The Yanks Are Coming! (38 page)

“THE UNNECESSARY WAR”

That feeling, of course, would not last, but the sense that the Second World War was the inevitable outcome of the First remains.
Winston Churchill, who surely has some standing on the issue, had a different opinion. He wrote that the Second World War was “the Unnecessary War.” “There never was,” he noted of World War II, “a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.”
⁶
Churchill foresaw the coming of the war, yet knew it did not have to happen. There was nothing ineluctable about the Second World War; it did not occur as a clanking Hegelian
deus ex machina
to tie up the loose ends of the Great War. Neither the Versailles Treaty nor the United States Senate's rejection of the League of Nations put Hitler in power. What put Hitler in power was a popular vote of the German people, making the National Socialists the largest party in the Reichstag, and the political miscalculation of German president Paul von Hindenburg—Germany's chief of the general staff in the First World War—who was pressured by his political allies into making Hitler chancellor. Hitler thought of himself as a man of the future—and too many Germans shared that belief. He thought of Hindenburg as a reactionary old fuddy-duddy who had to be tolerated until he died (which happened in 1934). Hindenburg, for his part, recognized Hitler as a violent upstart and a would-be dictator. Even while finally capitulating to many of Hitler's demands, Hindenburg thought he could restrain Hitler's excesses, but he was too old to be the guardian of a German republic he defended out of obligation while yearning for a restored monarchy. Events over the next half dozen years that led to Poland's partition between the National Socialists of Germany and the Communists of Russia, which triggered the declaration of war by Britain and France, were not preordained; they were the result of the free actions of individual statesmen and their governments.

America's doughboys of the First World War were not responsible for the rise of Hitler. They won a great and honorable victory,
and others squandered the peace. American intervention was decisive in defeating the Second Reich's attempt to dominate the European continent. When British foreign minister Arthur Balfour laid a wreath on George Washington's grave at Mount Vernon on 29 April 1917, shortly after America's declaration of war, he commented on “the immortal memory of George Washington, soldier, statesman, patriot, who would have rejoiced to see the country of which he was by birth a citizen and the country his genius called into existence fighting side by side to save mankind from a military despotism.”
⁷
Balfour, the Tory statesman and former prime minister, had it exactly right.

ARLINGTON

If Hitler thought he had an appointment to keep at Compiegne, President Warren G. Harding had another appointment to keep on Armistice Day 1921 at Arlington National Cemetery. Little more than a fortnight earlier, on 24 October 1921, Sergeant Edward F. Younger, a twice-wounded veteran of the First World War and holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, had stood alone in a chapel in France. Before him were four coffins containing the remains of unidentified American soldiers. His job was to place a bouquet of white and pink roses on one of the coffins, marking that anonymous soldier for internment at Arlington in a new monument dedicated to the “Unknown Soldier.”
⁸
He walked around the coffins until he finally felt an almost physical pull toward one of them. He placed the roses upon the casket, marking that soldier to be transferred back home along with French soil to line the bottom of his grave.

On 11 November 1921, the soldier and his casket were removed from the Rotunda of the United States Capitol building, where he had been lying in state, and placed upon a horse-drawn caisson for
the journey to Arlington. Accompanying him were President Harding, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, former President Wilson, the justices of the Supreme Court, and General Pershing, as well as other elected officials, military officers, and dignitaries. At the gravesite, Harding placed a Medal of Honor and Distinguished Service Cross on the casket. A British representative added a Victoria Cross. The Belgian representative, a general, ripped his own Medal of Valor from his uniform and awarded it to the dead American soldier. President Harding led the assembly in the Lord's Prayer. Chief Plenty Coups, a Crow Indian, placed his war bonnet and coup stick by the soldier's tomb and offered up another prayer, this one to the Great Spirit acknowledged by his people. A salute was fired, taps was played, and the soldier's coffin was lowered to its resting place. The tomb would bear the inscription: “H
ERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY
A
N
A
MERICAN
S
OLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD
.”
⁹

For as long as the United States exists, he will be there, a guard from the 3rd United States Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) keeping watch. The doughboys paid our debt to Lafayette. The question the Unknown Soldier might ask us is whether we have adequately paid our debt to the generation of Americans who fought the Great War, who forged the American Century, who defined for the world what it meant to be an American. Are we the nation of Sergeant York and Eddie Rickenbacker? Are we the same people, with the same mores, the same ambition, and the same spirit? If so, he'll rest easy. If not, perhaps we should return to study his generation's example, to remember what it was like to live “in the time of the Americans.”
¹⁰

NOTES

PROLOGUE

1
.
      
How American infantrymen gained this name is unclear, though it is usually thought to date from the sand-and-dust-covered soldiers tramping through deserts in the Mexican War.

2
.
      
Quoted in David D. Lee,
Sergeant York: An American Hero
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 35.

3
.
      
All quotations are from Tom Skeyhill and Richard Wheeler, eds.,
Sergeant York and the Great War: His Own Life Story and War Diary
(San Antonio: Vision Forum, 2011), 162–63.

4
.
      
This is how Byron Farwell quotes the famous exchange in
Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917
–
1918
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 310.

5
.
      
Woodrow Wilson's speech seeking a congressional declaration of war, 2 April 1917.

6
.
      
Ernest Hemingway,
A Farewell to Arms
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), 185.

7
.
      
Quoted in Bruce D. Porter,
War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics
(New York: Free Press, 1994), xvi.

CHAPTER ONE: THE CLASH OF EMPIRES

1
.
      
Quoted in S. L. A. Marshall,
The American Heritage History of World War I
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 19.

2
.
      
Quoted in David Fromkin,
Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914
(New York: Vintage, 2005), 155.

3
.
      
Quoted in D. J. Goodspeed,
The German Wars, 1914
–
1945
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1983), 11. Goodspeed notes that Bismarck often repeated this aphorism, which he first delivered in 1878, and over time the musketeer became a grenadier. He also predicted in 1897 that if Europe plunged into a continent-wide war, it would be because of “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” This is quoted in many sources, including Tom Gallagher,
Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789
–
1989, From the Ottomans to Milošević
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 60.

4
.
      
Quoted in Goodspeed,
The German Wars, 1914
–
1945
, 11.

5
.
      
Albeit of a very German sort given that his maternal grandfather and great-grandmother were German.

6
.
      
Quoted in James Barr,
Setting the Desert on Fire: T. E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916
–
1918
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 5.

7
.
      
President Theodore Roosevelt earned a Nobel Prize for mediating a treaty to end the war.

8
.
      
The French, in turn, pledged to help the British patrol the Mediterranean, not that the British needed any help. The real purpose of the agreement was to place the Royal Navy athwart Germany's North Sea fleet.

9
.
      
Quoted in Robert K. Massie,
Nicholas and Alexandra
(New York: Random House, 2011), 268.

10
.
    
Serbia had mobilized on 25 July and Austria had followed the next day, but Austria was focused on Serbia, not on a greater war against Russia as well.

11
.
    
This idea is explored at length in Sean McMeekin,
The Russian Origins of the First World War
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). Sazonov's famous exclamation is quoted on page 54.

12
.
    
Bismarck had recommended against annexing Alsace-Lorraine on these very grounds—that it would give the French a permanent grievance against Germany—but was overruled. Most of the population of the annexed territories spoke German.

13
.
    
Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, who joined the British cabinet as secretary of state for war in 1914, had long predicted an Anglo-German war, which he laid at the feet of weak statesmanship. He believed it would last at least three years, and that there would be no winners, except perhaps the growing peripheral powers of the United States and Japan. He told a stunned cabinet that he would need more than a million men to fight the war. “We must be prepared,” he said, “to put armies of millions in the field and maintain them for several years.” Quoted in Sir Philip Magnus,
Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), 284. See also the discussion of Kitchener's views in John Pollock,
Kitchener: Architect of Victory, Artisan of Peace
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), 375–76.

14
.
    
The Russians were particularly shortsighted; they had been forced to suppress a revolution only a decade earlier—in 1905, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War.

15
.
    
“The Younger” was to distinguish him from his famous uncle, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke (the Elder) (1800–1891), a great soldier, strategist, and longtime chief of the Prussian general staff.

16
.
    
Britain was not bound by treaty to defend France, and the cabinet was divided about whether Britain should go to war on France's behalf. The German invasion of Belgium decided the issue.

17
.
    
Yes,
that
John Foster Dulles, later secretary of state under President Eisenhower.

18
.
    
Quoted in John Terraine,
The Great War
(Ware: Wordworth Editions, 1998), 11.

19
.
    
Quoted in ibid.

CHAPTER TWO: TWO AND A HALF YEARS HARD

1
.
      
Quoted in Martin Gilbert,
The First World War: A Complete History
(New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 43.

2
.
      
Quoted in Michael A. Palmer,
The German Wars: A Concise History, 1859–1945
(Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2010), 57.

3
.
      
Though they have received relatively little scholarly attention, German newspapers at the outset of the war were full of stories of Russian atrocities in East Prussia.

4
.
      
See Michael Walzer,
Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations
(New York: Pelican Books, 1984), 240–42, for a discussion of the chancellor's remarks before the Reichstag on 4 August 1914.

5
.
      
Though he had been chief military historian for the general staff, he was officially retired when he wrote this book. He returned to command in the Great War.

6
.
      
Friedrich von Bernhardi,
Germany and the Next War
, trans. Allen H. Powles (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), 10, 6, 14, 13.

7
.
      
Stephen Jay Gould cites the account of the American entomologist and evolutionist Vernon Kellogg, who worked on Belgian relief efforts before the United States entered the war. Gould noted that “Night after night, [Kellogg] listened to dinner discussions and arguments, sometimes in the presence of the Kaiser himself, among Germany's highest military officers. . . . [Kellogg] arrived in Europe as a pacifist, but left committed to the destruction of German militarism by force. Kellogg was appalled, above all, at the justification for war and German supremacy advanced by these officers, many of whom had been university professors before the war. They not only proposed an evolutionary rationale but advocated a particularly crude form of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle.” See Stephen Jay Gould,
Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 424.