The Story of Our Submarines

A matter that caused a good deal of amusement to our submarine service throughout the war, and which probably made the Germans laugh also, was the great "petrol myth." It is a story which is at least as good as the Russian troops that travelled through England. Every part of the coast was reported to be the scene of mysterious rendezvous between U-boats and German spies, and at these meetings petrol cans changed hands – the U-boats taking the full tins, and the spy, presumably, insisting on getting the empty tins back, or else the sum of two shillings each in lieu. Heaven knows who invented the story, but it sounds like a "leg-pull," which had got out of hand and spread like a disease. For one thing, submarines don't use petrol – they use Diesel engines and heavy oil. For another thing, a submarine, depending on her size, carries from 30 to 300 tons of fuel in her tanks. If a wicked German spy was kind enough to take a couple of tins of petrol aboard a U-boat, he would, presuming that the captain owned a motor bicycle, be gladly welcomed; but his gift would hardly add to the radius of action of the boat. A submarine can keep the sea longer than a surface ship can, and has a much longer radius of action – the heavy-oil engine is economical and efficient, and such things as special fuel-carrying tenders or submerged fuel-tanks are unnecessary luxuries. It is true that U-boats used on occasions the little creeks and bays of Scotland and the Orkneys to shelter in, and in fact one boat landed some men on one of the smaller Orkney islands and stole half a dozen sheep; but such exploits are more matters of amusement than business. Our boats in the Bight used to shoot duck occasionally (and the Frisian Islands are a paradise for wild-fowl shooters in January – the birds are to be seen in thousands at a time), and if there had been anything else worth stealing on the very uninviting and ugly German coast, I'm certain that nothing but the innate honesty of our submarine officers would have prevented them from getting it.

As for the German spy scares, the Germans had a similar experience at the beginning of the war. Quite a number of perfectly good Huns were shot by enthusiastic amateur sentries, and the patriotic citizen felt it a duty to let off what firearms he had at any car which drove fast after dark, or which showed strong lights. The rumours of communication between U-boats and spies on the coasts of Great Britain continued throughout the war, while all the time the real German spies continued to send their reports by letters, and the N.I.D. continued to open the letters and substitute their own versions of the news. The fact is, very little information got away to Germany except through the newspapers. This country has the disadvantage, from an enemy spy's point of view, of being an island; Germany has a neutral country on each side of her: as a result, when the Armistice came, the Germans could give us little news about their Navy – everything of interest about it was already known at our Admiralty. There were some other widely believed "facts" about submarines which are dying a very slow death. They mostly came from the brains of the Press naval correspondents. One was that a submarine could not keep the sea more than a day or two. Of course, long before the war, even our little C-class boats were spending ten days on manœuvres. The first long trip of the war was "E 11's" thirty-one days in the Sea of Marmora. Again, it was solemnly proved when the Hogue, Cressy, and Aboukir were sunk, that more than one U-boat must have been present, "as a submarine cannot reload under water." I am mentioning these things, as it has been a matter of surprise to the submarine services of all navies that the boats have been looked on as new arrivals, and as weapons which were completely new and untried in 1914. The fact is, the submarine "arrived" long before the war, and has been used in annual manœuvres in our Navy since 1904. The first successful submarine attack, it should be noted, was by the Confederate submersible which sank the Housatonic in the American Civil War – some fifty-seven years ago.

There is no doubt that the German submarine service had everything in its favour. They had targets in plenty, in view of the fact that our fleet kept the sea practically continuously at the beginning of the war, and for about 25 per cent, of the time during the later stages. The coasts of these islands are ideal for submarines to work round; the shore is mostly steep-to, and the high landmarks make navigation easy. The German coast is low and difficult to see; it is guarded by outlying shoals and islands, and the visibility off-shore is usually poor; the numerous rivers emptying into the Bight make diving conditions bad at times owing to the alternate strata formed of fresh and salt water. Altogether, the two sets of conditions used to make our submarine service often wish that the two belligerent navies might change fleets, bases, and strategic problems, and so give our boats a chance to show how a weaker navy should carry out a war of attrition. Such a war could undoubtedly have been fought very much more efficiently by the enemy if he had concentrated on warship-targets only. There is a clause in a German instructional book for submarine officers which directs the young idea to "never attack a man-of-war if there is chance of usefully attacking commerce" (or words to that effect). That sort of order is an admission of defeat, as although the axiom, that "the object of strategy is the defeat of the main forces of the enemy," was, I believe, laid down by Napoleon, it is as old as the time of the first battle between tribes of Palæolithic men. A defeat of the Grand Fleet by direct naval action would have given Germany domination of the world; but the works of the late Admiral Mahan do not seem to have been understood in Berlin.

The great German commerce-destroying submarine navy is now no more. Its fate will be a reminder to strategists of the future that a guerre de course never won a war yet, and that there is no easy road to victory. It may be easier "to attack merchant ships rather than men-of-war," but if the result is the surrender of one's own Navy, the policy seems hardly profitable.

However, our own submarine strategy was, in spite of the enemy's example, kept on correct lines; our leaders saw the possibilities and the future of this type of craft far more clearly than did Admiral Tirpitz. Our boats were built and used for military purposes only, and their work was all part of the main strategical policy of the Navy.

IV

I

Facing each other across the southern part of the North Sea were the opposing submarine bases of Harwich and Flanders. The boats from these bases occasionally met and fought, but in the main their duties lay well apart. Harwich boats worked off the Bight, while the Flanders ports were bases for U-boats to start from on their way down channel to the traffic routes. The losses of the Flanders boats were heavy – so were the losses of the VIIIth Flotilla at Harwich, especially in 1916. In that year the VIIIth Flotilla submarine officers passed a self-denying ordinance to reduce their consumption of alcohol. (Now what I am leading up to is a comparison of British and German mentality, because I think the question of personnel to be infinitely more important than that of material.) The fact is, that heavy losses do affect those who are left to carry on the work. A boat comes back to harbour with her officers and crew tired and glad to be home again; they are perhaps met with, "Did you see anything of Seventy-six? He's been overdue three days. He was next to you – off Ameland. You didn't hear anything go up? Oh, well, you'll probably have that billet next week and you may find out…"

Well, it does affect people, and there is undoubtedly a great feeling of relief at getting back to harbour safely. In the Navy, where wines and spirits are free of duty, alcohol is cheap and obtainable, and alcohol is a relief from worry and an opiate for tired nerves. But the war has never seen a case of disciplinary action being necessary to control our submarine officers. It is a difficult question to approach in print, as the temperance argument seems to call out such strongly-expressed opinions from the advocates pro and con; but while I have no idea of holding up submarine officers as paragons of abstinence (for I hardly know any who are teetotallers), there is no doubt that they fully realised that only moderation could keep them efficient for war.

Over in Flanders it was the rule for U-boats to base at Bruges, and to use only Ostend and Zeebrugge as they passed through on their way to and from the sea. At Bruges the U-boat officers had a mess at the house of M. Catulle – a large, well-furnished, and comfortable building near the docks. There the officers had made the cellars (three inter-connected vaults) into an underground Rest for Tired Workers. All around the walls are painted frescoes illustrating the minds of the patrons. The frescoes are over two feet in depth, and are well executed in the type of German humour one meets in the Berlin comic papers. There are mines, projectiles, etc., with the conventional faces and hats of John Bull, France, and other Allies; dancing with the mines are torpedoes, some of which carry on them the faces of dead U-boat officers. Beneath the frescoes are mottoes – such as, "Drink, for to-morrow you may die" – "Life is short, and you'll be a long time dead." Between the pictures are smaller paintings of monkeys drinking champagne.

After dinner, according to witnesses, the officers would retire to these cellars and drink. There is little ventilation, and the atmosphere must have been fairly thick with smoke and fumes. Drinking sometimes continued till 8 A.M. – a horrible hour at which to be drunk. It is reported by Belgians that the officers got through four thousand bottles of wine in three weeks. Taking the high estimate of an average of twenty officers always present, this means ten bottles per head a day – which is absurd. It is probable, however, that the competitors broke or gave away a good many bottles. But there is no doubt they went at it pretty fast; one officer was drunk and incapable for five days on end, and (as apparently there was considered to be a limit of four days for states of coma) on the fifth day was ordered to sea by the Captain of the Flotilla "to cool his head." The whole impression one gets from the local stories is one of fear, morbid excitement, and drink. The pictures conjured up are unpleasant: the early morning scene in the cellars when a few hiccoughing stalwarts still sat over their wine – the guttural attempt at song – the pale glow of electric lamps through swirling smoke – the reek of alcohol – the litter of bottles – and the frightened face of the Belgian chambermaid peering round the angle of the cellar stairs. "Karl and Schmidt have not returned – God punish the English! Open more bottles, fool, and let us forget that our turn is coming!"

How the flotillas were able to do efficient work at all is a puzzle; but the Flanders Flotillas did the Allies a lot of harm. Had it not been the custom of the officers to throw off restraint in harbour, we might have suffered a good deal more – how much more only a student of psychology can guess. But there is no doubt of this – and a comparison of the Harwich and Flanders Flotillas shows it – the British take to games to soothe their nerves and the Germans to drink.

It is possibly something to do with this trait that brought the major part of the U-boat successes into the hands of a few special officers. The greater part of the captains did little; a few "aces" compiled huge lists of sunken tonnage to their credit (or otherwise). Judged by British Admiralty standards of efficiency, those few are the only ones who in our Service would have been retained at all.

However, it is time I went on with the doings of our own boats. Human beings are so much more important in war than are machines, that it is a temptation to describe them for preference. I would like to be able to talk about the submarine seamen also, but there is no ground for comparison between our own men and the German machine-made U-boat hand. One thinks of the German men as just things that opened or closed valves when barked at, and who never took any interest in what was going on outside their particular stations, or in what the boat was doing. Our sailors are – well, to put it "socially," they seem to belong more to the middle than the lower class. They are certainly not machine-made or dull, and they are not reluctant to act according to their own judgment in the absence of an officer's orders.

During the war our submarines sank 54 enemy warships and 274 other vessels. These figures do not, of course, include the many warships which were damaged but which were got back into harbour, although they include the U-boats which our submarines destroyed. German ships are very well subdivided in compartments and take a lot of killing. Certainly on a modern war-vessel one torpedo-hit is very little use; it takes about four to make certain of sinking her. The Moltke (battle-cruiser) was hit with one torpedo forward in the Baltic by Commander Laurence, and again off Hiorn's Reef by Lieutenant Allen (right aft this time); on each occasion she got home safely. Our own light cruiser Falmouth had to receive four torpedoes in succession before she sank. The Prinz Adalbert was torpedoed by Commander Horton in the Baltic off Cape Kola and returned safely to Kiel (she could not take a hint, however, and after a long interval for repair she went east again and met Commander Goodheart of "E 8," who sank her). Commander Laurence in "J 1" hit the Kronprinz and Grosser Kurfurst (battleships) in the North Sea, but both were got home safely. Our later submarines were fitted with larger torpedoes and tubes, but the boats fitted with eighteen-inch torpedoes made up the larger part of our flotillas, and it was realised by both our own and the enemy submarines that it took several hits with the smaller-size weapon to finish off a large ship. Perhaps the clearest case on record is that of the Marlborough, the ship being hit by a torpedo at the Jutland battle and remaining in the line at the Fleet speed and continuing her firing as if she had never been touched. Older ships, as both sides found to their cost, were much more vulnerable. Probably the Turkish ships were the easiest of all to put down, as it is doubtful if their fatalistic officers troubled to keep the watertight doors closed.

It must be remembered that there is all the difference in the world between a practice and a war attack. The war attack is usually unexpected, and is done under conditions of light and weather which make things chancy, to say the least of it. In a practice attack an officer can afterwards usually plot on the chart for you every movement his boat and the enemy made, and give reasons for all orders he gave. After a war attack he would probably only be able to remember clearly such things as the periscope hoisting gear giving trouble and the hydroplane men appearing to be unaccountably deaf. I have mixed up several boats' attacks in the following description, and it would not be far wrong as an account of more.

II

The mist closed in in swirling clouds that came along the calm water in lines a few hundred yards apart. One moment through the periscope the captain of the L-boat could see across the yellow-green sea a band of fog crossing his bows – the next, he could see nothing but the ripples that spread and vanished astern a few feet from the top prism of the instrument. It had been a poor visibility day since dawn, and now it looked like being thick weather till dark. He called to the first lieutenant and gave an order. The hydroplane wheels whirred and the boat tilted up and climbed to the accompaniment of sighs and roars, as a couple of external tanks were partly blown. The captain looked down as he climbed the conning-tower ladder: "Slow ahead, port motor – put a charge on starboard – stop blowing." He threw back the lid and met the clammy touch of wet fog on his face. The boat was moving slowly east through a calm sea with only her conning-tower and guns above water, while a white line of foam running forward traced where her deck superstructure ran a few inches below the surface. If she had been on patrol anywhere but to the west of the Vyl Lightship the captain would have taken her to seventy feet and kept a hydrophone watch, but that billet is one that marks the end of a German swept channel, and he wanted to watch from above for the first sign of the fog clearing. He sat on the conning-tower lip, his sea-booted legs resting on the third ladder-rung, and his head twisting this way and that as he stared at the white wall of mist that was so close to him. He had sat there barely a minute, and the booming roar of the big charging engine had just begun sounding up the conning-tower when he slid forward and stood on the ladder with his head and shoulders only exposed; he leaned out to starboard trying to catch again the faint note of a syren that he had felt rather than heard through the note of his own engine. Then something showed dark through the fog, a grey blur with a line of foam below, and the L-boat's lid clanged down, and through her hull rang the startling, insistent blare of the electric alarm. The engine stopped, the port motor woke to full speed, and the control-room was alive with sound and rapid movement. She inclined down by the bow as the captain's boots appeared down the ladder, and as he jumped to the deck his hasty glance at the gauge showed her to be already at twelve feet. But twelve feet by gauge means a conning-tower top still exposed, and as the tanks filled and the internal noises died down a sound could be heard to starboard – a noise of high-speed engines that swelled till it seemed that every second would bring the crash and roar of water each man could imagine so clearly. The gauge-needle checked at fifteen, then swung rapidly up to thirty; the faces watching it relaxed slightly – for the noise swelling through the boat told of destroyers, and destroyers are shallow-draught vessels. The boat still raced on down, with the gauge jerking round through 60-70-80… "Hold her up, now – back to seventy, coxswain"; the angle changed swiftly to "bow-up" as the spinning wheels reversed and the boat checked at eighty-five; a pump began to stamp and hammer as it drove out the water from a midship tank, and as the trim settled, the big main motors were steadily eased back to "dead slow." The first lieutenant looked up from the gauge and spoke over his shoulder to the captain. "I made it twelve seconds to twenty feet, sir; what was it that passed?"

"You're a cheery optimist with your twelve seconds. Your watch is stopped, Number One. It's destroyers, and they didn't give us much room either."

"Then d'you mean a fleet?"

"I mean I'm coming up to look in a quarter of an hour. I believe if it wasn't foggy I'd see them on the horizon now; that was a screening force that put us down. Here comes another."

Again the sound of a turbine-driven vessel came from the starboard hand. It swelled to its maximum and then suddenly died to a murmur, passing away to port. Twice more the warning came, and then fell a silence of just five minutes by the captain's wrist-watch. "Bring her up – twenty-four feet – and don't break surface now." He turned round to the periscope as the boat climbed and tested the raising gear, making the big shining tube move a few feet up and down. As the gauge moved to the 30 mark, the periscope rose with a rush, and he bowed his head to the eye-piece in readiness for an early glimpse of the surface world. At twenty-five feet a grunt of satisfaction and a quick swing round of the periscope spoke of his relief at being able to see at all; the fog was clearing and he was diving across one of the long lanes made in the mist by the rising wind. He turned the boat through eight points to keep her in the lane, turning up-wind to meet the clearer visibility that was coming. As he steadied on the new course he stiffened in his crouching attitude, staring to port: "Action Stations– evolution now – get a move on."

The clatter and excitement of flooding tubes and opening doors lasted hardly sixty seconds, but it was punctuated by several sentences from the periscope position such as: "Are you going to get those tubes ready?" and less plaintively, "How much something longer now?" The captain's thoughts were out in the mist above him where his range of view was bounded on two sides by faintly seen grey masses that rushed past him at close range. The reports of, "Ready, bow tubes"; "beam tubes ready, sir," came through the voice-pipes as the first lieutenant hurried from forward, panting from his exertions. "All ready, sir," he said, and paused for breath. "What is it, sir; can you see?.." The captain interrupted: "Yes," he said, "blinkin' mist and battle-cruisers. Port beam, stand by; port beam, fire! Starboard twenty-five; stop port, full speed starboard; look out forrard, Number One, I'm going to let go the lot."

The first lieutenant vanished through the control-room door as the familiar sound of a destroyer passing at short range began again to fill the boat. At the periscope the captain swore silently and continuously at the mist, the enemy, and the L-boat. He was between the destroyer screen and the big ships; the whole High Sea Fleet seemed to be coming by, and he had the very vaguest idea of their formation or even of their course. His first torpedo had missed, and it was more than likely the track of it would be seen. The L-boat spun round under the drive of the screw and the helm she carried, and as two destroyers of the screen converged on her periscope in high fountains of spray, she fired her bow salvo of torpedoes at the nearest of the big dim ships that crossed her bows. The range was short and the salvo ragged, for one torpedo "hung in the tube" a few seconds before leaving, its engines roaring and driving the water from the tube over the men abaft it in a drenching shower. That torpedo hit the ship astern of and beyond the target – the first bow torpedo to leave exploding right aft on the target herself. The converging destroyers swerved outwards slightly to avoid mutual collision, and the two "Wasserbomben" they dropped as they turned were let go more in anger than with accurate aim. Thirty feet down the L-boat, her forward tanks flooding and her nose down at an angle of 15°, was driving her gauge round in an urgent hurry to gain depth. Seventy – eighty – ninety-five. "Hold her up now. Blow number two external. Stop both —dammit, hold her up, man. Stop both – hold on, everybody!"

The gauge-needle went round with a rush; there was a heavy shock, and the boat's bow sprang upwards (the captain, holding with one arm to the periscope and bracing his feet, had a momentary vision in his memory of a photograph of a tank climbing a parapet – a trivial recollection of a Bond Street shop window); she rolled to starboard as the gauge-needle jumped back from a hundred and twenty to the hundred mark, then bounced again as her tail touched, rolled to port, and slid along the bottom to rest on an even keel. Whang-bang-whang. The explosions of depth-charges passed overhead and made the lights flicker; then a succession of fainter reports continuing to the southward told of a chase misled in the mist. A voice spoke from a tube at the captain's side, "Did they hit, sir?"

The captain was feeling vaguely in his pockets. A reaction from the tense concentration of the last few minutes was approaching, and the habits of an habitual smoker were calling to him. "Yes, I think so," he said; "but there were so many explosions I can't swear to it. We'll know when we get in."

He took a cigarette from his case and lit it. The match burnt blue and went out quickly; the cigarette gave him a mouthful of acrid smoke, and also failed. The short time the conning-tower had been open before the destroyers came had not cleared the air, and the work and excitement of the crew in the attack had consumed as much oxygen as if the boat had been diving for a summer's day. There is only one kind of cigarette which will burn in bad air; a stoker kneeling by the main line flooding-valve fumbled in his cap, and then held out a packet of five of them to the captain. The officer took one with a grunt of thanks, lit it, and spoke again. "Watch remain at diving-stations – fall out the rest – torpedo hands reload."