The Daily Catalog

Two Wars That Made the Twentieth Century

From the Sarajevo pistol to the Hiroshima cloud — a single, broken arc.

The First and Second World Wars are usually counted as two events. They are better understood as one — a thirty-one-year European civil war that became global twice, that reorganised every empire on earth, and that handed the closing of the century to two superpowers neither of which existed in 1914. This deck is laid out in the manner of a daily broadsheet because that is how the wars were largely received by the people who lived through them: in dispatches, casualty lists, and propaganda posters; in maps that needed redrawing every Tuesday; in obituaries. There are eighteen sections. The first nine concern the Great War; the next eight, the Second; the last gives a reading list with a documentary worth watching. Where dates are given, they are corroborated by Hew Strachan, Margaret MacMillan, Antony Beevor, and the official histories of the belligerent governments. The deck is not exhaustive — no deck could be. It is an attempt to lay the bones in their right order, and to suggest where the muscle ought to attach.

Contents

The Powder-Train of Europe

Five empires, three alliances, and forty years of mounting steel.

The Great War did not begin in 1914; it began, arguably, in 1871, when the Prussian victory over France at Sedan rearranged Europe around a new German Empire whose growing industrial strength terrified its neighbours. By 1907 the continent had divided into two opposing alliance blocs: the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, with the Ottoman Empire shortly attaching itself. Onto this brittle structure pressed several stress fractures. Naval rivalry between Britain and Germany — fought in dreadnought tonnage — had been escalating since 1898. The Balkans, where the Ottoman Empire was retreating, had become the playground of Austro-Hungarian and Russian ambition; two Balkan Wars in 1912–13 had already redrawn the map. Pan-Slavism in Serbia, pan-Germanism in Vienna, and a pervasive, almost religious cult of the offensive among general staffs from Paris to St Petersburg had made statesmen confident that any future war would be short, decisive, and clarifying. They were unanimously, catastrophically wrong. Then, on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne. The pistol was a Belgian-made FN Model 1910. The bullet that killed him also killed, eventually, the empires of Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, and Constantinople.

Lamps Going Out

"The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." — Sir Edward Grey, 3 August 1914

The July Crisis ran with the inevitability of a railway timetable, because that is largely what it was. Each great power's mobilisation plan — the German Schlieffen Plan most rigid of all — depended on hour-by-hour rail movement and could not be paused without surrendering the field. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia 28 July. Russia mobilised 30 July. Germany declared war on Russia 1 August, on France 3 August, and invaded neutral Belgium the same day. Britain declared war on Germany 4 August. The Ottomans joined the Central Powers in October. Within six weeks the German army was within forty kilometres of Paris. The Battle of the Marne (5–12 September), in which the French and British struck the exposed German right flank, halted the advance and condemned the Western Front to four years of trench stalemate. By Christmas the war had spread to Africa, the Caucasus, the Pacific, and the seas of the world.

Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele

The trench line that ran from the North Sea to the Swiss border did not move more than fifteen kilometres in either direction for three of the four years. To break it the generals of both sides reached for ever-larger artillery barrages and ever-newer instruments of horror: poison gas at Ypres in April 1915, the tank at the Somme in September 1916, the flamethrower, the storm trooper, the night raid. The Battle of Verdun (Feb–Dec 1916), Erich von Falkenhayn's plan to "bleed France white", produced 700,000 casualties without changing the line. The Battle of the Somme (1 July–18 Nov 1916) cost the British army 57,000 casualties on its first day alone and over a million on all sides by its end. Passchendaele (1917) sank thousands into Flemish mud. Only in 1918, with the influx of fresh American divisions, the failure of Germany's spring offensive, and the Allied Hundred Days, did the line at last move.

A World War, Truly

Total War, Total Society

For the first time, every belligerent state mobilised its civilian population as well as its army. Women entered factories and farms in unprecedented numbers; rationing, censorship, and propaganda became permanent state functions; income tax in Britain rose from 6% to 30%. Britain, France, and Germany printed money against future victory. None of them won enough to pay for the printing. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, which crossed the world along military supply lines, killed perhaps fifty million people — more than the war itself. Censorship in every country meant that nobody knew, until afterwards, what the cost had been.

Illustrative placeholder image (picsum.photos), not archival evidence.

Three Revolutions in a Single Year

1917 was the war's hinge. In February, food riots in Petrograd became the February Revolution; the Romanov tsar abdicated after three centuries of dynasty. In April, the United States — provoked by unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram — declared war on Germany. In October, Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and, by Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, took Russia out of the war at the price of a third of its population. The same year saw the Balfour Declaration committing Britain to a Jewish national home in Palestine, French army mutinies on the Aisne after the failure of the Nivelle Offensive, and the Battle of Caporetto. The world that came out the other side of 1917 was not the world that had walked into it.

Versailles & Its Discontents

"This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years." — Marshal Ferdinand Foch, 1919

The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) carved Germany out of seven percent of its territory, all its colonies, and 132 billion gold marks in reparations. The Habsburg Empire was dismembered into Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia; the Ottoman Empire became, after Sèvres and Lausanne, modern Turkey and a series of British and French mandates across the Arab world. The map of Europe was redrawn with a self-determination ruler that did not, in practice, fit. Foch's prediction was off by two months. Total Great War deaths: about 9.7 million military and 10 million civilian, with 21 million wounded. An entire age cohort of European men was thinned from the demographic record. The cultural fallout — modernist disillusionment from Eliot to Remarque to Hemingway — would shape the century's literature.

The Twenty Years' Crisis

The 1920s opened with hope: the League of Nations, the Locarno Treaties (1925), the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928) outlawing war. But Weimar Germany staggered through the hyperinflation of 1923 (a loaf of bread cost 200 billion marks by November), recovered briefly under the Dawes Plan, then collapsed again with the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. Mussolini's March on Rome (October 1922) inaugurated fascism. Hitler's NSDAP, marginal in 1928, took 33% of the Reichstag in November 1932 and became chancellor on 30 January 1933. The Reichstag fire, the Enabling Act, and Dachau followed within months. Stalin's Soviet Union, having industrialised brutally through the First Five-Year Plan, descended into the Great Terror in 1937–38. Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937; the Rape of Nanjing in December 1937 killed perhaps 200,000 civilians. Spain fought a civil war (1936–39) that became fascism's rehearsal. The League of Nations, lacking American membership and enforcement teeth, watched.

War Returns

On 23 August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with secret protocols partitioning Eastern Europe. On 1 September German armoured divisions invaded Poland; on 17 September Soviet forces invaded from the east. Britain and France declared war on 3 September. Poland fell in five weeks. The "Phoney War" of the winter ended on 9 April 1940 when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway; on 10 May, the panzers struck through the Ardennes, bypassing the Maginot Line. France fell in six weeks. Britain stood alone. The Royal Air Force, with radar and Spitfires, won the Battle of Britain by October 1940; the Blitz on London and Coventry continued through May 1941. On 22 June 1941 Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military invasion in history, against his erstwhile partner.

Where the War Was Decided

More than four out of five Wehrmacht soldiers killed in the war died on the Eastern Front.

Operation Barbarossa committed 3.8 million Axis troops along a 2,900-km front. By December 1941 they were within 30 km of Moscow but had not taken it; the Soviet counter-offensive, helped by the deepest winter in living memory, threw them back. Stalingrad (Aug 1942–Feb 1943) destroyed the German Sixth Army and the strategic initiative with it. Kursk (Jul–Aug 1943), the largest tank battle in history, finished German offensive capacity in the east. From there it was twenty months of grinding Soviet advance — Operation Bagration in summer 1944 destroyed Army Group Centre — to Berlin. Soviet war dead are still debated: at least 26 million, perhaps higher. Civilian and military casualties on the Eastern Front exceeded those of every other theatre of the war combined.

Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay

On 7 December 1941 Japanese carrier aircraft attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, sinking four battleships and killing 2,403 Americans. By April 1942 Japan had taken the Philippines, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and parts of Burma. The tide turned at Midway (June 1942), where US codebreakers and naval aviators sank four Japanese carriers in a single day. From Guadalcanal (1942) the Allied island-hopping campaign closed slowly on the home islands: Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. The Pacific war was an industrial mismatch from the start; Japan produced 16,000 aircraft in 1944 to America's 96,000. But Japanese resistance was suicidal — Iwo Jima alone cost 26,000 American casualties — and a planned invasion of Kyushu was projected to cost half a million. The decision-makers in Washington took another route.

The Shoah

Anti-Jewish persecution was central to Nazi ideology from the start: the boycotts of 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938. With the conquest of Poland and the Soviet territories, Einsatzgruppen death squads shot more than 1.5 million Jews, including 33,771 in two days at Babi Yar in September 1941. The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 coordinated the Final Solution: industrial extermination at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek. Approximately six million Jews were murdered. Romani people, Soviet POWs, disabled people, gay men, political prisoners, and Polish elites were murdered in additional millions. The Holocaust is not a parable. It happened in the centre of European civilisation, conducted by literate, often educated men with families, using filing cabinets and railway schedules. It is the moral fulcrum of the twentieth century and demands to be remembered exactly as it was.

Endgame in Europe

On 6 June 1944 — D-Day — Allied forces landed 156,000 troops on five Normandy beaches in the largest amphibious operation in history. Paris was liberated 25 August. The Battle of the Bulge (December 1944) was Germany's last gasp. From the east, the Red Army crossed the Vistula in January 1945; on 30 April Hitler shot himself in the Berlin Führerbunker. On 7 May at Reims and 8 May at Karlshorst, Germany surrendered unconditionally. V-E Day was the next morning. The continent was a shambles. Forty million Europeans had died. Twenty million were displaced. Cities — Hamburg, Dresden, Warsaw, Stalingrad, Coventry — were rubble. The future of every territory east of the Elbe was already, by Yalta and Potsdam, being argued.

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." — J. Robert Oppenheimer, Trinity test, 16 July 1945

A B-29 named Enola Gay dropped a uranium bomb, "Little Boy", on Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on 6 August 1945. About 80,000 people died on the day; perhaps 140,000 by the end of 1945 from injuries and radiation. Three days later "Fat Man", a plutonium implosion device, fell on Nagasaki, killing about 70,000. On 15 August Emperor Hirohito broadcast his rescript of surrender, the first time most Japanese citizens had ever heard his voice. Formal surrender was signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. The atomic bombings ended the war and opened the next one. The Soviet Union tested its own bomb in 1949. Whether a third world war was averted by deterrence or by luck remains, eighty years on, the most consequential open question in international affairs.

A New Order

The two wars also closed the European empires. India and Pakistan independent 1947; Indonesia 1949; Ghana 1957; Algeria 1962. The world of 1914 — a handful of European capitals ruling four-fifths of the planet — was, by 1965, simply gone.

Read & Watch

Hew Strachan, The First World War · Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace · Antony Beevor, The Second World War · Richard Evans, The Third Reich Trilogy · Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands · John Dower, Embracing Defeat.

↑ A canonical overview. Watch on YouTube.