On 1 February 1917, the Germans began their policy of “unrestricted” submarine warfare, ie the sinking of all merchant shipping without warning, including neutrals. It is widely believed that it was this policy and the outrage it caused amongst American public opinion that finally persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to come off the fence and declare war on Germany. In fact, it had only an indirect effect.
The German High Command recognised that the sinking of US-flagged ships would anger the USA and, perhaps, persuade the US to enter WW1 on the side of the Allies. However, they calculated that with the collapse of the Eastern Front and their consequent ability to transfer over 100 divisions to the west, they could knock Britain out of the war before the arrival of US troops in Europe were the Americans to be propelled into the war. Even so, they took measures to prevent this by diverting the US government’s attention towards its southern border with Mexico and western seaboard with Japan. The German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a top-secret telegram to his ambassador in Mexico instructing him to offer secret help to the Mexicans to invade and recover the southern states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. He further instructed his ambassador to try to persuade Britain’s ally, Japan, to switch sides.
Fortunately, since the beginning of the war, the Royal Navy had been intercepting most German wireless and telegraphic traffic and decoding it successfully. On interception and decryption of the Zimmermann Telegram, the Director of Naval Intelligence came up with a clever way to leak the telegram’s contents to the US government in a way that would not be suspected as a British propaganda plot nor reveal to the Germans that their most secret communications were being decrypted. The outrage in US public opinion at the perfidy of the Germans was enough to leave Wilson no choice but to declare war on Germany. I shine a light on the whole story in my latest novel, The Suicide Club, released in November. It has been described as ‘a cracking read’.
Comentarios