"A matter of extreme urgency": Theodore Roosevelt, Wilhelm II, and the Venezuela Crisis of 1902 - United States-Germany conflict over alleged German expansionistic efforts in Latin America

Naval War College Review, Spring, 2002 by Edmund Morris

For two years, tacticians at the Naval War College had been trying to combat this advantage in war games played on oceans of floor-sized charts. They sat cross-legged on "islands" and perched on "mainland" stools, throwing dice to send their celluloid ships (blue for the United States, black for Germany) creeping across the gridlines, trailing dotted wakes and firing off tiny broadsides of pencil lead. The results were not encouraging. In almost every engagement BLACK prevailed, the sheer range and accuracy of its fire combining to scatter BLUE all over the gaming floor. In Germany, meanwhile, tacticians concluded that their navy could seize key harbors in any Caribbean confrontation.

Roosevelt himself was convinced that the forthcoming maneuvers would show better than any calculation by college or committee how much seapower the United States actually had. Real ships and real guns were being committed to this game; if Germany and Britain wanted to splash in the same water, they would have to play by American rules, or the game would become deadly.

He was able to send a subtle but unmistakable signal to this effect in the executive dining room of the White House on 24 November. Baron von Sternburg was the guest of honor. "Specky" as he was popularly known, had been a young diplomat in the German embassy in Washington in the late 1880s, when Roosevelt had been head of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. At the same table sat the Englishman John St. Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator and another member of Roosevelt's broad circle of foreign friends. Von Sternburg was well connected on the Wilhelmstrasse, and Strachey, through his magazine, was one of the most powerful opinion shapers in Britain. Both men could be counted on to return home with the kind of intelligence that, in von Sternburg's phrase, was "better talked over than written."

Between them that night Roosevelt placed someone who could not fail to impress them, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey, who was about to assume command of the Caribbean exercises. Dewey (whose rank had been specially created by Congress in 1899) was America's greatest military hero. He had destroyed the entire Spanish fleet at Manila on 1 May 1898--and, given a chance, would have destroyed the German fleet there too. Blessed by Farragut and anointed by McKinley, he had an almost holy aura. Genteel ladies wore little cameos of him in their bosoms; some Filipinos reportedly believed that he communicated directly with God. The admiral was now almost sixty-five. His immaculate mustache was graying, his well pressed uniform no longer hung as straight as it once had, and his mahogany tan had been pinkened by too many good luncheons at the Metropolitan Club. He tended to nod off at odd moments. Awake, however, Dewey still had formidable authority, accentuated by the glitter of four gold stars. TR had selected him for the forthcoming maneuvers, his last command, to ensure world attention. Moreover, Dewey was the most notorious Germanophobe in the United States--as Baron von Sternburg well knew.