The World War I Era (19141920)
Name:_______
Date:________
Mods: _______
WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW
• Analyze the causes and effects of WWI with
emphasis on:
– Militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and alliances;
– The global scope, outcomes and human costs of war
– New technologies and techniques like poison gas,
trench warfare, machine guns, airplanes, submarines,
and tanks
– The Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations
A. Causes of WWI
ilitarism
lliances
mperialism
ationalism
1. Nationalism: a deep devotion to one’s nation.
2. Imperialism: stronger nations dominating
weaker nations led to competition.
3. Militarism: building up of armed forces.
4. Alliances: Countries in Europe made promises
to defend each other for a balance of power.
Because of this, an attack on one nation would
pull other nations into a larger war.
B. Tangled Alliances
• 1. Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria
Hungary, and Italy.
• 2. Triple Entente: Great Britain, France,
and Russia
B. The Alliances
France
Germany
The Central Powers
AustriaHungary
Serbia
The Allies
Ottoman
Empire
Great Britain
Russia
C. Assassination Leads to War
1. The heir to the
throne Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of
Austria-Hungary
and his wife Sophie
were assassinated
by a Serbian
nationalist named
Gavrio Princip while
they were visiting in
Bosnia.
2. The alliance system pulled one country
after another into war. So when AustriaHungary declared revenge on Serbia, they
faced Serbia’s allies (France, Great
Britain, and Russia).
3. Late in July 1914, Russia (Serbia’s
protector) began mobilization: the
readying of troops for war against Austria.
D. The Fighting Begins
1.
2.
3.
4.
On August 1, 1914 Germany
declared war on Russia.
Germany adopted the
Schlieffen Plan to knock the
French out of the war so
they could focus on Russia.
They invaded Belgium (a
neutral country) to get to the
French quickly.
The invasion of neutral
Belgium brought Great
Britain into the war b/c it was
a protector of Belgium.
Britain and France were
able to stop Germany’s
advance.
E. Stalemate
1. The allies, and the central powers were
relatively equal in size and strength.
2. Each size reached a stalemate: a situation
in which neither side is able to gain the
advantage.
3. 30 miles outside Paris at the river Marne,
French & British forces stopped German
progress.
F. Additional Alliances
1. The end of 1914 the Ottoman Empire
joined the central powers.
2. Italy joined the allies in the spring of
1915.
G. Trench Warfare
1. By spring of 1915 the stalemate caused
trench warfare two lines of deep trenches
developed in France.
2. Germans occupied one line, the allies
occupied the other.
3. Soldiers faced machine gun fire and
poisonous gasses.
Conditions of the Trenches
1. They were rat-infested
2. Soldiers caught diseases such as:
“trench-foot”, hypothermia, flu/cold,
typhoid, dysentery.
3. Wet
4. Quotes from soldiers:
•"[the bodies] we could not get from the German
wire continued to swell ... the color of the dead
faces changed from white to yellow-gray, to red, to
purple, to green to black." Robert Graves, poet,
novelist, critic
•Robert Graves - "The trench smell still haunts my
nostrils : compounded of stagnant mud, latrine
buckets, chloride of lime, half buried corpses, stale
human sweat and fumes of cordite and lyditte.
•Sgt.Pottering - "Rats, feeding on the flesh of
corpses, became giant sized. I saw a rat bite a
sergeant’s ear while he slept. They got used to the
troops; boots had to be worn at night and faces
covered while food had to be suspended from the
dug-out ceiling."
The first thing was it smelled bad.
"It smelled bad because there were open latrines everywhere. There were
bodies rotting everywhere. Nothing could be done about them. You could throw
a shovel full of quick lime on them to take some of the smell away, but the odor
of the trenches was appalling."It's hard to imagine people living for years in the
middle of that smell. That's what they had to endure. For the most part there
were no bunks, no places to lie down when you weren't on duty; so you lay in
the mud, in a hole cut in the side of the trench, or in a dugout if you were an
officer or an NCO.
"There were rats the size of cats.
• "Both the Germans and the British were troubled with rats. The rats ate corpses,
then they came in and snuggled next to you while you were sleeping. And they
ate your own food, and they were filthy creatures. They also carried disease –
bubonic plague primarily.
• "Many people think that the great flu epidemic of 1919, which affected the United
States, had something to do with bubonic plague, which was being carried by
these trench rats. Actually, more American troops died of flu than of bullets and
shell fragments in the war.
• "Sky study becomes one of your few amusements.
• "You never see your enemy and the only thing you can see is the sky up above.
You look at the sky constantly from the opening of the trench, because you can't
look out to the side. All of your view is vertical. You consequently get very
interested in birds for the first time, because those are the only animated things
you can see, except for rats and lice, or other human beings.
New Instruments of Death
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Poison Gases
Machine Guns
Tanks
Submarines
Planes
http://callofduty.com/codww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Y_Ip_SaJqpg
Poison Gas
Machine Guns
Tanks