Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  The fiasco in Mexico and routine interventions in the Caribbean gave no indication that Wilson had any strategic thoughts. But he had captured the essence of enduring peace; a war so terrible to be a deterrent against future wars must not incite insupportable ambitions for vengeance and redress, and the peace must be preserved by an international organization. It was a brilliant vision—the most imaginative insight into world affairs any leader of a great nation had ever had, almost a jingo of righteousness.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s naval construction, isthmian canal, and international activism, and Woodrow Wilson’s transformation of a response to maritime aggression into a crusade against belligerency and revanchism and in favor of international law, organization, and civility, were the first two forays of America into a foreign policy aimed at world influence: the big stick and bully pulpit, and the evangelization of militant democracy and constructive internationalism.

  Neither would prove immediately consequential. But Theodore Roosevelt’s most important relative, who would also prove to be the most talented member of the Wilson administration, would learn the necessity of possessing military strength from his quasi-uncle and cousin, and of selling a moral mission in foreign policy initiatives from his president. He would blend the two successfully and impose this dual character on American foreign policy thereafter. Franklin Delano Roosevelt would prove the true heir and continuator of both TR and Wilson, enemies of each other though they were, would be more successful in the world than either, and would win more elections as president than the two combined.

  4. THE UNITED STATES ENTERS THE WAR

  President Wilson delivered his war message to the Congress on the evening of April 2, 1917. Gaunt and dressed in black, ignoring the thunderous applause elicited by his eloquence, Wilson galvanized the nation, even a temporarily respectful Theodore Roosevelt, with his intellect, erudition, and articulation. “The world must be made safe for democracy.... the right is more precious than peace . . . . To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles which gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.” The declaration of war was voted and signed on April 6. To a world exhausted by a horrible war, America promised peace through the victory of the Western powers, buoyed by the mighty trans-Atlantic democracy, a victory of liberal reform, republican rule, and constitutional monarchy, over the dead hand of the authoritarian monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe. It would become a war to end war, and to, as the president stirringly said, “make the world safe for democracy.” Life and meaning and purpose were imparted, at this very late date, to the unspeakable carnage in which tens of thousands died every few days on all sides, for years, to move an army commander’s headquarters a few miles closer to Berlin or Paris or St. Petersburg, Vienna, Rome, or Constantinople.

  The American entry into the war came as Allied fortunes were being severely stretched. The Germans sank 881,000 tons of Allied shipping in March 1917. And the failed offensives of the French in Champagne in April and of the British and Canadians in Flanders from June to November 1917, of Brusilov’s Russian offensive against the Germans in July, and the rout of the Italians at Caporetto north of Venice in the late autumn, while the Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg, organized a communist dictatorship, and left the war in March 1918, all presaged a mighty effort by Germany to win the war in the west, having transferred her entire eastern army to France, before American reinforcements could turn the tide.

  In 19 months, Wilson raised the size of the United States Army from 200,000 to 4,000,000, with a navy of over 500,000; 2.8 million men were drafted and nearly 2 million volunteered. There were 500,000 American soldiers in France in May 1918, and they arrived throughout most of the last year of the war at the rate of over 200,000 a month, over 300,000 in July 1918 alone. The American Expeditionary Force under General John J. Pershing grew to 2.1 million men, of whom nearly 1.4 million were engaged combat forces. It became a race between the concentration of all German forces and arriving American forces on the Western Front, as well as a struggle against submarines in the Atlantic.

  As the Great War escalated to its sanguinary and desperate climax, the British replaced H.H. Asquith as prime minister with the more energetic David Lloyd George at the head of a coalition government in December 1916. The French handed almost unlimited power to the 76-year-old veteran of the Paris Commune and the long battle over the Dreyfus affair, Georges Clemenceau, in November 1917. As Russia left the war and the Germans began their supreme play for victory in the west in March 1918, the Allies agreed on the appointment of Ferdinand Foch as generalissimo and supreme commander of the Allied armies, and in August, as he launched his great offensive, he was named Marshal of France. Pershing retained command of the American army, which was kept integral and contiguous, as were other Allied armies, but Foch assumed command of the entire theater, the greatest host in human history (up to that time), over 6,000,000 soldiers by November 1918.

  The United States was not an Allied, but rather an “associated,” power, as Wilson wished to retain the independent moral authority to propose a compromise peace. As the terrible year of 1917 unfolded, others followed Wilson’s lead in trying to lift up the hearts of their embattled and much-widowed and orphaned populations with war aims that would inspirit a final and decisive sacrificial effort. Alexander Kerensky took office in Russia in May and called for a peace based on the self-determination of all the nationalities of Europe (the fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in particular but not including the ethnic minorities of Russia). In August, Pope Benedict XV commended to the leaders of the warring powers a peace without indemnities, the renunciation of war and its replacement by disarmament and arbitration, the complete freedom of the seas, and the evacuation of Belgium and other occupied territories. When the Bolsheviks seized power in St. Petersburg and in Moscow in November 1917, they published secret treaties with the British and French that had the semblance of imperialist designs, and they redoubled their call for universal revolt and the worldwide solidarity of the laboring classes.

  Woodrow Wilson returned to Congress on January 8, 1918, to enunciate his Fourteen Points. It was a world-shaking charter: open and openly negotiated covenants of peace; absolute freedom of the seas; tariff reduction and equality of trade; reduction of national armaments to the lowest point adequate for domestic security; impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, with equal weight to the native peoples and colonizing powers; evacuation of Russia and her self-determination; evacuation of Belgium; restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France; the redrafting of Italy’s borders to include all ethnic Italians except the Swiss; autonomous development for the peoples of Austria-Hungary; evacuation of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, and access to the sea for Serbia; opening of the Dardanelles, with self-determination of peoples governed by Turkey, but a secure and sovereign Ottoman Turkey; an independent Poland with access to the sea; and a general association of nations on the basis of equality of rights of all nations, regardless of size and strength.

  It was an electrifying and prophetic program, which had the initial intended effect of inspiring the world but also contained the ingredients of disillusionment and havoc. The Germans would accept only if it was clear they were losing the war; so at the point, if it could be achieved, where the Americans turned the tide in favor of the Allies, the Germans would have to sue for peace on the basis of their diminished prospects, and the United States might have to threaten a separate peace to get Anglo-French agreement to any such terms as these. Neither power would accept the colonial or disarmament provisions; the British would not unreservedly accept unconditional freedom of the seas, since they controlled most of them, and the French, if victorious, would never trust the Germans to stay disarmed, nor make Germany’s military renascence easier
by disarming themselves. Sundering the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had its appeal as an idea, but would create far more difficult and often lawless states than those being atomized had been. And any such total immersion in internationalism as this, especially any adherence to the multilateral assembly of nations that was envisioned in the last point, would be such a change of pace for America that it would require intensive lobbying of the opposition—not a tactic that commended itself to Wilson’s authoritarian and didactic temperament, nor one that would be easy with such obdurate and fierce personalities as Roosevelt and Lodge.

  Wilson’s ability to rely on the Republicans, bearing in mind that anything like this would have to be a treaty requiring two-thirds of the senators for ratification, was not helped by his dismissal of Roosevelt’s request to be allowed to lead a division of volunteers into the war, as he had the Rough Riders, with Leonard Wood and others, almost 20 years before in Cuba. TR was now 58, half-blind, and overweight and unfit after his 1913 trip up the Amazon, where he contracted some tenacious local ailments. Wilson thought that his predecessor was inspired by a Boy’s Own Annual fable of what war was like and remarked that it was no longer “the charge of the Light Brigade.” It was, in some respects, a nonsensical idea, but it held interesting political possibilities.

  Wilson could, in effect, have bargained this favor for Roosevelt’s support of his peace plan, if he had been prepared to preview some of it at this point, and could even have struck some sort of arrangement with Roosevelt, as Franklin D. Roosevelt would have done, and later did expediently and usually ephemerally, with any number of Republicans and dissident Democrats. But Wilson had no sense of political tactics, and was, rather, concerned with devising and imposing intellectual formulations that were profound but very complicated to implement. He was also a very inflexible personality, and a Virginia Presbyterian, afflicted with the racial attitudes of the South (unlike Theodore Roosevelt, an urbane world traveler and enlightened Lincoln Republican, who famously invited the eminent African American educator Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House).

  The addition of American shipbuilding capacity and of the U.S. Navy to the supply of men and materiel to the war zone tightened the blockade of Germany and defeated the German submarines, on behalf of which the German General Staff and emperor (over the protests of the civilian government) had provoked American entry into the war. Having driven Britain into the arms of the French with his colossal naval construction program, Wilhelm II used his fleet only for three days in the entire war in the spring of 1916, drawing an immense and inconclusive battle with the British Grand Fleet (Jutland), following which, the German High Seas Fleet returned to port and remained there for the duration of the war. Wilhelm, though not an unintelligent man, had notoriously impulsive and self-indulgent judgment and was one of the most catastrophically error-prone leaders in modern history, at a cost of countless millions of lives and his own throne and dynasty.

  With American forces, relatively untrained but physically strong and in high spirits, pouring into the French Atlantic ports at 50,000 men a week, the Germans launched their supreme offensive on March 21, 1918. They attacked in great strength toward the rail and supply center of Amiens, with the plan of splitting the French and British armies and wheeling northward to the Channel and forcing the British into the sea. It was at this point that Foch was given the supreme command of all Western Front Allied armies. The Germans launched a new attack on April 9, west of Lille, with the same general objective as at Amiens, but progressed only about 17 miles against continuing fierce resistance and at heavy cost. The next German thrust was on May 27 to the south of Amiens, and it captured Soissons and got to within 50 miles of Paris, but did not break through French ranks. From June 9 to 15, the Germans attacked in salients east and north of Paris, but as always in this war, they encountered fanatical French resistance as they got close to the French capital.

  By this time, Americans were playing a significant part in the defense and fought with much-remarked bravery and success at Cantigny, 50 miles north of Paris, where nearly 30,000 Americans were engaged. After these exertions, the German army had returned to the Marne, after an absence of four years. As a long war was presaged by the remarkable French recovery on the Marne in 1914, largely because of the immovability of Foch’s army in that battle, the generalissimo earned his marshal’s baton and opened the final offensive of the war by repulsing the Germans at the Marne again, with the assistance of 270,000 Americans. The salient between Soissons and Reims that threatened Paris was eliminated by August 6. Two days later, the British moved all their forces forward, with the Canadians and Belgians and over 50,000 Americans, pushing the Germans back from near Amiens.

  A series of offensives involving all the Allied armies now erupted steadily along the whole front from the Channel to the Swiss border, and by early November the Allies were at a ragged line that ran from Brussels to Namur, Luxembourg, Metz, and Strasbourg, and the Germans had been cleared from Alsace and about half of Lorraine. On the southern front, the Italians, reinforced by French units, decisively defeated the Austro-Hungarians at Vittorio Veneto in late October. The Central Powers swiftly disintegrated. Bulgaria surrendered on September 30; a new German government, through the Swiss, asked Wilson on October 2, as did Austria on October 7, for an armistice followed by a peace conference based on the Fourteen Points. (The timeless Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph had died in November 1916, at age 86, after a reign of 68 years. He had begun in the revolt that swept out Metternich and lived almost but, mercifully, not quite, to the end of the 703-year rule of the Habsburgs.)

  5. THE ARMISTICE

  It was at this late point, when the war was effectively won, that Wilson could act, but the French and British responded that they had not been consulted about the Fourteen Points and did not agree with all of them. Wilson also delayed responding to the Germans, because he would not deal with a German government that he was unconvinced really represented the German population. The German fleet, which had had the comparative good fortune to be inactive for virtually all of the war, mutinied at Kiel on November 3; Austria surrendered on November 4; after a revolution broke out in Bavaria on November 7, the emperor abdicated and fled to the Netherlands on November 9, and a republic was declared on November 11. Wilson did threaten a separate peace (and had House tell Lloyd George and Clemenceau he would send the British and French war aims to the Congress); finally on November 5, the British and French accepted the Fourteen Points as a basis of negotiation, but with the provisions that they would determine what freedom of the seas actually consisted of and that Germany would have to pay reparations for war damage in territories from which they withdrew. Wilson agreed to this and transmitted, via the Swiss, the conditions to the Germans, whose government was now in a state of chaos, and authority for negotiating an armistice was delegated to Marshal Foch. German military delegates met with him on his campaign railway car in the Compiègne Forest on November 8, and the armistice was signed early on November 11, and took effect on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

  Under its terms, Germany would evacuate all occupied territories, the left bank of the Rhine, and the bridgeheads of Mainz, Cologne, and Coblenz; the Allies retained a full right to claim damages; all submarines would be surrendered and the entire German fleet would be interned in British ports; the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest (when the Germans conquered Romania, which had been induced by the British into declaring war on Germany in 1915) were abrogated; all German aircraft, tanks, and heavy artillery were to be destroyed; prisoners of war and deportees were to be returned; and Germany was to hand over 150,000 railway cars, 5,000 locomotives, and 5,000 trucks. So ended the greatest war in history. Sixteen million people had died and 21 million had been wounded. Of the main combatants, the dead and wounded totals, including civilians, were, in millions of people: Russia, 3.3 and 4.95; Turkey, 2.92 and 0.4 (indicating poor medical facilities); Germany, 2.47 and 4.25; France,
1.7 and 4.27; Austria-Hungary, 1.57 and 3.6; Italy, 1.24 and 0.95; the United Kingdom, 1.0 and 1.66; the United States, 117,000 dead and 206,000 wounded, and more than half the American dead were from the terrible pandemic of influenza that swept the camps at the end of the war.

  Wilson began at once to make serious tactical errors; he called for a Democratic Congress in the midterm elections and was sharply rebuked by the voters, who delivered both houses to the Republicans, irritated by what was seen as a violation of his pledge to avoid politics. Roosevelt jubilated that “Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people” and denounced “his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points.” He issued his statement from Roosevelt Hospital, where he was convalescing, but he died 10 weeks later, aged just 60, leaving Wilson unchallenged in American public esteem, but on a slippery slope of overheated expectations.

  If Roosevelt had not weakened his health with his Amazon trip in 1913, he would almost certainly have lived longer, and, healthy, would have been the Republican presidential nominee in 1920, and would have been elected. His quarrel with Taft, splitting of his party, denigration of Irish and German Americans as insufficiently American, and extreme vitriol in reference to a distinguished incumbent (who replied with equally damaging, if less bombastic, strictures) all indicated that Roosevelt could not live easily with his mistaken pledge in 1904 not to seek reelection. If he finally had been reelected, he would presumably have been more temperate in his conduct. He was widely mourned as a gifted and popular leader. Wilson announced on November 18 that he would attend the peace conference in Paris in person, and that he would take no one from the Senate, nor any representative Republicans, with him. The conference opened on January 18, 1919.