"These Deeply Momentous Things" United States Intervention into World War I (No. 2)

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.

"These Deeply Momentous Things": United States Intervention into World War I (No. 1)

"These Deeply Momentous Things"

United States Intervention into World War I

     Introduction--The Great War in Late 1916

     In this month of December 2016 we are moving toward the hundredth anniversary of direct American intervention into the Great War in April 1917. This intervention became one of those pivotal aspects of the conflict that the Great War a kind of motor of modern world history, a war that altered everything it touched and everyone who touched it.

Brusilov Soldiers

     Over the next few weeks, I want to comment on the usual aspects of Wilson and House, "neutrality," and U-boats, but I also want to connect some episodes and trends of this piece of history that are less often seen as context to the decisions and the process of American intervention. Context, I hope it will be seen, is essential.

First, some points about the fighting itself. A hundred years ago at this time, the terrible battles of 1916 were over or winding down: Verdun, the Somme, the Brusilov Offensive, to name the biggest. The losses to both Entente and Central Powers were scarcely imaginable: over a million and half soldiers died in these three campaigns alone. The most prolific killer was artillery. These expensive big guns and their expensive shells really defined the war as it had developed by late 1916. In all three of these major offensives, artillery saturations, walking barrages, and various other new artillery techniques were at the core of nearly all tactical plans. At the same time, accelerated production was required to supply these armaments, putting still more strains on the already groaning fiscal systems of the belligerent governments. These and other costs of the war mounted as both British and French used up the loans negotiated and renegotiated since the fall of 1914.

     Who was winning in December 1916?

     Arguably, the real losers were simply all normal individuals in the populations of all belligerent countries. The state itself was winning. More on this issue later.

     But the question of which side was winning is still an important one to ask. It certainly merits its own post in this series of informal historical reflections. Many historians have tried to address this issue, including me in my recently expanded and revised book, The Great War: Western Front and Home Front (1916).

     At the outset, one thing is quite clear. However we evaluate Woodrow Wilson's actions and motives, he was absolutely right in his April 1917 War Message to Congress: the vast network of processes involved in American intervention represented "deeply momentous things."

A hundred years ago, British units (alongside a smaller French force) attacked the Germans on an eleven-mile wide front in Picardy, straddling the Somme River. The attack was the attempt to break through on the Western Front, and in accordance with emerging artillery doctrine and practice, the German lines were saturated with shells for a week in advance. But when the artillery stopped to allow the British to attack, the Germans raced out of their deep dugouts, manned their machine guns, and mowed down the British attackers. Nearly 20,000 British soldiers died on this day, July 1, a hundred years ago.

Many historians of World War I today argue that this battle was a kind of victory, since it kept the Germans from breaking through at other places. Or that it showed that the Allies could mount a huge assault. Or that it was part of "learning curve" in the process that finally won the war for the Allies. 

It certainly was in many ways a triumph for the state in the abstract. It represented the ability of the modern state at best to gamble the lives of hundreds of hundreds of thousands, at worst to waste them, in an attack that was only marginal in terms of its potential success. True, the Somme Campaign eventually made some headway: the German were pushed back as much a few hundred yards by November, in a few places more.  All of these gains, however, would be wiped out at the latest in the 1918 German Spring Offensive, another success of the modern state in inducing "sacrifice" among the masses.

The First Day of the Somme Battle was a human disaster.  But the state, after a few years of trying to sweep this affair under the carpet, now uses the episode as an example of "sacrifice," not state incompetence or callousness.

Here's to the memory of the 20,000 British subjects along with the few thousand French and Germans who died in this frenzy of state power. From whichever side of No Man's Land, they were tough, determined, and uncomplaining. The state didn't deserve them.

A Break in the Action for the Fatigued History Buff : My New Novel

If you are reading this series of blog entries on World War I, you are probably reading and researching the war in other ways too. This is wonderful, and certainly fulfilling as we plow through the Centennial of this massive event.

But if you want to take a break in the action (and some of you may well have battle fatigue at this point!), I would like to suggest checking out my new novel. It is a historical novel, but set well before World War I, in 1883. You can find out more by heading over to the listing at Smashwords.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/623478

 It is called Anima and the Goat, and it is some history, some adventure, some mystery, and a somewhat unusual take on the British Empire.

The electronic book is on pre-order right now with Smashwords, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, etc., and it will be available on June 20, 2016.

The hard copy will be a paperback offered at Amazon. The listing will be there in a day or two, and will also be available on June 20.

A little history, but maybe a relief from the flamethrowers, white feathers, munitions plants, and financial manipulations of World War I!

1916--The Breaking Point

The First World War was ferocious in its first years. But the combination of sustained and enormous losses of the enormous battles of 1916 and the strains on the home fronts brought the "deeper forces" to emerge, in the words of historian René Albrecht-Carrier. The number of enormous battles—and casualties—across the military theaters in the year 1916 staggers the imagination: Verdun, the Somme, Jutland, the Brusilov Offensive, the Siege of Kut, and five of the Isonzo front battles, as well as other actions. The death toll was barely fathomable. General Aleksei Brusilov's offensive alone, ended with a death toll (not casualty toll) of over a million men (when deaths from both sides are combined). These Brusilov deaths occurred over a period of just under four months.

But 1916 had its own logic, really. Stalemate was the hallmark of the Western Front and some other fronts, but in all theaters, a kind of larger stalemate had held sway already by 1915. On all fronts, 1915 was a period of intensive experimentation for breaking the deadlock: poison gas; undermining and explosion of enemy trenches; flamethrowers; proliferation of machine guns, trench mortars, and more. Above all, the dramatic rise in artillery shelling to prepare for breakthrough dominated the thinking of high commands. But breakthrough to "the green fields beyond" remained illusive nearly everywhere in 1915.

In the case of the Western Front, Allied representatives met at Chantilly, France, in early December 1915 to coordinate offensives for the coming year, all agreeing to attack on a large scale as soon as possible. The Germans got there first, however, and delivered a massive blow at Verdun. This disruption delayed the Allied attacks somewhat, but the British and French were able to launch the Somme Offensive on July 1, 1916.

The well-known human result on the Somme was slaughter.  More on that in weeks to come. But it was also slaughter in these other terrible conflicts.

But the changes resulting from this transition enormously increased armaments and material production went far beyond the battlefield. Indeed, in this Higgsian crisis related to war emergency and war production, almost all belligerents made fundamental changes in the size and extent of state intervention into their societies, in particular in economies. Since the labor force available for making all the artillery shells had been reduced by war recruitment and conscription, governments drew whole new ranges of the population into munitions plants. Young women in England whose livers were compromised by assembling toxic artillery shells were blithely called "Canary Girls." Some munitions plants exploded because of espionage, others because of accidents on the part of the young, inexperienced, and tired munitions workers.

Men like David Lloyd George in Britain and Albert Thomas in France came to fore as ministers of munitions who could break the old limitations on government transfers of private wealth through taxes, inflation, confiscation, etc. in order to produce the shells now thought to be needed in the war. The 1916 Hindenburg Program in Germany did the same but went much further in eroding individual rights and creating the total war system.

Although the war became even more ferocious before the end, 1916 stands as the year that finally broke the old world.

More analysis on the home front and battle front aspects of 1916 may be found in the new and expanded edition of my book, The Western Front (now retitled The Great War: Western Front and Home Front http://www.amazon.com/Great-War-Western-Front-Home/dp/1137471263).