World War I Selected Topics

Daniel W. Blackmon

IB HL History

Coral Gables Sr. High School

Key Battles

• First Battle of the Marne

• Tannenburg

• Jutland

• Verdun

• The Somme

• Caporetto

• Ludendorff Spring Offensive

Technological Innovations

• Bolt-action, magazine fed rifle

• Smokeless powder

• Machine gun (Maxim gun)

• Barbed Wire

• Quick firing artillery (French 75)

• Poison gas (chlorine, phosgene, mustard)

• Flame throwers

• Submarine (Lusitania)

• Airplane (Zeppelin, Gotha)

Underlying Technologies

• Railroads

• Telegraphs

• Telephone

• Metallurgy

• Chemicals (nitrogen based explosives)

• Canning

Organization of the State

• The Nation-State

• Conscript armies (levee en masse)

• Taxing powers

• Centralized bureaucracies

• Economic, physical, moral mobilization of the entire nation

Significance of the Submarine

The Birth of Airpower

• Reconnaisance

• Artillery Spotting

• Fighter aircraft

• Early bombing efforts

The Home Front

• Political: Strengthening of the central government

• Economic: Economic controls, rationing

• Social: Women enter work force, receive voting rights in Great Britain and U.S.

• Intellectual: Mobilization of public opinion via propaganda and censorship

Home Front: Germany

• Burgfriede• The Kaiser offers a cessation of class and

party hostility: "I do not know parties any longer, I know only Germans."

• A "state of siege" is declared, which gave military commanders virtually untrammeled power to suppress activities detrimental to the war effort.

• This included

• the suspension of many civil rights,

• complete censorship of all publications, and

• any measures necessary for internal security and control of associations.

• Censorship in Germany, as indeed all the warring powers, was grossly misused.

• Walter Rathenau, the Jewish head of Germany's largest electrical firm, is the chief organizer of the integration of the German economy with the war effort.

• Wages rose with the war, but were outstripped by price increases as a result of wartime shortages.

• Women enter the industrial work force (from approx. 1.4 million to 2.2 million), composing 37.8% of Krupps by war's end.

• Juveniles were increasingly employed, Sunday's rest, and the ten-hour day were abandoned.

• Juveniles' wages were necessary in many families to make up for the loss of real wages.

• The wages paid women and juveniles were dramatically lower than for men.

• The Law of Auxiliary Patriotic Service did provide gains for war economy workers while also regulating the movement from job to job.

• Workers councils were introduced for businesses with 50 workers or more.

• These councils were to act as intermediaries for questions regarding wages, hours, working conditions, and welfare arrangements.

• Ludendorff's policies were ruthless and totalitarian in nature. In a move that presages the Nazis, he deports 400,000 Belgian workers for forced labor in German war industries.

• By the end of 1916, the blockade is causing very severe problems in Germany--1916-17 is Germany's Turnip Winter. The potato crop that harvest was half pre-war levels.

• With an official normal intake of 2,250 calories, rationing provided only 1,350 calories in early 1916, and only 1,000 calories during the Turnip Winter--a starvation diet for those who could not afford the black market.

• An estimated 750,000 Germans starved to death.

• In addition, the surviving population was weakened for the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, which killed more people than the war itself--6,000,000 in India alone.

• The epidemic moved from east to west, and struck Germany before it reached the Allies.

The Home Front: France

• France declares Union sacrée• The initial effect was the institution of

virtual martial law, which was ruthlessly applied by a French officer corps with strong monarchist, clericalist connections (such as Foch, Castelnau and d'Esperey).

• Leading politicians such as Malvy and Caillaux were arrested. Lists of subversives were compiled.

• Censorship becomes very severe even in France, with its history of freedom of the press.

The Home Front: Great Britain

• Great Britain begins to abandon its "business as usual" attitudes by 1915.

• In December, 1915, Lloyd George pushes through the Defense of the Realm Act which organized corporatist war boards to coordinate manufacturing, transport, and supply.

• John Maynard Keynes becomes the Economics Tsar for Great Britain

The Home Front: The United States

• The US, even with the idealistic Progressive Woodrow Wilson as President, adopts policies at variance with traditional principles.

• As a war-time president, Wilson, the advocate of the New Freedom, looks more like Theodore Roosevelt and the New Nationalism of Herbert Croly.

• War Industries Board, run by Bernard Baruch, "ran a kindergarten for 1920s interventionism and the New Deal, which in turn inspired the New Frontier and the Great Society."

• Fuel Administration• Shipping Board

• War Labor Policies Board

The Locomotive of History

• Political COT

• Economic COT

• Social COT

• Intellectual COT

• Aesthetic COT

Political

• The Russian Revolution

• Collapse of Austro-Hungarian Empire

• Collapse of German Empire

• Impoverishment of France and Great Britain

• Impact on Colonies

• Entry of U.S. into European affairs

The Fourteen Points

The Armistice