Apr. 8

World War I: The Character of Total War

I. The meaning of "total war": the full mobilization of all resources, human and material, to prosecute the war.

II. Strategy: from European war to Global war.

A. Quick collapse of the Schlieffen Plan.
B. Trench warfare in the west.

1. The sheer magnitude of battles with losses of lives in the hundreds of thousands--Ypres, Verdun, Somme.
2. New weapons:

a. Gas introduced at the second battle of Ypres 1915.
b. Tanks.
c. Airplanes.

C. War of movement in the east.
D. European diplomacy and the expansion of war to Balkans and Middle East.

1. Gallipoli.
2. Salonika Front.

E. The end of the Ottoman Empire.

1. Sykes-Picot Agreement.
2. Balfour Declaration.
3. The Arab Revolt.
4. The Mesopotamian campaign. British take Baghdad and proclaim that they have come as liberators.

F. The U.S. enters the war April 1917.

III. From a war of states to a war of peoples.

A. The racialization of the enemy in propaganda.
B. The genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

IV. The European home front.

A. Quick decline in living standards.
B. Vast expansion of war industries.
C. Increased regulation of all aspects of life.
D. The transformations in women's lives.

V. The expansiveness of war aims.

A. German dreams of Mitteleuropa.
B. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty March 1918.

VI. The inglorious end to the Great War.

A. War weariness at home.
B. Failed diplomacy.
C. The German collapse.