CHAPTER X
SUBMARINE MOTIVES
The German submarines are standardised. The draughts and blue prints of the most important machinery are multiplied and sent, if necessary, to twenty different factories, while all the minor stampings are produced at one or other main factory. The "assembling" of the submarines, therefore, is not difficult. During the war submarine parts have been assembled at Trieste, Zeebrugge, Kiel, Bremerhaven, Stettin, and half a dozen other places in Germany unnecessary to relate. With commendable foresight, Germany sent submarine parts packed as machinery to South America, where they are being assembled somewhere on the west coast.
The improvement, enlargement, and simplification of the submarine has progressed with great rapidity.
When I was in England after a former visit to Germany I met a number of seafolk who pooh-poohed extensive future submarining, by saying that, no matter how many submarines the Germans might be able to produce, the training of submarine officers and crew was such a difficult task that the "submarine menace," as it was then called in England, need not be taken too seriously.
The difficulty is not so great. German submarine officers and men are trained by the simple process of double or treble banking of the crews of submarines on more or less active service. Submarine crews are therefore multiplied probably a great deal faster than the war destroys them. These double or treble crews, who rarely go far away from German waters, and are mostly trained in the safe Baltic, are generally composed of young but experienced seamen. There are, however, an increasing number of cases of soldiers being transferred abruptly to the U-boat service.
The education of submarine officers and crew begins in thorough German fashion on land or in docks, in dummy or disused submarines, accompanied by much lecture work and drill. Submarine life is not so uncomfortable as we think. With the exception of the deprivation of his beer, which is not allowed in submarines, or, indeed, any form of alcohol, except a small quantity of brandy, which is kept under the captain's lock and key, Hans in his submarine is quite as comfortable as Johann in his destroyer.
Extra comforts are forwarded to submarine men, which consist of gramophone records (mostly Viennese waltzes), chocolate, sausages, smoked eels, margarine, cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco, a small and treasured quantity of real coffee, jam, marmalade, and sugar. All these, I was proudly told, were extras. There is no shortage in the German Navy.
I learned nothing of value about the largest German submarines, except that everybody in Germany knew they were being built, and by the time the gossip of them reached Berlin the impression there was that they were at least as large as Atlantic liners.
Now as to German submarine policies. The part that has to do with winning the war will be dealt with in the next chapter. But there is also a definite policy in connection with the use of submarines for winning the "war after the war."
The National Liberal Party, of which Tirpitz is the god, is at the head of the vast, gradually solidifying mammoth trust, which embraces Krupps, the mines, shipbuilding yards, and the manufactures. Now and then a little of its growth leaks out, such as the linking up of Krupps with the new shipbuilding.
The scheme is brutally simple and is going on under the eyes of the British every day. These people believe that by building ships themselves and destroying enemy and neutral shipping, they will be the world's shipping masters at the termination of the war. In their attitude towards Norwegian shipping, you will notice that they make the flimsiest excuse for the destruction of as much tonnage as they can sink. It was confidently stated to me by a member of the National Liberal Party, and by no means an unimportant one, that Germany is building ships as rapidly as she is sinking them. That I do not believe; but that a great part of her effort is devoted to the construction of mercantile vessels I ascertained beyond the shadow of a doubt.
I have met people in England who refuse to believe that Germany, battling on long lines east and west, and constructing with feverish haste war vessels of every description, can find sufficient surplus energy to build ships which will not be of the slightest use until after the war is finished. I can only say that I personally have seen the recently completed Hamburg-America liners Cap Polonio and Cap Finisterre anchored in the Elbe off Altona. They are beautiful boats of 20,000 and 16,000 tons, a credit to the German shipbuilding industry, which has made such phenomenal strides in recent years. At Stettin I passed almost under the stem of the brand new 21,000 ton Hamburg-South America liner, Tirpitz—which for obvious business reasons may be re-named after the war.
Both at Hamburg and Lubeck, where the rattle of the pneumatic riveter was as incessant as in any American city in course of construction, I was amazed at the number of vessels of five or six thousand tons which I saw being built. Furthermore, the giant North German, Lloyd liner, Hindenburg, is nearing completion, while the Bismarck, of the Hamburg-America Line will be ready for her maiden trip in the early days of peace.
Another part of the National Liberals' policy is the keeping alive of all German businesses, banks and others, in enemy countries. Some people in England seem to think that the Germans are anxious to keep these businesses alive in order to make money. Many Germans regard John Bull as extremely simple, but not so simple as to allow them to do that. So long as the businesses are kept going until after the war, when they can again start out with redoubled energy, the Germans desire nothing more. The Deutsche Bank, for example, which bears no comparison to an English or American bank, but which is an institution for promoting both political and industrial enterprise, is entrenched behind so powerful an Anglo-German backing in London, I was informed on many occasions, that the British Government dare not close it down. The mixture of spying and propaganda with banking, with export, with manufacture, seems so foreign to Anglo-Saxon ways as to be almost inconceivable.
Coincident with the destruction of foreign shipping, and the maintenance of their businesses in enemy countries (England and Italy especially) is the exploitation of the coal and other mines, oil wells, and forests in occupied enemy territory. The French and Belgian coalfields are being worked to the utmost, together with the iron mines at Longwy and Brieux. Poland is being deforested to such an extent that the climate is actually altering.
It is a vast and definite scheme, with such able leaders as Herr Bassermann, the real leader of the National Liberal Party, Herr Stresemann, and Herr Hirsch, of Essen. "We have powerful friends, not only in London, Milan, Rome, Madrid, New York, and Montreal, but throughout the whole of South America, and everywhere except in Australia where that verdammter Hooges (Hughes) played into the hands of our feeble, so-called leader, von Bethmann-Hollweg, by warning the people that the British people would follow Hughes' lead."
So much for the commercial part of submarining.
U-boating close to England has long ceased to be a popular amusement with the German submarine flotilla, who have a thoroughly healthy appreciation of the various devices by which so many of them have been destroyed. The National Liberals believe that the British will not be able to tackle long-distance submarines operating in the Atlantic and elsewhere. Their radius of action is undoubtedly increasing almost month by month. From remarks made to me I do not believe that these submarines have many land bases at great distances—certainly none in the United States. They may have floating bases; but this I do know—that their petrol-carrying capacity altogether exceeds that of any earlier type of submarine, and that their surface speed, at any rate in official tests, runs up to nearly 20 knots.
The trip of the Deutschland was not only for the purpose of bringing a few tons of nickel and rubber, but for thoroughly testing the new engines (designed by Maybach), for bringing back a hundred reports of the effects of submersion in such cold waters as are to be found off the banks of Newfoundland, for ascertaining how many days' submerged or surface travelling is likely to be experienced, and, indeed, for making such a trial trip across the Atlantic and back as was usual in the early days of steamships.