First Great War

TBD: Spain, Portugal, Poland, Romania, everyone in the Americas, Iran

The First Great War, often abbreviated as FGW or 1GW, was a major global conflict that began on __ and ended on __. Its belligerents included much of Europe, __, and __, with fighting taking place across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia(?). New technology, including the recent invention of the airplane, trench warfare, and especially chemical weapons made it one of the deadliest conflicts in history. An estimated 9 million soldiers died in combat, with another 5 million civilian deaths as a result of military actions, hunger, and disease.[2] Millions more died in genocides within __ and the __ pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war.

French expansion into Morocco caused the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905, from which France emerged victorious on paper but diplomatically isolated, with Britain forming an alliance with Prussia-Germany. The immediate cause of the war was the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911, in which France deployed troops to Morocco to put down a rebellion in April and Germany, fearing a French annexation of the country, responded by occupying the port of Agadir on 1 July. Fighting broke out between the French and Prusso-German expeditions, diplomacy failed to defuse the tensions, and France declared war on Prussia-Germany on 21 July; the system of alliances pulled Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire into the war by the start of August.

The Western Front, along the eastern borders of France, quickly bogged down into a stalemate defined by costly trench warfare, particularly focused around the Allied siege of the French fortifications at Luxembourg, where repeated offensives and counter-offensives resulted in massive casualties for both sides but little progress for either. The Central Front, along Austria's western borders, likewise saw a bloody stalemate with a war of attrition fought in the Alps and other rough terrain. The Eastern Front...

In 1912, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia formed the Balkan League and attacked Austria and Turkey, joining the war on the Allied side. Campaigns were also waged between the combatant powers' colonies and client states in North and West Africa (though ironically Morocco, the original focus of the war, saw little fighting for most of it), India, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, and the Caribbean, over the course of which the Allies were able to partially or fully occupy most of France's overseas colonies. However a number of Allied attempts to invade the Ottoman Empire via the Middle East and the Russian Empire via Central Asia were repelled.

Amidst a flagging French offensive, the French garrison of Luxembourg mutinied on 25 April 1915 and surrendered the fort to the Allies. Mutiny spread further and the French defensive line collapsed within weeks, forcing the French government to surrender on 8 June, shortly before its own fall. With their strongest ally knocked out of the war, the remaining Central Powers collapsed over the course of the summer: the Hungarian crownland abolished its personal union with Austria in June, effectively seceding from the Austrian Empire and joining the Allied war effort, forcing Austria to surrender in August. The Russian tsar was overthrown in July and the new provisional government surrendered in September, and finally the Ottoman Empire surrendered on 30 October in the face of the Arab Revolt, bringing the war to an end.

The war was profoundly destabilizing and its end and aftermath saw a wave of revolutions and uprisings in both defeated and victorious countries, including the aforementioned French and Russian Revolutions during the war's last months as well as the Irish Crisis in Great Britain and the Second German Revolution and dissolution of Prussia-Germany after its end. In its wake numerous new countries in Europe and the Middle East gained their independence, and the Balkan War over the spoils of war broke out between the former allies of the Balkan League quickly after the Ottoman surrender. Final peace terms were settled at the Berlin Peace Conference in 1916-17, most notably the Treaty of Sanssouci between the Allies and France, but these were insufficient to prevent the future re-emergence of tensions culminating in the outbreak of the Second Great War.