Dönitz: The Last Führer (8 page)

It was fairly clear what was going on and both France and Russia hugely stepped up their military programmes in response. This alarmed the Army; by the end of May 1914 von Moltke had become very anxious indeed—so he told the Foreign Minister. In two or three years’ time the military superiority of their enemies would be so great that he did not know how he could cope with them. In his opinion there was no alternative to launching a preventive war while there was still a chance of victory. He asked the Minister ‘to gear policy to an early unleashing of a war’.
⁵⁵

Relations with England had improved meanwhile, since the focus had shifted from the dreadnought building competition, and when news of the murder at Sarajevo came on June 28th it was possible to hope that here was the pretext needed for a continental war which England, with her Liberal, humanitarian government containing several proclaimed pacifists, would not enter. It was not, however, a moment for reason; war had become a psychological necessity and it was a time for that touch of madness—that steeling oneself for the leap into the unknown, necessary at times in human affairs. To the ministers, ‘haunted by the nightmare of internal chaos and external defeat, war seemed the only way out of the deadlock’.
⁵⁶

For Wilhelm himself, shocked by the murder and in a high state of emotion, the existence of the Austrian Empire was at stake; it was time
for the Serbs to be ‘straightened out’ once and for all.
⁵⁷
When his ministers urged the Austrians to do this and the Austrian Emperor sought clarification, Wilhelm assured him of unconditional German support. He was playing up to the war-lord image expected; he also wanted to believe the war could be localized. Tirpitz, on holiday, received a letter from his ‘ears’ in Berlin saying that HM did not think it very likely that Russia would help Serbia because the Tsar would not wish to support regicides and Russia was not yet ready militarily or financially; the same was true of France. ‘HM did not speak of England.’
⁵⁸
Whatever plane the Kaiser was inhabiting, on any rational consideration it was evident that Russia could not afford to allow her client Serbia to be overrun by Austria without losing her whole position in the Balkans. She had made this very clear after the previous crisis: she would consider an attack on Serbia as a
casus belli
—‘
une question de vie et de mort’.
⁵⁹

So in alternating realism and wishful thinking, optimism and doubt and increasing high nervous tension, as in any great conspiracy, the secret preparations went ahead in Berlin and Vienna behind a façade of normality and calm deliberately created to prevent alerting the other powers prematurely. Meanwhile the fleet was put on a war footing. Of the Mediterranean ships, the
Goeben
, which had not been in dock for two years and whose speed was seriously affected by boiler trouble, had been ordered to Pola in the Adriatic and workmen and materials were sent overland from Germany for the necessary repairs. Cruisers on foreign stations were alerted to the state of tension.
⁶⁰

Dönitz, as signals officer of the
Breslau
, must have been aware of the alert. In common with all other German naval officers who wrote of this period, he made no mention of it in his memoirs. To outward appearances there was no change in the international squadron lying off Durazzo; occasionally the
Breslau
’s landing parties went ashore to repel insurgents, from time to time in off-duty hours a
Breslau
team played
Wasserball
against a team from HMS
Defence
, yet ‘the continually increasing tension lay like a shadow overall’.
⁶¹
This is a revealing sentence if it refers to July as a whole for in accordance with the German policy of complete normality until the very moment to strike, the only ‘constantly increasing tension’ was in Berlin and Vienna and aboard the
Hohenzollern
and the ships of the High Seas Fleet on exercises in the North Sea and in Tirpitz’s hideaway in the Black Forest—and aboard the
Breslau
, now the only Imperial warship in operational
condition in the Mediterranean, and anchored close by a British heavy cruiser!

The British position was an enigma. In Berlin the Foreign Ministry pondered the question with the chief of the Admiralty staff: ‘How would it be if we threatened England that if she declared against us we would occupy Holland? How would the Admiralty staff evaluate that?’
⁶²

Tirpitz received a report of this conversation, which could not have reassured him about the competence of the diplomats in charge of the game, and in the same post a letter informing him that Austria would deliver a note to Serbia on July 23rd: ‘Private information over its tone differs. Zimmermann thinks Serbia cannot swallow it.’
⁶³
Tirpitz underlined the final words. The letter went on to say that the German Ambassadors in St Petersburg, London and Paris would go into action on the same day to call for localization of the conflict; evidently it was believed Serbia would not swallow it.

The Austrian note was delivered as planned while the French President and Premier were at sea on their way home from a visit to Russia and just a few hours out of Kronstadt. As the deliberately humiliating terms and extraordinarily short time for reply became known in the European capitals and the German Ambassadors went into their prepared professions of surprise and complete ignorance of the ultimatum, and sought to advise their host governments of the ‘inestimable consequences’ which might arise as a result of the alliance system if they were to become involved, it was clear that Bebel’s forecast was about to be fulfilled and they were ‘on the eve of the most dreadful war Europe has ever seen’.

The British Foreign Secretary tried desperately to pull the powers back from the edge and into another international conference, but the timetable of the central powers admitted no delay. On July 28th Austria declared war on Serbia, then one after another—although not without prodding from Berlin—the links of the alliance machinery began to clank together. Finally by July 29th only a few large questions remained: would Italy join the central powers, which way would Turkey jump, and above all would England come in?

On the same day the British Admiralty sent out the ‘Warning Telegram’ to all ships. Aboard the
Breslau
before Durazzo they saw their British neighbour weigh and take up another position far to seawards out of torpedo range. That night she disappeared. She made no signal, ‘let alone a personal leave-taking as she broke the long lying-time
together. With that the change of our relationship to England became obvious’.
⁶⁴

In Pola, meanwhile, the crew of the
Goeben
had been assisting the dockyard men sent out from Germany and, working around the clock in the fierce heat below decks, had replaced 4,000 defective tubes in the battlecruiser’s boilers in eighteen days. She sailed down the Adriatic on the 30th, and late on the 31st Admiral Souchon ordered the
Breslau
by wireless to Messina in Sicily, calling on the way at Brindisi to organize colliers for a rendezvous at sea. The cruiser sailed secretly that night, arriving at Brindisi in the early hours of August 1st. Dönitz had been chosen to make the coaling arrangements with the German consul and, after he had been put ashore, the cruiser continued on her way; he was to be picked up later by the
Goeben
.

It was a close, heavy summer’s night as he walked through the silent streets looking for the Consul’s residence. Finding it eventually, he made his way in to an inner courtyard—it was an old palace—but found he had to shout to rouse the household. At length a man appeared on one of the balconies demanding angrily who it was; when he saw the naval uniform his manner changed. ‘His first question, which he put to me without knowing what I wanted of him at such an early morning hour, was: would England take part in the coming war or not?’
⁶⁵

After a morning spent in arrangements for the colliers, Dönitz had lunch with the Consul and his family, then went down to the harbour and sat alone on the outer mole gazing out to sea, gnawed by fears that the
Goeben
might be diverted and might not be able to pick him up; he would have to spend the war in Italy instead of in the fighting with his ‘beloved
Breslau
’. Late in the afternoon she appeared, ‘God be thanked …’and he went aboard and reported the success of his mission to Souchon.
⁶⁶

She sailed that night, steering south-west for the toe of Italy. The following morning, August 2nd, was fine and hot; the sea flashed and glittered under a blue sky cut grandly to starboard by the heights of Calabria. Rounding Cape Spartivento with Mount Etna ahead shimmering in a heat haze, she steered up for Messina; soon the masts and funnels of the
Breslau
could be made out amongst the assembled shipping; Dönitz transferred to her as soon as they were moored.

By now it had become clear that Italy was not going to come in on the German side; it was also clear that the German squadron was not going to have the support of the Austrian fleet on which Souchon had counted. He had come to Messina to carry out an agreed plan for a joint strike
against transports which would carry army units from North Africa back to mainland France, but now he was alone. No doubt it was because of the question mark over England’s intentions, but it left his two ships dangerously exposed to the British Mediterranean squadron headed by three battlecruisers, now concentrated at Malta, barely 150 miles to the south.

In Berlin, meanwhile, Wilhelm had collapsed. Monstrous reality had forced itself in, distorted as it was in his egocentric view: ‘as a reward for keeping our pledges we get set upon and
beaten
by the Triple Entente as a body so that their longing to ruin us completely can be finally satisfied’.
⁶⁷
Up to this point France had done her utmost to give no provocation, but von Moltke’s heavy artillery and troop trains were precisely timetabled; the Chancellor had been forced to dash off a note to Paris to legalize the declaration of war necessary on the next day.

Souchon, informed of the situation by cable, made the extraordinarily bold decision to strike against the French transports with his squadron alone. The ships were cleared for action, boats, wooden furniture and other inflammables offloaded into a German passenger liner which had been diverted to the harbour because of the threatening situation, while reluctant Italians were prodded by the German Embassy into providing coal. At last at dusk the lighters arrived and coaling began in an atmosphere of feverish excitement.

Coaling was completed at midnight. An hour later, after washing down, the two ships weighed and left, steering with screened lights first north, then westerly for a position between Sardinia and the French North African coast. After sunrise any smoke seen on the horizon caused them to make large alterations away.

In London that day the government was at last able to unite on the decision that honour—because of its obligations to France—and self-interest both dictated; for the King of Belgium had appealed for help against German violation of his country’s neutrality. The Foreign Secretary told a packed House of Commons that he did not believe that if
Great Britain stood aside she would at the end of the war be in a position to undo what had happened, ‘to prevent the whole of the west of Europe opposite to us—if that had been the result of the war—falling under the domination of a single power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect’.
⁶⁹
He carried the House, and afterwards composed a simple ultimatum to the German government timed to expire at midnight (Berlin time) on the next day, August 4th: unless the invasion were halted Britain would be at war with Germany.

The invasion could not be halted. The railways and strategically located sidings could not be moved, the plan was inflexible. France had to be crushed inside six weeks so that the effort could be shifted east against Russia before that ponderous colossus should overwhelm Austria and the few German divisions holding the East Prussian borders.

Nevertheless the ultimatum came as a profound shock. Until then all had gone well; the new-found unity of the nation was a particular success. Socialist leaders who had been denouncing the ‘patriotic’ parties and war only a week before had been wooed by ministers and had submitted without a struggle, suddenly discovering that they were, before everything, Germans. They had swung round almost
en bloc
, declaring in the
Reichstag
that the war was a ‘just cause’ and plighting their union with the government. As if this was the moment for which they had been waiting, the people followed; everywhere was a fervent, fierce nationalism; for the time for reason was past. ‘Brilliant mood,’ the chief of Wilhelm’s naval cabinet had noted in his diary after the Russian declaration, ‘the government has succeeded very well in making us appear the attacked.’
⁷⁰

Wilhelm had roused himself temporarily to play up to the mood, but his private world dream had become a nightmare. Those who saw him after the British ultimatum were shocked at his appearance.

In the early hours of August 4th the
Goeben
and
Breslau
neared the Algerian coast, the battlecruiser steering for Philippville, the light cruiser for Bone.