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Notes on video lecture:
Why the Allies Won World War One
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on August 10, 2013 (go to class or lectures)


Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
Finland, mutinied, terrible, Bulgaria, Turks, defensive, scientific, politicians, 1917, Sultan, Pasha, interval, convoys, gas, Litovsk, military, casualties, communists, Wilhelm, seas, Charles, aircraft, submarine, Australians, long, Salonika, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, spent, Bolshevik, psychologically, best, budged
America officially entered WWI in April , and even in early 1918, it was not clear who was going to win the war
situation in 1917
Britain and France
in terms of lack of military advancement and sheer , both countries had another year
yes the Americans had joined the war in April 1917 but the American soldiers were just being trained to fight and hardly any are engaging in combat in France
in France, the Germans were moving into fortifications and letting the allies come at them and beat themselves bloody
French armies are failing so badly that portions of the army against their officers
in northern France, British and their imperial allies the Canadians and are launching offensives which are causing 4,000 casualties a day for weeks
the front hadn't much in over three years of fighting
Russia
1917 Russian Revolution
take over in late 1917 cutting any deal they can to get the war over
Treaty of Brest-
March 1918
between new government and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria, , Turkey) which ended Russia's participation in the war
renounced Russia's claims on Poland, , Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania
Central Powers
early 1918, expanded far into what had been the Russian Empire
down into the Balkans
British and French fighting at in Greece
British driving up against the
Italians attacking the Austrians in the Alps but suffered a considerable defeat
early 1918: war is not going well for the Allies
Allies:
playing for the run
we're blocking Germans with naval forces
Allies looking toward 1919-1920
Germans
strategy dominated by Ludendorff
Erich (1865-1937)
August 1916 became joint head with Hindenburg to manage the war
1935: published "Der Totale Krieg"
"peace is merely an between wars"
had rivalry with , told him that him handing over power to Hitler would bring ruin to Germany
Ludendorff wants to have a decisive battle: move all eastern soldiers to the west.
war in first half of 1918
five German offensives in west
break open big holes in Allied lines
British hold well
Germans are using their forces and running out of steam
war in second half of 1918
Germans feel , not just in formal military terms but spent the way someone feels who has made what they think is their maximum effort yet has not achieved anything near their goal
Instead of letting the Allies continue to beat themselves up against the German lines, the German High Command weakened their military considerably by exhibiting a particular mix of tactical arrogance and strategic political insecurity wanting somehow to redeem everything by winning that one decisive battle, yearning for that great gamble one more time, just as they had done with their strategy on unrestricted warfare in 1917, another gamble that did not pay off. And so in the summer of 1918 just as German power and moral was reaching its nadir, the fresh and newly trained American forces were beginning to move into significant combat action in France.
so why did the war turn the way it did in 1918
1. Germany made choices that didn't turn out the way they had hoped
2. The Allies now with America in the war controlled the and dominated much of the access to raw materials
Allies largely took care of the German submarine threat by developing the concept of ship in which merchant ships had naval escorts to protect them
3. Had access to help from imperial partners from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even from India, not only as military powers but as sources of labor and materials.
4. Increasing advantage in leveraging advantages: caught up to and exceeded the Germans in the quality of their poison , also developed highly sophisticated intelligence technologies and in particular.
5. Leadership and Resilience: David Lloyd George, George Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, like them or dislike them, these were gifted : extremely able to articulate national objectives and rally people to a cause. Contrast this with Kaiser in Germany who didn't even make speeches in public since his advisers were afraid to let him speak in public for fear of what he would say. In Austria, the aging emperor Franz Joseph had passed away and in 1918 the Habsburg emperor was I, not a charismatic speech maker at all, since, that's just not the kind of thing emperors do. And in Turkey, the Ottoman Empire was headed by a figurehead , but the real source of power was Enver , a decent politician but not someone who is used to rallying the Turkish people on the stump. So in a conflict among countries ramping themselves up into total states, strained to the limits of what they can do, the resilience of the Allied countries and their leaders, their ability to adapt under enormous pressure, turned out to be a key measure of who would last out the war. At the end of the summer in 1918, what surprised most people was how suddenly the Central Powers, having lost their bid to win the war, just seemed to fall apart and crack, and in November 1918, it was all over."