While World War II is still widely discussed and analyzed, the horrors of the first have all but faded from memory. For more than four years, millions of people around the world were killed by newly discovered weapons of destruction, such as artillery, tanks, poison gas, aircraft, flamethrowers, and many others. It was first a modern conflict that united science and war in a new, terrifying way.
According to some estimates, could have died in the war more15 million people, although the actual number is probably much higher. Sadly, about 13 million of them were civilians who perished from starvation, disease, massacres, civil wars and the many other tragedies caused by the Great War.
10. Surafend Massacre
December 10, 1918 group ANZAC (short for Australian and New Zealand) soldiers surrounded the village of Surafend in Palestine. women and children, the unit proceeded to massacre the male population of a small village using guns, bayonets and heavy sticks, killing between 40 and 100 people and burning most of the village buildings .
This became known as the Surafenda massacre, carried out in retaliation for the murder of an ANZAC soldier by a local thief. It was one of the most shocking episodes of the war, although the perpetrators were never identified or charged. The Surafenda massacre can be understood in context wider tensions between Palestinian Arabs and the occupying ANZAC forces throughout the war.
9. Famine in Mount Lebanon
Before the war, Mount Lebanon was a semi-autonomous Turkish region within what is now Lebanon, whose economy relied heavily on silk production and trade. Beginning in 1914, numerous war-related factors converged to trigger one of the worst famines in the region's history, resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people over four years.
Maritime trade was initially disrupted by an Allied blockade in response to the Ottomans' accession to the Central Powers. This was followed by an Ottoman-imposed land blockade. , as well as a devastating locust plague that destroyed crops in Palestine and Syria.
Accounts from within the city tell horrific tales of starvation, including instances of cannibalism. The ordeal continued until the British and French defeated the Ottomans in 1918, when they destroyed between one third and one half of the population of Mount Lebanon.
8. Germany
Almost immediately after the war began British blockade Germany, aimed at starving the German population and breaking its will to fight. While this was hardly effective at first, the ongoing shortage of supplies actually began to hinder Germany's war effort by 1917, as officers found it difficult to obtain food or warm clothing for their units operating on the brutal front.
For civilians in German cities, the situation had gone from bad to catastrophic by the end of the war. This was exacerbated by factors other than the blockade, such as the severe shortage of agricultural labor throughout Germany, which led to its worst phase in the winter of 1916–1917. By the end of the war, more 770 000 people died of starvation, and in the following years, millions more died from malnutrition and other related causes.
7. Belgium
The German army entered Belgium in August 1914, beginning one of the most brutal occupations of the war, now largely forgotten. Atrocities began almost immediately, prompted by fierce resistance from Belgian troops. During the first four days of the invasion, approximately 850 civilians were shot or bayoneted in the Liège area alone.
In the Allied countries, this episode was called by the press « rape of Belgium »", even though some of the published details were exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, the German army committed several massacres during the Belgian invasion, killing over 100,000 people in various ways. In one case August 23, 1914 674 citizens of the city of Dinant were executed for alleged partisan sniper attacks on German soldiers. Many of these techniques would be used on a much larger scale and with much greater effect during World War II .
6. Battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme, named after the Somme River in France, was a large-scale offensive launched by British and French forces to make it easier the French army fighting at Verdun. Beginning on July 1, 1916, it was one of the bloodiest battles in history, in which the old, outdated The tactics of maneuver were opposed to new means of warfare such as artillery and machine guns.
On the first day alone, the British contingent, made up of British, Irish and Commonwealth soldiers, suffered over 57,000 casualties and around 20,000 killed, making it the worst day for the British Army in its history. Chemical attacks were commonplace along the narrow 18-mile front, as several waves of French and British soldiers were sent to crush the heavily fortified German positions. Although the Allies achieved some of their wartime objectives, more million soldiers were wounded or killed in the five-month battle.
5. Uprisings in Central Asia
Beginning in the summer of 1916, several Russian-controlled provinces in Central Asia revolted against the Russian Empire. The main trigger was a decree by Tsar Nicholas II ordering the conscription of all non-Russian males. workers detachments on the Eastern Front, although tensions between Imperial Russia and its colonized populations began long before the war.
The uprising began in Khujand in what is now Tajikistan, but quickly spread to the provinces of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and other Russian-ruled Central Asian territories. Although the demonstrations were largely peaceful, save for a few incidents, they were still brutally suppressed by Tsarist troops, killing, by some estimates, more than 270,000 Central Asians before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Some modern politicians in countries like Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan even call it genocide, though the classification has been difficult to prove due to the fog of Soviet censorship after the revolution.
4. Anti-Jewish pogroms
Although anti-Semitic violence reached horrific proportions during World War II, it did not completely disappear during the first war. In fact, many historians agree that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution that swept through Eastern Europe after the war, especially In Ukraine and Poland, where more than 100,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of 1919, it laid the ideological foundation for the mass killings twenty years later.
The most destructive of these campaigns were carried out by the Tsarist Russian army. The peak of violence occurred during the period« Great Retreat »" 1915, when the Russians employed a scorched-earth policy against the local population during their retreat from Galicia and Poland. Rape, robbery, and summary executions of Jews were commonplace at the front—an ordeal that would continue long after the war ended. Unlike previous pogroms, much of the violence was perpetrated by the Tsarist soldiers , often on explicit orders from superiors.
3. The Greek Genocide
Although the Armenian Genocide is still widely remembered and analyzed, it was only one of many campaigns of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottomans in their quest to create an ethnically pure Turkish state. state . The first of these genocides, now known as late Ottoman genocide , was committed against Greeks living in Anatolia, or the Asian part of modern-day Turkey. Even by the most conservative estimates, over a million Greeks were killed in massacres or forced into prison camps across Turkey.
The violence included summary executions, rape, forced conversion to Islam, torture, looting, and arson, mostly committed by members of the Young Turk movement and Ottoman military personnel. While some of the guilty officers were punished after the war, many were not punished , as the Young Turks were an important part of the post-war Turkish government.
2. Serbia
While it is difficult—almost impossible—to trace all the underlying causes of the widespread carnage of World War I, the rivalry between Serbian nationalists and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a central piece of the puzzle. After all, it was murder The conflict was initially sparked by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (pictured above) by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. Austria used this as a pretext to invade Serbia, forcing all other major powers of the time to choose sides based on their respective national interests and military alliance treaties.
Retribution for the murder would be brutal. During the subsequent invasion, Serbia lost more of its population than any other country in the war. According to Serbian estimates, during the three years of occupation, people were killed more 1.2 million Serbs , of which about 800 thousand were civilians. There were many others deported , tortured, raped, or forced to work by the Habsburgs, as the entire Serbian population was seen as potential enemies and traitors who had to be exterminated.
1. Spanish flu
The final phase of the war was compounded by another global tragedy that claimed millions of lives: the Spanish flu. While precise figures are impossible to establish, the outbreak, which began in January 1918, may have killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, making it one of the deadliest events in human history.
Even today, we know little about the origins of the virus, although we do know that war played a central role in its spread. study points to trenches where mild strains were left to spread and strengthen after the first wave of severe cases had been withdrawn from the front lines.
Front conditions , where soldiers typically lived in cramped, crowded conditions, further accelerated the spread of the disease. Some researchers believe the number of deaths caused by the Spanish flu could have speed up peacekeeping process, as the warring countries suddenly lost large numbers of their fighting forces to disease.