1917

by Arthur Herman, PhD

  Pétain took command at a time of profound crisis in his beloved army, one that was crippling its effectiveness as a fighting force, possibly permanently. All military plans had to be laid aside so that the state of the army itself could be dealt with. Urgently but quietly, Pétain got to work. He relied on two tried-and-true methods of reviving an army’s spirit: the carrot and the stick. The stick in this case was mass arrests and trials for mutiny of soldiers from the most rebellious units. Literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers were court-martialed; 23,000 were found guilty, and a total of 432 were sentenced to death.

  Movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory paint a particularly gruesome and misleading picture of the punishments handed out under Pétain. In the end, only 49 soldiers in the entire army were actually shot—although, in some units, officers took matters into their own hands and executed notorious mutineers without formal trial. Those men put on trial were selected by their officers and NCOs, with the knowledge and implicit consent of the rest of the men in their units. Therefore, it can be assumed that most of, if not all, the men tried and convicted were in some way seriously guilty of violating the military code. Several hundred mutineers were deported, but of the hundreds sentenced to life imprisonment, many were later reprieved.16

  That was the stick, or hard edge of Pétain’s restoration of discipline. The carrot, or softer side of his approach, included his reforming how French soldiers were treated, specifically at last making them feel that their commanders saw them as more than mere cannon fodder. In this task, Pétain had the advantage of knowing and liking the average soldiers, and they in turn liked and respected him. They knew, for instance, that during the Siege of Verdun, he had taken care to ensure that units were rotated out of the trenches every two weeks, instead of leaving them to fight until they died, as the Germans and many other French generals did.

  Now, as commander in chief, Pétain set out on a “listening tour” of his units in the field, visiting ninety divisions in thirty days. He met informally with soldiers to hear their complaints and gave impromptu speeches standing on the hood of his touring car, promising soldiers that he would not send them into battle again until they were properly rested and trained, and that he would fire incompetent and dishonest officers. He met with junior officers, too, listening to their ideas and urging them to give recommendations on restoring a sense of pride in an army whose morale had been shattered.

  Pétain instituted more generous leave for his men, too, and pressured the government to raise their pay. There were important changes in how the troops were fed; rest camps were introduced; and socialist tracts were replaced with his own “trench pamphlets,” which stressed the importance of duty, honor, and country—and of obeying one’s officers.

  By July, the incidents of “collective indiscipline” were steadily falling; by August, the crisis had passed. Pétain had saved the French army—one could argue that he had saved France—but it had come at a price. He had promised his men he would not send them against the Germans again until they were ready, and for an entire year, from June 1917 to June 1918, they were deemed not ready. France had lost the ability to mount large-scale offensive operations on its own; its reputation as a premier military power was at end. This spelled the end of France’s position as a Great Power as well.

  The implications for the future were huge. In 1914, France and Germany were more or less equal rivals for power and influence. In 1918, Germany would be a broken nation, while a triumphant France led the other Allies to victory. But two decades later the once-defeated Germany would emerge as the most powerful country in Europe, while France was reduced to a distant second or even third place, behind Great Britain and the Soviet Union. All this was the direct result of the Nivelle Offensive and the mutinies of May and June 1917. Together they spelled the end of glory, and the end of greatness.

  Pétain had managed to save the French army by a combination of his firmness and reforms. There was, however, one other thing he needed: for the Americans to get to France. On April 27, three weeks after America’s declaration of war, Marshal Joffre visited Washington to urge the dispatch of an American division as soon as possible, and as many divisions as the United States could put in the field, as an independent command. At the time, Joffre knew nothing about the mutinies; neither, of course, did the Americans. But Joffre’s plea worked. On May 2, he met with President Wilson, who agreed to the request.17

  From that point on, whenever anyone asked Pétain what his plans were for the rest of 1917, he would answer, “I’m waiting for the tanks”—that is, the new armored vehicles being produced at the Renault autoworks outside Paris—“and the Americans.”

  LONDON, MAY–JULY

  BY JUNE, THE possibility that the Allies could lose the war through the collapse of France had faded. But the even greater threat to the war effort still had to be faced: the impact of Germany’s all-out submarine warfare.

  In April, sinkings increased to more than 516 ships, or 880,000 tons of merchant shipping—well beyond the minimum of 600,000 tons Germany believed it needed to force Britain out of the war. A crisis was looming, and the two men who came to confront it would forge a new strategic relationship between the United States and Great Britain, one that would extend beyond this war into the next—and right down to today.

  The first was David Lloyd George. He had been made Britain’s prime minister in December 1916, not because he commanded the confidence of Parliament, the essential requirement for becoming prime minister going back to the days of Queen Anne, but because he commanded the loyalty of the British public. His party, the Radical Free Churchers, did not have a majority in Parliament. But the majority of those of other parties, Liberal, Unionist, and above all Labour, believed he was the only man for the job of getting Great Britain, and the British Empire, fully committed to the war effort.

  That included both industrialists and labor unions. At a time when many crusty conservatives still thought of unions as illegal “combinations” and the British workingman as essentially a different species of humanity, Lloyd George was able to get the men who dug the coal mines and worked the factory floors, and their leaders and shop stewards, fully behind a maximum effort for the war. His close partnership with Arthur Henderson (nominally president of the Board of Education but in fact the fledgling Labour Party’s “man” in the coalition government) included putting Henderson into his War Cabinet. Together, in person or on the phone, they would tackle incidents of strikes and labor unrest, persuading recalcitrant workers to go back to work or an employer to give way on some minor pay issue. Together they never quite got rid of labor problems during the war, but Henderson and Lloyd George did more than anyone else to make sure these problems were not a drag on mobilization for war.18

  Meanwhile, it was the First World War and Lloyd George’s premiership that put Britain’s labor unions on the political and social landscape for the first time, and gave them some power over the economic life of Britain, power they have never completely lost.

  The same was true of women. The suffragette movement in the prewar years had mobilized an activist minority in pursuit of the right to vote, though without result. When war came, its leader, Christabel Pankhurst, and thousands of other suffragettes marched on Whitehall with a new slogan: “We demand the right to work.” As minister of munitions and then prime minister, Lloyd George gladly took them up on their offer. By 1917, 20 percent of Britain’s labor force was female, from bus conductors and clerk typists to truck drivers and restaurant staffs. The army and navy had started up auxiliary services for women, providing them with their own khaki uniforms. As historian A. J. P. Taylor once remarked, “by the end of the war the woman’s place was no longer in the home,” thanks to Lloyd George’s willingness to defy ordinary sexual convention.19

  In the effort to mobilize, Lloyd George did not hesitate to challenge another of Britain’s most cherished traditions. This was the workingman’s habit, some would argue his right, to have a pint
or a wee dram in the mid-afternoon or even on the way to work in the morning. Lloyd George decided that the consumption of alcohol at this rate and on this scale (nearly 200 gallons of alcohol per capita per year) represented a serious drag on the war mobilization effort. Even before becoming minister of munitions, he had declared in February 1915, “Drink is doing more damage than all the German submarines put together.” His one-man wartime temperance campaign—Lloyd George himself was not a teetotaler, but many of the voters in his party were—convinced no less a personage than King George V himself to take the pledge of “no spirits, wine, or beer” for the duration of the war.

  Millions enthusiastically followed their sovereign’s example, but in Lloyd George’s mind, voluntary compliance was not enough. Therefore, in May 1915, he oversaw creation of the Central Control Board to regulate the sale and distribution of alcohol in Britain. For a time in 1917, as prime minister, he even contemplated nationalizing the country’s entire beer and liquor industry, but then decided that this was a draft too large to swallow.20 He did, however, impose strict regulation of the hours during which establishments, particularly local bars or public houses, could serve alcohol. The regulations (letting pubs open only shortly before lunch and then closing them after lunch, until late in the afternoon) survived the war; indeed, they survived in Britain until the 1980s. They were Lloyd George’s most lasting gift (if that is the word) to the nation whose fate had fallen into his hands, and his hands alone, when 1917 began.

  Of all the issues that confronted him in the first months of that year, the most important was what to do about loosening the noose around Britain’s neck: the German U-boat campaign.

  The first step Lloyd George had to take was to get the nation’s merchant shipping under control. Incredibly, after two and a half years of war, the requisitioning of ships for carrying wartime supplies had not essentially changed since the days of Nelson. The task was largely in the hands of the Admiralty, which sent its requisition orders to private shipping companies as the need arose. There was no central coordination, no centralized planning, no clear sense of what ships might be available to carry vital supplies, or when, let alone from where.

  All that changed under Lloyd George. His most important decision was to create a Ministry of Shipping under a hardworking Scot, Glaswegian shipping magnate Sir Joseph Maclay. A private businessman, Maclay opposed nationalizing the entire merchant marine fleet, which was Lloyd George’s first instinct. But he did see the good sense in bringing all the fleet’s resources under public control, with a regular system for sending ships where they could get the cargo that would do the most good for the war effort.

  Very shortly, 90 percent of Britain’s merchant fleet was subject to control by the Ministry of Shipping.21 At the same time, Lloyd George put another Scot, Admiralty official Sir Eric Geddes, in charge of all shipbuilding, both naval and merchant marine. Although Geddes was separate from the Ministry of Shipping, he and Maclay worked together to build vessels as fast as, or even faster than, the Germans could sink them. In the end, Geddes and Maclay set up a shipbuilding program that made more than three million tons of merchant shipping available every year.22

  Maclay’s other achievement was to figure out where the nation’s shipping trade needed to be concentrated in order to have the maximum result. Before April 1917, much of Britain’s overseas trade still rested on the long, long voyage to Australia and back.23 Maclay quickly decided that the Atlantic trade with North America alone could meet almost all Britain’s wartime needs. That decision early on prevented Britain’s merchant fleet from being spread out all over the globe, even as the German submarine campaign was reaching full flood. Yet it also meant that securing the North Atlantic lifeline from Canada and the United States was now crucial to the course of the war—and even to the survival of Britain.24

  To do that, Britain had to adopt one strategy from the Napoleonic Wars that would work in this war, namely, a convoy system. Unfortunately, the Admiralty was unalterably opposed to this idea. Its reasons were many, and superficially sound. Ships traveling in a convoy would present too large a target for U-boat captains, Britain’s top admirals had told Lloyd George when he raised the issue back in November 1916; convoys would also require more escorting warships than the Royal Navy could possibly spare from its other vital missions. Besides, the admirals doubted that the average merchant captain had the skill to “keep station,” in other words, to stay in orderly formation on a long voyage across the Atlantic. Really, First Sea Lord John Jellicoe told Lloyd George as late as January 1917, sailing in convoys would only make merchant ships more vulnerable to attack, not less.25

  Maclay, who knew his merchant sea captains, thought these arguments absurd. Still, neither he nor Lloyd George could get the Admiralty to reconsider its opposition to convoys—even after Germany unleashed its unrestricted attacks on the high seas and the number of ships sunk surged.

  Fortunately, the prime minister was about to get a persuasive ally in his campaign to shift to convoys: an American who was the new naval attaché at the American embassy in London, Vice Adm. William Sims.

  Sims was an experienced hand in naval warfare, having served as an observer during the Russo-Japanese War. He also understood the danger Britain was facing in the war at sea: on his way into Liverpool Harbor, the ship he was on struck a German mine. Yet when Sims met the prime minister and asked what Britain needed most from the United States, Lloyd George said nothing about convoys, but he did say over and over again, “Ships, ships, ships,” meaning naval vessels that could deal with the U-boat threat.

  At the time, this meant destroyers, of which the United States had more than fifty. Using primitive hydrophones (a British naval invention) to track its submerged prey, a destroyer would then either drive the U-boat off or sink it, with pressure-detonated depth charges, another new naval technology. Now it was the Americans’ turn to lend a hand. By May 4, 1917, the first six U.S. destroyers arrived at Queenstown, Ireland, the terminus of the typical transatlantic voyage from New York or Boston to Britain. By July, there would be thirty-four.26 But there was also a need for smaller, faster, and more agile craft that could hunt down U-boats in coastal waters and approaches.

  Here, again, the Americans stepped up. In the spring of 1916, the U.S. Navy Department had approved a new “sub chaser” design, 110 feet long, made entirely of wood, and armed with one or two 3-inch guns on the prow and a Y-shaped depth charge gun on the stern. Here at last was a design that could supplement the war against the submarine in home waters while letting the larger vessels concentrate on escorting convoys across the ocean.

  The first of the sub chasers, designated SC-boats, came out of American shipyards in early 1917. In the end, more than four hundred of them would be stationed to guard Allied shipping from Ireland and the Mediterranean to Archangel, in Russia. Their success would be the making of the career of the young assistant secretary of the navy who first approved the design: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a cousin of former president Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt’s first steps to national prominence, and toward the White House his cousin had once occupied, began that spring of 1917 in the war against the U-boat.

  Yet, even with the right ships, and the right number of ships, there was no winning the war for the Atlantic without convoys. Here Sims turned out to be a willing and persuasive ally in Lloyd George’s campaign to overcome the Admiralty’s obstinate resistance.

  Fortunately, both found help from a study done by a junior officer inside the Admiralty, Cdr. R. G. H. Henderson. His study took on the argument that protecting the large number of merchant vessels entering British waters every week—more than 2,500, statistics showed—would require far more warships than the Royal Navy could possibly provide. Looking more closely at the numbers, Henderson was able to show that the vast majority of those 2,500 vessels were actually engaged in coastal trade. The real number of merchant ships completing a transoceanic voyage, the ones most vital to the war effort, was closer
to 120 to 140, a far more feasible mission even for a heavily stretched and stressed Royal Navy.27

  Besides, with America now in the war and U.S. Navy vessels available to provide additional escorts, the argument that convoy duty would overtax Royal Navy resources fell apart. A closer look at the numbers also dispelled the Admiralty’s other argument against convoys: that so many ships traveling grouped together would be too easy a target. Instead, a quick lesson in statistics showed that the large number of individual ships not traveling in convoy actually increased the odds of a U-boat captain’s finding ships to sink. In other words, a single large convoy (replacing multiple widely dispersed targets) would be harder to find in the vast reaches of the North Atlantic.

  Sims had one final argument for the convoy system. “The thing to do,” he wrote, “[is] to make the submarines come to the anti-submarine craft and fight in order to get merchantmen.” In short, when the convoy was used as bait, the U-boat became the prey rather than the predator. So, if the Admiralty wanted to take the offensive against the German submarine fleet, the convoy system was the way to do it.

  Slowly, in meeting after meeting, the Admiralty began to relent in its opposition. A personal visit by Lloyd George to the Admiralty offices on April 30 marked the tipping point. Sims cabled Washington joyfully: “The Admiralty has decided to give trial to convoy scheme.” On May 10, 1917, the first organized convoy sailed from Gibraltar. Not a single ship was lost.28