World War I

The First World War, also known as World War I, the 1914-18 War (TV: The War Games) and The Great War (TV: The Family of Blood) was a major conflict on Earth fought over four years, four months and four days (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons) from 1914 (TV: The War Games) to 11 November 1918. (AUDIO: The White Room) It was referred to as "the War to End All Wars", (TV: To the Last Man, PROSE: The Way Through the Woods) or "the War to End Wars". (TV: The War Games) Millions of people — men, women and children — lost their lives in the war. Sometimes 20,000 soldiers were killed in a single day, and a battle for six miles of wasteland could cost lives of 1,500,000 men. Battlefields of the First World War were considered perfect hunting grounds by Weeping Angels. (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons)

By the war's end, 37 million people had lost their lives, from both sides. (AUDIO: Harry Houdini's War)

Foreseeing
Ada Lovelace was temporally displaced from 1834 to 1943, where she was witness to the war-torn Paris, as well as learning from Noor Inayat Khan that the current war came following one of a similar scale. The Thirteenth Doctor noted that these were "dark times", but that they would not sustain. Ultimately, the Doctor removed Ada's memory of this experience as she returned her home to 1834. (TV: Spyfall)

In 1903, after receiving a wealth of information from the future, Grigori Rasputin foresaw the Great War. (AUDIO: The Wanderer) The time travelling Family of Blood, while in 1913, warned some people there would be a war the next year though they kept some details vague. (TV: The Family of Blood)

Influences
It was caused in part by the influence of the Nemesis statue passing by Earth in 1913 (TV: Silver Nemesis) but also by Jack Harkness throwing Object 1 into the Rift. (AUDIO: The Torchwood Archive)

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
However, the ostensible reason was that a Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914. Austria issued a list of demands to Serbia, which were rejected. In response, Austria prepared to invade Serbia. Russia was allied to Serbia and started mobilising its troops. Knowing that France was also allied to Serbia, Germany, which was itself allied to Austria, decided to attack France first because France wanted the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine back. In order to do that, Germans had to march through Luxembourg and Belgium. However, the United Kingdom had a treaty to protect Belgium. Thus, most of the major powers were pulled into the war, and the others soon chose a side too. (PROSE: Human Nature)

At one point, the Eleventh Doctor grew fearful as he began to suspect that the Daleks had conditioned Princip to commit the assassination so humanity would be plunged into war, allowing the Daleks to make advancements with the Dalek Project. Yet the Doctor ultimately never found any conclusive evidence to confirm his suspicions and conceded that it was only a possibility. (COMIC: The Dalek Project)

Early combat
The United Kingdom did not engage in combat until the end of August 1914. (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons)

Some of the battlegrounds were Mons (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons), Passchendaele, the Somme, Verdun, Tannenberg and Ypres. (TV: To the Last Man, AUDIO: The Next Life, PROSE: Byzantium!, Remembrance of the Daleks, Illegal Alien) A million British soldiers died during the war. (TV: To the Last Man)

In 1914, the Third Doctor, Tobias Philby and Thomas ended up in a No Man's Land in France, where they learned of a German artillery build-up and warned the British Army of it. (COMIC: The Amateur)

The Tenth Doctor and Rose visited the war again and put a stop to the Warfreekz' observation of the battles. (COMIC: Warfreekz!)

The Tenth Doctor encountered the Weeping Angels in the town of St Michel. (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons)

The Eighth Doctor was led by Straxus to the middle the conflict, and arrived in a No Man's Land in France. A time winds leak from the vortex was causing trouble and harm to the humans. During the mission, he met his soon-to-be companion Molly O'Sullivan, a nurse serving on the front. When he acknowledged the conflict as "the Great War", she commented there was nothing great about it, calling it the "worst war". At this point in the war, tanks had yet to be introduced, while American involvement was limited to volunteers. (AUDIO: The Great War)

Christmas truce
On Christmas Day 1914, a festive truce was called and soldiers on both sides participated in football matches in no-man's land. (PROSE: This Town Will Never Let Us Go) They also conversed and shared cigarettes. (PROSE: The Little Drummer Boy, COMIC: The Forgotten) The celebrations were witnessed by the First Doctor, Steven Taylor, and Sara Kingdom; (PROSE: The Little Drummer Boy) the Third Doctor, Tobias Philby and Thomas; (COMIC: The Amateur) the Fifth Doctor and Peri Brown; (PROSE: Never Seen Cairo) the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler; (COMIC: The Forgotten) the First Doctor a second time and the Twelfth Doctor. (TV: Twice Upon a Time)

The Ninth Doctor visited at Christmas, 1914 with Rose Tyler. He started the football game between the opposing troops taking part in the Christmas truce. (COMIC: The Forgotten) The Fifth Doctor also visited a battlefield during the Christmas truce, during which he met Edward Woodbourne. (PROSE: Never Seen Cairo)

On Christmas 1914 in Ypres, Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart entered into a standoff with a German soldier that would ultimately cost them both their lives. However, Archibald was briefly extracted by the Testimony to copy his memories, but an error in the timeline caused Archibald to end up in Antarctica in 1986 near the First Doctor and Twelfth Doctor. The two Doctors attempted to save Archibald from the Testimony before understanding its true purpose. Ultimately, Archibald was returned to his own time, but the Twelfth Doctor adjusted the time periods for the two soldiers ahead by a couple of hours. As a result, their standoff ended with neither man dying when the Christmas truce began shortly after time resumed. Seeing his future self's actions caused the First Doctor to understand what "the Doctor of War" really was and decide to go forth with his regeneration. (TV: Twice Upon a Time)

The next day, soldiers resumed fighting. (PROSE: The Little Drummer Boy)

1915
On 7 May 1915, the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by the German U-boat and sank, precipitating the entry of the United States of America into the war two years later. (AUDIO: The Sirens of Time)

In 1915, Wilfred Hollins was killed in the war. (AUDIO: Nightshade)

This year, the Forge ran one of least two experiments they conducted for the war effort: trying to create vampire soldiers. (AUDIO: Project: Twilight)

The Seventh Doctor offered one private the opportunity to travel with him but the man declined. At that point, the war had been raging for 16 months. (PROSE: Front Line)

1916
In July 1916, the British Army began a massive offensive in the Somme. It was later called the First Battle of the Somme or simply the "Big Push". The attacks were happening simultaneously along miles of trenches. Jamie Colquhoun and his regiment took part in the offensive. (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons) So did Captain Richard Hadleman and his Ninth battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. (PROSE: Human Nature)

1917
In 1917, George Newman fought on the Italian front. (AUDIO: Fiesta of the Damned)

The Eleventh Doctor arrived at Hellcombe Hall in 1917 where, with help from Corporal Edward Anderson and Lord Hellcombe, he learned about the Dalek Project. He managed to help the Allied and German armies defeat the Daleks and their robotic drones before all witnesses to the Dalek plan could be exterminated. (COMIC: The Dalek Project)

The immortal Jack Harkness fought in the war in the British Army, (TV: Utopia, COMIC: The Forgotten) as did Tim Latimer, Hutchinson (TV: The Family of Blood) and Major Burton. (TV: Delta and the Bannermen) Tommy Brockless also served, and was eventually executed in 1918 when, suffering from shell shock, he refused to return to the front lines. (TV: To the Last Man) Solomon and the older members of his Hooverville fought in the American army during the war (TV: Evolution of the Daleks) as did Diagoras. (TV: Daleks in Manhattan) By 1917, most young men in England had been drafted. (PROSE: The Way Through the Woods) The android Edwin Bracewell had memories of the War implanted in his positronic brain. The Eleventh Doctor speculated that these were someone else's memories that had been stolen for the process. (TV: Victory of the Daleks)

This year, the Forge tried to brainwash soldiers into being more aggressive. The Seventh Doctor, travelling with Ace and Hex, was drawn to the Forge's experiments at Charnage Hospital and thwarted them. (AUDIO: No Man's Land)

A number of British and German soldiers were kidnapped by the War Lords for their War Games, fighting in a replica of the Western Front. The Second Doctor, believing the "1917 Zone" was the real conflict, called it "one of the worst wars in human history". The soldiers were eventually returned home to Earth by the Time Lords. (TV: The War Games)

The First Doctor witnessed the Battle of Passchendaele and considered it an awful event. (PROSE: Byzantium!)

1918
11 November 1918, Armistice Day, marked the end of the war. (AUDIO: The White Room) A conference was held at Versailles in 1919 for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. (PROSE: Illegal Alien) Under the terms of the treaty, Germany lost all of her colonies, much of her European territory and was made to accept responsibility for the war. (PROSE: Just War)

Recriminations and the post-war climate
In the aftermath of the war, certain women over thirty in the United Kingdom gained the right to vote. (AUDIO: The Suffering) The "Kingdom of Iraq" was formed. (COMIC: A Wing and a Prayer)

After the war, an influenza pandemic raged across the world. The Ice Warriors had released the virus to weaken humanity and allow them to invade. The virus killed the Ice Warriors instead. (PROSE: Cold)

By 1930, the British very rarely spoke about the war. (AUDIO: Hall of the Ten Thousand)

The war was followed relatively quickly by the Second World War which began on 1 September 1939, (PROSE: Timewyrm: Exodus, AUDIO: Just War, Neverland, A Blind Eye) This war had its roots in the First World War and its aftermath, with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party defying the Treaty of Versailles in order to regain much of Germany's lost territories such as the Rhineland. (PROSE: Players, Just War)

Tommy Brockless, a shell-shocked WWI soldier who had been put in the care of Torchwood and preserved in hibernation until the 21st century, was saddened about the Iraq War, since he had been told that this one was "The War to End All Wars." He was eventually returned to his original time period through the Cardiff Rift, completing a stable time loop that required him to survive until the 21st century. Unfortunately, once he returned to 1918, his memories reverted to their original state, and all his old fears of the battlefield returned. Brockless would be shot down by a British firing squad three weeks later for displaying cowardice. (TV: To the Last Man)

Remembrance and memory
When Ben Jackson told him about the First World War in November 1920, Jamie McCrimmon initially assumed that it was fought against aliens. (AUDIO: The Mouthless Dead)

The First Doctor, along with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, recalled having survived a Zeppelin air raid. (TV: Planet of Giants; AUDIO: The Alchemists)

The Tenth Doctor went on to describe the men who fought in the war as part of the "lost generation" because the war resulted in the deaths of so many soldiers, effectively decimating their generation. (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons) While talking with Christina de Souza, he listed the First World War amongst the places he had been. (TV: Planet of the Dead)

In 2017, some archaeologists came across the crashed Dalek saucer Survey Ship Sigma in France, one hundred years after it had crashed following the failure of the Dalek Project, and accidentally revived the surviving Daleks inside. The Eleventh Doctor arrived just in time to prevent a disaster and connected the saucer to a power line, overloading the Daleks. He saw this as him dealing with "unfinished business". (COMIC: The Dalek Project)

Behind the scenes
In the real world, the First World War lasted four years, three months and 14 days, rather than four years, four months and four days as the Tenth Doctor claims in the comic story The Weeping Angels of Mons.