by G. J. Meyer
Ludendorff was of course far from unique in understanding that the Great War was something new in history, a conflict in which the whole population was almost as involved as the soldiers. Nor was he alone in seeing that, with everything at stake, every possible resource must be poured into the war effort. There were generals who shared that view in all the belligerent armies, and they were by no means wrong. What was different for Ludendorff, what gave him unique opportunities, was the ramshackle system of government that Bismarck had designed to suit his own purposes after creating the German Empire. By vesting all executive power in the monarchy, with no checks or balances, that system enabled anyone capable of dominating the kaiser to dominate everyone and everything else as well. Ludendorff proved to be the first man since Bismarck strong enough to exploit this to the hilt.
Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff
Their successes on the Eastern Front brought them to Berlin and to command of the entire German war effort.
When Hindenburg and Ludendorff showed themselves to be unhappy with submarine policy, Bethmann knew that a new hour of decision had come. He could resist only so long as Wilhelm resisted with him. But the kaiser, who even in happier times had never been strong or stable, was by late 1916 too frightened and demoralized to stand firm for long. As he gave way, ironically, the war turned Germany into the kind of military dictatorship that the Allied powers claimed to have gone to war to resist and destroy. The dictator was not the much-reviled kaiser, a cartoonist’s dream with his flamboyant mustaches and preposterous headgear, but a general of middle-class origins unknown even to most Germans until the war was well advanced. Much of Germany’s tragedy would flow from the fact that Ludendorff, incomparable as de facto general-in-chief, had no talent for or understanding of politics or diplomacy. The consequences of his incompetence in those fields should stand forever as proof that war truly is too important to be left to the generals.
By November 1916 Ludendorff was already powerful enough to force Bethmann to dismiss Foreign Minister Jagow, thus removing almost the only senior figure who still backed the chancellor. At about the same time Ludendorff ordered that unemployed men in occupied Belgium should be rounded up, transported to Germany, and put to work there. Bethmann foresaw the indignation that this would spark in America and elsewhere. Ludendorff cared only that unemployment was high in Belgium at a time when Germany badly needed manpower. He cared not at all when a formal protest came from Washington. And he would be angry more than abashed when, within a few months, the whole project proved to be unworkable and the Belgian workers had to be returned home.
As in the days leading up to the start of the war in 1914, the tension seemed to become palpably greater with every new day. The insistence of the German military that restrictions on submarine warfare must be ended now, the growing desperation of Bethmann and Bernstorff as they tried to stop any such thing from happening, Wilson’s gradual awakening to the dangers of the situation and the need for peace talks, the determination of London and Paris to make talks impossible—all these things contributed to tightening the screws. In London, in December, Prime Minister Asquith’s Liberal government fell. It was brought down by War Minister David Lloyd George, who entered into a coalition with his party’s Conservative rivals and seized the premiership for himself. Not for nothing was Lloyd George known as the Welsh Wizard. He was widely distrusted but had a gift for somehow mastering every situation. He had entered the crisis of 1914 as chancellor of the exchequer and one of the Liberal government’s most staunchly antiwar members. When he saw which way the political winds were blowing, however, he moved in one smooth leap to the other end of the spectrum. His maneuvers would destroy the Liberal Party, but his 1916 coup ensured that for the remainder of the war and the crucial few years that followed, Britain would be led by a man as strong-willed and capable as he was unscrupulous. His rise brought Sir Edward Grey’s long tenure as foreign secretary to an end, removing from the government’s innermost circle Colonel House’s best friend there.
On December 9, at a meeting of the German leadership at Pless Castle, the contest between Bethmann and the duo of Hindenburg and Ludendorff ended in a deal. Bethmann, having lost hope that Washington was going to call for a peace conference, got approval of a statement that would inform the world of Germany’s willingness to engage in talks. The quid for this quo was that if nothing came of the offer, the U-boats would be set free to do their worst.
Bethmann issued his statement three days later. Handled adroitly, it might have put Europe on a new course and saved millions of lives. Instead it became a display of German diplomacy at its most tragicomically inept. Out of fear that it would be seen as an acknowledgment that the Germans were losing the war, the offer to enter into negotiations was encased in boastful verbiage about Germany’s strong military position and expectations of victory. This gave the Allies all the excuse they needed to dismiss it as a display of arrogance, an unwarranted demand for surrender, empty and insulting bluster. What was worse, on the day following the statement’s release, the kaiser said in addressing an assembly of troops that talks had become possible because the Germans were in the position of “absolute conquerors.” This was pure bluster, all too typical of Wilhelm’s addiction to bombast and strutting. When it was reported in the press, Britain, France, and Russia all responded with understandable contempt. Bethmann’s offer was dead on arrival.
Coming on the heels of Lloyd George’s tough talk and rise to the premiership, these developments persuaded President Wilson that no White House call for a peace conference could possibly succeed. Instead, therefore, he issued a note—perhaps naïve but unquestionably well intended—asking the two sides to declare their war aims. It observed that, as both sides claimed to desire a just and lasting peace, specifying the means by which they hoped to achieve this shared goal would be a sensible first step. If this appeal came as a particular disappointment to Bethmann, who urgently needed more from Washington, it was not welcomed by the Allies, either. The promises that the original members of the Triple Entente had made to Italy, Romania, and faraway Japan (not to mention to each other) were secret for a reason. It was impossible to disclose them without revealing that the Allies had grandiose territorial ambitions and that achieving them was going to require nothing less than the annihilation of the Ottoman Empire, the radical reduction if not the outright destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the demotion of Germany to second-rank status. Nor would it be possible to respond forthrightly to Wilson’s request without revealing how Italy and Romania had been bribed to join the Allies. Britain and France could say nothing about their plans for the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific without contradicting their own propaganda about what they were fighting for.
Bethmann, too, recoiled. His plan had been to get a peace conference started with U.S. help, then get the Americans to step aside while the Germans used their conquests in France, Belgium, and Poland to force concessions from the Allies. Such hopes were groundless, both because the Allies supported Lloyd George in his opposition to peace talks and because President Wilson would never have accepted exclusion from a settlement process. What Bethmann wanted was, however, exactly what the people of Germany had been led to expect. They had been promised that their sacrifices would be justified by the fruits of victory and that their ultimate reward would be a permanent strengthening of German security. Getting out of the war without delivering on such promises was the great challenge facing the leaders of all the warring powers. “It is a dangerous thing,” Colonel House had written early in the war after visiting several European capitals, “to inflame a people and give them an exaggerated idea of success. This is what has happened and is happening in almost every country that is at war.” He would live to see the government that he served fall into the same pit.
By the end of 1916, in any case, the actions of the U.S. government had made it impossible for the Central Powers to accept Wilson as the peacemaker he so badly wanted to be. The pre
sident had poisoned the well by favoring the Allies too often, too openly, and in too many ways for the Germans to be willing to return for another drink. The slanted character of American neutrality made it impossible even for Chancellor Bethmann, never mind the military and naval chiefs with whom he was now chronically at odds, to entrust the future of their nation to any peace conference in which the United States would play a leading part. One of the tragedies of the Great War is that the Germans lost all interest in such a conference at exactly the moment when Wilson was for the first time displaying a real sense of urgency about peace negotiations, and an awareness that talks, if they were to have any chance of success, were going to have to be reasonably evenhanded.
Assuming good faith on Wilson’s part, and it is only fair to do so at this point, he appears to have been motivated by two considerations. First was the sense, which he shared with Bernstorff, Bethmann, and many others, that time really was running out—that American entry into the war was becoming more likely week by week, bringing a host of horrendous new problems into view. Second was the president’s understanding that it would be impossible to take the United States into the war without making victory over Germany the objective, and his conviction that this objective was inherently dubious because—his one great prophetic insight—the decisive defeat of either side would make a stable postwar Europe impossible. That something radically different from victory was needed.
This was the moment, and surely not by coincidence, when Secretary Lansing committed what the dean of Wilson scholars, Arthur S. Link, has described as “one of the most egregious acts of treachery in American history.” He met with the British and French ambassadors and urged them to encourage their governments to be demanding in responding to the president’s call for war aims. He said it should be made clear that neither nation would accept anything resembling the status quo ante and that both would negotiate only with a new and democratic German regime, not with agents of the kaiser. Lansing of course knew that this second demand would make even consideration of talks impossible.
House, too, if he had never done so before, was now undercutting the president. He was assuring his friends in London that the Allies could respond to Washington in whatever way they wished, because the call for terms was a sham, as empty an exercise as the House-Grey Memorandum had been intended to be, a formality that would precede American entry into the war.
On December 22 Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, head of Germany’s naval general staff, sent the kaiser a lengthy memorandum stating unequivocally that unrestricted submarine warfare, if undertaken soon, would force Britain to the peace table in no more than six months. There was no need to worry about the reaction of the United States, Holtzendorff said, because (this he promised on his “honor as an officer”) not a single American soldier would ever reach the continent. Bethmann, defeated by Washington’s failure to act and declaring himself unqualified by training or experience to challenge Holtzendorff’s bright scenario, sorrowfully withdrew his opposition. He remained certain that the men in uniform were making a tragic mistake but accepted that he was now powerless to stop them.
December 26 brought the Germans’ response to Wilson’s note. It declined to lay out the war aims of the Central Powers, saying that this was a matter to be broached after “the speedy assembly, on neutral ground, of delegates of the warring states,” a category that excluded the United States. It went on to say that “a direct exchange of views”—as opposed to an arrangement in which the United States served as middleman and referee—“appears to the Imperial Government as the more suitable way of arriving at the desired result.” Challenged on this by Colonel House, Ambassador Bernstorff said, ingeniously if not credibly, that the aims of Germany and her allies were so modest that disclosing them in advance would be interpreted as weakness. Behind this evasiveness was not only an unwillingness to reveal that Berlin still hoped to emerge from the war with significant gains, but also a distrust of Wilson that was now insurmountable. On Christmas Day, writing to the German ambassador in Vienna, newly appointed German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann had said it was Berlin’s intention to “prevent at all costs any participation on the part of Wilson in peace negotiations.” Such were the fruits of Washington’s two and a half years of not-really-neutral neutrality.
The president, unable to imagine that any honorable human being could fail to trust him completely, was painfully disappointed, so much so that he became lastingly resentful of the Berlin regime and at least as distrustful of the Germans as they were of him. Out of such small ironies can great tragedies grow. Unwittingly, the Germans were telling Wilson that if he wished to play a part in ending the war and shaping the peace that would follow, he was going to have to go to war first.
David Lloyd George, meanwhile, was playing the Americans more artfully. On December 29 he met with Ambassador Page, who reported to Washington that although the new prime minister was unwilling to meet with the Germans—Lloyd George said, probably not wrongly, that if he attempted any such thing he would be swept from office—he nevertheless saw an immensely important role for the United States in the restoration of peace. “He said that you [Wilson] are the only man in the world to bring this carnage to an end when the time for it should come,” Page wrote. “This was true because not only of your high character and disinterested aims but also because you were the head of the great democracy which is as vitally interested as Great Britain itself.” It was almost as if Colonel House had coached the Welshman on how to appeal to Woodrow Wilson. Possibly it was Page who had done the coaching—or some editing of whatever Lloyd George actually said.
On that same day, in a joint statement issued from Paris, the Allies formally rejected the German offer to negotiate. They dismissed it as not genuine, a cynical ploy. Their tone hardened the thinking in Berlin, where this refusal was taken as final confirmation that there was no alternative to fighting the war to a conclusion, and that Germany must use every possible weapon because her survival was at stake. The Allies meanwhile were still debating how to respond to Wilson’s request for war aims and evidently feeling no great pressure to do so. The French in particular were reluctant even to try to satisfy the president and took comfort in Lansing’s advice to take a firm line.
One result of all these developments was that on January 9, 1917, when the German high command again gathered at Pless, Bethmann was a defeated figure and Hindenburg and Ludendorff were in control. Armed with the Holtzendorff Memorandum, the Entente’s refusal of peace talks, and Washington’s continuing failure even to complain about the blockade, Hindenburg and his iron-willed deputy needed only minutes to get a shaken kaiser to consent to their demands. Effective immediately, U-boat commanders were to be instructed to torpedo “without warning” all Allied “freight ships indisputably recognized as armed.” What was vastly more momentous, effective February 1, the same would be true of unarmed ships—even those of neutral nations. This second decision was one of the great crossings of the Rubicon in European history. Everyone at Pless understood it to mean war with the United States.
What made the new policy so momentous, the fact that it applied even to unarmed and neutral ships, was dictated by the brutal logic of the situation. Holtzendorff was promising to remove the dangers of American intervention by cutting off Britain from her sources of supply so effectively that she would be forced to negotiate. But fully one-third of Britain’s imports arrived in neutral ships. This meant that the submarine campaign on which Germany was betting everything would be doomed to failure if neutral shipping were not stopped.
German writer Heinrich Pohl explained his nation’s view of the situation: “Germany finds herself in the position of a warrior, hemmed in on all sides, whose enemies are all aiming at his heart. Every time this warrior succeeds in disarming the foe most harmful to him, every time the warrior strikes the sword from the hand of the enemy, a so-called neutral comes running from behind and places a new weapon in the hand of the defeated foe.”
<
br /> Again, the logic of the situation was simple and pointed to a hard conclusion. It was necessary to face facts: the “so-called neutral” was not neutral at all and had to be dealt with accordingly.
The Allies of course saw things differently—or saw them in the same way but with themselves as the parties “hemmed in on all sides.” Be all that as it may, after the January 9 decision at Pless, the die was cast. The tragedy this time, at least for the Central Powers, was that if that decision had been delayed just a few months, it probably would never have been made. By then the Germans would have known what they could not know in January: the system of exchange by which the United States was financing Britain’s purchases was at the point of collapse. The British were, for all practical purposes, insolvent. Their cupboard had been stripped so bare that they no longer had collateral that the banks were willing to accept. Their credit was no longer good. As early as November 27, at President Wilson’s urging, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board had issued a warning about unsecured loans to Britain and France, saying that “it does not regard it in the interests of the country at this time that [member banks] invest in foreign treasury bills of this character.” If things had gone on as they were, American exports probably would have had to be drastically reduced because the Allies were unable to pay for them.
