People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [214]
Despite the opposition of Lloyd George and the skepticism of some of his subordinates, Haig proceeded hopefully to the main offensive. The third battle of Ypres was a series of 8 heavy attacks, carried through in driving rain and fought over ground water-logged and muddy. No break-through was effected, and the total gain was about 5 miles of territory, which made the Ypres salient more inconvenient than ever and cost the British about 400,000 men.
The people of France and Britain were not told the extent of the casualties. When, in the last year of the war, the Germans attacked ferociously on the Somme, and left 300,000 British soldiers dead or wounded, London newspapers printed the following, we learn from Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory:
WHAT CAN I DO?
How the Civilian May Help in this Crisis.
Be cheerful. . . .
Write encouragingly to friends at the front. . . .
Don’t repeat foolish gossip.
Don’t listen to idle rumors.
Don’t think you know better than Haig.
Into this pit of death and deception came the United States, in the spring of 1917. Mutinies were beginning to occur in the French army. Soon, out of 112 divisions, 68 would have mutinies; 629 men would be tried and condemned, 50 shot by firing squads. American troops were badly needed.
President Woodrow Wilson had promised that the United States would stay neutral in the war: “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight.” But in April of 1917, the Germans had announced they would have their submarines sink any ship bringing supplies to their enemies; and they had sunk a number of merchant vessels. Wilson now said he must stand by the right of Americans to travel on merchant ships in the war zone. “I cannot consent to any abridgement of the rights of American citizens in any respect. . . .”
As Richard Hofstadter points out (The American Political Tradition): “This was rationalization of the flimsiest sort. . . .” The British had also been intruding on the rights of American citizens on the high seas, but Wilson was not suggesting we go to war with them. Hofstadter says Wilson “was forced to find legal reasons for policies that were based not upon law but upon the balance of power and economic necessities.”
It was unrealistic to expect that the Germans should treat the United States as neutral in the war when the U.S. had been shipping great amounts of war materials to Germany’s enemies. In early 1915, the British liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. She sank in eighteen minutes, and 1,198 people died, including 124 Americans. The United States claimed the Lusitania carried an innocent cargo, and therefore the torpedoing was a monstrous German atrocity. Actually, the Lusitania was heavily armed: it carried 1,248 cases of 3-inch shells, 4,927 boxes of cartridges (1,000 rounds in each box), and 2,000 more cases of small-arms ammunition. Her manifests were falsified to hide this fact, and the British and American governments lied about the cargo.
Hofstadter wrote of “economic necessities” behind Wilson’s war policy. In 1914 a serious recession had begun in the United States. J. P. Morgan later testified: “The war opened during a period of hard times. . . . Business throughout the country was depressed, farm prices were deflated, unemployment was serious, the heavy industries were working far below capacity and bank clearings were off.” But by 1915, war orders for the Allies (mostly England) had stimulated the economy, and by April 1917 more than $2 billion worth of goods had been sold to the Allies. As Hofstadter says: “America became bound up with the Allies in a fateful union of war and prosperity.”
Prosperity depended much on foreign markets, it was believed by the leaders of the country. In 1897, the private foreign investments of the United States amounted to $700 million dollars. By 1914 they were $31⁄2 billion. Wilson’s Secretary