Free Blackett's War by Stephen Budiansky

Eight hundred colliers a month made the journey; in escorted convoys from February to April a total of five ships had been sunk by U-boats. 23
    Lloyd George quickly discovered that the American admiral was an ally and had several lengthy discussions with Sims, then began pressing his “Lord High Admirals” (as he sarcastically referred to the Admiralty Board in his subsequent memoirs) even harder, finally announcing on April 25 that he would visit the Admiralty and personally straighten out the matter. The admirals’ most consistent objection had been that with 5,000 shipping movements a week at British ports, it was simply a numerical impossibility to organize convoys and provide escorts for them all. It turned out that the figure was a ridiculous exaggeration, arrived at only by counting every coming and going of vessels of every description. The actual number of large oceangoing ships that arrived and departed each week was 300. “The blunder on which their policy was based,” Lloyd George would later write of the Admiralty’s resistance to convoys, “was based on an arithmetical mix-up which would not have been perpetrated by an ordinary clerk in a shipping office.” 24
    The institution of convoys over the next several months was nothing short of a revolution. Karl Dönitz, in his memoirs, recalled the sudden wind taken out of the U-boat offensive, “robbed of its opportunity to become a decisive factor”:
    The oceans at once became bare and empty; for long periods at a time the U-boats, operating individually, would see nothing at all; and then suddenly up would loom a huge concourse of ships, thirty or fifty or more of them, surrounded by a strong escort of warships of all types.… The lone U-boat might well sink one or two of the ships, or even several; but that was but a poor percentage of the whole. The convoy would then steam on … bringing a rich cargo of foodstuffs and raw materials safely to port. 25
    By the summer of 1918, sinkings had fallen to less than 300,000 tons a month. 26
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    ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1918, British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops launched a huge assault against the last German defensive position on the Western Front, a twenty-five-mile-deep system of fortifications and redoubts running through northern France known as the Hindenburg Line. German morale both at the front and at home was on the verge of total collapse. Three days later Ludendorff informed the astonished Kaiser and civilian leaders of the government—who up until then had heard nothing to make them doubt the inevitability of a German victory—that the army was defeated and Germany must seek an armistice without a moment’s delay if the empire was to be saved; the Kaiser must also immediately decree a parliamentary constitution to avert a revolution at home. Several days of confusion followed as the chancellor resigned and the government was without a leader capable of making a decision. On October 2 the high command’s demand that the civilian government sue for peace became a virtual ultimatum. An aide sent by Ludendorff put the situation starkly: “We cannot win the war … we must make up our minds to abandon further prosecution of the war as hopeless.”
    Ludendorff would later try to throw all of the blame for Germany’s surrender upon the civilian government, writing in his memoirs that he was “unable to understand how the idea ever arose that I said that the front would break if we did not have an armistice in twenty-four hours.” In fact the idea came from Ludendorff’s own increasingly panicked messages, including one which stated that “every twenty-four hours that pass may make our position worse, and give the enemy a clearer view of our present weakness,” with “the most disastrous consequences.” When the new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden—the Kaiser’s second cousin and the only liberal-minded member of the royal family—balked, suggesting that