War and revolution, 1917

Abstract

In the autumn of 1914, with the war barely two months old, Tirpitz warned Admiral Hugo von Pohl, then chief of the Admiralstab , of the dire consequences if Germany’s High Sea Fleet remained at anchor much longer: “morale is bound to be affected as the prospects of warlike activities become ever more remote.” After a year of relative idleness between the defeat at Dogger Bank and the appointment of Scheer, the German fleet’s six sorties during 1916 dispelled such fears, but the renewed emphasis on submarine warfare once again placed the morale of the navy at risk by dooming so many of its sailors to inactivity. In sharp contrast to the average submarine of the Great War, whose two or three junior officers shared the hardships of their crew of two or three dozen men, the larger warships were social microcosms of the countries they represented. In the German navy, but even more so, in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian fleets, the routines aboard these vessels and even the physical configuration of shipboard space accentuated rather than ameliorated class differences. To make matters worse, because the most highly regarded junior officers were assigned to U-boats, or to the light cruisers and destroyers that remained the most active surface ships, less capable men were left to take their places aboard the battleships and larger cruisers. During the last two years of the war, this mediocre “middle management” aboard the big ships exacerbated the problem of the social gulf between officers and seamen, at a time when their inactivity made effective, enlightened command more important than ever. Men aboard ships anchored in home ports also had closer contact with the home front, leaving German sailors, and their Austro-Hungarian and Russian counterparts, more likely to see their own hardships in the context of the general social and political conditions affecting their countries, and to make common cause with those ashore who sought to change those conditions.