Attitude of the United States
Since 1783 the United States had acquired a number of foreign policy traditions. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, admonished his young and vulnerable country to avoid alliances that would drag it into disputes in which it had no interest. Thus was born a powerful isolationist and exclusivist tradition. The Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to European adventurism, giving birth to a regionalist and paternalist tradition vis-à-vis Latin America. After the Civil War, belief in America’s Manifest Destiny directed national attention to the West Coast and beyond. Then the war against Spain in 1898 yielded colonial possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific and inspired the building of a two-ocean navy and of a Panama Canal to serve it. By 1914, when the canal opened, the United States was already the greatest industrial power in the world, yet its tradition of exclusivity and its tiny standing army gave the Europeans excuse to ignore America’s potential might.
In August 1914 President Woodrow Wilson implored the American people to be “neutral in thought as well as deed” with respect to the European war. In so doing he was not only honouring tradition but also applying his own religious principles to foreign policy. His agenda upon entering the White House in 1913 had been domestic reform, and he had written that it would be an irony of fate should foreign policy come to dominate in his administration. Yet when fate so decreed, Wilson preferred to trust his own motives and methods rather than the advice of his secretaries of state or his other advisers. Wilson deplored the war and earnestly wished to bring about a just and lasting peace through U.S. mediation, for what greater mission could Providence assign to that “city on a hill,” the United States of America?
American power began to figure in the balance of war almost from the start. Trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange when war broke out, but when it resumed in November 1914, Europeans sold most of the $4,000,000,000 worth of securities they held before the war. U.S. loans to belligerents were at first declared “inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality,” but the large Anglo-French orders for U.S. munitions, raw materials, and food created an economic boom, and by 1915 the Allies needed credit to continue their purchases. An initial £200,000,000 loan in September 1915 led eventually to billions being floated on the U.S. market and a complete reversal of the financial relationship between the Old World and the New. By 1917 the United States was no longer a debtor nation but the world’s greatest creditor. U.S. firms also inherited many overseas markets, especially in Latin America, which the British and Germans could no longer serve.
To Americans neutrality seemed both moral and lucrative—the United States, said Wilson, was “too proud to fight.” But the failure of his peace initiatives, the German assaults on neutrals’ rights at sea, and the cumulative effect of Allied propaganda and German provocations conjoined to end U.S. neutrality by 1917. On February 4, 1915, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone in which Allied ships would be sunk, without warning if necessary. While this procedure dispensed with traditional civilities like boarding, search and seizure, and care of civilians, effective submarine warfare required it. Underwater craft relied on stealth and surprise and exposed themselves to easy destruction once they made their presence known. Thus, even though the British blockade interfered with neutral shipping more than the German blockade, the latter appeared far more beastly. The sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, which killed over a thousand passengers, including 128 U.S. citizens, outraged U.S. public opinion despite the rightful German claim that she was carrying munitions (173 tons worth). Two more passenger ships, the Arabic and Hesperia, went down in August and September, respectively, whereupon American diplomatic protests caused civil officials in Berlin to overrule the military command and call off unrestricted submarine warfare, although the issue did not remain settled.
Wilson’s own peace initiatives, including an offer of mediation by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 and a trip to Europe by Wilson’s personal aide and adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, in 1915, were unsuccessful. Early in 1916 House returned to Europe and on February 22 in London agreed to a formula whereby the United States would summon a peace conference and—if Germany refused to attend or proved unreasonable—“would leave the conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” Wilson later drew back from the guarantee and added the word “probably” after “would.” But the British themselves shied from promoting such a conference, while the other belligerents also ducked the suggestion lest they compromise the determination of their people or incur the distrust of allies.
By the end of 1916 Germany had 102 U-boats ready for service, many of the latest type, and the chief of the naval staff assured the kaiser that unrestricted submarine warfare would sink 600,000 tons of Allied shipping per month and force Britain to make peace within five months. Bethmann fought to delay escalation of the submarine war in hopes of another Wilsonian peace move. But the president held off new initiatives during his reelection campaign. When he had still not acted by December 1916, Bethmann was forced to make a deal with his own military, which consented to tolerate a German peace offer in return for Bethmann’s endorsement of unrestricted submarine warfare if the offer failed. But the army helped ensure that the German note (released December 12) would fail by insisting on implicit retention by Germany of Belgium and other battlefield conquests. Wilson followed on the 18th with an invitation to the two camps to define their war aims as a prelude to negotiation. The Allies demanded evacuation of occupied lands and guarantees against Germany in the future. The Germans stuck to their December note, and the military command decided to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1.
The United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany on February 3 and commenced the arming of merchant ships on March 9. Meanwhile, German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, anticipating war with the United States over the U-boat issue, cabled an offer of alliance to Mexico on January 16, promising Mexico its own “lost provinces” of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in case of war with the United States. British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann telegram and leaked it to Washington, further inflaming American opinion. When U-boats proceeded in mid-March to sink the Algonquin, City of Memphis, Vigilancia, and Illinois (the latter two without warning), Wilson went before Congress and in a lofty and moving address reviewed the reasons why America was forced to take up the sword—why, “God helping her, she can do no other.” On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war on Germany, and the United States became an associated (not an Allied) power. Henceforth World War I hinged on whether the U-boats could force Britain to her knees and the German armies overwhelm the sagging Western Front before the men and matériel of the aroused Yankees could arrive in France.
The crises of 1917
War-weariness and diplomacy
For every belligerent, 1917 was a year of crisis at home and at the front, a year of wild swings and near disasters, and by the time it was over the very nature of the war had changed dramatically. A French offensive in the spring soon ground to a standstill, sparking a wave of mutinies and indiscipline in the trenches that left the French army virtually useless as an offensive force. The British offensive of July–November, called variously Passchendaele or the Third Battle of Ypres, was a tactical disaster that ended in a viscous porridge of mud. That offensive action could be ordered under such conditions is a measure of how far Western Front generals had been seduced into a gothic unreality. Allied and German casualties “in Flanders Fields, where poppies grow” numbered between 500,000 and 800,000. The British Army, too, neared the end of its offensive capacities.
For two years the Italian front had been left unchanged by the first nine battles of the Isonzo, but the underfinanced and underindustrialized Italian war effort gradually eroded. The Tenth Battle of the Isonzo (May–June 1917) cost Italy dearly, while the Eleventh (August–September) registered a “success” amounting to some five miles of advance at a cost of over 300,000 casualties, pushing the total for the war to more than 1,000,000. With peace propaganda, strikes, and communist agitation spreading throughout Italy, and the Austrians in need of stiffening, the German high command reinforced the Austrians at Caporetto. Within days the Italian commander had to order a general retreat. The Germans broke the line of the Tagliamento as well, and not until the Italians regrouped at the Piave on November 7 did the front stabilize. Caporetto cost Italy 340,000 dead and wounded, 300,000 prisoners, and another 350,000 deserters: an incredible 1,000,000 in all, suggesting that the Italian army, like the French, was on strike against its own leadership.
Among the Central Powers also, 1917 intensified the yearning for peace. Polish, Czech, and Yugoslav leaders had formed committees in exile to agitate for the autonomy or independence of their peoples, while war-weariness among those at home grew with food shortages, bad news from the front, and desertions among the troops. When Emperor Franz Joseph died in November 1916 after 68 years on the throne, there was a sense that the empire must die with him. Austro-Hungarian officials already had begun to look for a way out of the war—which meant a way out of the German alliance. The new Habsburg foreign minister, Ottokar, Graf Czernin, raised the issue of war aims and peace at his first ministerial meeting with the new emperor, Charles. A negotiated peace could only be one without victors or vanquished, conquests or indemnities—so said Czernin 10 days before Wilson’s own “Peace Without Victory” speech. The only means of achieving such a peace, however, was for Austria-Hungary’s ally Germany to restore Belgium and, perhaps, Alsace-Lorraine.
The first Austrian demarches, made through Scandinavia, came to nothing, and so Charles, Czernin, and the Empress Zita tried again in late January 1917 through the intermediary of her brother, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, on leave from service in the Belgian army. In March, Charles drafted a letter in which he asked Sixtus to convey to the president of France his “lively sympathies” and support for the evacuation of Belgium and the lost provinces. The cautious French premier, Alexandre Ribot, shared the news in April with Lloyd George, who said simply, “That means peace.” But Baron Sonnino, at the Conference of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, refused to consider peace with Austria-Hungary (the only enemy Italy was interested in fighting) and warned Lloyd George against attempts to split their alliance. Charles’s second letter, in May, which inexplicably told the French and British of an “Italian peace offer” that was never made, only put the Allies on their guard.
Simultaneously the parliamentary forces of Germany rose in protest against the war, the erosion of civilian authority, and the war-aims stubbornness of the military command. A moderate annexationist deputy, Matthias Erzberger, met with Czernin and Emperor Charles in April 1917 and learned that Austria-Hungary’s military strength was near its end. In May a Reichstag committee demanded that the army be placed under civilian control. The kaiser and the military high command replied with scorn. In July, Bethmann was forced to resign and the army assumed de facto control of Germany. When the kaiser appointed a nonentity, Georg Michaelis, as chancellor, the Reichstag passed a peace resolution on July 19 by a vote of 212–126. But the resolution could have no bearing on the ruling circles, to whom compromise with the foreign enemy meant surrender to the domestic forces of reform.
In mid-August, Pope Benedict XV tried to preserve momentum toward a truce by calling on all parties to evacuate occupied regions, but the German government again refused to surrender Belgium, while the American reply to the Vatican seemed to insist on the democratization of Germany. Emperor Charles and Czernin were likewise unable to make headway, for the Allies were not at this point seeking a general peace but only a separate peace with Austria-Hungary that would leave Germany stranded. This Vienna could not in honour do, nor Berlin permit. The United States declared war on Austria-Hungary on December 7, 1917, and, when the French government leaked news the following spring of the Austrian peace correspondence, Charles and Czernin were forced to humble themselves before the kaiser and German high command at Spa. Austria-Hungary had become a virtual satellite of the German military empire.
The Ottoman Empire in 1917 began to give way before the relatively mild but incessant pressure on fronts the other powers considered sideshows. Baghdad fell to British forces in March. Sir Edmund Allenby, having promised Lloyd George that he would deliver Jerusalem to the British people “as a Christmas present,” made good his promise on December 9. The political future of Palestine, however, was a source of confusion. In the war-aims treaties, the British had divided the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence. In their dealings with the Arabs the British spoke of independence for the region. Then, on November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration promised “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” albeit without prejudice to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.” Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour was persuaded that this action was in British interest by the energetic appeals of Chaim Weizmann, but in the long run it would cause no end of difficulty for British diplomacy.
The one flank on which Turkey had not been besieged was the Balkan, where an Allied force remained in place at Salonika pending resolution of the Greek political struggle. The Allies continued to back Prime Minister Eleuthérios Venizélos, who, because King Constantine still favored the Central Powers, had fled Athens in September 1916 and set up a provisional government under Allied protection at Salonika. Finally, the Anglo-French forces deposed Constantine in June 1917 and installed Venizélos in Athens, whereupon Greece declared war on the Central Powers. By the end of 1917, therefore, Turkey, like Austria, was exhausted, beleaguered on four fronts, and wholly dependent on German support.
