To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [149]
France saw strikes and the largest May Day demonstrations of the war years, with red flags flying and speakers calling for peace. An American correspondent on the Eastern Front watched through his field glasses as Russian and German enlisted men met in no man's land to communicate in sign language: the Russians blowing across their open palms to show that the Tsar had been blown away, the Germans thrusting their bayonets into the earth. Could this finally be the moment that Hardie had hoped for so fervently, when soldiers on both sides refused to continue killing each other? Sylvia Pankhurst jubilantly called the change in Russia "the first ray of dawn, after a long and painful night."
At sea, as on land, nothing was going well for the Allies. Germany's ramped-up U-boat war had severely disrupted the vital transatlantic lifeline and sowed fear among sailors and passengers. For them, the danger of being sunk by a torpedo was magnified by the fact that the explosion could crack a ship's engine room boilers, releasing below decks a high-pressure blast of scalding steam. An officer on a merchant ship taking supplies to Russia reported that some officials he was carrying stayed on deck, near the lifeboats, for most of the voyage. The area just southwest of Ireland, crossed by ships approaching most major English and Irish ports, became what Churchill called "a veritable cemetery of British shipping."
Once a submarine had shown its location by firing a torpedo, a Royal Navy ship could attack it by dropping depth charges—explosives set to go off underwater, at the level the submarine was thought to be. But seldom was a warship close by, for it was impossible for them to escort each of the thousands of cargo vessels crossing the Atlantic. Few U-boats were sunk and, ominously, the Germans were increasing the size of their submarine fleet. Senior Admiralty officers had long resisted one possible solution: sending merchant ships in convoys, guarded by a screen of destroyers or other small warships. Convoys were cumbersome, limited to the speed of the slowest ship, and ports became clogged when dozens of ships arrived together. The navy chiefs, writes war historian Trevor Wilson, "were imbued with a proud tradition, according to which going hunting for the enemy seemed a proper course and chugging along in support of merchantmen did not." The navy preferred to be, as it were, cavalrymen of the sea. But wiser heads eventually prevailed. Milner, now wielding unprecedented powers supervising Britain's entire war economy, was acutely aware of its depen dence on shipping and helped persuade Lloyd George to adopt the convoy system. On May 10, 1917, 17 merchant vessels and their naval escorts set off for England from Gibraltar, and, at a time when more than 300 ships a month were being torpedoed, not a single ship in the convoy was sunk.
Convoys made life far more difficult for U-boats, for if one did torpedo a cargo ship, fast destroyers with the convoy could rush to the scene to drop depth charges. And with electric engines limiting their underwater travel to a mere eight knots, less than a quarter of a destroyer's speed, submarines had trouble getting away. Before the year was over, more than half of Britain's overseas trade would be carried by ships in convoy. U-boat "kills" dropped dramatically. The submarine, though still much feared, was not going to win the war. Germany's great gamble at sea had failed.
The German high command had long known that unrestricted U-boat warfare would risk bringing the United States into the war. And so it did—but far sooner than the Germans had planned for. In March, the American press trumpeted news of the notorious "Zimmermann Telegram," gleefully decoded and given to Washington by British intelligence, in which Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister, foolishly tried to induce Mexico to join the war on the German side by promising