America's Century w Peter Jennings Shell shock

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country

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created

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intro

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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

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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

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"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

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"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."

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[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"

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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

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Even the victors Britain and France

grappled with ruin and rage.

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In all nine million men had died.

Every family had lost someone, a father, a

son, a brother,

a cousin, a friend

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For years the wounded and the maimed

haunted the streets of every city in

Europe.

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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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