Castles of Steel (140 page)

[The circumstances of these deaths were particularly grim.
Laconia
was first torpedoed at 10:30 at night. Twenty minutes after the first torpedo struck, and as the passengers were taking to the lifeboats, the U-boat captain fired a second torpedo. The lifeboat holding the two American women and seventeen other passengers scraped down the side of ship as it was lowered, and it arrived in the water, said Wesley Frost, the American consul at Queenstown, Ireland, “leaking like a basket. It filled with water instantly but was buoyed up by air-tanks under its thwarts. . . . [It] drifted away through a chilling drizzle, coasting the twelve-foot ocean swells in the black darkness. . . . As the night wore on, two American ladies found it necessary to stand continuously on their feet, so deep had settled the water-logged boat. These ladies were Mrs. Mary Hoy of Chicago and her daughter, Miss Elizabeth Hoy . . . proceeding to London to join Mrs. Hoy’s husband and son.

“At half past one o’clock . . . gray-haired Mrs. Hoy sank down and tucked her head back like a tired child and entered the last sleep. After this, Miss Elizabeth Hoy’s mind seemed to be unhinged. She kept chafing the hands of the stiffening remains of her mother and pouring endearments into those deaf ears, until an hour later a merciful heaven released her overtaxed spirit in its turn. . . . When the wan dawn suffused the winter sea, the eleven survivors found themselves shipmates with eight staring corpses.”]

Arthur Zimmermann, the new foreign minister of the German empire, was “a very jolly sort of large German,” said Ambassador Gerard. Zimmermann once had crossed America by train, spending two days in San Francisco and three days in New York. In Berlin, this qualified him as an expert on American affairs equivalent to Bernstorff, who had spent eight years in the United States. The former chancellor Bernhard von Bülow was unimpressed by his newly promoted countryman. Zimmermann, he said, “is filled with the best of intentions, one of those Germans who mean well, whose industry is unquestionable, whose virtues are solid and apparent, an excellent fellow who would have done very good and useful work had he stayed in the consular service. He might have done even better as a public prosecutor. People would have greeted him on all sides as he came every morning to take his aperitif at the local hotel, ‘Good morning. Good health, Your Honor.’ ”

In Berlin, Zimmermann liked to speak bluntly. During the
Lusitania
crisis, when he was still Jagow’s deputy, he reminded Gerard of the large German-American population in the United States. “The United States does not dare to do anything against Germany because we have five hundred thousand German reservists in America who will rise in arms against your government if it should dare to take any action against Germany,” he said, striking the table with his fist. “I told him,” the ambassador replied, “that we have five hundred and one thousand lamp posts in America and that is where the German reservists would find themselves if they tried any uprising.” During the
Sussex
affair, Zimmermann said to a group of German reporters, “Gentlemen, there is no use wasting words about Mr. Wilson’s shamelessness and impudence, but we have torn the mask from his face.” Now, confronting another submarine crisis, Zimmermann was confident that he could handle the Americans. Germany, he assured Gerard, would not begin unrestricted submarine warfare without first reaching an understanding with America. At a grand dinner on January 6, assembled at the Hotel Adlon by the American Chamber of Commerce to honor Ambassador Gerard, the ambassador told the guests that “relations between the two countries had never been better” and that “so long as such men as . . . Hindenburg and Ludendorff . . . Müller . . . Holtzendorff and State Secretary Zimmermann are at the head of the civil, military and naval services in Germany, it will undoubtedly be possible to keep these good relations intact.”

Behind his mask of bonhomie, however, the jolly Zimmermann was concocting something unpleasant for his American friend. During the weeks following the Pless decision, the foreign minister looked for ways to contribute to the coming submarine campaign. He came up with an extraordinary scheme designed to keep America occupied on her own side of the Atlantic once the U-boats began sinking American ships. On the chance that war might come between the United States and Germany, he proposed to arrange in advance a Mexican-German alliance that would pledge Mexico to invade the United States. Mexico was to be lured into this folly by the assurance that following a German victory she would be restored her lost territories of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In addition, Mexico was to work diligently to persuade Japan to join the alliance. To assure rapid, secure communication with Mexico City, Zimmermann decided to make use of the State Department cable that Wilson had made available to Bernstorff for communicating American peace proposals to Berlin. Bernstorff, of course, had promised that this channel would be used only for this purpose, but Zimmermann saw no need to honor the ambassador’s word. On January 16, the German foreign minister sent a coded message on the American cable through Washington to German minister Eckhardt in Mexico:

We intend to begin unrestricted submarine warfare on the first of February. We shall endeavor in spite of this to keep the United States neutral. In the event of this not succeeding, we make Mexico a proposal of alliance on the following basis: Make war together, make peace together, generous financial support, and an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you.

You will inform the president [of Mexico] of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the United States is certain and add the suggestion that he should, on his own initiative, invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves.

Please call the [Mexican] president’s attention to the fact that the unrestricted employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England to make peace within a few months. Zimmermann.

The telegram arrived at the Department of State in Washington on January 17 and was delivered, still in code, to Bernstorff at the German embassy. Bernstorff decoded and read his information copy and, having no choice, forwarded the original to Mexico. Meanwhile, the telegram, promptly decoded, was also in the hands of Room 40.

For nineteen days, the Zimmermann telegram lay in an Admiralty safe, awaiting the moment when it could be discreetly handed to the Americans. The problem was how to present the telegram without revealing to the Americans—and thereby, through leaks, perhaps informing the Germans—that Britain had broken the German code. On February 5, two days after the American diplomatic rupture with Germany, Admiral William Reginald Hall, Room 40’s chief, decided he could wait no longer and took the decoded telegram to the Foreign Office. Balfour read it and knew that the Allied cause had been blessed. On February 23, the British foreign secretary formally presented the Zimmermann telegram to Walter Page, the American ambassador, who transmitted it to Washington. When Lansing, who had sensed all along that the Germans could not be trusted, told the president how the Zimmermann telegram had been sent, Wilson clutched his head and cried out, “Good Lord! Good Lord!”

The president held the telegram only a single day. On February 28, while a bill authorizing the arming of American merchant ships was being debated in the House of Representatives, he gave it to the press. Next day, March 1,
The New York Times
announced, “Germany Seeks Alliance Against U.S.: Asks Japan and Mexico to Join Her.” The news that the German government was conniving to slice off and give away pieces of the United States enraged the American public and in a surge of patriotic emotion the armed merchant-ship bill passed the House, 403–13. Even so, eleven pacifist senators, led by Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, filibustered and on March 4, Congress adjourned without passing the legislation. Wilson immediately did what he could have done weeks before: he used his executive authority to issue an order to arm American merchantmen. The question of the telegram’s authenticity was resolved on March 3 when Zimmermann, believing by now that it made no difference whether America was hostile, freely acknowledged authorship.

For another month, Wilson and the country awaited the “overt act.” On March 12, the American steamer
Algonquin
was sunk by gunfire; the crew escaped and reached land after twenty-seven hours in open boats. On March 18, three American merchant ships, the
Illinois, City of Memphis,
and
Vigilancia,
were torpedoed without warning; fifteen members of
Vigilancia
’s crew were lost. “If he does not go to war,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote privately to Henry Cabot Lodge, “I shall skin him alive.” Still, for another two weeks, the president waited. At a Cabinet meeting on March 20, he went around the table, asking each member for advice. The unanimous recommendation was war, but Wilson gave no hint of his own opinion. The following day, he summoned Congress to a special session on April 2 to hear “a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.”

It was raining in Washington that evening when the president drove to the Capitol. His car was surrounded by a squadron of cavalry provided at the insistence of Lansing and the Attorney General, who worried that a “fanatical pro-German, [an] anarchist or pacifist” might attempt an assassination. “I shall never forget it,” wrote Ambassador Spring-Rice. “The Capitol was illuminated from below—white against a black sky. I sat on the floor of Congress. The president came in, and in a perfectly calm, deliberate voice, he recited by word and deed what Germany had said and done.” “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” Wilson said. “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission.” He asked formal acknowledgment that “the status of belligerent has been thrust upon us,” and then went on to say, “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war. But the right is more precious than peace. The world must be made safe for democracy. The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth. God helping her, she can do no other.” Congress debated and on April 4, the Senate voted for war, 82–6. On April 6, the House confirmed the decision, 373–50.

It had happened as the American president, the German chancellor, and the German ambassador to Washington had feared: the decision to begin a new unrestricted submarine campaign had brought America into the war.

CHAPTER 36
The Defeat of the U-boats

Between February and April 1917, the massacre of merchant shipping in the waters around the British Isles began in earnest and Admiral Holtz-endorff’s promise that Britain would be starved into surrender seemed on its way to realization. Holtzendorff had said that sinking 600,000 tons a month would suffice for the purpose. The February figure, 520,000 tons, approached Holtzendorff’s goal; the March figure, 564,000 tons, was closer still. In April, the figure soared above the German admiral’s most extravagant hope: 860,000 tons of shipping were destroyed. These losses, which included neutral ships, so intimidated many Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish captains that, in February alone, 600 neutral merchantmen in British ports refused to sail.

Three great trade routes brought goods and raw materials into Great Britain. One of these came up the Irish Sea from the southwest to Liverpool and Bristol; another lay around the north of Ireland, thence down to Liverpool; a third came into the Channel and up to Southampton and other Channel ports. The focal point for most of this trade lay in what the Royal Navy called the Western Approaches: the wide expanse of waters between Lands End, the Irish coast, and the Bay of Biscay. It was here that the U-boats were creating, in Churchill’s words, “a veritable cemetery of British shipping.” The agents responsible for filling this cemetery were about 130 U-boats, of which fewer than half were at sea at any given moment. By now, two and a half years into the war, early submarines like the one that had sunk
Bacchan-te
’s three sisters were antiques. The undersea craft now operating in the Western Approaches were 240 feet long, displaced 820 tons, and carried a 4.1-inch deck gun, six torpedo tubes, and sixteen torpedoes. They could remain at sea for four to six weeks. Submarines fitted as minelayers transported from thirty-six to forty-two mines. In addition, smaller U-boats 100 feet long with a surface speed of 8 knots, carrying two tubes and four torpedoes, were based in Flanders and operated in the Channel and the North Sea. These small submarines were prefabricated in Germany and brought in sections by rail to Bruges, in Belgium, where they were assembled; from Bruges, they traveled by canal to Zeebrugge and Ostend, and from there they put to sea.

Britain’s first lines of defense against these enemies were layers of mines and nets laid and strung across the Channel and in the German Bight. Once the submarines reached the high seas, the Royal Navy relied on surface ships, primarily destroyers, to defeat them. British destroyers, designed to attack enemy surface warships, could churn the water at 34 knots, far in excess of the 15 to 17 knots a surfaced submarine could make, but once submerged, the submarine was safe. A modern U-boat could travel as much as eighty miles under water before having to come up, and no destroyer—or sloop, trawler, or yacht pressed into service against the U-boats—could know where that would be.

Inability to attack a submerged enemy was only part of the problem involving British destroyers. Another complication was that there were too few of them. The British navy simply did not possess enough destroyers to screen the Grand Fleet, maintain the Harwich Force, secure the Channel crossings, and simultaneously protect merchant shipping from submarines. In April 1917, Britain had in commission about 260 destroyers, many old and badly worn after three years of service. The best 100 were assigned to the Grand Fleet, and no one wished to send the dreadnoughts into battle without their protective screen. Even so, in February 1917, Beatty reluctantly permitted eight destroyers to be borrowed from the Grand Fleet for antisubmarine work in southern waters. From every other station, the admirals or commodores in charge chorused that their flotillas could not be stripped without compromising their missions: the Harwich Force covered the southern North Sea and the Dutch coast; the Dover Patrol confronted thirty German U-boats and thirty destroyers based in Flanders; military expeditions in Greece and the Middle East required destroyers to guard their transports and supply ships. Nor was there much hope from new construction: Britain was producing destroyers at a rate of only four or five per month, a rate the shipyards said could not increase for many months.