Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  7 G. Pedroncini, Les Mutineries de 1917, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1967 (reprinted with corrections 1999).

  8 William Serman and Jean-Paul Bertaud, Nouvelle Histoire Militaire de la France, Fayard, Paris, 1998.

  9 I am grateful to Mr Nicholas Perry, of HM Imperial Civil Service and probably the greatest living authority on the 36th (Ulster) Division, for his help with the history of this division.

  10 For an assessment of the German defenders of Messines Ridge see Ian Passingham, Pillars of Fire, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 1998.

  11 According to Ludendorff the German army had quite a few ‘black days’, but this was undoubtedly one of their worst.

  12 ChrisMcCarthy, Passchendaele: The Day-by-Day Account, Arms and Armour Press, London, 1995.

  13 Tyne Cot was so called because the Northumberland soldiers thought that the Belgian houses looked like cottages on Tyneside.

  14 About forty per cent of all French infantry officers were killed in the war, a far higher proportion than in the British army.

  13

  TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

  The United States of America wanted nothing to do with European squabbles and internecine conflicts, which much of her population had emigrated to avoid. President Woodrow Wilson spent most of the war years in naïve manoeuvrings trying to persuade the Allies to accept an impossible peace based on the ‘brotherhood of man’. America entered the war at the last minute, contributed nothing, and became the only power to make money out of it. The United States insisted on setting up the League of Nations, which she then fatally weakened by refusing to join, before she returned to an isolationism that was a major contributory factor to the Second World War a generation later.

  Such is the impression of American effort in the Great War as held by a very large number of people in Britain and Europe today. It is a view arising from an ignorance of the facts and a failure to understand America’s perception of herself, tinged with not a little resentment as America has superseded the powers of the Old World as the arbiter of man’s destiny.

  America was vital to the United Kingdom’s prosecution of the Great War almost from Day One; she helped the Allies in away that far exceeded the obligations of a neutral. By the middle of 1918 there were as many American soldiers in France as there were British, and they held a longer sector of front. While America’s casualties were slight compared to those of the French and British, what she did do was done well and undoubtedly helped to shorten the war.

  During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the United States settled her interior, secured her coastlines, acquired Hawaii, chased Spain out of the Caribbean, and built the Panama Canal. Since the 1890s she had been the world’s greatest industrial power, with a steel output greater than that of Britain and France combined. With her rapidly increasing economic muscle America now had the potential to become a world power, but was unsure how to use that potential. Within the Republican Party there was a vocal and influential minority, led by Theodore Roosevelt (President from 1901 to 1909) and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and linked to business interests, that favoured an outward-looking approach to world affairs. This group became increasingly suspicious of Germany, which they saw as a rival in the snapping-up of spare colonial morsels in the Pacific. The mass of the American population, however, was uninterested in matters far from home, and only reluctantly accepted the acquisition of the Philippines from Spain. It is important for Europeans to realise that America is a huge country. A truism to be sure, but it meant that Americans saw no need to travel abroad and, apart from the East Coast elite, had little contact with, and less understanding of, foreign aspirations. Most American political activity was directed inwards: the scars of the Civil War took many years to heal, and the priority (and the votes) went to nation-building, not international affairs.1 Even today, only fifteen per cent of Americans hold passports, and American schoolchildren learn Spanish, not French.

  In 1912 Roosevelt, attempting to make a comeback, split the Republican Party with his novel approach to both home and foreign affairs. This led to the election of a Democrat – Thomas Woodrow Wilson – as President. Wilson is somewhat of an enigma. He was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and grew up in Georgia and South Carolina during the Civil War and its painful aftermath. He qualified as a lawyer and was called to the Georgia bar in 1882, but his law practice was unsuccessful. He next attended Johns Hopkins University and became a teacher, firstly in Pennsylvania and then as a professor at Princeton, whose president he became in 1902. In 1910Wilson was nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the governorship of New Jersey, and won the election in a landslide. In 1912 he stood for President of the United States and won with eighty-two per cent of the Electoral College votes.

  Wilson is often described as being non-political, and as seeing himself as being an ‘outside force’ in politics. This is the image he wanted to portray, but his Ph.D. From Johns Hopkins was in political science and based on his book Congressional Government. At Princeton he taught political economy (as well as jurisprudence). Clearly he was deeply interested in politics, and no one, then or now, becomes President of the United States without the financial backing of one of the two parties. Wilson had strong religious convictions, rejected the views of the ‘imperialist’ school with its links to banks and big business, and believed (probably genuinely) that the moral imperative and the spirit of universal brotherhood should govern relations between nations. There was much about Britain that he disliked, but he admired the British system of government where power lay with a prime minister in Parliament, and his hero was Gladstone. On the other hand he was inclined to be dictatorial, introduced segregation to the US civil service, rarely listened to advisers and largely ignored his wartime ambassador in Britain, Walter Page, whose advice he considered to be tainted by being too pro-British.

  When war broke out in 1914Wilson declared for neutrality. He could have done nothing else: at this stage the American voters, as represented by the Congress, would never have tolerated their leaders’ taking them into a foreign war. And he was re-elected in 1916 largely on the slogan that he had kept America out of the war (although he himself never said that). His Republican opponent in 1916, Hughes, was much harder on Germany and suffered at the polls because of it.

  It has to be said that America did well out of her neutrality. In 1914 she was entering recession, and the war saved her from it, or at least postponed it. America was now able to dominate markets that the Europeans could no longer service, and the warring Allies’ greatly increased demand for American products boosted production and profits as never before. While Britain’s gold reserves were depleted by £42 million between 1914 and 1919, America’s increased by £278.5 million.2 Theoretically the United States sold to all the belligerents, but in practice most of her exports went to the Allies, as the British blockade prevented trade with Germany. Increasingly, sales on credit to Britain and France gave American business a vested interest in Allied victory. While this was not the cause of eventual American involvement in the war, it was a sufficiently strong reason to lead to the passing of the Neutrality Acts of 1935 and 1936, so that in the Second World War only ‘cash and carry’ sales could be made, with no commitment of American money or ships.

  Despite Wilson’s preference for democracy over autocracy, relations with Britain actually declined up to 1916. As a trading nation America regarded the freedom of the seas as a paramount objective of her foreign policy. Britain blockaded Germany, blockaded German ships in American ports, and stopped and searched neutral shipping to ensure that no ‘contraband’ was being carried to the Central Powers. This irritated Wilson – America had gone to war with Britain in 1812 largely on this issue – and many were the notes of protest handed to the British ambassador. When relations became too strained, Britain either allowed goods regarded as vital to American exports to go through or, if the cargo was considered by Britain to be too important to be allowed to g
o to Germany (such as cotton), bought the entire output herself.

  The Hearst press was openly hostile to Britain. Indeed, their correspondent in Berlin was later found to have been in the pay of the Germans, and the repression of the ‘Easter Rising’ in Ireland increased anti-British sentiment amongst the Irish-American community – feeling which was encouraged by German agents. There were a large number of Americans of German descent in the Midwest, with their own newspapers and clubs, many of which were under the influence of the German embassy. All of this meant that Wilson would have found it very difficult to go to war alongside the French and, particularly, the British in 1914. Nevertheless Britain relied on America as the provider of all manner of war materials that British industry could not itself produce. For horses, rifles, artillery pieces, ammunition of all types, aircraft, aero-engines and motor vehicles, the British government placed contracts with American suppliers and manufacturers, to say nothing of the thirty per cent of British foodstuffs that by 1916 were being imported from the United States. America was under no obligation, moral or legal, to provide any of this, and it would have taken but a nod and a wink from the US government to banks and industrial magnates for credit to dry up and contracts to be unfulfilled. That no such censure was ever hinted at was, of course, partly commercial good sense; but it was also partly a mark of unwritten sympathy with, and understanding of, British war aims. American industry and American governmental tolerance were essential to the British war effort long before the United States entered the war, and while Britain might still have won the war without them, it would have taken far longer and would have cost many more lives.

  While America disliked the blockade, Britain could make strong legal arguments for it, and these were always more convincing to the US government than German use of the submarine, which was seen as a terror weapon. The British did not sink ships or kill their crews; increasingly, German submarines were to sink merchant shipping without warning. With the failure of the Schlieffen plan and the onset of what would be a long war, informed opinion in Germany moved to regarding Britain, rather than France, as the major enemy. Initially this was not because of the size of Britain’s army but because of her navy. The British blockade had an increasingly deleterious effect on the German war effort, not so much because it prevented the import of war-making items (oil could be extracted from coal and rubber replaced by synthetics), but because Germany had always relied on imports of food, mainly from France and Russia but also from further afield. All this was now denied to her, and as the war continued rationing became more extreme. If the Allies held their nerve, then, short of a quick victory on land (which looked increasingly unlikely), Germany would eventually starve.

  The answer was the submarine. At the beginning of the war submarines were restricted to coastal defence, but improvements in diesel engines soon made them capable of being used offensively. In February 1915 Germany initiated unrestricted submarine warfare in war zones. This led to vehement American protests – so much so that on 1 September 1915 Germany announced the cessation of unrestricted submarine warfare. Germany tried the submarine again in 1916, and on 21 February announced that from 1 March armed merchant ships would be treated as warships. More American lives were lost (mainly in British ships), and further vigorous protests from America led to Germany’s once more abandoning her unrestricted campaign. By 1917 the situation had changed. Largely owing to their inability to switch sufficient reserves from fending off the British 1916 offensive on the Somme to defeat the French at Verdun, the German High Command saw little prospect of a victory on land. The British blockade was becoming increasingly effective, rations for civilians were not far above the bare minimum, and the only option seemed to be to force Britain out of the war by strangling her trade. Previously there had been too few submarines to mount a quick and overwhelming knockout blow; now it appeared that there were enough. The German High Command and the increasingly sidelined civilian government were well aware that this could bring America into the war on the Allied side, but considered that the war could be won before America was in a position to intervene decisively. In any event, they calculated, American attention could be diverted elsewhere.

  Part of the process of consolidating the US as the major state on the American continent was the incorporation of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming at the expense of Mexico, who saw herself as the rightful inheritor of Spanish interests on the North American continent. In the years leading up to 1914, Mexico underwent a series of changes of government in which one dictator replaced another, usually by assassination or armed insurrection. America had large financial interests in Mexico, and the business world wanted nothing so much as stability, regardless of who actually supplied it. Britain too wanted stability, as most of Mexico’s oil was British-owned and needed for the Royal Navy. Wilson, on the other hand, wanted democracy in Mexico, an unrealistic hope for a country where eighty-five per cent of the population were illiterate peasant farmers. The rise of the rebel Pancho Villa and his propensity to raid across the border into the United States eventually led to Wilson’s reluctantly sanctioning military intervention in Mexico. From March 1916 four-fifths of the United States regular army, under Major General John J. Pershing, was tied down inside Mexico or on its borders. All this was grist to the German mill. Germany supplied arms and money to the various Mexican factions, and hoped that the US would be too preoccupied with her own borders to become involved in the European war.

  Another factor that Germany hoped to use was Japan. Japan had declared war on the Allied side in 1914. She had annexed Korea in 1910 and was now able to seize German bases in China and to obtain markets that the Europeans could no longer supply. Japan played little part in the war on land, but the use of her fleet in the Pacific, the China Seas and the Indian Ocean allowed Britain to withdraw ships from the Far East for use in the Atlantic. Relations between Japan and America were, however, fragile. Japan had now come to be seen as the ‘Yellow Peril’, competing with the United States for trade and influence in China, and posing a threat to American interests in the Pacific. Relations worsened with American restrictions on Japanese immigration, particularly with the passing by the California state legislature of a law forbidding Japanese nationals to own or lease land in that state. Rumours of Japanese ships off the Mexican coast and Japanese officers with the Mexican army abounded.

  Up to this point Wilson was attempting to mediate between the belligerent powers. His efforts were directed towards ‘peace without victory’. They were well-meaning but naïve, and were coming to naught. The Allies refused to accept that both sets of belligerents should receive equal treatment – it was their territory that was occupied – and Germany would not countenance a settlement that left her with no gains.

  American mediation efforts were not helped by the man who was deputed to make them. Eschewing the normal diplomatic channels, Wilson used a trusted crony, Colonel Edward Mandell House. House was a wealthy Texan who had been active in state politics and whose organisational abilities and social contacts had been largely instrumental in securing the election of a succession of Democratic governors of Texas. In 1911 House met Wilson and played a crucial role in uniting the Democratic Party behind this somewhat unusual presidential candidate. Having succeeded to the presidency, Wilson found House to have no political ambitions of his own and began to use him more and more, although without giving him an official government position. As Wilson’s emissary to Europe before the war, House had discussions with all the principal governments, but his somewhat unsophisticated attempts to broker a solution to great-power rivalry came to nothing. Once war broke out House believed, as did Wilson, that it was in America’s interest to stay neutral, although his (and Wilson’s) sympathies were with the Allies. The Allied governments found House difficult because he did not fit the mould of the professional diplomat, a type with which they were used to dealing. The French and British generals assumed that his title of colonel impli
ed that he had served in the American army, and thus understood the military imperative. When this was found not to be the case House’s credibility was diminished, although Haig eventually formed the opinion that he was ‘natural, sincere and capable’.3 The French and British considered House’s rank to be bogus, although this was a somewhat unfair description, as the conferring of honorary military ranks was common in the United States – Colonel Sanders of Kentucky being the best-known bearer of such today, at least in Britain.4 House obtained his colonelcy from James Hogg, Governor of Texas in the early 1890s, and with it came a smart uniform, which House later said he had given away to a ‘grateful darkie’ in his employ.5 In the spring of 1914 House sent a report to President Wilson describing his impressions of the European situation:

  ...It is militarism run stark mad...Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria. England does not want Germany wholly crushed, for she would then have to reckon with her ancient enemy, Russia; but if Germany insists upon an ever increasing navy, then England will have no choice. The best chance for peace is an understanding between England and Germany in regard to naval armaments and yet there is some disadvantage to us by these two getting too close.6