As pressure for some sort of naval legislation increased, the Wilson administration and Congress designed a new fleet-building program. Abandoning 1914 plans to modernize but not enlarge the fleet, the administration essentially proposed a five-year program drafted by the General Board that would have brought the fleet by 1925 to numbers second only to the Royal Navy and in quality superior to even the British. After much internal bargaining, Congress approved the General Board’s plan in August 1916, with the major change that the shipbuilding should be completely started within a three-year period, thus ensuring a “Navy second to none” earlier than 1925. Approved by the Senate by a vote of 71 to 8 and by the House by 283 to 50, the Naval Act of 1916 provided for the construction of ten battleships, sixteen cruisers, fifty destroyers, seventy-two submarines, and fourteen auxiliaries. The strategic rationale for the program did not depart from the assumptions of prewar contingency plans, largely focused on deterring or fighting Japan in the Pacific and Germany in the Caribbean. The law, however, stated that the United States would forgo the program if it could find some way to negotiate freedom of the seas and secure its interests in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific through mutual nonaggression pacts. Given the development of the naval campaigns of World War I, the act had little relevance to the war itself, since it paid no special attention to antisubmarine warfare.
Land force reform followed a more controversial course. Discouraged by the limits of National Guard reconstruction and encouraged by the enthusiasm of Secretary of War Stimson and Chief of Staff Wood, the General Staff completed a comprehensive analysis of land force policy in 1912, released in an executive document, The Organization of the Land Forces of the United States. The General Staff study had two novel aspects: It was made public, and it focused on the lack of an adequate reserve force with prewar training. Reflecting Stimson’s and Wood’s faith in the effectiveness of the American citizen-soldier, the report stressed that the United States could not fight a major war without reserves drawn from the citizenry, but it warned that the nation might not be granted sufficient time to train volunteer forces in a future war. But the idea of voluntary peacetime training in a federally sponsored reserve system found no champions in an election year despite its military wisdom.
Coming to office in 1913, the Wilson administration and its Democratic Congress did not view land force reform as a pressing national issue. Recognizing General Wood’s preference for the Republicans and professional commitment to reserve reform, the administration nevertheless allowed the aggressive Rough Rider to finish his full term as chief of staff. Wood used the opportunity to sponsor a pet project: summer military training camps for college students. Surveying the public sentiment for voluntary peacetime training, Wood saw hopeful signs in the cadet training programs of the land-grant colleges established by the Morrill Act of 1862. Even without any promise of a postgraduation commission, such programs in 1911 had 29,000 male participants. Wood also knew that the most critical shortage of soldiers in the wartime volunteer armies was company-grade officers. Therefore, he established two summer camps for college students in 1913. So successful was the response from students and educators that Wood held four camps in the summer of 1914, enrolling nearly 1,000 students. Not accidentally, the summer trainees, who paid their own expenses, represented the elite of the east coast and received as much citizenship and policy indoctrination as technical military training.
The outbreak of World War I gave the voluntary training movement a welcome stimulus, and Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison and Wood, now commander of the Eastern Department, exploited the new sense of urgency in land force reform. Converted to preparedness by the General Staff, Garrison sponsored an updated report on readiness, Statement of a Proper Military Policy for the United States (1915), which proposed the creation of a federal volunteer reserve force of 250,000 men trained before war broke out. But Garrison’s “Continental Army Plan” did not impress Congress, since it smacked of intervention in the world war and relegated the National Guard to a lower order of federal support. Both characteristics were politically unattractive, even to preparedness advocates. In the meantime Wood, manfully supported by new Chief of Staff Hugh L. Scott, enlarged the summer training program to include college students and civic-minded business and professional men from the east coast. Although the summer camp movement took its name from Wood’s encampment at Plattsburgh, New York, the 1915 camps were held at four different locations and enrolled nearly 4,000 volunteers. Despite official and Democratic criticism that the camps were a hotbed of Republican interventionism, the summer camp movement prospered under the sponsorship of an impressive array of business, labor, professional, and religious groups. As Wood himself became more controversial and outspoken on the issue of compulsory military training, the leadership of the movement shifted to civilians, especially the Military Training Camp Association (1916), led by New York lawyer Grenville Clark.
Nourished by Clark’s astute guidance and heightened public concern for military preparedness, the Plattsburg Movement reached a new apogee of popularity in the summer of 1916, when 10,000 volunteers attended ten different camps held across the country. Although the War Department supported the camps with training cadres and equipment, the trainees still paid their own way or received “scholarships” and had no guarantee that they would be commissioned in wartime. Nevertheless, the Plattsburg Movement demonstrated the depth of interest in military training and presented Congress with irrefutable proof that influential portions of the public were willing to make personal commitments to peacetime preparedness. In addition, the movement stressed values that no true Progressive could reject: Increased civic awareness and public responsibility; the role of military service in reducing class, ethnic, and regional antagonisms; and the preparation of American youth for leadership.
Having scuttled the “Continental Army Plan” and thrown Wilson’s War Department into disarray when Garrison and his assistant resigned, Congress seized the initiative in drafting new land force legislation. Correctly reading public sentiment toward some form of peacetime training, Congress patched together a set of proposals drawn from the General Staff, the National Guard lobby, citizen preparedness groups, and a technical-corporate elite concerned about economic mobilization. The intense cloakroom bargaining reflected not only ideas about preparedness but also Democratic determination to seize the military reform issue away from the Republicans and to accommodate the National Guard. As passed finally on June 3, the National Defense Act of 1916 represented the most comprehensive effort to organize a land force structure for future mobilization, but it made no special provisions for a crash preparedness program. Any reform hinting at intervention in the European war was still too controversial. To interventionists, the act was “either a comedy or a tragedy,” as one critic described it.
The National Defense Act of 1916, however, contained ambitious plans for future land force expansion. The regular Army was to grow to 175,000 over a five-year period. Its first-line reserve force would be the National Guard, which was supposed to grow with the aid of federal drill pay to a maximum of 400,000. By taking a dual oath (federal and state) upon enlistment, Guardsmen could be compelled to serve abroad for unlimited periods of time in a national emergency, but they would go to war as Guard units, not as individuals. Guard units, however, would not receive federal subsidies unless they drilled forty-eight times a year at their armories and attended a two-week summer camp. The War Department would establish physical and mental standards for Guard enlistees and retained the right to screen Guard officers for fitness. Behind the Guard the law did not establish a federal reserve like the “Continental Army,” but it did provide opportunities for college students and Plattsburg enthusiasts to receive reserve commissions through the Reserve Officers Training Corps at universities and through summer training. The reserve officers would form an Officers Reserve Corps prepared to provide junior line officers and technical specialists for the enlarged wartime Army.
/> The new law for the first time also recognized that the federal government required substantial emergency powers over industry and transportation if it was to supply a mass wartime Army. The president could compel any business to give government orders first priority in wartime. In the meantime, he should begin to study the problems of economic mobilization, a charge further strengthened with additional legislation that created a Council of National Defense from within the cabinet. Although Wilson did not use the council, he permitted Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to appoint an advisory committee of industrial experts in December 1916. This committee provided the early direction of mobilization planning upon America’s entry into World War I.
Together the Naval Act of 1916 and the National Defense Act of 1916 culminated two decades of unsteady but consistent growth and modernization of the American armed forces. Certainly the two acts appalled antimilitarists and noninterventionists, primarily because they believed the legislation was a frightening national affirmation of bellicosity. Some believed peacetime compulsory service would soon follow. On the other hand, militants like Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood recognized that paper reform did not mean real increases in military capability unless Congress funded the shipbuilding plans and the expanded, improved Army and Guard. Whether or not Congress would do so depended upon political events beyond the control of the military establishment. As commentators of all persuasions debated the meaning of the acts, German submarines prepared to resume unrestricted warfare against Allied and neutral shipping. As silent and deadly as a running torpedo, the European war approached a United States rich with paper plans and woefully unprepared for the one war it had not foreseen.
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ELEVEN
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The United States Fights in the “War to End All Wars,” 1917–1918
During the green April of 1917, as America entered the “Great War,” a United States senator cornered a General Staff officer and asked the critical strategic question of the intervention: “Good Lord! You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?” Some eighteen months later, the answer was clear as the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) of over 2 million men, cooperating with the armies of France and the British Empire, bludgeoned Imperial Germany into an armistice. Supporting the AEF stood a Navy and Marine Corps of over 600,000. In the United States and in places as far separated as northern Italy, polar Russia, and Siberia, another 2 million American soldiers served the war effort and diplomacy of the Wilson administration. World War I was the debut of the United States as an international military power. Like most debuts, the war brought its share of high anticipation, major disappointment, dogged accomplishment, and exaggerated exhilaration.
The American role in World War I derived its character less from strategic thinking in the United States than from the geopolitical notion that the future well-being of the United States depended upon the balance of power in Europe and the outcome of the war. Discarding the hallowed assumption that Europe’s affairs did not involve the United States and the security of the Western Hemisphere, the Wilson administration decided that the nation had a critical stake in an Allied victory. American involvement stemmed from economic self-interest as well as an emotional commitment to support “democracy” (France and Great Britain) against “autocracy” (Germany). After a brief economic dislocation when the war began in 1914, American bankers, farmers, industrialists, and producers of raw materials exploited British naval control of the Atlantic and Allied financial strength to make the war the biggest profit-making enterprise in the history of American exporting. Before American entry, the balance of trade, already favorable to the U.S., jumped by a factor of five; the Allies liquidated $2 billion of American assets and privately borrowed another $2.5 billion to pay for their purchases. In contrast, Germany secured only $45 million in American loans.
The patterns of trade depended upon the relative strength of the Royal Navy and the submarine force of the Imperial German Navy, whose operations had to cope with American conceptions about neutrality and freedom of the seas. Despite some minor German successes at surface commerce raiding early in the war, the Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic—except its cold, green depths. The Germans could keep about thirty submarines on stations around the British Isles to intercept trans-Atlantic merchantmen. This force proved an important threat to the Allied war effort, which was dependent on American and Latin American imports. The German submarine campaign, however, had limitations. Despite mutually declared blockades by both the Allies and Germany, the Americans became more upset about submarine warfare than about British interference with neutral trade. While the British blockade cost money and irritated shippers, German submarines killed American citizens with their unannounced torpedo attacks. The Lusitania incident of May 1915 was only one of several well-publicized episodes in which American passengers died. Although the German U-boat (Unterseeboot) campaign, characterized by periods of “restricted” and “unrestricted” operations, could not halt American trade, it produced a groundswell of anti-German outrage in the United States.
Deprived of decision in its ground war, the German military planned one more massive, unrestricted effort against all shipping in 1917. Even though this campaign was likely to bring open belligerency from the United States, the Germans thought the prospect of victory outweighed the risks of American entry. The German General Staff had carefully analyzed the potential military threat from the United States and decided that the Americans could not influence the ground war in Europe for at least two years. General Erich Ludendorff, the major architect of the German war effort after 1916, summed up the German position on the United States: “What can she do? She cannot come over here! . . . I do not give a damn about America.”
Despite its global reach, the war remained in 1917 a war to be won or lost on the three major fronts of Europe. From the American political and military point of view, two of these three fronts did not appear attractive. From the Baltic to the Balkans, the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reinforced with German troops, continued to bleed the Russians, but with such losses that both belligerents stood on the verge of collapse. Although the first phase of the Russian Revolution in March 1917 made the Russians more “democratic” allies, few American policymakers saw profit in a commitment to the Eastern Front. In northern Italy the Italian army remained locked in the mountains with other Austro-Hungarian and German ground forces after two years of futile offensives.
Although it was crucial to avoid defeat in both Russia and Italy in order to prevent the release of the German armies there, the British and French commanders regarded the Western Front—stretching from Belgium to Switzerland—as the theater of decision. Already the muddy graveyard of Allied and German armies, the Western Front had become the ultimate test of the belligerents’ political and military will and capability. Both had run thin by 1917. Nevertheless, as the United States entered the war, the Allies made one more effort against the German barriers of barbed wire, machine guns, artillery, fortifications, and skilled infantry. The results of the Allied effort, launched in conjunction with an equally desperate Russian offensive, could not be tallied until the late summer of 1917. It was an unequivocal failure that cost the British and French an additional million casualties. The French army mutinied and refused to participate in any further offensives. Under the command of a new general, Henri Philippe Petain, the French army manned its trenches and waited for better times. The Russian army simply dissolved as the Russian Revolution moved in more radical directions. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), commanded by General (later Field Marshal) Sir Douglas Haig, lapsed back into a defensive posture, riven by command and civil-military conflicts and deprived of reinforcements by Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Having exhausted their own armies, the British and French stood ready to fight to the last American.
Declaring war on April 6, 1917, the Wilson administration, prodded by British and French diplomats and military missions, reluctantly con
cluded that the American military effort had to focus on the Western Front. American war aims, articulated later by President Wilson as the “Fourteen Points,” required maximum effort in the theater of decision with minimal political and military integration with the Allies, whose own war aims remained suspect and decidedly nonidealistic. The Allies sought such practical goals as dissolving the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, annexing territory, eliminating German military power, and collecting monetary reparations. Wilson, on the other hand, thought in terms of a new world order based on principles of national self-determination, democratic government, freedom of the seas, an end to imperialism, open diplomacy, disarmament, and free economic development. Administration slogan makers told the public that the United States would make “the world safe for Democracy.” French Premier Georges Clemenceau wondered why Wilson needed Fourteen Points when God required only Ten. More practically, the volatile state of American public opinion seemed to justify only a commitment to free France from its German occupiers, since a direct alliance with Britain threatened to raise the ire of Irish-Americans and opponents of British imperialism. The War Department General Staff urged that an American army go to France, since only such a commitment would break the military stalemate and thus provide the diplomatic leverage Wilson sought. The Western Front, for all its horrors, was the only “over there” that counted.
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