home | 1901-World War II | Turks and Armenians,1915

French cavalry in Paris, on their way to Germany.

Paul von Hindenburg, the hero
of Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes.
Future president of Germany. Credit really belonged to a little-known staff officer,
Max Hoffmann

Disappointing Offensives in the West

French military leaders were counting on self-confidence and verve, and they believed that the five armies they were sending into Alsace-Lorraine were going all the way to Berlin. Their offensive began on August 12, their foot soldiers dressed in glorious red pants and blue jackets, and their cavalrymen with shining, plumed helmets and sabers. They had inadequately appreciated the new mechanistic nature of warfare. The Germans mowed them down with machine guns, and by August 23 the Germans had broken the French offensive and were driving the French back, the French suffering in the first few weeks of the war about 200,000 wounded and 100,000 dead - almost twice as many men as the United States, a more populous nation, was to lose in Vietnam in eight years.

From August 12 to 23, the British were transporting their Expedition Force - about 26,000 men - across the channel to France, the British throwing themselves into the fight alongside the French and joining French in retreat.

The Germans were marching through Belgium, having broken through Belgium's system of border fortresses at Liège on August 12. As the Germans marched in columns with their rifles on their shoulders they were fired upon by Belgian civilians. The Germans called this terrorism and a cowardly abomination, and they retaliated by executing a few local citizens chosen at random, viewing this as just and as a means of discouraging further assaults. It was a useless tactic. Rather than the Belgians being cowed, the terrorist attacks upon the Germans increased, and the Germans retaliated again, killing more civilians and burning towns. In the city of Louvain, frustrated German troops rioted, and they destroyed much in the city, killing civilians and looting. Headlines in Britain and the United States spoke of the Germans sacking Louvain and of women and clergy being shot dead. Added to fact in these reports were stories of Germans bayoneting babies and nuns and other rumors. It was a turning point what was already a propaganda war, with the Germans appearing to many in the United States and Britain as brutal and bloodthirsty aggressors.

Germany crossed from Belgium into France on August 24, but the Germans did not march to Paris as they had planned. The significance of Paris as a communications center, as the hub of France's railways, and its psychological value, was not given precedence by Germany's military command. Von Moltke was employing traditional tactics:  he was searching out the enemy's army. The German offensive swung short of Paris and southward. The German troops were exhausted after weeks of marching. Gaps appeared in the German positions. And the regrouped French and British forces south of Paris counterattacked in what became known as the Battle of the Marne.

The commander of the French armies at the Marne, General Foch, exercised his belief in determination and the power of élan against all odds, and circumstances were right for a temporary success. The French and the British Expeditionary Force drove the Germans back across the Marne River. But there the favorable circumstances for Foch ended. The Germans dug in. The French armies pushed against but could not penetrate Germany's defensive positions. The Germans, in turn, were unable to penetrate French positions or sweep around the French or British. The generals were bewildered. At this point in European history defensive warfare was superior. The best defense was not a good offense as they had believed.

It was obvious that the war would not be over by autumn as Germany's military planners had anticipated. By mid-November the superior strength of defensive warfare resulted in stalemate, a line of trenches and barbed wire from the English Channel, in Belgium, to Switzerland - more than fifty miles from Paris at its closest point. Von Moltke was blamed for the defeat at the Marne, and the tough-minded von Moltke had a nervous breakdown and resigned from his high command.

Stalemate Also in the East

France's hope in the "Russian Steamroller" proved misplaced. The slow moving Russians launched their offensive into eastern Germany on August 13, crossing the border northward, halfway between Warsaw and Danzig. Only a third of Russia's military was mobilized. Their two attacking armies were ill-trained and lacked weaponry, communications equipment and good leadership. In late August, at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, just a few miles inside the border, the Germans easily defeated them, securing their eastern border for the remainder of the war. The Russians lost much of the weaponry that their army had, and around 250,000 men. It was obvious now that Germany could easily have defended herself without having launched any offensive - through Belgium or any where else - leaving the Germans to appear as virtuous as they thought themselves to be.

The Russians did better against Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary's forces - Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs and others - moved into Galicia, and the Russians inflicted heavy losses on them. Austria-Hungary's armies fell back, demoralized and in a rout. German troops went to the assistance of Austria-Hungary to prevent a complete collapse of their front against the Russians, and the German armies drove the Russians back into Poland. There, in or near the war zones, Christians attacked Jews, accusing them of sympathy with the Germans. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven from their homes, and the Jews retreated eastwards away from the hysteria of the war zones.

The Habsburg offensive into Serbia failed, the armies of little Serbia humiliating Austria-Hungary. At the town of Sabac, frustrated Habsburg forces rounded up and shot male civilians, massacred children and raped women. Habsburg forces rounded up 150 peasants from the town of Lesnica and shot them. The Serbs drove the Habsburg forces back across their border. Then in September, Austria-Hungary's armies came again, establishing a bridgehead just inside Serbia, where their offensive bogged down. Outnumbering the Serb forces three to two and superior in the quality of their equipment, by December Austria-Hungary's forces were able to push into Belgrade. Then the Serbs counterattacked and again drove the invaders back across their border. This left Austria-Hungary with at least 6,000 in dead, about 30,000 wounded and 3,000 captured. And the Serb armies at this point in the war had lost about 3,000 killed and 15,000 wounded.

War Spreads across the Globe

With Britain as one of the belligerents, the war spread across the globe. The first task of the British navy was to clear the seas of German warships, while German warships began hitting the British where it could. On August 8th, British ships bombarded Dar-es-Salam, the port for German East Africa (Tanganyika). From their African colonies, British, French and Belgian forces - largely African men - launched assaults against Germany's colonies. In the French colony of Gabon, the famous Dr. Schweitzer found his African patients wondering about Europeans. They had been told of Christian ethics and the superior standards of white civilization, and now they saw Europeans killing each other. Then they saw French authorities arrest the harmless Schweitzer and ship him to France as a prisoner of war.

To protect Hong Kong and combat German warships, the British requested help from their ally, Japan. On August 23, 1914, Japan declared war on Germany and sent a force of 30,000 men to capture Germany's possession in China's Shandong province. The Japanese used aerial bombardments against the Germans, the Germans being the first victims of this kind of warfare. And, on November 7, the Germans in Shandong surrendered.

Canada, New Zealand and Australia entered the war on the side of Britain. New Zealand took possession of what had been German Samoa. Australia took control of German colonial holdings in the Bismarck Archipelago (just north and northeast of New Guinea), and Japan took over Germany's colonial holdings in the Caroline Islands and the Marshall Islands (to the east of the Carolines).

German submarines, meanwhile, had begun attacking the shipping of war supplies to Britain, a German submarine sinking the first British merchant vessel on October 20, off the coast of Norway, after having surfaced to warn the British crew.

Then the Turks cooperated with two German warships in the bombardment of two Russian seaports on the Black Sea: Odessa and Nikolayev. Russia responded three days later, on November 2, by declaring war on Turks. France and Britain declared war on the Turks on November 5. And Britain found this an opportune time to annex Cyprus and Egypt - lands that it had been administering while nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire had not yet recovered from its wars of 1911 to 1913, and its treasury was empty. But its leader, a thirty-three year-old military officer and national hero, Enver Pasha, was viewing the war in Europe as an opportunity to take back Islamic lands that had been absorbed by the Russian Empire. Enver dreamed of reinvigorating the Ottoman Empire. He feared that if Britain, France and Russia won against Germany and Austria-Hungary, they might deprive the empire of more of its territory. So he favored taking the empire into the war on the side of Germany.

The Turks closed the straits between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, preventing Russia from exporting her wheat or receiving shipments of materials from her allies. To protect its oil wells in the Middle East, Britain moved a military force up the Persian Gulf to Iraq, where it began engaging Turkish forces. And in December, the Turks began an assault into Russia's Caucasus Mountains.

Choosing more Death for the Sake of the Fallen

Expectations that the war would be over and troops home by Christmas had proved false. And on Christmas Day at places along the Western Front, German and Allied troops sang Christmas songs, heard the songs of their enemies and ventured across no man's land to visit and exchange friendship and gifts. It shocked the military commands, and the German, French and British commands issued orders against any further mingling with enemy soldiers.

Many people on the home fronts were less given to friendship with the enemy. They were disappointed that the quick victory they had expected had not occurred, but their loss of this illusion did not move them to conclude that a mistake had been made and negotiations to end the war should begin. Instead they continued to believe that the war was created by the enemy and that the perpetrators of the war should be defeated rather than negotiated with.

Germany had failed in the objectives it had set for itself as it went to war, but it had been the most successful militarily. A withdrawal to its borders would have done much to have inspired a negotiated settlement of the war. But this was not to be. Germany would like to have made a separate peace with Russia. But, as compensation for its costs in going to war, Germany wanted its settlement with Russia to include gains it had made in the east at Russia's expense, and the Russians were not about to agree. Nicholas II, meanwhile, did not want to admit to his subjects that the war had been a mistake. To admit failure, cut his losses and negotiate a settlement with Germany was to him unthinkable. With enemy troops on Russian territory he was determined to keep his recent vow to fight until the invader was driven back. Nicholas still expected benefits from the war. He had seen nothing of the conditions at the front. His contact with his armies to this time had been on parade grounds, where he had been impressed by their splendid appearance.

As for the war between Germany and France, King Wilhelm's chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, preferred a negotiated settlement, and Wilhelm was depressed and also wished for peace. Some German strategists preferred a separate peace with France, splitting France from the British, but the French were determined to drive the Germans from their soil, and Bethmann-Hollweg, under pressure from people around him and public opinion, was unwilling to negotiate a withdrawal of German troops from France and Belgium. The German public, press and military high command were opposed to what they called a rotten peace - a compromise settlement. They believed that German superiority would prevail. Believing that the war had been forced upon them, the German public favored war until the fatherland won a peace that offered it lasting protection against its enemies and a peace that justified the nearly 300,000 German soldiers that had already been killed. [note]

The British also believed that the war should be fought to total victory - their victory. Like the Germans, they wanted the sacrifices that had already been made to account for something. From the British government came word that there could be no peace until German militarism was destroyed and Belgium restored.  A member of Britain’s admiralty, Winston Churchill looked on and in a secret memo predicted that the war would be ended "by the exhaustion of nations rather than the victory of armies."  [note]

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