What does the First World War mean to you?

[aj4010]

My Grandfather having his ankle shot away at the Somme, disabled for life in an instant.
He was relatively lucky though.

Andy

[SteveR]

A great opportunity to collect WWI stuff in the future.

[relicz]

Nationalistic insanity and butchery where technology out paced military tactics, couple that with the influenza of 1918 and the death toll exceeds that of the Second World War.

Not to mention that it, and its aftermath, were the catalyst for WWII.

[4md]

My home town suffered a devastatingly high proportion of servicemen killed during ww1, 13 killed from 39 enlisted. The slaughter on the western front and Gallipoli had a huge effect on Australia as a nation. In school we were always taught about the heroism of the Anzac's and the pointless destruction of units being thrown one after the other at the enemy by unfeeling Generals.

The high casualty rates reflect this, but i think the more we learn the more we will hopefully find commanders were making the best of a fruitless situation where military technology had outstripped military tactics and that things did improve tactically towards the end of the war

regards Paul

[crites1234]

I lost two great uncles during ww1 one at Paschendale and one on the last day of the battle of vimy ridge

[AmericanKraut]

All are good answers but I would like to add an opinion on top of that, it was one of the wars that transitioned from fighting for chivalry / glory into a war of masses and industrialized killing like the world had never seen before, and also the precursor to WWII that ended in the so called 20 years armistice.

[ObKrieger]

WWI is one of the main causes of my misanthropy.

[Adrian]

It means an awful lot of different things to an awful lot of different people.

My advice would be to read all you can about what you're interested in and then take the short trip across the channel and visit places like below and see if you're perception changes. You can learn a lot from a book but in reality they're quite sterile.

Go to the places and see for yourself.

Try and quantify the names and the numbers. It's impossible.

Then you'll know what the Great War means to you.

[mpw]

Looking at the bigger picture it might also be worth remembering the Franco - Prussian war 1870/71 where the southern states of Germany defeated France in a series of battles. France re-armed and continued the fighting which led to other German states joining the Prussians. This shifted the balance of power in Europe and ultimately led to a united Germany led by Wilhelm 1.

Mark.

[StefanM]

Was the First World War really the catalyst for the Second?

IMHO the catalyst for WWII was the 1917 Russian October Revolution (which had its antecedents in the earlier 1905 Revolution) which led to the 14 nation Allied Intervention together with the world Communist movement strategy to spread the communist revolution across Europe leading to the Polish-Bolshevik War, the German Revolution, the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the Hungarian Revolution, Biennio rosso in Italy, the Bulgarian September Uprising plus other smaller abortive communist inspired uprisings.

We seem to have swallowed the interbellum German propaganda that it was the unfair terms of the Treaty of Versailles that led to WII rather than a social revolution being fought out with its roots established well before WWI. A social conflict that started before WWI, continued through WWI, through the interbellum, through WWII and through the Cold war and on to today.

The Treaty of Versailles was merely one focal point on which the National Socialist Party could hang its propaganda around the other propaganda hook of course was Jewish-Bolshevism and the spread of the communist revolution abroad through Europe.

To me WWI was the devastating outcome of the imperialistic machinations and conflicting alliances/treaties of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire and France and Italy!

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Archduke Franz Ferdinand's uniform coat.

450px-Franzshirt.jpg

Now at the Museum of Military History, Vienna, Austria.