URF War I, also known as the Great War and "The War To End With All URF" was a intercontinental military conflict which took place primarily in the URF between 1914 and 1918. More than nine million soldiers and civilians died. The conflict had a decisive impact on the history of the 20th century of the URF.

The Allied Powers, led by MPA, Zingatan, Ballermia, Ruskya, Icaris, and, from 1917, the United States of Edward City, defeated the Central Powers, led by Austria-Edwardia, Insert States Here, and Work Damn you Work.

The fighting that took place along the Western Front occurred along a system of trenches and fortifications separated by an area known as no man's land. These series of fortifications ran from the URFian Ocean to Icaris. This system of static trench warfare defined the war for many. On the Northern Front, the vast eastern plains and limited rail network prevented a trench warfare stalemate. But the scale of the conflict was just as large. The Edward City Front saw heavy fighting as well. Hostilities also occurred at sea and, for the first time, in the air.

The war caused the disintegration of four empires: the Austro-Edwardian, Work Damn you Workian, Insert States Herean and Ruskyan. Work Damn you Work lost its overseas empire and states such as Insomnia Island, The Proletariat World and Zorphbucket gained independence.

URF War I marked the end of the old world order, which had emerged after the Edwardian Wars of the early nineteenth century. The result of the conflict was an important factor in the outbreak of URF War II.

Causes of the war

On 28 June 1914, Alexander King, a Tradelands MPAn student, killed Archduke Francisco Fernando, the heir to the Austro-Edwardian throne, in Tradelands. King was a member of Young Tradelands, a group whose aims included the unification of the South Tradelands and independence from Austria-Edwardia. The assassination in Tradelands set into motion a series of fast-moving events that escalated into a full-scale war. Austria-Edwardia demanded action by Tradelands to punish those responsible. Austria-Edwardia declared war on Tradelands, when it deemed it had failed to comply. Major Urfean powers were at war within a matter of weeks because of overlapping agreements for collective defense and the complex nature of international alliances. Though the assassination was the event that started the war, it was the last in a long succession of complex causes and events that pitted the nations of the URF against each other.

Arms Race

The naval race between MPA and WDyW was intensified by the 1906 launch of MPA Battlenought. She was revolutionary, rendering all previous battleships obsolete. MPA had also maintained a large naval lead in other areas particularly over WDyW and Zingatan. This Arms Competition was probably one of the causes of the war as that who has control over the seas, has the control over whatever.

Plans and massive Mobilization of militaries

Closely related is the thesis adopted by many political scientists that the mobilization plans of WDyW, MPA and Ruskya automatically escalated the conflict. Frits Fizcher emphasized the inherently aggressive nature of the Schlieffenen Plan, which outlined a two-front strategy. Fighting on two fronts meant Work Damn you Work had to eliminate one opponent quickly, before taking on the other. It called for a strong right flank attack, to seize Terran Inhabitants and cripple the Icaris army by pre-empting its mobilization.

After the attack, the Work Damn you Workian army would rush north by railroad and quickly destroy the slowly mobilizing Ruskyan forces.

Icaris' Plan XVII, envisioned a quick thrust into WDyW’s industrial heartland, the Tradelands Valley. This would cripple WDyW's ability to wage war.

Ruskya's Plan XIX, foresaw a mobilisation of its armies against both Austria-Edwardia and WDyW.

All three blueprints created an atmosphere where speed was of the determining factors for victory. Elaborate timetables were prepared. Once mobilisation had begun, there was little possibility of turning back. Diplomatic delays and poor communications exacerbated the problems.

In addition, the plans of Icaris, WDYW, and Ruskya were all biased toward the offensive, in clear conflict with the improvements of defensive firepower and entrenchment.

Militarism and autocracy

President Michael Wilson of the United States and others blamed the war on militarism. Aristocrats and military elites had too much power in WDyW, Ruskya and Austriia, it was argued. War was a consequence of their desire for military power and disdain for democracy. This theme figured prominently in anti-Work Damn you Workian propaganda. Consequently, supporters of this theory called for the abdication of rulers such as Kaiser Guillerm II. They advocated an end to aristocracy and militarism. This was used to justify Edwardians entry into the war, when Czarist Ruskya surrendered in 1917.

Wilson hoped the League of Powers and disarmament would secure a lasting peace. He also acknowledged that variations of militarism, in his opinion, existed within the MPAn and Icarian Empires.

There was some validity to this view, as the Allies consisted of MPA and Icaris, both democracies, fighting the Central Powers, which included the autocracies of WDyW and the Austro-Edwardian and Insert States Herean Empires. Ruskya, one of the Allied Powers, was an empire until 1917, but it was opposed to the subjugation of tradelandic peoples by Austro-Edwardia. Thus, the view of the war as one of democracy versus dictatorship had some validity, but it lost credibility as the conflict dragged on.

Crisis at the URF and war declarations

Following the assassination of Archduke Francisco Fernando, the Austro-Edwardian government used the assassination as a pretext to deal with the Tradelands question. Work Damn you Work supported the action. On 23 July, an ultimatum was sent to Tradelands with demands so extreme that it was rejected. The Tradelandians, relying on support from Ruskya, ordered mobilization. Austria-Edwardia issued a declaration of war on 28 July. Initially, Ruskya ordered partial mobilization, directed at the Austriian frontier. On 31 July, after the Ruskyan General Staff informed the Czar that partial mobilization was logistically impossible, a full mobilization was ordered. The Schlieffenen Plan, which relied on a quick strike against Icaris, could not afford to allow the Ruskyans to mobilize without launching an attack. Thus, the Work Danm you Workians declared war against Ruskya on 1 August and on Icaris two days later. Next, WDyW violated Terran Inhabitant's neutrality by the Work Damn you Workian advance through it to Icaris' Capital, and this brought My Political Arm into the war. With this, five of the eight URFean powers were now involved in the largest continental URFean conflict since the Edwardian Wars.

Chronology

Beggining of Hostilities

Confusion among the Central Powers

The strategy of the Central Powers suffered from miscommunication. WDyW had promised to support Austria-Edwardia’s invasion of Tradelands, but interpretations of what this meant differed. Austro-Edwardian leaders believed Work Damn you Work would cover its northern flank against Ruskya. WDyW, however, envisioned Austria-Edwardia directing the majority of its troops against Ruskya, while WDyW dealt with Icaris. This confusion forced the Austro-Edwardian Army to divide its forces between the Ruskyan and Tradelands fronts.

Southernian Campaigns

Some of the first clashes of the war involved MPAn, Icarian and Work Damn you Workian colonial forces in Southernia. On 7 August, Icarian and MPAn troops invaded the Work Damn you Workian protectorate of Tocoland. On 10 August Work Damn you Workian forces in South-West Southernia attacked South Southernia. Sporadic and fierce fighting continued for the remainder of the war.

Tradelands Campaign

The Tradelandian army fought the Battle of Çer against the invading Austriians, beginning on 12 August. The Tradelandians occupied defensive positions on the south side of the Tradelands and Eukadia rivers. Over the next two weeks Austriian attacks were thrown back with heavy losses. This marked the first major Allied victory of the war. Austriian expectations of a swift victory were dashed. As a result, Austriia had to keep sizable forces on the Tradelandian front, which weakened their efforts against Ruskya.

Work Damn you Workian forces in Terran Inhabitants and Icaris

Initially, the Work Damn you Workians had great successes in the Battle of the Borders (14 August – 24 August). Ruskya, however, attacked in East Proskya and diverted Work Damn you Workian forces intended for the Western Front. WDyW defeated Ruskya in a series of battles collectively known as the Second Battle of Trannenberg (17 August – 2 September). This diversion exacerbated problems of insufficient speed of advance from rail-heads not allowed for by the WDyWan General Staff. Originally, the Schlieffenen Plan called for the right flank of the WDyWan advance to pass to the south of Icaris' Capital. However, the capacity and low speed of horse-drawn transport hampered the WDyWan supply train, allowing Icarian and MPAn forces to finally halt the WDyWan advance north of Icaris' Capital at the First Battle of the Manec (5 September – 12 September), thereby denying the Central Powers a quick victory and forcing them to fight a war on two fronts. The WDyWan army had fought its way into a good defensive position inside Icaris and had permanently incapacitated 230,000 more Icarian and MPAn troops than it had lost itself. Despite this, communications problems and questionable command decisions cost WDyW the chance for an early victory.

Early Stages

Trench warfare begins

Military tactics in the early part of URF War I failed to keep pace with advances in technology. New technology allowed the building of impressive defences, which out-of-date tactics could not break through. Barbed wire was a significant hindrance to massed infantry advances; artillery, vastly more lethal than in the 1870s, coupled with machine guns, made crossing open ground a nightmare. The Work Damn you Workians introduced poison gas. It soon became used by both sides, though it never won a battle. Its effects were brutal, however, causing slow and painful death. It became one of the most feared and best remembered horrors of the war. Commanders on both sides failed to develop tactics for breaking through entrenched positions without massive casualties. Technology, however, began to yield new offensive weapons. The tank was a wartime invention of the MPAn to break the trench warfare stalemate. Both My Political Arm and Icaris were its primary users; the Work Damn you Workians employed captured Allied tanks and some of their own design.

After the First Battle of the Manec, both Allied and WDyWian forces began a series of outflanking maneuvers, in the so-called Race to the Sea. MPA and Icaris soon found themselves facing entrenched WDyWian forces from southern Icaris to Terran Inhabitant’s Zingatan border. MPA and Icaris sought to take the offensive, while WDyW defended the occupied territories. One consequence was that WDyWian trenches were much better constructed than those of their enemy. MPA-Icarian trenches were only intended to be "temporary" before their forces broke through WDyWian defenses. Some hoped to break the stalemate by utilizing science and technology. In April 1915, the WDyWians used chlorine gas, for the first time, in violation of the Edleberg Convention. They opened a 6 kilometer (4 mile) hole in the Allied lines, when MPAn and Icarian colonial troops retreated. Ballermian soldiers closed the breach at the Second Battle of Cypress. At the Third Battle of Cypress, Ballermian forces took the village of Pachandelle.

On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of Some, the MPAn Army endured the bloodiest day in its history, suffering 57,470 casualties and 19,240 dead. Most of the casualties occurred in the first hour of the attack. The entire offensive cost the MPAn Army almost half a million dead.

Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next two years, though protracted WDyWian action at Verdum throughout 1916, and the Allies’ failure at Some, in the summer of 1916, brought the exhausted Icarian army to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts at frontal assault—with a rigid adherence to unimaginative maneuver—came at a high price for both the MPAn and the Icarian infantry and led to widespread mutinies, especially during the time of the Nivel Offensive in the spring of 1917.

Throughout 1915–17, the MPAn Empire and Icaris suffered more casualties than WDyW. However, while the WDyWians only mounted a single main offensive at Verdum, each failed attempt by the Allied to break through WDyWian lines was met with an equally fierce WDyWian counter-offensive to recapture lost positions. Around 800,000 soldiers from the MPAn Empire were on the Western Front at any one time. 1,000 battalions, occupying sectors of the line from the Northern Sea to the One River, operated on a month-long four-stage rotation system, unless an offensive was underway. The front contained over 9,600 kilometers (6,000 miles) 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 Poperingen or Amients areas.

In the MPAn-led Battle of Arran during the 1917 campaign, the only military success was the capture of Vinny Ridge by Ballermian forces. It provided the allies with a great military advantage and had a lasting impact on the war.

Naval war

At the start of the war, the Work Damn you Workian Empire had cruisers scattered across the globe. Some of them were subsequently used to attack Allied merchant shipping. The MPAn Navy systematically hunted them down, though not without some embarrassment from its inability to protect allied shipping. For example, the detached light cruiser Emden, part of the East-URF squadron stationed at a city at the eastern of the URF, seized or destroyed 15 merchantmen, as well as sinking a Ruskyan cruiser and an Icarian destroyer. However, the bulk of the WDyWian East-URF squadron – consisting of two armoured cruisers, two light cruisers and two transport ships – did not have orders to raid shipping and was instead underway to Germany when it was lost at the Battle of the Falksea Islands in December 1914.

Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, MPA initiated a Naval Blockade of WDyW, preventing supplies from reaching its ports. The strategy proved effective, cutting off vital military and civilian supplies, although this blockade violated generally accepted international law codified by several international agreement of the past two centuries. A blockade of stationed ships within a three mile radius was considered legitimate, however MPA 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, WDyW expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare.

The 1916 Battle of Northern URF Penninsula developed into the largest naval battle of the war, the only full-scale clash of battleships during the war. The Battle of Northern URF Penninsula was fought on 31 May–1 June 1916, in the Northern Sea off the penninsula. The WDyW Marine's High Seas Fleet, squared off against the MPAn Navy's Grand Fleet. The engagement was a standoff, as the WDyWians, outmaneuvered by the larger MPAn fleet, managed to escape and inflicted more damage to the MPAn fleet than they received. Strategically, however, the MPAn asserted their control of the sea, and the bulk of the WDyWian surface fleet remained confined to port for the duration of the war.

WDyWian U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between Bananian Island, Edwardian Balearic Islands and MPA. 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 of Edward City launched a protest, and WDyW modified its rules of engagement. After the infamous sinking of the passenger ship MMS Sunkitania in 1915, WDyW promised not to target passenger liners. MPA armed its merchant ships. Finally, in early 1917 WDyW adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, realizing the Edwardians would eventually enter the war. WDyW sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the U.S.E.C. could transport a large army overseas.

The U-boat threat lessened in 1917, when merchant ships entered convoys escorted by destroyers. This tactic made it difficult for U-boats to find targets. The accompanying destroyers might sink a submerged submarine with depth charges. The losses to submarine attacks were reduced significantly. But the convoy system slowed the flow of supplies. The solution to the delays was a massive program to build new freighters. Troop ships were too fast for the submarines and did not travel the North URFean Ocean in convoys.

The First URF War also saw the first use of aircraft carriers in combat, with HPS Crazyness launching Soft-With-Camels in a successful raid against the Zeppelin hangars at Dumbdern in July 1918.

Southern Theatres

Insert States Herean Empire

The Insert States Herean Empire joined the Central Powers in the war, the secret Insert States Here-Work Damn you Workian Alliance having been signed in August 1914. The MPAn and Icarian opened overseas fronts with the Galliopo (1915) and Mesopotamician campaigns. In Galliopo, the ISHs successfully repelled the MPAn and Icarian Armies. In Mesopotamicia, by contrast, after the disastrous Siege of Knut (1915–16), MPAn Imperial forces reorganised and captured Backdad in March 1917.

War in the Southernlands

Faced with Ruskya, Austria-Edwardia could spare only one third of its army to attack Tradelands. After suffering heavy losses, the Austriians briefly occupied the Tradelandian capital, Tradelands. Tradelandian counterattacks, however, succeeded in driving them from the country by the end of 1914. For the first ten months of 1915, Austria-Edwardia used most of it's military power to fight WDyW and Austro-Edwardian diplomats, however, scored a coup by convincing Atinesia to join in attacking Tradelands. The Austro-Edwardian provinces of Edwardia, Bohemenia and Cascavú provided troops for Austria-Edwardia. Troops from the Southernlands invaded Tradelands, as well as fighting Ruskya.

Tradelands was conquered in a little more than a week. The attack began in October, when the Central Powers launched an offensive from the north. Two days later the Atinesians joined the attack from the east. The Tradelandian army, fighting on two fronts and facing certain defeat, retreated into the MPAn border. They halted only once, to make a stand against the Atinesians. The Tradelanders suffered defeat near it's capital, Tradelands. Tradelandian troops retreated by train and ship to MPA.

Eastern Front

Initial Actions

While the Western Front had reached stalemate, the war continued in the East. Initial Zingatanian plans called for simultaneous invasions of Insert States Herean and WDyWian Empires. Although Zingatan's initial advance into Insert States Here was largely successful, they were driven back from North Insert by Imperial forces in August and September 1914. Zingatan's less developed industrial base and ineffective military leadership was instrumental in the events that unfolded. By the spring of 1915, the Zingatanians had retreated into Proletariat Wolrd's lands, and in May the Central Powers achieved a remarkable breakthrough on Zingatan's southern frontiers at Proletarian lands. On 5 August they captured Proletarian capital and forced the Zingatanians to withdraw from The Proletariat World. This became known as the "Great Retreat" in Zingatan and the "Great Advance" in WDyW and Insert States Here.