The Germans likely would never have resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare but for British treachery, specifically Winston Churchill. At the beginning of the war German submarines would stop British merchant ships offload the crew into boats, and then sink it with a deck gun. Churchill came up with the bright idea of Q ships. They armed ships disguised as merchant ships. As soon as the submarine would surface to board the suspect merchant ship, it would drop the covers on the deck guns and sink the submarine. It was expressly against the rules of war, but to Churchill that didn’t matter. After a few winnings, the Germans decided that they could no longer afford to stop a merchant ship and board it, but instead they were forced to sink them without warning.
A stretch in my opinion..The facts are from day one of WWI, not a single merchant ship was able to reach Germany. They just got desperate in an attempt to stop the strangulation by the RN. Churchill was out of business by 1915 after he was wrongfully blamed for Gallipoli (the Imperial General Staff waited too long, had they struck when Churchill wanted, things might have gone differently)
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