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Show April, 1917 T In April of 1917 the United I States declared war on Ger- I many. AMERICANS were in- I funated by Germany's con- 1 duct; they believed many i atrocity stories and were con- I vinced the "Lusitanta" had I been wrongly and immorally sunk. They resented t unrestricted U-Boal warfare. I The succeeding years have f shown most of these convic-. i Hons were incorrect. F THE "Lusitanta" was indeed in-deed carrying contraband-- k and the German government I had publicly warned ' Americans not to sail on her. i And while U-Boat sinkings I were a ruthless form of war, ' Britain was at that time attempting at-tempting to starve out Ger- many by blockading all her ports; because Britain was stronger in surface ships, Germany's only recourse, actually, ac-tually, was to seek victory or a truce through a submarine campaign. YET, WE went to war, and insured defeat of the haughty Kaiser's Germany. That defeat and the unfair and immoral im-moral Treaty of Versailles produced first the Weimar Republic, weak and ineffective, ineffec-tive, and then Huler. That, in turn, produced world war II. which resuhed in a strong communist Russia, Rus-sia, a divided Germany and the threat of communist domination of the world. And so, scholars now wonder about America's action in 1917. |