Over there

By the time the United States formally entered the fight of World War I, one hundred years ago today, Europeans had already been slugging it out for more than two-and-a-half years. Both sides, represented by Germany and Britain, had tried to coax or coerce America into joining them, and I suppose we might never have made the move had Germany not been so arrogant and ham-handed.

Specifically, resumption in February 1917, after a two-year suspension, of unrestricted submarine warfare, which put at risk American goods (and American lives; but the merchandise was what got the real attention) on the Atlantic, was what pushed President Woodrow Wilson and Congress into taking the unprecedented step of taking the country into a war on another continent that did not seem to threaten us directly.

I mean, consider: in 1917, the United States had a strong immigrant community from both Germany and Ireland, and these people were not friends of Great Britain. (April 1917 was just a year after the Easter Rising in Ireland, which was brutally suppressed by British forces.) It was hard to see a distinction between the imperial interests of Russia and the United Kingdom as opposed to those of Germany and Austria. And as for Serbia, the powder keg that set it all off—meh.

We pretty much thought of ourselves as sui generis—whatever connection we’d once had with the Old World we’d long since outgrown. We reckoned we could manage on our own, no foreign entanglements, that sort of thing. But also, in 1916 the War Between the States was barely 50 years in the past. Men who’d fought in that still hobbled to reunions on battlefields between Richmond and Gettysburg, and along the Mississippi and Ohio; we had real and still bleeding wounds to tend to.

(We had, of course, had our little foreign adventure in Cuba, and acquired the Philippines, but you can’t really count those, can you?)

Well, anyhow: on 2 April Wilson asked a joint session of Congress to declare war against the Central Powers (remember when it was Congress that had to declare war?), speaking of it as a war to “make the world safe for democracy.” and the declaration was duly issued on 6 April. The vote in the Senate was 82 to six (eight Senators didn’t vote); the House confirmed it 373 to 50. (We officially declared war on Austria-Hungary in December.)

US naval forces arrived in British ports on 9 April, but it would take another two months before the first ground troops landed in France for combat training. You do not field a combat-ready army on a dime. For one thing, our historical predilection is against standing, professional armies, so we had to implement a draft. And it takes months to equip and train civilians to the point where they can actually fight cohesively in battle. American forces did not become a factor per se until mid-1918, although the fear of their addition to the British and French armies on the Western Front spurred the Germans to launch a last-gasp offensive in Spring 1918, hoping to knock out their exhausted enemies before we arrived.

There was another issue to be sorted—in one respect, kind of cheeky on our part. The French and Brits expected to integrate American troops into their own armies—effectively using them as replacements for their massive casualties—under the command of their own generals. But the American chief, John J. Pershing, was not having any of that. And he prevailed: the American Expeditionary Force fought, under his command, as a unit.

(Except for African-American regiments, who joined French divisions. Notably, the Harlem Hellfighters fought with the French 16^th Division, and achieved combat honors for their actions at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood and Séchault.)

The declaration a hundred years ago marked a major step for America—not only as a national commitment to an international war, but as a player in the international community as a whole. Following what turned out to be the First World War, we attempted to retreat back into isolationism. That lasted two years into the Second World War.

I don’t know what to tell you about what’s ahead of us. I’ll just note that it would be really nice if we could learn the lessons of the past hundred years and not keep making the same damned mistakes again and again.