Editing The World Wars (section)

==The First World War==
[[File:Trench warfare great war.jpg|thumb|right|Over the top, lads (sorry, no joke on this one)]]
{{topquote|The War That Will End War.|[[H. G. Wells]], 1914 (spoiler alert, [[fail|it was not]])}}

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it. The abbreviation M.A.I.N is used to refer to the big four reasons it started: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism.

===Militarism===
Militarism on its own resulted partially from the romanticizing of knights and chivalry, and the idea that serving in the military to conquer colonies for the homeland served to make the state better as a whole. And of course the best way to conquer stuff and then to protect the stuff you'd conquered was to have better weapons and soldiers than the other guys. While most major nations participated in the rise of militarization to some degree, Germany was the keystone of the movement, as its progenitor Prussia was oftentimes called "an army with its own state". This had some factual basis, given that Prussia was born from the Teutonic Crusader State, and its military aristocracy continued to define German policy and culture well into the 20th century.

The veritable arms race in the late 1800s was meant to force peace, resulting in the development of semiautomatic pistols, advanced artillery, increasingly advanced warships, automatic firearms, and a slew of military technological innovations designed to increase the killing power of an individual soldier or unit. Most wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were colonial conflicts waged against low-tech indigenous populations or countries with shitty militaries (the Anglo-Zulu War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War) and as a result were laughably one-sided. This resulted in a general myth that war was an adventure where you got to go kill a bunch of dumb people who needed to understand that your country was better than theirs. It hadn't occurred to the top brass, or anyone else, that if the other guy has the same weapons you do, it isn't nearly as fun; this in spite of warnings from colonial veterans that such a slaughter is inevitable, especially under the old Napoleonic tactics that Europe was still using.

One thing that we'll discuss later is the dreadnought battleship, which radically altered the idea of naval warfare and made everything before them obsolete. A nation's prestige was tied to how many battleships it had, so literally everyone and their dog who could afford one was trying to get their hands on them.

===Alliances===
To prevent one country from getting too much power and hopefully prevent war through mutually assured destruction, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which ultimately coalesced into two pacts: the Triple Entente (France, Britain (kind of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria), with the United States being free to do whatever the fuck it wanted in the Americas and eastern Pacific sans Canada. The Ottoman Empire was desperately trying to stave off its imminent and inevitable collapse, and the chaos in the Balkans would eventually lead them to try and join the Central Powers.

Japan was a special case. It had an alliance with Britain to act as a sort of "check" against the Russians and their Pacific ambitions, while also serving as an valuable ally against the German Pacific colonies. The benefit was also that Russia could act as an ally against the Japanese if they ever started looking towards Australia without Parliament's permission.

Serbia's national sovereignty was guaranteed by France and Russia, and Belgium received a guarantee from Britain that they'd intervene if Germany tried to use them to just waltz into France and thereby threaten Britain. Meanwhile Italy was in theory allied to the Germans and Austrian-Hungarians, but had stuff in Austria-Hungary that they wouldn't [[Blood Ravens|feel too bad about stealing]]. [[Tzeentch|If this all sounds very convoluted, welcome to the late 1800s.]]

===Imperialism===
One of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire, or Imperialism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. This all kicked off back when Spain discovered the New World and became very wealthy as a result; as stated on the [[Renaissance]] page, the other nations of Europe ''realllly'' didn't want to live under the Hapsburgs' hegemony and started competing to build their own empires. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France in order to fuel their industry and economy back home at the expense of the natives. The treatment of the indigenous population varied based on whichever European power happened to dominate a particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off; one could argue that at least that stopped the chattel slavery that was endemic to the region until the colonization, but suffice to say the natives would likely think that the chattel slavery was preferable. For a while, the competition was "merely" a case of rivalry, as each nation generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly, barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire, until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck.

The unification of Germany triggered a renewed colonial rush across the globe. Germany, having come late to the game, was determined to play catch-up, even though all of the really desirable territory in Africa and Asia was already claimed. Nevertheless, they still managed to take possession of a bunch of African territories in modern day Namibia and gained a number of island colonies in the Pacific. This ultimately led to everyone starting to side-eye each others' colonies for various reasons. Italy, for example, aspired to be master of the Mediterranean Sea, while Britain had a historical and economic/political reputation to uphold as protector of the waves with their navy, the so-called "Pax Britannica". Remember that, it'll be important. 

Meanwhile Austria-Hungary wanted Balkan territories, and Germany and Japan were latecomers who wanted in on the pie. Even the Americans dipped their hand into it by taking Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. Needless to say there were plenty of instances where each empire had a vested interest in stealing territory away from each other for their own political and economic gains.

===Nationalism===
Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who looked at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and decided that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog of Europe. Enter the idea of Nationalism, a political theory that roughly states that loyalty to the state trumps all other loyalties, and that there is no higher expression of loyalty to the state than making it better than all the other states. Combine this with borderline unrestrained capitalism and social Darwinism, and you have a toxic brew of ideas: that your country "must" be better than other countries, cooperation is purely for the benefit of countering rivals and earning prestige, and diplomacy, global politics, and economics are zero-sum games that you have to win. Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is a love for one's country, while nationalism is a determination to make one's country better than others even at the expense of those other countries.

Remember how we mentioned that Pax Britannica and the technological innovations will come up again later? These two, combined with nationalism, were a special point of concern for Britain. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had become the enforcer of the peace on the world's seas and the guarantor of Britain's world-spanning empire. The United Kingdom invested colossal amounts of time and money into building a world-beating fleet, equipped with the latest naval technology and manned by a highly trained pool of professional officers and sailors. They produced one of the world's first ironclad warships in 1860 and pioneered the use of propeller-driven ships, gun turrets, and torpedoes. By 1889, Britain's determination to hold onto their top-dog status at sea was formally codified as the "two power standard", whereby the Royal Navy was always to be as strong as the number two and three navies in the world. This worked just fine until 1906, when the revolutionary new battleship HMS ''Dreadnought'' was built and launched. With a uniform armament of big guns, turbine engines, and many other technological improvements, ''Dreadnought'' instantly rendered all other battleships in the world obsolete and triggered a worldwide naval arms race as other countries started building their own dreadnoughts.

In this time before the rise of aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships were still the final arbiter of naval power and a potent symbol of national prestige. Any navy that wanted to be taken seriously had to have battleships, but ''Dreadnought'' had set everyone back to square one, including the Royal Navy. Now it was possible for countries that had lacked a battleship navy to catch up with the big players, and it didn't take long for everyone on the planet to get in on the game. Aside from the usual suspects like Britain, Germany, America, Russia, and France, countries like Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were all ordering up dreadnoughts as fast as they could find the money. Wilhelm II was particularly obsessed with having a dreadnought fleet of his own; aside from the boost it would bring to Germany's prestige and military power, he had long been in love with the Royal Navy and dreamed of building a fleet just like it when he became Kaiser. He hadn't even intended to start an arms race, but when Britain saw Germany investing in a fleet that was potentially equal to theirs, they were completely unwilling to risk losing their status as the dominant naval power. Germany wasn't willing to acquiesce either, since they didn't understand why Britain was getting so upset about the whole thing until one British commentator summed up the UK's position as follows: Germany would still be the most powerful country on the continent of Europe with or without a navy, but if the Royal Navy were wiped out, Britain would instantly lose control of its empire and its position as number one superpower in the world.

A further thing to note is that nationalist tensions were starting to weaken the imperial system, as people living in countries that had been subjugated by the great empires started looking around and going "hey, fuck being ruled by a bunch of smelly dickhead foreigners!" While some countries were able to survive these tensions with more or less sensible governments, like England with the House of Commons, more often than not this resulted in outright revolt, which caused the creation of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and a swath of states formerly under the control of an empire that figured they'd be better off ruling themselves. Others were crushed under the Russians, who knew that successful nationalist movements could cause them to face similar issues with Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The countries that were hardest hit by these successive waves of unrest revolution were none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were creaky, poor, exhausted states in dire need of reform. The solution that was attempted in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep the state from collapsing. The formation of the Dual [[Monarchy]] and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but was really a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver Pasha and his fellows in high command. Others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror and oppression tactics. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the fractious and ethnically diverse Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

===Additional Factors===
Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm was first ''and'' second cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia and first cousins with the Tsarina, the King of England, and the queens of Norway, Spain, and Romania, and they all got along about as well as your average pack of siblings.

Another was that when the war started, a [[That Guy|certain someone]] called the United States took a [[A Game of Pretend |totally neutral and not blatantly pro-Entente]] stance by shipping vast amounts of food and materiel to Britain and funding the war via loans to the Entente powers. The massive debt that Britain and France rang up made Wall Street and Washington more and more interested in making sure their investment could be paid back. This along other things would be one of the deciding factors in American involvement in the First World War. 

The Franco-Prussian War was also a sore spot for France, who were not only afraid of German encroachment, but determined to get revenge for what they had done to them. This not only contributed to France's bloody-minded determination not to quit fighting, but also influenced the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

As far as significant developments, probably one of the biggest was Wilhelm II sacking Otto von Bismarck for a yes-man. Unlike Wilhelm, Bismarck was smart enough to understand that Germany's rise was a substantial shake-up of the existing European order, and had spent years doing his best to establish Germany's strength and prestige without causing alarm to the other powers. The first Kaiser, Wilhelm I. understood this, as did his son Friedrich III. (who died 90 days into office from cancer), but Wilhelm II wanted to prove his country was better (or more to the point, he wanted to prove that ''he'' was better, as he had longstanding insecurity due to a birth defect in his left arm - a big drawback in an overtly militarized society where physical prowess was the gold standard of manliness). So he sacked probably the smartest man in the entire goddamn government because he wasn't retarded enough to create a [[Horus Heresy|massive war that would fuck everyone over.]] Although there is a point to be made that Bismarck isolated himself in interior politics, as much of his efforts to keep the country stable consisted of suppressing the quickly growing movement of Socialists and alienating the otherwise staunchly conservative Catholics and in both efforts, he failed miserably (The culture war against the Catholics drew the ire of the Pope and the repressions against the workers movement and the Social Democratic Party SPD saw their share of votes increase to the point that they became the largest political party in the Empire by 1913)

===The Straw that Broke Europe's Back===
The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When [[Just as Planned|the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli]] and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, [[Not as planned|Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany]]. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved. 

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnicities that the colonial empires of Europe press-ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen and Maori soldiers killing Turks at Gallipoli, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, the outbreak of diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. An entire generation of Europe's young men was destroyed as a result (commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

===Hell on Earth===
{{topquote|European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches.|Virginia Postrel}}

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority/superior fighting spirit, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilian population, at least for a while, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. As the war ground on, morale became so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of mass destruction. Tanks made their debut in this war, slowly rumbling through no-man's-land like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing out punishing amounts of firepower themselves, only to break down in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. Airplanes first saw use in a combat role here, and they would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow influence the negotiations in their countries' favor. The fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM, where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

===Campaigns===
====Western Europe==== 
{{topquote|What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?<br>— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.<br>Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle<br>Can patter out their hasty orisons.<br>No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;<br>Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—<br>The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells<br>And bugles calling for them from sad shires.|Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"}}

Of all the fronts in WWI, Western Europe is the one that's been most documented and seared into the popular consciousness. It cut through Belgium and France all the way down to Switzerland. When Italy joined the Allies, the front was extended to across the Italo-Austrian border. Germany's Schlieffen Plan was intended to be used to quickly deal with France, and once France was broken troops could be diverted to support the Eastern Front. This didn't come to pass as diplomatic pressure caused troops to be diverted East, preventing their use in the Schlieffen Plan and resulting in the offensive against France stalling out short of its goal of capturing Paris. As neither side had a real advantage over the other, they were forced to dig in for the long haul, creating the conditions for trench warfare, the ugliest and most iconic aspect of WWI. This is where all the stereotypical images of the war originated: endless lines of trenches, forests and fields reduced to blasted, muddy moonscapes, barbed wire and rotting corpses everywhere, clouds of mustard gas, and soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles and bayonets charging into no-man's-land to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns and artillery. 

The front lines would effectively remain static throughout the war, though both sides made attempts to break the stalemate and resume a true offensive. The Entente attempted breakthroughs at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, both of which ended in massive casualties for minimal gains. The British army suffered over 57,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the first day of the Somme, which is still the worst casualty rate in its history. Ypres was a series of battles fought in the same general area, collectively becoming known as the First through Fifth Battles of Ypres. Second Ypres saw the Germans' first mass deployment of chemical weapons, while Third Ypres, aka Passchendaele, resulted in somewhere between 400,000-800,000 casualties on both sides. Verdun was a 1916 attempt to knock France out of the war by attacking the fortified city of Verdun, a keystone of France's defensive line. The idea was to grind the French army down through sheer attrition; it backfired and wound up costing the Germans almost as many troops as it did the French (~336,000 German vs. ~379,000 French). Meanwhile, the Spring Offensive of 1918 was a last-ditch attempt to win the war after the Russian capitulation and before the Americans could show up in sufficient numbers to turn the tide. Some indicator of how well this was going to go came from Ludendorff himself, who declared that all the German army had to do was punch a hole in the Allied lines and they'd somehow just win from there. 

When Italy joined the fight, basically nothing changed except that the Austro-Hungarians now had to defend their western border in addition to their south and east. The only other significant nation to join the Allies in western Europe was Portugal, who were wooed by promises of protection for their colonial empire in Africa in exchange for joining the Entente.

====Eastern Europe====
Eastern Europe receives comparatively little study compared to the Western Front, mainly because records from that time weren't well preserved or were destroyed during the chaos of the Russian Revolution. While just as bloody in some instances, it offered many more opportunities for maneuver warfare than was afforded on the Western Front. An attack by the Russians on East Prussia went terribly, but just as France hoped, it forced the Germans to divert men away from France and the Schlieffen Plan and into the Eastern Front. This slow advance by the Central Powers in the east would only be halted and reversed in 1916 by the Brusilov Offensive, a brutal assault wherein the Russians shoved the Austro-Hungarians back into their homeland. 

This was too much at too high a cost, because mass desertions, poor battlefield performance, inadequate food supply and widespread dissatisfaction with the ruling aristocracy along with everything else wrong with the Russian empire saw the country basically collapse. Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate, after which he and his family were eventually murdered by the Bolsheviks, and a provisional government was set up. This government proceeded to try an attack against Austria-Hungary with horrific results, stoking further unrest. This was eventually followed by the November 1917 Russian Revolution that brought in Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks, who would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The peace agreement between Germany and Russia saw the latter have a ton of territory taken from them in March, which eventually led to the formation of the Baltic nations, Poland, and Ukraine, among others. Finland also broke away during the chaos of the revolution, and with much bigger problems on their plate, the Russians kinda just let it happen. 

Meanwhile, Serbia would hold out until 1915 against Austria-Hungary, until being overrun after Bulgaria declared for the Central Powers and helped chase the Serbs into Greece. Montenegro followed a few months later in 1916. Greece eventually forced their king to abdicate and declared for the Entente in 1917. The Bulgarians were forced into an armistice after the defeat at Dobro-Pole.  

Romania joined the war after seeing the debacle of the Brusilov Offensive, thinking they could join in on the tail-end and steal some land from a couple of dying empires. They were promptly disabused of this notion after they got their shit kicked in by Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, and their army took up a supporting role alongside the Russians until the Bolshevik revolution forced them to sign an armistice. In the end they still managed to increase their territories as a result of their participation in the conflict, so they got what they'd wanted even if it hadn't gone exactly as planned.

====Ottoman Empire==== 
When the guns of August started blasting, the Ottoman Empire was in the final stages of collapse. A series of military defeats throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had led to the Tanzimat period of the 19th century, which had bought the empire some time thanks to extensive reforms that had taken place, but there was increasing unrest in the Balkans and elsewhere. Though the Turks suppressed several nationalist uprisings, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 forced them to grant independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, while Austria-Hungary walked in and took Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain gained ''de facto'' control of Cyprus and Egypt. The empire's last throw of the dice came with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a ''coup d'etat'' that attempted to reform the empire into a democratic state by restoring its constitution and establishing an electoral system. The Italo-Turkish War in 1911 cost the Empire its North African territories and the Dodecanese, while the First Balkan War the following year cost it almost all its territories in the Balkans. 

When the war broke out, the Ottomans officially declared neutrality at first, though they talked to both sides to see what they might get out of joining either one. They ultimately came down on the German side after being offered territorial concessions and a guarantee of defense against Russia, along with the Germans essentially forcing the issue by sending a battlecruiser and light cruiser through the Dardanelles strait to Constantinople. Turkey bought the ships and officially commissioned them into their navy, only for the Germans to run off and start bombarding Russia's Black Sea ports without formal authorization from the Turkish government, however it is acknowledged that Germanonphile members of the government likely gave unofficial approval.

Turkey's most well-known contribution to World War I was its defense of the Dardanelles, the strait which allows passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They had closed the strait to all Allied shipping not long after entering the war. This inflicted a crippling blow to Russia's economy, which depended on grain exports from the Crimea and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The British made several attempts to capture the strait, which would let them put ships into the Black Sea, threaten Constantinople directly, and reopen Russia's lifeline. Several purely naval efforts to smash the forts and gun positions defending the strait failed, after which Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a landing at the Gallipoli peninsula. A protracted and bloody campaign ensued which saw Australian and New Zealander troops (the famed ANZACs) being fed into the grinder while the Turks more than held their own (no thanks to high command, big thanks to then Colonel Mustafa Kemal). The British ultimately conceded defeat and withdrew their troops, and the Dardanelles remained closed for the rest of the war. The campaign became an emotional flashpoint for Australia and New Zealand, who (not inaccurately) viewed it as a senseless sacrifice of their best young men by their colonial overlords, and was part of the reason they began pushing for greater autonomy and eventually independence after the war. The failure also got Churchill fired from the Admiralty, which most people at the time figured was the end of his career. Perhaps the biggest consequence of this was the shattering of the notion of colonial invincibility, which officially ignited the spark of anti-colonialism across the globe.

Another major front for the Ottomans was the Mesopotamian campaign, which saw them fighting the British in the Middle East. Though the empire did well for the first two years, the Arab Revolt of 1916-1917, led by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Faisal bin Al-Hussein, saw Arabic irregulars waging a guerrilla war against the Ottomans that tied down great numbers of troops and ultimately led to their defeat in the theater. Britain fucked up here as well; to secure Arabic support for the revolt, they had promised to back the creation of a unified Arab state, which they would recognize after the war. They promptly reneged on that deal once the war was over, instead signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France. The agreement haphazardly carved the Middle East into a bunch of mandate territories, all of whom had and still have beef with each other for various reasons. It is still the cause of widespread resentment in the region to this day.

After the war had really gotten rolling, the Ottomans also decided they might as well do some war crimes while they were at it and promptly committed genocides against the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. [[/pol/|Turkey claimed at the time, and still insists today, that the Armenian genocide in particular was not a genocide, that the Armenians were resettled for totally legitimate military reasons, and that the Armenians were actually the ones doing the genociding, so they totally had it coming, etc etc]]. Bringing this up around anyone from Turkey is a ''really'' good way to start a fight; Turkey's founding myths rest on the notion that the genocide never happened, so the modern Turkish government is quick to banhammer any kind of pop culture that even mentions it. The average citizen either doesn't care or if educated sees any and all actions taken as desperate survival measures against colonization (not an unfair concern if one looks at Africa or India). The indisputable Turkish hero of the war and founder of the modern nation state, Mustafa Kemal, fighting at Gallipoli while the whole mess that was Anatolia at the time was taking place while Enver Pasha was in the lap of luxury pretending to be a soldier also makes sure that the modern republic is fiercely held as being wholly separate so even modernists won't agree with Western historians on this matter.

====Africa====
Before the war, most of the colonial powers seemed to agree that if a war ever started, Africa should be left out of it. The risk of breaking the grasp of the metropoli over the colonies was too great, and if the colonial powers kicked each other to the curb in Africa, it could give the natives ideas about declaring independence, especially if they were armed and trained for war. The Conference of Berlin had already stated decades ago that any war between colonial powers would set the colonies aside as neutral parties. Of course, once the war started, all the high-minded rhetoric went down the drain; the Entente saw the German colonies as easy pickings, isolated and surrounded as they were by the much bigger colonial holdings of the British, the French, and the Portuguese. Thus, Germany had lost control over most of its colonies by 1916, since it couldn't really afford to divert resources to the colonies (and the British Navy would have intercepted them anyway). In German East Africa, however, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck decided he wasn't going to let any damned Limeys roll over on him, so he rallied his small force of native askaris and German officers and led a notably successful campaign of guerrilla/mobile warfare against the British colonial troops. They managed to hold out against British, Belgian, and Portuguese armies many times their size (hell, by the time he learned Germany had lost the war, [[awesome|he was invading British territory]]). 

As an equally badass postscript, when the German government finally agreed to award the askaris back pay several decades later, most of the survivors had lost their uniforms and certificates of service. To prove that they had served under von Lettow-Vorbeck, each man who came forth was handed a broom and ordered in German to execute the manual of arms. [[Awesome|Every one of them remembered their training]].

====Pacific====
Easily the quietest theater of the war. Mostly just Japan taking over Germany's scattered Pacific colonies. There were a few minor naval engagements between the German Far East Squadron and the Royal Navy and some attacks by German commerce raiders, but overall it was pretty sparse compared to what would happen in the sequel. The biggest consequence was that the Chinese had joined the Allied Powers, hoping to show solidarity with them and get some of their land back from at least one of the imperial powers that had been carving them up like Peking duck for the last century, so they were understandably pissed when Japan was awarded those German territories instead. Japan was also given a bunch of other German island colonies scattered across the western Pacific, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused all three powers to start side-eyeing each other.

===Aftermath===
The consequences of WWI cannot be understated. This four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that had persisted since the 1500s, reduced all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states, and began the end of the age of (overt) imperialism for good. The amount of money spent on this war was enormous; Britain went from the world's biggest lender to its biggest debtor, having spent a treasury accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced to a shell-pocked, poisonous wasteland that is ''to this day'' unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordnance buried in the fields and forests. Germany had gone from its familiar Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to try and clean up the mess they had created. Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate for the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and condemning millions of its own people to death in forced labour camps and engineered famines. And that's just in Europe. In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France haphazardly carved the region up into a bunch of countries and territories with no regard ([[Marines Malevolent|or intentional disregard]]) for the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans. This ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts in history, most of which are still going on to this day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising was explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only on the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to a nonviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers, or worse, Syria or Iraq, wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over during the Cold War. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later. Japan gained a bunch of Pacific territory taken from the Germans, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused them to start thinking more seriously about flexing their own imperialist muscles in the region. Moreover, Japan's vocal dissatisfaction with how they were treated by the rest of the Allies after the war caused a negative feedback loop of hostility and distrust between them and the Western powers, which had direct and dire consequences in the next war.

===The Easter Rising===
Ever since they'd been incorporated into Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, Ireland hadn't been particularly happy under British rule. Things like the abolition of their parliament, the Great Potato Famine, the oppression of Irish Catholics, and the British army's heavy-handed treatment of anyone who got too unruly had caused younger Irish nationalists to conclude that nothing was going to get done unless they did it with violence. Just before the outbreak of the war, Britain had actually passed an act to grant the Irish home rule, but with Europe turning into a mosh pit, the act was suspended for a year, and then for two more periods of six months each as the war dragged on. At this point, several leaders of the nationalist Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that enough was enough and began planning an armed uprising during Easter Week 1916 to break Ireland free from the UK, even reaching out to the Germans for support. The rest of the IRB didn't think it was such a good idea and the Germans refused their initial suggestion to send a landing force, instead offering to send them some weapons and ammunition. The leaders who were planning the revolt didn't tell their foot soldiers in the Irish Volunteers until the last minute what was going on, and when the Royal Navy seized the German arms shipment, one of the less belligerent IRB leaders immediately decided to call the whole thing off. As a result, what was supposed to be a nationwide uprising was confined almost entirely to Dublin. The first day went pretty well, with the rebels taking control of the city and establishing the foundation of a government. [[Fail|Then the British army showed up with artillery and gunboats and started blasting them to shit]]. The uprising was suppressed by the end of the week, and the ringleaders were tried in military courts and executed. The executions and the brutal reprisals leveled by the British army, along with the murders of a bunch of unarmed civilians during the Rising, stoked public opinion in Ireland against the British and led to the rise of the nationalist party Sinn Fein, ultimately laying the grounds for the Irish War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, and full independence in 1949.

===The Punitive Expedition===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. His actual reasons for this are unclear, but seizing supplies and/or trying to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was pretty small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

===The Warlord Era===
Around the same time, after the Boxer Rebellion failed to remove the Europeans from China, it became clear that Imperial China's days were over. After the forced abdication of the Qing Emperor, attempts to create a modern Chinese Republic quickly collapsed as regional warlords split the country among themselves, each intent on unifying China with themselves as its leader. Much like the Three Kingdoms period way back in early China, much of the military and political conflict was characterized by long, drawn-out border skirmishes with the occasional big battle, massive conscript armies, backstabbing, and leaders who were able to hold onto power so long as they had their army's loyalty. Due to an arms embargo and limited domestic manufacturing, industrialized warfare played a very limited role in the early part of the Warlord era; cavalry and bayonet charges were still viable, as very few warlords could afford the artillery and machine guns needed to make them obsolete. However, the eventual intervention of the Japanese eventually shifted the conflict away from a domestic dispute into a fight for China's survival against a technologically superior force, as covered in more detail below.

===The Empire of the Rising Sun===
Japan began emerging as something of the world power a few decades before the war. In 1854, the Japanese were peacefully telling foreigners to stay the fuck out of their country (a policy which hasn't really changed much to this day, only this time they are using things called "laws" instead of [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katanas]]) when suddenly this funny guy named Matthew Perry shows up with some warships. His purpose was to open Japan for business with the West, particularly America. Now contrary to many countries of the period that were forced to open trade at gunpoint, Japan was smart enough to realize that if they did not modernize, they'd be made someone else's bitch. This fate was something that the Japanese have loathed and regularly tried to avoid for their entire history. So after a brief civil war that may or may not have involved Tom Cruise, the Meiji dynasty was established. This began a period of rapid military, economic, and cultural expansion in Japan. Baseball is a popular sport in Japan because Japan took great early influence from the United States. They modeled themselves on Britain, especially its notions of empire, conquest, and spheres of influence; for quite a while, all orders in the Imperial Japanese Navy were given in English, not Japanese. Eventually, this led the Japanese into disagreements with the Russians over Manchurian China and the Kuril Islands. This was the cause of the Russo-Japanese War. 

The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers because the Japanese had managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides blundered hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent and further from their supply lines - the Russian armada sent from the Baltic Sea to Japan suffered multiple breakdowns and almost started a war with Britain by firing on a British fishing fleet because they thought it was the Japanese). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations, most of Germany's possessions in the Pacific, and recognition as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the Western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to [[RAGE|increased nationalism and militarism]] down the line.