A ‘Mystery VC’ becomes the scourge of German submarines
At about seven in the morning of 22 March 1916, off Dingle in south-west Ireland, the German submarine U-68 fired a torpedo at what her captain probably took to be a British merchantman, the collier Loderer, 3,207 gross tons. The torpedo narrowly missed Loderer’s bow, and she continued her same speed and course. Twenty minutes later U-68 surfaced 1,000 yards astern, moved to her port quarter and fired a shot across her bow. The ‘collier’ stopped, blew off steam, and launched a boat taking off some of the crew. The U-boat closed to 800 yards, whereupon Loderer – or rather HMS Farnborough, the ‘Q-ship’ into which she had recently been converted – raised the white ensign of the Royal Navy, uncovered her guns and opened fire with her 12-pounders, scoring several hits. U-68 began to dive. Farnborough’s captain, Lieutenant-Commander Gordon Campbell, restarted her engines, steered straight for where the U-boat had submerged and dropped a depth charge, blowing the submarine’s bow out of the water. Farnborough’s gunners opened fire again, and U-68 sank by the stern with all thirty-eight of her crew. It was not the first loss of a U-boat to a decoy ship – U-boot Falle (U-boat trap), as the Germans called it – but it was the first to the newly developed depth charge, or ‘dropping mine’.
No aspect of German ‘frightfulness’, whether reprisals against Belgian civilians, the shelling of seaside towns such as Scarborough, or the bombing of cities by Zeppelin – came as such a shock and posed so serious a threat as the U-boat campaign against merchant shipping. Before the war, Admiral Sir Jacky Fisher, the first sea lord, had warned that German submarines would flout the so-called ‘cruiser’, or ‘prize’, rules and sink merchantmen without warning, but the prime minister, Asquith, had refused to consider that a civilized nation would embark on such a ‘barbarous practice in violation of international law’. The rules even prohibited leaving men adrift in open boats, though in practice, because submarines hadn’t the room to take them aboard and couldn’t spare men for prize crews (to take command of the ship and sail her to a friendly port), and because in the early months the U-boat’s range was limited to coastal waters, where there was a reasonable chance of crews being picked up quickly, the convention was that the U-boat surfaced to warn the crew to take to the boats, before sinking the ship by torpedo or gunfire. In the early days some U-boat captains even displayed a degree of chivalry. On 20 October 1914, U-17, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Johannes Feldkirchner, stopped the British steamship Glitra bound for Stavanger with a mixed cargo some 14 miles off the Norwegian coast. Feldkirchner ordered the crew to take to the boats and then, having scuttled the ship, towed them towards the coast, before a Norwegian patrol boat took over.
At the beginning of the war the Kaiserliche Marine had only twenty-four operational Unterseeboote, the Royal Navy about a hundred. Submarines relying on electric propulsion when submerged were still a recent development. Their first operational use had been with the Imperial Russian Navy in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. Diesel engines gave them a surface speed of around 9 knots and charged the electric-motor batteries. Underwater they could make 15 knots for about two hours. In 1914 submarines on both sides were only around 150 feet in length and displaced about 400 tons. Armed initially with self-propelled torpedoes, once war began they were fitted with deck guns to force merchant ships to stop for searching, and to sink smaller ships that did not warrant a torpedo. The Germans also constructed specialized submarines with vertical mine tubes through their hulls to lay mines covertly.
Both sides saw submarines as adjuncts to the main battle fleet for patrolling, screening and offensive action against warships. On 22 September 1914 German U-boats sank three pre-dreadnought cruisers, Cressy, Aboukir and Hogue, in the North Sea with the loss of 1,400 men. A month later HMS Audacious was sunk off the north coast of Ireland by a surface-laid mine, at first thought to have been a torpedo, the only dreadnought to be lost to enemy action during the entire war. The Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow in Orkney quickly became ‘U-boat conscious’, wary of torpedoes and mines, and its battle plans were increasingly characterized by caution.
The Kaiserliche Marine had never expected its U-boat service to make war on British commerce, even under the ‘cruiser rules’. The prevailing view before 1914, at least among the Kaiser and his circle, was that if war came it would be over quickly. France would be rapidly defeated by the surprise offensive through Belgium, leaving the German army free then to deal with the slower-mobilizing Russians – the so-called Schlieffen Plan. Britain’s ‘contemptible little army’ was too small to make any difference, and the Royal Navy could not affect the war on land. Besides, reckoned Berlin, the Grand Fleet would be held in check by the Imperial Navy’s High Seas Fleet, the Hochseeflotte. War at sea, if it came to it, would therefore be a clash of titans – the dreadnought battleships – not a long-running affair of blockades and counter-blockades.
Germany’s naval minister, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who saw a naval war with Britain as somehow inevitable and not necessarily connected with any continental clash, had always advocated submarine warfare against British merchantmen, in addition to trying to outbuild the Royal Navy in dreadnoughts. The Kaiser’s qualms over sinking unarmed ships had nevertheless prevailed. In any case, the naval staff had estimated that some 220 U-boats would be needed to carry out such a campaign according to international law, far too many for the naval budget, whose first priority was the ‘dreadnought race’. Soon after the war began, however, the commander of the submarine service, Korvettenkapitän Hermann Bauer, urged that his boats be allowed to attack British commerce without restriction on the grounds that Britain had already violated international law by its blockade. Not until 1915 would the Kaiser agree; and then, following the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania in May that year, with the death of many American passengers, he rescinded the order. Tirpitz continued to press for the restoration of unrestricted submarine warfare, until, frustrated by the Kaiser’s vacillations, he resigned in March 1916.
The war on merchant shipping, including neutrals, therefore continued to be a perilous business for the German submarine service. A U-boat on the surface, even with its gun in action, was highly vulnerable to an armed merchantman, and even more so to the Q-ship, so called because they operated largely out of Queenstown (Cobh) in south-east Ireland. The idea of the Q-ship, like so many another in both world wars, can in part be credited to Winston Churchill. In November 1914, ignoring the niceties of the formal chain of command, the first lord of the Admiralty had telegrammed Admiral Sir Hedworth Meux, C-in-C Portsmouth, responsible for the English Channel:
It is desired to trap the German submarine which sinks vessels by gunfire off Havre. A small or moderate sized steamer should be taken up and fitted very secretly with two twelve-pounder guns in such a way that they can be concealed with deck cargo or in some way in which they will not be suspected. She should be sent when ready to run from Havre to England and should have an intelligence officer and a few seamen and two picked gunlayers who should all be disguised. If the submarine stops her she should endeavour to sink her by gunfire. The greatest secrecy is necessary to prevent spies becoming acquainted with the arrangements.
The Le Havre submarine wasn’t caught, but soon afterwards the Admiralty ordered its first dedicated decoy vessels, converted merchantmen. The possibilities of decoying were soon demonstrated by the Aberdeen fishing fleet, whose boats were being regularly harassed. On 5 June 1915 a dozen of them were fishing off Peterhead, among them the armed trawlers Oceanic II and Hawk, when U-14 surfaced in their midst. Days before she had sunk two Danish and Swedish freighters, both neutrals, and not noticing that any of the trawlers were armed she fired warning shots. Both Oceanic and Hawk returned fire, and U-14 began to sink; the trawlermen managed to pick up the crew of twenty-seven, though not the captain, Oberleutnant zur See Max Hammerle, who was killed when a shell hit the conning tower.
Despite the dangers, the U-boats had to wage war as best they could, for the Hochseeflotte’s surface warships were increasingly confined to tip-and-run raiding from their base at Wilhelmshaven, and Germany’s armed cruisers elsewhere had long been sent to the bottom or else confined to the Black Sea. All that Tirpitz had otherwise were auxiliary cruisers – converted merchant ships – which were good at laying mines but not in a fight. U-boats would therefore be the mainstay of his Kleinkrieg (‘small war’) campaign to wear down the Royal Navy’s numerical advantage or to divert warships from the Grand Fleet for trade protection. As the war went on, the Kaiserliche Marine poured resources into building more and more U-boats – 350 in all – increasingly sophisticated technically, ever larger and with greater range. Operating from their main base at Heligoland in the German Bight, from Ostend and Zeebrugge in Belgian Flanders, and in the Mediterranean, by 1916 U-boats were becoming not just an irritation but a menace.
Losses in merchant shipping mounted – a million and a quarter tons between October 1916 and January the following year. From February 1917, after the Kaiser had given in to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, to April that year, U-boats sank more than 500 merchant ships, with latterly an average of thirteen each day. One ship out of every four that left the British Isles never returned.
Still the Admiralty would not adopt the convoy system. The first sea lord, by this point Admiral Jellicoe, would not divert the necessary escort vessels, judging that his destroyers had to remain with the Grand Fleet to screen the dreadnoughts if the Hochseeflotte tried to sortie in strength. Just as adamantly opposed were the merchant captains themselves, who did not want to be massed into an array of targets limited to the speed of the slowest ship. Only in May 1917, at the insistence of Lloyd George, now prime minister, were convoys formed, after which the losses began slowly to decline. Nevertheless, a month later, Jellicoe, in a mood of abject gloom, warned the cabinet that nothing could be done to defeat the U-boats at sea, and that unless the army could capture their bases on the Flanders coast he considered it ‘improbable that we could go on with the war next year for lack of shipping’.
The Q-ships continued to operate even after the reintroduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, and by December 1917 the losses had significantly reduced; moreover, a new mine barrier in the Channel effectively closed this route for U-boats and inflicted heavy losses on the U-Flotilla Flandern. Over the course of the whole war, the German submarine service lost 178 U-boats in combat – 50 per cent – and 39 (11 per cent) to misadventure. How cost-effective the Q-ships were is uncertain. Twice as many were lost as submarines they sank, but this does not take account of their deterrent value. A U-boat commander was sparing of his torpedoes, and it is likely that many allowed smaller prizes to escape rather than risk surfacing to use the deck armament, only to find his submarine on the receiving end of concealed fire. Q-ship ruses grew ever more resourceful. One such was the trawler that towed a submerged submarine, connected by telephone. If a U-boat surfaced, the trawler engaged its attention while the submarine was released for attack. This ploy scored its first success in June 1915 when the Aberdeen trawler Taranaki, with Royal Navy submarine C24, sank U-40 off the east coast of Scotland.
Q-ships were also built with especially shallow draughts, so that torpedoes would pass underneath, or else their holds were filled with buoyancy aids and fire-suppressants to limit the damage if struck. After sinking U-68 by depth charge in March 1916, Commander Gordon Campbell became an ever more aggressive exponent of decoy tactics, believing that Q-ships must actually invite torpedo attacks in order to tempt U-boats to the surface to ‘finish off’ a stricken vessel. On 17 February 1917, off Cork, his audacity was rewarded when Farnborough was struck by a torpedo fired by U-83 at extreme range. Campbell had intentionally failed to evade the torpedo, and Farnborough took the blow in the hold, causing only minor injuries to some crewmen but serious damage to the ship. As U-83 surfaced, the well-rehearsed ‘panic party’ took to the boats with a great show of alarm and disorder while the gun crews manned the hidden weapons. When four lifeboats had been released and the ship was low in the water, the U-boat closed alongside. Farnborough’s remaining crew now sprang the ambush, opening fire at point-blank range with her 6-pounder and machine guns, killing the commanding officer, Kapitänleutnant Bruno Hoppe (who had sixteen sinkings to his credit). U-83 went down with just one survivor.
Only then did Campbell radio for help: ‘Q5 slowly sinking respectfully wishes you goodbye.’ In fact, with help she was able to beach at Mill Cove without loss. Campbell, who had joined the navy in 1900 from Dulwich College as a cadet of fourteen, was awarded the VC. The citation was deliberately vague: ‘In recognition of his conspicuous gallantry, consummate coolness, and skill in command of one of HM ships in action.’ The vagueness backfired, however, with the press referring to him as ‘The Mystery VC’, which led to reports that German agents had put a price on his head. He would survive the war nevertheless, with the DSO and two bars in addition to the VC, and afterwards rose to vice-admiral. His VC is held by his old school.