This entry is a subentry of World War I (1914 – 18).
“The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad.” Col. Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson's closest adviser, did not exaggerate when he wrote these words. The Europe he described in the spring of 1914 was divided into two armed camps: the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and Great Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria‐Hungary, and Italy). An unprecedented arms race was underway that coincided with revolutionary advances in the technology of warfare. Magazine‐loading rifles, belt‐fed machine guns, and improved artillery dramatically increased the firepower of armies. Relying on an expanding network of railways, the general staffs of the major European powers devised elaborate mobilization and offensive schemes. The smallest details were covered, including the preparation of exact railway timetables and even the registration of farmers' horses for possible use. Universal conscription fostered militarism. Governments identified and registered able‐bodied males of military age. Approximately 4 million men were in uniform when the war started in August 1914; that number had risen to a staggering 20 million by the end of the month.
Europe's military elite, accepting Carl von Clausewitz's military principles of “the decisive force, at the decisive place, at the decisive time,” were committed to an offensive strategy designed to climax in one or two great decisive battles. Clausewitz's ideas on war may also have influenced society. The historian John Keegan argues that Europe had been transformed into a warrior society by the acceptance of Clausewitz's maxims that war was a continuation of political activity and that “war is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.”
A month after House's letter, the assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro‐Hungarian throne, precipitated a general European crisis that quickly became unmanageable. The Austrians, given unequivocal support by their ally, Germany, blamed Serbia for the archduke's death and decided to crush Serbia's challenge to the fragile Austro‐Hungarian empire. Vienna's determination to go to war triggered a general conflict. The illusion that modern industrialized wars would be short made this decision easier. Few believed the Polish banker and economist, Ivan S. Bloch, the author of The Future of War in Its Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible? (1898), who argued that modern military technology had made unlimited war mutually destructive for the participants.
Germany's “Schlieffen Plan,” designed to achieve victory over France within six weeks by a gigantic flanking movement through neutral Belgium, came to grief during the First Battle of the Marne (5–9 September). An ominous portent was that the French, Germans, and British had suffered over half a million casualties in three weeks of fighting. Meanwhile, the Russian offensive in East Prussia was checked and thrown back, with an entire Russian army destroyed at Tannenberg (26–30 August).
Following the opening battles, the armies in the west dug in. An almost continuous line of parallel defensive systems was constructed from the North Sea to Switzerland. Protected by barbed wire, usually 50 or more feet deep, these earthworks were frequently built in depth. The front resembled a spiderweb, consisting of thousands of miles of connecting and parallel trenches. Trench warfare also existed to some extent of other fronts—in some areas of Russia, Italy, the Balkans, and Palestine—though nowhere did it become as prominent as in France and Flanders.
Europe's military leaders sought to return to a war of maneuver by rupturing the enemy's front. To restore the offensive, new weapons such as tanks and chemical warfare were eventually introduced. High‐explosive shells, recoilless carriages, optical sights, improved communications, and cannon ranges of 20 or more miles made indirect artillery bombardment the dominant force of the battlefield. The application of massive and increasingly sophisticated artillery fire proved to be the most effective means of reducing fortifications. But the western defenses, bolstered by dramatic advances in firepower, were so strong and thickly defended that it was possible to break into them but not through them prior to 1918. When breakthroughs were successful, there remained limitations to the advance. The 1916–18 version of the tank lacked the speed and reliability to maintain the momentum of an attack over battle‐torn ground before defenders dug in again. Nor could the heavy guns be moved forward rapidly to support a continued advance of the infantry.
The 1930s view, which lingers still among many, is that the generals of the western front were inept and their approaches to winning the war futile. “A war of attrition was substituted for a war of intelligence,” is the way that Lloyd George, British prime minister and a leading critic of attempts to win the war on the western front, put it. The historian Tim Travers has emphasized that many commanders had difficulty abandoning their nineteenth‐century vision of warfare, which emphasized the élan of the individual soldier over the new weapons technology. But recent studies of the evolution of tactics by Paddy Griffith and Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have demonstrated that the western front during the last half of the war was not tactically stagnant. The Germans are often considered the most innovative with their elastic defense‐in‐depth and stormtrooper tactics of infiltration. But the British, with more offensive experience than the enemy in 1916–17, also perfected all‐arms assaults and advanced techniques of trench raiding prior to the tactical successes of the Germans in the spring of 1918.
Germany, relying on strong support from Austria‐Hungary, concentrated its resources on the eastern front in 1915. The vastness of that front, and the clear superiority of German artillery and leadership, made possible an advance of some 300 miles. Although Italy joined the Allies in 1915, by the end of the year, Berlin dominated Central and southeastern Europe, had a bridge to Asia and Africa through its Turkish ally, and retained Belgium and the most industrial part of France. Serbia had been defeated and Bulgaria enlisted as an ally. British efforts to find a “way around” the western front ended in dismal failure in the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns. The central powers, with a more unified command because of Germany's dominant position, interior lines, and a good system of railways, held a formidable position despite their inferiority in warships, manpower, and industrial capacity.
In 1916, Germany sought to break the stalemate in the west in the ten‐month Battle of Verdun, deliberately seeking a decisive battle of attrition and will. To relieve Verdun, a massive Anglo‐French offensive was launched on the Somme in July. When winter brought the fighting to a close, the western front had little changed: Verdun remained in French hands, and the Allies had captured no position of strategical importance on the Somme. Combined German‐Allied casualties exceeded 2 million. Despite the carnage, the warring coalitions faced a bleak future of continued stalemate and exhaustion.
Compared to the great powers of Europe, the United States was a profoundly peaceful and unmilitaristic nation. Prior to America's entry into the war in April 1917, Wilson's secretary of the navy, Josephus Daniels, was decidedly antiwar if not pacifistic, and Newton Baker, secretary of war since 1916, was an ardent antimilitarist. The U.S. Navy had expanded to defend American shores and trade routes, but the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth in the world. The United States was the world's number one industrial power, but the army lacked modern weaponry, including tanks, poison gas, aircraft, heavy artillery, and trench mortars. War mobilization, 1917–18, failed to remedy this deficiency: the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) largely fought with foreign weapons.
Although legally neutral, the United States had become a vital factor for the Allies with their growing dependence on American credit and material. Caught between the effective Allied naval blockade and Germany's submarine warfare campaign, America's right to trade overseas was jeopardized. To keep the United States from being drawn into the global conflict, Wilson attempted mediation. With the European belligerents unable to take the U.S. military seriously, he had little diplomatic leverage except for American economic might. The European nations wanted a peace to reflect their immense sacrifices in blood and treasure. But an acceptable peace to one side represented defeat to the other.
Wilson's mediation efforts implied that he was prepared to accept a global role for the United States to obtain a compromise peace, but he certainly never imagined any circumstances that would involve American forces in what he referred to as the “mechanical game of slaughter” in France. Nor apparently could he identify any strategic interest for the United States in the total defeat of Germany, which he believed would result in an unbalanced peace of victors. His formula for a satisfactory end to the fighting as he announced in January 1917 was “peace without victory.”
Pressed into the war in April 1917 by Germany's gamble for quick victory through unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson initially believed that American belligerency would largely be economic and psychological and that the central powers could be forced to the peace table without U.S. troops becoming involved on European battlefields. Pressure from London and Paris and the realization that his voice in any peace conference would be small without an American military presence in Europe changed his mind.
Only once before, during the American Revolution, had the United States fought as part of a military alliance. The General Staff in the War Department, however, quickly concluded that the only way that the United States could fight in Europe was through a collective military enterprise with the British and French on the western front. Nonetheless, America's leadership was determined to maintain a distinct military and political position. Wilson immediately disassociated himself from the entente's controversial war objectives by insisting that the United States was an “associate power,” with freedom to conduct independent goals.
The commander in chief of the AEF, John J. Pershing, proved an excellent choice to defend a separate and distinct U.S. military role in the war. The AEF commander tenaciously adhered to his goal of an independent U.S. force with its own front, supply lines, and strategic goals. His preparations for a win‐the‐war American breakthrough to occur in 1919 in Lorraine to the east and west of Metz profoundly influenced America's military participation. The United States supported unity of command and the selection of Gen. Ferdinand Foch as generalissimo; but Pershing resisted anything but the temporary amalgamation of American units into French and British divisions, even during the grave military crisis confronting the Allies in the spring of 1918. The German High Command, with Russia knocked out of the war in the winter of 1917–18, attempted to destroy the French Army and drive the British from the Continent through a series of offensives. Pershing resisted the only means of immediately assisting the depleted Allied forces: the inclusion of American units in British and French divisions. Small numbers of American soldiers, however, began to enter combat under the American flag in May and June. On 28 May, 14 months after the United States entered the war, a reinforced U.S. regiment (about 4,000 men) captured the village of Cantigny. Several days later, the Second Division (which included a Marine brigade) took up a defensive position west of Château‐Thierry and engaged the advancing Germans.
Pershing rebuffed efforts by Allied soldiers to share their increasingly sophisticated tactical techniques with his forces. Revisionists have been critical of his emphasis on riflemen, the American frontier spirit, and open field tactics, arguing that he did not comprehend how science and the machine age had revolutionized warfare.
After gaining reluctant approval from Foch for the formation of an independent American force, the U.S. First Army, Pershing went forward with plans to eliminate the threatening salient of St. Mihiel, as a prelude to his Metz offensive. The Battle of St. Mihiel (12–16 September 1918) proved to be an impressive but misleading U.S. victory because German forces were in the process of withdrawing to a new and shorter defensive line when the Americans attacked and cut off the salient.
The pressing demands of coalition warfare, however, forced Pershing to delay preparations for his 1919 Metz campaign. Complying with Foch's strategy, he reluctantly shifted most of his troops some sixty miles northward to the Meuse‐Argonne sector, where he was expected to participate in simultaneous and converging Allied attacks against the large German salient. Logistical chaos, flawed tactics, and inexperienced men and officers contributed to a disastrous start to the Meuse‐Argonne offensive (26 September–11 November 1918). Pershing hoped to advance ten miles on the first day; his front, however, had moved just thirty‐four miles by the armistice six weeks later, much of the ground gained only during the last phase of the offensive when Germany had exhausted its reserves.
Although only involved in heavy fighting for 110 days, the AEF made vital contributions to Germany's defeat. With tens of thousands of “doughboys” crossing the Atlantic to reinforce the Allies, and with the AEF emerging as a superior fighting force, the exhausted and depleted Germans had no hope of avoiding total defeat if the war continued into 1919.
Before Berlin's appeal in early October for a peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points, the United States was on the verge of brilliantly coordinating its participation in the land war in Europe with its political plans to reshape the postwar world. If the war had continued into the spring of 1919, Pershing's plan to deliver a knockout blow to the German Army probably would have been achieved. Gen. Jan C. Smuts, the South African statesman who served in the British War Cabinet, warned the British government in October: if the war continued another year, the United States would become the “diplomatic dictator of the world.”
In contrast to Pershing's wishes for total victory, Wilson hoped to avoid placing Germany at the mercy of the Allies. American participation had not been designed to further the British empire, strengthen French security, or even maintain the European balance of power. Wilson stood not with the interests of the nation‐states, but with the rights of humankind. He thus attempted with mixed results to use separate negotiations with Berlin over an armistice to impose his Fourteen Points on the Allies as well as Germany.
As the Great War concluded with the armistice on 11 November 1918, American policy was directed toward the repudiation of power politics and the erection of a “permanent” peace. Wilsonianism promised an end to war primarily through democratic institutions, the end of secret diplomacy, the self‐determination for ethnic minorities, and most especially through a League of Nations. It has been argued that this visionary approach raised expectations that were impossible to meet. The war had destroyed the old balance of power in Europe, and the peace settlement made revisionist nations out of the two states that would soon dominate the Continent, Germany and the Soviet Union. The United States, the greatest economic beneficiary of the war, helped make the peace, but with its rejection of the Treaty of Versailles refused responsibility for maintaining it.
A war in which over 65 million troops had been mobilized by the belligerents ended in a twenty‐year truce instead of “permanent peace.” The failure to achieve Wilson's unrealistic though desirable goal was hardly surprising. But another general war was not inevitable. World War II was caused by many factors, including the flawed peace settlement of 1919, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the psychological scars of World War I, which enfeebled the democracies. But the inability of the victorious powers, especially Great Britain and the United States, to work together to prevent the resurgence of German military power, was certainly one of the most important reasons for the resumption of war in 1939.
Bibliography
- B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War 1914–1918, 1930.
- Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I, 1968.
- Donald Smythe, Pershing: General of the Armies, 1985.
- Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918, 1987.
- Allan R. Millett,
Over Where? The AEF and the American Strategy for Victory, 1917–1918 , in Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Against All Enemies: Interpretations of the American Military from Colonial Times to the Present, 1988. - Timothy K. Nenninger,
American Military Effectiveness in the First World War , in Military Effectiveness, Vol. 1: The First World War, Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., 1988. - David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics, 1988.
- Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson 1914–18, 1992.
- John Keegan, A History of Warfare, 1993.
- David F. Trask, The AEF and Coalition Warmaking, 1917–1918, 1993.
- David R. Woodward, Trial by Friendship: Anglo‐American Relations, 1917–1918, 1993.
- Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916–18, 1994.
- D. Clayton James and Anne Sharp Wells, America and the Great War, 1914–1920, 1998
