In June of 1914, Archduke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and his wife Sophie were assassinated. This provided the impetus for Austro Hungarians to declare war on Serbia, which drew Germany in, and soon all of Europe was plunged into war. The US tried diligently to maintain a strict policy of neutrality in thought and deed as President Wilson put it. The US citizenry really had no desire to enter the war, though we did robustly supply Great Britain and the allies. With the sinking of the Lusitania (with 128 Americans on board) and increased German aggression by their submarines (U-Boats) against shipping targets including our ships, we found ourselves being drawn rather unavoidably closer to the conflict. The war itself was brutal. Never in the history of warfare had there been such protracted hand-to-hand warfare... trench warfare, which was unimaginably terrible in almost every way.. Any description of the fighting falls far short of giving us, removed by 100 years from the reality of what it was actually like for the average combatant, a clear enough picture. In places, the front lines were only a hundred or more feet apart, less than half the length of a football field. And given the difficulty with actually gaining any new territory, the troops were often entrenched in one location for days and days on end. The hardship went far beyond the actual battle to food, sanitation, gangrene, dysentery, and every manner of health problem you could imagine. By the time the US entered there were already millions of casualties, with more on the way. Many hundreds of thousands of these were from the influenza epidemic which raged through BOTH sides of the combatants. With that backdrop, no wonder the US was reluctant to enter the fray. But in the Spring of 1917, leading up to the April 6th formal declaration of war, it was becoming clearer and clearer to US citizens everywhere, even in Mexico, that war was going to be unavoidable. The horrors yet to come, of places like the Argonne Forest and Meuse river were still unknown and unimagined. In the newspapers though, there was already much talk about what sorts of things a formal declaration of war would mean to the average citizen ... Mexico, like towns all over the country would be profoundly affected in ways big and small. From March 15th Ledger comes this warning that war would mean that those with radios ... radio plants .... would likely be forced to surrender them, so they did not fall into the hands of German spies needing to use them for nefarious and secret communication, unrestricted, right here on our soil.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 01:20:39 +0000