The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 30

military budgets in 1914 were a paltry $671 million. In modern context,
$10.5 billion is worth $177 billion in 2018.
In addition to loans, the United States had no scruples selling war
materials to the British and French, as well. The amount of goods made
or manufactured in the United States which ended up in Europe for the
war effort is so numerous it would be too time-consuming to list them
all. Some examples, according to Moser (2001): the British Army used
US manufactured Winchester and Remington rifles, their eight-inch
howitzers were produced in Pennsylvania, and the French Army relied
on imported American steel to manufacture their tanks (p. 304). Just as
important as the loans, the Entente governments heavily relied on
American toluol, which is an essential component of trinitrotoluol, more
commonly known as TNT, and necessary for artillery shells (Mosier,
2001). Mosier has supposed that the reason the United States
government neglected to mention the massive assistance rendered to the
Entente (and the pro-Entente positions of many important figures, such
as Wilson) is the insistence that the US entered the war because of
morally superior arguments of harm done to American citizens and
property, and not because the government was sympathetic to England
from the start. Mosier stated that “the United States was a cobelligerent
long before it declared war” (p. 305).
The British Royal Navy was the chief naval power on the globe, both
commercial and military. According to Peck (2018), the British Navy