Why World War I Still Matters.

AuthorBrown, Bryan
PositionTIMES PAST 1918

Millions of people were killed, mighty empires fell, and the globe was remade during World War I. A hundred years later, we're still dealing with the consequences.

In one moment, the world stopped and began again. On November 11, 1918, at exactly 11 a.m. Paris time, bells rang and celebrations broke out all over the globe. After four years and millions of deaths, World War I was over.

The timing had been laid out in an armistice--an agreement to stop fighting--written by the war's victors, the Allied Powers. Led by France, the United Kingdom (U.K.), and the United States, the Allies had forced their defeated enemy, Germany, to sign the agreement.

The conflict it ended was so massive, people referred to it simply as the Great War. Up to that point in history, it was the bloodiest war ever. About 20 million people--both soldiers and civilians--were killed. France alone lost 1.4 million soldiers in battle, 17 percent of all the country's fighting-age men.

"It affected countries for generations," says Doran Cart, senior curator of the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. "It changed the whole outlay of the globe."

This November 11, bells will again ring around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. The war continues to influence our world. Here are some essential things to know about it.

1 The war introduced deadly new weapons.

The war began in July 1914 as a struggle for power between two groups of European nations: the Allied Powers--first led by Russia, France, and the U.K.--and the Central Powers, headed by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, centered in what is now Turkey (see map above).

Few people could have predicted that so many soldiers would be killed. A main reason for the historic loss of life, say experts, was the introduction of deadly new weapons. Among these were machine guns and artillery that could fire more rapidly than before. Tanks, airplanes, and poison gas were also deployed for the first time in World War I.

For protection, troops on both sides dug long ditches in the ground called trenches, using them to take cover. Soldiers sometimes stayed in them for weeks or months.

By the end of 1914, the opposing armies had created an almost unbroken battle line of parallel trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to Switzerland. This 450-mile-long line of trenches was called the Western Front.

In letters home, soldiers described the brutal reality of life in the trenches: mud up to their knees, rats as large as cats, and the horrible smell of overflowing toilets.

When ordered to attack, soldiers rushed out of their trenches onto open ground. As they charged the opposing trenches, waves of men would be mowed down by enemy fire. Despite the high death count, battles often resulted in little or no gain of territory. Afterward, bodies sometimes remained where they had fallen. There was no safe way to retrieve them.

French soldier Louis Barthas recalled stumbling upon a gruesome scene while searching an abandoned enemy trench: "I saw ... a pile of corpses, almost all of them German, that they had started to bury right in the trench.... 'There's no one here but the dead!' I exclaimed."

2 The U.S. didn't want to get involved.

When the war began, President Woodrow Wilson pledged the United States to neutrality. But from the start, many Americans felt the U.S. should fight alongside the U.K. and France because of our strong historical ties to those nations.

Then on May 7,1915, a German submarine sank a British passenger ship called the Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland. Among the 1,200 crew members and passengers who died, 128 were Americans.

"What the Lusitania did was to bring the war home to Americans," historian John Cooper has said. Suddenly, that foreign conflict felt like our own.

Still, it took nearly two more years--and the steady worsening of the U.S.-German relationship--for America to enter the fight. On April 2, 1917, President Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. The Germans were waging "a warfare against mankind," Wilson said. "The world must be made safe for democracy."

3 U.S. troops helped save the day.

In June 1917, American soldiers began arriving in Europe. The people of Britain and France, devastated by years of fighting, cheered the young Americans who marched through their streets on the way to the battlefront. Those fresh U.S. troops helped turn the war around for the Allies. In July 1918, U.S. forces joined with British and French troops to push back the Germans at the Second Battle of the Marne, in France. The battle proved to be the last major stand for an exhausted Germany.

By early November, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which were fighting the Allies on the war's Eastern Front, had...

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