“The WWI Imperial Germans were not Nazis, but they weren’t angels either.”
In my opinion, the only decent nation in WWI was the USA. We were duped, but we were trying to do right, and sought no national gains or revenge.
Oh that’s very true, however, the war is always cast as making the “world safe for democracy”, stopping the “German Empire”, and we are told of endless German atrocities in WWI.
But at the same time, Germans had universal male suffrage by 1871 in federal elections,,, most British Soldiers could not vote due to age and not owning property. And for the British, Belgian, and French Empires to whine about the German empire borders on the silly,,, both in size and violence visited on the occupied colonial possessions. And British and French atrocities are utterly equal if not worse.
The British had invented concentration camps 20 years earler,,, the Belgians mass murdered millions at about the same time.
Thank God our soldiers were not simply fed into the British Army as replacements as the British all but demanded. They would have watefully used them even more freely than their own.
But WWI is an amazing topic. The whole European system was rotten,, and i believe America has always suffered from the European garbage wars. They dragged us in, and we had to become incredibly strong military to win, and to finally stop their crap and create peace for them.
And now a peaceful Europe, which was literally created by our strength, turns and criticizes our military strength.
Yes, they would gladly have used us like they used the Australians. Ridden hard and put away wet, or ridden to death on the road. American soldiers should always serve under American command.
The British and French did nothing of the sort. They might not have had the same level of suffrage as the Germans, but they didn't, you know, bayonet women and children.
Also: the concentration camp was developed in America - they were set up for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s.
Neither the Indian camps nor the concentration camps of the Boer wars were designed as death camps: those that suffered from high death rates did so because of cholera, not due to deliberate attempts at genocide.
Hope this was helpful.
In other wars too. Colin Powell nailed it in a speech in 2003: "We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works."
Australians and New Zealanders also fought and died for the British Empire, but their governments also put people in concentration camps just because of their ancestry, namely immigrants from Austria-Hungary, including those who would have eagerly signed up to fight against Austria or had sworn allegiance to their adopted country.