Europe Plunges into war
The Battle On The Eastern Front
The Great War Begins
A bloody Stalemate
A deadlock region in Northern France became known as the Western Front
The Conflict Grinds Along
Why did Germany declare war on France?
Why might the war on the Eastern Front have been more mobile than that on the Western Front?
How did Russia's industrialization affect its war effort?
Both sides were sending millions of men to fight on the Eastern Front.
Russians and Serbs battled Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
What country had taken over territories that Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire wanted to regain?
The war in the wast was a more mobile war than in the west.
Early Fighting
Russia Struggles
Germany had developed a battle strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan. Named after it's designer General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen
The plan called for attacking and defeating France in the West and then Rushing east to fight Russia.
Russian forces had launched an attack into Austria and Germany.
Russia still wasn't industrialized.
Germans crushed the invading Russian army and drove it unto full retreat which made thousands of Russians soldiers die.
Germans felt they could carry our such plan because Russia lagged behind the rest of Europe in it's railroad system.
Speed was vital to the Schlieffen plan
Russian forces defeated the Austrians twice in September 19114.
German leaders knew they needed to win a quick victory over France
By early September, German forces had swept into France and reached the outskirts of Paris.
On September 5, however, the Allies regrouped and attacked the Germans northeast of Paris, in the valley of the Marne River.
more than 600 taxicabs rushed soldiers from Paris to the front.
After four days of fighting, the German generals gave the order to retreat.
War
In the east, Russian forces had already invaded Germany.
the First Battle of the Marne was perhaps the single most important event of the war.
The defeat of the Germans left the Schlieffen Plan in ruins.
A quick victory in the west no longer seemed possible.
Germany was going to have to fight a long war on two fronts
Realizing this, the German high command sent thousands of troops from France to aid its forces in the east. Meanwhile, the war on the Western Front settled into a stalemate.
By early 1915, opposing armies on the Western Front had dug miles of parallel trenches to protect themselves from enemy fire.
This set the stage for what became known as trench warfare.
In this type of warfare, soldiers fought each other from trenches. And armies traded huge losses of human life for pitifully small land gains.
The trenches were awful. The soldiers slept in mud and rats swarmed the trench floors.
The Western front became a "terrain of death"
Military strategies were at a loss
Which made them short on food, guns, ammunition, clothes, boots, blankets, etc.
Throughout the war, the Russian army suffered a lot of battlefield losses.
The battered Russian army managed to tie up hundreds of thousands of German troops in the east.
As the war raged on, fighting spread beyond Europe to Africa, as well as Southwest and Southeast Asia. The massive European conflict indeed became a world war.
The Eastern Front was more mobile because it was a greater stretch of land and stretched across the Russian-German border
They were unable to efficiently transport supplies and weapons for the war
War
Germany assumed France would align with Russia against the Central Powers
Russia took over territories that Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire wanted to regain.
Russia moved their army toward the Russian-Austrian border.
Russia's mobilization amounted to a declaration of war.
Two days after declaring war on Russia, Germany also declared war on France. Great Britain declared war on Germany.
One side was Germany and Austria-Hungary which was the central powers. The other side was the Allies which was Great Britain, France, and Russia.
In the summer of 1914, millions of soldiers marched happily off to battle, and they thought the war would be short.
Sir Edward Grey, was one of the few that foresaw the horror ahead.
Alliance
Change
Invasion
New tools of war- machine guns, poison gas, armored tanks, larger atillary. they did not deliver the fast- moving war they had hoped for
Germans launched a massive attack against the French near Verdun.
Each side lost more than 300,000 men.
Britsh army tried to relieve the pressure on the French.
British forces attacked the Germans northwest of Verdun.
In the first day of battle alone, more than 20,000 British soldiers were killed.
Battle ended in November.
Self-Intrest
Why did Germany attack France First?
They attacked first because they thought they would have a quick and easy victory.
Why were land gains so small?
They had to make their way, and they were mostly in trenches which were little strips dug into the ground