Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Great War

Season 4 Episode 9 | 26m 1sVideo has Closed Captions

Join us as we discover how the First World War impacted the settlers of the Great Plains.

How did the first of the world wars impact those who settled on the Great Plains, how did western Kansas serve the effort, and in what way did the conflict alter the industry of agriculture.

05/12/2024

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

Cottonwood Connection is a local public television program presented by Smoky Hills PBS

Cottonwood Connection

In War Time: The Great War

Season 4 Episode 9 | 26m 1sVideo has Closed Captions

How did the first of the world wars impact those who settled on the Great Plains, how did western Kansas serve the effort, and in what way did the conflict alter the industry of agriculture.

05/12/2024

Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback

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[Music] In the first half of the 20th century, major international events impacted communities on the plains. This episode of Cottonwood Connections is the beginning of a three-part series, examining the era of the World Wars, the role rural communities played, and the long-term impact of these global conflicts on life today. [Music] In the early 1900s, the first decade of the 20th century, things had changed. Things were pretty good in 1900s. There was a lot of agricultural changes, and as much as they were getting the heavy machinery, they called them traction machines, or tractors, or stuff, but they were mostly ran by steam, and they could hook, like, plows on the back of them that might have 16 shares on them, instead of mule and one share, and that was okay.

And then World War I hit. Hi, I'm Laura Vogt.

I am the Vice President of Education and Interpretation at the National World War I Museum and Memorial. In history textbooks, we start and end eras on an exact year, 1900 to 2000. But that's rarely how history really works. It tends to be these major impactful moments that introduce this whole new era. And when you really look at the 20th century, it's not 1900 that starts this new era for the United States and for the rest of the world.

It really is 1914. Before 1914, Europe was the center of the world, economically, politically, and culturally in a lot of ways.

It dominated the world through its empires and its economic power.

But it was also a continent beset by deep-seated and growing rivalries. In Europe, there were major empires, and they were growing and some were contracting. And the peoples who were located in these empires, many of them wanted to have some level of what Woodrow Wilson really later coins as self-determination. The Russian Czar was struggling to maintain his throne. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Balkans was seemingly falling apart. The Ottoman Empire and the Middle East appeared to be on the edge of total collapse. In this, we find a group in what is the Austro-Hungarian Empire who come together, the Black Hand, and they assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In the hopes that that, like other regional conflict, would ultimately get European diplomats to come together and help ceed them out from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It's not at all what happens.

Instead, a system of alliances draws nation upon nation into war against each other. When Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, Russia moves against Austria-Hungary, and the alliance structure kicks in.

Germany supports Austria-Hungary.

France supports Russia. The German military plans to avoid a two-front war call for an invasion of France via Belgium. And that brings Britain into the war.

And now it's not a European war, it's a world war. You have Japan that becomes involved, Australia that becomes involved, different African nations, later nations, many of them colonies at the time, that become involved. But it cascades into this moment that precipitates change all over the world. How we farm, how we cook, women getting the right to vote, the shift in colonies. There were so many things that were just right there upon the cusp. It changes how we fight in wars, and it changes who we are as a military inside the United States. The United States is involved in the war from day one, even though it remains neutral. All of the powers wanted to trade with the U.S. Only some of them could. Britain's control of the sea meant that American trade relations with Germany ended very quickly. But Britain and France sought to buy things in the U.S. to sustain their war effort. They bought weapons and ammunition, but they also bought things like food, oil, raw materials. France and England, a lot of them were coming to America to buy horses and mules because they still had cavalry and horse-drawn artillery and stuff like that. And so America got involved as a de facto ally of Britain and France, even though the American people wanted to stay neutral. But people like Kansas farmers wanted to sell food to London and Paris. If you can feed your soldier, you can win the war. So America, and particularly the heartland, was very important to allied nations and to others who might be able to get that agricultural produce. Because when you think of the battles of the First World War, when you think of Verdun and the Somme, those are actually areas of French agriculture. So these spaces that would have been ripe for food production are absolutely obliterated. European food production collapses because European states mobilize farmers to fight. And most fertilizers in 1914 are based on nitrates. The same thing explosives are based on. And ammunition had a higher priority than food production, which meant that Britain and France, and even neutral states in Europe, needed to buy a lot of food. And the prices of commodities such as wheat just soared. In fact, I don't remember the specifics of it, but I know that wheat got between $2.20 a bushel to $2.40 a bushel at times. Well, that's the equivalent in the mid-1980s of $40 per bushel. Kansas farmers made a lot of money on the war. They brought a lot of new land into production because of it. By 1916, every acre that could grow food, even if it wasn't very good land, went into production. Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on a platform of staying out of the war. This changes in early 1917 because the Germans are getting desperate. They're under a brutal blockade by Britain to hit back the German government-approved unrestricted submarine warfare. World War I was the first U-boat war. The Germans relied on U-boats to try and interdict trade going to Britain and France. They used them to sink troop ships, but they also tried to starve the British and French war economies. By denying them raw materials they needed to sustain war production. Early in the war, German submarines had sunk any ship approaching Britain, but it pulled back after they sank ships like the Lusitania, and the American public opinion reacted viscerally against it. But that was early in the war. In 1917, the Germans go back to it, and they begin sinking neutral ships. Many of them are, in fact, legitimate military targets. But American opinion views American ships engaged in trade as sacrosanct. So when the Germans sink them in January-February March of 1917, American public opinion turns rapidly to war. It was aided by a brilliant British information operation. The British had intercepted a telegram that the Germans had sent to their ambassador in Mexico City, instructing him to offer the Mexican government a military alliance against the United States. They were promised Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Mexican government, to their credit, responded with like horror. This was an insane idea from their perspective. But the British had the telegram. They waited until American opinion was angry at the loss of American lives on the high seas. And then they released it. The combination was electric. It turned American public opinion, and it forced the Wilson administration to ask for a declaration of war, which was granted with overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. So in April 1917, the United States enters the war. The U.S. Navy has a major effect immediately. The large U.S. Navy was probably the third most powerful fleet in the world at the time behind Britain and Germany, and a large destroyer force, which helped the British run effective anti-submarine operations in the Atlantic. And fairly quickly, the Allies will get control of German U-boat operations. We moved very quickly to mobilize from what had been a standing army of 120,000 in 1914, to 4 million who are serving in 1918. In Kansas, they send over 63,000 soldiers to go to the front lines and to fight. A lot of recruiting being done, I mean, soldiers coming. We have photographs here at Fort Riley of civilians getting off the trains in their civilian garb and lining up and then being issued their army uniforms and gear. The problem is, since we were such a small army at that time, that it took quite a while for us, even our industrial base, to gear up to equip those soldiers. Rural America rallies in a number of ways. One, of course, is agricultural production for the war. But you also have a surge of voluntary organizations, fundraising drives to buy war bonds. Farmers' leagues work together to buy bonds, encourage people to buy bonds. Churches, for Lutheran churches in particular, showing ways that they can support the war was a way to prove to their fellow Americans that even though they were predominantly German-American, they were Americans before they were Germans. The U.S. had a PR problem that they had to face with World War I. Our number one immigrant group from Europe was Germany. We had hundreds of thousands of German-Americans speaking German, teaching their children in German and attending German churches and services here in the U.S. And Kansas is no exception. We have incredibly high rates of German settlement in Kansas. Now, there are a bunch of factors that are contributing to the loss of German around World War I. We see very steep declines in German. One is the reorganization of school systems. Another one is competition in the printing presses. So a lot of German publications start to fall off as well. Certainly stigma likely played some sort of role in that. We see all sorts of language tricks occurring during this time. We see language play where people are trying to speak away from German. So instead of having sauerkraut, you'll have victory cabbage. This is a moment where a lot of Lutheran churches change the language of service. They stop singing hymns in German. Some German-American churches are reported for espionage because people hear songs in German and think they're praising the Kaiser or Hindenburg. In the most egregious cases, they were actually singing "Silent Night.

" There was an immediate push by the United States government and the United States Army to create divisions that they could send overseas. And here at Fort Riley, we were one of the 16 major contonements. We were actually one of the largest contonements in training soldiers. Most of the soldiers that were sent to Fort Riley came from Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri. Camp Funston was the central focus for that training that was being done. At any one time, it would have around 50,000 soldiers there. Camp Funston grew up overnight. Thousands of wooden buildings went up. Contractors worked 12-hour days, 6 days a week. And during the war years, 1917, 1918, the division trained the 89th Division, and that division was sent overseas. And then there were two other divisions in training at that time, the 10th and the 90th. Now the 89th went over and served in all of the major campaigns that the United States Army was involved in. Same with the 1st Division. It was the 1st Division that was sent overseas. It was initially called the 1st Expeditionary Division. 1917, historically, 1917 was not a good year for the Allies, I mean. They had witnessed 1916, and the French at the Battle of Verdun took 500,000 casualties. The battle lasted from February to December. And so then the British, in order to help alleviate the pressure off of the French, launched an offensive in the Somme region of France, in northeastern France. They took 60,000 casualties one day, in one day. And so they had a manpower issue, and they were really, really insistent about the United States. Okay, you're in the war. Now, Wilson required Pershing to have a specific U.S. Army and not feed those troops out into penny packets, you know. Use the American soldiers' replacements. And so it took a little while longer for us to convince our allies that we were going to have an organic American Army there, and also have that organic American Army trained for the type of warfare that occurred in World War I. World War I is really a 19th century ideology for many of the military commanders up and against a 20th century technology. The tank, the plane. Well, my name's Kevin Drewelow.

I'm the director of the Combat Air Museum here in Topeka. We've got a nice collection of replica aircraft here.

They've all flown. And it starts from the very beginning, like this airplane behind me, this Curtis Jenny. Some American pilots learned to fly in this American-built airplane, but most American pilots learned to fly on British and French trainers once they got to Europe. Well, the French at that stage were clearly technically way ahead of most of the other nations. So any of the American forces that went over to fight in World War I on an aviation basis were using French craft, even using some of the British planes. And you can probably see some examples behind me in our museum. In fact, we pride ourselves in being the largest display of World War I replicas in the Midwest. But most of those planes were very, very flimsy. I've always been amazed at how quickly things developed in the short time of World War I. Only 11 years after the Wright brothers flew, the very first battles in the air were, first they'd fly by each other and wave at each other, then someone brought a pistol along and then a rifle. And then they stuck a machine gun on, but you couldn't shoot through the propeller until someone developed a synchronizing device. Then it was two machine guns firing through the propeller and went on and on from there. Behind me here you see this wooden, Jenny fuselage. This is how most airplanes began in World War I. By the end of the war, the Germans had built the first all-metal single-wing ground attack airplane, armored, and this astonishing developments in the space of four years. My grandfather served in the Kansas Army National Guard.

He was in the 130th field artillery. And in 1916, he was enlisted and had the pleasure of going on the Mexican Punitive Expedition. That was the first time American military forces ever took a flying machine with them. They took some earlier versions of the Jenny with them and went into Mexico chasing Pancho Villa. My grandfather told me he got a ride in the Jenny one time. I wish I'd been old enough to have asked him more questions. But here's this Kansas National Guard soldier getting a ride in one of the country's first military flying machines. Later he commissioned and went to France and again as a Kansas National Guardsman serving in World War I in France. My name is Ed Gerhardt and I'm president of the Museum of the Kansas National Guard here in Topeka, Kansas. As World War I started, Kansas had a couple of infantry regiments like the first Kansas. They were mobilized in 1917 and sent to Camp Donofan, Oklahoma, which is now a part of Fort Sill, which is an artillery base. From there they were combined with the Missouri National Guard and the 35th Infantry Division was formed. The 35th Infantry Division, which was, there were about 15,000 in that division and then there was another, some Army Reserve type units that were also sent. Pretty much the whole Kansas Guard went to France. World War I became a very patriotic thing because it was a foreign war. So there was a lot of home support. All sorts of war bonds go to the post offices and buy war stamps. And that's when also the Victory Gardens came in. They were popular in World War II, but Victory Gardens in World War I were the same. So you could grow the stuff and eat it at home. You produce more in your garden so you could eat it. So the wheat and the meat and stuff that the soldiers needed could be shipped out. Studley had what they called the home guard, but they had officers. They had cooks. They had mess people and quarter masters and the whole thing. They had uniforms and some not, but they were marching and drilling and studying the home guard. So it was a very serious thing. The flu of 1918, 1919 didn't actually start in Spain. It is only because of journalists who were in a neutral nation who had free speech. They had a free media. So they put that information out into their papers. From there, history has written this as the Spanish flu. But in tracking down where it began, some say that it might have actually begun in Europe, which makes a great deal of sense, as millions of men are together in trenches. One of the other possible candidates is a large British hospital that was set up behind the Western Front in 1915, 1916. Millions of men are shipping from Asia, around Africa, up into the fighting areas of the Middle East. One possible candidate occurred in China. It's believed that those Chinese laborers were actually hired by the British government. And inside the United States, the one space was at Camp Funston. The epidemic at Fort Riley had actually two iterations. There was one in the late spring of 1918. And it was not as virulent. The second one that struck in the late summer, early fall of 1918 was much more virulent and spread across the globe. The end of the war took leaders even more by surprise than the beginning of the war had. No one in any of the Allied governments expected to win in 1918. They thought the war would last until 1919, but the German army began disintegrating in September and October of 1918. The two significant factors, one is that the failed Ludendorff Offensive of 1918, the losses that were taken there by the German army, and also the amount of American soldiers coming over, the just incredible amount of American soldiers that were actually put into the fighting front. Losses mounted, the German government realized it couldn't win, and the German army told the Kaiser he needed to sue for peace. The Social Democrats, the socialists, allied with the army and conservatives in the government to proclaim a republic in order to forestall a communist revolution. They forced the Kaiser to advocate and leave the country. The new republic asked Woodrow Wilson for peace under his 14 points. They asked for it under the 14 points, but the Allies grant it as an armistice, which is a ceasefire pending a peace treaty. And that peace treaty would have to be negotiated amongst the victorious Allied powers. The United States, yes, but also France, which had done the most fighting in the war, Britain, which had paid for the war, Italy, which had lost 600,000 men in the war, Japan, which was one of the Allies, and the United States. The spring of 1919, and the Allies meet in Versailles just outside of Paris. The National World War I Museum and Memorial was formed as an idea really two weeks after the armistice occurred for the World War, when Kansas Citians came together and they wanted to create a memorial for those who lived through and those who sacrificed their lives. In this catastrophic moment that changes the world, the mission of the National World War I Museum and Memorial is to understand, remember, and interpret the World War. It is the foundation of the 20th and the 21st centuries. You can't open up the figurative first page of any news source today and not see something that is impacted because of this timeframe. So understanding this history, it helps us be better citizens today.

It helps us better understand our art. It changes literature.

It changes how we produce our food.

It changes the wine that is made in France. It is this crucible of time that really affects so many things, not only inside the United States, but around the world and makes it a really important timeframe of history to be sure to study. Join us for our next episode as we take a look at how the aftermath of World War I impacted life on the plains, how rural communities responded, and how the stage was set for a second global conflict. [Singing] [Singing]