World War One: A Short History (12 page)

But it was the Germans who first translated the new
jusqu’au boutiste
(‘to the very end’) mood into practice. They proclaimed unrestricted submarine warfare. This was a revolutionary business, because it brought the risk that the USA would enter the war on the Allied side. American trade with the British had vastly risen, and much of the economy depended upon it. The British had been by far the greatest foreign investors in the USA, and now these investments were being sold off to pay for the imports. What would happen if American trade were stopped by submarine sinkings, with the attendant drownings of civilians? The Americans did not, generally, have any desire at all to intervene, and their president, Woodrow Wilson, had called for compromise peace. U-Boats might change that.

However, the new High Command in Germany were clear that there could be no victory in the west as matters stood, and they looked to the navy. The naval authorities, as a matter of professional pride, resented the inactivity of their great ships, but they had discovered how effective the submarine could be almost as soon as the war broke out, when
U-29
sank three British battleships. If they could torpedo civilian ships supplying Great Britain, then the British ocean lifeline would be cut, and the British population would face the privation that Germans were undergoing in ‘the turnip winter’ of 1916–17. There were two great problems. The first was a formal one, that international law forbade the sinking, without warning, of civilian (and maybe neutral) ships. Common humanity said that people should have a chance to get to lifeboats, and in any case the ship might easily not be carrying war goods. Possibly,
the USA would enter the war if American ships were sunk. These arguments were widely dismissed as
Humanitätsdüselei
– ‘humanitarian babbling’ – and in any case most Germans were by now convinced that the British were trying to starve them. They were also convinced, and not unfairly, that the USA had been quite disproportionately helpful to the Allies – especially with loans that held up the international value of the British pound and with trade that kept the French war economy going. If the USA did intervene, would it really make any significant difference?

The second problem counted for more. The Germans did not, in 1915, have enough submarines – fifty-four, most carrying only four torpedoes, and short in range. They were supposed, on encountering a ship in British waters, to surface, enquire what was on board, inspect it and, where appropriate, allow the ship’s company to take to lifeboats before the ship was sunk. This proceeding – ‘cruiser rules’ – exposed a submarine to concealed guns, but the alternative – sinking upon sight, a torpedo gliding silently just below the waterline, against a ship containing women and children – counted as barbaric, inhuman (as Churchill had said in 1914: he could not even imagine such methods being used). In the early months of 1915, to counter the British blockade, ‘unrestricted’ submarine warfare – sink on sight – had been declared, a forbidden zone being demarcated around the British Isles, and the
Lusitania
passenger liner had been sunk, on 7 May 1915, with due loss of civilian life (1,201, of whom 128 were American citizens). There were strong American protests, and since the German navy did not have adequate numbers of submarines, Berlin backed down, and agreed that ‘cruiser rules’ would be respected. But in 1916, 108 submarines were built, together with a new pen for lighter ones at Zeebrugge in Belgium, from where the Channel transports could be threatened. The navy reckoned at the end of 1916 that it was ready for a new campaign
of unrestricted submarine warfare. It presented memoranda, complete with figures, and two of the best-known economists at Berlin University, Max Sering and Gustav Schmoller, were brought in to opine as to the damage that would be done to the British economy. It would collapse, especially if Zeppelins dropped bombs on the grain depots in the Channel ports, they helpfully added.

Admiral Holtzendorff said that he could sink 600,000 tons of shipping every month, that British shipping would be cut by half, that there would be food riots, and terrible distress in the trading areas. The Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, had to take a wider and more sceptical view. He knew in the first place that if Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare, the United States would almost certainly come in to the war. His advisor, Helfferich, could read figures and said that the navy’s were a concoction. The new Austrian emperor, Karl, desperate for peace, objected, and the political parties of Left and Centre were also not enthusiastic. But against the military, and with a population that blamed its rat sausages and endless turnips on the British blockade, Bethmann Hollweg could make no headway. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, he tried a manoeuvre to escape from the problem. The four Central Powers declared on 12 December that they would engage upon negotiations over peace. President Wilson’s good offices were sought, and he did in fact allow the Germans what appeared to be a safe route for communications to their embassy in Washington. He then enquired as to what the peace terms were to be.

The Allies had no great difficulty: they said that Belgium would have to be restored, that people should have the right to self-determination. Much of this was humbug, and among themselves they were talking about vast extensions of empires, quite without reference to ‘self-determination’. The Germans were silent as to their own terms, even when Wilson asked them privately what they had in mind. Bethmann Hollweg
could not say that he would restore Belgium, because he did not intend to do so: Germany was fighting for a German Europe, in effect the
Mitteleuropa
programme partly realized at Brest-Litovsk a year later, and Belgium, with its French establishment and British leanings, did not belong. German industrialists were expecting to take over the considerable coal and iron reserves of Belgium, and the military at the very least wanted to take the fortifications of Liège with a view to any future war. The German
Generalgouvernement
in Brussels was also giving guarded encouragement to Flemish separatists, allowing Ghent University to use Flemish, which was regarded in educated circles as peasant stuff – a sort of corrupted Dutch. Bethmann Hollweg was stuck. If he said that Germany was fighting for goodness, beauty and truth, as the Allies claimed that they were doing, he would have been thrown out by a Ludendorff who was now the real master of Germany: the military and the industrialists were working themselves into a fever of annexationism, Belgian coalfields and French iron-ore mines one minute, strips of Poland, to be ethnically cleansed, the next. This left Bethmann Hollweg no alternatives, as regards statements of war aims, beyond silence and lies. British and French diplomats might equally have been embarrassed, and vast imperial plans were being cooked up in secret. But they always had the ostensibly unbeatable argument concerning the restoration of Belgium: at no point did Berlin say it would just restore the country. German diplomats were too clumsy to deal with this situation, and their peace initiative got nowhere. Bethmann Hollweg had no more arguments against the admirals.

On 1 February 1917 a zone around western France and the British Isles was declared open to sinking upon sight. Admiral Holtzendorff, it appeared, was at once proved right. He now had 105 submarines (in June, 129). In January, under ‘cruiser rules’, 368,000 tons had gone down, 154,000 of them British. In February, 540,000. In March, nearly 600,000 (418,000
British). In April, 881,000 (545,000). The sinkings generally occurred as ships bunched together to reach the ports, at the end of their voyage. Neutrals began to withdraw, ships to be laid up, and American citizens were drowned. To begin with, the British appeared to be helpless; there seemed to be no defence against the submarines. However, Holtzendorff’s calculations proved to be wrong – not only wrong, but so far wide of the mark as to make the greatest contribution to Germany’s defeat. The British survived; the Americans came in.

Defences were found against U-Boats. The great (New Zealand) physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford was held upside-down from a rowing boat above the Firth of Forth to see if he could hear anything, and eventually a hydrophone was invented, able to detect underwater noise. Depth-charges followed. Destroyers equipped with these things could riposte to submarines, though it meant extraordinary tension on both sides. Brave spirits also suggested to the Admiralty that if ships were placed in a convoy (of twenty ships) then they could be guarded by destroyers. There was absurd resistance – part of the naval establishment clearly not wishing to be held responsible for the doings of merchant captains far beneath them in station. The ‘black fortnight’ of April, with hundreds of ships down, changed this, and convoy became the rule. After this, sinkings declined, more or less to the number that obtained under ‘cruiser rules’. On 10 May, the first convoy sailed, the merchantmen obeyed orders, and the destroyers shepherded them safely across the Atlantic. Only 63 merchantmen were lost of the 5,090 convoyed, and the U-Boats, spending two thirds of their time on voyages to and from port, were hardly more effective than they had been before. But they had conjured up Germany’s worst nightmare. The United States entered the war, which meant, in the first instance, that British war finance was saved, and in the second, that blockade worked.

*

Even after the U-Boat campaign had started, American intervention might not have happened: public opinion was not in favour. It had to be forced. There followed an episode that belongs with the Weber inaugural, the Schlieffen Plan and the Tirpitz fleet in the annals of German self-destructiveness. American intervention – a very large navy, though no army – would have to be countered somehow, thought Berlin. There had, Berlin was aware, been problems with Mexico. Perhaps the Mexicans could be encouraged to attack the United States, upon which Germany would recognize their right to reverse the verdict of the Alamo. Was not Arizona a sort of Mexican Alsace-Lorraine? A telegram was composed, indicating that the Mexicans might be interested in a German alliance; and while they were about it, might they enquire of the Mikado in Japan as to whether he might join the club.

Arthur Zimmermann – not even minister for foreign affairs, but the deputy – sent a telegram to this effect and for good measure sent it along the private line that President Wilson, as a sign of good will, had allowed the Germans to use. British naval intelligence had in fact tapped this American line, and could read German codes (having captured a codebook from an exceedingly brave German expedition through Iran). Great ingenuity was then shown by the British Admiral Hall, who copied the telegram and sent it along a German line that the British knew, and could ‘officially’ tap. The American ambassador in London was shown the telegram at the end of March. By then, the Americans had broken off diplomatic relations with Berlin (though not with the other Central Powers, and they never did break with Bulgaria). The Zimmermann Telegram reached Congress, and on 6 April, with storms of outraged patriotism, Wilson declared war on Germany. Arthur Zimmermann’s telegram was Germany’s suicide note, written in farce.

American intervention saved the Allies. The navy helped greatly when it came to extending blockade, but in particular
money had become very important indeed. British credit, by the end of 1916, had nearly been exhausted, and the value of Sterling really depended upon the willingness of Americans to honour it, at a rate close to five dollars to the pound. The British had been subsidizing Russia – a debt, in the end, of 800 million gold pounds, which for present-day values must be multiplied by forty (it was settled in 1985). Their credit could only be extended if the US government guaranteed it. Now, it did. Raw materials flowed to the Allies. Creating an American army and shipping it to France was another matter, and took months and months. By 1918, 200,000 Americans were arriving every month, but in 1917 men had to be trained, by trainers who themselves knew nothing but boots and saddles. In that sense, Admiral Holtzendorff had been right – the American intervention would not formally matter too much. Nothing would change, provided that the Central Powers could win in 1917.

The British and French did their best to make this possible. General Robert Nivelle almost wrecked the French army, and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig did a great deal to wreck the British one as well – the best Scottish general, it was said, in that he killed the most Englishmen. Nivelle was not a fool. This was a war that could be made mobile again if artillery was properly used. There were now thousands of guns and millions of shells, and there were new weapons. Aircraft, in 1914 too liable to break down, and only useful for spotting large bodies of men if the weather was right, were coming into their own. The pilot could now fire at the enemy along the nose of the plane without hitting his own propellors, and single-wing craft were brought in to replace the slow old biplanes. Aerial photography was now far more accurate, and tanks had been invented. Besides, the gunners’ communications improved (on the German side, telephone wire was buried six feet underground)
and the ‘creeping barrage’ was becoming standard: Nivelle reckoned that it would win the war. A barrage that ran just sixty yards ahead of the infantry could silence the enemy until the attackers were within grenade-throwing range, and grenades had also improved. Infantry tactics needed to be changed: no advance in waves, let alone in the great clumps of 1914, but small parties, darting from shell-hole to shell-hole, diagonally, one part firing at the enemy to give cover for the other darting forward.

Nivelle appreciated all of this, and from his Verdun successes thought that he had discovered a formula. He referred to
chablons
(‘pulleys’), meaning well-managed mutual support by all arms. Politically and personally he was also suitable. He was Protestant, and Protestants (usually engineers and doctors) were the backbone of the Third Republic, supplying the morality, the education, the spirit – including the Eiffel Tower. His mother was English, and he could charm London lunches (at which – as was ominously said – ladies were present) and explain his methods. Word got back to the Germans that something was impending. Needing to make more economical use of their forces, they shortened the line. The existing western front reflected the events of 1914, and had no logic to it.