Imperial German WWI War Bulletin March 1917 U-Boat Sinkings Ludendorff Kriegsmeldung

Original Imperial German war news bulletin of 2 March 1917, an official daily communiqué sheet from the height of the unrestricted U-boat campaign, headlined with the sinking of Allied troop-transport steamers and closing with an army report signed in print by Ludendorff. The sheet measures approximately 12 by 11.5 inches (about 30.5 by 29.2 cm), printed on one side within a decorative red and black border, and belongs to the numbered series of official Kriegsmeldungen (war reports) posted and distributed on the German home front during the First World War.

At the upper left flies the Reichskriegsflagge (Imperial war ensign) of 1903 to 1918, the black cross and Iron Cross canton of the Kaiserliche Marine and Imperial army, printed as a woodcut vignette; at the foot is a woodcut of a German capital ship at sea. The bulletin is numbered 1124 in large type and dated 2. März 1917, 7:30 Uhr vorm. (2 March 1917, 7:30 a.m.). The banner headline reads Versenkung mehrerer feindlicher Truppenbeförderungsdampfer ("Sinking of Several Enemy Troop-Transport Steamers"). The whole is framed in a broad orange-red and black printed border, the format of the illustrated war bulletins issued for public display and sale.

The text is a sequence of official (Amtlich) naval and army communiqués. The lead report, from the Chief of the Admiralty Staff of the Navy, lists merchant and troop steamers sunk by German U-boats in the Mediterranean Sperrgebiet (barred zone) during late February 1917, giving dates, tonnages, and in several cases the ships' names, among them the armed troop-transport Dorothy of 4,494 tons, reported carrying some five hundred colonial troops, artillery, and horses, and a further list of thirteen vessels totaling over twenty-five thousand tons, including named Italian, English, Swedish, and Greek steamers with their cargoes and routes. A following army evening report notes the failure of English attacks near Souchez. To the right, a naval notice announces that the Schonfrist (grace period) for sailing ships in the Atlantic barred zone had wholly expired, so that henceforth only the general warning applied and shipping could expect no individual warning; a London item reports that the sea blockade might exhaust the city's potato stocks within six or seven weeks; and an army Nachtrag (supplement) from the Großes Hauptquartier (Great Headquarters) dated 27 February 1917 summarizes the Western, Eastern, and Macedonian fronts, closing with the printed signature of Der Erste Generalquartiermeister, Ludendorff (the First Quartermaster-General, Erich Ludendorff).

The bulletin is a direct artifact of one of the decisive decisions of the war. On 1 February 1917 the German leadership launched unrestricted submarine warfare, ordering U-boat commanders to sink without warning all enemy and neutral shipping, armed or unarmed, within the declared barred zones around the British Isles and in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. The campaign was at first devastatingly effective, sinking on the order of half a million tons of shipping in each of February and March 1917, and this 2 March sheet is a daily ledger of that effort: the ship-by-ship tallies, the expiry of the last grace period for sailing vessels, and the potato-shortage item together document both the naval offensive and the economic strangulation it was meant to achieve. The gamble failed at the strategic level. The sinking of neutral and American shipping without warning brought the United States into the war on 6 April 1917, five weeks after this bulletin, and the eventual adoption of the convoy system blunted the U-boat threat. The presence of Ludendorff's name at the foot ties the sheet to the military dictatorship that he and Hindenburg effectively exercised over Germany in the war's second half.

The sheet shows the physical characteristics of a genuine period war bulletin. The paper is thin, brittle newsprint-weight stock, evenly age-toned, with the printed text showing strongly through to the otherwise blank reverse. The black text and the red border are cleanly and densely printed in the manner of period letterpress, without the halftone dot screen of later photographic reproduction, and the woodcut flag and warship vignettes are crisp. There is a vertical fold, some edge wear and small nicks, and a series of file holes down the left margin from period binding or posting, consistent with a sheet that was displayed or filed in 1917 rather than a modern facsimile.

Condition is very good for an ephemeral single-sheet bulletin over a century old. The sheet is complete, printed on one side, with the headline, communiqués, border, and vignettes all clear and fully legible, including Ludendorff's printed signature. There is light overall toning, a central fold, minor edge wear with small nicks, and the marginal file holes noted; there are no significant losses to the printed area and no tape or repair. It presents as a sound, displayable original.

For the collector, the bulletin unites several strong themes on a single dated sheet: the Imperial German war ensign, the U-Boot campaign of 1917 with named ship sinkings, the naval blockade and its economic warfare, and the printed signature of Ludendorff. Dated daily war bulletins of this illustrated, bordered type are considerably scarcer than the mass-printed patriotic postcards and prints of the war, and one documenting the opening weeks of unrestricted submarine warfare, the policy that brought America into the conflict, sits at a pivotal point of the naval and diplomatic history of the Great War. It suits collectors of Imperial German naval and U-Boot material, of First World War documents and broadsides, and of home-front and propaganda ephemera.