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The challenges for peace movements in World War I and today

Almost a century ago, world powers fought an unexpectedly destructive war that we call World War I now. During the conflict, between 1914 and 1918,it was called the Great War, and described by President Woodrow Wilson as the war to end all wars. Rather than ending war, the seeds of future conflicts were sown on the battlegrounds of this bloody conflagration that left millions of soldiers and civilians dead and empires in ruin. At least 8.5 million soldiers died on all fronts and more than 21 million were wounded, according to conservative estimates. According to some accounts, civilian deaths were even higher. The British alone lost 722,000 soldiers killed, and the combat death toll was half again as many for Austria-Hungary, roughly double that number for France and Russia, and nearly triple that for Germany. Despite the unceasing carnage and powerful voices decrying the war, by its conclusion in 1918, a majority of the citizens in each of the warring countries continued to support the war effort. Technology during World War I reflected a trend toward industrialism and the application of mass production methods to weapons and to the technology of warfare in general. This trend began fifty years prior to World War I during the U.S. Civil War, and continued through many smaller conflicts in which new weapons were tested. August 1914 marked the end of a relatively peaceful century in Europe with unprecedented invention and new science. The 19th-century vision of a peaceful future fed by ever-increasing prosperity through technology was largely shattered by the war's end; after the technological escalation during World War II, it was apparent that whatever the gains in prosperity and comfort due to technology applied to civilian uses, these benefits would always be under the shadow of the horrors of technology applied to warfare. The earlier years of the First World War can be characterized as a clash of 20thcentury technology with 19th-century warfare in the form of ineffective battles with huge numbers of casualties on both sides. It was not until the final year of the war that the major armies made effective steps in revolutionizing matters of command and control and tactics to adapt to the modern battlefield, and started to harness the myriad new technologies to effective military purposes. Tactical reorganizations (such as shifting the focus of command from the 100+ man company to the 10+ man squad) went hand-in-hand with armored cars, the first submachine guns, and automatic rifles that could be carried and used by one man. Development of world war 1 is Tanks, gas and early airplanes were mayor developments in ww1. The First World War lasted for four years and three months. It involved sixty sovereign states, overthrew four Empires, gave birth to seven new nations, took ten million combatant lives along with another 30 million wounded.

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