THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

About this book

<b>World War I history — America and the First World War 1914-1919: Wilson's neutrality, the Lusitania, the Zimmermann Telegram, the Western Front, the influenza pandemic, and the Treaty of Versailles that planted the seeds of the next catastrophe.</b> <p>On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip stepped forward from the crowd outside a Sarajevo delicatessen and fired twice. Both the Archduke and his wife were dead within the hour. Within thirty-seven days, the alliance machinery of Europe had transformed a Balkan assassination into a continental war. The United States watched from three thousand miles away — and was dragged in anyway, not by any single act of will but by finance, submarines, propaganda, and the structural impossibility of neutrality when $2.3 billion in American bank loans had already tied the country's economy to an Allied victory.</p> <p>This World War I history follows America's full arc from August 1914 through the Senate's rejection of the League of Nations in 1920. <b>Woodrow Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Pershing, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eugene Debs, Colonel Edward House, Secretary William Jennings Bryan, and the two million doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces</b> — along with the 675,000 Americans killed by the influenza pandemic, more than all twentieth-century combat deaths combined — move across twenty-four chapters of the most transformative five years in modern American history.</p> <h4>Inside this World War I history:</h4> <ul> <li><b>The Lusitania's 18 minutes</b> — U-20's single torpedo, 1,198 dead including 128 Americans, and how Germany's legally defensible military argument was politically catastrophic (Chapter 3)</li> <li><b>The Western Front's industrial killing</b> — 57,470 British casualties on July 1, 1916 alone; men walking upright into intact machine guns because commanders believed the artillery had cleared them (Chapter 9)</li> <li><b>Wilson's impossible neutrality</b> — exports to the Allies rising from $824 million in 1914 to $3.2 billion by 1916; Bryan resigning rather than sign the second Lusitania note; the Sussex Pledge's fragility from the moment Wilson accepted it (Chapter 2)</li> <li><b>Influenza at the peace conference</b> — Wilson's April 1919 illness, the cognitive changes his advisers noticed, and the concessions on reparations and the war guilt clause made in his final weeks at Paris (Chapter 16)</li> <li><b>Black Americans in the war</b> — the 369th Infantry's 191 days in the French front line, more than any other American unit, and the race riots greeting their return in 1919 (Chapter 14)</li> <li><b>The Senate's fatal arithmetic</b> — 23 Wilson-loyal Democrats voting against the treaty with reservations; a shift of 7 votes would have passed it; what the League's absence from American membership cost (Chapter 19)</li> </ul> <p>Holbrook's World War I history delivers the complete American story: why a neutral nation became a belligerent, what it paid, what Wilson promised at Paris, and why the gap between the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles was the wound through which the next war entered.</p>