Saying that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress on April 2, 1917 to declare war on Germany. Congress voted ‘yes’ and America entered into the “Great War,” later called World War I.
Fighting in Europe had been underway since 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated while visiting the Serbian city of Sarajevo. The Austrian Empire declared war on Serbia, Russia came to Serbia’s defense, Germany declared war on Russia and her ally, France, and Great Britain declared war on Germany when German troops invaded Belgium.
America under Wilson took a neutral position on the war and tried to stay out of it. In 1915, the ocean liner Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo and 128 Americans were among the 1,200 passengers who died when the ship sank. While the American public cried out, Wilson held the country back from war.
Over the next two years German boats attacked a number of American merchant ships, but America would not declare war. Then, in early 1917, two things happened which assured America’s entry into the war.
First, the Germans once again began unrestricted submarine warfare, which President Wilson had warned would mean war with the United States. Second, was the British Secret Service releasing an intercepted telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to the German ambassador in Mexico. Called the Zimmerman Telegram, it said Germany would help Mexico recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona from America, if Mexico would side with Germany, when America entered the war.
These two incidents made Americans so furious at Germany that the country joined the war. American troops fought mostly in France, but the war was fought with great slaughter in Italy, the Balkans, throughout Eastern Europe, and into what is today Saudi Arabia and Israel. The World War saw the first use of poison gases, such as mustard gas, as weapons. The American Army was in the field for just six months before an Armistice was agreed to on November 11, 1918. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. About 130,000 American soldiers died in the war that took the lives of ten million people. Another 20 million people died of disease and starvation, among other causes.
Ultimately, the war determined which European nations would control the natural resources and wealth of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The gold and diamonds of South Africa, the other metals and rubber trees of the rest of Africa, and the oil in the Mideast were the final prizes to the war’s victors.