WI Germany doesn't make the Sussex pledge of May 1916, keeps sinking ships outside cruiser rules continuously?

[docfl]

What if the Hog island project started a year earlier? Then when war is declared the Americans have. More shopping avalable.

 

[raharris1973]

How pushed.

Between the first Lusitania note and the Sussex pledge, only three American ships were sunk, all w/o loss of life. Is there any reason for this number to increase in 1916 even if the pledge is not made?

Best as I can figure based on what Riain has been teaching us about the different periods of unrestricted U-Boat warfare, I guess simply continuing the ROE from 1916 won't increase the frequency of sinking US -flagged merchants. So I guess maybe any from 1-5 more sinking might be expected through May 1917, to make a guess. So if not bunched together maybe not a push into war.

Looks like we're going to need to go beyond simply no Sussex Pledge and have the Germans turn sharply in the other direction and have them start their Jan-Feb 1917 USW policy in May 1916 instead.

That should, I expect, cause sinking US vessels in much more rapid succession and really push Wilson.

The difference between the 1915 and 1917 unrestricted submarine warfare that Riain was teaching us about in the first page wasn't so much looser ROE but a bigger free-fire zone on the map, covering everything from the north coast of Spain up to the Faroe Islands in the 1917 version. I guess that swept up more US ships than the smaller free fire zone of 1915 around the UK and northern France.

So 1917-style German submarine warfare starts in May 1916, what happens? Does America declare war in a couple months, intervene and help finish the Germans in 1917? Is Wilson even still President in 1917?

 

[Mikestone8]

+

Looks like we're going to need to go beyond simply no Sussex Pledge and have the Germans turn sharply in the other direction and have them start their Jan-Feb 1917 USW policy in May 1916 instead.

Exactly. If you want America to do in 1916 what it did in 1917, you must get Germany to do in 1916 the things which *it* did in 1917, and which caused America to do those things.

So 1917-style German submarine warfare starts in May 1916, what happens? Does America declare war in a couple months, intervene and help finish the Germans in 1917? Is Wilson even still President in 1917?

It may very well lead to war, and by November of the same year the war will almost certainly still be popular enough to ensure Wilson's re-election.

 

[Mikestone8]

Because the ship would be sunk and not able to bring cargo back to America
Trade runs both ways even during wartime
That would also be the matter of not being able to buy the ammunition because they're on enough ships to send it across the Atlantic.

They'll do what they did OTL - concentrate more of their merchant shipping on the North Atlantic routes. This will also have the side-effect of leaving a lot of business in South America and the Pacific for US shippers to take up - thus conveniently putting their vessels out of the u-boats' reach.

There will still be enough ships to ensure that US manufacturers make fat profits, u-boats or no u-boats. The US economy will have problems only when the war orders stop coming altogether, which won't be till the end of the war.

 

[Riain]

Bear in mind that in ww1 there were far more small, coastal ships than in ww2. So not concentrating on the trans Atlantic shipping still gives the Germans plenty of targets without offending America's sensibilities .

 

[cjc]

When the U.S. entered WW I (April ,1917) the Army's TOTAL manpower Regulars and National Guard, was a touch over 300,000. In June of 1918 there were over 2 MILLION American troops IN FRANCE, about half combat the rest logistical personnel, artillery, etc. and more troops were arriving at 10,000 per DAY. When the U.S. demobbed in early 1919 the total force was over four million, including men in training, and the induction/training system had barely begun to operate smoothly.

Starting a couple years earlier, even with a pre WW II draft scenario where men only served active for 12 months before going into reserves? Start that in April 1915 and by later summer 1917 (assuming the U.S. enters the war on the same schedule as IOTL) the U.S. has at least a million men, by spring of 1918, three-four million, more if enough shipping can be scraped together. Shipping was IOTL, and will be in any ATL, a major bottleneck; ships tended to be smaller and slower than their counterparts a quarter century later, and Henry Kaiser was a 34 year old paving contractor, not the industrialist who was a major player in the building the Hoover Dam and one of the first to use welding in place of riviting in ship construction on a large scale.

Ya, the amount of troops America planed on sending to Europe was insane. I believe the plan was to have a army 5 million strong in France and to keep that strength up for 5 years if necessary. It should also be noted that America decreased its movement of troops after nov. 1918 so it was planing to have that full army together by the spring of 1919, to boldly ram its head at metz but still, yikes.