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World War I, 1914-1917
In the summer of 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ignited a continental war between the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire and the Allies of France, Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. By the war's end in 1918, the war would span the globe, claim more than 16 million lives, and change the world forever.
Germany planned to quickly defeat the British and French to the west before turning its full force east to Russia, but its initial thrusts into Belgium and northern France were checked. By the end of 1914 four hundred miles of trench lines -- the Western Front -- stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea.
Over the next three years, a series of bloody offensives failed to overcome the stalemate of trench warfare. In 1916 the Battle of the Somme lasted 140 days with more than a million casualties and moved the front lines six miles, while the German assault on Verdun yielded little gain at a cost of 700,000 dead and wounded. By 1917 both sides were nearing exhaustion.
The United States initially remained neutral. But reports of German atrocities and submarine attacks on shipping bound for Britain and France -- most infamously the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, which killed 128 Americans -- began to change American opinion.
In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of war." But in April 1917, Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, along with its offer to help Mexico recover territories lost to the Untied States in 1848, led Wilson to ask Congress to declare war on Germany. American entry came none too soon. The British were running out of men, almost half of the French army had mutinied, and the Russian Revolution in 1917 would lead to Russia's withdrawal from the war, allowing Germany to shift troops to the Western Front.
Although the first American soldiers landed in France in June 1917, it would take a year to create, train, and equip an army and ship it across the Atlantic. The outcome of the war would turn on whether Germany could defeat Britain and France before the Americans arrived in force.
"It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace."
-- President Woodrow Wilson, April 2, 1917 |