Today In History: United States Officially Enters World War I

OCEANSIDE, CA — On this date in 1917, America formally entered World War I. Just two days after the U.S. Senate voted to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorsed the declaration.

When World War I erupted in 1914, most Americans agreed with President Woodrow Wilson's pledged neutrality for the United States. However, Britain was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain.

On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed. In November, Germany sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the United States began to turn against Germany.

On June 26, the first U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives.

Visit History.com for more on this day in history, April 6, 1917.

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