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US History
Social Studies
Unit: 04 Lesson: 02
Zimmermann Telegram as Received by the German Ambassador to Mexico,
01/19/1917
Between 1914 and the spring of 1917, the European
nations engaged in a conflict that became known as
World War I. While armies moved across the face of
Europe, the United States remained neutral. In 1916
Woodrow Wilson was elected President for a second
term, largely because of the slogan "He kept us out of
war." Events in early 1917 would change that hope. In
frustration over the effective British naval blockade, in
February Germany broke its pledge to limit submarine
warfare. In response to the breaking of the Sussex
pledge, the United States severed diplomatic relations
with Germany.
Department of State. Office
of the Secretary. (9/1789-).
Textual Records retrieved
from an online source at the
National Archives:
http://www.archives.gov/educ
ation/lessons/zimmermann/
In January of 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a
telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur
Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, von
Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico in
return for joining the German cause. This message helped
draw the United States into the war and thus changed the
course of history. The telegram had such an impact on
American opinion that, according to David Kahn, author of
The Codebreakers, "No other single cryptanalysis has
had such enormous consequences." It is his opinion that
"never before or since has so much turned upon the
solution of a secret message." In an effort to protect their
intelligence from detection and to capitalize on growing
anti-German sentiment in the United States, the British
waited until February 24 to present the telegram to
Woodrow Wilson. The American press published news of
the telegram on March 1. On April 6, 1917, the United
States Congress formally declared war on Germany and
its allies.
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/zimmermann/
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US History
Social Studies
Unit: 04 Lesson: 02
Road to War
On June 28, 1914, a car carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial Hapsburg throne,
made a wrong turn. As the car came to a halt and tried to turn around, a nervous teenager
approached from a coffee house, pulled out a revolver, and shot twice. Within an hour, the Archduke
and his wife were dead.
Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old assassin, was a Bosnian nationalist who opposed the domination of
the Balkans by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had received his weapon from a secret society
known as the "Black Hand," which was clandestinely controlled by the government of Serbia. Princip
died of mistreatment in an Austrian prison in 1918.
The assassination provoked outrage in Austria-Hungary. The dual monarchy wanted to punish Serbia
for the assassination and to intimidate other minority groups whose struggles for independence
threatened the empire's stability. The assassination of the archduke triggered a series of events that
would lead, five weeks later, to the outbreak of World War I. When the conflict was over, 11 million
people had been killed, four powerful European empires had been overthrown, and the seeds of
World War II and the Cold War had been planted.
A complicated system of military alliances transformed the Balkan crisis into a full-scale European
war. Recognizing that any action it took against Serbia would create an international incident, Austria
asked for Germany's diplomatic and military support. Meanwhile, Russia, fearful of Austrian and
German expansion into the Balkans, strongly supported the Serbs and began to mobilize its army.
This move made Germany's leadership fear encirclement by Russia and France. Germany sent an
ultimatum to France asking it to declare its neutrality in the event of a conflict between Russia and
Germany. The French refused. They were obligated by treaty to support Russia and were still bitter
over their defeat by Prussia in 1871. When Russia failed to demobilize its forces, the German Kaiser
agreed to war.
World War I caught most people by surprise. Lulled by a century of peace--Europeans had not seen a
large-scale war since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815--many observers had come to regard armed
conflict as a relic of the past, rendered unthinkable by human progress. World War I shattered these
dreams. The war demonstrated that death and destruction had not yet been banished from human
affairs.
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US History
Social Studies
Unit: 04 Lesson: 02
The Guns of August
Faced by Russia to its east and France to its west, Germany believed that its only hope for victory
was to strike first. The German military had formulated a blueprint (known as the Schlieffen Plan) for
victory in Western Europe in 42 days. The attack would occur before the Russians would have time to
advance from the east. The plan called for a preemptive strike at France through Belgium.
Germany's plan involved a violation of international law. Belgium was a neutral country and Britain
was committed to its defense. Thus, a German invasion was certain to bring Britain into the war.
Germany asked for permission to move its troops through Belgium. But King Albert, the country's
monarch, refused by saying, "Belgium is a nation, not a road." Germany decided to press ahead
anyway; its forces invaded Belgium on August 3.
The German military strategy worked better on paper than it did in practice. While fierce resistance by
200,000 Belgian soldiers did not stop the German advance, it did give Britain and France time to
mobilize their forces. Meanwhile, Russia mobilized faster than expected, forcing Germany to divert
100,000 troops to the eastern front. German hopes for a quick victory were dashed at the first battle
of the Marne in September 1914, when a retreating French army launched a powerful counter-attack,
assisted by 6,000 troops transported to the front by 1,200 Parisian taxicabs.
After the Allies halted Germany's massive offensive through France and Belgium at the Marne River,
the Great War bogged down into trench warfare and a ghastly stalemate ensued. Lines of men,
stretching from the English Channel to the Swiss border, formed an unmovable battle front across
northern France. Four million troops burrowed into trenches that were 6-to-8 feet deep and wide
enough for two men to pass each other. The trenches stretched for 450 miles. The soldiers were
ravaged by tuberculosis and plagued with lice and rats. They stared at each other across barren
expanses called "no-man's land" and fought pitched battles over narrow strips of blood-soaked earth.
To end the stalemate, Germany introduced several military innovations in 1915. But none proved
decisive. Germany dispatched submarines to prevent merchant ships from reaching Britain; it added
poison chlorine gas to its military arsenal at the second battle of Ypres in northern France; and it
dropped incendiary bombs over London from a zeppelin. Airplanes, tanks, and hand grenades were
other innovations that distinguished World War I from previous conflicts. But the machine gun did
most of the killing, firing eight bullets per second.
In a fateful attempt to break the deadlock, German forces adopted a new objective in 1916: to kill so
many French soldiers that France would be forced to sue for peace. The German plan was to attack
the French city of Verdun, a psychologically important town in northeastern France, and to bleed the
French dry. The battle--the war's longest--lasted from February 21, 1916 through July. The battle also
engaged two million soldiers. When it ended, Verdun had become a symbol of wartime futility. France
had suffered 315,000 casualties, Germany 280,000. The town was destroyed; however, the front had
not moved.
At the Somme River, a hundred miles northwest of Verdun, the British launched an assault in July
1916. When it was over in October, one million men on both sides had died.
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US History
Social Studies
Unit: 04 Lesson: 02
The Guns of August (continued)
With fighting on the western front deadlocked, action spread to other arenas. A British soldier and
writer named T.H. Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), organized revolts against the
Ottoman territories in Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. With Germany preoccupied in
Europe, Japanese and British Commonwealth forces seized German islands in the Pacific, while
British forces conquered German colonies in Africa.
The military stalemate produced political turmoil across Europe. On Easter Monday 1916, some
1,500 Irish Catholics seized buildings in Dublin and declared Ireland an independent republic.
Fighting raged for a week before British forces suppressed the rebellion. British reprisals created
great sympathy for the rebels. A two-year guerrilla war followed. The war reached a climax when
British troops in November 1920 fired at a soccer crowd, killing a dozen people--an event that
became known as "Bloody Sunday." In 1921, Britain was forced to agree to the creation of a selfgoverning Irish Free State.
In Czarist Russia, wartime casualties, popular discontent, and shortages of food, fuel, and housing
touched off revolution and civil war. In March 1917, strikes and food riots erupted in the Russian
capital of Petrograd. Soldiers called in to quell the strikes joined the uprising. On March 15, Czar
Nicholas II abdicated. The czarist regime was replaced by a succession of weak provisional
governments which tried to keep Russia in World War I. On November 7, communist Bolsheviks led
by V.I. Lenin overthrew the provisional government. Lenin promised "Peace to the army, land to the
peasants, ownership of the factories to the workers."
In 1917, after two-and-a-half years of fighting, 5 million troops were dead and the western front
remained deadlocked. This was the grim situation that awaited the United States.
Germany was desperate to break the stalemate and to end the war of attrition. In January 1917, they
launched unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping to cripple the British economy. German subs sank a
half million tons of Allied shipping each month, leaving Britain with only a six week supply of grain.
But these German U-boats risked bringing the United States into the war.
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US History
Social Studies
Unit: 04 Lesson: 02
The U.S. Enters the War
President Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. When the War began, Wilson declared U.S.
neutrality and demanded that the belligerents respect American rights as a neutral party. He hesitated
to embroil the United States in the conflict with good reason. Americans were deeply divided about
the European war; involvement in the conflict would certainly disrupt Progressive reforms. In 1914, he
had warned that entry into the conflict would bring an end to Progressive reform. "Every reform we
have won will be lost if we go into this war," he said. A popular song in 1915 was "I Didn't Raise My
Boy to Be a Soldier."
In 1916, President Wilson narrowly won reelection after campaigning on the slogan, "He kept us out
of war." He won the election with a 4,000 vote margin in California.
Toward Intervention
Shortly after war erupted in Europe, President Wilson called on Americans to be "neutral in thought
as well as deed." The United States, however, quickly began to lean toward Britain and France.
Convinced that wartime trade was necessary to fuel the growth of American trade, President Wilson
refused to impose an embargo on trade with the belligerents. During the early years of the war, trade
with the allies tripled.
This volume of trade quickly exhausted the allies' cash reserves, forcing them to ask the United
States for credit. In October 1915, President Wilson permitted loans to belligerents, a decision that
greatly favored Britain and France. By 1917, American loans to the allies had soared to $2.25 billion;
loans to Germany stood at a paltry $27 million.
In January 1917, Germany announced that it would resume unrestricted submarine warfare. This
announcement helped precipitate American entry into the conflict. Germany hoped to win the war
within five months. Additionally, they were willing to risk antagonizing Wilson on the assumption that,
even if the United States declared war, it could not mobilize quickly enough to change the course of
the conflict.
Then a fresh insult led Wilson to demand a declaration of war. In March 1917, newspapers published
the Zimmerman Note, an intercepted telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur
Zimmerman to the German ambassador to Mexico. The telegram said that if Germany went to war
with the United States, Germany promised to help Mexico recover the territory it had lost during the
1840s, including Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. The Zimmerman telegram and German
attacks on three U.S. ships in mid-March led Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war.
Wilson decided to enter the war so that he could help design the peace settlement. Wilson viewed the
war as an opportunity to destroy German militarism. "The world must be made safe for democracy,"
he told a joint session of Congress. Only six Senators and 50 Representatives voted against the war
declaration.
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US History
Social Studies
Unit: 04 Lesson: 02
TRADE RIVALRY WAS THE CAUSE OF WORLD WAR I
Excerpt from How America Got It Right, by Bevin Alexander, pages 79-80
Until [World War I] occurred, the imperial powers of Europe—notably Britain, France, and Russia—
controlled much of the world’s underdeveloped territory and most of the world’s seaborne trade.
Britain was incomparably the leader. It had outperformed all other countries industrially until the last
few years of the nineteenth century. Moreover, by means of the Royal Navy, it had seized a quarter of
the earth’s surface, which made Britain the paramount force in world commerce, commanding trade
with the new dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, with its crown jewel,
India, and with most of Latin America.
Since its unification in 1871, however, Germany had become a major contender, seeking a large
colonial empire of its own and expanding its trade, especially at the expense of Britain. Right-wing
political leaders began to claim for Germany status as a world power—Weltmacht. Around the turn of
the century Germany passed Britain in industrial development and overall economic power. At the
same time it began a fatal program of building a modern fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, which set
in motion a fierce naval arms race. By 1909 Britain had won the contest. Its navy was double the size
of Germany’s, and the disparity was growing, not shrinking. Nevertheless, the damage had been
done. Fearful of Germany’s economic growth, Britain signed a series of agreements with France in
1904 that grew into a secret military alliance, and signed a similar agreement with Russia in 1907.
Meanwhile Germany had allied itself with Austria-Hungary. Thus two powerful coalitions arose in
Europe, each ready to challenge the other.
In 1907 Arthur Balfour, British prime minister from 1902 to 1905, told an American diplomat, “We are
probably fools not to find a reason for declaring war on Germany before she builds too many ships
and takes away our trade.”
Alexander, B. (2005). How America got it right. New York: Random House.
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