Europe from War to War, 1914-1945

Alice-Catherine Carls, Stephen D. Carls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138999145
• eBook ISBN: 9781351659598
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Europe from War to War, 1914–1945 explores this age of metamorphosis within European history, an age that played a crucial role in shaping the Europe of today. Covering a wide range of topics such as religion, arts and literature, humanitarian relief during the wars, transnational feminism, and efforts to create a unified Europe, it examines the social and cultural history of this period as well as political, economic, military, and diplomatic perspectives.

Thematically organized within a chronological framework, this book takes a fully comparative approach to the era, allowing the reader to follow the evolution of key trends and ideas across these 30 turbulent years. Each period is analyzed from both an international and a domestic perspective, expanding the traditional narrative to include the role and impact of European colonies around the world while retaining a close focus on national affairs, everyday existence within Europe itself and the impact of the wars on people's lives. Chapters include discussion of regions such as Scandinavia, the Balkans, and Iberia that are less frequently covered, emphasizing the network of connections between events and places across the continent.

Global in scope, accessibly written and illustrated throughout with photographs and maps, this is the perfect introductory textbook for all students of early twentieth-century European history.

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Part 1

World War I and after, 1914–1923

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1 The war’s international dimensions and aftermath

Introduction

World War I, also referred to as the Great War, was the first truly global conflict in history. There were several major fronts in Europe: the Western Front in northeastern France and across Belgium; the Eastern Front located along a 2,000-mile long line stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea; the Italian Front that affected northeastern Italy and the western frontier of Austria–Hungary (the Dual Monarchy) beginning in the spring of 1915; and the Balkans Front that touched several countries in Southeastern Europe. Military operations also took place in Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and at sea. The campaigns beyond Europe, though of less overall importance, often included important military commitments and fierce fighting. Indeed, the extensive combat that occurred outside Europe testifies to the new dimension that the conflagration represented.

Domestic and diplomatic policies were tightly woven into military strategy. When the war did not end quickly, both sets of belligerents began to mobilize their countries’ economies and societies. The global nature of the fighting and the sudden expectation of a long conflict required large amounts of human and material resources, courting new allies, securing alliance reversals, advancing peace proposals, and supporting massive military operations. The monumental scale of economic mobilization necessitated not only unprecedented government controls at home, but also increasing cooperation among allies, thus creating another level of diplomatic activity. To win the war required the coordination of efforts at many levels.

Military operations

As Europe hovered on the edge of war in the summer of 1914, the continent’s Great Powers were split into two rival alliance systems. On one side was the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria–Hungary, and Italy, and on the other the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Great Britain. Because of the entangling nature of the alliances, it appeared likely that if a member of one alliance fell into war with a party from the other, the remaining alliance members would follow suit. The possibility of keeping any conflict localized seemed remote.

The turmoil of nationalities in Austria–Hungary and the Balkans was decisive in the tensions that erupted into war in 1914. Inside Austria–Hungary were several ethnic groups with nationalist aspirations that threatened the well-being of the empire. The presence of ambitious states in southeastern Europe and the impact this had on the Great Powers also contributed greatly to the war’s outbreak. Thus, while the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie (Duchess of Hohenberg) by a Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, precipitated the final steps to war, there were deeper causes to the crisis. Among them were two Balkan wars in 1912–1913. The Treaty of London that ended the First Balkan War in 1913 resulted in the partition of Ottoman lands among members of a Balkan League consisting of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, and the creation – at the behest of Austria–Hungary – of an independent Albanian state on the Adriatic Sea. Signed by the Great Powers, the treaty nevertheless failed to resolve all boundary issues satisfactorily, and a Second Balkan War quickly ensued. In this war, Serbia and Greece, joined by Romania and the Ottoman Empire, defeated Bulgaria, which had started the conflict to obtain better territorial provisions than it had gained in the London treaty. Serbia emerged from the conflicts stronger, but bitter that Austria–Hungary had prevented it from expanding through Albania to the Adriatic Sea.

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Map 1.1 World nations at war, 1914

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In the Near East, the Ottoman Empire was subject to Great Power ambitions. By 1913, Germany, France, and Britain had entrenched themselves in Ottoman territories. Germany was expanding its investment in Anatolia, particularly on the construction of a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad. Britain was developing its oil interests in northern and southern Iraq and securing its presence in the Persian Gulf. France showed interest in Syria. Russia had long sought control of the Black Sea and the Dardanelles. Added to this volatile situation were wider tensions among European nations, including commercial competition, colonial conflicts, intense nationalist feelings, Russian expansionism, and an Anglo-German naval arms race. These created wars of words where chauvinists became shrill, and the press and public strident.

The tragedy in Sarajevo ignited a global war that, because of its complexities, was not completely settled at the peace table in 1919. Conflicts continued on the periphery of Europe and elsewhere until 1923, ranging from border hostilities to colonial struggles to internationalized civil wars. The belligerents’ aims were still largely traditional: more land, more status, and more power.

The outbreak of war in Europe

On July 23, the Austro-Hungarians, long fearful of Serbia’s intentions in the Balkans and convinced of its complicity in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, sent their Balkan neighbor an unconditional ultimatum containing demands that would have compromised Serbian sovereignty. Serbia’s response was conciliatory, but it failed to comply fully with the Dual Monarchy’s demands. The Austrian government, armed with the knowledge of German support in the matter, declared war on Serbia on July 28. Viewing his country as the protector of Serbian interests, Russian Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) initially reacted by ordering a partial mobilization along Russia’s border with the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, but he ordered full mobilization the next day after his top generals warned him that partial mobilization was technically impossible. Germany responded with full mobilization and a declaration of war on Russia on August 1. Germany also mobilized against France and delivered an ultimatum to neutral Belgium demanding free passage across that country. When the Belgian government rejected the ultimatum, the Germans invaded. The German actions against Belgium shifted British public opinion from being quite opposed to the war to being enthusiastically in favor of it. Great Britain on August 4 declared war against Germany. With Britain’s action, all of the European Great Powers were now locked in a war that had the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary fighting against the Allied (Entente) forces of France, Great Britain, and Russia. Britain’s entry also arrayed her empire against the Central Powers.

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When war came, there was general excitement and jubilation in the European countries that found themselves engaged in the enterprise. Elated crowds poured onto the streets in St. Petersburg and Berlin. Joyous Frenchmen went to the Paris train stations to cheer for mobilized soldiers as they boarded trains. In non-conscript Britain, volunteer enlistments surged. Not everyone approached the war with a deep sense of celebration, however. There were anti-conscription riots in Russia and talks of an international general strike among the members of several countries’ socialist parties, even though workers ultimately allowed a nationalist sense of duty to prevail over international working class solidarity, and they joined their respective nations’ war efforts.

The consensus among European economists, political leaders, and military planners was that the conflict would be short – no more than a few weeks or a couple of months. Military plans on both sides called for offensive actions. France’s Plan XVII involved a massive attack along the border with Germany, but was short on details. The Germans’ blueprint for the war, known as the Schlieffen Plan, consisted of an initial holding action against the Russians, while launching a major offensive in the West with a large wheeling movement through Belgium, across France to the west of Paris, and then back to eastern France to defeat the French army trapped by a massive encirclement. The Germans would then shift their forces to the Eastern Front to defeat the isolated Russians in a quick campaign. Austria’s plans were limited to war against Serbia. Russia, aware that its army would be slow to mobilize, planned an initial holding action against German attacks, followed by an offensive plan when its army was fully deployed. The British had extensive defensive plans to protect their imperial trade routes.

The Germans’ offensive across Belgium and into France soon revealed shortcomings in the Schlieffen Plan. For one thing, the Belgians unexpectedly slowed down the German advance through their tenacious resistance. Also, a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of 100,000 men, whose participation the Germans had not even considered in their planning, arrived in France quickly enough to retard the German advance in the latter part of August. Meanwhile, German General Alexander von Kluck’s First Army, whose position on the extreme right wing of the German invasion force required travel across considerable territory very quickly, began to suffer from fatigue, low provisions, and difficult communications. Kluck, eager to close a gap between his soldiers and the Second Army to their left, obtained the approval of Helmuth von Moltke, the indecisive and overly reflective chief of the German General Staff, to wheel his army to the east of Paris instead of enveloping the city from the west. That decision, which exposed the right flank of the First Army, proved fateful. Opposing him was Joseph Joffre, the imperturbable French commander-in-chief, who had watched France’s Plan XVII in eastern France turn into a debacle. Joffre remained confident in spite of the adversity his forces had endured militarily.

What ensued was the decisive First Battle of the Marne, which began on September 5. The French threw every available soldier into the battle; to supplement rail transport, they had to commandeer some 1,200 Parisian taxicabs to transport 6,000 troops to the battlefront. At the end of an intense week of fighting, the French, along with the BEF, prevailed. The Allies had shattered what was left of the Schlieffen Plan and ended German hopes for a quick resolution of the war in the West. German Emperor Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918) relieved a physically and emotionally broken Moltke of his command on September 14 and appointed Erich von Falkenhayn as his successor. Joffre emerged from the battle as a hero, and the French soon referred to their victory as the “Miracle of the Marne.” In the weeks that followed, both sides, in a series of attacks and counterattacks, tried to outflank each other in a northward race to the sea. In the last of these actions, fought in the mud around the Belgian town of Ypres from mid-October to November, the British stopped the Germans from reaching the French Channel ports.

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The overall casualties on the Western Front in 1914 were staggering. The Germans lost 667,000 men and the French 995,000, British totals reached 96,000, and those of Belgians were close to 50,000. The human carnage in the west was an indication of what the cost of the war would be for the belligerents in forthcoming campaigns. The war of maneuver turned into a war of stalemate and attrition, since both camps lacked the ability to dislodge the other and there was no more space for either side to outflank the other. The rival armies dug into their positions with trenches, creating two thin lines along a battlefront that extended from the English Channel to the border of Switzerland.

In the East, the Russians launched an offensive faster than German planners had calculated and actually got troops into German East Prussia. Moltke, unhappy with the German commander on the Eastern Front, replaced him in late August 1914 with General Paul von Hindenburg, a 67-year-old Prussian aristocrat who came out of retirement to do his duty. Moltke assigned Erich Ludendorff, a hard-working, determined officer who proved to be a brilliant military strategist, to serve as Hindenburg’s chief of staff. A lack of coordination among the two Russian armies moving into Prussia from the east and the south helped the Germans defeat each Russian force separately. The Germans first mauled the army of Aleksandr Samsonov in what was subsequently named the Battle of Tannenberg on August 26–30, and then defeated the second Russian army on September 8 in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. The completeness of his army’s loss caused Samsonov to commit suicide. By September 13, all remaining Russian forces had abandoned Germany. The defeats set back the Russians’ ability to fight on this front indefinitely. On the other hand, the German victories made Hindenburg and Ludendorff instant national heroes.

Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarians, under the guidance of the surprisingly self-confident and energetic Chief of the General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, struggled in their two-front war against the Russians and the Serbians. Russia sent four armies to challenge the Austro-Hungarian Empire along the frontier of Galicia, where the combined armies totaled approximately 2.2 million men. Despite some early successes along the northern section of the front in late August, Austrian forces were routed and fell back over 100 miles to the passes of the Carpathian Mountains. Along the way, they strengthened the defense of their military fortress of Przemysl, which was pivotal to the protection of Hungary. The Russians trapped some 120,000 Austrian soldiers at the fortress in late September, though the besieged fort did not surrender until March 1915. The impact of the Galician fighting in the war’s first weeks was devastating for the Austrians, since they suffered losses of more than 350,000 men and much of Galicia fell under Russian occupation. Moreover, the Russians were in a position to launch attacks against Hungary and the German state of Silesia. The Central Powers ultimately succeeded in preventing the Russians from attacking either of those places in 1914.

Austria-Hungary also faced difficulties against Serbia on the Balkan front. In the first important encounter of the two armies in August 1914, Serbian troops defeated the Austrians at the Battle of the Tser Mountains. In the months that followed, the Austrians advanced against the Serbs, capturing Belgrade on December 2. Within days, however, the Serbs pushed the Austrians out of the city, and the Austrian retreat quickly became a rout. Soon there were no Austro-Hungarian troops left on Serbian soil.

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Map 1.2 World War I in Eastern Europe in 1914.

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In late October, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, when ships flying the Turkish flag bombarded the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa, and the Ottomans closed the Dardanelles, thereby cutting off an important supply route for Russia through the Black Sea. The intervention of the Ottoman Empire was a sign of a spreading war, since the conflict now reached the Middle East. Another sign was Japan’s entry into the conflict in 1914 on the side of the Allies, as the Japanese were eager to take control of German colonial possessions and spheres of influence in the Far East. Indeed, the war that began as a European conflict had reached global proportions by year’s end.

The technology of mass death

A major reason for the enormous casualty figures in the fighting was that war planners applied nineteenth-century principles to a conflict transformed by new and improved technology. One of these changes was the development of smokeless gunpowder. It made for a clearer battlefield, and it reduced bore fouling (deposits that form in the rifle bore from firing), thus allowing for the emergence of increased firepower. There was also a major transformation in small arms going back to the 1880s with the development of clip-fed breech-loading rifles that had a longer range and greater velocity than their predecessors. In addition, manufacturers produced newly shaped bullets that were smaller, more stable, and had a longer range. The result of these innovations was an advantage for the defense over the offense.

The weapon most frequently mentioned when referring to the killing fields of World War I is the machine gun. The first modern model came in the 1880s. Improved versions followed, and by 1914, the machine gun’s firepower had increased to between 450 and 600 rounds per minute. When the fighting began, the Germans had 12,000 machine guns at their disposal, while the British and French had only a few hundred. Machine guns quickly became prevalent in the arsenals of all the major warring nations.

Artillery saw significant changes. The introduction of recoil systems enabled the artillery tube to move back to its original position after recoiling against springs in its carriage upon firing. The result was an increased firing rate and improved accuracy. New steel alloys allowed for the manufacture of more durable artillery weapons with greater firing ranges. Many European armies developed and standardized the procedures for using indirect artillery fire, which involved targeting a remote site and massing one’s artillery fire on it. As for types of artillery in hand when the war broke out, the French relied heavily on their 75 mm field gun, a highly effective offensive weapon that was light, mobile, rapid, and had an impressive firing range of 6,000 yards. On the other hand, the shells of this French artillery piece could not penetrate enemy embankments or entrenchments. When the war started in 1914, the French had 3,840 75mm field guns and only about 300 heavy artillery pieces (howitzers). The Germans had a heavy artillery force of 2,000 guns that represented one-third of all their artillery weapons in 1914. The howitzers had much greater destructive power than light field guns, more accuracy in hitting enemy targets, and a much longer firing range. The popularity of heavy artillery increased on both sides during the conflict, and even in France, heavy guns constituted close to half of its artillery strength by war’s end. Estimates indicate that artillery was responsible for as many as 70 percent of all soldiers’ deaths at the battlefront.

Airplanes, an invention of the Wright brothers in America in 1903, were a minor factor in the war in 1914, but their importance grew significantly as the fighting progressed. Their potential was evident in the conflict’s initial weeks, when French reconnaissance planes discovered and confirmed that the German First Army had shifted its line of movement to the east of Paris, helping Joffre decide to launch a counterattack near the Marne in September. At the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the Germans concentrated aircraft in a manner not seen before, consequently ridding the sky of French fighter planes and chasing off French observation aircraft trying to track German troop movements; at the same time, the Germans used their own observation planes to assist their artillery units in pinpointing enemy targets. Before 1918, the military use of planes was confined primarily to artillery o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Europe from War to War, 1914–1945
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Methodology and Organization of the Book
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1 World War I and After, 1914–1923
• PART 2 Brave New World, 1919–1929
• PART 3 Dress Rehearsals for War, 1929–1939
• PART 4 World War II, 1939–1945
• PART 5 European Civilization in the Crucible, 1914–1945
• Index