100th Anniversary of the End of the Great War - World War I

[lpetrich]

A hundred years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the Western Allies and Germany agreed to stop their fighting in the Great War. This date has been commemorated ever since as Armistice Day, now called Veterans Day in the US.

The Great War is nowadays called World War I, because it was followed by an even bigger war, World War II, though I remember someone proposing the name Hitlerian Wars for that war. Fortunately, there has been no World War III, despite there being some close calls.

That war brought to an end what might be called the Shifted Nineteenth Century, an era that began with the end of Napoleon's wars in 1814. Bertrand Russell once wrote a book, "Freedom And Organization 1814 To 1914", something that fits that era. I've also seen the Long Nineteenth Century, starting in 1789, when the French Revolution began.

It began the Short Twentieth Century, as historian Eric Hobsbawm called it, an era that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

It was was an outcome of the power politics of the big nations of nineteenth-century Europe, with their ever-shifting alliances. By 1914, Britain and France had ended their long enmity with each other with their Entente Cordiale, and they formed an alliance with Russia. Germany had been cobbled together from kingdoms large and small, and it allied itself with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Austria was a multiethnic empire, and it was starting to fragment, with Hungary getting autonomy in 1867, and with some people pushing for similar autonomy for the Slavic states in that nation. The Ottoman Empire was also falling apart, and in Britain, the Irish were getting restless.

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist revolutionary, assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary confronted Serbia about that attack, and got Germany's support. When Serbia's leaders did not do enough, Austria declared war on Serbia. This led Russia to confront Austria and Germany, France to support Russia, and Britain to support France. Germany attacked France and Austria attacked Russia, with Germany following. The Ottoman Empire then attacked Russia. What started out as a terrorist attack became a major war, with most of Europe's nations participating.

 

[lpetrich]

The war was a mixture of new and old, with small armies of troops trying to charge the other side's lines and then getting mowed down by that side's machine gunners. In the west, the war was often stalemated, with soldiers in trenches, each side difficult to attack by the others. The war claimed that the lives of large numbers of idealistic young men who thought of themselves as fighting for civilization. Among them was the British physicist Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley. Before the war, he took X-ray spectra of various elements, and he discovered that their X-ray spectral lines had a nice progression in energy with atomic number. This progression resolved discrepancies between atomic-number and atomic-weight progression, and this progression had gaps that were later filled in. But when WWI started, he thought that it was his duty for him to sign up for military service, and he got killed in the Battle of Gallipoli, a failed attempt by Britain and France to take Istanbul. Robert Millikan and Isaac Asimov have stated that his death was a big loss to scientific research. As a result, his colleague Ernest Rutherford successfully lobbied the British Government to keep other young scientists from going on the front lines of combat.

Despite that loss, the war featured the development of several technologies, including land, sea, and air military vehicles.

On land was the development of armored continuous-tread vehicles: tanks. Their English name started as a cover story for their development. Though tanks could easily survive small gunfire, they were not as decisive as their developers hoped.

In the sea the Germans used submarines very heavily. They got named U-boats, from their German name Unterseeboot ("undersea boat"), abbreviated to U-boot. Their undersea capability was limited, because they had to surface to run their engines to recharge their batteries. But it was enough to be a major threat to US-British shipping. The Lusitania was sunk by a submarine crew. The British developed antisubmarine weapons like sonar to look for them, and depth charges, bombs that explode underwater.

In the air, WWI had some of the first aerial warfare, and the war stimulated a lot of development of aircraft. It started off as observing the other side, but the observers became fighters, trying to shoot down the other side's aircraft. Aerial bombing was pioneered by the Germans especially, with big bomber airplanes and Zeppelin airships, essentially powered balloons. But the Germans' bombing efforts did not do much other than keep the Royal Air Force very busy.

The war also featured the use of poison gases. Germany was a leader in industrial chemistry and was the first to use them. But the Allies also used poison gases, and one of their victims was a soldier in the Austrian army, Adolf Hitler. Poison gas was a ghastly weapon, but it was a fickle one, since a cloud of poison gas could be blown the wrong way. It also could be protected against, and both sides developed gas masks.

Isaac Asimov called poison gases an example of "the sin of the scientist", to develop things that can only plausibly be used for mass destruction. He also listed the Byzantines' "Greek fire", a kind of napalm, and nuclear bombs.

The Germans' chemical expertise had a more behind-the-scenes application. To make explosive materials like gunpowder, one used nitrates, and it was hard for Germany to get nitrates from the usual source back then: deposits of guano left by birds in western South America. So some of Germany's chemists developed the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, and they then burned the ammonia to make nitric acid. Thus making birdshit unnecessary for them.

 

[lpetrich]

World War I was pretty much stalemated in the west, after Germany invaded NW France and dug in.

But in the east, Germany was very successful against Russia, to the point that Russia was suffering from food shortages and soldiers deserting and army units mutinying and revolutionaries revolting. In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II resigned, and Alexander Kerensy's Provisional Government took his place. But it was never very successful, and it kept the war going.

Germany had a secret weapon against Russia. An exiled revolutionary named Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was living in Switzerland at the time. So the German authorities sent him by diplomatically-sealed train from Switzerland to the Baltic Sea, and he crossed over to Sweden, going north in that nation and then south in Finland, being greeted in Petrograd's Finland Station by cheering supporters. Petrograd's original name was St. Petersburg, but it was given a more Slavic name because Russia was fighting Germany. The city was eventually named after Lenin, becoming Leningrad, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, it got its original name back.

Lenin promised peace, land, and bread, and he got more supporters. He and his Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government on November 7, or October 25 in the Julian calendar, which Russia was still using because the Russian Orthodox Church considered the Pope a heretic. His opponents did not give up, and his Bolsheviks fought a civil war with them that lasted until 1921.

On March 3, 1918, Lenin and the Central Powers, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It got peace, but at the price of giving to Germany and Austria the westernmost parts of the Russian Empire. Parts that are now eastern Poland, the Baltic states, western Belarus, and western Ukraine.

Despite this triumph, Germany lost the war.

This was because they provoked the United States into entering that war. In 1914, Woodrow Wilson promise to keep the US out of that war, and he stuck by that campaign promise for most of the war. However, the US had a lot of trade with Britain, trade which the Germans attacked with their submarines. On May 7, 1915, the Germans sank the ocean liner Lusitania, and despite provoking a lot of outrage in the US, WW kept the US out of the war, arguing that the US was "too proud to fight." But early in 1917, a German official proposed to Mexican officials that Germany ally with Mexico against the US. That changed WW's mind, and he declared that "the world must be made safe for democracy". He sent a lot of troops over to Europe, and they successfully help the British and French ones hold off Germany's ones.

Late in 1918, Germany's leaders decide to thrown in the towel. Their nation is pretty much exhausted from its war, and they decided to quit while they still have a lot of nation under their control. Thus the armistice 100 years ago.

 

[lpetrich]

The aftermath? Four major monarchies fell, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Romanovs of Russia, and the Osmans of the Ottoman Empire, with none of their successors forming new monarchies. Several new and reconstituted nations emerged from the defeated ones, and only some Middle Eastern ones became monarchies.

Of the defeated ones, Germany survived the best, retaining most of its former territory, though it lost some land in the west to France, some land in the north to Denmark, and some land in the east to Poland. That latter loss separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany by a tiny strip of territory. But Germany's loss was considered by many Germans a major humiliation, and the stab-in-the-back (Dolchstoss) notion became popular. According to it, Germany was not defeated because it could not fight for much longer, it was defeated because some traitors stabbed it in the back with their treason. This political legend eventually got a very notable advocate: Adolf Hitler.

But with the emergence of these nations came the notion that every ethnicity and nationality deserves its own nation-state. This very idealistic principle turned out to cause a lot of trouble in the decades to come, in large part because people are not always very neatly sorted by ethnicity.

Austria-Hungary was broken up into several nations, with German Austria being much smaller than it. WWI's victors did not allow it to join Germany, and it has stayed a separate nation ever since, except for it being annexed by Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.

The Bolsheviks tried to get back some of what they gave away to the Central Powers, but while they got back western Belarus and Ukraine, they were thwarted by Poland. The nation they formed they called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and it included Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as constituent republics, along with some Asian ones.

Communist revolutionaries had brief success in parts of Germany and Hungary, but they were soon overthrown.

The WWI victors organized an international organization, the League of Nations, an organization which would try to keep such big wars form happening again. But the United States was too burned out by WWI, and it never joined. It was ineffective against the Axis powers, and after WWII, it was replaced by the United Nations.

 

[ruby sparks]

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Do1p1CWyc[/YOUTUBE]

Peter Jackson's, WW1 documentary 'They Shall Not Grow Old'.

In cinemas in the UK now. I was lucky enough to catch it for free on the BBC last night.

10 out of 10 imo, and I wasn't even a particular fan of Peter Jackson as a director.

 

[lpetrich]

World War I was a landmark event in another way: it was a major landmark in the decline of monarchy in modern times. Before the last few centuries, it was rare for nations larger than a city-state to be republics. That is not to say that they were completely stable, but the overthrowers of a monarch almost always either established a new monarchy or else claimed succession from the overthrown monarchy. Some monarchies would last for centuries, even if they were not very continuous. Monarchies like the Pharaonic and Chinese ones, and also some European ones, like the Roman/Byzantine one. But in modern times, the successors of monarchs have almost never established new monarchies or successor monarchies, though a few de facto monarchies have emerged, like North Korea's.

Before WWI, Europe had not had many republics. Switzerland and Venice were both republics, though the latter could also be called an elective monarchy. The Dutch Republic turned into a de facto monarchy as its position of stadholder became hereditary. The French Revolution was a bad advertisement for republicanism, and the nation then alternated between republicanism and monarchy before settling down as a republic. Portugal became a republic in 1910, and it also was not a good advertisement for republicanism.

Between 1814 and 1914, in the shifted nineteenth century, European nation builders wanted monarchs for their nations -- Holland, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania. When Hungary became autonomous in the Austrian empire, it also got a monarch. Finland almost got a monarch, but that process was interrupted by World War I.

But after the war, not many of the new nations got monarchs. Finland did not, and it was joined by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia, originally the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, inherited the Serbian monarchy, much as Germany inherited the Prussian monarchy. In the Middle East, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq became monarchies, while Lebanon and Syria became republics. The direct successors of the German, Austria, Russian, and Ottoman monarchies all created republics. Germany became a republic, and German Austria, the Soviet Union, and Turkey originated as republics. Hungary did not become a monarchy because Hungarians were divided between whether to choose some Habsburg or some native Hungarian noble for the job.

 

[lpetrich]

Returning to nationalism, the four big fallen monarchies had ruled multiethnic empires. But the

The German Empire was the least multiethnic, being mostly ethnic Germans, but with some Poles in its far eastern parts. Germany did not lose much territory in WWI, but many Germans got butthurt about it out of proportion to their loss.

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The Austrian Empire was much more multiethnic, with much more of it being non-Germans. Hungarians won autonomy in 1866, turning the nation into Austria-Hungary, and Archduke Ferdinand and some others were working on a  United States of Greater Austria, turning their nation into a federal state. It is evident from Wikipedia's map of the nation how ethnically mixed and patchy it was, and how impractical it would be to subdivide it into single-ethnicity nations.

The states of Greater Austria would have been Trentino (Italian), German Austria, Bohemia (Czech), German Bohemia, German Moravia, Slovakia, West Galicia (Polish), East Galicia (Ukrainian), Hungary, Transylvania (Romanian), Szekler Land, Trieste (Italian), Carniola (Slovenian), and Croatia, including Bosnia-Herzegovina and ethnic Serbs.

After WWI, Trentino and Trieste joined Italy, German Austria became just plain Austria, Bohemia, German Bohemia, German Moravia, and Slovakia became Czechoslovakia, West Galicia and East Galicia joined Poland, Hungary stayed itself, Transylvania and Szekler Land joined Romania, and Carniola, Croatia, and B-H joined Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia to make Yugoslavia.

 

[lpetrich]

The Russian Empire was largely ethnic Russian, but it had plenty of non-Russians on its southern and western borders. To the west, there were Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns, and to the south there were Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Kazaks, Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc.

After WWI, Poland became independent, and ruled some of is was now Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Vilnius was ruled by Poland as Wilno, something that made for poor relations with Lithuania.

In the years before WWII, Nazi Germany annexed German Austria, and Adolf Hitler demanded - and got - the Sudetenland (German Bohemia and German Moravia) from Czechoslovakia. He claimed that ethnic Germans there were being persecuted by Czechs there, getting beaten up and whatnot. Hitler tried the same sort of claim on Poland, claiming at one point that six men had been castrated. Poland's leaders were less willing to give him what he wanted, so he started a big propaganda campaign about how Poland was going to invade Germany, and then invaded Poland.

After the war, Poland was moved westward, with Lithuania getting Vilnius/Wilno again, and Ukraine and Belarus getting some western territories. The Russians expelled Poles from those territories, and the Poles expelled Germans from far-eastern Germany. Russia got Koenigsberg, renaming it Kaliningrad. The Czechs also expelled Germans, from the Sudetenland.

After the fall of Communism, Czechoslovakia split amiably, but Yugoslavia didn't. That nation gradually broke up over the 1990's in a series of civil wars. Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia split off first, in 1991, Bosnia-Herzegovina became independent in 1995, and Montenegro in 2006. Kosovo then splits off from Serbia.

Back to Russia itself, the Bolshevik revolutionaries made Russia proper a republic in the Soviet Union, and as they retook territories to the south and east, they made those territories additional republics. They retook Ukraine, Belarus, and all the Russian Empire's southern territories.

Just before Germany invaded Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union made a deal to divide up eastern Europe. Germany conquered Poland and the SU annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and a bit of Romania as Moldova, and also fought a war with Finland, annexing Vyborg/Viipuri. After WWII, the SU annexed some land for some of its republics, but was content to dominate otherwise-independent nations.

The Soviet Union's Eastern-European empire fell in 1989, with East and West Germany reunifying in 1990 and the Soviet Union breaking up in 1991.

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The Ottoman Empire never had a shared ethnic identity. It has Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, among others. Near the Mediterranean coast lived Christian Arabs, Sunni-Muslim Arabs, Shiite-Muslim Arabs, Alawite Arabs, Druze Arabs, ... There were Jews here and there, and Zionist Jews were starting to settle in Palestine.

Before the Great War, the Ottoman Empire was gradually falling apart and losing territories, and it got known as the "Sick Man of Europe". Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania became independent over the shifted 19th century, but their hostility to each other was where the word "balkanization" came from. After WWI, Turkish nationalists fought against the occupying Allied powers, establishing the Republic of Turkey in 1923. They arranged for an exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, with ethnic Greeks going from Turkey to Greece and ethnic Turks going from Greece to Turkey.

The British continued to rule Cyprus, which had both Greeks and Turks in it. It became independent in 1960, and the populations continued to coexist until a Greek military junta did a coup in 1974 and attempted to unite Cyprus with Greece. Turkey invaded and conquered the northern part of the island, and it has been divided between Greek and Turkish parts ever since.

The Middle East was worse.

In 1915, during WWI, British diplomat Mark Sykes and French diplomat François Georges-Picot worked out a division of the Middle East between their two countries. The Bolsheviks leaked their plan in late 1917, and it became a big embarrassment. When the victors divided up the Middle East, Britain took what became Palestine, Transjordan (now Jordan), and Iraq, and France what became Lebanon and Syria. Iraq became independent in 1932, and Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon in 1946.

The Kurds never got their own nation, and they have been divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. They have struggled off and on for autonomy in their lands for nearly a century.

Worse than that was what happened in Britain's Palestine Mandate. Britain promised a "Jewish national home" and independence for the Arabs. Jewish settlers came in, hoping that here at last was a place where they will not be subject to others, and a place where they will not be hated and persecuted. But the Arabs did not appreciate these newcomers, and the British rulers of Palestine failed miserably in trying to make both sides happy. During WWII, the Zionists stopped attacking Britain, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was good buddies with Adolf Hitler. After the war, the Zionists started a terror campaign against the British rulers of Palestine, making them cower in a compound that got named "Bevingrad". The United Nations was given the task of resolving this issue, and it proposed a Solomonic solution: divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs, with Jerusalem being an international city. The Zionists accepted it as better than nothing, while the Arabs found it intolerable, because it was less than driving those pesky Zionists into the sea. When the Zionists declared themselves an independent State of Israel, its neighbors attacked it and tried to do just that. They failed miserably, losing some territory. They tried again in 1967, and Israel now ruled all of Palestine and some neighboring territories. Some Arabs have since made peace with Israel, but the Israelis continue to increase their hold on their land and make life miserable for its Arab inhabitants.

 

[lpetrich]

Another place with nationalist trouble is Ireland.

Britain had long dominated the people of that island, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, large numbers of Protestant British settlers were invited in to help rule that land, and they were most successful in Ulster, present-day Northern Ireland. Catholic Irish were turned into second-class citizens, and many of them ended up tenants of absentee landlords.

When the people of Ireland suffered the Great Potato Famine, Britain's leaders refused to do much for them, and many of them either starved or emigrated.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some Irish people started pushing for home rule, but the Protestant ones in the north preferred staying with Britain to becoming a minority.

Then on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, some Irish rebels seized some important locations in Dublin. They were defeated, but the British authorities' hanging the rebels' leaders provoked a lot of sympathy for them. Then in 1918, some Irish politicians organized an Irish Parliament and declared it sovereign over the entire island. That led to a war against the British that ended in 1921 with a compromise: Britain would have Ulster, and the rest of Ireland would be independent. The Irish Free State and Northern Ireland were established in 1922, but that was not good enough for some Irish people, and they continued to fight for the independence of the entire island. This civil war ended in 1923.

In Northern Ireland, the Protestants treated the Catholics as second-class citizens, and when they started to protest that treatment in 1968, the Protestants and British authorities attacked them. This resulted in "The Troubles", a low-level civil war that lasted for nearly 30 years. But it has since calmed down.