When the causes of World War I are discussed, the acronym MANIA is often used as an aid to memory. The letters stand for Militarism, Alliances, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Assassination. Many countries in Europe had developed substantial military forces; they had also established empires in Africa, and some of the imperial claims led to conflicts and bad feelings.
Many people in Europe were experiencing a rise in nationalism, not least the Serbs; a network of alliances had been created (the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance) that had the potential to drag all of Europe into war. And finally, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo was a short-term cause of the war.
The long-term causes of the war are the militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and alliances; the short-term cause is the assassination and the subsequent activiation of the alliances when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the Russians mobilized to support their fellow Slavs. Soon, most of the other countries that were part of the alliances had been drawn into the war. An exception was Italy, which did not join Germany and Austria Hungary, instead waiting until after the Treaty of London was to join the war in 1915 on the side of the Allied powers.
Germany’s plan for the war (the Schlieffen Plan) involved a rapid attack on France, driving so swiftly toward Paris that the French would have no time to mobilize their defenses. Then, Germany would be able to pivot and fight a one-front war against Russia which, because it was less industrialized, would have a more difficult time mobilizing rapidly. The plan nearly succeeded, but the French stopped the German advance just 30 miles from Paris. Combat settled down to a slow process of trench warfare.
Major battles involved staggering casualties; for example, 75,000 were killed in the Battle of the Marne in 1914. In the trenches, the soldiers suffered cold, wet, filthy conditions, and often contracted trench foot. In the air, ace pilots fought dogfights in their biplanes and German zeppelins bombed cities in Britain. Machine guns, barbed wire, and tanks added to the casualties, but the most distinctive weapon used was poison gas. A variety of types of gasses were used during the war including chlorine and mustard gas, and the gas that caused the most casualties: phosgene.
Battles during WWI had staggering casualty rates; for example, during the battle of Verdun (1916) there were over 350,000 casualties (injuries and deaths) on each side. The Russians on the Eastern Front were suffering from lack of weapons, clothing, and food. The urgent need to support them was clear; the British tried to break through to bring support to them by occupying the Gallipoli peninsula (because the Ottoman Empire controlled the Dardanelles and had mined them heavily) but this turned out to be a catastrophe.
The US entered the war in 1917, provoked by attacks on US shipping by the Germans who had initiated unrestricted submarine warfare as well as by the revelation that Germany had tried to persuade Mexico to attack the US (this was revealed when the Zimmerman Note came to light).
World War I was a total war and civilians were required to make sacrifices to support the war; many women went to work in factories, helping produce weapons. Other women replaced men, going to work on farms and in offices. In the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian genocide took place; up to 1.5 million people were killed.
The war caused rationing and food shortages, and men returned from the war disfigured and suffering from shellshock, a term for PTSD. The United States came out of the war with a stronger economy, having suffered less from the damage of the war and also having benefitted from the opportunity to sell weapons and equipment to Europe. Many in the US also developed the conviction that the US should remain neutral and avoid entanglement with future European wars.
The USSR experienced the Russian revolution, brought about in part by the hardships of the war and made a separate peace with Germany: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The treaties that ended the war broke up the empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. Germany lost its territories in Africa, which became ‘mandates’. It also lost land including the Polish Corridor, which became a cause of WWII. In the aftermath of the war, many countries that had abandoned the gold standard during the war, were unable to go back on it.
The Treaty of Versailles burdened Germany with huge reparations to France and Britain, exacerbating the economic crisis in which Germany found itself. Italy was denied most of the land that it had been promised in the Treaty of London, causing resentment that contributed to Mussolini’s decision to ally himself with Hitler.
In a positive outcome, in the United States, women were given the right to vote in 1920 by the passage of the 19th amendment, partly in recognition of the important contribution their work had made to the victory in the War. Art and literature were also affected; writers composed poetry and wrote novels about the war like All Quiet on the Western Front, and artists experimented with new styles like surrealism.
