Which countries participated in world war 1

A total of 13 million German citizens fought in the war between and Nayar, Baldev Raj and Paul, T. Cambridge University Press, Boissoneault, Lorraine. Johnston, Eric. Brendan, and Suthida Whyte. Beckett, Ian, et al. Vickers, Brittany. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.

Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. This created a new class of fighter airplanes, and a new class of pilots to fly them.

The most famous of these "flying aces" was the German pilot Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron for the distinctive color of his airplanes.

Between and , he achieved 80 victories over enemy aircraft, the highest of any pilot in the war. The Red Baron became a celebrity on both sides of the front line and his victories provided a boost to German morale. After downing 21 enemy planes in April , he was in a crash in July. He survived, but his injuries forced him to fly fewer missions in the second half of the year.

He continued flying in but was fatally shot down on April 21, The Philatelic Database. By , the leading nations of Europe all had extensive rail networks. Trains were hardly a new technology in , but armies relied on them to a greater extent than they ever had before, and this helped to make World War I a bloody war of attrition. In previous wars, armies would clash until one side achieved a breakthrough. At that point, the winning army could encircle the enemy, march on the capital, or take other steps to consolidate their gains and bring the war to an end.

The slow speed of transportation meant that reinforcements often couldn't reach the losing side until it was too late to avert disaster. The mature rail networks of the early 20th century changed this dynamic. Now, when one side launched an offensive, the defenders could quickly move thousands of additional troops to counter it.

Yet it wasn't practical for attackers who broke through enemy lines to use the enemy's rail lines to move their troops quickly. So defenders were usually more mobile than attackers. This helped to produce the perpetual stalemate of the Western Front. As began, Germany was growing increasingly desperate.

Britain's blockade of German ports was making it harder and harder for Germany to feed its own people. The German war plan had depended on a quick victory over France, but now the Western Front seemed to be in a perpetual stalemate.

So the German high command decided to resume submarine attacks on neutral ships in British waters. Their goal was to so devastate neutral shippers that they would become unwilling to trade with the Allies.

Germany hoped that would inflict on Britain the same pain Germany itself had been suffering and force the Allies to come to terms. The Germans knew that this was a risky gamble because it could draw the United States into the war, but they hoped to bring the Allies to their knees before US involvement became significant.

This proved to be a fatal miscalculation. The submarine campaign never came close to halting American shipping to the Allies, while the flood of American troops in the final months of the war ensured Germany's defeat. Anticipating that the German submarine campaign would draw the United States into the war, Germany's foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a coded telegram to the German ambassador in Mexico.

In the event the United States declared war on Germany, the ambassador was instructed to approach the Mexican government with a proposed alliance. Germany would help fund a military campaign to allow Mexico to retake some of the territory lost in the Mexican-American war seven decades earlier. This map shows Zimmermann's proposal: Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico would be annexed into Mexico the red line shows Mexican territory before Unfortunately for Zimmermann, the Brits were not only tapping undersea cables between Europe and the United States, but they had also broken Germany's ciphers.

So the Brits deciphered Zimmerman's message and passed a copy along to the Americans. The release of Zimmermann's telegram inflamed American public opinion and helped to build momentum for a US declaration of war, which occurred on April 6, Mexico, meanwhile, realized that it would have no hope of defeating the United States and rejected Germany's proposal.

America officially joined the war in April , but it would take a year before American troops started arriving in a large enough volume to make a significant difference in the outcome of the war. The United States had never mobilized so many troops to fight in a war so far away. Congress, anticipating a possible war, had authorized a troop buildup in ; at that time the US had only had , soldiers. Meyer writes that "thirty-two training camps, each occupying eight to twelve thousand acres and containing fifteen hundred buildings capable of accomodating forty thousand men, were constructed in sixty days" after the declaration of war.

Despite these efforts, fewer than , troops had arrived on French soil by the end of But those numbers grew rapidly in By May, ,00 fresh troops per month were flooding onto the continent. United States military academy. Following the collapse of the Czarist regime in the February Revolution, a provisional government led by Aleksander Kerensky came to power in Russia. Kerensky's government was unable to impose discipline on the unraveling Russian military or conduct effective military operations.

German authorities allowed Vladimir Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, to travel via special train through German-occupied territory into Russia where he and his Bolshevik allies took political leadership of the anti-war cause. After seizing power in the October Revolution, the new Bolshevik government was forced to negotiate peace with the Germans from a position of extreme weakness. German plans called for this territory to be reorganized as a series of German-dominated satellite states but the failure of the Spring Offensive in the West and the subsequent German surrender rendered the new order in the East irrelevant.

In the spring of , the German Empire made a final, audacious attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front.

German troops had spent the winter learning a new style of trench warfare inspired by the successful tactics of the Russians under Alexei Brusilov two years before. The artillery barrages that preceded attacks became shorter and more precisely timed to preserve the advantage of surprise.

Instead of advancing on enemy positions in mass waves, troops were instructed to cross the front in small groups and improvise once they reached enemy trenches. Initially, the offensive was a stunning success, punching a hole in the Allied line and allowing German troops to pour through it. But for the offensive to pay strategic dividends, the Germans needed to widen the hole in the enemy lines.

Otherwise, the Allies could later repair the breach and cut the advancing enemy troops off from supplies and reinforcement. The key to the battle was French fortifications near the city of Reims, which is that awkward corner on the left-hand side of the German gains. If Reims had fallen, German troops might have been able to widen the breach in the French line and march down to Paris. But Reims didn't fall, and so German troops became more vulnerable the deeper they marched into French territory.

After repeated attempts to take Reims failed, the Germans were forced to abandon the territory they had taken to avoid being cut off.

Germany was blessed with excellent military leadership that allowed the nation to hold its own against numerically superior foe. But it had a problem that couldn't be overcome with military tactics alone. Britain and France could draw on the resources of their vast overseas empires, and trade with neutral countries, to get the resources they needed to win the war.

Thanks to the British blockade, the Central Powers were cut off from the rest of the world. So conditions in Germany, for soldiers and civilians alike, steadily deteriorated. This map, based on a map from a book published by the United States government in July , shows the food situation in Europe as the war was drawing to a close. While the US government might have been tempted to exaggerate Germany's hardship, this map is basically accurate. By , the Central Powers were facing severe food shortages, and things could have gotten a lot worse if the war had dragged into the winter of An increasingly desparate German citizenry began pressuring the German government for peace.

The war officially ended when Germany agreed to lay down its weapons on November 11, In , the victorious Allies, led by Britain, France, and the United States, met in Paris to decide the fate of the empires they had defeated. Their decisions transformed Europe's borders. The Austro-Hungarian empire was carved up into six new countries. One of these, the awkwardly named Czechoslovakia, would split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in The former Serbia was combined with territories annexed from Austria-Hungary to form Yugoslavia, a national home for South Slavic peoples.

It, too, disintegrated in the early s, producing several small nations that exist in the Balkans today. Poland, along with France, got chunks of Germany. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are gone, but the other new states persist today, so it's fair to say that World War I set the contours for the modern European state system.

The war devastated economies across continental Europe. Not only did each country rack up significant amounts of war debt, they almost all suffered massive losses in gross domestic product over the course of the conflict.

France and Russia had each lost a third of their prewar output by the time they left the conflict. The economic pain and massive debt load prompted the Allies to demand huge punitive damages from from the losing side after the war.

The burden of debt and reparation payments hobbled the Weimar Republic that governed Germany from the end of the war until Adolf Hitler rose to power in the early s. Germany stopped paying reparations in , having paid only a small fraction of the sum the allies had demanded. The Allies also demanded that Austria, Hungary, and Turkey pay reparations, but their economies were so devastated by the war that they never made significant payments.

Financial Times. World War I also transformed the Middle East. The agreement permitted British and French authorities to divide up their respective territories however they pleased. This led to the creation of a series of Arab countries — Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and so on — whose borders and political institutions only dimly reflected the Arab world's ethno-sectarian makeup. Many scholars believe the Sykes-Picot borders were a major factor in the chaotic state of the Middle East in the decades since then.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October , it triggered a civil war. Opponents organized a White Army to oppose Soviet control of Russia.

The Whites were strongest in the Eastern parts of the vast Russian empire, and for a time they controlled the bulk of the land — though much of their Eastern holdings were sparsely populated. The White Army was aided by the British, French, and Americans, who didn't want to see a communist revolution succeed in one of the world's most powerful nations. After making gains in , the Whites were driven into retreat in The White Army had been largely destroyed by mid, though it took another two years for the Soviets to consolidate their control of the vast territory they would dominate for the next 70 years.

Background European alliances in European alliances in Immediately prior to the war's outbreak in , Central Europe was dominated by two powerful states: Germany to the north and its weaker cousin, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the South.

Two wars in the Balkans fail to settle regional rivalries The Balkans, the area around the Aegean Sea in the Southeast of Europe, was one of the continent's most volatile regions in European powers carve up Africa From right up until World War I, European countries competed to colonize as much African land as they could.

The German and French war plans emphasized attacks German and French war planners both believed the war was going to be an offensive one. The world mobilizes for war The main participants in the war mobilized over the course of about a week. Paris is saved in the Battle of the Marne In a sense, this September conflict was the decisive battle of the war. The British blockade the German Empire This map illustrates the meanderings of the HMS Orvieto, one of the British ships assigned to Northern Patrol — the main naval operation dedicated to enforcing a British blockade of Germany and her allies.

The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane. Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans. On April 1, , the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army.

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, , German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces joined by 85, American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force in the Second Battle of the Marne.

The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later. The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars , and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I. Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely.

Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers. Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in , the 92nd and 93rd Divisions. Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war.

The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September The 93rd Division, however, had more success. With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing , commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army. Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt that destroyed the Ottoman economy and devastated its land, and the Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4.

Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, , ending World War I.

At the Paris Peace Conference in , Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such devastating scale. As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II. World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded.

Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey. World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use.

The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in , restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remains in effect today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.

When World War I broke out across Europe in , President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the United States would remain neutral, and many Americans supported this policy of nonintervention. However, public opinion about neutrality started to change after the sinking of the British For four years, from to , World War I raged across Europe's western and eastern fronts, after growing tensions and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war.

Trench warfare and the early use of tanks, submarines and airplanes meant the