Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  After this day in August 1916, the British Admiralty and Commander-in-Chief agreed that only in exceptional circumstances—a threat of invasion or an attack on the Thames or the Straits of Dover—should the British battle fleet be deployed south of the latitude of Horns Reef. When Room 40 warned on October 18 that Scheer intended another sortie, the Grand Fleet was ordered to raise steam but was held at anchor. And when a British submarine patrolling the Heligoland Bight fired a torpedo into the light cruiser München soon after the High Seas Fleet left the Jade, Scheer, fearing a trap, returned to harbor. Thereafter, the German admiral and Naval Staff decided that the chance of catching a part of the Grand Fleet alone at sea was too small to justify risking a major battle, and the dreadnoughts of the High Seas Fleet were kept in port. There they lay, rusting and crewed by mutineers, when the war ended on November 11, 1918.

  CHAPTER 35 America Enters the War

  Before Jutland, Reinhard Scheer’s had not been the only—or even the most prominent—voice in Germany calling for resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. In the spring of 1916, before the battle, that voice had belonged to Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, but Tirpitz’s demand for ruthless use of the U-boats had been defeated by the chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, and the embittered navy minister had resigned in protest. Thereafter, the demand to unleash the U-boats was muffled but it did not go away. During June, July, and August, the submarines worked primarily with the High Seas Fleet and, except for a few merchantmen sunk under the old rules of stop-and-inspect, the campaign against merchant shipping lapsed. By autumn, however, more new U-boats were available and the navy was eager to try again. As before, the fateful question was whether releasing the U-boats would provoke America to war; and, as before, the primary opponent of taking this risk was the chancellor. This time, however, the navy had two powerful new allies. And, ironically, these two men had been placed in authority on the recommendation of Bethmann-Hollweg himself.

  By the early autumn of 1916, the war on land was going badly. The attack on Verdun had become a bloodbath for both sides, the British were pressing hard on the Somme, and the Russian Brusilov offensive in the east had produced a near fatal Austrian collapse, drawing off German reserves. And then, on August 28, a new blow fell on Germany when Rumania with an army of 400,000 men joined the Allies. General von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff, was summoned to a conference at Supreme Headquarters at Pless, where, despite the news from Rumania and the fact that more German troops would have to be sent to bolster the reeling Austrians, he urged resuming the offensive against Verdun. Appalled, Bethmann-Hollweg asked, “Where does incompetence end and crime begin?” and decided that the chief of staff must be replaced. The chancellor’s candidate was General Paul von Hindenburg, commander of the Eastern Front, who he believed would be more malleable. Bethmann-Hollweg’s wish became fact when the kaiser told Falkenhayn that he wished to have Hindenburg’s advice on various military matters. Stiffly, Falkenhayn replied that the kaiser had only one military adviser: himself, the Chief of the General Staff. If the kaiser insisted upon receiving Hindenburg, then he, Falkenhayn, must go. “As you wish,” William replied. Falkenhayn was gone before nightfall, on the way to the east to deal with Rumania. The new chief, the sixty-six-year-old hero of the Battle of Tannenberg, accepted office on the understanding that there would be no further attacks at Verdun. And with Hindenburg came his lieutenant, General Erich Ludendorff, who, many said, did most of the hero’s thinking. The promotion of these two generals was the costliest mistake of Bethmann-Hollweg’s career.

  They made an odd couple. Shortly before Tannenberg, Hindenburg was a ponderous retired general living in Hanover. Because his credentials appealed to the kaiser (he was a Prussian nobleman, a Junker, descended from the Teutonic Knights) and to the Supreme Command (he had specialized in the study of the region of East Prussia through which the Russians were advancing) he was suddenly summoned to command the army opposing the invaders. His famous reply, the cornerstone of the towering Hindenburg legend, was “I am ready.” At three o’clock in the morning, wearing the old blue uniform in which he had retired, he went to the railway station to await the train that was to bear him into history. Ludendorff, assigned to be Hindenburg’s chief of staff, already was on the train. A man of middle-class origin whose life was the army, a brilliant General Staff officer, Ludendorff had advanced on the basis of ability, energy, and relentless determination.

  The two men met in the middle of the night in the railway waiting room in Hanover. Hindenburg, his square, flat face topped by a thick brush haircut, had gained weight since his retirement, and his old tunic would no longer hook at the collar. His new chief of staff, whom he had never met, was shorter and round-headed; he wore a large mustache and had a thick, elongated trunk rising above unusually short legs. Ludendorff’s uniform was the new German army field gray and on his chest sparkled the blue and gold of the country’s highest military honor, the Ordre pour le Mérite, awarded for his part in the spectacular taking of the great Belgian fortress of Liège. Three weeks after this meeting came the victory at Tannenberg, which transformed Hindenburg into the military idol of the German people and established Ludendorff permanently at the titan’s side, where he was content to operate in the shade as long as he could supply the ideas.

  William, accustomed to the elegant, sophisticated Falkenhayn, disliked them both. They were charmless, they were always busy, and they refused even to pretend to listen to his endless stories. Hindenburg loudly and publicly professed his Junker allegiance to “my emperor, my king, my master,” but Ludendorff had no time for these frivolities. The German biographer Joachim von Kurenberg described the working relationship between the monarch and the military workhorse:

  When the Quartermaster General had to appear before the Kaiser to make a report . . . he spoke fast, crisply and emphatically . . . with few gestures; he looked on . . . [these meetings] as unnecessary and a waste of time. His reports seemed to exclude all possibility of misapprehension. . . . If the Kaiser asked a question, Ludendorff would clap his monocle in his eye, bend over his map, mark off distances . . . detail the names and numbers of divisions, times of attack and the objective aimed at. He would point to the arrows marked on the maps which he had drawn to show the directions of the advance planned, then hurriedly roll up the maps and await the hint to withdraw. Then he would stand by the door with the Pour le Mérite on his collar, his lips pouting, as always, and await the sign of dismissal from his War Lord. . . . [William] would keep him standing there for a few seconds just to enjoy, if only for a moment, the triumph of still being able to give orders. At last would come the signal, then there was a click of spurs, an effortless about-turn . . . and the Quartermaster General returned to his work.

  To the public, Ludendorff remained essentially faceless; Hindenburg, on the other hand, was a national icon.

  [In August 1915, on the first anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg, a wooden statue of Hindenburg, twelve feet high, was placed near the Reichstag in Berlin. A donation to a war-widows organization bought the right to hammer a nail into the hero’s likeness. By the end of the first week, 10,000 silver nails and 90,000 ordinary nails had been driven into the wooden field marshal.]

  William did not dare do without either of them. They owed their appointments to victory on the battlefield, and to prevail they had only to threaten resignation. William already had dismissed the legendary Tirpitz; for him now to dismiss the new saviors of the empire was politically impossible. As the months went by, the kaiser, nominally the Supreme War Lord, played a reduced role at Supreme Headquarters, functioning mainly as a mediator between the generals and civilian officials. Swiftly, the military pair moved to put the civilians in their place. On September 13, two weeks after his appointment, Ludendorff bluntly demanded that Bethmann-Hollweg extend the draft for military service or compulsory war production work to all men between fifteen and sixty. “Every day is important,” he barked at the chancellor. “The n
ecessary measures must be taken immediately.”

  From the beginning, Hindenburg and Ludendorff favored immediate resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. As generals, they knew better than most that Germany probably could not win the war on land. The human and material resources of the Central Powers were substantially inferior to those of the more populous and industrialized Allied coalition. In manpower, they were outnumbered on the battlefronts: 304 German, Austrian, and Turkish divisions opposed 405 Allied divisions. On the Western Front, 2.5 mil-lion German soldiers faced 3.9 million French, British, and Belgian troops equipped with more artillery, more ammunition, and more airplanes. To meet this challenge, Hindenburg and Ludendorff wished to employ every strategy and weapon likely to succeed, no matter what the risks. The most decisive appeared to be the submarine. For two years, Bethmann-Hollweg had resisted, not because he had reservations about torpedoing merchant ships, but because he feared that the torpedoing of American merchant ships would bring the United States into the war. Now the chancellor was under heavy pressure. A majority in the Reichstag and the press, Scheer and the admirals, and now Hindenburg and Ludendorff all favored unleashing the U-boats. If it was necessary to achieve this goal, they wanted the chancellor removed from office. So far, one man had saved Bethmann-Hollweg. Only the kaiser had the constitutional power to remove a chancellor and William, who had known and liked the tall, melancholy Bethmann-Hollweg since the monarch was eighteen, jealously guarded his own prerogative and refused to make a change. Accordingly, the chancellor, a widower whose eldest son had recently been killed on the Eastern Front, resisted his enemies, reminding them that his actions were not subject to parliamentary control or public opinion and that he was responsible only to the kaiser.

  In opposing the U-boats, Bethmann-Hollweg had two principal allies in the bureaucracy: Gottfried von Jagow, the foreign minister, and Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington. Both men shared the chancellor’s opinion that no success resulting from submarine warfare would be worth American entry into the war. This opinion had a halfhearted and private supporter in William himself. However irritated he might be by the United States, the kaiser did not want to fight the Americans. On the other hand, he shrank from the prospect of being considered weak by his own military chiefs or by the German people. His ambivalence was made plain during the Lusitania negotiations: in the same conversation, he told the American ambassador, James Gerard, that, as a Christian ruler, he would never have permitted the torpedoing of Lusitania if he had known that there were women and children on board—and then added brusquely, “America had better look out after this war. I shall stand no nonsense from America.”

  On August 31, two days after being elevated to command, Hindenburg and Ludendorff met Bethmann-Hollweg, Jagow, and Admiral Holtzendorff. To fend off their talk of using the submarines, the chancellor warned that unrestricted U-boat warfare might provoke the neutrals on Germany’s border, Holland and Denmark, into declaring war on Germany. Holland alone, he declared, would be able to put more than 500,000 men into the field and either state could be used as a beachhead for British landings. Hindenburg, who was scrambling to assemble divisions to fight Germany’s new enemy, Rumania, lacked the reserves to fight on any new fronts and agreed temporarily to postpone the submarine decision. At the same time, he insisted that, sooner rather than later, unrestricted submarine warfare must come. On September 10, Ludendorff buttressed his chief’s opinion. An officer from the Naval Staff asked what the new Supreme Command wanted the navy to do. Ludendorff assured the officer that he and the field marshal intended to expand the submarine war as soon as the military position was stabilized; first, however, the army must bolster the Austrians, who were “nothing more than a sieve.” Did the general think that the neutrals would come in as the chancellor feared? the officer asked. Grimly, Ludendorff replied that it was a great pity that the civil authorities had ever been allowed a say in the matter. Submarine warfare was a purely military question; in war, it must rest entirely with military and naval authorities to decide what forces to use and how to use them.

  It did not take Bethmann-Hollweg long to recognize that by bringing in the new men, he had released a genie from its bottle. On October 5, Hindenburg advised the chancellor that “the decision for an unrestricted U-boat campaign fell primarily to the Supreme Command.” Bethmann-Hollweg parried, saying that an order by the kaiser to begin unrestricted U-boat warfare would indeed be an expression of imperial authority, but that an unrestricted submarine campaign, directed not only against enemy ships but also against neutral vessels, “directly affects our relations with neutral states and thus represents an act of foreign policy . . . for which I have sole and untransferable responsibility.” Unwilling at that moment to challenge this position, the generals backed away.

  Across the Atlantic, two years after the outbreak of war, the predominant opinion of the American people continued to be that the struggle was a purely European affair; Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection campaign was based on a single, powerful claim: “He kept us out of war.” Political and military neutrality, however, had not prevented the United States from enjoying an ever-growing volume of trade in war supplies, general cargo, and foodstuffs, which now firmly attached the American economy to the Allied war effort. In theory, U.S. commercial loans and trade in food and munitions were equally available to the Central Powers, but theory and actual usefulness to the German cause ran up against the implacable barrier of Allied control of the oceans.

  In the formation of neutral opinion, the different methods of the belligerents in fighting economic war at sea weighed heavily against the Germans. The British blockade infringed on the freedom of the seas, but these incidents, sometimes infuriating, did not put lives at risk or even seriously retard the flow of goods. By contrast, unrestricted U-boat warfare, threatening and sometimes taking neutral ships and neutral lives, challenged the American government either to abandon use of the world’s oceans or take whatever steps were necessary to ensure the safety of American lives and cargoes. Twice, acts by German submarines had forced a crisis. The sinking of Lusitania in May 1915 and the sinking of Sussex in April 1916 had led each time to prolonged negotiations in which President Wilson attempted to force Germany to acknowledge American rights without invoking the ultimate threat of a war that neither he nor the American people wanted. Both times, Wilson succeeded, and all U-boats operating in the North Sea, the Channel, the eastern Atlantic, and the Mediterranean had been ordered to surface, establish the identity of the ship they had stopped, and allow neutral ships to pass.

  In the autumn of 1916, an episode much closer to home caused friction between the British and American governments. At 3:00 on the afternoon of October 7, the new German submarine U-53, with four of her ballast tanks altered for carrying fuel, surfaced and anchored in the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island. The captain, Hans Rose, came ashore in his dress uniform to pay his respects to the American admiral commanding a destroyer flotilla based in Newport. Then he mailed a letter to the German ambassador and picked up local newspapers, which listed vessels in port about to sail and named their destinations. Observing protocol, the American admiral returned the visit and came on board to inspect the U-boat and admire its diesel engines. He was followed—with Rose’s permission—by many curious American naval officers, their wives, Newport civilians, reporters, and a photographer. At 5:30 p.m., observing all conventions limiting the stay of belligerent warships in neutral ports, Rose weighed anchor and put to sea. At dawn the next morning, U-53 lay on the surface in international waters off the Nantucket lightship where she began sinking ships. During the day, Rose stopped, searched, and sank seven merchant vessels: five British, one Dutch, and one Norwegian. All crew members were permitted to leave their ships before they were sunk.

  No person was harmed that day and U-53 ’s behavior outside American territorial waters had been conducted according to the rules of cruiser warfare and international law. Still, in Massachusetts and
surrounding states, the sinking of merchant vessels so close to home inspired a sense of terrified vulnerability. In Britain, the reaction was official and public fury. Not only were the British appalled by the fact of U-boat activity at that great distance, but they were bitterly critical of the fact that sixteen American destroyers had clustered near the Nantucket lightship, had witnessed the sinkings, and, although picking up passengers and crews from their lifeboats, had done nothing to inhibit the submarine. At one point, U-53 was so close to an American warship that the submarine had to reverse engines to avoid collision. Later in the day, another destroyer, lying near the abandoned Dutch steamer, was asked by Rose to move away so that he might sink the ship. Obligingly, the destroyer moved and U-53 fired two torpedoes, sending the ship to the bottom. For the submarine, it was a successful voyage. U-53 returned to Germany, having covered 7,550 miles without refueling and having stopped only once, for the two and a half hours in Newport. In her wake, she left huge newspaper sales along the Eastern Seaboard, urgent conferences at the State Department, angry cries in the House of Commons, and eventually a soothing speech by Sir Edward Grey, who explained to his countrymen that the American warships had had no legal right to intervene in the belligerent activities of U-53.

  By mid-autumn of 1916, Woodrow Wilson believed that American relations with the Central Powers were becoming more amicable. It was true that the country still generally favored the Allies, but with Germany’s Sussex pledge still in force, most Americans wanted simply to let Europeans kill one another however they wished without American participation. Wilson, however, was unwilling to leave it at that. Repelled by the mindless slaughter at Verdun and on the Somme, he made up his mind that it was his duty—his mission—to use his position as the leader of the one great neutral state to persuade the warring powers to call a halt. In September, the Germans and Austrians as well as the British and French were told that the president would launch a mediation effort as soon as he was reelected.