The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  The word ‘Weltpolitik’ therefore gave rise to another word, ’Weltkrieg’ (world war). It was not only popular writers who prefixed their descriptions of future war in this way; responsible politicians like Bethmann Hollweg did so, too. They used it for three reasons. The first was of course for effect: they were not being geographically precise. It was not necessarily clear that Europe and the world were different. After all, to their Eurocentric eyes any war involving two alliance blocs would be massive, and in many contexts that was all ‘Welt’ meant. The second reason related to Germany’s challenge to the status quo. Britain had a vested interest in peace, because the existing order confirmed its own domination. In 1907 Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal prime minister, combined pacifism with navalism in a logic which was self-evident to British liberals but nonsensical to Continental powers: ’The sea power of this country implies no challenge to any single State or group of States.... Our known adhesion to those two dominant principles - the independence of nationalities and the freedom of trade — entitles us of itself to claim that, if our fleets be invulnerable, they carry with them no menace across the waters of the world, but a message of the most cordial good will.‘3

  Campbell-Bannerman emphasised Britain’s subscription to universal principles for a pragmatic reason. The military value of the Royal Navy lay above all in its ability to protect the United Kingdom; its capacity to defend Britain’s far-flung possessions and their trading routes was much less assured, and relied to a large extent on the acceptance by other powers of the Pax Britannica. If Germany found itself at war with Britain, the latter’s overseas possessions were more vulnerable to attack than Britain itself; its trade and its financial markets were more sensitive to danger than were its forces in the field. Germany therefore had an interest in taking the war beyond Europe if it could find the means to do so. Although Germany - like the other powers of Europe - had a vociferous colonial lobby, its enthusiasm for widening the conflict was not principally a form of covert imperialism. It was a way of fighting the war.

  This was the third reason underpinning Germany’s use of Weltkrieg. By the same token Britain had an imperative need to close the war down. On 5 August 1914 the Committee of Imperial Defence, an advisory body of the British cabinet, convened a sub-committee to consider ‘combined operations in foreign territory’. Its cardinal objective was that nothing should be undertaken which might prejudice the conduct of the war in Europe. The principal task outside Europe was defensive, to secure Britain’s sea routes against German attack : these were the links that would enable Britain to tap the resources of both its empire and its neutral trading partners. The targets of offensive operations were to be the naval bases and wireless stations that supported the German navy. The sub-committee laid down two guiding principles. It renounced the conquest of territory, and it declared that any land forces used should be local formations only.

  These principles proved mutually incompatible. Those dominions and allies on whom Britain called to provide forces for local operations proved ready to do so. But their motives were shaped less by the needs of the war in Europe than by territorial ambitions in their own regions. Britain did not see the outbreak of the First World War as an opportunity to acquire German colonies; however, others on whom it relied did. British imperialism may have been dormant between 1914 and 1918, but so-called ‘sub-imperialism’ flourished.

  WAR IN THE FAR EAST

  This conundrum became immediately evident. The biggest of the German overseas naval bases was Tsingtao on the Shantung peninsula in China. Acquired in 1897, it was the most obvious manifestation of Weltpolitik in action. The East Asiatic Squadron, which was based there, consisted of two armoured cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and three light cruisers, all under the command of Graf von Spee. It was numerically comparable and qualitatively superior to the British ships based on Hong Kong. The dominions of both Australia and New Zealand had begun the creation of their own navies just before the outbreak of the war, and each had built a battle cruiser, but neither ship was available for use against Spee. HMS New Zealand was not even in the Pacific: she had been deployed to the North Sea to improve the naval balance against the main German fleet. HMS Australia was in the right ocean, but the Commonwealth of Australia was determined that she would be used for the close defence of its own territory.

  In the minds of Australians the danger of invasion lay not just with Germany. Japan was seen as a threat which was as great and more immediate. Racism underpinned the fear. But Japan was Britain’s ally. The Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 was designed by the British to deal with the balance of power in the Far East. It had never been intended as a weapon against Germany. However, in August 1914 the Admiralty’s anxiety about the defence of British trade in the Pacific caused it to change tack: the Japanese navy included fourteen battleships, among them the Kongo, laid down in 1912 and at the time the most powerfully armed and largest battleship in the world. On 6 August the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, asked the Japanese for limited naval assistance in hunting down German armed merchantmen. This was a lifeline for the Japanese navy. It had designs on the islands of the north Pacific as the base for a Japanese empire. It was therefore engaged in a major funding battle with the army, whose ambitions focused on the mainland of China. Entry to the war gave both services, and their political lobbies, an opening to further their own interests.

  The war in Europe was, in the words of Inoue Kauro, an elder statesman, ‘divine aid ... for the development of the destiny of Japan’.4 Like many others in Japan, as in Australia, Inoue interpreted international relations in racial terms. Just as the current war in Europe could be seen as a conflict between Teuton and Slav, so a future war would pit the yellow races against the white. Grey’s invitation was therefore a ‘one in a million chance’5 to establish Japanese suzerainty in China, and therefore in Asia, while the European powers were engaged elsewhere. Most of these elder statesmen and service chiefs believed that the Anglo-Japanese alliance had outlived its usefulness. In 1902 it had given Japan great power status and provided a foil to Russia in the Far East. By 1914 Russia seemed the more logical ally in a regional context, and Germany the more obvious role model in terms of constitutional development.

  Crucially, these were not the views of Kato Takaaki, the foreign minister, who had served as ambassador in London and who was an ardent anglophile. He wished to exclude the elders from government, to assert the cabinet’s control over the armed forces and to put parliamentary politics on a secure footing. Of all the world’s statesmen in 1914, Kato proved the most adroit at using war for the purposes of policy. Domestically he exploited it to assert the dominance of the Foreign Ministry and of the cabinet in the making of Japan’s foreign policy. Internationally he took the opportunity to redefine Japan’s relationship with China. In doing so he was not simply outflanking the extremists opposed to him; he was also honouring his own belief that Japan should be a great power like those of Europe. An essential aspect of that status was imperialism, as Britain itself showed.

  On 23 August Japan declared war on Germany. It had every intention of keeping its involvement limited: it never seriously entertained the idea of sending troops to Europe, although it did deploy a squadron of ships to the Mediterranean in 1917. But, equally, it was not going to conform to the constraints on its actions suggested by the British. It immediately set about the capture of Tsingtao by means of an amphibious assault. Germany had presumed that the principal threat to Tsingtao would come from the sea; its landward fortifications had been designed to check the Boxers, a secret society which had orchestrated an anti-foreigner rebellion in 1900. An overland approach from the sea breached China’s neutrality. The British contributed two battalions to a Japanese force of 60,000 and therefore colluded (not for the last time in this war) in the infringement of the rights of neutrals - a principle which they had ostensibly got into this war to defend. On 7 November the German garrison surrendered.

  War enth
usiasm in Tokvo on 12 December 1914 crowds welcome the Japanese victors on their return from the capture of Tsingtao Of all the belligerents, Japan best showed that it was possible to use the war for the successful pursuit of policy

  Japanese troops were home by Christmas, and their total losses in the First World War were less than 2,000. The Tsingtao campaign was sufficiently short and decisive to ensure that Kato retained the initiative in policy. On 18 January 1915 he presented China with the so-called 21 Demands, divided into five groups. The first four groups sought to extend Japanese direct control over Shantung, southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, and to buttress its trading position elsewhere; the fifth’ group were dubbed ‘wishes’ rather than ’demands‘, and aimed to secure for Japan the sort of privileges already accorded to the other great powers. Kato’s aims were economic rather than annexationist. But the objectives of the army, of big business and of pan-Asiatic nationalists were more directly political and military. Kato miscalculated the effects of his own success, and by 1916 the elders and the army had reasserted their hold on government. Admirers of German rather than British styles of government, they began to orientate themselves for what they saw as the coming struggle with the United States.

  An Australian mother sees her son off to the German colony of Rabaul, where he and his mates landed on 11 September 1914

  The Japanese navy also used the opportunity of the war to seize the German Pacific islands north of the equator. Britain could hardly protest too strongly when its own dominions similarly seized the opportunity to further their colonial ambitions. New Zealand had occupied Samoa by 30 August 1914, and Australia laid claim to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. But British anxieties were focused on the activities of the Japanese army on the continent of Asia. China was already in chaos, following the revolution in 1911 and the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1912. The 21 Demands deepened China’s domestic turmoil. The president of the Chinese republic, Yuan Shih-kai, claimed the credit for moderating the humiliation of the 21 Demands and suggested that he become emperor, seeking the backing of the Entente for his bid. The military governors of south China turned against Yuan, and the Japanese army encouraged their rebellion by supplying them with military advice. Internal division within China created Japan’s opportunity to advance its indirect control over the remainder of China. The Japanese economy boomed in the First World War, not least on the back of Japanese investment in China and exploitation of China’s labour and raw materials. On 14 August 1917 China abandoned its neutrality. Its declared enemy was Germany, but the real danger came from Japan. Its purpose was not to fight the war but to attend the peace conference in order to regain Shantung and reassert its sovereignty.

  Germany’s loss of Tsingtao left the East Asiatic Squadron without a base. But Spee had never intended to contribute directly to its defence. The basic presumption of cruiser warfare was that cruisers should retain their freedom of manoeuvre as long as possible. Spee’s ships should therefore have dispersed. Individual ships were easier to supply and coal, particularly with so many bases around the Pacific littoral in British control. By scattering he would force a superior enemy to follow suit. He would be free to direct his attacks against vulnerable targets, such as merchant ships and harbours, and he would avoid a battle in which the enemy could concentrate strength against weakness.

  But in mid-August, with Japan not yet in the war, Spee’s quandary was that his squadron was not - in local terms - the inferior force. As a professional sailor and as an admiral, Spee’s temperamental preference was to keep his squadron united and under his own control, and to exercise maritime dominance while he could. On 12 August he received a signal warning him of Japan’s probable entry to the war, but he did not revise his intentions. He had already resolved to direct his squadron south-east towards Chile. Chile was neutral, but was reported to be well disposed towards Germany and could provide coal. The Entente naval chain was weakest in this quarter of the Pacific.

  When Spee told his captains what he intended, Karl von Müller of the Emden disagreed. Spee’s scheme would keep his command intact, but it would do so at the price of the principles of cruiser war, and it would not threaten Britain’s commerce at its most vulnerable points. Spee agreed to the extent that he allowed Müller to detach the Emden from the squadron and to make for the Bay of Bengal. Over two months, beginning on 10 September, the Emden raided Madras and Penang, captured twenty-three vessels, and sank a Russian cruiser and a French destroyer. Müller applied the principles of cruiser warfare to brilliant effect. Although his exploits created chaos in British trade in the Indian Ocean, he was lionised as much by the British press as the German. On 9 November the Emden was surprised and sunk by an Australian light cruiser as she was raiding the wireless station on the Cocos Islands. Even then the Emden’s exploits were not over. Müller had put a landing party ashore on Direction Island. It seized a schooner and sailed to the Yemen. After crossing to the Red Sea, it braved the desert, despite attacks by hostile Arabs, and reached Damascus and then Constantinople. A German journalist greeted the party on its arrival by asking its commander, Hellmuth von Mücke, which he would prefer, a bath or Rhine wine: ‘Rhine wine,’ replied von Mücke.6

  In 1914 coal powered almost all ships, which bunkered every eight or nine days This gave Britain two advantages it possessed a network of bases for coaling, and Welsh anthracite burned more slowly and with greater heat than other coal.

  Spee’s squadron set a course for the Marshall Islands, so eluding both the Japanese navy, which was confined to the north Pacific, and the British and Australian vessels, which focused on the defence of the trade routes from the Far East to Europe. The swift destruction of the German wireless stations in the Pacific forced Spee to observe radio silence, and so helped him hide in the vastness of the ocean. Having learnt via an American newspaper of the fall of Samoa, Spee called at Apia in the hope of finding enemy warships there - a clear indication of his abandonment of cruiser warfare. Luckily for him there were no major targets. As he left Samoa he made course for the north-west to fool any pursuers, but then doubled back towards Tahiti as darkness fell. At Tahiti his good fortune deserted him. He bombarded Papeete on 22 September. Papeete had no wireless of its own, but a French steamer was able to report the attack, and so confirmed what some of his pursuers were beginning to realise: that Spee was aiming for South America.

  Sir Christopher Cradock, commanding the Royal Navy’s Western Atlantic Squadron off South America, was one of those who had suspected as much since early September. It was a rare flash of intuition: a brave man, he was not particularly intelligent, and believed that ‘a naval officer should never let his boat go faster than his brain’.7 To cover both the western Atlantic and the eastern Pacific, Cradock was obliged to divide his command, taking four ships only round the Horn. The Admiralty intended to reinforce them, but the attacks of the Emden and Spee‘.s north-westerly course after the attack on Apia persuaded it that it must have been mistaken about Spee’s destination. Only an ageing pre-Dreadnought, HMS Canopus, arrived. Her 12-inch guns gave Cradock the firepower if he could lure Spee’s faster-moving ships into range. But the engineer on Canopus said that she could not make more than 12 knots and that she needed four days’ overhaul after the long voyage to the Falklands. If Cradock waited for the Canopus, he risked losing track of Spee, and so he left her behind : in reality, the engineer was mentally unhinged and the ship could do 16 knots.

  The Admiralty’s orders to Cradock were ambiguous - the consequence of an offensive-minded First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who could not resist the temptation offered by the wireless to direct operations from London on the basis of outdated intelligence. The Admiralty certainly told Cradock that it was his job to seek out the enemy, and only by leaving Canopus did it seem that he would have the speed to do so. The trouble was that he now lacked the firepower to be effective when he found Spee.

  Spee used only one vessel, the light cruiser Leipzig, to transmit
wireless signals. Cradock heard the signals and fancied that he might catch the Leipzig in isolation. In fact, Spee’s squadron had rendezvoused with two cruisers, including the Leipzig, off Easter Island. Cradock used HMS Glasgow in exactly the same way. The Germans heard the Glasgow’s signals and closed with her off Coronel at about 4.30 p.m. on 1 November. Cradock could still have escaped. He did not. He closed up to the Glasgow. While the setting sun was in the Germans’ eyes, his ships had a temporary advantage, but as soon as it sank over the horizon the British ships were silhouetted against a reddening sky. Spee kept his distance until the light was right, and then at 7 p.m. opened fire. His theoretical broadside was 4,442 1b to the British 2,875 1b. In practice, the British guns were mounted lower on the ship than the Germans‘, and the rough seas meant that water flooded the casemates, so up to half of them could not be used. Cradock’s flagship, Good Hope, was hit before she opened fire and sank within half an hour; HMS Monmouth followed two hours later.

  It was a crushing victory, but Spee was realistic about his options. When he called at Valparaiso on 3 November to bunker, he told an old friend: ‘I cannot reach Germany; we possess no other secure harbour; I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, till my ammunition is exhausted, or till a foe far superior in power succeeds in catching me.’8 After an uncharacteristic delay he set course for Cape Horn and the Atlantic. He was now in the one quarter of the globe not reached by the German wireless network. He therefore did not know, as those in Germany did, that the British had responded to the news of Coronel by detaching two battle cruisers, Inflexible and Invincible, from the Battle Cruiser Squadron in the North Sea. Commanded by Sir Doveton Sturdee, they reached the Falkland Islands on the morning of 7 December 1914.