A Higher Form of Killing (10 page)

Since in 1914 few effective devices existed to prevent either submarine or mine attacks, the British navy early recognized the impracticality of maintaining the close blockades of enemy ports to interrupt trade in contraband generally accepted as legal. Strangling seaborne trade into Germany, however, remained crucial to the navy’s war strategy and the British quickly instituted what was in effect a distant blockade by patrolling the exits from the North Sea and in particular the two hundred miles between the Shetland Islands and the Norwegian coast. The patrol squadron initially comprised twelve old cruisers. After sighting a merchant ship the cruiser dispatched a boarding party to look for contraband. If they found anything suspicious they escorted the merchant vessel into a British port for more thorough examination. Commercial passenger liners requisitioned into the navy as armed merchant cruisers, given naval crews, repainted with camouflage paint, and fitted with a couple of four- or six-inch guns soon replaced the old cruisers.

On November 2 Britain issued a declaration that the whole of the North Sea must henceforth be considered “a British military area” and that as a consequence of previous and continuing illegal German mining, Britain would mine parts of this zone. This would be the first but not the last time in the war that one country claimed “necessity” forced it to follow its enemy into conduct or the use of weapons banned by international law. If neutral shipping vessels wished to avoid the perils of mines they should approach the military area through the English Channel, where they would be stopped and searched for contraband and then escorted safely through British minefields to resume their journeys.

Even before November 2, the distant blockade together with British unilateral expansions of the definition of “contraband”—for example, by including goods judged by Britain to be going to Germany through neutral countries in “a continuous voyage”—had caused friction with neutral maritime nations. One American paper claimed that Britain not only ruled the waves but waived the rules. However, Foreign Secretary Grey’s determination to restrict the blockade to “the maximum that could be enforced without a rupture with the United States” had resulted in soothing responses from Britain which, helped by Britain’s willingness to pay top prices for any goods brought into its ports whatever their original intended destination, meant relations were not too heavily strained. At the same time as declaring the military zone, Britain wrote to the U.S. State Department explaining that only recently Germany had illegally scattered mines in the northern sea route from New York to Liverpool and that the White Star liner
Olympic
had “escaped disaster” only by “pure good luck.” Therefore, the Admiralty had concluded that it was “necessary to adopt exceptional measures appropriate to the novel conditions under which this war is being waged.” The United States did not even formally protest to Britain about the declaration despite being pressed to do so by Norway and Sweden, two of the other leading neutral maritime nations.

Just a few days before the declaration of the military zone another issue had been delicately solved between the United States and the Allies using the niceties of language and legal drafting. In August 1914 the French government had attempted to raise loans through J. P. Morgan and Company to finance its arms purchases. However, Secretary of State Bryan, believing money to be “the worst of contrabands . . . it commands all other things,” persuaded President Wilson that for American banks to lend money to governments at war would be “inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.” J. P. Morgan Jr., the head of the company following his father’s death in 1913, determined to overturn this ruling by an administration that he despised: “A greater lot of perfectly incompetent and apparently thoroughly crooked people has never, as far as I know, run or attempted to run a first-class country.”

He approached Robert Lansing, the fifty-year-old New York–born legal counselor to the State Department. An anglophile and ambitious right-wing Democrat, Lansing was unkindly described by a colleague as “meticulous, metallic and mousy.” Nevertheless, many found him easier and more clearheaded to deal with than Bryan. Morgan and a fellow New York banker, Samuel McRoberts of National City Bank, soon persuaded Lansing of the advantages to U.S. commerce of a more flexible approach toward the financing of Allied purchases, warning that without it the Allies might buy elsewhere leaving the United States in its present economic depression. On October 23, 1914, McRoberts provided Lansing with a helpful note on the subject. In Bryan’s absence from Washington, Lansing quickly copied the phraseology into a memorandum, only inserting a few first-person pronouns to claim the ideas as his own, then rushed with his memo to the White House at eight thirty the same evening and easily secured Wilson’s approval. Henceforth, American banks would not make loans to warring governments; they would extend them credit.

The hairsplitting distinction between credits and loans was typical of lawyers like Wilson and Lansing. “An arrangement as to credits has to do with a commercial debt rather than with a loan of money” and therefore was “not a matter for Government,” they concluded. Lansing’s stock rose with both Wilson and Wall Street. The Allies quickly agreed to large credits with American banks, who in turn eagerly advanced money to fund contracts with American munitions manufacturers. The
New York Sun
rejoiced, “All talk of stagnation in our export trade has ceased.” J. P. Morgan and Company was soon playing a pivotal and highly profitable role in keeping Britain and its allies supplied with American munitions. In 1915, Britain’s imports of £238 million from America were 68 percent greater by volume and 75 percent greater by value than in 1913. French imports rose similarly.

Appalled by the growing trade between the United States and the Allies, the kaiser refused to see the American ambassador, James Gerard: “I have nothing against Mr. Gerard personally, but I will not see the Ambassador of a country which furnishes arms and ammunition to the enemies of Germany.” Von Tirpitz thought the United States “contrary to the whole spirit of neutrality . . . an enemy arsenal.” The German government continued to press the Wilson administration but it remained unsympathetic. By January 1915, Germany was pursuing another and illegal method of redressing what it perceived as an unfair balance—sabotage. A German Foreign Office telegram to its Washington embassy stated, “The sabotage in the United States can extend to all kinds of factories for war matériel” and named several contacts who could suggest “suitable people for sabotage.” German agents quickly infiltrated the New York docks and manufactured novel cigar-shaped fire bombs designed to be smuggled about merchant ships and to explode when the vessel was at sea. Elsewhere agents plotted the sabotage of infrastructure and munitions plants such as the “Black Tom” facility in New Jersey, destroyed in 1916.

At the end of October 1914, Winston Churchill had called seventy-three-year-old Sir Jacky Fisher out of retirement and appointed him First Sea Lord once more. “Lord Fisher can only think on a Turkish rug,” a subordinate claimed after Fisher on his return demanded improvements to his Admiralty offices. Fisher began firing off his characteristic scrawled, heavily underlined memos in green ink designed to shake up the navy. “I’m
exceeding
busy!” he wrote. “I’ve just told Garvin that war is ‘Great Conceptions’ and ‘Quick Decisions’! ‘Think in Oceans,’ ‘Shoot at Sight.’ I’m stirring up accordingly.” However, Fisher knew that in practice, he could do little to defend against the submarine threat.

One area where Britain and, in particular the intelligence unit headquartered in Room 40 of the Admiralty building, was making progress was in reading German codes. On August 11 the Royal Australian Navy captured the German merchant shipping codebook and soon after the Russians took the signal book of the Imperial Navy from a grounded German cruiser in the Baltic. Both were sent to London. On November 30 a British trawler fishing off the Dutch coast hauled up a lead-lined chest in its nets. Inside was the Imperial German Naval codebook—the so-called Traffic Book used to communicate with overseas naval attachés and warships. The captain of a German destroyer had jettisoned the chest in desperation while under attack by British ships. Room 40’s personnel called the discovery “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes” since it provided the last remaining information they needed to decode messages between German warships, submarines, and their bases—an invaluable asset in thwarting German plans to disrupt Britain’s mastery of the seas.

CHAPTER SIX

“England Will Burn”

As well as the control of the seas Churchill and Fisher were battling with another issue, which had, perhaps surprisingly, become part of the Admiralty’s remit—the control of British airspace. Developments in both zeppelin and airplane technology had been rapid. In November 1908, the kaiser traveled to Lake Constance to see for himself what Count von Zeppelin’s
LZ3
airship was capable of. Though with true Prussian hauteur he privately considered von Zeppelin “the greatest donkey” of all southern Germans, his airship’s performance so impressed the kaiser that he awarded him the Order of the Black Eagle and hailed him as “the greatest German of the twentieth century” and “the Conqueror of the Air.”

That same year the German army ordered the 450-foot-long
LZ4
from von Zeppelin, but after only her second flight she broke her moorings and burst into flames. David Lloyd George, then Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, visiting Germany shortly after the incident, recalled how “disappointment was a totally inadequate word for the grief and dismay” that swept Germany. “There was no loss of life to account for it. Hopes and ambitions far wider than those concerned with a scientific and mechanical success appeared to have shared the wreck of the dirigible . . . What spearpoint of Imperial advance did the airship portend?” A public appeal launched in the aftermath of the disaster raised six million marks to allow the now impoverished von Zeppelin to continue his work.

The army purchased further zeppelins—by the outbreak of war it had seven—as well as airships from the Schütte-Lanz company, established in 1909, whose machines had plywood rather than aluminum frames. The army believed airships’ chief value in wartime would be in scouting and observation. However, the Naval Airship Division, set up in 1912, foresaw a more attacking role. A naval officer invited his Kiel audience to “imagine a war with England, which from time immemorial has had an unwarlike population. If we could only succeed in throwing some bombs on their docks, they would speak with us in quite different terms. With airships we have . . . the means of carrying the war into Britain.” British planes—unlike zeppelins—could not fly at night and thus could “afford no protection against airships.”

The Naval Airship Division suffered several early disasters. In the first fatal zeppelin accident, its inaugural airship plunged into the North Sea in bad weather in September 1913, taking the first head of the Naval Airship Division with it, though six crewmen survived. Five weeks later another exploded: “We could recognise the men looking out of the cars,” an eyewitness described. “At about fifteen hundred feet up, one of the crew tried to climb from the catwalk into the forward engine car . . . Then our blood ran cold. A long thin tongue of flame leapt from the forward gondola and ran along the catwalk. There was a terrific explosion, the whole earth seemed to echo and re-echo with it. In the twinkling of an eye the airship . . . was a mass of flames.” There were no survivors and the Naval Airship Division’s very future seemed uncertain until its new head, naval captain Peter Strasser, a neat, dapper man with a goatee, convinced his superiors of the airship’s military potential.
*

Airplanes also achieved success. On October 16, 1908, Samuel Cody, an American who had come to Britain with a Wild West show before being employed by the British army, flew fourteen hundred feet in a biplane over Farnborough Common in Britain’s first successful heavier-than-air flight. The plane crashed on landing but Cody survived to become such an iconic public figure that when he died in another flying accident in 1913, one hundred thousand people lined the route of his funeral procession.

On July 25, 1909, a Frenchman, Louis Blériot, nursed his monoplane in a thirty-seven-minute dawn flight across the English Channel to land behind Dover Castle. The following day the author H. G. Wells warned the
Daily Mail
’s readers that “within a year we shall have—or rather they will have—aeroplanes capable of starting from Calais . . . circling over London, dropping a hundredweight or so of explosive upon the printing machines of
The Daily Mail
and returning securely to Calais.” The previous year his
The War in the Air
had conjured a nightmare vision of “the little island set in the silver sea . . . at the end of its immunity” as planes and giant airships battled in the skies above.

One hundred twenty thousand people queued for a glimpse of Blériot’s plane when it went on display in Selfridges department store in London. Yet despite such popular enthusiasm on the one hand and Wells’s apocalyptic warnings on the other, the British government remained cautious about airplanes. Sir William Nicholson, chief of the general staff, dismissed them as “a useless and expensive fad.” A government committee concluded that planes posed no serious threat but endorsed the Royal Navy’s proposal to acquire an airship to explore its military potential. The craft—named
Mayfly
—had a short life. As she was being readied for her maiden flight, crosswinds ripped her apart and British interest in airships waned.