Henning von Holtzendorff (1853-1919) was a Germanadmiral during World War I who became famous for his memo to Kaiser Wilhelm II about unrestricted submarine warfare against the United Kingdom. He was made a Grand Admiral in 1918. Admiral is a word from the Arabic term Amir-al-bahr (Lord of the bay). ... World War I was primarily a European conflict with many facets: immense human sacrifice, stalemate trench warfare, and the use of new, devastating weapons - tanks, aircraft, machineguns, and poison gas. ... Wilhelm II of Prussia and Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Hohenzollern (January 27, 1859 - June 4, 1941) was the last German Emperor (Kaiser) and the last King (König) of Prussia from 1888 - 1918. ... Naval warfare is divided into three operational areas: surface warfare, air warfare and submarine warfare. ...
Among the claims in his memo were that this kind of warfare would starve the British into submission within five months and that the Americans were too disorganized to help.
Holtzendorff served as commander of the High Seas Fleet from 1909 until 1913 when, as an opponent of Tirpitz's policy of rapid expansion of the German Navy in competition with Britain, he was manoeuvred into retirement along with numerous others of a similar viewpoint.
Critically, both Holtzendorff and Tirpitz recognised that the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare would probably bring the then-neutral U.S. into the war on the side of the Allies; however they were also convinced that they could knock Britain out of the war before the U.S. could effectively mobilise.
Awarded the Pour Le Merite on 22 March 1917 and the Oakleaves on 1 February 1918, AdmiralHenningvonHoltzendorff died in 1919.
Holtzendorff's appointment was intended to preserve the fiction of imperial control over naval policy, which had in fact largely passed to the State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Grand-Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
A day after Holtzendorff had submitted his final memorandum, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg bluntly declared in a tersely worded telegram to Bethmann-Hollweg that "the situation will be favourable at the end of January [1917]" for the commencement of unrestricted U-boat warfare and urged a political decision.
The conference itself was a thinly disguised set up in which Hindenburg and Ludendorff contented themselves with pursuing the line of argument agreed upon with Holtzendorff and von Müller on the previous day.The officers had also privately agreed--with the Kaiser's consent--that they would rid themselves of the Chancellor, should he continue interfere with their plans.
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