At the time of President Wilson's first inauguration, in 1913, the country faced two crises in foreign affairs. The first was the murder of Francisco Madero, Diaz' successor in Mexico. Wilson, who regarded Madero as his ideological counterpart, became the uncompromising opponent of Madero's murderer, Victoriano Huerta. [66] At about the same time, the California state legislature passed the Alien Exclusion Act, which forbade Japanese nationals from owning or leasing land in that state. The Japanese government, which refused to believe that the Federal government could not overturn a state law, was incensed, and began to take advantage of what they saw as a convergence of interests with Mexico. [67] In the spring and summer of 1913, Japan supplied arms to the Huerta government. Then, in May, England recognized the Huerta government in order to secure a steady supply of Mexican oil to fuel the warships of the Royal Navy. [68] These developments moved the Army-Navy Joint Planning Board to act. What the Board did was based upon the conclusion that the country could not defeat any hostile force landed on the west coast. One analysis read: If 200,000 men of any first class hostile power should be landed on our Pacific Coast, we should have no course but to hand over to a foreign nation the rich empire west of the Rockies, with its cities, its harbors, and the wealth of its valleys and mountains. [69] In the summer of 1913 the Joint Board dispatched a number of warships to Manila and the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii, [70] thus following the example of the Navy Board in 1898, which began the deployment of the fleet in advance of a declaration of war or of a Presidential order. Wilson, however, was less inclined to provoke a war than McKinley. He countermanded the order and disbanded the Joint Board. [71] The United States would not be like the European powers in letting military planning requirements drive the decision to wage war. The outbreak of the European war in the summer of 1914 initially seemed to confirm American assumptions that the rivalry among the European powers would keep them so preoccupied that none of them would be able to pose any threat in the Americas. Soon, however, events were to shake the nation from its pre-war complacency. On December 8th, 1914, the British 12-inch cruisers Invincible and Inflexible sank the German 8.3-inch cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off the Falkland Islands. The engagement began at 16,500 yards. Then, on January 24th, 1915, the British 13.5-inch battle cruisers Lion and Tiger sank the German 8.3-inch cruiser Blucher and severely damaged the 11-inch cruiser Seydlitz at ranges between 17,000 and 20,000 yards. [72] These extremely long- range engagements invalidated the American assumptions about the ranges of naval ordnance, and brought into question the adequacy of nation's coastal defenses. [73] In November 1914, the Japanese embarked on a series of campaigns in Asia and the Pacific, ostensibly in support of their British allies, but which in reality were designed to take advantage of Germany's predicament to extend Japan's empire. The German port of Tsingtao, as well as the Marshalls, the Caroline, and the Mariana Islands were captured, which worsened the already precarious strategic situation in the Philippines. The situation on the sea lanes also put Americans and American interests at risk. The German High Seas Fleet, bottled up in the North Sea, was little danger, but the German submarine force became the major peril on the high seas, for which the assumptions of Plan BLACK made no provision. But where all of the dangers of war seemed to converge with the most immediate impact was in Mexico. In December 1914, the captain of a Japanese warship visited Mexico City. [74] Japan was aggrieved at the United States and had been preparing for war for over 3 years. [75] In April 1915, the Japanese battle cruiser Asama was detected maneuvering off the coast of Baja California. [76] The Hearst press, which had so effectively worked Americans into a war fever in 1898, screamed that the Japanese had been using naval bases in Baja California. [77] In April 1915, the U.S. Government learned of a German plan to put Huerta, who was in exile, back in power. [78] At this stage of the war, Germany had already begun intrigues to tie the United States down in its hemisphere and prevent it from intervening in Europe. This plot, coming on the heels of the Lusitania crisis, almost brought the United States into the war. It was clear that German attempts to involve the United States in a war with Mexico would continue, and would become the deciding factor regarding U.S. policy. As Secretary of State Lansing put it, "Our possible relations with Germany must be our first consideration, and our intercourse with Mexico must be regulated accordingly." [79] A covert operation took Huerta out of the picture, and Germany's attention turned to Pancho Villa, the next beneficiary of German support. In January 1916, a Germanarmed band of Villistas raided a group of American mining engineers in San Ysabel, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Americans called for revenge for the "massacre at San Ysabel." The next crisis, Villa's March 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, produced intelligence to suggest that the threat from Mexico was more than bandit gangs. Among the dead of the Villista raiders was a courier carrying dispatches from Villa to Emiliano Zapata, fighting in the southern part of Mexico. These dispatches suggested a union of the two revolutionaries "to join in a concentrated attack upon the United States," and informing Zapata that he had "sent couriers to all states to incite the population against the Americans . . . the common enemies of the Mexicans." [80] This was the impetus for the deployment of Pershing's punitive expedition in accordance with Plan GREEN. One of the more bizarre aspects of the Mexican campaign was the discovery in June 1916 of the so-called "Plan of San Diego," a Huertista scheme to promulgate revolution among the Mexican, Indian, and African American populations in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and California. The success of the revolution in these states was expected to spread to six more southern states, where Jim Crow laws would motivate African Americans to keep a long-term insurgency alive. [81] The evidence is inconclusive as to the degree that the Plan of San Diego was official policy in either the Huerta or Carranza governments, but the American military took it seriously and started to prepare for full-blown war with Mexico. [82] Wilson's more insightful response was to prepare for war with the source of the nation's problems, that is against Germany itself. Accordingly, on January 12th, 1917, Wilson told Secretary Baker to withdraw the expedition, in time for the intercept of the Zimmerman telegram in February. In this regard, Wilson was right and the military wrong, for had the United States gone to war with Mexico, it would have played right into German hands. [83] By 1917, the contingencies envisioned by ORANGE and BLACK were extremely unlikely-the German fleet was bottled up in the North Sea, and the Japanese fleet was far away from home waters cooperating with Allied navies in the Mediterranean-yet, the United States was not secure. It could not protect its maritime commerce, it had to contend with foreign instigated violence on its southern frontier, and it had to face the prospect of insurrection on its own territory. Further, the situation in Europe was now a factor. If the Germans won, which in 1917 was a strong possibility, they would feel emboldened enough to expand their influence into the Americas. If the stalemate continued, and the European armies ground each other to powder, then the way would be open for an ever more aggressive Japan. As an estimate prepared by one of President Wilson's military advisors (LTC Henry T. Allen) concluded, without U.S. involvement none of the principal nations involved in the European war could be destroyed, meaning that the war could not "reconcile the victors to the vanquished" and that postwar Europe could not escape its troublesome nature. In the Far East, the "terrible catastrophe" that had overcome the Western powers would weaken "the white races" to the point that "the yellow races will have their innings." [84] At this point, American strategy underwent a profound and sudden change. Freedom of the sea lanes, and stability in the American republics could not be achieved by hemispheric defense, but only by the deployment of an expeditionary force large enough to remove the hostile regime. The quick and complete defeat of Imperial Germany, heretofore believed to be of no interest to the United States, was now recognized as essential to American security. Such thinking did not immediately catch on. At one point in April 1917, for example, a U.S. senator buttoned-holed an officer of the General Staff and asked with incredulity, "Good Lord! You're not going to send soldiers over there, are you?" [85] Army and Navy planners adapted no better than the Senate. While there were aspects of Plan BLACK which were implemented (for example, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels recounts that the seizure of German and Austrian ships interred in American ports was a provision of BLACK), existing plans were of little value for the dispatch of American forces to Europe.. Under immense pressures of time, the War Department prepared estimates for the new contingency. These envisioned invading Bulgaria through Greece, and of a landing in the rear of the German armies in France through an alliance with the Netherlands. [86] None of these concepts was, of course, fit for anything other than the trash, and the time wasted on them actually contributed to the delay of American intervention. No realistic planning was undertaken until the designated commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General Pershing, arrived in Europe to survey the requirement. As Pershing bitterly noted: when the Acting Chief of Staff (Bliss) went to look in the secret files where the plans to meet the situation that confronted us should have been found, the pigeon hole was empty. In other words, the War Department was face to face with the question of sending an army to Europe, and the General Staff had never considered such a thing. [87] A later comment of Pershing's indicates the strain on Army- Navy relations the requirements of the Western Front would cause. Pershing's estimate that the AEF would number at least 2,000,000 men and would consume over 50,000 tons of freight per day was regarded by Admiral William Sims, the commander. of U.S. Naval forces in Europe, as "very much an exaggeration or else as just an army joke." [88] Once planning got underway in Pershing's headquarters, it assumed the broad outlines of the modern American deliberate planning process, that is, with the theater commander-in-chief outlining requirements, the Army Chief of Staff making provision to provide the forces required, and the Chief of Naval Operations conducting the strategic deployment of those forces. This was the dawn of 20th century American military history. Back to Table of Contents Joint U.S. Army-Navy War Planning WWI Back to SSI List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by US Army War College. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com