The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  In 1917, the British intercepted a telegram (later known as the Zimmermann Telegram) sent from Germany to Mexico. In the telegram, Germany told Mexico that if America got into the war, they should team up with Japan and declare war on America. The telegram promised that at the end of the war, Mexico would regain control of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico if they played ball. Wilson made a big deal out of this.

  Furthermore, while Wilson talked about being neutral, he had been quietly sending merchant submarines over to England with weapons and other supplies. When a bunch of the submarines were sunk by Germany, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war. They gave it to him in April 1917.

  HIT SONGS OF THE DAY

  Some popular songs from World War I include “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” “Over There,” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Soldiers in the trenches kept themselves amused by making up songs that spread from trench to trench, like this one:

  “WHEN THIS LOUSY WAR IS OVER”

  (sung to the tune of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”)

  When this lousy war is over, no more soldiering for me!

  When I get my civvy clothes on, oh how happy I will be!

  No more church parades on Sunday, no more begging for a pass.

  You can tell the sergeant major to stick his passes up his …40

  Of course, there were also somewhat naughty versions of the popular songs of the day going around, as there always are in wars. There was a popular parody of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” going around the trenches entitled “That’s the Wrong Way to Tickle Mary.” More songs from the war are linked from www.smartalecksguide.com.

  Of course, there was another reason for America to go to war: money. American businessmen knew that a good old-fashioned war would be good for the economy. The seat at the table that Wilson wanted would help them with international business deals in the postwar world, and while the war was on, they could make a fortune building tanks, sewing uniforms, and selling miniature flags. They did not, however, stoop so low as to make war-themed trading cards. No one would go that far until 1991.41

  Trench warfare. Please, no “Still beats being in school” cracks. It doesn’t.

  The guy who tried to sell the navy a submarine was named Lodner Darvantis Phillips. He was a shoemaker by day and a submarine inventor by night. He is said to have had successful models of subs, which he used to take his family on underwater picnics, in the Great Lakes as early as the 1840s.

  America didn’t have much of an army at that point, but almost four million men were soon in the armed services. Practically overnight, America became one of the greatest powers in the world.

  A flying ace was a pilot who had killed five or more people. This is Baron Manfred von Richtofen, a German pilot better known as the Red Baron, who led a squadron known as the Flying Circus. He is credited with shooting down eighty enemy planes—but he never got that beagle!

  Wars hadn’t changed much in the centuries that came before World War I. But in the early twentieth century, new technology made wars deadlier than ever. No one knew just how bad their new weapons would make World War I, which introduced the world to several new ways for soldiers to be killed or maimed.

  First of all, there was submarine warfare. Countries had experimented with submarines before, but as late as the Civil War, when a guy tried to sell the U.S. Navy on the idea of submarines, they told him, “Our boats go on the water, not under it.” But in the fifty-odd years since then, submarine technology had advanced, making subs into viable weapons, not just metal tubes for people who liked to cheat death by having underwater picnics.

  More significantly, this was the first war in which airplanes played a major role. But flying planes in those days was ridiculously dangerous; they were clunky contraptions that had a tendency to catch fire even when they weren’t being shot at.

  Then, of course, there was gas.42 Chemical warfare was hardly a new idea, but it really came into its own in World War I. By the end of the war nearly two hundred thousand tons of gas had been used in chemical weapons. Some of this was regular old tear gas, but there were more damaging formulas. One was mustard gas, which causes some pretty nasty blisters and can have deadly long-term effects, like causing cancer. Most of the gases weren’t very effective when it came to killing, but they could put soldiers out of commission for quite a while.

  But the most notorious sort of fighting in World War I was trench warfare. The practice of digging a trench and firing at the other army from inside it also wasn’t new, but it became deadlier than ever in an era with machine guns, gas, and more sophisticated explosives.

  The idea of trench warfare is that one army digs a big ditch and hides out in it. The opposing army digs a trench of their own on the other side of the field. The two armies hang out in the trenches, shooting at each other as well as they can. In World War I, armies were often holed up in trenches for months at a time. The space between the trenches, littered with dead bodies that no one could safely remove, became known as no-man’s-land. Sitting around in a ditch staring out at dead bodies and waiting for someone to throw a grenade at you is just about as pleasant as it sounds. To make matters worse, it’s hard to feel as though your army is making any progress when all you do is sit in a trench all day. Add to the equation the fact that many of the soldiers only had a vague idea of what the heck they were trying to accomplish (other than staying alive longer than the guys in the other army) and you can imagine that the soldiers were a pretty unhappy bunch.

  EXPERIMENTS TO TRY AT HOME!

  Make your own mustard gas! You will need:

  4 tablespoons of margarine

  1/3 cup of milk

  1/2 cup of corn syrup

  3 ounces of unsweetened chocolate

  4-1/2 cups of confectioner’s sugar

  1 tablespoon of water

  1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

  Melt the margarine over medium heat and stir everything else in slowly. Pour the mixture into an eight-inch-square baking pan, cool, cut into squares, and serve. You will notice that this doesn’t look, smell, or taste anything like poison gas. You see, we do know how to make poison gas, but our lawyers said that even though we’ve already told you to hire interns and poke them in the liver, saw off your friends’ legs and hang them, and all sorts of things that we assume you know are just jokes, providing an actual recipe for poison gas might violate international law. So we replaced it with a recipe for fudge. Everyone just loves fudge!

  American involvement in the war lasted for just about a year and a half before Germany and the rest of the Central Powers gave up. It was really already winding down by the time America joined in. The Allies were already winning, and getting a sudden infusion of four million soldiers was all they needed to put them over the top.

  THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE

  The war was hell. No nicer way to put it. And a great many of the soldiers were only fighting because they’d been drafted—they didn’t really have anything against the soldiers on the other side personally. Soldiers rarely do.

  On Christmas 1914 came the Christmas Truce. In the early hours of the morning, German soldiers in a trench in Ypres, Belgium, began decorating the area around their trench and singing Christmas songs. British soldiers began to respond by singing songs of their own. Then the two armies were shouting Christmas greetings back and forth. Soon, they even began climbing out of their trenches and walking across no-man’s-land to exchange gifts of cigars, booze, and whatever else they could scare up. Religious services were held, and bodies that had been festering in no-man’s-land were finally buried.

  STUPID HATS OF HISTORY:

  WWI GERMAN HELMET WITH A SPIKE ON IT

  The helmets used by German officers in World War I were known as (get this) Pickelhaubens. Do not forget that you left one of these on your chair. It’s a mistake you’ll only make once.

  The truce spread all around the lines. The two armies even organ
ized soccer games in no-man’s-land.

  In most places, the truce only lasted for one day, but in some sectors, no one fired a shot until after New Year’s Day. Many commanding officers on both sides were furious with the soldiers who had participated and vowed that no such truce would ever take place again. They began rotating soldiers around more to keep them from getting overly familiar with enemy troops, and started ordering heavy bombing on Christmas Eve the following year to make sure that the fighting would still be going on the next day. But informal truces sprang up at various points on Christmas.

  Archduke Ferdinand, a guy who might as well have had a sign reading KILL ME on his back. Medical aides were a bit tripped up when they tried to help Ferdinand; he had had his suit sewn shut to make himself look thinner, or to avoid wrinkles, depending on who you believe.

  ARMISTICE

  Armistice was declared on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—you’ll want to make a note of that, because most teachers expect you to remember it. When the armistice was declared, soldiers from both sides ran out of the trenches and had a big party. Their commanding officers had warned them not to fraternize with their former enemies, but seeing as how the war was over, they weren’t that concerned about getting in trouble anymore.

  In a way, battlefield celebrations were holdovers from old-style warfare, when people imagined that war was an honorable contest fought by equals who respected one another. It was still true that the soldiers on opposing sides didn’t really have anything against each other, and were only too happy to party together as soon as the orders to stop shooting started coming in.

  At the end of the war, four major European empires (the Russian Empire, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire) had been broken apart. Borders were redrawn; dynasties were ended. The Russian czar was gone, replaced by Communists.43 Germany’s kaiser was gone; even Germany itself had been turned into the Weimar Republic.

  Twenty million or so people had been killed, and at least another twenty million had been wounded. And just to make things worse, toward the end of the war, the Spanish flu broke out, beginning an epidemic that would kill another fifty million people around the world.

  When Wilson sailed over to Europe for his seat at the table that would carve up Europe, he became the first sitting president ever to travel overseas. He was greeted as a hero by crowds in the street; the decisive victory that America brought the Allies sealed America’s reputation as the most trustworthy of all nations. Roosevelt’s popularity had made it an admirable nation, and America was seen as having won the war for the Allies.

  Most of the other countries at the conference were sold on Wilson’s League of Nations, but there was one problem: Congress wasn’t wild about it. When Wilson got home, he went on a tour to promote the idea, hoping that if he could get the public behind his plan, Congress would feel like they had to approve it. Unfortunately, in the middle of the tour, he suffered a stroke. For the next six weeks, his wife, Edith, essentially ran the country for him while he recovered.

  The government (the British one, in this case) found all sorts of ways to guilt people into joining the army. This is a good example of war propaganda.

  Congress eventually refused to ratify the treaty, which kept America out of the League of Nations. Without American help, the League proved to be pretty much useless. Wilson died feeling that the whole war had been for nothing.

  And just to add insult to injury, World War I didn’t end all wars. Not even close. And the wars to come would wipe away any remaining illusion that there was anything dignified about war.

  “War profiteers” were sometimes criticized just for making money off the war. Imagine!

  Another propaganda poster. As history book writers, we suggest you do read history. Being propaganda, the poster plays down the notion that if you went off to war, you could be history.

  SOME OF THE STUFF WE MISSED

  A lot of stuff about World War I was left out of this chapter, mostly because it happened a long time before America got involved in the war. But here’s some stuff longer history books probably talk more about.

  Newton D. Baker: The smart-looking U.S. secretary of war (pictured above).

  Battles: Goodness gracious, we barely mentioned these! There were lots of them, of course, though most of them were already fought by the time America entered the war. Some of the more famous battles of World War I are the Battles of Gallipoli, Ypres, the Somme, and the Marne.

  “In Flanders Fields”: The most famous poem about the war, by Colonel John McRae, a Canadian.

  The Sedition Act of 1918: An act that made “disloyal” statements illegal. In other words, it was against the law to protest the war.

  The October Revolution: The midwar revolution in which the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, took over Russia to make it a Communist country.

  Remembrance Day: The international holiday on November 11 commemorating the armistice. Rarely noticed in the United States, where it’s now called Veterans Day. By this time, we’re already too busy getting ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  William Fitzsimmons: Said to be the first U.S. officer killed in the war.

  END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1. What kind of poison gas was common in the war?

  Mustard.

  Ketchup.

  Onion.

  C’mon, you know we’re building up to another bad joke about pickles, right?

  (ANSWER: A.)

  2. What is it with the Smart Aleck staff and pickles, anyway?

  Pickles are like monkeys, feet, and butts: always funny.

  It’s a running gag, just go with it.

  The Smart Aleck headquarters is right above a deli.

  Ask Sigmund Freud.

  (ANSWER: ALL OF THE ABOVE.)

  3. Why did people still think there was anything dignified or noble about war?

  The army recruitment film sure made it look that way.

  They hadn’t heard that speech that Sherman made about its being hell.

  Jean Renoir’s brilliant World War I film The Grand Illusion, which condemned that whole idea, wouldn’t come out for nearly another twenty years.

  They were old-fashioned and still clinging to stupid ideas.

  (ANSWER: MOSTLY C AND D.)

  4. What was the best part about trench warfare?

  Being packed in tight with dozens of other guys who you might or might not have gotten along with and who hadn’t showered in weeks.

  The convenience of not having to travel far to use the bathroom.

  Staying alert for grenades, which really helped your hand-eye coordination.

  Going home when the lousy war was over.

  (ANSWER: D.)

  ESSAY

  How would you like to be named Lodner?

  Think of a nice thing to say about Woodrow Wilson!

  What sort of mustache would you have grown during the war? (Girls: You have to answer this one, too. We’re just trying to be fair.)

  So … what was World War I about?

  Mustaches of War

  Kings were no safer than their soldiers during the war—less so, given how many of them were exiled or executed by the end of the whole thing. But royalty in Europe was still a big deal before World War I, and who was in charge of what was a complicated business. One thing the war did accomplish was that it put a lot of old-fashioned dictators out of a job. Match the name to the mustache!

  Wilhelm “Kaiser Bill” II, King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany, was the go-to bad guy of the war—which ended with him abdicating (giving up the job). He was exiled to the Netherlands, where he lived until his death in 1941. You can just imagine him curling that mustache in his finger while tying a damsel to the railroad tracks.

  Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was also King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland, sported both a handlebar ’stache and a beard that would make Grant proud. After the midwar Bo
lshevik uprising in Russia, Nicholas and his family were imprisoned for a year before being executed in 1918. Also known as Bloody Nicholas (for things that happened during his reign, not because of how his corpse looked) and now considered a saint by some religions, St. Nick44 was one of the richest people who ever lived. Rumors that his daughter Anastasia was still alive went around for years.

  David Lloyd George, prime minister of England, who promised to punish the bad guys, reward the good guys, and make England a place “fit for heroes to live in.” He was insanely popular—even conservatives seemed to admire him, though he was a liberal. He had one of the more sensible mustaches of the day, as well, though the similarity to the one Hitler ended up wearing has made it very unpopular since the 1940s.