Realities of Continued
Stalemate
This short piece continues
series on some "Deeply Momentous Things"--that is, American intervention in the First World War. As the first installment has shown in a general way, the
background of the war among Europe and its extensions (Canada, Australia, etc.)
is crucial to understanding how the United States would eventually declare war
on the Central Powers. More specifics on this issue will help us understand
just what the might of the United States meant to the warring powers.
European leaders on both
sides hoped to change the dynamic of the war in January 1917. Certainly from a
technical military standpoint, 1916 represented a highly complicated and
progressive experimentation with methods of war that would break up the
stalemate. In answer to a question posed in the first installment--who was winning
at the end of 1916--if I had to choose the side that had the upper hand in
December 1916, I would probably choose the Central Powers by a nose.
In December 1916, Field Marshal Haig, Commander of the British
forces on the Western Front, sent in an extensive report to his government on the just completed Somme Campaign. The
Somme battles had advanced the Allied line in some places, but had never come close
to a breakthrough. And the losses of both British and French units were
appalling. Yet Haig declared the Somme campaign a victory in that it had
achieved the wearing down of the Germans and the stabilization of the front.
Yet even with Haig's
report in hand, British statesmen and diplomats were not as optimistic. The
Field Marshal's optimism could not hide the fact that the Somme advance had
been at best shallow, and that the Germans still held onto nearly as much of
France as they had before. And significantly, the Central Powers were killing
Entente troops at a faster rate than the Allies were killing the Germans and
their Allies. For every two deaths on the side of the Central Powers, three
Entente soldiers were dying.
And there were more
concrete signs of distress. In East Central Europe, recently acquired Entente
partner Romania faced an Austro-Hungarian, German, and Bulgarian force which
had besieged and captured the Romanian capital, Bucharest. The great Brusilov
Offensive against the German and Austro-Hungarian armies was an enormous
success at its beginning, and almost certainly took pressure off the French
defenders at Verdun, in France. But the offensive tailed off with counterattacks
that were costly and worrisome. And there were in addition, the enormous losses
to the Brusilov fighters, upwards of a million dead, wounded, and captured. In
Russia, rumblings of demoralization--including the plot which would end in
Rasputin's murder in December 1916--emerged as hunger and depletion accompanied
deep winter. In retrospect, the Brusilov Offensive planted the seeds of
Russia's revolutionary collapse the following year--which would no doubt have
tipped the balanced sharply in favor of the Central Powers had the United
States not intervened.
Elsewhere, it is true, things
were going somewhat better for the Russians and the British in fighting the
Ottoman Empire by December 1916 and January 1917, but many British leaders thought they were looking at the real
crisis of the war a hundred years ago. Hoping to bring every kind of weapon to
bear in the midst of this depressing and murderous year, British leaders
departed from their slogan of "business as usual" in a variety of
ways. Great Britain had already adopted conscription a year earlier in January
1916, though not quite in time to supply replacements for the inevitable losses
in the coming offensive operations on the Somme and elsewhere. On the
diplomatic front, it was in 1916 that the British government began a process
that would end by promising overlapping parts of the Ottoman Empire both to the
future "king of the Arabs" and to Jews across the world as a future
homeland. At the same time, British propaganda designed to influence the United
States to enter the war heightened dramatically. Charles Masterman's War
Propaganda Bureau in London worked on the "American question" with
newspaper subventions in the United States, speaking tours, increased
distribution of the famous Bryce Report on German atrocities in Belgium, and in
other ways.
One crucial example of
non-traditional attempts to break the impasse was the starvation of German
civilians resulting from the British Blockade. In place since late 1914, the
Blockade kept even neutrals from delivering food and other essentials to
Germany. Before the Blockade was lifted in 1919, somewhere between 500,000 and
800,000 German civilians would die from starvation and from the effects of
nutritional shortages on other conditions. Adding indirect deaths influenced by
nutritional privation adds many more to the total (see the excellent analysis
of the Blockade by David A. Janicki at
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/899/the-british-blockade-during-world-war-i-the-weapon-of-deprivation
as well as Ralph Raico's detailed review of the classic book on the subject by C. Paul Vincent).
The dynamics of the
Blockade intensified among the belligerents the importance of future American
decisions. In order to survive the war, Britain had to control the seas. In
order to survive the war, Germany had to eat. But at the same time, Germany had
to avoid bringing the world's most powerful economy into the conflict. Unlimited
submarine warfare was the most likely way to break the Blockade and eat. But
German statesman expressly feared that this step would bring the United States
into the war. (See the minutes of atop-level German meeting on the issue of unlimited submarine warfare from
August 1916.)
Meanwhile, the one obvious
solution to the war--namely, ending it--seemed out of the question. Both sides
desired any help they could get, but both sides had turned down offers of mediation, truce, and negotiations, all of these attempts foundering on the
acquisitive territorial aims and financial obligations of one belligerent or
the other.
One important note: the
weather impacted home and battle fronts. The winter of 1916/17 was one of the
coldest in memory. The impact on the hungry German home front was immense--this
was the terrible "turnip winter," so-called because turnips were
about the only home-grown food available to many. But the soldiers on all sides
found the cold almost unbearable http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/podcasts/voices-of-the-first-world-war/podcast-25-winter-1916-17
as well, misery in the trenches and encampments did not bode well for the
future will to fight in any army.
Quite clearly, momentous American
decisions were crucial to the future course of the war.
