“Forget how many died...they don’t even know what WW I was all about, what started it, nor who won.”
I’ve studied WWI at length, had a grandfather who served in the German (Prussian?) Army, and live in a backwater of the former Ottoman Empire (Israel), and I can’t honestly say I know what WWI was all about, who started it, and can only kind of say who won.
Talk about a confused mess of a war.
I’m convinced the world would have been much better off had Britain, and subsequently the US, stayed out of WWI, even if it resulted in a German victory.
Germany was never going to be a threat to Britain, they had no designs on the British Empire. They wanted to rule the Continent, but were they really that much worse than the French?
I have been interested in WW I since I was a small child and first learned about the sinking of the Lusitania, from my grandmother.
Is it a "complicated" war? No, not really, if you take it on step by step.
I suggest that you first read DREADNOUGHT, by Robert K. Massie. That book will give you the background needed for understand where the world was, before that stinking Nihilist Bosnian garbage, with the aid of "THE BLACK HAND" and Russian aid, assassinated the heir apparent, to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Morganistic wife Sophie, in Sarajevo.
If you'd like to know HOW this war could have been avoided, send me a FRmail and I'll give you a few books to read, as well as some personal observations and explanations.
And you should also read PARIS,1919, by Margaret MacMillen !
Without WWI, but more importantly, without the horrible garbage that the Brits and French cooked up and pushed through, in Versailles, in 1919, there would NEVER have been WW II, nor probably any of the wars that took place throughout the rest of the 20th century.
WWI was a European dynastic squabble that morphed into an anti-aristocratic revolution and got completely out of control. Stupidity started it, and EVERYBODY lost. We (USA) should have stayed the hell out of it.