Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  “At half past one o’clock . . . gray-haired Mrs. Hoy sank down and tucked her head back like a tired child and entered the last sleep. After this, Miss Elizabeth Hoy’s mind seemed to be unhinged. She kept chafing the hands of the stiffening remains of her mother and pouring endearments into those deaf ears, until an hour later a merciful heaven released her overtaxed spirit in its turn. . . . When the wan dawn suffused the winter sea, the eleven survivors found themselves shipmates with eight staring corpses.”]

  Arthur Zimmermann, the new foreign minister of the German empire, was “a very jolly sort of large German,” said Ambassador Gerard. Zimmermann once had crossed America by train, spending two days in San Francisco and three days in New York. In Berlin, this qualified him as an expert on American affairs equivalent to Bernstorff, who had spent eight years in the United States. The former chancellor Bernhard von Bülow was unimpressed by his newly promoted countryman. Zimmermann, he said, “is filled with the best of intentions, one of those Germans who mean well, whose industry is unquestionable, whose virtues are solid and apparent, an excellent fellow who would have done very good and useful work had he stayed in the consular service. He might have done even better as a public prosecutor. People would have greeted him on all sides as he came every morning to take his aperitif at the local hotel, ‘Good morning. Good health, Your Honor.’ ”

  In Berlin, Zimmermann liked to speak bluntly. During the Lusitania crisis, when he was still Jagow’s deputy, he reminded Gerard of the large German-American population in the United States. “The United States does not dare to do anything against Germany because we have five hundred thousand German reservists in America who will rise in arms against your government if it should dare to take any action against Germany,” he said, striking the table with his fist. “I told him,” the ambassador replied, “that we have five hundred and one thousand lamp posts in America and that is where the German reservists would find themselves if they tried any uprising.” During the Sussex affair, Zimmermann said to a group of German reporters, “Gentlemen, there is no use wasting words about Mr. Wilson’s shamelessness and impudence, but we have torn the mask from his face.” Now, confronting another submarine crisis, Zimmermann was confident that he could handle the Americans. Germany, he assured Gerard, would not begin unrestricted submarine warfare without first reaching an understanding with America. At a grand dinner on January 6, assembled at the Hotel Adlon by the American Chamber of Commerce to honor Ambassador Gerard, the ambassador told the guests that “relations between the two countries had never been better” and that “so long as such men as . . . Hindenburg and Ludendorff . . . Müller . . . Holtzendorff and State Secretary Zimmermann are at the head of the civil, military and naval services in Germany, it will undoubtedly be possible to keep these good relations intact.”

  Behind his mask of bonhomie, however, the jolly Zimmermann was concocting something unpleasant for his American friend. During the weeks following the Pless decision, the foreign minister looked for ways to contribute to the coming submarine campaign. He came up with an extraordinary scheme designed to keep America occupied on her own side of the Atlantic once the U-boats began sinking American ships. On the chance that war might come between the United States and Germany, he proposed to arrange in advance a Mexican-German alliance that would pledge Mexico to invade the United States. Mexico was to be lured into this folly by the assurance that following a German victory she would be restored her lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In addition, Mexico was to work diligently to persuade Japan to join the alliance. To assure rapid, secure communication with Mexico City, Zimmermann decided to make use of the State Department cable that Wilson had made available to Bernstorff for communicating American peace proposals to Berlin. Bernstorff, of course, had promised that this channel would be used only for this purpose, but Zimmermann saw no need to honor the ambassador’s word. On January 16, the German foreign minister sent a coded message on the American cable through Washington to German minister Eckhardt in Mexico:

  We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: Make war together, make peace together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you.

  You will inform the president [of Mexico] of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.

  Please call the [Mexican] president’s attention to the fact that the unrestricted employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England to make peace within a few months. Zimmermann.

  The telegram arrived at the Department of State in Washington on January 17 and was delivered, still in code, to Bernstorff at the German embassy. Bernstorff decoded and read his information copy and, having no choice, forwarded the original to Mexico. Meanwhile, the telegram, promptly decoded, was also in the hands of Room 40.

  For nineteen days, the Zimmermann telegram lay in an Admiralty safe, awaiting the moment when it could be discreetly handed to the Americans. The problem was how to present the telegram without revealing to the Americans—and thereby, through leaks, perhaps informing the Germans—that Britain had broken the German code. On February 5, two days after the American diplomatic rupture with Germany, Admiral William Reginald Hall, Room 40’s chief, decided he could wait no longer and took the decoded telegram to the Foreign Office. Balfour read it and knew that the Allied cause had been blessed. On February 23, the British foreign secretary formally presented the Zimmermann telegram to Walter Page, the American ambassador, who transmitted it to Washington. When Lansing, who had sensed all along that the Germans could not be trusted, told the president how the Zimmermann telegram had been sent, Wilson clutched his head and cried out, “Good Lord! Good Lord!”

  The president held the telegram only a single day. On February 28, while a bill authorizing the arming of American merchant ships was being debated in the House of Representatives, he gave it to the press. Next day, March 1, The New York Times announced, “Germany Seeks Alliance Against U.S.: Asks Japan and Mexico to Join Her.” The news that the German government was conniving to slice off and give away pieces of the United States enraged the American public and in a surge of patriotic emotion the armed merchant-ship bill passed the House, 403–13. Even so, eleven pacifist senators, led by Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, filibustered and on March 4, Congress adjourned without passing the legislation. Wilson immediately did what he could have done weeks before: he used his executive authority to issue an order to arm American merchantmen. The question of the telegram’s authenticity was resolved on March 3 when Zimmermann, believing by now that it made no difference whether America was hostile, freely acknowledged authorship.

  For another month, Wilson and the country awaited the “overt act.” On March 12, the American steamer Algonquin was sunk by gunfire; the crew escaped and reached land after twenty-seven hours in open boats. On March 18, three American merchant ships, the Illinois, City of Memphis, and Vigilancia, were torpedoed without warning; fifteen members of Vigilancia ’s crew were lost. “If he does not go to war,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote privately to Henry Cabot Lodge, “I shall skin him alive.” Still, for another two weeks, the president waited. At a Cabinet meeting on March 20, he went around the table, asking each member for advice. The unanimous recommendation was war, but Wilson gave no hint of his own opinion. The following day, he summoned Congress to a special session on April 2 to hear “a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.”

  It was raining in Washington that evening when the president drove to the Capitol. His car was surrounded by a squadron of cav
alry provided at the insistence of Lansing and the Attorney General, who worried that a “fanatical pro-German, [an] anarchist or pacifist” might attempt an assassination. “I shall never forget it,” wrote Ambassador Spring-Rice. “The Capitol was illuminated from below—white against a black sky. I sat on the floor of Congress. The president came in, and in a perfectly calm, deliberate voice, he recited by word and deed what Germany had said and done.” “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” Wilson said. “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission.” He asked formal acknowledgment that “the status of belligerent has been thrust upon us,” and then went on to say, “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war. But the right is more precious than peace. The world must be made safe for democracy. The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth. God helping her, she can do no other.” Congress debated and on April 4, the Senate voted for war, 82–6. On April 6, the House confirmed the decision, 373–50.

  It had happened as the American president, the German chancellor, and the German ambassador to Washington had feared: the decision to begin a new unrestricted submarine campaign had brought America into the war.

  CHAPTER 36 The Defeat of the U-boats

  Between February and April 1917, the massacre of merchant shipping in the waters around the British Isles began in earnest and Admiral Holtz-endorff’s promise that Britain would be starved into surrender seemed on its way to realization. Holtzendorff had said that sinking 600,000 tons a month would suffice for the purpose. The February figure, 520,000 tons, approached Holtzendorff’s goal; the March figure, 564,000 tons, was closer still. In April, the figure soared above the German admiral’s most extravagant hope: 860,000 tons of shipping were destroyed. These losses, which included neutral ships, so intimidated many Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish captains that, in February alone, 600 neutral merchantmen in British ports refused to sail.

  Three great trade routes brought goods and raw materials into Great Britain. One of these came up the Irish Sea from the southwest to Liverpool and Bristol; another lay around the north of Ireland, thence down to Liverpool; a third came into the Channel and up to Southampton and other Channel ports. The focal point for most of this trade lay in what the Royal Navy called the Western Approaches: the wide expanse of waters between Lands End, the Irish coast, and the Bay of Biscay. It was here that the U-boats were creating, in Churchill’s words, “a veritable cemetery of British shipping.” The agents responsible for filling this cemetery were about 130 U-boats, of which fewer than half were at sea at any given moment. By now, two and a half years into the war, early submarines like the one that had sunk Bacchan-te’s three sisters were antiques. The undersea craft now operating in the Western Approaches were 240 feet long, displaced 820 tons, and carried a 4.1-inch deck gun, six torpedo tubes, and sixteen torpedoes. They could remain at sea for four to six weeks. Submarines fitted as minelayers transported from thirty-six to forty-two mines. In addition, smaller U-boats 100 feet long with a surface speed of 8 knots, carrying two tubes and four torpedoes, were based in Flanders and operated in the Channel and the North Sea. These small submarines were prefabricated in Germany and brought in sections by rail to Bruges, in Belgium, where they were assembled; from Bruges, they traveled by canal to Zeebrugge and Ostend, and from there they put to sea.

  Britain’s first lines of defense against these enemies were layers of mines and nets laid and strung across the Channel and in the German Bight. Once the submarines reached the high seas, the Royal Navy relied on surface ships, primarily destroyers, to defeat them. British destroyers, designed to attack enemy surface warships, could churn the water at 34 knots, far in excess of the 15 to 17 knots a surfaced submarine could make, but once submerged, the submarine was safe. A modern U-boat could travel as much as eighty miles under water before having to come up, and no destroyer—or sloop, trawler, or yacht pressed into service against the U-boats—could know where that would be.

  Inability to attack a submerged enemy was only part of the problem involving British destroyers. Another complication was that there were too few of them. The British navy simply did not possess enough destroyers to screen the Grand Fleet, maintain the Harwich Force, secure the Channel crossings, and simultaneously protect merchant shipping from submarines. In April 1917, Britain had in commission about 260 destroyers, many old and badly worn after three years of service. The best 100 were assigned to the Grand Fleet, and no one wished to send the dreadnoughts into battle without their protective screen. Even so, in February 1917, Beatty reluctantly permitted eight destroyers to be borrowed from the Grand Fleet for antisubmarine work in southern waters. From every other station, the admirals or commodores in charge chorused that their flotillas could not be stripped without compromising their missions: the Harwich Force covered the southern North Sea and the Dutch coast; the Dover Patrol confronted thirty German U-boats and thirty destroyers based in Flanders; military expeditions in Greece and the Middle East required destroyers to guard their transports and supply ships. Nor was there much hope from new construction: Britain was producing destroyers at a rate of only four or five per month, a rate the shipyards said could not increase for many months.

  Meanwhile, the U-boats were not only eating away the imported food stocks needed by Britain’s civilian population, they also were directly sapping the lifeblood of the Royal Navy itself. The fleet’s newest and most powerful dreadnoughts, its new light cruisers, and all of its destroyers burned fuel oil. The tankers bringing oil from Hampton Roads in America were large and slow, presenting fat, easy targets for submarines. So many tankers had been sunk that Britain’s reserve of fuel oil had dropped alarmingly; a six-month reserve had shrunk to a supply sufficient for only eight weeks. In consequence, the Admiralty had ordered Grand Fleet battle squadrons to cruise at no more than three-fifths speed except in case of emergency.

  Jellicoe had come to the Admiralty to deal with the submarine menace, but once in office and seeing its dimensions, he was shaken. “The shipping situation is by far the most serious question of the day,” he wrote to Beatty at the end of December 1916. “I almost fear it is nearly too late to retrieve it. Drastic measures should have been taken months ago to stop unnecessary imports, ration the country and build ships. All is being started now, but it is nearly, if not quite, too late.” Late was better than never; the effort to build merchant ships faster than the enemy was sinking them was set in motion. Merchant vessel design was standardized and 35,000 skilled workers were recalled from army service and returned to the shipyards. To provide steel for new merchant ships, the Admiralty canceled orders for five new light cruisers and three giant battle cruisers. A dragnet was set to locate and purchase neutral ships. “The world’s ports were ransacked for tonnage. . . . Decrepit steamers fetched fabulous prices and even old sailing vessels, derelict or used as harbor hulks, were reconditioned and sent to sea again,” wrote Ernest Fayle, the official historian of the British merchant marine in the Great War. The result was an additional 1,163,000 tons brought into the merchant fleet in 1917. Unfortunately, this addition equaled only about one-quarter of Britain’s losses of 4.01 million tons of merchant shipping during that year.

  Much of this work was done by ministries and departments other than the Admiralty; the navy’s task was to see that once these ships were built or reconditioned and sent to sea, they survived. On December 18, 1916, Jellicoe appointed Rear Admiral Alexander Duff as head of a new Anti-Submarine Division. Duff laid out new protected trade routes for merchantmen sailing independently to Britain, frequently changing these routes to confuse U-boat commanders. Destroyers and smaller craft were deployed to patrol these ocean highways. More mines were laid and more merchantmen were armed. Still the rate of shipping losses continued to mount. “The position is exceedingly grave,” Jellicoe wrote to the First Lord and the War C
abinet on February 21, 1917. Soon, he feared, the government would have “to determine how long we can continue to carry on the war if the losses of merchant shipping continue at the present rate.”

  One approach to fighting the U-boats was guile, trickery, and ambush. Former merchant ships with Royal Navy crews and hidden guns were sent to sea, in the hope that their apparent innocence and vulnerability would lure submarines to their destruction. These vessels, which fought some of the most heroic actions of the war, were known variously as Special Service ships and mystery ships. Eventually the name that stuck was Q-ships.

  To the eye, a Q-ship seemed merely one of the myriad small freighters, tramp steamers, motor drifters, even sailing vessels crossing the ocean on a hundred different courses with a thousand separate purposes. At first, honest ships this size were plums ripe for picking by German U-boat commanders. The submarine rose to the surface, allowed the crew and passengers to enter lifeboats, and then, hoarding their torpedoes for more important targets, placed time bombs in the victim’s hold. It did not take long, once the war against commercial shipping had begun, for the Admiralty to realize that this procedure—the U-boat abandoning the safety of the deep in order to approach the vessel it meant to sink—offered opportunity. No ship is more vulnerable than a submarine on the surface. The idea of tricking such deadly craft into presenting themselves in their condition of greatest jeopardy appealed to the inventive mind of Winston Churchill; not surprisingly, these dangerous theatricals were initiated during his administration of the Admiralty. But Churchill’s few Q-ships, fitted out in the winter of 1914–15, had no success: one never saw a submarine; another caught a single glimpse of a U-boat, which dived and disappeared. In May 1915, an even more ingenious bit of trickery was conjured up and sent to sea. A lonely trawler flying the British flag was sent out to move slowly across the ocean on seemingly innocent business. From its stern, however, two lines—one a tow cable, the other a telephone wire—dropped off the stern into the depths, where both were attached to a submerged British submarine. Should a U-boat take the bait, the fact would be communicated by telephone to the friendly submarine, which would cast off the tow and maneuver underwater into position to torpedo the U-boat. In June 1915, the British submarine C-24, cruising off Aberdeen in tow from the trawler Taranaki, torpedoed and sank U-40. On being brought aboard the trawler, the rescued U-boat captain bitterly complained that his boat had been sunk by a “dirty trick.” The following month, north of Scapa Flow, the submarine C-27, working with the trawler Princess Louise, torpedoed and sank U-23. By then, however, Churchill had left the Admiralty and the Q-ship–submarine tandem did not survive him long.