The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 34

sovereignty and preached rhetoric about the potential of a new, ideal
world as he envisioned it (Carlisle, 2009).
Woodrow Wilson was loathe to refer to the United States as an “ally”
of the Entente; the preferred term was “associate.” This may seem like
unnecessary hairsplitting, but, according to Grotelueschen (2011) in his
other work Anglo-American Cooperation in World War I, the semantics
of American involvement in the war was vital to the self-identity of the
American Expeditionary Force, or AEF, as an independent army and the
United States having different war aims than the British and French (p.
214-215).
World War I was the very first instance the United States sent an
army overseas (Peck, 2018). An immediate problem became apparent:
How would it be possible to ship over a million American soldiers to
Europe without the German U-Boats sinking the ships? The United
States demanded all US ships be provided with convoys, which,
surprisingly, the British were not doing. The United States and Great
Britain erected huge trails of mines and nets to deter German attacks.
The Germans severely miscalculated their ability to keep American
transport from bringing soldiers to Europe in the first place. As
Grotelueschen (2017) states, “The Admiralty famously gave the Kaiser a
‘guarantee’ that not a single American soldier would ever arrive safely
in France” (p. 8).