Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/September 2018/Op-ed
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Twilight of the Gods |
- By TomStar81
In September 1918, with the commencement of the Hundred Days Offensive in Europe on the Western Front, the two warring factions' surviving pro-war holdouts began to come to terms with the inevitability of the outcome of the war. With the United States now backing the Allied Powers, the Russian Empire out of the conflict, and an unchecked march by Allied military personnel that was slowly and undeniably forcing the German Empire's battle-weary but still functional military units to withdraw from the territory they had occupied since the outbreak of World War I some four years before, even the hardest ultra-nationalist forces began to realize who would eventually win the war and who was going to lose.
Helping to cement this particular point of view were a pair of military actions fought toward the end of September and into early October. On September 15, a multinational force of the Allied Powers commenced the
Meanwhile, on September 18, the Allied Powers in Palestine under the command of General
The Battle of the Nablus Plain ranks with Ludendorff's Black Days of the German Army in the effect that it had on the consciousness of the Turkish General Staff. It was now apparent to all but the most diehard nationalists that the Turks were finished in the war. In spite of the great victories in Armenia and in Azerbaijan, Turkey was now in an indefensible condition, which could not be remedied with the resources on hand. It was also apparent that the disintegration of the Bulgarian Army at Salonika and the dissolution of the Austro–Hungarian Army spelled disaster and defeat for the Central Powers. From now until the Armistice, the focus of the Turkish strategy would be to retain as much Ottoman territory as possible.
With the benefit of hindsight this campaign could also be said to be the last of major operation on the
Compounding the aforementioned problems was a massive uprising of citizens across most of the European continent who were in broad strokes fed up with monarchist and imperial sentiment, and having witnessed the success of the Socialist/Communist uprising in Russia were now protesting en mass in hopes of effecting a similar change for their nation, region, or ethnic group. With the military power of most involved nations largely exhausted by this point in the war, and Allied Power affiliated forces predicted to win in the not too distant future, many of these factions began to stir an already upset and badly proportioned pot at home to demand changes before the governments in their respective area's could regroup and put down the uprisings. With these protesters came new ideas about government, ideas which would take root in multiple nations across Europe in the coming years as politicians and military personnel applied lessons from war years in an attempt to prevent the same mistakes from being made again.
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