100 Years: Remembering World War One

WORLD WAR I IN NUMBERS
by Laurent MAILLARD

Millions of dead, millions more wounded, widowed and orphaned, the dizzying figures from World War I provide a small clue to the scale and horrors of the 1914-18 conflict.

The lack of reliable statistical tools at the time makes figures on the Great War difficult to pin down, accounting for sometimes substantial variations between historians.

The number of victims on the Russian and Ottoman sides remains particularly uncertain.

AFP has compiled the most widely accepted figures related to the conflict, and provided estimates in cases where major discrepancies still exist.

MORE THAN 70 NATIONS: The figure is slightly anachronistic, since many of these nations had yet to gain independence from the six empires and colonial powers -- Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the Ottoman Empire -- at the heart of the conflict.

A dozen independent nations went to war in the summer of 1914, the rest entering the conflict later like Italy in 1915 or the United States in 1917. Together the warring nations accounted for more than 800 million people, or more than half the world's population at the time.

Only around 20 countries were to remain neutral throughout the conflict, most of them in Latin America or northern Europe.

70 MILLION SOLDIERS: Some 20 million men were mobilised by the warring parties at the outset of war in 1914, a figure that rose as the war dragged on in time and expanded in scope.

Close to half of those mobilised were killed or injured.

Eight million men were mobilised in France, 13 million in Germany, nine million in Austria-Hungary, nine million in Britain and the British Empire (chiefly India), 18 million in Russia, six million in Italy, four million in the United States.

10 MILLION MILITARY DEAD, 20 MILLION INJURED

France: 1.4 million dead, 4.2 million injured

Germany: 2 million dead, 4.2 million injured

Austria-Hungary: 1.4 million dead, 3.6 million injured

Russia: 2 million dead, five million injured

Britain and British Empire: 960,000 dead, two million injured, of which 760,000 for Britain, 62,000 for Australia, 61,000 for Canada, 54,000 for India.

Italy: 600,000 dead, one million injured

Ottoman Empire: 800,000 dead

Serbia suffered the worst losses proportionally to the size of its army, with 130,000 dead and 135,000 wounded -- three quarters of its forces.

The emblematic battles of Verdun and the Somme, in 1916, respectively left 770,000 and 1.2 million dead, wounded and missing, on both sides.

But the opening weeks of the war took the heaviest toll in human lives, with 27,000 French soldiers killed in a single day on August 22, 1914, the deadliest day in the history of the French army.

Seventy percent of the dead and wounded were hit by artillery fire. Between five and six million were mutilated for life. Poison gas, used on the battlefield for the first time, claimed 20,000 lives -- relatively few in terms of the war's overall toll -- but was to loom large in the shared memory of the conflict, and with consequences for many of the survivors long after the war had ended.

MILLIONS OF CIVILIAN DEAD: In addition to military losses many millions of civilian lives were lost to the fighting. One million Armenians were massacred by Turkish forces, while some historians believe that up to five million people died in the Russian civil war and lingering conflicts that simmered on after 1918 in eastern Europe and Turkey.

A Spanish Influenza epidemic that broke out at the end of the war claimed another 20 TO 40 MILLION LIVES among populations often weakened by years of deprivation.

SIX MILLION PRISONERS OF WAR

20 MILLION LIVING UNDER OCCUPATION at the end of 1915, most of them in Belgium, France, Poland and Serbia, living under German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian rule.

10 MILLION REFUGEES across Europe, most of them in Russia, Serbia, France, Belgium, Germany and Armenia.

THREE MILLION WAR WIDOWS, SIX MILLION ORPHANS

1.3 MILLION SHELLS FIRED, most of them on the Western Front, including 330 million fired by French artillery and 60 million during the Battle of Verdun alone.

10 BILLION LETTERS AND PACKAGES exchanged between fighters on the Western Front and their loved ones during more than 50 months of conflict.

180 BILLION DOLLARS: The estimated cost of the war for the seven main belligerents -- Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States. Two thirds of the cost was borne by the Allies and one third by the Central Powers. It was the equivalent of three to four times the combined GDP of the European powers, who were ruined by the conflict.


Source : Sapa-AFP /gm
Date : 20 Jun 2014 04:25
 
1914-1918: WORLD WAR I TIMELINE

The Great War pulled in close to 70 million soldiers on five continents, leaving some 10 million dead in battle and claiming many million more lives through hunger and disease.

The 1914-18 conflict toppled four empires, Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian, redrawing the world map and shaping the geopolitics of the coming century.

Here is a timeline of the war:

-- 1914 --

- June 28: Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is assassinated by a pro-Serb nationalist in Sarajevo.

- July 28: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. Russia mobilises two days later in aid of its Serbian ally, setting off a chain reaction among European powers bound by a web of military alliances.

- August 1: Both France and Germany declare general mobilisations, Germany declares war on Russia.

- August 3: Germany declares war on France, German troops invade neutral Belgium.

- August 4: Britain declares war on Germany, joins France, Russia in group known as the Allies.

- August 19-24: Clashes along the borders between France and Belgium, and France and Germany push French back 200 kilometres (125 miles) before they dig in on the banks of the Marne River.

August 22 is the worst day of the war for France as 27,000 troops die.

- August 23: Japan declares war on Germany.

- August 26-30: Battle of Tannenberg. German General Paul von Hindenburg halts Russian breakthrough in Prussia.

- September 6-9: First battle of the Marne. Franco-British force of almost one million troops stops 800,000 German soldiers less than 40 kilometres from Paris, then recovers some ground.

- September-November: "Race to the sea" on the Western Front. Each side tries to outflank the other, fighting creeps north, reaches North Sea on November 17.

A front now extends from the coast to Switzerland, barely to shift until 1918 as troops dig vast trench networks cutting through northeast France. Lines on the Eastern Front are more fluid.

- November 1: The Ottoman Empire blocks Black Sea access, isolates Russia and joins Austria-Hungary and Germany in a group known as the Central Powers.

-- 1915 --

- January 19: First Zeppelin raid on Britain.

- March 18 - December: Allied campaign in the Dardanelles region of the Ottoman Empire aimed at helping Russia is a failure.

On April 25, troops from Australia, Britain, France and New Zealand attempt landing near Gallipoli but are driven back by the Ottomans.

The Allies lose 180,000 soldiers, Ottoman losses are put at 66,000.

Last Allied troops are evacuated on January 9, 1916 and the southern European front is frozen until late 1917.

- April 22: Germans launch first poison gas attack against Canadian and French soldiers near Ypres.

- April 24: Arrest and massacre of Armenians in Istanbul, then called Constantinople. Start of a genocide that lasts into 1917 and kills more than 1.5 million people according to Armenian sources. Turkish authorities put toll at 250,000-500,000.

- May 7: British ocean liner Lusitania is sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland, leaving 1,198 people missing, including 128 US citizens, and provoking outrage in western democracies.

- May 23: Italy joins the war on the Allied side.

- October 5: Allied expeditionary force lands in Salonica, Greece. Bulgaria joins the Central Powers.

-- 1916 --

- January 27 : Conscription introduced in Britain.

- February 21: Battle of Verdun begins with a German offensive but the French contain a breakthrough. Fierce fighting that lasts until June, claiming the lives of 500,000 soldiers in all. The battles becomes a symbol of the war for the French.

- March 9: Secret Sykes-Picot Agreement establishes British and French zones of influence in the Middle East.

- June 7: Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire begins with help from Britain.

- July 1: Battle of the Somme, the war's biggest, begins. More than three million soldiers take part to November 18.

British forces introduce tanks on September 15. Overall casualties total 1.2 million troops.

For Britain and Germany, the Somme becomes the symbol of the war.

-- 1917 --

- February 1: Germany launches all-out submarine attacks against Atlantic shipping. The United States cuts diplomatic ties with Berlin.

- March 8-15: The first Russian Revolution topples Czar Nicolas II.

- April 6: The United States declares war on Germany.

- April 16-May 9: A French offensive at Chemin des Dames in the Champagne region fails, killing several tens of thousands in a few days. Some French soldiers mutiny.

In September, British forces mutiny in the coastal town of Etaples, and German sailors refuse to embark on what they consider a suicide mission from Kiel in late October 1918.

- November 5-6: Second Russian revolution, also called October Revolution owing to Russian use of the Julian calendar, brings Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik party to power.

- December 9: British forces enter Jerusalem, a month after the Balfour declaration backs the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

- December 15: Russia and Central Powers sign Brest-Litovsk armistice, follow with a peace treaty on March 3, 1918.

-- 1918 --

- January 8: United States spells out its goals in a statement known as the Fourteen Points that presage post-war treaties.

US intervention takes effect in the spring of 1918, helps end the war.

- March 21: German forces launch first of several offensives on the Western Front to claim victory before US reinforcements arrive. Allied troops struggle but hold their positions.

- July 15: Second Battle of the Marne. Allies stage a counteroffensive at Viller-Cotterets with fresh US troops. German forces are pushed back and begin a long retreat.

Allies also advance in Asia and the Balkans.

- September/November: Peak of Spanish flu epidemic that kills at least 20 million people across Europe in two years.

- October 30: Ottoman Empire signs an armistice, Austria-Hungary follows on November 3.

- November 9: German emperor Wilhelm II abdicates. Demonstrations break out in Berlin.

- November 11: Allied Victory. Armistice with Germany takes effect at 11:00 am.


Source : Sapa-AFP /gm
Date : 20 Jun 2014 04:24
 
KEY PLAYERS AT THE OUTBREAK OF WWI

Here are ten profiles of the key players at the outbreak of World War I.

- Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914), heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne whose assassination is considered the spark that ignited World War I. He was a Slavophile who favoured a federation to replace the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was murdered with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by a Serbian nationalist.

- Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918): The assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, the event that sparked World War I. He was a Serbian nationalist student from Bosnia-Herzegovina, which at the time was under Austro-Hungarian domination.

Considered a hero in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and later in the Yugoslavia of former strongman Tito, Princip died of tuberculosis in prison in April 1918.

- Franz Joseph (1830-1916): The emperor of Austria and king of Hungary, he launched hostilities in World War I by declaring war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, a month after the assassination of his nephew and heir Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. A member of the Habsburg family and widower of the famous Empress Sisi, he was the senior European sovereign in 1914. He ascended to the Austrian throne after the 1848 revolution and ruled as an absolute monarch before being forced to adopt a more liberal policy. He died during the war, in November 1916.

- Leopold Von Berchtold (1863-1942): Austro-Hungarian foreign minister from 1912 to 1915. He played a key role in escalating tensions following the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Emboldened by the assurance of German backing, he ignored reports exonerating the Serbian government from involvement. Von Berchtold also kept the information from Emperor Franz-Joseph, and drafted an ultimatum to Serbia in such terms that it was certain to be rejected. His influence waned as the war dragged on, and he was forced to resign in 1915.

- Franz Conrad von Hoetzendorf (1852-1925): Austro-Hungarian army chief of staff. A determined supporter of the war, von Hoetzendorf did not believe that Russia would intervene if his troops invaded Serbia, and that the conflict would thus remain at a local level.

He hounded the empire's ageing emperor to launch war on Serbia, judging the time right to quell a southern Slavic rebellion and boost the monarchy.

Von Hoetzendorf was replaced in 1917 after Charles I, who was inclined to negotiate peace, ascended to the throne.

- Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941): Last king of Prussia and German emperor who led his country to war in 1914. The grandson of Britain's Queen Victoria, Wilhelm ascended to the German throne in 1888 and forced the resignation of chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

With support from conservative factions, Wilhelm put Germany on an expansionist, colonialist path. He broke traditional alliances with Russia and drew closer to Austria-Hungary and Italy. He was obliged to abdicate on November 9, 1918, and went into exile in The Netherlands.

- Helmuth von Moltke (1848-1916): German army chief of staff from 1906, von Moltke is deemed by historians to carry the heaviest responsibility for the outbreak of war.

Convinced that a conflict with France and Russia was unavoidable, he felt Germany should attack quickly before either they or Britain could mobilise troops.

Von Moltke set in motion a war plan drafted by his predecessor, Alfred von Schlieffen, but was stopped before reaching Paris by the battle of the Marne in September 1914.

That failure cost him his post, and after falling sick, he died in 1916.

- Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (1868-1918): The last Russian tsar, he approved Russia's entry into World War I in August 1914. The Imperial Army's severe casualties -- some 3.3 million -- are often cited as a leading cause of the fall of the Romanov dynasty.

Earlier Nicholas II led his country into a disastrous 1904-05 war with Japan. As the first Russian revolution erupted, the tsar was forced to abdicate in March 1917 and he and his family were executed by Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918.

- Raymond Poincare (1860-1934): A conservative French prime minister and president noted for strong anti-German positions. Said to be cold and unimaginative, he came from the Lorraine region claimed by both France and Germany. His 1914 call for a "Sacred Union" of political figures struck a deep chord, and he was a highly respected figure after the war.

- Joseph Joffre (1852-1931): Author of a French war strategy dubbed "Plan XVII" that foresaw a massive drive into Germany, but which failed early in the war. Considered competent but not greatly talented, Joffre nonetheless managed to save the situation during the First Battle of the Marne, and remained the top French commander until 1916.

- Herbert Asquith (1852-1928): Britain's prime minister from 1908 to 1916. A liberal pacifist, Asquith tried to mediate in the brewing conflict in late July 1914, which led Germany to believe Britain would stay out of the conflict.

Asquith was convinced that Berlin had to be kept in check however, in part because it planned to challenge Britain's naval supremacy. The German invasion of neutral Belgium lifted residual hesitation in London and Britain declared war on Germany.

- Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916): Became British war minister in 1914. Known as an effective organiser, Kitchener managed to quickly raise a massive volunteer army, building the force from 170,000 to 1.3 million by 1915. He was killed a year later when the ship he was on struck a mine off the coast of Scotland.

- Albert I of Belgium (1875-1934): Belgian king who succeeded his uncle Leopold II in 1909. Albert took an active role in the war alongside France, Britain and Russia on both the military and diplomatic fronts, earning the nickname "The Knight King". A keen mountaineer, Albert died in a climbing accident.

- Peter I of Serbia (1844-1921): Joined the Foreign Legion in 1870 under the name of Pierre Kara. He ascended to the throne in 1903, but chose to retire due to ill health in June 1914. Peter I passed royal prerogatives to his son, Crown Prince Alexander, who directed Serbian military operations during World War I.

- Nikola Pasic (1845-1926): Serbia's prime minister several times in the late 19th century and again starting in 1912. Pasic was aware of a plot to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and warned the Austro-Hungarian government, to no avail.

Pasic's government was then accused of complicity in the attack. Knowing that Vienna was looking for a pretext for military intervention, the Serb premier responded in measured terms to a sharply-worded Austro-Hungarian ultimatum. He nonetheless ensured that Russia would come to his aid if necessary.

After the war, Pasic helped found the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the future Yugoslavia, and led its government several times.

- Enver Pacha (1881-1922): A leader of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, he became a member of the military triumvirate and war minister in 1913, and the architect of the Ottoman-German alliance forged soon after the outbreak of the war. In April 1915 he authorised the deportation of Ottoman Armenians, and he is considered a key figure behind the Armenian and Assyrian genocides. He fled to Germany at the end of the war and was sentenced to death in absentia. He tried to return to Turkey in 1920 but was prevented by Kemal.


Source : Sapa-AFP /gm
Date : 20 Jun 2014 04:23
 
Informative thread Gary, thanks
 
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SARAJEVO REMEMBERS SPARK FOR GREAT WAR

by Rusmir SMAJILHODZIC

Sarajevo marks 100 years since the assassination that triggered World War I on Saturday, but without the leaders of Europe and with its people still torn over the legacy of that fateful day.

Five weeks after a Bosnian Serb nationalist shot dead the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Europe's great powers were sucked through a complex network of alliances into four horrific years of war.

The former foes marked the centenary of the attack at Ypres in Belgium, where German forces infamously made first use of mustard gas in 1915, with a low-key ceremony Thursday during an EU summit.

But plans for heads of state and government to come together in the Bosnian capital on June 28 turned out to be wishful thinking, in light of the old Balkan divisions stirred up by the centenary.

"It would have been impossible to bring everyone (Serbs Muslims and Croats) together on June 28 in Sarajevo," said the Bosnian Serb historian and diplomat Slobodan Soja.

Wildly differing interpretations of 20th-century history endure in a region scarred by the conflicts that marked the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

And the figure of the archduke's assassin, the 19-year-old Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, is particularly divisive.

In Sarajevo the Vienna Philharmonic -- symbolic envoy from the capital of a once-loathed empire -- will perform Saturday in the newly-rebuilt national library, destroyed during the 1992 siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces.

The concert is the highlight of a series of cultural and sports events, most run with outside funding from France and the EU.

But there will be little sign of officialdom, from Europe or the Balkans.

The Muslim majority in today's Sarajevo see Princip as a terrorist -- all the more loathed for being associated with the Bosnian Serb forces that besieged the city in the 1990s.

"Within the army bombing Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip was a cult figure," said the Bosnian Muslim historian Husnija Kamberovic.

Two plaques in the city commemorating Princip have been ripped up and a bridge named after him has reverted to its pre-1914 name.

But for Serbs he was a hero seeking to "liberate" Slavs from the Austro-Hungarian occupier.

In 1920, two years after he died in prison, Princip's bones were dug up and brought to Sarajevo to be buried. Until the Balkan wars he was the city's favourite son.

Serbian leaders have refused to join the ceremonies in Sarajevo, resenting the notion that Serb nationalism was to blame for triggering the Great War.

Instead they will hold their own events, backed by Milorad Dodik the president of the Serb part of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, and the filmmaker Emir Kusturica.

Counter-commemorations will include the unveiling of monuments to Princip in a Serb area of Sarajevo as well as in eastern Bosnia and in Belgrade.

"The events in Sarajevo on June 28 are not meant as an attack on Serbia or the Republika Srpska," insisted Joseph Zimet, head of the French centenary mission in charge of this week's commemorations.

"And they are not a referendum on Gavrilo Princip," he said.

Ethnic rivalries aside, ordinary people in Sarajevo -- where memories of Bosnia's 1992-95 war and its 100,000 dead are still sharp -- view the centenary with some scepticism.

"We have war commemorations here nearly everyday -- for our own war of the 1990s," said Jasmin Bukaric, a 34-year-old computer technician.

"One day it's for the Muslims, the next day it's the Serbs, then the Croats. All it does is increase the divisions" between the three communities, he said.

Badema Besic, a 63-year-old pensioner, said her main concern was "how to get by on 300 marks (150 euros) each month."

"They are going to have fun and spend money. Yes, they are commemorating a terrible war. But we remember a war that is far more recent."

Princip's brazen attack 100 years ago dragged almost half the world's population into a cycle of violence of unprecedented scale and intensity.

Over 52 months, it left some 10 million dead and 20 million injured and maimed on its battlefields, while millions more civilians perished under occupation, through disease, hunger or deportation.

Four of the world's most powerful empires -- Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman -- collapsed as the world map was redrawn and Europe's ruin cleared the way for the rise of a new superpower, the United States.

And World War I fanned the emergence of many of the ideologies that fashioned the 20th century and its conflicts: anti-colonialism, Communism, Fascism and Nazism.


Source : Sapa-AFP /mm
Date : 27 Jun 2014 04:40
 
From the first Battle of the Marne in September 1914 to the Allied counter-offensive of mid-1918, here are the 10 key moments of World War I:

--1914--

- September 5/12: After a month-long westward offensive, with Paris almost within reach, German troops are stopped in the First Battle of the Marne. A joint French-British counteroffensive led by French General Joseph Joffre successfully pushes them back north and east. The losses from this first major battle are dizzying, with some 250,000 dead and wounded on each side.

- November 17: The war, which all sides expected to be brief, shows no sign of ending as the Western Front stabilises from the North Sea to Switzerland. This marks the beginning of the conflict's iconic trench warfare, which lasts until March 1918. Dug in at times just a few dozen metres (yards) apart, the troops learn to live in the mud as protection from shelling.

--1915--

- April 22: First use of chemical warfare, in this case a chlorine-based compound, by the Germans at Ypres in Belgium. Two years later in the same area they experiment a second weapon, dubbed "Yperite" or "Mustard Gas."

- April 25: Start of the Armenian massacre by Ottoman Empire forces, with the arrest and execution in Constantinople of 2,300 Armenian figures. Over the next 16 months, the alleged genocide kills between 600,000 and 1.5 million people, according to various sources. The Ottomans dispute the numbers and the term genocide and say the Armenians were providing support for Russian troops.

The same day, French and British forces land at Gallipoli, along the Dardanelles straits to try and force open a supply line to their Russian allies. The operation, launched by Winston Churchill, is a dismal failure, with the Allies suffering 180,000 dead before they withdrew in January 1916.

--1916--

- February/June: The Battle of Verdun is launched by German troops and becomes the overall symbol of the war for France. Saved in extremis by General Philippe Petain, the French army and its German adversary suffer horrendous casualties numbering more than 770,000 of which more than 300,000 are deaths.

French infantrymen, known as "poilus," nonetheless stand their ground and prevent a decisive German breakthrough.

- July 1/November 18: The Battle of the Somme is launched by British troops and becomes the bloodiest of them all. Overall casualties number 1.2 million, of which 400,000 are dead or missing. Territorial gains are minuscule and this time it is the German soldiers who hold fast.

--1917--

- January 9: Germany declares all-out submarine warfare with more than 150 U-boats to break a British naval blockade and choke off supplies to Britain and France.

- April 6: The submarine campaign backfires as the United States abandons the neutrality it had observed up till then, in spite of attacks such as the 1915 sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania, and declares war on Germany.

- November 6/7: Following the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II in February, Russian Bolsheviks seize power during the October revolution, named according to the Russian calendar. On December 15, Lenin concludes an armistice with the Germans, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which allows Berlin to redeploy forces to the Western Front.

--1918--

- July 18: After blunting months of German offensives, the Allies counter-attack at Villers-Coteret in what is dubbed the second Battle of the Marne. US forces participate in strength and tanks help to finally break through. German troops are forced into a general retreat that leads to the armistice of November 11.


Source : Sapa-AFP /nsm
Date : 12 Feb 2014 06:29
 
BOSNIAN SERBS ERECT STATUE TO MAN WHO IGNITED WWI

Marking the centennial of the beginning of World War I in their own way, Bosnian Serbs have unveiled a monument in their part of Sarajevo to the man who ignited the war by assassinating the Austro-Hungarian crown prince on June 28, 1914.

At the other end of the city, the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra was rehearsing Friday for Saturday's grand EU-sponsored performance planned as a symbolic start to a new century of peace at the place where the century of wars started 100 years ago.

The two evidence testify to the depth of lingering divisions, with one side promoting peace to the tunes of Joseph Haydn's "God save the Emperor" while the other erects a monument to Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the emperor's heir.


Source : Sapa-AP /ar
Date : 27 Jun 2014 14:56
 
Scars of World War I Linger in Europe on Eve of Centennial

A Century After Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Sparked WWI, Tensions Persist

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina—Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary gazes regally from a banner on one side of a museum here. From the other stares a haunted Gavrilo Princip, who, on the street below 100 years ago, shot to death the archduke and set in motion Europe's Great War.

"The street corner that started the 20th Century," the banner proclaims.

Those two .38-caliber bullets unleashed a lethal torrent of technology, toppled empires, dragged the U.S. from its isolation and sowed the seeds of the next even bloodier war, genocide and the Cold War partition of Europe.

A century later, the scars of World War I linger. The display at the assassination site has prompted a furious response from the local Austrians and Germans, whose representatives called it "inappropriate and scandalous"—like equating Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. But the banner hasn't come down....
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/scars-of-world-war-i-linger-in-europe-on-eve-of-centennial-1403836504
 
The gunshots that change history: Murder of Franz Ferdinand and the start of WW1

28f32franz1-485408.jpg

FRANZ Ferdinand's murder a century ago today started the First World War. But a little-known love story lay behind his fateful final journey.

Nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip wasn't expecting the royal convoy to pass his vantage point outside a delicatessen in Sarajevo's Franz Josef Strasse. After an unsuccessful bomb attack on the visiting Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie by one of Princip's nationalist comrades less than an hour earlier, the young Bosnian Serb assumed the route would have been changed.

He was right about that but nobody had thought to tell the driver. The man at the wheel only realised his mistake when a senior member of the party saw they were going the wrong way and told him to turn the open-topped car around. In doing so he stalled it, giving Princip the chance to shoot the 50-year-old heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne from just five feet away. The Archduke's wife also collapsed and at first it was assumed she had fainted. But she had been shot in the abdomen.....
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http://www.express.co.uk/news/world-war-1/485408/WW1-World-War-One-Franz-Ferdinand-centenary
 
100th Anniversary of Start of World War I Approaches

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 25, 2014 – “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”

This prophecy, from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, came in 1888, and he was spot on.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Duchess Sophie, were visiting Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Austria-Hungary was a multinational empire in the heart of Europe. The Dual Monarchy, as it was also known, covers land now occupied by 13 countries. The empire’s citizens came from multiple ethnic groups and spoke scores of languages; therefore the empire often was pulled in different directions. The Russian Empire supported the protests of the Slav minorities inside Austria-Hungary and saw itself as a protector of Orthodox Christians inside Austria-Hungary.

The archduke was the heir of the House of Habsburg, which presided over this polyglot empire. His house traced its lineage to the ninth century and ruled in the region from at least 1276.

Sarajevo was a center of unrest against foreign rule. Many advisors had advised the archduke to not visit the city....
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http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=122546
 
What If World War I Never Happened?

world-war-1-franz-ferdinand-140625.jpg
Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie one hour before they would be shot and killed by Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip as they drove through the streets of Sarajevo.

This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of an obscure event that changed the world -- the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. A month later, five of the six great powers of Europe had declared war on each other.

By the end of the conflict four years later, 37 million soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded, empires were reshaped, and society had changed forever. Victorian principles of humankind's orderly progress and the gallantry of war were upended. In its place came the barbarity of trench warfare, gas attacks, starvation and the great "No Man's Land" between armies.

"The First World War revealed that barbarism lay just beneath the thin veneer of civilization," said Gordon Martel, author of the new book "The Month That Changed The World: July 1914." "It revealed that if you scratch the surface that we are all killers under the skin. And we all fear death."...
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http://news.discovery.com/history/w...sin-missed-franz-ferdinand-in-1914-140625.htm
 
SARAJEVO MARKS 100 YEARS SINCE KILLING THAT SPARKED WWI
by Rusmir SMAJILHODZIC

Sarajevo on Saturday was to mark 100 years since the assassination that sparked World War I, an act that still deeply divides the people of the Balkans over the legacy of that fateful day.

On June 28, 1914 a Bosnian Serb nationalist shot dead the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, setting off a chain of events that sucked Europe's great powers into four years of violence unprecedented in its scale and intensity.

Many of the former foes marked the centenary on the sidelines of an EU summit on Thursday with a low-key ceremony at Belgium's Ypres, where German forces used mustard gas for the first time in 1915.

But the deep Balkan divisions stirred up by the anniversary have made it impossible for heads of state and government to come together at the site of the assassination in the Bosnian capital.

Wildly differing interpretations of 20th-century history endure in a region where the scars of the wars that marked the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, unleashing centuries of resentment and divisions, are still fresh.

And a particularly divisive figure is the archduke's assassin, the 19-year-old Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip.

While the Muslim majority in today's Sarajevo see Princip as a terrorist who unleashed calamity, the Serbs regard him as a hero seeking to liberate the Slavs from the Austro-Hungarian occupier.

Resenting the notion that Serb nationalism was to blame for triggering the Great War, Bosnian Serb leaders have refused to join the main Sarajevo commemorations that will feature a late afternoon performance by the Vienna Philharmonic, the symbolic envoy from the capital of a once-loathed empire.

Instead they will hold their own early afternoon ceremonies, unveiling monuments to Princip in a Serb area of Sarajevo as well as in eastern Bosnia and in Belgrade.

Princip's brazen attack 100 years ago dragged almost half the world's population into a cycle of violence of unprecedented scale and intensity.

Over 52 months, it left some 10 million dead and 20 million injured and maimed on its battlefields, while millions more civilians perished under occupation, through disease, hunger or deportation.

Four of the world's most powerful empires -- Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman -- collapsed as the world map was redrawn and Europe's ruin cleared the way for the rise of a new superpower, the United States.

And World War I fanned the emergence of many of the ideologies that fashioned the 20th century and its conflicts, including anti-colonialism, Communism, Fascism and Nazism.


Source : Sapa-AFP /mjs
Date : 28 Jun 2014 09:13
 
What If World War I Never Happened?
http://news.discovery.com/history/w...sin-missed-franz-ferdinand-in-1914-140625.htm
Click to expand...

Interesting link, thanks.

I think a war was inevitable, but the assassination simple sped up the process.

The Russian Empire was going through political changes anyway, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing and shrinking, while the Austro-Hungarian Empire was seeing rising nationalism in its Eastern Regions.

the barbarity of trench warfare
Click to expand...

Trench warfare wasnt a new thing, it was used in the American Civil War, the Paraguayan War, the Second Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War, however never on the same scale as that of Europe in WW1.

Toss in the widespread use of heavy machine guns like the Maxim and Vickers coupled with outdated military strategy plus the idea of "charging the enemy in large numbers" or the Victorian idea of heroically marching "into the guns", and you are left with the wholesale slaughter that occured. :cry:
 
100 years: The Russian Tsar's reluctant march to war

After a week of failed diplomacy, dithering and doubt, Tsar Nicholas II ordered Russia's armies to mobilise on July 30, 1914. There would be no turning back from a decision that set Europe on a course to war.

At 6:00 pm the order was telegraphed across the vast empire, whose pre-war borders reached deep into central Europe, as red posters appealing to Russian patriots were plastered up in towns and villages.

Joyous street rallies broke out in support of the call to arms, with nationalist fervour still high two days later when the German Emperor Wilhelm II responded by declaring war on his Russian cousin.

"Only the tsar, with his German origins, is against the war," the liberal journalist Mikhail Lemke mused in his diary at the time.

Over the past four days the two sovereigns -- "Willy" and "Nicky" as they nicknamed each other -- had been trading telegrams in a last-ditch bid to save peace, even as their army chiefs readied for battle.

On July 29, a day after Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia's Slavic ally Serbia, Nicholas sent a first message pledging his affection to his German cousin -- and urging him to stop Vienna's march to war.

"I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war," he warned.

Wilhelm pleaded with his cousin the tsar to stay out of the brewing European conflict in the name of their "hearty and tender friendship".

But Nicholas admitted he was powerless to reverse Russia's military march, despite the warning that a mobilisation would be a casus belli for Germany's military leaders.

The tsar's German cousin was not alone in warning him of the impending bloodbath.

At home too, the influential advisor to the imperial family, Grigori Rasputin, urged him not to enter a conflict "that will be the end of us all".

But the pressure from his civil and military advisors was too strong, and the ruler ultimately bowed to their will -- signing the order to mobilise on July 29, then withdrawing it, before confirming it again on July 30.

On the evening of August 1, "Willy" declared war on "Nicky" and the horror foretold by the courteous cousins had begun.

"At 6:30 pm, we went to mass. Upon our return we were informed that Germany had declared war on us," Nicholas recorded in his diary that day.

The next day the tsar blessed his armies in Saint Petersburg -- whose German-sounding name was promptly changed to Petrograd, as a fired-up mob vandalised Berlin's embassy in the city home to a historic German community.

Bells rang out all day as crowds flocked to church in support of the Russian troops.

"The war against Germany is popular with the military, with the civil service, the intelligentsia and with leading industrialists," the war minister at the time, Vladimir Sukhomlinov, recorded in his memoirs.

Three years later, World War I had precipitated the Russian Revolution, unseated the three-century Romanov dynasty and exacted a terrible price in blood, with two million Russians dead.

Fighting alongside France and Britain in a group known as the Triple Entente, against the Central Powers led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, Russia threw its might into the war's eastern theatre.

But after a disastrous defeat in East Prussia in late August 1914, the tsar's armies began a shambolic eastward retreat.

Against a backdrop of desperate food shortages at home, military failure left the crippled state vulnerable to assault from Lenin's Bolsheviks.

When bread riots in Petrograd spun out of control in March 1917, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and was executed along with his family the following year.

Russia's new Bolshevik rulers, who signed the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty in March 1918, were keen to forget a war whose humiliating settlement stripped Russia of its western territories and a third of its population.

The 1914-18 conflict was eclipsed by the losses suffered in the Revolution and the civil war that ensued, and even more by the Soviet Union's 25 million dead in the battle against Nazi Germany in World War II, according to the historian Pyotr Multatuli.

Enter Vladimir Putin, who decided upon first coming to power in 2000 it was time to resurrect the memory of the Great War.

"The First World War must bring Russians together," summed up Artyom Savinov of the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow, which unveiled its first-ever exhibition on the war to mark its centenary.

"Remembering a war that brought about the collapse of the Russian Empire must be helpful for rulers trying to recreate the idea of a nation," lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Multatuli.

A recent Russian survey found that 58 percent of the population could not venture any answer as to why the Great War started, while 53 percent could not say against whom Russia had fought.


Source : Sapa-AFP /kd
Date : 28 Jul 2014 13:31
 
Saving Private Smith: Real WWI story that beats Hollywood

"Saving Private Ryan" became a Hollywood classic with its heroic tale of how a World War II soldier was rescued from the front line after losing three of his brothers in action.

But the real-life story of Private Smith, brought home by royal request from the trenches of World War I following the deaths of his five brothers, puts the movie in the shade.

A simple stone memorial in the rural market town of Barnard Castle in northern England bears the names of five Smith boys: Robert, George Henry, Frederick, John William and Alfred.

Their deaths across two short years of bitter fighting on the Western Front tell of an almost unparallelled family tragedy, yet it is the survival of the youngest brother Wilfred that provides drama worthy of any blockbuster.

For Wilfred's granddaughter Amanda Nelson, the sadness of the family's past was only recently brought crashing into the present when she sat down and watched Stephen Spielberg's epic movie "Saving Private Ryan".

"As soon as I saw the film I thought -- this is just like what happened to my granddad," said the 47-year-old care worker, who still lives in Barnard Castle.

"It should have been called 'Saving Private Smith', due to the fact that he got sent back from the war, because he'd lost his five brothers.

"It was a sad film but it did make me think that it was based on our family."

When Wilfred joined the fighting in 1917 aged 19, the Smith family was already grieving.

Robert had died in 1916 aged 21, followed soon after by 26-year old George Henry Smith at the Battle of the Somme.

Frederick died at the Battle of Ypres in 1917, the eldest brother John William also died that year and Alfred died in July 1918, just four months before the end of the war.

Leafing through 100-year-old family documents with her mother Dianne Nelson, Wilfred's daughter, Amanda points at a haunting photograph of four of the Smith brothers posing together in uniform before heading off to fight.

"Apparently my great-grandmother would say, 'don't have boys because they'll only grow up to be cannon fodder'," Amanda told AFP.

Of the several hundred men from Barnard Castle who fought in World War I, 125 were killed.

The terrible price paid by Margaret Smith was recognised at the unveiling of the town's war memorial in 1923, when she was chosen to lay the first wreath, with Wilfred at her side.

By then she had also lost her husband, John. "All that she had left was my granddad Wilf," said Amanda.

The four-year conflict left 10 million dead and 20 million injured and maimed on its battlefields -- one million dead in Britain and her empire.

It was not uncommon for British families to lose more than one son, especially when many friends, relatives or colleagues would join the fight together as part of 'pals brigades' which were recruited locally.

One day of slaughter on a battlefield in France or Belgium could decimate a community and wipe out the male line of an entire family.

Towards the end of the war, the tragic toll on the Smith family prompted the wife of the local vicar to write to Queen Mary, the wife of King George V, to plead for Wilfred to be returned home.

"The town was aware of the great sacrifice that the Smith family had made," said Peter Wise, an amateur local historian who recently uncovered the account of the royal intervention in the archives of the local newspaper.

"Losing five sons was a lot and it was the death of the last son which was the straw which triggered off the action."

The vicar's wife, Mrs Bircham, wrote to the queen and was informed that her letter had been passed onto the relevant authorities.

"Action did take place so the letter must have had an effect," said Wise.

Wilfred was brought home alive, although he suffered for years from the respiratory effects of a mustard gas attack.

He stayed in Barnard Castle, married and worked as a chimney sweep and stone mason, before dying at the age of 74 in 1972.

Wilfred used to visit the memorial to his brothers, a tradition continued by his daughter, now 70.

"My dad never talked about the war. He didn't like to mention anything like that," Nelson recalled, looking at the names on the memorial of the five uncles she never met.

"He was a good dad," she added.

"If my granddad hadn't been sent home we wouldn't be here," said Amanda. "But the Smith name is still going."


Source : Sapa-AFP /aw
Date : 01 Aug 2014 05:40
 
BRITAIN REMEMBERS WWI DEAD, 100 YEARS ON
by James PHEBY

Lights went out across Britain on Monday to commemorate 100 years since the outbreak of World War I, which claimed the lives of nearly one million Britons.

Homes, businesses and famous landmarks turned off their lights for an hour from 10:00 pm (2100 GMT) and lit a single candle, inspired by a remark by Britain's then foreign minister Edward Grey on the eve of war that "the lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

A lantern was left on the steps of 10 Downing Street, the official residence of Prime Minister David Cameron, as part of the campaign organised by the Royal British Legion charity.

And a tower of white light shone straight into the sky from central London, an art installation by Japan's Ryoji Ikeda described as a "unifying point" to mark the anniversary by city mayor Boris Johnson.

At the nearby Tower of London, a striking art installation made up of hundreds of thousands of ceramic poppies -- one for each British soldier killed in the war -- poured out of the tower into the surrounding moat.

Cameron called on people to "never fail to cherish" peace at an evening ceremony in a military cemetery near Mons, Belgium.

"Here on the continent of Europe we saw not the war to end all wars, but the precursor to another desperate and violent conflict just two decades later," Cameron said.

"We should never fail to cherish the peace between these nations and never underestimate the patient work it has taken to build that peace."

"So, 100 years on, it is right that collectively we stop, we pause; and we re-pledge this for the next 100 years. We will never forget. We will always remember them."

The ceremony was attended by several hundred people including descendants of the soldiers buried in the cemetery, which contains the graves of both German and Commonwealth soldiers.

The site was allowed as a burial ground by its owner on the condition that both British and German soldiers were buried with equal dignity.

The ceremony was attended by British royals Prince William and his wife Catherine and Prince Harry, as well as the King and Queen of Belgium, Germany president Joachim Gauck, Irish president Michael D. Higgins and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

The Duchess of Cambridge, dressed in a cream coat and floral hat, laid a bunch of flowers during the ceremony, and the Last Post was played by a soldier as darkness fell.

Queen Elizabeth II attended a commemoration at Crathie Kirk, the small Scottish church used by the royal family when holidaying at nearby Balmoral Castle.

Charles's wife Camilla attend a service at London's Westminster Abbey.

Elsewhere, the famous red-coated Chelsea pensioners, former members of the British Army, took part in a procession of more than 40 Edwardian cars through central London.

Britain declared war on Germany at 11 pm on August 4, 1914, after it rejected an ultimatum issued following the invasion of neutral Belgium.

Future wartime leader Winston Churchill described the mood in London as war was declared in his diary.

"It was 11 o'clock at night -- 12 by German time -- when the ultimatum expired," he wrote. "Along the Mall from the direction of the Palace the sound of an immense concourse singing 'God Save The King' floated in.

"On this deep wave there broke the chimes of Big Ben; and, as the first stroke of the hour boomed out, a rustle of movement swept across the room. The war telegram, 'Commence hostilities against Germany', was flashed to the ships and establishments... all over the world."

The ensuing conflict led to the death of 10 million troops and millions of civilians, completely reshaping Europe's political map.

Newspapers on Monday paid tribute to the World War I dead with special centenary editions.

The Times carried a front-page photograph of a poppy field, while an editorial drew uneasy parallels between today's geopolitical climate and that which led to World War I, supposedly "the war to end all wars".

After mentioning the bloodshed in Gaza and Ukraine, the paper said: "As in 1914, there is a risk of complacency as crises swirl around us."

In a service in Belfast, the Anglican Bishop of Armagh also made the link in an event to mark the centenary in which he described war as an "abject failure of the human spirit and of humanity".

"Without being guilty of the worst kind of religious escapism, we cannot spiritually separate the violence, the carnage and the suffering of the innocent that is under our gaze today - whether in Gaza, in Israel, in Syria, in Ukraine or in Iraq - from our memorialising of the beginnings of the First World War," Richard Clarke said.


Source : Sapa-AFP /mjs
Date : 05 Aug 2014 01:07
 
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