Submarine and Anti-submarine

by Sir Henry John Newbolt

The Triumph was not designed for our Navy, but taken over from the builder’s yard, and the curious arch formed by her derricks made her outline a conspicuously foreign feature in our Fleet. The Majestic, on the other hand, which quickly followed her to destruction, was a typically British vessel, and gave her name to the whole class, built in 1895 and the following years, and then greatly admired. She also, on May 27, was supporting the army in action on the Gallipoli peninsula, when a German torpedo ended her twenty years’ career. She carried about 760 officers and men, but nearly all of them were saved. In June, two torpedo-boats, the Greenfly and Mayfly, of 215 tons, were sunk; the Roxburgh, a 10,000-ton cruiser, was slightly damaged; and the Lightning torpedo-boat, of 275 tons, was disabled, but brought into harbour. On August 8, a U-boat sank one of our large auxiliary cruisers, the India, off the coast of Norway and in Norwegian territorial waters. By this breach of the rules, she succeeded in killing 10 officers and 150 men, out of a complement of over 300.

The losses so far enumerated were all strictly naval losses. Up to this time, although we had been transporting troops by the hundred thousand from Canada and Australia to England, and from England to France, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Gallipoli, our numbers had hardly suffered the smallest diminution by submarine action. Again, during the last three years (1916–18) we have had minor losses now and then; but the one and only real disaster of this kind came upon us in 1915. On August 14, the British transport, the Royal Edward, was in the Ægean, carrying reinforcements for the 29th Division in Gallipoli, and details of the Royal Army Medical Corps, when she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank rapidly. She had on board 32 military officers and 1,350 troops, in addition to her own crew of 220 officers and men. Of all these, only 600 were saved; and for the first time in modern war we suffered the cruel loss of soldiers to the strength of a whole battalion killed—not in battle, but helpless and unresisting, without the chance of firing a shot or delivering a last charge with the bayonet. The ship herself was a less harrowing loss; but she was a fine vessel that we could ill spare—a steel triple-screw steamer of 11,117 tons and 545 feet in length. She, like her sister ship, the Royal George, was originally built for the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company, and ran between Marseilles and Alexandria. Her later service was carrying the mails for the Canadian Northern Steamship Company between Avonmouth and Montreal—and now she had returned to Eastern waters, only to give an isolated and inconclusive triumph to a desperate enemy.

The remainder of the year saw many attempts by the U-boat commanders to repeat this success; but they mostly ended in failure. On September 2, the transport Southland was hit by a torpedo, but got into Madras under her own steam, with a loss of 30 men killed in the explosion. On September 19, the Ramazan, with 385 Indian troops on board, was shelled and sunk by a submarine, off Antikythera. In October, the transport Marquette was sunk in the Ægean. On November 3, the transport Mercian was heavily shelled, and had nearly 100 killed and wounded. On November 5 the Tara, armed boarding-steamer, was sunk in the Bay of Sollum, on the eastern border of Egypt; and immediately afterwards two small Customs cruisers—the Prince Abbas of 300 tons and the Abdul Moneim of 450—were sunk at the same place, and no doubt by the same pair of U-boats.

The year 1916 showed clearly that, as a weapon against armed ships, the U-boat was not likely to succeed, after the first period of surprise was past. During this year we lost three mine-sweepers—Primula, Clacton, and Genista; two empty transports—the Russian and Franconia; the Zaida and Duke of Albany, armed steamers of the auxiliary patrol; and one destroyer, the Lassoo, which was sunk with a loss of six men, either by mine or torpedo, off the coast of Holland. To this insignificant list must be added one disaster of a more serious kind. As we have already noted, our control of the North Sea was a continuous and effective control, and every effort was made, especially after the flight of the Germans from Jutland, to bring out the enemy fleet from its hiding-place. These efforts, of course, involved the exposure of our advanced forces to certain risks. On August 19, there was a report that the High Canal Fleet was at sea again. Hope outstripped belief, and light cruisers were sent out in every direction to find the enemy. Two of these, the Nottingham and the Falmouth—good ships of 5,400 and 5,250 tons—were torpedoed and sunk while scouting. Here again it was the loss of the men which we felt most. The ships were new and useful ones; but they could be replaced, and they belonged to a class in which the enemy’s force, since the battle of Jutland, had been deficient, almost to a disabling degree. There was no ground for the German hope that our naval superiority could be permanently whittled away by rare and fractional losses like these. Our Battle Fleet continued to hold up theirs, and our blockade of their coasts was in no degree weakened.

The record of 1917, and the first half of 1918, is even more significant. The German submarine effort was more and more completely diverted from legitimate to illegitimate war—from the attack on the enemy’s armed forces, to the destruction of non-combatants and neutrals in mercantile shipping of any kind. British destroyers, going everywhere, facing every kind of risk, and protecting everyone before themselves, now and again furnished an item to the German submarine bag; but the ‘regardless’ campaign against the world’s trade and the world’s tonnage was now the U-boats’ chief occupation. One legitimate objective they did still set before themselves—the destruction or hindrance of transport for the United States army between the shores of America and Europe. Again and again during 1917, and even in the earlier days of 1918, assurances were given to the German people by Admiral von Tirpitz, by Admiral von Capelle, by the Prussian Minister of Finance in the Diet, and by the chief military writers in the Press, that the promise of an American army was a boast and a deception, that the American troops could not and would not cross the Atlantic, because of the triumphant activity of the U-boats. Of the complete failure to make good these assurances no better account need be given than that supplied by the German Admiralty, in answer to the complaints of their own people. Towards the end of July 1918, when there was no longer any possibility of concealing the presence of a large and victorious American force in France, Admiral von Holtzendorff, the Admiralty Chief of Staff, gave the following explanation to the Kölnische Zeitung. He admitted the success of the Allies in improving oversea transport, especially the transport of troops from America. But in reply to the statement that there was in Germany much disappointment that the submarines had sunk so few of the American transports, he asked, with truly Prussian effrontery, how could submarines be specially employed against American transports. ‘The Americans,’ he said, ‘have at their disposition, for disembarkation, the coasts from the North of Scotland to the French Mediterranean ports, with dozens of landing-places. Ought we to let our submarines lie in wait before these ports, to see whether they can possibly get a shot at a strongly protected American transport, escorted by fast convoying vessels? The convoys do not arrive with the regularity and frequency of railway trains at a great station, but irregularly, at great intervals of time, and often at night or in a fog. Taking all this into consideration, it is evident how little prospect of success is offered for the special employment of submarines against American transports.’

This is all sound enough, and in fact the U-boats have only succeeded in killing 126 men out of the first million landed from America. But the argument of Admiral von Holtzendorff does not explain the official assurances by which the German public was deceived for more than a year, and it only partially explains the ill success of the U-boats. That could only be fully done by considering the offensive (or offensive-defensive) action of war-ship against submarine—which will be touched upon presently.

The record of the ‘bag’ made during the War by our own submarines has never yet been published in a complete form. Yet it is a most striking one, and ought effectually to remove any impression that the German Submarine Service is in any way superior—or even equal—to ours. In three years of war our boats sank over 300 enemy vessels. We lost, of course, many more; but when it is remembered that we were offering to our enemies every week more than four times as many targets as they offered us during the whole three years, it will be admitted that the comparison is not one to give them much ground for satisfaction. At present, however, this general comparison is not the one which we wish to make—we are concerned now with attacks on war-ships, or armed forces, and not on mercantile shipping. The greater part of our record is made up of such attacks, and it is now possible to give a short summary of them.

There have been, during this War, practically only three hunting-grounds where British submarines could hope to meet with enemy war-ships, transports, or supply ships. These are the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora. Of the work done by our submarines in the Baltic and Dardanelles we shall have separate accounts to give in later chapters. For the present, it is enough to tabulate the results. In the Baltic the bag included, besides a large number of steamers (some carrying iron ore for military use), the following war-ships: three destroyers, three transports, one old battleship or cruiser, one light cruiser, and one armed auxiliary. In the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora were sunk or destroyed the following, besides a very large number of ships with stores or provisions for the troops in Gallipoli: two battle-ships, four gun-boats, one armed German auxiliary, seven transports, three ammunition ships and one ammunition train, destroyed by gunfire. We may add, as a note to these two parts of our record, that the work was done, not by a large number of submarines issuing in relays from a home base close at hand, and equipped with every kind of facility for repairing defects or relieving tired crews, but by an almost incredibly small number of boats, working far from their base, in closed waters, and under difficulties such as no German boat has ever successfully attempted to face.

There remains the North Sea patrol. The first success in this record stands against a famous name—that of Commander Max Horton, who (in his boat E. 9) afterwards established what has been called ‘The Command of the Baltic.’ In September 13, 1914, he was in the North Sea, near to enemy forces. He was submerged, and not in the happiest of circumstances, for one of his officers was ill, and to afford him some relief from the exhausted atmosphere below, it became imperatively necessary to rise to the surface. No sooner was the periscope above water, than the commander sighted a German light cruiser, the Héla, in a position where she might be expected to see the periscope and attack at any moment. Fortunately a torpedo-tube was loaded and bearing. Commander Horton took a snap-shot and dived. The shot went home, and the Héla troubled the patrol of E. 9 no more. On October 6, a German destroyer (S. 116) fell to another shot from the same hand.

After this, game was much scarcer. The German Admiralty tried to establish a paper command of the North Sea, kept up (for the benefit of the German public) by runaway raids on our East Coast towns; but anything like a regular patrol was impossible to discover. In the following eighteen months, however, our submarines did succeed in two attacks on stray German destroyers, and four on armed auxiliary vessels. Lieut.-Commander Benning (E. 5) hit an auxiliary in April 1915, but did not sink her. In June, Lieut.-Commander Moncrieffe hit another, the America, so badly that she was run ashore. In September, Commander Benning sank a third outright; and in December, Lieut.-Commander Duff-Dunbar (E. 16) secured a larger one of 3,000 tons. Of the destroyers, the first (V. 188) was got by Commander C. P. Talbot, in E. 16, on July 26; and the second on February 4, 1916, by Lieut.-Commander H. W. Shove, in E. 29. This was a boat of the ‘S. 138’ class, but she could not be further identified, nor did any British eye actually witness her final disappearance.