“Reprisal” Guild

"Wilson responded by asking U.S. Congress to arm American ships so that they could fend off potential German submarine attacks. A few days later, on April 2, 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. On April 6, 1917, Congress complied, bringing the U.S. into World War I.

The Telegram was not an isolated case of German-Mexican collaboration. The Germans had engaged in a pattern of actively arming, funding and advising the Mexicans, as shown by the 1914 SS Ypiranga arms-shipping incident, and German advisors present during the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales. The German Naval Intelligence officer Franz von Rintelen had coordinated a 1915 plan to restore the exiled Victoriano Huerta to the Mexican presidency; Huerta and large caches of arms were intercepted by U.S. operatives near El Paso in June 1915. The German saboteur Lothar Witzke, responsible for the March 1917 munitions explosion at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in the Bay Area, and possibly responsible for the July 1916 Black Tom explosion in New Jersey, was based in Mexico City. According to the U.S. Senate testimony of intelligence officer Paul Altendorf, who was undercover with the U.S. Military Intelligence Corps from 1917 through April 1919, President Carranza had aided Witzke. According to Altendorf, Carranza had also approved a plan for an army of 45,000 men, funded by ambassador von Eckardt and trained by German reservists, to march against the U.S. in 1918.

Nor was the Telegram the only reason for the U.S. declaration of war. Previously, German U-boats had sunk U.S. ships or ships which carried U.S. citizens, of which the best-known was the RMS Lusitania, torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in May 1915. The RMS Lusitania was, however, flying the flag of a belligerent nation (the United Kingdom) and was sailing through a war zone, and the Germans previously had given warning of the inadvisability of travelling on such ships. Adhering to the view that citizens of neutral nations had the right to sail on such ships regardless, the U.S., under the leadership of President Wilson, ignored such warnings.[citation needed] U.S. ships sunk, less well known, were the SS Housatonic in February 1917 in the Bay of Biscay, and the SS California off the Irish coast."
- Virtuoso, GM of Reprisal