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THE LYMAN REPORT: Why America Went to War in 1917

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A blindfolded Secretary of War Newton D. Baker draws the first draft numbers from a fishbowl on 20 July 1917. The lottery numbers ranged from 1 to 10,500, and each of the 10 million registrants in the country held one of these numbers. This draft system was designed to be more fair and much more comprehensive than the one in the Civil War. Before the war ended, 4.8 million Americans would serve in the Army and Naval services between 1917 and 1919, 5 percent of the population at that time, the vast majority conscripted. Eleven percent of the eligible male population, some 338,000 men, made some effort to evade the draft when called to service. The pattern for all future draft-registration systems in the United States, including the one that 18-year-old Americans register for today, was established by the 1917 law.

 

One hundred years ago in April 1917 the United States entered World War I, a conflict involving all the major world powers that had already lasted 30 months, and stepped onto the world stage as a great power. Yet the long road to war was never the result of any deliberate national policy and was undertaken with a cautious reluctance that frustrated and angered pro-Allied interventionists like former President Theodore Roosevelt and Senate Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge. In August 1914, when the guns of August erupted across Europe, Africa, and the Far East, President Woodrow Wilson urged his fellow countrymen to be neutral in thought as well as deed. It was a very hard thing to ask, and almost impossible in a world where both sides used propaganda, diplomacy, and intrigue to influence the American people and government. German- and Irish-Americans tended to favor the Central Powers, the East and West Coasts favored the Allies, and Midwesterners and Westerners overwhelmingly supported neutrality. America at the end of 1916 was a deeply divided country.

As in 1861, 1941, and 2001, it would take an extreme provocation by a hostile power to unite the country and provide the political backing for a formal declaration of war by the U.S. Congress, as required in the Constitution. The provocation might have remained buried in history or not revealed until after the war if not for a minor naval incident in the Baltic Sea during the first weeks of the war in 1914. That incident, so little noted at the time, would change modern history and ensure that the United States would lead the Western world in the last half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century.

From 1 August 1914, the day that Germany and Russia went to war, the Baltic Sea was dominated by the Imperial German Navy, the second largest in the world, but the Tsar’s far smaller fleet made occasional forays from Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg) and her Finnish and Baltic ports, just to show the Kaiser’s beloved navy that the Russian bear had sharp teeth, even at sea. Among the islands and treacherous shoals of the Gulf of Finland it was largely a war of smaller ships, destroyer flotillas, fast light cruisers, and submarines, all seeking exposed and vulnerable victims that might be removed from the other side’s naval list without too much risk or damage to their own forces.

One of the first such casualties of this war at sea in the Gulf of Finland was the German light cruiser Magdeburg, which ran aground on an island off the Estonian coast and fell victim to Russian light cruisers happy to find a stationary target. The German captain ordered his crew to abandon ship and sent his radioman to drop the naval codebooks in deep water where they could never be recovered. Before this German sailor could do his duty, he was killed. The codebooks were discovered in a life raft along with the dead radioman by enterprising Russian sailors engaged in fishing Germans out of the freezing Baltic and promptly turned over to their superiors.

Russian naval intelligence was overwhelmed by the treasure trove that had fallen into their laps, the communication codes of Imperial German Navy and, more important, the key to unraveling their ciphering system, since all German codes were enciphered to make them absolutely unbreakable. The Russians, whose expertise was in spying on their own citizens, knew they did not have mathematicians and technicians in their ranks to use this priceless intelligence properly, information that might decide the outcome of the war. They might spend 10 years working on the cipher before they succeeded in breaking it, and Imperial Russia did not have 10 years. Their British allies, however, did have that capability.

So, the Imperial Russian government made one of its last intelligent decisions before humiliating defeats, enormous manpower losses, and collapsing morale led to abdication and revolution. In October the Russian embassy in London passed on the codebooks to the director of British Naval Intelligence. The next month, one of the most remarkable men of World War I, Rear Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall, became Director of Royal Navy Intelligence, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1919. Known as “Blinker” Hall, the new director established a secret code-breaking and radio communication intercept unit in Room 40 of the Admiralty Building.

Over time, even as it expanded with more personnel and greater space, the code-breaking unit became known as Room 40. Other encryption and codebooks fell into British hands as a result of covert operations in Persia, where German provocateurs were suborning an anti-British insurgency, and through an Austrian radio operator in Brussels who had spent most of his life in England. Lives were sacrificed to acquire these codes and ciphers, including that Anglophile Austrian in Brussels, and not all were silenced by Germans. By the spring of 1916, Room 40 was reading the full text of German naval and diplomatic wireless radio and cable traffic being sent around the world.

Blinker Hall took great care to ensure that the German government and military remained blissfully unaware that the British were listening in on and understanding their confidential communications. There was little need to worry, as it turned out. It was inconceivable to the German cryptographers and their masters that their highly complex codes enciphered by a multiplicative pattern of random numbers could ever be broken by befuddled Englishmen who had spent their professional lives attending yachting regattas and firing the occasional naval shell at rabid Chinese Boxers and Bible-thumping Boer riflemen. No one in German counterintelligence ever became suspicious. It was, like the Enigma cipher machine a generation later, the best-kept secret of the war.

As 1916, one of the worst years in the history of Western civilization, came to a close, the Germans were approaching desperation. On the Western Front alone they had lost 800,000 killed, wounded, and missing during the 10-month Battle of Verdun and five-month Battle of the Somme. The British and French had lost 1.2 million men in these battles, but that was little consolation to the German nation, which was running out of young men to feed into the meat grinder. Boys of 16 and middle-aged men of 45 were being conscripted. The Germans knew that time was not on their side. The British naval blockade was slowly but surely strangling the life out of Germany. Her people were starving, reduced to a diet of turnips. Strategic materials were in short supply.

Imperial Germany’s High Seas Fleet under Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the surface navy that had been the Kaiser’s prewar symbol of national prestige, had made a bold foray into the North Sea on 31 May 1916 in a forlorn attempt to break the British blockade but failed to achieve decisive results in the Battle of Jutland off the Danish coast, barely making it back to port during the night and early morning. British losses in warships and men were much higher and Scheer could claim a tactical victory of sorts, but the strategic result was defeat with the German surface navy confined to home ports, where it would remain until its surrender in 1918. The Royal Navy easily afforded the losses at Jutland and still retained decisive superiority in numbers of battleships and battle cruisers. They were the jailers, and the Germans were the inmates with no place to go.

Germany’s allies were becoming restive and starting to have doubts about the ultimate victory of the Central Powers. The Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Franz Josef, who had ruled since 1848, died in November, and his heir, the Emperor Karl I, was already looking for a way out of the war that would leave the Habsburgs with something left of their empire. Ethnic minorities were clamoring for self-rule and seeking recognition from the Allies, deserting the ranks of an Austrian army that was fighting on three fronts. Only the presence of German divisions stiffened their resistance and kept Austria from collapse. How long they could continue to do so was problematic.

In the Middle East, the Turks were on the defensive with an Anglo-Indian army of a quarter of a million men under Sir Stanley Maude pushing up the Tigris River toward Baghdad. The Arabs in the Hejaz of the Arabian Peninsula were in full revolt against the Turks, armed and supported by the British in Egypt and on the Sinai peninsula. Among their British advisers was an eccentric and brilliant young officer and former archaeologist, Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence, who would be made internationally famous by the war correspondent Lowell Thomas as “Lawrence of Arabia.” The Ottoman Empire and caliphate — corrupt, venal, and oppressive — was dying, kept in the war by the presence of German commanders, German weapons, and increasingly more German troops grudgingly transferred from other war fronts.

The least of Germany’s allies, Bulgaria, was under constant pressure from a growing Anglo-French-Serbian army bottled up in the Greek port of Salonika, the last Allied stronghold in the Balkans. The war that Bulgaria’s King Ferdinand had joined in September 1915 to recover territory lost to Serbia and Greece in the 1913 Second Balkan War was proving to be longer, much more expensive in lives and treasure, and far riskier than Foxy Ferdinand, as this master of intrigue was known, had ever imagined it would be.

Germany was officially still led by a civilian government under Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann-Holweg and the elected deputies in the German Reichstag, a constitutional monarchy that had been established by Bismarck, but the civilians made few, if any, decisions related to the conduct of the war. Even the Kaiser, who in 1914 exercised far greater political authority than his first cousin, Britain’s King George V, was now not much more than a figurehead who agreed to any policy that his army and navy general staffs put in front of him to sign. Germany had become a military state under the virtual dictatorship of its two most prominent soldiers.

On 29 August 1916 Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the victor over the Russians at Tannenberg in 1914 and Warsaw in 1915, replaced Erich von Falkenhayn, the architect of Verdun, as chief of the Imperial General Staff with his brilliant and relentlessly ruthless chief of operations, General Erich Ludendorff, as first quartermaster general, a title that meant nothing but held more power than any single person in German history until the advent of Adolf Hitler. Hindenburg was the indomitable face of German authority, and Ludendorff was the power behind the scenes. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the real rulers of the German Empire. They dictated the strategy, economies, and foreign policies of all the Central Powers and tolerated no opposition. They were, in effect, the most powerful men in Europe.

While Hindenburg and Ludendorff planned to win the war in 1917 and annex to the German Empire vast conquered territories, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was trying to keep America neutral and offer his services as a mediator to negotiate a compromise peace between Germany and the Allies. Indeed, he had won reelection in November 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” An idealist and progressive to the core of his being, Wilson proposed a peace without victory for either side in which the frontiers of 1914 would be restored, none of the belligerents would pay any indemnity, freedom of the seas would be guaranteed, and colonial claims decided on a basis fair to both sides. It was a way out of a war that no one seemed able to win, and Wilson was hopeful until the end that reason would prevail over emotion and greed. Of course, it did not.

Ludendorff thought that Wilson was a weakling and a hypocrite. The German army on all war fronts was well established deep inside the territory of its enemies, and those gains had been won at a high cost. The first quartermaster general and the general staffs of the army and navy regarded any peace without annexations as favorable to the Allies, showing Wilson to be pro-Ally and anti-German. The British and French governments, who had conquered Germany’s four African colonies, could not face the voters at home in the next election and tell them that more than a million French and half a million Britons had died for nothing. Wilson’s pleas for peace without victory fell on deaf ears in Germany, which offered peace terms that amounted to a demand for Allied capitulation. The Allies were more tactful, politely but firmly rejecting Wilson’s offer in London, Paris, Rome, and Petrograd.

 

These are the frontiers of Europe that the Central Powers planned to dictate after the defeat of the Allied powers. Germany expected to annex all of Belgium and Luxembourg, the northeastern part of France, all of Russian Poland, the Russian Baltic coast, Finland, Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus region. Austria would annex all of Montenegro and Albania and partition Serbia with the Bulgarians. Romania would be partitioned among Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria. It was a draconian peace that would have made the Paris peace treaties, including Versailles, seem generous by comparison. These annexations were drawn up in January 1917 as part of the peace terms presented to the Allies. President Wilson, who hoped to broker a peace without victory, was not surprised when they were rejected.

These are the frontiers of Europe that the Central Powers planned to dictate after the defeat of the Allied powers. Germany expected to annex all of Belgium and Luxembourg, the northeastern part of France, all of Russian Poland, the Russian Baltic coast, Finland, Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Caucasus region. Austria would annex all of Montenegro and Albania and partition Serbia with the Bulgarians. Romania would be partitioned among Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria. It was a draconian peace that would have made the Paris peace treaties, including Versailles, seem generous by comparison. These annexations were drawn up in January 1917 as part of the peace terms presented to the Allies. President Wilson, who hoped to broker a peace without victory, was not surprised when they were rejected.

On 9 January 1917, a day on which the world was changed forever, the military and civilian leaders of Imperial Germany met with the Kaiser at the Castle of Pless near the Polish frontier. Ludendorff and the chief of the German Naval General Staff, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorf, had persuaded Hindenburg that the time was right, and dictated by necessity, for Germany to initiate a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare against all ships, neutral along with belligerent, in the war zone the Germans had declared around the British Isles. Unrestricted meant that ships would be torpedoed without warning and no effort would be made to rescue survivors. Everyone understood that this policy would in all likelihood bring the United States into the war on the Allied side.

 

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (left), Kaiser Wilhelm II (middle), and General Erich Ludendorff (right) plan the last great German offensives of the war that they hope will secure victory before the United States can send a trained army to Europe. By 1917 the Kaiser had little influence over the strategy and operations of his armies and appeared in this photo to show the German public that their Kaiser was still a warlord, which, in reality, he no longer was. It was Ludendorff who decided the strategy and policy of the German state with Hindenburg as the respected aristocratic visage behind whom he ruled as a prototype for the Nazi regime to come. Ludendorff respected only naked state power backed up by military success. He had overseen a revolution in German infantry tactics that would take German armies to the gates of Petrograd, Venice, and Paris and set the stage for the blitzkrieg tactics of the next war.

Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (left), Kaiser Wilhelm II (middle), and General Erich Ludendorff (right) plan the last great German offensives of the war that they hope will secure victory before the United States can send a trained army to Europe. By 1917 the Kaiser had little influence over the strategy and operations of his armies and appeared in this photo to show the German public that their Kaiser was still a warlord, which, in reality, he no longer was. It was Ludendorff who decided the strategy and policy of the German state with Hindenburg as the respected aristocratic visage behind whom he ruled as a prototype for the Nazi regime to come. Ludendorff respected only naked state power backed up by military success. He had overseen a revolution in German infantry tactics that would take German armies to the gates of Petrograd, Venice, and Paris and set the stage for the blitzkrieg tactics of the next war.

 

Germany’s civilian government — facing civil unrest, strikes, and socialist Reichstag deputies demanding peace — needed to support the decision, if only to spread the responsibility if things went wrong. Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Holtzendorf assured the Kaiser and Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg that no U.S. soldier would ever set foot in Europe — long before the Yankees could ever raise, train, equip, and transport an army, the U-boats would already have won the war. German economic experts had calculated in scientific fashion with carefully compiled statistics that Britain would have to surrender in four months to avoid starvation and complete economic collapse.

Chancellor Bethmann-Holweg was doubtful. He warned Ludendorff and Hindenburg that war with the United States would bring catastrophe to Germany, that the American colossus possessed unlimited financial and industrial resources, and that U.S. belligerency would raise the morale and hopes of all the people in every Allied nation. Ludendorff dismissed these points. The United States, he argued, had no army to speak of: only 200,000 regulars, no tanks, no heavy artillery, and only a handful of flimsy aircraft flown by just 50 military aviators. The American President actually boasted of being “too proud to fight.” The Americans would have no effect on the outcome of the war that the U-boats would win in a matter of months. Bethmann-Holweg bowed to the pressure and reluctantly signed on to the strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

The Kaiser, who privately referred to Ludendorff as a top sergeant and wanted to be rid of the unpleasant man, did not have the moral courage, toughness, or intellect to stand up to Ludendorff’s assertive personality. He signed the orders and hoped that the military leaders were right, but he must have known that he was no longer in command. Wilhelm II had sealed his own fate and that of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which had ruled Germany and Prussia for three centuries. Bethmann-Holweg left the Castle of Pless in a depressed mood. Asked by a court functionary after the meeting with Ludendorff about the cause of his depression, Bethmann-Holweg replied simply, “Finis Germaniae.”

Unrestricted submarine warfare was to commence on 1 February 1917, and President Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, was informed of it the day before by the German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, who had worked tirelessly for three years to keep America neutral. He knew that Wilson had been shocked and outraged by U-boat sinkings in the first years of the war. Sinking a ship, carrying civilian passengers, without warning and then not stopping to pick up survivors was to the president an act of barbarism. It was irrelevant to Wilson, an uncompromising moralist, that the fragile submarines of the time were slow, submersible for only short periods, and could be sunk by the smallest caliber of naval gun, making any kind of warning, in a practical sense, a suicidal act for U-boat commanders.

 

These small, cramped, fragile U-boats, capable of submerging for only a few hours, are the lethal hunter-killers that will sink 5,000 Allied ships in World War I. Naval authorities before the war had planned for the submarine to perform as scouts for the battleships that would have little real utility. Few imagined, aside from Jules Verne and H.G. Welles, that it would emerge as the most effective commerce raider in naval history. During the first three months of 1917 the U-boats sank 1.3 million tons of Allied shipping and another 900,000 tons during America’s first month in the war. This was as close as the Germans would ever come to winning the war. Britain faced famine and bankruptcy. Vice Admiral William Sims, commander of the U.S Atlantic Fleet, arrived in Britain with a destroyer flotilla only weeks after the declaration of the war. They were the first U.S. combat forces to engage the enemy.

These small, cramped, fragile U-boats, capable of submerging for only a few hours, are the lethal hunter-killers that will sink 5,000 Allied ships in World War I. Naval authorities before the war had planned for the submarine to perform as scouts for the battleships that would have little real utility. Few imagined, aside from Jules Verne and H.G. Welles, that it would emerge as the most effective commerce raider in naval history. During the first three months of 1917 the U-boats sank 1.3 million tons of Allied shipping and another 900,000 tons during America’s first month in the war. This was as close as the Germans would ever come to winning the war. Britain faced famine and bankruptcy. Vice Admiral William Sims, commander of the U.S Atlantic Fleet, arrived in Britain with a destroyer flotilla only weeks after the declaration of the war. They were the first U.S. combat forces to engage the enemy.

 

When the Cunard liner Lusitania was sunk off the coast of Ireland on 7 May 1915 with 1,198 passengers and crew lost, including 128 Americans, Wilson came very close to breaking diplomatic relations with Germany. He sent an angry note to the German government, so bellicose in content that his pacifist Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, resigned his office rather than be part of it. Germany issued an apology to the United States for the loss of American lives, but at the same time awarded the U-boat captain who sank the Lusitania a decoration for valor. In April 1916, after another sinking with American lives lost, the French liner Sussex in late March, the Germans limited their submarine campaign to placate Wilson and preserve U.S. neutrality. All that would end on the first day of February.

Still there were those in Germany, primarily in the Foreign Ministry under Arthur Zimmermann, who asked what would happen if the U-boats did not win the war, only provoking American entry. There were only two possible options for Germany. The first was to knock the already exhausted Russian out of the Allied camp and then, using all of Germany’s remaining land power, which was considerable, to win the war in the West before enough Americans arrived in Europe to make a difference. The second or concurrent option was to distract and occupy the Americans with a threat closer to home. The only conceivable threat to U.S. interests close to their homeland was a country where Germany already had substantial influence and that was Mexico.

Since 1910 Mexico had been in a state of anarchic revolution and civil war, with control of the central government in Mexico City changing hands several times. During the 10 years of revolutionary upheaval, 1.3 million Mexicans died from acts of violence, most of them peasants drafted into the armies or killed in the general social disorder. Mexico was then what Syria is today, and it was on America’s doorstep, right across the Rio Grande. Wilson’s primary foreign policy concern, aside from the war in Europe, was the revolution in Mexico. He adopted a policy he called “watchful waiting,” which meant, in essence, that the United States would keep a close eye on the border and intervene with military force when U.S. interests were threatened.

In 1911 revolutionary forces had finally deposed the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, a former general under Benito Juarez who had ruled Mexico since 1876, and installed a democratic government under dedicated reformer Francisco Madero in Mexico City. Madero soon made powerful enemies among the foreign business interests, particularly oil, mining, and railroads, and the large landowners, who owned most of the country. They missed the business-friendly Diaz and looked for someone like him to lead Mexico. The man they found was General Victoriano Huerta, who had no desire to reform anything. Madero was ousted in February 1913 in a coup engineered by Huerta and assassinated with his vice president shortly after by his captors (very much like the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam five decades later), probably on the orders of Huerta, under whom the firing squads worked overtime.

Wilson was shocked by the murder of Madero and refused to recognize the Huerta government, but one government that did recognize Huerta was Germany. The German government sent officers to train and lead his army, ship loads of modern weapons, and bureaucrats and civil servants to help manage his affairs of state and finances. This was not done out of any charitable instincts on the part of Germany, but to further German influence in Mexico, which was a principal supplier of oil to the British Royal Navy. German aims were to stop that flow of oil and, if possible, acquire naval bases in Mexican ports in the event of war. Huerta was friendly to German overtures, which led Wilson to support his chief rival, General Venustiano Carranza, who called himself a Constitutionalist and whose power base was in northern Mexico.

Aside from the rival generals, there were other revolutionary armies vying for power in the Mexican chaos. In the south an agrarian reformer named Emiliano Zapata led a peasant army in the cause of land reform. In the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, a Constitutionalist general named Francisco “Pancho” Villa led a ragtag army of bandits and self-proclaimed revolutionaries, killing land owners and government soldiers out of hand and raping the wives and daughters of class enemies. Largely due to favorable press coverage, which left out the darker side of their exploits, Villa and Zapata became folk heroes in both Mexico and the United States. For a time, simply because Villa was fighting against Huerta and Carranza, the Wilson administration gave him some tacit support and allowed him to purchase arms in Texas. That marriage of strange bedfellows would not last.

 

Mexico in chaos! General Francisco “Pancho” Villa (center left) and revolutionary insurgent Emiliano Zapata (center right) occupy the presidential palace in Mexico City after Mexican President Venustiano Carranza and Constitutionalist forces are driven from the capital on 6 December 1914. The two legendary figures soon had a falling out over how they intended to govern Mexico and lost the capital to Carranza’s army after a brief occupation in which they looted anything that was not nailed down. Carranza followed Villa north with an army led by professional officers and staffed with German advisors, well supplied with German machine guns, French artillery, and armored trains that were intended to assert government authority to the U.S. border. The army carried out ruthless reprisals against any Mexican village that provided sanctuary or sustenance to Villa, not that they would have had any choice in the matter.

Mexico in chaos! General Francisco “Pancho” Villa (center left) and revolutionary insurgent Emiliano Zapata (center right) occupy the presidential palace in Mexico City after Mexican President Venustiano Carranza and Constitutionalist forces are driven from the capital on 6 December 1914. The two legendary figures soon had a falling out over how they intended to govern Mexico and lost the capital to Carranza’s army after a brief occupation in which they looted anything that was not nailed down. Carranza followed Villa north with an army led by professional officers and staffed with German advisors, well supplied with German machine guns, French artillery, and armored trains that were intended to assert government authority to the U.S. border. The army carried out ruthless reprisals against any Mexican village that provided sanctuary or sustenance to Villa, not that they would have had any choice in the matter.

 

In April 1914, after a U.S. Navy shore party was temporarily detained by Mexican authorities in Veracruz, a crisis escalated between the Huerta government and Washington. The admiral commanding the U.S. naval squadron in the Gulf of Mexico demanded an apology for the arrest of the sailors and a 21-gun salute from the Mexican military as a show of respect. Huerta issued the apology but refused the salute. Wilson backed up his admiral, if only because of his loathing for Huerta. The Navy landed a force of 800 Marines and sailors in Veracruz to occupy the port until Mexico acquiesced to a 21-gun salute. In the ensuing battle for the Customs House and other public buildings, 19 Americans and 126 Mexicans were killed. Wilson now occupied a piece of Mexican sovereign territory, which for the first time since the start of the Revolution united nearly all Mexican opinion, and that opinion was vehemently anti-American.

Wilson’s occupation of Veracruz, as short as it was, did prevent more German arms from reaching Huerta. A German ship packed with bolt-action Mausers, machine guns, and millions of rounds of ammunition was turned around by the U.S. Navy and denied to the Huerta government, which shifted the balance of power to Carranza in the north. In July General Huerta boarded a German ship in Veracruz and sailed off to exile in Spain. General Carranza assumed the presidency and established a dictatorship that was indistinguishable from that of Huerta, enforced with firing squads and machine guns. The German ambassador in Mexico City, Heinrich von Eckhardt, promised the same German friendship and support to Mexico’s new leader as it had the previous one. The German government had many friends in Mexico and a common potential enemy: the United States.

Alarmed by the continuing violence inside Mexico and the real potential for it spilling across the border, Wilson recognized the Carranza regime as the official government of Mexico in October 1915, which surprised everyone. Wilson, like many of his successors in the White House (Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, to name the most recent), believed that democracy was the answer to all international problems, and authoritarianism and militarism the root of all international problems. It is a flawed point of view, but it reflected the thinking of Wilson and the people around him. They truly believed that they could make the world safe for democracy and that this should be the primary foreign policy objective of the United States, which it has been ever since.

American recognition of Carranza did have consequences. Pancho Villa, who had been favorably disposed toward the United States, felt betrayed by the American acceptance of the Carranza dictatorship as the official government of Mexico. He reacted like the anarchic bandit that he was with violence that could not possibly benefit Mexico. On 10 January 1916 the Villistas stopped a passenger train near the town of Santa Ysabel in Chihuahua. They removed 17 American mining engineers from the train, stripped them, and shot them execution style. On 9 March, Villa invaded the United States and attacked Columbus, New Mexico, with 400 riders, the first and only land attack on U.S. continental soil since the War of 1812. Another 20 Americans were killed in Columbus, and half the town was burned to the ground. Four-fifths of the U.S. Army was sent to the Mexican border under the most influential and successful American soldier of his generation, John J. Pershing.

 

Major General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing crosses the Rio Grande with his staff during the “Punitive Expedition” after the Villista attack on Columbus, New Mexico. Pershing was what we would call today the U.S. Army’s leading expert on defeating insurgencies. Pershing, then age 56, had started his army career after West Point fighting Apaches in the Southwest and Ghost Dancer Sioux in the Dakotas. Serving with the elite 10th Cavalry, an African-American regiment, at the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898, Pershing, still a first lieutenant, had been transferred to the Philippine Islands, where as a captain he suppressed an Islamic Moro rebellion on Mindanao in the first decade of the 20th century and attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. His subsequent rise through the ranks of the army was meteoric until receiving the all-important command of the American Expeditionary Force to Europe in May 1918.

Major General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing crosses the Rio Grande with his staff during the “Punitive Expedition” after the Villista attack on Columbus, New Mexico. Pershing was what we would call today the U.S. Army’s leading expert on defeating insurgencies. Pershing, then age 56, had started his army career after West Point fighting Apaches in the Southwest and Ghost Dancer Sioux in the Dakotas. Serving with the elite 10th Cavalry, an African-American regiment, at the Battle of San Juan Hill in 1898, Pershing, still a first lieutenant, had been transferred to the Philippine Islands, where as a captain he suppressed an Islamic Moro rebellion on Mindanao in the first decade of the 20th century and attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. His subsequent rise through the ranks of the army was meteoric until receiving the all-important command of the American Expeditionary Force to Europe in May 1918.

 

Known in the Army as “Black Jack” for his service with the African-American 10th Cavalry Regiment in the Spanish-American War, Pershing had served on the Mexican border since the Veracruz crisis. During that time his principal objective had been to keep peace on the border. Pershing had met with Villa several times, and they had a good personal relationship. When Pershing’s wife and three young children died in a house fire at the Presidio in San Francisco, Villa sent the general his condolences. After the Columbus, New Mexico, attack, Pershing was ordered to enter Mexico, defeat Villa’s army, and capture Villa. The Carranza regime was at first more than happy to let the Americans do their work for them, since Villa had been a thorn in their side since the fall of Huerta.

 

A column of U.S. cavalry advance south into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa and his ragtag army of horsemen. The U.S. Army in 1916 was not too much changed from the army of Custer and Crook, lacking modern weapons and reliable motorized transport. Machine guns were in short supply, and artillery was antiquated. In Mexico, a few rickety Curtis Jenny JN-4 biplanes were flown in scouting missions and to drop a few bombs by hand, establishing the U.S. Army Air Service that would later become the Army Air Corps and the Army Air Force before it became a separate branch of the service. This was a small army that was accustomed to doing a great deal with very little. It would soon be expanded into very large army of 4 million men and a few women that would face an enormous task with all the resources that the world’s greatest manufacturing nation could give them.

A column of U.S. cavalry advance south into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa and his ragtag army of horsemen. The U.S. Army in 1916 was not too much changed from the army of Custer and Crook, lacking modern weapons and reliable motorized transport. Machine guns were in short supply, and artillery was antiquated. In Mexico, a few rickety Curtis Jenny JN-4 biplanes were flown in scouting missions and to drop a few bombs by hand, establishing the U.S. Army Air Service that would later become the Army Air Corps and the Army Air Force before it became a separate branch of the service. This was a small army that was accustomed to doing a great deal with very little. It would soon be expanded into very large army of 4 million men and a few women that would face an enormous task with all the resources that the world’s greatest manufacturing nation could give them.

 

Pershing crossed the Mexican border into the state of Chihuahua on 15 March 1916 with more than 3,000 horse cavalry and motorized vehicles. By summer more than 12,000 U.S. troops were deep inside Mexico and engaged in numerous small-scale actions with the Villistas. Villa and his highly mobile forces were scattered but kept ahead of the Americans in the rugged country of northern Mexico. Carranza refused to let Pershing make use of Mexican railroads, which hampered operations and made logistics a daunting challenge. When Carranza soldiers encountered U.S. troops, they frequently clashed. Soon Pershing’s punitive expedition was spending much more time fighting the Mexican army than Villa’s irregulars. By the end of 1916, the United States and Mexico seemed to be on the verge of war as Wilson’s policy of watchful waiting ended in what was proving to be a quagmire with no end in sight.

In Berlin, Foreign Minister Zimmermann, who thought of himself as something of an authority on the United States, was delighted at the course of events. German diplomats and agents in Mexico were encouraging both Carranza and Villa to resist the “Punitive Expedition” and promising financial support in the event of war. As war with the United States was expected after the commencement of unrestricted submarine warfare, Zimmermann proposed an alliance with Mexico, and Ludendorff and the Kaiser agreed. Of course, the Mexicans would have to be offered financial and territorial inducements, and the alliance would need a third partner to make it viable and a genuine national security threat to the United States. The obvious third partner was Japan.

Japan and the United States had been at loggerheads since the U.S. annexation of the Philippines at the end of the Spanish-American War. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt had sent the Great White Fleet around the world, primarily to impress Japan with American capability to project power, and they were impressed. Both countries started to make plans for a naval war in the Pacific, and the army and naval general staffs of the U.S. and Japanese armed forces regarded that war as all but inevitable, a mere matter of time.

Officially, Japan was an Allied power. In 1914 her army had seized the German concessions in China and the German island groups in the Pacific, which would play such a large part in the next war. Since taking all the German possessions within their reach, the Japanese had been sitting out the war. They were not about to send an expeditionary force to Europe as the Australians had done. Indeed, they sympathized with German aims in Europe, which were antithetical to those of the other colonial powers in Asia. An alliance between Germany, Japan, and Mexico seemed a natural partnership to Zimmermann, one that would open a front in North America that would keep the U.S. Army fully occupied until Germany won the war in Europe.

On 16 January 1917, Zimmermann dispatched a coded and enciphered telegram to German Ambassador Bernstorff in Washington. The telegram was sent on the U.S. State Department cable, a courtesy offered by Wilson and Lansing, since all the German trans-Atlantic cables had been cut at the start of the war. Bernstorff acted as a conduit to transmit cables via Western Union to other German diplomatic missions in the Western Hemisphere. In the telegram, soon to be infamous, Zimmermann proposed that Eckhardt, the German ambassador in Mexico City, approach Carranza and the Japanese ambassador with an offer of a joint alliance with Germany against the United States.

The Zimmermann telegram offered Mexico generous German financial support and a German commitment to help Mexico recover her lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. While this may seem a fantastical proposal today, it was not so much of one in 1917. The Alamo and U.S.-Mexican War were still in the memory of living men at that time, and Mexicans had never resigned themselves to the loss of the northern half of their country. Indeed, they still have not done so, and the ultimate disposition of those lands remains to be seen. It was expected that Mexico would jump at the opportunity the Kaiser’s government presented them.

At the same time Japan would receive Germany’s assurance that they would not dispute the loss of her China concessions and Pacific Islands, and would support Japanese aspirations in China, which had already been revealed in her outrageous “21 Demands” of 1915 that would effectively make the Chinese Republic an economic colony. Only the United States stood in the way of these demands against Chinese sovereignty. As early as 1908, the Japanese had approached the Mexican government about a naval base at Magdalena Bay on the Baja peninsula, and in 1915, during the Veracruz crisis, they had sent warships to Turtle Bay on the Baja in the expectation that Huerta would let them stay as a deterrent to the Americans. The crisis ended, and Huerta fell from power before anything could come of it. Zimmermann had high expectations that the Imperial government would be receptive to the German courtship.

British Naval Intelligence under Admiral Hall had wiretapped all communications coming out of Europe and the Zimmermann telegram was picked up along with the rest of the wireless and cable traffic. When the message was decoded and deciphered by the cryptographers in Room 40, Blinker Hall knew instantly that he had in his possession a bombshell that might change the course of the war. The problem for Room 40 was how to hand over the translated text of this secret German communication to the Americans without also revealing that they had broken the German codes and cipher system. They had to convince the pacifists and isolationists in America that it was no British forgery and fool the Germans into believing that it had been acquired through conventional espionage activities. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Arthur Balfour, gave Blinker Hall a free hand to expose the Zimmermann telegram in his own time and manner.

On 25 January 1917, Wilson ordered the evacuation of the Punitive Expedition from Mexico, declaring the mission largely accomplished. Pershing would complete the withdrawal from Mexico by early February, leaving Villa still at large. Six days after the evacuation order was issued, Ambassador Bernstorff informed Secretary Lansing that unrestricted submarine warfare would start the next day. Wilson was angered by the German decision and left with no choice but to do what he had threatened and break diplomatic relations with the German Empire, which he did on 3 February. He still hoped to maintain American neutrality and become the mediator when both sides were ready to make a peace without victory. Even Woodrow Wilson was finding it hard to be a peacemaker in 1917.

It would require a major provocation to convince President Wilson that he had to go before Congress and ask for a declaration of war. Former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Senate Republican leader Henry Cabot Lodge on 12 February, “I don’t believe Wilson will go to war unless Germany literally kicks him into it.” Roosevelt and Lodge were both frustrated by what they saw as Wilson’s failure to lead. They had been urging military preparedness and a stronger response to German outrages ever since 1914, fighting the very strong pacifist and isolationist sentiments in America at that time. Teddy Roosevelt, who was only 58, expected to get back in uniform and hold another military command when the United States did finally go to war. He also planned to run for president again in 1920 but would not live long enough for this political last hurrah. He would, however, live to see Germany kick Wilson into the war.

Events moved rapidly. British Naval Intelligence handed the Zimmermann telegram over to the U.S. Embassy in London on 24 February. The cover story was that it had been purloined by an agent inside the German embassy in Mexico City. Wilson was outraged when he read the telegram but waited to release it the newspapers, which were the principal mass media in the United States at that time. He spent a week without making any kind of decision and then broke the story in the New York Times on 1 March. During that week the authenticity of the document was established by checking the records of Western Union and papers seized from Count Bernstorff during his return to Germany on a Swedish ship that dropped anchor briefly in the Canadian port of Halifax.

 

This is an actual photo of the Zimmermann telegram as it was sent by Western Union from the German Ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, to the German legation in Mexico City on 18 January 1917. Next to it is a decoded and deciphered English translation from the cryptographers of Room 40 in British Naval Intelligence under Rear Admiral Sir William Reginald “Blinker” Hall. The telegram clearly proposed an alliance among Germany, Mexico, and Japan, and an understanding on the part of Germany that Mexico would reconquer her lost territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. This was the most spectacular espionage coup of the war, one that propelled an isolationist and pacifist American nation into the fire of the Great War. British Naval Intelligence continued to read all the German wireless and cable traffic throughout the war, while the German military and diplomatic service never suspected that their codes and cipher system had been broken and they might as well have been transmitting in the clear.

This is an actual photo of the Zimmermann telegram as it was sent by Western Union from the German Ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, to the German legation in Mexico City on 18 January 1917. Next to it is a decoded and deciphered English translation from the cryptographers of Room 40 in British Naval Intelligence under Rear Admiral Sir William Reginald “Blinker” Hall. The telegram clearly proposed an alliance among Germany, Mexico, and Japan, and an understanding on the part of Germany that Mexico would reconquer her lost territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. This was the most spectacular espionage coup of the war, one that propelled an isolationist and pacifist American nation into the fire of the Great War. British Naval Intelligence continued to read all the German wireless and cable traffic throughout the war, while the German military and diplomatic service never suspected that their codes and cipher system had been broken and they might as well have been transmitting in the clear.

 

As expected by Blinker Hall, the exposure of the Zimmermann telegram with its proposal for an anti-American alliance that would dismember the American southwest sent shock waves across the country. It was not quite Pearl Harbor, but it was close. Most of the country clamored for war as the last vestiges of neutrality and pacifism were shouted down. In California fears of the “Yellow Peril” were revived, along with suspicion of the loyalty of Japanese immigrants, and in Texas men rushed to the border to defend the virtue of Texas Womanhood from rampaging Mexican hordes. Pancho Villa did not help matters any when he announced that he was going to “help the Germans whip the United States and obtain California, Arizona, and Texas back for Mexico.” While always willing to kill at the drop of a sombrero, Villa prudently never crossed the U.S. border again.

There were many people, dubious of anything coming from Perfidious Albion, who still doubted the authenticity of the Zimmermann telegram, but they were silenced by Zimmermann himself, who admitted his authorship to an American correspondent from the Hearst newspaper chain on 3 March, “I cannot deny it. It is true.” Zimmermann did not understand the American outrage over the matter. This was just what nations did in their own interests as a matter of self-defense; only naïve children could object to such practical diplomacy, even if they were the object of it. His casual and unapologetic admission of guilt generated further clamor for war in the American press, Congress, and everywhere but the White House.

Zimmermann had warned the U.S. ambassador in Berlin that America’s millions of German immigrants would never support a war against the homeland and that a half million would rise up in revolt if Wilson made the foolish mistake of declaring war. Zimmermann, the self-proclaimed authority on the United States, would be proved wrong again. Treason by German-Americans would be almost nonexistent; although, like all perceived foreign elements, they came under suspicion and harassment from home front patriots not in uniform. The only disloyalty would come from anarchists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Wobblies, fighting against the Draft Law and agitating for labor strikes, and the Bolsheviks calling for a world revolution. These people were thrown into prison or deported.

On 15 March 1917 another impediment standing in the way of American entry into the war was removed. The Allied cause had always been tainted by its alliance with the reactionary Tsarist regime of Russia. On 11 March starving rioters demanding bread in Petrograd had been joined by soldiers of an Imperial Guard regiment, who murdered their officers and released political dissidents from the prisons and jails. The autocratic Tsar Nicholas II, who exercised command of the Russian armies in the field, rushed back by train from the front to the capital. His train was stopped by revolution-infected troops blocking the tracks and turned back. The Revolution was spreading fast in the streets and the army.

At Imperial Army high command headquarters, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate his throne and submit to arrest along with his family in Petrograd. The Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries was finished. A provisional government of social democrats under Prince Lvov as prime minister and Alexander Kerensky, the Minister of War, took power in the Duma, the Russian parliament. Russia was now one of the democracies, and the Allies could claim without hypocrisy that they were fighting for democratic values. As in 1991, Russia seemed headed for a democratic future, and, as in 1991, that democratic future would be short-lived. The provisional government’s first act was to commit itself to the Allied cause and victory with no separate peace.

Wilson still refused to take America into war. He retained hope that Germany would back off from the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare before a serious incident at sea. Wilson feared that his progressive programs, the very thing that had driven the Princeton professor into politics, would never see the light of day in a wartime environment and the rest of his term in office would need to be devoted to war and foreign policy, which, indeed, it was. Then, on 18 March, three unarmed American merchant ships were torpedoed without warning and with heavy loss of life. There was no other option but war at that point. Wilson delayed another two weeks, but went to Congress on 2 April to ask for a war declaration. Never has an American president taken his country into war with such reluctance.

The president gave a moving address, probably the best speech of his political career, to a joint session of Congress. It was one of the first presidential addresses broadcast on radio and heard by large segments of the American people. Congress was by no means unanimous in its response to Wilson’s request for a declaration of war, and under the Constitution it is Congress, not the president, which holds the power to declare war. This was only the fourth time in U.S. history that an American president had made such a request of the legislature. Both houses of Congress hotly debated the issue of war and peace for four days.

Wisconsin progressive populist Senator Robert La Follette Sr., the Bernie Sanders of that time, fought a passionate rear-guard action in the Senate to stop the country from going to war. La Follette had opposed all efforts to prepare the country for war, fighting every military expenditure. He urged his colleagues to remember that Britain had also violated American neutrality. Of course, the British violations did not end up killing Americans. In the House, pacifist Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin led the fight in opposition to the “warmonger” Wilson. (Rankin would become the only member of Congress to vote against going to war with Japan after Pearl Harbor and would live long enough to march against the Vietnam War.) On 4 April the Senate passed the war resolution by a vote of 82 to 6, and on 6 April 1917 the House passed it 373 to 50.

The United States was in the war, the greatest war in its history to that point. The exhausted and nearly bankrupt Allied nations were heartened as they had not been in years by the entry of the United States, the world’s wealthiest industrial, financial, and agricultural nation. Although it was more than a year before an American Army was ready to take over a major sector of the Western Front, Ludendorff’s promise to his Kaiser that no American soldier would set foot in Europe was shown to be empty within two months. In June, the U.S. First Infantry Division (the Big Red One), the only trained division in the U.S. Army, landed in France as the first contingent of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) that would number more than two million men by Armistice Day. The commander of the AEF was the man who for a year had chased Pancho Villa across northern Mexico, General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.

As for Zimmermann’s proposed alliance with Mexico and Japan, the bombshell that had pushed the United States from neutrality toward belligerency, there was not much more to be heard from it. Carranza had met secretly with Eckhardt, the German ambassador, but he was not about to act without an assurance of a Japanese alliance and a fountain of German money that was not forthcoming. A Japanese envoy to Washington informed Secretary of State Lansing that the German government had approached them three times about abandoning the Allied cause, but that they had no intention of doing so. Japan wisely determined that this was not the right time or the right war to settle its differences with the United States and that Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany and Carranza’s Mexico were not the right allies.

In 1917 the United States opened the door to world leadership, and there was no turning back — although, heaven knows, the American people would try to do so more than once. Wilson’s dream of making the world safe for democracy and making this the war to end all wars was not to be. While his idea for a world body that would protect small nations with collective security and mediate international disputes was realized in League of Nations, the Senate of his own country, led by his old rival Henry Cabot Lodge, rejected the League. The League had little chance to succeed without the power of the United States behind it, and when it faced serious challenges in the 1930s, its member states lacked the will, courage, and strength to meet them.

Woodrow Wilson died in February 1924 a broken man, largely ignored by a nation that was drinking bathtub gin and dancing the Charleston in the Roaring Twenties and trying hard to forget the war. Wilson is remembered rather badly these days, scorned for different reasons by demagogues and historical illiterates of the Left and the Right, but a hundred years after taking America to war, he deserves better from his countrymen. For all his tragic character flaws, this American president more than any other is responsible for the fact that we are the leader of what has come to be known as the Free World, and I think Wilson would approve of that.

 

Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.


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