POSITION OF THE ALIEN SOLDIER
The Provost Marshal General[121] reported 1,243,801 aliens registered under the first draft, and estimated that of these (21–30) nearly half a million (457,713) had been called for examination, and 16.72 per cent—nearly 17 out of every hundred—certified for service; a few in ignorance of their right to exemption, but virtually all of them voluntarily waiving that right.
The position of the aliens, even if they had declared their intention to become citizens, was unenviable. They still owed technical allegiance to European sovereignty—many of them to the nations with which we were formally or practically at war. Many of them were of the cobelligerent nations known as “the Allies,” but were here in evasion of military-service laws or other embarrassing legal obligations at home, making personally undesirable their return to the old country; and as for those of German, Austrian, Bulgarian, or Turkish nationality, there was for them short shrift—upon capture while fighting against armies of the Central Powers—only the dismal certainty of summary execution as traitors. Their only possible shadow of protection would lie in completed American citizenship.
Furthermore, there was the fact that only American citizens are eligible for commissions as officers in the military service of the United States; but in the new army, and the augmented navy and marine corps—to say nothing of the merchant marine—a very large number of officers would be needed. This last consideration seems to have been the one which chiefly impressed the Commissioner of Naturalization; for, in his explanation of the necessity for the legislation of May 9, 1918, which let down the bars to citizenship for the benefit of aliens and declarants taken into the military service of the nation, he twice refers to it:[122]
No man engaged in the actual military and naval operations of our country can attain to the rank of commissioned officer unless he be an American, either by birth in the United States or by naturalization therein, irrespective of his training or qualifications. As this restriction, made for peace times, was no less a detriment to the country in limiting its range of selection for commissions to citizens than to those who demonstrated their efficiency, legislative action was taken to remove this restriction....
... The foreign-born residents of the United States, nondeclarants and declarants, had not claimed exemption from military service because of their alienage; but, unless he could claim full American citizenship, none of them, however valiantly he might fight, could receive a commission as an officer, which is the laudable ambition of every soldier.