The Story of Our Submarines

by John Graham Bower

The men entered in much the same way, being recommended, of first-class character and of excellent physical standard. They went through a less comprehensive training course, but had the same weeding-out to undergo, so that as far as possible the "duds" were got rid of before they had cost the country much in useless teaching.

In war-time it has not been possible to spare the time for the full instructional courses, but the courses continued, although much shortened. The shortage of personnel in the Navy generally cut down the field from which volunteers were drawn, but in spite of this the Submarine Service was able to keep up its voluntary entry, and to continue to retain its standard by drafting back those who were by nature or capabilities unfit for such work. The submarine sailor is a picked man, and is the admiration of his officers. There is a Democracy of Things Real in the boats which is a very fine kind of Democracy. Both men and officers in a submarine know that each man's life is held in the hand of any one of them, who by carelessness or ignorance may make their ship into a common coffin; all ranks live close together, and when the occasion arises go to their deaths in the same way. The Fear of Death is a great leveller, and in submarines an officer or a man's competency for his job is the only real standard by which he is judged.

In the German Navy, before the War, the Submarine Service had not received the attention it might have done. There, the submarine officer did not hold the status in the eyes of his Navy that was held by his destroyer or battleship brother. Since the accident to U-3 at exercise practice, also, certain rules for exercise had been introduced, which precluded practice attacks on target-ships going at high speed, and had circumscribed the areas (by defining "safe" depths of water) in which exercises might be carried out. In our Navy it had always been recognised that risks must be incurred in peace, so as to ensure greater safety in war. As far back as 1912 our submarines were practising attacks on destroyers zigzagging at high speed, and were diving in any waters, and generally reproducing war conditions as far as possible. While even in 1904 the early boats on manœuvres were allowed to dive under surface ships, and destroyers were allowed to use wire-sweeps against them.

For years before the War a Submarine Defence Committee of officers was working to find the best antidote to the submarine menace, and experiments were carried out by the Committee with our own boats. The result of this was that, on the War coming, both the submarine officers and those of our Navy whose task it was to deal with the U-boat had considerable experience to begin on.

The British Submarine Flotillas, as shown in the preceding list, comprised in 1914 far more small boats than sea-going ones. This was altered later as the strategy of the War crystallised, but when the War began it had never been expected that the enemy Fleet would remain so inactive. The Navy's view had naturally been that the German had not built such a fine Fleet if he wasn't going to use it, and so the majority of our boats, instead of being designed for "Over There" work, were designed for "half-way over." And very good boats the C boats were, too. If the expected War of Movement had taken place, with a North Sea dotted with racing cruisers, and ships of both sides looking for a fight, every boat in our service would have been in the thick of the trouble. As it was, the course of events very soon showed that the ring round the Heligoland Bight—the blockading patrol—was to be the chief station of our submarines in Home waters.

Both belligerents began to design and build at once. The German went straight ahead on the one type, which, with variations, has served him throughout the War—viz., the commerce-destroying medium-sized patrol boat. To this type he later added the mine-laying submarine, and towards the end of the War he evolved the large, commerce-destroying cruiser boat.

Now, both before and during the War, we held a lead over our enemy in the matter of submarine design. That statement is confirmed by the data given by the U-boats arriving at Harwich as I write. Some time ago the British Navy prepared an antidote to a design of submarine which it was thought the enemy must, by logical reasoning, soon produce as being the obvious thing for him to think of. Our antidote has not yet had a chance to be used, as it was only recently that the German designers got to that stage in their reasoning.

But what did we build? Well, we did not want commerce destroyers at least; such work as the cutting of the Turkish communications in the Sea of Marmora and the sinking of transports in the Baltic could be done by our ordinary E boats. But we did want mine-layers, and we built those. What else? Well, I must branch off into a dissertation on submarines generally.

A submarine may be any kind of surface vessel, with the advantage added to her of being able to dive. She need not necessarily be a diving boat with a few torpedo tubes and a couple of guns. She may be anything. A surface ship can only be one thing; you cannot have a cruiser-monitor or a destroyer-battleship. But a submarine may be two things at once; and a submarine can, as a result, act unsupported. Take the case of a scouting submarine. What is the alternative? If we had no scouting submarines we would have had to keep a ring of destroyers out to watch the Bight. Those destroyers might, being out near the enemy's coast, be attacked by enemy cruisers, so that it would be essential to keep our cruisers out in support. Then if the enemy brought out—and so on—up to the final result of our battle fleet being continuously at sea, which would have been not only unnecessary wear and tear on the big ships, but a good opportunity for the U-boats if they had cared to take a chance. Take the case of the submarine mine-layer. She has the great advantage, to begin with, of not only getting to her position unseen, but of being able to lay her unpleasant cargo down unsuspected and unobserved. Then, again, she does not need a supporting force to follow her in case she meets with trouble. She does not look on a big enemy ship as a trouble, should one interfere with her; she would rather describe the big ship as a "gift." She is open to the usual anti-submarine methods, and can be dealt with by destroyers, seaplanes, and so on; but if she succumbs to their attacks—well, that is another submarine gone, but it might have been a big surface ship.

By the nature of the German strategy our lines of design were indicated. The chief type we needed were scouts—in other words, patrol boats. We built these in considerable numbers, for the several types of patrol boats we diverged into were capable of doing any of several things. They could do the Heligoland Bight patrol, attacking the enemy if met with, and reporting to the C.-in-C. what they saw on their patrols; they could go out into the Atlantic to hunt U-boats on the traffic lanes, or they could go to the Mediterranean to work in the Adriatic. They were the general-utility craft of the Submarine Navy.