17. War in the Trenches

European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202)

With the failure of Germany's offensive strategy, WWI became a war of defense, in which trenches played a major role. The use of trenches and barbed wire, coupled with the deployment of new, more deadly forms of artillery, created extremely bloody stalemate situations. The hopelessness of this arrangement resulted in a number of mutinies on the French side, motivated neither by defeatism nor by ideology, but rather by the sheer horror of trench warfare. Due to the unprecedented scale of casualties, WWI impressed itself irresistibly upon the cultural imagination of the combatant nations.

00:00 - Chapter 1. The Failure of the Schlieffen Plan: The Battle of the Marne
05:47 - Chapter 2. Trench Warfare
13:51 - Chapter 3. The Legacy of the Great War
22:20 - Chapter 4. The French Mutinies of 1917
34:18 - Chapter 5: The Turning Point in 1917: The Russian Revolution and American Involvement
41:52 - Chapter 6: The Scale of Destruction

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Fall 2008.