Via History.com
On
April 6, 1917, two days after the U.S. Senate votes 82 to 6 to declare
war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the
decision by a vote of 373 to 50, and the United States formally enters
the First World War.
When World War I erupted in 1914, President
Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position
favored by the vast majority of Americans. Britain, however, was one of
America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the
United States and Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the
British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or
sunk by German mines, and, in February 1915, Germany announced
unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that
entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced
that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American
vessel. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government
apologized, calling the attack an unfortunate mistake.
On
May 7, the British-owned ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed without
warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the nearly 2,000 passengers
aboard, 1,201 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German
government maintained, correctly, that the Lusitania was carrying
munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations and an end to German
attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany
pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed
vessels, but in November a U-boat sank an Italian liner without warning,
killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public
opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.
In February 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition
against the Allies, resumed its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare
in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke
diplomatic relations with Germany; the same day, the American liner
Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a
$250 million arms-appropriations bill intended to ready the United
States for war. In late March, Germany sank four more U.S. merchant
ships, and on April 2, President Wilson went before Congress to deliver
his famous war message. Within four days, both houses of Congress had
voted in favor of a declaration of war.
Despite measures taken to
improve U.S. military preparedness in the previous year, Wilson was
unable to offer the Allies much immediate help in the form of troops;
indeed, the army was only able to muster about 100,000 men at the time
of American entrance into the war. To remedy this, Wilson immediately
adopted a policy of conscription. By the time the war ended on November
11, 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers had served on the
battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their
lives. Still, the most important effect of the U.S. entrance into the
war was economic—by the beginning of April 1917, Britain alone was
spending $75 million per week on U.S. arms and supplies, both for itself
and for its allies, and had an overdraft of $358 million. The American
entry into the war saved Great Britain, and by extension the rest of the
Entente, from bankruptcy.
The United States also crucially
reinforced the strength of the Allied naval blockade of Germany, in
effect from the end of 1914 and aimed at crushing Germany economically.
American naval forces reached Britain on April 9, 1917, just three days
after the declaration of war. By contrast, General John J. Pershing, the
man appointed to command the U.S. Army in Europe, did not arrive until
June 14; roughly a week later, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops
landed in France to begin training for combat. Though the U.S. Army’s
contributions began slowly, they would eventually mark a major turning
point in the war effort and help the Allies to victory.
No comments:
Post a Comment