ABSTRACT
World War I was in the first instance the result of a failure of diplomacy among the major European powers to resolve the crisis of July 1914, precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne. Each of the governments involved bore a share of the responsibility for the outbreak of war. However, the support of Germany’s government for Austria’s position in the crisis departed from good faith in the calculation that a general European war would secure Germany the status of a world power, sought since 1890. All the European governments had developed plans for the prosecution of a major war, but Germany’s war plans called for simultaneous operations against France and Tsarist Russia that allowed for little margin of error. When the attempt to secure a prompt defeat of France was thwarted, the war on land became a stalemate between the roughly equal strengths of the Entente and the Central Powers. Thereafter, the carnage of the Battles of Verdun and the Somme testified to a failure of military imagination. As a consequence, many military commanders were dismissed as civilian political leadership sought to exert more influence over the prosecution of the war – with mixed results.
