ON THIS DAY ·
Greek landing at Smyrna
15 May 1919 — Greek troops land under Allied warships to claim western Anatolia. The Ottoman partition ignites the Turkish War of Independence — proof, within months, that the peacemakers’ map would not draw itself.
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The moment in context
The peace settlements created or restored a line of states from Finland to Yugoslavia and Poland, yet they could not draw national borders around populations that lived intermingled. Roughly twenty-five to thirty million Europeans ended up as minorities inside someone else’s nation-state. Outside Europe, the former German and Ottoman territories became League of Nations mandates rather than independent countries, so that the promise of self-determination stopped at the edge of the colonial world.
From Treaty of Versailles, chapter 14 of The Great War, 1871–1923 (FEB 1919).
The place: Greek landing at Smyrna — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Three peacemakers, three incompatible peaces. Clemenceau wanted French security against a neighbor with twenty million more people; Wilson wanted a rule-based order redeeming the slaughter;…
- The turn — The Hall of Mirrors, 28 June 1919. Two German delegates sign under the eyes of the victors in the room where Bismarck’s empire was born — a humiliation staged as symmetry, 1871…
- What it changed — What 1919 genuinely built. Do not let the failure erase the invention: the League of Nations — flawed, but the first permanent machinery for collective security, whose…
Then ask the room: “The Treaty of Versailles caused the Second World War.” Prosecute and defend that sentence. The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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