In 1914 when World War 1 started, the president of the United States at the timeWoodrow Wilson had pledged

for neutrality for his country. Neutrality is a position that the vast
majority of Americans agreed with. Britain was one of America's closest trading partners, and
since Britain has a few problems with Germany soon enough so did the United States. Many
American ships that were traveling to Britain were either sunk or damaged by German, later on
in February Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships that were basically not on
their side. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk a private
American vessel known as the William P. Frye. President Wilson was not happy at all, but the
German government then decided to call it an unfortunate accident and apologized.
On May 7, off the coast of Ireland, the Lusitania, a British-owned ocean liner was
torpedoed. There was a total of 1,198 passengers on board and of them 1,959 were killed, which
included 128 Americans. Germans maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions,
however America had demanded reparations along with a stop to all the ongoing attacks..
Germany then pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in
November they sunk an Italian liner without warning which ended up killing 272 people,
including 27 Americans. Since Americans were involved in both incidents, they were not happy
about the attacks and wanted to put them to an end.
In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the
resumption of unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. A couple days later, the U.S. broke
diplomatic relations with Germany, then a couple hours later Housatonic, the American-liner,
was sunk by a U-Boat which was owned by Germany. In February,
Congress passed a two hundred fifty million dollar arms
appropriations bill that was supposed to make America ready for war.
In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on
April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a
declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, his request was
granted. After four long years of bloody war, stalemate along the
western front was declared. The entrance of America's well-supplied
forces into the conflict 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 U.S soldiers had served and more than 500,000 of them lost their lives.