1) When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in 1914, it caused Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia and triggered a series of military alliances that drew the major powers of Europe into World War I.
2) On the Western Front between Germany and France, opposing armies had dug miles of trenches by early 1915, resulting in brutal trench warfare that caused immense suffering for soldiers.
3) Fighting also occurred on the Eastern Front between Germany and Russia, inflicting thousands of casualties. Although Russia launched attacks into Germany and Austria, it was often hampered by shortages of supplies due to lack of industrialization and attacks on supply lines.
2. Introduction
By 1914, Europe was divided into two rival camps
the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.
Then the Serbian Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke
Franz Ferdinand from Austria-Hungary.
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Then
Russia declared war con Austria-Hungary.
4. Austria-Hungary declared war to Serbia but Russia
helped Serbia and then Germany helped AustriaHungary. The Alliance System pulled everyone into
war.
5. The others alliances started to join in the battle,
countries like Japan, Italy, France, Great Britain,
Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire.
9. In the fall of 1914, the war turned into and
bloody stalemate. The region of the bloody
stalemate was also known as the WESTERN
FRONT.
10. Germany was fighting two fronts. The Western
Front with France. The Eastern Front with
Russia.
11. Germany developed the Schlieffen Plan by
General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen. Consisted in
attacking and taking down the French. Then
attack and take down the Russian. It did not
work.
12. By early 1915, opposing armies on the Western Front
had dug miles of parallel trenches to protect
themselves from enemy fire. This was known as
trench warfare.
13. Life in trenches was pure misery “The men slept in
mud, ate in mud, washed in mud, and dreamed
mud".
14. The space between the opposite sides was known as
"no man's land" The Western Front had become a
"terrain of dead" it covered nearly 500 miles from the
North Sea to the Swiss border.
15. Technology helped by killing more people
faster.
Annihilation reached its peak in 1916.
In the Battle of Verdun, 600,000 men died. In
the Battle of Some 1 million.
17. The Eastern Front caused thousands of lifes too. It
was the battlefield between the Germans and the
Russian border. Russians and Serbs battled
Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
18. Russian forces launched an attack into Austria and
Germany.
Germany counterattacked then they
crushed the invading Russian army and drove it into
full retreat. More than 30,000 Russian soldiers were
killed.
19. Russia fought better against the Austrians. They
defeated the Austrians twice but then Austria
defeated the Russians and pushed them out of
Austria-Hungary.
20. By 1916 Russia had not yet been industrialized
Russian army was often short on food, guns,
clothes and other resources
Supply shipments sent from the Allies were
limited by the German submarine campaign
21. The Ottomans controlled the straits leading from the
Mediterranean to the Black Sea.
The Russian Army had a large number of
soldiers.
The suffered a lot of battlefield loses.
The army was continually rebuilt by Russia's
large population.
22. They managed to retain the Germans in the East.
The Germans was busy fighting the Russians
and could not concentrate fully on fighting at
the West.
As the war continued fighting spread to
Southwest and Southeast Asia.
The conflict became a World War.
23. Conclusion
The alliances instead of keeping countries from
fighting, they spurred war. The countries went
with honor and nationalism to war. But soldiers
lost hope when they figured out it wouldn’t be
short. Countries lost millions of soldiers over
nothing.
