What Led Up To The Great War Essay

60 million casualties. 20 million soldiers and innocent civilians’ dead. Another 20 million that left the battlefield wounded. These are just some of the results of what historians call today as “The Great War”. As we dig deeper into the reasons for the outbreak of one of the most atrocious wars in history, we see a common trend that references the crisis of 1914 as the reason for the outbreak of war. When we look at the chain of events that led up to the war, aka the July Crisis, we see that it starts with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian national Gavrilo Princip, followed by the rapid war movements demonstrated by the Austrian-Hungarian government towards Serbia. It was at this point that war seemed inevitable. The Crisis of 1914, the assassination and events that followed helped to shape the world into what we see it as today, as well as setting the stage for a more technological devastating war thirty years later. Even though the motive is not totally clear, we still know that what happened on the fateful day of June 28, …show more content…
It united and broke nations that were all the way across the world and led them all under a single cause. You had nations fighting from the shores of Kamchatka in the Eastern Russian regions all the way to the fronts in France, this was truly the first time the world has seen a war on this scale. Throughout the rest of the book, Fromkin goes on to give 2 main conclusions dealing with the causes of the war. These reasons boiled down to the German and Austrian Empires and their battles that led to the conflicts that we now know as World War 1. As Professor Magagna detailed in his lecture, when it came to the balance of power during this period, the conflicts of this era caused these players to choose war over attempted peace. (Lecture,