Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

terrible, politicians, aircraft, Wilhelm, Ludendorff, Sultan, Turks, submarine, communists, Salonika, scientific, spent, Bolshevik, Litovsk, seas, Hindenburg, Charles, Australians, Finland, gas, budged, best, Pasha, defensive, 1917, Bulgaria, long, interval, mutinied, psychologically, convoys, military, casualties

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America officially entered WWI in April         1917, and even in early 1918, it was not clear who was going to win the war

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situation in 1917

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Britain and France

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in terms of lack of military advancement and sheer                     casualties, both countries had another                 terrible year

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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

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in France, the Germans were moving into                   defensive fortifications and letting the allies come at them and beat themselves bloody

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French armies are failing so badly that portions of the army                 mutinied against their officers

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in northern France, British and their imperial allies the Canadians and                       Australians are launching offensives which are causing 4,000 casualties a day for weeks

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the front hadn't             budged much in over three years of fighting

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Russia

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1917 Russian Revolution

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                    communists take over in late 1917 cutting any deal they can to get the war over

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Treaty of Brest-              Litovsk

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March 1918

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between new                   Bolshevik government and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria,                 Bulgaria, Turkey) which ended Russia's participation in the war

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renounced Russia's claims on Poland,               Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania

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Central Powers

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early 1918, expanded far into what had been the Russian Empire

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down into the Balkans

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British and French fighting at                 Salonika in Greece

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British driving up against the           Turks

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Italians attacking the Austrians in the Alps but suffered a considerable defeat

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early 1918: war is not going well for the Allies

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Allies:

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playing for the         long run

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we're blocking Germans with naval forces

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Allies looking toward 1919-1920

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Germans

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strategy dominated by Ludendorff

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Erich                     Ludendorff (1865-1937)

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August 1916 became joint head with Hindenburg to manage the war

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1935: published "Der Totale Krieg"

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"peace is merely an                 interval between wars"

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had rivalry with                     Hindenburg, told him that him handing over power to Hitler would bring ruin to Germany

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Ludendorff wants to have a decisive battle: move all eastern soldiers to the west.

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war in first half of 1918

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five German offensives in west

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break open big holes in Allied lines

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British hold well

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Germans are using their         best forces and running out of steam

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war in second half of 1918

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Germans feel           spent, not just in formal military terms but                               psychologically spent the way someone feels who has made what they think is their maximum effort yet has not achieved anything near their goal

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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                   submarine 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.

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so why did the war turn the way it did in 1918

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1. Germany made                 military choices that didn't turn out the way they had hoped

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2. The Allies now with America in the war controlled the         seas and dominated much of the access to raw materials

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Allies largely took care of the German submarine threat by developing the concept of ship               convoys in which merchant ships had naval escorts to protect them

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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.

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4. Increasing advantage in leveraging                     scientific advantages: caught up to and exceeded the Germans in the quality of their poison       gas, also developed highly sophisticated intelligence technologies and                 aircraft in particular.

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5. Leadership and Resilience: David Lloyd George, George Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, like them or dislike them, these were gifted                       politicians: extremely able to articulate national objectives and rally people to a cause. Contrast this with Kaiser               Wilhelm 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               Charles 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             Sultan, but the real source of power was Enver           Pasha, 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."