One hundred years ago on April 6, 1917, four days after President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, America went to war. In the House of Representatives, with a vote of 373 to 50, the measure passed easily. In the Senate, the vote was 82-6, again a large majority. Yet the decision to go to war was not as popular with the people. And the nation suffered irreparable losses in men, with thousands killed and many more severely injured. The cost was in the billions of dollars for the U. S. to participate in about 19 months of the world-wide conflict.
But, as we look back over the century, we come to the inescapable conclusion that, for America and the world, the Great War, World War 1, was the essential war of the 20th century. Reasons for this are clear as we dust off the years and look at what transpired.
Perhaps the most important outcome was the ascendancy of the United States in the world. By war’s end, we had become the world’s most powerful military nation. Our defense industries churned out the hardware to fight this conflict, and when over much of such hardware was still on our shores. We had an abundance.
In addition, we became the world’s foremost economic country. While nations such as Great Britain, France, Russia and Germany were impoverished by the huge outlay of monies to fight, by war’s end, the U. S. had become the financier of the European war machines. We were owed huge amounts of money, from friends because of loans, and foes because we helped finance their rebuilding. The dollar became the benchmark currency of the world and English replaced French as the language of diplomacy.
The political landscape was altered dramatically. Empires perished: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire. Our ally, Great Britain, saw its empire weakened, and the French felt their world-wide holdings start to slip from their grasp. Colonialism was beginning a death spiral. Holdings of the Germans were redistributed, and nationalistic tendencies in the other empires would eventually ripen into rebellion and finally independence.
In Europe, national boundaries were changed by fiat, much like the redrawing of the continent’s map by the Congress of Vienna a century earlier. Yugoslavia was created, a hodgepodge of ethnic and religious peoples. Czechoslovakia, a union of two disparate groups, came into being. Each of these would contribute to further conflict decades in the future.
Perhaps the most significant political change was in Russia. Battered by war and the huge casualties and war debt, the Bolsheviks managed to topple the Czar and set up a socialist state. Eventually, the Soviet Union would emerge, the communist colossus that would bedevil the world for the next seventy years. History still has to document fully the carnage on the Russian people who communism brought, and the cost of the Cold War is still felt in the Western world.
In Paris in 1919, the victors hammered out a punitive peace on the losers. Within the Treaty of Versailles were the seeds of World War 2. Germany became the villain as the war guilt clause blamed them for the war. Heavy and unrealistic reparations were written into the pact. A limit on the German military was restrictive to that proud nation. Borders were shrunk for the Germans, the Austrians and Hungarians were separated, and the Italians were ignored. Another war was almost foreordained, as a humiliated people were ripe for the demagogue Hitler who promised a return to glory.
In World War 1, the lives of soldiers were too often thrown away, especially in the trenches. Estimates of the casualties range to about ten million killed on the battlefield, with upwards of twenty million dying when collateral damage is added in. Although World War 2 saw about sixty million who perished due to that conflict, at war’s end the Great War had one more visit from the Grim Reaper. A flu pandemic, commonly called the Spanish Flu, broke out. Soldiers returning to their homelands helped to spread the pandemic. In the U. S., the disease was found in army camps, and before it finally ended, 675,000 Americans died, with millions more affected. Worldwide, some estimate as many as 100 million were victims. Although all cannot be laid at the doorstep of the Great War, the spread of the disease was undeniably quickly spread because of the soldiers infected.
War always brings out the best in innovations in how to kill enemy soldiers quickly, and World War 1 was no exception. During those years of conflict, the battlefield saw the advent of aerial warfare, from simple observation of enemy emplacements to dogfights in the sky to the beginning of bombing runs. By war’s end, even the idea of warships carrying airplanes was in the works.
Other ways to kill were either invented or improved. Machine guns had evolved from the Civil War’s Gatling gun to the rapid fire weapons that devastated those in no man’s land between the trenches. Rudimentary flamethrowers brought terror and death to the battlefield. Tanks were created and used by all sides before the war ended. Submarines, used since the American Revolution, were perfected and became the deadly U-boats which almost strangled the British economy with its deadly blockage of the sea lanes. Poison gas left many dead and more permanently disabled, a method of warfare begun in the Great War. Treatment of the wounded began to improve, and saved many of those who were injured in the fighting. Although runners and carrier pigeons were still in use for communications, wires and telephones began to improve the flow of information between commanders and front line soldiers.
Leaders forged in that war would be vital to the next war. Generals like George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton cut their teeth on warfare. Bernard Montgomery, Charles De Gaulle, Erwin Rommel and others honed their military skills on the battlefields of Europe. Political leaders also came out of the Great War. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt played important parts in their nations’ struggles to win against the Central Powers. Kemal Ataturk emerged to lead Turkey into the modern world.
Middle Eastern politics and conflicts were dramatically altered during that conflict. With the Balfour Resolution of 1916, Zionists were encouraged to seek a homeland in Palestine, a decision that has repercussions to the present day. When that movement resulted in the Israeli state in 1948, perpetual war in the area was assured. With the additional problem of European “mandates” of so much of the Middle East, there seems to be no end to armed conflict in the area.
And the Great War produced heroes of undying fame. Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron of Germany’s air force, Eddie Rickenbacker, an American race car driver who became one of our nation’s top air aces are still lauded, along with the feat of Alvin York. From this conflict came such literary classics as A Farewell to Arms, written by an ambulance driver, Ernest Hemingway. One of the lasting poems, In Flanders Field, came from a soldier who was killed in the conflict, John McCrae. Another novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is still read today. I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger is a poem remembered today, written by a soldier who died in the war in 1916. Several other works of literature could be cited as inspired by the deadly conflict.
World War 2 has been dubbed “The Good War” by some. Perhaps the most popular war, if war can ever be called such, in American history, much has come, both good and bad from that conflict in the 20th century. But because of what went before, and because the stage was set by the earlier war, we can confidently call World War 1 “The Essential War” of the century, both for the United States and the for the “civilized” world.
(Appeared in print in the Prairie Press on Saturday, April 8)