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The Zimmerman Telegram as it was sent from Washington to Mexico.

The Zimmermann Telegram (or Zimmermann Note) was a 1917 diplomatic proposal from the German Empire to Mexico. Named for German foreign minister Arthur Zimmerman, the telegram proposed that in the event that the United States become involved in the ongoing First World War, Mexico should ally with Germany in fighting against the United States. Furthermore, it proposed that Japan should be invited to join the anti-American alliance, and that at its successful conclusion Mexico could recover territory it had ceded to the United States after the Mexican-American War.

The telegram was sent to Washington DC to German Ambassador to the United States Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, with instructions to forward it to the German Ambassador to Mexico Heinrich von Eckardt. En route to Washington, it was intercepted by British intelligence and decrypted by cryptanalysts of Room 40, who had broken Germany's highest level diplomatic code. In order to make the telegram public without compromising their Intelligence efforts, the British broke into the Western Union telegraph office in Mexico City and stole the note, where it had been retransmitted using an older code. They turned the note over to the United States, and it was made public on March 1, 1917.

Though some people initially thought it was a British-made forgery, two days after its publication Arthur Zimmerman confirmed the telegram's authenticity. The American public, already angered over the German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, was infuriated. One month after its publication, the United States declared war on Germany. The huge influx of American men, materiel, and money broke the back of the German war effort and led to their defeat the following year.

Background

The War

At midnight on the evening of August 4-5, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. That same evening, HMTS Alert, a cable layer in the service of Britain's General Post Office formerly called The Lady Carmichael, set sail from Dover into the English channel. Once in position, the ship dredged up the telegraph cables connecting Germany with the outside world and cut them. The British also systematically destroyed German radio stations in Africa and Asia, cut telegraph cables in the Mediterranean, and pressured neutral countries to shut down German owned or operated stations in their territory. The net effect of these efforts was to isolate Germany. For the rest of the war the Central Powers, surrounded as they were by France, England, and Russia, would have to communicate with the outside world by radio, couriers traveling on neutrally-flagged ships, or through telegrams sent by way of neutral countries. By its very nature, radio is subject to interception. Couriers can be arrested and their papers seized. The neutral countries' telegraph lines passed through British repeating stations, where their messages could be intercepted. With all of their communications potentially subject to eavesdropping, the Germans were forced to rely on encryption preserve their secrecy.

Reginald "Blinker" Hall, director of British Naval Intelligence.

Also on that first day of the war, Henry Oliver, the director of British Naval Intelligence, recruited James Alfred Ewing to create Room 40, the naval cryptanalysis division. Two months later, Oliver was promoted, and was replaced by "Blinker" Hall, who was described by American Ambassador to the United Kingdom Walter Hines Page as "The one genius this war has developed... All other secret-service men are amateurs by comparison." Ewing and Hall recruited German language speakers with strong analytical abilities, and put them to work attacking Germany's codes. Room 40 rapidly expanded in scope and were soon decrypting all manner of messages. When Ewing left in October 1916 to become Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University, Room 40 was one of the premier code-breaking organizations in the world.

As an island, Britain is dependent on the sea for sustenance. Two days after Britain declared war, Germany initiated a submarine campaign against Allied merchant shipping in the Atlantic, hoping to starve England into submission. Legally, these attacks were governed by a series of international laws known as the Prize rules, and codified in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. These laws specified that passenger ships may not be sunk, crews of merchant ships must be placed in safety before their ships may be sunk, and only warships and merchant ships that are a threat to the attacker may be sunk without warning. In April 1915, Germany declared that the entire sea zone around Britain was a war zone, and that it would no longer abide by such laws, thus initiating the first ever campaign of Unrestricted submarine warfare. However, after public outrage over the sinking of the Lusitania and the Arabic threatened to bring America into the war, the Germans issued the Arabic pledge, in which they promised to give non-military ships thirty minutes to evacuate before sinking them. Six months later, on March 24, 1916, German U-boat SM UB-29 sunk the Sussex in violation of the Arabic pledge. Faced with renewed American outrage, Germany issued the Sussex pledge, in which they promised to avoid sinking passenger ships entirely, and that merchant ships would not be sunk without first establishing that they were carrying contraband. The Germans spent the following year building up their submarine forces to unprecedented levels, which they planned to unleash all at once to finally destroy the British merchant fleet and end the war.

While the Germans realized their submarine strategy carried the concomitant risk of bringing America into the war against them, they considered it as unimportant. They regarded America as already fully committed economically to the Allies. (In 1914, the total American trade was $824 million with the Allies and $169 million with the Central Powers. By 1916, American trade to the Allies had more-than-tripled to $3 billion, while trade to the Central powers had almost vanished, declining to $1 million.) The Members of the German military, perhaps misled by Japan's example, dismissed as unrealistic the potential for large American contingents to shift the balance of power in Europe. The United States Army, 107,641 men strong in 1916, was only the 17th largest Army in the world, had few modern weapons, and had not seen major action since the American Civil War ended five decades earlier. Admiral Eduard von Capelle assured the German parliament that "They will not even come because our submarines will sink them. Thus America from a military point of view means nothing, again nothing, and for a third time nothing."

Anti-German sentiment in American spiked after the sinking of the Lusitania. This recruiting poster by Fred Spear depicts a drowning mother and child. It was published by the Boston Committee of Public Safety after the sinking of the Lusitania.

Anti-German sentiment in America had grown after the the Rape of Belgium, the execution of Edith Cavell, and German use of submarine warfare. The effect of such events was magnified by skillful British use of propaganda. However, a significant minority of Americans, particularly those of German, Irish, and Jewish descent, opposed American intervention. From the beginning of the war, American president Woodrow Wilson had remained "puritanically attached" to neutrality.. He said the United States was "too proud to fight" and was re-elected in 1916 using the slogan "He kept us out of war." All the while, Wilson was attempting to mediate an end to the war. These mediation attempts required diplomatic ties to Germany, forcing Wilson to ignore repeated German violations of American neutrality.

By the spring of 1917, the war was not going well for the Allies. Repeated British and French offensives had failed to crack the German defenses on the Western Front, which remained stalemated. In the east, Serbia had been overrun, as had most of Romania. The British had been defeated at Gallipoli and the combined British-French-Greek army in Macedonia also remained stalemated. In Russia, civil unrest had reached the breaking point. And the worst was yet to come. Before the end of the year, a joint German-Austrian army devastated the Italians at the Battle of Caporetto, pushing deep into Italian territory and capturing huge numbers of POWs; Russia would succumb to Revolution and make a separate peace with Germany, freeing up huge numbers of German soldiers to be redeployed to the Western Front; and a mass mutiny would paralyze the French Army, preventing it from launching any offensive until mid-1918.

Mexico and Japan

The United States and Mexico have had a long, frequently conflict-riddled relationship. Americans who settled in Mexican Texas fought for and won independence in the Texas Revolution. The Mexican-American began when the United States annexed Texas, and at its conclusion Mexico was forced to relinquish all claims on the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when Francisco Madero overthrew long-time dictator Porfirio Díaz. Madero's short-lived government ended when Victoriano Huerta overthrew Madero. In the process, Madero was murdered, possibly on Huerta's orders. In turn, Venustiano Carranza led a revolt against Huerta. Civil war ensued, and the fighting between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries would continue until 1929. The United States became involved in the revolution very early on, when United States Ambassador to Mexico Henry Lane Wilson - without any official authority - conspired with Huerta to overthrow Madero. The murder of Madero deeply shocked the newly inaugurated Woodrow Wilson, who took an uncompromising position that Huerta must be removed. Gradually, the United States was pulled into the conflict by an escalating series of events. The Tampico Affair led to the occupation of Vera Cruz and a series of border clashes. Pancho Villa attacked several American border cities, and the United States responded by sending an expedition into Mexico to capture him. The Mexican populace became bitterly resentful of their American neighbors.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Japanese had ended their xenophobia, modernized, and begun building an empire. The defeat they inflicted on the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War had stunned the rest of the world. It was assumed that Japanese expansionism into America's Pacific sphere of influence would naturally bring the two countries into conflict. "All Europe considered a clash between [Japan] and the United States inevitable." (Such predictions would eventually be born out during World War II.) In such a conflict, the Japanese looked to Mexico as a natural ally. Mexico's geography and rail network made it the natural route for any Japanese invasion of the American mainland.

The Japanese had been making overtures to Mexico for several years prior to World War I. Rumors abounded that the Japanese had negotiated a secret treaty with the Mexicans in 1911; that they had attempted to purchase Magdalena Bay in 1912; that they had been giving Huerta and then Carranza credit for arms, and that Japanese soldiers were serving in their armies. The Japanese cruiser Asama created a war scare in the United States when in April 1915 it was discovered in Turtle Bay in Baja, where it had run aground the previous December.

German Conspiracies

Kaiser Wilhelm II once told Arthur Balfour "Whenever war occurs in any part of the World we in Germany sit down and make a plan." Even before the outbreak of World War I, Germany saw the advantage of a conflict pitting the United States against Japan, Mexico, or both. Such a conflict would divert and weaken the US, a potential enemy. Further, Great Britain would naturally support the US in such a conflict, destroying Britain's alliance with Japan. To that end, the Germans actively worked to foment such a conflict.

In 1911 German spy Horst von der Goltz claimed to have stolen the draft of a secret treaty between Mexican finance minister José Yves Limantour and Japanese agents in France, and to have given the draft to the American ambassador to Mexico Joseph Lane Wilson. Wilson denied ever receiving such German agents in the United States

The Kaiser alternated between viewing the Japanese as the Yellow Peril - a term he himself coined - or Prussians of the East. The Germans repeatedly attempted to foment conflict between the United States and Mexico.

Once the war began, geography and British naval power guaranteed that most American-made arms were sold to the Allies, infuriating the Germans. In response, the Germans undertook clandestine operations to disrupt American munitions manufacturing and transport. These efforts were led byFranz von Rintelen. The German spies fomented strikes and slowdowns among munitions workers and longshoremen and built and planted bombs aboard merchant ships. But these German clandestine activities did not go unnoticed. Ron Rintenlen's spy ring had been thoroughly penetrated by Czech revolutionaries led by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Emanuel Viktor Voska. Austrian citizens by birth and German-speakers by education, Masaryk's Czechs wanted to bring about an Austrian defeat that would lead to the break up of the Austrian Empire and the creation of an independent Czechoslovak homeland. The Czechs repeatedly leaked information about German clandestine activities in America to British spy Guy Guant, who in turn gave the information to John R. Ratham, editor of the Providence Journal.

Von Rintelen's rival, Franz von Papen, who was later to become Chancellor of Germany, was another German spy in America.

In 1916, Franz von Rintelen arrived in the United States

Publication and Reaction

• 
  The Temptation (Dallas Morning News, March 2)
• 
  Some Promise
• 
  Exploding in his Hands, a political cartoon about the Zimmerman telegram by Rollin Kirby published in the New York World.

References

• Boghardt, Thomas. The Zimmermann Telegram: Diplomacy, Intelligence and the American Entry into World War I. Georgetown University. Working Paper Series. Working Paper No.6-04. November 2003
• Coetzee, Frans, and Marilyn Shevin-Coatzee. World War I - A History in Documents. Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0195137469
• Kahn, David. The Codebreakers. Scribner. Revised Second edition, 1996.
• Keegan, John. The First World War. Vintage Books First edition, 2000. ISBN 0375700455
• Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. 1962. Ballentine Books, 1994 edition. ISBN 034538623X
• Tuchman, Barbara. The Zimmerman Telegram.
• Winkler, Jonathan Reed. Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I. Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN 0674028392. Page 5-7