Germany Resumes Unrestricted Submarine Warfare
Germany announced on 1 February 1917 that its submarines would sink any ship in the waters around Britain and France without warning, and it brought the United States into the war within nine weeks. The decision was taken with full knowledge of that risk. The naval staff calculated that Britain could be starved out in five months if 600,000 tons were sunk monthly, and that the Americans could not raise, train and ship an army fast enough to matter before then. It was an explicit gamble on arithmetic, and the arithmetic was defensible: sinkings peaked at 869,000 tons in April, and Britain was reportedly down to about six weeks of grain. Germany had tried it before, in 1915, and had suspended it after the Lusitania and the Sussex produced American ultimatums. What broke it was the convoy system, which the Admiralty resisted for months on the argument that merchant captains could not keep station and that convoys made bigger targets. Lloyd George forced a trial in May 1917, and losses fell sharply — because an empty ocean is large and a submarine has to find the convoy at all, and because escorts could then attack it. Losses fell below new construction by late 1917. The Americans declared war on 6 April, and the effect was immediate in shipping, finance and morale long before the army arrived in strength. Some 5,000 merchant ships and 15,000 Allied seamen were lost. The same argument was rerun from 1939. The German naval staff's calculation was not stupid, and it was made on a model that ignored what the enemy might do differently. That is the standard criticism of it, and the standard defence is that Germany had no other way of breaking a blockade that was starving it.
- Year: 1917 CE
- Category: Political
