Quote:
Originally Posted by Dan_San_Abbott
Bristol Scout:
I concurr with your statements, Germany violated the Geneva Conventions of 1899 and subsequent, invasion of Belgium in 1914, the Zeppelin bombing of England 1915 and subsequent and the Gotha bombing in 1917 was indiscriment contrary to whatever they thought they were doing. It was civilians that were killed. The sinking of passenger ships, the Lusitania that finally brought the USA into the war. It was these acts that led to the retaliation by Great Britain into the bombing of Germany in 1918.
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Just a few corrections worth pointing out. There was no Geneva Convention of 1899. The first Geneva Convention took place in 1864, with the second taking place in 1906. It was the Hague Convention which took place in 1899, and the sections in that convention, made binding in 1900, on 'The launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons', which is about as close as it gets to dealing with bombing from the air, were only deemed to be binding until September 1905. Therefore, aerial bombing in WW1 was not actually covered at all by either those Geneva or Hague Conventions, since the Geneva Convention was mostly to do with the treatment of prisoners and combat casualties. That doesn't make bombing cities from the air any less reprehensible of course, but those are the facts.
The lack of the treaty mentioning that stuff is sort of understandable given that at the time there was barely any capability to drop bombs from aeroplanes and Zeppelins at all, so to expect those articles to be in there would be a bit like expecting them to mention rules regarding laser-guided bombs. The 1907 Hague Convention was mostly about naval stuff, much of it on restricting submarine warfare to the need to stop and search a feighter or passenger ship before firing on it, and allowing the people on board to abandon ship first, but it is interesting to note that the Lusitania and the British were directly flouting many of the articles of that treaty in relation to its conversion and use, the Lusitania actually being registered as an Armed Merchant Cruiser and featuring in the 1914 edition of Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships. However, not to be outdone, the Germans were really going to town in flouting such treaty articles with their submarine fleet and the way they often used it in later stages of WW1.
At the time just preceding WW1, the Kaiser was in fact very keen to build a huge surface Navy, for he wanted Germany to have an Empire like the British had, and to do that, he needed a Navy like the British, but better, naturally. As a result, when the British had built its new capital ships, the famous Dreadnoughts, they had been limited in beam because of Britain's dockyard berth and dry-dock sizes, so none of them were wider than 90 feet. It is quite telling, and perhaps a little Freudian, that the Kaiser's new battleships were all ten feet wider than that!
However, the sinking of the Lusitania was not what brought the US into The Great War, in fact, the US President at the time the Lusitania was sunk - Woodrow Wilson - was expressly against joining the war following the attack, as evidenced by this quote from him in response to the incident:
'There is such a thing as being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others, by force, that it is right.'
That statement was intended to quell any calls for a declaration of war, and it would be almost two years after the sinking of the Lusitania before the US finally would declare war, but Wilson's attitude at the time was roundly condemned in Britain's press, who were hoping for the US to join in the war immediately following the Lusitania's destruction, which is why they made much of it as propaganda and were somewhat economical with the facts about its orders and its cargo. Such attitudes expressed in the British press which promoted the image of an innocent civilian ship with no war materials on board having been cruelly massacred, mostly believed to be incontrovertibly true at the time, led to British soldiers at the front to begin nicknaming dud shells which either did not explode or misfired, 'Wilsons'. which might be considered a little unfair, since Woodrow Wilson of course knew what the ship was carrying.
There are lots of arguments about what exactly brought the US into The Great War, and it is fair to say that the sinking of the Lusitania was part of it, although probably more in relation to the way the British manufactured a lot of propaganda surrounding the event in those intervening two years or so, since Lusitania's sinking was in fact widely condemned in the German press and that of her allies, as well as by many of the German public, many of whom either doubted some of what they were being told with regard to it carrying arms, or were appalled that the Cunard line should risk passengers in such a way. There were other ships sunk by the Germans after the Lusitania which still did not prompt the declaration of war, including other Cunard liners on which American citizens were traveling too.
What probably is more pertinent to the US entering into The Great War with regard to German subs and their actions, is their operation just off the US coast, where they were regularly harassing neutral ships, many of which were of course American freighters, and that was a real challenge to the US and its trade.
It is not generally realised with regard to German subs in WW1 just how powerful some of them were; they were not the frail things we tend to see in most photos of the ones from the Flanders Fleet, which were small by virtue of the shallow English Channel and North Sea, in which they had to operate, the ones operated off the US coast were real monsters and were primarily intended to engage ships on the surface and slug it out if necessary, being genuine U-Boats, i.e. submersibles with very little sub-surface capability, rather than true submarines. For example, the U-Cruisers employed by the Germans off the US coast had a range of over 12,000 nautical miles and carried two 15 cm deck guns (nearly twice the calibre of the WW2 Type VII's deck gun), which is armament that would have put a good many military surface vessels to shame at the time. Such a U-Cruiser could have easily engaged a fairly large warship, since it had such a low profile itself, making it a tricky target. The Germans had eleven of that type of vessel alone. Another, the UEII class German U-Boat had a 10 cm deck gun, four bow torpedoes and could launch up to 72 mines too, which it often did, right in US coastal waters. The fact is, most German subs of WW1 were on par with the subs the US and Brits deployed at the start of WW2! So it was not surprising that the US wanted to put a stop to that kind of thing eventually, and who could blame them?
One could even argue that the US was always in The Great War to some extent, since it was providing a great deal of material to the British and French from almost the outset, and a good few US volunteers were joining military outfits in Europe long before the US as a nation was a combatant, and generally with the blessings of many people back home.
Sadly for the passengers on board the Lusitania in 1915, some of those munitions supplies bound for Britain from the US were on board her at the time she was attacked, in the shape of four million .303 rifle rounds and numerous artillery shell components, making her a legitimate target for the Germans, because the area in which she was engaged had been declared a War Zone by the British Admiralty the year before the sinking took place.
Al