World War I World War I , also known as the 1914 - 18 War ( TV : " The War Games " ) was a major conflict on Earth fought over four years , four months and four days ( COMIC : " The Weeping Angels of Mons " ) from 1914 to 1918 . ( TV : " The War Games " ) 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 World War I were considered perfect hunting grounds by Weeping Angel s . ( COMIC : " The Weeping Angels of Mons " ) Foreseeing . In 1903 , after receiving a wealth of information from the future , Grigori Rasputin foresaw the Great War . ( AUDIO : " The Wanderer " ) The time travel ling Family of Blood , while in 1913 , warned some people there would be a war the next year . ( TV : " The Family of Blood " ) Origin . It was caused in part by the influence of the Nemesis statue passing by Earth in 1913 . ( TV : " Silver Nemesis " ) However , the ostensible reason was that a Serbia n nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austria n 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 Dalek s had conditioned Princip to commit the assassination so human ity 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 " ) The war . 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 " ) 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 cigarette s . ( 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 Fifth Doctor and Peri Brown ; ( PROSE : " Never Seen Cairo " ) and the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler . ( COMIC : " The Forgotten " ) The next day , soldiers resumed fighting . ( PROSE : " The Little Drummer Boy " ) 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 " ) 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 " ) In 1917 , George Newman fought on the Italian front . ( AUDIO : " Fiesta of the Damned " ) 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 . ( TV : " Victory of the Daleks " ) The Forge ran at least two experiments for the war effort : trying to create vampire soldier s in 1915 ( AUDIO : " Project : Twilight " ) and trying to brainwash soldiers into being more aggressive in 1917 . ( AUDIO : " No Man ' s Land " ) A number of British and German soldiers were kidnapped by the War Lord s for their War Game s , 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 Lord s . ( TV : " The War Games " ) 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 " ) The Doctor and the war . The First Doctor , along with his granddaughter , Susan Foreman , survived a Zeppelin air raid . ( TV : " Planet of Giants " ; AUDIO : " The Alchemists " ) The First Doctor also witnessed the Battle of Passchendaele and considered it an awful event . ( PROSE : " Byzantium ! " ) 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 Seventh Doctor , travelling with Ace and Hex , was drawn to the Forge ' s experiments at Charnage Hospital in 1917 and thwarted them . ( AUDIO : " No Man ' s Land " ) On another occasion , he offered one private the opportunity to travel with him but the man declined . ( PROSE : " Front Line " ) The Ninth Doctor visited at 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 Tenth Doctor and Rose visited the war again and put a stop to the Warfreek z ' observation of the battles . ( COMIC : " Warfreekz ! " ) The Tenth Doctor encountered the Weeping Angel s in the town of St Michel . ( COMIC : " The Weeping Angels of Mons " ) 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 " ) Aftermath . In the aftermath of the war , certain women over thirty in the United Kingdom gained the right to vote . ( AUDIO : " The Suffering " ) After the war , an influenza pandemic raged across the world . The Ice Warrior s had released the virus to weaken humanity and allow them to invade . The virus killed the Ice Warriors instead . ( PROSE : " Cold " ) The war was followed relatively quickly by World War II which began on 1 September 1939 , ( PROSE : " " , AUDIO : " Just War " , " Neverland " , " A Blind Eye " ) This war had its roots in World War I 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 " ) In the aftermath , the " Kingdom of Iraq " was formed . ( COMIC : " A Wing and a Prayer " ) Tommy Brockless , a shell - shocked WWI soldier who had been put in the care of Torchwood and preserved in hibernation for 90 years , 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 2008 . 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 " ) When Ben Jackson told him about the First World War in November 1920 , Jamie McCrimmon initially assumed that it was fought against alien s . ( AUDIO : " The Mouthless 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 Dalek s 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 , World War I 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 " .