by Paul Ham
The winter of 1916–17 was the coldest in memory. The troops, ice-caked and sick, were being rotated along the line; the guns were quiet for the winter months. Warmer weather, everyone knew, heralded the resumption of battle and the roar of the howitzers, severing any vestigial association of spring with joy. At home, the exuberance of earlier years was flagging. New Year’s Eve parties were frowned upon. High society tangoed and frolicked behind closed doors. The gossip columns were muted. The university halls were near deserted, and traditional male enclaves – clubs, sports events, pubs and non-war factories – bereft of younger men. Those not working in vital war industries were being trained, or were serving in France or Belgium. The rest were dead or wounded. London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow were cities of the elderly, women and children – and the walking wounded, whose nervous disorders and hideous injuries alerted the home fires to an unprecedented phenomenon: the effects of heavy artillery on the mind and body. Insensate politicians and pub warriors continued ranting about the nobility of war and reciting the old lie, how sweet and right it was to die, etc. In this war, for a rising number, the holocaust of 1916 had crushed those illusions.
In Britain, the war still held most people in its trance, abetted by political propaganda and a grossly irresponsible press. If a form of collective amnesia obscured the original case for going to war, there could be no doubt now about the reasons for staying in it, according to the new pitch: the Great War had become an epic struggle of vengeance. The Germans must pay for what they have done to our boys, fulminated members of parliament and soapbox orators. The militarists in the Reichstag railed in a similar vein: the perfidious English must be vanquished. The lives of so many young men have not been lost in vain, the rival governments declared; the supreme sacrifice must be avenged. This was thought to be politically popular: the families of the fallen should settle for nothing less than all-out war, the governments implied, and so should the people. Nobody asked when or whether the quality of forgiveness had deserted the British and German people. This popular appeal, carefully synchronised between politicians and journalists, amounted to a call for more violence to avenge past violence, implying a never-ending spiral of bloodshed.
The German bombing of London and other cities, first with zeppelins and then, in 1917, with Gotha bombers, ratcheted up the war of revenge. In June, a Gotha raid struck a school in Poplar, East London, killing eighteen children and maiming thirty. The air raids would continue until May 1918, killing nearly a thousand Londoners and wounding three times as many. All this militated against any talk of mediation or a negotiated surrender. Terms such as ‘peaceful settlement’ and ‘understanding’ had no traction.
Hate-filled lies spilled off the German and British presses. None could match the British newspapers for sheer inventiveness, and their squalid line in Hun-bashing enraged the public against the enemy. Everyone heard the stories of the abominable Germans who had crucified Canadians with bayonets and boiled down the bodies of the dead for use as pig-feed, fertiliser and soap. This nonsense, peddled in Lord Northcliffe’s Times and Daily Mail, horrified the public and poured oil on the furnace of vengeance.1 The ‘public interest’ had rarely been so gravely abused.
At the subtler end of the spectrum of indoctrination, the British War Propaganda Bureau, incorporated into the Department of Information in February 1917 under the direction of John Buchan, with the secret assistance of some of Britain’s most famous writers, was determined to preserve the public mind from softening. It published more than a thousand pamphlets enunciating the case for war, the horror of German aggression, the honour of the British Empire and the freedom of the nation.2
Appeals to civic duty, to lend all hands, entrenched the idea of war as a normative, daily struggle that must be fought to the bitter end. Everyone must do his or her bit: knitting socks and mittens; sending blankets and letters to the men at the front; collecting scrap for recycling; naming new babies after French and Flemish towns; volunteering in every way possible. British middle-class women had joined the workforce for the first time, as nurses, ambulance drivers and non-combat soldiers: the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and the formation in early 1917 of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and the Women’s Royal Naval Service. The people were enmeshed in the conflict at every level. The war was no longer viewed as a passing tempest; it had become a way of life. In 1917, that way of life would get a lot tougher, especially for the German people, for whom the ‘war of hunger’ was about to enter its most extreme phase.
The presence of German submarine bases on the Belgian coast exerted a powerful hold on the minds of the British Government, the military command and the people. Enemy U-boats threatened the free passage of ships in the English Channel, which was crucial in supplying provisions to Haig’s armies in France and food to the British Isles. ‘There is no measure to which the War Cabinet attaches greater importance than the expulsion of the enemy from the Belgian Coast,’ noted a Cabinet Minute on 26 October 1916.3
As early as January 1916, Haig had begun planning an offensive in Flanders to achieve that goal. He conceived of a war-winning blow that would not only destroy the U-boat bases on the coast but also crush the German Army in Belgium. It would involve six stages and seven corps (350,000-400,000 men). Passchendaele Ridge would be taken within the first week or so. The fall of Roulers would follow, freeing Haig’s armies to march on the Belgian coast, where, with the help of an amphibious land invasion, they would destroy the submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. The battle for Belgium would end, fittingly enough, with the return of mobile warfare and a cavalry charge over the remnants of the enemy.4 It would all be over by Christmas – a familiar refrain.
Verdun postponed Haig’s Belgian plan, and the Somme intervened. The Flanders Offensive resurfaced at the end of 1916, in commanders’ discussions of the war plans for 1917. All agreed that a knockout blow should be inflicted on Germany. The decisive struggle would unfold on the Western Front, where a massive French-led Spring Offensive on the Aisne would culminate in Haig’s coup de grâce in Flanders. The British and French commanders persuaded themselves that the resumption of the ‘wearing down’ war would kill, wound or exhaust so many German troops that victory would be theirs before the year was out.
In other words, nothing had happened in 1916 to dent the generals’ enthusiasm for further massed frontal attacks. The commanders looked back on the Somme and Verdun not as disastrous warnings but as tactical lessons in new methods of waging attritional war. With the resumption of offensive action, they planned to apply those lessons, with modifications, chiefly in the use of the creeping barrage.
The peculiar misery of the German people impinged ever more acutely on the war, driving the German regime to revive a ‘strategy’ that would have fatal consequences. Berlin’s decision to resume unlimited submarine warfare cannot be seen as an isolated atrocity. It was a direct response to the British naval blockade, which was slowly starving the German nation. The Royal Navy had slashed the country’s food supply. Most available food went to Germany’s armed forces. The elderly, women and children were severely malnourished.
The British blockade was ruthless but necessary, claimed Lloyd George (and a string of post-war apologists). ‘Potential famine is the most powerful weapon in the army of the belligerents,’ he later wrote. ‘War is organised cruelty … savagery is of its essence.’5 According to this argument, anything went in total war. Lloyd George was parroting the usual justification for barbarity, so long as it was ‘our’ barbarity, the cruelty of the righteous.
He lacked the honesty to confront the truth: the British blockade was illegal according to any fair interpretation of international law. Within a fortnight of declaring war, the British Government had reneged on two international agreements, the first to the letter, the second in spirit. The Treaty of Paris (1856) stipulated that sea blockades were permissible only if they visibly ringed a port or harbour; blockades from a ‘distance’, in open wat
ers – such as the Royal Navy’s of Germany – were illegal. The Declaration of the London Naval Conference of 1909 – which Britain had not signed but was expected to honour (it had been a British idea) – distinguished between shipping used for military purposes (arms and military equipment, or ‘absolute contraband’) and solely for civilian purposes (food, clothing, etc.). The British redefined all food bound for Germany as ‘absolute contraband’ and seized it.
The effects of the blockade were immediate and devastating: by the end of 1914, the Allies had impounded more than 60 per cent of German merchant shipping, leading to a grave shortage of green vegetables that winter. In January 1915, the Bundesrat (the Upper House) urged every German community of 5000 people or more to store canned meat, unleashing the Great Hog Murder (Schweinemord). In March 1915, Britain banned neutral vessels from calling at German ports, abolished any distinction between contraband and non-contraband, and insisted on the right to board all neutral vessels. ‘Guilty until proven innocent’ became the British law of the sea.6
The ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 was the harshest in German memory. The early frost and heavy rains halved the potato harvest. Ordinary German people ate swede turnips, the loathed ‘Prussian pineapple’, a coarse root crop hitherto used for animal fodder. The author Ernst Glaeser witnessed children stealing each other’s rations and heard women in food queues talking ‘more about their children’s hunger than the death of their husbands’.7 Mobile field kitchens, or ‘goulash guns’, rushed to feed the hungriest but did little to assuage the fury of German mothers, who formed a ‘new front’ against the authorities: in 1916, women committed 1224 acts of violence against the German police.8
By 1917, malnutrition and related diseases – dysentery, scurvy and tuberculosis – ravaged the cities. Hunger oedema, characterised by gross swelling of the limbs, proliferated among the poor. Long lines of starving women and children were a daily occurrence at soup kitchens. Food prices soared on the black market. Riots and wholesale theft overrode German loyalty to the war effort, in what Berlin described as the British ‘hunger blockade’.
‘Once I set out for the purpose of finding in these food-lines a face that did not show the ravages of hunger,’ reported an American correspondent in Berlin near the end of 1916. ‘Four long lines were inspected with the closest scrutiny. But among the 300 applicants for food there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the youngest women and children the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless. Eyes had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips all color was gone, and the tufts of hair which fell over the parchmented faces seemed dull and famished – a sign that the nervous vigor of the body was departing with the physical strength.’9
German rage brooded on a response that would immeasurably worsen their plight. In the summer of 1916, the German admiralty, desperate to prove their usefulness and break the British blockade, advocated a return to unlimited submarine warfare, to ‘drive all neutral shipping from British shores’ and starve the British Isles into submission.10 In other words, a German war crime would match a British war crime, and so the ‘war of starvation’ would dramatically escalate.11 The Berlin regime defended the U-boat war on neutral shipping as an act of national survival – even if it risked bouncing America into the war.
That was a risk worth taking, concluded Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the German fleet commander.12 An unlimited U-boat war, he believed, would crush the British economy and reduce the English to the wretchedness to which the Royal Navy had reduced the German and Austro-Hungarian people. Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, chief of the admiralty staff of the German Navy, shared this sentiment. ‘The blockade of Germany is becoming more and more oppressive,’ he told the U-boat conference at Pless Castle on 31 August 1916, attended by Bethmann-Hollweg, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, senior admirals and the ministers of the Interior and Foreign Office.13
The admirals were solidly in favour of the new U-boat offensive, conceding nonetheless that submarines were unlikely to be able to break the British blockade or impose one on Britain. ‘U-boats can undertake nothing in the night time,’ warned Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, who had curiously metamorphosed into a submarine expert.14 Even so, the admirals believed an unlimited underwater offensive offered a golden opportunity to force Britain to surrender before America entered the war.
The ineffectual Bethmann-Hollweg and his soon-to-be-retired foreign minister, Gottlieb von Jagow, were initially unpersuaded. Attacks on neutral shipping would merely provoke neutral nations to declare war on Germany, Jagow warned: ‘Germany will … be looked upon as a mad dog against whom the hand of every man will be raised for the purpose of finally bringing about peace …’15 Bethmann-Hollweg worried about alienating Germany’s allies, and advised postponing a decision. He dreaded another international backlash.
In December 1916, Holtzendorff again pressed the case for a resumption of unlimited submarine war. Only if ‘we can break England’s backbone’ – i.e. her shipping power and unchallenged naval supremacy – could Germany win the war. The point that Britain would lose the war if she lost the Channel was high in the minds of the Prussian admirals, who had far bigger ambitions for the submarine offensive: they saw it as the first strike in Germany’s long-held plan to supplant Britain as the world’s leading naval power.
In a strategic paper submitted to the chancellor and general staff on 22 December, Holtzendorff calculated that if, from 1 February 1917, German submarines sunk 600,000 tons of enemy shipping per month (deterring a further 1.2–3 million tons from sailing, he estimated), Britain would be forced to surrender within six months and Germany would win the war on 1 August, the start of the 1917 harvest. Had he announced the very hour of the armistice, the assembled top brass, accustomed as they were to Prussian military precision, would probably have nodded in concurrence.
The all-powerful German Army commanders applauded the idea. If it worked, it would avoid another Somme, thought Ludendorff. One grim fact animated Germany’s actions on the Western Front in the opening phases of 1917: Britain and France possessed far more men, heavy guns, machine guns and other equipment than Germany did. Against Germany’s 154 divisions, the Allies had 190 – ‘an exceedingly unfavourable balance of forces’, Ludendorff later wrote.16 That meant Germany had little choice other than to fight a defensive war on the Western Front, undermining the argument that if Britain hadn’t attacked in Flanders the Germans would have crushed the French. If Ludendorff’s men could hold on for six months, while German submarines sank British ships, denied Haig his supply line across the Channel and starved the British people, Berlin had a good chance of winning the war before America arrived.
‘It has to be,’ Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg told the meeting, silencing dissent. ‘We expect war with America and have made all preparations for it. Things cannot get any worse.’17 He added, ‘We need the most energetic, ruthless methods which can be adopted. For this reason, we need the … U-boat war to start from February 1, 1917.’18 The jar-headed Ludendorff, the supposed brains behind Hindenburg’s brawn, echoed these sentiments with his own note of defiance. ‘I don’t give a damn about America,’ Ludendorff said; for him, the starving of England was all that mattered as it would spare the German Army another Somme.19
Already, the German commanders had begun shifting reinforcements to Flanders to defend the submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. As early as 30 December 1916, ‘definite information’ reached the War Cabinet that a German division (of about 14,000 men), ‘fresh from training’ with ‘a specific purpose’, had relieved an exhausted one stationed at the Ypres Salient. The item was first on the agenda at the meeting the prime minister chaired that morning.20 In early 1917, British military intelligence reported a further German troop build-up in Flanders. Between 1 January and 8 March, six fresh German divisions – about 85,000 men – were sent to reinforce the Western Front (including Flanders), with evidence of ‘large numbers’ of enemy troops moving to eastern
Belgium.21
The German civilian leaders succumbed to the military imperative. Fearful that the U-boat offensive would bring America into the war, Bethmann-Hollweg now resigned himself to the inevitable, in a statement of lethal stupidity and rank cowardice: he would strive to keep America out of the war while supporting the decision to resume the unlimited submarine offensive. The chancellor failed or refused to see that the pursuit of the latter ensured the failure of the former. Just as he had blinded himself to the truth about British ‘neutrality’ during the crisis of July 1914, so now he blinded himself to the absurdity of his policy towards America. America would assuredly be in the war the moment the first German torpedo struck the belly of a neutral vessel. Bethmann-Hollweg even deluded himself into believing that the Entente’s rejection of his worthless ‘Peace Note’ could be used to justify the submarine war and appease Washington.
Ultimately, it mattered little what Bethmann-Hollweg did or said, because he had limited if any power left. Like the Kaiser, he functioned in name alone, a plaything of the militarists after years of dysfunctional civilian leadership: ‘Step by step, the generals roped off the Chancellor’s freedom of manoeuvre and worked to nail him to their standard.’22 He now yielded completely to their will, abrogating any shred of responsibility for the country in its encroaching catastrophe. The U-boat war was Germany’s ‘last card’ and ‘a very serious decision’, Bethmann told the meeting, echoing the Kaiser’s view that the offensive was a strictly military decision. His next sentence epitomised the helplessness of this political marionette: ‘But if the military authorities consider the U-boat war essential, I am not in a position to contradict them.’23 The ceding of civilian authority to the Prussian military was complete, and Bethmann-Hollweg and Germany entered their ‘darkest hour’: ‘the literal capitulation of political authority before the military in the most decisive question of the entire World War’, noted the historian Gerhard Ritter, one of the chancellor’s strongest apologists.24
