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The Sarajevo bombing
The Bosnian Serb nationalist student Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke and his wife dead. Austria held Serbia responsible for the murder. This set in motion a gear that led to the Great War a month later. -
The declaration of war
On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia and bombed Belgrade after giving it an ultimatum on July 23. On the 30th of that month, Russia decreed a general mobilization to intimidate Austria. On August 1, Germany, an ally of Austria, and France, an ally of Russia, proclaimed a general mobilization. That same day Berlin declared war on Russia.
On August 3, Germany declared war on France and German troops invaded Belgium. The following day, the United Kingdom, declared war on Germany -
The battle of the Marne
On September 6, the French forces, led by General Joffre, and the British launched a counterattack: the Battle of the Marne.
General Joseph Gallieni, military governor of Paris, decided to requisition some 700 taxis to transport between 5,000 and 6,000 combatants to the front.
The main battle was fought from September 6 to 9. The German forces fell back. The casualties on each side were tremendous: nearly 100,000 dead or missing on each side and twice as many wounded -
The Dardanelles
On April 25, 1915, British and French forces landed in Gallipoli, in the Turkish Strait of the Dardanelles, controlling access to Constantinople and the Black Sea, closed by Turkey an ally of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. at the beginning of the war.
The operation, defended by Winston Churchill, atthe British Royal Navy, was aimed at reaching Germany and Austria from the rear and establishing a link with Russia.
It resulted in a resounding failure: 180,000 dead among the Allies -
The battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme is considered the bloodiest of the war with 1.2 million dead, wounded or missing. The Germans and the Allies clashed in northern France between July and November 1916. The offensive was launched by the Allies on July 1, the bloodiest day in British history with 20,000 killed or missing - most of them within the first hour - and 40,000 wounded.
After five months of fighting, progress on the ground was negligible. -
Verdun
On February 25, 1916, the Germans who wanted to "bleed completely" the French army and force Paris to ask for peace, launched a major offensive north of Verdun.
In December 1916, when the battle ended, the lines had hardly changed, which shows the absurdity of the combat. The number of victims was enormous and distributed almost evenly between the two sides: hundreds of thousands of deaths. -
America at war
n January 1917, Germany launched into unrestricted submarine warfare, attacking every ship en route to Great Britain, in the hope of hastening the end of the war by drowning economically to England. The strategy was counterproductive because on April 6 the United States, until then neutral despite several attacks on its ships, declared war on Germany. On June 26, the first American convoy arrived in France. The expeditionary force reached 2 million at the end of the war. -
The Russian Revolution
Between 1914 and 1917, Russia lost more than two million soldiers and officers in combat, mainly due to insufficient armament. In March 1917, a first revolution led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the formation of a provisional government. Lenin reached an armistice with the Germans on December 15 in Brest-Litovsk that ended the fighting, and on March 3 of 1918 a treaty that made Russia lose a large part of its western territories to the benefit of Germany -
Road of the Ladies
On April 16, 1917, the French army, under the command of General Robert Nivelle, launched an offensive with a million men on the Road of the Ladies, a small road once used by the Ladies of France.
The offensive collided with the German resistance. The French death toll reached about 100,000 in a few weeks.
Between 30,000 and 40,000 men participated in revolts, often in the rear, between troops who saw that they were going to risk their lives for almost zero advances. -
Rethondes
Prepared by General Ferdinand Foch, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces, this counteroffensive definitively changed the course of the war and provoked a German retreat on all fronts. One after another, Germany's allies fell apart: Bulgaria signed an armistice on September 29; Austria was defeated by the Italians at Vittorio Veneto (October 24-27); Turkey was forced to sign the Mudros armistice on October 30. -
End of the war
On November 11, at 5:20 a.m., in Rethondes (, in General Foch's wagon, a German delegation, with the agreement of the new Berlin government, signed the armistice. The Germans accepted considerable deliveries of war material, wagons, locomotives. They released the Allied prisoners without reciprocity and had to evacuate in 15 days the invaded territories to the west, as well as Alsace-Lorraine. At 11:00 o'clock sharp the ceasefire went into effect. The First World War was over.