The First World War stage by stage, from Sarajevo to the Armistice: the Marne and the trenches, Tannenberg and the Great Retreat, Gallipoli, Verdun and the Somme, revolution in Russia and the collapse of four empires.
Stop 01 · June–August 1914
Two Armed Camps
By 1914 Europe was split into two alliances: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, France, Russia and Britain on the other. On 28 June a Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip, shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, declared war on Serbia on 28 July. Within a week the alliances had pulled in Russia, Germany and France, and when Germany invaded neutral Belgium, Britain declared war on 4 August.
DC-1914-27-d-Sarajevo-croppedAchille Beltrame · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Who holds what
Central Powers
The Allies (Entente)
Unshaded: neutral or out of the war. Front lines are simplified.
By 1914 Europe was split into two alliances: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, France, Russia and Britain on the other. On 28 June a Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip, shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, declared war on Serbia on 28 July. Within a week the alliances had pulled in Russia, Germany and France, and when Germany invaded neutral Belgium, Britain declared war on 4 August.
BattlesBelgrade shelled, 29 July · Battle of Cer, August: Serbia's first victory
Germany's war plan, drawn up by Alfred von Schlieffen, was to knock France out quickly by sweeping through Belgium, then turn on Russia. The forts of Liège held the Germans up for eleven days. In the Battles of the Frontiers in August, French attacks into Lorraine failed with terrible losses, and the small British army fell back from Mons. By early September the Germans were about 40 km from Paris. Then the French and British counter-attacked on the Marne (5–12 September), and the Germans retreated to the Aisne river and dug in. The quick victory both sides expected was gone.
BattlesLiège, 5–16 August · Mons, 23 August · Battles of the Frontiers, August · First Battle of the Marne, 5–12 September
Russia mobilized faster than Germany expected and invaded East Prussia in August. At Tannenberg (26–30 August) the Germans under Hindenburg and Ludendorff surrounded one Russian army and took about 90,000 prisoners, then drove the other out at the Masurian Lakes. Further south, Russia did far better against Austria-Hungary: it took Lemberg (Lviv) in September, overran Galicia and besieged the fortress of Przemyśl. In Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian invasion was thrown back in December. In November the Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany's side.
BattlesTannenberg, 26–30 August · Masurian Lakes, September · Lemberg taken, 3 September · Przemyśl besieged · Kolubara: Serbia drives Austria-Hungary out, December
After the Marne, each side tried to get round the other's northern flank, a 'race to the sea' that ended on the Belgian coast. At Ypres in October and November 1914, the British, French and Belgians stopped the last German attempt to break through. By Christmas a line of trenches ran some 700 km from the North Sea to Switzerland. Through 1915 French and British attacks gained little ground at enormous cost, and at Ypres in April 1915 the Germans used poison gas on a large scale for the first time.
BattlesYpres: battles in 1914, 1915 and 1917 · Loos, September 1915 · Champagne, 1915
In May 1915 German and Austro-Hungarian armies broke through the Russian line between Gorlice and Tarnów after a massive bombardment. The Russians, short of shells and even rifles, fell back all summer. Przemyśl and Lemberg were retaken, Warsaw fell on 5 August, and by September the Central Powers held all of Russian Poland, Lithuania and part of Latvia. Russia lost close to a million men as prisoners that year, but it did not make peace. In May, Italy joined the Allies.
BattlesGorlice–Tarnów breakthrough, 2 May 1915 · Lemberg retaken, June · Kovno fortress falls, August
To knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war and open a sea route to Russia, Britain and France tried to force the Dardanelles. A naval attack failed on 18 March 1915, and on 25 April British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Ottoman defenders, among them Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, kept them pinned near the beaches for eight months, and the Allies evacuated in January 1916. Italy, which joined the Allies in May 1915, attacked Austria-Hungary along the Isonzo river: eleven battles there in two years gained little.
BattlesThe Narrows: naval attack fails, 18 March · Anzac Cove, 25 April 1915 · Cape Helles · The Isonzo front, 1915–1917
In October 1915 Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, and German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian armies invaded Serbia from three sides. The Serbian army, with its king and tens of thousands of civilians, retreated over the snowbound mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic; many thousands died on the way. Allied ships carried the survivors to the Greek island of Corfu. A British and French force landed at Salonika in neutral Greece, too late to help, and stayed there behind a new front for the rest of the war.
In February 1916 Germany attacked the French fortress city of Verdun, aiming, its commander later claimed, to 'bleed France white'. The battle lasted ten months and cost each side over 300,000 casualties for almost no change in the line. To take the pressure off Verdun, the British and French attacked on the Somme on 1 July: the British army suffered about 57,000 casualties on the first day alone, the worst in its history. By November they had advanced about 10 km. At sea, the British and German fleets met off Jutland in May, the only great clash of battleships in the war. Britain lost more ships but kept control of the North Sea.
BattlesVerdun, February–December 1916 · The Somme, July–November 1916 · Jutland, 31 May 1916
In June 1916 the Russian general Aleksei Brusilov attacked Austria-Hungary along a wide front, without the long bombardment that usually warned the enemy. It was one of the most successful Allied offensives of the war: the Russians retook Lutsk and Bukovina and captured hundreds of thousands of prisoners, and Germany had to rush troops to save its ally. Encouraged, Romania joined the Allies in August and invaded Transylvania. But German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces struck back from two sides and took Bucharest on 6 December; by January 1917 they held most of Romania.
BattlesLutsk retaken, June 1916 · Czernowitz taken by the Russians, June · Bucharest falls, 6 December 1916
The war was fought far beyond Europe. Japan joined the Allies and took Germany's base at Tsingtao in China in November 1914, while Allied forces seized Germany's Pacific islands. In Africa, Togoland fell in weeks, South African forces conquered German South-West Africa in 1915, and Kamerun fell in 1916. In German East Africa, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck led a guerrilla campaign that tied down far larger British, Indian, African, Belgian and Portuguese forces for the whole war; he surrendered only on 25 November 1918, two weeks after the armistice. Hundreds of thousands of Africans died, many of them porters carrying supplies.
BattlesTogoland falls, August 1914 · Kamerun, 1914–1916 · Tanga, November 1914 · German South-West Africa, 1915
In February 1917 Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking ships without warning to starve Britain. That, and a German offer of an alliance to Mexico (the Zimmermann Telegram), brought the United States into the war in April. In Russia, revolution overthrew the tsar in March, and in November the Bolsheviks seized power promising peace. In the west, a failed French offensive led to mutinies, and the British offensive at Passchendaele sank into mud. In October, German and Austro-Hungarian troops broke through at Caporetto and drove the Italians back to the Piave river. The map shows the lines at the end of 1917.
BattlesPasschendaele, July–November 1917 · Cambrai: the first mass tank attack, November · Caporetto, October 1917 · Riga falls, September 1917
Lenin's Bolshevik government asked for peace. When it balked at Germany's terms, German troops simply advanced, almost unopposed. By the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918, Russia gave up Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland and Ukraine, with about a third of its population. German and Austro-Hungarian troops occupied Ukraine for its grain. Romania, now alone, made peace in May. Germany's new eastern empire was vast, but it kept around a million German soldiers in the east who were badly needed in France. Russia, out of the war, is left unshaded here.
With Russia out, Germany moved dozens of divisions west and gambled on winning before the Americans arrived in strength. On 21 March 1918, Operation Michael smashed into the British line on the Somme, with short, intense bombardments and fast-moving 'stormtroopers'. More offensives followed in Flanders, on the Aisne and in Champagne, and by June the Germans were back on the Marne, less than 100 km from Paris, which they shelled with long-range guns. But they gained ground, not victory, and lost hundreds of thousands of their best soldiers. In July the French and Americans stopped the last attack in the Second Battle of the Marne.
BattlesOperation Michael, 21 March 1918 · The Lys, April 1918 · Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, June · Second Battle of the Marne, July
Against the Ottoman Empire the war ranged across the Middle East. A British and Indian army advancing up the Tigris was besieged and forced to surrender at Kut in April 1916, but Baghdad fell in March 1917. In June 1916 the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein, launched the Arab Revolt with British backing; Arab forces took Aqaba in 1917. From Egypt, General Allenby broke through at Gaza and took Jerusalem in December 1917, and at Megiddo in September 1918 he routed the Ottoman armies; Damascus fell on 1 October. In 1915 the Ottoman government began the Armenian Genocide, in which around a million Armenians or more were killed. The Ottomans signed an armistice on 30 October 1918; the map shows the lines then.
BattlesSarıkamış, winter 1914–15 · Kut: British surrender, April 1916 · Baghdad taken, March 1917 · Aqaba, July 1917 · Gaza, 1917 · Megiddo, September 1918
On 8 August 1918, at Amiens, British, Australian, Canadian and French troops, with hundreds of tanks, broke the German line; Ludendorff called it 'the black day of the German army'. In the Hundred Days that followed, the Allies, now with American armies fighting in strength, pushed the Germans back across France and broke the Hindenburg Line. Germany's allies collapsed one by one: Bulgaria after a breakthrough on the Salonika front in September, the Ottoman Empire in October, and Austria-Hungary after the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in early November. With mutiny in its navy and revolution at home, Germany's Kaiser abdicated, and the armistice took effect at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918.
BattlesAmiens, 8 August 1918 · Meuse–Argonne, September–November · Dobro Pole: the Salonika front breaks, September · Vittorio Veneto, October–November
The peace treaties signed in Paris in 1919 and 1920 redrew Europe. Four empires were gone: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. Poland was reborn, and new states appeared: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, along with a small Austria and Hungary. By the Treaty of Versailles, Germany lost land and all its colonies, was limited to a small army, and had to accept blame for the war and pay reparations, terms that many Germans bitterly resented. About nine million soldiers and millions of civilians had died, and a flu pandemic was killing tens of millions more around the world.