United States declares war on Germany

On 6 April 1917, Good Friday, the United States entered the war against Germany. At 3.12 a.m. the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50 the joint resolution of Congress which the Senate had approved two days earlier. At 1.18 p.m. President Woodrow Wilson signed it and issued a proclamation that a state of war existed. Two months had passed since the breaking off of diplomatic relations, and four days since the president’s address to Congress.

The resolution

The text was short. The preamble stated that the Imperial German Government had repeatedly committed acts of war against the government and people of the United States. Congress therefore formally declared the state of war “which has thus been thrust upon the United States”, authorised and directed the president to employ the entire naval and military forces and the resources of the government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government, and, to bring it to a successful termination, pledged all the resources of the country. The resolution concerned Germany only. Wilson deliberately left out its allies.

The Senate, 4 April

The Senate debated the resolution on Wednesday 4 April for about thirteen hours. It was managed by the Democrat Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, because the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, William J. Stone, was opposed to the war. The Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, until then a sharp critic of the president, called for a war waged with full force, because “the worst of all wars is a feeble war”. The longest speech against was made by Robert La Follette. He argued that Britain had broken the law of the sea just as Germany had, and that America, by tolerating British mines and the blockade, had itself ceased to be neutral. He proposed that the people should decide on war in a vote, because in his view Americans would reject it by ten to one. The Republican George Norris of Nebraska said that the country was going to war “upon the command of gold” and that Congress was “putting the dollar sign upon the American flag”. The Democrat John Sharp Williams of Mississippi replied that this was a lie, because it was not Wall Street that had sunk the Lusitania, the Arabic or the Sussex.

At 11.11 p.m. the Senate passed the resolution by 82 votes to 6. Voting against were the Republicans La Follette, Norris and Asle Gronna of North Dakota, and the Democrats Stone, Harry Lane of Oregon and James Vardaman of Mississippi. The eight absent senators supported the war.

The House of Representatives, 5–6 April

The House began its debate on Thursday 5 April at 10 a.m. and sat without a break through the whole night. More than fifty members spoke. The greatest impression was made by the speech of the leader of the Democratic majority, Claude Kitchin of North Carolina. He recalled that for two years the British had been stopping American ships, cargoes and mail, and America had not gone to war with them, because it kept its ships away from their minefields. He believed that war with Germany could have been avoided in the same way, and voted against the resolution, even though it was put forward by his own party’s administration.

The vote ended at 3.12 a.m. There were 373 members for the resolution and 50 against, while a few did not vote. The opponents came mainly from the states of the Midwest and the West, many of them from districts with large numbers of voters of German descent. Among them was Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress. When her name was called, she spoke, contrary to the rules, in a breaking voice: “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.” Some suffragists later considered that she had harmed their movement.

The signature and the first orders

The resolution was taken to the White House, and Wilson signed it at 1.18 p.m.; from that moment the two countries were formally at war. At the same time the president issued a proclamation in which he called on officials to be vigilant and on citizens to give the war their loyal support “to a successful issue” and to the attainment of “a secure and just peace”. The proclamation also laid down rules for dealing with German nationals living in the United States. The news was telegraphed to all warships, bases, forts and diplomatic posts, and the navy was placed on a war footing.

At dawn, as soon as word of the House vote came from Washington, port officials and soldiers seized the German ships that had taken refuge in American ports since 1914. According to the New York Times Current History there were 91 of them, totalling almost 595,000 gross register tons, 27 of them in New York and the rest in ports from Boston to the Philippines and Hawaii. Their value was estimated at about 100 million dollars. It turned out that the German crews had wrecked the engine rooms of almost all the ships in advance. Only the largest of them was untouched, the liner Vaterland, which later, as the transport Leviathan, carried American soldiers to France. The crews were interned, among other places on Ellis Island. On Guam, where it was already 7 April, the German auxiliary cruiser Cormoran, interned there since 1914, was scuttled by her own crew when the Americans demanded her surrender. Several German sailors were killed, between five and nine according to various accounts.

An army on paper

The United States entered the war almost without a land army. According to the American official military history, at the beginning of April 1917 the regular army numbered about 128,000 officers and men, and about 80,000 soldiers of the National Guard were also in federal service, some of whom had recently returned from the expedition against Pancho Villa on the Mexican border. The army had not a single division in the European sense, and had almost no heavy artillery, machine guns or modern aircraft. The United States Navy was in a better position, with a strong battleship fleet, but it had too few destroyers and small craft needed to fight submarines.

In his address Wilson had announced an army increased by half a million men raised on the principle of universal liability to service. In the spring Congress was to deal with a conscription bill, and the first American destroyers and the first infantry units under General John Pershing arrived in Europe in the following months. Rear-Admiral William Sims, sent to arrange cooperation between the two navies, was already sailing to Britain in civilian clothes.

An associated power

The United States did not conclude an alliance with the Entente and did not join its members’ agreement that none of them would make a separate peace. Wilson called his country an “associated power” rather than an allied one, and wanted to keep a free hand over the peace terms. For the Allies, what mattered most for the time being was money and ships. Britain and France had already spent most of their reserves on purchases in America and were finding it ever harder to pay. Now they could count on credits from the American government, and in April German submarines were sinking more ships than in any other month of the war. In Paris and London the news from Washington brought enormous relief and the promise that sooner or later millions of fresh soldiers would reach the front.

The calculation in Berlin

The German high command had reckoned with war with America from the moment it decided to begin unrestricted submarine warfare. The Admiralty promised that the submarines would force Britain to make peace within a few months, and Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff believed that the Americans would not have time to raise a significant army and carry it across the ocean before the war was decided. As late as the last days of March the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, said in the Reichstag that Germany had never wanted war with America and would bear no responsibility if America declared it.

Other states of the Americas soon followed Washington’s example. The very next day Cuba declared war on Germany and Panama announced that it would stand by the United States, and on 8 April Austria-Hungary broke off diplomatic relations with the United States.