Europa: The History of the White Race : Chapter 59

The First World War was the first of the two great conflicts in Europe fought during the 20th century: starting out as a local war between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, it mushroomed into a world wide conflict involving 32 nations.

The fundamental cause of the conflict lay in the centuries of conflict in Europe which preceded it: the endless rounds of nationalist wars which had characterized the region for two hundred years, reached a climax in 1914, when the old adversaries squared up once again.

The big difference in this conflict was however that it was the first to be fought with the aid of the massive developments in technology which had occurred towards the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. The result was a devastating war which had never been seen before; and indeed some aspects were not to be seen again.

If there was a particular starting point for the rash of nationalistic conflicts in Europe, it must be the French Revolution and resulting Napoleonic Wars, starting in 1789. As Napoleon's armies marched across Europe, the idea of ethnic groups being entitled to their own lands with representative governments, separate and distinct from other nations, was spread in all directions.

It is no co-incidence that many of the modern European nations only started taking on their approximate present day borders at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

In this sense, the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was an anachronism in a changing political landscape. Consisting of a multitude of different ethnic, and in some parts, even racial, nationalities thrown together under one royal household was a form of government which was certainly pre-French Revolution style: indeed it smacked of the empire of Charlemagne and of the Holy Roman Empire, and was completely out of pace with the spread of ethnically based nationalism.

Internationally, growing competition between the European nations and a series of conflicts dating back to the beginning of the 19th century resulted in the formation of two great alliances: the Central Powers and the Triple Entente. The Central Powers consisted of Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy; and the Triple Entente, of Britain, France and Imperial Russia. Against the background of these emerging alliances, all the nations began to invest heavily in armaments, resulting in the creation of large standing armies poised for war.

Indeed, at least three times before the outbreak of the First World War, a conflict did break out: twice over German and French interests clashing in Morocco, and once over the Balkans Wars which saw the Ottoman Turks ejected from all but a small part of Europe. Against this turbulent background came the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, by a Serbian nationalist, Princip, in July 1914.

Unsurprisingly, the Austro-Hungarians linked the Serbian nationalist movement to the assassination - which it was - and on 23 July an ultimatum was submitted to Serbia submitting ten specific demands, most of which had to do with the suppression, with Austrian help, of anti-Austrian propaganda in Serbia.

Two days later, Serbia had accepted all but two of the demands. On 28 July, Austria-Hungary then declared war on Serbia, thinking it could use the opportunity to extinguish the budding pan-Slavism which was in any event tugging at the seams of that empire.

Much to everyone's surprise, Russia promptly announced a partial mobilization against Austria. This was surprising, as everyone knew that the Russians were the weakest of all the powers, and had in fact just been beaten by tiny Japan a few years before in the 1904 Russo-Japanese war. The Russian army was badly equipped and suited mainly to 19th century warfare.

Nonetheless, Germany issued a warning that any moves against Austro-Hungary would be met with pan-German resistance. An official German note was sent to Russia demanding demobilization: the Russians refused, and on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia. At the time the Germans did not foresee any great trouble in overcoming the Russian army. The French then announced a general mobilization: the conflict was already out of control.

On 2 August, the Germans decided to strike first at the French: advancing through Belgium, they penetrated French territory on 3 August, declaring war on France the same day. Britain, objecting to the invasion of neutral Belgium, then declared war on Germany on 4 August.

Japan, which had made an alliance with Britain in 1902, then declared war on Germany on 23 August.

Within a matter of days, three huge war fronts had been opened: in the west on the French-German border; in the east on the German-Russian border, and in the south east between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

At first, the German advance was rapid: sweeping through Belgium, they easily won the first engagement with the French at the Battle of Charleroi. The British sent an expeditionary force of 90,000 men across the channel to help the French, but they too were routed by the Germans at the Battle of Mons.

The Allied forces in the west were plunged into a headlong retreat. Making the campaign seem easy, the Germans pressed home their victories, crossing the Marne River. The French capital, Paris, seemed certain to fall, and the seat of the French government was formally moved to Bordeaux. Flushed with victory, the Germans then transferred six army corps from the Western Front to the Eastern Front, where the campaign against Russia was moving into full swing.

As the first of the three major German armies converging on Paris crossed the Marne River, a French attack fell upon them: the first Battle of the Marne was joined on 5 September 1914. Weakened by the transfer of part of its reinforcements, the German advance wilted under the unexpected French counter attack.

Quickly the tables were turned, and the German army was forced into a general retreat. The Germans fell back to the Aisne River, where they were reinforced by two other German armies. There they dug themselves into defensive positions and awaited the French attack.

The Germans prepared their defenses on the Aisne well: digging huge trenches and other positions in the earth, they unwittingly set the standard for virtually the rest of the war in the West. Trench warfare, a new and horrifying form of static war, was to emerge: moving completely away from the set battle pieces and mobile tactics of previous European wars.

The French launched three major attacks to try and dislodge the Germans from their dug in positions: the Battle of the Aisne; a battle on the Somme River; and the First Battle of Arras. All three attempts failed, and the French saw first hand how effective trenches could be as a defensive measure. They started digging their own large trenches virtually immediately.

On the northern part of the front, the Germans still managed to keep up their momentum: on 10 October, the city of Antwerp fell. The Germans then began pursuing the British Expeditionary Force and the Belgians towards the English channel itself. The Belgians then flooded a large part of the front in the path of the Germans by opening the sluices on the Yser River.

The British had in the interim managed to draw together their forces, and in a series of battles now known as the Battle of Flanders, halted the German advance in the north, forcing a trench based stalemate as had happened in the south.

In December 1914, the French and British launched a new assault on the German line: this broke on the defensive positions and trenches set up by the Germans, and the entire front settled down to a bloody and muddy stalemate By the end of 1914 both sides had established trench lines extending 800 kilometers (500 miles) from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Trench warfare had broken the mobility needed to bring conflicts to a sharp end and neither side was able to penetrate each other's defenses to any great measure. As a result the front line hardly moved for another three years from the positions established in October 1914.

During the course of 1914, the German and British fleets did not come to grips with one another off the European coast: the only engagements were a British raid on a German naval base at Helgoland Bight, an island off Germany in the North Sea, in which three German ships were sunk. German submarines then went onto the offensive, sinking several British naval units, including the warship Audacious, in October 1914.

During September and October 1914, a task force of five German naval raiders in the South Pacific attacked French installations on the island of Tahiti and the British on Fanning Island. The German raiders then engaged and defeated a British squadron off Chile in November 1914, but then suffered a major defeat, losing four of the five ships in the party, to the British at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914.

The German airforce launched its first air raid on Paris in August 1914, and the first German air raid on Dover, England, took place in December of that year. Then in 1916, the Germans perfected the airship (known as the Zeppelin, after its designer, Count Graf von Zeppelin) and during that year, England and London were raided 60 times by bomb dropping Zeppelins. The first German aircraft raid on London took place in November 1916.

The Germans continued to raid the city right up until the end of the war. No military advantage was gained by the raids, and they were intended solely as a moral breaking exercise on the British - an effort which failed.

The progress of the war saw a number of technological breakthroughs in aircraft design: the German invention of a machine gun which could shoot through the rotating propeller without destroying the blades, made the German fighters for a while the most accurate gunships in the air. Amongst the German air aces to exploit this technological leap was the famous Red Baron, Manfred von Richthoven, who led his squadron, the Flying Circus, in his aircraft painted bright red (so as to attract enemy aircraft - other aircraft were camouflaged to avoid detection.)

After Richthoven was shot down and killed in 1918, leadership of the Flying Circus passed to his deputy and another German air ace of the war, Herman Goering.

By 1918, the arrival of hundreds of American aircraft had ensured that air supremacy had passed into Allied hands.

On the Western Front, the situation remained static until March 1915, when the British launched a massive attack at Neuve Chapelle. It achieved virtually no significant territorial advances, taking only the very outermost advanced German positions. The Germans then launched their only offensive of 1915 - they were busy with a major offensive in the East at the time - in April at Ieper.

This attack was marked by the German use of chlorine gas for the first time, setting a frightening precedent which would soon be followed by all sides, adding significantly to the horror of the front line. The German attack also achieved virtually nothing in terms of territorial advantage.

In May and June, the French and British launched a combined offensive against the German lines between Neuve Chapelle and Arras. Once again, despite huge losses, the gains were pathetic, with only some four kilometers (2.5 miles) of land, all still in the German trenchworks, falling into Allied hands. In September, the French launched an attack on the German lines between Reims and the Argonne Forest. Once again the attack ground to a halt after the French had taken only the first line of German trenches.

In the East, the Russians initially did well. Beating numerically inferior forces in several straight battles in August 1914, the Russians advanced deep into East Prussia and into the Austrian province of Galacia. The German situation became so desperate in East Prussia that emergency plans to evacuate the entire province were started, while the Russian armies in the south overran most of Galacia and by March 1915, were poised to invade Hungary itself.

Just when a German collapse in East Prussia seemed inevitable, a fresh German army arrived. Under General Paul von Hindenburg they rushed East and in a furious battle at Tannenburg, decisively defeated the invading Russians in East Prussia in August 1914. Tannenburg marked the first of three major defeats for the Russians: the cumulative effect of these reverses would see Russian forces retreat into Russian territory where the front would mostly remain for the duration of the war.

The German forces followed up this victory with two further overwhelming victories: the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, fought in September 1914, and the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes fought in February 1915. In April 1915, a combined German and Austrian army launched a major offensive against the Russians, driving them out of the Carpathians.

In May, the Austro-German armies began a great offensive in central Poland, forcing the Russians to withdraw from Galacia. By September 1915, the Germans had driven the Russians out of Poland, Lithuania, and Courland, and had also taken possession of the western border of Russia itself. When the German drive east finally ran out of steam, the front line lay well within Russia: behind the Dvina River between Riga and Dvinsk and south to the Dniester River. The Russians lost thousands of men and much equipment: it would be months before they were to play any significant role in the war again.

On the third front, that between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, the initial Austrian attacks were all repulsed by the small but powerful Serbian army. The front then stalemated with both sides holding their own territory. In October 1915, British and French troops were landed in neutral Greece at Salonika, with the permission of the Greek government, with the aim of coming to the aid of Serbia.

Then the Bulgarians, still smarting from their defeat in the Second Balkan War of 1913, tried to retake the territorial claims they had lost in that previous war. In the same month that the French and British troops landed in Greece, Bulgaria declared war on Serbia and formally entered the war on the side of the Central Powers.

The Allied troops immediately advanced into Serbia, but were routed by a well planned Bulgarian offensive and were forced to retreat all the way back to Salonika. Simultaneously the Bulgarians also managed to inflict a severe defeat upon the Serbians.

In October 1915, a fresh combined Austro-Hungarian and German army drive south was launched. This, coming on top of the Bulgarian victory, saw Serbia crushed. By the end of that year all of Serbia was occupied and the Serbian army eliminated from the conflict.

Ottoman Turkey, still smarting at its defeat and ejection from its southern European held territories during the First Balkan War of 1912, was easily persuaded to join in an attack on Russia, its fiercest rival in Eastern Europe. Turkish warships eagerly participated with German warships in a naval bombardment of Russian Black Sea ports and Russia then declared war on Turkey in November 1914. Britain and France then followed their Russian ally, and by the most bizarre set of circumstances the Nonwhite power that had for so long tried to exterminate the Germans in Austria suddenly found itself allied to that very same nation.

The Turks lost no time in attacking their Russian foes. In December 1914, they invaded the Caucasus, overrunning large areas. The Russians, under severe pressure from the Germans in the west and the Turks in the south, then asked for help in the form of a diversionary attack on Turkey by the Allied powers.

In February 1915, the French and British navies then bombarded Turkish forts along the Dardanelles. This was followed up with two sea borne invasion of Gallipoli in Turkey between April and August, one of British, Australian, and French troops in April, and one of several additional British divisions in August. The Turks prepared their defenses well: the invasion was a complete failure and the Allied forces were forced to withdraw with severe losses.

The land of Mesopotamia had been occupied by Muslims since soon after the founding of that religion, and had later been incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. Now it was attacked by a British force operating out of India. The Turks were defeated in a series of battles from 1914, and the British then launched a drive on Baghdad, another Ottoman stronghold.

However, a desperate Turkish rearguard action at the Battle of Ctesiphon in November 1915, saw the British defeated and forced to retreat back into Mesopotamia, where they were besieged by the Turks at the town of Al Kuut in December of that year.

Although Italy had formally been a member of the Central Power alliance, it remained neutral until May 1915, when it broke ranks and declared war on Austro-Hungary, allying itself to the western powers. The Italians then launched an offensive to capture Trieste, but after four major battles with the Austrian army, at the Isonzo River from June to December, they failed in their attempts to break through the Austrian lines.

By May 1915, the Germans had instituted a policy of trying to blockade Britain into submission: they reasoned that if that island country could be starved of all supplies and raw materials, it would have to sue for peace. A policy of unrestricted submarine warfare was then declared: all ships traveling to or from Britain were targets and would be sunk without warning.

On 7 May 1915, the British passenger liner, Lusitania, which was later shown to be carrying munitions and military supplies, was sunk by a German submarine. A number of American nationals were on board and died in the sinking. The American government protested and the Germans then announced a modification in their policy: in future all such ships would be warned before they were attacked and the Americans undertook to urge their nationals not to travel on such vessels in future.

In March 1916, a French liner, the Sussex, was sunk by a German submarine, again with the loss of American lives, leading to another controversy between the American and German governments. This time the Germans announced they were abandoning the unrestricted submarine warfare policy completely.

On the last day of May and the first day of June 1916, the only major naval battle between the Germans and the British took place off the north European coast of Jutland. Although the British losses, both in ships and human lives, were greater than Germany's, the German fleet never again joined battle on such a scale for the rest of the war.

The German victories in the east enabled them to transfer a half million men to the Western Front in 1916. In February that year, they launched a new offensive designed to break the French lines around the city of Verdun. After bitter fighting, the Germans managed to seize some surrounding forts, but failed to take Verdun itself, mainly due to the heroic French defense of the region under the leadership of one of their ablest generals, Philipe Petain (who won the title of Hero of Verdun in France as a result).

By the end of November, the French had managed to retake the German gains and the front line had reverted to where it had started. German and French losses were massive: as a result, the French were only able to contribute 16 divisions out of the intended 40 with which they had started the year, to an Allied attack which began on the Somme in July 1916.

The Battle of the Somme, which continued until November 1916 saw the first significant Allied territorial gains of the war in the west: some 325 square kilometers of land was wrested from the Germans.

The main reason for this surprising territorial gain was the introduction of a British secret weapon: the tank, the first time ever such a weapon was deployed in any war. These armored vehicles, which had originally been conceptualized by Leonardo da Vinci, were built in secret, and were only called tanks as a code name: the word however stuck.

The tank, conceptualized by Leonardo da Vinci, first appeared during the First World War, developed by the British.

In the east, the Russians recovered from their first defeats and launched a new offensive against the Germans in February 1916, in the Lake Narocz region northeast of Vilna. The attack was a complete failure and saw the Russians lose more than 100,000 men.

In June 1916, the Russians carried out a new attack against the Austrians on a wide front running from Pinsk south to Czernowitz. This attack penetrated some 65 kilometers (40 miles) and took half a million prisoners until the arrival of German reinforcements in September turned back the Russian advance. The Russians lost a million men during the four month campaign.

The Russian advance had however persuaded Rumania that it could enter the war on the side of the Allies: it declared war on Germany and Austria in August 1916 and invaded the Austro-Hungarian province of Transylvania. In a combined offensive which saw Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish troops invade Rumania, that country was completely overrun by January 1917 and eliminated from the war.

On the Italian front, 1916 was marked by five more battles on the Isonzo River, all but one being launched by the Italians, and all ultimately failing in their objective to significantly move the front line.

Meanwhile, in Greece the Greek king was accused by the Allies of becoming pro-German. A renewed Allied landing at Thesalonika saw rebel Greeks set up an alternative government under Allied supervision in November 1916, splitting Greece politically and physically into two: one section neutral, the other declaring war on Germany and Austro-Hungary. The Allies then resorted to a naval blockade of the neutral part of Greece, giving formal recognition to the rebel government in Thesalonika.

Simultaneously, an Allied push into Austro-Hungarian territory took place: Macedonia was seized in November and by the end of the year the Allied armies had reached the border of Albania and Macedonia.

In the Middle East the Turks were steadily put under pressure: by February 1916, a large part of Mesopotamia had been cleared of Turkish troops by the British, while at the same time a number of Arabs seized the opportunity to revolt against Ottoman rule in Saudi Arabia. Then the British attacked from their long established bases in Egypt (which had been there since the building of the Suez Canal) and steadily drove the Turks out of the Sinai Peninsula and Palestine. By early 1917, most parts of these regions were under British rule.

The World Zionist movement, a nationalist Jewish organization founded by European Jews to create a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, saw an opportunity open up with the British occupation of Palestine, and persuaded the British foreign minister, Lord Arthur Balfour, to issue a public promise in 1917 to the effect that Britain would support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This public promise became known as the Balfour Declaration.

In return for this undertaking, the World Zionist Movement then promised Britain that it would marshal the world's Jews behind the Allied cause (although how they gave such an undertaking when there were many thousands of German Jews fighting in the German army, remains a mystery) and, more importantly, endeavor to use their influence to bring the United States of America into the war. In this way, considerable pressure was brought to bear on the American government to enter the war against Germany, although by this stage they hardly needed much prompting.

While the World Zionist Congress was actively working behind the scenes with the powerful Jewish lobby in the American government, the course of the war at sea presented the American president, Woodrow Wilson, with an opportunity to enter the war against Germany, despite his presidential election campaign having been specifically fought on a non-interventionist ticket.

In January 1917, Germany announced that it was resorting to unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping to and from Britain - this in a renewed attempt to force the British to surrender by physically depriving them of necessary fuels and foodstuffs to keep going. The re-introduction of this policy brought about the excuse Wilson needed to bring America into the war.

In February 1917, the US broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and formally declared war in April. The timing of the US entry into the war - virtually simultaneously with the Balfour Declaration - is too good to be coincidental. By June 1917, more than 175,000 American troops were already in France; by the end of the war more than two million Americans had been deployed in France.

The Germans had hoped to starve Britain of raw materials and supplies by sinking as many ships going to that island as possible: in this aim they failed due to the development of depth charges and other submarine hunting devices; the deployment of convoys for shipping and the overwhelming industrial production lines of the United States which could turn out new ships far faster than what the Germans could hope to sink them.

In April 1918, the British, in an effort to end the submarine war, blocked the German submarine port at Zeebrugge in Belgium by deliberately sinking three aged British cruisers in the harbor entrance. Finally the war of attrition grew too high: the German submarine losses, in percentage terms, started to outstrip the Allied shipping losses, and the campaign was gradually abandoned.

In 1917, a Dutch woman by name of Gertrud Margarete Zelle was arrested by the French police in Paris. At the time she was working as an erotic dancer using the stage name of Mata Hari. Apart from her professional life as a strip tease dancer, she was also a German spy. By entrapping a string of high ranking Allied officers (who she befriended at the club where she worked) into sexual relationships, she had been able to obtain many important military secrets for her masters. The name Mata Hari from then on became synonymous with a femme fatale: the original Mata Hari was executed in October 1917 by a French firing squad.

In April and May 1917, the Allies launched their first major offensive of that year at Arras. The Germans saw the attack coming, and withdrew from the Aisne to a new position a short way back known as the Hindenburg line. The Allied attack then found itself forced to attack this heavily fortified and well prepared defensive position: although Canadian troops took a small series of hills known as Vimy Ridge and the main British forces advanced some six kilometers (four miles), this was the sum total of the Allied gains.

A French attack in Champagne failed so atrociously that the French troops in the region mutinied - serious disorder broke out which had to be suppressed by military police and the replacement of the troops in that sector with much needed reserves from another sector. In June, a second Allied offensive went in: with the British launching an attempt to break the German lines at Flanders.

After a preliminary battle at Messines, a three and a half month static battle took place at Ieper from July to November: despite both sides losing in excess of 250,000 men, neither line moved at all.

British troops "go over the top" - out of the trenches into the no-man's land. Both sides launched endless such suicidal attacks.

In other sectors, the Allies made slight gains: a new battle at Verdun saw the French take back a small area of land; and in the end November 1917, Battle of Cambrai, the British deployed 400 tanks in the first mass tank attack of the war. The sheer weight of the offensive punched through the German lines at last, but a lack of reserves saw the attack peter out before it could be properly exploited. A German counter attack saw the eight kilometer hole in their lines quickly filled and the original front line was restored once again.

Suddenly on the Eastern Front things took a dramatic turn: after the Germans had let the Communist revolutionary Lenin and his cohorts enter Russia with the deliberate intention of letting him stir up trouble, a popular revolution in March 1917 saw the abdication of the Tsar and the establishment of a new provisional government in Moscow.

However, much to Lenin's (and the Germans') anger, the new Russian government continued to participate in the war. In July, the Russians actually managed to make modest gains on the Galacian front, although an immediate German counter attack retook the lost areas and then pushed on to take the city of Riga and all of Latvia by October 1917.

Then in November 1917, the Communists seized power in a coup which finally saw Lenin come to power: on 20 November 1917, the Communists offered the Germans an armistice. In mid December, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed and all fighting ceased on the Eastern Front - Germany had won. The Germans had made spectacular territorial gains: virtually all of the Ukraine, Byelorussia and a large part of western Russia fell under German control in terms of the treaty. The occupying Germans were only expelled after their collapse in the West, over a year later.

On the southern front, the endless Battles of the Isonzo River continued. The Italian drives of 1917, which resulted in the 10th and 11th battles of the Isonzo, achieved nothing, breaking against the rock solid German defense. Then in October, a renewed German-Austrian offensive at last succeeded in breaking the Italian line near the town of Caporetto and the first real gains of that campaign were made. The Italians suffered disastrously in this offensive: they lost 300,000 men as prisoners, and easily as many deserted. Concerned at the deteriorating situation, French and British troops were sent to bolster the Italian forces at their new position on the Piave River.

Finally, the stalemate in Greece came to an end with a formal invasion of the neutral part of that country by Allied troops in June 1917. The Greek king abdicated and the provisional government, recognized by the Allies alone, was installed over all of Greece, bringing all of that country formally into the war against the Central Powers.

After the initial British successes in the Middle East, 1917 saw them drive further north and attack the Turkish stronghold city of Gaza. The first two attacks on the city failed: but by November, other British gains in the region forced the Turks to evacuate the city. By December 1917, Jerusalem was taken by the British in an ironic re-enactment of the highpoint of the Crusades hundreds of years previously. 1917 also saw the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks on the Saudi-Arabian peninsula reach a climax, aided by the leadership of a British army officer named Colonel T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. The British also started rolling up other Turkish possessions in the Middle East: Baghdad fell, as did Ramadi on the Euphrates river and other important towns on the Tigris River. The net was closing on the Ottomans at last.

Following the Russian collapse, Rumania threw in the towel: in May 1918, that country signed the Treaty of Bucharest which finally ended all sporadic resistance in that country and ceded important territories to Austro-Hungary and gave Germany a long term lease on Rumanian oil wells.

In September 1918, a combined Allied army of 700,000 men began an offensive in the Balkans against the south eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian empire in Serbia. The offensive was dramatically successful: by October, the Bulgarians were exhausted and surrendered, dropping out the war and their alliance with the Central Powers.

Then the Allied armies advanced into Rumania: a new provisional government in that country then tore up the treaty of Bucharest and re-entered the war on the side of the Allies. In a matter of months, the Austro-German successes in the south east turned sour. Belgrade was captured by the Allies army on 1 November, while a surprise Italian invasion captured Albania.

On the Southern Front, a last Austrian offensive against the combined Italian, French and British emplacements along the Piave River in June 1918 was turned back; a failed offensive which cost 100,000 Austrian lives. As a result the combined Allied armies seized the initiative in Italy and at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, fought from October to November 1918, the main Austrian army was destroyed, losing hundreds of thousands of prisoners and causing a general collapse, with thousands of demoralized soldiers streaming in a shambles back into Austria itself.

On 3 November, the city or Trieste finally fell to Allies - the objective since 1915 - followed by Fiume two days later. The scale of the defeats served as the signal for the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Already the Czechs and the Slovaks had declared themselves independent; in October, the South Slavs declared themselves independent and in November the Hungarians set up their own government. The Austrians and Hungarians then signed an armistice with the Allies on 3 November 1918, and the last Habsburg Emperor ever, Charles I, abdicated. The Austrian Republic was proclaimed.

In September 1918, the British finally routed the last Turkish forces in Palestine and quickly marched on into Lebanon and Syria, with Damascus falling in October. The French occupied Beirut and then the Turkish government surrendered: an armistice was concluded at the end of October which obliged Turkey to demobilize, break off relations with the Central Powers and allow Allied ships to pass through the Dardanelles.

Within the space of a year, the Germans had gone from what seemed to be a complete victory to total isolation and the collapse of all of their allies. The German High Command then drew together its reserves for one last push on the Western Front, being able to bring in significant reserves from the now defunct Eastern Front. In March 1918, they launched what was to one of their biggest attacks ever; it smashed the British lines at Arras and drove them back 65 kilometers (40 miles) before being halted early in April by a French counter attack.

The Germans then renewed their offensive later in April, once again punching a further hole in the struggling British lines. In June a third attack, which took the French by surprise on the Aisne river, saw the Germans push to within 60 kilometers of Paris. The huge German gun, Big Bertha, made by the Krupp weapons factory, was then used to shell Paris, causing considerable anxiety in the French capital.

However, the Germans had left their offensive too late: by the time of the drive towards Paris, the first American troops had been deployed, and at the Battle of the Marne, before Paris, a combined French and fresh American force halted the German advance.

By the middle of July, the German offensive had run out of steam. Its soldiers were exhausted; political unrest was brewing at home; they were low on rations and supplies; all these factors combined to make them easy prey to an Allied counter offensive. In July, the Allies drove the Germans back over the Marne, retaking the initiative which they were never to lose again for the rest of the war.

In August, a British attack at Amiens saw the German lines begin to crack; a renewed Allied offensive leading to the Second Battle of the Somme and the Fifth Battle of Arras, saw the Germans forced back to what was their very last defensive position, the Hindenburg line, once again.

In September, waves of fresh American troops captured 14,000 exhausted and virtually starving German troops at Saint-Mihiel, and then pushed on through the Argonne forest, breaking the German lines between Metz and Sedan.

With this major defeat, the German government asked for an armistice in October 1918 - this attempt to end the war failed when the American president Woodrow Wilson insisted on negotiating only with a democratic German government. The British then pushed home an attack in Belgium and Northern France and early in November American and French forces reached Sedan. By early November, the Hindenburg line had been broken and the Germans were in disarray.

In Germany, the combined effects of starvation due to the Allied blockade; the military defeats and war weariness created ideal ground for revolution. The Communists launched a massive agitation program, with the conditions of the time creating many receptive ears.

Several localized Communist revolutions broke out: the German fleet mutinied; and an uprising dethroned the king of Bavaria. Minor democratic reforms were introduced and a limited election was held: the Social Democratic Party won the majority of votes. Its leader, Freiderich Ebert, became chancellor; in November the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, abdicated and went into exile in the Netherlands.

The first elected German government sat in the town of Weimar: the republic which they proclaimed on 9 November 1918 became known by that name thereafter.

The Weimar government then sent a delegation to the Allies to seek an immediate end to the war, and an armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. By this time, German military defeat loomed in all sectors. However, because the western front line never penetrated Germany proper right to the end of the war, many German soldiers were later to bitterly accuse the Weimar politicians of having "stabbed them in the back" before any final military defeat dictated the need for a surrender.

The Weimar government also took responsibility for the surrender in a war they had not been party to starting, and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the war (which they Weimar politicians were forced to sign) made them even more unpopular and opened the way for a German nationalist revival which was later to be exploited by Adolf Hitler.

In terms of the armistice, the remaining German fleet was surrendered to the Allies: all were interned at the British naval base of Scapa Flow in Scotland. The treaty of Versailles demanded that these ships all become the permanent property of the Allies. In protest, the German crews on the interned ships then scuttled their fleet in Scapa Flow.

The conflict in Europe and the Middle East is the best known part of the First World War: however, the "forgotten war" was fought out in the colonies, and included action in China, Africa and South East Asia. In August 1914, an Anglo-French force opened the war in the colonies by capturing Togoland from the Germans; the next month they captured the Cameroons.

In September 1914, the White South Africans, officially allied to Britain, invaded German South West Africa with relative ease, but attempts to crush the German forces in German East Africa (modern Tanzania) were much more difficult. The first attack on the German forces in East Africa (who were under the remarkable leadership of General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck) by British and Indian troops was repulsed in November 1914.

It was only one year later, that a combined British, South African and Portuguese army, placed under the leadership of former Boer War general Jan Smuts, managed to finally capture the main German East African towns. Lettow-Vorbeck was not captured: he and his troops retreated south in the colony, where they in 1917 invaded Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and in November 1918, they began an invasion of Rhodesia.

The war in Africa was still raging when the armistice in Europe was signed: Lettow-Vorbeck himself only surrendered three days after the German surrender in Europe.

In August 1914, New Zealand occupied the German colony in Samoa; while Australian forces occupied German possessions in the Bismarck Archipelago and New Guinea. The Japanese took the German held port of Shandong, China in November 1914, simultaneously taking the German-held Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands, the Palau group of islands, and the Carolines.

The First World War was a bloody, unnecessary and violent struggle which took the lives of over 8.4 million Whites over the space of the four years it was fought: a staggering average of 2 million per year.

Russia	1,700,000
France	1,357,800
British Empire	908,371
Italy	650,000
United States	126,000
Rumania	335,706
Serbia	45,000
Belgium	13,716
Greece	5000
Portugal	7222
Montenegro	3000
Germany	1,773,700
Austria-Hungary	1,200,000
Ottoman Empire	325,000
Bulgaria	87,500
Total	8,538,015

France was particularly badly hit: much of the war was fought on its territory and the population went into severe decline: the French government then opened up its borders to North African and Black African immigration to fill up its numbers.

Britain, although weakened, came off the lightest of the Western European powers: her losses, both in material and human terms, were amongst the lowest in Europe, and the British Empire even expanded in size as a result of the annexation of German territories.

The United States of America played a key role in deciding the war: the arrival of fresh, well armed and massive amounts of troops and material played a major role in stopping the final German attack and rolling up the German armies at the end of the war.

The war also saw the final death of the Ottoman Empire which had so long dominated the Middle East. A whole new can of worms was to be opened for the British who found themselves trying to appease both World Zionism and Arab demands for self rule in Palestine: eventually the British would end up fighting a vicious terrorist war against Jewish nationalists in the region.

Russia ended the war in the grip of a Communist revolution and a civil war which would only end in 1924. The country had been devastated by years of misrule prior to the war, and suffered huge human and material losses as a result. It would be years before any semblance of stability was restored. Germany was devastated, although the war had never actually reached its territory (apart from the initial Russian excursion into East Prussia).

Racked by rebellion and revolution, the Weimar Republic in Germany was doomed to failure: economic collapse followed and was aggravated by the huge reparations which the country was forced to pay to the victors of the war. Germany was held to blame for the war: this was unjust, as the Germans were no more to blame for the war than any of the other European powers: all were short sighted and bloody minded enough to allow all the continent to descend into a madness which provided the mainspring for yet another European wide conflict twenty years later.