A primer on World War I

While the USA joined the war on the side of the Allies, we technically entered the war as an associated power.

How prepared was the country’s military to enter a modern conflict? The combination of these two developments galvanized American support for war against Germany, not for conquest but to defend the national interests. Britain got all the food it needed, and by the beginning of 1918 the US was sending 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers each week to France.

Wilson appointed future President Herbert Hoover to lead the Food Administration, which cleverly changed German terms, like hamburger and sauerkraut, to more American-sounding monikers, like liberty sandwich or liberty cabbage.

Locally, in anticipation of the war declaration, a mass meeting of citizens of Charlottesville and Albemarle County was held at the courthouse the evening before, “pledging support to the President and national Government in the wholly unjustifiable war which has been forced upon the United States”. That conflict deserves to be remembered, as it introduced the U.S.to a new role as a world power, influential in might and in ideas, with all the challenges and costs that would imply. Commemorations are also taking place across the US. In this scenario, German strategy was to make sure that the USA stayed outside the war, but German methodology proved a colossal miscalculation that produced exactly the opposite outcome. When he was rejected, Lewis sold the design to Britain and Belgium, where it was mass-produced throughout the war. But the greatest failure to emerge from that “Great War” is one we still live with and are still dying from today.

U.S. Army soldiers playing baseball in France in 1917.

November 20, 1917: US troops engage German forces for the first time in large numbers during the Battle of Cambrai.

“Tanks were created to combat trench warfare”, said Vietti. Resistance against joining the conflict was strong in the USA, where the huge wave of immigrants who came to America from Europe had little desire to fight to protect countries they had fled.

Also new to Americans was poison gas, an early form of chemical warfare.

Some detected a cynical motive from those on the Allied side who wanted to see America in the war.

Little of the 20th century history as we know it seemed inevitable at that moment when Wilson, who had come to the presidency with only two years of experience in elected office as governor of New Jersey, faced angry crowds of anti-war demonstrators threatening to block his entrance to the U.S. Capitol. For many years, it had been focusing much of its energy on preparing for a surface naval confrontation with Germany. The proposal, directed through the German embassy in Mexico, was a straightforward one, written in a most to-the-point fashion: “Make war together, make peace together”, said Zimmerman. In fact, inaction is itself a choice – and usually a bad one. The Army remained pitifully small, and Navy ships were undermanned and undertrained. As the filmmakers and their interview subjects (who include Oregon-based podcaster Dan Carlin and Kimberly Jensen of Western Oregon University) and tell it, the fault lines that shake America’s foundations today can be traced back to a global conflict that, rather than bringing peace, launched a new era of world disorder.

For example, Meyer writes that the assault on Germany began with an intense propaganda campaign that mixed half-truths with outright lies to paint a simplistic and inaccurate picture of the reasons for the war, and the necessity of USA involvement. But the Americans were furious when their civilian ships, such as the Lusitania, were destroyed and their citizens killed. Planes were becoming offensive weapons that could actively engage ground targets with sufficient force to make a difference on the battlefield below. The U.S. had neither the inclination nor the military might to wage a major war in Europe, and the Americans initially sat on the sidelines under the banner of “armed neutrality”. As a result, American pilots had to learn to fly British and French planes those countries could not man.

While unrestricted submarine warfare is, of course, the textbook answer as to why the US entered the war there’s also the infamous Zimmerman telegram.