American Contributions to World War I in 1918
The U.S. Role in Defeating the Central Powers
Jul 19, 2009
1918 would be the decisive year in the long and bloody conflict often called the Great War. In the East, the Central Powers had devastated Russia. The December 1917 armistice allowed the German High Command to redeploy divisions to the western front for an “all or nothing” spring offensive that took German forces within thirty miles of Paris. But by 1918 it would be the United States that made the difference and ultimately ensured an Allied victory.
Supplying the Allies Since 1914
From the very beginning of the war, American popular sympathies had been with Britain and France, despite large American German immigrant communities. Between 1914 and United States’ entry in the war in April, 1917, American financial institutions authorized loans and credits that would exceed several billions. The Allies used these credits to purchase war material from the United States.
After April 1917, the federal government guaranteed all loans and undertook a massive relief effort that included munitions, merchant ships, destroyers, and food. All of this came at a time the Central Powers were exhausting their own industrial output which had been retooled for the war effort. Further, so many convoys sailed the Atlantic that the already crippled U-boat fleet was unable to stem the tide of American supplies, despite a return to unrestricted naval warfare.
The Central Powers by 1918
Historian Paul Kennedy has argued that by 1918 the near total channeling of German production into war production by the military establishment was beginning to backfire and production levels dramatically decreased due to the inability to keep up the flow of raw materials needed for the war effort. Agriculture declined precipitously and, with bad harvests, resulted in soaring food prices and scarcity of everyday staples.
This situation exacerbated popular unrest that, in 1918 and into 1919, would translate into revolutionary activity, mutinies, and uprisings against the Imperial government. Similar conditions existed in France, most notably after a major mutiny of French troops on the front line trenches, but food supplies coming from the United States bolstered morale while the failure of the German spring offensive provided renewed encouragement. As American troops began to augment Allied forces, it was apparent that the days of the Central Powers were numbered.
Woodrow Wilson Failed to Fully Exploit United States’ Contributions
Although President Wilson was given a welcome fit for a Roman Emperor in Paris, his Allied colleagues suffered no such illusions. As thankful and appreciative as they were for United States’ help in defeating the Central Powers, they had a victor’s agenda that did not include Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points. For his part, Wilson bargained away his vision of a world Utopia for the acceptance of the League of Nations. Ironically, the United States never joined the League.
President Wilson was a “loner president” who acted independently and particularly snubbed his political opposition. In this, he may have been the wrong American to represent the one power at the Versailles Conference that might have checked the ambitions and revenge agenda of the British and the French. Further, his intractable allegiance to the League may have indirectly pushed the United States into a period of isolationism at a time forces in Europe and Asia were combining to wreak an even greater global havoc: World War II.
The U.S. and the Great War
The United States entered the Great War precisely at a time the Allies were in danger of disintegration. American supplies, both food stuffs and munitions, allowed the Allies to out-produce the Central Powers and drive those societies into revolution, the same goal the Germans had in mind in 1917 when they provided safe passage for V. Lenin back into Russia.
Sources:
- Kenrick A. Clements, The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson (University Press of Kansas, 1992)
- Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987)
- Page Smith, America Enters the War: A People’s History of the Progressive Era and World War I (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985)
- Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962)
 |
