Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary alone on 22 May 1915 as a result of popular demand from the Italian people, for “their war” to win “Italia Irredanta.” or in the interest of further pursuing reinforced unification of the Italians that remained “unredeemed” due to the remaining existence of outlying territories with Italian inhabitants, in addition to a desire to acquire colonies to revive Italian control of the Mediterranean, which included acquiring Tunis as a colony that was occupied by France in 1881, which consequently drove Italy into the Triple Alliance in 1882. The Italian occupation of Tripoli and acquiring Aegean islands after the war with Turkey in 1911 encouraged these and other ambitions, including seeking to acquire influence in Albania from Austria-Hungary. This development was a welcome reinforcement to the allied effort at a time when their offensive in the west had broken down, little progress was made in the Dardanelles, and the Germans were advancing rapidly against the Russians, who remained chronically poorly equipped and supplied as a result of underdeveloped national industrial capacity. There was hope among the allies that Italy’s intervention could distract Austrian forces from the eastern front by attacking the Italians’ former allies, which they maintained had engaged in offensive actions.
Italian decision makers maintained that the Triple Alliance had been essentially defensive, and designed solely to preserve the status quo, or maintain equilibrium in Europe. It was now argued that Austria had used the alliance as a pretext for aggression against Serbia without Italy’s assent through the usual diplomatic channels, as had been specified in the Triple Alliance treaty, and therefore encroached on its political and economic interests in the Balkan Peninsula, while Serbia’s independence was considered to be essential for Balkan equilibrium. Moreover, the secret London treaty with the Entente Allies recognized Italy’s claims to the Trentino, Trieste, the eastern littoral of the Adriatic, and further acquisitions on the Aegean seacoast, which encouraged its “irrendentist” ambitions, or claiming the whole Italia irredenta constituted unredeemed territory with an Italian population in the Trentino and across the Adriatic that had remained under Hapsburg control after the wars of Italian liberation. In addition, Italy had considerable ambitions entailed demanding control of the eastern shores of the Adriatic to maintain the safety of its exposed coasts, as well as retaining the Greek islands in the Dodecanse that were seized in the Italian-Turkish war, and to acquire a foothold in Asia Minor and along the Straights of Otranto. However, practically the entire northeastern coasts of the Adriatic were inhabited by a predominantly Slavic population, and therefore not any conclusion could be reached with the Austrians about making these territorial concessions. Being thus absolved from its obligations to the Triple Alliance and aiming to acquire gains, Italy thereby joined the war on the side of the Entente in the interest of regaining former Italian territories from Austria.
Italy joining the war effort against Austria-Hungary proved to lead to limited effects, as its forces hardly produced effects corresponding to its population almost equal to that of France, and the bulk of the Austrian armies were engaged against Russia. Moreover, the geographical features of the Italian-Austrian frontier provided Austria with natural defensive advantages in terms of mountainous terrain with heights that were controlled by Austrian troops that were reinforced with fortifications. Apart from contributing troops to the western front and taking part in the war at sea, Italian offensives were carried out on the lines of its national ambitions, and proved to be subsidiary operations during the war. There were never more than six German divisions on the Italian front, and Italian strategy only threatened Trieste, and Italy’s lack of industrial means was incapable of sufficiently equipping forces that could threaten any vital Hapsburg possessions. After two years of repeated attacks along a very narrow front on the Austrian frontier northeast of Venice, the Italians failed to gain any military results of importance in view of the military situation in 1915, when attempting to overcome greatly inferior Austrian forces defending positions in difficult mountainous terrain. The Italians did not provide any appreciable assistance to the Russians during the Austrian-German offensive that was launched in May 1915. Further renewed Italian attacks ceased from exhaustion, and further offensive operations were abandoned until a renewed offensive toward Gorizia on 6 August 1916 when Austrian troops were diverted to engage the Russians during the Germans’ Verdun offensive that was countered and ruined on the Somme.
A Russian offensive led by General Brusilov that was launched on the eastern front on 4 June caused the worst crisis for Austria-Hungary during the war, which led to regaining some territory from the losses of the previous year, and inflicted massive casualties during infantry advances supported by artillery. Marshalling resources to counter this surprise attack halted the Austrian advance from the Trentino, and penetrated Austrian lines at Lutsk and Dubno. These movements contributed to Gorizia falling into Italian control on 9 August in its first victory, which was followed by Italy declaring war on Germany on 27 August 1916. Russia’s own offensive successes influenced Rumania to declare war on Austria-Hungary on the same day, which ceased operating as an independent military entity, with its forces hereafter led by German commanders.
General Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of staff, would attempt applying a strategy of attrition, rather than attempting to achieve a breakthrough, in the first German offensive of 1916 to break the stalemate on the western front at Verdun as the most fortified sector on the western front in a decisive battle that would eliminate any threat to the German lines, and the city of Metz. This strategy dictated that a massive attack, beginning with artillery barrages and probing infantry assaults from 21 February in Operation Judgement, followed by a major offensive launched on 24 February that was expected draw the French to dispatch troops in to defend this city situated in a crucial defensive position in the French northeast, which could then lead to establishing a pivotal tactical advantage for an advance toward Paris. It was expected the French army would be destroyed there, in a second attempt to break French resistance, as had been attempted in 1914 on the Marne. This city was targeted for attack due to its proximity to the German frontier, which made it dangerous in the hands of the Allies, and it also made it easier for the Germans to concentrate masses of artillery during its attack, while the salience of the attack was to hamper French communication lines. France losing Verdun and the corresponding heights east of the Meuse river would undermine hopes of realising the primary French purpose in the war of recovering Alsace-Lorraine, which could have led to a peace settlement, as this position had an incalculable advantage for any attempt to retake Lorraine by using this natural advantage of possessing higher ground, while Germany holding St. Mihiel made the Verdun positions in the Allied battle line an exposed salient, with the Meuse river behind it. Moreover, the German crown prince would also enhance his prestige as heir to the throne as the commander of the Verdun sector, and would also pacify demands in the German government for the tendency to yield to American remonstrances against ruthless German submarine warfare. A more significant underlying consideration was American consideration for how the war became a civil war of mankind to offset how Europe and the western hemisphere could potentially be in a permanent state of war in the event of a Central Powers victory.
While Britain had imposed a naval blockade since the beginning of the war, living conditions in Germany became acutely worsening during 1915. Following the German government’s announcement on 26 January that it would take all grain stocks under its control, the British government responded on 2 February that this action made foodstuffs contraband. The German government then retaliated by stating on 8 February 1916 that submarines were instructed to attack any armed merchant vessels found around the British Isles would be destroyed without warning, beginning on 1 March, which could expose neutral vessels to danger, revoking the earlier pledge stated on 4 May 1916 that vessels other than warships would not be sunk without warning. The German people had been assured of a victory during this time, and thereby end the war of attrition that would also alleviate the blockade effects that would continue having a degenerative effect on the Central Powers, regardless of having had secured a great deal worth defending in Belgium and exploiting its great mining and industrial resources, as well as northern French coalfields, which alleviated the strain on German labour and raw materials to a degree, while also straining British industries and shipping capacity.
Falkenhayn planned to use the methods that had been very successful against the Russians in 1915 by concentrating massive artillery firepower, including using heavy guns that had defeated the Russians, to destroy the French defences, and masses of troops to stage a breakthrough in the French lines, and thereby win the war on the western from, while there was a favourable military situation on the eastern front, where there was not any possibility of a military diversion in the east, while the Italians, who had their own independence of action, were being held and were going to be attacked by the Austrians. Hence, there was not any military force in any other region that was strong enough to compel German forces to leave the western front, and thus interrupt the new drive against France. Moreover, the earlier failed Allied offensives in the west toward Loos and Champagne would make it unable to deliver a counteroffensive in the west in early 1916.
The attack on Verdun in February 1916 was aimed at provoking the French and the British to launching a premature movement before forces were prepared for this purpose, before Italy’s threatened advance could be paralysed through an offensive in May, and both western dangers could thus be parried before Russia could resume offensive efforts in the summer. The Verdun battles did not resemble the western campaign of 1914 or the eastern campaign in 1915, as they were concentrated into a narrow area, and involved a fraction of the German forces, while the ones deployed in the west were mostly distributed along other sectors to deprive the French from advancing toward Germany. This was also to partly anticipate general pressure on all fronts to counter Allied strategy in 1916, and preclude the comprehensive danger of an Allied synchronization of its offensives to forestall Germany’s ability to transfer the weight of its forces from one threatened point to another.
These successful defensive efforts at Verdun led to the Germans pouring increasingly more men into the attacks following initial destructive artillery attacks as well, and soon they were losing at the same rate as the French while the German artillery could not be advanced far enough over barely passable roads, while the French were able to tenaciously hold their positions, and counterattack on 26 February, as well as bringing a number of powerful artillery batteries into position, which included heavy naval guns taken from French warships, and eventually established an equality in artillery. After three days of the most appalling slaughter in which there were over 300,000 casualties on both sides, the Germans gave up their offensive in the face of the prevailing obstinate French defence. Falkenhayn was replaced on 29 August by Hindenburg as the chief of the German general staff, who took a defensive stance after the failure of this Verdun campaign, prior to re-evaluating how German forces could be reallocated more effectively. The French had won, but at such a fearful cost that the big joint attack on the German lines that the allies had been intending to launch in the summer of 1916 on the western front would have to be a mainly British effort, prior to further French advances from Verdun between October and December 1916 that led to retaking positions that the German forces had acquired during the Battle of Verdun.
The war in the east had mainly consisted of the Russians acting on the defensive, following the earlier dramatic movements, marked by Russian advances against the Austro-Hungarians into Galicia and the Germans pushing back the Russians in East Prussia in 1914, and then the combined Central Powers’ forces pressing the Russians into a headlong retreat during 1915, which ended in both sides consolidating their gains while the Russian forces outnumbered those of the Central Powers by two to one. Although the battle lines on the eastern front were more fluid and not as rigid as in the west, there was nevertheless a comparable stalemate until 1916, characterised by the familiar combination of extensive trench networks, heavy artillery fire, and strategic impasse. Russian General Alexei Brusilov launched an offensive on the eastern front to alleviate pressure on the western Allies during the Battle of Verdun. The French were initially surprised, and then did exactly as Falkenhayn had hoped they would. The French president Aristide Briand sent General Phillippe Pétain to defend Verdun at all costs.
This offensive massed along a 450 kilometre front began on 4 and 14 June 1916 on separate fronts, aiming at whatever possible breakthroughs, initially advanced roughly 322 kilometres behind the Austro-Hungarian reinforced defensive front lines and imposed casualties composing fifty-four percent of their troops, before facing reinforced resistance supplied by the Germans, while ammunition and reserves on both sides became increasingly depleted, and therefore having to consolidate their gains over a wide front. In spite of the heavy losses and the destruction of their entrenchments, the French successfully defended Verdun, and retook the forts that the Germans had taken. The front line also became further greatly extended by Rumania’s declaration of war on Russia on 27 August following the failure of the Brusilov offensive. Hitherto underperforming Russian troops would hereafter be on the defensive, which would culminate in a state of progressive military and political collapse.
Domestic discontent in Russia with the tsardom and living conditions led to a massive outbreak of popular protest on 3 March, when factory workers in St. Petersburg went on strike against the government, which further escalated on 8 August with protests against food shortages. Troops ordered to quell these protests refused to take action against them, with these expresses of discontent ultimately leading to the abdication of the tsar Nicholas II on 15 March, in an attempt to restore order in the capital. A caretaker provisional government succeeded the monarchy, which was to govern during wartime conditions until a new constitution could be promulgated, in the face of continued political instability and diminishing support for the war effort. This revolution did not remove Russia from the war, but it effectively ended any possibility that the Russians could make a positive contribution to the eventual allied victory. This was the ultimate culmination of how the power of resistance of the Russian military that continually degenerated throughout the war years due to the lack of heavy weapons, their inferiority of artillery, and their nearly complete lack of aircraft. An additional underlying element was the increasingly greater degrees of demoralisation, before and after the final failed Russian offensive in July 1917, as the military remained undermined by its lack of sufficient material, and the largely peasant conscripts who were treated contemptuously by class privileged officers who were commonly incompetent, including the tsar who had taken over command at the front, and would no longer support a common national cause, regardless of the regime change, particularly among those who were drawn from non-Russian ethnic minorities in the Russian empire, which undermined the war effort through desertions. Political turmoil in Russia would inevitably led to a collapse of the war effort, as political authority could not sustain order and stability in the military, as well as providing sufficient resources for defensive purposes.
This next major allied offensive on the western front was due to take place in northern France, along the river Somme. Its original purpose had been to attempt to achieve a wide breakthrough on the western front that were believed to be spread thinly, and therefore incapable of maintaining a properly flexible defence while being forced to defend against simultaneous British, French, Italian and Russian assaults in a massive coordinated offensive with enormous amounts of materials involving a wide range of coordination operations. A German attack on Verdun disrupted the French arm of launching this independent offensive, while General Pétain organised the French defences at Verdun, and demanded the British divert German resources to the north at the Somme River. Nevertheless, the Somme offensive was staged and prolonged on the strength of the earlier considerable planning and massive logistical efforts.
The Somme offensive launched by British and French troops began on 1 July 1916, following the earlier Russian offensive on the eastern front and the assaults at Isonzo on the Italian front. The strategy was to begin with the biggest artillery bombardment in history that would last a week, and was expected to utterly destroy the German trenches. Then the British would get out of their trenches and simply shift over to the German lines along the Somme River that inauspiciously appeared to be devoid of strategic significance. In fact, the reality was very different. The unexpected earlier German offensive at Verdun had greatly weakened the numbers of available French forces by this time. Moreover, the ordinance used in the British bombardment was insufficiently powerful to destroy the German trenches due to a critical lack of heavy guns, with firing that was distributed over a wide area of this front line. The allied troops who began crossing no man’s land found that the earlier shelling had not destroyed the German machine gun positions either. The British lost 60,000 casualties on the first day alone, which decided the actual results of this battle due to these prohibitive amounts of casualties, and was not renewed on any similar scale in the ensuing operations. Subsequent assaults on 14 July that focused on more limited objectives, with narrower artillery concentrations on certain targeted areas, but a decisive breakthrough was not achieved in spite of the successful advances. Fighting continued from 15 July to 14 September with disorganised attacks, and mainly contributed to the attrition of German resources, without reaching specific objectives. Slow moving and cumbersome tanks were introduced in this battle on 15 September, but with limited results when they were combined with infantry support, and another successful assault was made on 25 September, but nevertheless failed to reach a breakthrough, achieving only limited advances in the face of reinforced German defences and heavy rainfalls fouling movement, with the battle ending in a new stalemate on 18 November. This drive achieved three overall purposes. Firstly, it relieved the situation at Verdun to a great extent, and transferring the offensive in France from the Germans to the allies, which contributed to ceasing the offensive at Verdun in what had become a useless effort. Secondly, the bulk of the German army was blocked on the western front while Austria-Hungary was left unsupported against Russia and Italy. Thirdly, it contributed to the ongoing war of attrition in which opposing amounts of resources would strain the Central Powers to a greater degree than the allies.
The major attack during the following year was launched by the British near the Belgian village of Passchendaele. Earlier Allied successes at Neuve Chapelle in March exposed the superiority of British bombardments, which shook the German General Staff’s belief in the supposed superiority of German artillery. This development led to issuing an order shortly afterward to conduct experiments on the effects of asphyxiating gases on animals to attempt to regain a battlefield advantage, following an intensive artillery bombardment. The Germans released135 tonnes of chlorine gas for the first time on 22 April 1915 as a tactical measure in this attack at Ypres, which opened six kilometre gap in the front as French defences crumbled while being unable to defend against this new innovative weapon. A moderate steady northeast wind in the direction of the enemy led to a mere local success, which was not followed by an offensive to achieve a decisive result in this sector in which a temporary gap was created in the front. The Germans had only planned a limited offensive, and were unable to exploit the gap they had created without sufficient amounts of reserves. Canadian forces were able to advance to close the flank, but this ended with a small salient in the allied line that was shelled from three sides, followed by another gas attack.
Subsequent poison gas attacks led to gaining ground, until the British learned how to avoid their more severe effects, which then led to the battlefield application of a flame projector – a portable tank filled with a highly inflammable coal-tar product with the contents pumped through a nozzle at the end, and hurling a flame for approximately forty metres. A large supply of them arrived in the German trenches on 30 July 1915, but this new weapon likewise only achieved limited results. Another battlefield innovation that was used to a wide extent at Ypres was digging tunnels to reach enemy trenches to circumvent the trench warfare stalemates on the surface, and pack explosives under enemy lines. The greatest use of these mines took place on 7 June 1917 at the beginning of a British assault near Ypres, but a breakthrough possibility following their explosion was not exploited.
There was later the incomplete development of the tank in September 1916, accounted for the immobility as well as the terrible destructiveness of the fighting on the western front, where two opposing battle lines running from the Swiss border to the Channel coast had troops dug in, and making trenches and bunkers to protect them from artillery and setting up machine gun posts that would cut down any enemy advances. The initial war of movement had thus become a slow process of attrition that largely depended on competing amounts of material and personnel resources, and aiming major assaults at key points to sap strength before breakthroughs could be made possible. The introduction of the tank, with external armour and caterpillar tracks and powered by an internal combustion engine was introduced to break the trench war stalemate by crossing no man’s land between opposing lines, and also overwhelm enemy trenches with their mobile firepower while supporting infantry assaults. They were first used in a limited capacity in September 1916 during the battle of the Somme, and then far more extensively in an assault at Cambrai on 20 November 1917, by the time the British had built a fleet of 376 tanks, and had acquired experienced with deploying them in conjunction with artillery and infantry. Tanks hereafter showed their true offensive potential by forcing several temporary breakthroughs, but these could not be maintained due to their mechanical unreliability during this time, along with taking effective countermeasures. In turn, the Germans developed tanks of their own to counter them.
The regional conflict that turned into a continental conflict finally became a global conflict. Japan also intended to enter the war in the interest of expanding its influence in the Pacific Rim, in addition to being obliged to take action in accordance with the terms of the Anglo-Japanese alliance while also being secure from attack on its home territory, and was therefore in an ideal position to drive the Germans out of the far east, and thereby strengthening its own supremacy in the region. Moreover, its military force was greatly strengthened since its wars against China and Russia. Since Germany’s colonies had only skeleton military garrisons, they quickly fell to the Allies. Japan’s main purpose in declaring war in August 1914, was to secure Germany’s Pacific islands and Chinese concessions for itself. Japanese forces began blockading Tsingtao on 27 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, followed by its invasion that the Japanese considered a threat to menacing peace and commerce in the region. Japanese naval forces quickly occupied the Marianas, the Marshalls, the Carolines, and Palau, and a combined sea and land operation took over the Shantung peninsula of China. A New Zealand force occupied German Samoa, and the Australians took over the Bismarck Archipelago and German New Guinea. All these operations were secure by the beginning of November 1914.
The German garrisons held out longer in Africa, although the actual fighting was rarely severe. Togoland capitulated to an Anglo-French force in August 1914. Another combined Anglo-French attack almost completely drove the Germans out of the Cameroons in October 1915. The Union of South Africa invaded German Southwest Africa at the beginning of 1915 and completed its conquest on 19 July. The Germans only raised a determined show of resistance in German East Africa. Their troops were still in the field at the time of the armistice in 1918, although most of the colony itself had fallen to British, South African, and Portuguese forces.
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