WORLD WAR 1

5 Things You Need To Know About The First World War

1. It was a global war

Over 30 nations declared war between 1914 and 1918. The majority joined on the side of the Allies,
including Serbia, Russia, France, Britain, Italy and the United States. They were opposed by Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, who together formed the Central Powers. What
began as a relatively small conflict in southeast Europe became a war between European empires.
Britain and its Empire’s entry into the war made this a truly global conflict fought on a geographical scale
never seen before. Fighting occurred not only on the Western Front, but in eastern and southeast
Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The First World War was not inevitable or accidental, but began as a result of human actions and
decisions.

Over 65 million men volunteered or were conscripted to fight in mass citizen armies. Millions of civilians
also contributed to the war effort by working in industry, agriculture or jobs left open when men
enlisted. Victory depended on popular support. Some nations were forced to surrender as their people,
pushed to their physical and emotional limits, lost the will to continue fighting. The First World War was
also a war against people. Invading armies committed atrocities against civilians in the areas they
occupied. Attacks on civilians became increasingly common as each nation tried to break their
opponents’ home morale and diminish popular support for the war. Propaganda demonised entire
nations and attacked the ‘national characters’ of enemy peoples.

3. It was a war of production

National resources were mobilised as each combatant nation raced to supply its armed forces with
enough men and equipment.

In Britain, early failures in munitions manufacturing led to full government intervention in war
production. These controls helped its industry produce nearly 4 million rifles, 250,000 machine guns,
52,000 aeroplanes, 2,800 tanks, 25,000 artillery pieces and over 170 million rounds of artillery shells by
1918.

4. It was a war of innovation

Advances in weaponry and military technology provoked tactical changes as each side tried to gain an
advantage over the other. The introduction of aircraft into war left soldiers and civilians vulnerable to
attacks from above for the first time.

Major innovations were also made in manufacturing, chemistry and communications. Medical advances
made the First World War the first major conflict in which British deaths in battle outnumbered deaths
caused by disease.
Watercolour painting. The ruins of a building that has been completely destroyed. There are a number
of graves in the foreground marked by small wooden crosses in the ground.

5. It was a war of destruction

The First World War left an estimated 16 million soldiers and civilians dead and countless others
physically and psychologically wounded. The war also forever altered the world’s social and political
landscape. It accelerated changes in attitudes towards gender and class and led to the collapse of the
Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. The cost of waging total war - and of rebuilding
afterwards - ravaged the national economies of both the victorious European Allies and the defeated
Central Powers.

The human cost of the First World War for Britain saw the creation of a new language of remembrance,
which remains to this day. It can be seen in war memorials in cities, towns, schools, places of worship
and workplaces, as well as in rituals such as Remembrance Sunday and the two-minute silence at 11am
each 11 November.

World War I was a major conflict fought between 1914 and 1918. Other names for World War I include
the First World War, WWI, the War to End All Wars, and the Great War.

Who fought in World War I?

World War I was fought between the Allied Powers and the Central Powers. The main members of the
Allied Powers were France, Russia, and Britain. The United States also fought on the side of the Allies
after 1917. The main members of the Central Powers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman
Empire, and Bulgaria.

Where was most of the fighting?

The majority of the fighting took place in Europe along two fronts: the western front and the eastern
front. The western front was a long line of trenches that ran from the coast of Belgium to Switzerland. A
lot of the fighting along this front took place in France and Belgium. The eastern front was between
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria on one side and Russia and Romania on the other.

How did it start?

Although there were a number of causes for the war, the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand was the main catalyst for starting the war. After the assassination, Austria declared war on
Serbia. Then Russia prepared to defend its ally Serbia. Next, Germany declared war on Russia to protect
Austria. This caused France to declare war on Germany to protect its ally Russia. Germany invaded
Belgium to get to France which caused Britain to declare war on Germany. This all happened in just a
few days.

Major Battles
A lot of the war was fought using trench warfare along the western front. The armies hardly moved at
all. They just bombed and shot at each other from across the trenches. Some of the major battles during
the war included the First Battle of the Marne, Battle of the Somme, Battle of Tannenberg, Battle of
Gallipoli, and the Battle of Verdun.

How did it end?

The fighting ended on November 11, 1918 when a general armistice was agreed to by both sides. The
war officially ended between Germany and the Allies with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Interesting Facts about World War I

* More than 65 million men fought in the war.

* Dogs were used in the trenches to carry messages. A well-trained messenger dog was considered a
very fast and reliable way to carry messages.

* It was the first major war where airplanes and tanks were used.

* Ninety percent of the 7.8 million soldiers from Austria-Hungary who fought in the war were either
injured or killed.

When the British first invented tanks they called them "landships."

The terrorist group responsible for assassinating Archduke Ferdinand was called the Black Hand.

Famed scientist Marie Curie helped to equip vans with x-ray machines that enabled French doctors to
see bullets in wounded men. These vans were called "petites Curies", meaning "little Curies."

WORLD WAR 2

World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the world
during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—
and the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China.
The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left
unsettled by World War I. The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the
bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.

Along with World War I, World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical
history. It resulted in the extension of the Soviet Union’s power to nations of eastern Europe, enabled a
communist movement to eventually achieve power in China, and marked the decisive shift of power in
the world away from the states of western Europe and toward the United States and the Soviet Union.

The outbreak of war

By the early part of 1939 the German dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to invade and
occupy Poland. Poland, for its part, had guarantees of French and British military support should it be
attacked by Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize the
possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western neighbour. Secret negotiations
led on August 23–24 to the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in Moscow. In a secret
protocol of this pact, the Germans and the Soviets agreed that Poland should be divided between them,
with the western third of the country going to Germany and the eastern two-thirds being taken over by
the U.S.S.R.

Having achieved this cynical agreement, the other provisions of which stupefied Europe even without
divulgence of the secret protocol, Hitler thought that Germany could attack Poland with no danger of
Soviet or British intervention and gave orders for the invasion to start on August 26. News of the signing,
on August 25, of a formal treaty of mutual assistance between Great Britain and Poland (to supersede a
previous though temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the start of hostilities for a few days.
He was still determined, however, to ignore the diplomatic efforts of the western powers to restrain
him. Finally, at 12:40 PM on August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland to start at 4:45 the
next morning. The invasion began as ordered. In response, Great Britain and France declared war on
Germany on September 3, at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM, respectively. World War II had begun.

COLD WAR

Cold War, the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States
and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and
propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons. The term was first used by the English
writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear
stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which
millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” It was first used in the United States by the
American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech at the State House in Columbia,
South Carolina, in 1947.

Origins of the Cold War

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy
wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on
the other began to unravel. By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of
eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. The Americans and the British feared the
permanent Soviet domination of eastern Europe and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties
coming to power in the democracies of western Europe. The Soviets, on the other hand, were
determined to maintain control of eastern Europe in order to safeguard against any possible renewed
threat from Germany, and they were intent on spreading communism worldwide, largely for ideological
reasons. The Cold War had solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to
western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed
openly communist regimes in eastern Europe.

The struggle between superpowers

The Cold War reached its peak in 1948–53. In this period the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded the
Western-held sectors of West Berlin (1948–49); the United States and its European allies formed the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in
Europe (1949); the Soviets exploded their first atomic warhead (1949), thus ending the American
monopoly on the atomic bomb; the Chinese communists came to power in mainland China (1949); and
the Soviet-supported communist government of North Korea invaded U.S.-supported South Korea in
1950, setting off an indecisive Korean War that lasted until 1953.

From 1953 to 1957 Cold War tensions relaxed somewhat, largely owing to the death of the longtime
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953; nevertheless, the standoff remained. A unified military
organization among the Soviet-bloc countries, the Warsaw Pact, was formed in 1955; and West
Germany was admitted into NATO that same year. Another intense stage of the Cold War was in 1958–
62. The United States and the Soviet Union began developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and in
1962 the Soviets began secretly installing missiles in Cuba that could be used to launch nuclear attacks
on U.S. cities. This sparked the Cuban missile crisis (1962), a confrontation that brought the two
superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles.

Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty

The Cuban missile crisis showed that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were ready to use
nuclear weapons for fear of the other’s retaliation (and thus of mutual atomic annihilation). The two
superpowers soon signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear
weapons testing. But the crisis also hardened the Soviets’ determination never again to be humiliated by
their military inferiority, and they began a buildup of both conventional and strategic forces that the
United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.

Throughout the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union avoided direct military confrontation
in Europe and engaged in actual combat operations only to keep allies from defecting to the other side
or to overthrow them after they had done so. Thus, the Soviet Union sent troops to preserve communist
rule in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979). For its
part, the United States helped overthrow a left-wing government in Guatemala (1954), supported an
unsuccessful invasion of Cuba (1961), invaded the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), and
undertook a long (1964–75) and unsuccessful effort to prevent communist North Vietnam from bringing
South Vietnam under its rule (see Vietnam War).

POLARITY

The concept of polarity in international relations is used to describe the presence of one or more great
powers dominating the international system. The great powers which have enormous capability are
divided into several poles from different periods. More precisely, according to Goedele De Keersmaeker
(2017: 232), “Polarity is about the number of great powers or polar powers.” It can be seen that the
international system tends to anarchy where there are no rules to control the state’s behavior. Thus, it
encourages the state as an actor to act freely to increase its capability to be a great power. In addition,
there are three arguments about the concept of polarity, including the disparity between great powers
and fewer powers. First, unipolarity is a condition where there is a wide power disparity between the
great powers and all other states. Second, bipolarity is the two great powers in the international system
having an approximately equal position, and there is wide power disparity with the fewer powers. Third,
multipolarity is more than two great powers which have the approximately equal position, and there is
the wide power disparity between the fewer powers in the international system (Levy 1985 cited in
Mansfield 1993).”

There are many different ways to visualise where power lies within the global system. One way to do so
is to consider different types of ‘polarity’ and match these to historical time periods, or to the present
day. For example, the Cold War represented a global system of bipolarity. A bipolar system is one where
two powers dominate. In that case, it was the United States on one side, and the Soviet Union on the
other – with each side assembling their allies into their sphere of influence. When the Cold War ended, a
debate raged over how to describe the system. Some maintained that it was a system of unipolarity – as
there was only one superpower remaining, the United States. This idea was captured by Charles
Krauthammer when he described it as a ‘unipolar moment’ in which the United States stood in an
unprecedented historical situation where one state was significantly more economically, militarily and
politically powerful to the extent that it would take a generation or more for a competitor of equal
stature (a peer) to emerge.