The Yanks Are Coming! (6 page)

Meanwhile, the Germans' ardent wooing of the Ottoman Empire had been rewarded when the Turks declared war as an ally of the Central Powers in November 1914. The Ottoman army was already well supplied with fez-capped German generals leading goose-stepping Turks, and though the Ottoman Empire was, famously, the sick man of Europe, the Ottoman caliphate did something most belligerents could not: it declared a global holy war against the British, French, and Russians. In the event, the jihad proved of little practical account except perhaps to justify (in Turkish eyes at least) the war against the empire's Christian Armenians, which amounted to mass executions of civilians and selling Armenian women and children into slavery.

The Ottomans' war had several fronts. In Central Asia, the Russians obliterated Turkish offensives, though, fatally for the Czar, the Turks still held the Dardanelles, closing off the Black Sea as a source of resupply for the Russian Empire. Ottoman threats to the Suez Canal were rebuffed by the British, who in, turn, won the support of Sherif Hussein of Mecca for a British-backed Arab revolt against the Ottomans.
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In Mesopotamia, the Turks forced a humiliating British surrender at the siege of Kut (December 1915 to April 1916), but were in turn driven out of Baghdad in March 1917, losing
Mesopotamia to the British. The one unmistakable Turkish victory was at Gallipoli (April 1915 to January 1916), where the Western Allies had hoped to force the Dardanelles; bring relief to Russia; knock Turkey out of the war; and gain Greek and Bulgarian allies to advance through what would later be called the “soft underbelly of Europe.”
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But the Gallipoli Campaign was a litany of misfortune for the British Empire; an epic, tragic event in the history of the Australian and New Zealand armed forces; and the temporary crusher of political careers, including that of Winston Churchill. Churchill, who had ardently backed the expedition, resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty and took a commission first with the Grenadier Guards and then with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, serving in the trenches at age forty-one.
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In the Balkans, everything was a mess as usual. Greece was neutral and politically divided. One parliamentary faction wanted to ally Greece with Britain and France (the Western Allies already occupied Salonika). But King Constantine of Greece was the brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm and had no interest in declaring war against him. Neighboring Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915, invading Serbia just in time to be in at the kill. Romania joined the Allies in 1916 in a bid to strip Transylvania from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Romanian army was large—more than 650,000 men—and Romanian casualties by war's end were perhaps equally large. In December 1916, the Romanian government was driven from Bucharest and into exile in Moldova by a German-Austrian-Bulgarian offensive.

Indeed, on the Eastern Front, things were going relatively well for Germany and Austria. In 1915 the Germans and Austrians had pushed east along an eight-hundred-mile front, advancing up to three hundred miles through Russian Lithuania and Poland and regaining most of the Habsburg province of Galicia across the Carpathian
Mountains of northeastern Austria-Hungary. So great was the Austro-German advance that Czar Nicholas felt compelled to dismiss Grand Duke Nicholas, a dashing six-foot-six professional soldier with experience as an engineer and a cavalryman, as commander in chief of the Russian forces and take command himself. It was not a popular move. The imposing Grand Duke was respected by his armies—even in retreat and with losses that amounted to perhaps two and a half million men—while an aura of suspicion hung around the Czar, whose wife, Alexandra, was German.

In June 1916, the Russians launched a massive offensive led by General Aleksei Brusilov (the Brusilov Offensive). Though the Austrians were initially mauled, almost to destruction, losing a million men, four hundred thousand of whom surrendered (and the Germans lost more than three hundred thousand men coming to their rescue), the Russians were halted, the offensive petering out in September. They had moved forward, along a broad Ukrainian front, about sixty miles, which as historian John Keegan noted, “was, on the scale by which success was measured in the foot-by-foot fighting of the First World War, the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before,”
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or at least since the Germans had lunged across Poland. But it came at a cost of a million Russian casualties. By the end of 1916, it was estimated that another million Russians had deserted; and the Germans still occupied western Russia.

THE IRISH DISTRACTION

In 1916, Britain, seat of a world empire and embattled on a global scale, was obliged to deal with rebellion close to home, in Ireland. The Great War had actually staved off war in Ireland in
1914, when the British Parliament passed a home rule bill. Protestant Ulstermen—and a significant portion of the British army, which was heavily populated with Anglo-Irish officers—were prepared to fight to prevent Ulster's absorption into an Ireland governed by an Irish parliament where Protestants would be doomed to minority status. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill was prepared to use the Royal Navy to fire on rebellious Ulstermen, and any British troops who supported them, in order to enforce home rule.

War in Europe deferred enactment of home rule in Ireland and diverted the fighting Irish of all faiths and none to raise their shillelaghs not against each other, but as members of the British Empire against the Central Powers. There remained, however, a small, secretive group of extreme nationalists who could not wait for the end of the war to achieve home rule. In April 1916, they hatched a squalid little rebellion in Dublin—the Easter Uprising—which, though central to modern Irish myth, was at the time recognized by the vast majority of the Irish as a tawdry thing; after all, nearly a hundred thousand Irish Catholics had signed on to fight in the British army against the Central Powers. The rebels were fewer than a thousand. The British made short work of them. The Royal Navy had intercepted the German arms shipments meant for them, and the rebels, with the resolute approval of the Dubliners themselves, were swiftly put down.

Having quashed the rebellion, the British proved rather less adept at winning the peace. Irish Americans protested against British brutality. Harsh measures in Dublin—courts-martial and firing squads—imposed on the rebels turned them into martyrs. Conscription, which after much debate had become law in Britain, was announced, though never enforced, for Ireland. That unpopular law cost the
British support in Ireland; its non-enforcement meant they gained nothing from it; it was pure political loss.

But Ireland was, perhaps obviously, a noisome sideshow. More important was the fact that the vast might of the British Empire—with troops flocking to the colors from as far away as Canada, South Africa, and Australia—was deployed against the enemy in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, Arabia, and the Near East, not to mention enforcing a naval blockade on Germany. Still, it was not enough for victory. That would await the arrival of the United States, a scion of the British Empire that had become an empire of its own, stretching from the Eastern Seaboard to the Philippine Islands, brimming with industrial might, but which was as yet a resolute neutral.

CHAPTER THREE

WOODROW'S WAR

W
oodrow Wilson was not an obvious war leader. For one thing, he professed not to know what the war was about. He asked the Cincinnati Women's City Club in 1916, “Have you ever heard what started the present war? If you have, I wish you would publish it, because nobody else has, so far as I can gather. Nothing in particular started it, but everything in general.”
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Wilson entered the White House a foreign policy novice. After winning election as president in 1912,
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Wilson confided to a friend, “It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters.”
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Even after Europe plunged into war, Colonel Edward M.
House,
⁴
one of Wilson's closest personal advisors,
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lamented that the president was “singularly lacking in appreciation of the importance of this European crisis. He seems more interested in domestic affairs, and I find it difficult to get his attention centered upon the one big question.”
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THE WAR COMES CLOSER

If Wilson wasn't “centered upon the one big question,” the Army was, even if it seemed unlikely America would enter the war. In September 1915, the United States Army War College issued a report warning that “The safeguard of isolation no longer exists. The oceans, once barriers, are now easy avenues of approach by reason of the number, speed and carrying capacity of ocean-going vessels. The increasing radii of submarine, the aeroplane, and wireless telegraphy, all supplement ocean transport in placing both our Atlantic and Pacific coasts within the sphere of hostile activities of overseas nations.” The War College report added, “The great mass of the public does not yet realize the effect of these changed conditions upon our scheme of defense.”
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To the “great mass of the public” one could perhaps add Woodrow Wilson, though he had scant excuse. Naval guns had sounded in the Western Hemisphere as early as November and December 1914, when British and German ships clashed off the coast of Chile and the Falkland Islands, inflicting casualties of more than 3,500 men. By 1915, the Germans were pursuing a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, not excepting neutral merchant shipping.

Wilson was nothing if not resolutely neutral. That was his constant refrain. It was endorsed by the majority of Americans, many of whom (especially those of German and Irish heritage) had no
desire to join a European war on the side of the British Empire—whatever the Anglophilic sympathies of the educated classes of the South and the East and West Coasts.

In the months before the war, even some of America's European ambassadors felt estranged from a continent apparently febrile for self-destruction. In May 1914, Colonel House wrote from Berlin that the atmosphere in Europe was “militarism run stark mad.”
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The madness was not just in Germany, but in France and Russia, which, he said, wanted only Britain's consent to attack. Walter Hines Page, Wilson's ambassador to Britain, writing as the great powers mobilized for war, saw strange, elemental, barbaric passions consuming Continental Europe: “It's the Slav and the German. Each wants his day, and neither has got beyond the stage of tooth and claw.”
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In June 1914, House wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, “I have never seen the war spirit so nurtured and so glorified as it is [in Germany]. The situation is dangerous in the extreme and I am doing what I can in a quiet way to bring about better conditions.”
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It was not enough.
¹¹

STUDYING WAR

Former president Theodore Roosevelt, a moralist himself but disdainful of the liberal moralism of Woodrow Wilson and his administration, saw the war at its outset with clear-eyed dispassion: “The melancholy thing about this matter to me is that this conflict really was inevitable and that the several nations engaged in it are, each from its own standpoint, right under the existing conditions of civilization and international relations.” Roosevelt recognized Germany's arguments of military necessity even as his sympathies were engaged by the martyrdom of neutral Belgium. America's interests,
he thought, were not yet directly at risk; but the country should be ready. He wished the Navy were put “in first-class fighting order” and the army “up to the highest pitch at which it can now be put. No one can tell what this war will bring forth.” But of one thing he was certain—President Woodrow Wilson and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, were not the men to see America through the European crisis: “It is not a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state, nor a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people . . . and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.”
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William Jennings Bryan, if not precisely “a professional yodeler” and “human trombone,” was certainly an odd choice as secretary of state. A three-time failed presidential candidate (1896, 1900, and 1908), Bryan was a progressive, a Prohibitionist, a stem-winding (or bloviating, according to taste) orator, and an Evangelical Christian with next to no experience in foreign affairs. During Bryan's second run for the presidency, Roosevelt had urged voters to repudiate Bryan's “populistic and communistic doctrines.”
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To Republicans, Bryan was a demagogic, backwoods, extremist buffoon.

Bryan was something close to a pacifist, distrustful of the military, and suspicious of elitist, imperialist, wine-drinking Europeans. Elitism, militarism, and imperialism were three of his many
bêtes noires
, which made it difficult for him to deal with pinstriped American foreign service officers who actually spoke foreign languages and drank wine, aristocratic foreign ambassadors capable of sophisticated banter, stalwart military officials who believed in power politics, and representatives of the imperial states of Europe who did not think their empires were immoral: he tended to dismiss them all as
corrupt. He also refused, as a matter of principle, to offer them alcohol at formal dinners, which had wags smirking at his “grape-juice diplomacy.” Bryan's often shambolic appearance—unshaven, untidy, and unkempt—was another source of embarrassment. To his critics, and in reality, he was a blustering yokel. Or as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “a third rate revivalist preacher . . . and a not wholly sincere revivalist preacher at that.”
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