With my co-moderator Bloomsby's permission (I hope!) I have transferred his words from another place to this thread in hopes of sparking a nice little debate/discussion. Bloomsby has 'questions about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the outbreak of WWI, Princip and the Black Hand' which commonly are perceived to be the sparks which set off the 'Great War'.

Bloomsby also wrote, "There is a widespread view among historians that the international crisis in June-July 1914, though very tricky, was containable. Indeed, the Serbian government in the end complied with most of the Austro-Hungarian demands, and the 'doves' in Austria-Hungary were inclined to accept. When news of this reached Berlin, the dismay on the part of the German General Staff knew no bounds and it used its influence with the 'hawks' in Vienna to get the 'jolly little war' it so desperately wanted.

Indeed, late in 1912 the German General Staff had decided in principle to *exploit* the next suitable major international crisis to launch its planned war. For more detail, see Fritz Fischer,
'Griff nach der Weltmacht' first published in 1961. (Details of English translation to follow soon in another post). One needs to bear in mind that by 1912 the German General Staff was a 'state with a state' in Germany and was outside political control. Moreover, the General Staff was at the time obsessed with the 'threat of encirclement' (from France and Russia).

Fritz Fischer's analysis has been modified since 1961 but it's still very widely accepted (with modifications) by mainstream German historians. It's worth adding that at the end of WW2 (unlike WW1) the relevant German archives fell into the hands of the Allies ... Most of the documents Fischer used were shipped to DC in 1945, left untouched and returned to West Germany in 1955-6."

Finally, Bloomsby added these points:

"1. Fritz Fischer's theory is in some respects close to perceptions at the time - at least in the Entente countries, the US and among critical elements within Germany. However, at the time the blame was laid at the door of the German government and not the General Staff. Btw, Fischer stresses that his work does not substantiate Article 231 (the 'War Guilt Article') of the Treaty of Versailles, which treated Germany in a comprehensive, collective and over-arching way as guilty for the outbreak of WW1.

2. For a few weeks after publication Fischer's book was treated with genuine interest in Germany, but then as the implications of his work became apparent, there followed a wave of hysteria ... It took quite a while till the matter became the object of serious academic debate and further research. Probably the most controversial aspect centres on the *motives* of the German General Staff. Fischer gave a lot of weight to fear of socialism following the 1912 general election to the Reichstag, in which the Social Democrats emerged as the strongest party.
According to Fischer, one of the key motives on the part of the General Staff was that a major war would allow for the imprisonment of Social Democrats, trade union leaders and liberals, as in Germany at the that time war immediately and automatically involved the declaration of a state of emergency with drastic curbs on individual liberty ... Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, only discovered at the eleventh hour that the General Staff was planning to lock up socialists, and pointed out that any such moves would lead to a civil as well as an international war. He managed to persuade the General Staff to give him time to negotiate a 'truce' in party politics with the Left. This emphasis on domestic political motives has been hotly debated ...

3. In the late 1960s and the 1970s some German historians, such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, extended Fischer and hypothesized that German history had followed a 'Sonderweg' (or 'special/idiosyncratic path') since c. 1870, that both world wars had been essentially one (pathological) German bid for world power status and so forth. On the whole, this view is now regarded as highly problematical, not least because it presupposes the existence of a 'standard' or 'normal' path of historical development - something for which there is little convincing evidence."

Are there any other experts on the 'Great War' who would like to participate in discussing these 'revelations'? Do you believe that WWI was begun as a result of a single assassination or were there many other factors involved? Were the Germans the key belligerents, itchy to begin another regional fight in the region, but in the end biting off more than they could chew? Why did the United States take so long to get involved and what really precipitated U.S. participation? Some point to the sinking of the Lusitania as a key factor, but many scholars suggest that there were much more important reasons. Please add your views below...

In socials we just recently learned this event. However, we mainly looked at the Cdn view of the war. There was tensions between various countries before the assassination. The assassination of the arch-duke just sparked the war. Some causes of WWI was(i got this from my ss worksheet)
1. The alliance system
2. Imperialism-extension of one's nation'c control over other lands
3. Militarism-building up military forces & threated armed aggression
4. NAtionalism

Britain went to war(which automatically pulled Canada[a dominion] into war too) when Germany attacked Belgium. Britain promised to protect Belgium if anything happend.

Serveral battles broke out in the war. The most notorius are:
Ypres
Passchendal
Vimy Ridge(Canada's first victory)

I can't tell u anything on why the Americans waited awhile before entering. Possibly, they did not want to get into conflicts which would pull them into the war immediatly?

Yes, with *any* war or other major historical event one needs to go beyond the obvious 'trigger' for the war and probe ... Agreed, the system of alliances, imperalism and nationalism were all important elements. However, they had been around for a long time *without* any really major European war erupting, which suggests that governments had previously attached very considerable importance to containing these potentially dangerous phenomena. Why did 'containment' break down in 1914?

As for the horrific battles on the Western Front, part of the answer is that until the arrival of American troops the two sides were very evenly matched - another was a staggering lack of imagination on the part of the generals on both sides.

Among British politicians on the eve of WW1, Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary) and Lord Haldane (Lord Chancellor, previously Secretary for War, 1906-10) seem to have had a pretty good idea how appalling a major European war would be and also seem to have had some notion of the potential social and political upheavals that were likely to follow.

Here are the details of the English version of Fischer's 'Griff nach der Weltmacht'.

Fritz Fischer, 'Germany's Aims in the First World War', Chatto and Windus, London 1967. Also published simultaneously in the US by W. W. Norton and Co., Inc.

In Germany, the book (first published in 1961) played a key role in the difficult process of 'confronting the [recent] past', for if the German general staff, together with key figures in the political establishment, had deliberately unleashed WW1, then it was quite impossible to dismiss Nazism as a mere 'accident in the works'
('Betriebsunfall'). Indeed, there was implicitly a strong case for regarding *both* worlds wars, at least in Europe, as part of *one* attempt by the key elites in Germany to turn the country from an essentially regional great power into a world power +++.