Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas

by William Wood

It was up-hill work for the British to guard thousands of ships over millions of miles against the hidden foe, who sometimes struck without being seen at all. A ship is a small thing on millions of square miles. A slinking submarine is very much lower and harder to see on the surface. A periscope is far harder still. The ordinary periscope is simply a tube, a few inches in diameter, with a mirror in the upper end reflecting the outside view on the corresponding mirror at the lower end, where the captain watches his chance for a shot. No wonder the Germans got on well for so long. It was over two years before British merchantmen were armed. There was a shortage of guns; and the neutral American Government would not allow any armed merchantmen into their ports, though many and many a life was lost because a vessel was unarmed. But, bit by bit, the merchantmen were forced to arm or die like sheep before the German wolves; and once they had a gun they soon learnt how to use it.

One gun over the stern was all that most ships had. It was mounted astern because the best chance of escape was to turn away and go full speed, zig-zagging every which way as you went, firing at the chasing submarine; This made vessels harder for submarines to hit, not only on account of the zig-zags, but because the ship, going the same way as the torpedo, made fast and short shots harder to get; also because the backwash of the screw helped to put torpedoes off their course; and finally because the target was itself firing back at the submarine. Even so, however, it was often touch-and-go; and very few people ever enjoyed the fun of being fired at as much as that little Canadian girl of six, who, seeing a torpedo shimmering past the ship's side, called out, "Oh, Mummy, look at the pretty fish!" Once a fast torpedo was hit and exploded by a shell from the vessel its submarine was chasing. But this was a perfect fluke.

More to the point was the readiness of the merchantman Valeria and of Commander Stockwell's destroyer to turn happy accidents to the best account on the spur of the moment. The Valeria bumped over a rising submarine at three o 'clock one summer morning off the coast of Ireland. Instantly all hands ran to "action stations," when the gunner saw, to his delight, that the periscope had been broken off and so the submarine was blind. His first shot hit the hull. His second was a miss. But his third struck the base of the conning tower; on which the submarine sank, nothing but bubbles and oil remaining to mark the spot where she went down. Stockwell's adventure was rather different. He had marked a submarine slinking round in the early dawn, and, knowing the spot the Germans liked best outside of Liverpool, watched his chance over it. Suddenly he felt his destroyer being lifted up, tilted over, and slid aside. The "sub" had risen right under it! Swinging clear in a moment he let go a depth charge; and the sea-quake that followed had plenty of signs to show that the "sub" had gone down.

1917 was the great year of submarine war: the Germans straining every nerve to kill off all the ships that went to or from the Allied ports, the Allies trying their best to kill off all the submarines. The Mediterranean was bad, the North Atlantic was worse, the west coasts of the British Islands worst of all. The American Navy came in and did splendid service off the south coast of Ireland, in the Bay of Biscay, and along the North Atlantic seaways between French and British and American ports. More and more destroyers were put into service, aided by "chasers"—very much smaller vessels with only one gun and a few men, but so cheap and easily built that they could be turned out in swarms to help in worrying the submarines to death. The "scooters" and "Porte's babies," as we saw in Chapter XXIV, were, however, even better than these swarming "chasers."

The enormous steel nets were also used more than ever. You can fancy what they were like by thinking of a gigantic fishing-net many miles long, with armed steamers instead of floats. In the entrances to some harbours there were sea-gates made by swinging open a bit of the net by means of its steamers to let traffic go through, and then swinging it back again. The mine-fields were made bigger than ever; it was then that the vast one, mostly laid by the Americans, was begun from the Orkneys to Norway. Mines were also laid by British submarines and by daring fast surface mine-layers round Heligoland and other places off the German coast. In this way the waters in which submarines could work were made narrower and narrower and were better and better guarded.

But more and more submarines were launched, and they still sneaked out to sea along the Dutch and Norwegian coasts where the Navy could not stop them because they used to slink through "territorial waters," that is, within three miles of the coast, where the sea belonged to the nearest country, just the same as the land. The Navy, however, had lines of patrols always on the watch from the Orkneys to the Shetlands, on to Iceland, over to Norway, and north to the Arctic ice. The narrow waters of the English Channel were watched by the famous Dover Patrol under Sir Roger Keyes. From Folkestone to Cap Griz Nez in France there was an unbroken line of the strongest searchlights on vessels anchored to ride out the biggest gales. Seven miles west was another line. Between were hundreds of patrol boats always ready, night or day, to fire at anything on the surface or to drop depth charges on anything that dived. A depth charge is a sort of mine that can be set to go off at a certain depth, say thirty to sixty feet down, when it makes a sea-quake that knocks the submarine out of gear and sinks it, even if it does not actually hit it. Besides all these guards on the surface there were nets and mines underneath. That is why the British army in France never had its line of communication with England cut for one single day all through the war.

Now and then the Germans tried a destroyer raid from their ports on the Belgian coast, or even from their own coast; for they would sneak through Dutch waters within the three-mile limit as well as through the Danish or Norwegian. They played a game of tip-and-run, their gunners firing at any surface craft they saw (for they knew no Germans could be anywhere but underneath) and their captains streaking back home at the first sign of the British Navy. On the night of the 20th of April, 1917, they were racing back, after sinking some small craft, when an avenging flotilla of British destroyers began to overhaul them. Seeing that one of the Germans might escape in the dark, the Broke (named after Captain Broke of the Shannon in the War of 1812) turned and rammed her amidships. The Germans fought well, swarming aboard the Broke and fighting hand to hand, as in the days of boarding. But Midshipman Giles stood up to the first of them, who was soon killed by a bluejacket's cutlass; and then, after a tremendous tussle with swords and pistols and anything else that was handy, every German was either driven overboard or killed on the spot, except two that surrendered.

A year later (on St. George's Day) the Vindictive led the famous raid on Zeebrugge under Captain Carpenter, V.C. The idea was to destroy the principal German base in Belgium from which aircraft and submarines were always starting. For weeks beforehand the crews that had volunteered to go on this desperate adventure were carefully trained in secret. The plan was to block the mouth of the Bruges Canal, by sinking three vessels filled with concrete, while the Vindictive smashed up the batteries on the mole (long solid wharf) guarding the entrance, and an old submarine, loaded like a gigantic torpedo, blew up the supports for the bridge that connected the mole with the land. Twice the little expedition sailed and had to put back because the wind had shifted; for the smoke screen would not hide the block ships, unless the wind had just the proper slant. At last it started for the real thing; a great night of aircraft going ahead to bomb the defences and a squadron of monitors staying some miles astern to pour in shells at the same time. The crash of air bombs and the thudding of the distant monitors were quite familiar sounds to the German garrison, whose "archies" (anti-aircraft guns) barked hoarsely back, while the bigger guns roared at where they thought the monitors might be. (Monitors are slow, strong, heavy, and very "bargy" craft, useful only as platforms for big guns against land defences.)

Suddenly, to the Germans' wild astonishment, Zeebrugge harbour was full of a smoke screen, of concrete-loaded block-ships, and of darting motor boats; while the old cruiser Vindictive made straight for the mole. Instantly the monitors and aircraft were left alone, while every German gun that could be brought to bear was turned on to this new and far more dangerous enemy at hand. But the British won through. The three block-ships were sunk. The submarine used as a torpedo blew up the bridge joining the mole to the land; and the smoke screen worked fairly well. Still, the tornado of German shells was almost more than flesh and blood could stand. Meanwhile the old Vindictive ran alongside the mole and dropped her eighteen special gangways bang against it. In a moment her forlorn hope—her whole crew was one great forlorn hope—swarmed on to the mole, over the splintering gangways, while her guns roared defiance at the huge German batteries. The ground swell made the Vindictive roll and racked her breaking gangways terribly. The storm of German shells and the hail of machine-gun bullets seemed almost to be sweeping everything before them. An officer awaiting his turn on deck asked, "What are all those men lying down for?" and was answered, "All dead, Sir"; killed before they had started. Several gangways were smashed to pieces, the men on them falling between the Vindictive and the mole. The Germans on the mole fired furiously to keep the storming party back. But, with an eager courage no Viking could have beaten, and with a trained skill no Viking could have equalled, every seaman and Marine in that heroic party who was not killed or disabled pressed on till the flaming battery was silenced. Then the survivors swarmed back with all the wounded they could find, climbed over the few broken gangways still holding together, and turned to the work of getting clear. At last the Vindictive, though a mere mangled wreck, got off and limped home victorious with all that was left of the equally daring flotilla of small craft.

Zeebrugge was the bigger base on the Belgian coast. But Ostend remained; and both were connected by canals with Bruges, which stood several miles inland. The whole formed a triple base shaped like the letter V, with Bruges at the bottom, Zeebrugge (sea-Bruges) to the right, and Ostend to the left. To close only Zeebrugge was to leave the back door open. So Ostend was raided, and smashed later on, the old Vindictive, now past her fighting days, being sunk full of concrete. From all that remained of her still above water the hero-king, Albert, was cheered into Ostend after the Armistice by the Belgian Boy Scouts, as he steamed past with Sir Roger Keyes to land, with his heroine-queen, on the soil so long fouled by German pirates.