World War I

In 1914 war broke out in Europe and rap­idly spread across the globe. Although the United States had strong cultural ties with the European powers, President Woodrow Wilson was not prepared to take his coun­try into the war.

Submarine Warfare

At the outbreak ofWorld War I most of the major powers included submarines in their naval armory. However, they were generally small in size, limited by operational range to coastal waters, and carried one or two deck-mounted guns and a limited number of self-propelled torpedoes fired from bow tubes. Initially, the submarines would ap­proach enemy merchant vessels on the sur­face and, using the threat of the deck guns to ensure the target ships’ surrender, then search the vessels for contraband—and in many instances for food for the U-boat (U-boot, Unterseeboot [submarine]) crew.

From the outset of hostilities, Alfred von Tirpitz, grand admiral of the Imperial German Navy, advocated a policy of unre­stricted submarine warfare against the British and their allies, with the resulting loss of 750,000 tons of British shipping in the first six months of the war. On Febru­ary 4, 1915, the German Admiralty issued a declaration that forbade merchant ship­ping from traveling in British waters. The declaration announced all waters around the United Kingdom to be a war zone and that starting on February 18, 1915, any merchant vessel found within the zone would be destroyed. Importantly, the dec­laration indicated that no guarantee could be given as to the safety of the crew and passengers. Neutral shipping would be treated the same as that from combatant nations. This included American merchant vessels. For the first time German sub­marines were directly threatening Ameri­can ships and American lives.

Both sides in the war had the same aim as regards naval power, which was to block­ade the enemy’s ports and prevent com­merce and the supply of raw materials from reaching them. The British were able to achieve this through the use of their surface fleet, while the German navy chose to use submarines. Although the principles of warfare decreed that merchant shipping of enemy nations was a legitimate target, every effort was to be made to ensure the safety of the crews. This was fine until the British began mounting guns on their mer­chant vessels, whereby it became too dan­gerous for the submarines to attack on the surface or to surface in an attempt to com­municate with the target vessel. The hulls of the U-boats were thin and any damage in action would compromise the safety of the vessel. It therefore became impossible to make the necessary provision for the crews of merchant vessels.

The German policy of unrestricted warfare soon made itself clear when the William P. Frye, an American vessel carry­ing a shipment of wheat to England, was sunk on January 28, 1915, in the South At­lantic. This was the first loss of an Ameri­can ship, and Wilson’s reaction was to warn Germany that it would be held responsible for the safety of American lives. On May 1, 1915, the American tanker Gulflight was damaged by a torpedo attack off the south­west coast of England. Although the vessel remained afloat, 3 Americans were killed. Six days later, on May 7, the liner Lusitania was sunk by a torpedo off the coast of Ire­land with the loss of 128 American lives. It was only later, under intense diplomatic pressure, that Germany agreed to pay repa­rations for the incident and also to halt such unannounced attacks on passenger ships. Two Americans were among the 40 passengers and crew of the British passen­ger liner Arabic that was sunk on August 19 off the coast of Ireland. The sinking, com­ing as it did only a short period after the Lusitania, inflamed public opinion in the United States, with Wilson threatening to break off diplomatic relations with Ger­many. The response of the German author­ities was to issue the “Arabic Pledge,” which promised to halt the practice of at­tacking unarmed passenger ships without warning and to provide for the safety of the passengers and crew.

An uneasy calm lasted until March 1916 when a German U-boat sank the French passenger ship Sussex, killing several Americans. Again, in a repetition of the Arabic incident, the Germans, in an at­tempt to keep the United States from en­tering the war, issued the “Sussex Pledge,” which reiterated the previous “Arabic Pledge” in promising not to sink merchant ships without adequate warning and to prevent loss of life to the passengers and crew. In early 1916 U-53, under the com­mand of Lieutenant Hans Rose, crossed the Atlantic with the help of extra fuel stored in the ballast tanks and sank three British merchant ships, one Dutch ship, and one Norwegian ship just outside American territorial waters. This was seen as an attempt to intimidate the United States into remaining neutral, but it back­fired when the sinkings outraged public opinion against Germany.

Germany returned to unrestricted sub­marine warfare on February 1, 1917, at which point Wilson broke off diplomatic relations and began to arm American mer­chant vessels. This “armed neutrality” was the final step before American entry into the war. In February 86 vessels were sunk, with the number increasing to 103 in March and 155 in April. On February 25 the Cunard liner Laconia on passage from New York was sunk off the Irish coast. The report of that sinking, written by Floyd

U.S. Navy recruiting poster from 1917 showing a sailor reaching out to a young girl in a lifeboat labeled Lusitania. It reads, “When you fire remember this—Enlist in the Navy. ” (Library of Congress)

Gibbons, who was one of the passengers, helped to steer American public opinion to­ward war.

American trade priorities changed as the war progressed. There was always a question as to the extent of American neu­trality: With its trade with Germany effec­tively cut off, could the United States then afford to have its trade with Britain re­duced to the same extent? This would have meant economic hardship. In 1914 U.S. trade with Germany stood at $169 million, dropping to $1 million in 1916, while trade with Britain and its allies rose to $3,214 million in 1916 from $825 million in 1914. From March 1915 until the American entry into the war in April 1917 U.S. bank loans to Britain and its allies ex­ceeded $2 billion.

In May 1918 the U-151 wreaked havoc along the U.S. eastern seaboard. On May 21 she laid a number of mines off Bal­timore harbor and attacked and sank three small coastal ships. The submarine also laid a number of mines in Delaware Bay before proceeding to New York and cutting un­dersea telegraph lines. The U-151 returned to Germany on July 20, 1918, having sunk twenty-seven ships.

By the end of the war German U-boats had sunk almost 5,000 ships, but at a high cost to themselves. When the armistice came, out of 345 U-boats built and 13,000 men who served on them only 176 U-boats were left to be handed over to the

Allies and scrapped and over 5,000 men had perished.

Lusitania

Built by John Brown & Company of Clydebank, Scotland, the Lusitania was launched on June 7, 1906. With a length of 762 feet, a beam of 87 feet, and a gross tonnage of 31,550 tons, the vessel, with a speed of 25 knots, was intended to recap­ture for Britain the coveted Blue Riband, awarded for the fastest Atlantic crossing, from the German liner SS Deutschland. The construction of the ship was financed by the British Admiralty, which also pro­vided the owners, Cunard, with an operat­ing subsidy of £75,000 annually.

On Saturday, May 1, 1915, the Lusi­tania left New York bound for Liverpool, England, under the command of Captain William Turner with a crew of 702 and carrying 1,257 passengers. As the Lusita­nia left port, newspapers in the city carried a warning from the German government that the zone of war between Germany, Great Britain, and their respective allies in­cluded British coastal waters and that any vessels found sailing in these waters flying the flag of Great Britain or its allies would be liable to destruction. The Lusitania had previously flouted international law by fly­ing the flag of the United States on her previous voyage when the captain felt they were under threat from German U-boat activity.

At 1:20 P.M. on Friday, May 7, the Lusitania was sighted by U-20, com­manded by Captain Schwieger, approxi­mately twelve miles from the coast of Ire­land. At 2:10 P.M. the ship was struck by a single torpedo on the starboard side, with a second explosion occurring within the ves­sel almost immediately. The origin and cause of the second, larger explosion has never been fully explained. While some contend that the ship secretly carried arms and munitions, contrary to its manifest and U.S. law, others put the explosion down to coal dust that was ignited by the torpedo explosion. Having originally been designed as an armed auxiliary cruiser, the Lusitania’s coal bunkers were of Admiralty design and were constructed along the sides of the ship, protecting the ships’ boiler rooms that had been placed below the waterline. This has been identified as a design weakness that contributed to the speed at which the ship sank—large voids that rapidly filled with seawater.

The explosions caused an immediate list of 15 degrees to starboard, increasing to 25 degrees, which severely hampered the launching of the lifeboats and, although the number of lifeboats had been doubled in the wake of the Titanic sinking, only 6 out of the 48 available were successfully launched. In the 18 minutes that the ship took to sink 1,201 lives were lost, 794 pas­sengers and 407 crew—including 124 Americans, the most famous being Alfred Vanderbilt. Captain Turner was the last to leave the ship and was picked up after three hours in the water. While a naval disaster in its own right, the sinking also served to increase political tensions between the United States and Germany, and although the United States chose not to enter the war at that time, the incident ensured that there would be no alliance between the two countries.

Deutschland

The sinking of the Lusitania did not sour relations between the United States and Germany to the extent that trade with Ger­many was suspended. The U.S. govern­ment, reacting to pressure from Germany and attempting to avoid accusations of fa­voritism for the Allied cause, announced that unarmed submarines were to be re­garded as merchant vessels. In July 1916 the unarmed merchant submarine Deutschland, under the command of Captain Paul Koenig, arrived in Baltimore harbor with a cargo of chemical dyes and gemstones. It re­turned to Germany with a cargo of nickel, copper, and zinc. On her second voyage to New London, Connecticut, she returned with rubber, oil, and silver. The significance of the Deutschlands voyages was in the length of the journey across the Atlantic without the support of surface ships or the need to refuel. Built as a blockade runner and launched on March 28, 1916, the Deutschland was operated by the North German Lloyd Line. Totalling 1,500 tons, the vessel had a cargo-carrying capacity of 700 tons and a speed of 12 knots. Although this was not a significant cargo load, the vessel’s political and propaganda value far outweighed the practicalities.

The Deutschland was one of two cargo­carrying submarines built to run the Allied blockade. Her sister ship, the Bremen, was lost on her maiden voyage to the United States—although no one was quite sure, it was assumed that she had been lost after striking a mine. The Deutschland made only two voyages to the United States be­fore being converted into a combat vessel. She was converted to carry 18 torpedoes and 2 150-mm guns. Redesignated U-155 she undertook 3 combat cruises, sinking 43 allied ships totalling 122,033 tons, be­fore surrendering after the armistice. She was then taken to England as a prize and displayed for public viewing until finally being broken up for scrap in 1921. There were another 6 vessels in this class intended for commercial trade, but they were all converted to warships and designated U-151 to U-157. Captain Paul Koenig in 1916 published a book based on those two journeys to America entitled Voyage of the Deutschland.

The Zimmermann Telegram In January 1917, a telegram from the Ger­man foreign minister, Arthur Zimmer­mann, to the German minister to Mexico, Heinrich J. F. von Eckhardt, was inter­cepted and deciphered by British cryptogra­phers. In the telegram Zimmermann in­formed von Eckhardt that Germany was in­tending to return to unrestricted submarine warfare while at the same time endeavoring to preserve the neutrality of the United States. The telegram outlined the steps to be taken in the event of the United States entering the war against Germany as a re­sult of this increased submarine action. In the first instance, von Eckhardt was to ap­proach the president of Mexico with the proposal of an alliance. The telegram of­fered, in return for a German Mexican al­liance in support of the German cause, gen­erous financial support and the return to Mexico of all the lands formerly owned by Mexico and now (1917) owned by the United States—that is, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The final details of any land settlement were to be left up to the Mexican authorities. This was a direct attempt to neutralize American entry into the war—by keeping the relatively small U.S. Army oc­cupied on the U.S.-Mexican border. The second step to be taken was for Mexico to mediate between Germany and Japan and to invite Japan to join the alliance.

In the meantime, in direct response to the effectiveness of the British naval block­ade, Germany returned to unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 with the immediate sinking of eight American ships and the adverse effect on U.S. indus­try as ships remained in port in the face of the increased submarine threat. By return­ing to unrestricted submarine warfare Ger­many had broken the “Sussex Pledge,” which had previously limited submarine warfare. The British, in an effort to maxi­mize the propaganda value, generate the greatest possible political impact, and pro­tect their intelligence-gathering networks, waited until February 24 before presenting the telegram to Wilson.

A variety of reactions greeted the telegram and its contents. German, Japa­nese, and Mexican diplomats claimed it to be a forgery, until Zimmerman confirmed that he had, indeed, written the message. In Mexico, Pancho Villa declared that he would help Germany by recovering lost Mexican soil and left Parral with a force of some 3,000 men. Wilson was becoming in­creasingly frustrated at the number of American merchant ships being sunk by U-boats and by the number of American civilians being killed in U-boat attacks on Allied passenger ships. When he was pre­sented with the evidence of the Zimmer­mann Telegram and the German resump­tion of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Reported widely in American newspapers, the telegram prompted him to take America into the war. On April 4, 1917, the Senate approved Wilson’s call for American entry into the war by a vote of 82to 6, supported 2 days later by a vote in the House of Representatives of 373 to 50.

Lafayette Escadrille Commanded by a French officer, Captain Georges Thenault, the Lafayette Escadrille was made up of American volunteer pilots. Initially formed in April 1916, the es­cadrille (squadron) was known as the Es­cadrille Americaine until German diplo­matic protests forced a change in name. Although the U.S. government had granted the volunteers’ petition to under­take military service abroad, the United States still maintained its neutrality.

Initially based at Luxeuil, France, the squadron settled itself into the Grand Hotel and adopted a luxurious lifestyle. Supplied with the best accommodations and the best equipment, most of it bought with American private subscriptions, the members of the escadrille soon became as well known for their antics on the ground as for their recklessness in the air, with dice and poker the favorite pastime. The unit adopted two lion cubs as squadron mas­cots, naming them “whiskey and soda.” They also selected an Indian head as the squadron insignia and had this painted on the fuselage of their aircraft. After suffering unnecessary casualties, the squadron soon found itself transferred to the front at Ver­dun, this time based at Bar-le-Duc, to un­dertake bomber escort duties.

As an individual squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille was not large enough to absorb the large number of Americans who chose to serve in the French Air Ser­vice and so the Lafayette Flying Corps was created as a means of utilizing the services of the American pilots. Over 200 Ameri­cans passed through the training program initiated by the French Air Service and served in the Lafayette Flying Corps, mostly flying as members of French squadrons.

The escadrille’s first aerial victory was by Kiffin Rockwell on May 18, 1916. However, Rockwell himself was brought down by machine-gun fire on September 23, 1916. On June 23, 1916, Harvard graduate Victor Chapman became the es­cadrille’s first American pilot killed in ac­tion. In all, some sixty-five Lafayette Es­cadrille and Lafayette Flying Corps members died. In February 1918, ten months after the United States entered the war, the Lafayette Escadrille was trans­ferred to the United States Air Service and renamed the 103rd Pursuit Squadron. Nine Americans were killed serving with the escadrille out of a total of thirty-eight American pilots serving while the escadrille was under French command. In the twenty months of its existence, the Lafayette Es­cadrille accounted for fifty-seven downings of German planes. Among the members of the Lafayette Escadrille were Charles Nord- hoff and James Norman Hall, who in 1932 coauthored the book Mutiny on the Bounty.

General John “Black Jack” Pershing

Born in Linn County, Missouri, in 1880, John Pershing spent a short period as a school teacher before attending West Point Military Academy. Pershing’s military ex­perience included service against the Sioux and Apache (1886—1898), service in the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Philippines (1903), and service as a mili­tary observer in the Russo-Japanese War (1904—1905). Pershing also led an unsuc­cessful campaign against Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1917.

Appointed commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force on May 28, 1917, Pershing and his staff sailed from New York on the liner Baltic, arriving in Liverpool on June 8. Pershing believed American forces, acting as an independent army, would quickly alter the balance of power on the western front, but had to re­vise his belief in the face of stiff British and French opposition. The British and French insisted that American troops should oper­ate as part of the existing Allied armies, while Pershing was determined that Amer­ican troops should operate as an indepen­dent force. He not only believed this from a military standpoint but believed it would be best for the morale of the troops and the pride of the public at home.

The idea of a distinct American army was supported by Wilson and the secretary of war in written instructions given to General Pershing, who was also given a wide brief in the relationship he would de­velop with the Allies. Although the United States had entered the war, Wilson clarified the American position by declaring that the United States was not joining the al­liance but should be seen as an associated member. Pershing stood his ground over the use of American troops, and a stalemate developed with the headquarters of Mar­shal Foch, the French commander in chief.

In March 1918 German forces over­whelmed the British 5th Army in an area between Arras and a few miles south of Saint-Quentin, and broke through on a wide front, threatening to create a gap be­tween the British and French forces. The British withdrew, and setting aside his de­termination to create a separate American force, Pershing went to Marshal Foch and offered to put at his disposal the five Amer­ican divisions then in France to be utilized as Foch saw fit.

Pershing’s main priority was to build up supply bases and establish independent lines of communication. He felt that he was being hindered on two fronts. He was hampered by his reliance on the British to provide vessels to bring his troops from the United States and their insistence that the priority for transportation should be given to infantry and machine gunners. From the point of view of the French and British this made sense, as those were the troops most required to build up the existing forces and undo the manpower damage suffered in the German March offensive. However, from Pershing’s standpoint, this merely de­layed the arrival of support troops neces­sary in creating an independent force. The second restriction on his efforts was the in­creasing determination of the French and British that American troops should be

German soldiers posed in trenches during World War I. (Library of Congress)

used only to fill manpower gaps in the French and British armies.

In July 1918 Foch at last agreed to Per­shing’s demand for an independent Ameri­can force. The first successful offensive un­dertaken by the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was at St. Mihiel and was fol­lowed almost immediately by further American operations in the Argonne re­gion of France. Pershing remained in France after the armistice and, after a brief holiday, administered the task of returning the American troops home.

American Expeditionary Force The U.S. 1st Division arrived at Saint- Nazaire on June 28, 1917, with the 2nd, the 26th (New England National Guard), and the 42nd (Rainbow) divisions arriving in France by November of that year, an ini­tial force of over 100,000 men. Pershing’s initial plans called for 30 American divi­sions to be sent to Europe, over 1 million men. The AEF was assigned to an area in the Toul-Dijon-Troyes region of France on the Lorraine front, with the ports of Saint- Nazaire and Marseille as their supply ports. Initially, supplies of food, tobacco, and mail were slow in arriving, and the men were not paid for several months, but Per­shing quickly established his general head­quarters at Chaumont, and the American troops began a tough program of training in trench and open warfare to prepare them for the planned offensives.

The first experience of trench warfare came for the American troops in October 1917, when it was agreed that one battal­ion from each 1st Division regiment would accompany French troops, who had been acting as their instructors, into trenches in the quiet Toul sector in order to gain first­hand experience. This “learning experi­ence” continued into November as other American battalions were rotated into the French trenches in turn. The first artillery action by the AEF was undertaken by the 6th Field Artillery on the morning of Oc­tober 23. On November 2 the troops of the 1st Division had their first taste of trench warfare when the Germans staged a trench raid, capturing eleven prisoners and killing three Americans. While the AEF was estab­lishing itself in France, at home men were being drafted into the new national army and training was being carried out under the direction of NCOs taken from the reg­ular army.

Draft

One month after the United States entered World War I, the Selective Service Act was passed on May 18, 1917, authorizing the president to increase the military establish­ment of the country. The Selective Service System was the body responsible for select­ing those men who would be inducted into military service. Made up from 4,648 local draft boards, the system had overall re­sponsibility for classifying and registering men, dealing with appeals, conducting medical examinations, and transporting the men selected to regional training cen­ters. During the war there were three regis­trations: the first on June 5, 1917, called on all men between the ages of 21 and 31; the second on June 5, 1918, called for those who had reached the age of 21 after June 5, 1917; and the third on September 12, 1918, called for men aged 18 to 45. Some 24,000,000 men registered for the draft, 23 percent of the population. In 1917 there were 516,212 men inducted, with an increase in 1918 to 2,294,084 men inducted into the military. For the period covering direct American involvement in the war, 1917 through 1918, the number of men inducted stood at 2,810,296. Not all men who served with the AEF were draftees; large numbers came forward to volunteer for service in the military. The local boards were closed down in May 1919 and the Selective Service System was closed down in July of that year.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points

On January 8, 1918, Woodrow Wilson pre­sented to Congress his peace program for the aftermath of the war. He proposed a program known as the Fourteen Points, which had been compiled by a group of U.S. foreign policy experts including Dr. Sidney Mezes and Walter Lippmann. Wil­son gave his speech to a rather depleted au­dience, as Congress had been given only half an hour’s notice of his appearance. In Wil­son’s view, the Great War (as World War I was known at the time) was to end all wars. Wilson insisted that the settlement was to provide for long-term goals—the establish­ment of democracy throughout Europe and the securing of a permanent peace. The Fourteen Points were based on three funda­mental principles. First, war must and could be avoided in the future if the nations in concert obeyed certain guidelines, above all the conclusion of “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” Second, national status should rest on ethnic self-determination, de­pendent on whether a people considered themselves a unity and lived together “along historically established lines of allegiances and nationality.” Third, an international body should be created, the League of Na­tions, to negotiate conflicts between nations before war erupted. “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mu­tual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity of great and small states alike” (http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh ∕wwi∕1918∕14points.html).

Wilson’s Fourteen Points gave the newly elected democratic German government some hopes for a just peace. In opposition to France, Wilson seemed not to be interested in crushing Germany completely, but in es­tablishing stable democratic states. Wilson’s Fourteen Points appealed to European mod­erates and convinced Germans that the set­tlement would not be vindictive. In fact, Wilson’s commitment to settlement as op­posed to surrender contained tough-minded stipulations, for he recognized that Ger­many was still the strongest state on the con­tinent. He merely pushed for a treaty that balanced the strengths and interests of the various European powers. Many of the his­torians, economists, and other experts ac­companying Wilson to Paris agreed that, harshly dealt with and humiliated, Germany might soon become vengeful and chaotic— a lethal combination that could lead to the growth of unsavory political sects.

Derek Rutherford Young

See also Norddeutscher Lloyd; Treaty of Versailles; World Wars I and II, Brazil and Germany in

References and Further Reading

Beckett, Ian. The Great War 1914—1918.

Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001.

Cooper, John Milton. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2001.

DeGroot, Gerard. The First World War.

Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001.

Horton, Edward. The Illustrated History of the Submarine. London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1974.

Hough, Richard. The Great War at Sea. Sussex, UK: Naval & Military, 2000.

Longstreet, Stephen. The Canvas Falcons, The Men and Planes of World War 1. London: Leo Cooper, 1995.

Marshall, Samuel Lyman Atwood. World War 1. Boston: Mariner, 2001.

Peeke, Mitch, Kevin Walsh-Johnson, and Steven Jones. The Lusitania Story. Annapolis, MD.: Naval Institute, 2002.

Preston, Diana. Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy. New York: Berkley, 2003.

Saunders, Robert. In Search of Woodrow Wilson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.

Strachan, Hew. The First World War; Volume 1: To Arms. Oxford, UK: Oxford University, 2003.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Zimmermann Telegram. New York: Dell, 1967.

Wilson, Woodrow. Fourteen Points Plan.

http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/1918/14 points.html.