Out on the patrol areas, however, a British boat diving had to stand her chance. No surface ship could be expected to differentiate between our own and enemy periscopes, and the potency of British depth charges was highly spoken of by those of our boats that had experience of them.
III
The work of the submarines on the anti-submarine patrols, minelaying trips, etc., was useful, and at times exciting; but it must be remembered that the main duty of the flotillas lay in watching for the enemy's fleet, and that this duty continued throughout the war. Boats were stationed watching both the entrance to the Baltic and the several exits from the Bight right up to the date of the signing of the Armistice. For the first two years of the war the duty of these boats was to attack the enemy if seen, and to signal afterwards that the enemy had been met. The signalling question then was a secondary consideration. The boats were considered less as scouts than as torpedo-boats, especially in view of the fact that in the early part of the war their wireless range was limited. When "E 23" (Lieut.-Commander Turner) torpedoed the Westfalen in August 1916, he rose to the surface as the enemy drew out of sight and signalled the enemy's position to the Commander-in-Chief. It is true that no decisive result came of the signal, as the enemy turned home when barely clear of the Bight, and the Grand Fleet's attempt to cut him off, as usually happened, failed again; but that signal was the first clear "enemy report" given by a unit of the Bight Patrol. It was then that new long-range wireless sets were installed in all boats, amid the curses of the submarine officers, who at that date were distinctly narrow-minded on the question of how their boats could be most usefully employed. They looked upon it as a personal insult that their limited accommodation should be cut down by the extra instruments supplied, and also that (this was where the shoe pinched) their splendid independence on patrol should be lost to them now that Their Lordships could call them up direct from the wireless at Whitehall. But they soon discovered that the idea was right, and that their loss of independence weighed nothing against the new strategic use which had been found for the submarine as a fleet scout. Orders were issued that the boats were on no account to fire at the enemy if he was seen coming out, until a wireless signal had been made to Commander-in-Chief. This, of course, implied that the boat could not attack the outward-bound High Sea Fleet at all, as the signal would have to be made from surface trim, and by the time it was acknowledged the chance of a torpedo attack would have gone by. If the enemy was seen homeward bound, the submarines were at liberty to fire at them; but outward-bound squadrons were safe from under-water attack. A submarine officer was heard to explain the reason for these orders by the light of his own logic: "The Commander-in-Chief won't let us fire at them coming out, because he wants 'em for himself, and thinks if we butt in it discourages them and they lose their enthusiasm; I suppose he's right, but it looks a bit selfish…."
During the last two years of the war, the enemy gradually discovered that such orders as these must have been given. The Naval Armistice Commission to Germany has heard some interesting sidelights on the war from the officers of the German Commission. A good deal of the information volunteered has to be left unconfirmed owing to the lack of opportunities for checking it, but in cases where it can be corroborated by our own information, it can be seen that the Germans see no object now in concealment or perversion of facts. The following is from a German Commander, a dignified solemn-featured figure standing rigidly on the bridge of an Allied destroyer, his face turned to the bank of the Kiel Canal that slid past him—a man who felt clearly the disgrace and humiliation that had come upon his country:—
"We wondered why, when we made an excursion, we were not fired at. We knew you had submarines all round the Bight, and our ships even saw periscopes, but no torpedoes came. We thought after a while that it was an order—that we were being watched and reported, but left unmolested till the Grand Fleet should come. I remember when we came out one night and we heard the wireless speak by Hiorn's Reef. The operator heard it, but we could not block the signals. If we had blocked we would have been yet found—our position would have been known by the Directional Wireless in England. We heard him sending by full power, and by the nature of his signal (it was so short and quick) we knew the purport of it. Then we went on, but all the time we knew it. We knew that we might meet the Fleet. It is impossible to leave the Bight without being reported. Then on the return by Hiorn's Reef the torpedo came and the Moltke was hit. She was badly damaged, but we towed her in. I do not know if it was the same submarine that saw us go out. I do not think so. You do not know? No? It was perhaps the same, but you had many boats patrolling. The Zeppelins claimed many to be sunk with bombs. It was not so? No? The flying men are all full of imagination. It is the vibration of the engines that affects the eyes….
"… Yes, I was at the Skageraksclaght (the Jutland Battle). We were not hit. Some ships were badly hit. One ship [probably the Seydlitz—Author] had an artillery officer on board. It was his holiday, and he spent it on board her with his friend. He said after that he would prefer a year on the Western Front to twenty minutes' naval bombardment. The doctors were all killed and the ship was on fire. The shells came into both casualty stations. Did many English ships receive hits from torpedoes? The Marlborough only? That is strange, for we fired many. Yes, the Emperor said it was a victory, but if it had been a victory we would have known it without his having to tell us so. The sailors were not persuaded so…."
(I seem to be quoting irrelevant matter here, but German mentality at any rate bears on the submarine subject, even if indirectly.)
"… The Tiger is not sunk? No? We thought not—we heard later that it was a dummy Tiger that was torpedoed. We were sure before that it was the real ship that sank, and the officer that fired was decorated. It is all right, because since then he has earned the decoration for other things, so that he does not mind. A lot of things we did not understand for long. Our submarines have seen your K-boats at sea. They saw them through the periscope, and could read the numbers, but they said they must be fast submarine-hunters, like the Americans were written to be building. Then one day a U-boat saw through his periscope a K-boat steaming, and then in one minute the K was submerged, so we knew it was really a submarine. What was the submarine that torpedoed the U 51 in the mouth of the Jahde river? That was a fine attack. The U-boat was not yet out of the river on its voyage. Did the English boat get home? Yes. I am glad—she had many depth-charges to face. Your mine-laying submarines were dangerous. They had a trick of following our mine-sweeping boats up the channel. They did not lay mines until the channel was swept and reported free. It was well organised … and also the submarine that struck the mine and yet got back. The captain of her is to be congratulated; we heard of it and we thought she was very lucky—I think it was at Amrum bank she struck the mine. I think it was an English mine; one of our mines would have put her in pieces. I do not know why the Heligoland trawlers did not see her as she was passing home to England…."
I must just hark back to the question of the U-boat here, as the Inspection Commissions in Germany that are seeing to the handing over or destruction of the U-boats bring back their reports here, and their reports are full of interest, though perhaps they contain little that is news to the Admiralty. There are now 135 German submarines in England, and there are more to come yet. The building-yards of Germany show that a huge effort was to have been made along the lines of submarine war in the spring and summer of 1919. Every available yard was working at full power at the date of the cessation of hostilities, and the work was almost entirely on submarine construction. The only other work being done was on new and more powerful destroyers and on standard merchant ships—the latter for after-the-war reconstruction. Yards that had never before done warship work of any kind were fully employed on building small submarines. The big yards were given all the new submarine-cruiser work to do. The submarine cruisers were a comparative failure on trials, as were also the big submarine mine-layers of the U 118 class; this must have been a sad disappointment to the enemy, as one can judge by the number of big boats preparing that he had set his heart on a campaign of thorough frightfulness on the American coast in the spring. Work on the new big surface ships had stopped in the spring of 1918, partly owing to the shortage of nickel and chiefly owing to their whole stake having been put on submarines and not on the Fleet. The German mentality never seems to have grasped the fundamental rule of sea-fighting—that commerce-destruction will never win a war, and that only the defeat or mastery of the main enemy fleet can bring command of the sea.
Such yards as the two at Hamburg (Vulcan and Blohm & Voss) are typical of the method of construction. On November 11 these two yards had seventy-two submarines under construction. At the same time at Blohm & Voss's yard the battle-cruiser Mackensen lay abandoned in the water just as she had been launched in the spring of 1918, and the battleship Ersatz Freya lay half-finished on the building-slip. The submarines were on the slips in rows—each row representing a group of perhaps seven boats of the same class. Lying alongside each row were parts and fittings waiting to be built in: for instance, seven bows (complete with sterns and torpedo-tube pads), seven sterns (complete with hydroplane-guards, etc.), seven bow top-strakes, seven stern top-strakes, etc.—in fact, one was reminded strongly of what one had heard of American motor-car factories. The whole idea was of quick and standardised production, and the two points that occurred at once to the observer were—"There would have been a deuce of a rush of new stuff into commission in the spring," and then, "How on earth were they going to provide skilled crews for such a lot of boats all at once?"