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FROM PEACE TO WAR
When the war started, the United States had much to gain from neutrality. Its industrialists could arm the combatants, its financiers could service their debts and a long and exhausting war that weakened the European powers could only work to its advantage. American public opinion favoured isolationism and a concentration on interests in Latin America, the Pacific and the Caribbean. The US reaffirmed its neutral stance on 4 August 1914.
One major factor that increasingly drove the Americans towards the Allies was Germany's U-boat campaign.
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Submarines formed a key part of Germany's naval strategy
(Photos of the Great War) |
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| The Lusitania sinking sparked off strong Anti-German protests around the world (NARA) |
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When the war started, U-boats only attacked merchant vessels from the surface, which was held to be in accord with the rules of war. However, as the war continued, all the combatants began to abandon these conventional rules of warfare and employ more ruthless methods. Britain devised the Q-ship (armed vessels disguised as harmless merchant ships) and on 1 February 1915, Kaiser Wilhelm declared Britain's coastal waters to be a war zone and advised neutral and civilian ships to enter at their own risk.
The first high-profile victim of this policy was the Lusitania, a Cunard liner that was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in May 1915 with the loss of 1,200 lives, 128 of them American.
World opinion was outraged by this atrocity and anti-German riots broke out in Britain and in the US, where the German embassy in Washington received bomb threats.
Even though it had been carrying war materiel, the Lusitania's sinking forever cemented the image of the 'barbaric Hun' and horrified many neutrals, including US President Woodrow Wilson , who wrote: 'In God's name, how could any nation calling itself civilized [do] so horrible a thing?'
However, as the war continued, American opinion hardened against Germany and increasingly supported the Allies. Revulsion against the barbarity of the Lusitania sinking was only one of the reasons. It may also be attributed to the US establishment's tendency towards Anglophilia and to the cultural and family ties that bound many Americans to the UK. But there was one further factor-business interests. 99% of all funds raised in the United States for the war effort were directed towards Britain and her Allies. As cabinet minister David Lloyd George wryly observed, 'Success means credit. Financiers never hesitate to lend to a prosperous concern'. At one point, the Federal Reserve Board, the nearest US equivalent to a central bank, even advised people not to invest too heavily in the Allies' cause in case they lost the war and a financial panic ensued.
As a result of this growing pro-Allied stance, Germany's attitude towards the United States became increasingly provocative and aggressive. If the United States was going to behave like one of the Allies, Germany thought, it should be treated like one. Starting in 1915, Germany started organising a campaign of subversion and sabotage against targets on the US mainland.
In 1916, German saboteurs blew up Black Tom Island, a loading depot in New York harbour that was packed to the gunwales with ammunition bound for the Allies - the ground shook 90 miles away in Philadelphia. German agents slipped bombs on to ships, planted a bomb in the US Capitol in Washington and even attempted several assassinations.
Proof that Germany was organising this campaign of subversion was provided in July 1915, when German diplomat Heinrich Albert left his attaché case containing incriminating papers on the Harlem-Broadway train in New York.
Two other German diplomats were expelled in the ensuing contretemps. When Germany renewed its campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, the US severed diplomatic relations with the Reich.
However, the incident that finally propelled the United States towards war was the attempt by the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to foment conflict between Mexico and the US.
Then, as now, the US was jealously protective of its territorial integrity. Just over one month after details of the Zimmermann telegram appeared in the press, the United States declared war on Germany. Germany's previous belief that the Americans would sooner or later join the Allies had proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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