America Enters World War I
Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6
to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the
declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I.
When World War I erupted in 1914, President
Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the
vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s
closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and
Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several
U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in
February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral
or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later,
Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a
private American vessel. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government
apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.
On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania
ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the
1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German government
maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S.
demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and
merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers
before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner without
warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public
opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.
In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of
attrition against the Allies, announced the resumption of unrestricted warfare
in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic
relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic
was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million
arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In
late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2
President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war
against Germany. Four days later, his request was granted.
On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry
troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of
bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s
well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war
and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11,
1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of
Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives.