LIFE World War I: The Great War and the American Century

98 Pages·2017·5.88 MB·English

by  The Editors of LIFE

World War I
The Great War and the American Century
PHOTOGRAPH BY A. R. COSTER/TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY
American servicemen parade through the streets of London on August 15, 1917.
CONTENTS
Introduction: A Crisis That Redefined Us
War in Europe and Peace at Home
The U.S. Goes In
The Cost of Peace
A New Age in the U.S.
Epilogue: A Century Later
Just One More
FRONT COVER Scottish soldiers from the 10th Battalion leaving the safety of their
trench to attack the German lines, on March 24, 1917. Photograph by Lt. J .W.
Brooke/IWM/Getty
PHOTOGRAPH FROM HAECKEL COLLECTION/ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY
Launched in June 1915, the USS Arizona super-dreadnought battleship served as a gunnery trainer during the war
and would be sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
1914–1917
War in Europe and Peace at Home
As the world descends into conflict, the United States
struggles with whether to join in
ROBERT HUNT COLLECTION/MARY EVANS
CANADIAN TROOPS leave their trenches and head over the top at the Battle of the Somme. The 141-day
offensive in 1916 failed to break through the German line and led to more than one million dead and wounded of all
nationalities.
As the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Countess Sophie
Chotek, strolled through a bazaar in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, on
June 27, 1914, they passed carpet shops and coppersmiths, singing street clowns and
citizens who happily greeted the couple. But as these visiting royals made their way
through the market’s winding paths, they were not aware that 19-year-old Gavrilo
Princip stalked them.
The next day was St. Vitus Day, the anniversary of the Serbs’ defeat by the Turks in
1389. Many Serbs resented Austria-Hungary’s 1908 annexation of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, which they considered part of Greater Serbia. For them, it was
outrageous that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne dared come to Sarajevo on a
somber day so rich with nationalist feeling. When the couple returned to the capital
that morning, several radicals from the revolutionary group Mlada Bosna (Young
Bosnia)—of which Princip was a member—awaited them. Hoping to assassinate the
archduke and free their land, the group set out with bombs and semiautomatic pistols
given to them by the Black Hand, a secret Serbian nationalist group.
The morning was warm in this city with its minarets and villas along the Miljacka
River. Colorful banners and flags hung from homes and shops, and Sarajevans lined the
main boulevard to watch the six-car procession and catch a glimpse of the proud
archduke sporting a helmet with bright green ostrich feathers. But as the procession
moved along, a bomb—thrown by one of the Mlada Bosna conspirators—bounced off
of Franz Ferdinand’s Gräf and Stift double phaeton and exploded under the following
vehicle.
Despite the attack, the archduke was determined to keep to his schedule and
commented that the man who had thrown the bomb was “clearly insane.” His driver
sped off to the town hall, and after a visit there, the party headed to the hospital to see
those wounded by the blast. Along the way, the driver took a wrong turn. As he slowed
down to reverse, he happened to stop in front of Princip. The youth pulled out a pistol,
jumped onto the car’s running board and shot Franz Ferdinand in the jugular and
Sophie in the abdomen.
Within minutes, the two were both dead.
Princip had no idea of the events he was setting in motion. While no clear evidence
linked the attack to Serbia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire delivered a series of
ultimatums to punish that nation for what had happened. After Serbia balked at one of
them, the empire declared war on July 28, and a tangle of existing treaties led to an
international cataclysm. When Austria-Hungary bombed the Serbian capital of
Belgrade, Serbia’s ally Russia mobilized its troops. Austria-Hungary and its ally
Germany subsequently declared war on Russia. Germany also declared war on France
and invaded Belgium, in response to which Belgium’s ally Britain declared war on
Germany.
In just a week, much of Europe was engulfed in war.
Strutting German, French, Russian, and British soldiers headed off for what they
believed would be a brief rout, their rifles adorned with flowers from proud
sweethearts. But by the fall, the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, and Italy) and the
Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria)
found themselves in an intractable military deadlock. Troops on the western front dug
460 miles of trenches, stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, transforming
pastoral farmlands and urban centers into a shell-pocked no-man’s-land of death.
Meanwhile, on the eastern front, soldiers fought large battles that ranged across the
Meanwhile, on the eastern front, soldiers fought large battles that ranged across the
land.
In the United States, it all seemed very far away.
As news of the fighting made its way across the Atlantic, many Americans counted
themselves lucky that an ocean stood between them and the conflict. The Chicago
Herald noted that “peace-loving citizens of this country will now rise up and tender a
hearty vote of thanks to Columbus for having discovered America.” On August 4,
President Woodrow Wilson declared the nation’s determination to remain “impartial
in thought as well as in action.” Born in Virginia and raised in the South during the
Civil War and its aftermath, the professor turned President had seen the devastation of
battle and sought to keep America neutral.
Though the calendar might have read 1914, the United States was still a largely 19th-
century society, decidedly Victorian in nature. Women lacked the vote, and few were
employed outside the home. One in 10 infants died before turning one, less than 20
percent of homes contained stoves, and few had radios. More than half the U.S.
population of nearly 100 million lived in rural areas or small towns. Men of whom the
war would make heroes lived quiet lives. Harry Truman lived in Grandview, Missouri,
on his family’s 600-acre farm, sharing a room with his brother and the farmhands. A
young Alvin York lived in the hamlet of Pall Mall, Tennessee, farming alongside the
other 12 members of his family. York later recalled that “the logs were chinked with
clay and sticks” in the two-room cabin that was their home.
But change was coming, especially thanks to industrialization and migration. While
there were only two million cars on the roads—one for every 50 people—in 1913 Ford
Motors began its integrated moving assembly line. Progressive politics nurtured labor
federations, women’s leagues, and social welfare groups. The era saw the start of child-
labor regulations, the popular election of senators, environmental preservation, and the
birth of a centralized bank system. From 1865 to 1914, the U.S. economy grew faster
than any other in the world. And a couple by the name of Shemin, who had fled the
pogroms of Russia, settled in New Jersey, where their son William was born and would
go on to play semiprofessional baseball.
Jobs beckoned in the industrial north, in steel mills, factories, and railroads in places
like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. The age witnessed the beginning of the Great
Migration, a vast movement of African Americans fleeing southern sharecropping and
racist Jim Crow laws. A man named Henry Johnson joined the northern wave, leaving
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and finding work as a porter at Union Station in
Albany, New York.
“The war in Europe cut off the flow of immigrant labor to the United States,”
Professor Jennifer Keene, chair of the history department at Chapman University and
author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, tells LIFE. “You had
labor agents going to the South to recruit people to come up.”
While the United States had waged war against Spain in the Philippines in 1898, it
had since remained more focused on its own hemisphere. In the summer of 1915, Haiti
became a U.S. protectorate. The following year, Wilson sent General John Pershing to
Mexico to capture the revolutionary Pancho Villa.
A West Point graduate, the Missouri-born Pershing had amassed an enviable military
record. He had led the African American 10th Cavalry during the Indian War
campaigns of the late 19th century—earning the moniker “Black Jack”—and in the
1898 Battle of San Juan Hill under Lt. Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Later, when
Roosevelt ended up in the White House, the President so appreciated the work of the
officer who was said to be as “cool as a bowl of cracked ice” that he promoted Pershing
to brigadier general.
Quite a few Americans lived in Europe in August 1914. Herbert Hoover and his wife,
Lou, had recently settled in London. A prosperous mining engineer from Iowa, Hoover
had assisted fellow Americans besieged in Tientsin in 1900 during China’s Boxer
Rebellion. Now, as his fellow citizens, fleeing the present conflict, poured into England
from the Continent, he arranged for food, shelter, and the evacuation of 100,000. To
the expats trapped by the fighting, who desperately wanted to get home, the shores of
the United States seemed an oasis of peace and prosperity.
Meanwhile, the trenches of Europe’s western front had become lice-infested sores of
humanity, assaulted by artillery shells, machine gun fire, and poisoned gas. Lieutenant
Colonel Winston Churchill of England wrote in November 1915 of the “filth and
rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defenses” and how “about this scene in the
dazzling moonlight troops of enormous bats creep & glide.”
While President Wilson and most of his countrymen had no desire to be dragged into
such a battle, sitting on the sidelines proved difficult.
Many Americans felt a cultural connection to Britain and France. People like Hoover
—who had also been called upon to assist starving Belgian and French citizens by U.S.
ambassador to England Walter Hines Page—engaged in charity at home and abroad.
And at the same time, many Americans who claimed German roots endured
harassment. The family of Baltimore bookkeeper Henry Gunther came from Germany,
and after one of them was accused of being a spy, the police picked her up for
questioning.
But help wasn’t all a matter of charity: The combatants needed both supplies and
food, and the United States—already the world’s largest producer of coal and steel—
was positioned to provide. Allied agents rushed to its shores to buy raw materials, as
was positioned to provide. Allied agents rushed to its shores to buy raw materials, as
well as meat, cotton, livestock, and grain. Armament makers churned out rifles,
machine guns, and light artillery shells. Since supplies cost the British $10 million a day,
Britain had to liquidate overseas investments and send gold stateside. The U.S.
economy boomed. Exports increased from more than $2 billion in 1913 to $6 billion in
1916, and America’s industrial capacity soon surpassed Britain’s.
Though the United Kingdom could acquire goods from abroad, they had instituted a
naval blockade that made it difficult for Germany to do the same, leading to the
starvation deaths of 200 citizens a day. Desperate to break the blockade, Germany
retaliated with submarines—Unterseeboote, or U-boats—sinking roughly two ships a
day. Wilson warned that if they attacked American ships, the United States would hold
Germany to “strict accountability.”
Then on May 7, 1915, the submarine U-20 torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS
Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. It took less than 20 minutes for the liner to go down.
Lieutenant Commander Walther Schwieger recalled watching the ship through his
periscope and how “men and women jumped into the water and tried to swim to
empty overturned lifeboats.”
Among the nearly 1,200 killed by the attack were 128 Americans. Their deaths
galvanized the movement for the United States to abandon neutrality. Soon after the
sinking, the hawkish Roosevelt, who had run for President against Wilson three years
earlier, said, “It seems inconceivable to me that we can refrain from taking action in this
matter.” In mid-August, a German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Arabic,
killing 44 people, including two Americans. Not wishing to pull the United States into
the war, Germany promised to stop unannounced attacks on passenger ships.
And so America maintained its stance of neutrality as the war raged on.
In western Turkey, the Allies had begun their badly planned Gallipoli Campaign,
attacking the Dardanelles Strait. The assault would lead to the deaths of more than
110,000 Allied and Turkish troops. In France, along the Meuse River, German general
Erich von Falkenhayn launched an assault on the fortified city of Verdun in February of
1916, in order to “bleed France white” by killing as many soldiers as possible. “When
the first wave of the assault is decimated, the ground is dotted with heaps of corpses,
but the second wave is already pressing on,” said one French officer of the carnage,
which led to the deaths of some 300,000.
Then, to relieve pressure at Verdun, in July the British and French launched the
Somme Offensive. On the first day, 19,000 died.
Staggering battle losses appalled observers, and during the 1916 presidential
campaign, Wilson won reelection under the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Even so,
many Americans believed that Wilson would not—and should not—be able to