Doomsday: World War I

- Season 1

(2013)

During the early 20the century belle Epoque, after a century of relatively peaceful social progress, nobody in Europe, with its intensely intermarried dynasties, imagined the continent was heading for an arguably unprecedented inferno, although the constellation of defensive alliances was a recipe for the Great War. The Sarejevo murder by a Serbian nationalist of the Austrian heir to the imperial throne sparkled a series war declarations opposing the German-Hansburg axis to an Anglo-Franco-Russian-based coalition. The quick victory everybody expected within months ...

Despite superior artillery to deal quickly with allied forts, the German offensive is quickly bogged down roughly over the French borders, while the czar resorts to scorched earth retreat. The Western front is transformed into a long hell of opposing trenches, sites of endless bombardments and bloody assaults, producing millions of victims, often dying or crippled, and the arsenal of industrialized horror grows, extending to toxic gasses and aircraft. The home front suffers, deprived of unprecedented supplies needed for the front, war production with women filling in,...

As the years progressed, the body count rose unprecedented, also among citizens as never before in an unprecedented, industrialized total warfare concept, from more destructive weapons, blockades, disease, while the whole society was thoroughly disrupted, with underpaid women and prisoners doing enlisted men's work. The often traumatic experiences, on the front or as POW, would forge major military and/or political actors from both sides in Word War II, which sprung from the Great War due to the effects of the ill-considered Versailles peace treaties. Revolutions ...