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Politics & Prose
November 29, 2006
Soon the last of the "doughboys" of 1917-1918 will be gone. What did America's entry into the Great War achieve? by Jack Beatty War Disposes
In 1918 they numbered 4.7 million; now, a Veteran’s Day survey conducted by the Scripps-Howard News Service found, only twelve remain. Since the youngest, Frank Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia, (who lied about his age to join the Army) is 105, 2007 will likely see the passing of the last American veteran of World War One. My father, John J. Beatty, served in that war; he is the second head-bandaged sailor on the left seen in the photo at right. A German U-boat had just torpedoed his ship, the USS Mount Vernon, in the Bay of Biscay, killing thirty-six of his crewmates, the war’s highest toll of casualties for a single Navy vessel. The Mount Vernon, a former German ocean liner converted into a troop transport, seen in this photo, did not sink; the torpedo blew a hole in her port side but left her boilers intact. Behind the protective smoke screen laid down by the destroyer seen distantly in the photo below, it returned to Brest, the American base in Brittany, under its own steam.
My father joined the Navy to stay out of the Army—not to "make the world safe for democracy," nor win a "peace without victory," nor create a post-war "concert of nations" that would secure "the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments" and protect "the rights and liberties of small nations" and establish perpetual peace upon a "universal dominion of right." Those were President Wilson’s war-redeeming goals. For them, he told a joint session of Congress on April 5, 1917, called to hear his request for a declaration of war, he had led "this great peaceful people into war, the most terrible and disastrous of wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance…." He ended his speech, often ranked with Lincoln’s second inaugural, on a note of heart-breaking idealism: "To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other." Unlike the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who lost a son in the war, or the opposition leader Bonar Law, who lost two sons, Wilson did not spend his family’s blood in the "war to end all wars." The 114,000 U.S. dead and 205,000 U.S. wounded spent the blood. Wilson’s idealism was heartbreaking because their sacrifice, like that of the U.S. troops dying and suffering today in Iraq, was worse than in vain. Rather than peace without victory, U.S. intervention assured a victory without peace. Rather than end war, it sowed history with the "most terrible of all wars." Jack Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly and the editor of Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, which was named one of the top ten books of 2001 by Business Week. His previous books are The World According to Peter Drucker (1998) and The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1992).
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