Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  In the memorandum Britain’s defeat was projected to happen primarily because of the interruption for five months of her wheat supply. She was ill-equipped, judged Germany’s naval experts, to overcome a sudden stoppage of deliveries of this crucial commodity. Unlike the Reich, Britain had no other grains with which to ‘stretch’ her flour, and would have no time to gather them. She possessed neither the administrative machinery nor, it was thought, the popular consent needed to introduce food-conservation measures. The timing was auspicious, for a poor harvest in North America in 1916 meant that British grain ships would have to travel further, to India, Argentina and Australia, increasing the strain on precious tonnage. To add to Britons’ misery, other key imports would also be diminished. Cutting Britain off from Holland and Denmark would cause fats to run short. Breaking her links with Scandinavia would reduce stocks of wood, crucial for pit props, and ore, which would reduce coal, steel and munitions production. The U-boat campaign had to begin no later than 1 February in order to take effect before the next harvest in August, but then Britain would be starved out, its people panicked by shortages and spiralling prices, its exchequer emptied and its war industries crippled by strikes and a lack of key raw materials.6

  The precondition for realizing this apocalyptic scenario, the German navy insisted, was the introduction of U-boat warfare unfettered by international law. The submarines’ rules of engagement had been altered repeatedly during the war, as the navy’s desire for greater aggression was balanced by diplomatic scruples. There were debates within the Reich’s leadership about whether passenger liners could be attacked and when merchantmen might be sunk on sight. During a period of ‘sharpened’ warfare in March and April 1916, armed enemy merchant ships had been destroyed without warning everywhere and unarmed freighters had met the same fate if they were encountered within a designated war zone. For much of the war, however, the U-boats had fought under something approximating traditional ‘prize rules’. The standard procedure for submarines was to halt a merchant ship and permit the crew to disembark. If the vessel belonged to an enemy nation, it was then sunk. If it were neutral, its papers would be checked to establish whether it was taking ‘contraband’ to an enemy port, and if so, it too would be sunk. This practice was more abrupt and destructive than that of surface ships, which took enemy or suspicious merchant vessels back to their home station to have their fates decided by a prize court.7 However, it was widely, albeit reluctantly, understood that submarines had little space for prize crews and no easy way of bringing a ship back across open sea, the surface of which at least was still ruled by Britannia. The last U-boat campaign conducted under these rules was extremely successful, sinking an average of 326,000 tons per month between October 1916 and the end of January 1917, and, no less crucially, not unduly provoking the Americans.8

  Nonetheless, Holtzendorff and his experts considered these results inadequate. Submarine warfare conducted along lines tolerated by the international community, they estimated, could destroy at most 18 per cent of British shipping over five months; a painful blow, to be sure, yet not nearly enough to force Germany’s arch-enemy to the peace table. An illegal sink-on-sight campaign, by contrast, would enable submarines to avoid risky attacks on the surface, where they might be hit by the guns of armed merchantmen or surprised by a Q-Ship (a British warship disguised as a merchant vessel), and allow commanders to throw caution to the wind, thus raising the kill rate. The prospect of being sunk without warning by a torpedo strike was also intended to inspire terror in British and, still more importantly, neutral sailors. Holtzendorff’s unrestricted submarine warfare was another innovation of total war; it was conceived as a campaign of terror and its ability to provoke ‘panic and fear’ was explicitly regarded as an ‘indispensable precondition of success’. Of course, the admiral recognized that this ruthless way of fighting was certain to provoke the Americans to declare war. However, while paying lip service to ‘so serious a matter’, he did not regard the United States as a major threat. It could provide the Entente with little extra tonnage and without ships no American troops could intervene on Europe’s battlefields. Most likely, he predicted, once Britain sued for peace, the US would quickly also parley.9

  Unfortunately for Germany’s leaders, the memorandum’s ambitious claims, forceful language and intimidating statistics disguised considerable wishful thinking. Holtzendorff and the staff of Department B-1 underestimated the robustness of modern economies: ‘the economy of a country resembles a masterpiece of precision mechanics’, their December memorandum insisted. ‘Once it falls into disorder, interference, frictions and breakages continue incessantly.’ The view was understandable, for it reflected the German economy’s own war experience. Official intervention had proven powerless to solve food shortages, and dabbling with the market had frustratingly resulted in unforeseen distortions in production and the disappearance of goods from legal sales outlets. To the Reich’s leaders and bureaucrats, suffering under fierce public criticism, it did indeed seem that Britain’s ‘hunger blockade’ had thrown their country’s economy into a cycle of ‘disorder, interference, frictions and breakages’. Still, the planners’ strenuous denial that Britain could counter the U-boat threat was clearly exaggerated. Their bald assertion that it was incapable of ‘stretching’ food or implementing conservation measures was a reckless underestimation of a formidable enemy.10

  Holtzendorff and the specialists of Department B-1 also made other unwarranted assumptions. The admiral’s dismissal of convoys as ‘a great boon for our U-boats’, because their length and slowness would make the ships sitting ducks, would later prove to be disastrously misguided.11 Despite their confident tone, the planners did not in fact know how much British shipping was devoted to the transport of grain. They were also guessing about how much more destructive unrestricted submarine warfare would be: an initial estimate in February 1916 posited it to be three times as effective as operations conducted under prize rules, but ten months later their estimate had mysteriously dropped to around twice as effective.12 In fairness, the British Admiralty shared the Germans’ doubts about convoys, and the estimates of how much the U-boats could sink monthly proved remarkably accurate. Nevertheless, there were too many unknowns and too much poor or biased judgement to justify the German navy’s confidence and ambition. The memorandum was an extremely dangerous document, for under a comforting veneer of scientific certainty it pushed a high-risk strategy, whose failure guaranteed devastating consequences. Bethmann accurately characterized unrestricted submarine warfare as a ‘game of va banque whose stakes will be our existence as a Great Power and our entire national future’.13

  The siren call of the imperial navy’s experts to gamble everything on unrestricted U-boat warfare was consistently opposed by the Reich’s Chancellor. Bethmann had no humanitarian scruples about torpedoing merchant ships; he simply doubted that it would defeat Britain and he greatly feared provoking the United States. In his reading, which admittedly looked less convincing after the Entente had strongly rejected the German peace offer in December 1916, mutual exhaustion offered the most likely opportunity for a satisfactory settlement. American belligerence would be disastrous, as it would stiffen Entente resolve for total victory. In 1915, Bethmann had succeeded in response to neutral pressure in forcing the navy to modify aggressive rules of engagement so that neutrals and all passenger liners were not attacked. Throughout 1916, he had successfully opposed the navy’s constant urgings for unrestricted submarine warfare. Here, he was aided by other civilian ministers, who also harboured grave misgivings about the navy’s plans. When an unlimited submarine campaign was mooted in August, the Vice Chancellor, Karl Helfferich, had disputed Holtzendorff’s figures and warned that such a campaign would bring ‘catastrophe’. The Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, agreed, stressing that it would turn the whole international community against the Reich.14 Even on 9 January 1917, when Bethmann met Hindenburg and Ludendorff before the Crown Council, he had argued for ove
r an hour against unrestricted submarine warfare. This time, however, he failed to halt the campaign. The Third OHL and the Admiralty united behind it, and the Kaiser, in whose hands the decision ultimately lay, had according to the Chief of his Naval Cabinet, Admiral Georg von Müller, already decided the evening before that he was ‘definitely in favour of it’.15

  Bethmann’s final failure in January 1917 to stop unrestricted submarine warfare from going ahead was a consequence of power shifts that had taken place late during the preceding summer and autumn. The right had long clamoured for unrestricted U-boat warfare, but by this point even centrists wanted it, and Bethmann found himself under strong pressure to submit. In August 1916 he had felt obliged to conjecture openly in the Bundesrat – the parliamentary house containing the states’ representatives – about when such a campaign could be launched, and had named February 1917. Even more threatening to the Chancellor’s position was the formation in October of a Reichstag majority in favour of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Catholic Centre Party, whose best-known member Matthias Erzberger had to this point been opposed, now joined right-wing parties in demanding that the submarines be unleashed. ‘Should the decision fall in favour of undertaking unrestricted U-boat war, the Chancellor may be certain of the agreement of the Reichstag,’ Erzberger had assured him. Bethmann was urged to defer to the rising power of the Third OHL.16

  Hindenburg and Ludendorff had refused to support the Admiralty at the end of August 1916. With heavy fighting on the Somme and at Verdun, a frail ally in the east and the new need to defend against Romania, the army’s manpower was totally committed. The Field Marshal and his First Quartermaster General feared no soldiers would be left to defend the borders if the submarines provoked Denmark or Holland into war against the Reich. However, German leaders had not rejected unconditional U-boat warfare outright; rather, a firm decision on the submarine campaign had been postponed until the Romanian threat was eliminated. Bethmann had also come out of these discussions with his authority weakened. He had explicitly conceded that the decisive voice on whether to launch unrestricted submarine warfare should be that of the Third OHL. Tactically, he had been extremely clever, for he was able to defuse some of the pressure from parliament and heavy industry for unrestricted U-boat warfare by sheltering behind the refusal to countenance it of the wildly popular Hindenburg. Had Bethmann stepped back, however, he would have seen that this same popular pressure had pushed him into the arms of the military. When Hindenburg and Ludendorff turned in favour of an unrestricted campaign, the Chancellor was in no position to refuse.17

  The Third OHL’s opposition to unrestricted U-boat warfare was always temporary. Hindenburg had judged the future to be ‘darker than ever’ at the end of August 1916, but already in September he and his Quartermaster General gave conditional support to Holtzendorff’s urging to launch a campaign from mid-October. The OHL’s complete conversion to unrestricted submarine warfare came as a result of the crushing of Romania in December. The strategic situation was still worrying, but the victory had released the men needed to secure Germany against war with irate neutrals and U-boat warfare seemed worth trying. The reasons listed by Ludendorff to Bethmann on 9 January 1917 for supporting Holtzendorff’s plan testify to grave concern rather than aggression. Above all, his priority was to relieve pressure on the army: ‘We must spare the troops a second Somme battle.’ Ludendorff counted on the submarines to damage Entente munitions production. Hindenburg was more gung-ho, claiming that Germany, although not its allies, could hold out for much longer, but he agreed that ‘the war must be brought to an end faster’.18

  One other factor, more emotional than reasoned, also influenced the decision of German leaders to launch unrestricted submarine warfare. Whether they feared or dismissed the United States, the Reich’s leaders harboured bitter and largely justified resentment against the country. President Woodrow Wilson, son of a Presbyterian minister and a man who had devoted his political life to progressive causes, usually adopted a tone of moralistic condescension when addressing warring Europeans. His sanctimonious preaching on ‘behalf of humanity’ rankled with German leaders, who were well aware that the ships passing from America to Britain carried US-produced weapons and munitions intended to kill their subjects.19 Ludendorff was, for once, justified in complaining that ‘The attitude of the United States in regard to the question of the supply of munitions left no doubt about their one-sided conception of neutrality.’20 Hindenburg too brought up the problem of American munitions in the Crown Council on 9 January, hoping that the submarines might reduce the deliveries.21 The United States was raking in immense profits from helping Europe tear itself apart; its net gain in foreign trade during the period of neutrality totalled between 4.5 and 5 billion dollars.22 This exploitation of the old world’s misery activated the inherent animosity towards all things commercial harboured by the Kaiserreich’s aristocratic ruling classes. Above all, this was true for the Kaiser, in whose hands rested the ultimate power to launch the submarines. For him, as he explained in January 1917, ‘the war is the struggle between two world views: the Teutonic-German for morality, right, loyalty and faith, genuine humanity, truth and real freedom, against the Anglo-Saxon [world view], the worship of Mammon, the power of money, pleasure, land-hunger, lies, betrayal, deceit and – last but not least – treacherous assassination!’23

  THE UNRESTRICTED SUBMARINE CAMPAIGN

  The German navy had been the Kaiser’s pet project and a source of intense national pride before the First World War. In a country united for only a few decades in a federal structure, where the army still comprised four distinct, if closely linked, forces – the Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon and that of Württemberg – the navy was a rare, genuinely German institution. Its expansion, and particularly its growing number of dreadnoughts, had been seen domestically and internationally as a mark of the Reich’s aspiration to world power. However, in war the performance of the vaunted surface ships of the High Seas Fleet had been uninspiring. The fleet had launched a few raids in 1914, and in the summer of 1916 at Jutland it had finally fought a battle with the force it had been constructed to beat, the much larger British Grand Fleet. It had acquitted itself well, sinking fourteen British ships for the loss of eleven of its own vessels, but the battle had not changed the overall strategic balance. The fleet remained bottled up in its own ports and the Baltic, stopped by its superior enemy from sallying out to cut British supply lines or smash the blockade against Germany.24

  The dramatic escapades of Germany’s submarines had contrasted sharply with the surface fleet’s apparent inactivity already in 1914. Over the course of subsequent years, they had not only become the public’s darlings but had also acquired a much more important position in the navy’s order of battle and operational planning. German U-boat strength had risen from a paltry thirty-seven, at the start of the first abortive attempt to conduct unrestricted warfare in February 1915, to 105 submarines two years later. Forty-six U-boats were in the High Seas Fleet and twenty-three smaller vessels served with the Flanders Flotilla. All these operated around the United Kingdom and off the coast of France. Another twenty-three U-boats were stationed at the Austro-Hungarian Pola and Cattaro bases in the Mediterranean, three worked out of Constantinople in the Black Sea and the remaining ten patrolled in the Baltic.25 These vessels would permit the navy to step out from the army’s shadow and at last prove its value for the German war effort. As Admiral Reinhard Scheer, Chief of the High Seas Fleet, informed his men proudly on 31 January 1917, a day before the new rules of engagement went into force, ‘the trust of the nation’ and ‘responsibility for exerting the decisive pressure on our main enemy has been placed on the navy’.26

  The U-boats were unquestionably formidable weapons. The modern vessels that were the mainstay of the force could reach speeds of over sixteen knots with their diesel engines on the surface, nine or ten knots running off batteries under water, and had a range of at least 7,500 and in some cases 11,500 nautical miles.
Most had six torpedo tubes, four up front in the bow and another two in the stern, and two deck-mounted 8.8cm and 10.5cm cannon. The smaller U-boats deployed by the Flanders Flotilla and in the Mediterranean were less powerful, but still dangerous. Some, the so-called UC boats, were mine-layers for whom a relatively low surface speed of twelve knots was not a major disadvantage. UB boats, which carried torpedoes as their primary armament, were faster, reaching eight knots under water and fourteen on the surface. From May 1917, the navy also deployed large U-cruisers, whose displacement of 1,510 tons was nearly double that of ordinary U-boats and three times that of the biggest and most modern UB and UC submarines. U-cruisers had originally been developed as submersible cargo vessels capable of evading the British blockade, and one, the ‘Deutschland’, had made two trips in this role to the United States in 1916, causing a huge public stir on its arrival in Baltimore. When re-equipped for fighting, they mounted two 15cm guns, as well as torpedo tubes. They were extremely unwieldy, but their tremendous range of up to 13,500 nautical miles and ability to remain at sea for three and a half months allowed the navy to project force into hitherto unreachable waters.27

  From the outset of the unrestricted submarine campaign, German naval commanders stressed the overriding need for speed and ruthlessness. The Leader of Submarines of the High Seas Fleet, Commander Hermann Bauer, resolved to work his forces at a frenetic pace in the bid for final victory. Submarine commanders were ordered to keep cruises short and violent: operations were ideally to last just fourteen days, in which all torpedoes should be expended. ‘No vessel must remain afloat the sinking of which is authorized,’ warned Bauer. To maximize the time in the main hunting grounds in the Atlantic, U-boats were ordered to cease travelling around the coast of Scotland. Instead, commanders were to take the more direct, and dangerous, route through the English Channel. Maintenance on the submarines was to be reduced to a bare minimum, so as to waste no time in dock. The men’s leave was also to be restricted and, this being the navy, warnings to sailors about the perils of venereal disease were redoubled. The commanders were told to stress to their crews that the campaign was ‘to decide the whole war’.28 These instructions, along with the new rules of engagement, clearly made an impression, for in February 1917 sinkings rose by 50 per cent over those of the previous month, to nearly 500,000 tons. This was short of what Holtzendorff had promised, but was excusable because the first half of the month had seen some restraint so as to allow neutral ships at sea when the blockade zone was declared to return home. The Flanders Flotilla was upbeat at the beginning of March. Neutral ships were staying in port and, it reported, the enemy’s counter-measures were ineffective. The submariners felt invincible.29