CHAPTER 28
The Blockade of Germany
In the year 1915, the Great War was fought on many fronts, of which the doomed campaign at the Dardanelles and Gallipoli was only one. In the North Sea, German battle cruisers fought and lost the Battle of the Dogger Bank and then were forbidden by the kaiser to come out again. On the Western Front, armies lunged at each other in bloody offensives that despite the involvement of millions of men and, for the first time, of poison gas, left the lines of barbed wire–laced trenches essentially in place. In May, Italy declared war on Austria, her former Triple Alliance partner (Italy’s declaration of war against Germany would wait until August 1916). In October, Bulgaria, emboldened by the obvious failure of the Allied armies at Gallipoli, joined the Central Powers and aided in the overrunning of Serbia. On the Eastern Front, from the Baltic to the Rumanian border, a mammoth German-Austrian offensive beginning May 1 captured Warsaw, drove the Russians out of Poland, and killed, wounded, or captured 2 million men of the Russian army. Beginning in February, German submarines began attacking merchant vessels in the waters around the British Isles. And through the year, the Allied blockade continued its silent, deadly corrosion of the German war effort.
On both sides, January of the new year had been a watershed of critical decisions. It was then that the Admiralty and the British government agreed to attack the Dardanelles. During the same weeks, the German Naval Staff, fearing the Allied blockade but forbidden to send German dreadnoughts to challenge the British fleet, proposed to employ what Admiral von Tirpitz called “the miracle weapon,” the U-boat, to turn the tables and ensure that supplies to Britain would be cut off, as the British had done to Germany. Ultimately, it was by winning on these maritime battlefields—by sustaining the blockade and defeating the U-boats—that the Allies won the Great War. But it was, in a phrase used by the Duke of Wellington in describing his victory at Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”
The ability to blockade an enemy coast and choke off seaborne commerce has always been a potent derivative of superior sea power. Blockade was not a rapid method of waging war, however; during the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy blockaded the coasts of Europe for twenty years; in the American Civil War, the Union navy had blockaded the ports of the Confederacy for more than four years. Nor was a policy of blockade free of diplomatic and military risk. The efforts of a blockading fleet to control access to enemy ports ran counter to many neutral rights as well as to the more generally espoused doctrine of freedom of the seas, which in its purest form declared that vessels of neutral nations should be able to travel on the high seas untroubled by any belligerent power. So vigorously had the new American republic supported this doctrine in 1812 that when the British stopped American merchant vessels, seized their cargoes, and then began removing American seamen and impressing them into the Royal Navy, war followed. During the American Civil War, hostilities again came close when blockading Union cruisers halted British merchant vessels bringing supplies to the South and carrying cotton back to the textile mills of England. In the American South, half a century later, memories of the Union blockade remained vivid. *48
Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rights of belligerents and neutrals regarding blockade were generally recognized. Nevertheless, before the Great War, when two Hague peace conferences attempted to codify the rules of war, it was decided that the procedures of blockade needed further clarification. Accordingly, in 1908, the British government invited the leading naval powers to a conference in London to work out specific rules of blockade and to agree on definitions of contraband. Ten nations were invited: Germany, Austria, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Japan, and the United States. The conference took place between Decem-ber 4, 1908, and February 26, 1909, and resulted in a draft declaration that all parties agreed was “in conformity with generally accepted principles of international law.” Blockading ships, on encountering a commercial vessel approaching or leaving a blockaded port, were first to determine the nationality of the vessel. If it belonged to a hostile nation, it was fair game for seizure, the ship as well as the cargo. If the vessel was a neutral, the ship’s cargo and destination became the determinants. Goods legitimately ripe for seizure were considered contraband, the simplest definition of which was “all materials useful to enemy armed forces.” *49
The London conference also restated the rights of neutrals. Neutral nations were empowered to prohibit belligerent blockading ships from entering their territorial waters within three miles of the coast; failure to respect this limit justified internment of the encroaching vessel for the duration of the war. Neutral nations and citizens were permitted to trade freely with belligerents, even to sell munitions to one or more belligerents. If a neutral ship was stopped, it must submit to search. If the vessel was found to be carrying munitions or other contraband, these materials would be confiscated. If the cargo consisted of conditional contraband, the ship could be detained and brought into a port of the blockading nation where the matter would be decided by a prize court. When detained cargoes were confiscated, compensation might be paid.
On February 26, 1908, the document known as the Declaration of London was signed and the delegates returned home. The document’s publication, however, stirred a violent reaction in Britain, where advocates of British sea power vehemently argued that the declaration favored a neutral’s right to trade over a belligerent’s right to blockade, thus nullifying a major benefit of naval supremacy. Although the House of Commons supported making the declaration law, the House of Lords voted against ratification by a margin of three to one. The U.S. government, influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan, an advocate of omnipotent, unfettered sea power, also refused to ratify the declaration.
During his term as First Sea Lord, 1910–12, Sir Arthur Wilson drafted no specific plans for a blockade of German commerce. He simply assumed that it would come about in the old-fashioned way: as a by-product of naval operations to contain an enemy fleet. The British navy would patrol aggressively inside the Heligoland Bight with strong forces of light cruisers and destroyers. No German merchant ships would pass this barrier; thus, a blockade of German merchant shipping would be an automatic, if secondary, effect of an essentially military operation. In May 1912, however, Winston Churchill’s new Admiralty Board considered that if an attempt was made to execute Wilson’s war plan deep inside the Bight, the British fleet would sustain heavy losses from torpedoes and mines. The new board lost no time in canceling Wilson’s plan and substituting another, which called for holding the Grand Fleet on the periphery of the North Sea and snuffing out German oceanic trade by a distant blockade. “A close commercial blockade is unnecessary . . . provided that the entrances to the North Sea . . . are closed,” said the Admiralty staff.
The shift to distant blockade raised legal and practical difficulties. By international law, a blockade is merely a paper or fictitious exercise unless it is rendered effective: every port of the blockaded country must be patrolled and blocked and all vessels must be intercepted, boarded, and their cargoes examined. Even British jurists agreed that no place could be called blockaded unless watched by a force of warships that cut all communication between the blockaded harbor and the outer oceans. In the situation Britain faced in 1914, no true, legal blockade was possible because certain German ports could not be blockaded; the British fleet did not control the Baltic and could not prevent Sweden and Denmark from trading freely with Germany.
Nevertheless, legally or otherwise, Britain had a powerful incentive to isolate a hostile Germany from world suppliers and markets. Before the war, international maritime trade played a paramount part in the German economy. Imports of foodstuffs and raw materials greatly exceeded exports, which largely consisted of manufactured goods. Germany imported about 25 percent of its food, particularly eggs, dairy products, vegetable oils, fish, and meat. One and a half million tons of wheat arrived annually from America, and 3 million tons of barley consumed by farm animals—half of Germany’s annual requirement—came from Russia. Although the German empire produced 40 million tons of potatoes, sufficient for the nation’s needs, German agriculture was notoriously dependent on fertilizers—potash, phosphates, and nitrates—of which 50 percent were imported from the United States, Chile, and North Africa. As for raw materials, the United States supplied all of Germany’s cotton and 60 percent of her copper. Argentina provided wool and hides. Sixty percent of these imports were carried in German vessels belonging to a German merchant marine that totaled 5.5 million tons, approximately 12 percent of the world’s merchant tonnage. But from August 5, 1914, onward, Allied sea power quickly extinguished the international maritime trade of the Central Powers. Six hundred and twenty-three German and 101 Austrian merchant vessels, 1.875 million tons of shipping, took refuge in neutral harbors while Britain and her allies seized another 675,000 tons. In the first five months of war, Allied warships intercepted and captured still another 405,000 tons. Germany was left with less than 2 million tons of merchant vessels, and they were usable only in the Baltic.
Before 1914, Admiral von Tirpitz had warned that in a war with Great Britain the Royal Navy would blockade Germany, but he was confident that this could be compensated for by expanding German trade with nearby neutrals such as Holland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Neutral ships, in Tirpitz’s vision, would sail to Dutch or Scandinavian ports—Rotterdam or Copenhagen, for example—where their cargoes would be unloaded and subsequently transshipped to Germany by rail or coastal shipping. When war came, this machinery quickly began to operate and, within the first two weeks, the British Admiralty learned that cargoes of wheat were being unloaded in Rotterdam and sent up the Rhine on barges. Over the next several months, this trade expanded and German imports from the United States fell from a value of $32 million in December 1913 to $2 million in December 1914. In the same period, German imports from Sweden soared from $2.2 million worth to $17.7 million; from Norway, from $1.5 million to $7.2 million; from Denmark, from $3 million to $14.5 million; and from Holland, from $19 million to $27 million.
The British Cabinet moved quickly to block these channels. An order in council issued on August 20 decreed that neutral trade with Germany in conditional contraband would be regulated by the doctrine of continuous voyage. This meant that the ultimate destination of seaborne cargoes, not their initial stopping point, would become the determining factor. The British argued that if a nation at war had a right to blockade an enemy and to stop contraband from reaching him directly, then it also had a right to enforce these rights against an enemy who was supplying himself through neutral states. Contraband goods consigned to a neutral country, but destined for the blockaded country, were to be regarded as subject to seizure on the ground that the passage through the neutral country was merely part of a continuous voyage into the blockaded country. Thereafter, neither absolute nor conditional contraband intended for use by the enemy state or its armed forces could be shipped freely merely because it was consigned to a neutral receiver. “Finally, to further empower the blockade force,” the order declared that “the destination . . . may be inferred from any sufficient evidence.” In addition, the order in council revised the lists of absolute and conditional contraband established by the Declaration of London. The new, more comprehensive lists included many items formerly on the free list—leather for saddles, rubber for tires, copper, lead, cotton, raw wool, raw textiles, even paper, all now said to be convertible to military use. The practical effect of making conditional contraband subject to capture when it was to be discharged in a neutral port was to transform everything that had been conditional contraband into absolute contraband.
For the moment, the most controversial cargoes—food and foodstuffs—were left unaffected by the order in council. Originally, Britain did not intend to stop food supplies bound for Germany if they were to be consumed by the German civilian population. This policy was spelled out in a telegram from Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, on September 29, 1914: “We have only two objects . . . to restrict supplies for the German army and to restrict the supply to Germany of materials essential for the making of munitions of war. We intend to attain these objectives with the minimum of interference with the United States and other neutral countries.” Subsequently, the Admiralty received information that the German government had taken control of the supply and distribution of all food in the empire. Stretching a point, this could be taken to have turned virtually every German dealer in foodstuffs into a state contractor or government agent and thus, by further extension, to proclaim that all food on its way to Germany by any route was conditional or even absolute contraband. The British government reminded the United States that Article 33 of the Declaration of London had stated that “conditional contraband is liable to capture if it is shown to be destined for the use of the armed forces or of a government department of the enemy State.”
Inevitably, the Allied blockade trespassed on neutral rights. By applying belligerent rights of blockade—stopping and searching ships and confiscating contraband—the Allied navies were insisting on regulating the trade of neutral nations to a degree unparalleled in history. Anticipating that this might happen, the United States on August 6, 1914, formally asked all belligerents to declare their adherence to the Declaration of London as the legal basis for naval operations connected with the blockade. Sir Edward Grey, who had just learned of the destruction of the cruiser Amphion in a freshly laid minefield off the English coast, replied that as the enemy evidently considered themselves at liberty to endanger neutral maritime traffic in international waters, he doubted whether the British government could undertake to observe every article in the declaration. The Admiralty, he said, must decide which rules could be followed and which must give way to “the efficient conduct of naval operations.” When the August 20 order in council appeared, Americans were particularly affronted by the doctrine of continuous voyage; it seemed intolerable that the British navy be permitted to seize merchandise in transit from a neutral American port to a neutral Dutch or Scandinavian port, whatever the ultimate destination of the goods. Subsequently, in response to American complaints regarding enforcement of this doctrine, London replied that the Royal Navy’s hand had been applied only lightly. From August 4, 1914, to January 3, 1915, 773 merchant vessels had sailed from America to Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Italy. Of these, the cargoes of only forty-five had been placed in prize court, and ultimately only eight had been permanently confiscated.
Nevertheless, American complaints made Britain uneasy. As a long war seemed more and more likely, the Allies knew that they would have to draw upon the United States for food, arms, and money. To tighten and enforce the blockade of Germany while at the same time maintaining friendship with neutral America became simultaneously necessary and painfully difficult. As every added restraint on neutral shipping raised another protest from Washington, it became apparent to Britain that she might ultimately have to decide which of the two policies was the more important. If the choice had to be made, Sir Edward Grey was never in doubt as to which path he would follow. “The surest way to lose the war would be to antagonize America,” he said. The British government’s effort, he added, would be “to secure the maximum blockade possible that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States.”
The daily work of the blockade was entrusted by the Admiralty to twelve obsolete cruisers, all unfit to fight modern warships. Four of these ships went to the western end of the Channel where, working with a French squadron, they patrolled the entrance from the Atlantic. Eight old cruisers of the Edgar class established watch over the other, wider North Sea exit, the 200-mile gap between the Shetlands and Norway. Rarely were all eight cruisers on patrol together; periodically, each vessel had to go into the Shetlands to coal. Thus, during the first four months of war, the North Sea blockade of the German empire was routinely performed by six rusty old warships, steaming ten, twenty, or thirty miles apart.
In practice, blockade duty meant an always wearying, sometimes dangerous routine. When a cargo ship was halted, a naval boarding party including two officers went across to the neutral vessel. The visitors’ first task was to look at the ship’s papers and establish her identity using a copy of the Lloyds registry. A more difficult task for naval officers, most of whom knew no language other than English, was to discover whether crew members and passengers calling themselves Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes, or other, were, in fact, Germans. Occasionally, people were closely questioned. This examination, says A. C. Bell, the official British historian of the blockade, “was conducted with the assistance of a printed list of unusual words in every European language and with the aid of drawings of familiar objects.” A German or Austrian citizen attempting to deceive the examiners “might have an exceptional knowledge of the language he professed to speak as a native, [but] it was not likely that he would, in rapid succession, [be able to] give the right word for . . . a bicycle pedal, an instep, a cheekbone, a nasturtium, or a frying pan.” Halting or erroneous answers led to close inspection of the person’s luggage. As for the cargo, the boarding officers would read the manifest, then descend into the hold to look about. Discovery of anything suggesting contraband, absolute or conditional, sent the vessel into port—usually Kirkwall, in the Orkneys—for a rigorous examination. There, even when the ship and its cargo were entirely cleared, several weeks might go by before the vessel was released; the natural result was neutral frustration and bitterness.
The hardships suffered by neutral seamen and shipowners were small, however, compared to those endured by the men of the blockading squadron. In normal weather in these waters, the crews, wrapped in yellow duffel suits, looked out at gray skies and rolling gray waves. When autumn gales brought winds down from the Arctic, piling the sea into short, steep ridges of water, the men on the old cruisers continued the work of the blockade. In tumultuous seas, the engines stopped, a boat was lowered, and a boarding party went down the ladder. Putting off from the tall steel side of their own vessel, the men rowed to the waiting neutral, where another ordeal awaited them. One unexpected flick of the churning sea could hurl their wooden boat against the hull, turning the craft into splinters and the boarders into floundering, drowning men.
Still, the ships gave out before the men. Hawke, one of the eight old cruisers, was sunk by a German torpedo on October 14. By the end of that month, Theseus reported bilgewater leaking into her feed tanks, Endymion declared urgent need for engine repairs, and Crescent, the flagship, developed a leaky condenser. At first, patchwork sufficed. Then, November 11 brought down on the squadron a full gale with monster waves. Edgar, with engine trouble, was ordered into harbor. Two ships had to heave to. Crescent was so battered that her admiral, Dudley de Chair, said later, “We rather feared she would go down.” Once the storm had passed, half the squadron went into the Clyde for repairs. There, inspectors reported so unfavorably on the condition of the ships that, on November 20, the Admiralty ordered all of the seven remaining Edgars withdrawn from service.
Replacements were available, some of them already at work. These were civilian passenger liners, of which Britain possessed more than a hundred before the war. Weighing up to 20,000 tons, with speeds from 15 to 25 knots, they had been converted into armed merchant cruisers. They were, of course, unarmored, but this was irrelevant as they were not to face enemy war-ships. Equipped with 6-inch and 4.7-inch guns to intimidate enemy or neutral merchant vessels, they were manned in part by the crews of the seven retired Edgars. In December, Admiral de Chair gave up his 7,000-ton flagship Crescent for the 18,000-ton liner Alsatian, capable of 23 knots in pursuit, or, if maintained at a patrol speed of 131⁄2 knots, of remaining at sea for forty-two days. By the end of December 1914, eighteen liners patrolled the blockade lines; eventually, there were to be twenty-four.
Germany had counted on a short war in which a blockade of its coasts would not be a factor. In Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s mind when he drafted his great flanking movement for invading France through Belgium was fear of the dangers of a long war. “A campaign protracts itself,” he said. “Such wars are, however, impossible when a nation’s existence depends upon an unbroken movement of trade and industry.” Underlying this need for haste was the basic economic structure of a powerful young empire that had existed for only forty-three years. In 1914, the German Reich was still divided into two distinct economic units. The industrial cities and manufacturing towns of the west had always been supplied with food and raw materials from overseas, imported through Rotterdam and Antwerp and thence brought up the Rhine, while the eastern agricultural areas of Germany were accustomed to sending their surplus farm products into industrial Bohemia or on to Russia. The German railway system, therefore, had never carried the food surpluses of the empire’s eastern provinces to the west and now, largely diverted to military purposes, was unable to do so. Unless the flow of imports through neutral Dutch ports could be maintained, the food-consuming populations of the west were bound to suffer. It was because of this that Admiral von Tirpitz, fearing that the war would be longer than Schlieffen expected, and reviewing the potential impact of a British blockade, declared that neutrals must be used to bring supplies into Germany. Even so, German experts believed that the empire’s powers of resistance would depend on early and decisive military success; overall, the conclusion was that Germany could maintain itself on its own resources for nine or ten months but no more.
Because the German government had invested so much in the Schlieffen Plan and believed so strongly in the power of the German army to deliver a quick victory, the Germany navy had been held back. The navy’s war plan, in any case, had been a defensive one, which called for awaiting an expected British offensive. German planners had been aware of Admiral Wilson’s earlier intention to attack Heligoland and seize islands on the German coast; anticipating this offensive, the Germans intended to turn it to their own use. The battle, the Germans hoped, would be fought in the inner Bight in the presence of their own minefields, where they could sink or cripple a significant portion of the attacking fleet. Somehow, through a failure of intelligence, the German Naval Staff remained unaware when in 1912 the Royal Navy abandoned its aggressive plan. There were suspicions that the Admiralty might adopt the strategic defensive by sealing off the North Sea at the Dover Strait and from the Orkneys to the Norwegian coast; shortly before the war, a German intelligence summary had hedged: “There is nothing certain about how Britain will wage war. A series of fleet maneuvers in previous years suggested a close blockade of our coasts; later maneuvers . . . suggest that a distant blockade had been chosen as the starting point of the British war plan.” But even had they been told that the British plan had changed, most German naval officers probably would not have abandoned their belief that the full might of the Grand Fleet would come charging into the Bight in the first weeks of war. When the expected onslaught failed to materialize, the premise on which German naval strategy had been based was overturned.
Even so, the German Naval Staff still believed that the British would keep light forces within striking distance of the German bases and that these forces would be supported by heavy battle squadrons that from time to time would sweep into the Bight to flaunt their superiority. On these assumptions, the German navy continued to base its naval war plan. Because the kaiser refused to permit an early fleet action, the British fleet was to be reduced by attrition achieved by minelaying, by attack with minor vessels, including submarines, and by offensive sweeps by battle cruisers. When sufficiently large losses had been inflicted and the two battle fleets were approximately equal in strength, then the High Seas Fleet would steam out and force a major battle.
This campaign of attrition began on the war’s first day when the converted steamer Königin Luise laid a long line of mines, one of which sank the light cruiser Amphion. Britain reacted quickly. The laying of mines in the open sea, beyond an enemy’s three-mile coastal limit, was in violation of the Second Hague Convention. (Germany, anticipating the potential of mine warfare, had refused to accept this portion of the convention.) On August 10, the British Foreign Office sent a note to neutral powers accusing the Germans of scattering mines illegally and indiscriminately around the North Sea, endangering merchant ships of all nations. This peril, the Admiralty warned, would increase because Britain reserved the right to lay mines of its own in self-defense. Further, the note declared, the Admiralty would begin to turn back ships of all neutral flags trading with North Sea ports before they entered areas of exceptional danger. The Dutch, believing these positions a pretext for diverting the Rotterdam trade, were furious; in any case, for the moment, most neutral vessels ignored the warning.
On the night of August 25, two more German minefields were laid, off the Humber and off the Tyne. Although British minesweeping officers were convinced that the minefields had been laid by fully equipped German navy minelayers, the Admiralty concluded that the work had been done by fishing trawlers disguised as neutrals. Immediately, all east coast ports were closed to neutral fishing craft, and neutral governments were warned again about indiscriminate German mining. Near the end of October, the German Naval Staff decided to mine the approaches to a great commercial harbor; deciding on Glasgow, they dispatched the Berlin to the Firth of Clyde on the approaches to that city. Her captain instead mined the approaches to Tory Island where, on October 27, one of his mines sank the dreadnought Audacious. This shocked the British Admiralty and provided an excuse for a dramatic escalation of the war at sea. On November 2, during Jellicoe’s visit to London to confer with Jacky Fisher, who had just become the First Sea Lord, the British government issued a harsh proclamation:
During the last week, the Germans have scattered mines indiscriminately in the open sea on the main trade route from America to Liverpool via the north of Ireland. . . . These mines cannot have been laid by any German ship of war. They have been laid by some merchant vessel flying a neutral flag . . . [which is an] ordinary feature of German naval warfare. [Therefore, the Admiralty] give[s] notice that the whole of the North Sea must be considered a military area . . . [where] merchant shipping of all kinds, traders of all countries, fishing craft and all other vessels will be exposed to the gravest dangers. . . . Ships of all countries wishing to trade to and from Norway, the Baltic, Denmark, and Holland, are advised to come, if inward bound, by the English Channel and the Straits of Dover. There they will be given sailing directions which will pass them safely . . . up the east coast of England. . . . Any straying, even by a few miles from the course indicated, may be followed by fatal consequences.
This declaration, in effect saying that the whole of the North Sea was out of bounds to world shipping without the express permission of the Royal Navy, brought a storm of anger and protest. Neutral governments read the announcement as a declaration that the British government meant to sever communication between Scandinavia and America. In Germany, the decree was interpreted as an illegal declaration of economic war. Admiral Scheer, who already considered the British “lords of hypocrisy” for not having ratified the Declaration of London, was bitterly indignant. “She [Great Britain] did not consider herself bound by any international laws which would have made it possible to get food and other non-contraband articles through neutral countries into blockaded Germany,” he wrote. “Thus, when the distinction between absolute and relative contraband was done away with, all German import trade by both land and sea was strangled, in particular the importation of food. . . . [Further,] neutral states were forced by England to forbid almost all export of goods to Germany in order to obtain any overseas imports for themselves. . . . Free trading of neutral merchant vessels on the North Sea was made impossible . . . because . . . all shipping was forced to pass through English waters and to submit to English control.” The blockade, intended to starve Germany, Scheer said, “required time to attain its full effect. . . . Success would be achieved gradually and silently, which meant the ruin of Germany as surely as the approach of winter meant the fall of the leaves from the trees.”
Breaking the blockade imposed by British sea power was, properly, a mission for the German navy. In the war’s early months, however, the kaiser’s navy had shown itself glaringly—embarrassingly—ineffective. Offensive minelaying and submarine operations against British warships had produced paltry results. The Berlin’s expedition had resulted in the sinking of the Audacious, but the Naval Staff remained convinced that the British fleet could not be significantly reduced by this means, and minelaying was discounted as a major factor in the naval war. Expectations from a U-boat campaign against the British fleet were scarcely greater. It was true that the U-boats had inflicted losses—Pathfinder, the Bacchantes, Hawke, and Formidable—but the German Naval Staff did not rate these successes highly; the torpedoed ships were old and of little combat significance. More important, submarines had proved ineffective against modern, fast-moving, escorted heavy warships. They had failed to interrupt movement across the Channel and had not sunk a single troop transport. By December 1914, most German naval officers did not believe that submarines could play a serious role in the war of attrition against the Royal Navy. Increasingly, the Naval Staff and officers in the fleet demanded a new plan, new tactics, new leadership. How could the German fleet, the second most powerful in the world, contest the command of the sea? Mine warfare and submarine attacks on warships had failed, and the emperor had forbidden his navy to force an action between the battle fleets at sea. What other possibilities existed? It was in this state of embarrassment and frustration that the German navy and government considered proposals for a submarine campaign against merchant shipping.
During the first months of war, when the offensive mission of German submarines was to locate and attack the British fleet and to sink British troop transports moving across the Channel, Allied merchant shipping was left mostly alone. Nevertheless, U-boat commodore Hermann Bauer, closely questioning his captains on their return to base, learned that through their periscopes these young officers were watching a heavy flow of seaborne commercial traffic moving along the English coasts. Early in October, Bauer reported these observations to his superior, Ingenohl. Stressing the deadly potential of using submarines to attack British trade, Bauer argued the uselessness of keeping the bulk of the U-boat fleet parked in defensive circles around Heligoland. Ingenohl, impressed, forwarded Bauer’s recommendation to the Chief of the Naval Staff, Hugo von Pohl. “From a purely military point of view,” Ingenohl wrote, “a campaign of submarines against commercial traffic on the British coasts will strike the enemy at his weakest point and will make it evident . . . that his power at sea is insufficient to protect his imports.” Pohl agreed that unleashing the U-boats against merchant shipping could usefully harm Great Britain, but he hesitated; submarine warfare against commerce would be a violation of international maritime law, to which Article 112 of the German Naval Prize Regulations conformed. Further, any accidental destruction of neutral merchant vessels might provoke neutral nations into war with Germany. Accordingly, it seemed to Pohl, U-boat warfare against merchant ships could be justified only as a reprisal for some flamboyantly heinous act by the enemy. Therefore, without consulting any political leaders, Pohl decided to ignore Ingenohl’s proposal.
The British Admiralty’s declaration of November 2, declaring the whole of the North Sea a war zone, dramatically changed Pohl’s point of view. An effort to stop shipments of conditional contraband now appeared as a gross violation of international law and the beginning of a campaign to starve the German people. Accordingly, two days after the British declaration was published, Pohl reversed himself and laid before the German chancellor a proposal for submarine warfare against commerce.
The concept of using submarines as blockading ships was technologically revolutionary and raised numerous problems. To follow the procedures of eighteenth-century sailing-ship days, the U-boat would have to surface, halt its intended prey by either a signal or a warning shot with its deck gun, send a boarding party to the vessel to establish its nationality, and, if it was an enemy, make adequate provisions for the safety of the crew and passengers before sinking it. It being patently impossible for a small, crowded U-boat to take aboard the crew and passengers of a large ship, the best that could be done was that they be allowed to enter their lifeboats before their ship was destroyed. If this happened far from land, with crew and passengers left to fend for themselves in open boats, such arrangements did not meet the requirements of international maritime law.
Ultimately, U-boat warfare was refined into one or another of two basic operational strategies: restricted and unrestricted. “Restricted” submarine warfare meant that U-boats, before torpedoing enemy merchant vessels, would surface, warn their victims, and give them time to abandon ship. All neutral ships would be spared, and passenger liners of all nations, even enemies, might be spared. “Unrestricted” U-boat warfare meant that all the old formalities of “visit and search” would be ignored and that German U-boats would torpedo without warning all merchant and passenger ships, armed or unarmed, neutral or enemy, without distinguishing between absolute and conditional contraband and without regard for the fate of crew or passengers. The argument for this seemingly barbaric method of warfare rested, ironically, on the frailty of the attacking craft: U-boats were small, slow, unarmored warships, armed only with a small deck gun and a few torpedoes; their primary defense was their ability to operate hidden underwater; once surfaced to stop and examine a merchant vessel and wait while the crew boarded lifeboats, a submarine became the most vulnerable of all warships. For this reason, most German naval officers not only endorsed Bauer’s and Pohl’s proposal, but wished to go immediately to unrestricted submarine warfare. “The gravity of the situation,” said Admiral Scheer, “demands that we should free ourselves from all scruples which certainly no longer have any justification.”
When the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, first heard Admiral von Pohl’s proposal, he was inclined to endorse it. “Viewed from the standpoint of international law, U-boat warfare is a reprisal against England’s hunger blockade,” he wrote to Pohl in December 1914. “When we consider the purely utilitarian rules by which the enemy regulate their conduct, [when we consider] their ruthless pressure on neutrals . . . we may conclude that we are entitled to adopt whatever measure of war is most likely to bring them to surrender.” This was the pragmatic chancellor speaking, the man who a few months before had deplored Britain’s entry into the war merely to uphold “a scrap of paper”—the treaty in which Great Britain had promised to defend Belgian neutrality. But while the chancellor saw nothing illegal or immoral in the proposed U-boat campaign, he argued that the decision must be made on practical grounds, involving political as well as military considerations. He feared that a U-boat blockade of Britain would provoke neutral nations and therefore could be employed only when Germany’s military position on the Continent was so secure that there could be no doubt as to the ultimate outcome; once this was achieved, the navy could do as it wished because the intervention of neutral states would have no impact. Now—in December 1914—Bethmann-Hollweg told Pohl, these conditions did not exist.
The kaiser was not ready to approve a submarine campaign and he supported the chancellor. William was well aware that neutral as well as Allied ships were carrying contraband war material from America to Britain and France, and he deeply resented this fact. He feared, on the other hand, that indiscriminate sinkings by U-boats would poison relations with Holland and Scandinavia and might pitch Germany into war with the United States. William’s gentler, more sentimental side also played a part. Unrestricted submarine warfare and the killing of civilians at sea conflicted with his notion of chivalry and his own self-image as a knightly figure. Wearing this mantle, he told a group of admirals in November 1914, “Gentlemen, always realize that our sword must be clean. We are not waging war against women and children. We wish to fight this war as gentlemen, no matter what the other side may do. Take note of that!”
William was reluctant to use such moderate language when speaking to Tirpitz, of whom he was somewhat afraid. The following day, he explained defensively to the Grand Admiral that while he did not object to submarine warfare in itself, he was determined to wait until it could be waged effectively. Pohl, on the other hand, was a small man who possessed little power to intimidate, but had a large talent for guile. On December 14, only three weeks after the kaiser had said no, Pohl returned with a more specific U-boat campaign proposal: planning would be completed by the end of January; a declaration would give ample cautionary notice to neutrals; U-boat operations would begin at the end of February. Again, Bethmann-Hollweg objected. Why provoke antagonism just when Britain, by its coercive blockade, was exasperating most of Europe’s neutrals? At this point, Pohl received unexpected help. A month before, when Tirpitz had realized that his imperial master did not intend to risk his prized dreadnoughts, the Grand Admiral had begun to champion the idea of submarine warfare as the only alternative means by which England’s power at sea might be broken. On December 21, German newspapers published an interview given by Tirpitz at the end of November to Charles von Wiegand, a German-born American journalist. The circumstances of the interview had been unusual: Tirpitz received Wiegand in his bedroom at German Supreme Headquarters at Charleville in occupied France and the Grand Admiral sat in a chair beside his unmade bed. Before speaking, he asked the reporter to submit the interview to the Foreign Ministry for clearance. Wiegand agreed, and Tirpitz plowed ahead. “America has raised no protest and has done little or nothing to stop the closing of the North Sea against all neutral shipping,” he said. “Now what will America say if Germany institutes a submarine blockade of England to stop all traffic?”
Wiegand asked whether such a measure was contemplated.
“Why not, if we are driven to extremities? England is endeavoring to starve us. We can do the same, cut off England and sink every vessel that attempts to break the blockade.” Once the transcription was in his notebook, Wiegand failed to submit it to the Foreign Ministry, and Tirpitz never bothered to inform the chancellor or to mention the matter to Pohl. When Wiegand published his story in a Dutch newspaper, Bethmann-Hollweg had no choice but to permit publication in Germany. Tirpitz, learning that the kaiser was irritated, breezily explained that “he wished to sound American opinion on the submarine war.”
The interview reverberated through the German press. Many Germans, accepting the famous Grand Admiral as the nation’s foremost authority on naval affairs, now believed that a decision was imminent to use submarines against enemy merchant shipping and that this would soon bring a victorious end to the war. A stream of articles and papers appeared, written by “eminent financiers, shipping and industrial magnates, politicians, scientists and university academics, urging [the government] not to be deterred from using a decisive weapon by false misgivings.” Pohl, hoping to capitalize on this public support, came to Supreme Headquarters at Charleville on January 7, 1915, and once again presented his submarine proposals to the kaiser and the chancellor. Again, Bethmann-Hollweg opposed Pohl’s plan, arguing that the uncertainty of the neutrals still made U-boat warfare too risky. Again, the kaiser supported the chancellor and opted for postponement. However, William gave indirect and unintentional backing to Pohl’s proposal when, on the same day, he issued his order forbidding Admiral von Ingenohl to engage the High Seas Fleet in a major fleet action. This command confirmed U-boat warfare against commerce as Germany’s only naval offensive option.
Pohl did not give up. On February 1, buttressed by the fact that he had been chosen to succeed Ingenohl as Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, he repeated his submarine proposal to Bethmann-Hollweg for the fourth time. When the chancellor reiterated his concern that submarine warfare would antagonize America and other neutrals, Pohl replied that if the proclamation of a German war zone frightened away neutral shipping, as the naval authorities assumed it would, then, by definition, diplomatic confrontation with neutrals would not occur. Further, at this interview, Pohl deliberately lied to the chancellor: he had never set foot in a submarine at sea, but he claimed, falsely, that the U-boat captains would be able to distinguish between enemy and neutral ships and that only enemy ships would be sunk. Hearing this, Bethmann-Hollweg said he would raise no further objections. For Pohl, the rest was easy. When Admiral Gustav Bachmann relieved Pohl as Chief of the Naval Staff, he was informed by his predecessor that the launching of a German submarine campaign had been approved at the highest level and that the kaiser did not wish the matter to be raised again. The kaiser’s consent, of course, had not been given, but Pohl knew how to secure it. February 4, 1915, was Pohl’s last day as Chief of the Naval Staff and his first as Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet. In bright winter sunshine, the kaiser arrived in Wilhelmshaven to attend the change-of-command ceremony. As a launch carried him across the harbor to visit the battle cruiser Seydlitz, damaged at the Dogger Bank, Pohl, standing with the kaiser in the stern of the boat, took the submarine war order from an inner pocket and handed it to William to sign. The kaiser, excited by the presence of so many colorful uniforms against a background of giant gray warships, scribbled his name. The following morning, the declaration was published in the official Imperial Gazette:
The waters surrounding Great Britain and Ireland including the whole English Channel are hereby declared to be a military area. From 18 February onwards, all enemy merchant ships in these waters will be destroyed, irrespective of the impossibility of avoiding in all cases danger to the passengers and crew.
Neutral shipping will also be in danger in the war zone for, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British government on 31 January and of the uncertainties of naval warfare it may not always be possible to avoid neutral vessels suffering from attacks intended for enemy ships.
The order was made public before other senior admirals were informed. Müller later damned Pohl’s behavior: the declaration was unskillfully drafted; the moment had been badly chosen; the means were not sufficiently ready. “It was disloyal to Tirpitz not to have discussed the declaration,” said Müller. “It was also disloyal to me. . . . [But] Pohl was anxious at all costs to get the declaration issued over his own name and February 4 was certainly the last day on which this was possible.” Privately, Tirpitz raged that “Pohl, by his vanity and lack of judgement, has made a mess.” Considering how few submarines were available, Tirpitz had recommended declaring a proper, effective blockade of a limited area, such as the mouth of the Thames. “Instead of which, flourish of trumpets, intimidation, and in consequence . . . England warned and given fourteen days to make preparations.” Nevertheless, despite complaints, Pohl had obtained what Tirpitz and most German naval officers desired: imperial approval for striking a blow at England. If the kaiser had forbidden the use of battleships, now, at least, he would permit the U-boats to try. It was in these confused circumstances that the German submarine war on neutral merchant shipping had its beginnings.
For the German navy and government, the decision to unleash the U-boats was a leap into the dark. Pohl’s persistence had thrust the campaign into reality, but neither he nor anyone on his staff were familiar with submarines and only Bauer and the U-boat captains themselves actually knew how the vessels could perform. Pohl knew that the number of U-boats available was grievously insufficient to enforce a submarine blockade on the whole of the British Isles. “We are not in a position to cut off England’s imports to a degree that the country will suffer hunger,” the Naval Staff analysts had told their chief. In fact, in May 1914, an unofficial staff study prepared at Kiel had calculated—very accurately, as experience proved—that an effective blockade of the British Isles would require at least 222 operational U-boats to maintain permanent patrols. However, Tirpitz had neglected to build submarines in peacetime; when the war zone was proclaimed in February 1915, the German navy had only thirty U-boats, only twenty of which were long-range diesel boats of the High Seas Fleet. The rest were small and obsolescent, useful only for coastal work. Again optimistically, the Naval Staff assumed that half of the diesel submarines could be at sea at any given time. And again experience proved that, allowing for the time-consuming voyage to the rich hunting grounds of the Western Approaches, the Irish Sea, and the western end of the English Channel, and the need for proper maintenance for the boats and rest for the crews, only a third of the force could be on station at a given moment. *50 Thus, from March to September 1915, the average number of modern U-boats on station every day was between seven and eight.
Pohl, who now commanded the High Seas Fleet submarine force, was not deterred. He intended to follow the plan recommended by Bauer. Three U-boats would operate on the Western Approaches and in the Irish Sea to interdict the main Atlantic trade routes to Liverpool and the Bristol Channel ports. One submarine would be stationed off the Thames in the English Channel, another off the Tyne, and still another off the northeast coast, covering the routes from Britain to Scandinavia. Six U-boats could not sink enough ships to halt British trade, but Pohl hoped that simply by making an appearance they would terrify merchant sailors, British and neutral. Pohl, however, was not allowed to begin the campaign without having a nervous hand placed on his sleeve. Before the U-boats sailed, the kaiser sent a telegram demanding a guarantee that within six weeks of the campaign’s opening “England would be forced to modify her attitude.” Tirpitz and Bachmann immediately responded that six weeks would be sufficient—“a silly question deserves a silly answer,” Tirpitz noted of this exchange. On February 14, Pohl, on board Friedrich der Grosse, was handed another imperial telegram: “For urgent political reasons, send orders by wireless to U-boats already dispatched for the present not to attack ships flying a neutral flag, unless recognized with certainty to be enemies.” Pohl was dismayed; if neutrals were promised immunity, there was no chance of frightening them away from trading with Britain. “This order makes success impossible as U-boats cannot determine the nationality of ships without exposing themselves to great danger,” he telegraphed the Naval Staff. “The reputation of the navy will, in my opinion, suffer tremendously if this undertaking, publicly announced and most hopefully regarded by the people, achieves no results. Please submit my views to H.M.” To this message, Pohl received no reply. Instead, the following day, still another telegram from Supreme Headquarters delayed the date fixed for the opening of the campaign: “H.M. the Emperor has commanded that the U-boat campaign to destroy commerce, as indicated in the announcement of February 4, is not to begin on February 18, but only when orders to do so are received from the All Highest.”
By February 18, newly clarified instructions had been issued to U-boats: hostile merchant ships were to be destroyed; all ships flying neutral flags were to be spared, although neutral flags or funnel markings alone were not to be regarded as sufficient guarantees of neutral nationality. To make certain, U-boat captains were ordered to take additional evidence into account: the structure, place of registration, course, and general behavior of the intercepted vessel. Hospital ships were to be spared, as well as ships belonging to the Belgian Relief Commission, funded in America to provide food for impoverished German-occupied Belgium. On the other hand, U-boat commanders were promised that “if, in spite of the exercise of great care, mistakes should be made,” they would not be held responsible. In this manner, says the official historian of the British blockade, “a handful of naval officers, most of them under thirty years of age, without political training, and isolated from the rest of the world by the nature of their duties, were . . . given a vague and indefinite instruction to give a thought to politics before they fired their torpedoes.”
British reaction to the announcement that German submarines were about to attack Allied merchant ships was divided: some felt that the threat was ominous; others said that the Germans were posturing and that there was little danger. Arthur Balfour, long an expert on defense, warned that the threat was real. On May 6, 1913, Balfour had written to Fisher: “The question that really troubles me is not whether our submarines could render the enemy’s position intolerable, but whether their submarines could render our position intolerable.” Fisher had replied by reiterating his credo: that “war has no amenities” and that as far as rules were concerned, “You might as well talk of humanizing hell!” Submarines, he pointed out, had no alternative but to sink their victims and thus were indeed “a truly terrible threat for British commerce. . . . It is freely acknowledged to be an altogether barbarous method of warfare . . . [but] the essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility.” He added that neutral shipping could not be immune because “one flag is very like another seen against the light through a periscope.” Churchill, receiving a copy of Fisher’s paper, had pronounced it “brilliant,” but had noted, “There were a few points on which I am not convinced. . . . Of these, the greatest is the question of the use of submarines to sink merchant vessels. I do not believe this would ever be done by a civilized power.” Asquith and Prince Louis had agreed with Churchill. Even in February 1915, the Admiralty was generally satisfied that U-boats could not do much harm to Britain’s enormous merchant trade. Churchill, addressing the House of Commons on February 15 on the subject of the German war zone proclamation, declared that “losses will no doubt be incurred—of that I give full warning. But we believe that no vital injury can be done if our traders put to sea regularly. . . . If they take the precautions which are proper and legitimate, we expect the losses will be confined within manageable limits, even at the outset when the enemy must be expected to make his greatest effort to produce an impression.” The Foreign Office, for its part, doubted that the German government was sufficiently reckless to torpedo neutral—including American—merchant ships and concluded that the German proclamation was largely bluff.
In the end, the calculations and assumptions of both opposing belligerents—the German belief that the U-boats could terrify and drive away the neutrals, and the British estimate that the submarine war was bluff—were wrong. Bauer and Pohl had overestimated; neutral shipping did not flee in terror from the few submarines posted off British harbors. And, once the U-boats had sailed, it quickly became apparent that the diplomatic repercussions, warned of by Bethmann-Hollweg and discounted by Pohl, would be severe. On the other hand, over the years, the German submarine campaign, far from being a bluff, came close to winning the war.
On February 10, the U.S. government emphatically objected to the German proclamation of a war zone and warned that any harm befalling ships under the American flag, or American citizens—even if they were passengers on a belligerent vessel flying a belligerent flag—would be regarded in Washington as “an indefensible violation of neutral rights.” Specifically, the American note warned that “if the commanders of German vessels of war should . . . destroy on the high seas an American vessel, or the lives of American citizens . . . the government of the United States would . . . hold the Imperial Government to a strict accountability for such acts.” Italy, which was then at war with Austria but not with Germany, also spoke in strong language: if an Italian ship were sunk by a German U-boat, the Italian premier told the German ambassador, it would be “une chose énorme.”
The unexpectedly stern language of the American protest note confronted the German chancellor with precisely the situation he had hoped to avoid. The United States was announcing that it had no intention of allowing itself to be frightened into giving up trade with Great Britain and was prepared to defend its right to freedom of maritime commerce. It was from this moment that German diplomacy toward the United States became an effort to mesh two ultimately incompatible policies: to continue to employ submarine warfare against merchant shipping while at the same time preventing America from joining the Allies. This first American note convinced Bethmann-Hollweg that he could combine these goals only by giving absolute guarantees that U-boats would not attack neutral ships. The naval command immediately protested that this limitation would make success impossible. Admiral Bachmann said flatly that if this undertaking to the Americans was given, the submarine campaign would have to be abandoned outright. Tirpitz bitterly reproached Bethmann-Hollweg for advocating any compliance with the American note. However, if, against his advice, concessions must be made, then, “in the interest of German prestige,” he demanded that they should come only in return for a lifting of the British blockade on all food and raw materials and the return of all interned German cargo vessels. Hearing this, Müller, who sided with the chancellor, wrote in his diary that Tirpitz’s ideas were “absolutely crazy.” Müller himself believed that “the effect of submarine war on commerce was greatly exaggerated” and agreed with Bethmann-Hollweg that the American protest note could be accepted without wholesale abandonment of the U-boat offensive. William II, caught in the middle, complained that Pohl had laid this weighty question before him at a time when his mind was on other things and admitted that his consent in Wilhelmshaven harbor might have been too lightly given. Ultimately, the kaiser endorsed the chancellor’s position. On February 18, on the eve of the beginning of the submarine campaign, Germany replied to the American note by saying that, while she insisted on her fundamental right to use submarine warfare against commerce and that her U-boat captains would sink British and Allied merchant ships, they would not molest American vessels, “when they are recognizable as such.”
In fact, German submarines were attacking Allied merchant shipping before the war-zone proclamation was issued. The first victim was the British freighter Glitra, 866 tons, bound from Grangemouth to Stavanger, Norway, with a cargo of coal, oil, and iron plate. On October 20, 1914, she was halted by U-17 fourteen miles off the Norwegian coast. A boarding party, acting in strict accordance with international law, gave the crew time to lower and enter their boats, then opened the Glitra’s sea cocks and sent her to the bottom. U-17 then towed the lifeboats to within easy rowing distance of the coast. Seven days later, U-24, in the Channel to attack troopships, sighted the 4,590-ton French steamer Amiral Ganteaume off Cape Gris-Nez. The decks of the ship were crowded with figures whom the U-boat captain took to be soldiers; in fact, the vessel carried 2,500 Belgian civilian refugees. Without warning, the submarine fired a torpedo. Most of the passengers were taken off by a British steamer and the French ship, which did not sink, was towed into Boulogne, but forty people died as a result of panic. In November, U-21 sank two small steamers, Malachite, 718 tons, and Primo, 1,366 tons, within sight of the French coast off Le Havre. Again, following the rules of prize law, the U-boat captain permitted the crews of both ships to enter their lifeboats before he sank the steamers with his deck gun. On January 30, a single U-boat, U-21, sank three merchant ships off Liverpool in a single afternoon. In each case, the sinkings were done under prize law rules. On February 1, the hospital ship Asturias, which the submarine captain genuinely mistook for a merchantman, was attacked off Le Havre but escaped. During the first six months of war—August 1914 through January 1915—ten Allied merchantmen totaling 20,000 tons had been sent to the bottom by U-boats, most of them in a gentlemanly manner and at trivial cost to the Germans who, not wishing to waste torpedoes, used bombs or shells from their deck guns.
Once the war-zone campaign began, the U-boat attack fell most heavily on the Western Approaches, through which most of Britain’s essential imports passed. This vital area could be reached only by the twenty diesel boats of High Seas Fleet flotillas, leaving the older, heavy-oil-engine boats to operate in the North Sea and the Channel. At first, U-boat captains attempted to discriminate in their attacks. British and French merchant ships were sunk on sight; neutrals were stopped, the ship’s papers were inspected, and, if contraband was found, the crew was allowed to take to its lifeboats and the ship was sunk by bombs or gunfire. In these cases, the papers were sent to a German prize court, which occasionally judged the neutral shipowner entitled to damages. Between February 22, when the campaign was launched, and March 28, German submarines sank twenty-five merchant ships. Sixteen of these were torpedoed without warning and fifty-two crew members were killed. Thirty-eight of these men died in a single attack, when a freighter carrying nitrates blew up. Nevertheless, on board the twenty-five ships sunk, not one passenger died and twenty of the twenty-five ships suffered no loss of life whatever. Meanwhile, every week, between 1,000 and 1,500 ships—more than 4,000 vessels a month—sailed in and out of British ports, a number that exceeded peacetime traffic in the summer of 1914.
At first, it seemed that there was little the Royal Navy could do to fight the U-boats. The Admiralty advised captains of British merchantmen to hoist neutral colors in the war zone, a questionable act that may have saved some vessels but also provoked a storm of protest from the neutral nations whose flags were flown. As for attacking the submarines themselves, no one knew how. Little thought had been given before the war to submarines as offensive weapons and even less to antisubmarine tactics or weaponry. The earliest British attempts to cope were primitive, even quixotic. Coastal yachts and motorboats patrolled outside British harbors, but only one in ten of these craft was armed with anything larger than a rifle. A few motor launches carried two swimmers, one armed with a black bag, the other with a hammer. If a periscope was sighted, the launch was to come as close as possible. The swimmers were to dive in and one man would attempt to place his black bag over the periscope; if he failed, the other would try to smash the glass with his hammer. Another unsuccessful scheme involved attempting to teach seagulls to defecate on periscopes. The most effective form of attack, ramming or gunfire, demanded that the submarine be caught on the surface. But as long as a submarine remained submerged, it was undetectable and invulnerable. Mines and minefields were laid down, but, being passive defenses, they had to wait for submarines to bump into them. Nevertheless, to protect the Channel from U-boats, twenty-two minefields with 7,154 mines were laid east of the Dover Strait between October and February. This mine barrier proved ineffective because British mines were of poor quality. They were visible on the surface at low tide and when struck they frequently failed to explode. Moreover, about 4,000 either sank to the bottom or drifted away. An effort to build a twenty-mile-long boom of heavy steel harbor-defense nets across the Channel from Folkestone to Cap Gris-Nez failed because the tides placed too great a strain on the mooring cables.
Not all losses at sea were British, however. During January 1915, two U-boats had been lost—one mistakenly torpedoed by a third U-boat—bringing to seven the total number destroyed in the seven months since the beginning of war. The eighteen remaining of the original twenty-five German submarines were reinforced by twelve new boats brought into service after August 1914, making a total of thirty with which to begin the new campaign. The month of March 1915 brought more German losses. On March 4, U-8 was caught in the Dover nets and sunk by the destroyer Ghurka. On March 10, U-12 was caught on the surface and rammed by the destroyer Ariel off the coast of Scotland. On the same day, the new U-29, commanded by the famous Otto Weddigen, who had sunk Aboukir, Hogue, Cressy, and Hawke, was patrolling off Scapa Flow when she encountered battle squadrons of the Grand Fleet steaming through Pentland Firth. Maneuvering to attack, Weddigen fired a torpedo at the dreadnought Neptune but missed. Apparently engrossed in continuing his attack, Weddigen failed to see the battleship Dreadnought coming up behind him. Dreadnought, spotting the periscope, rammed at full speed. The force of the blow threw the submarine to the surface, revealing her identity as the bow, rising high out of the water, displayed the painted number “U-29.” The U-boat sank with no survivors. In all, forty-nine German U-boats were destroyed in the first twenty-eight months of war, either on the surface or, if submerged, by mines. But the British and Allied navies had neither means of detecting U-boats nor weapons other than mines to destroy them under water. Not until December 13, 1916, when UB-29 was sunk in the English Channel, was a German submarine sunk by a British depth charge.
Each new, aggressive step in the naval war provoked retaliation. Britain’s November 2, 1914, blockade proclamation had been presented as a response to “indiscriminate” German mining in the North Sea. In turn, the German submarine war-zone proclamation of February 4, 1915, was described as a reprisal for the British proclamation of November 2. On March 11, 1915, Britain upped the ante, announcing that, in response to the German war-zone proclamation and submarine campaign, the Allied navies would establish a total blockade of Germany. An order in council declared that by creating a war zone in which all Allied merchant ships were to be destroyed on sight without ascertaining the nature of their cargoes and the purpose or destination of their voyages, and without heed to the safety of their passengers or crews, Germany was, in effect, imposing a total blockade “with the avowed object of preventing commodities of all kinds including food for the civilian population from reaching or leaving the British Isles.” In response, therefore, the Allied navies now would prevent all cargoes, contraband or not, from reaching Germany. The U.S. government protested this further restriction of the freedom of the seas, declaring that the new order conferred the rights of a blockading squadron upon British squadrons that were not blockading an enemy coast: Admiral de Chair’s squadron, for example, was not patrolling off German harbors; it was strung out on a line hundreds of miles away between the Shetlands and Norway, the Faeroes and Iceland. Nevertheless, the American protest was relatively mild and a note of triumph appeared when Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador in Washington, wrote to Sir Edward Grey at the end of April, “I think we may say that, roughly speaking, you have achieved a very great diplomatic success in your negotiations with this government. You have asserted the rights of a belligerent in a very severe form because these rights are necessary to the existence of this country.”
Ironically, the grounds on which Spring-Rice’s message claimed and trumpeted a victory were the same—raison d’état—that the German admirals wished to invoke, but were not to be allowed to use for another two years. For the first three months of the submarine campaign, German U-boat commanders had done their best to abide by the policy of restricted submarine warfare; as a result, the U.S. government had found little about which to complain. Neutral ships had been sunk by mistake, but none were of American registry; neutral citizens had died, but none were American citizens. On March 28, this record was marred when, in the St. George’s Channel, off the Irish coast, U-28 fired a shot across the bow of the 5,000-ton British cargo and passenger liner Falaba. When the vessel halted, Falaba’s master was given ten minutes to abandon ship. While disembarkation proceeded, Falaba continued to send wireless messages requesting assistance; even so, U-28 extended the disembarkation period by another ten minutes and then by still another three minutes. As time was expiring, an armed British trawler appeared, whereupon U-28 promptly put a torpedo into Falaba. A hundred and four lives were lost, including that of an American passenger, Leon C. Thrasher, a mining engineer on his way to a job in South Africa. Thrasher thereby entered history as the first U.S. citizen to be killed at sea by a German U-boat. The Woodrow Wilson administration was divided on how to react: the State Department Counselor, Robert Lansing, described the sinking as “an atrocious act of lawlessness” and argued that the Germans must be held to the threatened “strict accountability.” Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, however, insisted that American citizens who traveled on ships of belligerent powers passing through a war zone had no more right to claim immunity than they would if they were traveling across a land battlefield while a battle was being fought. President Woodrow Wilson, although disagreeing with Bryan’s premise, decided that the loss of a single citizen was insufficiently grave to provoke a crisis with Germany. For the moment, Wilson merely asked the German ambassador for more information.
The month of April 1915 passed in relative calm. Then, on May 3, an American ship, the tanker Gulflight, carrying a cargo of oil from Port Arthur, Texas, to Rouen, was torpedoed without warning. The explosion caused only minor damage and no loss of life on board, and the ship did not sink. But two panic-stricken crew members jumped overboard and were drowned, and that night the tanker’s captain died of a heart attack. Lansing characterized the attack as “wanton and indiscriminate”; again, Wilson asked for more details.
The German government may have concluded from the limited and technical nature of these enquiries that Americans and their president were inclined to acquiesce in the submarine war, but neither the American government nor its people were as indifferent as they might have seemed. If Wilson was slow to protest, it was because he was struggling to integrate the implications of this series of incidents into his personal structure of political and moral belief. Somehow, from far away, Bethmann-Hollweg sensed the deceptive quality of the apparent calm in Washington. On May 6, he wrote to Admiral Bachmann protesting “the growing number of neutral ships falling victim to submarine warfare,” which may “drive the neutral powers into the camp of our enemies.” Demanding once again that the safety of neutral vessels be guaranteed, the chancellor warned that he “could not be responsible for the political direction of the German empire if neutral nations were to be continually antagonized by U-boat warfare.” Ironically, this letter was written one day before the nightmarish episode that the German chancellor had feared became reality. On May 7, 1915, a few miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, a rocky promontory on the southwest coast of Ireland, a U-boat torpedoed the famous Cunard transatlantic liner Lusitania. Among the vessel’s 1,265 civilian passengers were 128 Americans.