The Zimmermann Telegram
Germany offered Mexico an alliance and the recovery of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona in a coded telegram in January 1917, and the British showed it to Washington. Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, sent it to his ambassador in Mexico City on the eve of resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. The instruction was to approach Mexico if and only if the United States entered the war — offering an alliance, generous financial support and the recovery of the lost territories, and asking Mexico to invite Japan to switch sides. It travelled, remarkably, on American diplomatic cables that Wilson had allowed Germany to use for peace correspondence. British naval intelligence in Room 40 had been reading German diplomatic traffic since 1914 and decrypted it within a day. The problem was showing it to the Americans without revealing that Britain read both German and American cables. The solution was to obtain the version relayed onward from Washington to Mexico City through a Mexican telegraph office, which gave a plausible provenance. It was handed to the American ambassador in February and published on 1 March. Much of the American press assumed a British forgery, and Zimmermann then confirmed it in a press conference — for reasons never satisfactorily explained. Mexico's government examined the offer, concluded the territories could not be held even if taken, and declined. Wilson asked Congress for war on 2 April. The telegram did not by itself cause the American entry — unrestricted submarine warfare had resumed on 1 February and was sinking American ships — but it destroyed the neutralist case in the South and West, where the war had been someone else's quarrel until the map showed Texas on it.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Political
