by Erik Larson
There was at least one moment, however, when his grief seemed to lessen. In November 1914, he traveled to Manhattan to visit Colonel House. That evening, at about nine o’clock, the two men set out for a walk from House’s apartment, not in disguise, but also not advertising the fact that the president of the United States was now strolling the streets of Manhattan. They walked along Fifty-third Street, to Seventh Avenue, to Broadway, somehow managing not to draw the attention of passersby. They stopped to listen to a couple of sidewalk orators, but here Wilson was recognized, and a crowd gathered. Wilson and Colonel House moved on, now followed by a trailing sea of New Yorkers. The two men entered the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, stepped up to the elevator, and directed the startled operator to stop at a high floor. They got off, walked to the opposite end of the hotel, found another bank of elevators, and returned to the lobby, then exited through a side door.
After a brief walk along Fifth Avenue, they caught a city bus and rode it uptown to House’s building. As exhilarating as this escape may have been, it was no cure for Wilson’s malaise. On their return, Wilson confessed to House that as they were out walking he had found himself wishing that someone would kill him.
In the midst of this darkness, Wilson still managed to see America as the world’s last great hope. “We are at peace with all the world,” he said in December 1914 in his annual address to Congress. In January, he dispatched Colonel House on an unofficial mission to Europe to attempt to discover the conditions under which the Allies and the Central Powers might be willing to begin peace negotiations.
House booked passage on the largest, fastest passenger ship then in service, the Lusitania, and traveled under a false name. On entering waters off Ireland, the ship’s then-captain, Daniel Dow, following a tradition accepted in times of war, raised an American flag as a ruse de guerre to protect the ship from attack by German submarines. The act startled House and caused a sensation aboard, but as a means of disguise it had questionable value: America did not operate any liners of that size, with that distinctive four-funnel silhouette.
The incident highlighted the press of forces threatening to undermine American neutrality. The battles in Europe posed no great worry, with the United States so distant and secure within its oceanic moat. It was Germany’s new and aggressive submarine war that posed the greatest danger.
AT THE beginning of the war, neither Germany nor Britain understood the true nature of the submarine or realized that it might produce what Churchill called “this strange form of warfare hitherto unknown to human experience.”
Only a few prescient souls seemed to grasp that the design of the submarine would force a transformation in naval strategy. One of these was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a year and a half before the war, wrote a short story (not published until July 1914) in which he envisioned a conflict between England and a fictional country, Norland, “one of the smallest Powers in Europe.” In the story, entitled “Danger!,” Norland at first seems hopelessly overmatched, but the little country has a secret weapon—a fleet of eight submarines, which it deploys off the coast of England to attack incoming merchant ships, both cargo and passenger. At the time Doyle conceived his plot, submarines did exist, but British and German naval commanders saw them as having little value. Norland’s submarines, however, bring England to the verge of starvation. At one point, without warning, the commander of the submarine fleet, Capt. John Sirius, uses a single torpedo to sink a White Star passenger liner, the Olympic. England eventually surrenders. Readers found that last attack particularly shocking because the Olympic was a real ship. Its twin had been the Titanic, lost well before Doyle wrote his story.
Intended to sound the alarm and raise England’s level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius’s behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.
In the story, Doyle’s narrator dismisses as a delusion England’s belief that no nation would stoop to such levels. “Common sense,” Captain Sirius says, “should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best—that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.” Doyle’s forecast was dismissed as too fantastic to contemplate.
But Britain’s own Adm. Jacky Fisher, credited with reforming and modernizing the British navy—it was he who had conceived the first Dreadnought—had also become concerned about how submarines might transfigure naval warfare. In a memorandum composed seven months before the war, Fisher forecast that Germany would deploy submarines to sink unarmed merchant ships and would make no effort to save the ships’ crews. The strengths and limitations of the submarine made this outcome inescapable, he argued. A submarine had no room to bring aboard the crew of a merchant ship and did not have enough men of its own to put a prize crew aboard.
What’s more, Fisher wrote, the logic of war required that if such a strategy were adopted it would have to be pursued to the fullest extent possible. “The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”
Churchill rejected Fisher’s vision. The use of submarines to attack unarmed merchant ships without warning, he wrote, would be “abhorrent to the immemorial law and practice of the sea.”
Even he acknowledged, however, that such tactics when deployed against naval targets constituted “fair war,” but early on neither he nor his German counterparts expected the submarine to play much of a role in deep-ocean battle. The strategic thinking of both sides centered on their main fleets, the British “Grand Fleet” and the German “High Seas Fleet,” and both anticipated an all-or-nothing, Trafalgar-esque naval duel using their big battleships. But neither side was willing to be the first to come out in direct challenge of the other. Britain had more firepower—twenty-seven Dreadnought-class battleships to Germany’s sixteen—but Churchill recognized that chance events could nullify that advantage “if some ghastly novelty or blunder supervened.” For added safety, the Admiralty based the fleet in Scapa Flow, a kind of island fortress formed by the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Churchill expected Germany to make the first move, early and in full strength, for the German fleet would never be stronger than at the war’s beginning.
German strategists, on the other hand, recognized Britain’s superiority and crafted a plan whereby German ships would make limited raids against the British fleet to gradually erode its power, a campaign that Germany’s Adm. Reinhard Scheer called “guerrilla warfare,” borrowing a Spanish term for small-scale warfare in use since the early nineteenth century. Once the British fleet was pared down, Scheer wrote, the German fleet would seek a “favorable” opportunity for the climactic battle.
“So we waited,” wrote Churchill; “and nothing happened. No great event immediately occurred. No battle was fought.”
At the start of the war, the submarine barely figured in the strategic planning of either side. “In those early days,” wrote Hereward Hook, a young British sailor, “I do not think that anyone realized that a submarine could do any damage.” He was soon to learn otherwise, in an incident that demonstrated in vivid fashion the true destructive power of submarines and revealed a grave flaw in the design of Britain’s big warships.
At dawn, on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 1914, three large British cruisers, HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, were patrolling a swath of the North Sea off Holland known as the “Broad Fourteens,” moving at eight knots, a leisurely and, as it happened, foolhardy pace. The ships were full of cadets. Hook, one of them, was fifteen years old and assigned to the Hogue. The ships were old and
slow, and so clearly at risk that within Britain’s Grand Fleet they bore the nickname “the live-bait squadron.” Hook—who in later life would indeed be promoted to Captain Hook—was in his bunk, asleep, when at 6:20 A.M. he was awakened by “a violent shaking” of his hammock. A midshipman was trying to wake him and other cadets, to alert them to the fact that one of the big cruisers, the Aboukir, had been torpedoed and was sinking.
Hook sprinted to the deck, and watched the Aboukir begin to list. Within minutes the ship heeled and disappeared. It was, he wrote, “my first sight of men struggling for their lives.”
His ship and the other intact cruiser, the Cressy, maneuvered to rescue the sailors in the water, each coming to a dead stop a few hundred yards away to launch boats. Hook and his fellow crewmen were ordered to throw overboard anything that could float to help the men in the water. Moments later, two torpedoes struck his own ship, the Hogue, and in six or seven minutes “she was quite out of sight,” he wrote. He was pulled into one of the Hogue’s previously launched lifeboats. After picking up more survivors, the lifeboat began making its way toward the third cruiser, the Cressy. But another torpedo was now tearing through the water. The torpedo struck the Cressy on its starboard side. Like the two other cruisers, the Cressy immediately began to list. Unlike the others, however, the list halted, and the ship seemed as if it might stay afloat. But then a second torpedo struck and hit the magazine that stored ammunition for the ship’s heavy guns. The Cressy exploded and sank. Where just an hour earlier there had been three large cruisers, there were now only men, a few small boats, and wreckage. A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.
Weddigen and his U-boat were of course to blame, but the design of the ships—their longitudinal coal bunkers—contributed greatly to the speed with which they sank and thus the number of lives lost. Once ruptured, the bunkers caused one side of each ship’s hull to fill quickly, creating a catastrophic imbalance.
The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.
THROUGH THE fall and winter of 1914, Germany’s submarines came to occupy more and more of Wilson’s attention, owing to a new shift in German naval strategy that brought with it the steadily worsening threat of entanglement. The Aboukir incident, and other successful attacks against British ships, caused German strategists to view submarines in a new light. The boats had proved to be hardier and deadlier than expected, well suited to Germany’s guerrilla effort to abrade the strength of Britain’s Grand Fleet. But their performance also suggested another use. By year’s end, Germany had made the interception of merchant shipping an increasingly important role for the navy, to stanch the flow of munitions and supplies to Allied forces. This task originally had fallen to the navy’s big auxiliary cruisers—former ocean liners converted to warships—but these cruisers had been largely swept from the seas by Britain’s powerful navy. Submarines by their nature offered an effective means of continuing the campaign.
They also raised the risk that an American ship might be sunk by accident, or that U.S. citizens traveling on Allied vessels might be harmed. Early in 1915, this risk seemed to increase sharply. On February 4, Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an “area of war” in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning. This posed a particularly acute threat to Britain, which, as an island nation that imported two-thirds of its food, was utterly dependent on seaborne trade. Neutral ships were at risk also, Germany cautioned, because Britain’s willingness to fly false flags had made it impossible for U-boat commanders to rely on a ship’s markings to determine whether it truly was neutral. Germany justified the new campaign as a response to a blockade begun previously by Britain, in which the British navy sought to intercept all cargoes headed to Germany. (Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.) German officials complained that Britain made no attempt to distinguish whether the cargoes were meant for hostile or peaceful use and charged that Britain’s true goal was to starve civilians and thereby “doom the entire population of Germany to destruction.”
What Germany never acknowledged was that Britain merely confiscated cargoes, whereas U-boats sank ships and killed men. German commanders seemed blind to the distinction. Germany’s Admiral Scheer wrote, “Does it really make any difference, purely from the humane point of view, whether those thousands of men who drown wear naval uniforms or belong to a merchant ship bringing food and munitions to the enemy, thus prolonging the war and augmenting the number of women and children who suffer during the war?”
Germany’s proclamation outraged President Wilson; on February 10, 1915, he cabled his formal response, in which he expressed incredulity that Germany would even think to use submarines against neutral merchant ships and warned that he would hold Germany “to a strict accountability” for any incident in which an American ship was sunk or Americans were injured or killed. He stated, further, that America would “take any steps it might be necessary to take to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.”
The force of his prose took German leaders by surprise. Outwardly, Germany seemed a fierce monolith, united in carrying out its war against merchant ships. But in fact, the new submarine campaign had caused a rift at the highest levels of Germany’s military and civilian leadership. Its most ardent supporters were senior naval officials; its opponents included the commander of Germany’s military forces in Europe, Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn, and the nation’s top political leader, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Moral scruple had nothing to do with their opposition. Both men feared that Germany’s undersea war could only lead to disaster by driving America to shed its neutrality and side with Britain.
Wilson’s protest, however, did not impress Germany’s submarine zealots. They argued that if anything Germany should intensify its campaign and destroy all shipping in the war zone. They promised to bring Britain to heel well before America could mobilize an army and transport it to the battlefield.
Both camps maneuvered to win the endorsement of Kaiser Wilhelm, who, as the nation’s supreme military leader, had the final say. He authorized U-boat commanders to sink any ship, regardless of flag or markings, if they had reason to believe it was British or French. More importantly, he gave the captains permission to do so while submerged, without warning.
The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now held the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war. As Chancellor Bethmann would later put it, “Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.”
No one had any illusions. Mistakes would happen. One of Kaiser Wilhelm’s orders included an acknowledgment of the risk: “If in spite of the exercise of great care mistakes should be made, the commander will not be made responsible.”
WILSON’S GRIEF and loneliness persisted into the new year, but in March 1915 a chance encounter caused that curtain of gray to part.
His cousin, Helen Woodrow Bones, lived in the White House, where she served as a proxy First Lady. Often, she went walking with a good friend, Edith Bolling Galt, forty-three years old, who happened also to be a f
riend of Wilson’s physician, Dr. Grayson. At five feet nine inches tall, with a full and shapely figure and a taste for fine clothes, including those designed in the Paris fashion house of Charles Frederick Worth, she was a striking woman, with a complexion and manner said to gleam, and eyes of a violet blue. One day while riding in a limousine with Wilson, Dr. Grayson spotted Galt and bowed toward her, at which point the president exclaimed, “Who is that beautiful lady?”
Born in October 1872 as the seventh of eleven siblings, Edith claimed family roots that dated back to Pocahontas and Capt. John Rolfe. She grew up in a small Virginia town, Wytheville, in a landscape still warm with residual passions of the Civil War. While a teenager, she began making periodic visits to Washington, D.C., to visit her eldest sister, who had married into a family that owned one of Washington’s finest jewelry stores, Galt & Bro. Jewelers, situated near the White House. (The store was repairing Abraham Lincoln’s watch at the time the Civil War began.) On one visit, when Edith was in her twenties, she met Norman Galt—a cousin of her sister’s husband—who shared management of the store with other members of the family. They married in 1896.
Eventually Norman bought out his relatives to become sole owner of the business. Edith bore a son in 1903, but the baby died within days. Five years later, Norman died as well, suddenly, leaving substantial debts from his acquisition of the store. It was a difficult time, Edith wrote. “I had no experience in business affairs and hardly knew an asset from a liability.” She placed the store’s day-to-day operations in the care of a seasoned employee, and with his help the business began again to prosper so that Edith, while retaining ownership, was able to withdraw from daily management. She became a skilled golfer and was the first woman in Washington to acquire a driver’s license. She tooled around the city in an electric car.