by G. J. Meyer
This is all too obviously not true. House’s diary states that he laid out the ideas that made up the core of his proposal for the president weeks before writing to Grey, and that when he sent his letter he did so not only with the president’s knowledge but with his encouragement.
“My suggestion [to the president],” the relevant diary entry states, “is to ask the Allies, unofficially, to let me know whether or not it would be agreeable to them to have us demand that hostilities cease. We would put it on the high ground that the neutral world was suffering along with the belligerents and that we had rights as well as they, and that parleys should begin upon the broad basis of both military and naval disarmament….
“If the Allies understood our purpose, we could be as severe in our language concerning them as we were with the Central Powers. The Allies, after some hesitation, could accept our offer or demand and, if the Central Powers accepted, we would then have accomplished a master-stroke of diplomacy. If the Central Powers refused to acquiesce, we could then push our insistence to a point where diplomatic relations would first be broken off, and later the whole force of our Government—and perhaps the force of every neutral—might be brought against them.”
House describes the president as “startled” by all this, as well he might have been, but adds that “he seemed to acquiesce by silence.” The diary notes also that House later explained his scheme to Secretary Lansing and State Department counselor Frank Knox and that both liked it. But as Lord Devlin observes, even if House had told no one before writing to Grey, this would matter less than the fact that later, when House’s proposal produced diplomatic ramifications that had to be brought to Wilson’s attention, the president instructed the colonel to take further steps in the same direction. At no point is there evidence of presidential disapproval.
“It has occurred to me,” House told Grey in the letter of October 17, “that the time may soon come when this Government should intervene between the belligerents and demand that peace parleys began [sic] upon the broad basis of the elimination of militarism and navalism. It is in my mind that after conferring with your Government I should proceed to Berlin and tell them that it was the president’s purpose to intervene and stop this destructive war, provided the weight of the United States thrown on the side that accepted our proposal could do it. I would not let Berlin know of course of any understanding had with the Allies, but would rather lead them to think that our proposal would be rejected by the Allies. This might induce Berlin to accept the proposal, but if they did not do so it would nevertheless be the purpose to intervene. If the Central Powers were still obdurate, it would probably be necessary for us to join the Allies and force the issue.”
While all this was happening, continuing trouble between the United States and Mexico and difficulties arising from American interventions in the Caribbean were fueling congressional demand for a stronger army and navy. On September 24 there was a second Baralong-type incident, with a British Q-ship sinking a U-boat and killing all but two members of her crew. German protests were again ignored, and German questions about how cruiser rules could possibly be observed under such circumstances grew more insistent.
For some months President Wilson had been indifferent when not downright unfriendly to what was called the Preparedness Movement, a broad-based campaign for increased military spending. In November, however, he surprised friends and foes alike by issuing his own proposal for increasing the size of the regular army by roughly one-third and creating a ready reserve to be called the Continental Army and made up of four hundred thousand volunteers. He did so in part, probably, to keep the Republicans from making preparedness an issue in the 1916 election, but also because he had come to see the value of military and naval muscle in giving credibility to his foreign policy. Though generally uninterested in military matters (he showed little interest in the work of most government departments, generally leaving the members of his cabinet free to do as they wished), he had begun paying attention to the War Department’s capabilities and possible needs when the U-boats first became a problem. Nor is it a coincidence that his proposal came just a few months after the exchange of notes over the Lusitania.
There was much opposition. It came from people who did not want to raise the $200 million in new taxes that the president was proposing, or did not want the nation to pursue more proactive policies overseas, or feared that Wilson’s plan would require conscription and lead to intervention in Europe. A potent if surprising source of opposition was the National Guard, which was controlled by the states rather than Washington and would have been replaced as the army’s reserve by the proposed Continental Army. All this was disputed in both houses of Congress over the winter of 1915–16, with members from the South and West forming the core of resistance to the administration’s plans.
Colonel House, who thought increases much larger than those urged by the president should be a national priority, returned to London in January 1916. Soon after his arrival, at lunch with half a dozen British officials including Grey, he was asked point-blank what the United States wanted from Britain. His companions could hardly have hoped for a more delightful answer. “The United States,” the colonel would record having told them, “wanted the British government to do what would enable the United States to do whatever necessary for the Allies to win the war.” A week later Grey ventured to resurrect the subject that he had raised so boldly late in 1915: he asked House what he and the president would regard as an acceptable territorial arrangement at the conclusion of the war. House was ready with an answer, and it, too, was music to British ears. Not only must Belgium and Serbia be restored—House could have said no less—but Germany must give up Alsace and Lorraine to France and Constantinople should be surrendered by the Turks to Russia. This meant that the Ottoman Empire, with its vast holdings, must disappear. Which meant that almost the whole of the Middle East was going to be available for the taking.
Even this was not the most dramatic thing said that day. According to the recollection of Irwin B. Laughlin, a member of the American embassy’s diplomatic staff, Grey also asked House in plain terms the most momentous question of all: did President Wilson want Britain to end its blockade? He cannot have been disappointed by the answer. According to Laughlin’s account, House “replied definitely and without qualification in the negative.” In so doing, he killed any possibility of a British-German resolution of the blockade-versus-submarines issue. This raises once again the question of how closely House was adhering to President Wilson’s directions or acting with the president’s knowledge. Was he, by encouraging the British not to compromise on the blockade, undercutting Wilson’s hopes of arranging an end to the war that would not require the United States to take up arms? The president’s earlier acceptance of House’s “positive policy” makes this seem improbable, but certainty is beyond our reach. The absence of conclusive evidence, coupled with the way both Wilson and House could shift from seeming to want intervention to seeming to want a negotiated settlement and back again, shrouds much of the neutrality story in mystery.
It does not appear that House told Wilson anything about this exchange with his London hosts. A few days later, however, he sent an account of having dined with David Lloyd George, then serving as Britain’s minister of munitions, because in this case he had things to report that were certain to please the president. Lloyd George had said, according to the colonel, that the war could “only be ended by your intervention,” adding however that intervention should be postponed until September, by which time, it was expected, massive Entente offensives planned for the summer would have greatly strengthened the Allies’ bargaining position. He said also that once conditions were right, “you [Wilson] can dictate the terms of peace, and he does not believe that any agreement is possible without such dictation.” Finally House has the Welshman saying that “no man had ever lived with such an opportunity, and that if the world went on for untold centuries, history would record this as the greatest indivi
dual act of which it had record.”
In wondering how many of his own words Lloyd George meant, and how many were calculated to seduce House and Wilson, it is helpful to remember what he would write years later in his memoirs. The colonel, he said, was “not nearly as cunning as he thought he was.”
Background
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Mystery Voyage
The torpedo that sank the mighty Lusitania was twenty feet long and twenty inches in diameter. It weighed a ton and a half, so that an early-model submarine like Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger’s U-20 could carry only seven at a time. It had cost the German navy about five thousand dollars, a princely sum in 1915, and was both an ingenious mechanism and not very reliable.
When it was shot out of one of the U-20’s two bow tubes, compressed air was released at a steady rate from an internal tank. This air turned pistons that caused two rear propellers to spin, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise for stability. The torpedo was kept on course by a gyroscope. Its movement through the water caused a small nose propeller to spin itself loose and fall away. This—when everything went as it should—exposed and activated the firing mechanism.
It sped toward its target at forty-plus miles per hour, faster than any ship, producing a stream of bubbles that rose to the surface and left a discernible trail. The sea was weirdly calm that day—smooth as a pane of glass. On the Lusitania, passengers who had just finished what they knew would be their last lunch on board—they were scheduled to dock in Liverpool before breakfast the next morning—lolled about on deck. Some of them gazed idly out to sea. Some heard a lookout suddenly shout through his megaphone, “Torpedo coming!” Some saw the torpedo as it churned toward them on the starboard beam. It was “covered with a silvery phosphorescence, you might term it, which was caused by air escaping from the motors,” one survivor would recall. “It was a beautiful sight.”
No one aboard the Lusitania could see her waterline; overhanging decks blocked the view. They saw the torpedo disappear beneath their feet, just below the bridge, and waited breathlessly for they didn’t know what. Time seemed to stop. For what seemed an eternally long moment, it seemed possible that nothing was going to happen.
Actually that was possible—more possible than the passengers could have known. The German navy’s experience was that 60 percent of its torpedoes malfunctioned. But not this time. The impact of the torpedo’s firing mechanism against the Lusitania’s hull fired a small charge into the 350 pounds of TNT and hexanite packed in just behind the nose. The explosives were instantly transformed into a gas at a temperature of nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit under pressures that no mere steel could withstand. This sent a geyser of water and debris upward into the sky and opened a horizontal hole of approximately forty by fifteen feet below the ship’s waterline. It burst rivets and tore steel plates loose across an area many times larger than the hole. Interior damage was massive as well: watertight bulkheads and hatches were twisted open. A Niagara of seawater came pouring in.
A second explosion followed, perhaps thirty seconds after the first. It had a different sound and feel to it, seeming to rumble up from deep inside the ship. There was, however, nothing like panic in these early minutes. Passengers were dumbfounded, but unable to believe that such a massive vessel could sink. Most were in no hurry to get to their life jackets.
Within a few minutes the ship was listing fifteen degrees to starboard. There she held steady. Her captain, the experienced and respected W. T. Turner, hurried to the bridge and ordered the engine order telegraph set at full speed astern. That was to force the ship to a halt, so that lifeboats could be launched safely. But the propellers did not respond. The ship continued forward, still making eighteen knots, her thousands of tons creating overwhelming momentum. Turner told the helmsman to steer for Old Kinsale Head on the coast of Ireland, clearly visible to port. He wanted to get closer to help, even, if necessary, to run aground rather than sink. Again nothing happened; the rudder was not answering the helm. The ship swung heavily to starboard, heading farther out to sea. The bow was low in the water now, awash, the stern rising out of the sea.
The torpedo had hit as the watch was changing. Dozens of crew members, half going off duty and half coming on, were assembled belowdecks in the baggage room, organizing passengers’ luggage for unloading at Liverpool. If not killed by the explosions, these men drowned in darkness later, trapped when the electricity went out and the elevator that was their only escape stopped working. Among them were many of the men responsible for, and trained in, the launching of lifeboats.
The elevators reserved for the use of first-class passengers stopped, too. They did so between decks, trapping their riders inside. The only electricity was an emergency system serving the radio room. Distress signals and calls for help were, of course, going out one after another. Every inside passageway and cabin was in total darkness. There were more explosions as cold seawater reached the ship’s huge boilers. As the list to starboard began to worsen—by 2:25 it was a terrifying twenty-five degrees—water came pouring into portholes that had been opened for ventilation in the midday heat or broken by the explosions. Seventy portholes are believed to have been open on the starboard side. That number was sufficient to let in 260 tons of water a minute.
One of Captain Turner’s first orders had been for the lifeboats to be lowered to the boat deck, where passengers were supposed to board them. But the severity of the list suspended the boats on the starboard side in midair, almost out of reach and sixty feet above the surface of the sea. People had to leap to get in them. The boats on the port side came down onto the up-rearing deck and were impossible to launch. Some of the starboard boats, upon being filled to capacity, came loose at their bow or stern ends while being lowered to the water and pitched their passengers out. A good many passengers—not all of them wearing life jackets—gave up on the lifeboats and jumped overboard. Deck chairs and debris rained down on their heads. Other passengers went to the main deck, worked their way forward toward the half-submerged bow, and waded into the ocean as gingerly as if doing it from a beach.
The ship returned to near-upright, indicating that the port side was now as flooded as the starboard. Captain Turner was still on the bridge when, just eighteen minutes after the torpedo hit, the bow took a final downward lurch, the stern rose so high that the propellers were exposed to the sun, and the Lusitania slid out of sight. Turner was sucked down with her, but his life jacket brought him back up. He found himself afloat in the middle of a nightmare. Only six of the ship’s twenty-two lifeboats had been successfully launched. (A few portable boats were put to use as well.) People of every age and description, hundreds of them, were in the water. They clung to oars, to pieces of wreckage, to whatever they could find. Some were already dead. Some floated upside down, having put on their life jackets wrong. The children were in gravest jeopardy. The water temperature was fifty-five degrees, cold enough to bring on hypothermia and death. The small were especially vulnerable.
The U-20 had departed by then. “The ship was sinking with unbelievable rapidity,” Schwieger would recall of his last look at the Lusitania through his periscope. “There was a terrific panic on her deck. Overcrowded lifeboats, fairly torn from their positions, dropped into the water. Desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks. Men and women jumped into the water and tried to swim to empty, overturned lifeboats. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen.” But there was little he could do to help, and there were reasons not to try. A British cruiser, identifiable by the sound of its engines and propellers, had passed directly over the submerged U-20 earlier in the day; obviously danger was nearby. So, low on fuel, Schwieger resumed the long homeward voyage upon which he had embarked the day before. It would take him northward around Scotland, the English Channel being too dangerous to try. A month past his thirtieth birthday on the day of the Lusitania sinking, he would continue to command submarines until meeting the fate that awaited most U-boat sailors. In September
1917, trying to escape a pursuing Q-ship, he entered a British minefield. He and his crew and their submarine were never seen again. Fifty-seven percent of the U-boats that saw action in the Great War perished.
Help for the Lusitania had set out from the fishing port and naval base at Queenstown, twenty miles or so distant, as soon as Turner’s distress calls came in. Speed was literally a matter of life and death, and the fastest of the ships available to help was the Juno, the same cruiser that had passed over the U-20 earlier in the day. She had space for all the survivors and was capable of reaching them in little more than an hour. But she was ordered back to port almost as soon as she set out. The Admiralty, after experiencing some dreadful calamities, had forbidden large warships to go to the assistance of vessels attacked by submarines. This removed the danger of their being sunk upon arrival by U-boats lying in ambush. But with the Juno out of the picture, only an odd assortment of fishing boats and other small craft were on their way to the Lusitania. It took most of them nearly three hours to reach the scene. By then a thousand people were dead.
The aftermath was both ugly and mysterious. Awkward questions arose.