Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/February 2017/Op-ed


 * By TomStar81

On February 1, 1917, the Imperial German Navy made good on the German Government's decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare by loosing U-boats into the Atlantic to intercept and destroy shipping of the British Empire. This unsettling news, first delivered to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States by way of the intercepted Zimmerman Telegram, threatened the existence of the British Empire by exploiting its greatest weakness: logistics.

Like the Empire of Japan, the British Empire had a unique advantage and disadvantage in times of war: as island empires, both home nations are surrounded by bodies of water, which makes a military invasion of either inherently more difficult because the only way to invade either country is by massive amphibious assault or by airborne assault. As both of these invasion options were known to the Empire of Japan and the British Empire, it is somewhat easier for both governments to plan an effective defense because spies and civilian observers would note a sudden increase of ships or airplanes and the personnel that would be assigned to them. Anticipating these signs would allow both empires to plan a defense by recalling the needed units to stop and repel an invasion.

This disadvantage, however, is that both nations are resource-poor, and therefore like the Empire of Japan the British Empire had a heavy reliance on its colonies for the raw materials necessary to run a nation in the post-industrial revolution world. Therefore, goods such as rubber, tin, aluminum, and oil needed to be imported to the homeland in order to ensure that the empire ran at peak performance. It was for this reason that many different European powers sought out overseas colonies to compensate for the lack of critically need raw materials at home, and it is with this Achilles heel in mind that the German Empire let loose the submarines once more. Britain's Royal Navy lacked an effective counter to the submarine threat, owing in part to a lack of foresight on the part of the Navy (both in the British Empire and other nations and empires in Europe) and due to a lack of technology capable of detecting submarines while submerged. As noted earlier, the best solution to the U-boat problem that the Royal Navy could come up with in 1915 was look for the periscope and then turn escorting vessels toward the submarine in hopes that it would evade or suffer periscope damage. Now, once more, the British Empire's shipping was under siege by this submerged menace.

Unlike in 1915, though, the Royal Navy was somewhat better prepared for round 2 of the U-boat war. Having seen what the U-boats could do had allowed the Royal Navy to develop some defensive measures, but the masterpiece of the 1917 counter-strategy would be the May 1917 re-introduction of a system for moving shipping to and from the home island. This system was called a "convoy", and had been in use during the age of sail before being abandoned at dawn of the industrial revolution when merchant shipping had made the switch from sail to steam power. Convoy shipping involved sailing groups of merchant ships together surrounded by escort ships of the Royal Navy designed to intercept and destroy Imperial Navy U-boats - or a worse-case scenario, to take a torpedo for the merchant ships so that they could reach the home island with their supplies.

The effect of the convoy system for the transport of war material was extraordinarily pronounced. In February 1917 U-boats sank over in the war zone around Britain, 80% of the total for the month; in March they sank over 500,000 (90%), in April over 600,000 of, the highest total sinkings of the war. Following the introduction of the convoy system in May, losses for the British Empire started to fall dramatically. In the three months following their introduction, on the Atlantic, North Sea, and Scandinavian routes, of 8,894 ships convoyed just 27 were lost to U-boats as opposed to the 356 ships which were lost sailing independently. As shipping losses fell, U-boat losses rose; during the period May to July 1917, 15 U-boats were destroyed in the waters around Britain, compared to 9 the previous quarter, and 4 for the quarter before the campaign was renewed.

By the time the U-boat campaign began to falter in May the Imperial German Government had turned to a much more urgent and far more disturbing development: war with the United States. In letting the U-boats loose in the Atlantic once more the German Empire had gambled that they would be able to knock the British Empire out of the war before reaching critical mass with the United States, but on April 6, 1917, Germany's fears of a U.S. intervention were realized when the United States Congress, in response to a request from President Woodrow Wilson, formally declared war against Germany, bringing a new nation, new armies, new ships, and fresh troops into the conflict.