The United Kingdom in the First World War

Britain entered the First World War on 4 August 1914, when Germany invaded neutral Belgium, and fought until the Armistice of 11 November 1918. The whole empire went to war with it: the Dominions, India and the colonies. The British, who had no conscription, built a mass army during the war, and their fleet blockaded Germany and protected the Entente’s sea lanes. Britain fought on the Western Front, at sea and against Turkey from the Dardanelles to Palestine, and emerged from the war victorious.

The road to war

In 1898 Germany passed its first Navy Law, which started the naval arms race with Britain. On 10 February 1906 HMS Dreadnought was launched, the first battleship with only heavy guns and turbines. In this race Britain did not lose its lead before 1914.

Meanwhile the British were looking for a way out of isolation: in 1904 they concluded the Entente Cordiale with France, and in 1907 the Anglo-Russian Convention with Russia, which completed the Triple Entente. None of these agreements was a military alliance. Before the war the country was preoccupied mainly with strikes, the suffragette movement and the threat of civil war in Ireland.

Entering the war

In July 1914 the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, proposed an international conference to prevent war. On 3 August he set out to the House of Commons Britain’s obligations to Belgium and France. When Germany invaded Belgium, the British ultimatum expired at 11 p.m. London time on 4 August, and Britain found itself at war with Germany. It declared war on Austria-Hungary on 12 August and on Turkey on 5 November.

The Liberal government of Herbert Asquith immediately introduced censorship and the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). Lord Kitchener, one of the few who foresaw a long war, became Secretary of State for War. On 21 August the War Office ordered the formation of the first New Army from volunteers. By the end of 1914 just over a million volunteers had come forward, and by December 1915 almost 2.5 million. In all some 5.2 million men passed through the British army during the war, about half of them originally volunteers.

The Western Front

On 16 August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force completed its landing in France under Sir John French. On 23 August it fought its first battle at Mons, and on 26 August it checked the German pursuit at Le Cateau. After the Marne the British moved to Flanders, where in the First Battle of Ypres they held the town, but the old regular army bled to death before it.

In 1915 they attacked at Neuve Chapelle and Loos. After the setback at Loos French was removed, and on 19 December 1915 General Douglas Haig took command.

On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British army lost 57,000 men, the worst day in its history. In September, on the Somme, tanks went into action for the first time.

In 1917 the British attacked at Arras, from 31 July to 10 November from Ypres towards Passchendaele, losing a quarter of a million men, and in November they broke the Hindenburg Line with hundreds of tanks at Cambrai.

On 21 March 1918 the Germans broke through the British front in Operation Michael and advanced more than 60 km, but did not take Amiens. On 8 August the British, Canadians and Australians with tanks, together with the French, broke through the front at Amiens. This began the Hundred Days Offensive, in which the Allies drove the Germans from the Hindenburg Line and forced them into an armistice. On the morning of 11 November Canadians entered Mons, where the British had fought their first battle in 1914.

The sea and the fronts beyond Europe

From August 1914 Britain maintained a naval blockade of the Central Powers. On 31 May – 1 June 1916, off Jutland, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet clashed with the German High Seas Fleet. It lost more ships, but the Germans fled and did not break its superiority.

From 1 February 1917 German submarines sank without warning all ships around the British Isles. On 14 June 1917 Jellicoe approved the convoy system, which decided Germany’s defeat in the submarine war.

The British fought Turkey on several fronts. From February 1915 to January 1916 the Entente tried to take the Dardanelles, which ended in the defeat of the Gallipoli campaign and evacuation. In Mesopotamia, British and Indian troops surrendered at Kut on 29 April 1916, and in March 1917 they took Baghdad.

From Egypt the forces of Edmund Allenby entered Palestine, took Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, and in September 1918 routed the Turks at Megiddo. On 2 November 1917 the Balfour Declaration promised support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. On 30 October 1918 the Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros.

The empire

The British could draw on soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and on the volunteer Indian army. Indian army troops fought in France from 1914, Canadians from early 1915, and by 1916 Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Newfoundlanders had joined them. More than a million Indian army soldiers served overseas, and at least 74,187 of them died.

Some 3 million British and imperial soldiers served in the war against Turkey, more than a million of them from Britain itself. In all the empire mobilised 8,904,467 men, about 5.7 million of them from Britain alone.

The home front

In 1915 the Western Front ran short of artillery shells, and the shell crisis became a political issue. On 25 May Asquith formed a coalition government with the Conservatives and Labour, and David Lloyd George took over the Ministry of Munitions, which could take control of factories and direct workers to them.

Volunteers began to run short, and on 27 January 1916 conscription was introduced for unmarried men aged 18 to 41; on 25 May it was extended to all men of that age. In April 1916 the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin. On 7 December 1916 Lloyd George became prime minister.

About a million women moved during the war from domestic service and traditional occupations to new, better-paid jobs, and in January 1917 the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was formed. The war also reached British towns from the air. On 19 January 1915 airships carried out the first raid on England, on the night of 31 May – 1 June 1915 an airship bombed London, and on 13 June 1917 Gothas killed 162 people in the City and the East End.

From 25 February 1918 meat, butter and margarine in London were sold only on ration cards. On 6 February 1918 the Representation of the People Act gave the vote to women over thirty and to all men from 21. The war was paid for with taxes and debt: income tax rose to 30 per cent in 1918, and the national debt from 625 to 7,800 million pounds.

Britain also supported the Polish cause. On 5 April 1917 London assured the Russian Provisional Government that it backed the principle of an independent and united Poland, and on 15 October 1917, as the second Entente power after France, it recognised the Polish National Committee. On 3 June 1918 the prime ministers of France, Britain and Italy recognised in the Versailles declaration an independent Poland with access to the sea as a condition of peace, and on 15 October 1918 London recognised the Polish Army as allied and co-belligerent.

The end of the war and the cost

On 14 December 1918, in the first election in which women voted, Lloyd George’s coalition won by a landslide, while in Ireland Sinn Féin prevailed. According to the War Office in 1922, 908,000 soldiers of the empire’s land forces died, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission commemorates more than 1.1 million dead, including the navy. About 744,000 soldiers died from the British Isles alone. Together with civilian victims the war took, according to the Wikipedia table, 1.9–2.2 per cent of the population of Britain and its colonies. According to Stephen Badsey, British losses were lower, in absolute and relative terms, than those of any other major belligerent except the United States.