HST206-handout-Word War I

WORLD WAR I
General Picture:

+ Then called the World War or the Great War

* also sometimes called "the war to end war" or "the war to end all wars" due to its then-
unparalleled scale and devastation

+ The spark – the trigger that ignited World War I:

In late June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by a Serbian
nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. (June 28, 1914.)

+ An escalation of threats and mobilization orders followed the incident, leading by mid-August
to the outbreak of World War I

+ The war drew in all the world's economic great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances:
Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire (Nov 14), Bulgaria

Allied Powers: Great Britain, France, Russia (Triple Entente), Italy (1915) , Romania (1916),
Japan, USA (1917), Greece

+ The four years of the Great War–as it was then known–saw unprecedented levels of carnage
and destruction, thanks to grueling trench warfare and the introduction of modern weaponry
such as machine guns, tanks and chemical weapons.

+ During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Big Four (Britain, France, the United States
and Italy) imposed their terms in a series of treaties.

* Allied leaders would state their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard
itself against future conflicts of such devastating scale. The Versailles Treaty, signed on
June 28, 1919, would not achieve this objective.
* The League of Nations was formed with the aim of preventing any repetition of such
a conflict. (Germany was denied entrance into the League of Nations)

World War I’s Legacy:

1. Human Cost:

+ By the time World War I ended in the defeat of the Central Powers in November 1918, more
than 9 million soldiers had been killed and 21 million more wounded.
Civilian casualties caused indirectly by the war numbered close to 10 million.

2. Fall of Empires:

+ The war also marked the fall of four imperial dynasties–Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia
and Ottoman Empire.

1
 HST206-handout-Word War I

3. Maps Re-drawn:

a. New States: Re-drawing of European map! (9 new countries)

EX:
* The former empire of Austria-Hungary: Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and
Yugoslavia.
* Poland, which had long been divided among Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary,
was reconstituted.
* Russian land yielded the new nations of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
* Russia and Austria-Hungary gave up additional territory to Poland and Romania.

b. Mandates in Middle East and Africa (12 new mandates)

* The mandate system was a compromise between the Allies' wish to retain the former
German and Ottoman colonies and their pre-Armistice declaration (November 5, 1918)
that annexation of territory was not their aim in the war.

* A League of Nations mandate was a legal status for certain territories transferred from
the control of one country to another following World War I, or the legal instruments
that contained the internationally agreed-upon terms for administering the territory on
behalf of the League.

* Class A mandates, were territories formerly controlled by the Ottoman

Empire:
EX: Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, Mesopotamia (Iraq)

* Class B mandates, were all former Schutzgebiete (German territories) in

West and Central Africa
EX: Cameroun, Ruanda-Urundi, Tanganyika

* Class C mandates, German territories including South West Africa and

certain of the South Pacific Islands
EX: South West Africa

4. World War II:

+ Economic depression + renewed European nationalism + weakened member states + the

German feeling of humiliation and resentment contributing to the rise of Nazism.
 These conditions eventually contributed to World War II.