Submarine and Anti-submarine

by Sir Henry John Newbolt

On the morning of Friday, May 7, she made her landfall on the Irish coast. The sea was dangerously calm; but Captain Turner, wishing ‘to reach the bar at Liverpool at a time when he could proceed up the river without stopping to pick up a pilot,’ reduced speed to 18 knots, holding on the ordinary course. At 2 P.M. the Lusitania passed the Old Head of Kinsale; at 2.15 she was torpedoed without warning, and without a submarine having been sighted by anyone on board. Her main steam-pipe was cut, and her engines could not be stopped; she listed heavily to starboard, and while she was under way it was very difficult to launch the boats. At 2.36 she went down, and of the 1,906 souls on board, 1,134 went down with her, only 772 being saved in the boats which got clear.

This was, for the German Government and the German Navy, an unparalleled disgrace. The German nation had still the chance of repudiating such a crime. But they knew no reason for repudiating it; it was congenial to their long-established character, and differed only in concentrated villainy from the countless murders and brutalities which had troubled the criminologists before the War. The German people adopted the crime as their own act, and celebrated it with universal joy. ‘The news,’ said the well-known Kölnische Zeitung, ‘will be received by the German people with unanimous satisfaction, since it proves to England and the whole world, that Germany is quite in earnest in regard to her submarine warfare.’ The Kölnische Volkszeitung, a prominent Roman Catholic and patriotic paper, was even more delighted. ‘With joyful pride we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy, and it will not be the last.’ The two words ‘joyful’ and ‘pride’ are here the mark of true savagery. Only savages could be joyful over the horrible death of a thousand women, children, and non-combatants; only savages could feel pride in the act, for it was in no way a difficult or dangerous feat. But this half-witted wickedness is clearly recognised in Germany as the national ideal. In the midst of the general exultation, when medals were being struck, holidays given to school children, and subscriptions got up for the ‘heroic’ crew of the U-boat, Pastor Baumgarten preached on the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and gave his estimate of the German character in these words: ‘Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve, from the bottom of his heart, the sinking of the Lusitania—whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to countless perfectly innocent victims, and give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German.’

‘It will not be the last.’ The threat was soon made good. On August 9, of the same year, the White Star liner Arabic, one day out from Liverpool, was 60 miles from the Irish coast when she sighted the ss. Dunsley in a sinking condition. She naturally steered towards her; but as she approached, a submarine suddenly appeared from behind the Dunsley and torpedoed the Arabic without a moment’s warning. Boats were got out, but the ship sank in eight minutes and 30 lives were lost out of 424.

In both these cases the Germans, feeling that their joy and pride were not exciting the sympathy of neutral nations, afterwards tried to justify themselves by asserting that our liners carried munitions of war. This was obviously impossible in the case of the Arabic, which was bound from England to America. With regard to the Lusitania, an inquiry was held by Judge Julius Meyer of the Federal District Court of New York, who found that the Lusitania did not carry explosives, and added: ‘The evidence presented has disposed, without question and for all time, of any false claims brought forward to justify this inexpressibly cowardly attack on an unarmed passenger steamer.’

The year closed with the torpedoing, again without warning, on December 30, of the P. and O. liner Persia, from London to Bombay. She sank in five minutes, and out of a total of 501 on board, 335 were lost with her. Four of her boats were picked up after having been thirty hours at sea.

The year 1916 was a not less proud one for Germany; but it was distinctly less joyful. The American people took a fundamentally different view of war, especially of war at sea, and they began to express the difference forcibly. The German Government, after months of argument, was driven to make a show of withdrawing from the most extreme position. They admitted, on February 9, 1916, that their method was wrong where it involved danger to neutrals, and they offered to pay a money compensation for their American victims. They also repeated the pledge they had already given, and broken, that unarmed merchantmen should not be sunk without warning, and unless the safety of the passengers and crew could be assured; provided that the vessels did not try to escape or resist. This again is a purely savage line of thought; no civilised man could seriously claim that he was justified in killing unarmed non-combatants or neutrals by the mere fact of their running away from him. As for the ‘safety of passengers and crew,’ we shall see presently how that was ‘assured.’

But it matters little how the pledge was worded; it was never intended to be kept. Only six weeks after it was given, it was cruelly broken once more. On March 24, 1916, the French passenger steamer Sussex, carrying 270 women and children, and 110 other passengers, from Folkestone to Dieppe, was torpedoed without warning as she was approaching the French coast. Many were killed or severely injured by the explosion, others were drowned in getting out the boats. There were twenty-five Americans on board, and their indignation was intense; for the ship was unarmed, and carried no munitions or war stores of any kind. Nor, as President Wilson pointed out, did she follow the route of the transports or munition ships. She was simply a well-known passenger steamer, and eighty of her company on board were murdered in cold blood by pirates.

The President went on to say that the German Government ‘has failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation which has arisen, not only out of the attack on the Sussex but out of the whole method and character of submarine warfare as they appear in consequence of the practice of indiscriminate destruction of merchantmen, by commanders of German submarines. The United States Government,’ he continued, ‘has adopted a very patient attitude, and at every stage of this painful experience of tragedy upon tragedy, has striven to be guided by well-considered regard for the extraordinary circumstances of an unexampled war.... To its pain, it has become clear to it that the standpoint which it adopted from the beginning is inevitably right—namely, that the employment of submarines for the destruction of enemy trade is of necessity completely irreconcilable with the principles of humanity, with the long existing, undisputed rights of neutrals, and with the sacred privileges of non-combatants.’

This note touches the real point, and settles it; until the submarine is as powerfully armed and armoured, and manned with as large a crew as a cruiser of the ordinary kind, it is not a ship which can be used for the general purposes of blockade by any civilised nation. And it may be added that, even if the Germans had possessed submarines of a suitable kind, they could not have brought their prizes into port, because our Fleet and not theirs had the control of the seas. As it was, they pretended once more to submit, and gave nominal orders that merchant-vessels ‘shall not be sunk without warning and without saving human lives, unless these vessels attempt to escape or offer resistance.’

It was not intended that this third promise should be kept; there were other ways of evading the issue. The Rappahannock, a ship which sailed with a crew of 37, from Halifax, on October 17, 1916, was never heard of again, except in the wireless message by which the German Admiralty reported her destruction. The plan of sinking without a trace was first officially recommended by Count Luxburg, the German diplomatic agent in the Argentine; but the German Professor Flamm, of Charlottenburg, has also the honour of having proposed it in the paper Die Woche. ‘The best would be if destroyed neutral ships disappeared without leaving a trace, and with everything on board, because terror would very quickly keep seamen and travellers away from the danger zones, and thus save a number of lives.’ No doubt the Rappahannock was ‘spurlos versenkt’; so was the North Wales, and so were many others meant to be. The German method, in 1916, was to torpedo the ship, and then shell the survivors in their open boats. This was done in the cases of the Kildare and the Westminster, both sunk in the Mediterranean; but on neither occasion were the pirates successful in killing the whole of the crew, and their crime was therefore known and doubly execrated by the whole civilised world. None the less, they continued the hideous practice, and in the following eight months fired upon the helpless survivors of at least twelve ships, enumerated with authentic details in a list published by the Times on August 20, 1917.