Other problems were caused by the lack of raw materials. Thus civilians faced a severe shortage of heating, clothing, fuel, and hygiene products, and in its wake came physical exhaustion, mental fatigue, and lack of concentration caused by undernourishment. As all industries associated with war production had to rely on a large intake of unskilled women and juveniles, the rate of accidents caused by negligence and inexperience soared, rising by ten times between 1914 and 1917. The number of strikes was increasing. In addition, all the forced measures introduced to overcome the shortage of labour failed. Neither the Auxiliary Service Law, nor the employment of POWs, nor the forced recruitment of labour in occupied countries could prevent the German war effort from running out of manpower by the beginning of 1917. If the war was to be won it had to be soon, and this meant the British blockade had to be broken — by hook or by crook.
The resumption of unlimited submarine warfare was almost certain to bring the United States into the war — a disastrous prospect, as a number of military and political leaders (including the chancellor) warned. But the proponents of renewed total submarine aggression won the day. They argued — correctly — that it would take the best part of a year before the U.S. would be able to put sufficient troops into the field; by then, they said, Britain would have been brought to its knees. They also doubted — incorrectly — that American soldiers would make a significant military contribution. 19 Initially, all seemed to go well for the OHL. Although Wilson had indeed broken off diplomatic relations with the German empire on 3 February, and although the recommencement of unlimited submarine warfare had put an end to Wilson’s rhetoric about peace without victory, as yet there had been no American declaration of war.
A month later, the March Revolution of 1917 disposed of the tsar. Although the Russians remained in the war, the chief force that drove the uprising — the extreme war-weariness of both soldiers and civilian population — was not eased. The German war leaders were already designing schemes aimed at finishing off the Russian empire. 20
In the submarine war, German U-boats were inflicting massive damage: 840,000 tons of Allied shipping were sunk in April 1917 alone. A continuation of such losses might indeed have forced the Allies to sue for peace. This did not eventuate, because the German leadership obliged with a second disastrous decision.
On 17 January 1917, in Whitehall’s Room 40 — the most secret chamber of the British Secret Service — two cryptographers, the Reverend William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey, a young publisher the service had borrowed from William Heinemann — were routinely working through intercepted telegrams when Grey noticed an unusually long message comprising more than a thousand row of numerals. Because Britain already knew how to decipher German diplomatic codes, the pair realised, after hours of painstaking work, that they were looking at telegrams sent by the state secretary of the German foreign office, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorf.
In what could easily have been a routine message, the decoders were struck by the word ‘Mexico’ and later by the word ‘alliance’. They worked out that the message fell into two parts. The first announced that German submarine warfare was to recommence on 1 February, a decision the Allies had long been expecting (and dreading). The second, which was to be passed on to the resident minister for the German empire in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, was much harder to understand. They made out words proposing an alliance, joint conduct of war, and joint conclusion of peace, but it was only after days of work that they understood the full implications of the telegram: Germany was promising to assist Mexico ‘to regain by conquest her lost territories in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico’. 21
The cryptographers were aware of the great importance of their discovery: here at last was the instrument to puncture U.S. neutrality. They informed their superior, the director of naval intelligence, Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall, who also realised the complexity of the problem. How could the Zimmermann telegram be revealed to the Americans, and above all to president Wilson, without revealing how it had been obtained? The U.S. would not believe it to be genuine if it came from a British source, but Hall was fearful about the risk of disclosure. If the Germans realised that British security had cracked their code, the British advantage would be ended.
Admiral Hall waited until 1 February, the date the Germans proposed for the recommencement of unrestricted submarine warfare. He had assumed, like almost everyone else in the United States and among the Allies, that such resumption would inevitably mean the U.S. declaration of war against Germany. Alas, having broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, president Wilson gave no hint that he intended to go further. Hall decided to act. On 5 February, he informed the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Arthur Balfour, of the telegram. By now he had also worked out how to make the telegram’s existence public without revealing that the British had deciphered the German code. What was needed was to obtain a copy of the telegram that had been sent by von Bernstorf to Mexico. The von Bernstorf telegram would have small but vital differences in date, address, and signature from the original. This copy, when published, would lead the Germans to believe that the interception had been accomplished somewhere on the American continent. Convinced of the inviolability of their code, they would assume that an already decoded copy of the telegram had been stolen or leaked after reaching Mexico, and that there must have been spies or betrayers in Washington or in Mexico. Hall proved right in all of his assumptions.
It was several days before the British contact in the Mexican Telegraph Office managed to secure the desired copy. When obtained, it was found to differ in the essential points that Hall had hoped for. It took a further fortnight to complete the decryption of the Zimmermann telegram. Balfour and Hall decided that the admiral should reveal the telegram to Mr. Edward Bell, the U.S. chief intelligence officer, on 22 February. Bell’s reaction was the same as that of many Americans who subsequently saw the telegram — it was a fraud. How could anyone in his right mind plan to dispossess the United States of a huge part of its territory? However, after Hall had convinced Bell of the authenticity of the document, his doubts were settled, and he assured Hall that publication of the telegram would certainly mean war. At 1.00 p.m. on 24 February, Balfour formally sent the full text of the telegram to Walter Hines Page, American ambassador to the United Kingdom, who forwarded it to the White House, along with a note explaining how the document had been obtained. 22
Realising he had been deceived by the Germans, the president was outraged, as was the majority of the American public when the text was passed to the media on 28 February. At the same time, both Houses in Washington were considering the so-called ‘Armed Ship Bill’ — a bill to equip merchant ships with navy gunners who were empowered to shoot on sight. The bill was widely seen as a last warning to Germany that U.S. entry into the war was imminent if submarine warfare were resumed, and it had thus met hefty opposition from pro-German and pacifist organisations. The House of Representatives was so outraged by the newspaper reports about German perfidy that it passed the bill virtually unanimously. Not so the Senate, where a small but vociferous section of pro-German senators and a group of equally vociferous pacifist members questioned the authenticity of the telegram and demanded convincing evidence that the document was not a hoax.
This meant that state secretary Robert Lansing, who was officially in charge of handling the affair, faced the difficulty that had earlier hampered Page and Hall — how to make it public enough to convince, but not so much as to give away the source. The attack upon the genuineness of the telegram gathered momentum inside and outside the Senate over the next 24 hours, and the State Department was expecting that the situation would be further complicated should Zimmermann deny sending it. To the stunned amazement of all involved, however, the problem was solved the next day when the German foreign secretary, for reasons known only to himself, admitted sending the telegram. This effectively ended pro-Germanism in the United States, a
lthough the Senate still refused to pass the Armed Ship Bill. On 9 March, using his executive authority, Wilson gave the order to arm the ships anyway. On 18 March, three American vessels were sunk without warning by German submarines. Two days later, Wilson reconvened Congress for 2 April to hear a matter of grave national importance. On 6 April, the United States entered the war. On that day, Zimmermann was dismissed.
As Hindenburg and Ludendorff had correctly predicted, U.S. entry into the war was not followed by the speedy arrival of large numbers of American troops, but it did give the Allies an immediate boost in morale, and it meant that there was no longer a threat that the president would cut off supply or loans. By May 1917, the British had also found ways to blunt the German submarine attacks. The re-introduction of the convoy system — a group of merchant or troopships travelling together with a naval escort — had immediate results. Convoys had been widely used in the age of sailing vessels, but had been discarded in the age of steam. Now, aircraft helped to make the new convoy system particularly effective: from June 1917 until the end of the war, only 138 of 16,539 vessels convoyed across the Atlantic were sunk, 36 of these because they were stragglers. 23
Under these circumstances, and in the light of the disastrous battles of 1916, the Allies’ best strategy would obviously have been to wait and see, avoiding further massive loss of human lives, as time was on their side. This time, however, the French army leadership felt sure that the German war effort in the west could be broken without too many losses. Robert George Nivelle, head of the French military since December 1916, designed an attempt to break through German defences on the River Aisne in the spring of 1917. The British leadership initially held great reservations about Nivelle’s plan, but as the bulk of the attack was to be carried out by French forces, they consented. Nivelle launched his offensive in mid-April. Within a month, the French had suffered such heavy losses that parts of the French armies began to mutiny, and his campaign collapsed. In the end, it was not the German but the French war effort that had been brought to the brink of collapse.
By now, one might have expected even the thickest of army commanders to have realised that trench warfare created serious disadvantages for attacking forces seeking to overcome entrenched defending troops — but not so the commander-in-chief of the British army, Sir Douglas Haig. Haig ordered a renewed attempted to break the German lines in Flanders in August 1917, against considerable opposition — in particular from Lloyd George, who had replaced Herbert Henry Asquith as prime minister in December 1916 (and who regarded Field Marshal Haig as ‘dull witted’). 24 The ill-fated enterprise, which reached its nadir in the bloodbath at Passchendaele in November 1917, left the U.K.’s war effort, as the year drew to its close, once more in a dire position. The French were still licking their wounds after the failure of the Nivelle offensive, and the Italians had been repeatedly mauled in their unsuccessful and costly attempts to invade Austria. Then came the news from St. Petersburg that Russia was pulling out of the war.
The March Revolution had sent a clear message that the Russian war effort was not likely to survive much longer. The provisional government tried its best to avoid the collapse, but opposition to the war was increasing by the day. The most outspoken radicals in the anti-war movements were the Bolsheviks, but virtually all of their leaders were in exile, mainly in Switzerland. If the exiles, particularly their chief theoretician, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, could be brought back to Russia, they would surely hasten the process of disintegration. With the aid of the Social Democrats, the German government struck a deal: on 9 April 1917, Lenin and all of the Bolshevik exiles in Switzerland were put onto a sealed train at Zurich and carried through Germany to the Baltic port of Sassnitz, where they boarded a ship to Sweden. From there they made their way by train to Petrograd’s Finland Station, where they arrived at midnight on 16 April. They were greeted by crowds of workers, sailors, and soldiers singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and waving red flags. Lenin gave a short speech heavily criticising the Petrograd Soviet, which he described as a stinking corpse. He demanded that the Petrograd government and capitalism be overthrown, that Russia withdraw from the war, and that all lands be given to the peasants; in short: peace, bread, land — all power to the Soviets. It took the Bolsheviks all of six months to take government in the October Revolution of 1917. They immediately withdrew from the war.
The showdown
As the year 1917 drew to its close, the Allied war effort rested almost solely on the shoulders of the United Kingdom and its empire — a situation serious enough to persuade the British prime minister to once again address the question of peace negotiations. His speech to the British Trade Union Congress of 5 January 1918 followed a peace feeler by the German secretary of state, Richard Kühlmann. Under what came to be known as the ‘Kühlmann Peace Kite’, the Berlin government was willing to accept terms favourable to Britain. Belgium and Serbia were to be restored, Alsace-Lorraine to be returned to France, and there would be colonial concessions to Britain. As there was no reference to Russia, the Germans obviously expected compensation at Russia’s expense. The Kühlmann Peace Kite soon turned out to be another diversionary manoeuvre, like the German peace talk a year earlier, but the possibility of peace in the east offered a way out of Britain’s difficulty. 25
Referring to the German-Bolshevik peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Lloyd George expressed his regret that the current Russian rulers had withdrawn from the war and had commenced negotiations with the enemy without consulting the Allies. Thus the latter had ‘no means of intervening to arrest the catastrophe which is assuredly befalling their country. Russia can only be saved by her own people’. 26 Lloyd George did not call for the destruction of Germany or Austria-Hungary; nor did he want Germany to lose her former position in the world. Only her quest for world domination was to be abandoned. The demand for a democratic order in Germany, it was hoped, would strengthen the position of moderate elements in German politics against the OHL. The independence of Belgium, of course, had to be restored, and Alsace-Lorraine returned, but his reference to Russia offered Germany a chance of peace with gains in the east.
Lloyd George’s speech, which also aimed at securing the support of the British workforce for a further year of war, was almost immediately overshadowed by a move that was to have enormous consequences for the peacemaking of 1918–19 and the rest of the century: president Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Announced by the president on 8 January 1918, they played a key part in the evaluation of the post-war peace treaties, and in particular the Treaty of Versailles. Since the signing of the treaty, accusations have been made that international guarantees allegedly made by the president in the Fourteen Points were not honoured. The losers were deceived and treated in a dishonest manner. As will be shown below, according to post-war German political and historical accounts, this failure to follow ‘Wilsonian principles’ was the chief injustice imposed on the German nation in 1918–19. Over the years, this interpretation has also gained considerable support in some in the former Allied nations. The importance of this issue for the subsequent discussion in this book calls for a brief analysis of the Fourteen Points.
Wilson made his proposals in January 1918, at a time when U.S. troops were still to arrive in Europe in significant numbers. They were another attempt by the president to stop the slaughter and to establish peace. No doubt he also hoped that the success of his initiative would spare the Americans major combat and loss of life. That some of his points later became part of the peace treaties, and were incorporated into the charter of the League of Nations, did not make them post facto into a binding legal document or a set of immutable laws for the peacemaking process. They did not and could not constitute more than another step on the part of the president towards finding a way to end the war; nor were they meant to. Any serious peace negotiations could only commence in collaboration with the Allies — above all, Britain and its empire, France, and Italy, who had borne the brunt of the war on various fronts for three-and-a-hal
f years.
The first five of Wilson’s points dealt with general issues: (1) open covenants and abandonment of secret diplomacy; (2) freedom of the seas in times of war and peace; (3) freedom of trade; (4) reduction of armaments; and (5) a fair settlement of colonial issues.
Of these, the first two had a short life. Article 2 was not accepted by Britain. The first demand, to establish open covenants, was also abandoned before the peacemaking process proper commenced. Wilson himself acknowledged that open diplomacy, which would involve media access to the negotiations, would allow the deleterious effect of public opinion to influence the proceedings, rendering meaningful negotiations impossible. 27 As the subsequent century has shown, noble as are the goals of abandoning secret diplomacy, no government lays bare its security and surveillance policies.
Articles 6 to 13 contained demands affecting specific countries involved in the war. There was to be withdrawal of foreign troops from Russia (Article 6); from Belgium (Article 7); from France, which included Alsace-Lorraine (Article 8); and from Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro (Article 11). The peoples of the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Turkey were to be given the freest opportunity for autonomous development (Articles 10 and 12), the frontiers of Italy were to be adjusted along recognisable lines of nationality (Article 9), and there was to be an independent Polish state with free and secure access to the sea (Article 13). Last but not least was the formation of an association of nations to secure international stability and order (Article 14).
A Perfidious Distortion of History Page 7