Submarine and Anti-submarine

by Sir Henry John Newbolt

The other discovery is a much more recent one. As soon as it was once recognised that a torpedo is just as innocuous when deflected, as when stopped or evaded, the idea was sure to strike the handiest gunners in the world that they might use their weapons to disturb the straightforwardness of the fish’s onset. Even thirty knots is nothing to the velocity of a modern shell, and without hoping for a direct hit on an object from six to twenty-two feet under water, it was thought possible to give a twist to the torpedo’s nose sufficient to make a potential hit into a miss or a glancing shot. This feat was actually performed by the gunners of the Justitia, who, with splendid coolness, shot at torpedoes as sportsmen used to shoot at oncoming tigers, and succeeded in killing or diverting several, only to fall at last before the rush of numbers.

‘She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him.’

A third weapon of the war-ship was the ram; and the use of this, being an offensive-defensive method, was the best of all, as we shall see presently. It was, from the beginning, present to the mind of every naval man, for A. 1 (our very first submarine) was lost, with all hands, in May, 1904, by being accidentally rammed in the act of submerging. It happened, too, that the first attack made by a submarine against British war-ships in the present War was beaten by this method. On August 9, 1914, a squadron of our light cruisers sighted the periscope of a German U-boat, which had succeeded in approaching to within short range of them. In the account of the affair published at the time, we were informed that H.M.S. Birmingham had sunk the submarine by a direct hit on the periscope, and that this was the only shot fired. Some time afterwards, the truth became known—the Birmingham had to her credit, not an impossible feat of gunnery, but a brilliant piece of seamanship. She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him. Her captain was not led to do this by inspiration or desperation, but by a scientific knowledge of the elements in the problem. Without stopping to think afresh, he knew that a submarine takes a certain time to dive to a safe depth, and that his own ship, at 27 knots, would cover a good 900 yards of sea in one minute. When his eye measured the distance of that periscope, he saw that—given straight steering—the result was a mathematical certainty.

The new methods introduced during the War are also three in number. Of one—the use of dazzle-painting—we have already heard. It is, of course, a purely defensive measure, intended to deceive the eye at the periscope by misrepresenting the ship’s size, distance, and course. Another deceptive device is the phantom ship or dummy. A vessel of comparatively small size and value is covered more or less completely with a superstructure of light wood-work, with sham funnels, turrets and big guns, so that she has all the appearance of a battle-cruiser or Dreadnought. The U-boat may run after her, or run from her, according to his feeling at the moment; but, in either case, he will be wasting his time and laying up disappointment for himself. In May, 1915, during the Gallipoli campaign, the Germans spent a certain amount of time and trouble in torpedoing a ship which they supposed to be H.M.S. Agamemnon, and in their illustrated propaganda sheets they give a picture of that ship as one of the victims of the irresistible U-boats. For a short time the story was believed inside Constantinople, and Mr. Lewis Einstein, of the American Embassy there, relates in his diary that this success, coming (as it appeared to do) immediately after the sinking of the Triumph and Majestic, was almost more than he could bear. Fortunately for his peace of mind, he soon discovered the truth. The supposed Agamemnon was a dummy, and lay for some time near the entrance of the Dardanelles, with her false turrets and sham guns, exposed to the view of friends and foes on the two shores. Very possibly this dummy received a shot which might otherwise have been successfully directed against a genuine battle-ship, and the deception was thus really useful. The German cunning is expended in a very different direction. Its object is often to deceive their own people as to what has actually been lost, not to avert a possible loss at our hands. Thus when the super-submarine Bremen was sunk on her outward voyage for America, one dummy Bremen after another was ostentatiously brought home to a German port, as if returning from a successful Atlantic passage. A more flagrant instance still was the statement that, among the German losses in the Battle of Jutland, was the sinking of the Pommern, a small and obsolete battle-ship of 13,000 tons, built in 1905. The British Admiralty, who knew that that older Pommern had been sunk in the Baltic by Commander Max Horton, nearly a year before, had no difficulty in identifying the Pommern lost at Jutland with a new Dreadnought of the largest type, commissioned since her predecessor’s destruction and christened by her name—either then or at the moment when it became necessary to put a good face on their disasters in the battle. It is to be hoped that this state of things may continue on both sides. The Germans are welcome to our phantom ships, if we thereby save our real ones; while, if we can sink their real ones, we may well be content to hear them given imaginary names. The two Services have different ideas of what is a useful dummy.

The newest method of preserving ships from the torpedo is a purely constructional device, and very little can be said of it here. But we have been allowed to know this much—the Marlborough was torpedoed at Jutland, but returned to the line of battle within nine minutes, fought for three hours, and eventually came home under her own steam, defeating a submarine attack on the way. We are not told how this very satisfactory result is attained in the construction of a Dreadnought of 25,000 tons, capable of full battle-ship speed. It cannot be by the mere addition of the bulging compartments known as ‘blisters,’ for in the older cruisers in which these were tried they were found to cause too great a sacrifice of speed. The result, however, is there; and there can be no doubt that as the number of unsinkable ships increases, the activity of the U-boat will be very greatly discouraged.

But it would be contrary to the principles of war and the genius of our Navy, to rely upon purely defensive measures to defeat the submarine enemy. It is sometimes said that the U-boat campaign took us by surprise. So far as this applies to the legitimate use of the submarine against war-ships, the statement is quite untrue. The campaign against merchant shipping and non-combatant passengers, waged in defiance of all international law and common humanity, did certainly take us by surprise; and it is only to our credit, and the discredit of our enemies, that their barbarity was beyond our imagination. But the efforts of the U-boats against our fleet were, as we have shown in a previous chapter, actually less successful than our own attacks upon theirs, and our tacticians were never for a moment at a loss to deal with them. The principles had been thought out long ago. As early as 1907, the distinguished admiral who writes over the name ‘Barfleur’ clearly stated his belief that ‘the untried submarine’ was not likely to prove more effective than the torpedo-boat and destroyer in depriving our Battle Fleet of the control of the sea. ‘Nothing is more to be deprecated,’ he added, ‘than the attempt which has been made to enhance unduly its importance, by playing on the credulity of the public. The new instrument of war has no doubt a value, but that it is anything more than an auxiliary, with limited and special uses, is difficult to believe.’ And he turned back to old and tried principles: ‘The traditional role of the British Navy is not to act on the defensive, but to prepare to attack the force which threatens.’ In September, 1914, when Weddigen’s coup showed that the moment had come, ‘Barfleur’ was among the first to attack the new problem tactically—he saw at once that the war-ship’s best defence lies in the offensive power given by her immense superiority in speed and weight. And if the single ship is formidable to the submarine, a squadron is still more so. By its formation, its manœuvres, its pace and its ramming power, it reverses the whole situation—the hunter becomes the hunted, and must fly like a wolf from a pack of wolf-hounds, every one more powerful than itself.

There remains, of course, the question of the best formation for the squadron to adopt. Upon this point there are more opinions than one, and a conversation may be reported in which the merits of line abreast and line ahead were set against one another by two naval officers, and both put out of court by a third. The first two were captains commanding ships in two different squadrons. They argued the question between them with great seriousness; but in so cool and abstract a manner, that the spectator might be pardoned for suspecting—rightly or wrongly—that they were supporting doctrines which were not personal to themselves but derived from higher authority—perhaps from their respective admirals, both men of great ability and experience. It was noticeable, too, that the admiral at whose table the disputants were sitting, and who himself commanded yet another squadron, maintained an attitude of neutrality; though it is certain that he and his own officers, several of whom were present, had often discussed the problem, and were probably agreed upon the answer to it.

‘Speed,’ said Captain A, ‘seems to be the key to the solution. It is only in line ahead that speed helps you—in fact gives you something like practical safety. If a torpedo, fired at a column in line ahead, misses the ship it is aimed at, it is very unlikely to be so wide a shot as to hit either the next ahead or next astern—it is a miss directly it crosses the line.’

Captain B remained perfectly grave, but he looked very well content with this argument. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘theoretically; but, in fact, the contrary has happened. In a column of eight ships, in line ahead, the London and the Formidable were the last two. You remember that the torpedo which sank the Formidable was believed to have been meant for the London. And anyhow, speed and stormy weather failed to save the rear ship.’