556Chapter 28
joined Poland (Upper Silesia) and Romania (Transylva-
nia) or the newly created states of Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia. The Treaty of St. Germain with Austria rec-
ognized these changes as a fait accompliand also obliged
the Austrians to cede the frontier territory of the south
Tyrol and the Istrian Peninsula to Italy (as promised in
the Treaty of London), although Orlando walked out of
the conference to protest other “unredeemed promises”
of territory, such as the town of Fiume on the Adriatic.
The once mighty Habsburg Empire, which had domi-
nated central Europe for centuries, was reduced to an
Austria 12 percent of its size in 1914, left with a popu-
lation of six million, and forbidden to unite with Ger-
many. The Hungarians were made to accept the Treaty
of Trianon, by which they lost 75 percent of their pre-
war territory. Serbia, whose Pan-Slavic nationalism had
done so much to provoke the war (and had suffered so
much during the war), was rewarded with the creation
of Yugoslavia, which included Montenegro, part of
Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and
Slovenia.
The Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which made peace
with Turkey, bequeathed the twentieth century some of
its most difficult problems. Turkey received much
harsher treatment than Germany had in the Versailles
Treaty; the powerless sultan lost all non-Turkish por-
tions of the former Ottoman Empire, but these territo-
ries did not become independent. Greece claimed most
of European Turkey and part of the Turkish coast, Italy
took Rhodes and several other Mediterranean islands,
and the entire Middle East was detached from Turkey.
Turkish nationalists, led by Atatürk, fought many of
these losses and won a new treaty in 1923.
Economic Recovery and the
Reconstruction of Europe in the 1920s
The cost of World War I cannot be measured precisely.
More than eight million soldiers and seven million
civilians had died in the fighting; counting war-related
epidemics, roughly twenty million Europeans had
perished. France and Germany lost approximately
10 percent of their labor force; Britain lost one-third
of all men aged fifteen to twenty-four in the 1911
census. The casualties rate in some armies surpassed
50 percent of all personnel. The German and the
Austro-Hungarian armies each reported more than
five million war wounds. The French wounded included
740,000 crippled men, mutilés de guerre,who would be
living reminders of the war for fifty years. The British
needed forty-eight new mental hospitals just to house
the sixty-five thousand cases of acute shell shock. Little
wonder that a British novelist, D. H. Lawrence, wrote,
“We have all lost the war. All Europe.” The living and
the dead alike were a “lost generation.”
Economic data show similar devastation. The eco-
nomic cost of World War I still cannot be counted (vet-
erans and widows still receive benefits), and even the
direct costs, such as government spending and property
destroyed, can only be estimated. Postwar calculations
translate into nearly 100 trillion late twentieth-century
dollars. Economic historians have shown what this
meant in local cases: six percent of all Belgians lost their
homes, the nation lost 75 percent of its railroad cars,
and farmers lost two-thirds of all pigs in prewar totals.
The devastation in France was even worse. The fighting
had laid waste to more than six thousand square miles
of northeastern and eastern France; nine thousand small
factories and five thousand large factories were de-
stroyed, as were fifteen hundred miles of railroad and
thirty-three thousand miles of highway. Europe needed
nearly a decade of peace merely to approach 1913 lev-
els of production (see table 28.1). This slow recovery
permitted the United States to achieve dominance in
the global economy. While France mined 7 million tons
of coal in 1924, the United States mined 485 million
tons; while Germany produced 9 million tons of steel
that year, the United States produced 45 million tons.
By 1929 the United States accounted for 34.4 percent
of global industrial production, while Britain, France,Output of crude steel (in thousands of metric tons)
Country 1913 1919 1923 1928
Belgium 2,467 334 2,297 3,905
France 4,687 1,293 5,222 9,479
Germany 17,609 8,710 6,305 14,517
Output of coal (in thousands of metric tons)
Country 1913 1919 1923 1928
Belgium 24,371 18,483 22,922 27,587
France 40,844 22,441 38,556 52,440
Germany 277,342 210,355 180,474 317,136
Source: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970
(London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 362–65, 400, 430.TABLE 28.1Industrial Recovery after World War I