Villa began with only fourteen loyal followers, but this band soon ballooned into an army. Arrested earlier by Huerta, Villa had escaped from jail by sawing through the bars with a smuggled saw and seemed to live a charmed life. Allied with Carranza, he used the aura of the Constitutional Party to legitimate his expropriation of landowners’ money and property. Why he attacked Columbus, even with a force of 400 men, is still under debate. Certainly he knew that a local detachment of the U.S. Army’s 13th Regiment was garrisoned nearby when his men arrived at four o’clock in the morning. Villa’s bandits burned the town and seized military supplies and food, but not without resistance from Columbus’s armed citizens, who fought back with fierce determination. American soldiers suffered 8 dead and 6 wounded, along with 10 civilians killed, but their resistance cost Villa nearly 100 men killed and 30 captured—one fourth of his entire force. It was a disastrous foray which guaranteed further American military action.
Within a week, Wilson ordered General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing to lead a 10,000-man expeditionary force to capture Villa. Pershing’s force was filled with oddities and ironies: Custer’s old reconstituted 7th Cavalry was present, including Pershing’s second in command, George Dodd, a sixty-three-year-old colonel who had fought the Indians with the 7th Cavalry. The 7th had, in fact, regained some of its honor at the Battle of Bear Paw, where Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce surrendered in 1877, lost it again in 1890 at Wounded Knee, and regained it for good in the Filipino campaign a decade later. Pershing had also commanded troops in two African-American regiments, the 10th and 24th Infantry, whose glory included the charge up San Juan Hill in 1898 and action in the Philippines. Pershing, an advocate of black rights, felt Wilson’s racist hand on his shoulder at all times, and carefully separated the units from white troops as Wilson demanded. For his association with the all-Negro units, Pershing earned the nickname “Black Jack.”
Pershing had languished under the Army’s slow promotion policies in spite of his obvious talents as a military leader until marrying Helen Frances Warren, daughter of Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming in 1905. Pershing was only a captain, but in 1906 he was suddenly promoted from captain to brigadier general, leapfrogging 862 more senior officers. Apparently the fact that Senator Warren was chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee (now the Armed Forces Committee) did not hurt Pershing in the least. Although the promotion was heavily criticized as gross favoritism, Pershing had been highly recommended by leading generals in the Army, and enjoyed the support of President Roosevelt since his days alongside him at San Juan Hill. Following another six years in the Philippines, Pershing had been placed in command of the 8th Brigade in San Francisco, and then ordered to El Paso, where he was when Villa attacked Columbus.
Using Curtiss Jenny observation planes and armored cars as scouts, the Americans crossed into Chihuahua, pushed relentlessly by Black Jack. American troopers came close to nabbing Villa in late March, but Mexican guides misled the yanquis and delayed their arrival until the banditos had fled. In April, Lieutenant George S. Patton’s advance units located one of Villa’s top officers, Julio Cárdenas, and Patton personally shot him and two of his men. Patton ceremoniously notched his revolvers before tying the bodies to the hoods of the cars so that he could return them to the base for identification. Although a second Villa general was shot later, the Expeditionary Force increasingly bumped into Mexican Federal Army units. Two separate clashes between Pershing’s men and the federales forced Carranza to warn Pershing off, by which time the American forces had lost precious manpower to liquor and venereal diseases.
Both Wilson and Carranza feared they were stumbling into war, and the Mexican president knew he would lose, while the American president knew a conflict with Mexico might well be a distraction for the larger, almost inevitable, entry into the European conflict. By spring of 1916, the danger from U-boat attacks, tremendous British financial losses, and French casualties made it obvious to Wilson that the United States would be drawn into war. Villa, meanwhile, soon after having his leg operated on without anesthetic, led a new offensive against the Mexican government in Chihuahua City. When that Carranza garrison fell, Villa issued his “Manifesto to the Nation,” denouncing the “twin evils” of the “barbarians of the North” and the “most corrupt Government we ever had.” Wilson reined in Pershing, infuriating George Patton, who said the president had neither “the soul of a louse nor the mind of a worm or the backbone of a jellyfish.”67
American troops were finally withdrawn in January 1917, having failed to capture Villa or stop the raids. A bitter Black Jack later said he had been “outwitted and out-bluffed at every turn,” and denounced the withdrawal, describing it as “sneaking home under cover, like a whipped cur with its tail between its legs.”68 Villa, on the other hand, had become a hero, in part because he managed his publicity and massaged his image. He permitted legendary writer Ambrose Bierce to tag along with his banditos. Bierce was with Villa in Chihuahua in 1913, then mysteriously disappeared in December of that year, writing to his niece just before his death, “Good-bye—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think it was a pretty good way to depart this life…. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!”69
Another reason for Villa’s success was his identification with the peasant classes, building a school and freely redistributing wealth. Not only did most Chihuahuans protect and revere him—he had been Carranza’s governor of Chihuahua—but his impressive victory at Tierra Blanca brought him a Hollywood contract with producer D. W. Griffith’s production company. Film units tagged along with Villa on his battles, and the Revolution got half the profit from the movies they made. He also robbed trains, forced unwilling hacienda workers into his army, and extracted money at gunpoint from hacienda owners. But he knew how to mug for the camera, and American journalists and movie producers ate it up. The fact that he evaded the mighty gringo army only added to his mystique, as did his spectacular and grisly death. Accepting retirement under a negotiated peace with interim president Adolfo de la Huerta in 1920 after his archenemy Carranza was assassinated, Villa agreed to cease his revolutionary activity and retire on some land and a small stipend provided by the Mexican government. A lifetime of enemies, however, could not be negotiated away. In July 1923, assassins pounded 150 shots into Villa’s car, riddling the bandito leader with bullets. After his death, Villa’s legend grew, with pawn shops claiming to possess his trigger finger, tombstones set up on both sides of the border, a famous statue in Zacatecas, and over two dozen movie depictions by such stars as Yul Brynner, Wallace Beery, Telly Savalas, and Antonio Banderas. Celebrated in rock songs and horror movies, Villa became in death far more influential than he was in life.
Neutrality in a Worldwide Conflict
Americans may have had their attention on their southern border, but slowly and steadily, Europe pulled an “isolationist” America into the fray. Ground warfare, with all its massive carnage, was unable to decide anything after two full years, but it was events at sea that eventually brought the United States into the Great War.
At the outbreak of hostilities, the German High Seas Fleet had thirteen of the new dreadnought battleships and three fast battle cruisers, while the British had twenty dreadnoughts and four cruisers. Both sides had built the new submarines, but the Germans—who were slower to adopt U-boats (Unterseebooten) than the British—caught up rapidly and unleashed the subs against merchant ships in February 1915. After the Battle of Jutland (May 31–June 1, 1916), the high command of the German Imperial Navy became convinced it had to rely on U-boats to break British sea power. The Battle of Jutland itself involved a total of twenty-eight British battleships of all varieties and another forty-three cruisers of different classes aligned against sixteen German battleships and twenty-two cruisers and pre-dreadnought warships. But the German High Seas Fleet under Vice-Admirals Reinhard Scheer and Franz Hipper sought to run the British through a gauntlet
of U-boats before the heavy surface ships clashed. British admirals Sir John Jellicoe and Sir David Beatty were able to unite their forces before the German U-boats were ready, and in the ensuing battle, fourteen British and eleven German ships were lost. Even though the sheer numbers indicated a German victory, the German High Command became convinced the fleet could not survive all-out fleet-to-fleet exchanges, and it remained in harbors for the remainder of the war. (There was a single foray on August 19, 1916, but Scheer abruptly turned his fleet around when he learned the British were waiting.) By ceding the oceans to the Royal Navy, the Germans allowed the concept of “rights of neutrals” to mean whatever the British said it did. After Jutland, all German sea warfare was reduced to actions by U-boats, although the British were forced to maintain a presence in the North Sea in case the High Seas Fleet sortied out again. Reliance on U-boats proved risky in the extreme, because of the possibility of a U-boat commander’s accidentally sinking a civilian vessel or an American ship. That, in turn, was certain to provoke American reaction—as it did on May 7, 1915, when a German submarine sank the RMS Lusitania, a British luxury liner traveling from New York. The Lusitania had changed course off the Irish coast to avoid U-boats, ironically pulling into the path of U-20, a German submarine low on fuel with only three torpedoes. No one knows how many torpedoes Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger fired (his log said one, although some think it was doctored), but however many were fired, the Lusitania went down in eighteen minutes, taking along 1,198 civilians. Of the 139 Americans aboard, 128 died, leading to howls of protest from the United States. Britain, of course, fanned the flames of outrage, hoping to draw the United States into the war.70
Germany’s U-boat fleet had been forced into “unrestricted submarine warfare” (firing torpedoes from a submerged position at targets that could not always be positively identified) by the British use of “Q-boats”—vessels that looked like freighters, but which concealed guns beneath phony “cargo” boxes on deck. In reality, the Q-boats were far less effective than they appeared. Some 180 Q-ships were used during the war, but they achieved only 28 U-boat kills. Still, they made U-boats more cautious, and attacking an unidentified ship was like playing Russian roulette for a U-boat commander. According to international law, the sub was to surface near the target, signal a warning, and allow time for evacuation, even if the intended victim broadcast the U-boat’s presence to the Royal Navy by radio. German U-boats faced a dilemma: if the subs “played by the rules,” they ran the risk of surfacing in front of a Q-boat and being quickly eliminated or sought out by British naval units. If they attacked without surfacing and warning their intended victim, sooner or later passenger ships or neutral vessels would be sunk. Aware of the danger of angering the United States, Germany began publishing disclaimers in port city papers in America warning that a state of war existed between Germany and Britain, and that passengers assumed the risk by sailing in “war zone” waters. Such disclaimers worked no better then than legal disclaimers about physical injury or even death at amusement parks work today. Simply put, Americans blamed the Kaiser for the Lusitania—and all subsequent American deaths through U-boat attacks.
William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson’s pacifist secretary of state, resigned in 1915 in anticipation that the United States would declare war on Germany. In fact, Wilson issued a formal protest to Germany only after the Lusitania disaster. Convinced that Wilson was a coward, British soldiers took to calling a shell that did not explode a “Wilson.” Indeed, U.S. response to the Lusitania sinking was remarkably tame, given that Americans had absorbed unfettered British propaganda about Germany. Allied propaganda told of soldiers smashing babies’ heads against walls, raping nuns, humiliating the elderly before shooting them, and destroying churches. Some charges were true, if exaggerated: the Germans shelled the Reims cathedral (mistaking German troops already in the city for the enemy); they terror-bombed Paris, hitting the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Yet their rationale differed little from American explanations about the need to raze Monte Cassino in World War II. “Better a thousand church towers fall than that one German soldier should fall as a result of these towers,” wrote one German historian in terms echoed by frustrated Americans ninety years later in Iraq, where terrorists routinely carried out operations from mosques.71
The Kaiser did not help his cause by celebrating the sinking of one million tons of Allied shipping in October 1916, nor did it endear Americans to Germany when five Allied ships were torpedoed within sight of Nantucket Sound.72 A passenger liner, the Marina, was sunk a few days before the U.S. election in 1916, killing six Americans. Nevertheless, in the United States isolationism still reigned, especially as it seemed Wilson might become the peacemaker that Teddy Roosevelt had played between Russia and Japan in 1905. Perhaps also the Progressive Wilson realized the power that would be unleashed, both abroad and domestically, by the new state he had created. If the American people were led to war, he prophesied in 1916, “they’ll forget there was ever such a thing as tolerance…. The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life.”73
Antiwar groups recognized the possibility of the United States’ being drawn into the European conflict, and staged marches down Fifth Avenue in New York when the first shots were fired. In 1915, high-profile Americans such as Jane Addams and Henry Ford denounced any suggestion that the United States had an interest in the outcome. Ford even chartered a “Peace Ship” to sail to Stockholm and negotiate a cease-fire. Satirized by the newspapers—one blared a mocking headline, “GREAT WAR ENDS CHRISTMAS DAY: FORD TO STOP IT”—and blasted by Theodore Roosevelt, who said, “Mr. Ford’s visit abroad will not be mischievous only because it is ridiculous,” Ford bulled ahead.74 Many American notables who had egged him on and promised to go now backed out: Addams was ill (but feared the scheme would fall into the hands of “fanatical and impecunious reformers”); Thomas Edison, department store magnate John Wanamaker, Helen Keller, and Ida Tarbell all begged off.75 Others invited by Ford had never indicated they supported his scheme, including William Howard Taft, “Colonel” Edward House (referred to because he was a “Kentucky Colonel,” not an officer), and Louis Brandeis. Edison and his wife actually came to the Hoboken docks to see Ford off, whereupon Ford pleaded with the inventor to sail, offering him a million dollars to make the trip.76 Edison shook his head and left. The Oscar II departed from port with 115 pacifists and a gaggle of reporters as a band struck up “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.” Ford confided that he didn’t expect to end the war immediately, but to increase psychological pressure on the warring powers—an entirely ineffective strategy. Typical of many “peace” efforts, the group on board the Oscar II quickly had sharp disagreements over producing a statement critical of Wilson and calling for universal disarmament. “Pacifist,” observed William Bullitt, one of the passengers, “means a person hard to pacify.”77
In contrast to the press of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the reporters of 1915 were cynical and critical of the peace mission, drawing the ire of many of the “delegates.” Ford ordered them to ignore the reporters, but one of Ford’s companions, Rosika Schwimmer, was accused of tampering with dispatches and listening to journalists’ conversations at keyholes. Predictably, American leftists and radicals, including Walter Millis and Upton Sinclair, praised the mission. Ford, meanwhile, became ill on the voyage and after arriving in Christiana, Norway, quietly returned to America, denying from New York that he had abandoned his friends, who plodded on to Sweden, Denmark, and Holland for talks. “The comedy of errors is over,” noted the Tribune when the gangplank of the returning ship Rotterdam was pulled in and the delegates headed home. Ford claimed to have gotten a million dollars’ worth of advertising for an investment of $465,000 in peace and participants claimed it had resulted in a conference that offered an alternative to war. In reality, nothing in Europe changed one iota. Trenches still cut across the French and Belgian landscapes, and U-boats still ravag
ed vessels at sea.
Sentiment in the United States, except for pockets of German support in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and a few other cities, was pro-British from the outset. J. P. Morgan’s syndicates kept Britain and France alive financially, despite Wilson’s plea that Americans be “impartial in thought as well as action”—a clear impossibility and practically unattainable, given that the United States was trading heavily with Britain and France. Rather than being impartial himself, Wilson refused to recognize the “war zones” published by Germany where neutral vessels were at a high risk of being torpedoed. Wilson restated Americans’ right to sail anywhere at any time they wished, and emphasized that any consequences would be the fault of Germany. To a large degree, Wilson actively forced Germany into a box from which there was no good strategy for escape.
It is doubtful that “globalization of the conflict was an inevitable consequence of British involvement,” as historian Niall Ferguson has argued. The Germans were already seeking to align Turkey—the mission of the Goeben, ordered to Constantinople early on August 4, 1914, would have occurred regardless of British actions (Britain only decided to declare war that night)—nor would the war have ended immediately if the Germans had forced a French surrender.78 Instead, given Germany’s prewar state of mind, it is entirely likely that a much more successful and arrogant Germany would have pressed her advantages even further, and at even greater human cost. At the same time, U.S. trade with Germany immediately evaporated with the British blockade, dropping to a percentage of its prewar levels by 1916, and the British severed Germany’s international cables and broke the main German naval codes.
Britain correctly assessed the reality of the Anglo-American relationship, perceiving that it would be easy to draw in the United States by maneuvering the Germans to commit an outrage. While Britain’s blockade violated international law (the Declaration of London, 1909, known as the “Declaration Concerning the Laws of Naval War”) and subjected neutral ships to harassment and diversion to British ports, this proved far less visually jarring and emotionally charged than the sinking of a passenger liner. Germany’s own colonial secretary, Bernhard Dernburg, acknowledged as much before the Lusitania was sunk, noting, “The American people cannot visualize the spectacle of a hundred thousand…German children starving by slow degrees as a result of the British blockade, but they can visualize the face of a little child drowning amidst the wreckage caused by a German torpedo.”79
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