James Shockley
2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of American troops fighting in World War I (The Great War, “The War to End All Wars”) as well as the 100th anniversary of the end of that war.
I have spoken to veterans of World War II about the Great War, and they have tended to ignore it, assuming that their war was much worse.
That is not a good assumption. Worldwide, the Great War involved 65 million soldiers. There were 18 million deaths and 23 million wounded.
It killed more people than any previous war in history and wiped out much of an entire generation of young European men. American involvement, however, was slight, limited to about six months at the end.
By the end of the war, it was clear to most observers that it had been a horrible example of how minor events can spiral out of control and that it should never have happened. The Great War demonstrated that a diplomatic forum for settling disputes between nations is absolutely necessary if we want to avoid major conflicts.
At the start of the war there were three major empires that reached into Europe, all fragile and prime for collapse:
The Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and North Africa. In 1914 the Grand-Duke of Austria went on a diplomatic mission to Serbia (a minor country in the Russian Empire) and was assassinated on the street by a Serbian radical. Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia retaliated by declaring war on Austria, and soon all of the nations in the three empires were at war.
The Kaiser of Germany entered the war on the side of Austria and declared war on its old enemy, France. England came into the war on the side of France. Soon Western Europe was embroiled in a trench-warfare struggle between Germany and the combined forces of France and Britain, fought mainly in Belgium and France.
The war in Eastern Europe was largely fought between the Russian Empire and the combined forces of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
Trench warfare was an ancient defensive strategy, not suitable for offense. Soldiers on one side dug miles-long six-foot deep trenches to hold their positions. Invading soldiers had to attack and overwhelm the trenches in order to advance.
This required the attacking soldiers to be exposed so that protected soldiers in the trenches could kill them as they advanced. This was a standard method of defense for several thousand years, but it broke down with the invention of machine guns.
In the Great War, opposing forces had complexes of trenches between 25 yards and a mile apart that stretched from Flanders (the northern part of Belgium) into France. Each side had machine guns.
No-man’s land, the area between the trenches, was a killing field. Tanks had not yet been invented, so each army sent waves of soldiers on foot to try to break through the opposite side with the result that most of the attacking soldiers were slaughtered by machine gun fire.
This continued from 1914 until 1918, when the United States sent soldiers to fight on the side of England and France.
There was strong sentiment in our country to stay out of the war. The east coast had millions of first and second-generation European immigrants, many from Germany, who did not want to fight their relatives.
The citizens in the central part of the country had rural roots and no desire to get into a war between European empires. Socialists and Communists were fairly strong on the East Coast and definitely did not want to go to war to protect imperialist interests. The isolationist sentiment was so strong that President Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection in 1916 on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War.”
German submarine tactics brought us into the war. Britain had the greatest navy on earth and used it to transfer armaments, sometimes in the bottom of passenger ships.
German submarines started torpedoing those ships; in particular they sank the Lusitania, the greatest passenger ship of its day, when it was loaded with Americans traveling to England.
The United States government ordered Germany to stop using submarines to sink British passenger ships on the threat that we would join the war on the side of England and France.
The threat worked for a while, but Germany started torpedoing again. Knowing that this might bring the United States into the war, Germany sent a coded telegram to the Mexican government asking them to get into the war on the German side and attack us from the south.
As an inducement, Mexico was promised the return of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The British government intercepted the telegram, decoded it, and relayed the message to the United States, which considered it grounds for war.
We formally declared war on Germany in 1917, but we had no army to send to Europe. Wilson’s government instituted a major draft, which, along with volunteers, raised the total military forces to about five million young men.
The standing army was used for training and leadership. Almost a year later our army arrived in Europe.
The war was largely a war of attrition – we kill one of your soldiers and you kill one of ours. After four years the combatants were mostly exhausted.
The arrival of hundreds of thousands of fresh American troops in the spring of 1918, along with the invention of tank warfare, changed the dynamics of the war, and it ended about six months later. An armistice was signed on November 11 and final surrender papers on June 28, 1919.
The most popular poem during the war was In Flanders Fields, written by a Canadian military physician on the combat death of a close friend. The first two verses are:
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
The next time you make a donation to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and are given a paper poppy, think about this poem and about the Great War that inspired it.
James Shockley writes a monthly history column. He lives in Blacksburg.
