By the time the Allies completed their humiliating withdrawal in December 1915, they had suffered 300,000 casualties. The Turks, allies of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians since November 1915, repulsed assault after assault by the Anglo-French invasion force, keeping it stranded in elaborate trench networks on the beaches. The Gallipoli Campaign, the largest amphibious operation in the history of warfare until that time, was an unmitigated disaster. But the “cult of the offensive,” widely shared among the major armies, insured that the quest to find a way to break through defensive positions would continue until war’s end.Īs the corpses mounted at an unprecedented rate in futile attacks and counterattacks in France, the Allies tried in April 1915 to seize the Dardanelles straits, hoping to open a sea supply route to Russia, and relieve pressure on the Western Front. The growing deadliness of rifle, machine gun, and long-range artillery fire, coupled with a lack of reliable tanks and instant communications, made it nearly impossible for offensive thrusts to break through defensive lines. The stalemate would remain for another three and a half years. The war in the West soon fell into a grim stalemate along a 470-mile, heavily fortified front from the North Sea to the Swiss border in northeastern France. More than half a million German, French, and British casualties fell in the first three weeks of fighting. The first of many rude awakenings came early, when Germany’s massive opening offensive against France was stopped cold at the First Battle of the Marne in early September. A long struggle would have destroyed civil society outright-or so the thinking went. Victory was sure to go to the alliance whose forces mobilized first, and struck hardest. Given the unprecedented size of the armies involved, and the immense destructive power at their disposal, statesmen and generals across Europe anticipated a very short war. “Europe,” writes historian Barbara Tuchman in her classic account, The Guns of August, “was a heap of swords piled on delicately as jackstraws one could not be pulled out without moving all the others.” The complicated web of alliances among the key states encouraged mutual belligerence rather than stability. Long before the opening salvos, imperial ambitions and mutual suspicion among Europe’s great powers made war a likely if unwelcome prospect. Just what was America’s role in this tragic event? What effect did the war have on American society? We’ll turn to those questions after briefly exploring the contours of this mammoth conflict while America stayed on the sidelines, from August 1914 until April 1917. The war’s causes remain murky and obscure, its ending inconclusive, and its legacies contested. It’s hard to say, because we Americans have no generally accepted narrative of the conflict. Yes, we are told again and again, World War I “shaped the trajectory of the contemporary world in many ways”. Newspaper stories and TV documentaries about the Middle East and the Balkans never fail to remind us that recent conflagrations in those regions have their origins way back in the First World War, when the victors redrew the map of the world in cynical ways. The Germans were the bad guys, but not perhaps quite as bad as the Germans in the Other World War. And of course, it was a war of trenches, poison gas, and horrendous casualties. Indeed, to most Americans today, “the war to end all wars” is pretty much a mystery. We may vaguely remember from our history courses that it was the first “total war,” and the first conflict in which airplanes and tanks figured prominently. Our collective memory of the conflict, it seems, is rather foggy. The United States officially joined the ranks of the combatants in World War I on April 6, 1917-a bit more than 100 years ago.
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