Russia Out, America In: 1917
The Two Turning Points of 1917
By spring 1917 the war had reached its third winter with no decisive result. Two events that year transformed it. Russia, ground down by huge losses and food shortages, would leave the war altogether by spring 1918. The United States, finally pushed past its tradition of neutrality, would enter the war in April 1917. Both events promised major shifts in manpower — in opposite directions. Germany would gain a free hand in the east; the Allies would eventually gain a vast new pool of soldiers from across the Atlantic.
The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, triggered by unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February 1917 and the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram in March 1917. Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, ending the Eastern Front and freeing around 50 German divisions to move west.
Russia’s Long Collapse
Russia entered the war as a great power and left it as a country in revolution. The huge losses of 1914–16 (around five million casualties), food shortages in the cities, the Tsar’s decision to take personal command of the army in 1915, and the chaotic influence of the mystic Rasputin at home all combined to discredit the Tsarist regime. In late February 1917 (early March in the Western calendar) bread riots in Petrograd grew into a revolution. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March 1917. A new Provisional Government took over.
The Provisional Government made a fatal decision: continue the war. Its summer 1917 offensive collapsed within weeks. Soldiers began to vote with their feet, deserting in tens of thousands. Germany helped the process: in April 1917 the German government provided the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin with a sealed train to return from Swiss exile to Petrograd. His promise of ‘Peace, Land and Bread’ gained traction precisely because the Provisional Government refused to make peace.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power on 7 November 1917 (October in the Russian calendar) and immediately opened peace talks. The German terms were ferocious. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918, stripped Russia of Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and other territories — about a third of its population, half of its industry and almost all its coal. Germany now had a free hand to move troops west. By March 1918 around 50 German divisions had transferred from the Eastern to the Western Front, and Ludendorff was ready to use them.
America’s Long Patience
President Woodrow Wilson had run for re-election in 1916 on the slogan ‘He kept us out of war.’ The United States had a long tradition of avoiding European conflicts, a strong German-American minority, and an economy doing well from selling food and munitions to both sides — though much more to the Allies. Wilson’s position became impossible across the early months of 1917 because of two German decisions.
First, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, expecting Britain could be starved out in six months. American protests had ended the first U-boat campaign in 1915 after the sinking of the Lusitania (7 May 1915, 1,198 dead including 128 Americans). Wilson immediately broke off diplomatic relations on 3 February 1917. Second, in mid-January 1917 British naval intelligence intercepted and decoded the Zimmermann Telegram, in which the German Foreign Minister proposed an alliance with Mexico against the United States, offering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona as a reward. The British made the telegram public on 1 March 1917. American opinion swung sharply behind war.
Wilson asked Congress to declare war on 2 April 1917 with the words ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’. Congress voted to declare war on 6 April 1917. The first American Expeditionary Force divisions arrived in France in June 1917, but it took until summer 1918 for them to deploy in mass strength — by the armistice in November 1918, around two million American troops were in France.
The Lusitania Misconception
A common student error is to claim the USA ‘joined because of the Lusitania’. The Lusitania sank in May 1915, almost two years before American entry. The sinking generated outrage and forced Germany to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare for over a year, but did not trigger US entry on its own. The actual triggers in 1917 were a combination: the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917 and the Zimmermann Telegram revelation on 1 March 1917, against a background of growing economic ties to the Allies and Wilson’s shift towards intervention.
The two turning points worked against each other in time. Russia’s exit gave Germany an immediate manpower advantage from late 1917 into spring 1918 — this was the gap Ludendorff used to launch his Spring Offensive in March 1918, attempting to win the war before American troops arrived in mass. The American Expeditionary Force, by contrast, took time to mobilise, equip, train and ship across the Atlantic. The race against time defined 1918 strategy on both sides. Germany had to win quickly; the Allies had to hold long enough for the Americans to arrive in numbers.
Significance
The 1917 turning points reshaped the war in opposite directions. The fall of the Tsarist regime, the Bolshevik seizure of power and Brest-Litovsk gave Germany its last realistic chance of victory through manpower transfer and a sharper strategic focus. Unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram cost Germany America’s neutrality and brought 4.7 million eventual American servicemen into the war on the Allied side. The mismatch in timing — German gains immediate, American gains slow — explains both the German Spring Offensive of March 1918 and its eventual collapse: Germany had only the months between the Russian collapse and the full American deployment to win the war, and could not.