World War I

World War I is infamous for the protracted stalemate of trench warfare along the Western Front, embodied within a system of opposing manned trenches and fortifications (separated by a "No man's land") running from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. Hostilities were also prosecuted, however, by more dynamic invasion and battle, by fighting at sea and - for the first time - in and out from the air. More than 9 million soldiers died on the various battlefields, and nearly that many more in the participating countries' home fronts on account of food shortages and genocide committed under the cover of various civil wars and internal conflicts. In World War I, only some 5% of the casualties (directly caused by the war) were civilian - in World War II, this figure approached 50%.

Ultimately, World War I created a decisive break with the old world order that had emerged after the Napoleonic Wars, as modified by the mid-19th century national revolutions, the processes of European national unification and European colonialism. Three European land empires were shattered and subsequently dismembered to varying degrees: the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian. In the Balkans and the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire experienced the same fate. Three European imperial dynasties, represented by the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg and the Romanov families in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia respectively, also fell during the war.

World War I brought about the circumstances that allowed Communism to take hold as a means of government in Russia. The following decades would see the transformation of the old Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a global power. In the east, the demise of the Ottoman Empire paved the way for the states such as Republic of Turkey and a number of successor states and territories throughout the Middle East. In Central Europe, the new states of Czechoslovakia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Yugoslavia were born and Austria, Hungary and Poland were re-created. Shortly after the war, in 1923, Fascists came to power in Italy; in 1933, 14 years after the war, Nazism took over Germany. Problems unresolved or created by the war would be highly important factors in the outbreak, within 20 years, of World War II.

• Battle of Saint-Mihiel
• Battle of Vimy Ridge
• Battle of Megiddo
• Western Front
• Battle of Verdun
• Battle of the Somme
• Battle of Caporetto
• Battle of Tannenberg
• First Battle of the Marne
• February Revolution
• War crime
• French First Army
• Australian Corps
• Casualties by country

• Photos frome world war I