1917 begins - hopes and fears

David Lloyd George - supreme politician.
His new government galvanised
a weary nation

As 1916 ticked over into 1917 peoples of the warring nations had conflicting emotions. On one hand the understandable fear that the war would drag on without closure was balanced on the other by the hope of some decisive initiative, breakthrough or collapse that would hasten its end. In Britain Lloyd George's new coalition government was led by a small and determined War Cabinet of five rather than Asquith's Cabinet of 23. His four fellow members were Andrew Bonar Law (Conservative) as Chancellor; Lord Curzon (ex-Viceroy of India) as Leader of the Lords; Arthur Henderson (Labour), without portfolio but lead for labour issues; and Lord Milner also without portfolio but a brilliant administrator. Within weeks radical proposals were put forward to improve the national position in army recruitment; production and distribution of foodstuffs; labour relations, and for effective nationalisation of mines and shipping. A gigantic loan was raised through war bonds, and Lloyd George set about organising the first Empire Conference, encouraging greater dominion leadership involvement. He was one of a number of new brooms around.

The widespread state of war weariness amongst the combatants made all sides ready to countenance harsh or radical measures to bring it to a solution. Politicians, military leaders and the peoples were ready to get behind schemes that carried some imprecise hopes of decisive victory.

Germany was now effectively a military dictatorship. Hindenburg and Ludendorff  had crushed most of the arguments against their all out victory approach. The younger Ludendorff was the more active, almost running the country on a day to day basis. The Kaiser was now no more than a figurehead. Once the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had played his final cynical diplomatic peace card, and the Allies had decisively rejected it, Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over. They moved to save resources on the Western Front by withdrawing to shortened positions – the Hindenburg Line. Once the diplomatic effort had failed, they then quickly decided to launch the threatened unrestricted U-boat warfare. This was an all out gamble to win the war by mid 1917, through strangling the British Empire into submission. Success here and (they argued) the rest of the Allies would fall like dominoes. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were advised by their experts that 3-4 months would prove sufficient to bring Britain to its knees with economic and military ruin, and starvation for the people. In retrospect it is hard to see why they were so confident about this – it was clearly wrong. Perhaps it was simply wishful thinking. A victory in such a short time would not allow the USA time to influence military events on the European continent, even if they entered the war on the Allied side. The German people were suffering the privations of the ‘turnip winter’, with food and fuel shortages taking them to the limits of their resilience. They blamed the ongoing British naval blockade for their suffering, and would gladly see the British people in the same position.

Meanwhile the allies had plans of their own to make a decisive breakthrough in the west and roll up the German forces. The promotion of Nivelle to replace Joffre as Western Front military supremo somehow convinced the French and British war cabinets that he could succeed in 1917 where Joffre and Haig hd been unsuccessful in 1915 and 1916. Nivelle argued persuasively - based on his recent successes at Verdun with improvements in artillery and infantry tactics – that this time a concerted attack on the large German salient in Artois and Champagne would succeed. This was not radical, but ambitious and fanciful. The British would attack Arras from the north, and the French would resume their attacks from the river Aisne (scene of the 1914 battle – see Post 27/12/14).

Lloyd George as War Minister in 1916, seen here with Haig and Joffre. His relationship
with Haig was difficult. He over-rode Haig's resistance to Joffre's successor Nivelle's plans for 1917

The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had come to power partially on the promise of a decisive ‘knockout blow’ to bring the war to an end. He was quick to support Nivelle’s ideas, to the extent of undermining his own C-in-C, Douglas Haig, who was much more sceptical about the plans.

The Russian military leadership, still nominally under control of the Tsar, had agreed again to play their part by keeping the Eastern Front busy during the Anglo-French assaults, but their ability to do so was questionable. As we have seen in the previous blog (23/12/16) the storm clouds of revolution were very close. The radical solution of the most extreme revolutionaries was to exit Russia from the ‘imperialist’ war. This, of course, was deeply worrying to the Allies who were propping up Russia by shipping large amounts of material support (much of it American but paid for by Britain and France) to northern Russian ports.

All of this left Woodrow Wilson, President of the world’s most powerful non-combatant nation, in a precarious position. His own attempt to finesse the German peace proposal to an honest broker mediator role for himself in a negotiated peace, had fallen flat with the unanimous and decisive response of the Allies (see Post 19/12/2016). His advisers and intelligence services were warning him of the imminence of unrestricted submarine warfare, and he must have been preparing for the worst. However, it was to take an additional, quirky diplomatic blunder to tip the balance on the USA’s entry to the war, as we shall see in due course.