Origins of WWI
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What led to World War I? The question is surprisingly difficult to answer, yet it is vitally important to an understanding of modern times. Much of the violent change of the twentieth century had its origins directly or indirectly in World War I. Even before it ended the war brought the fall of Czarist Russia, the Russian Revolution, and the emergence of Communism as a revolutionary political force. World War II stemmed so directly from the unsettled issues of World War I that the two can be regarded simply as two phases of one war. Indirectly, World War I set the stage for the decline of Britain as a world power, and more broadly for the end of European imperialism, while the the massive and futile slaughter on the Western Front battlefields permanently shattered the cultural self confidence of the West. The specific trigger of all this was the assassination of Austrian archduke Frantz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in July, 1914.1 The assassination, in the now Yugoslav city of Sarajevo, set in train a series of increasingly harsh diplomatic confrontations among the major European powers, confrontations which by August brought every leading European power into war. Yet a single political assassination seems a fundamentally inadequate explanation for a war that engulfed the world and shaped a century. Compared to the immediate triggers of World War II the Nazi invasion of Poland in Europe; the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the Pacific the Sarajev
. . .
m back. The major military lesson to which European war planners looked back was the Franco Prussian War of 1870, in which Bismarck's diplomacy combined with von Moltke's military planning to produce a lightning victory over France. The lesson learned was that the key to victory was swift mobilization of one's forces, so as to concentrate them and move into decisive position before the enemy could concentrate against them. The key to swift mobilization was, in turn, extremely elaborate (and inflexible) schedule for movements of troop and supply trains over a nation's railroad system. Once set in motion, such a mobilization timetable could not be gracefully halted, much less reversed; any deviation from the plan would produce a railroad "gridlock" and a chaos of troops and supplies stranded in the wrong positions and extremely vulnerable to attack by an enemy who carried his mobilization on through to the planned attack.2 In effect, a 1914 era army was
slower but hardly less inexorable than a ballistic missile: once ________
2Joachim Remak, The Origins of World War I (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1967), 147.
launched, it could not be called back. The order for mobilization, was therefore nearly equivalent
. . .
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Approximate Word count = 2264
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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