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country
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Pier 54 New York City.
On May the 1st 1915 2000 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"
EDA 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
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On her last day at sea the Lusitania was
approaching the Irish coast
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"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.
There was a terrific bang. Dad knew what it was.
I mean that he knew darn well that
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 and they
were begging to be taken in we would have
capsized and everybody would have gone
down. 1,200 drowned. I think.....There was
more drowned than was saved"
Among those who drowned were a hundred
and twenty-eight 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 began in
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 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
[Applause]
In the German city of Coblenz
twelve-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
the crowd of all other 18,19 and 20 year
olds and we thought was going to be a
tremendous tremendous lark to go and knock
the Kaiser off his throne, you see"
"Everyone, everyone thought the war would
be over Christmas and they really badly
wanted to get to France to get in the
fighting"
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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
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"Nobody in Europe expected these appalling
casualties and when they came they were
utterly crushing
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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
then died in tens of thousands in a few
weeks
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Nothing like that had ever happened
before to any country in Europe and
moreover this was the flower of German
youth. They were they the best educated
young men. They were from middle-class
families almost exclusively and they had
no expectation at all 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. The object being to
makes money and and good business
Everything was very pleasant indeed"
" It's hard for people who weren't
there to realize how enormously
the world has changed. On New Year's Day
President Wilson had open house at the
White House. And he would go out
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on the lawn and we went down once
I was a little kid and we went down on the
lawn and 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"
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But certainly America was changing. The
pace of 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 dollars it was the first car priced
within reach of ordinary Americans
"We played baseball in the streets.
There was no problem of 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
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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 had to take me
out of the movie house." As moviemaking
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
and 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 just eighteen)
to go."
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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
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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 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 substantial Black
labor pool of the American South. " Black
newspapers, we went down south and told
them 'come on up to Chicago with us
we'll get you a job and you don't have
to stay down here and be lynched and
burned'" " My relatives, aunt, uncles
cousins came North and were able
to get into factories and steel mill 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
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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. 60 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
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"Someone said to us excitedly" Jack Smith"
I said what about him? he said" he's dead.
he's been shot"
The first one of the battalion to be
shot. I said " what?"
" Yes he's dead. Been shot
Put his head too far over and a sniper
got him" and that caused a bit of a
sensation amongst the lads. They
thought 'well this is not exactly what we
come for' (mumbling) from that day
onwards while we were in the trenches
it was three killed, four killed, five
killed, 20 killed, a hundred killed. 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 on the ground and only showing our
heads outside to fight and to feed"
"We'd been
there about six months. Covered in mud
Wet through practically all day
Absolutely chewed up by lice and we'd
say "and to think we wanted to come to
this hole" I said "yes, we didn't know"
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Every so often one side or the other
seized a few hundred yards of territory
only to be forced back again
surrendering what had costs 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
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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
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"There were
just a splintered trunks of trees, there's
a quagmire of the shell holes
and no ,no grass. It was just like a
lunar landscape
really"
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"At night the rats, they grew to
enormous sizes feeding on the bone and
the corpses. It was impossible
to get to 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 was 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. (NOTE) By now the machine gun
had been perfected to the point that a
single soldier could command as much
firepower as 40 riflemen
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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
you swore that bush was somebody creeping
up on you. The perfect soldier for that
war would have been somebody with no
imagination whatsoever.
We all had too much imagination"
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"So many men who had been through these
dangers and anxieties. Their life broken
They were the victims of shell shock. You
know there is a breaking point for most
people. For anybody really. Robbed of all
humanity and courage and everything else
that 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
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The river Somme in 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 would last an
entire week
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The Battle of the Somme was about to
begin.
"There must be a thousand gods if there
was one. It was a terrible roar from
morning to night but the foolish officers
said "tomorrow boys will be over the top
and don't worry" he says.
"There'll be no trenches there. Our shells
have blown them to pieces. There will 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."
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"The Germans after the shelling, they
simply come out of the dugouts,
grabbed their machine guns and then
waited for the Tommies."
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They just simply shot them down .
like cutting down grain. They didn't
get 200 feet. 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.
Poet volunteer Alan Seeger was killed
on July the 4th. On the same morning Ted
Francis waited for the signal to go
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Officers are down below us in the
trenches with a whistle and when they
blow that whistle we'd got to dash out of
the trenches and make for this German
trench and (mumbling) still
four or five minutes but we look at each
other and say I would also do this. Some
were visibly shaken. Some were crying and
of course when the whistle went off we
had to scramble over."
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The Battle of the Somme would come to
define the futility of the First World
War
It went on for six more months at a 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 a hundred and fifty
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 Saint 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. The man who spoke for a socialist
movement known to Russians as the
Bolsheviks. His given name was Vladimir
Ulianov. He's better remembered as
Vladimir Lenin. Sascha Bryansk
served as Lenin's bodyguard
"He spoke with a lot of gestures and
rushed 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
[Applause]
"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 here
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. That was the one
moment I remembered that feeling
of fear that the whole world of which
I was part of was 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 " put down your weapons"
The 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"
[Applause]
With Lennon's victory, Russia quickly
withdrew from the war. But the Germans
had seen their plans 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 the 2nd 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 was very
very strong,strong appeal and
it certainly influenced me a great deal."
I said"if 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 fought with
America during the Revolutionary War
"One of the officers, he said it loud
enough for everybody to hear and
he was waving his hands.
"Lafayette, Lafayette" I didn't know who
Lafayette was
"Lafayette we are here"
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"It was coming to the end of our bit and
when the Americans decided to have a go,
I was absolutely... I said "Hurrah"
"They were untouched by
the anxiety or doubts that
had afflicted everybody else. By that
stage they were, they were" American"
you know. They were "American" They
were what the Americans were 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.
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The train came through from the Front.
and we got to go aboard . Of course
which we did it as soon as possible
We got on it and we asked the guys
" how was up there what's going on?"
and "what are you doing?" and it
was a hospital train. I can see these
poor kids like me. Youngsters, but the
leg gone or two arms gone. "Well
this is kind of a cold water treatment.
All of a sudden to realize what war was
like. You grew up very quickly in
surroundings lie that. This is no longer
Freshmen Studies. It was the real world"
By 1918 with thousands of 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. Its
last major offensive on the Western Front
It was successful.
"It was a remarkable moment. The Western
Front moved. A 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 upon earth got hit. They 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 battle and along with
the French, managed to stop the German
drop."
The Germans had put
everything into this last desparate
effort and when it was it was over they
were finally spent. Along the Western
Front that Autumn, the focus shifted
from war to peace. On the 10th of
Nov the Kaiser was forced into
exile by his own government; a
victim of the war he had helped to
start. " This cut me so deeply that
I can't tell you. I had a little picture
of the Kaiser in my room and 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 eleventh
day, of the eleventh month November 1918
the Germans formally surrendered.
"And suddenly the guns stopped and there
was a terrible shock as if somebody had
hit me over the head with a big pan
[Music]
"And that sudden hush after four years of
continual gunfire had become part of our
lives.There seemed to be something missing
we didn't believe it you know."
[Music]
[Applause]
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One of the greatest calamities in human
history was over and America's veterans
began to return home.
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The trouble was that having made the
world a safer place American veterans
returned to a very uncertain future.The
economy that the 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"
[Music]
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
[Music]
Even the victors Britain and France
grappled with ruin and rage.
[Music]
In all nine million men had died.
Every family had lost someone, a father, a
son, a brother,
a cousin, a friend
[Music]
For years the wounded and the maimed
haunted the streets of every city in
Europe.
[Music]
And even those who had escaped physical
harm were forever changed by the Great
War
"Sometimes I'm thinking about the war
two,, three o'clock in the morning. My
brother being hit. My best friend killed
and I wonder, while I'm lying in bed
" how is it that I'm lying here
and they're all dead?""
"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 loss
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 Fourteen 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"
[Music]
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
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