Europe Plunges into War

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Europe Plunges into War
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• 1914 Rival groups
• Triple Entente (G.B., Fr., Russia)
• Triple Alliance (Germany, Aust.-Hung., Italy)
• Austs declaration of war against Serbia set off
  a chain reaction w/in alliance system

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I. The Great War Begins

• Russia mobilized along Austs Germanys border
  
• Germany declared war on Russia (Aug 1)
• Russia looked to Fr.
• Germany declared war on Fr.
• G.B. declared war on Germany

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A. Nations Take Sides

• Mid-Aug 1914 battle lines were clear
• Central Powers
• Germany, Aust-Hung, Bulgaria, Ottoman Emp.
• Allied Powers
• G.B., Fr., Russia, Japan, Italy

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II. A Bloody Stalemate

• War became a stalemate
• Western Front
• Schlieffen Plan
• Russia had weak RRs
• Did not work as planned
• First Battle of the Marne
• Russia invaded in the east
• Germany TWO FRONT WAR!

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A. Trench Warfare

• By early 1915 W. Front miles of parallel
  trenches
• Life was miserable
• The men slept in mud, washed in mud, ate mud,
  dreamed mud.
• --trenches rats, excrement, blood, bodies,
  disease
• no mans land area betw. enemy trenches
• Bombed-out, barren landscape
• Shells of all calibers kept raining on our
  sector. The trenches disappered, filled with
  earththe air was unbreathable. Our blinded,
  wounded, crawling, and shouting soldiers kept
  falling on top of us and died splashing us with
  blood. It was living hell.

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• W. Front terrain of death
• Stretched 500 miles (N. Sea to Switzerland)
• Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width,
  stretching from the Channel to the German
  frontier near Basle, which is positively littered
  with the bodies of men and scarified with their
  rude graves in which farms, villages and
  cottages are shapeless heaps of blackened
  masonry in which fields, roads and trees are
  pitted and torn and twisted by shells and
  disfigured by dead horses, cattle, sheep and
  goats, scattered in every attitude of repulsive
  distortion and dismemberment.

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• Military strategists ????????
• New tools of war
• Machine gun, poison gas, tanks, artillery,
  battleships, submarine, flame-thrower
• DEATH!!

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III. Battle on the Eastern Front

• Millions were sent to fight on E. Front
• Stretched along German-Russian border
• Russians Serbs battled Germans Austro-Hungs.
• War was more mobile in east
• Early on, Russia attacked both Aust. Germany
• Russia was later pushed out of Germany
• Fared better against Aust. initially, but later
  pushed out

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A. Russia Struggles

• By 1916 Russias war effort poor
• Russia had not yet industrialized
• Allied supply shipments cut off by Central Powers
• Russias only asset
• Large s fought war of attrition (large pop)