Attrition and Saving the Bacon. The United States and World War One

 January 1918 Coke calendar.  Soon, soft drinks would be about your only option.  World War One gave a big boost to the Prohibition movement, but a lot of the days after reading the days news you'd probably feel like you needed a drink.

If you've occasionally read the headlines of the newspapers from 1915, 16 and 17 (and now 18) we've put up here, there's something that should probably be obvious from reading them.

The Allies were loosing the war.

Okay, maybe not loosing. But the Allies sure weren't clearly winning.

Let's take a look at that, at this point, the beginning of 1918.

And to start off on that, let's take a look at it as an observant reader of one of the newspapers we've been putting up might have read it.  I think such a reader, observing the news of the prior day over his cup of morning coffee, or the news of the day over his soon to be banished glass of evening beer, would have been worried. And particularly so if they had a son in the service (and let's face it, while there were women volunteering to serve in various roles, the services were overwhelmingly male at the time. . . and in fact they still are).

 

Women did serve of course, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise, in a variety of ways.  Indeed, if you subscribe to Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today subreddit you'll frequently find the photographs of British nurses and war workers who died as a result of the war.  Pretty poignant.
 

So, what would such a person have absorbed before they went to work after that cup of Joe. . . or after they came home and poured that glass of beer?

Well let's go back to 1914, as nobody reads a newspaper or absorbs the news in a vacuum.

 Readers of the Cheyenne July 28, 1914 morning paper were greeted with the news that Europe was on the brink of war.  If they got the evening paper, and many did, they'd next read that Europe was in fact at war.  Another name already familiar to Wyomingites which would be followed the next few years, that of "General Villa", was also on the front page that morning.

Readers of the Casper Record in then tiny Casper would have been less disturbed that morning.  And keep in mind there was no commercial radio at the time either.

Starting in August of 1914 they'd have been reading about the horrific outbreak of a titanic war in Europe. And in that war, the Central Powers, Germany and the Austro Hungarian Empire, gained ground, and a fair amount of it in the East, in 1914.  Their progress was arrested in the west, but not before they'd shown a willingness to trample over the neutrality of a small nation, Belgium, and to have come frighteningly close to breaking through and overwhelming France. . .something they had done last time they'd fought the French in 1870.

Then things seemed to stabilize in the West while bloody huge battles continued on in the East.  Chances are our reader would have vaguely sympathized with the Allies, but only to a degree.  Ethnic feelings about the war were strong and some German Americans were less than keen about the Allies while Irish Americans had mixed feelings about the English. Generally, however, that war was "over there" and we weren't in it, and we were glad.

All along, and so commonly forgotten in histories about the war, our reader would be worrying at least a bit about the situation on the American border with Mexico.  The Mexican Revolution had been going on in one form or another since 1910 and things just refused to stabilize. The US, moreover had demonstrated a feeling that intervening in Mexico, as necessary (in our view) was justified.  Chances are that our reader might have been more concerned, in 1914, about Mexico than Europe.  Indeed, the United States had intervened in the Mexican Revolution by landing troops in Vera Cruz in April, 1914.

Marines and Sailors raising the Stars and Stripes in Vera Cruz, April 1914.

We occupied the town until November.

 

 Sailor searches Mexican man in Vera Cruz.

And so we go to 1915. The war in Europe just keeps on keeping on, but the war south of the border is really ramping up.  Mexico is in a full scale civil war, and its bloody indeed.  American eyes, to a large extent, and for good reason, were looking south and worrying. The US government was keeping a watchful eye and getting involved.  In the background, some men like Theodore Roosevelt were demanding that the US enter the war in Europe, but most Americans were keeping Europe on the distant horizon and worrying about Mexico in the not so distant foreground.

Nonetheless, the war in Europe was making an appearance in Wyoming. In June of that year British Remount agents started purchasing horses in the state.  By the wars end they'd be purchasing them all over the globe, and indeed they already were.  An economic boom in the state, fueled by the war, was on.

Things were getting scary.

And the changes going on couldn't be missed.

So then arrived 1916.  And the U.S. was attacked.  By the rebel Mexican Division del Norte commanded Pancho Villa.  Now the US was in a conflict, although a low grade one as the US retaliated by entering Mexico in pursuit of Villa.

 March 9, 1916 evening edition of the Casper Daily Press detailing the raid on Columbus and the US entry into Mexico. The paper termed it an "invasion", which must have been jarring to the newspaper's readers.  The US didn't view it that way, but the Mexicans more or less did.

The entire time it threatened to break out into a general war with Mexico in which the US would be at war with the Carranza government in Mexico City.  Troop needs required the calling up of the National Guard to man the border in very short order, with the entire National Guard ultimately rotating through border posts over the 1916-1917.

The US actually did end up exchanging some shots with the de facto federal army of Mexico at Carrizal while still trying to hunt down and wipe out the insurgent Pancho Villa. Finally, at that point, with a full scale war looming, it seemed, we backed down and entered into an uneasy occupation of Chihuahua while we negotiated for an exit.  As we were negotiating, the war in Europe started to become more and more of a problem.

The U.S. Army set back at Carrizal hit the press in full force by June 24.  On the same day the press reported that the Germans had one another victory at Verdun, while stopping the "Slavs", when in fact the Russian offensive had terminated the German's hopes at Verdun.

In early 1917 we left Mexico under an arrangement with Carranza's government.  The whole thing had been very inconclusive and far from a victory of any sort.  Carranaza, whose government we had been aiding in the civil war in Mexico before we were attacked by Villa, and indeed, that likely caused Villa to attack us, had shown us contempt.  Villa was on the rise once again.  Tension on the border had not gone away and US troops were not out of danger.  Indeed, cross border action, both ways, continued.

The smile on the soldier to the left's face was likely quite genuine.  The 6th and the 16th Infantry crossing back into the United States, February 1917.

There were big headlines going in, coming out was still on the front page, but not nearly as big in the headlines. 

And then came the Spring of 1917.

Even as we were struggling to find a way out of Mexico, with that struggle being in the newspaper nearly every day, we were starting to worry more and more about the war in Europe, which was now drawing nearer and nearer. And then, just as we were getting out of Mexico, getting into the war in Europe suddenly looked inevitable, as it was. February 1917 saw the US finally take its troops out of Mexico and the National Guard was finally allowed to stand down, but that same month saw the Germans resume unrestricted submarine warfare, something that would cost American lives.  Also in that same month the Zimmerman Note, a German diplomatic effort to coax Mexico and Japan into an alliance with the US in the event of war, was revealed. National Guards men were finding themselves called back up in anticipation of war just weeks after the last of them had gone home.  The cycle was so fast that many National Guardsmen would likely have been better off in every sense if they hadn't gone home at all.

 

Starting in February 1917 the hypothetical reader of the news we imagine here would have seen one thing after another rushing the US towards war.  By April the war had arrived.

The war news after that was confusing. At first the US talked as if it was only going to raise a Navy. But soon thereafter it had enacted mass conscription.  It was obviously going to raise a huge Army, but how huge wasn't evident at first.  By late summer it was pretty clear it was going to be really big, and the Navy wasn't going to be the primary fighting arm of the nation.  At the same time both the British and the French launched huge offensives, with the British ones featuring the first use of tanks. There was reason for our reader to hope that the war might even end before the US really got committed in Europe.

That hope was soon dashed. The offensives rapidly stalled and by Fall revolution had broken out in giant Russia.

We don't often think how that news must have read to the average person.  In many histories written later its often noted that this meant that Americans could accept that the war was really one "to make the world safe for democracy".  I'll bet that at the time, at least for a savvy reader, the news of the fall of Russia was unbelievably grim.

Imperial Russia in the war meant that the Central Powers tied up on a two, or really three, front war with one of those fronts involving a combatant with a much larger population and fast resources and territory.  Never mind how primitive Imperial Russia was and how inept.  I think this would have been at least obvious to a savvy reader.  And then, right after that, a massive Austrian offensive through Italy back on its heals. To most readers, it would have appeared, rightly, that Italy was about to be knocked out of the war.  And it would have been hard not to conclude that the extra defensive front that would have opened up against France would have been disastrous.

And that's about where you are right now. 

According to the Wyoming Tribune, the Kaiser was saying he was going to win.  Readers of the paper would have to wonder if he was right.

So, at this point, New Years Day, 1918, you'd know that the first American troops had arrived in France, and indeed some had already been killed in action.  You'd also know that Russia was descending into chaos and its giant army had dissolved.  And you'd know that Italy had nearly been defeated in the past few weeks.  You'd also know that the French and the British had mounted successful offensives in late 1917, but they hadn't succeeded in gaining a breakthrough.  You'd know that the British had taken Jerusalem in the Middle East but the Turks were trying to take it back. You'd know that U-Boats were ranging the seas, and indeed they'd sunk a British ship with large loss of life just a couple of days prior.  And you'd know that Pancho Villa was fully resurgent and a force again in Northern Mexico, and there were renewed Mexican raids, from somebody, going on along the border.

It would have been hard to have been optimistic.

Of course, you'd also be aware that there were persistent rumors that there were serious foods shortages in Germany.  And you'd know that US troops were arriving in France.

And locally, no matter what you might think of it, a major economic boom was going on.  Indeed, it had changed the entire town.  That would have been impossible not to notice.

Okay, so that's what you know. And what would you have thought of all of that?

Well, that depends, I suppose, on how much you deduce for yourself and how much you accept what others are saying.  Personally, I think in my own case, as I have a little military experience, and I would have had at the time, and assuming that I would have been in Casper on a frigid January 1918 rather than in the service (it was easier to get in, if overage, at the time), I would have been pretty concerned.

It would have seem obvious to me that the German defeat of Russia would mean that the Germans would now be free to move hundreds of thousands of troops to the Western Front and they would have also have had all the resources available to them that Western Russia has, and that's a lot.  My guess would have been that that would take a few months, but once they did it, they'd be ready to launch a major offensive to knock France out of the war, and end it.

Of course, that's based on what I would have known. What I wouldn't have known is that the food crisis in Germany was now at the true crisis level and starvation was starting to set in.  I would also not have know that the revolutionary spirit that was haunting Imperial Russia was now also setting in, inside of Germany, and revolution was becoming a real possibility, particularly in the radicalized German Navy's enlisted ranks.  And I would never have guessed that Imperial German avarice and incompetence would lead it to keep advancing in Russia even as the country surrendered and descended into civil war such that Germany was unable to move substantial numbers of men to the West after all.

I also would not have guessed that the Germans had so depleted their horse stocks that they were now incapable of mobile warfare.  And I wouldn't have guessed that the Germans proved unable to exploit Russian resources which could have addressed that, and their food, situation.

I would also not have known that moral was so low in some units of the French army that they could no longer be used for offensive warfare.  Obviously that wasn't true of the entire French army, but it was true of some of it and it was a serous problem.  And I would not have realized that British and French manpower resources were now so stretched that they were importing Chinese labor in order to relieve service troops.

So, I would have been legitimately worried. 

Which gets to a topic that we'll likely look at more later.  The U.S. role in the First World War.  

It's always been somewhat controversial in a way. The way we view it has been, for a long time, significantly different than the way at least the British view it.  But viewed in context, a century past, while the British retained the ability to launch offensives, and the French somewhat did, their manpower situation was now desperate.  Italy was barely hanging on, and while Germany was facing severe problems of its own, only its own greed and incompetence kept it from working through those problems and solving them in time to win the war in the spring of 1918.  Without the commitment of U.S. troops to the defense against that 1918 spring offensive, as we'll see in a few months, the Germans may well have prevailed that spring.  And certainly without the increasing number of American troops in action, brief though that period of action was in the spring, summer and fall of 1918, its doubtful that the Allies could have overcome the increasing German manpower advantages. They likely would have gotten their act together sooner or later.

So, while we will look at the situation in greater depth later, did the entry of the United States into the war in 1917 win it for the Allies?  Nobody can say for sure. But a good case for that can be made.

And I would have been skeptical that U.S. troops would arrive in time.

Booze was on its way out, temporarily. But cigars were still in, temporarily.  The war was bringing in cigarettes in a major way.