1. THE WESTERN FRONT
The German war plan, devised by Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, the former chief of the German General Staff, was to advance in overwhelming strength along the Channel coast of Belgium and France (“Let the last man on the right brush the Channel with his sleeve!”) and encircle Paris from the north and west, severing Britain from France, and France from its capital. Schlieffen, like America’s Admiral Mahan, was a student of the Punic Wars and wrote a learned treatise on Hannibal’s masterpiece of encirclement, the Battle of Cannae, which was emulated in his plan for France and was partially revived in the great German blitzkrieg in France a generation later. The French plan, Plan XVII, devised by their commander, (subsequent) marshal Joseph Joffre, was to advance into the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, and then into Germany. The Germans aimed at a quick knockout of France, while holding the eastern front against the Russians with relatively light forces.
Although Schlieffen’s last words allegedly were “Keep the right wing strong!,” his successor, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, nephew of the victor of the Franco-Prussian War, weakened the right wing and revised the German plan to pass before Paris. After about two weeks of war, it became clear that the Germans were advancing well beyond the French in the north, and the French attack in Alsace and Lorraine was repulsed. Recognizing late, but not quite too late, the great danger in which France suddenly was, Joffre, with imperturbable coolness, abandoned his long-prepared Plan XVII and devised a new one, which consisted of a hasty but orderly retreat, keeping his armies intact, and surprising the Germans with a defense of Paris that would, if necessary, be fought to the last cartridge and the last man.
Moltke considered a French recovery impossible as his armies rolled inexorably toward Paris, and began to detach a few divisions and send them by rail to Russia. When the German armies arrived on and just north of the Marne, just 15 miles from Paris, they were attacked from the north and west and south with unsuspected force. Units totaling 1.485 million German soldiers and about 1.1 million Allied soldiers, 90 percent of them French, were engaged, and in five days of intensive fighting, the French, dramatically reinforced at the height of the battle with the Paris militia dispatched to the front in 600 requisitioned Paris taxis, defeated the Germans, who fell back 40 miles. The armies then extended their fronts to the English Channel and the Swiss border, and settled into more than four years of horribly bloody trench warfare, where the advantage was with the defense, and attacks were in the face of massed machine gun and artillery fire on both sides. There would be decisive fighting on the Russian and Turkish fronts, but in the greatest theater, in France, blood-letting would be without precedent and beyond imagination, and without decisive result. In the five days of the first Battle of the Marne, each side would endure 250,000 casualties, a ghastly prefiguring of the horrors and prodigies of courage and sacrifice to come.
It was quickly a stalemate. The French and the Germans, in their supreme struggle, a declining France and surging a Germany, met where the addition of the British Commonwealth forces and the unshakeable determination of France enabled that country to hold its own against what was now a larger and stronger German Empire. As the war continued on in sanguinary indecision, Europe’s great nationalities bleeding themselves white (including Italy, which was unwisely seduced by offers of Allied favors and territorial gains in the Alps and on the Adriatic, to enter the war in 1915, though the horrible nature of the war was by then clear), it was inevitable that thoughts should focus on the United States, the mighty unengaged power, which had excluded itself from European affairs or interests in the Monroe Doctrine of 90 years before but possessed the power to determine the victor.
The British, although the Germans had built a formidable navy, announced an absolute blockade of Germany, which they shortly extended to include neutral countries that could pass on imports to or receive exports from Germany overland or in coastal waters—Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The agreed but unratified Declaration of London of 1909 detailed items that could be embargoed in war, but these did not include foodstuffs and other goods not normally regarded as the sinews of war. We were now in an era of total war, and Great Britain was not about to relax its blockade policy, which had been rigorously exercised since the Seven Years’ War, now more than 150 years before. On August 6, 1914, in the first few days of the war, Secretary Bryan asked that the belligerents accept the Declaration of London as written.
The Central Powers agreed, unsurprisingly, and the Russians and French said they would conform to the British position, which was also unsurprising, since without the British, the German navy would have prevailed over them without much difficulty. (France had the world’s fourth navy, after Britain, Germany, and the U.S., but it was a distant fourth and concentrated in the Mediterranean.) The British, on August 20, 1914, accepted the Declaration, but with a radical expansion of what it considered contraband. This scandalized Bryan, who thought it smacked of the British attitude during the Napoleonic Wars, which led to the War of 1812. His sharp rejoinder was intercepted by Wilson’s confidant in international affairs, (honorary) colonel Edward Mandell House, and toned down to a warning to the British of the severe effects on American public and political opinion of too restrictive a blockade. The British quietly ignored the warning and in November 1914 declared the North Sea a war zone and mined it entirely. This again outraged Bryan, who considered the British antics to be in no way less hostile and belligerent than the German recourse to submarine warfare against merchant shipping, which began in earnest when Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone in retaliation, in February 1915.
The Bryan position had some merit, but in practical terms American trade with the Central Powers had been about $170 million in 1913, while trade with France and Britain in the same year had been about $800 million—a figure that ratcheted almost vertiginously upwards from there, to about $3 billion in 1919, while trade with Germany and Austria-Hungary declined in the same period by over 99 percent, to under $2 million. The U.S. banking industry was also something less than even-handed. It was obvious that whatever happened, Great Britain was not going to be conquered and her loans could always be collected, if needs must, from prosperous bits of her empire that could come within the maw of America, such as the hardy perennial in the American appetite, Canada, which had been salivated over intermittently by American leaders since Washington and Franklin and Jefferson. Canada was now independent, but there were extensive British assets in it. By April 1917, the American financial community had made loans to or bought bonds from Britain, France, Italy, and, to a slight degree, Russia, totaling $2.3 billion. This was a much more profitable version of the high-handedness of the British on the high seas than Jefferson and Madison had had to contend with.
The British position was made a good deal more tolerable by the typically abrasive methods of the Germans. The British were imposing an embargo, running ships into port, inspecting them, but not threatening American lives or property. The Germans warned on February 4, 1915, that neutral ships would enter the war zone around the British Isles at their own risk. Six days later, the United States, showing favoritism certainly based on kinship, the democratic bona fides of the British and French, their status as the defenders rather than aggressors in the war, and, not to be altogether put out of mind, their status as huge and profit-generating importers and borrowers, responded to Germany that attacks on American ships and the endangering or taking of American lives on the high seas would be considered “an indefensible violation of neutral rights.” Germany would be held “strictly accountable.” This was uneven treatment of the warring powers, but the Germans were threatening to sink ships and the British were only claiming a right to embargo certain cargoes.
The issue came quickly to a head with the German sinking, by submarine-launched torpedoes, off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, of the great British liner
Lusitania
, former holder of the Blue Riband as the fastest trans-Atlantic ship, and one of the world’s six or seven greatest ships, with the loss of 1,198 lives, including 124 Americans. American opinion was outraged. And so was the president. He drafted a diplomatic note that Bryan signed with reluctance, on May 13, demanding that Germany cease unrestricted submarine warfare, express regret at the sinking of the
Lusitania,
and offer reparations for the loss of American lives.
The German reply, on May 28, justified the incident on the grounds that the ship was armed and that it was carrying contraband. (It was unarmed, but carried a shipment of rifles and munitions, though not in significant quantities for a ship of 35,000 tons.) Wilson was dissatisfied with this and drafted a supplementary note, which rejected the German rationalization and demanded specific pledges against repetitions. Bryan resigned rather than sign the note, as he feared that it could involve America in the war. His resignation was tendered and accepted on June 7, 1915, and he was replaced at once by the counselor of the State Department, Robert Lansing (son-in-law of Benjamin Harrison’s second secretary of state, John W. Foster). Wilson and Lansing followed with a third note on July 21 telling the German government that any future sinking of passenger vessels would be regarded as “deliberately unfriendly,” an outright threat of war.
U.S.-German relations were further shaken by American discovery of a list of check stubs for payments to 126 identified German agents (who were then rounded up) in the United States, in the luggage of German attaché and future chancellor Franz von Papen, who was accused of fomenting sabotage, and eventually of trying to blow up the Welland Canal (in Canada). Germany was deemed responsible for several acts of sabotage in the United States while the U.S. was a neutral country, an utterly insane activity. Papen and others were deported from the United States in December 1915. Chastened by Wilson’s sacking of Bryan and threatening war on Germany if it did not curtail its submarine activities, Germany ordered its submarine forces to leave all liners alone and focus on enemy warships, freighters, and tankers. Germany apologized to the United States in October 1915 for the sinking of the British liner
Arabic
, in which two Americans died.
2. DIPLOMATIC INITIATIVES
In Latin America apart from Mexico, there were the usual financial collapses and outbreaks of chaos to address. Haiti’s president was assassinated in July 1915, and the country was mired in debt. Wilson dispatched the Marines, under the command of the racist war-lover General Smedley Butler, who treated all Haitians as virtual chimpanzees. Haiti became a protectorate of the United States, unable to adjust its tariffs or subscribe loans without American approval, while the United States collected and assessed tariffs and excise duties. An agreement with Nicaragua was finally agreed, in February 1916, granting the U.S. exclusive rights over an isthmian canal, though the canal in Panama was functioning well. When financial mismanagement and civil disorder again gripped the Dominican Republic in 1916, Wilson occupied the country and it was administered by U.S. naval officers until 1924. On January 17, 1917, the United States would buy the Danish Virgin Islands for $25 million.
Wilson had sent Colonel House to London, Paris, and Berlin in February 1915, and he held inconclusive talks with the leaders of those countries; he returned to see them a year later, to explore the possibilities of peace again. If neither side scored a decisive breakthrough, they would either stalemate and keep fighting until they had no more soldiers to kill, or the balance would have to be tipped by a current non-combatant, and only the United States had the power to do that. (Japan was a powerful enough country to make a difference, but it had no way of influencing events in Europe.) Wilson showed considerable foresight and imagination in suggesting peace terms, as his formidable mind focused on the challenge of ending this terrible war without the United States being drawn into it. In consequence of House’s 1916 visit, a peace plan emerged consisting of enhanced German colonial rights and reduction of naval construction, restoration of occupied areas, including Alsace-Lorraine, and the complete expulsion of Turkey from Europe, including the handing over of Constantinople to Russia. Wilson communicated to Britain’s Foreign Secretary Grey that if Britain, France, and Russia accepted such terms and the Central Powers declined them, the “United States would probably enter the war against Germany.” Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers bit at this prospect, though it would have been much better for all of them if they had. Both sides still thought they could win the war, and the carnage continued. The 10-month Battle of Verdun, the greatest in the history of the world up to that time, was already well underway; it would inflict over a million casualties, about 700,000 dead, more French than German, but the French army held the city and forts of Verdun and forced the Germans back.
By now, a considerable agitation for war had arisen in the United States. A Preparedness Movement arose, in various almost paramilitary organizations, operating boot camps for volunteers, especially at Plattsburgh, New York. Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and previous and future cabinet secretary Colonel Henry L. Stimson were among the leaders of the movement. They ranged from advocates of vigilance and readiness to deal with war should it be unloosed on the country to outright interventionists invoking the solidarity of the English-speaking peoples and of the great American and French republics. Senior British and French officials, including former prime minister Arthur James Balfour (now foreign secretary) and former French army commander Marshal Joseph Joffre, received very enthusiastic welcomes when they visited the United States. In February 1916, Secretary of War Lindley Garrison and Deputy Secretary Henry Breckinridge abruptly resigned from the administration in protest against Wilson’s refusal to institute peacetime conscription, the exact opposite to Bryan’s concern of a rush toward war when he resigned a year before, which indicated that Wilson was holding the solid center of public opinion. The new secretary of war would be the mayor of Cleveland, Newton D. Baker.