March, 1918. Russia signs the Treaty of Brest-Livosk with Germany and Austria-Hungary, leaving World War 1. Under the terms of the peace treaty, Germany and Turkey gain large regions of western and southern Russia.
March 31, 1918. The Germans launch a massive offensive on the Western Front, and the Allies retreat in confusion toward Paris.
June, 1918-1921. The Red Army of the Bolsheviks in Russia fight a civil war with the White Russians, a loosely organized group of anti-communists who are supported to some extent by the British and other Allied countries.
July 17, 1918. Czar Nicholas II of Russia and his family are murdered in their prison house in the Ural Mountains.
August 8, 1918. Twenty Allied divisions including British, Canadian, Australian, U.S. and French troops go on the attack near Amiens, France and push the Germans back five miles to the lines they occupied before German victory earlier in the spring.
September, 1918. Spanish influenza sweeps through Europe killing millions and crippling the war effort on both sides. Between 50 and 100 million people will die from the influenza between 1918 and 1920 as it travels across the world, making it possibly the most deadly epidemic in history. The flu epidemic kills far more people, soldiers and civilians, than the war, in spite of the horrible casualty rate of World War I.
October 1, 1918. Arab forces led by Prince Feisal and advised by British Major T.E. Lawrence capture the Syrian city of Damascus from the Turkish Ottomans. Most of the Arab Middle East, including Palestine and the city of Jerusalem, is now free of Turkish rule.
October, 1918. The Austro-Hungarian Empire begins to break up as Czechoslovakia declares its independence.
November 11, 1918. At 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918 the armistice between the Allies—France, Britain, the United States, and Italy–and the German Empire takes effect. It is estimated that more than ten million people have died in the war, more than in other war in the history of mankind.
December, 1918. The world’s first three-color traffic lights are introduced in New York CIty.