What Is The Great War

What People Mean When They Say "The Great War"

The Great War is what World War I was called by people who thought it would be the war to end all wars. That turned out to be wrong, obviously. It lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, involved most of Europe and a lot of countries outside Europe, and killed somewhere between 15 and 22 million people depending on how you count combat deaths versus disease and starvation. I've seen this topic come up constantly in history forums and in genealogy research threads. People often confuse it with WWII, which is fair since the two are deeply linked, but they're fundamentally different conflicts with different causes and different ways they were fought.

What Is The Great War

At its core, it was a conflict triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, but the actual causes ran much deeper. The alliance system in Europe meant that a dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated through Russia, Germany, France, and Britain within weeks. This wasn't accidental. The major powers had spent decades building military timetables and treaty obligations designed to activate automatically. Diplomacy got run over by logistics. The war itself had several distinct phases. The mobile phase in 1914 collapsed when the German advance on Paris was stopped at the Marne. Then both sides dug in. What followed was roughly four years of trench warfare on the Western Front, simultaneous campaigns in the Balkans, the Middle East, Italy, and colonial Africa, a naval blockade that starved Germany into submission, and the 1917 entry of the United States which shifted the material balance decisively. I work a lot with digitized military records and family history research, and one of the most common problems I run into is that people assume the war was mostly fought in trenches in France and Belgium. That's only part of it. The Ottoman campaign in Mesopotamia and Palestine, the Italian front in the Alps, the Brusilov Offensive on the Eastern Front, and the German colonial wars in Africa were all substantial. The Eastern Front alone was roughly three times longer than the Western Front and far more mobile until the Russian collapse in 1917. If you're researching a specific ancestor or even just trying to understand a particular battle, assuming everything happened near Ypres or Verdun will get you wrong answers.

One edge case that trips people up consistently involves the Russian withdrawal. After the Bolshevik Revolution in late 1917, Soviet Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918, exiting the war entirely. This freed up about 50 German divisions to move west for the Spring Offensive of 1918. Those offensive operations nearly broke the Allied lines before the Hundred Days counteroffensive reversed everything. A lot of popular accounts either skip this entirely or lump it into vague references to "the Eastern Front," which does a disservice to how consequential that transfer of forces actually was. The technology of the war deserves a specific mention because it defined how it was fought. Machine guns made defensive firepower massively dominant, which is why offense and defense became so mismatched. Artillery caused the majority of casualties. Poison gas was introduced but turned out to be more psychologically damaging than strategically decisive. Tanks appeared in 1916 at the Somme but weren't reliable enough to change the course of the war until 1918. Aircraft evolved from reconnaissance platforms to fighters and bombers over the conflict. The naval war featured the Battle of Jutland in 1916, which was the largest naval battle of the war and strategically inconclusive, while the U-boat campaign against merchant shipping was where the navy actually mattered. The political aftermath is where things get complicated. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East, dissolved the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, and created a bunch of new nations whose borders didn't necessarily match any coherent ethnic or geographic logic. The League of Nations was formed to prevent future wars and failed completely within two decades. The economic devastation and political humiliation baked into the peace settlements fed directly into the rise of fascism and the conditions for World War II. Historians still argue about whether the treaty was too harsh or not harsh enough, but almost everyone agrees it was inadequate.

If you want to go deeper, the Imperial War Museum in London and the US National Archives both have extensive digitized collections. The WW1 centenary projects from various national libraries have made enormous amounts of primary source material freely available. For battlefield visits, the Somme sector in northern France and the Ypres Salient in Belgium are the main areas, though Menin Gate in Ypres has the daily Last Post ceremony which is worth seeing if you can handle the crowds.