Britain And France The Western Front example essay topic

The assassination of Austrian archduke Ferdinand in the Balkans in June 1914 led to much international comment throughout July and war became virtually inevitable by August, arriving at the height of a summer in which, for the British, there had been greater fears of a conflict in Ireland than in Europe. Mobilisation evoked a sense of patriotism in most of the confrontational nations (Germany and Austria-Hungary being the key powers on one side; France, Russia and Britain the principals on the other), which made them all believe they had a good cause for going to war with one another. In the east Russia lumbered towards Germany but was stopped decisively at Tannenberg. In the west France launched her armies with much elan and dash at her former territories of Alsace-Lorraine, only to be thrown back with huge losses.

Britain called for volunteers to reinforce Expeditionary Force which was swiftly despatched to the nearest appropriate scene of action: Belgium (whose neutrality had been violated by the Germans) and northern France. There, after some months of high-casualty encounters of which the last and most bloody was the First Battle of Ypres in October-November, a stalemate ensued which was to continue for almost four years. The power of twentieth-century artillery forced the armies to dig in; the machine-gun and the rifle made 'over-the-top' attacks highly costly. For Britain and France the 'Western Front' - as it soon came to be known - was to be, as it were, the central stage of the war. Britain, the world's maritime superpower, had expected that the Navy, would play a decisive role, and indeed it did so up to a point but not in the manner expected, in that the battleship was to prove less important than the submarine and blockade was to prove a more effective weapon than the broadside.

1914 also saw the immediate rallying to the flag of troops from the British Empire. The year ended with a Christmas truce along much of the Western Front - a remarkable display of camaraderie between enemies that would never occur on such a scale again. 1915 In the west, hopes of breaking the trench deadlock faded as a series of relatively minor frontal attacks resulted in few gains and many casualties. Air raids started, in which civilians - their traditional spectator role gone for ever - found themselves potential victims. In April poison gas was used by the Germans during the Second Battle of Ypres, a weapon which seemed basically evil and to break all the chivalrous rules; it was soon adopted by the Allies. In May a famous liner, the Lusitania, was sunk with much loss of life - producing strong anti-German feeling in Britain.

In an attempt to relieve pressure on Russia by challenging Turkey, British and French naval forces were despatched to break through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara. When this purely seaborne effort failed, Allied land forces kept up the pressure on Turkey by invading the Gallipoli peninsula; a bitterly fought campaign ensued which the Allies ultimately had to abandon. In Mesopotamia (Iraq) a British Indian Army, failed in its attempt to seize Baghdad. In Britain the formation of a Ministry of Munitions was a potent symbol of the kind of war now being fought; the main source for the workers in the new munitions factories was the nation's womanhood.

Women would play many roles in the conflict, short of actual fighting. 1916 The Germans mounted a massive attack against the city of Verdun in north-eastern France and the French fought back ferociously; it was a battle that would not only claim hundreds of thousands of lives but would permanently scar the French psyche. The British, not to be outdone, suffered their own Verdun that year - on the Somme. Indeed, conscription had already come into force in Britain in March, removing the traditional volunteer principle for the foreseeable future. On the Eastern Front, a Russian general, Brusilov, launched a major offensive; ultimately that, while unsuccessful, broke the spirit of the Austro-Hungarian army.

Two empires emerged crucially weakened from this episode and would ultimately collapse - the Habsburgs (the ruling family of Austria-Hungary), and the Romanov's (the family of the Russian Tsars). At sea on 31 May there was at last a meeting of British and German battle fleets in the North Sea, with the disadvantage that there was no clear victory; the fact that the German surface fleet would hardly ever seek combat again could not be known until the war ended more than two years later. 1917 Blockade threatened to debilitate Britain fatally, revolution actually did take her eastern ally Russia right out of the war, and with the Bolshevik putsch in Petrograd in November (October according to the Eastern calendar) Marxism Leninism arrived on the world scene. On the Western Front the failure of a French initiative (known as the Nivel le offensive) led to widespread mutinies in the French army. Making the British contribution of even more importance. In late July another major 'push' was launched by the British, this time in Flanders.

This three-and-a-half-month marathon is now named after its final objective, Passchendaele. The offensive slowed up in the mud of the Ypres front much as the previous attempt had done in the mud of the Somme. The reason for this confidence lay in the fact that 1917 saw the Americans coming in on the Allied side. 1918 Vigorous implementation of the convoy system solved much of Britain's blockade problem. However, starting in March, massive German attacks on the Western Front destroyed the idea that trenches could not be overrun, and Britain and France, with America only just beginning to deploy, seemed almost to be facing defeat. But then the German thrusts petered out in exhaustion and it was the Allies' turn to break through and march.

They forced their way through the well-defended Hindenburg Line with astonishing speed when Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated leaving it to politicians who had had little say in the war to take on the humiliating task of suing for peace. In Italy, where the Italians advanced across the Piave, taking vast numbers of prisoners; in Macedonia, where Allied forces based on Salonika were at last able to show their fighting spirit; and the Middle East, where the Palestine Campaign was brought to a victorious conclusion, most memorably with the seizure of Damascus. By way of a curious footnote to the cessation of hostilities, two days after the guns fell silent in Europe, a resourceful German commander in East Africa, Let tow-Vor beck, who had teased the Allies for years, captured a small town in Northern Rhodesia; informed of the Armistice he decided he had no option but honourably to lay down his arms.