The rest of the bag is, for the most part, a forbidden subject. The items are many, the loss to the enemy was great; but as he is racking his brains to get or guess the details, it is no part of our business to help him. There are, however, two items of which we may speak with open satisfaction. One is the capture of a German trawler—of this we have already heard from the Admiral Commanding our Submarine Base, in Chapter IV. The simple story is that Lieut.-Commander G. Kellett, finding his boat (S. 1) so far disabled that she could not get home on her own engines, took over a German trawler by force, without attracting undue attention, and came safely into port, towed from enemy waters by an enemy boat. The remaining item hardly falls within our range; but though not submarine work, it is work actually done by a submarine, and may be classed, perhaps, with the destruction of the ammunition train by Lieut.-Commander Cochrane at Yarandji. On May 4, 1916, a Zeppelin (L. 7) fell to Lieut.-Commander F. E. B. Feilman, in E. 31, and he brought home seven of her crew as prisoners.
Even this is not all. In 1916, our submarines inflicted on the German Fleet itself four blows, which, though they were none of them actually fatal, must yet have been extremely damaging to the nerve of the Service, and certainly cost heavily for repairs both in time and labour. On August 19, the Westfalen—a battle-ship of 18,000 tons, built in 1908—was torpedoed by Lieut.-Commander Turner, in E. 23. On October 19, Lieut.-Commander Jessop severely damaged the light cruiser München, of 3,200 tons; and on November 5, Commander Lawrence (in J. 1) achieved the brilliant feat of torpedoing two German Dreadnoughts—the Grosser Kurfurst, which was laid down in 1913 and finished since the War began, and the Kronprinz, which was both laid down and commissioned since August 1914. A success of this kind, though not final, may well be set against the sinking of much older and more vulnerable ships, like the Formidable, Triumph, and Majestic; and it must be remembered that the disappearance of these three from our Navy List, however regrettable, had absolutely no effect on the relative strength of the British and German Battle Fleets; whereas the loss, for some months at any rate, of two great Dreadnoughts like the Grosser Kurfurst and Kronprinz—coming as it did shortly after the Jutland losses—carried the inferiority of Admiral von Scheer’s force to the point of impotence. In the match of submarine against war-ship, our boats had succeeded where the U-boats had signally failed.
CHAPTER VII
WAR-SHIP v. SUBMARINE
The story of the contest between our war-ships and their new enemy, the submarine, is the story of a most remarkable and successful adaptation. Of the six principal methods of defence used by our Navy at the end of the fourth year of war, three are old and three new; and it is a striking proof of the scientific ability of the Service, that the three old methods have been carefully reconsidered, and that, instead of abandoning them because, in their original use, they were apparently obsolete, our officers have turned them to even better account than the new inventions.
The oldest device for the protection of war-ships against torpedoes—whether fired by torpedo-boats or submarines—is the net. Our older battle-ships, as everyone will remember, were fitted with a complete set of steel nets on both sides, and with long booms for hanging them out. These booms, when not in use, were lashed diagonally along the ship’s sides, like great stitches, and gave the typical vessels of the British Fleet a peculiar and decidedly smart appearance. Very smart, too, was the quickness and precision with which the order ‘Out torpedo nets!’ was executed; but—long before 1914—everyone was perfectly aware that the nets were practically as much out of date as masts and sails. They were so heavy, and hung so low in the water, that no ship could manœuvre in them, and even for a fleet at anchor they had ceased to be a trustworthy defence; for the Whitehead torpedo was now fitted with cutters which could shear a way through the steel meshes.
Nets of the old type, therefore, have played no part in the present War—unless we are to believe the Turkish account of the sinking of the Ocean in the Dardanelles, according to which the nets were out, and were not only useless as a protection, but dragged down some of our men when they might otherwise have escaped by swimming. But, because one type of net is obsolete, the British Navy has seen no reason to reject all nets as impracticable. It is not beyond imagination to conceive a net so light and large of mesh, that it will diminish by no more than one knot the speed of the ship which carries it, and will yet catch and deflect a torpedo in the act of passing through it. For it must be remembered that the real problem is not how to stop a torpedo in its full 30-knot career, but how to prevent it from striking the ship with its head at an angle not too fine for the detonator to be fired. A turn of the helm, or the mere wave from the cut-water of a fast ship, has often sent a torpedo running harmlessly away along the quarter. The net of the future may be found equally successful in catching the fish by its whiskers and turning it forward along the bow, where the same wave will drive it outwards from the ship’s course.
The second familiar means of defence was the gun. Here again there was a temptation to despair. The secondary armament of any battle-ship or cruiser was fairly certain to make short work of a torpedo-boat, or of a submarine visible upon the surface. But no living gunner had ever fired at the periscope of a submarine—a mark only two feet, at most, out of the water, and only four inches in diameter. To see such an object at, say, 1,000 yards, was difficult; to hit it might well seem impossible. Yet 1,000 yards was but one-tenth of the possible range at which a modern submarine might fire its torpedo.
Nevertheless the use of the gun was not discarded; and two important discoveries were made in consequence. The first of these was that gunfire may be distant, wild, or even unaimed, and yet have an excellent effect. The existence of a submarine is so precarious—its chance of surviving a single direct hit is so slight—that the mere sound of a gun will almost always be enough to make it submerge completely—unless it can engage the enemy, with superior gun-power, at a range of its own choosing. When Captain Weddigen had already hit the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy, and all three were sinking, the sound of the Cressy’s guns was enough to cause his disappearance, though it is very improbable that the shooting was really dangerous; for the listing of the ship was rapid, and according to eye-witnesses, the gallant gunners were soon firing in the air. Since then, the same thing has been repeatedly observed; and some brilliant successes by our patrol-boats and trawlers have shown that the U-boat has every right to be nervous when it hears even a 6-pounder talking English.