The World Wars

War has changed...

"War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope"

– Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883

Unless you've been living under a rock in Antarctica for the past 80-odd years, there is a chance you've heard of the World Wars. They were some of the most devastating conflicts ever waged by mankind. Even today there are still noticeable economic, demographic, and ecological effects from the raw amount of destruction wrought during both wars. For all intents and purposes, the World Wars are the closest we have ever gotten to Warhammer 40,000.

A brief introduction is difficult to write, but for World War I, M.A.I.N.(Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism) largely sums it up. When most people think of WWI, they envision trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, and massive artillery barrages. Meanwhile, World War II can be summarized as some dickhead using conspiracy theories about Jews and geopolitics to start a war that rapidly boiled into a massive clusterfuck. When people think WWII, they typically think of Nazis, D-Day, America, the Holocaust, and maybe the Battle of Britain/Pearl Harbor/Stalingrad, depending on where they're from.

The World Wars have served as inspiration for hundreds of games, uncounted thousands of novels and comics, hundreds of movies, dozens of franchises, and overall have left a lasting impact on most of the globe, with the only minor caveat being South America. If you were to go anywhere in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, the Middle East, North Africa, China, or Russia and ask people to share stories of their relatives from either conflict, there is a good chance that someone will have a story for you to hear.

The World Wars resulted in the end of unmatched European global dominance, the collapse of the great imperial powers, and the rise of the United States and Soviet Union until the latter's collapse in 1991. The world we currently lived in has been made entirely possible by the tragedy that was the two World Wars.

Prelude

During the Industrial Revolution, Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century kicked off with the Napoleonic Wars when industrialization was building up steam in England, and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers^1,2. The American Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era and saw about 600,000-750,000 people dead but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and the issue of Slavery had been resolved. The Franco-Prussian War was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling preview of things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Many Europeans figured that in this new civilized age big wars were a thing of the past, that if war happened it would be resolved quickly with one side throwing in the towel and cutting their losses when things turned south. In the Spring of 1914 few in Europe realized that they were sitting on not only a political powder keg but also a barrel of napalm.

There are two important factors to consider in the buildup to the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand. In the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 yards, was supported by muzzle-loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1 km, and was supplied by ox carts. Meanwhile, steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. By 1914, the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by breech-loading guns that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air, raining a spray of shrapnel over a wide area, machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute, and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, submachine guns, and chemical weapons had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were less than useless on this new kind of battlefield, and the book needed to be re-written from page one.

Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an industrialized nation could turn more of its population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do. As a specific example, Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of its population even at the peak of its power, whereas Germany mobilized nearly 20% of its population during the Great War. This period of peace had consequences in that no one had any good idea how to wage war with or against these newfangled contraptions besides sending in the next wave. People were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London whose dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich whose mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their family, job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with on a daily basis). If a civil war happened and a new noble house ended up in charge while they and their family and friends got through unharmed, they weren't going to care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties and wasn't a huge dick. There was a king somewhere and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all well and good, but politics was generally an abstract that had little to do with their everyday lives.

This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and escalated throughout the Age of Enlightenment as mass propaganda started to become a thing, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their weird languages and customs. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to instill these ideals into everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations with nationalistic populations and governments and other influential groups fond of egging nationalistic sentiment on, it doesn't take much to get them at each other's throats and keep them there.

Intertwined with nationalism is the issue of "Balance of Power"; since the end of the Thirty Years War, the various European powers had been very conscious about preventing any one nation from becoming too powerful and exerting their authority over everyone else. None of them wanted to fight a massive war that would screw everyone else over, and for the most part this rule was followed by everyone except Napoleon, who had great ambitions for France and is mostly vilified for that reason, among others.

This was one of the motivating factors behind such actions as the race to colonize Africa, the "Great Game" between Russia & Britain over India, the War of Spanish Succession where Britain and the Holy Roman Empire fought to prevent the union of France & Spain, or the clusterfuck that was the Crimean War, where a dispute over churches in the Ottoman Empire led to Britain and France declaring war on Russia, only for neither side to gain anything and lose a lot of men and respect. Napoleon had gotten damn near close to completely dominating Europe, but the alliance system played a major role in ensuring no one would get too sabre-rattly... up until Germany unified and changed the whole playing field, leaving politicians desperate and uncertain as to how far Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to go to prove Germany's prestige as a rising power. The result was an arms race that turned into a giant powder keg, which would inevitably explode with the right spark.

Either way, the full implications of all these changes were not really appreciated until it was too late. It's not that people completely had their heads up their asses, mind you. The officers of 1900-14 had taken note of developments in the Boer War and the conflicts in China. Otto von Bismarck was smart enough to see that Europe was a powder keg, and the dreadnought arms race was a clear sign of things being unsettled. Some ideas such as armoured combat land vehicles had been speculated on by the likes of H.G. Wells, and there was some experimentation with armoured cars and things that might evolve into tanks during the first years of the 20th century. Even so, the scope of the shift was underappreciated, especially since there were still plenty of conservative voices in prominent places (both in the military and government) who'd downplay or ignore new technological developments and until things were tested they'd often be seen as voices of moderation against radicals and doomsayers with zero practical experience. Their disillusionment would be complete, bloody, and brutal.

• ¹The Taiping Rebellion (not to be confused with the Boxer Rebellion) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.
• ²There was also The War of The Triple Alliance (1865-70), in which Paraguay under López decided to Fight half of South America all at once and ended up getting 9 in 10 Paraguan men killed as well as a decent chunk of the women and kids after López tried to use them as soldiers, which kinda spooked Uruguay and Venezuela but Brazil didn't give a rat's ass and just kept shooting. Again it was fairly localized and South America was fairly underdeveloped, though the simple bloody mindedness of the war was an ominous foreboding of what was to come.

The First World War

Over the top, lads (sorry, no joke on this one)

"The War That Will End War."

– H. G. Wells, 1914 (spoiler alert, it was not)

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

Militarism

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

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

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

Alliances

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

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

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

Imperialism

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

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

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

Nationalism

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Factors

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

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

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

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

The Straw that Broke Europe's Back

The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved.

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

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

Hell on Earth

"European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches."

– Virginia Postrel

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

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

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

Campaigns

Western Europe

"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells
And bugles calling for them from sad shires."

– Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

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

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

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

Eastern Europe

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

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

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

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

Ottoman Empire

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

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

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

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

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

Africa

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

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

Pacific

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

Aftermath

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

The Easter Rising

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

The Punitive Expedition

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

The Warlord Era

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

The Empire of the Rising Sun

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

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

Side Note: The Shackleton Expedition and the End of the Age of Heroes

Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic voyage and the perils they faced ending with the miraculous survival of all but three members and the ship's cat after incredible heroism occurred during the First World War in its entirety. Shackleton was sure that the war wouldn't last more than a few months after last hearing that Russia had mobilized and that there were some minor German victories. So what happened to the great hero and his crew of champions? They returned from their epic expedition the middle of 1916. When Shackleton asked the governor of South Georgia Island when the war had ended, the reply was that millions were dying, that Europe was mad, and that the World was mad. Expecting a well deserved hero's welcome, Shackleton and his men found abject, mute horror instead. Most of them volunteered to serve in minesweepers or on the front, and several were killed in action. Shackleton even demanded a frontline position despite his severe heart condition exacerbated by the nightmare he went through, though they resisted until the Allied intervention in the Arctic front of the Russian Civil War, where he worked until the Bolsheviks took that part and the war shifted to the Caucasus and when that was done through a deal with Turkish revolutionaries (more on that below) the chase to the Pacific across Asia. Shackleton himself passed away due to heart complications in 1922, perhaps the last larger than life hero before the world woke up to gritty reality.

The Interwar Period

"This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years."

– Ferdinand Foch, 1919, being spot on

Believing that the world could not endure another such war, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted to set the groundwork for long-term peace between whites and "white equivalents" (Wilson was a massively racist cunt even by that era's standards); he set forth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Unfortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (it was basically an even shittier proto-United Nations, in that at least the UN specialist agencies do important global coordination work). Most significantly, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in Congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European war.

Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge. Of note also was Wilson's hyper nationalism to the point he believed if everywhere was just like America it would be paradise on Earth, ironically being just as stubborn about forcing democracies and decolonisation as his allies were against the League despite the people involved not knowing a single thing about any of this stuff and nations (like Germany) not being too hot on democracies anyway leading to widespread political instability to the point some say (whether true or not) every issue of the modern day can somehow be traced back to this guy. He was also a huge dick on a personal level as well, the man was an exceptionally vile racist in a time when being racist was the norm. Got crippled by a stroke which precluded him from really doing anything mid-1919 onwards, killed his plans for reelection to a third term, then straight up killed him after his term was over.

Near the end of the First World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, which got its name because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war/didn't actively suppress the news of the epidemic, spread rapidly and killed millions thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various conflicts continued at the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French colonial forces, Islamists loyal to the Ottoman Government and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime.

The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarchy and the caliphate a year after the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Lausanne, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing, with the only real big scare being the Bosphorus Straits affair with the Soviets, that was resolved through the Montreaux Convention in the 1930s. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

Compare this to America, which was having some of its best years. The aftermath of WWI and the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty had seen Britain concede that it could no longer maintain the two-power standard, since: 1. it couldn't afford to keep spending that kind of money and 2. this would have required the Royal Navy to compete with the US Navy, which was a friend and ally as opposed to a potential threat. As a result, the US Navy managed to achieve parity with the Royal Navy fairly quickly during the interwar period. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. Presidents Harding and Coolidge lead the country into great economic growth, to the point that most of the world would look to the NYSE as an indicator of economic health. See, unlike the European powers, it hadn't seen the deaths of millions of young men, been forced to reorient itself to the demands of a continental total war, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that happen and was taken over by communists after a civil war like Russia (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war, meaning that the country was flush with cash.

Coolidge would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). Then in October of 1929 the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression., officially earning Hoover a place as one of the worst presidents in American history.

There had been a series of stock market crashes in the US every decade or so during the the 19th century, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment becoming commonplace, loans for buying stock with, a lot of scams and the limits of the real economy which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery.

It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle-scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now tottering under the weight of an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. It culminated in a French occupation of some of the last profitable land left in Germany, the Ruhr valley, and eventually lead to a renegotiation of the payments that would be more generous to the German economy. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across whole states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things didn't seem to be working and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008, after New Deal-era financial regulations were pulled.

Rise of Authoritarians: Italy

See Fascist Italy. Shortly put though, as the Italians are not entirely to blame, this guy named Mussolini created a new ideology that seemed pretty snazzy, called Fascism¹, that combined big government and ultra-nationalist militarism into another toxic ideology that advocated the strength and growth of the state. Italian Fascism is found in a manifesto of sorts written by Giovanni Gentile in the seminal work "The Doctrine of Fascism" for those interested in research. He also ruled for far longer than Hitler did, taking over as "Prime Minister" in 1922 until his removal in 1943.

The Italians conquered Ethiopia to reclaim their national honor after getting wrecked by them, and had a general foreign policy of attempting to promote international fascism. By which of course the end result would be an Italian sphere of influence. This is represented in HOI4 by the Albania tree, the attempts at Turkish influence, and their intervention in the Spanish Civil War along with the Germans. For all intents and purposes, Mussolini seemed very genuine in his intent to promote Fascism across the globe to not only promote Italian interests but to correct the "failures of liberalism" and counter those filthy Communists². It also helps that the leader of such a movement could become wealthy and powerful as a result.

¹Fascism with a capital "F" refers specifically to Italian fascism. With a little "f", it is a noun describing a broad ideology. Nazism is fascist, but not "Fascist". Savvy?

²Fascism was a reaction against the Russian Revolution and the chaos of post-war Italy. Mussolini came to power by leading a bunch of nationalist thugs that beat up Socialists and Communists in Northern Italy and eventually the Italian King and the old-school conservatives made him Prime Minister as he seemed to be effective against them.

Rise of Authoritarians: Germany

In Germany, the economic and political failures of the Weimar Republic soured people on the whole idea of democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the creation of the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party or NSDAP) party to counter them (possibly with help from other Western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations Germany was forced to pay to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, which renegotiated or not, still put a perceived blame for the war unjustly upon them along with a variety of other complicated things that can be blamed on the Nazis. Rounding it off was the Dolchstosslegende, or "stab-in-the-back-myth", that was concocted by butthurt imperial generals like Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats or the historic enemy of Germany, the Jews.

The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and nationalist and antisemitic parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself led to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected President as the candidate of a coalition of nationalist and conservative parties, reigned over Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up for war, and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament were certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France after the bloodbath of the Western Front.

To their credit, in the mid '30s the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany and Italy sent weapons and eventually troops to curbstomp them and test out their new toys on people with wrong opinions, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks that they were legally not supposed to have, and that France and the Soviets were doing the same thing with the communist revolutionaries. So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in the border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Then shit started to get real.

In 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, which was a direct violation of both treaties. Britain and France were concerned, but neither country was ready to go to war again, so they let it slide. Hitler took this as confirmation that they wouldn't do shit to stop him and ramped up his plans for rearmament and conquest. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria more or less peacefully, then walked into Czechoslovakia and took the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans. The rest of the continent was getting increasingly worried, but Hitler super-duper promised that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition, cross his heart and hope to die. Britain and France were desperate to avoid war, and Hungary and Poland also wanted some of Czechoslovakia's turf, so together they strong-armed Czechoslovakia into signing the Munich Agreement, officially ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that the Agreement was "peace for our time" when he came home from the negotiations on 30 September 1938. A pissed-off Winston Churchill correctly predicted that Hitler wasn't going to stop at the Sudetenland, and was proven right when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then started side-eyeing Poland and the former German territories it now controlled.

Rise of Authoritarians: Japan

In the 19th century the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would come by and stomp all over them like they did China and Southeast Asia. During the Tokugawa period, military technology had basically stagnated as there were no pressing internal or external threats that required shootier guns or better tactics to sort out. There was much anxiety in the Tokugawa Shogunate about this (and even a limited attempt at army modernization by at least one Japanese domain) but things came to a head in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour and ended two centuries of isolation at cannon-point. The end of the Sakoku and bombardments by US and Royal Navy ships drove the necessity of modernization home. The Shogunate bought foreign guns and ships, lifted restrictions on shipbuilding and sent diplomatic missions abroad, but the pace of modernization and Westernization really picked up after the Meiji Restoration. By 1914 Japan had a solid public education system and set of universities, a well-developed rail network, a respectable industrial base and an army and navy which had beaten the Russian Empire. In the Great War they drove the German Empire out of the Pacific. Japan had arrived on the world stage, but despite that they were still concerned about the West and its influence, what with Britain and France being two of the largest and most acquisitive colonial powers on Earth. The Japanese saw what had happened to their neighbors and wanted no part of it. Combine this with a historic extreme hard on for cultural and political independence that can still be observed to this very day, and you start to get the anxiety faced by Imperial Japan.

Even so while the Meiji Restoration was successful in its general goals, it had its faults. It did end the Tokugawa class system and introduced a parliament, but it was still largely a system set up for the benefit of a small number of well connected oligarchs. The franchise was limited to only 1% of the population, with the prominent lordlings and industrialists who'd backed the Emperor in the Boshin War and their kids being disproportionately prominent in Japanese society. There would be considerable push for reform after the Great War (in particular there was universal male suffrage in 1925), but there would also be strong pushback by conservatives and militarist ultranationalists, especially after a huge earthquake devastated Tokyo in 1926 and the Great Depression came along to wallop the Japanese economy. Unlike their later partners in the Axis, there was no Japanese Hitler or Mussolini figure who masterminded and led a movement which came to dictate authority. Instead Japan had a collection of right-wing cranks and extremists and a military which was off the chain. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were loyal only to the Emperor (and in practice they just did whatever they wanted and asked the Emperor for permission after the fact) and the Diet had very little power over them at the best of times. Technically the Meiji Parliament continued to putter on, but from 1931-45 it was marginalized and subverted. Whenever prominent liberals and socialists who oppose rampant militarism get ganked by radical thugs who are pardoned by judges who are either on board with the militarists or afraid that they'll get ganked themselves, the power and influence of said nationalist militarists will steadily grow until they can more or less do as they please, specifically getting their imperialism on.

Even though the Japanese had managed to modernize rapidly in a short span of time and kicked the shit out of the Russians, they were still often seen as inferiors by white people, "yellow monkeys who could only copy what white folk invented" and other such nonsense. Some people like Wilhelm II and some nativist shitheads in the US, Canada and Australia saw the Japanese and East Asians in general as still being lesser, but still capable enough to be a threat ("The Yellow Peril"). When the League of Nations was founded, the Japanese had a seat at the table and the Japanese Ambassador requested that its charter have a non-binding statement on human equality³, which got some support, but Woodrow Wilson vehemently shot it down, mostly because this would require him to see minorities as anything other than evil cockroaches trying to devour the white man, and GOLLY GEE WE CAN'T HAVE THAT NOW CAN WE? This sort of thing breeds animosity at the best of times, and these times were anything but.

Things got worse with the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, which was called by the Allied powers in an effort to prevent another naval arms race like the one that had led into the war. The practical result of the conference and its treaty was to impose strict limits on the size and firepower of capital ships and aircraft carriers and downsize the British, American, and Japanese fleets by scrapping obsolete or unfinished ships. It also saw the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance that had been signed in 1902, since the American delegates made it clear that the US felt threatened by this alliance and the British themselves weren't too sure about it anymore. Japan took both of these actions as an insult, especially the tonnage ratio imposed by the treaty, which was 5:5:3 UK/US/Japan. This meant that for every five tons of capital ship that the British and Americans built, the Japanese were only allowed to have 3 tons. The Japanese militarists and ultranationalists who'd demanded naval parity with the UK and US saw this as an insult, though a number of Japanese Navy officers, including Isoroku Yamamoto, actually supported the treaty, since they knew that Japan could never outproduce the United States. He and the "Treaty Faction" were largely ignored, and when Japan couldn't get better results at the London Naval Treaties in the 1930s, they flipped everyone the bird and started building ships that ignored the treaty limitations.

From the Meiji period onward some prominent Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves⁴, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward. Their first steps were pretty humble, taking back some of the Kuril Islands, Okinawa, etc. Then they stomped into Korea, renamed Taiwan "Formosa" because fuck your local names, and then logically jumped into trying to conquer all of China.

Imperialism and colonialism? No, we're doing this in the name of Asian liberation, friend! A "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" if you will. Pay no mind to the atrocious war crimes we're about to be committing. The Japanese kept this going into the 20th century when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after 1931, by which time the military more or less dictated the course of Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria and made it into a puppet state under the deposed Qing emperor, then invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went (around four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of the Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR efforts). Japanese forces in China occasionally attacked foreign shipping, airliners, and property. Despite this, international reactions were fairly limited — the European powers were too busy worrying about Herr Hitler and Nazi Germany and America had profitable trade agreements with Japan.

Not that Japan was in any way shape or form having a good time. Entire books can be written on all the crap that went down, but before they invaded China things had gotten to the point that there were no real political parties but Army and Navy whose officers near openly murdered each other.

• ³Yes, there was an element of hypocrisy in the Empire of Japan making this statement. But Wilson was probably too racist to understand this or care.
• ⁴See previous footnote, the Japanese were very racist towards Koreans and Chinese, especially during the height of militarism. They just wanted to be the ones who were conquering all of Asia, not the Western powers.

The Second World War

The War in the West

See also Nazis and Fascist Italy.

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the Sitzkrieg, or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military was stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they could win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any Axis & Allies or Hearts of Iron player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in.

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS Hood, the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the Bismarck and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.

American Rearmament

This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war. Chief among them was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US - the only reason that fell through was because the Filipinos could see the Japanese quite obviously eyeing them up - and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, start pouring funds into the military, instituted a peacetime draft, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe, as they had been thirty years previously; they were content to let the Europeans kill each other and live their lives unbothered by the Old World's problems. Besides, the Depression was still going on, and the last thing people wanted was even more misery on top of that. Like Wilson, FDR realized that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, he and the generals and admirals took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-Allied stance by escorting transports, allowing American destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until the Japanese Navy ran up and kicked America in the balls at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and Congress declared war the next day. Recruitment offices were overrun with men willing and eager to fight, and promising officers such as Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Doolittle were given important assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command. Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

Mid-War

The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African campaign and the fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of inexperienced troops and lackluster leadership, poor logistical planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied, with promising results for future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, cutting the Axis army off from resupply and ensuring that they couldn't be evacuated. With the Americans coming in from the west and Montgomery's army in the east, the Axis army in Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare. From there, they began preparing their next operation, which was the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.

While the Allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets were beating the absolute fuck out of each other at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a strategically important city; its position meant that it controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and passage along the Volga River, one of Russia's major waterways. Whoever controlled the city would control both of these critical resources. Besides this, Stalingrad was also a symbolically important city, since it was named after old Josef himself; losing it would have humiliated him and the Red Army. The Germans attacked the city as part of Case Blue, a general invasion of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately for them, city fights were exactly the kind of thing their technology and tactics weren't designed for. The Wehrmacht's superiority over the Red Army at this stage of the war depended on its mobility, shock power, and armored formations. The urban combat in Stalingrad deprived them of all of these advantages, sucking them into a 5-month meat grinder of a siege that functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The Russian 62nd Army fought for literally every inch of the city, fueled by rage, patriotism, and desperation; even when the oil depots were set on fire, the city was bombed into rubble, and the Germans had driven them into a tiny pocket on the banks of the Volga, they refused to quit, hanging on and fighting tooth and nail. Ultimately, the Russians managed to encircle Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army and fight off all attempts at relief from outside the pocket, resulting in the surrender of over 250,000 German soldiers, only 5,000 of whom would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as its rugged, mountainous terrain proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. The Germans had also predicted that Italy would hit the "change team" button and immediately executed Operation Axis, which subdued and dismembered the Italian army, stole all its equipment, and effectively seized control of the country, while a commando raid on Mussolini's prison successfully freed Il Duce. This resulted in Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans, while the Germans dug into the Apennines and refused to shift. This prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

The Normandy landings

"So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide."

– President Barack Obama, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe raid also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1944 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease and having managed to relocate most of its heavy industry beyond the Urals. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the Allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. Overlord had intelligence gathered from old Time-Life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything else they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and led by General Patton would attack Calais. They even went one step further by dressing up the corpse of a dead homeless man as a fake intelligence officer that "drowned" off the coast of "Neutral" Spain, with fake documents of fake landing plans. It was obvious that Churchill had been so shaken by Gallipoli that he wanted to leave nothing to chance this time around.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened, thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. American and British paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to hold back reinforcements and seize or demolish important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed and bombed German positions for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid. Once Normandy had been secured, it was now the beginning of the end.

Victory in Europe

After liberating France and Belgium, the Western Allies marched on Germany's border at the Rhine River while the Soviets blew through Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany before bumrushing Berlin. The Germans launched several desperate counter-attacks to try and break the Allies' will to fight, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the last-ditch offensives in Hungary and Romania. It prevented the Western Allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized that all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar and a paranoid, tyrannical sociopath hell-bent on carving out a swath of European territory to expand Communism and Soviet influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many countries of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Nazis, while the Soviets sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. This is known as VE Day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Heer.

The War in the East

As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack, except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II expected carriers to be important. Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when Admiral Chester Nimitz intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that American and British Naval Intelligence partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders — and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the Yamato, and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

The Manhattan Project

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

– Robert Oppenheimer

"Now we are all sons of bitches."

– Kenneth Bainbridge

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 tons of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is controversial depending on who you ask, and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as the Cold War. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.

Notes

"...We now return to the adventures of Bobby Gill and the Imperium Boys, brought to you by George Rough Ridin' Martin's Jackets. Bundle up tight, because Winter is Coming!"

• Radio! While radio was being used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of mass media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap Volksempfanger radio sets to get one in every german house to feed a steady stream of Nazi propaganda to the German masses. FDR's famous "fireside chats" were made possible by radio, as was the speed and shock power that defined Blitzkrieg.
  • A quirk of Radio of this time was as a major part of the standardization of language. Beforehand most people learned how to speak from their families, friends and neighbours and accents were far more pronounced. While other things such as railways and records had some impact, having a radio set meant that there was a voice being piped into your parlour every day. It also meant that the speaker needed a Radio Voice: something which was legible to the audience especially with the crappy speakers of the early 20th century. In the UK this lead to Received Pronunciation (the clipped middle class UK accent the Imperials use in Star Wars) while in the US they went with the Midatlantic Accent (that sort of posh way you here people talk in old hollywood movies) and eventually a Midwestern Accent.
• During this time science fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed people's lives, there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, radio and pulp magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to a wide audience. Ideas such as Rockets, Robots, the towering cities of the future, day to day life in them and the future of human evolution were all discussed. The downside of this was that there was also a lot of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shovelled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of atomic warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers.
• Art Deco became a thing during this time and remains iconic to this day. Breaking with traditional European styles, its stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments became widely popular. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which was important in an era when cars, planes and trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph.
• Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in assembly line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the gold standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet. On the other hand it could be really fucking boring for the people on the line whose job was to slot one bit of metal into another every twenty seconds for eight hours a day. It would remain king until the Japanese worked out Just-In-Time manufacturing in the 60s.
• These improvements in manufacturing evolved further with the invention of modern quality control. While America did have the largest manufacturing base at the start of WWII, it experienced many teething problems such as explosive shells failing to explode, or vehicle parts not being cross-compatible between factories. And without extremely tight tolerances, many newer technologies couldn’t be developed. New disciplines in measuring tolerances and conforming to standards helped improve the quality of these technologies. After the war, though, these standards were gradually relaxed as meeting them was expensive and American civilian manufacturers had little economic reason to make extremely high quality products, what with most of their competitors trying to rebuild from the war. Ironically enough, it would be the Japanese that would rediscover and improve upon QA tools to become an economic powerhouse in the postwar era.
• The Superhero Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
• In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. The first Conan the Barbarian was written in 1932 and the The Hobbit was released in 1937. The Lord of the Rings was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the '50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but all the pieces were there and coming together.
• Everybody smoked like fucking chimneys. In the late 19th century cigarette-making machines were developed and cigarette companies started using modern advertisement methods. Cigarettes were advertised to soldiers in WWI as a way to "relieve stress" which family members could send to the front as gifts, to women as "torches of freedom" in the 20s and 30s, and in WWII the cigarette companies made deals with the military to provide cigarettes as part of every soldier's ration pack. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was first found in 1939 by Franz Muller (and highly politically motivated at that, as Hitler famously hated cigarette smoke), but his work was met with reasonable if misplaced skepticism given that it was done in Nazi Germany and it would not be until 1950 that non-Nazis came to the same conclusions. (Hitler of all people was famed for his anti-smoking stance; he harangued his friends and cronies endlessly about the negative effects of cigarettes and even offered them gold watches as an incentive to quit.) By 1945, the average American adult smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year. True Anti-Smoking campaigns like we see today, and the general trend of people quitting smoking is only a very recent occurrence though. Just zap into any archived footage of a talk show on TV of that time and you will be amazed at how casually everyone has their own personal ash tray and is sucking on cigars and cigarettes.
  • As a sidenote, Cigarette brands were one of the avenues American cultural influence started to slowly entrench itself into the public consciousness in western countries and revolutionized product advertisement. Before WW2, most countries had their own Tobacco industries, especially France and Germany, and every country their own local brands of cigarettes. The introduction of the much smoother American Virginia tobaccos changed global tastes in tobacco significantly; the old traditional European brands (like Roth-Händle or Gauloises before they were bought out) were reviled by younger people who didn't enjoy the sensation of having their lungs forcibly cut out by Cigarettes with lovely nicknames such as "Lung Torpedo". Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Camel were pushed by novel advertising strategies that emphasized brand recognition over the quality of the product itself, so if you wonder why Coca-Cola somehow still feels the need to spend millions each year on advertising, this is why.

The appeal of the World Wars

These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across entire continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern war was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval and air wars in the Pacific, the grinding hell in the Eastern Front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities. Ernest Shackleton is perhaps the perfect example. He journeyed out to the Antarctic believing the war would soon be over, then returned to find that it had become a nightmare with no end in sight, a unique perspective.

Of these two conflicts, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, and the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear "right" side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for any convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the only motivation the common people had to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down hard. It's hard to make easily dehumanized rank-and file villains for a narrative when the soldiers of neither side actually want to be fighting at all.

When it was all over, the country that got blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved, so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a pointless and wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WWI was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. Richthofen was the most famous fighter ace of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, as a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down when a few small mutinies arose over the matter. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive and as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other. Sometimes temporary truces were declared for around kilometer wide sectors to clear corpses, but that was about it.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs. Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium and probably forever). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WWII also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WWI, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember the deeds of Simo Häyhä or Audie Murphy than say, Alvin York (They all have Sabaton songs though!)).

As a result, a solid majority of Alternate History fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.

World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings

• A lot of stuff from the Imperium of Man, especially the Death Korps of Krieg, the Armageddon Steel Legion, and the Valhallan Ice Warriors.
• Dieselpunk is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
• Bolt Action, Flames of War, and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
• Star Wars takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
• Wolfenstein, both the classic and reboot settings, are focused on fighting the Nazis and their Wunderwaffen. WWII gets dragged on by many decades thanks to some crazy antics including transdimensional portals, spacebases on Venus, etc.
• Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
• The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Poland, and Russia that's in the middle of transitioning from Imperial to Soviet, in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state. America also makes an appearance as a major air power, favoring battleship blimps and other wacky aircraft, in a campaign very reminiscent of Laurence of Arabia.
• Never Going Home is a fairly new RPG system that takes place from 1916-1918 where fighting in the Somme ripped open a goddamn hole in reality, and now eldritch beings are whispering in the ears of soldiers and telling them how to summon demons powered by the general misery caused by the conditions of trench warfare. Fun times!

Historical Time Periods
Deep Time:	Prehistory
Premodern:	Stone Age - Bronze Age - Classical Period - Dark Age - High Middle Ages - Renaissance
Modern:	Age of Enlightenment - Industrial Revolution - The World Wars - The Cold War - Post-Cold War