A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  In a short war, one in which the Schlieffen Plan succeeded and was followed by the defeat of Russia, the United Kingdom’s great navy would have mattered even less than its little prewar army. But in the siege that the Western Front became, all the combatant powers desperately needed access to the outside world. Few of them, the island nation of Britain least of all, produced enough food to support their populations. None could keep their war machines in operation without imported raw materials.

  Britain, by 1914, had enjoyed unchallenged naval supremacy for a century. The Royal Navy provided the sinews that held the empire together. The government in London adhered to a policy of spending whatever was needed to keep the navy bigger and more potent than any other two navies in the world.

  This policy was no great burden for the United Kingdom, and it posed no great problem for the other Great Powers, from Lord Nelson’s destruction of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805 on through the rest of the nineteenth century. But in the 1890s the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, eager to make his empire not only a continental but a global power, was persuaded by the ambitious Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz that Germany’s growing world trade and colonial possessions required a first-class navy. By the start of the new century Berlin was expending enormous sums to build warships that rivaled Britain’s.

  The consequences were profound. Until the kaiser began his shipbuilding program, Britain and Germany had seemed designed by destiny not to conflict. Britain had the world’s greatest collection of colonies and greatest fleet of warships, but only a small and widely dispersed army and no ambitions on the European mainland. Germany’s overseas possessions were small by comparison, and it had no navy at all beyond a tiny coastal defense force. Both nations were focused on France, which for generations had been the most powerful country on the continent (it had taken Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Spain together to bring Napoleon down) and Britain’s great rival in North America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

  Even after the Franco-Prussian War, which established the newly unified Germany as Europe’s leading power, Britain saw little reason to be concerned. She and Germany continued to regard each other as natural allies and old and good friends—a relationship personalized in the happy marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter and the first kaiser’s son and heir. After 1890, when Russia and France became allies, whatever worries London might have had about Germany disrupting the European balance of power were temporarily put to rest.

  But when Wilhelm II and Tirpitz embarked upon the building of a navy that they hoped to make as powerful as Britain’s, they threatened the foundations of British security. From the perspective of London, Germany was no longer a friend but a rival at best and a serious danger at worst. (The kaiser neither intended nor foresaw this change. At once jealous and admiring of a United Kingdom ruled in succession by his grandmother, his uncle, and his cousin, he entertained fantasies in which Britain would embrace Germany as its equal on a world stage that the two would govern to the benefit of everyone, including the “natives” of backward and faraway lands.)

  The German navy was born in 1898, when legislation financed the construction of seven state-of-the-art battleships immediately and fourteen more over the next five years. This ignited an enormously costly arms race. Britain was able to pay for its shipbuilding with tax revenues, but the Germans, already spending heavily to keep their army competitive with those of France and Russia combined, had to borrow heavily. (Members of the Reichstag objected, but they had no authority over the naval budget.) Further naval construction bills were enacted in Berlin in 1900, 1906, 1908, and 1912, each one more costly than the last. In 1898 Germany’s annual naval spending had been barely one-fifth of the army budget. By 1911, with the army much bigger and more expensively equipped, the navy was costing more than half as much.

  The result, for a nation with little in the way of a maritime tradition, was a surprisingly excellent navy, one whose ships and crews were by every measure at least equal in quality to those of the British. But London had done, and spent, still more. Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher—“Jacky” Fisher, the brilliant, dynamic, and strangely Asian-looking little first sea lord—radically reformed and upgraded the Royal Navy to trump the German challenge. Thanks largely to Fisher, in 1906 Britain launched a monster ship that revolutionized naval warfare: HMS Dreadnought, which at 21,845 tons was more than a fourth bigger than any battleship then in service, was sheathed in eleven inches of steel armor, carried ten twelve-inch guns capable of firing huge projectiles more than ten miles, and in spite of its size and weight could achieve a speed of twenty-one knots. When the Germans then built dreadnoughts of their own, the British responded by building still more, making them even bigger and arming them with fifteen-inch guns. It was a race the Germans could not win, but it went on.

  Admiral Lord John Fisher

  “Damn the Dardanelles—they will be our grave!”

  Germany began the war with fifteen Dreadnought-class warships, each fitted with a suite of luxury quarters for the exclusive use of the kaiser, and five under construction. The British had twenty-nine and were building another thirteen. With France’s ten heaviest warships added to the equation, the Entente had an insuperable advantage. Neither side was willing to risk its best ships in all-out battle, the Germans because they were outgunned and the British because the loss of their fleet would mean ruin. And so the first months of war saw a distinctly limited naval conflict in which no dreadnoughts were involved.

  That war was a costly one despite its limits. It showed the Germans that their High Seas Fleet was not big enough to compete, and the British that they could keep that fleet bottled up in port but not destroy it. On August 28 a British foray at Helgoland Bight in the North Sea turned into the war’s first naval battle; three German cruisers and one destroyer were sunk. On September 3, north of Holland, a single German submarine sank three antiquated British cruisers, fourteen hundred of whose crewmen were lost. On November 1 five German cruisers commanded by Admiral Maximilian von Spee met and defeated the Royal Navy’s South American squadron off the coast of Chile, sinking two cruisers and badly damaging a third. Fisher, retired in 1910, had been called back to active duty by Churchill after war hysteria forced Prince Louis Battenberg to retire as first sea lord because of his German antecedents. (The family soon changed its name to Mountbatten.) Dispatching a task force of two battle cruisers (smaller than dreadnoughts and battleships), three armored cruisers (smaller still), and two light cruisers to South America, Fisher ordered Admiral Sir Frederick Sturdee not to return until Spee and his ships had been destroyed. On December 8 Spee raided Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands and was surprised to find Sturdee already there, taking on coal. Spee fled and Sturdee pursued, catching up with the slower German ships and sinking all but one. Spee went to the bottom with his flagship and his two sons.

  Later that month German battle cruisers shelled three towns on England’s east coast, killing a number of civilians. In January British and German ships clashed inconclusively—there were no sinkings—at Dogger Bank in the North Sea. Surface combat then came to an end, the British satisfied to keep the Germans in port and Kaiser Wilhelm, in the face of protests from Tirpitz, unwilling to send his fleet out to engage them.

  The Royal Navy had by this time clamped down a naval blockade that cut off most of Germany’s imports. In violation of international agreements, the Asquith government declared that the entire North Sea was a war zone in which not only German but neutral ships would be boarded, searched, and prevented from delivering cargo of any kind (food and medicine included) to places from which it might be forwarded to the Central Powers. Even neutral ports were blockaded, with most of Germany’s merchant fleet interned therein. The British and French, meanwhile, were using their control of the world’s oceans to move troops and supplies wherever they chose—to Europe from India, Africa, Australia, Canada, and the Middle East, and from Europe to the Mediterranean.
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  Berlin responded with a new and still-primitive weapon that was the only kind of ship it could send into open waters with any hope of survival. On February 4, though they had fewer than twenty seaworthy submarines (Britain and France each had more, Fisher having insisted on adding them to the Royal Navy during his first tenure as sea lord), Germany declared that the waters around Britain and Ireland were to be regarded as a war zone in which all ships, merchantmen included, would be fair game.

  Like poison gas and the machine gun, like the airplane and the tank, the submarine was something new in warfare. Both sides needed time to adapt to it. Only the Germans went after commercial shipping, because there was no German commercial shipping for the Entente’s submarines to sink. At first they observed traditional “prize rules,” according to which naval vessels were supposed to identify themselves (which in the case of the submarines meant surfacing) before attacking nonmilitary ships and allow passengers and crews to depart by lifeboat before torpedoes were fired. Such practices proved dangerous for the tiny, fragile, slow-moving and slow-submerging U-boats. They became suicidal when the British began not only to mount guns on merchantmen but to disguise warships as cargo vessels in order to lure submarines to the surface. The prize rules were soon abandoned.

  The U-boats (Unterseebooten) sank hundreds of thousand of tons of British shipping, suffering heavy losses themselves in the process. They were, however, of little real value. At its peak their campaign was stopping less than four percent of British traffic but was arousing a ferociously negative response not only in Britain but in the United States. The German foreign office, fearful of American intervention, tried to persuade the kaiser that the U-boats’ successes were not nearly worth the risk. Most leaders of the German army and navy demanded that the campaign continue.

  On May 1 the German consulate in New York ran newspaper advertisements warning readers of the dangers of sailing on the Lusitania, a British Cunard steamship famous as the biggest, fastest liner in Atlantic service. Less known was the Lusitania’s status as an “auxiliary cruiser” of the Royal Navy. Its construction had been subsidized by the government, which equipped it with concealed guns, and it almost certainly had American-manufactured guns and ammunition as part of its cargo for the May crossing.

  The “auxiliary cruiser” Lusitania embarking from New York Harbor on her last Atlantic crossing

  On May 7, passing close to Ireland as it neared the end of its voyage, the Lusitania turned directly into the path of the patrolling submarine U-20 and was torpedoed. It sank in twenty minutes after a massive second explosion that soon would be attributed to the German commander’s gratuitous firing of a second torpedo into the mortally wounded ship but has since been traced to an ignition of coal dust in empty fuel bunkers. Some twelve hundred passengers and crew drowned, 124 Americans among them, and the United States erupted in indignation. German diplomats warned with new urgency that the U-boat attacks must stop, and on June 5 an order went out from Berlin calling a halt to the torpedoing of passenger liners on sight.

  Chapter 15

  Ypres Again

  “Out of approximately 19,500 square miles of France and Belgium in German hands, we have recovered about eight.”

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  As March turned to April the leaders of the Entente had reason to be satisfied with how the war was going for them in the East. The Russian offensive against Austria-Hungary in Galicia and the Carpathians—the same offensive that had taken Przemysl—continued to make headway despite lingering winter weather and chronic shortages of weapons and ammunition. (Ludendorff wrote admiringly of how the Russian soldiers, attacking uphill and armed only with bayonets, displayed a “supreme contempt for death.”) The Russian Eighth Army, commanded by the able and aggressive General Alexei Brusilov, was capturing miles of the Carpathian crest and the passes leading to the Danube River valley. Russian control of Galicia was so secure that the tsar himself visited the conquered city of Lemberg (Lvov to the Russians, now Lviv in Ukraine), where he had the satisfaction of sleeping in the suite that until then only Emperor Franz Joseph had been allowed to use. A massive Russian move beyond the Carpathians seemed inevitable by spring or early summer. The Austrians, frightened, knew that they had little hope of fending it off. The Russians were so confident of their prospects that they no longer saw any need to offer a rich share of their anticipated postwar spoils in order to draw Italy into the war. And they were being successful enough against the Turks in the Caucasus to make a Dardanelles campaign seem no longer imperative or even particularly desirable except in connection with a Russian advance on Constantinople.

  On the other side, Conrad saw that his armies were on the verge of collapse and was begging the Germans for more help. Falkenhayn remained reluctant to comply, though increasingly he was of two minds on the question. His reluctance was fortified by the obvious intention of the French and British to continue their attacks on the Western Front, and by his belief that the war was going to have to be decided there. A complicating factor was the willingness of the Italian government, which until August 1914 had been joined to Germany and Austria-Hungary in what was called the Triple Alliance, to put itself on the auction block and see which side could offer the best terms.

  Rome had been excluded from the July 1914 crisis by its putative but distrustful allies in Vienna and Berlin. This suited Italy’s astute foreign minister, Antonio di San Giuliano, who wanted nothing to do with any of it. He saw Austria’s behavior toward Serbia as aggressive and provocative, and he accused Germany and Austria of violating the terms of the alliance by failing to confer. Their actions, he said, relieved Italy of any obligation to go to war.

  San Giuliano died in October, and Italy’s foreign affairs were taken over by the prime minister, Antonio Salandra, a future fascist who regarded his country’s neutrality not as a gift to be treasured but as a negotiable asset to be sold to the highest bidder. He put Italy up for sale, and because he claimed to have a ready army of almost a million men, the bidding was intense. The Entente and the Central Powers both thought it likely that the war would be decided by what Italy did. By spring, with the situation of the Entente so promising overall, it seemed almost impossible that the Central Powers would not collapse if a million fresh troops were thrown into the scales against them.

  Antonio Salandra Prime Minister of Italy

  Put his nation and its army on the auction block.

  Britain made extravagant offers. It enjoyed the advantage of not having to promise anything that it, or France, possessed or wanted. Everything to be given to Italy (the port city of Trieste, lands from the crest of the Alps southward, islands in the Aegean, pieces of the Balkans and Asia Minor and Africa) could be extracted from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires at the end of the war. The Russians were less forthcoming. Confident at this point of defeating Austria, they wanted to promise nothing that might compromise their postwar dominance in the Balkans and points farther east. To win the acquiescence of the Russians, Sir Edward Grey promised them Constantinople and other parts of the Ottoman Empire—thus reversing what had long been an essential element of Britain’s Middle East policy.

  The ability of the Central Powers to bargain was limited: much of what Italy wanted belonged to or was coveted by Vienna. The Germans, accordingly, hoped for nothing more than to keep Italy neutral, but they were willing to pay a high price to achieve this goal. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg went so far as to float the idea of giving part of Silesia to Austria-Hungary in compensation for its concessions to Italy. The proposal was shunned in Berlin; Silesia had been the single most highly prized conquest of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

  The intrigues were endless. In Vienna the desperate Conrad and Berchtold came up with a scheme for getting Italy to mediate a general eastern settlement. Italy’s reward would be the South Tyrol, part of Austria-Hungary’s Alpine domain. Russia would be won over with offers of part of Galicia, Constantinople, and the whole chain of waterways from the D
ardanelles to the Black Sea. That these plans would have been a flagrant betrayal of the Turks and likely would have been seen as a betrayal of the Germans as well appears to have been of no concern to either Conrad or Berchtold. Emperor Franz Joseph, when he learned of the idea, dismissed Berchtold. Thus the man most responsible for the war departed the stage before the conflict was a year old.

  To Salandra, the bargaining appears to have been a game in which he had nothing to lose. It was obvious that he could do best by siding with the Entente. He merely went through the motions of bargaining with Germany to force the Entente partners to improve their offer. A decision could not be delayed indefinitely, however. If the Russians broke through the Carpathians, Italy’s market value would plummet.

  Meanwhile the French general staff had turned its attention to the St. Mihiel salient, a forward bulge in the German line south of Verdun (which was itself a French salient extending like a spear point into German-held territory). The plan was typical: by breaking the line on both sides of St. Mihiel, the French could either cut the Germans off or force them to withdraw. In so doing they would straighten and shorten their line and reduce Verdun’s vulnerability. If fully successful, they would capture the railway lines extending westward from the German-held city of Metz and force an even more extensive withdrawal. These goals were, as always, deliciously attractive. The only question was, as always, their feasibility.

  The offensive began on April 5. Fourteen French divisions supported by three hundred and sixty heavy guns—fully half of the total number of such guns possessed by the French army—attacked on a front almost fifty miles wide. The weather was terrible, the ground muddy, and visibility spoiled by fog, rain, and snow. French security was so lax, with French officers talking of what was coming in the cafés of Paris and towns nearer the front, that the Germans knew of the attack well before it began. Though most of the defenders were reservists, German combat engineers had been installing strong defenses since the capture of St. Mihiel in the fall, and the salient was rich in artillery. The fight quickly degenerated into prototypical Western Front warfare: bloody and sterile French assaults across the Woëvre plateau on the north side of the salient, withering fire from German machine guns and cannon. When Joffre finally allowed what came to be called the Battle of the Woëvre to gutter out, it had cost him sixty-two thousand men. But the relentless commander in chief, convinced yet again that he had come tantalizingly close to success, immediately set his staff to work on plans for another, bigger, two-pronged offensive north of St. Mihiel and in the Artois region to the west. All Europe settled down to a brief period of relative quiet. Even the Russians, their troops and supplies exhausted, had found it necessary to suspend—temporarily, they expected—their attacks in the Carpathians.