Both the Allies and the Central Powers sought to break the deadlock of the Great War by opening up new fronts. Britain and France tried first, with an abortive attempt to invade the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) at Gallipoli in 1915. Germany sought to break the stalemate at sea in 1915 and 1917 by starving Britain out with unrestricted submarine warfare, but the inevitable consequence of sinking merchant shipping on the Atlantic would be the deaths of heretofore neutral Americans and the entry of the U.S. into the war on the side of the Allies. The Germans had one more trick up their sleeves. In 1917, they attempted to foment revolution in Russia.
By 1915, with the war
deadlocked in both France and Poland, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty,
Winston Churchill, devised a plan to attack Germany and Austria—the Central
Powers—from the south. This would be the Dardanelles Campaign. In the opening days of
the war, Germany and Austria were joined by the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). For the Ottoman Empire,
this meant allies in the fight to hang onto its Middle Eastern Empire against
Russian ambitions. From the Allied point of
view, the Ottoman Empire was dangerously close to the Suez Canal. As the leader of the Muslim world, the
Ottoman Empire’s sultan proclaimed a jihad against the empire’s enemies. But many Arabs hoped that
the British and French would free them from Ottoman domination. Churchill’s plan was to
open up a third front by sending a British-French naval expedition and
amphibious force into the Black Sea. This plan would knock
the Ottoman Empire out of the war. It
would create a supply line to Russia while taking pressure off the Eastern
Front and the Suez Canal.It
would enable the Allies to invade Austria and Germany through “Europe’s soft
underbelly.” To accomplish all this,
the Allies would have to get past the gateway into the Black Sea, the
Dardanelles, and, in particular, a series of forts on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Churchill advocated a
naval bombardment, beginning early in 1915.But after a number of Allied ships were sunk by
mines, Horatio, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, ordered an
amphibious assault on the heights of Gallipoli Peninsula. Gallipoli was a logistical and
executional disaster. The Germans supplied the
Turks with machine guns, allowing them to rake the beach with a constant
barrage. The Allied supply lines
were long and tortuous, stretching all across the Mediterranean.Above all, the Allies had no notion of
what would later be called landing craft; nor had they engaged in any
amphibious training. Combined
Allied casualties came to 250,000 men. The failure of the Gallipoli
campaign had wide-ranging effects. There would be no third front, at
least not for a while.
Russia continued to face
Germany and Austria without British and French help. The Ottoman Empire’s relations with the
Central Powers were strengthened. In
1915, while fighting the Russians in Armenia, the Ottoman Empire decided to
retaliate against Christian Armenians who fought on Russia’s side. As many as
1.5 million Armenians died of disease or starvation or at the hands of Turkish
soldiers. In October 1915,
Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in hopes of gaining Balkan territory. The
Bulgarians eventually overran the Serbs, cutting Russia off from any help via
the Mediterranean. Churchill
was made the scapegoat and fell from office. Australians and New Zealanders never forgot that the British
sent them into the Gallipoli campaign with such poor preparation.
Both Britain and Germany
had long prepared for a great naval battle to settle the mastery of the seas.
Churchill ordered an
early mobilisation of the Grand Fleet so that, from the very beginning of the
war, German ports were blockaded. But despite superior
odds, the British did not want to risk a great fleet action, because they had
nothing to gain. This led the Germans to
try to starve Britain out via unrestricted submarine warfare. Britain, an archipelago,
was, in 1914, heavily dependent on shipments of food, fuel, and munitions from
America and the empire. The United States,
though technically and militarily neutral, was happy to supply both sides. Yet
with the British blockade preventing trade with Germany, American firms traded
ever greater amounts of goods and loaned ever greater amounts of money to the
Allies, especially Britain. This Atlantic trade
became the crucial lifeline that kept Britain in the war. By the same token, the Germans could win if
they could cut Britain’s lifeline. At first, the Germans
tried to cut American supplies with surface raiders, but these were too easy
for the Royal Navy to hunt down. Submarines or U-boats
were far more effective. Early
in the war, the German U-boat commanders tried to minimize loss of life by
warning their victims to abandon ship. This warning gave the crew
time to radio the Royal Navy and sink the U-boat. In the spring of 1915,
the German Admiralty announced a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. All
ships traveling in an area around Britain were subject to sinking. On 15 May 1915, the U-20
sighted and sank the British luxury liner R.M.S. Lusitania off the coast
of Ireland. Of the passengers and crew, 1,198 died, including 128 American
citizens. The Germans claimed—correctly, as it turned out—that the Lusitania
was carrying war materiel. Many Americans called for America to join the
war. Reluctant to add the
American industrial giant to its list of enemies, the Germans revoked their
policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. As a result, Germany’s
U-boat offensive stalled, and Britain continued to be supplied from America. This led the Germans to
attempt another surface-ship action.
On 31 May 1916, the
British and German fleets met while out on patrol off the Jutland Peninsula,
Denmark. Involving 250 ships and
100,000 men, Jutland was the largest naval battle in history up to that time. At first, everything went according to
the German plan. The German battlecruisers lured those of the British into
battle and, in quick succession, dispatched three ships. But instead of the
Germans trapping the small British squadron, the main German battlefleet was
drawn into the range of the whole British Grand Fleet. Moreover, the British
commander, Sir John Jellicoe, had crossed the German Admiral Reinhard Scheer’s
T: He was facing the German Fleet broadsides to bows. At this point, knowing
that he was outnumbered and just minutes from destruction, Scheer ordered his
destroyers and torpedo boats to run interference against the combined firepower
of the Royal Navy, while the High Seas Fleet retreated behind a smokescreen. Instead of giving chase, Admiral
Jellicoe turned his ships away from the German torpedoes, thus allowing the
High Seas Fleet to escape. Both
commanders seem to have felt that, in the end, their primary mission was not so
much to engage and defeat the enemy as to bring their expensive battlewagons
back intact. Though the Germans
claimed victory, the kaiser’s High Seas Fleet spent most of the rest of the war
in harbour. Thanks to the British blockade, the German situation grew desperate
by early 1917. Germany was carrying a number of weaker
allies, including the Austrians and the Turks. Further, in 1916, Arab peoples
began a revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled them for centuries.
The British finally had their third front.
Lawrence of Arabia
organised and led the Arabs. They entered Damascus in triumph—ahead of the
British—in 1918. To open this third
front, Lawrence had promised the Arab peoples national self-determination—
independence—after the war. But in Palestine, this
would conflict with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a British promise to
support a national homeland for the Jews. Here, as in so many
other places, World War I set the course for the rest of the century. The German army was being worn down by
superior numbers in the East and West. At
home, Germany was running out of fuel oil and food stuffs. Something had to be done quickly or
Germany would lose the war. Early in 1917, the German government decided on
two terrific gambles. First,
the German Admiralty reinstated unrestricted submarine warfare. They knew that, sooner
or later, an American ship would be sunk, and American lives would be lost. They gambled that they could sink
enough ships to starve Britain out before the Americans declared war. On February 3, the United States
broke diplomatic relations with Germany after the sinking of an American ship, the S.S. Housatonic
This strategy almost worked. By April 1917, the U-boats were sinking
600,000 tons of shipping per month. British domestic food stocks were down to
six weeks. But then, two things happened:
i) In April 1917, America
entered the war, partly because German U-boats had attacked American ships. In
addition, the Americans learned via the Zimmerman telegram that Germany had
offered Mexico the prizes of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas if it joined in a
war against the United States.
ii) In May, the British and
American navies implemented a convoy system, and U-boat losses began to rise. The U.S.
Army—inexperienced but fresh—was gearing up to join the fray.
The war in Russia before
the Americans mobilised, perhaps he could concentrate all his resources on
breaking open the Western Front. The
Russian strategy in World War I was the same as against Napoleon: Give ground,
retreat into the vast expanses of Mother Russia, and wait for the German and
Austrian armies to freeze or burn themselves out. Because of the
backwardness of Russian industry, though, many of the Russian troops had no
rifles, bullets, uniforms, or food. Luckily for Russia, the
Germans concentrated on the Western Front, but in the spring of 1915, the
Germans launched a successful offensive in southern Poland. Stymied in Poland, in
1916 the Russians launched an offensive against Austria. The Austrians were weakened because
they had had to divert troops to the Italian frontier in the south. The Russians broke through and gained
60 miles, but their offensive stalled when the Russian railway system was unable to
bring more troops up to the front. Still,
this offensive diverted German troops away from Verdun. With both sides so
evenly matched, World War I was a zero-sum game. Troops massed for a decisive offensive on one front meant
that their army would be too weak to maintain another front. The only way to break
the deadlock would be to bring in a big ally, such as the United States, or
eliminate one, such as Russia. This would be the next German strategy. By 1917, the Russian war
effort was in chaos. In
that year, more than a million men deserted. Civilians at home suffered food shortages, workers went
on strike, and peasants began to seize the holdings of their landlords. In March 1917 (February
by the Russian calendar), a series of street demonstrations broke out in
Petrograd. Regular troops refused
to fire on the starving demonstrators. Revolt
spread through the countryside, and mutiny, through the army. On 12 March, Russia’s
legislature, the Duma, established a provisional government. On 15 March, Czar Nicholas II
abdicated. From this point, real
power rested with the defence minister, Alexander Kerensky. He was a moderate
democrat who passed a series of reforms. He fatally, though,
decided to continue the war.
The
position of the Kerensky government worsened daily as it and the war grew more
and more
unpopular. Russia was ripe for a more violent
revolution. Germany was
only too happy to help by putting the exiled Vladimir Lenin on a train for
Russia.
Supplementary Reading:
Chambers, chapter 27,
section II. A. Moorehead, Gallipoli. R. K. Massie, Castles of Steel:
Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea.
Questions to Consider:
1. If Churchill’s southern
Europe strategy had succeeded, how would it have changed the course of 20th-century
history?
2. Why was the British blockade of Germany
more successful than the German blockade of Britain?
