Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The intense exhaustion, falling morale and declining quality of submarine crews inevitably impacted negatively on fighting performance. Lack of skill or nervousness and misjudgement started to cause U-boat losses. The sinking of U110 in March 1918, for example, was blamed partly on the ‘striking . . . youth and inexperience’ of its crew, among whom were just four veteran petty officers.83 The next month, UB85, whose crew were also novices, surrendered after a disastrous cruise in which every torpedo fired had missed its target. When the U-boat had dived, the conning tower hatch had been left open or malfunctioned and fifteen tons of water had poured in, short-circuiting a motor and reacting with the acid in the boat’s batteries to produce poisonous fumes. Frightening as this was, the submarine could still have escaped over open water with its diesel engines, and British interrogators considered the commander to have acted ‘somewhat prematurely’ in bringing his crew up on deck and having them shout ‘We surrender’ in unison at a nearby Royal Navy patrol ship.84 At the other extreme, exhausted veteran commanders also became nervous and started to make unforced errors. Lieutenant Commander Robert Moraht, a professional officer who had served in submarines since 1915 and had won the Pour le Mérite, frankly admitted that faulty judgement, stemming from his poor mental health, had cost him his boat, the U64, in June 1918. He knew that after two years in the service ‘his nerves had begun to suffer’, but had resisted transferral to an appointment onshore. He had lost his ability accurately to assess risk, attacked a well-protected convoy, and was sunk by its escorts. All but himself and four others of U64’s forty-one-strong crew had gone down with the boat.85

  The U-boat war was not, as it is often presented, solely a matter of numbers, technology or tactics. As in land fighting, the skill, resilience and determination of men played a key part in its outcome. The increase in sinkings after February 1917 was due not only to more numerous and efficient deployment of U-boats but also to the pushing of their crews to the limits of endurance. Human psychology was always central to unrestricted submarine warfare. The campaign’s success hinged in good part on its ability to spread terror, yet Holtzendorff and his experts overestimated their own commanders’ ruthlessness and underrated their enemy’s courage and resilience. The submarines drove neither British nor neutral merchant shipping from the seas. Instead, as their opponents’ tactics and weaponry improved, as losses increased and as the high tempo of operations exhausted them, it was the will of German U-boat commanders and crews that waned. The U-boats never realized their aim of inflicting panic and collapse on British society. Instead, through its failure the submarine campaign’s greatest impact would be felt in Germany.

  WONDER WEAPON BLUES

  The mass of the German people had placed great emotional investment in the U-boats to end the war quickly and victoriously. True, in February 1917, there had been voices urging caution. Moderate intellectuals including the military historian Hans Delbrück and, in Austria, the jurist and politican Josef Redlich saw through the Admiralty’s overly rosy predictions and rightly feared provoking the United States.86 Yet these people were a minority. Most of the population greeted the unrestricted campaign with a hope that even the immediate diplomatic break with the United States did not suppress. The newspaper editor of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, Theodor Wolff, no friend of the annexationists calling most insistently for the submarines’ ruthless deployment, punned in February about the ‘unrestricted U-boat optimism’ sweeping the country.87 The generals in charge of the home districts made similar observations in their monthly morale reports. The commander of IV district, which covered Prussian Saxony in the middle of Germany, caught the nation’s mood best when he wrote that ‘scarcely has any step of the Reich leadership been greeted with such approval and such striking unanimity, right down to the parts of the population furthest to the left, as the decision to undertake the submarine war without restrictions’.88

  The enthusiasm is not difficult to understand. After a cold and hungry winter, many Germans felt a certain Schadenfreude at the thought of the British being starved out by the submarines. Their animosity towards America too should not be underestimated. For years, they had read press reports detailing the huge quantities of armaments manufactured in the neutral United States for the Entente. Publicists spread news of how millionaires were being created across the Atlantic by the flood of war orders. German Americans had tried hard to have an embargo imposed on weapons exports, but commercial interests and the government’s growing sympathy for the Entente took precedence. Woodrow Wilson’s administration insisted disingenuously that it could not interfere with free trade.89 The weapons shipments provoked much anger in the German public. One of the more imaginative responses took place within the army, where in 1915 troops vented their irritation with a satirical art exhibition held behind the Somme lines. The first piece on display, entitled with heavy irony ‘Wilson, the neutral’, was a chalk bust of the American president wearing a supercilious smile set over a rostrum of unexploded shells, all made in the USA.90 German military home commands referred to the ingrained resentment from the arms deliveries to explain the population’s ‘calm composure’ when on 3 February 1917 America broke diplomatic relations. Nonetheless, by far the most important reason why the Reich’s weary populace supported the unrestricted submarine campaign was that it promised a rapid end to the conflict. Few, unlike the conservatives who had been the primary agitators for unrestricted U-boat warfare, were in favour of annexations. Yet whether wishing for a speedy end or total victory, there was widespread confidence in February that the campaign would succeed. Most Germans firmly believed, noted the home generals, ‘that the year 1917 will bring the Fatherland the hoped for victorious peace’.91

  The German people remained, as the Reich Navy Office remarked with satisfaction, ‘under the spell of the unrestricted submarine war’ through the spring of 1917.92 The high rate of sinkings encouraged public optimism that within half a year peace might be restored. The true figures were impressive enough, but those released by the naval authorities to the press and Germany’s allies tended, whether by accident or design, to inflate them by a third. The people read that the U-boats had sunk 781,500 tons (instead of the genuine figure of 499,430) in February and a colossal 861,000 tons (rather than 548,817) in March.93 Newspapers were kept under tight censorship. All articles referring to the U-boats had to be submitted for inspection before publication, and the rhetoric surrounding the campaign was shaped skilfully to appeal to the Socialist working classes. Portrayals of it as revenge or as a starvation war were banned. Instead, it was stressed that the campaign was a means for ending hostilities quickly.94 Private publishers, recognizing that patriotism could be profitable even in the war’s third year, exploited and fuelled the excitement with hurriedly written, cheap and sensational accounts by submariners of their war experiences. The Berlin publisher Ullstein was the leader in a market that printed no fewer than nine ‘penny dreadful’ U-boat novels in 1917. They provided a human angle to the submarine campaign, portraying a face of masculine toughness and heroism that neatly complemented the navy’s impressive statistics.95

  While commerce thus continued to play a role in popular mobilization, it along with other private initiatives had receded in importance from the heady days of 1914–15 due to war-weariness and material shortage. Instead, official propaganda, which also made imaginative use of the U-boats, was now becoming much more organized and influential. The centrepieces of civil and military efforts were the biannual War Loan appeals. The Sixth War Loan advertised in the spring of 1917, just after the unrestricted campaign began, attracted 7,063,347 subscribers, nearly double those who had signed the preceding loan six months earlier.96 Its unprecedented success at attracting large numbers of small sums, making it a genuinely popular exercise, rested in part on its appropriation of commercial methods of advertising. Nearly 1,500,000 posters designed by professional artists were hung up across the Reich on advertising boards and in stations, offices, and on public t
ransport. Twelve million flyers were distributed explaining why people should contribute and millions of attractive, illustrated postcards were issued with the intention of keeping public attention focused on the war loan.97 The submarines featured in the propaganda, with Germans urged to ‘sign war loans for the U-boats against England’. One poster aimed at the army featured a submarine commander with his arm on a soldier’s shoulder and pointing in the distance to a sinking ship. ‘That’s the way your money helps you to fight!’, read the caption. ‘Turned into U-boats, it keeps enemy shells from your body! Therefore: sign the War Loan!’98 Above all, the remarkable readiness of people to buy war loans after so demoralizing a winter can be explained only with reference to the popularity of the submariners and the great expectations raised by the unrestricted U-boat campaign. With victory apparently close, buying into the state’s Sixth War Loan not only was a patriotic act but also appeared to be a safe investment.

  In spite of this success, popular confidence had already taken its first serious knock at the start of March due to a piece of extraordinary stupidity by the new German Foreign Secretary since November 1916, Arthur Zimmermann. On 1 March, American newspapers published a highly sensitive telegram that Zimmermann had sent to the German ambassador in Mexico, but that the British had intercepted, decrypted and passed onto the US government. In it, Zimmermann had proposed an alliance with Mexico in the event of war with the United States, promising German financial aid as well as Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. This was explosive, and the publication caused outrage across America. In Germany, the public could barely comprehend their government’s incompetence. Theodor Wolff of the Berliner Tageblatt was disgusted at Zimmermann’s recklessness and right in describing the telegram as ‘boundlessly naive’. One of his business associates joked that after it a sure way to get rich would be to build a spittoon factory: ‘thirty million spittoons – that would satisfy an urgent need, for the entire people would like to spit!’99 For thinking Germans, the news cast doubt upon the reports of tremendous success at sea. ‘If we are so sure of defeating England in a few months,’ mused one front-line officer in his diary, ‘then surely we don’t need an ally like Mexico!!’100

  Few were surprised when little over a month later, on 6 April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. Some people took the news badly. Ruth Höfner in Silesia wrote in her diary a cry of despair: ‘What crime has our people committed that it must suffer so terribly?!’101 The effect on the army of acquiring yet another enemy to fight was, as one nationalist commentator conceded grudgingly after the war, ‘not exactly encouraging’.102 The middle of the month also witnessed the Reich’s first major political strike, with 217,000 workers downing tools in Berlin. Stoppages also took place in other centres, above all in Leipzig. The protests suggest that some on the left had little faith in the U-boat campaign to end the war quickly and many more distrusted its most fervent domestic plans for Germany’s future after victory: among the workers’ demands were a non-annexationist peace, the annulment of wartime restrictions on political rights, and the introduction of universal and equal suffrage.103 Nonetheless, if the news of US animosity lay in the background, it was not a major factor in inciting the stoppages. Berlin’s Police Chief reported that the capital’s inhabitants had in fact responded calmly to the start of hostilities with the US, as well as to the subsequent declarations of war by South American states. The generals in the home districts agreed: the population beyond the metropolis reacted ‘with complete composure’. The middle classes were grimly resolute. Elisabeth Stempfle was probably representative of the bourgeoisie when she adamantly promised in her journal ‘we will hold out!’104

  It was only in the summer that morale really crumbled. The German home front itself entered a new supply crisis, as both food and coal ran out, and with Britain still showing no sign of being on the verge of capitulation despite the submarines’ best efforts, the population stopped believing. ‘On what should we now set our hopes?’ appealed Anna Kohnstern in Hamburg to her soldier son Albert at the end of June. ‘Everything looks so wretched. At first they say here that the war will be finished in August and then it’s said again that it will last another year.’105 As despair gripped the people, democratic politicians took note. The Social Democrats’ leadership warned the Reich government that the failure to realize promises of a rapid U-boat victory had left workers at the end of their endurance.106 The Catholic Centre Party representative Matthias Erzberger also realized that unrestricted submarine warfare had failed, and the conclusions that he drew from this precipitated a major political crisis. On 6 July in the Reichstag Steering Committee, Erzberger questioned official figures on tonnage available to Britain and argued rightly that the enemy’s ability to counter the U-boat threat had been underestimated. He accused the government of erring in its promise to deliver victory within six months. Moreover, he pointed out, ‘the wonderful work of our U-boats cannot make it possible for a single ship to reach us, while 90 per cent of ships arrive in England’.107

  The Centre Party’s scepticism towards the submarine war was particularly significant, for its conversion in favour of an unrestricted campaign in the autumn of 1916 had been crucial in urging upon the Chancellor naval and military demands to release the U-boats. Erzberger’s recognition that the gamble had failed now prompted him to demand an intervention by the Reichstag to set Germany on a new path. The ensuing political crisis pushed Bethmann Hollweg from office and on 19 July 1917, barely a fortnight after Erzberger had proposed it in his speech, a Reichstag majority of Centre, Social Democrat and Progressive deputies voted through a Peace Resolution. It rejected the ‘acquisition of territories by force’ – the policy favoured by those conservatives who had most fervently agitated for unrestricted U-boat warfare – and instead advocated ‘a peace of understanding’.108

  Both the war and the submarine campaign continued, but the hope of politicians and the public that the U-boats could bring a quick end to the fighting was replaced with apathy or even anger. After briefly uniting the population in the hope of some sort of victory – for most, above all, quick, and for a small minority, total – the submarines again became a source of discord. The Admiralty was not forgiven for its claim that it would deliver victory in five months. Moreover, as the United States mobilized, criticism mounted about the underestimation of this new enemy. By October there were loud complaints that, contrary to the promise made in the Reichstag by the Secretary of State for the Navy, Admiral Eduard von Capelle, troop transports had not proven at all easy to sink.109 The official claim that the number of US troops arriving in France was being overstated failed to mollify the population.110 Indeed, rumours circulated in the German army that the US was deliberately being treated leniently. These had a slight basis in truth: the Kaiser had initially forbidden US warships or shipping in the blockade zone around Britain to be attacked and, fearing that it would later make a negotiated peace more difficult to achieve, had banned the navy from large-scale submarine operations off the American coast. US ships were also spared in the Mediterranean during the first eleven months of the campaign, as Austria-Hungary and the US were not at war until December 1917.111 None of this, however, accounted for the navy’s failure to destroy more than three loaded Allied troop transports. Instead, as an official response to the rumours lamely explained, ‘the ocean is really big and . . . it therefore remains a matter of chance if a U-boat . . . comes across an American steamer carrying troops’.112 The submarines, which had once made such good press, were by 1918 something of an embarrassment to the Reich government. A British intelligence analysis of German propaganda found a decrease in reports about the U-boat war. By the spring, they were in ‘total eclipse’.113

  Germany’s U-boats inflicted tremendous damage to Allied shipping during the course of the war. Over a total of 3,274 operations, they sunk 6,394 ships with a cumulative weight of 11,948,702 tons. In 1917 the U-boats’ most successful year, they reduced British imports to 37 million tons, two-t
hirds of the pre-war level.114 Yet although at its height in the spring and summer of 1917 unrestricted submarine warfare appeared briefly to pose a mortal threat, ultimately the destruction was not sufficient to bring Britain to her knees, either in the promised five-month window or afterwards. The Germans’ campaign was another illustration that ruthlessness and flouting international law brought worse than nothing. As with the Third OHL’s attempted use of Belgian forced labour, the returns were negligible; most of the rise in sinkings was due to an increase in submarine numbers and efficiency improvements that could have been implemented while continuing to use cruiser rules. The reputational cost was similarly huge, and this time had a decisive impact. The disastrous decision to open unrestricted submarine warfare and the consequent and inevitable declaration of war by the United States cost the Reich victory in the First World War.

  The decisive impact of the United States on the war was in large part due to the immense resources it added to the Entente’s war effort. The Americans spent 42.8 million dollars a day from mid-1917, dwarfing British, French and German daily expenditure of just over 32 million dollars each. They provided naval reinforcement to assist with convoying and to tighten the blockade against Germany. Their contribution to replacing sunk merchant shipping was especially large: in 1918 alone, the US constructed 2.6 million tons, nearly half of the 5.4 million tons built in total by the Allies. Although the US was no military power – a key reason why the OHL tended to dismiss it – it quickly set about expanding its small professional army of 128,000 men and was ultimately able to send over two million soldiers across the Atlantic.115 Yet no less important than the material contribution made by America, and much more immediate, was the idealism and moral weight that it brought to the Entente cause. President Wilson in the west, together with Russian revolutionaries in the east, would in 1917 confront the Central Powers with a new and very dangerous ideological challenge.