War Erupts in Europe

Figure 1. An illustration from an Italian newspaper depicting the killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.

When Serbian-Slavic nationalists assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on June 29, 1914, the underlying forces that led to World War I had already long been in motion and seemed, at first, to have little to do with the United States. At the time, the events that pushed Europe from ongoing tensions into war seemed very far away from U.S. interests. For nearly a century, European nations had negotiated a series of mutual defense alliance treaties to secure themselves against their imperialistic rivals. Among the largest European powers, the Triple Entente included an alliance of France, Great Britain, and Russia. Opposite them, the Central Powers, also known as the Triple Alliance, included Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and initially Italy. To complicate matters, a series of “side treaties” also required the larger European powers to protect several smaller ones should war break out.

At the same time that European nations committed each other to defense pacts, they jockeyed for power over empires abroad and invested heavily in large, modern militaries. Dreams of empire and military supremacy fueled an era of nationalism that was particularly pronounced in the newer nations of Germany and Italy but also provoked separatist movements among various European populations who were resentful of being ruled by foreign powers. In Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo, Serbian citizen Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in their fight for a Slavic nation independent from Austro-Hungarian rule. When Serbia failed to accede to Austro-Hungarian demands in the wake of the Archduke’s murder, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia with the confidence that it had the backing of Germany, which had united in 1871 and had begun posturing itself as an imperial power on the world stage soon after.

Separatist Movements

Most historians agree that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was the spark that ignited World War I. However, it can be difficult to understand why the murder of an Austrian Archduke in Eastern Europe by a Serbian citizen could be the cause of a war that swept over almost every nation in Europe and came to involve the U.S. To understand how this happened, it is important to examine the nature of European Imperialism and separatist movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and German Empires ruled vast areas of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East in the early 20th century. The British Isles also ruled over colonies in parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. These massive Empires were holdovers from the pre-Industrial world where nations would compete against one another to acquire new territories, populations, and resources. The effect of this was that millions of people around the world lived under the rule of governments or monarchs who were often oppressive and authoritarian. When imperial powers conquered and annexed new territories, the local populace sometimes became the target of violence and ethnic cleansing. There were many examples of religious persecution, forced deportations or relocations, ethnic cleansing, and other atrocities. The responses from local populations were varied, but many areas developed strong independence movements whose goal was to politically, socially, and militarily free themselves from their imperial rulers. Most used paramilitary tactics, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism to achieve their goal.

Figure 2. Map of military alliances in 1914.

 

Separatist movements against the Austro-Hungarian Empire developed mostly in the Balkan region (southeastern Europe) with the goal of breaking Austro-Hungarian rule and establishing a united Slavic nation. After World War I, these pan-Slavic movements succeeded in establishing the country of Yugoslavia, which included modern-day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia (though Yugoslavia dissolved in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence). Other separatist movements against the Austro-Hungarian Empire developed in present-day Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

The Ottoman Empire dealt with its own separatist movements in present-day Albania, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and Bosnia. In the wake of World War I, a movement for Turkish independence took power in the weakened Ottoman Empire, officially dissolving it and creating the Turkish Republic in 1923.

The British Empire has dealt with some of the most prominent separatist movements in history, including the American Revolution and The Troubles conflict with Northern Ireland. Approximately 65 countries have won their independence from Britain, with most becoming independent shortly after World War II.

Figure 3. The British Empire at its height in 1921.

 

At the start of World War I, the German Empire encompassed all of present-day Germany, plus parts of France, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia. The German Empire also held overseas territory in China, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. While Germany was punitively stripped of this territory due to its participation in World Wars I and II, and not strictly because of separatist insurrections, many former German territories were able to press the Allies for their independence after being removed from the German Empire.

Figure 4. The German Empire and its colonial possessions in 1914. The red circles show some small colonial possessions, such as the Chinese trading city of Tianjin.

 

The idea of self-determination, where independent, sovereign nations are formed from voluntary associations of ethnic, linguistic, religious, or cultural groups, was a key tenet of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points, which were Wilson’s principles for peace following WWI. The 20th-century trend toward self-determination was often driven by separatist movements that developed within broader histories of decolonization and shifting balances of power.

As the German Empire extended its reach at the end of the nineteenth century, skilled diplomats maneuvered this disruption of traditional powers and influences into several decades of European peace. In Germany, however, a new ambitious monarch would complicate these years of tactful diplomacy. Wilhelm II rose to the German throne in 1888. He admired the British Empire of his grandmother, Queen Victoria, and envied the Royal Navy of Great Britain so much that he attempted to build a rival German navy capable of establishing colonies around the globe. Though the British viewed the prospect of a German navy as a strategic threat, Wilhelm II pressed Germany’s case for access to colonies and symbols of status suitable for a world power. Wilhelm’s ambitions and Germany’s subsequent rise produced a new system of alliances as rival nations warily observed Germany’s territorial aspirations. Austro-Hungarian expansion in Europe worried Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II, who saw himself and his nation as the historic guarantor of the Slavic nations in the Balkans and as a competitor for territories governed by the Central Asian Ottoman Empire.

Austria-Hungary’s declaration against Serbia, in turn, brought Russia into the conflict, due to a treaty in which they had agreed to defend Serbia. Germany followed suit by declaring war on Russia, fearing that Russia and France would seize this opportunity to move against Germany if it did not take the offensive. Germany then planned to take advantage of sluggish Russian mobilization by focusing the German army on France. Germany’s leaders recycled earlier military tactics and activated the Schlieffen Plan, which rapidly moved German armies by rail to march through Belgium and into France. However, this violation of Belgian neutrality ensured that Great Britain entered the war against Germany. On August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany for failing to respect Belgium’s neutrality. Soon after, the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia on the Black Sea. By the end of October 1914, a complex structure of mutual treaties had become operational through a chain reaction of events. Abruptly, it seemed as if Europe’s tangled alliances had dragged the entire world into war.

Total, Industrial Warfare

The Great War was unlike any war that came before it. Whereas in previous European conflicts, troops typically faced each other on open battlefields, often on horseback, and used weapons like swords, muskets, and canons, World War I saw new military technologies that turned war into a conflict of prolonged industrial warfare that often settled agonizingly into static trench warfare. Both sides used new artillery, tanks, airplanes, machine guns, barbed wire, and, eventually, poison gas: weapons that strengthened defenses and turned offensives into barbarous sacrifices of thousands of lives with minimal territorial advances in return. By the end of the war, the total military death toll was ten million, as well as another million civilian deaths attributed to military action, and another six million civilian deaths caused by famine, disease, or other factors. World War I was also the first large-scale example of total war, a term coined by later historians, which refers to warfare that includes any and all civilian-associated resources and infrastructure as legitimate military targets, mobilizes all of the resources of society to fight the war, and gives priority to warfare over non-combatant needs. Total war involves propaganda, mass conscription, unrestricted use of technology and weapons, and the targeting of civilian population centers in order to demoralize the enemy.

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare

One terrifying new piece of technological warfare was the German U-boat (short for the German “unterseeboot,” meaning “undersea boat”), more commonly known as a submarine. By early 1915, in an effort to break the British naval blockade of Germany and turn the tide of the war, the Germans dispatched a fleet of U-boats around Great Britain to attack both merchant and military ships, a tactic known as unrestricted submarine warfare. The U-boats acted in direct violation of international law, attacking without warning from beneath the water instead of surfacing and permitting the surrender of civilians or crew. By 1918, German U-boats had sunk nearly five thousand vessels.

Of greatest historical note was the attack on the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania, on its way from New York to Liverpool on May 7, 1915. The German Embassy in the United States had announced that this ship would be subject to attack for its alleged cargo of ammunition, an accusation that was later substantiated. Nonetheless, almost 1,200 civilians died in the attack, including 128 Americans. The sinking of the Lusitania horrified the world, galvanizing support in England and beyond for the war. This provocation, more than any other event, would test President Wilson’s desire to stay out of what had been a largely European conflict.

Figure 5. The torpedoing and sinking of the Lusitania, depicted in the English drawing above (a), resulted in the death of over twelve hundred civilians and was an international incident that shifted American sentiment regarding a potential role in the war, as illustrated in a British recruiting poster (b).