Page 6 - Desert Lightning News April 7, 2017

6 April 7, 2017 Desert Lightning News www.aerotechnews.com/davis-monthanafb
Library of Congress photo
Recruits line up in 1917 at Fort Slocum, New York. The fort was one of the busiest recruit training stations in the nation.
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World War I: Building the American Military
By Jim Garamone
DOD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, — War!
That was the headline screaming from newspa- pers around the country on April 6, 1917, as the United States declared war on the German empire.
The United States had avoided being drawn into what was then known as “The Great War,” which had been raging in Europe since 1914. But Ger- man unrestricted submarine warfare — which U.S. leaders regarded as war on civilians — led to this juncture. President Woodrow Wilson, who had just been re-elected under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” felt he had no other option.
Congress provided the then-astronomical sum of $3 billion to build a million-man Army.
“The United States was in it, but they had to define what ‘it’ meant,” said Brian Neumann, Center of Military History historian.
Neumann, who edited a series on the Army during World War I, said it wasn’t a done deal that Americans would go to France to help man the Western Front.
Various points of view
Some Americans believed that because a naval
provocation led to the war, the proportional re- sponse would be a naval campaign against Ger- many. Others felt it was all right to help France, but not to help Great Britain, he said.
Still others believed that going to war had to mean something greater than simply returning to the status quo on the continent, Neumann said. They saw the war as an inferno that would topple empires so democracy and the will of the people could triumph. This was the camp that led.
“For the United States to have a voice at the peace table, it had to make a significant contri- bution to the war effort,” Neumann said. “That meant building an Army and engaging the enemy on the Western Front.”
Doing that was no simple task. On April 6, the U.S. Army was a constabulary force of 127,151 soldiers. The National Guard had 181,620 mem- bers. Both the country and the Army were abso- lutely unprepared for what was going to happen.
The United States had no process in place to build a mass army, supply it, transport it and fight with it. Continental European powers had a universal military service program in place, and when war broke out, reservists — already trained
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