36: Crash course World History Video Notes World War I

The immediate cause of World War I was the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke______on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip; which led Austria to issue an_________to Serbia, whereupon Serbia accepted some but not all of Austria's demands, leading Austria to declare war against Serbia.

_____, due to its alliance with the Serbs, then mobilized its army;__________, because it had an alliance with Austria, told Russia to stop mobilizing, which Russia failed to do, so then Germany mobilized its own army, declared war on Russia, cemented an alliance with the__________, and then declared war on____________. (Whew)

Germany's War plan, the Schillefen Plan, required that it invade France in the most expedient way possible via _________, a neutral country. _________was a friend of Belgium so they declared war on Germany. So by August 4th, all the major powers of Europe are at war with each other.

By the end of the month_________ , honoring its alliance with Britain, would be at war with Germany and Austria, too. When all was said and done, counting_________and spheres of influence, the world would be divided between the Allies and the Central Powers.

There were many opportunities NOT to mobilize and declare war, none of which were taken. Some blame the web of __________itself, which is what Woodrow Wilson tried to fix with the___________

Some blame Russia, the first big country to______. Some blame_________ for the inflexibility of the Schlieffen plan. Leninists claim war grew out of __________ and was fueled by capitalist rivalries; and others claim it was a war between Germany's radical modernism and Britain's traditional ___________.

The ___________warfare on the Western Front is most famous for its brutal futility—Great Britain and France on one side, Germany on the other, with "__________" between. The lines of trenches on the western front covered only about _________miles as the crow flies, but because of the endless zigzagging, the trenches themselves may have run as much as __________miles.

The _________of trench warfare wasn't seen on every front. At the beginning of the war there was a lot of offensive movement, with the initial German strikes, especially on the____________ ; the Germans were pretty successful against the________, who had a large but pretty hapless army.

In the Middle East, T. E. Lawrence's exploits took place in the context of World War I with the British battling the ___________. (aka Lawrence of Arabia)

World War I featured combatants from around the world—Britain's army, especially, included soldiers from India, Africa, Australia, _________ and Canada. _________ served with the French, and for a lot of these people, their experiences helped build __________movements when survivors returned home after the war.

The war itself was incredibly destructive. Over ____ million people were killed and over 20 million wounded. In France,________ of the male population between the age of 15 and 49 died in the war.

The war also saw a lot of _________ die, especially in the Ottoman Empire where more than 2 million of the 3 million people killed were non-combatants.

Like so many other wars, World War I's most efficient killer was _______. For instance, _______of arm wounds among German soldiers were fatal. And that's not even to mention the famous ________ epidemic that broke out toward the end of the war, which killed ___________ times as many people as the war itself.

The main reason the war was so deadly was the combination of new ________and outdated tactics. While we may think about _______, ______, and ______all of which made their debut in the First World War, the two most devastating technologies were __________: machine guns, and barbed wire.

At the Somme the British lost_______men in the first day of fighting.

For most soldiers, there was nothing glamorous or heroic about this war. For the British, for example, the trenches were two things above all: _____ and______. The dampness came from the fact that the British trenches were in the wettest part of Flanders. The smell was mainly decomposing _____.

While going "________" of the trench to cross no-man's land and attack the enemy trench is what lights our romantic imagination, most soldiers' lives were dominated by the fear of__________.

For most soldiers, British and especially French, the pay for their efforts was pitiful. So why did they even keep fighting? ______, nationalism,______ to their comrades, and fear of being shot for desertion all played a role.

So what did we take away (learn) from the so-called Great War? Well, not much. • The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, fixed the blame for the war on ______, proved ruinous to their economy and destructive to their political institutions. • World War I was also a disaster for _______, because it facilitated the rise of the Bolsheviks.

20. The Russian Revolution had two phases. In the first phase, called the ______Revolution, (March Revolution...The calendar will change) army mutinies and civil unrest forced the overthrow of the _______ dynasty which had been in power in Russia since 1618.

The monarchy was replaced by a ______government led (eventually) by Alexander Kerensky, which made the terrible decision to keep Russia in the war, which led to the ______(November) Revolution in which _______ and his Bolsheviks took over, famously promising the Russian people "_______, ______, and ______."

Lenin's first big achievement was signing a separate peace with Germany and getting Russia out of the war, which was helpful to him since he needed to fight a _________that wouldn't end until 1922.

This might've helped Germany, too, except the _______entered the war on the side of the British and the French.

All these terrible outcomes led to a general sense of disappointment in literary circles, and this feeling of pointlessness and cynicism was expressed by the writers of the "____________"

Another major outcome of the war was the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the nation-state of _________. The rest of the world saw some change too, but not much for the better: In Africa, _________ took Germany's colonies, and even though ________ fought and died in a higher percentage than Americans in World War I, India didn't gain any real autonomy.

24. As a result another outcome of the war: increased ___________influence for the U.S. The U.S. was already becoming a major _________ power; the war helped catapult the U.S. from being a debtor nation to a creditor one, and _________leading role in the negotiations at Versailles -even though he actually didn't get what he wanted -made America a big player on the world stage for the first time.