Conflict	World War I
Caption	Clockwise from top: Trenches on the Western Front; a British Mark IV Tank crossing a trench; Royal Navy battleship HMS Irresistible sinking after striking a mine at the Battle of the Dardanelles; a Vickers machine gun crew with gas masks, and German Albatros D.III biplanes
Date	28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918 (Armistice)
Place	Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, China and off the coast of South and North America
Casus	Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (28 June) followed by Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Kingdom of Serbia (28 July) and Russian mobilization against Austria–Hungary (29 July).
Result	Allied victory
Combatant1	Allied (Entente) Powers
Combatant2	Central Powers
Commander1	Leaders and commanders
Commander2	Leaders and commanders
Strength1	Allies
Strength2	Central Powers assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (centred around the Triple Entente) and the Central Powers. More than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, due largely to great technological advances in firepower without corresponding advances in mobility. It was the second deadliest conflict in history.

On the battle of the Menin Road Ridge, Ludendorff wrote, 's Bermuda Contingent, Royal Garrison Artillery, in Europe.]]

Around 1.1 to 1.2 million soldiers from the British and Dominion armies were on the Western Front at any one time. A thousand battalions, occupying sectors of the line from the North Sea to the Orne River, operated on a month-long four-stage rotation system, unless an offensive was underway. The front contained over of trenches. Each battalion held its sector for about a week before moving back to support lines and then further back to the reserve lines before a week out-of-line, often in the Poperinge or Amiens areas.

In the 1917 Battle of Arras, the only significant British military success was the capture of Vimy Ridge by the Canadian Corps under Sir Arthur Currie and Julian Byng. The assaulting troops were able for the first time to overrun, rapidly reinforce and hold the ridge defending the coal-rich Douai plain.

Naval war

making steam for Scapa Flow, 1914]] At the start of the war, the German Empire had cruisers scattered across the globe, some of which were subsequently used to attack Allied merchant shipping. The British Royal Navy systematically hunted them down, though not without some embarrassment from its inability to protect Allied shipping. For example, the German detached light cruiser , part of the East-Asia squadron stationed at Tsingtao, seized or destroyed 15 merchantmen, as well as sinking a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer. However, the bulk of the German East-Asia squadron—consisting of the armoured cruisers and , light cruisers and and two transport ships—did not have orders to raid shipping and was instead underway to Germany when it encountered elements of the British fleet. The German flotilla, along with , sank two armoured cruisers at the Battle of Coronel, but was almost destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, with only Dresden and a few auxiliaries escaping, but at the Battle of Más a Tierra these too were destroyed or interned.

at sea]] Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, Britain initiated a naval blockade of Germany. The strategy proved effective, cutting off vital military and civilian supplies, although this blockade violated generally accepted international law codified by several international agreements of the past two centuries. Britain mined international waters to prevent any ships from entering entire sections of ocean, causing danger to even neutral ships. Since there was limited response to this tactic, Germany expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare.

The 1916 Battle of Jutland (German: Skagerrakschlacht, or "Battle of the Skagerrak") developed into the largest naval battle of the war, the only full-scale clash of battleships during the war, and one of the largest in history. It took place on 31 May – 1 June 1916, in the North Sea off Jutland. The Kaiserliche Marine's High Seas Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, squared off against the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, led by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe. The engagement was a stand off, as the Germans, outmanoeuvred by the larger British fleet, managed to escape and inflicted more damage to the British fleet than they received. Strategically, however, the British asserted their control of the sea, and the bulk of the German surface fleet remained confined to port for the duration of the war.

German U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between North America and Britain. The nature of submarine warfare meant that attacks often came without warning, giving the crews of the merchant ships little hope of survival. The United States launched a protest, and Germany modified its rules of engagement. After the notorious sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania in 1915, Germany promised not to target passenger liners, while Britain armed its merchant ships, placing them beyond the protection of the "cruiser rules" which demanded warning and placing crews in "a place of safety" (a standard which lifeboats did not meet). Finally, in early 1917 Germany adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, realizing the Americans would eventually enter the war. Germany sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the U.S. could transport a large army overseas, but were only able to maintain five long range U-boats on station, to limited effect. The U-boats had sunk almost 5,000 Allied ships, at a cost of 178 submarines.

World War I also saw the first use of aircraft carriers in combat, with HMS Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a successful raid against the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in July 1918, as well as blimps for antisubmarine patrol.

Southern theatres

War in the Balkans

.]] Faced with Russia, Austria-Hungary could spare only one-third of its army to attack Serbia. After suffering heavy losses, the Austrians briefly occupied the Serbian capital, Belgrade. A Serbian counter attack in the battle of Kolubara, however, succeeded in driving them from the country by the end of 1914. For the first ten months of 1915, Austria-Hungary used most of its military reserves to fight Italy. German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats, however, scored a coup by persuading Bulgaria to join in attacking Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian provinces of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia provided troops for Austria-Hungary, invading Serbia as well as fighting Russia and Italy. Montenegro allied itself with Serbia.

Serbia was conquered in a little more than a month. The attack began in October, when the Central Powers launched an offensive from the north; four days later the Bulgarians joined the attack from the east. The Serbian army, fighting on two fronts and facing certain defeat, retreated into Albania, halting only once to make a stand against the Bulgarians. The Serbs suffered defeat near modern day Gnjilane in the Battle of Kosovo. Montenegro covered the Serbian retreat toward the Adriatic coast in the Battle of Mojkovac in 6–7 January 1916, but ultimately the Austrians conquered Montenegro, too. Serbian forces were evacuated by ship to Greece.

In late 1915, a Franco-British force landed at Salonica in Greece, to offer assistance and to pressure the government to declare war against the Central Powers. Unfortunately for the Allies, the pro-German King Constantine I dismissed the pro-Allied government of Eleftherios Venizelos, before the Allied expeditionary force could arrive. After conquest, Serbia was divided between Austro-Hungary and Bulgaria. Bulgarians commenced bulgarization of the Serbian population in their occupation zone, banishing Serbian Cyrillic and the Serbian Orthodox Church. After forced conscription of the Serbian population into the Bulgarian army in 1917, the Toplica Uprising began. Serbian rebels liberated for a short time the area between the Kopaonik mountains and the South Morava river. The uprising was crushed by joint efforts of Bulgarian and Austrian forces at the end of March 1917.

The Macedonian Front proved static for the most part. Serbian forces retook part of Macedonia by recapturing Bitola on 19 November 1916. Only at the end of the conflict were the Entente powers able to break through, after most of the German and Austro-Hungarian troops had withdrawn. The Bulgarians suffered their only defeat of the war at the Battle of Dobro Pole but days later, they decisively defeated British and Greek forces at the Battle of Doiran, avoiding occupation. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September 1918. Hindenburg and Ludendorff concluded that the strategic and operational balance had now shifted decidedly against the Central Powers and a day after the Bulgarian collapse, during a meeting with government officials, insisted on an immediate peace settlement.

The disappearance of the Macedonian front meant that the road to Budapest and Vienna was now opened for the 670,000-strong army of general Franchet d'Esperey as the Bulgarian capitulation deprived the Central Powers of the 278 infantry battalions and 1,500 guns (the equivalent of some 25 to 30 German divisions) that were previously holding the line.

Ottoman Empire

in the Battle of Jerusalem.]] The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in the war, the secret Ottoman-German Alliance having been signed in August 1914. It threatened Russia's Caucasian territories and Britain's communications with India via the Suez Canal. The British and French opened overseas fronts with the Gallipoli (1915) and Mesopotamian campaigns. In Gallipoli, Turkey successfully repelled the British, French and Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs). In Mesopotamia, by contrast, after the disastrous Siege of Kut (1915–16), British Imperial forces reorganized and captured Baghdad in March 1917. Further to the west, in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, initial British setbacks were overcome when they captured Jerusalem in December 1917. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, under Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, broke the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918.

Russian armies generally had the best of it in the Caucasus. Enver Pasha, supreme commander of the Turkish armed forces, was ambitious and dreamed of conquering central Asia. He was, however, a poor commander. He launched an offensive against the Russians in the Caucasus in December 1914 with 100,000 troops; insisting on a frontal attack against mountainous Russian positions in winter, he lost 86% of his force at the Battle of Sarikamish.

General Yudenich, the Russian commander from 1915 to 1916, drove the Turks out of most of the southern Caucasus with a string of victories.

Instigated by the Arab bureau of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Arab Revolt started with the help of Britain in June 1916 at the Battle of Mecca, led by Sherif Hussein of Mecca, and ended with the Ottoman surrender of Damascus. Fakhri Pasha, the Ottoman commander of Medina, resisted for more than two and half years during the Siege of Medina.

Along the border of Italian Libya and British Egypt, the Senussi tribe, incited and armed by the Turks, waged a small-scale guerrilla war against Allied troops. The British were forced to dispatch 12,000 troops to deal with the Senussi. Their rebellion was finally crushed in mid-1916.

Italian participation

Italy had been allied with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires since 1882 as part of the Triple Alliance. However, the nation had its own designs on Austrian territory in Trentino, Istria and Dalmatia. Rome had a secret 1902 pact with France, effectively nullifying its alliance. At the start of hostilities, Italy refused to commit troops, arguing that the Triple Alliance was defensive in nature, and that Austria–Hungary was an aggressor. The Austro-Hungarian government began negotiations to secure Italian neutrality, offering the French colony of Tunisia in return. The Allies made a counter-offer in which Italy would receive the Southern Tyrol, Julian March and territory on the Dalmatian coast after the defeat of Austria-Hungary. This was formalized by the Treaty of London. Further encouraged by the Allied invasion of Turkey in April 1915, Italy joined the Triple Entente and declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May. Fifteen months later Italy declared war on Germany.

Militarily, the Italians had numerical superiority. This advantage, however, was lost, not only because of the difficult terrain in which fighting took place, but also because of the strategies and tactics employed. Field Marshal Luigi Cadorna, a staunch proponent of the frontal assault, had dreams of breaking into the Slovenian plateau, taking Ljubljana and threatening Vienna. It was a Napoleonic plan, which had no realistic chance of success in an age of barbed wire, machine guns, and indirect artillery fire, combined with hilly and mountainous terrain.

On the Trentino front, the Austro-Hungarians took advantage of the mountainous terrain, which favoured the defender. After an initial strategic retreat, the front remained largely unchanged, while Austrian Kaiserschützen and Standschützen engaged Italian Alpini in bitter hand-to-hand combat throughout the summer. The Austro-Hungarians counter attacked in the Altopiano of Asiago, towards Verona and Padua, in the spring of 1916, (Strafexpedition), but made little progress.

Beginning in 1915, the Italians under Cadorna mounted eleven offensives on the Isonzo front along the Isonzo River, north east of Trieste. All eleven offensives were repelled by the Austro-Hungarians, who held the higher ground. In the summer of 1916, the Italians captured the town of Gorizia. After this minor victory, the front remained static for over a year, despite several Italian offensives. In the autumn of 1917, thanks to the improving situation on the Eastern front, the Austro-Hungarian troops received large numbers of reinforcements, including German Stormtroopers and the elite Alpenkorps. The Central Powers launched a crushing offensive on 26 October 1917, spearheaded by the Germans. They achieved a victory at Caporetto. The Italian army was routed and retreated more than 100 kilometres (60 mi.) to reorganize, stabilising the front at the Piave River. Since in the Battle of Caporetto the Italian Army had heavy losses, the Italian Government called to arms the so-called '99 Boys (Ragazzi del '99), that is, all males who were 18 years old. In 1918, the Austro-Hungarians failed to break through, in a series of battles on the Piave River and, finally being decisively defeated in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in October of that year. Austria-Hungary surrendered in early November 1918.

Romanian participation

inspecting Romanian troops]] Romania had been allied with the Central Powers since 1882. When the war began, however, it declared its neutrality, arguing that because Austria-Hungary had itself declared war on Serbia, Romania was under no obligation to join the war. When the Entente Powers promised Romania large territories of eastern Hungary (Transylvania and Banat), that had a large Romanian population, in exchange for Romania’s declaring war on the Central Powers, the Romanian government renounced its neutrality, and on 27 August 1916 the Romanian army launched an attack against Austria-Hungary. The Romanian offensive was initially successful, pushing back the Austro-Hungarian troops in Transylvania, but a counter attack by the forces of the Central Powers defeated the Romanian army and as a result of the Battle of Bucharest the Central Powers occupied Bucharest on 6 December 1916. Fighting in Moldova continued in 1917 until an armistice was signed between the Central Powers and Romania on 9 December 1917.

In January 1918, Russia, allied to Romania, had to withdraw its troops from the Romanian front and Romanian forces established control over Bessarabia. Although a treaty was signed by the Romanian and the Bolshevik Russian government following talks between 5–9 March 1918 on the withdrawal of Romanian forces from Bessarabia within two months, on 27 March 1918 Romania attached Bessarabia to its territory, formally based on a resolution passed by the local assembly of the territory on the unification with Romania.

Romania officially made peace with the Central Powers signing the Treaty of Bucharest on 7 May 1918. Under that treaty Romania was obliged to cease war with the Central Powers. Romania made small territorial concessions for Austria-Hungary, ceding control of some passes in the Carpathian Mountains and granted oil concessions for Germany. On the other hand, the Central Powers recognized the sovereignty of Romania over Bessarabia. The treaty was renounced in October 1918 by the Alexandru Marghiloman government and Romania nominally re-entered the war on 10 November 1918. The next day, the Treaty of Bucharest was nullified by the terms of the Armistice of Compiègne. Total Romanian deaths from 1914 to 1918, military and civilian, within contemporary borders, were estimated at 748,000.

The role of India

The war began with an unprecedented outpouring of loyalty and goodwill towards the United Kingdom from within the mainstream political leadership, contrary to initial British fears of an Indian revolt. The Indian Army in fact outnumbered the British Army at the beginning of the war. India under British rule contributed greatly to the British war effort by providing men and resources. This was done by the Indian Congress in hope of achieving self-government as India was very much under the control of the British. The United Kingdom disappointed the Indians by not providing self-governance, leading to the Gandhian Era in Indian history. About 1.3 million Indian soldiers and labourers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while both the Indian government and the princes sent large supplies of food, money, and ammunition. In all 140,000 men served on the Western Front and nearly 700,000 in the Middle East. Casualties of Indian soldiers totalled 47,746 killed and 65,126 wounded during World War I.

Eastern Front

Initial actions

While the Western Front had reached stalemate, the war continued in East Europe. Initial Russian plans called for simultaneous invasions of Austrian Galicia and German East Prussia. Although Russia's initial advance into Galicia was largely successful, they were driven back from East Prussia by Hindenburg and Ludendorff at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in August and September 1914. Russia's less developed industrial base and ineffective military leadership was instrumental in the events that unfolded. By the spring of 1915, the Russians had retreated into Galicia, and in May the Central Powers achieved a remarkable breakthrough on Poland's southern frontiers. On 5 August they captured Warsaw and forced the Russians to withdraw from Poland.

Russian Revolution

Despite the success of the June 1916 Brusilov Offensive in eastern Galicia, dissatisfaction with the Russian government's conduct of the war grew. The success was undermined by the reluctance of other generals to commit their forces to support the victory. Allied and Russian forces were revived only temporarily with Romania's entry into the war on 27 August. German forces came to the aid of embattled Austro-Hungarian units in Transylvania and Bucharest fell to the Central Powers on 6 December. Meanwhile, unrest grew in Russia, as the Tsar remained at the front. Empress Alexandra's increasingly incompetent rule drew protests and resulted in the murder of her favourite, Rasputin, at the end of 1916.

In March 1917, demonstrations in Petrograd culminated in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the appointment of a weak Provisional Government which shared power with the Petrograd Soviet socialists. This arrangement led to confusion and chaos both at the front and at home. The army became increasingly ineffective. The manpower required for German occupation of former Russian territory may have contributed to the failure of the Spring Offensive, however, and secured relatively little food or other materiel

With the adoption of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Entente no longer existed. The Allied powers led a small-scale invasion of Russia, partly to stop Germany from exploiting Russian resources and, to a lesser extent, to support the "Whites" (as opposed to "Reds") in the Russian Civil War. Allied troops landed in Archangel and in Vladivostok.

Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II declares victory

In December 1916, after ten brutal months of the Battle of Verdun, the Germans attempted to negotiate a peace with the Allies, effectively declaring themselves the victors. Soon after, U.S. President Wilson attempted to intervene as a peacemaker, asking in a note for both sides to state their demands. Lloyd George's War Cabinet considered the German offer as a ploy to create divisions amongst the Allies. After initial outrage and much deliberation, they took Wilson's note as a separate effort, signalling that the U.S. was on the verge of entering the war against Germany following the "submarine outrages". While the Allies debated a response to Wilson's offer, the Germans chose to rebuff it in favour of "a direct exchange of views". Learning of the German response, the Allied governments were free to make clear demands in their response of 14 January. They sought restoration of damages, the evacuation of occupied territories, reparations for France, Russia and Roumania, and a recognition of the principle of nationalities. This included the liberation of Italians, Slavs, Roumanians, Czecho-Slovaks, and the creation of a "free and united Poland". On the question of security, the Allies sought guarantees that would prevent or limit future wars, complete with sanctions, as a condition of any peace settlement.

1917–1918

, with their machine guns amongst the ruins of a cathedral near the Marne, driving back the Germans. 1918]]

Developments in 1917

Events of 1917 proved decisive in ending the war, although their effects were not fully felt until 1918.

The British naval blockade began to have a serious impact on Germany. In response, in February 1917, the German General Staff convinced Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to declare unrestricted submarine warfare, with the goal of starving Britain out of the war. Tonnage sunk rose above 500,000 tons per month from February to July. It peaked at 860,000 tons in April. After July, the newly re-introduced convoy system became extremely effective in reducing the U-boat threat. Britain was safe from starvation and German industrial output fell.

On 3 May 1917, during the Nivelle Offensive, the weary French 2nd Colonial Division, veterans of the Battle of Verdun, refused their orders, arriving drunk and without their weapons. Their officers lacked the means to punish an entire division, and harsh measures were not immediately implemented. Then, mutinies afflicted an additional 54 French divisions and saw 20,000 men desert. The other Allied forces attacked but sustained tremendous casualties. However, appeals to patriotism and duty, as well as mass arrests and trials, encouraged the soldiers to return to defend their trenches, although the French soldiers refused to participate in further offensive action. Robert Nivelle was removed from command by 15 May, replaced by General Philippe Pétain, who suspended bloody large-scale attacks.

, France, 1917]]

The victory of Austria–Hungary and Germany at the Battle of Caporetto led the Allies at the Rapallo Conference to form the Supreme War Council to coordinate planning. Previously, British and French armies had operated under separate commands.

In December, the Central Powers signed an armistice with Russia. This released large numbers of German troops for use in the west. With German reinforcements and new American troops pouring in, the outcome was to be decided on the Western front. The Central Powers knew that they could not win a protracted war, but they held high hopes for success based on a final quick offensive. Furthermore, the leaders of the Central Powers and the Allies became increasingly fearful of social unrest and revolution in Europe. Thus, both sides urgently sought a decisive victory.

Entry of the United States

Non-Intervention

The United States originally pursued a policy of non-intervention, avoiding conflict while trying to broker a peace. When a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania in 1915, with 128 Americans aboard, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson vowed, "America is too proud to fight" and demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships. Germany complied. Wilson unsuccessfully tried to mediate a settlement. He repeatedly warned the U.S. would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare, in violation of international law and U.S. ideas of human rights. Wilson was under pressure from former president Theodore Roosevelt, who denounced German acts as "piracy". Wilson's desire to have a seat at negotiations at war's end to advance the League of Nations also played a role. Wilson's Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, resigned in protest at what he felt was the President's decidedly warmongering diplomacy. Other factors contributing to the U.S. entry into the war include the suspected German sabotage of Black Tom in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the Kingsland Explosion in what is now Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

Making the case

In January 1917, after the Navy pressured the Kaiser, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain's secret Royal Navy cryptanalytic group, Room 40, had broken the German diplomatic code. They intercepted a proposal from Berlin (the Zimmermann Telegram) to Mexico to join the war as Germany's ally against the United States, should the U.S. join. The proposal suggested that if the U.S. were to enter the war then Mexico should declare war against the United States and enlist Japan as an ally. This would prevent the United States from joining the Allies and deploying troops to Europe, and would give Germany more time for their unrestricted submarine warfare program to strangle Britain's vital war supplies. In return, the Germans would promise Mexico support in reclaiming the territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona that Mexico lost during the Mexican-American War 70 years earlier.

Germany also lent a minor amount of support to Mexico during its border war with the United States, such as sending equipment and military advisors. This aid, though insubstantial, nonetheless reinforced growing interventionist sentiment in the US.

U.S. declaration of war on Germany

After the British revealed the telegram to the United States, President Wilson, who had won reelection on his keeping the country out of the war, released the captured telegram as a way of building support for U.S. entry into the war. He had previously claimed neutrality, while calling for the arming of U.S. merchant ships delivering munitions to combatant Britain and quietly supporting the British blockading of German ports and mining of international waters, preventing the shipment of food from America and elsewhere to combatant Germany. After submarines sank seven U.S. merchant ships and the publication of the Zimmerman telegram, Wilson called for war on Germany, which the U.S. Congress declared on 6 April 1917.

Crucial to U.S. participation was the sweeping domestic propaganda campaign executed by the Committee on Public Information, overseen by George Creel. The campaign consisted of tens of thousands of government-selected community leaders giving brief carefully scripted pro-war speeches at thousands of public gatherings. Along with other branches of government and private vigilante groups like the American Protective League, it also included the general repression and harassment of people either opposed to American entry into the war or of German heritage.

First active U.S. participation

The United States was never formally a member of the Allies but became a self-styled "Associated Power". The United States had a small army, but, after the passage of the Selective Service Act, it drafted 2.8 million men and by summer 1918 was sending 10,000 fresh soldiers to France every day. In 1917, the U.S. Congress gave U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans when they were drafted to participate in World War I, as part of the Jones Act. Germany had miscalculated, believing it would be many more months before they would arrive and that the arrival could be stopped by U-boats.

The United States Navy sent a battleship group to Scapa Flow to join with the British Grand Fleet, destroyers to Queenstown, Ireland and submarines to help guard convoys. Several regiments of U.S. Marines were also dispatched to France. The British and French wanted U.S. units used to reinforce their troops already on the battle lines and not waste scarce shipping on bringing over supplies. The U.S. rejected the first proposition and accepted the second. General John J. Pershing, American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) commander, refused to break up U.S. units to be used as reinforcements for British Empire and French units. As an exception, he did allow African-American combat regiments to be used in French divisions. The Harlem Hellfighters fought as part of the French 16th Division, earning a unit Croix de guerre for their actions at Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood and Sechault. AEF doctrine called for the use of frontal assaults, which had long since been discarded by British Empire and French commanders because of the large loss of life.

Austrian offer of separate peace

In 1917, Emperor Charles I of Austria secretly attempted separate peace negotiations with Clemenceau, with his wife's brother Sixtus in Belgium as an intermediary, without the knowledge of Germany. When the negotiations failed, his attempt was revealed to Germany, a diplomatic catastrophe.

German Spring Offensive of 1918

German General Erich Ludendorff drew up plans (codenamed Operation Michael) for the 1918 offensive on the Western Front. The Spring Offensive sought to divide the British and French forces with a series of feints and advances. The German leadership hoped to strike a decisive blow before significant U.S. forces arrived. The operation commenced on 21 March 1918 with an attack on British forces near Amiens. German forces achieved an unprecedented advance of 60 kilometres (40 miles).

British and French trenches were penetrated using novel infiltration tactics, also named Hutier tactics, after General Oskar von Hutier. Previously, attacks had been characterized by long artillery bombardments and massed assaults. However, in the Spring Offensive of 1918, Ludendorff used artillery only briefly and infiltrated small groups of infantry at weak points. They attacked command and logistics areas and bypassed points of serious resistance. More heavily armed infantry then destroyed these isolated positions. German success relied greatly on the element of surprise.

The front moved to within 120 kilometers (75 mi) of Paris. Three heavy Krupp railway guns fired 183 shells on the capital, causing many Parisians to flee. The initial offensive was so successful that Kaiser Wilhelm II declared 24 March a national holiday. Many Germans thought victory was near. After heavy fighting, however, the offensive was halted. Lacking tanks or motorised artillery, the Germans were unable to consolidate their gains. This situation was not helped by the supply lines now being stretched as a result of their advance. The sudden stop was also a result of the four Australian Imperial Force (AIF) divisions that were "rushed" down, thus doing what no other army had done and stopping the German advance in its tracks. During that time the first Australian division was hurriedly sent north again to stop the second German breakthrough. troops blinded by tear gas during the Battle of Estaires, 10 April 1918.]]

General Foch pressed to use the arriving American troops as individual replacements. Pershing sought instead to field American units as an independent force. These units were assigned to the depleted French and British Empire commands on 28 March. A Supreme War Council of Allied forces was created at the Doullens Conference on 5 November 1917.

Following Operation Michael, Germany launched Operation Georgette against the northern English Channel ports. The Allies halted the drive with limited territorial gains for Germany. The German Army to the south then conducted Operations Blücher and Yorck, broadly towards Paris. Operation Marne was launched on 15 July, attempting to encircle Reims and beginning the Second Battle of the Marne. The resulting counterattack, starting the Hundred Days Offensive, marked their first successful Allied offensive of the war.

By 20 July the Germans were back across the Marne at their Kaiserschlacht starting lines, having achieved nothing. Following this last phase of the war in the West, the German Army never again regained the initiative. German casualties between March and April 1918 were 270,000, including many highly trained stormtroops.

Meanwhile, Germany was falling apart at home. Anti-war marches became frequent and morale in the army fell. Industrial output was 53 percent of 1913 levels.

New states under war zone

In 1918, the internationally recognized Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, Democratic Republic of Armenia and Democratic Republic of Georgia bordering the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire were established, as well as the unrecognized Centrocaspian Dictatorship and South West Caucasian Republic. Later, these unrecognized states were eliminated by Azerbaijan and Turkey.

In 1918, the Dashnaks of the Armenian national liberation movement declared the Democratic Republic of Armenia (DRA) through the Armenian Congress of Eastern Armenians (unified form of Armenian National Councils) after the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. Tovmas Nazarbekian became the first Commander-in-chief of the DRA. Enver Pasha ordered the creation of a new army to be named the Army of Islam. He ordered the Army of Islam into the DRA, with the goal of taking Baku on the Caspian Sea. This new offensive was strongly opposed by the Germans. In early May 1918, the Ottoman army attacked the newly declared DRA. Although the Armenians managed to inflict one defeat on the Ottomans at the Battle of Sardarabad, the Ottoman army won a later battle and scattered the Armenian army. The Republic of Armenia signed the Treaty of Batum in June 1918.

Allied victory: summer and autumn 1918

The Allied counteroffensive, known as the Hundred Days Offensive, began on 8 August 1918. The Battle of Amiens developed with III Corps British Fourth Army on the left, the French First Army on the right, and the Australian and Canadian Corps spearheading the offensive in the centre through Harbonnières. It involved 414 tanks of the Mark IV and Mark V type, and 120,000 men. They advanced 12 kilometers (7 miles) into German-held territory in just seven hours. Erich Ludendorff referred to this day as the "Black Day of the German army".

The Australian-Canadian spearhead at Amiens, a battle that was the beginning of Germany’s downfall, helped pull the British armies to the north and the French armies to the south forward. While German resistance on the British Fourth Army front at Amiens stiffened, after an advance as far as and concluded the battle there, the French Third Army lengthened the Amiens front on 10 August, when it was thrown in on the right of the French First Army, and advanced liberating Lassigny in fighting which lasted until 16 August. South of the French Third Army, General Charles Mangin (The Butcher) drove his French Tenth Army forward at Soissons on 20 August to capture eight thousand prisoners, two hundred guns and the Aisne heights overlooking and menacing the German position north of the Vesle. Another "Black day" as described by Erich Ludendorff.

Meanwhile General Byng of the Third British Army, reporting that the enemy on his front was thinning in a limited withdrawal, was ordered to attack with 200 tanks toward Bapaume, opening the Battle of Albert, with the specific orders of "To break the enemy's front, in order to outflank the enemies present battle front" (opposite the British Fourth Army at Amiens). Rawlinson’s Fourth British Army was able to battle its left flank forward between Albert and the Somme straightening the line between the advanced positions of the Third Army and the Amiens front which resulted in recapturing Albert at the same time. During the last week of August the pressure along a front against the enemy was heavy and unrelenting. From German accounts, "Each day was spent in bloody fighting against an ever and again on-storming enemy, and nights passed without sleep in retirements to new lines." According to Ludendorff “We had to admit the necessity ... to withdraw the entire front from the Scarpe to the Vesle.”

In nearly four weeks of fighting since 8 August, over 100,000 German prisoners were taken, 75,000 by the BEF and the rest by the French. Since "The Black Day of the German Army" the German High Command realized the war was lost and made attempts for a satisfactory end. The day after the battle Ludenforff told Colonel Mertz "We cannot win the war any more, but we must not lose it either." On 11 August he offered his resignation to the Kaiser, who refused it and replied, "I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended." On 13 August at Spa, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Chancellor and Foreign Minister Hintz agreed that the war could not be ended militarily and on the following day the German Crown Council decided victory in the field was now most improbable. Austria and Hungary warned that they could only continue the war until December and Ludendorff recommended immediate peace negotiations, to which the Kaiser responded by instructing Hintz to seek the mediation of the Queen of the Netherlands. Prince Rupprecht warned Prince Max of Baden "Our military situation has deteriorated so rapidly that I no longer believe we can hold out over the winter; it is even possible that a catastrophe will come earlier." On 10 September Hindenburg urged peace moves to Emperor Charles of Austria and Germany appealed to the Netherlands for mediation. On the 14 September Austria sent a note to all belligerents and neutrals suggesting a meeting for peace talks on neutral soil and on 15 September Germany made a peace offer to Belgium. Both peace offers were rejected and on 24 September OHL informed the leaders in Berlin that armistice talks were inevitable. The following week cooperating French and American units broke through in Champagne at the Battle of Blanc Mont Ridge, forcing the Germans off the commanding heights, and closing towards the Belgian frontier. The last Belgian town to be liberated before the armistice was Ghent, which the Germans held as a pivot until Allied artillery was brought up. The German army had to shorten its front and use the Dutch frontier as an anchor to fight rear-guard actions.

When Bulgaria signed a separate armistice on 29 September, the Allies gained control of Serbia and Greece. Ludendorff, having been under great stress for months, suffered something similar to a breakdown. It was evident that Germany could no longer mount a successful defence.

Meanwhile, news of Germany's impending military defeat spread throughout the German armed forces. The threat of mutiny was rife. Admiral Reinhard Scheer and Ludendorff decided to launch a last attempt to restore the "valour" of the German Navy. Knowing the government of Prince Maximilian of Baden would veto any such action, Ludendorff decided not to inform him. Nonetheless, word of the impending assault reached sailors at Kiel. Many rebelled and were arrested, refusing to be part of a naval offensive which they believed to be suicidal. Ludendorff took the blame—the Kaiser dismissed him on 26 October. The collapse of the Balkans meant that Germany was about to lose its main supplies of oil and food. The reserves had been used up, but U.S. troops kept arriving at the rate of 10,000 per day.

Having suffered over 6 million casualties, Germany moved toward peace. Prince Maximilian of Baden took charge of a new government as Chancellor of Germany to negotiate with the Allies. Telegraphic negotiations with President Wilson began immediately, in the vain hope that better terms would be offered than by the British and French. Instead Wilson demanded the abdication of the Kaiser. There was no resistance when the social democrat Philipp Scheidemann on 9 November declared Germany to be a republic. Imperial Germany was dead; a new Germany had been born: the Weimar Republic.

Armistices and capitulations

after agreeing to the armistice that ended the war, Foch is seen second from the right. The carriage seen in the background, where the armistice was signed, later was chosen as the symbolic setting of Pétain's June 1940 armistice. It was moved to Berlin as a prize, but due to Allied bombing it was eventually moved to Crawinkel, Thuringia, where it was deliberately destroyed by SS troops in 1945.]] The collapse of the Central Powers came swiftly. Bulgaria was the first to sign an armistice on 29 September 1918 at Saloniki. On 30 October the Ottoman Empire capitulated at Moudros.

Allied superiority and the stab-in-the-back legend, November 1918

In November 1918 the Allies had ample supplies of men and materiel to invade Germany, yet at the time of the armistice, no Allied soldier had set foot on German soil in anger and Berlin was still almost from the Western Front. The Kaiser's armies had also retreated from the battlefield in good order which enabled Hindenburg and other senior German leaders to spread the story that their armies had not really been defeated. This resulted in the stab-in-the-back legend which attributed Germany's losing the war not to its inability to continue fighting (even though up to a million soldiers were suffering from the 1918 flu pandemic and unfit to fight), but to the public's failure to respond to its "patriotic calling" and the intentional sabotaging of the war effort, particularly by Jews, Socialists and Bolsheviks.

A formal state of war between the two sides persisted for another seven months, until signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on 28 June 1919. Later treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were signed. However, the latter treaty with the Ottoman Empire was followed by strife (the Turkish War of Independence) and a final peace treaty was signed between the Allied Powers and the country that would shortly become the Republic of Turkey, at Lausanne on 24 July 1923.

Some war memorials date the end of the war as being when the Versailles treaty was signed in 1919; by contrast, most commemorations of the war's end concentrate on the armistice of 11 November 1918. Legally the last formal peace treaties were not signed until the Treaty of Lausanne. Under its terms, the Allied forces divested Constantinople on 23 August 1923.

Technology

The First World War began as a clash of 20-century technology and 19th-century tactics, with inevitably large casualties. By the end of 1917, however, the major armies, now numbering millions of men, had modernized and were making use of telephone, wireless communication, armoured cars, tanks, and aircraft. Infantry formations were reorganized, so that 100 man companies were no longer the main unit of manoeuvre. Instead, squads of 10 or so men, under the command of a junior NCO, were favoured. Artillery also underwent a revolution.

In 1914, cannons were positioned in the front line and fired directly at their targets. By 1917, indirect fire with guns (as well as mortars and even machine guns) was commonplace, using new techniques for spotting and ranging, notably aircraft and the often overlooked field telephone. Counter-battery missions became commonplace, also, and sound detection was used to locate enemy batteries.

Germany was far ahead of the Allies in utilising heavy indirect fire. She employed 150 and 210 mm howitzers in 1914 when the typical French and British guns were only 75 and 105 mm. The British had a 6 inch (152 mm) howitzer, but it was so heavy it had to be hauled to the field in pieces and assembled. Germans also fielded Austrian 305 mm and 420 mm guns, and already by the beginning of the war had inventories of various calibers of Minenwerfer ideally suited for trench warfare.

Much of the combat involved trench warfare, where hundreds often died for each yard gained. Many of the deadliest battles in history occurred during the First World War. Such battles include Ypres, the Marne, Cambrai, the Somme, Verdun, and Gallipoli. The Haber process of nitrogen fixation was employed to provide the German forces with a constant supply of gunpowder, in the face of British naval blockade. Artillery was responsible for the largest number of casualties and consumed vast quantities of explosives. The large number of head-wounds caused by exploding shells and fragmentation forced the combatant nations to develop the modern steel helmet, led by the French, who introduced the Adrian helmet in 1915. It was quickly followed by the Brodie helmet, worn by British Imperial and U.S. troops, and in 1916 by the distinctive German Stahlhelm, a design, with improvements, still in use today. {|class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 85%; background:#white; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5" |style="text-align: left;"|"Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!... Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime... Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning."- Wilfred Owen, DULCE ET DECORUM EST, 1917 |} The widespread use of chemical warfare was a distinguishing feature of the conflict. Gases used included chlorine, mustard gas and phosgene. Few war casualties were caused by gas, as effective countermeasures to gas attacks were quickly created, such as gas masks. The use of chemical warfare and small-scale strategic bombing were both outlawed by the 1907 Hague Conventions, and both proved to be of limited effectiveness, though they captured the public imagination.

The most powerful land-based weapons were railway guns weighing hundreds of tons apiece. These were nicknamed Big Berthas, even though the namesake was not a railway gun. Germany developed the Paris Gun, able to bombard Paris from over 100 kilometres (60 mi), though shells were relatively light at 94 kilograms (210 lb). While the Allies had railway guns, German models severely out-ranged and out-classed them.

Sopwith Camel]] Fixed-wing aircraft were first used militarily by the Italians in Libya 23 October 1911 during the Italo-Turkish War for reconnaissance, soon followed by the dropping of grenades and aerial photography the next year. By 1914 the military utility was obvious. They were initially used for reconnaissance and ground attack. To shoot down enemy planes, anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft were developed. Strategic bombers were created, principally by the Germans and British, though the former used Zeppelins as well. Towards the end of the conflict, aircraft carriers were used for the first time, with HMS Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a raid to destroy the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in 1918.

German U-boats (submarines) were deployed after the war began. Alternating between restricted and unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, they were employed by the Kaiserliche Marine in a strategy to deprive the British Isles of vital supplies. The deaths of British merchant sailors and the seeming invulnerability of U-boats led to the development of depth charges (1916), hydrophones (passive sonar, 1917), blimps, hunter-killer submarines (HMS R&-1, 1917), forward-throwing anti-submarine weapons, and dipping hydrophones (the latter two both abandoned in 1918). To extend their operations, the Germans proposed supply submarines (1916). Most of these would be forgotten in the interwar period until World War II revived the need.

Trenches, machineguns, air reconnaissance, barbed wire, and modern artillery with fragmentation shells helped bring the battle lines of World War I to a stalemate. The British sought a solution with the creation of the tank and mechanized warfare. The first tanks were used during the Battle of the Somme on 15 September 1916. Mechanical reliability became an issue, but the experiment proved its worth. Within a year, the British were fielding tanks by the hundreds and showed their potential during the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, by breaking the Hindenburg Line, while combined arms teams captured 8000 enemy soldiers and 100 guns. Light automatic weapons also were introduced, such as the Lewis Gun and Browning automatic rifle.

Manned observation balloons, floating high above the trenches, were used as stationary reconnaissance platforms, reporting enemy movements and directing artillery. Balloons commonly had a crew of two, equipped with parachutes. If there was an enemy air attack, the crew could parachute to safety. At the time, parachutes were too heavy to be used by pilots of aircraft (with their marginal power output) and smaller versions would not be developed until the end of the war; they were also opposed by British leadership, who feared they might promote cowardice. Recognized for their value as observation platforms, balloons were important targets of enemy aircraft.

s for attacking observation balloons.]]To defend against air attack, they were heavily protected by antiaircraft guns and patrolled by friendly aircraft; to attack them, unusual weapons such as air-to-air rockets were even tried. Blimps and balloons contributed to air-to-air combat among aircraft, because of their reconnaissance value, and to the trench stalemate, because it was impossible to move large numbers of troops undetected. The Germans conducted air raids on England during 1915 and 1916 with airships, hoping to damage British morale and cause aircraft to be diverted from the front lines. The resulting panic took several squadrons of fighters from France. The Ottomans saw the entire Armenian population as an enemy that had chosen to side with Russia at the beginning of the war. In early 1915, a number of Armenian nationalist groups, such as the Armenakan, Dashnak and Hunchak organizations, joined the Russian forces, and the Ottoman government used this as a pretext to issue the Tehcir Law. This authorized the deportation of the Armenians from eastern Anatolia to Syria between 1915 and 1917. The exact number of deaths is unknown, although Balakian gives a range of 250,000 to 1.5 million for the deaths of Armenians, the International Association of Genocide Scholars estimates over 1 million.

Russian Empire

Approximately 200,000 Germans living in Volhynia and about 600,000 Jews were deported by the Russian authorities. In 1916, an order was issued to deport around 650,000 Volga Germans to the east as well, but the Russian Revolution prevented this from being carried out. Many pogroms accompanied the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War, 60,000–200,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire.

Rape of Belgium

In Belgium, German troops, in fear of French and Belgian guerrilla fighters, or francs-tireurs, massacred townspeople in Andenne (211 dead), Tamines (384 dead), and Dinant (612 dead). On 25 August 1914, the Germans set fire to the town of Leuven, burned the library containing about 230,000 books, killed 209 civilians and forced 42,000 to evacuate. These actions brought worldwide condemnation.

Soldiers' experiences

to the 1 Lincolns, training in Bermuda for the Western Front, Winter 1914–1915. One in four survived the war.]]

The soldiers of the war were initially volunteers, except for Italy, but increasingly were conscripted into service. Britain's Imperial War Museum has collected more than 2,500 recordings of soldiers' personal accounts and selected transcripts, edited by military author Max Arthur, have been published. The museum believes that historians have not taken full account of this material and accordingly has made the full archive of recordings available to authors and researchers. Surviving veterans, returning home, often found that they could only discuss their experiences amongst themselves. Grouping together, they formed "veterans' associations" or "Legions".

Prisoners of war

.]] About 8 million men surrendered and were held in POW camps during the war. All nations pledged to follow the Hague Convention on fair treatment of prisoners of war. A POW's rate of survival was generally much higher than their peers at the front. Individual surrenders were uncommon. Large units usually surrendered en masse. At the Battle of Tannenberg 92,000 Russians surrendered. When the besieged garrison of Kaunas surrendered in 1915, some 20,000 Russians became prisoners. Over half of Russian losses were prisoners (as a proportion of those captured, wounded or killed); for Austria-Hungary 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 2.-3.5 million men as prisoners.) From the Central Powers about 3.3 million men became prisoners.

Germany held 2.5 million prisoners; Russia held 2.9 million; while Britain and France held about 720,000. Most were captured just prior to the Armistice. The U.S. 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 scarce, but only 5% died.

The Ottoman Empire often treated POWs poorly. Some 11,800 British Empire soldiers, most of them Indians, became prisoners after the Siege of Kut, in Mesopotamia, in April 1916, 4,250 died in captivity. Although many were in very bad condition when captured, Ottoman officers forced them to march 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.

In Russia, where the prisoners from the Czech Legion of the Austro-Hungarian army were released in 1917 they re-armed themselves and briefly became a military and diplomatic force during the Russian Civil War.

While the Allied prisoners of the Central Powers were quickly sent home at the end of active hostilities, the same treatment was not granted to Central Power prisoners of the Allies and Russia, many of which had to serve as forced labor, e.g. in France until 1920. They were only released after many approaches by the Red Cross to the Allied Supreme Council. There were still German prisoners being held in Russia as late as 1924.

Military attachés and war correspondents

Military and civilian observers from every major power closely followed the course of the war. Many were able to report on events from a perspective somewhat akin to modern "embedded" positions within the opposing land and naval forces. These military attachés and other observers prepared voluminous first-hand accounts of the war and analytical papers.

For example, former U.S. Army Captain Granville Fortescue followed the developments of the Gallipoli Campaign from an embedded perspective within the ranks of the Turkish defenders; and his report was passed through Turkish censors before being printed in London and New York. However, this observer's role was abandoned when the U.S. entered the war, as Fortescue immediately re-enlisted, sustaining wounds at Forest of Argonne in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, September 1918.

In-depth observer narratives of the war and more narrowly focused professional journal articles were written soon after the war; and these post-war reports conclusively illustrated the battlefield destructiveness of this conflict. This was not the first time the tactics of entrenched positions for infantry defended with machine guns and artillery became vitally important. The Russo-Japanese War had been closely observed by Military attachés, war correspondents and other observers; but, from a 21st Century perspective, it is now apparent that a range of tactical lessons were disregarded or not used in the preparations for war in Europe and throughout the Great War.

Support and opposition to the war

Support

The war was primarily supported by nationalists, industrial producers, and imperialists.

In the Balkans, Yugoslav nationalists such as Yugoslav nationalist leader Ante Trumbić in the Balkans strongly supported the war, desiring the freedom of Yugoslavs from Austria-Hungary and other foreign powers and the creation of an independent Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Committee was formed in Paris on 30 April 1915 but shortly moved its office to London, Trumbić led the Committee. In 1916, the Arab Revolt began in Ottoman-controlled territories of the Middle East in an effort to achieve independence. The Italian Liberal Party under the leadership of Paolo Boselli promoted intervention in the war on the side of the Allies and utilized the Dante Aligheri Society to promote Italian nationalism.

A number of socialist parties initially supported the war when it began in August 1914. Initially European socialists became split on national lines with the conception of class conflict held by radical socialists such as Marxists and syndicalists being overstepped by their support for war. Once the war began, Austrian, British, French, German and Russian socialists followed the rising nationalist current by supporting their country's intervention in the war.

Italian socialists were divided on whether to support the war or oppose it, some were militant supporters of the war including Benito Mussolini and Leonida Bissolati. However the Italian Socialist Party decided to oppose the war after anti-militarist protestors had been killed, resulting in a general strike called Red Week. The Italian Socialist Party purged itself of pro-war nationalist members, including Mussolini. Mussolini's nationalism enabled him to raise funds from Ansaldo (an armaments firm) and other companies to create Il Popolo d'Italia to convince socialists and revolutionaries to support the war.

In April 1918 the Rome Congress of Oppressed Nationalities was held that included Czechoslovak, Italian, Polish, Transylvanian, and Yugoslav representatives that urged the Allies to support national self-determination for the peoples residing within Austria-Hungary. The war had begun amid the Home Rule crisis in Ireland that had begun in 1912 and by 1914 there was a serious possibility of an outbreak of civil war in Ireland between Irish unionists and republicans.

Other opposition came from conscientious objectors – some socialist, some religious – who refused to fight. In Britain 16,000 people asked for conscientious objector status. Many suffered years of prison, including solitary confinement and bread and water diets. Even after the war, in Britain many job advertisements were marked "No conscientious objectors need apply".

The Central Asian Revolt started in the summer of 1916, when the Russian Empire government ended its exemption of Muslims from military service.

In 1917, a series of mutinies in the French army led to dozens of soldiers being executed and many more imprisoned.

In Milan in May 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries organized and engaged in rioting calling for an end to the war, and managed to close down factories and stop public transportation. The Italian army was forced to enter Milan with tanks and machine guns to face Bolsheviks and anarchists who fought violently until May 23 when the army gained control of the city with almost fifty people killed (three of which were Italian soldiers) and over 800 people arrested. Out of approximately 625,000 Canadians who served, about 60,000 were killed and another 173,000 were wounded.

In 1917, Emperor Charles I of Austria secretly entered into peace negotiations with the Allied powers, with his brother-in-law Sixtus as intermediary, without the knowledge of his ally Germany. He failed, however, because of the resistance of Italy.

In September 1917, the Russian soldiers in France began questioning why they were fighting for the French at all and mutinied. In Russia, opposition to the war led to soldiers also establishing their own revolutionary committees and helped foment the October Revolution of 1917, with the call going up for "bread, land, and peace". The Bolsheviks reached a peace treaty with Germany, the peace of Brest-Litovsk, despite its harsh conditions.

The end of October 1918, in northern Germany, saw the beginning of the German Revolution of 1918–19. Units of the German Navy refused to set sail for a last, large-scale operation in a war which they saw as good as lost, initiating the uprising. The sailors' revolt which then ensued in the naval ports of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel spread across the whole country within days and led to the proclamation of a republic on 9 November 1918 and shortly thereafter to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Conscription

As the war slowly turned into a war of attrition, conscription was implemented in some countries. This issue was particularly explosive in Canada and Australia. In the former it opened a political gap between French-Canadians, who claimed their true loyalty was to Canada and not the British Empire, and the Anglophone majority who saw the war as a duty to both Britain and Canada. Prime Minister Robert Borden pushed through a Military Service Act, provoking the Conscription Crisis of 1917. In Australia, a sustained pro-conscription campaign by Prime Minister Billy Hughes, caused a split in the Australian Labor Party and Hughes formed the Nationalist Party of Australia in 1917 to pursue the matter. Nevertheless, the labour movement, the Catholic Church, and Irish nationalist expatriates successfully opposed Hughes' push, which was rejected in two plebiscites.

Conscription put into uniform nearly every physically fit man in Britain, six of ten million eligible. Of these, about 750,000 lost their lives and 1,700,000 were wounded. Most deaths were to young unmarried men; however, 160,000 wives lost husbands and 300,000 children lost fathers.

Aftermath

Health and economic effects

{|class="toccolours" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 2em; font-size: 99%; background:#white; color:black; width:30em; max-width: 40%;" cellspacing="5" |style="text-align: left;"| ..."Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn." "None," said the other, "Save the undone years"... |- |style="text-align: left;" |— Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting, 1918 not counting other casualties. Germany and Russia were similarly affected.

The war had profound economic consequences. Of the 60 million European soldiers who were mobilized from 1914–1918, 8 million were killed, 7 million were permanently disabled, and 15 million were seriously injured. Germany lost 15.1% of its active male population, Austria–Hungary lost 17.1%, and France lost 10.5%. About 750,000 German civilians died from starvation caused by the British blockade during the war. By the end of the war, famine had killed approximately 100,000 people in Lebanon. The best estimates of the death toll from the Russian famine of 1921 run from 5 million to 10 million people. By 1922, there were between 4.5 million and 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the subsequent famine of 1920–1922. Numerous anti-Soviet Russians fled the country after the Revolution; by the 1930s the northern Chinese city of Harbin had 100,000 Russians. Thousands more emigrated to France, England and the United States. , 1922]] nurses tend to 1918 flu pandemic patients in temporary wards set up inside Oakland Municipal Auditorium, 1918.]] Diseases flourished in the chaotic wartime conditions. In 1914 alone, louse-borne epidemic typhus killed 200,000 in Serbia. From 1918 to 1922, Russia had about 25 million infections and 3 million deaths from epidemic typhus. Whereas before World War I, Russia had about 3.5 million cases of malaria, its people suffered more than 13 million cases in 1923. In addition, a major influenza epidemic spread around the world. Overall, the 1918 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people.

Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann and fear that American Jews would encourage the USA to support Germany culminated in the British government's Balfour Declaration of 1917, endorsing creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. A total of more than 1,172,000 Jewish soldiers served in the Allied and Central Power forces in World War I, including 450,000 in Czarist Russia and 275,000 in Austria-Hungary.

The social disruption and widespread violence of the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War sparked more than 2,000 pogroms in the former Russian Empire, mostly in the Ukraine. An estimated 60,000–200,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities.

In the aftermath of World War I, Greece fought against Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal, a war which resulted in a massive population exchange between the two countries under the Treaty of Lausanne. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Pontic Greeks died during this period.

Peace treaties and national boundaries

After the war, the Paris Peace Conference imposed a series of peace treaties on the Central Powers. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war. Building on Wilson's 14th point, the Treaty of Versailles also brought into being the League of Nations on 28 June 1919.

In signing the treaty, Germany acknowledged responsibility for the war, agreeing to pay enormous war reparations and award territory to the victors. The "Guilt Thesis" became a controversial explanation of later events among analysts in Britain and the United States. The Treaty of Versailles caused enormous bitterness in Germany, which nationalist movements, especially the Nazis, exploited with a conspiracy theory they called the Dolchstosslegende (Stab-in-the-back legend). The Weimar Republic lost the former colonial possessions and was saddled with accepting blame for the war, as well as paying punitive reparations for it. Unable to pay them with exports (a result of territorial losses and postwar recession), Germany did so by borrowing from the United States. Runaway inflation in the 1920s contributed to the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic and the reparations were suspended in 1931 following the Stock Market Crash in 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression worldwide.

Austria–Hungary was partitioned into several successor states, including Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, largely but not entirely along ethnic lines. Transylvania was shifted from Hungary to Greater Romania. The details were contained in the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon. As a result of the Treaty of Trianon, 3.3 million Hungarians came under foreign rule. Although the Hungarians made up 54% of the population of the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary, only 32% of its territory was left to Hungary. Between 1920 and 1924, 354,000 Hungarians fled former Hungarian territories attached to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

The Russian Empire, which had withdrawn from the war in 1917 after the October Revolution, lost much of its western frontier as the newly independent nations of Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were carved from it. Bessarabia was re-attached to the Greater Romania, as it had been a Romanian territory for more than a thousand years.

The Ottoman Empire disintegrated, and much of its non-Anatolian territory was awarded as protectorates of various Allied powers. The Turkish core was reorganized as the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was to be partitioned by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. This treaty was never ratified by the Sultan and was rejected by the Turkish republican movement, leading to the Turkish Independence War and, ultimately, to the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

Legacy

The first tentative efforts to comprehend the meaning and consequences of modern warfare began during the initial phases of the war, and this process continued throughout and after the end of hostilities.

Memorials

in the Somme.]] Memorials were erected in thousands of villages and towns. Close to battlefields, the improvised burial grounds were gradually moved to formal graveyards under the care of organisations such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the German War Graves Commission and Le Souvenir français. Many of these graveyards also have central monuments to the missing or unidentified dead, such as the Menin Gate memorial and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme.

of Canada, author of In Flanders Fields, died in 1918 of pneumonia.]] On 3 May 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed. At his graveside, his friend John McCrae, M.D., of Guelph, Ontario, Canada wrote the memorable poem In Flanders Fields as a salute to those who perished in the Great War. Published in Punch on 8 December 1915, it is still recited today, especially on Remembrance Day and Memorial Day.

Cultural memory

The First World War had a lasting impact on social memory. It was seen by many in Britain as signaling the end of Victorian England, and across Europe many regarded it as a watershed moment. Historian Samuel Hynes explained:

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This has become the most common perception of the First World War, perpetuated by the art, cinema, poems and stories published subsequently. Films such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory and For King and Country have perpetuated the idea; while war-time films including Camrades, Flanders Poppies and Shoulder Arms indicate that the most contemporary views of the war were overall far more positive. Likewise, the art of Paul Nash, John Nash, Christopher Nevison and Henry Tonks in Britain painted a negative view of the conflict in keeping with the growing perception, while popular war-time artists such as Muirhead Bone painted more serene and pleasant interpretations subsequently rejected as inaccurate. these perceptions of the war, they are nevertheless prevalent across much of society. They have dynamically changed according to contemporary influences, reflecting in the 1950s perceptions of the war as 'aimless' following the contrasting Second World War, and emphasising conflict within the ranks during times of class conflict in the 1960s. For years afterwards, people mourned the dead, the missing, and the many disabled. Many soldiers returned with severe trauma, suffering from shell shock (also called neurasthenia, now called posttraumatic stress disorder). Many more returned home with few after-effects; however, their silence about the war contributed to the conflict's growing mythological status. Such historians as Dan Todman, Paul Fussell and Samuel Heyns have all published works since the 1990s arguing that these common perceptions of the war are factually incorrect. World War II was in part a continuation of the power struggle never fully resolved by the First World War; in fact, it was common for Germans in the 1930s and 1940s to justify acts of international aggression because of perceived injustices imposed by the victors of the First World War.

The establishment of the modern state of Israel and the roots of the continuing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict are partially found in the unstable power dynamics of the Middle East which resulted from World War I. Prior to the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire had maintained a modest level of peace and stability throughout the Middle East. With the fall of Ottoman government, power vacuums developed and conflicting claims to land and nationhood began to emerge. The political boundaries drawn by the victors of the First World War were quickly imposed, sometimes after only cursory consultation with the local population. In many cases, these continue to be problematic in the 21st-century struggles for national identity. While the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I was pivotal in contributing to the modern political situation of the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, the end of Ottoman rule also spawned lesser known disputes over water and other natural resources.

Views in the United States

U.S. intervention in the war, as well as the Wilson administration, became deeply unpopular. This was reflected in the U.S. Senate's rejection of the Versailles treaty and membership in the League of Nations. In the interwar era a consensus arose that U.S. intervention was a mistake, and the Congress passed laws in an attempt to preserve U.S. neutrality in any future conflict. Polls taken in 1937 and the opening months of World War II established that nearly 60% regarded the intervention as a mistake, with only 28% opposing that view. But, in the period between the fall of France and the attack on Pearl Harbor, public opinion changed dramatically and, for the first time, a narrow plurality rejected the idea that the war was a mistake.

New national identities

Poland reemerged as an independent country, after more than a century. As a "minor Entente nation" and the country with the largest casualties per head the Kingdom of Serbia and its dynasty became the backbone of the new multinational state, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia). Czechoslovakia became a new nation. Russia became the Soviet Union and lost Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, which became independent countries. The Ottoman Empire was soon replaced by Turkey and several other countries in the Middle East.

In the British Empire, the war unleashed new forms of nationalism. In Australia and New Zealand the Battle of Gallipoli became known as those nations' "Baptism of Fire". It was the first major war in which the newly established countries fought and it was one of the first times that Australian troops fought as Australians, not just subjects of the British Crown. Anzac Day, commemorating the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, celebrates this defining moment.

After the Battle of Vimy Ridge, where the Canadian divisions fought together for the first time as a single corps, Canadians began to refer to theirs as a nation "forged from fire". Having succeeded on the same battleground where the "mother countries" had previously faltered, they were for the first time respected internationally for their own accomplishments. Canada entered the war as a Dominion of the British Empire and remained so afterwards, although she emerged with a greater measure of independence. While the other Dominions were represented by Britain, Canada was an independent negotiator and signatory of the Versailles Treaty.

Economic effects

One of the most dramatic effects of the war was the expansion of governmental powers and responsibilities in Britain, France, the United States, and the Dominions of the British Empire. In order to harness all the power of their societies, new government ministries and powers were created. New taxes were levied and laws enacted, all designed to bolster the war effort; many of which have lasted to this day. Similarly, the war strained the abilities of the formerly large and bureaucratized governments such as in Austria–Hungary and Germany; however, any analysis of the long-term effects were clouded by the defeat of these governments. . When the war began in 1914, a dollar was worth 4.2 marks. By November 1923, the dollar was at 4.2 trillion marks.]] 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.

All nations had increases in the government's share of GDP, surpassing fifty percent in both Germany and France and nearly reaching fifty percent in Britain. To pay for purchases in the United States, Britain cashed in its extensive investments in American railroads and then began borrowing heavily on Wall Street. President Wilson was on the verge of cutting off the loans in late 1916, but allowed a great increase in U.S. government lending to the Allies. After 1919, the U.S. demanded repayment of these loans, which, in part, were funded by German reparations, which, in turn, were supported by American loans to Germany. This circular system collapsed in 1931 and the loans were never repaid. In 1934, Britain owed the US $4.4 billion of World War I debt.

Macro- and micro-economic consequences devolved from the war. Families were altered by the departure of many men. With the death or absence of the primary wage earner, women were forced into the workforce in unprecedented numbers. At the same time, industry needed to replace the lost labourers sent to war. This aided the struggle for voting rights for women.

In Britain, rationing was finally imposed in early 1918, limited to meat, sugar, and fats (butter and oleo), but not bread. The new system worked smoothly. From 1914 to 1918 trade union membership doubled, from a little over four million to a little over eight million. Work stoppages and strikes became frequent in 1917–1918 as the unions expressed grievances regarding prices, alcohol control, pay disputes, fatigue from overtime and working on Sundays and inadequate housing.

Britain turned to her colonies for help in obtaining essential war materials whose supply had become difficult from traditional sources. Geologists such as Albert Ernest Kitson were called upon to find new resources of precious minerals in the African colonies. Kitson discovered important new deposits of manganese, used in munitions production, in the Gold Coast.

Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles (the so-called "war guilt" clause) declared Germany and its allies responsible for all "loss and damage" suffered by the Allies during the war and provided the basis for reparations. The total reparations demanded was 132 billion gold marks which was far more than the total German gold or foreign exchange. The economic problems that the payments brought, and German resentment at their imposition, are usually cited as one of the more significant factors that led to the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. After Germany’s defeat in World War II, payment of the reparations was not resumed. There was, however, outstanding German debt that the Weimar Republic had used to pay the reparations. Germany finished paying off the reparations in October 2010.

See also

European Civil War

List of last surviving World War I veterans by country

List of people associated with World War I

List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll

Lists of wars

Lists of World War I topics

World War One – Medal Abbreviations

Media

{| |- | | |}

Notes

References

For a comprehensive bibliography see List of books about World War I (translated from the German) , reviewed in . | publisher=University of California Press| issn=0030-8684}} , Wilson's maneuvering U.S. into war , general military history }} also published by Harper as "Ludendorff's Own Story, August 1914 – November 1918: The Great War from the Siege of Liege to the Signing of the Armistice as Viewed from the Grand Headquarters of the German Army" (original title Meine Kriegserinnerungen, 1914–1918) | journal=The Journal of Military History| volume=60| issue=3| month=July| year=1996| pages=495–511| doi=10.2307/2944522| url=http://jstor.org/stable/2944522| publisher=Society for Military History| jstor=10.2307/2944522}} cites "Cf. articles signed XXX in La Revue de Deux Mondes, March 1 and March 15, 1920" Deals with technical developments, including the first dipping hydrophones | doi=10.2307/1986064| url=http://jstor.org/stable/1986064| publisher=Society for Military History| jstor=10.2307/1986064 }} , major reinterpretation : the major scholarly synthesis. Thorough coverage of 1914 , reviewed at , tells of the opening diplomatic and military manoeuvres

External links

A multimedia history of World War I

World War I postcard archieve

British Pathé Online film archive containing extensive coverage of World War I

The Heritage of the Great War, Netherlands

The War to End All Wars BBC News 10 November 1998

WWI Service Questionnaires at Gettysburg College

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission

World War I : Soldiers Remembered, Washington State Library and Washington State Archives

The World War I Document Archive Wiki, Brigham Young University

Brazilian naufrages in World War I in portuguese

The American Expeditionary Force in World War I

The Diary of Leonard L. Youell 1916-18, a Canadian Lieutenant in WWI (from the Ontario Time Machine virtual book)

Animated maps

An animated map "Europe plunges into war"

An animated map of Europe at the end of the war

A collection of vintage maps from all theaters of World War I

Category:Articles containing video clips Category:Contemporary German history Category:Contemporary Italian history Category:Edwardian era Category:French Third Republic Category:Global conflicts Category:History of Austria-Hungary Category:History of Montenegro Category:History of Serbia Category:History of the United States (1865–1918) Category:Russo-Ottoman Wars Category:Wars involving Armenia Category:Wars involving Australia Category:Wars involving Austria Category:Wars involving Belgium Category:Wars involving Brazil Category:Wars involving British India Category:Wars involving Bulgaria Category:Wars involving Canada Category:Wars involving Costa Rica Category:Wars involving Croatia Category:Wars involving Czechoslovakia Category:Wars involving France Category:Wars involving Germany Category:Wars involving Greece Category:Wars involving Guatemala Category:Wars involving Haiti Category:Wars involving Hungary Category:Wars involving Ireland Category:Wars involving Italy Category:Wars involving Japan Category:Wars involving Liberia Category:Wars involving Montenegro Category:Wars involving New Zealand Category:Wars involving Nicaragua Category:Wars involving Panama Category:Wars involving Portugal Category:Wars involving Romania Category:Wars involving Russia Category:Wars involving Serbia Category:Wars involving South Africa Category:Wars involving Sri Lanka Category:Wars involving Thailand Category:Wars involving the Ottoman Empire Category:Wars involving the states and peoples of Oceania Category:Wars involving the Republic of China Category:Wars involving the United Kingdom Category:Wars involving the United States

Name	Howard Hughes
Birth name	Howard Robard Hughes, Jr.
Birth date	September 24, 1905
Birth place	Houston, Texas, U.S.
Death date	April 05, 1976
Death place	Houston, Texas, U.S.
Occupation	Chairman of Hughes Aircraft, Industrialist, Aviator, Engineer, Film producer and Director
Yearsactive	1926-1957
Spouse	(alleged)

}}

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (September 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American aviator, engineer, industrialist, film producer, film director, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained prominence from the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big-budget and often controversial films like Hell's Angels, Scarface and The Outlaw. Hughes was one of the most influential aviators in history: he set multiple world air-speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 "Hercules" (better known to history as the "Spruce Goose") aircraft, and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines. Hughes is also remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Early years

Hughes' birthplace is recorded as either Humble or Houston, Texas. The date is also uncertain, though Hughes claimed his birthday was Christmas Eve. A 1941 affidavit birth certificate of Hughes signed by his aunt Annette Gano Lummis and Estelle Boughton Sharp states he was born on December 24, 1905, in Harris County, Texas. However, his baptismal record of October 7, 1906, in the parish register of St. John's Episcopal Church, in Keokuk, Iowa, has his birth listed as September 24, 1905, without reference to the place of birth.

His parents were Allene Stone Gano (a descendant of Owen Tudor, second husband of Catherine of Valois, Dowager Queen of England) and Howard R. Hughes, Sr., who patented the two-cone roller bit, which allowed rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible places. Howard R. Hughes, Sr. made the shrewd and lucrative decision to commercialize the invention, founding the Hughes Tool Company in 1909.

Showing great aptitude in engineering at an early age, Hughes built Houston's first radio transmitter when he was 11 years old. At 12, he was photographed in the local newspaper as being the first boy in Houston to have a "motorized" bicycle, which he had built himself from parts taken from his father's steam engine. He was an indifferent student with a liking for mathematics, flying, and things mechanical, taking his first flying lesson at 14 and later auditing math and aeronautical engineering courses at Caltech. On his 19th birthday, Hughes was declared an emancipated minor, enabling him to take full control of his legacy.

Hughes was an outstanding and enthusiastic golfer from a young age, often scoring near par figures, and held a handicap of three during his twenties. He played frequently with top players, including Gene Sarazen. Hughes rarely played competitively, and gradually gave up his interest in the sport.

Hughes dropped out of Rice University shortly after his father's death. On June 1, 1925, he married Ella Botts Rice (1904–1992), daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston, Texas. They moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself making movies.

Hollywood years

His first two films, Everybody's Acting (1927) and Two Arabian Knights (1928), were financial successes, the latter winning the first Academy Award for Best Director of a Comedy Picture. The Racket (1928) and The Front Page (1931) were also nominated for Academy Awards. Hughes spent US$3.8 million to make the flying film Hell's Angels (1930). He produced another hit, Scarface (1932), a production delayed by censors' concern over its violence. The Outlaw (1943), completed in 1941, which featured Jane Russell, also received considerable attention from industry censors, this time owing to Russell's revealing costumes. Hughes designed a special bra for his leading lady, although Russell decided against wearing the bra because of a mediocre fit.

Hughes' wife returned to Houston in 1929 and filed for divorce. Hughes dated many famous women, including Billie Dove, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Katharine Hepburn, and Gene Tierney. He also proposed to Joan Fontaine several times, according to her autobiography No Bed of Roses. Bessie Love was a mistress during his first marriage. Jean Harlow accompanied him to the premiere of Hell's Angels, but Noah Dietrich wrote many years later that the relationship was strictly professional—Hughes personally disliked Harlow. In his 1971 book, Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes, Dietrich said that Hughes genuinely liked and respected Jane Russell but never sought romantic involvement with her. According to Russell's autobiography, however, Hughes once tried to bed her after a party. Russell (who was married at the time) refused him and Hughes promised it would never happen again. The two maintained a professional and private friendship for many years. Hughes remained good friends with Tierney — when Tierney's daughter Daria was born deaf and blind with severe mental retardation, due to Tierney being exposed to rubella during her pregnancy — he saw to it that Daria received the best medical care and paid all expenses.

On July 11, 1936, Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian named Gabriel S. Meyer with his car, at the corner of 3rd Street and Lorraine in Los Angeles. Although Hughes was certified as sober at the hospital to which he was taken after the accident, an attending doctor made a note that Hughes had been drinking. A witness to the accident told police that Hughes was driving erratically and too fast, and that Meyer had been standing in the safety zone of a streetcar stop. Hughes was booked on suspicion of negligent homicide and held overnight in jail until his attorney, Neil McCarthy, obtained a writ of habeas corpus for his release pending a Coroner's inquest. By the time of the coroner's inquiry, however, the witness had changed his story and claimed that Meyer had moved directly in front of Hughes's car. Nancy Bayly (Watts), who was in the car with Hughes at the time of the accident, corroborates this version. On July 16, 1936, Hughes was held blameless by a Coroner's jury at the inquest into Meyer's death. Hughes told reporters outside the inquiry, "I was driving slowly and a man stepped out of the darkness in front of me."

On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters. The couple met in the 1940s, before Peters became a film actress. They had a highly publicized romance in 1947 and there was talk of marriage, but she said she could not combine it with her career. It was later claimed that Peters was "the only woman [Hughes] ever loved", and he reportedly had his security officers follow her everywhere even when they were not in a relationship. This was confirmed by actor Max Showalter, who became a close friend of Peters during shooting of Niagara (1953). Showalter told in an interview that because he frequently met with Peters, Hughes' men threatened to ruin his career if he did not leave her alone.

The H-1 Racer featured a number of design "innovations": it had retractable landing gear (as Boeing Monomail had five years before) and all rivets and joints set flush into the body of the aircraft to reduce drag. The H-1 Racer is thought to have influenced the design of a number of World War II fighters such as the Mitsubishi Zero, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and the F8F Bearcat; although that has never been reliably confirmed. The H-1 Racer was donated to the Smithsonian in 1975 and is on display at the National Air and Space Museum.

On July 10, 1938, Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in just 91 hours (3 days, 19 hours), beating the previous record by more than four hours. Taking off from New York City, he continued to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, Minneapolis, and continued to New York City. For this flight he did not fly an aircraft of his own design, but a Lockheed Super Electra (a twin-engine transport with a four-man crew) fitted with all of the latest radio and navigational equipment. Hughes wanted the flight to be a triumph of technology, illustrating that safe, long-distance air travel was possible. In 1938, the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, Texas, known at the time as Houston Municipal Airport, was re-named Howard Hughes Airport, but the name was changed back after people objected to naming the airport after a living person.

He also had a hand in the design and financing of both the Boeing 307 Stratoliner and Lockheed L-049 Constellation.

Hughes received many awards as an aviator, including the Harmon Trophy in 1936 and 1938, the Collier Trophy in 1938, the Octave Chanute Award in 1940, and a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 "in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world." According to his obituary in the New York Times, Hughes never bothered to come to Washington to pick up the Congressional Gold Medal. It was eventually mailed to him by President Harry S. Truman.

Near-fatal crash of the XF-11

Hughes was involved in a near-fatal aircraft accident on July 7, 1946, while piloting the experimental U.S. Army Air Force reconnaissance aircraft, the XF-11, over Los Angeles. An oil leak caused one of the contra-rotating propellers to reverse pitch, causing the aircraft to yaw sharply. Hughes tried to save the craft by landing it on the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but seconds before he could reach his attempted destination, the XF-11 started to drop dramatically and crashed in the Beverly Hills neighborhood surrounding the country club.

When the XF-11 finally skidded to a halt after hitting three houses, the fuel tanks exploded, setting fire to the aircraft and a nearby home at 808 North Whittier Drive, owned by Lt Col. Charles E. Meyer. Hughes managed to pull himself out of the flaming wreckage but lay beside the aircraft until he was rescued by Marine Master Sergeant William L. Durkin, who happened to be in the area visiting friends. Hughes sustained significant injuries in the crash; including a crushed collar bone, multiple cracked ribs, crushed chest with collapsed left lung, shifting his heart to the right side of the chest cavity, and numerous third-degree burns.

However, Hughes was proud that his mind was still working. As he lay in his hospital bed, he decided that he did not like the design of the bed. He called in plant engineers to design a "tailor-made" bed, equipped with hot and cold running water, built in six sections, and operated by 30 electric motors, with push-button adjustments.

Many attribute his long-term addiction to opiates to his use of codeine as a painkiller during his convalescence. The trademark mustache he wore afterward was meant to cover a scar on his upper lip resulting from the accident.

H-4 Hercules

The Hughes H-4 Hercules was the world's largest flying boat, the largest aircraft made from wood, and, at , had the biggest wingspan of any aircraft ever built (the next largest wingspan is about shorter). (The Hercules is no longer the longest or heaviest aircraft ever built, however, as both of those titles are currently held by the Antonov An-225).

The Hercules was originally contracted by the U.S. government for use during World War II to transport troops and equipment across the Atlantic as an alternative to sea-going troop transport ships that were vulnerable to German U-boats. However the aircraft was not completed until after the end of World War II.

with Howard Hughes at the controls]] The Hercules flew only once for one mile (1.6 km), and 70 feet above the water, with Hughes at the controls, on November 2, 1947.

The Hercules was nicknamed the "Spruce Goose" by critics, but was actually made largely from birch (not from spruce), rather than of aluminum, because the contract required the aircraft to be built of "non-strategic materials." It was built in Hughes's Westchester, California facility. Howard Hughes was summoned to testify before the Senate War Investigating Committee to explain why the aircraft had not been delivered to the United States Army Air Forces during the war, but the committee disbanded without releasing a final report. The aircraft was moved to McMinnville, Oregon, where it is now part of the Evergreen Aviation Museum.

Hughes Aircraft

test plane in Brazoria County Airport in Texas|thumb]] Texas: The S-43 Sikorsky test plane]] Hughes Aircraft Company, a division of Hughes Tool Company, was originally founded by Hughes in 1932, in a rented corner of a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation hangar in Burbank, California, to carry out the expensive conversion of a military aircraft into the H-1 racer. During and after World War II, Hughes fashioned his company into a major defense contractor. The Hughes Helicopters division started in 1947 when helicopter manufacturer Kellett sold their latest design to Hughes for production. In 1948, Hughes created a new division of the company, the Hughes Aerospace Group. The Hughes Space and Communications Group and the Hughes Space Systems Division were later spun off in 1948 to form their own divisions and ultimately became the Hughes Space and Communications Company in 1961. In 1953, Howard Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a tax-exempt charitable organization. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for US$5.2 billion. In 1997, General Motors sold Hughes Aircraft to Raytheon and in 2000, sold Hughes Space & Communications to Boeing. A combination of Boeing, GM and Raytheon acquired the Hughes Research Laboratories.

Airlines

In 1939, at the urging of Jack Frye, president of TWA, Hughes quietly purchased a majority share of TWA stock for nearly US$7 million and took control of the airline. Upon assuming ownership, Hughes was prohibited by federal law from building his own aircraft. Seeking an aircraft that would perform better than TWA's fleet of Boeing 307 Stratoliners, Hughes approached Boeing's competitor, Lockheed. Hughes had a good relationship with Lockheed since they had built the aircraft he used in his record flight around the world in 1938. Lockheed agreed to Hughes's request that the new aircraft be built in secrecy. The result was the revolutionary Constellation and TWA purchased the first 40 of the new airliners off the production line.

In 1956, Hughes placed an order for 63 Convair 880s for TWA at a cost of US$400 million. Although Hughes was extremely wealthy at this time, outside creditors demanded that Hughes relinquish control of TWA in return for providing the money. In 1960, Hughes was ultimately forced out of TWA, although he owned 78% of the company and battled to regain control.

Before Hughes' removal, the TWA jet financing issue precipitated the end of Hughes' relationship with Noah Dietrich. Dietrich claimed Hughes developed a plan by which Hughes Tool Company profits were to be inflated in order to sell the company for a windfall that would pay the bills for the 880s. Dietrich agreed to go to Texas to implement the plan on the condition that Hughes agreed to a capital gains arrangement he had long promised Dietrich. When Hughes balked, Dietrich resigned immediately. "Noah," Dietrich quoted Hughes as replying, "I cannot exist without you!" Dietrich stood firm and eventually had to sue to retrieve personal possessions from his office after Hughes ordered it locked.

In 1966, Hughes was forced by a U.S. federal court to sell his shares in TWA because of concerns over conflict of interest between his ownership of both TWA and Hughes Aircraft. The sale of his TWA shares netted him a profit of US$547 million. During the 1970s, Hughes went back into the airline business, buying the airline Air West and renaming it Hughes Airwest.

RKO

In 1948, Hughes gained control of RKO, a struggling major Hollywood studio, by acquiring 25 percent of the outstanding stock from Floyd Odlum's Atlas Corporation. Within weeks of taking control, he dismissed three-quarters of the work force and production was shut down for six months in 1949 while he undertook the investigation of the politics of all remaining studio employees. Completed pictures would be sent back for re-shooting if he felt his star (especially female) was not properly presented, or if a film's anti-communist politics were not sufficiently clear. In 1952, an aborted sale to a Chicago-based group with no experience in the industry disrupted studio operations even further.

Hughes sold the RKO theaters in 1953 as settlement of the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. antitrust case. With the sale of the profitable theaters, the shaky status of the film studio became increasingly apparent. A steady stream of lawsuits from RKO's minority shareholders, charging him with financial misconduct and corporate mismanagement, became an increasing nuisance, especially because Hughes wanted to focus on his aircraft-manufacturing and TWA holdings during the Korean War years. Eager to be rid of the distraction, Hughes offered to buy out all other stockholders.

By the end of 1954, at a cost of nearly US$24 million, he had gained near total control of RKO, becoming the closest thing to a sole owner of a Hollywood studio seen in three decades. Six months later, Hughes sold the studio to the General Tire and Rubber Company for US$25 million. Hughes retained the rights to pictures he had personally produced, including those made at RKO. He also retained Jane Russell's contract. For Howard Hughes, this was the virtual end of his 25-year involvement in motion pictures; though he had all but destroyed a major Hollywood studio, his reputation as a financial wizard emerged unscathed. He reportedly walked away from RKO having made US$6.5 million in personal profit.

General Tire was interested mainly in exploiting the value of the RKO library for television programming, though it made some attempts to continue producing films. After a year and a half of mixed success, General Tire shut down film production at RKO for good at the end of January 1957. The studio lots in Hollywood and Culver City were sold to Desilu Productions later that year for US$6.15 million.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

In 1953, Hughes launched the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, formed with the express goal of basic biomedical research, including trying to understand, in Hughes' words, the "genesis of life itself." Hughes' first will, which he signed in 1925 at the age of 19, stipulated that a portion of his estate should be used to create a medical institute bearing his name. Hughes gave all his stock in the Hughes Aircraft Company to the institute, thereby turning the aerospace and defense contractor into a tax-exempt charity. Hughes' internist, Dr. Verne Mason, who treated Hughes after his 1946 plane crash, was chairman of the institute's medical advisory committee. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute's new board of trustees sold Hughes Aircraft in 1985 to General Motors for US$5.2 billion, allowing the institute to grow dramatically.

The deal was the topic of a protracted legal battle between Hughes and the Internal Revenue Service, which Hughes ultimately won. After his death in 1976, many thought that the balance of Hughes' estate would go to the institute, although it was ultimately divided among his cousins and other heirs, given the lack of a will to the contrary. The HHMI was the 4th largest private organization as of 2007 and the largest devoted to biological and medical research, with an endowment of US$16.3 billion as of June 2007.

Nixon scandal

Shortly before the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon was harmed by revelations of a US$205,000 loan from Hughes to Nixon's brother Donald.

In late 1971, Donald Nixon was collecting intelligence for his brother in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. One of Donald's sources was John H. Meier, a former business adviser of Hughes who had also worked with Democratic National Chairman Larry O'Brien.

However, Meier conspired with former Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, and others to feed disinformation to the Nixon campaign. Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because Larry O’Brien had a great deal of information on Richard Nixon’s illicit dealings with Hughes that had never been released; (O’Brien didn’t actually have any such information, but Meier wanted Nixon to think he did.) Donald told his brother that O’Brien was in possession of damaging information that could destroy his campaign.

Glomar Explorer

In 1972, Hughes was approached by the CIA to help secretly recover Soviet submarine K-129 which had sunk near Hawaii four years earlier. Thus the Glomar Explorer, a special-purpose salvage vessel, was born. Hughes' involvement provided the CIA with a plausible cover story, having to do with civilian marine research at extreme depths and the mining of undersea manganese nodules. In the summer of 1974, Glomar Explorer attempted to raise the Soviet vessel.

However, during the recovery a mechanical failure in the ship's grapple caused half of the submarine to break off and fall to the ocean floor. This section is believed to have held many of the most sought-after items, including its code book and nuclear missiles. Two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic machines were recovered, along with the bodies of six Soviet submariners who were subsequently given formal burial at sea in a filmed ceremony. The operation, known as Project Azorian (but incorrectly referred to by the press as Project Jennifer), became public in February 1975 because burglars had obtained secret documents from Hughes' headquarters in June 1974. Though he lent his name to the operation, Hughes and his companies had no actual involvement in the project.

Managing the financial empire

As his empire grew, Hughes worked to minimize the company's taxes. In the early years of Hughes Aircraft, Hughes attempted to move his company from Southern California to Nevada in an effort to take advantage of Nevada's low taxes. Ultimately, Hughes donated all his stock in Hughes Aircraft to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turningover the ownership of and all profits the military contractor to tax-exempt charity. In addition to avoiding income taxes, this had the effect of silencing the upper management in Hughes Aircraft, who for many years had clamored for stock in the company as part of their compensation.

Mental illness and physical decline

As early as the 1930s, Hughes displayed signs of mental illness, primarily obsessive-compulsive disorder. Close friends reported that he was obsessed with the size of peas, one of his favorite foods, and used a special fork to sort them by size.

While directing The Outlaw, Hughes became fixated on a minor flaw in one of Jane Russell's blouses, claiming that the fabric bunched up along a seam and gave the appearance of two nipples on each breast. He was reportedly so upset by the matter that he wrote a detailed memorandum to the crew on how to fix the problem. Richard Fleischer, who directed His Kind of Woman with Hughes as executive producer, wrote at length in his autobiography about the difficulty of dealing with the tycoon. In his book, Just Tell Me When to Cry, Fleischer explained that Hughes was fixated on trivial details and was alternately indecisive and obstinate. He also revealed that Hughes' unpredictable mood swings made him wonder if the film would ever be completed.

In December 1947, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. Hughes stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He subsisted exclusively on chocolate bars and milk, and relieved himself in the empty bottles and containers. He was surrounded by dozens of Kleenex boxes, which he continuously stacked and re-arranged. He wrote detailed memos to his aides on yellow legal pads giving them explicit instructions not to look at him, to respond when spoken to, but otherwise not speak to him. Throughout this period, Hughes sat fixated in his chair, often naked, continuously watching movies, reel after reel, day after day. When he finally emerged in the spring of 1948, his hygiene was terrible, as he had not bathed or cut his hair and nails for weeks. The Screening Room was located at Sunset Blvd. and Doheny Drive in Los Angeles, it was owned by Martin Nosseck and it was called, "Martin Nosseck Projection Theatre". Martin Nosseck, who died in 1980, was also the full time projectionist for Mr. Hughes during that time.

After the screening room incident, Hughes moved into a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He also rented out several other rooms for his aides, his wife, and his numerous girlfriends. His erratic behavior continued, however, as he would sit naked in his bedroom with a pink hotel napkin placed over his genitals, watching movies. In one year, he spent an estimated $11 million at the hotel.

In a bout of obsession with his home state, Hughes began purchasing all restaurant chains and four star hotels that had been founded within the borders of Texas. This included, if for only a short period, many unknown franchises currently out of business. Ownership of the restaurants was placed in the hands of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and all licenses were resold shortly after.

Another time, he became obsessed with the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra and had it running on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times.

Hughes insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, so that he could insulate himself from germs. He would also notice dust, stains or other imperfections on people's clothes and demand that they take care of it.

Once one of the most visible men in America, Hughes ultimately vanished from public view, although the tabloids continued to follow rumors of his behavior and whereabouts. He was reported to be terminally ill, mentally unstable or even dead.

As a result of numerous plane crashes, Hughes spent much of his later life in pain, eventually becoming severely addicted to codeine, which he injected intramuscularly. London, England; Managua, Nicaragua; Acapulco, Mexico and others.

On November 24, 1966 (Thanksgiving Day), Hughes arrived in Las Vegas by railroad car and moved into the Desert Inn. Because he refused to leave the hotel and to avoid further conflicts with the owners of the hotel, Hughes bought the Desert Inn in early 1967. The hotel's eighth floor became the nerve center of his empire and the ninth-floor penthouse became Hughes' personal residence. Between 1966 and 1968, Hughes bought several other hotels/casinos such as the Castaways, New Frontier, The Landmark Hotel and Casino, and the Sands. He bought the small Silver Slipper casino only to reposition the hotel's trademark neon silver slipper, visible from Hughes bedroom, which apparently had been keeping him up at night. An unusual incident marked an earlier Hughes connection to Las Vegas. During his 1954 engagement at the Last Frontier hotel in Las Vegas, flamboyant entertainer Liberace mistook Howard Hughes for his lighting director, instructing him to instantly bring up a blue light should he start to play Clair de lune. The alleged staff member nodded in accordance as the hotel's entertainment director approached the scene, properly introducing Howard Hughes to Liberace.

Hughes wanted to change the image of Las Vegas to something more glamorous than it was. As Hughes wrote in a memo to an aide, "I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a beautifully jeweled and furred female getting out of an expensive car." Hughes bought several local television stations (including KLAS-TV).

Hughes' considerable business holdings were overseen by a small panel unofficially dubbed "The Mormon Mafia" because of the many Latter-day Saints on the committee. In addition to supervising day-to-day business operations and Hughes' health, they also went to great pains to satisfy Hughes' every whim. Hughes once became fond of Baskin-Robbins' Banana Ripple ice cream, so his aides sought to secure a bulk shipment for him—only to discover that Baskin-Robbins had discontinued the flavor. They put in a request for the smallest amount the company could provide for a special order, 200 gallons (750 L), and had it shipped from Los Angeles. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of Banana Ripple and wanted only Chocolate Marshmallow ice cream. The Desert Inn ended up distributing free Banana Ripple ice cream to casino customers for a year. In a 1996 interview, ex-Howard Hughes communicator Robert Maheu said "There is a rumor that there is still some Banana Ripple ice cream left in the freezer. It is most likely true."

As an owner of several major businesses in Las Vegas, Hughes wielded enormous political and economic influence in Nevada and elsewhere. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Hughes disapproved of the underground nuclear testing taking place at the Nevada Test Site. Hughes was concerned about the risk posed by the residual nuclear radiation from the tests, and so attempted to halt the tests. When the tests finally went through despite Hughes' efforts, the detonations were powerful enough that the entire hotel in which he was staying trembled with the shock waves. In two separate, last-ditch maneuvers, Hughes instructed his representatives to offer million-dollar bribes to both presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon. His aides, however, never offered the bribes, instead reporting to Hughes that Johnson declined the offer and they were unable to contact Nixon.

In 1971, Jean Peters filed for divorce; the two had not lived together for many years. Peters requested a lifetime alimony payment of US$70,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, and waived all claims to Hughes' estate. Hughes offered her a settlement of over a million dollars, but she declined it. Hughes did not insist upon a confidentiality agreement from Peters as a condition of the divorce; aides reported that Hughes never spoke ill of her. She refused to discuss her life with Hughes and declined several lucrative offers from publishers and biographers. Peters would state only that she had not seen Hughes for several years before their divorce and had only dealt with him by phone.

Hughes was living in the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Managua in Nicaragua, seeking privacy and security, when a magnitude 6.5 earthquake damaged Managua in December 1972. As a precaution, Hughes moved to the Nicaraguan National Palace and stayed there as a guest of Anastasio Somoza Debayle before leaving for Florida on a private jet the following day. He subsequently moved into the Penthouse at the Xanadu Princess Resort on Grand Bahama Island, which he had recently purchased. He lived almost exclusively in the penthouse of the Xanadu Beach Resort & Marina for the last four years of his life.

Hughes had spent a total of US$300 million on his many properties in Las Vegas.

Death

Hughes was reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27 PM on board an aircraft owned by Robert Graf, en route from his penthouse at the "Acapulco Fairmont Princess Hotel" in Mexico to The Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. Alternatively, other accounts indicate that he died in the flight from Freeport Grand Bahamas to Houston. His reclusive activities and drug use made him practically unrecognizable; his hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long, his tall 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 lb (41 kg), and the FBI had to resort to fingerprints to identify the body. Howard Hughes' alias of "John T. Conover" was used upon the arrival of his body at a morgue in Houston on the day of his death. There, his body was received by Dr. Jack Titus.

A subsequent autopsy noted kidney failure as the cause of death. Hughes was in extremely poor physical condition at the time of his death. He suffered from malnutrition. While his kidneys were damaged, his other internal organs, including his brain, were deemed perfectly healthy.

Hughes is featured briefly in the 1988 film , where he is played by Dean Stockwell.

Hughes was portrayed by Terry O'Quinn in Disney's The Rocketeer (1991), substituting for the "mystery inventor" (Doc Savage) in the original comic book version. In the film, Hughes had designed the rocket for use by soldiers, regretted the project, and declined to manufacture any more rockets. In the first scene with Hughes, he is arguing with two War Department people about his decision.

Before The Aviator (2004), there were several attempts to create a biopic based on the life of Hughes. For years, director-actor Warren Beatty wanted to play Hughes and direct a big-screen film of the mogul. It was to be released alongside Beatty's film Reds, but due to the lack of the right script, the project was abandoned. In the 1990s, producers with Touchstone Pictures wanted to do it with John Malkovich, Edward Norton, or Johnny Depp as Hughes, but, due to climbing costs, that venture was abandoned. Castle Rock Entertainment also tried to develop a biopic called Mr. Hughes with Jim Carrey starring and with Christopher Nolan directing and re-writing a script originated by David Koepp and Brian De Palma. When The Aviator began production, the idea was scrapped, and Nolan went on to direct Batman Begins. Some of the details of Hughes as an adult were confirmed in A. Scott Berg's memoir of Katharine Hepburn (Kate Remembered).

The Aviator (2004), directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and winning five, the acclaimed film focuses primarily on Hughes' achievements in aviation and in the movies and on the increasing handicaps imposed on him by his obsessive–compulsive behavior, and ends shortly after the successful flight of the Hercules in 1947.

The Hoax (2007), directed by Lasse Hallström. The story depicts events in the life of Clifford Irving, an American novelist who became well known in the early 1970s when his "authorized autobiography" of Howard Hughes was exposed as a hoax.

Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau is an adaptation of a comic book about a wealthy weapons manufacturer, Tony Stark. According to creator Stan Lee, the character's personality and playboy lifestyle were inspired by Hughes, explaining, "Howard Hughes was one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-billionaire, a ladies' man and finally a nutcase".

In the animated movie Up, young Charles Muntz was compared by the director to Hughes.

Music

John Hartford's 1972 album Morning Bugle includes the song "Howard Hughes Blues" which describes his solitary life of "poor old Howard Hughes and all of his blues". The song was covered by Laura Cantrell on her 2008 digital-only release, Trains and Boats and Planes. The soul trio Hues Corporation, whose biggest hit was "Rock the Boat", originally called themselves "Children of Howard Hughes", but changed their name after 1973 for fear of a lawsuit.

The Boomtown Rats released the song "Me And Howard Hughes" on their album A Tonic for the Troops in 1978.

The British punk rock band The Tights wrote a song called "Howard Hughes", released as a single in 1978.

Cello trio Rasputina have a song entitled "Howard Hughes" in Thanks for the Ether (1996).

Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell wrote a song called "Bargain Basement Howard Hughes" included in his Degradation Trip solo album (2002).

New York band Bayside reference Howard Hughes in their song "Howard," which was named after Hughes, from the album Shudder.

The band Kansas wrote several songs about the life of Howard Hughes, most notably the song "Closet Chronicles."

The British shoegaze band Ride have released a song titled "Howard Hughes". It is now available on the re-issues of their second album Going Blank Again.

Literature

Howard Hughes appears as a character in Death and Honor (Putnam, 2008), W.E.B. Griffin's fictional account of the clandestine espionage activities of agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services (the "OSS") during World War II. In the novel, Hughes is portrayed as an unofficial intelligence community insider.

Howard Hughes also appears in James Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy.

Howard Hughes and his dominion over Las Vegas has a significant role to play in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice.

Games

In the Bioshock 2 Art book it is said the character of Andrew Ryan is partly based on Howard Hughes.

In the post-apocalyptic RPG the character of Mr. House is heavily based on Howard Hughes.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

Barkow, Al. Gettin' to the Dance Floor: An Oral History of American Golf. Short Hills, New Jersey: Burford Books, 1986. ISBN 1-58080-043-2.

Barton, Charles. Howard Hughes and his Flying Boat. Fallbrook, CA: Aero Publishers, 1982. Republished in 1998, Vienna, VA: Charles Barton, Inc. ISBN 0-9663175-0-5.

Barlett, Donald L. and James B. Steele. Empire: The Life, Legend and Madness of Howard Hughes. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979. ISBN 0-393-07513-3, republished in 2004 as Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness.

Brown, Peter Harry and Pat H. Broeske. Howard Hughes: The Untold Story. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. ISBN 0-525-93785-4.

Burleson, Clyde W. The Jennifer Project. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M; University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-89096-764-4.

Dietrich, Noah and Bob Thomas. Howard: The Amazing Mr. Hughes. New York: Fawcett Publications, 1972. ISBN 0-0-44902-565-1.

Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes: In his Own Words, How Howard Hughes Tried to Buy America. Portland, Oregon: Broadway Books, 2004. ISBN 0-76791-934-3.

Hack, Richard. Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters: The Definitive Biography of the First American Billionaire. Beverly Hills, California: New Millennium Press, 2002. ISBN 1-893224-64-3.

Irving, Clifford. The Hoax. New York: E. Reads Ltd., 1999. ISBN 978-0759238688.

Marrett, George J. Howard Hughes: Aviator. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2004. ISBN 1-59114-510-4.

Kistler, Ron. I Caught Flies for Howard Hughes. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976. ISBN 0-87223-447-9.

Lasky, Betty. RKO: The Biggest Little Major of Them All, 2d ed . Santa Monica, California: Roundtable, 1989. ISBN 0-91567-741-5.

Maheu, Robert and Richard Hack. Next to Hughes: Behind the Power and Tragic Downfall of Howard Hughes by his Closest Adviser. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. ISBN 0-06016-505-7.

Moore, Terry. The Beauty and the Billionaire. New York: Pocket Books, 1984. ISBN 0-67150-080-5.

Moore, Terry and Jerry Rivers. The Passions of Howard Hughes. Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN 1-88164-988-1.

Phelan, James. Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years. New York, Random House, 1976. ISBN 0-39441-042-4.

Real, Jack. The Asylum of Howard Hughes. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation, 2003. ISBN 1-4134-0875-3.

Thomas, Bob. Liberace: The True Story. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-01469-4.

Tierney, Gene with Mickey Herskowitz. Self-Portrait. New York: Peter Wyden, 1979. lSBN 0-883261-52-9.

Weaver, Tom. Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks: Conversations with 24 Actors, Writers, Producers and Directors from the Golden Age. New York: McFarland & Company, 2004. ISBN 0-78642-070-7.

Additional resources

Photograph collections related to Hughes: Houston Public Library; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum; Charles Barton, Inc.

External links

AZORIAN The Raising of the K-129 / 2009 - 2 Part TV Documentary / Michael White Films Vienna

Welcome Home Howard: Collection of photographs kept by UNLV

Howard Hughes' Sikorsky at Brazoria County Airport, Texas (See Archives, July, 2009)

Hughes legacy lives on in litigation – Houston Business Journal

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{{ infobox person | image = David Icke by Stef (cropped).jpg | image_size = 200px | caption = Icke in 2008 | birth_name = David Vaughan Icke | birth_date = April 29, 1952 | birth_place = Leicester, England | residence = Ryde, Isle of Wight | nationality = | known_for = Football, television sports, books on global politics | occupation = Writer and speaker | years_active = Since 1990 | party = Formerly the Green Party | spouse = Linda Atherton, Pamela Leigh Richards | children = Kerry (1975), Gareth (1981), Rebecca (1991), Jaymie (1992) | parents = Beric Vaughan Icke, Barbara J. Icke (née Cooke) | relations = Trevor and Paul (brothers) | website = davidicke.com }}

David Vaughan Icke (born April 29, 1952) is an English writer and public speaker best known for his views on what he calls "who and what is really controlling the world". Describing himself as the most controversial speaker and author in the world, he has written 16 books explaining his position, dubbed New Age-conspiracism, and has attracted a substantial following across the political spectrum. His 533-page The Biggest Secret (1999) has been called the conspiracy theorist's Rosetta Stone.

Icke was a well-known BBC television sports presenter and spokesman for the Green Party, when he had an encounter in 1990 with a psychic who told him he was a healer who had been placed on Earth for a purpose. In April 1991 he announced on the BBC's Terry Wogan show that he was the son of God, and predicted that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. The show changed his life, turning him practically overnight from a respected household name into an object of public ridicule.

He continued nevertheless to develop his ideas, and in four books published over seven years—The Robots' Rebellion (1994), And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001)—set out a moral and political worldview that combines New-Age spiritualism with a passionate denunciation of what he sees as totalitarian trends in the modern world. At the heart of his theories lies the idea that a secret group of reptilian humanoids called the Babylonian Brotherhood controls humanity, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.

Some of Icke's theories have attracted the attention of the far right and the suspicion of Jewish groups; for example, he has argued that the reptilians were the original authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 1903 Russian forgery purporting to be a plan by the Jewish people to achieve world domination. Icke strongly denies there is anything antisemitic about this claim. He was allowed to enter Canada in 1999 only after persuading immigration officials that when he said lizards, he meant lizards, but his books were still removed from the shelves of Indigo Books, a Canadian chain, after protests from the Canadian Jewish Congress. Icke's problems in Canada became the focus in 2001 of a documentary by British journalist Jon Ronson, David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews.

Personal life and career

Early life and education

Icke was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke and Barbara J. Icke, née Cooke, who were married in Leicester in 1951. There was a brother, Trevor, seven years older than Icke, and another, Paul, seven years younger. Beric had wanted to be a doctor, but his family had no money, so he joined the Royal Air Force instead. He was awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry in May 1943 after helping to save the crew of an aircraft that had crashed into the Chipping Warden air base in Oxfordshire. Along with a Squadron Leader, he ran into the burning aircraft, without protective clothing, and saved the life of a crew member who was trapped inside.

After the war, Beric got a job in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a slum terraced house on Lead Street, near Wharf Street in the centre of Leicester. When Icke was three, they moved to a housing estate known as the Goodwood, one of the massive 1950s council estates the post-war Labour government built, their new home just across the road from the hospital. The family had nothing. "To say we were skint," he wrote in 1993, "is like saying it is a little chilly at the North Pole." He remembers having to hide under a window or chair when the council man came to collect the rent—after knocking, the rent man would walk round the house peering through the windows to see whether anyone was at home. His mother never explained that it was about the rent; she just told him to hide, and Icke writes that he still gets a fright when he hears a knock on the door.

He was always a loner, and felt different from other children, spending hours playing by himself with little steam trains that he had, and preferring to cross the street rather than speak to anyone. He attended Whitehall Infant School, then Whitehall Junior School, where he spent most of his time feeling nervous and shy, often to the point of feeling faint during the morning assembly and having to leave before he passed out. The family doctor suggested a referral to a child psychologist, but his father put his foot down. He made no effort at school and failed at practically everything, but when he was nine, he was chosen for the junior school's football team. It was the first time in his life he had succeeded at anything, and he came to see football as the only way out of his poverty. He played in goal, which he writes suited the loner in him, and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.

Football and first marriage

He failed his 11-plus, a test that was used at the time to divide children between grammar schools, supposedly for the brightest, and secondary moderns or technical schools for the rest, so Icke was sent in 1963 to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern. He left at 15 after being talent-spotted while playing football, and was signed up as a goalkeeper for Coventry City. Arthritis in his left knee—which later spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists, and hands—stopped him from making a career out of football, but he managed to play for Coventry for four years and Hereford United for one, before retiring from the game in 1973 at the age of 21.

He met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa. She was working at the time as a van driver for a garage in Leamington. Shortly after they met, Icke had another one of the huge rows he had started having with his father—always a domineering man, his father was upset that Icke's arthritis was interfering with his football career—so he packed his bags and left home. He moved into a tiny bedsit and worked in a local travel agency during the day, travelling to Hereford in the evenings to practice or play football. He and Linda were married on September 30, four months after they'd met. Their daughter, Kerry, was born three and a half years later on March 7, 1975, followed by a son, Gareth, on December 12, 1981, and another son, Jaymie, on November 18, 1992.

Journalism

team. Clockwise from top left: Francis Wilson, Debbie Rix, David Icke, Nick Ross, Selina Scott, Frank Bough.]] He found a job in 1973 as a reporter with the weekly Leicester Advertiser, through a contact who was a sports editor at the Daily Mail, though he writes that he got the job because he was the only applicant. He advanced quickly through local radio to television, and became a regional sports presenter for the BBC's South Today in 1982, around the time his first son was born, and the year he moved to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, somewhere he had always wanted to live. He appeared on the first edition of British television's first national breakfast show, Breakfast Time, on January 17, 1983, presenting the sports news for them until 1985. He published his first book in 1983, It's a tough game, son! about football and how to break into it. He worked for BBC Sport until August 1990, often as a stand-in host on Grandstand and snooker programmes, and also at the 1988 Summer Olympics, but a career in television began to lose its appeal for him; he wrote in Tales from the Time Loop that he found television workers insincere, shallow, and vicious, with rare exceptions.

His contract with the BBC was terminated in 1990 when he refused to pay his poll tax, a controversial new tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher. He ended up paying it in November 1990, but his initial announcement that he was willing to go to jail rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.

Green Party

At some point during the 1980s, he began to flirt with fringe medicine and New Age philosophies in an effort to find relief from his arthritis.

Sessions with a psychic healer

Icke writes that it was when he was working for the Green Party, and particularly while he was writing the book in 1989, that he began to feel a presence around him, as though there was always someone else in the room, even when he was alone. He writes in Days of Decision (1993) that it was a time of considerable personal despair for him, though he gives no details. In March 1990, he had an experience in a newsagent's that felt as though a magnetic force was pulling his feet to the ground, and he heard a voice tell him to look at a particular section of books. One of the books was by Betty Shine, a psychic healer, or channeller, in Brighton. He decided to visit her to ask for help with his arthritis. She told him she had a message for him, that he was a healer who had been sent to heal the Earth, and who would become famous but would face enormous opposition, but that they would always be there to protect him. , Peru, that Icke said he had a pivotal mystic experience in February 1991.]]

In February 1991, Icke travelled to Peru, where he visited the pre-Inca Sillustani burial ground near Puno. He writes that he felt drawn to a large mound of earth, at the top of which lay a circle of waist-high stones. As he stood in the circle, he felt his feet pulled to the earth as if by a magnet, just as he had experienced in the newsagent's in Ryde, and an urge to outstretch his arms. His feet started to vibrate and burn, his head felt as though a drill was passing through it, and he felt two thoughts enter his mind: first, that people will be talking about this in 100 years, and then, "it will be over when you feel the rain." He said his body started shaking as though plugged into an electrical socket and new ideas began to pour into him. Time became meaningless, he writes, and he has no idea how long he stood there, arms outstretched. Then it started raining, and the experience ended as suddenly as it had begun. He described it later as the "kundalini"—a term from Indian yoga describing a libidinal force that lies coiled at the base of the spine—exploding up through his spine, activating his brain and his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.

He returned to England and began to write a book about the experience, Truth Vibrations, published in May that year. At a Green Party conference in Wolverhampton on March 20, 1991, before the book appeared, he resigned from the party, telling them he was about to be at the centre of "tremendous and increasing controversy," and winning a standing ovation from them after the announcement.

Turquoise period

What followed became what Icke calls his "turquoise period." He began to wear only turquoise because, he explained, it is a conduit of positive energy. He had met Deborah Shaw, an English psychic living in Calgary, Alberta, in August 1990, and after he returned from Peru, he struck up a relationship with her, which became close and led to the birth of a daughter, Rebecca, in December 1991. At one point, Shaw moved in with him and his wife. Shaw had changed her name to Mari Shawsun, while Icke's wife became known as Michaela, an aspect of the Archangel Michael, and they became known in the press as the "turquoise triangle," though Icke insisted that he and Shaw were just friends. He answered reporters' questions about the relationship with, "if you resonate on this higher level then you see not two ladies, but two bodies with energy patterns."

In March 1991, a week after resigning from the Green Party, he, his wife, and Deborah/Mari held a press conference to announce that he had become a "channel for the Christ spirit," a title conferred on him by "the Godhead." He said the world would end in 1997, preceded by a number of disasters. There would be a severe hurricane around the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, eruptions in Cuba, disruption in China, a hurricane in Derry, and an earthquake on the Isle of Arran. Los Angeles would become an island, New Zealand would disappear, and the cliffs of Kent would be under water by Christmas 1991. He said the information was being given to the three of them by voices and automatic writing. In In the Light of Experience (1993), Icke wrote that, at the time he gave the press conference, he didn't feel in control. He heard his voice predicting the end of the world, and was appalled by what he was saying. "I was speaking the words," he wrote, "but all the time I could hear the voice of the brakes in the background saying, 'David, what the hell are you saying? This is absolute nonsense'." His predictions were splashed all over the next day's front pages, to his great dismay.

Terry Wogan interview

for an interview on April 29, 1991, during which Icke declared that he was the son of God. He said his children were devastated afterwards, because their dad had become a figure of ridicule. He later said he had been misinterpreted, and that he had used the term "the son of God" to mean an "aspect" of the infinite consciousness. The interview proved devastating for him. As the audience laughed, Wogan memorably pointed out that they were laughing at him, not with him, and his humiliation seemed complete. He disappeared from public life, and for several years was unable to walk down the street without people pointing at and mocking him. His children were followed to school by journalists and ridiculed by schoolmates, and his wife would open the back door to get the washing in, only to find a camera crew filming her. Icke told Jon Ronson:

One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into "Icke's a nutter." I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.

The BBC was criticised for allowing the interview to go ahead, Des Christy in The Guardian calling it a "media crucifixion." Wogan interviewed Icke again in 2006, acknowledging that his comments had been a bit sharp,

Key ideas

Icke's core ideas are put forward in four books—The Robots' Rebellion (1994), And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995), The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the World (1999), and Children of the Matrix (2001)— self-published by his Bridge of Love Publications or David Icke Books. Discussion about the nature of consciousness is intermingled with unsourced allegations against named individuals, including that certain senior politicians are Satanic paedophiles, and that the Swine flu vaccinations are a deliberate attempt to cull the world's population. He argues that human beings are the result of a breeding program conducted by a race of reptilians called Anunnaki from the Draco constellation, and that what we call reality is nothing but a "five-sense illusion," or holographic experience. The only reality is the realm of the Absolute. He believes in a collective consciousness that has intentionality; in reincarnation; in other possible worlds that exist alongside ours on other frequencies; and in acquired characteristics, arguing that our experiences change our DNA by downloading new information and overwriting the software. We are also able to attract experiences to ourselves, by means of good and bad thoughts.

Global Elite

Icke argues that humanity was created, and is controlled, by a network of secret societies run by an ancient race of interbreeding bloodlines from the Middle and Near East, originally extraterrestrial. Icke calls them the "Babylonian Brotherhood." The Illuminati, Round Table, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the IMF, United Nations, the media, military, science, religion, and the Internet are all Brotherhood created and controlled. The Brotherhood is mostly male. Their children are raised from an early age to understand the mission; those who don't are pushed aside. Key Brotherhood bloodlines are the British House of Windsor, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, European royalty and aristocracy, and the Eastern establishment families of the United States. At the apex of the Brotherhood stands the "Global Elite," identified throughout history as the Illuminati, and at the top of the Global Elite stand the "Prison Wardens." The goal of the Brotherhood—their "Great Work of Ages," or the "Brotherhood Agenda"—is world domination and a micro-chipped population.

In The Robot's Rebellion (1994), Icke introduced the idea that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was first laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, which supposedly presented a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. The Protocols is the most influential piece of antisemitic material of modern times, portraying the Jewish people as cackling villains from a Saturday matinee, as Jon Ronson puts it, widely drawn on by the far right and neo-Nazi groups. Mark Honigsbaum writes that Icke refers to it 25 times in the book, calling it the "Illuminati protocols," and it is the first of a number of examples of Icke moving dangerously close to antisemitism, according to Michael Barkun of Syracuse University.

Reptilians and shape-shifting

from Uranographia by Johannes Hevelius, 1690]] In The Biggest Secret (1999), Icke introduced the "Reptoid Hypothesis." He identifies the Brotherhood as originating from reptilians from the constellation Draco who walk on two legs and appear human, and who live in tunnels and caverns inside the earth. They are the same race of gods known as the Anunnaki in the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Eliš. Tyson Lewis of Montclair State University and Richard Kahn of Antioch University Los Angeles write that Icke has taken his "ancient astronaut" narrative from the Israeli-American writer, Zecharia Sitchin. Icke's idea of "inner-earth reptilians" is also not new, though Barkun writes that Icke has done more than most to expand it.

Sitchin writes that the reptilians came to Earth for its precious metals. Icke argues that the Anunnaki came specifically for "monoatomic gold," a mineral he says can increase the carrying capacity of the nervous system ten thousandfold. After ingesting it, the Anunnaki are able to process vast amounts of information, speed up trans-dimensional travel, and shapeshift from reptilian to human form. They use human fear, guilt, and aggression as energy in a similar way, part of the reason they organise human conflict. The more negative emotion we emit, the more the reptilians absorb. "Thus we have the encouragement of wars," he writes, "human genocide, the mass slaughter of animals, sexual perversions which create highly charged negative energy, and black magic ritual and sacrifice which takes place on a scale that will stagger those who have not studied the subject."

The Anunnaki have crossbred with human beings, the breeding lines carefully chosen for political reasons. He believes they are the Watchers, the fallen angels, or "Grigori," who mated with human women in the Biblical apocrypha. Their first reptilian-human hybrid, possibly Adam, was created 200,000–300,000 years ago. There was a second breeding program around 30,000 years ago, and a third 7,000 years ago. It is the half-bloods of the third breeding program who today control the world, more Anunnaki than human. They have an extremely powerful, hypnotic stare, the origin of the phrase to "give someone the evil eye," and their hybrid DNA allows them to shapeshift when they consume human blood. In Children of the Matrix, he expanded his description of those in charge, adding that the Anunnaki also bred with another extraterrestrial race called the "Nordics," on account of their blond hair and blue eyes, to produce a race of human slave masters, the Aryans. The Aryans retain many reptilian traits, including cold-blooded attitudes, a desire for top-down control, and an obsession with ritual, lending them a tendency toward fascistic militarism, rationalism, and racism.

Lewis and Kahn write that, with the Nordic hypothesis, Icke is mirroring standard claims by the far right that the Aryan bloodline has ruled the Earth throughout history. For Icke, Sumerian Kings and Egyptian pharaohs have all been Aryan reptilian humanoids, as have 43 American presidents and the Queen Mother, who he writes was "seriously reptilian." All have taken part in Satanic rituals, paedophilia, kidnapping of children, drug parties and murder, needed to satisfy their reptilian blood lust, which allows them to retain their temporary human form. The reptilians not only come from another planet, but are also from another dimension, the lower level of the fourth dimension, the one nearest the physical world. Icke writes that the universe consists of an infinite number of frequencies or dimensions of life that share the same space, just as television and radio frequencies do. Some people can tune their consciousness to other wavelengths, which is what psychic power consists of, and it is from one of these other dimensions that the Anunnaki are controlling this world—though just as fourth-dimensional reptilians control us, they are controlled, in turn, by a fifth dimension. The lower level of the fourth dimension is what others call the "lower astral dimension." Icke argues that it is where demons live, the entities Satanists summon during their rituals. They are, in fact, summoning the reptilians. Barkun argues that the introduction of different dimensions allows Icke to skip awkward questions about which part of the universe the reptilians come from and how they got here. The incidents allow the Elite to respond in whatever way they intended to act in the first place, a concept Icke calls "order out of chaos," or "problem-reaction-solution". There are few, if any, public events that are not engineered, or at least used, by the Brotherhood in their bid to sow division and centralise power. He suggested that the 1996 Dunblane massacre, for example, was organised by the Elite to strengthen gun laws:

Red Dresses

In Infinite Love is the Only Truth (2005), Icke introduces the idea of "reptilian software." He says that there are three kinds of people. The highest level of the Brotherhood are the "Red Dresses." These are "software people," elsewhere called "reptilian software," or "constructs of mind," without consciousness, without free will. Their human bodies are holographic veils. A second group, the so-called "sheeple"—the vast majority of humanity—have what Icke calls "back seat consciousness." They are conscious, but they do whatever they are told and are the main source of energy for the Brotherhood. They include the "repeaters," the people in positions of influence who simply repeat what other people have told them. Doctors repeat what they are told in medical school and by drug companies, teachers repeat what they learned at teacher training college, and journalists are the greatest repeaters of all. The third group, by far the smallest, are those who see through the illusion; they are people like Neo from the film, The Matrix. They are usually dubbed dangerous or mad. The "Red Dress" genetic lines keep obsessively interbreeding to make sure their bloodlines are not weakened by the second or third levels of consciousness, because consciousness can rewrite the software.

Reception

Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Holocaust

cites this cartoon, "Rothschild" (1898), by Charles Léandre, arguing that Jews have long been depicted as lizard-like creatures out to control the world.]]

Icke's criticism of Judaism, his reliance on the Protocols, questioning of the Holocaust, and claims about Jewish involvement in the "Global Elite," have attracted the attention of Jewish groups, who fear that his talk of lizards wanting to rule the world is a smokescreen for claims about Jews. Journalist Louis Theroux cautions against accusing him of antisemitism, arguing that it might not only be unfair, but may also lend a patina of seriousness to his ideas. Icke strongly denies that his reptiles represent Jews, calling the claim "friggin' nonsense." "There is a tribe of people interbreeding," he told Jon Ronson in 2001, "which do not, do not, relate to any earth race ... This is not a Jewish plot. This is not a plot on the world by Jewish people".

Icke introduced the idea in The Robot's Rebellion that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was first laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax published in Russia in 1903, supposedly a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world. Parts of it were serialised in a Russian newspaper in 1903, and it was published in English throughout the U.S. in 1920 by The Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford's weekly newspaper, becoming mixed up with conspiracy theories about anti-Christian Illuminati, international financiers, and the Rothschilds, a powerful Jewish dynasty involved in banking. After it was exposed as a hoax, Michael Barkun writes that it disappeared from mainstream discourse until interest in it was renewed by the American far right in the 1950s.

Icke's use of the Protocols in The Robots' Rebellion was greeted with dismay by the Green Party's executive, who argued that his book promoted fascist and antisemitic views. They had allowed Icke to address the party's annual conference in 1992, despite the controversy over his "son of God" interview, but in September 1994 they decided to deny him a platform. Icke wrote to The Guardian protesting the party's decision, denying the book was antisemitic, and arguing that racism, sexism and prejudice of any kind were horrific and ridiculous, but in the same letter, he insisted that whoever wrote the Protocols "knew the game plan" for the 20th century. Barkun argues that Icke is trying to have it both ways—offended by the allegation of antisemitism, while "hinting at the dark activities of Jewish elites," Icke explicitly blames a ruling Jewish clique for the first and second world wars and the rise of Hitler—and indeed writes that Hitler's father was a Rothschild—and in And the Truth Shall Set You Free, he appears to flirt openly with Holocaust denial. Alick Bartholomew of Gateway, Icke's former publisher, told journalist Mark Honigsbaum in 1995 that an early draft of the book contained material questioning the Holocaust, and that Icke was dropped because of it. The September 2004 edition still contains material in chapter seven that is arguably revisionist. Sam Taylor writes in The Observer that, having read the chapter in question, he does not believe Icke is antisemitic, but argues that he is "tapping into a seriously paranoid, aggressive strain in U.S. society."

Honigsbaum writes that Combat 18, the British neo-Nazi group, publicised a 1995 talk Icke gave at Glastonbury in its magazine, Putsch. The talk was understood as antisemitic both by Combat 18 and by the Isle of Avalon Foundation, the New Age group that had promoted Icke's tour, which not only disowned him, but started handing out leaflets in protest at his presence. Perhaps unfairly projecting its own views onto Icke, Putsch wrote that Icke had talked about "the big conspiracy by a group of bankers, media moguls etc.—always being clever enough not to mention what all these had in common." Icke dismisses Combat 18's attentions, writing that it is a front for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Mossad.

Protests in Canada

Icke was detained by immigration officials when he tried to enter Canada in 1999, after Ontario's Hate Crime Unit added his name to an all-ports watch list because of complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress. The officers combed his luggage and reading material for evidence of antisemitic material. Jon Ronson writes: "Finally, after four hours of questioning, they concluded that when David Icke said lizards, lizards was what he meant."

While his lecture in a downtown Vancouver theatre attracted an audience of 1,200—attended, according to Icke, by the head of the Hate Crimes Unit—his books were removed from Indigo Books, and several venues on his speaking tour were cancelled. Human rights lawyer Richard Warman, working at the time for the Canadian Green Party, took credit for much of this in an interview with Jon Ronson for the latter's documentary, David Icke, the Lizards and the Jews (2001), in which Ronson catalogues the cancelled radio interviews and book signings that Warman appears to have engineered. In response, Icke's Children of the Matrix (2001) reportedly accused Warman of being an Illuminati "gatekeeper," and of working to stop the exposure of child abuse, which triggered a statement of claim from Warman.

Place within the conspiracism genre

Improvisational millennialism

of Syracuse University writes that Icke is the most fluent of the conspiracy writers. Barkun calls Icke's work "improvisational millennialism," with an end-of-history scenario involving a final battle between good and evil. Because everything is connected in the conspiracist world view, every source can be mined for links, and the greater the stigma attached to an idea, the more attractive it becomes, because the vehemence with which the mainstream rejects it becomes a measure of its validity. For Icke, therefore, the widespread ridiculing of the lizard theory is a guarantee that there's something to it, Barkun argues.

According to Barkun, Icke has actively tried to cultivate the far right. In 1996, he spoke to a conference in Reno, Nevada, alongside opponents of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act—which mandates background checks on people who buy guns in the United States—including Kirk Lyons, a white nationalist lawyer who has represented the Ku Klux Klan. Barkun argues that the relationship between Icke, the militias, and the Christian Patriots is complex because of the New Age baggage Icke brings with him, and he stresses that Icke is not actually a member of any of these groups, but it is nevertheless true that Icke has absorbed the world view of the radical right virtually intact. "There is no fuller explication of its beliefs about ruling elites than Icke's," he writes. Icke regards Christian patriots as the only Americans who understand the truth about the New World Order, but he also told a Christian patriot group: "I don't know which I dislike more, the world controlled by the Brotherhood, or the one you want to replace it with."]] Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn see Icke as a spiritual philosopher, arguing that it's not clear he believes in the reptilians himself. They write that he has produced an extraordinary, all-inclusive narrative, a consolidation of all conspiracy theories into one massive project with unlimited explanatory power. There is an almost obsessive-compulsive element to his writing, they argue, whereby he ferrets out any minutiae he can find to support a narrative structure that allows him to pole vault from ancient Sumer to modern America in a way that "defies the laws of academic gravity."

His work cuts across political, religious, cultural, and socio-economic divisions, uniting the political left and right—they write that his lectures might see neo-Nazis and Christian Patriots sitting next to 60-something UFO buffs and New Age earth goddesses—and as such he represents a truly global counter-culture and should not, they argue, be dismissed as fringe. He has lectured in 25 countries, his books have been translated into eight languages, his website gets 600,000 hits a week, and his lecture tours attract thousands. The Biggest Secret has gone through six reprintings since 1999, and Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster is a top-five seller in South Africa.

They argue that the lizards may be allegorical, a Swiftian satire intended to demonstrate the emergence of a global fascist state. In Children of the Matrix, Icke writes that, that if the reptilians did not exist, we would have to invent them. "In fact," he says, "we probably have. They are other levels of ourselves putting ourselves in our face." He argues, "We are the reptilians and the 'demons' and, at the same time, we are those they manipulate because we are all the same 'I'." Lewis and Kahn make use of Douglas Kellner's distinction in Media Spectacle (1995) between a reactionary clinical paranoia, a mindset dissociated from reality, and a positive, progressive, critical paranoia, which uses the culture of suspicion to question and confront power. They argue that Icke displays elements of both, writing that what they call his "postmodern metanarrative" may be politically empowering, a way of giving ordinary people a narrative structure with which to question what they see around them.

Works

;Books

It's a Tough Game, Son!. Piccolo Books, 1983. ISBN 0330280473

It Doesn't Have To Be Like This: Green Politics Explained. Green Print, 1989. ISBN 1854250337

Truth Vibrations. Gateway, 1991, 1994. ISBN 1858600065

Love Changes Everything. Harper Collins Publishers, 1992. ISBN 1855382474

In the Light of Experience: The Autobiography of David Icke. Time Warner Books, 1993. ISBN 0751506036

Days of Decision. Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1993. ISBN 1897766017

The Robot's Rebellion. Gateway, 1994. ISBN 1858600227

Heal the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation. Gateway, 1994. ISBN 1858600057

...And the Truth Shall Set You Free. Bridge of Love Publications, 1995. ISBN 0953881059

I Am Me, I Am Free: The Robot's Guide to Freedom. Truth Seeker, 1996, 1998. ISBN 0952614758

Lifting the Veil: David Icke interviewed by Jon Rappoport. Truth Seeker, 1998. ISBN 0939040050

The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World. Bridge of Love Publications, 1999. ISBN 0952614766

Children of the Matrix. Bridge of Love Publications, 2001. ISBN 0953881016

Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster. Bridge of Love Publications, 2002. ISBN 0953881024

Tales from the Time Loop. Bridge of Love Publications, 2003. ISBN 0953881040

Infinite Love Is the Only Truth: Everything Else Is Illusion. Bridge of Love Publications, 2005. ISBN 0953881067

The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy (and how to end it). David Icke Books Ltd, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9538810-8-6

Human Race Get Off Your Knees—The Lion Sleeps No More. David Icke Books Ltd, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9559973-1-0

;DVDs and videos

Speaking Out: Who Really Controls the World and What We Can Do About It

David Icke: Turning of the Tide (1996)

The Reptilian Agenda (1999) (DVD)

David Icke: Revelations of a Mother Goddess

David Icke: The Freedom Road (2003)

David Icke: Secrets of the Matrix, Parts 1–3 (2003) (DVD)

David Icke, Live in Vancouver: From Prison to Paradise (2005) (DVD)

Freedom or Fascism: The Time to Choose (2006) (DVD)

David Icke: Big Brother, the Big Picture, (2008) free Internet Video

Beyond The Cutting Edge (2008) (DVD)

''David Icke Live at the Oxford Union Debating Society

''Secret Space

''Secret Space 2

See also

Erich von Däniken

Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa

List of people who have claimed to be Jesus

Notes

References

David Icke's website

Barkun, Michael (2003). A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, University of California. ISBN 0-520-23805-2

Cowley, Jason (2000). "The Icke Files,' The Independent on Sunday, October 1, 2000.

Channel 5 Television (2006). David Icke: Was He Right?, December 12, 2006, YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

Evans, Paul (2008). Interview: David Icke, New Statesman, March 3, 2008.

Gillis, Charlie (2008). "Righteous Crusader or Civil Rights Menace?", Macleans, April 9, 2008.

Greenslade, Nick (2004). "The ten worst sportsmen in politics", The Observer, September 5, 2004.

Grossman, Wendy (1991). "Green Party Cofounder Icke Goes New Age", Skeptical Inquirer, January 1, 1991.

Honigsbaum, Mark (1995). "The Dark Side of David Icke", London Evening Standard, May 26, 1995, accessed December 12, 2010.

Icke, David (1983). It's a tough game, son!. Piccolo Books.

Icke, David (1989). "Does the Animal Kingdom need a Bill of Rights?", Royal Institute of Great Britain, YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

Icke, David (1993). In the Light of Experience, Warner Books.

Icke, David (1993). Days of Decision. Jon Carpenter Publishing.

Icke, David (1995). And the Truth Shall Set You Free. David Icke Books; the edition used in this article, September 2004.

Icke, David (1999). The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the World. David Icke Books.

Icke, David (2002). Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster, Bridge of Love Publications.

Icke, David (2003). ''Tales from the Time Loop. David Icke Books.

Icke, David (2005). Infinite Love is the Only Truth. Bridge of Love Publications.

Icke, David (2007). The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy. David Icke Books.

Icke, David (undated). "Problem-reaction-solution", News for the Soul, accessed December 12, 2010.

Icke, David (undated). David Icke part 1, part 2, Davidicke.com, accessed December 12, 2010.

Icke, David (undated). Was Hitler a Rothschild?, DavidIcke.com, accessed December 12, 2010.

Jabbari, Dorsa (1999). "U of T provides accused anti-Semite with mike", Varsity News, October 12, 1999, accessed December 12, 2010.

Kraft, Frances (1999). "New Age speaker set to talk in Toronto", The Canadian Jewish News, October 7, 1999, accessed December 12, 2010.

Laming, Donald (2003). Understanding Human Motivation: What makes people tick. Blackwell. ISBN 0631219838

Lewis, Tyson and Kahn, Richard (2005). "The Reptoid Hypothesis: Utopian and Dystopian Representational Motifs in David Icke's Alien Conspiracy Theory", Utopian Studies, Vol. 16, accessed December 12, 2010.

Mitchell, Ben (2006). "This much I know", interview with David Icke, The Observer, January 22, 2006.

Offley, Will (2000a). "Selected Quotes Of David Icke", PublicEye.org, Political Research Associates, February 23, 2000, accessed December 12, 2010.

Offley, Will (2000b). "David Icke And The Politics Of Madness: Where The New Age Meets The Third Reich", PublicEye.org, Political Research Associates, February 29, 2000, accessed December 12, 2010.

Ronson, Jon (March 17, 2001). "Beset by lizards, part 1", part 2, extracts from Ronson's book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Guardian.

Ronson, Jon (2001). "David Icke, the Lizards, and the Jews" 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5, 5/5, Channel 4 Television, UK, YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

Spargo, John (1921). The Jew and American Ideals. Harper & Brothers.

Steyn, Mark (2008). I am Warman, hear me roar!, Steynonline.com, January 27, 2008.

Taylor, Sam (1997). "So I was in this bar with the son of God...," The Observer, April 20, 1997.

Theroux, Louis (2001). "Stranger than fiction: Are 12ft lizards running the world?", The Guardian, April 7, 2001.

Warman, Richard (2002). Statement of claim against David Icke, Court File No. 02-CV-237691 SR, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, October 17, 2002, accessed December 12, 2010.

Whitney, Nicole (undated). "Interview with David Icke", News for the Soul, 2004, accessed December 12, 2010.

Wogan, Terry (1991). David Icke interviewed by Terry Wogan, 1991 and again in 2006, BBC, courtesy of YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accessed December 12, 2010.

Further reading

DavidIcke.com, accessed December 12, 2010.

Banyan, Will. Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster">"The Big Picture" A review of Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster (pdf) Paranoia Magazine, October 2003, accessed December 12, 2010.

Lewis, Tyson and Kahn, Richard. Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Shermer, Michael. Illuminati, The New World Order & Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists (PCTs), The Skeptic's Dictionary, accessed December 12, 2010.

;Audio/video

Britton, Fern (1991). Interview with David Icke, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3, BBC's Coast to Coast People, courtesy of YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

Icke, David. Presenting snooker, BBC, 1980s, courtesy of YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

Icke, David (1989). Does the Animal Kingdom need a Bill of Rights?, Royal Institute of Great Britain, Arena, BBC2, courtesy of YouTube, accessed November 15, 2009.

Icke, David (2009). Live at the Oxford Union, June 10, 2009, courtesy of YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

Maher, Bill (2008). Interview with David Icke, Religulous, courtesy of YouTube, accessed December 12, 2010.

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