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U. S. Gullibility filled up the yawning chinks in the propaganda armor of the Allies. The outbreak of the War was a shock to the U. S.: some explanation of the disaster had to be found. The Allies' official defense supplied it—Germany was a criminal. U. S. grounds for this temporarily satisfying belief had already been plowed. ''Long before the great war propagandas began to develop from abroad, the leading organs of American opinion, through the interplay of haste, ignorance and their own psychological necessities, had begun to distinguish in the German Empire a vast, malignant power which alone and for its own atrocious ends had plunged the world into this stupendous catastrophe." "Marse Henry" Watterson. fiery editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, voiced U. S. opinion early in the War (September, 1914): "May Heaven protect the Vaterland from contamination and give the German people a chance! To hell with the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs!" From this sentiment to the feeling that all Germans were barbarians was an easy step. Though U. S. General Sherman had coined the phrase, the U. S. never grasped the fact that war is hell, thought (under advice) the Germans must be hellions. "Innumerable sensible Americans were . . . genuinely, seriously convinced that Germans were a peculiarly fiendish and brutal race, quite beyond the pale oi ordinary humankind."
Germany's only chance to break the stranglehold of the Allied blockade was by submarine warfare. The blockade interfered with U. S. trade, and torpedoes took U. S. lives. The German dilemma was how to make the submarine campaign effective without embroiling the U. S Author Millis does not compare the morality of the blockade with that of the submarine campaign, simply puts their on a warlike par. He notes that "all the lives, both civilian and naval, lost in the whole course of the U-boat war were a: nothing compared with the frightful slaughters of the West Front deadlock which the U-boat sought to circumvent It was humane because it was the one remaining means which promised to get ; quick military decision at relatively small cost." But few U. S. citizens in 1913; could take this view. When 124 Americans were drowned in the sinking of the Lusitania, anti-German sentiment blaze up in the violently pro-Ally Northeast spread all through the country.