Meirion Harries

Fascinating but perhaps a little suspect. Authors Mehrion and Susie Harries are interesting choices for a book about U.S. involvement in World War One; neither is a historian (Mehrion is a lawyer and Susie studied classical literature), they’re British, and they seem to have spent a lot of their working life in Hong Kong. However, this is a quite readable history of US politics, military, and economics for the period. The Harries make Woodrow Wilson their protagonist – in the classical Greek sense, since Wilson’s claimed hubris is the focus of their analysis.


The Harries see Wilson as wanting to bring the United States – and therefore, himself – into a central role in world affairs; sort of a “New World Order”, if you will. By 1916, the US basically had the Allies by the spheroidal parts. Britain and France had spent their national monetary reserves buying war material from the US on a cash-and-carry basis. The British has spent their human resources at the Somme; the French at Verdun and on the Nivelle Offensive. The French, Italian, and Russian armies had all had mutinies (with the Russian one, of course, eventually becoming the Bolshevik Revolution). One of the British Great War historians – I can’t remember if it was J.F.C. Fuller or B. H. Liddell-Hart – later argued that if the US had just stayed out of things it could have eventually dictated a peace without having to send a single doughboy overseas.


Imperial Germany didn’t cooperate with that idea, however; the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the interception of the Zimmerman Telegraph pushed the US over the edge. The Harries argue that while Wilson had delusions of a mighty US army going to the Western Front and defeating the Germans single handed while the exhausted Allies looked on in awe, the reality was that the US was woefully unprepared for war. Wilson had resisted any attempts to increase peacetime Army strength – the US army was the 18th largest in the world - and had also resisted any economic preparation for war. Even after the declaration, he was strangely reluctant to rationalize economic production. There were various government committees – the War Industries Board and the War Trade Board – but, according to the Harries, actual businessmen with experience in manufacturing were excluded due to Wilson’s fear that capitalists would become too powerful. Ironically, the Harries argue, manufacturing businesses frustrated by the lack of government direction set up their own cartels and commissions and eventually achieved the level of power Wilson had feared.


The government didn’t do any better organizing the military. Alas, it was 35 some years too early for PERT charts. Masses of draftees showed up at encampments with no barracks and no running water. Government departments competed for resources; one agency bought up every available typewriter and jealously guarded its stockpile. Equipment was loaded on boxcars and dispatched to ports without checking to see if there was shipping available, establishing a feedback cycle; ships couldn’t depart because they couldn’t get coal, and coal couldn’t be delivered to ships because the rail lines were clogged with freight waiting to be loaded.


No active American soldier had ever commanded a unit larger than 2000 men. American divisions were twice the size of Allied or German ones; there were just too few officers. The Allies pressed repeatedly for American units to be brigaded with British or French ones for training, but Wilson and Pershing insisted on an independent American army.


The demand for quick American combat ended up with an initial army with too many teeth and not enough tail. Pershing fought against this as best he could, over the complaints of the French that they saw a lot of Americans building port facilities and warehouses but not many fighting, but still when the American army finally did get into action it was woefully short of road builders, truck drivers, medical personnel, and signalers. The reluctance to train with the Allies resulted in a lot of casualties; although a few of his staff had absorbed the lessons of trench warfare, Pershing still believed that troops should advance in ordered lines and close with the bayonet.


In the meantime back home the Wilson administration undertook to make the world safe for democracy by becoming one of the most repressive governments in American history. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to criticize the government, punishable by 20 years in prison; the Postmaster General got the authority to shut down any publication deemed critical of the government. What’s more amateurs got into the act with the formation of the American Protective League. According to the Harries, the Justice Department gave tacit approval to the APL because it was jealous of competition by military investigative agencies and because Congress hadn’t voted any money to increase the Justice Department’s own investigative arm, the Bureau of Investigation. APL members were given badges and instructed to investigate “persons of character or mentality in keeping with activities of sabotage and crime”. There were more than 100000 APL members, who conducted “slacker raids”, engaged in breaking and entering, tapped telephones, bugged offices, impersonated gas and telephone repairmen, and gained access to bank accounts, medical records, real estate transaction, and other personal information. Although APL members didn’t have any legal authority to carry weapons or make arrests, many believed they did and acted accordingly. There were also legions of casual informal vigilantes, not affiliated with the APL, who reported on anybody they didn’t like – annoying neighbors, businessmen they thought were overcharging, coworkers who got promoted over them, and so on.


In early 1918, Wilson made his “14 points” speech to Congress. This apparently astonished everybody; Wilson didn’t discuss his plans in advance with his cabinet, Congress, or the Allies. What’s more, he suggested to some of his advisors that the Democratic Party wouldn’t be adequate to implement his proposals and a new political party would be necessary. Harries note some modern historians suggest Wilson had had a serious of “mini-strokes” that impaired his judgement – and just maybe gave him delusions of grandeur.

Off in Europe, the Germans launched the “Ludendorff Offensive”; they had enough divisions freed from the eastern front to give them numerical superiority over the Allies, and new tactics that gave them military superiority – but it was their last gasp. The Allies were able to renew their own offensive later in the year, retook the ground they had lost, and began pushing the Germans back. Pershing launched the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which resulted in horrendous casualties but eventually got within artillery range of the railroad that allowed the Germans to shift forces behind the front. The Germans sent a private peace initiative to Wilson, tentatively accepting the 14 Points – and at this point the Allies realized they didn’t need the Americans any more. The French announced the American army was big enough, and they wouldn’t be providing any more shipping or port facilities for new American divisions. When the US entered the war, it extended credit to the Allies so they could continue to buy war material; the Allies didn’t feel any great urgency to pay this off, expecting the Germans to make good on it. The Germans felt betrayed when the American stance shifted to unconditional surrender, because there was no longer enough influence with the Allies to accomplish anything else. Wilson and the Democrats lost control of Congress in the 1918 midterm elections; although some of the 14 Points were adopted at the Paris Peace conference, the United States effectively disavowed Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations and resumed an isolationist stance.


I’ve read a number of military histories of World War One; this is the first one that goes into the political and economic aspects. I’m no fan of Woodrow Wilson, and this book reinforces that opinion. But, as mentioned above, some things seem a little suspect; it’s possible the authors are picking and choosing their data to support particular points. There aren’t any charts or tables supporting their economic arguments, for example.


Certainly World War One was a great turning point in world history, setting up the rest of the 20th century. Alternate history fans are invited to consider what would have happened if the US hadn’t entered the war; would the Allies have been defeated, or at least forced to negotiate, in 1918? I’ll have to wargame that out and see what happens.


File photographs of various more or less relevant things. As mentioned, no charts or tables. Overall maps of the front and a general map of the Meuse-Argonne area, but no detailed battle maps; a handicap when trying to make sense of accounts of Belleau Wood (for example). A fairly extensive reference list but no endnotes or footnotes; instead there are page references giving sources. The index seems sparse; I wasn’t able to find some of the things I wanted to look up. Overall, though, raises a lot of interesting questions and inspires further reading.… (mer)

This book is a well written narrative of American involvement in WWI. The authors set forth in detail the transformation of the United States from a nation living in self-imposed isolation to a world power and the change of America to a centralized state which demanded increasing conformity from its citizens.
These developments followed the changes in the European countries as the demands of WWI introduced the concept of "total war".
The book first portrays the American entry into the war. Since the beginning of the war the U.S. was providing massive assistance to the Allied countries. The German practice of unrestricted submarine warfare led to the dissolution of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Germany. The German attempts to bring Mexico into the war against the U.S. made public by the publication of the Zimmerman Telegram heightened the hostility between the two countries. All of these factors led to Wilson's war message to the Congress. After the U. S. entered the war the government orchestrated a propaganda campaign in support of the war including harassment and oppression of groups opposed to the war.
The American preparation to enter the war brought massive economic and social changes to the country. The economy switched over from providing consumer goods to war production. Labor shortages in the North caused the immigration of tens of thousands of African-Americans from the South. This led to social unrest and riots bringing death and destruction to Northern cities.
As predicted by many opponents of U.S. involvement in the war the role of the federal government grew as five million men were drafted and $33 billion dollars were spent to change an army of 150,000 men to a modern military power.
There was a continuing conflict between the Allies and the U.S. about the use of the American military power. The Allies wanted the U.S. to supply a source of replacements for their military while the U.S. was determined to create an independent army. The U.S. needed to make an independent military contribution in order to have substantial influence on the peace terms.
The final section of the book deals with the course of the war in 1918 and American military involvement. Beginning in March, 1918 the Germans began a series of offensives that came close to bringing them victory. The French army was used up and at the end of 1917 their soldiers began to mutiny and desert in large numbers. The British were drafting everyone from the age of 17 to 50 to maintain their military manpower. In the summer of 1918 mounting casualties blunted the force of the German army and the first American troops began to make their presence felt.
The Germans saw they could not win the war and in November of 1918 proposed an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. The eventual result was the harsh terms imposed by the Allies at the Paris Peace conference.
One year after the war the American army was down to 140,000 men. The U.S. rejected the Versailles Treaty withdrew into isolationism.
Given the amount of information that was covered the book read very well. It was primarily descriptive narrative with little real analysis. It is a good addition to the majority of the histories of the war written from a European viewpoint. I recommend the book with a rating of four out of five.… (mer)