Soviet Union
The Soviet Union the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were centralized; the country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Minsk, Alma-Ata, Novosibirsk, it spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, steppes and mountains; the Soviet Union had its roots in the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II during World War I. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed by a treaty which legalized the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian and Byelorussian republics that had occurred from 1918. Following Lenin's death in 1924 and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s.
Stalin committed the state's ideology to Marxism–Leninism and constructed a command economy which led to a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization. During his rule, political paranoia fermented and the Great Purge removed Stalin's opponents within and outside of the party via arbitrary arrests and persecutions of many people, resulting in at least 600,000 deaths. In 1933, a major famine struck the country. Before the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviets signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, after which the USSR invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. In June 1941, Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk; the territories overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Soviet Union.
The post-war division of Europe into capitalist and communist halves would lead to increased tensions with the United States-led Western Bloc, known as the Cold War. Stalin died in 1953 and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin and began the de-Stalinization; the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during Khrushchev's rule, among the many factors that led to his downfall in 1964. In the early 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed with the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. In 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost and perestroika, which caused political instability. In 1989, Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist governments; as part of an attempt to prevent the country's dissolution due to rising nationalist and separatist movements, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by some republics, that resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation.
Gorbachev's power was diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin's high-profile role in facing down a coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the Soviet Union; the remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states, with the Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assuming the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and being recognized as the successor state. The Soviet Union was a powerhouse of many significant technological achievements and innovations of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite, the first humans in space and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus; the country had the largest standing military in the world. The Soviet Union was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, it was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.
The word "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word сове́т meaning council, advice, harmony and all deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti, related to Slavic věst, English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or", or the Dutch weten. The word sovietnik means "councillor". A number of organizations in Russian history were called "council". For example, in the Russian Empire the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905. During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union, which he named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin resisted the proposal, but accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name of the newly proposed sta
United States Army
The United States Army is the land warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States, is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution; as the oldest and most senior branch of the U. S. military in order of precedence, the modern U. S. Army has its roots in the Continental Army, formed to fight the American Revolutionary War —before the United States of America was established as a country. After the Revolutionary War, the Congress of the Confederation created the United States Army on 3 June 1784 to replace the disbanded Continental Army; the United States Army considers itself descended from the Continental Army, dates its institutional inception from the origin of that armed force in 1775. As a uniformed military service, the U. S. Army is part of the Department of the Army, one of the three military departments of the Department of Defense; the U. S. Army is headed by a civilian senior appointed civil servant, the Secretary of the Army and by a chief military officer, the Chief of Staff of the Army, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It is the largest military branch, in the fiscal year 2017, the projected end strength for the Regular Army was 476,000 soldiers. S. Army was 1,018,000 soldiers; as a branch of the armed forces, the mission of the U. S. Army is "to fight and win our Nation's wars, by providing prompt, land dominance, across the full range of military operations and the spectrum of conflict, in support of combatant commanders"; the branch participates in conflicts worldwide and is the major ground-based offensive and defensive force of the United States. The United States Army serves as the land-based branch of the U. S. Armed Forces. Section 3062 of Title 10, U. S. Code defines the purpose of the army as: Preserving the peace and security and providing for the defense of the United States, the Commonwealths and possessions and any areas occupied by the United States Supporting the national policies Implementing the national objectives Overcoming any nations responsible for aggressive acts that imperil the peace and security of the United StatesIn 2018, the Army Strategy 2018 articulated an eight-point addendum to the Army Vision for 2028.
While the Army Mission remains constant, the Army Strategy builds upon the Army's Brigade Modernization by adding focus to Corps and Division-level echelons. Modernization, reform for high-intensity conflict, Joint multi-domain operations are added to the strategy, to be completed by 2028; the Continental Army was created on 14 June 1775 by the Second Continental Congress as a unified army for the colonies to fight Great Britain, with George Washington appointed as its commander. The army was led by men who had served in the British Army or colonial militias and who brought much of British military heritage with them; as the Revolutionary War progressed, French aid and military thinking helped shape the new army. A number of European soldiers came on their own to help, such as Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, who taught Prussian Army tactics and organizational skills; the army fought numerous pitched battles and in the South in 1780–1781, at times using the Fabian strategy and hit-and-run tactics, under the leadership of Major General Nathanael Greene, hit where the British were weakest to wear down their forces.
Washington led victories against the British at Trenton and Princeton, but lost a series of battles in the New York and New Jersey campaign in 1776 and the Philadelphia campaign in 1777. With a decisive victory at Yorktown and the help of the French, the Continental Army prevailed against the British. After the war, the Continental Army was given land certificates and disbanded in a reflection of the republican distrust of standing armies. State militias became the new nation's sole ground army, with the exception of a regiment to guard the Western Frontier and one battery of artillery guarding West Point's arsenal. However, because of continuing conflict with Native Americans, it was soon realized that it was necessary to field a trained standing army; the Regular Army was at first small and after General St. Clair's defeat at the Battle of the Wabash, the Regular Army was reorganized as the Legion of the United States, established in 1791 and renamed the United States Army in 1796; the War of 1812, the second and last war between the United States and Great Britain, had mixed results.
The U. S. Army did not conquer Canada but it did destroy Native American resistance to expansion in the Old Northwest and it validated its independence by stopping two major British invasions in 1814 and 1815. After taking control of Lake Erie in 1813, the U. S. Army seized parts of western Upper Canada, burned York and defeated Tecumseh, which caused his Western Confederacy to collapse. Following U. S. victories in the Canadian province of Upper Canada, British troops who had dubbed the U. S. Army "Regulars, by God!", were able to capture and burn Washington, defended by militia, in 1814. The regular army, however proved they were professional and capable of defeating the British army during the invasions of Plattsburgh and Baltimore, prompting British agreement on the rejected terms of a status quo ante bellum. Two weeks after a treaty was signed, Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans and Siege of Fort St. Philip, became a national hero. U. S. troops and sailors captured HMS Cyane and Penguin in the final engagements of the war.
Per the treaty, both sides (the United S
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. He had served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. Bush was born in New Haven and grew up in Texas. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, he worked in the oil industry. Bush married Laura Welch in 1977 and unsuccessfully ran for the U. S. House of Representatives shortly thereafter, he co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. Bush was elected President of the United States in 2000 when he defeated Democratic incumbent Vice President Al Gore after a close and controversial win that involved a stopped recount in Florida, he became the fourth person to be elected president while receiving fewer popular votes than his opponent. Bush is a member of a prominent political family and is the eldest son of Barbara and George H. W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States.
He is only the second president to assume the nation's highest office after his father, following the footsteps of John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. His brother Jeb Bush, a former Governor of Florida, was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2016 presidential election, his paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U. S. Senator from Connecticut; the September 11 terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term. Bush responded with what became known as the Bush Doctrine: launching a "War on Terror", an international military campaign that included the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003, he signed into law broad tax cuts, the Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors, funding for the AIDS relief program known as PEPFAR. His tenure included national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, torture. In the 2004 presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in another close election.
After his re-election, Bush received heated criticism from across the political spectrum for his handling of the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, other challenges. Amid this criticism, the Democratic Party regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections. In December 2007, the United States entered its longest post-World War II recession referred to as the "Great Recession", prompting the Bush administration to obtain congressional passage of multiple economic programs intended to preserve the country's financial system. Nationally, Bush was both one of the most popular and unpopular U. S. presidents in history, having received the highest recorded presidential approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as well as one of the lowest approval ratings during the 2008 financial crisis. Bush finished his term in office in 2009 and returned to Texas, where he had purchased a home in Dallas. In 2010, he published Decision Points, his presidential library was opened in 2013. His presidency has been ranked among the worst in historians' polls that were published in the late 2000s and 2010s.
However, his favorability ratings with the public have improved after leaving office. George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, at Yale–New Haven Hospital in New Haven, while his father was a student at Yale, he was his wife, Barbara Pierce. He was raised in Midland and Houston, with four siblings, Neil and Dorothy. Another younger sister, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953, his grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U. S. Senator from Connecticut, his father was Ronald Reagan's vice president from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st U. S. president from 1989 to 1993. Bush has English and some German ancestry, along with more distant Dutch, Irish and Scottish roots. Bush attended public schools in Midland, until the family moved to Houston after he had completed seventh grade, he spent two years at The Kinkaid School, a prep school in Piney Point Village in the Houston area. Bush attended high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, where he played baseball and was the head cheerleader during his senior year.
He attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968. During this time, he was a cheerleader and a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon, serving as the president of the fraternity during his senior year. Bush became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior. Bush was a rugby union player and was on Yale's 1st XV, he characterized himself as an average student. His GPA during his first three years at Yale was 77, he had a similar average under a nonnumeric rating system in his final year. In the fall of 1973, Bush entered Harvard Business School, he graduated in 1975 with an MBA degree. He is the only U. S. president to have earned an MBA. Bush was engaged to Cathryn Lee Wolfman in 1967, but the engagement fizzled out. Bush and Wolfman remained on good terms after the end of the relationship. While Bush was at a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends introduced him to Laura Welch, a schoolteacher and librarian. After a three-month courtship, she accepted his marriage proposal and they wed on November 5 of that year.
The couple settled in Texas. Bush left his family's Episcopal Church to join his wife's United Methodist Church. On November 25, 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters and Jenna. Prior to getting married, Bush struggled with multiple episodes of alcohol abuse. In one instance on September 4, 1976, he was pulled over near his fami
War
War is a state of armed conflict between states, governments and informal paramilitary groups, such as mercenaries and militias. It is characterized by extreme violence, aggression and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers of wars in general. Total war is warfare, not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties; the scholarly study of war is sometimes called polemology, from the Greek polemos, meaning "war", -logy, meaning "the study of". While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature, others argue it is a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances; the English word war derives from the 11th century Old English words wyrre and werre, from Old French werre, in turn from the Frankish *werra deriving from the Proto-Germanic *werzō'mixture, confusion'. The word is related to the Old Saxon werran, Old High German werran, the German verwirren, meaning “to confuse”, “to perplex”, “to bring into confusion”.
War must entail some degree of confrontation using weapons and other military technology and equipment by armed forces employing military tactics and operational art within a broad military strategy subject to military logistics. Studies of war by military theorists throughout military history have sought to identify the philosophy of war, to reduce it to a military science. Modern military science considers several factors before a national defence policy is created to allow a war to commence: the environment in the area of combat operations, the posture national forces will adopt on the commencement of a war, the type of warfare troops will be engaged in. Asymmetric warfare is a conflict between belligerents of drastically different levels of military capability and/or size. Biological warfare, or germ warfare, is the use of weaponized biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria and fungi. Chemical warfare involves the use of weaponized chemicals in combat. Poison gas as a chemical weapon was principally used during World War I, resulted in over a million estimated casualties, including more than 100,000 civilians.
Civil war is a war between forces belonging to political entity. Conventional warfare is declared war between states in which nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons are not used or see limited deployment. Cyberwarfare involves the actions by a nation-state or international organization to attack and attempt to damage another nation's information systems. Insurgency is a rebellion against authority, when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents. An insurgency can be fought via counter-insurgency warfare, may be opposed by measures to protect the population, by political and economic actions of various kinds aimed at undermining the insurgents' claims against the incumbent regime. Information warfare is the application of destructive force on a large scale against information assets and systems, against the computers and networks that support the four critical infrastructures. Nuclear warfare is warfare in which nuclear weapons are the primary, or a major, method of achieving capitulation.
Total war is warfare by any means possible, disregarding the laws of war, placing no limits on legitimate military targets, using weapons and tactics resulting in significant civilian casualties, or demanding a war effort requiring significant sacrifices by the friendly civilian population. Unconventional warfare, the opposite of conventional warfare, is an attempt to achieve military victory through acquiescence, capitulation, or clandestine support for one side of an existing conflict. War of aggression is a war for gain rather than self-defense. War of liberation, Wars of national liberation or national liberation revolutions are conflicts fought by nations to gain independence; the term is used in conjunction with wars against foreign powers to establish separate sovereign states for the rebelling nationality. From a different point of view, these wars are called insurgencies, rebellions, or wars of independence; the earliest recorded evidence of war belongs to the Mesolithic cemetery Site 117, determined to be 14,000 years old.
About forty-five percent of the skeletons there displayed signs of violent death. Since the rise of the state some 5,000 years ago, military activity has occurred over much of the globe; the advent of gunpowder and the acceleration of technological advances led to modern warfare. According to Conway W. Henderson, "One source claims that 14,500 wars have taken place between 3500 BC and the late 20th century, costing 3.5 billion lives, leaving only 300 years of peace." An unfavorable review of this estimate mentions the following regarding one of the proponents of this estimate: "In addition feeling that the war casualties figure was improbably high, he changed "approximately 3,640,000,000 human beings have been killed by war or the diseases produced by war" to "approximately 1,240,000,000 human beings...&c."" The lower figure is more plausible, but could be on the high side, considering that the 100 deadliest acts of mass violence between 480 BCE and 2002 CE claimed about 455 million human lives in total.
Primitive warfare is estimated to have accounted for 15
Kingdom of Greece
The Kingdom of Greece was a state established in 1832 at the Convention of London by the Great Powers. It was internationally recognised by the Treaty of Constantinople, where it secured full independence from the Ottoman Empire; this event marked the birth of the first independent Greek state since the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottomans in the mid-15th century. The Kingdom succeeded from the Greek provisional governments after the Greek War of Independence, lasted until 1924. In 1924 the monarchy was abolished, the Second Hellenic Republic was established, after Greece's defeat by Turkey in the Asia Minor Campaign, it lasted until 1935. The restored Kingdom of Greece lasted from 1935 to 1973; the Kingdom was again dissolved in the aftermath of the seven-year military dictatorship, the Third Republic, the current Greek state, came to be, after a popular referendum. Most of Greece became part of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century; the Eastern Roman, the direct continuation to the ancient Roman Empire who ruled most of the Greek-speaking world for over 1100 years, had been fatally weakened since the sacking of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204.
The Ottoman advance into Greece was preceded by a victory over the Serbs to its north. First, the Ottomans won at 1371 on the Maritsa River – where the Serb forces were led by the King Vukašin of Serbia, the father of Prince Marko and the co-ruler of the last emperor from the Serbian Nemanjic dynasty; this was followed by a draw in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. With no further threat by the Serbs and the subsequent Byzantine civil wars, the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453 and advanced southwards into Greece, capturing Athens in 1458; the Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, the Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by 1500 most of the plains and islands of Greece were in Ottoman hands. The mountains of Greece were untouched, were a refuge for Greeks to flee foreign rule and engage in guerrilla warfare. Cyprus fell in 1571, the Venetians retained Crete until 1670; the Ionian Islands were only ruled by the Ottomans, remained under the rule of Venice. In the context of ardent desire for independence from Turkish occupation, with the explicit influence of similar secret societies elsewhere in Europe, three Greeks came together in 1814 in Odessa to decide the constitution for a secret organization in freemasonic fashion.
Its purpose was to unite all Greeks in an armed organization to overthrow Turkish rule. The three founders were Nikolaos Skoufas from the Arta province, Emmanuil Xanthos from Patmos and Athanasios Tsakalov from Ioannina. Soon after they initiated a fourth member, Panagiotis Anagnostopoulos from Andritsaina. Lots of revolts were planned across the Greek region and the first of them was launched on 6 March 1821, in the Danubian principalities, it was put down by the Ottomans, but the torch had been lit and by the end of the same month the Peloponnese was in open revolt. In 1821, the Greeks rose up against the Ottoman Empire. Following a protracted struggle, the autonomy of Greece was first recognized by the Great Powers in 1828. Count Ioannis Kapodistrias became Governor of Greece in 1827, but was assassinated in 1831. At the insistence of the Powers, the 1832 Treaty of London made Greece a monarchy. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was the first candidate for the Greek throne. Otto of Wittelsbach, Prince of Bavaria was chosen as its first King.
Otto arrived at Nafplion, in 1833 aboard a British warship. Otto's reign would prove troubled, but managed to last for 30 years before he and his wife, Queen Amalia, left the way they came, aboard a British warship. During the early years of his reign, a group of Bavarian Regents ruled in his name and made themselves unpopular by trying to impose German ideas of rigid hierarchical government on the Greeks, while keeping most significant state offices away from them, they laid the foundations of a Greek administration, justice system and education system. Otto was sincere in his desire to give Greece good government, but he suffered from two great handicaps, his Roman Catholic faith, the fact that his marriage to Queen Amalia remained childless. Furthermore, the new Kingdom tried to eliminate the traditional banditry, something that in many cases meant conflict with some old revolutionary fighters who continued to exercise this practice; the Bavarian Regents ruled until 1837, when at the insistence of Britain and France, they were recalled, Otto after that appointed Greek ministers, although Bavarian officials still ran most of the administration and the army.
But Greece still had no constitution. Greek discontent grew until a revolt broke out in Athens in September 1843. Otto agreed to grant a constitution, convened a National Assembly which met in November; the new constitution created a bicameral parliament, consisting of a Senate. Power passed into the hands of a group of politicians, most of whom had been commanders in the War of Independence against the Ottomans. Greek politics in the 19th century was dominated by the national question. Greeks dreamed of liberating them all and reconstituting a state embracing all the Greek lands, with Constantinople as its capital; this was called the Great Idea, it was sustained by cont
Central Powers
The Central Powers, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria—hence known as the Quadruple Alliance —was one of the two main coalitions that fought World War I. It was defeated by the Allied Powers that had formed around the Triple Entente; the Powers' origin was the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879. Despite having nominally joined the Triple Alliance before, Italy did not take part in World War I on the side of the Central Powers; the Central Powers consisted of the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the war. The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in 1914. In 1915, the Kingdom of Bulgaria joined the alliance; the name "Central Powers" is derived from the location of these countries. Finland and Lithuania joined them in 1918 before the war ended and after the Russian Empire collapsed The Central Powers were composed of the following nations: In early July 1914, in the aftermath of the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the immediate likelihood of war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German government informed the Austro-Hungarian government that Germany would uphold its alliance with Austria-Hungary and defend it from possible Russian intervention if a war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia took place.
When Russia enacted a general mobilization, Germany viewed the act as provocative. The Russian government promised Germany that its general mobilization did not mean preparation for war with Germany but was a reaction to the events between Austria-Hungary and Serbia; the German government regarded the Russian promise of no war with Germany to be nonsense in light of its general mobilization, Germany, in turn, mobilized for war. On 1 August, Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia stating that since both Germany and Russia were in a state of military mobilization, an effective state of war existed between the two countries; that day, France, an ally of Russia, declared a state of general mobilization. In August 1914, Germany waged war on Russia, the German government justified military action against Russia as necessary because of Russian aggression as demonstrated by the mobilization of the Russian army that had resulted in Germany mobilizing in response. After Germany declared war on Russia, France with its alliance with Russia prepared a general mobilization in expectation of war.
On 3 August 1914, Germany responded to this action by declaring war on France. Germany, facing a two-front war, enacted what was known as the Schlieffen Plan, that involved German armed forces needing to move through Belgium and swing south into France and towards the French capital of Paris; this plan was hoped to gain victory against the French and allow German forces to concentrate on the Eastern Front. Belgium would not accept German forces crossing its territory. Germany invaded the country to launch an offensive towards Paris; this caused Great Britain to declare war against the German Empire, as the action violated the Treaty of London that both nations signed in 1839 guaranteeing Belgian neutrality and defense of the kingdom if a nation reneged. Subsequently, several states declared war on Germany in late August 1914, with Italy declaring war on Austria-Hungary in 1915 and Germany on 27 August 1916, the United States declaring war on Germany on 6 April 1917 and Greece declaring war on Germany in July 1917.
EuropeUpon its founding in 1871, the German Empire controlled Alsace-Lorraine as an "imperial territory" incorporated from France after the Franco-Prussian War. It was held as part of Germany's sovereign territory. AfricaGermany held multiple African colonies at the time of World War I. All of Germany's African colonies occupied by Allied forces during the war. Cameroon, German East Africa, German Southwest Africa were German colonies in Africa. Togoland was a German protectorate in Africa. AsiaThe Kiautschou Bay concession was a German dependency in East Asia leased from China in 1898, it was occupied by Japanese forces following the Siege of Tsingtao. PacificGerman New Guinea was a German protectorate in the Pacific, it was occupied by Australian forces in 1914. German Samoa was a German protectorate following the Tripartite Convention, it was occupied by the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1914. Austria-Hungary regarded the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as being orchestrated with the assistance of Serbia.
The country viewed the assassination as setting a dangerous precedent of encouraging the country's South Slav population to rebel and threaten to tear apart the multinational country. Austria-Hungary formally sent an ultimatum to Serbia demanding a full-scale investigation of Serbian government complicity in the assassination, complete compliance by Serbia in agreeing to the terms demanded by Austria-Hungary. Serbia submitted to accept most of the demands, however Austria-Hungary viewed this as insufficient and used this lack of full compliance to justify military intervention; these demands have been viewed as a diplomatic cover for what was going to be an inevitable Austro-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia. Austria-Hungary had
Kingdom of Romania
The Kingdom of Romania was a constitutional monarchy at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe. It existed from 1881, when prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was crowned as King Carol I of Romania, until 1947, when King Michael I of Romania abdicated and the Romanian parliament proclaimed Romania a socialist republic. From 1859 to 1877, Romania evolved from a personal union of two vassal principalities under a single prince to an autonomous principality with a Hohenzollern monarchy; the country gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire during the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War, when it received Northern Dobruja in exchange for the southern part of Bessarabia. The kingdom's territory during the reign of King Carol I, between 14 March 1881 and 27 September 1914 is sometimes referred as the Romanian Old Kingdom, to distinguish it from "Greater Romania", which included the provinces that became part of the state after World War I. With the exception of the southern halves of Bukovina and Transylvania, these territories were ceded to neighboring countries in 1940, under the pressure of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Following a disastrous World War II campaign on the side of the Axis powers and name change, Romania joined the Allies in 1944, recovering Northern Transylvania. The influence of the neighboring Soviet Union and the policies followed by Communist-dominated coalition governments led to the abolition of the monarchy, with Romania becoming a People's Republic on the last day of 1947; the 1859 ascendancy of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as prince of both Moldavia and Wallachia under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire united an identifiably Romanian nation under a single ruler. On 5 February 1862 the two principalities were formally united to form the Principality of Romania, with Bucharest as its capital. On 23 February 1866 a so-called Monstrous coalition, composed of Conservatives and radical Liberals, forced Cuza to abdicate; the German prince Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was appointed as Prince of Romania, in a move to assure German backing to unity and future independence. He adopted the Romanian spelling of his name and his descendants would rule Romania until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1947.
Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Romania was recognized as an independent state by the Treaty of Berlin, 1878 and acquired Dobruja, although it was forced to surrender southern Bessarabia to Russia. On 15 March 1881, as an assertion of full sovereignty, the Romanian parliament raised the country to the status of a kingdom, Carol was crowned as king on 10 May; the new state, squeezed between the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian Empires, with Slavic populations on its southwestern and northeastern borders, the Black Sea due east, Hungarian neighbors on its western and northwestern borders, looked to the West France, for its cultural and administrative models. Abstaining from the Initial Balkan War against the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Romania entered the Second Balkan War in June 1913 against the Tsardom of Bulgaria. 330,000 Romanian troops moved into Bulgaria. One army occupied Southern Dobrudja and another moved into northern Bulgaria to threaten Sofia, helping to bring an end to the war.
Romania thus acquired the ethnically-mixed territory of Southern Dobrudja, which it had desired for years. In 1916 Romania entered World War I on the Entente side. Romania engaged in a conflict against Bulgaria but as a result Bulgarian forces, after a series of successful battles, regained Dobruja, ceded from Bulgaria by the treaty of Bucharest and the Berlin congress. Although the Romanian forces did not fare well militarily, by the end of the war the Austrian and Russian empires were gone; the Romanian Old Kingdom is a colloquial term referring to the territory covered by the first independent Romanian nation state, composed of the Danubian Principalities — Wallachia and Moldavia. It was achieved when, under the auspices of the Treaty of Paris, the ad hoc Divans of both countries - which were under Imperial Ottoman suzerainty at the time - voted for Alexander Ioan Cuza as their prince, thus achieving a de facto unification; the region itself is defined by the result of that political act, followed by the inclusion of Northern Dobruja in 1878, the proclamation of the Kingdom of Romania in 1881, the annexation of Southern Dobruja in 1913.
The term came into use after World War I, when the Old Kingdom was opposed to Greater Romania, which included Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina. Nowadays, the term has a historical relevance, is otherwise used as a common term for all regions in Romania included in both the Old Kingdom and present-day borders. Romania delayed in entering World War I, but declared war on the Central Powers in 1916; the Romanian military campaign ended in stalemate when the Central Powers crushed the country's offensive into Transylvania and occupied Wallachia and Dobruja, including Bucharest and the strategically important oil fields, by the end of 1916. In 1917, despite fierce Romanian resistance at Mărăşeşti, due to Russia's withdrawal from the war following the October Revolu
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