Colphax wrote:
Hmm, I'm apparently gonna hafta take another look at Wilsonian Progressivism (not that I ever really have, LOL). I'd always thought of Wilson as kind of a wimp when it came to the military and foreign policy.
Wilson was sort of an odd duck on that. He essentially didn't want to get into a European war, but he was perfectly willing to occupy Haiti.
Basically he wanted the rights of the United States as a neutral nation respected. The problem was that both Britain and Germany insisted on violating those rights. The ultimate decision-maker was A) that Germany was trying to cook up a deal with Mexico to attack the U.S. and B) that while British violations of neutrality were annoying, German violations sometimes killed people.
Wilson held of fighting as long as he could (which was great for us since we let both sides beat the **** out of each other for 3+ years before we got involved) but what happened was sort of inevitable because of the nature of sea warfare at the time.
Prior to WWI, various international treaties laid out what was contraband and what wasn't. If you blockaded an enemy nation, you were perfectly within your rights to sieze contraband on neutral ships coming into his ports.
A blockade was expected to be what in WWI was called a "close blockade"; you kept your ships in a close perimeter along his ports and likely spots on his coast and stopped ships coming in. However, this became a problem with the advent of the submarine
A submarine on the surface is easy prey to enemy ships (aircraft weren't yet a serious threat in WWI). Hence, they remained submerged, and surfaced to stop merchant ships. The rules of the time were written before submarines (and to a certain degree radio) and expected warships to stop the merchant ship, inspect its papers, and if it was necessary to sink the ship, take the crew on board or place them in safety, which might or might not include lifeboats depending on the situation.
The slow speeds and vulnerability of submarines made this exceedingly risky to them, however, and Germany's submarine fleet was its only real chance of breaking the British supply line to the U.S. and breaking the "distant blockade". Hence, a controversy was ongoing in the German government over restricted versus unrestricted submarine warfare with flareups such as the
Lusitania sinking.
A major reason that forced the Germans to do this was that Britain had a larger battleship and battlecruiser fleet (although the German ships
may have been qualitatively superior; British ships were built with more of a "speed is armor" philosophy of Jackie Fisher while German ships followed Tirpitz's axiom that a warship's first duty is to stay afloat. Hence British ships tended to favor gun size and speed over armor, while German ships tended to have smaller guns but heavier armor with generally comparable speed) but it had established what it called a "distant blockade" out in the North Sea and environs for 2 reasons
1) Maintaining a close blockade of Germany inside Heligoland Bight was impractical; the coal-powered ships of the day would have to return to base to replenish coal too frequently, as well as cleaning of their boiler tubes. One could of course, rotate ships, but that would have meant only a portion of the Grand Fleet was there at any time and the entirity of the German High Seas Fleet could have snapped it up piecemeal. In fact, the German strategy throughout the war was to try to isolate single British battle squadrons and destroy them.
2) The same submarines could be used to break the blockade much more easily close to port
Distant blockade allowed the heavy ships to remain in port, going to sea to train and exercise or respond to German sorties such as the Yarmouth raid while lighter ships conducted the buisness of stopping the merchant ships. German submarines therefore couldn't get to the heavy warships. In fact, no German submarine penetrated Scapa Flow during WWI despite several attempts, although one did get in early in WWII and sunk HMS
Royal OakOn top of this, Britain established the "final destination" doctrine for contraband; declaring much contraband forfeit that was bound for neutral Scandinavian countries because it mgiht eventually end up in Germany (which may or may not have been true in any given case).
While this was irritating to the U.S., the strangling effect this had on Germany's economy was the main reason for eventually deciding on the unrestricted submarine warfare that finally forced Wilson's hand in entering the war.
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