Note: This is a fairly general, high-level overview of the events that led to the outbreak of the Great War. I wanted to write it in narrative form, from the perspective of a historian ITTL, to give a sense of the scope and scale of events. In the next few posts, I’ll try to fill in some of the more granular diplomatic and military details, and also provide updates on what happened in the rest of the world in the first half of 1914. Then, I will have to take a bit of a pause; I’m not very schooled on the military history of the first world war, and feel like I have some reading to do before I continue things (if anyone has recommendations for a comprehensive-ish military history of WW1, let me know. So far I have the Oxford Handbook and some of Hew Strachan’s stuff on-hand). Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting so far, I really do appreciate it!
Excerpts from the book: “The Crisis of Capitalist Europe: 1905-1914”, by Enzo Traverso
Published by the Piedmont-Milan Federation of Publishing Collectives, © 1977, Milan, European Socialist Federation.
…Some might be tempted to say that the month or so which elapsed between the peace which ended the Second Balkan War and the beginning of the Albanian Crisis marked a point of relative tranquility between two separate crises. Yet, in truth, the very fact that Europe was on the verge of fratricidal blood-letting over the minor emendation of borders in the Balkans indicated that the crisis ran much deeper than any of its individual manifestations. Each time the imperialist powers met to impose a peace which they believed would constitute a final settlement, a new crisis reared its head.
Of course, the Albanian problem in all its particularity had never disappeared. Serbia and Greece had been forced to evacuate Albania following the end of the First Balkan War, since Austria insisted that a Serbian port on the Adriatic constituted a threat to its security. Then the Second Balkan War forced the six powers to postpone negotiations over the final drawing of Albanian borders, as Austria refused to cede Albanian lands to Greece as long as they were at war with Bulgaria. Though most of the great powers were not intrinsically hostile to Greek, Serbian, and Montenegrin claims, they jointly decided that it would be easiest to come to a diplomatic solution concerning Albania without the presence of troops from the minor powers in the Balkans. Both Serbia and Greece nursed some bitterness about this, but it is likely that they would have eventually forgotten it if it were not for the imposition of the “Loafers Peace” in 1913 and the sense of grievance both nations had over the losses in the Second Balkan War.
During the three weeks or so in January 1914 in which the Great Powers met to determine the form that a new Albanian state would take, some progress was made. The Austrians agreed that Southern Epirus and parts of rural, mountainous Northeastern Albania could be ceded to Greece and Serbia (respectively) in return for the Austrian right to station troops in the country, turning it into a de facto protectorate. Russia was wary of accepting this Austrian proviso , but with sufficient British pressure, they may have eventually consented. Nonetheless, it was all too little, too late. None of the imperialist powers had foreseen what was coming.
On January 24th, over five hundred Ottoman troops who had been smuggled into Vlore seized the city and declared Ahmet Izzet Pasha, an Ottoman general, the rightful Monarch of Albania. Vlore was the headquarters for the International Commission of Control, the transitional governing body composed of representatives of the Great Powers which was intended to run the country until the Great Powers determined its borders and installed a broadly acceptable civilian administration. The failure of the imperialist states to detect the build-up of Ottoman troops in the city is itself somewhat astounding, and testifies both to the failure of the control commission to create adequate police forces and to the failure of European states to understand the motives of the new Turkish government, which some (such as the English) erroneously believed to be secretly run by a clique of Mizrahim Jews. We are now aware that the one state which had knowledge of the coming Turkish intervention was Serbia, which chose not to share information about the Turkish plot with the Control Comission in the hope that the Turkish seizure of Vlore would provide a pretext for a Serbian military intervention.
In the following days, a coordinated response by European states may have forced the Ottomans to back down, but the Germans, though privately furious at the Ottomans, refused to countenance a joint military response for fear of alienating their new ally and creating an anti-bulgarian coalition in the Balkans. The British may have dissuaded the Ottomans with a naval blockade to prevent them from ferrying additional troops into the region, with the Germans perhaps looking the other way in such a situation, but the Liberal government believed that such a move would provoke a general European war (when in fact it may have been the only one that could have temporarily postponed it). And the Russians, though skeptical of Ottoman intentions, did not fear any direct threat to their interests in the region, which were not tied up in Albania.
By the time that the European powers had begun to look for a joint solution to the crisis, it had started to spiral out of control. The attempt by the Commission to solidify its control over the coastal cities by declaring martial law had turned the Albanian peasantry against them and led to a surge of support for the Ottoman troops among the population. The Prime Minister of Albania, Ismail Qemali, declared that he recognized Ahmed Izzet Pasha as the rightful Monarch of Albania. Recent historical documents reveal that he knew of the Ottoman attempt at a coup weeks in advance and had provided covert support for it. The fact that he did not declare his actual support until two days after it took place showed the tenuousness of Pasha’s position.
Germany immediately became a prime suspect in the affair. Both Russia and France accused it of “Subverting order in the Balkans”, and the German proclamations that it knew nothing of the Ottoman plot did not gain much purchase with their increasingly wary rivals. We now know that the German were not lying: their foreign policy ministry was genuinely shocked with the Ottoman behavior, and contemplated rescinding their guarantee. In fact, numerous memorandums reveal that it was the conclusion of the foreign ministry that it would have been in Germany’s interest to break with the Ottomans, but they were prevented from doing so by the Kaiser himself, who believed that backing down would have led to a loss of Germany’s international prestige.
The situation grew far more explosive after Elbasan fell to Ottoman soldiers and the march to Tirana begun. With the hinterlands of Albania largely out of the reach of the Control Commission, it looked inevitable that the Ottomans would soon regain suzerainty over more of the Balkans. A mixture of irredentism, anti-ottoman sentiment, and a genuine belief in the possibility of a mostly bloodless seizure of territory led both Greece and Serbia to mobilize against Albania. The reactionary government in Serbia, at this point led by a clique of military officers with ties to the terrorist Black Hand organization, desired to finally seize an Adriatic Port, whereas the Greek Government merely aimed to gain some territory in Epirus in order to compensate for the loss of Salonica.
Entente pleas for the Serbians and Greeks to pause mobilization fell on deaf ears: the imposition of the “loafers peace” had ensured that the smaller powers would no longer pay deference to the larger ones. Nonetheless, the more optimistic politicians in France and Russia nursed the illusion that there was some grain of truth to the Greek and Serbian pronouncements that they were intervening to “secure order and return land to the rightful authority of the control commission.” The Liberal government in England, meanwhile, held no such illusions, and were increasingly skeptical of both Serbian and Greek intentions, a sign of the growing rifts within the Entente. Ironically, while the Entente powers tried to restrain their balkan allies, Austria attempted to have Bulgaria announce a mobilization, which many British historians later treated as evidence of Central Powers aggression. However, it is now clear that Austria intended Bulgarian mobilization to be a defensive measure that would convince Serbia and Greece to stand down. It is unclear whether this could have actually been successful, and must be left to writers of counter-factual history.
The Serbian offensive into Albania was slower than expected. Though they encountered little organized resistance, they were increasingly beset by roving bands of partisans, and roughly a week into the invasion, an up-rising within Kosovo amongst ethnic Albanians started to severely hamper their supply lines. Though the genocidal response of the Serbian armed forces against ethnic Albanians eventually succeeded in clearing their supply lines, in the short term it led to an intensification of the Albanian guerilla campaign and gave the small Ottoman force in Albania time to be reinforced and consolidated.
The Greek incursion was of a different character. Although some ethnic cleansing occurred, it seems clear that the Albanian population in Southern Epirus did not respond to the Greeks with similar hostility, and on the whole the Greek intervention was of a more limited nature, involving a smaller portion of their armed forces which purposefully avoided provoking the Ottomans. After seizing much of the Epirus region, the Greeks quietly signed an agreement with the Ottomans to avoid direct conflict between the armed forces of the two countries. This did have the effect of radicalizing many Greek nationalists against the government of Venizelos and Constantine, but at the time it was a popular move within a war-weary country.
By the middle of March, the stakes of the conflict had become clear. Having seized Tirana and liquidated many of the Albanian partisans (along with the civilian Albanian population in Kosovo), Serbia had a clear path to the coast, but Austria had declared that a Serbian presence on the Adriatic would be cause for war. The Serbians hoped to secure Russian support, but the Russians, in the absence of English backing, felt unable to provide a blank check to the Serbs. The great powers returned to the negotiating table, but progress was slow and marginal. What followed was a dangerous game of provocation and denouncement as the Serbs tried to see how far they could push into Albania without incurring an Austrian declaration of war. Intentionally avoiding direct thrusts toward the coast, they began offensives to the South, scouring much of the country-side of Ottoman forces and their Albanian supporters.
Fearing that a loss of Muslim Albania would imperil their reputation among the world’s faithful, the Ottomans entered into negotiations with Bulgaria for their entry into the war. In return for a free hand with Serbia and the cession of Ottoman lands west of Adrianople, Bulgaria would declare war on Serbia. The Serbs had a little less than a third of their army in Albania, and another fifth facing the border with Austria. When the Bulgarians mobilized, they did so against Serbia alone, sending a clear signal to Greece that they had no desire for a two-front war. Although some voices in Greece called for the resumption of hostilities, many were skeptical that Greece could win the war. A rift soon emerged between the Prime Minister, Venizelos, who favored intervention, believing that the Greeks could regain Salonica, and the King, Constantine I, who feared that another war would be opposed by the majority of the population of Greece and result in the loss of Epirus and what remained of Greek Macedonia.
On April 2th, Bulgaria declared war on Serbia. Though they expected to quickly smash through Serbian lines, the muddy terrain and dogged defense of the Serbian Army resulted in a much slower advance than expected. The Serbian Army was also fully prepared for the Bulgarian intervention: a trail through Greece and Serbian-held Albania had provided them with Russian artillery and small arms, which in concert with the extensive network of defensive fortifications around Pirot and Prizden allowed the Serbians to inflict punitive losses on the Bulgarian divisions. It would take three weeks before the Bulgarian Army could make a real break-through, and it would take until the end of June until the Bulgarian Army began to approach Belgrade proper.
It is at this point, around June 27th, that most date the real beginning of the “Summer Crisis”. As an Ottoman-Bulgarian force prepared to launch a July offensive that would surround and envelop Belgrade, Russia declared that an “Annexationist” peace against Serbia would see a Russian mobilization against the Ottomans. The day after, two Bosnian Serbs shot and injured Franz Ferdinand and his wife on a trip to inspect a military exercise in Austrian Bosnia, prompting the Austrians to announce “unconditional” support for Bulgarian war aims. On July 4th, the Bulgarians proceeded with their offensive into Belgrade’s flanks and refused to respond to the Russian threat. On July 7th, the Russians began to partially mobilize against the Ottoman Empire. At this point, many of the European powers still believed that the war could be contained to a Russian-Ottoman one. Neither the Germans nor Austrians responded to the Russian mobilization with one of their own. Ottoman attempts to call in the German guarantee fell on deaf ears, with the German foreign ministry retorting that the Turks had begun the entire fiasco with their assault on the International Comission in Albania.
More importantly, the Russians had not begun a complete mobilization; they were still uncertain of French and British support. Over he following week, they eventually convinced the French government to support them in the event that a war with the Ottomans broke out into a war with Austria. Asquith’s government, however, still waffled, split between the Russia-skeptical radicals and the more pro-entente moderates. Britain offered to mediate on the 22nd, proposing a “general diplomatic summit” between the Great Powers to hash out a “Final Balkan Peace”, an offer that was reluctantly entertained by the Germans and Austrians.
On the 25th, German military reconnaissance units reported increased activity within Congress Poland. Even today, it is the source of some dispute whether this involved a genuine Russian mobilization within Poland; what is clear is that the Russian mobilization system involved the movement and transfer of armies in many different locations throughout the Russian Empire, and that following the British assurance of support, Russia had ramped up its mobilization efforts. In an important sense, “partial mobilization” was a fiction.
The Germans felt as if they were forced to mobilize by their war planning doctrine, which called for a decisive strike against France before the Russians could bring soldiers to bear on the Eastern Front. Once Germany feared that Russian mobilization might involve the concentration of troops in Poland and the Baltics, full German mobilization was nearly inevitable given the strategic thinking of the government
On the 26th, Germany began their mobilization. On the 27th, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. On the 28th, the Germans delivered an ultimatum to France demanding that they force Russia to stop its “aggressive and offensive” mobilization or face a German mobilization against France. In truth, the German mobilization had already begun, rendering any possibility of a receptive response from France null. On the 29th, Russia officially announced a general mobilization. On the 30th, Austria-Hungary began to mobilize against Russia and Serbia. On the 31st, Germany delivered an ultimatum to France demanding that it renounce its alliance with Russia or face a declaration of war. On August 1st, Germany declared war on France and Russia following an invasion of Luxembourg, and that morning delivered a demand to Belgium to allow for the free passage of German troops into France.
The world would never be the same. Within a week, all the great powers of Europe would be at war. Within a decade, the red flag would fly from Kiel to the Carpathians.
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