What was the Zimmerman telegram? The Zimmerman telegram was the device the US used as an excuse to join World War 1.
World War 1 started in 1914 and lasted until November of 1918. The German forces moved quickly, but very soon, both sides were bogged down in trenches and it became a war of attrition. Neither side could make much of an advance and it became a waiting game to see who had more resources. Once the Russians withdrew after their revolution, it became the Allies versus the Axis and neither side really had an advantage. There is no way of telling which side would win, or even if there would be a winner. If the war had dragged on past 1920, both sides might have lost too much to continue and they could have sued for a peace that gave Germany a lot of what they wanted. If that had happened, there is a high likelihood that World War 2 wouldn’t have happened, but that is all just speculation. Besides, the Axis didn’t win because the USA joined the war in 1917 and their influx of weapons, money, and resources made the war a done deal. But, why did they join? Woodrow Wilson, president of the USA, had spent the previous four years keeping the US out of the war and repeating that the US was neutral. What happened?
In the earl 20th century, communication by telegram had come a long way and there were long cables that crossed the bottom of the Atlantic connecting Europe to the US. At the beginning of the war, Britain sent out a ship to cut all of Germany’s transatlantic cables so that they could not communicate. That meant the Germans needed to borrow cables from neutral countries and the British were able to tap into those. They collected huge amounts of German communications, but they couldn’t be easily decoded until the Russians found a copy of a code book on a drowned German sailor’s body in October 1914. From this point on, the British could read all of Germany’s communications.
Britain wanted the US to join the war because they knew that the extra resources would be decisive, but Woodrow Wilson had no intention of joining. The United States was far removed from Europe and its politics. Wilson also wanted to protect the US economy. A neutral company can trade with both sides. He also saw the US as a global peacemaker, an impartial moral authority, which required that they stay neutral. As well as this, there were a lot of immigrants living in the US from many European countries and Wilson didn’t want any unrest at home. Britain wanted them to join, but they politely refused.
The US didn’t join the war, but they did supply Britain with vital money and resources. Without these, the UK might not have been able to fight for as long as it did. Germany obviously wanted to put a stop to that, so they sent their submarines into the Atlantic with the goal of sinking ships carrying resources from the US to the UK. They had to be careful which ships they hit because they didn’t want to accidentally draw the US into the war. They wanted to start targeting more ships, so they needed a way to keep the US busy, and that is where the Zimmerman letter comes in.
The US and Mexico had only finished fighting about 20 years earlier and there was still a lot of anger on the Mexican side. The US had ended up with a huge amount of Mexican territory. The Germans thought that if they could get Mexico to declare war on the US, it would keep the US occupied, leaving Germany free to finish the war in Europe.
A coded telegraph message was sent from a civil servant in Germany, Arthur Zimmerman, to the German ambassador to Mexico. The message said that if the US declared war on Germany, Germany would ally with Mexico and help it recover the territory of New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona. The telegraph was shown to the president of Mexico, but Mexico was in the middle of a civil war and he couldn’t even consider it. However, the telegraph was put to another use.
Britain had been able to read communications from Germany for a long time and they quickly decoded the Zimmerman telegraph. The head of the code breaking group, William Reginald Hall, was torn because releasing the telegraph to the Americans would sway public opinion and probably bring them into the war. However, it would reveal to the Germans that Britain had been able to read their codes all along. He sat on the telegraph for three weeks before passing it to the foreign office. They decided to show it to the Americans, but they went to great lengths to make a cover story about stealing it from the Mexican post office to cover their tracks first. The Americans were incensed at what the Germans were trying to do and the rest is history. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_telegram
https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/zimmermann-telegram
https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/what-if-the-united-states-had-sat-out-world-war-i
Image By Unknown author or not provided – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27222069