In the opening months the mould for a new kind of war was cast in the West. The First World War: Under the Eagle 1914–1915
The image of the murderous Hun, the barbaric Bosch, was born. ibid.
Germany was now committed to a long war and she didn’t have the resources for it. ibid.
It was Germany’s idea to take the war beyond Europe. The First World War: Global War 1914-1916
The Battle of the Falklands heralded the end of Germany’s Cruiser campaign. ibid.
India provided Britain with one-and-three-quarter million men in the war. ibid.
The call goes out for Jihad – Holy War. Germany hoped her new ally Turkey would do just what it was told. And the allies thought Turkey would be a pushover. The First World War: Jihad 1914-1916
The Kaiser had come to see Jihad as the way to foment revolution among the millions of Muslims under British rule. ibid.
The Germans paid over five million pounds in gold securing Turkey as their ally. ibid.
Breaking out of Anzac cover the casualties soared. ibid.
The conditions at Gallipoli were terrible. ibid.
The Turks lost 10,000 men in one afternoon. ibid.
The eastern front was the conflict at the heart of the First World War. A struggle which devastated the lives of Eastern Europe’s peoples as old scores were settled and new hatreds forged. A harbinger of the Second World War. The First World War: Shackled to a Corpse
A war of alliances stretched to breaking point. ibid.
A German official said, referring to Austro-Hungary, that his country was now shackled to a corpse. ibid.
Italy initially declared neutrality. ibid.
You think of the First World War and you think of trenches. There was mobility elsewhere in the East and Africa, but the war on the Western Front was bogged down. The challenge on both sides was to find new ideas, new weapons, new spirit among the men. Only then could they break out and win. The First World War: Breaking the Deadlock 1915-1917
The popular image of First World War soldiers is lions led by donkeys. But the generals knew battles could not be won from behind trench walls. Sooner or later the men would have to go over the top, and that meant heavy casualties. ibid.
Throughout the war new ideas were quickly picked up by the other side. ibid.
Shelling is the biggest killer of the war. ibid.
British newsreel of German POWs was used to convince audiences back home that Britain was gaining the upper hand. ibid.
Farmers around the Somme still gather a harvest of iron for the French army to collect and diffuse. ibid.
Musgrove jumped into the North Sea, and became the only man in the war to be sunk on three ships in one hour. The First World War: Blockade
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill got the blame. Over fourteen-hundred men many of them cadets had died in a single torpedo attack. ibid.
The North Sea would become a no-man’s land: a dead sea. ibid.
The Kaiser had no idea his enemies had his code book. ibid.
Lloyds of London kept a log of every vessel sunk. Their records show that on one day alone – 8th August 1914 – Germany lost forty-one ships. ibid.
Eight million Americans had German parents or grandparents. Four and a half million were of Irish descent. Many of them had little love for England. At the outbreak of war thousands of US citizens had tried to enlist in the German army. ibid.
Half Britain’s war budget was spent in the States. ibid.
Twelve hundred people died on the Lusitania. ibid.
Governments in the First World War feared one thing almost as much as defeat: revolution. First World War: Revolution
Throughout the First World War Paris lived under the threat of invasion. ibid.
But the Germans had no inkling of the French mutiny. It was a massive intelligence failure ... The French soldiers’ actions were more like a strike than a mutiny. ibid.
T E Lawrence took up the cause of Arab nationalism. ibid.
Capturing Turkish-held Jerusalem was a key British objective in 1917. ibid.
The Arabs would find they had won not self-rule but new masters. ibid.
Britain had promised Ireland home rule. But the First World War shelved all that. Two hundred thousand Irishmen – Protestants and Catholics – would fight for Britain. About thirty thousand of them would die. But the Irish Republican Brotherhood – forerunners of the IRA – believed England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity. ibid.
Germany had long seen subversion in Ireland as a way to destabilising Britain. ibid.
Germany’s high command got cold feet and refused to commit an invasion force. But in April 1916 Zeppelin raids did take place. ibid.
But now the British made a terrible blunder throwing away their moral authority and turning the Easter Uprising into the seminal event of Irish statehood. ibid.
The Tsar ordered the protests crushed ... Over fifty civilians were shot dead. The massacre forced Petrograd soldiers to choose whom to defend – the people or the Tsar. They shot their duty officer dead and poured onto the streets. ibid.
Germany’s greatest help to Lenin’s cause was getting him back to Russia. ibid.
Lenin was soon winning converts. ibid.
What he said was, End the war. ibid.
Lenin’s ideas spread to the front. ibid.
The city [Petrograd] woke to a new world order. ibid.
The first thing the Bolsheviks did was to take the Russians out of the First World War ... Germany now had a chance to win the First World War. ibid.
Spring 1918: Revolution had taken Russia out of the war releasing half a million German soldiers from the East. The First World War: Germany’s Last Gamble 1918
The Germans hit the British with a million shells in just five hours. ibid.
Demoralised British troops retreated over the Somme battlefield of 1916, giving up ground for which so much blood had been shed. ibid.
But German success in the March offensive masked deep problems at home. The biggest threat to Germany and her allies had increasingly come not from their enemies but their civilians. The crucial link between civilians and home front became decisive in 1918. ibid.
Dangerous ideas were coming in from Russia. ibid.
The German advance which had looked so good on paper had dangerously outstripped its supply lines. ibid.
Germany had left one and a half million troops on the Eastern front, soaking up vital resources, food and transport. Germany’s leaders were out of their depth ... Germany had failed to achieve a decisive victory before the Americans poured into France. ibid.
Their [American] presence gave the allies a huge morale boost. ibid.
The Germans had lost nearly a million men since March. [Erich] Luddendorff blamed the home front for spreading defeatism. Germany’s problems went beyond poor morale. She had lost a string of vital battles. The battle of the factories and technology. Germany had built just twenty tanks; the allies over four thousand. She had lost the battle of manpower. The First World War: War without End
The six-hundred-year-old Ottoman Empire was a spent force. ibid.
The allies broke through the Bulgarian lines and smashed north. ibid.
Germany approached US president Woodrow Wilson asking him to broker a peace settlement with the allies. ibid.
While the politicians argued, the fighting raged on. ibid.
It was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. ibid.
The German armies in France and Belgium headed home. ibid.
The losers were not invited. ibid.