The world wars

In short

The two world wars (1914-18 and 1939-45) were industrialised "total wars" that drew in most of the world's states, killed roughly 10 million and 70-85 million people respectively, destroyed four empires in the first and ended European global dominance in the second. They matter because almost every institution of the present order - the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank, international human-rights and genocide law, decolonisation, the Cold War and the partitioned map of Asia and Europe - was shaped by them. For an Indian student the wars are also national history: about 1.3 million Indians served in the first and some 2.5 million in the second, and wartime policy produced Quit India, the Bengal famine of 1943, the Indian National Army and ultimately the 1947 transfer of power. The topic is examined in UGC-CBCS BA/MA world-history and modern-India papers, UGC-NET History, and the General Studies papers of UPSC Civil Services and State PSCs, and is used professionally in teaching, research, archives and museums, journalism, publishing, UPSC coaching and content writing.

Explained

Causes of the First World War

• Alliance system: the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, 1882) against the Triple Entente built from the Franco-Russian Alliance (1894), the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention (1907). Alliances turned a Balkan quarrel into a continental war.
• Militarism and arms race: Germany's naval expansion under Admiral Tirpitz against Britain's dreadnought programme; conscript armies with fixed mobilisation timetables that left diplomats little time.
• Imperial rivalry: competition for colonies, markets and prestige - the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 are the standard examples.
• Nationalism and the "Eastern Question": Serbian and Pan-Slav nationalism against Austria-Hungary's multi-ethnic empire; Ottoman decline and the Balkan Wars (1912-13) left unsettled claims.
• Immediate cause: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip; Austria's ultimatum, Germany's "blank cheque", Russian mobilisation and the chain of declarations from 28 July 1914.
• The war-guilt debate: Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles blamed Germany; Fritz Fischer (1961) argued German leaders deliberately risked war; others (A. J. P. Taylor, and later writers such as Christopher Clark) stress shared miscalculation. Examiners reward the debate, not a single verdict.

Course of the First World War, 1914-18

• The Schlieffen Plan aimed to knock out France through Belgium in six weeks, then turn on Russia; it failed at the First Battle of the Marne (Sept 1914), producing a stalemated Western Front from the Channel to Switzerland.
• Trench warfare and attrition: machine guns, barbed wire and quick-firing artillery favoured defence. Verdun and the Somme (both 1916) each cost around a million casualties for a few kilometres.
• New technology: poison gas (Second Ypres, 1915), tanks (Somme, 1916), aircraft, submarines; Jutland (1916) was the one great fleet battle.
• Eastern and other fronts: Tannenberg (1914), the Gallipoli landings (1915-16), Mesopotamia (Kut, where Indian troops fought heavily), Palestine, East Africa, Italy (Caporetto, 1917).
• Turning points: Britain's naval blockade; German unrestricted submarine warfare (the *Lusitania*, 1915), the Zimmermann Telegram and the US entry in April 1917; the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and Russia's exit by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918).
• End: Germany's 1918 spring offensives failed, the Allied counter-offensive and collapse of Germany's partners forced the Armistice of 11 November 1918.
• Home fronts and total war: conscription, rationing, war loans, state control of industry, censorship and propaganda; large-scale entry of women into factories and services, followed in Britain by partial women's suffrage (1918).

The peace settlement and the interwar years

• Paris Peace Conference (1919): dominated by the "Big Four" - Wilson (USA), Lloyd George (Britain), Clemenceau (France), Orlando (Italy). Wilson's Fourteen Points urged self-determination, open diplomacy and a league of nations.
• Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919): war guilt (Art. 231), loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar and the Polish Corridor, all colonies taken as League "mandates", army capped at 100,000 with no tanks, submarines or air force, Rhineland demilitarised, reparations later fixed at 132 billion gold marks (London Schedule, 1921; the effective obligation was much smaller and payments were repeatedly rescheduled by the Dawes and Young Plans).
• Companion treaties: St Germain (Austria), Neuilly (Bulgaria), Trianon (Hungary), Sèvres (Ottoman Empire) - the last rejected by the Turkish nationalists and replaced by Lausanne (1923); Sèvres also triggered India's Khilafat movement.
• League of Nations (1920): Covenant, Assembly, Council, Secretariat, Permanent Court of International Justice, ILO. India was an original member although not independent. Weaknesses: the USA never joined, no armed force, unanimity rule, absence of Germany and the USSR initially. It failed over Manchuria (1931) and Abyssinia (1935-36).
• Economic shocks: war debts, German hyperinflation (1923), brief recovery after Locarno (1925) and the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), then the Great Depression from 1929, which collapsed trade and fed extremism.
• Rise of fascism and militarism: Mussolini's March on Rome (1922); Hitler Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Enabling Act, one-party state, Nuremberg Laws (1935), rearmament; Japan's army-led expansion from Manchuria.
• Appeasement: Rhineland remilitarised (1936), Rome-Berlin Axis and Anti-Comintern Pact, Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Anschluss with Austria (March 1938), the Munich Agreement (Sept 1938) ceding the Sudetenland, occupation of Czechoslovakia (March 1939), the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 with its secret partition of Poland.

Course of the Second World War, 1939-45

• Outbreak: Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war on 3 September. India was declared a belligerent by the Viceroy without consulting Indian leaders - the Congress ministries resigned.
• Blitzkrieg phase (1939-41): Denmark and Norway, the fall of France (June 1940) with the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain (air defence, radar, first German defeat), the Blitz, Balkan and North African campaigns.
• Widening (1941): Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, which brought in the United States and made the war global. The Atlantic Charter (Aug 1941) set Allied war aims.
• Turning points (1942-43): Midway (June 1942) in the Pacific, El Alamein (Oct-Nov 1942) in North Africa, Stalingrad (Aug 1942-Feb 1943) and Kursk (1943) on the Eastern Front, and the Battle of the Atlantic against U-boats. Italy surrendered in September 1943.
• Allied victory (1944-45): D-Day, the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, Soviet advance through Eastern Europe, the Battle of the Bulge, the fall of Berlin and VE Day, 8 May 1945; in Asia, Imphal and Kohima (1944) broke the Japanese advance into India, followed by Burma and the island campaigns.
• Atomic bombs: Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945; Soviet entry against Japan; Japan's surrender announced on 15 August and signed on 2 September 1945. Whether the bombs were militarily necessary or a Cold War signal remains a live historiographical debate.
• The Holocaust: escalation from boycotts and the Nuremberg Laws to ghettos, mass shootings, the Wannsee Conference (1942) and extermination camps such as Auschwitz; about six million Jews were murdered, along with Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners, political prisoners and others. "Intentionalist" and "structuralist/functionalist" readings differ on how far it was a long-held plan versus cumulative radicalisation. Japan's conduct in China (the Nanjing massacre, Unit 731) and Allied area bombing (Dresden, Tokyo) are also examined under total war.
• Wartime diplomacy: Tehran (1943), Yalta (Feb 1945) and Potsdam (July-Aug 1945) conferences settled occupation zones, the Polish frontier and the shape of the post-war order - and sowed the Cold War.

India and the world wars

• First World War: about 1.3 million Indians were recruited; roughly 60,000-74,000 died (counts differ by source) in France, Mesopotamia, Palestine and East Africa. Consequences: heavy taxation and price rise, the Defence of India Act (1915), the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and the Rowlatt Act (1919), the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movements, and the Ghadar and Komagata Maru episodes.
• Second World War: some 2.5 million Indians served - the largest volunteer force of the war - with about 87,000 dead; India supplied food, textiles, timber and ordnance under Allied contracts, and war finance turned Britain into India's debtor (sterling balances), accelerating industrial growth but causing severe inflation.
• Politics: the August Offer (1940), individual satyagraha, the Cripps Mission (1942), the Quit India movement (Aug 1942) and its repression, the Muslim League's Lahore Resolution (1940) and growth, the Wavell Plan and Simla Conference (1945), the Cabinet Mission (1946).
• Subhas Chandra Bose escaped to Germany and then Japan, led the Indian National Army and proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Oct 1943); the INA fought at Imphal and Kohima. The INA trials (1945-46) and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny (Feb 1946) convinced the British that Indian loyalty in the armed forces could no longer be assumed.
• Bengal famine of 1943: an estimated 2-3 million deaths, caused by the loss of Burmese rice, boat denial and "scorched earth" policy, wartime procurement, hoarding, inflation and the refusal to divert shipping - studied with Amartya Sen's argument that it was a failure of entitlement and distribution, not of absolute food availability.

Consequences and the post-war order

• Human and material cost: roughly 9-10 million military dead in the first war (plus the 1918-19 influenza pandemic); 70-85 million dead in the second, well over half of them civilians, with the USSR (about 27 million) and China (15-20 million) worst hit.
• Political map: collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires after 1918; after 1945 the eclipse of Britain and France, the division of Germany and Europe, and the emergence of the USA and USSR as superpowers.
• Institutions: the United Nations Charter, signed 26 June 1945 and in force 24 October 1945 (India was an original signatory), with the Security Council and its five permanent members; the Bretton Woods institutions - IMF and the World Bank - from 1944; GATT (1947), later the WTO.
• Law and rights: the Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) created the categories of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity; the Tokyo Tribunal, where the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal dissented against all convictions; the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948); the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, given effect in India by the Geneva Conventions Act, 1960, with the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 as the domestic rights machinery.
• Decolonisation and the Cold War: Indian independence (1947), Indonesia, Indochina, Africa; the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947-48), NATO (1949) and the Warsaw Pact (1955), the nuclear arms race, and India's non-alignment articulated from the Asian Relations Conference (1947) to Bandung (1955) and the NAM summit at Belgrade (1961).
• Social and cultural change: women's enfranchisement and employment, welfare states, "lost generation" literature and war poetry, the Partition of Palestine and creation of Israel (1948), and the beginnings of European integration.

Key points

• Total war - mobilisation of whole economies and societies, so civilians become both producers and targets.
• Triple Alliance / Triple Entente - the two pre-1914 blocs that converted a Balkan crisis into a world war.
• Sarajevo, 28 June 1914 - assassination of Franz Ferdinand; immediate, not fundamental, cause.
• Schlieffen Plan - German plan to defeat France fast through Belgium; failed at the Marne (1914).
• Attrition - the logic of Verdun and the Somme: wear the enemy down rather than break through.
• Brest-Litovsk (1918) - Bolshevik Russia's exit from the war at heavy territorial cost.
• Article 231 - the Versailles "war guilt" clause, the basis of reparations and of German resentment.
• Mandate system - former German and Ottoman territories administered under League supervision; colonialism renamed.
• League of Nations - first general collective-security body; crippled by US absence, unanimity and lack of force.
• Appeasement - conceding to Hitler to avoid war, from the Rhineland (1936) to Munich (1938).
• Nazi-Soviet Pact (23 Aug 1939) - non-aggression plus a secret carve-up of Poland; cleared the way for war.
• Blitzkrieg - fast combined armour-air offensives; decisive in 1939-41, ineffective once the war became one of production.
• Stalingrad and Midway (1942-43) - the land and naval turning points in Europe and the Pacific.
• Holocaust - the systematic murder of about six million Jews; the origin of modern genocide law.
• Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Aug 1945) - the only combat use of atomic weapons; opened the nuclear age.
• INA and the INA trials - Bose's army and the 1945-46 trials that shook the loyalty of the Indian armed forces.
• Bengal famine (1943) - 2-3 million deaths; a wartime policy and distribution failure, not absolute scarcity.
• United Nations and Bretton Woods (1944-45) - the security and economic architecture built to prevent a third such war.

Examples

1. Framing an answer: "Was the First World War caused by alliances or by Germany?"

• Step 1 - set out the standard long-term causes: militarism, alliances, imperialism, nationalism (the "MAIN" frame).
• Step 2 - test each: alliances were defensive on paper but obliged mobilisation; imperial rivalry was real but had been settled peacefully in 1905 and 1911.
• Step 3 - present the Fischer thesis (German leaders used the July crisis deliberately) and the "slide into war" counter-view.
• Step 4 - conclude with a position: the system made a general war possible, but the specific decisions of Berlin and Vienna in July 1914 made it actual. Answer with judgement, not a list.

2. Measuring India's contribution. First war: about 1,300,000 served, about 74,000 died → 74,000 ÷ 1,300,000 = 5.7% of those who served. Second war: about 2,500,000 served, about 87,000 died → 87,000 ÷ 2,500,000 = 3.5%. India therefore sent nearly twice as many men to the second war with a lower fatality rate, because most Indian formations fought in Africa, Italy and Burma rather than in sustained trench attrition. (Recruitment and casualty figures vary a little between official and later estimates.)

3. Scale of the Second World War. Taking 75 million deaths against a 1940 world population of about 2.3 billion: 75 ÷ 2,300 = 3.3% of all humanity. Soviet deaths of about 27 million are 27 ÷ 75 = 36% of the total - which is why the Eastern Front, not Normandy, decided the European war. Compare the first war's roughly 10 million military dead on a 1.8 billion population: about 0.6%.

4. Source-based question: Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles. Identify it as the war-guilt clause of 28 June 1919. Explain its purpose - a legal basis for reparations. Explain the reaction: Germans called Versailles a *Diktat*; J. M. Keynes in *The Economic Consequences of the Peace* (1919) called the reparations unpayable. Then evaluate: Versailles was harsher than Wilson's Fourteen Points but milder than Brest-Litovsk, and the "Versailles caused Hitler" line is too simple - the Depression, Weimar's weakness and political choices mattered as much.

5. Comparing the two wars

Where it is used

• Teaching and academia: school and college history teaching (CBSE/NCERT and state boards), UGC-NET and PhD research in modern world history and military history.
• Civil services and defence: UPSC and State PSC General Studies and History optional, CDS/NDA and SSB interviews, Indian Army and Navy education corps; the National Defence Academy and Defence Services Staff College teach these campaigns as doctrine.
• Archives, museums and heritage: the National Archives of India, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Indian National Army memorials, Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries in India, and the National War Memorial in New Delhi (2019).
• Journalism, publishing and content: editorial and feature writing, anniversary reporting, documentary research, test-prep content and educational publishing.
• Policy and international affairs: think tanks and ministries working on UN Security Council reform, non-alignment and strategic autonomy, nuclear policy and India's No-First-Use doctrine - all arguments that start from 1945.
• Law and human rights: humanitarian law practice under the Geneva Conventions Act, 1960, refugee and genocide law, and NHRC-related work tracing back to the 1948 instruments.

Interview questions

• Q: Distinguish the immediate from the underlying causes of the First World War. A: The immediate cause was the Sarajevo assassination and the July 1914 crisis of ultimatums and mobilisations; the underlying causes were militarism, the alliance system, imperial rivalry and nationalism, which made any such spark escalate.
• Q: Why did the Schlieffen Plan fail? A: Belgian resistance and British intervention slowed the advance, the right wing was weakened, Russia mobilised faster than expected, and the French counter-attack at the Marne ended the hope of a quick victory.
• Q: Was the Treaty of Versailles the cause of the Second World War? A: It supplied grievances - war guilt, reparations, lost territory, disarmament - but the Depression, Weimar's instability, appeasement and Hitler's own expansionist aims were equally necessary; Versailles is a condition, not the cause.
• Q: Why did the League of Nations fail? A: No US membership, no armed force, the unanimity rule, the self-interest of Britain and France, and the Depression, which turned states inward - shown in Manchuria and Abyssinia.
• Q: Was appeasement defensible? A: Defenders cite British rearmament needs, Dominion opinion, memory of 1914-18 and misread Soviet reliability; critics argue it conceded strategic assets like Czechoslovakia's defences and convinced Hitler the democracies would not fight.
• Q: Which front decided the European war? A: The Eastern Front - the USSR absorbed the bulk of German divisions and suffered about 27 million deaths; Stalingrad and Kursk broke the Wehrmacht before D-Day.
• Q: What made the Second World War "total" in a way the first was not? A: Civilians were deliberate targets through strategic bombing and genocide, whole economies were centrally directed, and over half the dead were non-combatants.
• Q: How did the Second World War hasten Indian independence? A: It exhausted Britain financially and turned it into India's debtor, discredited imperial legitimacy, produced Quit India and the INA trials that shook army loyalty, and brought to power a Labour government willing to transfer power.
• Q: What caused the Bengal famine of 1943? A: Loss of Burmese rice imports, denial policies, wartime procurement and inflation, hoarding and the refusal to divert shipping - a collapse of entitlement and distribution rather than of total food supply.
• Q: Were the atomic bombings necessary? A: The official case is that they avoided a costly invasion of Japan; revisionists argue Japan was near collapse, Soviet entry was decisive, and the bombs were partly a signal to Moscow. State the evidence on both sides.
• Q: What is the significance of the Nuremberg Trials? A: They established individual criminal responsibility for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, rejecting "superior orders" as a defence, and laid the basis for later tribunals and the ICC.
• Q: Who was Radhabinod Pal and why is he remembered? A: The Indian judge at the Tokyo Tribunal who dissented from all convictions, arguing the charges were retrospective and that the Allies' own conduct, including the atomic bombings, was not being judged.

Common mistakes

• Treating the Sarajevo assassination as *the* cause of the First World War instead of as the trigger.
• Mixing up the treaties: Versailles was with Germany, not with Austria (St Germain), Hungary (Trianon) or Turkey (Sèvres, replaced by Lausanne).
• Confusing the dates of the two wars' entries - US entry was 1917 in the first war and December 1941 in the second; Soviet-German fighting began only in June 1941.
• Saying Germany was disarmed "completely" by Versailles: the limit was a 100,000-man army with specified bans, not abolition.
• Writing that India "declared war" in 1939 - the Viceroy committed India without consulting elected Indian opinion, which is why the Congress ministries resigned.
• Quoting the 132 billion gold marks reparation figure as though it was paid; most was never collected and the schedules were revised by the Dawes and Young Plans.
• Narrating battles chronologically when the question asks for causes, consequences or a historiographical evaluation - and omitting the denominator when quoting casualty or recruitment figures.

Related topics

Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution · Rise of nationalism and imperialism · Russian Revolution and the Cold War · Indian national movement, 1919-1947 · Decolonisation and the Non-Aligned Movement · United Nations and international humanitarian law