[inilbowly]

Originally posted by Ned


Trade embargo or just arms embargo?

Stock sales highly profitably? Why? Were the stocks undervalued? No, but it was a forced sale. Large numbers of stock issues went up for sale dropping the prices. American financiers got good quality stocks at fire sale prices, then once the selling was over the prices rebounded, and "foreign interests" no longer owned generous slices of the top American companies.

[Jenisoisy]

Ecthy, interests? So, you discount Wilson focus on democracy?

[lalffibra]

Well, Etchy, we live in a democracy here where politicians have to be elected. Americans simply would not stand for a war for purely economic reasons. If Wilson had approached congress and made an economic argument that we should go to war with Germany because that would be good for business, he wouldn't have gotten the votes because all involved would be answerable to the American people.

When people accuse Wilson or even Bush of economic reasons for going to war, they simply ignore this facet of America.

I think Wilson was, in fact, a radical "democrat" and truly believed that the cause of WWI lay in the lack of democracy in Germany.

[obegeLype]

Exactly right, Ecthy. The public justifications for a war may not be the real reason the leadership decided to get involved. Democracy sounds better than our economic interests lie with Britain and France, especially after Lend-Lease. There probably is a little bit of both involved for Wilson, but I think the national interest was more important. Especially seeing how he was essentially a war profiteer for the US vis-a-vis Britain and France!!

[ljq0AYOV]

Originally posted by Sandman
They didn't move half a million men from the Western front to crush Romania. Most of the troops for that campaign were supplied by Bulgaria and the Ottomans, even if the German units did most of the legwork.
Beg your pardon, yes they did move 500k troops from the Western Front to crush Romania. After Romania was wiped out they moved these troops to Italy to finish off the Italians.

[Petwrenny]

That and there were some sketchy mustaches in German politics (and that's just on Rosa Luxemburg) .

[Ijkavylo]

Originally posted by Ned
were protrayed as uncouth barbarians by the Brits for their actions in Belgium and on the High Seas.
The english have always pretended for centuries to be more civilized and moral than their enemies during wars, and usually succesfully, it is a long tradition

[gogoleanylinkfo]

Incidentally, Britains last payment in respect of WW2 lend lease is apparently on Friday. A final instalment payment of ~$83 million to the US and $23 million to the Canadians.

[Theariwinna]

Imran, I was reading up on the WWI U-boat campaign. It appears that the only defense the Brits had to U-boats what to shoot at them while they were on the surface. So they came up with the stealth merchantman concept, where they would arm a cargo ship to the teeth and cover up its guns. When a U-boat would surface to shoot at the ship, the Brits would open up in return.

Prior to this technique being employed by the Brits, U-boat captains would surface, give prior notice and allow debarking to lifeboats before sinking the ship with its guns. After the Brits started using this technique, though, U-boats would hit without prior warning with torpedoes.

But in all the propaganda surrounding the U-boat campaign, the American public was not really informed as to why the Germans had changed their tactics. Naturally, therefore, the American public was outraged.

So, the Germans might have prevented the war with America by simply countering the Brit propaganda just a bit.

[RokeIdeadioke]

Originally posted by Ecthy
Was it Wilson or Congress who declared war on Germany?

I'm not a strict adherent to any theories of political realism, but especially in this case I'm more convinced by the financial argument raised by Strangelove than by the idealistic of the US fighting for representation.

Don't think they supported the whites in Russia because those stood for a post-czarist regime (Kerensky) that was supposed to establish freedom - it rather guaranteed the pursuit of business interest more than the reds. er doesnt assuming its either idealism or financial interests leave out you, know, US STRATEGIC interests.

The US and Germany were the two powers that had surpassed the UK in GDP. The UK was a declining power, as was France. Russia was growing, but no immdediate threat to the US. Germany was threatening to "unite the world island" or at least the dominant European part of it. Germany had a large and growing navy. US and German interests had already come into conflict in the southwest Pacific. Mahanists like Theodore Roosevelt were concerned with the growth of German power.

[muytreda]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


No, they did so cause there was revolution in the streets, and giving the democrats a chance was seen as the only alternative to Communism. Also the conservatives wanted the socialists and democrats to be seen as the ones surrendering and signing the peace treaty, so they would not carry the blame for Germany's defeat in the future.

[Effofqueeno]

Originally posted by GePap
Tanks in WW1 were still too technically backwards for them to be a real breaktrough weapon. The German innovations in infantry tactics and how to support them with artillery was certainly more important in terms of breaking the stalemate, as the huge and innitially crushing German spring offensive of 1918 shows. Hm,
the tanks didn´t make a difference when they were first used by the Brits, due to the fact that the british generalstaff made the failure of employing too few of them.

But when they were later used in masses (from the battle at Cambrai on) IMHO they really made a difference.

I don´t think that the Brits had been able to penetrate the german trenchlines in these battles without the support of the tanks (meaning that the war probably would have lasted much longer and perhaps with the german Kaiserreich being in a better position during the negotiations for peace)

[Siffidiolla]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Probably true of Ludendorff. I dont think Groener, Prince Max of Baden or the others were thinking that far ahead. Nevertheless they did not want to stain their honor by signing the armistace. They wanted someone else to carry that stain, preferably someone lowly and icky like a democrat or a socialist.

[blohannaserri]

Bump. No comment from even LotM about the Ruskie revolution having more effect on the outcome of the war than the US entry?

[CenICrerflind]

Originally posted by Lonestar
Germany would have won.
No, it wouldn't.

Germany and its allies in the Alliance, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey had nowhere near the level of cooperation or integration that the Western Entente powers possessed.

After 1916, Germany's allies were more like satellites dependent upon German troops, German coal, German food and German commanders and subject to the vagaries of Imperial German decisions.

The Imperial command was not only out of touch with its own people and armed forces, it also proved itself more than capable of alienating the military commanders of it allies and their statesmen.

The effectiveness of the Continental blockade by the British was such that Germany suffered two 'hunger winters', in 1916-1917 and 1917-1918.

The Allies used not just the naval blockade but also intelligence and industrial espionage in the neutral countries too, making use of commercial pressures to interdict supplies for Germany through the Netherlands or Denmark and Sweden.

German imports during the war dropped by 60%, and exports fell off by an even greater percentage. Disproportionate resources were channelled to sustain the German and its Alliance partners' war efforts.

In February 1917 German daily rations dropped to
1 000 calories per person. This was the 'turnip' winter, when food usually given to cattle and pigs was made into bread or used instead of potatoes.

The Prussian Minstry of War created a War Food Office, and this department recognised that the availability of the normal peacetime foodstuffs had a psychological role to play in keeping up civilian morale: German ingenuity in the food/chemical industry which could create substitutes such as ersatz coffee, could not prevent ersatz changing its meaning in common parlance from 'substitute' to 'fake', with the predictable knock-on effect .

German coffee ceased being a delightful pick-me-up and became a an acrid beverage manufactured not from chicory or beets but treebark. German bread was no longer rye or wheat based, but Kriegsbrot , calorifically adequate in itself, but Germans were not used to bread made from potatoes, no matter how nourishing a substitute it might be.


At the end of the 19th Century and in the run-up to the First World War, German agriculture had massively imported phosphates and nitrates from Nauru and Chile- these supplies were cut off, with the result that nitrate use in German agriculture dropped by 50%.

Although Germany had the Haber process, its value was seen as lying more in the production of explosives for the war.

Germany suffered from price increases for staple foods, almost from the beginning of the war and introduced food controls a full four years before the British.

In 1915 milk cost 12 pfennigs a litre, but then rose to 33 pfennigs, which workers' wages did not rise to match.

City was set against country- farmers saw the townsdwellers as unscrupulous profiteers and city folk saw the farmers as sleek hoarders of necessities.

In 1917 rye could be bought for 380% more than the government set price, beans for 200% and butter 90% more. The army had no choice but to fall back on the black market to supply its soldiers.


Without America's help, it appears that Britain would have collapsed in 1917 at a time when Germany was still very powerful. Ned


Really ? And there I was thinking that the British instituted the convoy system and the Q-Ships to counter the U-Boats. It was precisely because the convoy system and the Q-Ships were successful and the Allied blockade was working that Germany resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare.

Germany had the second biggest economy in the world, and, incidently, the number one chemical industry. They had the vast majority of the war material and cash they needed, and the British blockade was a joke. You're wrong.

As I've already indicated in detail the blockade was far from being a joke, and the German approach to financing the war was to act as if they were issuing post-dated cheques, with the expectation that ultimate victory over the Allies and future war reparations and the creation of a German dominated common market would pay for current wartime expenditure.

Karl Helfferich, Minister of Finance & Minister of the Interior:

(Germany would hang)....the lead weight of milliards... round the necks of its enemies.

He certainly had it in for the German government Ned.


He may well have done, but that doesn't make him a Germanophobe. He made a clear distinction between the German Imperial government and the peoples it governed.

Germany also didn't have to burn cash paying for chemicals and material needed from outside sources, either. Lonestar


Germany also didn't have the resources of the Dominions and the Commonwealth to call upon: in 1914, the British possessed the largest merchant marine in the world.

In 1913, British local and central government expenditure equalled only 12.3% of G.N.P. .

The British allocated a smaller share of national income to defence than any other Great Power in Europe. The British had $ 19.5 billion invested overseas, which equalled 43% of the world's foreign investments.

British textiles had enjoyed an export boom in the run up to 1914, and its shipbuilding industry launched over 60% of the world's merchant tonnage and 33% of its warships. The British still had 13.6% of world manufacturing output in 1913 and 14.1% of world trade in 1911-13. Most of the United States' foreign trade was done in sterling and London was still resorted to for gold-borrowing. Germany and its partners could not compete economically.

but if this is the kind of ally he was to the Brits and French, then I'd hate to have an enemy. Ned


Strictly speaking, Wilson and the United States were 'associates' of the Entente, not full allies in it. Their war aims were very different, after all.

Americans simply would not stand for a war for purely economic reasons. Ned

Uh huh. So the Spanish American War was a war of liberation which liberated who, exactly ? And the numerous wars against Native Americans were wars of high moral principle were they ?

Nothing to do with valuable agricultural land or mineral deposits.

It would be a foolish government which boldly set out its real agenda for going to war- the United States did rather well out of its late entry into the First World War, as by 1916 the British were spending $ 250 million in the U.S. PER MONTH on their own behalf and on behalf of their allies, much earmarked to support the sterling-dollar exchange rate.

In November 1917, Paul Warburg (a German born member of the Federal Reserve Board) persuaded his colleagues that the U.S. was too heavily dependent on a future Entente victory and that U.S. over-exposure should be cut back. $ 1 000 million was lost from the U.S. stock market in a week.

After Romania was wiped out Germany moved these troops to Italy to finish off the Italians. Lonestar


No, they didn't. Not only because the troops in Romania were Bulgarian, Turkish and Austro-Hungarians, but because the Italians threw back the German/Austro-Hungarian forces at Piave, and with the British and French defeated them at Vittorio Veneto.

Well there still is the argument that Germany was much stronger than UK and France combined prior to the war Ecthy


In which aspects ? Certainly not financially, nor in terms of fleets, either merchant or combat, nor in access to resources.

They could have emphasized the justice in their position. Ned.


You should read Fritz Fischer's work based on the Wilhelmine archives. The German Imperial command wanted a war, but were caught on the backfoot by Sarajevo. They issued a 'blank cheque' to Austria-Hungary because it was in their interests to do so, as Bethman-Hollweg's September Programme indicates.

I fail to see how the assassination of an Austrian aristocrat in a recently occupied province of Austria-Hungary in any way directly concerns Prussian aristocrats. Or am I missing something ?

Imran, I was reading up on the WWI U-boat campaign. It appears that the only defense the Brits had to U-boats what to shoot at them while they were on the surface. Ned.


Not enough in depth or breadth, clearly.

The destroyer/convoy system, Q-Ships, and depth charges were all ways U-boats could be countered.

[selayeffethy]

Molly sighting!