The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

  oscssw ,

  Interesting thanks.  There is a video from the Military History Lectures site that goes into a lot of detail on it.  Rather critical of things as you can probably tell from the title, Giant with Feet of Clay which is interesting but depressing on how difficult it is to assemble a mass army quickly in the modern age, when your a country without a large military establishment.

  Steve

  Well to be fair the USN was already in 1917 about the 3rd largest in the world - if it hadn't already overtaken the Imperial German navy in actual power since it continued laying down new ships during the early part of the war.  With the need to defend the Philippines colony and other interests in the western Pacific it also had some reasons and experience for operating far from home.  The US Army was - as the link I think you posted mentioned largely a constably for still in some part split around the west in isolated outposts left over from the Indian wars.  To enlarge it into a force capable to go head to head with Germany, even in part, was a massive effort and it really needed a larger core of experienced forces.  Britain which had a larger army in 1914 still had problems bringing the new volunteers and later conscripts up to capacity although in our case that was also affected by Britain trying to assemble such a mass army while also having the vast bulk of its regulars heavily engaged in the war.

  It does suggest that Wilson made an error in refusing to allow for any expansion, or even planning for such before he finally made the decision to declare war on Germany.  Even so if some forward planning for a possible expansion had occurred say from Nov 1916 [re-election] or even from mid 1916 there would have been huge problems. 

  The USN in comparision shipped a battle squadron to join the Grand Fleet at Scapa, which was fairly easy to do with the existing forces and put the bulk of its effort into expanding escort units to protect against the U boat threat.  Still a big task but much more manageable given its existing resources compared to what the army was called upon to do.

  Interesting,  A few points I would disagree with as the Germans were still building new ships at the start of the war and on into it they didn't really give up the race in 1912.  Plus the actual challenge to Britain started prior to the Dreadnought which Jellicoe hoped would actually end it.  Similarly while the naval race was expensive it wasn't punitively so.  However generally accurate and useful information.  Didn't realise we denied the crews access to dentists.  That definitely sounds harsh under those conditions.

  The Baden, the saved BB, was actually useful in that it was used for armament tests a few years later which helped in the design of new ships, although unfortunately those ships were never built because of the Washington Treaty.