Agreed, but so were France & Britain, equally exhausted.
One imagines heavy-weight prize fighters in a ring after 14 rounds, both staggering, flailing away hoping to land one last punch that really counts.
The mind's eye sees one fighter raring back, winding up, unsteady, aiming, swinging... POW!
He lands the punch, his opponent goes down but then he too collapses unconscious on top, fight called, who won?
The US played a minor, but we think critical role in stopping the last German offensive in 1918.
Without us, the Western Front may have cracked, letting Germans reach Paris & victory.
But there's more...
Everybody knows Germans transported & supported Lenin's Bolsheviks rise to power in Russia.
What we don't know is how much support Kerensky & other anti-Bolsheviks received from Britain & other Allies.
How much was the Russian civil war fueled by aid from the West?
So let's say it was a lot, and this aid made possible by US support for Britain & France.
One result was, even after Brest-Litovsk, Germans kept nearly a million troops in Eastern Europe, troops which could have been transported to the Western Front for a final push to victory.
Finally, German minimum terms for peace in 1918 were: stop in place, meaning whatever the lines of battle were, that's the war-ending peace settlement.
Indeed, that's what the German High-Command thought President Wilson's "Peace without victory" proposal amounted to, and they were willing to take it.
But absent the US, Germany's position was much stronger and they may well have dictated some of their own conditions to the Allies.
Bottom line: I think absent the US intervention, WWI victor & vanquished change places and the rise of militant National Socialism moves from Germany to France &/or Britain.
You disagree?
“...I think absent the US intervention, WWI victor & vanquished change places and the rise of militant National Socialism moves from Germany to France &/or Britain. ...”
Quite possible.
Arthur Koestler (Hungarian (?), became communist after the war, later became anti-communist, wrote about it) stated that prevailing opinion at the end of WWI anticipated Germany turning Communist). If I recall correctly. What the other major powers would have done then is imponderable.
The tendency in WWI historical analysis is to consider land combat only, and the European fronts (West predominantly, a few nods to the East) in isolation.
Flies in the face of labeling the dismal business a world war: the total strategic picture cannot be separated out into sub-components like that without great loss of meaning. Other theaters cannot be dismissed so easily, and the maritime situation was a major factor.
Imperial Russia was put in severe peril when German warships were chased into Constantinople harbor in August 1914, but the impact took time to materialize.
All Russian trade through the Dardanelles and thus the Black sea was cut off (the major route), and the Allies were prevented from supplying weapons and munitions to the Czarist forces.
The Germans convinced the Ottoman Empire to enter the war on the side of the Central Powers. The entire Middle East became embroiled, consuming yet more Allied resources, diverting attention of senior leadership, and diluting efforts elsewhere. The aftermath was not handled well, setting the stage for yet more problems down the road.
Concerning the war at sea, many words have been written about how the British blockade was starving Germany, but it’s rarely recognized that German submarine warfare was putting British participation at severe risk, even before unrestricted submarine warfare (the chief German move that precipitated US intervention) was declared.
When William S Sims, the first senior US naval liaison officer to arrive in Britain after the United States declared war, was briefed by British Admiralty leaders, he was astounded: merchant vessel losses to the U-boats had become so severe that British stocks of munitions, materiel, and simple food supplies were low and going lower.
Despite many ideas and theories, no one really knew how to defeat the U-boats; the methods that ultimately worked were as yet untried or unthought-of, and the weaponry to execute those methods hadn’t yet been built in any quantity.
Sims was told flatly that Germany would win unless the trend of losses was reversed.
All those tasks were accomplished, resources were found, weaponry manufactured, and the sailors of the Royal Navy and US Navy prevailed. But we have the luxury of looking at the situation from a comfy perch 100 years later; it’s wrong to assume Allied victory was inevitable just because it did happen.