How was war on the western and eastern fronts the same?

Answer 1

The main difference between Eastern and Western front in WW1 was that on the Eastern front the German and the Austrians defeated the Allied forces, in particular defeated Russia, one of the major allied nations, and imposed an humiliating armistice to the Russians with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (march 3, 1918); peace negotiations began in December 1917, a few months after the Revolution of October, who lead Communists to power in Russia and the deposition of the Tzar Nicolai II.

There were a lot of troubles during the negotiations because the new Russian leaders didn't accept the term of surrender, which they considered too heavy, and this caused a momentaneous restart of the hostilities between Russia and the Central Empires; the treath of an occupation by the Germans of the Bolshevik Russia convinced the Russian revolutionary leaders to come back to the negotiations and to accept terms even worse than before the restart of war.

The treaty, signed between Bolshevik Russia on the one side and the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Ottoman Empire (collectively the Central Powers) on the other, marked Russia's final withdrawal from World War I as an enemy of her co-signatories, fulfilling, on unexpectedly humiliating terms, a major goal of the Bolshevik revolution of November 7, 1917.

In all, the treaty took away a third of Russia's population, half of her industry and nine-tenths of her coal mines.

However, Germany's defeat in World War I, marked by the armistice with the Allies on November 11 at Compiègne, made it possible for Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland (which were assigned to Germany by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk) to become truly independent sovereign states, and the designated monarchs had to renounce their thrones.

On the Western front, instead, after the German Spring offensive, who was very near to succed in defeating the Allied armies and to give to Germany the final victory, there were two major allied offensives in summer which caused the collapse of the German western front and a general withdraw or surrender of the German troops.

The immediate consequence was the collapse of the German government and of the monarchy; the new government quickly signed an armistice which stopped all fighting on the Western Front on Armistice Day (11 November 1918). The German Imperial Monarchy collapsed as Ludendorff's successor General Groener agreed, for fear of a revolution like that in Russia the previous year, to support the moderate Social Democratic Government under Ebert rather than sustain the Hohenzollern Monarchy.

The war along the western front led the German government and its allies to sue for peace in spite of German success elsewhere. As a result the terms of the peace were dictated by France, Britain, Italy (which soon abandoned the negotiations in disagree with the other allies about the terms of assignation of the former German Empire's African and Far East colonies) and the United States, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The result was the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919 by a delegation of the new German government.

The terms of the treaty were the end for Germany as an economic and military power.

There was also an other difference between the war on Eastern and Western front: on the West, the Germans and the Allies, in an effort to break the deadlock, introduced new military technology, including poison gas, aircraft, and tanks.

On the contrary, on the Eastern front was fought a more traditional war of infantries, with large massive land attacks and the use of conventional artillery.

Answer 2

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