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World War I (1914-18). Now usually abbreviated ‘WW I’, to the British it was until recently always ‘the Great War’. It was the first major conflict between European coalitions since 1815. Individual powers were not defeated in seemingly decisive battles because each had allies to take up the fight. Ranged against the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany, joined in November 1914 by Turkey and in September 1915 by Bulgaria) were those of the Entente. Originally consisting of Russia, France, and Britain, they were reinforced by Japan in August 1914, Italy in May 1915, Portugal in March 1916, Romania in August 1916, and Greece in June 1917. When the USA entered the war in April 1917, the nations of South America followed suit, as did China. Much of the rest of the world were colonies of the belligerents, thus it was indeed a global war. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 in a bid to reassert its authority as a Balkan power. Its determination was buoyed by the knowledge that it enjoyed the backing of its ally, Germany. But Serbia was supported by Russia, and Germany therefore confronted the danger of a war on two fronts, as Russia was allied to France. Determined to deal with France first, Germany needed Austria to engage Russia in Galicia. The result was that Austria-Hungary divided its forces, and suffered defeat on both fronts. The situation was partially redeemed by the Germans' defeat of two Russian armies in East Prussia. The Germans then shifted their efforts to the south, so as to give direct aid to the Austrians, and the two allies advanced into Poland in October. The offensive miscarried, partly owing to lack of co-ordination, but principally because the Russians crossed the Vistula westwards with comparable designs. In the west the main German advance, swinging through Belgium in order to envelop the French, began on 18 August. The French, redeploying round Paris, together with the British, checked the now extended German armies on the Marne. Thereafter each side sought to get round the other's flank to the north. By October they had filled the space to the coast and heavy fighting around Ypres between then and mid-November failed to result in breakthrough. The principal priorities of the British and French outside Europe were to contain the war by destroying the Germans' network of wireless stations and cruiser bases. Conversely, by extending the war to the Islamic peoples of central Asia and North Africa, Germany could threaten the colonies of their enemies. Her ally Turkey declared a jihad on 14 November 1914, while Britain had already landed an expeditionary force in Mesopotamia, and in March and April 1915 British sea and land forces attacked the Dardanelles. The Turks countered both threats, causing the British to evacuate the Gallipoli peninsula at the end of 1915, and forcing the advanced elements of the Mesopotamian force to surrender at Kut Al Amara on 29 April 1916. In Germany, Falkenhayn's first instinct was to renew the offensive in the west in 1915, but the need to support Austria-Hungary, the greater fluidity of the eastern front, and the pressure of Hindenburg and his supporters resulted in a concentration in the east. A joint Austro-German offensive at Gorlice-Tarnow (2 May 1915) unlocked Russian Poland and the tsar's shattered armies fell back to the Pripyat marshes. Falkenhayn hoped that the Russians would accept a separate peace so that the Germans could concentrate on the west. But alliance loyalty held. Moreover, the entry of Italy on the Entente side in May prompted the Austrians to divert their already inadequate forces to a third front on the river Isonzo. By September the German advance into Russia had exhausted itself, and Falkenhayn switched his attention to the Balkans. With Bulgaria as an ally, the Central Powers outflanked and overran Serbia. Britain and France finally sent troops to Salonika in October, too late to influence Bulgaria and too distant to give aid to Serbia. Although the Germans had not won on the eastern front, they had gained sufficient breathing space to allow them to turn their attention back to the west. On 21 February 1916 they attacked the Verdun salient. Their initial target was the French army but Falkenhayn realized that the financial and industrial hub of the Entente was Britain. He therefore wanted submarine warfare to accompany the offensive on land, but Bethmann Hollweg opposed him for fear of America's reaction. Britain's surface ships confirmed their control of the exits from the North Sea in the less than decisive battle of Jutland, and so Germany continued to be denied direct access to oceanic trade. By June the German attack at Verdun had stalled, as had the Austrians' independent offensive against the Italians in the Trentino. Both Britain and France had learnt from a series of offensives in the west, either limited in objectives or limited in effectiveness, in 1915. At the end of that year the Allies agreed that simultaneous attacks on all fronts were the way to drain the reserves of the Central Powers, given the latter's ability to operate on interior lines. On 4 June 1916 the Russians under Brusilov made quick initial gains against the Austrians in Galicia, so much so that Romania joined the Allies in August. Once again the Germans had to bail out their ally. The Anglo-French offensive was launched on the Somme on 1 July 1916. In the event, France's contribution, not least thanks to Verdun, was second to Britain's, and the latter now figured as a major player in land operations as well as at sea and on the stock markets. The Somme campaign continued until November for negligible territorial gains, but did enough damage to the German army to force the latter to retreat to the so-called Hindenburg Line in March 1917. No power except Britain had anticipated being able to fight on into 1917, and even Britain was close to economic collapse, its international exchange strained by its arms orders in the USA and by the credit needs of its allies. However, Germany finally adopted unrestricted submarine warfare in February, and in doing so drove America into the war. With Romania all but overrun, and with Russia internally divided by revolution, the boost to the Allies was incalculable. The Entente's master plan for 1917 was similar to that of 1916, but in the event only the British could sustain major operations on land, in the third battle of Ypres (July-November). It did not prevent the Germans capturing Riga on 1 September nor reinforcing the Austrians to achieve a near-breakthrough at Caporetto on the Isonzo front on 24 October. On 21 March 1918 the Germans applied similar principles to the Somme. It was the first of four offensives, falling also in Flanders, on the Aisne, and in Champagne. In making considerable territorial gains, the Germans extended their front while reducing their strength by almost a million men. Simultaneously they continued to advance in the east, competing with their Austrian allies in the Ukraine and the Turks in the Caucasus. The French counter-attacked in July and the British in August. Together with the Americans, they drove the Germans back in a series of individually limited but collectively interlocking offensives. On 15 September the Anglo-French forces at Salonika attacked in Macedonia, forcing the Bulgars to seek an armistice by the end of the month. The whole of the Central Powers' Italian front was crumbling after the Austrian defeat on the Piave in June, and with the British pushing through Palestine towards Anatolia. The German high command itself initiated the request for an Armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points on 4 October, and, although it then tried to resume the war, it had begun a process which it could not now halt. After the war it would claim that the army was ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolution at home. The peoples of Germany and Austria-Hungary were indeed battered by food shortages and inflation, but the division between front and rear in what was a war of mass mobilization was essentially an artificial one. Science and technology, mass production, and centralized government (see political economy) were key ingredients in determining the war's direction and destructiveness. But alongside modernity backwardness persisted. Major belligerents like Russia and Turkey were insufficiently developed as states to be able fully to mobilize the (predominantly peasant) manpower available to them. In the Middle East and Africa, if armies did not build their own railways, they remained reliant on the mule, the ox, and man himself. The dominant image of the war is that derived from the trench warfare of its western front, snaking from Belgium on the Channel coast southwards to form a salient jutting towards Paris and then turning east along the Aisne valley through Champagne to Verdun; here it turned south once more, past the French frontier fortresses of Nancy and Belfort through the Vosges to the Alps. This front remained largely static from the autumn of 1914 to the spring of 1918. Its network of defensive trenches became progressively more deep and sophisticated. But the appearance of stability could be misleading. The trenches were not an end in themselves. Their tactical purpose was protection; their operational task was to enable ground to be held with fewer troops so that a masse de manœuvre could be created for deployment elsewhere. At the end of 1914 the Germans opted for the tactical defensive in the west in order to pursue a strategic offensive on the eastern front. Similarly the British continuously debated the merits of securing gains elsewhere rather than reinforce the deadlock on the major front. Moreover, the static nature of trench fighting masked a continuous tactical struggle to regain mobility through the reintegration of fire and movement. The chief consequence of industrialization on the battlefield was a hail of fire, delivered by machine guns and by quick-firing field artillery. Forfeiting mobility to find cover, armies eased many of the supply problems which had dogged their predecessors, and so could use munitions with much greater abandon; in particular heavy artillery, hitherto reserved for the previously distinct phase of siege warfare, was deployed on the battlefield itself. Thus by 1915 and 1916 infantry attacks were preceded by massive artillery bombardments which sacrificed surprise. Lacking direct communication with the gunners, the infantry could not convert partial gains into breakthrough or breakout. One long-run solution to this tactical dilemma was the tank, which combined fire and movement in a single weapon system, but in 1916-18 it was still too slow and too mechanically unreliable for deep exploitation. Much more important was the transformation in the application of artillery. Guns in quantity could fire shorter bombardments for the same effect; with consistent performances, particularly in the manufacture of shells by 1916 but also with the adoption of the contact fuse in 1917, infantry could advance close to the protective fire of the barrage. Even more important were the techniques of aerial reconnaissance, flash-spotting, and sound-ranging, which allowed targets to be identified without preliminary registration and—when combined with detailed survey and up-to-date meteorology—enabled predicted fire. Armies regained the potential for surprise. Furthermore, the infantry acquired more of its own firepower—principally through light machine guns and grenades but also through the use of flame-throwers and mobile trench mortars. In all armies the ratio of machines to men increased. The essential precondition for such warfare was economic mobilization. Before the war many pundits imagined that the principal constraint on sustained operations would be war finance—that states would be unable to extend their credit. They were wrong: by borrowing from abroad, from their own citizens, and ultimately from themselves (through accepting treasury bills as security for currency issue), the belligerents postponed payment until after the war. The more pressing economic constraints were the availability of raw materials (especially for the blockaded powers of central Europe) and the conversion of industrial plant to munitions production. In the winter of 1914-15, all the armies experienced shell shortages as the combination of higher than expected consumption at the front intersected with the blockages consequent on the time lag in adaptation. The state—which had itself now become the principal purchaser—intervened to regulate the market. In Germany the Prussian war ministry established a raw materials office in August 1914, whose task was to seek out stocks of commodities vital to the war effort, and to allocate them so as to ensure their most efficient use. In Britain the ministry of munitions was created in 1915, and itself established its own regional factories. In general, although much of the rhetoric was collectivist, the principles which drove economic mobilization were derived from capitalism; profits, although regulated, were still considerable, and the arms manufacturers, even if in the guise of government employ, were responsible for the daily management of the war economy (see war and economic growth). The war-generated industrial boom competed with the manpower needs of the armies. Organized labour was thereby handed a strong negotiating position, which it both grasped and partially forfeited in compacts with the state. In Britain in 1915 munitions workers agreed not to strike; in Germany the Auxiliary Service Law of December 1916 created an alliance between state, industry, and labour in which each felt it had conceded too much to the other. The real wages of males with skills vital to war production were eroded less by price inflation than those of white collar workers. Unskilled workers, by contrast, could be replaced by women, many of them not new to the workplace but diverted to munitions production from textile manufacture or domestic service. The strength of the labour movement acquired fresh resonance in 1917. In May 100, 000 French men and women went on strike, affecting 71 industries; Germany experienced 531 strikes over the year as a whole, as opposed to 240 in 1916. Much of this activity was to do with working conditions, wages, prices, and food supplies. But mutinies at the front and, even more, the Russian Revolutions of March and November 1917 gave labour a political and anti-war dimension which socialist movements had sacrificed by their adherence to the nation-in-arms concept. The Bolsheviks called for a peace without annexations and indemnities, and published the secret agreements of the tsarist regime with its British and French allies, so showing that annexationist war aims were the objective not only of the Central Powers. Hitherto the populations of the warring states had largely accepted the bigger ideas that underpinned their efforts. For Austria-Hungary it was a war to save a decaying empire, its multinationalism potentially riven by national self-determination; for Germany, the values were a counterpoint to the individualism that it saw as the legacy of Revolutionary France and the dominance of money-grabbing market forces in Britain and the USA; for France, it was a war for civilization; and for Britain for liberalism and the rights of small nations. In 1914 all the powers had been willing to fight for their great-power status, and all their peoples had been inspired by the needs of national self-defence. The doubts about these ideals, stoked by the length of the war and by its losses, were resolved, at least in part, by the entry of the USA and by the decision of Soviet Russia to seek terms with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in the New Year of 1918. The ‘Fourteen Points’ of US Pres Woodrow Wilson (Clemenceau commented drily that God had been satisfied with ten) reasserted in international relations the ideals of political liberalism—however much its domestic and economic underpinnings had been eroded by state intervention. Moreover, by 1917 the Allied states had largely resolved the problems of wartime government. In France invasion made Joffre, the French C-in-C, a key force in civil affairs as well as in strategy. In Britain civilian direction of strategy was discredited in 1915, and soldiers dominated in 1916. Neither power had a body which integrated civil and military wisdom and which was capable of rapid decision-making. In December 1916, Britain created a war cabinet, itself the occasion and the consequence of the formation of Lloyd George's coalition government. Joffre was replaced by Nivelle at the end of 1916, and not until Clemenceau became premier in November 1917 did France's civil authority definitively reassert itself over the military. The offensives of 1917 discredited the generals of both nations to the extent that even their political allies were ready to acquiesce in their subordination. The autocratic empires of Austria-Hungary and Germany, but also of the Entente's ally, Russia, had a more difficult problem to resolve. The junction of civil and military was the crown; in September 1915 Tsar Nicholas II, who had been dissuaded from doing so at the war's outbreak, became C-in-C. In Austria-Hungary the Emperor Franz Josef was too old to exercise such active responsibility, and his successor in 1916, Karl, was young and irresolute. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II believed strongly in his personal rule but had begun to lose his authority even before the war broke out. The complexities of strategy-making in modern war were incompatible with the simplifications of monarchy. Without the mediating efforts of the structures which political liberalism spawned, the autocracies lacked the institutions for easing civil-military discord. The German chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, intrigued against the CGS Falkenhayn, using as his allies the commander on the eastern front, Hindenburg, and his COS Ludendorff. In August 1916 the kaiser was forced to concede to this pressure, and Hindenburg replaced Falkenhayn, with Ludendorff as 1st QMG. Thereafter the general staff's interpretation of strategy, with the conduct of a total war penetrating every aspect of national life, and with all the nation's resources deemed vital for its prosecution, meant that the army played an increasing role in issues of economic mobilization and political direction. Although Bethmann Hollweg resigned in July 1917 because he could no longer command the support of the Reichstag, his successors were the puppets of the army not of the assembly, and it was the army's loss of confidence in the monarchy that determined the timing of the kaiser's final abdication in November 1918. Bibliography Falls, Cyril, The First World War (London, 1960). Herwig, Holger, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 (London, 1997). Strachan, Hew (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford, 1998) — Hew Strachan Sponsored LinksAircraft Ringtones Send Complimentary Ringtones to your cell. BestTones4U.info Spanish American War TX Search Texan Vetarans Who Fought in the Spanish American War www.worldvitalrecords.com US Military History Companion: World War I (1914 – 18) Causes Causes of U.S. Entry Military and Diplomatic Course Domestic Course Postwar Impact Changing Interpretations Sponsored LinksWorld War 2 Map Find where you're going with maps. Find world war 2 map online. MapHistory.info World war 1 news World war 1 news In The World's Largest News Archive www.NewspaperArchive.com/War US Supreme Court: World War I Is considered the first modern war because it involved the mobilization of entire populations. For the United States, it also represented a break with tradition because, for the first time, American armies were sent to fight on European soil. Believing the nation faced a crisis of unprecedented proportion, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress acted swiftly to extend the authority of the federal government after war was declared in April 1917. In May, the Selective Service Act instituted a wartime military draft. In June, the Wilson administration proposed the Lever Food Control Bill, which subjected fuel and food to federal regulation and which gave the president the power in an “extreme” emergency to dictate price schedules in any industry. Although congressional critics charged the measure gave the president dictatorial powers and violated the Tenth Amendment, it became law in August 1917. In November 1918, the War Prohibition Act banned the making and sale of alcoholic beverages during the war. Other statutes empowered the president to compel preferential treatment for government war contracts, to seize and run plants needed for the war effort, to operate the water and rail transport systems, and to regulate exports. Through a combination of executive orders and federal statutes, the government was able to curtail sharply freedom of speech and the press. In April 1917, Wilson issued two executive orders, one creating the first large‐scale government propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, the other giving the government control of land and cable telegraph lines out of the country. In June 1917, the Espionage Act made it a felony to cause insubordination, interfere with enlistments, and transmit false statements that obstructed the military (see Subversion). It also established postal censorship and gave the postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, power (which he often used capriciously) to ban material deemed seditious or treasonable from the mails (see Postal Power). In October, the Trading with the Enemy Act created a Censorship Board to coordinate and make recommendations about censorship. It allowed censorship of mail or any other kind of communication with foreign countries. The Sedition Act of May 1918 (an amendment to the Espionage Act) sought to repress anarchists, socialists, pacifists, and certain labor leaders. The law made it a felony to disrupt recruiting or enlistments, to encourage either support for Germany and its allies or disrespect for the American cause, or otherwise to bring the United States government, its leaders, or its symbols into disrepute. Critics charged that virtually every right guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution was nullified or abridged during the war. The Supreme Court, however, was not asked to pass judgment on the constitutionality of many of these statutes. Those cases that did reach the Court did so, with a few exceptions, only after the war had ended. Chief Justice Edward D. White, a one‐time Confederate soldier from Louisiana and the president of a sugar company, led the Court during the war years and after. Joining White on the bench were Justices Joseph McKenna, a California lawyer appointed by President William McKinley; two Theodore Roosevelt appointees, William R. Day and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Willis Van Devanter and Mahlon Pitney, both appointees of William Howard Taft and two of the Court's most conservative members; and three Wilson appointees, Louis D. Brandeis (whose Judaism and advocacy for social causes made him anathema to conservatives), John H. Clarke, a progressive‐minded railroad attorney, and James C. McReynolds from Tennessee, who as Wilson's first attorney general had vigorously prosecuted antitrust cases. As a Supreme Court justice, McReynolds became a champion of property rights against the expansion of government regulation and thus proved far less liberal than Wilson had hoped. Enlargement of Federal Power Despite his Civil War record, White was strongly nationalistic on issues relating to states' rights and the war. Under his leadership, the Court did little to challenge the expansion of federal power. It upheld the Selective Service Act in January 1918 in Arver v. United States, known as the Selective Draft Law Cases. Writing for a unanimous Court, White said Congress had the power to “raise and support armies” and that the draft was not “involuntary servitude” as defined by the Thirteenth Amendment (p. 367). A few months later, in Cox v. Wood (1918), the Court refused relief to a man who sought discharge from the armed forces on grounds that the draft could not be used to force military service abroad. In Ruthenberg v. United States (1918), the Court rejected a claim by socialists that their constitutional rights had been violated. (The socialists had argued that at their trial for not registering for the draft, the grand jury and trial jury had been made up entirely of people from other political parties.) A similar pattern of approving the enlargement of federal power appeared in other cases. Although the War Prohibition Act was passed after the armistice, the Court sustained its validity in the War Prohibition Cases of late 1919. Brandeis accepted the measure's legality under the federal war power and held that federal regulatory authority continued even after the armistice. The Court again upheld prohibition a few months later in Rupert v. Caffey (1920), rejecting the argument that the act encroached on the police power of the states. In Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. North Dakota (1919), a unanimous Court endorsed a section of the Army Appropriation Act of August 1916 that empowered the president to take over and run railroads during wartime. White noted that “the complete and undivided character of the war power of the United States is not disputable” and said that the federal government could override state rate controls that would be binding during peacetime (p. 135). The Court also turned back challenges to the Trading with the Enemy Act (Rumely v. McCarthy, 1919; Central Union Trust Co. v. Carvin, 1921; Stoehr v. Wallace, 1921) to government takeover of telegraph and telephone lines (Dakota Central Telephone v. South Dakota, 1919), and to use by the federal government of cable property during the war (Commercial Cable v. Burleson, 1919). The Court invalidated a section of the Lever Act dealing with unfair charges for food in United States v. L. Cohen Grocery Co. (1921), but it did not deny the federal government's right to fix prices during war. Rather, it contended that the Lever Act had not set clear standards for what constituted unreasonable prices. Limits on Dissent Not since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 had the national government limited dissent so severely as during World War I. The government prosecuted nearly twenty‐two hundred people under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and more than a thousand were convicted. No cases involving the constitutionality of these statutes came before the Supreme Court during the war, although lower federal courts upheld and interpreted the measures in several instances. Several cases involving civil liberties came before the Supreme Court after the war. The Court upheld government security legislation, relying on the bad tendency test, which held that the prosecution did not have to establish a cause‐and‐effect relationship between an utterance and an illegal act. The mere intent of the speaker or writer was sufficient to establish guilt. Schenck v. United States (1919) involved a prosecution under the Espionage Act for distributing antidraft leaflets to American military personnel. The appellant, Schenck, argued that the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment, but the Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the law. Justice Holmes, who wrote the opinion, argued that free speech was not an absolute right (it would not, for example, “protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre, and causing a panic,” he said) and that during war the government could limit some utterances that might be acceptable during times of peace (p. 52). Holmes set forth the clear and present danger test to determine whether the words used in a given situation “caused” someone to violate the law. Although the phrase “clear and present danger” would later be used to shield some types of dissent, in Schenk Holmes employed it in a way that was consistent with the bad tendency doctrine. He believed that Schenck had intended to interfere with the draft in publishing the leaflets. The Court sustained convictions under the Espionage Act in two other cases: in Frohwerk v. United States (1919), the editor of a German‐language newspaper was convicted for publishing articles that criticized the war and questioned the legality of the draft; in Debs v. United States (1919), the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was prosecuted for a speech in which he had praised people convicted for hindering enlistments. The Court sustained the conviction on grounds that Debs had intended to hinder recruiting. In writing the opinions in Frohwerk and Debs, Holmes made no mention of the clear and present danger principle. Before the year ended, however, he changed his position, thanks in part to the influence of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. When he dissented in subsequent cases, he interpreted clear and present danger in a way that broadened protection for dissent. In Abrams v. United States (1919), the Court upheld the Sedition Act of 1918. Abrams and others were charged with publishing leaflets condemning the American expeditionary force in Russia and called for a general strike. Justice Clarke, writing for the majority, contended that the pamphlets sought to “excite, at the supreme crisis of the war, disaffection, sedition, riots, and … revolution” and were not protected by the First Amendment (p. 623). Holmes, joined by Brandeis, argued in dissent that the prosecution failed to demonstrate that the leaflets had any impact on the war effort. Publishing a “silly leaflet by an unknown man” was unlikely to present “any immediate danger” of obstructing, or even have a tendency to interfere with, the success of the government's armed forces. Holmes relied on the notion of a “marketplace of ideas” to justify his stand (p. 628). Four months later Clarke joined Holmes and Brandeis in dissenting from the Court's majority in Schaefer v. United States (1920). The case involved a German‐language paper in Philadelphia that had published articles favorable to the German war effort that were generally unpatriotic in tone. Brandeis, in writing for the minority, thought the publications in question were relatively harmless and that their suppression imperiled free press as well as freedom of thought not only during the war but also in peacetime. Pierce v. United States (1920) grew out of the government's wartime security legislation. Three socialists had been prosecuted for distributing an antiwar pamphlet. Justice Pitney, speaking for the majority, attacked one of the publication's arguments—that the war had economic roots—and contended that such material could only hurt the war effort. Once again, Holmes and Brandeis dissented, arguing that if statements of judgment and opinion could be prosecuted, then freedom of expression was imperiled, especially during national emergencies. In United States ex rel. Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co. v. Burleson (1921), the Court upheld the postmaster general's decision to exclude a socialist newspaper, the Milwaukee Leader, from the mails. In Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920), the Court upheld a Minnesota statute similar to the Espionage Act. While Holmes concurred with the majority in this case, White dissented, arguing that only Congress had power to legislate in this area. Brandeis also dissented, but on the grounds that the state law invaded civil liberties. World War I accelerated the growth of nationalism in the United States, enhancing the authority of the federal government at the expense of the states and the power of the president relative to Congress. Through its decisions the Supreme Court endorsed these developments. One legacy from this period was the example that expanded federal authority provided for later national emergencies. Americans were more willing during the Great Depression and World War II to accept the idea that the national government and the president could deal with problems more effectively than could the individual states and Congress. World War I also initiated controversies about the meaning of the First Amendment. While the Court upheld the government's security legislation, the idea of clear and present danger, as applied in the Abrams case, opened the door—if only slightly—to stronger safeguards for dissent. See also Presidential Emergency Powers; War. Bibliography David P. Currie, The Constitution and the Supreme Court: 1910–1921, Duke Law Journal (Dec. 1985): 1111–1162. Paul L. Murphy, The Constitution in Crisis Times, 1918–1969 (1972). Richard Polenberg, Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (1987). Fred D. Ragan, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and the Clear and Present Danger Test for Free Speech: The First Year, 1919, Journal of American History 58 (1971): 24–45 — Stephen Vaughn Sponsored LinksWorld War 2 Veteran Over 20 Million Records. Free Locator - Reconnect Now! www.military.com World War II Watch a TV programme about the World War II at factualTV factualtv.com/World-War-II US Military Dictionary: World War I (1914-18) Essentially a civil war in Europe with global implications, World War I resulted in a shift of economic and cultural influences away from Europe, ultimately enabling new nations to emerge and encouraged others (notably the United States) to challenge Europe's international leadership. The fighting pitted Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire (together styled the Central Powers) against an alliance of Britain, France, Russia, Italy and, eventually, the United States. With the mobilization of 65 million troops, World War I was ultimately the most destructive military conflict in world history to that point.Triggered by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Bosnia-Herzegovina's capital, Sarajevo (allegedly by Serbian nationalists), open warfare grew from a series of strategic alliances that drew in powers that seemingly had little interest in this immediate cause. The Austrians, given unequivocal support by their ally, Germany, decided to crush Serbia's perceived challenge. Russia, fearing domestic uprisings in support of Orthodox Serbia, gave notice that it would support its coreligionists against Catholic Austria-Hungary. German military leaders, particularly Gen. Alfred von Schlieffen, sought to advance their own goals by using the crisis as a justification for attacking Russia's ally, France. That all these nations had been steadily arming over the previous years only further exacerbated the crisis, pushing them toward war. By August 12, all major powers had declared war, and Germany, challenging Belgium's declarations of neutrality, began hostilities by marching through the smaller nation in order to launch an attack on France. France and Britain responded by meeting the German attack. Acting on its own declaration of war, Russia launched an attack on Germany's eastern front.Within three weeks the engaged armies had fought to a virtual standstill. German troops destroyed an entire Russian army at Tannenberg (August 26-30). A week later, British and French stopped Germany's own flanking maneuver through Belgium in the First Battle of the Marne (September 5-9). Soon the western armies had constructed an almost continuous parallel line of defensive systems stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. Trench warfare, most prominent in France and Flanders, but existing in some areas of Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine as well, flouted attempts by Europe's military leaders to return to a war of maneuver by rupturing the enemy's front. To restore the offensive, both sides eventually introduced new weapons such as tanks and chemical warfare. High-explosive shells, recoilless carriages, optical sights, improved communications, and cannon ranges of 20 or more miles made indirect artillery bombardment the dominant force of the battlefield. The application of massive and increasingly sophisticated artillery fire proved to be the most effective means of reducing fortifications. But western defenses were so strong and thickly defended that, although it was possible to break into them, there remained severe limitations to any advance.In 1915, the Central Powers concentrated their resources on the eastern front. The vastness of that front, and the clear superiority of German artillery and leadership, made possible an advance of some 300 miles. Although Italy left its pre-war pact with Germany and Austro-Hungary to join the Allies in 1915, by the end of the year, Berlin dominated Central and southeastern Europe. British efforts to find a “way around” the western front ended in dismal failure in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. In 1916, Germany sought to break the stalemate in the west in the ten-month Battle of Verdun, deliberately seeking a decisive battle of attrition and will. To relieve Verdun, a massive Anglo-French offensive was launched on the Somme in July. Nevertheless, when winter ended the fighting, the western front had changed little. 1917 marked two important changes in the war. In October, Russian revolutionaries bolstered by public discontent over the country's dismal fortunes in the war overthrew the Tsar, and the new Soviet Union removed itself from the fighting. A perhaps more important shift occurred when the previously neutral United States joined the Allies against Germany. President Woodrow Wilson had attempted to keep the United States in a mediating position. Germany's attempt to quickly end the war by stopping U.S. shipments to the Allies through unlimited submarine warfare and secretly propositioning Mexico to attack (discovered when British code-breakers intercepted the Zimmerman Telegram) backfired and drew the United States into the conflict. Wilson's goals, however, differed from his allies' in that he advocated a plan for “peace without victory” he announced in January 1917 and further codified a year later in his Fourteen Points. United States troops, called the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), did relatively little to alleviate the military stalemate when they arrived on European soil. AEF commander-in-chief John J. Pershing planned to launch a win-the-war campaign in 1919. Early AEF actions were less than successful, however. Logistical chaos, flawed tactics, and inexperienced men and officers contributed to a disastrous start to the Meuse-Argonne offensive (September 26- November 11, 1918) and by the armistice Pershing's troops had moved just thirty-four miles. Nevertheless, although only involved in heavy fighting for 110 days, the AEF made vital contributions to Germany's defeat. With tens of thousands of “doughboys” crossing the Atlantic to reinforce the Allies, and with the AEF emerging as a superior fighting force, the exhausted and depleted German army appealed for peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points in early October. As the Great War concluded with the armistice on November 11, 1918, the Allies were divided on how to construct the peace. American policy was directed toward the repudiation of power politics and the erection of a “permanent” peace. Wilsonianism promised an end to war primarily through democratic institutions, the end of secret diplomacy, self-determination for ethnic minorities, and most especially through a League of Nations. The war had destroyed the old balance of power in Europe, and the peace settlement made revisionist nations out of the two states that would soon dominate the continent, Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet, the peace settlement did not prove satisfactory. British and French insistence on reparations created lingering animosity within Germany. Likewise, the division of colonies and former Central Powers territories aggravated tensions in areas such as North Africa, the Balkans, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula. The United States, the greatest economic beneficiary of the war, helped make the peace, but with its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles refused responsibility for maintaining it. The war ended in a twenty-year truce instead of a “permanent peace.” The failure to achieve Wilson's unrealistic though desirable goal was hardly surprising, but another general war was not inevitable. World War II was caused by many factors, including the flawed peace settlement of 1919, the great Depression of the 1930s, and the psychological scars of World War I, which enfeebled the democracies. But the inability of the victorious powers, especially Great Britain and the United States, to work together to prevent the resurgence of German military power, was certainly one of the most important reasons for the resumption of war in 1939. See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details. Sponsored LinksWorld War Two Posters Search multiple engines for world war two posters www.webcrawler.com Revolutionary War Sites See Historic Williamsburg. Battle Sites, Museums, Tours & More VisitWilliamsburg.com Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: World War I (1914 – 18) International conflict between the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey — and the Allied Powers — mainly France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and (from 1917) the U.S. After a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914, a chain of threats and mobilizations resulted in a general war between the antagonists by mid-August. Prepared to fight a war on two fronts, based on the Schlieffen Plan, Germany first swept through neutral Belgium and invaded France. After the First Battle of the Marne (1914), the Allied defensive lines were stabilized in France, and a war of attrition began. Fought from lines of trenches and supported by modern artillery and machine guns, infantry assaults gained little ground and were enormously costly in human life, especially at the Battles of Verdun and the Somme (1916). On the Eastern Front, Russian forces initially drove deep into East Prussia and German Poland (1914) but were stopped by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg and forced back into Russia (1915). After several offensives, the Russian army failed to break through the German defensive lines. Russia's poor performance and enormous losses caused widespread domestic discontent that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Other fronts in the war included the Dardanelles Campaign, in which British and Dominion forces were unsuccessful against Turkey; the Caucasus and Iran (Persia), where Russia fought Turkey; Mesopotamia and Egypt, where British forces fought the Turks; and northern Italy, where Italian and Austrian troops fought the costly Battles of the Isonzo. At sea, the German and British fleets fought the inconclusive Battle of Jutland, and Germany's use of the submarine against neutral shipping eventually brought the U.S. into the war in 1917. Though Russia's armistice with Germany in December 1917 released German troops to fight on the Western Front, the Allies were reinforced by U.S. troops in early 1918. Germany's unsuccessful offensive in the Second Battle of the Marne was countered by the Allies' steady advance, which recovered most of France and Belgium by October 1918 and led to the November Armistice. Total casualties were estimated at 10 million dead, 21 million wounded, and 7.7 million missing or imprisoned. See also Battles of Caporetto and Ypres; Fourteen Points; Lusitania; Paris Peace Conference; Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, Neuilly, Saint-Germain, Sèvres, Trianon, and Versailles; Edmund H.H. Allenby, Ferdinand Foch, John French, Douglas Haig, Paul von Hindenburg, Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre, Erich Ludendorff, John Pershing. For more information on World War I, visit Britannica.com. Sponsored LinksMilitary Records Search Locate Military Records by US City, County or State. Instant Access. www.FreeRecordsRegistry.com World War Medals Find great deals and save! Compare products, prices & stores www.Shopping.com US History Encyclopedia: World War I The United States did not enter World War I until April 1917, although the conflict had begun in August 1914. After an intense period of military buildup and imperial competition, war broke out in Europe between Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) and Britain, France, and Russia (the Allies). Turkey quickly joined the Central Powers and Italy joined the Allies in 1915. Prelude to Involvement Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson issued a declaration of neutrality. He was committed to maintaining open use of the Atlantic for trade with all the European belligerents. However, British naval supremacy almost eliminated American trade with Germany while shipments to the Allies soared. To counter this trend, German U-boats (submarines) torpedoed U.S. merchant vessels bound for Allied ports. In May 1915, Germans sunk the British passenger ship Lusitania, killing 128 Americans. Strong protest from Wilson subdued the submarine campaign, but it would emerge again as the war ground on and became more desperate. In late January 1917, Germany announced it would destroy all ships heading to Britain. Although Wilson broke off diplomatic ties with Germany, he still hoped to avert war by arming merchant vessels as a deterrent. Nevertheless, Germany began sinking American ships immediately. In February 1917, British intelligence gave the United States government a decoded telegram from Germany's foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, that had been intercepted en route to his ambassador to Mexico. The Zimmerman Telegram authorized the ambassador to offer Mexico the portions of the Southwest it had lost to the United States in the 1840s if it joined the Central Powers. But because Wilson had run for reelection in 1916 on a very popular promise to keep the United States out of the European war, he had to handle the telegram very carefully. Wilson did not publicize it at first, only releasing the message to the press in March after weeks of German attacks on American ships had turned public sentiment toward joining the Allies. Gearing Up for War: Raising Troops and Rallying Public Opinion On 2 April 1917, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war and four days later all but six senators and fifty representatives voted for a war resolution. The Selective Service Act that was passed the following month, along with an extraordinary number of volunteers, built up the army from less than 250,000 to four million over the course of the conflict. General John Pershing was appointed head of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and led the first troops to France during the summer. Initially, the nation was woefully unprepared to fight so large a war so far from American soil. The task of reorganizing government and industry to coordinate a war and then of recruiting, training, equipping, and shipping out massive numbers of soldiers was daunting and would proceed slowly. The first serious U.S. military action would not come until April 1918, one year after declaration of war. It would take a gargantuan national effort, one that would forever change the government and its relationship to the citizenry, to get those troops into combat. Although there is strong evidence that the war was broadly supported—and certainly Americans volunteered and bought Liberty Bonds in droves—the epic scale of the undertaking and the pressure of time led the government, in an unprecedented campaign, to sell the war effort through a massive propaganda blitz. Wilson picked George Creel, a western newspaper editor, to form the Committee on Public Information (CPI). This organization was charged with providing the press with carefully selected information on the progress of the war. It also worked with the advertising industry to produce eyecatching and emotional propaganda for various agencies involved in the war effort in order to win maximum cooperative enthusiasm form the public. Its largest enterprise was the Four Minute Men program, which sent more than 75,000 speakers to over 750,000 public events to rouse the patriotism of as many as 314 million spectators over the course of the war. The CPI recruited mainly prominent white businessmen and community leaders; however, it did set up a Women's Division and also courted locally prominent African Americans to speak at black gatherings. Gearing Up for War: the Economy and Labor The government needed patriotic cooperation, for it was completely unequipped to enforce many of the new regulations it adopted. It also had to maximize the productive resources of the nation to launch the U.S. war effort and prop up flagging allies. The War Industries Board was charged with gearing up the economy to war production, but it lacked coercive authority. Even the Overman Act of May 1918, which gave the president broad powers to commandeer industries if necessary, failed to convince capitalists to retool completely toward the war effort. The government only took control of one industry, the railroads, in December 1917, and made it quite clear that the measure was only a temporary necessity. In all other industries, it was federal investment—not control—that achieved results. The Emergency Fleet Corporation pumped over $3 billion into the nation's dormant shipbuilding industry during the war era. Overall, the effort to raise production was too little and too late for maximizing the nation's military clout. American production was just hitting stride as the war ended, but the threat that it represented did help convince an exhausted Germany to surrender. The government also sought the cooperation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and involved its top officials in the war production effort, but very low unemployment emboldened union workers and it became difficult for the leadership to control the rank and file. Many workers connected Wilson's war goals—democracy and self-determination for nations—to struggles for a voice in their workplaces through union representation. However, the number of striking workers was lower in 1917 and 1918 than in 1916. The government hastily created labor arbitration boards and eventually formed a National War Labor Board (NWLB) in April 1918. The government had considerable success in resolving disputes and convincing employers to at least temporarily give some ground to the unions. When this novel arbitration framework disappeared along with government contracts in 1919, workers participated in the largest strike wave in the nation's history—over four million participated in walkouts during that year. Women and African Americans in the War For women workers the war also raised hopes, but as with labor as a whole, they were dashed after the conflict. The number of women working as domestic servants and in laundering or garment making declined sharply during the war, while opportunities grew just as dramatically in office, industrial, commercial, and transportation work. The very limited place of women in the economy had opened up and government propaganda begged women to take jobs. However, few of these new opportunities, and even then only the least attractive of them, went to nonwhite women. Mainly confined to low-skilled work, many women were let go when the postwar economy dipped or were replaced by returning soldiers. Although women did gain, and hold on to, a more prominent place in the AFL, they were still only 10 percent of the membership in 1920. The government made some attempts through the NWLB to protect the rights of working women, although it backed off after the war. But women fought on their own behalf on the suffrage front and finally achieved the right to vote in 1920. African Americans also made some gains but suffered a terrible backlash for them. There were ninety-six Lynchings of blacks during 1917 and 1918 and seventy in 1919 alone. Blacks were moving out of the South in massive numbers during the war years, confronting many white communities in the North with a substantial nonwhite presence for the first time. Northward migration by blacks averaged only 67,000 per decade from 1870 through 1910 and then exploded to 478,000 during the 1910s. This Great Migration gave blacks access to wartime factory jobs that paid far better than agricultural work in the South, but like white women, they primarily did lowskilled work and were generally rejected by the union movement. The hatred that many of these migrants faced in the North forced them into appalling ghettos and sometimes led to bloodshed. In July 1917, a race riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, left thirty-nine African Americans dead. The recently formed NAACP championed justice and democratic rights for African Americans at a time when black soldiers were helping to guarantee them for the peoples of Europe. Although job opportunities would recede after the war, the new racial diversity outside the South would not—and neither would the fight for equal rights. Repression and the War The fragility of a war effort that relied on a workforce of unprecedented diversity and on cooperation from emboldened unions led the federal government to develop for the first time a substantial intelligence-gathering capability for the purpose of suppressing elements it thought might destabilize the system. The primary targets were anti-capitalist radicals and enemy aliens (German and Austro-Hungarian immigrants). The former group was targeted through the Espionage Act of June 1917, which was amended by the Sedition Act in May 1918 after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia convinced the government to seek even wider powers to control public speech. The Department of Justice, through its U.S. attorneys and Bureau of Investigation field agents, cooperated with local and state authorities to suppress radical organizers. Many government agencies developed at least some intelligence capacity and the private, but government sanctioned, American Protective League recruited perhaps 300,000 citizen-spies to keep tabs on their fellow Americans. In this climate of suspicion, German-speaking aliens had the most cause to be afraid. War propaganda dehumanized Germans and blasted their culture and language. Well over a half-million enemy aliens were screened by the Department of Justice and were restricted in their mobility and access to military and war production sites. Several thousand enemy aliens deemed disloyal were interned until the conflict was over. American Soldiers in Battle The end of the war was nowhere in sight when U.S. troops first saw significant fighting in the spring of 1918, after the new Bolshevik government in Russia pulled out of the war in March and Germany switched its efforts to the western front. Under British and French pressure, General Pershing allowed his troops to be blended with those of the Allies—ending his dream of the AEF as an independent fighting force. Now under foreign command, American troops helped stop the renewed German offensive in May and June. The First U.S. Army was given its own mission in August: to push the Germans back to the southeast and northwest of Verdun and then seize the important railroad facilities at Sedan. The campaign got under way in September and American troops succeeded in removing the Germans from the southeast of Verdun, although the latter were already evacuating that area. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive to the northwest of Verdun was launched in late September and proved to be much more bloody. Although the German position was heavily fortified, well over a million American soldiers simply overwhelmed all resistance. This massive and relentless operation convinced the German command that its opportunity to defeat the Allies before American troops and industry were fully ready to enter the fray had been lost. As exhausted as the United States was fresh, the Central Powers surrendered on 11 November 1918. In the end, two million American troops went to France and three-quarters of them saw combat. Some 60,000 died in battle and over 200,000 were wounded. An additional 60,000 died of disease, many from the influenza pandemic that killed over twenty million across the globe in 1918 and 1919. Many surviving combatants suffered psychological damage, known as shell shock, from the horrors of trench warfare. The casualties would have been far greater had America entered the war earlier or been prepared to deploy a large army more quickly. Wilson hoped that after the war the United States would become part of the League of Nations that was forming in Europe to ensure that collective responsibility replaced competitive alliances. But America was retreating inward, away from the postwar ruin and revolutionary chaos of Europe. The government was suppressing radicals at home with unprecedented furor in 1919 and 1920 in what is known as the Red Scare. Progressive wartime initiatives that further involved the government in the lives of its citizens withered against this reactionary onslaught. But the notion of government coordination of a national effort to overcome crisis had been born, and the Great Depression and World War II would see this new commitment reemerge, strengthened. Bibliography Farwell, Byron. Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917–1918. New York: Norton, 1999. Focuses on military action. Greenwald, Maurine Weiner. Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States. West-port, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980. Kennedy, Kathleen. Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion during World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Luebke, Frederick. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974. McCartin, Joseph. Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Focuses on workers and war production. Preston, William, Jr. Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903–1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. Focuses on home front repression. Venzon, Anne Cipriano, ed. The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1995. Good general work. Zieger, Robert. America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Stresses the home front. Zeiger, Susan. In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Sponsored LinksWWII Memorial Photo Book 90 pages photos: intro by Sen. Dole Great Gift For Veterans www.wwiimemorialbook.com World War Ii Romance Save on War Romance Books Join Rhapsody Romance Book Club www.rhapsodybookclub.com Russian History Encyclopedia: World War I Imperial Russia entered World War I in the summer of 1914 along with allies England and France. It remained at war with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey until the war effort collapsed during the revolutions of 1917. In 1914 military theory taught that new technologies meant that future wars would be short, decided by initial, offensive battles waged by mass conscript armies on the frontiers. Trapped between two enemies, Germany planned to defeat France in the west before Russia, with its still sparse railway net, could mobilize. Using French loans to build up that net, Russia sought to speed up the process, rapidly invade East Prussia, and so relieve pressure on the French. Berlin therefore feared giving Russia a head start in mobilizing and, rightly or wrongly, most statesmen accepted that if mobilization began, war was inevitable. On June 28, 1914, a nationalist Serbian student shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at Sarajevo. To most statesmen's surprise, this provoked a crisis when Austria, determined to punish the Serbs, issued an unacceptable ultimatum on July 23. Over the next six days, pressure mounted on Nicholas II but, recognizing that mobilization meant war, he refused to order a general call-up that would force a German response. Then Vienna declared war on Serbia, Nicholas's own efforts to negotiate with Kaiser William II collapsed, and on July 30 he finally approved a general mobilization. When St. Petersburg ignored Berlin's demand for its cancellation within twelve hours, Germany declared war on August 1. Over the next three days Germany invaded Luxembourg, declared war on France on August 4, and by entering Belgium, added Britain to its enemies. The War of Movement: Summer 1914 - april 1915 Some Social Democrats aside, Russia's educated public rallied in a Sacred Union behind their ruler. Strikes and political debate ended, and on August 2, crowds in St. Petersburg cheered Nicholas II after he signed a declaration of war on Germany. Local problems apart, the mobilization proceeded apace as 3,115,000 reservists and 800,000 militiamen joined the 1,423,000-man army to provide troops for Russian offensives into Austrian Galicia and, as promised, France and East Prussia. Although Nicholas II intended to command his troops in person, he was pressured into appointing instead his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich the Younger. Whatever its merits, this decision split the front administratively from the rear thanks to a new law that assigned the army control of the front zone. This caused few problems when the battle line moved forward in 1914 and early 1915. However, without the tsar as a civil-military lynchpin, it led to chaos during the later Great Retreat. The Grand Duke established his skeleton Stavka (Supreme Commander-in-Chief's General Headquarters) at Baranovichi to provide strategic direction to the Galician and East Prussian offensives. These were to open on August 18-19 under the direct supervision of the separate operational headquarters of the Northwest and Southwest Fronts. Yet on August 6 Austria-Hungary declared war and on the next day invaded Russian Poland. This forestalled the Southwest Front (Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Armies, with 52% of Russia's strength) and it opened its own Galician offensive on August 18. Despite early enemy successes, the Front's armies trounced the Austrians and captured the Galician capital of Lvov (Lemberg) on September 3. A week later the Russians won decisively at Rava Ruska, and by September 12 they had foiled an Austrian attempt to retake Lvov. By September 16 they had besieged the major fortress of Przemysl and reached the San River. Resuming their offensive, they then pushed another 100 miles to the Carpathian passes into Hungary. Over seventeen days the Austrians lost 100,000 dead, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 prisoners, and 216 guns, or one-third of their effective strength. The Northwest Front (First and Second Armies, with 33% of Russia's forces) was less successful. Ordered forward to aid the desperate French on August 13, Pavel Rennenkampf's First Army advanced slowly into East Prussia, was checked at Stalluponen, then defeated the Germans at Gumbinnen on August 20, and turned against Konigsberg. To the south, Alexander Samsonov's Second Army occupied Neidenburg on August 22, and all East Prussia seemed open to the Russians. But by August 23, when the new German commander Paul von Hindenburg arrived with Erich von Ludendorff as chief of staff, General Max von Hoffmann had implemented plans to defeat the Russians piecemeal. Accordingly, on August 23 - 24 the Germans checked Samsonov and, learning his deployments through radio intercepts, withdrew to concentrate on Tannenberg. When the Second Army again advanced on August 26, it was trapped, virtually surrounded, and then crushed. Samsonov shot himself, and by August 30 the Germans claimed more than 100,000 prisoners. This forced Rennenkampf's withdrawal, and during September 9 - 14, he too suffered defeat in the First Battle of the Mansurian Lakes. Despite German claims of a second Tannenberg and 125,000 prisoners, the First Army escaped and lost only 30,000 prisoners, as well as 70,000 dead and wounded. The Germans then advanced to the Niemen River before the front stabilized in mid-September. Again alerted by radio intercepts, they fore-stalled a Russian thrust at Silesia by a spoiling attack on September 30. Counterattacking in Galicia, the Austrians then cleared the Carpathian approaches and relieved Przemysl before being halted on the San in mid-October. The Russians, repulsing a secondary attack in the north, finally held the Germans before Warsaw. As the latter withdrew, devastating the countryside, the Russians again drove the Austrians back to Kracow and reinvested Przemysl. This set the pattern for months of seesaw fighting all along t