The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917

I was talking to my Hoover colleague and noted diplomatic historian Philip Zelikow, and he mentioned this recent book of his; I asked him for a quick summary of his conclusions, and he was kind enough to put one together for me:

For five months, from August 1916 until the end of January 1917, leaders secretly struggled to end the Great War. Most of their struggle was out of public sight. It is still little understood today.

The spotlights have long been trained on how the war started. Scholars have minutely studied every move and countermove in the “July crisis” of 1914. Few have noticed or discussed why the war did not end in late 1916 and early 1917.

In many ways, these choices not to end the war are more interesting than the ones to start it. In July 1914, it was hard to see all the consequences of the choices. Time and options were extremely compressed. Between August 1916 and January 1917, the leaders had months to work and the stakes were tragically visible.

Few know that the German government secretly sought peace and pleaded for Wilson to mediate a peace conference. This was a direct move made at the top, coordinated with allies and key political figures in Germany.

Few know that Wilson entirely recognized the significance of this move and sought to act on it as quickly and emphatically as he could. He placed it at the top of his agenda as soon as he was reelected. Wilson also knew he had practically absolute leverage—mainly financial—over the Allied ability to continue the war. Given the political climate in the warring countries, much rested on the Americans, to give the peacemakers in all the warring capitals the face-saving way out.

Few know that the divided British coalition government was intensely, secretly, debating its own growing pessimism about the war and its imminent bankruptcy in the dollars to sustain it. These debates were quickened by a still deeper layer of secret knowledge. British intelligence had learned of the secret German peace move.

Few know any of these things because, to outsiders then and most historians now, it seemed that nothing happened. About four months after the initial German peace move, Wilson sent around an ill-crafted note that was a misfire. More than a month after that, in late January 1917, Wilson gave a well-received speech calling for a “peace without victory.” But his speech still made no concrete diplomatic move.

Then, just as Wilson thought he was getting his peace effort truly underway, he seemed to run out of time. By then, five months after they had initiated the effort, the Germans—their view of Wilson poisoned by false information about why Wilson had delayed—had given up on American mediation.

Wilson was stunned. He thought, he confided to his adviser, that “within a month the belligerents would be talking peace.” In Berlin, the advocates of military solutions were back in charge. Yet their zeal for military victory rescued their most determined enemies from imminent breakdown.

During those five months of speculation, arguments, and choices behind closed doors, the future of the war, and the world, hung in the balance.

The French historian, Georges-Henri Soutou, calls this period of late 1916 and early 1917, and the flurry of efforts to bring the war to an end, the “tournant,” the great turning. He is right.

“The transition from 1916 to 1917 marked a decisive turning point in the war,” writes a German historian, Jörn Leonhard. “For the historian,” another good one observed, “the autumn and winter of 1916 provide clearly a division in the course of the First World War. More to the point, many contemporary thinkers as well as the great suffering mass of Europe, saw events in the same way.” The intense interest in peace possibilities, though much of it was in secret, arose from a deep, shared sense that a set of trends were coming together that, by the latter half of 1916, were bringing their societies, their world, to the edge of a precipice.

Historians are rightly cautious about ‘lost opportunity’ arguments. In this case, though, the argument is inverted. The Great War was on track to wind down during 1917, if only because the Allies had run out of the dollars to continue their existing war effort. It turns out that the only way the war could have continued would be if America joined it, and then financed it. And America, and its president, were determined not to do that.

Six months before America entered the war, few Americans (or British leaders) predicted it would. Even in January 1917, urged to look to the readiness of the armed forces, Woodrow Wilson, who had just been reelected with the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” turned sharply on his adviser. “There will be no war,” the president said. “This country does not intend to become involved in this war.”

The surprise then is that the war did continue, because America joined and financed it! And the even darker irony is that all this happened because of the failure of a secret peace process.

This book is the secret understory of why and how America’s historic neutrality came to an end. There is a public story, a debate over German submarine warfare, that is well understood. But behind that is the secret story. The Germans resumed their full U-Boat war because they decided their peace option had failed. The Americans faced the end of neutrality because their peace diplomacy had failed.

The 1916-17 phase of peacemaking was a unique opportunity. Because after that, the British and French had America on their side. That sustained them, quite literally. In their darkest days, later in 1917 and in 1918, the rising American support always gave them hope.

German interest in peace also flickered. In March 1917, the Russian revolution began. The Russian war effort slowly collapsed, easing some major problems for Germany and its allies. It gave them hope to carry on too, until well into 1918.

The winter of 1916-17 was pivotal for the whole history of the United States. In April 1917, when the United States of America declared war on the German Empire, the United States was nearing its 141st birthday. In those 141 years, the United States government had never sent a single soldier or sailor to fight on the continent of Europe.

During the next year and a half, the United States, then a country of about 100 million people, would send two million of them across the Atlantic Ocean to war. Neither Europe nor the United States would ever be the same.

As the war continued, what was profoundly damaged most of all, beyond the countless individual human tragedies, were the future prospects for core regions of the world—Europe and the Middle East. Like a patient ravaged by illness, its resistance more and more compromised, every further year of this terrible warfare lowered the odds for a healthy recovery.

As terrible as the war had been until the end of 1916, the conflicts of 1917-18 pushed Europe and the Middle East over a precipice. By the end of 1918, when the armistice stopped the shooting in western Europe, other wars were already well underway, including the revolution and civil war in Russia that began in 1917-18, the violent decomposition of the Austro-Hungarian domains, and the wars that tore apart the former domains of the Ottoman empire. The regions slid irreversibly into years of violent torment that continued on into 1923.

These further wars in central and eastern Europe, Asia, and in the Middle East inflicted some of the worst traumas of the whole era. The scars and burdens—psychic, financial, physical, and political—crushed ideals, dimmed hopes, and infected European society with every conceivable social and political virus.

Two roads diverged. Both were uncertain. One led toward peace; the other toward a wider war. The secret battles to end the war were not a blur of explosions and gunfire, the battles that kill thousands. They were the quieter, more secret kind, that determine the fate of millions.

This is the story of how a small number of leaders faced their choice. These leaders were mainly in London, Washington, and Berlin. What did they think would happen down each road? What did they care most about most? How did they try to find some practical way forward, one way or another?

Some rose to the occasion. Others did not. It is a story of civic courage, and its absence, of awful responsibility, and of how some evaded it. It was one of those times reveal a person’s deepest strengths and weaknesses, in ability and in character.

“Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!” the German ambassador to the United States pleaded, in November 1916. He was right. This is a story of how some tried.

Fascinating.

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