Great War World War One Ultimately Killed

Great War

World War One ultimately killed 35 million people -- this alone might have merited its being called "The Great War," although to a large degree it was the astonishing way in which the deaths happened. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, Britain suffered almost sixty thousand casualties. The ten-month stalemate of the Battle of Verdun resulted in seven hundred thousand (700,000) dead, with no discernible tactical advance made by either side (Tuchman 174). The immediate causes of World War One were complicated but fairly straightforward. Many of the long-standing political institutions of Europe were badly outmoded, in particular two of the oldest: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Each of these institutions were the inheritors of previous large-scale imperial institutions (the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire accordingly) which dated back nearly a thousand years -- and each was failing badly. By the time war broke out, for example, the Ottoman Empire had for decades been referred to as "the sick man of Europe" -- due to its territorial losses in various smaller conflicts, its failing infrastructure, and its greater financial indebtedness to the larger European powers (Tuchman 141).

Meanwhile, ethnic conflict and agitation within the various populations contained within these political institutions -- covering the whole of eastern Europe -- had led to internal political instability. Into this powderkeg of long-term difficulties, the tiny spark of a political assassination performed by a fringe political group was enough to set off the vast explosion. A teenaged anarchist university student, Gavrilo Princip, shot the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand -- the reasons were separatism for one of the smaller ethnic and political units contained within the Empire (Tuchman 71). Eventually this led to a declaration of war, but a system of secret alliances between the European powers ultimately involved virtually every nation in Europe -- and the conflict would extend almost worldwide.

To this political situation, we must add the larger world picture, summed up by the general current of nineteenth-century Imperialism. Great Britain -- a small island in the north Atlantic -- had managed to amass a commercial empire that spanned the globe. The scramble for commercially exploitable colonial territories had already led to threats and armed conflicts elsewhere: in Great Britain's case, they would experience saber-rattling from American President Grover Cleveland during the Venezuela border dispute of 1897, and would descend into open warfare in Africa during the Boer War in 1899-1902 (Tuchman 10). In this scramble for territories, Germany -- which, due to the political order initially imposed in the wake of religious conflict, was extremely late in becoming a single unified state -- had to a certain degree lost out. German expansion, therefore, would find a push into the surrounding territory in Europe easier than establishing a serious colonial presence on other continents, although the Germans did manage to take territory in Africa, not difficult when even Belgium could manage to do so (Tuchman 30). Even America had entered the free-for-all in the last years of the nineteenth century, annexing the Philippines after a brief war with Spain (Karp 110).

America's entry into the war was long delayed -- it is worth noting that Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. President who would ultimately enter the war in his second term of office, had won re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War" (Karp 332). Wilson's entry into the war was, to a large extent, prompted by America's own global ambitions, rather than by any logical reason for involvement. Although German submarine attacks in the Atlantic against otherwise neutral vessels had claimed American lives -- in particular the 1915 sinking of the steamship Lusitania -- these hardly presented an obvious casus belli, and there is some indication that America had known in advance of the Lusitania attack. The more immediate cause of American entry was the discovery of the Zimmerman telegram -- this was a top-secret German diplomatic offer to assist Mexico in war against the United States (Tuchman xvi). Discussions of the Zimmerman telegram seldom mention that Wilson had already been engaged in military hostilities (but not war declared by Congress) against Mexico -- with an invasion of Veracruz and skirmishes fought against the revolutionary Pancho Villa. (Indeed the same American soldier -- "Black Jack" Pershing -- would fight in Mexico before leading American troops after official entry into the European conflict). However the larger reasons for American entry into the conflict hinged mostly on Woodrow Wilson himself -- his Anglophilia was stimulated by the British desire for American assistance, and moreover he sought a larger American role in world affairs (Karp 350). This was, of course, accomplished when Wilson was able to take part in the postwar settlement conferences. Tuchman and Karp differ in their explanation as to Wilson's ultimate purposes in involving America in World War One. Tuchman describes Wilson as being "rigidly, puritanically attached to neutrality" but notes that his "neutrality was the opposite of isolationism": rather, his goal was to maximize America's influence in the settlement of the conflict by maintaining neutrality (Tuchman 336-7). Karp agrees to a certain degree with this assessment of Wilson's desire to maximize America's role in world affairs, but he sees Wilson's entry into the war as largely Machiavellian; in Karp's words " The decisive trait of Wilson's political character was vainglory: a hunger for glory so exclusively self-regarding, so indifferent to the concerns of others, that it would lead him to betray in turn the national movement for reform, the great body of the American people, the fundamental liberties of the American Republic, and in the end the hopes of a war-torn world." (Karp 299).