On this day 100 years ago the First World War ended. The First World War and its aftermath created our world as we know it; and sadly our culture tries to ignore it.
The First World War changed our world. It made possible the rise of the National Socialists in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. It made the Russian revolution and the rise of the Soviet empire possible. The victorious powers also promised the lands of Palestine to both the Arabs and the Jews, thus guaranteeing generations of conflict. It’s been argued that the Allied victory in the First World War brought the United States to the forefront as a global power.
What is less recognized is that with the fall of the Ottoman Empire the victorious European powers carved up not only the Balkan states but the lands of the middle-east. The treaty of Versailles parceled out Germany’s colonies to France, Belgium, England, and Japan. Thus increasing instability around the world that we live with today.
Watch this lecture by Jay Winter; he lists some of the war’s legacy that we are still dealing with.
He adds the foundation of the European Union to the legacy of the First World War. He sees this as coming out of the desire never to repeat the conditions that led to WW1.
The cost of the First World War was huge. 65,000,000 men fought in the war. Almost 7,000,000 civilians and 10,000,000 combatants died in the war. These numbers are huge, to give you a bit more perspective it is more than the total number of people living in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Nevada. The war further created the conditions for the rapid spread of the Spanish Flu in 1918 and 1919 that killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people; between three and five percent of the world’s population at the time; and these were people in the prime of life. The war and its aftermath significantly reduced human populations across the globe.
I mention the Spanish flu epidemic as a legacy of the war because, despite the name, it didn’t start in Spain; it started in Kansas, and it was spread to the rest of the US and to Europe by soldiers. The 1919 variant probably mutated and became established in France. This variant was carried back to the US by returning US and Canadian soldiers; restarting the epidemic in North America. It’s likely that soldiers from every nation returning from the war carried the virus home. That’s why the death toll was so high and estimates so uncertain.
However the Great War’s legacy was not entirely negative. Advances in chemistry, aircraft, medicine, radio, banking, and manufacturing occurring during those four years were of lasting significance. Perhaps we perceive that all of these advances would have occurred even without the war.
I hope that we have learned the lessons of the Treaty of Versailles and will never again impose such horrible conditions on our defeated enemies; but I’m not certain that we have. So few people remember the war and its aftermath, which in itself is interesting. Even the last surviving US WWI soldier said:
“What we fought for, now, I don’t know”
This series on youtube has some very powerful things to say about the war; I encourage you to watch it:
And now an interlude, one of my favorite WWI era songs Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin:
So what did the US soldier fight for in the First World War? I guess, like everyone else in the war, he fought in support of his countries allies because his government made an agreement that said he would; just doing what he was told. Perhaps that is another insidious legacy of the War to End War, one that would blossom twenty years hence.