by Hew Strachan
None the less, support for Bauer’s idea gathered after 2 November 1914, when as part of the blockade the British declared the North Sea a military area. From the outset Bethmann Hollweg and the Foreign Ministry were concerned about the possible reactions of neutrals, but the combination of press agitation and naval frustration overbore both of them, and on 4 February 1915 the Kaiser announced that the North Sea was a war zone and that all merchantmen, including neutral vessels, were liable to be sunk without warning. The US government immediately protested in the strongest terms, and in so doing opened a fault line between Germany’s politicians, anxious to avoid incurring American wrath, and its sailors, determined to prosecute the U-boat campaign as vigorously as possible. Orders regarding the treatment of neutral vessels became ambiguous and the accusations directed by one belligerent against the other increasingly heated - and on the whole justified. The British flew neutral flags, and they armed merchant ships. If the U-boat captain obeyed international law he was liable to have his submarine attacked, particularly if he had fallen for one of the British decoys, the heavily armed but equally heavily disguised Q ships. In July 1916 the Germans court-martialled Charles Fryatt, master of the Brussels, a British merchant vessel, on the grounds that on 28 March 1915 he had attempted to ram a U-boat although not himself a member of a combatant service. Fryatt was executed.
In terms of propaganda and diplomatic effect, Fryatt’s ‘deliberate murder’, as the New York Times called it, worked in Britain’s favour.26 But even more powerful ammunition was the sinking of the Lusitania off the Irish coast on 7 May 1915. She was indubitably a British-owned vessel, and as it happened she was carrying munitions. But she was principally a passenger ship, and among the 1,201 who died were many women and children, including 128 American citizens. Colonel Edward House, plenipotentiary of Woodrow Wilson, the American president, had crossed the Atlantic in the Cunard liner only weeks before and was about to sit down to a dinner in London organised by the American ambassador when the news came. House telegrammed the president to say that ‘America has come to the parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. We can no longer remain neutral spectators. Our action in this crisis will determine the part we will play when peace is made, and how far we may influence a settlement for the lasting good of humanity. We are being weighed in the balance, and our position among nations is being assessed by mankind.’27
On 10 May 1915 Queenstown in Ireland came to a halt, as 130 victims of the sinking of the Lusitania were buried in a mass grave
Such sentiments were calculated to appeal to Wilson’s idealism, but so, too, did his own argument that ‘there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right’.28 Wilson, an academic and a Democrat, whose high principles reflected his Presbyterian upbringing, had been president since 1913. For the moment he held back from war. In doing so he reflected the views of most of his fellow citizens, but he still went further than his pacifist secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, was prepared to accept. Bryan resigned when Wilson sent Germany a strong note demanding that it cease submarine warfare against unarmed merchantmen. It was a significant step: the sinking of the Lusitania had convinced his successor, Robert Lansing, that ultimately the United States would have to enter the war against Germany.
In Germany itself, the incident inclined both Bethmann Hollweg and the Kaiser’s circle in favour of operating under cruiser rules once more. In the short term the quantity of tonnage sunk actually rose rather than fell, as surfacing enabled the U-boats to use their guns and so economise on torpedoes. But on 19 August 1915 the crew of the British Q ship, Baralong, sailing under the American flag until she opened fire, sank the U 27 and then killed out of hand the boarding party the Germans had put on a captured merchant vessel. British attempts to justify the Baralong’s action by reference to the fate of the Arabic, a passenger liner sunk without warning the same day, were somewhat specious but worked in the United States, because three Americans had been aboard her. By September the constraints on the U-boat commanders imposed by the Kaiser, as well as the internal friction they were generating within the navy itself, were sufficient to persuade the naval staff to suspend U-boat warfare.
In the early hours of 30 June 1916 dynamite and munitions, loaded in rail cars and barges on Black Tom, a promontory ir New Jersey, caught fire The explosions shook the Brooklyn Bridge and blew out windows in Manhattan Believed at the time to be an accident, this was in fact the work of German saboteurs.
Scheer was not prepared to accept such passivity, and after Jutland his assertion that the submarine was the most obvious weapon with which to strike Britain gained in stridency. He now had powerful support from the army. Falkenhayn had proposed a U-boat campaign against Britain to accompany his attack on France at Verdun, and when Hindenburg and Ludendorff replaced him they, too, accepted that economic warfare, not direct confrontation on the battlefields of France and Flanders, was the way to tackle Britain. However, they wanted to wait until they had sufficient forces available to deal with Holland and Denmark, should an unrestricted campaign drive the neutral states into the arms of the Entente. At the end of August 1916 Romania had finally been persuaded by the success of Brusilov’s offensive in Galicia to declare war on the Central Powers, and therefore a new front had just opened for Germany. By December Mackensen and the recently demoted Falkenhayn had overrun most of Romania. The army supreme command planned to remain on the defensive in the west in 1917, and endorsed a memorandum written on 22 December by the chief of the naval staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, arguing that unrestricted U-boat warfare could win the war by autumn 1917. Once again German strategy was out of step. At the beginning of 1916, military action had not been accompanied by naval; at the beginning of 1917, naval action was seen as partial compensation for the renunciation of military.
Bethmann Hollweg remained very worried about the likely American response. At one level this seemed irrational. In the autumn of 1916 Wilson fought his campaign for re-election as president with the slogan ‘He kept us out of the war’. But his success reflected other factors - his record in domestic policy, above all. Moreover, although he had not done as much to prepare the United States for intervention in Europe as Theodore Roosevelt and other Republicans demanded, he had secured the passage of the National Defense Act in May 1916, doubling the regular army and expanding the National Guard, and of the Naval Appropriations Act in June, setting out to create a US navy equal to the most powerful in the world by 1925. Wilson’s policy was one of internationalism, but he recognised that its fulfilment might require the United States to take up arms. A German move to unrestricted submarine warfare was likely to he the precipitant to such a step. The chancellor resolved to appease potential American wrath by himself proposing peace.
For Hindenburg and Ludendorff peace could only be a ‘German peace’, the product of an overwhelming German victory. The conquest of Romania enabled Bethmann Hollweg to persuade the army that, if Germany took the initiative in suggesting peace negotiations, it could not be interpreted as doing so out of weakness. But the chancellor was so constrained by the army’s shopping list of war aims that his offer. when it was published on 12 December, was meaningless. It failed to specify terms, and it was accompanied by an order to the armed forces stating that the peace offer rested on a German victory. Realising that the Entente was likely to reject the German initiative, Wilson stepped in with one of his own. On 18 December he invited the belligerents to state their terms. But the Entente did not want a peace set by America, and the Germans did not want a public debate on war aims, which was likely to divide the country internally. The failure of the December 1916 peace initiatives was not simply the consequence of diplomatic manoeuvres and the great powers’ amours propres. There were irreconcilable issues here, which, if exposed in negotiation, would have deepened and explained the war’s continuation, not ended it. France could not agree t
erms without securing the return of Alsace-Lorraine. and Germany could not accept that the provinces were not German. Britain had gone to war to restore Belgian sovereignty, hut the German navy was now clear that access to the Channel ports would be vital for Germany’s future security, especially in the event of what many in Germany were already billing as the ‘Second Punic War’. December 1916 was a caesura in the war’s course, but not one which opened up a real possibility of ending it. Instead it confirmed its rationale.
The Entente side-stepped Wilson by declaring that it could not agree to talks on the basis of the German initiative. At 7 p.m. on 8 January 1917 the navy and army presented a united front in an audience with the Kaiser, ‘who has suddenly come round to the idea that unrestricted U-boat warfare is now called for, and is definitely in favour of it even if the Chancellor is opposed to it. He voiced the very curious viewpoint’, Georg von Müller, head of the naval cabinet, noted in his diary, ‘that the U-boat war was a purely naval affair which did not concern the Chancellor in any way.’29 Bethmman Hollweg was not even at the meeting, and when he was informed of the Kaiser’s decision he simply accepted it. He had run out of options, hemmed in between the armed forces on the one hand and public opinion on the other. When at the end of the month he rose in the Reichstag to announce the decision to begin unrestricted U-boat warfare on 1 February 1917, ‘his voice was hoarse and rough. It was evidently very painful for him to plead for a policy which formerly he had passionately opposed.’30
THE UNITED STATES ENTERS THE WAR
Wilson too had failed. It was now clear that the United States could not participate in the creation of a liberal international world order by staying out of the conflict. On 3 February America broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Its reason for doing so was the danger to American shipping, but within sixteen days its ambassador in London knew of a possible German threat to the United States itself. In 1916 John J. Pershing had led an American military expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa, a bandit backed by the Germans. Mexico’s resentment at this intervention encouraged Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, to think that the Mexicans might relish the opportunity to invade Texas. He therefore signalled Germany’s ambassador in Washington, telling him to broach the idea of an alliance with Mexico in the event of war between Germany and the United States. He used three different routes to send the message and Room 40 intercepted all three. By 17 January ‘Blinker’ Hall had an incomplete version and on 19 February he was able to brief the US ambassador in London. Wilson published the Zimmermann telegram as though the Americans had deciphered it themselves, so protecting Room 40’s secrecy.
The revelation, and Zimmermann’s own acceptance of its truth, persuaded those of the American people who remained to be convinced that America should intervene in the war. However, despite the appearances that it and the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare created, Wilson’s decision for war was neither reactive nor defensive. On 2 April 1917 he addressed the American nation, telling it of the cabinet’s unanimous resolve: ‘the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts - for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.’31
He meant what he said, and in saying it he revalidated and reformulated the big ideas which Britain and France had espoused in 1914, but which had lost their lustre in the mud and blood of the intervening years. But he had little to offer in terms of immediate contribution, despite his measures to improve America’s military preparedness in 1916. The army mustered 100,000 men, a third of whom were in the cavalry or coastal artillery. Pershing’s expedition against Pancho Villa marked the limits of its capability. Wilson immediately adopted conscription, on the grounds that it was the most democratic form of military enlistment, but the creation of a mass army had two short-term consequences likely to work against the rapid despatch of the American Expeditionary Force overseas: first, it required the existing army to become the cadre for the new, and second, the latter was likely to commandeer the war production of American factories carefully nurtured by Britain and France. When Ludendorff dismissed the military implications of America’s entry, he was not just resorting to bravado. He reckoned that the United States could not put a major army on the continent of Europe until 1919, an assessment which exactly reflected America’s own assumptions, and he knew that Germany would have to have won the war by then.
What Ludendorff’s calculations failed to take into account was the consequences of America’s entry for the conduct of economic warfare. They were much more immediate, and paradoxically it was they which were in large part responsible for his conclusion that the war would have to be over by 1919.
On 28 November 1916 the Federal Reserve Board, the nearest agency the United States had to a central bank, had published a warning to its member banks, advising against the purchase of foreign treasury bills. By this stage of the war Britain was spending about $250 million per month in the United States, both on its own behalf and on that of its allies. Much of it was devoted to supporting the sterling-dollar exchange rate, in order to control the price of American goods. It reflected a dependence on American industry and on the American stock market which in German minds both justified the submarine campaign and undermined the United States’s claim to be neutral. Britain and France had calculated on spending $1,500 million in the United States in the six-month period between October 1916 and April 1917, and they anticipated funding five-sixths of it by borrowing in New York - in other words, by selling treasury bills. On 28 November the Federal Reserve Board had been swayed by the views of one of its members in particular, Paul Warburg, a German by birth, who argued that the average American investor was too deeply dependent on an Entente victory. He believed that this over-exposure should be wound down. What followed was better described as a crash: $1,000 million was wiped off the stock market in a week. By 1 April 1917 Britain had an overdraft in the United States of $358 million and was spending $75 million a week.32 The American entry to the war saved the Entente - and possibly some American speculators - from bankruptcy.
Allied borrowing in the war after the United States’s entry became the goad with which the United States could drive forward allied economic cooperation. The US Treasury refused to see the Entente’s funding needs in isola-tion. It aimed to reduce wastefulness in their orders and above all to eliminate price inflation caused by the rivalries of competitive tendering. A joint committee on war purchases and finance was established in August 1917. The committee’s remit extended to purchases from neutrals. The Entente had created a wheat executive in 1916; after America’s entry, the model spread to other commodities. By 1917-18 the alliance was the most powerful economic bloc in the world’s commodity markets, and its ordering created what were virtually global monopolies in the purchasing of major foodstuffs.
The United States enters the war, April 1917 the Stars and Stripes, borne in a British tank, are paraded past the Flatiron in New York.
What underpinned this was the blockade, which gave the allies the power of coercion. Moreover, the entry of the most powerful remaining neutral to the war removed any final constraint on the enforcement of blockade. America showed few of the reservations in dealing with the neutrals bordering on Germany displayed by Britain. Holtzendorff had hoped that the submarine would scare neutral shipping away; in reality, it had the effect of cutting the flow of imports to Germany’s border neutrals and so reduced the quantities available for onward transhipment. Shipping losses, as much as shortage of foreign exchange, forced the allies to coordinate their controls on purchasing, thus squeezing the Central Powers even more out of world markets. Both indirectly and directly, the German decision to adopt unrestricted U-boat war tightened the ec
onomic stranglehold in which it was gripped.
And that was where the United States’s military contribution was first felt. Pershing, appointed to command the American army in Europe, did not arrive in France until 14 June. Rear-Admiral W S. Sims, commanding the American naval forces in European waters, reached Britain on 9 April, three days after the formal declaration of war. In London, the US ambassador and he drafted a cable to the president: ‘Whatever help the United States may render at any time in the future, or in any theatre of the war, our help is now more seriously needed in this submarine area for the sake of all the Allies than it can ever be needed again, or anywhere else.’33
8
REVOLUTION
LIBERALISM UNDER CHALLENGE
