By December 1916, the Asquith coalition government in Britain was coming apart, the central issue being the effectiveness of the prime minister himself. Asquith had always governed as a relaxed chairman of the board, hearing all arguments, then postponing decisions until consensus emerged.
[In Cabinet meetings, “it was not unknown for the Prime Minister to be writing letters while the discussion proceeded,” said Austen Chamberlain, the secretary of state for India. “The result was that complete confusion prevailed and when at last he intervened with a statement that, ‘Now that is decided, we had better pass on to . . .’ there would be a general cry of ‘But what is decided?’ and the discussion would begin all over again.”]
Now, after eight years in office, he was tired and, to make matters worse, his focus was blurred by the recent death in action of his eldest son. David Lloyd George, a Liberal colleague who had served under Asquith for many years, saw his chance. Asquith’s leadership had become “visibly flabbier, tardier, and more flaccid,” the ambitious Welshman declared; what was needed was a new War Committee of three, chaired by himself and excluding the prime minister, who would be allowed to keep that office with diminished authority. When Asquith refused this political emasculation, his government collapsed. Lloyd George resigned; then Asquith resigned, and on December 10, a new, Lloyd George government took office with Grey out as foreign secretary and Balfour shifted from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office. Two days later, the German peace note arrived. The Allies saw clearly that the peace being offered was a conqueror’s peace. Europe from the English Channel to the Black Sea was in the grip of the Central Powers; the German army occupied Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Rumania, and ten of the richest provinces of France. Now, the note suggested, the rulers of Germany would be willing to call off the war if they could keep everything they had occupied. On December 30, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that “to enter into a conference on the invitation of Germany, proclaiming herself victorious, is to put our heads in a noose.” Both Britain and France rejected the German note.
The Allies’ emphatic rejection of Bethmann-Hollweg’s peace offer fur-ther weakened the chancellor in Berlin. Admiral von Holtzendorff said, “Since I do not believe in a quick effect of the beautiful peace gesture, I am totally committed to the use of our crucial weapon—unrestricted submarine warfare.” Hindenburg insisted that “diplomatic and military preparations for an unrestricted U-boat campaign begin so that it may for certain begin at end of January.” But now came another complication—and a last opportunity for the chancellor. On December 18, the president of the United States finally issued his own peace note to the warring powers. Presenting himself as “the friend of all nations,” Wilson asked each of the belligerents to declare its war aims so that a search for middle ground could begin. “It may be,” he declared, “that peace is nearer than we know. . . . The objects which the statesmen of the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same, as stated to their own peoples and to the world.” Privately, House told Bernstorff that Wilson would not hesitate to use heavy economic pressure to coerce the Allies if he thought their conditions unreasonable.
Wilson’s note was received unwillingly by all to whom it was addressed. The German reply arrived first, on December 26. It was a polite rebuff, declaring that Germany was willing to meet its enemies, but preferred to negotiate with them directly on neutral ground, without the assistance of the United States. Bernstorff pointed out to Berlin that Wilson wished only to be informed of the war aims of both sides so that the belligerents could identify their differences. He was ignored. Specifics were precisely what the German government did not wish to reveal, because such revelations would arouse in Germany a bitter struggle over what German war aims actually were. Nor did the German government wish Wilson to be present at the conference because, as Zimmermann told Bernstorff, “we do not want to run the risk of being robbed of our gains by neutral pressure.” The kaiser’s reaction was blunt: “I go to no conference. Certainly not one presided over by him.”
The Allied reply came two weeks later. Despite their exhaustion, the Allies believed they were winning the war and regarded Wilson’s mediation offer as an effort, witting or unwitting, to rescue their enemies from the consequences of defeat. They wanted no compromises that would leave Germany in a position to renew the struggle later. Lloyd George actively resented Wilson’s effort to “butt in,” as he put it. At the end of September, before becoming prime minister, he had made clear his disdain for any American mediation efforts. “There had been no such intervention when we were being hammered though the first two years, as yet untrained and ill-equipped,” he told an American newspaperman. “Now the whole world—including humanitarians with the best of motives—must know that there can be no outside interference at this stage. Britain will tolerate no interference until Prussian military despotism is broken beyond repair.” Wilson’s phrase, equating the war aims of the opposing sides as “virtually the same” and thus seeming to exonerate Germany and ignore or cheapen the sacrifices of the Allies, appeared less neutral than mischievous. The American ambassador, Walter Page, reported that King George V had wept when the subject came up at lunch. On January 12, 1917, the governments of Britain and France firmly rejected peace talks. The sole cause of war, they declared, was the brutal, unprovoked aggression of Germany and Austria-Hungary. German misdeeds were set forth at length and specific Allied war aims were listed, including evacuation of all occupied territories and enormous reparations and indemnities. Until this was achieved and Germany so reduced that fear of another war did not hang over them, they would continue to fight. France, especially, felt that never again would she be supported by as strong a combination of powers and have as good a chance of beating Germany to her knees. In Washington, however, the negative Allied response produced exactly the reaction Spring-Rice had feared: a resentful president who decided that the two sides, equally intractable, were equally guilty. His peace initiative momentarily thwarted, Wilson decided that the other pillar of his foreign policy, American neutrality, must be buttressed. “There will be no war,” he told House. “This country does not intend to become entangled in this war. It would be a crime against civilization if we entered it.”
Wilson’s peace move was of no interest to the German Supreme Command. Ludendorff already had declared “ Ich pfeife auf Amerika” (I don’t give a damn about America) and had informed the American military attaché that the United States could do no greater harm to Germany by declaring war than it already was doing by supplying the Allies. For months, stories about American war munitions and foodstuffs flowing across the Atlantic had appeared in German newspapers. “If it were not for American ammunition, the war would have been finished long ago” became a nationwide refrain. A copy of an advertisement by the Cleveland Automatic Tool Company depicting a new artillery shell and printed in The American Machinist was laid on every desk in the Reichstag. A drawing distributed throughout Germany depicted a freighter in an American port ready to take on a cargo of ammunition. Massed in the background were three groups of German soldiers doomed to become casualties of this single cargo: “30,000 killed, 40,000 seriously wounded, 40,000 lightly wounded.” Not surprisingly, the German public supported a U-boat effort intended to cut this transatlantic supply line and preserve the lives of their husbands, sons, and brothers.
James Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany, bore the brunt of this hostility. Gerard, a former justice of the New York State Supreme Court, had come to Berlin in 1913; in May 1914, he had believed that war between Germany and the United States was unthinkable. Beginning in August 1914, however, Gerard was denied contact with the head of the state to which he was accredited. “An ambassador is supposed to have the right to demand an audience with the kaiser at any time,” Gerard later wrote, “[but] on each occasion my request was refused. I was not even permitted to go to the railway station to bid him goodbye when he left for the front.” Nine months later, Gerard
asked the American military attaché “to tell the kaiser that I had not seen him for so long a time that I had forgotten what he looked like.” Through the attaché, the kaiser retorted, “I have nothing against Mr. Gerard personally, but I will not see the ambassador of a country which furnishes arms and ammunition to the enemies of Germany.” Another five months passed, until finally, in September 1915, Gerard wrote to Bethmann-Hollweg: “Your Excellency: Some time ago I requested you to arrange an audience for me with His Majesty. Please take no further trouble about this matter. Yours sincerely.” Immediately, Gerard was granted an audience.
The ambassador was summoned again six months later, after the settlement of the Sussex affair. This time Gerard was escorted to Supreme Headquarters in the French town of Charleville-Mézières, fifty miles behind the western battlefront. Before seeing the kaiser, he was asked condescendingly by William’s staff what America could do if Germany recommenced unrestricted submarine warfare. “I said that nearly all great inventions used in war were made by Americans: barbed wire, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph—and the submarine. I believed that if forced into it, we would come up with something else.” The Germans replied, “While you might invent something and will furnish money and supplies to the Allies, the public sentiment of your country is such that you will not be able to raise an army large enough to make an impression.”
On May 1, 1916, Gerard was taken to see Kaiser William, strolling in a garden. “Do you come bearing peace or war?” the kaiser asked, and then launched into a monologue: Americans, he said, had “charged Germany with barbarism in warfare, but that as emperor and head of the church, he had wished to carry on war in knightly manner. He then referred to the British blockade and said that before he allowed his family and grandchildren to starve he would blow up Windsor Castle and the whole Royal Family of England. . . . The submarine had come to stay . . . and a person traveling on an enemy merchant ship was like a man traveling in a cart behind the battle lines—he had no just cause for complaint if injured.” The kaiser then asked why America had complained about the Lusitania but had done nothing to break the British blockade.
Gerard put his answer into metaphor: “If two men entered my house and one stepped on my flowerbeds and the other killed my sister, I should probably pursue the murderer first. [As for] those traveling on the seas in belligerent merchant ships, it was different from those traveling in a cart behind enemy lines because the travelers on land were on belligerent territory while those on the sea were on territory which, beyond the three-mile limit, was free.” The kaiser argued that Lusitania ’s passengers had been warned before the ship sailed. Gerard replied, “If the chancellor warns me not to go out on the Wilhelmsplatz, where I have a perfect right to go, the fact that he gave me the warning does not justify him in killing me if I disregarded his warning.”
Gerard’s meeting with the emperor did not diminish the widespread antagonism he met in Berlin. Caricatures of Uncle Sam and President Wilson appeared daily in German newspapers. At one point, Gerard was obliged to deny in print a story that his wife had pinned a German decoration he had received on the collar of the family dog. In January 1916, a large wreath with an American flag draped in mourning was placed at the base of the statue of Frederick the Great near the royal palace on Unter den Linden. A silk banner was inscribed, “Wilson and his press are not America.” For four months, Gerard protested, but the police refused to act. Then Gerard announced that he would go with his own photographer and himself remove the wreath. Instantly, it disappeared. Subsequently, Gerard and his staff were in a concert box when a man in the next box began shouting that people in the hall were speaking English. Told that it was the American ambassador, the man shouted that Americans were worse than the English. Finally, in January 1917, a few weeks before the ambassador left Berlin, the heavyset Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin planted himself in front of Gerard. “ ‘You are the American ambassador and I want to tell you that the conduct of America in furnishing arms and ammunition to the enemies of Germany is stamped deep on the German heart, that we will never forget it and some day we will have our revenge.’ He spoke in a voice so loud and slapped his chest so hard that everyone in the room stopped their conversation in order to hear. He wore on his breast the orders of the Black Eagle, the Red Eagle, the Elephant and the Seraphim and when he struck all this menagerie, the rattle was quite loud.” Gerard reminded him that American behavior was legal under the Hague Convention. “We care nothing for treaties,” bellowed the nobleman, and stalked away.
Even as the two peace initiatives, German and American, were failing, events were moving rapidly. At the end of December, a French counterattack at Verdun recovered most of the ground lost earlier in the year. Austria told Berlin that she was near the end of her resources and could not last another winter. The Emperor Franz Joseph had died in November at the age of eighty-six and been succeeded by his thirty-year-old great-nephew Karl, who told William imploringly, “We are fighting against a new enemy which is more dangerous than the Entente—against international revolution which finds its strongest ally in general starvation.” William ignored him. Hindenburg told Bethmann-Hollweg, “We must resume torpedoing armed enemy merchantmen without notice. We received a slap in the face from all their parliaments. [In August] you said I should choose the time, depending on the military situation. That moment will be the end of January.” Bethmann-Hollweg reminded the field marshal that unrestricted submarine warfare affecting neutral ships and Germany’s relations with neutral states both were aspects of foreign policy, “for which I alone bear the responsibility. The question must be cleared up with America [Germany’s Sussex pledge was still in force]. Many people in neutral countries already believed that our peace offer was in bad faith and indeed only stated at all as a starting point for the unrestricted submarine campaign. We must do everything possible to avoid intensifying that impression.” Hindenburg wished to waste no time on “clearing up questions” with America. “Unfortunately, our military situation makes it impossible that negotiations of any kind should be allowed to postpone military measures which have been recognized as essential, and thus paralyze the energy of our operations,” the field marshal told the chancellor. “I must adhere to that view in no uncertain manner. It goes without saying that I myself shall never cease to insist with all my might and in the fullest sense of responsibility for the victorious outcome of the war, that everything of a military nature shall be done which I regard as necessary.”
Meanwhile, a significant member of the military high command had changed sides. Admiral von Holtzendorff, the Chief of the Naval Staff, who in the spring of 1916 had supported Bethmann-Hollweg and opposed Tirpitz’s insistence on unrestricted submarine warfare, had been told by Scheer that because the U-boats were still tethered, the fleet was losing confidence in the Naval Staff. On December 22, Holtzendorff sent Hindenburg and the Supreme Command a 200-page memorandum in which he advocated unleashing the U-boats. This document laid out figures and charts of shipping tonnage available to Great Britain, with comprehensive calculations of such factors as world grain prices, cargo space, freight rates, shipping insurance rates, and shortages in England of cotton, iron and other metals, wood, wool, and petroleum. All these numbers then marched with mathematical precision to the conclusion that the U-boats could break Britain’s power to resist within six months. “A decision must be reached before the autumn of 1917,” Holtzendorff wrote, “if the war is not to end in the exhaustion of all parties and consequently disastrously for us. Of our enemies, Italy and France are economically so hard hit that it is only by the energy and force of England that they are still kept on their feet. If we can break England’s back, the war will immediately be decided in our favor.” Holtzendorff stressed that the unrestricted submarine campaign was to be directed, not merely, or even primarily, at ships carrying munitions, but against all imports necessary to life in the British Isles; it was to strike at the general economic capacity of the British to continue
the war. “The backbone of England consists in her shipping which brings to the British Isles the necessary supplies of food and materials for war industries.” Success would be reflected not only in rising freight rates and insurance rates for ocean cargoes, but in higher prices of bread and other foodstuffs in the British Isles.
Holtzendorff calculated that 10.75 million tons of British and neutral shipping was required to keep Britain fed and supplied. Once unleashed, he argued, the submarines should be able to sink at least 600,000 tons of shipping every month; another million tons of neutral shipping would be frightened away. “We may reckon that in five months, shipping to and from England will be reduced by thirty-nine percent. England would not be able to stand that. I do not hesitate to assert that, as matters now stand, we can force England to make peace in five months by an unrestricted U-boat campaign. But this holds good only for a really unrestricted U-boat campaign.”
The admiral’s argument and the statistics supplied in the Naval Staff memorandum were not enough. As long as Bethmann-Hollweg refused to agree, the kaiser would not give permission for unrestricted warfare. On January 8, the chancellor, fighting for time, told the Chief of the Naval Staff that even if unrestricted warfare must begin, he still needed an interval to prepare the neutrals. Then, suddenly, Admiral von Müller, a Bethmann-Hollweg ally who had always supported the chancellor, defected. “After our peace feelers and their curt rejection by the Allies, circumstances warrant the use of this weapon which offers a reasonable chance of success,” Müller wrote in his diary on January 8. “I told Holtzendorff he could rely on my support.” Müller’s entry was written at the castle of Pless in Silesia where he, the kaiser, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Holtzendorff had gathered. That night, Bethmann-Hollweg, suffering from severe bronchitis, boarded a train in Berlin. It would take him to Pless, and to a meeting that would seal the fate of Imperial Germany.
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