I am the Edison Bulldog. Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor by... Tear down! Tear down! Ask not what your country can do to you...
The penalty has been shot... What will this plan be? It seems to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Pier 54, New York City. On May the 1st, 1915, 2,000 passengers boarded one of the fastest, most luxurious ships in the world, the Lusitania. She was simply a wonderful, steady ship. She had four red funnels and she was a beautiful sight to see, she really was.
Edith Stanley and her family were heading home to England and into the midst of the most brutal conflict man had ever experienced. The First World War was almost a year old and any transatlantic crossing was made potentially dangerous by the presence of German submarines. Still, the passengers felt safe.
After all, the Lusitania was a passenger ship. On her last day at sea, the Lusitania was approaching the Irish coast. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and you could see all this coastline.
It was a beautiful day, couldn't have been any better. And then bang! It was a terrific bang! Dad knew what he was!
I mean, that he knew darn well it was a torpedo! The single German torpedo did such damage that the Lusitania could launch only six of her lifeboats before she went down. We could not take the people in that were begging to be taken in. I mean we'd have capsized and everybody would have gone. 1,200 drowned didn't they?
There was 1,200 drowned. The more drowned there were saved. Among those who drowned were 128 Americans. The memory has faded for all but a very few, some of whom you'll hear from.
But because it has affected so much of what has happened since, the bulk of this program is about the First World War, the Great War, they called it. It began in June of 1936. June of 1914, with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, he was shot by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Ferdinand had governed in a circle of European royalty that also included the King of England, the Tsar of Russia, and the King of the Soviet Union. Russia and the Kaiser of Germany, and together their colonial empires dominated most of the earth's population.
And when the competitive Kaiser seized upon the assassination as a pretext to begin a European war, he found the other royals only too willing to go along. All of them sought to widen their influence. None could possibly realize how radically they were about to alter the course of the 20th century.
In the summer of 1914, the generation that would fight the First World War was enthusiastic about doing so. Those young men who were so quick to answer their nation's call to arms had no reason to anticipate the hell ahead. In the German city of Koblenz, 12-year-old Joachim von Elbe began a diary.
August 5, 1914. The city is full of soldiers. They were singing this song, On, on, to fight we are born, On, on, to fight for the fatherland. To Kaiser Wilhelm we have sworn, to Kaiser Wilhelm we give our hand.
The optimism of the Germans was matched by their allies in Austria, and by their enemies in Russia, in France, and in England. As soon as I enlisted I was in a crowd of other 18, 19 and 20 year old and we thought it was going to be tremendous, tremendous luck to go and knock the Kaiser off his throne you see. Everyone, everyone thought the war would be over at Christmas and they really badly wanted to get to France to get in the fighting. The Germans attacked first and very quickly they were through Belgium and into France.
The romantic notion of war that so many young men carried into battle was very quickly shattered. The new weapons of war were so ferocious that by the end of the first year, French casualties alone would approach a million men. Nobody in Europe expected these appalling casualties. And when they came, they were utterly crushing.
The first dreadful experience was that of the victims of what was called the massacre of the innocents in Germany. These boys from high school or college who were given a couple of months training and sent off to the front and who died in tens of thousands in a few weeks. Now nothing like that had ever happened before to any country in Europe.
And moreover, this was the flower of German youth. They were the best educated young men, they were from middle class families almost exclusively. And they had no expectation at all that this terrible thing was going to happen. Americans had never dreamed that a war on the other side of the ocean could affect them.
The US was officially neutral, and most of its citizens assumed it would stay that way. People were going about their own business, object being to make money, good business. Everything was very pleasant indeed.
It's hard for people who weren't there then to realize how enormously the world has changed. On New Year's Day, President Wilson had open house at the White House. And you could go down, and we went down once. I was a little kid, I was taking along. Went down, and we stood in a little queue, and it moved up, and we all went through and shook his hand.
Shook hands with the President on New Year's Day. But certainly America was changing. The pace of life was changing.
Life was quickening. Almost overnight, Henry Ford's historic assembly line had lowered the cost of making cars, as well as the cost of buying them. The mass-produced Model T came in one color, black. But at $295, it was the first car priced within reach of ordinary Americans. We played baseball in the streets.
And there was no problem playing baseball when horses and wagons dominated the traffic. It only became a problem when automobiles and trucks came in. So much in America was changing as Europe went about its ugly war. At this first movie that I attended, I recall the scene where there was a great deal of shooting. As they came to the front of the screen and the figures got larger and larger and I thought they were coming at me and I started screaming so badly that they had to take me out of the movie house.
As movie making techniques improved, movies became an American obsession. And it was in the movie houses that Americans were exposed to the war in Europe. In the movie house, it still seemed glamorous. We went every Saturday morning and just devoured the pictures of the war. Beautiful uniforms of the dashing mounted cavalry with their flashing sabers in the sun riding into battle and oh I thought that would be something else.
I was just 18 to go. The movies were the perfect proving ground for the new art form called propaganda. Americans saw and soon sympathized with the British view of the Germans. By early 1915, the war in Europe was good for America. U.S. banks were lending huge amounts of money to Britain and France, who in turn used the money to buy arms from American factories.
With the war, Americans were in the greatest economic boom in their history. During the war, everybody worked. Before the war, my father brought home six or seven dollars a week.
Now he brought home checks for a hundred, a hundred and ten dollars a week. It was like, it was like bringing home a check for a million. The war had another effect. It virtually cut off European immigration to the United States, causing a labor shortage in American factories. And that forced northern employers to look for the very first time at the a substantial black labor pool of the American South.
Black newspapers went down south and told them, come on up to Chicago with us. We'll get you a job to take care of. You don't have to stay down here and be lynched and burned.
My relatives, aunt, uncle, cousins, came north. We were able to get into factories and steel mills, jobs that just wouldn't have been available to blacks under normal circumstances. This great migration from the South kept America's economy strong and vigorous, while the increasing economic stake in Britain and France encouraged greater support for their war against the Germans.
But the war was not going well. and the idea that Americans might yet have to be involved was now an issue. All over the United States, with the support of former President Theodore Roosevelt, potential volunteers began to train for battle. By Christmas 1914, the armies of Europe had completely bogged down and fighting had spread to Russia, Africa, and the Middle East. The empires drew on their colonies for manpower.
Sixty countries were eventually represented in the conflict. The Germans had expected to win in 42 days, but they had not anticipated what would happen on the Western Front in France. On the Western Front, the German assault had finally failed, and soldiers on both sides had raced to dig an elaborate trench system that stretched for 300 miles, from the English Channel all the way to Switzerland.
On New Year's Day in 1915, the young men who had gone off to fight glorious battles were now trapped in a desperate war of attrition. Someone said to us excitedly, Jack Smith. I said, what about him?
He's dead, he's been shot. The first one of the battalion to be shot. I said, what? Yes, he's dead, he's been shot. He put his head too far over and a sniper got him.
That caused a bit of a sensation amongst the lads. They thought, well this is not exactly what we come for kind of business. But later on, from that day onwards, when we went to the trenches, it was three kill, four kill, five kill, twenty kill, a hundred kill.
By then, we was veterans. A young American poet, Alan Seeger, was among those looking for adventure when he joined the Foreign Legion to fight for France. His diary reveals how seldom he found it. It's a miserable life, shivering in these wretched holes in the dirt.
We're not leading the life of men at all, but that of animals, living in our holes in the ground, and only showing our heads outside to fight and to feed. When we'd been there about six months, covered in mud, wet through practically all day, absolutely chewed up my lice. We used to say, and to think, we wanted to come to this hole.
I said, yes, we didn't know. Every so often, one side or the other seized a few hundred yards of territory, only to be forced back again, surrendering what had cost hundreds of lives to win. The front never moved more than a mile or two in either direction.
By the spring of 1915, the generals had concluded that the best way out of the stalemate was to blast the enemy out of their trenches. The same factories and assembly lines that had begun to contribute to life in the 20th century were now retooled to create massive killing machines. This was the industrialization of war.
There was just a splintered trunks of trees and there was the quagmire of the shell holes and no grass. It was just like a lunar landscape really. Night the rats They grew to enormous sizes Feeding on the burn on the corpses there It was impossible to get the get the dead buried We put dead bodies in the bottom of the trench so that we could stand on them to keep dry.
And on some occasion, dead bodies were put on the top of the trench to make it higher, so that we could walk a bit better instead of crouching. And contributing to the stalemate were new weapons. By now the machine gun had been perfected to the point that a single soldier could command as much firepower as 40 riflemen. The tank made its first appearance, invented by the British to get through the dense thickets of barbed wire that protected the enemy trenches.
And in April 1915, the Germans introduced the most terrifying weapon of all, poison gas. No one had ever seen it before. This is the moment when chemical warfare was invented.
It scared the living daylights out of the Canadian troops that were hit by it. The First World War had become a contest not of fighting spirit but of technological might. And for the soldiers caught in the middle of it, there was no way forward and no way back.
There was simply endurance. You saw a little bush and you swore that bush was somebody creeping up on you. The perfect soldier in that war would have been somebody with no imagination whatsoever.
We all had too much imagination. So many men... Who had been through these dangers and anxieties, they're nerve-broken, they were the victims of shell shock, you know.
There is a breaking point for most people, for everybody really. Robbed of all humanity and courage and everything else, makes life worth living really. He's descended to something less than human.
The stalemate in the trenches continued through 1915 and into 1916 when the generals decided to go back to their original weapon, their men. The River Somme, northern France, early summer 1916. Along a front 25 miles wide, a massive allied army prepared to attack. Thousands of British Tommies, as they were called, would lead the charge. And they would follow one of the most intense bombardments in the history of warfare, an artillery barrage that would last an entire week.
The Battle of the Somme was about to begin. There must be a thousand guns if there was one. It was a terrible roar from morning till night.
But the foolish officers said, Tomorrow boys, you'll be over the top and don't worry, he says. There'll be no trenches there, our shells have blown to pieces. There'll be no Germans there. They're blown to pieces.
All you have to do is to walk over and take those trenches. In fact, he says you can carry your rifle like a bag. The Germans, after the shelling, they simply come out of the dugouts, grab their machine guns, and then... waiting for the Tommies. Just simply swathed them down so you're cutting down grain.
They didn't get 200 feet from the trench. One German machine gunner said, I stopped firing because I was sickened by what we were doing. It was the bloodiest day in British history. 20,000 men killed, 40,000 wounded. And yet, the day after, and for days after that, young men continued to be ordered out of their trenches and into near certain death.
The poet volunteer Alan Seeger was killed on July the 4th. On the same morning, Ted Francis waited for the signal to go. Officers are down below us in the trenches with a whistle, and when they blow that whistle we've got to dash out of the trenches and make for this German trench.
And it is in those few four or five minutes that we look at each other and say, oh, well, now I shall do this. Some were visibly shaking. Some were crying. And, of course, when the whistle went and we had to scramble over...
The Battle of the Somme would come to define the futility of the First World War. It went on for six more months at the cost of a million men. And at the end of it, the Allied armies had moved a grand total of five miles. The guns of the Somme were so loud and so insistent that they were heard across the English Channel in London, 150 miles away.
In every country that was involved in the war, there were growing problems at home. After so many years of struggle, the disillusionment of the battlefront now extended to the home front. Russia in particular was ripe for revolution.
Its people were starving and its battered army was on the verge of defeat. In February 1917, a food riot broke out in the city of Petrograd, which had been called St. Petersburg. In no time, Russia was embroiled in full-scale revolution.
The ruling family, led by Tsar Nicholas, was brought down. 300 years of royal rule were replaced by a provisional government that stubbornly decided to continue the war. The Germans chose this moment to help a Russian revolutionary return home from exile. A man who spoke for a socialist movement known to Russians as the Bolsheviks. His given name was Vladimir Ulyanov.
He's better remembered as Vladimir Lenin. Sasha Bryansky served as Lenin's bodyguard. He spoke with a lot of gestures, thrust forward, calling us to advance, saying power had been taken over by the bourgeoisie that went on with the bloody war.
A new order had to be established to ensure the power of the working class. Lenin and the Bolsheviks hoped to create the world's first communist state, where all land, capital and political power would be given to the people. For many Russians, it would mean the end of privilege. Victory of the Bolsheviki would mean the end of Russia.
That we knew. I remember one evening at our country place, I was running down the lawn to call my mother to tell her that supper was ready and I suddenly stopped and there was all the beauty around. The roses, the trees, the park, the lawns.
It was a beautiful place. It was sunset. And I stopped and said, all this disappears, all this will be gone. It was the one moment I remember that feeling of fear that the whole world of which I was part would disappear. And it would.
In October 1917, Lenin encouraged an insurrection against the provisional government that had replaced the fallen Tsar. The end came at the Tsar's old winter palace. I ran up the carpeted stairway. In the very first room I saw soldiers standing with their rifles ready. I shouted, down, put down your weapons.
Defenders just dropped their weapons and left. We saw the fires. In the night. And then, after five or six days, the shooting died. There were no more guns.
So we knew it was over. And we knew that the Bolsheviki had won. With Lenin's victory, Russia quickly withdrew from the war.
But the Germans had seen their plan succeed only to find that they now faced a new opponent. It was clear to most Americans now that Germany regarded them as an enemy too. President Woodrow Wilson resisted the demands to get involved for a while.
But by 1917, the Germans had increased their attacks on unarmed ships. And then they brazenly urged Mexico to invade the United States. The president felt he had no other option.
On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson stood anxiously before a special session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war. He hoped it would be the war to end all wars. He said, it is a fearful thing for me to try to lead a great peaceful people into war. It could be one of the most terrible and disastrous of all wars.
But let me tell you this, right is more precious than peace. The idea of a last great war and being part of it. It was very, very strong.
Strong appeal. And it certainly influenced me a great deal. I said, we're never going to see another war. This is the time to see it. In the summer of 1917, American troops landed in France, returning the favor of Lafayette, the French soldier who had fought with America during the Revolutionary War.
One of the officers, he said it loud enough for everybody to hear it. Lafayette! He was waving his hand.
Lafayette! Lafayette! I didn't know who Lafayette was. Lafayette!
Lafayette! We're here! He was coming to the end of our men. And when the Americans decided to have a go, I was absolutely, I could have said all right. They were untouched by the anxiety and doubt that had afflicted everybody else by that stage.
They were, they were American, you know, they were what Americans were supposed to be. supposed to be. They were enthusiastic.
They were also badly armed, poorly trained, and like the Europeans before them, completely unprepared for what lay ahead of them. The train came through from the front. And we got to go aboard, of course, which we did as soon as we could get on it, and ask the guys how it was up there, what's going on, and what do you do, and it was a hospital train. I can see these poor kids, like me, youngsters.
With a leg gone, or two arms gone. Well this was a kind of a cold water treatment all of a sudden to realize what war was like. You grew up very quickly in surroundings like that.
It was no longer freshman studies. It was a real world. By 1918, with thousands of Americans... Americans pouring into France every day.
The Germans decided they had to do something massive. In March 1918, the German army tried its last major gamble, the last major offensive on the Western Front, and it was successful. It was a remarkable moment.
The Western Front moved. The war of movement finally arrived. And after years of impasse, the Germans suddenly threatened to overwhelm the Allies and actually capture the French capital, Paris. The Germans had a fire.
They called it sweeping fire. Everything up on earth got hit. They either were wounded or died. The threat to Paris was so severe that a million people simply left the city.
The Germans got to within 30 miles. At this point, these still semi-trained American divisions were thrown into the bath, and along with the French, managed to stop the German draft. The Germans had put everything into this last desperate effort, and when it was over, they were finally spent.
Along the Western Front that autumn, the focus shifted from war to peace. On the 10th of November, the Kaiser was forced into exile by his own government, a victim of the war he had helped to start. This struck me so deeply that I can tell you I had a little picture of the Kaiser in my room. What did I do? I put a black tie around the picture to show my utter sorrow for this tremendous change in history.
And finally, at the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month, November 1918, the Germans formally surrendered. And suddenly, the guns stopped, and it was a terrible shock. It was as if somebody had hit me over the head with a big pan.
That sudden hush, after four years of continual gunfire, had become part of our life. There seemed to be something missing. We didn't believe it, you know. One of the greatest calamities in human history was over, and America's veterans began to return home.
The trouble was that having made the world a safer place, American veterans returned to a very uncertain future. The economy that had boomed during the war was now shrinking. Factories were laying off workers, just as veterans came looking for jobs. We had no help to find a job, no grants to go to school, to finish our college education. When you took your discharge, that was it.
You had no more connection with the government or they with you. You were on your own. In the winter of 1918, Europe was a disaster. The empires of Germany, Austria, and Russia had been shattered, leaving destitute nations in their wake. Even the victors, Britain and France, grappled with ruin and rage.
In all, nine million men had died. Every family had lost someone. A father, a son, a brother, a cousin, a friend. For years the wounded in the main haunted the streets of every city in Europe and even those who had escaped physical harm were forever changed by the Great War.
Sometimes I'm thinking about the war two and three o'clock in the morning. My brother being hit. my best friend being killed.
I wonder while I'm blinded, Ben, how is it that I'm blind here and they're all dead? Well, I lost all my youth. I lost the best years of my life, you might say. And I lost so many friends.
It was all lost for me. I mean, a few medals. Don't make up for that, you know. Nobody wins in a war.
They lost. We didn't win. Into this chaos, traveling to a post-war peace conference in the French town of Versailles, came President Woodrow Wilson.
With him, President Wilson brought his so-called 14 points, which called for liberty and self-determination for all, even the enemy. The people of Britain and France greeted Wilson ecstatically, for he represented the hope of democracy. But the British and French governments were interested in revenge. The Versailles Peace Treaty is the politics of hatred. It was the encapsulation of every mean-spirited element on the Allied side.
The new Soviet Union was completely excluded from the peace conference, and not one victorious power was ready to give up a colony. Sowing the seeds of future discord, Britain and France added several colonies by carving up the Middle East. As for the Germans, they were forced to accept conditions that would humiliate and impoverish them for years.
In the end, Versailles was about punishment, not peacemaking. In many ways, all those men who died, nine million men, died for nothing. Almost before it was over then, it was clear that the legacy of this war would be anything but the end of all wars. Within 30 years, these same nations would all fight again, over precisely the same ground. The war had shown technology's dark side, but dark or bright technology was here to stay.
And in the decade that followed, an electric pulse of change ran through America. We'll see that on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. Thank you for joining us.
I'm Peter Jennings.