In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  The name Roosevelt stood for the proposition (among others) that if America were militarily strong, she would be left in peace—an opinion shared by young Americans otherwise as different from one another as Averell Harriman and Douglas MacArthur. The assistant secretary, much influenced by the theories of TR’s friend Admiral Alfred. Thayer Mahan, brought to his job a fervor for a strong navy that was reassuring to such opposition leaders as Senator Lodge.

  The navy’s especial sphere, and that of the marines, was the mini-empire in Central America, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean that the United States administered with scant regard for the nominal independence of the countries in the area. U.S. forces were permanently stationed in Panama, while by the terms of the so-called Platt Amendment (1901), Cuba had become a U.S. protectorate. Haiti was to undergo U.S. military occupation from 1915 to 1934. Santo Domingo was to be controlled by an American military governor from 1916 to 1924; and Nicaragua was subject to almost continuous U.S. armed intervention from 1912 to 1925.

  When Roosevelt came to Washington, these tropical lands were where the action was to be found. Felix Frankfurter, still in the State, War and Navy Departments Building in 1913, was busily tidying up the legalities of it all in what he supposed would be his last year in the War Department. John Foster Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell was traveling the West Indies, scouting out chances for his clients to compete against British trade in the English colonies; and a disease contracted in the tropics left him with an eye tic for the rest of his life. In pursuance of American interests, Roosevelt found himself repeatedly ordering warships and marines to Caribbean lands.

  In Roosevelt’s second year in office, war with Mexico threatened to erupt, and his spirits soared. For a time it seemed that his moment might have come, and he spoke excitedly of annexing the whole of America’s southern neighbor. But despite the temporary occupation of the Mexican port of Vera Cruz by the United States Navy, the war failed to ignite; and glory in the field was won only by Roosevelt’s contemporary Douglas MacArthur.

  In April 1914 Captain MacArthur was sent out from Washington to Vera Cruz, arriving on May 1 with orders “to obtain … all possible information which would be of value” to an American expeditionary force advancing on Mexico City if war should come. MacArthur was acting under the direct command of the War Department, and independently of the American command in Vera Cruz, whose orders were to stay put and to avoid hostilities against the Mexican forces surrounding the city. MacArthur was not bound by such orders; on his own initiative, but in pursuance of his mission, he set out on a one-man reconnaissance patrol behind Mexican army lines. Having spied out the position, he was able to return to his own lines only after a series of fast-action gunfights. Fired on by five armed men at Salinas, he shot two of them with his short-barreled pocket pistol. Three bullets whizzed through his clothes at Piedra as fifteen horsemen attacked; he got four of them. He dropped one out of three near Laguna, as bullets again ripped through his uniform.

  After returning safely to his own lines, MacArthur wrote a brief report. It did not dwell on his own exploits. A few months later he was brought back to the General Staff in Washington.

  When the general to whom MacArthur had reported in Washington became aware of the details of the young officer’s adventures, he recommended that he be awarded the highest of military decorations, the Medal of Honor. But then others were heard from. The American commander in Vera Cruz, bypassed in an operation in which MacArthur had taken orders directly from Washington, wrote stiffly that “as the reconnaissance was made on the theory that Captain MacArthur was not a member of my command at the time, and as I had no knowledge of it until many months later, I am at a loss to know how I can properly make official recommendation on the subject.” He questioned “the advisability of this enterprise having been undertaken without the knowledge of the commanding general on the ground,” and claimed that the success of the mission with which he had been entrusted by the secretary of war had been jeopardized by MacArthur’s actions.

  A special board convened by the army chief of staff to consider the MacArthur case took the same view. Overlooking the fact that it was Washington (in the person of former chief of staff General Leonard Wood) that had chosen to send MacArthur out on a mission independent of the local army commander, the board recommended against awarding the Medal of Honor, saying that though he had risked his life to accomplish his mission, “to bestow the award recommended might encourage any other staff officer … to ignore the local commander, possibly interfering with the latter’s plans with reference to the enemy.”

  For many decades his father had been unjustly denied the Medal of Honor and the recognition that had been his due, and now MacArthur felt the pattern recurring. The board’s decision fueled what was to prove his lifelong suspicion that “they” were conspiring against him; and in his intemperate expression of his disappointment, he confirmed the enemies that he was making in their view that he was arrogant and unbalanced. He was bitter, but he had won glory and, in 1915, promotion to major.

  For lack of adventures like MacArthur’s, Franklin Roosevelt felt frustrated. Not even the outbreak of what was to become the First World War in Europe seemed to lead to any excitement. Roosevelt’s instant reaction was that it would be “the greatest war in human history,” but he remarked that “to my astonishment on reaching the Dept. nobody seemed the least bit excited about the European crisis.…”

  * Later known as the Executive Office Building and now as the Old Executive Office Building.

  6

  THE OUTBREAK OF THE GREAT WAR

  IT BEGAN IN THE OLD COUNTRY, from whose hatreds, quarrels, and entanglements Americans believed they had escaped. Its first stirrings were on a peninsula crisscrossed by mountains and rivers—the Balkans—where the crumbling empire of the Ottoman sultans retreated before the only slightly less shaky empire of the Hapsburg emperors. Inhabited by peasants and traders whose customs and beliefs were rooted in the dim past, it remained a land of fierce clans and undying feuds. The remains of a Neolithic settlement, found and excavated nearby, went back perhaps 7,000 years. Close by, too, a spa, still functioning, dated to the days of the Roman Caesars. More than a millennium before, the Slavs had come, and had remained. Once Bogomilian Christians, many of the Slavs had become Muslims during the centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Turks. The Hapsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary) had taken possession of the province—Bosnia and Herzegovina—from the Turks in 1878, unilaterally annexing it in 1908, which provoked the Slavs to plot attacks against Hapsburg officials. Millions of Slavs lived uneasily under Hapsburg rule, many of them dreaming of a free southern Slav confederacy; but the Hapsburg regime believed that the unrest was fomented from the outside, by Serbia, an independent, neighboring Slav state that was a client of Russia’s.

  The town where it happened—Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, an assemblage of wooden buildings at the bottom of Mount Trebevic—stretched along a narrow river valley through which flowed a turbulent stream that (so claimed a later observer) ran red. It was a mining town that had become a trading center; indeed, in 1914 many of its streets still were named for crafts and trades, and the Turkish market in the town center continued to flourish. Clashing with the east European facial features of most of its inhabitants, and with the central European cut of the uniforms worn by the soldiery of its new Austrian and Hungarian rulers, the town had an Oriental aspect. A third of its population was Muslim; minarets shot up from its skyline; and five times a day muezzins, from the heights of their mosques, called the faithful to prayer. It was evident at a glance that, like so many towns in eternally warring Europe, it had changed hands often.

  TO AMERICANS, almost every aspect of the tragedy at Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 was foreign—not least of them, Francis Ferdinand’s title of archduke, and his position as heir to the Hapsburg throne of Austria-Hungary, in line to inherit not just properties but provinces, peoples, and countries. It was odd and European that one bor
n so powerful could not do what even the humblest American could do—marry for love. Yet it was true, for his beloved Sophie, as a mere countess, was too lowly to be married to an archduke. In espousing her, he therefore was allowed to contract only a “morganatic” marriage, so that the children of their marriage were disinherited. More to the immediate point, it pained him constantly that she was not allowed to take her place by his side on formal occasions. So it is not inconceivable, as an English historian suggested decades ago, that Francis Ferdinand may have scheduled the Hapsburg army’s annual maneuvers in Bosnia—and on that fateful day—because under the arcane rules of Hapsburg court etiquette, the frontier province was the only place in the empire where he was permitted, even on June 28, the fourteenth anniversary of his wedding, to have his consort seated by his side in public.

  Foreign though they were, and far away, the events that occurred in Sarajevo on Sunday, June 28, soon were burned into memory in the New World as in the Old: the procession of four open cars, bringing Francis Ferdinand and Sophie and their party, moving into Sarajevo along the quay that followed the river; the half-dozen Slav nationalist students, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip among them, waiting by the side of the road to attack, and then bungling the attempt; the flight of the failed conspirators, and Princip’s retirement in despair to a café; the decision by Francis Ferdinand’s party to cut short their visit; the failure of Hapsburg officials to tell the archduke’s chauffeurs of the change in plans—that they now were to stay on the main thoroughfare and drive straight ahead, to the hospital and then out of town; the driver, not having gotten the word, turning, as in the original plan, into the narrow side street that led to the market; the angry shouts, “What are you doing? We’re going the wrong way!”; the driver stopping, by a terrible coincidence, at the very café in which Princip gloomily was sipping a glass of water to wash down his morning coffee; Princip looking up, astonished to see the archduke seated in a stopped car only two yards away; and Princip leaping up, jumping on the running board of the car, shooting at point-blank range, and killing Francis Ferdinand and Sophie.

  The archduke’s last words were: “It is nothing.” Nobody was ever more wrong. For the rest of the century, the images of his final hours were to be recalled, peered at through magnifying glasses, and scanned in enlargements for hidden meanings. For from the apparently meaningless acts of violence in the far-off Balkan peninsula that day came the greatest disaster in modern history, the outbreak of the Great War, with far-reaching consequences—some evil, some extremely good—within the lifetime of Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s generation: the practical disappearance of traditional rural societies; the destruction, after at least 5,000 years, of the monarchical system of government; the legal emancipation of women; the collapse of colonial empires; the coming to an end, after five centuries, of Europe’s hegemony over the rest of the world; the eruption of fascism, Nazism, and communism; the discovery of how to release nuclear power; the end of America’s isolation; and the rise of the United States to global hegemony.

  WHAT WAS NOT CLEAR AT THE TIME, especially to Americans, was why the murder of these two people had to lead to the killing of tens of millions of others. Yet evidently there was some eerie, apparently inescapable—and foreign—logic to it. As absurd and blurred as a nightmare, the events that unfolded after Francis Ferdinand and Sophie died moved from the apparently accidental to the seemingly inevitable.

  After consulting with Germany’s leaders on July 5, the government of Austria-Hungary presented Serbia with an ultimatum on July 23, in effect demanding that Serbia surrender her independence; rejected Serbia’s abject and nearly total acceptance of the ultimatum on July 25; and on July 28 declared war. On July 30 Russia, as Serbia’s protector, started to mobilize. In response, Germany delivered ultimatums to Russia and to Russia’s ally France, and on August 1 declared war on them. Germany commenced hostilities by attacking France through neutral Belgium and Luxembourg in violation of treaty obligations. The treaties entitled Britain to go to war to defend Luxembourg, but obliged her to do so to defend Belgium. After receiving no reply to her demand that Germany stop the invasion, Britain came into the war at midnight (German time) August 4.

  HISTORIANS EVER SINCE have disagreed about why the war really started and are likely to go on doing so. But the works of those who wrote in the first half-century after the event were rendered obsolete in important respects by the publication, beginning in the 1960s, of revealing German documents dating from the first decades of the century. As a result, we know that the conclusions that the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower generation drew from their formative political experience in the First World War were based on faulty information about Germany’s role in the origins of the conflict.

  The question that Americans focused on during the first years of the war—and that, for example, William Bullitt pursued as a journalist seeking a “scoop” in wartime Europe—was whether Germany had known and approved of the Austrian ultimatum of July 23 before it was sent to Serbia. It was an important question (to which the answer was “yes”), but did not go to the heart of the matter.

  Perhaps more attention should have been given to what Colonel Edward House, President Wilson’s confidant, had observed in Germany before the assassination. On June 17, 1914, House, in London on his way back from Berlin, told the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, “of the militant war spirit in Germany and of the high tension of the people, and I feared some spark might be fanned into a blaze. I thought Germany would strike quickly when she moved: that there would be no parley or discussion; that when she felt that a difficulty could not be overcome by peaceful negotiation, she would take no chances but would strike. I thought … the army was militaristic and aggressive and ready for war at any time.” The British foreign secretary, however, and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith treated such reports as alarmist and no cause for concern. They were taken up with other matters, Ireland in particular, and it was not until nearly four weeks after the assassinations in Sarajevo that foreign affairs were even discussed by the British cabinet.

  It was difficult for Britons—or Americans—to imagine, when they read of Francis Ferdinand’s death in the distant Balkans, that it could affect their own lives. The British prime minister did not see it coming, any more than did the man or woman on the street in Europe or the United States. Even later, during and after the war, it seemed so unlikely a chain of events that led from Sarajevo to the trenches of the western front, that Americans throughout the twentieth century have tended to believe that the war came about through mischance or miscalculation, or through flaws in Europe’s political, social, economic, or international relations systems that made it possible for accidents and mistakes to cause a war that nobody wanted.

  This assumed that nobody wanted the war—which we now know to be untrue, for the powerful chief of the German General Staff certainly desired it. In picturing the outbreak of war as accidental, what always has carried conviction is the observation that on June 28, 1914, nobody could have foreseen that an unlikely and unexpected shooting in the Balkans would bring about a war that would draw in all of Europe. We now know that to be untrue, too; a handful of men in Berlin had foreseen it—and in large part had planned it—long before.

  IN THE UPPER REACHES of German business, political, and military life before 1914, as historians now have shown, there was a widespread desire for Germany to be supreme on the continent of Europe. This was not an unusual sort of goal for a nation’s leaders to harbor at that time; TR and Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, were ambitious for the United States to dominate the two continents of North and South America as well as much of the Pacific.

  Germany’s leaders were aware that if their country expanded beyond a certain point, Russia or Britain would step in to stop her, and that to achieve her goals, Germany would have to fight a war. That thought did not deter them. They were determined to expand no matter who tried to stand in their w
ay. That is what they meant when they told one another that a European war was inevitable; they meant that their own actions were going to make it inevitable.

  Germany’s military leaders carried their logic further. They argued that rather than wait the extra couple of years until the enemy was ready to fight (for Russia was making alarming progress in strengthening her army), it would be only prudent for Germany to launch a preemptive strike immediately against Russia and her ally France.

  Such, or something like it, was the thinking of the chief of the German General Staff, tall, heavy, balding, gloomy Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke. He had focused his attention on central and eastern Europe as the direction both of Germany’s expansionist goals and of her vulnerability. He saw in the ferment in that area a fated, ages-old conflict between Teutons and Slavs. In 1909 Moltke, in correspondence with the Hapsburg chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hotzendorff, committed Germany to side with Austria-Hungary if Russia intervened in a war between the Hapsburg Empire and Serbia. Moltke, who made the point that it would be better to wait until Serbia committed an act of aggression that provoked the Hapsburg Empire into making war, kept the kaiser and the German chancellor aware of this correspondence.

  The kaiser (“caesar,” or emperor) was Wilhelm II. When war broke out in 1914, he was fifty-five years old and had reigned for twenty-six years. He ruled a German federation of states that had kings and princes of their own, but in it he and his state—Prussia—were supreme. Germany had a parliament, the Reichstag, but especially in foreign policy and national security matters, it tended to defer to the kaiser. The chancellor was the civilian head of government; he was appointed by the kaiser, and an important part of his job was to win support in the Reichstag for the government’s policies and especially for the raising of the money—the appropriations—that the government required.