A Higher Form of Killing (6 page)

Politics were also changing in Europe. Shaken by its poor military performance in the Boer War and feeling threatened by the pace of German armament, Britain in 1904 concluded an informal alliance or “entente” with the French. King Edward VII had prepared the ground for the alliance by a royal visit to Paris. As Prince of Wales he had always been a lover of all things French, in particular the food and the women. A Parisian brothel owner proudly displayed the chair where he had habitually sat to select his woman for the evening. Now, as king, he showed himself a tactful diplomat. Following the entente with France, Britain moved toward a similar understanding with Russia, allied with France since 1892 in a marriage of convenience between autocracy and republicanism. The negotiations were protracted, fraught with long-standing suspicions and antagonisms on both sides, particularly about conflicting ambitions in Persia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, but in 1907 an entente was finally agreed.

In 1904, the new Conservative British prime minister, Arthur Balfour, appointed Admiral Jacky Fisher as First Sea Lord, the professional head of the Royal Navy. The following year Fisher revolutionized the naval arms race by ordering the first of a new generation of battleships, the steam-turbine-driven, eighteen-thousand-ton HMS
Dreadnought
, which carried ten twelve-inch guns and rendered all other battleships obsolete at a stroke. Germany immediately set out to build similar ships of its own and to widen the Kiel Canal to allow them a swift and secure transit from their Baltic bases to the North Sea. Whether by coincidence or not, the work on the canal was finally completed on July 23, 1914, barely two weeks before the outbreak of war with Britain.

In the midst of these developments Theodore Roosevelt, pressed by U.S. peace campaigners, used his and the United States’ emerging prestige to promote the convening of a second Hague Conference. Although none of the nations rushed to accept Roosevelt’s proposal, just as in the case of the first conference none felt able to refuse and so on June 15, 1907, delegates assembled again at The Hague. This time 256 men represented forty-four countries.

By then Great Britain had a new Liberal government led by Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Roosevelt, becoming convinced that “aggressive” Germany “despises the Hague Conference and the whole Hague idea,” was concerned lest Campbell-Bannerman and his colleagues be “carried away by sentimental ideas” and so “go to any maudlin extreme at the Hague Conference.” He need not have worried. Although to please their Liberal supporters Campbell-Bannerman’s government proposed placing disarmament on the agenda, supported by Roosevelt for the sake of U.S. public opinion, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and this time Russia protested. When the British did raise disarmament at the conference itself, they did so very briefly and the topic was quickly disposed of, all agreeing that it was for the future when it would merit “further serious study.”

The Hague Arbitration Tribunal had since 1899 successfully resolved a number of international disputes voluntarily submitted to it, the first being between the United States and Mexico over church property and another the Anglo-Russian dispute over the sinking of the British trawlers in the North Sea. During the 1907 conference, Andrew Carnegie laid the foundation stone for the new Peace Palace, which was to house Hague arbitration proceedings and for whose construction he had donated $1,250,000. Although at the conference every delegation expressed support for arbitration, they could not agree about what should appear on a list defining subjects to be compulsorily submitted to the process.

With gas not having been used as a weapon and no significant research done on such use, the agreement prohibiting the use of asphyxiating gases remained in force with little debate. The development of airships and airplanes had, however, progressed considerably since the earlier conference. On July 2, 1900, spectators at Friedrichshafen on the shore of Lake Constance in southern Germany watched Count von Zeppelin’s cylindrical 420-foot-long
Luftschiff 1
(
LZ1
)—the world’s first rigid dirigible airship with a frame of aluminum girders encased by fabric—as it was moved from the floating shed on the lake in which it had been built and ascended into the air where seventeen gas bags holding four hundred thousand cubic feet of hydrogen and contained within the fabric envelope held it aloft. Two gondolas suspended beneath the keel each held one of the two 850-pound Daimler petrol engines that powered her two four-bladed propellers. Each engine only produced fifteen horsepower, driving the airship forward at a mere sixteen miles per hour. In 1906, a year before the second Hague Conference, von Zeppelin produced the larger, stronger, speedier
LZ2
,
however a storm destroyed the craft at its moorings after its second flight. Using the last of his personal fortune he constructed a third airship—the
LZ3
—capable of eight hours of sustained flight, which he would soon demonstrate to a hitherto skeptical kaiser.

On December 17, 1903, American brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright became the first to solve the technical problems of constructing and operating a heavier-than-air flying machine. Taking turns as pilot they completed four flights aboard their biplane
Flyer I
from the sandy beach near Kitty Hawk on one of the barrier islands off North Carolina. The brothers, who had developed the craft at their own expense, saw the military forces of “a great government” as the only market for their invention.

Recognizing the airplane’s potential, which the U.S. government then did not, the British War Office dispatched Lieutenant Colonel John Capper to meet them at their new base at Dayton, Ohio. They demonstrated to him their new plane,
Flyer II
, capable of flying at thirty-five miles per hour for more than three miles. Impressed by this “wonderful advance,” after a series of discussions over the next year Capper invited the Wrights to Britain. However, when they asked for twenty thousand pounds for four years work including supplying an airplane, training a pilot, and granting the British government a license to build its own craft, the British balked, partly because the brothers, doubtless fearing industrial espionage, would not allow their planes to be inspected, partly because they were beginning to believe they could develop their own machines as the French were said to be doing. The Wrights therefore remained in America, refining their designs and setting new records. Unsure of where the next developments in aircraft and airships might lead, the Hague delegates, after some discussion, felt it prudent only to renew the prohibition on launching projectiles and explosives from the air for another five years.

Japan had opened its war against Russia in 1904 by surprise attack, and the second Hague Conference agreed to a prohibition against countries acting in this way in the future. Instead they were required first to issue an ultimatum or a declaration of war. Another convention, agreed to unanimously with strong support from Belgium, concerned neutral rights. The first of its twenty-five articles stated that “the territory of neutral Powers is inviolable,” the second that, “Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral Power.” The convention on land warfare was revised while maintaining the key principles such as that in Article 23 which began “In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden: a. To employ poison or poisoned weapons”; or in Article 25 forbidding “the attack or bombardment by whatever means” of “undefended” areas. Article 3 of the same convention made belligerent states responsible for the acts of their armed forces and “liable to pay compensation” for violations. However neither of the Hague Conferences gave any thought to an international court either to punish those who broke the rules of the various conventions or to set the level of compensation.

Discussions on maritime matters were for the most part inconclusive. The chief German delegate, Baron Marschall, warned against the stupidity of making laws for naval combat that might be rendered useless “by the law of facts.” Although the delegates agreed to ban the use of unanchored submarine contact mines that remained armed for more than an hour after release, the major issues of Cruiser Rules, contraband, and neutral rights were deferred to a meeting of naval powers to be held in London the following year, 1908.

Ironically, the second Hague Conference ended by adopting a resolution calling for a third in 1915.

*
In 1906 the winner of the physics prize was J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron. Marie Curie, her husband Pierre, Henri Becquerel, and Wilhelm Röntgen had all earlier received prizes for their work on radiation. Then considered pure science with its results openly published and internationally discussed, it would lead to the development of the atomic bomb—a weapon many times more powerful than any contemplated at The Hague.

CHAPTER FOUR

“A Scrap of Paper”

When the conference on marine matters convened in London in 1908, Britain was the dominant maritime power in both naval and commercial terms. Engaged in a naval race with Germany, Britain’s philosophy was that its navy should be equal in strength to any two others. (The U.S. Navy was omitted from such calculations indicating the growing closeness between the two countries and the consequent improbability of war between them.) Britain’s merchant fleet made up 48 percent of the world’s shipping and transported more than half the world’s total seaborne trade.

Despite Jacky Fisher’s introduction of the dreadnought battleship, some naval strategists saw the torpedo-armed submarine as the greatest threat to Britain’s maritime hegemony. Fisher himself called them “the battleships of the future.” The concept of underwater warfare was not new. Thucydides described divers acting as underwater saboteurs during the Roman siege of Syracuse. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a form of diving suit. In 1578 an Englishman, William Bourne, designed a submersible that could rise and sink by filling or emptying ballast tanks on either side—a key characteristic of modern submarines. Early next century Dutchman Cornelius Van Drebbel reputedly demonstrated a vessel based on Bourne’s design on the river Thames.

David Bushnell produced the first documented precursor of the modern submarine when he launched his submersible
Turtle
against HMS
Eagle
during the American Revolution in New York harbor on September 6, 1776. The egg-shaped
Turtle
was a one-man wooden vessel, seven feet long and four feet wide with four portholes, three sleeved armholes, and an access hatch on top. She was propelled by two hand-operated screws—a horizontal one to propel her up and down and a vertical one to move her backward and forward. A foot-operated valve let water flow in to help her descend, while a foot pump pushed it out again to enable her to rise. Bushnell’s plan for the
Turtle
to attach a 150-pound explosive charge to the
Eagle
failed because the operator, Sergeant Ezra Lee, could not get the drill bit designed to fit dynamite charges to penetrate the
Eagle
’s metal-reinforced hull.

In May 1801 Robert Fulton of Pennsylvania followed up Bushnell’s work, launching the copper-skinned
Nautilus
—the first submarine built of metal. He offered his designs first to France and then to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. Both declined. British admiral Earl St. Vincent summed up the general view that they were “a mode of war which we who command the seas do not want, and which, if successful, would deprive us of it.”

In February 1864, the USS
Housatonic
—a new 1,264-ton frigate serving with the Union squadron blockading the Confederate port of Charleston—was the first ship sunk by a submarine. On a clear, cold, moonlit night, the CSS
Hunley
,
a slender submersible forty feet long but just forty-two inches in diameter and built of 3/8-inch boiler plate, slunk out of Charleston harbor. Commanded by Lieutenant George E. Dixon, she crept semi-submerged toward the Union fleet. The eight-man crew labored over the hand crank which, connected to the propeller, drove the
Hunley
forward at four knots. Dixon was standing up since the only way he could navigate was by peering out of the forward hatch.

Just before eight forty-five
P.M.
, the master of the
Housatonic
saw something resembling a piece of driftwood heading straight for his ship. Realizing that a current or tide could not be propelling it, he took evasive action but too late. Dixon brought the
Hunley
alongside and detonated the 143 pounds of gunpowder supported on her projecting spar. The
Housatonic
was flung into the air, settled back, and slowly sank. The
Hunley
’s crew vanished, probably sucked into the gash in the frigate’s side.

An Irish emigrant to the United States, John P. Holland, undertook the next crucial developments. Beginning in the late 1870s, over successive prototypes he developed petrol-engine-driven designs with the streamlined porpoise shape of modern submarines. His designs did not ascend or descend by their own weight but tilted their hydroplanes in the appropriate direction and propelled themselves by their engine power.