1917
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Cast of Characters
Prologue: A World on Fire
Preface
1 : The German Note
2 : Russia and America Confront a World War
3 : Tommy and Volodya
4 : Neutrality at Bay
5 : Break Point
6 : President Wilson Goes to War; Lenin Goes to the Finland Station
7 : Ruptures, Mutinies, and Convoys
8 : Mr. Wilson’s War
9 : Summer of Discontent
10 : American Leviathan
11 : Russia on the Brink
12 : Hinge of Fates
13 : 1918: War and Peace and War Again
14 : 1919: Grand Illusions
15 : Last Act
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Arthur Herman
Copyright
About the Publisher
DEDICATION
TO BETH, THE LOVE OF MY LIFE
AND MY GUIDING STAR
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Prologue: A World on Fire
Preface
1 : The German Note
2 : Russia and America Confront a World War
3 : Tommy and Volodya
4 : Neutrality at Bay
5 : Break Point
6 : President Wilson Goes to War; Lenin Goes to the Finland Station
7 : Ruptures, Mutinies, and Convoys
8 : Mr. Wilson’s War
9 : Summer of Discontent
10 : American Leviathan
11 : Russia on the Brink
12 : Hinge of Fates
13 : 1918: War and Peace and War Again
14 : 1919: Grand Illusions
15 : Last Act
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Also by Arthur Herman
Copyright
About the Publisher
CAST OF CHARACTERS
GERMANY
THEOBALD VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG: chancellor, 1909–17
ERICH LUDENDORFF: quartermaster general
PAUL VON HINDENBURG: chief of the German General Staff
ARTHUR ZIMMERMANN: foreign secretary
JOHANN VON BERNSTORFF: ambassador to the United States
ERICH VON FALKENHAYN: general; former chief of the German General Staff (1914–16), then commander of German armies in Romania and Russia
BARON GISBERT VON ROMBERG: ambassador in Bern, Switzerland
MATTHIAS ERZBERGER: prominent member of Catholic Center Party in Reichstag; later Reich minister of finance, 1919–20
GREAT BRITAIN
DAVID LLOYD GEORGE: prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party
ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR: foreign minister and former leader of the Conservative Party
WINSTON CHURCHILL: former first lord of the admiralty; later named minister of munitions (July 1917)
ANDREW BONAR LAW: leader of the Conservative Party and prominent member of the War Cabinet as chancellor of the exchequer
DOUGLAS HAIG: general; commander, British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front
WILLIAM HALL: admiral; director, British Naval Intelligence
EDMUND ALLENBY: general; commander, British Third Army during the Battle of Arras (March 1917) and later named commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (May 1917)
CHAIM WEIZMANN: president, British Zionist Federation; later first president of the State of Israel
FRANCE
ARISTIDE BRIAND: prime minister (later succeeded by Georges Clemenceau, November 1917)
GEORGES CLEMENCEAU: leader of the Radical-Socialist Party in the Chamber of Deputies
JOSEPH JOFFRE: general; commander in chief of French armies on the Western Front, 1914–16 (replaced by Gen. Robert Nivelle, December 1916); later as field marshal served as French envoy to the United States, May 1917
ROBERT NIVELLE: general; commander in chief of French armies, December 1916–April 1917 (succeeded by Gen. Philippe Pétain)
PHILIPPE PÉTAIN: general; chief of the General Staff, April 1917 to November 1918
FERDINAND FOCH: general; supreme Allied commander on the Western Front
MAURICE PALÉOLOGUE: ambassador to Russia
INESSA ARMAND: mistress of Lenin
RUSSIA
NICHOLAS II (NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH ROMANOV): “czar of all the Russias”
ALEXANDRA (ALEKSANDRA FYODOROVNA): czarina and wife of Nicholas II
NICHOLAS (NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH ROMANOV): grand duke; commander in chief of the Russian armies
MICHAEL (MIKHAIL) ROMANOV: grand duke; brother of Czar Nicholas II
ALEXANDER KERENSKY: lawyer; member of the Duma, Social Revolutionary Party; later minister of war and prime minister, Provisional Government
ALEKSEI BRUSILOV: general; commander of the Southwest Front; later commander in chief, Provisional Government
GRIGORI RASPUTIN: monk and mystic; adviser to Czarina Alexandra
NIKOLAI POKROVSKY: minister of foreign affairs
NIKOLAI CHKHEIDZE: member of the Duma, Social Revolutionary Party; later president of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Petrograd or Ispolkom
PAVEL MILIUKOV: member of the Duma, Constitutional Democratic Party (or Kadets); later foreign minister, Provisional Government
MIKHAIL RODZIANKO: state councillor and president of the Duma
A. A. BOGDANOV: early member of the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Russia and rival of Lenin; expelled from the party in 1909
LENIN (ORIGINALLY VLADIMIR ILYICH ULYANOV): leader of the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic Labour Party of Russia; later chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars
NADEZHDA KRUPSKAYA: wife of Lenin
LEON TROTSKY (ORIGINALLY LEV DAVIDOVICH BRONSTEIN): early member of the Mezhraiontsy faction; then people’s commissar for foreign affairs for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union; later founder and commander of the Red Army
KARL RADEK (ORIGINALLY KAROL SOBELSOHN): Lenin’s friend and fellow exile in Switzerland; later vice commissar for foreign affairs and key figure in the Communist International
LEV KAMENEV: editor of Pravda and brother-in-law of Leon Trotsky; later deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union
LAVR KORNILOV: general; named commander of Petrograd Military District in March 1917; later commander in chief under Provisional Government and then commander of the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army
ALEXANDER KOLCHAK: admiral; commander, Black Sea Fleet; later “Supreme Ruler and Commander-in-Chief of All Russian Land and Sea Forces” for anti-Bolshevik (White) forces during Russian Civil War
ANTON DENIKIN: general; succeeded Lavr Kornilov as commander, anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army
UNITED STATES
WOODROW WILSON: president (1913–21)
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: former U.S. president (1901–9)
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: former U.S. president (1909–13); later president, the League to Enforce Peace
HENRY CABOT LODGE: senator, Massachusetts (R); later chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Senate majority leader
ROBERT LANSING: secretary of state
WALTER HINES PAGE: ambassador to Great Britain
WILLIAM MCADOO: secretary of the treasury
EDWARD HOUSE: colonel; special adviser to President Wilson
JOSEPH
TUMULTY: private secretary to President Wilson
JOHN J. PERSHING: general; commander, American Expeditionary Force in France
GILBERT HITCHCOCK: senator, Nebraska (D)
WILLIAM SIMS: vice admiral; commander of all U.S. naval forces operating in Britain (named May 1917)
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: assistant secretary of the navy
GEORGE CREEL: former editor of the Progressive newspaper the Independent; later named by President Wilson as head of the Committee on Public Information
THOMAS GREGORY: attorney general (succeeded by A. Mitchell Palmer, 1919)
EUGENE V. DEBS: founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World and Socialist Party of America; presidential candidate in 1912 and 1920
PROLOGUE:
A WORLD ON FIRE
The world is on fire. There is tinder everywhere. The sparks are liable to drop anywhere, and somewhere there may be material which we cannot prevent from bursting into flame.
—WOODROW WILSON, JANUARY 1917
LONDON, JANUARY 17, 1917
HE WAS A small, narrow-faced man nicknamed the Door Mouse. After coming up the steps of the Admiralty House, he quietly made his way past the first sea lord’s office and opened the door to a dark, dingy room at the end of the corridor.
They called it Room 40. It was here that a handful of men and women, many of them civilians, worked on decoding German military and diplomatic messages. This was wartime, and the decoded information they’d passed on to their superiors had led to several breakthroughs on the battlefield and in the war at sea. But no piece of intelligence would be comparable to the message that dropped into Room 40’s wire basket that morning.
Nigel de Grey—that was the Door Mouse’s real name—picked it up and looked at it. He was joined by his colleague William Montgomery. They were an incongruous pair. Both were civilians, although de Grey had done a stint in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Montgomery was a Presbyterian minister and an expert on the works of Saint Augustine. De Grey was a junior editor on loan from the publisher William Heinemann. But both men had the intellectual skills that made code breaking an engaging and also highly successful enterprise.
For example, de Grey saw at once, from the numbers at the top of the page, that this was a message in a diplomatic code used by the German Foreign Office. He and Montgomery pulled out the relevant notebooks that would provide the key for this particular message (an unusually long one, they noticed), derived from German Codebook No. 13040.1
Room 40 hadn’t gotten hold of these diplomatic codes until the war was more than a year old. In the very beginning, in October 1914, as the British army was fighting for its life at the First Battle of Ypres, the director of naval intelligence had handed Alfred Ewing, who was director of naval education but also did ciphers as a hobby, a pile of intercepted German radio messages to decipher.2 Ewing was delighted, and he summoned his friend William Montgomery to help make sense of the pile. That marked the start of a decoding industry based in Room 40 that would dramatically shift the odds for the Royal Navy in the war.
Ewing had started work there using a German naval codebook, The Signal Book of the Imperial German Navy, known by its German initials SKM, which Britain’s ally Russia had found on a captured German cruiser, the SMS Magdeburg. The Russians kept one copy; the other they sent along to the British. Ewing and Montgomery quickly put it to good use, but it was just the start of a codebook treasure trove.
That same month, another codebook was captured, one that the Germans used for wireless or radio communication with naval warships, merchant ships, zeppelins, and U-boats. On November 30, came the codebook the German navy used to communicate with its naval attachés in foreign embassies.
Then, in March 1915—just as British and French troops were about to land at Gallipoli, in Turkey, in the hope of breaking the war wide open, and a British Cunard liner, the Lusitania, was taking on cargo in New York Harbor for the trip home—Ewing and Adm. William Hall received a suitcase captured from a German diplomat in Persia. Inside was a copy of the German diplomatic codebook known as No. 13040.
It was a code breaker’s dream find. Of course, over a period of months, the Germans came to realize that their codes were being read, and they issued new ones. But ships or submarines far away at sea often didn’t have access to the new codebooks, and had to send messages using the old ones; also, the new codes were often just variants on the old, which meant it was possible for the team in Room 40 to reconstruct a new code from its predecessors.
This was exactly what de Grey and Montgomery had done. The numbers at the top of the telegram, 13042, meant that the code was a 13040 variant, which was used for a message of more than one thousand coded groups. The men set to work. The first word they came up with, the signature at the end of the message, was “Zimmermann”—that was Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary. Then, at the top, came “Most Secret,” followed by “For Your Excellency’s Personal Information.” The “Excellency” in this case was the German ambassador in Washington, DC, Count Johann von Bernstorff.
So far, no surprises. But the next word they decoded gave them pause. It was “Mexico.” De Grey and Montgomery looked at each other. This was an odd country name to turn up in a wartime communication. For one thing, Mexico was neutral in this war, although its president was hardly a friend of the Allies and had good relations with Germany and Berlin. The next name they decoded was even more incongruous: “Japan.” In fact, it popped up several times in this first part of the dispatch. Japan had been on the side of the Allies since August 23, 1914—but, alarmingly, the dispatch was worded as if Tokyo were about to become Germany’s ally.
Thoroughly worried, the two code breakers worked with fierce determination for the next two hours. What emerged was a secret message from Berlin to Washington in two parts. The first contained what they knew was a diplomatic bombshell: on February 1, Berlin informed its ambassador in Washington, Germany would resume its unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping.
This was an important warning to the German ambassador, because no neutral country’s position was likely to change more as a result of that decision than that of the United States—and no leader’s views more than those of U.S. president Thomas Woodrow Wilson.
The submarine was a new offensive weapon unleashed by this war, one of the most feared—and certainly the most controversial. From the start of the war in 1914, Germany had used its submarine fleet to strangle the Allies’ maritime supply lines, especially Britain’s. German submarines, known as U-boats, had sunk merchant ships without warning, and without picking up survivors—making no distinction between cargo ships of enemy combatants such as Britain, France, and Russia, and neutral ships such as those from Holland, Spain, and America. All those ships unloaded cargo, including industrial goods and sometimes even ammunition, in Allied ports; all were therefore fair targets, in the German view. This ruthless approach to war, one that didn’t distinguish between combatant and neutral, or even between soldier and civilian, had brought down the collective wrath of the international community on Germany’s head, particularly the wrath of American president Woodrow Wilson.
As 1917 began, Wilson was working hard to keep the United States officially neutral in the greatest war history had ever known. Most Americans thought he was right to do so. What did they care about a war being fought on the other side of the Atlantic, in Europe, or even farther away, in the Middle East and on the plains of Russia? Just that past November, Wilson had run for a second term as president with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” and voters had responded by sending him back to the White House for another four years.
It was true that some Americans thought their country should get into the war. Some, especially those of German descent, wanted to join with the Germans and Austrians. But those who pushed hardest for war, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, wanted the United States to join up with Britain and France. But Wilson had resisted their persistent call
s for the United States to end its neutrality and choose a side in a conflict that, as the Allies kept insisting, defined the difference between civilization and barbarism—as witnessed by the all-out submarine warfare.
In Wilson’s view, entering that war would irreparably damage his vision of what America was and should be to the world: the peacemaker, the symbol of a human future that turned its back on war—even though the United States was more than capable of fighting, and winning, the war if it had to. In Wilson’s view, America’s neutrality was a reflection of strength, moral strength, rather than weakness or timidity. His other slogan in 1916, besides “He Kept Us Out of War,” was “Too Proud to Fight.” While Europeans ruthlessly fought other nations for land and treasure, Americans did not—those holding this belief conveniently forgetting that, in the nineteenth century, the United States fought for land and treasure more than once: against various Native American tribes; against Mexico in 1844; and, that same year, very nearly against Britain over the Oregon Territory.
Yet Germany’s submarine warfare strained even Wilson’s patience. When a German U-boat sank the liner Lusitania on May 7, 1915, killing more than 1,100 civilian passengers, including 128 Americans, Wilson’s wrath was palpable.
These moments tended to bring out the frustrated schoolmaster in Wilson. (In fact, he was a former college professor and onetime president of Princeton University.) He sat down at his typewriter in a small alcove near the Oval Office and set to work on an angry note to Bernstorff, the German ambassador. The note expressed Wilson’s “growing concern, distress, and amazement” at Germany’s conduct at sea, conduct that was “so absolutely contrary to the rules, the practices, and the spirit of modern warfare.” Wilson added, “Expressions of regret and offers of reparation in case of the destruction of neutral ships sunk by mistake, while they may satisfy international obligations, if no loss of life results, cannot justify or excuse a practice, the natural and necessary effect of which is to subject neutral nations and neutral persons to new and immeasurable risks.”
Therefore, Wilson concluded, “the Imperial German Government will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.” It was a veiled threat that if the Germans persisted in sinking neutral ships without warning, the United States would be driven to take military action—to defend its ships at sea if necessary and to choose sides in the conflict if there was no other recourse.3