The Great Cat Massacre (11 page)

At least that was the plan. It went somewhat wrong during embarkation when the crates with their equipment were clearly labelled ‘Indian Expeditionary Force B, Mombasa’, giving the local German spies a pretty good idea that their target was Tanga, just down the coast. If that wasn’t enough, the newspapers reported their destination; then there were the uncoded radio messages from the convoy to Mombasa, allowing the German residents of that town to tip off the authorities in Tanga. Just to make sure the Germans knew exactly when to expect them, the flotilla sailed along the coastline in full sight of land.

Ahead of the main convoy, the cruiser HMS
Fox
sailed into Tanga for a little chat. The captain, F.W. Cauldfield, asked the German commissioner if the harbour was mined. After thinking for a second, the German said that it was. Cauldfield, a trusting soul, took him at his word and spent a day and a half trawling the entirely un-mined harbour for explosives. The German commissioner took the time to put on his army uniform, run up the German flag and wander off to join his military unit.

Meanwhile, the British, beginning to think that German chappie might not have been telling the truth, decided to land their troops. For the task, they selected a landing site that turned out to be a swamp infested with deadly water snakes, tsetse flies and leeches.

The ensuing conflict didn’t go much better. On one battleground, at the sound of the first gun firing, the terrified Indian troops turned around and ran back to the water, paddling in up to their necks, where they floated about, waiting for something to happen. Slightly further
up, their brothers-in-arms were advancing through some trees when they disturbed a number of hives full of African wasps – a highly aggressive species, which attacked the men. They too turned around and ran back to the water, where they joined their comrades bobbing about in the sea. As one British officer remarked: ‘I would never have believed that grown-up men of any race could have been reduced to such shamelessness.’

After this, despite outnumbering the Germans eight-to-one, the invasion was called off and the forces returned to their ships, which sailed back to Mombasa. The invasion became known as the Battle of the Bees.

On the other hand, German intelligence could do an even worse job. In August 1914, a train full of soldiers arrived at a countryside station in England. The porter, a curious fellow, did what came naturally to him and asked the troops where they were from. ‘Ross-shire,’ one shouted down in reply. But here fate stepped in and instead whispered ‘Russia’ into the porter’s ear. And thus Germany lost the war.

There was, at the time, a belief that Russia, Britain’s ally in the war, was going to send troops via Britain to join the Western Front, and soon a rumour of Russian troops having arrived ‘with snow on their boots’ spread through Britain.

One of those who heard the rumour was Carl Hans Lody, who would become the first German spy to be executed during the war, and the first person to be
executed at the Tower of London since the Jacobite rebel Lord Lovat in 1747. He knew that Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, had been considering a scheme whereby Russian soldiers would be shipped to Scotland, and then be sent through England and on to support the Western Front. So, on 4 September, Lody sent a telegram to Berlin informing them that large numbers of Russian troops had landed in Aberdeen and would soon join the Allied troops.

The message was passed to General von Moltke of the German intelligence, who took the news badly and consequently held back two German divisions from the next day’s Battle of Marne as reserves in case the phantom Russian troops joined the fray. Those two divisions would probably have prevented the success of an Allied
counter-attack,
which sent the Germans into retreat, halting the advance on Paris and beginning the trench warfare phase of the war that led to Germany’s eventual defeat.

It is hard to think of any case in the whole of history where such a momentous event has been brought about by a single mis-heard word.

It raises the odd eyebrow to read just what was expected of British pilots during the First World War. Professionalism, training, decent equipment – all these were certainly ‘out’, while stiff upper lips, shiny boots and excellent family trees were very much ‘in’. Older gentlemen who had attended public schools were ‘OK’, whereas young men who would
be unable to translate Latin proverbs were ‘not OK’. As the editor of the leading journal
Aeroplane
explained in 1915: ‘There is an idiotic theory that a man is too old at 30 and that a howling little bounder of 20 is going to make a better officer aviator than a thoroughly sound sportsman of 32. The youngster, who may certainly fly more recklessly till his nerve breaks just as a mongrel dog will go yapping into a fight till he gets a damned good hiding, will never fly after a bad smash in the way the better class of man will do. Blood tells in a man as much as it does in a horse or a dog.’

This was the generally approved thinking of the Royal Flying Corps. Field Marshal Douglas Haig himself commented on the new-fangled flying thingummies: ‘I do hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think that aeroplanes will be able to be usefully employed for reconnaissance in the air. There is only one way for a commander to get information by reconnaissance and that is by the use of cavalry.’

Had anyone asked what the cavalry were supposed to do about reconnaissance on shipping – strap some planks to the underside of the horse and teach it to swim, perhaps – one wonders what answer Haig might have given. But the most brutal of mess-ups on the part of Haig and chaps of his ilk was the decision to deny British pilots parachutes. These were readily available
*
but the British command viewed it as ungentlemanly for a pilot to bale out and save his life when he could be much more sporting and smash
his body into a thousand parts on the ground. It was also believed that an exit strategy would make the pilots cowardly and interested in staying alive rather than killing the sausage-eaters.

Given that of the 14,166 British pilots who perished in the First World War, more than 8,000 died during training, it can only be surmised that those who saw their pals dying at their feet, even without an enemy in sight, and still volunteered to fly in combat must have had rather more courage than they were being credited with. Condemning them to death even as a result of a mechanical failure was not only harsh, it also robbed the British forces of the airmen so desperately needed and gave the German aerial forces a huge advantage.

One of the most infamous deeds of the First World War was the attack by a German submarine on the transatlantic passenger liner
Lusitania
– an event, more than any other, which brought the US into the war.

The ship sailing with 1,257 passengers from New York to London sank, but what truly angered the American public was that the attack was apparently planned by a cold-blooded Germany days in advance, rather than as a spur-of-the-moment decision. And the reason they thought this was a manufacturing error by a German jewellery maker.

The ship set sail on 1 May 1915. At the time, Germany had declared that it would attack any ship sailing for
Britain, even those flying neutral flags, such as the American one. In the US, the German embassy went so far as to advertise warnings in the newspapers – but the adverts didn’t appear until the day of departure, at which point few would have seen them or been prepared to alter their plans.

On 7 May the
Lusitania
was seen in Irish waters by the German sub
U20,
which shot a single torpedo and hit the boat. The ship went down in 18 minutes, with 1,198 lives lost; of them, 128 were Americans, resulting in US outrage when the news broke. The mood was summed up by the American magazine
The Nation,
which described the sinking as ‘a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a Barbary pirate apologise’.

Despite this pressure, America’s isolationist president Thomas Woodrow Wilson resisted public pressure to enter the war at Britain’s side. He insisted, with thin justification: ‘There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.’ Instead, he merely lodged a protest with the Germans.

Britain was angry at Wilson’s stance – at the Front, shells that did not explode were thenceforth named ‘Wilsons’. But things took a turn when, in August, a German manufacturer of medals struck a
Lusitania
medal to celebrate the sinking. And, importantly, the medal-maker, Karl Goetz, mistakenly emblazed the date 5 May on the medal, instead of 7 May. In Britain and America, this was taken as proof that there had been a plan all along to sink the ship.

In London, the director of Naval Intelligence, Reginald
‘Blinker’ Hall, seized on this proof of bosch treachery and ordered 300,000 copies of the medal to be struck in Britain (by Harry Selfridge who founded the eponymous department store), with the date translated into English to make sure everyone understood the point. These were then distributed in neutral nations across the world to show how Germany had planned for days to sink a civilian liner from a neutral country and was celebrating the bloodshed.

The
Lusitania
had turned US public opinion against Germany, but, if there was one man responsible for finally drawing the United States into the fray, then his name was Arthur Zimmermann.

By January 1917, the war was at a stalemate; the opposing sides were dug in and, with President Wilson still opposed to entering the conflict, there was no end in sight. But in April something happened to so infuriate Wilson that he declared war on Germany: Arthur Zimmermann sent a telegram along the wrong wire.

Zimmermann was Germany’s Foreign Minister. When he was appointed in 1916, America had liked him –
The New York Evening Post
ran a profile headlined ‘Our friend Zimmermann’, and, having once visited America, Zimmermann felt he knew its character and what the people were all about.

His strategy, though, was not just to maintain friendship with America. It was to bring Mexico into the war on the German side, and to persuade Japan – up until then an ally
of Britain – to switch teams. He desperately wanted to keep America out of the war, but, if the US did join the fight, then he wanted a deal with Mexico and Japan such that they would declare war on America and tie up its military forces. In return, he would offer to help Mexico recapture land it had lost to its northern neighbour. Mexico joining in would, he hoped, be enough to persuade Japan.

Direct communication with Mexico was the hard part since the negotiations obviously had to be top secret. His first plan was to send a letter by submarine to the German ambassador in Mexico, asking him to put the deal to the Mexicans, but the submarine voyage was cancelled at the last minute. Zimmermann therefore switched to plan B – sending the message by encrypted telegram along America’s own transatlantic cable, which passed through Britain and then on to Germany. The telegram would go to the US State Department, which would pass it to the German ambassador in Washington, DC, and he would then send it on to Mexico. Although Britain and America could ‘eavesdrop’ on the message, it would be encrypted and therefore safe to send. He believed this because he thought German codes – and intelligence – far superior to that of the British or the Americans.

In fact, British Naval Intelligence was already reading Germany’s messages at will so when the message fell into their laps, they saw a missive which stated:

Britain casually brought the contents of the message to President Wilson’s attention. He was, understandably, apoplectic and released the message to the press.

The Germans had one extremely simple strategy that might have neutralised the problem: they could have claimed the message was a fake dreamed up by the devious British in Whitehall. It would have been easy to do and there was no way of proving it either way. Zimmermann, however, seems to have been on a one-man mission to undermine the German war effort and publicly admitted that he had sent the message.

After the resulting publicity, even Wilson could no longer keep the US neutral. He told a joint session of Congress to ‘declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and the people of the United States’ and to state America ‘formally accept the status of belligerent’, i.e. war. The telegram, he announced, showed that Germany ‘means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors, the
intercepted note to the German Minister in Mexico is eloquent evidence’.

Four days later, America did indeed declare war. Mexico stayed out of it.

The K-Class subs were Britain’s answer to intelligence that Germany was building a fleet of huge submarines capable of 22 knots. There were two problems with this: first, the reports were false and, second, the K-Class subs were more lethal to British sailors than the German Navy. Of the 18 built, six sank in accidents and only one ever engaged a German vessel, firing a torpedo that failed to detonate. They became known as ‘Kalamity Class’.