A Higher Form of Killing (33 page)

The American press reaction was hostile. The suggestion that ships should be painted like “barber’s poles” was an insult. The U.S. response sent on July 21 was the strongest yet, declaring that by offering special privileges to American vessels, Germany was setting international law aside; that by stating its submarine blockade was an act of reprisal the German government was admitting its illegality, reprisals being inherently illegal. The key issue was the “grave and unjustifiable violations of the rights of American citizens.” The U.S. government would regard any further violations “as deliberately unfriendly.” When he received the note, the kaiser scrawled on it, “immeasurably impertinent,” “you don’t say so!” and at the bottom “about the most impudent note which I have ever read . . . It ends with a direct threat!”

In the face of the continuing squabbles about the campaign Admirals Bachmann and von Tirpitz felt that the position of the U-boat service had become intolerable. “Order, counter-order, disorder!” von Tirpitz wrote.

Worse was to come for them. Fifty miles off the Old Head of Kinsale on August 19, the
U-24
sank without warning the sixteen-thousand-ton unarmed British White Star passenger liner
Arabic
which had avoided the
U-20
just before she had sunk the
Lusitania
. Forty-four passengers and crew including four Americans died. The U-boat commander claimed he had mistaken her for a freighter but had clearly contravened the orders issued in June not to fire if in doubt about the status of a vessel. Von Bethmann Hollweg now persuaded the kaiser to inform Washington that no unresisting passenger liners would be sunk without warning.

Bachmann complained that trying to distinguish a passenger liner could cause confusion. Von Tirpitz insisted that following these orders would endanger U-boats. His arguments were strengthened when, on the day of the
Arabic
sinking, the German U-boat service discovered in brutal fashion the existence of British “Q” or decoy ships. Originally the brainchild of Churchill and Fisher, these naval vessels were disguised to resemble ordinary tramp steamers but carried guns concealed behind collapsible screens. Q-ships aimed to entice U-boats to surface and approach, sometimes by pretending to be foundering, sometimes even by launching lifeboats full of apparently panic-stricken crews. Then at the last moment, they would hoist the Royal Navy’s white ensign and attack.

On August 19, the Q-ship HMS
Baralong
approached the
U-27
, the submarine that had lain in wait in March for the
Lusitania
, while she was attacking another British freighter. The
Baralong
revealed her guns and fired on the
U-27
. As the submarine sank her crew abandoned her. The
Baralong
’s men shot some of the sailors in the water, then hunted down, killed, and threw overboard those who had sought refuge on the freighter. American muleteers aboard the freighter, which was carrying 250 mules to Britain, reported the incident.

Ambassador von Bernstorff protested to Lansing that the
Baralong
had been flying the Stars and Stripes just before revealing her guns and hoisting the white ensign. But Lansing did not protest to the British about either the use of the American flag or the merciless killing of the U-boat survivors, a crime the British tried lamely to defend on the grounds that the
Baralong
’s crew had thought the submariners were armed.

Von Tirpitz again submitted his resignation, which the kaiser again refused, trying to convince him of the need not to provoke the United States by resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. If America joined the Allies, he worried, it could provide “unlimited money for our foes.” He told von Tirpitz, “First the war must be won, and that end necessitates absolute protection against a new enemy; how that is to be achieved . . . is My business. What I do with My navy is
My business only
.” The kaiser did, however, accept Bachmann’s resignation, telling Müller, “I must have a man who is personally devoted to me, not one who does what Tirpitz tells him to do.” Bachmann’s replacement was Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, a friend of von Bethmann Hollweg and hostile to von Tirpitz.

On September 4, as dusk was falling, Walther Schwieger in the
U-20
sighted a ship eighty-five miles southwest of the Fastnet Rock. His war diary records that she was outside the usual shipping channels, zigzagging, and had dimmed her lights. He fired a single torpedo without warning and did not stay long enough to see his victim sink. She was the 10,920-ton British passenger liner
Hesperian
. Thirty-two lives were lost in the sinking.

On his return to port, Schwieger was ordered to Berlin to explain why he had attacked a passenger ship against orders. He claimed to have thought the
Hesperian
was “an auxiliary cruiser.” He was not believed and ordered to acquiesce in the fiction already put about by the authorities, that the
Hesperian
had not been torpedoed but struck a mine, and to tell his men to say nothing about the sinking. Surprised by his hostile reception, Schwieger wrote a bitter six-page letter to Hermann Bauer complaining it was impossible to expect U-boatmen to distinguish between auxiliary cruisers, troop transports, and ordinary shipping.

*
Carson had successfully defended the criminal libel suit brought by Oscar Wilde against the Marquis of Queensberry which had led to Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol for homosexual acts.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“A Gift of Love”

In Germany, senior commanders had been assessing the recent zeppelin raids as well as the submarine campaign. Just as with the gas attacks at Ypres, it was obvious that suitable weather was vital for the airships. Experts studied meteorological data on weather patterns in the North Sea and over England and as a result recommended that the best period for attacking London was late summer and autumn when the hours of darkness would be longer and weather conditions the most favorable. Raids would also no longer be undertaken on nights of bright moonlight. This, coupled with the fact that the German army had sent its two remaining operational airships to the eastern front, gave Britain’s civilian population a temporary respite following the attacks of the first half of June.

When still in post as the chief of the naval staff Admiral Bachmann—a firm believer in unrestricted warfare in the air as well as at sea—wrote on June 18 to von Falkenhayn seeking his agreement to the lifting of all restrictions on bombing London. Von Falkenhayn agreed but proposed that since Germany as yet possessed too few zeppelins to inflict “maximum damage on the enemy” waiting until Germany had sufficient airships to launch a mass attack on London by both army and navy would be best. Bachmann, however, wished to deploy the navy’s new zeppelins immediately.

On July 9, Bachmann secured von Bethmann Hollweg’s support for unrestricted air attacks on central London though the chancellor requested these only be carried out on weekends to limit casualties. On July 20, Bachmann petitioned the kaiser, arguing that

really effective attacks are possible only if the City, the heart of London commercial life, is bombed. The Chancellor has agreed . . . but requests on humanitarian grounds that these be made only on week-ends, from Saturday to Monday morning so that buildings in the City would be unoccupied. This limitation is unacceptable because of the dependence of the airships on the weather. Every night the City empties of people regardless of the weather, also the enemy shows no regard for humanitarian behaviour in attacks on Karlsruhe [by French pilots on June 15 killing twenty-nine civilians and wounding fifty-eight] and elsewhere. Therefore I request Your Majesty to withdraw this prohibition and . . . to designate the City of London as a target; monuments like St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower will be spared as far as possible.

The kaiser agreed but insisted no historic buildings should be targeted. He also inclined toward the chancellor’s view that raids should only take place on weekends until Bachmann finally convinced him that this would be unreasonable.

On August 9, with the nights beginning to lengthen, Strasser dispatched four of the navy’s newest zeppelins. Their orders were to “remain together until 8.45
P.M.
, then each airship will carry out an independent raid, first on the London dock, then the city.” None reached their target because of mechanical difficulties and rainy, misty weather and either jettisoned their bombs in the sea or dropped them outside London.
L12
attacked Dover in the mistaken belief that it was Harwich. Major Cuthbert Lawson, who had been in the Ypres Salient during the spring gas attacks, witnessed the raid and described it in a letter to his mother:

Our great excitement was a real live Zeppelin on Monday night—she arrived about 12.15
A.M.
and stayed nearly half an hour dropping about ten enormous bombs—she was almost directly above the Admiralty pier which [was] set on fire with an incendiary bomb and she missed a hospital ship and a big boat full of petrol and ammunition literally by inches . . . It was a most wonderful sight, the searchlights on the hills round picked her up very quickly and concentrated on her and she looked exactly as if the sun was shining on her—and she was only about 4,500 feet up and looked enormous . . . The noise was tremendous while whenever she dropped a bomb the noise fairly shook the earth. She was hit three times by a 12 pdr. gun in the castle and hastily hopped it after the third time and was seen no more—but excitement was great next morning when we heard she was in the sea off Ostend and three destroyers from here went racing over to do her in but they found no trace of her.

In fact
L12
had crash-landed, frame broken, in the sea near Zeebrugge and been towed by a German torpedo boat to Ostend.

With the faint light of a new moon, on August 12, Strasser again dispatched four zeppelins to London. Strong headwinds and engine trouble prevented three even reaching England. Of these,
L11
was returning to base when she was caught in a thunderstorm. Her captain described how “lightning ran at intervals of five seconds from cloud to cloud and cloud to water and encompassed the airship, the points and wire stays of which emitted electric sparks. Bluish flames 3 centimetres long ran along the machine guns and even the crew on the top platform who were soaked with rain, were encircled in a ring of light. Had the airship been carried above her pressure weight by a squall, gas could have been given off and the airship would have perished by fire.” However, she survived to regain her base at Nordholz. The only airship to cross the English coast that night—
L10
—merely got far enough to bomb the outskirts of Harwich.

On August 17, Strasser ordered yet another zeppelin raid. This time
L10
, commanded by Oberleutnant Friedrich Wenke, reached London. Approaching from the east at an altitude of 10,200 feet, he dropped incendiary bombs, according to his report, “between Blackfriars and London bridges.” He was either confused about his location or trying to impress Strasser by exaggerating his achievements because his first bombs in fact fell near a railway station in the heavily populated and industrialized area of Walthamstow six and a half miles northeast of the City. Heading south he bombed houses and almshouses, and set a tram depot alight. He next passed over the working-class district of Leyton where his bombs killed two people, injured twenty more, and badly damaged several houses. He then arrived above the adjoining district of Leytonstone to bomb yet more houses and gut the recently built mission church of Saint Augustine of Hippo in Lincoln Street, close to where Linnarz’s final bombs landed on May 31, before turning for home. Ironically Saint Augustine of Hippo was the earliest notable Christian thinker to ponder the question of “a just war,” calling wars fought “with a malicious intent to destroy” a crime.

Wenke’s raid, the second to hit the capital, killed ten civilians—seven men, two women, and a child—injured forty-eight, and did more than thirty thousand pounds of damage to property. Two RNAS pilots who had taken off earlier from Chelmsford, but too late to intercept
L10
on her westward flight, were waiting for her on her return but again failed to catch her. Both their planes crashed on landing, badly injuring the pilots.
L10
did not survive long either. Sixteen days later the airship exploded, possibly after being struck by lightning, and crashed into the sea off Cuxhaven, killing her entire crew.

Zeppelins next attacked London on the dark night of September 7. By now Londoners were growing knowledgeable about what was good “zeppelin weather” so that theaters reported smaller audiences on fine nights with little or no moon. During such periods, German airships were kept on standby for a quick departure, the huge rolling doors of their hangers open, the handling crew ready, the gas bags full of hydrogen, the outer skin tautened, and machine guns, ammunition, petrol, and bombs already aboard. This time the German army sent three airships.