World War I: Military and Diplomacy in two minutes
- Wilson declared neutrality in 1914, but trade and loans favored the Allies, and Germany's U-boats, which sank the Lusitania in May 1915 and killed 128 Americans, strained that neutrality.
- Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann Telegram offering Mexico an alliance became public, and Wilson asked for war on April 2, 1917; Congress declared it April 6.
- Wilson cast the war as a defense of democracy, a break with the tradition of avoiding European affairs; a draft, naval convoys and Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces carried the fight to France.
- American troops played a limited combat role, fighting at Belleau Wood and in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, but their fresh numbers tipped the balance before the armistice of November 11, 1918.
- Wilson's Fourteen Points (January 1918) called for freedom of the seas, self-determination and a League of Nations; the Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) included the League but punished Germany harshly.
- Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other critics objected to Article X, which pledged members to defend one another; the Senate rejected the treaty in 1919 and 1920.
- On the exam: Topic 7.5 asks for causes and consequences of entering World War I and of rejecting the League; connect it to Washington's neutrality and the 1930s Neutrality Acts.
Topic 7.5 key terms
- Zimmermann Telegram
A secret telegram sent in January 1917 by Germany's foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann. It proposed an alliance with Mexico if the United States entered the war, and offered to help Mexico win back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. British codebreakers read it, and its publication in March 1917 hardened American opinion against Germany.
- Unrestricted submarine warfare
Sinking merchant ships, neutral ones included, on sight and without warning inside a declared war zone. Germany announced it for February 1, 1917, ending the promise it had made after the Sussex attack in 1916. Attacks on American ships followed, and they were a main immediate cause of U.S. entry into the war.
- Election of 1916
Democrat Woodrow Wilson narrowly beat Republican Charles Evans Hughes, 277 electoral votes to 254. His party campaigned on peace and prosperity, and on a slogan that gave Wilson the credit for keeping the United States out of the European war: “He kept us out of war.”
- Allied Powers
The coalition that fought Germany and its partners in World War I. It began as Britain, France and Russia, and later added Italy (1915) and the United States (1917).
- Central Powers
Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, joined by Bulgaria in 1915. They fought the Allied Powers from 1914 to 1918.
- Neutrality
A nation's refusal to take sides in other countries' wars. Wilson declared it in August 1914 and asked Americans to stay impartial too, in the tradition of noninvolvement that began with Washington and Jefferson.
- Propaganda
Information, often slanted or exaggerated, spread to win support for a cause. After Britain cut Germany's cables, American newspapers got their war news through London, including stories of German atrocities in Belgium. Some were true. Some were invented.
- Freedom of the seas
The principle that neutral ships may carry goods to any country in wartime without being seized or sunk. Wilson demanded it from Britain, which stopped American cargoes, and from Germany, whose submarines sank ships.
- Ethnic influences
How immigrants' ties to their homelands shaped American opinion. Many German Americans wanted Germany to win, and many Irish Americans wanted Britain beaten. Many Americans of British descent leaned toward the Allies.
- Submarine warfare
Germany's use of U-boats to sink ships on sight, with little or no warning. After Britain's blockade cut off German trade, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone (announced February 4, in force February 18, 1915). Neutral ships, and Americans aboard Allied ships, were now at risk.
- Lusitania
Cunard's fast British passenger liner, sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915. Of the 1,198 people who died, 128 were Americans. The sinking turned much American opinion against Germany, but Wilson kept the country out of the war for nearly two more years.
- Strict accountability
Wilson's warning, in a February 10, 1915 note, that the U.S. would hold Germany to "strict accountability" for any American ships or lives lost to its submarines. After the Lusitania, Wilson sent Germany two more sharp notes (May 13 and June 9). Bryan, who wanted to keep Americans off belligerent ships, thought they risked war and resigned before the second went out.
- Sussex pledge
Germany's promise of May 4, 1916, made after Wilson threatened to cut off relations, to stop sinking merchant ships without warning. It came with a condition: Germany said it could change course if the U.S. did not make Britain obey the rules of blockade too. Germany kept the pledge until February 1917.
- Preparedness
The 1915–1916 campaign to build up the U.S. army and navy in case the war reached America. Wilson took it up in 1916 and signed the National Defense Act in June. Peace progressives such as Bryan and Jane Addams opposed it as a step toward war.
- Peace without victory
Wilson's plan, announced January 22, 1917, to end the war with no winner and no loser. He argued that only a peace between equals could last. Neither side accepted it.
- Russian Revolution
The March 1917 uprising in Petrograd that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. It removed the autocrat from the Allied side and let Wilson describe the war as democracies against autocracy.
- Humanitarian and democratic principles
The College Board's phrase for the aims Wilson gave the war: spreading democracy and protecting human rights abroad. It marked a break with the tradition of noninvolvement in European wars.
- Convoy system
Merchant ships sailing together under warship escort instead of alone. A convoy was harder for U-boats to find and easier to fight. The U.S. Navy joined it in 1917, and troopships crossed the same way.
- American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)
The U.S. Army sent to Europe in 1917–18 under Gen. John J. Pershing. About two million Americans reached France. Pershing fought to keep them together as their own army, not scattered among British and French units.
- Segregated units
The U.S. Army kept Black and white soldiers in separate units, mostly under white officers, and assigned most Black soldiers to labor and supply work. The four Black combat regiments of the 93rd Division fought under French command.
- Western Front
The main line of battle in France and Belgium, where Germany faced Britain, France and, from 1917, the United States. Trench warfare held it nearly still until 1918.
- Meuse-Argonne offensive
The American First Army's attack of September 26 to November 11, 1918, between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest in northeastern France. It was the largest battle in American history and the AEF's last big offensive of World War I.
- Hello Girls
The nickname for the American women who ran Army telephone switchboards in France in 1918. Fluent in French and English, more than 200 of them worked in France for the Signal Corps, connecting headquarters, units and the French.
- Limited, but it tipped the balance
AP shorthand for the American role: compared with Britain, France or Germany, the AEF fought in force for a short time, so its combat role was relatively limited. But it arrived when the other armies were exhausted, with fresh troops and supplies, and that helped tip the balance toward the Allies.
- Armistice
An agreement to stop fighting. It is not a peace treaty: the terms of peace came later, at Versailles in 1919.
- Sound ranging
A way to find enemy guns without seeing them. Microphones spaced along the front recorded when each gun's boom arrived, and the tiny differences in timing pinpointed where the gun stood.
- American Expeditionary Forces
The U.S. Army in Europe, under General Pershing. Its combat role was relatively limited, but its arrival helped tip the balance toward the Allies.
- Fourteen Points (1918)
Wilson's January 1918 program for a lasting peace: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, fewer weapons, fair colonial claims, new borders drawn by nationality, and a League of Nations. Germany asked for an armistice on this basis.
- Self-determination
The idea that each people should choose its own government. Wilson pointed it at Europe's nationalities. Colonized peoples in Asia and Africa hoped it would apply to them too.
- Big Four
Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando, the leaders who made the main decisions at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Wilson gave way on most of the Fourteen Points but held out for the League.
- Treaty of Versailles (1919)
The peace treaty with Germany, signed June 28, 1919. It made Germany accept guilt for the war (Article 231), pay reparations, give up territory and colonies, and limit its army. It also created the League of Nations.
- League of Nations
The international organization created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to keep peace by collective security. Article X pledged members to protect one another's territory and independence. Wilson later called Article X 'the heart of the whole matter.'
- Article X
Article X of the League covenant: members promise 'to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.' Lodge feared it could commit the United States to war without a vote in Congress. Wilson answered that the League's Council could only advise.
- Irreconcilables
About sixteen senators (historians' counts run from about twelve to eighteen), mostly Republicans, who opposed joining the League in any form, however the covenant was worded. Borah of Idaho, Hiram Johnson of California and La Follette of Wisconsin were among them.
- Reservationists
Senators led by Lodge who would accept the League only if the Senate attached changes, called reservations, to the ratification. One of Lodge's fourteen said the United States would take on no Article X duty unless Congress voted for it.
- Collective security
A system in which nations promise to act together against an aggressor, so an attack on one becomes everyone's problem. It was the idea behind the League of Nations. Wilson argued for it; the Senate declined to join.
- Normalcy
Warren Harding's 1920 campaign word for a return to peacetime quiet after the war and the reform crusades. In May 1920 he said the country needed "not nostrums but normalcy." Voters agreed: he won about 60 percent of the popular vote.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Last Groups
January 17, 1917
Key terms: Zimmermann Telegram, Unrestricted submarine warfare, Election of 1916
London, January 1917. In Room 40 of the Admiralty, the British are reading Germany's mail.
Tonight's letter is from Berlin. The men breaking it are a publisher and a Presbyterian minister.
It's from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann. Germany will sink ships without warning. And it mentions Mexico.
Arthur Zimmermann
…Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Germany's codebook had no word for Arizona. It had to be spelled out, syllable by syllable.
Two months earlier, Americans had re-elected Woodrow Wilson on a slogan. He kept us out of war.
How did a country that stayed out of Europe's wars end up in the biggest one yet, and then refuse the peace its own president wrote?
So how did a country that stayed out of Europe's wars end up in the biggest one yet, and then refuse the peace its own president wrote?
Impartial in Thought
1914–1915
Key terms: Allied Powers, Central Powers, Neutrality, Propaganda, Freedom of the seas, Ethnic influences
A gunman shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Alliances did the rest. Within six weeks, the Allied Powers and the Central Powers were at war.
Wilson's wife Ellen died on August 6. Thirteen days later, he asked the country for neutrality.
Woodrow Wilson
We must be impartial in thought as well as in action…
George Washington
'Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world.
The oldest rule in American foreign policy.
In the war's first days, a British ship cut Germany's undersea cables. After that, most war news reached America through London.
Britain's navy blockaded Germany. So American trade flowed to one side.
Trade with the Allies nearly quadrupled. With Germany, it all but vanished. Banks lent the Allies over two billion dollars. Germany got twenty-seven million dollars.
William Jennings Bryan
Money is the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else.
Wilson agreed, at first. By 1915, the loans were flowing.
Over thirty percent of Americans were immigrants or their children. Many German and Irish Americans hoped Britain would lose.
Theodore Roosevelt
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
Wilson demanded freedom of the seas from both navies. Only one of them could kill you.
Eighteen Minutes
1915–1916
Key terms: Submarine warfare, Lusitania, Strict accountability, Sussex pledge, Preparedness
Germany answered Britain's blockade with a new weapon, the U-boat. In February 1915, it declared the waters around Britain a war zone.
On May 1, the German embassy ran a warning in New York papers. In some, it sat beside the Lusitania's sailing notice.
May 7, 1915. A calm sea, eleven nautical miles off the Irish coast. The Lusitania was nearly home. One torpedo.
The ship sank in eighteen minutes. 1,198 people died. 128 of them were Americans.
Germany said the ship carried rifle ammunition. It did: over four million rounds. Americans saw a liner full of civilians.
Woodrow Wilson
There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.
He never named the ship. Roosevelt was disgusted.
Wilson warned Germany of "strict accountability." Bryan, his Secretary of State, quit over it. So Wilson was too soft for Roosevelt and too tough for Bryan.
In March 1916, a U-boat torpedoed the ferry Sussex, wounding Americans. Wilson threatened to break relations. Germany pledged to stop sinking merchant ships without warning.
That March, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico. Pershing chased him for eleven months and never caught him. Mexico remembered Veracruz, and the land lost in 1848.
Wilson, once against a bigger army, now toured the country demanding one. In June, Congress raised the army toward 175,000. Backers called it preparedness.
Democrats ran on "He kept us out of war." Wilson carried California by fewer than 4,000 votes, and the election with it. The slogan lasted five months.
Safe for Democracy
January–April 1917
Key terms: Peace without victory, Unrestricted submarine warfare, Zimmermann Telegram, Russian Revolution, Humanitarian and democratic principles
Woodrow Wilson
…it must be a peace without victory.
Wilson asked Europe to end the war as equals. A victor's peace, he warned, would leave a sting.
Germany's commanders had already made their bet: starve Britain in five months, before America could matter. On February 1, the U-boat war began. Two days later, Wilson broke relations.
So Hall had a problem. Showing Washington the telegram meant admitting he'd been reading Washington's mail.
Hall's agents in Mexico City found a second copy at the telegraph office. Now Britain could say it found the telegram in Mexico, and hide its tap on the cable.
It offered Mexico an alliance, and Texas, New Mexico and Arizona back. Washington released it. On March 1, papers everywhere printed it.
Plenty of Americans called it a British forgery. Then, on March 3, Zimmermann told reporters it was real.
Arthur Zimmermann
I cannot deny it. It is true.
On March 15, Russia's tsar gave up his throne. Now the Allies had no tsar, and Wilson could call this a fight for democracy.
U-boats sank three American ships in three days. On the rainy night of April 2, Wilson asked Congress for war.
Woodrow Wilson
The world must be made safe for democracy.
Not for land or payment. For democracy, and a break with a century of staying out of Europe's wars.
The Senate voted 82 to 6. The House voted 373 to 50.
Jeannette Rankin
I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no.
That afternoon, Wilson signed. The United States was at war. Its army had about 200,000 men. Germany's had millions.
Lafayette, We Are Here
1917–1918
Key terms: Convoy system, American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), Segregated units, Western Front
Here's a photograph from near the end of this story. Before you know anything about it, think of three things you'd need to find out.
Congress passed a draft. By the war's end, 24 million men had registered for it.
The Navy herded merchant ships into escorted convoys, and the sinkings fell.
Pershing usually gets the credit for this line. It was one of his colonels.
Col. Charles E. Stanton
Lafayette, we are here.
Britain and France wanted Americans fed into their own tired divisions. Pershing insisted on an American army.
With one exception. The Army would not put Black combat regiments beside white ones. So it lent four of them to France.
The 369th, from Harlem, fought in French helmets with French rifles.
In May 1918, Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts fought off a German raiding party. France gave both the Croix de Guerre.
The United States gave Johnson the Medal of Honor in 2015.
In March 1918, Russia's new Bolshevik government quit the war. Germany threw its freed-up armies at France and got within about fifty miles of Paris.
At Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, Americans helped stop it.
By summer, about 10,000 a day. Germany had bet it could win before they came. It was losing the bet.
Number, Please
September–November 1918
Key terms: Meuse-Argonne offensive, Hello Girls, Limited, but it tipped the balance
On September 26, 1918, the American First Army attacked between the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. It became the biggest battle in American history.
Hundreds of thousands of men. A few muddy roads. Rain.
At First Army headquarters in Souilly, women of the Army Signal Corps ran the telephone exchange. The soldiers called them the Hello Girls.
Operators had to speak French, and they worked within sound of the guns. When fire broke out, they had to be ordered out.
Grace BankerDramatized
Number, please.
Compared with Europe's armies, Americans fought at full strength for only about six months. But they came when both sides were spent, and they kept coming. That tipped the balance.
Three days in, Erich Ludendorff, the general running Germany's war, told the Kaiser to ask for an armistice. Bulgaria was quitting, and British and Australian troops had broken the Hindenburg Line. The Americans weren't the only blow.
And Germany asked Wilson, not Britain or France. It wanted the peace of his Fourteen Points.
The Eleventh Hour
November 11, 1918
Key terms: Armistice, Sound ranging, American Expeditionary Forces
Germany's sailors mutinied. The Kaiser fled to Holland. In Foch's railway car, at about five that morning, Germany's delegates signed an armistice. It would take effect at eleven.
That left about six hours. Some commanders kept attacking until the end. Congress later asked why.
At 10:59, Private Henry Gunther of Baltimore charged a German machine gun.
His comrades said the gunners waved him back. He is usually counted as the last American killed in the war.
Near the Moselle River, an Army sound-ranging machine was recording the guns on film.
That strip is a photograph of sound. The famous “recording” of it online is a reconstruction, made in 2018.
About nine million soldiers died. France lost about 1.4 million. The United States lost about 116,000. More than half died outside combat, mostly of disease.
Fourteen Points
January 1918 – June 1919
Key terms: Fourteen Points (1918), Self-determination, Big Four, Treaty of Versailles (1919), League of Nations
In January 1918, Woodrow Wilson typed out America's war aims. There were fourteen. Open diplomacy. Freedom of the seas. Fewer weapons. Fair treatment of colonial peoples. A league of nations.
In December he sailed for France, the first president to visit Europe in office. Paris turned out by the hundreds of thousands. He brought no senators, and only one Republican.
Four men did most of the writing, in a private room: Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Orlando. France had lost 1.4 million soldiers. Clemenceau wanted Germany too weak to try again.
Clemenceau is said to have joked that God needed only ten commandments, and Wilson wanted fourteen. Nobody has found where he said it.
In April, Japan asked to write racial equality into the League's covenant. Eleven of seventeen delegates voted yes. Wilson, in the chair, ruled that it needed all of them.
A young man from French Indochina brought the delegations a petition asking France for equal rights in his own country. He signed it Nguyen Ai Quoc. Later he called himself Ho Chi Minh.
They signed on June 28, 1919, five years to the day after Sarajevo. The room was the Hall of Mirrors, where Germany's empire had been proclaimed in 1871.
One point came through Paris whole: the League. Wilson had traded almost everything else to keep it. Now two-thirds of the Senate had to agree.
Seven Votes Short
July 1919 – 1921
Key terms: Article X, Irreconcilables, Reservationists, Collective security, Normalcy
Wilson carried the treaty to the Senate himself. Last October he'd asked for a Democratic Congress. Voters elected a Republican Senate.
The new Foreign Relations chairman, Henry Cabot Lodge, had the whole treaty read aloud. It took two weeks, often to an empty room.
The fight was over Article X. Members promised to protect one another's borders. Lodge feared it could take America to war without Congress.
Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge
The United States is the world's best hope, but if you fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations … you will destroy her power for good…
About sixteen Irreconcilables wanted no League at all. Lodge's larger group would accept one with reservations. He wrote fourteen.
Wilson wouldn't bargain. He took his case west by train.
Woodrow Wilson
I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
After a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he collapsed. A week later, in the White House, a stroke paralyzed his left side.
For months almost no one saw him. Edith Wilson decided what reached him.
Wilson told Democrats to vote no on the treaty with Lodge's reservations. It failed. So did the treaty without them.
On March 19, 1920, the Senate voted one last time.
Seven votes short.
Wilson asked voters for a "solemn referendum" on the League. Warren Harding promised "normalcy" and won sixty percent of the vote.
The League met in Geneva without the United States.
December 1920 The Nobel Peace Prize for 1919 goes to Woodrow Wilson.
July 2, 1921 Congress declares the war with Germany over.
Now look again. February 17, 1919. The 369th comes home up Fifth Avenue, after 191 days under fire in French helmets.
That May, Du Bois printed a wartime memo telling French officers not to shake hands with Black soldiers. In the same issue, he wrote this.
W. E. B. Du Bois
We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.
Wilson asked Americans to make the world safe for democracy. The men in this photograph had a place in mind to start.