The Mysteries of History (June 28 Edition)
World War 1 Begins; L.A. Earthquakes
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, 1905
1914 — Archduke Ferdinand and Wife Murdered, Sparking World War 1
public domain image from wikimedia commons
The second “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired today — or shots, rather. The event that was later seen as what led to what was first called The Great War (later renamed World War 1 when a second global conflagration erupted) was the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie.
It only took a little over a month before these politically motivated murders dysmogrified into a four-year global bloodbath of horrendous proportions.
After an estimated twenty million soldiers and civilians died as a result of the mutual mass slaughter, the Versailles Treaty officially ending what most consider to be the first world war (I and some others hold the “Seven Years War” of 1756-1763 to have fit the bill as such) took effect exactly five years after the heartless extinguishing of the lives of Franz and Sophie.
The following is what I wrote about the beginning of World War 1 in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 2: 1914-2006:
The global conflict which began in 1914 and didn’t end until 1918 was first called “The Great War,” but got a name change in the 1940s when another world conflict broke out. The hostilities raging at that time throughout the world was christened World War II (and what was formerly called the “The Great War” took on the more grandiose title of “World War I”).
Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria had been warned to stay out of Bosnia, whose Serbian population was seeking independence. On June 28th, an assassination attempt was averted. A bomb was thrown into the Archduke’s car. Ferdinand himself threw it right back out again before it exploded. Later on the same day, however, a Serbian student named Gavrilo Princip was successful in his plot to assassinate the Archduke—along with his wife, the Duchess. The first bullet hit Ferdinand’s wife Sophie in the abdomen; the second struck Francis in the jugular. They both died of their wounds.
The First World War began on July 3rd when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, although the Serbia government apparently did not sponsor or condone the murder of the Archduke and Archduchess.
This declaration of war opened a Pandora’s box, as it then became apparent that many countries had concluded secret pacts with one another to come to each other’s defense in case of war. It was as though a row of dominoes had been toppled by way of chain reaction: One declaration of war led to another, until practically the entire world was involved, at least tangentially. And of course, even the “neutral” nations were not left unaffected. Banding together on one side were chiefly Britain, France, Russia, and China. The other side included Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Italy. Others would enter the melee later.
In the view of many, the Victorian era ended with the advent of this terrible bloodbath. This global cataclysm, although not as costly in terms of lives lost, was even more a watershed event than the Second World War. It brought a greater break with the past, gravely altering people’s view of the world and its future.
At the time of the war, it would have been difficult to imagine a more devastating one. Ten million died in battle, and twenty million more died of hun ger and disease related to the war. Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “No one since that day has been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity that would be worth one human life.” In the Battle of the Marne alone, one million soldiers were brutally slaughtered: 500,000 Germans; 500,000 French and British. To an even more dramatic extent than in most battles, there were no winners—only losers.
To provide an idea of just how devastating and world-changing this war was, all one has to do is consult history books that expound on the era and put the conflict in context. Before the war, most people thought world conditions were improving, and that the future looked bright. Prior to the war, people and nations felt secure enough, and trusted each other enough, that passports were not required when traveling from country to country. The war was a terrifyingly traumatic event for the world. Mankind, society, and civilization have not been the same since.
As just one example of just how far-reaching and fundamental this jolt to the world was (see the Introduction for more on this), note this translation of an excerpt from the German history book Kursbuch Geschichte (History text book) by Dr. Wolfgang Jager, which is taken from the compilation “History Lessons,” by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward:
Artillery and machine guns, battle cruisers and submarines, as well as the first tanks and bombers led to an extermination of people and materials, which exceeded any thing previously imagined. Poison gas, first employed in 1915, was one of the especially dreadful battle means employed. It signified the great downfall of the values of civilization in the consciousness of contemporaries. The First World War bore the traits of a total war from the beginning. The war-waging nations mobilized every member of their societies for the war at the front and on the “homefront,” which led to a shaky separation between the military and the civil sphere. In the course of the war almost the entire civilian population, male and female, was involved in the war, both in the armaments factories and in the “normal” work positions, where women replaced men who were drafted into the military. “The present war,” noted the French ambassador in St. Petersburg on August 20, 1914, “does not belong to those that can be ended by a political treaty […]; it is a war of life and death, in which every fighting nation puts its national existence at stake.” The First World War meant the breakdown of the system of states, but not simply because all great powers were part of it, as a hundred years before in the Napoleonic Wars. Rather all the states and peoples involved felt and experienced it as an existential struggle for survival. As varied as they were in the details, the war goals on both sides aimed at a destruction of the former international order…Therefore, the only war aim that mattered was the complete subjugation of the enemy nation…Actually this war patriotism developed a tremendous power of integration, which concealed the tensions within populations and consequently deepened the chasms between the nations. Not since the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries had the population been drawn in such measure into the occurrences of war as both fighters and sufferers—and that meant mobilization, nationalization, fanaticism, in completely new dimensions.
In addition to the millions of human lives, eight million horses were killed on the battlefields of the “Great War.”
Questions: Have you got any ancestors who fought in World War 1 or were otherwise strongly affected by it? Have you read the book The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914? Have you seen the movie All Quiet on the Western Front? Have you read the book and/or seen the movie Johnny Got His Gun? Have you seen the movie Joyeux Noel (aka Merry Christmas)? Have you seen the movie War Horse? Have you seen the movie 1917? Have you seen the movie Gallipoli? Have you seen the movie Lawrence of Arabia? Have you seen the movie They Shall Not Grow Old?
1992 — Two Big Quakes Hit the L.A. Area
public domain image from wikimedia commons
Although the quakes struck a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, in the small town of Landers, L.A. was devastated by them. Early on a Sunday morning on this date in 1992, the first quake hit, registering 7.3 on the Richer scale. A whole lot of shaking was going on, and so strong that it was even felt as far away as Boise, Idaho (approximately 675 miles north, in a straight line).
A few hours later, a second quake, this one measuring 6.3, struck somewhat near the first, in Big Bear, California (about 40 miles distant).
Hundreds of people were injured, and tens of millions of dollars of damage was caused, but the saddest of the three deaths attributed to the quakes was that of a three year old child, who died when a chimney fell on the boy in Yucca Valley, which is about 14 miles from Landers, the epicenter of the first quake.
public domain image from wikimedia commons
Questions: Have you ever experienced an earthquake? Are you prepared for one? If not, why not? Have you heard the Guy Clark song “L.A. Freeway” (made famous by Jerry Jeff Walker)?
