World War One: The Wrong Turn That Changed the World (Episode 1)

Key takeaways

• The wrong turn in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 was only the match. Europe was already full of gunpowder: alliances that tied the great powers together like climbers on one rope, an arms race, and war plans that ran on railway timetables and were very hard to stop.
• Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, exactly one month after the shots. Within about one week all five great powers of Europe were at war, and soldiers and workers came from the colonies too, including nearly 100,000 from French Indochina, Cambodians among them.
• Everyone said the boys would be home by Christmas. Instead the armies dug trenches about 700 km long and were stuck for almost four years. On the first day of the Somme alone, British losses were more than 57,000 killed and wounded.
• The war destroyed the empires that started it: Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Germany. About 9 million soldiers died, and historians estimate more than 15 million deaths in all with civilians.
• The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors, five years to the day after Sarajevo. Humiliation, reparations, the 1923 money collapse and a lie that Germany was 'stabbed in the back' prepared the ground for the next war. Marshal Foch is quoted as saying it was only 'an armistice for twenty years'.