Dead Wake (44 page)

Wilson’s protest—the so-called First
Lusitania
Note—was the initial salvo in what would become a two-year war of paper, filled with U.S. protests and German replies, made against a backdrop of new attacks against neutral ships and revelations that German spies were at work in America. Wilson did all he could to keep America neutral in action and in spirit, but Secretary Bryan did not think he tried hard enough, and resigned on June 8, 1915. His resignation brought universal condemnation, with editors comparing him to Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold. The Goshen, Indiana,
News-Times
said, “
The Kaiser has awarded the Iron Cross for less valuable service than that rendered by Mr. Bryan.” In a letter to Edith Galt,
Wilson himself described Bryan as a “traitor.” He replaced him with the department’s number two man, Undersecretary Robert Lansing, who by this time had come to long for war.

Wilson had cause for cheer, however. In a letter dated June 29, 1915, Edith at last agreed to marry him. They wed on December 18, 1915, in a simple ceremony at the White House. Late that night the couple set out on their honeymoon, traveling by private railcar to Hot Springs, Virginia. They had chicken salad for a late supper. As the train pulled into the station early the next morning, Wilson’s Secret Service man Edmund Starling happened to look into the railcar’s sitting room and, as Starling later wrote, saw “
a figure in top hat, tailcoat, and gray morning trousers, standing with his back to me, hands in his pockets, happily dancing a jig.”

As Starling watched, Wilson, still oblivious to his presence,
clicked his heels in the air, and sang, “Oh, you beautiful doll! You great big beautiful doll!”

G
ERMANY
’
S
U-
BOAT
campaign waxed and waned, in step with the rising and falling influence of factions within its government that favored and opposed submarine warfare against merchant ships. Kaiser Wilhelm himself expressed a certain repugnance for attacks on passenger liners. In February 1916, he told fleet commander Admiral Scheer, “
Were I the Captain of a U-boat I would never torpedo a ship if I knew that women and children were aboard.” The next month, Germany’s most senior advocate of unrestricted warfare, State Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz, resigned, in frustration. This brought a sympathy note from an odd quarter—Britain’s former First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher. “
Dear Old Tirps,” he wrote. He urged Tirpitz to “cheer up” and told him, “You’re the one German sailor who understands War! Kill your enemy without being killed yourself.
I don’t blame you for the submarine business
. I’d have done the same myself, only our idiots in England wouldn’t believe it when I told ’em. Well! So long!”

He signed off with his usual closing, “Yours till hell freezes, Fisher.”

That June, 1916, the Kaiser issued an order forbidding attacks against all large passenger ships, even those that were obviously British. He went on to order so many restrictions on how and when U-boat commanders could attack ships that the German navy, in protest, suspended all operations against merchant vessels in British waters.

But the
Lusitania
remained a point of conflict. President Wilson’s protests failed to generate a response he deemed satisfactory—much to the delight of Britain’s director of naval intelligence, Blinker Hall, who argued that any delay in resolving the
Lusitania
situation was “
advantageous to the Allied cause.”

Kapitänleutnant Schwieger did his part to worsen relations between America and Germany. On September 4, 1915, in the midst
of a patrol during which he sank ten steamships and one four-masted bark, he torpedoed the passenger liner
Hesperian
, killing thirty-two passengers and crew.

The
Hesperian
was clearly outbound, on its way to New York, and thus unlikely to be carrying munitions or other contraband. Among its cargo was the corpse of a
Lusitania
victim, Frances Stephens, a wealthy Canadian at last being transported home to Montreal.

W
ILSON WON
reelection in 1916. He played golf nearly every day, often with the new Mrs. Wilson. They even played in snow: Secret Service man Starling painted the golf balls red to improve visibility. They routinely took drives through the countryside, a pastime Wilson adored. Marriage buoyed his spirits and eased his loneliness. Like the previous Mrs. Wilson, Edith became a trusted counselor, who listened to drafts of his speeches, critiqued his various notes to Germany, and now and then offered advice.

Outside the White House, Wilson’s many notes to Germany and their replies became the target of wry humor, as when one editor wrote: “
Dear Kaiser: In spite of previous correspondence on the subject another ship with American citizens on board has been sunk. Under the circumstances we feel constrained to inform you, in a spirit of utmost friendliness, that a repetition of the incident will of necessity require the dispatch of another note to your majesty’s most estimable and peace-loving government.”

As late as December 1916, Wilson believed he could still keep America neutral and, further, that he might himself be able to serve as a mediator to bring about a peace accord. He was heartened, therefore, when that winter Germany stated it might consider seeking peace with Britain, under certain conditions. Britain dismissed the overture out of hand, describing it as a German attempt to declare victory, but to Wilson it offered at least the hope that future negotiations could take place. Germany’s ambassador to America, Count Johann-Heinrich von Bernstorff, reinforced Wilson’s optimism,
signaling that Germany was indeed willing to engage in discussions toward peace.

But Bernstorff tended to be more optimistic than facts warranted and possessed only a limited grasp of a new and dramatic change in his own government’s thinking.

I
N
G
ERMANY
, a paradoxical shift was under way. Even as its leaders seemed to be maneuvering toward peace, the camp within the government that favored all-out submarine warfare gained ground. These were military officials who now sought authority to sink
all
merchant ships entering the war zone, neutral or otherwise—even American vessels. The shift was driven in part by the enthusiasm of the German public, who, dismayed by the carnage of the trenches, had come to see the U-boat as a miracle weapon—a
Wunderwaffe
—that if deployed for total war would quickly force Britain to her knees. This coincided with a fundamental change in German naval thinking, in which Schwieger and U-20 played an important role.

Throughout the fall of 1916, Schwieger had continued his exemplary performance as a submarine commander, sinking ship after ship, but early that November he ran into trouble. While returning from a three-week patrol in the Western Approaches, his boat ran aground, in fog, about 20 feet from the Danish shore. He radioed for assistance. The response was overwhelming. Admiral Scheer ordered destroyers to the scene, to attempt to pull U-20 loose, and dispatched an entire battle squadron—cruisers and battleships—to provide protection. Still U-20 remained mired. Schwieger was ordered to destroy the boat to keep it from falling into enemy hands. He exploded two torpedoes in the bow. If his intent was to obliterate the boat, he failed. The bow was mangled, but the rest of the boat, and its gun, remained intact, embedded in the sand to a depth of about 15 feet, and fully visible from the shore.

Meanwhile, in London, Room 40 began receiving wireless
intercepts that indicated something extraordinary was taking place. The Room 40 log noted, “
Great excitement & activity.” The Admiralty dispatched a submarine to the scene, whose commander found four battleships and managed to torpedo two of them, damaging both, sinking neither.

The episode proved to have a crystallizing effect on German naval strategy. At first, Kaiser Wilhelm upbraided Admiral Scheer for putting so many ships at risk on behalf of one submarine. But Scheer countered that the U-boat force had supplanted the High Seas Fleet as the primary offensive weapon of the German navy. The fleet, hiding in its bases while ostensibly waiting for the great battle, had achieved nothing. Henceforth, Scheer told Wilhelm, the fleet “
will have to devote itself to one task—to get the U-boats safely out to sea and bring them safely home again.” Scheer argued that U-20 was especially important, because if the Royal Navy had been allowed to destroy or capture the U-boat that had sunk the
Lusitania
, “this would be glad tidings for the British Government.”

He told Wilhelm that if submarine crews were to maintain their daring—their “ardor”—they needed full assurance that they would not be abandoned if they encountered difficulties. “To us,” Scheer declared, “
every U-boat is of such importance, that it is worth risking the whole available Fleet to afford it assistance and support.”

By this point, Germany’s U-boat fleet had achieved a level of strength that at last gave it the potential to become a truly imposing force. Where in May 1915 the navy had only thirty U-boats, by 1917 it had more than one hundred, many larger and more powerful than Schwieger’s U-20 and carrying more torpedoes. With this robust new fleet now ready, the pressure to deploy it to the fullest grew steadily.

A German admiral, Henning von Holtzendorff, came up with a plan so irresistible it succeeded in bringing agreement between supporters and opponents of unrestricted warfare. By turning Germany’s U-boats loose, and allowing their captains to sink
every
vessel that entered the “war zone,” Holtzendorff proposed to end
the war in six months. Not five, not seven, but six. He calculated that for the plan to succeed, it had to begin on February 1, 1917, not a day later. Whether or not the campaign drew America into the war didn’t matter, he argued, for the war would be over before American forces could be mobilized. The plan, like its territorial equivalent, the Schlieffen plan, was a model of methodical German thinking, though no one seemed to recognize that it too embodied a large measure of self-delusion. Holtzendorff bragged, “
I guarantee upon my word as a naval officer that no American will set foot on the Continent!”

Germany’s top civilian and military leaders converged on Kaiser Wilhelm’s castle at Pless on January 8, 1917, to consider the plan, and the next evening Wilhelm, in his role as supreme military commander, signed an order to put it into action, a decision that would prove one of the most fateful of the war. On January 16, the German Foreign Office sent an announcement of the new campaign to Ambassador Bernstorff in Washington, with instructions that he deliver it to Secretary Lansing on January 31, the day before the new campaign was to begin. The timing was an affront to Wilson: it left no opportunity for protest or negotiation and came even as Bernstorff was promoting the idea that Germany really did want peace.

Wilson was outraged but chose not to see the declaration itself as sufficient justification for war. What he did not yet know was that there was a second, very secret message appended to the telegram Bernstorff had received and that both telegrams had been intercepted and relayed to Blinker Hall’s intelligence division in the Old Admiralty Building in London, which by now oversaw a second, and singularly sensitive, component of Room 40’s operations—the interception of diplomatic communications, both German and, incidentally, American.

T
HE FIRST OF
Hall’s men to grasp the importance of the second telegram was one of his top code breakers, Lt. Cdr. Nigel de Grey.
On the morning of January 17, 1917, a Wednesday, Hall and another colleague were attending to routine matters, when de Grey walked into the office.

“D.I.D.,” he began—using the acronym for Director of Intelligence Division—“
d’you want to bring America into the war?”

“Yes, my boy,” Hall answered. “Why?”

De Grey told him that a message had come in that was “rather astonishing.” It had been intercepted the day before, and de Grey had not yet managed to read the entire text, but what he had deciphered thus far seemed almost too far-fetched to be plausible.

Hall read the partial decrypt three or four times, in silence. “I do not remember a time when I was more excited,” he wrote.

But just as quickly, he realized that the remarkable nature of the message presented a challenge. To disclose the text right away would not only put the secret of Room 40 at risk but also raise questions about the credibility of the message, for what it proposed was certain to raise skepticism.

The telegram was from Germany’s foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, written in a new code that was unfamiliar to Room 40. The process of rendering its text in coherent English was slow and difficult, but gradually the essential elements of the message came into view, like a photograph in a darkroom bath. It instructed Germany’s ambassador in Mexico to offer Mexican president Venustiano Carranza an alliance, to take effect if the new submarine campaign drew America into the war. “
Make war together,” Zimmermann proposed. “Make peace together.” In return, Germany would take measures to help Mexico seize previously held lands—“lost territory”—in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Hall had no doubt as to the telegram’s importance. “
This may be a very big thing,” he told de Grey, “possibly the biggest thing of the war. For the present not a soul outside this room is to be told anything at all.” And that included even Hall’s superiors in the Admiralty.

Hall hoped he could avoid revealing the telegram altogether. There was a chance that Germany’s declaration of unrestricted U-boat warfare by itself would persuade President Wilson that the
time for war had come. Hall’s hopes soared on February 3, 1917, when Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and ordered Ambassador Bernstorff to leave. But Wilson stopped short of calling for war. In a speech that day, Wilson stated that he could not believe Germany really intended to attack every ship that entered the war zone and added, “
Only actual overt acts on their part can make me believe it even now.”