10.5 Lecture – The 10.5 Lecture – The Global ConflictGlobal Conflict

I. War Affects the WorldA. On August 2, 1914 – The Turks signed a secret alliance with Germany.

1. Joined the fighting hoping to gain land at Russia’s expense.2. The campaign proved disastrous for both armies.3. Turkey decided to use the war as an excuse to long history of animosity between Turks and Armenians.

a. The Turks deported the Armenians, whom they suspected of being pro-Russian, from their homelands in eastern Anatolia to Syria and other parts of the Ottoman Empire.b. Removed Armenian soldiers from ranks and deported them to labor camps.c. Forced to march across the mountains in the winter, hundreds of thousands of Armenians died of hunger and exposure.

B. The Gallipoli Campaign1. The Turks closed the Dardanelles, the strait between the

Mediterranean and Black Seas.a. Gateway to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople.

2. Seeing little hope of victory on the Western Front, British officials tried to open the Dardanelles by landing troops on the nearby Gallipoli

Peninsula in 1915.a. Defeat the Turks and established a supply line to Russia.

3. British, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops made repeated assaults on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the western side of the strait.

a. Turkish defended their land and troops ended up in a stalemate.

1. Dug trenches2. Allies gave up and began to evacuate.3. 250,000 causalities4. Turkish troops pushed the invaders back into the sea.

C. America Joins the Fight1. Unrestricted submarine warfare

a. Germans announced that their submarines would sink without warning any ship in the waters around Britain.b. May 7, 1915, a German submarine, or U-boar, had sunk the British passenger ship Lusitania.

1. 1,198 died, 128 US Citizens2. Germany claimed that the ship had been carrying ammunition, which turned out to be true.

i) American public was outragedii) President Woodrow Wilson sent a strong protest to Germany.iii) After two further attacks, the Germans finally agreed to stop attacking neutral and passenger ships.

3. Resumed submarine warfare in 1917.i) They knew it might lead to war with the US.ii) They gambled that their naval blockade would starve Britain into defeat before the US could mobilize. iii) Ignoring warnings by President Wilson, German U-boats sank three American ships.

2. US was diverse in the belief of wara. Americans were divided due to ethnic background and felt it was a European war.

3. US closer to war with Germanya. Officials intercepted a telegram written by Germany’s foreign secretary: Arthur Zimmerman.

1. Stated: Germany would help Mexico “re-conquer” the land it had lost to the US if Mexico would ally itself with Germany.

i) Territories of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona.2. The Zimmerman note simply proved to be the last straw.

i) The American population favored the Allies, especially England.

- The two nations shared a common ancestry and language, as well as similar democratic institutions and legal systems.

b. On April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress the declare war on Germany.

D. War Affects the Home Front1. US joined the war; it had been going on for three years.

a. Europe had lost more men in battle than in all of the wars in the previous three years.

2. Total Wara. Countries devoted all their resources to the war effort.

1. All dedicated to winning the conflict.b. Governments took control of the economy.

1. Governments told factories what to produce and how much.2. Nearly every able body person was put to work.

i) Unemployment around Europe disappeared.c. Rationing

1. Goods were in short supply.2. People could buy only small amounts of those items that were also needed for the war effort.

d. Suppressed anti-war activity1. Censored news about the war.

i) Feared honest reporting about the war would turn people against it.

2. Propagandai) One-sided information designed to persuade, to keep up morale and support for the war.

3. Women and the wara. Thousands of women replaced men in factories, offices, and shops.b. Women build tanks and ammunition, plowed fields, paved streets, and ran hospitals.c. Kept troops supplied with food, clothing, and weapons. d. Although most women left the work force when the war ended, they changed many people’s views of what women were capable of doing.

II. Double Revolution in Russia, 1917A. At the beginning of the war Russia had the largest army in the world, but its generals were incompetent, supplies were lacking, and soldiers were

poorly trained and equipped.1. In 1916, after a string of defeats, the Russian army ran out of ammunition and other essential supplies.2. Soldiers were ordered into battle unarmed and told to pick up the rifles of fallen comrades.3. Railroads broke down for lack of fuel and parts; crops rotted in the fields.

a. Civilians faced shortages and widespread hunger.

4. During the bitterly cold winter of 1916-1917 factory workers and housewives had to line up in front of grocery stores before dawn to get food.

a. The court of the Tsar (Czar) Nicholas II however, remained as extravagant.b. March 1917, food ran out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), the capitol.

1. Housewives and women factory workers staged mass demonstrations.2. Soldiers mutinied and joined striking workers to form soviets (councils) to take over factories and barracks.

5. Revolutionary groups formerly hunted by the tsar’s police came out of hiding.

a. Soviet Revolutionaries: advocated the redistribution of land to the peasants.b. The Social Democrats: A Marxists party, were divided into two factions: Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

1. The Mensheviks advocated electoral politics and reform in the tradition of European socialists and had a large following among intellectuals and factory workers.

2. The Bolsheviks, their rivals, were a small but tightly disciplined group of radicals obedient to the will of their leader, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).

i) Lenin, the son of a government official, became a revolutionary in his teens when his older brother was executed for plotting to kill the tsar. ii) He spent years in exile, first in Siberia and

later in Switzerland, where he devoted his full attention to organizing his followers.

- His goal was to create a party that would lead the revolution rather than wait for it.iii) His program: immediate peace, all power to the soviets, and transfer of land to the peasants and factories to the workers.

- This plan proved immensely popular among soldiers and workers exhausted by the war.

6. Russian soldiers began to desert by the hundred of thousands, throwing away their rifles and walking back to their villages.

a. On November 6, 1917 the Bolsheviks rose up and took over the city.

1. Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government and arrested Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries, and other rivals.b. The Bolsheviks nationalized all private land and ordered the peasants to hand over their crops without compensation.c. In the cities the Bolsheviks took over the factories and drafted the workers into compulsory labor brigades.

1. To enforce his rule Lenin created the Cheka, a secret police force with powers to arrest and execute opponents.

d. The Bolsheviks also sued for peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

1. By the Treaty of Brest-Litousk, signed on March 3, 1918, Russia lost territories containing a their of its population and wealth.2. Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) became independent republics.

III. The End of the War in Western Europe, 1917-1918A. President Woodrow Wilson wanted to stay out of the European conflict.

1. For nearly three years he kept the US neutral and tried to persuade the belligerents to compromise.2. The Germans knew that unrestricted submarine warfare was likely to bring the US into the war, but they were willing to gamble that Britain and France would collapse before the US could send enough troops to help them.

a. The submarine campaign resumed on February 1, 1917, and the German gamble failed.b. The British organized their merchant ships into convoys protected by destroyers, and on April 6, President Wilson asked the United States Congress to declare war on Germany.

3. Losing hope of winning, soldiers began to mutiny.a. May 1917, before the arrival of US forces, fifty-four of one hundred French divisions along the Western Front refused to attack. b. At Caporetto, Italian troops were so demoralized that 275,000 were taken prisoner.

B. The Central Powers Collapse1. Germany could send all forces to the Western Front with the end of the war with Russia.2. Fresh US troops helped the Allies.

a. Allied forces began to advance steadily toward Germany.3. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Turks surrendered first.

a. Revolution swept through Austria-Hungary.b. German soldiers mutinied and the public turned against the Kaiser.

4. November 9, 1918 the Kaiser stepped down and Germany became a republic.

a. German soldiers, many of them sick with the flu had lost the will to fight.

5. New leader of Germany met the French in a railway car near Paris.a. Signed an Armistice

1. An agreement to stop fighting.2. On November 11, 1918 at 11am the guns on the Western Front were silent.

C. The Legacy of War1. New kind of war

a. New technologies, war on a grand scale, left behind a landscape of death and destruction.b. 8.5 million soldiers died from the war.c. 21 million were woundedd. Death of civilians by way of starvation, disease, and slaughter.e. Wiped out an entire generation of Europeans.

2. Economic Impacta. Drained the treasuries of European countries.b. Total cost for the war $338 Billionc. Destroyed acres of farmland, as well as homes, villages, and towns.