Two global wars in the space of a single generation reshaped borders, toppled empires, and killed tens of millions — remaking the modern world.
Stop 01 · 28 June 1914
Europe's Armed Peace
By 1914 Europe was divided into rival alliances and swollen with empires, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British and French, bristling with new industrial weapons. The rise of the German Empire had upset the old balance of power and set off an arms race. Then a single assassination set the whole system alight. On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie. Assured of German backing, Austria-Hungary sent Serbia a harsh ultimatum on 23 July and declared war on 28 July. Russia mobilised to defend Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and France, and when German troops invaded Belgium, Britain entered the war.
DC-1914-27-d-Sarajevo-croppedAchille Beltrame · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
German invasion through Belgium, August 1914 · Conquest
By 1914 Europe was divided into rival alliances and swollen with empires, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British and French, bristling with new industrial weapons. The rise of the German Empire had upset the old balance of power and set off an arms race. Then a single assassination set the whole system alight. On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie. Assured of German backing, Austria-Hungary sent Serbia a harsh ultimatum on 23 July and declared war on 28 July. Russia mobilised to defend Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and France, and when German troops invaded Belgium, Britain entered the war.
The First World War (1914–1918) bogged down into industrialised slaughter: trenches, machine guns, heavy artillery and poison gas. Germany's plan to defeat France quickly was halted in September 1914, and the Western Front hardened into a near-continuous line of trenches. In 1916 the Germans attacked at Verdun on 21 February, opening the longest battle of the war, and on 1 July the British and French began the Somme offensive. On its first day the British suffered 57,470 casualties, the worst in their army's history. Neither side broke through. By the end of the war, 15 to 22 million people had died, and four empires had fallen: the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. New nations were drawn across their ruins.
BattlesVerdun, 21 February–18 December 1916 · The Somme, 1 July–18 November 1916
In April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany, which had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against Atlantic shipping; by the summer of 1918, 10,000 American soldiers were arriving in Europe each day. Russia went the other way. Defeats and bread shortages brought the February Revolution of 1917 and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, and in October Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, promising peace, land and bread. At Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 they gave up Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic lands and more. Germany's spring offensive in the west exhausted its army, the Allied Hundred Days Offensive broke its lines, and an armistice signed at Compiègne ended the fighting on 11 November 1918.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, redrew Europe and burdened Germany with blame and reparations. Its Article 231, the 'war guilt' clause, made Germany accept responsibility for the loss and damage of the war; it also lost territory and was limited to an army of 100,000 volunteers. John Maynard Keynes condemned it as a 'Carthaginian peace'. Then came the Great Depression, which began with the Wall Street crash of 1929; Germany was among the countries worst hit by unemployment. Amid economic collapse and resentment, extreme movements rose. Adolf Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933, and his Nazi Germany was soon rearming and tearing up the postwar settlement.
Through the 1930s aggression went unchecked. On 18 September 1931 Japanese officers set off a small charge beside a Japanese-owned railway near Mukden, the pretext for seizing Manchuria, where Japan set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. In July 1937 a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing grew into full-scale war with China; Japanese forces took Nanjing that year and carried out a massacre there. In Spain, Germany and Italy aided the Nationalist rebels in a civil war from 1936. Hitler annexed Austria on 12 March 1938, and at Munich on 30 September Britain and France agreed to give him Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, home to three million people. In August 1939 he signed a pact with Stalin.
On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, and war engulfed Europe again; Britain and France declared war two days later, and on 17 September the Soviet Union invaded from the east under a secret protocol of its pact with Germany. In May 1940 German armour drove through the Ardennes, the Allies evacuated encircled troops from Dunkirk, and France signed an armistice on 22 June. Nazi Germany overran most of the continent by 1941, and on 22 June that year more than 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the Soviet Union. This was total war, waged against civilians as much as armies, and at its heart lay the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews in mass shootings and death camps.
The war spanned the planet. Japan, at war in China since 1937 and facing American sanctions, struck the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Aircraft from six carriers damaged all eight battleships present, sinking four, and killed 2,403 Americans. Within hours Japan also attacked the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong, and the United States declared war the next day. On 15 February 1942 Singapore fell, the largest surrender in British history. Campaigns raged across North Africa, the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia; it became the deadliest conflict in human history. In June 1942, at Midway, American code breakers helped to sink four Japanese aircraft carriers.
BattlesPearl Harbor, 7 December 1941 · Singapore falls, 15 February 1942 · Midway, 4–7 June 1942
In late 1942 the tide turned. Germany's summer offensive in the Soviet Union aimed at the Caucasus oil fields and at Stalingrad on the Volga, which Luftwaffe raids reduced to rubble from 23 August. The fighting became house-to-house, and by mid-November the Soviet defenders held only narrow strips along the river. On 19 November the Red Army's Operation Uranus broke through the Romanian armies on the flanks and encircled the German 6th Army. Hitler forbade a breakout, and on 2 February 1943 the starving survivors surrendered. In Egypt, Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army defeated the Axis at El Alamein between 23 October and 4 November 1942, and on 8 November Allied troops landed in French North Africa.
BattlesStalingrad, August 1942–February 1943 · El Alamein, 23 October–4 November 1942
On 6 June 1944 the Allies invaded Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history. A deception campaign had misled the Germans about where it would fall, and bad weather forced a 24-hour delay. In the night some 24,000 airborne troops landed, and from 06:30 seaborne forces stormed five beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, against Erwin Rommel's Atlantic Wall. Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded; by nightfall about 156,000 men had landed. The Allies lost at least 10,000 men killed, wounded or missing on the first day, 4,414 of them confirmed dead, with Omaha the costliest beach. On 22 June the Soviet Operation Bagration tore open Army Group Centre in Byelorussia, inflicting around 450,000 German casualties, the largest defeat in German military history.
BattlesNormandy landings, 6 June 1944 · Minsk liberated, 4 July 1944
By 1945 Germany and Japan were defeated. Soviet armies launched their assault on Berlin on 16 April; Hitler killed himself on 30 April, and Germany surrendered on 8 May. Firebombing had devastated 64 Japanese cities when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August, killing 150,000 to 246,000 people, most of them civilians. After the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Manchuria, Japan announced its surrender on 15 August and signed on 2 September. Some 60 to 75 million people had died, more than half in China and the Soviet Union. From the wreckage rose two superpowers, the United Nations, and a Cold War that would divide the world for decades.