The War Over World War I

- It is no exaggeration, then, to say there is a violent controversy over the question of who started World War I. There are few other historical questions that people are willing to kill and die for. A century after the war began, Britain’s top leaders are writing columns in national newspapers arguing over why the nation fought the war and who started it. Germany has publicly agonized over its role for decades. No other question of history gets the attention of world leaders the way this one does.

Why? It is a conflict that defined the century. Winston Churchill saw the two world wars as one conflict separated by a 20-year truce. Even historians with differing views see that the two are intimately connected. World War I was the crisis that founded the modern world.