Trixcia Anne G.

G9-

Submitted to:
Studies

Social

Mrs.Cueto

World War I

1. The countries involved are:

Austria-Hungary : Austria-Hungary initiated World War I by declaring war on Serbia in
July 1914.
Belgium : Though initially neutral, Belgium joined World War I to offer stiff resistance
against German invasion.
Brazil : Brazil joined World War I in 1917 on the side of the Allies, and was the only Latin
American country to participate in the Great War.
British Empire : Britain and British colonies including Australia, Canada, India, and New
Zealand formed part of the Allied camp. The spread of the British colonies across the
globe brought World War I to Africa and Asia.
Bulgaria : The Kingdom of Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 and fought until
September 1918.
China : China entered World War I in 1917 following U.S. entry into the war.
France and Colonies : One of the major Allied nations, France declared war with the
German declaration of war against France on August 3, 1914.
German Empire : Germany was a major Central Power. Austria-Hungarys declaration of
war was heavily influenced by Germanys assurance of support.
Greece : Following the U.S. entry into World War I, Greece entered the war on the side
of the Allies on June 27, 1917.
Italy : Initially reluctant to join the war despite an alliance with Germany and AustriaHungary, Italy sided with the allies in 1915.
Japan : Japan's entry into World War I in August 1914 followed Britain's request to
combat raids of the Kaiserliche Marine (German Imperial Navy).
Liberia : Liberian trade was adversely affected by World War I, and the country joined
the Allied Powers in 1917.

Montenegro : Linked closely with Serbia, Montenegro joined the Allied cause in August
1914.
Ottoman Empire : The Ottoman Empire joined World War I in November 1914, on the
side of the Central Powers, due to its close ties with Germany.
Portugal : Despite the rivalry between Portugal and Germany, Portugal remained neutral
until March 1915, when Germany declared war. Portugal then joined the Allies.
Romania : Romania joined the Allies in August 1916.
Russia : Russia, along with Britain and France, was one of the major Allied Powers, and
first among the nations to mobilize troops against Germany.
Serbia : The outbreak of World War I was triggered by the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo, Serbia. Austria-Hungary declared war
on Serbia in July 1914.
United States of America: The United States declared neutrality in 1914. In 1917, the
United States associated with the Allied nations thereby changing the course of World
War I.
Other countries such as Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, San Marino,
and Siam were also involved in the Great War.

2. The cause of world war I

The origins of World War I remain controversial and debated questions. The war
began in the Balkans in late July 1914 and ended in November 1918, leaving 17
million dead and 20 million wounded.
A long-term analysis of its origins seeks to explain why two rival sets of powers
Germany and Austro-Hungary on the one hand, and Russia, France, Serbia and
Great Britain on the other had come into conflict by 1914. It examines political,
territorial and economic conflicts, militarism, a complex web of alliances and
alignments,imperialism, the growth of nationalism, and the power vacuum
created by the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Other important long-term or
structural factors were unresolved territorial disputes, the perceived breakdown
of the balance of power in Europe, convoluted and fragmented governance,
the arms races of the previous decades, andmilitary planning.
A short-term analysis focuses on why the conflicting sets of powers went to war
when they did. The immediate causes lay in decisions made by statesmen and
generals during the July Crisis of 1914, triggered by the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, on 28 June
1914. The assassin,Gavrilo Princip, was an ethnic Serb and Yugoslav
nationalist from the group Young Bosnia, which was supported by the Black Hand, a

nationalist organization in Serbia. The crisis escalated as the conflict between

Austria-Hungary and Serbia came to involve Russia, Germany, France, and
ultimately Belgium and Great Britain. Other factors that came into play during the
diplomatic crisis that preceded the war included misperceptions of intent (e.g., the
German belief that Britain would remain neutral), fatalism that war was inevitable,
and the speed of the crisis, which was exacerbated by delays and
misunderstandings in diplomatic communications.
The crisis followed a series of diplomatic clashes among the Great
Powers (Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary and Russia) over
European and colonial issues in the decades before 1914 that had left tensions
high. In turn these public clashes can be traced to changes in the balance of
power in Europe since 1867.
Consensus on the origins of the war remains elusive since historians disagree on
key factors, and place differing emphasis on a variety of actors. This is
compounded by changing historical arguments over time, particularly the delayed
availability of classified historical archives, and differing geographic zeitgeist then
prevailing. The deepest distinction among historians is between those who focus
on the actions of Germany and Austria-Hungary as key and those who focus on a
wider group of actors. Secondary fault lines exist between those who believe that
Germany deliberately planned a European war, those who believe that the war
was ultimately unplanned but still caused principally by Germany and AustriaHungary taking risks, and those who believe that either all or some of the other
powers, namely Russia, France, Serbia and Great Britain, played a more
significant role in causing the war than has been traditionally suggested.

3. The effect of the War

England had been the center of the great British Empire before World War I. The war
marks the beginning of the decline of that empire in the face of rising nationalist demands
for independence throughout the non-European world.
England had also been the great creditor nation of the world, providing shipping and
insurance services to the rest of the world. The cost of the war was so great that England
consumed all of its credits and became heavily indebted to the United States. As a result
of the war, the world's financial center shifted from England to the United States, from
London to New York.

The demands by women for the right to vote had become most strident in England
prior to the war. It could no longer be denied. Women acquired that right throughout most
of the countries of Europe following the war.
Working class people, as well as women, were fully employed during the war, and their
status, once defined as very subordinate to the aristocracy, was greatly enhanced. The
distribution of income shifted in favor of the poor. Relatively, the status of the aristocracy
was diminished. Politically, this is reflected in England by the rise of the Labor Party as
one of the two major parties.
In France, the heavy losses in manpower at the front decimated an entire generation of
Frenchmen and are thought to have created a leadership vacuum when that generation
came of age. France had fallen behind Germany and England in population during the
19th century. They were, therefore, less able to sustain wartime losses.
France also suffered untold property damage since most of the war on the western front
was fought on French soil.
The United States, removed by an ocean from the center of the war and joining late in
the war, did not suffer the catastrophic losses of the major belligerents. U.S. losses in life
were great, more than 100,000, but this was small in comparison to the millions lost by
the other major powers.
Furthermore, the United States was a great continental power, with great population
and resources. The war stimulated the U.S. economy, increased employment and wages,
and brought great profit to industry. The United States emerged from the war as clearly
the greatest power in the world as well as the creditor nation of the world.
These circumstances thrust the United States into a position as world leaders, while the
American people still assumed that Europe had little to do with America. President
Wilson had a vision that would have involved the United States extensively in world
affairs through the League of Nations, but he was unable to find popular support.
Germany had entered World War I as the greatest power among the belligerents, with
its people immensely proud of Germany's achievements in the years since unification.
Defeat in war was a profound shock, and coupled with economic privation and collapse,
was more than the German people could accept.
The unusual circumstances at the end of the war, in which their government collapsed
and the Social Democratic Party assumed power, were not of their choosing. Revolution
was forced upon them by outside pressure, before the people were prepared for change.

The new government was unpopular from the beginning. Rather than being in the
mainstream of German politics, its support came mainly from the working class. Its
popularity was further eroded by the fact that it was tainted with having to sign the
armistice and then to accept the Versailles Treaty, a treatly which was universally
denounced by the German people.
Severe economic difficulties created by the war and the demand for reparations caused
despair and hardship which ensured an uncertain future for the nation.
Austria-Hungary collapsed during the war, torn apart by its multi-national divisions.
Though the Treaty negotiators in Paris in 1919, recognized a new political arrangement
after the war, it, too, lacked stability because it was impossible to put to rest the multiethnic tension between the people in the region.
Czechoslovakia was a relatively stable successor state in the north, though it was
divided among two Slavic nationalities and included many Germans in the Sudetenland,
as well as Polish and Hungarian minorities.
Rumania, one of the Allied nations, was given a large share of territory inhabited by
Hungarians.
The greatest uncertainty was, however, in the areas inhabited by Slovenes, Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims, where the different ethnic groups could not be separated from one
another and were included together in the new multi-national state of Yugoslavia.
In the former European portion of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish people mingled with
Bulgars in Bulgaria, while Albanians mingled with Greeks in Greece and with Serbs in
Yugoslavia.
Both the Austrian and the Ottoman Empires had been destroyed without there being
any stable alternative.
In Russia, the war led to the Russian Revolution and a civil war which continued the
conflict for three years beyond World War I. The civil war involved foreign intervention,
almost total disintegration of the economy and, by 1921, massive famine.
The revolution came earlier than it otherwise would have, under circumstances of war,
and before a middle class leadership were prepared to establish a stable, liberal
alternative to the old regime.
In other words, the war accelerated the process of change driven by industrialization,
and created circumstances in Germany, in the Balkans, and in Russia which people were

not prepared for. As previously indicated, it also thrust the United States into a position of
world leadership before the American people were ready to accept that responsibility.
The problems, the instability, the uncertainties, and the economic collapse created by
the war were far more difficult to deal with than any situation that existed prior to the
war.

Trixcia Anne G.

G9-

Submitted to:
Studies

Social

Mrs.Cueto

World War II

1. The countries involved are:

German
Italy
Japan
Slovakia (Nov. 1940)
Hungary (Nov. 1940)
Romania (Nov. 1940)
Bulgaria (March 1941)
The Allies
Australia
Belgium

Brazil
Canada
China
Czechoslovakia
Denmark
Estonia
France
Greece
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malta
The Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Poland
South Africa
United Kingdom
United States
USSR
Yugoslavia
and others.

2.The cause of world war II

Among the causes of World War II were Italian fascism in the 1920s, Japanese
militarism and invasions of China in the 1930s, and especially the political takeover in
1933 of Germany by Hitler and his Nazi Party and its aggressive foreign policy. The
immediate cause was Britain and France declaring war on Germany after it invaded
Poland in September 1939.
Problems arose in Weimar Germany that experienced strong currents
of revanchism after the Treaty of Versailles that concluded its defeat inWorld War I in
1918. Dissatisfactions of treaty provisions included the demilitarizarion of the Rhineland,
the prohibition of unification with Austria and the loss of German-speaking territories
such as Danzig, Eupen-Malmedy and Upper Silesia despite Wilson's Fourteen
Points, the limitations on the Reichswehr making it a token military force, the war-guilt
clause, and last but not least the heavy tribute that Germany had to pay in the form of
war reparations, and that become an unbearable burden after the Great Depression.
The most serious internal cause in Germany was the instability of the political system,
as large sectors of politically active Germans rejected the legitimacy of the Weimar
Republic.
After his rise and take-over of power in 1933 to a large part based on these
grievances, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis heavily promoted them and also ideas of vastly
ambitious additional demands based on Nazi ideology such as uniting all Germans (and
further all Germanic peoples) in Europe in a single nation; the acquisition of "living
space" (Lebensraum) for primarily agrarian settlers (Blut und Boden), creating a "pull
towards the East" (Drang nach Osten) where such territories were to be found
and colonized, in a model that the Nazis explicitly derived from the American Manifest
Destiny in the Far West and its clearing of native inhabitants; the elimination
of Bolshevism; and the hegemony of an "Aryan"/"Nordic" so-called Master Race over
the "sub-humans" (Untermenschen) of inferior races, chief among
them Slavs and Jews.

Tensions created by those ideologies and the dissatisfactions of those powers with
the interwar international order steadily increased. Italy laid claim on Ethiopia and
conquered it in 1935, Japan created a puppet state in Manchuria in 1931 and expanded
beyond in China from 1937, and Germany systematically flouted the Versailles treaty,
reintroducing conscription in 1935 with the Stresa Front's failure after having secretly
started re-armament, remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, annexing Austria in March
1938, and the Sudetenland in October 1938.
All those aggressive moves met only feeble and ineffectual policies of
appeasement from the League of Nations and theEntente Cordiale, in retrospect
symbolized by the "peace for our time" speech following the Munich Conference, that
had allowed the annexation of the Sudeten from interwar Czechoslovakia. When the
German Fhrer broke the promise he had made at that conference to respect that
country's future territorial integrity in March 1939 by sending troops into Prague, its
capital, breaking off Slovakia as a German client state, and absorbing the rest of it as
the "Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia", Britain and France tried to switch to a policy
of deterrence.
As Nazi attentions turned towards resolving the "Polish Corridor Question" during the
summer of 1939, Britain and France committed themselves to an alliance with Poland,
threatening Germany with a two-front war. On their side, the Germans assured
themselves of the support of the USSR by signing a non-aggression pact with them in
August, secretly dividing Eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence.
The stage was then set for the Danzig crisis to become the immediate trigger of the war
in Europe started on 1 September 1939. Following the Fall of France in June 1940,
the Vichy regime signed an armistice, which tempted the Empire of Japan to join
the Axis powers and invade French Indochina to improve their military situation in their
war with China. This provoked the then neutral United States to respond with an
embargo. The Japanese leadership, whose goal was Japanese domination of the Asia-

Pacific, thought they had no option but to pre-emptively strike at the US Pacific fleet,
which they did by attacking Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

3. Effects of the war

Germany was totally defeated, and the Nazi regime brought down. Its leaders were
tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg, the former site of Nazi propaganda
triumphs. Hitler escaped trial and execution by committing suicide in his Berlin bunker at
the end of the war. German cities were in ruins from a massive bombing campaign.
Germany was divided into 4 zones of occupation by the victorious powers, pending a
more permanent political settlement.
Japan also was in ruins from extensive bombing. Prominent military leaders were
tried and convicted of war crimes, but the emperor was allowed to retain his position.
Japan was temporarily placed under U.S. military rule.
England was devastated by the war, having experienced extensive bombing during
the 1940 blitz by the Germans. The economy depended for recovery upon aid from the
United States. England rapidly phased out most of its remaining imperial holdings in the
years immediately following the war.
France had not experienced the enormous human losses sustained in the First World
War, but would have to recover from the effects of Nazi occupation. Retribution was
taken upon collaborators. Like England, France would be compelled to dismantle its
colonial empire in the years following the war. This was a particularly traumatic and
drawn out process for the French, in Algeria and in Vietnam where they fought
prolonged and bitter wars in an attempt to maintain their colonial control.
England and France no longer held a status of power comparable either to the United
States or the Soviet Union.
The Russian people had suffered immeasurably during the war, and western Russia
was devastated by the land warfare which was primarily on Russian territory. But, in the
process of defeating the Germans, the Russians had built a large and powerful army,
which occupied most of Eastern Europe at the end of the war. The great resources and

population of Russia assured that the Soviet Union would be, along with the United
States, one of two super-powers.
The United States economy was greatly stimulated by the war, even more so than in
World War I. The depression was brought decisively to an end, and new industrial
complexes were built all over the United States. Spared the physical destruction of war,
the U.S. economy dominated the world economy. After 4 years of military buildup, the
U.S. had also become the leading military power. The position of the United States as
world leader was now more obvious than ever.