Germany, The Next Republic?Ackerman, Carl W. (Carl William)
History
Germany, The Next Republic?
Ackerman, Carl W. (Carl William)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Germany
In September, 1915, while the German army was moving against Russia
like a surging sea, I was invited to go to the front near Vilna.
During the intervening months I had observed and recorded as much as
possible the growing indignation in Germany because the United States
permitted the shipment of arms and ammunition to the Allies. In June I
had had an interview with Secretary of State von Jagow, in which he
protested against the attitude of the United States Government and said
that America was not acting as neutral as Germany did during the
Spanish-American war. He cited page 168 of Andrew D. White's book in
which Ambassador White said he persuaded Germany not to permit a German
ship laden with ammunition and consigned for Spain to sail. I thought
that if Germany had adopted such an attitude toward America, that in
justice to Germany Washington should adopt the same position. After
von Jagow gave me the facts in possession of the Foreign Office and
after he had loaned me Mr. White's book, I looked up the data. I found
to my astonishment that Mr. White reported to the State Department that
a ship of ammunition sailed from Hamburg, and that he had not
protested, although the Naval Attaché had requested him to do so. The
statements of von Jagow and Mr. White's in his autobiography did not
agree with the facts. Germany did send ammunition to Spain, but
Wilhelmstrasse was using Mr. White's book as proof that the Krupp
interests did not supply our enemy in 1898. The latter part of
September I entered Kovno, the important Russian fortress, eight days
after the army captured it. I was escorted, together with other
foreign correspondents, from one fort to another and shown what the 42
cm. guns had destroyed. I saw 400 machine guns which were captured and
1,300 pieces of heavy artillery. The night before, at a dinner party,
the officers had argued against the United States because of the
shipment of supplies to Russia. They said that if the United States
had not aided Russia, that country would not have been able to resist
the invaders. I did not know the facts, but I accepted their
statements. When I was shown the machine guns, I examined them and
discovered that every one of the 400 was made at Essen or Magdeburg,
Germany. Of the 1,300 pieces of artillery every cannon was made in
Germany except a few English ship guns. Kovno was fortified by
_German_ artillery, not American.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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