Key Battles of World War One

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Did you enjoy this series? Then you'll love James Early's new show "Key Battles of American History." Check it out on the podcast player of your choice or go to keybattlesofamericanhistory.com. Listen here to a snippet...

World War One was the most consequential social event in centuries. 10 million soldiers died, creating 3 million widows and 10 million orphans. Many Europeans felt disillusionment and even anger about the war. They...

From 1914-1918, the leaders of World War One were generals who commanded millions of men, emperors who inherited dynasties with centuries of accumulated wealth, and Sultans who claimed a direct line of connection to the...

The Paris Peace Conference opened on January 18, 1919. Its task was the writing of five separate peace treaties with the defeated separate powers: Germany, Turkey, Bulgaria, Austria, and Hungary (now separate nations)...

After Germany's' failed spring offensive, realized the only way to win was to push into France before the United States fully deployed its resources. The French and British were barely hanging on in 1918. By 1918...

The Battle of Megiddo was the climactic battle of the Sinai and Palestine campaign of the First World War, with Germans and Ottomans on one side, and British and French forces on the other (with Arab nationalists led by...

Many thought that Germany was capable of winning World War One until the very end. Unlike World War 2, in which the Allies believed that victory was inevitable as early as 1943, this was not the case with the Great War...

The British developed the tank in response to the trench warfare of World War I. In 1914, a British army colonel named Ernest Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defense, championed the...

Most Americans are indifferent about the nation's involvement in World War One (under half say the U.S. had a responsibility to fight in the war; one-in-five say it didn't). Many figure it entered the conflict too late...

The best way to describe the Third Ypres (Passchendaele) Campaign of 1917. It’s ‘slog.’ When you think about a drudging act that seems to accomplish nothing, this battle is it. Mud. Mud to your waist. Everything sinks...

We’ve looked at many battles in this series, but we’ve only tangentially touched on how this war fundamentally altered European society. The Great War is the watershed between the pre-modern and early modern era. As an...

World War One shattered the empires of Russia, the Ottomans, and the Austro-Hungarians, which had all existed in one form or another for centuries. That's because it broke the fragile alliances that kept these Empires...

The 1916 Battle of the Somme caused a total of 1 million casualties on all sides. the total is over a million casualties. The Allies had gained very little ground. At the end of the battle, they had gained only 7 miles...

Since the first successful flight of an airplane, people had imagined and dreamed of airplanes being used for combat. H. G. Wells's 1908 book (The War in the Air was an example. When World War One broke out, there were...

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Although overlooked today, the war at sea was a crucial part of World War I overall. The German use of the Unrestricted Submarine Warfare (in which non-military ships could be blown up by submarines without the latter...

The Battle of Verdun--fought from February 21-December 18 1916 in the Western Front of France--was horrifying and hellish even by the standards of World War One. Over a 299-day-period, there were 1 million total...

In 1915, the Central Powers and Allies dug in their heels and tried desperately to break the stalemate of the war, still hoping for a short conflict on the scale of a few months. Poison gas was used for the first time...

The Allies desperately wanted to take control of the Dardanelles (the straights connecting Constantinople with the Mediterranean). They were crucial to Russia and would make it possible for Russia to (in effect) have a...

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The beginning of World War One was marked the breakdown of the western powers’ war plans. Leaders on both sides experienced surprises, shocks, and the failure of plans. The first few months saw shocking violence on a...

The Battle of Tannenberg was the first major battle of World War One, fought between Germany and Russia, who surprised everyone with its fast mobilization. This muddled the plans of Germany, which sought to quickly...

An impossibly complex web of alliances that maintained a fragile peace in Europe (and surprisingly held it together since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815) always threatened to unravel. The 1914 assassination of...