The Changing Nature of War 897awaited a major confrontation. Certain that the German fleet was going to
sail from Wilhelmshaven, the British Grand Fleet lay in wait. At Dogger
Bank on January 24, 1915, the Royal Navy sunk a German battleship. The
British blockaded the principal German ports, neutralizing the kaiser’s
proud fleet.
Late in the 1880s, several countries had experimented with underwater
warfare. At the turn of the century, the U.S. Navy was the first to commis
sion a submarine. Although all of the powers had submarines by the time of
the Great War, those of Germany made the greatest impact. The German
navy believed that its fleet of submarines, which brought another fearful
dimension to warfare, could force Britain to pull out of the war by sinking
its warships and by preventing supplies from reaching the British Isles from
the United States. In September 1914, a German submarine, or “U-boat,”
sank three large British armored cruisers off the coast of Belgium. U-boats,
188 feet long and with a range of 2,400 miles, could slip in and out of ports
undetected. Yet ships carrying supplies to Britain continued to get through.
The Home Front
The waging of war on such an unprecedented scale required the full support
of the “home front,” the very concept of which emerged during the war. Sus
taining the massive war effort depended first on mobilizing enough soldiers
and food to supply the front, and then on producing enough guns and
shells. It also depended on maintaining morale at home. Popular enthusiasm
increasingly fed on a deep hatred of the enemy. German propagandists por
trayed the war as a fight for German culture, besieged by Russian barbarians
and the dishonorable French. A German soldier wrote, “We know full well
that we are fighting for the German idea in the world, that we are defending
German feeling against Asiatic barbarism and Latin indifference.” British
propagandists depicted the Allies as defending law, liberty, and progress
against German violations of national sovereignty and international law.
French propagandists had the easiest case to make: Germany had, after all,
invaded France.
Such propaganda mixed elements of myth and truth. By the end of 1914,
false tales of Germans impaling children and raping nuns were horrifying
British and French readers. The German high command had instructed
officers to ignore provisions of the Hague Conventions that sought the
humane treatment of soldiers and civilians during war, which Germany had
signed. Rumors had spread that civilians had killed German soldiers. The
German army executed 5,500 Belgian civilians in two months, including in
Louvain, where troops panicked when they heard shots fired in the distance
by French troops and mistook them for action by Belgian citizens. The Ger
mans then burned the library of the University of Louvain, which included
rare manuscripts, for good measure. Austrian soldiers massacred, muti
lated, and raped villagers in Serbia, as did Russian troops in East Prussia