As the guns fell silent in 1918, World War I victors all agreed on one thing: Germany must pay.
How much was a matter of debate but there was never any doubt that the post-war settlement enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles was going to be punitive.
Germany did pay, but it was not alone. A century on, the world lives with the consequences of a peace accord that, even at the time, was criticised as making another war inevitable in Europe, a continent which had dominated the world for centuries.
Economist JM Keynes, then a British Treasury official, resigned rather than be associated with a treaty he denounced as “Carthaginian” in its harshness. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch judged it “not so much a peace as a 20-year armistice”.
The “war to end all wars” turned out to be the opposite. By ensuring Germany’s economic ruin and political humiliation, the post-war settlement provided fertile ground for the rise of Nazism and its horrors.
Beyond Germany, the slew of peace treaties redrew the map of Europe, carving up vanquished empires and creating as many future conflicts as new countries and borders from the Baltic States to Turkey, via Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
Just as important, the war served as an incubator for the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Against a backdrop of desperate food shortages, military failure left the Tsarist state crippled and vulnerable to an assault by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who then established the Soviet Union as an authoritarian Communist state. By the mid-1930s, conditions were in place for the post-World War II division of Europe.
That in turn produced the Cold War and its associated splitting of the rest of the planet into Western or Soviet spheres of influence, and an unstable global equilibrium that helped fuel countless conflicts across the developing world.
While the political prestige of the main victors Britain and France was at a height in 1919, it did not hide the blossoming on the international stage of the US, which would become the main economic, military and political power in the Western camp in the following decades.
World War I also left a lasting mark on the Middle East. By encouraging an Arab revolt, Britain helped precipitate the collapse of the Germany-allied Ottoman empire.
A secular Turkey emerged and Britain and France assumed post-war control of much of the Arab world.
By then Britain had also made clear, through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, its support for the principle of a Jewish state on land it had pledged to the Arabs.
Finally, the Ottoman Empire’s collapse also resulted in the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in what they steadfastly argue was a full-blown genocide.
Events in Russia cast a long shadow over the rest of Europe, generating a fear of upheaval that helped accelerate reforms while also inspiring other revolutionaries, including the nascent fascist movement that was soon to seize power in Italy.
Worker uprisings in Germany and Hungary immediately after the war were crushed or collapsed internally. But waves of militancy in other countries — in the Fiat factories of Turin, Italy, or the shipyards of Scotland’s Red Clydeside — delivered major advances in terms of working conditions. More broadly, the aftermath of the war was a period of rapid social progress in much of the industrialised world. This was most notable in terms of women’s right to vote. — AFP
From first shot to silence of peace
- June 28, 1914: Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip kills Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand
- July 28: Austria-Hungary declare war on Serbia
- Aug 1-3: Germany declares war on Russia, France
- Aug 4: Germany invades Belgium; Britain declares war on Germany
- Aug 23: Japan declares war on Germany
- Oct 29: Ottoman Empire enters the war
- November: Beginning of trench warfare
- Feb, 1915: German U-boat campaign marks first large use of submarines in warfare
- April: Allied troops land in Gallipoli, Turkey
- April 22: First use of a chemical weapon,
- chlorine gas, near Ypres, Belgium
- May 7: British ship Lusitania sunk by U-boat
- May 23: Italy enters war against Austria-Hungary
- October: Bulgaria joins war, on side of Central Powers
- Feb 21, 1916: Battle of Verdun begins
- March 9: Germany declares war on Portugal
- July 1: Battle of the Somme begins, with first mass use of tanks
- Aug 27: Romania enters war, is invaded by Germany
- Sept 4: British take Dar es Salaam in German East Africa
- Oct: Soldier Adolf Hitler wounded during the Battle of the Somme
- Dec 23: Allied forces defeat Turkish in the Sinai Peninsula
- March, 1917: Baghdad falls to Anglo-Indian forces
- April 6: US declares war on Germany
- Oct 15: German spy Mata Hari executed by French firing squad
- Oct 26: Brazil declares war, joining allied powers
- March 3, 1918: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ends Russia’s involvement on the Eastern Front
- July 21: German submarine fires on Cape Cod, only attack on mainland US
- Sept 26: Battle of the Meuse-Argonne begins
- Oct 30: Ottoman Empire signs armistice with allies
- Nov 9: Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates
- Nov 11: Germany signs armistice ending the war
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