This Day in History: July 28, 1914
Today marks 100 years since the fuse of The Great War, World War I (WWI), the first world war was lit. It carried with it hopes of it being "the war to end all wars," while in actuality, the concluding peace treaty set the stage for World War II. The events of an extremely bloody war fought mostly by soldiers in trenches resulted in an estimated 10 million military deaths and another 20 million wounded.
What prompted such massive death and tumultuous destruction?
The spark that started World War I was the assassination of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. The assassination occurred on June 28, 1914 while Ferdinand was visiting the city of Sarajevo in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
When Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, this effectively begins the First World War. Events from that day lead to Winston Churchill being proven right in a comment written to his wife, "My darling one and beautiful, everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse!"
On August 1, after its demands for Russia to halt mobilization met with defiance, Germany declared war on Russia. Russia's ally, France, ordered its own general mobilization that same day, and on August 3, France and Germany declared war on each other. The German army's planned invasion of neutral Belgium, announced on August 4, prompted Britain to declare war on Germany. Thus, in the summer of 1914, the major powers in the Western world—with the exception of the United States and Italy, both of which declared their neutrality, at least for the time being—flung themselves headlong into the First World War.
It was supposed to be the war to end war.
For over four years World War I raged on,
leaving in its
wake a toll of death and destruction
such as the world had never seen.
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