Twentieth Century: Apex of Savagery - Part 1: The Beginning of Woes

The "40 Years- War" between WWI and WWII saw the greatest inhumanity to man ever. One would be hard pressed to find a similar epoch in human history to compare the total depravity of man as expressed during the first half of the 2oth century. Empires fell, millions of people were murdered by the state, wars ensued on nearly every continent, personages arose and fell as the fortunes of their countries rose and fell. How did it all start?

World War I essentially started because Russia activated their armies on Germany's Eastern Front as a way to politically and militarily lend support to Serbia. Considering that Russia had a pact with France to wage war as allies against Germany this was a very volatile situation. With two very large countries on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, the Kaiser had to act quickly and yet he sent communique's to the Czar to stand down before making the final plunge into conflict. Unfortunately, this was met with silence. Therefore, Germany had to activate their reserves for fear of a Russian Invasion of Prussia. Which in fact did come. The rest is history. Russia's attempt at brinksmanship started World War One and when it began who could know how the entire world would change, and change for the worse, in just 5 short years.

Millions perished on the battlefields of Europe. Russians suffered nearly 4 million dead and left the Czar completely open to domestic political chaos. The men that normally would have protected the Czar during any other time were now dead in Poland and Ukraine. Germany unleashed an evil not yet comprehended in the form of Lenin. His advent in Russian history would bring to fruition 100 years of socialist thought and utopian philosophy that would come to enslave billions of people! Socialism would come to be imposed upon vast populations at the point of a bayonet and the stockbutt of the rifle. The Russian Revolution which ushered in Communism was but the beginning of woes.

In spite of the losses in dead and wounded, by 1918 Germany had won World War I. On every front, Germany was victorious by any standard when compared to the British, French, Italian, Austrian and Russian casualties. The Russian army was decimated by war and simply melted away leaving the Russian frontier completely open to German advancement. The Germans walked, thats right, walked into Ukraine unopposed. The French Army, by 1917, had completely given up and rebelled against their Army High Command and refused en masse and in typical French fashion to go on the offensive. Their armies simply sat and waited for the war to come to an end. Yes, Paris had been saved by the combined armies of Britain and France, however they were in no position to move forward and reclaim the French territories taken by Germany. The Western Front had ground to a halt.

Italy, which showed so much passion to punish Austria ended up in the end to be a liability for the British and French. Italy, at first boldly attacked Austria in an attempt to take back territory they felt was occupied unjustly by the Austrians, however the Italians could not sustain themselves against the combined armies of Germany and Austria once they were counterattacked and thus Italy too was bitterly routed with Rome left dangerously open to German occupation. The British had to peel off troops from the Western Front to hedge up the weak defenses on the Italian front.

In the middle of this vast conflaguration of war was Austria. The axel upon which the wheel turned, she was the victim of a Slavic plot to undermine and perhaps overthrow this ancient kingdom with the murder of the ArchDuke of Austria-Hungary in 1914 and yet, could not muster the power to defeat Russia or Italy during the Great War thus relying more and more on the more masterful German Army to stay alive. Her destruction and fall would end up breaking Eastern Europe into defenseless petty states that would become the pawns for the next World War.