The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (Hardcover)

Within a few years after the First World War ended, popular sentiment shifted dramatically and the majority of Americans believed that our participation in the European War was a mistake. Following Pearl Harbor and the Nazi declaration of war against the United States, the conventional wisdom shifted again and it was generally assumed that if fighting Hitler was right, going to war with the Kaiser must also have been correct.

The Illusion of Victory re-examines the justification for America's declaration of war against Germany in 1917 and the negotiation of the Versailles Peace Treaty following the armistice. Thomas Fleming's highly critical assessment of American policy with regard to both the war and the peace treaty is hardly novel. Walter Millis expounded these views in the best seller The Road to War in 1935. However, Fleming's book is a very readable account of the American experience in World War I. He is dismissive of the reasons we went to war. Foremost was Germany's resort to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 to prevent ships of neutral countries from reaching England and France. As Senators Robert La Follette, Sr., George Norris, and a few others pointed out at the time, the United States had acquiesced in the equally illegal British blockade of German ports since 1914.

Fleming demonstrates utter contempt for President Woodrow Wilson, a figure whose conventionally good historical reputation is indeed difficult to understand. Wilson is most famous for his "Fourteen Points" speech and his crusade for American participation in the League of Nations. As Fleming points out, at Versailles in 1919, Wilson completely abandoned the Fourteen Points and agreed to British and French demands for a punitive peace.

During the War, Wilson repeatedly stated that we had no quarrel with the German people, only with their government. At Versailles, Wilson and the Allies forced the Kaiser's successors to pay reparations, acknowledge sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war and yield territory and its colonial possessions to its neighbors. These measures were regarded to be illegitimate by Germans of every political persuasion and sowed the seeds for World War II. Wilson also acquiesced in the continuation of the British naval blockade of Germany, which starved its civilian population for months after the armistice and the abdication of the Kaiser.

Fleming fails to fully acknowledge the domestic political pressures with which Woodrow Wilson had to contend. Beginning with the German sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, there was a very influential segment of American society passionately advocating war. The leader of this group was Theodore Roosevelt, the most notorious warmonger in this nation's history. The author appears to admire Roosevelt, who at least had the courage of his convictions. TR wanted to lead an American division to France and sent all four of his sons to fight. The youngest, Quentin Roosevelt, an aviator, was killed. Nevertheless, if Woodrow Wilson led the United States down the wrong path in going to war in 1917 and mishandled the Paris Peace Conference, Theodore Roosevelt and his allies bear as much responsibility for these errors as the President.

Wilson, due to his unwillingness for compromise, bears much responsibility for America's rejection of the League of Nations. However, it is highly unlikely that even with the United States as a member, that the League would have sent an adequate number of soldiers to oppose Hitler's early moves to nullify the Treaty of Versailles. Since Hitler's criticisms of the Treaty contained some half-truths, Americans would have been no more willing than the French and the English to contest German rearmament in the 1930s, remilitarization of the Rhineland and the absorption of Austria.

In The Illusion of Victory, Fleming is too easy on Imperial Germany, which was dominated by militarists, many of who believed war with France and Russia was inevitable and preferred it sooner than later. The harsh terms the Germans dictated to Russia at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 indicates that Germany would have been no more magnanimous than the Allies had they been victorious in the west. General Erich Ludendorff, who for all practical purposes ran Germany during the war, was only a slightly less despicable person than Hitler. As it turned out, had the Germans been more patient and not provoked the United States with submarine warfare, they most certainly would have defeated the French and British after the Russians collapsed. By bringing America into the War, the Kaiser's government clutched defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Fleming covers the military aspects of American participation in World War I without much analysis. The biggest issue to arise was General John J. Pershing's insistence that American soldiers fight as an American army rather than as replacements in decimated French and British units. The Americans played a vital role in stopping the last German offensive and bringing about the German collapse when the Allies counterattacked. However, one wonders how history would judge General Pershing had the Germans broken through the Allied lines while he was resisting French and British pleas for reinforcements.

The Illusion of Victory is an easily digestible introduction to a war whose unintended consequences plague us to this very day. While the Nazis and the Soviet Union no longer threaten us, we are at this very moment dealing with the fallout from the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Iraq for hundreds of years.

The reviewer, Arthur J. Amchan, is the author of The Kaiser's Senator: Robert M. LaFollette's Alleged Disloyalty during World War I.