer War (1899–1902) had all been long wars, with appalling loss of life. Somehow, when war broke out in 1914, people didn’t think that this war might follow the same pattern.

He started it! Regional disputes and old grudges

Before 1914 the Great Powers were caught up in a series of increasingly dangerous disputes:

France v Germany: The Germans had defeated and humiliated the French back in 1871, besieging Paris and taking over two French border provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. The French wanted to get even; the Germans thought it might be a good idea to get their retaliation in first.

Britain v Germany: The Germans had started building a massive battle fleet to challenge Britain’s control of the seas. Both sides started building more and bigger battleships, especially the new Dreadnought type, heavily armoured and fast too – a rare combination.

Slavs v Turks: The Turks still ruled most of the Balkans (south-eastern Europe) and the Balkan states wanted them out. Some of them wanted to set up a single Slav superstate, but which of them would control it?

Serbia (and friend) v Austria-Hungary (and friend): The Serbs were hoping to set up a big Slav state (with them in charge, of course); their powerful neighbours, Turkey and Austria-Hungary, weren’t having that. In 1908 the Austrians took over the Slav province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which infuriated the Serbs because they’d wanted it. The Serbs turned to their friend, Russia, and the Austrians turned to their friend, Germany, and for a time it looked like war, until everyone saw sense and calmed down. Next time the world would not be so lucky.

Unfortunately, 1908 wasn’t the last time little Bosnia-Herzegovina provoked an international crisis. When Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s, Bosnia-Herzegovina was the scene of some of the worst atrocities and mass killings the world had seen since the Second World War. Chapter 19 has the lowdown.

This means war! PS Love to all the family

Britain’s Queen Victoria had married her numerous offspring into most of the other royal houses of Europe. The three leading European monarchs in 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and the King-Emperor George V of Great Britain and India, were all first cousins and knew each other well.

Monarchs were still very important. Tsar Nicholas was an autocrat, a monarch with absolute power (in theory at any rate, though his ministers did most of the work); the German Kaiser helped decide policy and the war was actually sparked off when the Austrians got indignant because their heir to the throne was assassinated. But ultimately these monarchs weren’t able to stop the drive towards war and even their close family kinship didn’t stop them declaring war on each other.

Germany: We want a place in the sun

The Germans had come from nowhere in the nineteenth century to create Europe’s most formidable military and economic superpower. You might think that would be enough to be going on with, but the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, wasn’t satisfied. He had a massive inferiority complex about the British – he was half British himself – and convinced himself that they were behind a global conspiracy to exclude Germany from the top rank of Europe’s Great Powers. Germany, he said, wanted its ‘place in the sun’.

German ministers talked of Weltpolitik – making Germany the dominant power in the world. To achieve that position, Germany had to build up its army and navy and generally throw its weight around in international affairs. Germany wasn’t just powerful, but dangerously unpredictable too. Ironically, the German government abandoned Weltpolitik and stopped building expensive battleships in 1913. But by then the damage to Germany’s relations with the other Great Powers had been done.

Agreements and assignations affecting the rest of the world

Most of the world was part of one or other of the European empires, so that what happened in Europe would have an immediate impact in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific whether they liked it or not. Africa and Asia provided the setting for some of the big diplomatic showdowns before the war:

Anglo–Japanese alliance, 1902: Britain’s only actual military alliance was with Japan. The Japanese agreed to keep an eye on Britain’s possessions in the Far East.

Anglo–French entente, 1904: Also known as the entente cordiale, this was, in theory, just an agreement between Britain and France about how they would divide up Africa, but the Germans always suspected there was a bit more to it than that. And they were right.

Morocco, 1905: The Kaiser decided to test the new Anglo–French entente. He took a ship to Morocco, whose Sultan had recently accepted French control – sorry, protection – and made a speech saying that if the Sultan ever wanted any help kicking the French out, he only had to give Wilhelm a call. Result: International outcry, Britain stood by France, all the Great Powers met at Algeçiras (Spain) and told the Kaiser to keep his nose out of Morocco. Kaiser’s conclusion: The entente cordiale is an Anglo–French military alliance. Told you so.

Anglo–Russian entente, 1907: The Germans were busy sending military advisers to Turkey and planning a railway link from Berlin to Baghdad, so the British and Russians signed this agreement to share out Persia between them, leave Afghanistan alone – and keep the Germans out of the whole region.

Morocco, 1911: A German gunboat, the Panther, sailed into the Moroccan port of Agadir, supposedly to defend German interests but really just to annoy the French. To the Germans’ surprise it was the British who seemed ready to go to war if the Germans didn’t pull out of Morocco. So the Germans very sensibly did.

Tripoli, 1911:The Italians landed troops in Tripoli and took it away from the Turks. Why? The Italians thought no one would take them seriously if they didn’t have a colony or two. They’d been badly beaten when they tried to conquer Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the 1890s and Tripoli looked a bit easier. People still didn’t take Italy very seriously though.

Apocalypse Now: The War Starts (1914)

When the Great War finally came, it came from the Balkans. The Balkans are the area of south-eastern Europe, which includes Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. In the 1900s most of the Balkans were still ruled by the sleazy and corrupt Turkish Empire. In 1908 a group of young nationalist army officers called the Young Turks seized control in Constantinople and injected a bit of backbone into the Empire, but even they couldn’t stop what was about to happen in the Balkans:

Balkan War No. 1: Everyone attacks the Turks (1912): All the Balkan states launched a fierce attack on the Turks and forced them out of the Balkans. All that remained of the once-mighty Turkish Empire in Europe was a little strip of land near Constantinople, which is still part of Turkey to this day.

Balkan War No. 2: Everyone attacks Bulgaria (1913): No sooner had they beaten the Turks than all the Balkan states started arguing over territory. The squabbling culminated in a huge showdown between Bulgaria and all its neighbours. Bulgaria was pulverised. The Balkan states agreed their new national boundaries in the 1913 Treaty of London but the Bulgarians didn’t forget what had happened and were on the look-out for revenge.

The shot heard around the world

Flush from beating the Turks and the Bulgarians, the Serbs were determined to get Bosnia-Herzegovina back off the Austrians (see the earlier section ‘He started it! Regional disputes and old grudges’ to find out why the Austrians had Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first place). On 28 June 1914, the Austrian Archduke and future emperor Franz Ferdinand visited the Bosnian capital Sarajevo with his wife to inspect the Austrian forces of occupation (that day was Franz Ferdinand’s wedding anniversary. If only he’d settled for roses and a box of chocolates).

Unfortunately, 28 June was also the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and one of the most important days in the calendar for Serbs. For the Serbian nationalist terrorist gang the Black Hand, the date was too good a chance to miss. They slipped over the border to Sarajevo where one of them lobbed a bomb at the Archduke’s car. It bounced off and exploded in the street. The bomber was caught and the others hastily tried to get out of town. One of them, Gavrilo Princip, was sitting at a café trying to look calm when, quite unexpectedly, the Archduke’s car pulled up right in front of him, with the Archduke and his wife inside. Princip stepped up to the car and shot them both – dead.

The Austrian government was furious. They were sure the Serbian government was behind the plot and decided the time had come to crush Serbia once and for all. First, though, they checked with the Germans: Would they help if the Russians stood by the Serbs? The Germans, who didn’t actually think the Russians would do anything, told the Austrians: ‘Do what you have to: We’ll stand by you.’ This German promise became known as the ‘blank cheque’. The Germans didn’t know it, but they’d just guaranteed that this quarrel in a little corner of southern Europe would become a global war.

Ironically, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been opposed to war with Serbia and tended to restrain those who wanted war. Now he was dead, no one could stop the hawks in the Austrian government.

A rickety republic in China

China was still a medieval-style empire, with a child emperor and all power in the hands of his grandmother, the dowager empress Tz’u-hsi. Her idea of policy was essentially ‘Change Nothing’, so as soon as she died in 1908 the country fell apart, with different revolutionary groups all wanting to Change Everything but disagreeing about how. The man who stepped in to restore a bit of order was Dr Sun Yat-sen, a widely-respected medic who had very sensibly fled China for the USA one step ahead of the imperial police. In 1911 Sun declared a republic with himself as President; little Emperor Pu-Yi had to abdicate before bedtime. But trying to control China proved too much for Sun and within a few months he handed power over to a rather more military-minded tough guy called Yuan Shih-k’ai. Yuan closed down China’s new democratic parliament and ruled China as a dictator. The Chinese soon got fed up with Yuan and in 1916 they rose up in arms against him. While the rest of the world was busy fighting and recovering from the Great War, China sank into civil war, famine, and massacre.

Declarations of war

Following the assassination of their archduke, the Austrians sent the Serbian government a furious note, demanding an apology, telling them to hand the assassins over, and claiming the right to send the Austrian police into Serbia to look for them. The Serbs had forty-eight hours to reply. The Serbs were genuinely shaken by the assassination and agreed to nearly everything, just asking if they could talk about that point about the police. Not good enough, said the Austrians. And declared war.

Events moved very fast from that point, with declarations of war whizzing around like flyers:

28 July: Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and immediately shelled the Serb capital, Belgrade.

30 July: Russia mobilised its army, that is, got it ready for war.

31 July: Germany told Russia to stand its army down. Russia took no notice.

1 August: Germany declared war on Russia.

3 August: Because their war plans were all based on the idea that they would have to fight Russia and France, Germany declared war on France. So:

4 August: Following their famous Schlieffen Plan, or How To Invade France in Three Easy Lessons, which said the best way was to sneak in via Belgium, Germany invaded Belgium. But that move alarmed the British (it didn’t exactly please the Belgians either), who told the Germans to clear out of Belgium, or else. The Germans didn’t really believe the British were serious, but they were. So:

4 August (at midnight): Britain declared war on Germany.

The declarations of war didn’t stop there. Britain, France, and Germany all had colonies around the world, so they were suddenly all at war with each other as well. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland (which was separate from Canada in those days), and South Africa were all self-governing dominions within the British Empire, but they all took their lead from Britain and declared war on Germany and its allies, as did Britain’s ally in the Far East, Japan. The war started in Europe but it quickly spread to the rest of the world.

All Not So Quiet on the Eastern and Western Fronts

You may have seen some of the well-known photographs of cheering crowds in different European cities in 1914 greeting the outbreak of war. If you look more closely, you’ll see that they are mostly young office workers who loved the idea of a bit of excitement for once. The workers and agricultural labourers who’d be making up most of the world’s armies were usually a bit more resigned about the conflict.

Hmm, so much for Plan A . . .

All the Great Powers had plans for war in 1914 but they all came unstuck. The Austrians’ plan for defeating Serbia didn’t work because they had to fight Russia as well and they didn’t have enough men to do both. And the Serbs weren’t the push-over the Austrians thought they would be either. Then the Austrians had a plan to invade Russian Poland from the south while the Germans marched in from the north with the intent that they could envelop the Russians who, the Austrians confidently expected, would be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. But the Germans were too worried about a Russian invasion of East Prussia to spare any men for invading Poland, and the Russians didn’t actually send any men into Poland anyway.

The French plan for invading Germany had to be called off when the Germans got in first with their plan, called the Schlieffen Plan after the general who had devised it. The plan was to defeat France quickly and then concentrate on fighting Russia so that Germany didn’t end up fighting a war on two fronts, against Russia in the east and France in the west. Guess what Germany ended up doing? Yes – fighting a war on two fronts, against Russia in the east and France (and Britain, and Belgium, and later the USA) in the west. Here’s why.

The technology of the First World War

The armies of 1914 had all the latest military technology. Rifles could fire ten bullets a minute and had a range of about a mile; they didn’t give off any tell-tale smoke either. Machine guns could fire 400 bullets a minute, fed through on a long belt, though they weren’t very portable and were better kept for defence. Artillery was accurate and deadly and the only real defence against it was to encase yourself in thick concrete forts or ‘pill boxes’ (so called because they looked like, er, pill boxes). However, once trench warfare started the artillery just stayed in one place firing shells at such a rate that the munitions factories at home couldn’t keep up (see the section ‘Stalemate in the west’ later in this chapter for more on trench warfare). Many manufacturers cut corners, with the result that huge numbers of duds or – worse – shells blew up inside the gun.

Some of the most important technological developments on the western front had their origins in the American West. Barbed wire was developed in the 1860s as a cheap way of fencing off large areas of land for farming. The idea for tanks came from a new design of tractor with caterpillar tracks to go over rough terrain, patented in the USA in 1901. The new vehicles were originally to be called landships; ‘tanks’ was just a cover name but it stuck. So, at first, did most of the tanks. Not till the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 did tanks really show what they could do. Tanks didn’t tip the scales in the First World War, but military tacticians were already taking careful notes in case there was a Second.

The First World War was also the first war to use aircraft. At first these were small one-seater planes used to spy out the land, but soon the planes acquired guns and started shooting each other down. The best ‘aces’ on each side became national heroes. The Germans also used enormous gas-filled airships called Zeppelins, which could travel much further than aeroplanes: They carried out the world’s first aerial bombing raids, on London and other British towns. Zeppelin raids caused serious loss of life until the British worked out how to shoot them down with incendiary bullets. And when a Zeppelin caught fire and went down, it really went down.

The Schlieffen Plan was based on three assumptions. Each one turned out to be wrong:

Assumption 1: Russia would take months to get its armies ready for war so there’d be time to defeat the French first. In fact, the Russians were ready in three weeks. Oops.

Assumption 2: Going through Belgium would be a cake walk. In fact the Belgians and the British held the Germans up badly, messing up the Germans’ timetable.

Assumption 3: The Germans would sweep along the Channel coast and come up on Paris from behind, where the French wouldn’t be expecting them. In fact, the Germans found they hadn’t got time to go swanning along the Channel coast, at least not if they didn’t want the French to cut them off from all contact with home. So they turned left out of Belgium and headed straight down to Paris. Which was exactly where the French were expecting them.

Crimes of war?

German soldiers going into Belgium were shocked when the locals shunned them as if they were monsters. People accused the Germans of all sorts of unspeakable acts, usually involving babies, nuns, and bayonets. Allied propaganda made the most of these stories of ‘Hun’ frightfulness to persuade people to join up. After the war, many of these stories were exposed as false or, at best, wildly exaggerated, which explains why so many people found it difficult to believe the tales coming out of occupied Europe in the Second World War. Recent historians have looked more closely at what happened in the territories the Germans occupied in 1914. They haven’t found instances of babies or nuns being bayoneted, but they have found evidence of shootings and executions without trial. The Germans claimed these were legitimate reprisals for being fired on by non-uniformed francs tireurs, ‘free shooters’; in later wars these people would be called resistance fighters, insurgents, or illegal combatants. In fact, the Germans were just acting much like any other army in any other war in the twentieth century. Or any century, come to that.

Stalemate in the west

As the Germans closed in on Paris, the French launched a massive counter-attack north of the River Marne. The Battle of the Marne was a huge German defeat (despite the fact that the Germans always liked to claim that they were never actually defeated in the First World War). The Germans had to retreat fast, and every time they tried to slip round the Allied lines, the French and British blocked them. Soon each side dug deep trenches to protect themselves from the machine guns and shells, so that neither side was able to move forward. The whole western front turned into two long lines of trenches that stretched all the way from the Swiss frontier to the English Channel. No one had ever seen anything like it.

The problem was how to break through the lines of trenches. Commanders tried sending men running over to seize the enemy’s trenches, but long lines of men could just be mown down by machine guns. They tried shelling, firing thousands and thousands of shells, so that the landscape on the western front was blown into mud and craters and the whole place came to look like the surface of the moon. But men just dug themselves deeper into the earth and, in any case, even shelling couldn’t destroy the barbed wire that ran along in front of each side’s trenches.

If at first you don’t succeed . . .the major assaults in the west

In 1915 both sides concentrated their efforts on other fronts. The Germans attacked in the east and the British and French attacked the Turks at Gallipoli (the sections ‘The eastern front’ and ‘Disaster in the Dardanelles’ tell you more about these campaigns). The Germans attacked the British positions around the Belgian town of Ypres and reduced it to rubble, but they weren’t able to break through.

In 1916 the French and British planned a massive attack on the River Somme to overrun the German lines and break through into open country. Unfortunately, the Germans got their attack in first, on the French lines at Verdun. The French put up fierce resistance. ‘They shall not pass!’ declared General Pétain, the French general hurriedly brought in to take charge. Verdun saw a long, bitter battle with appalling casualties: The French called the road leading to the front the ‘Sacred Way’ because so many men went along it to their deaths. The Germans never did break through, but the French were fully occupied so the Somme attack was now down to the British.

The British attack on the Somme on 1 July 1916 was a disaster. The British had spent months planning it and a week shelling the German trenches, but on the day of the attack, the Germans just came up from their deep dug-outs and machine-gunned the advancing British soldiers, mowing them down like a scythe through corn. The British suffered 60,000 casualties, about 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded. In one day. To get this fact in perspective, think about the impact a single soldier’s death can have in news coverage of wars today.

The British learned the lessons of 1 July. By the time the battle ended in the autumn of 1916, Allied attacks were much more effective and the Germans had suffered crippling casualties. But the British still hadn’t broken through.

. . .Try, try, try again: Using poison gases

If huge assaults couldn’t break through the trenches, each side would have to find something else. In 1915 the Germans started using poison gas; the Allies acted shocked at first and then started using it themselves. Of course, if the wind changed direction you could end up gassing your own men and they frequently did. In 1916 the British introduced tanks, which scared the life out of the Germans – until most of those tanks broke down.

The eastern front

The Germans had much more success in the east. To everyone’s surprise, not least their own, the Russians got their armies together quickly and sent them off, all smiling for the cameras, to smash their way through to Berlin. Unfortunately the Russian communications system was so bad – and so easy to hack in to – that the Germans had a fuller picture of the Russians’ plans than the Russians did! The Germans surrounded one Russian army at the Battle of Tannenburg and annihilated it, then they attacked a second army and destroyed it at the Masurian Lakes: Many Russians drowned trying to escape. The situation was so serious that Tsar Nicholas II decided to take command himself. Which proved a real disaster for the Russians.

The Russians fought well against the Austrians, and after the disasters of 1914, they were even able to hold their lines against the Germans. In 1916, under General Alexei Brusilov, the Russians achieved what everyone had thought impossible – they broke through the Austrian trenches, captured thousands of prisoners, and advanced miles into Austrian territory. But even victorious offensives need food and ammunition to keep going, and the chaotic Russian supply system just couldn’t cope. The attack petered out, the Germans sent help to their allies, and the Russians were driven back again. By the end of the Brusilov offensive the Russians had lost one million men. Thousands of Russian soldiers decided they’d had enough and headed for home, and can you blame them?

World Wide War

The First World War wasn’t just fought on the eastern and western fronts: It quickly began to spread to other parts of the world.

You Italian? I got an offer you can’t refuse

Italy was allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, so she should have come into the war on their side, but the Italians held back. Not from principle but because, allies or no allies, the Austrians were their old enemies. So the British made the Italians an extremely interesting offer: Come over to our side and you can help yourself to Austrian land after the war. As a result, in 1915 Italy suddenly declared war on her own allies. Switching sides didn’t do the Italians much good, though. They got into a long stand-off with the Austrians up in the Alps, until in 1917 they finally had their great showdown battle at Caporetto. And lost.

Beat your neighbour – Balkan style

The Bulgarians, Romanians, Greeks, and Turks had long been enemies and rivals, and the war gave them the chance to settle a few old scores. In the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the Turks and Bulgarians had both lost a lot of land to Serbia and Romania, and they wanted revenge. So in 1915 the Turks joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. In 1916 Bulgaria followed suit. The Romanians joined in on the Allied side and immediately started fighting their old Bulgarian enemies.

The Austrians and their new Bulgarian allies were getting ready for a massive offensive to crush the Serbs, so as a distraction the British and French landed troops at Salonika in Greece. Which was a bit awkward as Greece wasn’t actually in the war. The Greek king, Constantine I, protested, but his prime minister was secretly rather pleased: He wanted to join the winning side before it was too late. In 1915 the Austrians and Bulgarians did indeed crush Serbia, but the Serbs evacuated their army and sent it round to join the British and French at Salonika. In 1917 the Greeks decided it was safe to come down off the fence and declared war on Bulgaria, Turkey, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.

The Salonika front proved a long and slow campaign, but eventually, in 1918, the Allies managed to break through, defeat Bulgaria, capture Constantinople, and force the Turks to surrender.

Turkey – the not-so-sick man of Europe

The old Turkish Ottoman Empire had been in decline for so long, with a long line of weak and corrupt rulers, that many people simply wrote the Turks off as losers. The Tsar of Russia had once referred to Turkey as ‘the Sick Man of Europe’ and most of the world agreed with him, especially when the Turks lost nearly all their land in Europe in the First Balkan War (see the earlier section ‘Apocalypse Now: The War Starts (1914)). Boy, were they wrong.

In 1915 the British sent an army over from India to invade Turkish-held Iraq. The Turks surrounded the invaders at Kut al-Amarah and forced them to surrender. Thousands of British and Indian prisoners starved in Turkish captivity. Not the last time invaders would get into difficulty in Iraq.

Disaster in the Dardanelles

Meanwhile, back in London, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, had come up with a daring plan:

Send in the navy to seize the narrow Dardanelles Strait that leads from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea

Take Constantinople and knock Turkey out of the war

Send British and French troops into the Black Sea to aid Russia to help win the war in the east.

It was a brilliant plan – on paper. Unfortunately, the naval force sailed straight into a Turkish minefield so the Allied leaders had to rethink. Meanwhile, the Turks very sensibly poured troops into the area ready for when the Allies came back. Sure enough, the Allies landed troops on the nearby Gallipoli peninsula and the Turks pinned them down on the beaches. The Allies tried landing further round the coast, but they still couldn’t crack the Turkish defences. So, after months of sitting in trenches dug into the cliffs, the Allies had to pull out, having achieved precisely nothing.

The Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) took part in the Gallipoli landings and suffered very heavy casualties. The Australians in particular blamed their losses on poor leadership by the British generals and the campaign started a growing sense of disillusion and resentment towards Britain, which grew steadily through the twentieth century. Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli was an angry indictment of how British incompetence cost Australian lives. The history’s a bit simplistic, but the film’s good.

Arabia for the Arabs! (Not!)

Back in 1902, Ibn Saud launched a revolt among the Bedouin that eventually threw the Turks out of the eastern half of Arabia. In 1916 his rival, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, tried to organise a similar revolt in the western half, but he didn’t get very far because the Turks had built a railway across the desert so they could rush their troops to wherever there was trouble. Hussein decided to link up with the Allies, hoping that they’d hand the region over to the Arabs after the war. The British and French thanked him kindly, promised him all the help they could spare, and secretly started planning to take over the region themselves.

General Allenby was leading a British army into Palestine and Syria and he could only spare one or two liaison officers to work with Sherif Hussein. However, one of them was the young T. E. Lawrence who, quite unasked, took it on himself to lead the Arabs in a daring raid over the desert to take the port of Aqaba and launch a series of spectacular attacks on the Turks’ railway network. ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, as the press dubbed him, made great copy and did wonders for British and Arab morale. However, when the Arabs captured Damascus and tried to declare an independent Arab state, they found that running a modern city was a bit more complicated than it looked. In any case, the British had no intention of letting them do it. The British took over the city and resolved that, whoever ruled the region when the war ended, it wouldn’t be the people who lived there.

The Balfour Declaration

The Jewish people had been driven out of Palestine back in Roman times and had settled all over Europe and Russia. However, anti-Semitic persecution got so bad that many thousands of European Jews emigrated to the USA. A nineteenth-century Jewish nationalist called Theodore Herzl set up a Zionist movement (from ‘Zion’, the old name for the Promised Land) to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Zionist movement was very strong in the influential Jewish community in America, and since the British and French wanted America in the war, in 1917 the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared that Britain would support a Jewish national home in Palestine, as long as some sort of arrangement could be reached with the Arabs who actually lived there. The Balfour Declaration certainly won the Zionists over, but it stored up serious problems for later.

The Japanese land grab

The Japanese joined in the war for one simple reason: To get land. Ideally they wanted that land in China, which is just across the water from Japan and has many more raw materials. Within days of declaring war on Germany, the Japanese attacked Germany’s colony in China, Tsingtao. Never ones to miss an opportunity, the Japanese also forced the Chinese to hand over southern Manchuria and Shantung and encouraged them to overthrow their ruler, President Yuan Shih-k’ai, not that they needed much persuading (see the sidebar ‘A rickety republic in China’). China came into the war in 1917 on the Allied side, mainly so that she could negotiate with her Japanese ‘allies’ to get her territory back.

The Japanese troops also took over the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands in the Pacific from the Germans, but they weren’t the only ones to seize the opportunity to take over some prime territory from the Germans in 1914:

Australian troops occupied the Solomon Islands and the German area of New Guinea.

New Zealand sent troops to take Samoa from the Germans.

By the end of 1914, the German Empire in Asia and the Pacific had collapsed.

They seek him here, they seek him there – the elusive Colonel Lettow

The Germans had a lot more luck in Africa than they had in Asia (see the earlier section ‘The Japanese land grab’ for details). The British thought rolling up the German African Empire would be easy. They took Togo, but the Cameroons proved much more difficult. The South Africans invaded German South-West Africa, but lots of them changed sides and joined the Germans, who’d supported them in the Anglo–Boer War. In German East Africa, the local German commander, a dapper officer called Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, gave the British a lot of trouble running a hit-and-run campaign with his small force of men. The British called in the South African general, Jan Smuts, who’d done exactly the same to them in the Anglo–Boer War, but although Smuts captured the towns he couldn’t find Lettow. Lettow didn’t finally surrender until twelve days after the war had ended.

Who Rules the Waves?

Before the war the British and Germans had been desperately building ever-bigger battleships. When the war came, battleships played a surprisingly small part in it, but control of the sea was still absolutely vital.

The British imposed a strict blockade of German ports, with minefields in the North Sea and surface vessels to stop any ship heading for a German port. Naval blockades were only supposed to stop actual war supplies like ammunition or spare parts, not essentials like food, but the British took no notice. The Germans knew that the effects of the British blockade would get worse with each year the war dragged on, so they were very keen on a quick victory before food shortages got really serious. In the end the blockade seriously weakened the Germans, and it was a major factor in their defeat.

The Germans tried to impose a sort of blockade of Britain. They bombarded some British ports and sent a small fleet of raiders to sink Allied ships anywhere in the world that they found them. The most successful raider was the Emden, which attacked shipping in the Indian ocean, raided Madras and Penang, and sank a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer until it was finally sunk by the Australian navy. Meanwhile Admiral von Spee, with a small force of German warships, was attacking British bases in the Pacific. The British challenged him off Coronel, in Chile, but Spee sank two of the British ships and got away. He sailed round Cape Horn into the Atlantic, but the British trapped him off the Falkland Islands and sank his entire fleet.

Showdown at Jutland

The main German fleet stayed in harbour in Germany until 1916, when it received orders to sail into the North Sea and challenge the British. The two fleets finally met off the coast of Jutland in Denmark. When the firing started, the British discovered a serious fault in their ships – an unfortunate tendency to, er, blow up. German shells managed to penetrate the British gun turrets where the British, ignoring safety warnings, had stockpiled their own shells so they could keep up a rapid rate of fire. So a single hit from a German shell could blow up the whole ship. As a result, the Germans actually sank more ships than the British did, though when the full British fleet arrived on the scene, the Germans skedaddled. The British were very frustrated with the Battle of Jutland, but it may have been a better day for them than it seemed, because the German fleet never dared set sail again except right at the end of the war – to surrender.

U boats

The First World War saw one important new development in naval warfare: Submarines. The idea for submarines wasn’t new: It came from an American, Roger Fulton, who proposed them to Napoleon and some oar-powered models had been trialled in the American Civil War (they weren’t a success), but by 1914 the technical problems had been solved and the submarine, or Unterseeboot in German (U boat for short), was ready for war.

Surface raiders had captured merchant ships and taken their crews prisoner, but a submarine had to leave the crews to their fate. The Germans said they would sink any ship, neutral or not, which sailed to British ports. Neutral countries complained angrily, especially the USA, which sent thousands of merchant ships each year to British ports. Many American ships were sunk by German U boats, but the case which caused most anger in America was the British passenger liner Lusitania, which sailed from New York for England in 1915 with a large number of American passengers on board. The Germans put warnings in the New York press saying they would sink the Lusitania. And they did.

Isolationist America

Unlike modern America, which is so central to world events, before 1914 the US largely stuck to its policy of isolationism – keeping well out of international affairs. The Americans had very good reasons:

Immigration: America was built on waves of immigrants fleeing persecution or poverty in Europe. They came to America to start a new life and didn’t want to get dragged into the European quarrels they’d come all the way across the sea to get away from. In any case, which side should America be on? America had immigrants from both sides. Much safer to stay out.

America only had a small army: The Americans hadn’t fought a major war since the Civil War (1861–65) and the US army was tiny. Fighting the Sioux or the Spanish was all very well, but it was no preparation for fighting the Germans.

America had much more pressing problems closer to home: Specifically in Mexico, where it intervened in the free-for-all to determine who, out of a field of many, would actually be president of Mexico. Once that decision was settled, the US found itself under attack by one of the guys it hadn’t backed (Pancho Villa), who’d taken up raiding towns across the US–Mexico border. (For the details, read the sidebar ‘And this week’s President of Mexico is . . .’.)

The strange case of the Lusitania

Only three years after the Titanic went down in 1912, the world was faced with another tragedy at sea when the British liner Lusitania was sunk by a German U boat off the coast of Ireland. The Germans had warned that they would consider any vessel heading into British waters a legitimate target, including the Lusitania, but most people thought they were bluffing, especially as many of the ship’s passengers were American. The ship went down very quickly and some 1,200 people drowned, including 128 Americans. The Germans said the British had deliberately allowed American passengers to sail into a war zone; the British said it showed how inhuman the Germans were, especially when a special medallion surfaced in Germany celebrating the sinking and showing passengers buying their tickets from a figure of Death. The biggest outcry was in the US, where pressure began to grow for America to join the war against Germany. When America finally did join in (see the section ‘Isolationist America’), American troops went into action shouting out ‘Remember the Lusitania!’

Then, at the end of the century, historians looked a bit more closely at the Lusitania. Why on earth did the Germans sink her? Simple: The Lusitania was carrying arms and ammunition for the British. That meant that she was a legitimate target under the rules of war, and the Germans had every right to sink her. Whether or not the British had any right to put arms on a passenger liner, or to allow passengers to sail on an arms shipment, is quite a different matter.

Ironically, although the situation with Mexico was one of the initial reasons Americans didn’t have time for the war in Europe, it actually ended up by tipping the US into the First World War. In Berlin, the German Foreign Minister, Count Zimmerman, sent a telegram to the German ambassador to Mexico hinting that if Mexico supported Germany in a war with the US, the Germans would give them all the land they’d lost to America in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The British intercepted the telegram, thought ‘Hello: This is interesting’ and promptly sent it to Washington. President Wilson choked on his cornflakes, and the American people united behind Wilson when he declared war on Germany in April 1917.

And this week’s President of Mexico is . . .

Mexico was ruled by General Porfirio Diaz, dictator since the 1870s and with no plans to retire. In 1910 he held rigged elections and threw his opponent, Francisco Madero, into jail. Madero called on his supporters to stage a revolution, but Diaz was too strong for them. But in 1911 one of Madero’s men, a bandit leader called Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, captured the town of Cuidad Juarez, up near the US border. That event triggered anti-Diaz risings all over Mexico and Diaz had to get out – fast. Francisco Madero became president, promising reforms and an end to poverty. And then the fun began:

1913: General Victoriano Huerta staged a military coup, had Madero shot, and declared himself President of Mexico, without saying a word about reforms or ending poverty. US President Woodrow Wilson refused to recognise Huerta’s government, and four separate Mexican leaders staged revolts against him: Pancho Villa in the north, Emiliano Zapata in the south, Venustiano Carranza in the north east, and Alvaro Obregon in the north west. They all converged on Mexico City.

1914: The rebels trapped Huerta in Mexico City, while President Wilson sent US Marines to seize the port of Veracruz to cut off any arms shipments heading Huerta’s way. Huerta resigned. End of story? Not a bit of it!

The rebel leaders all fought over who should assume power. First, Obregon declared his old chum Venustiano Carranza President (well, officially ‘First Chief’ but everyone knew that meant President) of Mexico. ‘Oh yeah? Says who?’ fumed Villa and Zapata as they saddled up and led their troops into Mexico City and sent Carranza and Obregon packing. But Carranza just phoned his very good friend President Woodrow Wilson, who immediately sent in the Marines.

1915: With US help, Obregon recaptured Mexico City and put Carranza back in charge. Villa and Zapata headed off to start a guerrilla campaign against the government. They proved very good at it.

1916: Villa launched raids over the US border and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, to punish the Americans for supporting Carranza. President Wilson sent an army under General Pershing into Mexico to capture Villa, but Villa evaded them and Pershing had to go home empty-handed. Villa became a national hero in Mexico.

The Times They Are A-Changing

The Great War proved the catalyst for long-lasting, even revolutionary, change. This was the first total war, in which civilians working at home were every bit as vital as soldiers at the front. The experience of war had a profound effect on people’s attitudes, both towards each other and towards the leaders who had led them into the war in the first place.

On the home fronts

In the past, the men had marched off to war, the women had sighed and waved hankies and then gone home to make the beds. Not any more. Women were expected to do their bit, sometimes in traditional ‘female’ roles such as nursing, but also by taking over men’s work so they could go off to fight. Women went into the factories to make shells and sew uniforms, they worked on farms, and kept the transport system running. Women were also recruited into the armed forces, usually in support roles, though the Russians had a female fighting unit. Most women had to go back to their domestic role when the men came home after the war, but at least they had shown what they could do. In Britain, women’s war work had been so impressive that in 1918 the government finally conceded women the right to vote.

The war also brought real hardship to civilian populations. As well as the pain of losing loved ones in the fighting, civilians had to cope with ever more serious food shortages as the U boat campaign and the British blockade took their toll. The winter of 1917–18 was known in Germany as the ‘Turnip Winter’ because they had so little food they were reduced to gnawing on turnips. In Russia, real starvation occurred as the food chain virtually broke down. By the time the war ended in 1918, thousands of people all over Europe were facing starvation. Classic conditions for revolution.

In the colonies

Remembering that thousands of colonial troops fought in the war is important, and they suffered appalling casualties. Britain and France both enlisted colonial troops to fight in the war. Soldiers from French Africa and Indo-China were sent to France, though they were mostly assigned to fairly menial tasks; the British sent troops from India and the Caribbean into the front line in France and used Indian and African troops extensively in other theatres.

The experience of war helped to foster a sense of imperial unity against a common enemy, but the colonial peoples also thought that after all that effort they’d earned the right to more of a say in their own affairs after the war. Funnily enough, the British and French didn’t see the situation that way, so the years after the war saw the start of major independence movements in Europe’s overseas empires.

Russia’s revolution

In February 1917 revolution broke out in Russia. The people rioted, the troops refused to obey the tsar’s orders, and the whole country seemed likely to collapse. The tsar abdicated and a new provisional government took over. (You can find out more about the Russian Revolution in Chapter 4.) The British and French were scared in case the Russians pulled out of the war, but the provisional government decided it would be better to stay in the war, knock out the Germans, and get all the credit. Bad idea. The troops had hoped the revolution would mean they could go home; when they finally did launch an attack, the Germans trounced them.

The Russians were very interested when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin told them that he and his Bolshevik Party would pull Russia out of the war and completely reorganise society on fairer lines. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and Lenin immediately started peace talks with the Germans. In March 1918, the Russians, Germans, and Austrians signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia gave up huge areas of territory, including Ukraine, Finland, Belorussia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Caucasus, and agreed to pay a huge indemnity (that’s a fine to you and me). But Lenin had got what he wanted: Russia was out of the war, and he could concentrate on building the world’s first communist state. Chapter 4 tells you how he did it.

No more wars?

Many people thought that one of the main causes of the war had been the way countries formed alliances and signed secret agreements behind each other’s backs. US President Wilson declared that in future the nations of the world should operate by ‘open agreements openly arrived at’, and he proposed a League of Nations, a sort of world government, to make sure that everyone kept to this arrangement. He hoped that if countries dealt openly and honestly with each other, war would disappear. Ordinary people around the world set up their own branches of the League of Nations Union and other organisations to try to keep the political leaders on the path to peace. In the end, though, the politicians just followed their own policies – as they always do.

All Out on the Western Front: War’s End

The Russian Revolution threatened to be a disaster for the Allies. America entered the war in April 1917, but the Americans would need time to recruit new troops and train them; most experts reckoned America would be ready for war by the summer of 1918. So the Germans decided to have one last go to win the war before the Americans started arriving in large numbers. In the spring of 1918 the Germans launched a massive offensive which they called The Kaiser Battle.

Caution: Highly inflammable ideas on board

When revolution broke out in Russia, Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders were stuck in exile in Switzerland. How to get back to Russia? The Allies wouldn’t help them, and the Germans would arrest them as enemy nationals. Lenin got in touch with the German government and made a deal: If the Germans allowed Lenin and friends to cross German territory, they would immediately take Russia out of the war once they seized power. The Germans agreed, but they didn’t want Lenin spreading any of his revolutionary ideas in Germany, so they imposed some strange conditions. The Bolsheviks would have to travel in a train with a single railway carriage, and no one was allowed on or off during the journey: It was to be a ‘sealed’ train. (Lenin couldn’t stand cigarette smoke, so the Bolsheviks, who were mostly chain smokers, had to spend the journey nipping into the toilet for a fag.) But the plan worked. Lenin arrived back in Russia in April 1917 and immediately set about undermining the Russian government.

Germany’s final push: The Kaiser Battle

In March 1918 the Germans launched a massive attack on the Allied trenches in France. They broke through the British lines on the Somme and headed for Paris. The Allies were thrown into confusion until the French Marshal Foch took charge and restored a bit of order. Helping the Allies even more was the fact that the Germans had advanced so far that they began to run into serious supply problems. Thanks to the British naval blockade (explained in the earlier section ‘Who Rules the Waves?’), many of the German troops were badly underfed; their supply system couldn’t keep up, and thousands of them went down with a deadly form of flu. Moreover, the Americans were coming over to France much faster and in greater numbers than the Germans had anticipated, and when Marshal Foch sent the Americans into action at the Battle of Chateau Thierry, they proved more than capable of beating the Germans hollow.

The British recovered from their initial shock and on 8 August 1918, ‘the Black Day of the German Army’ according to General Ludendorff, the British, Australians, and Canadians pushed the Germans back and took over 16,000 prisoners. The Germans were beaten and in full retreat.

After the war, the Germans simply couldn’t believe that they’d lost, so they comforted themselves with the idea that they hadn’t lost really: They’d been betrayed. They quoted a British general who said something along the lines that the Germans had in some way been ‘stabbed in the back’ by socialists and others in Germany who wanted to end the war quickly. Not too many years later, the Nazis went on to make full use of this idea to blame socialists and Jews for all Germany’s misfortunes after the war. Modern historians, however, are under no doubt at all: Germany caught the Allies on the hop in the spring of 1918, but the Allies recovered quickly and then comprehensively and completely defeated the German army in the field. Germany wasn’t stabbed in the back at all. Shot itself in the foot, more like.

The long war closes: The armistice agreement

In January 1918, President Wilson issued a set of Fourteen Points as a basis for peace. The Germans and Austrians would have to hand back the lands they had conquered, but the points also promised freedom of the seas for all nations and an end to secret alliances. They also guaranteednational self-determination – freedom for all peoples to govern themselves. This guarantee was very good news for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who wanted to do just that.

By November 1918, Germany had lost the war. The Allies were ready to invade Germany; the British had conquered Palestine and Syria; the Allies had defeated Bulgaria and Turkey; the Austrians had lost to the Italians at the Battle of Vitorio Veneto; and German socialists were trying to stage a revolution in Berlin. The Germans began to look seriously at President Wilson’s offer. But first the Allies made it clear that they’d only deal with Germany if the Kaiser stood down, so Germany’s top military brass went in to see him and told him it was time to go. Then they got in touch with the Allies.

The Allied commander, Marshal Foch, agreed to meet the German representatives in his private railway carriage. They agreed an armistice – a ceasefire – to take effect at 11 o’clock on 11 November. In some parts of the front, things were quiet but elsewhere the shooting and killing went on right up till 11 o’clock, though it’s hard to see the point.

A not very just or lasting peace: The treaties

French premier Georges Clemenceau, US president Woodrow Wilson, and British prime minister David Lloyd George were the key Allied participants at the Paris peace conference. Woodrow Wilson was the star of the show. He had drawn up a set of Fourteen Points which, he said, would lay the foundations for a just and lasting peace. They suggested things such as setting up free nations, allowing freedom of the seas, and keeping diplomacy open and above board. The suggestions all sounded good to the Germans and their allies so they agreed to make peace, thinking that the final treaty would be along the lines of the Fourteen Points. So did President Wilson. Boy, were they wrong.

Holding the conference in Paris was a bad start as it wasn’t exactly neutral territory (okay, the food was very good) and it meant the conference was run by the bullish and deeply anti-German French premier, Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau had no time for small nations or Wilson’s Fourteen Points (or Wilson himself); in fact, Clemenceau didn’t have much time for anyone except Georges Clemenceau.

Lloyd George was a wily old bird, but he was in a tricky position in Paris. He didn’t think that grinding the Germans into the dust was a particularly good idea, but the people and the press back home were screaming for him to ‘Hang the Kaiser’, and his Liberal government needed every vote it could get. So Lloyd George had to spend his time in Paris trying to steer a middle course between Wilson’s naïve optimism and Clemenceau’s vindictiveness, while making sure Britain got hold of Germany’s fleet and colonies, of course.

With the French premier out for revenge for all that Germany had done to France, and Lloyd George declaring to the British public that he would squeeze Germany till the pips squeaked, the odds were heavily stacked against the just and lasting peace that Wilson hoped for.

New nations for all! But not for you. Or you

Wilson arrived in Paris with two exciting big ideas: The first was national self-determination, which meant that each national group should have its own independent national state. This idea was fine as long as you could work out where one national group ended and the next began – which didn’t prove easy. In any case, Britain and France quickly insisted that, of course, Wilson didn’t mean that national groups who happened to be part of their empires should have their own states. President Wilson had to stammer out that, er, of course he had never intended any such thing. And when the Germans and Austrians asked if national self-determination meant they could join together in one big German state, the Allies said very firmly, ‘No, you can’t’. Already Wilson’s ideas were beginning to come apart at the seams.

Wilson’s second big idea was a League of Nations, a world government, a gathering of all the states of the world to settle disputes peacefully instead of by war. Dream on, friends. (You can read more about the League of Nations in the sidebar ‘A League of Nations. Well, some of them, anyway’.)

Wilson’s vision hit two main difficulties. First: The French and British had just come through four and a half years of destructive war and they weren’t as ready to be nice to everybody as President Wilson seemed to be (the French made sure that everyone going to the peace conference travelled through the areas that had been destroyed in the fighting and they told the train drivers to slow down so the delegates could get a good look). Second: To the different peoples of Europe, President Wilson’s talk of national self-determination sounded a good excuse for nationally determining on grabbing as much of their neighbours’ lands as they could get away with.

The conference was dominated by the ‘big three’, Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George, who had to look particularly carefully at three main areas:

Central Europe: This had been the Austro-Hungarian empire, but now the Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Ruthenes, and all their friends and relations were clamouring to be given their own states. Some groups were too small to be viable, so they’d have to link up with others: Czecho-Slovakia, for example, or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia. This joining-together rule doesn’t apply to the Germans and Austrians, however, and sulking about it won’t get you anywhere, the others didn’t start a major war, now did they?

Russia: Russia didn’t attend the conference as it was busy holding its own revolution (see Chapter 4), and in any case it had left the war early. However, Lenin had said that the different peoples of the Russian empire could set up their own states if they wanted and many of them, such as the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Armenians, and the Baltic peoples of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, were planning to do just that.

The Middle East: The old Turkish Ottoman empire had collapsed, partly as a result of the Arab Revolt that had accompanied the British advance against the Turks. The Arab delegations arrived in Paris expecting soon to be running a string of modern independent states, along the lines of what was being planned for Europe. The Allies had other ideas.

Different national delegations arrived armed with historical maps and charts to show why they had an ancient right to huge swathes of territory. The men listened and then they retired to their hotel rooms, got their maps and pencils out, and decided who should have what. This approach saved all that tedious business of actually talking to people.

Instead of setting the former German and Turkish colonies free, the Allies decided to hand them over to the new League of Nations for safe keeping. The League would then mandate them (that is, hand them over) to Britain and France to administer. In theory, this was so that Britain and France could prepare these territories for independence, but in the meantime these mandates were simply added to Britain and France’s long lists of colonies. This meant that the Arabs had simply exchanged one colonial ruler, the Turks, for another, the British and French, and they began to wonder what the point of their revolt had been. Britain and South Africa took over the German colonies in Africa; Britain and Australia mopped up the German colonies in Asia and the Pacific. The new masters said this situation was all in the very best interests of the colonised peoples, of course.

Thanks to this mandate system, the British and French empires reached their greatest extent in the years after the First World War.

Everything is your fault. Sign here

Although delegations from Germany and its allies were at the Paris conference, the big three declined to meet them until the peace treaties had all been drawn up. So the first these nations knew of what was in their treaties was when they were given them to sign. As a result none of the defeated countries regarded the treaties they signed as fair or honourable, and they didn’t see why they should keep to them. In time, some of the Allies came to agree with them.

The treaties were signed at various chateaux around Paris. The big one was the treaty with Germany, signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The Germans had actually declared their own empire here after defeating the French back in 1871, so by making them sign it at Versailles the French were really rubbing their noses in it. The Treaty said:

Germany must hand back territories it had conquered and hand over some of its territory to the new states being created. The country lost a huge section of its eastern territories to Poland.

Germany can only have a small army of 100,000 men, no tanks, no air force, no submarines, and no big battleships.

Germany must pay a huge financial bill known as reparations to cover the damage the war had caused. The French would decide how much.

Germany must accept the War Guilt clause, which blamed her for starting the war in the first place.

The German delegates felt they had no choice but to sign this humiliating treaty – and they were right – but they reckoned it would cause outrage in Germany. They were right there, too.

The other defeated powers were just as unhappy with their settlements. The other treaties were:

Treaty of St Germain signed with Austria, which dismantled the Austro-Hungarian empire and set up a series of new national states like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

Treaty of Trianon signed with Hungary, which made them hand over large areas of land to the Czechs and Romanians.

Treaty of Neuilly signed with Bulgaria, which made them hand over land to Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

Treaty of Sèvres signed with Turkey, which forced the Turks to hand land over to their old enemies, the Greeks.

All these treaties followed the pattern set by the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. They all handed various lands over to neighbouring countries; they all severely limited the size of their armed forces; they took away any overseas colonies; and they hadreparations imposed on them to pay for damage caused by the war.

The peace treaties in 1919 were so unequal and so obviously unfair on the defeated countries that even critics said they would spark off another war within a generation. They were absolutely right. The Germans’ resentment at the way they were treated was a major factor leading to the rise of the Nazis and, eventually, the Second World War.

A League of Nations. Well, some of them, anyway

Even President Wilson’s most visionary idea, the League of Nations, failed to live up to expectations. He’d planned it to be a world government, but colonies weren’t represented, which cut out most of Africa and Asia; Germany wasn’t allowed to join because it had started the war; Russia wasn’t allowed in because the Allies didn’t approve of communist governments; and the United States voted against joining anyway.

Wilson had only himself to blame for the American decision. He’d been so sure that he could solve Europe’s problems single-handed that he decided he didn’t need any help or advice, and certainly not from his opponents. He refused to have any Republicans in his delegation and he wouldn’t listen to anyone who said that joining the League of Nations would mean dragging America into more foreign wars. Voters have a way of dealing with leaders who ignore them; it’s called democracy and Wilson and the Democrats learned it the hard way. Congress rejected the Treaty of Versailles and voted against the League. Wilson tried a whistle stop tour to sell his treaty directly to the American people, but this tactic didn’t work and it finished him off: His health collapsed completely and he spent his last years in office as an invalid. America never did join the League and the voters turned in droves to the Republicans.