this is Crash Course: World History

and today we’re gonna talk about World War I.

The so-called, Great War?

World War I wasn’t the most destructive war, or the first total war,

and it certainly wasn’t—

despite its billing—

the war to end all wars.

But it was the war to change all wars.

World War I changed our outlook,

it normalized cynicism and irony,

which, I think you’ll agree,

are kind of dominant lenses for describing our world today.

Basically,

I’d argue that World War I helped make possible everything from The Simpsons

to intentionally unattractive mustaches. [some may disagree w/ your premise there]

Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

are you referring to me? [Whoah. Any way to unsee this?]

Oh Me From the Past,

you’re an embarrassment to our family.

Also to all our other selves.

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Most people think of World War I as a tragedy

because it didn’t need to happen and didn’t really accomplish much,

except for creating social and economic conditions

that made World War II possible.

So when we talk about the causes,

inevitably, we’re also assigning blame.

The immediate cause was of course the assassination in Sarajevo

of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand

on June 28, 1914,

by a Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip.

Quick aside:

It’s worth noting that the first big war of the 20th century

began with an act of terrorism.

So Franz Ferdinand wasn’t particularly well-liked by his uncle,

the Emperor Franz Joseph

NOW THAT IS A MUSTACHE.

But even so,

the assassination led Austria to issue an ultimatum to Serbia,

whereupon Serbia accepted some but not all of Austria’s demands,

leading Austria to declare war against Serbia.

And then Russia,

due to its alliance with the Serbs, then mobilized its army;

Germany, because it had an alliance with Austria,

[Survivor has ruined the word "alliance"]

told Russia to stop mobilizing, which Russia failed to do,

so then Germany mobilized its own army,

declared war on Russia,

cemented an alliance with the Ottomans,

and then declared war on France,

because, you know, France. [how 'Merican of you, John]

Germany’s War plan, the Schillefen Plan,

required that it invade France in the most expedient way possible,

which as you can see is via Belgium,

And Great Britain was a friend of Belgium,

I mean as much as anyone can be a friend of Belgium, [snap]

and so they declared war on Germany.

so by August 4th, all the major powers of Europe are at war with each other.

By the end of the month,

Japan,

honoring its alliance with Britain, would be at war with Germany and Austria, too.

When all was said and done,

Counting colonies and spheres of influence,

the world map would eventually look like this.

You’ll never guess who wins.

So there were many opportunities NOT to mobilize and declare war,

none of which were taken.

Some blame the web of alliances itself,

which is what Woodrow Wilson tried to fix with the League of Nations.

Some blame Russia, the first big country to mobilize.

Some blame Germany for the inflexibility of the Schlieffen plan.

Leninists claim war grew out of imperialism

and was fueled by capitalist rivalries;

and others claim it was a war between

Germany’s radical modernism and Britain’s traditional conservatism.

But if I had to assign blame,

I’d go with the alliance system and the cultural belief that war was,

in general, good for nations.

War helped define who was them and who was us,

and doing that strengthened the idea of us.

And before World War I,

war was perceived to be necessary and often even glorious.

The trench warfare on the Western Front is most famous for its brutal futility—

Great Britain and France on one side,

Germany on the other,

with no man’s land between.

World War I was a writer’s war,

and there’s a lot of metaphorical resonance

in living men digging holes where they would in time die.

[okay, that was heavy]

The lines of trenches on the western front

covered only about 400 miles as the crow flies,

but because of the endless zigzagging,

the trenches themselves may have run as much as 25,000 miles..

But the stalemate of trench warfare wasn’t seen on every front.

Especially at the beginning of the war

there was a lot of offensive movement, especially in the initial German strikes,

especially on the Eastern Front,

the Germans were pretty successful against the Russians,

who had a large but pretty hapless army.

Also, for those blessed few of you who sat through all of Lawrence of Arabia

you’ll remember that T. E. Lawrence’s exploits took place in

the context of World War I with the British battling the Ottomans.

This brings up an important point:

World War I featured combatants from around the world—

Britain’s army, especially, included soldiers from India, Africa,

Australia, New Zealand, and Canada,

who was just happy to be invited.

Africans served with the French,

and for a lot of these people, their experiences helped build

nationalist movements when survivors returned home after the war.

That’s about as close as we get to a silver lining.

The war itself was incredibly destructive.

Over 15 million people were killed and over 20 million wounded.

In France,

13.3% of the male population between the age of 15 and 49 died in the war.

The war also saw a lot of civilians die,

especially in the Ottoman Empire

where more than 2 million of the 3 million people killed were non-combatants.

But like so many other wars,

World War I’s most efficient killer was disease.

Stupid disease, always hijacking history.

dysentery, typhus, and cholera were rampant,

and otherwise minor injuries would prove fatal when gangrene set in.

I mean, 25% of arm wounds among German soldiers were fatal.

And that’s not even to mention the famous influenza epidemic

that broke out toward the end of the war, which killed three times as many people

as the war itself. [but gave us a sparkly Edward Cullen]

The main reason the war was so deadly was the combination of

new technology and outdated tactics.

While we may think about tanks, airplanes and poison gas

all of which made their debut in the First World War,

the two most devastating technologies were American:

machine guns, and barbed wire. [insert your own Pam Anderson joke]

Attempting to march in lines towards an enemy’s trench,

soldiers of both sides were mowed down by machine gun fire.

According to one German machine gunner at the battle of the Somme in 1916 :

“The [British] officers went in front.

I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick.

When we started firing we just had to load and reload.

They went down in their hundreds.

You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

At the Somme the British lost 60,000 men in the first day of fighting.

Remember the old colonialist verse

Whatever happens / we have got / the maxim gun / and they have not?

Yeah, well, now everybody had machine guns.

One of the things we try to remember here at Crash Course

is that people both make history and are made by it.

World War I brings this fact into stark relief

because we know so much about the soldiers who fought in it,

and how they wrote about the war

really changed our relationship with systemic violence.

For most soldiers, there was nothing glamorous or heroic about this war.

For the British, for example, the trenches were two things above all:

wet and smelly.

The dampness came from the fact that

the British trenches were in the wettest part of Flanders.

The smell was mainly decomposing flesh.

Nothing glorious about that.

On the upside,

soldiers were at least rarely hungry,

and there was a lot of food from home,

which is worth underscoring,

because it reminds us, home wasn’t very far away.

Even for the British,

at their closest the front was only 70 miles from England.

They could read newspapers from London one day later than Londoners.

While going “over the top” [meet me half way, across the sky…]

Stan...

no puns in this episode!

Right,

while going “Over the Top” of the trench

to cross no-man’s land and attack the enemy trench

is what lights our romantic imagination,

most soldiers lives were dominated by the fear of shelling.

According to a journal published by French soldiers:

“There’s nothing more horrible in war than being shelled.

It’s a form of torture that the soldier can’t see the end of.

Suddenly he’s afraid of being buried alive …

The man stays put in his hole,

helplessly waiting for, hoping for,

a miracle.”

Although soldiers then, as now,

lived under conditions difficult to imagine,

there was more than even the threat of death to distress them.

According to German officer Ernst Junger,

it was not “danger, however extreme … that depresses the spirit of men,

so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions.”

And for most soldiers, British and especially French,

the pay for their efforts was pitiful.

So why did they even keep fighting?

Duty, nationalism, loyalty to their comrades,

and fear of being shot for desertion all played a role.

And so did alcohol.

As one British medical officer said:

“Had it not been for the rum ration, I do not think we should have won the war.”

Ernst Junger also remarked on the propensity of soldiers

to drink their troubles away:

“Though ten out of twelve had fallen, still the last two, as sure as death,

were to be found on the first evening of rest over the bottle

drinking a silent health to their dead ‘companions’”

Oh, it’s time for the open letter?

whew!

an open letter to alcohol.

I wonder what’s in today’s secret compartment.

Oh, shocking,

it’s a golf club.

and an actual disco golf ball made by a crash course fan!

Dear Alcohol, oh, that’s...

Like disease,

you’ve been a key figure in human history,

despite not actually being a person

and for millennia,

you’ve played an important role in war;

often helping soldiers do their duty, often distracting them from it.

but here’s the thing alcohol,

in my experience, which is extensive,

if you need to be drunk to do something,

you should maybe not do the thing.

Unless of course the thing is golf.

Best wishes, John Green.

So what did we take away from the so-called Great War?

Well, not much.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I,

fixed the blame for the war on Germany,

which proved ruinous to the German economy

and destructive to its political institutions.

And unless you’re really nostalgic for totalitarian communism,

you’ve gotta say that World War I was also a disaster for Russia,

because it facilitated the rise of the Bolsheviks..

The Russian Revolution had two phases.

In the first phase, called the February Revolution,

and get this,

it occurred in February,

army mutinies and civil unrest forced the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty