Winning the War

When the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, the Allied forces were close to exhaustion. Great Britain and France had already indebted themselves heavily in the procurement of vital American military supplies. Now, facing near-certain defeat, a British delegation to Washington, DC, requested immediate troop reinforcements to boost Allied spirits and help crush German fighting morale, which was already weakened by short supplies on the frontlines and hunger on the home front. Wilson agreed and immediately sent 200,000 American troops in June 1917. These soldiers were placed in “quiet zones” while they trained and prepared for combat.

Figure 1. U.S. soldiers run past fallen Germans on their way to a bunker. In World War I, for the first time, photographs of the battles brought the war vividly to life for those at home.

By March 1918, the Germans had won the war on the eastern front. The 1917 Russian Revolution had not only toppled the hated regime of Tsar Nicholas II but also ushered in a civil war from which the Bolsheviks, Communist revolutionaries under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, had emerged victorious. Weakened by war and internal strife, and eager to build the new Soviet Union, Russian delegates agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending their war with Germany and the Central Powers. Germany, suddenly able to shift massive numbers of troops away from the Eastern Front, began their Kaiserschlacht (Spring Offensive), causing both the French and British to ask Wilson to forestall extensive training to U.S. troops and instead commit them to the front immediately. Although wary of the move, Wilson complied, ordering the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John “Blackjack” Pershing, to offer U.S. troops as replacements for the Allied units in need of relief. Prior to August 8, 1918, two million men of the American Expeditionary Forces had joined British and French armies in a series of successful counteroffensives that pushed the disintegrating German lines back across France. German general Erich Ludendorff referred to the launch of the counteroffensive as the “black day of the German army.”

In a series of battles along the front that took place from May 28 through August 6, 1918, including the battles of Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and the Second Battle of the Marne, American forces alongside the British and French armies succeeded in repelling the German offensive. The Battle of Cantigny, on May 28, was the first American offensive in the war. In less than two hours that morning, American troops overran the German headquarters in the village, thus convincing the French commanders of their ability to fight against the German line advancing towards Paris. The subsequent battles of Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood proved to be the bloodiest of the war for American troops. At the latter, faced with a German onslaught of mustard gas, artillery fire, and mortar fire, U.S. Marines attacked German units in the woods on six occasions—at times meeting them in hand-to-hand and bayonet combat—before finally repelling the advance. The U.S. forces suffered 10,000 casualties in the three-week battle, with almost 2,000 killed in total; 1,087 perished in a single day. Brutal as they were, these battles entailed relatively small losses compared to the casualties suffered by France and Great Britain. Ultimately, the German offensive exhausted the Central Powers’ faltering military effort. Defeat was inevitable. These summer battles turned the tide of the war, with the Germans in full retreat by the end of July 1918.

Figure 2. This map shows the Western Front at the end of the war, as the Allied Forces decisively break the German line.

By the end of September 1918, over one million U.S. soldiers staged a full offensive into the Argonne Forest. By November—after nearly forty days of intense fighting—the German lines were broken, and their military command reported to German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II of the desperate need to end the war and enter into peace negotiations. Facing civil unrest from the German people in Berlin, as well as the loss of support from his military high command, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated his throne on November 9, 1918, and immediately fled by train to the Netherlands. Two days later, on November 11, 1918, Germany and the Allies declared an immediate armistice, thus bringing the fighting to a stop and signaling the beginning of the peace process. The United States celebrates Veteran’s Day on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to commemorate the signing of the Armistice in World War I.

Figure 3. This photograph of U.S. soldiers in a trench hardly begins to capture the brutal conditions of trench warfare, where disease, rats, mud, and hunger plagued the men.

When the armistice was declared, a total of 53,000 American soldiers had been killed in battle, while 64,000 had died of disease, the vast majority from the Spanish Flu, which first appeared in Kansas in the spring of 1918 and was carried to Europe by American soldiers. Reports from the Surgeon General of the Army revealed that while 227,000 American soldiers were hospitalized from wounds received in battle, almost half a million suffered from influenza. The worst part of the epidemic struck during the height of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the fall of 1918 and weakened the combat capabilities of the American and German armies. During the war, more soldiers died from influenza than combat.

The Allies as a whole suffered over 5.7 million military deaths, primarily Russian, British, and French soldiers. The Central powers suffered 4 million military deaths, with half of them being German soldiers. Both France and Germany lost about 4% of their population to the war.^[1] The total cost of the war to the United States alone was in excess of $32 billion, with interest expenses and veterans’ benefits eventually bringing the cost to well over $100 billion.

A Transformed World

Before the war, the Middle East had three main centers of power: the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Iran. President Wilson’s call for self-determination appealed to many under the Ottoman Empire’s rule. In the aftermath of the war, Wilson sent a commission to investigate the region to determine the conditions and aspirations of the populace. The King-Crane Commission found that most of the inhabitants favored an independent state free of European control. However, these wishes were largely ignored, and the lands of the former Ottoman Empire were divided into “mandates” through the Treaty of Sèvres at the San Remo Conference in 1920. The Ottoman Empire disintegrated into several nations, many created by European powers with little regard for ethnic realities. These Arab provinces were ruled by Britain and France, and the new nation of Turkey emerged from the former heartland of Anatolia. Though allegedly for the benefit of the people of the Middle East, the mandate system was essentially a reimagined form of nineteenth-century imperialism. France received Syria; Britain took control of Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan (Jordan). The United States was asked to become a mandate power but declined.

The 1917 Russian Revolution, meanwhile enflamed American fears of communism, which manifested in an exacerbated nervousness about immigrants and the potential spread of radical ideas. When in March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed a separate peace treaty with Germany, the Allies planned to send troops to northern Russia and Siberia to prevent German influence and fight the Bolshevik Revolution. Wilson agreed, and, in a little-known foreign intervention, American troops remained in Russia as late as 1920. Although the Bolshevik rhetoric of self-determination followed many of the ideals of Wilson’s Fourteen Points—Vladimir Lenin supported revolutions against imperial rule across the world—the American commitment to self-rule was hardly strong enough to overcome powerful strains of nativist anticommunism.