Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2017/Op-ed


 * By TomStar81

In January 1917, the German Empire crunched the numbers of World War I for 1916 and came up wanting advancement. With the battles of the Somme and Verdun having reached endings which were inconclusive but favored the Allied Powers, this Central Power was growing increasingly frustrated with the progress of the war to date. Attempts to thin out enemy forces and cut off logistic lines had been largely unsuccessful, and the one attempt that had shown great success - the use of the infamous U-boats in the Atlantic Ocean to intercept and destroy Allied shipping - had been abandoned in the aftermath of the loss of RMS Lusitania in 1915. The loss of Lusitania had also inadvertently incensed the United States, whose government made it known in no uncertain terms through diplomatic channels that the German Empire's continued use of war weaponry like the submarine against U.S. citizens and U.S. shipping would be viewed in the future as a "deliberately unfriendly act". As the world rang in 1917 the German Empire made two decisions that would ultimately alter the course of the war, and in so doing, secure the upper hand that the Allied Powers had attained in late 1916 on the Somme and Verdun.

The first of these actions was a military decision coming in the wake of the failure of the Imperial German Navy to annihilate the Royal Navy fleet in the Battle of Jutland. With the gunship fleets once again in a fleet in being role the decision was made to resume the Atlantic U-boat campaign. This decision carried a number of risks - most notably, it risked upsetting the United States, and by extension pulling a new nation with a large and well rested military into the war. In assessing the risk, the German Empire looked at the British Empire's need for overseas colonies and possessions to operate on an at war footing, and gambled that the Imperial German Navy could sink enough shipping to compel the British Empire to sue for peace before reaching the critical mass at which the United States was likely to intervene. To hedge their bets, Foreign Secretary of the German Empire Arthur Zimmermann elected to send a coded message to the German ambassador in Mexico City, Mexico, to see if the Mexican Government would be interested in joining the German Empire in exchange for "generous financial backing" and a chance to reclaim territories lost to the United States in earlier military campaigns. Unbeknownst to the Foreign Secretary, the British had broken the diplomatic codes used by the German Empire, allowing personnel assigned to Room 40 to decode the letter. Once decoded, the British Empire realized that it now had the means to instigate an international incident between the U.S. and the German Empire, and wasted no time in plotting sending the telegram off to Washington. The sole hang up was disguising the origins of the telegram, as Britain did not wish it to be known publicly that they were reading German diplomatic cables.

In the United States, 1916 was a time of cold war between a number of different groups. Republicans and Democrats were still simmering over the American Civil War, with the states comprising the former Confederate States of America going to monumental lengths to keep the races segregated and the federal government out of its business. In the southwest, raids by the outlaw Pancho Villa had become problematic enough that General John J. Pershing had been dispatched to Fort Bliss, Texas with orders to undertake a punitive expedition to find the rebel and put an end to the mischief. Commanding some 10,000 men - including buffalo soldiers - across forts in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona that had originally been set up to protect westward settlers from raids by Apache and Comanche tribes as they pushed westward, Pershing invaded Mexico in hopes of capturing the rebel and putting an end to his cross border raiding. Isolationist in ideology, the United States wanted nothing to do with Europe's war, and as a hold over from the American Revolutionary War many U.S. citizens were unfriendly toward the British in general. In Mexico, revolutionary sentimentally had fuelled an uprising in 1910, and the government there was still trying to get things settled down and back to what passes for normal in a nation divided against itself. Despite the revolutionary sentiment still working its way across Mexico, Venustiano Carranza put together a committee to examine the proposal from the German Empire in greater detail. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that entertaining any of the proposals put forward by the German Empire would be extremely inadvisable.

Mexico was no stranger to combat with the United States, having twice fought the U.S. openly and lost on both occasions. In the first instance, seeking to improve the taxable base for the nation, Mexico's government had opened Mexican Texas and other areas up to colonization by United States citizens. Moses Austin and Stephen F. Austin, know as the founding fathers of Texas, took Mexico up on this offer and brought in settlers to found towns and work the land. Mexico, however, had been very lax with its border enforcement, and as a result a massive number of illegal U.S. citizens had come across the border to start a new life - lives which, in more than a few cases, included importing slaves to the new towns to help work the land. When Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had tried to reestablish Mexican laws and enforce immigration practices in the region in the 1830s it upset a number of the illegal U.S. citizens living the area, who took up arms and forcibly expelled the Mexican garrisons in the state before electing to break away from Mexico altogether and form their own government. In an attempt to reclaim the now occupied Texas, Santa Anna had mobilized a massive military force and marched northeast during the winter, which was unheard of in a time when men and machines depended on good weather to march and fight. Arriving in San Antonio in February, the Mexican president quickly surrounded and subsequently overran the Alamo garrison, however his brutal tactics (in particular refusing to take prisoners) ultimately resulted in his losing favor with those who once backed him Texas, and David G. Burnet's revolutionary government was begrudgingly recognized following the victory achieved by rebel forces under the command of Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto. Following annexation by the United States, both nations fought the Mexican–American War, which ended with a U.S. victory and the transfer and subsequent settlement of what had been Mexican territory north of the modern U.S.-Mexico border to the United States for colonization by U.S. citizens.

In view of this history, the Mexican government concluded that it would be neither possible nor even desirable to attempt such an enterprise for the following reasons:


 * The United States was far stronger militarily than Mexico was. No serious scenarios existed under which Mexico could win a war against the United States.
 * Germany's promises of "generous financial support" were very unreliable. The German government had already informed Carranza in June 1916 that they were unable to provide the necessary gold needed to stock a completely independent Mexican national bank. Even if Mexico received financial support, the arms, ammunition, and other needed war supplies would presumably have to be purchased from the ABC nations (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), which would strain relations with them.
 * Even if by some chance Mexico had the military means to win a conflict against the United States and reclaim the territories in question, Mexico would have severe difficulty accommodating a large English-speaking population that was better supplied with arms than most populations.
 * Other foreign relations were at stake. The ABC nations organized the Niagara Falls peace conference in 1914 to avoid a full-scale war between the United States and Mexico over the United States occupation of Veracruz. If Mexico were to enter war against the United States, it would strain relations with those nations.

Initially, the American public responded to the telegram cautiously. Most assumed that it was some kind of forgery intended to provoke the U.S. into joining the war, however this illusion quickly evaporated following a press conference on 3 March 1917, in which Zimmermann himself told an American journalist, "I cannot deny it. It is true." Then, on 29 March 1917, Zimmermann gave a speech in the Reichstag in which he admitted the telegram was genuine. Although this and the resumption of the U-boat campaign on 1 February showed an expressed interest by the German Empire in attacking U.S. shipping by land and sea, the absence of an assault on the homeland such as occurred December 7th, 1941 at Pearl Harbor or September 11, 2001 in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania made it exceedingly difficult for President Woodrow Wilson to take any kind of action against Germany. Even something as simple as calling for the arming of merchant shipping failed to get through the antiwar camp present in the United States Congress at the time.

All the same, other measures were taken by the U.S. to offset or counter the telegram's proposals. The Carranza government was recognized de jure by the United States on 31 August 1917 as a direct consequence of the Zimmermann telegram, since recognition was necessary to ensure Mexican neutrality in World War I. After the military invasion of Veracruz in 1914, Mexico would not participate in any military excursions with the United States in World War I, thus ensuring Mexican neutrality was the best outcome that the United States could hope for, even if Mexican neutrality would allow German companies to keep their operations in Mexico open.