The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 37

out by British historians arguing that American assistance to the Allied
victory was relatively minor. Mosier (2001) writes; “American
historians have been strangely receptive to taking British claims…about
American [in]competence at face value, often seeming to assume that
the BEF possessed a level of skill it clearly never did” (p. 325).
As the Entente Hundred Days Offensive triumphed in November of
1918, the German Empire finally sued for peace…with the Americans.
Wilsonian idealism succeeded, much to the consternation of the British
and French governments, who had very little intention to comply with
President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, his manifesto for his new world
order of peace and democracy. French General Petain correctly assumed
they would need to mount a large invasion to utterly defeat the German
army, which, for the majority of the war, had dominated the battlefield,
to bring the German Empire to its knees (Mosier, p. 335). The home
front in Germany was in dire straits; the German people were starving,
war weary, and the threat of revolution as had happened in Russia was
very real. As things stood, the German command was more than happy
to negotiate a less painful cessation via an armistice on American terms,
which would leave the German army mostly intact. The British and
French were in no shape to protest. In the end, the Americans dominated
in the war effort and at the peace table.