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Woodrow Wilson | Biography, Presidency, & Accomplishments

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Woodrow Wilson: Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States.

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Who Was Nicholas II?

Nicholas II was born on May 6, 1868 (from the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until 1918) in Pushkin, Russia. He inherited the throne when his father, Alexander III, died in 1894. Although he believed in autocracy, he was eventually forced to create an elected legislature. Nicholas II's handling of Bloody Sunday and World War I incensed his subjects and led to his abdication. Bolsheviks executed him and his family on the night of July 16-17, 1918, in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Death

Over the course of WWI, Russia endured major losses and was subject to extreme poverty and high inflation. The Russian public blamed Nicholas II for his poor military decisions, and Empress Alexandra for her ill-advised role in government. Because Alexandra was originally from Germany, suspicion spread that she might have even deliberately sabotaged Russia, ensuring its defeat in the war.

By February of 1917, Nicholas II's subjects were in such an uproar that riots broke out in St. Petersburg. Nicholas was still headquartered at Mogilev at the time. When he tried to get home to Petrograd, the Duma (the elected legislature), which had by then turned on him, prevented him from boarding the train. After the Duma elected their own provisional committee built of progressive bloc members, and the soldiers sent to quash the St. Petersburg riots mutinied, Nicholas II had no other choice but to step down from the monarchy. On March 15, 1917 he abdicated the throne. He and his family were then taken to the Ural Mountains and placed under house arrest.

In the fall of 1917 Russia's provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. In the spring of 1918 Russia was engaged in a civil war. On the night of July 16-17, 1918, Nicholas II and his family were murdered by Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, in Yekaterinburg, Russia, thus ending more than three centuries of the Romanov dynasty's rule. Historians have long speculated as to whether Nicholas II's daughter, Anastasia, might have survived the shooting but in 2007, a DNA analysis conclusively identified her body.

Coronation & Marriage

Nicholas II inherited the Russian throne when his father died of kidney disease at the age of 49 on October 20, 1894. Reeling from the loss, and poorly trained in affairs of state, Nicholas II hardly felt up to the task of assuming his father's role. In fact, he confessed to a close friend, "I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling."

Despite all that was happening, Nicholas II managed to marry Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt (commonly known as Alexandra) within a month of Alexander III's passing. Once he ascended the throne, Nicholas II had to marry and have children expediently, in order to secure a future heir to the throne. Although a figure in the public eye, Empress Alexandra was something of a homebody, who preferred to spend the majority of her time at the palace at Tsarskoe Selo.

Family Tree

The couple had their first child, a daughter named Olga, in 1895. The following year, Nicholas II was officially crowned as the tsar of Russia. During a mobbed public celebration of the coronation near Moscow, thousands of people were stampeded to death. Unaware of the event, Nicholas II and Alexandra were all smiles as they went on to celebrate the coronation at a ball. The couple's oblivion made a poor first impression on Nicholas II's new subjects.

In 1897 the couple gave birth to a second daughter, Tatiana. She was followed by a third, named Maria, in 1899 and a fourth, named Anastasia, in 1901. In 1904 Alexandra gave birth to the longed-for male heir, Alexei. The parents' joy soon turned to concern as Alexei was diagnosed with hemophilia.

Desperate to find an effective treatment for Alexei, Nicholas II and Alexandra even went so far as to let the monk Rasputin hypnotize the boy. The emperor proved such a devoted family man that his journal entries, which were meant to log official affairs of state, instead focused on the everyday goings-on of his wife and kids.

Japan Attacks

The main objective of Nicholas II's foreign policy during his early reign was to maintain the status quo in Europe, rather than to conquer new territory. But, in the 1890s, as Russia experienced economic growth, it began to expand its industry into the Far East. In 1891, construction on the Trans-Siberian railroad had begun, connecting Russia with the Pacific Coast. As a result, Japan felt increasingly threatened.

In 1904 Japan attacked Russia. In December of that year, Nicholas II's army was forced to surrender Port Arthur. By spring of 1905, his fleet was decimated in the Battle of Tsushima. In the wake of Russia's defeat, Nicholas II entered peace negotiations with Japan that summer, but much greater concerns soon demanded his attention.

Bloody Sunday

On January 5, 1905, Father George Gapon led a sizable but peaceful demonstration of workers in St. Petersburg. The demonstrators appealed to Nicholas II to improve working conditions and establish a popular assembly. Troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing more than a thousand people in what would come to be called the infamous "Bloody Sunday."

In reaction, indignant workers throughout Russia went on strike. As peasants all over Russia sympathized with the workers' cause, thousands of uprisings took place and were suppressed by Nicholas II's troops, serving to further increase tensions.

Although he believed himself to be an absolute ruler as ordained by God, Nicholas II was eventually forced to concede to creating an elected legislature, called the Duma. Despite this concession, Nicholas II still stubbornly continued to resist government reform, included those suggested by the newly elected minister of the interior, Peter Stolypin.

World War I

At the beginning of World War I, Russia's armies performed poorly. In response, Nicholas II appointed himself commander-in-chief, so he could take direct control of the military from Grand Duke Nicholas, against the advice of his ministers. Nicholas II spent much of late 1915 through August 1917 away from Tsarskoe Selo in Saint Petersburg.

In his absence, the empress grew increasingly withdrawn and ever more dependent on Rasputin, who heavily influenced her political view on matters at home. Nicholas II's ministers consequently resigned in rapid succession and were replaced by Alexandra's chosen candidates, as influenced by Rasputin until his 1916 murder by nobles.

Early Life

Nicholas II was born Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov in Pushkin, Russia, on May 6, 1868. He was his parents' firstborn child. Nicholas II's father, Alexander Alexandrovich, was heir to the Russian empire. Nicholas II's mother, Maria Feodorovna, had been born in Denmark. Maria Feodorovna provided a nurturing family environment during Nicholas II's upbringing. Alexander was a strong influence on Nicholas II, shaping his conservative, religious values and his belief in autocratic government.

Nicholas II received his education through a string of private tutors, including a high-ranking government official named Konstantin Pobedonostsev. While Nicholas II excelled in history and foreign languages, ironically, the future leader struggled to comprehend the subtleties of politics and economics. To make matters worse, his father failed to provide him with much training in affairs of state.

In 1881, when Nicholas II was 13 years old, his grandfather, Alexander II, was assassinated by a revolutionary bomber. Alexander Alexandrovich ascended the throne as Alexander III that year, and Nicholas II became heir apparent.

When Nicholas II was 19 years old he joined the army. He spent three years in service before touring Europe and Asia for an additional 10 months. Passionate about the military, Nicholas II rose to the rank of colonel. Although he was the crown prince of Russia, while in the military he attended few political meetings except for those held by the state council and the committee of ministers.

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(Photo: A. A. Pasetti [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

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Nicholas II was born on May 6, 1868 (from the Julian calendar, which was used in Russia until 1918) in Pushkin, Russia. He inherited the throne when his father, Alexander III, died in 1894. Although he believed in autocracy, he was eventually forced to create an elected legislature.

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Mao Zedong (26 December 1893 - 9 September 1976) was a Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC). He led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, while also serving as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during that time. His theories, military strategies and policies are known as Maoism.

Mao was the son of a prosperous peasant in Shaoshan, Hunan. He supported Chinese nationalism and had an anti-imperialist outlook early in his life, and was particularly influenced by the events of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and May Fourth Movement of 1919. He later adopted Marxism-Leninism while working at Peking University as a librarian and became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), leading the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927. During the Chinese Civil War between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the CCP, Mao helped to found the Chinese Red Army, led the Jiangxi Soviet's radical land reform policies, and ultimately became head of the CCP during the Long March. Although the CCP temporarily allied with the KMT under the Second United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), China's civil war resumed after Japan's surrender, and Mao's forces defeated the Nationalist government, which withdrew to Taiwan in 1949.

On 1 October 1949, Mao proclaimed the foundation of the PRC, a Marxist-Leninist single-party state controlled by the CCP. In the following years he solidified his control through the land reform campaign against landlords, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the " Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns", and through a truce in the Korean War, which altogether resulted in the deaths of several million Chinese. From 1953 to 1958, Mao played an important role in enforcing command economy in China, constructing the first Constitution of the PRC, launching an industrialisation program, and initiating military projects such as the " Two Bombs, One Satellite" project and Project 523. His foreign policies during this time were dominated by the Sino-Soviet split which drove a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. In 1955, Mao launched the Sufan movement, and in 1957 he launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals and dissidents, were persecuted. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward that aimed to rapidly transform China's economy from agrarian to industrial, which led to the Great Chinese Famine and the deaths of 15-55 million people between 1958 and 1962.

In 1963, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement, and in 1966 he initiated the Cultural Revolution, a program to remove "counter-revolutionary" elements in Chinese society which lasted 10 years and was marked by violent class struggle, widespread destruction of cultural artifacts, and an unprecedented elevation of Mao's cult of personality. Tens of millions of people were persecuted during the Revolution, while the estimated number of deaths ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions. After years of ill health, Mao suffered a series of heart attacks in 1976 and died at the age of 82. During the Mao era, China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million while the government did not strictly enforce its family planning policy. During his leadership tenure, China was heavily involved with other Asian communist conflicts such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cambodian Civil War.

Mao is considered one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He has been credited with transforming China from a semi-colony to a leading world power by advancing literacy, women's rights, basic healthcare, primary education, and improving life expectancy. However, Mao's policies were also responsible for a vast number of deaths, with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims due to starvation, persecution, prison labour, and mass executions, and his government has been described as totalitarian. He became an ideological figurehead and a prominent influence over the international communist movement, being endowed with remembrance, admiration and cult of personality both during and after his life.

English romanisation of name

During Mao's lifetime, the English-language media universally rendered his name as Mao Tse-tung, using the Wade-Giles system of transliteration for Standard Chinese though with the circumflex accent in the syllable Tsê dropped. Due to its recognizability, the spelling was used widely, even by the PRC's foreign ministry after Hanyu Pinyin became the PRC's official romanisation system for Mandarin Chinese in 1958; the well-known booklet of Mao's political statements, The Little Red Book, was officially entitled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung in English translations. While the pinyin-derived spelling Mao Zedong is increasingly common, the Wade-Giles-derived spelling Mao Tse-tung continues to be used in modern publications to some extent.

Youth and the Xinhai Revolution: 1893-1911

Mao Zedong c. 1910s

Mao Zedong was born on 26 December 1893, near Shaoshan village in Hunan. His father, Mao Yichang, was a formerly impoverished peasant who had become one of the wealthiest farmers in Shaoshan. Growing up in rural Hunan, Mao described his father as a stern disciplinarian, who would beat him and his three siblings, the boys Zemin and Zetan, as well as an adopted girl, Zejian. Mao's mother, Wen Qimei, was a devout Buddhist who tried to temper her husband's strict attitude. Mao too became a Buddhist, but abandoned this faith in his mid-teenage years. At age 8, Mao was sent to Shaoshan Primary School. Learning the value systems of Confucianism, he later admitted that he did not enjoy the classical Chinese texts preaching Confucian morals, instead favouring classic novels like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin. At age 13, Mao finished primary education, and his father united him in an arranged marriage to the 17-year-old Luo Yixiu, thereby uniting their land-owning families. Mao refused to recognise her as his wife, becoming a fierce critic of arranged marriage and temporarily moving away. Luo was locally disgraced and died in 1910 at 20 years old.

While working on his father's farm, Mao read voraciously and developed a "political consciousness" from Zheng Guanying's booklet which lamented the deterioration of Chinese power and argued for the adoption of representative democracy. Mao also read translations of works by Western authors including Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Huxley. Interested in history, Mao was inspired by the military prowess and nationalistic fervour of George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. His political views were shaped by Gelaohui-led protests which erupted following a famine in Changsha, the capital of Hunan; Mao supported the protesters' demands, but the armed forces suppressed the dissenters and executed their leaders. The famine spread to Shaoshan, where starving peasants seized his father's grain. He disapproved of their actions as morally wrong, but claimed sympathy for their situation. At age 16, Mao moved to a higher primary school in nearby Dongshan, where he was bullied for his peasant background.

In 1911, Mao began middle school in Changsha. Revolutionary sentiment was strong in the city, where there was widespread animosity towards Emperor Puyi's absolute monarchy and many were advocating republicanism. The republicans' figurehead was Sun Yat-sen, an American-educated Christian who led the Tongmenghui society. In Changsha, Mao was influenced by Sun's newspaper, The People's Independence ( Minli bao), and called for Sun to become president in a school essay. As a symbol of rebellion against the Manchu monarch, Mao and a friend cut off their queue pigtails, a sign of subservience to the emperor.

Inspired by Sun's republicanism, the army rose up across southern China, sparking the Xinhai Revolution. Changsha's governor fled, leaving the city in republican control. Supporting the revolution, Mao joined the rebel army as a private soldier, but was not involved in fighting or combat. The northern provinces remained loyal to the emperor, and hoping to avoid a civil war, Sun-proclaimed "provisional president" by his supporters-compromised with the monarchist general Yuan Shikai. The monarchy was abolished, creating the Republic of China, but the monarchist Yuan became president. The revolution over, Mao resigned from the army in 1912, after six months as a soldier. Around this time, Mao discovered socialism from a newspaper article; proceeding to read pamphlets by Jiang Kanghu, the student founder of the Chinese Socialist Party, Mao remained interested yet unconvinced by the idea.

Fourth Normal School of Changsha: 1912-1919

Over the next few years, Mao Zedong enrolled and dropped out of a police academy, a soap-production school, a law school, an economics school, and the government-run Changsha Middle School. Studying independently, he spent much time in Changsha's library, reading core works of classical liberalism such as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, as well as the works of western scientists and philosophers such as Darwin, Mill, Rousseau, and Spencer. Viewing himself as an intellectual, years later he admitted that at this time he thought himself better than working people. He was inspired by Friedrich Paulsen, a neo-Kantian philosopher and educator whose emphasis on the achievement of a carefully defined goal as the highest value led Mao to believe that strong individuals were not bound by moral codes but should strive for a great goal. His father saw no use in his son's intellectual pursuits, cut off his allowance and forced him to move into a hostel for the destitute.

Mao wanted to become a teacher and enrolled at the Fourth Normal School of Changsha, which soon merged with the First Normal School of Hunan, widely seen as the best in Hunan. Befriending Mao, professor Yang Changji urged him to read a radical newspaper, ( Xin qingnian), the creation of his friend Chen Duxiu, a dean at Peking University. Although he was a supporter of Chinese nationalism, Chen argued that China must look to the west to cleanse itself of superstition and autocracy. In his first school year, Mao befriended an older student, Xiao Zisheng; together they went on a walking tour of Hunan, begging and writing literary couplets to obtain food.

A popular student, in 1915 Mao was elected secretary of the Students Society. He organised the Association for Student Self-Government and led protests against school rules. Mao published his first article in New Youth in April 1917, instructing readers to increase their physical strength to serve the revolution. He joined the Society for the Study of Wang Fuzhi ( Chuan-shan Hsüeh-she), a revolutionary group founded by Changsha literati who wished to emulate the philosopher Wang Fuzhi. In spring 1917, he was elected to command the students' volunteer army, set up to defend the school from marauding soldiers. Increasingly interested in the techniques of war, he took a keen interest in World War I, and also began to develop a sense of solidarity with workers. Mao undertook feats of physical endurance with Xiao Zisheng and Cai Hesen, and with other young revolutionaries they formed the Renovation of the People Study Society in April 1918 to debate Chen Duxiu's ideas. Desiring personal and societal transformation, the Society gained 70-80 members, many of whom would later join the Communist Party. Mao graduated in June 1919, ranked third in the year.

Early revolutionary activity

Beijing, anarchism, and Marxism: 1917-1919

Mao moved to Beijing, where his mentor Yang Changji had taken a job at Peking University. Yang thought Mao exceptionally "intelligent and handsome", securing him a job as assistant to the university librarian Li Dazhao, who would become an early Chinese Communist. Li authored a series of New Youth articles on the October Revolution in Russia, during which the Communist Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin had seized power. Lenin was an advocate of the socio-political theory of Marxism, first developed by the German sociologists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Li's articles added Marxism to the doctrines in Chinese revolutionary movement.

Becoming "more and more radical", Mao was initially influenced by Peter Kropotkin's anarchism, which was the most prominent radical doctrine of the day. Chinese anarchists, such as Cai Yuanpei, Chancellor of Peking University, called for complete social revolution in social relations, family structure, and women's equality, rather than the simple change in the form of government called for by earlier revolutionaries. He joined Li's Study Group and "developed rapidly toward Marxism" during the winter of 1919. Paid a low wage, Mao lived in a cramped room with seven other Hunanese students, but believed that Beijing's beauty offered "vivid and living compensation". A number of his friends took advantage of the anarchist-organised Mouvement Travail-Études to study in France, but Mao declined, perhaps because of an inability to learn languages. Mao raised funds for the movement, however.

At the university, Mao was snubbed by other students due to his rural Hunanese accent and lowly position. He joined the university's Philosophy and Journalism Societies and attended lectures and seminars by the likes of Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, and Qian Xuantong. Mao's time in Beijing ended in the spring of 1919, when he travelled to Shanghai with friends who were preparing to leave for France. He did not return to Shaoshan, where his mother was terminally ill. She died in October 1919 and her husband died in January 1920.

New Culture and political protests: 1919-1920

On 4 May 1919, students in Beijing gathered at Tiananmen to protest the Chinese government's weak resistance to Japanese expansion in China. Patriots were outraged at the influence given to Japan in the Twenty-One Demands in 1915, the complicity of Duan Qirui's Beiyang government, and the betrayal of China in the Treaty of Versailles, wherein Japan was allowed to receive territories in Shandong which had been surrendered by Germany. These demonstrations ignited the nationwide May Fourth Movement and fuelled the New Culture Movement which blamed China's diplomatic defeats on social and cultural backwardness.

In Changsha, Mao had begun teaching history at the Xiuye Primary School and organising protests against the pro-Duan Governor of Hunan Province, Zhang Jingyao, popularly known as "Zhang the Venomous" due to his corrupt and violent rule. In late May, Mao co-founded the Hunanese Student Association with He Shuheng and Deng Zhongxia, organising a student strike for June and in July 1919 began production of a weekly radical magazine, Xiang River Review. Using vernacular language that would be understandable to the majority of China's populace, he advocated the need for a "Great Union of the Popular Masses", and strengthened trade unions able to wage non-violent revolution.[clarification needed ] His ideas were not Marxist, but heavily influenced by Kropotkin's concept of mutual aid.

Zhang banned the Student Association, but Mao continued publishing after assuming editorship of the liberal magazine New Hunan ( Xin Hunan) and authored articles in popular local newspaper . Several of these advocated feminist views, calling for the liberation of women in Chinese society; Mao was influenced by his forced arranged-marriage. In fall 1919, Mao organized a seminar in Changsha studying economic and political issues, as well as ways to unite the people, the feasibility of socialism, and issues regarding Confucianism. During this period, Mao involved himself in political work with manual laborers, setting up night schools and trade unions. In December 1919, Mao helped organise a general strike in Hunan, securing some concessions, but Mao and other student leaders felt threatened by Zhang, and Mao returned to Beijing, visiting the terminally ill Yang Changji. Mao found that his articles had achieved a level of fame among the revolutionary movement, and set about soliciting support in overthrowing Zhang. Coming across newly translated Marxist literature by Thomas Kirkup, Karl Kautsky, and Marx and Engels-notably The Communist Manifesto-he came under their increasing influence, but was still eclectic in his views.

Mao visited Tianjin, Jinan, and Qufu, before moving to Shanghai, where he worked as a laundryman and met Chen Duxiu, noting that Chen's adoption of Marxism "deeply impressed me at what was probably a critical period in my life". In Shanghai, Mao met an old teacher of his, Yi Peiji, a revolutionary and member of the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party, which was gaining increasing support and influence. Yi introduced Mao to General Tan Yankai, a senior KMT member who held the loyalty of troops stationed along the Hunanese border with Guangdong. Tan was plotting to overthrow Zhang, and Mao aided him by organising the Changsha students. In June 1920, Tan led his troops into Changsha, and Zhang fled. In the subsequent reorganisation of the provincial administration, Mao was appointed headmaster of the junior section of the First Normal School. Now receiving a large income, he married Yang Kaihui, daughter of Yang Changji, in the winter of 1920.

Founding the Chinese Communist Party: 1921-1922

The Chinese Communist Party was founded by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao in the Shanghai French Concession in 1921 as a study society and informal network. Mao set up a Changsha branch, also establishing a branch of the Socialist Youth Corps and a Cultural Book Society which opened a bookstore to propagate revolutionary literature throughout Hunan. He was involved in the movement for Hunan autonomy, in the hope that a Hunanese constitution would increase civil liberties and make his revolutionary activity easier. When the movement was successful in establishing provincial autonomy under a new warlord, Mao forgot his involvement.[clarification needed ] By 1921, small Marxist groups existed in Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Jinan; it was decided to hold a central meeting, which began in Shanghai on 23 July 1921. The first session of the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was attended by 13 delegates, Mao included. After the authorities sent a police spy to the congress, the delegates moved to a boat on South Lake near Jiaxing, in Zhejiang, to escape detection. Although Soviet and Comintern delegates attended, the first congress ignored Lenin's advice to accept a temporary alliance between the Communists and the "bourgeois democrats" who also advocated national revolution; instead they stuck to the orthodox Marxist belief that only the urban proletariat could lead a socialist revolution.

Mao was party secretary for Hunan stationed in Changsha, and to build the party there he followed a variety of tactics. In August 1921, he founded the Self-Study University, through which readers could gain access to revolutionary literature, housed in the premises of the Society for the Study of Wang Fuzhi, a Qing dynasty Hunanese philosopher who had resisted the Manchus. He joined the YMCA Mass Education Movement to fight illiteracy, though he edited the textbooks to include radical sentiments. He continued organising workers to strike against the administration of Hunan Governor Zhao Hengti. Yet labour issues remained central. The successful and famous Anyuan coal mines strikes (contrary to later Party historians) depended on both "proletarian" and "bourgeois" strategies. Liu Shaoqi and Li Lisan and Mao not only mobilised the miners, but formed schools and cooperatives and engaged local intellectuals, gentry, military officers, merchants, Red Gang dragon heads and even church clergy. Mao's labour organizing work in the Anyuan mines also involved his wife Yang Kaihui, who worked for women's rights, including literacy and educational issues, in the nearby peasant communities. Although Mao and Yang were not the originators of this political organizing method of combining labor organizing among male workers with a focus on women's rights issues in their communities, they were among the most effective at using this method. Mao's political organizing success in the Anyuan mines resulted in Chen Duxiu inviting him to become a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee.

Mao claimed that he missed the July 1922 Second Congress of the Communist Party in Shanghai because he lost the address. Adopting Lenin's advice, the delegates agreed to an alliance with the "bourgeois democrats" of the KMT for the good of the "national revolution". Communist Party members joined the KMT, hoping to push its politics leftward. Mao enthusiastically agreed with this decision, arguing for an alliance across China's socio-economic classes, and eventually rose to become propaganda chief of the KMT. Mao was a vocal anti-imperialist and in his writings he lambasted the governments of Japan, the UK and US, describing the latter as "the most murderous of hangmen".

Collaboration with the Kuomintang: 1922-1927

Mao giving a speech (no audio)

At the Third Congress of the Communist Party in Shanghai in June 1923, the delegates reaffirmed their commitment to working with the KMT. Supporting this position, Mao was elected to the Party Committee, taking up residence in Shanghai. At the First KMT Congress, held in Guangzhou in early 1924, Mao was elected an alternate member of the KMT Central Executive Committee, and put forward four resolutions to decentralise power to urban and rural bureaus. His enthusiastic support for the KMT earned him the suspicion of Li Li-san, his Hunan comrade.

In late 1924, Mao returned to Shaoshan, perhaps to recuperate from an illness. He found that the peasantry were increasingly restless and some had seized land from wealthy landowners to found communes. This convinced him of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, an idea advocated by the KMT leftists but not the Communists. Mao and many of his colleagues also proposed the end of cooperation with the KMT, which was rejected by the Comintern representative Mikhail Borodin. In the winter of 1925, Mao fled to Guangzhou after his revolutionary activities attracted the attention of Zhao's regional authorities. There, he ran the 6th term of the KMT's Peasant Movement Training Institute from May to September 1926. The Peasant Movement Training Institute under Mao trained cadre and prepared them for militant activity, taking them through military training exercises and getting them to study basic left-wing texts.

When party leader Sun Yat-sen died in May 1925, he was succeeded by Chiang Kai-shek, who moved to marginalise the left-KMT and the Communists. Mao nevertheless supported Chiang's National Revolutionary Army, who embarked on the Northern Expedition attack in 1926 on warlords. In the wake of this expedition, peasants rose up, appropriating the land of the wealthy landowners, who were in many cases killed. Such uprisings angered senior KMT figures, who were themselves landowners, emphasising the growing class and ideological divide within the revolutionary movement.

In March 1927, Mao appeared at the Third Plenum of the KMT Central Executive Committee in Wuhan, which sought to strip General Chiang of his power by appointing Wang Jingwei leader. There, Mao played an active role in the discussions regarding the peasant issue, defending a set of "Regulations for the Repression of Local Bullies and Bad Gentry", which advocated the death penalty or life imprisonment for anyone found guilty of counter-revolutionary activity, arguing that in a revolutionary situation, "peaceful methods cannot suffice". In April 1927, Mao was appointed to the KMT's five-member Central Land Committee, urging peasants to refuse to pay rent. Mao led another group to put together a "Draft Resolution on the Land Question", which called for the confiscation of land belonging to "local bullies and bad gentry, corrupt officials, militarists and all counter-revolutionary elements in the villages". Proceeding to carry out a "Land Survey", he stated that anyone owning over 30 mou (four and a half acres), constituting 13% of the population, were uniformly counter-revolutionary. He accepted that there was great variation in revolutionary enthusiasm across the country, and that a flexible policy of land redistribution was necessary. Presenting his conclusions at the Enlarged Land Committee meeting, many expressed reservations, some believing that it went too far, and others not far enough. Ultimately, his suggestions were only partially implemented.

Nanchang and Autumn Harvest Uprisings: 1927

Fresh from the success of the Northern Expedition against the warlords, Chiang turned on the Communists, who by now numbered in the tens of thousands across China. Chiang ignored the orders of the Wuhan-based left KMT government and marched on Shanghai, a city controlled by Communist militias. As the Communists awaited Chiang's arrival, he loosed the White Terror, massacring 5,000 with the aid of the Green Gang. In Beijing, 19 leading Communists were killed by Zhang Zuolin. That May, tens of thousands of Communists and those suspected of being communists were killed, and the CCP lost approximately 15,000 of its 25,000 members.

The CCP continued supporting the Wuhan KMT government, a position Mao initially supported, but by the time of the CCP's Fifth Congress he had changed his mind, deciding to stake all hope on the peasant militia. The question was rendered moot when the Wuhan government expelled all Communists from the KMT on 15 July. The CCP founded the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army of China, better known as the " Red Army", to battle Chiang. A battalion led by General Zhu De was ordered to take the city of Nanchang on 1 August 1927, in what became known as the Nanchang Uprising. They were initially successful, but were forced into retreat after five days, marching south to Shantou, and from there they were driven into the wilderness of Fujian. Mao was appointed commander-in-chief of the Red Army and led four regiments against Changsha in the Autumn Harvest Uprising, in the hope of sparking peasant uprisings across Hunan. On the eve of the attack, Mao composed a poem-the earliest of his to survive-titled "Changsha". His plan was to attack the KMT-held city from three directions on 9 September, but the Fourth Regiment deserted to the KMT cause, attacking the Third Regiment. Mao's army made it to Changsha, but could not take it; by 15 September, he accepted defeat and with 1000 survivors marched east to the Jinggang Mountains of Jiangxi.

Base in Jinggangshan: 1927-1928

革命不是請客吃飯，不是做文章，不是繪畫繡花，不能那樣雅緻，那樣從容不迫，文質彬彬，那樣溫良恭讓。革命是暴動，是一個階級推翻一個階級的暴烈的行動。

Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

The CCP Central Committee, hiding in Shanghai, expelled Mao from their ranks and from the Hunan Provincial Committee, as punishment for his "military opportunism", for his focus on rural activity, and for being too lenient with "bad gentry". The more orthodox Communists especially regarded the peasants as backward and ridiculed Mao's idea of mobilizing them. They nevertheless adopted three policies he had long championed: the immediate formation of workers' councils, the confiscation of all land without exemption, and the rejection of the KMT. Mao's response was to ignore them. He established a base in Jinggangshan City, an area of the Jinggang Mountains, where he united five villages as a self-governing state, and supported the confiscation of land from rich landlords, who were "re-educated" and sometimes executed. He ensured that no massacres took place in the region, and pursued a more lenient approach than that advocated by the Central Committee. In addition to land redistribution, Mao promoted literacy and non-hierarchical organizational relationships in Jinggangshan, transforming the area's social and economic life and attracted many local supporters.

Mao proclaimed that "Even the lame, the deaf and the blind could all come in useful for the revolutionary struggle", he boosted the army's numbers, incorporating two groups of bandits into his army, building a force of around 1,800 troops. He laid down rules for his soldiers: prompt obedience to orders, all confiscations were to be turned over to the government, and nothing was to be confiscated from poorer peasants. In doing so, he moulded his men into a disciplined, efficient fighting force.

When the enemy advances, we retreat.
When the enemy rests, we harass him.
When the enemy avoids a battle, we attack.
When the enemy retreats, we advance.

In spring 1928, the Central Committee ordered Mao's troops to southern Hunan, hoping to spark peasant uprisings. Mao was skeptical, but complied. They reached Hunan, where they were attacked by the KMT and fled after heavy losses. Meanwhile, KMT troops had invaded Jinggangshan, leaving them without a base. Wandering the countryside, Mao's forces came across a CCP regiment led by General Zhu De and Lin Biao; they united, and attempted to retake Jinggangshan. They were initially successful, but the KMT counter-attacked, and pushed the CCP back; over the next few weeks, they fought an entrenched guerrilla war in the mountains. The Central Committee again ordered Mao to march to south Hunan, but he refused, and remained at his base. Contrastingly, Zhu complied, and led his armies away. Mao's troops fended the KMT off for 25 days while he left the camp at night to find reinforcements. He reunited with the decimated Zhu's army, and together they returned to Jinggangshan and retook the base. There they were joined by a defecting KMT regiment and Peng Dehuai's Fifth Red Army. In the mountainous area they were unable to grow enough crops to feed everyone, leading to food shortages throughout the winter.

Jiangxi Soviet Republic of China: 1929-1934

In January 1929, Mao and Zhu evacuated the base with 2,000 men and a further 800 provided by Peng, and took their armies south, to the area around Tonggu and Xinfeng in Jiangxi. The evacuation led to a drop in morale, and many troops became disobedient and began thieving; this worried Li Lisan and the Central Committee, who saw Mao's army as lumpenproletariat, that were unable to share in proletariat class consciousness. In keeping with orthodox Marxist thought, Li believed that only the urban proletariat could lead a successful revolution, and saw little need for Mao's peasant guerrillas; he ordered Mao to disband his army into units to be sent out to spread the revolutionary message. Mao replied that while he concurred with Li's theoretical position, he would not disband his army nor abandon his base. Both Li and Mao saw the Chinese revolution as the key to world revolution, believing that a CCP victory would spark the overthrow of global imperialism and capitalism. In this, they disagreed with the official line of the Soviet government and Comintern. Officials in Moscow desired greater control over the CCP and removed Li from power by calling him to Russia for an inquest into his errors. They replaced him with Soviet-educated Chinese Communists, known as the " 28 Bolsheviks", two of whom, Bo Gu and Zhang Wentian, took control of the Central Committee. Mao disagreed with the new leadership, believing they grasped little of the Chinese situation, and he soon emerged as their key rival.

In February 1930, Mao created the Southwest Jiangxi Provincial Soviet Government in the region under his control. In November, he suffered emotional trauma after his second wife Yang Kaihui and sister were captured and beheaded by KMT general He Jian. Facing internal problems, members of the Jiangxi Soviet accused him of being too moderate, and hence anti-revolutionary. In December, they tried to overthrow Mao, resulting in the Futian incident, during which Mao's loyalists tortured many and executed between 2000 and 3000 dissenters. The CCP Central Committee moved to Jiangxi which it saw as a secure area. In November, it proclaimed Jiangxi to be the Soviet Republic of China, an independent Communist-governed state. Although he was proclaimed Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, Mao's power was diminished, as his control of the Red Army was allocated to Zhou Enlai. Meanwhile, Mao recovered from tuberculosis.

The KMT armies adopted a policy of encirclement and annihilation of the Red armies. Outnumbered, Mao responded with guerrilla tactics influenced by the works of ancient military strategists like Sun Tzu, but Zhou and the new leadership followed a policy of open confrontation and conventional warfare. In doing so, the Red Army successfully defeated the first and second encirclements. Angered at his armies' failure, Chiang Kai-shek personally arrived to lead the operation. He too faced setbacks and retreated to deal with the further Japanese incursions into China. As a result of the KMT's change of focus to the defence of China against Japanese expansionism, the Red Army was able to expand its area of control, eventually encompassing a population of 3 million. Mao proceeded with his land reform program. In November 1931 he announced the start of a "land verification project" which was expanded in June 1933. He also orchestrated education programs and implemented measures to increase female political participation. Chiang viewed the Communists as a greater threat than the Japanese and returned to Jiangxi, where he initiated the fifth encirclement campaign, which involved the construction of a concrete and barbed wire "wall of fire" around the state, which was accompanied by aerial bombardment, to which Zhou's tactics proved ineffective. Trapped inside, morale among the Red Army dropped as food and medicine became scarce. The leadership decided to evacuate.

Long March: 1934-1935

On 14 October 1934, the Red Army broke through the KMT line on the Jiangxi Soviet's south-west corner at Xinfeng with 85,000 soldiers and 15,000 party cadres and embarked on the " Long March". In order to make the escape, many of the wounded and the ill, as well as women and children, were left behind, defended by a group of guerrilla fighters whom the KMT massacred. The 100,000 who escaped headed to southern Hunan, first crossing the Xiang River after heavy fighting, and then the Wu River, in Guizhou where they took Zunyi in January 1935. Temporarily resting in the city, they held a conference; here, Mao was elected to a position of leadership, becoming Chairman of the Politburo, and de facto leader of both Party and Red Army, in part because his candidacy was supported by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Insisting that they operate as a guerrilla force, he laid out a destination: the Shenshi Soviet in Shaanxi, Northern China, from where the Communists could focus on fighting the Japanese. Mao believed that in focusing on the anti-imperialist struggle, the Communists would earn the trust of the Chinese people, who in turn would renounce the KMT.

From Zunyi, Mao led his troops to Loushan Pass, where they faced armed opposition but successfully crossed the river. Chiang flew into the area to lead his armies against Mao, but the Communists outmanoeuvred him and crossed the Jinsha River. Faced with the more difficult task of crossing the Tatu River, they managed it by fighting a battle over the Luding Bridge in May, taking Luding. In Moukung, Western Sichuan, they encountered the 50,000-strong CCP Fourth Front Army of Zhang Guotao (who had marched from the mountain ranges around Ma'anshan), and together proceeded to Maoerhkai and then Gansu. Zhang and Mao disagreed over what to do; the latter wished to proceed to Shaanxi, while Zhang wanted to retreat west to Tibet or Sikkim, far from the KMT threat. It was agreed that they would go their separate ways, with Zhu De joining Zhang. Mao's forces proceeded north, through hundreds of kilometres of grasslands, an area of quagmire where they were attacked by Manchu tribesman and where many soldiers succumbed to famine and disease. Finally reaching Shaanxi, they fought off both the KMT and an Islamic cavalry militia before crossing the Min Mountains and Mount Liupan and reaching the Shenshi Soviet; only 7,000-8,000 had survived. The Long March cemented Mao's status as the dominant figure in the party. In November 1935, he was named chairman of the Military Commission. From this point onward, Mao was the Communist Party's undisputed leader, even though he would not become party chairman until 1943.

Alliance with the Kuomintang: 1935-1940

Mao's troops arrived at the Yan'an Soviet during October 1935 and settled in Bao'an, until spring 1936. While there, they developed links with local communities, redistributed and farmed the land, offered medical treatment, and began literacy programs. Mao now commanded 15,000 soldiers, boosted by the arrival of He Long's men from Hunan and the armies of Zhu De and Zhang Guotao returned from Tibet. In February 1936, they established the North West Anti-Japanese Red Army University in Yan'an, through which they trained increasing numbers of new recruits. In January 1937, they began the "anti-Japanese expedition", that sent groups of guerrilla fighters into Japanese-controlled territory to undertake sporadic attacks. In May 1937, a Communist Conference was held in Yan'an to discuss the situation. Western reporters also arrived in the "Border Region" (as the Soviet had been renamed); most notable were Edgar Snow, who used his experiences as a basis for Red Star Over China, and Agnes Smedley, whose accounts brought international attention to Mao's cause.

Mao in 1938, writing On Protracted War

On the Long March, Mao's wife He Zizhen had been injured by a shrapnel wound to the head. She travelled to Moscow for medical treatment; Mao proceeded to divorce her and marry an actress, Jiang Qing. He Zizhen was reportedly "dispatched to a mental asylum in Moscow to make room" for Qing. Mao moved into a cave-house and spent much of his time reading, tending his garden and theorising. He came to believe that the Red Army alone was unable to defeat the Japanese, and that a Communist-led "government of national defence" should be formed with the KMT and other "bourgeois nationalist" elements to achieve this goal. Although despising Chiang Kai-shek as a "traitor to the nation", on 5 May, he telegrammed the Military Council of the Nanjing National Government proposing a military alliance, a course of action advocated by Stalin. Although Chiang intended to ignore Mao's message and continue the civil war, he was arrested by one of his own generals, Zhang Xueliang, in Xi'an, leading to the Xi'an Incident; Zhang forced Chiang to discuss the issue with the Communists, resulting in the formation of a United Front with concessions on both sides on 25 December 1937.

The Japanese had taken both Shanghai and Nanjing-resulting in the Nanjing Massacre, an atrocity Mao never spoke of all his life-and was pushing the Kuomintang government inland to Chongqing. The Japanese's brutality led to increasing numbers of Chinese joining the fight, and the Red Army grew from 50,000 to 500,000. In August 1938, the Red Army formed the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army, which were nominally under the command of Chiang's National Revolutionary Army. In August 1940, the Red Army initiated the Hundred Regiments Offensive, in which 400,000 troops attacked the Japanese simultaneously in five provinces. It was a military success that resulted in the death of 20,000 Japanese, the disruption of railways and the loss of a coal mine. From his base in Yan'an, Mao authored several texts for his troops, including Philosophy of Revolution, which offered an introduction to the Marxist theory of knowledge; Protracted Warfare, which dealt with guerrilla and mobile military tactics; and On New Democracy, which laid forward ideas for China's future.

Resuming civil war: 1940-1949

In 1944, the U.S. sent a special diplomatic envoy, called the Dixie Mission, to the Chinese Communist Party. The American soldiers who were sent to the mission were favourably impressed. The party seemed less corrupt, more unified, and more vigorous in its resistance to Japan than the Kuomintang. The soldiers confirmed to their superiors that the party was both strong and popular over a broad area. In the end of the mission, the contacts which the U.S. developed with the Chinese Communist Party led to very little. After the end of World War II, the U.S. continued their diplomatic and military assistance to Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT government forces against the People's Liberation Army (PLA) led by Mao Zedong during the civil war and abandoned the idea of a coalition government which would include the CCP. Likewise, the Soviet Union gave support to Mao by occupying north-eastern China, and secretly giving it to the Chinese communists in March 1946.

In 1948, under direct orders from Mao, the People's Liberation Army starved out the Kuomintang forces occupying the city of Changchun. At least 160,000 civilians are believed to have perished during the siege, which lasted from June until October. PLA lieutenant colonel Zhang Zhenglu, who documented the siege in his book White Snow, Red Blood, compared it to Hiroshima: "The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months." On 21 January 1949, Kuomintang forces suffered great losses in decisive battles against Mao's forces. In the early morning of 10 December 1949, PLA troops laid siege to Chongqing and Chengdu on mainland China, and Chiang Kai-shek fled from the mainland to Taiwan.

Leadership of China

Establishment of the People's Republic of China

Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China from the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tian'anmen) on 1 October 1949, and later that week declared "The Chinese people have stood up" (中国人民从此站起来了). Mao went to Moscow for long talks in the winter of 1949-50. Mao initiated the talks which focused on the political and economic revolution in China, foreign policy, railways, naval bases, and Soviet economic and technical aid. The resulting treaty reflected Stalin's dominance and his willingness to help Mao.

Mao's views as a Marxist were strongly influenced by Lenin, particularly with regard to the vanguardism. Mao believed that only the correct leadership of the Communist Party could advance China into socialism. Conversely, Mao also believed that mass movements and mass criticism were necessary in order to check the bureaucracy.

Mao pushed the Party to organise campaigns to reform society and extend control. These campaigns were given urgency in October 1950, when Mao made the decision to send the People's Volunteer Army, a special unit of the People's Liberation Army, into the Korean War and fight as well as to reinforce the armed forces of North Korea, the Korean People's Army, which had been in full retreat. The United States placed a trade embargo on the People's Republic as a result of its involvement in the Korean War, lasting until Richard Nixon's improvements of relations. At least 180 thousand Chinese troops died during the war.

Mao directed operations to the minutest detail. As the Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), he was also the Supreme Commander in Chief of the PLA and the People's Republic and Chairman of the Party. Chinese troops in Korea were under the overall command of then newly installed Premier Zhou Enlai, with General Peng Dehuai as field commander and political commissar.

Social reform

During the land reform campaigns, large numbers of landlords and rich peasants were beaten to death at mass meetings organised by the Communist Party as land was taken from them and given to poorer peasants, which significantly reduced economic inequality. The Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries targeted bureaucratic bourgeoisie, such as compradors, merchants and Kuomintang officials who were seen by the party as economic parasites or political enemies. In 1976, the U.S. State Department estimated as many as a million were killed in the land reform, and 800,000 killed in the counter-revolutionary campaign.

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were killed in attacks on "counter-revolutionaries" during the years 1950-1952. Because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution", the number of deaths range between 2 million and 5 million. In addition, at least 1.5 million people, perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million, were sent to "reform through labour" camps where many perished. Mao played a personal role in organising the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas, which were often exceeded. He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.

The Mao government is credited with eradicating both consumption and production of opium during the 1950s using unrestrained repression and social reform. Ten million addicts were forced into compulsory treatment, dealers were executed, and opium-producing regions were planted with new crops. Remaining opium production shifted south of the Chinese border into the Golden Triangle region.

Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns

Starting in 1951, Mao initiated two successive movements in an effort to rid urban areas of corruption by targeting wealthy capitalists and political opponents, known as the Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns. Whereas the three-anti campaign was a focused purge of government, industrial and party officials, the five-anti campaign set its sights slightly broader, targeting capitalist elements in general. Workers denounced their bosses, spouses turned on their spouses, and children informed on their parents; the victims were often humiliated at struggle sessions, where a targeted person would be verbally and physically abused until they confessed to crimes. Mao insisted that minor offenders be criticised and reformed or sent to labour camps, "while the worst among them should be shot". These campaigns took several hundred thousand additional lives, the vast majority via suicide.

Mao and Zhou Enlai meeting with the Dalai Lama (right) and Panchen Lama (left) to celebrate the Tibetan New Year, Beijing, 1955

In Shanghai, suicide by jumping from tall buildings became so commonplace that residents avoided walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them. Some biographers have pointed out that driving those perceived as enemies to suicide was a common tactic during the Mao-era. In his biography of Mao, Philip Short notes that Mao gave explicit instructions in the Yan'an Rectification Movement that "no cadre is to be killed" but in practice allowed security chief Kang Sheng to drive opponents to suicide and that "this pattern was repeated throughout his leadership of the People's Republic".

Five-year plans of China

Following the consolidation of power, Mao launched the first five-year plan (1953-1958), which emphasised rapid industrial development. Within industry, iron and steel, electric power, coal, heavy engineering, building materials, and basic chemicals were prioritised with the aim of constructing large and highly capital-intensive plants. Many of these plants were built with Soviet assistance and heavy industry grew rapidly. Agriculture, industry and trade was organised on a collective basis ( socialist cooperatives). This period marked the beginning of China's rapid industrialisation and it resulted in an enormous success.

Despite being initially sympathetic towards the reformist government of Imre Nagy, Mao feared the "reactionary restoration" in Hungary as the Hungarian crisis continued and became more hardline. Mao opposed the withdrawal of Soviet troops by asking Liu Shaoqi to inform the Soviet representatives to use military intervention against "Western imperialist-backed" protestors and Nagy's government. However, it was unclear if Mao's stance played a crucial role, if any role, in Khrushchev's decision to invade Hungary. It was also unclear if China was forced to conform to the Soviet position due to economic concerns and China's poor power projections compared to the USSR. Despite his disagreements with Moscow's hegemony in the Socialist Camp, Mao viewed the integrity of the international communist movement as more important than the national autonomy of the countries in the Soviet sphere of influence. The Hungarian Revolution also influenced Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign. Mao decided to soften his stance on Chinese intelligentsia and allow them to express their social dissatisfaction and criticisms of the errors of the government. Mao wanted to use this movement to prevent a similar uprising in China. However, as people in China began to criticize the CCP's policies and Mao's leadership following the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Mao cracked down the movement he initiated and compared it to the "counter-revolutionary" Hungarian Revolution.

Programs pursued during this time include the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao indicated his supposed willingness to consider different opinions about how China should be governed. Given the freedom to express themselves, liberal and intellectual Chinese began opposing the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. This was initially tolerated and encouraged. After a few months, Mao's government reversed its policy and persecuted those who had criticised the party, totalling perhaps 500,000, as well as those who were merely alleged to have been critical, in what is called the Anti-Rightist Movement. The movement led to the persecution of at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals and dissidents. Li Zhisui, Mao's physician, suggested that Mao had initially seen the policy as a way of weakening opposition to him within the party and that he was surprised by the extent of criticism and the fact that it came to be directed at his own leadership.

Military projects

United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower's threats during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis to use nuclear weapons against military targets in Fujian province prompted Mao to begin China's nuclear program. Under Mao's Two Bombs, One Satellite program, China developed the atomic and hydrogen bombs in record time[quantify ] and launched a satellite a few years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.

Project 523 ( Chinese: 523项目) is a code name for a 1967 secret military project of the People's Republic of China to find antimalarial medications. Named after the date the project launched, 23 May, it addressed malaria, an important threat in the Vietnam War. At the behest of Ho Chi Minh, Prime Minister of North Vietnam, Zhou Enlai convinced Mao Zedong to start the mass project "to keep [the] allies' troops combat-ready", as the meeting minutes put it. More than 500 Chinese scientists were recruited. The project was divided into three streams. The one for investigating traditional Chinese medicine discovered and led to the development of a class of new antimalarial drugs called artemisinins. Launched during and lasting throughout the Cultural Revolution, Project 523 was officially terminated in 1981.

Great Leap Forward

In January 1958, Mao launched the second five-year plan, known as the Great Leap Forward, a plan intended to turn China from an agrarian nation to an industrialised one and as an alternative model for economic growth to the Soviet model focusing on heavy industry that was advocated by others in the party. Under this economic program, the relatively small agricultural collectives that had been formed to date were rapidly merged into far larger people's communes, and many of the peasants were ordered to work on massive infrastructure projects and on the production of iron and steel. Some private food production was banned, and livestock and farm implements were brought under collective ownership.

Under the Great Leap Forward, Mao and other party leaders ordered the implementation of a variety of unproven and unscientific new agricultural techniques by the new communes. The combined effect of the diversion of labour to steel production and infrastructure projects, and cyclical natural disasters led to an approximately 15% drop in grain production in 1959 followed by a further 10% decline in 1960 and no recovery in 1961.

In an effort to win favour with their superiors and avoid being purged, each layer in the party exaggerated the amount of grain produced under them. Based upon the falsely reported success, party cadres were ordered to requisition a disproportionately high amount of that fictitious harvest for state use, primarily for use in the cities and urban areas but also for export. The result, compounded in some areas by drought and in others by floods, was that farmers were left with little food for themselves and many millions starved to death in the Great Chinese Famine. The people of urban areas in China were given food stamps each month, but the people of rural areas were expected to grow their own crops and give some of the crops back to the government. The death count in rural parts of China surpassed the deaths in the urban centers. Additionally, the Chinese government continued to export food that could have been allocated to the country's starving citizens. The famine was a direct cause of the death of some 30 million Chinese peasants between 1959 and 1962. Furthermore, many children who became malnourished during years of hardship died after the Great Leap Forward came to an end in 1962.

In late autumn 1958, Mao condemned the practices that were being used during Great Leap Forward such as forcing peasants to do exhausting labour without enough food or rest which resulted in epidemics and starvation. He also acknowledged that anti-rightist campaigns were a major cause of "production at the expense of livelihood." He refused to abandon the Great Leap Forward to solve these difficulties, but he did demand that they be confronted. After the July 1959 clash at Lushan Conference with Peng Dehuai, Mao launched a new anti-rightist campaign along with the radical policies that he previously abandoned. It wasn't until the spring of 1960, that Mao would again express concern about abnormal deaths and other abuses, but he did not move to stop them. Bernstein concludes that the Chairman "wilfully ignored the lessons of the first radical phase for the sake of achieving extreme ideological and developmental goals".

Jasper Becker notes that Mao was dismissive of reports he received of food shortages in the countryside and refused to change course, believing that peasants were lying and that rightists and kulaks were hoarding grain. He refused to open state granaries, and instead launched a series of "anti-grain concealment" drives that resulted in numerous purges and suicides. Other violent campaigns followed in which party leaders went from village to village in search of hidden food reserves, and not only grain, as Mao issued quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks and eggs. Many peasants accused of hiding food were tortured and beaten to death.

Mao stepped down as President of China on 27 April 1959; he retained other top positions such as Chairman of the Communist Party and of the Central Military Commission. The Presidency was transferred to Liu Shaoqi. Mao was eventually forced to abandon the policy in 1962, and he lost political power to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

The Great Leap Forward was a tragedy for the vast majority of the Chinese. Although the steel quotas were officially reached, almost all of the supposed steel made in the countryside was iron, as it had been made from assorted scrap metal in home-made furnaces with no reliable source of fuel such as coal. This meant that proper smelting conditions could not be achieved. According to Zhang Rongmei, a geometry teacher in rural Shanghai during the Great Leap Forward: "We took all the furniture, pots, and pans we had in our house, and all our neighbours did likewise. We put everything in a big fire and melted down all the metal".[citation needed ] The worst of the famine was steered towards enemies of the state. Jasper Becker explains: "The most vulnerable section of China's population, around five percent, were those whom Mao called ' enemies of the people'. Anyone who had in previous campaigns of repression been labeled a 'black element' was given the lowest priority in the allocation of food. Landlords, rich peasants, former members of the nationalist regime, religious leaders, rightists, counter-revolutionaries and the families of such individuals died in the greatest numbers."

According to official Chinese statistics for Second Five-Year Plan (1958-1962):" industrial output value value had doubled; the gross value of agricultural products increased by 35 percent; steel production in 1962 was between 10.6 million tons or 12 million tons; investment in capital construction rose to 40 percent from 35 percent in the First Five-Year Plan period; the investment in capital construction was doubled; and the average income of workers and farmers increased by up to 30 percent."

At a large Communist Party conference in Beijing in January 1962, dubbed the " Seven Thousand Cadres Conference", State Chairman Liu Shaoqi denounced the Great Leap Forward, attributing the project to widespread famine in China. The overwhelming majority of delegates expressed agreement, but Defense Minister Lin Biao staunchly defended Mao. A brief period of liberalisation followed while Mao and Lin plotted a comeback. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rescued the economy by disbanding the people's communes, introducing elements of private control of peasant smallholdings and importing grain from Canada and Australia to mitigate the worst effects of famine.

At the Lushan Conference in July/August 1959, several ministers expressed concern that the Great Leap Forward had not proved as successful as planned. The most direct of these was Minister of Defence and Korean War veteran General Peng Dehuai. Following Peng's criticism of the Great Leap Forward, Mao orchestrated a purge of Peng and his supporters, stifling criticism of the Great Leap policies. Senior officials who reported the truth of the famine to Mao were branded as "right opportunists." A campaign against right-wing opportunism was launched and resulted in party members and ordinary peasants being sent to prison labour camps where many would subsequently die in the famine. Years later the CCP would conclude that as many as six million people were wrongly punished in the campaign.

The number of deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward is deeply controversial. Until the mid-1980s, when official census figures were finally published by the Chinese Government, little was known about the scale of the disaster in the Chinese countryside, as the handful of Western observers allowed access during this time had been restricted to model villages where they were deceived into believing that the Great Leap Forward had been a great success. There was also an assumption that the flow of individual reports of starvation that had been reaching the West, primarily through Hong Kong and Taiwan, must have been localised or exaggerated as China was continuing to claim record harvests and was a net exporter of grain through the period. Because Mao wanted to pay back early to the Soviets debts totalling 1.973 billion yuan from 1960 to 1962, exports increased by 50%, and fellow Communist regimes in North Korea, North Vietnam and Albania were provided grain free of charge.

Censuses were carried out in China in 1953, 1964 and 1982. The first attempt to analyse this data to estimate the number of famine deaths was carried out by American demographer Dr. Judith Banister and published in 1984. Given the lengthy gaps between the censuses and doubts over the reliability of the data, an accurate figure is difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, Banister concluded that the official data implied that around 15 million excess deaths incurred in China during 1958-61, and that based on her modelling of Chinese demographics during the period and taking account of assumed under-reporting during the famine years, the figure was around 30 million. Hu Yaobang, a high-ranking official of the CCP, states that 20 million people died according to official government statistics. Yang Jisheng, a former Xinhua News Agency reporter who had privileged access and connections available to no other scholars, estimates a death toll of 36 million. Frank Dikötter estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths attributable to the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962. Various other sources have put the figure at between 20 and 46 million.

Split from Soviet Union

On the international front, the period was dominated by the further isolation of China. The Sino-Soviet split resulted in Nikita Khrushchev's withdrawal of all Soviet technical experts and aid from the country. The split concerned the leadership of world communism. The USSR had a network of Communist parties it supported; China now created its own rival network to battle it out for local control of the left in numerous countries. Lorenz M. Lüthi writes: "The Sino-Soviet split was one of the key events of the Cold War, equal in importance to the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Second Vietnam War, and Sino-American rapprochement. The split helped to determine the framework of the Second Cold War in general, and influenced the course of the Second Vietnam War in particular."

The split resulted from Khrushchev's more moderate Soviet leadership after the death of Stalin in March 1953. Only Albania openly sided with China, thereby forming an alliance between the two countries which would last until after Mao's death in 1976. Warned that the Soviets had nuclear weapons, Mao minimised the threat. Becker says that "Mao believed that the bomb was a 'paper tiger', declaring to Khrushchev that it would not matter if China lost 300 million people in a nuclear war: the other half of the population would survive to ensure victory". Struggle against Soviet revisionism and U.S. imperialism was an important aspect of Mao's attempt to direct the revolution in the right direction.

In the late 1950s, Mao wrote reading notes responding to the Soviet Book Political Economy: A Textbook and essays (A Critique of Soviet Economics) responding to Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. These texts reflect Mao's views that the USSR was becoming alienated from the masses and distorting socialist development.

According to historian Mingjiang Li, Mao deliberately escalated Sino-Soviet diplomatic tensions as part of his attempt to reassert his domestic political power and limit that of his rivals by showcasing his commitment to revolution and his hardline stance against what he deemed Soviet revisionism.

Third Front

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, China's leadership slowed the pace of industrialization. It invested more on in China's coastal regions and focused on the production of consumer goods. Preliminary drafts of the Third Five Year Plan contained no provision for developing large scale industry in China's interior. After an April 1964 General Staff report concluded that the concentration of China's industry in its major coastal cities made it vulnerable to attack by foreign powers, Mao argued for the development of basic industry and national defense industry in protected locations in China's interior. Although other key leaders did not initially support the idea, the 2 August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident increased fears of a potential invasion by the United States and crystallized support for Mao's industrialization proposal, which came to be known as the Third Front. Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Mao's own concerns of invasion by the United States increased. He wrote to central cadres, "A war is going to break out. I need to reconsider my actions" and pushed even harder for the creation of the Third Front.

The secretive Third Front construction involved massive projects including extensive railroad infrastructure like the Chengdu-Kunming line, aerospace industry including satellite launch facilities, and steel production industry including Panzhihua Iron and Steel.

Development of the Third Front slowed in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution, but accelerated again after the Sino-Soviet border conflict at Zhenbao Island, which increased the perceived risk of Soviet Invasion. Third Front construction again decreased after United States President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China and the resulting rapprochement between the United States and China. When Reform and Opening up began after Mao's death, China began to gradually wind down Third Front projects. The Third Front distributed physical and human capital around the country, ultimately decreased regional disparities and created favorable conditions for later market development.

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

During the early 1960s, Mao became concerned with the nature of post-1959 China. He saw that the revolution and Great Leap Forward had replaced the old ruling elite with a new one. He was concerned that those in power were becoming estranged from the people they were to serve. Mao believed that a revolution of culture would unseat and unsettle the "ruling class" and keep China in a state of " continuous revolution" that, theoretically, would serve the interests of the majority, rather than a tiny and privileged elite. State Chairman Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping favoured the idea that Mao be removed from actual power as China's head of state and government but maintain his ceremonial and symbolic role as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, with the party upholding all of his positive contributions to the revolution. They attempted to marginalise Mao by taking control of economic policy and asserting themselves politically as well. Many claim that Mao responded to Liu and Deng's movements by launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. Some scholars, such as Mobo Gao, claim the case for this is overstated. Others, such as Frank Dikötter, hold that Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to wreak revenge on those who had dared to challenge him over the Great Leap Forward.

The Cultural Revolution led to the destruction of much of China's traditional cultural heritage and the imprisonment of a huge number of Chinese citizens, as well as the creation of general economic and social chaos in the country. Millions of lives were ruined during this period, as the Cultural Revolution pierced into every part of Chinese life, depicted by such Chinese films as , The Blue Kite and Farewell My Concubine. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. This included prominent figures such as Liu Shaoqi.

When Mao was informed of such losses, particularly that people had been driven to suicide, he is alleged to have commented: "People who try to commit suicide-don't attempt to save them! ... China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people." The authorities allowed the Red Guards to abuse and kill opponents of the regime. Said Xie Fuzhi, national police chief: "Don't say it is wrong of them to beat up bad persons: if in anger they beat someone to death, then so be it." In August and September 1966, there were a reported 1,772 people murdered by the Red Guards in Beijing alone.

It was during this period that Mao chose Lin Biao, who seemed to echo all of Mao's ideas, to become his successor. Lin was later officially named as Mao's successor. By 1971, a divide between the two men had become apparent. Official history in China states that Lin was planning a military coup or an assassination attempt on Mao. Lin Biao died on 13 September 1971, in a plane crash over the air space of Mongolia, presumably as he fled China, probably anticipating his arrest. The CCP declared that Lin was planning to depose Mao and posthumously expelled Lin from the party. At this time, Mao lost trust in many of the top CCP figures. The highest-ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed he had a conversation with Nicolae Ceaușescu, who told him about a plot to kill Mao with the help of Lin Biao organised by the KGB.

In 1969, Mao declared the Cultural Revolution to be over, although various historians in and outside of China mark the end of the Cultural Revolution-as a whole or in part-in 1976, following Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four. The Central Committee in 1981 officially declared the Cultural Revolution a "severe setback" for the PRC. It is often looked at in all scholarly circles as a greatly disruptive period for China. Despite the pro-poor rhetoric of Mao's regime, his economic policies led to substantial poverty.

Historian Daniel Leese writes that in the 1950s, Mao's personality was hardening: "The impression of Mao's personality that emerges from the literature is disturbing. It reveals a certain temporal development from a down-to-earth leader, who was amicable when uncontested and occasionally reflected on the limits of his power, to an increasingly ruthless and self-indulgent dictator. Mao's preparedness to accept criticism decreased continuously."

State visits

During his leadership, Mao traveled outside China on only two occasions, both of which were state visits to the Soviet Union. His first visit abroad was in December 1949 to celebrate the 70th birthday of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Moscow, which was also attended by East German Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers Walter Ulbricht and Mongolian communist General Secretary Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal. The second visit to Moscow in November 1957 was a two-week state visit of which the highlights included Mao's attendance at the 40th anniversary ( Ruby Jubilee) celebrations of the October Revolution (he attended the annual military parade of the Moscow Garrison on Red Square as well as a banquet in the Moscow Kremlin) and the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, where he met with other communist leaders such as North Korea's Kim Il Sung and Albania's Enver Hoxha. When Mao stepped down as head of state on 27 April 1959, further diplomatic state visits and travels abroad to the Soviet Union and other countries were undertaken by either President Liu Shaoqi, Premier Zhou Enlai or Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping rather than Mao personally.[citation needed ]

Death and aftermath

Mao's health declined in his last years, probably aggravated by his chain-smoking. It became a state secret that he suffered from multiple lung and heart ailments during his later years. There are unconfirmed reports that he possibly had Parkinson's disease in addition to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. His final public appearance-and the last known photograph of him alive-had been on 27 May 1976, when he met the visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He suffered two major heart attacks, one in March and another in July, then a third on 5 September, rendering him an invalid. He died nearly four days later, at 00:10 on 9 September 1976, at the age of 82. The Communist Party delayed the announcement of his death until 16:00, when a national radio broadcast announced the news and appealed for party unity.

Mao's embalmed body, draped in the CCP flag, lay in state at the Great Hall of the People for one week. One million Chinese filed past to pay their final respects, many crying openly or displaying sadness, while foreigners watched on television. Mao's official portrait hung on the wall with a banner reading: "Carry on the cause left by Chairman Mao and carry on the cause of proletarian revolution to the end". On 17 September the body was taken in a minibus to the 305 Hospital, where his internal organs were preserved in formaldehyde.

On 18 September, guns, sirens, whistles and horns across China were simultaneously blown and a mandatory three-minute silence was observed. Tiananmen Square was packed with millions of people and a military band played " The Internationale". Hua Guofeng concluded the service with a 20-minute-long eulogy atop Tiananmen Gate. Despite Mao's request to be cremated, his body was later permanently put on display in the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, in order for the Chinese nation to pay its respects.

On 27 June 1981, the communist party's Central Committee adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China,which assessed the legacy of the Mao era and the party's priorities going forward. The Resolution describes setbacks during the period 1957 to 1964 (although it generally affirms this period) and major mistakes beginning in 1965, attributing Mao's errors to individualist tendencies which arose when he departed from the collective view of the leadership. Regarding Mao's legacy, the Resolution concludes Mao's contributions to the Chinese Revolution far outweigh his mistakes.

Mao remains a controversial figure and there is little agreement over his legacy both in China and abroad. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential individuals in the twentieth century. He is also known as a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, poet, and visionary. He was credited and praised for driving imperialism out of China, having unified China and for ending the previous decades of civil war. He is also credited with having improved the status of women in China and for improving literacy and education. In December 2013, a poll from the state-run Global Times indicated that roughly 85% of the 1,045 respondents surveyed felt that Mao's achievements outweighed his mistakes. It is said in China that Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.

His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his 27-year reign, according to some sources, more than any other 20th-century leader; estimates of the number of people who died under his regime range from 40 million to as many as 80 million, done through starvation, persecution, prison labour in , and mass executions. Mao rarely gave direct instruction for peoples' physical elimination. According to biographer Philip Short, the overwhelming majority of those killed by Mao's policies were unintended casualties of famine, while the other three or four million, in Mao's view, were necessary victims in the struggle to transform China. Mao's China is described as an autocratic and totalitarian regime responsible for mass repression, as well as the destruction of religious and cultural artifacts and sites (particularly during the Cultural Revolution).

China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million under his rule while the government did not strictly enforce its family planning policy, leading his successors such as Deng Xiaoping to take a strict one-child policy to cope with human overpopulation. Mao's revolutionary tactics continue to be used by insurgents, and his political ideology continues to be embraced by many Communist organisations around the world.

In mainland China, Mao is revered by many members and supporters of the Chinese Communist Party and respected by a great number of the general population. Mobo Gao, in his 2008 book The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, credits him for raising the average life expectancy from 35 in 1949 to 63 by 1975, bringing "unity and stability to a country that had been plagued by civil wars and foreign invasions", and laying the foundation for China to "become the equal of the great global powers". Gao also lauds him for carrying out massive land reform, promoting the status of women, improving popular literacy, and positively "transform(ing) Chinese society beyond recognition." Mao is credited for boosting literacy (only 20% of the population could read in 1949, compared to 65.5% thirty years later), doubling life expectancy, a near doubling of the population, and developing China's industry and infrastructure, paving the way for its position as a world power.

Mao also has Chinese critics. Opposition to him can lead to censorship or professional repercussions in mainland China, and is often done in private settings such as the Internet. When a video of Bi Fujian, a television host, insulting Mao at a private dinner in 2015 went viral, Bi garnered the support of Weibo users, with 80% of them saying in a poll that Bi should not apologize amidst backlash from state affiliates. In the West, Mao has a bad reputation. He is known for the deaths during the Great Leap Forward and for persecutions during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese citizens are aware of Mao's mistakes, but nonetheless, many see Mao as a national hero. He is seen as someone who successfully liberated the country from Japanese occupation and from Western imperialist exploitation dating back to the Opium Wars. Between 2015 and 2018, 70 interviewees in China were asked about the Maoist era. Their responses mixed nostalgia with trauma. Life used to be simpler and had clear meaning; people trusted and helped one another, and inequality was minimal. They also acknowledged the negative experiences, however, and said their "material life" was poor.

On 25 December 2008, China opened the Mao Zedong Square to visitors in his home town of central Hunan Province to mark the 115th anniversary of his birth.

There continue to be disagreements on Mao's legacy. Former party official Su Shachi has opined that "he was a great historical criminal, but he was also a great force for good." In a similar vein, journalist Liu Binyan has described Mao as "both monster and a genius." Li Rui, Mao's personal secretary and Communist Party comrade, opined that "Mao's way of thinking and governing was terrifying. He put no value on human life. The deaths of others meant nothing to him."

Chen Yun, a leading Chinese Communist Party official under Mao and Deng Xiaoping remarked "Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?" Deng Xiaoping said "I should remind you that Chairman Mao dedicated most of his life to China, that he saved the party and the revolution in their most critical moments, that, in short, his contribution was so great that, without him, the Chinese people would have had a much harder time finding the right path out of the darkness. We also shouldn't forget that it was Chairman Mao who combined the teachings of Marx and Lenin with the realities of Chinese history-that it was he who applied those principles, creatively, not only to politics but to philosophy, art, literature, and military strategy."

In their 2013 biography, Mao: The Real Story, Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine asserted that Mao was both "a successful creator and ultimately an evil destroyer" but also argued that he was a complicated figure who should not be lionised as a saint or reduced to a demon, as he "indeed tried his best to bring about prosperity and gain international respect for his country." They also remarked on Mao's legacy: "A talented Chinese politician, an historian, a poet and philosopher, an all-powerful dictator and energetic organizer, a skillful diplomat and utopian socialist, the head of the most populous state, resting on his laurels, but at the same time an indefatigable revolutionary who sincerely attempted to refashion the way of life and consciousness of millions of people, a hero of national revolution and a bloody social reformer-this is how Mao goes down in history. The scale of his life was too grand to be reduced to a single meaning."

Mao's English interpreter Sidney Rittenberg wrote in his memoir The Man Who Stayed Behind that whilst Mao "was a great leader in history", he was also "a great criminal because, not that he wanted to, not that he intended to, but in fact, his wild fantasies led to the deaths of tens of millions of people." Dikötter argues that CCP leaders "glorified violence and were inured to massive loss of life. And all of them shared an ideology in which the end justified the means. In 1962, having lost millions of people in his province, Li Jingquan compared the Great Leap Forward to the Long March in which only one in ten had made it to the end: 'We are not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the backbone.'" Regarding the large-scale irrigation projects, Dikötter stresses that, in spite of Mao being in a good position to see the human cost, they continued unabated for several years, and ultimately claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of exhausted villagers.

Some historians argue that Mao was "one of the great tyrants of the twentieth century", and a dictator comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, with a death toll surpassing both. Mao was frequently likened to the First Emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, and personally enjoyed the comparison. During a speech to party cadre in 1958, Mao said he had far outdone Qin Shi Huang in his policy against intellectuals: "What did he amount to? He only buried alive 460 scholars, while we buried 46,000. In our suppression of the counter-revolutionaries, did we not kill some counter-revolutionary intellectuals? I once debated with the democratic people: You accuse us of acting like Ch'in-shih-huang, but you are wrong; we surpass him 100 times." As a result of such tactics, critics have compared it to Nazi Germany. Philip Short reject comparisons by saying that whereas the deaths caused by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were largely systematic and deliberate, the overwhelming majority of the deaths under Mao were unintended consequences of famine. Short stated that landlord class were not exterminated as a people due to Mao's belief in redemption through thought reform, and compared Mao with 19th-century Chinese reformers who challenged China's traditional beliefs in the era of China's clashes with Western colonial powers. Short writes that "Mao's tragedy and his grandeur were that he remained to the end in thrall to his own revolutionary dreams. ... He freed China from the straitjacket of its Confucian past, but the bright Red future he promised turned out to be a sterile purgatory."

The United States placed a trade embargo on the People's Republic as a result of its involvement in the Korean War, lasting until Richard Nixon decided that developing relations with the PRC would be useful in dealing with the Soviet Union. The television series stated: "[Mao] turned China from a feudal backwater into one of the most powerful countries in the World. ... The Chinese system he overthrew was backward and corrupt; few would argue the fact that he dragged China into the 20th century. But at a cost in human lives that is staggering." In the book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know published in 2010, Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom of the University of California, Irvine compares China's relationship to Mao to Americans' remembrance of Andrew Jackson; both countries regard the leaders in a positive light, despite their respective roles in devastating policies. Jackson forcibly moved Native Americans through the Trail of Tears, resulting in thousands of deaths, while Mao was at the helm during the violent years of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

John King Fairbank remarked, "The simple facts of Mao's career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28, with a dozen others, to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land-history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin-no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung's scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China." In China: A New History, Fairbank and Goldman assessed Mao's legacy: "Future historians may conclude that Mao's role was to try to destroy the age-old bifurcation of China between a small educated ruling stratum and the vast mass of common people. We do not yet know how far he succeeded. The economy was developing, but it was left to his successors to create a new political structure."

Stuart R. Schram said in The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung (1989), "Eternal rebel, refusing to be bound by the laws of God or man, nature or Marxism, he led his people for three decades in pursuit of a vision initially noble, which turned increasingly into a mirage, and then into a nightmare. Was he a Faust or Prometheus, attempting the impossible for the sake of humanity, or a despot of unbridled ambition, drunk with his own power and his own cleverness?" Schram wrestled with the problem of making any overall assessment of Mao. Schram said "I agree with the current Chinese view that Mao's merits outweighed his faults, but it is not easy to put a figure on the positive and negative aspects. How does one weigh, for example, the good fortune of hundreds of millions of peasants in getting land against the execution, in the course of land reform and the 'Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries,' or in other contexts, of millions, some of whom certainly deserved to die, but others of whom undoubtedly did not? How does one balance the achievements in economic development during the first Five-Year Plan, or during the whole twenty-seven years of Mao's leadership after 1949, against the starvation which came in the wake of the misguided enthusiasm of the Great Leap Forward, or the bloody shambles of the Cultural Revolution?" Schram added, "In the last analysis, however, I am more interested in the potential future impact of his thought than in sending Mao as an individual to Heaven or to Hell."

Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic (3rd ed., 1999) assessed Mao's legacy: "It is the blots on the Maoist record, especially the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, that are now most deeply imprinted on our political and historical consciousness. That these adventures were failures colossal in scope, and that they took an enormous human toll, cannot and should not be forgotten. But future historians, without ignoring the failures and the crimes, will surely record the Maoist era in the history of the People's Republic (however else they may judge it) as one of the great modernizing epochs in world history, and one that brought great social and human benefits to the Chinese people."

Delia Davin, in Mao: A Very Short Introduction (2013), remarked: "The consequences of Mao's actions were inevitably in proportion to the prodigious power he exercised, and the enormous population he ruled over. As a unifier and modernizer his achievements were immense, but his errors caused appalling suffering on a scale that is difficult to grasp. His utopian dreams, his periodic refusal to engage with reality, his ruthlessness, and his determination to win imposed terrible suffering on the Chinese people and cost millions of them their lives. He was ready to accept huge costs because he believed that suffering and death were inevitable in the pursuit of his cause. Mao's revolution improved life for those who survived it, bringing the economic development, education, and modernization on which subsequent progress was built. It also reunified China and made the country a force to be reckoned with in the world. He left an indelible mark on history."

Third World

The ideology of Maoism has influenced many Communists, mainly in the Third World, including revolutionary movements such as Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Peru's Shining Path, and the Nepalese revolutionary movement. Under the influence of Mao's agrarian socialism and Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge conceived of his disastrous Year Zero policies which purged the nation of its teachers, artists and intellectuals and emptied its cities, resulting in the Cambodian genocide. The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, also claims Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as its ideology, as do other Communist Parties around the world which are part of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. China itself has moved sharply away from Maoism since Mao's death, and most people outside of China who describe themselves as Maoist regard the Deng Xiaoping reforms to be a betrayal of Maoism, in line with Mao's view of " capitalist roaders" within the Communist Party. As the Chinese government instituted market economic reforms starting in the late 1970s and as later Chinese leaders took power, less recognition was given to the status of Mao. This accompanied a decline in state recognition of Mao in later years in contrast to previous years when the state organised numerous events and seminars commemorating Mao's 100th birthday. Nevertheless, the Chinese government has never officially repudiated the tactics of Mao. Deng Xiaoping, who was opposed to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, stated that "when we write about his mistakes we should not exaggerate, for otherwise we shall be discrediting Chairman Mao Zedong and this would mean discrediting our party and state."

The July 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty increased Chinese concerns over a US-Soviet re-alignment against China and prompted Mao's articulation of the "Two Intermediate Zones" concept. Mao viewed Africa and Latin America as the "First Intermediate Zone," in which China's status as a non-white power might enable it to compete with and supersede both United States and Soviet Union influence. The other intermediate zone was the USA's wealthier allies in Europe.

Military strategy

Mao's military writings continue to have a large amount of influence both among those who seek to create an insurgency and those who seek to crush one, especially in manners of guerrilla warfare, at which Mao is popularly regarded as a genius. The Nepali Maoists were highly influenced by Mao's views on protracted war, new democracy, support of masses, permanency of revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Mao's major contribution to the military science is his theory of People's War, with not only guerrilla warfare but more importantly, Mobile Warfare methodologies. Mao had successfully applied Mobile Warfare in the Korean War, and was able to encircle, push back and then halt the UN forces in Korea, despite the clear superiority of UN firepower. In 1957, Mao also gave the impression that he might even welcome a nuclear war.

Literature

Mao's poems and writings are frequently cited by both Chinese and non-Chinese. The official Chinese translation of President Barack Obama's inauguration speech used a famous line from one of Mao's poems. In the mid-1990s, Mao's picture began to appear on all new renminbi currency from the People's Republic of China. This was officially instituted as an anti-counterfeiting measure as Mao's face is widely recognised in contrast to the generic figures that appear in older currency. On 13 March 2006, the People's Daily reported that a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference proposed to include the portraits of Sun Yat-sen and Deng Xiaoping in the renminbi.

Public image

Mao gave contradicting statements on the subject of personality cults. In 1955, as a response to the Khrushchev Report that criticised Joseph Stalin, Mao stated that personality cults are "poisonous ideological survivals of the old society", and reaffirmed China's commitment to collective leadership. At the 1958 party congress in Chengdu, Mao expressed support for the personality cults of people whom he labelled as genuinely worthy figures, not those that expressed "blind worship".

In 1962, Mao proposed the Socialist Education Movement (SEM) in an attempt to educate the peasants to resist the "temptations" of feudalism and the sprouts of capitalism that he saw re-emerging in the countryside from Liu's economic reforms. Large quantities of politicised art were produced and circulated-with Mao at the centre. Numerous posters, badges, and musical compositions referenced Mao in the phrase "Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts" (毛主席是我們心中的紅太陽; Máo Zhǔxí Shì Wǒmen Xīnzhōng De Hóng Tàiyáng ) and a "Savior of the people" (人民的大救星; Rénmín De Dà Jiùxīng ).

In October 1966, Mao's Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, known as the Little Red Book, was published. Party members were encouraged to carry a copy with them, and possession was almost mandatory as a criterion for membership. According to Mao: The Unknown Story by Jun Yang, the mass publication and sale of this text contributed to making Mao the only millionaire created in 1950s China (332). Over the years, Mao's image became displayed almost everywhere, present in homes, offices and shops. His quotations were typographically emphasised by putting them in boldface or red type in even the most obscure writings. Music from the period emphasised Mao's stature, as did children's rhymes. The phrase "Long Live Chairman Mao for ten thousand years" was commonly heard during the era.

Visitors wait in line to enter the Mao Zedong Mausoleum.

Mao also has a presence in China and around the world in popular culture, where his face adorns everything from T-shirts to coffee cups. Mao's granddaughter, Kong Dongmei, defended the phenomenon, stating that "it shows his influence, that he exists in people's consciousness and has influenced several generations of Chinese people's way of life. Just like Che Guevara's image, his has become a symbol of revolutionary culture." Since 1950, over 40 million people have visited Mao's birthplace in Shaoshan, Hunan.

A 2016 survey by YouGov survey found that 42% of American millennials have never heard of Mao. According to the CIS poll, in 2019 only 21% of Australian millennials were familiar with Mao Zedong. In 2020s China, members of Generation Z are embracing Mao's revolutionary ideas, including violence against the capitalist class, amid rising social inequality, long working hours, and decreasing economic opportunities. As of the early 2020s, surveys conducted on Zhihu frequently rank Mao as one of the greatest and most influential figures in Chinese history.

Mao's ancestors were:

Wén Qīmèi (, born Xiangxiang 1867, died 1919), mother. She was illiterate and a devout Buddhist. She was a descendant of Wen Tianxiang.

Máo Ēnpǔ (, born 1846, died 1904), paternal grandfather

Liú (, given name not recorded, born 1847, died 1884), paternal grandmother

Mao had four wives who gave birth to a total of 10 children, among them:

1. Luo Yixiu (1889-1910) of Shaoshan: married 1907 to 1910

2. Yang Kaihui (1901-1930) of Changsha: married 1921 to 1927, executed by the KMT in 1930; mother to Mao Anying, Mao Anqing, and Mao Anlong

3. He Zizhen (1910-1984) of Jiangxi: married May 1928 to 1937; mother to 6 children

4. Jiang Qing (1914-1991), married 1939 until Mao's death; mother to Li Na

Mao had several siblings:

Mao Zemin (1896-1943), younger brother, executed by a warlord

Mao Zetan (1905-1935), younger brother, executed by the KMT

Mao Zejian (1905-1929), adopted sister, executed by the KMT

Mao's parents altogether had five sons and two daughters. Two of the sons and both daughters died young, leaving the three brothers Mao Zedong, Mao Zemin, and Mao Zetan. Like all three of Mao Zedong's wives, Mao Zemin and Mao Zetan were communists. Like Yang Kaihui, both Mao Zemin and Mao Zetan were killed in warfare during Mao Zedong's lifetime. Note that the character zé () appears in all of the siblings' given names; this is a common Chinese naming convention.

From the next generation, Mao Zemin's son Mao Yuanxin was raised by Mao Zedong's family, and he became Mao Zedong's liaison with the Politburo in 1975. In Li Zhisui's The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Mao Yuanxin played a role in the final power-struggles.

Mao had a total of ten children, including:

Mao Anying (1922-1950): son to Yang, married to Liú Sīqí (), killed in action during the Korean War

Mao Anqing (1923-2007): son to Yang, married to Shao Hua, son Mao Xinyu, grandson Mao Dongdong

Mao Anlong (1927-1931): son to Yang, died during the Chinese Civil War

Mao Anhong: son to He, left to Mao's younger brother Zetan and then to one of Zetan's guards when he went off to war, was never heard of again

Li Na (b. 1940): daughter to Jiang (whose birth surname was Lǐ, a name also used by Mao while evading the KMT), married to Wáng Jǐngqīng (), son Wáng Xiàozhī ()

Through his ten children, Mao became grandfather to twelve grandchildren, many of whom he never knew. He has many great-grandchildren alive today. One of his granddaughters is businesswoman Kong Dongmei, one of the richest people in China. His grandson Mao Xinyu is a general in the Chinese army. Both he and Kong have written books about their grandfather.

Personal life

Mao's private life was kept very secret at the time of his rule. After Mao's death, Li Zhisui, his personal physician, published The Private Life of Chairman Mao, a memoir which mentions some aspects of Mao's private life, such as chain-smoking cigarettes, addiction to powerful sleeping pills and large number of sexual partners. Some scholars and others who knew Mao personally have disputed the accuracy of these accounts and characterisations.

Having grown up in Hunan, Mao spoke Mandarin with a marked Hunanese accent. Ross Terrill wrote Mao was a "son of the soil ... rural and unsophisticated" in origins, while Clare Hollingworth said that Mao was proud of his "peasant ways and manners", having a strong Hunanese accent and providing "earthy" comments on sexual matters. Lee Feigon said that Mao's "earthiness" meant that he remained connected to "everyday Chinese life."

Sinologist Stuart R. Schram emphasised Mao's ruthlessness but also noted that he showed no sign of taking pleasure in torture or killing in the revolutionary cause. Lee Feigon considered Mao "draconian and authoritarian" when threatened but opined that he was not the "kind of villain that his mentor Stalin was". Alexander Pantsov and Steven I. Levine wrote that Mao was a "man of complex moods", who "tried his best to bring about prosperity and gain international respect" for China, being "neither a saint nor a demon." They noted that in early life, he strove to be "a strong, wilful, and purposeful hero, not bound by any moral chains", and that he "passionately desired fame and power".

Mao learned to speak some English, particularly through Zhang Hanzhi, his English teacher, interpreter and diplomat who later married Qiao Guanhua, Foreign Minister of China and the head of China's UN delegation. His spoken English was limited to a few single words, phrases, and some short sentences. He first chose to systematically learn English in the 1950s, which was very unusual as the main foreign language first taught in Chinese schools at that time was Russian.

Writings and calligraphy

Eagles cleave the air,
Fish glide in the limpid deep;
Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom.
Brooding over this immensity,
I ask, on this boundless land
Who rules over man's destiny?

-Excerpt from Mao's poem "Changsha", September 1927
Mao was a prolific writer of political and philosophical literature. The main repository of his pre-1949 writings is the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, published in four volumes by the People's Publishing House since 1951. A fifth volume, which brought the timeline up to 1957, was briefly issued during the leadership of Hua Guofeng, but subsequently withdrawn from circulation for its perceived ideological errors. There has never been an official "Complete Works of Mao Zedong" collecting all his known publications. Mao is the attributed author of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, known in the West as the "Little Red Book" and in Cultural Revolution China as the "Red Treasure Book" (). First published in January 1964, this is a collection of short extracts from his many speeches and articles (most found in the Selected Works), edited by Lin Biao, and ordered topically. The Little Red Book contains some of Mao's most widely known quotes.

Mao wrote prolifically on political strategy, commentary, and philosophy both before and after he assumed power. Mao was also a skilled Chinese calligrapher with a highly personal style. In China, Mao was considered a master calligrapher during his lifetime. His calligraphy can be seen today throughout mainland China. His work gave rise to a new form of Chinese calligraphy called "Mao-style" or Maoti, which has gained increasing popularity since his death. There exist various competitions specialising in Mao-style calligraphy.

Literary works

As did most Chinese intellectuals of his generation, Mao's education began with Chinese classical literature. Mao told Edgar Snow in 1936 that he had started the study of the Confucian Analects and the Four Books at a village school when he was eight, but that the books he most enjoyed reading were Water Margin, Journey to the West, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dream of the Red Chamber. Mao published poems in classical forms starting in his youth and his abilities as a poet contributed to his image in China after he came to power in 1949. His style was influenced by the great Tang dynasty poets Li Bai and Li He.

Some of his best known poems are " Changsha" (1925), " The Double Ninth" (October 1929), "Loushan Pass" (1935), "The Long March" (1935), " Snow" (February 1936), " The PLA Captures Nanjing" (1949), " Reply to Li Shuyi" (11 May 1957), and "Ode to the Plum Blossom" (December 1961).

Portrayal in film and television

Mao has been portrayed in film and television numerous times. Some notable actors include: Han Shi, the first actor ever to have portrayed Mao, in a 1978 drama Dielianhua and later again in a 1980 film Cross the Dadu River; Gu Yue, who had portrayed Mao 84 times on screen throughout his 27-year career and had won the Best Actor title at the Hundred Flowers Awards in 1990 and 1993; Liu Ye, who played a young Mao in The Founding of a Party (2011); Tang Guoqiang, who has frequently portrayed Mao in more recent times, in the films The Long March (1996) and The Founding of a Republic (2009), and the television series Huang Yanpei (2010), among others. Mao is a principal character in American composer John Adams' opera Nixon in China (1987). The Beatles' song " Revolution" refers to Mao in the verse "but if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow..."; John Lennon expressed regret over including these lines in the song in 1972.

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

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Mao Zedong (26 December 1893 - 9 September 1976) was a Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC). He led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, while also serving as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during that time.

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Vladimir Lenin - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Vladimir Lenin, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Table of Contents

1. Kaiser Wilhelm II's Early Years

2. Emperor and King: 1888

3. Kaiser Wilhelm II and World War I

4. Kaiser Wilhelm II's Years of Exile

Wilhelm II (1859-1941), the German kaiser (emperor) and king of Prussia from 1888 to 1918, was one of the most recognizable public figures of World War I (1914-18). He gained a reputation as a swaggering militarist through his speeches and ill-advised newspaper interviews. While Wilhelm did not actively seek war, and tried to hold back his generals from mobilizing the German army in the summer of 1914, his verbal outbursts and his open enjoyment of the title of Supreme War Lord helped bolster the case of those who blamed him for the conflict. His role in the conduct of the war as well as his responsibility for its outbreak is still controversial.

Some historians maintain that Wilhelm was controlled by his generals, while others argue that he retained considerable political power. In late 1918, he was forced to abdicate. He spent the rest of his life in exile in the Netherlands, where he died at age 82.

Kaiser Wilhelm II's Early Years

Kaiser Wilhelm II was born in Potsdam, Germany, on January 27, 1859, the son of Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia (1831-88) and Princess Victoria (1840-1901), the oldest daughter of Queen Victoria (1819-1901). The future monarch was the queen's firstborn grandchild and was genuinely fond of her; in fact, he was holding her in his arms when she died. His ties to Britain through its royal family would play an important part in his later political maneuvering.

Did you know? Kaiser Wilhelm II was reportedly amused when he heard his cousin King George V (1865-1936) had changed the name of the British royal family from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in 1917 as a result of anti-German sentiment in Britain during World War I.

Wilhelm's childhood was shaped by two events, one medical and one political. His birth had been traumatic; in the course of a complicated delivery, the doctor permanently damaged Wilhelm's left arm. In addition to its smaller size, the arm was useless for such ordinary tasks as cutting certain foods with a knife at mealtime.

The political event that shaped Wilhelm was the formation of the German Empire under the leadership of Prussia in 1871. Wilhelm was now second in line after his father to become an emperor as well as king of Prussia. Twelve years old at the time, Wilhelm was filled with nationalistic enthusiasm. His later determination to win a "place in the sun" for Germany had its roots in his childhood.

An intelligent young man who possessed a lifelong interest in science and technology, Wilhelm was educated at the University of Bonn. His quick mind, however, was combined with an even quicker temper and an impulsive, high-strung personality. He had dysfunctional relationships with both parents, particularly his English mother. Historians still debate the effects of the kaiser's complicated psychological makeup on his political decisions.

In 1881, Wilhelm married Princess Augusta Victoria (1858-1921) of Schleswig-Holstein. The couple would go on to have seven children.

Emperor and King: 1888

Wilhelm's father became Kaiser Frederick III of Germany in March 1888. Already ill with terminal throat cancer, he died after a reign of only several months. Wilhelm succeeded his father on June 15, 1888, at the age of 29. Within two years of his coronation, Wilhelm broke with Otto von Bismarck (1815-98), the "Iron Chancellor" who had dominated German politics since the 1860s. The kaiser embarked on his so-called New Course, a period of personal rule in which he appointed chancellors who were upper-level civil servants rather than statesmen. Bismarck bitterly predicted that Wilhelm would lead Germany to ruin.

Wilhelm damaged his political position in a number of ways. He meddled in German foreign policy on the basis of his emotions, resulting in incoherence and inconsistency in German relations with other nations. He also made a number of public blunders, the worst of which was The Daily Telegraph affair of 1908. Wilhelm gave an interview to the London-based newspaper in which he offended the British by saying such things as: "You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares." The kaiser had already been hurt politically in 1907 by the Eulenburg-Harden affair, in which members of his circle of friends were accused of being homosexuals. Although there is no evidence that Wilhelm was gay-in addition to his seven children with his first wife, he was rumored to have several illegitimate offspring-the scandal was used by his political opponents to weaken his influence.

Wilhelm's most important contribution to Germany's prewar military expansion was his commitment to creating a navy to rival Britain's. His childhood visits to his British cousins had given him a love for the sea-sailing was one of his favorite recreations-and his envy of the power of the British navy convinced him that Germany must build a large fleet of its own in order to fulfill its destiny. The kaiser supported the plans of Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930), his chief admiral, who maintained that Germany could gain diplomatic power over Britain by stationing a fleet of warships in the North Sea. By 1914, however, the naval buildup had caused severe financial problems for Wilhelm's government.

Kaiser Wilhelm II and World War I

Wilhelm's behavior during the crisis that led to war in August 1914 is still controversial. There is little doubt that he had been broken psychologically by the criticism that followed the Eulenburg-Harden and Daily Telegraph scandals; he suffered an episode of depression in 1908. In addition, the kaiser was out of touch with the realities of international politics in 1914; he thought that his blood relationships to other European monarchs were sufficient to manage the crisis that followed the June 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Although Wilhelm signed the order for German mobilization following pressure from his generals-Germany declared war against Russia and France during the first week of August 1914- he is reported to have said, "You will regret this, gentlemen."

With World War I under way, the kaiser, as commander in chief of the German armed forces, retained the power to make upper-level changes in military command. Nonetheless, he was largely a shadow monarch during the war, useful to his generals as a public-relations figure who toured the front lines and handed out medals. After 1916, Germany was, in effect, a military dictatorship dominated by two generals, Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) and Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937).

Kaiser Wilhelm II's Years of Exile

In late 1918, popular unrest in Germany (which had suffered greatly during the war) combined with a naval mutiny convinced civilian political leaders that the kaiser had to abdicate to preserve order. In fact, Wilhelm's abdication was announced on November 9, 1918, before he had actually consented to it. He agreed to leave when the leaders of the army told him he had lost their support as well. On November 10, the former emperor took a train across the border into the Netherlands, which had remained neutral throughout the war. He eventually bought a manor house in the town of Doorn, and remained there for the remainder of his life.

Although the Allies wanted to punish Wilhelm as a war criminal, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands (1880-1962) refused to extradite him. His last years were darkened by the death of his first wife and the suicide of his youngest son in 1920. He did, however, make a happy second marriage in 1922. His new wife, Hermine Reuss (1887-1947), actively petitioned German leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in the early 1930s to restore the monarchy, but nothing ever came of her negotiations. Hitler despised the man he held responsible for Germany's defeat in World War I, and Wilhelm was shocked by the Nazis' thuggish tactics. In 1938, Wilhelm remarked that for the first time he was ashamed to be a German. After two decades in exile, he died in the Netherlands on June 4, 1941, at the age of 82.

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Kaiser Wilhelm II - WWI, Abdication & Death

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Wilhelm II (1859-1941) was the last German kaiser (emperor) and king of Prussia from 1888 to 1918, and one of the most recognizable public figures of World War I (1914-18). He gained a reputation as a swaggering militarist through his speeches and ill-advised newspaper interviews.

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Joseph Stalin - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Joseph Stalin, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Gavrilo Princip, (born July 25 [July 13, Old Style], 1894, Obljaj, Bosnia-died April 28, 1918, Theresienstadt, Austria), South Slav nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his consort, Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg (née Chotek), at Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914. Princip's act gave Austria-Hungary the excuse that it had sought for opening hostilities against Serbia and thus precipitated World War I. In Yugoslavia-the South Slav state that he had envisioned-Princip came to be regarded as a national hero.

Born into a Bosnian Serb peasant family, Princip was trained in terrorism by the Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand (true name Ujedinjenje ili Smrt, "Union or Death"). Wanting to destroy Austro-Hungarian rule in the Balkans and to unite the South Slav peoples into a federal nation, he believed that the first step must be the assassination of a member of the Habsburg imperial family or a high official of the government.

Having learned that Franz Ferdinand, as inspector general of the imperial army, would pay an official visit to Sarajevo in June 1914, Princip, his associate Nedjelko Čabrinović, and four other revolutionaries awaited the archduke's procession on June 28. Čabrinović threw a bomb that bounced off the archduke's car and exploded beneath the next vehicle. A short time later, while driving to a hospital to visit an officer wounded by the bomb, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot to death by Princip, who said he had aimed not at the duchess but at General Oskar Potiorek, military governor of Bosnia. Austria-Hungary held Serbia responsible and declared war July 28.

After a trial in Sarajevo, Princip was sentenced (October 28, 1914) to 20 years' imprisonment, the maximum penalty allowed for a person under the age of 20 on the day of his crime. Probably tubercular before his imprisonment, Princip underwent amputation of an arm because of tuberculosis of the bone and died in a hospital near his prison.

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Gavrilo Princip: Gavrilo Princip, South Slav nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his consort, Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg (née Chotek), at Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914. Princip's act gave Austria-Hungary the excuse that it had sought for opening

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Franz Ferdinand - Assassination, WW1 & Death

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Franz Ferdinand’s assassination on June 28, 1914, at the hand of a Serbian terrorist group the “Black Hand,” led to the beginning of World War I.

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As World War I ground on, Germany began assessing options for striking a decisive blow. Unable to break the British blockade of the North Sea with its surface fleet, the German leadership decided to return to a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. This approach, whereby German U-boats would attack merchant shipping without warning, had been briefly used in 1916 but was abandoned after strong protests by the United States.

Believing that Britain could be quickly crippled if its supply lines to North America were severed, Germany prepared to reimplement this approach effective February 1, 1917.

Concerned that the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare could bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies, Germany began making contingency plans for this possibility. To this end, German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann was instructed to seek a military alliance with Mexico in the event of war with the United States. In return for attacking the United States, Mexico was promised the return of territory lost during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), including Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as substantial financial assistance.

Transmission

As Germany lacked a direct telegraph line to North America, the Zimmermann Telegram was transmitted over American and British lines. This was permitted as President Woodrow Wilson allowed the Germans to transmit under the cover of US diplomatic traffic in hopes that he could remain in touch with Berlin and broker a lasting peace.

Zimmermann sent the original coded message to Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff on January 16, 1917. Receiving the telegram, he forwarded it on to Ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt in Mexico City via commercial telegraph three days later.

Mexican Response

After reading the message, von Eckardt approached the government of President Venustiano Carranza with the terms.

He also asked Carranza to aid in forming an alliance between Germany and Japan. Listening to the German proposal, Carranza instructed his military to determine the feasibility of the offer. In assessing a possible war with the United States, the military determined that it largely lacked the capability to re-take the lost territories and that German financial assistance would be useless as the United States was the only significant arms producer in the Western Hemisphere.

Furthermore, additional arms could not be imported as the British controlled the sea lanes to Europe. As Mexico was emerging from a recent civil war, Carranza sought to improve relations with the United States as well as other nations in the region such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. As a result, it was determined to decline the German offer. An official response was issued to Berlin on April 14, 1917, stating that Mexico had no interest in allying with the German cause.

British Interception

As the ciphertext of the telegram was transmitted through Britain, it was immediately intercepted by British codebreakers who were monitoring traffic originating in Germany. Sent to the Admiralty's Room 40, codebreakers found that it was encrypted in cipher 0075, which they had partially broken.

Decoding parts of the message, they were able to develop an outline of its content.

Realizing that they possessed a document that could compel the United State to join the Allies, the British set about developing a plan that would allow them to unveil the telegram without giving away that they were reading neutral diplomatic traffic or that they had broken German codes. To deal with the first issue, they were able to correctly guess that the telegram was sent over commercial wires from Washington to Mexico City. In Mexico, British agents were able to obtain a copy of the ciphertext from the telegraph office.

This was encrypted in cipher 13040, which the British had captured a copy of in the Middle East. As a result, by mid-February, British authorities had the complete text of the telegram.

To deal with the code breaking issue, the British publicly lied and claimed they had been able to steal a decoded copy of the telegram in Mexico. They ultimately alerted the Americans to their code breaking efforts and Washington elected to back the British cover story. On February 19, 1917, Admiral Sir William Hall, the head of Room 40, presented a copy of the telegram to the secretary of the US Embassy, William Hall.​​

Stunned, Hall initially believed the telegram to be a forgery but passed it on to Ambassador Walter Page the next day. On February 23, Page met with Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour and was shown the original ciphertext as well as the message in both German and English. The next day, the telegram and verifying details were presented to Wilson.

American Response

News of the Zimmermann Telegram quickly released and stories about its contents appeared in the American press on March 1. While pro-German and anti-war groups claimed that it was a forgery, Zimmermann confirmed the telegram's contents on March 3 and March 29. Further inflaming the American public, which was angered over the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare (Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3 over this issue) and the sinking SS Houstonic (February 3) and SS California (February 7), the telegram further pushed the nation towards war. On April 2, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. This was granted four days later and the United States entered the conflict.

Selected Sources

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The Zimmermann Telegram: German Alliance With Mexico?

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As World War I ground on, Germany began assessing options for striking a decisive blow. Unable to break the British blockade of the North Sea with its surface fleet, the German leadership decided to return to a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

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The main theatre of fighting in World War I was the Western Front, a meandering line which ran from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea. Most of the Western Front's 700 kilometre length traversed the north-east of France, with its ends in Belgium and southern Germany. The largest battles of the war - Marne, Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele and others - were fought along the Western Front. Though the death toll from Western Front battles will never be accurately known, at least four million were killed there. Despite the size, frequency and ferocity of attempts to break through the line or push back the enemy, the Western Front remained relatively static until 1918. Many aspects of the Western Front have become symbolic of World War I: mud-filled trenches, artillery bombardments, appalling tactical blunders, futile charges on enemy positions, periods of stalemate, high death rates and atrocious conditions.

The Western Front began to take shape in the autumn of 1914, after the German advance through northern France was halted at the Battle of the Marne. The Germans then retreated to the Aisne River, where they dug a network of trenches to consolidate and hold their position. The Allies, believing the Germans were awaiting reinforcements and preparing a further assault into French territory, reciprocated by constructing their own trench system. Over the next few weeks both sides extended their trench systems further to the north, racing to outflank each other and to reach the North Sea coastline. Their aim was to prevent an enemy advance, to secure supply lines and to seize control of key ports and French industrial areas.

As the Allies and Germans carried out this 'race to the sea', a major battle erupted at Ypres in Belgium. At the personal order of the Kaiser, German generals launched a massive assault on the Allied line, using divisions of their most experienced infantry and cavalry - but the attack was repelled at the cost of more than 40,000 men. By the end of 1914 the Western Front trenchline had grown to more than two-thirds of its eventual length. Commanders on both sides developed grand plans to outmanoeuvre and outflank the enemy, or to break through the front. But as weeks passed, home-front enlistments pumped hundreds of thousands of reinforcements into the area. By early 1915 many parts of the Western Front were thick with soldiers on both sides of 'no man's land'. This weight of numbers contributed to the front's impenetrability and the stalemate that developed through 1915. Germany's early defeats in northern France also shaped its tactical approach. German military strategists embraced defensive positions, determined not to be forced out of France. Victory, they asserted, would pass to the side that could better withstand assaults and lose fewer men. German military planners abandoned the Schlieffen Plan and adopted a strategy of attrition, aiming to inflict death and injury on as many Allied men as possible. (The German chief of staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, famously declared that his goal was to "bleed France white"). The consequence of this was that Germany launched few major assaults in 1915; they instead relied on weapons like artillery and poison gas to weaken and debilitate Allied personnel.

"By the end of 1914, fighting on the Western Front had cost Germany 667,000 casualties, the French 995,000, the British 96,000 and the Belgians 50,000. The old professional British army had virtually ceased to exist... The Allies, who were now staging the bulk of the attacks, adopted a strategy of attrition, what General Sir Douglas Haig called 'wearing out' the enemy, and Joffre referred to as 'nibbling'. This strategy, pursued by massive front assaults, resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties. The Western Front became one great charnel house."
Priscilla M. Roberts, historian

In contrast, British and French generals were more committed to battlefield offensives and attempts to break through the front. They tried to penetrate the German line at Champagne and Loos during the autumn of 1915, but against positions fortified with artillery and machine-guns this proved almost impossible. Falkenhayn changed tack in early 1916, hoping to lure the French army into a gigantic battle from which it could not retreat or withdraw; his aim was to inflict maximum casualties and to sap French morale. For this showdown the German commander chose the town of Verdun, near a heavily-fortified section of the Franco-German border. The Battle of Verdun, which began in February 1916, was the longest and the second-deadliest battle of World War I, claiming between 750,000 and 1,000,000 lives. It ended with no decisive victor: neither army was able to achieve their objective. Even more deadly was the Battle of the Somme, from July to November 1916. With many French generals occupied at Verdun, the Somme assault was planned and led by the British, particularly General Sir Douglas Haigh. It was to be part of a simultaneous three-way offensive: with the Russians attacking on the Eastern Front and the Italians from the south. But the choice of location, the Somme River, was problematic. German defences there sat on an elevated position; they had seen minimal action since late 1914 so had been able to construct a comprehensive system of trenches and bunkers.

The Somme assault began with an artillery barrage that lasted seven days and used more than one million shells. This assault did not wipe out or push back the Germans, who sat it out in deep bunkers; it also failed to destroy the masses of barbed wire strewn in front of German trenches. At 7.30am on July 1st 1916, more than 120,000 British soldiers leapt from their trenches and advanced on the German line. Expecting to find obliterated trenches and dead Germans, they were instead met by machine-gun fire, artillery shells, mortars and grenades. In the coming slaughter, more than 50,000 soldiers were killed in just one 24-hour period - the deadliest single day in British military history.

1. The Western Front was the main theatre of World War I, a 700-kilometre line from Switzerland to the North Sea.
2. It took shape in late 1914, as fighting in northern France stalled and both sides attempted to outflank the other.
3. Eventually the Western Front became a long line of trenches, fortifications and defences crossing western Europe.
4. Most of the major battles of the war - and therefore most of its casualties - were fought along the Western Front.
5. Breaking through the Western Front was a critical objective of military planners on both sides. These offensives were often overly ambitious, poorly planned and wasteful of men and resources.

© Alpha History 2014. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use.
This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "The Western Front" at Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/western-front/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

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The main theatre of fighting in World War I was the Western Front, a meandering line which ran from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea. Most of the Western Front's 700 kilometre length traversed the north-east of France, with its ends in Belgium and southern Germany.

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The Allies, or the Entente Powers, were an international military coalition of countries led by France, the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, Italy, and Japan against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria in World War I (1914-1918).

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the major European powers were divided between the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. The Triple Entente was made up of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. The Triple Alliance was originally composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, but Italy remained neutral in 1914. As the war progressed, each coalition added new members. Japan joined the Entente in 1914 and, despite proclaiming its neutrality at the beginning of the war, Italy also joined the Entente in 1915. The term "Allies" became more widely used than "Entente", although the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and Italy were also referred to as the Quadruple Entente and, together with Japan, as the Quintuple Entente. The colonies administered by the countries that fought for the Allies were also part of the Entente powers such as American Philippines, Belgian Congo, British India, French Algeria, and Japanese Korea.

The United States joined near the end of the war in 1917 (the same year in which Russia withdrew from the conflict) as an "associated power" rather than an official ally. Other "associated members" included Serbia, Belgium, Montenegro, Asir, Nejd and Hasa, Portugal, Romania, Hejaz, Panama, Cuba, Greece, China, Siam, Brazil, Armenia, Luxembourg, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti, Liberia, and Honduras. The treaties signed at the Paris Peace Conference recognized the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States as "the Principal Allied and Associated Powers".

When the war began in 1914, the Central Powers were opposed by the Triple Entente, formed in 1907 when the agreement between the United Kingdom and the Russia complemented existing agreements between the three powers.

Fighting commenced when Austria invaded Serbia on 28 July 1914, purportedly in response to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Emperor Franz Joseph I; this brought Serbia's ally Montenegro into the war on 8 August and it attacked the Austrian naval base at Cattaro, modern Kotor. At the same time, German troops carried out the Schlieffen Plan, entering neutral Belgium and Luxembourg; over 95% of Belgium was occupied but the Belgian Army held their lines on the Yser Front throughout the war. This allowed Belgium to be treated as an Ally, in contrast to Luxembourg which retained control over domestic affairs but was occupied by the German military.

In the East, between 7 and 9 August the Russians entered German East Prussia on 7 August, Austrian Eastern Galicia. Japan joined the Entente by declaring war on Germany on 23 August, then Austria on 25 August. On 2 September, Japanese forces surrounded the German Treaty Port of Tsingtao (now Qingdao) in China and occupied German colonies in the Pacific, including the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands.

Despite its membership of the Triple Alliance, Italy remained neutral until 23 May 1915 when it joined the Entente, declaring war on Austria but not Germany. On 17 January 1916, Montenegro capitulated and left the Entente; this was offset when Germany declared war on Portugal in March 1916, while Romania commenced hostilities against Austria on 27 August.

On 6 April 1917, the United States entered the war as a co-belligerent, along with the associated allies of Liberia, Siam and Greece. After the 1917 October Revolution, Russia left the Entente and agreed to a separate peace with the Central Powers with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. Romania was forced to do the same in the May 1918 Treaty of Bucharest but on 10 November, it repudiated the Treaty and once more declared war on the Central Powers.

These changes meant the Allies who negotiated the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 included the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan and the United States; Part One of the Treaty agreed to the establishment of the League of Nations on 25 January 1919. This came into being on 16 January 1920 with Britain, France, Italy and Japan as permanent members of the Executive Council; the US Senate voted against ratification of the treaty on 19 March, thus preventing the United States from joining the League.

For much of the 19th century, Britain sought to maintain the European balance of power without formal alliances, a policy known as splendid isolation. This left it dangerously exposed as Europe divided into opposing power blocs and the 1895-1905 Conservative government negotiated first the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, then the 1904 Entente Cordiale with France. The first tangible result of this shift was British support for France against Germany in the 1905 Moroccan Crisis.

HMS Dreadnought; the 1902, 1904 and 1907 agreements with Japan, France and Russia allowed Britain to refocus resources during the Anglo-German naval arms race.

Since control of Belgium allowed an opponent to threaten invasion or blockade British trade, preventing it was a long-standing British strategic interest. Under Article VII of the 1839 Treaty of London, Britain guaranteed Belgian neutrality against aggression by any other state, by force if required. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg later dismissed this as a 'scrap of paper,' but British law officers routinely confirmed it as a binding legal obligation and its importance was well understood by Germany.

The 1911 Agadir Crisis led to secret discussions between France and Britain in case of war with Germany. These agreed that within two weeks of its outbreak, a British Expeditionary Force of 100,000 men would be landed in France; in addition, the Royal Navy would be responsible for the North Sea, the Channel and protecting Northern France, with the French navy concentrated in the Mediterranean. Britain was committed to support France in a war against Germany but this was not widely understood outside government or the upper ranks of the military.

As late as 1 August, a clear majority of the Liberal government and its supporters wanted to stay out of the war. While Liberal leaders H. H. Asquith and Edward Grey considered Britain legally and morally committed to support France regardless, waiting until Germany triggered the 1839 Treaty provided the best chance of preserving Liberal party unity.

The German high command was aware entering Belgium would lead to British intervention but decided the risk was acceptable; they expected a short war while their ambassador in London claimed troubles in Ireland would prevent Britain from assisting France. On 3 August, Germany demanded unimpeded progress through any part of Belgium and when this was refused, invaded early on the morning of 4 August.

This changed the situation; the invasion of Belgium consolidated political and public support for the war by presenting what appeared to be a simple moral and strategic choice. The Belgians asked for assistance under the 1839 Treaty and in response, Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. Although Germany's violation of Belgium neutrality was not the only cause of British entry into the war, it was used extensively in government propaganda at home and abroad to make the case for British intervention. This confusion arguably persists today.

The declaration of war automatically involved all dominions and colonies and protectorates of the British Empire, many of whom made significant contributions to the Allied war effort, both in the provision of troops and civilian labourers. It was split into Crown Colonies administered by the Colonial Office in London, such as Nigeria, and the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. These controlled their own domestic policies and military expenditure but not foreign policy.

In terms of population, the largest component (after Britain herself) was the British Raj or British India, which included modern India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Unlike other colonies which came under the Colonial Office, it was governed directly by the India Office or by princes loyal to the British; it also controlled British interests in the Persian Gulf, such as the Trucial States and Oman. Over one million soldiers of the British Indian Army served in different theatres of the war, primarily France and the Middle East.

From 1914 to 1916, overall Imperial diplomatic, political and military strategy was controlled by the British War Cabinet in London; in 1917 it was superseded by the Imperial War Cabinet, which included representatives from the Dominions. Under the War Cabinet were the Chief of the Imperial General Staff or CIGS, responsible for all Imperial ground forces, and the Admiralty that did the same for the Royal Navy. Theatre commanders like Douglas Haig on the Western Front or Edmund Allenby in Palestine then reported to the CIGS.

After the Indian Army, the largest individual units were the Australian Corps and Canadian Corps in France, which by 1918 were commanded by their own generals, John Monash and Arthur Currie. Contingents from South Africa, New Zealand and Newfoundland served in theatres including France, Gallipoli, German East Africa and the Middle East. Australian troops separately occupied German New Guinea, with the South Africans doing the same in German South West Africa; this resulted in the Maritz rebellion by former Boers, which was quickly suppressed. After the war, New Guinea and South-West Africa became Protectorates, held until 1975 and 1990 respectively.

Between 1873 and 1887, Russia was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the League of the Three Emperors, then with Germany in the 1887-1890 Reinsurance Treaty; both collapsed due to the competing interests of Austria and Russia in the Balkans. While France took advantage of this to agree the 1894 Franco-Russian Alliance, Britain viewed Russia with deep suspicion; in 1800, over 3,000 kilometres separated the Russian Empire and British India, by 1902, it was 30 km in some areas. This threatened to bring the two into direct conflict, as did the long-held Russian objective of gaining control of the Bosporus Straits and with it access to the British-dominated Mediterranean Sea.

Defeat in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and Britain's isolation during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War led both parties to seek allies. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 settled disputes in Asia and allowed the establishment of the Triple Entente with France, which at this stage was largely informal. In 1908, Austria annexed the former Ottoman province of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Russia responded by creating the Balkan League in order to prevent further Austrian expansion. In the 1912-1913 First Balkan War, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece captured most of the remaining Ottoman possessions in Europe; disputes over the division of these resulted in the Second Balkan War, in which Bulgaria was comprehensively defeated by its former allies.

Russia's industrial base and railway network had significantly improved since 1905, although from a relatively low base; in 1913, Tsar Nicholas approved an increase in the Russian Army of over 500,000 men. Although there was no formal alliance between Russia and Serbia, their close bilateral links provided Russia with a route into the crumbling Ottoman Empire, where Germany also had significant interests. Combined with the increase in Russian military strength, both Austria and Germany felt threatened by Serbian expansion; when Austria invaded Serbia on 28 July 1914, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov viewed it as an Austro-German conspiracy to end Russian influence in the Balkans.

In addition to its own territory, Russia viewed itself as the defender of its fellow Slavs and on 30 July, mobilized in support of Serbia. In response, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August, followed by Austria-Hungary on 6th; after Ottoman warships bombarded Odesa in late October, the Entente declared war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914.

French defeat in the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War led to the loss of the two provinces of Alsace-Lorraine and the establishment of the Third Republic. The suppression of the Paris Commune by the new regime caused deep political divisions and led to a series of bitter political struggles, such as the Dreyfus affair. As a result, aggressive nationalism or Revanchism was one of the few areas to unite the French.

The loss of Alsace-Lorraine deprived France of its natural defence line on the Rhine, while it was weaker demographically than Germany, whose 1911 population was 64.9 million to 39.6 in France, which had the lowest birthrate in Europe. This meant that despite their very different political systems, when Germany allowed the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse, France seized the opportunity to agree the 1894 Franco-Russian Alliance. It also replaced Germany as the primary source of financing for Russian industry and the expansion of its railway network, particularly in border areas with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

However, Russian defeat in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War damaged its credibility, while Britain's isolation during the Second Boer War meant both countries sought additional allies. This resulted in the 1904 Entente Cordiale with Britain; like the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, for domestic British consumption it focused on settling colonial disputes but led to informal co-operation in other areas. By 1914, both the British army and Royal Navy were committed to support France in the event of war with Germany but even in the British government, very few were aware of the extent of these commitments.

In response to Germany's declaration of war on Russia, France issued a general mobilisation in expectation of war on 2 August and on 3 August, Germany also declared war on France. Germany's ultimatum to Belgium brought Britain into the war on 4 August, although France did not declare war on Austria-Hungary until 12 August.

As with Britain, France's colonies also became part of the war; pre-1914, French soldiers and politicians advocated using French African recruits to help compensate for France's demographic weakness. But it eventually proved useless, the soldier from Metropolitan France still undertook all the task. From August to December 1914, the French lost nearly 300,000 dead on the Western Front, more than Britain suffered in the whole of WWII and the gaps were partly filled by colonial troops, over 500,000 of whom served on the Western Front over the period 1914-1918. Colonial troops also fought at Gallipoli, occupied Togo and Kamerun in West Africa and had a minor role in the Middle East, where France was the traditional protector of Christians in the Ottoman provinces of Syria, Palestine and Lebanon.

Prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan was a semi-feudal, largely agrarian state with few natural resources and limited technology. By 1914, it had transformed itself into a modern industrial state, with a powerful military; by defeating China in the First Sino-Japanese War during 1894-1895, it established itself as the primary power in East Asia and colonised the then-unified Korea and Formosa, now modern Taiwan.

Concerned by Russian expansion in Korea and Manchuria, Britain and Japan signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance on 30 January 1902, agreeing if either were attacked by a third party, the other would remain neutral and if attacked by two or more opponents, the other would come to its aid. This meant Japan could rely on British support in a war with Russia, if either France or Germany, which also had interests in China, decided to join them. This gave Japan the reassurance needed to take on Russia in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War; victory established Japan in the Chinese province of Manchuria.

The Japanese carrier Wakamiya conducted the first ship-launched aerial attack in 1914.

With Japan as an ally in the Far East, John Fisher, First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910, was able to refocus British naval resources in the North Sea to counter the threat from the Imperial German Navy. The Alliance was renewed in 1911; in 1914, Japan joined the Entente in return for German territories in the Pacific, greatly annoying the Australian government which also wanted them.

On 7 August, Britain officially asked for assistance in destroying German naval units in China and Japan formally declared war on Germany on 23 August, followed by Austria-Hungary on 25th. On 2 September 1914, Japanese forces surrounded the German Treaty Port of Qingdao, then known as Tsingtao, which surrendered on 7 November. The Imperial Japanese Navy simultaneously occupied German colonies in the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands, while in 1917, a Japanese naval squadron was sent to support the Allies in the Mediterranean.

Japan's primary interest was in China and in January 1915, the Chinese government was presented with a secret ultimatum of Twenty-One Demands, demanding extensive economic and political concessions. While these were eventually modified, the result was a surge of anti-Japanese nationalism in China and an economic boycott of Japanese goods. In addition, the other Allies now saw Japan as a threat, rather than a partner, lead to tensions first with Russia, then the US after it entered the war in April 1917. Despite protests from the other Allies, after the war Japan refused to return Qingdao and the province of Shandong to China.

The 1882 Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy was renewed at regular intervals, but was compromised by conflicting objectives between Italy and Austria in the Adriatic and Aegean seas. Italian nationalists referred to Austrian-held Istria (including Trieste and Fiume) and Trento as 'the lost territories', making the Alliance so controversial that the terms were kept secret until it expired in 1915.

Alberto Pollio, the pro-Austrian Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, died on 1 July 1914, taking many of the prospects for Italian support with him. The Italian Prime Minister Antonio Salandra argued that as the Alliance was defensive in nature, Austria's aggression against Serbia and Italy's exclusion from the decision-making process meant it was not obliged to join them.

His caution was understandable because France and Britain either supplied or controlled the import of most of Italy's raw materials, including 90% of its coal. Salandra described the process of choosing a side as 'sacred egoism,' but as the war was expected to end before mid-1915 at the latest, making this decision became increasingly urgent. In line with Italy's obligations under the Triple Alliance, the bulk of the army was concentrated on Italy's border with France; in October, Pollio's replacement, General Luigi Cadorna, was ordered to begin moving these troops to the North-Eastern one with Austria.

Under the April 1915 Treaty of London, Italy agreed to join the Entente in return for Italian-populated territories of Austria-Hungary and other concessions; in return, it declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915 as required, although not on Germany until 1916. Italian resentment at the difference between the promises of 1915 and the actual results of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles would be powerful factors in the rise of Benito Mussolini.

In 1817, the Principality of Serbia became an autonomous province within the Ottoman Empire; with Russian support, it gained full independence after the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War. Many Serbs viewed Russia as protector of the South Slavs in general but also specifically against Bulgaria, where Russian objectives increasingly collided with Bulgarian nationalism.

When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, Russia responded by creating the Balkan League to prevent further Austrian expansion. Austria viewed Serbia with hostility partly due to its links with Russia, whose claim to be the protector of South Slavs extended to those within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, such as the Czechs and Slovaks. Serbia also potentially gave Russia the ability to achieve their long-held objective of capturing Constantinople and the Dardanelles.

Austria-Hungary supported the idea of an independent Albania, since this would prevent Serbian access to the Austrian-controlled Adriatic Sea. The success of the Albanian revolt in 1912 threatened Serbian ambitions for the incorporation of " Old Serbia" into its domain and exposed the weakness of the Ottoman Empire. This led to the outbreak of the First Balkan War, with Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece capturing most of the remaining Ottoman possessions in Europe. Disputes over the division of these resulted in the Second Balkan War, in which Bulgaria was comprehensively defeated by its former allies.

As a result of the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, Serbia increased its territory by 100% and its population by 64%. However, it now faced a hostile Austria-Hungary, a resentful Bulgaria and resistance in its conquered territories. Germany too had ambitions in the Ottoman Empire, the centrepiece being the planned Berlin-Baghdad railway, with Serbia the only section not controlled by a pro-German state.

The exact role played by Serbian officials in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is still debated but despite complying with most of their demands, Austria-Hungary invaded on 28 July 1914. While Serbia successfully repulsed the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, it was exhausted by the two Balkan Wars and unable to replace its losses of men and equipment. In 1915, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers and by the end of the year, a combined Bulgar-Austrian-German army occupied most of Serbia. Between 1914 and 1918, Serbia suffered the greatest proportional losses of any combatant, with over 25% of all those mobilised becoming casualties; including civilians and deaths from disease, over 1.2 million died, nearly 30% of the entire population.

In 1830, the southern provinces of the Netherlands broke away to form the Kingdom of Belgium and their independence was confirmed by the 1839 Treaty of London. Article VII of the Treaty required Belgium to remain perpetually neutral and committed Austria, France, Germany and Russia to guarantee that against aggression by any other state, including the signatories.

Belgian Congolese Force Publique troops in German East Africa, 1916

While the French and German militaries accepted Germany would almost certainly violate Belgian neutrality in the event of war, the extent of that was unclear. The original Schlieffen Plan only required a limited incursion into the Belgian Ardennes, rather than a full-scale invasion; in September 1911, the Belgian Foreign Minister told a British Embassy official they would not call for assistance if the Germans limited themselves to that. While neither Britain or France could allow Germany to occupy Belgium unopposed, a Belgian refusal to ask for help would complicate matters for the British Liberal government, which contained a significant isolationist element.

However, the key German objective was to avoid war on two fronts; France had to be defeated before Russia could fully mobilise and give time for German forces to be transferred to the East. The growth of the Russian railway network and increase in speed of mobilisation made rapid victory over France even more important; to accommodate the additional 170,000 troops approved by the 1913 Army Bill, the 'incursion' now became a full-scale invasion. The Germans accepted the risk of British intervention; in common with most of Europe, they expected it to be a short war while their London Ambassador claimed civil war in Ireland would prevent Britain from assisting its Entente partners.

On 3 August, a German ultimatum demanded unimpeded progress through any part of Belgium, which was refused. Early on the morning of 4 August, the Germans invaded and the Belgian government called for British assistance under the 1839 Treaty; by the end of 1914, over 95% of the country was occupied but the Belgian Army held their lines on the Yser Front throughout the war.

In the Belgian Congo, 25,000 Congolese troops plus an estimated 260,000 porters joined British forces in the 1916 East African Campaign. By 1917, they controlled the western part of German East Africa which would become the Belgian League of Nations Mandate of Ruanda-Urundi or modern-day Rwanda and Burundi.

Eleftherios Venizelos with Constantine during the Balkan Wars

Greece almost doubled in size as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, but the success masked deep divisions within the political elite. In 1908, the island of Crete, formally part of the Ottoman Empire but administered by Greek officials, declared union with Greece, led by the charismatic nationalist Eleftherios Venizelos. A year later, young army officers formed the Military League to advocate for an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy; with their backing, Venizelos won a majority in the 1910 Parliamentary elections, followed by another in 1912. He had effectively broken the power of the pre-1910 political class and his position was then further strengthened by success in the Balkan Wars.

In 1913, the Greek monarch George I was assassinated; he was succeeded by his son Constantine who had attended Heidelberg University, served in a Prussian regiment and married Sophia of Prussia, sister of Emperor William II. These links and a belief the Central Powers would win the war combined to make Constantine pro-German. Venizelos himself favoured the Entente, partly due to their ability to block the maritime trade routes required for Greek imports.

Other issues adding complexity to this decision included disputes with Bulgaria and Serbia over the regions of Thrace and Macedonia as well as control of the Aegean Islands. Greece captured most of the islands during the Balkan Wars but Italy occupied the Dodecanese in 1912 and was in no hurry to give them back, while the Ottomans demanded the return of many others. In general, the Triple Entente favoured Greece, the Triple Alliance backed the Ottomans; Greece ultimately gained the vast majority but Italy did not cede the Dodecanese until 1947, while others remain disputed even today.

In September 1915, Bulgaria joined the Central Powers; in October, Venizelos allowed Entente forces to land at Thessaloniki or Salonica to support the Serbs, although they were too late to prevent their defeat. In August 1916, Bulgarian troops advanced into Greek-held Macedonia and Constantine ordered the army not to resist; anger at this led to a coup and he was eventually forced into exile in June 1917. A new national government under Venizelos joined the Entente, while the Greek National Defence Army Corps fought with the Allies on the Macedonian front.

Unlike Serbia, with whom it shared close cultural and political connections, the Kingdom of Montenegro gained little from its participation in the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars. The main Montenegrin offensive was in Ottoman-controlled Albania, where it suffered heavy losses during the seven month Siege of Scutari. Austria-Hungary opposed Serb or Montenegrin control of Albania, since it provided access to the Adriatic Sea; despite Scutari's surrender, Montenegro was forced to relinquish it by the 1913 Treaty of London and it became capital of the short-lived Principality of Albania. This was largely an Austrian creation; the new ruler, William, Prince of Albania, was a German who was forced into exile in September, only seven months after taking up his new position and later served with the Imperial German Army.

In addition to the lack of substantive gains from the Balkan Wars, there were long-running internal divisions between those who like Nicholas I preferred an independent Montenegro and those who advocated union with Serbia. In July 1914, Montenegro was not only militarily and economically exhausted, but also faced a multitude of political, economic and social issues.

At meetings held in March 1914, Austria-Hungary and Germany agreed union with Serbia must be prevented; Montenegro could either remain independent or be divided, its coastal areas becoming part of Albania, while the rest could join Serbia.

Nicholas seriously considered neutrality as a way to preserve his dynasty and on 31 July notified the Russian Ambassador Montenegro would only respond to an Austrian attack. He also held discussions with Austria, proposing neutrality or even active support in return for territorial concessions in Albania.

However, close links between the Serbian and Montenegrin militaries as well as popular sentiment meant there was little support for remaining neutral, especially after Russia joined the war; on 1 August, the National Assembly declared war on Austria-Hungary in fulfilment of its obligations to Serbia. After some initial success, in January 1916, the Montenegrin Army was forced to surrender to an Austro-Hungarian force.

The Beda Sultanate was invaded by Ottoman forces in February 1915 and March 1916. Britain assisted the Beda Sultanate in defeating the Ottoman invasions by sending arms and ammunition.

The Idrisid Emirate of Asir participated in the Arab Revolt. Its Emir, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Idrisi, signed an agreement with the British and joined the Allies in May 1915.

Equal status with the main Entente Powers was one of the primary conditions for Romania's entry into the War. The Powers officially recognised this status through the 1916 Treaty of Bucharest. Romania fought on three of the four European Fronts: Eastern, Balkan and Italian, fielding in total over 1,200,000 troops.

Other Romanian technological assets include the building of Vlaicu III, the world's first aircraft made of metal. The Romanian Navy possessed the largest warships on the Danube. They were a class of four river monitors, built locally at the Galați shipyard using parts manufactured in Austria-Hungary. The first one launched was Lascăr Catargiu, in 1907. The Romanian monitors displaced almost 700 tons, were armed with three 120 mm naval guns in three turrets, two 120 mm naval howitzers, four 47 mm anti-aircraft guns and two 6.5 machine guns. The monitors took part in the Battle of Turtucaia and the First Battle of Cobadin. The Romanian-designed Schneider 150 mm Model 1912 howitzer was considered one of the most modern field guns on the Western Front.

Romania's entry into the War in August 1916 provoked major changes for the Germans. General Erich von Falkenhayn was dismissed and sent to command the Central Powers forces in Romania, which enabled Hindenburg's subsequent ascension to power. Due to having to fight against all of the Central Powers on the longest front in Europe (1,600 km) and with little foreign help (only 50,000 Russians aided 650,000 Romanians in 1916), the Romanian capital was conquered that December. Vlaicu III was also captured and shipped to Germany, being last seen in 1942. The Romanian administration established a new capital at Iași and continued to fight on the Allied side in 1917. Despite being relatively short, the Romanian campaign of 1916 provided considerable respite for the Western Allies, as the Germans ceased all their other offensive operations in order to deal with Romania. After suffering a tactical defeat against the Romanians (aided by Russians) in July 1917 at Mărăști, the Central Powers launched two counterattacks, at Mărășești and Oituz. The German offensive at Mărășești was soundly defeated, with German prisoners later telling their Romanian captors that German casualties were extremely heavy, and that they "had not encountered such stiff resistance since the battles of Somme and Verdun". The Austro-Hungarian offensive at Oituz also failed. On 22 September, the Austro-Hungarian Enns-class river monitor SMS Inn was sunk by a Romanian mine near Brăila. After Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and dropped out of the War, Romania was left surrounded by the Central Powers and eventually signed a similar treaty on 7 May 1918. Despite being forced to cede land to Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, Romania ended up with a net gain in territory due to the Union with Bessarabia. On 10 November, Romania re-entered the War and fought a war with Hungary that lasted until August 1919.

Brazil entered the war in 1917 after the United States intervened on the basis of Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare sinking its merchant ships, which Brazil also cited as a reason to enter the war fighting against Germany and the Central Powers. The First Brazilian Republic sent the Naval Division in War Operations that joined the British fleet in Gibraltar and made the first Brazilian naval effort in international waters. In compliance with the commitments made at the Inter-American Conference, held in Paris from 20 November to 3 December 1917, the Brazilian Government sent a medical mission composed of civilian and military surgeons to work in field hospitals of the European theatre, a contingent of sergeants and officers to serve with the French army; Airmen from the Army and Navy to join the Royal Air Force, and the employment of part of the Fleet, primarily in the anti-submarine war.

The Council of Four (from left to right): David Lloyd George, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson in Versailles, 1919

The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 on the grounds that Germany violated U.S. neutrality by attacking international shipping with its unrestricted submarine warfare campaign. The remotely connected Zimmermann Telegram of the same period, within which the Germans promised to help Mexico regain some of its territory lost to the U.S. nearly seven decades before in the event of the United States entering the war, was also a contributing factor. The U.S. entered the war as an "associated power", rather than a formal ally of France and the United Kingdom, in order to avoid "foreign entanglements". Although the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria severed relations with the United States, neither declared war, nor did Austria-Hungary. Eventually, however, the United States also declared war on Austria-Hungary in December 1917, predominantly to help hard-pressed Italy.

Three non-state combatants, which voluntarily fought with the Allies and seceded from the constituent states of the Central Powers at the end of the war, were allowed to participate as winning nations to the peace treaties:[citation needed ]

Armenian irregulars and volunteers: seceded from the Russian Empire in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and fought against the Ottoman Empire.

Assyrian volunteers under Mar Shimun XIX Benyamin and the Assyrian tribal chiefs decided to side with the Allies, first with Russia, and next with the British, in the hope that they might secure after the victory, self-government for the Assyrians.[95] The French also joined the alliance with the Assyrians, offering them 20,000 rifles, and the Assyrian army grew to 20,000 men co-led by Agha Petros of the Bit-Bazi tribe, and Malik Khoshaba of the Bit-Tiyari tribe[96][97]

Polish Legions

Czechoslovak Legions: armed by France, Italy, and Russia

Additionally, there were also several Kurdish rebellions during World War I. Most of these, except for the uprisings of August 1917, were not supported by any of the Allied powers.

Military leaders of World War I: Jules Jacques de Dixmude (Belgium), Armando Diaz (Italy), Ferdinand Foch (France), John Pershing (United States), and David Beatty (United Kingdom)

Douglas Haig and Ferdinand Foch inspecting the Gordon Highlanders, 1918

Constantine I: King of Greece, he retired from the throne in June 1917, due to Allied pressure, without formally abdicating.

Alexander: King of Greece, he became King in 1917 after his father and brother retired from the throne

Eleftherios Venizelos: Prime minister of Greece after 13 June 1917

Panagiotis Danglis: Greek general of the Hellenic Army

Braziliian ship Cruzador Bahia

These are estimates of the cumulative number of different personnel in uniform 1914-1918, including army, navy and auxiliary forces. At any one time, the various forces were much smaller. Only a fraction of them were frontline combat troops. The numbers do not reflect the length of time each country was involved.

Ellis, John and Mike Cox. The World War I Databook: The Essential Facts and Figures for All the Combatants (2002)

Esposito, Vincent J. The West Point Atlas of American Wars: 1900-1918 (1997); despite the title covers entire war; online maps from this atlas

Falls, Cyril. The Great War (1960), general military history

Gooch, G. P. Recent Revelations Of European Diplomacy (1940), 475pp; summarises memoirs of major participants

Higham, Robin and Dennis E. Showalter, eds. Researching World War I: A Handbook (2003); historiography, stressing military themes

Pope, Stephen and Wheal, Elizabeth-Anne, eds. The Macmillan Dictionary of the First World War (1995)

Strachan, Hew. The First World War: Volume I: To Arms (2004)

Trask, David F. The United States in the Supreme War Council: American War Aims and Inter-Allied Strategy, 1917-1918 (1961)

Tucker Spencer C (1999). The European Powers in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland. ISBN 978-0-8153-3351-7.

Tucker, Spencer, ed. The Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social, and Military History (5 volumes) (2005); online at eBook.com

United States. War Dept. General Staff. Strength and organisation of the armies of France, Germany, Austria, Russia, England, Italy, Mexico and Japan (showing conditions in July, 1914) (1916) online

The War Office (2006) [1922]. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War 1914-1920. Uckfield, East Sussex: Military and Naval Press. ISBN 978-1-84734-681-0. OCLC 137236769.

CWGC (2006), Annual Report 2005-2006 (PDF), archived from the original (PDF) on 16 June 2007

CWGC (2012), Debt of Honour Register, archived from the original on 18 January 2012

Urlanis, Boris (2003) [1971, Moscow]. Wars and Population. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. OCLC 123124938.

Huber, Michel (1931). La population de la France pendant la guerre, avec un appendice sur Les revenus avant et après la guerre (in French). Paris. OCLC 4226464.

Bujac, Jean Léopold Emile (1930). Les campagnes de l'armèe Hellènique 1918-1922 (in French). Paris: Charles-Lavauzelle. OCLC 10808602.

Mortara, Giorgio (1925). La Salute pubblica in Italia durante e dopo la Guerra (in Italian). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. OCLC 2099099.

Harries, Merion; Harries, Susie (1991). Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army. Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-75303-2. OCLC 32615324.

Clodfelter, Micheal (2002). Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500-2000 (2nd ed.). London: McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-1204-4. OCLC 48066096.

Donato, Hernâni (1987). Dicionário das Batalhas Brasileiras. Rio de Janeiro: IBRASA. ISBN 978-85-348-0034-1.

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The Allies, or the Entente Powers, were an international military coalition of countries led by France, the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, Italy, and Japan against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria in World War I (1914-1918).

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Triple Alliance | Definition, Countries, Facts, & Significance

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Triple Alliance, secret agreement between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy formed in May 1882 and renewed periodically until World War I when, despite renewals of the pact in 1907 and 1912, Italy entered into the war in opposition to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Read here to learn more about the Triple Alliance.

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Trench warfare | Definition, History, & Facts

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Trench warfare, combat in which armies attack, counterattack, and defend from relatively permanent systems of trenches dug into the ground. Trench warfare is resorted to when the superior firepower of the defense compels the opposing forces to ‘dig in,’ sacrificing their mobility in order to gain pr…

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Treaty of Versailles - World War I - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Treaty of Versailles, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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centralized control by an autocratic authority; the political concept that the citizen should be totally subject to an absolute state authority... See the full definition

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World War I was a total war, involving the governments, economies and populations of participating nations to an extent never seen before in history. This was distinct from the way 'smaller' wars had been fought, like the Crimean War (1853-56) and late-19th century colonial wars. In 'total war' - a term not coined until the 1930s, by German general Paul von Ludendorff - the entire nation was called into service, rather than just its military. Governments played an active and interventionist role, passing laws that would be intolerable during peacetime. Ministers and departments took control of economic production, nationalising factories, determining production targets, allocating manpower and resources. Conscription was introduced to bolster military forces and resources like ships, trains or vehicles were commandeered for military purposes. Wartime governments also acted to protect national security, by implementing press censorship, curfews and strict punishments for breaches and violations. They also made extensive use of propaganda, both to raise public morale and to raise money through war bonds.

Britain initiated total war from the outset. A week after the declaration of war, the parliament at Westminster passed the Defence of the Realm Act. This legislation empowered the government to secure the nation from internal threat or invasion, by handing it wide-ranging powers, including censorship, the authority to imprison without trial and the power to court martial and execute civilians. Control of the press and communication media was particularly stringent. London appointed 'official' military journalists and set up the War Office Press Bureau, which processed stories and distributed them to newspapers (very few civilian reporters were ever let near the front lines). Government agencies and the military were authorised to prevent the publication of offensive or dangerous material in newspapers and books; to open and censor civilian mail; and to tap into telegraph and telephone communications. As the war progressed, new restrictions were added to the legislation. Daylight saving was introduced to provide more working hours in the day. Alcohol consumption was restricted, opening hours of pubs were cut back and beer was watered down to reduce its strength. It became illegal to light bonfires or fly kites, both of which might attract enemy airships.

The British economy was also shifted to a total war footing. Under the Defence of the Realm Act the government could requisition any land or building deemed necessary for the war effort. Government control of the economy increased dramatically in 1915, in the wake of the 'Shell Crisis' (a shortage of artillery shells that contributed to British military failures on the Western Front; this shortage brought about strong criticism of the government and a change in prime minister). A new portfolio was created: the Ministry of Munitions, filled initially by future prime minister David Lloyd George. Construction of a massive factory capable of producing 800 tons of cordite a day was ordered, while other factories were nationalised and retooled for the production of artillery shells. British production of shells increased by more than 1000 per cent. The government also formed departments to coordinate other areas of the economy, including food, labour and maritime transport. Munitions aside, the other pressing demand was for food, both for the military and the civilian population. Westminster seized control of unused land for farming, including parks, commons and disused blocks. Rationing was introduced and food queues became the norm. Food became so valuable that it was a criminal offence to feed bread to animals or to throw rice at weddings.

In Germany, Walter Rathenau was put in charge of the Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, or War Raw Materials Department. As Germany started to suffer shortages caused by an Allied naval blockade, Rathenau's skilful coordination of available raw materials and synthetic substitutes allowed industrial production to continue. But after two years these resources were severely depleted, and by 1916 production levels were falling. Military commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff implemented a series of reforms to double production of military needs. The Oberster Kriegsamt, or Supreme War Office, was formed to control and coordinate all aspects of wartime production, labour, industry and transport. The Auxiliary Service Law, passed in late 1916, empowered the government to employ and relocate any adult males it needed to meet its labour needs. More than two million men were forced out of the agricultural sector to work in weapons and munitions production. This had the desired military outcome, however the reallocation of labour saw production of both food and consumer goods plummet. These shortages, exacerbated by the ongoing Allied blockade, led to critical food shortages by the winter of 1916.

"Study of total war might begin with the premise that total warfare, the scourge of the first half of the 20th century, did not fall from the skies in 1914. Its political, military, economic, social and cultural origins lie in the 19th century, if not earlier. The Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars fundamentally altered the course of military history. For the first time since states had established monopolies over the use of armed force, mass mobilisation and broad social support became the basis of warfare. The great Prussian military analyst von Clausewitz was so impressed by this military revolution that he later wrote: 'Suddenly war again became the business of the people - a people of 30 million, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens."
Roger Chickering, historian

The French economy also mobilised to meet the nation's war needs, though this was achieved with less government intervention than in Germany and Britain. France's war production was left largely to groups of privately-owned companies, each responsible for a particular military necessity (there were fifteen groups responsible for producing shells, for example, and three groups for producing rifles). These consortiums received government orders and targets, then worked collaboratively to fill them. This system worked in principle, though France as a whole lacked the production capacity of Germany; it produced only one-sixth the amount of coal as Germany, and it was also hamstrung by the loss of some key industrial areas in 1914. Nevertheless the French achieved some spectacular increases in armaments production. By 1918 French producers were making 1,000 artillery guns, 261,000 shells and six million bullets per month. At the outbreak of war there were 162 aircraft in France; by 1918 there were more than 11,800. These striking increases made France the largest Allied producer of weapons and munitions, exceeding even the United States. Socially, the demands of the war economy took their toll on France's workers, who suffered from stagnant wages and rising prices.

1. World War I was a 'total war' as civilian societies, economies and labour were all seconded to the war effort.
2. Britain's Defence of the Realm Act gave its leaders extensive powers to reduce threats and harness the economy.
3. A critical shortage of artillery shells in 1915 led to a change in government and new measures to increase production.
4. In Germany, production was taken over by high-ranking officers, who reorganised industries and conscripted labour.
5. There were also dramatic increases in French military production, which exceeded that of the other Allies. Unlike in Britain, production was largely left to private companies working to fulfil government contracts.

© Alpha History 2014. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use.
This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "Total war" at Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/total-war/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

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World War I was a total war, involving the governments, economies and populations of participating nations to an extent never seen before in history. This was distinct from the way 'smaller' wars had been fought, like the Crimean War (1853-56) and late-19th century colonial wars.

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The Schlieffen Plan was a battle plan, drawn up by German tacticians, to secure victory against both France and Russia. From the 1870s, German military tacticians mused over a particular strategic concern: if Germany ever found itself at war with both France and Russia, she would be surrounded and forced to fight on two fronts, dividing her resources and doubling the risk. A better strategy was to knock out one of her antagonists quickly, then deal with the other - but this was easier said than done. The French had constructed a chain of forts, defences and concrete pillboxes (machine-gun nests) along their eastern border with Germany. These fortifications made an invasion of France a difficult prospect; any assault on French territory would be held up, would take weeks to penetrate and would probably involve significant losses.

The Germans embraced a workaround to this impasse called the Schlieffen Plan. It was named for its inventor, Count von Schlieffen, who constructed the plan in 1905 after studying the Russian military's performance in its ill-fated war with Japan (1904-5). Schlieffen noted that Russia was enormous but lacked railways; any full mobilisation of its forces would take several weeks, perhaps as long as three or four months. He set his sights on finding a way to invade France, capture Paris and force a French surrender quickly, ideally within two months; after this Germany could turn its full attention to Russia. Schlieffen's battle plan involved some German troops entering France through its more lightly-defended northern borders - but most would instead invade via the small nations of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These three nations were neutral, lacked sizeable military forces and had borders with France that were largely unprotected. Once into northern France, four waves of German troops would sweep south-west and down toward Paris. Since most French troops would be positioned on the German border, they could be outflanked and surrounded. Schlieffen and his planners predicted victory could be achieved in as little as 40 days.

"Demands imposed on men and animals, the requirement for perfect co-ordination over long distances and the difficulty of dislodging entrenched opponents all suggest that the plan could never have succeeded. Schlieffen's plan was a brilliant strategy but designed for an era when armies numbered in tens of thousands, not in the hundreds of thousands and millions. Still, the details of planning seem to have provided the basis for a pervasive confidence that they could win the war that they believe would happen, and that they could win it quickly."
Frank B. Tipton, historian

It was a bold and daring strategy that reflected Schlieffen's philosophy: "To win, we must be the stronger of the two at the point of impact. Our only hope of this lies in making our own choice of operations, not in waiting passively for whatever the enemy chooses to do." But not all in the German high command supported his plan. Some thought it risky, provocative and wasteful of men and resources. Schlieffen's replacement, General von Moltke, was of this view. When he took command in 1906 he downsized the Schlieffen strategy, reducing troop numbers and removing the Netherlands from the battle plan. In August 1914 German troops entered Belgium as per von Moltke's modified plan, catching the small Belgian contingent by surprise. But it was in Belgium that the strategy began to unravel. Belgian military forces, supported by civilian militia, held up the Germans for almost four weeks - double the anticipated time. The attack on neutral Belgium also drew England, a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, into the war. Belgium also provided a ripe source of Allied propaganda about callous German disregard for neutrality, as well as alleged German brutalities against Belgian civilians, women and children.

In military terms the Schlieffen Plan was partially successful, in that it allowed some rapid penetration into France. But the nature of this advance created its own problems. The speed of the German advance placed great strain on its troops, most of whom were travelling on foot. Within a month German divisions had reached the Marne River, to the immediate north-east of Paris - but they were fatigued, battle-weary from marching, plus many small but frequent engagements along the way. There was also considerable strain on long German supply lines (the routes by which an advancing army receives its food, munitions, reinforcements and other needs). The Schlieffen Plan also under-estimated the military, infrastructure and capacity for mobilisation of both France and Russia. On the Eastern Front, the Russians were able to launch an offensive against Germany faster than anticipated. The French also organised and moved their own troops rapidly. Several hundred Paris taxis were even commandeered by the military and used to ferry thousands of troops to defensive positions. The German advance was ultimately halted at the week-long Battle of the Marne (September 1914); their inability to advance further became a major factor in the development of trench warfare and the Western Front.

1. The Schlieffen Plan was Germany's tactical solution for avoiding a two-front war with France and Russia.
2. Under this plan, drawn up in 1905, France would be forced to a quick surrender by a German invasion in the north.
3. German forces would move through neutral nations like Belgium and Luxembourg, bypassing French fortifications.
4. Schlieffen's initial plan, modified by General von Moltke, became the accepted strategy in the event of a European war.
5. The plan allowed the Germans to penetrate French territory quickly and with relatively few losses, however the speed and logistics of the advance meant that it could not be sustained, allowing the French to quickly mount a response.

© Alpha History 2014. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use.
This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "The Schlieffen Plan" at Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/schlieffen-plan/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

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The Schlieffen Plan was a battle plan, drawn up by German tacticians, to secure victory against both France and Russia. From the 1870s, German military tacticians mused over a particular strategic concern: if Germany ever found itself at war with both France and Russia, she would be surrounded and forced to fight on two fronts, dividing her resources and doubling the risk.

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Citation: C N Trueman "Assassination at Sarajevo"
historylearningsite.co.uk. The History Learning Site, 31 Mar 2015. 8 Apr 2018.

The murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is accepted by historians as the immediate cause of World War One though serious trouble - long term causes - had been brewing for sometime.

On June 28th 1914, the heir to the Austrian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.

Bosnia was in the very south-east corner of the Austrian empire and some people there wanted to be independent from Austria and set up their own state which could run itself.

Franz Ferdinand had been warned that his visit could provoke trouble but he ignored this advice and visited Sarajevo regardless. As was common at the time, he travelled in an open topped car.

Franz Joseph and his wife
There had been trouble at the start of his royal tour of Sarajevo when another car in his entourage was hit by a grenade and an Austrian officer had been injured. Clearly, Sarajevo was a dangerous place to be.

However, Franz Ferdinand wanted to demonstrate that his family was in control of Sarajevo and to have stopped the tour would have been seen as a sign of weakness by those who did not want Bosnia and Sarajevo ruled by the Austrians.

Franz ordered that his route through Sarajevo be changed at the last minute as he wanted to see the injured officer in hospital. Unfortunately, his driver did not fully understand his instructions and got lost.

Stopping to check where he was, the driver attempted to reverse out on to the main street. By bad luck, he stopped right by a man called Gavrilo Princip. He was a member of the Black Hand Gang which wanted to rid Bosnia of Austrian rule. He had also been behind the grenade throwing and was now trying to disguise himself among the many people who lined the streets fearing the police might arrest him. Not believing his luck, Princip pulled out the revolver he had on him and shot Franz and his wife. Both died as a result.

There was also a photographer at the scene and he captured scenes that were printed throughout the world.

Princip, second on the right, under arrest

But how did this murder of an unpopular man lead to war?

A country called Serbia was blamed by Austria for this murder. Serbia was near to Bosnia and it had encouraged the Black Hand Gang and given the gang weapons. What did Serbia want out of this? She hoped that both herself and Bosnia would unite to form a new Balkan state.

Austria decided that Serbia must be punished and planned to invade her. Serbia called on her old friend Russia to help her. Now the alliance/entente came in to play. One country from each was involved on opposite sides. The situation could only get worse.

Serbia would have been easy for Austria to crush. Russia was a different issue. She had a huge army and Austria would not have coped with a Austro-Russian war. Austria called on Germany for help. The German government agreed to this and their response provoked the French government.

However, unknown to anybody other than the German government, the German army had created a plan called the Schlieffen Plan. Schlieffen was a senior German army officer and he believed that the German army was superior to any army in Europe but that it could not fight a war on two fronts - France and Russia.

However, he calculated that the vast Russian army would take 6 weeks to get itself organised - called mobilisation - and that in that time, the Germans could attack the French, beat them and then send their army across Europe to fight the Russians. The German High Command accepted this plan. But it had one problem. It relied on what the French or Russians did and the actions of one would provoke a German response and not the other way round. In other words, the Germans had to react to a situation as opposed to controlling it.

When France called up her army, Germany had no choice but to carry out the Schlieffen Plan. This plan involved an attack on France via Belgium.

Britain had given Belgium a guarantee in 1839 that if anybody attacked her, Britain would attack the attacker.

Therefore, within weeks of the murder at Sarajevo, five out of the six countries that had signed the two treaties were on the verge of war.

On August 4th, 1914, Germany invaded Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany. France and Russia supported Britain. Austria supported Germany. Only Italy did not get involved - yet.

Every country concerned was convinced that the war would last only from August to Christmas 1914. No-one envisaged the horrors of trench warfare.

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Assassination at Sarajevo - History Learning Site

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The murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is accepted by historians as the immediate cause of World War One though serious trouble - long term causes - had been brewing for sometime. On June 28th 1914, the heir to the Austrian Empire, Franz Ferdinand, was visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.

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Reparations definition, the making of amends for wrong or injury done: reparation for an injustice. See more.

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Propaganda

During World War One, propaganda was employed on a global scale. Unlike previous wars, this was the first total war in which whole nations and not just professional armies were locked in mortal combat. This and subsequent modern wars required propaganda to mobilise hatred against the enemy; to convince the population of the justness of the cause; to enlist the active support and cooperation of neutral countries; and to strengthen the support of allies.

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Propaganda During World War One, propaganda was employed on a global scale. Unlike previous wars, this was the first total war in which whole nations and not just professional armies were locked in mortal combat.

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A neutral country is a state which is either neutral towards belligerents in a specific war, or holds itself as permanently neutral in all future conflicts (including avoiding entering into military alliances such as NATO). The exact nature of neutrality can differ between the interpretations of various countries.

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Militarism is a philosophy or system that places great importance on military power. Alfred Vagts, a German historian who served in World War I, defined militarism as the "domination of the military man over the civilian, an undue preponderance of military demands, an emphasis on military considerations". Militarism was a significant force in several European nations in the years prior to World War I. Their governments were strongly influenced, if not dominated, by military leaders, their interests and priorities. Generals and admirals sometimes acted as de facto government ministers, advising political leaders, influencing domestic policy and demanding increases in defence and arms spending. This militarism fathered a dangerous child, the arms race, which gave rise to new military technologies and increased defence spending. Militarism affected more than policy; it also shaped culture, the media and public opinion. The press held up military leaders as heroes, painted rival nations as aggressive and regularly engaged in 'war talk'. Militarism alone did not start World War I - that first required a flashpoint and a political crisis - but it created an environment where war, rather than negotiation or diplomacy, was considered the best way of resolving international disputes.

Militarism, nationalism and imperialism were all intrinsically connected. In the 19th and early 20th centuries military power was considered a measure of national and imperial strength. A powerful state needed a powerful military to protect its interests and support its policies. Strong armies and navies were needed to defend the homeland; to protect imperial and trade interests abroad; and to deter threats and rivals. War was avoided where possible - but it could also be used to advance a nation's political or economic interests (as the famous Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in 1832, war was "a continuation of policy by other means"). In the 19th century European mind, politics and military power became inseparable, in much the same way that politics and economic management have become inseparable in the modern world. Governments and leaders who failed to maintain armies and navies capable of enforcing the national will were considered weak or incompetent.

"The belief in war as a test of national power and a proof of national superiority added a scientific base to the cult of patriotism... In Britain, a real effort was made to teach boys that success in war depended upon the patriotism and military spirit of the nation, and that preparation for war would strengthen 'manly virtue' and 'patriotic ardour'."
Zara Steiner, historian

The north German kingdom of Prussia is considered the wellspring of European militarism. Germany's government and armed forces were both based on the Prussian model and many German politicians and generals were Junkers (land-owning Prussian nobles). Prior to the unification of Germany in 1871, Prussia was the most powerful of the German states. The Prussian army was reformed and modernised in the 1850s by Field Marshal von Moltke the Elder. Under von Moltke's leadership Prussia's army implemented new strategies, improved training for its officers, introduced advanced weaponry and adopted more efficient means of command and communication. Prussia's crushing military defeat of France in 1871 revealed its army as the most dangerous and effective military force in Europe. This victory also secured German unification, allowing Prussian militarism and German nationalism to become closely intertwined. Prussian commanders, personnel and methodology became the nucleus of the new German imperial army. The German kaiser was its supreme commander; he relied on a military council and chief of general staff, made up of Junker aristocrats and career officers. When it came to military matters, the Reichstag (Germany's elected civilian parliament) had no more than an advisory role.

Elsewhere in Europe militarism took on a different flavour, yet it was an important political and cultural force. British militarism, though more subdued than its German counterpart, was considered essential for maintaining the nation's imperial and trade interests. The Royal Navy, by far the world's largest naval force, protected shipping, trade routes and colonial ports. British land forces kept order and imposed imperial policies in India, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. British attitudes to the military underwent a stark transformation. During the 18th century Britons had considered armies and navies a necessary evil, their ranks filled with the dregs of the lower classes, most of their officers failed aristocrats and ne'er-do-wells. But in 19th century Britain soldiering was increasingly depicted as a noble vocation, a selfless act of service to one's country. As in Germany, British soldiers were glorified and romanticised, both in the press and popular culture. Whether serving in Crimea or the distant colonies, British officers were hailed as gentlemen and sterling leaders, while enlisted men were well drilled, resolute and ready to make the ultimate sacrifice 'for King and Country'. The concept of soldiers as heroes was epitomised by Tennyson's 1854 poem The Charge of the Light Brigade and reflected in cheap 'derring-do' novels about wars, both real and imagined.
The arms race
Military victories, whether in colonial wars or major conflicts like the Crimean War (1853-56) or the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), only increased the prestige of the military and intensified nationalism. In contrast, a military defeat (such as Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905) or even a costly victory (like Britain in the Boer War, 1899-1902) might expose problems and heighten calls for military reform or increased spending. Virtually every major European nation engaged in some form of military renewal in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In Germany, military expansion and modernisation was heartily endorsed by the newly crowned kaiser, Wilhelm II, who wanted to retain his country's "place in the sun". In Britain the arms race was driven not by the monarchy but by public interest and the press. In 1884 the prominent newspaperman W. T. Stead published a series of articles suggesting that Britain was unprepared for war, particularly in its naval defences. Pressure groups like the British Navy League (formed 1894) agitated for more ships and personnel. By the early 1900s the Navy League and the press were calling on the government to commission more Dreadnoughts (battleships), one popular slogan being "We want eight and we won't wait!"

As a consequence of this pressure and other factors, European military expenditure between 1900 and 1914 sky-rocketed. In 1870 the combined military spending of the six great powers (Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Italy) totalled 94 million pounds. By 1914 it had quadrupled to 398 million pounds. German defence spending during this period increased by a massive 73 per cent, dwarfing the increases in France (10 per cent) and Britain (13 per cent). Russian defence spending also grew by more than one third. Russia's embarrassing defeat by the Japanese (1905) prompted the tsar to order a massive rearmament program. By the 1910s around 45 per cent of Russian government spending was allocated to the armed forces, in comparison to just five per cent on education. Every major European power, Britain excluded, introduced or increased conscription to expand their armies. Germany added 170,000 full-time soldiers to its army in 1913-14, while dramatically increasing its navy. In 1898 the German government ordered the construction of 17 new vessels. Berlin also led the way in the construction of military submarines; by 1914 the German navy had 29 operational U-boats. This rapid growth in German naval power triggered a press frenzy and some alarm in Britain. London responded to German naval expansion by commissioning 29 new ships for the Royal Navy.

The following table lists estimated defence and military spending in seven major nations between 1908 and 1913 (figures shown in United States dollars):

This period saw significant changes to the quality of military weapons and equipment, as well as their quantity. Having studied the lessons of the Crimean War and other 19th century conflicts, military industrialists developed hundreds of improvements and rushed them to patent. Perhaps the most significant improvements were made to the calibre, range, accuracy and portability of heavy artillery. During the American Civil War (1861-65) heavy artillery could fire up to 2,500 metres at best; by the early 1900s this range had almost tripled. The development of explosive shells was also significant, giving a single artillery round greater killing power wherever it landed. These advances allowed artillery shelling and bombardments to become standard practice along the Western Front during World War I. First developed in 1881, machine guns also became smaller, lighter, more accurate, more reliable and much faster, some capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute. Small arms also improved significantly. The effective range of a rifle in the 1860s was around 400 metres; in contrast the British issue Lee-Enfield .303 could hit a target more than 2,000 metres away. Barbed wire, an invention of the 1860s, was also embraced by military strategists as an anti-personnel device. While historians often disagree on the reasons for the arms race, there is no doubt that the development of new weaponry changed the face of modern warfare. Sir Edward Grey, reflecting on his service as British foreign secretary in July 1914, said it thus:

"A great European war under modern conditions would be a catastrophe for which previous wars afforded no precedent. In old days, nations could collect only portions of their men and resources at a time and dribble them out by degrees. Under modern conditions, whole nations could be mobilised at once and their whole life blood and resources poured out in a torrent. Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in war, millions would now meet - and modern weapons would multiply manifold the power of destruction. The financial strain and the expenditure of wealth would be incredible."

1. Militarism is the incorporation of military personnel and ideas into civilian government - and the belief that military power is essential for national strength.
2. Militarism was strongest in Germany, where the kaiser relied heavily on his military commanders and the civilian legislature ( Reichstag) exerted little or no control over the military.
3. Militarists were also driven by experiences and failures in previous wars, such as the Crimean War, Boer War and Russo-Japanese War.
4. Militarism, combined with new weapons, emerging technologies and developments in industrial production, fuelled a European arms race in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
5. Influenced by nationalism and advice from military commanders, European governments ramped up military spending, purchasing new weaponry and increasing the size of armies and navies.

© Alpha History 2014. Content on this page may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use.
This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "Militarism as a cause of World War I" at Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/militarism/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

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Militarism is a philosophy or system that places great importance on military power. Alfred Vagts, a German historian who served in World War I, defined militarism as the "domination of the military man over the civilian, an undue preponderance of military demands, an emphasis on military considerations".

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mandate, an authorization granted by the League of Nations to a member nation to govern a former German or Turkish colony. The territory was called a mandated territory, or mandate.

Following the defeat of Germany and Ottoman Turkey in World War I, their Asian and African possessions, which were judged not yet ready to govern themselves, were distributed among the victorious Allied powers under the authority of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (itself an Allied creation). The mandate system was a compromise between the Allies' wish to retain the former German and Turkish colonies and their pre-Armistice declaration (November 5, 1918) that annexation of territory was not their aim in the war. The mandates were divided into three groups on the basis of their location and their level of political and economic development and were then assigned to individual Allied victors (mandatory powers, or mandatories).

Class A mandates consisted of the former Turkish provinces of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. These territories were considered sufficiently advanced that their provisional independence was recognized, though they were still subject to Allied administrative control until they were fully able to stand alone. Iraq and Palestine (including modern Jordan and Israel) were assigned to Great Britain, while Turkish-ruled Syria and Lebanon went to France. All Class A mandates reached full independence by 1949.

Class B mandates consisted of the former German-ruled African colonies of Tanganyika, parts of Togoland and the Cameroons, and Ruanda-Urundi. The Allied powers were directly responsible for the administration of these mandates but were subject to certain controls intended to protect the rights of the mandates' native peoples. Tanganyika (which is now part of Tanzania) was assigned to Britain, while most of the Cameroons and Togoland were assigned to France, and Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi) went to Belgium.

Class C mandates consisted of various former German-held territories that mandatories subsequently administered as integral parts of their territory: South West Africa (now Namibia, assigned to South Africa), New Guinea (assigned to Australia), Western Samoa (now Samoa, assigned to New Zealand), the islands north of the Equator in the western Pacific ( Japan), and Nauru (Australia, with Britain and New Zealand).

Theoretically, exercise of the mandates was supervised by the League's Permanent Mandates Commission, but the commission had no real way to enforce its will on any of the mandatory powers. The mandate system was replaced by the UN trusteeship system in 1946.

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Mandate, an authorization granted by the League of Nations to a member nation to govern a former German or Turkish colony. After the defeat of Germany and Ottoman Turkey in World War I, their colonies, which were judged not yet ready to govern themselves, were distributed among the victorious Allied powers.

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Maginot Line - World War II - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Maginot Line, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Table of Contents

1. Prelude to Lusitania: Germany Announces Unrestricted Submarine Warfare

2. The Lusitania Sinks: May 7, 1915

3. America Enters World War I

On May 7, 1915, less than a year after World War I (1914-18) erupted across Europe, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from New York to Liverpool, England. Of the more than 1,900 passengers and crew members on board, more than 1,100 perished, including more than 120 Americans. Nearly two years would pass before the United States formally entered World War I, but the sinking of the Lusitania played a significant role in turning public opinion against Germany, both in the United States and abroad.

Prelude to Lusitania: Germany Announces Unrestricted Submarine Warfare

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America's closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter's attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Britain.

Did you know? The Lusitania made its maiden voyage in 1907. When it was sunk in 1915, the ocean liner was on the return leg of its 101st roundtrip voyage across the Atlantic.

In early May 1915, several New York newspapers published a warning by the German Embassy in Washington, D.C., that Americans traveling on British or Allied ships in war zones did so at their own risk. The announcement was placed on the same page as an advertisement of the imminent sailing of the Lusitania liner from New York back to Liverpool. The sinkings of merchant ships off the south coast of Ireland prompted the British Admiralty to warn the Lusitania to avoid the area or take simple evasive action, such as zigzagging to confuse U-boats plotting the vessel's course.

The Lusitania Sinks: May 7, 1915

The captain of the Lusitania ignored the British Admiralty's recommendations, and at 2:12 p.m. on May 7 the 32,000-ton ship was hit by an exploding torpedo on its starboard side. The torpedo blast was followed by a larger explosion, probably of the ship's boilers, and the ship sank off the south coast of Ireland in less than 20 minutes.

It was revealed that the Lusitania was carrying about 173 tons of war munitions for Britain, which the Germans cited as further justification for the attack. The United States eventually protested the action, and Germany apologized and pledged to end unrestricted submarine warfare. However, in November of that same year a U-boat sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing more than 270 people, including more than 25 Americans. Public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

America Enters World War I

On January 31, 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced it would resume unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American ship Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat.

On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted to declare war against Germany, and two days later the House of Representatives endorsed the declaration. With that, America entered World War I.

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On May 7, 1915, less than a year after World War I (1914-18) began in Europe, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from New York to Liverpool, England. More than 1,100 crew and passengers died, including more than 120 Americans.

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League of Nations, an organization for international cooperation established on January 10, 1920, at the initiative of the victorious Allied powers at the end of World War I.

The terrible losses of World War I produced, as years went by and peace seemed no nearer, an ever-growing public demand that some method be found to prevent the renewal of the suffering and destruction which were now seen to be an inescapable part of modern war. So great was the force of this demand that within a few weeks after the opening of the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, unanimous agreement had been reached on the text of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Although the League was unable to fulfill the hopes of its founders, its creation was an event of decisive importance in the history of international relations. The League was formally disbanded on April 19, 1946; its powers and functions had been transferred to the nascent United Nations.

Origins of the League of Nations

The central, basic idea of the movement was that aggressive war is a crime not only against the immediate victim but against the whole human community. Accordingly it is the right and duty of all states to join in preventing it; if it is certain that they will so act, no aggression is likely to take place. Such affirmations might be found in the writings of philosophers or moralists but had never before emerged onto the plane of practical politics. Statesmen and lawyers alike held and acted on the view that there was no natural or supreme law by which the rights of sovereign states, including that of making war as and when they chose, could be judged or limited. Many of the attributes of the League of Nations were developed from existing institutions or from time-honoured proposals for the reform of previous diplomatic methods. However, the premise of collective security was, for practical purposes, a new concept engendered by the unprecedented pressures of World War I.

When the peace conference met, it was generally agreed that its task should include the establishment of a League of Nations capable of ensuring future peace. U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson insisted that this should be among the first questions to be dealt with by the conference. The work proceeded with far greater speed than that of territorial and military settlement, chiefly because the subject had been exhaustively studied during the war years. Unofficial societies in the United States, Great Britain, France, and some neutral countries had drawn up many plans and proposals, and in doing so they in turn had availed themselves of the efforts of earlier thinkers.

Over many years lawyers had worked out plans for the settlement of disputes between states by legal means or, failing these, by third-party arbitration, and the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 had held long debates on these subjects. The results had been unimpressive; the 1907 conference tried in vain to set up an international court, and though many arbitration treaties were signed between individual states, they all contained reservations which precluded their application in more dangerous disputes. However, though the diplomatists thus kept the free hand as long as possible, the general principle of arbitration-which in popular language included juridical settlement and also settlement through mediation-had become widely accepted by public opinion and was embodied as a matter of course in the Covenant.

Another 19th-century development which had influenced the plan makers was the growth of international bureaus, such as the Universal Postal Union, the International Institute of Agriculture, and numerous others, set up to deal with particular fields of work in which international cooperation was plainly essential. They had no political function or influence, but within their very narrow limits they worked efficiently. It was concluded that wider fields of social and economic life, in which each passing year made international cooperation more and more necessary, might with advantage be entrusted to similar international administrative institutions. Such ideas were strengthened by the fact that, during the war, joint Allied commissions controlling trade, shipping, and procurement of raw materials had gradually developed into powerful and effective administrative bodies. Planners questioned whether these entities, admitting first the neutrals and later the enemy states into their councils, could become worldwide centres of cooperation in their respective fields.

Other lessons of the war concerned the problems of armaments on the one hand and of diplomacy on the other. It was widely believed that the enormous increase in armaments undertaken by the great powers of Europe during the immediate prewar period had been not only a consequence, but also in itself a cause, of tension, hostility, and finally war. The naval arms race between the United Kingdom and Germany was an especially obvious manifestation of this phenomenon. Equally strong was the belief that "secret diplomacy," that is, the existence, under secret treaty, of commitments for reciprocal diplomatic or military support, had enabled statesmen and generals to run risks which public opinion would never have countenanced had they been known.

These general propositions-collective security, arbitration, economic and social cooperation, reduction of armaments, and open diplomacy-inspired in various degrees the plans drawn up during the war. It was urged from the first that they could become effective only through the creation of a great international organization charged with the duty of applying them and invested with the powers necessary to that end. Already in spring 1915 the name "League of Nations" was in general use among the small groups which were discussing the future organization of peace. Their ideas, encouraged by statesmen such as former Pres. William H. Taft in the United States and Sir Edward Grey and Lord Robert Cecil in Great Britain, gradually became known and supported. The League to Enforce Peace in the United States and the League of Nations societies in Britain acted as centres of discussion. In the presidential election of 1916 both parties advocated U.S. membership in a future league. A few months later the United States was a belligerent, and Wilson, entering on his second term, became, by right both of his personality and of his position as leader of the greatest world power, the chief spokesman of the Allied coalition. In January 1918, in the historic Fourteen Points in which he summed up U.S. war aims, he called for the formation of "a general association of nations...affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike." The Fourteen Points were in due course accepted by all the Allies as an authentic statement of their war aims also. Thus what had seemed hardly more than a utopian hope was transmuted in a few months into the formal and official purpose of the soon-to-be-victorious Allies.

Meanwhile, both the British and French governments had appointed special committees to draw up plans for the new organization, and their reports were transmitted to Washington, where Wilson and his confidential adviser Edward M. House were drafting proposals in their turn. A further contribution of great importance was made by South African statesman Jan Smuts, who published in December 1918 The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion. Smuts declared that the League must not be a mere diplomatic defense against war but "a great organ of the ordinary peaceful life of civilisation...woven into the very texture of our political system," and that in the long run its power to prevent war would depend upon the extent of its action in peace. To many of his contemporaries, this was a new vision of the real nature of an effective League of Nations.

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League of Nations | Definition & Purpose

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League of Nations, organization for international cooperation established at the initiative of the victorious Allied powers after World War I. Although the League was unable to fulfill the hopes of its founders, its creation was an event of decisive importance in the history of international relations.

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Our Documents - President Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points (1918)

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OurDocuments.gov. Featuring 100 milestone documents of American history from the National Archives. Includes images of original primary source documents, lesson plans, teacher and student competitions, and educational resources.

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Kids learn about the Central Powers of World War I including the countries, leaders, military commanders, and facts - the alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire.

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byname of:

Ujedinjenje Ili Smrt (Serbo-Croation: Union or Death)

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Black Hand, secret Serbian society of the early 20th century that used terrorist methods to promote the liberation of Serbs outside Serbia from Habsburg or Ottoman rule and was instrumental in planning the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914), precipitating the outbreak of World War I. The society was formed (1911) and led by Col. Dragutin Dimitrijević; its members were primarily army officers with some government officials. Operating from Belgrade, it conducted propaganda campaigns, organized armed bands in Macedonia (before the Balkan Wars, 1912-13), and established a network of revolutionary cells throughout Bosnia. Within Serbia it dominated the army and wielded tremendous influence over the government by terrorizing officials; it became so powerful that its authority challenged that of the government. In order to eliminate that rival, Prince Alexander, commander in chief of the expatriate Serbian army, brought the leaders of the Black Hand to trial on dubious charges at Salonika in 1917. Dimitrijević and two others were executed, and more than 200 were imprisoned.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Black Hand | Definition, History, & Facts

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Black Hand, secret Serbian society of the early 20th century that used terrorist methods to promote the liberation of Serbs outside Serbia from Habsburg or Ottoman rule and was instrumental in planning the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, precipitating the outbreak of World War I.

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Some wars make strange bedfellows. Countries that had been traditional enemies; Russia and Japan, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and even France and Great Britain were scrapping old enmities. Although long before victory against the Central Powers was assured, Britain and France were diplomatically at odds over the division of the spoils. For some countries joining forces in past wars, it was similar ideology, for others, common interests or culture, or simply "that an enemy of my enemy is my friend". World War 1 broke the mold. In this war, partners simply chose "all of the above". Commenting on the vagaries of alliances the famous, T.E, Lawrence, who was intricate in the history of the Middle East said, "All is fair in love, war, and alliances".

Great Britain, a limited monarchy, France, a republic and Russia, an absolute monarchy all were intent on defending the deep differences in their goals, but nevertheless bound them into a Triple Entente. They formed a mutual military alliance to counter the imperialistic ambitions of Germany and its Austria-Hungary ally and their Triple Alliance that included Italy. The sophisticated diplomats wrongly believed they had achieved a balance of power that would prevent conflict.

There were different roads that led each participant into the relationship that was called the Triple Entente. Many of those byways crossed each other in the form of treaties and secret agreements that formed a tangled web, without an agreed starting point, that surprisingly found a common end point as World War 1 allies. However, France seems to have always been central. After all, French was the language of diplomacy, and its purposes always haunted by the the political machinations of the Renaissance Italian, Machiavelli.

World War 1 Allies World War 1 Allies

Russian Monarch,Tsar Nicholas & British Monarch,George V French President, Raymond Poncaire
Look alike? They were cousins.

As in the case of Germany, each of its future enemies, the entente nations, also had reason to support their own ambitions for expanding their empires. A somewhat paranoid Kaiser Wilhelm (Kaiser from the Latin Caesar) felt surrounded by three nations, Russia, France and Great Britain. His natural disposition to reject diplomacy as a solution would lead him into a world war which he seemed to welcome. However, before that war, Germany was exhibiting its desire to expand at the expense of France.

Through a series of secret as well as published agreements in late 19th and early 20th centuries, many European nations arranged to avoid stepping on each others toes by establishing and respecting spheres of influence in Africa and Asia. Germany was noticeably an absent partner preferring to act with a smaller group of like minded nations. Germany openly displayed disdain for the rights of its European neighbors.

This was evident in their hostile attack on France in July 1870, when the German states, marshaled by the Prussian monarchy, struck France. France was forced to cede a rich prize, Alsace- Lorraine and Chancellor Bismark would pull the various Germanic states into a unified nation that was more of a threat to its continental neighbors.

As planned by German Chancellor, Otto Von Bismark (Iron Chancellor), France was left defeated and diplomatically isolated. It had no mutual defense treaties excepting those non military arrangements dealing with dispositions of influence on other continents. However, Germany was taking no chances that a potential Russian -French alliance would force Germany into a two front war. In 1881 Germany and Russia secretly agreed to respect the then current territories of each. The quid pro quo was Germany recognizing Russian sphere of influence in Bulgaria. Six years later, 1887, the agreement was formalized as the Reinsurance Treaty scheduled to run three years. This left the French desperate for an ally. A "treaty" with Russia would be a diplomatic coup. However, the French Constitution required that a treaty be approved by its Chamber of Deputies. The possibility existed that a treaty with Russia would be defeated by that body. Thus, The French Foreign Minister called the agreement a "convention" and avoided a confrontation with the Deputies. Russia approved, and in an about face, did not renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Germany.

These were the safe years that Germany used to build a war machine and duplicitously engage other European countries in diplomatic gamesmanship. They had betrayed Bulgaria to empower Russia. Nevertheless, Bulgaria would ultimately choose joining the Central Powers as a wartime partner because Russia was more of a menace to a free Bulgaria than another German ally, the Ottomans, with their loose footprint in the Balkans. Wilhelm had courted the Ottomans and his bellicosity toward Russia must have charmed the Turks. The seat of the Ottoman Empire sat astride Europe and Asia and a natural block to Russian ambitions for a southern passage into the Mediterranean Sea. During this era, Ottoman and Turkey were names used interchangeably as did its major city known to the world as Constantinople or Istanbul.

Wilhelm's Chancellor, Bismark, had trounced the French in 1870, but wisely acted as a brake on further German ambitions as Wilhelm ascended to the throne in 1888. However, the Kaiser forced Bismark from government leaving Wilhelm unchecked to deal on the international stage.

Threats against European neighbors were common place through the reign of German Kaiser Wilhelm II ( 1888-1918). He found mutual interests with Emperor Franz Joseph (Austria- Hungary- 1848-1916). Their peoples shared a common culture and language. Both of these men had displayed little compunction about extending their realms at the expense of adjacent countries. In point of fact, even their countries had been at war with each other in mid 19th century when the Austrians unsuccessfully attempted to impose Hapsburg succession over Prussia and the German confederation of states. Each of these monarchs, and their predecessors, were no strangers to wars of conquest. In 1879, they formed an alliance to defend against potential Russian aggression that was a challenge to Austrian ambitions in the Balkans.Together they formed the core ( 1879) of the "Triple Alliance" until Italy joined the group in 1882. At that time, Italy was embroiled in a dispute with France over Tunisia. Essentially, the ambitions of the Triple Alliance became an invitation for a war.

Russia was feeling the heat of the German-Austrian agreement despite its secret agreement with Germany. The reality on the ground in Serbia, allied with Russia, pointed to a conflict with Austrian ambitions and hence a clash with Germany--the tight partner of Austria. Russia then allowed the Reinsurance Treaty to expire in 1890 in the face of the dual alliance of Germany and Austria. In turn, this led to Russian rapprochement with France. The diplomatic wheel was spinning and turning in the direction of conflict.

France then saw an opening and offered Russia financial and technological assistance in exchange for a military agreement ( 1894) pointedly to protect each other from invasion from the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. This beneath the table agreement went unnoticed by the world for two years. The table was set for an eventual war and a pairing of potential World War 1 allies.

Britain had remained aloof from the German problems that had beset France. There was no love lost between these nations with a 500 year history of war between them. However, when the German Kaiser began to speak of building a huge fleet of warships, Britain took notice. The British empire with its vast, far flung global wealth was protected by its navy. Any potential threat to its fleet could not be ignored. And a united Germany ( 1871) was a threat as the new century loomed on the horizon.

Subsequent to the Napoleonic wars in the early years of the 19th century there were some diplomatic overtures between France and Great Britain that fell far short of any mutual military assistance. They joined other European countries to guaranty the neutrality and viability of Belgium . Essentially to protect it against invasion ( 1839). The signatories included all of the initial belligerents in World War 1 who were, at that moment in time, acting in concert. . This document, added to the later Franco- Russian agreement, were the building blocks of the Triple Entente some 75 years in the future.

When that "future" arrived in 1914, Germany advised Britain that it would cross Belgium to invade France. The German plan of attack had been hatched by Prussion General Alfred von Schlieffen who believed that a direct attack against northeast France would meet stiff resistance from heavy French fortifications, and chose the least point of resistance, Belgium.

England warned Germany that it would mean war and cited the 1839 protocol. The German Chancellor declared that it was unbelievable that their countries would go to war over a "scrap of paper". In Britain, Belgium was the red line and not the protection of French sovereignty.

Britain and France took a further step to improve their relations. On April 8, 1904, they signed into the Entente Cordiale recognizing British influence in Egypt and the French sphere in Morocco. A small step forward, but short of any mutual military agreement.

World War 1 Allies World War 1 Allies

In 1889, The United States was flexing its muscle in the Pacific.

Historically, avoiding foreign entanglements, they broke that rule after a near battle of fleets with Germany over commercial hegemony of the Samoan Archipelago.

The United States entered into a Tripartite agreement with Germany and Britain dividing their geographical spheres of influence.

This was their first geopolitical accord with Germany.

Thus, in 1889, America became part of the web of treaties that would be severed by war. Was it coincidence or prophesy that in that year an Austrian mother gave birth to Adolph Hitler, a future master of secret agreements made to be broken ? Ten years later in 1899, following on the heels of their Philippine acquisition from Spain in 1898, the United States annexed eastern Samoa and Germany annexed western Samoa pursuant to the Treaty of Berlin. America was firmly in the European game that created overseas empires.

World War 1 Allies World War 1 Allies

Italy personified the adventurism that gripped many countries in the early 1900s. Search for the best alliance that would bring the greatest rewards in the event of war. Italy was much more subtle than the United States that had exacted the Philippines from Spain in 1898. Since 1889, Italy was a nominal partner of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Nevertheless, Italy entered into a secret agreement with France in 1902 that effectively nullified relations with the German Triple Alliance. Italy had long coveted Trieste, immediately to its north and the Dalmatian coast to its east. Italy recognized that Austria would never voluntarily cede these areas to Italy as a price for Italian support in case of war. One year into the "war to end all wars" Italy partnered with the Triple Entente ( May 3, 1915) claiming that their earlier agreement with the Triple alliance was solely meant to be of a defensive nature, and Austria had breached the agreement by commencing hostilities against Serbia. Italy did not feel uncomfortable quitting one alliance because it had become an initiator of offensive actions to join another alliance whose sole purpose was to engage in an offensive war.

World War 1 Allies click to enlarge

Every European foreign office was engaged in clandestine meetings with their counterparts from other countries. The secret understandings and treaties that traded the territories of others was the currency of diplomacy.

Countries that had in recent memory been at each others throats were now initialing secret protocols with former enemies. Russia coveted the Straits of Constantinople, the mile wide Bosphorus separating two continents, behind the guise of protecting Christians from Ottoman persecution. Britain, France, Germany and the Ottomans, the one empire most directly affected, vigorously opposed the action. Originally these same European countries had conspired to grant Russia its dream of a southern path to the sea. When the deal fell apart, what followed was the Crimean war ( 1853-56) setting Britain against Russia. After the Constantinople collapse of negotiations, the British forces were now deeply committed to defeating Russia, and were backed by France and the Ottoman Turks, now allies that had long held conflicting positions. However,each of these strange bedfellows had there own agendas. Catholic France was deeply committed to protecting their church's privileges in Palestine and clashed with the Russian Orthodox Church. Theological differences had morphed into national policies and the French believed that war was the only way to win that argument as well as adding territory to the empire.

The 1878 Treaty of Berlin, recognized Austria's right to administer the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina and further threatened the Ottoman long time control of Macedonia. The outright annexation of these Ottoman territories in 1908 was another harbinger of a wider war. Nevertheless, the annexation was approved in 1909 by an amendment to the Treaty of Berlin. This could not have endeared Austria, (Germany's partner) to the government in Turkey whose military had once knocked at the gates of Vienna ( 1683)..

The rapidly dissolving Ottoman Empire left them with three options in 1914: remain neutral as favored by the Sultan, or more importantly the ruling junta controlled by a group known as the "young Turks", join the Triple Entente and ally with Russia, a menace on its border, or join with Germany and Austria that was also participating in the dismemberment of its six hundred year old empire. Their choice of the Triple Alliance sealed their ultimate destruction.

August 2, 1914: Another secret treaty committed the Ottoman Empire to enter the war the day after Germany declared war on Russia. It was so secret that the Turkish home government was unaware that one of its ministers had committed the Ottomans and left them with little wiggle room. it would take 3 more months before the Turkish government took the plunge and publicly endorsed the treaty.That ultimate alliance with Germany triggered the appetites in the war offices in London and Paris. Great Britain had designs on the Holy Land. France looked north at Syria. Both areas had long been major components of the Turkish Empire for six centuries. In the background, there were also the commercial interests that understood the international thirst for middle eastern oil.

The only way the Ottoman Empire, now 500 years old, could survive was through its ability to make and break alliances as the western countries were constantly feeding on its periphery. Russia had all but eliminated the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and Romania during the 1870s. Ten years later, Tunisia was seized by the French. Another blow to the Ottomans in North Africa, A year later, their crown jewel, Egypt, was snatched by the British on the pretext of maintaining order in areas of local unrest. Thus Great Britain controlled another piece of the Ottoman Empire while thinly disguising that they were now the masters of Egypt. The prize was the Suez Canal. This lifeline was essential for the British, whose power was on the sea, and in the event of war was an essential conduit to their colonies in the far east. .The ultimate irony would be the Turkish alliance with Germany, and its new best friend, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The ruling Hapsburg's had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina held by the Ottomans for centuries, but the enmity between them was shelved in favor of a greater distaste for Great Britain and led to joining forces in 1914. However, they came to the new alliance with considerable baggage. In addition to a poorly trained army, their considerable Arab population south of Turkey was not enamored with their Ottoman masters despite a common Islam religion. Their antipathy to the old regime would be used by the British led by Lt.T.E. Lawrence to exploit these divisions in the Turkish forces in Palestine and Syria.(Lawrence of Arabia--too short for army standards but pressed into the intelligence service because of his knowledge of the terrain.) Although, their French ally never looked favorably on British offensive actions in that region that did not include French forces. The latter jealously guarded their ambition to secure Syria as a war prize. Friction existed in the ranks of the Entente. Britain sought an alliance with Arab leaders that would fight the Ottomans--and consequently the Germans-- and their French allies rejected any new partner that would hinder their imperial designs in Syria.

After all of the diplomatic machinations, Britain was irretrievably now an enemy of the Ottomans and the Germans. Great Britain secretly promised Russia the Straits of Constantinople which divided two continents in exchange for a British sphere of influence in Asia minor ( 1915). The agreement would give control of the ancient Byzantine capital, Constantinople, (current Istanbul) to Russia. A promise that Britain did not have to honor because the secret agreement was repudiated by the new Russian Bolshevik government ( 1917). The Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin were determined to exit the war. They probably assassinated the Czar and his family and proceeded, contrary to all prior agreements, to make a separate peace with Germany in 1917. The Triple Entente lost a partner. Russia perched on the Black Sea, lost the long sought outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.

But first things first. In 1915, the British Royal Navy and their French counterparts commenced a direct attack against Constantinople believing that success would end the war in the middle east. The plan failed because of the mine laden waters of the Dardanelles.They then attempted a land invasion targeting the Ottoman capital through the Gallipoli peninsula. Their Australian colonists fought valiantly but the Turks exacted great casualties, and after eight months the victory belonged to the home team courtesy of mistakes made by British generals. This was the greatest achievement of the Ottomans in the entire war and featured the Turkish hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the future founder of the Turkish republic.

Czar and Troops

.In Asia, Japan tardily entered the modern world. Its military build up and industrialization was originally encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt. He saw Japan as a kindred spirit that could bring western civilization to Asia. Belatedly, Roosevelt would later have second thoughts.

From 1894 to 1895, Japanese forces sought to extend its reach onto the Korean peninsula. They successfully defeated the Chinese army and China was forced to cede the Liadong Peninsula to Japan. This strategic territory would bring the Russians in conflict with Japanese empire building. Succumbing to the pressure of Germany, France and Russia the Japanese withdrew from the Peninsula.

Russia was desperate for a warm water port on the Pacific Ocean. Their far northern port of Vladivostok was closed by ice in the long winter months. Port Arthur, on the aforementioned Liadong was ideal. In a typical display of gunboat diplomacy, their fleet sailed into Port Arthur and in 1898 exacted a favorable lease from a weak China. The map displays the favorable geo-political position of Russia over lands lying between Port Arthur and Russian Siberia. This did not escape the notice of the Japanese.

World War 1 Allies

In the first year of the 20th Century, the international community was exploiting the wealth of China. They maintained huge legations in Shanghai and the capital, Beijing. Their presence prompted a Chinese populace revolt that endangered the diplomats and all foreigners. A large international force of eight nations was assembled to protect their interests. Japan and Russia were well represented. The latter landed over 170,000 men. After the security forces were no longer necessary, they began their withdrawal----except Russia who promised to leave, but did not.

Multi-Nationals

Britain, United States, Australian , British India, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Japan

absentee: Russia

World War 1 Allies

Great Britain was always suspicious of Russia's expansionist designs as well as the presence of the French navy--and then there was the French-Russian alliance of 1894 to ponder.

They held competing interests in the Middle East, and in 1902 they were encroaching on British interests further east in China.

It was time for an understanding with Japan that would isolate Russia from European aid and counter the French presence with the British and Japanese fleets.

The Agreement provided for neutrality if either country were involved in war; support, if the war was against more than one power; and no other pacts that would affect the validity of the treaty.

One immediate benefit was the exchange of intelligence regarding Russian strength.

In 1904, the Japanese and Russians attempted to resolve their differences without success. The Japanese, with the British treaty at their back, attacked the Russian fleet in Port Arthur. They followed with a land war and the ultimate defeat of Russia. Japan had made its mark as a world power, and the Russian defeat was a welcome sign for Germany. Russia lost its warm water port and its influence in Korea and Manchuria. The progenitor of the peace was President Teddy Roosevelt who won a Nobel Peace prize (initiated in 1901) for the effort.

Japan entered World War 1 in its first year ( 1914) ostensibly as Britain's ally, but effectively an ally of Russia and France. Japanese strikes at Germany's Pacific possessions (prizes which Japan retained) drained German resources and manpower. It was not until 1916 that Japan and Russia had an official rapprochement. Their treaty provided that neither would make a separate peace treaty with Germany or any of its Central Powers allies.

Japan's entry in 1914 justified the title of World War and heavily weighted the power of the Triple Entente.

The Russian view of the Triple Entente

The circuitous roads that led to this war included the relationship between Austria-Hungary, a large power, and the comparatively small and marginal state of Serbia. The larger power directed its attention and territorial ambitions to the Adriatic coast south of Austria.It already had a power base in Bosnia. Serbia was a stumbling block, and of necessity, so was its strong ally, Russia.

Austria had the assurance of Kaiser Wilhelm that Germany would back the expansion even at the risk of a larger war that would almost certainly create a conflict with Russian ambitions in the Balkan countries. The Russian defeat at the hands of Japan was not missed by the Germans who now understood the basic weakness of Russia.

The back story involved another secret agreement. In 1912, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia broke away from the Ottoman Empire (First Balkan War). Macedonia was then parceled out between the victors. Bulgaria was unhappy with its share, and did not know at the time that a secret agreement between Greece and Serbia had conspired to reduce Bulgarian share of the spoils. In 1913, Bulgaria attacked Greece and Serbia and was soundly defeated. Austria-Hungary had backed Bulgaria and Russia stood behind its Serbian ally (Second Balkan War). Austria was not deterred. It looked for ways to goad Serbia into striking the first blow.

Serbian assassins lit the fuse on June 28, 1914.They shot and killed the touring heir apparent ( Arch Duke Ferdinand and his wife Sophia) to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Serbia could not placate Austria already intent on war. The serbian trial that followed found 16 conspirators guilty and three were hung.

World War 1 Allies World War 1 Allies

On July 28, 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia. The dominoes began to fall and all of the prior secret and public accords began to play out. July 30, Russia (Serbia ally) declared war on Austria-Hungary. On August 1, Germany (ally of Austria Hungary) declared war on Russia. August 3, Germany declares against France (Russian ally). August 4, Germany requires free passage through neutral Belgium (which was refused) to attack France and declares war against Belgium. United Kingdom responding on the same day to a breach of the 1839 Treaty guarantying Belgian neutrality declares war on Germany. August 6, Serbia (Russian ally) declares against Germany (Austria-Hungary ally). On the same day, ( August 6), Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia. August 11, France (Russian ally) responds and declares war on Austria-Hungary (ally of Germany). August 12, United Kingdom declares war on Austria- Hungary (ally of Germany).

At this point, the Central Powers had solidified their alliance minus Italy which had declared its neutrality, and completely jumped ship the following year in favor of the Triple Entente. Italy was opportunistic, but also concerned with the German's covetous intentions.

We noted the tight Russo- French relationship. Through August 12, 1914, the United Kingdom had not entered into any mutual military alliance with any European nation. Until the German invasion of Belgium, Britain had maintained its "splendid isolation" from all of its European neighbors. Its two treaties, France in 1904 and Russia in 1907 were commercial in nature. Factually, Britain had been a traditional friend of Germany and more at odds with France and Russia over commercial interests in Africa, Middle East, and Asia.

The unlikely glue that formed the Triple Entente was the Belgium Treaty of 1839 and the threat of a huge German navy that threatened British overseas commercial interests.

Triple Entente and partners

Triple Alliance pre 1914

From 1914-1917, the United States remained on the sidelines.

There had always been the public sentiment generated since its Revolutionary times to avoid foreign entanglements.

It was averse to military pacts and secret agreements.

President Woodrow Wilson ( 1913-1921) on the secret world of treaties:
"Open covenants of peace openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
Nevertheless there was a growing sentiment favoring Great Britain and France. Both countries were significant trading partners. The German policy ( February 1, 1917) placed all neutral shipping at risk. American ships were fair game to German submarines.

On February 3, the American freighter, Housatanic was sunk. On April 1, the Aztec was sunk with 28 Americans lost.

Between those two hostile events, the German Ambassador to Mexico, Zimmerman, in a coded telegram ( March 1), promised Mexico financial support and return of lost territories if they would declare war against the United States. British intelligence had decoded the message and passed it to the Americans. The note was published in the United States and public opinion immediately pressed the administration for a war against Germany. President Wilson was about to make a 180 degree turn. While the war raged on three continents, Wilson intentionally had maintained a small army of just over 100,000 men. This was his way of dampening the calls for intervention. Circumstances now called for a new principle. Wilson had preached, during his first term, a principle that kept Americans safe from a foreign war. The new policy required American intervention to keep the world "safe for democracy".

President Wilson sent a war request to Congress ( April 2, 1917) which was overwhelmingly adopted. In the message, Wilson said:
"With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war".
America's entry into the war was met with similar declarations from Central and South American nations. Mexico was silent. Many of the associated countries were former enemies, but mutual interests with the United States and the Entente nations trumped: e.g. China and Japan.They were referred to as the "Allies" and their combined power would subdue the German alliance. The "Central Powers" were now outgunned in Asia.

American soldiers boarded the first ships to Europe in the spring of 1917 to join the British and French with whom they had no prior military alliance, but merely a friendly sympathy with their plight against a common enemy. Germany, had overplayed its hand and forced an American reaction to act in concert with the original Triple Entente. In a strange act of nonconformity with with its Entente allies, the United states never declared war against the Ottoman Empire. Their presence in the Middle East would have been welcomed by the French and British who might have agreed to give America greater influence in the region after the war, and in this manner resolve their own conflicts with each other by completely withdrawing in the favor of a third party. An American that was devoted to peoples "self determination", President Wilson seems to have ignored the possibilities inherent in that paramount position that would have given the United States complete control of the Ottoman's southern empire (Syria, Palestine, Arabia), and an Arab population that admired the Americans, hated the French and mistrusted the British. "What if ?" We will never know.

World War 1 Allies World War 1 Allies

References and Sources:

Anderson, Scott, Lawrence In Arabia, Doubleday, New York 2013.

Cocks, F. Seymour. The Secret Treaties and Understandings. London: Union of Democratic Control.

Encyclopedia Britannica

Woodward, David R. World War I Almanac, Facts on File. New York 2009.

History of American Wars | Causes of World War 1 | World War 1 Allies

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Some wars make strange bedfellows. Countries that had been traditional enemies; Russia and Japan, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and even France and Great Britain were scrapping old enmities. Although long before victory against the Central Powers was assured, Britain and France were diplomatically at odds over the division of the spoils.