CHAPTER V

DEALING WITH THE SUBMARINES

My name is Captain Kidd, Captain Kidd. My name is Captain Kidd, Captain Kidd. My name is Captain Kidd, And wickedly I did; God’s laws I did forbid, As I sailed.

_Old Nautical Ballad._

Having seen the British Fleet and the fleets allied with it operating in the North Sea, the Oceans, and the Mediterranean, we may suitably turn to some special features of the duties and work of the Navy in the war. The submarine came as a sign and a portent of new developments in the means and the practice of warfare at sea. Regarded once as the weapon of the weaker Power, it was adopted into the naval armoury of the strongest. When, in 1901, under Lord Fisher’s administration as First Sea Lord, a beginning was made in submarine construction by the ordering of five Holland boats, many people were taken aback. Confessedly the part to be played by the submarine lay at that time in the realm of speculation, but the British Navy could not afford to ignore it. Every advance must be watched and studied as it developed. The development has been rapid, and there are British submarines of astonishing powers, which have no equals in the world. They have made their mark in many a theatre of war. The French had led the way. The Germans followed in 1906. There is, indeed, the best reason to believe that Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, chief of the Navy Department, looked with no kindly eye upon submarine boats. He was a believer in battleships and the creator of the High Sea Fleet, with its battle squadrons and cruiser divisions. Concessions were made to the Admiralty Staff, and a few submarines were put in hand; but it was not until the beginning of the war that Tirpitz became inspired with the fervour of the convert.

Even now the relative position of the submarine in the category of warships is obscure. Admiral Sir Percy Scott thought that the knell of the battleship had been rung by its growing power; yet ships of the battleship class, carrying incredible armaments, possessing speed beyond the dreams of _ante-bellum_ naval constructors, and infinitely superior for a dozen reasons to anything the Germans had thought of, have recently been completed, and will probably play a decisive part in any future naval engagement.

But if the submarine has not dethroned the battleship, she has, in the hands of the enemy, done other remarkable things. She has struck a mortal blow at what many excellent people have hitherto regarded as the settled and accepted code of International Law; she has appeared as a pirate commerce-destroyer. Without warning and without pity she has sunk fishing vessels, tramp steamers, stately liners, and hospital ships. The code of honour is not observed by her. The German submarine officer has orders to run no risks, although in the old wars naval officers—who had no means of submerging either to attack or to escape—gladly ran every risk incidental to the service in which they were engaged. When the _Lusitania_ was sunk it was explained that if the commander of the submarine had permitted the passengers to take to the boats before firing his torpedo, “this would have meant the certain destruction of his own vessel.” There was no evidence that such would have been the case, but the risk, which implied a danger merely incidental to naval service, was held to justify the sinking of the great liner with 1,200 souls on board. The wildest imagination could not have conceived that any human being could take such a distorted view of right and wrong, and of the plain duty of the seaman.

The submarine has accomplished other remarkable things in the war. She has converted benevolent neutrals into resolute enemies. She has brought the United States into the war in support of the Allies. She has transformed the mercantile marines opposed to her into actual fighting forces. A few merchant ships were armed before the war began, but now, because of ruthless submarine attack, the British mercantile marine is for practical purposes embodied with the Navy, in the sense that it is under naval control, is provided with means of defence, and acts directly under naval orders. Moreover, one-half or more of its shipping has been taken over by the naval service. The same is true of the merchant ships of the Allies. The German submarine has had a further effect. She has created a whole array of means directed to her destruction. Countless inventors have been set at work, and extraordinarily ingenious methods have been employed with the purpose of putting an end to submarine activities by sinking every boat as she appeared.

In the early days of the submarine it was believed that she might be sunk by using spar torpedoes fixed in swift boats, which would bear down upon the submarine as she submerged and explode the charge against her hull. But it soon occurred to seamen that if a swift vessel, destroyer or other, could run down a submarine she might more easily sink her by the impact of her sharp stem or a special keel. This method has been practised in the war, and by this means a number of enemy submarines have been dispatched to Davy Jones’s locker. There was an early case in which a certain destroyer, going at high speed, actually impaled a German submarine on her stem, and carried her onward, so injured that she sank. Another early case was that of the German submarine rammed and sent to the bottom off Beachy Head on March 28th, 1915, by the _Thordis_, commanded by that plucky skipper, Captain Bell, who set an example to many.

Another plan was to use suitable vessels in pairs, each pair dragging a cable connecting them, from which hung, on short lines, small mines to be electrically exploded when a submerged obstruction, probably a periscope or conning-tower, put a tension upon the connecting cable. The disadvantage of this system was that the entrapping vessels could not travel swiftly without bringing the cable near to the surface, and the chance of a submarine fouling the cable was remote. Yet it may be conjectured that the features of this system may have furnished the germ of procedures now in use. Capture or sinking by the use of nets was also an early idea, probably suggested by the nets used by big ships at anchor for protection against torpedoes, and Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson devised a large steel net for the purpose. Possibly this method, too, has developed into the nets employed in dealing with enemy submarines at the present time. But submarines were continually increasing in strength of structure, speed, and handiness, so that new systems were necessary and have developed with the requirements.

What the actual methods employed by the Navy are cannot be explained. When Mr. Frederick Palmer, the American writer, visited the Grand Fleet he asked how the thing was done, and officers said: “Sometimes by ramming; sometimes by gunfire; sometimes by explosives; and in many other ways which we do not tell.” M. Joseph Reinach also visited the Fleet, and said in the _Figaro_ that the submarine was pursued “by net, gun, explosive bomb, and other means.” Squadron-Commander Bigsworth on August 26th, 1915, destroyed a submarine off Ostend by dropping bombs upon her from his aeroplane, and there have been several other episodes of the same kind. When the first American transports were attacked in the Atlantic, bombs fitted with a short-time fuse were employed which burst at a determined depth below the surface of the sea.

The Royal Naval Air Service plays a large part in the anti-submarine campaign. Its seaplanes are always scouting over our waters and sight enemy submarines from afar. Flying high, they can and do discover submarines navigating below the surface, and by wireless or other signals bring destroyers or other craft to the scene, where by special means submarines are destroyed.

Probably gunfire is the chief means by which submarines are sent to the bottom. A German submarine may attain complete submergence from the cruising trim within about three minutes; but the time may be longer, if she has a gun mounted, wireless rigged, and other top hamper. From the awash position, in which her speed is reduced, she may submerge in about two minutes. A swift destroyer, knowing the position of such a submarine, may advance toward her, covering a nautical mile within two minutes, so that she has an excellent chance of coming within range and putting in shots with effect. Gunnery is carried to a high pitch of proficiency in the Navy, and one destroyer may be mentioned which knocked out the periscope of a German submarine at a range of over 2,000 yards with her first round. There is nothing an enemy submarine likes less than to see destroyers tearing down towards her at high speed as she is getting in her gun, withdrawing her periscope, lowering her masts—often a disguise—and filling her tanks. Moreover, complete submergence may not be a sure protection for her if she is watched, for she may be destroyed by an explosive bomb.

German submarines have also learned to fear armed merchantmen, which have not seldom used their guns with effect, sometimes compelling their assailants to submerge, and so evading their attack, and sometimes by obtaining direct hits. The _Dunrobin_ in September, 1916, carried on a lively action for some minutes, hitting her assailant in the vicinity of her conning-tower with a T.N.T. shell—thereby causing an internal explosion, from which dense smoke arose—followed by three common shell, each of them making a direct hit, after which the enemy suddenly plunged at a sharp angle, evidently going to the bottom. In March, 1917, the _Bellorado_ was attacked by gunfire from a submarine, whereby her master, chief officer, and a seaman were killed, while her gunners put such shot into the assailant that she was silenced and manifestly disabled.

Further it is not permissible to go on describing how submarines are accounted for. The catalogue of methods is a long one. There could certainly be no single and decisive weapon for the destruction of this new engine of warfare. There is no remedy for the effects of gunfire, and if submarines discover targets possible to be attacked they will certainly attack them. Some surprise was expressed that the British Admiralty did not at once suppress the submarine menace. When the submarine campaign began in February, 1915, it resulted in the sinking of a number of British merchantmen; but, having risen to its height, it declined, with fluctuations, until it was described as being “well in hand.” The methods employed had been successful. Then, after several months, the submarines began their depredations again, carrying them into the Atlantic and the Mediterranean with great violence. They also penetrated the Channel, though they never checked the great stream of transport for the armies between English and French ports, which the Navy was guarding with complete success.

The reason for this recrudescence of submarine piracy was the intense energy which the Germans devoted to the production of standardised and powerful classes of submarines, whose parts were produced in many districts of the German Empire. The new boats were practically submarine cruisers, capable of high surface speed, which enabled them to overhaul slow merchantmen, and they were armed with powerful guns. The early enemy submarine carried a 1.4-inch gun, but a 2.9-inch 12-pounder was provided. There is now reason to believe that the calibre has risen to 4.1 inches and, in the case of some of the more powerful boats, to 5.1 inches, these larger guns being shorter and lighter than the same guns mounted in cruisers. But obviously submarines of these classes, carrying on their work over wider areas and in distant places, will not be so easy to destroy as the smaller boats of the early submarine campaign, and this may account for the difficulty in providing a complete protection from the attack. Submarine sections have been sent overland and assembled at Trieste for the Adriatic and Mediterranean, and at Varna for use in the Black Sea, and also doubtless at the Golden Horn or in the Gulf of Ismid.

There is much uncertainty about the future of the submarine. She exercises no command at sea, and she makes many fruitless attacks upon armed merchantmen; but she is dangerous, nevertheless. The British Navy has devoted exhaustless energy in applying every possible agency for dealing with hostile submarines, and its great success encourages the hope and belief that the scourge will yet be exterminated. Destroyers, motor launches, patrolling ships of many classes, seaplanes, observation balloons, and other craft are at work every day and many of them every night. But whatever element of uncertainty there may be as to the complete success of these agencies, there is none in the conclusion that the submarine will never bring England, still less her Allies, to the verge of famine or anywhere near it. Scarcity of food is not due so much to the submarine as to the great demand on the world’s supplies, and the enormous volume of shipping absorbed by the naval and military requirements of England and her Allies. The Navy, which has done such wonderful work in the war, is not and will not be ineffective against the submarine.