American merchant ship blown up

The first event was one that emphasized the dangers to shipping from the numerous mines that had been laid in the Aegean Sea and the Straits.  At 5:20 pm on Monday, 29 April, a small steamer called the Texas bound for Thessaloniki hit a mine as it was leaving the Turkish port of Izmir and sank.  Of the 100 passengers and 39 crew on board, 69 lost their lives while 70, including the captain, were saved by the pilot boat.  The Turkish government blamed the ship captain for not following the pilot boat through the mined entrance to the harbor and of ignoring warning shots from the batteries on shore.  The ship belonged to a company called the Archipelago-American Steamship Company, which was owned by naturalized Greek-Americans and headquartered in Izmir.  There is some dispute as to whether it was flying the American or Ottoman flag when it sank.  In any case, it led to American diplomatic representations to the Turkish government.  The Turks were suspicious that the ship’s captain was in fact trying to ascertain the port’s defences when he deviated off course:  later in the week he was removed from a Greek-owned hospital and put in a prison ward and accused of spying for Italy.

Turkish fears of Italian naval activity in the Aegean Sea were well founded.  On Sunday, 28 April, two companies of Italian soldiers from the battleship Pisa went ashore on the island of Astypalaia.  They took over the hill dominating the main town of Livadia and accepted the surrender of the small Turkish garrison that had retreated there.  The Italians were to use Astypalaia as the staging ground for a much larger operation later in the week.

Italian Navy Sails to Rhodes

Once Astypalaia had been captured, a large fleet under the command of Vice-Admiral Leone Viale (who had been in charge of the Dardanelles bombardment) left Taranto, the main Italian naval base, on 30 April and headed to the Aegean.  On 1 May, Italian ships cut all communications cables connecting the island of Rhodes, the largest and most important of the island group called the Dodecanese, with the mainland and Crete.  At noon on 2 May about 9,000 troops from the forces stationed in Benghazi and Tobruk in eastern Libya were loaded on to transports and headed to Rhodes.  They arrived during the early morning hours of Saturday, 4 May, and started disembarking at 4:00 a.m. at Kalithea Bay on the east side of the island about 15 kilometers from the city of Rhodes.  There was no opposition from Turkish forces, and all troops had landed by 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon.  They advanced towards the city with only minimal Turkish resistance and halted 2 kilometers outside the town walls at 7:00 p.m.  The few Turkish forces left the city during the night via the western coast road and established a defensive position in the center of the island in a place called Psinthos.

Admiral Viale called on the local governor to surrender, which he did, under protest, on the morning of Sunday, 5 May, and Italian troops marched into the the city at 10:00 a.m.   The offensive operation to capture Psinthos did not take place for another 10 days while the remaining islands of the Dodecanese were captured over a two-week period until 20 May.  The Italians aimed to use these islands as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Turks and threatened at various times to take other larger islands as well.  In the end, they did not vacate Rhodes and the Dodecanese until 1943.

The Rome newspaper La Tribuna justified the Italian offensive action by claiming “we were led into the Aegean Sea by the force of events.  We had  hoped at the beginning to limit our operations to Tripolitania: that was our only objective.  But the obstinacy of Turkey through its dilatory policies that aim to get neutrals involved in the conflict force us, after seven months of war, to act at sea.  Since the intention of the Porte is to prolong the war, we will hit Turkey through its communication channels.  Our duty now is to carry out operations quickly in order to isolate Constantinople from the rest of the empire and see how long Istanbul can keep its eyes closed [to reality].”

German vs. French Military

Elsewhere in Europe, the Reichstag debate the previous week about increasing the size of the German military led to journalistic efforts to investigate how the increased expenditures would translate into boots on the ground, especially compared to Germany’s main rival on the continent, France.  One estimate said that if the new expenditures were approved (which they would be), Germany would have a standing army of 544,000 men, 97,000 non-commissioned officers, 14,000 one-year volunteers, and 34,000 officers for a total of 689,000, of which 9,000 were stationed overseas in German colonial possessions.  France would have a total of 580,000 officers and men plus 20,000 colonial regiments stationed in France.  However, because of its much larger and more restive colonial empire, 70,000 of those troops were stationed outside of metropolitan France, especially in North Africa: 680,000 Germans versus 530,000 French.

This discrepancy was well appreciated in France and would lead to continuing efforts to rectify it, including by increasing the years of service for conscripts and by trying to get its allies, Great Britain and Russia, more tightly wrapped in French strategic planning.  The French also worked to instill an offensive spirit in its army, which its proponents claimed, would render it superior to any opposing force.  During the first week of May 1912, the Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand, made a tour of France’s troops and fortifications on the eastern frontier facing Alsace.  In response to numerous complaints, he said he would work to improve the conditions of service there.  In the fortress town of Belfort, which had successfully resisted the Germans during the war of 1870, he made a speech in which he said his main goal was to organize the army into an offensive force and to instill the offensive spirit in all the military’s leaders and soldiers.  This spirit led France to attack German forces in Alsace in the very first days of World War I, but with results much less positive than Millerand would have hoped for.

 Book recommendations

Policy Debates in Berlin and St. Petersburg

On Monday, 22 April 1912, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Holweg presented the long-awaited German military and naval laws to the Reichstag.  As had been previously reported in the press, the proposed laws called for substantial increases in both the land and marine forces as well as asking for new armaments.  In his presentation, Bethmann said notably, “At the moment, there is no reason to be worried; but, in any case, it would be imprudent not to maintain our armaments ready for any eventuality. … I am convinced, and all of the external political signs confirm my view, that none of the governments of the Great Powers are looking to enter into conflict with us.”  Bethmann said, however, that Germany’s position in the center of Europe required it to maintain a strong army.

Following Bethmann’s statement, many commentators, both in the Reichstag and in the press, asked why if the international situation seemed so unthreatening it was necessary to increase the defense budget; no such necessity had been perceived in 1911 or 1910.  In the ensuing debate, those Reichstag members who supported the new measures argued that the recent Agadir crisis had shown the need to strengthen Germany’s military might and pointed out that neither France nor Great Britain were taking measures to reduce their armies or navies.  Quite the contrary:  the new British naval estimates were predicated on maintaining superiority over Germany while France was said to be ahead of Germany in developing such new technologies as machine guns battalions and airplanes.

The one political party opposed to the increases, the Socialists, would have none of it.  When a rightist deputy said that chauvinist forces were creating trouble in Europe, the Socialists yelled out,  “Yes, here at home!”  The Socialist Georg Gradnauer said: “The new armaments do not serve the cause of peace.  On the contrary, they put it in danger.  The government needs to give us an explanation on the subject of negotiations with England.”  He along with other members wanted to know whether the secret, but widely reported, talks with Richard Haldane, the British Minister of War, held out the possibility of a mutual reduction in forces with Great Britain.  The parliamentary leader of the Socialists, Hugo Haase said, “Our country is strong enough that if we took the intiative on the question of disarmament no one would think us weak.”

The respected member Conrad Haussmann of the Progressive Party summed up the arguments against increasing the military budget: “What we need to do is put a stop to this building of armaments.  We should not be putting forward new programs without a reason.  The government has a duty to contribute to improving the European political situation.  Such a task conforms to the desires of the German people.  We regret the alarmist demonstrations of the pan-Germanists.  It is false to say that the information bureaus of the imperial navy are not agitating [for new ships].  The government should not contribute to spreading such propaganda.  If Germany increases its naval forces, England will only do the same.”

Both the Minister of War, Josias von Heeringen, and the Minister of Navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, presented the reasons why they thought the new forces were called for and were loudly applauded by deputies on the right-hand side of the chamber.  However, it was not clear how the expensive new programs were to be paid for.  The new State Secretary for Finance, Hermann Kühn, was left to assure the members that the money could be found and, crucially, that it would not be necessary “at the present time” to introduce an inheritance tax (Socialists:  “For how long!?”).  Kühn had taken over when the previous Finance Secretary, Adolf Wermuth, had been forced to resign in March because he had told the Chancellor and military chiefs that introduction of an inheritance tax was the only way to come up with enough money.  The problem was that such a tax would lose the support of the “bourgeois” parties needed to get a majority of the Reichstag to approve the military build-up.

The Socialist sponsored a demonstration against the proposed laws, which brought out 12,000 people in protest in Berlin on Thursday, 25 April.  But in spite of this and the debating points made by the Socialists in the Reichstag, the result was a foregone conclusion.   Although they were the largest party in the Reichstag, the Socialists had only 110 of the 397 seats.   The sole means of defeating the measures would have been if the opponents had the support of the Center party, which represented Catholic interests in southern and western Germany and was the second largest party, with 91 seats.  In the earlier, Bismarckian era, the Center had been the main opposition party and had resisted growing militarization.  However, that had changed and the party leader, Dr. Martin Spahn, announced his party’s support for the increased spending.

The Center party seemed less concerned with the actual bills in front of them than they were by a perceived threat to the Catholic faith.  Spahn and other members of the Center tried to turn the debate into one dealing with freedom of conscience over the duelling policy of the German officer corps.  Under the army’s code of honor, an officer was obliged to fight if challenged to a duel.  In a case in Catholic Württemberg a civilian doctor who was employed by the army had been accused of unethical practices by a colleague and challenged to a duel (the doctor was later cleared in court of the charges).  The doctor refused to fight saying that his Catholic conscience forbade him to do so.  The army dismissed him.  The Center party took the occasion of the military/naval debate to complain about this injustice and the threat it posed to religious liberty.  The army was intransigent.  Von Heeringen, the Minister of War, said “Such a man is not worthy of belonging to the officer corps.”  This created a big stir in the chamber, and the parliamentary debate got bogged down over the issue.

Meanwhile, on Friday, 26 April, the Duma in St. Petersburg met to debate the budget of the Russian Foreign Ministry, which afforded the Foreign Minister, Sergei Dimitrievich Sasonov, the opportunity to present an overview of the state of Russian foreign relations – or at least that part that he wished to make public.  He reported, “The basis of Russia’s external policy rests unshakeably on its alliance with France, which ensures peace in Europe. … [The alliance] has no aggressive intent.  On the contrary, it contributes very effectively to safeguarding universal peace.”  He then looked at relations with other countries, saying there was no quarrel with Germany and that relations with Britain had improved since a 1907 agreement had settled outstanding issues such as control of Persia.  As for relations between those two countries, he hoped that the Haldane Mission would have a fruitful outcome.

When Sasonov turned to the major source of Russian anxieties – the Balkans – his confidence was less steadfast.  He said that Russia had increasingly good relations with Italy and that both countries wanted the peoples of the Balkans to pursue peaceful development.  He said that the Italian-Turkish war would not lead to a wider conflict (which turned out to be too optimistic) and that Russia continued to work with other Powers to arrive at a quick settlement.  Indeed, the recent closing of the Straits had hurt Russian commercial interests severely.  (In fact, 40 per cent of Russian exports went through the Dardanelles and already 1o million pounds of Russian wheat had accumulated on docks since the Turks closed the Straits in response to the Italian attack of 18 April.)  Russia had made strong representations to Istanbul about the closing.  He also called on Turkey to ensure internal security throughout its entire territory, especially in European Turkey, but any rumors that Russia had any aggressive intentions against its neighbor were erroneous.

Turning to relations with Austria-Hungary, Sasonov put the best possible gloss on the situation.  He said that there was tension between the two countries, but he said that they agreed on three things: the need to maintain the status quo in the Balkans, the need to maintain the independence of the current Balkan states, and the acceptance of the new order (i.e., the rule of the Young Turks) in Turkey.  In fact, there was no such meeting of the minds.  Both countries were trying to shape the situation in the Balkans to their own ends.  The secret Serbian-Bulgarian treaty of 13 March, brokered by Russia, could be used against either Turkey or Austria-Hungary to overturn the status quo, which was not satisfactory to either of the two Balkan Slav countries.  The major hand in working out that agreement had been the pan-Slav Russian ambassador to Belgrade, Nicholas Hartwig, who was a rival of Sazonov’s, favoring a much more aggressive Russian policy in the Balkans, particularly against Austria-Hungary in favor of Serbia.

In the debate following Sasonov’s speech, the main critique was delivered by Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov, the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (“Kadets”), who was to become Foreign Minister himself after the fall of the Tsar.  Milyukov said that Sasonov’s hopes that Russia could mediate the Italian-Turkish conflict were at best exaggerated and that any hopes nourished by pan-Slav elements of a confederation of Balkan States (not mentioned by Sasonov) were unrealizable and that the best outcome for Russia was maintenance of the status quo and the integrity of Turkey.  He hit the nail on the head when he said, “Even if  Austrian-Russian relations are momentarily improving, the question of knowing on what basis Russia and Austria intend to carry out their policies in the Balkans is very much open.”  They were to remain open until the two countries went to war on 1 August 1914.

Troubles in Hungary; French Take Control of Morocco

The eastern half of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy caused Emperor Franz Josef and his imperial cabinet no end of troubles in March and  April 1912.  The Hungarian government, led by Prime Minister Károly Khuen-Héderváry, had resigned back on 7 March over the issue of the annual conscription authorization bill.  The Hungarian parliament, never enthusiastic about providing troops for the common defense of the empire, had been unwilling to agree to a provision in the annual law that in case of necessity (i.e., war)  the Emperor could extend the three-year period of service of the latest annual class and mobilize the three preceding classes.  This was a traditional prerogative of the monarch and was insisted upon by the joint Austro-Hungarian defense ministry, which was seeing the country fall behind in the build up of European armies.  The problem for the Dual Monarchy was that the number of exemptions and the lax enforcement of the conscription law meant that its armed forces were weaker relative to its size than that of any of the other European powers.  Its forces represented 0.29 per cent of its population compared to 0.47 per cent in Germany and 0.75 per cent in France.  (When war broke out in 1914, Austria-Hungary was only able to mobilize 49 army divisions compared to 62 by France, which had a smaller population.)

During the last three weeks of March, Khuen-Héderváry had sought to resolve the ministerial crisis by trying to find new ministers to serve in the cabinet and by searching for formulations of the law that would allow it to gain support from the Hungarian Chamber of Deputies, where he was faced with obstructionism from the two branches of the nationalist Independence party.  He was too clever by half.  His solution consisted of a side “declaration” to the law that said that the extension of service and additional call-up would not take place unless approved by parliament.  In other words, it negated the whole point of the provision.  Franz Josef had had enough.  He summoned Khuen-Héderváry from Budapest to Vienna on Friday, 29 March, and told him, in effect, that if the law was not approved then he would abdicate.  This frightened Khuen-Héderváry – the Hungarians were very worried about the succession, which would put Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the throne.  Franz Ferdinand was known to believe in a centralized empire with universal suffrage representing all nationalities, the antithesis of the Compromise of 1867, which had put Hungarian magnates in charge of half the empire.

On Saturday, 30 March, Franz Josef sent a letter over his hand-written signature to Khuen-Héderváry laying out his position.  The Emperor said that throughout his reign he had scrupulously respected the rights of his Kingdom of Hungary as laid out in the Compromise of 1867.  Since 1888, the law had given him the power to call up reserves in case of need and he had no intention of relinquishing that right and duty.  “As it is my inflexible will to keep intact the constitional rights of the nation, I must also defend with equal resolution the rights of the crown if I can exercise them within my dual role.  With complete confidence, I ask the nation to help me accomplish my duty according to my conscience and to ensure the continuation of my constitutional role based on the understanding that exists between the king and the nation.”

Khuen-Héderváry made an urgent telephone call to his colleagues in Budapest and asked them to come to Vienna for an immediate consultation on the Emperor’s ultimatum.  The members of Khuen-Héderváry’s party, the National Labor Party, which had a majority in parliament, agreed that they would form a cabinet immediately and pass the conscription law without further ado, without trying to get the support of the two factions of the Independence Party — one led by Gyula Justh and the other by Ferenc Kossuth.   On Monday, 1 April, the prime minister presented a new cabinet to the parliament and called on it to approve the recruitment law without the “declaration”.  “It is our duty to reassure the King and to prevent incalcuble risks.”

Following Khuen-Héderváry’s appeal to parliament, he then undertook a dangerous tactic to try to win the support of the nationalists.  For many years (1883-1903), he had served as the Ban (Viceroy) of the autonomous Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, which was part of the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy.  The population of Croatia-Slavonia was mainly Croatian and Serbian and in recent years had seen an increase in anti-Habsburg and pro-south Slav (“Yugoslav”) activity.  Suddenly, on Thursday, 4 April, the current Ban, Slavko Cuvaj de Ivanska, suspended the Croatian constitution, dissolved the local legislature, instituted press censorship, suspended the right of assembly and nominated special police commissioners for the cities and towns of Croatia.  On the next day, Cuvaj was named as royal commissioner for the province, signifying its demoted status.  As expected, the outcry in Croatia was immediate and vociferous, which was matched by indignation in the press in Vienna, which said that the new decrees were a political ploy that could only lead to more unrest in the future.  Cuvaj himself was the object of two assassination attempts in the coming months, including a narrow escape on 8 June 1912.  Within a year, he was kicked upstairs with the title of “Baron” and forced into retirement.

For Khuen-Héderváry, neither his appeal to parliament or his heavy-handed tactics in Croatia met with success.  The parliamentary faction led by Justh refused to give up its obstructionism unless the ruling party agreed to pass a universal suffrage bill, which the nationalists assumed would lead them to victory in the next elections.  For three weeks, the parties squabbled and the conscription bill came no closer to passage.  Finally, on 22 April Khuen-Héderváry resigned.  The real leader of his National Labor Party, Istvan Tisza, became speaker of the house in May and then took over as prime minister in 1913, in time for him to give Hungarian acquiescence to the ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914 that led to war.  Although Franz Joseph never did abdicate, it is interesting to speculate what might have happened if he had followed through on his threat of 29 March.  It is unlikely that his successor would have been visiting Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

Elsewhere in the world, an important event took place in Fez, Morocco, on Saturday afternoon, 30 March, although the news did not reach the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay until the following afternoon.  Its representative in Morocco, Eugène Regnault, had been able to get the Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd el-Hafid, to sign a protectorate agreement that to all intents and purposes turned his country over to France.  The protectorate agreement had been pending since France and Germany had concluded a treaty in February that allowed France a free hand in Morocco, following the Agadir crisis of May 1911.  Abd el-Hafid had brought the conclusion on himself by first overthrowing his brother and then, unable to quell the resulting unrest, had called on French troops to protect him, thus setting off the Agadir crisis.  Under the new protectorate agreement, he lost all his power.  In exchange for maintaining his title and a titular religious role, control of finances, justice, schools and armed forces was taken over by the French with a French military and police presence installed to ensure it.  The Sultan could not make any decree without the approval of the French Resident Commissioner and could undertake no public or private loans without French approval.  Abd el-Hafiz’s humiliation was so complete that he abdicated on 12 August 1912 in favor of another brother, the father of the future King Mohammed V, who was to regain independence for Morocco in 1956.

The signing of the protectorate agreement effectively took Morocco off the plate of international politics – there were no further crises to mirror those of 1905 and 1911.  However, the situation in Morocco was not fully resolved.  Spain and France were still in protracted negotiations about control of the northern part of the country opposite the Straits of Gibraltar.  One reason for pushing through the protectorate agreement was to give France an upper hand in those negotiations.  Notably, the protectoriate provided that the city of Tangier, claimed by the Spanish, would come under an international regime (which was not instituted until after World War I).  It was forecast that now that the Franco-Moroccan agreement had been signed, the Franco-Spanish one would follow quickly, which would establish a khalifate under Spanish control in the north of the country.  In fact, such an accord was not signed until 27 November 1912.  More to the point, the Moroccan people objected to the new arrangements: there were riots in Fez in the weeks following the conclusion of the protectorate and endemic resistance to the European presence in the interior for decades.  This culminated in the Rif War of 1921-1926, which resulted in major Spanish defeats before a joint French-Spanish force was able to defeat insurgent general Abd el-Krim.

Italians Bombard Entrance to Dardanelles

The major world event of the third week of April 1912 was the sinking of the giant passenger steamship, the Titanic, off the southeastern coast of Newfoundland during the night of 14-15 April with a loss of more than 1,500 passengers and crew.  That tragedy knocked everything else off the front pages of the world’s newspapers, and it still reverberates 100 years later.  However, the disaster had no direct bearing on the European political situation, which continued to be fraught, as highlighted by another maritime event in the eastern Mediterranean.

On 13 April, a flotilla of Italian warships had left the main Italian naval base at Taranto while another had sailed from the port of Tripoli in North Africa.  Their progress was not a great secret; they were spotted off the island of Skyros on the 17th and the assumption in the world press was that they were headed to cause mischief in the Aegean or in the Dardanelles.  The ships rendez-voused off the island Astypalaia, near the large island of Rhodes, during the night of Wednesday, 17 April.  The next morning the larger part of the fleet sailed north while a smaller division remained near Astypalaia.  The main fleet steamed north at an average speed of 12 knots and reached the northern end of the Aegean Sea by the evening.  During the night, the Italians cut the telegraph cables linking the Turkish islands of Imbros, Tenedos and Lemnos with the mainland.

At 6:30 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, 18 April, the Italian fleet, with the Pisa and Amalfi in advance, sailed to the western entrance of the Dardanelles, hoping to draw the Turkish fleet anchored within the straits.  At about 9:00 a.m. a Turkish anti-torpedo boat appeared at the entrance to the Straits to reconnoiter but quickly retired on sighting the Italian warships.  At that point, the Turkish forts guarding the entrance to the Dardanelles on both the European and Asiatic sides opened fire, sending about 150 projectiles at the ships.  There were no hits; none  of the Italian ships was damaged in spite of Turkish claims that the Varese had caught on fire.  In return, the Italian ships fired back at the Turkish forts.  On the European side, three ships split off and aimed their fire at the old Byzantine fort of Seddulbahir (later named “No. 3″ by the British during the Gallipoli campaign) and at Ertugrul (“No.1″), a little to the west, with a total of about 12 shots being fired.  The larger group of ships concentrated on the Asiatic side, with the fort of Kum Kale (“No. 6″) taking about 30 shells while its neighbor to the south, Orhaniye (“No. 4″), received 300 and suffered the most damage.  The bombardment lasted for about two hours and then the Italian ships withdrew.

Meanwhile, the smaller group of ships left behind farther south in the Aegean caused more havoc, with the old battleship Emanuele Filiberto (described by critics as both unsightly and unseaworthy) shelling the town of Vathy on the (Greek-inhabited) island of Samos, destroying a Turkish infantry barracks in the town while its accompanying torpedo boat, the Ostro, sank a Turkish gunboat in the harbor.  Meanwhile, the Regina Margherita and the Benedetto Brin, accompanied by one torpedo boat each, cut the cable between Rhodes and the mainland at both sides of the cable landings.  On the 19th, the Italian ships reassembled and headed back to Italy, leaving behind the Pisa, Amalfi and a number of torpedo boats as a task force to destroy communications between Asia Minor and the islands.  They destroyed the telegraph station on the island of Chios and the one opposite it in the mainland town of Cesme and at places near Izmir and opposite Rhodes.

Amazingly, when the Italian Foreign Minister, Antonino di San Giuliano, met with foreign diplomats in Rome, he claimed that the attack was “accidental”.  In his report back to London, the British ambassador, Sir James Rodd, wrote on 19 April:  “Minister of Foreign Affairs is anxious that accidental character of engagement should be appreciated.  He fears that Turkish Government may try to close Dardanelles …. Position of Italy is as follows: She had not intended any attack on Dardanelles at present time; she must reserve to hersel liberty to attack Turkey in any way to her advantage, and Turkish apprehensions on account of Dardanelles are an asset to her.”  In fact, later intelligence revealed that Italy had contemplated “forcing” the Straits if circumstances had been propitious, which apparently they were not.

Even though the Italian attack had no military impact on the Turkish ability (or not) to carry out the war in Libya, it did demonstrate the power of the Regia Marina to disrupt marine transportation and communications.  The major impact of the attack was the one that was desired by Italian diplomacy – the Turks closed down the Bosphorus and Dardanelles to all shipping and mined the Straits.  The Italians hoped this would lead the Great Powers to put pressure on Turkey to sue for peace.  Indeed, the closure did cause an uproar by the countries most affected, Russia, France and Britain, which depended on this outlet to ship grain from Russia to Europe and other markets abroad.  Navigation companies demanded compensation for the losses incurred, which the Turkish government refused to pay, saying that the situation was outside its control and that it could not guarantee the safety of the ships.  It did promise to reopen the Straits as soon as the threat had passed, but in the event this did not happen for another month, on 20 May.  The Russians in particular suffered great losses, and the closure emphasized their vulnerability and reinforced their desire to control the Straits.  This was always a major backdrop to the events of the following months and years, as it had been an issue ever since the Congress of Berlin had forbidden non-Turkish warships to use the Straits.

Whether on purpose or not, the Italians had carried out their attack on the very day that a new Turkish parliament was to convene in Istanbul.  The two-party elections, which had had taken place over the preceding weeks, had been decisively won by the “Young Turks”, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), with 240 seats versus 30 for the Liberal Union.  On Tuesday, the 16th, the ambassadors of the Great Powers had met at the German embassy in Istanbul to agree on phrasing that they would put to the Turkish Foreign Minister, Azim Bey, asking his government on what basis they would accept the mediation of the Powers in settling the war.  In opening the parliament on the 18th, the Grand Vizir, Said Pasha, answered the question by saying “We also want peace but the only peace that can end the war is one that maintains our rights of sovereignty intact.”  This is what the Ottoman government had been saying since the beginning of the and indicated that in spite of the Italian demonstration off the Dardanelles the Turks were still not willing to agree to peace terms.

Elsewhere in Europe, on Monday, 15 April, the German government of Theobald von Bethmann-Holweg sent its proposed new military and naval bills, with the proposal for increased spending that had been the source of fruitless negotiations with the British as a result of the Haldane Mission, to the secretariat of the Reichstag.  Almost simultaneously, a convention of pan-Germanists. led by the nationalist Alldeutsches Verbandes, opened in the city of Hannover.  In a speech to the convention, General August Keim, head of the Deutsche Wehrverein (German Defense League), said that the military and naval bills were good as far as they went but were still inadequate.  In his opinion, the Germany army needed to be one third larger than the French army, a level that would not be achieved by the new laws.  (The problem was that the German government did not have the financial resources to pay for such a large force, especially because of the increased spending on the navy and its expensive Dreadnoughts.  During the war and after, there were many recriminations about the money that was spent on the fleet, with army generals and their supporters saying the sum could have been better used to equip at least one more army corps, probably making the difference in the Battle of the Marne.)  The feeling of the convention was aptly summed up by the egregious Kurd von Strantz who wrote that Germany was not looking to declare war on France in the near future, but that “the ambitions of Gaul will certainly furnish Germany an occasion”.  In that regard, the pan-Germanists registered their unhappiness with the Morocco agreeement that had just be concluded and asked the government to re-open negotiations (which did not happen).

As always in the build-up to World War I, most countries were preoccupied by purely domestic issues.  Great Britain in particular was struggling with the issue of Home Rule for Ireland and the disaffection of its Protestant minority, particularly in the northern province of Ulster.  The Liberal Party of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith had won the elections of 1910 on the promise to grant Irish home rule.  His government introduced the Third Home Rule bill, the previous two, sponsored by the great Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone, having gone down to defeat in 1886 and 1893, respectively.  On Wednesday, 17 April 1912, the first reading of the new bill was approved by a vote of 360 to 266 in the House of Commons.  But that was only the beginning of a lengthy parliamentary and political struggle that was to continue until the outbreak of war in 1914 and beyond.

Jockeying for Position in the Mediterranean

During the second week of April 1912, the Italians once again tried to break the stalemate that had followed their invasion of Turkish-ruled Libya the previous year.  Their strategy followed two parallel approaches – by attempting to complete the conquest of the long Libyan littoral and by applying pressure on Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean in order to force it to come to terms.  The first prong of these attacks was heralded by the appearance of a large Italian flotilla off the port of  Zuwarah in western Tripolitania on Tuesday, 9 April.  The force included three old battleships dating from the 1880s, led by the Sardegna, and a large number of support vessels.  They had left from the Sicilian port of Augusta and assembled 2,000 meters off Zuwarah on the evening of the 9th.  Starting on the morning of the 10th the ships bombarded the town of Zuwarah at 5-minute intervals into that evening.  According to the Italian military history, this ample warning of an Italian landing was intentional.  It was designed as a feint to draw all of the Turkish and Arab defenders in western Tripolitania to defend Zuwarah.  In this, they were successful – when the Italian soldiers came on shore from 20 transport boats on the morning of the 11th, they were repulsed by the local Turkish-Arab defenders and forced to return to their ships offshore.

In the meantime, the main part of the Italian flotilla moved westward and landed troops about 40 kilometers away at the Ras-al-Makhbaz peninsula.  The invading force was made up of the Italian 5th Division under the command of General Vincenzo Garioni (a future two-time governor of Tripolitania).  The Italians clashed with the local defenders near the shrine of a local prophet known as Sidi Sa’eed (also the site of a later battle) but were able to move inland and capture the fort of Farwah, which guarded the small fishing village of Abu Kammash across the bay from the peninsula. The attack was notable because  it used two dirigibles, P2 and P3, to reconnoiter the situation on the ground.  The Italians took Abu Kammash and the peninsula and were able to hold their ground when they were attacked later in the month, on the 23rd.

The control of the coastal waters and of  Abu Kammash enabled the Italian forces to interdict the flow of supplies and reinforcements that were clandestinely coming into Libya via Tunisia.  This was an important gain, but it was highly indicative of the troubles besetting the Italian forces in Libya that they were unable to take Zuwarah from the meagerly supplied but highly motivated Turkish and Arabic forces, even though they had complete maritime supremacy and a very large army on the ground.  The Italians would not take Zuwarah until August, finally completing their control of the entire coastline of Tripolitania.

Faced with such slow progress on the ground, on Saturday, 13 April 1912, the Italian navy (the “Regia Marina“) started operations leading up to, the following week, an attack at the very center of the Ottoman Empire, the Dardanelles between Asia Minor and Europe.  The commencement of this vital operation had been discomfited by the resignation on 9 April of the head of the navy, Vice-Admiral Luigi Faravelli, who suffered a nervous breakdown under the pressure of his war-time responsibilities.  He was immediately replaced by Leone Viale.

On the 13th, three battleships, the Vittorio Emmanuele, Roma, and Napoli, along with three armored cruisers and the flagship of the squadron commander, the Duca degli Abruzzi, the Vettor Pisani, set sail from the main Italian naval base at Taranto. The cover story was that the squadron was headed for Tripoli to relieve ships on patrol there.  In fact, a large body of those ships including four battleships, the Regina Margherita, Benedetto Brin, St. Bon and Emmanuele Filiberto, plus a number of auxiliary ships left the North African coast at the same time and headed for the eastern Aegean, with a rendez-vous planned for 17 April, with an attack on the Straits to follow soon thereafter.

The balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was very much to the forefront in 1912, with the Entente powers of France and Great Britain worried about their lifelines to North Africa and the Suez Canal in case of war against the Triple Alliance navies of Italy and Austria-Hungary.  The weekend of April 12-14 offered a singular opportunity for France and Britain to publicly demonstrate and strengthen their ties.  The unveiling of a statue of Queen Victoria in the French Mediterranean city of Nice was given maximum publicity by the French government as part of a concerted diplomatic and public relations effort to bind the two countries ever closer together.  Queen Victoria had started taking vacations on the French Riviera in 1895 and stayed at the Excelsior Régina Hotel in the town of Cimiez next to Nice.  She became very fond of the spot in her final years, and her son, King Edward VII, followed in her footsteps and also vacationed on the Riviera.  In honor of the Queen, the town built a large statue in front of the hotel, showing four young women, representing the nearby towns of Nice, Cannes, Grasse and Menton, presenting flowers to the royal personage.  The French went overboard in making the inauguration of the statue on Friday, 12 April, a display of entente cordiality.

French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré himself went to Nice, accompanied, not coincidentally, by the two military ministers, Minister of War Alexandre Millerand and Minister of Navy Théophile Delcasse.  Delcassé and Millerand had arrived earlier at the main French naval base in near-by Toulon to inspect ships of the French navy, with much publicity about how up-to-date the fleet was.  Millerand gave his colleague a pat on the back by speaking publicly at the occasion on how much the Navy Minister had done to correct the problem of unstable gunpowder, which had destroyed the battleship Liberté in September 1911.  Delcasse had worked to get rid of possibly dangerous old powder and to substitute it with a supply of new powder that contained a stabilizing agent.  This had been one of his main priorities when taking over the Navy Ministry.

During the ceremonial weekend, Britain was represented by the francophile ambassador to Paris, Sir Francis Bertie.  Speeches began at 10:00 a.m. on Friday morning to inaugurate the statue of Queen Victoria.  Poincaré gave the principal address, lauding the Entente Cordiale, calling it “one of the surest elements to guarantee peace and equilibrium in Europe”.  A parade of 10,000 troops then followed on the aptly-named Promenade des Anglais, with French and British warships providing a backdrop in the the bay outside and with a flyover by a bi-plane and several monoplanes.  That evening there was a gala ball in honor of the French and British naval officers.  The next day the whole show was moved to Cannes, where a large statue of King Edward VII, successor of Victoria, was unveiled on the main seaside bouleveard, La Croisette.  That night there was a fireworks display over Cannes while the three French cabinet ministers and the British ambassador were the guests of honor at a dinner offered by the Prince of Monaco at his palace in Monte Carlo.

Of course such a grand display for a not very significant statue had an important diplomatic objective.  Already, in March, the British First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had said that his country would remove its fleet from the Mediterranean to the North Sea if necessary to counter the rising threat of the German Kriegsmarine.  That would only work if the British could turn over the defense of the Mediterranean to their French ally.  Nothing would suit the French government more – such an agreement would bind the two countries together in a way that would make it almost impossible for the one to go to war without the other.  The display in Nice was designed to show that France was willing and able to take on the responsibility.  During the course of the year 1912 just such an agreement was made, and was a major element of Britain’s decision to fight in 1914.

Meanwhile, the rumblings of domestic politics continued to highlight the tensions among the European countries.   The pan-Germanist Baron Kurd von Strantz made a stir during the week by publishing a brochure saying that seven departments in France were properly German-speaking and should be united to the Fatherland, as should all of Switzerland.  Von Strantz had already caused bemusement in the United States in 1909 when he said that German should be the national language of the United States, not English, because of the large number of German immigrants.  The pan-Germanist newspaper, the Tägliches Rundschau, was also in an uproar because a Progressive member of the Reichstag, Conrad Haussmann, had published an article saying that the head of the German navy, the bellicose Admiral von Tirpitz, was a very dangerous man and that his goals for a navy equal to Britain’s would lead the country to war.  In an attempt to wound an old enemy, the Tägliches Rundschau claimed that Haussmann had been incited by Foreign Minister Alfred von Kiderlen-Waechter.

Tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean

The European naval competition, which had been highlighted by the presentation of competing British and German plans the previous week, continued to resonate during the last week of March 1912.  On Wednesday, 27 March, the Journal de Genève commented that all the differences between the two powers could be resolved if there was a halt to the naval competition:  “The only, the one truly grave, question between London and Berlin is that of the battle fleets.  Germany is investing it with all the fervor of its global ambitions while for England it is a question of its very existence.”  Another power in the equation, France, followed the other two countries in debating its new navy law in the Senate on 28 March.  The Minister of the Navy, Théophile Delcassé, said that France was determined to maintain its status as fourth naval power (the third being the United States) and would pursue a construction program that would see it equipped with 28 modern battleships by 1920 and would modernize its naval bases to accommodate them.  One senator, Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet d’Estournelles de Constant, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1909, spoke out against the program, saying that the continuing growth of the world’s naval fleets was creating more problems than it solved.

However, most of the world’s anxieties at the end of March 1912 centered on the eastern Mediterranean.  On 30 March 1912 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov sent a circular letter to his ambassadors in Paris and London asking them to advise those friendly governments of the existence of the Serbian-Bulgarian treaty of 13 March.  However, he did not inform the governments of the offensive nature of that treaty or  the role of Russia as the arbiter between the two countries.  Later, in August 1912, when French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré learned of its full contents during a visit to St. Petersburg, he rightly exclaimed that it was an agreement for war against Turkey.

The value of this alliance as a tool against Turkey was apparent elsewhere as well.  On Tuesday, 26 March, the results of the elections in Greece were announced.  The Liberal Party of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos won a large majority – 146 seats out of 181.  Venizelos was himself a native of the island of Crete who had headed up the Cretan revolt of 1908 against Turkish sovereignty before he left to go to the mainland in 1910, quickly becoming head of the Greek government.  Under international law, Crete was an autonomous state guaranteed by Great Britain, France, Italy and Russia, with the Ottoman sultan as the nominal head of state.  In fact, since a Greek nationalist revolt in 1908 it had been self-governing, and the revolutionary committee in charge had declared enosis, or union, with Greece, but it was not yet consummated.  The committee had announced that they would be sending representatives to the new Greek parliament when it convened in May 1912.  The Turks declared that seating the delegates would be an act of war, and that their army could quickly take Athens if need be.  This put Venizelos in a difficult position: Greece had suffered a disastrous defeat in a war with the Turks in 1897, which had broken out over the issue of control of Crete.  He did not want to take such risks again, yet his whole career had been devoted to uniting Crete with mainland Greece.  Later, Venizelos admitted that he had tried at this time to negotiate secretly with Istanbul, proposing that the Cretan delegates be seated in the Greek parliament while the putative sovereignty of the Turkish sultan would be acknowledged with the island paying an annual tribute to the Ottoman government.

The Turks rejected the deal proposed by Venizelos, and so he opened up negotiations with Bulgaria instead about forming an alliance against Turkey, along the lines already agreed with the Serbs.  The Bulgarians were said to be anxious to take on Greece as a partner because they valued the addition of the Greek navy in any military operations against the Turks while discounting the value of the Greek army, which had been humiliated in its most recent war with Turkey.  The Bulgarians thought the Greek land forces would not constitute much of an adversary in their mutual competition for control of Macedonia, especially of the great seaport of Thessaloniki.  (This calculation turned out to be wrong.)

There were problems in another Greek-speaking island under Ottoman suzerainty.  The island of Samos, hard by the Asia Minor mainland, was ruled by a Christian prince nominated by and accountable to Istanbul.  On 22 March 1912, the incumbent, Andreas Kopassis, was assassinated while on a visit to Istanbul.  As part of the Turkish attempt to find the perpetrators, the leader of the Greek nationalists on Samos, Themistoklis Sophoulis, was forced to flee to Greece.  Within a few months, he was to return as the new prince of Samos when the Greeks defeated Turkey in the first Balkan War.  He later succeeded Venizelos as leader of the Liberal Party and served three terms as Prime Minister of Greece.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire was also undertaking elections, over an extended period, which would result in a majority for the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the “Young Turks”.  The election provided for the representation of national and religious minorities in the proportion of 1:100,000, resulting in, for example, 27 Greeks and 11 Armenians being elected to the new parliament.  However, there were many accusations that the Ottoman police tried to suppress minority votes, and during the last week of March, riots broke out in the town of Langkadas in the hinterland of Thessaloniki in which 10 people were killed and 25, including policemen, were wounded.  There were similar disturbances elsewhere, including in the town on Xanthi, east of Langkadas.

The ongoing Italian-Turkish war over Libya was moving its focus to the eastern Mediterranean as well.  There was much speculation in the press during the last week of March and first week of April that the Italians were preparing a naval attack on the Dardanelles.  This turned out to be true: later, it was learned that the Italian Navy Minister, Pasquale Leonardi Cattolica, had started preparations for just such an attack on 18 March.  Commentators asked what Italy hoped to gain from such an action, in that it would not have the means to follow it up with any substantive military action against Turkey proper.  The answer was, of course, that Italy wanted to force Turkey to see that it would lose more from not conceding Libya than it would gain by continuing to fight.  But the potential for catastrophe was great.  The perspicacious Journal de Genève summed it up by saying, “This could be the opening of the final crisis, which Europe does not want, and it is for this reason that Italy is being restrained from striking at the heart of the sick man.  The only real defense for Turkey and the Dardanelles is Europe, which will impose peace when it is ready.”

Trying to look for a way to end the war was in fact one of the main aims of Kaiser Wilhelm II when he met King Vittorio Emmanuele III on Monday, 25 March in Venice, on his way down the Adriatic to a vacation on the island of Corfu.  The Italian king alluded to the expansion of the war, which had already included bombardment of Beirut, saying that if the Turks were not willing to make peace, then Italy could not be expected to fight “with one hand tied behind its back while its enemy hid behind the seconds to the duel”, i.e., the European powers.  The Kaiser also wanted Italy to undertake an early renewal of the Triple Alliance (which also included Austria-Hungary), but Italian Foreign Minister Antonino di San Giuliano had already made it clear that this could not happen until the Turkish war came to a successful (from Italy’s point of view) conclusion.  San Giuliano laid out Italy’s view that the Triple Alliance was not relevant to Asia Minor and the seas around it.  So, the Kaiser’s stopover in Italy, which had been much ballyhooed in advance, did not accomplish anything.  This was not surprising considering the mutual antipathy between the two men – in private, the Kaiser referred to the diminutive Italian king as “the Dwarf”.

Competing British and German Military Plans

On Monday, 18 March 1912, Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the British Admiralty, presented the budget estimates for the Royal Navy for the following year to the House of Commons.  “I propose, with the permission of the House, to lay bare to them this afternoon, with perfect openness, the naval situation.  It is necessary to do so mainly with reference to one Power.”  He then specified that that power was Germany.

As a reflection of the stand-off over the Haldane conversations, he also took the occasion, with the consent of the Cabinet, to lay out the naval policy of the Liberal government for the coming years.  ”Having reviewed our existing naval resources … we are not prepared to recommend at the present time the two-keels-to-one standard in new construction against Germany.  The time may come when that will be necessary, but it is not necessary now.” He said that Britain would  maintain a superiority of 60 percent over Germany in terms of the battleships (“Dreadnoughts”) that it deployed as long as Germany adhered to its current shipbuilding program.  “We are able for the present to adhere to so moderate a standard because of our great superiority in vessels of the pre-’Dreadnought’ era.”   But he said that if Germany exceeded that program (which was the intention of the German naval bill that had already been shared with the British government via Haldane but not yet presented to the German parliament), then Britain would build two ships for every additional one that the Germans built.  This would be in addition to any number of ships that were built by the British Dominions.  Specifically, Churchill detailed that if Germany kept to its  previous schedule of two new dreadnoughts every year then, over the next six years, Britain would build 4-3-4-3-4-3.  If Germany went up to 3-2-3-2-3-2, then Britain would counter with 5-4, etc.

Then, surprisingly, Churchill said that his government was willing to stop the madness of tit-for-tat.  He proposed that the two countries take a “naval holiday”,  an offer he reiterated in the coming weeks.  “Let me make clear, however, that any retardation or reduction in German construction will, within certain limits, be promptly followed here. … For instance, if Germany elected to drop out any one, or even any two, of these annual quotas and to put her money in her pocket for the enjoyment of her people and the development of her own prosperity, we will at once … blot out our corresponding quota, and the slowing down by Germany will be accompanied naturally on our larger scale by us. … Take as an instance … the year 1913.  In that year, as I apprehend, Germany will build three capital ships, and it will be necessary for us to build five in consequence.  Supposing we were both to take a holiday for that year.  Supposing we both introduced a blank page in the book of misunderstanding; supposing that Germany were to build no ships in that year, she would save herself between £6,000,000 and £7,000,000 sterling. … As to the indirect results, even from a single year,they simply cannot be measured, not only between our two great brother nations, but to all the world.”  In other words, Germany would gain nothing by persisting in her building program and would lose nothing if it desisted in terms of its naval strength relative to Britain’s.  “Here, then, is a perfectly plain and simple plan of arrangement whereby without diplomatic negotiation, without any bargaining, without the slightest restriction upon the sovereign freedom of either Power, this keen and costly naval rivalry can be at any time abated.”

In his speech, Churchill endeavored to make clear to the Germans, because they were the real audience, why Britain had to maintain naval superiority over its rival, following a theme he had struck in a much-noted speech he had made at Glasgow at the time of the Haldane mission to Berlin.  “It [is] necessary for us to have a sufficient margin to be able to meet at our average moment the naval force of an attacking Power at their selected moment. … The consequences of defeat at sea are so much greater to us than they would be to Germany or France.  There is no similarity between our naval needs and those of the two countries I have mentioned.  There is no parity of risk.  Our position is highly artificial.  We are fed from the sea; we are an unarmed people; we possess a very small Army; we are the only Power in Europe which does not possess a large army.”

The German response to Churchill’s speech came quickly.  On Friday, 22 March, the German government tabled in the Bundesrat, the “Federal Council” or upper house of the German parliament, the new army and navy laws, which the Haldane mission and Churchill’s proposal for a naval holiday had tried to forestall.  The new military law proposed the creation of two new army corps for the Prussian army, one to be stationed in the west, at Saarbrucken, facing France and the other at Allenstein in East Prussia near the Russian border, as well as small increases in the sizes of the Bavarian and Saxon armies.  The army was to be strengthened by ensuring three battalions for every regiment while every infantry regiment was to have a machine gun company.  In addition, the law would create two new field artillery regiments and an aviation battalion.  The increases would require an additional 29,000 new recruits each year so that the total peacetime German armed forces would have 650,000 soldiers, 61,000 sailors, and 30,000 officers for the two services — a total of 740,000 men.

The navy bill, which was the chief worry of the British, would proceed with the creation of a third battle squadron and the construction of three battleships additional to what was planned under the previous law — an additional one for 1913, one for 1916 and one without a date.  As for smaller ships, which had also been a British concern, there would be three additional large cruisers and three small cruisers as well as an increased number of submarines and several dirigibles.  All of this would necessitate an increase in naval personnel as well.

The submission of the two bills to the Bundesrat could only be seen as a direct response to Churchill’s naval estimates and seems to have been chosen for Friday, the 22nd, so that Kaiser Wilhelm II could ensure that it was made public before he left on a long-planned trip to the Adriatic.  He left with members of his family at 6:30 p.m. Friday night from Berlin and arrived by train in Vienna at 11:00 a.m. the next morning.  He had lunch with Emperor Franz Josef at Schönbrunn Palace and an early, gala dinner before leaving Vienna at 9:00 p.m. to travel to Venice to meet the Italian king.  Before starting on his trip, the Kaiser had made sure that the gauntlet was laid down to the British.

In the event, the Germans explicitly rejected the offer of a naval holiday.  In April, the Kaiser sent word via his intermediary Sir Ernest Cassel that such an agreement would only be possible between “allies”.  In his memoirs, Twenty-Five Years, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, wrote, “The proposal for a naval holiday was not welcomed in Germany; if it was not regarded as an unfriendly act, it was far from being regarded as a friendly one.  It was hard to understand then why such proposals were so unfavourably received. … We did not realize then how inveterate and deep-rooted at Berlin was the habit of attributing a sinister and concerted motive to any proposal from another Government.  Nor was it understood, as it should be now, how certainly competition in armaments leads to war.”

Churchill had in fact ended his speech of 18 March with an appeal to peace.  “The spectacle which the naval armaments of Christendom afford at the present time will no doubt excite the curiosity and the wonder of future generations.  Here are seen all the polite peoples of the world, as if moved by spontaneous impulse, devoting every year an immense and ever-growing proportion of their wealth, their manhood, and their scientific knowledge, to the construction of a gigantic military machinery, which is obsolescent as soon as it is created; which falls to pieces almost as soon as it is put together; which has to be continually renewed and replenished on a larger scale; which drains the coffers of every Government; which denies and stints the needs of every people; and which is intended to be a means of protection against dangers which have perhaps no other origin than in mutual fears and suspicions of men. … [W]e cannot conceal from ourselves the fact that we live in an age of incipient violence and strong and deep-seated unrest.  The utility of war even to the victor may in most cases be an illusion. … The Admiralty must leave to others the task of mending the times in which we live, and confine themselves to the more limited and more simple duty of making quite sure that whatever the times may be our Island and its people will come safely through them.”

Churchill’s remarks on the “utility of war” of course turned out to be prophetic and were made manifest by another event that occurred during the third week of March 1912.  On Wednesday afternoon, 20 March, the Royal Navy launched the battle cruiser Queen Mary, named after the consort of reigning King George V.  The ship was the largest in the world launched to that time, with a displacement of 27,200 tons and measuring 198 meters by 26 meters, powered by 75,000 horsepower and capable of steaming at 28 knots an hour with a total of 24 guns.  After fitting out and trial runs, it was commissioned on 4 September 1913, the last British capital ship commissioned before the war.  During the Battle of Jutland, it was hit by two shots from the German ship SMS Derfflinger and sunk on 31 May 1916.  Twenty-eight crew members survived while 1,266 lost their lives.

Haldane Accords Die; Serbs and Bulgarians Collude

In order to forestall the resignation of his Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Holweg, the previous week, Kaiser Wilhelm II had been forced to back down in his desire to submit forthwith a new naval bill, with big increases in the size of the German navy, to the Reichstag.  The size of the proposed increases was the main sticking point in defusing tensions with Great Britain, which had been the object of a mission to Berlin by Sir Richard Haldane, the British Minister of War, in February.  The Kaiser gave Bethmann one more chance to find a basis for agreement.  Bethmann took advantage of this new opportunity to propose to the British that they work on a formulation of mutual neutrality in case of war, which was his goal in the negotiations, in return for German concessions in the naval bill, or Novelle as it was called.  Bethmann worked with the German ambassador in London, Count Paul Wolff-Metternich, to make new proposals to the British.

On Tuesday, 12 March, Metternich procured an appointment with Haldane at the British Ministry of War and presented Bethmann’s ideas on salvaging the results of the earlier negotiations.  As detailed in Robert K. Massie’s comprehensive book Dreadnought, the bachelor Haldane wrote to his mother that evening: “I believe our prayers have been answered and that the good Chancellor has got the better of Tirpitz [head of the German navy] and his admirals.”

Haldane wrote a memo to the British cabinet in which he reported his discussion with Metternich.  Haldane wrote that “if the British Government would offer a suitable political formula, the proposed Fleet Law as it stood would be withdrawn.  Some Fleet Law there must be, but one of less magnitude would be introduced …. The reduction… would be considerable… [and] extended to personnel.  He wanted to say that time pressed, as a statement would have to be made almost at once to the Reichstag … and the Chancellor wished to be provided with the offer of a formula from us as a reason for not proceeding with his original proposals.  I asked whether the formula need go beyond the disclaimer of aggressive intentions and combinations.  He indicated that he thought it need not.”

Haldane went to see the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who drafted a ” political” formula on the spot.  It read: “England will make no unprovoked attack upon Germany and will pursue no aggressive policy towards her.  Aggression upon Germany is not the subject and forms no part of any treaty, understanding or combination to which England is now a party, nor will she become a party to anything that has such an object.”  This formulation was approved by the British cabinet on Thursday, 14 March, and presented to Metternich to despatch to Berlin.

Metternich was worried that unless the phrasing of the proposed agreement specified “neutrality” on Britain’s part, it would not be accepted in Berlin.  He was right; Bethmann felt that Grey’s wording was not strong enough to head off Tirpitz.  According to Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, in his book The World Crisis 1911-1918, Bethmann proposed through Metternich two other possible formulations: “England will therefore observe at least a benevolent neutrality should war be forced upon Germany” or “England will therefore, as a matter of course, remain neutral if a war is forced upon Germany”.  The sticking point for the British was, of course, the word “forced”: who and how to determine if a war was “forced” or not?  In the event, when war did break out in 1914, this point was made manifest — had Germany been “forced” to declare war on Russia and France?

As Churchill makes clear in his book, the proposed German wording would have effectively put an end to the entente between Britain and France and, therefore, could not be accepted by the British cabinet.  On Saturday, 16 March, Metternich received two telegrams asking the state of the negotiations with Britain.  In a meeting with Grey to seek further information, Metternich alluded to Bethmann’s precarious situation and said that there might be a “change of personnel” in Berlin if there was no agreement.  Grey replied that the British saw Bethmann’s remaining as Chancellor as the best guarantee of peace in Europe.  When this was transmitted to the Kaiser, he was furious.  According to German diplomatic documents published after the war, he said, “It is clear that Grey has no idea who is master here, namely myself.  He dictates to me in advance who is to be my Minister if I am to conclude an agreement with England.”

Moving into the next week, on Tuesday, 18 March 1912, Grey confirmed that Britain could not accept the German wording regarding neutrality.  This put Bethmann “in a state of collapse” because it was now clear that he would not get the diplomatic weapons he needed to prevent Tripitz from proceeding with his plan for the Novelle.  On the 19th, Bethmann informed the Kaiser that he no longer opposed publication of the naval bill.

All of these negotiations were, of course, going on in secret, nor, indeed, had anyone other than a very small circle known about Bethmann’s resignation attempt.  Other secret negotiations going on elsewhere in Europe that very week would have equal ramifications on the European power configuration, which would ultimately culminate in war in 1914.  On Wednesday, 13 March, Serbia and Bulgaria signed a secret treaty that had been negotiated for three months under the auspices of the Russians.  The two Balkan Slavic-speaking countries were competitors over the region of Macedonia, which had been awarded to Bulgaria under the Treaty of San Stefano of 1878 and then taken away and restored to the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Berlin the following year.  Now that the Turks were engaged in a war with Italy over Libya, it seemed like the opportune time to clear the Ottomans out of their remaining Balkan possessions – if the Balkan countries themselves could resolve their own disagreements.  Russia, which wanted control of the Straits separating the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, had also decided this was the time to make a move and worked to push Bulgaria and Serbia together in an alliance against Turkey.

Under the agreement of 13 March, Bulgaria and Serbia came up with a rather shaky solution to their differences over Macedonia, mostly in favor of Bulgaria.  The aim of the agreement was to produce an autonomous Macedonia with only nominal Turkish suzerainty.  The assumption on the Bulgarian side was that theywould evenutally absorb such an autonomous province much as had happened with another anomalous territory, Eastern Rumelia, in 1885.  If the autonomy of the whole of Macedonia could not be not achieved, then Bulgaria would receive southern Macedonia while the northern part would become a “contested zone” whose fate would be decided by the arbitration of the Russian tsar.  These two provisions effectively foretold the two upcoming Balkan wars: during the first, which would break out later in 1912, the aim was to wrest Macedonia away from Turkey;  the second was fought in 1913 to decide the control of Macedonia among the Balkan states.  The other provisions of the agreement provided for military cooperation by Serbia and Bulgaria against both Turkey and Austria-Hungary if necessary and spelled out that Bulgaria had pre-eminent interests in Thrace and Serbia in Kosovo and Albania.  Having concluded this Balkan Alliance, the two countries turned to the third country with Balkan claims against the Ottomans – Greece – and endeavored to bring it on board as well.

The conclusion of the Balkan Alliance seems to have animated Russia to take a more aggressive attitude towards Turkey.  During the week of 10 March there were press reports of a massing of Russian troops in the Caucasus near the Turkish frontier.  On the 12th, the Russians recalled their ambassador to Istanbul, Count Charykov, who earlier in the year had unsuccessfully floated an agreement with the Turkish government for Russian warships to use the Bosphorus and Dardanelles; he was seen, apparently, by St. Petersburg as being too pro-Turkish.  Meanwhile, the Turks became increasingly concerned about their own ability to maintain control of the Straits: in response to the threat of Italian naval action, on 12 March the Turks announced that they had mined the Dardanelles and all merchant vessels using that route had to be escorted by pilot boats.

Two resignations during the course of the second week of March 1912 exposed some of the tensions that were underlying the domestic politics of European countries as they tried to respond to the increasing atmosphere of insecurity on the continent.  On the 15th, the German Imperial Secretary of the Treasury, Adolf Wermuth, resigned when Bethmann refused to endorse his demand to initiate an inheritance tax to pay for the anticipated augmentations of the army and navy budgets.  On the same day, the Belgian Minister of War, General Joseph Hellebaut, submitted his resignation in the face of a series of articles by a leading Brussels newspaper, Le Soir, claiming that he had not done enough to prepare the country for war.  Hellebaut had attempted to make several reforms in the Belgian defences, including refurbishing the line of fortifications along the Meuse River and completing and arming the redoubt of Antwerp, but these were perceived to have been largely cosmetic and were in any case subject to delays due to financial constraints.  Hellebaut’s major policy had been to institute universal military service for Belgian young men, such as existed in neigboring Germany and France.  However, the most he had been able to convince the parliament to agree to was the service of only one son per family.  This meant that rather than achieving an army that was estimated to require 300,000 men to mount an effective defence it was able to reach only half that size.

One piece of unfinished business was concluded during the week when German ambassador Baron Wilhelm von Schoen returned to Paris after a lengthy absence in Berlin, and France and Germany exchanged ratifications of the two treaties concerning Morocco and the Congo at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, 12 March, at the Quai d’Orsay.  Paris had been worried that the Germans might have a change of heart, but with the exchange of ratifications the two parties proceeded to appoint experts to delineate the new boundaries in central Africa.

One dramatic incident took place on Thursday, 14 March, that consumed the attention of the European press for the next few days:  an Italian anarchist, Antonio d’Alba, fired two shots at King Vittorio Emmanuele III and Queen Elena at 9:00 a.m. when the royal couple were riding in an open car on the way to a mass to commemorate the birthday of the King’s father, King Umberto I, who been killed by an anarchist in July 1900.  In a premonition of two other famous assassinations of the 20th century, the Queen saw the gunman and threw her body on top of her husband.  Neither one was wounded, but the King’s bodyguard, Major Lang, riding alongside on a horse, was injured in the leg.   The would-be assassin was attacked by onlookers and subdued and after some roughing up was handed over to the police.  That afternoon, the King and Queen received members of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate who congratulated them on their escape, and then the royal pair appeared on the balcony of the Quirinal Palace to acknowledge the cheers of an enormous crowd.

Bethmann Submits Resignation

The German government reacted very negatively when they received, during the last week of February, the British response to the proposals coming out of the earlier Haldane discussions.  Kaiser Wilhelm II had been especially incensed and wanted to send his government’s rejection immediately.  Hoping to let tempers settle and to see in what ways the British might be willing to negotiate, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Holweg was able to delay a response for a few days while he argued that the new German naval law, the Novelle, which was at the heart of British objections, should be postponed.

However, the Kaiser, who was out of Berlin, telegraphed to Bethmann on Tuesday, 5 March, that he could wait no longer.  The negative German reply had to be delivered in London the following day and the Novelle should be tabled in the Reichstag on the evening of the 6th.  He then took the unusual step of telegraphing a message directly to the German ambassador in London, Count Paul Wolff-Metternich saying, among other things, ”I shall consider any transfer of the [British] Mediterranean Squadron into the North Sea as a cause of war.”  He also said that he would order the German military to mobilize and that the offer of slowing down the rate of construction of new battleships was no longer on the table.  In sending this extraordinary message, Wilhelm had ignored the constitutional requirement that any such instructions should come from Metternich’s bosses — the Chancellor, Bethmann, and the Foreign Secretary, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter.

On learning of the Kaiser’s message to Metternich, Bethmann submitted his resignation.  The Kaiser quickly returned to Berlin and tried to assuage his minister.  Not wishing to cause a governmental crisis, Wilhelm backtracked and said that he would agree to delay the submission of the Novelle and allow Bethmann to negotiate with the British.  Bethmann felt that the most important part of those negotiations should be that Britain agree to remain neutral in case of war on the continent — in other words that it give up its informal alliance with France, the “Entente”.  If that could be agreed, then he was convinced that he could get Admiral von Tirpitz, the head of the German navy, to agree to even further reductions in the construction of new warships and perhaps reductions in the increase in naval personnel — these, he felt, had been the main sticking points on the British side.    His partner in designing these new proposals was Ambassador Metternich in London, who was also very keen to see an amicable agreement between the two countries.  Together the two prepared a counter-response to the British government, which would be submitted during the second week of March.

While Bethmann and Metternich were working on their proposals, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, tried to increase the pressure on the Germans to reach a deal.  He had leaked to the press on 8 March that the upcoming British budget would provide for building four Dreadnoughts in the coming year and that the British government was determined to construct two of the battleships for every one built by Germany.

In the meantime, the diplomatic attempts  to end the war between Italy and Turkey, which had been initiated the previous week under the impetus of the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, had, as expected, not made any progress.   On Saturday, the 9th, the ambassadors of France, Great Britain, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary had individually visited the Consulta, the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome, and asked their Italian counterparts what terms would be possible for peace.  The Italians replied that recognition of Italian political sovereignty over both Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was non-negotiable — it had already been enacted by the Italian parliament.  However, it would be possible to negotiate some kind of religious links between the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul and the Muslim inhabitants of Libya.  Italy was also willing to make a monetary settlement with the hard-pressed Turkish government.

Similar talks took place Istanbul, where the Turks reportedly said that they insisted on the Sultan’s religious sovereignty over both Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and on maintaining political sovereignty over one of the two provinces.  The other European powers were rightly concerned that the embroilment of Turkey in this conflict was providing an opportunity for other countries, especially in the Balkans, to attack the weakened state, an eventuality that would come to pass later in the year.  But in March 1912, five months after the Italians had landed at Tripoli, the truth was that neither side was ready to settle because Italy had not been able to defeat Turkish and local Arab forces in the field.  One newspaper concluded that the diplomatic démarche by the five European powers was a pure formality.

The Italians continued their strategy of putting naval pressure on Turkey, both in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen from their bases in the colony of Eritrea and in the eastern Mediterranean, following their 24 February raid on Beirut.  On 9 March there were reports, for example, of Italian warships off the port of Izmir in Anatolia.  However, the Italians had not been able to make any more progress on the ground in Libya, in spite of having 103,000 troops there (all but 3,000 of these were conscripts).  On the night of 3 March Turkish-Arab forces attacked Italian positions around the port of Derna and were pushed back only with great difficulty.  On the 5th, a column of “askaris”, Eritrean recruits in the Italian army, left from the town of Ain Zara, 12 kilimeters inland from Tripoli, but were forced back with heavy losses.   The stalemate continued.

Curiously, one bit of inexplicably unfinished diplomatic business surfaced during the first week of March 1912.  The French Chamber of Deputies and Senate had voted in December and January, respectively, to ratify two agreements with Germany — one, adhered to by other countries as well, providing for a French protectorate over Morocco and the other granting territorial concessions to the German colony of Cameroun from French Congo.  But they had languished, unsigned, ever since in Berlin.  The German ambassador to Paris, Baron Wilhelm von Schön, had been absent for several weeks with no word of his return.  The French were getting worried that the Germans were going to backtrack or ask for further concessions.  The French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon, traveled to Paris on Wednesday, 6 March, to discuss the situation with his colleagues and returned to his post on Saturday with instructions to press harder for a speedy signing.

The everyday tensions between France and Germany continued unabated.  On Monday, 4 March, three German workers in Frankfurt-am-Main were arrested and charged with spying for France for the princely sum of 500 marks.  They were alleged to have passed secrets about German artillery and projectiles to Paris, and the police said they anticipated further arrests in Wilhelmshaven and Essen.

Fallout from Haldane Mission and the Beirut Attack

On Thursday, 22 February, 1912, the British Foreign Minister, Edward Grey, and the Minister of War, Richard Haldane, had met in London with the German ambassador, Count Paul Wolff-Metternich.  They told him that it would be impossible to go forward with the negotiations that had begun with Haldane’s mission to Berlin at the beginning of the month if the Germans insisted upon publishing the new naval law, the Novelle, as it had been presented to the British.  As the British now understood, the proposed law would indeed slow down the construction of German battleships but would greatly increase production of other ships and would increase total naval personnel by 15 per cent.  When Metternich’s report on this British rejection was forwarded to Berlin and digested during the week of Monday, 26 February, the German reaction was one of anger.  Kaiser Wilhelm II, in fact, is said to have flown into a rage and started berating both the British and his own chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Holweg, who had convinced the sovereign and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, head of the German navy, to make the offer to slow down the rate of battleship construction.  According to the memoirs of Admiral Tirpitz, the Kaiser said that the British reaction was “absolutely unacceptable” and an example of their “grandiose impudence”.

Wilhelm claimed that the Haldane mission was supposed to have had full powers to reach an agreement and that now the British were reneging on the deal.  In the exchanges that followed, Haldane replied that his was an exploratory mission only and that it would have been impossible to make any counter-proposals to the Novelle because he had no idea what it contained until he returned to London and turned it over to the Admiralty.   But the Kaiser was now convinced that  Britain had offered a spurious neutrality in return for Germany giving up its “defensive” capacity to oppose the British fleet.  He felt personally insulted.  Tirpitz is alleged to have said that ”the quicker we publish the Novelle, the more we limit the possibility of the English making greater demands on us.”

On 26 February, Tirpitz wrote that the aim of the negotiations should be that Britain “should give up her existing ententes and we should take the place of France.”  However, he said that even if that were to happen, Germany would not renounce the Novelle and the construction program because that would be the only thing that would compel the British to stay aligned with Germany.  Such a stance was, of course, totally unacceptable to the British, who had never contemplated giving up the entente with France.  On Friday, 1 March, Haldane met again with Metternich in London and said that no matter what happened, Britain would build two battleships for every German one and reported to him that Britain was considering bringing battleships from Mediterranean to North Sea to counter the size of the German navy in home waters.  When this was reported to the Kaiser he became further outraged, and during the following week took actions on his own that were to precipitate a crisis within the German government.  On Saturday, 2 March, the official North German Gazette announced that the naval law would shortly be presented to the Reichstag.

This to-and-fro between the British and German governments was ultimately to have very grave consequences, but at the time the negotiations were entirely unknown to the parliaments of either country, much less to the public at large.  Other diplomatic maneuverings regarding the Italian-Turkish war, another irritant in the relations between the European powers, were taking place at the same time and were more widely known and discussed.  The Italian attack on two Turkish ships in the harbor of Beirut on Saturday, 24 February, had gotten the attention of the European capitals — which seems to have been the intention.  The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Dimitrievich Sazonov, was worried that the continuing war between Italy and Turkey was both weakening the Ottoman Empire and distracting it from other pressing problems.  In particular, the Russians feared that the war was giving Austria-Hungary the opportunity to intervene in Albania and even in Thessaloniki, strengthening its position in the Balkans, where Russia was also heavily engaged.  After the attack on Beirut, Sazonov started pushing a plan for all of the Great Powers to put pressure on Rome and Istanbul to make a deal over the Libyan territories, before the quarrel spilled over into other areas.

Sazonov’s prime target was France, which was of course Russia’s prime ally in Europe.   France had important interests in the Lebanese and Syrian parts of the Ottoman Empire, both commercial and through close cultural ties with the Maronite Christian community.  Sazonov found a receptive friend in the Italian ambassador to Paris, Tommaso Tittoni, who indicated to the French government that Italy was on board with the Russian initiative (whether this is true or not is unclear).  Tittoni was a former Italian foreign minister and a rival of the current one, Count Antonino di San Giuliano.  It would be quite a feather in Tittoni’s cap if he could end the war from his perch in Paris and gain the sovereignty of Libya for Italy.  But it was that sovereignty that was the sticking point.  The vote the preceding week in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and Senate ratifying the annexation of Libya put an impossible stumbling block in Sazonov’s path.  The Turks might have been willing to accept a a face-saving deal that would maintain the facade of Turkish sovereignty while giving Italy a controlling “protectorate”, much like the British position in Egypt and that of the French in Morocco.  But the outright cession of Libya to Italy was too much — especially because they were not losing the war in the field, in spite of all the burdens being placed on the overstretched Turkish military and naval resources.  The Italian military had made its landings in the major ports and towns along the coast of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, but they had been thwarted in every attempt to move inland and to gain control of the interior, where there were being harassed by Turkish and local Arab forces.

The French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, would have been glad to see the war end and to stop the constant irritations such as the seizure of the French ships Manouba and Carthage and the shelling of Beirut, but he was not willing to put strong pressure on Turkey for fear of forcing it further into German arms.  On Tuesday, 27 February, the French government issued a statement saying that it was not part of any effort to put pressure on the Ottoman government to sue for peace.  Poincaré told Sazonov that his government would be part of the initiative only if Rome and Istanbul were presented with exactly the same terms and only if all of the powers took part.  And two of those powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, were unwilling to alienate Turkey or to support too strongly the (unreasonable) demands of their nominal Italian allies.   So Sazonov’s initiative was stillborn, and the war continued.

Two domestic political developments took place at the end of February that were to have consequences for the course of World War I in later years.  In the United States, former President Theodore Roosevelt announced that he would contest the incumbent, William Howard Taft, to be the Republican nominee for President in the November 1912 election.  When Roosevelt failed to get the nomination, he ran a third-party candidacy that ensured the victory of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was to bring the United States into the war on the side of the Allies in 1917.  In a much smaller country, Grand Duke William IV of Luxembourg died on Sunday, 25 February.  The following day it was announced that in the absence of male offspring he would be succeeded by his eldest daughter, Marie-Adélaïde, who would turn 18 only later in the year, rather than a distant, elderly male cousin.  Marie-Adélaïde took the oath of office in an impressive ceremony at the royal Chateau de Berg, on Saturday, 2 March.  However, her reign was to be short and unhappy — she was forced to abdicate in January 1919 because of alleged collaboration with the Germans who invaded the country in August 1914.  She retired to a convent and died in 1924.