This Day in History Marks Centennial of US Entry Into the 'Great War' Catherine Maddux - VOA News
go to original April 6, 2017

Why the U.S. Entered World War I, in 1 Minute (TIME)

The United States formally entered World War I a hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917.

The nation set aside its posture of neutrality nearly three years after the start of the bloody conflict that came to be known as the "Great War."

The war began in July 2014, a tumultuous period in Europe. Following the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, by a suspected Serbian nationalist gunman, the Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria — were pounding Russia, France and Britain.



The war was the most violent conflict in centuries, largely due to advances in the technology of warfare resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Armies were modernized, using tanks, high explosives, machine guns, trench warfare, airplanes and, to the horror of combat troops and civilians alike, poison gas — chemical weapons.

Shortly after Germany declared war on Russia and France in August 1914, President Woodrow Wilson told the U.S. Senate: "The United States must be neutral in fact, as well as in name. ... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action."

In November 1916, Wilson won re-election after campaigning on the slogan, "He kept us out of war!"

The United States remained neutral until a series of provocative acts by Germany, including deadly submarine assaults against U.S. merchant ships and a German U-boat's torpedo attack that sank the British cruise ship Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, shifted American public opinion about the war.

Read the rest at VOA News

Related: 100 Years Ago Today, America Entered a World War That Changed Everything and Solved Nothing (Yankton)

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