Blackett's War (8 page)

OBERLEUTNANT ZUR SEE KARL DÖNITZ
was one of them. In background and upbringing, he was strikingly similar to Patrick Blackett. Dönitz
was six years older, but because German naval cadets entered at age eighteen he had become a naval cadet the same year as Blackett, 1910. Dönitz’s family had been small farmers, pastors, scholars, part of Prussia’s rising or at least aspiring middle class; his father was employed by the Zeiss optical firm. Karl collected rocks and fossils, founded a literary society and managed to convince six of his classmates to join, played the flute, and studied art.

If there was one striking difference between the two young naval officers-to-be, it was Dönitz’s burning ambition to fit in. Like the Royal Navy, the Imperial Navy took a hard look at cadets’ social status and charged their parents a fee that effectively limited admission to the upper middle classes; unlike the Royal Navy the German service maintained an air of Prussian aristocratic exclusivity even as its ranks swelled with the sons of the middle class inculcated with the Second Reich’s hyperpatriotism and cult of soldiership. Admiral Fisher had done away with distinctions between executive and specialist officers; the German navy exaggerated them, demanding almost feudal deference to shipboard commanders. Officer cadets were subjected to arduous physical tasks bordering on hazing; they were taught gentlemanly refinements such as fencing, riding, and dancing; a rigid aristocratic code of honor still condoned dueling to settle tiny perceived slights.
¹⁹

Dönitz excelled in it all. Reports by his commanders praised his diligence, enthusiasm, and perspicacity as well as his charm, popularity with fellow officers, “very good military appearance,” and social deftness. A memoir the young officer published in 1917 reveals a bright but exceedingly shallow young man, describing his part in sea battles and visits to foreign ports without a hint of self-awareness or irony. The language reads like a cross between a
Boy’s Life
adventure story (“There, now our salvo lands and the foremost destroyer sustains three hits! There, now another five! Suddenly, there is only his bridge foc’s’le to be seen. He has had enough!”) and a third-rate travelogue (“the fairy-tale town of Istanbul”). He passed out of the U-boat course in January 1917 and was preparing to take up his first posting when, at Admiral Scheer’s headquarters, the long-awaited telegram from the Kaiser arrived instructing that “the unrestricted campaign shall begin on February 1 in full force.” Dönitz was assigned as a watch officer on
U-39
, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walter Forstmann, already a legendary ace who had sunk 300,000 tons of shipping and been awarded the Pour le Mérite. Later in the year Dönitz received his first command of his own, the minelayer and attack boat
UC-25
. “I felt as mighty as a king,” he said.
²⁰

———

ON APRIL 9, 1917,
two commonplace-looking gentlemen in civilian clothes arrived at Liverpool on the American passenger steamer
New York
and were quickly hustled aboard a special train, which departed at once for London. It was three days after America’s declaration of war, which President Wilson said his country had at last been driven to as a direct consequence of Germany’s abandonment “of all restraints of law or of humanity” in its submarine campaign.

During the voyage over an alert steward had noticed that the initials embroidered on one of the men’s pajamas did not match his name on the passenger list and reported him to the captain as a suspicious character. The captain had a quiet laugh; he was in on the secret that the two suspicious passengers, sailing under the names S. W. Davidson and V. J. Richardson, were in fact two American naval officers, Rear Admiral William S. Sims and his aide, Commander J. V. Babcock, traveling incognito. Sims, up until a few weeks before the president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, had been hastily summoned to Washington in late March and, with war imminent, dispatched at once to England to establish high-level contacts with the U.S. Navy’s counterparts in the British Admiralty.

Upon his arrival in London, Sims was immediately ushered in to see Admiral John Jellicoe, the first sea lord. The two admirals had known each other for years, having first crossed paths in China in 1901, and Sims found the British admiral the same calm, imperturbable, frank, and approachable man he remembered, “all courtesy, all brain,” betraying none of the immense burdens his job carried. British newspapers had been full of vaguely reassuring statements suggesting that the German U-boat offensive had already proved a failure and, as Sims would observe in the coming days, “this same atmosphere of cheerful ignorance” prevailed “everywhere in London society.” After a few preliminary pleasantries, the first sea lord took a paper out of his desk and handed it to Sims. “I never imagined anything so terrible,” Sims would recall. It was a record of actual British and neutral tonnage lost since the unrestricted U-boat campaign had begun, and it was a disaster. Sinkings had surpassed 500,000 tons a month in February and March; they would hit 900,000 tons in April if the current rate of destruction held. Sims, astonished, said that it looked like the Germans were winning the war. Jellicoe agreed. “They will win, unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon.”

“Is there no solution?”

“Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe replied.
²¹

Actually there was a solution: Jellicoe himself had vetoed it. Jellicoe had arrived at the Admiralty the previous December determined to shake up the antisubmarine effort. Until then there was no single command responsible for the British response to the U-boats, and the new first sea lord moved swiftly to take charge and establish a new Anti-Submarine Division. A week later a new man arrived at 10 Downing Street equally determined to put new life into the British war effort: the venerable Liberal David Lloyd George had been chosen to take the helm of the national unity government in the face of waning confidence in Prime Minister Henry Asquith. Impressed by a cabinet paper arguing the effectiveness of convoying merchant ships as a way to protect them from submarine attack, Lloyd George pressed Jellicoe to look into the idea as the first appalling sinking statistics began to arrive in February 1917.

Convoys were not, however, what Jellicoe had in mind. He thought they were impractical and ineffective, and the Admiralty’s experts concurred: “It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being enabled to attack successfully, and the greater the difficulty of the escort in preventing such an attack.” Actually,
exactly
the opposite was the case; but Jellicoe was also swayed by the fact that the merchant shippers themselves opposed the idea, and at a conference at the Admiralty on February 23, 1917, both the navy men and ten merchant sea officers summoned to discuss the matter all agreed that merchant ships could not possibly manage to keep station in a large, zigzagging convoy. There were undeniable challenges in seamanship involved, but the shippers also just disliked the delays and nuisance of waiting for a convoy to assemble and having to sail under Admiralty orders, and navy officers disliked the idea of being reduced to ferrying a bunch of tubs back and forth across the ocean.
²²

But Sims was a firm believer in convoys and he began to “emphatically” press the matter, too. Sims pointed out that “sailing vessels in groups, and escorting them by warships, is almost as old as naval warfare itself.” He pointedly added that the British navy already implicitly recognized the principle of convoying when it came to protecting their own battle fleets from submarines: battleships never moved without an accompanying destroyer screen shielding them. But his clinching argument was that a limited convoy
system—euphemistically termed “controlled sailings”—had already been introduced at French insistence in February for colliers supplying coal to France, and had been a clear-cut success. Eight hundred colliers a month made the journey; in escorted convoys from February to April a total of five ships had been sunk by U-boats.
²³

Lloyd George quickly discovered that the American admiral was an ally and had several lengthy discussions with Sims, then began pressing his “Lord High Admirals” (as he sarcastically referred to the Admiralty Board in his subsequent memoirs) even harder, finally announcing on April 25 that he would visit the Admiralty and personally straighten out the matter. The admirals’ most consistent objection had been that with 5,000 shipping movements a week at British ports, it was simply a numerical impossibility to organize convoys and provide escorts for them all. It turned out that the figure was a ridiculous exaggeration, arrived at only by counting every coming and going of vessels of every description. The actual number of large oceangoing ships that arrived and departed each week was 300. “The blunder on which their policy was based,” Lloyd George would later write of the Admiralty’s resistance to convoys, “was based on an arithmetical mix-up which would not have been perpetrated by an ordinary clerk in a shipping office.”
²⁴

The institution of convoys over the next several months was nothing short of a revolution. Karl Dönitz, in his memoirs, recalled the sudden wind taken out of the U-boat offensive, “robbed of its opportunity to become a decisive factor”:

By the summer of 1918, sinkings had fallen to less than 300,000 tons a month.
²⁶

———

ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1918,
British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops launched a huge assault against the last German defensive position on the Western Front, a twenty-five-mile-deep system of fortifications and redoubts running through northern France known as the Hindenburg Line. German morale both at the front and at home was on the verge of total collapse. Three days later Ludendorff informed the astonished Kaiser and civilian leaders of the government—who up until then had heard nothing to make them doubt the inevitability of a German victory—that the army was defeated and Germany must seek an armistice without a moment’s delay if the empire was to be saved; the Kaiser must also immediately decree a parliamentary constitution to avert a revolution at home. Several days of confusion followed as the chancellor resigned and the government was without a leader capable of making a decision. On October 2 the high command’s demand that the civilian government sue for peace became a virtual ultimatum. An aide sent by Ludendorff put the situation starkly: “We cannot win the war … we must make up our minds to abandon further prosecution of the war as hopeless.”

Ludendorff would later try to throw all of the blame for Germany’s surrender upon the civilian government, writing in his memoirs that he was “unable to understand how the idea ever arose that I said that the front would break if we did not have an armistice in twenty-four hours.” In fact the idea came from Ludendorff’s own increasingly panicked messages, including one which stated that “every twenty-four hours that pass may make our position worse, and give the enemy a clearer view of our present weakness,” with “the most disastrous consequences.” When the new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden—the Kaiser’s second cousin and the only liberal-minded member of the royal family—balked, suggesting that such a precipitous offer of an armistice, coming so completely out of the blue, would itself have the air of capitulation, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were adamant that no delay could be tolerated: the military situation demanded an end to the fighting at once. The next day the government drafted a note stating that Germany was prepared to accept Wilson’s Fourteen Points and requesting an immediate armistice and peace negotiations. (Ludendorff would later claim that he thought the message should have had “a more manly wording.”)
²⁷

Over the next five weeks British and Commonwealth troops won a series of smashing victories, breaking through the final Hindenburg Line defenses on October 5 and then rolling forward five to ten miles a day as they captured
thousands of prisoners and hundreds of enemy guns. In later years, amid the postwar mood of disillusionment and pacifism, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig would be remembered to history almost entirely as the man responsible for the disaster of the Somme, thus becoming the archetype of the unimaginative general who mindlessly sent millions to their slaughter. Few historians would deign to acknowledge that he was also the architect, in those final weeks, of the Allies’ victory; or that with the breakthrough had come a return not just of mobile warfare but of the kind of battlefield heroism that every generation before and since rightly venerated. The advance rolled on and on, beating off frequent German counterattacks and desperate rearguard actions. In a scene right out of medieval warfare, the New Zealand Division scaled the ramparts of the ancient walled city of Le Quesnoy on ladders to rout a sizable German force holding out inside, taking 2,500 prisoners and more than 100 guns.

Well aware it would be all but impossible to resume fighting once the guns ceased firing, President Wilson insisted that an armistice incorporate all key Allied terms; so the fighting raged on as notes were exchanged between Berlin and Washington. The continuation of the U-boat campaign in the meanwhile threatened to scuttle the negotiations altogether. In the first two weeks of October, U-boats off Ireland torpedoed two passenger ships, taking more than 800 lives and setting off a rage of indignation in Britain and America that left the Allies in no mood to grant concessions. On October 14 Wilson delivered a withering reply to the latest German peace proposal, stating that the United States would never consent to an armistice “so long as the armed forces of Germany continue the illegal and inhuman practices which they still persist in” even as they were professing to seek peace. Finally, on October 20, the German government agreed to halt the U-boat campaign. Ludendorff would term “this concession to Wilson” the “heaviest blow” to the morale of the German armed forces.
²⁸