1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  On May 25, Sims cabled again: “The principle of convoying merchant ships is approved by the Admiralty.” Yet he still faced resistance to convoys from his own navy, including objections from navy secretary Josephus Daniels. In June, as plans were made for sending the first troopships from America to France, Sims warned that it would be “suicidal” not to organize them in escorted convoys, as the British were now doing.29

  His arguments were backed by solid results by the British. Shipping losses had dropped off significantly in May, owing at least in part to the first convoys, from 516 ships to 413. The numbers took a slight jump to 433 in June, but then dropped to 311 in July and fell steadily after that, as the use of the convoy became standard practice—with the Admiralty’s Convoy Room coordinating merchant sailings in convoy formation from all across the globe. In August, the number of sinkings stood at 242, less than half of what it had been in April, with only 511,000 tons lost—well below the 600,000 threshold. It never reached that existential danger level again.

  As A. J. P. Taylor has written, the margin of survival remained narrow. “At one time there was less than one month’s supply of grain in Britain.” The sinking of a single ship carrying sugar from the United States meant that jam factories in Britain had to close their doors.30 On the whole, though, the ships got through. Average losses for vessels traveling in convoys were less than 1 percent. And thanks to the Scottish duo of Maclay and Geddes, British and American shipyards were building ships far faster than the U-boats could send them to the bottom.

  By July 1917, the German bid to win the war by sea alone had failed. Lloyd George’s admirers, including historian Taylor, would like to claim that the adoption of convoys was due almost entirely to the prime minister’s efforts—an impression not contradicted by Lloyd George’s own account.

  As Lloyd George’s most recent biographer, John Grigg, admits, the prime minister never pressed the issue on the admirals as frequently or consistently as he might have. The fact that his famous in-person visit to the Admiralty coincided with the navy brass’s change of mind seems to have been exactly that: coincidence. Yet Lloyd George’s championing of the convoys that saved Britain deserves great credit, a credit shared with Admiral Sims.

  Sims’s cooperation with the prime minister on convoys extended to all matters naval. At one point, he even advocated integrating American naval forces directly with Britain’s, although this proved too much for either side to accept. Nonetheless, William Sims’s dedicated work on coordinating America’s plans for the war at sea with London’s efforts, including combined convoy escorts, was the first step in developing what would come to be called the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain, a relationship that went far beyond simply a strategic alliance. Lloyd George, for one, was all for it. As he told Secretary Lansing, he looked forward to building a world around “the active sympathy of the two great English-speaking countries”—words that anticipate Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech of nearly thirty years later, in March 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, in which he first coined the phrase “special relationship.” Lloyd George told Colonel House that “if the United States would stand by Britain the entire world could not shake the combined mastery we would hold over the seas.”31

  The events of spring and summer 1917 proved him right. Still, he knew there was also a risk. With America fully engaged and committing all its industrial resources to the war, Britain’s dependence on its former colony could become more than financial. It would eventually be strategic, with America pulling Britain along on whatever great enterprises President Wilson had in mind—whether Britain wanted to go or not. Lloyd George believed the brake that would prevent this from happening would be America’s realization that its interests and Britain’s were closely interconnected—that and President Wilson’s personal horror of Great Power realpolitik.

  But this was all. By taking America to war, Wilson had irreversibly redefined its relationship with other nations, including soon-to-be allies such as Britain. As it became an active military player, the United States would find its role to be not that of partner but increasingly that of master. If Wilson’s goal of making America the arbiter of a new world order couldn’t be achieved by staying out of the war, it would surely be realized by plunging in headlong. It would take a long time for Lloyd George’s worries to come true, and for British power to be eclipsed by the colossus of the Western Hemisphere. But the first steps down that road, the road somewhat misleadingly marked “special relationship,” were made in those spring days of 1917.

  July saw the war at sea turn away from Germany and toward Britain and the Allies. That month, Lloyd George made another decision, one that would have long-term consequences for both Britain and the world.

  In June, his successor at the Ministry of Munitions, Christopher Addison, had stepped down. Lloyd George sensed he needed someone as energetic and creative as he himself had been at the post, someone who could combine administrative drive with a keen understanding of what Britain’s armed forces would need to fight, and how to get it to them.

  There was one person in his orbit who fitted the bill: Winston Churchill. As first lord of the admiralty, Churchill had seen his political reputation destroyed when he championed the Gallipoli invasion, the joint Franco-British expedition to Turkey that was supposed to knock Germany’s ally out of the war but that, instead, turned into a fiasco, with more than 154,000 Allied lives lost for no gain. Churchill had taken responsibility for Gallipoli’s failure (not entirely justly) and left the government in disgrace. He had even taken a commission in the trenches in France, serving as a major in the Royal Fusiliers. In the months following his political eclipse, perhaps he hoped a stray bullet might end the humiliation and disappointment of seeing a promising, even predestined, future die along with thousands of British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers on the rocky slopes of Souda Bay.32

  But in 1917, a year after the debacle of the Somme, memories of Gallipoli had faded. When generals such as Douglas Haig continued to keep their jobs despite failure after failure, for someone such as Churchill to lose his after just one seemed slightly unfair. Lloyd George certainly thought so. He had hoped to bring Winston back when he first assumed the premiership in December 1916, but the extreme hatred of Churchill still felt by the Tories in his coalition government had held him back.33 Now, in July 1917, he tried again. A parliamentary commission study on the Gallipoli disaster in March had partially vindicated Churchill; in May, the former first lord of the admiralty paid a visit to Douglas Haig and the other generals in France; it went well. Those steps had cleared the way for Churchill’s rehabilitation, although, when he and Lloyd George sat down to discuss Winston’s possible portfolios in the Cabinet, Churchill made it clear that, grateful though he was for a second chance, he would accept a position only if it had a direct bearing on the war.

  The War Office and Admiralty were clearly out. So was the brand-new Air Board, which would have suited Churchill perfectly, with his interest in airplanes and airpower. But the Tories, led by George Curzon and Alfred Milner, would never have stood for it. The appointment, a young Conservative MP said gravely, “would strain to breaking point the Unionist Party’s loyalty [to Lloyd George].”34

  The Ministry of Munitions was really the only choice. In the end, it proved to be a brilliant choice, and one that restored Winston Churchill’s political career. He proved as energetic and innovative a minister as Lloyd George could have hoped, and for the rest of that year and the next, he would oversee key developments of the new weapon that would transform the World War I battlefield and the history of warfare: the armored vehicle code-named “the tank.”

  Eventually, Churchill came to epitomize the “special relationship” he first defined in his Iron Curtain speech after his own premiership had ended. By 1946 it was widely recognized that Churchill had saved Britain in World War II. It was much less clear until later that Lloyd George had done the same during World War I. Both me
n had done it by turning to the United States for help. In Lloyd George’s case, it had involved Admiral Sims’s support for the concept of convoys, and what happened next. In Churchill’s case, it was getting the fifty World War I–era destroyers America sent to Britain’s rescue in September 1940, Lend-Lease in March 1941, when Britain’s fortunes in the war against Hitler seemed at their bleakest.35

  Yet both episodes were merely stages in a process that began unfolding in 1917 and gathered momentum only as time passed. That process was the eclipse of Britain as global hegemon and the rise of the United States as its increasingly self-conscious heir.

  8

  MR. WILSON’S WAR

  We are mobilizing the nation as well as creating an Army.

  —WOODROW WILSON TO SEN. CARTER GLASS, APRIL 9, 1917

  WASHINGTON

  DECLARING WAR WAS one thing. Getting ready to fight a war, specifically one that was supposed to make the world safe for democracy, was going to be quite another.

  This would be a war on a scale no American government had ever confronted before—a war demanding a transatlantic strategy as well as coordination with the Allies on land, at sea, and in the air—and there was no doubt on anyone’s part that Wilson was not up to the task. Having never served in the military himself; having little knowledge of how the war in Europe was actually being fought and what resources would have to be mobilized to meet the challenge (much larger than the small-scale expeditions he had sent into Mexico in 1914 and 1916); having personal questions himself as to whether he was the right man to be a war leader; and still plagued by lingering uncertainty that joining forces with the Entente was the right course of action, President Woodrow Wilson looked woefully unprepared for what lay ahead.

  As did the rest of the government, and the country. Even after the sinking of the Lusitania alerted Americans to the fact that what was happening in Europe might inevitably draw them into war, the steps that had been taken to get ready for that possibility remained minimal. On July 21, 1916, for example, Congress passed and Wilson signed the Naval Appropriations Act, which authorized five hundred million dollars to build ten new battleships, six battle cruisers, thirty submarines, and fifty destroyers over the next three years. The act’s immediate target, however, was not Germany’s maritime challenge, ironically enough, but Britain’s. Wilson was still smarting from Britain’s imposition of its naval blockade. “Let us build a navy bigger than [the United Kingdom’s],” Wilson remarked, “and do what we please.”1

  Earlier, on June 3, Wilson had signed a National Defense Act, calling for the creation of the largest U.S. Army since the Civil War, with 175,000 regular troops and 450,000 National Guardsmen—still a tiny fraction of the size of the armies then fighting in Europe. Wilson’s theme was “national readiness” in case the war in Europe did spill over onto American shores. Eight months later, national unreadiness was more like it. Even as late as February 1917, Gen. Hugh Scott, army chief of staff, complained that “the President does not want to do anything which will give the Germans an idea that we are getting ready for war, so we are not allowed to ask for any money or get ready in any serious way.”2

  Indeed, when Wilson learned that the Army General Staff was drawing up contingency plans for a war with Germany, his first instinct was to have the staff fired.3

  Now, with war officially here, Wilson would have to scramble to make up for lost time. His task included figuring out how to add the half million new men for the armed services he had mentioned in his April 2 speech. A military draft seemed the only possible answer, but even as late as January, Wilson had dragged his feet about imposing the country’s first draft since the Civil War, when the draft had provoked bloody riots in New York City and nearly split the North in two.

  Now, however, in the face of modern war’s demand for manpower, there was no choice. On May 18, 1917, six weeks after war had been declared, the Selective Service Act came into effect.

  It could have been a logistical as well as a political disaster. There were many people alive who could still remember how unfair and arbitrary the draft had been during the Civil War, when the wealthy (among them John D. Rockefeller) were able to buy their way out by paying a substitute. But the trio who drew up the plan for Selective Service in 1917—army judge advocate Gen. Enoch Crowder; Lt. Col. Hugh Johnson; and a thirty-six-year-old major who had been running the War Department’s Bureau of Information (in effect, its propaganda and censorship wing), Douglas MacArthur—managed to craft a system that turned out to be as fair as it was efficient. By handing control of the selection process over to local boards of ordinary citizens from the same towns, even the same neighborhoods, as the young men they were drafting, Crowder, Johnson, and MacArthur turned what could have been a public relations and administrative nightmare into a crowning success—it was so successful that it would serve as the model for an even bigger military draft effort during World War II.4

  In the end, more than two million young Americans would get the call for the army, the navy, or the marines. Across the ocean, in Europe, America’s allies were eager to have these fresh troops breathe new life into the war effort. But in what capacity? That was the question Wilson had to take up when the former French commander in chief Joffre and British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour arrived in Washington during the third week in April.

  Wilson had not wanted these visits. He was afraid of any summit meetings or public gestures that seemed to imply that the United States was joining the Entente as a formal ally rather than an “Associated Power,” as he had insisted. Also, he worried that Joffre and Balfour would try to pressure him to embrace the entire Entente war agenda, which he saw as just another extension of typical Great Power geopolitics.

  His fears were unfounded. Somewhat to his surprise, and certainly to his relief, Joffre and Balfour respected Wilson’s desire to stay at arm’s length from the Allies as an Associated Power. They were willing to take U.S. support any way they could get it. Their meeting was also a chance for the two spokesmen for their countries to take stock of the American president. Balfour and Wilson did not hit it off at first, but later, the foreign minister had to aver that the president was “at that moment by far the most important man in the world.”5

  The French delegation was even more intrigued by this “lay Pope,” as Joffre’s interpreter, Émil Hovelacque, sardonically described Wilson. To the Frenchmen, Wilson seemed wooden and impassive at first. When he spoke, though, “the subtle inflections of his musical voice” revealed “a sudden intensity of life” that his icy, buttoned-down appearance belied. “I watched this austere, wise face of a Scottish dialectician,” Hovelacque remembered, and “the Celt appeared to me in the rapid flash of a smile, in the sudden humanity of [his] clear eyes.”6

  While Joffre went on a rapid cross-country tour extolling French-U.S. ties going back to the American Revolution, Balfour stayed in the States for five weeks, giving a rousing address to a joint session of Congress before he left. By then, the awkwardness with which the two scholars (one a political scientist turned politician, the other a politician turned philosopher) had started their relationship with each other had thawed to a mutual respect. Before he left the United States, Balfour met privately with the French ambassador to the United States, Jean Jules Jusserand. Balfour was now convinced that Wilson was fully committed to the war “until the security of the liberal nations is assured.” He was also sure that victory was near. “You will no doubt come then to Europe,” he told the ambassador gleefully, “and we shall celebrate together.”

  Only one incident in his meeting with Wilson still bothered Balfour. After a private dinner at the White House, Balfour took the bold step of revealing to Wilson some of the secret treaties that had been drawn up among the Allies, such as the 1915 Treaty of London, which had brought Italy into the war on the Allied side in exchange for future territorial gains at the expense of Austria; and the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which in effect would divide up Turkey’s empire in the Middle
East between Britain and France once the war was won. Wilson seemed unfazed by this news, which was passed to him confidentially, “man to man,” as Balfour later put it. Balfour realized that “when Wilson had made up his mind about coming into the war, it was the present and the future that mattered to him, not the past . . . those Treaties had no importance to him.”7

  Here Balfour was wrong. In fact, the treaties mattered very much to Wilson, not at the time perhaps, but later, at the very end of the year, after a series of devastating revelations would force him to reassess his commitment to the Allies and their war aims and lead him to push the entire agenda regarding the war in a sharply different and radical direction.

  Those revelations would come from the Russian Foreign Ministry, and would be an unexpected gift to the American president from Lenin.

  SECRET TREATIES OR no, Wilson now had to get into the serious business of drawing together the resources, both material and human, of the United States into the means of achieving victory. In doing this, he made a serious mistake at the very start—one with fateful consequences later on.

  The minute he heard of Wilson’s speech calling for war against Germany, Theodore Roosevelt had thrown himself in the effort with all his usual energy and enthusiasm. He became overnight the president’s biggest supporter, and followed up on a project he had first broached with the secretary of war, Newton Baker, back on March 19: that of raising, at his own expense, a division of volunteers to be trained at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Baker had given the former Rough Rider the cold shoulder, but on April 10, four days after Congress declared war, Roosevelt followed up with a visit to the White House and buttonholed the president himself.

  At first Wilson was cold and uncommunicative with the man who for more than a year had publicly branded him a coward. But Roosevelt’s enthusiasm was not to be resisted. “First he commended in the warmest terms the President’s message to Congress and gave his entire approval to the administration’s program.”