Submarine Warfare of To-Day

came within its shadow, regardless of race and sex.

But there was an avenger upon the seas, one who had been rocked in its cradle from time immemorial, and to whom the world appealed to save the lives of their seamen. It sailed beneath the White Ensign and the Blue, and with aid from France, Italy and Japan it fought by day and by night, in winter gale and snow, and in summer heat and fog, in torrid zone and regions of perpetual ice to free the seas of the traitorous monster who had, in the twentieth century, hoisted the black flag of piracy and murder. For three years this ceaseless war was waged, and then, with her wonderful patience exhausted, the great sister nation of the mother tongue joined her fleets and armies with those of the battle-worn Allies and peace came to a long-suffering world.

In that abyss of war there was romance sufficient for many generations of novelists and historians. Many were the epic fights, unimportant in themselves, but which need only a Kingsley or a Stevenson to make them famous for all time. So with the happenings to be described in this book, many of them historically unimportant compared with the epoch-making events of which they formed a decimal part, but told in plain words; just records of romance on England’s sea frontier in the years 1914-1918.

Although jealous of any encroachment on the space available for the description of guerrilla war at sea, there are many things which must first be said regarding the organisation and training of what may appropriately be termed the “New Navy,” which took the sea to combat the submarine and the mine; also of the novel weapons devised amid the whirl of war for their use, protection and offensive power. Into this brief recital of the events leading to the real thing an endeavour will be made to infuse the life and local colour, which, however, would be more appropriate in a personal narrative than in a general description of anti-submarine warfare of to-day, but without which much that is essential could not be written without dire risk of tiring the reader before the first few chapters had been passed.

The names of places and ships have necessarily been changed to avoid anything of a personal character, and all references to existing or dead officers and men have been rigidly excluded as objectionable and unnecessary in a book dealing entirely with events.

Many of the incidents described—written while the events stood out in clear, mental perspective—could no doubt be duplicated and easily surpassed by many whose fortunes took them into zones of sea war during the historic years just past. If such is found to be the case, then the object of this book has been accomplished, for it sets out to tell, not of great epoch-making events, but of the organisation, men, ships, weapons and ordinary incidents of life in what, for lack of a better term, has been called the “New Navy”—a production of the World War.

It may be that an apology is due for placing yet another war book before a war-weary public, but an effort has been made to make of the following chapters a record of British maritime achievement, more than a narrative of sea fighting, although to do this without introducing the human element, the arduous nature of the work, the monotony, the danger and, finally, the compensating moments of excitement would have been to falsify the account and belittle the achievement.

There are many books available, full of exciting stories of sea and land war, but no other, so far as the Author knows, which describes in detail and in plain phraseology those important “little things”—liable to be overlooked amid the whirl of war—which go to make an anti-submarine personnel, fleet and base, together with an account of “how it was done.”

^{Plan of 55 feet Coastal Boat, carrying two 18-inch Torpedoes}

CHAPTER I The Task of the Allied Navies

The hour was that of the Allies’ greatest need—the last months of the year 1914. On that fateful 4th August the British navy was concentrated in the North Sea, and the chance for a surprise attack by the German fleet, or an invasion of England by the Kaiser’s armies, vanished for ever, and with this one chance went also all reasonable possibility of a crushing German victory.

Although during the years of bitter warfare which followed this silent coup de main the German fleet many times showed signs of awakening ambition, it did not, after Jutland, dare to thrust even its vanguard far into the open sea. Behind its forts, mines and submarines it waited, growing weaker with the dry-rot of inaction, for the chance that fickle Fortune might place a single unit of the Allied fleet within easy reach of its whole mailed-fist.

With a great and modern fleet—the second strongest in the world—awaiting its chance less than twenty hours’ steam from the coast of Great Britain, it quickly became evident that the old Mistress of the Seas would have to call upon her islanders to supply a “new navy” to scour the oceans while her main battle squadrons waited and watched for the second Trafalgar.

Faced, then, with the problem of a long blockade, a powerful fleet in readiness to strike at any weak or unduly exposed point of land or squadron, and with similar problems on a decreasing scale imposed by Austria in the Adriatic and by Turkey behind the Dardanelles, the work of the main battle fleets became well defined by the commonest laws of naval strategy.

All this without taking into account the widespread menace of submarines and mines, and, in the earlier stages of the war, the rounding-up of detached enemy squadrons, such as that under Von Spee in South American waters, and the protection of the transport and food ships from raiders like the Wolfe and the Moewe.

The German High Command realised this as quickly as that of the Allies. Their oversea commerce was strangled within a few days of the Declaration of War with Great Britain, and their fleet was confined to harbour, with the exception of occasional operations against Russia in the Baltic. From the German standpoint the naval problem resolved itself into one of how best to strike at the lines of communication of the Allies, paying special attention, first, to the transport of troops, and, second, to England’s food supply. As they alone knew to what extent they would violate the laws of war and of humanity, it became apparent that the submarine and the mine were the only possible weapons which could be used for this purpose in face of the superior fleets of the Allies. But the number of these weapons was strictly limited compared with the immense shipping resources at the command of the Western Powers, so one submarine must do the work of many, and an effort was made to accomplish this by a reign of sea terrorism and inhuman conduct unparalleled in the history of the world. It opened with the sinking of the Lusitania.

The Allies had secured and maintained the command of the sea, and all that it implies, but to do this with the certainty of correct strategy they had to dedicate almost their entire battle fleet to the purpose for which battle fleets have always been intended—the checkmating or annihilation of the opposing navy.

There came a second problem, however, one entirely new to sea warfare, and unconsidered or provided against in its strategic and tactical entirety because hitherto deemed too inhuman for modern war. This was the ruthless use of armed submarines against unarmed passenger and merchant ships, and the scattering broadcast over the seas, regardless of the lives and property of neutrals, of thousands of explosive mines.

The type of ship constructed exclusively for open sea warfare against surface adversaries was not the best answer to the submarine. The blockading of the hostile surface fleet did not prevent, or even greatly hinder, the free passage of submarine flotillas, and the building by Germany of under-water mine-layers enabled fields of these weapons to be laid anywhere within the carrier’s radius of action.

In this way the second, or submarine, phase of the naval war opened, and it was to supplement the comparatively few fast destroyers and other suitable ships which could be spared from the main fleets that the “new navy” was formed.