At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, stripped of manpower and supplies and facing an impending invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car at the exterior of Compiégne, France. World War I killed nine million and injured 21 million, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France and Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least five million civilians have died from disease, starvation or exposure.
On June 28, 1914, in an event widely believed to have triggered the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot and killed with his wife by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Ferdinand had inspected his uncle’s imperial armed forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, despite threats from Serbian nationalists who wanted these Austro-Hungarian possessions to join the newly independent Serbia. Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification to settle the problem of Slavic nationalism once and for all. However, as Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause in the event of Russian intervention. .
READ MORE: Outbreak of WWI
On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the precarious peace between the great European powers collapsed. On July 29, Austro-Hungarian forces began bombing the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and Russia, an ally of Serbia, ordered a mobilization of troops against Austria-Hungary. France, allied with Russia, began to mobilize on August 1. France and Germany declared war on August 3. After passing through neutral Luxembourg, the German army invaded Belgium on the night of August 3-4, inciting Great Britain, Belgium. ally, to declare war on Germany.
For the most part, European citizens greeted the outbreak of war with jubilation. Most patriotically assumed that their country would be victorious in a matter of months. Among the early belligerents, Germany was the most prepared for the outbreak of hostilities, and its military leaders had devised a sophisticated military strategy known as the “Schlieffen Plan,” which envisioned the conquest of France through a major arc offensive across Belgium and northern France. . Russia, slow to mobilize, was to be kept occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces while Germany attacked France.
The Schlieffen plan almost succeeded, but in early September the French rallied and stopped the German advance during the bloody Battle of the Marne near Paris. By the end of 1914, more than a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and neither for the Allies nor for the Central Powers was a final victory in sight. On the Western Front – the line of battle that stretched across northern France and Belgium – fighters moved into the trenches for a terrible war of attrition.
READ MORE: Life in the trenches of WWI
In 1915, the Allies attempted to break the deadlock with an amphibious invasion of Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in October 1914, but after heavy bloodshed the Allies were forced to withdraw early in 1916. The year 1916 saw great offensives by Germany and Britain along the Western Front, but neither side achieved a decisive victory. In the east, Germany was more successful and the disorganized Russian army suffered terrible losses, triggering the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and immediately took over. negotiate peace with Germany. In 1918, the infusion of American troops and resources on the Western Front finally tipped the scales in favor of the Allies. Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies on November 11, 1918.
READ MORE: Why WWI ended with an armistice instead of a surrender
World War I was known as the “war to end all wars” because of the great massacre and destruction it caused. Unfortunately, the peace treaty that officially ended the conflict – the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 – imposed punitive sentences on Germany that destabilized Europe and laid the foundation for World War II.
