On Nov. 1, 1916, as the United States continued to maintain a neutral stance in the Great War — the nearly three-year, worldwide conflict being waged between the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia) and the Central Powers (the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires) — a German U-boat, the Deutschland, put in at New London. Officially a merchant vessel, she was carrying $2 million of cargo. Her captain, Paul König, and his crew quickly became the toast of the town, feasted and feted over the course of their stay in the city. Their arrival and activities in New London were headline news in The Day and the New London Telegraph. Captain König was treated like a rock star.

On Nov. 17, at the conclusion of this visit, during which the Deutschland had unloaded her goods and taken aboard other cargo, the U-boat pulled away from the pier. In the Race, she accidentally rammed one of the tugboats guiding her, causing it to sink and five of its crew to perish. Deutschland had to re-berth at State Pier for repairs before heading out again. It was an inglorious and tragic end to what had seemed a highly successful port-of-call.

Between November 1916, and April 1917, America drew ever closer, ideologically and materially, to the Allied Powers, loaning vast amounts of money to underwrite their cause and supplying them with vital goods shipped across the Atlantic on merchant and passenger ships. The lead player of the Central Powers, Germany, had been effectively blockaded by Britain's Grand Fleet, and her people, dependent on imported foodstuffs, were near starvation. So in February 1917, the German Admiralty and Kaiser Wilhelm II resumed a program, earlier abandoned because of worldwide condemnation, of "unrestricted submarine warfare," designating a ship of any design or purpose spotted on the high seas fair game for attack.

The resumption of this aggressive policy became for the recently re-elected President Woodrow Wilson the principal casus belli. Also aiding the decision to enter the war was the discovery of a decrypted message — the infamous "Zimmermann Telegram" — from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico, advising him to incite Mexico to ally with Germany and declare war on the U.S. (thereby reclaiming in the process Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona).

So on April 2, 1917, five months after the Deutschland's visit and nearly three years after the commencement of the conflict with its appalling loss of life, principally along Europe's 500-mile Western Front, President Wilson asked the 65th Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. He got it, and four days later, on April 6, America was at war. As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of that event, let us consider its implications for the remainder of the 20th century, and into our own.

In one sense, this became "Wilson's war"; in another, it inaugurated America's debut onto the world stage. It was Wilson's war in that the rationale for U.S. participation was the president's particular set of justifying principles, later enshrined in his "Fourteen Points": a declaration of norms for national and international behavior that would pre-empt bullying by aggressive nations against weaker peoples.

Wilson's benchmarks included national self-determination, open covenants, and international disarmament; they would be upheld by a world body called the League of Nations. His utopian concepts were also intended as a deliberate counterweight to the emerging Bolshevik doctrine of world domination arising from Russia's revolution in 1917. Wilson's mission, then, was nothing short of making the world "safe for democracy."

World War I (as the Great War came to be known) also propelled America to pre-eminence as a world power, eclipsing the moribund empires of Europe, replacing Great Britain as international banker, and assuming the mantle of moral and geopolitical leadership: a beacon of liberty against burgeoning avatars of despotism.

Meanwhile our soldiers ("doughboys"), as they disembarked in Europe, were welcomed as heroes, arriving just in time to rescue the exhausted British and French troops who had fought and suffered for over three years. Not least among these young warriors was a black unit, the legendary 369th Infantry Regiment known as the "Harlem Hellfighters," initially discounted by a still-racist society and sidelined by a still-segregated military. Their almost reckless courage amidst the French troops with whom they served earned them the coveted Croix de Guerre, yet it would take another world war before African-American servicemen and women were integrated into the military establishment they had so honorably represented.

World War I ended at 11 a.m., Nov. 11, 1918, with an armistice signed by representatives of the victorious Allied Powers and the defeated Central Powers. In many ways, though, it has never ended. The Treaty of Versailles, whose onerous terms, despite Wilson's ameliorating efforts, crippled and humiliated the German nation, led to the rise of an insignificant Austrian corporal, Adolf Hitler, whose unleashed fury would plunge the world into war again just 20 years later.

We still live with the unresolved consequences of the Great War, particularly in the Middle East, where mandates were carved from the dying Ottoman Empire and parceled out to the victors. This set the stage for the instability, clashing orthodoxies, and revanchist plots that still plague that part of the world, and beyond.

The U.S. Congress never ratified the Versailles Treaty, which included the League of Nations, and so Wilson's dream died with him, yet the unifying principles he espoused, dormant for a generation, were resurrected in 1945 with the establishment of the United Nations.

New London gave its fair share and more of its sons to fight and die in the Great War. And today its submarine fleet, the "Silent Service," active for over a century and housed at the renowned Submarine Base in Groton, still patrols the oceans of the world to keep us safe and maintain the peace.

As for the Deutschland, after returning to Bremerhaven in late 1916, she was refitted for war two months later and renamed U-155. By war's end she had sunk 43 Allied ships.

Anne Carr Bingham, a student of history, lives in Salem.