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World War One....
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World War I, also known as the First World War, the Great War, the War
of the Nations, and the War to End All Wars, was a world conflict
occurring from 1914 to 1918. The war was fought by the Allies on one side
and the Central Powers on the other. No previous conflict had mobilized so
many soldiers or involved so many in the field of battle. By its end, the
war was the second-bloodiest conflict of all time. Among other notable events, chemical weapons were used for the first
time, the first large scale bombing from the air was undertaken, and some
of the century's first large-scale civilian massacres took place. Four
dynasties, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Ottomans and the
Hohenzollerns, who had roots of power back to the days of the
Crusades,
all fell during or after the war.
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World War I proved to be the decisive break with the old
world order, marking the final demise of absolutist monarchy in Europe. The
post-war failure to deal effectively with many of the causes and results of
the War would lead to the rise of Facism in Italy, National Socialism in
Germany and the outbreak of World War II within a generation. The War was
also the catalyst for the Russian Revolution, which would inspire later
revolutions in countries as diverse as China and Cuba, and would lay the
basis for the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the United
States. The War ended the Ottoman Empire in the east and laid the basis for
a modern democratic successor state, Turkey. In Central Europe, new states
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were born and Poland was re-created. |
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Activity by the French and British forces in the eastern
part of the former Ottoman Empire would give rise to several modern
conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Greco-Turkish
conflict over Cyprus, the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s, and the attempted
land grab of the 1990s by Iraq. The Graeco-Turkish conflict, which ended in
1924, was the last direct major conflict of the war.
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It was commonly called "The Great War" (a title
previously used to refer to the Napoleonic Wars) or sometimes "the war to
end all wars" until World War II. The term "First World War," implying an
event distinct from a "Second World War" has fallen into
disfavor by some
scholars, who regard World War I as merely the first phase of a
three-decade long war spanning the period 1914–1945. Other scholars view
World War I as one of the consequences of French indignation at the French
defeat in the Franco-Prussian War that would lead France to exploit a
Balkan crisis as a precept for a general war. Scholars have also cited
German diplomatic ineptitude as well as a tremendous tide of nationalism
that swept the European continent at this time. |
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