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Overview | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918
The war began and, in a sense, ended in the Balkans, with the collapse of the Bulgarian front. Historically, several great powers and a number of national minorities had competed for power and influence in this area. The region had once been dominated by the Turks, but, over time, they had been displaced by the indigenous Slavs and the Austro-Hungarians. The Serbs, the most dynamic Slavic group, wanted to create a Slav super-state and expel the Austro-Hungarians. Serbia's desire to expand threatened the integrity of austrian-Hungary, and the Austro-Hungarians were determined to remove the Serbian threat so that they could maintain control over the southern Slav peoples.
When Serb nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Austria-Hungary's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum that it knew Serbia could not fully accept.
The Serbs asked Russia for help, Germany agreed to support Austria-Hungary, and France stood by Russia.
The interlocking alliances forged by these states in the late 19th/early 20th century to provide security now hurled them over the edge of the precipice into four years of bloodshed. The first shots of what would become the First World War were fired on 29 July 1914 when the guns of the Austro-Hungarian fortress of Zemun began bombarding the Serb capital, Belgrade.
Watching from the sidelines, Britain - free of binding military commitments and without territorial ambitions in Europe - still felt that it couldn't abstain from the conflict. It declared war on Germany on 4 August as a result of the German invasion of Belgium, which threatened British security and free access to the Channel ports, and to retain the goodwill of its allies (and imperial rivals) France and Russia. In a strange way, Britain became embroiled in a European war in 1914 to protect its overseas empire.
The First World War started as a highly mobile conflict. On the Western Front, Germany bludgeoned its way through Belgium in an attempt to defeat the French army in the field by enveloping it from the North, a strategy which, if successful, would have allowed Germany to focus its energies on the Eastern Front.
However, Germany was defeated on the Marne by combined British and French forces between 5 and 10 September, and was doomed to fight a highly draining war on two fronts.
When the German commander Falkenhayn ordered his men to dig into fortified positions on high ground, the British and French were forced to attack, to regain what had been lost. As a result, a highly mobile war was transformed into a war marked by stasis and deadlock.
The onset of trench warfare enabled Germany to deploy a large part of its manpower on the Eastern Front against Russia. The Germans had fewer men and fewer resources than the Allies, but they occupied better defensive positions. This tended to produce equilibrium on the Western Front. Trench warfare evolved out of circumstance rather than choice, and both sides made a number of attempts to break the deadlock.
Germany enjoyed some notable naval successes in late 1914. On 1 November, the Royal Navy experienced its worst defeat for 250 years when two of its ships were sunk at Cape Coronel, off the coast of Chile.
But even before this, on 5 September, the U-boat U-21 had sunk the British cruiser HMS Pathfinder as it left Rosyth harbour. And two weeks later, Captain Weddigen of U-9 had sunk the three warships of the 'Live Bait Squadron' (Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue) off the coast of Holland.
After this, the British naval commander-in-chief Admiral Jellicoe withdrew his most important ships beyond the U-boats' range and imposed a blockade on German ports and merchant shipping.
This form of economic warfare took time to take effect. However, within weeks of its introduction, Germany began to ration food. In the winter of 1916, German and Austro-Hungarian civilians endured what became known as the 'Turnip Winter', when many of them were forced to subsist on little more than cattle feed for several months.
On the Eastern Front, Germany expected Austria-Hungary to bear the bulk of the fighting against Russia, but its hopes were disappointed. The Serbs humiliated the Austro-Hungarians at Cer Mountain on 12 August and the Russians poured into eastern Prussia and eastern Austria-Hungary in great numbers.
General von Hindenburg was drawn out of retirement to coordinate, with General Ludendorff , Germany's resistance.
They inflicted a major defeat on the Russians at Tannenberg in late August.
This halted the Russians' advance, but it didn't remove them from Central Powers territory. The war was clearly going to impose great strains on German and Austro-Hungarian resources.
In late 1914 and throughout 1915, other states joined the fray. The war became a truly global conflict as fighting spread to other parts of the world.
See also Controversies: Tangled beginnings.