The World's War

by David Olusoga

  Unlike weak and foreign-dominated China, independent Siam had largely avoided foreign incursions in its history. Although the target of a series of unfair treaties, Siam had escaped the indignities that had been piled upon its giant neighbour to the north. Throughout their short involvement in the First World War, the Siamese made every effort to guarantee that their army of specialists was not confused with the mere colonial conscripts of French Indochina or the contract labourers sent by China. In France, Siamese officials were on hand to ensure that the Expeditionary Force was accorded all rights and respect due to the soldiers of a sovereign allied nation. The Siamese were alert to the subtleties of procedure and diplomacy and were determined to be treated as an equal partner within the Entente. By 1917, both Siam’s king and the country’s increasingly Westernized political class had come to the same realization as had been reached in 1914 by the leaders of Republican China: that the post-war world would be shaped only by those nations able to win a place at any peace conference. Rama VI and his government set out to use the contribution of the Siamese Expeditionary Force as a means of guaranteeing that place. To this end, Rama VI’s government even redesigned the national flag. The old Thong Chang Puak, the ‘Elephant Banner’ consisting of a white elephant on a red background – a depiction of the sacred albino elephants kept for centuries by the kings of Siam within their royal palaces in Bangkok – was, in 1917, replaced with the Thong Trairong¸ Siamese for ‘Tricolour’.*1 This new red, white and blue flag, which remains the banner of modern Thailand, is said to have been specifically designed to sit well alongside the red, white and blue of the French Tricouleur, the British Union flag and the US Stars and Stripes, as if its designers could already envisage it fluttering outside the Palace of Versailles.

  In 1917 Siam was not the only nation whose leaders made the calculation that it was in their interests to join the war and set themselves alongside the Allies. In the months before the collapse of Russia, the First World War spread to its maximum extent in respect of the number of nations involved. In April, both Cuba and Panama declared war on Germany, followed in August by Liberia, one of the only two non-colonized nations in Africa. In October 1917, Uruguay and Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and Brazil declared war. The Brazilians, outraged at the sinking of their merchant ships by German U-boats, sent a military mission to France to pave the way for a Brazilian Expeditionary Force, though the end of hostilities meant that only a handful of Brazilians actually saw action on the Western Front. In August 1917 China finally abandoned its neutrality and joined the Allies, a move that gave the British and French an excuse to deploy the Chinese Labour Corps in more dangerous zones that when they were merely the labourers of a neutral nation. Far more significant than all these declarations of war, however, was the one that set the trend on 6 April 1917 and which would transform the balance of power decisively in the Allies’ favour: the US declaration of war.

  Those in Berlin who quaked at the news of America’s entry into the war did so not out of immediate fear of the US Army – diminutive as it was in April 1917 – but in the knowledge of the awesome potential that was contained within that most dynamic and industrious of nations. War against the United States was war against a country built on a continental scale, a land of 100 million people (greater in population than France and Britain combined) and already a superpower in industrial, if not yet military, terms. The bulk of America’s people – from the old established East Coast families to the recent immigrants clustered in the great cities of the Midwest – had been drawn from all over Europe, in addition to which there were 9 million African Americans, most of them still in the South, and the remnants of the long-abused indigenous Native American ‘Indians’. The mobilization of these varied peoples would involve the transplantation onto French (and ultimately German) soil of these human and material manifestations of American power.

  But US mobilization would bring something else, too, in the shape of the complex, sophisticated, hypocritical and violent institution that was American racism. Although fighting in a global, multiracial war, the United States was to remain at all times committed to the principle that its own multiracial army would serve and fight in firm accordance with the prevailing racial attitudes at home. At the core of this was white America’s determination that its African-American citizens would not be permitted to gain from their experiences of war and military service any new skills, status or achievements that would alter their lowly status at home. There is perhaps no aspect of the First World War that more clearly demonstrates the gulfs that existed between the Allies when it came to race and the treatment of their non-white citizens and subjects.

  In the years 1917 and 1918, African Americans were approaching the deepest point in the dark valley of betrayal, terror and oppression that characterized the century between the Civil War of the 1860s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. By coming to the aid of Britain and France, the United States brought to Europe its own ‘huddled masses’, the 200,000 African Americans who served in the ranks of the quickly expanded army and who were ‘yearning to breathe free’ every bit as much as the white Europeans who had abandoned the old continent in previous decades. For these black soldiers it was, though, the Old World – the continent from which America’s white immigrants had fled – that offered them the liberty, brotherhood and equality that was denied to them at home. After the war, the black writer and philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois claimed that for the African-American soldiers that ‘taste of real democracy and old-world culture, was revolutionizing’.6 Yet what is perhaps most striking about the US Army during the First World War is how effective it was at ensuring that most African Americans were not given access to the revolutionizing freedoms on offer in Europe. Despite their courageous service and endless labour, they ended the war as firmly in the grip of American racism and segregation as they had been in 1914. In some respects, the war even made the position of African Americans more precarious and exposed them to even greater violence and abuse.

  When President Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress on 2 April 1917, calling for the declaration of war, he proclaimed that the United States was not pursuing any self-interest but rather ensuring that the world ‘be made safe for democracy’. It was a phrase that chimed with the aspirations and ideals of the peoples of Britain and France, but which largely rang hollow in the black quarters of the Northern US cities and in the farmsteads and shacks of the Deep South. The ultimate status of African Americans in the pre-war nation was summed up in the pithy condemnatory assessment of Archibald Grimke, a black activist and minister at a Presbyterian church in Washington, DC. In the United States, he bemoaned:

  Men of darker hue have no rights which white men are bound to respect. And it is this narrow, contracted, contemptible un-democratic idea of democracy that we have been fighting to make the world safe for, if we have been fighting to make it safe for democracy at all.7

  The editors of The Messenger, which was the publication of the civil-rights campaigner A. Philip Randolph, argued that African Americans ‘would rather fight to make Georgia safe for the Negro’ than follow the injunctions of the white and black elites that they should spill their blood in order to make the world safe for democracy.8 Even the New York Times, in July 1917, made a similar point, warning that America’s politicians ‘are saying a great deal about democracy in Washington now, but while they are talking about fighting for freedom and the Stars and Stripes, here at home the whites apply the torch to the black man’s homes, and bullets, clubs, and stones to their bodies’.9

  For African Americans, the United States of 1917 was two nations: North and South. By almost every indicator and measurable statistic, African Americans were better off in the North than in the South – better educated, better nourished, better employed and better treated. In the North there was a black, professional middle class. To fight against their oppression, African Americans in the North had formed civil-rights organizations such as the Na
tional Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. There was a black press and a black publishing infrastructure, run by a journalistic elite dedicated to fight for progress and against racism. The cautionary refrain of much of the African-American middle class and some of journalistic elite was ‘patience’. Gauging the depth and shocking ferocity of white racism, campaigners – both black and white – concluded that if change were ever to come about, it would take generations, perhaps centuries, and it would only ever be granted, it could never demanded or seized. Even among many of the white liberals who supported black calls for enhanced civil rights, the doctrine of black inferiority was largely accepted. The supposed racial characteristics of African Americans, which had been loaded on to the shoulders of black people by centuries of slavery and racial theory, asserted that they were a people of low intelligence, perhaps irredeemably so. African-American men and women were supposedly innately lazy and lacking in moral courage. According to such views, both sexes harboured a predilection towards crime, and the men in particular were overly sexual and uncontrollably desirous of white women. The modish Social Darwinian pseudo-sciences of racial eugenics, racial anthropology, phrenology and craniology all jostled to add their own patina of scientific legitimacy to long-standing racial theories (and assumptions).

  The visceral expression of American racism was lynching, the nation’s blood ritual. It was as barbaric as anything that ever took place in Rome’s Colosseum. Neither the Democratic nor Republican party, nor President Wilson (who depended upon the votes of racist Southern Democrats), had the political will to control the lynch mobs. The practice was even given a boost by the burgeoning film industry in 1915, when D.W. Griffiths’ Birth of a Nation was released, a distorted and toxic retelling of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed.*2 In 1916, fifty-four African Americans were lynched. In 1917, the year in which the United States began to conscript black men into the army, seventy African Americans were killed – mostly men, but some women too. The induction of African Americans into the army seemed to have the effect of fanning the flames of racial violence. The killings became more frequent, even in the North, but also more sadistic, even ritualized. African Americans in 1917 were lynched for talking to white women, for walking along the sidewalk, or for attempting to save other men from the mobs; black men were killed on the streets of St Louis, Chicago and New York. The events in St Louis escalated into a widespread and horrific killing spree. In photographs taken of those frenzied killings, the euphoria on the faces of the murderers and onlookers is as horrifying as the mutilated and burned black bodies around which the crowds huddle. Some photographs were even transformed into an ugly but booming trade in postcards – until they were eventually banned by the Post Master General.10

  From the depths of their dark valley, African Americans had little interest in the war in Europe. Among Northern black communities, who had had access to education and a free press, there was a natural wave of sympathy for France, a nation known to be significantly more racially tolerant than the United States. Yet that sympathy was not potent enough to induce within African Americans a feeling that the war, or the plight of France, was their affair – any more than white Americans felt any great compulsion to rush en masse to the defence of Britain. There was stronger support for the view that if the United States were to enter the war, then African Americans should show themselves willing to take part in the conflict and be permitted to take part by the white authorities on equal terms with white men. If America were to go to war, black men wanted the chance to fight, as their fathers and grandfathers had done in the last years of the Civil War. This was understood to be in the interests of ‘the race’ as much as in interests of the nation.

  During the Civil War the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had prophesied: ‘Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.’11 Half a century later, Douglass had been proved tragically over-optimistic. African Americans were supposedly full citizens of the United States, yet they found themselves in the same quandary as colonial subjects in the empires of Britain and France. In 1917 the leaders and opinion-formers of black America made the same calculation that had been agreed by the political elites of the British Raj in 1914: that service in war could be used as a lever with which to prise some concessions and liberties out of their white rulers’ hands, after victory had been achieved. Loyalty now would earn sympathy later. As with the Indian political class of 1914 and Frederick Douglass in the 1860s, the black political class of Wilsonian America disastrously under-estimated the determination of a white elite to maintain racial order and keep dark-skinned peoples in their place. If there is a significant difference between the position of Indian soldiers in the British Army and African Americans in the US Army during the First World War it is that while the British were compelled, for reasons of propaganda and military expediency, to temporarily lower some of the barriers of race within which their empire was run, the Americans chose instead to attempt to export to Europe, virtually wholesale, their racial laws and the apparatus and institutions that enforced them.

  After US entry into the war, it was clear that if Germany were to win the conflict, the final opportunity to do so would be in 1918. By 1919, the balance of military power on the Western Front, combined with the metastasizing German cancers of hunger and defeatism, would threaten to overwhelm both the German people and their army. In the first weeks of 1918, the German High Command under General Ludendorff, the conqueror of Russia, finalized plans for a last great attack against the British and French in the west. The preparations for the German Spring Offensive of 1918 represented the final stages of a race, a sprint to the finish-line with Germany scrambling to defeat the British and the French before America could arm and train a vast conscript army and deploy it on the battlefields. There was a window of opportunity, because in its own race to deploy an American Expeditionary Force large enough to shift the balance of power, the United States had to begin from virtually a standing start.

  The US Army of 1917 was small and technologically backward. At around 100,000 men, it ranked seventeenth in the world. In terms of equipment it was in some respects a generation behind the armies of Europe. It had a modern and effective service weapon in the shape of the Springfield rifle, and the early American adoption of light machine guns counted as a blessing; but the army’s artillery consisted largely of museum pieces. America had around 200 mainly obsolete aircraft, and no American tank was to appear on the battlefield – or even on the drawing board until after the war. The United States had not known a mass conscript army since the demobilization of the Union Army in 1865, and beyond the nation’s tiny army and the National Guard the only military formations were the various state militias. The transformation of this army of 1917 into the force that was 2 million-strong and which would march across the frontiers of Germany in the last weeks of 1918 was an enormous and astonishing undertaking.

  The Selective Service Act, America’s draft law, was passed in May 1917. It required the registration of all US males aged between 21 and 30, of all races. During the Civil War, 180,000 free African Americans, most of them recently emancipated slaves, had followed Frederick Douglass’s injunction and served in the blue uniforms of the Union Army. There had even been a small number of black men who had fought with the Confederacy. As recently as 1898, African-American troops had fought in the Cuban War (against Spanish colonial control). In the first years of the twentieth century, they had performed a role not dissimilar to that of the sepoys of British India and the Tirailleurs Sénégalais of French Africa. Two African-American regiments had, for example, been sent to the Philippines in 1900 to put down a revolt against US rule. During that war against the Philippine Insurectos, the US Army had concluded that African-American troop
s were especially suited to the tropical conditions of the Philippines and would be immune to the tropical diseases of the region.*3 In 1917, despite having received little in return, African Americans could point to their long history of military service as a glorious chapter of the black experience, a source of pride and a record cited in the continuing demands for full citizenship.

  Despite the long history of black service, the army authorities of 1917 had concluded that all but a very small proportion of African-American men lacked not just the raw intellect needed to make them effective combat troops, but also the moral qualities of stamina, courage, industry and fortitude that were required of men at war. This reflected a general belief in white America that African Americans were lacking in intelligence, which became a justification for providing them with a low standard of education. The predictable result was that white children far outperformed black children in educational achievement, a fact that was, in turn, cited as evidence of African Americans’ lower intelligence. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1917 the US Army entered the war in the belief that modern warfare had become so technological as to be beyond the capacity of most African Americans.

  In May 1918, Colonel E.D. Anderson, Chairman of the Operations Branch of the US General Staff, wrote a plan for the deployment of ‘colored’ men who had been, and who would later be, inducted into the army. While Anderson was confident that ‘those colored men of the best physical stamina, highest education and mental development, the cream of the colored draft, will make first class fighting troops’, he devoted the bulk of his attention to those who would be left behind, ‘after this cream has been skinned off’.12 Confident that it was appropriate for black men to be drafted into the US Army on similar terms to whites, he warned that:

  …a large percentage of colored men [are] of the ignorant illiterate day laborer class. These men have not, in a large percent of cases, the physical stamina to withstand the hardships and the exposure of hard field service, especially the damp cold winters of France. The poorer class of backwoods negro has not the mental stamina and the moral sturdiness to put him in the line against opposing German troops who consist of men of high average education and thoroughly trained. The enemy is constantly looking for a weak place in the line and if he can find a part of the line held by troops composed of culls of the colored race, all he has to do is concentrate on that, break through and then he will be in the rear… .13