Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918

by Roger Chickering

  Germans could thus take comfort in events in east Africa, but the campaign itself, like the operations in the rest of the German colonies, only confirmed the military weakness of the German position outside Europe. Germany’s difficult dealings with the Ottoman Empire, its ally, offered more evidence of the same truth. Tensions in the alliance contributed to the frustration of both parties’ goals.57 The Ottoman Turks failed in the end to avert partition at the hands of the Great Powers. The Germans failed to subvert the Asian empires of Britain and Russia. Pursuit of these goals nevertheless exposed Turks and Germans alike to additional charges of barbarism.

  The alliance, whose terms were negotiated amid the euphoria of the war’s first week, immediately inspired grand visions in the German army command and Foreign Office, as well in the ranks of the country’s “orientalists,” the several hundred students of Orientalistik whose academic training in the languages and cultures of the Near and Middle East now took on immediate political relevance.58 In these visions, revolution was to sweep the Islamic territories that Germany’s enemies had colonized or otherwise brought under their control. Helmut von Moltke wrote in August of prospective uprisings from Morocco to India. The sultan’s public declaration of jihad in November 1914 accommodated these German designs, insofar as it appeared to commit the Ottoman Empire to a pan-Islamic crusade.59 The difficulties in this proposition quickly became manifest. For one thing, the goals of the Turkish government, particularly its dominant faction, the Committee for Union and Progress, were directed in the first instance towards the survival of the state. This goal seemed to mandate ethnic homogeneity at home and recovering Turkish territory in Europe that had been lost during the Balkan wars, as well as in the Caucasus, which had been lost to Russia in 1878. The potential tensions with broader German designs were compounded by the fierce commitment of the Turkish leadership to its own projects. Finally, the hopes of the Turkish and German leadership were alike frustrated by military weakness. Two years after its defeat in the Balkan Wars the Ottoman Empire was ill prepared to fight another war on several fronts, among which communications remained rudimentary. Beyond the prominent role that a German military mission had played in staffing and training the Ottoman army since 1913, the Germans were, despite pleas from Germans and Turks in Constantinople, unable to provide their ally with much more than loans, weapons, propaganda materials, and advice.60 Once the military defeat of Serbia had cleared the land and river routes between the two countries in the fall of 1915, growing shortages in Germany limited deliveries of other vital materials, such as food and coal.

  Most of the fruit from the alliance fell early. Communication between Britain and Russia via the Dardanelles was immediately blocked. It remained so for the duration of the war, thanks principally to Turkish–German collaboration. The Allied landings on the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915 were designed to open the Dardanelles. The Turkish armies that defeated this plan were commanded by Otto Liman von Sanders, the chief of the German military mission. At almost the same moment as Allied troops evacuated the peninsula, Turkish forces under the command of a German field marshal, Colmar von der Goltz, began to lay siege to the British garrison at Kut-al-Amara on the river Tigris, south of Baghdad. Four months later the garrison of some 15,000 British and Indian troops surrendered, in one of the most spectacular Allied defeats of the war. In 1916 crack Turkish units joined the armies of the Central Powers in Galicia.

  The alliance otherwise enjoyed little operational success. An ill-advised thrust into the Russian Caucasus by a large Turkish army (with a German chief-of-staff) ended in catastrophe at the Battle of Sarikamish early in 1915. The defeat demonstrated deficiencies in the equipment, mobility, communications, coordination, and (by no means least) strategic planning of the Turkish forces, for which the Turkish war minister, Enver Pasha, now bore the principal responsibility. Defeat also placed these forces on the defensive in eastern Anatolia for most of the war and brought a practical end to hopes of rallying the peoples of the region to a pan-Islamic, or even pan-Turkish, crusade. Several weeks later the failure of an attack on the Suez Canal, which had been planned by German officers, emphasized the same point and committed Turkish forces to defensive operations in Palestine, during which several hundred German soldiers lost their lives.61

  Some Germans clung nevertheless to hopes of fomenting uprisings among the Muslim peoples.62 Plots continued to incubate within the army, foreign service, and among self-styled experts. With the support of local German businessmen and other sympathizers (and, in 1915, of German and Austrian prisoners of war who had escaped south from camps in Russia), German agents provocateurs ventured out to exploit local grievances, distributing propaganda, weapons, bribes to tribal leaders, and promises of alliance and military support. Traces of these plots surfaced in French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), in Egypt, Abyssinia, and the Sudan (where the idea was to support Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign), and to the east, in the Caucasus. These German projects extended as well to Persia and Afghanistan, where the ultimate hope was to undermine British rule in India; and to this end the Germans supported networks of dissident Indians in the United States and Canada.63 The most notable German incursion to the east involved a year’s trek of more than 3,600 kilometers from Constantinople to Kabul (most of it by camel caravan). In the course of its adventures, the German expedition skirmished with Russian and British troops and attempted to sabotage British oil fields in southern Persia. The hope was to win the Persian shah and the Afghan emir for the Central Powers, to persuade them to declare war on the Entente and support an Indian rebellion.64

  Little issued from any of these projects, and it is tempting to characterize them with words such as “hare-brained,” “fanciful,” and “preposterous.” That they were unrealistic and ill conceived is not in question, but they did speak to real grievances against the Entente powers among the peoples that the Germans encountered. That the Germans failed was not due to the extravagance of their designs alone but, rather, to the hopeless discrepancy between these designs and the resources available to achieve them. Everywhere they operated, Germans contended with superior local British, French, or Russian military and naval power – including superior military intelligence, particularly once a German agent in Persia had mislaid the German codebook, so the British soon knew more about the German machinations than the Germans did themselves. The great disproportion in power on the spot was lost on none of the local leaders with whom the Germans sought to deal.

  Even so, these German activities were the source of grave concern to the powers against which they were directed. The Arab uprising against Turkish rule, to say nothing of the Bolshevik revolution, suggested that anxieties about insurgencies directed by a cadre of skilled agents were not misplaced. Nowhere were these anxieties more vivid, however, than within the Turkish government, owing in part perhaps to the circumstances in which the Committee for Union and Progress had itself come to power. In all events, within the Turkish leadership the fears of subversion attached in the first instance to the Armenians, a minority group that had, like Jews and Greeks, for several decades been the object of discrimination and persecution in the Ottoman lands. On a number of recent occasions before the war, the persecution of Armenians had erupted into organized massacres, drawing loud international protests and threats of Russian intervention. The outbreak of war with Russia and the proclamation of jihad in 1914 made perilous the situation of this Christian minority. It could be portrayed with no difficulty as an internal enemy of the Turkish nation, a Russian fifth column, particularly since some Armenian nationalists were known to advocate armed resistance and Armenian volunteers were known to be fighting in the Russian army. Early in 1915, as Russian forces pressed south and west in the aftermath of the Battle of Sarikamish, the Turkish government resolved to rid itself of the Armenian problem.65 It initiated a violent action that gathered momentum and ferocity as it proceeded. In areas near the front lines in eastern Anatolia, in which much of the Armenian
population was concentrated, regular Turkish troops and special forces systematically emptied communities of their inhabitants, massacring thousands on the spot, herding the rest, mostly women, children, and the elderly, into marches towards camps hundreds of kilometers away in the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Along the way the killing continued. Many others died of starvation and exposure. Within the next twelve months, during which the deportations expanded throughout the Ottoman Empire, hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps half the prewar population, perished.

  The word “genocide” was invented only after the next world war, and it was inspired by massacres of civilians then that were even more widespread and systematic than those of the first. By any understanding of the term today, however, the policy of the Turkish government towards the Armenian minority qualified; it was genocidal both in effect and intent. And the Germans, like everyone else, knew about it. Accounts of the atrocities began to filter out almost immediately. However much they shared Turkish anxieties about Armenian subversion, and however eager they were to believe Turkish assurances that the reports of atrocities were exaggerated, German diplomats in Constantinople began in the summer of 1915 to protest formally to their ally. As reports from missionaries and other witnesses accumulated in the international press, the Germans’ position became increasingly difficult, for remonstrations might well jeopardize the Turkish alliance. So they kept quiet. In October 1915 the German government began to censor reports out of the Ottoman Empire, insisting that Turkish actions were justified by military necessity, hence a legitimate response to a mortal threat.66 The Entente powers faced no such dilemma. Their public protests against the Armenian massacres retrieved old themes, including renewed accusations of German barbarity, which now resided, they argued, not just in approving the atrocities but in inspiring them in the first place. The fact that these accusations were largely untrue mattered little in the escalating propaganda war, in which portrayals of the Armenians correlated on both sides with the interests of the military alliances.67 The Germans again had the weaker hand, however. It was another of the many disadvantages under which they fought the war around the globe.

  The war at sea

  Naval operations in the First World War resembled the face of battle on land, insofar as they, too, took planners everywhere by surprise and failed to produce a decisive engagement.68 Navies had figured centrally in the deterioration of diplomatic relations between Germany and Great Britain before 1914, when competition to build battle fleets reflected a widely held belief that, in any future war, vital issues of national power and security were to be settled at sea. The reigning philosopher of naval power in both countries was an American, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who foretold a cataclysmic battle between surface fleets dominated by huge battleships and battlecruisers. To the victor in this great clash would go command of the sea, the coveted prize that would guarantee eventual triumph in the broader war. The Anglo-German naval race had begun in 1897, when the Germans concluded that they might one day prevail in such a battle. The relentless growth of the German battle fleet predictably fed the enlargement of the Royal Navy. The centerpiece of the British effort was the introduction in 1906 of ultra-modern, fast, and heavily armed battleships called “dreadnoughts.” These presented a technological challenge that the Germans, in turn, could not resist. But the escalation of naval force altered only the dimensions, not the basic concept of the titanic sea battle, which loomed, as if in a maritime Schlieffen Plan, as the decisive moment in a future war.

  From the perspective of the German naval leadership, the war broke out too soon. In 1914 the core of the German High Seas Fleet consisted of eighteen state-of-the-art capital ships, battleships, and battlecruisers The corresponding figure for the British Grand Fleet was twenty-five.69 Given this ratio of force, the British appeared to enjoy a prohibitive advantage in any concentrated showdown in the North Sea. The British were also reluctant to risk a confrontation, however, despite these odds. Instead, they conceded much of the North Sea to the Germans, as they removed their fleet to the north, to Scapa Flow, and blockaded the German coast with ships and mines from the safe distances of Scotland and the English Channel. These moves made a major engagement unlikely, for the German fleet was hesitant to venture far from the sanctuary of its own shores. The first months of the war accordingly brought several skirmishes between elements of the two fleets but no strategic decision, except to prolong the confinement of the German fleet to its ports.

  Stalemate thus quickly descended at sea as well as on land. To Admiral von Tirpitz and other leaders of the German navy, this situation was a source of particular frustration, for it emphasized their own marginality in the great exertions that were taking shape on land. The German navy played no role in the Schlieffen Plan, for there had been no interservice planning whatsoever. After the failure of this initial offensive, the direction of the German war effort remained in the hands of the generals, who were convinced that the decision-at-arms would come on land and were largely indifferent to the navy’s concerns. Virtually from the beginning of the conflict, the navy’s leaders were therefore compelled to search for a new role.

  Discussions of this issue were bitter throughout the war, for the naval leadership was united more in restless exasperation than in a strategic concept to vent it. While one faction clung to the hope of a great surface battle, for which their traditions and training had prepared them, another group concluded that Germany was now involved in a different kind of war, in which naval action had become subsidiary to commercial warfare – that the principal targets of German naval operations would not be enemy warships but the merchant vessels that maintained enemy armies in the field. Commercial warfare had traditionally been the business of smaller warships; and German cruisers and other surface raiders scored some notable successes against British shipping in the first months of the war, before they were put out of action. The initial successes of the raiders also drew attention to an arm of the German fleet that had not figured much in prewar plans. Submarines had proved effective in early action against both merchant shipping and older British warships. They could be built quickly – some classes in a matter of months – and far more cheaply than surface warships. The submarine thus promised relief for at least one of the navy’s frustrations, for it seemed to offer an effective means to retaliate against the Allied blockade.

  These prospects were decisive to admirals who were eager for action of any kind. In February 1915 they were rewarded when the German government proclaimed the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, in which German submarines were entitled to attack without warning every merchant vessel they encountered, whether these ships flew the flags of enemies or neutrals. The announcement of this bold step was rewarded with jubilation on the German right, where frustrations were also rife. But the new strategy raised more problems than it resolved. At the moment of the proclamation, the German navy counted only thirty-seven submarines of all descriptions. Given the fact that an average of six of them were daily at sea during the spring of 1915, the initial results of their campaign were impressive. In March, April, and May they sank 115 ships with more than 250,000 tons, losing but five of their own. These figures lent urgency to building more submarines as rapidly as manpower shortages in the German shipyards would allow.

  A more serious problem was diplomatic; and it inhered in the very features that made the submarine such a formidable weapon. War at sea was governed in 1914 by an elaborate body of maritime law, which had taken shape in an era when submarines prowled only the minds of visionaries. This law, to which the Germans were party, prescribed that only specific categories of goods were subject to interdiction, that ships were not to be sunk without warning, and that the safety of the crews of the unfortunate vessels was to be assured. In 1914 submarine warfare quickly made a mockery of the law. During the early months of the conflict German commanders learned that warning merchant vessels and inspecting cargoes sacrificed the stealth that was the submarine�
��s principal advantage, while it put their own ships at dire risk. Escorting captured crews to port in submarines was simply ludicrous. Well could the Germans argue that the British were also defying maritime law in enforcing their blockade. The Germans failed to appreciate, however, that inflated definitions of contraband goods and the many other forms of chicanery with which the British sought to throttle the German economy were directed against property, while the German response also took lives. “Germany’s malpractices on the high seas,” as Professor Chambers put it, “were more criminal and spectacular than England’s.”70

  The German declaration of submarine warfare laid bare all these problems. A series of incidents in the spring of 1915 drew howls of protest from neutral countries whose shipping and nationals were falling victim to the German submarine offensive, which was in fact calculated to sow terror in these quarters. The loudest protests came from the neutral country that mattered the most, to the British and Germans alike. When in May 1915 a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania with over 100 Americans on board, the charges of German barbarism resonated widely across the Atlantic, while Germany and the United States reached the point of a diplomatic rupture. At this stage of the conflict a break with the United States seemed like too high a price to pay; and the German government relented with measures first to limit the submarine blockade around the British Isles and then, in September, for most intents and purposes, to call it off.