All language subtitles for BBC.The.Great.War.16of26.Right.Is.More.Precious.Than.Peace.divx.mp3

On April 6th, 1917,

the United States of America
declared war on Germany.

For two and a half years, the most
powerful nation in the world

had stood apart
from Europe's mortal struggle.

Now at last she was drawn in.

Many months would pass before her
soldiers could be ready for battle.

But to the war-weary Allies, she
brought a new vision of victory.

CHEERING

America had travelled a long road
since August 1914.

The outbreak of war in Europe
at first barely touched
the American people.

Its coming took a form
hardly physical at all.

It came as newspaper dispatches
from far away in the distance
and even farther away in spirit.

The dispatches
were as if black flocks of birds
frightened from their rookeries

came darting across the ocean,
their excited cries
a tiding of stirring events.

In 1914, Europe's quarrels seemed
to be no concern of Americans.

They were a nation
born out of the need to become
and remain separate from Europe.

George Washington
had expressed their creed...

Why quit our own
to stand upon foreign ground?

Why, by interweaving our destiny
with that of any part of Europe,

entangle our peace and prosperity
in the toils

of European ambition, rivalship,
interest, humour or caprice?

FAIRGROUND MUSIC PLAYS

The separatism which inspired
the first Americans helped to drive
forward the new nation's expansion.

In the 19th century, millions
of personal decisions by Europeans

to break away from the fetters
of the Old World

brought a swift increase
of population to America.

Every immigrant fought
his private War of Independence

when he took the decision to uproot
himself from the land of his birth
and cross the Atlantic.

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed to me.

These Americans
wanted no part of Europe.

It was a new world
that they were seeking.

They found the fruits
of isolationism sweet.

They acquired greater wealth
and material power
than the world had ever known.

In America,
men could make vast personal
fortunes with astounding speed.

Andrew Carnegie, when he retired,
gave away 350 million.

America was the land of promise.

Poor men could grow rich
almost overnight.

They could also remain very poor.

In the Dust Bowl, in the factories
of Detroit, Baton Rouge or Chicago,

in the cities with their slums
which matched the slums of Europe,

there was squalor, misery,
bitterness.

For many immigrants and their sons,
it was a poor exchange

to escape servitude
to Europe's hereditary princes,

only to find servitude
to Wall Street's tycoons.

Tycoons were tough.

The first battles of American
trade unions were battles indeed.

32 men were killed
in a coalfield strike in Colorado.

A bomb in the printing works
of a Los Angeles newspaper
killed 19 people.

Then we went to hear Emma Goldman
at the Bronx Casino,

but the meeting was forbidden
and the streets were crowded.

There were moving vans, said to be
full of cops with machine guns.

Everybody was talking machine guns,
revolution,

civil liberty, freedom of speech,

but some got beaten up by a cop
and shoved into a patrol wagon.

Everyone said it was an outrage. And
what about Washington and Jefferson?

Yet America offered abundant space
to her people,

with a sense of promise
never far away.

By the turn of the century,

the frontier, the legendary, luring
frontier of the West, had vanished.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific,
the nation was won.

Americans who had confined
their expansion within their coasts
began to look beyond them.

While Britain was fighting in
South Africa, America fought Spain

and became a surprised imperialist.

She freed Cuba and she acquired the
rich Philippine Islands and Hawaii.

Spokesman of the extrovert American
mood was Theodore Roosevelt,
twice Republican President...

Our nation,
while first of all seeing
to its own domestic wellbeing

must not shrink
from playing its part

among the great nations without.

Speak softly

and carry a big stick.

Roosevelt's
bounding personal vitality

matched that of a nation whose
pioneer days were barely finished,

which recognised no challenge
which the human muscle and spirit
could not overcome.

After his presidency,
Roosevelt departed for a long tour
of Africa and South America.

He had made America's voice heard
in the world's affairs.

He intervened in the Russo-Japanese
War, spoke up when France and
Germany quarrelled over Morocco,

seized Latin American territory
to build the Panama Canal.

His ideas carried the American
people beyond their present
understanding of themselves.

In 1914,
after 20 years out of office,

the Democrats swept back to power
on the rallying cry of "Reform".

President Woodrow Wilson
voiced the nation's concerns.

We have been proud
of our industrial achievements,

but we have not hitherto
stopped to count the human cost.

Our duty is to cleanse,

to reconsider, to restore...

every process of our common life.

When war broke out in Europe,

America's president seemed likely
to keep her out of it.

Woodrow Wilson was an austere,
withdrawn intellectual, the son
of a Presbyterian clergyman.

He had lived in the seclusion
of the academic world.

His orderly mind found difficulty
in grasping the complex dilemmas
of the world outside the campus.

But all his instincts
were for peace.

Sometimes
people call me an idealist.

Well, that is the way
I know I am an AMERICAN.

America is the only idealist nation
in the world.

ENTHUSIASTIC CHEERING

The idealism of the American people
was often confused

and coloured with the boastfulness
of a young and thriving country.

Any American mechanic could see that
if the Europeans hadn't been a lot
of ignorant, underpaid foreigners

who drank, smoked, were loose about
women and wasteful in their methods
of production, there'd be no war.

Most Americans were well satisfied
when Wilson stated the nation's
posture towards Europe's war...

We must be impartial in thought,
as well as in action.

Must put a curb upon our sentiments,
as well as upon every transaction

that might be construed
as a preference of one party
to the struggle before another.

Many Americans of British origin
were two ways torn.

It was New England which had first
rebelled against King George.

The memory of rebellion,
long distrust of British policy,

some irritation at the sight
of the Union Jack in Canada,

conflicted with an instinctive
condemnation of German aggression.

Affection towards France,
which had helped the colonies
in their rebellion,

then imitated them by becoming
a republic, was another factor.

And 15 million Irish Americans
whose forebears had been forced
to emigrate by hunger and poverty

could not easily forgive
their English oppressors.

There were millions
from Russian territories -
Poles, Ukrainians, Jews -

with memories of pogroms
and the secret police,

who loathed the notion
of a Tsarist victory.

There were over 11 million
Americans of German descent.

Many were powerful figures, willing
to put forward Germany's case.

England's only grudge was that
Germany has grown commercially,
financially and industrially

to a position which threatens
to crowd England into a second rank.

Jealousy appears to control
this English attitude.

And what is Germany fighting for?
Does she want anything from anybody?

She wants to be left alone.

The delicate balance of American
sympathy was soon disturbed.

Germany's invasion of Belgium
outraged American opinion.

Life magazine wrote...

If we see anything right at all
in all this matter, Belgium
is a martyr to civilisation.

Sister to all who love liberty
or law, the great unconquerable fact
of the Great War is Belgium.

Strict impartiality was easier
to proclaim than to preserve.

As the impact of war sank in,

invasion, destruction, atrocity,
authentic or not,

American opinion swayed
upon a deep underwater tide.

Yet this tide of pro-British
sentiment might be reversed

by the exigencies of war itself.

The exercise of British sea power
had always grated upon America.

Britain's blockade of Germany meant
the searching of American ships,
the seizure of contraband cargos.

A flood of protests
poured into the White House.

The British Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Lloyd George, wrote...

Germany's chief power was on land,
Britain's on the sea.

Germany's invasion of Belgium,
her devastation of France,

might arouse disinterested wrath
in America, but it did not touch
American pockets.

On the other hand,
Britain's firm measures

to prevent contraband of war
from reaching Germany

and her wide and constantly widening
interpretation of contraband

caused serious inconvenience
to American shipping and direct
interference with American business.

Left to itself, this friction might
have developed into a fatal sore,

but German action swung the tide
of sympathy against her once more.

U-boat attacks on merchant ships,

sunk with their crews aboard
or left to die in their boats,

were more shocking
than the Royal Navy's blockade.

The loss of America's trade with
Germany was not to be such a blow.

She found a new, insatiable market.

The Allies would buy all the
munitions that America could make.

A temporary slump
turned into an unprecedented boom.

Righteous sentiment might coincide
with self-interest after all -

an ideal circumstance
for judicious propaganda.

In the field of propaganda, the
Allies enjoyed a vast advantage.

The Royal Navy had ripped up
the German transatlantic cables
from the ocean bed.

Only the Allies now had direct
access to America's public ear.

As the months went by,

the Allied version of events loomed
ever larger in the American press.

Gradually the true meaning
of neutrality was eroded.

Yet, for a while,
its outward forms remained.

In May 1915, there were
great issues at home to distract
American minds from Europe's war.

Prohibition was one of them -

a cause
which stepped into every home.

Already 14 states had gone dry

and a nationwide campaign
was demanding total prohibition
of the sale of alcohol.

There were dissenters.

Campaigners for women's rights
were active

and women, on the whole,
also supported Prohibition.

In May, the fastest British liner
afloat, the Lusitania,

left New York for Liverpool.

Aboard were 2,000 passengers
and crew...

and 5,000 crates of ammunition
for the Allies.

On the day before, the German
Embassy in Washington had published
an announcement in the press.

This warned that Allied ships,
including passenger liners,

were liable to be sunk by U-boats.

It meant that the Lusitania's
passengers travelled at their own
risk, but few paid much attention.

On May 7th, Commander Schwieger's
U-20 was waiting for her.

She fired two torpedoes.

EXPLOSION

Her commander noted in his log...

Great confusion on board. Lifeboats
being cleared and lowered to water.

Many boats crowded, come down bow
first or stern first in the water

and immediately fill and sink.

1,153 people went down
in the Lusitania,

including 114 American citizens.

Some of the Lusitania's dead
were brought to Ireland for burial.

The American press
blazed with indignation.

Germany has affronted
the moral sense of the world

and sacrificed her standing
among the nations.

The sinking of the Lusitania
was deliberate murder.

Once more, the pendulum of American
sympathy took a violent swing.

It was no longer just a question
of which side America favoured.

It became a matter of whether
America herself might fight.

Theodore Roosevelt said...

This represents not merely piracy,

but piracy
on a vaster scale of murder than
old-time pirates ever practised.

It is warfare against innocent men,
women and children on the ocean

and our own fellow countrymen and
women who are among the sufferers.

It seems inconceivable

that we can refrain
from taking action in this matter,

for we owe it not only to humanity,
but to our own national
self-respect.

Amid all the passion,
President Wilson kept his head.

The principles of a lifetime
sustained him.

The example of America must be
the example not merely of peace
because it will not fight,

but of peace because peace is
the healing and elevating influence
of the world and strife is not.

There is such a thing
as being too proud to fight.

Proud, certainly. And rich. America
was now the arsenal of the Allies.

HER booming prosperity was closely
linked to THEIR fortunes.

If U-boats could not check
the flow of vital war material
from America to Europe,

Germany must try other ways.

She turned to sabotage.

Warehouses and factories supplying
the Allies were burnt down,

bombs were planted,
a huge espionage and sabotage ring
was uncovered.

It had spent nearly 30m of German
government money, disbursed through
the military and naval attaches.

America insisted on their recall.

Her relations with Germany
deteriorated further still.

Yet the months went by
without any definite consequence

of America's ripening hostility
towards the Central powers.

The anniversary of the Lusitania's
sinking approached.
It was April 1916.

Suddenly once more the pendulum
took a counter-swing.

The Easter Rebellion in Ireland
was suppressed by British forces.

The execution of captured rebels,
spread over ten days,

infuriated
millions of Irish Americans
and revived their ancient hatred.

The British ambassador
in Washington reported...

The attitude towards England
has been changed for the worse.

Our cause for the present
among the Irish here is a lost one.

In America,
1916 was an election year.

The war was the dominant issue.

The election campaigns
of the parties crystallised
the sway of opinion.

Neutralism, the desire to stay out
of the war, still possessed a
doughty champion in the President.

Support for this policy was strong
in the Midwest and Pacific states.

Europe's war
seemed more remote there
than on the Atlantic seaboard.

At the Democratic convention,
Wilson was renominated
presidential candidate.

The chairman quoted
from the Sermon on the Mount.

Blessed are the peacemakers

for they shall be called
the children of God.

He was applauded to the echo.

Up and down the United States,

Wilson's campaign slogan was,
"He kept us out of the war."

The Republican candidate against
Wilson was Charles Hughes, strongly
backed by Theodore Roosevelt.

Their policy was preparedness.

They wanted a bigger army,

universal military training, more
aggressive American leadership.

Roosevelt taunted Wilson with...

The shadows of men, women
and children who have risen
from the ooze of the ocean,

the shadows of babies,

gaping pitifully
as they sank under the waves.

The shadows of deeds
that were never done.

The shadows of lofty words
that were followed by no action.

The shadows...

of the tortured dead.

Woodrow Wilson was re-elected,
but his majority fell sharply.

The portents
were becoming unmistakable.

Yet Wilson clung to his ideal
of peace.

There will be no war.
This country does not intend
to become involved in war.

It would be a crime against
civilisation for us to go into it.

Once again,
it was Germany's own acts which
swung the balance against her.

On January 31st, 1917, Germany
informed America of her intention

to carry out
unrestricted submarine warfare.

This meant that all shipping,
including neutrals,

whether carrying contraband or not,

would be sunk at sight without
warning anywhere in Allied waters.

Stage by stage,
President Wilson's campus ideals
were battered down by war reality.

Stage by stage, he resisted
the evidence and its implications.

I refuse to believe that it is the
intention of the German authorities

to do in fact what they have warned
us they will feel at liberty to do.

Only overt acts
can make me believe it.

Wilson was forced to believe.

As vessel after vessel went down,

Germany's ruthless determination
became evident.

The German ambassador in Washington
was handed his passport.

America broke off diplomatic
relations and drafted a bill
to arm her merchant ships.

Now she stood on the brink of war.

The last act needed to drag her in
was not slow in coming.

In 1917,
four-fifths of America's small army
was embroiled with Mexico.

Relations between the US and her
Latin neighbour were never easy.

The border along the Rio Grande
was rarely quiet.

Mexico's successive revolutions
alarmed America,

threatened her commercial interests
and the lives of her citizens.

To Germany, this distant
preoccupation was a godsend.

If the American army was busy in
Mexico, it couldn't come to Europe.

Germany proposed an alliance
to the Mexican government.

Germany makes Mexico a proposal
of alliance on the following basis.

Make war together,
make peace together,

generous financial support
and an understanding that Mexico

is to reconquer the lost territory
in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

We suggest Mexico should invite
Japan's immediate assistance

and mediate
between Japan and ourselves.

This was the secret
Zimmermann telegram,

one of history's
most explosive documents.

British naval intelligence
had broken the German codes

and selected its moment carefully
to inform America
of the contents of the telegram.

They came as a thunderclap.

This was a conspiracy to attack the
very homeland of the United States.

Isolationism withered away.

The Peace Party collapsed.

The fire-eaters rose
in their wrath,

headed by a characteristic bellow
of rage from Theodore Roosevelt.

This man Wilson is enough to make
the saints and the angels, yes,
and the Apostles, swear

and I would not blame them.

My God! Why doesn't he do something?

If he does not go to war with
Germany, I shall skin him alive.

This was the end
of the President's dream of peace.

While he took
his last agonising decisions,

Germany for the last time
fortified his resolve

by torpedoing three American
merchant ships in one day.

Now there was no choice.
The peacemaker must go to war.

On April 2nd, 1917,
Woodrow Wilson drove to the Capitol
to deliver a momentous address.

The wrongs against which we array
ourselves are not common wrongs.

They cut to the very root
of human life.

I advise that Congress declare

that it formally accept
the status of a belligerent
which is thrust upon it.

It is a fearful thing to lead
this great peaceful people into war,

into the most terrible
and disastrous of all wars,

civilisation itself
seeming to be in the balance.

But the right
is more precious than peace.

The world must be made safe
for democracy.

Wilson spoke for the whole nation,

yet the ecstatic cheers with which
it applauded him only filled him
with sorrowful wonder.

My message today was a message
of death for our young men.

How strange it seems
to applaud that.

America was at war at last.

The mood which swept her
echoed the passionate violence
of Europe in 1914.

Winston Churchill wrote...

Pacifism, indifference, dissent
were swept from the path

and fiercely pursued
to extermination.

And with a roar of slowly gathered,
pent-up wrath,

which overpowered in its din
every discordant yell,

the American nation sprang to arms.

CHEERING

All America's competitiveness,
all her genius for publicity, were
channelled into the war effort.

The first war loan
was oversubscribed by 50%.

Anti-German feeling ran riot.

Wagner's music was banned.
Dachshunds were stoned.

Sauerkraut was rechristened
liberty cabbage.

And Potsdam, Missouri, hurriedly
changed its name to Pershing.

Newspapers, magazines and posters

provided constant fuel
for the nation's passion.

Even in a prayer before
the House of Representatives,
Germany was remembered.

Thou knowest, O Lord,
that no nation so infamous, vile,

greedy, sensuous, bloodthirsty,
ever disgraced the pages of history.

Young men swarmed
into recruiting centres.

But with memories of the breakdown
of volunteering in the Civil War,

the government
rushed through a conscription bill.

Every male between 21 and 30 had
to register for military service.

Only 4% of the ten million
available failed to do so.

680,000 were selected by ballot
for the first draft,

the most America could possibly
equip and train at once.

ENTHUSIASTIC CHEERING

American womanhood, determined not
to miss this opportunity of proving
itself equal in a man's world,

joined the war effort
with equal fervour.

The task which faced America
was tremendous.

President Wilson said...

It is not an army that we must shape
and train for war. It is a nation.

American industry was heavily
committed to supplying the Allies.

Now the Secretary for War needed it
to arm and supply her own soldiers.

War is no longer Samson
with his shield and spear and sword,
and David with his sling.

It is the conflict
of smokestacks now, the combat
of the driving wheel and engine.

The government called in
the great business tycoons.

Bernard Baruch was placed
in charge of coordinating
all the nation's resources.

Private shipping was commandeered
and new shipyards were built

for the enormous task of
transporting and supplying an army
across 3,000 miles of ocean.

Agriculture and food conservation
were organised and publicised.

Life magazine urged its readers...

Do not permit your child to take
a bite or two from an apple
and throw the rest away.

Even children must be patriotic
to the core.

Like Britain in 1914,
America was a naval power
with only a small regular army.

Immediately she placed her fleet
at the disposal of the Allies.

On May 4th, 1917, the first
American warships reached Britain.

Admiral Beatty welcomed the
reinforcement to Britain's fleet.

But it was the American army,

the influx of her inexhaustible
manhood, that Europe was awaiting.

It was hard for the Allies to grasp
the problems that faced the USA.

The strength of America's army
was only 80,000 men

and most of them
were on the Mexican border.

To turn this tiny force
into a trained army of hundreds
of thousands, perhaps millions,

was a stupendous task.

Huge camps were built
at breakneck speed and men began
training in them almost at once.

The peaceful nation adapted itself
to war with a speed and efficiency

which the President
had grimly prophesied.

Once lead this people into war

and they'll forget there was ever
such a thing as tolerance.

A spirit of ruthless brutality
will enter into the very fibre
of our national life.

BATTLE CRIES

Conflicts arose
between America and her allies -

conflict between America's need
for munitions and Allied needs,

between the demand of the Allies
for immediate reinforcements

and America's determination
to build a great army,

as befitted
her station among the powers.

Allied missions, headed
by Marshal Joffre for France,

and by Mr Balfour and General
Sir Tom Bridges for Britain,

pleaded for American soldiers.

The Allies would have to wait.

America was irrevocably determined
upon her course.

The Yanks were coming, but they
would come as a United States Army
with a United States general,

General Joseph Pershing.

They would come in the fullness
of time and not before.

Until then, the Allies must
make shift to do without them.

But for encouragement,
as a token of what would follow,

a handful of Americans
headed by Pershing
came to Europe to show the flag.

They disembarked at Liverpool
to a hero's welcome.

As we stepped off the gangplank
onto British soil,

the band struck up
The Star-Spangled Banner,

this being the first time in history
that an American army contingent

was officially received in England.

BAND PLAYS US NATIONAL ANTHEM

ENTHUSIASTIC CHEERING

They went on to London, followed
by the same tumultuous cheering.

MUSIC: Elgar's
"Pomp And Circumstance March No 4"

Pershing was greeted by the King.

It has always been my dream that
the two English-speaking nations
should some day be united

in a great cause.

And today my dream is realised.

Together, we are fighting
for the greatest cause
for which peoples could fight.

The Anglo-Saxon race
must save civilisation.

The triumphal progress
continued into France.

# Over there, over there

# Send the word
Send the word over there

# That the Yanks are coming
The Yanks are coming

# The drums
rum-tumming everywhere... #

In Paris, it swelled to a frenzy.

# Send the word
Send the word over there... #

All felt that they were present
at the magical operation
of the transfusion of blood.

Life arrived in floods
to reanimate the mangled body

of a France bled white by the
innumerable wounds of four years.

At his new headquarters
in the Hotel Crillon,

Pershing was called out
onto the balcony by the crowd
in the Place de la Concorde.

A breeze caught the folds
of the French flag
and in a spontaneous gesture,

the normally unemotional
American pressed it to his lips.

CHEERING

BAND PLAYS "Over There"

No conquering army could have had
a more rapturous welcome from
its own people than France gave

to this handful of inexperienced,
untried, but vigorous and cheerful
American soldiers.

As yet, their fighting value
was almost nothing, but
their moral effect was everything.

To the onlookers in the streets
of Paris, it was one of the most
poignant moments in history.

The New World was coming
to redress the balance of the Old.

# And we won't come back
till it's over over there

# And we won't come back
till it's over over there. #