In the midst of this darkness, Wilson still managed to see America as the world’s last great hope. “We are at peace with all the world,” he said in December 1914 in his annual address to Congress. In January, he dispatched Colonel House on an unofficial mission to Europe to attempt to discover the conditions under which the Allies and the Central Powers might be willing to begin peace negotiations.
House booked passage on the largest, fastest passenger ship then in service, the Lusitania, and traveled under a false name. On entering waters off Ireland, the ship’s then-captain, Daniel Dow, following a tradition accepted in times of war, raised an American flag as a ruse de guerre to protect the ship from attack by German submarines. The act startled House and caused a sensation aboard, but as a means of disguise it had questionable value: America did not operate any liners of that size, with that distinctive four-funnel silhouette.
The incident highlighted the press of forces threatening to undermine American neutrality. The battles in Europe posed no great worry, with the United States so distant and secure within its oceanic moat. It was Germany’s new and aggressive submarine war that posed the greatest danger.
AT THE beginning of the war, neither Germany nor Britain understood the true nature of the submarine or realized that it might produce what Churchill called “this strange form of warfare hitherto unknown to human experience.”
Only a few prescient souls seemed to grasp that the design of the submarine would force a transformation in naval strategy. One of these was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a year and a half before the war, wrote a short story (not published until July 1914) in which he envisioned a conflict between England and a fictional country, Norland, “one of the smallest Powers in Europe.” In the story, entitled “Danger!,” Norland at first seems hopelessly overmatched, but the little country has a secret weapon—a fleet of eight submarines, which it deploys off the coast of England to attack incoming merchant ships, both cargo and passenger. At the time Doyle conceived his plot, submarines did exist, but British and German naval commanders saw them as having little value. Norland’s submarines, however, bring England to the verge of starvation. At one point, without warning, the commander of the submarine fleet, Capt. John Sirius, uses a single torpedo to sink a White Star passenger liner, the Olympic. England eventually surrenders. Readers found that last attack particularly shocking because the Olympic was a real ship. Its twin had been the Titanic, lost well before Doyle wrote his story.
Intended to sound the alarm and raise England’s level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius’s behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.
In the story, Doyle’s narrator dismisses as a delusion England’s belief that no nation would stoop to such levels. “Common sense,” Captain Sirius says, “should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best—that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.” Doyle’s forecast was dismissed as too fantastic to contemplate.
But Britain’s own Adm. Jacky Fisher, credited with reforming and modernizing the British navy—it was he who had conceived the first Dreadnought—had also become concerned about how submarines might transfigure naval warfare. In a memorandum composed seven months before the war, Fisher forecast that Germany would deploy submarines to sink unarmed merchant ships and would make no effort to save the ships’ crews. The strengths and limitations of the submarine made this outcome inescapable, he argued. A submarine had no room to bring aboard the crew of a merchant ship and did not have enough men of its own to put a prize crew aboard.
What’s more, Fisher wrote, the logic of war required that if such a strategy were adopted it would have to be pursued to the fullest extent possible. “The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”