Over the years many different opinions on why World Was 1 started, many controversial and some are very far fetched. I am able to pull different reasons from almost each theory and piece them together into my opinion on why The Great War started, all beginning with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28th, 1914. This specific death launched a series of events which lead to the First World War.
I believe the immediate cause for World War 1 was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his pregnant wife Sophie. Ferdinand of Austria was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the throne of Austria and Hungary. It is believed that the assassination was planned out by the Serbian terrorist group The Black Hand and the actual deed of killing the Archduke and his wife Sophie was carried out by a Bosnian revolutionary named Gavrilo Princip.
Before WW1 was triggered, a number of defence alliances existed between the major European countries. What this meant was that if one country declared war on another, the other countries would also have to enter the conflict because it was in the treaty they agreed. Britain, France, Ireland and Russia were part of an alliance called the Triple Entente, while Germany aligned itself with Austria-Hungary known as the Central Powers.
Austria-Hungary, like many in countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack on and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Slav nationalism once and for all. As Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention–which would likely involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Britain as well. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers collapsed. Within a week, seven major nations were at war. Germany stepped in to defend Austria-Hungary and decided that the best way to start invading Serbia was to march through Belgium who had neutrality with Great Britain. So now we have five countries at battle. Russia was allied with Serbia, that’s 6, and finally France was partnered with the U.K. so by law they were also now involved. Seven days, seven countries, World War 1 had begun.
Our in class learning for this mainly consisted of watching videos and taking notes. We were told to focus mainly on the points that could have really lead to start of World War 1.
As you can see my notes are focused mainly around the ideas of Germany’s jealousy towards Britain and how the murder Archduke Ferdinand were the main two causes for throwing everyone into panic and into WW1.
The last part to this section of our unit was to create a visual that would explain our theory for why The Great War began. For this I was partnered with Izzy (new to PLP) and Mimi.
We created the video simply by drawing on a white board, I think that’s obvious, and then speeding it up later so it could match up with the audio.
I thought this unit was really fun since I love studying the wars. I’m really excited to see where the rest of this unit will take us in history.
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