The First World War

by Hew Strachan

keep ‘as much as possible out of our range, but ... within reach of their own long-range guns’. Declining visibility also militated against accuracy, but ‘when a heavy shell hit the armour of our ship, the terrific crash of the explosion was followed by a vibration of the whole ship, affecting even the conning tower’.8 Aboard his flagship, Friedrich der Grosse, Scheer could see even less. He had begun to consider breaking off the pursuit for fear of a night action, in which his battleships would be vulnerable to British light forces, when at 6.26 (7.26 German time) he received a signal that captured survivors from an enemy destroyer reported that there were

over sixty large enemy warships in the area, and that twenty of them were new battleships. Minutes later the horizon over a six-mile arc erupted in a line of gun flashes.

At 6.15 he began the deployment of the fleet to port, so putting the Germans to his south-west, and silhouetting them against the evening light. Each Dreadnought opened fire as she was free to do so, but because of the poor visibility could see only three or four enemy capital ships at a time. At 6.35 a third battle cruiser, Invincible, also struck in the turret, blew up and split in two. But the position of the High Seas Fleet was desperate: ranges were down to 12,000 yards, and the British could concentrate all their fire against portions of the German line. Scheer turned away to the south-west. But in so doing he was moving further from his base. Jellicoe could see less and less in the fading light, but he had the consolation of knowing that he lay between the Germans and their line of escape. This consideration was presumably what prompted Scheer to turn about and strike Jellicoe’s line once more. For twenty minutes, from 7.15, the whole of the Grand Fleet was engaged. Then again Scheer withdrew, and to cover his retreat ordered his destroyers to unleash their torpedoes. Fearful of further loss, Jellicoe turned the Grand Fleet away to port, and therefore to the east. In so doing he broke

contact with the German fleet. His aim now was to avoid the dangers of night fighting, but to keep the High Seas Fleet to the west, so that it would have to seek a fleet action on the following day.

At 11.30 Jellicoe received a signal from the Admiralty relaying an intercepted German signal, giving the course and speed of the High Seas Fleet two hours previously, at 9.14, when it was ordered home. But Jellicoe’s faith in the Operations Department of the Admiralty had been undermined: twice already that day, in the morning and again at 9.58 p.m., it had managed to place Scheer in the wrong place. Only three of the sixteen decrypts passed over by Room 40 between 9.55 p.m. on 31 May and 3.00 a.m. on 1 June were relayed to Jellicoe, and therefore he had no context into which to set the intelligence he did receive. But it was not only the Operations Division which was guilty of inadequate communication. Jellicoe knew that his greater speed would prevent Scheer cutting across his bow. Therefore the Germans’ most obvious escape route lay astern,...

The battle of Jutland (as the British called it) engaged 100,000 men in 250 ships over 72 hours. It dwarfed Trafalgar in scale but not - it seemed - in outcome. The Royal Navy had lost fourteen ships, including three battle cruisers, and had sustained 6,784 casualties. The Germans had lost eleven ships, including one battleship and one battle cruiser, and had suffered 3,058 casualties. But ten of Scheer’s ships had suffered heavy damage, and only ten were ready for sea on 2 June.

By 1914 almost 60 per cent of the food consumed in Britain was imported from overseas. Germany, its agriculture (unlike Britain’s) protected from foreign competition by tariffs, claimed to be self-sufficient in foodstuffs, although in fact about 25 per cent was imported. The second was legal. In 1909 the Declaration of London had defended the rights of neutrals by defining contraband, the goods that a blockading power in time of war might legitimately sequester, in narrow terms. Foodstuffs for the civilian population most certainly were not contraband. If Britain were neutral, the Declaration of London served the country’s interests as a trading nation. If it were a belligerent, it did not. Britain refused to ratify the Declaration of London, but the divisions in its counsels revealed the practical - and third - objection to blockade. Germany would be able to circumvent it by importing through the neutral powers on its borders.

The most forceful spokesman of economic warfare in government was the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Maurice Hankey. He bolstered Britain’s pre-war policy, in 1911 establishing the general principle that trading with the enemy would cease when war broke out, and in 1912 preparing the ‘war book’, which spelt out the legal steps and the financial initiatives to put economic warfare in place. He sustained that commitment once the war had begun. In June 1915, now secretary to the war committee, Hankey told the prime minister that the effects of blockade were cumulative ‘and the process inevitably slow. It may be that years must elapse before its effect is decisive. But when the psychological moment arrives and the cumulative effects reach their maximum and are perhaps combined with crushing defeats of the enemy, the results may be not merely material but decisive.’

The problems of assessment were compounded because, of all the enemy’s assets, his armed forces suffered least from the blockade’s effects. The focus of economic warfare lay not simply where pre-war German calculations had located it - in the denial of raw materials vital for munitions production - but also in food supplies. Because in time of war the state gave priority to feeding its direct defenders, the soldier and the factory worker, those most likely to suffer from shortages were the militarily useless, the old and the weak.

In January 1914 US exports by value totalled $204 million. In July the economy was in depression and exports had fallen to $154 million. By December they had climbed back to $245 million. A year later, in December 1915, they reached $359 million, and in December 1916 $523 million. American shares soared: the Dow Jones index showed an 80 per cent gain between December 1914 and December 1915.13

With information like this, the British were able to use commercial pressures to persuade businesses to collude in the blockade, regardless of the political sympathies of their parent governments. Naval control meant they could disrupt normal maritime trade by stopping ships, checking their cargoes and directing vessels to port, where they might be detained for three to four weeks. Neutral firms therefore had an incentive to form cartels to which goods could be consigned.

did nothing to prevent the neutrals selling their own domestic produce. By 1915 Dutch cheese exports to Germany had tripled since 1913, and those of pork had risen five times. Sweden shipped four times the quantity of herring. In 1916, therefore, the Entente began the practice of pre-emptively purchasing the neutrals’ produce: this was particularly important in the one sea it did not control, the Baltic.

Between 1890 and 1913 imports of fertiliser to Germany had risen fourfold and as a result yields of cereals had increased by between 50 and 60 per cent per hectare. The blockade cut off imports of saltpetre from Chile, and the quantity of nitrates used in agriculture halved. Fritz Haber had

developed the synthetic production of nitrogen, but in 1914 the process’s value to Germany lay particularly in the production of explosives. Mobilisation took horses, as well as over 3 million agricultural workers, from farming, and therefore reduced the supply of both manure and labour. Between 1913 and 1918 the area of Germany under cultivation fell by 15 per cent and yields of cereals by a minimum of 30 per cent.

None the less, support for Bauer’s idea gathered after 2 November 1914, when as part of the blockade the British declared the North Sea a military area. From the outset Bethmann Hollweg and the Foreign Ministry were concerned about the possible reactions of neutrals, but the combination of press agitation and naval frustration overbore both of them, and on 4 February 1915 the Kaiser announced that the North Sea was a war zone and that all merchantmen, including neutral vessels, were liable to be sunk without warning.

Orders regarding the treatment of neutral vessels became ambiguous and the accusations directed by one belligerent against the other increasingly heated - and on the whole justified. The British flew neutral flags, and they armed merchant ships. If the U-boat captain obeyed international law he was liable to have his submarine attacked, particularly if he had fallen for one of the British decoys, the heavily armed but equally heavily disguised Q ships. In July 1916 the Germans court-martialled Charles Fryatt, master of the Brussels, a British merchant vessel, on the grounds that on 28 March 1915 he had attempted to ram a U-boat although not himself a member of a combatant service. Fryatt was executed.

But even more powerful ammunition was the sinking of the Lusitania off the Irish coast on 7 May 1915. She was indubitably a British-owned vessel, and as it happened she was carrying munitions. But she was principally a passenger ship, and among the 1,201 who died were many women and children, including 128 American citizens.

In the early hours of 30 June 1916 dynamite and munitions, loaded in rail cars and barges on Black Tom, a promontory ir New Jersey, caught fire The explosions shook the Brooklyn Bridge and blew out windows in Manhattan Believed at the time to be an accident, this was in fact the work of German saboteurs.

However, they wanted to wait until they had sufficient forces available to deal with Holland and Denmark, should an unrestricted campaign drive the neutral states into the arms of the Entente. At the end of August 1916 Romania had finally been persuaded by the success of Brusilov’s offensive in Galicia to declare war on the Central Powers, and therefore a new front had just opened for Germany. By December Mackensen and the recently demoted Falkenhayn had overrun most of Romania.

endorsed a memorandum written on 22 December by the chief of the naval staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, arguing that unrestricted U-boat warfare could win the war by autumn 1917.

Wilson’s policy was one of internationalism, but he recognised that its fulfilment might require the United States to take up arms. A German move to unrestricted submarine

warfare was likely to he the precipitant to such a step. The chancellor resolved to appease potential American wrath by himself proposing peace.

The failure of the December 1916 peace initiatives was not simply the consequence of diplomatic manoeuvres and the great powers’ amours propres. There were irreconcilable issues here, which, if exposed in negotiation, would have deepened and explained the war’s continuation, not ended it. France could not agree terms without securing the return of Alsace-Lorraine. and Germany could not accept that the provinces were not German. Britain had gone to war to restore Belgian sovereignty, hut the German navy was now clear that access to the Channel ports would be vital for Germany’s future security, especially in the event of what many in Germany were already billing as the ‘Second Punic War’. December 1916 was a caesura in the war’s course, but not one which opened up a real possibility of ending it. Instead it confirmed its rationale.

In 1916 John J. Pershing had led an American military expedition into Mexico to capture Pancho Villa, a bandit backed by the Germans. Mexico’s resentment at this intervention encouraged Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, to think that the Mexicans might relish the opportunity to invade Texas. He

therefore signalled Germany’s ambassador in Washington, telling him to broach the idea of an alliance with Mexico in the event of war between Germany and the United States. He used three different routes to send the message and Room 40 intercepted all three. By 17 January ‘Blinker’ Hall had an incomplete version and on 19 February he was able to brief the US ambassador in London.

On 2 April 1917 he addressed the American nation,

first, it required the existing army to become the cadre for the new, and second, the latter was likely to commandeer the war production of American factories carefully nurtured by Britain and France.

What Ludendorff’s calculations failed to take into account was the consequences of America’s entry for the conduct of economic warfare. They were much more immediate, and paradoxically it was they which were in large part responsible for his conclusion that the war would have to be over by 1919.

Britain and France had calculated on spending $1,500 million in the United States in the six-month period between October 1916 and April 1917, and they anticipated funding five-sixths of it by borrowing in New York - in other words, by selling treasury bills. On 28 November the Federal Reserve Board had been swayed by the views of one of its members in particular, Paul Warburg, a German by birth, who argued that

the average American investor was too deeply dependent on an Entente victory. He believed that this over-exposure should be wound down. What followed was better described as a crash: $1,000 million was wiped off the stock market in a week. By 1 April 1917 Britain had an overdraft in the United States of $358 million and was spending $75 million a week.32 The American entry to the war saved the Entente - and possibly some American speculators - from bankruptcy.

Allied borrowing in the war after the United States’s entry became the goad with which the United States could drive forward allied economic cooperation. The US Treasury refused to see the Entente’s funding needs in isolation. It aimed to reduce wastefulness in their orders and above all to eliminate price inflation caused by the rivalries of competitive tendering. A joint committee on war purchases and finance was established in August 1917. The committee’s remit extended to purchases from neutrals. The Entente had created a wheat executive in 1916; after America’s entry, the model spread to other commodities. By 1917-18 the alliance was t...

What underpinned this was the blockade, which gave the allies the power of coercion. Moreover, the entry of the most powerful remaining neutral to the war removed any final constraint on the enforcement of blockade. America showed few of the reservations in dealing with the neutrals bordering on Germany displayed by Britain. Holtzendorff had hoped that the submarine would scare neutral shipping away; in reality, it had the effect of cutting the flow of imports to Germany’s border neutrals and so reduced the quantities available for onward transhipment. Shipping losses, as much as shortage of foreign exchange, forced the allies to coordinate their controls on purchasing, thus squeezing the Central Powers even more out of world markets. Both indirectly and directly, the German decision to adopt unrestricted U-boat war tightened the economic stranglehold in which it was gripped.

Rear-Admiral W S. Sims, commanding the American naval forces in European waters, reached Britain on 9 April, three days after the formal declaration of war. In London, the US

ambassador and he drafted a cable to the president: ‘Whatever help the United States may render at any time in the future, or in any theatre of the war, our help is now more seriously needed in this submarine area for the sake of all the Allies than it can ever be needed again, or anywhere

In France the Law of Siege, invoked on 2 August 1914, gave the army the power to requisition goods, to control the press, and to apply military to civilians; it even subordinated the police to military control. Not until 1 September 1915 did the civilian administration in the interior regain control of policing, and not until April 1916 were strict limits set to the courts martial of civilians.

In Britain, the army never achieved that degree of autonomy, but the executive arrogated to itself powers which were contrary to any idea of parliamentary accountability and which affected the independence of the judiciary. The Defence of the Realm Act, passed on 8 August 1914, although primarily designed to safeguard Britain’s ports and railways from sabotage or espionage, permitted the trial of civilians by court martial. Its provisions were progressively extended to cover press censorship, requisitioning, control of the sale of alcohol (Britain’s licensing laws date from 1915), and food regulations.

The most significant step in the extension of state authority in Britain was compulsory military service, adopted by the Asquith coalition in the first half of 1916.

The press and public grew angry more because not enough was done, than because the state had become the enemy of civil liberties. Asquith’s government followed public opinion rather than driving it. When it acted it did

so with consent.

In France the debate on the extension of the state’s power was even less emotive: the legacy of the French Revolution meant that the use of totalitarianism in the name of national defence had a powerful pedigree. In both countries, the popular cry was for more government direction, not less.

But output per worker fell, despite longer working hours. Skilled males were replaced by unskilled females, children and prisoners of war. Many under-performed because of weakness and hunger. Significantly, the workforce in food-processing fell by 30 per cent. Food was simply not getting into the capital in sufficient quantities. Peasants withdrew from the market in response to inflation, either hoarding or speculating, and what they sold went in the first instance to the army. Russia’s fragile railway network was creaking under the demands of supplying the troops at the front. Petrograd’s special council on food supply, set up at the beginning of September 1915 to get food into the urban areas of the province, calculated it needed 12,150 wagonloads per month; in 1916 that figure was exceeded only in September and October. In December 8,654 wagonloads arrived in Petrograd, and in January 1917 6,556. By then the average unskilled

worker had to spend over 52 kopecks a day to feed himself, exactly twice the amount he had required in July 1914. Over the same period the average wages of a textile worker rose from 17.6 roubles to 28.3, which represented a fall of 22 per cent in real terms. Only those in war-related industries had experienced a rise in real wages, and even for those in the metal industries it was 21 per cent at best.

Revolutionary socialists wanted delay in order to coordinate these protests. But on 8 March women textile workers took to the streets to demand bread. By the afternoon they had been joined by metal-workers from the war industries, and now the targets were the government and the war. Within two days 200,000 workers were on strike. Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador, must have felt some ambivalence on hearing the strains of the Marseillaise. At Tsarskoye Seloye the Tsarina wrote one of her tender, loving letters to her ‘own priceless, beloved treasure’, fortifying him and blaming the Duma: ‘It’s a hooligan movement ... But this will all pass & quieten down.’19

But even before the revolution, at the Petrograd conference, the Russians had made it clear that they could not support the offensive in the west. The Anglo-French plan for the spring of 1917 was therefore unravelling at two levels. First, the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line had upset its operational

assumptions: the left wing of the French offensive on the Aisne now had no opponent. Second, it would not be part of a coordinated assault on Germany’s central position. The logical conclusion was to call the whole thing off.

Three days after the meeting at Compiègne, on 9 April the British launched their attack round Arras, at the northern extremity of what would have been the German salient. Its role was strictly limited: to pull German reserves away from the River Aisne. Well planned and well executed, it revealed that the learning curve on which the army had embarked in 1915 was now bearing fruit. Restricted to a front of 24 km, the battle was fought as a series of limited and staged attacks, leap-frogging each other, and with pauses to consolidate after each. The artillery now had both the equipment and the expertise to fight the sort of battle to which it had aspired on the Somme and which was to shape the nature of allied successes for the rest of the war. Nearly 2.7 million shells were fired, over a million more than on the Somme, and 99 per cent of them detonated. Fast-acting graze fuses meant that shells did not bury themselves in the ground, breaking it up and losing their force, but exploded on impact, and in particular cut barbed wire. This firepower was used more discriminatingly: bombardments elsewhere along the line deceived the enemy as to the true point of attack, and intelligence focused the guns on the key sectors. Of nearly 1,000 heavy guns, 377 were concentrated on a 6-km front facing Vimy Ridge, a high point commanding the plain to Douai and the east.

Above the ground, aerial reconnaissance provided the photographic images on which the planning could be based, and later reported progress as the attack went in; beneath it engineers tunnelled into the chalk to lay charges beneath the German front line.

It was also proof that combined arms tactics and careful preparation could successfully link fire and movement to break into the enemy’s position. As well as the integration of artillery support, each Canadian brigade had eighty machine-guns, including a Lewis-gun section for every platoon.

The deterioration in the weather slowed the attack in subsequent days, but so did the impossibility of progressing beyond the range of effective artillery support: in the case of field artillery cutting wire, this was about 2,000 yards. However, the battle of Arras achieved its principal strategic objective: the Germans doubled their strength in the sector within a week.

It proved of no assistance to Nivelle on 16 April. As a result of the German evacuation of Artois, his front had moved to his right, and he was now attacking out of a cul-de-sac, going from south to north, towards the River Oise. Few roads and railways ran in that direction. The towns on the south bank of the Aisne were small for the infrastructure now required of them. On the north bank the intersected slopes rose steeply to the ridge, along which ran the Chemin des Dames. The Germans had been here since September 1914, and their positions were both strong and deep, the main line hidden on the reverse slope, and behind that and out of artillery range a fourth line was under construction. Nivelle had collected enough guns on his 40-km front to allocate one field gun and one trench mortar for every 23 metres and one heavy gun for every 21 metres. But the depth of the German positions meant that the number of guns per metre of enemy trench was half that. The Germans had ample intelligence of French intentions, and they had 100 machine-guns for every 1,000 yards of front.