war to end all wars

war to end all wars

1. A war that will be of such huge scale and have such a large impact on the world as to end the need for any other wars in the future. If it ever comes to using nuclear warheads against them, it will truly be a war to end all wars—there won't be any world left to fight another one.
2. A name commonly given to the First World War. My great-grandfather was on the front lines of what was called the war to end all wars, only to see his son march into the fray in a second world war twenty years later.
See also: all, end, war
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

a war to end all wars

a war, especially the First World War, regarded as making subsequent wars unnecessary.
See also: all, end, war
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • a war to end all wars
  • spread far and wide
  • on a biblical scale
  • small is beautiful
  • loom up
  • bud scale
  • Scales
  • May the Fourth be with you
  • mount against
  • mount against (someone or something)
References in periodicals archive
World War One 1914-1918: The War to End All Wars. Illus.
Pax Britannia ended in 1914, with the War to End All Wars, at least until the next one, and Europe, with trenches and artillery, was laid waste.
Now as we approach August 2014, 100 years from the beginning of the "war to end all wars", we should recall that the British belief was that it would all be over by the first Christmas.
Peter Simkins, Geoffrey Jukes and Michael Hickey's THE FIRST WORLD WAR: THE WAR TO END ALL WARS (9781782002802, $30.00) provides a detailed, in-depth history covering the basics of the First World War, with a focus on how its techniques and radical strategies changed the face of warfare.
A skilled historian answers key questions about military strategy during the "war to end all wars."
Machinations during these last hours of that war to end all wars throw these combatants together in the fundamental battle to survive.
The Great War, for example, which was used to describe World War I, fell out of use around 1939 when people realized it wasn't actually the war to end all wars.
Kassirer manages her prose in such a way that an ornate, fruit-shaped drawer pull and the war to end all wars seem meant to share a paragraph, as if an author couldn't possibly mention one without the other.
Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the United States entered the "war to end all wars", in April, 1917.
"The War to End All Wars: World War I," is organized into 15 neatly-delineated chapters, beginning with the assassination of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.
But The War to End All Wars does a fine job of telling this military story from 1914-1918.
The recreated trench warfare workshops act as a stark reminder of the squalor encountered by troops during the war to end all wars. The Royal Engineers lost 25,000 men.
Oxford University English Faculty researchers are putting together the archive, to be launched on November 11, 90 years after the guns fell silent as the "war to end all wars" drew to a close.
We know the Marines at a place called Belleau Wood in the "War to end all Wars" placed blistering long-range .30-06 rifle fire on German infantry the likes of which the Germans had never seen--and never forgot.
The Histories describe the world from its beginnings as a concept rather than merely a physical entity up to that war to end all wars, the Persian of the early fifth century BCE.