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Allied And Central Powers' Conflicting Propaganda

Long before the doughboys fired a shot in anger they had been subjected to the crossfire of the Allied and Central Powers' conflicting propaganda campaigns fought inside the United States. While many Americans remained inclined to neutrality in April 1917, the hearts and minds of many others had been swayed by some highly resourceful Allied propaganda.

Stories of German atrocities perpetrated upon innocent Belgian civilians were as old as the war itself. British control of the means of transatlantic communication got on the right track from the outset, when on 5 August 1914 the British cable ship Telconia sailed close to the German naval base at Emden and cut Germany's deep-sea cables, snapping this important communications thread between Germany and North America. A further advantage for the British was the fact that US newspapers and press associations - and their readers - had long been accustomed to having the whole of Europe covered by London-based reporters.

At the start of the war some US reporters made a strenuous effort to cover the story objectively. Some ninety American journalists travelled to France as war correspondents from August 1914, but as the trench stalemate took a firmer grip, and the Allies realized that they had very little good news to tell, it finally became impossible for journalists to move freely anywhere near the front lines. The French refused access to both French correspondents and neutral correspondents to the front lines; if found there they were arrested and put in jail. The British only permitted journalists near the front line in tightly controlled guided tours. If a journalist from a neutral nation accredited to the British side then covered the war from the German side, and was later captured by the British, he was liable to be summarily shot as a suspected spy. Under these circumstances neutral journalists usually found themselves inevitably reduced to reporting only one side of the conflict.

Before this clamp-down occurred five US reporters travelled from Brussels and spent several days at the front in August 1914, even accidentally finding themselves behind German lines. One of the party, Irvin S. Cobb of the Sunday Evening Post, eagerly asked every refugee he found for some hard evidence of German cruelty.

Cobb certainly found plenty of evidence of an invading army, one with little time for the niceties of bargaining over food or horses. He was also told by German officers that the penalty for Belgian civilians who shot at German troops was death by firing squad; Cobb witnessed evidence of such sentences. But where there was no resistance there was no house-burning, or any signs of wanton pillage. Even in Louvain, where Cobb spent three days before it was put to the torch, there was no German pillage in the first few days, when there was little initial resistance by the Belgian populace. Cobb's portrayal of the invading German army did its best to counteract stereotypical images which had begun to gain ground in the United States in the previous few years.

With a degree of exasperation Cobb bluntly concluded that in his personal experience there were no atrocities. Thanks to reporters such as Cobb, American public opinion was at the start of the war solidly against being sucked into what seemed an insane conflict. The stance of newspaper and magazine editors, dependent as they always were upon giving the public what it wants, was a fair litmus test of general attitudes. On 14 November 1914 the American periodical Literary Digest published an opinion poll of the country's newspaper editors in which 242 out of 367 described themselves as favouring neither the Allies nor the Central Powers. This desire to stay out of the war did not alter significantly until 1917 and it is not hard to see why. Many of America's new citizens - from Ireland, Poland, Russia, Italy, Greece, Ukraine and various Slavic countries - had flocked to the United States, a rapidly growing country, largely because they wanted to shun the poverty and political repression of the very countries now engaged in a bitter struggle for European dominance. In 1900 almost 40 per cent of the white population of the United States had either been born in Europe or had at least one European-born parent. Moreover America had a large German émigré population whose sympathies over the war were naturally with Germany.

When war broke out in August 1914 Woodrow Wilson - a highminded politician but a politician all the same - was acutely aware of how little spirit there was in the American nation to take part in a conflict 3,000 miles away. He took swift steps to ring-fence America and its citizens from being drawn into the war. In a presidential proclamation of 4 August 1914 Wilson forbade American citizens from enlisting in any of the armies involved in the conflict, or indeed from doing anything which might help either side. This decree was, however, widely flouted. On 19 August 1914 Wilson declared to Congress that the United States should be neutral in deed as well as in name, saying 'we must be impartial in thought as well as action'.

Both the Allies and the Central Powers put considerable money and time into trying to break down the stubborn neutrality of the United States. The process by which the Allies achieved relatively greater success in this struggle was composed of one part cunning, one part innate disposition, and two parts diplomatic ineptitude. Like a house whose foundations have been nibbled away by termites, America seemed immovably neutral right up until the last moment. Germany's first use of poison gas, and the German execution by firing squad of the British nurse Edith Cavell in October 1915 for the 'crime' of helping Allied prisoners to escape, were portrayed by the British (and seen by many Americans) as especially despicable acts, while U-boat sinkings of myriads of unarmed (and unwarned) merchant ships, in the process killing American men, women and children, were easily depicted as barbaric outrages. Proved and suspected German sabotage of American factories, seaports and transport routes - such as the arrest on 2 February 1915 of a German-born US resident, Werner Horn, who was attempting to blow up the railway bridge linking the US and Canada at Vanceboro, Maine - seemed to threaten domestic security. There were at least eighty-eight suspicious accidents and acts of proven sabotage between 1 January 1915 and 11 January 1917, affecting US vessels at sea, warehouses and factories. One of the worst was the explosion on 30 July 1916 at the Lehigh Valley Railroad's Black Tom Island ship-loading terminal, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, close to the lower end of Manhattan. The Black Tom terminal was an important loading centre for munitions being shipped to the Allies. On Saturday 29 July supposed German agents placed time-fused incendiary bombs on several munitions barges at the terminal. Massive blasts occurred on the afternoon of 30 July, wrecking the terminal and destroying munitions with an estimated value of $20 million. Miraculously only three people died, though the explosions shattered windows all across lower Manhattan. Against such pressure President Wilson fought hard to preserve America's neutrality, though in one key area his government early on appeared implicitly to favour the Allies when, in August 1914, the United States immediately conceded that all belligerents had the right to search neutral merchant vessels (including American) in order to prevent delivery of so-called 'contraband' exports to the enemy. As the British ruled the seas above the waves (while Germany attempted to dominate below) this acceptance of one of the flimsy 'laws' of the sea then prevailing inevitably played into Britain's hands.

The war at sea was ultimately to drag America into the European conflagration. In 1915, for a moment, many Americans understandably thought their president might have declared war on Germany following the sinking of the 31,550-ton passenger ship Lusitania, a British-owned Cunard liner. In 1914 Admiral von Pohl, chief-of-staff of Germany's Admiralty, vociferously advocated the use of submarines against enemy merchant shipping, but there were technical and moral difficulties which complicated what might have appeared a straightforward military decision.

Roosevelt's tub-thumping on behalf of the Allies struck home with some youthful Americans. By late 1915 the British government was increasingly confident that, despite US irritation with the British naval blockade and the interruption to free trade, it could depend upon American sympathies to lie much more with the Allies than the Central Powers. A crucial, though unquantifiable, ingredient was the intangible influence exercised by the significant numbers of young men who, partly out of a romantic attachment to the vision of France as the cradle of republicanism and liberty, went to serve in both combatant and non-combatant roles with the Allies. For the jeunesse doree of America the smell of war drifted slowly but surely across the Atlantic, seeping under the doors of their college dormitories. The natural wanderlust of late adolescence and a sense of collegiate comradeship enticed an estimated 25,000 Americans to fight in France on the side of the British and French, most in the Foreign Legion, but some in the Lafayette Escadrille, a volunteer air squadron staffed entirely by Americans, before the United States declared war. The years 1915 and 1916 saw Germany begin to lose an important battle - not on the fields of Flanders but in the waters of the Atlantic, on the threshold of every newspaper-reading American home, and in the dormitories of America's Ivy League colleges.

In May 1916 seven Americans formed the Lafayette Escadrille Americaine, though its name was truncated in December that year after the Germans protested against this open breach of US neutrality. The brainchild of Norman Prince, a Harvard graduate and the polo playing son of a wealthy Boston banking family, owners of an estate in Gascony, Prince Joined the French air service in 1914 and gained permission to form. a volunteer squadron in December 1915. The Lafayette Escadrille attracted some of the most colourful of American volunteers, including Raoul Lufbery, whose French parents had brought him up in America. Before long their 'death-or-glory' escapades were so well publicized that a stream of would-be volunteers arrived on their doorstep in France.'

The AFS started as the voluntary ambulance arm of the American Hospital in Paris. It owed its existence and fame to A. Platt Andrew, a former US Treasury assistant secretary and Harvard economics professor, a man perfectly placed to recruit the flower of upper-class American manhood for a foreign adventure. The AFS was an Ivy League in exile, taking its drivers from among only the top-notch US universities. In 1915 the AFS became firmly tied to the Allies by agreeing to have its ambulances attached to French line divisions. It was finally merged with the US army on 30 August 1917; by the end of the war 127 AFS drivers and former drivers (some transferred to the AEF) had been killed in action, out of a total of about 2,500. The other volunteer US ambulance service was the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, created by merging the Harjes Formation of the American Red Cross (established by A. Herman Harjes, a French banker) and the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, organized in 1914 by Richard Norton, son of Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton; Norton-Harjes suffered no fatalities among its drivers. It is impossible to assess the propaganda value to the Allies of the ephemeral writings by AFS drivers and other non-combatant American volunteers which were published in the United States during the early days of the war.

Gary Mead. . The Overlook Press, New York. 2000.

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