For better or worse, modern technology had so closely articulated the twentieth-century world that disputes among various nations and peoples which once would have remained localized now spread with dismasing ease.
If Germany had not resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare as a counterstrategy to Britain's efforts at economic strangulation, it is unlikely that America would have become a belligerent in the first World War. Possessing vast resources within its remote boundaries, isolationist by tradition, diverse in its ethnic composition, America was nevertheless drawn into the war's vortex because of these German submarines.
But when America entered the war, California's Navy was ready to enter the war along with the rest of the U.S. Navy. Among these sailors were members of the Aeronautic Section and Marine Corps Company of the California Naval Militia.
