The Yanks Are Coming! (37 page)

NATION-BUILDING

More difficult was determining the borders of the countries of Eastern Europe. Few Americans thought they had fought the Great War to settle the fate of Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Serbs, Slovenes, Romanians,
Croats, or the countless other ethnic groups whose futures were being determined in the faraway deal-making in Paris. Nevertheless, these groups and others canvassed for public support in the big cities of the United States, tapping into ethnic immigrant communities and affirming the Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination—or some variant thereof, given that it was impossible to draw borders that did not incorporate other nationalities. Small countries, the peacemakers soon realized, could be just as aggressive in asserting their dominion over territory as had been the defeated Central Powers. Trying to come up with proper borders, the Big Four, led by Wilson, literally crawled over a giant map on the floor. President Wilson was not always scrupulous on the matter of self-determination. He turned over a quarter of a million German-speaking citizens of Tyrol to the Italians, for example. This was an act of appeasement, but it did not stop Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando from storming out of the Peace Conference, incensed at Wilson's blocking Italian territorial claims in the Adriatic—claims against the newly formed state of Yugoslavia, which had Wilson's sympathy. In June Orlando's government fell from power.

Wilson found the negotiations all very trying. He was in bad health and perhaps suffered a minor stroke during the six months spent hammering out the peace in Paris. Though European matters dominated the agenda, decisions made over other parts of the world cost him equal political strife—in particular, allowing the Japanese to take over the German concessions at Shantung, China, on a presumed temporary basis and with restrictions. China had declared war on Germany with the understanding that China would regain Shantung, the birthplace of Confucius. The Chinese thought Shantung should be theirs, and a good portion of the American public, which looked kindly on China as a great missionary field, agreed.
Wilson, however, needed Japan's support for the League of Nations and did not think he could get it otherwise.

For Wilson, the League was everything. Whatever shortcomings were left from the peace treaty the League would iron out through international cooperation and liberal, democratic principles. Wilson's understanding of democratic principles, however, fell short at home, where Republicans in the Senate thought the Treaty of Versailles a badly botched job and raised a particular protest over Wilson's concession to the Japanese on Shantung and China's consequent refusal to endorse the Versailles Treaty.

There were also doubts about the mandate system. As with China, American Protestant missionaries had been active in Armenia. It was assumed by some, including many Armenians, that when it came to divvying up the Ottoman Empire (against which America had never declared war), the United States might take responsibility for governing Armenia under a League of Nations mandate. Armenian representatives wanted this; Wilson, anti-Turk and pro-Armenian in sentiment, accepted the mandate—but subject to the approval of the United States Senate, which he assumed would not be given. It was hard for Wilson to imagine the American people accepting a de facto imperial role in the Near East, no matter how sympathetic they were to Armenia, and he was right about that.

Then there was the Holy Land. Wilson had appointed a commission, led by Henry Churchill King, president of Oberlin College, and Charles R. Crane, a wealthy businessman, diplomatic dilettante, Wilson supporter, and Arabist, to advise him on what should be done with certain non-Turkish areas of the former Ottoman Empire, chiefly the territories of modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. (Anatolia was also within the commission's remit, but its fate would be decided in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, which essentially
drove all non-Turks out of the region.) The commission completed its report at the end of August 1919, and it was ignored by all.

The King-Crane Commission stated that the ultimate and rightful ambition of the Arabs was independence. But this, for the nonce, was impractical and unwise. The best course and the one preferred by the Arabs themselves was an American mandate over the Middle East. The Arabs' second choice as a mandate power was the British, because most Arabs, with exception of the Maronite Christians of Lebanon, were Francophobes. The King-Crane Commission opposed a Zionist state, to which the British were committed by the Balfour Declaration (1917)—arguing that it could only be created and supported by military force.

In the event, American influence in drawing up the map of the Middle and Near East was practically nil. It was the British who took charge, creating the region's modern borders and granting France control of Syria and Lebanon while Britain assumed tutelage over Mesopotamia, Jordan, and Palestine. In 1922 the United States Congress passed a joint resolution affirming support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, in accord with British policy.

But while drawing new borders was fun, the nub of the peace treaty—without which it was meaningless—was getting Germany's signature on the document. When the Germans arrived at Versailles in the spring of 1919, they were appalled at the treaty's terms and harrumphed at Woodrow Wilson's hypocrisy. The first of his Fourteen Points insisted on diplomacy being conducted in public, with “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” But the reality was that the treaty had de facto been decided by Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau. The Germans were expected to sign and shut up, though as a face-saving measure they were granted a fortnight to study the treaty (it was the size of a book) and comment on it. By
the end of May, the Germans had thoroughly annotated their objections. Many in the British delegation, including Lloyd George, and some Americans, including Herbert Hoover, had second thoughts (or first thoughts—because most had never seen the entire document themselves), but the signing of the treaty went ahead on 28 June 1919 at the palace of Versailles.

The reparations owed by Germany were, in fact, ratcheted down several times, but this had no effect on German resentment or on Germany's default on the debt in 1933.
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In the end, according to historian Sheldon Anderson, “The Germans paid less in relative terms than the French did in 1871” following the Franco-Prussian War.
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It was not reparations that sank Germany's economy during the Great Depression of the early 1930s, but something far more mundane, according to historian Richard Vinen: “Germany's problems sprang mainly not from reparations, which rarely amounted to more than 3 percent of her gross national product, but from a tradition of high state spending, compounded by the welfare commitments of the Weimar government and the financial legacy of the Great War.”
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Reparations and the military limitations placed on Germany crumbled away as the British and French declined to enforce them.

AMERICA BOWS OUT

The Americans were no longer involved at all—not because they were excluded, but because they had decided that they had paid their debt to Lafayette with more than 320,000 American military casualties, more than 116,000 of them dead. Their duty was done. In the Senate, the Republican majority had long warned Wilson that it would not accept a League of Nations that interfered with
an independent American foreign policy; a treaty that obliged America to belong to such a league would be fatally flawed. This was not Wilson's attitude, of course. He thought the Treaty of Versailles a victory—he told his wife that “as no one is satisfied, it makes me hope we have a just peace”
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—and he fought for it with such vigor that he brooked no compromises with, and would accept no amendments or revisions from, the United States Senate. On 10 July 1919 he challenged the Senate to approve the treaty, saying, “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”
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It looked as though the Senate, to Wilson's astonishment and rage, was prepared to do just that. So he embarked on a whistle-stop campaign to rally the American people to the treaty. His health was failing, and the campaign nearly killed him. His doctors finally forced him to stop. But in his own righteous way he was prepared to risk his life for what he and Lloyd George and Clemenceau had wrought in Paris. Wilson suffered a terrible stroke on 2 October, which left him physically and mentally debilitated, though Wilson's wife tried to keep the effects hidden.

Republicans in the Senate would not ratify a treaty that committed the United States, without the consent of Congress, to protect the territorial integrity of threatened League states. Wilson, who by November had regained some of his strength, again refused any alteration of the treaty. He won the Noble Peace Prize but failed to get what he really wanted. In November 1919, the Versailles Treaty was put up for a vote in the Senate, once with amendments, once without—and both times it failed to gain the necessary two-thirds majority. On 19 March 1920 another vote was held on an amended version of the treaty, but Wilsonian Democrats who refused to countenance any changes helped sink it. In 1921, after Wilson was out of office, the United States reached a separate peace with each of the
chief Central Powers—Germany, Austria, and Hungary—but disdained joining the League of Nations.

Wilson had the United States enter the Great War as an “associated power” rather than an “ally.” Perhaps it should have been no surprise that despite his best efforts the United States wrapped up its postwar business in similar fashion, on its own terms. Wilson was asked in his last cabinet meeting what he would do now. Pedagogical to the last, he announced, “I am going to try to teach ex-presidents how to behave.”
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EPILOGUE

APPOINTMENT AT ARLINGTON

W
ilson died in 1924. Fifteen years later came the most telling refutation of his postwar vision: an even greater war than the Great War had been. The peace of the world was not overturned by any statesmen he knew. It was overturned by a failed postcard painter; but for Adolf Hitler, the Great War was unfinished business.

In the Great War Hitler had been a regimental dispatch runner, a moustached corporal disdained by his fellow soldiers as an apple polisher yet considered unpromotable by his officers. A loner, unsociable, impractical, and a dreamer whose twin passions were art and politics, he spent much of his time in the rear but got close enough to the front
lines to be wounded by shrapnel in October 1916 and to be temporarily blinded by mustard gas in October 1918. He was still recuperating in hospital when news of the Armistice arrived in November. He had welcomed war in August 1914—“I sank down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart”
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—and now, in shock and despair at Germany's defeat, he envisioned another war. “When I was confined to bed, the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great. I knew immediately that it would be realized.”
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A NEW ARMISTICE

On 22 June 1940, Hitler the corporal was now Hitler the Führer, the dictator of a third German Reich and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. His destination was a railway car on the tracks near the forest of Compiegne, France, the very same railway car in which German representatives had agreed to the Armistice of 1918. Hitler had ordered the railway car removed from a museum (German engineers blew out a wall to get at it) and returned to the exact spot where the 11 November 1918 Armistice had been signed. The site of the surrender was now a memorial commemorating France's victory. It was transformed by Hitler into a revanchist historical tableau.

A guard of honor from the SS was there to welcome him. A monument to France's recapture of Alsace-Lorraine (an Allied sword plunged into the breast of a German eagle) was partly obscured by a draped Nazi flag. Not obscured was a separate granite tablet, raised three feet from the ground, on which were inscribed the words: “Here on the eleventh of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German Empire. . . . Vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.” Hitler read the inscription and struck the prototypical fascist pose, as described by CBS radio reporter William
Shirer, an eyewitness: “He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.”
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The railway car had belonged to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, supreme commander of the Allied armies at the end of World War One. Hitler entered the railway car and sat in Foch's chair. When the French delegates arrived, General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
, read out the preamble to the terms of the new armistice, which was all Hitler wanted to hear. He left the railway car, not bothering to listen to the recitation of the terms themselves. He knew them well enough: most important, the Germans would occupy northern and western France, the entire Atlantic coast—with the occupation costs paid by the French. The new French government, eventually centered on Vichy and led by a French hero of the First World War, Marshal Philippe Pétain, would represent a pliant vassal state. Keitel could wrap up the details; there would be no negotiations. In six weeks Hitler had achieved what Kaiser Wilhelm II had failed to do in more than four years of titanic battle. Shirer summarized the dramatic event by saying, “The whole ceremony in which Hitler has reached a new pinnacle in his meteoric career and Germany avenged the 1918 defeat is over in a quarter of an hour.”
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As Joseph Goebbels told Hitler, “The disgrace is now extinguished. It's a feeling of being born again.”
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