by Paul Ham
A few months later, in April 1917, Bethmann would justify the U-boat war on the grounds that ‘England not only did not give up her illegal and indefensible policy of blockade, but uninterruptedly intensified it’.25 That at least made an arguable ethical point.
The decision went out that night, 9 January; the Kaiser and chancellor celebrated with champagne. German submarines would fire their first torpedoes into neutral shipping on 1 February. On that day, just 23 of the German Navy’s 105 operational U-boats embarked from bases on the Flanders coast. Ostend and Zeebrugge were never as critical to the submarine war as the Allies supposed.
Hope for peace lay with one great power: America, still neutral at the end of 1916. Inconveniently for the Entente, on 20 December President Woodrow Wilson made a genuine peace proposal, albeit modified from an earlier, more robust version. The president’s letter was not an open call to end hostilities; it merely appealed to the belligerents to sit down and ‘compare views’ so that ‘soundings may be taken’ as to what ‘ultimate arrangements’ must precede the ‘peace of the world’.26
London and Paris paused to consider their reply on account of the proposal’s powerful provenance; the Entente could not ignore the White House. The president’s naive hopes for a negotiated peace were misguided, of course, and would have to be shot down. Yet deflecting Wilson had to be handled with the utmost diplomatic care, as they desperately needed America in the war. Somehow, the Americans must be made to see that they misunderstood the war and required an education, Lord Robert Cecil, the undersecretary of state for Foreign Affairs, advised the War Cabinet on 23 December. Both sides were ‘not fighting for the same objects’, as Wilson had claimed.27 Germany was the aggressor; Germany had breached Belgium’s neutrality and invaded France. It was for Germany to make sincere proposals of peace, not the Allies.
Cecil urged the government to engage the president with a vigorous explanation of the origins and goals of the war. Above all, Britain must be seen to be the reasonable party. ‘Englishmen do not mind doing violent things,’ Cecil wrote, ‘but they like to persuade themselves that they are all the while models of moderation.’28
On 10 January 1917, the British rejected the president’s peace gambit with a litany of examples of German perfidy, such as the earlier waging of unlimited submarine war, the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell, accused of being a spy, and the ‘enslavement’ of the Belgian workforce. If Wilson failed to see that those crimes necessitated the continuation of the war, he certainly grasped the logic of attrition, fearing that ‘million after million of human lives’ would be offered up if the war continued, until one side or the other ‘had no more to offer’.29
One issue, however, would persuade Washington to join the war: the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare. Berlin had abandoned this tactic in 1916 after international condemnation of the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger ship, by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915, killing 1198 passengers and crew. To resume the submarine offensive would not only be barbarous, Wilson later said, but also foolish. On 1 February 1917, Berlin’s leaders offered ample evidence that they were both.
In the opening months of 1917, many British people feared that German U-boats would win the war. The British Admiralty seemed helpless to protect the country from hundreds of underwater predators: German submarines had sunk 632,000 tons of British (i.e. non-neutral) shipping in the last four months of 1916, easily outpacing the shipbuilding rate of 52,000 tons a month. Britain ‘could not carry on much longer’ and ‘a complete breakdown in shipping would come before June 1917’, Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, warned the Cabinet on 9 November 1916. He later revised this deadline, fearing that the collapse of the nation must come sooner.30 Admiral of the Fleet Lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher of Kilverstone even warned of a U-boat invasion of Britain, the danger of which bubbled up in his letter to the prime minister on 15 March 1917: ‘in view of the development by the enemy of submarines of great size and power … the Germans were likely to undertake an invasion of this country’.31 Few ministers took the threat of invasion seriously, yet they pandered to Fisher’s eminence by asking him to flesh out his warning.
From Germany’s viewpoint, the success of the U-boat war would rely on the accuracy of its own navy’s estimates of the British shipping schedule. The admirals had complete faith in their arithmetic, the fruit of months of analysis of the shipping news. The statistics and timetables failed, however, to account for the frustrating tendency of the real world to change, to adapt to expectations, rather than stay conveniently inert in deference to what Germany planned to do. The German admirals tended to ignore or play down factors that hobbled their pristine plan, such as British retaliation or food stockpiling. Their blindness reprised the army’s slavish obedience to the Schlieffen Plan of 1914, investing their blueprint with the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But a ‘prophecy’ is only as accurate as the information being fed into it.
In this case, the U-boat planners lacked a correct inventory of British food supplies and failed to account for the determination of David Lloyd George to outwit and stall the underwater war. Nor had the German Navy considered the extent to which they would imperil their own army by exposing it to the full onslaught of General Haig’s Flanders Offensive, the case for which, at least in part, was the destruction of the submarine bases in Belgium.
The British Admiralty monitored the ensuing disaster with a statistician’s fetish for numbers. Lord Jellicoe, the first sea lord, presented a daily tally of shipping losses to the War Cabinet, which revealed that Germany had been sinking neutral vessels well before 1 February 1917: of 304,000 tons of shipping sunk in November 1916, 93,000 tons had sailed under a neutral flag.32 On 19 January, Britain established a ‘restricted area’ covering most of the North Sea, ‘which will be dangerous to all shipping and should be avoided’.33
In February 1917, as feared, German U-boats sent thousands of tons of British and neutral ships to the ocean floor. The new campaign was immediately successful, alarming the War Cabinet. In the week ending 25 February 1917, German submarines sank 34 neutral and Allied vessels, a total of 65,677 tons. Merchant vessels were encouraged to arm themselves: 1681 were armed by 11 February, up from 1194 two months earlier.34 Many ships refused to venture out of port, fulfilling Germany’s secondary goal of deterring them. Still, the losses rose: in the first two weeks of March, 192,863 tons (109 British and neutral ships) were sent to the seabed, compared with 204,860 tons (116 ships) in the same period in February.35 U-boats destroyed 499,430 tons of shipping in February and 548,817 in March, rapidly approaching the threshold for an August victory.36
The campaign unleashed terror on the ships at sea: a torpedo ripped open its hull with a terrific submarine explosion; the men scrambled for life rafts as the ship filled with water and began to list; the seamen caught below deck drowned; and thousands of tons of food and supplies were lost. On the German side, the submariners, in their hot, cramped metal tubes, endured mind-shattering conditions. ‘[S]ubmarine men,’ said one German account, ‘were likely to break down with nerve strain of some kind or other and were constantly being sent away to recuperate … Some went mad.’37
April’s record losses drained the faces of the War Cabinet: a staggering 841,118 tons of shipping were sunk that month, 169 British and 204 other nations’ ships, the worst month of the U-boat campaign.38 The stunned Jellicoe announced that, in the first nine days, 192,000 tons were lost, almost double that of the corresponding period in March.39 The exchange ratio was one U-boat to 53 merchant ships in February, one to 74 in March and one to 167 in April. That loss rate easily exceeded Britain’s capacity to fix damaged ships, build new ones or find extra tonnage elsewhere.
The U-boats were also finding their ultimate target: the British civilian. By mid-April, Britain had nine weeks’ supply of wheat and flour stocks (compared with fourteen weeks’ the previous December).40 Total British imports of food, drink and raw materials had fallen to 2,503,00
0 tons in March 1917, compared with 3,567,000 tons in the same month in 1916.41 By May, the net annual rate of depletion of British shipping had reached 25 per cent, which, if continued, would have seriously threatened British survival. Haig’s armies relied on the lifeline across the English Channel. ‘Britain would lose the war, if it lost the Channel,’ writes the British naval expert Geoffrey Till. For Jellicoe, the rising losses pointed to the ‘absolute necessity of turning the Germans out of northern Belgium at the earliest possible moment. It must be done during the present summer.’42
Spurred by this success, Berlin decided to devote its entire shipbuilding resources to building submarines, according to a captured U-boat captain (whose statements were presented to the War Cabinet in May). Output would soon reach twenty submarines per month; already 300 submarines were in use, he claimed (not all were operational). By then, a special U-boat training school was turning out crews within three months.43
All this added huge impetus to the case for Haig’s Flanders Offensive, with three caveats. First, the submarine bases in Flanders played a relatively minor role in the U-boat war, because Germany had more important bases in the Baltic. Second, shipping losses would never reach their April peak thanks to the effectiveness of a new convoy system championed by Lloyd George (see below). The losses fell to 590,729 tons (287 ships) in May 1917, 669,218 tons in June (290 ships), and 534,799 tons in July (227 ships) – a total of 3.7 million tons of world shipping since 1 February.44 Third, the British people were better off than Jellicoe feared and these figures suggested. The government had acted quickly to raise domestic food production, stockpile food and relieve the nation’s dependence on imports. The food controller pressed the public to curb waste and ‘extravagant consumption’,45 and urged every eating-place to observe one ‘meatless day’ per week and bakers to use only ‘straight-run flour’. Posters exhorted the public to ‘Eat Less Bread’, ‘Save the Wheat, Help the Fleet’ and ‘Save Two Slices every day and Defeat the U-Boat’.46 The Germans had failed to factor into their calculations the huge grain reserves on hand in Australia, Canada and the Americas, which was more than enough to feed the nation. The British people would never experience the severe malnourishment and, in some regions, starvation of their counterparts in Germany. The wealthy could afford to ignore these restraints, and many continued gorging themselves as if it were peacetime. Nor would British racehorses receive less corn and oats, so plentiful were the grain supplies.
As anticipated, the U-boat offensive accelerated America’s entry into the war. On 31 January 1917, Ambassador Count Johann von Bernstorff, with all the bumbling menace that passed for German diplomacy, told Robert Lansing, US secretary of state, that German submarines would stop all sea traffic ‘with every available weapon and without further notice in the … blockade zones around Great Britain, France, Italy and in the Eastern Mediterranean’.47 US ships, he warned, should henceforth display prominent markings to ensure their safe passage. Most would distrust that warning and confine themselves to port: German submarines sank two ships bearing US flags that month, bringing back memories of the Lusitania and hardening American opinion against Germany. The president promptly condemned the U-boat war as illegal and indefensible, and froze all diplomatic contact with Germany.
The moment that confirmed US entry was the interception by British intelligence of the ‘Zimmermann Note’, a cypher telegram sent on 11 January 1917 by Arthur Zimmermann, German foreign secretary, to Heinrich von Eckardt, the German ambassador in Mexico. It proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico should America enter the war, and that Mexico, in return, would share in the spoils of victory, including the disputed border states. When Edward Bell, secretary of the US Embassy in Britain, first saw the note on 19 February, he thought it a fake. His incredulity turned to rage when Zimmermann himself confirmed the telegram’s authenticity.
‘We intend to begin on the 1st of February unrestricted submarine warfare,’ the Note told the Mexicans. ‘We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States of America 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 … an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona … [T]he ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace. Signed, Zimmermann.’48 Within two months, America was at war with Germany.
While German and British commanders respectively defended the submarine war and naval blockade as legitimate weapons, powerful civilians were not persuaded. The ‘immorality’ of the two offensives drew the concern of the Vatican. In a message to the British Government on 28 February, Pope Benedict XV urged Britain and Germany to cease waging ‘warfare by means of starvation’, and offered to mediate to reach an agreement.49
Downing Street dismissed the Vatican’s intervention. ‘The Pope’s proposal was not one that could be accepted,’ reasoned the War Cabinet on 2 March. ‘It was doubtful whether … Germany could be trusted to adhere to any such arrangement. The danger would be that, after accumulating a certain stock of food, Germany would find some pretext for throwing the arrangement over and reverting to unrestricted submarine warfare.’50
The Vatican failed to see that the blockade lay at the heart of British military strategy, as the War Cabinet noted in its response:
[T]o accept the [Vatican’s] proposal would be to abandon the whole of our military policy, of which the blockade formed an essential part, and even to consider it would be an admission on our part of the success of the submarine campaign and of our own weakness.51
Germany dismissed the Pope’s intervention on similar lines: national survival was at stake. Both responses revealed the callousness of governments unwilling even to consider mediation and determined to use any weapon, regardless of whether it broke international laws or slaughtered civilians.
Compounding the threat of submarines in early 1917 was the alarming prospect of Russia abandoning Britain and her allies. Russia’s domestic turmoil was steadily undermining the Allied war effort. The revolution of March 1917 forced the Tsar to abdicate, installing a provisional, ‘democratic’ government, first under Prince Georgy Lvov and then under Alexander Kerensky. The next month, the new regime moved to reassure the Entente governments of Russia’s commitment to the war, promising to continue the struggle against Germany. Huge Bolshevik-inspired protests against the war, by Russian workers and soldiers, countermanded any such promise; in May and July, the soldiers would ‘vote with their feet’ and desert en masse.52
There was a ‘deplorable lack of discipline’ in the Russian Army, the British consul in Odessa cabled the War Cabinet on 11 May, ‘and very poor prospects of any offensive on the part of the Russian forces’.53 Deserters had exceeded two million before the March Revolution, and doubled after it, Major General Alfred Knox, the British military attaché (and spy) in Russia, reported at the end of May. A mere 100,000 had returned to the colours.54
In response, the French and British Governments wrote off hopes of their eastern ally contributing anything further to the war effort. Britain’s High Command ‘quite plainly believed that nothing could be expected of Russia in the future’.55 (The wounded Russian bear would keep grumbling until September, when the Germans put it out of its misery for good, at the Battle of Riga.) Lord Robert Cecil (whose avowed pacifism had not dissuaded him from serving as minister of blockade), failed to see how Britain and France could win the war alone. Several top officials dwelled once more, in the privacy of their clubs and offices, on finding a peaceful settlement with Germany.
Yet France, too, had become an unreliable ally, for reasons peculiar to the experiences and culture of the French Army. Many of France’s finest regiments had expired in the fires of Verdun, and the country needed time to recoup her huge losses. That much was clear at the start of 1917. Less clear was how the brooding beast of French morale would hold up to another h
uge offensive, planned on the Aisne. Already, there were dark mutterings in the French ranks about the terrible food and short leave, among other complaints. Yet nobody in French High Command – certainly not its new commander, General Robert Nivelle – anticipated the speed and thoroughness with which the genie of mutiny would spread through the poilu.
Meanwhile, Lloyd George had devoted much of his time to finding a way of neutralising the German submarine offensive. This cohered with the idea of himself as an amateur expert in strategic matters who could countermand his admirals and generals through sheer genius and force of will. In this case, the prime minister would be proved perfectly correct. He championed a system of ‘scientifically organized convoys’, first proposed by the Cabinet secretary, Maurice Hankey, in a memo in February 1917, on the recommendation of Admiral Reginald Henderson, a quiet renegade in the upper ranks of the navy. Simply put, the system worked in the same way as a herd of wildebeest: the herd presented a moving, collective target to the lion, and the biggest protected the weakest. In the same way, merchant ships would sail in convoy formation, protected by destroyers, denying the U-boats a lone target. If the submarines attacked the convoy, they risked immediate exposure and destruction. It was a fairly obvious solution, which Lloyd George came to cherish as his pet project.
Yet the prime minister’s enthusiasm for convoys had not counted on the intransigence of the admiralty, whose grandees frowned on the notion of a British destroyer escorting a fishing trawler. Had the Royal Navy, monarch of the oceans, ruler of the waves, been reduced to this? Jellicoe and other top sailors agreed over breakfast with Lloyd George on 13 February to ‘conduct experiments’ in convoys, but argued that merchant captains lacked the discipline to keep their stations.56
