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Re-elect President Woodrow Wilson! An October 18, 1916 cartoon from the British magazine Punch. The German sinking of ships that killed American citizens and sabotage such as the July 30, 1916 attack that destroyed the Black Tom munitions plant in Jersey City, New Jersey, were not enough to make Wilson call for a declaration of war on Germany, much to the distress of Great Britain and the other Entente allies. The date on Wilson's desk calendar is October 8, 1916, a day on which German submarine U-53 sank five vessels — three British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian — off Nantucket, Massachusetts. One of the British ships was a passenger liner traveling between New York and Newfoundland.
A British woman laments the loss of 'poor John' who has been called up. A postcard by D. Tempest, postmarked October 12, 1915.
'Street Life, 1916' by Hans Larwin, a native of Vienna and painter of the war on multiple fronts, including the home front. A bread line, chiefly of women, waits along the shopfronts to buy bread. To the left, a policeman stands guard.
The salute of General Black Jack Pershing, Commander in Chief of the American Expeditionary Force, landing in France, June, 1917. Pershing landed in Boulogne on June 13.
Advertising postcard map of Austria-Hungary from the Amidon Starch Company with images of Vienna, Budapest, and a wheat field.
"— The 9th. At noon there was published a message from Wilson laying down fourteen peace conditions. It is the most important document of the war. After forty-three months, here is a man who dares to say what ought to have been said on the very first day: he clearly states his war aims." ((1), more)
"'Conditions . . . certainly seem very bad,' I wrote to my family on January 10th [1918]; 'from everyone's people come exactly the same sort of letters I get from you. Everyone is servantless, no one visits anyone else or goes away, and the food seems as hard to get hold of in other places as in London now. But do if you can,' I implored, 'try to carry on without being too despondent and make other people do the same . . . for the great fear in the Army and all its appurtenances out here is not that it will ever give up itself, but that the civil population at home will fail us by losing heart—just at the most critical time. The most critical time is of course now, before America can really come in and the hardships of winter are not yet over. It wouldn't be so bad if the discomfort and inconvenience and trouble were confined to one or two towns or one or two families, but it seems to be general.'" ((2), more)
"More than 2000 women had rioted in Vienna's public market on 11 January; 5 days later 25 000 stood in line at the main meat market. It was not unusual for buyers to line up at markets the night before; many fainted in the process. While the best hotels and butcher shops had beef and port for sale to their regular (and wealthy) clients, the markets in the working-class districts had only horse meat on hand. Butchers there complained bitterly that they were forced to sell at fixed prices. Soup kitchens were besieged by patrons, many of them Landser on leave. Countless 'soldiers in rags' went door to door begging food. The capital's populace, in the words of the police, was on the point of starvation and rebellion." ((3), more)
"France's new allies received a very different welcome [from that given the Russians]. The first American units had disembarked in June 1917, but the build-up over the autumn and winter was slow, and by January only 161,750 men had crossed the Atlantic. By September, however, there would be over 1.5 million American troops in France." ((4), more)
"In January of 1918, Vienna and other substantial Austrian cities experienced the most serious civilian convulsions of the war era. Accumulated resentments among industrial workers due to war-borne hardships and to the trend of diplomatic negotiations at Brest-Litovsk combined with bitterness because of a sudden cut in the slim bread rations in Austria and with faint undertones of Bolshevism to produce concerted mass action. . . . Socialist-organized mass meetings on January 13, 1918 protested furiously against the sabre-rattling tactics of German General Hoffmann at Brest-Litovsk. 'Without any warning or signal from the Socialists,' Viktor Adler explained, 'the idea had suddenly spring up among the masses that if this hope [a peace settlement with the Russians] vanishes, and there is nothing to eat, we have nothing to lose.' Starting spontaneously in a left-wing clique at the Daimler works at Wiener Neustadt, a strike movement spread to locomotive and munitions factories there and thence to other industrial centers." ((5), more)
(1) Entry for January 9, 1918 from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress on January 8, 1918, and laid out the country's war aims, the Fourteen Points for which he said the United States was fighting. The aims included open and transparent diplomacy, freedom of the seas, equality of trade between nations, reduction in armaments, 'impartial adjustment of colonial claims,' the evacuation of occupied Russian, Belgian, and French territory including Alsace and Lorraine, adjustment of Italy's frontiers along ethnic lines, the 'opportunity for autonomous development' of the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the end of the occupations of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, sovereignty for Turkey, an independent Poland, and a 'general association of nations' to guarantee 'political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.'
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, pp. 306–307, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
(2) Vera Brittain served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and had been in France for the last six months when she wrote in January, 1918. Fewer than 200,000 American troops were in Europe, and were not on the front lines as American commander John Pershing built his army. The United Kingdom's food shortages paled beside those of Russia and Austria-Hungary.
Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925 by Vera Brittain, page 401, copyright © Vera Brittain, 1933, publisher: Penguin Books, publication date: 1978, originally 1933
(3) Food shortages were acute in Austria-Hungary in January, 1918, and a strong impetus for the country to conclude peace with Russia in the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. Austria-Hungary had not recovered from the loss of its rolling stock in the battles of 1914, Hungary withheld food supplies from the rest of the empire, and the failure to agree treaties prevented transportation of food from the breadbaskets of Russia and Romania. Landser is a colloquial expression for Landwehrmann, the Austrian home or territorial guard.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, pp. 363–364, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
(4) After their revolution in November, 1917, the Bolsheviks agreed an armistice with the Central Powers while a peace treaty was negotiated. Many French, anticipating a German offensive supported by troops recently redeployed from the Eastern Front, spoke ill of their former ally. The United States had declared war in April, 1917, but were not on the front lines.
They Shall Not Pass: The French Army on the Western Front 1914-1918 by Ian Sumner, page 185, copyright © Ian Sumner 2012, publisher: Pen and Sword, publication date: 2012
(5) Food shortages were acute in Austria-Hungary in January, 1918, and a strong impetus for the country to conclude peace with Russia in the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. Austro-Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Count Ottokar Czernin was prepared to make peace with no annexations,but the German negotiators, particularly the military representatives led by General Max Hoffman, were not. On January 12, Hoffman had given a particularly bellicose speech at the conference, in which he made it clear Germany would not evacuate occupied territory. Viktor Adler was a founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party.
The Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1914-1918 2 Volumes by Arthur James May, Vol. 2, pp. 654, 655, copyright © 1966 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, publication date: 1966
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