World War 1, 2nd Part

Source: Western Civilizations – Coffin, Stacy, Cole and Symes (2011 –Norton)

The road to German Defeat

The Allies finally brought their material advantage to
bear on the Germans, who were suffering acutely by the
spring of 1918. This was not only because of the continued
effectiveness of the Allied blockade but also because
of growing domestic conflict over war aims. On the front
lines, German soldiers were exhausted. Following the lead
of their distraught generals, the troops let morale sink, and
many surrendered. Facing one shattering blow after another,
the German army was pushed deep into Belgium.
Popular discontent mounted, and the government, which
was now largely in the hands of the military, seemed unable
either to win the war or to meet basic household needs.
Germany’s network of allies was also coming undone.
By the end of September, the Central Powers were headed
for defeat. In the Middle East, Allenby’s army, which combined
Bedouin guerrillas, Indian sepoys, Scottish highlanders,
and Australian light cavalry, decisively defeated
Ottoman forces in Syria and Iraq. In the Balkans, France’s
capable battlefield commander, Louis Franchet d’Esperey
(1914–1921), transformed the Allied expedition in Greece
and drew that country into the war. The results were
remarkable.
Greek and Allied forces knocked Bulgaria out of the war.
Meanwhile Austria-Hungary faced disaster on all sides,
collapsing in Italy as well as the Balkans. Czech and Polish
representatives in the Austrian government began pressing
for self-government. Croat and Serb politicians proposed a
“kingdom of Southern Slavs” (soon known as Yugoslavia).
When Hungary joined the chorus for independence
the emperor, Karl I, accepted reality and sued for peace.
The empire that had started the conflict surrendered on
November 3, 1918, and disintegrated soon after.
Germany was now left with the impossible task of
carrying on the struggle alone. By the fall of 1918,
the country was starving and on the verge of civil
war. A plan to use the German surface fleet to
attack the combined British and American navies
only produced a mutiny among German sailors at
the start of November. Revolutionary tremors
swelled into an earthquake. On November 8 a
republic was proclaimed in Bavaria, and the next
day nearly all of Germany was in the throes of
revolution.
The kaiser’s abdication was announced in Berlin on November
9; he fled to Holland early the next morning. Control of the
German government fell to a provisional council headed
by Friedrich Ebert (1912–1923), the socialist leader in the
Reichstag. Ebert and his colleagues immediately took steps
to negotiate an armistice. The Germans could do nothing
but accept the Allies’ terms, so at fi ve o’clock in the morning
of November 11, 1918, two German delegates met
with the Allied army commander in the Compiègne forest
and signed papers officially ending the war.
The final turning point of the war had been the entry of
the United States in April 1917. Although America had
supported the Allies financially throughout the war, its
official intervention undeniably tipped the scales. The
United States created a fast and efficient wartime
bureaucracy, instituting conscription in May 1917. About
ten million men were registered, and by the next year,
three hundred thousand soldiers a month were being
shipped “over there.” Large amounts of food and supplies
also crossed the Atlantic, under the armed protection of
the U.S. Navy
The direct cause of America’s entry into the war
was the German U-boat. Germany had gambled
that unrestricted submarine warfare would
cripple Britain’s supply lines and win the war.
But by attacking neutral and unarmed American
ships, Germany only provoked an opponent it
could not afford to fi ght.
The American public
was further outraged by an intercepted
telegram from Germany’s foreign minister,
Arthur Zimmerman (1916–1917), stating
that Germany would support a Mexican attempt
to capture American territory if the
United States entered the war. The United
States cut off diplomatic relations with
Berlin, and on April 6, President Woodrow
Wilson (1913–1921) requested and received
a declaration of war by Congress.
Wilson vowed that America would fight
to “make the world safe for democracy,” to
banish autocracy and militarism, and to
establish a league or society of nations inplace of the old
diplomatic maneuvering. The Americans’
primary interest was maintaining the international
balance
of power. For years, U.S. diplomats and military leaders
believed
that American security depended on the equilibrium
of strength in Europe.
As long as Britain could prevent any
one nation from achieving supremacy on the Continent,
the United States was safe. But now Germany threatened
not only the British navy—which had come to be seen as
the shield of American security—but also the
international
balance of power. American involvement stemmed those
threats in 1918, but the monumental task of establishing
peace still lay ahead.
 Total War
Total War
The search for peace was spurred by shock at the murderousness
of the war. As early as 1915 contemporaries were
speaking of “the Great War”; the transformations were
there for all to see. The changing technologies of warfare
altered strategic calculations. New artillery was heavier,
with a longer range and more deadly results: German mobile
howitzers, such as “Big Bertha,” could fire shells of over
a thousand pounds at targets nine miles and even farther
away. (One shelled Paris from seventy-five miles out.) This
was modern, industrialized warfare, first glimpsed in the
American Civil War but now more advanced and on a
much larger scale.
The
statistics and what they imply still strain the
imagination:
seventy-four million soldiers were mobilized on
both sides;
six thousand people were killed each day for
more than
fifteen hundred days.
The warring nations, Europe’s new industrial
powerhouses,
were also empires, and this “world” war consumed
resources and soldiers from all over the globe.
Mobilization
also reached more deeply into civilian society. Economies
bent to military priorities. Propaganda escalated to
sustain
the effort, fanning old hatreds and creating new ones.
Atrocities against civilians came in its wake
Europe had
known brutal wars against civilians before, and guerilla
war during the time of Napoleon, but the First World War
vastly magnified the violence and multiplied the streams of
refugees. Minorities who lived in the crumbling Russian,
Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman empires were especially
vulnerable. Jewish populations in Russia had lived in fear
of pogroms before 1914; now they were attacked by Russian
soldiers who accused them of encouraging the enemy.
Austria-Hungary, likewise, summarily executed minorities
suspected of Russian sympathies
 Peace Settlement
The Peace Settlement
The Paris Peace Conference, which opened in
January
1919, was an extraordinary moment, one that
dramatized
just how much the world had been transformed by
the war and the decades that preceded it. Gone
were the
Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires.
That
the American president Woodrow Wilson played such a
prominent role marked the rise of the United States as a
world power. Although many attended, the conference was largely
controlled by the so-called Big Four: the U.S. president
Woodrow Wilson, the British prime minister David
Lloyd George (1916–1922), the French premier Georges
Clemenceau (1917–1920), and the Italian premier Vittorio
Orlando (1917–1919). The debates among these four personalities
were fi erce, as they all had confl icting ambitions
and interests. In total, fi ve separate treaties were signed,
one with each of the defeated nations: Germany, Austria,
Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria. The settlement with
Germany was called the Treaty of Versailles, after the town
in which it was signed.
Wilson’s widely publicized Fourteen Points represented
the spirit of idealism. Wilson had proposed the
Fourteen Points before the war ended, as the foundation
of a permanent peace. Based on the principle of “open covenants
of peace, openly arrived at,” they called for an end
to secret diplomacy, freedom of the seas, removal of international
tariffs, and reduction of national armaments “to
the lowest point consistent with safety.” They also called
for the “self-determination of peoples” and for the establishment
of a League of Nations to settle international confl
icts.
Idealism, however, was undermined by other
imperatives.
Throughout the war, Allied propaganda led
soldiers
and civilians to believe that their sacrifi ces to
the war effort
would be compensated by payments extracted
from
the enemy. Total war demanded total victory
The devastation of the war and
the fiction that Germany could be made
to pay for it made compromise impossible.
The settlement with Germany was
shaped more by this desire for punishment
than by Wilson’s idealism.
The Versailles treaty required Germany to surrender the “lost
provinces” of Alsace and Lorraine to France and to give up other
territories to Denmark and the new state of Poland.
The treaty gave Germany’s coal mines in the Saar basin to France for
fifteen years, at which point the German government could buy them
back. Germany’s province of East Prussia was cut off from the rest of
its territory. The port of Danzig, where the majority of the population
was German, was put under the administrative control of the League
of Nations and the economic domination
of Poland. The treaty disarmed Germany, forbid a German air force,
and reduced its navy to a token force to match an army capped at a
hundred thousand volunteers.
To protect France and Belgium, all German soldiers and fortifications
were to be removed from the Rhine Valley.
The most important part of the Versailles treaty, and
one of the parts at odds with Wilson’s original plan, was
the “war-guilt” provision in Article 231. Versailles held
Germany and its allies responsible for the loss and damage
suffered by the Allied governments and their citizens
“as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the
aggression of Germany and her allies.” Germany would be
forced to pay massive reparations. The exact amount was
left to a Reparations Commission, which set the total at $33
billion in 1921. The Germans deeply resented these harsh
demands, but others outside of Germany also warned
of the dangers of punitive reparations.
The Ottoman Empire ended as well, with two results: the creation of
the modern Turkish state and a new structure for British and French
colonial rule. As territories were taken from the Ottomans, Greece
chose to seize some by force. The effort was successful at first, but the
Turks counterattacked, driving out Greek forces by 1923 and creating
the modern state of Turkey under the charismatic leadership of
General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1923–1938). Ottoman territories
placed under French and British control became part of the colonial
“mandate system,” which legitimized Europe’s dominance over
territories in the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific. Territories were
divided into groups on the basis of their location and their
“level of development,” or how far, in European eyes, they would have
to travel to earn self-government.
Each peace treaty imposed on the defeated incorporated
the Covenant of the League of Nations, an organization
envisioned as the arbiter of world peace, but it never
achieved the idealistic aims of its founders. The League
was handicapped from the start by a number of changes
to its original design. The arms-reduction requirement
was watered down, and the League’s power to enforce it
was rendered almost nonexistent. Japan would not join
unless it was allowed to keep former German concessions
in China. France demanded that both Germany and
Russia be excluded from the League.
 The New States
• The First World War brought about the collapse of four
multinational empires – the Russian empire in 1917, and then the
Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires in 1918. They
collapsed in defeat and revolution.
• In the wake of Russia’s collapse in 1917, new states emerged – the
Baltic states and Ukraine as well as Poland.
• By the end of 1918, the other three empires had collapsed. New
states included the remnants of the defeated powers – the German
Weimar Republic, Austria, Hungary, Turkey (and Bulgaria, a
prototypical small nation state, which had chosen fatefully the
losing side in the war);
• greatly enlarged nation states, notably Greece, Romania;
• and the successor states, such as Yugoslavia (the kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenians), and Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania.