the Great War [III]

The German decision to embrace unrestricted submarine warfare on an epic scale would cost them the war. The sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 and the Arabic in August the same year had prompted the United States to threaten war. The Germans backed off in September, issuing orders “on the policy to be followed for sinking liners or ships containing passengers. They would no longer attack them without warning, and they would make some provision, whenever they could, to see that passengers got off safely, as long as the ships stopped and did not try to escape or ram or otherwise fight back.” (217) As the British blockade strangled Germany from the sea, and as business with neutrals supplying Germany plummeted, German militarists and politicians became convinced that unrestricted submarine warfare would alleviate their woes. Early in 1916, the Kaiser agreed to unrestricted sub warfare in limited areas. On March 24, a U-boat sank a French cross-channel steamer the Sussex; several American passengers lost their lives. The United States swore that if Germany didn’t call off the submarine campaign, they would sever diplomatic relations, a first step towards war. The Germans backed off again, issuing the “Sussex Pledge,” agreeing to return to prewar rules for submarines. Thus the submarines were relegated to adjuncts to the German battle fleet or to prowling the Mediterranean and striking at Allied vessels.

The war continued in its stalemate, and Germany, despite massive victories against Russia and in France, couldn’t break the stalemate. Their attention again turned to submarines, and they asked why they were so afraid of the United States anyways? Militarily they ranked it alongside Denmark, Holland, and Chile. The United States had an army of 110,000 men, negligible numbers. Add to the mix that the United States was utterly deficient in wartime supplies; they had enough artillery and ammunition to support only about five divisions. They only had fifty-five airplanes, none of them modern by Western Front standards; the Army had never seen a tank; and the Navy, though somewhat more formidable, was offset by the fact that only a third of the vessels were war-ready, and the Navy only had ten percent of its required manpower. Furthermore, they didn’t have antisubmarine or escort forces necessary to combat the German submarines. The Germans failed to factor in America’s reserve strength, the adaptability of American industry, or the wide-ranging effects of American financial credit being unlocked. Thus they decided not to worry about the United States and politely informed the White House on January 31st 1917 that they’d begin unrestricted submarine warfare the next day.

The United States severed diplomatic relations on February 3, but President Wilson wanted more cause for war before throwing the United States directly into the conflict. The Zimmerman Note pressed Wilson to the brink. The British had intercepted a note from Germany’s Foreign Secretary to the German Ambassador in Mexico. “[If] Germany and the United States were to go to war, Germany would offer Mexico assistance in recovering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, in return for her air against the Americans. The Germans were also going to offer Japan pieces of the American West if she switched her alliance.” (221) Wilson learned of the note on February 25, but it wasn’t until the middle of March that the last straw came: German submarines sank four unarmed and clearly marked American merchant ships. Thirty-six American lives were lost, and Wilson went to Congress. On April 6, the United States of America went to war with the German empire.

The American declaration of war intensified Germany’s submarine campaign. The Germans possessed 120 submarines, and two-thirds operated in the seas at any given time. The British responded to the submarine threat by initiating the Convoy System, so that “tempting vessels were no longer scattered unescorted all over the ocean. The submarine now had to come to the target, and when it did, it had to get by the escorts to make its attack.” (223) The British developed depth charges and hydrophones to detect the sounds of approaching submarines; the United States built wooden sub chasers and light destroyers. The British and French patrolled the Channel and created a mine barrage across it; the Allies strung a mine barrage from Scotland across the North Sea to Norwegian waters, restricting the North Sea theater. In the Mediterranean, the Allies bottled up the Germans at Austrian ports. Thus the German submarines were penned up where the Allies wanted them to be, and attacking merchants to stifle trade also meant jostling with newly-designed antisubmarine weapons and ships. If the Germans didn’t make headway on the Western Front, and fast, they would keep strangling worse than before.

On the Western Front, Germany tightened its lines. They retreated out of the westernmost bulge in their line, and twenty-five miles from the rear they created the heavily-fortified Siegfried Zone (or Hindenburg Line, as the Allies called it); in abandoned territory, they blew bridges and culverts, burned buildings, and poisoned wells. The Allies moved to attack. The Battle of Arras lasted from April 9th to May 16th 1917; Great Britain and Germany went head-to-head yet again, at a cost of around 300,000 casualties. The infamous Battle of Vimy Ridge, a subset of the Battle of Arras, itself cost 15,000 casualties. The French attacked the Germans in the Second Battle of the Aisne; from the 16th of April to the 9th of May, 240,00 casualties were suffered by either side. The bloodshed was so brutal, and the French army so demoralized, that it was on the verge of outright revolt. A Frenchman named Petain took over; being a “soldier’s soldier,” he was able to quell the revolting soldiers. The Germans never found out about the army’s rebellion, for the French soldiers continued to man the front lines, even if they refused to charge out of them. British attacks at Messines Ridge through the 7th and 14th of June made headlines: 60,000 casualties were suffered by either side; the Allies mined underneath the ridge and blew it to smithereens. The blast could be heard seventy miles away across the Channel in London. One of the final campaigns on the Western Front of 1917, the Third Battle of Ypres, would be known in folklore as Passchendaele, and 850,000 casualties would be suffered in this punching match between Great Britain and Germany. “Passchendaele was the end of an era in warfare… [The] nature of the war was changing, and within a few months of the slaughter in Flanders new techniques, new weapons, and new tactics would make Haig’s great battle nearly as obsolete as Waterloo or Balaclava… [The] next big battles of World War I were to be quite different from those that had gone before.” (243)

Passchendaele would be called a “love battle” by Scott Fitzgerald, since “the only people who could fight them were those who possessed a sublime faith in their countries, their institutions, and their own unquestioned value systems. Only that kind of security, that kind of unthinking confidence, armored men sufficiently to endure the hell of such battles.” But “Now those men were gone; either they lay rotting in the mud of France, or, if they still lived, they no longer possessed the faith of those pathetically empty times. The German Army consisted of old men who had already dreamed their dreams or young boys who had never had time to see visions. The French Army had already mutinied. In Britain they no longer allowed soldiers to take their rifles home on leave with them, for men returning to the front took pot shots at London houses as they rode by on the trains, in a futile but revealing expression of their frustrations. The whole sickening horror had simply gone on too long.” But the horrid affair would continue for another year. “The equilibrium of force still prevailed; the Clausewitzian extension of violence had proceeded farther than ever before, but had still not achieved a victory. Until one side or the other acknowledged defeat and bowed to the will of the stronger, the war must continue. Indeed, in that sense, it did not even end in 1918; it lasted until 1945.”

On the Austrian front, the 10th and 11th Battles of Isonzo gave the Italians the advance they had been craving against the Austrians. Reinforced by German soldiers, Germany used newly-developed hutier tactics to overwhelm the Italians at the Battle of Caporetto, which exacted nearly half a million casualties between the armies involved. German hutier tactics paid handsome dividends, but the Allies had a card up their sleeve: the tank. “The Germans, with their fine military tradition, had answered the problem of the World War I battlefield with new tactics and new techniques; the Allies, with their inventive and industrial genius, answered it with new machines.” The Battle of Cambrai utilized a British tank force of 300-500 tanks to grab an Allied victory. Allied struggles on the Eastern Front were offset by victories in the Middle East: the British seized Baghdad, Beersheba, and Gaza. They pushed the Turks out of Jerusalem and seized the holy city as an early Christmas present, and as an omen to a better (more victorious) year ahead. The coming year would see the Americans in their first action in the European Theater.

At the beginning of 1918, the Bolshevik rulers in Russia were waiting for the capitalist powers to destroy themselves before beginning the World Revolution. As for Germany, “the country was living on next to nothing. The war had consumed Germany, taking off her older and older men and younger boys, as indeed it was doing to all the major long-term belligerents, and starving the nation for the most basic of consumer goods.” (259) In the French countryside, “Women, oldsters, and children were all that were left. They went to the factories or the field each morning, they came home to empty houses at night; some sort of half-life went on. But the industries kept producing the guns and the shells, and somewhere the men were found to use them.” (260) Britain faced its own woes: “Conscription had been introduced in 1916, against the bitter opposition of organized labor; the national debt had increased nearly ten times, but there was still little sign of flagging.” The war had a momentous effect on the national psyche; “Britain had lost three times as many men on the first day of the Somme as she had lost in combat during the entire twenty-two years with France and Napoleon.” The Americans were the only Allies who were giddy, optimistic, and eager for war. They didn’t know better yet.

Day after day Germany flushed veterans from the Eastern Front onto the Western’s front lines; at the same time, Americans poured into France. By March, their numbers would reach 325,000. The first half of the 1918 campaigns on the Western Front are marked by German aggression: Germany hoped to prey upon the weakened French and British before they gathered enough arms and morale. Germany knew a decisive battle was needed, and if it didn’t come in 1918, it might not come at all. A series of offensive maneuvers, lumped together as The Spring Offensives, launched against Allied troops and threw them into disarray. The Germans gained ground with each push, getting close enough to shell Paris for several months, killing or wounding close to a thousand Parisians. America had her own taste of warfare at Belleau Wood; the little hamlet looked like a miniature Verdun, and the month-long fighting throughout June cost 9000 casualties. The Allies blunted the German push and then pushed back with a series of counter-offensives taking place later in the year. First they sought about flattening out salients in their lines: The Second Battle of the Marne cost 270,000 casualties and lasted from July 15th to August 6th; this was France’s largest tank battle of the war. The Battle of Amiens launched on August 8th and involved coordination between air, ground, and tank forces. On the first day, 16,000 German troops surrendered. General Ludendorff, shocked at the news, later remarked that August 8th was “the black day” for the German armies. The third salient attack, that at the Battle of St. Mihiel, lasted from September 12th to the 15th; basically an all-American slugfest with the Germans, this victory cost 27,000 casualties on either side. By this point the Germans were retreating, falling back to more defensive positions, riddled with influenza, and struggling to remain united. The Allies pushed against them, striking into German-occupied territory. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive lasted from the 26th of September to the last day of the war, November 11th of that year; 400,000 casualties wound be suffered in this offensive. The Fifth Battle of Ypres lasted from the 28th of September to the 2nd of October, costing 10,000 casualties. The Second Battle of Cambrai, taking 20,000 casualties, lasted from the 8th to the 10th of October. By now the Germans were in complete disarray, and they came to the peace table looking to end the madness and preserve Germany from woes from within and woes from without.

The Central Powers began collapsing. Bulgaria surrendered to the Allies in September after being overrun by Allied troops. The Ottoman Empire (resembling not much of an empire, and whose fate would be dissolution, bringing an end to six centuries of Ottoman rule over much of Europe) surrendered on October 30th; its edges were snipped away, and the British had taken Baghdad, Mesopotamia, and Jerusalem. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary simply dissolved: the Czechoslavs and Yugoslavs declared their independence, and Austria and Hungary went their own separate ways. The armistice they signed on November 3rd was an armistice with a nation that didn’t exist. The Germans, wounded and fractured and with no way out, signed an armistice with the Allied powers on November 11th of 1918, thus ending the war. “When [Marshal Foch of France] read the peace treaty, [he] burst out, ‘This isn’t peace! This is a truce for twenty years!’ The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. Twenty years and sixty-seven days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Hitler’s Germany.” (323)