World War 1 Japan, The Ottoman Empire, the Western Front and Russia
Discussion about the geographical involvement around the world
Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914. Japan had been an ally of Britain since 1902.
Japan’s aim was to capture Tsingtao which was the biggest overseas German naval base, located on the Shantung peninsula in China. 60,000 Japanese troops, aided by two British battalions, violated Chinese neutrality with an overland approach. Tsingtao was captured on 7th November 1914 and the Germans surrendered.
In January 1915 Japan presented China with 21 demands which included the extension of direct Japanese control over most of Shantung,southern Mongolia, eastern Inner Mongolia and island territories in the South Pacific controlled by Germany.
China did not declare war on the Central Powers until 14th August 1917. China had been struggling since the 1911 revolution which overthrew the Manchu dynasty and was in no position to refuse the 21 demands made by Japan.
When China declared war its major aim was to secure a place at the post war bargaining table to enable China to regain control of the territories ceded to Japan in 1915.
The Ottoman Empire
By the turn of the 20th century the Ottoman Empire had been established for 500 years. But it had been seriously weakened by 3 recent wars – The Libyan War from 1911 to 12; the first Balkan War from 1912 to 13 and the second Balkan war in 1913. The army had suffered 250,000 casualties and lost equipment. By 1914 there were insufficient uniforms to go round.
In July 1914 the mobilisation of the Russian army began in response to Germany’s preparation for war in the east. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman Minister for War, , who had already signed a secret treaty with Germany in August, saw Russia as Turkey’s bitter enemy. Within Turkey there was conflict between the Prime Minister who wanted Turkey to remain neutral and Enver Pasha who argued vehemently for war.
There was pro German sentiment in the army particularly among the officers, many of whom had been trained in Germany, and who admired the German army’s professionalism. Despite opposition, Enver Pasha mobilised the Ottoman army.
Delays in mobilisation occurred because of lack of soldiers, due to the previous three wars, and modern war materials, especially artillery. The army was simply not ready for another war. The primitive railway system also caused delays.
A rapid escalation in tension was caused by Britain immediately seizing two Turkish warships that were in Britain for repair and refurbishment. Then two German warships appeared off the Dardanelles requesting passage to Constantinople. These ships were immediately transferred to the Turkish navy. Senior German officers were appointed to command the Turkish army and navy and protect the western coastal defences.
On 24 October 1914, Enver Pasha ordered the Ottoman fleet into the Black Sea. They carried out surprise raids on Odessa, Sevastopol and two other ports. By 5th November the British Empire and France, Russia’s Allies, declared war on the Ottoman Empire bringing it into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers.
Initially the Ottoman war effort concentrated on fighting the Russians in the Caucasus, protecting its European territories and the coast of western Anatolia. Sinai, Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) were seen as low priorities because the British were not expected to attack there.
Mesopotamia
British forces landed in the Shatt al Arab waterway (Persian Gulf) and destroyed the Turkish fort which guarded it. This opened the way to Basra and southern Iraq. The success encouraged the British to invade Mesopotamia with a force comprising mainly Indian troops. The Ottoman 6th Army spent the next four years trying to hold on to the region.
Sinai and Palestine
In the Sinai region the Ottoman 4th army attacked the Suez Canal but was defeated in 1915. By the end of 1916 the British had driven the Turks out of Sinai. The Turkish 7th and 8th armies were formed to defend Gaza, Palestine and Trans Jordan which they continued to battle over until 1918.
Gallipoli
The invasion of the British, Anzac and French armies stretched the Ottoman Empire to breaking point, causing them to divert soldiers from the Caucasus where they were facing an intensive struggle on the Russian front.
Caucasus
There was prolonged fighting from the outset with defeats and victories on both sides. By 1916 this part of the war had costs the Turkish army over 100,000 casualties and driven them out of a large part of eastern Anatolia. The outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917 caused the Russians to abandon these gains.
North Persia
The Russian withdrawal from the war encouraged the Turkish army to invade the Caucasus and north Persia in order to foil the attempts of Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Armenians from forming breakaway states. Enver Pasha then urged the army to the Caspian Sea.
Conclusion of the conflict
By 1918 British expeditionary forces in Mesopotamia and Palestine made decisive breakthroughs which destroyed the Turkish army on both fronts. Bulgaria’s capitulation in September 1918 meant that the Allied armies on the Salonika front were poised to overrun all of Ottoman Europe and Turkey and capture Constantinople.
Acknowledging the hopelessness of the situation, the Ottoman leadership agreed an armistice with the Allied forces on 30th October 1918.
The Western Front (1914-18)
On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia and ,two days later, she declared war on France. Germany now hastened to implement the Schlieffen Plan ,-which had been devised in 1905, to avoid the nightmare of a two-front war. This plan envisaged an all-out attack on France ,thro’ Belgium-defeating France in 6 weeks- and then switching the German forces to the Eastern front- to meet the slowly mobilizing Russians.- Germany’s enemies would be defeated one at a time!. At first all went well-the German advance thro’ Belgium went ahead on schedule-but then at Mons, the British Expeditionary force-small, but highly trained , and suffering heavy losses, managed to slow the German advance. The Germans also began to make mistakes : their First Army advanced too rapidly and wheeled to the east of Paris rather than to the west. With gaps opening in the German advance , the French general , Joffre, launched a counter- attack . For three days -from Sept 3 to the 6,- fierce fighting raged along the River Marne. This was one of the decisive battles in history; a German victory would have led to the occupation of Paris and the fall of France; as it was the German advance was halted-the Schlieffen Plan had failed - and Germany would now have to fight a two-front war!
There now began the so -called “Race to the Sea”, with each side trying to outflank the other. Both sides now began to dig in. By the onset of winter, opposing lines of trenches faced each other stretching some 300miles from the Channel coast to Switzerland. There was also military stale mate-for the invention of barbed -wire and the machine gun had given an enormous advantage to the defence - and produced a form of trench warfare unique in history. Typically, there were three lines of trenches -the front line ,the support line and the reserve line ,each separated by several hundred yards, and connected by communication trenches, through which supplies could be moved up to the front and troops circulated between the front and reserve lines. The trenches were usually six to eight feet deep and five feet wide, with a parapet of sandbags, surmounted by coils of barbed wire -and were zig-zagged to prevent the enemy firing along the trenches if one section was captured. At intervals, there were also “fire -steps”-two feet or so above the bottom of the trenches ,which enabled the defenders to fire at the advancing enemy . There were also “dugouts”, rooms cut out of the soil ,where the troops
sheltered, rested ,slept, wrote letters and played cards.. The front trenches could be any thing from 50 yards to a mile from the German front line. In between, there was “no-mans land” -a wilderness of barbed wire ,shell craters and dead bodies. Living conditions in the British trenches compared badly with those of the French and even more with those of the Germans. British lines to the north in Flanders, were prone to flooding, ,necessitating the use of “duck-boards”-but even so the water often rose to knee height. In addition to “trench-foot”, there was the smell of rotting bodies , the presence of rats, which fed on those bodies, and spread disease- and the ubiquitous louse , which infested clothing and carried typhus. Then there was the boredom-with times of intense fear, when the trenches were bombarded or the order was given to “go over the top”. Yet ,despite all the misery and health problems they caused , the trenches saved lives-the war would have been far more horrific had there been no trenches. The greatest casualties came in 1914 and 1918 when the war was one of movement.
With a large part of north- eastern France under German control, there seemed no alternative but for the Allied commanders to attack if the invader was to be expelled. These attacks followed a similar pattern. After an initial pounding by artillery, wave after wave of infantry was sent charging across “no-man’s land” -only to be mown down by withering machine gun fire . This happened at the Battle of the Somme in July,1916. The battle began with a massive nine day bombardment ,with some 30 tons of shells falling on each square mile of the German front. The British troops, heavily laden with some 66lbs. of equipment (half
their body weight) were ordered to advance at walking speed in lines some 50-100 yards apart. The assumption was that the initial bombardment had obliterated the German defences and the defenders. This proved not to be the case; the German machine gunners were able to get back into position and strafe the British lines; those troops who did reach the German trenches found the barbed wire uncut! The casualties were appalling: 61,000 on the first day, with 21,000 dead. The battle was not over until November, amid the mud, cold and rain-by then the British casualties had reached 415,000. The Somme
was not the only catastrophe. In 1917 came the Battle of Pass-
-chendaele. All through that summer, the British had been attacking at Ypres ,near the Belgian border, reducing the boggy low-lying ground to a muddy quagmire ,where tanks floundered, guns sank up to their axles and the infantry struggled forward up to their knees , thighs and waists. By the time the British captured the village of Passchendaele and the ridge on which it stood ,they had lost 250,000 troops. For the French ,there was the defence of Verdun, where the Germans ,intending to “bleed the enemy white” in defence of this ancient and symbolic fortress, did much the same to themselves-each side losing some 350,000 men. The scale of the bombardment was almost beyond imagination-in one sector at Verdun, one thousand shells fell on every square mile of ground!
The military deadlock and these appalling casualties forced the generals on both sides to revise their tactics. With new technologies, a new method of warfare emerged. There was the use of poison gas (unreliable)- and the introduction of the aeroplane for reconnaissance and directing artillery fire-but, above all, there was the tank-first introduced by the British in 1917.This proved the war winning weapon, breaking the deadlock and restoring a war of movement to the western front. The tank was not the only factor. In 1917, two events occurred which reshaped the war. Russia, shaken first by the March Revolution, which over threw the Tsar, and then by the Bolshevik October Revolution, was forced to surrender in March,1918-enabling the German forces to be switched from the eastern front to the west. Here was Germany’s opportunity to win the war-but it had to be won quickly for ,in April, 1917 ,there occurred the second momentous event-the entry of the United states into the European war. It would take time to train and to deploy the American troops, but by the spring of 1918, they were starting to arrive in increasing numbers. From March to June ,the German Army launched a last desperate attack in the west- to secure victory, before the American forces tipped the balance. Once more they reached the Marne; once more Paris was evacuated. But, now, the Germans were exhausted: American troops were pouring into Europe- and suddenly the tide turned. On August 8 “The black day of the German army”, the whole front began to roll back. Tanks were now available in numbers which staggered and demoralised the Germans. The war was now one of movement -with the Germans under constant attack and in constant retreat. The end was inevitable. At 11 o’clock of the 11 day of the 11 month, 1918,Germany surrendered and the First World War ,at last, came to an end.
RUSSIAN THEATRE OF WORLD WAR ONE
In 1913 Tsar Nicholas II celebrated the Tercentenary of Romanov rule in Russia. He ruled over an almost feudal empire comprising -1/6th of the world’s land surface, populated by 150 million people’ having 100 nationalities
In 1904 Russia became involved in a war with Japan. Russia’s Pacific fleet was destroyed, and after sailing round the Cape of Good Hope to China, its Baltic Fleet was also destroyed.
In 1905, the pre-dreadnought Battleship Potemkin of the Black Sea Fleet, based in the Crimea, raised the red flag and mutinied at Odessa.
In 1914 with the worsening situation in the Balkans, particularly with her ally Serbia being bullied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire at Germany’s request, Russia began mobilisation. Germany requested that they cease. Russia refused. Accordingly Germany declared war.
Russia agreed to attack East Prussia to help relieve the French, who were under attack from Germany. They advanced the 1st and 2nd Armies into East Prussia. Unfortunately the commanding generals were hardly on speaking terms. This coupled with Germany intercepting a telegraph message in clear from the general: that the 1st Army was going to remain where it was, led to catastrophe. The Germans were outnumbered 2:1, but with daring and with the use of railway transport, destroyed both armies, one at a time, causing a Russian loss of 250,000 men along with all their hardware.
This Battle of Tannenberg did divert the Germans from fighting in France, saved Paris and allowed the French to regroup for the counterattack at the Marne. The defeat began a long retreat from the eastern front. By mid1915 all of Russian Poland, Lithuania and most of Latvia were overrun by the German Army
In 1916 all was not well inside Russia. Tsarina Alexandra and her favourite Rasputin were rumoured to be German spies. The militarisation of industry, and crises in food supply were causing chaos. By November 1916 critics of the regime were asking whether Russia’s misfortunes including 1.7M dead and 5M wounded were stupidity or treason. Subversion came internally from anarchists and bolshevists, and externally from Germany (at a cost of 30M marks!) Russia fell apart with riots, demonstrations and the mutiny of the Petrograd Garrison.
The Tsar abdicated in February 1917. A provisional liberal government was declared (eventually led by Kerensky)
In April 1917 Germany sent a diplomatically sealed train from Switzerland to Russia via Germany and Sweden, carrying Lenin and leading Bolsheviks. By this time Russia was finished as a cohesive martial force. Kerensky was toppled in the October 1917 Revolution
At the peace signed with Germany at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, Russia forfeited to the Central Powers: Finland, Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Ukraine and Transcaucasia, along with1/3rd of the Empire’s population,1/3rd of its agricultural land and ¾ of its industries.
On 17 July 1918 the entire Romanov family was murdered. But as it descended into an internecine Civil War, Mother Russia’s agonies were far from over.