How the war began

For our first unit in history, we focused on World War 1, and how it began. As a class and in groups, we have talked about the many ways it could have started. In class we watched three videos to help us understand about what happened. To reflect on that we learned we created a mind map of many reasons why the war could have happened. At first I was very confused with all the different countries involved, and how such a small fight can turn into something massive involving countries all over the world.

After thinking about how the war started, I believe nationalism started WW1. The  reason is, because there was competition over land between countries. Each country wanted to be strongest out of all the other countries. The British had a very large empire and controlled a lot of land including India, North America, and parts of Africa. Germany however, had a very small empire therefore, they were jealous of the British, and tried to redeem more land. If you think about it, if each country is trying to expand their empire, something is going to go wrong. There isn’t enough land for each country to have a huge empire. If countries weren’t so competitive and all wanting to be the strongest, this war might not have happened.

(Figure 1)
In this image it shows what which part of the world each country controlled. As you can see, the British is in red and that they controlled a lot. You can also see that Germany is in brown and they owned barley anything. It is very easy to see why the Germans would want to control and expand their empire.

Figure 2)
This image are the alliances. Britain, France and Russia were fighting against Germany, Austria and Italy. These were the countries that started the war. This is related to nationalism because each alliance wanted to be better than the other, and were competing to have the best empire.

Since Germany didn’t have a huge empire, for Germany to gain more land they needed to expand their navy. This triggered the British, because they have always considered themselves to have the strongest navy. The British had a navy called the Royal Navy, no one had tried to compete with it. When the Germans expanded their own navy, the British were annoyed Germans. As a result tensions between the British and Germany were increased and lead to the war.

Because of nationalism tensions were all ready so high. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the AustrianHungarian throne, and his wife were shot dead by a Serbian terrorist, who was a member of the Black Hand terrorist group. This event sparked the start of the war. Austria then blamed blamed Serbia. Serbia then needed help and asked for their allies (Britain, France and Russia) for help. At the same time Austria was asking for help from Germany. On July 28 1914 Australia/Hungary declared war on Serbia. Before the murdering of Archd eke Franz Ferdinand there was already a war starting because of nationalism. If tensions weren’t already so high, this event probably not start a war.

In groups we made a visual to answer the question (why world war 1 began). All of my group members, Mimi and Kate,had different opinions. However, we all shared our ideas andi concluded that we agreed with the arms race for being the main reason of the war starting. Our visual is about the Arms Race, our video will explain why we thought the Arms Race was the reason on why the war began. 

Hope you enjoy 🙂

Now that I have done this project I have a better understanding why the war began and after doing this project a few times, I don’t think I will ever forget how World War 1 began. World War 1 was such a important part of history, and it was interesting to learn about. It’s also important to learn about the war so we don’t repeat history.