1915

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• From 8 April, Turkish troops systematically massacre Armenian citizens, killing 1.3 million, the first example of ethnic cleansing in this century.

• On the Western Front, trench warfare results in stalemate. On 22 April, during the second battle of Ypres, poison gas is used as a weapon for the first time.

• On 25 April, British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops land at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles in an attempt to defeat Turkey, an ally of Germany, but fail with heavy loss of life (ends January 1916). Winston Churchill is blamed for the failure.

• On 26 April, Italy enters the war on the Allied side, but its armies fail to defeat Austro-Hungarian troops.

• On 7 May, a German submarine sinks the British liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 including 128 US citizens. The sinking results in controversy over the ethics of submarine warfare.

• London experiences air raids by Zeppelins. In Germany, Hugo Junkers develops the first all-metal fighter plane.

• Japan presents its Twenty-one Demands to China with the aim of occupying that country.

• Inventor Alexander Graham Bell makes the first transcontinental phone call from New York to San Francisco.

• Physicist Albert Einstein publishes the General Theory of Relativity, an expansion of his work on the physics of the universe.

• American film-maker D W Griffith makes the epic Birth of a Nation, which glamorises the racist Ku Klux Klan.

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