A Higher Form of Killing (39 page)

Room 40 had decoded the telegram and passed it to Hall. He waited until the middle of February when it was clear that the German announcement of its submarine campaign would not provoke the United States into an immediate declaration of war. Then Hall showed it to Edward Bell, an intelligence officer at the U.S. embassy in London and Hall’s longtime associate, whom he used to get messages quickly and accurately to Washington.
****
Bell in turn showed Zimmermann’s telegram to the American Ambassador to Britain Walter Hines Page. Together they passed it to Washington, ensuring that its source was not revealed so as not to let Germany know its code had been broken by Room 40. On receiving the document on February 24, Wilson and Lansing released it to the press, most of whom were outraged. However, a few staunchly anti-interventionist papers suggested it was a fake until Zimmermann, for reasons best known to himself, confirmed its authenticity. Then they too changed their minds. The
Omaha
World Herald
wrote: “The issue shifts from Germany against Great Britain to Germany against the United States.” The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
thought there was “neither virtue nor dignity” in not fighting now.

On March 18 U-boats sank three unarmed American freighters without warning and with the loss of fifteen men on one of them, the
Vigilance.
Wilson summoned a special session of Congress on April 4 and told them: “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission. The status of belligerent has been thrust upon us . . . It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war. But the right is more precious than peace. The world must be made safe for democracy. The day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood . . . for the principles that gave her birth.” By April 6 Congress had ratified the declaration of war.

Recruitment posters appeared headlined
REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA
. Another depicted a drowning woman, hair streaming out like seaweed in blue-green water and a baby clasped tight to her chest. A single bloodred word was superimposed over the image—
ENLIST
.

*
A bullet killed Wilfred Owen in November 1918, a week before the end of the war.

**
 At this time the same sum would buy about four bottles of whisky.

***
Japan had joined the Allies in August 1914, seizing several German North Pacific territories.

****
Bell said of Hall, “No man could fill his place—a perfectly marvellous person but the coldest-blooded proposition that ever was—he’d eat a man’s heart and hand it back to him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Each One Must Fight On to the End”

Despite the U.S. declaration of war, that year, 1917, was not a successful one for the Allies on land, at sea, or in the air. In March, revolution in Russia saw Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government take power after the abdication of the czar. Although the provisional government kept Russia in the war, its allies knew that for the present little could be expected from the Russian armies wracked by desertions and turning in on themselves. Then in the summer of 1917 Russian armies suffered a series of heavy defeats resulting in the loss of much territory including cities such as Riga. In October 1917, nine Austro-Hungarian and six German divisions attacked and routed the Italian army at Caporetto in the Italian foothills in the Alps, pushing them back seventy miles. The Italian army suffered two hundred thousand casualties and in addition nearly four hundred thousand men deserted. The French authorities felt compelled to send six divisions to Italy to reinforce their allies, and the British sent five.

On the western front, French armies were exhausted after the attritional fighting around Verdun and their morale was weakening, leading to several mutinies. British attacks at Arras and around Ypres—among their aims to seize occupied Belgian ports being used as bases for the marauding U-boats and the airfields from which German planes took off to attack London—failed to gain significant ground. They finally petered out in the thick mud around the village of Passchendaele in mid-November. British casualties in the preceding six months had been 275,000, of whom 75,000 were dead.

British troops had become accustomed to protecting themselves from attacks by German phosgene and chlorine shells—their box respirators successfully kept these gases out. However, on the warm summer evening of July 12, 1917 near Ypres the British Fifteenth and Fifty-fifth Divisions faced for the first time another and even more hazardous substance. They had been subjected to a heavy barrage mixing high-explosive shells with those containing shrapnel or phosgene before shells containing a liquid that to some looked like sherry burst around them. It vaporized to give off a gas variously described as smelling like “mustard, rubber, vulcanite, dead horses, diseased vegetables, petrol, garlic and lamp oil,” even “freshly chopped horseradish.” Some soldiers thought it was a weak tear gas and did not put on their box respirators. A few hours later they woke with pain in their eyes and “blisters and painful burns” on their skin. The first deaths occurred two days later “after a period of excruciating agony.” The new weapon was mustard gas developed and manufactured under Fritz Haber’s supervision as the head of the German Ministry of War’s chemistry department. He hailed it as an “amazing success.”

Observing some of the gassed men, a medical officer described faces “congested and swollen,” covered with small blisters, and “a few cases . . . had blisters on the backs of the thighs and buttocks and even on the scrotum with oedema of the scrotum and penis . . . probably due to men sitting on the ground contaminated with the toxic substance.” Another doctor described entering a ward of gassed men and being struck by “the incessant and apparently useless coughing.” A British nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote of soldiers with “great mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, blind eyes . . . all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”

Because its vaporization point was high, the liquid mustard gas lingered in water, in shell craters, and elsewhere and contaminated the soil—to the extent that gas used in late 1917 vaporized on the return of warmth in spring 1918. Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers recalled, “Our new box respirators were proof against [the gas]. It would burn through the clothes and nasty blisters would break out. If an area had been shelled with these shells it was never safe to use a shell hole as a latrine . . . The gas would hang around.” Gas shells of which “mustard was the most deadly sort” fell with “no loud explosions . . . They struck the ground with a soft thud and it was difficult to tell them from duds.”

Blindness caused by mustard gas was usually but not always temporary. A British corporal described his fears, “Was I going to be blind for life? What was I going to do? My trade, my employment gone. It hit me very, very hard.” Even if like this soldier men gradually recovered their sight, those afflicted were away from the battlefield for long periods and caring for them used up considerable resources. Life in the trenches became even more difficult. Soldiers had to protect themselves at nearly all times, frequently donning gas masks and goggles, covering exposed skin—a particular problem for kilted Scottish and Canadian Highlanders—washing as best they could any suspected contaminated clothing and using bleach to clear a path across heavily contaminated soil. Lieutenant Safford of the U.S. Marine Corps recalled how before going into battle soldiers “would often grease their bodies with lard” to stop the gas coming into contact with their skin.

General Amos Fries, head of the United States Chemical Warfare Service, thought “the reduction in physical vigour and, therefore, in efficiency of an army forced at all times to wear masks would amount to at least twenty-five per cent, equivalent to disabling a quarter of a million men out of an army of a million.” And all this was in a sea of mud. A British sergeant major, Richard Tobin, described the conditions: “There was no chance of being wounded . . . at Passchendaele. You could either get through or die, because if you were wounded and slipped off the duckboards you just sank into the mud . . . Each side was a sea of mud, and if you stumbled you would go in up to the waist, and literally every pool was full of the decomposed bodies of humans and mules.”

The German U-boat commanders fulfilled Admiral von Holtzendorff’s promise to the kaiser about the tonnage they would sink. Between the beginning of February 1917 and the end of April that year they sank almost two million tons of shipping, more than 870,000 tons of that in April alone. This did not, however, cause the British authorities to seek peace. Instead, in May they somewhat belatedly instituted a convoy system—naval officers having been unnecessarily concerned about their merchant equivalents’ ability to keep station and follow instructions from their naval escorts. Destroyers were the ideal escort but were in short supply. Therefore, the British naval headquarters at Queenstown was more than grateful when six modern U.S. destroyers arrived in the port in early May to be followed before the end of the month by twelve more. They were quickly integrated into the British naval operations—the U.S. Navy unlike the U.S. Army under General John Pershing did not insist on retaining its own independent command structure—and were soon at work with their British counterparts protecting convoys, searching for submarines, and enforcing the blockade to which until very recently their government had been taking exception as contrary to America’s long-cherished policy of “freedom of the seas.” By the end of July, the combined naval force at Queenstown had thirty-four U.S. destroyers, mostly larger than the British ones and therefore perfect for the Atlantic convoy role.

The introduction of the convoy system reduced, even if it did not halt, the sinkings. Karl Dönitz, commander in chief of the German navy in the Second World War, was in 1917 a submarine commander and reported, “the oceans at once became bare.” The concentration and protection of the merchant ships was the key factor in reducing losses, not the number of submarines destroyed. Nevertheless, more submarines were being sunk due in particular to scientific and engineering advances accelerated by wartime needs. In 1915, the only method of detecting a submerged submarine had been rudimentary hydrophones that only worked in a shore installation or on a ship that had its engines and machinery stopped. Even then, waves hitting the hull provoked serious interference. During the next two years hydrophones—though still by no means perfect—were sufficiently improved to detect submarines from moving ships.

Until the invention of the depth charge in 1916, attacks on fully submerged submarines had in any case been virtually impossible. Depth charges looked like metal dustbins and were rolled off the stern of a destroyer when the vessel’s crew believed it to be above a submarine. They contained three hundred pounds of TNT with a pressure fuse set to the depth the submarine was thought to be at. They achieved their first kill in December 1916.

When von Holtzendorff’s five-month timescale for British capitulation passed at the end of June, shipping losses for that month were 696,000 tons, compared to May’s 616,000 and April’s record of over 800,000, but thereafter they began to decline. In November 1917 they were 302,000 and reduced further to some 230,000 per month at the war’s end. By April 1918 U.S. and British shipyards were producing more new merchant tonnage than was being sunk. Even more significantly, of the nearly two million U.S. troops crossing the Atlantic to the western front less than seven hundred died as a result of submarine action.

Zeppelin attacks on London had continued through the first part of 1916 but British air defenses had improved. New fighters like the De Havilland DH2—with a one-hundred-horsepower rotary engine capable of ninety-three miles per hour and of reaching fourteen thousand feet—flew faster and higher. Their guns now had explosive and incendiary bullets, fired alternately first to puncture the zeppelins’ gas cells, then to ignite the hydrogen within. Germans airmen called the bullets “an invention of the devil. Had we caught the man who invented that bullet, we should gladly have incinerated him in a stream of burning hydrogen.” Also, in April 1916 the British captured one of the new German fighters, the Fokker Eindecker, designed by Anthony Fokker, a Dutchman working in Germany, and learned the secrets of its synchronization gear which allowed a forward-facing machine gun to fire through a rotating propeller. This mechanism would soon be introduced into British planes. (The DH2 avoided this problem by being a “pusher” biplane with the propeller facing the rear.)

In early September 1916, twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson coaxed his BE2c (an older model of plane) to nearly thirteen thousand feet and attacking from above became the first British pilot to shoot down an airship (the German army’s
SL11)
over England. Another airship commander watched as “it caught fire at the stern, burned with an enormous flame and fell.” It crashed near the village of Cuffley in Hertfordshire with no survivors. A female onlooker thought “poor devils” but Londoners cheered, danced, and sang in the streets. Robinson received the Victoria Cross five days later. The German army disbanded its Airship Service shortly afterward. Peter Strasser still believed his naval zeppelins could inflict decisive damage on London, but by the end of 1916 five of his airships had also been shot down. Heinrich Mathy, the first commander ever to bomb central London, died jumping from his burning zeppelin above Potters Bar, north of the city.