7.7: The Costs of War

The Costs of War

The European powers struggled to adapt to the brutality of modern war, with its advanced artillery, machine guns, poison gas, and submarines. Until the spring of 1917, the Allies possessed few effective defensive measures against German submarine attacks, which had sunk more than a thousand ships by the time the United States entered the war. The rapid addition of American naval escorts to the British surface fleet and the establishment of a convoy system countered much of the effect of German submarines. Shipping and military losses declined rapidly, just as the American army arrived in Europe in large numbers. Although many of the supplies still needed to make the transatlantic passage, the physical presence of the army proved to be a fatal blow to German plans to dominate the Western Front. Where Germany had numerical superiority on the Western Front in April 1918, the addition of American troops throughout the rest of the year provided the Allies with a decisive military advantage (see Figure 7.7.1). In March 1918, Germany tried to take advantage of the withdrawal of Russia and its new single-front war before the Americans arrived, with the Kaiserschlacht (Spring Offensive), a series of five major attacks. By the middle of July 1918, every one had failed to break through the Western Front. Then, on August 8, 1918, two million men of the American Expeditionary Forces joined the British and French armies in a series of successful counter-offensives that pushed the disintegrating German lines back across France. The gamble of the Spring Offensive had exhausted Germany’s military, making defeat inevitable. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated at the request of the German military leaders and a new democratic government agreed to an armistice on November 11, 1918, hoping that by embracing Wilson’s call for democracy, Germany would be treated more fairly in the peace talks. German military forces withdrew from France and Belgium and returned to a Germany teetering on the brink of chaos. November 11 is still commemorated by the Allies as Armistice Day (called Veterans’ Day in the United States).

 

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "Rifle strength of allied and German armies on the western front," Leonard Porter Ayres, in the Public Domain.

In all between 16 and 19 million soldiers died in World War I along with 7 to 8 million civilians (before the influenza pandemic of 1919). Some of the worst battles were:

• Verdun: 976,000 casualties (Feb.-Dec. 1916) (Figure 7.7.2)
• Brusilov Offensive: Nearly 2,000,000 casualties (June-Sept. 1916)
• Somme: 1,219,201 casualties (July-Nov. 1916)
• Passchendaele: 848,614 casualties (July-Nov. 1917)
• Spring Offensive: 1,539,715 casualties (March 1918)
• 100 Days Offensive: 1,855,369 casualties (Aug.-Nov. 1918)

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "German remains from the Battle of Verdun recovered in 1919," Library of Congress, in the Public Domain.

Civilian populations were also targeted. While bombing cities from airplanes was not yet common, naval blockades were also an effective way of putting pressure on civilians. Even if a nation was relatively self-sufficient in food production under normal circumstances, war was not a normal circumstance. The British blockade of Germany prevented not only war supplies but food from reaching the German people, resulting in a half million civilian deaths.  For the Europeans, World War One was a “Total War” involving every level of society.

By the end of the war, more than 4.7 million American men had served in all branches of the military. The United States lost over one hundred thousand men, with fifty-three thousand dying in battle, and even more from disease. Their terrible sacrifice, however, paled before the European death toll. After four years of stalemate and brutal trench warfare, France had suffered almost a million and a half military dead and Germany even more. Both nations lost about 4 percent of their populations to the war. By contrast, Serbia’s population had fallen by nearly 17% by the war’s end with the Ottoman Empire nearly matching them at 15%. 

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): "Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with “Spanish flu” at an emergency hospital ward at Camp Funston in 1918," Public Domain in Wikimedia Commons

Even as war raged on the Western Front, an even deadlier threat loomed. In the spring of 1918, a new strain (H1N1) of the influenza virus appeared in the farm country of Kansas and hit nearby Camp Funston (image 7.7.3), one of the largest army training camps in the nation. The virus spread like wildfire. Between March and May 1918, fourteen of the largest American military training camps reported outbreaks of influenza. Some of the infected soldiers carried the virus on troop transports to France. By September 1918, influenza had spread to all training camps in the United States.

The second wave of the virus was even deadlier than the first. Unlike most flu viruses, the H1N1 strain struck down those in the prime of their lives rather than old people and young children. A disproportionate number of influenza victims were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. In Europe, influenza hit troops and civilians on both sides of the Western Front. The disease was misnamed “Spanish Influenza,” due to accounts of the disease that first appeared in the uncensored newspapers of neutral Spain while the warring nations tried to suppress the news of the disease for propaganda purposes.

The Influenza Pandemic infected about 500 million people worldwide and resulted in the deaths of between fifty and a hundred million people; possibly more. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion; influenza infected nearly a third and killed between 5% and 10%. Reports from the surgeon general of the army revealed that while 227,000 American soldiers had been hospitalized from wounds received in battle, almost half a million suffered from influenza. The worst part of the wartime epidemic struck during the height of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the fall of 1918 and weakened the combat capabilities of both the American and German armies. During the war, more soldiers died from influenza than combat. But the pandemic continued to spread after the armistice, with a death toll of nearly 20% of those infected, as opposed to about 0.1% in regular flu epidemics. Four waves of worldwide infection spread before cases and deaths finally began fading in the early 1920s. No cure was ever found.

Review Questions

• Why was the arrival of American troops such a decisive moment in the War?
• How did the war contribute to Influenza Pandemic?