Lunch with President Wilson

How Woodrow Wilson failed to end the First World War in 1916.

De: Michael Bennett

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The First World War is often characterized as a war of annihilation, which would end only when one side was either morally or materially exhausted. Such a description can be applied to the fighting that raged across Eastern Europe between Germany and Austria, the Central Powers, and Russia but by 1916, that conflict was, to all intents and purposes over, after having suffered a series of defeats, St Petersburg lost the ability to mount any further large-scale offensives.

With Germany’s eastern border secure, Germany’s Reich Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg recognized that the organized slaughter of trench warfare with Britain and France, on the Western Front, had become a strategic irrelevance who's continuation risked the blockade being imposed by the Royal Navy slowly wearing down Germany's ability to fight to the point where Berlin might be forced to sue for peace. Bethmann saw another, bleaker scenario; the inevitable defeat he believed would follow an American military intervention, provoked by the return to unrestricted submarine warfare being demanded by Germany's military leadership.

Recognising that only a negotiated peace would secure Germany’s place in Europe, during the summer of 1916, Bethmann persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm II to agree to a request to President Wilson to issue a call for mediation. The military leadership's support was conditional; unless it was in place by the 1st of February 1917, they demanded a return to unrestricted submarine warfare, abandoned in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania had brought the United States to the edge of a declaration of war.

On the 1st of September 1916, the German Ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, delivered an extraordinary message to President Wilson's advisor, Edward House: Germany wanted to end the war and requested that the President issue a call for mediation.

There is nothing in Wilson’s two presidential terms that approaches the significance of the period between the delivery of Berlin's request for mediation, on the 1st of September 1916 and the decision to break off diplomatic relations with Germany, taken on the 1st of February 1917. Between those dates the opportunity for a negotiated settlement was allowed to slip away and the United States‘ intervention in a war that Wilson had been determined to avoid became almost inevitable. Time and again the narrative leads away from consideration of the political reality facing those in Berlin, London and Washington, who sought a negotiated settlement and back to Wilson, his personality and dysfunctional relationship with House. This is the story of those five crucial month, at the heart of which lies a failure of character rather than intellect, told through two fictional interviews with Wilson, set in 1922.