Ten million American men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, on the other hand, registered for the draft on June 5, 1917. Although there had been threats of resistance, the day passed without incident. Over the next year and a half, almost five thousand local boards would register nearly twenty-five million men, assigning each a number between 1 and 10,500. Then, a little before ten o’clock in the morning of July 20, 1917, in a room in the Senate Office Building, Secretary of War Baker stood before a crowd of government officials. Wearing a blindfold, he dipped his hand into a large glass jar and fished out a capsule, inside of which was the number 258. It was announced and written on a chalkboard, and newsreel cameras recorded the event. Over the next sixteen and a half hours, other officials and eventually local college students pulled the 10,499 remaining capsules, thus completing the first and largest such lottery in history. Shortly thereafter, more than 10 percent of those registered would be called up and then selected according to five categories of eligibility—factoring marital, medical, and occupational status along with the number of dependents one supported. Not everybody answered the call: 350,000 men—including a discernible number of German Americans, Socialists, and pacifists—simply resisted. Over the course of America’s involvement in the war, the age limits would stretch to include all men between eighteen and forty-five. Over 150,000 lads under military age joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, getting a jump on their preparation for service, usually on a college campus; and 80,000 men—mostly young businessmen—earned commissions after three months of twelve-hour days at officers’ training camp. A Presbyterian minister wondered whether he could serve his country best by going to the front or staying in his parish; Wilson said that “it is the duty of these gentlemen to stand by their flocks, unless it is very evident that they can be dispensed with.”
Suddenly the United States government was responsible for feeding, housing, clothing, and training millions of men. In just three months, thirty-two encampments requiring hospitals, power stations, sewage systems, theaters, libraries, and, often, railroad tracks and stations were built, a marvel of administration and construction. At a cost of roughly $10 million each, half these “cantonments” provided wooden barracks for the national Army; the other half provided tent camps, with wooden floors, for the National Guard. Stretching from Camp Devens in Massachusetts to Camp Kearney in California—all named for military heroes and most clustered in the South—each cantonment accommodated 40,000 soldiers. According to Secretary Daniels’s final reckoning, 4,272,521 men served in the wartime Army.
Manpower proved easier to supply than firepower. By the time enlisted men appeared in camp, only a small fraction of the standard-issue Springfield rifles were on hand. By the end of the war, Springfield could supply only half the American Expeditionary Force’s needs, forcing the government to purchase weapons from other companies. Because time was of the essence, Secretary Baker could not afford to gather competitive bids on every item the government needed. The War Department placed orders at once with Colt, Lewis, and Vickers for machine guns, anything to get weapons into soldiers’ hands as quickly as possible. For months, American soldiers used European equipment. Indeed, not until late in the war would an American squadron fly American planes. As Charles G. Dawes—a Midwestern banker who became a Brigadier General in charge of supply procurement—quickly learned, it was essential to acquire any weaponry on hand and pay the going rate. The result was a fighting force that was never completely standardized but one that could improvise when necessary.
The Commander in Chief encouraged as much in what Josephus Daniels called the “most remarkable address of the war.” It seemed to Wilson that the greatest obstacle in this “unprecedented war” was the German submarine, which the legendary British Admiralty had been unable to overcome—largely because of its timorous approach to the problem. (They repeatedly rejected America’s idea of including convoys to accompany their ships across the Channel, for example.) On Saturday, August 11, 1917—as the core of the United States Navy was preparing to transport men and materiel overseas—the Wilsons cruised down the Potomac on the Mayflower for their regular summer weekend jaunt. Then, without any public announcement, they sailed into the York River, where the massive dreadnoughts that constituted the Atlantic Fleet were at anchor. Unceremoniously, Wilson boarded the flagship Pennsylvania, where he found all the officers of the fleet gathered on the quarterdeck. With no press even aware of his presence, Wilson addressed the men “in confidence,” delivering a personal inspirational message.
Wilson asked the sailors before him—from Ensigns to Admirals—to strategize beyond the lessons in their manuals, to
please leave out of your vocabulary altogether the word “prudent.” . . . Do the thing that is audacious to the utmost point of risk and daring, because that is exactly the thing that the other side does not understand. And you will win by the audacity of method when you cannot win by circumspection and prudence.
Wilson believed “the most extraordinary circumstance of modern history is the way in which the German people have been subordinated to the German system of authority, and how they have accepted their thinking.” The purpose of this war, he told those about to fight, was “to see to it that no other people suffers a like limitation and subordination. . . . We are in some peculiar sense the trustees of liberty.” Edith saw that her husband had inspired the men profoundly. He shook hands with every officer.
Thus began the most colossal conveyance of fighting men the world had ever known. The United States Navy swelled from 65,000 to 500,000; and, by the end of 1917, it had transported 145,918 men across the Atlantic Ocean. The next year it carried two million more. In all the months of mass passage, only 768 American soldiers and sailors were lost at sea.
In truth, Wilson had not anticipated building so sizeable a war machine. He read every night from a khaki-covered pocket edition of the Bible that a soldier had sent him, and he prayed for the hostilities to end. The threat of the American invasion might encourage the Germans to withdraw to the peace table; and there was always the hope that the Allies might just win the war on their own before the Yanks arrived.
In August 1917, Pope Benedict XV appealed to the leaders of all the belligerent governments, asking them to stop turning the civilized world into “a field of death” and forcing Europe to take “a hand in its own suicide.” He insisted that there should be a simultaneous and reciprocal reduction of armaments and that arbitration should begin right away. Secretary Lansing presumed this appeal emanated from Austria-Hungary—with its heavily Catholic population and strong support of the Vatican. He questioned the Pope’s motives and suggested that he had become an unwitting “agent of Germany,” eager to restore peace to Catholic Belgium and Poland but making no mention of Slavic Serbia and Montenegro. Wilson felt the Pontiff offered nothing more than a return to the status quo before the war, without removing any of the elements that provided the pretext for the war. “It is none of our business how the German people got under the control of such a government or were kept under the domination of its power and its purposes,” he wrote in shorthand in preparing his reply, “but it is our business to see to it that the history of the world is no longer left to their handling.” Wilson expressed doubt that such a peace could be based upon a restitution of the German government’s power or upon “any word of honor it could pledge in a treaty of settlement and accommodation.” He would not take the word of the present German rulers as “a guarantee of anything that is to endure, unless explicitly supported by such conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of the German people themselves as the other peoples of the world would be justified in accepting.” The President looked forward to the possibility of a “covenanted peace.”
On December 4, 1917, the President delivered his State of the Union Address and spoke almost entirely about the war, clarifying America’s objectives. “We shall regard the war as won only when the German people say
to us . . . that they are ready to agree to a settlement based upon justice and the reparation of the wrongs their rulers have done,” he said. Observing that Austria-Hungary had become nothing more than “the vassal of the German Government,” he now recommended a declaration of war against that empire. Three days later, Congress complied—by a unanimous vote in the Senate (La Follette was absent) and by all but one vote in the House.
The declaration cemented the bond between the United States and the Allies, signaling that all Germany’s friends were now America’s enemies. That only induced new talk that Austria-Hungary wished to arrive at a separate peace and extract itself from the war, which would, in turn, weaken Germany. In fact, Britain would soon enter secret talks with Austria on that very subject, as it desperately waited for the Americans to train and unleash the full force of their Army. When Vice Admiral William Sowden Sims—who was appointed Commander, United States Naval Forces Operating in European Waters—arrived in London, he learned a shocking truth that the British government had withheld from its people and the rest of the world. It was underreporting the tonnage of ships it had been losing each month. It was in the millions.
Some bumptious Englishmen—including Winston Churchill—would later claim that “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War,” that the Allies were on the verge of making peace with Germany in the spring of 1917. But few of Churchill’s countrymen agreed. Most were undyingly grateful for American participation. Admiral John Jellicoe, head of the Royal Navy, privately told Admiral Sims upon his arrival, “They will win, unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon.” King George summoned Ambassador Page to Windsor Castle to tell him how much his nation appreciated the help of the Americans and to confess how badly they needed it. In September 1917, new Prime Minister David Lloyd George sent Wilson some hard facts, specifically that “in spite of the efforts of the Allies to raise and equip armies and to manufacture munitions, in spite of their superiority in men and material and the perfection to which they have brought their offensive arrangements, the Germans . . . find themselves in possession of more and not less Allied territory.” As the American convoy plan met immediate and long-term success, the hopes of the King, like those of every citizen of the Allied nations, rested on American leadership.
General Frederick Funston was the presumptive leader of the American forces until his sudden death just weeks before the declaration of war. Many supposed that General Leonard Wood, leading spokesman for America’s Preparedness Movement, might fill his boots, though his close relationship to TR did not endear him to Wilson. Ironically, Wilson had distrusted Wood since a meeting in early 1913, at which the General had done nothing but badmouth Roosevelt, in an obvious attempt to curry favor with Wilson. That only made the President doubt Wood’s discretion and loyalty. And so, Secretary Baker and Wilson turned to General John J. Pershing, then fifty-seven years old. Tall, stiff-backed, and square-jawed, with a manicured mustache and a commanding voice that he used as little as possible, Pershing consistently had displayed leadership as he had risen through the ranks: with the 6th Cavalry, fighting Apaches and Sioux; commanding the 10th Cavalry—a regiment of the African American “buffalo soldiers,” which earned him the nickname “Black Jack”; teaching at West Point; fighting in Cuba and the Philippines; and serving in diplomatic postings in Japan and the Balkans before leading the 8th Calvary in the punitive expedition along the Mexican border. He had said little during the preparedness quarrels.
After one meeting at the White House on May 24, Wilson immediately sent Pershing to Europe, with several thousand troops, to establish his command and demonstrate support for the Allies. Those Americans fortified morale more than they did the front lines. Despite constant pressure to fill in with “doughboys” wherever the French “poilus” and British “Tommies” had suffered great losses, Wilson reiterated that “we will leave to General Pershing the disposition of our troops, but it must be an American Army, officered and directed by Americans, ready to throw their strength where it will tell most.” Like Wilson’s Cabinet officers, Pershing was given virtually free rein of his personnel, creating a centralization of his forces and avoiding internecine warfare by having the absolute approval and obedience of his Generals. Pershing did not want his troops to lose their national identity by becoming absorbed in the Allied armies. Wilson felt the same about all his country’s war efforts: when he saw a poster from the Food Administration referring to “Our Allies,” he asked Herbert Hoover to substitute the words “Our Associates in the War,” explaining, “I have been very careful about this myself because we have no allies and I think I am right in believing that the people of the country are very jealous of any intimation that there are formal alliances.”
Pushing the United States into the international arena, Wilson relied heavily on Colonel House’s secret intelligence-gathering project—“the Inquiry”—which Secretary Lansing helped define in a memorandum he wrote in optimistic preparation for the peace talks. Because it would be impossible to find any negotiators who possessed full knowledge of the myriad of issues involved, Lansing had recommended assembling a team of experts whose knowledge cut across different countries and different disciplines, each of whom would prepare a pamphlet that could assist in deciding the United States’ role in the determination of boundaries and the redistribution of colonial possessions. He had further recommended that House supervise the entire effort.
Working out of unimposing offices, the Inquiry quietly went about its work, as House assigned Sidney Edward Mezes to administer this think tank. Mezes happened to be Mrs. House’s brother-in-law; and House insisted that he was not only trustworthy but also supremely qualified. A lifelong academician and philosopher, Dr. Mezes was then president of the City College of New York and was “well grounded in both political and economic history,” had a progressive outlook, and was conversant in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. To serve as his secretary, House recommended Walter Lippmann, whose abilities were so impressive, the anti-Semitic House surmounted his objections—because “unlike other Jews he is a silent one.” The mission of the Inquiry was not simply to gather information but also to apply it in rebuilding the world after the current apocalypse.
At the end of 1917, its secret work grew complicated when a newspaper revealed its existence. Then a series of secret agreements among the Allies, predetermining how the Central empires would be dismantled and divided after the war, came to light. Great Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and—perhaps most problematic—Italy (which had joined the Allies) had all privately agreed to new covenants, creating a system of alliances as labyrinthine as those that had kindled the war. They imagined whole new countries drawn from territory between Germany and the Middle East. Affixing such territorial purposes to the war contradicted Wilson’s ideals. One cannot determine precisely what the President knew and when he knew it, because he proceeded to act as though these pacts did not exist. He believed he would be able to bring everybody around to his way of thinking—regardless of secret treaties—in due time. As the President wrote Colonel House: “When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.” By year’s end, however, it looked as though the Allies might not have a chance at any spoils.
During the first four weeks of autumn, the Austro-Hungarian and German armies overwhelmed the Italians at Caporetto. Starting with a surprise attack, from which the Italians never recovered, the battle effectively knocked its army out of commission; the retreat felt like a turning point in the war, as in addition to some 30,000 Italian casualties, 250,000 of their men were taken prisoner. Morale sank, and soldiers deserted. The retreat broke more than the back of the Italian armed forces; it fractured the spirit of the entire Allied cause. One young Red Cross ambulance driver from Oak Park, Illinois—Ernest Hemingway—would later capture that moment, saying, “Abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage, or hallow were obscene.” In the meantime, in Russia the Bolshevik government was hoping to draft a separate peace with the Germans. Such a treaty would hurt the Allies, allowing the Germans to remove their armies from the Eastern Front so they could fight on the Western. And in the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire, one small plot of sand proved to have far-reaching implications.
Commander of Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force since June 1917, British General E. H. H. “Bloody Bull” Allenby had steadily pushed his campaign east across the Sinai desert. How Palestine might figure into an Allied victory in the war had not been determined; Zionists had long prayed it might become a permanent homeland for the millions of Jews dispersed around the world. On November 2, 1917, after consideration by the British War Cabinet, Foreign Minister Balfour wrote Lionel, the 2d Baron Rothschild, a representative of the Zionists, a short letter, the core of which read:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
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