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A War Over Here?

Though the Great War was primarily a European war, there was fear in the United States that the war would spread, in some form, to American shores. There was evidence to support those fears—at one point, in fact, the Germans did fire shots on American soil. Much of those fears, though, were rooted in rumor and paranoia, and it was that paranoia that fed the nation’s rabid anti-German sentiment.

These were among the factors that caused American citizens to seriously worry about a war front opening in the U.S.:

The million Mauser rifles. On May 14, 1918, the headline on the front page of the Chicago Daily News read: “Million German Guns in U.S. for Revolt?” Throughout the course of America’s involvement in the Great War, there was fear that Germans already living in the U.S. would rise up in revolution. So a story like this one—based on the rumor that Mauser rifles had been secretly imported to the U.S.—got plenty of play among reporters and politicians, helping to fan American paranoia. In fact, the federal government ordered the New York attorney general to look The presence of German submarines off the East Coast helped stoke the fear of a war on an American front. (Photo courtesy of Great War Primary Document Archive, www.gwpda.org/photos.)into the rumor with an official inquiry. During that inquiry, a witness testified that he, “tried to buy the rifles but was unsuccessful, he said. During the negotiations, he said, Crossley told him that some 1,000,000 rifles had been imported from Essen by way of the Hoboken docks of two German steamship companies and were to be used in the United States.” Of course, the Germans were doing all they could just to arm their own soldiers—they would not be able to afford to send 1 million guns to sit idly in American storehouses. The state’s deputy attorney general, Alfred Becker, eventually concluded the inquiry by saying the rifles did not exist, but still, the rumors had an effect on the American mindset.

Attacks by German submarines. On June 2, 1918, six non-military ships were sunk off the East coast. In the past, German submarines occasionally slipped into U.S. waters to cause mischief and create a scare, but this was different. Between May 25-28, four other ships had been sunk, making the total 10 in a span of just eight days. This wave of submarine marauding would end in mid-June, with ships attacked from the waters of Massachusetts to Virginia, but at the time, there was no way to tell what was going on or when it would stop. It appeared the U.S. was under German assault. Word spread that there were as many as five U-boats off the coast, and a mother ship supplying them. It turned out that the raid was the work of one industrious U-boat, the U-151, which was sent to U.S. waters to lay mines and stuck around to do some ship-sinking, but the fear of U-boats would remain. That fear was further stoked in July 1918 by a strange encounter on Cape Cod. On one sunny morning, a U-boat emerged three miles offshore and began shooting at an unarmed tugboat and its four barges, raking it with bullets for an hour and a half, firing three errant torpedoes, while hundreds of stunned beachgoers watched. In all, the German submarine threat didn’t cause much real damage. But it did serve to maintain fear throughout the nation.

The fear of German airstrikes. The presence of German U-boats off the East coast not only roused concern about American shipping interests, but somehow became twisted into a fear of airstrikes that could originate from submarines (which, of course, were not nearly big enough to double as aircraft carriers). Yet, in June 1918, the War Department ordered that businesses on large thoroughfares in New York city—Broadway, Fifth Avenue, major bridges—should dim their lights at night, “in case an aviator from a German submarine should get over the city.” The city also installed an air raid signal for the first time.

The Zimmerman telegram. In January 1917, three months before the U.S.’s entry into the war, British spies intercepted a telegram from Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the Heinrich von Eckhardt, Germany’s ambassador in Mexico. The German navy was set to begin full-scale submarine warfare, and it was feared that this act would push the Americans into the war on the side of the Allies. Zimmerman instructed von Eckhardt that, if it appeared that the U.S. would join the war, “we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: make war together, make peace together, generous financial support and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.”

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