of sea-going ships. They had, on the contrary, to furnish anchor watches, shore sentries, duty crews for emergency pickets, prisoner guards, working and church parties, to attend drills, rifle practice, gun practice and instructional parades. The officers had similar shore duties to perform, which left them little time to rest from the strain of keeping watch and ward on the death-strewn seas.
CHAPTER IX
The Convoy System
Although the convoy system was employed at the beginning of the war for the transport of the Imperial armies to France, and subsequently for all the Allied troop movements overseas, it was some three years later before it was extended to the entire British Mercantile navy, on which the United Kingdom depended for too many of the necessities of civilised life.
The rapid development of submarine piracy, however, compelled the Admiralty, early in the year 1917, to resort to what was merely a new form of the old system of protecting sea-borne trade. This comprised the collection of all merchant ships passing through the danger zones into nondescript fleets, and the provision of light cruisers, destroyers, torpedo-boats, trawlers and occasionally (for coastal convoys) of patrol launches to escort them. Certain types of aircraft were also frequently used for observation and scouting purposes.
Previous to the adoption of the convoy system a merchantman, whether it was a fast-moving liner or a sturdy but slow ocean tramp,
But the danger zones grew wider as the radius of action of newer and larger German submarines increased. At last no waters were immune, from the Arctic circle to the Equator, or from Heligoland to New York.
The hour was one of extreme peril for the sea-divided Empire. To lose several hundred ships, with many thousands of lives and much-needed cargoes of food and munitions, when the valiant armies of civilisation were battling with the Teuton hordes, was bad enough; but if the enemy had been able, by casting aside the laws of humanity and sea war, to compel British ships to remain in harbour or meet certain destruction on the high seas, the result could only have been the complete failure of the Allied cause, the conquest of Europe and the fall of the greatest political edifice since Imperial Rome.
Between the world and these catastrophes, however, stood the undefeated Mercantile Marine and the Allied navies. Councils were held in the historic rooms of Whitehall and the old convoy system emerged from the archives of Nelson’s day. The commerce raiders were no longer the canvas-pressed privateers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who fought a clean fight, often against great odds, but were submarine pirates of the mechanical age, who only appeared from the sea depths when their victims had been placed
It is an old axiom of war that new weapons of attack are invariably met by new methods of defence. So it was with the convoy system which gave the death-blow to German hopes of a submarine victory. In order to understand this
At each great port there was a convoy officer, who assembled the merchant ships when they had been loaded and explained to their captains the exact position each ship was to occupy when the fleet was at sea. Printed instructions were handed round urging each vessel to keep its correct station, stating the procedure to be adopted in the event of an engine breakdown, giving the man?uvres which were instantly to be carried into effect when an attack was threatened, and finally the special signals arranged for communication between the merchantmen and their escort by day and by night.
The number of vessels composing a convoy varied, but often exceeded twenty big cargo ships, carrying some 120,000 tons of merchandise, or six liners, with 20,000 troops on board, while the escorting flotilla consisted of a light cruiser, acting as flag-ship, six destroyers, two special vessels (“P” boats) towing observation airships, and some eight or ten trawlers, with possibly one or more seaplanes and several M.L.’s for the first few miles of the voyage. The destroyers were spread out ahead and on the flanks of the fleet, and by using their greatly superior speed were able to zigzag and circle round the whole convoy.
In the event of an attack the whole fleet turned off from the course they were steering at a sharp angle, showing only their sterns to the U-boat. A destroyer acted as rearguard to prevent any of the convoyed ships from straggling. When the fleet had arrived at a rendezvous far out in the open sea, where the danger of a submarine attack was much less, the escort handed over their charges to one or two ocean-going cruisers, which stayed with the merchant ships throughout the remainder of their voyage.
The escorting flotilla then cruised about in the vicinity of the rendezvous until an incoming convoy appeared. These ships were then taken over from their mid-ocean cruiser guard and escorted back through the danger zone to port, and so the game of war continued until months became years.
All this may sound straightforward and quite simple, but there were difficulties, to say nothing of dangers, which made it a most arduous operation. First came the speed problem. Every merchant ship differed in this important respect, so the speed of the slowest unit became the speed of the entire fleet, and this reduction made an attack by under-water craft much easier of accomplishment. Hence the call for “standard ships,” which is a point that should be borne in mind by future generations as a safeguard against blockade. Then came the question of destination, which increased the number of escorting flotillas, and especially ocean cruiser guards, required for a given number of cargo ships. Next there was the loading and unloading to be considered, involving long hours and hard work by the men on the quaysides. This great difficulty was one of the reasons for the formation of docker battalions. Coaling such big fleets by given times caused many grey hairs to appear where otherwise they would not have been. Finally there was the danger of mines having been laid in the fair-ways leading to the port, which necessitated every convoy being met by special vessels to sweep the seas in front of each incoming and outgoing fleet.
All this and more had to be contended with and overcome before each convoy was able to sail. Then danger and difficulty came hand-in-hand. On a bright morning, with probably a fresh breeze blowing and a choppy sea, the work of the escorting flotilla was easy, but with such climatic conditions the risk of attack was so great in the waters around the coasts that troopships usually left harbour under cover of night. No lights were then allowed, and it will not be difficult for readers to imagine what it meant to be pounding through a black void in a fast-moving destroyer, against, possibly, a heavy head sea, with some twenty or thirty big ships in the darkness and spray around. Thick sea-mists were the cause of endless trouble, for the safety of an invisible fleet depended on the vigilance of a half-blind escort. Winter gales scattered the ships and rendered signals invisible. Attacks came from the most unexpected quarters and often from more than one point of the compass at the same time. However, relief came at last, on that never-to-be-forgotten morning when Sir David Beatty and his admirals accepted the unconditional surrender of the German fleet and its unsunk submarines.
Were this chapter to end with the foregoing description of the convoy system the reader would not be in possession of the full facts from which to gauge the importance of the work. Something must be said of what was accomplished. First in order of importance came the transport of many millions of soldiers not only from England to France, but also to and from every colony and dominion of the world-wide Empire. By August, 1915, the British navy had transported, across seas infested with submarines and mines, a million men without the loss of a single life or a
