To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [138]
In this sub-rosa battle, Haig's cultivation of Lord Northcliffe was crucial, for Lloyd George partly owed his position to the press baron, whose papers had praised him and kept up a drumbeat of criticism that had helped force Asquith to step down. When Lloyd George and the War Cabinet began trying to intervene in military strategy in a way that the mild Asquith had never dared, Haig turned to Northcliffe and confided to his diary that the magnate was "fully alive to his responsibility for putting Lloyd George into power," as well as "determined to keep him in the right lines or force him to resign." Nor did Haig's widely known relationship with the royal family do him any harm. "It gives me great pleasure and satisfaction," King George V wrote to him, "to tell you that I have decided to appoint you a Field Marshal in my Army.... I hope you will look upon it as a New Year's gift from myself and the country."
Haig was safe, but the first major military development of 1917 would not take place on the Western Front—or even on land.
In the previous two years, despite the millions of soldiers killed and wounded, nowhere along its entire length of nearly 500 miles had the front line moved in either direction by more than a few hours' walk. Military history had not seen the likes of this before, and the Germans were no less frustrated than the Allies.
Furthermore, the German government was battling against opponents, east and west, whose combined armies were significantly larger, and on the home front the situation remained dire. In a country already desperately short of food, abnormally severe temperatures froze rivers and canals that usually delivered coal, and millions of city dwellers, as the historian David Stevenson has put it, "endured cold and hunger unknown since pre-industrial times."
Austria-Hungary was in even worse condition, and militarily was more of a burden to Germany than the ally it was supposed to be. Its comic-opera army, rich in splendid uniforms, was weak in everything else, and its government was so inept that for the first eight months of war it had not bothered to stop a Vienna trading firm from doing a booming business selling food and medicine—through neutral countries—to the Russian army. The failure to take Verdun dashed any hopes Germany had for new frontal assaults against either the French or the British. So what was to be done? Like Lloyd George, the Germans were looking for ways around the impasse of the Western Front. And this led them to take one of the great gambles of the war.
Since the conflict began, German submarines had been sinking Allied ships by the hundreds, notoriously torpedoing the British passenger liner Lusitania in 1915. The prime targets were ships crossing the Atlantic, delivering essential food and a wide array of arms and manufactured goods Britain and France were buying from American suppliers. The Germans were wary, however, of sinking American ships, which could provoke the neutral United States into joining the Allies.
Germany's gamble of early 1917 was to declare unlimited submarine warfare, making fair game almost any vessel headed for Allied ports—including those from a neutral country. Cutting off the Atlantic supply lines so crucial to the British and French war effort, the Germans hoped, would force the Allies to sue for peace. The danger of unlimited submarine warfare, of course, was that it was certain to sink American ships and kill American sailors, therefore sooner or later drawing the United States, the world's largest economy, into the war. As reckless as this might seem,