WORLD WAR
1308 Words
The French attack in the Third Battle of Artois and Second Battle of Champagne;
The British, with the help of poison gas, attack at Loos.
Despite initial gains, the attacks soon get bogged down, with enormous losses on all sides.
Allied troops land at Salonika in Greece,
to open a new front against the Central Powers, and bring aid to Serbia.
But the Allies are too late.
Bulgaria joins the Central Powers, and their joint offensive overruns Serbia in two months.
That winter the remnants of the Serbian Army escape through the Albanian mountains.
Their losses are horrific – by the end of the war a third of Serbia's army has been killed – the highest proportion of any nation.
Fierce fighting continues on the Italian front, as Italian troops launch the Third and Fourth Battles of the Isonzo. Austro-Hungarian forces, though outnumbered, are dug in on the high ground, and impossible to dislodge.
In the Middle East, a British advance on Baghdad is blocked by Turkish forces at the Battle of Ctesiphon, miles south of the city. The British withdraw to Kut, where they are besieged.
The Allies abandon the Gallipoli campaign. troops are secretly evacuated without
alerting Turkish forces. Not a man is lost. It's one of the best executed plans of the war.
The campaign has cost both sides quarter of a million casualties.
is a bad year for the Allies – enormous losses, for no tangible gains.
But there is no talk of peace – instead all sides prepare for even bigger offensives in with new tactics developed from earlier failures.
All sides still believe a decisive battlefield victory is within grasp.
World War One was supposed to have been a short and glorious war. But by a new kind of industrialised warfare had seen the death toll soar into the millions, with no end in sight.
Naval blockades were beginning to cause shortages of food and fuel across Europe...
While thousands of women had entered the workforce, replacing the men sent to fight in their millions.
All sides were preparing for a long war.
The war has raged for a year and a half, as the Allies continue to battle the Central Powers, recently joined by Bulgaria. At sea, the British maintain their naval blockade of Germany, preventing the import of food and other vital raw materials.
Germany has retaliated with a U-boat blockade of Britain, but has to limit its attacks to avoid provoking the neutral USA, whose citizens have already been caught in the crossfire.
On the Western Front, French, British and Belgian troops are dug in opposite the Germans, both sides trapped in the bloody stalemate of trench warfare.
On the Eastern Front, the Russians have ended their long retreat and stabilised the line, but their army has suffered huge losses.
On the Italian Front, Italian troops have launched a series of costly, unsuccessful attacks against strong Austro-Hungarian defences.
While on the Balkan Front, the Central Powers have overrun Serbia, whose army is forced to make a bitter retreat through the Albanian mountains.
Now, on th January, Austro-Hungarian troops attack Montenegro. They are
delayed at the Battle of Mojkovac, but three weeks later Montenegro is forced to surrender.
On the Caucasus Front, the Russians launch a surprise winter offensive against
Ottoman Turkish forces. Six weeks later, Russian troops occupy the city of Erzurum. In April, they capture the Black Sea port of Trebizond.
Meanwhile the British transport two motor boats to Lake Tanganyika in Africa.
They finally arrive after a -mile trip by sea and land, and help the British seize control of the strategic lake from local German forces.
The same month, in German Cameroon, German troops, besieged on Mora mountain for months,
finally surrender to the Allies. It marks the end of the Cameroon campaign.
On the Western Front, the Germans unleash a devastating assault on the French fortress-town of Verdun.
German General Erich von Falkenhayn knows France will defend this symbolic town to the last man.
His plan, in his own words, is to 'bleed France white' in its defence. It is the strategy of attrition.
Verdun becomes one of the most terrifying battles of the war: a mincing machine,
where infantry divisions are destroyed almost as fast as they can be fed into the line.
In Britain, one million men have already volunteered for military service.
But the government realises it won't be enough, and Britain becomes the
last major power to introduce conscription.
That spring on the Western Front, British troops are the last to be issued with steel helmets.
The nature of trench warfare produces a high proportion of head wounds:
the German Stahlhelm, the French Adrian helmet, and the British Mark steel helmet,
offer limited protection from shell splinters and shrapnel.
Neutral Portugal has been co-operating with the British, which seems to offer
the best chance of holding onto her African colony, Portuguese Angola.
On th March, Germany retaliates by declaring war on Portugal.
On the Eastern Front, Russia launches an attack near Lake Naroch, to relieve
pressure on the French at Verdun. But it's a disaster. There are Russian casualties, and the attack fails to divert any German troops from the fighting at Verdun.
In Dublin, Irish republicans launch an armed revolt against British rule.
It becomes known as the Easter Rising, and is put down after six days of street fighting.
In the Middle East, after a five month siege, British forces at Kut surrender.
General Townshend leads British and Indian soldiers into captivity.
About half later die from starvation or disease.
Britain wants Arab support in its fight against the Ottoman Empire, so it's promised Arab leaders an independent Arab state after the war.
But now Britain and France secretly sign the Sykes-Picot Agreement, planning,
after the war, to divide the Middle East into British and French zones of control.
Unaware of this deal, Hussein bin Ali, Sherif of Mecca, leads the Arabs in revolt against Turkish Ottoman rule: in the Battle of Mecca, his forces seize control of the holy city.
On the Italian front, Austro-Hungarian forces launch a surprise attack at Asiago.
Italian defences give way; Austro-Hungarian troops are poised to break through into northern Italy.
That month, in the North Sea, the German High Seas Fleet clashes with
the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland.
In the only major naval battle of the war, the British suffer heavier losses, but claim victory, as the German fleet withdraws, and does not re-emerge from its base for the rest of the war.
For the summer of the Allies have planned major, simultaneous offensives
against the Central Powers from east and west. Now they are needed more than ever, to relieve pressure on the French at Verdun, and the Italians at Asiago.
The Russians launch their attack first: on the Eastern Front, General Alexei Brusilov
has carefully maintained the element of surprise. His troops break through the
enemy lines, in some places advancing miles, and taking prisoners.
This brilliant though costly Russian attack achieves its aim, as the Central Powers are forced to redeploy troops from other fronts to shore up the line.
At sea, British cruiser HMS Hampshire, en route to Russia, hits a mine and sinks off Orkney.
Among the dead is Britain's iconic Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener.
Three days later in the Adriatic, Italian troopship Principe Umberto is sunk by
a German submarine: it's the deadliest sinking of the war, with lives lost.
On the Western Front, Britain and France launch their major
summer offensive: the Battle of the Somme.
Hopes are high for a breakthrough, but the first day is a disaster:
a long Allied artillery bombardment fails to knock out German defences, and waves of
British infantry are cut down by machinegun fire as they advance into No Man's Land.
- Writer
