What was britains role in ww1

This increased hostility was directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra. Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December , freeing German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

At the outbreak of fighting in , the United States remained on the sidelines of World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of the conflict. In , Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania —traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard—in May helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. Germany sunk four more U. With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in late After a failed attack on the Dardanelles the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea , Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in January Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after suffering , casualties.

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia , while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.

British and French—and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the Italian Front. The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland May left British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war. World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in Aircraft were initially used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of in the United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily destroy the propeller of the plane it came from.

The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane. Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

On April 1, , the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army. With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, , German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces joined by 85, American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force in the Second Battle of the Marne.

The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later. The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars , and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I. Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely.

Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers. Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in , the 92nd and 93rd Divisions.

Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war. The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September The 93rd Division, however, had more success.

With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing , commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army.

A pattern of serious and sometimes violent political disputes just before the war suggested a politically divided country, with the underprivileged asserting their demands for recognition. But increasingly the legitimacy of these demands was being recognised, and the war accelerated this process. Despite these disputes, socially and culturally Great Britain was more homogeneous than any other major power, and better placed to withstand the strains of the war. English was almost universal as a sole or first language, as was literacy, although ports and industrial cities had pockets of diversity.

Christianity was almost universal, and most people professed some religious belief without necessarily being regular churchgoers.

This included the Church of England and Church of Scotland as state churches, a much smaller but growing Roman Catholic population, and numerous forms of non-conformism. Discrimination against other religions was mild in comparison with mainland Europe, notably as regards Judaism.

Religious convictions were seldom overtly political, although religious beliefs did influence politics, including strains of nonconformist pacifism in much of the British labour movement and British forms of socialism. This homogeneity was strengthened rather than weakened by a marked parochialism and regionalism, of which the Scots and Welsh identities were only the most prominent, with most people looking to their local rather than national leaders, including local business, religious, and trade union representatives.

The most marked differentiations were of social class. Of a workforce of just over Great Britain had no recent experience of peacetime military conscription, and had to create and equip a mass army of millions during the course of the war, with consequent significant social and economic dislocation, and cultural impact. In geo-strategic terms, the United Kingdom formed an kilometre-long breakwater lying across the sea communications of northwestern Europe, giving the Allies another critical advantage, particularly in the distant naval blockade of Germany that was one of their main weapons.

By , the British had decisively won a peacetime naval arms race with Germany prompted by a battleship-building programme, with twenty-two battleships in service and thirteen under construction, plus a strength in depth of about warships of various kinds, and an advantage over Germany of almost Although British naval power was strained and challenged throughout the war, it never experienced a critical shortage.

In contrast, the British army before was tiny in comparison with other powers, with about , men serving. Since the later 19 th century the army had been structured primarily to provide garrisons for the British Empire rather than to fight a European war. An all-volunteer force, the British army had little connection with British society, with officers being drawn mostly from a small section of the upper class, while the working-class regarded military service as a last resort or a disgrace.

Attempts since to create a volunteer reserve for home defence known as the Territorial Force an exact translation of the German Landwehr achieved little success, and even including the Territorials at full mobilisation the British army was on paper barely , men. This reflected a general attitude among the population as supportive of the British Empire and defensively patriotic, but not militaristic. Much the same attitude prevailed in many parts of the Empire.

In the First World War the British were able to draw substantially on soldiers many of them British-born from Canada , Australia , New Zealand and South Africa in particular, and on their Indian army, an all-volunteer force with British officers recruited chiefly from the northern part of India. The shock of this attack swung doubters in the British Cabinet, in Parliament, and as far as can be judged in the wider country, in favour of war. There are significant problems of evidence and methodology in evaluating British working-class attitudes towards the war.

It seems fair to say that for most British people the war was about the German occupation of Belgium , and all that it represented.

The British people saw this as a defensive war, despite the fact that Great Britain had not itself been attacked: a war against German militarism and in defence of wider British security and the principles of international law. Germany was considered to be by far the principal enemy, and the British public saw the war as won when German forces were ejected from France and Belgium in August-November As part of the British declaration of war, Prime Minister Asquith assembled a small inner War Council, which developed by the end of into a War Cabinet.

In August , Great Britain immediately imposed trade sanctions and a naval blockade on the Central Powers, although the effectiveness of this blockade, and the extent to which it contributed to crippling their domestic economies, is a matter of considerable historical dispute.

After some debate, the British Expeditionary Force or BEF as it came to be known was also sent to fight alongside the French army, rather than being used as the basis for training a larger army. The London Stock Exchange also stayed closed until January By then, British sea power had cleared the oceans of German warships, largely confining the conflict to Europe and its surrounding waters. The British government did not expect a short war, and felt that the country had survived the possibility of an early defeat.

The post of Secretary of State for War political head of the army was vacant at the start of the war, and Asquith appointed Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, a famous and respected military hero who was also a member of the House of Lords. Kitchener was notoriously taciturn and secretive, and he made little or no distinction between his political appointment and military rank. His domination of his cabinet colleagues for the first months of the war marked the start of important questions about political-military relationships in a democracy at war.

It is speculated that he hoped that the French and Russians could hold out against the Germans until this army was properly trained and equipped so that he could use it as the instrument of a British-led victory, probably not before Instead, the circumstances of the war led to the new British army being used piecemeal from onwards, while still undertrained and underequipped. The number of volunteers peaked in the first week of September with , coming forward, probably in response to news of the first BEF defeats at the Battles of Mons and Le Cateau.

While each individual had his own reasons for volunteering, the great majority appear to have volunteered as a grimly reasoned response to their country being in danger of defeat, rather than any light-hearted war enthusiasm; economic as well as patriotic factors and a sense of duty also played a role.

Overt propaganda had little part at first in British military volunteerism. Over the next two years, the British army expanded more than tenfold from the original six infantry divisions and one cavalry division of the BEF to over sixty fully equipped infantry divisions and their supporting troops. The Regular, Territorial and Kitchener formations retained a distinctiveness reflecting their origins at least up to the end of Just over 1 million men volunteered by the end of , part of a total of just under 2.

In round figures, 5. Almost from the start, this army also had a British Empire component, including Indian army troops from onwards, Canadian troops from early , and Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders and Newfoundlanders by But despite the centrality of the Western Front to the British experience and memory of the war, many British army and British Empire soldiers served in other theatres of war, including about 3 million who served in the war against the Ottoman Empire , over 1 million of them British rather than from the Empire.

At any time after there were also about 1 million British troops in Great Britain itself, including those in training, as well as numerous garrisons for India and the Empire around the world. While this mass army, which was unprecedented in British experience, was being recruited, trained and equipped, the British relied on sea power and blockade although in strict legal terms a formal blockade was not declared.

Great Britain financed its war effort at first chiefly by borrowing on the international markets, particularly from the United States , using the funds as loans to its Empire and Allies, or to purchase military equipment, also chiefly from the United States.

This included large subsidies to Russia , and to Italy which entered the war on the Allied side in May The extent of this borrowing tied the United States into financial support of an Allied victory long before its entry into the war in April , augmenting British diplomacy and a well-organised British propaganda campaign aimed mostly at American elite public opinion.

The British also relied on diplomacy to isolate their enemies, to win sympathy in other neutral countries, and to encourage others to enter the war on their side. The big difference from all previous wars that the British had fought using the same strategy was the immense financial cost and dislocation the longer the war lasted, coupled with its exceptionally heavy casualties as the product of mass industrialised warfare and trench deadlock.

While their own soldiers were being trained and rushed into battle, the British relied for land power chiefly on the forces of France and Russia. The entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war on the side of the Central Powers in late October severed British strategic communications with Russia through the Black Sea, and potentially threatened both the Suez Canal and India.

The British along with all other great powers on both sides wrongly assumed that the Ottoman army would collapse with the first attacks, and that the chief problems would be the political ones of how to partition the Ottoman Empire between the victorious Allies. As well as defending the Suez Canal and mounting an offensive into Mesopotamia , chiefly with Indian army troops, the British made an innovative use of sea power, the brainchild of Winston Spencer Churchill , First Lord of the Admiralty political head of the Royal Navy , to force the Dardanelles with warships in February and reach Constantinople.

When this failed, a British-led force of British Empire and French troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula in April in the hope of clearing the Dardanelles. This landing was expected to prompt naval and military support from Russia, and bring the Balkan countries into the war on the Allied side, but in this, British diplomacy failed.

After an additional landing in August had also failed to achieve victory, the British evacuated Gallipoli in January The British attempt to win a cheap success in Mesopotamia also ended in failure in April , with the surrender of British Empire forces at Kut-el-Amara. The year had been disastrous for the British; they did not win a single decisive battle on land or sea, and mostly suffered heavy defeats. This was a reflection of British political and military ambitions and weaknesses at the start of the war.

They had tried to mount two substantial land campaigns, one on the Western Front in support of much larger French attacks, and one against the Ottoman Empire, without the trained troops or resources to do either properly. At the same time the Royal Navy was under pressure from the first of two German unrestricted submarine warfare campaigns, in February to September , and British industry was not yet geared up for the war. Together with the continuing failure at Gallipoli, increasing dissatisfaction with Kitchener among his colleagues, and a sense that the war effort lacked political direction, this provoked a change of government.

On 25 May, Asquith formed a coalition government with the Unionists, including senior Unionists in his Cabinet. The complaints of the generals that they were not receiving adequate supplies of shells, and that Great Britain could not yet run two separate major land campaigns, were well founded.

After the failure at Gallipoli the British largely went onto the defensive against the Ottoman Empire until On the Western Front the key to overcoming the defensive deadlock was artillery firepower and shells on a previously unimagined scale, augmented by technological innovations, such as the development of air warfare almost from nothing in the course of the war; the invention and first use of tanks in September ; increases in infantry firepower; and the training to employ all these innovations in a unified manner.

By the British army on the Western Front had nearly 6, artillery pieces of all calibres: in practice, the only restrictions on the number of artillery shells fired in an attack were of transport, and over , rounds fired in twenty-four hours was not impossible.

Russia was also the first to mobilize its troops fully, and this ultimately halted almost all forms of diplomacy, with the French following suit by increasing their own mandatory conscription period. As for Britain; although they had a significantly less public approach to preparing for war, there were still some considerably formal meetings, such as that of the Committee of Imperial Defence CID which had more or less decided what form support for France would take in the event of German provocation [32].

It must be noted Britain never attributed herself to such a view, regardless of the inherent antipathy felt towards its noisy neighbour. This thesis has largely attempted to dismiss the notion that Britain was primarily to blame for the European descent to war in However, the burden of war can not be placed upon a country without any real concrete war plans, and this is where Germany stands alone. Weltpolitik, at its very core, was inflammatory and designed to challenge the existing pecking order.

Despite the quarrels of July , the latest in a string of a turbulent Baltic region, it was the German long term desires for hegemony that pushed sleeping giants, such as Russia, to full scale mobilization and thus triggered the unavoidable cataclysm that would follow. Hamilton and Holger H. Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing.

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Many thanks! Donations are voluntary and not required to download the e-book - your link to download is below. Does Britain bear the primary responsibility for World War I? Jay Stoll.