Unusual Facts about WWI?

Question

Tell me TEN unusual facts about WWI

Answer 1

The war was followed by a world-wide flu pandemic spread by the returning troops, that took more lives than the war itself.

Answer 2

Girls were not allowed to wear trousers, which would have been warmer for work, in those days, not even in the forces. The only place girls were allowed to wear them was in the Land Army.

In those days no scrap food was wasted. All hotels, restaurants and cafes had large bins into which any waste food was tipped. These were then transported to the farms for pig swill. This has all been stopped now on the grounds of hygiene. Worse than that any cakes that were left over in the shop and going stale were returned to the bakery the next day and were then chopped up and mixed together. Then the mixture was moistened and put between two squares of pastry, baked and sold as Nelson Squares or as they were commonly called “Door Stoppers.”

Answer 3

1.Brazil was the only independent South American country to declare war; they joined the Entente countries against Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917.

2.Despite Africa's size, the only regions to remain neutral were Ethiopia and the four small Spanish colonies of Rio de Oro (Spanish Sahara), Rio Muni, Ifni and Spanish Morocco.

3.OTHER NAMES FOR THE GREAT WAR
World War One
The War to End All Wars
The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy
The War of the Nations
The First World War
The World War

4.Famous Alumni of World War One
Humphrey Bogart, Walt Disney, Charles DeGaulle,
Ernest Hemmingway, Pope John XXIII, Lawrence of Arabia,
Winston Churchill, Bella Lugosi, Fritz Kreisler,
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussollini, Fiorello LaGuardia
Harry Truman, King Edward VIII, General Marshall,
General George Patton, General E. Rommel, G. Marconi
General Douglas MacArthur, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Field Marshall Montgomery

5.During the summer and fall of 1914, France lost as many men on the battlefield as the U.S.Army would lose in all of the 20th century

6.Russia's losses were never actually counted. It is estimated that over 6 million Russian soldiers were killed in WWI.

7.During World War One, 230 soldiers perished for each hour of the four and a quarter years it continued

8.The world's worst train accident occured in France, in December 1917 with the deaths of over 600 soldiers

9.There were 70,000,000 men and women in uniform of that number one-half were either killed, wounded or became prisoners of war.

10.Half of the dead of Great War have no known grave.

Answer 4

There is a famous book filled with facts so unusual, you will lose sleep. It presents a side of war that will forever change you. There is no surround-sound, no Brad Pitt, no wartime romance. It is haunting.

This answer won't help you on a test or a worksheet, but if you have an hour or two, pick up Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun". I guarantee you will never forget it.

Answer 5

1) the first war with aircraft
2) the first major war that used chemical weapons
3) the first war that used armored tanks
4) the Christmas Truce... during one Christmas their was a short cease fire where the English troops exchanged gifts with the German troops
5) it inspired the Surreal Art movement
6) there were a LOT of executions for desertion and also failing to follow orders in all armies (but especially in the British army)
7) the Russians had to pull out of the war because of their own civil war

Thats all i can think of now.

Answer 6

The armistice was timed for the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of 1918. It is claimed that this combination was a mere coincidence, but cynics say that it was a public relations exercise, and that lives were lost by delaying the end of the war to achieve a fatuous combination of digits.

Answer 7

Part One

The Maxim Heavy Machine Gun was an American invention, who was told by his banker or the US Govt to flog it off to all of those Euro peon nations who were always warring against the other.
Maxim did that and made heaps as he sold licences all over the place.

Part 2

They were used to slaughter 1000's of soldiers. ( including Americans)

Answer 8

1. it didnt involve the whole world

Answer 9

1.Prisoners of War
About 8 million men surrendered and were held in POW camps until the war ended. All nations pledged to follow the Hague rules on fair treatment of prisoners of war, and in general the POW's had a much higher survival rate than their peers who were not captured.[13] Individual surrenders were uncommon; usually a large unit surrendered all its men. At Tannenberg 92,000 Russians surrendered during the battle. When the besieged garrison of Kaunas surrendered in 1915, 20,000 Russians became prisoners. Over half the Russian losses were prisoners (as a proportion of those captured, wounded or killed); for Austria 32%, for Italy 26%, for France 12%, for Germany 9%; for Britain 7%. Prisoners from the Allied armies totalled about 1.4 million (not including Russia, which lost between 2.5 and 3.5 million men as prisoners.) From the Central Powers about 3.3 million men became prisoners.

2.Germany held 2.5 million prisoners; Russia held 2.9 million, and Britain and France held about 720,000, mostly gained in the period just before the Armistice in 1918. The US held 48,000. The most dangerous moment was the act of surrender, when helpless soldiers were sometimes gunned down. Once prisoners reached a camp in general conditions were satisfactory (and much better than in World War II), thanks in part to the efforts of the International Red Cross and inspections by neutral nations. Conditions were terrible in Russia, starvation was common for prisoners and civilians alike; about 15-20% of the prisoners in Russia died. In Germany food was short but only 5% died.

3.The Ottoman Empire often treated prisoners of war poorly. Some 11,800 British Empire soldiers, most of them Indians became prisoners after the five-month Siege of Kut, in Mesopotamia, in April 1916; 4,250 died in captivity.[16] Although many were in very bad condition when captured; Ottoman officers forced them to march 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) to Anatolia: a survivor said: "we were driven along like beasts, to drop out was to die." The survivors were then forced to build a railway through the Taurus Mountains.

4.The most curious case came in Russia where the Czech Legion of Czech prisoners (from the Austro-Hungarian army), were released in 1917, armed themselves, and briefly became a military and diplomatic force during the Russian revolution.


5War Crimes
The ethnic cleansing of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire is widely considered a genocide. The Turks accused the (Christian) Armenians of preparing to ally themselves with Russia, and saw the entire Armenian population as an enemy within their empire. The exact numbers of deaths is unknown; most estimates are between 800,000 and 1.5 million. Turkish governments since that time have consistently rejected charges of genocide, typically arguing either that those Armenians who died were simply in the way of a war or that killings of Armenians were justified by their individual or collective support for the enemies of the Ottoman Empire. These claims have often been labeled as historical revisionism by western scholars, sometimes compared to Holocaust Denial.

6.In Belgium, German troops, in fear of francs-tireurs, massacred townspeople in Andenne (211 dead), Tamines (384 dead), and Dinant (612 dead). The victims included women and children. On August 25, 1914, the Germans set fire to the town of Leuven and burned the library of 230,000 books, killing 209 civilians and forcing 42,000 to evacuate. These actions brought worldwide condemnation.

7.Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased for three Allies (Britain, Italy, and U.S.), but decreased in France and Russia, in neutral Netherlands, and in the main three Central Powers. The shrinkage in GDP in Austria, Russia, France, and the Ottoman Empire reached 30 to 40%. In Austria, for example, most of the pigs were slaughtered and, at war’s end, there was no meat.

8.World War I, also known as WWI (abbreviation), the First World War, the Great War, and "The War to End All Wars", was a global military conflict that took place mostly in Europe between 1914 and 1918. It left millions dead and shaped the modern world.

9.The Allied Powers, led by France, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, and later, Italy and the United States, defeated the Central Powers: Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.


10.Much of the fighting in World War I took place along the Western Front, within a system of opposing manned trenches and fortifications (separated by an unoccupied space between the trenches called "no man's land") running from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. On the Eastern Front, the vast eastern plains and limited rail network prevented a trench warfare stalemate from developing, although the scale of the conflict was just as large. Hostilities also occurred on and under the sea and — for the first time — from the air. More than nine million soldiers died on the various battlefields, and millions more civilians perished.