War Protest

On February 1, 1917, the German government, hard-pressed by the public clamor over mounting casualties and by the military’s growing control, resumed full-scale submarine warfare. The British responded by mining their harbors and the surrounding seas and by developing the convoy system of shipping to drive off German submarines. The Germans’ submarine gamble not only failed to defeat the British but also brought the United States into the war in April 1917, after German U-boats sank several American ships.

Political opposition increased in Europe. Irish republicans attacked government buildings in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 in an effort to gain Ireland’s independence from Britain during the crisis. The ill-prepared rebels were easily defeated, and many of them were executed. In the cities of Italy, Russia, Germany, and Austria, women rioted to get food for their families, and factory hands and white-collar workers alike walked off the job. Amid these protests, Austria-Hungary secretly asked the Allies for a negotiated peace; the German Reichstag also made overtures for a “peace of understanding and permanent reconciliation of peoples.” In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, a blueprint for a nonvindictive peace settlement held out to the war-weary citizens of the Central Powers.