The Only Sensible Course

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

The Only Sensible Course

David Clark

July 2003

Part I

“Our Deadliest Peril”

The Undersea Challenge

The initial role planned by the German Admiralstab for the U-boats in 1914 was purely defensive. They were to fight the expected close blockade forces of the Royal Navy. Only when the British fleet did not appear, as expected, off the German coast did they begin to look for an alternative employment. During the first months of the war, U-boats sank several major British warships including the battleship Formidable on New Year’s Day, 1915 but only a token number of merchant ships. All attacks on commerce were conducted in conformance with the existing Prize Regulations which specified that target vessels must be ordered to stop and given a chance to transfer their crew and passengers into lifeboats before being sunk.

By 1915 the Germans were considering a new tactic. As the Royal Navy’s distant blockade of Germany took hold, Admiral von Pohl argued for the use of the submarines to create a counter blockade of England. This would only be possible if the U-boats were permitted by their orders to sink ships without warning. Gradually Pohl won over the Admiralstab and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to the view that the chances of a decisive success outweighed the political risks of provoking the neutral nations, particularly the United States.

The unrestricted U-boat campaign began on February 22, 1915. It achieved considerable success but fell far short of expectations. This was primarily due to the small number of U-boats available at this time to prosecute the campaign. The daily average number of U-boats at sea from March through September of 1915 was only 7.3 out of a total fleet of 35. Balanced against the toll of British shipping sunk were the very strong protests of President Wilson and the United States government. After the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7 the Germans promised to refrain from attacks on passenger ships. Nonetheless on August 19 the U24 sank the White Star liner Arabic and on September 6, U20 sank the liner Hesperian. The United States threatened war and the Germans responded by withdrawing all U-boats from the English Channel and South-Western Approaches on September 18. The first offensive against shipping was over.

The British response to the U-boat threat had been to take the offensive themselves. They mobilized a vast fleet of destroyers, submarines, Q ships, and patrol craft to actively search for and destroy the U-boats at sea. The results in 1915 were meager accounting for only 11 U-boats through September. The idea of using convoys to protect shipping, which had been used for centuries during the Age of Sail, was rejected as “defensive minded thinking”. In addition it was presumed to be inefficient because all the ships in the convoy would be tied to the speed of the slowest ship and they would clog the ports by all arriving at the same time.

In 1915 the Germans began to dispatch U-boats to the Mediterranean. The initial objective was to provide support for the Turks in the Dardanelles. With the exception of two small boats that were shipped overland in pieces (UB3 and UB4) the German submarines had to make the lengthy passage around Spain and through the Straits of Gibraltar. The first to arrive at an Austrian port was U21 on May 13. U21 proceeded to score quickly sinking the battleship Triumph on May 25 and then the battleship Majestic on May 27.

Beginning in September the Germans broadened the scope of operations to a campaign against commerce noting that a large proportion of British trade (including 99 per cent of the tea) passed through the Mediterranean. They proved to be remarkably successful, in part due to the talents of several stellar submarine captains. Operating in largely in conformity with the Prize Regulations a mere five U-boats based in Pola and Cattaro sank 70 merchant ships totaling 293,423 tons in the last three months of 1915. By comparison the U-boats of the High Seas Fleet and Flanders flotillas, also under the Prize Regulations, achieved only 55 sinkings for 65,003 tons during the same period.

One curious situation developed since Germany, in 1915, was not yet at war with Italy. Unwilling to pass up opportunities because of such technicalities, the German submarine commanders carried two sets of flags and waited to declare their own nationality until after the nationality of the target had been determined. This also had the effect of showing the Austrian flag throughout the Mediterranean when in fact Austrian submarines rarely ventured out of the Adriatic. This ultimately provoked a diplomatic crisis when U38 sank the Italian liner Ancona on November 7 while flying the Austrian flag. The American Secretary of State called for action at this new loss of American lives. The Austrians dutifully stepped forward and took responsibly for the sinking.

To counter the submarine menace in the Mediterranean, the Allies convened a conference on November 29 in Paris. It produced an agreement to divide the Mediterranean in eighteen patrol zones, allocated to the French, Italian, and British navies. The results of offensive patrolling by hundreds of vessels in the Mediterranean were woeful. By the beginning of March, 1916 not a single German U-boat had been lost in the Mediterranean. It was against this sorry backdrop that a conference was called in Malta to revisit the agreements of the previous December for the defense of shipping.

The Malta Conference opened on March 2 with representatives from the French and Italian navies and Rear Admirals Limpus, Senior Naval Officer at Malta, and de Robeck, who had commanded the British naval forces in the Dardanelles campaign, present for the British. The admirals again condemned the notion of providing escorts for shipping and devoted themselves to refining the scheme for patrolling. Some of the patrol zones were consolidated and the British assumed full responsibility for the Aegean and most of the eastern Mediterranean. Everyone promised to supply the required patrol vessels “as quickly as possible”.

Rear Admiral Wemyss, the Senior Naval Officer at Mudros, was unable to attend the Malta conference because of pressing duties in Egypt and sent his Flag Officer to act as representative. Mudros, the harbor port on the Aegean island of Lemnos, was the staging point for all operations against and around the Dardanelles and saw a constant stream of shipping. On learning that the conference had decided to continue with the use of patrol zones he began a correspondence with Rear Admiral Limpus, now back in Malta, on a possible alternative tactic. Writing on April 19, he suggested that, “Convoy is a tried and proven method for the protection of commerce from hostile forces at sea. Naval warfare has not changed so much since the days of Nelson that a means which was highly effective then should be rejected out of hand today. The only sensible course in our present situation is to gather the shipping to be protected under the care of the available escorts and move it in convoy to its destination. The traffic now moving between Malta and Mudros would seem to be an ideal venue for a trial of this system.”

Although initially skeptical, Limpus agreed to a trial of the system which did not require inter-allied approval if it was confined to the British patrol zones. Ships sailing between Malta and Mudros were held for convoys which sailed every fifth day in each direction. Escort was provided by using a portion of the ships that had been assigned to the zones for offensive patrolling. The first such convoy sailed on May 8 and in June the system was extended to include traffic to and from Suez with convoys sailing every third day.

The results were immediate and dramatic. For the period of May through July the loss rate for ships sailing in convoy in the British zones dropped literally to zero as compared to an average of 75,000 tons per month for ships sailing individually, and usually without escorts, in the French zones. In retrospect we know that this was in large part also a result of the German decision, made in February, to shift their emphasis to the more lucrative hunting areas in the Western Mediterranean. At the time this factor was not recognized and full credit was given to the convoy system. (U-boats operating in the Mediterranean did not report their positions at sea by radio, as did those in Northern waters, and signals intelligence on their movements was essentially non-existent. The Germans also made a point of allowing a U-boat to be “observed” periodically in the Aegean in order to maintain the pressure in that area.)

Events in the north had taken a different course during the spring of 1916. Based on calculations that predicted a monthly loss rate of 160,000 tons of British shipping the Kaiser agreed to a renewal of the U-boat campaign to begin on February 29. In a compromise to the concerns of Bethman-Hollweg and others about the affects of the campaign on neutrals, there were a number of rules including an outright ban on submerged attacks on enemy passenger steamers. The second offensive against shipping began slowly but during the months of March and April accounted for 152 vessels of 347,843 tons. Then on March 24 the UB29 sighted a steamer entering Dieppe and operating under instructions from the previous year that permitted submerged attacks against “troop transports” torpedoed and sank the cross-Channel vessel Sussex. Several American citizens were among the 50 casualties. The United States sent an outraged note to the Germans threatening war and once again the Germans backed down. The German government issued instructions that the campaign should continue based on the Prize Regulations but an April 25 Admiral Scheer unilaterally withdrew the High Seas Fleet U-boats from the campaign insisting that the possible successes under the Prize Regulations did not justify the risk to the U-boats engaged. The second offensive was over. For the next four months the principle employment of the U-boats in the North Sea would be a serious of failed attempts to lay an ambush for the British Grand Fleet.

The British had noted again the ineffectiveness of their own countermeasures during this period. Offensive patrolling by literally thousands of craft was accounting for less than one U-boat every two months and the minefields in the Dover Straits had sunk only one U-boat in all of 1916. It was against this background that Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, the First Sea Lord, read the report of the first three months of the convoy trial in the Mediterranean which seemed like an answer to his prayers. In a minute to the Prime Minister on August 18 to summarized the report and then added, “The depredations of German U-boats upon trade comprise our deadliest peril in this war. We can wait no longer to put into force any measure which may prove to be an effective response.”

In Germany the bloody battles of the Somme and Verdun and the Russian offensive had compelled Field Marshal von Hindenburg to state at an August 31 conference that, “A country in danger must make every exertion possible, and that unrestricted U-boat warfare was on that account inevitable and had better commence at once.” Although Foreign Minister Jagow was still strongly opposed, Bethmann Hollweg began to waver suggesting only that the moment was not yet right for such an extreme measure. A breach with the northern neutrals that brought Holland and Denmark into the war at a moment when the German army was fully stretched could be disastrous. Hindenburg agreed and the conference decided to resume the campaign under Prize Regulations as in interim measure until the time was ripe for an unrestricted campaign. Confident that this would be soon, Admiral Scheer made no objections.

The third offensive against shipping began to gather momentum in the South-Western Approaches in September with the U-boats based in Flanders and then accelerated when the High Seas Fleet U-boats the campaign on October 6. The British responded with a trial convoy from Gibraltar on September 20 and when this was successful a convoy was run originating in Hampton Roads. The results invalidated the main objections to the convoy system and planning began to introduce it generally. This took considerable time and it was not until November that the bulk of trade on the Scandinavian and Atlantic routes was traveling in convoy. The results were dramatic. Even though the Prize Regulations permitted ships under escort to be attacked by submerged submarines, in the first 21 Atlantic convoys, comprising 354 ships, only two ships were lost.

The initial German response to the advent of convoys was to call for an increase in submarine construction to redress the situation. But at the same time there were renewed concerns about the wisdom of making the transition to an unrestricted campaign. Clearly, even if the tonnage war could be eventually won it would take longer than the five months that Admiral von Holtzendorf, Chief of the German Naval Staff, had been predicting. Thus the intervention of the United States could again be a critical factor. As Bethmann Hollweg reasoned, “International law already permits ships sailing under escort to be attacked without warning. If we extend this manner of attack to include ships sailing unescorted it will only be a needless provocation of the neutral states while hastening the consolidation of all English shipping into convoys.” Jagow, as always fervently opposed, insisted that the U-boats must first demonstrate results against the convoys before the nation could consider taking an irrevocable step. Hindenburg also hesitated at the prospect of provoking the United States without a guarantee of quick success. As before the final decision went to the Kaiser and as before the Kaiser compromised. The U-boats would be permitted to fight “unrestricted” against the convoys but must observe international law when attacking other ships and at all costs avoid attacks on passenger ships sailing independently without giving the passengers and crew a chance to disembark. In reality the instructions, issued on January 9, 1917, changed nothing about the way the campaign was already being fought.

President Wilson had won reelection the previous November with the slogan “He Kept Us Out Of War”. Isolationist sentiment was strong in the United States. The United States government sent a new note to the Germans in January cautioning them to abide strictly by the letter of international law. Further outrages against passenger liners that resulted in the loss of American lives would not be tolerated. The German reply was polite while pointing out that any passenger ships that chose to join an escorted convoy would forfeit their legal immunity from surprise attack. In this uneasy balance German-American relations were to continue for the remainder of the war. Whether due to a lack of targets, or some new found self restraint, or quiet threats from their superiors, no young U-boat captain would again provoke the United States to the brink of war. The sinking of the Northumbria on October 5, 1917 was the final flaring of tensions. After an exchange of notes the United States accepted the explanation that at the moment the liner was attacked by the U45, the Northumbria, although in fact sailing independently, had become intermingled with a convoy that was also waiting to enter the harbor at Portland. It was therefore effectively under escort and a legitimate target for an attack without warning.

The German U-boat campaign continued through 1917 with rising costs and decreasing results. The British finally awoke to the obvious consequence that escort craft sailing with a convoy were far more likely to encounter a U-boat than similar craft engaged on “offensive patrols” in generally empty waters. The convoy served as a magnet to draw the U-boats towards their hunters. The number of attacks on U-boats rose sharply as the destroyers in the “hunting groups” were reallocated to the escorts. In turn the U-boat captains found that they were no longer being presented with a stream of single ship targets that they could attack individually. The convoys presented a mass of ships that appeared suddenly and could at best be attacked only once before they all sailed on out of range. Most encounters resulted in the U-boat captain attacking the convoy with a salvo of long distance “browning” shots, aimed in the general direction of the convoy rather than at specific ships, while remaining submerged beyond the escorts. Hits became more a matter of luck than skill.

Monthly shipping losses which had approached 300,000 tons in the closing months of 1916 eventually fell to less than 100,000 tons by the end of 1917. In 1918 the loss rate dropped even further. U-boat losses climbed correspondingly from an average of two per month in the final quarter of 1916 to seven per month in the final quarter of 1917. The Germans continued the race to build more and more U-boats until 1918 when reality finally dictated a change in production priorities. Of the 340 U-boats ordered in 1918 only 72 were actually laid down and all of these were cancelled before completion.

Part II

“Last Man Standing”

Denouement in the Trenches

The Great War had begun in 1914 with the German invasion of France, through Belgium, that had swept to the outskirts of Paris and then degenerated into years of bloody stalemate in the trenches. In other theaters the Central Powers had been more successful. Serbia was fully occupied in 1915. Rumania was crushed in a quick campaign in 1916. Russia by 1917 had been driven to the point of collapse and the revolutions in that year removed her as an effective fighting force. Italy was very nearly driven from the war in the fall of 1917 by the Caporetto offensive that swept away all the gains from three seasons of fighting and sent her army reeling back in retreat. The French army spent itself in a series of bloody and futile attacks in April, 1917 until the troops were driven to the point of mutiny against their officers. General Petain took command and managed to restore a degree of control but the army was exhausted.

All of the combatants in France had sought for a key to the deadlock in the trenches. By the fall of 1917 both the British and the Germans thought that they had found one. The British had introduced tanks onto the battlefield in small numbers in 1916. Through a lengthy period of trial and error they gradually built up their numbers and worked out that tanks were best employed on a battlefield that had not already been churned into a sea of mud. Simultaneously the Germans were developing a new set of tactics based on infiltration by specially trained Storm Troops following a brief whirlwind artillery bombardment. The new tactics were used with stunning success on the Eastern and Italian fronts before their debut in the West.

The battle of Cambrai served as a tactical proving ground for both sides and a preview of what was to come. The British attacked on the morning of November 20 and sent a concentrated horde of 500 tanks against a German position that had been little disturbed by artillery. They immediately broke through and in four days of fighting advanced as much as eight miles through the German defenses. By the end of the fourth day only 36 of the original tanks were still operating and the advance largely came to a halt. The Germans had meanwhile been preparing a counterattack. On December 3 a thirty minute bombardment prepared the way for six divisions of special Storm Troops to assault the new British front. Bypassing points of resistance they infiltrated into the British rear and kept moving. In three days they took back most of the British gains and four miles of the original British frontline before their own advance came to a halt.

As 1918 dawned and Russia collapsed into civil war the Germans began a massive transfer of troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. An offensive in the west was inevitable as soon as the ground dried in the spring. The British were mass producing tanks for their own planned offensives but these would not be available in sufficient numbers until the summer. It was now clear to everyone that the United States intended to watch the war from the sidelines. The Allies remaining hope of victory was to hold out against the German offensive until they were ready to launch a counter offensive of their own. This would depend almost entirely on the British and their tanks.

On the foggy morning of March 20 the front of the British Third and Fifth Armies was overrun by the first of great German offensives, Operation Michael. The combination of a ferocious five hour bombardment and the proven infiltration tactics virtually wiped out the front line units. Before the two week battle had run its course the Germans had advanced as much as thirty miles towards the vital junction point of Amiens. One immediate result of this shock was that the British and French were finally able to agree on the need for a unified command structure and General Foch was given full authority over all operations on the Western Front on March 26.

The next German offensive, Operation George, punched into the British lines at Lys on April 9 but without completely shattering the front. Then a series of offensives opened against the French on the Aisne on May 27 and continued into June and July on the Marne and Matz. The French lines were driven back halfway to Paris and the front was only stabilized by committing the very last of the French reserves. German casualties in the attacks had also been very high, particularly amongst the specially trained Storm Troops. The Germans, realizing that their own armies were exhausted, finally went over to the defensive. Ludendorff, at least, was confident that the defense could hold against any enemy attack until the time came to resume the offensive.

The Battle of Amiens commenced on the morning of August 8 with 450 tanks rolling into the German lines and hundreds of supporting aircraft overhead. The German front collapsed and 18,000 prisoners were taken on the first day. The British advance continued for three more days until Germans reserves managed to consolidate a new front. A significant factor that was overlooked in the initial wave of victory was that by the end of the first day only half of the tanks committed were still running and only 155 of them participated in the renewed attack on August 9. Many of the dropouts were repaired and returned to service later but the severe attrition of tank assets in the attack would a constant theme in their employment.

Ludendorff was reported to be psychologically stunned by the events of August 8 and from that date Hindenburg became the sole power at the top. The British offensives on the Western Front continued relentlessly into the fall months, reaching and then breaking through the formidable Hindenburg Line. Once it became clear that the French army was unable to launch any major attacks on its own the Germans began to shift all of their reserves to meet the British. At the same time the number of tanks available to the British army was wearing away. For example, when the attack against Cambrai opened on October 12, only 105 tanks were available to support the infantry.

In October the Germans began a planned retreat behind the Aisne River to shorten their lines facing the French and create new reserves that could be sent to face the British in Flanders. The momentum of the British advance finally began to sputter in November as the weather worsened. The Germans had now, of necessity, adopted a defense in depth supported largely by hidden machine gun positions. With British attacks now being supported by mere handfuls of tanks the machine guns were often able to stall the advance of the infantry. On November 30, Field Marshal Haig acknowledged that the war must continue into 1919 and halted further attacks for the year. The new frontline on that date ran almost due south from the freshly liberated Belgian city of Ghent until it reached the course of the Aisne River near Craonne and then followed the long static front to the Swiss border.

In other theaters events were also drawing towards a conclusion. Allenby entered Damascus on October 1, 1918 and the Turkish army rapidly collapsed. The Turkish government soon requested terms for an armistice. The Germans had withdrawn their divisions from the Italian theater by April, 1918. The Allies were likewise compelled to remove divisions from Salonika and from the British Tenth and French Twelfth Armies in Italy throughout the year to stitch together the gaps in the Western Front. The Austro-Hungarian army had attacked along the Piave front in June, 1918 but made little progress without German assistance. On October 23, 1918 the Italians attacked the Austro-Hungarian front near Vittorio Veneto. With only a token British force remaining to assist them the Italian attack also bogged down and was suspended after ten days. In December secret negotiations began in Switzerland between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian governments.

As darkness fell on the night of November 15, a flight of the brand new Handley Page V-1500 bombers took off from their English base and delivered to Berlin a first taste of what Londoners had been enduring for nearly four years. The one bright spot for the German people in this fifth winter of the war was an increase in the ration for bread and other food staples. The occupation of the Ukraine gave Germany access to farm products to replace those long cut off by the British blockade. As much as anything else this served to shore up morale on the home front and steel the country for the coming year.

On the Western Front the Germans were energetically constructing new defenses. The plan involved a system of concrete strong points for the potent 77mm field guns arrayed in great depth behind the front lines. Numbers of the 88mm antiaircraft gun were also pressed into use for defense against tanks. German divisions facing the French on the portions of the Western Front in Alsace and Lorraine that had remained static for years were stripped of virtually all of their light artillery. Combined with new production this was sufficient to replace the losses suffered during the Great Retreat and arm the strong points. General Bruchmuller, the artillery specialist who had created the barrage tactics for the German offensives, had become Hindenburg’s partner in creating the new defensive scheme. The German plan was to allow the weight of the British attack to expend itself against a deep system of defenses and then counterattack at the opportune moment.

Socialist agitation in England and an outbreak of strikes in the munitions plants were signs of a growing war weariness in the populace. The government did its best to maintain morale by trumpeting the tank forces as the key to victory and predicting that all of Belgium would be liberated in the next campaign season. In the Grand Fleet the sailors wondered whether the High Seas Fleet would ever come out again. The continued existence of the German navy at least provided a welcome reason for the sailors to stay in the big ships as recruiters for the new Naval Infantry Brigades began to canvas the fleet.

The Germans had noted the paucity of offensive action by the French army and drawn the correct conclusions. The German High Command now hoped to strike the first blow of 1919 against the French. Working for them was the fact that the ground dried out later on the British front in Flanders than at any other point along the lines. The plan was a revision of operations Castor and Pollux for attacks on either side of the Verdun salient aimed at forming a linkage behind the city. These had been amongst the many alternative plans considered for 1918. Now they became part of a concerted effort to preempt the expected British attack while driving the French out of the war.

The storm broke on February 20, 1919 with two simultaneous attacks. South and east of Verdun the French army managed to make a stand along the Meuse River. West of the city the French faired far worse. German Storm Troops broke cleanly through their lines on the first morning and advanced eight miles in places. When it became clear that the eastern pincer was stalled the Germans redirected the western pincer to take the Meuse line from the rear. Despite the remonstrations of President Clemenceau and the government, General Foch realized that the only way to save the army was to abandon the city. In a gallant rear guard action the French pulled back from Verdun and finally, with desperate fighting, managed to stabilize a new line behind the Argonne River. Left behind in the rush were most of their heavy guns and supplies. The French managed to save sufficient numbers of their troops to preserve the front but at a terrible price. The loss of Verdun, which had achieved legendary status from the blood and sacrifice of 1916, was a shattering blow to the national morale.

On March 1, Italy and Austria-Hungary stunned their respective allies by jointly announcing a peace treaty between their two countries. The Treaty of Geneva called for the Austro-Hungarian army to withdraw by stages to the prewar border. Italy delivered a demand to Britain and France to remove all of their forces, including naval, from Italian territory within ten days. German U-boats were permitted to continue basing in Pola and Cattaro only on condition that they would henceforth respect the Italian flag. Although technically Italy remained at war with Germany while Austria-Hungary remained at war with Britain and France, neither country was in fact left with any active fighting fronts. The English press insinuated that since Italy had begun its war by betraying Germany and Austria-Hungary and had now ended it by betraying Britain and France, they would have to look hard for friends in the future.

The ground dried slowly in Flanders. Not until April were British finally ready to resume the offensive having amassed a force of almost 700 tanks. On the morning of April 10, British artillery shells crashed down on the thinly held front line trenches in front of Grammont, Belgium. The tanks rolled forward with the infantry close behind and close support aircraft above. Not until midday when they had penetrated four miles into the German position, and beyond the range of their own artillery, did they begin to encounter serious resistance. Then the leading tanks began to take hits from nests of 77mm and larger field guns concealed in carefully camouflaged concrete emplacements with overhead protection. The guns were sited to be mutually supporting with prepared fields of fire and intermixed with machine gun positions. The German guns outranged the 6 pounder guns (57mm) in the British tanks and could only be disabled by infantry assault or a direct hit on their embrasures whereas the British tanks presented themselves as large, slow moving targets in the flat, open Flanders fields. The British army had never before encountered a deliberately constructed anti-tank defense.

With mounting losses the British pushed forward. By the third day, they discovered that the defenses were not simply a line but an array of strong points over twelve miles deep. The Germans were willing to sacrifice considerable territory in Belgium to absorb the weight of the attack. On April 14, the Germans launched the first of a series of local counter attacks using their still potent infiltration tactics. The attack pushed back one section of the British front by two miles and, more importantly, netted the Germans 32 disabled British tanks that had not yet been recovered from the battlefield. The battle raged back and forth for another two weeks as the British crept towards the outskirts of Grammont. An observer noted that the British command at this time seemed to have reverted to mindset of Passchendaele in 1917. Finally the advance halted in exhaustion with the bulk of the tanks broken down or reduced to mangled wrecks.

Although nominally still the supreme commander, General Foch had seen much of his authority slide towards Field Marshal Haig as the French army had lost its offensive spirit. Now Haig’s shining sword had broken in his hand. When Foch tried to urge Haig to renew the effort, Haig lashed back asking when the French army was going to attack. Haig then appealed to the government and Prime Minister Lloyd George in turn posed the question to Clemenceau, asking him what the French were prepared to do. “The body of France lies prostrate, bleeding from a hundred wounds,” Clemenceau replied, “France has done its utmost. The army will hold the line until it breathes its last but it can not advance.”

Lloyd George later claimed to have realized at that moment that it would be necessary to accept a peace without victory. “It will matter little whether the last man standing in Belgium is a German soldier or an Englishman if both of our nations have been bled to the point of collapse,” he announced to the Cabinet, “the only winners in such an extremity will be the Bolsheviks.” The rest of the Cabinet insisted upon a final effort. Reluctantly, Haig ordered a new attack in the direction of Mons. When this also became mired in the German defenses the Cabinet secretly agreed to seek a compromise peace. Through discrete Swedish contacts a series of notes were exchanged with the Germans that resulted in a cease fire agreement coming into effect on the Western Front at 6:00 o’clock on the morning of June 6, 1919.

With the cease fire the Germans withdrew their lines, as a part of the agreement, for five miles all along the front in Belgium while the British lines remained in place. The Germans also withdrew completely from the city of Brussels and its environs creating a zone of neutrality between the two armies. Representatives from England, France, Germany and Belgium met in Brussels to negotiate a peace treaty between the warring powers. One British negotiator noted in his diary how little the city of Brussels seemed to have suffered from the war, except for the obvious signs of hunger, which put the lie to much of the wartime propaganda about bleeding Belgium.

The French representatives came to Brussels intent on demanding the return of Alsace-Lorraine as a peace condition. They were shocked to find little support from the British delegation. The feeling in England now was that they had gone to war in aid of neutral Belgium and not to recover lost territory for France. If that could be achieved in the peace, then honor would be satisfied. Besides which, many thought, the British army had been carrying the greater burden of the struggle for nearly two years now which hardly entitled the French to be making demands. In the end the French walked out of the Brussels conference and France remained in a technical state of war with Germany until 1925. The other three nations signed the Treaty of Brussels on August 10, 1919 officially ending the Great War.

The treaty called for German forces to withdraw from occupied France, Belgium, and Luxembourg to the prewar boundaries. The Royal Navy lifted its blockade of Germany. Germany also agreed to the creation of a Polish state, comprised entirely of former Russian territory and the eventual formation of an independent Ukraine. None of these adjustments in the east would occur until the Bolshevik threat had been contained so that in practice the German occupation continued as before. Austria-Hungary was also compelled to disgorge some of her Balkan territories which were reformed to become the new state of Yugoslavia. In the months that followed the centrifugal forces within the Dual Monarchy finally overcame the glue that had held it together for so long. Austria and Hungary emerged as two separate nations dividing between them the remaining territory of the empire.

In the wake of the Treaty of Brussels popular sentiment in both England and Germany began to converge on the notion that the late war had been brought on largely by the machinations of France. France in turn became increasingly isolated as she nursed her grievances against her former ally. The 1921 Anti-Bolshevik Pact between England and Germany signaled the realignment of power that had begun to emerge in Europe.

Author’s Notes

The point of divergence for this scenario is the initiative taken by Admiral Wemyss on April 19, 1916. All of the events described prior to that date are factual and all characters are historical personages. The direct quotes are invented except for the 1916 Hindenburg quotation. Events described outside of the Mediterranean are unchanged until the introduction of convoys in Northern waters. Subsequent events and statistics in the submarine war are extrapolated from historical data.

In retrospect it is remarkable that in our time line it took over two years, from February 1915 when the first unrestricted submarine campaign began until April 1917 when the second unrestricted campaign was already in high gear, for the British Admiralty to finally accept the idea that convoys provided not only the maximum protection for sea borne trade but also the optimal strategy for hunting the U-boats. This was not through any lack of experience of convoys in prior wars, or a lack of officers who saw the wisdom of convoys prior to 1917. The opportunity existed at any time for some innovative officer to begin operating convoys on a small scale and supply the proof that they were the solution to the U-boat menace. In the actual event the first convoys were initiated on January 10, 1917 for the colliers delivering coal across the Channel to France. The decrease in the loss rate was immediate and dramatic. This “unexpected immunity from successful U-boat attack on the French coal trade” (Admiral Duff quoted in Tarrant, p.51) was recognized by April and provided the proof of concept that soon led to the adoption of convoys for all other shipping. Admiral Wemyss was a talented officer who energetically sought a solution to the U-boat threat in his theater. In our time line he actually proposed a trial of convoys in the Eastern Mediterranean on December 11, 1916. As my point of departure, I have simply moved that proposal some months earlier and stated it more forcefully.

If convoys had been tested in the eastern Mediterranean in the summer of 1916, our own history leaves no doubt that they would have been an instant success. The Germans actually did shift their emphasis to the western Mediterranean at this time which would have made the drop in sinkings even more dramatic. From there it is only a small step to imagine that the Admiralty would have adopted universal convoys during the Germans third U-boat campaign in the fall of 1916. The result would have been greatly reduced losses to all shipping. This would have weighed heavily when the Germans pondered their own fateful decision on whether to launch an unrestricted campaign in 1917. With no prospect for a rapid and decisive victory to balance against the presumed entry of the United States into the war the Germans might well have held back. In particular, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who had resisted previous demands from the German Admiralty for a loosening of restrictions on the U-boats had finally relented, in our time line, by October, 1916 as a result of the successes that were being achieved during the third restricted campaign (October, 1916 through January, 1917 in our time line). This would not have been the case if the British had already begun successfully convoying their merchant traffic.

The final links in the scenario follow naturally from this. If the Germans refrain from launching an unrestricted submarine campaign on February 1, 1917 then the United States will not enter the war that April and probably not at all. Without the massive infusion of American forces into France in 1918 the Allies lose their chance to force a conclusion to the war in that year.

The course of events described for the British and German armies in 1918 begins very much as in our own time line. Some aspects remain close throughout the year, particularly in regards to the attrition rate and numbers of available tanks on various dates. The key difference is the absence of the United States army which becomes significant in the summer months. With the foreknowledge, at the beginning of 1918, that the Germans were shifting troops from the East, the Allies would have been able to compensate to a degree by bringing back many of their own divisions from Italy and other overseas theaters. This ought to have been sufficient to stave off an early French collapse and also allow the British to go over to the offensive in August. But by August, 1918, in the actual event, the number of American soldiers in France had reached one and a half million men and was still growing. Not only did these Americans launch several important attacks against the Germans, which consumed their manpower, but they also took over roughly one quarter of the front line that had previously been held by the French army. This enabled the French to form sufficient reserves to also resume the offensive in 1918. Relieved of pressure from the French and American armies by continued American neutrality, the Germans would have had greater reserves to face the British. Without the Americans, the British might even have been compelled to extend their own frontage to take over parts of the French front (a more extreme situation than that presented in this narrative). This would have depleted British reserves and reduced their options for attack. There is always the chance that in the end one army or the other might still have prevailed in 1919 but a peace of exhaustion becomes a distinct possibility.

What is most ironic about the chain of events in the actual course of the Great War is that it was only the stubborn and costly refusal of the British Admiralty, for two entire years, to adopt a sensible strategy for the defense of trade that leant so much to the eventual Allied victory in 1918.

Sources

There has been a great deal written about the German submarine campaign in World War I, or the Great War as it is still referred to here in a time line in which it did not become a “world war” and there was perhaps not a second. Two excellent recent sources are “The U-Boat Offensive 1914-1945”, V.E. Tarrant, 1989 and “A Naval History of World War I”, Paul G. Halpern, 1994 from which I have drawn quotes and statistics. Details of the Mediterranean campaign are from “The Naval War in the Mediterranean, 1914-1918”, Paul G. Halpern, 1987. For the fighting on the Western Front, I have used “1918 – The Unexpected Victory”, J.H. Johnson, 1997, “Amiens to the Armistice”, J.P. Harris, 1998, “Tanks and Trenches”, David Fletcher, 1994, and “Historical Maps of World War I”, Simon Forty, 2002 as my principle sources. A valuable description of conditions inside Germany during the Great War is found in “Victory Must Be Ours”, Laurence V. Moyer, 1995. Other background information regarding the air war, German field and anti-aircraft artillery, the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, and much else comes from the extensive literature on the Great War.