544 Chapter 27
trenches. (Trenches were typically seven to eight feet
deep and six to seven feet wide, dug in parallel lines
with connecting lateral trenches; they were often filled
with mud, standing water, vermin, or the unburied
dead; and despite timbering, tended to collapse.) De-
spite staggering casualty rates, the line did not move
more than ten miles in the next three years.
In the east, Russian armies engaged the Austrian
army in Galicia and invaded East Prussia, while most of
the German army participated in the Schlieffen Plan in
the west. They won some initial victories in Galicia, but
the German and Austrian armies soon defeated the
poorly equipped and commanded Russians. An outnum-
bered German army, led by a Prussian aristocrat and
veteran of the wars of unification, General Paul von
Hindenburg, and a young staff officer who had distin-
guished himself in the west, General Erich von Luden-
dorff, stopped the Russian invasion at the battle of
Tannenberg in August 1914, taking more than 100,000
prisoners. Two weeks later, Hindenburg’s army defeated
the Russians again at the battle of the Masurian Lakes,
taking another 125,000 captives and driving a demoral-
ized enemy from Prussia. The Russian defeat was so
complete that the commander shot himself, whereas
Hindenburg became a national hero who would be
elected president of Germany in 1925. Large armies and
vast territory still protected the czarist government, but
the first year of fighting cost nearly one million soldiers
plus all of Poland and Lithuania. The Russians recov-
ered sufficiently to stage a great offensive against the
Austrians in 1916 (the Brusilov Offensive), but that
campaign cost one million men and worsened demoral-
ization. Subsequent losses were so enormous (more
than 9 million Russian military casualties, including 1.7
million deaths, plus 2.2 million civilian deaths) that in
early 1918 a revolutionary government negotiated a
separate peace in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, surrender-
ing vast territories in order to leave the war.
By 1915 secondary fronts had expanded the Euro-
pean conflagration into a world war. In the first weeks
of the war, British and French colonial armies con-
quered most of the German colonies in Africa. In
southern Europe, Italy joined the western Allies in
1915, and the Italian front witnessed two years of inde-
cisive fighting. In late 1917 the Italians were badly de-
feated by forces under General Ludendorff at the battle
of Caporetto, but that action came too late to change
the outcome of the war. In the Balkans, the Serbians
initially held out against the Austrians, but the Balkan
war quickly expanded: Turkey joined the Central Pow-
ers in 1914, and Bulgaria followed in 1915. Romania
joined the western Allies in 1916. Turkish participation
led to bloody fighting in the Middle East. A Russo-
Turkish War nearly annihilated the Armenians who
were caught between them; in 1915 the Turks accused
the Armenians of pro-Russian sympathies and began
their forced eviction, a death march known as the Ar-
menian Massacre. The British intervened in the Middle
Eastern front (upon the advice of Winston Churchill)
and in 1915 made a landing at Gallipoli, a peninsula in
the Aegean Sea near the narrow passage of the Dard-
anelles. This ill-conceived attempt to open the straits
and supply the Russians ended in 1916 with heavy
British losses and a Turkish victory that established the
reputation of Mustapha Kemal (later known as At-
taturk), who became the first president of the postwar
Turkish republic. Britain countered by aiding an Arab
revolt whose success (such as the campaign led by
Colonel T. E. Lawrence in Arabia) hastened the Ot-
toman collapse.
An important part of World War I took place at
sea, but it was not the anticipated duel of dread-
noughts. Both sides were extremely cautious with their
expensive super-battleships and rarely sent them to
fight. Of fifty-one British, French, and German dread-
noughts afloat in 1914, only two were sunk during the
entire war. The British failed to win a decisive victory
against the German fleet at Jutland in May 1916, but
they effectively blockaded Germany, allowing only 10
percent of prewar imports to reach shore. The German
navy scored its own dramatic successes with sub-
marines. Between late 1916 and late 1917, German sub-
marines sank more than eight million tons of Atlantic
shipping, threatening the British food supply but con-
tributing to the American entry into the war on Britain’s
side. In 1915 German submarines sank passenger liners
with Americans aboard and American ships carrying
goods to Britain. Sentiment boiled over when the Lusita-
nia,a passenger liner en route from New York to Eng-
land with a cargo that included arms, went down with
139 Americans aboard. Germany placated American
opinion with a promise not to sink passenger liners but
withdrew that promise to resume unrestricted subma-
rine warfare in 1917; four days after that announce-
ment, the United States broke relations with Germany
and, two months later, entered the war.Trench Warfare and the Machine Gun
World War I was ultimately decided on the western
front. There, Britain, France, and Germany fought a
war of attrition in which hundreds of thousands of men