Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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Chapter Fifteen

The War from Above: Aims,

Strategy, and Diplomacy

Matthew Stibbe

Prior to 1914 wars were still fought for limited aims and usually ended in a negoti-

ated settlement and the immediate restoration of trade. The growing liberalization

of world markets and commerce reinforced this trend, as did the emergence of new

international conventions governing the rules of military and naval engagement.

During World War I, however, the mass mobilization of industrial resources and the

apparent steadfastness of the two rival coalitions (the Allies or Entente and the

Central Powers) went hand in hand with a ruthless disregard for the rights of com-

batants, civilians, and occupied populations, and a determination to ﬁght on to the

bitter end. For the generals and politicians on both sides, the stakes were simply too

high to contemplate anything other than total victory, even as total victory seemed

increasingly unobtainable. The continued German occupation of 95 percent of

Belgium, including the strategically signiﬁcant ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge,

proved to be one of the major sticking points. Whereas Britain and France insisted

on the full and unconditional restoration of Belgian independence as a precondition

for any peace settlement, Germany was determined not to abandon its demands for

appropriate “guarantees” and “securities,” lest Belgium should join the anti-German

camp in the future. In addition, after 1915 Germany and Austria-Hungary developed

rival plans to expand their sphere of inﬂuence over Russian Poland, while in 1918

Britain, France, and the United States championed the right of self-determination

for the Poles and other subject nationalities of east-central Europe, a move with far-

reaching consequences for Russia as well as for the two Central Powers.

The deadlock over Belgium and Poland, combined with Allied plans to weaken

the German economy and deny Germany equal trading rights after the war, in turn

doomed all attempts to achieve a peace settlement via neutral mediation. To round

the circle, the history of war aims and of failed attempts to negotiate a compromise

peace provides the background to understanding changes in military strategy, espe-

cially after the ﬁrst winter of the war. With stalemate in the west, both sides looked

for alternative fronts or for “miracle weapons” which could deliver victory in one

knockout blow. Compromise was not an option for either side; total war required

total commitment. Only when the German high command ﬁnally conceded defeat

the war from above 229

at the end of September 1918 was the way open for an armistice and the end of the

conﬂict. Until then, the outcome of the war was still uncertain, in spite of America’s

intervention on the side of the Allies.

In what follows we shall look at each of these three issues in turn, beginning with

war aims, moving on to strategy, and ending with diplomacy.

War Aims

Over the past forty years or so the volume of literature on the war aims of the great

powers has continued to grow, thanks largely to the discovery of fresh archival evi-

dence. A major turning point was the publication in 1961 of Fritz Fischer’s book

Germany’s Aims in the First World War, which has shaped international debate ever

since. Fischer’s conclusions were at ﬁrst extremely controversial, not least because he

argued that Germany’s leaders had deliberately unleashed war in Europe in July 1914

as part of a “grasp at world power” which in many ways paralleled Hitler’s ambitions

in the 1940s. In fact, though, a closer reading of Fischer reveals that his argument

was considerably more subtle than some of his detractors claimed. Throughout the

years 1914–18 different government departments put forward ambitious war aims

programs, and argued over how much Germany could or should demand from the

enemy at peace negotiations. The most famous statement of war aims was the secret

memorandum drawn up on behalf of the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann

Hollweg, in September 1914, which called for substantial annexations on the

European continent at the expense of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, as well as

a new German colonial empire in central Africa. In the east, Russia would have its

borders pushed back “as far as possible” and its “domination over the non-Russian

vassal peoples” would be “broken.” In western and central Europe, Germany would

establish a customs union as a means of obtaining indirect control over the economies

of several independent states, including the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and

Denmark. If necessary, Britain could be excluded from the continent by this means,

thus ensuring its defeat in a “Second Punic War.”

Bethmann’s program represented the aims of the moderate imperialists in Berlin.

On the extreme right, however, there were organizations like the Pan-German

League and the Independent Committee for a German Peace which wanted to go

even further in subjugating Europe to Germany’s will. The Independent Committee,

for example, demanded the wholesale annexation of the Polish frontier districts,

Lithuania, and the Baltic states, regardless of the wishes of their inhabitants. The

annexed territories would be used not only to create a security zone against Russia

(as Bethmann had suggested), but also for purposes of colonization (i.e., they would

be resettled with German farmers who would exploit the east’s abundance of natural

resources and thereby reduce Germany’s dependence on international trade).

Other

annexationist groups were more interested in the expansion of the German colonial

empire and trading posts overseas, an enthusiasm shared by several government

departments, including the colonial ofﬁce, the naval ofﬁce, and the admiralty. In

November and December 1916, for instance, the chief of the admiralty staff, Admiral

Henning von Holtzendorff, outlined an ambitious program for the acquisition of

new naval bases along the coasts of Belgium and Courland, west and east Africa, the

west and east Indian Ocean, the Azores and Dakar, and the Mediterranean. The key

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objective, as he wrote to the Kaiser on May 18, 1917, was to “retain control over

the colonial empire in a future war and to ﬁght a trade war and protect our trading

interests.” This, combined with extra spending on naval armaments, would eventually

allow Germany to challenge Britain’s domination of the seas.

While Germany arguably had the most aggressive war aims between 1914 and

1918, imperialism was a global phenomenon and was certainly not conﬁned to one

side. Among the Central Powers, Turkey and Bulgaria were more or less willing to

follow Germany’s lead as far as military operations were concerned, although Turkey

in particular remained suspicious of Berlin’s attempts to interfere in its domestic

affairs.

Germany’s most important ally, Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, was

keen to assert from the beginning that it had ambitions of its own. These included

some minor frontier changes on the borders with Italy and Romania, as well as a

major drive towards expansion in the Balkans at the expense of Serbia and Montenegro

and the establishment of a protectorate over Albania. More controversially,

the Habsburg Empire also claimed a say in the future of Russian Poland, insisting

ﬁrst of all on the uniﬁcation of the Austrian province of Galicia and Russian Poland

under Habsburg tutelage (the so-called Austro-Polish solution), and later, after

Bethmann and his advisors rejected this plan, demanding equal rights with the

German Reich in the newly proclaimed “independent” Kingdom of Poland in

November 1916. Austrian ambitions in Poland were of course regarded with great

suspicion in Berlin, not least because an increase in the Polish population of the

Habsburg Empire would also weaken the inﬂuence of the German-speaking element,

which was not in Germany’s long-term interests. The Hungarian Prime Minister

Count István Tisza was also wary of any arrangement which might upset the delicate

balance between the two halves of the Habsburg Empire, and argued that Hungary

should be compensated with Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia if Austria acquired

parts of Russian Poland.

Turning now to the Allies, Japan and Russia were the ﬁrst to draw up a compre-

hensive set of war aims in August 1914. Japan demanded support for its claims to

Kiaochow (the Chinese port leased to Germany) as a condition of its entry into the

war on August 23, 1914; later, it sought to expand its markets and inﬂuence in

southern Manchuria and China’s Shantung province, while weakening the inﬂuence

of other powers in these regions. Russia likewise revealed a series of aggressive war

aims in the opening stages of the war. The 13 point program drawn up by the foreign

minister Sergei Sazonov in September 1914 and presented to the British and French

ambassadors in St Petersburg/Petrograd provided details of the planned seizure of

German territory in Posen and Silesia, and of Austrian territory in Galicia. Most of

this land would be handed to a new “Kingdom of Poland” under Russian sovereignty,

but some of it would be directly annexed by the tsar. In the west, France would

acquire Alsace-Lorraine and parts of the Rhineland, while the remainder of the

German empire would be further weakened through the conﬁscation of its overseas

colonies, the return of Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, and the restoration of the

Kingdom of Hanover. As for east-central Europe, Sazonov’s program envisaged the

division of the Habsburg Empire into three independent kingdoms: Austria, Hungary,

and Bohemia. Serbia, Russia’s principal ally in the Balkans, would be handed Bosnia-

Herzegovina, the Dalmatian coastline, and the northern part of Albania. Through

its alliance with Greater Serbia, Russia would be in a position to exert a signiﬁcant

the war from above 231

inﬂuence on the future shape of Balkan politics, effectively canceling out any German

or Habsburg presence there.

Unlike Japan and Russia, Britain and France at ﬁrst resisted the temptation to put

forward speciﬁc territorial demands of their own, fearing that this would be divisive

and a potential threat to national as well as Allied unity. Instead, they stuck to much

vaguer formulations about the need to “liberate” Europe from the dangers of

“Prussian militarism.” A formidable propaganda campaign was set in motion in order

to convince the world that Germany had committed a monstrous act by violating

the neutrality of Belgium and terrorizing its civilian inhabitants; German counter-

claims were far less successful. Indeed, the one aim to which Britain and France

remained committed from the beginning was the restoration of Belgian indepen-

dence. In Britain in particular it was the Belgian issue that had persuaded nominally

paciﬁst members of parliament on the Liberal and Labour benches to swing round

in support of the war.

France, admittedly, had another agenda after 1914: the return of the provinces of

Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in 1871 and since then a bone of contention

for nationalist opinion on the left and the right. French politicians were also keen to

secure ﬁnancial compensation from the Germans for the devastation caused in occu-

pied northern France and Belgium, and some on the extreme right even wished to

see the Reich destroyed and split up into several different states. Secretly, the French

government and general staff were also moving in a similar direction, although

French ministers stopped short of calling for an end to German unity. During 1915

and 1916 the government of Aristide Briand considered various schemes for the

annexation of the industrialized Saar region and for the separation of the Rhineland

from the rest of Germany. This formed the basis of a conﬁdential agreement with

Tsar Nicholas II in February–March 1917 whereby Russia pledged to recognize

French claims to hegemony on the left bank of the Rhine in return for “complete

liberty” to redraw its own borders with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the east.

Although the French cabinet had not collectively approved this agreement before it

was signed, Briand’s successor Alexandre Ribot remained committed to it, at least

until the changing situation in Russia forced a serious reconsideration.

British leaders, on the other hand, were very wary about taking substantial amounts

of territory from Germany after the war, fearing that this would upset the balance of

power on the continent. Alsace-Lorraine was considered an acceptable French war

aim, but the Rhineland was not. David Lloyd George, prime minister from December

1916, was also personally committed to the establishment of a completely indepen-

dent Polish state after the war, and, as a former radical, had few sympathies for the

claims of hereditary rulers, whether German, Austrian, or Russian. Self-determination

for subject peoples indeed became a key British goal inside Europe in 1918. This

involved the restoration of prewar Belgium, Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia, and

a more vague declaration of sympathy for the national aspirations of the Czechs,

Romanians, and south Slavs living under Habsburg rule.

Beyond this, the British

cabinet and the British press wanted to punish the Kaiser and his senior generals for

having caused the war, both for reasons of “justice” and also to set an example. In

Lloyd George’s estimation, Germany’s military rulers were a “dangerous anachro-

nism in the twentieth century,” while no peace was possible without “reparation for

injuries done in violation of international law.”

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This appeal for “justice” and “freedom” does not mean that Britain had no impe-

rialist goals outside Europe, however. Indeed, as David Stevenson argues, “British

[war aims] policy combined uncertainty and even altruism within Europe with

Realpolitik outside.”

In particular, British leaders demanded that the German navy

should be eliminated in its entirety and that German naval bases in Africa and else-

where should be permanently occupied or at least rendered harmless to British

interests. In March–April 1917 the Curzon Committee on war aims called for

Germany to be dispossessed of all its overseas colonies, regardless of their strategic

worth, but Lloyd George refused to be bound by this. Instead, he kept open the

option of returning some of Germany’s colonies in return for concessions on other

matters. Nonetheless, it was clear that Britain intended to annex substantial parts of

German east Africa, including Tanganyika. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa

also expected to hold on to German possessions they had captured in Africa and the

south Paciﬁc soon after the beginning of the war.

In addition to looking after its own imperial interests, Britain sponsored imperial-

ism in a wider sense in that it supported the territorial ambitions of its allies, usually

at the expense of freedom for oppressed colonial peoples. Thus in August 1914 and

February 1916 agreements were reached with France over the future of Togoland

and the Cameroons. Likewise, Italy and Romania were brought into the war in 1915

and 1916 respectively through secret offers of territorial gains at the expense of

Austria, Hungary, and the future Yugoslavia. Italy was also offered a sphere of inﬂu-

ence in Asia Minor, even though this broke with a longstanding British commitment

to uphold the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. And in February 1917 the Lloyd

George government came to a new arrangement with Japan over the division of

Germany’s colonies in the Paciﬁc region. Like other wartime deals between the Allies,

this agreement was made behind closed doors and was not subject to public discus-

sion or approval.

The most controversial aspect of British war aims policy, however, was the ambi-

tious program for the expansion of western interests and capital in the middle east

at the expense of both the Ottoman Turks and the Arabs. Here, a breathtaking con-

cession to tsarist Russia over Constantinople in March 1915 was followed by the

infamous Sykes-Picot agreement of January 1916 outlining British and French areas

of “direct or indirect” control over Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, the Transjordan, and

Mesopotamia in the event of a collapse of Turkish power there. This agreement

contradicted the spirit, if not the exact text, of a letter sent by Sir Henry McMahon,

the British high commissioner in Cairo, to Hussain ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, in

October 1915, in which McMahon promised British recognition of the Arab claim

to independence in return for Hussain’s willingness to side with the Allies and accept

British advisors. Meanwhile, in November 1917, the British government added to

its other undertakings by publicly committing itself to the “establishment in Palestine

of a national home for the Jewish people,” a key aim of the World Zionist Federation.

How this project could be realized without leading to a rise in intercommunal hatreds

and without infringing on the rights of the native Arab and non-Arab populations

remained unclear, however, leaving Britain vulnerable to accusations that it had seri-

ously underestimated the complexities of the Palestinian question.

At ﬁrst sight it seems that the United States government, which came into the

war on the Allied side in April 1917, was determined to do things very differently

the war from above 233

and above all to avoid involvement in the kind of secret deals and covenants that had

characterized the war aims policies of the European powers. Indeed, in his message

to Congress on April 2, 1917 and in his Fourteen Points of January 1918, President

Woodrow Wilson outlined his vision for a new world order based on open diplomacy,

the limitation of armaments, and the establishment of a League of Nations. Some of

the Fourteen Points, if taken at face value, were directed more against Britain and

France than against Germany, in particular the demand for a “free, open-minded and

absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims” and for “absolute freedom of

navigation upon the seas.” In general, Wilson made it clear to his coalition partners

and to the American people at home that the USA was not an allied but an “associ-

ated” power, bound by no treaties and free to act independently at all times. The

USA would not and could not ﬁght a war for British, French, Japanese, or Italian

imperial interests. Nonetheless, after April 1917 Wilson ruled out any peace settle-

ment with Germany that involved leaving the existing regime in power, and even

rejected an offer of mediation by Pope Benedict XV in August 1917 on the grounds

that “no man [and] no nation could depend on” the word of Germany’s military

rulers.

In many ways, indeed, America after 1917 was even more concerned to stand up

to German militarism and aggression than the older democracies in Europe. The

desire to hold Germany to account for alleged war crimes, for instance, was as much

a part of Wilson’s agenda as it was of Lloyd George’s. At the same time, America

wished to expand its world trade interests, and Germany’s desire for economic and

political hegemony in Europe stood in the way of this. In a speech in Philadelphia

on May 10, 1915 Wilson declared that the American nation was “too proud to ﬁght,”

but behind the scenes most members of the Wilson administration were pro-Ally and

became more so as time went by. One person who had to be more circumspect in

public than others was the senior American diplomat Joseph C. Grew, ﬁrst secretary

at the US embassy in Berlin between 1912 and 1917, who was often accused of

having pro-German tendencies by his friends and family back home in Massachusetts.

In a fascinating letter written to his father-in-law on December 6, 1914 he revealed

his innermost feelings, and those of his wife:

Whatever may be our sympathy for individual Germans . . . we are, at heart, entirely

pro-Ally. We are opposed to the German cause, and all it stands for, the origin of the

war, the method of conducting it, the dropping of bombs on defenseless cities, killing

innocent people, the shooting of non-combatants, the violation of the Red Cross, the

maiming of the wounded – all these things have horriﬁed and disgusted us as much as

they have you – so far as they are true, though we are convinced – with our many sources

of information – that of every ten such reports published and told in the US, nine are

exaggerated or false. We believe that a German victory would be a step backward in

civilization and a misfortune to mankind, and we realize that if militarism is not now

killed once and for ever, the progress of the world will be retarded for many generations

to come.

Once America had entered the war on April 6, 1917, the country’s “extraordinary

capacity for industrial production and human organization took possession of the

nation’s energies,” as John Keegan puts it.

Economic self-interest and genuine

idealism combined to make the USA’s “moral imperialism” as much a force for

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violence as the imperialism of the older European powers. Washington nonetheless

continued to present itself as an “impartial” mediator in international affairs, and

many radicals and socialists in Germany as well as in Britain and France looked to

Wilson to prevent an imperialist “peace of victors.”

Strategy

In August 1914 the Germans were faced, as they were brieﬂy in September 1939

and again in June 1941, with the specter of war on two fronts. Their strategy – based

broadly on the so-called Schlieffen Plan of 1905 – was to knock out France quickly

in the west, capture Paris, and then move with equal rapidity against Russia in the

east, before the tsar could bring the full weight of his armies into the ﬁeld. Accordingly

the Germans advanced into Belgium and northern France in the opening days of the

ﬁghting, but were halted about 40 miles short of Paris on the River Marne just six

weeks into the war. Meanwhile, the Russians mobilized more quickly than the

German general staff had predicted, and invaded East Prussia at the end of August

1914. Paul von Hindenburg, the new German commander-in-chief in the east,

counter-attacked and the Russians were badly beaten at Tannenberg with 90,000

taken prisoner. The Russians arguably never recovered from this ﬁrst defeat, while

Hindenburg rapidly advanced to fame in Germany as a national hero and possibly

even as an Ersatzkaiser, once Wilhelm II had turned out to be an uninspiring war

leader. The Habsburg army too had been exposed as weak and ill-prepared, a liability

rather than an asset to Germany, although it is notable that there were no major

revolts among the empire’s subject nationalities until 1918.

Meanwhile, the building of defensive trenches from Flanders to the Swiss border

and the failure by Germany to capture Paris or the French Channel ports ended the

war of movement in the west and with it the expectation of rapid victory. In spite of

this, neither the Central Powers nor the Allies tried to limit the war or to sue for a

general peace. In the coming months, as the stalemate on the western front solidiﬁed,

both sides looked for new allies and new strategies. The Central Powers scored the

ﬁrst notable successes when they brought Turkey into the war on their side in

October 1914, followed by Bulgaria in October 1915. The alliance with Turkey in

particular was crucial, as it enabled the closing of the Dardanelles Straits, disrupting

the Allies’ main supply route to Russia and tying down British troops in Egypt and

elsewhere. On December 18, 1914 the Russian commander-in-chief, Grand Duke

Nikolai Nikolaevich, admitted to his French and British counterparts that shortages

of ammunition were hampering the Russian war effort on all fronts; efforts to increase

domestic production had failed and the rerouting of supplies through Arctic ports

like Archangel could not plug the gap left by the closing of the Straits.

In addition,

the Turkish sultan had now declared a jihad or holy war against the Allied forces in

the middle east, enabling Germany to put into motion plans to stir up discontent

among the Muslim subjects of the British and Russian empires. This undoubtedly

put further pressure on Russia in the Caucasus region.

Throughout 1915 German military advisors led Turkish forces in shoring up the

Ottoman Empire’s defenses on the Dardanelles, which, in the end, managed to repel

an attempted Anglo-French invasion at Gallipoli, southwest of Constantinople. Up

to 300,000 Turks and 265,000 Allied servicemen were killed or wounded in this

the war from above 235

campaign before it was ﬁnally abandoned in January 1916, with particularly severe

losses among the Anzacs, volunteers from Australia and New Zealand.

Combined

German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces also succeeded in overrunning

Serbia at the end of 1915 and Romania at the end of 1916, allowing the Central

Powers to create a continuous strip of territory from Berlin through to Constantinople

and beyond. There was more good news for the Central Powers when a British

expeditionary force sent into Mesopotamia (Iraq) was surrounded and captured at

Kut al-Amara in April 1916. On the western front, the German army managed to

repel several major British and French offensives in 1916–17, while inﬂicting maximum

damage at Verdun and on the Somme. The biggest blow for the Allies came in

December 1917, when the new Bolshevik government in Russia sued for peace on

terms highly favorable to Germany and Austria-Hungary. This seemed to be a vindi-

cation of the decision taken by the German high command to allow the Bolshevik

leader Lenin safe passage through Germany on his way home from Zurich to

Petrograd (later renamed Leningrad) in April 1917.

In other respects, however, the Central Powers fared less well. The plan to create

a pro-independence Irish army from captured Irish prisoners of war under the rebel

leader Sir Roger Casement, ﬁrst hatched in Berlin in November 1914, came to

nothing, as Casement could not ﬁnd the necessary recruits. In the end the Easter

Rising in Dublin in 1916 went ahead without German support, only to collapse

within days of its outbreak. Likewise, an attempted German–Turkish invasion of the

Suez Canal ended in complete failure, as did plans to encourage Islamic revolts against

British rule in Egypt and India. In fact, it was the Turkish sultan who turned out to

be more vulnerable to nationalist unrest in the Middle East, especially after the

announcement of the British-backed Arab revolt in June 1916. Above all, however,

Austria-Hungary proved to be a weak and unreliable ally for Germany, and was always

having to be bailed out, most notably in the summer of 1916 when the Russians

launched a surprise offensive on the eastern front under General Brusilov. Only after

the intervention of German troops was the Brusilov offensive pushed back, leading

to a momentary crisis of conﬁdence in Berlin. As the chief of the general staff, Erich

von Falkenhayn, put it on August 21, 1916: “Every redeployment in one direction

leads inevitably to a dangerous weakening in other places which – if even the slightest

error is made with regard to our assessment of the enemy’s next moves – could lead

to our destruction.”

How to break the stalemate on the western front remained the crucial strategic

question for both sides. As well as mass bombardments followed by orders to go over

the top, poisonous gas, ﬂamethrowers, and other deadly weapons were used, causing

huge numbers of casualties for no immediate gain. The brutalizing effects of trench

warfare were also evident in occasional, but very real, instances of prisoner killing on

both sides in contravention of international law. This had important strategic as well

as humanitarian implications, for, as Niall Ferguson has argued, in the end it was

numbers captured rather than numbers wounded or killed that determined the

outcome of the war. Thus high levels of desertion and surrender heralded the collapse

of the Russian army on the eastern front in late 1917, and of the Italian army after

the battle of Caporetto (October 1917). A similar pattern, albeit on a slightly lesser

scale, was seen with the German army on the western front in the late summer of

1918. Crucial here, according to Ferguson, was a shift in Allied propaganda towards

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bombarding frontline German soldiers with offers of food and humane treatment if

they surrendered; this, he argues, was a more effective means of undermining enemy

morale and discipline than the order to “take no prisoners.”

The war at sea was very different in this respect. Here the main target was civilians

(via economic blockade and submarine warfare) and they were encouraged to sur-

render not through promises of food and comforts but through disruption to living

standards and slow starvation. In this sense, Britain possessed a decisive strategic

advantage over Germany. Its geographic position allowed it to mount a distant block-

ade of the German coastline using surface ships, effectively cutting off the Central

Powers from trade with the outside world and with America in particular. German

propagandists reacted angrily, accusing Britain of gross violations of the rules of war

and the rights of neutrals. However, in reality the Central Powers could strike back

against British supply lines only by unleashing the submarine, a dangerous weapon

when used indiscriminately, as the international outcry caused by the sinking of the

Lusitania off the coast of Ireland in May 1915 showed. The alternative option of

breaking the blockade by drawing the Royal Navy into an all-out showdown for

control of the North Sea was considered too risky, particularly as Britain still had a

numerical advantage in terms of battleships. Indeed, only once did the British and

German ﬂeets face each other for a serious ﬁght: at the battle of Jutland on May 31,

1916. The result was inconclusive, although Admiral von Scheer, the commander of

the German High Seas Fleet, subsequently advised the Kaiser against further naval

engagements as “there can be no doubt that even the best possible outcome . . . would

not force England to make peace in this war.”

Instead, Scheer joined the growing number of naval strategists in Germany calling

for the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare as the only possible means of

compelling Britain to surrender. During the ﬁrst half of 1916 the Kaiser and Bethmann

Hollweg still resolutely refused to countenance such a move, on the grounds that it

would bring America and other neutrals into the war without securing any signiﬁcant

strategic advantages for the Central Powers. However, a major turning point came at

the end of August 1916 when the chief of the general staff, Falkenhayn, was replaced

by Hindenburg, with Erich Ludendorff as ﬁrst quartermaster general. The latter were

determined to force through an ambitious program of total mobilization of all the

nation’s resources for victory: unrestricted submarine warfare was a necessary part of

this plan. At a Crown Council meeting at Pleß on January 9, 1917 Bethmann’s objec-

tions were overruled and the decision was reached to unleash the submarines from

February 1. According to the calculations of a host of civilian experts, backed by

German admirals and the naval high command, Britain would now be defeated within

six months or less, rendering any American assistance irrelevant.

At ﬁrst it seemed as if they might be right. In the spring of 1917, the German U-

boats managed to sink even more than the predicted 600,000 tons of food per

month.

However, the British agreed to adopt the so-called convoy system, which

made the transatlantic run far less hazardous for ships in the second half of 1917,

and helped, in the end, to defeat the German blockade of the western powers. At

the same time, the German submarine campaign did more than anything else to bring

the United States into the war. Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany

on February 2, 1917, and declared war on April 6. In the short term, America’s

intervention had little noticeable effect, but in the long run it tipped the military and

the war from above 237

economic balance decisively in favor of the Allies. By December 1917 there were

already 176,000 American troops in France, and by March 1918 the total had reached

318,000. These were the forerunners of a much larger force of 1.3 million Americans

and several million British, French, Canadian, and Belgian troops deployed in the

Allied counter-offensive on the western front in August 1918, which ﬁnally forced

the German high command to sue for peace.

Diplomacy

War aims and the search for alternative strategies to win the war both involved an

avoidance of the question of peace. Restoration of the status quo ante bellum was

unacceptable to both sides. Indeed, those who talked of peace were marginalized and

persecuted in all countries. In Germany the socialists Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin,

and Karl Liebknecht were imprisoned, and bourgeois paciﬁsts were subject to close

police surveillance. In June 1917 Britain, France, Italy, and America joined together

to thwart a proposed conference of neutral and belligerent socialist parties in

Stockholm, and without their support the project – part of a joint Russian–Dutch–

Scandinavian initiative – eventually collapsed. When the British cabinet minister and

former Unionist foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne wrote a letter to the editor of

the Daily Telegraph in November 1917 calling for a negotiated settlement on prag-

matic and humanitarian grounds, he was disowned by his own party and widely vili-

ﬁed in the British press.

Even so, behind the scenes the Germans and the Russians were already discussing

possible peace terms by the end of 1914, and all the belligerents were involved at

one time or another in secret negotiations with the enemy. Throughout the war

Germany hoped to detach one of the Allies from the rest, and at ﬁrst it seemed that

Russia was the best bet. Subsequently, channels of communication between the Kaiser

and the tsar were developed through various intermediaries, including the king of

Denmark, Christian X, and one of his aides, the shipping magnate Hans Niels

Andersen. Contacts were also made with the former Russian prime minister Count

Sergei Witte, who was known to have pro-German sympathies.

For the time being,

however, the Russians stuck to the Pact of London (September 1914) by which the

Allies were bound not to make a separate peace with the Central Powers. After Italy

joined the war in May 1915, it too signed up to the terms of the Pact of London in

return for a promise of Allied support for its territorial demands against Austria and

the Ottoman Empire.

In 1915 and 1916 fresh opportunities for a general peace settlement came through

the ofﬁces of Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s special envoy to

Europe. House traveled across the Atlantic three times in a failed bid to persuade

the warring powers to specify their minimum terms. At the end of January 1916 his

efforts collapsed when Bethmann Hollweg refused to relinquish his demands for

“safeguards” in Belgium and Poland, and also asked for territorial compensations in

northern France, terms which were completely unacceptable to London and Paris.

Subsequently, House proposed to the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey that

a conference be held to end the war, and that minimum peace terms would include

“the restoration of Belgium, the transfer of Alsace and Lorraine to France, and the

acquisition by Russia of an outlet to the sea.” Germany would be offered territorial