1. World War I
The War to End All Wars

2. Europe on the eve of War
Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia, was looking toward Serbia
Serbians wanted all Slavs united in one nation, angry at A-H

4. The spark
Gavrilo Princip-member of Serbian Nationalist group “Black Hand” Assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife

5. Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
"What is the good of your speeches?  I come to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me.  It is outrageous!" Archduke Franz Ferdinand interrupting the Mayor's welcome speech at Sarajevo's city hall, 28 June 1914.
Bodies of Ferdinand and his wife Sophie

6. Chain Reaction
Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, attacks Serbia (July 28)
Allies-Russia, Britain, France and others
Central Powers- Germany, A-H, Turkey, Bulgaria
The tripwire that set off the century’s first global conflict was Austria's declaration of war against Serbia on July 28, A war between Austria and Serbia meant a war between Austria and Russia, Serbia's traditional ally. That meant war between Russia and Germany. And that meant war between Germany and France. And that meant war between Germany and Great Britain. In a flash, the whole continent was at war.

7. Europe 1914

8. Causes of World War I Nationalism Imperialism Militarism
Entangling Alliances

9. Germany’s leader during World War 1
Kaiser Wilhelm
Germany’s leader during World War 1

10. After the War a Medal and Maybe a Job,
antiwar cartoon by John French Sloan, 1914.

11. Life in the Trenches Lice-no effective way to get rid of them
Trench foot-a result of constant standing in water with wet feet. 20,000 British soldiers suffered from it, some resulting in amputation
Shell shock-(due to tiredness, fear, constant bombing. Some committed suicide
Trench rats
Body heat helped lice to hatch. Soldiers would often take up to an hour a day to pick lice off of themselves. One story tells of a soldier who spent time taking lice off of his clothing. His jacket was placed next to a fire and within a short time the entire jacket was literally moving from the lice under it.

12. Trench periscope

13. Trench foot
Britain soon ordered its men to carry three pairs of socks and change them at least twice a day
Trench foot was the result of spending hours all day and night in wet shoes standing in water in the trenches. One could not even feel his feet when he had trench foot. Feet swelled up to three times their normal size. If one was lucky, the swelling would wane, but the pain was tremendous. Often, amputation was the result

14. Weapons of War

15. 25-man team moving heavy gun

16. 240mm French gun made of paper

17. Tractor used to pull German guns

18. Gas Bombs exploding

19. Treating a Mustard gas victim
The skin of victims of mustard gas blistered, the eyes became very sore and they began to vomit. Mustard gas caused internal and external bleeding and attacked the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. This was extremely painful and most soldiers had to be strapped to their beds. It usually took a person four or five weeks to die of mustard gas poisoning. One nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote: "I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke."
Chlorine Gas
It produces a flooding of the lungs - it is an equivalent death to drowning only on dry land. The effects are these - a splitting headache and terrific thirst (to drink water is instant death), a knife edge of pain in the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish froth off the stomach and the lungs, ending finally in insensibility and death. The colour of the skin from white turns a greenish black and yellow, the colour protrudes and the eyes assume a glassy stare. It is a fiendish death to die.

20. Gas masks for horse and soldier

21. Gas bombs exploding in “No Man’s land”

22. “No Man’s land”

23. French Renault light tank

24. Original British Tank, “Little Willie”

25. British Light tank, called “Whippet”

26. French grenade launching crossbow

27. French troops using flame throwers

28. Dummy French mortars
Set up to confuse the enemy

29. Phosphorous grenades

30. Barbed Wire in a Lorraine wood

31. British plane wrecked in tree

32. British Dirigible R27

33. Nurse Balloons in hangar

34. Wreckage of a Zeppelin and body of commander

35. US Captain Eddie Rickenbacker

36. Unterseeboot

37. Submarine Warfare
Britain blockaded Germany in an effort to starve Germany into submission
Germany responded by attacking any ships carrying food or weapons to Britain.
According to international law, warring nations were allowed to stop and inspect neutral vessels at sea. Allowed to take contraband from a neutral ship.
Before sinking, warning had to be given and passengers were to be made safe
Britain enlarged the list of contraband to include food. They seized ships bound for neutral countries and planted mines in the North Sea. The US. Protested, but our ambassador was pro-British, so the protest was quite mild.
Germany warned of the risk of sailing on British ships. Wilson insisted we had the right to sail on any ship we wanted.

38. Field of French and German dead

40. Armenian Christians massacred by Turks
Since 1894, Muslim Turks had been murdering 1000’s of Armenian Christians.
When the Ottoman empire allied with the Central powers, it feared the Armenians would join the Allies. Therefore, the Turks murdered over 1.5 million Armenians in a campaign of genocide.

41. Armenian Genocide
Armenians had lived in their traditional lands for thousands of years. For much of the last thousand years they had lived as an ethnic and religious minority (Christian) in the Ottoman Empire. In 1915, during the First World War, the Turkish government resolved the "Armenian Question" by eliminating this population from the Ottoman Empire. In February of 1915 the government ordered Armenian men serving in the army disarmed. They were organized into labor groups and eventually were killed. In April they rounded up and summarily arrested Armenian community leaders and intellectuals. Nearly all of these men were executed.

43. Deportees

44. The Turkish government then turned its attention to the now defenseless population. They posted notices of deportation in public places and sent criers to the Armenian villages to order the Armenians to prepare to leave their homes in a few days time. They organized the people into convoys and ordered them to walk to the Syrian desert to the south.
The horrors of this march are revealed in this eyewitness account from a German missionary, Johannes Lepsius*:
The major portion of these miserable people brutally driven from home and land, separated from their families, robbed of everything they owned and stripped of all they carried underway, have been herded like cattle under the open skies without the least protection against heat and cold, almost without clothing, and were fed very irregularly, and always insufficiently. Exposed to every change in weather, the glowing sun in the desert, the wind and rain in spring and fall, and the bitter cold in winter, weakened through extreme want and their strength sapped by endless marches, deplorable treatment, cruel torture and the constant fear for their lives, those that had some shreds of their strength left dug holes at the banks of the river to crawl into them.
Along the route

45. Skulls of victims--evidence left behind
Shortly after reaching the outskirts of a village or a town, they separated males over fifteen from the convoy. They then took these men to isolated locations beyond the city limits and shot or otherwise killed them.
Skulls of victims--evidence left behind

46. Deportee women sleeping in the street
From the beginning the Armenians were subjected to the criminal attacks.
"The women, children, and straggling elderly were marched for miles on the Armenian plateau. They had to cross mountain passes and ravines on foot. Bands of Special Organization Units, organized by the government, killed many Armenians in attacks on the convoys. During the attacks women and children were often kidnapped and later sold to Turkish families as slaves. They routinely raped women and girls and mutilated their bodies." German missionary eyewitness Johannes Lepsius
Deportee women sleeping in the street

47. Armenian boy who starved to death
Most of those who did not die of disease died of starvation. It was a new kind of genocide, the planned extermination of a people through natural causes. The government did not provide for food or water on their long march.
"When the measures to transport the entire population into the desert were adopted, no appropriations were made for any kind of nourishment. On the contrary, it is obvious that the government pursued a plan to let the people die of starvation. Even an organized mass-killing such as during the times when liberty, equality, and fraternity had not yet been proclaimed in Constantinople, would have been a much more human measure, since it would have saved these miserable people from the horrors of hunger and the slow death and the excruciating pains of tortures so fiendish that the most cruel of the Mongols could not have imagined them. But a massacre is less constitutional than death by starvation. Civilization is saved!" German missionary eyewitness Johannes Lespius

48. Armenian boys who died in Syria
During the marches the lack of food and water led to disease which carried away more victims.

49. Less than 10 percent reached their destinations
Less than 10 percent reached their destinations. Of those who made it to the Syrian and Iraqi deserts, most eventually died. Estimates of the number of dead vary from 600,000 to 2 million. The United Nations Human Rights Sub-commission report of 1985 puts the figure at "at least one million." The Turkish government denies that the genocide took place.

50. After the War:
After their defeat in World War I, the new Ottoman government tried the leaders of the genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia. However within a few months the proceedings were suspended and the matter dropped. The Armenian survivors were not allowed to return to the Armenian plateau.
In 1939 Adolf Hitler, on his way to the "final solution," made this statement on his plan for Poland:

51. "I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad - that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness - for the present only in the East - with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion , men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

52. Russian mass grave

53. German remains at Verdun
The battle of Verdun lasted from Feb. 21 to Decd. 18, 1916.
France lost 550,000 troops; Germany lost 450,000. There was no strategic reason for this battle. It was nothing less than a sacrifice for nothing.
At the Battle of the Somme, July to Nov. 18, 1916, losses were:
Germany, 650,000, Britain 420,000, and France, 195,000. In one week’s time, Allies advanced only 1 mile; in a month, 2 1/2 miles

54. Russian soldier dead in wire

55. Dead horses in harness

56. Ruins of Ypres as seen from air

57. Refugees

58. Belgian refugees in Holland

59. “…neutral in thought as well as in name.”
American Neutrality
“…neutral in thought as well as in name.”

60. Lusitania
Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk. Imperial German Embassy Washington, D. C., April 22, 1915
After the sinking with 123 Americans on board and 1198 total, US demanded an apology, reparations, and promise to stop using subs. Germany agreed to all but the last

61. Burial Victims of the Lusitania

62. Lusitania
Both T.R. and Taft called for war. Sec. of State Wm. Jennings Bryan resigned from office as Wilson became more stern with Germany.
T.R. said “Professor Wilson” represents all “flubdubs, mollycoddles, and flapdoodle pacifists.”

63. Sussex Pledge
Germany sinks French ship Sussex, also killing Americans. (1916)
Germany promised not to sink merchant ships without warning.
Wilson begins military build up.

64. Election of 1916 Wilson runs on campaign of “He kept us out of war.”
Called for “Peace without victory.”

65. The Zimmerman Note (1917)

66. Zimmerman Telegram Berlin, January 19, 1917
On the first of February we intend to begin submarine warfare unrestricted. In spite of this, it is our intention to endeavor to keep neutral the United States of America.
If this attempt is not successful, we propose an alliance on the following basis with Mexico: That we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give general financial support, and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The details are left to you for settlement....
You are instructed to inform the President of Mexico of the above in the greatest confidence as soon as it is certain that there will be an outbreak of war with the United States and suggest that the President of Mexico, on his own initiative, should communicate with Japan suggesting adherence at once to this plan; at the same time, offer to mediate between Germany and Japan.
Please call to the attention of the President of Mexico that the employment of ruthless submarine warfare now promises to compel England to make peace in a few months.
Zimmerman (Secretary of State)

67. US declaration of War
April 2, Wilson asks for declaration of war.
“World must be made safe for Democracy.”