CHAPTER 15

The Underwater War

Underwater warfare had been a dream of inventors for more than a century, with experimental and usually unsuccessful submarines. Mines, known at the time as torpedoes, were used by the Russians during the Crimean War, but the Great War was the first in which these weapons would play a vital role. Historically the British had tended not to encourage or develop mines, preferring to advocate freedom of the seas. The Germans got in first at the start of the war by laying fields off Lowestoft and in the Humber during August 1914. Churchill accused them of using them ‘indiscriminately upon the ordinary trade routes’ without ‘any definite military scheme such as the closing of a military port’. He tried to turn it to advantage, he ‘wanted to impress not only on British but on neutral shipping the vital importance of touching at British ports on entering the North Sea, in order to ascertain according to the latest information the routes and channels which the Admiralty are keeping swept …’.¹ In a further statement on 2 November he accused the Germans of laying mines from supposedly neutral ships and declared the whole of the North Sea to be a military area.²

The Audacious, one of the new 13.5 inch super-Dreadnoughts, was sunk by a mine off the north coast of Ireland on 27 October 1914, an event which Churchill tried to keep secret.³ He remained sceptical about mines and resisted ‘the many unwise proposals which were pressed upon me … to squander our small stock of mines’. He divided them into two types – ‘Ambush mining’, in which they were ‘scattered about in small patches, or short lines in the neighbourhood of the enemy’s ports or of the approach to your own ports or landing places on the chance of enemy ships running into them’, and ‘Blockade mining’, which was not practicable unless superior force was maintained in the area.⁴ The only British minelaying consisted of fields off the Goodwin Sands and Ostend laid early in October, but the latter had to be swept as British troops were sent into Zeebrugge soon afterwards. In view of the limited numbers available, Churchill was sceptical about ‘scattering a few bouquets of mines from destroyers’ and told Fisher that it was ‘like saving a few lottery tickets. But it is no substitute for going to work’.⁵ Fisher replied in January: ‘The German policy of laying mines has resulted in denying our access to their harbours – has hampered our submarines in their attempts to penetrate into German waters – and we have lost the latest type of Dreadnought and many other war vessels and over 70 merchant vessels of various sizes.’ In return the British had laid only the field off Ostend. Fisher advocated a strong offensive policy, though there were few minelayers and only 4,900 mines were currently available, plus more from Russia.⁶ Soon controlled mines would be developed to protect the main harbours such as Scapa, operated electrically from a control station.

Regarding British submarines, Fisher complained about ‘the undoubted German submarine superiority in design’ which he attributed to Wilson’s neglect during his time as First Sea Lord.⁷ But as Churchill pointed out, ‘The submarine is the only vessel of war which does not fight its like.’ It would not have been an answer to the German submarine threat ‘to have multiplied our submarines by four, nor should we have exposed Germany to an equal danger had we done so’, for Germany was far less dependent on seaborne trade.⁸ At the beginning of the war the British submarines were under Commodore Roger Keyes, whom Churchill protected from the slights of Fisher, eventually offering him a post as chief of staff to Admiral Carden in the Dardanelles campaign. Keyes was pleased to get away from ‘a very wicked vindictive old man’.⁹ He was replaced by the return of S. S. Hall, who had already served as Inspecting Captain of Submarines in 1907–10.

The C-class coastal boats patrolled off the bases, but in the event they had no contact with the enemy and their main use was in training crews. At first overseas submarines were intended to be employed with destroyers and cruisers, and Keyes often went out in the aptly named destroyer Lurcher, in which even a hardened sailor could be seasick. This was abandoned because of the difficulties of communication, and Commodore (S) became a shore job at Harwich, to Keyes’s disgust. They had a few successes, such as the sinking of the cruiser Hela in September and the destroyer S116 in October, but as Churchill put it, ‘they suffered from one overwhelming disadvantage … viz a dearth of targets’.¹⁰ Some were sent to the Baltic where they had more success, and some to the Mediterranean. Despite the difficulties, Churchill wrote to Fisher on 28 October: ‘Please propose without delay the largest possible programme of submarine boats to be delivered in twelve to twenty-four months. … You should exert every effort of ingenuity and organisation to secure the utmost possible delivery.’¹¹

Churchill outlined his own ideas for dealing with enemy boats to Asquith in October 1914, including ‘enveloping and protecting “shoes”’ round ships, ‘a huge net-work of wire and nets, a “hencoop”’ off the east coast where major warships would be safe, and a larger ‘bird cage’, further north. Asquith, who knew very little about the subject, was pleased: ‘… it is inventive and resourceful, and shows both originality and dash’. It helped justify having a civilian minster at the Admiralty when the War Office had Kitchener – ‘I laugh at our idiotic outside critics who long for an expert instead of a civilian at the head of the Admiralty.’¹²

The initial German submarine assault was on warships as expected and the scout cruiser Pathfinder was sunk on 5 September, followed by a major tragedy. At the Loch Ewe conference on 17 September, Churchill heard an officer refer to ‘the live bait squadron’ and asked what he meant. It was a group of old cruisers patrolling the Broad Fourteens off the Dutch coast. He soon realised the danger (though at the time he was thinking of attack by surface ships) and ordered: ‘The Bacchantes ought not to continue on this beat. The risk to such ships is not justified by any services they can render. The narrow seas, being the nearest point to the enemy, should be kept by a small number of good, modern ships’ – presumably light cruisers which were fast enough to escape from trouble, or even battlecruisers which could fight almost anything on the surface. In fact he was not the first person in authority to spot the danger, Keyes had been urging their removal since August and Herbert Richmond of the naval staff was also suggesting a change, but it is not clear if they reported this to Churchill.¹³ In any case, the First Lord’s order to recall the cruisers was delayed and on 22 September U-9 fired a torpedo into the Aboukir which caused her to capsize. Her consorts Hogue and Cressy chivalrously went to rescue the men and were themselves torpedoed, with the loss of 1,400 men. Churchill had recently made a speech describing the German fleet as being trapped like ‘rats in a hole’, but the King commented on ‘what alas! happened today when the rats came out of their own accord and to our cost’. To Asquith it was ‘some very bad news: the worst, I think, since war began’.¹⁴

The submarine war was still quite gentlemanly in the early stages. The first merchant ship to be sunk was the Glitra of Leith, on the way to Stavanger in neutral Norway. On 20 October U-17 surfaced near her and gave the crew ten minutes to take to the boats before sinking her by gunfire. Then the submarine towed the boats towards the Norwegian coast until they were met by a pilot boat. The submarine war was raised to a very different level on 4 February 1915 when the German Admiralty declared: ‘All the waters surrounding Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be a war zone. From February 18 onwards every merchant vessel found in this war zone will be destroyed without it always being possible to avoid dangers to the crews and their passengers’ – and neutrals would not be exempted. Churchill immediately identified this as a submarine attack and drafted a memorandum after consulting his cabinet colleagues. ‘As it is not in the power of the German Admiralty to maintain any surface craft in these waters, this attack can only be delivered by submarine agency. … the British government cannot recognise attacks by submarines on merchant ships as a legitimate means of warfare.’¹⁵ Potentially this was the ‘truly terrible’ menace which Fisher had predicted.

It was not Churchill’s central issue at the time; according to Asquith he was ‘breast-high’ with the Dardanelles.¹⁶ Nor was it taken very seriously at first. The Germans had only 29 modern U-boats, so there were only about eight or nine at sea at any given time. To Asquith, it was ‘the truly absurd “blockade of our seas and coasts”’.¹⁷ After two weeks of the attack Churchill could still claim that in general the seas were ‘practically safe’.¹⁸ Indeed he welcomed the campaign as ‘a means of embroiling the U.S. with Germany’ and wanted to attract more neutral shipping to inflame the issue.¹⁹ Later he wrote: ‘On hundreds of ships proceeding weekly in and out of scores of harbours, this handful of marauders could make no serious impression. It was like hundreds of rabbits running across a ride, with only two or three one-eyed poachers to shoot them.’²⁰ It was decided to publish figures of losses to show how futile the German campaign was.

However, if the campaign intensified it could become serious, for as Fisher had written in 1913, there were ‘no means … of meeting it except by reprisals’. The main anti-submarine technique at the start of the war was a sweep fitted with floats and TNT charges which was towed by a group of destroyers in line abreast, hoping to catch any submarine that passed through.²¹ The torpedo school HMS Vernon began to develop a depth charge in December 1914 after a request from Jellicoe, but a suitable hydrostatic pistol did not come along until 1916. It was found that the wake or ‘feather’ of a periscope could be seen from the air in calm conditions, but aeroplanes did not have enough endurance for extended patrols while there were still very few airships – the first of the Sea Scout Class was delivered on 18 March but lost in an accident two months later. Commander C. P. Ryan, a friend of Beatty’s wife, was developing sound detection of submarines by means of the hydrophone in the Firth of Forth from the start of the war.²² There was some progress by March 1915 but the system remained experimental.²³ There is no sign that Churchill paid much attention to this apart from a brief mention later.²⁴ In the meantime the Auxiliary Patrol of armed motor yachts, largely manned by members of the RNVR who had not been sent to fight on land, was augmented, and more merchant ships were to be armed. Churchill was bombarded with ideas from the public. Arthur Pollen, the disgruntled inventor of a fire control system, wanted tramp steamers to be fitted with concealed guns and to carry German prisoners between Le Havre and Dover – if the ship lost its gun battle with the submarine, ‘there would at any rate be the consolation of drowning some German officers and men’.²⁵

Sir Arthur Wilson rejected Churchill’s ideas on how to make ships torpedo proof as this could not be done ‘without at the same time greatly impairing their sea-going qualities, economy and speed’.²⁶ However the First Lord favoured two main solutions. The first was the use of indicator nets made of thin, strong wire, which were suspended from floats. If a submarine made contact a portion of the net would detach itself and foul it, while giving notice of the submarine’s position by a buoy attached to the net. These were to be laid in an attempt to close the Straits of Dover to U-boats, as well as the North Channel, the main shipping route into Liverpool.

The second scheme was less passive. It was still the custom for U-boats to surface and sink merchant ships by gunfire, thus saving expensive torpedoes, and it was planned to take advantage of that. In September a small steamer carrying fruit and vegetables between Southampton and St Malo was fired on a by a U-boat. Admiral Sir Hedworth Meux, commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, heard about it and suggested to Churchill that a gun might be hidden under the fruit; that was done but it was never used. However it led to the idea of the Special Service Ship, or Q-ship. As described by Churchill, ‘Early in February I gave directions for a number of vessels to be constructed or adapted for the purpose of trapping and ambushing German submarines …. These vessels carried concealed guns which by a pantomime trick of trap doors and shutters could suddenly come into action.’²⁷ In fact such ships had been in service since November without any success, but many more were to be fitted. Another deception was to have a submarine towed behind a small merchant ship. The crews were connected by telephone and if the surface ship was attacked the submarine would torpedo the enemy. This was a case of one submarine attacking another, contrary to Churchill’s prediction.

Aggressive as ever, on 10 February 1915 Churchill issued orders to merchant ship masters that ‘… any submarine which shows by her action that she is attempting to close or communicate with a merchant vessel should be treated as hostile … No British merchant vessel should ever tamely surrender to a submarine, but should do her utmost to escape.’ If a submarine was seen straight ahead then the merchant ship was to ‘steer for her at your utmost speed’ and the submarine would probably dive. This became known as the ‘ramming order’, though that term was not used. One side-effect, according to Asquith, was that ‘we have a whole flotilla of our own submarines, huddled together in Dover Harbour, & afraid to go out, lest they should be rammed or sunk by British merchant ships, which now go for every periscope that appears above the surface’. Captain Charles Fryatt of the Great Eastern Railway Company applied the order on 2 March when he escaped from a U-boat in the steamer Wrexham. On the 28th U-33 surfaced in front of him in the Brussels and he did indeed steer for her at full speed, forcing her to submerge. In June 1916 he was captured and tried by the Germans as a franc-tireur, or unauthorised combatant, and shot.²⁸

The anti-submarine measures had their first success on 4 March when U-8 was entangled in the indicator nets in the Straits of Dover and sighted by a destroyer, which used her sweeps and forced her to surface. Her crew surrendered but Fisher wanted to try them for murder. The nets were effective as a deterrent and forced the U-boats to head round the north of Scotland, but this was the only time they played any part in a sinking or capture. Six days later the destroyer Ariel rammed the conning tower of U-12 as she tried to dive and her consort Attack shelled her, forcing the submarine’s crew to scuttle her. The most evocative success came on the 18th when U-29, which had sunk the three cruisers, was rammed and sunk by the battleship Dreadnought. But sinkings of merchant ships almost quadrupled to 84,000 tons in March, before dropping to half that in April.

The Cunard liner Lusitania left New York on 1 May carrying 1,965 passengers, despite German warnings that British ships in the war zone were liable to be sunk. On the 7th she was off the south coast of Ireland when she was sighted by Captain Walther Schwieger in U-20. He had been told to watch out for transports which might invade Schleswig-Holstein (though in fact they were being prepared for the Dardanelles) and at 1340 he fired a single torpedo at a range of 700 yards, causing a large explosion. The ship sank in 18 minutes. Only six of 48 lifeboats could be launched and 1,201 passengers were lost, including 128 Americans. At the time Churchill was absorbed in the biggest crisis of his career and Fisher would resign four days later; but later Churchill wrote: ‘Even in the first moments of realizing the tragedy and its horror, I understood the significance of the event. … On two supreme occasions [the other was the invasion of Belgium] the German Imperial Government, quenching compunction, outfacing conscience, deliberately, with calculation, with sinister resolve, severed the underlying bonds which sustained the civilisation of the world and united even in their quarrels the human family.’²⁹ There was outcry in the United States, which forced a drastic reduction and then an end to the submarine campaign against merchant shipping. Conspiracy theories that the British government or Churchill had engineered the sinking do not hold much water. The ship was carrying a consignment of small arms ammunition and shrapnel shells weighing 173 tons, as Churchill admitted in 1923;³⁰ even if the Germans had known about that and used it as an excuse, sinking the ship would have been grossly disproportionate and would not have absolved them of a huge diplomatic blunder.

Churchill had left the Admiralty by the time the towed submarines had their first successes. On 23 June U-40 was sunk by C24 off Aberdeen, and U-23 by C27 off Fair Isle, but the project was soon abandoned after two of the submarines struck mines. Q-ships captured the popular imagination and several books were written about them. Their first success was on 5 June with the sinking of U-14 off Peterhead. On the 24th U-36 was sunk off the Hebrides by the gunfire of a decoy ship, Prince Charles. In all 215 Q-ships were commissioned and they sank eleven U-boats, but lost 20 of their own number. Later Churchill described the whole affair as ‘The First Defeat of the U-Boats’, but in fact it was not the naval campaign which called the onslaught to be called off but rather the Germans’ lack of submarines and the irresistible pressure of the neutrals. In fact the campaign was quite misleading, and Churchill’s favoured measures offered little for the future.

The Germans resumed their unrestricted submarine campaign in February 1917, gambling that even after an American declaration of war they could still force Britain out of the conflict before any large-scale American help arrived. This time they had more than 130 U-boats in service. The British had developed the depth charge and airships patrolled the seas, but Ryan’s hydrophone was only effective for shore stations, not from ships. Out of office, Churchill watched from the sidelines as merchant shipping losses mounted to an unstainable 880,000 tons in April and Britain was in danger of starvation. The sea lords, now headed by Jellicoe, refused to adopt a system of convoy until it was forced on them by Lloyd George as Prime Minister. Contrary to the myth, Lloyd George probably did not take personal charge of an Admiralty meeting to enforce the change, but issued a decision of the War Cabinet which the Admiralty had already accepted by the time he visited the building the next day. But it was a momentous decision all the same. In overriding the considered advice of his service advisers, Lloyd George was committing an act in truly Churchillian fashion – except that Churchill was out of office. In fact it was more determined, and had much greater effect, than any single act of Churchill’s before 1940, and it was carried out by a ‘real’ civilian politician, not a warrior in political office. Churchill was rather dismissive of it in 1927, perhaps because he was no longer in alliance with Lloyd George, perhaps because he was jealous. In The World Crisis he merely stated that ‘The trial of the convoy system was urged upon the naval authorities by the Cabinet, and in this the Prime Minster took a decisive role.’³¹ He was much more effusive in 1932 when he wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph, later incorporated in a book:

On April 23 the War Cabinet debated the whole issue with their naval advisers. The results of the discussion were wholly unsatisfactory. On the 25th, therefore, the War Cabinet, sitting alone, resolved upon decisive action. It was agreed that the Prime Minister should personally visit the Admiralty ‘to investigate all the means at present used in anti-submarine warfare, on the ground that recent inquiries had made it clear that there was not sufficient co-ordination in the present efforts to deal with the campaign’. The menace implied in this procedure was unmistakeable. No greater shock can be administered to a responsible department or military profession. The naval authorities realised that it was a case of ‘act or go’.³²

By next day the sea lords had agreed to institute convoys. Sinkings soon began to fall to manageable levels and the crisis, probably the worst that Britain faced during the war, was over.