The decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare, which reveals much about military dominance in Imperial Germany, was taken in January 1917 at Pless (now Pszczyna) in Silesia, an elegant castle remodelled for the Hochberg family in the 1870s that served as Imperial Headquarters from May 1915 to February 1917. Chosen for its closeness to the Austro-Hungarian headquarters at Teschen, Pless was owned by a personal friend of the Kaiser, Prince Hans Heinrich, Duke of Hochberg. Ironically, the prince was married to an Englishwoman, Lady Mary ‘Daisy’ Cornwallis-West.
The Treaty of Paris in 1856 had outlawed privateers – vessels licensed by one belligerent to prey on those of another. The first conference on the laws of war held at The Hague in 1899 had simply applied the Geneva conventions of 1864 intended for land warfare to the sea, prohibiting attacks upon hospital ships. Reaffirming this prohibition, the 1907 Hague conference prohibited the naval bombardment of towns, and placed restrictions on the use of contact mines, as well as outlining the rights of neutrals in maritime conflict. Framed in the expectation of surface action alone, the rules stated that neutral vessels could be stopped and searched. Even if a merchant vessel was identified as a belligerent, all due regard had to be paid to the safety of crew and passengers before it was sunk. The Anglo-American War of 1812–14 had centred on the issue of the rights of neutral shipping. The American Civil War had then resulted in a long-running dispute over the Alabama claims, the Americans seeking compensation for the damage done by Confederate commerce raiders constructed in British yards. More recently, a British economic blockade of the Boer republics during the South African War of 1899–1902 had resulted in renewed Anglo-American tension, and a determination on all sides to review maritime law with regard to belligerent and neutral rights.
In February 1909, therefore, the Declaration of London saw a measure of agreement on the definition of those commodities that might be defined as ‘contraband’ and, hence, liable to seizure or destruction. The British delegation was prepared to give way on the so-called concept of ‘continuous voyage’, by which even a vessel sailing between neutral ports might be stopped on the assumption that the goods being carried were intended ultimately for conveyance to the enemy. Fears that too much was being conceded, however, persuaded the House of Lords to reject legislation ratifying the declaration in December 1911. There was still an assumption that belligerents would comply with the declaration, which required any detained neutral vessels to be taken to a port for adjudication by a prize court. The conventions were then restated at the meeting of the Institute of International Law in Oxford in August 1913, the resulting ‘Oxford Manual of Naval War’ establishing what could be regarded as the accepted laws of maritime warfare.
Whatever the precise interpretation placed on various aspects of customary convention, it was clear that merchant vessels of any description could not be sunk without proper identification, or without due warning sufficient to evacuate those on board. Submarines, however, were handicapped in playing by any such rules. Initially, submarines carried few torpedoes with the result that most relied on surface gunfire to sink merchant vessels – no U-boat had deck guns prior to 1915 – or boarding parties despatched with demolition charges. At first, too, different propulsion systems were required for surface and underwater operations, and, in the cramped conditions, submarine crews suffered from constant damp, human odours and fumes, with a build-up of carbon monoxide a distinct danger if they were submerged for too long. As Paul König of even a large ‘submarine cruiser’, the U-155, recorded, when submerged, a ‘frightful’ smell of oil ‘kept whipping and whirling through all the chambers of the boat’.5 Moreover, a submarine was extremely vulnerable on the surface and a number were lost to Q-ships – heavily armed vessels disguised as harmless merchant ships. As designs improved to extend range, so it made sense to submerge a submarine in order to approach surface vessels and to evade detection. As the British children's writer Arthur Mee put it, ‘There is no objection to playing cricket, only one side must not bowl with a bomb for a ball. We must play the game and keep the rules, and the submarine can do neither, because it must make haste to be gone, and cannot wait to make sure of its ship; and it has no means of saving the lives of the crews.’6
Although its original purpose had been as a deterrent, the Imperial German Navy had banked all on fighting a single decisive naval battle in the North Sea to annihilate the British Grand Fleet. Tirpitz had not considered any alternative should the Royal Navy resort to a long-distance blockade by closing the Straits of Dover and the waters between Norway and Scotland. In effect, the North Sea became, in the words of Holger Herwig, a ‘Dead Sea’ in strategic terms.7 The Royal Navy did not need to risk a decisive engagement in order to win the naval war, as did the German High Seas Fleet (Hochseeflotte). Yet the latter could not risk doing so in the face of British naval superiority. There was some success in commerce raiding on the part of the 10 German naval vessels at sea when the war began, but, with the exception of the Goeben and Breslau, the others had all been lost by July 1915. Moreover, 69 per cent of the German mercantile marine were interned in neutral ports and 16 per cent detained in allied ports at the outbreak of war.
Initially, the submarine did not appear to be an answer to the German naval problem. With so few U-boats available, it was inevitable that there would be some in, or travelling to or from, port at any given moment. By February 1915, only 10 British merchant ships had been lost to submarine attack, compared to 14 to mines and 51 to surface commerce raiders. Even after the first German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, Rear Admiral Alexander Duff of the Royal Navy's 4th Battle Squadron still wrote that, with submarines alone, the Germans ‘cannot hope to inflict any serious damage on our merchant shipping’.8
Faced with the deadlock on land and sea, Tirpitz changed his mind as to the value of submarines: his advocacy of unrestricted submarine warfare in a press interview in December 1914 had struck a chord with public and politicians alike. Bethmann-Hollweg argued against it on the grounds that it would antagonise neutrals, and possibly bring Italy and other Balkan states into the Entente. His opposition was steadily eroded and the commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Hugo von Pohl, reluctant to risk the fleet in battle, persuaded the Kaiser to agree to the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare on 4 February 1915. Consequently, Germany declared that the waters around Britain were a war zone, in which enemy shipping would be sunk on sight rather than being stopped and identified first. The Germans warned that, since allied merchantmen might fly neutral flags, neutral shipping should avoid the designated zone altogether. The campaign began on 28 February. There was an immediate impact, with 115 vessels lost to U-boats between February and May, even though there were rarely more than 6 at sea at any one time. In June a total of 114 ships went to the bottom, followed by 86 in July, and 107 in August.
The Germans argued that they had not been the first to violate the accepted conventions at sea since, by the Order in Council of 20 August 1914, and, without formally announcing it as such, Britain had imposed an economic blockade on the Central Powers. This clearly repudiated the restrictions on belligerent rights implicit in the Declaration of London. The British definition of contraband was extended to include foodstuffs, which had previously not been regarded as contraband. The Germans argued this was an illegal ‘hunger blockade’. The British similarly extended the definition of ‘continuous voyage’, compelling ships headed for neutral ports to stop in Britain to obtain details of safe passage. Mining of the North Sea, which Britain declared a military area on 3 November 1914, also impeded neutral shipping. Britain then responded to the German declaration with another Order in Council, on 11 March 1915, making all neutral trade subject to confiscation.
US reaction was crucial. Most Americans recognised that Germany was the aggressor, but British blockade posed the most potent threat to American interests. Publicly the American president Woodrow Wilson endorsed the view held by many Americans that the conflict was
one ‘with which we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us’.9 On the other hand, he concluded that long-term American interests would not be served by a German victory. Wilson was ever mindful that, in 1812, the United States had sided effectively with Napoleonic tyranny. Moreover, British actions endangered only American property, not American lives. Wilson therefore declined to confront the British openly and chose instead to make representations through his Anglophile ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page. There was thus de facto acceptance of the blockade. A US protest to the German government was despatched within six days of the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, but the response to the British retaliatory action in March 1915 took a month. While the Germans signalled acceptance of an American suggestion that they should stop submarine warfare in return for the British suspending their blockade on foodstuffs, Britain rejected it out of hand. Inevitably, neutral ships were sunk, although Wilson chose to act cautiously over the loss of the British steamship Falaba in March, in which a single American life was lost. Wilson had spoken of holding the Germans to ‘strict accountability’ but inclined at this stage more towards the non-interventionist policy of his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, whose view was that Americans took passage on belligerent ships at their own risk.
Then, on 7 May 1915, the British passenger liner Lusitania was sunk by U-20 off the Irish coast with the loss of 128 Americans among the 1,198 dead, who included 291 women and 94 children. Recorded in many contemporary lists as a merchant cruiser of the Royal Naval Reserve, the liner was carrying cases of rifle ammunition and fuses, but the event was still shocking. This produced an American note to the German government that, while representing neither an ultimatum nor a threat, made it clear that an unrestricted submarine campaign was unacceptable. The wording of the note was still sufficiently strong to force the resignation of Bryan, who was replaced by Robert Lansing.
The equally strong US reaction to the sinking of the liner Arabic outside the technical ‘war zone’ on 19 August, in which two Americans died, then brought a German declaration on 1 September 1915 that passenger ships would not be attacked without warning. U-boats were also withdrawn from the Western Approaches. On 6 October the Germans also offered an indemnity for the sinking of the Arabic. Effectively, therefore, unrestricted submarine warfare was suspended, though attacks continued in the Mediterranean. Bethmann-Hollweg's concern to modify the rules of engagement struck a chord with the Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, who feared that the Dutch, too, might abandon their neutrality. Not surprisingly, the Germans believed that Wilson should also take a firm line against the British blockade. Wilson did send a harsher note on blockade policy to the British government in October 1915. The British delayed their reply but took particular exception to the naive suggestion by Lansing in February 1916 that they should agree not to arm merchant ships in return for a German promise not to sink unarmed ships without warning.
The Germans resumed ‘intensified’ submarine warfare on 29 February 1916, albeit under accepted ‘cruiser’ rules of stop and search. With the sinking of an unarmed French-owned passenger ferry, the Sussex, in the Channel, by U-29 in March 1916, costing four American lives, there was another strong US public reaction against Germany, to which Wilson responded with a further note demanding that all merchantmen be treated according to the accepted rules. In line with their generally inept propaganda machine, the Germans initially claimed that they had not torpedoed the Sussex, but another vessel at the same time and place. It was also claimed that the British had sunk it using German torpedoes, an excuse that even the Chief of the Kaiser's Naval Cabinet, Admiral Georg von Müller, found ‘very picturesque’.10 Bethmann-Hollweg managed to stave off any irrevocable decision being taken for the time being and, not for the first time, Tirpitz threatened to resign as navy minister. This time his resignation was accepted, and there was another German pledge of restraint on 4 May 1916. The ‘Sussex pledge’, however, marked the end of the chancellor's success, for the German military leadership increasingly believed that any American intervention in the war could not be in sufficient strength quickly enough to offset the advantages from an intensification of the submarine war. That view coincided with the waning of the influence not only of the chancellor but also of Falkenhayn.
A lawyer by background and chancellor since 1909, Bethmann-Hollweg was a bureaucrat by instinct, ever ready to compromise rather than come down firmly on one side or the other. Given to depression, he had faced a situation of constant political and social flux. The emerging working-class political organisation of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) vied with a traditional landed elite able to co-opt a lower middle class of white-collar workers, artisans and shopkeepers through a strongly articulated nationalism. Though becoming the largest party in the Reichstag in 1912 under a system of universal male suffrage, the SPD's political leverage was restricted by a federal electoral system that gave real power to Imperial Germany's largely autonomous constituent states. These had narrower franchises and held the real power. Bethmann-Hollweg could hope to restrain the political right only by an appeal to a loose coalition of the Catholic Centre Party, the Progressives and those Social Democrats who supported the war effort. The German military collectively enjoyed a prestige that Bethmann-Hollweg found it difficult to challenge, albeit there was no adequate mechanism for overall strategic decision-making. Even within the army, the Prussian Minister of War and the Kaiser's Military Cabinet could challenge the Chief of the General Staff. No fewer than forty army and eight naval officers had the right of direct access to the Kaiser, whose mood swings only increased his growing political marginalisation. It should not be thought that Bethmann-Hollweg was some kind of pacifist for he fully subscribed to the inevitability of war in 1914, and he accepted the sweeping war aims articulated in the so-called September Programme of 9 September 1914 readily enough. The conduct of the war for him was, therefore, always a matter of means rather than ends, his principal concern being to limit the risk Germany ran by war though it was always risk he believed worth taking.
Clever and hard working but arrogant, sarcastic and aloof, Falkenhayn had been the Kaiser's surprising choice as Minister of War in 1913. He was relatively young at just fifty-two and had spent little time serving on the General Staff due to an extended tour of service in China. Consequently, he was always something of an outsider when he replaced Helmuth von Moltke as chief of staff in September 1914, and he had lost a great deal of political capital through the failure of the Ypres offensive in October and November 1914. Falkenhayn identified Britain as the main opponent to Germany. Thus, he advocated reaching a compromise peace with the Russians, his emphasis on the Western Front not endearing him to Hindenburg and Ludendorff, whose victories on the Eastern Front had won them heroic cult status with the public.
Bethmann-Hollweg agreed with Falkenhayn only to a limited extent, doubting that Tsar Nicholas II would act independently of his allies. Moreover, the chancellor believed it important to inflict a heavy defeat on the Russians before negotiating and, therefore, was persuaded by Hindenburg and Ludendorff of the need to replace Falkenhayn. The Kaiser, however, refused to dismiss Falkenhayn when his chancellor broached the subject in January 1915. The uneasy relationship between Bethmann-Hollweg and Falkenhayn was exacerbated further by Falkenhayn's conversion to the necessity for unrestricted submarine warfare in December 1915 as a means of increasing pressure on Britain, a course that Bethmann-Hollweg still resisted.
Over the winter of 1915–16, Falkenhayn resolved to destroy the French army to compel the French and British to negotiate, but the resulting Verdun offensive failed. Coupled with the success of the Russian Brusilov offensive, and Romanian entry into the war against Germany, this resulted in Falkenhayn's dismissal on 29 August 1916 despite the Kaiser's reluctance to see him go. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who subscribed to the wilder visions of German expansion, were summoned to take over. One member of the Kaiser's Military Cabinet, Colone
l Ulrich, Freiherr von Marschall, noted in August 1916 that Ludendorff ‘in his boundless pride and ambition will wage war until the German people are completely exhausted, and will saddle the monarchy with the blame’.11
Hindenburg and Ludendorff were convinced that a decisive victory could be won against Russia. It would force the Russians to negotiate a separate peace, which would give Germany access to raw materials and food supplies from the Ukraine, and thus avoid the consequences of the British naval blockade. A stable peace in the east would also allow Germany to transfer troops to the west to launch a major offensive in due course. Another consequence of Hindenburg and Ludendorff's success in effectively gaining control of the German governmental machine was renewed unrestricted submarine warfare. Indeed, given the usual lack of cooperation between army and navy generally, the decision to pursue submarine warfare was the only German strategic decision taken during the war that was ‘comprehensively co-ordinated’.12
In August 1916 the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, circulated a memorandum calling for the implementation of unrestricted submarine warfare. A pre-war head of the navy, Holtzendorff had been recalled from retirement in September 1915 precisely because he was seen as a moderate and a sceptic on submarine warfare. Characterised by an American journalist as a ‘small, plump, energetic man, with thick white whiskers and a hearty handshake’,13 Holtzendorff had quickly become converted to the view that an unrestricted campaign was necessary despite his usual caution. A meeting at Pless on 3 September 1916, however, concluded that any decision should be delayed while the military situation appeared unclear. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, indeed, were wary of the reaction of Denmark and the Netherlands in the light of warnings from the German ambassador at The Hague of possible Dutch intervention. Bethmann-Hollweg, the Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, and the Interior Secretary, Karl Helfferich, all stressed the risks of American intervention. Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who had succeeded to the command of the High Seas Fleet in January 1916, had been convinced of the efficacy of the submarine for some time. Despairing of Holtzendorff, Scheer sent Adolf von Trotha, chief of staff of the High Seas Fleet, to see Ludendorff. According to Trotha's later account in an interview in 1939, Ludendorff rang up army headquarters on the Western Front and received a gloomy situation report. He therefore told Trotha that unrestricted submarine warfare ‘must be implemented’.14 Scheer himself then went to see Ludendorff on 21 November to press the need for removing all operational restrictions.
The Making of the First World War Page 17
